ACIM Chapter 13. III. The Fear of Redemption, P 9, 10

ACIM Chapter 13. III. The Fear of Redemption, P 9, 10

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 9

9 Save him from his illusions that you may accept the magnitude of your Father in peace and joy. But exempt no one from your love, or you will be hiding a dark place in your mind where the Holy Spirit is not welcome. And thus you will exempt yourself from His healing power, for by not offering total love you will not be healed completely. Healing must be as complete as fear, for love cannot enter where there is one spot of fear to mar its welcome.

Wow! The Holy Spirit cannot enter where there is one spot of fear to mar its welcome. That is an uncompromising statement. So, if I insist on seeing my neighbor as nosy and bossy, I have blocked the flow of love, and I have prevented complete healing. It seems like such a small thing, so unimportant. I hardly ever see my neighbor and think of her even less, and I certainly don’t express any antagonism toward her. But that dark thought is in my mind, and because I have not opened it to light, I have barred the Holy Spirit from that place, and I am not healed.

So now I am going to change my mind about that.

I listened to this neighbor talk and make demands, and I asked the ego what that meant. The ego and I are now joined in this decision, how I see my neighbor, and how I respond to her. What I am going to do instead is to cancel that decision and all that came with it, and I am going to be in union with the Holy Spirit instead. The Holy Spirit will be my adviser, and together, we will join in a different decision-making process.

I haven’t given my neighbor much thought and have not become deeply attached to my decision about her, so it is not hard to do this. I readily choose to see the Christ in this woman and am happy to do it. Some other decisions I have made with the ego are harder to walk away from. I am deeply invested in the decision made with ego and so I have to gently extricate myself from it.

When my dear friend was in the hospital, I worried about him.

This is a dark spot in my mind that I bring to the light and then hide away again. I have been pulling it out and putting it back for a long time now. He has had a lot of physical and emotional challenges, and so it stays on my mind. Here is what is happening. I think of his problems, and I feel afraid for him. I tell myself it is love, but actually, this is an attack on him.

Every worry thought is an attack on his perfection, and an attack on God Who created him perfect. Every thought is a prayer and so my thought that he is vulnerable and fragile is a prayer that he be vulnerable and fragile. That can’t be love. It is certainly not light. I gladly offer these thoughts to the Holy Spirit right now and I ask that He join with me in a new vision of my friend.

Here is a new prayer that I say each time I forget and turn to the ego mind for an interpretation of what is happening to my friend. I think this prayer often in between attacks, too, as it helps me to remember to join with Spirit in every decision about how I feel about him.

My prayer is a visualization more than words. I see him standing with friends and throwing back his head in laughter. He is glowing from within, and I know it is his holiness that I see. I know that there is nothing his holiness cannot do. I join my holiness with his, and our holiness envelopes the world. Thus, I am saving him from his illusions that I may accept the magnitude of my Father in peace and joy.

III. The Fear of Redemption, P 10

10 You who prefer separation to sanity cannot obtain it in your right mind. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it for the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father Who truly loved His Son. Therefore you made of Him an unloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father could give. And the peace of God’s Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his real Father, having attacked his own glorious equality with Him.

Jesus says that if I prefer separation to sanity, I cannot obtain this in my right mind. I must use the ego mind to do this. This is why we have a split in our minds. In order to experience separation, we had to find a way to make that happen. We could not do it unless we left our minds in some way because, in our right minds, we could not believe such an insane idea.

Regina Dawn Akers gave me a way to understand this.

So now I have a helpful visual. We made a room in our mind that we could enter and be separate from our Self. Once in this room, we shut the door on reality (in our right mind). Thus, we can imagine an experience that could not happen and convince ourselves that it is happening.

Then Jesus tells us that we were at peace until we asked for special favor, which, of course, He could not give us. Here is how I understand this. We had this tiny mad idea. It was the idea that there could be something separate, that there could be a you and a me, and that we could be apart from each other and different. Now that we are imagining ourselves as separate from each other, we often project this idea of asking special favor in a direct way, and because we believe we are separate, we believe this is possible.

For instance, when I hear a siren, there is a secret prayer in my heart that I don’t know anyone it is coming for. In other words, I am pray that my family is safe, and this is happening to a different family. Or I see sports teams praying for victory over their opponents or stars praising God for making them more successful than their competitors.

All these are examples of asking for special favor.

We could not have this thought in our right mind because we could no more believe in the possibility that love could have favorites or degrees, than could God. Looking at this, it is easy to see why Jesus said that we were at peace before…. How could we be at peace with the idea of separation? There can be no peace in this idea.

This idea of separation, of special favor, was alien to God, and He loved us, so He could not do that to us. So, we pretended to have specialness. We made that little room, went into it, and closed the door on reality. Now, we could pretend that God was giving special favor. We traded peace for a belief in specialness. We traded love for specialness.

Just as we had to give up sanity for this experience, we had to give up God as He is. Instead, we made up an illusory god that could participate in our fantasy. This was a scary god, one who might grant favors and might not. One who might choose us or might choose another, and there seemed no sure way to gain his favor or even to predict His decision. We made up a god who we imagined wanted our sacrifice in exchange for his strange, unpredictable love. No wonder we are afraid of this god.

But worse yet, because in our minds, we betrayed our true God and our true Self, we feel like we have reason to fear Him.

This is another totally foreign concept to God, but it is hard for us to let it go because betrayal is possible and even expected in our little room.  We fear what we made, and our peace has been shattered. Now we are trying to backtrack, to find our way back to that door, and to leave this insane and awful room. We are learning that we have nothing to fear and that our peace is whole and complete, just as it always has been, in spite of our foolish illusions.

I’m most drawn to this sentence, especially the ending phrase. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his real Father, having attacked his own glorious equality with Him. What a stunning statement! Have you ever thought that you are equal to God? I had not, and why would I? I seem to have made of myself a small and vulnerable body destined to die. That certainly does not seem like a glorious equality with God. I am deeply grateful that I can dream of separation but cannot make it true.

CLICK HERE to watch some snippets of early teachings from Regina Dawn Akers.