The Direction of the Curriculum

Chapter 8.1
The Direction of the Curriculum
 
Knowledge is not the motivation for learning this course. Peace is. This is
the prerequisite for knowledge only because those who are in conflict are
not peaceful, and peace is the condition of knowledge because it is the
condition of the Kingdom. Knowledge can be restored only when you meet
its conditions. This is not a bargain made by God, Who makes no bargains.
 
It is merely the result of your misuse of his laws on behalf of an imaginary
will that is not his. Knowledge is his will. If you are opposing his will, how
can you have knowledge? I have told you what knowledge offers you, but
perhaps you do not yet regard this as wholly desirable. If you did you would
not be so ready to throw it away when the ego asks for your allegiance.
 
The distractions of the ego may seem to interfere with your learning, but the
ego has no power to distract you unless you give it the power to do so. The
ego’s voice is an hallucination. You cannot expect it to say “I am not real.”
 
Yet you are not asked to dispel your hallucinations alone. You are merely
asked to evaluate them in terms of their results to you. If you do not want
them on the basis of loss of peace, they will be removed from your mind for
you.
 
Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war does deprive you of
peace. Yet in this war there is no opponent. This is the reinterpretation of
reality that you must make to secure peace, and the only one you need ever
make. Those whom you perceive as opponents are part of your peace, which
you are giving up by attacking them. How can you have what you give up?
 
You share to have, but you do not give it up yourself. When you give up
peace, you are excluding yourself from it. This is a condition so alien to the
Kingdom that you cannot understand the state that prevails within it.
 
Your past learning must have taught you the wrong things, simply because
it has not made you happy. On this basis alone its value should be
questioned. If learning aims at change, and that is always its purpose, are
you satisfied with the changes your learning has brought you?
 
Dissatisfaction with learning outcomes is a sign of learning failure, since it
means that you did not get what you wanted.
 
The curriculum of the Atonement is the opposite of the curriculum you have
established for yourself, but so is its outcome. If the outcome of yours has
made you unhappy, and if you want a different one, a change in the
curriculum is obviously necessary. The first change to be introduced is a
change in direction. A meaningful curriculum cannot be inconsistent. If it is
planned by two teachers, each believing in diametrically opposed ideas, it
cannot be integrated. If it is carried out by these two teachers
simultaneously, each one merely interferes with the other. This leads to
fluctuation, but not to change. The volatile have no direction. They cannot
choose one because they cannot relinquish the other, even if it does not
exist. Their conflicted curriculum teaches them that all directions exist, and
gives them no rationale for choice.
 
The total senselessness of such a curriculum must be fully recognized
before a real change in direction becomes possible. You cannot learn
simultaneously from two teachers who are in total disagreement about
everything. Their joint curriculum presents an impossible learning task.
 
They are teaching you entirely different things in entirely different ways,
which might be possible except that both are teaching you about yourself.
 
Your reality is unaffected by both, but if you listen to both, your mind will
be split about what your reality is.