L e s s o n  331

There is no conflict, for my will is Yours. 
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IAMBIC PENTAMETER 
format from URTEXT by Lee Flynn 

   "How foolish, Father, to believe Your Son

    could cause himself to suffer! Could he make

    a plan for his damnation, and be left

    without a certain way to his release?

    You love me, Father. You could never leave

    me desolate, to die within a world

    of pain and cruelty. How could I think

    that Love has left Itself? There is no will

    except the Will of Love. Fear is a dream,

    and has no will that can conflict with Yours.

    Conflict is sleep, and peace awakening.

    Death is illusion; life Eternal Truth.

    There is no opposition to Your Will.

    There is no conflict, for my will is Yours."

   Forgiveness shows us that God's Will is one,

   and that we share It. Let us look upon

   the holy sights forgiveness shows today,

   that we may find the peace of God. Amen.

         ~ Original Handscript of ACIM 
 

This lesson starts a new section that addresses the ego.  What is the Ego?  The first paragraph tells us that the ego is idolatry--meaning the worship of a false god, the false self that we have come to identify as "me". It is about making a will, a self, a body, that is in opposition to God and sees Him as enemy. And now we fear this God,  not the true God but one that the ego has told us is our enemy. This god of the ego is perceived at war with us and we have run away from him, into the body and the world where we think we are safe from his wrath. Now we see God as a Being who has left us here to suffer and die yet we are the ones that abandoned Him and now project that decision on Him seeing ourselves as the powerless victim of His wrath. That is how the ego set it up so that our fear of God would keep us from choosing the truth of who we are. It is now a fear of His Love and instead an identification as a separate self, a body living in the world. 

But with our identification as a body, how can we be anything but doomed to suffer and die? "The ego is the "proof" that strength is weak and love is fearful, life is really death, and what opposes God alone is true". ( 1.3) The core of the ego thought system is our belief that we have been the victor over God, having destroyed Him to gain our own independent self. This thought system, of one or the other, is now projected onto the world where we are continually experiencing opposition with each other, competition, and betrayal. It all comes from the original "battle" with God where we now fear the Love that we believe will annihilate our separate self.  So it is our upside-down thinking that results in this fear of love. As long as we see ourselves as a body living in this world we are identifying with the ego. It seems like my life started when I was born in a body; it seems like life is hard, that we go through a series of challenges, that we are vulnerable, we suffer and the end is death. Isn't that what we identify with?

So the core of the ego thought system is one of having defeated God and established our own reality. Now we think we exist. But that existence is challenged when we have the experience of the holy instant outside of this dream. When we awaken from the dream we see that the dream has no reality and never did. Reality is egoless. God is not part of this ego insanity. And the choice is always there for us to choose the insanity of the ego or to choose to forgive recognizing that we are wrong about everything. Every time we admit we have been mistaken in our way of perceiving and choose to forgive, we are seeing a   reflection of heaven until the dream is no more.

Lesson 331 says that "There is no conflict, for my will is Yours". Yet our experience in this world is full of conflict. We established our identity when we chose for the ego and in that choice we seemed to be at conflict with God. Of course, Jesus teaches that only the ego is in conflict. God is not even aware of it. Now that conflict we think is there, is one of opposition and defiance that originated with our opposition to God. And that is the source of our authority problem which is brought into all of our conflicts in the world. It is simply a reflection of the original conflict with God.

The truth is that we have the same will as God's even though it seems to us as though we made a separate will. That has been a theme for the last two lessons. Our experience here is of a separate will, separate from Gods' and separate from others. And we even experience internal conflict between the right mind and the wrong mind. And thus we suffer and believe that we have been left by our Father alone in this world. Yet it is we who chose to leave Him and are unwilling to take responsibility for this choice. But once we see that it is a choice, then we can choose again and recognize that if we are the ones that left God then we can choose to make our way back to where we never really left. And that is our certain way to release because we have that power in our minds to make this choice. We have not been left desolate. The instant that we made the choice for the ego that Answer was given. And that is the Holy Spirit always available to remind us of God's love. "There is no will except the Will of Love".(1.6) "Fear is a dream, and has no will that can conflict with Yours.   Conflict is sleep, and peace awakening". (1.7-8). And in that awakening the realization will be clear to us that "Death is illusion." (1.9). In the dream we can and do experience conflict but the truth is that there is only God's Will and that we share it. This is shown us when we do the forgiveness work.

 The conflict in our lives may even seem to increase when we step on this path. Because now we are aware of two thought systems in our mind and the conflict seems to now be increased between our wrong mind and our right mind. Life no longer seems as simple as when we listened almost exclusively to the ego.  The Lessons of the Holy Spirit (Chapter 6.V) talked of this saying that when we invite the Holy Spirit in, we may feel tremendous conflict in our lives. Now it seems that we are going in different directions or trying to ride two horses. Do we choose the ego or the Holy Spirit? It is like we now have two options. In fact there seems to be more conflict in our lives when we start on this path than when our whole sense of identity was only that of the ego. Now when we attack, we feel a lot of pain because we recognize that our judgments and attacks on others are only bringing more guilt and pain into our own minds. We think we should forgive yet we hold onto our determination to pay someone back for what they have done to us. These are examples of the kind of conflict he is talking about in this lesson and it makes us despair that we will ever achieve our spiritual goal. Thus conflict is very much a part of our experience here until the blocks to the love that we are, are undone through forgiveness and we take only one side, which is that of our right mind and stand outside of this dream where there is no conflict.   

All conflict is thus in our own mind as a reflection of the original conflict. There is no one to be in conflict with. All of the characters in our dream are projections of our own mind. Any opposition is our own, reflected back to us so we can see it where it can be healed-in our own mind. It is all nothing. We are all One Self. We are our brother. There is no separation.

 When we are in conflict with anyone, we are given an opportunity to see our separate will striving to establish itself. Conflict can thus offer us an opportunity to see the unreality of our own will. My will is unreal and powerless. To be in conflict with "another" will that is unreal and powerless is like shadow boxing with ourselves.  Oh yes, to us it does seem like something real is happening but, in fact, if we are One and there is no separation then we have the same will-the One Will of God. It cannot be in conflict with itself. So all seeming conflict in the world is about nothing. It is all part of the dream.  When we realize that our Will is one with God, then we will awaken to the truth of who we are and be at peace. There will be no one to be in conflict with because we will realize that we are One. We are our brother. There is no separation. While in conflict, we are actually in the dream. "Conflict is sleep, and peace awakening". (1.8)

I remember clearly as a young child about 5 years of age, living in Sweden in a refugee camp, deciding that I was on my own and had to look after myself as I felt very vulnerable and believed that there was no one that could protect me. I made a decision for my independence from God at that time even though I did not realize that I was doing so. After that time, I became very independent, very strategic and very manipulative, believing that my success in the world was up to me. It was me against the world. What a relief, then to realize through this Course work, that I can give up this fight with God. He tells us it is simply foolish to believe that we can oppose God's Will. It is foolish to think that I could have done anything to corrupt or change myself in any way.   This new awareness has helped me to relax and to go with the flow, recognizing that all things truly do work together for our good. There is value in anything that seems to be happening to us as it can help us in our own awakening if we use every situation for that purpose. Imagine if we looked at every situation and every person with holy sight...with the eyes of Christ and saw only innocence. That is what forgiveness would show us. We would see only the holy. We would only see God's Will for us.

So in our daily lives it is important to bring our awareness to how the egoic mind  is operating in our experience.  We need to bring our ego thoughts for healing. We need to look at the patterns in our lives, how we defeat ourselves, how we attract that which we are running away from in ourselves. But it is important not to fight the ego, nor to indulge it or love it. We are merely asked to look at it and be willing to take full responsibility for it, rather than projecting blame on others. This takes courage. We tend to live in the upper rooms of our home, denying what is in the basement but we are now asked to look in the dark corners where we have closed the doors tight and placed sentinels outside of these doors that guard these rooms so we won't investigate what is in them. But this journey requires that we do look there and bring our darkness to the light.

We believe that we separated from God in that tiny tick of time when the Son of God remembered not to laugh at the foolishness of separating from Love and of establishing a separate will. So we need not continue to take ourselves so seriously but simply to smile at the foolishness of our thoughts and give them over. That is what the forgiveness process is. That is what Jesus is helping us to do. Even in the Gospel of John he said he would never leave us desolate. Here too, in this lesson, he says again that our Father could "never leave me desolate, to die within a world of pain and cruelty". (1.4)

 We need not be afraid of the ego. It is nothing. But it seems to us to have a lot of power. Yet when we unmask it, we find that it is indeed nothing. Have you ever had the experience of keeping a shameful secret which has tormented you and controlled you? And there was a lot of fear that you would be found out? Then when you finally open the door to that dark, secret room in your mind, and allow the light to shine in, that all of the shame, all of the power it contained is gone? When we bring our deep, dark, dirty, secrets to the Holy Spirit, the same process takes place.

 How do we discover what we are hiding? Sometimes, we don't even know what is there. But we can see it in our projections. When we 'hate' something about someone else, we can use this projection as an opportunity to look at some version of that same thing that we hate about ourselves. Unmasking the ego, is what this process allows us to do. It is the only way to our own healing. The ego is all about fear. And our will tries everything to keep us safe and guarded from discovering the love that we are. But the lesson says that "Fear is a dream, and has no will that can conflict with Yours. Conflict is sleep, and peace awakening. Death is illusion; life eternal truth. There is no opposition to Your (God's) Will". (1.7-10) And we know this through forgiveness. "Forgiveness shows us that God's Will is one, and that we share it". (2.1)

 So allow any conflict that you feel within yourself or with anyone else to be brought to the light of your awareness. Realize that in experiencing this conflict in yourself that it is your false will. Whenever you are feeling fearful, guilty, hopeless, unworthy, ashamed, disappointed, sad, depressed, angry, unloving, in conflict with anyone, out of accord with yourself  in any way remind yourself  "There is no conflict, for my will is Yours". That is the truth that you are affirming but it is not about covering over the feelings that are there for you. Those have to be acknowledged and explored, felt and released. Any conflict that we feel is simply not the truth of who we are. The will that I have identified with is nothing but fear. It will simply vanish with our awakening to the truth of who we are.

 Love and blessings,  Sarah

Sarah's Home Page

Quotes in this article are from Foundation for Inner Peace edition; To locate the same quotes in the 'Original Edition', use this link:  http://www.jcim.net/acim_us/Acim.php  
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^{A Course in Miracles
 TEXT
 Chapter Thirty One
The Simplicity of Salvation}

V. Self Concept Versus Self