 We continue today with Chapter 7, The Extension of the Kingdom. Only you can limit your creative power, but God wills to release it. He no more wills you to deprive yourself of your creations than He wills to deprive Himself of His. Do not withhold your gifts to the sonship, or you withhold yourself from God. Selfishness is of the ego, but self-fullness is of spirit, because that is how God created it. The Holy Spirit is in the part of the mind that lies between the ego and the spirit, mediating between them always in favor of the spirit. To the ego, this is partiality, and it responds as if it were being sited against. To spirit, this is truth, because it knows its fullness and cannot conceive of any part from which it is excluded. Spirit knows that the awareness of all its brothers is included in its own, as it is included in God. The power of the whole sonship and of its creator is therefore spirit's own fullness, rendering its creations equally whole and equal in perfection. The ego cannot prevail against the totality that includes God, and any totality must include God. Everything He created is given all His power, because it is part of Him and shares His being with Him. Creating is the opposite of loss, as blessing is the opposite of sacrifice. Being must be extended, that is how it retains the knowledge of itself. Spirit yearns to share its being, as its creator did. Created by sharing, its will is to create. It does not wish to contain God, but wills to extend His being. The extension of God's being is Spirit's only function. Its fullness cannot be contained, any more than can the fullness of its creator. Fulness is extension. The ego's whole thought system blocks extension, and thus blocks your only function. It therefore blocks your joy, so that you perceive yourself as unfulfilled. Unless you create, you are unfulfilled. But God does not know unfulfillment, and therefore you must create. You may not know your own creations, but this can no more interfere with the reality, than your unawareness of your spirit can interfere with its being. The kingdom is forever extending, because it is in the mind of God. You do not know your joy, because you do not know your own self-fullness. Exclude any part of the kingdom from yourself, and you are not whole. A split mind cannot perceive its fullness, and needs the miracle of its wholeness to dawn upon it and heal it. This reawakens the wholeness in it, and restores it to the kingdom, because of its acceptance of wholeness. The full appreciation of the mind's self-fullness makes selfishness impossible, and extension inevitable. That is why there is perfect peace in the kingdom. Spirit is fulfilling its function, and only complete fulfillment is peace. Your creations are protected for you, because the Holy Spirit, who is in your mind, knows of them, and can bring them into your awareness whenever you will let him. They are there as part of your own being, because your fulfillment includes them. The creations of every Son of God are yours, since every creation belongs to everyone being created for the Sonship as a whole. You have not failed to increase the inheritance of the Sons of God, and thus have not failed to secure it for yourself. Since it was the will of God to give it to you, He gave it forever. Since it was His will that you have it forever, He gave you the means for keeping it, and you have done so. Disobeying God's will is meaningful only to the insane, and truth it is impossible. Your self-fullness is as boundless as God's. Like His, it extends forever, and in perfect peace. Its radiance is so intense that it creates imperfect joy, and only the whole can be born of its wholeness. Be confident that you have never lost your identity, and the extensions which maintain it in wholeness and peace. Miracles are an expression of this confidence. They are reflections of both your proper identification with your brothers, and of your awareness that your identification is maintained by extension. The miracle is a lesson in total perception. By including any part of totality in the lesson, you have included the whole. And from the workbook, Lesson 53. Today we will review the following. My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world. Since the thoughts of which I am aware do not mean anything, the world that pictures them can have no meaning. What is producing this world is insane, and so is what it produces. Reality is not insane, and I have real thoughts as well as insane ones. I can therefore see a real world if I look to my real thoughts as my guide for seeing. I am upset because I see a meaningless world. Insane thoughts are upsetting. They produce a world in which there is no order anywhere. Only chaos rules a world that represents chaotic thinking, and chaos has no laws. I cannot live in peace in such a world. I am grateful that this world is not real, and that I need not see it at all unless I choose to value it. And I do not choose to value what is totally insane and has no meaning. A meaningless world engenders fear. The totally insane engenders fear because it is completely undependable and offers no grounds for trust. Nothing in madness is dependable. It holds out no safety and no hope. But such a world is not real. I have given it the illusion of reality and have suffered from my belief in it. Now I choose to withdraw this belief and place my trust in reality. In choosing this, I will escape all the effects of the world of fear because I am not acknowledging that it does not exist. God did not create a meaningless world. How can a meaningless world exist if God did not create it? He is the source of all meaning, and everything that is real is in his mind. It is in my mind too, because he created it with me. Why should I continue to suffer from the effects of my own insane thoughts when the perfection of creation is my home? Let me remember the power of my decision and recognize where I really abide. My thoughts are images that I have made. Whatever I see reflects my thoughts. It is my thoughts that tell me where I am and what I am. The fact that I see a world in which there is suffering and loss and death shows me that I am seeing only the representation of my insane thoughts and am not allowing my real thoughts to cast their beneficent light on what I see. Yet God's way is sure. The images I have made cannot prevail against him because it is not my will that they do so. My will is his and I will place no other gods before him. So today is a celebration of true creation. The perfection of creation is my home. To extend the love of God forever and ever and ever in wholeness, in completion, in totality. This is my joy. This is my happiness. In truth, I can only extend for my will and God's will are one. God's will is for perfect happiness and I share in this perfect happiness. This is my identity. My identity cannot be found in idols. No idol can take the place of God's love. No idol is worthy of pursuit. There is perfect peace in the kingdom. Spirit is fulfilling its function and only complete fulfillment is peace. This is self-fulfillment in the mind of God. The kingdom of heaven is forever and ever extending and extending. This is creation. Nothing in this world will content the mind because it is asleep, but awakening to creation, pure innocence, love extending, is all I can truly know. Nothing of this world can be known. You can never know father, mother, sister, brother, but by forgiving them, all past thoughts and concepts, all thoughts at the near time, persons, bodies, by letting it all go, I awake in and as the kingdom of heaven without limit. Amen.