Little adjective /ˈlɪt.əl/

• Small in size or amount. ‘He gave a little smile.’

• Not very important or serious. ‘I had a little problem with my car, but it's been fixed now.’

• Used to emphasize an opinion that is being given about something or someone. ‘That was a nice little suit she was wearing.’

 

Garden noun /ˈɡɑː.dən/

• A piece of land next to and belonging to a house, where flowers and other plants are grown, and often containing an area of grass. ‘The children were playing in the garden.’

 

I have said before that in this world of opposites, and as long as this world holds reality for you, you must make a decision between them at every moment. You may choose magnitude, or you may choose littleness. However, what you do not realise is that every time you choose, your choice is your assessment of yourself, your evaluation of yourself.

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What you truly are is not established by your perception and is not influenced by it at all. However, if you choose littleness in place of magnitude and accept it, everything in this world will be little because it is a world made out of littleness, in the strange belief that littleness can content you. Choose littleness, and you will not have peace, for you will have judged yourself unworthy of it.

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You are not a body; you are as God created you. You are free of all limits, safe and healed and whole. As God created you, you have made no changes in yourself that have reality, nor changed the universe so that what God created was replaced by fear and evil, misery and death. you are unlimited, and only the awareness of the body makes you seem limited because the body is a limit. The belief in limited love was its origin, as it was made to limit the unlimited. Do not think that this is only allegorical, because it was done to limit you. Can you, who see yourself inside a body, lightly recognise yourself as an idea? All that you recognise as external, you identify with the external. In this world of forms, you cannot even think of God without a body or in a form you think you would recognise.

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The body cannot know. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny, misleading senses, you will not see the greatness that surrounds you. God cannot come in a body, and neither can you join him there. The body is a small fence around a small part of a glorious and complete idea. It draws an infinitesimal circle around a little garden of the infinite Heaven, broken from the whole, proclaiming that within it is your kingdom, where God can enter not.

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Within this little garden, the ego cruelly rules, and for its defence, it bids you fight against the universe. This fragment of your mind is such a tiny part of it that, could you but appreciate the whole, you would see instantly that it is like the faintest ripple on the ocean's surface. And yet, the ocean does not know about all this weird, meaningless activity. It just keeps going, not realising that a small portion of itself is afraid of and hates it. It does not lose that portion because it could not survive apart from it. And what the ripple thinks it is in no way changes its total dependence on the ocean for its being. Its whole existence still remains in it because a ripple without the ocean is inconceivable.

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Such is the strange position in which those in a world inhabited by bodies seem to find themselves. Each body seems to harbour a separate mind, a disconnected thought, living alone and in no way joined to the Thought by which it was created. Each little fragment seems to be self-contained, needing another for some things only, but by no means wholly dependent on its one Creator for everything, needing the whole to give it any meaning, for in itself it means nothing nor has it any life apart and by itself.

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Your Own Self goes on, oblivious to the fact that this small part, this little garden, thinks of itself as you. Your Self knows it could not exist if it were separate, nor would the Whole be whole without it. It is not a separate kingdom, ruled by the idea of separation from the rest. No fence surrounds it, preventing it from joining with the rest and keeping it away from his Maker.

In your little, separated garden, you have so little! Do not accept this little garden, fenced-off aspect as yourself. Do not rest in your little kingdom, where an evil king reigns, a bitter ruler of all he surveys. The ocean is nothing but what you are, where the ripple dances as it rests on it.

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There is a deep responsibility you owe yourself, and one you must learn to remember all the time. The lesson may seem tough at first, but you will learn to love it when you realise that it is true and is but a tribute to your power. You who have sought and found littleness should remember that every decision you make stems from what you think you are and represents the value that you put upon yourself. Believe that little can content you, and by limiting yourself, you will not be satisfied. It is essential that you accept the fact, and accept it gladly, that there is no form of littleness that can ever content you.

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Let this question be asked every time you make a decision: would you be hostage to the ego or host to God? Since every decision you make does answer this, it invites sorrow or joy accordingly. Every decision you make is for Heaven or for hell and brings you the awareness of what you decided for.

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Don't let the truth about you today be hidden by false humility; instead, be grateful for the gifts our Father has given us all. Humility will never ask you to settle for littleness. But it does require you not to be satisfied with anything less than greatness that doesn't come from you. Your difficulty comes from your fixed belief that you are not worthy of it. And what is this but the determination to be as you would make yourself? God did not create his dwelling place unworthy of him. And if you think he can't enter where he wills to be, you must be interfering with his will. You do not need the willpower or strength of willingness to come from you, but only from His Will.

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You did not establish your value, and it needs no defence. Nothing can attack it or prevail over it. It does not vary. It merely is. Your value is in God's Mind, and therefore not in yours alone. Accepting yourself as God created you cannot be arrogance, because it is the denial of arrogance. Accepting your littleness is arrogant, because it means that you believe your evaluation of yourself is truer than God's.