Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 7: Healing and the Realm of Heaven Within

5. All That the World of the Ego Is

You can think truly of the Divine Family only as One. This is part of the Law of Creation and therefore governs all Thought. You can perceive the Divine Family as fragmented, but it is impossible for you to perceive something in part that you will not attribute to all of it. That is why attack is never discrete, and why it must be relinquished entirely. If it is not relinquished entirely, it is not relinquished at all. Fear and Love are each in their own way just as equally reciprocal. They make or create depending on whether the ego or the Holy Spirit begets or inspires them, but they will return to the mind of the thinker – which they never left – and they will affect this mind’s total conception and perception. That includes its conception of the Divine and of Its Creations, and of its own creations. The mind will not appreciate any of these if it regards them fearfully. It will appreciate all of them if it regards them with Love.

The mind that accepts attack cannot accept Love and therefore cannot truly love. This is because it believes that it can destroy Love, and therefore does not understand what Love is. If it does not understand what Love is, it cannot perceive itself as loving. Unloving perception loses the awareness of being, induces feelings of unreality, and results in utter confusion. Your own thinking has done this because of its Power. But your own thinking can also save you from this, because its Power is not of your making. Your ability to direct your thinking as you will is part of its Power. If you do not believe you can do this, you have denied the Power of your thought, and thus rendered it powerless in your belief.

The ingeniousness of the ego mindset to preserve itself is enormous, but it stems from the very Power of the mind that the ego denies. This means that the ego attacks what is preserving it, and this is a source of its extreme anxiety. This is why the ego never knows what it is doing. While this is perfectly logical, it is also clearly insane. The ego draws upon the one source for its existence that is totally inimical to its existence. Fearful of perceiving the Power of this source, it is forced to depreciate it. Yet because the mind is its host, depreciating it threatens the ego’s own existence, a state that it finds intolerable.

Remaining logical but still insane, the ego attempts to resolve this completely insane dilemma in a completely insane way. By projecting onto you the threat it perceives from the Power of mind, and perceiving your being as nonexistent, it doesn’t perceive its own existence as threatened. This ensures its continuance if you side with it by guaranteeing that you will not know your own Safety, which is in your own Power of mind.

The ego cannot afford to know anything. Knowledge is total, and the ego does not believe in totality. This unbelief is its own origin, and while the ego does not love you, because that is not the purpose for which you made it, it is faithful to the thing that generated it, begetting as it was begotten.

Mind always reproduces as it was produced. Produced by the part of the split mind that fears, the ego reproduces fear. Fear is its allegiance, and this allegiance makes Love treacherous to the ego, which it perceives as fear’s opposite, and makes the ego treacherous to you because you are Love. Love is your Power, which the ego must deny. It must also deny everything that this Power gives to you, because Love gives you Everything. No one who has Everything wants nothing, which is what the ego is. The ego’s own maker, then, when in their right mind, does not want it. Rejection is therefore the only decision that the ego could possibly encounter if the mind that made it knew itself. And if the mind recognizes any Part of the Divine Family, it will know itself. The ego therefore opposes all appreciation, all recognition, all sane perception, and all Knowledge. It perceives their threat as total because it senses the fact that all real commitments that the mind makes are total. Forced therefore to detach itself from you who are mind, it is willing to attach itself to anything that isn’t mind. But there is nothing real that isn’t mind. It does not follow, however, that the mind cannot make illusions that appear unlike itself. But it does follow that if it makes illusions it will believe in them, because belief is how it made them.

The Holy Spirit undoes illusions without attacking them merely because It cannot see them, because they cannot be seen. They therefore do not exist for It because they don’t exist in Reality. It resolves the apparent conflict that illusions engender by perceiving conflict as meaningless. It was said before that the Holy Spirit perceives the conflict exactly as it is, and it is meaningless. The Holy Spirit does not want you to waste your time attempting to understand conflict. It wants you to realize that because conflict is meaningless it cannot be understood. It was already said that understanding brings appreciation, and appreciation brings Love. Nothing else can be understood because nothing else is real and therefore nothing else has Meaning.

If you will keep in mind what the Holy Spirit offers you, which is the return of Everything to your awareness, then you cannot be vigilant for anything except the Divine and Its Realm. The only reason you could find this difficult would be because you think there is something else. Belief does not require vigilance unless it is conflicted. It can only be conflicted if there are conflicting components within the belief that have engendered a state of combat, making vigilance essential. Vigilance has no place at all in Peace. It is necessary only against beliefs that are not true, and would never have been called upon by the Holy Spirit if you had not believed the untrue yourself. A first step toward correcting this is to accept that when you believe something that you have made, it becomes true for you.

When you believe what the Divine does not know, your thought seems to contradict the Divine’s, and this makes it appear as if you are attacking the Divine. This Course has repeatedly emphasized that the ego does believe it can attack the Divine, and tries to persuade you that you have done this. Given the reality that the mind cannot attack, the ego proceeds perfectly logically yet insanely to the position that you cannot be mind. By perceiving you as you are not, it can perceive itself as it wants to be. Aware of its weakness, the ego wants your allegiance, but not as you really are. The ego therefore wants to engage your mind in its (the ego’s) own delusional system, because otherwise the Light of Understanding will dispel it.

The ego wants no part of Truth because the truth is that the ego is not true. If Truth is total, then the untrue cannot exist. Commitment to either the True or the untrue must be total, because they cannot coexist in your mind without splitting it. If they cannot coexist in Peace, and if you want Peace, you must give up the idea of conflict entirely and for all time. This requires vigilance only as long as you do not recognize without exception what is true and what is false. While you believe that two totally contradictory thought systems share Truth, your temporary need for vigilance for one to relinquish the other is apparent.

Your mind is dividing its allegiance between two realms, and as a result you are not totally committed to either. Your identification with the Realm of Heaven is totally beyond question except by you when you are thinking delusionally. What you are is not established or even influenced by your thoughts or perceptions. All perceived problems in identification at any level are not problems of fact. But they are problems in understanding, because they mean that you believe that what you can understand is up to you to decide. The ego believes this fully, being fully committed to it. But it is not true. The ego is therefore fully committed to untruth, perceiving in total contradiction to the Holy Spirit and to the Knowledge of the Divine.

You can be perceived with Meaning only by and through the Holy Spirit, because your being is the Knowledge of the Divine. Any belief that you accept that is apart from this will obscure the Divine’s Voice in you, and will therefore obscure the Divine to you. Unless you perceive Its Creation truly, you cannot know the Creator, because the Divine and Its Creation are not separate. The Oneness of the Creator and the Creation is your Sanity, your Wholeness, and your limitless Power. This limitless Power is the Divine’s Gift to you, because It is what you are. If you dissociate your mind from It because you do not believe you are Part of It then you are perceiving the most powerful Force in the Universe – Divine Thought – as if It were weak.

Perceived without your Part in It, the Divine’s Creation is perceived as weak, and those who look on themselves as weakened do attack. This attack must be blind because there is nothing to attack. Therefore, those who attack make up images, perceive them as unworthy, and attack them for their unworthiness. That is all the world of the ego is. It is nothing. It has no meaning, and it does not exist. Do not try to make sense of it or understand it, because if you do then you are believing that it can be understood, and therefore is capable of being appreciated and loved. This would justify it, but it cannot be justified. No one can make the meaningless meaningful. The attempt to do so can only be delusional.

Allowing insanity to enter your mind means that you have not assessed Sanity as wholly desirable. If you want something else, you will make something else. But because it is something else – something other than Sanity – it will attack your thought system and divide your allegiance. You cannot truly extend (create) in such a divided state of mind, and you must be vigilant against this divided state because only Peace can be extended.

Your divided mind is blocking the Extension of the Realm of Heaven, and Its Extension is your Joy. If you do not extend the Realm, then you are not thinking with your Creator and creating as It creates. In this depressing state, the Holy Spirit reminds you gently that you are sad because you are not fulfilling your Function as Cocreator with the Divine, and are therefore depriving yourself of Joy. This is not the Divine’s Will, nor really yours. If your will is out of accord with the Divine’s, you are willing without meaning. But because only the Divine’s Will is unchangeable, no real conflict of will is possible.

This is the Holy Spirit’s perfectly consistent Teaching. Creation, not separation, is your true will because it is the Divine’s. And nothing that opposes this means anything at all. Being a perfect Accomplishment, the Divine Family can only accomplish perfectly, extending the Joy in which It was created, and identifying Itself with both Its Creator and Its Creations, knowing they are One.