Chapter 7: The Gifts of the Kingdom

II. The Law of the Kingdom

¹ To heal is the only kind of thinking in this world that resembles the Thought of God, and because of the elements they share, can transfer easily to it. When a brother perceives himself as sick, he is perceiving himself as not whole, and therefore in need. If you, too, see him this way, you are seeing him as if he were absent from the Kingdom or separated from it, thus making the Kingdom itself obscure to both of you. Sickness and separation are not of God, but the Kingdom is. If you obscure the Kingdom, you are perceiving what is not of God.

² To heal, then, is to correct perception in your brother and yourself by sharing the Holy Spirit with him. This places you both within the Kingdom, and restores its wholeness in your minds. This parallels creation because it unifies by increasing and integrates by extending. What you project you believe. This is an immutable law of the mind in this world as well as in the Kingdom. However, the content is different in this world, because the thoughts it governs are very different from the Thoughts in the Kingdom. Laws must be adapted to circumstances if they are to maintain order. The outstanding characteristic of the laws of mind as they operate in this world is that by obeying them, and I assure you that you must obey them, you can arrive at diametrically opposed results. This is because the laws have adapted to the circumstances of this world, in which diametrically opposed outcomes are believed in. The laws of mind govern thoughts, and you do respond to two conflicting voices. 

³ You have heard many arguments on behalf of “the freedoms,” which would indeed have been freedom if man had not chosen to fight for them. That is why they perceive “the freedoms” as many, instead of as one. Yet the argument that underlies the defense of freedom is perfectly valid. Because it is true it should not be fought for, but it should be sided with. 

⁴ Those who are against freedom believe that its outcome will hurt them, which cannot be true. But those who are for freedom, even if they are misguided in how to defend it, are siding with the one thing in this world which is true. Whenever anyone can listen fairly to both sides of any issue, he will make the right decision. This is because he has the answer. Conflict can seem to be interpersonal, but it must be intrapersonal first.

⁵ The term “intrapersonal” is an ego term, because “personal” implies “of one person,” and not of others.” Interpersonal” has similar error, in that it refers to something that exists among different or separate people. When we spoke before of the extremely personal nature of revelation, we followed this statement immediately with a description of the inevitable outcomes of the revelation in terms of sharing. A person conceives of himself as separate largely because he perceives of himself as bounded by a body. Only if he perceives himself as a mind can this be overcome. Then he is free to use terms like “intramental” and “intermental” without seeing them as different or conflicting because minds can be in perfect accord.

⁶ Outside the Kingdom, the law that prevails inside is adapted to "What you project you believe." This is its teaching form, since outside the Kingdom teaching is mandatory because learning is essential. This form of the law clearly implies that you will learn what you are from what you have projected onto others, and therefore believe they are. In the Kingdom there is no teaching or learning because there is no belief. There is only certainty. God and His Sons, in the surety of being, know that what you project you are. That form of the law is not adapted at all, being the law of creation. God Himself created the law by creating by it. And His Sons, who create like Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the increase of the Kingdom depends on it, just as their own creation did. 

⁷ Laws must be communicated if they are to be helpful. In effect, they must be translated for those who speak different languages. Nevertheless, a good translator, although he must alter the form of what he translates, never changes the meaning. In fact, his whole purpose is to change the form so that the original meaning is retained. The Holy Spirit is the translator of the laws of God to those who do not understand them. You could not do this yourself because a conflicted mind cannot be faithful to one meaning, and will therefore change the meaning to preserve the form.

⁸ The Holy Spirit's purpose in translating is exactly the opposite. He translates only to preserve the original meaning in all respects and in all languages. Therefore, He opposes the idea that differences in form are meaningful, emphasizing always that these differences do not matter. The meaning of His message is always the same; only the meaning matters. God's law of creation does not involve the use of truth to convince His Sons of truth. The extension of truth, which is the law of the Kingdom, rests only on the knowledge of what truth is. This is your inheritance and requires no learning at all, but when you disinherited yourselves, you became learners.

⁹ No-one questions the intimate connection of learning and memory. Learning is impossible without memory since it cannot be consistent unless it is remembered. That is why the Holy Spirit is a lesson in remembering. We said before that He teaches remembering and forgetting, but the forgetting aspect is only to make the remembering consistent. You forget in order to remember better. You will not understand His translations while you listen to two ways of perceiving them. Therefore you must forget or relinquish one to understand the other. This is the only way you can learn consistency, so that you can finally be consistent.

¹⁰ What can the perfect consistency of the Kingdom mean to the confused? It is apparent that confusion interferes with meaning, and therefore prevents the learner from appreciating it. There is no confusion in the Kingdom, because there is only one meaning. This meaning comes from God and is God. Because it is also you, you share it and extend it as your Creator did. This needs no translation because it is perfectly understood, but it does need extension because it means extension. Communication is perfectly direct and perfectly united. It is totally free, because nothing discordant ever enters. That is why it is the Kingdom of God. It belongs to Him and is therefore like Him. That is its reality, and nothing can assail it.

¹¹ To heal is to liberate totally. We once said there is no order of difficulty in miracles because they are all maximal expressions of love. This has no range at all. The non-maximal only appears to have a range. This is because it seems to be meaningful to measure it from the maximum, and identify its position by how much it is not there. Actually, this does not mean anything. It is like negative numbers in that the concept can be used theoretically, but it has no application practically. It is true that if you put three apples on the table and them take them away, the three apples are not there. But it is not true that the table is now minus three apples. If there is nothing on the table, it does not matter what was there in terms of amount. The “nothing” is neither greater not less because of what is absent. 

¹² That is why “all” and “nothing” are dichotomous, without a range. This is perfectly clear in considering psychological tests of maximal performance. You cannot interpret the results at all unless you assume either maximal motivation or no motivation at all. Only in these two conditions can you validly compare responses, and you must assume the former because, if the latter were true, the subject would not do anything. Given variable motivation he will do something, but you cannot understand what it is.

¹³ The results of such tests are evaluated relatively assuming maximal motivation, but this is because we are dealing with abilities, where degree of development is meaningful. This does not mean that what the ability is used for is necessarily either limited or divided. Yet one thing is certain; abilities are potentials for learning, and you will apply them to what you want to learn. Learning is effort, and effort means will. We have used the term “abilities” in the plural because abilities began with the ego, which perceived them as potentials for excelling. This is how the ego still perceives them and uses them.

¹⁴ The ego does not want to teach everyone all it has learned, because that would defeat its purpose. Therefore, it does not really learn at all. The Holy Spirit teaches you to use what the ego has made to teach the opposite of what the ego has learned. The kind of learning is as irrelevant as is the particular ability which was applied to the learning. You could not have a better example of the Holy Spirit’s unified purpose than this course. The Holy Spirit has taken very diversified areas of your learning, and has applied them to a unified curriculum. The fact that this was not the ego’s reason for learning is totally irrelevant.

¹⁵ You made the effort to learn, and the Holy Spirit has a unified goal for all effort. He adapts the ego’s potentials for excelling to potentials for equalizing. This makes them useless for the ego’s purpose, but very useful for His. If different abilities are applied long enough to one goal, the abilities themselves become unified. This is because they are channelized in one direction, or in one way. Ultimately, then, they all contribute to one result, and by so doing, their similarity rather than their differences is emphasized. You can excel in many different ways, but you can equalize in one way only. Equality is not a variable state, by definition.

¹⁶ That it why you will be able to perform all aspects of your work with ease when you have learned this course. To the ego there appears to be no connection because the ego is discontinuous. 

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