ACIM Chapter 7. IV. Healing as the Recognition of Truth, P 6, 7. To think you can oppose the Will of God is a real delusion.
ACIM Chapter 7. IV. Healing as the Recognition of Truth, P 6, 7
IV. Healing as the Recognition of Truth P 6
6 To think you can oppose the Will of God is a real delusion. The ego believes that it can, and that it can offer you its own “will” as a gift. You do not want it. It is not a gift. It is nothing at all. God has given you a gift that you both have and are. When you do not use it, you forget that you have it. By not remembering it, you do not know what you are. Healing, then, is a way of approaching knowledge by thinking in accordance with the laws of God, and recognizing their universality. Without this recognition, you have made the laws meaningless to you. Yet the laws are not meaningless, since all meaning is contained by them and in them.
It is God’s Will that His children remain as He created them. Therefore, they can only be Love, holy, and perfect in every way. His children are the light of the world and forever innocent. The ego offers us another will, a will of our own. Through this will, we see God’s children as small, vulnerable, fragile, evil, and above all, as guilty. Fortunately, the gift of the ego is not real. It is nothing. A will separate and different from the Will of God cannot exist, and so we can only pretend to be in opposition to God. We can only pretend His children are something He did not create.
Because only God’s Laws are true, none of the ego nonsense applies to me.
But if I think it applies to anyone or anything, I will lose the knowledge of who I am and will believe the ego laws are real. In remembering the ego laws, I will forget the truth. In seeing my brother through the filter of ego will, I am choosing to forget the truth about myself as well. My brother is myself, and so what I believe about my brother, I believe about myself.
The ego laws say that I can be good while others are bad. In fact, they say that I am good only in comparison to the evil I see in others. Ego says goodness can be splintered into pieces and pieces can go their own way, some remaining good and others becoming evil. Ego will is the right to decide what is good and what is evil.
God’s Law says that what God creates good remains good, and wholeness can only and always remain whole. God’s Law says there is no will but God’s Will, and so we remain safe in spite of our dream of other wills and other laws. But choosing to believe we have a will separate from God, we forget what we have and are.
IV. Healing as the Recognition of Truth P 7
7 Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, because that is where the laws of God operate truly, and they can operate only truly because they are the laws of truth. But seek this only, because you can find nothing else. There is nothing else. God is All in all in a very literal sense. All being is in Him Who is all Being. You are therefore in Him since your being is His. Healing is a way of forgetting the sense of danger the ego has induced in you, by not recognizing its existence in your brother. This strengthens the Holy Spirit in both of you, because it is a refusal to acknowledge fear. Love needs only this invitation. It comes freely to all the Sonship, being what the Sonship is. By your awakening to it, you are merely forgetting what you are not. This enables you to remember what you are.
“God is All in all in a very literal sense.”
God is All, so I cannot be something separate from God. I am in God, part of Him. This means I am beyond all harm, and there is nothing to fear. If there was something to fear it would mean scary stuff is in God, but God is Love and so this cannot be true. This is what I am to remember.
“Healing is a way of forgetting the sense of danger the ego has induced in you, by not recognizing its existence in your brother.” Because I had forgotten who I am and where I am, healing was needed. Before we accepted the idea of separation, there was no fear. It is the ego that induces the sense of danger we feel. That makes sense to me because if there were no bodies and if there was only one in harmony within Itself and in God, where would the danger come from? In God, there are no bodies and no disharmony; therefore, there is nothing to fear.
I was thinking of my son as I read this.
One day years ago, he had surgery in the hopes of ending years of pain. The pain didn’t go away, and it was scary for us both. It might seem to the ego mind that the loving thing would be for me to commiserate with him, to be afraid for him and with him.
The ego mind says, “I am so afraid for my son. I can’t stand to think of him being in pain forever. I am afraid for him because I love him.” But is this really love? Is love fear? If I believe his fear thoughts and join him in that fear, I only increase the belief in fear in both of us. Do I believe in God, or do I believe in fear? Do I want to teach Love, or do I want to teach fear? What I teach is what I learn.
There is fear in my son’s mind, but there is also God. I choose which I support, and I can as easily choose to support the truth in his mind as I can choose to support the fear in his mind. It is up to me. Which do I want to make stronger for both of us? By choosing to acknowledge love rather than fear as real, I am choosing and therefore, strengthening the Holy Spirit in my son and in myself.
The sane choice is obvious.
The only reason there is any disturbance in my mind is because I have chosen wrongly so often that I have taught myself to believe in something that does not even exist. There is no fear in God, so there is no fear. Now I am teaching myself to forget the false lesson I have learned so well, so that I can remember the truth.
It is simple and easy to do. If I feel fear, I seek first and only the Kingdom of God. God loves me and doesn’t want me to suffer, so it is His Will that I return to His Love. Because it is His Will, there is no possibility of failure. I am meant for love, not for fear. Because I want both my son and myself to be free of suffering, I continue to forget the lessons of pain and fear that I learned from the ego. I continue to disregard appearances. And I remember for us both that there is only God’s Will.
I didn’t do this perfectly but it was the practice I needed.
I am grateful that I kept reminding myself of the truth. What I learned then has strengthened my mind in believing only what God’s will is. Reading in my journal what that experience was like for me, I can feel the fear and desperation again. At that time, my prayer was to have this nightmare end and that both of us be free of the effects of our choices. But amid that intense fear and hope of being saved from it, I also chose to ask for help to remember the truth.
Now, on thinking of it and allowing the memory of that fear, I look without flinching with the Holy Spirit and let Him do His healing work. I refuse to look away until my mind is healed of any lingering fear. The work I did at that time years ago was built on until it became the way I live my life. Now, the fear and dread, if they come up at all in any situation, don’t linger because I know what to do with them. I know that however real the world feels, it doesn’t exist. No matter how real fear feels, it doesn’t exist. Only God is real, and both my son and I are in God. I am so grateful for A Course in Miracles.
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