¹ Today we are considering the will you share with God. This is not the same as the ego's idle wishes, out of which darkness and nothingness arise. The will you share with God has all the power of creation in it. The ego's idle wishes are unshared and therefore have no power at all. Its wishes are not idle in the sense that they can make a world of illusions in which your belief can be very strong. But they are idle indeed in terms of creation. They make nothing that is real.

² Idle wishes and grievances are partners or co-makers in picturing the world you see. The wishes of the ego gave rise to it, and the ego's need for grievances, which are necessary to maintain it, peoples it with figures that seem to attack you and call for "righteous" judgment. They become the middlemen the ego employs to traffic in grievances and stand between your awareness and your brothers' reality. Beholding them, you do not know your brothers nor your Self.

³ Your will is lost to you in this strange bartering, in which guilt is traded back and forth and grievances increase with each exchange. Can such a world have been created by the will the Son of God shares with his Father? Did God create disaster for His Son? Creation is the Will of Both together. Would God create a world that kills Himself?

⁴ Today we will try once more to reach the world that is in accordance with your will. The light is in it because it does not oppose the Will of God. It is not Heaven, but the light of Heaven shines on it. Darkness has vanished; the ego's idle wishes have been withdrawn.

⁵ Yet the light which shines upon this world reflects your will, and so it must be in you that we will look for it. Your picture of the world can only mirror what is within. The source of neither light nor darkness can be found without. Grievances darken your mind, and you look out on a darkened world. Forgiveness lifts the darkness, reasserts your will, and lets you look upon a world of light.

⁶ We have repeatedly emphasized that the barrier of grievances is easily passed and cannot stand between you and your salvation. The reason is very simple. Do you really want to be in hell? Do you really want to weep and suffer and die? Forget the ego's arguments which seek to prove all this is really Heaven. You know it is not so. You cannot want this for yourself. There is a point beyond which illusions cannot go.

⁷ Suffering is not happiness, and it is happiness you really want. Such is your will in truth. And so salvation is your will as well. You want to succeed in what we are trying to do today. We undertake it with your blessing and your glad accord.

⁸ We will succeed today if you remember that you will salvation for yourself. You will to accept God's plan because you share in it. You have no will that can really oppose it, and you do not want to do so. Salvation is for you. Above all else you want the freedom to remember who you really are.

⁹ Today it is the ego which stands powerless before your will. Your will is free, and nothing can prevail against it. Therefore we undertake the exercises for today in happy confidence, certain that we will find what it is your will to find and remember what it is your will to remember. No idle wishes can detain us nor deceive us with an illusion of strength. Today let your will be done. And end forever the insane belief that it is hell in place of Heaven that you choose.

¹⁰ We will begin our longer practice periods with the recognition that God's plan for salvation, and only His, is wholly in accord with your will. It is not the purpose of an alien power, thrust upon you unwillingly. It is the one purpose here on which you and your Father are in perfect accord.

¹¹ You will succeed today, the time appointed for the release of the Son of God from hell and from all idle wishes. His will is now restored to his awareness. He is willing this very day to look upon the light in him and be saved.

¹² After reminding yourself of this and determining to keep your will clearly in mind, tell yourself with gentle firmness and quiet certainty:

¹³ I will there be light. Let me behold the light that reflects God's Will and mine.

¹⁴ Then let your will assert itself, joined with the power of God and united with your Self. Put the rest of the practice period under Their guidance. Join with Them as They lead the way.

¹⁵ In the shorter practice periods, again make a declaration of what you really want. Say:

¹⁶ I will there be light. Darkness is not my will.

¹⁷ This should be repeated several times an hour. It is most important, however, to apply today's idea in this form immediately you are tempted to hold a grievance of any kind. This will help you let your grievances go instead of cherishing them and hiding them in the darkness.

Course in Miracles

Original Edition

TEXT

Chapter 6

Attack and Fear



V.c. Be Vigilant Only for God and

His Kingdom

par 82-95

[READING PAUSED FOR WEEKEND]

⁸² For your own salvation you must be critical since your salvation is critical to the whole Sonship. We said before that the Holy Spirit is evaluative and must be. Yet His evaluation does not extend beyond you, or you would share it. In your mind, and your mind only, He sorts out the true from the false and teaches you to judge every thought that you allow to enter your mind in the light of what God put there. Whatever is in accord with this light, He retains to strengthen the Kingdom in you. What is partly in accord with truth, He accepts and purifies. But what is out of accord entirely, He rejects by judging against. This is how He keeps the Kingdom perfectly consistent and perfectly unified.

⁸³ What you must remember, however, is that what the Holy Spirit rejects the ego accepts. This is because they are in fundamental disagreement about everything, being in fundamental disagreement about what you are. The ego's beliefs on this crucial issue vary, and that is why it promotes different moods. The Holy Spirit never varies on this point, and so the one mood He engenders is joy. He protects it by rejecting everything that does not foster joy, and so He alone can keep you wholly joyous.

⁸⁴ The Holy Spirit does not teach your mind to be critical of other minds because He does not want you to teach errors and learn them yourselves. He would hardly be consistent if He allowed you to strengthen what you must learn to avoid. In the mind of the thinker, then, He is judgmental, but only in order to unify the mind so it can perceive without judgment. This enables the mind to teach without judgment and therefore to learn to be without judgment. The undoing is necessary only in your mind so that you cannot project falsely. God Himself has established what you can project with perfect safety. Therefore, the Holy Spirit's third lesson is:

⁸⁵ Be vigilant only for God and His Kingdom.

⁸⁶ This is a major step toward fundamental change. Yet it is still a lesson in thought reversal since it implies that there is something you must be vigilant against. It has advanced far from the first lesson, which was primarily a reversal and also from the second, which was essentially the identification of what is more desirable. This step, which follows from the second as the second follows from the first, emphasizes the dichotomy between the desirable and the undesirable. It therefore makes the ultimate choice inevitable.

⁸⁷ While the first step seems to increase conflict and the second step still entails it to some extent, this one calls for consistent effort against it. We said already that you can be as vigilant against the ego as for it. This lesson teaches not only that you can be, but that you must be. It does not concern itself with order of difficulty but with clear cut priority for vigilance. This step is unequivocal in that it teaches there must be no exceptions, although it does not deny that the temptation to make exceptions will occur. Here, then, your consistency is called on despite chaos. Yet chaos and consistency cannot coexist for long since they are mutually exclusive.

⁸⁸ As long as you must be vigilant against anything, however, you are not recognizing this mutual exclusiveness and are holding the belief that you can choose either one. By teaching what to choose, the Holy Spirit will ultimately be able to teach you that you need not choose at all. This will finally liberate your will from choice and direct it towards creation within the Kingdom. Choosing through the Holy Spirit will lead you to the Kingdom. You create by what you are, but this is what you must learn. The way to learn it is inherent in the third step, which brings together the lessons implied in the others and goes beyond them towards real integration.

⁸⁹ If you allow yourselves to have in your minds only what God put there, you are acknowledging your mind as God created it. Therefore, you are accepting it as it is. Since it is whole, you are teaching peace because you believe in it. The final step will still be taken for you by God, but by the third step the Holy Spirit has prepared you for God. He is getting you ready for the translation of having into being by the very nature of the steps you must take with Him.

⁹⁰ You learn first that having rests on giving and not on getting. Next you learn that you learn what you teach and that you want to learn peace. This is the condition for identifying with the Kingdom since it is the condition of the Kingdom. You have believed that you are without the Kingdom and have therefore excluded yourself from it in your belief. It is therefore essential to teach you that you must be included and that the belief that you are not is the only thing that you must exclude.

⁹¹ The third step is thus one of protection for your minds, allowing you to identify only with the center, where God placed the altar to Himself. We have already said that altars are beliefs, but God and His creations are beyond belief because they are beyond question. The Voice for God speaks only for belief beyond question, which is the preparation for being without question. As long as belief in God and His Kingdom is assailed by any doubts in your minds, His perfect accomplishment is not apparent to you. This is why you must be vigilant on God's behalf. The ego speaks against His creation and therefore does engender doubt. You cannot go beyond belief until you believe fully.

⁹² Transfer, which is extension, is a measure of learning because it is its measurable result. This, however, does not mean that what it transfers to is measurable. On the contrary, unless it transfers to the whole Sonship, which is immeasurable because it was created by the Immeasurable, the learning itself must be incomplete. To teach the whole Sonship without exception demonstrates that you perceive its wholeness and have learned that it is one. Now you must be vigilant to hold its oneness in your minds because, if you let doubt enter, you will lose awareness of its wholeness and will be unable to teach it.

⁹³ The wholeness of the Kingdom does not depend on your perception, but your awareness of its wholeness does. It is only your awareness which needs protection since your being cannot be assailed. Yet a real sense of being cannot be yours while you are doubtful of what you are. This is why vigilance is essential. Doubts about being must not enter your mind, or you cannot know what you are with certainty. Certainty is of God for you. Vigilance is not necessary for truth, but it is necessary against illusions.

⁹⁴ Truth is without illusions and therefore within the Kingdom. Everything outside the Kingdom is illusion, but you must learn to accept truth because you threw it away. You therefore saw yourself as if you were without it. By making another Kingdom which you valued, you did not keep only the Kingdom of God in your minds and thus placed part of your mind outside it. What you have made has thus divided your will and given you a sick mind which must be healed. Your vigilance against this sickness is the way to heal it. Once your mind is healed, it radiates health and thereby teaches healing. This establishes you as a teacher who teaches like me. Vigilance was required of me as much as of you, but remember that those who will to teach the same thing must be in agreement about what they believe.

⁹⁵ The third step, then, is a statement of what you want to believe and entails a willingness to relinquish everything else. I told you that you were just beginning the second step, but I also told you that the third one follows it. The Holy Spirit will enable you to go on if you follow Him. Your vigilance is the sign that you want Him to guide you. Vigilance does require effort, but only to teach you that effort itself is unnecessary. You have exerted great effort to preserve what you made because it was not true. Therefore, you must now turn your effort against it. Only this can cancel out the need for effort and call upon the being which you both have and are. This recognition is wholly without effort since it is already true and needs no protection. It is in the perfect safety of God. Therefore inclusion is total and creation is without limit.

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