Love is extension. To withhold the smallest gift is not to know love’s purpose. Love offers everything forever. Hold back but one belief, one offering, and love is gone, because you asked a substitute to take its place. And now must war, the substitute for peace, come with the one alternative [specialness] that you can choose for love. Your choosing it has given it all the reality it seems to have.
Beliefs will never openly attack each other because conflicting outcomes are impossible. But an unrecognized belief is a decision to war in secret, where the results of conflict are kept unknown and never brought to reason, to be considered sensible or not. And many senseless outcomes have been reached, and meaningless decisions have been made and kept hidden, to become beliefs now given power to direct all subsequent decisions. Mistake you not the power of these hidden warriors to disrupt your peace.
All that is ever cherished as a hidden belief, to be defended though unrecognized, is faith in specialness.
Specialness is the great dictator of the wrong decisions. Here is the grand illusion of what you are and what your brother is. And here is what must make the body dear and worth preserving. Specialness must be defended. Illusions can attack it, and they do. For what your brother must become to keep your specialness is an illusion. (A Course in Miracles, T-24.I.1:1-2:4;3:1;5:1-6. See also ACIM Text Made Simple.)
Because only Love is real, the extension of Love is the extension of everything. Nothing else is real. But belief in specialness offers an illusion of something else of value other than Love. The illusion of specialness is defended by believing in differences that make all things seem to be different and therefore special. It is this belief in differences that is at the core of every disagreement, conflict, battle and war.
Peace will return to our minds when we are willing to give up our belief in specialness. Without specialness, there is nothing to defend. Without specialness, Love extends freely, without interruption or limit.
Let us practice questioning our beliefs when any form of conflict seems to appear. Let us open our minds to the Light of the Holy Spirit to show us the mistaken beliefs behind the conflict and let them go.
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