A Course in Miracles

Chapter 8 - The Journey Back

Light of the World

If God’s Will for you is complete peace and joy, unless you experience only this you must be refusing to acknowledge His Will.

His Will does not vacillate, being changeless forever.

When you are not at peace, it can only be because you do not believe you are in Him. Yet He is all in all. His peace is complete, and you must be included in it.

His laws govern you because they govern everything. You cannot exempt yourself from His laws, although you can disobey them. Yet if you do, and only if you do, you will feel lonely and helpless because you are denying yourself everything.

I am come as a light into a world that does deny itself everything. It does this simply by dissociating itself from everything. It is therefore an illusion of isolation, maintained by fear of the same loneliness which is its illusion.

My purpose, then, is to overcome the world. I do not attack it, but my light must dispel it because of what it is.

Light does not attack darkness, but it does shine it away. If my light goes with you everywhere, you shine it away with me. The light becomes ours, and you cannot abide in darkness any more than darkness can abide wherever you go.

The remembrance of me is the remembrance of yourself and of Him Who sent me to you. You were in darkness until God’s Will was done completely by any part of the Sonship. When this was done, it was perfectly accomplished by all. How else could it be perfectly accomplished?

My mission was simply to unite the will of the Sonship with the Will of the Father by
being aware of the Father’s Will myself.

This is the awareness I came to give you, and your problem in accepting it is the
problem of this world. Dispelling it is salvation, and in this sense I am the salvation of the world.

The World Must Reject Me

The world must despise and reject me because the world is the belief that love is impossible.

Your reactions to me are the reactions of the world to God. If you will accept the fact that I am with you, you are denying the world and accepting God. My will is His, and your will to hear me is the decision to hear His Voice and abide in His Will.

As God sent me to you, so will I send you to others. And I will go to them with you, so we can teach them peace and union.

Do you not think the world needs peace as much as you do?

Do you not want to give it to the world as much as you want to receive it? For unless you do, you will not receive it. If you will to have it of me, you must give it.

Healing Is A Collaborative Venture

Rehabilitation does not come from anyone else. You can have guidance from without, but you must accept it from within. The guidance must be what you want, or it will be meaningless to you.

That is why rehabilitation is a collaborative venture.

I can tell you what to do, but this will not help you unless you collaborate by believing that I know what to do. Only then will your mind choose to follow me.

Without your will you cannot be rehabilitated. Motivation to be healed is the crucial factor in rehabilitation. Without this, you are deciding against healing, and your veto of my will for you makes healng impossible.

If healing is our joint will, unless our wills are joined you cannot be healed. This is obvious when you consider what healing is for...

Separation is overcome by union. It cannot be overcome by separating.

The will to unite must be unequivocal, or the will itself is divided or not whole. Your will is the means by which you determine your own condition because will is the mechanism of decision. It is the power by which you separate or join, and experience pain or joy accordingly.

God's Sons Are Equal and Free

My will cannot overcome yours, because yours is as powerful as mine. If it were not so, the Sons of God would be unequal.

All things are possible through our joint will, but my will alone cannot help you. Y

our will is as free as mine, and God Himself would not go against it. I cannot will what God does not will. I can offer you my will to make yours invincible by this sharing, but I cannot oppose yours without competing with it, and thereby violating God’s Will for you.

Nothing God created can oppose your will, as nothing God created can oppose His. God gave your will its power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of His.

I can teach you, but only you can choose to listen to my teaching.

Freedom cannot be learned by tyranny of any kind, and the perfect equality of all God’s Sons cannot be recognized through the dominion of one will over another.

God’s Sons are equal in will, all being the Will of their Father. This is the only lesson I came to teach, knowing that it is true.

Freedom Is Love

When your will is not mine, it is not our Father’s. This means that you have imprisoned yours, and have not let it be free. Of yourselves you can do nothing, because of yourselves you are nothing. I am nothing without the Father, and you are nothing without me because, by denying the Father, you deny yourself.

I will always remember you, and in my remembrance of you lies your remembrance of yourself.

In our remembrance of each other lies our remembrance of God, and in this remembrance lies your freedom because your freedom is in Him.

Join, then, with me in praise of Him and you whom He created. This is our gift of gratitude to Him, which He will share with all His creations, to whom He gives equally whatever is acceptable to Him. Because it is acceptable to Him it is the gift of freedom, which is His Will for all His Sons. By offering freedom you will be free.

Freedom is the only gift you can offer to God’s Sons, being an acknowledgment of what they are and what He is.

Freedom is creation because it is love.

What you seek to imprison you do not love. Therefore, when you seek to imprison anyone, including yourself, you do not love him, and you cannot identify with him.

When you imprison yourself, you are losing sight of your true identification with me and with the Father. Your identification is with the Father and with the Son. It cannot be with one and not the other. If you are part of one, you must be part of the other because they are One.

The Holy Trinity is holy because It is One. If you exclude yourself from this union, you are perceiving the Holy Trinity as separated.

You must be included in It, because It is everything. Unless you take your place in It and fulfill your function as part of It, It is as bereft as you are. No part of It can be imprisoned if Its truth is to be known.

Can you be separated from your identification and be at peace?

Dissociation is not a solution; it is a delusion. The delusional believe that truth will assail them, and so they do not see it because they prefer the delusion. Judging truth as something they do not want, they perceive deception and block knowledge.

Help them by offering them your unified will on their behalf, as I am offering you mine on yours. Alone we can do nothing, but together, our wills fuse into something whose power is far beyond the power of its separate parts. By not being separate, the Will of God is established in ours and as ours. This Will is invincible because it is undivided.

The undivided will of the Sonship is the perfect creator, being wholly in the likeness of God, Whose Will it is. You cannot be exempt from it, if you are to understand what it is and what you are. By separating your will from mine, you are exempting yourself from the Will of God which is yourself.

Yet to heal is still to make whole. Therefore, to heal is to unite with those who are like you because perceiving this likeness is to recognize the Father.

The recognition of God is the recognition of yourself. There is no separation of God and His creation. You will learn this as you learn that there is no separation of your will and mine.

Let the Love of God shine upon you by your acceptance of me.

My reality is yours and His. By joining your will with mine you are signifying your awareness that the Will of God is one.