ACIM Chapter 7.VI. From Vigilance to Peace, P 1, 2

ACIM Chapter 7.VI. From Vigilance to Peace, P 1, 2. Although you can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceive it as fragmented.

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, P 1

¹ Although you can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceive it as fragmented. It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you will not attribute to all of it. That is why attack is never discrete, and why it must be relinquished entirely. If it is not relinquished entirely it is not relinquished at all. Fear and love make or create, depending on whether the ego or the Holy Spirit begets or inspires them, but they will return to the mind of the thinker and they will affect his total perception. That includes his concept of God, of His creations and of his own. He will not appreciate any of them if he regards them fearfully. He will appreciate all of them if he regards them with love.

The idea that stands out to me is that attack is never discrete and must be relinquished entirely. If I believe in attack, if I believe in guilt and fear, this will show up in my life. If I forgave everyone except one person or one situation, I would still experience attack. I would experience myself attacking and myself being attacked. I would see attacks all around me.

The world I see is a projection from my mind, so it is made from the beliefs in my mind.

The only way to be free of attack is to forgive attack completely and for all time. If I don’t relinquish attack, then I will believe that my brothers are attacking me. I was posting from my Manual for Teachers journal this morning, and in this entry, I was talking about an experience with my daughter.

She had said something that seemed unloving to me. I experienced her words as an attack. When I asked the Holy Spirit to look with me, He showed me that they were an expression of her own fear. That example showed me that as long as I hold onto attack, I will see attack. If I see her words as an attack, I will defend myself, even if only in my mind. But if I don’t believe in attack, I will see her words as a call for love and respond with love.

I also see how I will never be able to relinquish my fear of God if I believe in attack. Attack is never discreet. “It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you will not attribute to all of it.” My belief in attack will cause me to see God as a threat, just as I saw my sweet daughter as a threat. If I don’t relinquish attack, the whole world will be my enemy, and I will never be safe. I will spend my life trying to defend myself against perceived threats. I will never be at peace. If peace and happiness are my goal, I must relinquish attack entirely.

VI. From Vigilance to Peace, P 2

² The mind that accepts attack cannot love. That is because it believes it can destroy love, and therefore does not understand what love is. If it does not understand what love is, it cannot perceive itself as loving. This loses the awareness of being, induces feelings of unreality and results in utter confusion. Your thinking has done this because of its power, but your thinking can also save you from this because its power is not of your making. Your ability to direct your thinking as you choose is part of its power. If you do not believe you can do this you have denied the power of your thought, and thus rendered it powerless in your belief.

Jesus has told us that what we believe is true for us. When we don’t believe in our power, we feel powerless. This kind of thinking drives us to a dead end. The power of our mind allowed us to drive there as we used it to make up a story of powerlessness. And the power of our mind allowed us to believe we are stuck there because our story of powerlessness left us no way out.

Fortunately, through our power, we can perceive the story in any way we like, even to the point of feeling powerless. But since the power is in us but not of us, we cannot destroy the power or be without the power. So, we seem stuck, but we are not. We are just in denial of the power that is always there. What we are doing now is choosing to rediscover our power.

We start by reminding ourselves that we are imagining the world we see.

Then, we allow our minds to be awakened from the imagined world into reality. The power that made the illusion will undo the illusion through the Holy Spirit. Our true and holy Self will emerge in our minds, and we will remember who we are. What a moment that is!

Lesson 99 offered this prayer: God still is Love and this is not His Will. That was very simple and easy to remember, but I wrote it on the palm of my hand anyway. I had been having some confusion about my place in the Kingdom, so the prayer was right on time. I had also been listening to a book called Divergence. It is a Young Adult book about a sixteen-year-old girl finding her place in the world.

In the part I was listening to that day, she was going through a training technique to help her learn to be in control of her fear. She sits in a chair and receives an injection that causes her to hallucinate something that symbolizes her greatest fears. In the first one, she is attacked by a flock of crows. It is very real to her, and she feels the terror of being helpless as they peck away at her body, even getting into her body through her mouth.

At first, she flails away at them, screaming in terror.

But she starts to calm herself by remembering it is just a simulation. She begins to hear her instructor’s voice, reminding her of the truth. She is still in the illusion but remembers it is an illusion. She gets calm enough to use breathing to calm herself even more, and finally, she lies down and surrenders to the experience. She finds herself back in the chair, and the birds are gone. It was awful, and the fear stays with her, but at least she is out of the simulated experience until the next time she will have to face a fear.

I thought about what a good metaphor this is for us. We are imagining a life with lots of fears, and they seem so real to us. We have the power to let go of the fear and see that it is all just an illusion, but often, our fear is too great for us to do so. When we are ready, we begin to listen to our Instructor as He reassures us that it is all just a dream, an illusion.

He encourages us to relax and to listen to His Voice and not the voice of our fears. We probably all go through experiences that trigger fears, and like Trice, we learn to use tools to help us when we are afraid, such as breathing techniques, mantras, and remembering the words from the Course. We learn to surrender to the experience and let the fear fall away.

In her second time in the chair, Trice gets another injection and has another horrific experience.

This time, she is in a glass box that slowly fills with water. She is drowning and cannot get out. As before, she reacts in panic and terror, but she remembers pretty quickly, through listening to her instructor’s voice, that it is a simulation and not real.

It feels so real, though, that it is hard to hold onto the idea that it is not real. Then, Trice does something that she shouldn’t be able to do. She breaks the glass. She got hold of her fear enough to think and to act instead of react. She changed the simulation. This is our next step, too. First, we learn that the world we see is an illusion, and then we learn to listen to the Voice of our Instructor even when we are afraid. We learn to stop fighting the illusion and just let it be.

Finally, we begin to glimpse our true power, which is the first step to manipulating the illusion. Trice lost her fear of the simulations once she saw through them. Breaking that box showed her she was not powerless, so fear no longer controlled her. We are learning that we are not powerless. Dreaming about fear cannot make fear real. We are learning to manipulate the dream, proving to us that we are not powerless and that if a scary situation can be manipulated, it cannot be real, and we cannot be a victim of it.

We are powerful beings who deliberately chose to look at fear.

This whole world we see is a simulation, a very realistic hallucination with lots of scary stuff. But it is scary only as long as we believe in it. We are only in danger as long as we believe we are in danger, but the story of danger continues for as long as we continue to believe it.

When we start to doubt the authenticity of the story, we begin to wake up. We can then manipulate it as did Jesus when he healed the sick and resurrected the dead. There was nothing special in what Jesus did; he simply stopped believing in the story. Changing the simulation is simple if you don’t believe in sickness and death. We can do this, too. More than that, we can end the simulation. We can break the glass and step out of the illusion. This can be done even while the illusion continues to play itself out in the background.

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