XI. The Peace of Heaven 6-11
6. You will not remember change and shift in Heaven. You have need of contrast only here. Contrast and differences are necessary teaching aids, for by them you learn what to avoid and what to seek. When you have learned this, you will find the answer that makes the need for any differences disappear. Trust comes of its own will unto its own. When you have learned that you belong to truth, it will flow lightly over you without a difference of any kind. For you will need no contrast to help you realize that this is what you want, and only this. Fear not the Holy Spirit will fail in what your Father has given Him to do. The Will of God can fail in nothing.
7. Have faith in only this one thing, and it will be sufficient: God wills you be in Heaven, and nothing can keep you from it, or it from you. Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares all mean nothing. They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you. The Holy Spirit will restore your sanity because insanity is not the Will of God. If that suffices Him, it is enough for you. You will not keep what God would have removed, because it breaks communication with you with whom He would communicate. His Voice will be heard.
8. The communication link that God Himself placed within you, joining your mind with His cannot be broken. You may believe you want it broken, and this belief does interfere with the deep peace in which the sweet and constant communication God would share with you is known. Yet His channels of reaching out cannot be wholly closed and separated from Him. Peace will be yours because His peace still flows to you from Him Whose Will is peace. You have it now. The Holy Spirit will teach you how to use it, and by extending it, to learn that it is in you. God willed you Heaven and will always will you nothing else. The Holy Spirit knows only of His Will. There is no chance that Heaven will not be yours, for God is sure, and what He wills is as sure as He is.
9. You will learn salvation because you will learn how to save. It will not be possible to exempt yourself from what the Holy Spirit wants to teach you. Salvation is as sure as God. His certainty suffices. Learn that even the darkest nightmare that disturbs the mind of God’s sleeping Son holds no power over him. He will learn the lesson of awaking. God watches over him, and light surrounds him.
10. Can God’s Son lose himself in dreams, when God has placed within him the glad call to waken and be glad? He cannot separate himself from what is in him. His sleep will not withstand the call to wake. The mission of redemption will be fulfilled as surely as the creation will remain unchanged throughout eternity. You do not have to know that Heaven is yours to make it so. It is so. Yet to know it, the will of God must be accepted as your will.
11. The Holy Spirit will undo for you everything you have learned that teaches that what is not true must be reconciled with truth. This is the reconciliation the ego would substitute for your reconciliation to sanity and to peace. The Holy Spirit has a very different kind of reconciliation in His mind for you, and one He will effect as surely as the ego will not effect what it attempts. Failure is of the ego, not of God. From Him you cannot wander. And there is no possibility that the plan the Holy Spirit offers to everyone, for the salvation of everyone, will not be perfectly accomplished. You will be released, and you will not remember anything you made that was not created for you and by you in return. For how can you remember what was never true, or not remember what has always been? It is this reconciliation with truth, and only truth, in which the peace of Heaven lies.[1]
Today as we come to our devotional text, hark back to yesterday’s first five paragraphs about the peace of Heaven. We bring nothing of this world to God’s Kingdom! No matter what we have suffered at the hands of others and what we have done to others has any bearing on our place in God’s Kingdom. This does not get us off the hook as one would tend to think – but rather it gives us a beautiful standard to live up to – as God’s Son. As we remember our Sonship we will no longer want to lay any blame or guilt upon ourselves or others – we will not have to compare and contrast to see what is good and what is not, what to move toward and what to move away from. The answer to all our questions is the one truth – Love is God and God is Love. When we learn to love God rather than to fear Him, our trust will be in Him even as His trust is in us.
When we belong to truth, there is no lie in us. When we belong to truth we do not have to worry about lies anymore. The truth is apparent to us, and no lie will tell us that it is not so! We will not have to suffer anymore to know that we want joy and wellness, health and wholeness. We will not have to believe in lies to know that we want only truth. We will not have to experience darkness to know that we are Sons born of Light. We will not live shrouded in shadows to find that we desire only clearness and the unobstructed vista.
Jesus tells us in paragraph seven that our faith is in God’s Will and God’s Will for you and God’s Will for me is for His Kingdom – nothing can keep us from God’s Will; nothing can keep God’s Will from us. All this terrible melodrama we go through, and we put each other through can melt away in a minute for they mean nothing. Nothing can prevail against God’s peace that Love wills for us. This insane world and its batty thinking is not the Will of God for us. We are not to be out to get each other, to take all we can and leave our beloved brothers with as little as possible, to be afraid of our beloved that they may get a scrap more than we are left! This is not the Sonship of God; this is the aim of the ego to tear us apart and keep us from being decent and kind and good toward one another. What God gives to us is enough for us – chasing after the world’s offering is lunacy for while we may get what we think we want, we will never be blessed, we will never be able to enjoy it, we will never truly own it, but it will seem to own us. Holy Spirit restores our right mind to us and gives us hearts that love and care and bring together not tear apart.
God has given us Holiness and made of us Spirit. This is our communication link with God, and nothing can break it, even our deepest desire to remove it far from us. No matter what we do – we will never find the deep peace that we yearn for in anything the world offers except the sweet and constant communication we have with God through our Holy Spirit. We cannot separate ourselves from God no matter how long we sleep, no matter how many times we come back to go another round in the hellish cycles – we will all return to peace eventually for we were created to be peace – peace is ours, we have it now because God and His Peace is in us.
Holy Spirit teaches us how to extend the peace of God because only by sharing it can we learn that it is of us and in us. If God willed for me to be in Heaven, He willed for you to be with me there. That is all God wills for us. He is our Father, and He is not an earthly father who could abandon us, disclaim us, disinherit us – He is God our Loving Father Who is Love Itself. When I share God’s Love with you, I share God’s peace. There is not Love without Peace nor is there Peace without Love.
This is how we save one another. Saving one another is not saying magical words or adopting a belief system or joining a physical church. We are saved when we remember that God Wills for us to be with Him in His Kingdom. The Church of Christ is within each one of us. Our salvation is as sure as God my dear brothers. It is going to happen. We have no more worries about the flesh for the flesh and all its dark nightmares holds no power over us when we awaken to the Sonship of God. When we awaken, we awaken others. Our safety and security is in the hands of God Whose love and light surrounds us.
We do not have to shout at people, go on rants, try to convince others, curse them or send them to hell for not wanting to awaken just yet for perhaps it is not their time yet. We do not have to push the trust down people’s throat and go about blabbing about Jesus all the time – this is unworthy for those whose trust is in God. We learn our lessons and we teach our lessons in peace, in quiet, in the knowing of God’s Love.
We can only sleep so long in the nightmare realm that takes away everything it gives to you and then some! All of us know the truth within us for God is in us and God is truth. We think of the world as being so big and so important and that everything we do has some everlasting meaning attached to it, but the good news is – that it means nothing for God is not the creator of madness, mayhem, and murder. Believe in it or not, Heaven is yours and it is mine – our belief in it or against it has no effect upon the truth. But to know it we must accept the fact that God’s Will and our will is one – there is none of this separate business, there is none of this God is out to get me business, there is none of this God wants me to sacrifice and suffer. Fearing God is not loving God. Fearing God is not accepting that God’s Will and our will is one and the same.
Many of us make the mistake that we must sacrifice our happiness, our joy, and our little pleasures in order to have God’s Will for our lives. This is a perverted way in which to relate to our Father for our Father’s Will for us is perfectly in accord with our own. We want to be loved – God loves us. We want to have peace – God’s peace is our peace. We want to be full of joy and happiness – the Joy of the Lord has no bounds – and it is ours. There is no sacrifice involved except the laying down of fear and the lies that come with it.
Holy Spirit will undo for us all the teaching that programmed us to think that God is out to get us, to make us pay for our sins, to hold us accountable for our fleshly deeds. This is the ego’s substitution for salvation, and it drives people into sorrow and insanity rather than to peace and God’s Kingdom. Our reconciliation with God has all to do with recognizing that all failure is of the ego and the ego is a big nothing for the ego is based on a lie that God is a God of vengeance and wrath and out to declare war upon His creation over silly things such as belief systems and doctrines and goofy creeds based upon scraps of ancient myths made up by a primitive people. Holy Spirit is in you and in me. Holy Spirit knows the truth and will teach us the truth when we go to the right source and ask for it. And all of us will sooner or later. Because sooner or later the ego will fail us. Our churches and our pastors fail us. Our bibles and other religious books fail us. Our mates fail us. Our riches and status and love affairs all fall by the wayside in one way or the other. All of us must go within in this life or the next or the one after that.
Let the following observations which Jesus uses to end this section and this chapter ring through your mind today – in your personal devotional practice and as you go through the day. Come back to it and sip at it like a deer by a clean spring of water for it is so beautiful and so redeeming and such a spiritual release from all that is unholy and impure:
Holy Spirit is our guarantee for the salvation of everyone. You and I will be released from the hellish realm of separateness, flesh, and decay. That which was not created in Love and for Love and by Love will be forgotten for it was never true and therefore had no reality. This is our salvation for why would we remember that which brings us suffering, sorrow, and death? What is there to cherish in lies that obscure God’s love and devotion toward His Creation? What is there to remember about the place where the brothers declared war upon each other and killed and plundered and made one another weep in agony and despair and called it honor and called it courage and built monuments to that which is death and decay? No. We can forget all about this substitute kingdom where the lies of ego pervert our vision and obscure the truth – for we live forever – perfectly whole and well and good – in the peace and certainty of our Father’s love and devotion.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 13 The guiltless world. XI The peace of heaven 6-11. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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