Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 10: Idols, Gods, or the Divine

1. Littleness, Grandiosity, and Grandeur

Grandeur, or Greatness, is of the Divine, and only of the Divine. Therefore It is in you. Whenever you become aware of It, however dimly, you abandon the ego automatically, because in the Presence of the Grandeur of the Divine the meaninglessness of the ego becomes perfectly apparent. The ego senses when you have this experience, and while it does not understand it, it believes that its “enemy” has struck, and it attempts to offer gifts to induce you to return to its “protection.” Self-inflation is the only offering it can make that it believes compares to its “enemy’s” gifts. The grandiosity of the ego is its alternative to the Grandeur of the Divine. Which will you choose?

Grandiosity is always a cover for despair. It is without hope because it is not real. It is an attempt to counteract what you have come to believe is your littleness, based on the belief that littleness is real. Without this belief, grandiosity is meaningless, and you could not possibly want it. The essence of grandiosity is competitiveness, because it always involves contrast, conflict and attack. It is a delusional attempt to outdo, but not to undo. This Course stated earlier that the ego vacillates between suspiciousness and viciousness. It remains suspicious as long as you despair of yourself. It shifts to viciousness whenever you decide not to tolerate self-debasement, and seek relief. Then the ego offers you the delusion of grandiosity as its solution of relief.

The ego does not know the difference between Grandeur and grandiosity because it does not know the difference between miracle impulses and its own strange beliefs and impulses. This Course has stated that the ego is aware of threat, but does not make distinctions between two entirely different kinds of threat to its existence: the baser impulses of the ego which it perceives are socially unacceptable to express and thus that it represses and conceals, and those that conceal from the ego’s awareness your loftiest inspirations, that is, the Grandeur you share with your Creator. The ego’s profound sense of vulnerability renders it incapable of assessment, except in terms of judgment and attack. When it experiences threat, its only decision is whether to attack now, or withdraw to attack later. If you accept its offer of grandiosity, it will attack your reality immediately out of the arrogance of this distorted state of mind. If you do not, it will wait.

The ego is immobilized in the Presence of the Divine’s Grandeur, because the Divine’s Grandeur establishes your Freedom. Even the faintest hint of your reality literally drives the ego from your mind, because of your complete lack of true investment in the ego. Grandeur is totally without illusion, and because It is real It is compellingly convincing. But the conviction of Reality will not remain with you unless you do not allow the ego to reframe it from its perspective. This reframing is always a misappropriation and rendering of something true and clear into something false and distorted.

If you do not allow the ego to attack or express fear through you, it will make every effort to recover, and mobilize its energies against your Release. It will tell you that you are insane, and argue that Grandeur cannot be a real part of you, because of the littleness in which it believes and which it wants you to continue to believe. Your Grandeur, however, is not delusional, because you did not make It. You have made grandiosity and are afraid of it because it is a form of fear. But your Grandeur is of the Divine, who created It out of Its Love. From your Grandeur you can only bless, because your Grandeur is your Abundance. By blessing you hold your Grandeur in your mind, protecting It from illusions, and keeping yourself aware of your being in the Mind of the Divine.

Remember always that you cannot be anywhere except in the Mind of the Divine. When you forget this, you will fear and despair.

The ego depends solely on your willingness to tolerate it. But if you are willing to behold your Grandeur, you cannot fear or despair, and therefore you won’t be able to tolerate the ego. Your Grandeur is the Divine’s Answer to the ego, because your Grandeur is true and the ego is not.

Littleness and Grandeur cannot coexist, nor is it possible for them to take turns alternating in your awareness in order to attempt to “honor” them both. Littleness and grandiosity can and must alternate, since both are untrue, and therefore appear on the same level. Being the level of shift, the untrue is experienced as shifting, and extremes are its essential characteristic. But Grandeur is Truth, and Truth is the denial of both littleness and grandiosity, as these are denials of Truth. Truth does not vacillate. It is always true. When Grandeur slips away from your awareness, it means you have replaced It with something you have made. Perhaps it is the belief in littleness; perhaps it is the belief in grandiosity. But it must be insane because it is not true. Your Grandeur will never deceive you, but your illusions always will, because they are deceptions.

You cannot triumph in truth, but you are exalted. And in your exalted State you seek others like you, and rejoice with them. It is easy to distinguish Grandeur from grandiosity, simply because Love is returned but pride is not. Pride will not produce miracles, and therefore will deprive you of the true Witnesses to your reality. Truth is not obscure or hidden, but Its obviousness to you rests in the Joy you bring to Its Witnesses, who show It to you. They attest to your Grandeur, but they cannot attest to pride because pride is not shared.

The Divine wants you to behold what It created, because this is Its Joy. Can your Grandeur be arrogant when the Divine Itself witnesses to It? And what can be real that has no witnesses? What good can come of it? And if no good can come of it, the Holy Spirit cannot use it. What Spirit cannot transform to the Will of the Divine does not exist at all. Grandiosity is delusional because it is used to replace your Grandeur. Yet what the Divine has created cannot be replaced.

The Divine would be incomplete without you, simply because Its Grandeur is total, and you cannot be missing from It. You are altogether irreplaceable in the Mind of the Divine. No one else can fill your Part of It, and while you leave your Part of It empty, your eternal Place merely waits for your Return. The Divine, through Its Voice, reminds you of It, and the Divine Itself keeps your creations safe within It. But you will not know them until you return to them.

You cannot replace the Realm of Heaven, and you cannot replace yourself. The Divine, Who knows your Value, would not have replacement be so, and so it is not so. Your Value is in the Divine’s Mind, and therefore not in yours alone. To accept yourself as you were created cannot be arrogant, because it is the denial of arrogance. To accept your littleness is arrogant, because it means that you believe that your judgment of yourself is truer than the Divine’s. But if Truth is indivisible, then your assessment of yourself must be the Divine’s.

You did not establish your Value and It needs no defense. Nothing can attack It or prevail over It. It does not vary. It merely is. Ask the Holy Spirit what It is, and It will tell you. But do not be afraid of Its Answer, for It comes from the Divine. It is an exalted Answer because of Its Source. But the Source is true, and so is Its Answer. Listen and do not doubt or question what you hear, for the Divine does not deceive. It would have you replace the ego’s belief in littleness with Its Own exalted Answer to the question of your being, so that you can cease to question it, and know it as it is.