Corresponding Manual for Teachers Section
Chapter 5: Student / World Questions
1. How Is Peace Possible in This World?
This is a question everyone must ask. Certainly Peace seems to be impossible here. Yet the Divine’s Word of Truth and Love promises other things as well as this that seem impossible. Its Word has promised Peace. It has also promised that there is no death, that awakening must occur, and that resurrection is part of our Divine Inheritance.
The world of illusions, of lack and suffering you look upon, cannot be the world the Divine loves, and yet Its Word assures us that It loves the world. The Divine’s Word has promised us that Peace is possible here, and what It promises can hardly be impossible, given the Source of these Promises. But it is true that the world must be perceived differently if the Divine’s Promises are to be received and accepted.
What the world is is merely a fact, and it isn’t given to us to decide what that fact is. But we can choose how we would conceive, perceive and experience the world. Indeed, we must choose this.
Again we come to the question of judgment. Ask yourself whether the ego’s judgment of the world or the Word of the Divine is more likely to be true. For they say different things about the world, and things so opposite that it is pointless to try to reconcile them. The Divine offers glad awakening to the world. The ego’s judgment would condemn it to the nightmare of endless separation. The Divine says there is only Life and no death in truth. The ego’s judgment looks on death as the inevitable end of what it calls life. The Divine’s Word assures you that It loves the world. The ego’s judgment says it is unlovable. Which is right? For these perspectives encompass the range of possibilities, and they cannot both be true. One of them is wrong. It must be so.
The Text of our Course clarifies that the Holy Spirit is the Answer to all problems you have made and believe that you have. These problems are not true, and therefore not real, but that is meaningless to those who believe in them. And everyone believes in what they make, for everything is made by their believing it. Into this strange and paradoxical situation, one without meaning and devoid of sense, and out of which no way seems possible, the Divine has sent Its Judgment – proclaiming Its eternal Love for all of Its Children, and their perfect Innocence regardless of their nightmares – to answer yours. Gently the Divine’s Judgment is accepted in place of yours. And through this acceptance is that which isn’t understood made understandable.
How is Peace possible in this world? In your judgment it is not possible, and can never be possible. But in the Judgment of the Divine what is reflected here is only Peace.
Peace is impossible to those who look on war. Peace is inevitable to those who offer Peace. How easily, then, is your judgment of the world released. It is not the world that makes Peace seem impossible. It is the world you look upon that is impossible. Yet has the Divine’s Judgment on this distorted world freed it and made it fit to welcome Peace. And Peace anoints it in joyous Answer. Peace now belongs here, because a Thought of the Divine has entered.
What else but a Thought of the Divine turns hell to Heaven merely by being what It is? The Earth kneels before Its gracious Presence, and It leans down in Answer to raise it up again. Now is the question different. It is no longer, “Can Peace be possible in this world?,” but instead, “Is it not impossible that Peace be absent here?”
