God’s
Will is your salvation. Would He not have given you the
means to find it?
If
He wills you to have it, He must have made it possible
and very easy to obtain it. Your brothers are everywhere.
You do not have to seek far for salvation. Every minute
and every second gives you a chance to save yourself.
Do not lose these chances, not because they will not return,
but because delay of joy is needless.
God
wills you perfect happiness now. Is it possible that this
is not also your will? And is it possible that this is
not also the will of your brothers?
Consider,
then, that in this joint will you are all united, and
in this only. There will be disagreement on anything else,
but not on this. This, then, is where peace abides. And
you abide in peace when you so decide. Yet you cannot
abide in peace unless you accept the Atonement because
the Atonement is the way to peace. The reason is very
simple, and so obvious that it is often overlooked. That
is because the ego is afraidD of the obvious, since obviousness
is the essential characteristic of reality. Yet you cannot
overlook it unless you are not looking.
It
is perfectly obvious that, if the Holy Spirit looks with
love on all He perceives, He looks with love on you. His
evaluation of you is based on His knowledge of what you
are, and so He evaluates you truly. And this evaluation
must be in your mind because He is.
The
ego is also in your mind because you have accepted it
there. Its evaluation of you, however, is the exact opposite
of the Holy Spirit’s because the ego does not love
you. It is unaware of what you are, and wholly mistrustful
of everything it perceives because its own perceptions
are so shifting. The ego is therefore capable of suspiciousness
at best and viciousness at worst. That is its range. It
cannot exceed it because of its uncertainty. And it can
never go beyond it because it can never be certain.
You,
then, have two conflicting evaluations of yourself in
your minds, and they cannot both be true. You do not yet
realize how completely different these evaluations are
because you do not understand how lofty the Holy Spirit’s
perception of you really is. He is not deceived by anything
you do because he never forgets what you are. The ego
is deceived by everything you do, even when you respond
to the Holy Spirit, because at such times its confusion
increases. The ego is, therefore, particularly likely
to attack you when you react lovingly because it has evaluated
you as unloving, and you are going against its judgment.
The
ego will begin to attack your motives as soon as they
become clearly out of accord with its perception of you.
This is when it will shift abruptly from suspiciousness
to viciousness, since its uncertainty is increased. Yet
it is surely pointless to attack in return. What can this
mean except that you are agreeing with the ego’s
evaluation of what you are? If you are willing to see
yourself as unloving, you will not be happy. You are condemning
yourself, and must therefore regard yourself as inadequate.
Would
you look to the ego to help you escape from a sense of
inadequacy it has produced, and must maintain for its
existence? Can you escape from its evaluation of you by
using its methods for keeping this picture intact?
You
cannot evaluate an insane belief system from within it.
Its own range precludes this. You can only go beyond it,
look back from a point where sanity exists, and see the
contrast. Only by this contrast can insanity be judged
as insane.
With
the grandeur of God in you, you have chosen to be little
and to lament your littleness. within the system which
dictated this choice the lament IS inevitable. Your littleness
is taken for granted there, and you do not ask, “Who
granted it?” The question is meaningless within
the ego’s thought system because it opens the whole
thought system to question.
We said before that the ego does not know what a real
question is. Lack of knowledge of any kind is always associated
with unwillingness to know, and produces a total lack
of knowledge simply because knowledge IS total. Not to
question your littleness, therefore, is to deny all knowledge
and keep the ego’s whole thought system intact.
You cannot retain part of a thought system because it
can be questioned only at its foundation. (What are you?)
And this must be questioned from beyond it because within
it its foundation does stand. The Holy Spirit judges against
the reality of the ego’s thought system merely because
He knows its foundation is not true. Therefore, nothing
that arises from it means anything.
The
Holy Spirit judges every belief you hold in terms of where
it comes from. If it comes from God, He knows it to be
true. If it does not, He knows that it is meaningless.
Whenever
you question your value, say:
“God
Himself is incomplete without me.”
Remember
this when the ego speaks, and you will not hear it. The
truth about you is so lofty that nothing unworthy of Godis
worthy of you. Choose, then, what you want in these terms,
and accept nothing that you would not offer to God as
wholly fitting for Him, for you do not want anything else.
Return your part of Him, and He will give you all of Himself
in exchangefor your return of what belongs to Him and
renders Him complete.