ACIM Chapter 13. XI. The Peace of Heaven, 10, 11

ACIM Chapter 13. XI. The Peace of Heaven, 10, 11

XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 10

10 Can God’s Son lose himself in dreams, when God has placed within him the glad call to waken and be glad? He cannot separate himself from what is in him. His sleep will not withstand the call to wake. The mission of redemption will be fulfilled as surely as the creation will remain unchanged throughout eternity. You do not have to know that Heaven is yours to make it so. It is so. Yet to know it, the Will of God must be accepted as your will.

What stood out to me in this paragraph is that I cannot be lost in my dreams because the call to awaken is in me. How can I be separated from something that is in me? So, regardless of how dark my dream becomes or how lost I feel, I am perfectly safe. I will wake up, and I will remember what I am. I will remember Heaven, and I will remember my Divinity.

Though I cannot lose my way Home, I can delay it.

As a consequence, I will experience pain, suffering, and death until I change my mind. That is also a fact, and it is why I chose to do this work. It feels hard sometimes and upsetting, especially at the beginning when my world, as I knew it, was turned upside down. It feels incredibly frustrating and disappointing when I resist it. But I will not veer from my path because this is working. I am happier and more peaceful. So, I will continue the work until it is done. I must because now that I have begun to listen, I hear the Voice calling me home, and I can no longer ignore it, nor do I want to ignore that Voice.

And what is all this work I do to return to my natural state and remember who I am? It is whatever it takes for me to remember and accept that the Will of God is my own. I am given 365 lessons, pages and pages of explanatory text, and many processes and personal guidance to help me make that transition. Not to change myself but just to become willing to accept my Self. All God wants for me is my happiness, and my job seems to be to realize that I would rather be happy than be right. Oh, my dear God, I surrender! And I will keep surrendering until there is no thought in my mind of resistance.

XI. The Peace of Heaven, P 11

11 The Holy Spirit will undo for you everything you have learned that teaches that what is not true must be reconciled with truth. This is the reconciliation the ego would substitute for your reconciliation to sanity and to peace. The Holy Spirit has a very different kind of reconciliation in His Mind for you, and one He will effect as surely as the ego will not effect what it attempts. Failure is of the ego, not of God. From Him you cannot wander, and there is no possibility that the plan the Holy Spirit offers to everyone, for the salvation of everyone, will not be perfectly accomplished. You will be released, and you will not remember anything you made that was not created for you and by you in return. For how can you remember what was never true, or not remember what has always been? It is this reconciliation with truth, and only truth, in which the peace of Heaven lies.

The ego will try to reconcile what is not true with what is truth.

So what does this mean? The ego says we must square the illusion with Reality. The ego says we must resolve these two opposites. To reconcile is to end the conflict, to make consistent or compatible. Well, that is not going to happen. It is not possible for us to do this. Illusion and reality are complete opposites in every way. They cannot be brought together and made compatible, and trying to bring them together does not achieve reconciliation. In fact, it does the opposite. It causes conflict. And conflict is war, and all of this happens in the mind, so we have a mind at war. There is no peace in war.

For instance, Reality says that we are as we were created. Illusion says that we have changed what God created. The ego tries to reconcile these two ideas by saying that we are both spirit and body. But these two beliefs cannot be reconciled. We can imagine we are separate bodies, or we can know ourselves as pure spirit, an extension of God, like Him in every way. How can those two beliefs be consistent? How could they be made compatible?

As we continue the mind-healing work that A Course in Miracles is teaching us, our mind undergoes a complete correction.

We let go of untrue thoughts that have made up this illusion we think of as our life. We begin to see a “better illusion” at first, but even that must give way to the truth. The final, perfect accomplishment of the Holy Spirit is the complete release of the illusion. We will have not even a memory of something that was never true. This is a certainty; it is the only certainty. Failure is of the ego, not of God.

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