From Vigilance to Peace

Chapter 7.6
 
From Vigilance to Peace
 
Although you can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceive it as
fragmented. It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it 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 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 and they will affect his total perception. That includes
his concept of God, of his creations and of his own. He will not appreciate
any of Them if he regards Them fearfully. He will appreciate all of Them if
he regards Them with love.
 
The mind that accepts attack cannot love. That is because it believes 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. This loses the
awareness of being, induces feelings of unreality and results in utter
confusion. Your thinking has done this because of its power, but your
thinking can also save you from this because its power is not of your
making. Your ability to direct your thinking as you choose 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 to preserve itself is enormous, but it stems
from the very power of the mind the ego denies. This means that the ego
attacks what is preserving it, which must result in extreme anxiety. That is
why the ego never recognizes what it is doing. It is perfectly logical but
clearly insane. The ego draws upon the one source that is totally inimical to
its existence for its existence. Fearful of perceiving the power of this
source, it is forced to depreciate it. This threatens its own existence, a state
which it finds intolerable. Remaining logical but still insane, the ego
resolves this completely insane dilemma in a completely insane way. It does
not perceive its existence as threatened by projecting the threat onto you,
and perceiving your being as nonexistent. This ensures its continuance if
you side with it, by guaranteeing that you will not know your own safety.
 
The ego cannot afford to know anything. Knowledge is total, and the ego
does not believe in totality. This unbelief is its origin, and while the ego
does not love you it is faithful to its own antecedents, begetting as it was
begotten. Mind always reproduces as it was produced. Produced by fear, the
ego reproduces fear. This is its allegiance, and this allegiance makes it
treacherous to love because you are love. Love is your power, which the
ego must deny. It must also deny everything this power gives you because
it gives you everything. No one who has everything wants the ego. Its own
maker, then, does not want it. Rejection is therefore the only decision the
ego could possibly encounter, if the mind that made it knew itself. And if it
recognized any part of the Sonship, it would 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 that all commitments the mind makes are total. Forced, therefore, to
detach itself from you, it is willing to attach itself to anything else. But there
is nothing else. The mind can, however, make up illusions, and if it does so
it will believe in them, because that is how it made them.
 
The Holy Spirit undoes illusions without attacking them, because he cannot
perceive them at all. They therefore do not exist for him. He resolves the
apparent conflict they engender by perceiving conflict as meaningless. I
have 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 understand
conflict; he wants you to realize that, because conflict is meaningless, it is
not understandable. As I have already said, 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, you cannot be
vigilant for anything but God and his kingdom. The only reason you may
find this hard to accept is because you may still think there is something
else. Belief does not require vigilance unless it is conflicted. If it is, there
are conflicting components within it that have led to a state of war, and
vigilance has therefore become essential. Vigilance has no place in peace. It
is necessary against beliefs that are not true, and would never have been
called upon by the Holy Spirit if you had not believed the untrue. When you
believe something, you have made it true for you. When you believe what
God does not know, your thought seems to contradict his, and this makes it
appear as if you are attacking him.
 
I have repeatedly emphasized that the ego does believe it can attack God,
and tries to persuade you that you have done this. If the mind cannot attack,
the ego proceeds perfectly logically to the belief that you must be a body.
 
By not seeing you as you are, it can see 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 own delusional system, because
otherwise the light of your understanding would dispel it. It wants no part of
truth, because the ego itself is not true. If truth is total, the untrue cannot
exist. Commitment to either must be total; 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. While you
believe that two totally contradictory thought systems share truth, your need
for vigilance is apparent.
 
Your mind is dividing its allegiance between two kingdoms, and you are
totally committed to neither. Your identification with the Kingdom is totally
beyond question except by you, when you are thinking insanely. What you
are is not established by your perception, and is not influenced by it at all.
 
Perceived problems in identification at any level are not problems of fact.
They are problems of understanding, since their presence implies a belief
that what you are is up to you to decide. The ego believes this totally, being
fully committed to it. It is not true. The ego therefore is totally committed to
untruth, perceiving in total contradiction to the Holy Spirit and to the
knowledge of God.
 
You can be perceived with meaning only by the Holy Spirit because your
being is the knowledge of God. Any belief you accept apart from this will
obscure God’s Voice in you, and will therefore obscure God to you. Unless
you perceive his creation truly you cannot know the Creator, since God and
his creation are not separate. The Oneness of the Creator and the creation is
your wholeness, your sanity and your limitless power. This limitless power
is God’s gift to you, because it is what you are. If you dissociate your mind
from it you are perceiving the most powerful force in the universe as if it
were weak, because you do not believe you are part of it.
 
Perceived without your part in it, God’s creation is seen as weak, and those
who see themselves as weakened do attack. The attack must be blind,
however, because there is nothing to attack. Therefore they make up
images, perceive them as unworthy and attack them for their unworthiness.
 
That is all the world of the ego is. Nothing. It has no meaning. It does not
exist. Do not try to understand it because, if you do, you are believing that it
can be understood and is therefore capable of being appreciated and loved.
 
That would justify its existence, which cannot be justified. You cannot
make the meaningless meaningful. This can only be an insane attempt.
Allowing insanity to enter your mind means that you have not judged sanity
as wholly desirable. If you want something else you will make something
else, but because it is something else, it will attack your thought system and
divide your allegiance. You cannot create in this divided state, and you must
be vigilant against this divided state because only peace can be extended.
 
Your divided mind is blocking the extension of the Kingdom, and its
extension is your joy. If you do not extend the Kingdom, you are not
thinking with your Creator and creating as he created.
 
In this depressing state the Holy Spirit reminds you gently that you are sad
because you are not fulfilling your function as co-creator with God, and are
therefore depriving yourself of joy. This is not God’s choice but yours. If
your mind could be out of accord with God’s, you would be willing without
meaning. Yet because God’s Will is unchangeable, no conflict of will is
possible. This is the Holy Spirit’s perfectly consistent teaching. Creation,
not separation, is your will because it is God’s, and nothing that opposes
this means anything at all. Being a perfect accomplishment, the Sonship 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.