The Peace of Heaven

Chapter 13 – 12. The Peace of Heaven

Forgetfulness and sleep and even death become the ego’s best advice for
dealing with the perceived and harsh intrusion of guilt on peace. Yet no one
sees himself in conflict and ravaged by a cruel war unless he believes that
both opponents in the war are real. Believing this he must escape, for such a
war would surely end his peace of mind, and so destroy him. Yet if he could
but realize the war is between real and unreal powers, he could look upon
himself and see his freedom. No one finds himself ravaged and torn in
endless battles if he himself perceives them as wholly without meaning.
God would not have his Son embattled, and so his Son’s imagined “enemy”
is totally unreal. You are but trying to escape a bitter war from which you
have escaped. The war is gone. For you have heard the hymn of freedom
rising unto Heaven. Gladness and joy belong to God for your release,
because you made it not. Yet as you made not freedom, so you made not a
war that could endanger freedom. Nothing destructive ever was or will be.
 
The war, the guilt, the past are gone as one into the unreality from which
they came.
 
When we are all united in Heaven, you will value nothing that you value
here. For nothing that you value here do you value wholly, and so you do
not value it at all. Value is where God placed it, and the value of what God
esteems cannot be judged, for it has been established. It is wholly of value.
 
It can merely be appreciated or not. To value it partially is not to know its
value. In Heaven is everything God values, and nothing else. Heaven is
perfectly unambiguous. Everything is clear and bright, and calls forth one
response. There is no darkness and there is no contrast. There is no
variation. There is no interruption. There is a sense of peace so deep that no
dream in this world has ever brought even a dim imagining of what it is.
 
Nothing in this world can give this peace, for nothing in this world is
wholly shared. Perfect perception can merely show you what is capable of
being wholly shared. It can also show you the results of sharing, while you
still remember the results of not sharing. The Holy Spirit points quietly to
the contrast, knowing that you will finally let him judge the difference for
you, allowing him to demonstrate which must be true. He has perfect faith
in your final judgment, because he knows that he will make it for you. To
doubt this would be to doubt that his mission will be fulfilled. How is this
possible, when his mission is of God?
 
You whose mind is darkened by doubt and guilt, remember this: God gave
the Holy Spirit to you, and gave him the mission to remove all doubt and
every trace of guilt that his dear Son has laid upon himself. It is impossible
that this mission fail. Nothing can prevent what God would have
accomplished from accomplishment. Whatever your reactions to the Holy
Spirit’s Voice may be, whatever voice you choose to listen to, whatever
strange thoughts may occur to you, God’s Will is done. You will find the
peace in which he has established you, because he does not change his
mind. He is invariable as the peace in which you dwell, and of which the
Holy Spirit reminds you.
 
You will not remember change and shift in Heaven. You have need of
contrast only here. Contrast and differences are necessary teaching aids, for
by them you learn what to avoid and what to seek. When you have learned
this, you will find the answer that makes the need for any differences
disappear. Truth comes of its own will unto its own. When you have learned
that you belong to truth, it will flow lightly over you without a difference of
any kind. For you will need no contrast to help you realize that this is what
you want, and only this. Fear not the Holy Spirit will fail in what your
Father has given him to do. The will of God can fail in nothing.
 
Have faith in only this one thing, and it will be sufficient: God wills you be
in Heaven, and nothing can keep you from it, or it from you. Your wildest
misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares all mean
nothing. They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you. The
Holy Spirit will restore your sanity because insanity is not the Will of God.
 
If that suffices him, it is enough for you. You will not keep what God would
have removed, because it breaks communication with you with whom he
would communicate. His voice will be heard.
 
The communication link that God himself placed within you, joining your
mind with his, cannot be broken. You may believe you want It broken, and
this belief does interfere with the deep peace in which the sweet and
constant communication God would share with you is known. Yet his
channels of reaching out cannot be wholly closed and separated from him.
 
Peace will be yours because his peace still flows to you from him whose
will is peace. You have it now. The Holy Spirit will teach you how to use it,
and by extending it, to learn that it is in you. God willed you Heaven, and
will always will you nothing else. The Holy Spirit knows only of his will.
 
There is no chance that Heaven will not be yours, for God is sure, and what
he wills is as sure as he is.
 
You will learn salvation because you will learn how to save. It will not be
possible to exempt yourself from what the Holy Spirit wants to teach you.
 
Salvation is as sure as God. His certainty suffices. Learn that even the
darkest nightmare that disturbs the mind of God’s sleeping Son holds no
power over him. he will learn the lesson of awaking. God watches over him
and light surrounds him.
 
Can God’s Son lose himself in dreams, when God has placed within him the
glad Call to waken and be glad? He cannot separate himself from what is in
him. His sleep will not withstand the Call to wake. The mission of
redemption will be fulfilled as surely as the creation will remain unchanged
throughout eternity. You do not have to know that Heaven is yours to make
it so. It is so. Yet to know it, the Will of God must be accepted as your will.
 
The Holy Spirit will undo for you everything you have learned that teaches
that what is not true must be reconciled with truth. This is the reconciliation
the ego would substitute for your reconciliation to sanity and to peace. The
Holy Spirit has a very different kind of reconciliation in his mind for you,
and one he will effect as surely as the ego will not effect what it attempts.
 
Failure is of the ego, not of God. From him you cannot wander, and there is
no possibility that the plan the Holy Spirit offers to everyone, for the
salvation of everyone, will not be perfectly accomplished. You will be
released, and you will not remember anything you made that was not
created for you and by you in return. For how can you remember what was
never true, or not remember what has always been? It is this reconciliation
with truth, and only truth, in which the peace of Heaven lies.