Sharing and Ownership

"There are no strange images in the Mind of God, and what is not in His Mind cannot be in yours, because you are of One Mind, and that Mind belongs to Him.  It is yours because it belongs to Him, for to Him ownership is sharing.  And if it is so for Him, it is so for you." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 10, Section IV, 6:2-4

It's always amazing to me that after all these years, I still find sections of the Course that blow me away, as if I've never read them before.  And this in spite of the heavy underlining and highlighting that shows I did indeed read it and find it important.  But how could I miss the import of the statement, "It is yours because it belongs to Him, for to him ownership is sharing."  There's no putting a spin on this statement.  And then this morning I read in Workbook Lesson 106, "Thus does salvation start and thus it ends: when everything is yours, and everything is given away, it will remain with you forever."  It doesn't say some things are given away... it states everything.  And promises that because we give it away, we have it forever.

This is obviously not the way the world seems to work, and it certainly is not the way we have been taught to understand giving and receiving.  It's radical and blunt... whatever we have must belong to all, because to God ownership is sharing, and so it must be for us.  The Course tells us over and over in so many ways that to have, we have to give.  Not giving to get, but giving because it's Who We Are... the outpouring of unconditioned and unconditional Love that simply extends for eternity.

I've always had the tendency to be idealistic and non-materialistic, as a child of the 60's and a life-long lover of the Spiritual.  I remember as a youth being inspired by the book, Stranger in a Strange Land, with its message of Love without limits and sharing without boundaries.  But all of my ideas and concepts through the years still centered on the notion of me in a body, and other people in the form of their bodies, attempting to share and love in a world of limitation and competition.  It never works.  These are the strange images the opening quotation refers to... images of discrete forms that seem to divide and limit the Oneness of Spirit.  But no such strange images exist in the Real World.

The Course reminds us that we are not bodies... we are pure Spirit, the image and reflection of God:  "I am as God created me." (ACIM Workbook Lesson 110) and "Spirit am I, a holy Son of God; free of all limits, safe and healed and whole; free to forgive, and free to save the world." (ACIM Workbook Lesson 97, 7:2)  The dream world of strange images seems to come and go, seems to enjoy or seems to suffer.  But consider all your night dreaming over the years.  You have had dreams of every description, and have lived and died many times and in many ways.  You have defied the seeming laws of the world, and failed and triumphed again and again.  And yet, what real effects have any of those dreams had?  Not one dream was ever cause of anything, and none of the seeming effects survived your waking.  No dream analysis has ever done anything except give us a new story to tell.  Our 'past lives' in dreams have absolutely no effect.. they are just dreams. 

The really good news is that our supposed waking life is another layer of dreaming.  "Hear the one answer of the Holy Spirit to all the questions the ego raises: You are a child of God, a priceless part of His Kingdom, which He created as part of Him.  Nothing else exists and only this is Real.  You have chosen a sleep in which you have had bad dreams, but the sleep is not real and God calls you to awake.  There will be nothing left of your dream when you hear Him, because you will awaken.  Your dreams contain many of the ego's symbols, and they have confused you.  Yet that was only because you were asleep and did not know.  When you wake you will see the Truth around you and in you, and you will no longer believe in dreams because they will have no reality for you." (ACIM Chapter 6, Section IV, 6:1-7)

Our Reality is the unified Oneness of Spirit, the unconditioned Awareness of One Self, One Mind, One Life and Love.  Competition and ownership cease to have meaning in Oneness, for who would have more than another?  Who in Oneness could possibly know anything other than perfect sharing with All?  And what could be lacking in All? Our dreaming mind has imagined a self that is split into infinite pieces, projecting infinite dreams of competition, striving, ownership, and struggle... always in the vain attempt to reclaim for the split self the sense of wholeness and completion that seems to be lost in separation.  The joke is that we never lost the Wholeness and Perfection we seek.  And we regain our memory of our True Self by giving... as we give, as we share, as we no longer seek to divide and keep divided bits of life to ourselves through ownership, we re-discover the infinite Being that we are.

"God gave you all there is.  And to be sure you could not lose it, did He also give the same to every living thing as well.  And thus is every living thing a part of you, as of HimSelf." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 29, Section VIII, 9:7-9