The Difference between Imprisonment and Freedom

Chapter 8.2
The Difference between Imprisonment and Freedom
 
There is a rationale for choice. Only one Teacher knows what your reality
is. If learning to remove the obstacles to that knowledge is the purpose of
the curriculum, you must learn it of him. The ego does not know what it is
trying to teach. It is trying to teach you what you are without knowing what
you are. It is expert only in confusion. It does not understand anything else.
 
As a teacher, then, the ego is totally confused and totally confusing. Even if
you could disregard the Holy Spirit entirely, which is impossible, you could
still learn nothing from the ego, because the ego knows nothing.
 
Is there any possible reason for choosing a teacher such as this? Does the
total disregard of anything it teaches make anything but sense? Is this the
teacher to whom a Son of God should turn to find himself? The ego has
never given you a sensible answer to anything. Simply on the grounds of
your own experience with its teaching, should not this alone disqualify it as
your future teacher? Yet the ego has done more harm to your learning than
this alone. Learning is joyful if it leads you along your natural path, and
facilitates the development of what you have. When you are taught against
your nature, however, you will lose by your learning because your learning
will imprison you. Your will is in your nature, and therefore cannot go
against it.
 
The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free, because you
will not listen to it. It is not your will to be imprisoned because your will is
free. That is why the ego is the denial of free will. It is never God Who
coerces you, because he shares his will with you. His voice teaches only in
accordance with his will, but that is not the Holy Spirit’s lesson because that
is what you are. The lesson is that your will and God’s cannot be out of
accord because they are one. This is the undoing of everything the ego tries
to teach. It is not, then, only the direction of the curriculum that must be
unconflicted, but also the content.
 
The ego tries to teach that you want to oppose God’s Will. This unnatural
lesson cannot be learned, and the attempt to learn it is a violation of your
own freedom, making you afraid of your will because it is free. The Holy
Spirit opposes any imprisoning of the will of a Son of God, knowing that
the Will of the Son is the Father’s. The Holy Spirit leads you steadily along
the path of freedom, teaching you how to disregard or look beyond
everything that would hold you back.
 
We have said that the Holy Spirit teaches you the difference between pain
and joy. That is the same as saying he teaches you the difference between
imprisonment and freedom. You cannot make this distinction without him
because you have taught yourself that imprisonment is freedom. Believing
them to be the same, how can you tell them apart? Can you ask the part of
your mind that taught you to believe they are the same, to teach you how
they are different?
 
The Holy Spirit’s teaching takes only one direction and has only one goal.
 
His direction is freedom and his goal is God. Yet he cannot conceive of God
without you, because it is not God’s will to be without you. When you have
learned that your will is God’s, you could no more will to be without him
than he could will to be without you. This is freedom and this is joy. Deny
yourself this and you are denying God his Kingdom, because he created you
for this.
 
When I said, “All power and glory are yours because the Kingdom is his,”
this is what I meant: The Will of God is without limit, and all power and
glory lie within it. It is boundless in strength and in love and in peace. It has
no boundaries because it created all things. By creating all things, it made
them part of itself. You are the Will of God because that is how you were
created. Because your Creator creates only like himself, you are like him.
 
You are part of him who is all power and glory, and are therefore as
unlimited as he is.
 
To what else except all power and glory can the Holy Spirit appeal to
restore God’s Kingdom? His appeal, then, is merely to what the Kingdom is,
and for its own acknowledgment of what it is. When you acknowledge this
you bring the acknowledgment automatically to everyone, because you
have acknowledged everyone. By your recognition you awaken theirs, and
through theirs yours is extended. Awakening runs easily and gladly through
the Kingdom, in answer to the Call for God. This is the natural response of
every Son of God to the Voice for his Creator, because It is the Voice for
his creations and for his own extension.