II. The Alternative to Projection 9-13
9. Thoughts begin in the mind of the thinker, from which they reach outward. This is as true of God’s thinking as it is of yours. Because your mind is split, you can perceive as well as think. Yet perception cannot escape the basic laws of mind. You perceive from your mind and project your perceptions outward. Although perception of any kind is unreal, you made it and the Holy Spirit can therefore use it well. He can inspire perception and lead it toward God. This convergence seems to be far in the future only because your mind is not in perfect alignment with the idea, and therefore does not want it now.
10. The Holy Spirit uses time but does not believe in it. Coming from God He uses everything for good, but He does not believe in what is not true. Since the Holy Spirit is in your mind, your mind can also believe only what is true. The Holy Spirit can speak only for this because He speaks for God. He tells you to return your whole mind to God because it has never left Him. If it has never left Him, you need only perceive it as it is to be returned. The full awareness of the Atonement then is the recognition that the separation never occurred. The ego cannot prevail against this because it is an explicit statement that the ego never occurred.
11. The ego can accept the idea that return is necessary because it can so easily make the idea seem difficult. Yet the Holy Spirit tells you that even return is unnecessary because what never happened cannot be difficult. However, you can make the idea of return both necessary and difficult. Yet is surely clear that the perfect need nothing, and you cannot experience perfection as a difficult accomplishment, because that is what you are. This is the way in which you must perceive God’s creations, bringing all of your perceptions into the one line the Holy Spirit sees. This line is the direct line of communication with God, and lets your mind converge with His. There is no conflict anywhere in this perception because it means that all perception is guided by the Holy Spirit, Who’s mind is fixed on God. Only the Holy Spirit can resolve conflict, because only the Holy Spirit is conflict-free. He perceives only what is true in your mind and extends outward only to what is true in other minds.
12. The difference between the ego’s projection and the Holy Spirit’s extension is very simple. the ego projects to exclude, and therefore to deceive. The Holy Spirit extends by recognizing Himself in every mind, and thus perceives them as one. Nothing conflicts in this perception because what the Holy Spirit perceives is all the same. Wherever He looks He sees Himself, and because He is united He offers the whole Kingdom always. This is a one message God gave to Him and for which He must speak, because that is what He is. The peace of God lies in that message, and so the peace of God lies in you. the great peace of the Kingdom shines in your mind forever, but it must shine outward to make you aware of it.
13. The Holy Spirit was given you with perfect impartiality, and only by recognizing Him impartially can you recognize Him at all. Ego is legion, but the Holy Spirit is one. No darkness abides anywhere in the Kingdom, but your part is only to allow no darkness to abide in your own mind. This alignment with light is unlimited, because it is in alignment with the light of the world. Each of us is the light of the world, and by joining our minds in this light we proclaim the Kingdom of God together and as one.[1]
Jesus tells us in our opening paragraph today that Holy Spirit inspires our perception in time to restore our mind to completeness in God. Without Holy Spirit we are out of alignment with this idea and there should be no wonder over our resistance to God. We have been misled about our Creator. The myths and traditional sacred texts that are written about God originated from fear, superstition, and guilt-ridden consciousnesses. In a perceptual world, spiritual truths, invisible to our flesh eyes, do not seem real, trustworthy, or verifiable. While we all know that love exists; evil seems more powerful, and something we must defend against. As we try to make sense of a God Who could place vulnerable meat creatures in a universe intent upon devouring them at every turn, we are naturally stupefied, suspicious, and unwilling to put our trust in such a deity.
Holy Spirit uses time to bring us back to God, to lead us back to truth, to awaken us from the perceptual world of time, space, and separateness to the light of God’s love, joy, and peace. Holy Spirit is the voice for God within each of us. Holy Spirit is the voice within each of our minds which calls for healing of our divided minds, to restore our love and devotion to God, to save our Being from the hellish dream.
Full awareness of the Atonement is simply the recognition that this is a mass hallucination – that the separation never occurred. The ego cannot prevail against this because when we realize that the world is the miscreation, we realize that the ego version of God, the ego version of us, the ego version of reality is a lie, it is a work of fiction, it is a temptation that never occurred except in the place where all lies originate and stay trapped in time outside the reality of eternity. When our eyes are opened, we begin to see the truth of the matter. It is the truth that sets us free.
God awaits our awakening with warmth and welcome. It is not God that makes cumbersome demands, obligations, and mean threats for our return. We are awakened with kindness, joy, love, and light. We are awakened by God’s Perfect Love and His never-ending Peace. We are awakened by His Voice which is placed within each one of us and calls to us quietly and with gentle tones. We do not return to God so to speak, because in God’s eyes we never left, we only fell asleep and dreamed a dark dream, we simply made a mistake which can easily be corrected.
The ego tells us that return to God is hard, it is a path of sacrifice, we will never have any more fun, we will have to give up everything we enjoy in the flesh. God is harsh. He demands all our attention. He is jealous and unswervingly besotted with His need for worship and praise. Who would want to return to a bully God who is impatient, egotistical, and prone to temper tantrums when things do not go His way? Who would want to return to God who demands we sacrifice that which we love? Who would want to return to God who ordains eternal suffering, pain, death, and sorrow for not only those who have not been convinced of Jesus’s role in salvation, but for all of us, even babies? I cannot speak for you, but I would rather take my chances in hell than to have to worship a cruel, depraved, egotistical deity for all of eternity! Yet this is the picture the ego paints of God and one in which we have been taught and continue to teach to this day.
Holy Spirit teaches that return to God is unnecessary – because this realm is not reality. We are not flesh and blood; we are spirit. Humanity and the story of humanity is an invention of the ego; our true Being is in God and has never lost its perfection. Accepting our identity in God we accept our perfection. We give up the lies we made up about our creation; we stop putting our faith in the perceptual world; we give the darkened parts of our mind to Holy Spirit – and our minds converge with God. Joining with God’s mind resolves all conflict, perceives only what is true, and shares only Creation’s perfection.
Pay particular attention to paragraph 12 which shows us how to detect whether ego or Holy Spirit is in charge of our perceptions. Ego manipulates the perceptual world to exclude, to banish, to break communion and unity. Holy Spirit uses perception to counteract the ego’s goal and perceives others as one. Wherever Holy Spirit looks He sees Himself and He offers the Kingdom always. There is never any judgment, any unforgiveness, any withholding. This is the one message God gave to Holy Spirit and this is the Voice for God within each of us – it is a call to be one. The peace of God is in this message. The peace of God is in each of us. The abiding peace of God’s Kingdom shines in our minds forever, and this is what we are to see in each other, this is what we share with each other.
Holy Spirit is given to each of us with perfect impartiality and it is only when we recognize Holy Spirit without partiality that we can recognize Him at all. Ego would have us think that we are special, that we have the Holy Spirit and others do not. Ego would have us think that some people are favored by God and others are not. Ego is legion, Jesus tells us. Each and every one of us have a different one. It will offer all kinds of different paths to God, a thousand different religions, a thousand different interpretations, a mass of many conflicting paths in which to judge one another and teach conflict, schisms, and factions. We must not accept this dark tale. We align ourselves with the light of truth because we are the light of the world. By joining our minds to this light we proclaim the Kingdom of God together and as one. We go to heaven as one for we are one, we are the same. The Kingdom is incomplete until the Sonship is restored to full awareness of this fact.
Today in your devotional practice ask Holy Spirit to shine the light of truth in your mind. Align with the light of God’s undying love and devotion. We are the light of the world. We accept God’s love, and we know ourselves as God knows us – without favoritism, without specialness, without magic formulas or sacrifices of any kind. We give up all perceptions we may have heard about, been taught about, or read about God in which He is said to be anything but the Loving Father, merciful, kind, and never failing in His abiding patience toward those who still fear Him instead of love Him.
Dear Father, let our minds be full of the light of Your love so that Your love shines through us, quietly and calmly awakening everyone we greet. We pray in the name of Jesus Who makes us one. Amen.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 6 The lessons of love. II The alternative to projection 9-13. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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