by Beverly McNeff

As children, my brother and I pretended we were pirates looking for buried treasure. We would make a map and put a big “X” on the spot where the treasure was buried. We would then hunt for that treasure in the woods around our home in Oregon. Of course, we never found the chest of gold, but we enjoyed the hunt.

Nowadays, people still play this game with their phones or GPS devices. Called geocachers, these people go out and hide trinkets and then write clues for anxious treasure hunters to follow to find the booty. Once you find the treasure, though, you are supposed to put it back so the next hunter can find it. It seems the fun is still in the hunt, with more than 3 million active containers hidden worldwide across more than 190 countries.

What is the hunt really about? We all wander in the world looking for our “treasure.” We call it by many names… career, relationship, family, fame, but they are really all substitutes for purpose. We are trying to find out why we are here; to make sense out of our being. But searching the world never quite seems to bring us the purpose we seek. That doesn’t mean we deny the world or our participation in it; we just stop looking to it for what we can only find within.

In A Course in Miracles’ text section, “The Treasure of God,” there is a powerful reminder that we are what we are looking for – not in an ego sense of our personal self-importance, but in the sense of our true Self value to God and to all our brothers. This awareness is the true treasure we can be.

This section also offers the Course’s restatement of the story of the prodigal son…

“Listen to the story of the prodigal son, and learn what God’s treasure is and yours: This son of a loving father left his home and thought he had squandered everything for nothing of any value, although he had not understood its worthlessness at the time. He was ashamed to return to his father, because he thought he had hurt him. Yet when he came home the father welcomed him with joy, because the son himself was his father’s treasure. He wanted nothing else.” (T-8.VI.4)

The Course tells us that God wants only us because nothing in this world holds any value. We are His only treasure. In truth, it’s the same for us. Nothing in this world holds any value and does not provide us with the purpose we are seeking for. This does not mean we stop participating in the world. It means that we participate in a “new” way. As lesson 155 in the Course’s workbook says…

“The world is an illusion. Those who choose to come to it are seeking for a place where they can be illusions, and avoid their own reality. Yet when they find their own reality is even here, then they step back and let it lead the way. What other choice is really theirs to make? To let illusions walk ahead of truth is madness. But to let illusion sink behind the truth and let the truth stand forth as what it is, is merely sanity.”

We can still participate in this world that is truly not our home and thereby be the treasure that God would have us be. This is how we become the sanity in a world of insanity. This is how we bring purpose to a purposeless world.

It can be done. We can approach life from a spiritual perspective without it being called naïve or airy-fairy. I believe that the Course has some very wise counsel for doing this, as we read in lesson 155:

“If truth demanded they [we who walk this world] give up the world, it would appear to them as if it asked the sacrifice of something that is real. Many have chosen to renounce the world while still believing its reality. And they have suffered from a sense of loss, and have not been released accordingly. Others have chosen nothing but the world, and they have suffered from a sense of loss still deeper, which they did not understand.

“Between these paths there is another road that leads away from loss of every kind, for sacrifice and deprivation both are quickly left behind. This is the way appointed for you now.”

Renouncing this world as an illusion and saying that we should not participate in it is a useless form of denial. I am always amazed when I get comments from well-meaning Course students who tell me that I am too focused on the world and that I don’t understand that the world is an illusion, as they put on their imaginary glasses to type in their purposeless words and send their comments to me through their illusory computers.

I don’t say this to ridicule but to make a dramatic point. If we deny the world we find ourselves in, then there is no way out. Our denial of the world will not make the world go away or prove to anyone how spiritual we are by separating ourselves from all those deluded ones who are cherishing the world. The only thing that will undo the illusion is our focus on the truth … the love of God that is with us, the treasure that we ALL are.

The path between denial of the world and cherishing the world, as the above passage suggests, is new to us and will take practice. That is why the Course’s workbook lessons are so helpful in providing us with that daily practice, but we also just have to begin. We can’t wait until the kids go off to college or until we retire so we have more time for our spiritual development. If we hope to find our purpose and live a life of fulfillment, we must start right now. Walt Disney once said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

When our son Jeff was younger, he loved reading the Harry Potter books, and so did I. If you’ve read them, you might be aware that while Harry was growing up, he was never made aware of his reality as a wizard. When he finally realizes who he is, he has to catch up with the other students who had always known they were wizards. So, Harry had to start learning who he was, make mistakes, and keep trying. Sound familiar?

I loved how the first Harry Potter movie illustrated the scene where Harry had to take a train to the wizard school, Hogwarts. The train left from track “9 ¾’s.” It was not track 9 or 10; it was a track between the two. We watched as all the other Hogwarts students walked into a place between the two tracks and disappeared. Harry tried to walk into that place over and over again to no avail, but he didn’t give up. Even though this was something he had never done before and was not having much success at, he kept trying until he made it. Once he made it, it became the most natural thing in the world to him. This metaphor echoes what the Course tells us when it says,

“It is quite possible to reach God. In fact it is very easy, because it is the most natural thing in the world. You might even say it is the only natural thing in the world. The way will open, if you believe that it is possible.” (W-41.8)

It is possible to walk a path of faith in a world of illusions. It is possible to see the valuelessness of the world without denying your experience of it. But it does require practice and intentionality. We can’t get discouraged when the world doesn’t support our path of truth because the world wasn’t made to support our truth, but that doesn’t mean that the world can’t be used to help us awaken. The Course reminds us that love does not condemn the illusions of the world that we value, respecting what we have made, but shows us how they can be used lovingly to help awaken us from our illusions.

“The body [or any form of the world] was not made by love. Yet love does not condemn it and can use it lovingly, respecting what the Son of God has made and using it to save him from illusions.” (T-18.VI.4)

My good friend and best-selling author of Love is Letting Go of Fear, Jerry Jampolsky, once shared a story about a meeting he had with Mother Teresa. He admitted to her how he wanted to remember God every moment of the day and practice a more forgiving and patient behavior, but he kept forgetting and falling back into old habits. Mother Teresa lovingly told him that it was his intentionality that was important, not his acts. If his heart had the intention of peace and healing, he would succeed.

The Course tells us that the Holy Spirit sees only one purpose for the world and that is our healing. When we believe that the world can fulfill us and bring us the happiness and treasures we seek, we get lost and misuse the world. The world then owns us and we “will not escape its laws of violence and death,” as the passage below so powerfully explains…

“Forget not that the healing of God’s Son is all the world is for. That is the only purpose the Holy Spirit sees in it, and thus the only one it has. Until you see the healing of the Son as all you wish to be accomplished by the world, by time and all appearances, you will not know the Father nor yourself. For you will use the world for what is not its purpose, and will not escape its laws of violence and death.” (T-24.VI.4)

This is where many of us feel we are now. We have forgotten that we are God’s treasure. We have forgotten that this world cannot diminish us or frighten us if we allow the Holy Spirit to reinterpret the world to His purpose. This is not a time to be discouraged or depressed, but to look clearly at this world and focus on the answer…

“The ego made the world as it perceives it, but the Holy Spirit, the reinterpreter of what the ego made, sees the world as a teaching device for bringing you home.” (T-5.III.11)

Let our intention be to focus on the treasure of God within us all. Let us not focus on the hurts and hates we may want to dwell on when the promise of our healing is so near. Let us not get distracted by the world that seems so overwhelming when we are promised that our salvation is at hand. It is time for us to arise in glory and accept our Father’s opinion of us … that we ARE His treasure and He wants nothing else. This awareness in our minds may seem to change nothing in this world, but it will change us. And as our focus begins to change, from illusions to truth, from fear to love, the world will change.

“This world will change through you. No other means can save it, for God’s plan is simply this: The Son of God is free to save himself, given the Word of God to be his Guide, forever in his mind and at his side to lead him surely to his Father’s house by his own will, forever free as God’s. He is not led by force, but only love. He is not judged, but only sanctified…

“Only be quiet. You will need no rule but this, to let your practicing today lift you above the thinking of the world, and free your vision from the body’s eyes. Only be still and listen. You will hear the Word in which the Will of God the Son joins in His Father’s Will, at one with it, with no illusions interposed between the wholly indivisible and true. As every hour passes by today, be still a moment and remind yourself you have a special purpose for this day; in quiet to receive the Word of God.” (W-125.2&9)

And that is a treasure worth hunting!

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