ACIM Chapter 10. IV. The End of Sickness, P 5, 6

ACIM Chapter 10. IV. The End of Sickness, P 5, 6

IV. The End of Sickness P 5

⁵ You are not free to give up freedom, but only to deny it. You cannot do what God did not intend, because what He did not intend does not happen. Your gods do not bring chaos; you are endowing them with chaos, and accepting it of them. All this has never been. Nothing but the laws of God has ever been, and nothing but His Will, will ever be. You were created through His laws and by His Will, and the manner of your creation established you a creator. What you have made is so unworthy of you that you could hardly want it, if you were willing to see it as it is. You will see nothing at all. And your vision will automatically look beyond it, to what is in you and all around you. Reality cannot break through the obstructions you interpose, but it will envelop you completely when you let them go.

I am free regardless of the experience I have chosen. This is because I cannot undo my Self. I can only choose to experience chaos instead of my natural state, which is peace. I am not being asked to re-make what I destroyed in my choice for separation. After all, nothing was destroyed. I am only being asked to accept what remains perfectly intact.

It cannot be difficult to simply accept what is true.

And yet, I see that my sight is often determinedly fixed on the illusory state of being I chose as my experience. There is separation everywhere I look. I see its effects, anger, fear, guilt, jealousy, sickness, all manner of suffering, and death. I see it as if it is real and true, and the mind balks at the idea that this is only an illusion and that the truth is its exact opposite.

This is the reason I give workshops and write about releasing guilt and accepting responsibility for our lives. I talk about how Jesus starts early, with Lesson 15, which tells us our thoughts are images we have made, and Lesson 152, which tells us that the world is a representation of our wishes. And I remind myself all the time that Jesus says that we but do this to ourselves. I go back to Lesson 325, which describes the process we use to make the images that seem to be our lives.

I focus on this in my teaching because it helps me to learn to believe what Jesus tells us all through the Course. God creates the eternal and the unchanging. Nothing about us has changed even in the slightest. We remain as we were created. We are part of God and in God. Our minds are very holy, and there is nothing our holiness cannot do. And everything else is an imaginative representation of an idea that entered the mind of the Son. It is not real and could never be real, no matter how realistic it seems.

IV. The End of Sickness P 6

⁶ When you have experienced the protection of God, the making of idols becomes inconceivable. There are no strange images in the Mind of God, and what is not in His Mind cannot be in yours, because you are of one mind and that mind belongs to Him. It is yours because it belongs to Him, for to Him ownership is sharing. And if it is so for Him, it is so for you. His definitions are His laws, for by them He established the universe as what it is. No false gods you attempt to interpose between yourself and your reality affect truth at all. Peace is yours because God created you. And He created nothing else.

It can be difficult for us not to feel threatened by the idea of a God that we belong to, one that rules the universe and whose laws we must live by. This can be frightening as the ego mind rebels and says that we are each independent and that independence is a point of pride. Ego says that we are separate and distinct, and our uniqueness is what makes us what we are, and to lose that is to lose ourselves. And if God makes all the laws, and we must live by them, what if we don’t? What if we fail to do this? In our world of time and space, when someone breaks the law, they are punished, so punishment is what we expect.

But Jesus tells us that for God, ownership is sharing.

This is meaningless in our experience, but it is the way of Reality. And while we cannot have that experience in the ego mind, we can infer its meaning.  What God is, He shares with us. So, if we belong to God, if we are His creation, we share all that is God. We share the Mind of God, and His laws are our laws, His power is our power, and His safety is our safety. The inference is that, in Reality, there is no loss in belonging to God. All that God Is, He gave to us in our creation because that is the very definition of creation.

And could we fail to obey the laws of God? In the illusory world of time and space, we act as if we can do this, and we see the effect of our imaginative play. This effect is the motivation to awaken from this dream of separation. As we pretend we can make laws different from God’s laws, we suffer pain and death. But we are not bound by those laws and can step out of the stories of separation at any time because they are not reality.

God’s laws are not optional.

They are like the law of gravity here. We can thumb our nose at gravity, but the moment we step off a cliff, we will plummet to the ground. Gravity is gravity. This is the way God’s laws operate. They simply are, and nothing undoes them. We are one. That is a law of God, as immutable as our law of gravity and as irreversible. We are one. We are love, we are mind, we are part of God and in God. As God creates, we create. As God is eternal, we are eternal. These are laws of God, and nothing can change this. Anything else is just a thought, an idea we are free to explore, but that changes nothing.

We can make an anti-gravity chamber and float around as if nothing holds us to the ground, but when we step out of that chamber, we find that the law of gravity has not altered. That is how it is for us in God. We have made an anti-oneness chamber and are hanging around in it and playing at separation. But we won’t stay forever because this is not natural for us. We will get tired of suffering or just get tired of the restrictions, and we will wake up to our true and perfectly free Selves. We will step out of the chamber we made, and the laws of God will still be in effect.

And thank God for that!