ACIM Chapter 9. I. The Acceptance of Reality, P 5, 6
I. The Acceptance of Reality, P 5
5 I have emphasized many times that the Holy Spirit will never call upon you to sacrifice anything. But if you ask the sacrifice of reality of yourself, the Holy Spirit must remind you that this is not God’s Will because it is not yours. There is no difference between your will and God’s. If you did not have a split mind, you would recognize that willing is salvation because it is communication.
I’m going to consider the idea of willing is communication when I look at the next paragraph, where Jesus says more about it. Right now, my mind is focused on the concept of sacrifice and the idea of my will and God’s Will being the same.
I have always thought that God was asking me to sacrifice. This has been going on all my life. Sacrificing for God was strongly emphasized when I was a Catholic, not that I needed any encouragement to believe in sacrifice, but through Catholicism, sacrifice became confused with the love of God in my mind. In reality, sacrifice is related not to the love of God but to the fear of God.
Slowly, through the study of ACIM, I have learned that God does not want my sacrifice. The idea of sacrifice is a sticky mess in my mind, though, and I still notice the belief cropping up. So, although it is still there, it is no longer strongly believed and is denied as truth when I see it. If God wanted my sacrifice, He would not be Love. For a long time, one belief confused me.
Here was my confusion.
It was the belief that the Holy Spirit wanted me to sacrifice the world and my own self in order to be saved. Indeed, He encourages me to give up the world and the ego self. But He also teaches me that there is no sacrifice in doing so. And up until now I just wasn’t buying it. There was still this corner of my mind where insanity reigned, and I thought it was better to rule the asylum than to be one with God. Well, it is still there but it is a shrinking space, nearly gone.
In this dark corner of the mind, the ego insists that with just a little more time, the world can be improved upon, and I will finally get what I want. It has been saying this for eons. Never mind that it can’t articulate precisely what I want or how that task will be accomplished. The ego mind is insistent that giving up on the separation idea is loss.
As a concept, I have already given up on the separation idea.
Now, I am just looking at the many forms of this idea in my mind and life, shining light into that dark corner. I have learned through contrast that it is no sacrifice to let it all go. I do this a thought at a time, a situation at a time, a relationship at a time. The lesson is being generalized, and I am much closer to letting go of the idea that I am ever being asked to sacrifice. I have finally realized that there is nothing here worth keeping, so how could it be that letting it go would be a sacrifice?
This naturally leads me to the next idea: God’s Will is my will. We share the same will, God and me. This separate ego will is a toy I have played with, not what I am. I am one with God, and so I am one with His Will. That is the only will I have, and as I let go of the belief I am being asked to sacrifice my own will for God’s, I become more eager for the truth.
I have become less protective of the ego will and more willing to accept my own true will. Now, the idea of my will being overcome by God’s Will no longer frightens me because I realize that is not what is happening. I am, instead, simply returning to my own will, which is returning to God’s Will. I’m still allowing this to be untangled in my mind, but it will go faster now that I am no longer afraid of it.
I. The Acceptance of Reality, P 6
6 It is impossible to communicate in alien tongues. You and your Creator can communicate through creation, because that, and only that is Your joint Will. A divided mind cannot communicate, because it speaks for different things to the same mind. This loses the ability to communicate simply because confused communication does not mean anything. A message cannot be communicated unless it makes sense. How sensible can your messages be, when you ask for what you do not want? Yet as long as you are afraid of your will, that is precisely what you are asking for.
My Creator doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t speak words at all. We cannot communicate in that way. We communicate through creation only. I have to admit that I don’t know how I do this, but I know that I must because in another place in the Course, it says that we communicate directly with God. It must be heart to Heart. My truest desires and my truest love are received by God without the interference of inadequate words and concepts and without the confusion I suffer when I try to communicate through my ego mind.
Do I ask for what I do not want? All the time. I have become more aware of this conflicted asking since I began practicing Lesson 325. It says that everything I see is a reflection of a process in my mind that starts with a desire, becomes an image in my mind, and is then projected outward so that I can look at it, believe it, and defend it.
So, I notice situations in my life that are upsetting in some way.
I ask myself what I desire. What I am discovering is that I desired something and made an image of it, and in my experience of that image, I often suffer. For instance, I had some physical discomfort this weekend. I asked the Holy Spirit to show me the desire that caused this image to be made, and I saw that I wanted to suffer physical pain.
All this healing of the mind is challenging the ego, and physical pain has been effective in the past as a deterrent to the idea I am not a body. It is also a significant distraction and keeps the mind focused on the story rather than the cause of the story. So, I can see why I desired pain. There can be other reasons, too, but the issue right now is that I desire pain, and then when I get the pain, I don’t want it.
Like Jesus said, I ask for what I don’t want. I don’t want the pain I asked for because then I would have an unpleasant experience. But it is more than that. I don’t want it because it teaches me that I am something I am not. This is confused communication, and so it is not really communication.
What I truly want is to remember what I am. I am certainly not the frail, sickly body I asked for. Noticing this process, becoming aware of and accepting that I did indeed choose to experience pain, is helping me to take full responsibility for the world I made. Now, seen in the light, it can be healed.
I could have taken medicine this weekend.
But fixing the image I made isn’t really fixing the problem, and trying to think differently doesn’t work. What I did instead is realize that the desire to be in pain is what needs healing. Once I see that, I can ask the Holy Spirit to remove that from my mind. I see the problem thoughts, I realize I no longer want them, and I ask for healing. That is all I have to do. The Holy Spirit does the rest.
These insane thoughts are making an insane world. The way to correct this is to allow the Holy Spirit to heal the mind. When there are no more insane thoughts in the mind, I communication will no longer be confused. All desire will come from the Love that we are. Then, the images we make will be the real world, that is, the happy dream that Jesus talks about. From that place, we will be lifted up by our Creator, and all else will disappear.
This weekend, it looked like I just wanted to be pain-free, but what I really wanted was a healed mind. I wasn’t just asking to feel better. I was asking to return the mind to its natural state, to be free of all conflict, and to return my awareness to true creation, and thus to full communication with my Creator.
Regina Dawn Akers has an interesting teaching called The Code. CLICK HERE to learn more.