ACIM Chapter 8. II.The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom, 3, 4

ACIM Chapter 8. II.The Difference Between Imprisonment and Freedom, 3, 4. The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free, because you will not listen to it.

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3 The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free, because you will not listen to it. It is not your will to be imprisoned because your will is free. That is why the ego is the denial of free will. It is never God Who coerces you, because He shares His Will with you. His Voice teaches only in accordance with His Will, but that is not the Holy Spirit’s lesson because that is what you are. The lesson is that your will and God’s cannot be out of accord because they are one. This is the undoing of everything the ego tries to teach. It is not, then, only the direction of the curriculum that must be unconflicted, but also the content.

We have imprisoned our will through our desire for self-will, and that was a misconceived plan on our part. I doubt we meant to be imprisoned, but however it occurred, we are not trapped. We have a way out. As long as we continue to listen to the ego thoughts in the mind and to believe these thoughts, we will remain imprisoned. However, we also have the thoughts we think with God in our mind. And we can choose to give our attention to those thoughts instead. This is the key to the prison we built, and it is in our own hands.

The thoughts we think with God are the only true thoughts in our minds.

When we give them our attention, we are letting go of the idea of a personal will. We are embracing our true will, which is the will we share with God. We are returning our mind to Reality and thus to sanity, and with sanity, to peace and joy. This decision to be the Divine Beings that we are is up to us. We will not be coerced.

In one of my favorite passages in the Course (Chapter 8, Section IV), Jesus says this. “If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing that we are alike. If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind.” In this passage, I see both the gentleness of Spirit and the inevitability of my return. I decide how long I want to remain the little self I have made. And I decide when I want to wake up and remember what I am.

The Voice for God is in my mind to help me wake up when I am ready. Until then, it speaks softly to me of Love. It never coerces; it never forces. As Jesus goes on to say in that section of the Course, God’s Kingdom is freedom, and freedom cannot be learned by tyranny of any kind.

Like most students of the Course, I have experienced the frustration of wanting freedom but being unwilling, and even afraid, to accept it.

I have wished that Jesus would just yank me out of my story and be done with it. This will never happen, of course, because we are equal in will, being the Will of God. Jesus says that this is the only lesson he came to teach. Could it be so easy? Could we simply wake up because we want to?

The only thing that stands in our way is our own willfulness and the guilt and fear that this willfulness engenders. At first, I needed to approach God very cautiously. I did so with a lot of Heavenly support and reassurance. I have looked at and chosen against many forms of guilt and fear. In doing so, I have come to realize that all of it is unreal. Every form of guilt and fear I have looked at with the Holy Spirit has been of my own making. The world I see has been smoke and mirrors every time I have looked without the filter of my desire for a personal will.

I have mostly stopped wanting the process to go faster. I have stopped trying to use my ego to wake up. Now, I am simply doing what the Holy Spirit puts before me. If I see fear or guilt in any of the ego guises, I ask the Holy Spirit to correct my perception. I listen to His Voice and I write what I hear and often share it. And I forgive and love I wait for the moment of readiness, knowing it is inevitable. I can’t make myself wake up; that kind of effort is just another expression of self-will. So, I allow my Self to be revealed to me. Then I will know my true will, the will I share with God.

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4 The ego tries to teach that you want to oppose God’s Will. This unnatural lesson cannot be learned, and the attempt to learn it is a violation of your own freedom, making you afraid of your will because it is free. The Holy Spirit opposes any imprisoning of the will of a Son of God, knowing that the will of the Son is the Father’s. The Holy Spirit leads you steadily along the path of freedom, teaching you how to disregard or look beyond everything that would hold you back.

I don’t want a personal will anymore. I recognize it is not my true desire. So, I accept that my past desire to have a will separate from God is imprisoning my true will. Because it seems to pit me against God, a separate will makes me feel deeply guilty. And guilt causes fear, which is not a happy state, nor is it my natural state.

I long for the freedom that is my natural state.

For this reason, I am vigilant for the ego thoughts I am tempted to believe. And I ask for the Atonement for my wrong-minded beliefs. I notice the effects of those thoughts, and I ask the Holy Spirit to correct my perception. He is teaching me that what I see in the world is meaningless, no matter how tempted I am to believe it.

I am learning to look past or beyond everything that would keep me in the world. It is very helpful to look past ego thoughts and their effects. I see what is before the body’s eyes, but I disregard the meaning of anything that is not an effect of the thoughts I think with God. I am not guilty for what I see, nor is what I see real.

Here is an example.

I woke up many times during the night and finally gave up trying to sleep around 4:00 this morning. The ego interprets this to mean that I am going to be tired long before my day is over. It offers me the thought that my mind is not going to be sharp. If I pay attention to the ego, this is what will happen. My mind is very powerful and will faithfully reflect back to me whatever it is that I believe.

I don’t want that kind of day, so I am not listening to the ego. There is only one true thought in this scenario. I didn’t get as much sleep as usual, and it was not entirely restful. In deciding what this means, I choose to take advise from my right mind or from my wrong mind. Out of habit, I might fall back on my past choices, which were habitual.

I might start to think I am tired, and then I will feel this way and act on the feeling. If I do, I will also remember the truth. I give the world all the meaning it has for me, including this. Thus it is in my power to disregard appearances and change my mind about the meaning I give it. My experience has been that as I change my mind, the effects often change as well, sometimes in startling ways. I used to dread the mornings after a restless night. Now that I have proven to myself that I can choose to see this differently, I am unconcerned. I know that I will feel fine during the day because this is what I believe is true. Rules about sleep no longer hold me back.

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