 We continue on today with Chapter 7. From Vigilance to Peace Although you can love the Sunship 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 discreet, 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 of 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 it is perceiving 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 non-existent. 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 sunship, it would know itself. The ego therefore opposes all appreciation, all recognition, all same 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 its 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 system 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 said 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 to 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. And from the workbook, Lesson 50 I am sustained by the love of God. Here is the answer to every problem that will confront you today and tomorrow and throughout time. In this world, you believe you are sustained by everything but God. Your faith is placed in the most trivial and insane symbols. Pills, money, protective clothing, influence, prestige, being liked, knowing the right people, and an endless list of forms of nothingness that you endow with magical powers. All these things are your replacements for the love of God. All these things are cherished to ensure a body identification. They are songs of praise to the ego. Do not put your faith in the worthless. It will not sustain you. Only the love of God will protect you in all circumstances. It will lift you out of every trial and raise you high above all the perceived dangers of this world and into a climate of perfect peace and safety. It will transport you into a state of mind that nothing can threaten, nothing can disturb, and where nothing can intrude upon the eternal calm of the Son of God. Put not your faith in illusions. They will fail you. Put all your faith in the love of God within you, eternal, changeless, and forever unfailing. This is the answer to whatever confronts you today. Through the love of God within you, you can resolve all seeming difficulties without effort and ensure confidence. Tell yourself this often today. It is a declaration of release from the belief in idols. It is your acknowledgement of the truth about yourself. For 10 minutes twice today, morning and evening, let the idea for today sink deep into your consciousness. Repeat it. Think about it. Let related thoughts come to help you recognize its truth and allow peace to flow over you like a blanket of protection and surety. Let no idol and foolish thoughts enter to disturb the holy mind of the Son of God. Such is the kingdom of heaven. Such is the resting place where your Father has placed you forever. I am sustained by the love of God. This today is a golden opportunity to choose to be God dependent, to choose to listen to the Holy Spirit, and be guided not in some things, but in all things, without exception. This is where we make the shift from vigilance to peace, where we shift from perceiving two worlds, from believing in two thought systems, one of love and one of fear. We take a stand in the mind. We devote ourselves so wholly, so completely to right-mindedness, to following the Holy Spirit, that we experience a state of complete invulnerability, complete wholeness, the forgiven world, the happy dream, the peaceful perception of the entire cosmos in this instant. Everything from this instant, without exception, and our mind shifts into a natural state of rest, without the need to be vigilant against the ego and for God. We rest in the certainty of a single unified purpose, one clear intent that guides us, that sustains us. This today is a very, very, very practical application of experiencing the love of God. We do not attempt to manage the world. We do not attempt to understand linear time, to figure out the laws of the world. We are sustained by the love of God. Every breath is assembled, used by the Holy Spirit. Every piece of food that is eaten by a body, every place where the body can lay itself down at night, every form of help that seems to come from many different directions in this world, all can be summed up in the very simple idea. I am sustained by the love of God. This idea frees the mind of concerns about work, about debt, all concerns about survival. The acceptance of this idea, holy and truly, frees the mind in an instant. It is handing over all the symbols of the world to the Holy Spirit and saying, this holy instant would I give to you, be you in charge. Bring to me whatever symbols will help me to awaken to God's love and take from me all symbols that would be a barrier. Show me that the symbols have no meaning in and of themselves, that money does not mean anything, that food does not mean anything, that travel does not mean anything, that nothing in form means anything in and of itself, that it's all a beautiful backdrop for witnessing perfect safety, perfect security, perfect love, perfect certainty. That is the only purpose that the symbols serve. There is no dependency on the symbols, the symbols but represent the purpose in the mind. When the purpose is to forgive and open to divine love, divine providence is the law of God, the law of love. Everything is provided easily and naturally without exception. So today we hearken the passage in the text of A Course in Miracles. We draw it into mind. Once you have accepted his plan as the one function that you would fulfill, there will be nothing else the Holy Spirit will not arrange for you without your effort making straight your path and leaving in your way no stones to trip on, no obstacles to bar your way. Nothing you need will be denied you. Not one seeming difficulty but will melt away before you reach it. You need take thought for nothing except the only purpose you would fulfill. Without your effort he will go before you making straight your path and leaving in your way no obstacles to bar your way. This is the meaning of I am sustained by the love of God. It means nothing you need will be denied you. It means not one seeming difficulty but will melt away before you reach it. That you need take thought for nothing, careless of everything except the only purpose you would fulfill. The Holy Spirit will provide everything you need and will renew it as long as you have need of it. But the Holy Spirit would not have you linger in time. That is not God's will for you. That is not your Holy will. The Holy Son of God is not meant to linger in time but to reside in eternity. I amness, truth, holiness and perfect innocence. Today we remember this and give thanks as we say, I am sustained by the love of God.