A Course in Miracles

Chapter 7 - Consistency of the Kingdom

The Defense of Conflict

We once said that without projection there can be no anger, but it is also true that without projection there can be no love. Projection is a fundamental law of the mind and therefore one which always operates. It is the law by which you create and were created. It is the law which unifies the Kingdom and keeps it in the Mind of God.

To the ego, the law is perceived as a way of getting rid of something it does not want.

To the Holy Spirit, it is the fundamental law of sharing, by which you give what you value in order to keep it in your own mind.

Projection to the Holy Spiri, is the law of extension. To the ego, it is the law of deprivation. It therefore produces abundance or scarcity, depending on how you choose to apply it. This choice is up to you, but it is not up to you to decide whether or not you will utilize projection. Every mind must project because that is how it lives, and every mind is life. The ego’s use of projection must be fully understood before its inevitable association between projection and anger can be finally undone.

The ego always tries to preserve conflict.

It is very ingenious in devising ways which seem to diminish conflic, because it does not want you to find conflict so intolerable that you will insist on giving it up. Therefore, the ego tries to persuade you that it can free you of conflict, lest you give the ego up and free yourself. The ego, using its own warped version of the laws of God, utilizes the power of the mind only to defeat the mind’s real purpose.

It projects conflict from your mind to other minds in an attempt to persuade you that you have gotten rid of it.

This has several fallacies which may not be so apparent.

1) Strictly speaking, conflict cannot be projected precisely because it cannot be fully shared.

Any attempt to keep part of it and get rid of another part does not really mean anything. Remember that a conflicted teacher is a poor teacher and a poor learner. His lessons are confused, and their transfer value is severely limited by his confusion.

2) A second fallacy is the idea the you can get rid of something you do not want by giving it away.

Giving it is how you keep it. The belief that by giving it out you have excluded it from within is a complete distortion of the power of extension.

That is why those who project from the ego are vigilant for their own safety. They are afraid that their projections will return and hurt them. They do believe they have blotted their projections from their own minds, but they also believe their projections are trying to creep back into them. That is because the projections have not left their minds, and this in turn forces them to engage in compulsive activity in order not to recognize this. You cannot perpetuate an illusion about another without perpetuating it about yourself. There is no way out of this because it is impossible to fragment the mind.

To fragment is to break into pieces, and mind cannot attack or be attacked.

The belief that it can, a fallacy which the ego always makes, underlies its whole use of projection. It does not understand what mind is and therefore does not understand what you are. Yet its existence is dependent on your mind because the ego is your belief. The ego is therefore a confusion in identification which never had a consistent model and never developed consistently. It is the distorted product of the misapplication of the laws of God by distorted minds which are misusing their own power.

Do not be afraid of the ego. It does depend on your mind, and as you made it by believing in it, so you can dispel it by withdrawing belief from it. Do not project the responsibility for your belief in it onto anyone else, or you will preserve the belief.

When you are willing to accept sole responsibility for the ego’s existence yourself, you will have laid aside all anger and all attack because they come from an attempt to project responsibility for your own errors.

But having accepted the errors as yours, do not keep them. Give them over quickly to the Holy Spirit to be undone completely so that all their effects will vanish from your minds and from the Sonship as a whole.

The Holy Spirit will teach you to perceive beyond belief because truth is beyond belief, and His perception is true. The ego can be completely forgotten at any time because it was always a belief that is totally incredible. No one can keep a belief he has judged to be unbelievable. The more you learn about the ego, the more you realize that it cannot br believed. The incredible cannot be understood because it is unbelievable. The utter meaninglessness of all perception that comes from the unbelievable must be apparent, but it is not recognized as beyond belief because it was made by belief.

The whole purpose of this course is to teach you that the ego is unbelievable and will forever be unbelievable.

You who made the ego by believing the unbelievable cannot make this judgement alone. By accepting the Atonement for yourself, you are deciding against the belief that you can be alone, thus dispelling the idea of separation and affirming your true identification with the whole Kingdom as literally part of you. This identification is as beyond doubt as it is beyond belief. Your wholeness has no limits because being is in infinity.

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 7 - Consistency of the Kingdom

Extension of the Kingdom

Only you can limit your creative power, but God wills to release it. He no more wills you to deprive yourself of your creations than He wills to deprive Himself of His. Do not withhold your gifts to the Sonship, or you withhold yourself from God. Selfishness is of the ego, but self-fullness is of the Soul because that is how God created it. The Holy Spirit is the part of the mind that lies between the ego and the Soul, mediating between them always in favor of the Soul. To the ego, this is partiality, and it therefore responds as if it were the part that is being sided against. To the Soul, this is truth because it knows its fullness and cannot conceive of any part from which it is excluded.

The Soul knows that the consciousness of all its brothers is included in its own, as it is included in God. The power of the whole Sonship and of its Creator is therefore the Soul's own fullness, rendering its creations equally whole and equal in perfection. The ego cannot prevail against a totality which includes God, and any totality must include God. Everything He created is given all His power because it is part of Him and shares His Being with Him. Creating is the opposite of loss, as blessing is the opposite of sacrifice. Being must be extended. That is how it retains the knowledge of itself.

The Soul yearns to share its being as its Creator did. Created by sharing, its will is to create. It does not wish to contain God but to extend His Being. The extension of God’s Being is the Soul’s only function. Its fullness cannot be contained, any more than can the fullness of its Creator. Fullness is extension. The ego’s whole thought system blocks extension, and thus blocks your only function. It therefore blocks your joy, and that is why you perceive yourselves as unfulfilled. Unless you create you are unfulfilled, but God does not know of unfulfillment, and therefore you must create. You may not know your own creations, but this can no more interfere with their reality than your unawareness of your Soul can interfere with its being.

The Kingdom is forever extending because it is in the Mind of God. You do not know your joy, because you do not know your own self-fullness. Exclude any part of the Kingdom from yourself, and you are not whole. A split mind cannot perceive its fullness, and needs the miracle of its wholeness to dawn upon it and heal it. This reawakens the wholeness in it, and restores it to the Kingdom because of its acceptance of wholeness. The full appreciation of its self-fullness makes selfishness impossible and extension inevitable. That is why there is perfect peace in the Kingdom. Every Soul is fulfilling its function, and only complete fulfillment is peace.

Insanity appears to add to reality, but no one would claim that what it adds is true.

Insanity is therefore the nonextension of truth, which blocks joy because it blocks creation, and thus blocks self-fulfillment. The unfulfilled must be depressed because their self-fullness is unknown to them. Your creations are protected for you because the Holy Spirit, Who is in your mind, knows of them and can bring them into your awareness whenever you will let Him. They are there as part of your own being because your fulfillment includes them. The creations of every Son of God are yours since every creation belongs to everyone, being created for the Sonship as a whole.

You have not failed to add to the inheritance of the Sons of God and thus have not failed to secure it for yourselves. If it was the Will of God to give it to you, He gave it forever. If it was His Will that you have it forever, He gave you the means for keeping it, and you have done so. Disobeying God's Will is meaningful only to the insane. In truth it is impossible. Your self-fullness is as boundless as God's. Like His, it extends forever and in perfect peace. Its radiance is so intense that it creates in perfect joy, and only the whole can be born of its wholeness.

Be confident that you have never lost your identity and the extensions which maintain it in wholeness and peace. Miracles are an expression of this confidence. They are reflections both of your own proper identification with your brothers and of your own awareness that your identification is maintained by extension. The miracle is a lesson in total perception. By including any part of totality in the lesson, you have included the whole. You have said that when you write of the Kingdom and your creations which belong in it, you are describing what you do not know. That is true in a sense, but no more true than your failure to acknowledge the whole result of the ego's premises.

The Kingdom is the result of premises, just as this (ego) world (of perception) is.

You have carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is total confusion about everything. Yet you do not really believe this, or you could not possibly maintain it. If you really saw this result, you could not want it. The only reason why you could possibly want any part of it is because you do not see the whole of it. You are willing to look at the ego's premises but not at their logical outcome. Is it not possible that you have done the same thing with the premises of God?

Your creations are the logical outcome of His premises. His thinking has established them for you. They are therefore there, exactly where they belong. They belong in your mind as part of your identification with His, but your state of mind and your recognition of what is in your mind depends at any given moment on what you believe about your mind. Whatever these beliefs may be, they are the premises which will determine what you accept into your mind. It is surely clear that you can both accept into your mind what is not really there and deny what is. Neither of these possibilities requires further elaboration here, but both are clearly indefensible, even if you elect to defend them.

Yet the function which God Himself gave your minds through His you may deny, but you cannot prevent. It is the logical outcome of what you are. The ability to see a logical outcome depends on the willingness to see it, but its truth has nothing to do with your willingness at all.

Truth is God's Will. Share His Will, and you share what He knows.

Deny His Will as yours, and you are denying His Kingdom and yours. The Holy Spirit will direct you only so as to avoid pain. The undoing of pain must obviously avoid pain. Surely no one would object to this goal if he recognized it. The problem is not whether what the Holy Spirit says is true, but whether you want to listen to what He says.