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Chapter 12: The Holy Spirit’s Course of Instruction

6. Seeking and Finding True Love

The ego is certain that Love is dangerous, and this is always its central teaching theme, though it never puts it this way. On the contrary, everyone who believes that the ego is real is intensely engaged in the search for love. Yet the ego, though encouraging the search very actively, makes one proviso: do not find it. Its dictate, then, can be summed up simply as, “Seek but do not find.” This is the one promise that it holds out to you, and the one promise it will keep. For the ego pursues its goal with fanatic insistence, and the way it does its testing and confirming of reality, though severely impaired, is completely consistent.

The search for love that the ego undertakes is therefore bound to be defeated. And since the ego also teaches that it – the ego – is your identification, its guidance leads you on a journey that must end in perceived self-defeat. For the ego frame of mind is the denial of Love, and therefore the ego cannot love. In its frantic search for love, it is seeking what it is afraid to find. The search is inevitable, because the ego is part of your mind, and because of its source, which is your mind, the ego is not entirely split off from existence, or it could not be believed at all. For it is your mind that believes in it, and gives existence to it. Yet it is also your mind that has the Power to deny existence to the ego, a denial which is merely an affirmation of Truth, and you will surely do so when you realize exactly what the journey it sets you on is.

It is surely obvious that no one wants to find what would utterly defeat them. Being incapable of loving, the ego would be totally inadequate in Love’s Presence, for it could not respond at all. In Love’s Presence you would have to abandon the ego’s guidance, for it would be quite apparent to you that it had not taught you how to respond appropriately to Love. The ego will therefore distort your perception of Love, and teach you that its version of “love” calls forth the responses that the ego can teach. Follow its teaching, then, and you will search for love, but will not recognize Love’s Presence, and therefore will not know how to find Love or respond to It when It is found.

Do you realize yet that the ego must set you on a journey that can only lead you to a sense of futility and depression? To seek and never to find is hardly joyous. Is this the promise of love you would make and keep?

The Holy Spirit offers you a different promise, and one that will lead to Joy. For Its Promise is always, “Seek truly and you will find,” and under Its Guidance you cannot be defeated. Spirit’s is the Journey to Accomplishment, and It will give you the Accomplishment of the Goal It sets before you. For It will never deceive the Divine’s Children, Whom It loves with the Love of the Creator.

You will undertake a journey because you are not at home in this world. And you will search for your true Home whether you know where It is or not. If you believe your Home is outside yourself, the search will be futile, for you will be seeking where It is not. You do not yet know how to see within yourself, for you do not believe your Home is there. Yet the Holy Spirit knows it for you, and It will guide you to your Home, because that is Its Mission. As It fulfills Its Mission, It will teach you yours. For your Mission is the same as Spirit’s. By guiding your sisters and brothers Home, you are following Spirit there.

Behold the Guide your Creator gave you, that you might learn you have eternal Life and Love. For futility and death are not your Creator’s Will or yours, and whatever is true is the Will of the Creator. You pay no price for Life, for that was given you forever by your Creator, but you do pay a price for your belief in death, and a very heavy one. If death is your treasure, even unbeknownst to you, you will sell everything else to purchase it. And you will believe that you have purchased it because you have sold everything else to gain it. But the Realm of Heaven, which is your Inheritance, cannot be bought or sold. There can be no disinherited parts of the Divine Family, for the Divine is Whole, and all Its Extensions are like It.

The Atonement was not a price paid for your Wholeness, but It is the Value of your awareness of your Wholeness. For what you chose to “sell” or throw away – your awareness of your Wholeness – had to be kept for you, since you could not “buy” it back, it not being for sale. Yet you can and must invest in it, not with money, but with your spirit. For spirit is will, and will is the “Value” of the Realm. Your Inheritance awaits only your Recognition that you have been awakened. The Holy Spirit guides you into Life and Love eternal, but you must relinquish your investment in death, or you will not see Life or Love, though They are in and all around you.