ACIM 5. II. The Voice for God, P 1, 2, 3. The Holy Spirit promotes healing by looking beyond it to what the children of God were before healing was needed, and will be when they have been healed.
The Voice for God
II. The Voice for God, P 1
1 Healing is not creating; it is reparation. The Holy Spirit promotes healing by looking beyond it to what the children of God were before healing was needed, and will be when they have been healed. This alteration of the time sequence should be quite familiar, because it is very similar to the shift in the perception of time that the miracle introduces. The Holy Spirit is the motivation for miracle-mindedness; the decision to heal the separation by letting it go. Your will is still in you because God placed it in your mind, and although you can keep it asleep you cannot obliterate it. God Himself keeps your will alive by transmitting it from His Mind to yours as long as there is time. The miracle itself is a reflection of this union of will between Father and Son.
The Holy Spirit knows what we believe about ourselves. He heals our minds by looking beyond our belief to the truth. He knows what we were before healing was needed, and He knows that is what we are. His lack of confusion is what heals us. I can speed up the process if I focus on what the Holy Spirit knows rather than what the ego believes.
Remembering My True Will
It is my will to awaken from the dream of separation and to return my full mind to God. This will has been asleep. What I mean by that is it has been out of my conscious awareness for most of my life. This has happened because it is what I wanted to happen. While I can be oblivious to my will, I cannot destroy, lose, or even change it because God Himself keeps it alive by transmitting it from His mind to mine. I must have changed my mind about remembering my will because it has begun to surface.
The Holy Spirit is in my mind to help me with this. Because I want to awaken, the Holy Spirit looks with me at the ego beliefs blocking the awareness of God’s Love and transforms these beliefs. For instance, to sustain the belief that I am separate from God, I have had to project an image of a body and give it autonomy. I make it seem as if the body gets sick and suffers and needs magical help to recover. I give it medicines and exercise it, and sometimes I have to take it to a doctor to save it.
Crazy Body Beliefs
The Holy Spirit is teaching me that this is insane. The body is only an image of a belief in my mind. It cannot cause anything, being an effect itself. It cannot get sick or suffer or die. When it does these things, it is only because it was so directed by the mind. So, when it seems I have pain in the body, I really believe in pain in the mind, which I then project onto the body. In this way, I convince myself that the pain is real and so is the body because it feels the pain. Because I seem to be feeling pain, I seem to prove that I am the body.
No matter how much care I take to preserve my “self,” the body continues to age and to suffer sickness, eventually dying. This is perfectly ego, which always seeks only to fail in what it seeks. I am a part of God, but as ego, I see myself as separate and different from God. It is as if I have become my own creator. I am not a very good creator, but I am a jealous god. I would rather be sick and suffer than give in to the truth. And I use my pathetic creation to prove that God has no power over me. I can be sick, and there is nothing He can do about it.
Correcting the Crazy Beliefs
I prove I can stand outside and apart from God and that He can’t get to me. Better to be fragile, weak, unhealthy, in pain, and even to die than to subject myself to God. No wonder I feel afraid of Him. I seem to have made God my enemy, and my only defense against Him is the pathetically inadequate and weak body.
This is what the Holy Spirit is showing me. And He is showing me the insanity of it all. God is Love. God is Life. I could never be a body, and I could never be sick or suffer. And I certainly could never die. I can pretend to be outside of Life and Love, but I cannot actually do that. As I look at these thoughts in my mind and ask the Holy Spirit to heal them, and as I become willing to accept the Atonement for them, I begin to awaken to the truth. I can never have a separate will from God because I can never be separate.
The miracle is the change of mind that allows me to remember the truth that God and I are joined forever, and nothing can come between us, not even my dreams of separation. My beliefs of separation have been projected as if they were outside me. In the same way, the happier dreams of union are being projected outward as well. They sometimes appear as literal miracles in my life and are the effect of the change in my mind. But always, the effects are a more peaceful and happy life. Ultimately, as more and more miracles occur, the mind awakens to reality.
Miracles Abound
While moving toward the goal of awakening, miracles abound. I need to know something, and there it is, in a book or a recording. I didn’t search for it as I didn’t even know what it looked like. There was a need, and it was there. I was in pain and remembered that pain was impossible, and the pain went away. I was in fear, remembered that fear is not part of God, and asked for healing. The fear vanished as if it were smoke blown by the wind. My mind was darkened by a long-held grievance. In a moment of sanity, I asked for healing, and the grievance disappeared. I cannot even remember what it felt like to hold that grievance. It is a miracle.
I didn’t do any of these things from within the dreamy world of separation. I welcomed the miracle of a healed mind, and the miracle was projected onto the world. It is a miracle when it comes from outside my ego mind, when I know that Myron could not have done it. The miracle in the world is a symbol of the healed mind that remembers, even if for just a moment, the union of Father and Son.
II. The Voice for God, P 2
2 The Holy Spirit is the spirit of joy. He is the Call to return with which God blessed the minds of His separated Sons. This is the vocation of the mind. The mind had no calling until the separation, because before that it had only being, and would not have understood the call to right thinking. The Holy Spirit is God’s Answer to the separation; the means by which the Atonement heals until the whole mind returns to creating.
We are not really here. We are dreaming of an impossible existence. It is not our entire mind that is dreaming, just a part of it. Despite that, we continue to be just as we always have. We are with God. We create, and we have creations. They love us just as we love our Creator. And we love them, just as our Creator loves us. But we are also, at the same time, dreaming of separation, and the part of the mind that dreams is fully involved in the dream and doesn’t remember that it is just a dream.
The Correct Answer
I am beginning to remember, just as you are. God placed the answer to the separation in our mind so that when the time came and when we were ready to awaken, we would have the means to do so. This answer is the Holy Spirit, the call to joy. As I get closer to awakening, I long for that joy. There was a time when I thought the way out of here was death, and, in my confusion and depression, I considered suicide, but I wasn’t sure that I was right, so I held off.
Now I understand that death is not an answer. It is just another part of the dream. But even my misguided longing to get out of this life made sense, just not the plan for doing it. I am ready to leave the story behind and return all of my mind to God. I am ready to return to true creation. Death is not the exit I thought it was, but there is an exit. As I turn my attention to the Holy Spirit and allow Him to heal my mind, I undo the world I made up. All that will be left is Reality.
3 II. The Voice for God, 3
3 The principle of Atonement and the separation began at the same time. When the ego was made, God placed in the mind the Call to joy. This Call is so strong that the ego always dissolves at Its sound. That is why you must choose to hear one of two voices within you. One you made yourself, and that one is not of God. But the other is given you by God, Who asks you only to listen to it. The Holy Spirit is in you in a very literal sense. His is the Voice that calls you back to where you were before and will be again. It is possible even in this world to hear only that Voice and no other. It takes effort and great willingness to learn. It is the final lesson that I learned, and God’s Sons are as equal as learners as they are as Sons.
I was reading in the Manual for Teachers this morning: “Heaven is here. There is nowhere else. Heaven is now. There is no other time.” So there is nothing to do to be what I am, nowhere to go. It is not in the future or the past. There is only now. But I don’t really know that. I still think I am something else, and Heaven is someplace else. I know the words that refute that, and I believe they must be true, but if I really knew them, I would experience life differently than I do.
An Alternative
On the other hand, my life does reflect my growing acceptance of the Atonement, and I do not doubt that I will soon be where I was before and will be again. That is, I will remember who I am. This is happening because I am learning to listen to that one Voice, the Voice for God, and my goal is to hear only that Voice. Right now, I still hear the ego voice, but I deny its ability to affect me. Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said that it takes effort and great willingness to learn to hear only this Voice, but it is worth every bit of it.
Because I ask for guilt and fear to be undone in my mind, I see a lot of it. This is necessary because for it to be undone, I must look at it with the Holy Spirit. With so much of this happening right now, I sometimes get discouraged. I see all this fear and guilt and think I haven’t made any progress at all. But while the well of guilt and fear is very deep in us, it is not endless. And I am capable of doing my part. I know this because Jesus said that we can do what he asked us to do.
What I Give, I Have Accepted
Something that helped me to feel more confident came from Chapter 14. It says: “You can learn to bless, and cannot give what you have not. If, then, you offer blessing, it must have come first to yourself. And you must also have accepted it as yours, for how else could you give it away? That is why miracles offer you the testimony that you are blessed.”
There is a reason this quote has helped me. Sometimes, I am completely tangled up in my fear and guilt thoughts to such a degree that I have forgotten why I am looking at them. But even so, when the opportunity comes, I can still teach the truth without any of that confusion. Because I give that truth, I know that I have that truth and that I have accepted it. Otherwise, I would not be able to give it. This helps me to remember why I am looking at all these thoughts of guilt and fear. I am looking so they can be healed. I am not guilty; I am only looking.
Sometimes it is really uncomfortable to look at the thoughts in my mind, but it is an essential part of the process that allows them to be purified. In doing this work, I am making the effort and giving my willingness to be healed. Thus, I am waking up. I remember who I am as I accept the Atonement for these thoughts. I am learning to hear only that one Voice.
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