A Change in Direction

The first change that must be introduced is a change in direction. A meaningful curriculum cannot be inconsistent. If it is planned by two teachers, each believing in diametrically opposed ideas, it cannot be integrated. If it is carried out by these two teachers simultaneously, each one merely interferes with the other. This leads to fluctuation, but not to change. The volatile have no direction. They cannot choose one, because they cannot relinquish the other even if the other does not exist and gives them no rationale for choice.

The total senselessness of such a curriculum must be fully recognized before a real change in direction becomes possible. You cannot learn simultaneously from two teachers who are in total disagreement about everything. Their joint curriculum presents an impossible learning task. They are teaching you entirely different things in entirely different ways, which would be possible except for the crucial fact that both are teaching you about yourself. Your reality is unaffected by both. But, if you listen to both, your mind will split on what your reality is.

There is a rationale for choice. Only one teacher knows what your reality is. If learning that is the purpose of the curriculum, you must learn it of Him. The ego does not know what it is trying to teach. It is trying to teach you what you are without knowing it. The ego is expert only in confusion. It does not understand anything else. As a teacher, then, it is totally confused and totally confusing.

Even if you could disregard the Holy Spirit entirely, which is quite impossible, you could learn nothing from the ego because the ego knows nothing. Is there any possible reason for choosing a teacher such as this? Does the total disregard of anything it teaches make anything but sense? Is this the teacher to whom a Son of God should turn to find Himself? The ego has never given you a sensible answer to anything. Simply on the grounds of your own experience with the ego's teaching, should not this alone disqualify it as your future teacher?

But the ego has done more harm to your learning than this alone. Learning is joyful, if it leads you along your natural path and facilitates the development of what you have. But, when you are taught against your nature, you will lose by your learning because your learning will imprison you. Your will is in your nature and, therefore, cannot go against it. The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free because you will not listen to it. It is not your will to be imprisoned because your will is free.

That is why the ego is the denial of free will. It is never God Who coerces you, because He shares His Will with you. His voice teaches only His Will, but that is not the Holy Spirit's lesson because that is what you are. The lesson is that your will and God's cannot be out of accord because they are one. This is the undoing of everything the ego tries to teach. It is not, then, only the direction of the curriculum which must be un-conflicted, but also the content.

The ego wants to teach you that you want to oppose God's Will. This unnatural lesson cannot be learned, but the attempt to learn it is a violation of your own freedom and makes you afraid of your will because it is free. The Holy Spirit opposes any imprisoning of the will of a Son of God, knowing that the will of the Son is the Father's. He leads you steadily along the path of freedom, teaching you how to disregard, or look beyond, everything that would hold you back.

We said before that the Holy Spirit teaches you the difference between pain and joy. That is the same as saying that He teaches you the difference between imprisonment and freedom. You cannot make this distinction without Him. That is because you have taught yourself that imprisonment is freedom. Believing them to be the same, how can you tell them apart? Can you ask the part of your mind that taught you to believe they are the same to teach you the difference?

The Holy Spirit's teaching takes only one direction and has only one goal. His direction is freedom, and His goal is God. But He cannot conceive of God without you, because it was not God's Will to be without you. When you have learned that your will is God's, you could no more will to be without Him than He could will to be without you. This is freedom and this is joy. Deny yourself this, and you are denying God His Kingdom because He created you for this.

When we said, "all power and glory are yours because the Kingdom is His," this is what we meant: The Will of God is without limit, and all power and glory lie within it. It is boundless in strength and in love and in peace. It has no boundaries because its extension is unlimited and it encompasses all things because it created all things. By creating all things, it made them part of itself. You are the Will of God, because this is how you were created. Because your Creator creates only like Himself, you are like Him.

You are part of Him Who is all power and glory, and are, therefore, as unlimited as He is. To what else except all power and glory can the Holy Spirit appeal to restore God's Kingdom? His appeal, then, is merely to what the Kingdom is, and for its own acknowledgment of what it is. When you acknowledge this, you bring the acknowledgment automatically to everyone because you have acknowledged everyone. By your recognition, you awaken theirs and, through the Kingdom, answer the call of God. This is the natural response of every Son of God to the Voice of His Creator, because it is the voice for His creations and for his own extension.

Glory be to God in the highest, and to you because He has so willed it. Ask and it shall be given you, because it has already been given. Ask for light, and learn that you are light. If you want understanding and enlightenment, you will learn it because your will to learn it is your decision to listen to the Teacher who Knows of light and can, therefore, teach it to you.

There is no limit on your learning because there is no limit on your minds. There is no limit on His will to teach because He was created by unlimited Will in order to teach. Knowing His function perfectly, He wills to fulfill it perfectly because that is His joy and yours. To fulfill the Will of God perfectly is the only joy and peace that can be fully known because it is the only function that can be fully experienced. When this is accomplished, then, there is no other experience. But the wish for other experience will block this because God's Will cannot be forced upon you, being an experience of total willingness.

The Holy Spirit knows how to teach this, but your ego does not. That is why you need Him, and why God gave Him to you. Only His teaching will release your will to God's, uniting it with His power and glory, and establishing them as yours. You will share them as He shares them because this is the natural outcome of their being. The will of the Father and of the son are one together by their extension. Their extension is the result of their Oneness, holding their unity by extending their joint will.

This is perfect creation by the perfectly created in union with the Perfect Creator. The Father must give Fatherhood to His Sons because His Own Fatherhood must be extended outward. You, who belong in God, have the holy function of extending His Fatherhood by placing no limits upon it. Let the Holy Spirit teach you how to do this, for you will know what it means of God Himself.1

1. 1. ACIM Speaks podcast reading of this selection in the previous entry.