SpiritAwake

Mind always re-produces as it was produced. Produced by fear, the ego reproduces fear. This is its allegiance, and this allegiance makes it treacherous to Love because we are Love. Love is our power, which the ego must deny. It must also deny everything which this power gives to us,  because it gives us everything.

No-one who has everything wants the ego. Its own maker, then, does not want it. Rejection is therefore the only decision which the ego could possibly encounter if the mind which made it knew itself. And if it recognized any part of the Children of God, it would know itself.

The ego therefore opposes all appreciation, all recognition, all sane perception, and all knowledge. It perceives their threat as total because it senses the fact that all commitments which the mind makes are total. Forced therefore to detach itself from us who are mind, it is willing to attach itself to anything else. But there is nothing else. It does not follow from this, however, that the mind cannot make illusions. Yet it does follow that if the mind makes illusions it will believe in them, because believing them is how it made them.

The Spirit of Love undoes illusions without attacking them merely because He cannot perceive them at all. They therefore do not exist for Him. He resolves the apparent conflict which they engender by perceiving conflict as meaningless. The Spirit of Love does not want you to understand conflict. He wants you to realize that because conflict is meaningless it cannot be understood. Understanding brings appreciation, and appreciation brings love. Nothing else can be understood because nothing else is real and therefore nothing else has meaning.

If we will keep in mind what the Spirit of Love offers us, we cannot be vigilant for anything but God and His Kingdom. The only reason why we find this difficult is because we think there is something else. Belief does not require vigilance unless it is conflicted. If it is, there are conflicting components within it which have engendered a state of war, and vigilance has therefore become essential. Vigilance has no place at all in peace. It is necessary only against beliefs which are not true.  Vigilance would never have been called upon by the Spirit of Love if we had not believed the untrue ourselves.

But we cannot deny that when we believe something we have made it true for ourselves. When we believe what God does not know, our thought seems to contradict His, and this makes it appear as if we are attacking Him. The ego does believe it can attack God, and tries to persuade us that we have done this. If the mind cannot attack, the ego proceeds perfectly logically to its next position that we cannot be mind. By my not seeing myself as I am, the ego can see itself as it wants to be. Aware of its weakness, the ego wants our allegiance, but not as we really are. The ego therefore wants to engage our minds in its own delusional system, because otherwise the light of our understanding will dispel it.

The ego wants no part of truth, because the truth is that it is not true. If truth is total, the un-true cannot exist. Commitment to either must be total, because they cannot co-exist in our minds without splitting them. If they cannot coexist in peace, and if we want peace, we must give up the idea of conflict entirely, and for all time. This requires vigilance only as long as we do not recognize what is true. While we believe that two totally contradictory thought systems share truth, our need for vigilance is apparent. Our minds are dividing their allegiance between two kingdoms, and we are totally committed to neither.

Our identification with the Kingdom of God is totally beyond question except by us when we are thinking insanely. What we are is not established by our perception, nor is it influenced by perception at all. All perceived problems in identification at any level are not problems of fact. But they are problems in understanding, because they mean we believe what we can understand to be true is up to us to decide. The ego believes this totally, being fully committed to it. But it is not true. The ego is therefore totally committed to un-truth, perceiving in total contradiction to the Spirit of Love and to the Knowledge of God.

We can be perceived with meaning only by the Spirit of Love, because our being is the Knowledge of God. Any belief that we accept which is apart from this will obscure God’s Voice in us, and will therefore obscure God to us. Unless we perceive His creation truly, we cannot know the Creator, because God and His creation are not separate. The oneness of the Creator and the creation is our wholeness, our sanity, and our limitless power. This limitless power is God’s gift to us, because it is what we are. If we dissociate our minds from it, we are perceiving the most powerful force in the universe as if it were weak, because we do not believe we are part of it.

Perceived without our part in it, God’s creation is perceived as weak, and those who see themselves as weakened do attack. The attack must be blind, because there is nothing to attack. Therefore, they make up images, perceive them as unworthy, and attack them for their unworthiness. That is all the world of the ego is. Nothing. It has no meaning. It does not exist. Do not try to understand it, because if you do you are believing that it can be understood, and therefore is capable of being appreciated and loved. This would justify it, but it cannot be justified. You cannot make the meaningless meaningful. This can only be an insane attempt.

Allowing insanity to enter our minds means that we have not judged sanity as wholly desirable. If we want something else, we will make something else. But because it is something else it will attack our thought system and divide our allegiance. We cannot create in this divided state, and we must be vigilant against this divided state because only peace can be extended. Our divided minds are blocking the extension of the Kingdom, and its extension is our joy. If we do not extend the Kingdom, we are not thinking with our Creator and creating as He created.

In this depressing state, the Spirit of Love reminds us gently that we are sad because we are not fulfilling our function as co-creators with God, and are therefore depriving ourselves of joy. This is not God’s Will, but ours. If our will is out of accord with God’s, we are willing without meaning. But because only God’s Will is unchangeable, no real conflict of will is possible. This is the Spirit of Love’s perfectly consistent teaching. Creation, not separation, is our will because it is God’s. And nothing that opposes this means anything at all. Being a perfect accomplishment, we can only accomplish perfectly, extending the joy in which we were created, and identifying with both our Creator and our creations, knowing they are One.

Whenever we deny a blessing to a Child of God, we will feel deprived. This is because denial is as total as Love. It is as impossible to deny part of the Children of God as it is to love it in part. Nor is it possible to love it totally at times. We cannot be totally committed sometimes. Never underestimate the power of denial. It has no power in itself, but we can give it the power of our mind, whose power is without limit of any kind. If we use it to deny reality, reality is gone for us. Reality cannot be partly appreciated. That is why denying any part of it means we have lost awareness of all of it.

That is the negative side of this law of God as it operates in this world. But denial is a defense, and so it is as capable of being used positively as it is of being used destructively. Used negatively, it will be destructive, because it will be used for attack. But in the service of the Spirit of Love, the law becomes as beneficent as all of the laws of God. Rendered positively by the Spirit of Love, the law requires us only to recognize part of reality to appreciate all of it. Mind is too powerful to be subject to exclusion. We will never be able to exclude ourselves from what we project.

When a Child of God acts insanely, He is offering us an opportunity to bless Him. His need is ours. We need the blessing we can offer Him. There is no way for us to have it except by giving it. This is the law of God, and it has no exceptions. What we deny we lack, not because it is lacking, but because we have denied it in another, and therefore are not aware of it in us. Every response we make is determined by what we think we are. And what we want to be is what we think we are. Therefore, what we want to be determines every response we make.

We do not need God’s blessing, because that we have forever. But we do need ours. The picture we see of ourselves is deprived, unloving, and very vulnerable. We cannot love this. But we can very easily escape from it, or better, leave it behind.

We are not there, and that is not us. Do not see this picture in anyone, or we have accepted it as us. All illusions about the Children of God are dispelled together, as they were made together. Teach no one that he is what we do not want to be. Our brother is the mirror in which we will see an image of ourselves as long as perception lasts. And perception will last until the Children of God know themselves as whole.

We made perception, and it must last as long as we want it. Illusions are investments. They will last as long as we value them. Values are relative, but they are powerful because they are mental judgments. The only way to dispel illusions is to withdraw all investment from them, and they will have no life for us because we have put them out of our minds. While we include them in it, we are giving them life. Except, there is nothing there to receive your gift.

Rendered from portions of Section 7, Chapter 2,
A Course In Miracles