II. The Difference between Imprisonment and Freedom
T-8.II.1. There is a rationale for choice. 2 Only one Teacher knows what your reality is. 3 If learning to remove the obstacles to that knowledge is the purpose of the curriculum, you must learn it of Him. 4 The ego does not know what it is trying to teach. 5 It is trying to teach you what you are without knowing what you are. 6 It is expert only in confusion. 7 It does not understand anything else. 8 As a teacher, then, the ego is totally confused and totally confusing. 9 Even if you could disregard the Holy Spirit entirely, which is impossible, you could still learn nothing from the ego, because the ego knows nothing.
T-8.II.2. Is there any possible reason for choosing a teacher such as this? 2 Does the total disregard of anything it teaches make anything but sense? 3 Is this the teacher to whom a Son of God should turn to find himself? 4 The ego has never given you a sensible answer to anything. 5 Simply on the grounds of your own experience with its teaching, should not this alone disqualify it as your future teacher? 6 Yet the ego has done more harm to your learning than this alone. 7 Learning is joyful if it leads you along your natural path, and facilitates the development of what you have. 8 When you are taught against your nature, however, you will lose by your learning because your learning will imprison you. 9 Your will is in your nature, and therefore cannot go against it.
T-8.II.3. The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free, because you will not listen to it. 2 It is not your will to be imprisoned because your will is free. 3 That is why the ego is the denial of free will. 4 It is never God Who coerces you, because He shares His Will with you. 5 His Voice teaches only in accordance with His Will, but that is not the Holy Spirit's lesson because that is what you are. 6 The lesson is that your will and God's cannot be out of accord because they are one. 7 This is the undoing of everything the ego tries to teach. 8 It is not, then, only the direction of the curriculum that must be unconflicted, but also the content.
T-8.II.4. The ego tries to teach that you want to oppose God's Will. 2 This unnatural lesson cannot be learned, and the attempt to learn it is a violation of your own freedom, making you afraid of your will because it is free. 3 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. 4 The Holy Spirit leads you steadily along the path of freedom, teaching you how to disregard or look beyond everything that would hold you back.
T-8.II.5. We have said that the Holy Spirit teaches you the difference between pain and joy. 2 That is the same as saying He teaches you the difference between imprisonment and freedom. 3 You cannot make this distinction without Him because you have taught yourself that imprisonment is freedom. 4 Believing them to be the same, how can you tell them apart? 5 Can you ask the part of your mind that taught you to believe they are the same, to teach you how they are different?
T-8.II.6. The Holy Spirit's teaching takes only one direction and has only one goal. 2 His direction is freedom and His goal is God. 3 Yet He cannot conceive of God without you, because it is not God's Will to be without you. 4 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. 5 This is freedom and this is joy. 6 Deny yourself this and you are denying God His Kingdom, because He created you for this.
T-8.II.7. When I said, "All power and glory are yours because the Kingdom is His," this is what I meant: The Will of God is without limit, and all power and glory lie within it. 2 It is boundless in strength and in love and in peace. 3 It has no boundaries because its extension is unlimited, and it encompasses all things because it created all things. 4 By creating all things, it made them part of itself. 5 You are the Will of God because that is how you were created. 6 Because your Creator creates only like Himself, you are like Him. 7 You are part of Him Who is all power and glory, and are therefore as unlimited as He is.
T-8.II.8. To what else except all power and glory can the Holy Spirit appeal to restore God's Kingdom? 2 His appeal, then, is merely to what the Kingdom is, and for its own acknowledgment of what it is. 3 When you acknowledge this you bring the acknowledgment automatically to everyone, because you have acknowledged everyone. 4 By your recognition you awaken theirs, and through theirs yours is extended. 5 Awakening runs easily and gladly through the Kingdom, in answer to the Call for God. 6 This is the natural response of every Son of God to the Voice for his Creator, because It is the Voice for his creations and for his own extension.