Suppose a brother insists on having you do something you think you do not want to do. His very insistence should tell you that he believes salvation lies in it. If you insist on refusing and experience a quick response of opposition, you are believing that your salvation lies in not doing it. You, then, are making the same mistake he is, and are making his error real to both of you. Insistence means investment, and what you invest in is always related to your notion of salvation. The question is always twofold; first, what is to be saved? And second, how can it be saved?
ACIM Chapter 12,III,2
This idea that ‘insistence means investment ’ and its corollary that ‘what you invest in is always related to your notion of salvation,’ is both startling and unfamiliar to our normal way of thinking. It is fairly easy for us to see that insistence is a result or reflection of investment, and indeed this concept is at the basis of our laws regarding “conflicts of interest.” We recognize that to be invested in someone or something creates a powerful bias in our perspective of anything related to that person or thing. In other words, because we wish to protect our investment we loose our objectivity with respect to that person or thing. The corollary that our investment is always related to our notion of salvation is less familiar to us, and it is this that the quote is bringing to our attention.
Our insistence in doing or not doing a certain thing indicates where our investment lies, and our investment is a statement of our notion of salvation. We would not invest in something unless we believe that it will bring us to a better place on some level, whether physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual, and the investment of our time, attention and resources is always in proportion to our edification. We choose: our friends, and acquaintances, our education and social connections; our career, political and spiritual affiliations, our neighborhood, possessions, and even our style of dress, all for our own edification. Furthermore we are willing to fight tooth and nail, to suffer and commit insult and injury in the defense of our choices, because at a very deep level of our consciousness we believe our very salvation depends on these choices.
This belief in our choices as a means to our salvation is at the root of all our conflicts. We believe our choices are the way not simply to edify, but to deify ourselves. We believe this because we believe we are something much less than the divine children God created us to be. Instead, we see ourselves as: bodies, limited, weak, frail, vulnerable, sinful, and therefore desperately in need of salvation -- what a different world it would be if only we believed in our God given divinity. In truth we need no salvation, for we are now, always was, and always will be as God created us, since we cannot change the will of God. But we do need salvation from our belief in the ego-personality we created and the concept of “sin” which gives rise to our belief in salvation, thus giving rise to the questions of “what” is to be saved, and “how?” It is only our minds that need salvation, for it is our mechanism of decision, and it can only be saved by the removal of conflict and the establishment of peace.
The conflict is our wish to have a Truth different from the Truth God created and established within our minds. And since Truth and illusion cannot abide in the same place, we split our minds and projected our wish, the cause of the conflict, outside our ego-personality, superimposing it on the world God created. Our projection is an illusion that covers (without changing in anyway) the Truth God created, and this is why conflict is inherent in our experience of the world, for it is literally built on conflict, better known as duality*.
Peace comes only when illusions are recognized for what they are and relinquished in exchange for Truth--the only state of lasting peace. In the state of peace, the mad idea of “separation” from God and from our divine inheritance is simply laughed at, for in that state, we recognize clearly our true identity with God and with each other; there we recognize the law of giving and receiving in a different light: that what we give to each other we give to ourselves, and what we receive all others receive as well. When we see this clearly, we also recognize what is real and what is illusion, and in recognizing illusion, we also recognize that there cannot be orders of magnitude between one illusion and another, and therefore no orders of magnitude in the solution to any of them. Regardless of how outrageous and different they may seem, illusions are unreal, have no effects, and do not matter at all. The solution to any illusion is always the same, bring it to Truth, like darkness to light, and watch it disappear.
As we relinquish our hold on illusions we begin to withdraw our projection and awaken to the real world God created; we understand that neither our illusions nor our brother’s matter, and in this awakening we can easily do whatever outrageous thing our brother asks of us, for then we recognize that his “outrageous” request like our own is simply a request for salvation, and to deny him his request would be to deny it from ourselves. We are one, so what is given, is given to all, and received likewise.
* The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 1,4,2 states: “Dvtiyad via bhayam bhavati” Certainly fear is born of duality. Duality gives rise to fear and fear is the source of all conflict.
Peace, Edmond
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