ACIM Chapter 12. VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 7, 8

ACIM Chapter 12. VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 7, 8

VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 7

7 Yet it does not matter how much distance you have tried to interpose between your awareness and truth. God’s Son can be seen because his vision is shared. The Holy Spirit looks upon him, and sees nothing else in you. What is invisible to you is perfect in His sight, and encompasses all of it. He has remembered you because He forgot not the Father. You looked upon the unreal and found despair. Yet by seeking the unreal, what else could you find? The unreal world is a thing of despair, for it can never be. And you who share God’s Being with Him could never be content without reality. What God did not give you has no power over you, and the attraction of love for love remains irresistible. For it is the function of love to unite all things unto itself, and to hold all things together by extending its wholeness.

My reality can never be lost to me because the Holy Spirit holds that vision.

He looks at me and sees only God’s Son. I want that vision badly. My most persistent desire is to think of myself and know I am only God’s Son and nothing else. And I want to look at everyone else and see only God’s Son. I have this desire because I am, in truth, Love.

I am an extension of Love, and Love is all that I am. As Jesus tells us, the attraction of love for love is irresistible. It is my function, as love, to unite all things to itself and to hold all things together. Therefore, I long to know myself and everyone else as love, to know Oneness. This is why A Course in Miracles is so attractive to me and why it is that when I picked it up, I kept reading. I kept reading even as I wondered why I believed every word in it. Certainly, there was no logical (ego) reason to do so.

Even though I believed it then and even though I practice it continuously now, it can still feel slow-going, and sometimes, it feels impossible to me. When it starts to feel impossible, it is because I have endowed the ego with power it does not have. My mind is conflicted as I choose to move toward God and, at the same time, refuse to relinquish some old belief that is not true. Conflict causes suffering, and so I can get discouraged.

One reason I might get discouraged is that I seem to be fighting myself.

It’s hard to see a winner in that scenario. Another reason for discouragement is that the inner conflict is not always apparent. When I don’t acknowledge that my problem is myself, I think it is real. I think that the problem occurs in the world and that I absolutely must do something about it. When this happens, the problem can take on frightening dimensions and seem to overwhelm me.

Sometimes, even when I finally let it go, I am still aware of ego thoughts that insist I can’t just pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Then I feel a twinge of fear in my gut, and I have to decide if I want to follow it to inevitable misery or turn away from it. The ego fear thoughts can be compelling. It seems to make so much more sense that the problem is not just going to go away, that I must do something.

This is my experience, but I am not experiencing reality.

Sometimes, I need to act; if so, I ask for guidance. But no matter what is going on in my story, and no matter how often I get pulled into the drama of it, nowadays, I always hear the Voice that tells me that this is not real. It might seem like a faint whisper next to the frantic warnings of the ego, but it is there, and that Voice has its own attraction. It is the attraction of love for love.

That attraction is very compelling, not in the frantic way of the ego, but in the clarity and certainty of its message. God’s Voice calls to the divinity in me, that is me. I may have disowned that divinity, but I have not destroyed it. So, I answer. I do this again and again, and it gets easier. I answer more confidently, and I accept the truth more quickly. This is how I wake up, maybe slowly, but gently and inevitably.

VIII. The Attraction of Love for Love, P 8

8 The real world was given you by God in loving exchange for the world you made and the world you see. Only take it from the hand of Christ and look upon it. Its reality will make everything else invisible, for beholding it is total perception. And as you look upon it you will remember that it was always so. Nothingness will become invisible, for you will at last have seen truly. Redeemed perception is easily translated into knowledge, for only perception is capable of error and perception has never been. Being corrected it gives place to knowledge, which is forever the only reality. The Atonement is but the way back to what was never lost. Your Father could not cease to love His Son.

We made the world we see.

And when we are ready to let it go, God will give us the real world. All that we believe is real now will become invisible. Pain, suffering, guilt, fear, anger, jealousy, death, all will be invisible to us. The real world becomes visible to us as we accept correction of our perceptions. Our perception will be perfect so we will see perfectly, and redeemed perception is easily translated into knowledge.

As Jesus says in other parts of the Course, while we believe in the world, that is, while we believe in the ego, we strive for corrected perception, true perception. Once that is done, perception gives way to knowledge, and this is the return to God. Jesus wants us to understand that God was never lost to us because God would never cease to love us.

We think we have lost our place in Heaven because we don’t remember it, and we don’t see it. It is invisible to us, not because it is gone or because we are absent from it, but because we have blinded ourselves to it. Through accepting the Atonement, we will see what has always been real. When we see reality, the illusion will not be seen.

I think of the world we made as blocks, and each block is a belief.

The world I have seen most of my life was made up of blocks of the belief in victimhood. In Lesson 31, Jesus told me that I am not the victim of the world I see. And for some reason, I believed this was true. Maybe it was the first sentence: Today’s idea is the introduction to your declaration of release. (ACIM, W-31.1:1) However it happened that I took it seriously, I began to remove the blocks of the belief I could be a victim of the world. This exposed something new to me. I felt peace and happiness in place of fear and anger.

Another block to Love was the belief in lack and loss. The world I saw was block after block of that belief. It showed up as lack of money, lack of love, lack of peace, lack of health. As I began to see that these unhappy events were really just different forms of the same belief, I realized there was a way out of my discontent. I just needed to remove the blocks to see what was behind them. So, I began by forgiving them as they showed up, and that became forgiveness of the belief in lack and loss. I still see those blocks sometimes, but they are no longer solid, and right behind them is the bright light of love.

It is helpful to know that nothing is lost to us and that God still loves us.

But we must do the work needed to dissolve these blocks to love. We must accept the Atonement. When I think about this, I see it as choosing God over ego. I use all sorts of processes to get myself to that point, but in the end, I simply decide for God.

This decision must be absolute for the ego to be undone, and so far, I am still struggling with that decision. I know. It’s crazy, right? It would seem that the answer is obvious. Who wouldn’t trade in this painful existence for a blissful existence with no pain and suffering, with eternal life, where nothing is ever lost or lacking? Evidently, me. But every time I struggle through a situation, no matter how difficult it seems at the time, I come out of it changed. I have more clarity. My perception is closer to reality. I am closer than before to making that final choice for God.

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