ACIM Chapter 7. II. The Law of the Kingdom, P 3-5. Outside the Kingdom, the law that prevails inside is adapted to “What you project you believe.”
ACIM Chapter 7. II. The Law of the Kingdom, P 3-5
II. The Law of the Kingdom, P 3
3 Outside the Kingdom, the law that prevails inside is adapted to “What you project you believe.” This is its teaching form, because outside the Kingdom learning is essential. This form implies that you will learn what you are from what you have projected onto others, and therefore believe they are. In the Kingdom there is no teaching or learning, because there is no belief. There is only certainty. God and His Sons, in the surety of being, know that what you extend you are. That form of the law is not adapted at all, being the law of creation. God Himself created the law by creating by it. And His Sons, who create like Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the increase of the Kingdom depends on it, just as their own creation did.
Jesus is helping us to see some basic differences between the world and the Kingdom. Teaching and learning have no place in the Kingdom because there is only certainty. There is nothing to teach or to learn. Here in the world, teaching and learning are essential because we have forgotten our certainty. I believe different things than you believe, and even within my own mind, the things I believe vary according to my experiences.
This seems so normal and natural that it is hard to imagine not having beliefs.
But think how peaceful the world will be when we let go of our desire to choose the form “truth” will take for us, and we simply know what there is to know. Everyone will know the same thing because it will not be a belief because perception will be as true as it is possible to be. It will be very close to knowledge.
In the meantime, I wonder at the absurdity of arguing for a viewpoint. Why would I give up my peace because someone did not agree with the meaning that I gave something? I could change my mind about it any moment, no matter what “it” is. I will find plenty of “proof” to support whatever concept I am in love with, but my proof is meaningless because it is also based on belief, not certainty. Would I really sacrifice Heaven for a belief?
It really makes me laugh when I hear people arguing for their personal understanding of a concept from the Course. I have even done that myself, and it is just as funny to me when I notice I am doing it. When this is done, we allow our ego to convince us that we need to defend our personal beliefs even when the belief is about not having a personal self.
I have studied the Course for over 40 years now.
So, I have witnessed the shifts my understanding has taken, and I expect these shifts will continue. And no matter how close I come to the truth, it will be a million miles away from the Truth. I only have words and concepts to work with. How close do I imagine I could come to something I cannot possibly understand from this ego framework from which I am working at this time? Why would I even care about my beliefs or how someone else understands them?
The other thing I always want to remember is that my projection onto others teaches me what I believe about myself. This is so basic and so essential to my growing understanding that I remind myself of it often. The world is, literally, my mirror. The axiom, “You spot it, you got it,” could not be truer.
Whatever I think is true about someone else, however, I see this person, I am only ever really seeing my self reflected there. If I see light that means I am seeing my true self reflected in another. If I see darkness, I see my own dark thoughts reflected onto this one. When my projections of darkness blur my vision of another, I know to go inward with the Holy Spirit to have my mind healed. I’m seldom confused about that anymore. When I use projection to teach myself, I am teaching what I don’t want to learn and will suffer for it.
II. The Law of the Kingdom, P 4
4 Laws must be communicated if they are to be helpful. In effect, they must be translated for those who speak different languages. Nevertheless, a good translator, although he must alter the form of what he translates, never changes the meaning. In fact, his whole purpose is to change the form so that the original meaning is retained. The Holy Spirit is the translator of the laws of God to those who do not understand them. You could not do this yourself because a conflicted mind cannot be faithful to one meaning, and will therefore change the meaning to preserve the form.
Jesus, what do you want me to know about this?
Jesus: You speak the language of confusion and complexity, and therefore, the Holy Spirit must translate for you the law, which is clear and simple. He will do this over and over as often as you will allow Him. As you bring to Him the endless variety of thoughts that stream through your mind, He will translate them. In this way, you will begin to see the underlying sameness.
Me: OK, I understand now. I was thinking the following things, and they left me feeling discouraged.
I wish I had remembered Barry’s birthday.
Reading the news this morning, I became afraid for the world.
I spent too much money on Christmas.
I don’t know why I can’t remember people’s names.
Am I ever going to catch up on my work?
I noticed that I was suddenly feeling dispirited.
I paid attention to the thoughts in my mind, gave them all to Spirit, and asked that He heal my mind. He did not have a different answer for each one. The thought He gave me is that I am deeply loved and cared for. I was given the thought to bring my mind back to the moment and bask in the love that is mine all the time.
When I looked at those thoughts, I felt like I had so many problems, and when I tried to consider them one at a time, they just got bigger and more complicated. When the Holy Spirit looked at them, He saw that I had forgotten who I am, and He reminded me. There. It’s done. I am at peace.
When I looked at the problems, I was looking at forms of the same problem and confusing it with content. While the forms of the problems varied, and they seemed to be about all sorts of things, the content remained that I was simply confused about my identity.
I become confused about the difference between content and form because I listen to two voices. When I do that, everything seems uncertain and overwhelming. The Holy Spirit is my interpreter of what I believe, and when I ask Him for help, He makes it all clear and simple.
II. The Law of the Kingdom, P 5
5 The Holy Spirit’s purpose in translating is exactly the opposite. He translates only to preserve the original meaning in all respects and in all languages. Therefore, He opposes the idea that differences in form are meaningful, emphasizing always that these differences do not matter. The meaning of His message is always the same; only the meaning matters. God’s law of creation does not involve the use of truth to convince His Sons of truth. The extension of truth, which is the law of the Kingdom, rests only on the knowledge of what truth is. This is your inheritance and requires no learning at all, but when you disinherited yourself you became a learner of necessity.
Truth is my inheritance, and so nothing was required of me to have truth and to be truth. But then I chose something else to believe and thus disinherited myself of truth. Now, I must learn truth to have it again. This is why I was given A Course in Miracles to help me learn what I had forgotten.
The ego wants only to judge me and condemn me, and then to blame it on my brothers.
But ultimately, the ego wants me to be most afraid of the God of its own making, a God that mirrors its own faults. It is the fear of this judgmental and condemning God that keeps me hunkered down in the ego, trying to avoid being found by Him. And all the time, God’s boundless love for me blinds Him to my faults. In me, He sees only the perfection of His creation, the echo of the Love that He Is.
I think of my life, and the ego rolls out the past with its undeniable proof of my faults and my shortcomings. If I can’t stand to look anymore, it gives me a preview of a dismal future in which I am condemned to repeat the past, which follows me with relentless determination that nothing will ever change. I try to unravel the many problems and regrets and attempt to somehow atone for my sins in a useless attempt to avert the inevitable future the ego has shown me. I become entangled in the complexity of it all. It seems there are too many problems. Too much to take in. Too impossible to figure it all out and to somehow make it all right.
But I am not alone.
⁵I give you the lamp and I will go with you. ⁶You will not take this journey alone. (ACIM, T-11.in.4:5-6)
Jesus says that I can bring each of these thorny problems to the Holy Spirit and He will reinterpret them for me. I will then see that there really are not a lot of problems but only this one: I think that I am the ego, that the ego is separate from God, and that God is offended by this perceived separateness.
He reassures me that this cannot be true. He reminds me that nothing has happened, that I am innocent, and that God only knows how to love me. It doesn’t seem to matter how huge my sin is or how enormous my fear is, the answer never changes: I am innocent and God loves to love me.