 We continue on today with Chapter 7, The Last Step. The creative power of God and His creations is limitless, but they are not in reciprocal relationship. You communicate fully with God, as He does with you. This is an ongoing process in which you share, and because you share it, you are inspired to create like God. Yet in creation, you are not in a reciprocal relation to God. Since He created you, but you did not create Him. I have already told you that only in this respect, your creative power differs from His. Even in this world, there is a parallel. Parents give birth to children, but children do not give birth to parents. They do, however, give birth to their children, and thus give birth as their parents do. If you created God and He created you, the kingdom could not increase through its own creative thought. Creation would therefore be limited, and you would not be co-creator with God. As God's creative thought proceeds from Him to you, so must your creative thought proceed from you to your creations. Only in this way can all creative power extend outward. God's accomplishments are not yours, but yours are like His. He created the sonship, and you increase it. You have the power to add to the kingdom, though not to add to the Creator of the kingdom. You claim this power when you become vigilant only for God and His kingdom. By accepting this power as yours, you have learned to remember what you are. Your creations belong in you as you belong in God. You are part of God as your sons are part of His sons. To create is to love. Love extends outward simply because it cannot be contained. Being limitless, it does not stop. It creates forever, but not in time. God's creations have always been, and you can create only as God creates. Eternity is yours because He created you, eternal. The ego on the other hand always demands reciprocal rights because it is competitive rather than loving. It is always willing to strike a bargain, but it cannot understand that to be like another means that no bargains are possible. To gain, you must give, not bargain. To bargain is to limit loving, giving, and this is not God's will. To will with God is to create like Him. God does not limit His gifts in any way. You are His gifts, and so your gifts must be like His. Your gifts to the kingdom must be like His gifts to you. I gave only love to the kingdom because I believed that was what I was. What you believe you are determines your gifts, and if God created you by extending Himself as you, you can only extend yourself as He did. Only joy increases forever, since joy and eternity are inseparable. God extends outward beyond limits and beyond time, and you who are co-creator with Him extend His kingdom forever and beyond limit. Eternity is the indelible stamp of creation. The eternal are in peace and joy forever. To think like God is to share His certainty of what you are, and to create like Him is to share the perfect love He shares with you. To this the Holy Spirit leads you, that your joy may be complete because the kingdom of God is whole. I have said that the last step in the reawakening of knowledge is taken by God. This is true, but it is hard to explain in words because words are symbols, and nothing that is true need to be explained. However, the Holy Spirit has the task of translating the useless into the useful, the meaningless into the meaningful, and the temporary into the timeless. He can therefore tell you something about this last step. God does not take steps because His accomplishments are not gradual. He does not teach because His creations are changeless. He does nothing last because He created first and for always. It must be understood that the word first, as applied to Him, is not a time concept. He is first in the sense that He is the first in the Holy Trinity itself. He is the prime Creator because He created His co-creators. Because He did, time applies neither to Him nor to what He created. The last step that God will take was therefore true in the beginning, is true now and will be true forever. What is timeless is always there because its being is eternally changeless. It does not change by increase because it was forever created to increase. If you perceive it as not increasing, you do not know what it is. You also do not know who created it. God does not reveal this to you because it was never hidden. His light was never obscured because it is His will to share it. How can what is fully shared be withheld and then revealed? And from the workbook, Lesson 45 God is the mind with which I think. Today's idea holds the key to what your real thoughts are. There is nothing that you think you think. Just as nothing that you think you see is related to vision in any way. There is no relationship between what is real and what you think is real. Nothing that you think are your real thoughts resemble your real thoughts in any respect. Nothing that you think you see bears any resemblance to what vision will show you. You think with the mind of God. Therefore you share your thoughts with Him as He shares His with you. They are the same thoughts because they are thought by the same mind. To share is to make a like or to make one. Nor do the thoughts you think with the mind of God leave your mind because thoughts do not leave their source. Therefore your thoughts are in the mind of God as you are. They are in your mind as well where He is. As you are part of His mind, so are your thoughts part of His mind. Where then are your real thoughts? Today we will attempt to reach them. We will have to look for them in your mind because that is where they are. They must still be there because they cannot have left their source. What is thought by the mind of God is eternal, being part of creation. Our three five-minute practice periods for today will take the same general form that we used in applying yesterday's idea. We will attempt to leave the unreal and seek for the real. We will deny the world in favor of truth. We will not let the thoughts of the world hold us back. We will not let the beliefs of the world tell us that what God would have us do is impossible. Instead we will try to recognize that only what God would have us do is possible. We will also try to understand that only what God would have us do is what we want to do. We will also try to remember that we cannot fail in doing what He would have us do. There is every reason to feel confident that we will succeed today. It is the will of God. Begin the exercises for today by repeating the idea to yourself, closing your eyes as you do so, then spend a fairly short period in thinking a few relevant thoughts of your own, keeping the idea in mind. After you have added some four or five thoughts of your own to the idea, repeat it again and tell yourself gently, my real thoughts are in my mind. I would like to find them. Then try to go past all the unreal thoughts that cover the truth in your mind and reach to the eternal. After all the senseless thoughts and mad ideas with which you have cluttered up your mind are the thoughts that you thought with God in the beginning. They are there in your mind now, completely unchanged. They will always be in your mind exactly as they always were. Everything you have thought since then will change, but the foundation on which it rests is wholly changeless. It is this foundation toward which the exercises for today are directed. Here is your mind joined with the mind of God. Here are your thoughts one with his. For this kind of practice only one thing is necessary. Approach it as you would an altar dedicated in heaven to God, the Father, and to God, the Son. For such is the place you are trying to reach. You will probably be unable as yet to realize how high you are trying to go, yet even with the little understanding you have already gained, you should be able to remind yourself that this is no idle game, but an exercise in holiness and an attempt to reach the kingdom of heaven. In the shorter exercise periods for today, try to remember how important it is to you to understand the holiness of the mind that syncs with God. Take a minute or two as you repeat the idea throughout the day to appreciate your mind's holiness. Stand aside, however briefly, from all thoughts that are unworthy of him whose host you are, and thank him for the thoughts he is thinking with you. God is the mind with which I think. So today we open up to the remembrance of our real thoughts, the thoughts in which we think with God, the thoughts which we share and extend as a creation of God, as co-creator in spirit, opening in stillness to our real thoughts, opening to the feeling of deep holiness, remembering that ideas leave out their source. Our real thoughts are the same as God's thoughts. They are of a like quality, pure, innocent, eternal, and this sinking inward is rising very high, higher than anything imaginable. All the way back to the original thoughts we think with God to our eternal thoughts, thoughts that have no form, that increase forever because of God, because of the Creator. This increase has nothing to do with time, size, or shape, or quantity. This increases love forever and ever extending, radiating our real thoughts, add to creation, ever increasing it. And we are very humble in seeing that we can add to the Kingdom of Heaven. We cannot add to God that we can extend these beautiful thoughts of God as we think like God. We give our heart to this exercise today. We give our all. We give everything to remembering our real thoughts, the thoughts we think with God as we say in deep remembrance, God is the mind with which I think.