Although in truth the term sacrifice is altogether meaningless, it does have meaning in the world. Like all things in the world, its meaning is temporary and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it. Now its real meaning is a lesson. Like all lessons it is an illusion, for in reality there is nothing to learn. Yet this illusion must be replaced by a corrective device; another illusion that replaces the first, so both can finally disappear. The first illusion, which must be displaced before another thought system can take hold, is that it is a sacrifice to give up the things of this world. What could this be but an illusion, since this world itself is nothing more than that?
ACIM Manual For Teachers, 13,1
Last week we explored the idea that the perception of separation is the perception of illusions. This dovetails nicely into this week’s quote which provides a clearer understanding of the meaninglessness or illusory nature of sacrifice. The idea of sacrifice is one that is highly regarded by the world, and is in fact lauded as the primary means for attaining anything of value. It is at the foundation of our learning and education systems, our work ethic, our system of rewards and punishments, our relationships, and at the heart of our concepts about God and salvation. It is an accepted idea that in order to attain any level of success one must pay a price by sacrificing something, usually referred to as the “price of success.”
This idea of sacrifice is mirrored in the often quoted biblical passage "For God so loved the world, that He 'gave' (read that as ‘sacrificed’) His only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16. This passage speaks about God's love for the world and for His son, implying that God created two different things and sacrificed one (His son) for the sake of the other (the world.) This is certainly a boon for the world and the believers of the world, but it also means that God created the world without giving it everlasting life, and later corrects the situation by offering it to us if we believe in His son. But we are His son and the whole creation is God's son-ship. We certainly did not create ourselves, so who else but God is our Creator, and He created us in his likeness, i.e. spirit, formless and free. Everlasting life is a given, a gift of inheritance from the Creator to His son-ship. This passage is true only if ‘His son’ and ‘the world’ are identical, then it would read: “For God so loved the world that He gave it to His only begotten son ... .” God created one son and that one son is everything in creation. We are that one creation, that one son, that son-ship, i.e., the sum of everything in creation is the son of God.
But just because an idea is accepted does not mean that it is true, and since we are interested in truth, let us examine this accepted idea of sacrifice*. Sacrifice means that an item of lesser value is given up in order to acquire something of greater value, and in order to make the correct choice, a proper evaluation and subsequent judgment of each is necessary. If either item is evaluated incorrectly or incompletely, the judgment based on that evaluation will also be incorrect or incomplete, and this would lead, perhaps to inadvertently giving up the item of greater value for the item of lesser value, which indeed would be an unfortunate sacrifice. It is ironic that the term sacrifice is associated with “loss” when what is accomplished through it is actually “gain,” indicating that our sense of value lies more with what is lost than it does with what is gained. For instance, the idea of loosing one's soul to gain the world would be an unfortunate sacrifice, if it were possible, but the idea of loosing the world to gain one's soul would be most fortunate, and by comparison not at all a sacrifice.
Clearly there are two worlds, the world God created and the dream-world we created and typically experience as "real." God's world is the experience of oneness and unity, whereas our world is the experience of separateness, struggle and strife. Last week's quote talks about why we did this. So how can we correctly evaluate our world and the world God created? Because sacrifice is meaningless to one who has everything and is everything, it is meaningless to God. And since we are the children of God, then it is also meaningless to us, but only if we appreciate our true value as children of God, i.e. god-children, created by God, in the image and likeness of God, and endowed with the knowledge and power of God. Since this is not how we typically value ourselves, it meas that our sense of value is skewed, which causes a skewed or incorrect evaluation of everything. We value the world we created over the world God created, because we forgot our knowledge of God’s world, which led to our dependence on perception, evaluation, and judgment, rather than on knowledge. We cannot perceive God’s world, as we learned from last week’s quote because 'what is one cannot be perceived as separate', so we therefore value God’s world little because we cannot perceive it evaluate it or judge it, even though it offers us everything. Our world by contrast offers us no lasting peace and abundant fear, yet we value it greatly just because we can perceive it, thus proving that we value perception over knowledge. Fortunately because something is lost does not mean we do not have it, it only means that we have forgotten what we have and therefore can potentially remember it.
It does not take much to realize that the world we created even though it has its happy moments, could not have been crated by God because it is not in accordance with the abilities we attribute to God, namely omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. For one endowed with such abilities, is it not reasonable to expect a world that is at least free from suffering? This question leads us to one of two conclusions: either God did not created our world, or if He did, then He must not be compassionate, and values suffering and pain and strife. This is one way of logically concluding that God indeed did not create our world, and because He did not create it, it cannot be real, and because it is not real, it has no value, and because it has no value, it therefore cannot be a sacrifice to give it up. Once we understand that it is not a sacrifice to give up the things of this world, we are well on the way home to remembering who God is, and who we truly are.
* Sacrifice connotatively also refers to the idea of “self-sacrifice” or of “doing without something.” Again, this idea is antithetical to God, for He is everything.
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