06.02.06
0301 – Power and Glory
Posted in the Branch at 10:11 pm by miracles 
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from Issue 003 — Jul 2001
Let us ascend in peace together to the Father, by giving Him ascendance in our minds. We will gain everything by giving Him the power and the glory, and keeping no illusions of where they are. They are in us, through His ascendance. T-17…IV.16: 2-4
Let us give the Father all power and glory, for in that relationship, and that relationship alone, all power and glory is ours. In this statement is summarised the Course’s answer to our apparent dilemmas here and implicitly the essence of its teachings about the fallacies and inherent non-existence of the ego thought system itself.
Let us take a moment to look at the concept of power. Power is God and God is power. The reason is that only God can create and only God can extend. As God Wills, so it is, eternally and forever. What is created cannot be uncreated. What is Life cannot die. What is One cannot be divided. What has being cannot become something else.
The egoic presumption lies in the mad idea that power can be divided, usurped and appropriated for special purposes. And, what is more, by one who presumes to be separate or apart from the whole. Another way of describing the tiny mad idea is that there was the presumption that there could be a will that is different or separate from the Father’s. It is assumed that this will can make or create a form of expression that it in itself deems worthy and pursues for it’s own ends. Therein lies the egoic bid for specialness, specialness being, we could say, the ego’s version of glory.
Specialness dictates that it, and it alone, can gain glory by snatching it from another and hoarding it to itself. Glory can only be known or felt in the power of triumphing over and being separate from another. This, of course, re-enacts the original ontological instant of apparent triumph apart from and over and above the all-pervading unity of God and Creation.
The truly liberating teaching of the Course is that God’s power cannot be usurped because only God has the ability to create. That is why there is only God’s Will and nothing beside it. That which is created or willed also has the power to create and will, but only in relationship to that which created it. In and of itself it has no power because it does not exist in and of itself. Literally! So the movement of will, which is more correctly described as a wish, that seemed to obliterate unity is entirely powerless. God’s power has not been usurped because the egoic idea cannot function in reality. It can truly be said to be without effects or entirely and absolutely ineffectual. Utterly powerless. No exceptions.
What of glory and specialness, or more to the point, the hope of finding glory in specialness? When seen from this light, there is none. Recalling the “Two Pictures” section of the Course (T-17.IV), the elaborate and imposing frame of specialness when contrasted with the light of simple truth, grows dull and lifeless and eventually disappears into the nothingness from which it came. Since time began (and before, for that matter) we have been looking in the wrong direction to find glory. The Course means what it says and says what it means when it repeatedly tells us we give up nothing to gain everything. Glory can only be found in the unity and totality of what we are as God created us. We will gain everything by giving Him the power and the glory, and keeping no illusions of where they are.
We were and are mistaken when we think we have the power to will against God. We were and are deluded when we believe we can find a form of specialness that can substitute for our eternal glory in God. But given that this has all been never more or less than a truly ineffectual mistake, we can, at any moment turn to the Light and receive the blessing of the Atonement. The Atonement teaches us that all that we seem to be and the damage we seem to have done is nothing but a hallucinatory figment being dreamed in our Mind.The complete Answer is waiting for us every moment no matter who or what we think we have become because of the truth of what it is. Let us thank God in the knowledge we will all receive the Answer because of the truth of what we are. All power and glory be to God!
© 2001 LH