XI. The Test of Truth 9-15
9. Do you think that what the Holy Spirit would have you give He would withhold from you? You have no problem that He cannot solve by offering you a miracle. Miracles are for you. And every fear or pain or trial you have has been undone. He has brought all of them to light, having accepted them instead of you, and recognized they never were. There are no dark lessons He has not already lightened for you. The lessons you would teach yourself He has corrected already. They do not exist in His Mind at all. For the past binds Him not, and therefore binds not you. He does not see time as you do. And each miracle He offers you corrects your use of time and makes it His.
10. He Who has freed you from the past would teach you are free of it. He would but have you accept His accomplishments as yours because He did them for you. And because He did, they are yours. He has made you free of what you made. You can deny Him, but you cannot call on Him in vain. He always gives His gifts in place of yours. He would establish His bright teaching so firmly in your mind, that no dark lesson of guilt can abide in what He has established as holy by His Presence. Thank God that He is there and works through you. And all His works are yours. He offers you a miracle with every one you let Him do through you.
11. God’s Son will always be indivisible. As we are held as one in God, so do we learn as one in Him. God’s Teacher is as like to His Creator as is His Son, and through His Teacher does God proclaim His Oneness and His Son’s. Listen in silence, and do not raise your voice against Him. For He teaches the miracle of oneness, and before His lesson, division disappears. Teach like Him here, and you will remember that you have always created like your Father. The miracle of creation has never ceased, having the holy stamp of immortality upon it. This is the Will of God for all creation, and all creation joins in willing this.
12. Those who remember always that they know nothing, and who have become willing to learn everything, will learn it. But whenever they trust themselves, they will not learn. They have destroyed their motivation for learning by thinking they already know. Think not you understand anything until you pass the test of perfect peace, for peace and understanding go together and never can be found alone. Each brings the other with it, for it is the law of God they be not separate. They are cause and effect, each to the other, so where one is absent the other cannot be.
13. Only those who recognize they cannot know unless the effects of understanding are with them, can really learn at all. For this it must be peace they want, and nothing else. Whenever you think you know, peace will depart from you, because you have abandoned the Teacher of peace. Whenever you fully realize that you know not, peace will return, for you will have invited Him to do so by abandoning the ego on behalf of Him. Call not upon the ego for anything; it is only this that you need do. The Holy Spirit will, of Himself, fill every mind that so makes room for Him.
14. If you want peace you must abandon the teacher of attack. The Teacher of peace will never abandon you. You can desert Him, but He will never reciprocate, for His faith in you is His understanding. It is as firm as is His faith in His Creator, and He knows that faith in His Creator must encompass faith in His creation. In this consistency lies His holiness which He cannot abandon, for it is not His will to do so. With your perfection ever in His sight, He gives the gift of peace to everyone who perceives the need for peace, and who would have it. Make way for peace, and it will come. For understanding is in you, and from it peace must come.
15. The power of God, from which they both arise, is yours as surely as it is His. You think you know Him not, only because, alone, it is impossible to know Him. Yet see the mighty works, that He will do through you, and you must be convinced you did them through Him. It is impossible to deny the Source of effects so powerful they could not be of you. Leave room for Him, and you will find yourself so filled with power that nothing will prevail against your peace. And this will be the test by which you recognize that you have understood.[1]
In today’s devotional text, Jesus assures us that we have what we give. Holy Spirit brings every fear, pain, and trial that we offer to Him and shines the light of Truth upon them. Whatever we bring to Him that is not of God can no longer hurt us for all that is not of God is not true. Every dark dream, every dark thought, every dark disease– all the trauma and conflict and drama that we seem to suffer is as nothing. All the hard lessons we endured in our efforts to teach ourselves how to be human – Holy Spirit corrects – for they mean nothing and are nothing in the Mind of God. How could any of it mean a thing to the everlasting Father? What joy would it bring to God to hold our past against us? What everlasting love could dig about in time trying to dredge up old wounds and past grievances in which to slake its thirst for drama? God is not like you and me, and we can be very thankful about it. He does not sit and stew over things that happened 20 years ago! He isn’t Santa Claus that keeps a strict account of all who have been naughty and nice. Holy Spirit’s use of time is different than how we see it – our holiness uses time to return to God, to teach us to lay down the ego and all of its dark symbols and return to the tender mercy, kindness, and patience of the only Power there is.
Holy Spirit merrily makes us whole, gently calms that which is chaotic in our lives, brings peace, serenity, and inner bliss where there was sickness and separateness. Holy Spirit is your holiness and holiness is our active, spritely, bright and beautiful eternal Spirit. Holy Spirit is you as you were created in love and joy and peace, in goodness and mercy, in power and in tenderness. Holy Spirit does not frighten others away but rather draws those who are seeking truth together to share in holiness, to be awakened in happiness and appreciative release from the dark lessons of ego. When we put our holiness in charge of our minds, all the works of holiness are ours for when we walk in holiness we are miracle workers for we teach what we are.
As we learn to identify with our higher minds we are becoming the mind of Christ. When we say the Mind of Christ we are saying the Mind of Sonship. We are no longer putting ourselves in a category of miserliness, we have cast off what the ego would make of us, we have accepted the call of Christ. We step out of what we have made and into our true Identity. To come to our Teacher, we listen in silence. We do not have to scream or shout, beg or plead. We devote ourselves by not raising our voice against the Voice for God within. We stop doing whatever we were doing in the flesh, and we give our undivided attention to Holy Spirit. Here our oneness is made apparent to us. By sharing this truth with others, we remember the love in which God made us. God’s Will for all Creation is to love, for love is creation – it is our holy destiny, our everlasting purpose of being, it is the law of Love for only Love can extend itself, only Love can create that which never dies or changes or fades away.
We do not get to this state of being by thinking we know it all. We cannot reason this out with fleshy, finite, faulty problem-solving mechanisms. There is nothing devised by humans or artificial intelligence of any kind that can return us to our original state of Being. We come to this state by recognizing that we cannot trust in our lower minds, that our egos will teach us nothing of value, that when we think we know it all, we know nothing.
Study war all you want to my brothers, but it is not knowledge, it is meaningless and will keep you steeped in nothingness. Study the clouds, study the animal kingdom, study human behavior, study anything at all and become the master of nothing for without God, we have made nothing and no worthless degree in vanity will make it anything more. Whatever we study in the perceptual realm will bring us more questions, not answers. We will think we found something that really works but that “knowledge” will be superseded by the next big discovery, the next big thing, a new twist on the same tired theme. In the realm of religion, if your “salvation,” depends on the everlasting punishment of those who do not believe like you, you will not find peace nor have any understanding of love. For with truth comes peace and understanding – peace and understanding are the test for truth for one does not come without the other.
Holy Spirit teaches peace for that is what our holiness wants – our higher minds are not content with conflict, war, mouth battles, grudges, and divisions of any kind. Our holiness wants only peace for only in peace comes understanding, only in peace can Love abide, only in peace comes true release from the bluster of the know-it-all ego who can only teach us what it thinks it knows, filling our mind with arrogance and opposition which is not conducive to real learning at all. When we can lay it aside – perceiving how futile and poor the ego’s attempts to make something apart from God – our minds are no longer lower and higher, our minds are restored to oneness, and we are united one mind with another.
We must abandon the teacher of attack. This is the only way to bring peace to our awareness, for peace and understanding is obscured by the dark ignorance of the lower mind which pits us against one another instead of nurturing mutuality and brotherhood. Holy Spirit does not war upon the ego but merely awaits our awakening with unshakable faith in our choice against all that opposes God. We cannot escape our Holiness for nothing can change what God created us to be. Holy Spirit therefore will not abandon us, give up on us, or turn us over to the darkness forever. When we do and say things that grieve Holiness – we will feel the reproach without any attack upon our Identity. We will experience it as correction. We will recognize it as an understanding that there is nothing good to be found in the lower realm.
For example, I tend to communicate in a coarse manner. I go on rants. I use language that some may find unacceptable. In each case, I do my best to let it stand for I am in process even as you are in process. When we hide our processes from each other we are not helping one another, we are using darkness to hide our blunders, we are pretending to a holiness that we have not yet attained and leading others to believe that we have arrived while they are still struggling. Even when I relate things from my personal life as examples, I am often tempted to not tell the complete truth thereby not exemplifying the real process of bringing humanity to the divine. It is easy to go back and erase all the “bad” words. It is easy to say I chose to go with Holiness when my first response was to go low. Abandoning the teacher of attack may be a once-and-for-all experience for some, but I have never encountered such a person who had completely abandoned the ego without process – although I have encountered countless people who claim they have! The take-away from this is that we will all find sooner-or-later that there is nothing worthwhile in darkness, that our humanity will give us only a puny parody of our true Self, that we do not want to practice even a bit of darkness in the light of truth. When we find unrest in our minds, we will gladly correct it to maintain our peace for it is precious to us.
Holy Spirit is tender and patient with us. Understanding and peace must come to us, for we are in this together and we are asking for what He alone can teach us. The power of God is ours no matter how impossible this may seem to us in our human state.
We must recognize the impossibility of our humanity to know that all things that come from God come from God and not from what we made outside the realm of truth. Leave room for Holy Spirit in your mind, know that without Him we are lost in the dark. All we have learned to survive in this realm is worthless to the Kingdom of God. When we come to this awareness, our minds are filled with the power of unshakeable peace – there will be absolutely nothing that can make us tremble, give us a moment’s unrest, or fill us with sorrow for we know the truth of the matter. Peace is the is the test for truth. For truth brings peace and with peace comes understanding. Let us live, walk, talk, and enjoy our Being in truth.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 14 Teaching for truth. XI The test of truth 9-15. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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