ACIM Chapter 7. XI. The State of Grace, P 1, 2. The Holy Spirit will always guide you truly, because your joy is His.
ACIM Chapter 7. XI. The State of Grace, P 1, 2
XI. The State of Grace, P 1
1 The Holy Spirit will always guide you truly, because your joy is His. This is His Will for everyone because He speaks for the Kingdom of God, which is joy. Following Him is therefore the easiest thing in the world, and the only thing that is easy, because it is not of the world. It is therefore natural. The world goes against your nature, being out of accord with God’s laws. The world perceives orders of difficulty in everything. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable. By demonstrating to yourself there is no order of difficulty in miracles, you will convince yourself that, in your natural state, there is no difficulty at all because it is a state of grace.
Ah, I begin to see why miracles are important. It is through miracles that I express love and it is through accepting that there is no order of difficulty in miracles, I convince myself that in my natural state of grace, there is no difficulty at all. Following Holy Spirit is easy and the only thing that is easy because He speaks for the Kingdom of God and so is not of this insane world.
When I was new to this, my thought was that it sure seemed hard to follow the Holy Spirit. It seemed to take great vigilance, and it often seemed, at least at first, to go against my own desires and my own safety. Something in me wanted to follow Spirit, and something in me warned me against this urge. But slowly, over time, I more and more often turned away from the voice of doom and followed the Holy Spirit, the Call for Joy. The results have proven to me that I can trust the Voice for God.
And it is not actually that hard.
I have also learned through the experience of breaking free of the ego’s hold on my mind that it really is easy to follow Spirit. The Holy Spirit is consistent and gentle, and always leads me to joy and peace. The ego, on the other hand, is so erratic and unreliable that I never know where I will end up when I follow it. It’s hard for me to believe I have wasted so much time listening to its counsel when it has so often guided me down the path of confusion and pain.
The Holy Spirit wants only joy for me and knows how to lead me to joy. The ego is not interested in joy. It wants to win. It wants to be right. Clearly, it has no idea how to achieve even these little goals, and when it does manage to win or to be right, the price is often steep, and there is little satisfaction, and no joy.
I want joy. I know that the only way to achieve joy is to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit. So, I notice in my life effects that do not come from following that guidance and realize I have slipped back into ego. I may not have a clear indication of when or how this happened and I have learned not to be too concerned about it.
Figuring out how it happened is often the way ego entangles me and distracts me from what is important. I simply ask for healing and trust that if there is something I need to be aware of, it will be shown to me. As I turn more often from ego to the Holy Spirit, my trust in my Guide grows, and the ease of following the Holy Spirit becomes obvious.
XI. The State of Grace, P 2
2 Grace is the natural state of every Son of God. When he is not in a state of grace, he is out of his natural environment and does not function well. Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment that he has made. He therefore cannot adapt to it, nor can he adapt it to him. There is no point in trying. A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is with God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond anything he can make.
Being with God is the only state that is natural to us and the only state in which we will not experience strain. I thought about the idea of strain, and I realized that this was true. I strive to be happy by seeking more money, satisfying relationships, and a better body. It is incredible the amount of time and effort I have put into these things in the past hoping something would make me happy.
The sentence that says it all for me is: “There is no point in trying.” This is where I am right now. There is no point in trying to make myself happy by earning more money, going on another diet, or getting people to like me. Winning, being right, and attempting in any way to adjust the world to my liking- have never made me happy. I might get a brief sense of satisfaction, but then I think of something else I believe I need, and happiness bursts like a soap bubble when you try to catch it.
So, I surrender.
I surrender not in the sense of giving up, but I surrender to grace. I will still earn money and ask for guidance in my relationships. And I will still watch what I eat and take vitamins, and maybe I will even exercise this body if I absolutely have to. But I will not look to these things for happiness. They will just be things I do, not the answer to my quest for peace, joy, and love.
It takes a lot of vigilance to notice when I have reverted to being in charge of my happiness through manipulating the world. It is all I have known while in the illusion, and I do it unless I deliberately choose not to. For example, I have been doing a lot of computer work the last few days, and my hand has started hurting when I type.
The thought in my mind is that I am not happy because my hand hurts. Then the ego mind starts looking for solutions, and this leads to looking for targets onto which I can project the blame for my predicament. The situation gets complicated really fast and is impossible to solve to my satisfaction. Just this one small thing causes life here to be a strain, and my day has hardly begun.
I ask Holy Spirit how to see this differently.
He reminds me that there is no point in trying to use the world to be happy and no point in trying to manipulate the world to make myself happy. It will just increase the strain. Instead, He directs me toward my purpose. I remember that there is no pain.
I remember that it is not the Will of God that I suffer, and so I cannot suffer. As I type this, the pain in my hand increases exponentially, and I see my resistance. But as soon as I see it, I let it go, and the pain fades away. This is my purpose: to use the world to allow the world to be undone. There is an environment in which I can live without strain, but to return to that environment, I must first give up the one I made to take its place.
To read Pathways of Light insights of this section, CLICK HERE.