T-7.VI:From Vigilance to Peace

1. 1Although you can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceive it as fragmented. 2It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you will not attribute to all of it. 3That is why attack is never discrete, and why it must be relinquished entirely. 4If it is not relinquished entirely it is not relinquished at all. 5Fear 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. 6That includes his concept of God, of His creations and of his own. 7He will not appreciate any of Them if he regards Them fearfully. 8He will appreciate all of Them if he regards Them with love.

2. 1The mind that accepts attack cannot love. 2That is because it believes it can destroy love, and therefore does not understand what love is. 3If it does not understand what love is, it cannot perceive itself as loving. 4This loses the awareness of being, induces feelings of unreality and results in utter confusion. 5Your thinking has done this because of its power, but your thinking can also save you from this because its power is not of your making. 6Your ability to direct your thinking as you choose is part of its power. 7If you do not believe you can do this you have denied the power of your thought, and thus rendered it powerless in your belief.

3. 1The ingeniousness of the ego to preserve itself is enormous, but it stems from the very power of the mind the ego denies. 2This means that the ego attacks what is preserving it, which must result in extreme anxiety. 3That is why the ego never recognizes what it is doing. 4It is perfectly logical but clearly insane. 5The ego draws upon the one source that is totally inimical to its existence for its existence. 6Fearful of perceiving the power of this source, it is forced to depreciate it. 7This threatens its own existence, a state which it finds intolerable. 8Remaining logical but still insane, the ego resolves this completely insane dilemma in a completely insane way. 9It does not perceive its existence as threatened by projecting the threat onto you, and perceiving your being as nonexistent. 10This ensures its continuance if you side with it, by guaranteeing that you will not know your own safety.

4. 1The ego cannot afford to know anything. 2Knowledge is total, and the ego does not believe in totality. 3This unbelief is its origin, and while the ego does not love you it is faithful to its own antecedents, begetting as it was begotten. 4Mind always reproduces as it was produced. 5Produced by fear, the ego reproduces fear. 6This is its allegiance, and this allegiance makes it treacherous to love because you are love. 7Love is your power, which the ego must deny. 8It must also deny everything this power gives you because it gives you everything. 9No one who has everything wants the ego. 10Its own maker, then, does not want it. 11Rejection is therefore the only decision the ego could possibly encounter, if the mind that made it knew itself. 12And if it recognized any part of the Sonship, it would know itself.

5. 1The ego therefore opposes all appreciation, all recognition, all sane perception and all knowledge. 2It perceives their threat as total, because it senses that all commitments the mind makes are total. 3Forced, therefore, to detach itself from you, it is willing to attach itself to anything else. 4But there is nothing else. 5The mind can, however, make up illusions, and if it does so it will believe in them, because that is how it made them.

6. 1The Holy Spirit undoes illusions without attacking them, because He cannot perceive them at all. 2They therefore do not exist for Him. 3He resolves the apparent conflict they engender by perceiving conflict as meaningless. 4I have said before that the Holy Spirit perceives the conflict exactly as it is, and it is meaningless. 5The Holy Spirit does not want you to understand conflict; He wants you to realize that, because conflict is meaningless, it is not understandable. 6As I have already said, understanding brings appreciation and appreciation brings love. 7Nothing else can be understood, because nothing else is real and therefore nothing else has meaning.

7. 1If you will keep in mind what the Holy Spirit offers you, you cannot be vigilant for anything but God and His Kingdom. 2The only reason you may find this hard to accept is because you may still think there is something else. 3Belief does not require vigilance unless it is conflicted. 4If it is, there are conflicting components within it that have led to a state of war, and vigilance has therefore become essential. 5Vigilance has no place in peace. 6It 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. 7When you believe something, you have made it true for you. 8When you believe what God does not know, your thought seems to contradict His, and this makes it appear as if you are attacking Him.

8. 1I have repeatedly emphasized that the ego does believe it can attack God, and tries to persuade you that you have done this. 2If the mind cannot attack, the ego proceeds perfectly logically to the belief that you must be a body. 3By not seeing you as you are, it can see itself as it wants to be. 4Aware of its weakness the ego wants your allegiance, but not as you really are. 5The ego therefore wants to engage your mind in its own delusional system, because otherwise the light of your understanding would dispel it. 6It wants no part of truth, because the ego itself is not true. 7If truth is total, the untrue cannot exist. 8Commitment to either must be total; they cannot coexist in your mind without splitting it. 9If they cannot coexist in peace, and if you want peace, you must give up the idea of conflict entirely and for all time. 10This requires vigilance only as long as you do not recognize what is true. 11While you believe that two totally contradictory thought systems share truth, your need for vigilance is apparent.

9. 1Your mind is dividing its allegiance between two kingdoms, and you are totally committed to neither. 2Your identification with the Kingdom is totally beyond question except by you, when you are thinking insanely. 3What you are is not established by your perception, and is not influenced by it at all. 4Perceived problems in identification at any level are not problems of fact. 5They are problems of understanding, since their presence implies a belief that what you are is up to you to decide. 6The ego believes this totally, being fully committed to it. 7It is not true. 8The ego therefore is totally committed to untruth, perceiving in total contradiction to the Holy Spirit and to the knowledge of God.

10. 1You can be perceived with meaning only by the Holy Spirit because your being is the knowledge of God. 2Any belief you accept apart from this will obscure God’s Voice in you, and will therefore obscure God to you. 3Unless you perceive His creation truly you cannot know the Creator, since God and His creation are not separate. 4The Oneness of the Creator and the creation is your wholeness, your sanity and your limitless power. 5This limitless power is God’s gift to you, because it is what you are. 6If 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.

11. 1Perceived without your part in it, God’s creation is seen as weak, and those who see themselves as weakened do attack. 2The attack must be blind, however, because there is nothing to attack. 3Therefore they make up images, perceive them as unworthy and attack them for their unworthiness. 4That is all the world of the ego is. 5Nothing. 6It has no meaning. 7It does not exist. 8Do 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. 9That would justify its existence, which cannot be justified. 10You cannot make the meaningless meaningful. 11This can only be an insane attempt.

12. 1Allowing insanity to enter your mind means that you have not judged sanity as wholly desirable. 2If 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. 3You cannot create in this divided state, and you must be vigilant against this divided state because only peace can be extended. 4Your divided mind is blocking the extension of the Kingdom; and its extension is your joy. 5If you do not extend the Kingdom, you are not thinking with your Creator and creating as He created.

13. 1In this depressing state the Holy Spirit reminds you gently that you are sad because you are not fulfilling your function as co-creator with God, and are therefore depriving yourself of joy. 2This is not God’s choice but yours. 3If your mind could be out of accord with God’s, you would be willing without meaning. 4Yet because God’s Will is unchangeable, no conflict of will is possible. 5This is the Holy Spirit’s perfectly consistent teaching. 6Creation, not separation, is your will because it is God’s, and nothing that opposes this means anything at all. 7Being 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.