 We continue today with Chapter 8, The Gift of Freedom. If God's will for you is complete peace and joy, unless you experience only this, you must be refusing to acknowledge His will. His will does not vacillate, being changeless forever. When you are not at peace, it can only be because you do not believe you are in Him, yet He is all in all. His peace is complete, and you must be included in it. His laws govern you because they govern everything. You cannot exempt yourself from His laws, although you can disobey them. Yet if you do, and only if you do, you will feel lonely and helpless because you are denying yourself everything. I am come as a light into a world that does deny itself everything. It does this simply by dissociating itself from everything. It is therefore an illusion of isolation, maintained by fear of the same loneliness that is its illusion. I said that I am with you always, even until the end of time, the world. That is why I am the light of the world. If I am with you in the loneliness of the world, the loneliness is gone. You cannot maintain the illusion of loneliness if you are not alone. My purpose then is still to overcome the world. I do not attack it, but my light must dispel it because of what it is. Light does not attack darkness, but it does shine it away. If my light goes with you everywhere, you shine it away with me. The light becomes ours, and you cannot abide in darkness anymore than darkness can abide wherever you go. The remembrance of me is the remembrance of yourself and of Him who sent me to you. You were in darkness until God's will was done completely by any part of the sonship. When this was done, it was perfectly accomplished by all. How else could it be perfectly accomplished? My mission was simply to unite the will of the sonship with the will of the Father by being aware of the Father's will myself. This is the awareness I came to give you, and your problem in accepting it is the problem of this world. Dispelling it is salvation, and in this sense, I am the salvation of the world. The world must therefore despise and reject me because the world is the belief that love is impossible. If you will accept the fact that I am with you, you are denying the world and accepting God. My will is His, and your decision to hear me is a decision to hear His voice and abide in His will. As God sent me to you, so I will send you to others, and I will go to them with you so we can teach them peace and union. Do you not think the world needs peace as much as you do? Do you not want to give it to the world as much as you want to receive it? For unless you do, you will not receive it. If you want to have it, of me, you must give it. Healing does not come from anyone else. You must accept guidance from within. The guidance must be what you want, or it will be meaningless to you. That is why healing is a collaborative venture. I can tell you what to do, but you must collaborate by believing that I know what you should do. Only then will your mind choose to follow me. Without this choice, you could not be healed because you would have decided against healing, and this rejection of my decision for you makes healing impossible. Healing reflects our joint will. This is obvious when you consider what healing is for. Healing is the way in which the separation is overcome. Separation is overcome by union. It cannot be overcome by separating. The decision to unite must be unequivocal, where the mind itself is divided and not whole. Your mind is the means by which you determine your own condition, because mind is the mechanism of decision. It is the power by which you separate or join and experience pain or joy accordingly. My decision cannot overcome yours, because yours is as powerful as mine. If it were not so, the sons of God would be unequal. All things are possible through our joint decision, but mind alone cannot help you. Your will is as free as mine, and God himself would not go against it. I cannot will what God does not will. I can offer my strength to make yours invincible, but I cannot oppose your decision without competing with it, and thereby violating God's will for you. Nothing God created can oppose your decision, as nothing God created can oppose His will. God gave your will its power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of His. If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing that we are alike. If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind. I can teach you, but only you can choose to listen to my teaching. How else can it be if God's kingdom is freedom? Freedom cannot be learned by tyranny of any kind, and the perfect equality of all God's sons cannot be recognized through the dominion of one mind over another. God's sons are equal in will, all being the will of their Father. This is the only lesson I came to teach. If your will were not mine, it would not be our Father's. This would mean you have imprisoned yours and have not let it be free. Of yourself you can do nothing, because of yourself you are nothing. I am nothing without the Father, and you are nothing without me, because by denying the Father you deny yourself. I will always remember you, and in my remembrance of you lies your remembrance of yourself. In our remembrance of each other lies our remembrance of God. And in this remembrance lies your freedom, because your freedom is in him. Join then with me in praise of him and you whom he created. This is our gift of gratitude to him, which he will share with all his creations, to whom he gives equally whatever is acceptable to him. Because it is acceptable to him it is the gift of freedom, which is his will for all his sons. By offering freedom you will be free. Freedom is the only gift you can offer to God's sons, being an acknowledgement of what they are and what he is. Freedom is creation, because it is love, whom you seek to imprison you do not love. Therefore when you seek to imprison anyone, including yourself, you do not love him and you cannot identify with him. When you imprison yourself you are losing sight of your true identification with me and with the Father. Your identification is with the Father and with the Son. It cannot be with one and not the other. If you are part of one you must be part of the other, because they are one. The Holy Trinity is holy because it is one. If you exclude yourself from this union, you are perceiving the Holy Trinity as separated. You must be included in it because it is everything. Unless you take your place in it and fulfill your function as part of it, the Holy Trinity is bereft as you are. No part of it can be imprisoned if its truth is to be known. And from the workbook, lesson 59, the following ideas are for review today. God goes with me wherever I go. How can I be alone when God always goes with me? How can I be doubtful and unsure of myself when perfect certainty abides in him? How can I be disturbed by anything when he rests in me in absolute peace? How can I suffer when love and joy surround me through him? Let me not cherish illusions about myself. I am perfect because God goes with me wherever I go. God is my strength, vision is his gift. Let me not look to my own eyes to see today. Let me be willing to exchange my pitiful illusion of seeing for the vision that is given by God. Christ's vision is his gift and he has given it to me. Let me call upon this gift today so that this day may help me to understand eternity. God is my source. I cannot see apart from him. I can see what God wants me to see. I cannot see anything else. Beyond his will lie only illusions. It is these I choose when I think I can see apart from him. It is these I choose when I try to see through the body's eyes. Yet the vision of Christ has been given me to replace them. It is through this vision that I choose to see. God is the light in which I see. I cannot see in darkness. God is the only light. Therefore, if I am to see, it must be through him. I have tried to define what seeing is and I have been wrong. Now it has given me to understand that God is the light in which I see. Let me welcome vision and the happy world it will show me. God is the mind with which I think. I have no thoughts I do not share with God. I have no thoughts apart from him because I have no mind apart from his. As part of his mind, my thoughts are his and his thoughts are mine. So today is a day of opening to unification and identification with God. It is an opening to freedom by offering the gift of freedom to all of God's sons as an acknowledgement of what they are and what he is. Then freedom is given me. The ego has been the attempt to imprison myself and everyone. When you imprison yourself, you are losing sight of your true identification, identification with Christ, identification with God. As the Trinity is unified, so the father and son are one. I and the father are one. Everything must be unified to be known. Truth is all that can be known. Self as Christ at one with God is all that can be known. And healing reflects our joint will. Separation is overcome by union. The decision to unite must be unequivocal or the mind itself is divided and not whole. Mind is the mechanism of decision. I must join my decision with the Christ in accepting myself as God created me. All things are possible through this joint decision. My will is free because my will is God's. I must accept God's will for me. And so we join with the mind of Christ. We listen with great attentiveness as Jesus extends this lovely invitation of eternal life. If you want to be like me, I will help you knowing that we are alike. If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind. I can teach you, but only you can choose to listen to my teaching. How else can it be if God's kingdom is freedom? So we practice. We practice today the thoughts that are given us, the thoughts of peace, the thoughts of freedom. God goes with me wherever I go. God is my strength. Vision is his gift. God is my source. I cannot see apart from him. God is the light in which I see. God is the mind with which I think.