ACIM Chapter 8. I. The Direction of the Curriculum, P 3, 4. Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war does deprive you of peace.
ACIM Chapter 8. I. The Direction of the Curriculum, P 3, 4
I. The Direction of the Curriculum, P 3
3 Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war does deprive you of peace. Yet in this war there is no opponent. This is the reinterpretation of reality that you must make to secure peace, and the only one you need ever make. Those whom you perceive as opponents are part of your peace, which you are giving up by attacking them. How can you have what you give up? You share to have, but you do not give it up yourself. When you give up peace, you are excluding yourself from it. This is a condition so alien to the Kingdom that you cannot understand the state that prevails within it.
As I read this, I thought of my last marriage. Toward the end, I spent a lot of my time responding to ego thoughts in my mind, and so it was more a war than a joining. It’s kind of funny when I think of it, but I divorced him because I wanted peace. It is kind of a metaphor for ego. The ego says if we want to be happy, we must separate ourselves from God and from each other.
God, on the other hand, is Wholeness.
If we want to be happy, we choose peace over war. We choose sharing rather than attacking. When I was married, I listened to my ego tell me that I needed to defend myself against my husband’s selfish behavior and that he was the cause of my unhappiness. And yet, peace is the condition of the Kingdom, and in choosing to separate myself in order to gain peace, I was asking that the Kingdom be something it is not. I was asking that it be separation rather than Wholeness. It was a ridiculous request.
I’m not saying that I am guilty of choosing divorce or even that I wish I had chosen differently. I am just noticing that I was looking for peace where I could not find it. After the divorce, I spent several years learning how to have the peace I did not achieve through divorce. I had to forgive myself and him, and that took a while because I often hid from myself my true feelings. In doing so, they couldn’t be healed.
Eventually, I did look at it all and allowed it to be healed. The final piece came when it was completely healed, and I spontaneously apologized for my part without any sense of loss or any need to defend myself. I apologized without expectation or need for a response from him. Maybe he never saw his part in it, but that is none of my business and does not affect me.
I am completely at peace with that relationship.
That means I don’t think he is responsible for how I feel. I don’t blame him for anything he did or any effect his actions had on anyone. I freed him from my grievances, and so I freed myself. Now I understand that the reason forgiving him freed us both is that we are each a part of the other’s peace. We are one, and if we continued to separate through anger and blame, we would both suffer.
Was this hard to do? I had many compelling reasons to hold a grievance against him. And it took a long time to work my way to the point where I realized there was nothing to forgive. In spite of this, I know it was not hard. All I had to do was let it go, knowing that I wanted peace more than I wanted the grievance.
That it took so long and that I felt like it was hard was a testament to my desire to be right rather than happy. But, again, no, it wasn’t hard to do. It required only that I choose peace and that I recognize that my peace is dependent on my desire to hear the Voice of God, Which speaks for Wholeness. I only need to answer that call with the certainty that nothing else is more important.
I. The Direction of the Curriculum, P 4
4 Your past learning must have taught you the wrong things, simply because it has not made you happy. On this basis alone its value should be questioned. If learning aims at change, and that is always its purpose, are you satisfied with the changes your learning has brought you? Dissatisfaction with learning outcomes is a sign of learning failure, since it means that you did not get what you wanted.
I laughed when I read this paragraph. It is so simple that you would think we would have thought of it ourselves. Well, I guess we did because, consciously or unconsciously, we became open to finding another way. That is why the Course is part of our life now. But it is not enough to learn about another way; we need to put it into practice.
We don’t just say there must be another way; find that way, then go back to making the same mistakes as always and expect our life to change. What works for me is to look at each outcome, day-by-day, moment-by-moment, actually, and notice if it makes me happy. If I am not happy, then I make a decision to do it differently because I didn’t get what I wanted. That makes sense, right?
A simple example of this occurred over the weekend.
I said something to a friend and then regretted saying it. It felt like it was a stupid thing to say and that my friend noticed how stupid it was and judged me for it. I kept having judgmental thoughts about myself, and then I would feel bad. I know this is foolish and not helpful, and I asked for correction. But I would notice the thought again, and I would become anxious about it.
When I woke up the next day, the thought was right there waiting for me. What I did then was ask the Holy Spirit to show me what I needed to learn from this experience and to help me let it go. I thought that I was upset because I was afraid I was being judged by my friend and coming up short. Then I had the thought that I believed that I needed my friend to approve of me.
The next thought I had was of one of lesson 205. This is one of my favorite lessons because it is so completely uncompromising. It says The peace of God is everything I want. This tells me something essential that made all the difference. The peace of God is not just something I want but everything I want. Now I understand that in order to have the peace of God, I have to let go of other goals. It helped me to understand that by having the goal of needing approval, I could not have the peace of God. Each time I did not get approval, I would be out of peace.
Ahh! Now that I understood the problem, I knew the solution.
I was upset because I had put another goal before the only goal that would make me happy. I wanted this friend to approve of me, and this goal is doomed to fail. At some point, my friend is bound to disapprove of something I did or said. Even if she didn’t, I would project my self-judgment onto her and it would appear as if she disapproved of me.
There is no way I could keep this goal and experience the peace of God. The solution is simple. Needing approval doesn’t make me happy. If it doesn’t make me happy, it has no value to me. I can easily let it go on that basis alone. Peace makes me happy, and so has value to me. It only makes sense to remember that my only goal is the peace of God. All the anxiety I had felt when I thought I needed approval just dissolved away instantly. When I looked at the whole situation from that peaceful place, I could laugh at what a big deal I had made of nothing.
²The peace of God is everything I want. ³The peace of God is my one goal; the aim of all my living here, the end I seek, my purpose and my function and my life, while I abide where I am not at home. (ACIM, W-205.1:2-3)