It is not necessary to follow fear through all the circuitous routes by which it burrows underground and hides in darkness, to emerge in forms quite different from what it is. ²Yet it is necessary to examine each [fear] as long as you would retain the principle that governs all of them. ³When you are willing to regard them, not as separate, but as different manifestations of the same idea, and one you do not want, they go together. ⁴The idea is simply this: You believe it is possible to be host to the ego or hostage to God. …⁷Sacrifice is so essential to your thought system that salvation apart from sacrifice means nothing to you. ⁸Your confusion of sacrifice and love is so profound that you cannot conceive of love without sacrifice. ⁹And it is this that you must look upon; sacrifice is attack, not love. ¹⁰If you would accept but this one idea, your fear of love would vanish. ¹¹Guilt cannot last when the idea of sacrifice has been removed.
How fearful, then, has God become to you, and how great a sacrifice do you believe His Love demands! ²For total love would demand total sacrifice.
³You must choose between total freedom and total bondage, for there are no alternatives but these. ⁴You have tried many compromises in the attempt to avoid recognizing the one decision you must make. ⁵And yet it is the recognition of the decision, just as it is, that makes the decision so easy. ⁶Salvation is simple, being of God, and therefore very easy to understand. ⁷Do not try to project it from you and see [salvation] outside yourself. ⁸In you are both the question and the answer; the demand for sacrifice and the peace of God. (T-15.X.5:1-4,7-11;7:1-2;9:3-8)
The idea of having a unique, separate identity is sacred to the ego. Loss of this identity is perceived as death. But to accept our inheritance of the oneness of God’s Love, we must give up our attachment to the illusion of a separate identity. The ego sees this as sacrifice. But when we accept God’s Love we let go of nothing (illusion) and accept all that is real.
Love demands no sacrifice. Because It is one, Love gives all of Itself without reservation. To give only a part of Itself would destroy the oneness of Love, which could never happen in truth. Joy is an attribute of Love. The only Source of happiness is the Love we are.
Today we happily let go of the wish for a unique identity to reclaim our true Identity as Love and nothing else.
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