Chapter 23: The War Against Yourself
1. You must recognize that the opposite of frailty and weakness is Innocence. Innocence is Strength and nothing else is strong. In Innocence you do not experience fear but in your belief that you are a “sinner” you believe that you are weak. The show of “strength” that attack is supposed to be is meant to conceal your frailty but it does not work because the unreal cannot be hidden. You are not strong if you have an “enemy” and you will not attack unless you think that you have one. If you believe in “enemies” then you believe that you are weak but weakness is not the Will of God. Weakness is opposed to God’s Will and if it were real it would be God’s “enemy”. If you believe that you are weak you fear God as an opposing Will.
2. How strange is this war against yourself! You believe that everything that you made for separation from God can hurt you and is your “enemy”. You fight against everything to weaken it and you think that you succeed so you continue to attack, believing that attack has value. But it is certain that you fear what you attack and that you love What you perceive as Innocent. When you travel in Innocence you walk in Peace on the way that Love shows you. Love walks with you, protecting you from fear and you see only Innocence, Which cannot attack.
3. Walk in Glory and do not fear evil. You are safe in your Innocence because you extend your Innocence. Do not see the harmful because your awareness of the Truth can release everything that you perceive from the illusion of harmfulness. What seemed harmful can stand in your Innocence, released from your belief in sin and fear and happily returned to Love. You share the Strength of Love when you look on Innocence. Every error disappears when you do not see it. Look for Glory and find It Where It is in Innocence.
4. Do not let the personal mind’s little interferences draw you into limiting yourself. Guilt is not attractive to you when you know that you are Innocent. Think what Happy Perceptions you see with Truth in your awareness! Do not give up perception of your Freedom for a little sigh of seeming guilt or for the tiny stirring’s of your attraction to separation from God. Do not lay Heaven aside for these meaningless distractions. Your Destiny and Purpose lay far beyond them in the Pure Place in your mind Where limitations do not exist. Your Purpose conflicts with limitations of any kind, so It conflicts with separation from God.
5. Do not let yourself be tempted by limitations. The Glory of your Christ Mind is beyond limitation, measureless, and Eternal. Do not let Time intrude upon your awareness of your Christ Mind. Do not leave yourself frightened and alone in your temptation but rise above it and perceive the Love of Which you are a Part. Extend your Innocence to protect It in your awareness. You cannot know your Glory and perceive limitations and weakness around you. You cannot walk trembling in a frightening world in your mind and realize that Heaven’s Glory is in you.
6. Everything around you is part of you. Look on it all Lovingly and see the Love of Heaven in it all. This is how you will come to realize All that is given to you. In your Kind forgiving the world that you perceive will sparkle and shine and everything that you once thought sinful will now be reinterpreted for you as part of Heaven. How Beautiful it is for you to walk through the world with corrected and Happy perceptions that were in bitter need of the correction that your Innocence bestows on them. You cannot value anything more than this because here is your salvation and your Freedom. It must be complete for you to recognize that it is so.
1. The Irreconcilable Beliefs
1. The Memory of God comes to your Quiet Mind. It cannot come where there is conflict in your mind because when your mind is at war with itself it does not remember Eternal Gentleness. The means of conflict are not the Means of Peace and what you remember in conflict is not Love. You have no conflict unless you believe that it is possible for you to win. Your conflict implies that you believe it is possible for the personal mind to overcome God. Why else would you identify with it? Surely you recognize that the personal mind thinks that it is at war with God. Just as surely the personal mind has no real enemy, though it is its fixed belief that God is the enemy it must overcome and it believes that it will succeed.
2. Realize that your war against yourself is a war on God. Victory is not conceivable but if it were, is this a victory that you want? If God dies you die. Is this victory for you? The personal mind always marches to defeat because it thinks it is possible to triumph over you. God thinks otherwise. There is no war, only your mad belief that you can attack and overthrow the Will of God. You may identify with this belief but it will never be more than madness. Fear will reign in your madness and seem to replace Love. This is conflict’s purpose and when you think it is possible the means to make it so seem real to you.
3. Be certain that it is impossible that God and the personal mind, and you and the personal mind, will ever meet. You seem to meet with the personal mind and make your strange alliance with it on grounds which have no meaning because your beliefs converge on the body, the personal mind’s chosen home, which you believe is yours, too. You meet at an error in your self-evaluation and the personal mind joins with you in an illusion of yourself that you share with it. But illusions cannot join. They are all the same and they are all nothing. Two illusions are as meaningless as one or a thousand. The personal mind, being nothing, joins with nothing. The victory over God that it seeks is as meaningless as itself.
4. Your war against yourself is almost over. Your journey ends at Peace. Accept the Peace offered to you here. The “enemy” that you fought as an intruder on your “peace” you will recognize as the Giver of your Peace. Your “enemy” was God, to Which all conflict, attack, and victory of any kind are unknown. God loves you Perfectly, Completely, and Eternally. For you who have God within you, your being at war with God is as ridiculous as the wind saying that nature is no longer part of it. Could the wind make this true? It is also not up to you to determine What is within you or what can never be part of you.
5. You undertook this war against yourself to teach yourself that you are not One with God. For this you must forget God and you do forget God in the body’s “life”. If you believe that you are a body you will believe that you have forgotten God. But Truth can never be forgotten by Itself and you have not forgotten What you are. Only a strange illusion of yourself, a tiny wish to triumph over What you are, seems to have forgotten.
6. Your war against yourself is only a battle of two illusions in your mind – the personal mind and what it has made of God – that you struggle to make different from each other in the belief that the one that wins will be true. There is no conflict between these illusions and Truth. They are not different from each other because both are not true. It does not matter what form they take. Your wish, which made them, is insane and they remain part of the insanity that made them. Madness does not threaten Reality and it has no influence on Reality. Illusions cannot triumph over Truth or threaten It in any way. The Reality that illusions deny is not a part of illusions.
7. The Truth that you remember is a part of you because you must be One with God. Truth does not fight against illusions and illusions only have an illusion of fighting against Truth. Illusions only battle themselves. Being fragmented they fragment but Truth is indivisible and far beyond their little reach. You will remember What you know when you learn that you cannot be in conflict. One illusion about yourself can battle another illusion about yourself but this war of illusions is a state where nothing real happens. There is no victor or victory. And Truth stands apart, untouched and Quiet in the Peace of God.
8. Conflict must be between two opposing forces. It cannot be between Power and nothingness. Anything you attack is part of your mind. By attacking you make two illusions of yourself in conflict with each other: the attacker and the attacked. Your mind is One with God and attack occurs whenever you look on anything that your mind perceives with anything but Love. Conflict is frightening and it is the birth of your fear. But what is born of nothing cannot make itself real through battle. Why would you fill your mind with perceptions of conflicts with yourself? Let all this madness be undone for you and turn in Peace to your Memory of God, Which is still in your Quiet Mind.
9. See how the conflict of illusions disappears when it is brought to Truth? The conflict seems real only as long as it seems to be between two truths, the winner being the more real and the defeated becoming the illusion. But conflict is always a choice between illusions, one to be crowned as real and the other to be despised in defeat as an illusion. God will never be remembered here. But no illusion can drive God out of your mind, which God loves Forever. What God loves must Forever be Quiet and at Peace because It is God’s Home.
10. You who are Beloved of God are not an illusion, being as True and as Holy as God. The Stillness of your Certainty of God and of your Self is Home to Both, Which are One. Open your mind, God’s Holy Home, and let forgiveness sweep away all trace of your belief in separation from God, which keeps God and you homeless. There are no strangers in God’s Home. Welcome all that you perceive to God’s Home, Where God has set Serenity and Peace for your entire mind and Where God dwells. Illusions have no place Where Love abides and Where Love protects you from everything that is not true. You dwell in Peace that is as Limitless as God and Everything is given to you when you want to remember God. The Holy Spirit watches over your mind, God’s Home, sure that Its Peace can never be disturbed.
11. You are God’s Resting Place and you cannot turn on yourself and seek to overcome God. Think what happens when you, the House of God, perceive yourself divided: Love disappears, you perceive separation from God as real, and guilt and fear follow. You remember nothing but illusions. Illusions conflict because their forms are different and they battle each other only to establish which form must be “true”.
12. Illusion meets illusion; Truth meets Truth. The meeting of illusions leads to conflict. Peace, looking on Itself, extends Itself. Conflict is the condition in which fear is born, grows, and seeks to dominate. Peace is the State Where Love abides and seeks to extend Itself. Conflict and Peace are opposites: where one is the other cannot be. Your Memory of God is obscured when your mind becomes conflict’s battleground. But far beyond this senseless conflict your Memory of God waits, ready to be remembered when you side with Peace.
2. The Laws of Chaos
1. The “laws” of the chaos that seem to uphold in your mind your separation from God must be brought to your conscious awareness, though you will never understand them. Chaotic laws cannot be meaningful so they are out of the sphere of your True Reasoning. But they appear to be an obstacle to your True Reasoning and to Truth. Look on them calmly so that you can look beyond them, understanding what they are but not what they are supposed to maintain. It is essential that you understand what they are for because it is their purpose to attack the Truth and to make It meaningless to you. These are the “laws” that rule the world that you made in your mind to be separate from God. But they govern nothing and you don’t need to break them. You only need to look at them and then go beyond them.
2. The first chaotic law that upholds in your mind your separation from God is your belief that the truth is different for everyone that you perceive in the world in your mind. You perceive each person as separate and with a different set of thoughts from everyone else. This principle evolves from your belief that there is a hierarchy in illusions, where some illusions are more valuable to you and you therefore consider them to be “true”. You and everyone that you perceive establish what is valuable for yourselves and then make it true for yourselves by attacking what others value. You see this as justified because values do differ in the world that you perceive and everyone is different from each other and therefore everyone is everyone else’s enemy.
3. Think of how this seems to interfere with your understanding the principle of miracles that one miracle is not harder than another. By establishing degrees of truth among illusions some seem harder for you to overcome than others. But if you realize that all illusions are the same and all are equally untrue it will be easy for you to understand that a miracle applies to all of them equally. You can accept correction of errors of any kind because they are untrue. When errors are brought to Truth instead of to other errors they merely disappear. No part of nothing can be more resistant to the Truth than can another part of nothing.
4. The second law of chaos that upholds in your mind your separation from God, which is dear to you when you want separation to be real, is that everyone must sin in the world that you perceive and that everyone therefore deserves attack and death. This principle, closely related to the first one which makes separation real to you, insists that separation calls for punishment instead of for correction. Destroying the one who makes an error then puts them beyond correction and forgiveness. You interpret their error as an irrevocable sentence on them, which even God is powerless to overcome. “Sin” cannot be cancelled out because “sin” is the belief that you can make mistakes for which your destruction by God becomes inevitable.
5. Think what this seems to do to your Relationship with God: It appears that you can never be One with God again. You and God must always seem to condemn each other because you are different; you are enemies. Your relationship is one of opposition, just as you meet the others that people the world in your mind only to conflict, never to join. Whether it’s God or another in the world that you perceive, you always perceive one of you as weak and the other as made strong by the defeat of the weak one. Your fear of God and of others now appears sensible, having been made real to you by what you have made of yourself and of God.
6. The arrogance of the laws of chaos can not be more apparent than they are here. Here is the principle that defines what God and Reality must be, what God must think and believe, and how God must respond. You do not see it as necessary to ask God what the Truth is. You tell God what the truth is and God has the choice to either accept it or to be mistaken. This leads directly to the third preposterous belief that seems to make your separation from God and chaos eternal to you: If God cannot be mistaken then God must accept what you believe that you are and hate you for it.
7. Do you see how your fear of God is reinforced in this third principle? Now it is impossible for you to turn to God for help in your misery. God has become the “enemy” Which causes your misery and to Which it is useless for you to appeal. And your salvation cannot lie in the world, which you perceive as justifiably at war with God, too. Conflict seems inevitable to you and beyond the help of God. You think that salvation is impossible because your Savior is your enemy.
8. Under this principle you have no release or escape because you view correction of your perception that you are separate from God as a myth and vengeance, not forgiveness, has become for you the “Will of God”. There is no help for you that can succeed. Only your destruction can be the outcome and God seems to side with this to overcome you. Do not think that the personal mind will enable you to find escape from the destruction that it wants for you. Escape is the function of this course, which does not value what the personal mind cherishes.
9. The personal mind values only what it takes from someone or something else. This leads to the fourth law of chaos which upholds in your mind your separation from God, and which must be true if you accept the others. This seeming law is the belief that you only have what you have taken from God or from others. You therefore see another’s loss as your gain. This law fails to recognize that your mind is One and that it can only ever take from itself. But all the other laws must lead to this because they say that separation is real so enemies are real. You must take from God and others what you want because enemies do not give willingly to one another or share what they value. And you believe that what your “enemies” keep from you must be worth having because they keep it hidden from you.
10. All of the mechanisms of the madness of your belief in separation emerge here: others as the “enemy” who are made strong by hiding what should be yours, your justified attack on them for what they are withholding from you, and the inevitable loss that they must suffer for you to save yourself. This is how, in your guilt, you protest your “innocence”: If you were not forced into this foul attack by the unscrupulous behavior of the enemy you would be kind instead. But in a savage world the kind cannot survive, so you must take or be taken from.
11. Now there is a vague, unanswered question that has not yet been “explained”: What is this precious hidden treasure that you must wrest from your cunning “enemies” in righteous wrath? It must be what you have been seeking for and have never found. Now you understand why you have never found it. It was taken from you by your enemies and hidden where you would not think to look. They hide it in their bodies, the cover for their guilt, and the hiding place for what belongs to you. Now they must be destroyed and sacrificed so that you can have what belongs to you. Their treachery demands their death so that you can live. You attack only in self-defense.
12. But what is it that you want and that you need others to die for? Can you be sure that your murderous attack is justified? Here, the final principle of chaos that upholds in your mind your separation from God comes to the “rescue”: There is a substitute for Love. This is the magic that you think will cure all of your pain, the missing factor in all of your madness that makes it “sane”. This is the reason why you must attack and what makes your vengeance justified. Behold unveiled the personal mind’s secret gift, torn from the body of another where it was hidden in hatred from you to whom it belongs! The other wants to deprive you of the secret ingredient that would give your life meaning. This substitute for Love, born of the hostility between you and others, must be your salvation. It has no substitute and it is the only substitute for Love. All of your relationships in the world that you perceive have the purpose of seizing it from others and making it your own.
13. Never is your possession of the substitute for Love complete and never will others cease their attack on you for what you stole from them. And God will never end Its vengeance on you and others because in God’s madness God must have this substitute for Love and kill all of you. You believe that you walk in sanity on solid ground through a world where meaning can be found. But consider this: These are the principles which make the world that you perceive seem solid and it is here that you look for meaning. These are the laws that you made for your salvation. They hold in place the world that you substitute for Heaven and which you prefer to Heaven. This is their purpose; what they were made for. It is apparent that there is no point in asking what they mean because the means of madness must be insane. But are you as certain that you realize that the goal is madness?
14. You don’t want madness and you would not cling to madness if you saw that it is madness. What protects your madness is your belief that it is the truth. It is the function of insanity to take the place of Truth and you must see it as truth to believe it. If madness is the truth then its opposite, Truth, must be madness. This reversal, where madness is “sanity”, illusions are “truth”, attack is “kindness”, hatred is “love” and murder is “benediction” is the goal that the laws of chaos serve. These are the means that seem to reverse the Law of God that Mind is One. Here the laws of separation from God appear to hold Love captive and to let “sin” go free from correction.
15. These do not seem to be the laws of chaos. In this reversal they seem to be the laws of order. Chaos is lawlessness so for you to believe its “laws” you must perceive them as real and you must see the goal of madness as sanity. You must confuse fear with Love, Which fear conquered, substitutes for, and “saves” you from. The laws of fear make separation seem lovely to you. Give thanks to fear, which has saved you for death!
16. How can it be that you believe laws like these? There is a strange device that makes it possible. It is not unfamiliar - you have looked on it in this course before. In Truth this device does not function but in illusions, where only shadows play major roles, it seems powerful. The laws of chaos compel your belief because of their emphasis on form and their disregard of content. When you think that these laws are true it is because you do not see what they really say. Some forms that these laws take have meaning for you but that is all.
17. Every form of separation attests that death is real, attack in any form cannot mean Love, guilt is not a blessing, and you cannot make your Christ Mind powerless and find salvation. Do not let the form of attack that you make on your Christ Mind deceive you. You cannot seek to harm your Christ Mind and be saved because you cannot find safety from attack by turning it on yourself. It does not matter what form madness takes. It is a judgment that defeats itself, condemning you who it is supposed to save. Do not be deceived when madness takes a form that you think is lovely. What is intent on your destruction is not your friend.
18. You want to maintain, and think it true, that you do not believe these senseless laws and that you do not act on them. And when you look at them directly they cannot be believed. But you do believe them. With content such as this, how else can you perceive the form that they take except that you believe the content? Can any form of these laws be supported? Yet you believe them for the form that they take and you deny their content. But their form never changes their content. You cannot paint rosy lips on a skeleton, dress it, pet it, and pamper it to make it live. You cannot be content living an illusion.
19. There is no Life outside of Heaven. Life is only Where God wants It to be. In any state apart from Heaven life is an illusion. At best it seems a type of “life”; at worst like death. But both are your judgments on what is not life, equally inaccurate and lacking in meaning. Life outside of Heaven is impossible and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven is only the conflict of illusions: senseless, impossible, and beyond all reason, yet perceived by you as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions are only forms; their content is never true.
20. The laws of chaos govern all illusions. The forms that illusions take conflict so that it seems possible for you to value some illusions above others. But they all rest on your belief that the laws of chaos are the laws of order. Each form of illusion upholds these laws completely, offering a witness that these laws are true. The seemingly gentler forms of separation from God are no less certain in their witnessing or in their results. Illusions bring you fear because of the beliefs that they imply, not because of their form. Your lack of faith that only Love is Real, in whatever form, attests to chaos as reality.
21. Your faith in chaos must follow from your belief that separation from God is real. It is because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion, a valid step in ordered thought. Your steps to chaos do follow neatly from their starting point of your belief in “sin”. Each is a different form in the progression of Truth’s reversal, leading you deeper into terror and away from Truth. No step is smaller than another and return from each is the same. Your whole descent from Heaven to hell lies in each one. Where your thinking starts, there must the descent end.
22. Do not take one step in the descent to hell because having taken one you will not recognize the rest for what they are. And they will follow. Your belief in separation from God in any form places your foot on the twisted stairway that descends from Heaven. But you can have it all undone in an Instant. How do you know if you have chosen the way to Heaven or the way to hell? Easily: How do you feel? Is Peace in your awareness and are you certain that you can reach the Goal of Heaven? If not you are listening to the personal mind. Ask the Holy Spirit to join you and to make you certain about the way that you go.
3. Salvation Without Compromise
1. It is true that you do not recognize some of the forms that your attack on God, and therefore on yourself, can take. Your desire for separation from God in any form will hurt you whether you recognize this is what you want or not and that is why you do not always recognize the source of your pain. Your mind is One and all thoughts in it that make separation real to you are attack thoughts and they are all equally destructive. Their purpose never changes. Their sole intent is to make God unreal to you by making death real to you and what form of murder can cover the massive guilt and frantic fear of punishment that you must feel? You may deny that you are a murderer and justify your savagery with smiles while you attack but you will suffer and look on your true intent in nightmares where the smiles are gone and where your purpose rises to your horrified awareness. You cannot think of murder and escape the guilt this thought entails. What does it matter what form your intent of death takes?
2. Any form that your belief in separation from God takes is a form of death, no matter how lovely and charitable it may seem to you to be. It can not be a blessing, nor a sign that you are extending the Holy Spirit to replace the world in your mind. The wrapping does not make the gift. An empty box, however beautifully wrapped and gently given, still contains nothing. Withhold forgiving the personal mind’s projections on the world that you perceive and you are attacking your mind. You extend nothing so nothing is what you receive.
3. Your salvation can contain no compromise of any kind. To compromise is to accept only part of what you want and to give up the rest. Your salvation can give up nothing; it must extend completely to your entire mind. Let the idea of compromise enter your mind and salvation’s purpose of restoring Oneness to your mind is lost to you because you won’t recognize it. Your salvation is denied to you when you try to compromise by holding on to some forms of separation because this compromise is your idea that Oneness is impossible. Your compromise maintains that you can separate a little and be One a little and know the difference. It teaches you that a little of What is One can be different and yet Oneness can remain intact. This does not make sense and you cannot understand it.
4. This course is easy precisely because it does not compromise but it seems difficult to you as long as you believe that compromise is possible. If compromise is possible then salvation is a form of separation and attack. Certainly your belief that salvation is impossible does not uphold your quiet, calm assurance that salvation has come. You cannot withhold forgiveness a little. You cannot be separate here and One there and understand that forgiveness overlooks all separation and sees only Oneness. The only way to not lose sight of your Peace is to recognize your assault on It in all of its forms. Peace can be kept forever clear in your Vision if you do not defend It.
5. If you believe that you can defend Peace and that your attack on Its behalf is justified then you do not perceive that Peace already lies within you. You will not overlook all separation while you still believe that some forms of separation are necessary for your Peace. You do not see that your savage purpose of separation is directed toward yourself. You cannot look at the world that you perceive as your enemy and be one with it in purpose. If you compromise and try to keep some separation with Oneness you will still hate the world that you perceive because it will seem to be keeping Peace from your mind.
6. Do not mistake a temporary truce with the personal mind for Peace, or the personal mind’s offering of compromise for an escape from conflict. For you to be released from conflict means that the conflict is over because you have left the personal mind behind. It does not mean that you linger with the personal mind in cowering hope that the conflict will not return because the personal mind is quiet an instant and your fear is not apparent. There is no safety in the conflict of the personal mind but you can look on it safely from the Holy Spirit. No illusion of protection that the personal mind offers to you can stand against your faith in murder. Here is the body, torn between your True Mind’s natural desire for Oneness and the personal mind’s unnatural intent to murder and to die. Don’t think that any form of separation can offer you safety from murder. Guilt cannot be absent from your wish for death.
4. Above the Battleground
1. Your fear of God is your fear of Life, not of death. But God is the only Place of Safety because in God there is no attack and no illusion in any form stalks Heaven. Heaven is wholly True. There are no differences in Heaven and what is all the same cannot contain conflict. You are not asked to fight against your wish to kill God but you are asked to realize the forms that conceal this intent. It is this intent that you fear, not the forms it takes. What is not Love is murder; what is not Loving is attack. Every illusion you hold is an assault on Truth and you do violence to the idea of Love because It seems to be as true as separation.
2. But what is equal to the Truth cannot be different. Murder and Love are different so both cannot be Truth. If they were both True they would be indistinguishable from each other. And this is what you believe when you believe that bodies are real. It is not the body that is like God. What is lifeless cannot be One with Life. A body cannot be extended to hold all of Reality, it cannot extend itself and be what it extends, and it cannot offer its extensions all that it is and never suffer loss.
3. God does not share Its Function with a body. God gave the function to extend to your Mind because your Mind is God’s Extension. It is not sinful for you to believe that your function is murder but it is insane. What is the same cannot have a different function. Your Whole Mind is the Means for God’s extension and what is God’s must be yours as well. Either both God and you are murderers or neither is. Life does not make death, as Life only extends Itself.
4. The Loveliness of your Holy relationship is like the Love of God. It cannot yet assume the Holy function God gave to your Christ Mind because your forgiving the personal mind’s projections on the other is not yet complete so it cannot yet be extended to your entire mind. Each form of separation that still attracts you and that you therefore do not recognize as attack and murder limits the healing and the miracles that you have the Power to extend to your entire mind. But the Holy Spirit knows how to increase your little gifts and make them mighty. The Holy Spirit also understands how your Holy relationship is raised above the personal mind’s projections of separation, where it is no longer. This is your part: to realize that separation from God in any form is murder and not your will. Overlooking the personal mind’s projections of separation is now your purpose.
5. Look on the personal mind’s projections of separation from the Holy Spirit within you and your perspective will be quite different from what it has been. From the perspective of the personal mind its projections seem quite real. You have chosen to be part of them; murder is your choice. But from the Holy Spirit your choice is miracles instead. And this perspective shows you that the separation is not real and it is easily escaped. Bodies may battle but the clash of forms is meaningless. It is over when you realize it was never begun. You cannot perceive that the personal mind’s projections are nothing when you engage in them. You will not recognize the Truth of miracles if you want murder to be your choice.
6. When the temptation to attack and make the separation real to you occurs remember that you can detach yourself from it. Even if you do not recognize all of the forms that this takes you do know the signs: a stab of pain, a twinge of guilt, and above all, the loss of your Peace. When this occurs do not leave the Holy Spirit but quickly choose to experience a miracle in place of separation. God and all the Love of Heaven will gently lean toward you and hold you up because you will have chosen to remain in Heaven, Where God wants you to be. No illusion can attack the Peace of God’s Oneness.
7. Look on anything from the perspective of the personal mind and you will see nothing. The personal mind does not have a reference point that can give meaning to what you see. Only a body can be separate and if attack and murder are your purpose then you will want to be a body. Only a purpose unifies and what you extend your purpose to is one with you. The body has no purpose and it must be separate and isolated. From the personal mind it cannot be surmounted. But from the Holy Spirit the limits it exerts on you are gone. The body stands between God and the Oneness that God extends to you because it has no purpose.
8. Think what will be given to you when you become fully aware that God’s Purpose is your Purpose: you will want nothing and sorrow of any kind will be inconceivable to you. Only Love will be in your awareness and only Love will shine on you Forever. Love will be your past, present, and future; always the same, Eternally Complete, and wholly extended. You will know that your Happiness cannot change. But perhaps you still think that the personal mind offers you something of value? Can it offer you Perfect Calmness and an Eternal Love so Deep and Quiet that no touch of doubt can ever mar your Certainty of It?
9. With the Strength of God in your awareness you will never think of the personal mind’s conflict. What can it give you but loss of your Perfection? Everything that the personal mind fights for is of the body – something that the body seems to offer or to own. When you know that you have everything you will not seek for the limitations of the body and you will not value anything that the body offers. The senselessness of conflict is quite apparent to you from the Quiet of the Holy Spirit. What can conflict with Everything? What that offers less than Everything could you want more than Everything? With the Love of God upholding you, you cannot find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make.
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