ACIM Chapter 8. IV. The Gift of Freedom, P 1-3. If God’s Will for you is complete peace and joy, unless you experience only this you must be refusing to acknowledge His Will.
ACIM Chapter 8. IV. The Gift of Freedom, P 1-3
IV. The Gift of Freedom
1 If God’s Will for you is complete peace and joy, unless you experience only this you must be refusing to acknowledge His Will. His Will does not vacillate, being changeless forever. When you are not at peace it can only be because you do not believe you are in Him. Yet He is All in all. His peace is complete, and you must be included in it. His laws govern you because they govern everything. You cannot exempt yourself from His laws, although you can disobey them. Yet if you do, and only if you do, you will feel lonely and helpless, because you are denying yourself everything.
Here is something from a past journal.
I have been out of peace since yesterday. I have a very full schedule for a couple of months and I have been anxious about getting everything done. And I am afraid I will run out of time or forget to do something. It is an old story for me, this battle with time. The problem is not time. The problem is that I am refusing to acknowledge God’s Will. It is not that I lack peace because it is not possible that I be outside peace. To be outside peace, I would have to be outside God, and there is no “outside God” for me to be.
Peace is the law of God, and I cannot exempt myself from it. However, I can disobey God’s laws, and as Jesus says, when I do, I feel lonely and helpless. I feel this way because I have denied myself everything. This is exactly how I feel when I become anxious about time. I feel lonely and helpless. If I allow myself to stay in that state for very long, I get panicky as the ego mind adds more and more upsetting scenarios.
So, yesterday afternoon, this anxiety reached a level I could not ignore. I started taking care of a few things, fiddling with the scheduling and writing myself notes. I was busy, busy in the world, trying to fix the effects of my problem. All I did was move things around. As I read this morning’s paragraph, I remembered that the source of all problems is in my mind, not in the world. The world is just a picture of the problem in my mind. It is an enactment of my thoughts and beliefs.
I don’t need that old story about time running out.
Time is not my enemy. Actually, time is the tool that I am using to heal my mind, so it is my friend. I am happy to release the notion that there is never enough time. So, I asked the Holy Spirit to remove that old story from my mind and free me of its effects. I don’t want it, and I don’t need it.
As I did this, I realized that I am not behind on anything. I had a couple of things I actually needed to do this weekend, and they are done. The anxiety is about what I will need to do in the future, so I am worrying about what has not happened and may never happen. That’s just crazy. I also realized that I have a long weekend coming up and that I can use it to catch up. As soon as I let go of the problem created by my thinking mind, answers began to show up without my effort.
The thing that I want never to forget is that I don’t actually “lose” my peace; I push my peace away. It is a deliberate act on my part. Loss of peace is always the refusal on my part to acknowledge God’s law, which is complete peace and joy. I am like a recalcitrant child, refusing to be happy, choosing misery instead, just because I can. Always, I come back to that simple sentence in the Course, “You but do this to yourself.” I am equally free to surrender to His law and accept that I have everything because I was given everything.
And now…
I am feeling the tug of my old nemesis – time. But now, it feels different. I am aware of it, and I look at it with the Holy Spirit, but I don’t obsess. I realize there is a temptation there, and I also realize that giving in to that temptation is a choice. In each moment, I decide if I will choose to get rid of peace, and maybe that will always be true as long as I remain within the illusion. The difference now is that I don’t mind. I can use this temptation to heal my mind and thus heal the Sonship. And it doesn’t feel hard anymore. It feels simple and even easy. Like all of the Course, now that I know what I want.
IV. The Gift of Freedom P2
2 I am come as a light into a world that does deny itself everything. It does this simply by dissociating itself from everything. It is therefore an illusion of isolation, maintained by fear of the same loneliness that is its illusion. I said that I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. That is why I am the light of the world. If I am with you in the loneliness of the world, the loneliness is gone. You cannot maintain the illusion of loneliness if you are not alone. My purpose, then, is still to overcome the world. I do not attack it, but my light must dispel it because of what it is. Light does not attack darkness, but it does shine it away. If my light goes with you everywhere, you shine it away with me. The light becomes ours, and you cannot abide in darkness any more than darkness can abide wherever you go. The remembrance of me is the remembrance of yourself, and of Him Who sent me to you.
This is a world of pretense.
I pretend to be alone. I pretend to be afraid and lonely. And I pretend to dwell in darkness. I do this by pushing away the light, the love, and the peace that are everything and everywhere. I stare out of sightless eyes and behold a world bereft of God. Thus, I make a god of darkness and give it the dark attributes I have come to identify with, and he becomes vengeful and punishing. I have done this for so long that I believe what I have pretended is there and forgotten the reality of all that is.
It is not necessary that I keep doing this. The veil I have pulled over reality is thin and insubstantial. The light that Jesus brought into the world will penetrate it easily, and I can have this light. It is here for me. I simply change my mind. I had decided on darkness and the play of images on that dark screen. Now, I decide for light to show me the real world. I ask for light to shine away the darkness in my mind, and then I carry that light everywhere I go. So now I am the light of the world along with Jesus.
IV. The Gift of Freedom P3
3 You were in darkness until God’s Will was done completely by any part of the Sonship. When this was done, it was perfectly accomplished by all. How else could it be perfectly accomplished? My mission was simply to unite the will of the Sonship with the Will of the Father by being aware of the Father’s Will myself. This is the awareness I came to give you, and your problem in accepting it is the problem of this world. Dispelling it is salvation, and in this sense I am the salvation of the world. The world must therefore despise and reject me, because the world is the belief that love is impossible. If you will accept the fact that I am with you, you are denying the world and accepting God. My will is His, and your decision to hear me is the decision to hear His Voice and abide in His Will. As God sent me to you so will I send you to others. And I will go to them with you, so we can teach them peace and union.
This paragraph makes me cry when I read it.
My reaction is one of gratitude. I feel so grateful to Jesus for what he did for us all. I am still choosing some silly grievance or another over salvation and I have the advantage of Jesus having already accomplished salvation, then sending me this Course to help me accept his gift. How did he do it? How did he come to be aware of the Father’s Will for himself? I can’t imagine.
But I do have help, lots of it, and I must be able to do this because I am like Jesus. I do my part the best I can. I notice those silly grievances and let them go as quickly as I am able. As I decide against them, I decide for God. Really, this is all I have to do to complete my part. I accept the Atonement for all wrong-minded thinking that I notice, mine or anyone else’s. This is the plan Jesus set out for us so we could join him in rejecting the world, which is accepting salvation.
I reject the world each time I reject guilt and fear.
In rejecting the world, I save the world. All of my life, I felt lost because I couldn’t see a purpose to my life. I thought everyone else had a purpose because they seemed content, and I seemed the only one whose life had no meaning. Then I found A Course in Miracles, and I knew this was my purpose. I was to join Jesus in saving the world. So, when I read the last two sentences, I really cried.
“As God sent me to you so will I send you to others. And I will go to them with you, so we can teach them peace and union.”
I am joining with Jesus for the purpose of releasing the world of the separation idea, the belief that love is impossible. I am accepting my part as I allow the Holy Spirit to undo what I did, to remove from my mind the belief in guilt and fear. And I am doing my part as I allow Jesus to send me to others. He knows where he needs me and what he needs me to say and do and be. I just have to follow, and I am learning to do that without resistance. And, thank God, he goes with me and teaches through me as I get my ego out of the way. This is my part, as it is everyone’s part as each one becomes ready to accept the Atonement.
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