With
these words, A Course in Miracles concludes its prescribed
curriculum of 365 daily lessons, and it is with these words,too, that we
begin our study.
A
Course in Miracles
(often called just "the Course")
is a self-study course for retraining the mind that is spiritual, rather
than religious, in its perspective. Although it uses Christian
terminology, it is ecumenical in its approach, and its underlying
ontology is reminiscent of ancient refrains, echoing the world's most
hallowed traditions.
The
Course is pragmatic in its method, and its aim is a peaceful
mind: "Knowledge is not the motivation for learning this course.
Peace is.[2]
Nevertheless, the Course frequently emphasizes its simplicity.[3]
The
story of the Course began when, in the midst of an environment
of intense competition and negative attitudes, Columbia University
clinical psychologist Dr. William T. Thetford decided he had had enough
and declared to his colleague, Dr. Helen Schucman, "There must be
another way, and I'm determined to find it." Dr. Schucman vowed to help
him.
What
ensued was a dramatic progression of waking dreams for Schucman, which
culminated in October 1965 with her experience of a voice which spoke
clearly in her mind, saying "This is a course in miracles. Please take
notes."
With
Thetford's support and assistance in transcribing her shorthand notes,
Schucman took down some fifteen hundred typewritten pages of A
Course in Miracles over a period of seven years.
Schucman
did not claim to be the author of the material herself. As she often
explained, she heard a kind of inner dictation and she felt compelled to
write it down, even though at times she disagreed with the content and
resisted the process. The voice which spoke through Helen clearly
identifies himself as Jesus. Nonetheless, one need not be Christian nor
accept Christianity's traditional doctrines to benefit from the
teachings of the Course. Indeed, traditional Christians will
at first find many of the pronouncements contained in this work to be
startling and perhaps unbelievable. Persistence and open-mindedness will
nevertheless be rewarded.
The
dictation of A Course in Miracles was completed in September
1972 and resulted in three volumes - the Text, the Workbook for
Students, and the Manual for Teachers. As the development of the
material progressed, Schucman and Thetford faced the formidable task of
organizing the original typescript (often called the "Urtext") into what
would become A Course in Miracles. They divided the Text into
chapters and sections and gave titles to each, and they removed a great
deal of material from the early chapters, material they believed was
meant for them personally, not for the Course. The edition
that resulted from those efforts is the book you hold in your hands.
The
Text volume of the Original Edition has undergone an
evolutionary process since the 1972 manuscript of A Course in
Miracles was discovered and released on the internet in late
1999. In early 2000 Course in Miracles Society (CIMS) printed the 1972
manuscript of the text as Jesus' Course in Miracles.
Distribution of that book was suspended during the continuance of the
copyright litigation, which was concluded in 2006.
In
November 2006 the initial printing of the Original Edition
(referred to as the 2006 Printing), containing the Workbook for Students
and Manual for Teachers in addition to the Text, was released. The 2006
Printing corrected numerous typographic errors, misspellings, and
aberrant punctuation that had appeared in the original 1972 manuscript
and which were reproduced in the Jesus' Course in Miracles
edition.
There
was a second printing in 2009 (referred to as the 2009 Printing) which
continued the process of correcting errors in the manuscript. In this
undertaking the editors for the first time looked back to earlier
manuscripts and restored material that appeared to have been
inadvertently or mistakenly omitted in retyping. This process of
restoration has continued through the 2012, 2017, and 2018 Printings,
adhering always to the fundamental directive, "fidelity to Source."
Among the improvements, beginning with the 2012 Printing, was the
updating of paragraph numbering in Chapters 2, 9, 26, and 27,
necessitated mainly by the restoration of material from an earlier
manuscript. Paragraph renumbering is described in footnotes where
pertinent.
In
its continuing evolution, this Original Edition faithfully
reproduces the original transcript of the book that was the result of
the collaboration between Schucman and Thetford, whom many believe were
involved with each other in the "holy relationship" described in
Chapters 17 through 22 of the Text. This edition preserves the original
language of the dictation of those chapters, which were addressed to the
two collaborators as they worked together to produce the manuscript.
Later editing of the manuscript changed the focus of these important
chapters and addresses them to a solitary reader, removing the mutuality
that is explicit in the original dictation.
It
seems clear that this Original Edition is what Schucman and Thetford
originally intended to be A Course in Miracles. However, in 1973 Ken
Wapnick, who had joined their small circle and received a copy of the
1972 manuscript, expressed his belief that further editing was needed.
Thetford withdrew from further detailed editing work, and Schucman and
Wapnick resumed the editing process. Along with changes in paragraphing,
punctuation, capitalization, and section titles, there was a great deal
of line-by-line editing. In addition, about one-fifth of the material in
the first five chapters was removed. Finally, a new section, the
Clarification of Terms, was added. The resulting edition, published in
1975 by the Foundation for Inner Peace, became the Course with which the
world would become familiar.
While
we honor that edition of the Course, we believe that the
additional editing resulted both in shifts of meaning and a change in
the over-all tone of the work. When encountering Schucman and Thetford's
Original Edition, students often find fresh clarity as they read its
wording or new understanding as they encounter passages that were not
included in the later 1975 edition. In the case of editing, it seems to
us that the "less-is-best" rule applies—the less tampering with the
eloquent and carefully worded dictation that Schucman received, the
better.
In
this Original Edition, we have taken great care in dealing
with the editorial issues presented by the original typed manuscript.
Our focus has been upon reproducing as nearly as possible the content as
it was originally given to Schucman and Thetford. It is to be noted,
however, that there are a few occasions where we encountered material
from the original dictation that appears to have been inadvertently or
mistakenly dropped in the early retyping. In those instances, we have
re-inserted the missing lines, noting our addition by placing the
inserted material in square brackets. Otherwise, the only changes that
have been made to the original manuscript of the Course as
completed by Schucman and Thetford have been to correct obvious
typographic errors and misspellings, to standardize punctuation and
capitalization, and to format the material for print publication. Apart
from the simple section and paragraph numbering which we include for
ease of reference and navigation, nothing has been added to or omitted
from the work.
We
would be remiss were we to fail to acknowledge the selfless support
provided to the Course in Miracles Society by its members and others.
From its earliest days, the work of the Society has been enabled by
tireless contributions of labor and generous financial support provided
by many individuals whose only compensation has been the satisfaction of
fostering the circulation of this sacred writing in the world.
Publication of this edition, in particular, has been underwritten by a
substantial grant from a member who wishes to remain anonymous. To those
supporters and all of our members, we extend a sincere "thank you." We
are most grateful.
In addition, Circle of
Atonement has created a book in which the first four chapters are
different from the Original, because they include Helen Schucman’s
handwritten notes from the areas she had edited out of recognition,
because she was uncomfortably affected by areas such as sex and personal
flaws, and you can find the four chapters at the link below:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z4t54On1IbLX0F_pcnoGKdxNIbQ39fL8/view
1
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you
take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the
curriculum. It means only that you may elect what you want to take at a
given time.
2
The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is
beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks
to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance.
The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no
opposite.
3
This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:
5
Herein lies the peace of God.
1.1
There is no order of difficulty among miracles. One is not "harder" or
"bigger" than another. They are all the same. All expressions of love
are maximal.
2.
2 Miracles as such do not matter. The only thing that matters
is their Source, Which is far beyond human evaluation.
3.
3 Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real
miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense, everything that
comes from love is a miracle.
4.
4 All miracles mean life, and God is the Giver of life. His
Voice will direct you very specifically. You will be told all you need
to know.
5.
5 Miracles are habits and should be involuntary. They should
not be under conscious control. Consciously selected miracles can be
misguided.
6.
6 Miracles are natural. When they do not occur,
something has gone wrong.
7.
7 Miracles are everyone's right, but purification is
necessary first.
8.
8 Miracles are [a form of] healing because they supply a lack
in that they are performed by those who temporarily have more for those
who temporarily have less.
9.
9 Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of
love, which are always miraculous in the true sense, the
exchange reverses the physical laws. They bring more love both
to the giver and the receiver.
10.
10 The use of miracles as spectacles to induce belief
is wrong, or better, is a misunderstanding of their purpose. They are
really used for and by believers.
11.
11 Prayer is the medium of miracles. Prayer is the natural
communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is
received, and through miracles love is expressed.
12.
12 Miracles are thoughts. Thoughts can represent lower-order
or higher-order reality. This is the basic distinction between
intellectualizing and thinking. One makes the physical and the other
creates the spiritual, and we believe in what we make or create.
13.
13 Miracles are both beginnings and endings. They thus alter
the temporal order. They are always affirmations of rebirth which seem
to go back but really go forward. They undo the past in the present and
thus release the future.
14.
14 Miracles bear witness to truth. They are convincing
because they arise from conviction. Without conviction they deteriorate
into magic, which is mindless and therefore destructive, or rather the
uncreative use of mind.
15.
15 Each day should be devoted to miracles. The purpose of
time is to enable man to learn to use it constructively. Time is thus a
teaching device and a means to an end. It will cease when it is no
longer useful in facilitating learning.
16.
16 Miracles are teaching devices for demonstrating that it is
as blessed to give as to receive. They simultaneously increase the
strength of the giver and supply strength to the receiver.
17.
17 Miracles are the transcendence of the body. They are
sudden shifts into invisibility, away from a sense of lower-order
reality. That is why they heal.
18.
18 A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service one
individual can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as
yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable
worth simultaneously.
19.
19 [Miracles make Souls one in Christ.] They depend on
cooperation because the Sonship is the sum of all the Souls God created.
Miracles therefore rest on the laws of eternity, not of time.
20.
20 Miracles reawaken the awareness that the spirit, not the
body, is the altar of truth. This is the recognition that leads to the
healing power of the miracle.
21.
21 Miracles are natural expressions of total forgiveness.
Through miracles, man accepts God's forgiveness by extending it to
others.
22.
22 Miracles are associated with fear only because of the
fallacious belief that darkness can hide. Man believes that what
he cannot see does not exist, and his physical eyes cannot see in the
dark. This is a very primitive solution and has led to a denial of the
Spiritual eye. [1]
The escape from darkness involves two stages:
A.
23 The recognition that darkness cannot hide. This
step usually entails fear.
B.
24 The recognition that there is nothing you want to
hide, even if you could. This step brings escape from
fear.
23.
25 Miracles rearrange perception and place the levels of
perception in true perspective. This heals at all levels because
sickness comes from confusing the levels.
26
When you have become willing to hide nothing, you will not only be
willing to enter into communion but will also understand peace and joy.
Your commitment is not yet total, and that is why you still have more to
learn than to teach. When your equilibrium stabilizes, you will be able
to teach as much as you learn, which will give you the proper balance.
Meanwhile, remember that no effort is wasted, for unless you remember
this, you cannot avail yourselves of my efforts, which are
limitless. Only eternity is real. Why not use the illusion of time
constructively?
24.
27 Miracles enable man to heal the sick and raise the dead
because he made sickness and death himself and can abolish both. You
are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator.
Everything else is only your own nightmare and does not exist. Only the
creations of light are real.
25.
28 Miracles are part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness
which, when completed, is the Atonement. This process works all the time
and in all the dimensions of time.
29
I am in charge of the process of Atonement, which I undertook to begin.
When you offer a miracle unto any of my brothers, you do it unto yourself
and me. The reason you come before me is that I do not
need miracles for my own Atonement, but I stand at the end in case you
fail temporarily. The purpose of my part in the Atonement is the
canceling out of all lacks of love which men could not otherwise
correct. The word "sin" should be changed to "lack of love" because
"sin" is a man-made word with threat connotations which he made up
himself. No real threat is involved anywhere. Nothing is gained
by frightening yourselves, and it is very destructive to do so.
26.
30 Miracles represent freedom from fear. "Atoning"
really means "undoing." The undoing of fear is an essential part of the
Atonement value of miracles.
31
The purpose of the Atonement is to restore everything to you, or rather
to restore it to your awareness. You were given everything when you were
created, just as everyone was. When you have been restored to the
recognition of your original state, you naturally become part of the
Atonement yourself. As you share my inability to tolerate lack of love
in yourself and others, you must join the Great Crusade to correct it.
The slogan for the Crusade is "Listen, learn and do":
Listen to my voice, learn to undo error, and do something to
correct it. The first two are not enough. The real members of my
party are active workers.
32
The power to work miracles belongs to you. I will provide the
opportunities to do them, but you must be ready and willing
since you are already able. Doing them will bring conviction in the
ability, since conviction really comes through accomplishment. The
ability is the potential; the achievement is its expression; and the
Atonement is the purpose.
27.
33 A miracle is a universal blessing from God through me to all
my brothers. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive.
34
The disciples were specifically told to be physicians of the Lord and to
heal others. They were also told to heal themselves and were
promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the
natural profession of the Children of God because they have professed
me. "Heaven and earth shall pass away" simply means that they will not
continue to exist as separate states. My word, which is the resurrection
and the life, shall not pass away, because life is eternal. You
are the work of God, and His work is wholly lovable and wholly loving.
This is how a man must think of himself in his heart because
this is what he is.
28.
35 Miracles are a means of organizing different levels of
consciousness.
36
Miracles come from the below or subconscious level. Revelations come
from the above or superconscious level. The conscious level is in
between and reacts to either sub- or superconscious impulses in varying
ratios. Consciousness is the level which engages in the world and is
capable of responding to both. Having no impulses from itself and being
primarily a mechanism for inducing response, it can be very wrong.
37
Revelation induces complete but temporary suspension of doubt and fear.
It represents the original form of communication between God and His
Souls, involving an extremely personal sense of closeness to creation
which man tries to find in physical relationships. Physical closeness cannot
achieve this. The subconscious impulses properly induce miracles, which
are genuinely interpersonal and result in real closeness to others. This
can be misunderstood by a personally willful consciousness as
impulses toward physical gratification.
38
Revelation unites Souls directly with God. Miracles unite [Souls]
directly with each other. Neither emanates from consciousness, but both
are experienced there. This is essential since consciousness is
the state which produces action, though it does not inspire it.
Man is free to believe what he chooses, and what he does attests
to what he believes. The deeper levels of his subconscious always
contain the impulse to miracles, but he is free to fill its more
superficial levels, which are closer to consciousness, with the impulses
of this world and to identify himself with them. This results in denying
himself access to the miracle level underneath. In conscious actions,
then, his relationships also become superficial, and miracle-inspired
relating becomes impossible.
29.
39 Miracles are a way of earning release from fear.
40
Revelation induces a state in which fear has already been
abolished. Miracles are thus a means, and revelation is an end. [In this
sense, they work together.] Miracles do not depend on revelation; they induce
it. Revelation is intensely personal and cannot actually be translated
into conscious content at all. That is why any attempt to describe it in
words is usually incomprehensible. Revelation induces only
experience. Miracles, on the other hand, induce [interpersonal] action.
Miracles are more useful now because of their impersonal nature.
In this phase of learning, working miracles is more important because
freedom from fear cannot be thrust upon you.
30.
41 Miracles praise God through men. They praise God by
honoring His creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because
they deny body-identification and affirm Soul-identification. By
perceiving the spirit, they adjust the levels and see them in proper
alignment. This places the spirit at the center, where Souls can
communicate directly.
31.
42 Miracles should inspire gratitude, not awe. Man should
thank God for what he really is. The Children of God are very holy, and
the miracle honors their holiness.
43
God's creations never lose their holiness, although it can be hidden.
The miracle uncovers it and brings it into the light where it belongs.
Holiness can never be really hidden in darkness, but man can deceive
himself about it. This illusion makes him fearful because he knows in
his heart it is an illusion, and he exerts enormous efforts to establish
its reality. The miracle sets reality where it belongs. Eternal reality
belongs only to the Soul, and the miracle acknowledges only the truth.
It thus dispels man's illusions about himself and puts him in communion
with himself and God.
32.
44 Christ inspires all miracles, which are really
intercessions. They intercede for man's holiness and make his
perceptions holy. By placing him beyond the physical laws, they raise
him into the sphere of celestial order. In this order, man is
perfect.
45
The Soul never loses its communion with God. Only the mind needs
Atonement. The miracle joins in the Atonement of Christ by placing the
mind in the service of the spirit. This establishes the proper function
of the mind and corrects its errors.
33.
46 Miracles honor man because he is lovable. They
dispel illusions about him and perceive the light in him. They thus
atone for his errors by freeing him from his own nightmares. They
release him from a prison in which he has imprisoned himself,
and by freeing his mind from illusions, they restore his sanity. Man's
mind can be possessed by illusions, but his spirit is eternally
free. If a mind perceives without love, it perceives an empty shell and
is unaware of the spirit within it. But the Atonement restores the Soul
to its proper place. The mind that serves the spirit is invulnerable.
34.
47 Miracles restore the [Soul] to its fullness. By atoning
for lack, they establish perfect protection. The strength of the Soul
leaves no room for intrusions. The forgiven are filled with the Soul,
and they forgive in return. It is the duty of the released to release
their brothers.
48
The forgiven are the means of Atonement. Those released by
Christ must join in releasing their brothers, for this is the plan of
the Atonement. Miracles are the way in which minds which serve the
spirit unite with Christ for the salvation or release of all God's
creations.
35.
49 Miracles are expressions of love, but it does not
follow that they will [be effective]. I am the only one who can perform
miracles indiscriminately because I am the Atonement. You have a
role in the Atonement, which I will dictate to you. Ask me
which miracles you should perform. This spares you exhaustion because
you will act under direct communication.
36.
50 Christ-controlled miracles are part of the Atonement, but
Christ-guidance is personal and leads to personal salvation. The
impersonal nature of miracles is an essential ingredient because this
enables me to control their distribution. Christ-guidance leads
to the highly personal experience of revelation. This is why it
involves personal choice. A guide does not control, but
he does direct, leaving the following up to you. "Lead us not
into temptation" means "guide us out of our own errors." "Take up thy
cross and follow me" means, "Recognize your errors and choose to abandon
them by following my guidance."
51
Remember that error cannot really threaten truth, which can always
withstand it. Only the error is really vulnerable. You are free
to establish your kingdom where you see fit, but the right choice is
inevitable if you remember this:
53
Atonement undoes all errors in this respect and thus uproots the real
source of fear. Whenever God's reassurances are experienced as threat,
it is always because you are defending misplaced and misdirected
loyalty. That is what projection always involves. Error is lack of love.
When man projects this onto others, he does imprison them, but
only to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already
made. This makes them vulnerable to the distortions of others since
their own perception of themselves is distorted. The miracle
worker can only bless and this undoes their distortions and
frees them from prison.
37.
54 Miracles are examples of right thinking. Reality contact
at all levels becomes strong and accurate, thus permitting correct
delineation of intra- and interpersonal boundaries. As a result, the
doer's perceptions are aligned with truth as God created it.
38.
55 A miracle is a correction factor introduced into false
thinking by me. It acts as a catalyst, shaking up erroneous perception
and reorganizing it properly. This places man under the Atonement
principle, where his perception is healed. Until this has occurred,
revelation of the divine order is impossible.
39.
56 The Spiritual eye is the mechanism of miracles because
what It perceives is true. It perceives both the creations of
God and the creations of man. Among the creations of man, it can also
separate the true from the false by Its ability to perceive totally
rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for
reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between
the false and the true.
40.
57 The miracle dissolves error because the Spiritual eye
identifies error as false or unreal. This is the same as saying that by
perceiving light, darkness automatically disappears.
58
Darkness is lack of light, as sin is lack of love. It has no unique
properties of its own. It is an example of the "scarcity" fallacy, from
which only error can proceed. Truth is always abundant. Those
who perceive and acknowledge that they have everything have no need for
driven behavior of any kind.
41.
59 The miracle acknowledges all men as your brothers and
mine. It is a way of perceiving the universal mark of God in them. The
specialness of God's Sons does not stem from exclusion but from
inclusion. All my brothers are special. If they believe they are
deprived of anything, their perception becomes distorted. When this
occurs, the whole family of God, or the Sonship, is impaired in its
relationships. Ultimately, every member of the family of God must
return. The miracle calls him to return because it blesses and honors
him even though he may be absent in spirit.
60
"God is not mocked" is not a warning but a reassurance on this point.
God would be mocked if any of His creations lacked holiness. The
creation is whole, and the mark of wholeness is holiness.
42.
61 Wholeness is the perceptual content of miracles. It thus
corrects or atones for the faulty perception of lack anywhere.
62
Here we begin to make the fundamental distinction between miracles and
projection. The stimulus must precede the response and will also
determine the kind of response that is evoked. Behavior is
response, so that the question "response to what?" becomes crucial.
Since stimuli are identified through perception, you first perceive the
stimulus and then behave accordingly. It follows, then, that:
64
The Golden Rule asks you to behave toward others as you would have them
behave toward you. This means that the perception of both must
be accurate. The Golden Rule is the rule for appropriate behavior. You
cannot behave appropriately unless you perceive accurately, because
appropriate behavior depends on lack of level confusion. The
presence of level confusion always results in variable reality
testing and therefore in variability in behavioral appropriateness.
Since you and your neighbor are equal members of the same family, as you
perceive both, so you will behave toward both. The way to perceive for
Golden Rule behavior is to look out from the perception of your own
holiness and perceive the holiness of others.
65
The emptiness engendered by fear should be replaced by love because love
and its absence are in the same dimension, and correction cannot be
undertaken except within a dimension. Otherwise, there has been
a confusion of levels. Death is a human affirmation of a belief in
"[hate]," or level confusion. That is why the Bible says, "There is
no death" and why I demonstrated that death does not exist. I came to
fulfill the law by reinterpreting it. The law itself, if
properly understood, offers only protection to man. It is those who have
not yet "changed their minds" who entered the "hellfire" concept into
it.
66
I assure you that I will witness for anyone who lets me and to
whatever extent he permits it. Your witnessing demonstrates your
belief and thus strengthens it. Those who witness for me are expressing
through their miracles that they have abandoned the belief in
deprivation in favor of the abundance they have learned belongs
to them.
43.
67 A major contribution of miracles is their strength
in releasing man from his misplaced sense of isolation, deprivation, and
lack.
68
Miracles are affirmations of Sonship, which is a state of completion and
abundance. Whatever is true and real is eternal and cannot
change or be changed. The Soul is therefore unalterable because
it is already perfect, but the mind can elect the level it chooses to
serve. The only limit which is put on its choice is that it cannot
serve two masters.
69
The mind, if it elects to do so, becomes a medium by which the Soul
creates along the line of its own creation. If it does not freely elect
to do so, it retains its creative potential but places itself
under tyrannous rather than genuinely authoritative control. As a result
it imprisons, because such are the dictates of tyrants. To change your
mind means to place it at the disposal of true Authority.
70
The miracle is thus a sign that the mind has chosen to be led by Christ
in His service. The abundance of Christ is the natural result of
choosing to follow Him. All shallow roots must be uprooted
because they are not deep enough to sustain you. The illusion that
shallow roots can be deepened and thus made to hold is one of
the distortions on which the reversal of the Golden Rule rests.
As these false underpinnings are given up, the equilibrium is
temporarily experienced as unstable. However, the fact is that nothing
is less stable than an orientation that is upside down. Nor can anything
which holds it that way be really conducive to greater stability.
44.
71 Miracles arise from a miraculous state of mind. By being
one, this state of mind goes out to anyone, even without the
awareness of the miracle worker himself. The impersonal nature of
miracles is because the Atonement itself is one, uniting all creations
with their Creator.
45.
72 The miracle is an expression of an inner awareness of
Christ and the acceptance of His Atonement. The mind is then in a state
of grace and naturally becomes gracious both to the host within and the
stranger without. By bringing in the stranger, he becomes your brother.
46.
73 A miracle is never lost. It touches many people you do not
even know and sometimes produces undreamed of changes in forces of which
you are not even aware. That is not your concern. The miracle will
always bless you.
74
The miracles you are not asked to perform have not lost their
value. They are still expressions of your own state of grace, but the action
aspect of the miracle should be Christ-controlled because of His
complete awareness of the whole plan. The impersonal nature of
miracle-mindedness ensures your grace, but only Christ is in a
position to know where grace can be bestowed.
47.
75 Miracle-mindedness means miracle-readiness. Readiness
means that you should always keep your perceptions straight, so that you
will always be ready, willing, and able. These are the
essentials for "listen, learn, and do." You must be ready to
listen, willing to learn, and able to do. Only the last
is involuntary because it is the application of miracles, which
must be Christ-controlled. The other two, which are the voluntary
aspects of miracle-mindedness, are up to you.
48.
76 Awe is an inappropriate response to miracles.
77
Revelation is literally unspeakable because it is an experience of
unspeakable love. Awe should be reserved for revelation, to which it is
perfectly and correctly applicable. It is not appropriate for
miracles, because a state of awe is worshipful. It implies that one of a
lesser order stands before a greater one. This is the case only
when a Soul stands before its Creator. Souls are perfect creations and
experience awe only in the Presence of the Creator of perfection.
78
The miracle, on the other hand, is a sign of love among equals. Equals
cannot be in awe of one another because awe implies inequality. It is
therefore an inappropriate reaction to me. An elder brother is entitled
to respect for his greater experience and a reasonable amount of
obedience for his greater wisdom. He is also entitled to love because he
is a brother and also to devotion if he is devoted. It is only my
devotion that entitles me to yours. There is nothing about me that you
cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The main
difference between us as yet is that I have nothing else. This
leaves me in a state of true holiness, which is only a potential
in you.
79
"No man cometh unto the Father but by me" is among the most
misunderstood statements in the Bible. It does not mean that I
am in any way separate or different from you except in time,
which does not really exist at all. Actually, the quotation is more
meaningful if it is considered on a vertical rather than a horizontal
axis. Regarded along the vertical, man stands below me and I stand below
God. In the process of "rising up," I am higher. This is
because, without me, the distance between God and man would be too great
for you to encompass.
80
I bridge the distance as an elder brother to man on the one hand and as
a Son of God on the other. My devotion to my brothers has placed me in
charge of the Sonship, which I can render complete only to the extent to
which I can share it. This may appear to contradict the
statement, "I and my Father are one," but there are still separate parts
in the statement in recognition that the Father is greater. (The
original statement was "are of one kind"). The Holy Spirit is the
bringer of revelations. Revelations are indirectly inspired by
me because I am close to the Holy Spirit and alert to the
revelation-readiness of my brothers. I can thus bring down to
them more than they can draw down to themselves.
49.
81 The Holy Spirit is the highest communication medium.
Miracles do not involve this type of communication because they are temporary
communication devices. When man returns to his original form of
communication with God, the need for miracles is over. The Holy Spirit
mediates higher to lower communication, keeping the direct channel from
God to man open for revelation. Revelation is not reciprocal. It is
always from God to man. The miracle is
reciprocal because it involves equality.
50.
82 The miracle is a learning device which lessens the need
for time. In the longitudinal or horizontal plane, the recognition of
the true equality of all the members of the Sonship appears to involve
almost endless time. However, the sudden shift from horizontal to
vertical perception which the miracle entails introduces an interval
from which the doer and the receiver both emerge much farther
along in time than they would otherwise have been.
83
The miracle thus has the unique property of shortening time by rendering
the space of time it occupies unnecessary. There is no
relationship between the time a miracle takes and the time it covers.
It substitutes for learning that might have taken thousands of years. It
does this by the underlying recognition of perfect equality and holiness
between the doer and the receiver on which the miracle rests.
84
We said before that the miracle abolishes time. It does this by a
process of collapsing it and thus abolishing certain intervals
within it. It does this, however, within the larger temporal
sequence. It establishes an out-of-pattern time interval which is not
under the usual laws of time. Only in this sense is it timeless. By
collapsing time, it literally saves time. Much as daylight saving time
does, it rearranges the distribution of light.
51.
85 The miracle is the only device which man has at his
immediate disposal for controlling time. Only revelation transcends
time, having nothing to do with time at all.
86
The miracle is much like the body in that both are learning aids which
aim at facilitating a state in which they are unnecessary. When the
Soul's original state of direct communication is reached, neither the
body nor the miracle serves any purpose. While he believes he is in a
body, however, man can choose between loveless and miraculous channels
of expression. He can make an empty shell, but he cannot express
nothing at all. He can wait, delay, paralyze himself, reduce his
creativity to almost nothing, and even introduce a developmental arrest
or even a regression. But he cannot abolish his creativity. He
can destroy his medium of communication but not his potential.
87
Man was not created by his own free will alone. Only what he
creates is his to decide. The basic decision of the miracle-minded is
not to wait on time any longer than is necessary. Time can waste as well
as be wasted. The miracle-worker, therefore, accepts the time-control
factor gladly because he recognizes that every collapse of time brings
all men closer to the ultimate release from time in which the
Son and the Father are one.
88
Equality does not imply homogeneity now. When everyone
recognizes that he has everything, individual contributions to the
Sonship will no longer be necessary. When the Atonement has been
completed, all talents will be shared by all the Sons of
God. God is not partial. All His Children have His total love,
and all His gifts are freely given to everyone alike. "Except ye
become as little children" means that, unless you fully recognize your
complete dependence on God, you cannot know the real power of the Son in
his true relationship with the Father.
89
You who want peace can find it only by complete forgiveness. You never
really wanted peace before, so there was no point in being told
how to achieve it. No learning is acquired by anyone unless he wants to
learn it and believes in some way that he needs it. While the
concept of lack does not exist in the creation of God, it is very
apparent in the creations of man. It is, in fact, the essential
difference. A need implies lack by definition. It involves the
recognition that you would be better off in a state which is somehow
different from the one you are in.
90
Until the "separation," which is a better term than the "fall," nothing
was lacking. This meant that man had no needs at all. If he had not
deprived himself, he would never have experienced them. After the
separation, needs became the most powerful source of motivation for
human action. All behavior is essentially motivated by needs, but
behavior itself is not a divine attribute. The body is the mechanism for
behavior. The belief that he could be better off is the reason
why man has this mechanism at his disposal.
91
Each one acts according to the particular hierarchy of needs he
establishes for himself. His hierarchy, in turn, depends on his
perception of what he is—that is, what he lacks. A sense
of separation from God is the only lack he really needs to
correct. This sense of separation would never have occurred if he had
not distorted his perception of truth and thus perceived himself
as lacking. The concept of any sort of need hierarchy arose
because, having made this fundamental error, he had already fragmented
himself into levels with different needs. As he integrates he
becomes one, and his needs become one accordingly.
92
Unified need produces unified action because it produces a lack of
ambivalence. The concept of a need hierarchy, a corollary to the
original error that man can be separated from God, requires correction
at its own level before the error of perceiving levels at all can be
corrected. Man cannot behave effectively while he operates at split
levels. However, while he does, correction must be introduced from the
bottom up. This is because he now operates in space, where
concepts such as "up" and "down" are meaningful. Ultimately, space is as
meaningless as time. The concept is really one of space-time belief.
93
The physical world exists only because man can use it to correct his unbelief,
which placed him in it originally. He can never control the effects of
fear himself because he made fear and believes in what he made.
In attitude, then, though not in content, he resembles his own
Creator, Who has perfect faith in His creations because He
created them. Belief in a creation produces its existence. That is why a
man can believe in what no one else thinks is true. It is true for him
because it was made by him.
94
Every aspect of fear proceeds from upside-down perception. The more
truly creative devote their efforts to correcting perceptual
distortions. The neurotic devotes his to compromise. The psychotic tries
to escape by establishing the certain truth of his own errors. It is
most difficult to free him by ordinary means because he is more
consistent in his own denial of truth. The miracle, however, makes no
such distinctions. It corrects errors because they are errors.
Thus, the next point to remember about miracles is:
52.
95 The miracle makes no distinction among degrees of
misperception. It is a device for perception-correction, effective quite
apart from either the degree or the direction of the error. This is its
true indiscriminateness.
96
Christ-controlled miracles are selective only in the sense that
they are directed towards those who can use them for themselves.
Since this makes it inevitable that they will extend them to others, a
strong chain of Atonement is welded. However, Christ-control takes no
account at all of the magnitude of the miracle itself because the
concept of size exists in a plane that is itself unreal. Since the
miracle aims at restoring the awareness of reality, it would
hardly be useful if it were bound by the laws which govern the error it
aims to correct. Only man makes this kind of mistake. It is an example
of the foolish consistency which his own false beliefs have engendered.
97
The power and strength of man's creative will must be understood before
the real meaning of denial can be appreciated and relinquished. It is not
mere negation. It is a positive miscreation. While the miscreation is necessarily
believed in by its maker, it does not exist at all at the level of true
creation.
53.
98 The miracle compares what man has made with the higher
level creation, accepting what is in accord as true and
rejecting the discordant as false. All aspects of fear
are untrue because they do not exist at the higher creative level, and
therefore do not exist at all. To whatever extent a man is willing to
submit his beliefs to this test, to that extent are perceptions
corrected.
99
In sorting out the false from the true, the miracle proceeds along the
following lines:
102
You are involved in unconscious distortions which are producing a dense
cover over miracle impulses and which make it hard for them to reach
consciousness. The nature of any interpersonal relationship is limited
or defined by what you want it to do. Relating is a way of
achieving an outcome. The danger of defenses lies in their propensity
for holding misperceptions rigidly in place. All actions which stem from
reverse thinking are literally the behavioral expressions of those who
know not what they do. A rigid orientation can be extremely reliable,
even if it is upside-down. In fact, the more consistently upside-down it
is, the more reliable it is.
103
However, validity is still the ultimate goal, which reliability can only
serve. Hostility, triumph, vengeance, self-debasement, and all kinds of
expressions of lack of love are often very clearly seen in the fantasies
which accompany them. But it is a profound error to imagine that
because these fantasies are so frequent or occur so reliably that this
implies validity. Remember that while validity implies reliability, the
relationship is not reversible. You can be wholly reliable and entirely
wrong. While a reliable instrument does measure something, what
use is it unless you discover what the "something" is? This
course, then, will concentrate on validity and let reliability fall
naturally into place.
104
The confusion of miracle impulses with physical impulses is a major
source of perceptual distortion because it induces, rather than
straightens out, the basic level confusion which underlies the
perception of all those who seek happiness with the instruments of this
world. Inappropriate physical impulses (or misdirected miracle impulses)
result in conscious guilt if expressed and depression if denied. All
real pleasure comes from doing God's will. This is because not
doing it is a denial of self. Denial of error results in
projection. Correction of error brings release. "Lead us not
into temptation" means "do not let us deceive ourselves into believing
that we can relate in peace to God or to our brothers with anything
external."
105
Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and
the holy. Do not lose sight of this. The love of God for a little while
must still be expressed through one body to another because the real
vision is still so dim. Everyone can use his body best by enlarging
man's perception so he can see the real vision. This
vision is invisible to the physical eye. The ultimate purpose of the
body is to render itself unnecessary. Learning to do this is the only
real reason for its creation.
106
Fantasies of any kind are distorted forms of thinking because they always
involve twisting perception into unreality. Fantasy is a debased form of
vision. Vision and revelation are closely related, while fantasy and
projection are more closely associated because both attempt to control
external reality according to false internal needs. Twist reality in any
way, and you are perceiving destructively. Reality was lost through
usurpation, which in turn produced tyranny. I told you that you are now
restored to your former role in the plan of Atonement, but you must
still choose freely to devote yourselves to the greater restoration. As
long as a single slave remains to walk the earth, your release is not
complete. Complete restoration of the Sonship is the only true
goal of the miracle-minded.
107
No fantasies are true. They are distortions of perception by
definition. They are a means of making false associations and obtaining
pleasure from them. Man can do this only because he is creative.
But, although he can perceive false associations, he can never make them
real except to himself. Man believes in what he creates. If he
creates miracles, he will be equally strong in his belief in them.
The strength of his conviction will then sustain the belief of
the miracle receiver. And fantasies become totally unnecessary as the
wholly satisfying nature of reality becomes apparent to both.
2:1
This section deals with a fundamental misuse of knowledge, referred to
in the Bible as the cause of the "fall," or separation. There are some
definitions which I asked you to take from the dictionary which will be
helpful here. They are somewhat unusual since they are not the first
definitions which are given. Nevertheless, the fact that each of them
does appear in the dictionary should be reassuring.
2
Project (verb): to extend forward or out.
Project (noun): a plan in the mind.
World: a natural grand division.
3
We will refer later to projection as related to both mental health and
mental illness. We have already observed that man can create an empty
shell, but he cannot create nothing at all. This emptiness provides the
screen for the misuse of projection.
4
The Garden of Eden, which is described as a literal garden in the Bible,
was not an actual garden at all. It was merely a mental state of
complete need-lack. Even in the literal account, it is noteworthy that
the pre-separation state was essentially one in which man needed
nothing. The "tree of knowledge" is also an overly literal figure. These
concepts need to be clarified before the real meaning of the separation,
or the "detour into fear," can be fully understood.
5
To "project," as defined above, is a fundamental attribute of God which
He gave to His Son. In the creation, God projected His creative ability
from Himself to the Souls He created, and He also imbued them with the
same loving will to create. The Soul has not only been fully created but
has also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in it.
Because of its likeness to its Creator, it is creative. No Child of God
can lose this ability because it is inherent in what he is, but
he can use it inappropriately. Whenever projection is used
inappropriately, it always implies that some emptiness or lack
exists and that it is in man's ability to put his own ideas
there instead of truth.
6
If you consider carefully what this entails, the following will become
quite apparent:
7
First, the assumption is implicit that what God created can be changed
by the mind of man.
8
Second, the concept that what is perfect can be rendered imperfect or
wanting is accepted.
9
Third, the belief that man can distort the creations of God, including
himself, is accepted.
10
Fourth, the idea that since man can create himself, the direction of his
own creation is up to him is implied.
11
These related distortions represent a picture of what actually occurred
in the separation. None of this existed before, nor does it actually
exist now. The world was made as "a natural grand division," or
a projecting outward of God. That is why everything that He created is
like Him. Projection, as undertaken by God, is very similar to the kind
of inner radiance which the Children of the Father inherit from Him. It
is important to note that the term "project outward" necessarily implies
that the real source of projection is internal. This is as true
of the Son as of the Father.
12
The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the
proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in
his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with
free will because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing
in these statements implies any sort of level involvement or in fact
anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects are
of the same order.
13
When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically
called "lies" because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard
was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true
unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can literally
disappear in "the twinkling of an eye" because they are merely visual
misperceptions. Man's Spiritual eye can sleep, but a sleeping eye can
still see. What is seen in dreams seems to be very real. The Bible
mentions that "a deep sleep fell upon Adam," and nowhere is there any
reference to his waking up.
14
The history of man in the world as he sees it has not yet been marked by
any genuine or comprehensive reawakening or rebirth. This is impossible
as long as man projects in the spirit of miscreation. It still remains
within him, however, to project as God projected His own Spirit to him.
In reality, this is his only choice because his free will was
given him for his own joy in creating the perfect.
15
All fear is ultimately reducible to the basic misperception that man has
the ability to usurp the power of God. It can only be emphasized
that he neither can nor has been able to do this. In
this fact lies the real justification for his escape from fear. The
escape is brought about by his acceptance of the Atonement, which places
him in a position to realize that his own errors never really occurred.
When the "deep sleep" fell upon Adam, he was in a condition to
experience nightmares because he was asleep. If a light is
suddenly turned on while someone is dreaming a fearful dream, he may
initially interpret the light itself as a part of his own dream and be
afraid of it. However, when he awakens the light is correctly perceived
as the release from the dream, which is no longer accorded
reality.
16
It is quite apparent that this release does not depend on the
kind of "knowledge" which is nothing more than deceiving lies. The
knowledge which illuminates rather than obscures is the knowledge which
not only sets you free, but which also shows you clearly that
you are free. Whatever lies you may believe are of no concern to
the miracle, which can heal any of them with equal ease. It
makes no distinctions among misperceptions. Its sole
concern is to distinguish between truth on the one hand and all kinds of
errors on the other. Some miracles may seem to be of greater
magnitude than others. But remember the first point in this course—that
there is no order of difficulty in miracles.
17
In reality, you are perfectly unaffected by all expressions of
lack of love. These can be either from yourself and others or
from yourself to others or from others to you. Peace is
an attribute in you. You cannot find it outside. All mental
illness is some form of external searching. Mental health is inner
peace. It enables you to remain unshaken by lack of love from without
and capable through your own miracles of correcting the external
conditions which proceed from lack of love in others.
18
When you are afraid of anything, you are acknowledging its power
to hurt you. Remember that where your heart is, there is your treasure
also. This means that you believe in what you value. If you are
afraid, you are valuing wrongly. Human understanding will
inevitably value wrongly and, by endowing all human thoughts with equal
power, will inevitably destroy peace. That is why the Bible
speaks of "the peace of God which passeth (human)
understanding." This peace is totally incapable of being shaken
by human errors of any kind. It denies the ability of anything
which is not of God to affect you in any way.
19
This is the proper use of denial. It is not used to hide
anything but to correct error. It brings all error into
the light, and since error and darkness are the same, it corrects error
automatically. True denial is a powerful protective device. You can and
should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is
not a concealment device but a correction device. The "right mind" of
the mentally healthy depends on it. You can do anything
I ask. I have asked you to perform miracles and have made it clear that
miracles are natural, corrective, healing, and universal. There
is nothing good they cannot do, but they cannot be performed in the
spirit of doubt.
20
God and the Souls He created are completely dependent on each
other. The creation of the Soul has already been perfectly accomplished,
but the creation by Souls has not. God created Souls so He could
depend on them because He created them perfectly. He gave them
His peace so they could not be shaken and would be unable to be
deceived. Whenever you are afraid, you are deceived. Your mind
is not serving the Soul. This literally starves the Soul by
denying its daily bread. God offers only mercy. Your
words should reflect only mercy because that is what you have received,
and that is what you should give.
21
Justice is a temporary expedient or an attempt to teach man the meaning
of mercy. Its judgmental side arises only because man is capable of injustice
if that is what his mind creates. You are afraid of God's Will because
you have used your own will, which He created in the likeness of His
own, to miscreate. What you do not realize is that the
mind can miscreate only when it is not free. An
imprisoned mind is not free by definition. It is possessed or held back
by itself. Its will is therefore limited and is not free to
assert itself. The real meaning of "are of one kind," which was
mentioned before, is "are of one mind or will." When the will of the
Sonship and the Father are one, their perfect accord is Heaven.
22
Denial of error is a powerful defense of truth. You will note that we
have been shifting the emphasis from the negative to the positive use of
denial. As we have already stated, denial is not a purely negative
device; it results in positive miscreation. That is the way the mentally
ill do employ it. But remember a very early thought of your
own—"Never underestimate the power of denial." In the service of the ","
the denial of error frees the mind and reestablishes the freedom
of the will. When the will is really free, it cannot
miscreate because it recognizes only truth.
23
False projection arises out of false denial, not out of its
proper use. My own role in the Atonement is one of true
projection; I can project to you the affirmation of truth. If you
project error to me or to yourself, you are interfering with the
process. My use of projection, which can also be yours, is not
based on faulty denial. It does involve, however, the very
powerful use of the denial of errors. The miracle worker is one who
accepts my kind of denial and projection, unites his own inherent
abilities to deny and project with mine, and imposes them back on
himself and others. This establishes the total lack of threat
anywhere. Together we can then work for the real time of peace, which is
eternal.
24
The improper use of defenses is quite widely recognized, but their
proper use had not been sufficiently understood as yet. They can indeed
create man's perception both of himself and of the world. They can
distort or correct depending on what you use them for.
25
Denial should be directed only to error, and projection should be
reserved only for truth. You should truly give as you have truly
received. The Golden Rule can work effectively only on this basis.
26
Intellectualization is a term which stems from the mind-brain confusion.
"Right-mindedness" is the device which defends the right mind
and gives it control over the body. "Intellectualization" implies a
split, while "right-mindedness" involves healing.
27
Withdrawal is properly employed in the service of withdrawing from the
meaningless. It is not a device for escape, but for
consolidation. There is only One Mind.
28
Dissociation is quite similar. You should split off or
dissociate yourself from error but only in defense of integration.
29
Detachment is essentially a weaker form of dissociation.
30
Flight can be undertaken in whatever direction you choose, but note that
the concept itself implies flight from something. Flight from
error is perfectly appropriate.
31
Distantiation can be properly used as a way of putting distance between
yourself and what you should fly from.
32
Regression is an effort to return to your own original state. It can
thus be utilized to restore, rather than to go back to the less
mature.
33
Sublimation should be a redirection of effort to the sublime.
34
There are many other so-called "dynamic" concepts which are profound
errors due essentially to the misuse of defenses. Among them is the
concept of different levels of aspiration, which actually result from
level confusion. However, the main point to be understood from this
section is that you can defend truth as well as error and, in fact, much
better.
35
The means are easier to clarify after the value of the goal itself is
firmly established. Everyone defends his own treasure. You do not have
to tell him to do so because he will do it automatically. The real
questions still remain. What do you treasure, and how much
do you treasure it? Once you have learned to consider these two
questions and to bring them into all your actions as the true
criteria for behavior, I will have little difficulty in clarifying the
means. You have not learned to be consistent about this as yet. I have
therefore concentrated on showing you that the means are
available whenever you ask. You can, however, save a lot of time
if you do not extend this step unduly. The correct focus will shorten it
immeasurably.
36
The Atonement is the only defense which cannot be used
destructively. That is because, while everyone must eventually join it,
it is not a device which was generated by man. The Atonement principle
was in effect long before the Atonement itself began. The principle was
love, and the Atonement itself was an act of love. Acts were not
necessary before the separation because the time-space belief did not
exist. It was only after the separation that the defense of Atonement
and the necessary conditions for its fulfillment were planned.
37
It became increasingly apparent that all of the defenses which man can
choose to use constructively or destructively were not enough to
save him. It was therefore decided that he needed a defense which was so
splendid that he could not misuse it, although he could refuse
it. His choice could not, however, turn it into a weapon of attack,
which is the inherent characteristic of all other defenses. The
Atonement thus becomes the only defense which is not a
two-edged sword.
38
The Atonement actually began long before the crucifixion. Many Souls
offered their efforts on behalf of the separated ones, but they could
not withstand the strength of the attack and had to be brought back.
Angels came, too, but their protection did not suffice because the
separated ones were not interested in peace. They had already split
their minds and were bent on further dividing rather than reintegrating.
The levels they introduced into their minds turned against each other,
and they established differences, divisions, cleavages, dispersions, and
all the other concepts related to the increasing splits which they
produced.
39
Not being in their right minds, they turned their defenses from
protection to assault and acted literally insanely. It was essential to
introduce a split-proof device which could be used only to heal,
if it were used at all. The Atonement was built into the space-time
belief in order to set a limit on the need for the belief and ultimately
to make learning complete. The Atonement is the final lesson.
Learning itself, like the classrooms in which it occurs, is temporary.
The ability to learn has no value when change of understanding is no
longer necessary. The eternally creative have nothing to learn. Only
after the separation was it necessary to direct the creative forces to
learning because changed behavior had become mandatory.
40
Men can learn to improve their behavior and can also learn to become
better and better learners. This serves to bring them into closer and
closer accord with the Sonship, but the Sonship itself is a perfect
creation, and perfection is not a matter of degree. Only while
there are different degrees is learning meaningful. The "evolution" of
man is merely a process by which he proceeds from one degree to the
next. He corrects his previous missteps by stepping forward. This
represents a process which is actually incomprehensible in temporal
terms because he returns as he goes forward.
41
The Atonement is the device by which he can free himself from the past
as he goes ahead. It undoes his past errors, thus making it
unnecessary for him to keep retracing his steps without advancing to his
return. In this sense the Atonement saves time but, like the miracle
which serves it, does not abolish it. As long as there is need
for Atonement, there is need for time. But the Atonement as a completed
plan does have a unique relationship to time. Until the
Atonement is finished, its various phases will proceed in time,
but the whole Atonement stands at time's end. At this point, the bridge
of the return has been built.
42
The Atonement is a total commitment. You still think this is
associated with loss. This is the same mistake all the separated
ones make in one way or another. They cannot believe that a defense
which cannot attack is the best defense. This is what is meant
by "the meek shall inherit the earth." They will literally take it over
because of their strength. A two-way defense is inherently weak
precisely because it has two edges and can turn against the self
very unexpectedly. This tendency cannot be controlled except by
miracles.
43
The miracle turns the defense of Atonement to the protection of the
inner self, which, as it becomes more and more secure, assumes its
natural talent of protecting others. The inner self knows itself as both
a brother and a Son. You know that when defenses are disrupted,
there is a period of real disorientation accompanied by fear, guilt, and
usually vacillations between anxiety and depression. This course is
different in that defenses are not being disrupted but reinterpreted,
even though you may experience it as the same thing. In the
reinterpretation of defenses, only their use for attack is lost.
Since this means they can be used only one way, they become much
stronger and much more dependable. They no longer oppose the Atonement
but greatly facilitate it.
44
The Atonement can only be accepted within you. You have
perceived it largely as external thus far, and that is why your
experience of it has been minimal. The reinterpretation of defenses is
essential in releasing the inner light. Since the separation,
man's defenses have been used almost entirely to defend himself against
the Atonement and thus maintain the separation. They themselves
generally see this as a need to protect the body. The many body
fantasies with which men's minds are engaged arise from the distorted
belief that the body can be used as a means for attaining "atonement."
45
Perceiving the body as a temple is only the first step in correcting
this kind of distortion. It alters part of the misperception but not all
of it. It does recognize, however, that the concept of Atonement
in physical terms is not appropriate. However, the next step is to
realize that a temple is not a building at all. Its real
holiness lies in the inner altar around which the building is
built. The inappropriate emphasis men have put on beautiful church
buildings is a sign of their fear of Atonement and their
unwillingness to reach the altar itself. The real beauty of the
temple cannot be seen with the physical eye. The Spiritual eye, on the
other hand, cannot see the building at all because it has perfect sight.
It can, however, see the altar with perfect clarity.
46
For perfect effectiveness, the Atonement belongs at the center of the
inner altar, where it undoes the separation and restores the wholeness
of the mind. Before the separation, the mind was invulnerable to fear
because fear did not exist. Both the separation and the fear are
miscreations of the mind which must be undone. This is what is meant by
"the restoration of the temple." It does not mean the restoration of the
building but the opening of the altar to receive the Atonement. This
heals the separation and places within man the one defense
against all separation mind-errors which can make him perfectly
invulnerable.
47
The acceptance of the Atonement by everyone is only a matter of time. In
fact, both time and matter were created for this purpose. This
appears to contradict free will because of the inevitability of the
final decision. If you review the idea carefully, however, you will
realize that this is not true. Everything is limited in some way by the
manner of its creation. Free will can temporize and is capable of
enormous procrastination. But it cannot depart entirely from its
Creator, Who set the limits on its ability to miscreate by virtue of its
own real purpose.
48
The misuse of will engenders a situation which in the extreme becomes
altogether intolerable. Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not
limitless. Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that
there must be a better way. As this recognition becomes more
firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This
ultimately reawakens the Spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the
investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two
types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a
long time and can become very acute, but the outcome is as certain as
God.
49
The Spiritual eye literally cannot see error and merely looks
for Atonement. All the solutions which the physical eyes seek dissolve
in its sight. The Spiritual eye, which looks within, recognizes
immediately that the altar has been defiled and needs to be repaired and
protected. Perfectly aware of the right defense, It passes over
all others, looking past error to truth. Because of the real strength of
Its vision, It pulls the will into Its service and impels the
mind to concur. This reestablishes the true power of the will and makes
it increasingly unable to tolerate delay. The mind then realizes with
increasing certainty that delay is only a way of increasing unnecessary
pain, which it need not tolerate at all. The pain threshold drops
accordingly, and the mind becomes increasingly sensitive to what it
would once have regarded as very minor intrusions of discomfort.
50
The Children of God are entitled to perfect comfort, which comes
from a sense of perfect trust. Until they achieve this, they waste
themselves and their true creative powers on useless attempts to make
themselves more comfortable by inappropriate means. But the real means
is already provided and does not involve any effort at all on
their part. Their egocentricity usually misperceives this as personally
insulting, an interpretation which obviously arises from their
misperception of themselves. Egocentricity and communion cannot
coexist. Even the terms are contradictory.
51
The Atonement is the only gift that is worthy of being offered to the
altar of God. This is because of the inestimable value of the altar
itself. It was created perfect and is entirely worthy of receiving
perfection. God is lonely without His Souls, and they
are lonely without Him. Men must learn to perceive the world as a means
of healing the separation. The Atonement is the guarantee
that they will ultimately succeed.
52
The emphasis will now be on healing. The miracle is the means, the
Atonement is the principle, and healing is the result. Those who speak
of "a miracle of healing" are combining two orders of reality
inappropriately. Healing is not a miracle. The Atonement or the
final miracle is a remedy, while any type of healing is a
result. The kind of error to which Atonement is applied is
irrelevant. Essentially, all healing is the release from fear.
To undertake this, you cannot be fearful yourself. You do not
understand healing because of your own fear.
53
A major step in the Atonement plan is to undo error at all
levels. Illness, which is really "not-right-mindedness," is the result
of level confusion in the sense that it always entails the belief that
what is amiss in one level can adversely affect another. We have
constantly referred to miracles as the means of correcting level
confusion, and all mistakes must be corrected at the level on which they
occur. Only the mind is capable of error. The body can act
erroneously, but this is only because it is responding to mis-thought.
The body cannot create, and the belief that it can, a
fundamental error, produces all physical symptoms.
54
All physical illness represents a belief in magic. The whole distortion
which created magic rests on the belief that there is a creative ability
in matter which the mind cannot control. This error can take two
forms—it can be believed that the mind can miscreate in the body
or that the body can miscreate in the mind. If it is understood that the
mind, which is the only level of creation, cannot create beyond
itself, neither type of confusion need occur.
55
The reason only the mind can create is more obvious than may be
immediately apparent. The Soul has been created. The body is a
learning device for the mind. Learning devices are not lessons in
themselves. Their purpose is merely to facilitate the thinking of the
learner. The most that a faulty use of a learning device can do is to
fail to facilitate learning. It has no power in itself to introduce
actual learning errors.
56
The body, if properly understood, shares the invulnerability of the
Atonement to two-edged application. This is not because the body is a
miracle but because it is not inherently open to
misinterpretation. The body is merely a fact in human experience. Its
abilities can be and frequently are over-evaluated. However, it is
almost impossible to deny its existence. Those who do so are engaging in
a particularly unworthy form of denial. The term "unworthy" here implies
simply that it is not necessary to protect the mind by denying the
unmindful. [There is little doubt that the mind can miscreate.] If one
denies this unfortunate aspect of the mind's power, one is also denying
the power itself.
57
All material means which man accepts as remedies for bodily ills are
merely restatements of magic principles. It was the first level of the
error to believe that the body created its own illness. It is a second
misstep to attempt to heal it through non-creative agents. It does not
follow, however, that the use of these very weak corrective devices is
evil. Sometimes the illness has a sufficiently great hold over a mind to
render a person inaccessible to Atonement. In this case it may be wise
to utilize a compromise approach to mind and body, in which
something from the outside is temporarily given healing belief.
58
This is because the last thing that can help the
non-right-minded, or the sick, is an increase in fear. They are
already in a fear-weakened state. If they are inappropriately
exposed to an "undiluted" miracle, they may be precipitated into panic.
This is particularly likely to occur when upside-down perception has
induced the belief that miracles are frightening.
59
The value of the Atonement does not lie in the manner in which it is
expressed. In fact, if it is truly used, it will inevitably be
expressed in whatever way is most helpful to the receiver[, not the
giver]. This means that a miracle, to attain its full efficacy, must
be expressed in a language which the recipient can understand without
fear. It does not follow by any means that this is the highest level of
communication of which he is capable. It does mean, however,
that it is the highest level of communication of which he is capable now.
The whole aim of the miracle is to raise the level of
communication, not to impose regression in the improper sense upon it.
60
Before miracle workers are ready to undertake their function in this
world, it is essential that they fully understand the fear of
release. Otherwise, they may unwittingly foster the belief that
release is imprisonment, a belief that is very prevalent. This
misperception arose from the underlying misbelief that harm can be
limited to the body. This was because of the much greater fear that the
mind can hurt itself. Neither error is really meaningful because the
miscreations of the mind do not really exist. This recognition
is a far better protective device than any form of level
confusion because it introduces correction at the level of the error.
61
It is essential to remember that only the mind can create.
Implicit in this is the corollary that correction belongs at the thought
level. To repeat an earlier statement and to extend it somewhat, the
Soul is already perfect and therefore does not require correction. The
body does not really exist except as a learning device for the mind.
This learning device is not subject to errors of its own because
it was created but is not creating. It should be obvious, then,
that correcting the creator or inducing it to give up its miscreations
is the only application of creative ability which is truly meaningful.
62
Magic is essentially mindless or the miscreative use of the mind.
Physical medications are forms of "spells." Those who are afraid to use
the mind to heal should not attempt to do so. The very fact that they
are afraid has made them vulnerable to miscreation. They are
therefore likely to misunderstand any healing they might induce and,
because egocentricity and fear usually occur together, may be unable to
accept the real Source of the healing. Under these conditions, it is
safer for them to rely temporarily on physical healing devices
because they cannot misperceive them as their own creations. As long as
their sense of vulnerability persists, they should be preserved from
even attempting miracles.
63
We have already said that the miracle is an expression of
miracle-mindedness. Miracle-mindedness merely means right-mindedness in
the sense that we are now using it. The right-minded neither exalt nor
depreciate the mind of the miracle worker or the miracle
receiver. However, as a creative act, the miracle need not await the
right-mindedness of the receiver. In fact, its purpose is to restore
him to his right mind. It is essential, however, that the miracle worker
be in his right mind or he will be unable to reestablish
right-mindedness in someone else.
64
The healer who relies on his own readiness is endangering his
understanding. He is perfectly safe as long as he is completely
unconcerned about his readiness but maintains a consistent trust
in mine. If your miracle working propensities are not
functioning properly, it is always because fear has intruded on
your right-mindedness and has literally upset it (or turned it
upside-down). All forms of not-right-mindedness are the result of
refusal to accept the Atonement for yourself. If the miracle
worker does accept it, he places himself in a position to
recognize that those who need to be healed are simply those who have not
realized that right-mindedness is healing.
65
The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the
Atonement for himself. This means that he recognizes that mind is the
only creative level and that its errors are healed by the
Atonement. Once he accepts this, his mind can only heal. By
denying his mind any destructive potential and reinstating its purely
constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can
undo the level confusion of others. The message he then gives to others
is the truth that their minds are similarly constructive and
that their miscreations cannot hurt them. By affirming this, the
miracle worker releases the mind from over-evaluating its own learning
device (the body) and restores the mind to its true position as the
learner.
66
It should be emphasized again that the body does not learn any more than
it creates. As a learning device, it merely follows the learner, but if
it is falsely endowed with self-initiative, it becomes a serious
obstruction to the very learning it should facilitate. Only the
mind is capable of illumination. The Soul is already illuminated, and
the body in itself is too dense. The mind, however, can bring its
illumination to the body by recognizing that density is the
opposite of intelligence and therefore unamenable to independent
learning. It is, however, easily brought into alignment with a mind
which has learned to look beyond density toward light.
67
Corrective learning always begins with the awakening of the Spiritual
eye and the turning away from the belief in physical sight. The reason
this so often entails fear is because man is afraid of what his
Spiritual eye will see. We said before that the Spiritual eye cannot see
error and is capable only of looking beyond it to the defense of
Atonement. There is no doubt that the Spiritual eye does produce
extreme discomfort by what it sees. Yet what man forgets is that the
discomfort is not the final outcome of its perception. When the
Spiritual eye is permitted to look upon the defilement of the altar, it
also looks immediately toward the Atonement.
68
Nothing the Spiritual eye perceives can induce fear. Everything
that results from accurate spiritual awareness is merely channelized
toward correction. Discomfort is aroused only to bring the need
for correction forcibly into awareness. What the physical eye sees is not
corrective nor can it be corrected by any device which can be
seen physically. As long as a man believes in what his physical sight
tells him, all his corrective behavior will be misdirected. The
real vision is obscured because man cannot endure to see his own
defiled altar. But since the altar has been defiled, his state
becomes doubly dangerous unless it is perceived.
69
The fear of healing arises, in the end, from an unwillingness to accept
the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. Man is not willing to
look on what he has done to himself. Healing is an ability lent
to man after the separation, before which it was completely unnecessary.
Like all aspects of the space-time belief, healing ability is temporary.
However, as long as time persists, healing is needed as a means for
human protection. This is because healing rests on charity, and charity
is a way of perceiving the perfection of another even if he cannot
perceive it himself.
70
Most of the loftier concepts of which man is capable now are
time-dependent. Charity is really a weaker reflection of a much more
powerful love-encompassment which is far beyond any form of
charity that man can conceive of as yet. Charity is essential to
right-mindedness in the limited sense in which right-mindedness can now
be attained. Charity is a way of looking at another as if he had
already gone far beyond his actual accomplishments in time. Since his
own thinking is faulty, he cannot see the Atonement for himself or he
would have no need for charity. The charity which is accorded him is
both an acknowledgment that he is weak and a recognition that he
could be stronger.
71
The way in which both of these perceptions are stated clearly implies
their dependence on time, making it quite apparent that charity lies
within the human limitations, though toward its higher levels. We said
before that only revelation transcends time. The miracle, as an
expression of true human charity, can only shorten time at most. It must
be understood, however, that whenever a man offers a miracle to another,
he is shortening the suffering of both. This introduces a
correction into the whole record which corrects retroactively as well as
progressively.
72
You believe that "being afraid" is involuntary, something beyond your
control. Yet I have told you several times that only constructive
acts should be involuntary. We have said that Christ-control can take
over everything that does not matter, while Christ-guidance can
direct everything that does if you so choose. Fear cannot be
Christ-controlled, but it can be self-controlled. It prevents
me from controlling it. The correction is therefore a matter of your
will because its presence shows that you have raised the unimportant
to a higher level than it warrants. You have thus brought it under your
will, where it does not belong. This means that you feel
responsible for it. The level confusion here is obvious.
73
The reason I cannot control fear for you is that you are attempting to
raise to the mind level the proper content of lower-order reality. I do
not foster level confusion, but you can choose to correct it.
You would not tolerate insane behavior on your part and would
hardly advance the excuse that you could not help it. Why should you
tolerate insane thinking? There is a confusion here which you
would do well to look at clearly. You believe that you are
responsible for what you do but not for what you think.
The truth is that you are responsible for what you think because
it is only at this level that you can exercise choice.
74
What you do comes from what you think. You cannot separate
yourself from the truth by "giving" autonomy to behavior. This is
controlled by me automatically as soon as you place what you think under
my guidance. Whenever you are afraid, it is a sure sign that you have
allowed your mind to miscreate or have not allowed me to guide
it. It is pointless to believe that controlling the outcome of
mis-thought can result in healing. When you are fearful you have willed
wrongly. This is why you feel responsible for it. You must change your mind,
not your behavior, and this is a matter of will.
75
You do not need guidance except at the mind level. Correction
belongs only at the level where creation is possible. The term
does not mean anything at the symptom level, where it cannot work. The
correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for
release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask
instead for help in the conditions which have brought the fear about.
These conditions always entail a separated mind willingness. At
that level, you can help it. You are much too tolerant of mind
wandering, thus passively condoning its miscreations. The particular
result does not matter, but the fundamental error does. The
correction is always the same. Before you will to do anything, ask me if
your will is in accord with mine. If you are sure that it is, there will
be no fear.
76
Fear is always a sign of strain, which arises whenever the will
to do conflicts with what you do. This situation arises in two
ways:
77
First, you can will to do conflicting things, either simultaneously or
successively. This produces conflicted behavior, which is intolerable to
yourself because the part of the will that wants to do something else
is outraged.
78
Second, you can behave as you think you should but without
entirely willing to do so. This produces consistent behavior but
entails great strain within the self.
79
In both cases, the will and the behavior are out of accord, resulting in
a situation in which you are doing what you do not will. This
arouses a sense of coercion, which usually produces rage. The rage then
invades the mind and projection in the wrong sense is likely to follow.
Depression or anxiety is virtually certain.
80
Remember that whenever there is fear, it is because you have not made up
your mind. Your will is split, and your behavior inevitably becomes
erratic. Correcting at the behavioral level can shift the error from the
first to the second type of strain described above but will not
obliterate the fear. It is possible to reach a state in which you bring
your will under my guidance without much conscious effort, but this
implies habit patterns which you have not developed dependably as yet.
God cannot ask more than you will. The strength to do comes from your
own undivided will to do. There is no strain in doing God's Will as soon
as you recognize that it is also your own.
81
The lesson here is quite simple but particularly apt to be overlooked. I
will therefore repeat it, urging you to listen. Only your mind
can produce fear. It does so whenever it is conflicted in what it wills,
thus producing inevitable strain because willing and doing become
discordant. This cannot be corrected by better doing, but it can
be corrected by higher willing.
82
The first corrective step is know first that this is an
expression of fear. Then say to yourself that you must somehow have
willed not to love, or the fear which arises from behavior-will conflict
could not have arisen.Then the whole process is nothing more than a
series of pragmatic steps in the larger process of accepting the
Atonement as the remedy. These steps can be summarized as
follows:
83
1. Know first that this is fear.
84
2. Fear arises from lack of love.
85
3. The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love.
86
4. Perfect love is the Atonement.
87
We have emphasized that the miracle, or the expression of
Atonement, is always a sign of real respect from the worthy to
the worthy. This worth is re-established by the Atonement. It is
obvious then that when you are afraid, you have placed yourself in a
position where you need Atonement because you have done
something loveless, having willed without love. This is precisely the
situation for which the Atonement was offered. The need for the remedy
inspired its creation. As long as you recognize only the need for the
remedy, you will remain fearful. However, as soon as you remedy
it, you have also abolished the fear. This is how true healing occurs.
88
Everyone experiences fear, and no one enjoys it. Yet it would take very
little right-thinking to realize why fear occurs. Very few people
appreciate the real power of the mind, and no one remains fully aware of
it all the time. However, if anyone hopes to spare himself from fear,
there are some things he must realize and realize fully. The mind is a
very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never
sleeps. Every instant it is creating and always as you will.
Many of your ordinary expressions reflect this. For example, when you
say, "Don't give it a thought," you imply that if you do not think about
something, it will have no effect on you. And this is true enough.
89
On the other hand, many other expressions clearly illustrate the
prevailing lack of awareness of thought-power. For example, you
say, "Just an idle thought," and mean that the thought has no effect.
You also speak of some actions as "thoughtless," implying that if the
person had thought, he would not behave as he did. While expressions
like "think big" give some recognition to the power of thought, they
still come nowhere near the truth. You do not expect to grow when you
say it because you do not really think that you will.
90
It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power
surge that can literally move mountains. It appears at first glance that
to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not
the real reason why you do not believe it. People prefer to
believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are
literally afraid of them. Many psychotherapists attempt to help
people who are afraid, say, of their death wishes by depreciating the
power of the wish. They even try to "free" the patient by persuading him
that he can think whatever he wants without any real effect at
all.
91
There is a real dilemma here which only the truly right-minded can
escape. Death wishes do not kill in the physical sense, but they do
kill spiritual awareness. All destructive thinking is dangerous.
Given a death wish, a man has no choice except to act upon the
thought or behave contrary to it. He thus chooses only
between homicide and fear. The other possibility is that he depreciates
the power of his thought. This is the usual psychoanalytic approach. It
does allay guilt but at the cost of rendering thinking impotent.
If you believe that what you think is ineffectual you may cease to be
overly afraid of it, but you are hardly likely to respect it.
92
The world is full of examples of how man has depreciated himself because
he is afraid of his own thoughts. In some forms of insanity, thoughts
are glorified, but this is only because the underlying depreciation was
too effective for tolerance. The truth is that there are no
"idle" thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level. The
reason people are afraid of ESP and so often react against it is because
they know that thoughts can hurt them. Their own thoughts have
made them vulnerable.
93
You who constantly complain about fear still persist in creating it. I
told you before that you cannot ask me to release you from fear
because I know it does not exist, but you do not. If I
merely intervened between your thoughts and their results, I would be
tampering with a basic law of cause and effect, the most fundamental law
there is in this world. I would hardly help if I depreciated the power
of your own thinking. This would be in direct opposition to the purpose
of this course. It is much more helpful to remind you that you do not
guard your thoughts carefully except for a small part of the day and
somewhat inconsistently even then. You may feel at this point that it
would take a miracle to enable you to do this, which is perfectly true.
94
Men are not used to miraculous thinking, but they can be trained
to think that way. All miracle workers need that kind of training. I
cannot let them leave their minds unguarded, or they will not be able to
help me. Miracle working entails a full realization of the power of
thought and real avoidance of miscreation. Otherwise, a miracle will be
necessary to set the mind itself straight, a circular process
which would hardly foster the time collapse for which the miracle was
intended. Nor would it induce the healthy respect for true cause and
effect which every miracle worker must have.
95
[Miracles cannot free the miracle worker from fear.] Both miracles and
fear come from thoughts, and if you were not free to choose one, you
would also not be free to choose the other. By choosing the miracle, you
have rejected fear. You have been afraid of God, of me, of
yourselves, and of practically everyone you know at one time or another.
This is because you have misperceived or miscreated us and believe in
what you have made. You would never have done this if you were not
afraid of your own thoughts. The vulnerable are essentially miscreators
because they misperceive creation.
96
You persist in believing that when you do not consciously watch your
mind, it is unmindful. It is time, however, to consider the whole world
of the unconscious or "unwatched" mind. This may well frighten you
because it is the source of fear. The unwatched mind is
responsible for the whole content of the unconscious which lies above
the miracle level. All psychoanalytic theorists have made some
contribution in this connection, but none of them has seen it in its
true entirety. They have all made one common error in that they
attempted to uncover unconscious content. You cannot understand
unconscious activity in these terms because "content" is applicable only
to the more superficial unconscious levels, to which the individual
himself contributes. This is the level at which he can readily introduce
fear and usually does.
97
When man miscreates he is in pain. The cause and effect principle here
is temporarily a real expediter. Actually, "Cause" is a term properly
belonging to God, and "Effect," which should also be capitalized, is His
Son. This entails a set of Cause and Effect relationships which are
totally different from those which man introduced into his own
miscreations. The fundamental opponents in the real basic conflict are
creation and miscreation. All fear is implicit in the second,
just as all love is inherent in the first. Because of this
difference, the basic conflict is one between love and fear.
98
It has already been said that man believes he cannot control
fear because he himself created it. His belief in it seems to render it
out of his control by definition. Yet any attempt to resolve the basic
conflict through the concept of mastery of fear is meaningless.
In fact it asserts the power of fear by the simple assumption
that it need be mastered. The essential resolution rests
entirely on the mastery of love. In the interim, the sense
of conflict is inevitable since man has placed himself in a strangely
illogical position. He believes in the power of what does not exist.
99
Two concepts which cannot coexist are "nothing" and
"everything." To whatever extent one is believed in, the other has
been denied. In the conflict fear is really nothing, and love is
everything. This is because whenever light enters darkness, the darkness
is abolished. What man believes is true for him. In this
sense the separation has occurred, and to deny this is merely to
misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further
misuse of defenses. The true corrective procedure is to recognize error
temporarily but only as an indication that immediate
correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the
Atonement can be accepted without delay.
100
It should be emphasized, however, that ultimately there is no
compromise possible between everything and nothing. Time is essentially
a device by which all compromise in this respect can be given up. It
seems to be abolished by degrees because time itself involves a concept
of intervals which do not really exist. The faulty use of creation made
this necessary as a corrective device. "And God so loved the world that
He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him shall not
perish, but have eternal life" needs only one slight correction to be
entirely meaningful in this context. It should read, "He gave it to
His only begotten Son."
101
It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all
the Souls God created are His Sons, then every Soul must
be an integral part of the whole Sonship. You do not find the concept
that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You
should therefore not have too much trouble in understanding this.
102
The Sonship in its oneness does transcend the sum of its parts.
However, this is obscured as long as any of its parts are missing. That
is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all the
parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then can the meaning of
wholeness, in the true sense, be fully understood.
103
Any part of the Sonship can believe in error or incompleteness if he so
elects. However, if he does so, he is believing in the existence of
nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement. We have
already briefly spoken about readiness, but there are some additional
points which might be helpful here. Readiness is nothing more than the prerequisite
for accomplishment. The two should not be confused. As soon as a state
of readiness occurs, there is usually some will to accomplish, but this
is by no means necessarily undivided. The state does not imply more than
a potential for a shift of will.
104
Confidence cannot develop fully until mastery has been accomplished. We
have already attempted to correct the fundamental error that fear can be
mastered and have emphasized that only love can be mastered. You
have attested only to your readiness. Mastery of love involves a much
more complete confidence than either of you has attained. However, the
readiness at least is an indication that you believe this is possible.
That is only the beginning of confidence. In case this be misunderstood
to imply that an enormous amount of time will be necessary between
readiness and mastery, let me remind you that time and space are under
my control.
105
One of the chief ways in which man can correct his magic-miracle
confusion is to remember that he did not create himself. He is apt to
forget this when he becomes egocentric, and this places him in a
position where the belief in magic in some form is virtually inevitable.
His will to create was given him by his own Creator, Who was expressing
the same will in His creation. Since creative ability rests in the mind,
everything that man creates is necessarily a matter of will. It also
follows that whatever he creates is real in his own sight but not
necessarily in the sight of God. This basic distinction leads us
directly into the real meaning of the Last Judgment.
106
The Last Judgment is one of the greatest threat concepts in man's
perception. This is only because he does not understand it. Judgment is
not an essential attribute of God. Man brought judgment into being only
because of the separation. After the separation, however, there was
a place for judgment as one of the many learning devices which had to be
built into the overall plan. Just as the separation occurred over many
millions of years, the Last Judgment will extend over a similarly long
period and perhaps an even longer one. Its length depends, however, on
the effectiveness of the present speed-up.
107
We have frequently noted that the miracle is a device for shortening but
not abolishing time. If a sufficient number of people become truly
miracle-minded quickly, the shortening process can be almost
immeasurable. It is essential, however, that these individuals free
themselves from fear sooner than would ordinarily be the case because
they must emerge from the conflict if they are to bring peace to other
minds.
108
The Last Judgment is generally thought of as a procedure undertaken by
God. Actually it will be undertaken by man with my help. It is a final
healing rather than a meting out of punishment, however much man may
think that punishment is deserved. Punishment is a concept in total
opposition to right-mindedness. The aim of the Last Judgment is to restore
right-mindedness to man.
109
The Last Judgment might be called a process of right evaluation. It
simply means that finally all men will come to understand what is worthy
and what is not. After this, their ability to choose can be directed
reasonably. Until this distinction is made, however, the vacillations
between free and imprisoned will cannot but continue. The first
step toward freedom must entail a sorting out of the false from
the true. This is a process of division only in the constructive sense
and reflects the true meaning of the Apocalypse. Man will ultimately
look upon his own creations and will to preserve only what is good, just
as God Himself looked upon what He had created and knew that it was
good.
110
At this point, the will can begin to look with love on its own creations
because of their great worthiness. The mind will inevitably disown its
miscreations which, without the mind's belief, will no longer exist. The
term "Last Judgment" is frightening not only because it has been falsely
projected onto God, but also because of the association of "last" with
death. This is an outstanding example of upside-down perception.
Actually, if the meaning of the Last Judgment is objectively examined,
it is quite apparent that it is really the doorway to life.
111
No one who lives in fear is really alive. His own last judgment cannot
be directed toward himself because he is not his own creation. He can,
however, apply it meaningfully and at any time to everything he
has created and retain in his memory only what is good. This is
what his right-mindedness cannot but dictate. The purpose of
time is solely to "give him time" to achieve this judgment. It is his
own perfect judgment of his own creations. When everything he retains is
loveable, there is no reason for fear to remain with him. This is
his part in the Atonement.
1
This is a course in mind training. All learning involves
attention and study at some level. Some of the later parts of the course
rest too heavily on these earlier sections not to require their study.
You will also need them for preparation. Without this, you may become
much too fearful when the unexpected does occur to make
constructive use of it. However, as you study these earlier sections,
you will begin to see some of their implications, which will be
amplified considerably later on.
2
The reason a solid foundation is necessary is because of the confusion
between fear and awe to which we have already referred and which so many
people hold. You will remember that we said that awe is inappropriate in
connection with the Sons of God because you should not experience awe in
the presence of your equals. However, it was also emphasized that awe is
a proper reaction in the Presence of your Creator. I have been careful
to clarify my own role in the Atonement, without either over- or
understating it. I have also tried to do the same in connection with
yours. I have stressed that awe is not an appropriate reaction
to me because of our inherent equality.
3
Some of the later steps in this course, however, do involve a
more direct approach to God Himself. It would be most unwise to start on
these steps without careful preparation or awe will be confused with
fear, and the experience will be more traumatic than beatific. Healing
is of God in the end. The means are being carefully explained to you.
Revelation may occasionally reveal the end to you, but to reach
it the means are needed.
1.
4 The miracle abolishes the need for lower-order concerns.
Since it is an out-of-pattern time interval, the ordinary considerations
of time and space do not apply. When you perform a miracle, I
will arrange both time and space to adjust to it.
2.
5 Clear distinction between what has been created and
what is being created is essential. All forms of
correction (or healing) rest on this fundamental correction in
level perception.
3.
6 Another way of stating the above point is: Never confuse
right- with wrong-mindedness. Responding to any form of
miscreation with anything except a desire to heal (or a miracle)
is an expression of this confusion.
4.
7 The miracle is always a denial of this error and an
affirmation of the truth. Only right-mindedness can create in a
way that has any real effect. Pragmatically, what has no real effect has
no real existence. Its effect, then, is emptiness. Being without
substantial content, it lends itself to projection in the improper
sense.
5.
8 The level-adjustment power of the miracle induces the right
perception for healing. Until this has occurred, healing cannot be
understood. Forgiveness is an empty gesture unless it entails
correction. Without this it is essentially judgmental rather than
healing.
6.
9 Miraculous forgiveness is only correction. It has no
element of judgment at all. "Father forgive them for they know not what
they do" in no way evaluates what they do. It is strictly limited to an
appeal to God to heal their minds. There is no reference to the outcome
of their mis-thought. That does not matter.
7.
10 The biblical injunction, "Be of one mind" is the statement
for revelation-readiness. My own injunction, "Do this in
remembrance of me" is the request for cooperation from miracle workers.
It should be noted that the two statements are not in the same order of
reality. The latter involves a time awareness since to remember implies
recalling the past in the present. Time is under my direction,
but Timelessness belongs to God alone. In time we exist for and with
each other. In Timelessness we coexist with God.
11
There is another point which must be perfectly clear before any residual
fear which may still be associated with miracles becomes entirely
groundless. The crucifixion did not establish the Atonement. The
resurrection did. This is a point which many very sincere Christians
have misunderstood. No one who is free of the scarcity-error could possibly
make this mistake. If the crucifixion is seen from an upside-down point
of view, it does appear as if God permitted and even encouraged
one of his Sons to suffer because he was good. Many ministers
preach this every day.
12
This particularly unfortunate interpretation, which arose out of the
combined misprojections of a large number of my would-be followers, has
led many people to be bitterly afraid of God. This particularly
anti-religious concept enters into many religions, and this is neither
by chance nor by coincidence. Yet the real Christian would have to pause
and ask, "How could this be?" Is it likely that God Himself would be
capable of the kind of thinking which His own words have clearly stated
is unworthy of man?
13
The best defense, as always, is not to attack another's position but
rather to protect the truth. It is unwise to accept any concept
if you have to turn a whole frame of reference around in order to
justify it. This procedure is painful in its minor applications and
genuinely tragic on a mass basis. Persecution is a frequent result,
undertaken to justify the terrible misperception that God Himself
persecuted His own Son on behalf of salvation. The very words are
meaningless.
14
It has been particularly difficult to overcome this because, although
the error itself is no harder to overcome than any other error, men were
unwilling to give this one up because of its prominent "escape" value.
In milder forms a parent says, "This hurts me more than it hurts you,"
and feels exonerated in beating a child. Can you believe that the Father
really thinks this way? It is so essential that all such
thinking be dispelled that we must be very sure that nothing of
this kind remains in your mind. I was not punished because you
were bad. The wholly benign lesson the Atonement teaches is lost if it
is tainted with this kind of distortion in any form.
15
"Vengeance is Mine sayeth the Lord," is a strictly karmic viewpoint. It
is a real misperception of truth by which man assigns his own "evil"
past to God. The "evil conscience" from the past has nothing to do with
God. He did not create it, and He does not maintain it. God does not
believe in karmic retribution. His Divine Mind does not create that way.
He does not hold the evil deeds of a man even against himself. Is
it likely, then, that He would hold against anyone the evil that another
did?
16
Be very sure that you recognize how utterly impossible this assumption
really is and how entirely it arises from misprojection. This
kind of error is responsible for a host of related errors including the
belief that God rejected man and forced him out of the Garden of Eden.
It is also responsible for the fact that you may believe from time to
time that I am misdirecting you. I have made every effort to use words
that are almost impossible to distort, but man is very inventive when it
comes to twisting symbols around.
17
God Himself is not symbolic; He is fact. The Atonement
too is totally without symbolism. It is perfectly clear because it
exists in light. Only man's attempts to shroud it in darkness have made
it inaccessible to the unwilling and ambiguous to the partly willing.
The Atonement itself radiates nothing but truth. It therefore epitomizes
harmlessness and sheds only blessing. It could not do this if it
arose from anything but perfect innocence. Innocence is wisdom because
it is unaware of evil, which does not exist. It is, however, perfectly
aware of everything that is true.
18
The Resurrection demonstrated that nothing can destroy truth.
Good can withstand any form of evil because light abolishes all
forms of darkness. The Atonement is thus the perfect lesson. It is the
final demonstration that all of the other lessons which I taught are
true. Man is released from all errors if he believes in this.
The deductive approach to teaching accepts the generalization which is
applicable to all single instances rather than building up the
generalization after analyzing numerous single instances separately. If
you can accept the one generalization now, there will be
no need to learn from many smaller lessons.
19
Nothing can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit
into the hands of his Father. By doing this, the mind awakens from its
sleep, and [the Soul] remembers its Creator. All sense of separation
disappears, and level confusion vanishes. The Son of God is part
of the Holy Trinity, but the Trinity itself is One. There is no
confusion within its levels because they are of One Mind and One Will.
This single purpose creates perfect integration and establishes the
peace of God. Yet this vision can be perceived only by the truly
innocent.
20
Because their hearts are pure, the innocent defend true perception
instead of defending themselves against it. Understanding the
lesson of the Atonement, they are without the will to attack, and
therefore they see truly. This is what the Bible means when it says,
"When He shall appear (or be perceived) we shall be like Him, for we
shall see Him as He is."
21
Sacrifice is a notion totally unknown to God. It arises solely from
fear. This is particularly unfortunate because frightened people are apt
to be vicious. Sacrificing another in any way is a clear cut
violation of God's own injunction that man should be merciful even as
his Father in Heaven. It has been hard for many Christians to realize
that this commandment (or assignment) also applies to themselves.
Good teachers never terrorize their students. To terrorize is to attack,
and this results in rejection of what the teacher offers. The result is
learning failure.
22
I have been correctly referred to as "the Lamb of God who taketh away
the sins of the world." Those who represent the lamb as blood-stained,
an all-too-widespread error, do not understand the meaning of
the symbol. Correctly understood, it is a very simple parable which
merely speaks of my innocence. The lion and the lamb lying down together
refers to the fact that strength and innocence are not in
conflict but naturally live in peace. "Blessed are the pure in heart for
they shall see God" is another way of saying the same thing.
23
There has been some human controversy about the nature of seeing in
relation to the integrative powers of the brain. Correctly understood,
the issue revolves around the question of whether the body or the mind
can see (or understand). This is not really open to question at all. The
body is not capable of understanding, and only the mind can perceive anything.
A pure mind knows the truth, and this is its strength. It cannot
attack the body because it recognizes exactly what the body is.
This is what "a sane mind in a sane body" really means. It does not
confuse destruction with innocence because it associates innocence with
strength, not with weakness.
24
Innocence is incapable of sacrificing anything because the
innocent mind has everything and strives only to protect
its wholeness. This is why it cannot misproject. It can only
honor man because honor is the natural greeting of the truly loved to
others who are like them. The lamb taketh away the sins of the world
only in the sense that the state of innocence, or grace, is one in which
the meaning of the Atonement is perfectly apparent. The innocence of God
is the true state of mind of His Son. In this state, man's mind does
see God, and because he sees Him as he is, he knows that the Atonement,
not sacrifice, is the only appropriate gift to his own
altar, where nothing except perfection truly belongs. The understanding
of the innocent is truth. That is why their altars are truly
radiant.
25
We have repeatedly stated that the basic concepts referred to in this
course are not matters of degree. Certain fundamental concepts cannot
be meaningfully understood in terms of coexisting polarities. It is
impossible to conceive of light and darkness, or everything and nothing,
as polarities. They are all true or all false. It is essential
that you realize that behavior is erratic until a firm commitment to one
or the other is made.
26
A firm commitment to darkness or nothingness is impossible. No one has
ever lived who has not experienced some light and some
[of everything]. This makes everyone really unable to deny truth
totally, even if he generally deceives himself in this connection. That
is why those who live largely in darkness and emptiness never find any
lasting solace. Innocence is not a partial attribute. It is not
a real defense until it is total. When it is partial, it is
characterized by the same erratic nature that holds for other two-edged
defenses.
27
The partly innocent are apt to be quite stupid at times. It is not until
their innocence becomes a genuine viewpoint which is universal in its
application that it becomes wisdom. Innocent (or true) perception means
that you never misperceive and always see truly. More
simply, it means that you never see what does not really exist. When you
lack confidence in what someone will do, you are attesting to your
belief that he is not in his right mind. This is hardly a miracle-based
frame of reference. It also has the disastrous effect of denying the
creative power of the miracle.
28
The miracle perceives everything as it is. If nothing but the
truth exists (and this is really a redundant statement because what is
not true cannot exist) right-minded seeing cannot see anything but
perfection. We have said many times that only what God creates,
or what man creates with the same will, has any real existence. This,
then, is all the innocent can see. They do not suffer from the
distortions of the separated ones. The way to correct all such
distortions is to withdraw your faith from them and invest it only
in what is true.
29
You cannot validate the invalid. I would suggest that you
voluntarily give up all such attempts because they can only be frantic.
If you are willing to validate what is true in everything you
perceive, you will make it true for you. Truth overcomes all
error. This means that if you perceive truly, you are canceling out
misperceptions in yourself and in others simultaneously. Because
you see them as they are, you offer them your own validation of their
truth. This is the healing which the miracle actively fosters.
30
We have been emphasizing perception and have said very little about
cognition as yet because you are confused about the difference between
them. The reason we have dealt so little with cognition is because you
must get your perceptions straightened out before you can know
anything. To know is to be certain. Uncertainty merely means that you do
not know. Knowledge is power because it is certain, and
certainty is strength. Perception is merely temporary. It is an
attribute of the space-time belief and is therefore subject to fear or
love. Misperceptions produce fear, and true perceptions produce love. Neither
produces certainty because all perception varies. That is why it
is not knowledge.
31
True perception is the basis for knowledge, but knowing
is the affirmation of truth. All your difficulties ultimately stem from
the fact that you do not recognize or know yourselves, each
other, or God. To recognize means to "know again," implying that you
knew before. You can see in many ways because perception involves
different interpretations, and this means that it is not whole. The
miracle is a way of perceiving, not of knowing. It is the right
answer to a question, and you do not ask questions at all when you know.
32
Questioning illusions is the first step in undoing them. The miracle, or
the "right answer," corrects them. Since perceptions change,
their dependence on time is obvious. They are subject to transitory
states, and this necessarily implies variability. How you perceive at
any given time determines what you do, and action must
occur in time. Knowledge is timeless because certainty is not
questionable. You know when you have ceased to ask
questions.
33
The questioning mind perceives itself in time and therefore looks for future
answers. The unquestioning mind is closed because it believes the future
and present will be the same. This establishes an unchanged state or
stasis. It is usually an attempt to counteract an underlying fear that
the future will be worse than the present, and this fear
inhibits the tendency to question at all.
34
Visions are the natural perception of the Spiritual eye, but they are
still corrections. The Spiritual eye is symbolic and therefore not a
device for knowing. It is, however, a means of right perception,
which brings it into the proper domain of the miracle. Properly
speaking, "a vision of God" is a miracle rather than a revelation. The
fact that perception is involved at all removes the experience from the
realm of knowledge. That is why visions do not last.
35
The Bible instructs you to "know yourself" or be certain.
Certainty is always of God. When you love someone, you have
perceived him as he is, and this makes it possible for you to know
him. However, it is not until you recognize him that you can
know him. While you ask questions about God, you are clearly implying
that you do not know Him. Certainty does not require action.
When you say that you are acting on the basis of knowledge, you
are really confusing perception and cognition. Knowledge brings the
mental strength for creative thinking but not for right
doing. Perception, miracles, and doing are closely related.
Knowledge is the result of revelation and induces only thought.
Perception involves the body, even in its most spiritualized form.
Knowledge comes from the altar within and is timeless because it is
certain. To perceive the truth is not the same as knowing it.
36
If you attack error in one another, you will hurt yourself. You cannot recognize
each other when you attack. Attack is always made on a stranger.
You are making him a stranger by misperceiving him so that you cannot
know him. It is because you have made him a stranger that you
are afraid of him. Perceive him correctly so that you can know
him. Right perception is necessary before God can communicate directly
to His own altars which He has established in His Sons. There He can
communicate His certainty, and His knowledge will bring peace without
question.
37
God is not a stranger to His Sons, and His Sons are not strangers to
each other. Knowledge preceded both perception and time and will
ultimately replace them. That is the real meaning of the Biblical
description of God as "Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End." It
also explains the quotation, "Before Abraham [Adam]
was I am." Perception can and must be stabilized, but knowledge
is stable. "Fear God and keep His commandments" should read "Know
God and accept His certainty." There are no strangers in His creation.
To create as He created, you can create only what you know and
accept as yours. God knows His Children with perfect certainty. He
created them by knowing them. He recognized them perfectly. When
they do not recognize each other, they do not recognize Him.
38
[The Soul knows, loves, and creates. These are its unequivocal
functions.] The abilities man now possesses are only shadows of his real
strengths. All of his functions are equivocal and open to question or
doubt. This is because he is not certain how he will use them.
He is therefore incapable of knowledge, being uncertain. He is also
incapable of knowledge because he can perceive lovelessly. He cannot
create surely because his perception deceives [and illusions are not
pure]. Perception did not exist until the separation had introduced
degrees, aspects, and intervals. The Soul has no levels, and all
conflict arises from the concept of levels. [Wars arise where some
regard others as if they were on a different level. All interpersonal
conflicts arise from this fallacy.] Only the levels of the Trinity are
capable of unity. The levels which man created by the separation cannot
but conflict. This is because they are essentially meaningless to
each other.
39
Freud realized this perfectly and that is why he conceived the different
levels in his view of the psyche as forever irreconcilable. They were
conflict-prone by definition because they wanted different things and
obeyed different principles. In our picture of the psyche, there
is an unconscious level which properly consists only of the
miracle ability and which should be under my direction. There is
also a conscious level, which perceives or is aware of impulses from
both the unconscious and the superconscious. Consciousness is thus the
level of perception but not of knowledge. Again, to perceive is
not to know.
40
Consciousness was the first split that man introduced into himself. He
became a perceiver rather than a creator in the true sense.
Consciousness is correctly identified as the domain of the ego. The ego
is a man-made attempt to perceive himself as he wished to be
rather than as he is. This is an example of the created-creator
confusion we have spoken of before. Yet man can only know
himself as he is because that is all he can be sure of.
Everything else is open to question.
41
The ego is the questioning compartment in the post-separation psyche
which man created for himself. It is capable of asking valid questions
but not of perceiving valid answers because these are cognitive
and cannot be perceived. The endless speculation about the
meaning of mind has led to considerable confusion because the mind is
confused. Only One-Mindedness is without confusion. A separated or
divided mind must be confused; it is uncertain by definition. It
has to be in conflict because it is out of accord with itself.
42
Intrapersonal conflict arises from the same basis as interpersonal
conflict. One part of the psyche perceives another part as on a
different level and does not understand it. This makes the parts
strangers to each other, without recognition. This is the essence of the
fear-prone condition in which attack is always possible. Man has
every reason to feel afraid as he perceives himself. This is why he
cannot escape from fear until he knows that he did not and could
not create himself. He can never make his misperceptions valid.
His creation is beyond his own error, and that is why he must
eventually choose to heal the separation.
43
Right-mindedness is not to be confused with the knowing mind
because it is applicable only to right perception. You can be
right-minded or wrong-minded, and even this is subject to degrees, a
fact which clearly demonstrates a lack of association with knowledge.
The term "right-mindedness" is properly used as the correction
for "wrong-mindedness," and applies to the state of mind which induces
accurate perception. It is miraculous because it heals
misperception, and this is indeed a miracle in view of how man perceives
himself.
44
Perception always involves some misuse of will because it
involves the mind in areas of uncertainty. The mind is very active
because it has will-power. When it willed the separation, it willed to
perceive. Until then, it willed only to know. Afterwards it
willed ambiguously, and the only way out of ambiguity is
clear perception. The mind returns to its proper function only when it wills
to know. This places it in the Soul's service, where perception is
meaningless. The superconscious is the level of the mind which wills
this.
45
The mind chose to divide itself when it willed to create both its own
levels and the ability to perceive, but it could not entirely
separate itself from the Soul because it is from the Soul that
it derives its whole power to create. Even in miscreation will is
affirming its Source or it would merely cease to be. This is impossible
because it is part of the Soul which God created and which is therefore
eternal.
46
The ability to perceive made the body possible because you must perceive
something and with something. This is why perception
involves an exchange or translation, which knowledge does not need. The
interpretive function of perception, actually a distorted form of
creation, then permitted man to interpret the body as himself,
which, though depressing, was an attempt to escape from the conflict he
had induced. The superconscious, which knows, could not be
reconciled with this loss of power because it is incapable of darkness.
This is why it became almost inaccessible to the mind and entirely
inaccessible to the body.
47
Thereafter, the superconscious was perceived as a threat because light
does abolish darkness merely by establishing the fact that it is not
there. The truth will always overcome error in this sense. This
is not an active process of destruction at all. We have already
emphasized that knowledge does not do anything. It can be perceived
as an attacker, but it cannot attack. What man perceives as its
attack is merely his own vague recognition of the fact that it can
always be remembered, never having been destroyed.
48
God and the Souls He created remain in surety, and therefore know
that no miscreation exists. Truth cannot deal with unwilling error
because it does not will to be blocked out. I was a man who remembered
the Soul and its knowledge, and as a man I did not attempt to counteract
error with knowledge so much as to correct error from the bottom
up. I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body and the
power of the mind. By uniting my will with that of my Creator, I
naturally remembered the Soul and its own real purpose.
49
I cannot unite your will with God's for you, but I can
erase all misperceptions from your mind if you will bring it under my
guidance. Only your misperceptions stand in your own way.
Without them your choice is certain. Sane perception induces
sane choosing. The Atonement was an act based on true perception. I
cannot choose for you, but I can help you make your own right
choice. "Many are called, but few are chosen" should read, "All
are called, but few choose to listen. Therefore, they do not choose right."
50
The "chosen ones" are merely those who choose right sooner. This
is the real meaning of the celestial speed-up. Strong wills can do this
now, and you will find rest for your Souls. God knows you
only in peace, and this is your reality.
51
We said before that the abilities which man possesses are only shadows
of his real strengths and that the intrusion of the ability to perceive,
which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the
separation. No one has been sure of anything since. You will also
remember, however, that I made it clear that the resurrection was the
means for the return to knowledge, which was accomplished by the
union of my will with the Father's. We can now make a distinction which
will greatly facilitate clarity in our subsequent statements.
52
Since the separation, the words "create" and "make" have been greatly
confused. When you make something, you make it out of a sense of lack or
need. Anything that is made is made for a specific purpose and has no
true generalizability. When you make something to fill a perceived lack,
which is obviously why you would want to make anything, you are tacitly
implying that you believe in separation. Knowing, as we have frequently
observed, does not lead to doing at all.
53
The confusion between your own creation and what you create is
so profound that it has become literally impossible for you to know
anything. Knowledge is always stable, and it is quite evident that human
beings are not. Nevertheless, they are perfectly stable as God
created them. In this sense, when their behavior is unstable they are disagreeing
with God's idea of the creation. Man can do this if he chooses, but he
would hardly want to do it if he were in his right mind. The
problem that bothers you most is the fundamental question which man
continually asks of himself, but which cannot properly be directed to
himself at all. He keeps asking himself what he is. This implies
that the answer is not only one which he knows but is also one which is
up to him to supply.
54
Man cannot perceive himself correctly. He has no image.
The word "image" is always perception-related and not a product
of knowing. Images are symbolic and stand for something else. The
current emphasis on "changing your image" merely recognizes the power of
perception, but it also implies that there is nothing to know.
Knowing is not open to interpretation. It is possible to
"interpret" meaning, but this is always open to error because it refers
to the perception of meaning. Such wholly needless complexities
are the result of man's attempt to regard himself as both separated and
unseparated at the same time. It is impossible to undertake a confusion
as fundamental as this without engaging in further confusion.
55
Methodologically, man's mind has been very creative but, as always
occurs when method and content are separated, it has not been utilized
for anything but an attempt to escape a fundamental and entirely
inescapable impasse. This kind of thinking cannot result in a creative
outcome, although it has resulted in considerable ingenuity. It is
noteworthy, however, that this ingenuity has almost totally divorced him
from knowledge. Knowledge does not require ingenuity. When we
say "the truth shall set you free," we mean that all this kind of
thinking is a waste of time, but that you are free of the need
to engage in it if you are willing to let it go.
56
Prayer is a way of asking for something. Prayer is the medium of
miracles, but the only meaningful prayer is for forgiveness because
those who have been forgiven have everything. Once forgiveness
has been accepted, prayer in the usual sense becomes utterly
meaningless. Essentially, a prayer for forgiveness is nothing more than
a request that we may be able to recognize something we already
have. In electing to perceive instead of to know, man placed himself in
a position where he could resemble his Father only by
miraculously perceiving. He has lost the knowledge that he himself
is a miracle. Miraculous creation was his Source and also his real
function.
57
"God created man in His own image and likeness" is correct in meaning,
but the words are open to considerable misinterpretation. This is
avoided, however, if "image" is understood to mean "thought" and
"likeness" is taken as "of a like quality." God did create the
Soul in His own Thought and of a quality like to His own. There is
nothing else. Perception, on the other hand, is impossible without
a belief in "more" and "less." Perception at every level involves
selectivity and is incapable of organization without it. In all types of
perception, there is a continual process of accepting and rejecting or
organizing and reorganizing, of shifting and changing focus. Evaluation
is an essential part of perception because judgments must be
made for selection.
58
What happens to perceptions if there are no judgments and there
is nothing but perfect equality? Perception becomes impossible. Truth
can only be known. All of it is equally true, and knowing any
part of it is to know all of it. Only perception involves
partial awareness. Knowledge transcends all the laws which
govern perception because partial knowledge is impossible. It is all one
and has no separate parts. You who are really one with it need
but know yourself, and your knowledge is complete. To know God's
miracle is to know Him.
59
Forgiveness is the healing of the perception of separation. Correct
perception of each other is necessary because minds have
willed to see themselves as separate. Each Soul knows God completely.
That is the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each one
has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human
thinking, in which if anyone has everything, there is nothing left.
God's miracles are as total as His Thoughts because they are His
Thoughts.
60
As long as perception lasts, prayer has a place. Since perception rests
on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the Atonement and
given themselves over to truth. Perception is a separated state,
and a perceiver does need healing. Communion, not prayer, is the
natural state of those who know. God and His miracles are
inseparable. How beautiful indeed are the Thoughts of God who live in
His light! Your worth is beyond perception because it is beyond doubt.
Do not perceive yourself in different lights. Know yourself in
the One Light where the miracle that is you is perfectly clear.
61
We have already discussed the Last Judgment in some though insufficient
detail. After the Last Judgment there will be no more. This is symbolic
only in the sense that everyone is much better off without
judgment. When the Bible says, "Judge not that ye be not judged" it
merely means that if you judge the reality of others at all, you will be
unable to avoid judging your own. The choice to judge rather than to
know was the cause of the loss of peace. Judgment is the process on
which perception, but not cognition, rests. We have discussed
this before in terms of the selectivity of perception, pointing out that
evaluation is its obvious prerequisite.
62
Judgment always involves rejection. It is not an ability
which emphasizes only the positive aspects of what is judged, whether it
be in or out of the self. However, what has been perceived and
rejected—or judged and found wanting—remains in the unconscious because
it has been perceived. One of the illusions from which man
suffers is the belief that what he judged against has no effect. This
cannot be true unless he also believes that what he judged against does
not exist. He evidently does not believe this, or he would not
have judged against it. It does not matter in the end whether you judge
right or wrong. Either way, you are placing your belief in the unreal.
This cannot be avoided in any type of judgment because it implies the
belief that reality is yours to choose from.
63
You have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes
from meeting yourselves and your brothers totally without judgment. When
you recognize what you and your brothers are, you will realize
that judging them in any way is without meaning. In fact, their
meaning is lost to you precisely because you are judging them.
All uncertainty comes from a totally fallacious belief that you are
under the coercion of judgment. You do not need judgment to organize
your life, and you certainly do not need it to organize yourselves. In
the presence of knowledge, all judgment is automatically
suspended, and this is the process which enables recognition to replace
perception.
64
Man is very fearful of everything he has perceived but has refused to
accept. He believes that, because he has refused to accept it, he has
lost control over it. This is why he sees it in nightmares or in
pleasant disguises in what seem to be his happier dreams. Nothing that
you have refused to accept can be brought into awareness. It does not
follow that it is dangerous, but it does follow that you have made
it dangerous.
65
When you feel tired, it is merely because you have judged yourself as
capable of being tired. When you laugh at someone, it is because you
have judged him as debased. When you laugh at yourself, you are
singularly likely to laugh at others, if only because you cannot
tolerate the idea of being more debased than they are. All of this does
make you feel tired because it is essentially disheartening. You are not
really capable of being tired, but you are very capable
of wearying yourselves. The strain of constant judgment is virtually
intolerable. It is a curious thing that any ability which is so
debilitating should be so deeply cherished.
66
Yet, if you wish to be the author of reality, which is totally
impossible anyway, you will insist on holding onto judgment. You
will also use the term with considerable fear, believing that judgment
will someday be used against you. To whatever extent it is
used against you, it is due only to your belief in its efficacy as a
weapon of defense for your own authority. The issue of authority is
really a question of authorship. When an individual has an "authority
problem," it is always because he believes he is the author of
himself, projects his delusion onto others, and then perceives the
situation as one in which people are literally fighting him for his
authorship. This is the fundamental error of all those who believe they
have usurped the power of God.
67
The belief is very frightening to them but hardly troubles God.
He is, however, eager to undo it, not to punish His Children,
but only because He knows that it makes them unhappy. Souls were
given their true Authorship, but men preferred to be anonymous
when they chose to separate themselves from their Author. The word
"authority" has been one of their most fearful symbols ever since.
Authority has been used for great cruelty because, being uncertain of
their true Authorship, men believe that their creation was anonymous.
This has left them in a position where it sounds meaningful to
consider the possibility that they must have created themselves.
68
The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of
men that some have even doubted whether they really exist at all.
Despite the apparent contradiction in this position, it is in one sense
more tenable than the view that they created themselves. At least it
acknowledges the fact that some true authorship is necessary for
existence.
69
Only those who give over all desire to reject can know that
their own rejection is impossible. You have not usurped the
power of God, but you have lost it. Fortunately, when you lose
something, it does not mean that the "something" has gone. It merely
means that you do not know where it is. Existence does not depend on
your ability to identify it nor even to place it. It is perfectly
possible to look on reality without judgment and merely know
that it is there.
70
Peace is a natural heritage of the Soul. Everyone is free to refuse to accept
his inheritance, but he is not free to establish what his
inheritance is. The problem which everyone must decide is the
fundamental question of authorship. All fear comes ultimately and
sometimes by way of very devious routes from the denial of Authorship.
The offense is never to God, but only to those who deny Him. To deny His
Authorship is to deny themselves the reason for their own peace, so that
they see themselves only in pieces. This strange perception is
the authority problem.
71
There is no man who does not feel that he is imprisoned in some way. If
this is the result of his own free will, he must regard his will as if
it were not free, or the obviously circular reasoning involved
in his position would be quite apparent. Free will must lead to
freedom. Judgment always imprisons because it separates segments
of reality according to the highly unstable scales of desire. Wishes are
not facts by definition. To wish is to imply that willing is not
sufficient. Yet no one believes that what is wished is as real as what
is willed. Instead of, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven" say, "Will
ye first the Kingdom of Heaven," and you have said, "I know what I am,
and I will to accept my own inheritance."
72
Every system of thought must have a starting point. It begins with
either a making or a creating, a difference which we have discussed
already. Their resemblance lies in their power as foundations.
Their difference lies in what rests upon them. Both are cornerstones for
systems of belief by which men live. It is a mistake to believe that a
thought system which is based on lies is weak. Nothing made by a
Child of God is without power. It is essential to realize this because
otherwise you will not understand why you have so much trouble with this
course and will be unable to escape from the prisons which you have made
for yourselves.
73
You cannot resolve the authority problem by depreciating the power of
your minds. To do so is to deceive yourself, and this will hurt you
because you know the strength of the mind. You also know that
you cannot weaken it, any more than you can weaken God. The
"devil" is a frightening concept because he is thought of as extremely
powerful and extremely active. He is perceived as a force in combat with
God, battling Him for possession of the Souls He created. He deceives by
lies and builds kingdoms of his own in which everything is in direct
opposition to God. Yet he attracts men rather than repels them,
and they are seen as willing to "sell" him their Souls in return for
gifts they recognize are of no real worth.
74
This makes absolutely no sense. The whole picture is one in which man
acts in a way he himself realizes is self-destructive but which
he does not choose to correct and therefore perceives the cause as
beyond his control. We have discussed the fall, or separation, before,
but its meaning must be clearly understood without symbols. The
separation is not symbolic. It is an order of reality or a system of
thought that is real enough in time, though not in eternity. All
beliefs are real to the believer.
75
The fruit of only one tree was "forbidden" to man in his
symbolic garden. But God could not have forbidden it or it could
not have been eaten. If God knows His Children, and I assure you
that He does, would He have put them in a position where their own
destruction was possible? The "tree" which was forbidden was named the
"tree of knowledge." Yet God created knowledge and gave it freely to His
creations. The symbolism here has been given many interpretations, but
you may be sure that any interpretation which sees either God or
His creations as capable of destroying their own purpose is in error.
76
Eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a symbolic expression
for incorporating into the self the ability for self-creating. This is
the only sense in which God and His Souls are not
co-creators. The belief that they are is implicit in the "self
concept," a concept now made acceptable by its weakness and
explained by a tendency of the self to create an image of
itself. Its fear aspect is often ascribed to fear of retaliation by a
"father figure," a particularly curious idea in view of the fact that no
one uses the term to refer to the physical father. It refers to an image
of a father in relation to an image of the self.
77
Images are perceived, not known. Knowledge cannot deceive, but
perception can. Man can perceive himself as self-creating, but
he cannot do more than believe it. He cannot make it
true. And, as we said before, when you finally perceive correctly, you
can only be glad that you cannot. But until then, the belief that you can
is the central foundation stone in your thought system, and all your
defenses are used to attack ideas which might bring it to light. You
still believe you are images of your own creation. Your minds are split
with your Souls on this point, and there is no resolution while
you believe the one thing that is literally inconceivable. That is why
you cannot create and are filled with fear about what you make.
78
The mind can make the belief in separation very real and very
fearful, and this belief is the "devil." It is powerful, active,
destructive, and clearly in opposition to God because it literally
denies His Fatherhood. Never underestimate the power of this denial.
Look at your lives and see what the devil has made. But know
that this making will surely dissolve in the light of truth because its
foundation is a lie.
79
Your creation by God is the only foundation which cannot be
shaken because the light is in it. Your starting point is truth,
and you must return to this beginning. Much has been perceived since
then, but nothing else has happened. That is why your Souls are still in
peace, even though your minds are in conflict. You have not yet gone
back far enough, and that is why you become so fearful. As you approach
the beginning, you feel the fear of the destruction of your thought
system upon you, as if it were the fear of death. There is no
death, but there is a belief in death.
80
The Bible says that the branch that bears no fruit will be cut off and
will wither away. Be glad! The light will shine from the true
Foundation of Life, and your own thought system will stand
corrected. It cannot stand otherwise. You who fear salvation are
willing death. Life and death, light and darkness, knowledge and
perception are irreconcilable. To believe that they can be reconciled is
to believe that God and man can not. Only the oneness of
knowledge is conflictless. Your kingdom is not of this world because it
was given you from beyond this world. Only in this world
is the idea of an authority problem meaningful. The world is not left by
death but by truth, and truth can be known by all those for whom
the Kingdom was created and for whom it waits.
1
The Bible says that you should go with a brother twice as far as he
asks. It certainly does not suggest that you set him back on his
journey. Devotion to a brother cannot set you back either. It
can lead only to mutual progress. The result of genuine devotion
is inspiration, a word which properly understood is the opposite of
fatigue. To be fatigued is to be dis-spirited, but to be
inspired is to be in the spirit. To be egocentric is to be
dispirited, but to be Self-centered in the right sense is to be
inspired, or in the Soul. The truly inspired are enlightened and cannot
abide in darkness.
2
You can speak from the Soul or from the ego, precisely as you choose. If
you speak from the Soul, you have chosen "to be still and know that I
am God." These words are inspired because they come from knowledge. If
you speak from the ego, you are disclaiming knowledge instead of
affirming it and are thus dispiriting yourself. Do not embark on foolish
journeys because they are indeed in vain. The ego may desire them, but
the Soul cannot embark on them because it is forever unwilling to depart
from its Foundation.
3
The journey to the cross should be the last foolish journey for every
mind. Do not dwell upon it, but dismiss it as accomplished. If you can
accept it as your own last foolish journey, you are also free to
join my resurrection. Human living has indeed been needlessly wasted in
a repetition compulsion. It reenacts the separation, the loss of power,
the foolish journey of the ego in an attempt at reparation, and finally
the crucifixion of the body or death.
4
Repetition compulsions can be endless unless they are given up by an act
of will. Do not make the pathetic human error of "clinging to the old
rugged cross." The only message of the crucifixion was that we can overcome
the cross. Unless you do so, you are free to crucify yourself as often
as you choose. But this is not the Gospel I intended to offer you. We
have another journey to undertake, and if you will read these lessons
carefully, they will help to prepare you to undertake it.
5
We have spoken of many different human symptoms, and at this level there
is almost endless variation. There is, however, only one cause
of all of them. The authority problem is "the root of all evil."
Money is but one of its many reflections and is a reasonably
representative example of the kind of thinking which stems from it. The
idea of buying and selling implies precisely the kind of exchange that
the Soul cannot understand at all because its supply is always abundant
and all its demands are fully met.
6
Every symptom which the ego has made involves a contradiction in terms.
This is because the mind is split between the ego and the Soul, so that
whatever the ego makes is incomplete and contradictory. This
untenable position is the result of the authority problem which, because
it accepts the one inconceivable thought as its premise, can only
produce ideas which are inconceivable. The term "profess" is used quite
frequently in the Bible. To profess is to identify with an idea and
offer the idea to others to be their own. The idea does not lessen; it
becomes stronger.
7
A good teacher clarifies his own ideas and strengthens them by teaching
them. Teacher and pupil are alike in the learning process. They are in
the same order of learning, and unless they share their lessons,
they will lack conviction. A good teacher must believe in the ideas
which he professes, but he must meet another condition; he must also
believe in the students to whom he offers his ideas. Many stand guard
over their ideas because they want to protect their thought systems as
they are, and learning means change. Change is always fearful to the
separated ones because they cannot conceive of it as a change towards healing
the separation. They always perceive it as a change towards
further separation because the separation was their first experience of
change.
8
You believe that if you allow no change to enter into your ego, your
Soul will find peace. This profound confusion is possible only if one
maintains that the same thought system can stand on two foundations. Nothing
can reach the Soul from the ego, and nothing from the Soul can
strengthen the ego or reduce the conflict within it. The ego is
a contradiction. Man's self and God's Self are in opposition.
They are opposed in creation, in will, and in outcome. They are
fundamentally irreconcilable because the Soul cannot perceive and the
ego cannot know. They are therefore not in communication and can
never be in communication. Nevertheless, the ego can learn
because its maker can be misguided but cannot make the totally
lifeless out of the life-given. The Soul need not be taught, but the ego
must.
9
The ultimate reason why learning is perceived as frightening is because
learning does lead to the relinquishment (not
destruction) of the ego to the light of the Soul. This is the change the
ego must fear because it does not share my charity. My lesson
was like yours, and because I learned it, I can teach it. I never attack
your egos, but I do try to teach you how their thought system[s]
arose. When I remind you of your true creation, your egos cannot
but respond with fear.
10
Teaching and learning are your greatest strengths now because you must
change your mind and help others change theirs. It is pointless to
refuse to tolerate change because you believe you can demonstrate that
by doing so the separation has not occurred. The dreamer who doubts the
reality of his dream while he is still dreaming is not really healing
the level-split. You have dreamed of a separated ego, and you have
believed in a world which rests upon it. This is very real to you. You
cannot undo this by doing nothing and not changing.
11
If you are willing to renounce the role of guardian[s] of your thought
system[s] and open [them] to me, I will correct [them] very gently and
lead you home. Every good teacher hopes to give his students so much of
his own thinking that they will one day no longer need him. This is the
one real goal of the parent, teacher, and therapist. This goal will not
be achieved by those who believe that they will lose their child
or pupil or patient if they succeed. It is impossible to
convince the ego of this because it goes against all of its own laws.
But remember that laws are set up to protect the continuity of the
system in which the law-maker believes.
12
It is natural enough for the ego to try to protect itself once you have
made it, but it is not natural for you to want to obey
its laws unless you believe in them. The ego cannot make this
choice because of the nature of its origin. You can because of
the nature of yours. Egos can clash in any situation, but Souls
cannot clash at all. If you perceive a teacher as merely a "larger ego,"
you will be afraid because to enlarge an ego is
to increase separation anxiety. I will teach with you and live with you
if you will think with me, but my goal will always be to absolve you
finally from the need for a teacher.
13
This is the opposite of the ego-oriented teacher's goal. He is
concerned with the effect of his ego on other egos and
therefore interprets their interaction as a means of ego preservation. I
would not be able to devote myself to teaching if I believed this, and you
will not be a devoted teacher as long as you maintain it. I am
constantly being perceived as a teacher either to be exalted or
rejected, but I do not accept either perception for myself.
14
Your worth is not established by your teaching or your
learning. Your worth was established by God. As long as you dispute
this, everything you do will be fearful, particularly any
situation which lends itself to the "superiority-inferiority" fallacy.
Teachers must be patient and repeat their lessons until they are
learned. I am willing to do this because I have no right to set your
learning limits for you. Once again—nothing you do or think or
wish or make is necessary to establish your worth. This point is not
debatable except in delusions. Your ego is never at stake
because God did not create it. Your Soul is never at stake
because He did. Any confusion on this point is a
delusion and no form of devotion is possible as long as this delusion
lasts.
15
The ego tries to exploit all situations into forms of praise for
itself in order to overcome its doubts. It will be doubtful forever, or
rather as long as you believe in it. You who made it cannot
trust it because you know it is not real. The only sane
solution is not to try to change reality, which is indeed a fearful
attempt, but to see it as it is. You are part of
reality, which stands unchanged beyond the reach of your ego but within
easy reach of your Soul. When you are afraid, be still and know
that God is real and you are His beloved Son in whom He is well
pleased. Do not let your ego dispute this because the ego cannot know
what is as far beyond its reach as you are.
16
God is not the author of fear. You are. You have chosen,
therefore, to create unlike Him, and you have made fear for yourselves.
You are not at peace because you are not fulfilling your function. God
gave you a very lofty responsibility which you are not meeting. You know
this, and you are afraid. In fact, your egos have chosen to be afraid instead
of meeting it. When you awaken you will not be able to understand this
because it is literally incredible. Do not believe the incredible
now. Any attempt to increase its believability is merely to
postpone the inevitable.
17
The word "inevitable" is fearful to the ego but joyous to the Soul. God
is inevitable, and you cannot avoid Him any more than He
can avoid you. The ego is afraid of the Soul's joy because, once
you have experienced it, you will withdraw all protection from the ego
and become totally without the investment in fear. Your investment is
great now because fear is a witness to the separation, and your ego
rejoices when you witness to it. Leave it behind! Do not listen to it,
and do not preserve it. Listen only to God, Who is as incapable of
deception as are the Souls He created.
18
Release yourselves and release others. Do not present a false and
unworthy picture of yourself to others, and do not accept such a picture
of them yourselves. The ego has built a shabby and unsheltering home for
you because it cannot build otherwise. Do not try to make this
impoverished house stand. Its weakness is your strength.
Only God could make a home that is worthy of His creations, who have
chosen to leave it empty by their own dispossession. Yet His home will
stand forever and is ready for you when you choose to enter it. Of this
you can be wholly certain. God is as incapable of creating the
perishable as the ego is of making the eternal.
19
Of your egos you can do nothing to save yourselves or others, but of
your Souls you can do everything for the salvation of both. Humility is
a lesson for the ego, not for the Soul. The Soul is beyond
humility because it recognizes its radiance and gladly sheds its light
everywhere. The meek shall inherit the earth because their egos are
humble, and this gives them better perception. The Kingdom of Heaven is
the right of the Soul, whose beauty and dignity are far beyond
doubt, beyond perception, and stand forever as the mark of the love of
God for His creations, who are wholly worthy of Him and only of
Him. Nothing else is sufficiently worthy to be a gift for a creation of
God Himself.
20
I will substitute for your ego if you wish but never for your
Soul. A father can safely leave a child with an elder brother who has
shown himself responsible, but this involves no confusion about the
child's origin. The brother can protect the child's body and his ego,
which are very closely related, but he does not confuse himself
with the father because he does this, although the child may. I can be
entrusted with your body and your ego simply because this enables you not
to be concerned with them and lets me teach you their
unimportance. I could not understand their importance to you if
I had not once been tempted to believe in them myself.
21
Let us undertake to learn this lesson together, so we can be free of
them together. I need devoted teachers who share my aim of healing the
mind. The Soul is far beyond the need of your protection or
mine. Remember this:
23
That is why you should be of good cheer.
24
You have asked lately how the mind could ever have made the ego. This is
a perfectly reasonable question; in fact, the best question you could
ask. There is, however, no point in giving a historical answer, because
the past does not matter in human terms, and history would not exist if
the same errors were not being repeated in the present. Abstract thought
applies to knowledge, because knowledge is completely impersonal and
examples are irrelevant to its understanding. Perception, however, is
always specific and therefore quite concrete.
25
Each man makes one ego for himself, although it is subject to enormous
variation because of its instability, and one for everyone he perceives,
which is equally variable. Their interaction is a process which
literally alters both, because they were not made either by or with
the unalterable. It is particularly important to realize that this
alteration can and does occur as readily when the interaction takes
place in the mind as when it involves physical presence. Thinking
about another ego is as effective in changing relative perception as is
physical interaction. There could be no better example of the fact that
the ego is an idea, though not a reality-based thought.
26
Your own present state is a good example of how the mind made the ego.
You do have knowledge at times, but when you throw it away, it
is as if you never had it. This willfulness is so apparent that one need
only perceive it to see that it does happen. If it can occur
that way in the present, why is it surprising that it occurred that way
in the past? Psychology rests on the principle of the continuity of
behavior. Surprise is a reasonable response to the unfamiliar but hardly
to something that has occurred with such persistence. I am using your
present state [as an example] of how the mind can work, provided
you fully recognize that it need not work that way. Why are you
surprised that something happened in the dim past when it is so clearly
happening right now?
27
You forget the love that animals have for their own offspring and the
need they feel to protect them. This is because they regard them as part
of themselves. No one disowns something he regards as a very real part
of himself. Man reacts to his ego much as God does to His Souls: with
love, protection, and great charity. The reaction of man to the self he
made is not at all surprising. In fact it duplicates in many ways how he
will one day react to his real creations, which are as timeless
as he is. The question is not how man responds to his ego, but
what he believes he is.
28
Belief is an ego function, and as long as your origin is open to belief
at all, you are regarding it from an ego viewpoint. [That is why
the Bible quotes me as saying “Ye believe in God, believe also in me.”
Belief does apply to me, because I am the teacher of the ego.] When
teaching is no longer necessary, you will merely know God.
Belief that there is another way is the loftiest idea of which
ego thinking is capable. That is because it contains a hint of
recognition that the ego is not the self. Undermining the ego's
thought system must be perceived as painful, even though this is
anything but true. Babies scream in rage if you take away a knife or a
scissors, even though they may well harm themselves if you do not. The
speed-up has placed you in the same position.
29
You are not prepared, and in this sense you are babies.
You have no sense of real self-preservation and are very likely to
decide that you need precisely what would hurt you most. Whether you
know it now or not, however, you have willed to cooperate in a
concerted and very commendable effort to become both harmless and
helpful, two attributes which must go together. Your
attitudes, even toward this, are necessarily conflicted, because all
attitudes are ego-based. This will not last. Be patient awhile and
remember that the outcome is as certain as God.
30
Only those who have a real and lasting sense of abundance can be
truly charitable. This is quite obvious when you consider the concepts
involved. To the ego, to give anything implies that you will do without
it. When you associate giving with sacrifice, then, you give only
because you believe that you are somehow getting something better so
that you can do without the thing you give. "Giving to get" is an
inescapable law of the ego, which always evaluates itself in
relation to other egos and is therefore continually preoccupied with the
scarcity principle which gave rise to it. This is the meaning of Freud's
"reality principle" since Freud thought of the ego as very weak and
deprived, capable of functioning only as a thing in need.
31
The "reality principle" of the ego is not real at all. The ego is forced
to perceive the "reality" of other egos because it cannot establish the
reality of itself. In fact, its whole perception of other egos as
real is only an attempt to convince itself that it is real.
"Self esteem" in ego terms means nothing more than that the ego has
deluded itself into accepting its reality and is therefore temporarily
less predatory. This "self esteem" is always vulnerable to
stress, a term which actually refers to a condition in which the
delusion of the ego's reality is threatened. This produces either ego
deflation or ego inflation, resulting in either withdrawal or attack.
32
The ego literally lives by comparisons. This means that equality is
beyond its grasp and charity becomes impossible. The ego never
gives out of abundance, because it was made as a substitute for
it. That is why the concept of "getting" arose in the ego's thought
system. All appetites are "getting" mechanisms, representing the ego's
need to confirm itself. This is as true of bodily appetites as it is of
the so-called "higher" ego needs. Bodily appetites are not
physical in origin. The ego regards the body as its home and does
try to satisfy itself through the body, but the idea that this
is possible is a decision of the ego, which is completely confused about
what is really possible. This accounts for its erratic nature.
33
The ego believes it is completely on its own, which is merely another
way of describing how it originated. This is such a fearful state that
it can only turn to other egos and try to unite with them in a feeble
attempt at identification or attack them in an equally feeble show of
strength. It is not free, however, to consider the validity of
the premise itself, because this premise is its foundation. The
ego is the belief of the mind that it is completely on its own.
Its ceaseless attempts to gain the Soul's acknowledgment and thus to
establish its own existence are utterly useless.
34
The Soul in its knowledge is unaware of the ego. It does not attack it;
it merely cannot conceive of it at all. While the ego is equally unaware
of the Soul, it does perceive itself as rejected by "something"
which is greater than itself. This is why self-esteem in ego terms must
be a delusion. The creations of God do not create myths, although the
creative efforts of man can turn to mythology. It can do so,
however, only under one condition; what man then makes is no longer
creative. Myths are entirely perceptions and are so ambiguous in form
and so characteristically good and evil in nature that the most
benevolent of them is not without fearful components, if only by
innuendo.
35
Myths and magic are closely associated in that myths are usually related
to the ego origins and magic to the powers which the ego ascribes to
itself. Every mythological system includes some account of "the
creation" and associates this with its particular perception of magic.
The "battle for survival" is nothing more than the ego's struggle to
preserve itself and its interpretation of its own beginning. This
beginning is always associated with physical birth, because no one
maintains that the ego existed before that point in time. The
religiously ego-oriented believe that the Soul existed before and will
continue to exist afterwards, after a temporary lapse in ego life. Some
actually believe that the Soul will be punished for this lapse, even
though in reality it could not possibly know anything about it.
36
The term "salvation" does not apply to the Soul, which is not in
danger and does not need to be salvaged. Salvation is nothing more than
"right-mindedness," which is not the One-Mindedness of the Soul, but
which must be accomplished before One-Mindedness can be restored.
Right-mindedness dictates the next step automatically, because right
perception is uniformly without attack so that wrong-mindedness is
obliterated. The ego cannot survive without judgment and is laid aside
accordingly. The mind then has only one direction in which it
can move. The direction which the mind will take is always automatic,
because it cannot but be dictated by the thought system to which
the mind adheres.
37
Every thought system has internal consistency, and this provides the
basis for the continuity of behavior. However, this is a matter of
reliability and not validity. "Reliable behavior" is a meaningful
perception as far as ego thinking goes. However, "valid behavior" is an
expression which is inherently contradictory because validity is an end
and behavior is a means. These cannot be combined logically,
because when an end has been attained, the means for its attainment are
no longer meaningful.
38
A hypothesis is either false or true, to be accepted or rejected
accordingly. If it is shown to be true, it becomes a fact, after which
no one attempts to evaluate it unless its status as fact is
questioned. Every idea to which the ego has accorded the status
of fact is questionable, because facts are in the realm of knowledge.
39
Confusing realms of discourse is a thinking error which philosophers
have recognized for centuries. Psychologists are generally quite
deficient in this respect, as are many theologians. Data from one realm
of discourse do not mean anything in another, because they can be
understood only within the thought system of which they are a
part. That is why psychologists are concentrating increasingly on the
ego in an attempt to unify their clearly unrelated data. It need hardly
be said that an attempt to relate the unrelated cannot succeed.
40
The more recent ecological emphases are but another ingenious way of
trying to impose order on chaos. We have already credited the ego with
considerable ingenuity, though not with creativeness. It should,
however, be remembered that inventiveness is really wasted effort, even
in its most ingenious forms. We do not have to explain anything.
This is why we need not trouble ourselves with inventiveness. The highly
specific nature of invention is not worthy of the abstract creativity of
God's creations.
41
You have never understood what "the Kingdom of Heaven is within you"
means. The reason you have not understood it is because it is not
understandable to the ego, which interprets it as if something outside
is inside, and this does not mean anything. The word "within" is
unnecessary. The Kingdom of Heaven is you. What else but you did
the Creator create, and what else but you is His Kingdom? This
is the whole message of the Atonement, a message which in its totality
transcends the sum of its parts. Christmas is not a time; it is a state
of mind. The Christ Mind wills from the Soul, not from the ego,
and the Christ Mind is yours.
42
You too have a kingdom which your Soul created. It has not
ceased to create because your ego has set you on the road of perception.
Your Soul's creations are no more fatherless than you are. Your
ego and your Soul will never be co-creators, but your Soul and your
Creator will always be. Be confident that your creations are as
safe as you are.
44
That was written in that form because it is a good thing to use as a
kind of a prayer in moments of temptation. It is a Declaration of
Independence. You will find it very helpful if you understand it fully.
45
In its characteristically upside-down way, the ego has taken the
impulses from the superconscious and perceives them as if they arise in
the unconscious. The ego judges what is to be accepted, and the impulses
from the superconscious are unacceptable to it because they clearly
point to the nonexistence of the ego itself. The ego therefore
experiences threat and not only censors but also reinterprets the data.
However, as Freud correctly pointed out, what you have repressed can
retain a very active life beyond your awareness.
46
Repression thus operates to conceal not only the baser impulses but also
the most lofty ones from awareness because both are threatening
to the ego and, being concerned primarily with its own preservation in
the face of threat, the ego perceives them as the same. The
threat-value of the lofty is actually much greater to the ego because
the pull of God Himself can hardly be equated with the pull of human
appetites. By perceiving them as the same, the ego attempts to
save itself from being swept away, as it would surely be in the
presence of knowledge.
47
The upper level of the unconscious thus contains the Call of God as well
as the call of the body. That is why the basic conflict between love and
fear is unconscious; the ego cannot tolerate either and represses both
by resorting to inhibition. Society depends on inhibiting the latter,
but salvation depends on disinhibiting
the former. The reason you need my help is because you have
repressed your own Guide and therefore need guidance. My role is to
separate the true from the false in your unconscious so it can break
through the barriers the ego has set up and shine into your minds.
Against our united strength, the ego cannot prevail.
48
It should be apparent to you by now why the ego regards the Soul as its
"enemy." The ego arose from the separation, and its continued existence
depends on your continuing belief in the separation. Having
reduced the Soul impulses to the unconscious, the ego has to offer you
some sort of reward for maintaining this belief. All it can
offer is a sense of temporary existence, which begins with its own
beginning and ends with its own ending. It tells you this life
is your existence because it is its own. Against this
sense of temporary existence the Soul offers you the knowledge of
permanence and unshakable being. No one who has experienced the
revelation of this can ever fully believe in the ego again. How
can its meager offering to you prevail against the glorious gift of God?
49
You who identify with your egos cannot believe that God loves
you. You do not love what you have made, and what you made does
not love you. Being made out of the denial of the Father, the
ego has no allegiance to its own maker. You cannot conceive of the real
relationship which exists between God and His Souls because of the
hatred you have for the self you have made. You project onto
your own idea of yourself the will to separate, which conflicts
with the love you feel for what you made because you made it. No
human love is without this ambivalence, and since no ego has experienced
love without ambivalence, the concept is beyond its
understanding.
50
Love will enter immediately into any mind which truly wants it,
but it must want it truly. This means that it wants it without
ambivalence, and this kind of wanting is wholly without the ego's "drive
to get." There is a kind of experience which is so different from
anything the ego can offer that you will never recover. The word
"recover" is used quite literally here—you will never be able to cover
or hide again. It is necessary to repeat here that your belief in
darkness and in hiding is why the light cannot enter. The Bible
gives many references to the immeasurable gifts which are for
you but for which you must ask. This is not a condition as the
ego sets conditions. It is the glorious condition of what you are.
51
No force except your own will is strong enough or worthy enough to guide
you. In this you are as free as God and must remain so forever. You can
never be bound except in honor, and that is always voluntary. Let us ask
the Father in my name to keep you mindful of His love for you and yours
for Him. He has never failed to answer this request because it asks only
for what He has already willed. Those who call truly are always
answered. Thou shalt have no other gods before Him because there are
none.
52
It has never really entered your mind to give up every idea you ever had
that opposes knowledge. You retain thousands of little scraps of
meanness which prevent the Holy One from entering. Light cannot
penetrate through the walls you make to block it, and it is forever
unwilling to destroy what you have made. No one can see through
a wall, but I can step around it. Watch your minds for the
scraps of meanness or you will be unable to ask me to do so. I can help
you only as our Father created us. I will love you and honor you and
maintain complete respect for what you have made, but I will neither
honor it nor love it unless it is true.
53
I will never forsake you any more than God will, but I must wait
as long as you choose to forsake yourself. Because I wait in love and
not in impatience, you will surely ask me truly. I will come in response
to a single unequivocal call. Watch carefully and see what it is you are
really asking for. Be very honest with yourself about this, for we must
hide nothing from each other. If you will really try to do this, you
have taken the first step toward preparing your mind for the Holy One to
enter. We will prepare for this together, for once He has come, you will
be ready to help me make other minds ready for Him. How long will you
deny Him His Kingdom?
54
In your own unconscious, deeply repressed by the ego, is the declaration
of your release. God has given you everything. This is the one
fact that means the ego does not exist and which therefore makes it
profoundly afraid. In the ego's language, remember, "to have" and "to
be" are different, but they are identical to the Soul. The Soul knows
that you both have everything and are everything. Any
distinction in this respect is meaningful only when the idea of
"getting," which implies a lack, has already been accepted. That
is why we made no distinction before between having the Kingdom
of God and being the Kingdom of God.
55
The calm being of God's Kingdom, which in your sane mind is perfectly
conscious, is ruthlessly banished from the part of the mind which the
ego rules. The ego is desperate because it opposes literally invincible
odds, whether you are asleep or awake. Consider how much vigilance you
have been willing to exert to protect your ego and how little you have
been willing to expend to protect your higher mind. Who but the insane
would undertake to believe what is not true and then protect this belief
at the cost of truth?
56
If you cannot hear the Voice of God, it is because you do not choose to
listen. The fact that you do listen to the voice of your ego is
demonstrated by your attitudes, your feelings, and your behavior. Your
attitudes are obviously conflicted, your feelings have a narrow range on
the negative side but are never purely joyous, and your behavior is
either strained or unpredictable. Yet this is what you want.
This is what you are fighting to keep and what you are vigilant to save.
Your minds are filled with schemes to save the face of your egos, and
you do not seek the Face of God. The glass in which the ego seeks to see
its face is dark indeed. How can it maintain the trick of its existence
except with mirrors? But where you look to find yourself is up
to you.
57
We have said that you cannot change your mind by changing your behavior,
but we have also said, and many times before, that you can
change your mind. When your mood tells you that you have chosen wrongly,
and this is so whenever you are not joyous, then know this need
not be. In every case you have thought wrongly about some Soul that God
created and are perceiving images your ego makes in a darkened glass.
Think honestly what you have thought that God would not have
thought and what you have not thought that God would have you
think. Search sincerely for what you have done and left undone
accordingly, and then change your minds to think with God's.
58
This may seem hard to you, but it is much easier than trying to think against
it. Your mind is one with God's. Denying this and thinking
otherwise has held your ego together but has literally split your mind.
As a loving brother, I am deeply concerned with your mind and urge you
to follow my example as you look at yourselves and at each other and see
in both the glorious creations of a glorious Father.
59
When you are sad, know that this need not be. Depression always
arises ultimately from a sense of being deprived of something you want
and do not have. Know you are deprived of nothing except by your
own decisions, and then decide otherwise.
60
When you are anxious, know that all anxiety comes from the
capriciousness of the ego and need not be. You can be as
vigilant against the ego's dictates as for them.
61
When you feel guilty, know that the ego has indeed violated the
laws of God, but you have not. Leave the sins of the ego to me.
That is what Atonement is for. But until you change your mind about
those your ego has hurt, the Atonement cannot release you. As long as
you feel guilty, your ego is in command because only the ego can
experience guilt. This need not be.
62
Watch your mind for the temptations of the ego and do not be deceived by
it. Know it offers you nothing. When you have given up this
voluntary dispiriting, you will see how your mind can focus and rise
above fatigue and heal. Yet you are not sufficiently vigilant against
the demands of the ego to disengage yourself. This need not be.
63
The habit of engaging with God and His creations is easily made
if you actively refuse to let your minds slip away. The problem is not
one of concentration; it is the belief that no one, including yourself,
is worth consistent effort. Side with me consistently
against this deception, and do not permit this shabby belief to pull you
back. The disheartened are useless to themselves and to me, but only the
ego can be disheartened. Have you really considered how
many opportunities you have to gladden yourselves and how many of them
you have refused? There is no limit to the power of a Son of God, but he
himself can limit the expression of his power as much as he chooses.
64
Your mind and mine can unite in shining your ego away and releasing the
strength of God into everything you think and will and do. Do not settle
for anything less than this, and refuse to accept anything but
this as your goal. Watch your minds carefully for any beliefs
that hinder its accomplishment, and step away from them. Judge how well
you have done this by your own feelings, for this is the one right
use of judgment. Judgment, like any other defense, can be used to attack
or protect, to hurt or to heal. The ego should be brought to
your judgment and found wanting there. Without your own allegiance,
protection, and love, it cannot exist. Judge your ego truly, and you must
withdraw allegiance, protection, and love from it.
65
You are mirrors of truth in which God Himself shines in perfect light.
To the ego's dark glass you need but say, "I will not look there because
I know these images are not true." Then let the Holy One shine
on you in peace, knowing that this and only this must be. His
Mind shone on you in your creation and brought your mind into
being. His Mind still shines on you and must shine through you.
Your ego cannot prevent Him from shining on you, but it can
prevent you from letting Him shine through you.
66
The first coming of Christ is just another name for the creation, for
Christ is the Son of God. The second coming of Christ means
nothing more than the end of the ego's rule over part of the minds of
men and the healing of the mind. I was created like you in the first,
and I have called you to join with me in the second. If you will think
over your lives, you will see how carefully the preparations were made.
I am in charge of the second coming, and my judgment, which is used only
for protection, cannot be wrong because it never attacks. Yours
is so distorted that you believe I was mistaken in choosing you. I
assure you this is a mistake of your egos. Do not mistake it for
humility.
67
Your egos are trying to convince you that they are real and I
am not because, if I am real, I am no more real than you
are. That knowledge, and I assure you that it is knowledge,
means that Christ must come into your minds and heal them. Although I am
not attacking your egos, I am working with your higher
mind whether you are asleep or awake, just as your ego does with your
lower mind. I am your vigilance in this, because you are too confused to
recognize your own hope. I was not mistaken. Your minds will
elect to join with mine, and together we are invincible.
68
You will yet come together in my name, and your sanity will be restored.
I raised the dead by knowing that life is an eternal attribute
of everything that the living God created. Why do you believe it is
harder for me to inspire the dispirited or to stabilize the unstable? I
do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles; you
do. I have called, and you will answer. I know that miracles are
natural because they are expressions of love. My calling you is as
natural as your answer and as inevitable.
69
All things work together for good. There are no
exceptions except in the ego's judgment. Control is a central factor in
what the ego permits into consciousness and one to which it devotes its
maximum vigilance. This is not the way a balanced mind holds
together. Its control is unconscious. The ego is further off
balance by keeping its primary motivation unconscious and
raising control rather than sensible judgment to predominance. The ego
has every reason to do this according to the thought system which gave
rise to it and which it serves. Sane judgment would inevitably judge against
the ego and must be obliterated by the ego in the interest of its
self-preservation.
70
A major source of the ego's off-balanced state is its lack of
discrimination between impulses from God and from the body. Any thought
system which makes this confusion must be insane. Yet this
demented state is essential to the ego, which judges only in
terms of threat or non-threat to itself. In one sense the ego's
fear of the idea of God is at least logical, since this idea does
dispel the ego. Fear of dissolution from the Higher Source, then, makes
some sense in ego-terms. But fear of the body, with which the ego
identifies so closely, is more blatantly senseless.
71
The body is the ego's home by its own election. It is the only
identification with which the ego feels safe, because the body's
vulnerability is its own best argument that you cannot be of
God. This is the belief that the ego sponsors eagerly. Yet the ego hates
the body because it does not accept the idea that the body is good
enough to be its home. Here is where the mind becomes actually dazed.
Being told by the ego that it is really part of the body and that the
body is its protector, the mind is also constantly informed that the
body can not protect it. This, of course, is not only accurate
but perfectly obvious.
72
Therefore the mind asks, "Where can I go for protection?" to which the
ego replies, "Turn to me." The mind, and not without cause, reminds the
ego that it has itself insisted that it is identified with the
body, so there is no point in turning to it for protection. The ego has
no real answer to this because there is none, but it does
have a typical solution. It obliterates the question from the
mind's awareness. Once unconscious, the question can and does produce
uneasiness, but it cannot be answered because it cannot be asked.
This is the question which must be asked: "Where am I to go for
protection?" Even the insane ask it unconsciously, but it requires real
sanity to ask it consciously.
73
When the Bible says, "Seek and ye shall find," it does not mean that you
should seek blindly and desperately for something you would not
recognize. Meaningful seeking is consciously undertaken, consciously
organized, and consciously directed. The goal must be formulated clearly
and kept in mind. As a teacher with some experience, let me
remind you that learning and wanting to learn are inseparable.
All learners learn best when they believe that what they are trying to
learn is of value to them. However, values in this world are
hierarchical, and not everything you may want to learn has lasting
value.
74
Indeed, many of the things you want to learn are chosen because
their value will not last. The ego thinks it is an advantage not to
commit itself to anything that is eternal because the eternal must
come from God. Eternalness is the one function which the ego has tried
to develop but has systematically failed. It may surprise you to learn
that had the ego wished to do so it could have made the eternal because,
as a product of the mind, it is endowed with the power of its
own creator. However, the decision to do this, rather than the
ability to do it, is what the ego cannot tolerate. That is because the
decision, from which the ability would naturally develop, would
necessarily involve accurate perception, a state of clarity which the
ego, fearful of being judged truly, must avoid.
75
The results of this dilemma are peculiar, but no more so than the
dilemma itself. The ego has reacted characteristically here as elsewhere
because mental illness, which is always a form of ego
involvement, is not a matter of reliability as much as of validity. The
ego compromises with the issue of the eternal, just as it does with all
issues that touch on the real question in any way. By compromising in
connection with all tangential questions, it hopes to hide the
real question and keep it out of mind. The ego's characteristic
busyness with non-essentials is for precisely that purpose.
76
Consider the alchemist's age-old attempts to turn base metal into gold.
The one question which the alchemist did not permit himself to ask was,
"What for?" He could not ask this because it would immediately
become apparent that there was no sense in his efforts even if he
succeeded. If gold became more plentiful, its value would decrease, and
his own purpose would be defeated. The ego has countenanced some strange
compromises with the idea of the eternal, making many odd attempts to
relate the concept to the unimportant in an effort to satisfy
the mind without jeopardizing itself. Thus, it has permitted minds to
devote themselves to the possibility of perpetual motion, but not
to perpetual thoughts.
77
Ideational preoccupations with problems set up to be incapable of
solution are also favorite ego devices for impeding the strong-willed
from making real learning progress. The problems of squaring the circle
and carrying pi to infinity are good examples. A more recent ego attempt
is particularly noteworthy. The idea of preserving the body by
suspension, thus giving it the kind of limited immortality which the ego
can tolerate, is among its more recent appeals to the mind. It is
noticeable, however, that in all these diversionary tactics, the one
question which is never asked by those who pursue them is, "What
for?"
78
This is the question which you must learn to ask in connection
with everything your mind wishes to undertake. What is the
purpose? Whatever it is, you cannot doubt that it will channelize your
efforts automatically. When you make a decision of purpose, then, you
have made a decision about your future effort, a decision which will
remain in effect unless you change the decision.
79
Psychologists are in a good position to realize that the ego is capable
of making and accepting as real some very distorted associations. The
confusion of sex with aggression and the resulting behavior, which is
perceived as the same for both, serves as an example. This is
"understandable" to the psychologist and does not produce surprise. The
lack of surprise, however, is not a sign of understanding. It is
a symptom of the psychologist's ability to accept as reasonable a
compromise which is clearly senseless—to attribute it to the mental
illness of the patient rather than his own and to limit his questions
about both the patient and himself to the trivial.
80
Such relatively minor confusions of the ego are not among its more
profound misassociations, although they do reflect them. Your egos have
been blocking the more important questions which your minds should
ask. You do not understand a patient while you yourselves are willing to
limit the questions you raise about his mind because you are
also accepting these limits for yours. This makes you unable to
heal him and yourselves. Be always unwilling to adapt to any
situation in which miracle-mindedness is unthinkable. That state in
itself is enough to demonstrate that the perception is wrong.
81
It cannot be emphasized too often that correcting perception is merely a
temporary expedient. It is necessary to do so only because misperception
is a block to knowledge, while accurate perception is a stepping-stone towards
it. The whole value of right perception lies in the inevitable judgment
which it entails that it is unnecessary. This removes the block
entirely. You may ask how this is possible as long as you appear to be
living in this world, and since this is a sensible question, it has a
sensible answer. You must be careful, however, that you really
understand the question. What is the "you" who are living in
this world?
82
Immortality is a constant state. It is as true now as it ever was or
ever will be because it implies no change at all. It is not a
continuum nor is it understood by being compared to an opposite.
Knowledge never involves comparisons. That is its essential difference
from everything else the mind can grasp. "A little knowledge" is not
dangerous except to the ego. Vaguely it senses threat, and being unable
to realize that "a little knowledge" is a meaningless phrase since "all"
and "a little" in this context are the same, the ego decides that, since
"all" is impossible, the fear does not lie there. "A little," however,
is a scarcity concept, and this the ego understands well. "A
little," then, is perceived as the real threat.
83
The essential thing to remember is that the ego does not recognize
the real source of its perceived threat, and if you associate
yourself with the ego, you do not perceive the whole situation
as it is. Only your allegiance to it gives the ego any power
over you.
84
We have spoken of the ego as if it were a separate thing acting on its
own. This was necessary to persuade you that you cannot dismiss it
lightly and must realize how much of your thinking is ego-directed. We
cannot safely let it go at that, however, or you will regard yourselves
as necessarily conflicted as long as you are here, or more properly, as
long as you believe that you are here.
85
The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about
yourselves. Your other life has continued without interruption and has
been and always will be totally unaffected by your attempts to
dissociate. The ratio of repression and dissociation varies with the
individual ego-illusion, but dissociation is always involved or you
would not believe that you are here. In learning to escape from
the illusions you have made, your great debt to each other is something
you must never forget. It is exactly the same debt that you owe to me.
Whenever you react egotistically towards each other, you are throwing
away the graciousness of your indebtedness and the holy perception it
would produce.
86
The term "holy" can be used here because as you learn how much you are
indebted to the whole Sonship, which includes me, you come as
close to knowledge as perception ever can. The gap is then so small that
knowledge can easily flow across it and obliterate it forever. You have
very little trust in me as yet, but it will increase as you turn more
and more often to me instead of your egos for guidance. The
results will convince you increasingly that your choice in turning to me
is the only sane one you can make. No one who has learned from
experience that one choice brings peace and joy while another brings
chaos and disaster needs much conditioning.
87
The ego cannot withstand the conditioning process because the process
itself demonstrates that there is another way. Conditioning by
rewards has always been more effective than conditioning by pain because
pain is an ego-illusion and can never induce more than a temporary
effect. The rewards of God, however, are immediately recognized as
eternal. Since this recognition is made by you and not the ego,
the recognition itself establishes that you and your ego cannot
be identical. You may believe that you have already accepted the
difference, but you are by no means convinced as yet. The very fact that
you are preoccupied with the idea of escaping from the ego shows
this.
88
You cannot escape from the ego by humbling it or controlling it
or punishing it. Remember that the ego and the Soul do not know
each other. The separated mind cannot maintain the separation except
by dissociating. Having done this, it utilizes repression against all
truly natural impulses, not because the ego is a separate thing,
but because you want to believe that you are. The ego is a
device for maintaining this belief, but it is still only your
willingness to use the device that enables it to endure.
89
My trust in you is greater than yours in me at the moment, but it will
not always be that way. Your mission is very simple. You have been
chosen to live so as to demonstrate that you are not an ego. I
repeat that I do not choose God's channels wrongly. The Holy One shares
my trust and always approves my Atonement decisions because my will is
never out of accord with His. I have told you before that I am in charge
of the whole Atonement. This is only because I completed my part
in it as a man and can now complete it through other men. My chosen
receiving and sending channels cannot fail because I will lend them my
strength as long as theirs is wanting.
90
I will go with you to the Holy One, and through my perception,
He can bridge the little gap. Your gratitude to each other is
the only gift I want. I will bring it to God for you, knowing that to
know your brother is to know God. A little knowledge is an
all-encompassing thing. If you are grateful to each other, you are
grateful to God for what He created. Through your gratitude, you can
come to know each other, and one moment of real recognition makes all
men your brothers because they are all of your Father. Love does not
conquer all things, but it does set all things right. Because
you are all the Kingdom of God, I can lead you back to your own
creations, which you do not yet know. What has been dissociated is still
there.
91
As you come closer to a brother, you do approach me and, as you
withdraw from him, I become distant to you. Your giant step
forward was to insist on a "collaborative venture." This does not go
against the true spirit of meditation; it is inherent in it. Meditation
is a collaborative venture with God. It cannot be undertaken
successfully by those who disengage themselves from the Sonship because
they are disengaging themselves from me. God will come to you only
as you will give Him to your brothers. Learn first of them, and you will
be ready to hear God as you hear them. That is because the function of
love is one.
92
How can you teach someone the value of something he has deliberately
thrown away? He must have thrown it away because he did not value it.
You can only show him how miserable he is without it and bring it near
very slowly, so he can learn how his misery lessens as he approaches it.
This conditions him to associate his misery with its absence and to
associate the opposite of misery with its presence. It gradually becomes
desirable as he changes his mind about its worth.
93
I am conditioning you to associate misery with the ego and joy with the
Soul. You have conditioned yourselves the other way around. A far
greater reward, however, will break through any conditioning if it is
repeatedly offered whenever the old habit pattern is broken. You are
still free to choose, but can you really want the rewards of the
ego in the presence of the rewards of God?
94
It should be clear by now that, while the content of any particular
ego-illusion does not matter, it is usually more helpful to correct it
in a specific context. Ego-illusions are quite specific,
although they frequently change and although the mind is naturally
abstract. The mind nevertheless becomes concrete voluntarily as soon as
it splits. However, only part of it splits, so only part
of it is concrete. The concrete part is the same part that believes in
the ego because the ego depends on the specific. It is the part
that believes your existence means you are separate.
95
Everything the ego
perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply being.
The ego is thus against communication except in so far as it is
utilized to establish separateness rather than to abolish it.
The communication system of the ego is based on its own thought system,
as is everything else it dictates. Its communication is controlled by
its need to protect itself, and it will disrupt communication when it
experiences threat. While this is always so, individual egos perceive
different kinds of threat which are quite specific in their own
judgment. For example, although all forms of perceived demands may be
classified or judged by the ego as coercive communication which must be
disrupted, the response of breaking communication will nevertheless be
to a specific person or persons.
96
The specificity of the ego's thinking, then, results in a spurious kind
of generalization which is really not abstract at all. It will respond
in certain specific ways to all stimuli which it perceives as
related. In contrast the Soul reacts in the same way to everything it
knows is true and does not respond at all to anything else. Nor does it
make any attempt to establish what is true. It knows that what
is true is everything that God created. It is in complete and direct
communication with every aspect of creation because it is in complete
and direct communication with its Creator.
97
This communication is the Will of God. Creation and
communication are synonymous. God created every mind by communicating
His Mind to it, thus establishing it forever as a channel for the
reception of His Mind and Will. Since only beings of a like order can
truly communicate, His creations naturally communicate with Him
and like Him. This communication is perfectly abstract in that
its quality is universal in application and not subject to any
judgment, any exception, or any alteration. God created
you by this and for this. The mind can distort its
function, but it cannot endow itself with functions it was not given.
That is why the mind cannot totally lose the ability to communicate,
even though it may refuse to utilize it on behalf of being.
98
Existence as well as being rests on communication. Existence, however,
is specific in how, what, and with whom communication is judged
to be worth undertaking. Being is completely without these distinctions.
It is a state in which the mind is in communication with
everything that is real, including the Soul. To whatever extent you
permit this state to be curtailed, you are limiting your sense of your own
reality, which becomes total only by your recognizing all
reality in the glorious context of its real relationship to you.
This is your reality. Do not desecrate it or recoil from it. It
is your real home, your real temple, and your real Self.
99
God, who encompasses all being, nevertheless created beings who
have everything individually but who want to share it to increase their
joy. Nothing that is real can be increased except by sharing.
That is why God Himself created you. Divine Abstraction takes joy in
application, and that is what creation means. "How," "what," and
"to whom" are irrelevant because real creation gives everything, since
it can create only like itself. Remember that in being there is
no difference between "having" and "being" as there is in existence. In
the state of being, the mind gives everything always.
100The
Bible repeatedly states that you should praise God. This hardly means
that you should tell Him how wonderful He is. He has no ego with which
to accept such thanks and no perception with which to judge such
offerings. But unless you take your part in the creation, His joy is not
complete because yours is incomplete. And this He does
know. He knows it in His own Being and its experience of His Son's
experience. The constant going out of His love is blocked when
His channels are closed, and He is lonely when the minds He
created do not communicate fully with Him.
101
God has kept your kingdom for you, but He cannot share His joy
with you until you know it with your whole mind. Even revelation is not
enough because it is communication from God. It is not enough
until it is shared. God does not need revelation returned to
Him, which would clearly be impossible, but He does want
revelation brought to others. This cannot be done with the actual
revelation because its content cannot be expressed, and it is intensely
personal to the mind which receives it. It can, however, still be
returned by that mind through its attitudes to other
minds which the knowledge from the revelation brings.
102
God is praised whenever any mind learns to be wholly helpful. This is
impossible without being wholly harmless because the two beliefs
coexist. The truly helpful are invulnerable because they are not
protecting their egos, so that nothing can hurt them. Their
helpfulness is their praise of God, and He will return their
praise of Him because they are like Him, and they can rejoice together.
God goes out to them and through them, and there is great joy throughout
the Kingdom. Every mind that is changed adds to this joy with its own
individual willingness to share in it. The truly helpful are God's
miracle workers whom I direct until we are all united in the joy of the
Kingdom. I will direct you to wherever you can be truly helpful and to
whoever can follow my guidance through you.
103
Every mind which is split needs rehabilitation. The medical orientation
to rehabilitation emphasizes the body, while the vocational orientation
stresses the ego. The "team" approach generally leads more to confusion
than to anything else because it is too often misused as a way of
exerting the ego's domination over other egos, rather than as a real
experiment in the cooperation of minds. Rehabilitation as a movement is
an improvement over the overt neglect of those in need of help, but it
is often little more than a painful attempt on the part of the halt to
lead the blind.
104
The ego is likely to fear broken bodies because it cannot tolerate them.
The ego cannot tolerate ego weakness either without ambivalence because
it is afraid of its own weakness as well as the weakness of its chosen
home. When it is threatened, the ego blocks your natural impulse to
help, placing you under the strain of divided will. You may then be
tempted to withdraw to allow your ego to recover and to gain enough
strength to be helpful again on a basis limited enough not to
threaten your ego but too limited to give you joy. Those with
broken bodies are often looked down on by the ego because of its belief
that nothing but a perfect body is worthy as its own temple.
105
A mind that recoils from a hurt body is in great need of rehabilitation
itself. All symptoms of hurt need true helpfulness, and whenever
they are met with this, the mind that so meets them heals itself.
Rehabilitation is an attitude of praising God as He Himself knows
praise. He offers praise to you, and you must offer it to others. The
chief handicaps of the clinicians lie in their attitudes to those whom
their egos perceive as weakened and damaged. By these
evaluations, they have weakened and damaged their own helpfulness and
have thus set their own rehabilitation back. Rehabilitation is not
concerned either with the ego's fight for control or its need to avoid
and withdraw. You can do much on behalf of your own rehabilitation and
that of others if in a situation calling for healing you think of it
this way:
1
To heal is to make happy. I have told you before to think how many
opportunities you have to gladden yourselves and how many you have
refused. This is exactly the same as telling you that you have refused
to heal yourselves. The light that belongs to you is the light of joy.
Radiance is not associated with sorrow. Depression is often contagious
but, although it may affect those who come in contact with it, they do
not yield to the influence whole-heartedly. But joy calls forth an
integrated willingness to share in it and thus promotes the mind's
natural impulse to respond as one.
2
Those who attempt to heal without being wholly joyous themselves call
forth different kinds of responses at the same time and thus deprive
others of the joy of responding whole-heartedly. To be whole-hearted,
you must be happy. If fear and love cannot coexist and if it is
impossible to be wholly fearful and remain alive, then the only possible
whole state is that of love. There is no difference between love
and joy. Therefore, the only possible whole state is the wholly joyous.
To heal or to make joyous is therefore the same as to integrate and to make
one. That is why it makes no difference to what part or by what
part of the Sonship the healing is done. Every part benefits and
benefits equally.
3
You are being blessed by every beneficient thought of any of your
brothers anywhere. You should want to bless them in return out of
gratitude. You do not have to know them individually or they you. The
light is so strong that it radiates throughout the Sonship and returns
thanks to the Father for radiating His joy upon it. Only God's holy
Children are worthy to be channels of His beautiful joy because only
they are beautiful enough to hold it by sharing it. It is impossible for
a Child of God to love his neighbor except as himself. That is
why the healer's prayer is:
5
Healing is an act of thought by which two minds perceive their oneness
and become glad. This gladness calls to every part of the Sonship to
rejoice with them and lets God Himself go out into them and through
them. Only the healed mind can experience revelation with lasting effect
because revelation is an experience of pure joy. If you do not choose to
be wholly joyous, your mind cannot have what it does not choose
to be. Remember that the Soul knows no difference between
"being" and "having." The higher mind thinks according to the laws which
the Soul obeys and therefore honors only the laws of God. To Him,
getting is meaningless and giving is all. Having everything, the Soul holds
everything by giving it and thus creates as the Father created.
6
If you think about it, you will see that, while this kind of thinking is
totally alien to having things, even to the lower mind it is
quite comprehensible in connection with ideas. If you share a
physical possession, you do divide its ownership. If you share
an idea, however, you do not lessen it. All of it is
still yours, although all of it has been given away. Further, if the
person to whom you give it accepts it as his, he reinforces it
in your mind, and thus increases it. If you can accept
the concept that the world is one of ideas, the whole belief in
the false association which the ego makes between giving and losing
is gone.
7
Let us start our process of reawakening with just a few simple concepts:
9
This is the invitation to the Holy Spirit. I told you that I could reach
up and bring the Holy Spirit down to you, but I can bring Him to you only
at your own invitation. The Holy Spirit is nothing more than your own
right mind. He was also mine. The Bible says, "May the mind be in you
that was also in Christ Jesus," and uses this as a blessing. It
is the blessing of miracle-mindedness. It asks that you may think as I
thought, joining with me in Christ-thinking.
10
The Holy Spirit is the only part of the Holy Trinity which is symbolic.
He is referred to in the Bible as the Healer, the Comforter, and the
Guide. He is also described as something "separate," apart from the
Father and from the Son. I myself said, "If I go I will send you another
comforter, and He will abide with you." The Holy Spirit is a difficult
concept to grasp precisely because it is symbolic and therefore
open to many different interpretations. As a man and as one of God's
creations, my right thinking, which came from the Universal Inspiration
which is the Holy Spirit, taught me first and foremost that this
Inspiration is for all. I could not have It myself without
knowing this.
11
The word "know" is proper in this context because the Holy Inspiration
is so close to knowledge that it calls it forth; or better, allows it to
come. We have spoken before of the higher or the "true" perception,
which is so close to truth that God Himself can flow across the little
gap. Knowledge is always ready to flow everywhere, but it cannot oppose.
Therefore, you can obstruct it, although you can never lose it. The Holy
Spirit is the Christ Mind, which senses the knowledge that lies beyond
perception. It came into being with the separation as a protection,
inspiring the beginning of the Atonement at the same time. Before that,
there was no need for healing and no one was comfortless.
12
God honored even the miscreations of His Children because they had made
them, but He also blessed them with a way of thinking that could raise
their perceptions until they became so lofty that they could reach
almost back to Him. The Holy Spirit is the Mind of the Atonement. It
represents a state of mind that comes close enough to one-mindedness
that transfer to it is at last possible. Transfer depends on common
elements in the old learning and the new situation to which it is
transferred. Perception is not knowledge, but it can be transferred to
knowledge or cross over into it. It might even be more helpful
here to use the literal meaning of "carried" over since the last step is
taken by God.
13
The Holy Spirit, the shared Inspiration of all the Sonship, induces a
kind of perception in which many elements are like those in the Kingdom
of Heaven itself.
14
First, its universality is perfectly clear, and no one who receives it
could ever believe for one instant that sharing it involves anything but
gain.
15
Second, it is incapable of attack and is therefore truly open. This
means that, although it does not engender knowledge, it does not obstruct
it in any way.[Third, it is an unequivocal call to love. Every other
voice is still.]
16
There is a point at which sufficient quantitative changes produce real
qualitative differences. The next point requires real understanding,
because it is the point at which the shift occurs. Finally, it points
the way beyond the healing which it brings and leads the mind
beyond its own integration into the paths of creation.
17
Healing is not creating; it is reparation. The Holy Spirit promotes
healing by looking beyond it to what the Children of God were
before healing was needed and will be when they have been
healed. This alteration of the time sequence should be quite familiar
because it is very similar to the shift in time perception which the
miracle introduces. The Holy Spirit is the motivation for
miracle-mindedness, the will to heal the separation by letting
it go. This will is in you because God placed it in your mind,
and although you can keep it asleep, you cannot obliterate it.
18
God Himself keeps this will alive by transmitting it from His Mind to
yours as long as there is time. It is partly His and partly yours. The
miracle itself is just this fusion or union of will between Father and
Son. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of joy. He is the Call to return with
which God blessed the minds of His separated Sons. This is the vocation
of the mind. The mind had no calling until the separation because before
that it had only being and would not have understood the call to
right thinking. The Holy Spirit was God's Answer to the separation, the
means by which the Atonement could repair until the whole mind returned
to creating.
19
The Atonement and the separation began at the same time. When man made
the ego, God placed in him the call to joy. This call is so strong that
the ego always dissolves at its sound. That is why you can choose to
listen to two voices within you. One you made yourself and that one is
not of God. But the other is given you by God Who asks you only
to listen to it. The Holy Spirit is in you in a very literal sense. His
is the Voice that calls you back to where you were before and will be
again.
20
It is possible even in this world to hear only that Voice and no
other. It takes effort and great willingness to learn. It is the final
lesson that I learned, and God's Sons are as equal as learners as they
are as Souls. The Voice of the Holy Spirit is the call to
Atonement or the restoration of the integrity of the mind. When the
Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed, there will be no
call to return, but what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will
remain with the Sons of God to bless their creations and keep
them in the light of joy.
21
You are the Kingdom of Heaven, but you have let the belief in
darkness enter your minds, and so you need a new light. The Holy Spirit
is the radiance that you must let banish the idea of darkness. His is
the glory before which dissociation falls away and the Kingdom of Heaven
breaks through into its own. Before the separation you did not need
guidance. You knew as you will know again, but as you do not
know now. God does not guide because He can share only perfect
knowledge. Guidance is evaluative because it implies that there is a right
way and also a wrong way, one to be chosen and the other to be
avoided. By choosing one, you give up the other.
22
This is a conflict state. It means that knowledge has
been lost because knowledge is sure. God is not in you in a literal
sense; you are part of Him. When you chose to leave Him,
He gave you a Voice to speak for Him because He could no longer
share His knowledge with you without hindrance. Direct communication was
broken because you had made another voice through another will. The Holy
Spirit calls you both to remember and to forget. You have chosen to be
in a state of opposition in which opposites are possible. As a result,
there are choices which you must make. In the holy state, the
will is free in the sense that its creative power is unlimited,
but choice itself is meaningless.
23
Freedom to choose is the same power as freedom to create, but
its application is different. Choosing means divided
will. The Holy Spirit is one way of choosing. This way is in you because
there is also another way. God did not leave His Children
comfortless, even though they chose to leave Him. The voice they put in
their minds was not the voice of His Will for which the Holy
Spirit speaks. The call to return is stronger than the call to depart,
but it speaks in a different way.
24
The Voice of the Holy Spirit does not command because it is incapable of
arrogance. It does not demand because it does not seek control. It does
not overcome because it does not attack. It merely reminds. It
is compelling only because of what it reminds you of. It brings
to your mind the other way, remaining quiet even in the midst of
the turmoil you have made for yourselves. The Voice for God is always
quiet because it speaks of peace. Yet peace is stronger than war because
it heals. War is division, not increase. No one gains from strife.
25
"What profiteth it a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own
Soul?" That means that if he listens to the wrong voice, he has lost
sight of his Soul. He cannot lose it, but he can
not know it. It is therefore lost to him until he chooses right.
The Holy Spirit is your Guide in choosing. He is the part of your mind
which always speaks for the right choice because He speaks for
God. He is your remaining communication with God, which you can
interrupt but cannot destroy.
26
The Holy Spirit is the way in which God's Will can be done on earth as
it is in Heaven. Both Heaven and earth are in you because the
call of both is in your will and therefore in your mind. The Voice for
God comes from your own altars to Him. These altars are not things; they
are devotions. Yet you have other devotions now. Your divided
devotion has given you the two voices, and you must choose at which
altar you will to serve. The call you answer now is an evaluation
because it is a decision. The decision itself is very simple. It
is made on the basis of which call is worth more to you.
27
My mind will always be like yours because we were created as equals. It
was only my decision that gave me all power in Heaven and earth.
My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision for
yourself. The will for this decision is the will to share
it because the decision itself is the decision to share. It is made
by giving and is therefore the one act of mind that
resembles true creation. You understand the role of "models" in the
learning process and the importance of the models you value and choose
to follow in determining what you will to learn. I am your model for
decision. By deciding for God, I showed you that this decision can
be made and that you can make it.
28
I promised you that the mind that made the decision for me is also in you
and that you can let it change you just as it changed me. This mind is
unequivocal because it hears only one voice and answers in only
one way. You are the light of the world with me. Rest does not
come from sleeping but from waking. The Holy Spirit is the call to awake
and be glad. The world is very tired because it is the idea of
weariness. Our task is the joyous one of waking it to the Call for God.
Everyone will answer the Call of the Holy Spirit, or the Sonship cannot
be as one. What better vocation could there be for any part of the
Kingdom than to restore it to the perfect integration that can make it
whole?
29
Hear only this through the Holy Spirit within you, and teach your
brothers to listen as I am teaching you. When you are tempted by the
wrong voice, call on me to remind you how to heal by sharing my decision
and making it stronger. As we share this goal we increase its
power to attract the whole Sonship and to bring it back into the Oneness
in which it was created. Remember that "yoke" means "join together" and
"burden" means "message." Let us reconsider the Biblical statement, "My
yoke is easy and my burden light" in this way: "Let us join together,
for my message is light."
30
I came into your minds because you had grown vaguely aware of the fact
that there is another way or another Voice. Having given this
invitation to the Holy Spirit, I could come to provide the model for how
to think. Psychology has become the study of behavior, but
no one denies the basic law that behavior is a response to motivation,
and motivation is will. I have enjoined you to behave as I behaved, but
we must respond to the same mind to do this. This mind is the Holy
Spirit, whose will is for God always. He teaches you how to keep me as
the model for your thought and to behave like me as a result.
31
The power of our joint motivation is beyond belief but not
beyond accomplishment. What we can accomplish together has no
limits because the Call for God is the call to the unlimited.
Child of God, my message is for you to hear and give away as you
answer the Holy Spirit within you.
32
The way to learn to know your brother is by perceiving the Holy Spirit
in him. We have already said that the Holy Spirit is the bridge or
thought-transfer of perception to knowledge, so we can use the terms as
if they were related because in His mind they are. The
relationship must be in His mind because, unless it were, the
separation between the two ways of thinking would not be open to
healing. He is part of the Holy Trinity because His mind is partly yours
and also partly God's. This needs clarification, not in statement, since
we have said it before, but in experience.
33
The Holy Spirit is the idea of healing. Being thought, the idea
gains as it is shared. Being the Call for God, it is also
the idea of God. Since you are part of God, it is also
the idea of yourself as well as of all the parts of God. The
idea of the Holy Spirit shares the property of other ideas because it
follows the laws of the Universe of which it is a part. Therefore, it is
strengthened by being given away. It increases in you as you
give it to your brothers. Since thoughts do not have to be conscious to
exist, your brother does not have to be aware of the Holy Spirit either
in himself or in you for this miracle to occur.
34
Your brother may have dissociated the Call for God, just as you
have. The dissociation is healed in both of you as you
become aware of the Call for God in him and thus acknowledge its being.
There are two ways of seeing your brother which are diametrically
opposed to each other. They must both be in your mind because you
are the perceiver. They must also be in his because you are
perceiving him. See him through the Holy Spirit in his
mind, and you will recognize Him in yours. What you acknowledge
in your brother you are acknowledging in yourself, and what you
share you strengthen.
35
The Voice of the Holy Spirit is weak in you. That is why you must
share it. It must be increased in strength before you
can hear it. It is impossible to hear it in yourself while it is so weak
in your own mind. It is not weak in itself, but it is
limited by your unwillingness to hear it. Will itself is an idea and is
therefore strengthened by being shared. If you make the mistake of
looking for the Holy Spirit in yourself alone, your meditations will
frighten you because by adopting the ego's viewpoint you are
undertaking an ego-alien journey with the ego as guide. This is
bound to produce fear.
36
Delay is of the ego because time is its concept. Delay is
obviously a time idea. Both time and delay are meaningless in eternity.
We have said before that the Holy Spirit is God's Answer to the
ego. Everything of which the Holy Spirit reminds you is in direct
opposition to the ego's notions because true and false perceptions are themselves
opposed. The Holy Spirit has the task of undoing what the ego
has made. He undoes it in the same realm of discourse in which the ego
itself operates, or the mind would be unable to understand the change.
37
We have repeatedly emphasized that one level of the mind is not
understandable to another. So it is with the ego and the Soul, with time
and eternity. Eternity is an idea of God, so the Soul understands it
perfectly. Time is a belief of the ego, so the lower mind, which is
the ego's domain, accepts it without question. The only aspect of time
which is really eternal is now. That is what we really mean when
we say that "now is the only time." The literal nature of this statement
does not mean anything to the ego, which interprets it at best to mean
"don't worry about the future." That is not what it really means at all.
38
The Holy Spirit is the Mediator between the interpretations of the ego
and the knowledge of the Soul. His ability to deal with symbols enables
Him to work against the ego's beliefs in its own language. His
equal ability to look beyond symbols into eternity also enables
Him to understand the laws of God, for which He speaks. He can thus
perform the function of reinterpreting what the ego makes, not
by destruction but by understanding. Understanding is light, and
light leads to knowledge. The Holy Spirit is in light because He
is in you who are light, but you yourselves do not know this. It
is therefore the task of the Holy Spirit to reinterpret you on
behalf of God.
39
You cannot understand yourselves alone. This is because you have no
meaning apart from your rightful place in the Sonship and the
rightful place of the Sonship in God. This is your life, your eternity,
and yourself. It is of this that the Holy Spirit reminds you. It
is this that the Holy Spirit sees. This vision invariably
frightens the ego because it is so calm. Peace is the ego's greatest
enemy because, according to its interpretation of reality, war
is the guarantee of its survival. The ego becomes strong in strife. If
you believe there is strife, you will react viciously because
the idea of danger has entered your mind. The idea itself is an
appeal to the ego.
40
The Holy Spirit is as vigilant as the ego to the call of danger,
opposing it with His strength, just as the ego welcomes it with
all its might. The Holy Spirit counters this welcome by welcoming peace.
Peace and eternity are as closely related as are time and war.
Perception as well as knowledge derives meaning from relationships.
Those which you accept are the foundations of your beliefs. The
separation is merely another term for a split mind. It was not an act,
but a thought. Therefore, the idea of separation can be given
away, just as the idea of unity can. Either way, the idea will be
strengthened in the mind of the giver.
41
The ego is the symbol of separation, just as the Holy Spirit is the
symbol of peace. What you perceive in others, you are strengthening in yourself.
You let your mind misperceive, but the Holy Spirit lets your mind
reinterpret its own misperceptions. The Holy Spirit is the perfect
teacher. He uses only what your minds already understand to
teach you that you do not understand it. The Holy Spirit can
deal with an unwilling learner without going counter to his will because
part of his will is still for God. Despite the ego's attempts to
conceal this part, it is still much stronger than the ego, even though
the ego does not recognize it. The Holy Spirit recognizes it perfectly
because it is His own dwelling place or the place in the mind where He
is at home.
42
You are at home there, too, because it is a place of peace, and
peace is of God. You who are part of God are not at home except
in His peace. If peace is eternal, you are at home only in eternity. The
ego made the world as it perceives it, but the Holy Spirit, the
reinterpreter of what the ego made, sees it only as a teaching
device for bringing you home. The Holy Spirit must perceive time and
reinterpret it into the timeless. The mind must be led into eternity through
time because, having made time, it is capable of perceiving its
opposite.
43
The Holy Spirit must work through opposites because He must work with
and for a mind that is in opposition. Correct and learn and be
open to learning. You have not made truth, but truth can still
set you free. Look as the Holy Spirit looks, and understand as He
understands. His understanding looks back to God in remembrance of me.
He is in Holy Communion always, and He is part of you. He is
your Guide to salvation because He holds the remembrance of things past
and to come. He holds this gladness gently in your minds, asking only
that you increase it in His name by sharing it, to increase His
joy in you.
44
You must have noticed how often I have used your own ideas to help you.
You have learned to be a loving, wise, and very understanding therapist
except for yourself. That exception has given you more than
perception for others because of what you saw in them but less
than knowledge of your real relationships to them because you
did not accept them as part of you. Understanding is
beyond perception because it introduces meaning. It is, however, below
knowledge even though it can grow towards it. It is possible,
with great effort, to understand someone else to some extent and to be
quite helpful to him, but the effort is misdirected. The misdirection is
quite apparent; it is directed away from you.
45
This does not mean that it is lost to you, but it does
mean that you are not aware of it. I have saved all your kindnesses and
every loving thought you have had. I have purified them of the errors
which hid their light and have kept them for you in their own perfect
radiance. They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. They came from
the Holy Spirit within you, and we know what God creates is
eternal. What fear has hidden still is part of you.
46
Joining the Atonement, which I have repeatedly asked you to do, is
always a way out of fear. This does not mean that you can safely
fail to acknowledge anything that is true. However, the Holy Spirit will
not fail to help you reinterpret everything that you perceive as fearful
and teach you that only what is loving is true. Truth is
beyond your ability to destroy but entirely within your grasp. It
belongs to you because you created it. It is yours because it is a part
of you, just as you are part of God because He created you.
47
The Atonement is the guarantee of the safety of the Kingdom.
Nothing good is lost because it comes from the Holy Spirit, the Voice
for creation. Nothing that is not good was ever created and
therefore cannot be protected. What the ego makes, it keeps
to itself, and so it is without strength. Its unshared existence
does not die; it was merely never born. Real birth is not a beginning;
it is a continuing. Everything that can continue has been
born, but it can increase as you are willing to return the part
of your mind that needs healing to the higher part and thus render your
creating undivided.
48
As a therapist, you yourself tell your patients that the real difference
between neurotic and "healthy" guilt feelings is that neurotic guilt
feelings do not help anyone. This distinction is wise though
incomplete. Let us make the distinction a little sharper now. Neurotic
guilt feelings are a device of the ego for "atoning" without sharing and
for asking pardon without change. The ego never calls for real
Atonement and cannot tolerate forgiveness, which is change.
49
Your concept of "healthy guilt feelings" has merit, but without the
concept of the Atonement, it lacks the healing potential it holds. You
made the distinction in terms of feelings, which led to a decision not
to repeat the error, which is only part of healing. Your
concept lacked the idea of undoing it. What you were really
advocating, then, was adopting a policy of sharing without a real foundation.
I have come to give you the foundation, so your own thoughts can
make you really free. You have carried the burden of the ideas
you did not share and which were therefore too weak to increase, but you
did not recognize how to undo their existence because you had
made them.
50
You cannot cancel out your past errors alone. They will not
disappear from your mind without remedy. The remedy is not of
your making, any more than you are. The Atonement cannot be
understood except as a pure act of sharing. That is what is
meant when we said it is possible even in this world to listen to one
voice. If you are part of God and the Sonship is one, you cannot
be limited to the "self" the ego sees. Every loving thought held in any
part of the Sonship belongs to every part. It is shared because
it is loving. Sharing is God's way of creating and also yours.
Your ego can keep you in exile from the Kingdom, but in the
Kingdom itself it has no power.
51
You have become willing to receive my messages as I give them without
interference by the ego, so we can clarify an earlier point. We said
that you will one day teach as much as you learn and that will keep you
in balance. The time is now because you have let it be now. You
cannot learn except by teaching.
52
I heard one voice because I had learned that learning is attained by
teaching. I understood that I could not atone for myself alone.
Listening to one voice means the will to share the voice in
order to hear it yourself. The mind that was in me is still irresistibly
drawn to every mind created by God because God's Wholeness is
the wholeness of His Son.
53
Turning the other cheek does not mean that you should submit to
violence without protest. It means that you cannot be hurt and
do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness.
Show him that he cannot hurt you and hold nothing against him,
or you hold it against yourself. Teaching is done in many ways: by
formal means, by guidance, and above all by example. Teaching is
therapy because it means the sharing of ideas and the awareness
that to share them is to strengthen them. The union of the
Sonship is its protection. The ego cannot prevail against the
Kingdom because it is united, and the ego fades away and is
undone in the presence of the attraction of the parts of the Sonship,
which hear the call of the Holy Spirit to be as One.
54
I cannot forget my need to teach what I have learned, which arose in me
because I learned it. I call upon you to teach what you have
learned because by so doing you can depend on it. Make it
dependable in my name because my name is the Name of God's Son. What I
learned I give you freely, and the mind which was in me rejoices as you
choose to hear it. The Holy Spirit atones in all of us by undoing
and thus lifts the burden you have placed in your mind. By following
Him, He leads you back to God where you belong, and how can you find
this way except by taking your brother with you?
55
My part in the Atonement is not complete until you join it and
give it away. As you teach, so shall you learn. I will never leave you
or forsake you because to forsake you would be to forsake myself and God
who created me. You will forsake yourselves and God if you forsake any
of your brothers. You are more than your brother's keeper. In fact, you
do not want to keep him. You must learn to see him as he is and
know that he belongs to God as you do. How could you treat your
brother better than by rendering unto God the things which are God's?
56
Ideas do not leave the mind which thought them to have a
separate being, nor do separate thoughts conflict with one another in
space because they do not occupy space at all. However, human ideas can
conflict in content because they occur at different levels and include
opposite thoughts at the same level. It is impossible to
share opposing thoughts. The Holy Spirit does not let you
forsake your brothers. Therefore, you can really share only the
parts of your thoughts which are of Him and which He also keeps for you.
And of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. All the rest remains with you
until He has reinterpreted them in the light of the Kingdom, making
them, too, worthy of being shared. When they have been sufficiently
purified, He lets you give them away. The will to share them is
their purification.
57
The Atonement gives you the power of a healed mind, but the power to
create is of God. Therefore, those who have been forgiven must devote
themselves first to healing because having received the idea of
healing, they must give it to hold it. The full power of
creation cannot be expressed as long as any of God's ideas
withhold it from the Kingdom. The joint will of all the Sonship
is the only creator that can create like the Father because only the
complete can think completely, and the thinking of God lacks nothing.
Everything you think that is not through the Holy Spirit is
lacking.
58
How can you who are so holy suffer? All your past except its beauty is
gone, and nothing is left except a blessing. You can indeed depart in
peace because I have loved you as I loved myself. You go with my
blessing and for my blessing. Hold it and share it, that it may
always be ours. I place the peace of God in your heart and in your
hands, to hold and share. The heart is pure to hold it and the hands are
strong to give it. We cannot lose. My judgment is as strong as the
wisdom of God, in Whose Heart and Hands we have our being. His
quiet Children are His blessed Sons. The Thoughts of God are with you.
59
Perhaps some of our concepts will become clearer and more personally
meaningful if the ego's use of guilt is clarified. The ego has a
purpose, just as the Holy Spirit has. The ego's purpose is fear
because only the fearful can be egotistic. The ego's
logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit because your mind has
all the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it
elects. But again, let us remember that both are in you. In
Heaven there is no guilt because the Kingdom is attained through the
Atonement, which releases you to create. The word "create" is
appropriate here because, once what you have made is undone by
the Holy Spirit, the blessed residue is restored and therefore continues
in creation.
60
What is truly blessed is incapable of giving rise to guilt and must
give rise to joy. This makes it invulnerable to the ego because its
peace is unassailable. It is invulnerable to disruption because
it is whole. Guilt is always disruptive. Anything that engenders
fear is divisive because it obeys the law of division. If the ego is the
symbol of the separation, it is also the symbol of guilt. Guilt is more
than merely not of God. It is the symbol of the attack on God.
This is a totally meaningless concept except to the ego, but do
not underestimate the power of the ego's belief in it. This is the
belief from which all guilt really stems.
61
The ego is the part of the mind which believes in division. How
can part of God detach itself without believing it is attacking
Him? We spoke before of the authority problem as involving the concept
of usurping God's power. The ego believes that this is what you
did because it believes it is you. It follows, then, that if you
identify with the ego, you must perceive yourself as
guilty. Whenever you respond to your ego, you will experience
guilt and you will fear punishment. The ego is quite literally a
fearful thought.
62
However ridiculous the idea of attacking God may be to the sane
mind, never forget that the ego is not sane. It represents a
delusional system, and it speaks for it. Listening to the ego's
voice means that you believe it is possible to attack God. You
believe that a part of Him has been torn away by you. The
classic picture of fear of retaliation from without then follows
because the severity of the guilt is so acute that it must be
projected. Although Freud was wrong about the basic conflict itself, he
was very accurate in describing its effects.
63
Whatever you accept into your mind has reality for you. It is,
however, only your acceptance of it that makes it real. If you
enthrone the ego in it, the fact that you have accepted it or allowed it
to enter makes it your reality. This is because the mind, as God
created it, is capable of creating reality. We said before that
you must learn to think with God. To think with Him is to think
like Him. This engenders joy, not guilt, because it is natural.
Guilt is a sure sign that your thinking is unnatural. Perverted
thinking will always be attended with guilt because it is
the belief in sin.
64
The ego does not perceive sin as a lack of love. It perceives sin as a positive
act of assault. This is an interpretation which is necessary to
the ego's survival because as soon as you regard sin as a lack
you will automatically attempt to remedy the situation. And you will
succeed. The ego regards this as doom, but you must learn to
regard it as freedom. The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being
sane, it heals the body because it has been healed. The sane
mind cannot conceive of illness because it cannot conceive of attacking
anyone or anything.
65
We said before that illness is a form of magic. It might be better to
say that it is a form of magical solution. The ego believes that by
punishing itself it will mitigate the punishment of God. Yet
even in this it is arrogant. It attributes to God a punishing intent,
and then takes over this intent as its own prerogative. It tries
to usurp all the functions of God as it perceives them because
it recognizes that only total allegiance can be trusted.
66
The ego cannot oppose the laws of God any more than you
can, but it can interpret them according to what it wants, just
as you can. That is why the question, "What do you
want?" must be answered. You are answering it every minute and
every second, and each moment of decision is a judgment which is
anything but ineffectual. Its effects will follow automatically
until the decision is changed. This is repeated here because you
have not learned it. But again, your decision can be unmade as
well as made. Remember, though, that the alternatives are
unalterable.
67
The Holy Spirit, like the ego, is a decision. Together they constitute
all the alternatives which the mind can accept and obey. The ego and the
Holy Spirit are the only choices open to you. God created one,
and so you cannot eradicate it. You made the other, and
so you can. Only what God creates is irreversible and
unchangeable. What you have made can always be changed because
when you do not think like God you are not really thinking at
all. Delusional ideas are not real thoughts, although you can
believe in them. But you are wrong. The function of thought comes from
God and is in God. As part of His Thought, you cannot think apart
from Him.
68
Irrational thought is a thought disorder. God Himself orders
your thought because your thought was created by Him. Guilt
feelings are always a sign that you do not know this. They also show
that you believe you can think apart from God and want to. Every
thought disorder is attended by guilt at its inception and maintained by
guilt in its continuance. Guilt is inescapable for those who believe
they order their own thought and must therefore obey its orders. This
makes them feel responsible for their mind errors, without
recognizing that by accepting this responsibility they are
really reacting irresponsibly. If the sole responsibility of the
miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself, and I assure you
that it is, then the responsibility for what is atoned for
cannot be yours.
69
The dilemma cannot be resolved except by accepting the solution of undoing.
You would be responsible for the effects of all your wrong
thinking if it could not be undone. The purpose of the Atonement is to
save the past in purified form only. If you accept the remedy for a
thought disorder, and a remedy whose efficacy is beyond doubt, how can
its symptoms remain? You have reason to question the validity of symptom
cure, but no one believes that the symptoms can remain if the
underlying cause is removed.
70
The continuing will to remain separated is the only possible
reason for continuing guilt feelings. We have said this before, but we
did not emphasize the destructive results of this decision at that time.
Any decision of the mind will affect both behavior and
experience. What you will, you expect. This is not delusional.
Your mind does create your future, and it can turn it back to
full creation at any minute if it accepts the Atonement first.
It will also turn back to full creation the instant it has done so.
Having given up its thought disorder, the proper ordering of thought
becomes quite apparent.
71
God in His knowledge is not waiting, but His Kingdom is bereft while you
wait. All the Sons of God are waiting for your return, just as you
are waiting for theirs. Delay does not matter in eternity, but
it is tragic in time. You have elected to be in time rather than
eternity and have therefore changed your belief in your status. Yet your
election is both free and alterable. You do not belong in time. Your
place is only in eternity, where God Himself placed you forever.
72
Guilt feelings are the preservers of time. They induce fears of
future retaliation or abandonment and thus ensure that the future will
remain like the past. This is the ego's continuity and gives it a false
sense of security through the belief that you cannot escape from it. But
you can and must. God offers you the continuity of eternity in
exchange. When you choose to make this exchange, you will simultaneously
exchange guilt for joy, viciousness for love, and pain for peace. My
role is only to unchain your will and make it free. Your ego cannot
accept this freedom and will oppose your free decision at every possible
moment and in every possible way. And as its maker, you recognize what
it can do because you gave it the power to do it.
73
The mind does indeed know its power because the mind does indeed know
God. Remember the Kingdom always, and remember that you who are part of
the Kingdom cannot be lost. The mind that was in me is
in you, for God creates with perfect fairness. Let the Holy Spirit
remind you always of His fairness, and let me teach you how to share it
with your brothers. How else can the chance to claim it for yourself be
given you? What you do not understand is that the two voices speak for
different interpretations of the same thing simultaneously, or almost
simultaneously, for the ego always speaks first. Alternate
interpretations were unnecessary until the first one was made, and
speaking itself was unnecessary before the ego was made.
74
The ego speaks in judgment and the Holy Spirit reverses its decisions,
much as the Supreme Court has the power to reverse the lower courts'
decisions about the laws of this world. The ego's decisions are always
wrong because they are based on a complete fallacy which they were made
to uphold. Nothing the ego perceives is interpreted correctly.
Not only does it cite Scripture for its purpose, but it even interprets
Scripture as a witness for itself. The Bible is a fearful thing to the
ego because of its prejudiced judgment. Perceiving it as fearful, it
interprets it fearfully. Having made you afraid, you do not
appeal to the Higher Court because you believe its judgment would be against
you.
75
We need cite only a few examples to see how the ego's interpretations
have misled you. A favorite ego quotation is "As ye sow, so shall ye
reap." Another is "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord." Still another is
"I will visit the sins of the father unto the third and fourth
generation," and also "The wicked shall perish." There are many others,
but if you will let the Holy Spirit reinterpret these in His own light,
they will suffice.
76
"As ye sow, so shall ye reap" merely means that what you believe to be
worth cultivating you will cultivate in yourself. Your judgment of what
is worthy makes it worthy for you. "Vengeance is mine, sayeth
the Lord" is easily explained if you remember that ideas increase only
by being shared. This quotation therefore emphasizes the fact that
vengeance cannot be shared. Give it therefore to the Holy
Spirit, who will undo it in you because it does not belong in your mind,
which is part of God.
77
"I will visit the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth
generation," as interpreted by the ego, is particularly vicious. It is
used, in fact, as an attempt to guarantee its survival beyond itself.
Actually, all the quotation means is that the Holy Spirit in later
generations retains the power to interpret correctly what former
generations have thought and thus release their thoughts from
the ability to produce fear anywhere in the Sonship. "The wicked shall
perish" is merely a statement of fact if the word "perish" is properly
understood. Every loveless thought must be undone. Even the word
"undone" is fearful to the ego, which interprets "I am undone" as "I am
destroyed."
78
The ego will not be destroyed because it is part of your
thought, but because it is uncreative and therefore unsharing, it will
be reinterpreted entirely to release you from fear. The part of your
thought which you have given to the ego will merely return to the
Kingdom, where your whole mind belongs. The ego is a form of
arrest, but arrest is merely delay. It does not involve the
concept of punishment, although the ego welcomes that interpretation.
You can delay the completion of the Kingdom, but you cannot
introduce the concept of assault into it.
79
When I said, "I am come as a light into the world," I surely came to
share the light with you. Remember the symbolic reference we made before
to the ego's dark glass, and remember also that we said, "Do not look
there." It is still true that "where you look to find yourself is up to
you." The Higher Court will not condemn you. It will merely
dismiss the case against you. There can be no case against a
Child of God, and every witness to guilt in Gods creations is bearing
false witness to God Himself.
80
Appeal everything you believe gladly to God's own Higher Court because
it speaks for Him and therefore speaks truly. It will dismiss the case
against you, however carefully you have built it. The case may
be foolproof, but it is not God-proof. The Voice for God will
not hear it at all because He can only witness truly. His verdict will
always be "Thine is the Kingdom" because He was given you to
remind you of what you are.
81
Your patience with each other is your patience with yourselves. Is not a
Child of God worth patience? I have shown you infinite patience
because my will is that of our Father, from Whom I learned of
infinite patience. His Voice was in me as it is in you, speaking for
patience towards the Sonship in the name of its Creator. What you need
to learn now is that only infinite patience can produce
immediate effects. This is the way in which time is exchanged for
eternity. Infinite patience calls upon infinite love, and by producing
results now, it renders time unnecessary.
82
To say that time is temporary is merely redundant. We have repeatedly
said that time is a learning device which will be abolished when it is
no longer useful. The Holy Spirit, Who speaks for God in time, also
knows that time is meaningless. He reminds you of this in every passing
moment of time because it is His special function to return you to
eternity and remain to bless your creations there. He is the
only blessing you can truly give because He is so truly blessed, and
because He has been given you so freely by God, you must give Him as you
received Him.
83
The idea of "set" is among the better psychological concepts. Actually,
it is used quite frequently in the Bible and also in this course under
many different terms. For example, "God will keep him in perfect peace
whose mind is stayed (or set) on Him," a statement which means that
God's peace is set in the Holy Spirit because it is fixed on God. It is
also fixed in you. You, then, are fixed in the peace of God. The
concept of "fixation" is also a very helpful one which Freud understood
perfectly. Unfortunately, he lost his understanding because he was
afraid and, as you know all too well, fear is incompatible with good
judgment. Fear distorts thinking and therefore disorders
thought.
84
Freud's system of thought was extremely ingenious because Freud was
extremely ingenious, and a mind must endow its thoughts with its
own attributes. This is its inherent strength, although it may misuse
its power. Freud lost much of the potential value of his thought system
because he did not include himself in it. This is a dissociated
state because the thinker cuts himself off from his thoughts. Freud's
thought was so conflicted that he could not have retained his sanity as
he saw it without dissociation. That is why the many
contradictions which are quite apparent in his thinking became
increasingly less apparent to him. A man who knows what fixation
really means and yet does not yield to it is terribly afraid.
85
Fixation is the pull of God, on whom your mind is fixed because
of the Holy Spirit's irrevocable set. "Irrevocable" means "cannot be
called back or redirected." The irrevocable nature of the Holy Spirit's
set is the basis for His unequivocal Voice. The Holy Spirit never
changes His mind. Clarity of thought cannot occur under
conditions of vacillation. Unless a mind is fixed in its purpose, it is
not clear. Clarity literally means the state of light, and
enlightenment is understanding. Enlightenment stands under
perception because you have denied it as the real foundation of
thought. This is the basis for all delusional systems.
86
The concept of fixation as Freud saw it has a number of learning
advantages. First, it recognizes that man can be fixated at a point in
development which does not accord with a point in time. This
clearly could have been a means toward real release from the time
belief, had Freud pursued it with an open mind. Freud, however, suffered
all his life from refusal to allow eternity to dawn upon his mind and
enlighten it truly. As a result, he overlooked now entirely and
merely saw the continuity of past and future.
87
Second, although Freud misinterpreted what the Holy Spirit told him, or
better, reminded him of, he was too honest to deny more than was
necessary to keep his fear in tolerable bounds as he perceived the
situation. Therefore, he emphasized that the point in development at
which the mind is fixated is more real to itself than the
external reality with which it disagrees. This again could have been a
powerful release mechanism had Freud not decided to involve it
in a strong defense system because he perceived it as an attack.
88
Third, although Freud interpreted fixation as involving irrevocable
"danger points" to which the mind could always regress, the concept can
also be interpreted as an irrevocable call to sanity which the mind
cannot lose. Freud himself could not accept this interpretation,
but throughout his thought system, the "threat" of fixation remained and
could never be eliminated by any living human being. Essentially, this
was the basis of Freud's pessimism, personally as well as theoretically.
He tried every means his very inventive mind could devise to set up a
form of therapy which could enable the mind to escape from fixation
forever, even though he knew this was impossible.
89
This knowledge plagued Freud's belief in his own thought system at every
turn because he was both an honest man and a healer. He was therefore
only partially insane and was unable to relinquish the hope of
release even though he could not cope with it. The reason for this
amount of detail is because you are in the same position. You
were eternally fixated on God in your creation, and the pull of this
fixation is so strong that you will never overcome it. The reason is
perfectly clear. The fixation is on a level so high that it cannot be
surmounted. You are always being pulled back to your Creator
because you belong to Him.
90
Do you really believe you can make a voice that can drown out
His? Do you really believe that you can devise a thought system
which can separate you from His? Do you really believe that you
can plan for your safety and joy better than He can? You need be neither
careful nor careless; you need merely cast your cares upon Him because
He careth for you. You are His care because He loves
you. His Voice reminds you always that all hope is yours because
of His care. You cannot choose to escape His care because that
is not His Will, but you can choose to accept His care and use
the infinite power of His care for all those He created by
it.
91
There have been many healers who did not heal themselves. They have not
moved mountains by their faith because their faith was not whole. Some
of them have healed the sick at times, but they have not raised the
dead. Unless the healer heals himself, he does not
believe that there is no order of difficulty in miracles. He has not
learned that every mind God created is equally worthy of being
healed because God created it whole. You are merely asked to
return to God the mind as He created it. He asks you only for
what He gave, knowing that this giving will heal you. Sanity is
wholeness, and the sanity of your brothers is yours.
92
Why should you listen to the endless insane calls which you think are
made upon you when you know the Voice of God Himself is in you?
God commended His Spirit to you and asks that you commend yours to Him.
He wills to keep it in perfect peace because you are of one mind and
spirit with Him. Excluding yourself from the Atonement is the ego's
last-ditch defense of its own existence. It reflects both the
ego's need to separate and your willingness to side with its
separateness. This willingness means that you do not want to be
healed.
93
But the time is now. You have not been asked to work out the
plan of salvation yourselves because, as I told you before, the remedy
is not of your making. God Himself gave you the perfect
correction for everything you have made which is not in accord
with His holy Will. I have made His plan perfectly explicit to you and
have also told you of your part in His plan and how urgent it is that
you fulfill it. There is time for delay, but there need not be. God
weeps at the "sacrifice" of His Children, who believe they are lost to
Him.
94
I have already told you that whenever you are not wholly joyous it is
because you have reacted with a lack of love to some Soul which God
created. Perceiving this as "sin," you become defensive because you expect
attack. The decision to react in this way, however, is yours
and can therefore be undone. It cannot be undone by repentance
in the usual sense because this implies guilt. If you allow yourself to
feel guilty, you will reinforce the error rather than allow it
to be undone for you.
95
Decisions cannot be difficult. This is obvious if you realize
that you must already have made a decision not to be
wholly joyous if that is how you feel. Therefore, the first step in the
undoing is to recognize that you actively
decided wrongly but can as actively decide otherwise. Be
very firm with yourselves in this, and keep yourselves fully aware of
the fact that the undoing process, which does not come from you,
is nevertheless within you because God placed it there. Your
part is merely to return your thinking to the point at which the error
was made and give it over to the Atonement in peace. Say to yourselves
the following as sincerely as you can, remembering that the Holy Spirit
will respond fully to your slightest invitation:
1
The relationship of anger to attack is obvious, but the inevitable
association of anger and fear is not always so clear. Anger always
involves projection of separation, which must ultimately be
accepted as entirely one's own responsibility. Anger cannot occur unless
you believe that you have been attacked, that your attack was justified,
and that you are in no way responsible. Given these three wholly
irrational premises, the equally irrational conclusion that a brother is
worthy of attack rather than of love follows. What can be
expected from insane premises except an insane conclusion?
2
The way to undo an insane conclusion is to consider the sanity of the
premises on which it rests. You cannot be attacked; attack has
no justification; and you are responsible for what you believe.
You have been asked to take me as your model for learning, since an
extreme example is a particularly helpful learning device. Everyone
teaches and teaches all the time. This is a responsibility which he
inevitably assumes the moment he accepts any premise at all, and no one
can organize his life without any thought system. Once he has
developed a thought system of any kind, he lives by it and teaches
it.
3
You have been chosen to teach the Atonement precisely because you have
been extreme examples of allegiance to your thought systems and
therefore have developed the capacity for allegiance. It has
indeed been misplaced, but it is a form of faith which you
yourselves have been willing to redirect. You cannot doubt the strength
of your devotion when you consider how faithfully you have observed it.
It was quite evident that you had already developed the ability to
follow a better model if you could accept it.
4
For teaching purposes, let us consider the crucifixion again. We have
not dwelt on it before because of its fearful connotations. The only
emphasis we laid upon it was that it was not a form of
punishment. Nothing, however, can be really explained in negative terms
only. There is a positive interpretation of the crucifixion which is
wholly devoid of fear and therefore wholly benign in what it teaches if
it is properly understood. The crucifixion is nothing more than an
extreme example. Its value, like the value of any teaching device, lies
solely in the kind of learning it facilitates. It can be and has been
misunderstood. This is only because the fearful are apt to perceive
fearfully.
5
I have already told you that you can always call on me to share my
decision and thus make it stronger. I also told you that the
crucifixion was the last foolish journey that the Sonship need take and
that it should mean release from fear to anyone who understands
it. While we emphasized only the resurrection before, the purpose of the
crucifixion and how it actually led to the resurrection was not
clarified at that time. Nevertheless, it has a definite contribution to
make to your own lives, and if you will consider it without
fear, it will help you understand your own role as teachers.
6
You have reacted for years as if you were being crucified. This
is a marked tendency of the separated ones, who always refuse to
consider what they have done to themselves. Projection means
anger, anger fosters assault, and assault promotes fear. The real
meaning of the crucifixion lies in the apparent intensity of the
assault of some of the Sons of God upon another. This, of course, is
impossible and must be fully understood as an impossibility. In
fact unless it is fully understood as only that, I cannot serve
as a real model for learning.
7
Assault can ultimately be made only on the body. There is little
doubt that one body can assault another and can even destroy it.
Yet if destruction itself is impossible, then anything that is
destructible cannot be real. Therefore, its destruction does not
justify anger. To the extent to which you believe that it does,
you must be accepting false premises and teaching them to others.
The message which the crucifixion was intended to teach was that it is
not necessary to perceive any form of assault in persecution
because you cannot be persecuted. If you respond with anger, you
must be equating yourself with the destructible and are therefore
regarding yourself insanely.
8
I have made it perfectly clear that I am like you and you are like me,
but our fundamental equality can be demonstrated only through joint decision.
You are free to perceive yourselves as persecuted if you choose. You
might remember, however, when you do choose to react that way,
that I was persecuted as the world judges and did not
share this evaluation for myself. And because I did not share it, I did
not strengthen it. I therefore offered a different
interpretation of attack and one which I do want to share with
you. If you will believe it, you will help me to teach
it.
9
We have said before, "As you teach, so shall you learn." If you react as
if you are persecuted, you are teaching persecution. This is not
a lesson which the Sons of God should want to teach if they are
to realize their own salvation. Rather, teach your own perfect immunity,
which is the truth in you, and know that it cannot be
assailed. Do not protect it yourselves, or you have believed that it is
assailable. You are not asked to be crucified, which was part of
my own teaching contribution. You are merely asked to follow my example
in the face of much less extreme temptations to misperceive and
not to accept them falsely as justifications for anger.
10
There can be no justification for the unjustifiable. Do not
believe there is, and do not teach that there is. Remember
always that what you believe you will teach. Believe with me,
and we will become equal as teachers. Your resurrection is your
reawakening. I am the model for rebirth, but rebirth itself is merely
the dawning on your minds of what is already in them. God placed it
there Himself, and so it is true forever. I believed in it and therefore
made it forever true for me. Help me to teach it to our brothers in the
name of the Kingdom of God, but first believe that it is true for you,
or you will teach amiss.
11
My brothers slept during the so-called "agony" in the garden, but I
could not be angry with them because I had learned I could not be
abandoned. Peter swore he would never deny me, but he did so three
times. He did offer to defend me with the sword, which I naturally
refused, not being at all in need of bodily protection. I am
sorry when my brothers do not share my decision to hear only one voice,
because it weakens them as teachers and as learners. Yet I know
that they cannot really betray themselves or me and that it is
still on them that I must build my church.
12
There is no choice in this because only you can be the
foundation of God's church. A church is where an altar is, and the
presence of the altar is what makes it a church. Any church
which does not inspire love has a hidden altar which is not serving the
purpose for which God intended it. I must found His church on you
because you who accept me as a model are literally my disciples.
Disciples are followers, but if the model they follow has chosen to save
them pain in all respects, they are probably unwise not to
follow him.
13
I elected both for your sake and mine to demonstrate that the
most outrageous assault as judged by the ego did not matter. As the
world judges these things, but not as God knows them, I
was betrayed, abandoned, beaten, torn, and finally killed. It was
perfectly clear that this was only because of the projection of others,
because I had not harmed anyone and had healed many. We are still equal
as learners, even though we need not have equal experiences. The Holy
Spirit is glad when you can learn enough from mine to be re-awakened by
them. That was their only purpose, and that is the only way in which I
can be perceived as the Way, the Truth, and the Light.
14
When you hear only one voice, you are never called on to
sacrifice. On the contrary, by enabling yourselves to hear the Holy
Spirit in others, you can learn from their experiences and gain from
them without experiencing them yourselves. That is because the
Holy Spirit is one, and anyone who listens is inevitably led to
demonstrate His way for all. You are not persecuted, nor was I. You are
not asked to repeat my experiences because the Holy Spirit, Whom
we share, makes this unnecessary. To use my experiences
constructively, however, you must still follow my example in how to
perceive them.
15
My brothers and yours are constantly engaged in justifying the
unjustifiable. My one lesson, which I must teach as I learned, is that
no perception which is out of accord with the judgment of the Holy
Spirit can be justified. I undertook to show this was true in a
very extreme case merely because it would serve as a good teaching aid
to those whose temptations to give in to anger and assault would not
be so extreme. I will with God that none of His Sons should suffer.
16
Remember that the Holy Spirit is the communication link between God the
Father and His separated Sons. If you will listen to His Voice, you will
know that you cannot either hurt or be hurt and that many need
your blessing to help them hear this for themselves. When you perceive only
this need in them and do not respond to any other, you will have
learned of me and will be as eager to share your learning as I am. The
crucifixion cannot be shared, because it is the symbol of
projection, but the resurrection is the symbol of sharing,
because the reawakening of every Son of God is necessary to enable the
Sonship to know its wholeness. Only this is knowledge.
17
The message of the crucifixion is perfectly clear:
19
If you interpret the crucifixion in any other way, you are using it as a
weapon for assault rather than as the call for peace for which it was
intended. The Apostles often misunderstood it and always for the same
reason that makes anyone misunderstand anything. Their own imperfect
love made them vulnerable to projection, and out of their own fear they
spoke of the "wrath of God" as His retaliatory weapon. Nor could they
speak of the crucifixion entirely without anger, because their own sense
of guilt had made them angry.
20
There are two glaring examples of upside-down thinking in the New
Testament, whose whole gospel is only the message of love. These
are not like the several slips into impatience which I made. I had
learned the Atonement prayer, which I also came to teach, too well to
engage in upside-down thinking myself. If the Apostles had not felt
guilty, they never could have quoted me as saying, "I come not to bring
peace but a sword." This is clearly the exact opposite of everything I
taught.
21
Nor could they have described my reactions to Judas as they did if they
had really understood me. They would have realized I could not
have said, "Betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?" unless I believed
in betrayal. The whole message of the crucifixion was simply that I did
not. The "punishment" which I am said to have called forth upon
Judas was a similar reversal. Judas was my brother and a Son of God, as
much a part of the Sonship as myself. Was it likely that I would condemn
him when I was ready to demonstrate that condemnation is impossible?
22
I am very grateful to the Apostles for their teaching and fully aware of
the extent of their devotion to me. Nevertheless, as you read their
teachings, remember that I told them myself that there was much they
would understand later because they were not wholly ready to
follow me at the time. I emphasize this only because I do not want you
to allow any fear to enter into the thought system toward which
I am guiding you. I do not call for martyrs but for teachers.
No one is "punished" for sins, and the Sons of God are not sinners.
23
Any concept of "punishment" involves the projection of blame and
reinforces the idea that blame is justified. The behavior that
results is a lesson in blame, just as all behavior teaches the
beliefs which motivate it. The crucifixion was a complex of behaviors
arising out of clearly opposed thought systems. As such, it was the
perfect symbol of conflict between the ego and the Son of God. The
conflict is just as real now, and its lessons, too, have equal reality when
they are learned. I do not need gratitude any more than I needed
protection, but you need to develop your weakened ability to be
grateful, or you cannot appreciate God. He does not need your
appreciation, but you do.
24
You cannot love what you do not appreciate, and fear makes
appreciation impossible. Whenever you are afraid of what you are,
you do not appreciate it and will therefore reject it. As a
result, you will teach rejection. The power of the Sons of God
is operating all the time because they were created as creators. Their
influence on each other is without limit and must be
used for their joint salvation. Each one must learn to teach that all
forms of rejection are utterly meaningless. The separation is
the notion of rejection. As long as you teach this, you still
believe it. This is not as God thinks, and you must think as He
thinks if you are to know Him again.
25
Any split in will must involve a rejection of part of it, and
this is the belief in separation. The wholeness of God, which is
His peace, cannot be appreciated except by a whole mind which
recognizes the wholeness of God's creation and by this
recognition knows its Creator. Exclusion and separation are synonymous,
as are separation and dissociation. We have said before that the
separation was and is dissociation and also that, once it had
occurred, projection became its main defense or the device that keeps
it going. The reason, however, may not be as clear as you think.
26
In the ego's use of projection, to which we are obviously referring,
what you project you disown and therefore do not believe is yours.
You are excluding yourself by the very statement you are making
that you are different from the one on whom you project. Since
you have also judged against what you project, you continue to
attack it because you have already attacked it by projecting it.
By doing this unconsciously, you try to keep the fact that you must have
attacked yourself first out of awareness and thus imagine that
you have made yourself safe.
27
Projection will always hurt you. It reinforces your belief in
your own split mind, and its only purpose is to keep the
separation going. It is solely a device of the ego to make
you feel different from your brothers and separated from them.
The ego justifies this on the wholly spurious grounds that it makes you
seem "better" than they are, thus obscuring your equality with them
still further. Projection and attack are inevitably related because
projection is always a means of justifying attack. Anger without
projection is impossible.
28
The ego uses projection only to distort your perception both of
yourself and your brothers. The process begins by excluding
something [you think] exists in you which you do not want and leads
directly to excluding you from your brothers. We have learned, however,
that there is another use of projection. Every ability of the ego has a
better counterpart, because its abilities are directed by the mind which
has a better Voice. The Holy Spirit as well as the ego utilizes
projection, but since their goals are opposed, so is the result.
29
The Holy Spirit begins by perceiving you as perfect. Knowing
this perfection is shared, He recognizes it in others, thus
strengthening it in both. Instead of anger, this arouses love for both,
because it establishes inclusion. Perceiving equality, the Holy
Spirit perceives equal needs. This invites Atonement automatically,
because Atonement is the one need which in this world is
universal. To perceive yourself this way is the only way in
which you can find happiness in the world. That is because it is the
acknowledgment that you are not in this world, for the world is
unhappy.
30
How else can you find joy in a joyless place except by realizing
that you are not there? You cannot be anywhere that God did not
put you, and God created you as part of Him. That is both where
you are and what you are. It is completely unalterable.
It is total inclusion. You cannot change it now or ever. It is forever
true. It is not a belief but a fact. Anything that God created
is as true as He is. Its truth lies only in its perfect inclusion in
Him, Who alone is perfect. To deny this in any way is to deny
yourself and Him since it is impossible to accept one without
the other.
31
The perfect equality of the Holy Spirit's perception is the counterpart
of the perfect equality of God's knowing. The ego's perception has
no counterpart in God, but the Holy Spirit remains the bridge between
perception and knowledge. By enabling you to use perception in a way
that parallels knowledge, you will ultimately meet it and know
it. The ego would prefer to believe that this meeting is impossible, yet
it is your perception which the Holy Spirit guides. You might
remember that the human eye perceives parallel lines as if
they meet in the distance, which is the same as in the future if time
and space are one dimension. Your perception will end where it
began. Everything meets in God because everything was created by
Him and in Him.
32
God created His Sons by extending His thought and retaining the
extensions of His Thought in His Mind. All His Thoughts are thus
perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they were
created neither partially nor in part. The Holy Spirit enables you to
perceive this wholeness now. You can no more pray for yourselves
alone than you can find joy for yourself alone. Prayer is the
restatement of inclusion, directed by the Holy Spirit under the
laws of God. God created you to create. You cannot extend His
Kingdom until you know of its wholeness.
33
Thoughts begin in the mind of the thinker from which they extend
outward. This is as true of God's Thinking as it is of yours. Because
your minds are split, you can also perceive as well as think. Yet
perception cannot escape from the basic laws of mind. You perceive from
your mind and extend your perceptions outward. Although perception of
any kind is unnecessary, you made it, and the Holy Spirit can
therefore use it well. He can inspire perception and lead it
toward God by making it parallel to God's way of thinking and
thus guarantee their ultimate meeting. This convergence seems to
be far in the future only because your mind is not in perfect alignment
with the idea and therefore does not want it now.
34
The Holy Spirit uses time but does not believe in it.
Coming from God, He uses everything for good, but He does not believe
in what is not true. Since the Holy Spirit is in your minds,
your minds must also be able to believe only what is true. The Holy
Spirit can speak only for this because he speaks for God. He tells you
to return your whole mind to God because it has never left Him.
If it has never left Him, you need only perceive it as it is to be
returned. The full awareness of the Atonement, then, is the recognition
that the separation never occurred. The ego cannot prevail
against this because it is an explicit statement that the ego
never occurred.
35
The ego can accept the idea that return is necessary because it
can so easily make the idea seem so difficult. Yet the Holy Spirit tells
you that even return is unnecessary because what never happened cannot
involve any problem. It does not follow, however, that you
cannot make the idea of return both necessary and difficult. It
is surely clear, however, that the perfect need nothing and cannot
experience perfection as a difficult accomplishment, because that is
what they are.
36
This is the way in which you must perceive God's creations,
bringing all of your perceptions into the one parallel line which the
Holy Spirit sees. This line is the direct line of communication with God
and lets your mind converge with His. There is no conflict
anywhere in this perception because it means that all perception
is guided by the Holy Spirit, Whose mind is fixed on God. Only
the Holy Spirit can resolve conflict, because only the Holy
Spirit is conflict-free. He perceives only what is true in your
mind and extends outward only to what is true in other minds.
37
The difference between the ego's use of projection and projection as the
Holy Spirit uses it is very simple. The ego projects to exclude
and therefore to deceive. The Holy Spirit projects by recognizing
Himself in every mind and thus perceives them as one.
Nothing conflicts in this perception, because what the Holy Spirit
perceives is the same. Wherever He looks He sees Himself, and
because He is united, He offers the whole Kingdom always. This is the
one message God gave to Him and for which He must speak because
that is what He is. The peace of God lies in that message, and
so the peace of God lies in you.
38
The great peace of the Kingdom shines in your mind forever, but it must
shine outward to make you aware of it. The Holy Spirit
was given you with perfect impartiality, and only by perceiving Him
impartially can you perceive Him at all. The ego is legion, but the Holy
Spirit is One. No darkness abides anywhere in the Kingdom, but your part
is only to allow no darkness to abide in your own mind. This
alignment with light is unlimited, because it is in alignment with the
light of the world. Each of us is the light of the world, and by
joining our minds in this light, we proclaim the Kingdom of God
together and as one.
39
We have used many words as synonymous which are not ordinarily regarded
as the same. We began with having and being and more recently have used
others. Hearing and being are examples, to which we can also add
teaching and being, learning and being and, above all, projecting
and being. This is because, as we have said before, every idea begins in
the mind of the thinker and extends outward. Therefore, what extends from
the mind is still in it, and from what it extends it knows itself.
That is its natural talent. The word "knows" is correct here, even
though the ego does not know and is not concerned with being at
all.
40
The Holy Spirit still holds knowledge safe through His impartial
perception. By attacking nothing, He presents no barrier at all to the
communication of God. Thus, being is never threatened. Your Godlike mind
can never be defiled. The ego never was and never will be part
of it, but through the ego you can hear and teach and learn what
is not true. From this, which you have made, you have
taught yourselves to believe that you are not what you are.
You cannot teach what you have not learned, and what you teach
you strengthen in yourselves because you are sharing it. Every
lesson you teach you are learning.
41
That is why you must teach only one lesson. If you are to be
conflict-free yourselves, you must learn only from the Holy
Spirit and teach only by Him. You are only love, but
when you denied this you made what you are something you must learn.
We said before that the message of the crucifixion was, "Teach only
love, for that is what you are." This is the one lesson
which is perfectly unified because it is the only lesson which is
one. Only by teaching it can you learn it. "As you teach, so
will you learn." If that is true, and it is true indeed, you must never
forget that what you teach is teaching you. What you project you
believe.
42
The only real safety lies in projecting only the Holy Spirit
because, as you see His gentleness in others, your own mind
perceives itself as totally harmless. Once it can accept this
fully, it does not see the need to protect itself. The
protection of God then dawns upon it, assuring it that it is perfectly
safe forever. The perfectly safe are wholly benign. They bless because
they know they are blessed. Without anxiety the mind is wholly
kind and because it projects beneficence, it is
beneficent.
43
Safety is the complete relinquishment of attack. No compromise
is possible in this. Teach attack in any form, and you have
learned it, and it will hurt you. Yet your learning is not
immortal, and you can unlearn it by not teaching it. Since you
cannot not teach, your salvation lies in teaching the exact opposite
of everything the ego believes. This is how you will learn the
truth that will set you free and keep you so, as others learn it of you.
The only way to have peace is to teach peace. By
learning it through projection, it becomes a part of what you know
because you cannot teach what you have dissociated.
44
Only thus can you win back the knowledge that you threw away. An idea
which you share, you must have. It awakens in you
through the conviction of teaching. Remember that, if teaching is being
and learning is being, then teaching is learning. Everything you
teach, you are learning. Teach only love, and learn that love is yours
and you are love.
45
Remember that the Holy Spirit is the Answer, not the question.
The ego always speaks first because it is capricious and does not
mean its maker well. That is because it believes, and correctly, that
its maker may withdraw his support from it at any moment. If it meant
you well, it would be glad, as the Holy Spirit will be glad when He has
brought you home, and you no longer need His guidance. The ego does not
regard itself as part of you. Herein lies its primary perceptual
error, the foundation of its whole thought system.
46
When God created you, He made you part of Him. That is why attack within
the Kingdom is impossible. You made the ego without love, and so
it does not love you. You could not remain within the
Kingdom without love, and since the Kingdom is love, you believe that
you are without it. This enables the ego to regard itself as
separate and outside its maker, thus speaking for the part of
your mind that believes you are separate and outside the Mind of God.
The ego, then, raised the first question that was ever asked, but one
which it can never answer. That question, "What are you?" was the
beginning of doubt.
47
The ego has never answered any questions since, although it has
raised a great many. The most inventive activities of the ego have never
done more than obscure the question, because you have
the answer and the ego is afraid of you. You cannot understand
the conflict until you fully understand one basic fact that the ego does
not know. The Holy Spirit does not speak first, but He always
answers. Everyone has called upon Him for help at one time or
another and in one way or another and has been answered. Since
the Holy Spirit answers truly, He answers for all time, which
means that everyone has the answer now.
48
The ego cannot hear the Holy Spirit, but it does believe that
part of the same mind that made it is against it. It interprets
this as a justification for attacking its maker. It believes
that the best defense is attack and wants you to believe it.
Unless you do believe it you will not side with it, and the ego
feels badly in need of allies though not of brothers. Perceiving
something alien to itself in your mind, the ego turns to the body, not
the mind, as its ally, because the body is not part of you. This
makes the body the ego's friend. It is an alliance frankly based on
separation. If you side with this alliance, you will be
afraid because you are siding with an alliance of fear.
49
The ego and the body conspire against your minds, and because
the ego realizes that its "enemy" can end them both merely by
knowing they are not part of him, they join in the attack
together. This is perhaps the strangest perception of all if you
consider what it really involves. The ego, which is not real,
attempts to persuade the mind, which is real, that the mind is
its own learning device and that the learning device is more real than it
is. No one in his right mind could though believe this, and no
one in his right mind does believe it.
50
Hear then the one answer of the Holy Spirit to all the
questions which the ego raises. You are a Child of God, a priceless part
of His Kingdom, which He created as part of Him. Nothing else exists,
and only this is real. You have chosen a sleep in which you have
had bad dreams, but the sleep is not real, and God calls you to awake.
There will be nothing left of your dream when you hear Him because you will
be awake. Your dreams have contained many of the ego's symbols, and they
have confused you. Yet that was only because you were asleep and did
not know. When you awake, you will see the truth around you and in
you, and you will no longer believe in dreams because they will have no
reality for you.
51
Yet the Kingdom and all that you have created there will have great
reality for you because they are beautiful and true. In the Kingdom,
where you are and what you are is perfectly certain. There is no doubt
there because the first question was never asked. Having finally been
wholly answered, it has never been. Being alone lives in the
Kingdom, where everything lives in God without question. The time that
was spent on questioning in the dream has given way to creation and to
its eternity.
52
You are as certain as God because you are as true as He is, but
what was once quite certain in your minds has become only the ability
for certainty. The introduction of abilities into being was the
beginning of uncertainty
because abilities are potentials, not accomplishments. Your
abilities are totally useless in the presence of God's accomplishments
and also of yours. Accomplishments are results which have been
achieved. When they are perfect, abilities are meaningless. It is
curious that the perfect must now be perfected. In fact, it is
impossible. You must remember, however, that when you put yourselves in
an impossible situation, you believed that the impossible was
possible.
53
Abilities must be developed, or you cannot use them. This is not
true of anything that God created, but it is the kindest solution
possible to what you have made. In an impossible situation, you
can develop your abilities to the point where they can get
you out of it. You have a Guide to how to develop them, but you
have no commander except yourself. This leaves you in
charge of the Kingdom with both a Guide to find it and a means
to keep it. You have a model to follow who will strengthen
your command and never detract from it in any way. You therefore retain
the central place in your perceived enslavement, a fact which itself
demonstrates that you are not enslaved.
54
You are in an impossible situation only because you thought it was
possible to be in one. You would be in an impossible situation
if God showed you your perfection and proved to you that you
were wrong. This would demonstrate that the perfect were inadequate to
bring themselves to the awareness of their perfection and thus
side with the belief that those who have everything need help and are
therefore helpless. This is the kind of "reasoning" which the ego
engages in, but God, Who knows that His creations are perfect,
does not insult them. This would be as impossible as the ego's
notion that it has insulted Him.
55
That is why the Holy Spirit never commands. To command is to
assume inequality, which the Holy Spirit demonstrates does not
exist. Fidelity to premises is a law of mind, and everything God created
is faithful to His laws. Fidelity to other laws is also possible,
however, not because the laws are true, but because you made them.
What would be gained if God proved to you that you have thought
insanely? Can God lose His own certainty? We have frequently stated that
what you teach you are. Would you have God teach you that you
have sinned? If He confronted the self you made with the truth He
created for you, what could you be but afraid? You would doubt your
sanity, which is the one thing in which you can find the sanity
He gave you.
56
God does not teach. To teach is to imply a lack, which God knows
is not there. God is not conflicted. Teaching aims at change, but God
created only the changeless. The separation was not a loss of perfection
but a failure in communication. A harsh and strident form of
communication arose as the ego's voice. It could not shatter the peace
of God, but it could shatter yours. God did not blot it
out because to eradicate it would be to attack it. Being questioned, He
did not question. He merely gave the Answer. His Answer is your Teacher.
57
Like any good teacher, the Holy Spirit does know more than you do now,
but He teaches only to make you equal with Him. This is because
you had already taught wrongly, having believed what was not true. You
did not believe in your own perfection. Could God teach you that
you had made a split mind, when He knows your mind only as whole? What
God does know is that His communication channels are not open to
Him so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His Children are
wholly joyous. This is an ongoing process, not in time, but in eternity.
God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when
the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thought, "My
Children sleep and must be awakened."
58
How can you wake children better and more kindly than by a gentle Voice
that will not frighten them but will merely remind them that the night
is over and the light has come? You do not inform them that the
nightmares which frightened them so badly were not real because children
believe in magic. You merely reassure them that they are safe now.
Then you train them to recognize the difference between sleeping
and waking, so that they will understand they need not be afraid of
dreams. Then when bad dreams come, they will call on the light themselves
to dispel them.
59
A wise teacher teaches through approach, not avoidance. He does
not emphasize what you must avoid to escape from harm so much as
what you need to learn to have joy. This is true even of the world's
teachers. Consider the confusion a child would experience if he were
told, "Do not do this because it might hurt you and make you
unsafe, but if you do that you will escape from harm and be
safe, and then you will not be afraid." All of this could be included in
only three words: "Do only that!" This simple statement is
perfectly clear, easily understood, and very easily remembered.
60
The Holy Spirit never itemizes errors because He does not
frighten children, and those who lack wisdom are children. Yet
He always answers their call, and His dependability makes them
more certain. Children do confuse fantasy and reality, and they
are frightened because they do not know the difference. The Holy
Spirit makes no distinction among dreams. He merely shines them
away. His light is always the call to awake, whatever you have
been dreaming. Nothing lasting lies in dreams, and the Holy Spirit,
shining with the light from God Himself, speaks only for what lasts
forever.
61
When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that
you will last forever. Many think this is accomplished through
death, but nothing is accomplished through death because death is
nothing. Everything is accomplished through life, and life is of
the mind and in the Mind. The body neither lives nor dies
because it cannot contain you who are life. If we share the same
mind, you can overcome death because I did. Death is an attempt
to resolve conflict by not willing at all. Like any other impossible
solution which the ego attempts, it will not work.
62
God did not make the body because it is destructible and therefore not
of the Kingdom. The body is the symbol of what you think you
are. It is clearly a separation device and therefore does not exist. The
Holy Spirit, as always, takes what you have made and translates it into
a learning device for you. Again as always, He re-interprets
what the ego uses as an argument for separation into a
demonstration against it. If the mind can heal the body but the
body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be stronger. Every
miracle demonstrates this.
63
We have said that the Holy Spirit is the motivation for
miracles. This is because He always tells you that only the mind
is real since only the mind can be shared. The body is
separate and therefore cannot be part of you. To be of one mind
is meaningful, but to be of one body is meaningless. By
the laws of mind, then, the body is meaningless. To the Holy
Spirit, there is no order of difficulty in miracles. This is familiar
enough to you by now, but it has not yet become believable. Therefore,
you do not understand it and cannot use it.
64
We have too much to accomplish on behalf of the Kingdom to let this
crucial concept slip away. It is a real foundation stone of the thought
system I teach and want you to teach. You cannot perform
miracles without believing it because it is a belief in perfect
equality. Only one equal gift can be offered to the equal Sons
of God, and that is full appreciation. Nothing more and nothing
less. Without a range, an order of difficulty is meaningless,
and there must be no range in what you offer to each other.
65
The Holy Spirit, who leads to God, translates communication into being,
just as He ultimately translates perception into knowledge. [You do
not lose what you communicate.] The ego uses the body for attack,
for pleasure, and for pride. The insanity of this perception makes it a
fearful one indeed. The Holy Spirit sees the body only as a
means of communication and because communicating is sharing, it
becomes communion. You might argue that fear as well as love can be
communicated and therefore can be shared. Yet this is not so real as it
sounds. Those who communicate fear are promoting attack, and attack
always breaks communication, making it impossible.
66
Egos do join together in temporary allegiance but always for what
each one can get separately. The Holy Spirit communicates only what
each one can give to all. He never takes anything back because He
wants you to keep it. Therefore, His teaching begins with the
lesson:
68
This is a very preliminary step, and the only one you must take for
yourself. It is not even necessary that you complete the step
yourself, but it is necessary that you turn in that direction.
Having chosen to go that way, you place yourself in charge of
the journey, where you and only you must remain.
69
This step appears to exacerbate conflict rather than resolve it
because it is the beginning step in reversing your perception
and turning it right-side up. This conflicts with the upside-down
perception which you have not yet abandoned, or the change in direction
would not have been necessary. Some people remain at this step for a
very long time, experiencing very acute conflict. At this point,
many try to accept the conflict rather than take the next step
towards its resolution. Having taken the first step, however, they will
be helped. Once they have chosen what they cannot complete
alone, they are no longer alone.
70
All the separated ones have a basic fear of retaliation and abandonment.
This is because they believe in attack and rejection, so this is
what they perceive and teach and learn. These insane concepts
are clearly the result of their own dissociation and projection. What
you teach you are, but it is quite apparent that you can teach wrongly
and therefore teach yourselves wrong. Many thought that I
was attacking them, even though it was quite apparent that I was not. An
insane learner learns strange lessons.
71
What you must understand is that when you do not share a thought
system, you are weakening it. Those who believe in it
therefore perceive this as an attack on them. This is because
everyone identifies himself with his thought system, and every
thought system centers on what you believe you are. If the
center of the thought system is true, only truth extends from it. But if
a lie is at its center, only deception proceeds from it. All
good teachers realize that only fundamental change will last, but they
do not begin at that level. Strengthening motivation for
change is their first and foremost goal. It is also their last and final
one.
72
Increasing motivation for change in the learner is all that a
teacher need do to guarantee change. This is because a change in
motivation is a change of mind, and this will inevitably produce
fundamental change because the mind is fundamental. The first
step in the reversal or undoing process, then, is the undoing of the getting
concept. Accordingly, the Holy Spirit's first lesson was "to have,
give all to all." We said that this is apt to increase
conflict temporarily, and we can clarify this still further now.
73
At this point, the equality of "having" and "being" is not yet
perceived. Until it is, "having" appears to be the opposite
of "being." Therefore, the first lesson seems to contain a
contradiction since it is being learned by a conflicted mind.
This means conflicting motivation, and so the lesson cannot
be learned consistently as yet. Further, the mind of the learner
projects its own split, and thus does not perceive consistent
minds in others, making him suspicious of their motivation. This
is the real reason why in many respects the first lesson is the hardest
to learn. Still strongly aware of the ego in himself and responding
primarily to the ego in others, he is being taught to react to both as
if what he does believe is not true.
74
Upside-down as always, the ego perceives the first lesson as insane. In
fact this is its only alternative here since the other one, which would
be much less acceptable to it, would obviously be that it
is insane. The ego's judgment, then, is predetermined by what it is,
though no more so than is any other product of thought. The fundamental
change will still occur with the change of mind in the thinker.
Meanwhile, the increasing clarity of the Holy Spirit's Voice makes it
impossible for the learner not to listen. For a time, then, he is
receiving conflicting messages and
accepting both. This is the classic "double bind" in
communication.
75
The way out of conflict between two opposing thought systems is
clearly to choose one and relinquish the other. If you identify
with your thought system, and you cannot escape this, and if you accept
two thought systems which are in complete disagreement, peace of
mind is impossible. If you teach both, which you will
surely do as long as you accept both, you are teaching conflict
and learning it. Yet you do want peace, or you would not
have called upon the Voice for Peace to help you. His lesson is
not insane; the conflict is.
76
There can be no conflict between sanity and insanity. Only one
is true, and therefore only one is real. The ego tries to
persuade you that it is up to you to decide which voice is true,
but the Holy Spirit teaches you that truth was created by God, and your
decision cannot change it. As you begin to realize the quiet
power of the Holy Spirit's Voice and its perfect consistency, it
must dawn on your minds that you are trying to undo a decision
which was made irrevocably for you. That is why we suggested
before that there was help in reminding yourselves to allow the Holy
Spirit to decide for God for you.
77
You are not asked to make insane decisions, although you are
free to think you are. It must, however, be insane to
believe that it is up to you to decide what God's creations are.
The Holy Spirit perceives the conflict exactly as it is. Therefore, His
second lesson is:
79
This is still a preliminary step since having and being
are still not equated. It is, however, more advanced than the first
step, which is really only a thought reversal. The second step
is a positive affirmation of what you want. This, then, is a
step in the direction out of conflict since it means that
alternatives have been considered and one has been chosen as more
desirable.
80
Nevertheless, the evaluation "more desirable" still implies that the
desirable has degrees. Therefore, although this step is
essential for the ultimate decision, it is clearly not the final
one. It is clear at this point that the lack of order of difficulty in
miracles has not yet been accepted because nothing is difficult that is
wholly desired. To desire wholly is to create,
and creating cannot be difficult if God Himself created you as
a creator. The second step, then, is still perceptual, although it is a
giant step toward the unified perception which parallels God's knowing.
81
As you take this step and hold this direction, you will be
pushing toward the center of your thought system where the fundamental
change will occur. You are only beginning this step now, but you have
started on this way by realizing that only one way is possible.
You do not yet realize this consistently, and so your progress is
intermittent, but the second step is easier than the first because it follows.
The very fact that you have accepted that is a demonstration of
your growing awareness that the Holy Spirit will lead you on.
82
For your own salvation you must be critical since your salvation is
critical to the whole Sonship. We said before that the Holy Spirit is
evaluative and must be. Yet His evaluation does not extend beyond
you, or you would share it. In your mind, and your mind only,
He sorts out the true from the false and teaches you to judge every
thought that you allow to enter your mind in the light of what God put
there. Whatever is in accord with this light, He retains to
strengthen the Kingdom in you. What is partly in accord
with truth, He accepts and purifies. But what is out of accord
entirely, He rejects by judging against. This is how He keeps
the Kingdom perfectly consistent and perfectly unified.
83
What you must remember, however, is that what the Holy Spirit rejects
the ego accepts. This is because they are in fundamental
disagreement about everything, being in fundamental disagreement about what
you are. The ego's beliefs on this crucial issue vary, and that is
why it promotes different moods. The Holy Spirit never varies on
this point, and so the one mood He engenders is joy. He protects
it by rejecting everything that does not foster joy, and so He
alone can keep you wholly joyous.
84
The Holy Spirit does not teach your mind to be critical of other minds
because He does not want you to teach errors and learn them
yourselves. He would hardly be consistent if He allowed you to strengthen
what you must learn to avoid. In the mind of the thinker,
then, He is judgmental, but only in order to unify the mind so
it can perceive without judgment. This enables the mind to teach
without judgment and therefore to learn to be without
judgment. The undoing is necessary only in your mind so that you
cannot project falsely. God Himself has established what you can project
with perfect safety. Therefore, the Holy Spirit's third lesson is:
86
This is a major step toward fundamental change. Yet it is still
a lesson in thought reversal since it implies that there is something
you must be vigilant against. It has advanced far from the first
lesson, which was primarily a reversal and also from the second,
which was essentially the identification of what is more
desirable. This step, which follows from the second as the
second follows from the first, emphasizes the dichotomy between
the desirable and the undesirable. It therefore makes the ultimate
choice inevitable.
87
While the first step seems to increase conflict and the second
step still entails it to some extent, this one calls for consistent
effort against it. We said already that you can be as vigilant against
the ego as for it. This lesson teaches not only that you can
be, but that you must be. It does not concern itself with order
of difficulty but with clear cut priority for vigilance. This
step is unequivocal in that it teaches there must be no
exceptions, although it does not deny that the temptation to make
exceptions will occur. Here, then, your consistency is called on despite
chaos. Yet chaos and consistency cannot coexist for long since
they are mutually exclusive.
88
As long as you must be vigilant against anything, however, you are not
recognizing this mutual exclusiveness and are holding the belief that
you can choose either one. By teaching what to choose,
the Holy Spirit will ultimately be able to teach you that you need
not choose at all. This will finally liberate your will from
choice and direct it towards creation within the Kingdom.
Choosing through the Holy Spirit will lead you to the Kingdom.
You create by what you are, but this is what you must learn. The
way to learn it is inherent in the third step, which brings together the
lessons implied in the others and goes beyond them towards real
integration.
89
If you allow yourselves to have in your minds only what God put
there, you are acknowledging your mind as God created it.
Therefore, you are accepting it as it is. Since it is whole, you
are teaching peace because you believe in it. The final step
will still be taken for you by God, but by the third step the
Holy Spirit has prepared you for God. He is getting
you ready for the translation of having into being by the very
nature of the steps you must take with Him.
90
You learn first that having rests on giving and not on
getting. Next you learn that you learn what you teach and that
you want to learn peace. This is the condition for
identifying with the Kingdom since it is the condition of the
Kingdom. You have believed that you are without the Kingdom and
have therefore excluded yourself from it in your belief. It is
therefore essential to teach you that you must be included and
that the belief that you are not is the only
thing that you must exclude.
91
The third step is thus one of protection for your minds,
allowing you to identify only with the center, where God placed
the altar to Himself. We have already said that altars are beliefs, but
God and His creations are beyond belief because they are beyond
question. The Voice for God speaks only for belief beyond
question, which is the preparation for being without question.
As long as belief in God and His Kingdom is assailed by any
doubts in your minds, His perfect accomplishment is not apparent
to you. This is why you must be vigilant on God's behalf. The
ego speaks against His creation and therefore does
engender doubt. You cannot go beyond belief until you believe
fully.
92
Transfer, which is extension, is a measure of learning because
it is its measurable result. This, however, does not mean that
what it transfers to is measurable. On the contrary, unless it
transfers to the whole Sonship, which is immeasurable because it was
created by the Immeasurable, the learning itself must be
incomplete. To teach the whole Sonship without exception
demonstrates that you perceive its wholeness and have learned
that it is one. Now you must be vigilant to hold its
oneness in your minds because, if you let doubt enter, you will lose
awareness of its wholeness and will be unable to teach it.
93
The wholeness of the Kingdom does not depend on your perception,
but your awareness of its wholeness does. It is only
your awareness which needs protection since your being cannot be
assailed. Yet a real sense of being cannot be yours while you
are doubtful of what you are. This is why vigilance is
essential. Doubts about being must not enter your mind, or you cannot
know what you are with certainty. Certainty is of God for you.
Vigilance is not necessary for truth, but it is necessary
against illusions.
94
Truth is without illusions and therefore within the
Kingdom. Everything outside the Kingdom is illusion, but
you must learn to accept truth because you threw it away. You therefore
saw yourself as if you were without it. By making another
Kingdom which you valued, you did not keep only the
Kingdom of God in your minds and thus placed part of your mind outside
it. What you have made has thus divided your will and given you a sick
mind which must be healed. Your vigilance against this
sickness is the way to heal it. Once your mind is healed, it
radiates health and thereby teaches healing. This establishes
you as a teacher who teaches like me. Vigilance was required of me as
much as of you, but remember that those who will to teach the same thing
must be in agreement about what they believe.
95
The third step, then, is a statement of what you want to believe
and entails a willingness to relinquish everything else. I told
you that you were just beginning the second step, but I also told you
that the third one follows it. The Holy Spirit will enable you
to go on if you follow Him. Your vigilance is the sign that you want
Him to guide you. Vigilance does require effort, but only to teach you
that effort itself is unnecessary. You have exerted great effort
to preserve what you made because it was not true. Therefore,
you must now turn your effort against it. Only this can cancel
out the need for effort and call upon the being which
you both have and are. This recognition is
wholly without effort since it is already true and needs
no protection. It is in the perfect safety of God. Therefore inclusion
is total and creation is without limit.
1
The creative power of both God and His creations is limitless, but they
are not in reciprocal relationship. You do communicate fully
with God, as He does with you. This is an ongoing process in which you
share, and because you share it, you are inspired to create like
God. Yet in creation you are not in reciprocal relation to God since He
created you, but you did not create Him. We have already
said that only in this respect your creative power differs from His.
Even in this world there is a parallel. Parents give birth to children,
but children do not give birth to parents. They do, however,
give birth to their children and thus give birth as
their parents do.
2
If you created God and He created you, the Kingdom could not increase
through its own creative thought. Creation would therefore be limited,
and you would not be co-creators with God. As God's creative Thought
proceeds from Him to you, so must your creative thought proceed from you
to your creations. Only in this way can all creative power
extend outward. God's accomplishments are not yours. But yours are like
His. He created the Sonship, and you increase it. You
have the power to add to the Kingdom, but not to add to the Creator
of the Kingdom. You claim this power when you become vigilant only for
God and His Kingdom. By accepting this power as yours, you have
learned to be what you are.
3
Your creations belong in you, as you belong in God. You are part of God,
as your sons are part of His Sons. To create is to love. Love extends
outward simply because it cannot be contained. Being limitless, it
does not stop. It creates forever, but not in time. God's
creations have always been because He has always been. Your
creations have always been because you can create only as God creates.
Eternity is yours because He created you eternal.
4
The ego demands reciprocal rights because it is competitive rather than
loving. It is always willing to make a "deal," but it cannot understand
that to be like another means that no deals are
possible. To gain you must give, not bargain. To bargain is to limit
giving, and this is not God's Will. To will with God is to create like
Him. God does not limit His gifts in any way. You are His gifts,
and so your gifts must be like His. Your gifts to the Kingdom
must be like His gifts to you.
5
I gave only love to the Kingdom because I believed that was what
I was. What you believe you are determines your gifts,
and if God created you by extending Himself as you, you can only
extend yourself as He did. Only joy increases forever, since joy
and eternity are inseparable. God extends outward beyond limits and
beyond time, and you who are co-creators with Him extend His Kingdom
forever and beyond limit. Eternity is the indelible stamp of creation.
The eternal are in peace and joy forever.
6
To think like God is to share His certainty of what you are and
to create like Him is to share the perfect love He shares with you.
To this the Holy Spirit leads you that your joy may be complete because
the Kingdom of God is whole. We have said that the last step in the
reawakening of knowledge is taken by God. This is true, but it is hard
to explain in words because words are symbols, and nothing that is true
needs to be explained. However, the Holy Spirit has the task of
translating the useless into the useful, the meaningless
into the meaningful, and the temporary into the timeless. He can
therefore tell you something about this last step, although this one you
must know yourself, since by it you know what you are. This is
your being.
7
God does not take steps because His accomplishments are not
gradual. He does not teach because His creations are changeless. He does
nothing last because He created first and for always.
It must be understood that the word "first" as applied to Him is not
a time concept. He is first in the sense that He is the first in the
Holy Trinity itself. He is the Prime Creator because He created His
co-creators. Because He did, time applies neither to Him nor
to what He created. The "last step" that God will take was therefore
true in the beginning, is true now, and will be true forever.
8
What is timeless is always there because its being is
eternally changeless. It does not change by increase because it was
forever created to increase. If you perceive it as not
increasing, you do not know what it is. You also do not know
what created it or Who He is. God does not reveal this
to you because it was never hidden. His light was never obscured because
it is His Will to share it. How can what is fully shared be
withheld and then revealed?
9
To heal is the only kind of thinking in this world that resembles the
Thought of God, and because of the elements which they share, can
transfer 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.
10
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.
11
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. 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.
12
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.
13
The term "intrapersonal" is an ego term because "personal" implies "of one
person" and not of others. "Interpersonal" has a 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.
14
Outside the Kingdom, the law which prevails inside it 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.
15
Laws must be communicated if they are to be helpful. In effect, they
must be translated for those who speak a different language.
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
yourselves because conflicted minds cannot be faithful to one
meaning and will therefore change the meaning to preserve the form.
16
The Holy Spirit's purpose in translating is naturally exactly
the opposite. He translates only to preserve the original
meaning in all respects and in all languages. Therefore,
He opposes differences in form as meaningful, emphasizing always that these
differences do not matter. The meaning of His message is always
the same, and only the meaning matters. God's law of Creation in
perfect form 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.
17
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.
18
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 without strain 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.
19
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 then 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 nor less because of what is absent.
20
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.
21
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.
22
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.
23
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.
24
That is 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.
Yet the Holy Spirit teaches one lesson and applies it to all
individuals in all situations. Being conflict-free, He maximizes
all efforts and all results. By teaching the power of the
Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that all power is yours.
Its application does not matter. It is always maximal. Your
vigilance does not establish it as yours, but it does
enable you to use it always and in all ways.
25
When I said, "I am with you always," I meant it literally. I am not
absent to anyone in any situation. Because I am
always with you, you are the way and the truth and the light.
You did not make this power, any more than I did. It was created to be
shared and therefore cannot be meaningfully perceived as belonging to
anyone at the expense of another. Such a perception makes it
meaningless by eliminating or overlooking its real and only
meaning.
26
God's meaning waits in the Kingdom because that is where He placed it.
It does not wait in time. It merely rests in the Kingdom because
it belongs there, as you do. How can you, who are God's
meaning, perceive yourselves as absent from it? You can see
yourselves as separated from your meaning only by experiencing
yourself as unreal. This is why the ego is insane; it teaches that
you are not what you are. This is so contradictory that
it is clearly impossible. It is therefore a lesson which you cannot
really learn, and therefore cannot really teach. Yet you
are always teaching. You must therefore be teaching something else
as well, even though the ego does not know what it is.
27
The ego, then, is always being undone and does suspect
your motives. Your mind cannot be unified in allegiance to the
ego because the mind does not belong to it. Yet what is
"treacherous" to the ego is faithful to peace. The ego's "enemy"
is therefore your friend. We said before that the ego's friend
is not part of you, since the ego perceives itself as at war and
therefore in need of allies. You who are not at war must
look for brothers and recognize all whom you see as
brothers, because only equals are at peace.
28
Because God's equal Sons have everything, they cannot compete.
Yet if they perceive any of their brothers as anything other
than their perfect equals, the idea of competition has entered
their minds. Do not underestimate your need to be vigilant against
this idea, because all your conflicts come from it. It is the
belief that conflicting interests are possible, and therefore you have
accepted the impossible as true. How is that different from
saying that you are perceiving yourself as unreal?
29
To be in the Kingdom is merely to focus your full attention on
it. As long as you believe that you can attend to what is not true, you
are accepting conflict as your choice. Is it really a
choice? It seems to be, but seeming and reality are hardly the
same. You who are the Kingdom are not concerned with seeming.
Reality is yours because you are reality. This is how having and
being are ultimately reconciled, not in the Kingdom, but in your
minds. The altar there is the only reality. The altar is
perfectly clear in thought because it is a reflection of perfect
Thought. It sees only brothers because it sees only in its own
light.
30
God has lit your minds Himself and keeps your minds lit by His light
because His light is what your minds are. God has lit your minds
Himself, and you were answered. The answer merely undoes
the question by establishing the fact that to question reality is to
question meaninglessly. That is why the Holy Spirit never
questions. His sole function is to undo the questionable and
thus lead to certainty. The certain are perfectly calm because
they are not in doubt. They do not raise questions because nothing
questionable enters their minds. This holds them in perfect
serenity because this is what they share, knowing what they are.
31
As has so often been said, healing is both an art and a science. It is
an art because it depends on inspiration in the sense that we have
already used the term. Inspiration is the opposite of dispiriting and
therefore means to make joyous. The dispirited are depressed because
they believe that they are literally "without the Spirit," which is an
illusion. You do not put the Spirit in them by inspiring them
because that would be magic and therefore would not be real healing. You
do, however, recognize the Spirit that is already there
and thereby reawaken it. This is why the healer is part of the
resurrection and the life. The Spirit is not asleep in the minds
of the sick, but the part of the mind that can perceive it and be glad is.
32
Healing is also a science because it obeys the laws of God, Whose laws
are true. Because they are true, they are perfectly dependable
and therefore universal in application. The real aim of science
is neither prediction nor control but only understanding. This
is because it does not establish the laws it seeks, cannot
discover them through prediction, and has no control over them
at all. Science is nothing more than an approach to what
already is. Like inspiration it can be misunderstood as magic and
will be whenever it is undertaken as separate from what
already is and perceived as a means for establishing it. To
believe this is possible is to believe you can do it. This can only
be the voice of the ego.
33
Truth can only be recognized and need only be
recognized. Inspiration is of the Spirit, and certainty is of God
according to His laws. Both, therefore, come from the same Source, since
inspiration comes from the Voice for God and certainty comes
from the laws of God. Healing does not come directly
from God, Who knows His creations as perfectly whole. Yet healing is
[nevertheless] of God, because it proceeds from His Voice and
from His laws. It is their result, in a state of mind which does not
know Him. The state is unknown to Him and therefore does not
exist, but those who sleep are stupefied, or better, unaware.
Because they are unaware, they do not know.
34
The Holy Spirit must work through you to teach you He is in
you. This is an intermediary step toward the knowledge that you are in
God because you are part of Him. The miracles which the Holy Spirit
inspires can have no order of difficulty because every part of creation
is of one order. This is God's Will and yours. The laws
of God establish this, and the Holy Spirit reminds you of
it. When you heal, you are remembering the laws of God and
forgetting the laws of the ego. We said before that forgetting is merely
a way of remembering better. It is therefore not the
opposite of remembering, when it is properly perceived. Perceived improperly,
it induces a perception of conflict with something else,
as all incorrect perception does. Properly perceived, it can be
used as a way out of conflict, as all proper perception can.
35
All abilities, then, should be given over to the Holy Spirit, Who
knows how to use them properly. He can use them only for
healing because He knows you only as whole. By healing
you learn of wholeness, and by learning of wholeness you learn to
remember God. You have forgotten Him, but the Holy Spirit still
knows that your forgetting must be translated into a way of remembering
and not perceived as a separate ability which opposes an
opposite. That is the way in which the ego tries to use all
abilities, since its goal is always to make you believe that you
are in opposition.
36
The ego's goal is as unified as the Holy Spirit's, and it is because of
this that their goals can never be reconciled in any way
or to any extent. The ego always seeks to divide and
separate. The Holy Spirit always seeks to unify and heal. As you
heal you are healed because the Holy Spirit sees no order of
healing. Healing is the way to undo the belief in differences,
being the only way of perceiving the Sonship without this
belief. This perception is therefore in accord with the laws of
God, even in a state of mind which is out of accord with His.
The strength of right perception is so great that it brings the mind into
accord with His because it yields to His pull which is in all of you.
37
To oppose the pull or the Will of God is not an ability but a
real delusion. The ego believes that it has this ability
and can offer it to you as a gift. You do not want it. It is not
a gift. It is nothing at all. God has given you a gift which you
both have and are. When you do not use it, you do not know you have
it. By not knowing this, you do not know what you are. Healing,
then, is a way of approaching knowledge by thinking in
accordance with the laws of God and recognizing their universality.
Without this recognition, you have made the laws themselves meaningless
to you. Yet the laws are not meaningless, since all meaning is
contained by them and in them.
38
Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven because that is where the
laws of God operate truly, and they can operate only truly since
they are the laws of Truth. But seek this only because you can find
nothing else. There is nothing else. God is all in all in a very
literal sense. All being is in Him who is all Being. You
are therefore in Him since your being is His. Healing is
a way of forgetting the sense of danger the ego has induced in you
by not recognizing its existence in your brothers. This
strengthens the Holy Spirit in both of you, because it is a refusal
to acknowledge fear. Love needs only this invitation. It comes freely to
all the Sonship, being what the Sonship is. By your
awakening to it, you are merely forgetting what you are not.
This enables you to remember what you are.
39
The body is nothing more than a framework for developing abilities. It
is therefore a means for developing potentials, which is quite
apart from what the potential is used for. That is a decision.
The effects of the ego's decision in this matter are so apparent that
they need no elaboration here, but the Holy Spirit's decision to use the
body only for communication has such a direct connection with
healing that it does need clarification. The unhealed healer obviously
does not understand his own vocation.
40
Only minds communicate. Since the ego cannot obliterate
the impulse to communicate because it is also the impulse to create, the
ego can only teach you that the body can both communicate and
create and therefore does not need the mind. The ego thus tries
to teach you that the body can act like the mind and is
therefore self-sufficient. Yet we have learned that behavior is not
the level for either teaching or learning. This must be so,
since you can act in accordance with what you do not
believe. To do this, however, will weaken you as teachers and
learners because, as has been repeatedly emphasized, you teach what you
do believe. An inconsistent lesson will be poorly taught and
poorly learned. If you teach both sickness and healing,
you are both a poor teacher and a poor learner.
41
Healing is the one ability which everyone can develop and must
develop if he is to be healed. Healing is the Holy Spirit's form of
communication and the only one He knows. He recognizes no other,
because He does not accept the ego's confusion of mind and body. Minds
can communicate, but they cannot hurt. The body in the service
of the ego can hurt other bodies, but this cannot occur unless
the body has already been confused with the mind. This fact,
too, can be used either for healing or for magic, but you must remember
that magic is always the belief that healing is harmful.
This is its totally insane premise, and so it proceeds accordingly.
42
Healing only strengthens. Magic always tries to weaken.
Healing perceives nothing in the healer that everyone else does
not share with him. Magic always sees something
"special" in the healer which he believes he can offer as a gift to
someone who does not have it. He may believe that the gift comes
from God to him, but it is quite evident that he does not
understand God if he thinks he has something that others lack.
You might well ask, then, why some healing can result from this
kind of thinking, and there is a reason for this.
43
However misguided the "magical healer" may be, he is also trying
to help. He is conflicted and unstable, but at times he is
offering something to the Sonship, and the only thing the Sonship can accept
is healing. When the so-called "healing" works, then, the impulse to
help and to be helped have coincided. This is coincidental
because the healer may not be experiencing himself as truly
helpful at the time, but the belief that he is, in the mind of
another, helps him.
44
The Holy Spirit does not work by chance, and healing that is of
Him always works. Unless the healer always heals by Him,
the results will vary. Yet healing itself is consistence
since only consistence is conflict-free, and only the
conflict-free are whole. By accepting exceptions and
acknowledging that he can sometimes heal and sometimes not, the healer
is obviously accepting inconsistency. He is therefore in
conflict and teaching conflict. Can anything of God not
be for all and for always?
45
Love is incapable of any exceptions. Only if there is fear does
the idea of exceptions seem to be meaningful. Exceptions are
fearful because they are made by fear. The "fearful healer" is a
contradiction in terms and is therefore a concept which only a
conflicted mind could possibly perceive as meaningful. Fear does not
gladden. Healing does. Fear always makes exceptions.
Healing never does. Fear produces dissociation because it
induces separation. Healing always produces harmony
because it proceeds from integration.
46
Healing is predictable because it can be counted on. Everything
that is of God can be counted on because everything of God is wholly real.
Healing can be counted on because it is inspired by His Voice
and is in accord with His laws. Yet if healing is consistence,
it cannot be inconsistently understood. Understanding means
consistence because God means consistence. Since that is His
meaning, it is also yours. Your meaning cannot be out of
accord with His because your whole meaning, and your only
meaning, comes from His and is like His. God cannot be
out of accord with Himself, and you cannot be out of
accord with Him. You cannot separate your self from your
Creator, Who created you by sharing His being with you.
47
The unhealed healer wants gratitude from his brothers, but he is
not grateful to them. This is because he thinks he is giving
something to them and is not receiving something equally
desirable in return. His teaching is limited because he is learning
so little. His healing lesson is limited by his own ingratitude, which
is a lesson in sickness. Learning is constant and so vital in
its power for change that a Son of God can recognize his power in one
instant and change the world in the next. That is because by changing his
mind he has changed the most powerful device that was ever created for
change.
48
This in no way contradicts the changelessness of mind as God
created it, but you think that you have changed it as long as
you learn through the ego. This does place you in a position of
needing to learn a lesson which seems contradictory—you must learn to
change your mind about your mind. Only by this can you learn
that it is changeless. When you heal that is exactly what you are
learning. You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by
realizing that he could not have changed his mind. That is how
you perceive the Holy Spirit in him. It is only the Holy Spirit
in him that never changes His mind. He himself must think he can,
or he would not perceive himself as sick. He therefore does not know
what his self is.
49
If you see only the changeless in him, you have not really
changed him at all. By changing your mind about his for
him, you help him undo the change his ego thinks it has made in
him. As you can hear two voices, so you can see in two ways. One way
shows you an image, or better, an idol which you may worship out of fear
but which you will never love. The other shows you only truth, which you
will love because you will understand it. Understanding is appreciation
because what you understand you can identify with, and by making
it part of you, you have accepted it with love.
50
That is how God Himself created you—in understanding, in
appreciation, and in love. The ego is totally unable to understand this,
because it does not understand what it makes; it does not
appreciate it; and it does not love it. It incorporates to take
away. It literally believes that every time it deprives someone of
something, it has increased. We have spoken often of the
increase of the Kingdom by your creations, which can only be
created as you were. The whole glory and perfect joy that is
the Kingdom lies in you to give. Do you not want to give
it?
51
You cannot forget the Father because I am with you, and I
cannot forget Him. To forget me is to forget yourself and Him
Who created you. Our brothers are forgetful. That is why they
need your remembrance of me and Him who created me. Through this
remembrance, you can change their minds about themselves, as I
can change yours. Your minds are so powerful a light that you
can look into theirs and enlighten them, as I can enlighten yours. I do
not want to share my body in communion, because that is to share
nothing. [Would I try to share an illusion with the most holy children
of a most holy Father?] Yet I do want to share my mind with you
because we are of One Mind and that Mind is
ours.
52
See only this Mind everywhere because only this is
everywhere and in everything. It is everything because it
encompasses all things within itself. Blessed are you who
perceive only this, because you perceive only what is true. Come
therefore unto me and learn of the truth in you. The Mind we
share is shared by all our brothers, and as we see them truly, they will
be healed. Let your mind shine with mine upon their minds and by
our gratitude to them, make them aware of the light in them.
53
This light will shine back upon you and on the whole Sonship
because this is your proper gift to God. He will accept it and give it
to the Sonship because it is acceptable to Him and therefore to His
Sons. This is the true communion of the Spirit, Who sees the altar of
God in everyone and, by bringing it to your appreciation, calls
upon you to love God and His creations. You can appreciate the
Sonship only as one. This is part of the Law of Creation and
therefore governs all thought.
54
Although you can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceive
it as fragmented. It is impossible, however, for you to see something in
part of it that you will not attribute to all of it. That
is why attack is never discrete and why attack must be
relinquished entirely. If it is not relinquished
entirely, it is not relinquished at all. Fear and love are equally
reciprocal. They make or create, depending on whether the ego or the
Holy Spirit begets or inspires them, but they will return to the
mind of the thinker, and they will affect his total perception.
That includes his perception of G od, of His creations, and of his own.
He will not appreciate any of them if he regards them fearfully.
He will appreciate all of them if he regards them with love.
55
The mind that accepts attack cannot love. That is because it
believes that it can destroy love and therefore does not
understand what love is. If it does not understand what love is,
it cannot perceive itself as loving. This loses the awareness of
being, induces feelings of unreality, and results in utter confusion.
Your own thinking has done this because of its power, but your own
thinking can also save you from this because its power is not
of your making. Your ability to direct your thinking as you will
is part of its power. If you do not believe you can do this, you
have denied the power of your thought and thus rendered it
powerless in your belief.
56
The ingeniousness of the ego to preserve itself is enormous, but it
stems from the power of the mind, which the ego denies. This
means that the ego attacks what is preserving it, and
this must be a source of extreme anxiety. That is why the ego never
knows what it is doing. It is perfectly logical but clearly insane. The
ego draws upon the one source which is totally inimical to its existence
for its existence. Fearful of perceiving the power of
this source, it is forced to depreciate it. This threatens its own
existence, a state which it finds intolerable.
57
Remaining logical but still insane, the ego resolves this completely
insane dilemma in a completely insane way. It does not perceive its
existence as threatened by projecting the threat onto you and
perceiving your being as nonexistent. This ensures its
continuance if you side with it by guaranteeing that you will not know
your own safety. The ego cannot afford to know anything.
Knowledge is total, and the ego does not believe in totality.
This unbelief is its origin and, while the ego does not love you,
it is faithful to its own antecedents, begetting as it was
begotten.
58
Mind always reproduces as it was produced. Produced by fear, the
ego reproduces fear. This is its allegiance, and this allegiance makes
it treacherous to love, because you are love. Love is your
power, which the ego must deny. It must also deny everything which this
power gives you because it gives you everything. No one who has
everything wants the ego. Its own maker, then, does not want it.
Rejection is therefore the only decision which the ego could possibly
encounter, if the mind which made it knew itself. And if it
recognized any part of the Sonship, it would know
itself.
59
The ego therefore opposes all appreciation, all
recognition, all sane perception, and all knowledge. It
perceives their threat as total because it senses the fact that all
commitments the mind makes are total. Forced, therefore, to
detach itself from you who are mind, it is willing to attach
itself to anything else. But there is nothing else. It
does not follow that the mind cannot make illusions, but it does
follow that if it makes illusions it will believe in them, because that
is how it made them.
60
The Holy Spirit undoes illusions without attacking them merely because
He cannot perceive them at all. They therefore do not exist for Him. He
resolves the apparent conflict which they engender by perceiving
conflict as meaningless. We said before that the Holy Spirit
perceives the conflict exactly as it is, and it is meaningless.
The Holy Spirit does not want you to understand conflict; He
wants you to realize that, because conflict is meaningless, it
cannot be understood. We have already said that understanding
brings appreciation, and appreciation brings love. Nothing else can
be understood because nothing else is real, and therefore
nothing else has meaning.
61
If you will keep in mind what the Holy Spirit offers you, you cannot be
vigilant for anything but God and His Kingdom. The only reason
you find this difficult is because you think there is something
else. Belief does not require vigilance unless it is conflicted.
If it is, there are conflicting components within it which have
engendered a state of war, and vigilance therefore has become essential.
Vigilance has no place at all in peace. It is necessary against beliefs
which are not true and would never have been called upon by the
Holy Spirit if you had not believed the untrue. You cannot deny
that, when you believe something, you have made it true for you.
62
When you believe what God does not know, your thought seems to contradict
His, and this makes it appear as if you are attacking Him. We
have repeatedly emphasized that the ego does believe it can
attack God and tries to persuade you that you have done this. If
the mind cannot attack, the ego proceeds perfectly logically to
the position that you cannot be mind. By not seeing you as you are,
it can see itself as it wants to be. Aware of its
weakness, the ego wants your allegiance, but not as you really are. The
ego therefore wants to engage your mind in its own delusional
system, because otherwise the light of your understanding would
dispel it.
63
The ego wants no part of truth because the truth is that the ego
is not true. If truth is total, the untrue cannot exist.
Commitment to either must be total, since they cannot coexist in
your minds without splitting them. If they cannot coexist in
peace and if you want peace, you must give up the idea of
conflict entirely and for all time. [This
requires vigilance only as long as you do not recognize what
is true.]
While you believe that two totally contradictory thought systems share
truth, your need for vigilance is apparent. Your minds are
dividing their allegiance between two kingdoms, and you are totally
committed to neither.
64
Your identification with the Kingdom is totally beyond question, except
by you when you are thinking insanely. What you are is not established
by your perception and is not influenced by it at all. All
perceived problems in identification at any level are not
problems of fact. They are problems of understanding, since they
mean that you believe what you can understand is up to
you to decide. The ego believes this totally, being fully
committed to it. It is not true. The ego therefore is totally committed
to untruth, perceiving in total contradiction to the Holy Spirit and to
the knowledge of God.
65
You can be perceived with meaning only by the Holy Spirit
because your being is the knowledge of God. Any belief that you
accept which is apart from this will obscure God's Voice in you and will
therefore obscure God to you. Unless you perceive His creation
truly, you cannot know the Creator, since God and His creation are not
separate. The Oneness of the Creator and the creation is your wholeness,
your sanity, and your limitless power. This limitless power is God's
gift to you, because it is what you are. If you dissociate your
mind from it, you are perceiving the most powerful force in the universe
[of thought] as if it were weak because you do not believe you
are part of it.
66
Perceived without your part in it, God's creation is
perceived as weak, and those who see themselves as weakened do
attack. The attack must be blind, however, because there is nothing to
attack. Therefore, they make up images, perceive them as unworthy, and
attack them for their unworthiness. That is all the world of the ego is—nothing.
It has no meaning. It does not exist. Do not try to understand it,
because if you do you are believing that it can be understood
and is therefore capable of being appreciated and loved. That would
justify it, and it cannot be justified. You cannot make the
meaningless meaningful. This can only be an insane attempt.
67
Allowing insanity to enter your minds means that you have not judged
sanity as wholly desirable. If you want something else,
you will make something else, but because it is
something else, it will attack your thought system and divide your
allegiance. You cannot create in this divided state, and you must be
vigilant against this divided state, because only peace can be
extended. Your divided minds are blocking the extension of the Kingdom,
and its extension is your joy. If you do not extend the Kingdom,
you are not thinking with your Creator and creating as He created.
68
In this depressing state, the Holy Spirit reminds you gently that you
are sad because you are not fulfilling your function as co-creators with
God and are therefore depriving yourselves of joy. This is not God's
Will but yours. If your will is out of accord with God's, you
are willing without meaning. Yet because God's Will is unchangeable, no
real conflict of will is possible. This is the Holy Spirit's
perfectly consistent teaching.
69
Creation, not separation, is your will because it is
God's, and nothing that opposes this means anything at all. Being a
perfect accomplishment, the Sonship can only accomplish perfectly,
extending the joy in which it was created and identifying itself with
both its Creator and its creations, knowing they are one.
70
Whenever you deny a blessing to a brother, you will feel
deprived. This is because denial is as total as love. It is as
impossible to deny part of the Sonship as it is to love it in part. Nor
is it possible to love it totally at times. You cannot be totally
committed sometimes. Remember a very early lesson—"Never
underestimate the power of denial." It has no power in itself, but you
can give it the power of your mind, whose power is without limit
of any kind. If you use it to deny reality, reality is gone for
you. Reality
cannot be partly appreciated. That is why denying any part of it
means you have lost awareness of all of it.
71
That is the negative side of the law as it operates in this world. Yet
denial is a defense, and so it is as capable of being used positively as
it is of being used destructively. Used negatively it will be
destructive because it will be used for attack, but in the service of
the Holy Spirit, [the law becomes as beneficent as all of the laws of
God. Stated positively,] the law requires you to recognize only part
of reality to appreciate all of it. Mind is too powerful to be
subject to exclusion. You will never be able to exclude yourself
from what you project.
72
When a brother acts insanely, he is offering you an opportunity to bless
him. His need is yours. You need the blessing you can
offer him. There is no way for you to have it except by giving
it. This is the law of God, and it has no exceptions. What you
deny you lack, not because it is lacking, but because
you have denied it in another and are therefore not aware of it in you.
Every response you make is determined by what you think you are,
and what you want to be is what you think you are.
Therefore, what you want to be determines every response you make.
73
You do not need God's blessing since that you have forever, but you do
need yours. The picture you see of yourselves is deprived,
unloving, and very vulnerable. You cannot love this. Yet you can
very easily escape from it or, better, leave it behind. You are not there,
and that is not you. Do not see this picture in anyone, or you
have accepted it as you. All illusions about the Sonship
are dispelled together, as they were made together. Teach no one
that he is what you would not want to be. Your brother
is the mirror in which you will see the image of yourself as long as
perception lasts. And perception will last until the Sonship
knows itself as whole.
74
You made perception, and it must last as long as you want it.
Illusions are investments. They will last as long as you value them.
Values are relative, but they are powerful because they are mental
judgments. The only way to dispel illusions is to withdraw all
investment from them, and they will have no life for you because you
have put them out of your mind. While you include them in
it, you are giving life to them, except there is nothing there
to receive your gift.
75
The gift of life is yours to give because it was given you.
You are unaware of your gift because you do not give it. You
cannot make nothing live since it cannot be enlivened.
Therefore, you are not extending the gift you both have and are, and so
you do not know your being. All confusion comes from not
extending life, since that is not the Will of your Creator. You
can do nothing apart from Him, and you do do nothing apart from
Him. Keep His way to remember yourselves and teach His way, lest you
forget yourselves. Give only honor to the Sons of the living God and
count yourselves among them gladly.
76
Only honor is a fitting gift for those whom God Himself created
worthy of honor and whom He honors. Give them the appreciation which God
accords them always because they are His beloved Sons in whom He is well
pleased. You cannot be apart from them because you are not apart
from Him. Rest in His love and protect your rest by loving. But love everything
He created of which you are a part, or you cannot learn of His peace and
accept His gift for yourself and as yourself. You cannot
know your own perfection until you have honored all those who were
created like you.
77
One Child of God is the only teacher sufficiently worthy to
teach another. One Teacher is in all your minds, and He teaches the same
lesson to all. He always teaches you the inestimable worth of every
Son of God, teaching it with infinite patience born of the infinite love
for which He speaks. Every attack is a call for His patience,
since only His patience can translate attack into blessing.
Those who attack do not know they are blessed. They attack
because they believe they are deprived. Give therefore of your
abundance and teach your brothers theirs. Do not share their
delusions of scarcity, or you will perceive yourself as lacking.
78
Attack could never promote attack unless you perceived it as a means of
depriving you of something you want. Yet you cannot lose
anything unless you did not value it and therefore did not want
it. This makes you feel deprived of it, and by projecting your
own rejection, you believe that others are taking it from you.
One must be fearful if he believes that his brother is attacking
him to tear the Kingdom of Heaven from him. This is the ultimate basis
for all of the ego's projection.
79
Being the part of your mind which does not believe it is responsible for
itself and being without allegiance to God, the ego is incapable
of trust. Projecting its insane belief that you have been
treacherous to your Creator, it believes that your brothers, who
are as incapable of this as you are, are out to take God from
you. Whenever a brother attacks another, this is what he
believes. Projection always sees your will in others. If you
will to separate yourself from God, that is what you will think
others are doing to you.
80
You are the Will of God. Do not accept anything else as
your will, or you are denying what you are. Deny this and you will
attack, believing you have been attacked. But see the love of
God in you, and you will see it everywhere because it is
everywhere. See His abundance in everyone, and you will know that you
are in Him with them. They are part of you, as you are part of
God. You are as lonely without understanding this as God Himself
is lonely when His Sons do not know Him. The peace of God is
understanding this. There is only one way out of the world's
thinking, just as there was only one way into it. Understand
totally by understanding totality.
81
Perceive any part of the ego's thought system as wholly insane,
wholly delusional, and wholly undesirable, and you have correctly
evaluated all of it. This correction enables you to perceive any
part of creation as wholly real, wholly perfect, and wholly
desirable. Wanting this only, you will have this
only, and giving this only you will be only this. The gifts you
offer to the ego are always experienced as sacrifices, but the
gifts you offer to the Kingdom are gifts to you. They will
always be treasured by God because they belong to His beloved Sons who
belong to Him. All power and glory are yours because the Kingdom
is His.
82
We once said that without projection there can be no anger, but it is
also true that without projection there can be no love. Projection is a
fundamental law of the mind and therefore one which always
operates. It is the law by which you create and were created. It is the
law which unifies the Kingdom and keeps it in the Mind of God. To the
ego, the law is perceived as a way of getting rid of something
it does not want. To the Holy Spirit, it is the fundamental law
of sharing by which you give what you value in order to keep it
in your own mind.
83
Projection, to the Holy Spirit, is the law of extension. To the ego, it
is the law of deprivation. It therefore produces abundance or scarcity,
depending on how you choose to apply it. This choice is up to
you, but it is not up to you to decide whether or not you will utilize
projection. Every mind must project because that is how it
lives, and every mind is life. The ego's use of projection must
be fully understood before its inevitable association between projection
and anger can be finally undone.
84
The ego always tries to preserve conflict. It is very ingenious
in devising ways which seem to diminish conflict because it does
not want you to find conflict so intolerable that you will insist
on giving it up. Therefore, the ego tries to persuade you that it
can free you of conflict, lest you give the ego up and free yourself.
The ego, using its own warped version of the laws of God, utilizes the
power of the mind only to defeat the mind's real purpose. It
projects conflict from your mind to other minds in an
attempt to persuade you that you have gotten rid of it. This has
several fallacies which may not be so apparent.
85
Strictly speaking, conflict cannot be projected, precisely because
it cannot be fully shared. Any attempt to keep part of it and
get rid of another part does not really mean anything. Remember
that a conflicted teacher is a poor teacher and a poor learner.
His lessons are confused, and their transfer value is severely limited by
his confusion. A second fallacy is the idea that you can get rid
of something you do not want by giving it away. Giving it is how
you keep it. The belief that by giving it out you have
excluded it from within is a complete distortion of the power of
extension.
86
That is why those who project from the ego are vigilant for their own
safety. They are afraid that their projections will return and
hurt them. They do believe they have blotted their projections
from their own minds, but they also believe their projections
are trying to creep back into them. That is because the
projections have not left their minds, and this in turn forces
them to engage in compulsive activity in order not to recognize
this. You cannot perpetuate an illusion about another without
perpetuating it about yourself. There is no way out of this because it
is impossible to fragment the mind.
87
To fragment is to break into pieces, and mind cannot attack or be
attacked. The belief that it can, a fallacy which the ego always
makes, underlies its whole use of projection. It does not understand
what mind is and therefore does not understand what you
are. Yet its existence is dependent on your mind because the ego is
your belief. The ego is therefore a confusion in identification which
never had a consistent model and never developed consistently. It is the
distorted product of the misapplication of the laws of God by distorted
minds which are misusing their own power.
88
Do not be afraid of the ego. It does depend on your mind
and, as you made it by believing in it, so you can dispel it by
withdrawing belief from it. Do not project the responsibility
for your belief in it onto anyone else, or you will preserve
the belief. When you are willing to accept sole responsibility for the
ego's existence yourself, you will have laid aside all anger and
all attack because they come from an attempt to project
responsibility for your own errors. But having accepted
the errors as yours, do not keep them. Give them over quickly to
the Holy Spirit to be undone completely so that all their
effects will vanish from your minds and from the Sonship as a whole.
89
The Holy Spirit will teach you to perceive beyond belief because
truth is beyond belief, and His perception is true. The
ego can be completely forgotten at any time because it was
always a belief that is totally incredible. No one can keep a
belief he has judged to be unbelievable. The more you learn about the
ego, the more you realize that it cannot be believed. The
incredible cannot be understood because it is unbelievable. The
utter meaninglessness of all perception that comes from the unbelievable
must be apparent, but it is not recognized as beyond belief
because it was made by belief.
90
The whole purpose of this course is to teach you that the ego is
unbelievable and will forever be unbelievable. You who made the
ego by believing the unbelievable cannot make this judgment alone. By
accepting the Atonement for yourself, you are deciding against
the belief that you can be alone, thus dispelling the idea of
separation and affirming your true identification with the whole Kingdom
as literally part of you. This identification is as beyond doubt
as it is beyond belief. Your wholeness has no limits because being is in
infinity.
91
Only you can limit your creative power, but God wills to release
it. He no more wills you to deprive yourself of your creations than He
wills to deprive Himself of His. Do not withhold your gifts to the
Sonship, or you withhold yourself from God. Selfishness is of the ego,
but self-fullness is of the Soul because that is how God created it. The
Holy Spirit is the part of the mind that lies between the ego and the
Soul, mediating between them always in favor of the Soul. To the
ego, this is partiality, and it therefore responds as if it were the
part that is being sided against. To the Soul, this is truth
because it knows its fullness and cannot conceive of any part from which
it is excluded.
92
The Soul knows that the consciousness of all its brothers is
included in its own, as it is included in God. The power of the
whole Sonship and of its Creator is therefore the Soul's own
fullness, rendering its creations equally whole and equal in perfection.
The ego cannot prevail against a totality which includes God, and any
totality must include God. Everything He created is given all
His power because it is part of Him and shares His Being with Him.
Creating is the opposite of loss, as blessing is the opposite of
sacrifice. Being must be extended. That is how it retains the
knowledge of itself.
93
The Soul yearns to share its being as its Creator did. Created by
sharing, its will is to create. It does not wish to contain God
but to extend His Being. The extension of God's Being is the
Soul's only function. Its fullness cannot be contained any more
than can the fullness of its Creator. Fullness is extension. The
ego's whole thought system blocks extension and thus blocks your only
function. It therefore blocks your joy, and that is why you perceive
yourselves as unfulfilled. Unless you create, you are
unfulfilled; but God does not know of unfulfillment, and therefore you must
create. You may not know your own creations, but this can no
more interfere with their reality than your unawareness of your Soul can
interfere with its being.
94
The Kingdom is forever extending because it is in the Mind of God. You
do not know your joy because you do not know your own
self-fullness. Exclude any part of the Kingdom from yourself,
and you are not whole. A split mind cannot perceive its fullness
and needs the miracle of its wholeness to dawn upon it and heal it. This
reawakens the wholeness in it and restores it to the Kingdom because of
its acceptance of wholeness. The full appreciation of its
self-fullness makes selfishness impossible and extension inevitable.
That is why there is perfect peace in the Kingdom. Every Soul is
fulfilling its function, and only complete fulfillment is peace.
95
Insanity appears to add to reality, but no one would claim that
what it adds is true. Insanity is therefore the non-extension of
truth, which blocks joy because it blocks creation and thus blocks
self-fulfillment. The unfulfilled must be depressed because
their self-fullness is unknown to them. Your creations are protected for
you because the Holy Spirit, Who is in your mind, knows of them and can
bring them into your awareness whenever you will let Him. They
are there as part of your own being because your fulfillment includes
them. The creations of every Son of God are yours since every creation
belongs to everyone, being created for the Sonship as a whole.
96
You have not failed to add to the inheritance of the Sons of God
and thus have not failed to secure it for yourselves. If it was the Will
of God to give it to you, He gave it forever. If it was His Will that
you have it forever, He gave you the means for keeping it, and you
have done so. Disobeying God's Will is meaningful only to the
insane. In truth it is impossible. Your self-fullness is as boundless as
God's. Like His, it extends forever and in perfect peace. Its radiance
is so intense that it creates in perfect joy, and only the whole can be
born of its wholeness.
97
Be confident that you have never lost your identity and the extensions
which maintain it in wholeness and peace. Miracles are an expression
of this confidence. They are reflections both of your own proper
identification with your brothers and of your own awareness that your
identification is maintained by extension. The miracle is a lesson
in total perception. By including any part of totality in
the lesson, you have included the whole. You have said that when
you write of the Kingdom and your creations which belong in it, you are
describing what you do not know. That is true in a sense, but no
more true than your failure to acknowledge the whole result of the ego's
premises. The Kingdom is the result of premises, just as this world is.
98
You have carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion,
which is total confusion about everything. Yet you do not really
believe this, or you could not possibly maintain it. If you
really saw this result, you could not want it. The only reason
why you could possibly want any part of it is because you do not
see the whole of it. You are willing to look at the ego's premises but not
at their logical outcome. Is it not possible that you have done the same
thing with the premises of God?
99
Your creations are the logical outcome of His premises. His
thinking has established them for you. They are therefore there,
exactly where they belong. They belong in your mind as part of
your identification with His, but your state of mind and your
recognition of what is in your mind depend at any given moment
on what you believe about your mind. Whatever these beliefs may
be, they are the premises which will determine what you accept into
your mind. It is surely clear that you can both accept into your mind
what is not really there and deny what is. Neither of these
possibilities requires further elaboration here, but both are clearly
indefensible, even if you elect to defend them.
100
Yet the function which God Himself gave your minds through His you may
deny, but you cannot prevent. It is the logical outcome of what you are.
The ability to see a logical outcome depends on the willingness
to see it, but its truth has nothing to do with your willingness at all.
Truth is God's Will. Share His Will, and you
share what He knows. Deny His Will as yours, and you are denying
His Kingdom and yours. The Holy Spirit will direct you only so
as to avoid pain. The undoing of pain must obviously avoid pain. Surely
no one would object to this goal if he recognized it. The
problem is not whether what the Holy Spirit says is true, but whether
you want to listen to what He says.
101
You no more recognize what is painful than you know what is joyful and
are in fact very apt to confuse the two. The Holy Spirit's main function
is to teach you to tell them apart. However strange it may seem
that this is necessary, it obviously is. The reason is equally
obvious. What is joyful to you is painful to the ego and, as
long as you are in doubt about what you are, you will be
confused about joy and pain. This confusion is the cause of the whole
idea of sacrifice. Obey the Holy Spirit, and you will be giving
up the ego. But you will be sacrificing nothing. On the
contrary, you will be gaining everything. If you believed this,
there would be no conflict.
102
That is why you need to demonstrate the obvious to yourself. It
is not obvious to you. You believe that doing the opposite
of God's Will can be better for you. You also believe that it is
possible to do the opposite of God's Will. Therefore,
you believe that an impossible choice is open to you and one which is
both very fearful and very desirable. Yet God wills. He
does not wish. Your will is as powerful as His because
it is His. The ego's wishes do not mean anything, because the
ego wishes for the impossible. You can wish for the impossible,
but you can will only with God. This is the ego's weakness and your
strength.
103
The Holy Spirit always sides with you and with your strength. As
long as you avoid His guidance in any way, you want to be weak.
Yet weakness is frightening. What else, then, can this decision
mean except that you want to be fearful? The Holy Spirit never
asks for sacrifice, but the ego always does. When you are
confused about this very clear distinction in motivation, it can
only be due to projection. Projection of this kind is a
confusion in motivation and, given this confusion, trust becomes
impossible.
104
No one obeys gladly a guide he does not trust, but this does not mean
that the guide is untrustworthy. In this case, it always
means that the follower is. However, this too is merely a matter
of his own belief. Believing that he can betray, he believes
that everything can betray him. Yet this is only because he has
elected to follow false guidance. Unable to follow this guidance
without fear, he associates fear with guidance and
refuses to follow any guidance at all. [If the result of this
decision is confusion, this is hardly surprising.] The Holy Spirit is
perfectly trustworthy, as you are. God Himself trusts you, and
therefore your trustworthiness is beyond question. It will
always remain beyond question, however much you may question it.
105
We said before that you are the Will of God. His Will is not an
idle wish, and your identification with His Will is not
optional, since it is what you are. Sharing His Will with me is
not really open to choice, though it may seem to be. The whole
separation lies in this fallacy. The only way out of the fallacy
is to decide that you do not have to decide anything. Everything
has been given you by God's decision. That is His Will,
and you can not undo it. Even the relinquishment of your false
decision-making prerogative, which the ego guards so jealously, is not
accomplished by your wish. It was accomplished for you by the
Will of God, Who has not left you comfortless. His Voice will
teach you how to distinguish between pain and joy and will lead
you out of the confusion which you have made. There is no
confusion in the mind of a Son of God whose will must be the
Will of the Father because the Father's Will is His Son.
106
Miracles are in accord with the Will of God Whose Will you do
not know because you are confused about what you will. This
means that you are confused about what you are. If you are God's
Will and do not accept His Will, you are denying joy.
The miracle is therefore a lesson in what joy is. Being a lesson
in sharing, it is a lesson in love, which is joy. Every miracle
is thus a lesson in truth, and by offering truth you are learning the
difference between pain and joy.
107
The Holy Spirit will always guide you truly because your
joy is His. This is His Will for everyone because He speaks for
the Kingdom of God which is joy. Following Him is therefore the
easiest thing in the world and the only thing that is easy,
because it is not of the world and is therefore natural. The
world goes against your nature, being out of accord with God's
laws. The world perceives orders of difficulty in everything. This is
because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable. By demonstrating
to yourselves that there is no order of difficulty in miracles,
you will convince yourselves that in your natural state there is
no difficulty because it is a state of grace.
108
Grace is the natural state of every Son of God. When he is not
in a state of grace, he is out of his natural environment and does not
function well. Everything he does becomes a strain because he was not
created for the environment that he has made. He therefore cannot
adapt to it, nor can he adapt it to him. There is no
point in trying. A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is
with God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience
strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only
environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond
anything he can make.
109
Consider the kingdom you have made and judge its worth fairly.
Is it worthy to be a home for a Child of God? Does it protect his peace
and shine love upon him? Does it keep his heart untouched by fear and
allow him to give always without any sense of loss? Does it teach him
that this giving is his joy and that God Himself thanks him for
his giving? That is the only environment in which you can be
happy. You cannot make it any more than you can make yourselves. It has
been created for you, as you were created for it. God watches
over His Children and denies them nothing. Yet when they deny Him, they
do not know this, because they deny themselves everything.
110
You who could give the love of God to everything you see and touch and
remember are literally denying Heaven to yourselves. I call upon you
again to remember that I have chosen you to teach the Kingdom to
the Kingdom. There are no exceptions to this lesson, because the lack of
exceptions is the lesson. Every Son who returns to the Kingdom
with this lesson in his heart has healed the Sonship and given thanks to
God. Everyone who learns this lesson has become the perfect teacher
because he has learned it of the Holy Spirit, Who wants to teach him
everything He knows. When a mind has only light, it knows
only light. Its own radiance shines all around it and extends out into
the darkness of other minds, transforming them into majesty.
111
The Majesty of God is there for you to recognize and appreciate and know.
Perceiving the Majesty of God as your brother is to accept your
own inheritance. God gives only equally. If you recognize His
gift in anyone else, you have acknowledged what He has given you.
Nothing is as easy to perceive as truth. This is the perception which is
immediate, clear, and natural. You have trained yourselves not
to see it, and this has been very difficult for you. Out of your
natural environment, you may well ask, "What is truth?" since truth is
the environment by which and for which you were created.
112
You do not know yourselves, because you do not know your
Creator. You do not know your creations, because you do not know your
brothers, who created them with you. We said before that only
the whole Sonship is worthy to be co-creator with God because only the
whole Sonship can create like Him. Whenever you heal a brother
by recognizing his worth, you are acknowledging his power to
create and yours. He cannot have lost what you
recognize, and you must have the glory you see in him. He is a
co-creator with God with you. Deny his creative power,
and you are denying yours and that of God, Who created you. You
cannot deny part of truth. You do not know your creations because you do
not know their creator. You do not know yourselves because you do not
know yours.
113
Your creations cannot establish your reality any more than you can
establish God's. But you can know both. Being is known by
sharing. Because God shared His Being with you, you can know
Him. But you must also know all He created to know what they
have shared. Without your Father, you will not know your fatherhood. The
Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like
the Sons as they are like the Father. Know then the Sons of God, and you
will know all creation.
1
You are hampered in your progress by your demands to know what you do not
know. This is actually a way of holding on to deprivation. You cannot
reasonably object to following instructions in a course for
knowing on the grounds that you do not know. The need for the
course is implicit in your objection. Knowledge is not the motivation
for learning this course. Peace is. As the prerequisite for
knowledge, peace must be learned. This is only because those who
are in conflict are not peaceful, and peace is the condition
of knowledge because it is the condition of the Kingdom.
2
Knowledge will be restored when you meet its conditions. This is not a
bargain made by God, Who makes no bargains. It is merely the
result of your misuse of His laws on behalf of a will that is not His.
Knowledge is His Will. If you are opposing His Will, how
can you have knowledge? I have told you what knowledge offers you, but
it is clear that you do not regard this as wholly desirable. If you did,
you would hardly be willing to throw it away so readily when the ego
asks for your allegiance. The distraction of the ego seems to interfere
with your learning, but the ego has no power to distract you
unless you give it the power.
3
The ego's voice is a
hallucination. You cannot expect it to say, "I am not real."
Hallucinations are inaccurate perceptions of reality. Yet you
are not asked to dispel them alone. You are merely asked to evaluate
them in terms of their results to you. If you do not want them
on the basis of loss of peace, they will be removed from your mind for
you. Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war does
deprive you of peace. Yet in this war there is no opponent. This
is the reinterpretation of reality which you must make to secure peace,
and the only one you need ever make.
4
Those whom you perceive as opponents are part of your peace,
which you are giving up by attacking them. How can you have
what you give up? You share to have, but you do not give it up
yourself. When you give up peace, you are excluding yourself
from it. This is a condition which is so alien to the Kingdom that you
cannot understand the state which prevails within it. Your past learning
must have taught you the wrong things simply because it has not made you
happy. On this basis alone, its value should be questioned.
5
If learning aims at change, and that is always its purpose, are
you satisfied with the changes your learning has brought you?
Dissatisfaction with learning outcomes must be a sign of learning
failure, since it means that you did not get what you want. The
curriculum of the Atonement is the opposite of the curriculum you have
established for yourselves, but so is its outcome. If the
outcome of yours has made you unhappy and if you want a
different one, a change in the curriculum is obviously necessary.
6
The first change that must be introduced is a change in direction.
A meaningful curriculum cannot be inconsistent. If it is planned
by two teachers, each believing in diametrically opposed ideas, it
cannot be integrated. If it is carried out by these two teachers
simultaneously, each one merely interferes with the other. This
leads to fluctuation, but not to change. The volatile have
no direction. They cannot choose one because they cannot
relinquish the other, even if the other does not exist. Their conflicted
curriculum teaches them all directions exist and gives them no
rationale for choice.
7
The total senselessness of such a curriculum must be fully recognized
before a real change in direction becomes possible. You cannot
learn simultaneously from two teachers who are in total
disagreement about everything. Their joint curriculum presents an
impossible learning task. They are teaching you entirely
different things in entirely different ways, which might be
possible except for the crucial fact that both are teaching you
about yourself. Your reality is unaffected by both, but if you listen
to both, your mind will be split about what your reality is.
8
There is a rationale for choice. Only one Teacher knows
what your reality is. If learning that is the purpose of the
curriculum, you must learn it of Him. The ego does not know what
it is trying to teach. It is trying to teach you what you are without
knowing it. The ego is expert only in confusion. It does not understand
anything else. As a teacher, then, it is totally confused and totally
confusing. Even if you could disregard the Holy Spirit entirely,
which is quite impossible, you could learn nothing from the ego because
the ego knows nothing.
9
Is there any possible reason for choosing a teacher such as
this? Does the total disregard of anything it teaches make anything but
sense? Is this the teacher to whom a Son of God should turn to
find himself? The ego has never given you a sensible answer to anything.
Simply on the grounds of your own experience with the ego's teaching,
should not this alone disqualify it as your future teacher? Yet the ego
has done more harm to your learning than this alone. Learning is joyful
if it leads you along your natural path and facilitates the development
of what you have. When you are taught against your
nature, however, you will lose by your learning because your
learning will imprison you. Your will is in your nature and
therefore cannot go against it.
10
The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free because
you will not listen to it. It is not your will to be
imprisoned because your will is free. That is why the ego is the
denial of free will. It is never God who coerces you
because He shares His Will with you. His Voice teaches only
His Will, but that is not the Holy Spirit's lesson because that is what
you are. The lesson is that your will and God's cannot
be out of accord because they are one. This is the undoing of everything
the ego tries to teach. It is not, then, only the direction of the
curriculum which must be unconflicted, but also the content.
11
The ego wants to teach you that you want to oppose God's Will.
This unnatural lesson cannot be learned, but the attempt
to learn it is a violation of your own freedom and makes you afraid of
your will because it is free. 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. 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.
12
We said before that the Holy Spirit teaches you the difference between
pain and joy. That is the same as saying that He teaches you the
difference between imprisonment and freedom. You cannot make
this distinction without Him. That is because you have taught
yourself that imprisonment is freedom. Believing them to be the
same, how can you tell them apart? Can you ask the part of your
mind that taught you to believe they are the same to teach you
the difference between them?
13
The Holy Spirit's teaching takes only one direction and has only
one goal. His direction is freedom, and His goal is God. Yet He
cannot conceive of God without you because it is not God's Will
to be without you. 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. This is freedom and this is joy.
Deny yourself this and you are denying God His Kingdom because
He created you for this. When we said, "All power and glory are
yours because the Kingdom is His," this is what we meant.
14
The Will of God is without limit, and all power and glory lie within it.
It is boundless in strength and in love and in peace. It has no
boundaries because its extension is unlimited, and it encompasses all
things because it created all things. By creating all things, it made
them part of itself. You are the Will of God because this is how
you were created. Because your Creator creates only like
Himself, you are like Him. You are part of Him Who is
all power and glory and are therefore as unlimited as He is.
15
To what else except all power and glory can the Holy Spirit
appeal to restore God's Kingdom? His appeal, then, is merely to what the
Kingdom is and for its own acknowledgment of what it is. When
you acknowledge this, you bring the acknowledgment automatically to
everyone because you have acknowledged everyone. By your
recognition you awaken theirs, and through theirs yours
is extended. Awakening runs easily and gladly through the Kingdom in
answer to the Call of God. This is the natural response of every Son of
God to the Voice of his Creator because it is the Voice for his
creations and for his own extension.
16
Glory be to God in the highest and to you because He has so
willed it. Ask and it shall be given you, because it has already been
given. Ask for light and learn that you are light. If you want
understanding and enlightenment, you will learn it because your
will to learn it is your decision to listen to the Teacher who knows
of light and can therefore teach it to you. There is no limit on
your learning because there is no limit on your minds. There is
no limit on His will to teach because He was created [by unlimited Will
in order] to teach. Knowing His function
perfectly, He wills to fulfill it perfectly, because that is His joy and
yours.
17
To fulfill the Will of God perfectly is the only joy and peace that can
be fully known because it is the only function that can be fully experienced.
When this is accomplished, then, there is no other experience.
Yet the wish for other experience will block its accomplishment
because God's Will cannot be forced upon you, being an experience of
total willingness. The Holy Spirit knows how to teach this, but
you do not. That is why you need Him and why God gave Him
to you. Only His teaching will release your will to God's,
uniting it with His power and glory and establishing them as yours.
You share them as God shares them because this is the natural outcome of
their being.
18
The Will of Father and of the Son are one together by their
extension. Their extension is the result of their oneness,
holding their unity together by extending their joint will. This
is perfect creation by the perfectly created in union with Perfect
Creator. The Father must give fatherhood to His Son because His
own Fatherhood must be extended outward. You who belong in God have the
holy function of extending His Fatherhood by placing no limits
upon it. Let the Holy Spirit teach you how to do this, for you
will know what it means of God Himself.
19
When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As you see him,
you will see yourself. As you treat him, you will treat yourself. As you
think of him, you will think of yourself. Never forget this, for in him
you will find yourself or lose sight of yourself. Whenever two Sons of
God meet, they are given another chance at salvation. Do not leave
anyone without giving salvation to him and receiving it
yourself, for I am always there with you in remembrance of you.
20
The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is know
thyself. There is nothing else to learn. Everyone is looking for
himself and for the power and glory he thinks he has lost. Whenever you
are with anyone, you have another opportunity to find them. Your power
and glory are in him because they are yours. The ego tries to
find them in yourself because it does not know where to look.
The Holy Spirit teaches you that if you look only at yourself,
you cannot find yourself because that is not what you are.
21
Whenever you are with a brother, you are learning what you are because
you are teaching what you are. He will respond either with pain
or with joy, depending on which teacher you are following. He
will be imprisoned or released according to your decision, and so
will you. Never forget your responsibility to him because it is
your responsibility to yourself. Give him his place in
the Kingdom, and you will have yours. The Kingdom cannot
be found alone, and you who are the Kingdom cannot find yourselves
alone.
22
To achieve the goal of the curriculum, then, you cannot listen
to the ego. Its purpose is to defeat its own goal. The
ego does not know this, because it does not know anything. But you
can know this, and you will know it if you are willing to look
at what the ego has made of you. This is your
responsibility, because once you have really done this, you will
accept the Atonement for yourself. What other choice could you make?
Having made this choice, you will begin to learn and understand why you
have believed that when you met someone else, you had thought that he was
someone else. And every holy encounter in which you enter fully
will teach you this is not so.
23
You can encounter only part of yourself because you are part of
God, Who is everything. His power and glory are everywhere, and
you cannot be excluded from them. The ego teaches that your
strength is in you alone. The Holy Spirit teaches that all
strength is in God and therefore in you. God wills no one
suffer. He does not will anyone to suffer for a wrong decision, including
you. That is why He has given you the means for undoing it.
Through His power and glory, all your wrong decisions are undone, completely
releasing you and your brothers from every imprisoning
thought any part of the Sonship has accepted. Wrong decisions
have no power because they are not true. The imprisonment which
they seem to produce is no more true than they are.
24
Power and glory belong to God alone. So do you. God gives whatever
belongs to Him because He gives of Himself, and everything
belongs to Him. Giving of your self is the function He gave you.
Fulfilling it perfectly will teach you what you have of Him, and
this will teach you what you are in Him. You cannot be
powerless to do this because this is your power. Glory is God's
gift to you because that is what He is. See this glory
everywhere to learn what you are.
25
If God's Will for you is complete peace and joy, unless you experience only
this you must be refusing to acknowledge His Will. His Will does
not vacillate, being changeless forever. When you are not at peace, it
can only be because you do not believe you are in Him. Yet He is
all in all. His peace is complete, and you must be included in
it. His laws govern you, because they govern everything. You
cannot exempt yourself from His laws, although you can disobey them. Yet
if you do, and only if you do, you will feel lonely and
helpless, because you are denying yourself everything.
26
I am come as a light into a world that does deny itself
everything. It does this simply by dissociating itself from
everything. It is therefore an illusion of isolation, maintained by fear
of the same loneliness which is its illusion. I have told you
that I am with you always, even to the end of the world. That is why
I am the light of the world. If I am with you in the loneliness of the
world, the loneliness is gone. You cannot maintain the
illusion of loneliness if you are not alone. My purpose, then, is
to overcome the world. I do not attack it, but my light must dispel it
because of what it is.
27
Light does not attack darkness, but it does shine it away. If my
light goes with you everywhere, you shine it away with
me. The light becomes ours, and you cannot abide in darkness any
more than darkness can abide wherever you go. The remembrance of me is
the remembrance of yourself and of Him Who sent me to you. You were in
darkness until God's Will was done completely by any part of the
Sonship. When this was done, it was perfectly accomplished by all.
How else could it be perfectly accomplished? My mission was
simply to unite the will of the Sonship with the Will of the Father by
being aware of the Father's Will myself. This is the awareness I came to
give you, and your problem in accepting it is the
problem of this world. Dispelling it is salvation, and in this sense I am
the salvation of the world.
28
The world must despise and reject me, because the world is the
belief that love is impossible. Your reactions to me are the
reactions of the world to God. If you will accept the fact that I am
with you, you are denying the world and accepting God.
My will is His, and your will to hear me is the decision to hear
His Voice and abide in His Will. As God sent me to you, so will I send
you to others, and I will go to them with you so we can teach
them [union and peace].
29
Do you not think the world needs peace as much as you do? Do you
not want to give it to the world as much as you want to receive
it? For unless you do, you will not receive it. If you will to
have it of me, you must give it. Rehabilitation does not come
from anyone else. You can have guidance from without, but you must accept
it from within. The guidance must [become] what you want, or it
will be meaningless to you. That is why rehabilitation is a
collaborative venture.
30
I can tell you what to do, but this will not help you unless you
collaborate by believing that I know what to do. Only then will
your mind choose to follow me. Without your will, you cannot be
rehabilitated. Motivation to be healed is the crucial factor in
rehabilitation. Without this you are deciding against healing,
and your veto of my will for you makes healing impossible. If
healing is our joint will, unless our wills are joined
you cannot be healed. This is obvious when you consider what
healing is for. Healing is the way in which the separation is
overcome. Separation is overcome by union. It cannot be overcome
by separating.
31
The will to unite must be unequivocal, or the will itself
is divided or not whole. Your will is the means by which you determine
your own condition, because will is the mechanism of decision.
It is the power by which you separate or join and experience pain or joy
accordingly. My will cannot overcome yours, because yours is as
powerful as mine. If it were not so, the Sons of God would be unequal.
All things are possible through our joint will, but my will
alone cannot help you. Your will is as free as mine, and God Himself
would not go against it. I cannot will what God does not
will. I can offer you my will to make yours invincible by this
sharing, but I cannot oppose yours without competing
with it and thereby violating God's Will for you.
32
Nothing God created can oppose your will, as nothing God created can
oppose His. God gave your will its power, which I can only
acknowledge in honor of His. If you want to be like me, I will
help you, knowing that we are alike. If you want to be
different, I will wait until you change your mind. I can teach
you, but only you can choose to listen to my teaching. How else
can it be, if God's Kingdom is freedom? Freedom cannot be
learned by tyranny of any kind, and the perfect equality of all
God's Sons cannot be recognized through the dominion of one will over
another. God's Sons are equal in will, all being the Will of their
Father. This is the only lesson I came to teach, knowing that it
is true.
33
When your will is not mine, it is not our Father's. This means
that you have imprisoned yours and have not let it be
free. Of yourselves you can do nothing, because of yourselves you are
nothing. I am nothing without the Father, and you are nothing
without me, because by denying the Father you deny yourself.
I will always remember you, and in my remembrance of you
lies your remembrance of yourself. In our remembrance of each
other lies our remembrance of God, and in this remembrance lies your
freedom because your freedom is in Him. Join then with me in
praise of Him and you whom He created. This is our gift of
gratitude to Him, which He will share with all His creations, to
whom He gives equally whatever is acceptable to Him. Because it
is acceptable to Him, it is the gift of freedom, which is His
Will for all His Sons. By offering freedom, you will be
free.
34
Freedom is the only gift you can offer to God's Sons, being an acknowledgment
of what they are and what He is. Freedom is creation
because it is love. What you seek to imprison you do not love.
Therefore, when you seek to imprison anyone, including yourself,
you do not love him, and you cannot identify with him.
When you imprison yourself, you are losing sight of your true
identification with me and with the Father. Your identification
is with the Father and with the Son. It cannot be with
one and not the other. If you are part of one, you must be part of the
other because they are one.
35
The Holy Trinity is holy because it is one. If you exclude yourself
from this union, you are perceiving the Holy Trinity as separated. You
must be included in It because It is everything. Unless
you take your place in It and fulfill your function as part of
It, It is as bereft as you are. No part of It can be imprisoned
if Its truth is to be known. Can you be separated from your
identification and be at peace? Dissociation is not a solution; it is a
delusion. The delusional believe that truth will assail them, and
so they do not see it because they prefer the delusion.
Judging truth as something they do not want, they perceive
deception and block knowledge.
36
Help them by offering them your unified will on their behalf, as
I am offering you mine on yours. Alone we can do nothing, but together
our wills fuse into something whose power is far beyond the power of its
separate parts. By not being separate, the Will of God is
established in ours and as ours. This Will is invincible
because it is undivided. The undivided will of the Sonship is the
perfect creator, being wholly in the likeness of God, Whose Will it is.
You cannot be exempt from it if you are to understand what it
is and what you are. By separating your will from mine,
you are exempting yourself from the Will of God, which is
yourself.
37
Yet to heal is still to make whole. Therefore, to heal is to unite
with those who are like you, because perceiving this likeness is
to recognize the Father. If your perfection is in Him and only
in Him, how can you know it without recognizing Him? The
recognition of God is the recognition of yourself. There is
no separation of God and His creation. You will learn this as you learn
that there is no separation of your will and mine. Let
the love of God shine upon you by your acceptance of me. My
reality is yours and His. By joining your will with mine, you
are signifying your awareness that the Will of God is one.
38
God's Oneness and ours are not separate, because His Oneness encompasses
ours. To join with me is to restore His power to you, because we
are sharing it. I offer you only the recognition of His power in
you, but in that lies all truth. As we unite, we unite
with Him. Glory be to the union of God and His holy Sons! All glory lies
in them because they are united. The miracles we do bear witness
to the Will of the Father for His Son and to our joy in uniting with
His Will for us.
39
When you unite with me, you are uniting without the ego, because
I have renounced the ego in myself and therefore cannot unite
with yours. Our union is therefore the way to renounce the ego
in yourself. The truth in both of us is beyond the ego.
By willing that, you have gone beyond it toward truth. Our
success in transcending the ego is guaranteed by God, and I can share
[my perfect confidence in His promise because I know He gave me] this
confidence for both of us and all of us. I bring God's peace
back to all His Children because I received it of Him for us all.
Nothing can prevail against our united wills because nothing can prevail
against God's. Would you know the Will of God for you? Ask it of
me who knows it for you, and you will find it. I will deny you
nothing, as God denies me nothing.
40
Ours is simply the journey back to God, Who is our home. Whenever fear
intrudes anywhere along the road to peace, it is always because
the ego has attempted to join the journey with us and cannot do so.
Sensing defeat and angered by it, the ego regards itself as rejected and
becomes retaliative. You are invulnerable to its retaliation because
I am with you. On this journey, you have chosen me as your companion instead
of the ego. Do not try to hold on to both, or you will try to go in
different directions and will lose the way.
41
The ego's way is not mine, but it is also not yours. The Holy
Spirit has one direction for all minds, and the one He
taught me is yours. Let us not lose sight of His direction
through illusions, for only illusions of another direction can obscure
the one for which God's Voice speaks in all of us. Never accord the ego
the power to interfere with the journey, because it has none,
[and] the journey is the way to what is true. Leave all
deception behind and reach beyond all attempts of the ego to hold you
back. I go before you because I am beyond the ego. Reach
therefore for my hand because you want to transcend the ego. My
will will never be wanting, and if you want to share it
you will. I give it willingly and gladly because I need you as
much as you need me.
42
We are the joint will of the Sonship, whose wholeness is for all.
We begin the journey back by setting out together and gather in
our brothers as we continue together. Every gain in our strength
is offered for all, so they too can lay aside their weakness and add
their strength to us. God's welcome waits for us all, and He will
welcome us as I am welcoming you. Forget not the Kingdom of God for
anything the world has to offer. The world can add nothing to the power
and the glory of God and His holy Sons, but it can blind the
Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and
know God. Only one is true.
43
I am come to tell you that the choice of which is true is not yours. If
it were, you would have destroyed yourselves. Yet God did not will the
destruction of His creations, having created them for eternity. His Will
has saved you, not from yourselves, but from your illusions of
yourselves. He has saved you for yourselves. Let us glorify Him
whom the world denies, for over His Kingdom, it has no power. No one
created by God can find joy in anything except the eternal. That
is not because he is deprived of anything else, but because nothing else
is worthy of him. What God and His Sons create is
eternal, and in this and this only is their joy.
44
Listen to the story of the prodigal son, and learn what God's treasure
is and yours: This son of a loving father left his home and
thought he squandered everything for nothing of any value, although he
did not know its worthlessness at the time. He was ashamed to return to
his father because he thought he had hurt him. Yet when he came home,
the father welcomed him with joy because only the son himself was
his father's treasure. He wanted nothing else.
45
God wants only His Son because His Son is His only treasure. You want your
creations as He wants His. Your creations are your gift to the
Holy Trinity, created in gratitude for your creation. They do
not leave you, any more than you have left your Creator, but
they extend your creation as God extended Himself to you.
Can the creations of God Himself take joy in what is not real? And what
is real except the creations of God and those which are created
like His? Your creations love you as your Soul loves your Father
for the gift of creation. There is no other gift which is
eternal, and therefore there is no other gift which is true.
46
How, then, can you accept anything else or give anything
else and expect joy in return? And what else but joy would you want?
You made neither yourself nor your function. You made only the decision
to be unworthy of both. Yet you could not make yourself unworthy
because you are the treasure of God. What He values is
valuable. There can be no question of its worth because its
value lies in God's sharing Himself with it and establishing its
value forever.
47
Your function is to add to God's treasure by creating yours.
His Will to you is His Will for you. He would not
withhold creation from you because His joy is in it. You cannot
find joy except as God does. His joy lay in creating you,
and He extends His Fatherhood to you so that you can extend yourself as
He did. You do not understand this because you do not understand Him.
No one who does not know his function can understand it, and no one can
know his function unless he knows who he is. Creation is the
Will of God. His Will created you to create. Your will was not created
separate from His, and so it wills as He wills.
48
An "unwilling will" does not mean anything, [because it is] a
contradiction in terms which actually leaves nothing. [You can make
yourself powerless only in a way that has no meaning at all.] When you think
you are unwilling to will with God, you are not thinking. God's
Will is thought. It cannot be contradicted by thought.
God does not contradict Himself, and His Sons, who are like Him,
cannot contradict themselves or Him. Yet their thought is so
powerful that they can even imprison the mind of God's Son if
they so choose. This choice does make the Son's function unknown
to him, but never to his Creator. And because it
is not unknown to his Creator, it is forever knowable to him.
49
There is no question but one you should ever ask of yourself- "Do I want
to know my Father's Will for me?" He will not hide it. He has
revealed it to me because I asked it of Him and learned of what He had
already given. Our function is to function together because apart
from each other we cannot function at all. The whole power of God's Son
lies in all of us, but not in any of us alone. God would not have us be
alone because He does not will to be alone. That is why He
created His Son and gave him the power to create with Him.
50
Our creations are as holy as we are, and we are the Sons of God Himself
and therefore as holy as He is. Through our creations, we extend our
love and thus increase the joy of the Holy Trinity. You do not
understand this for a very simple reason. You who are God's own treasure
do not regard yourselves as valuable. Given this belief, you cannot
understand anything. I share with God the knowledge of the value
He puts upon you. My devotion to you is of Him, being born of my
knowledge of myself and Him. We cannot be separated.
Whom God has joined cannot be separated, and God has joined all His Sons
with Himself. Can you be separated from your life and your being?
51
The journey to God is merely the reawakening of the knowledge of where
you are always and what you are forever. It is a journey without
distance to a goal that has never changed. Truth can only be experienced.
It cannot be described, and it cannot be explained. I can make you aware
of the conditions of truth, but the experience is of God.
Together we can meet its conditions, but truth will dawn upon you of
itself.
52
What God has willed for you is yours. He has given His Will to
His treasure, whose treasure it is. Your heart lies where your treasure
is, as His does. You who are beloved of God are wholly blessed. Learn
this of me, and free the holy will of all those who are as blessed as you
are.
53
Attack is always physical. When attack in any form enters your
mind, you are equating yourself with a body. This is the ego's interpretation
of the body. You do not have to attack physically to accept this
interpretation. You are accepting it simply by the belief that attack
can get you something you want. If you did not believe this, the
idea of attack would have no appeal for you. When you equate yourself
with a body, you will always experience depression. When a Child
of God thinks of himself in this way, he is belittling himself and
seeing his brothers as similarly belittled. Since he can find himself only
in them, he has cut himself off from salvation.
54
Remember that the Holy Spirit interprets the body only as a means of
communication. Being the communication link between God and His
separated Sons, the Holy Spirit interprets everything you have
made in the light of what He is. The ego separates
through the body. The Holy Spirit reaches through it to others.
You do not perceive your brothers as the Holy Spirit does because you do
not interpret their bodies and yours solely as a means of joining their
minds and uniting them with yours and mine. This interpretation
of the body will change your mind entirely about its value. Of itself it
has none.
55
If you use the body for attack, it is harmful to you. If you use
it only to reach the minds of those who believe they are bodies and
teach them through the body that this is not so, you will begin
to understand the power of the mind that is in both of you. If you use
the body for this and only for this, you cannot use it
for attack. In the service of uniting, it becomes a beautiful lesson in
communion, which has value until communion is. This is God's way
of making unlimited what you have limited. The Holy Spirit does not see
the body as you do because He knows the only reality anything
can have is the service it can render God on behalf of the function He
has given it.
56
Communication ends separation. Attack promotes it. The
body is beautiful or ugly, holy or savage, helpful or harmful, according
to the use to which it is put. And in the body of another you will see
the use to which you have put yours. If the body becomes for you a means
which you give to the Holy Spirit to use on behalf of union of the
Sonship, you will not see anything physical except as what it is. Use it
for truth, and you will see it truly. Misuse it, and you will
misunderstand it because you have already done so by misusing
it. Interpret anything apart from the Holy Spirit, and you will
mistrust it. This will lead you to hatred and attack and loss of
peace.
57
Yet all loss comes only from your own misunderstanding. Loss of any
kind is impossible. When you look upon a brother as a physical entity, his
power and glory are lost to you, and so are yours. You have
attacked him, but you must have attacked yourself first. Do not
see him this way for your own salvation, which must bring him his.
Do not allow him to belittle himself in your mind, but give him
freedom from his belief in littleness and thus escape from yours.
As part of you, he is holy. As part of me, you are. To
communicate with part of God Himself is to reach beyond the Kingdom to
its Creator through His Voice, which He has established as part of you.
58
Rejoice, then, that of yourselves you can do nothing. You are not of
yourselves. He of Whom you are has willed your power and glory for
you, with which you can perfectly accomplish His holy Will for you when
you so will it yourself. He has not withdrawn His gifts from you, but you
have withdrawn them from Him. Let no Son of God remain hidden for His
Name's sake because His Name is yours.
59
Remember that the Bible says, "The Word (or thought) was made flesh."
Strictly speaking this is impossible, since it seems to involve the
translation of one order of reality into another. Different orders of
reality merely appear to exist, just as different orders of
miracles do. Thought cannot be made into flesh except by belief, since
thought is not physical. Yet thought is communication,
for which the body can be used. This is the only natural
use to which it can be put. To use the body unnaturally is to
lose sight of the Holy Spirit's purpose and thus to confuse the goal of
His curriculum.
60
There is nothing so frustrating to a learner as to be placed in a
curriculum which he cannot learn. His sense of adequacy suffers, and he
must become depressed. Being faced with an impossible learning
situation, regardless of why it is impossible, is the most depressing
thing in the world. In fact, it is ultimately why the world is
depressing. The Holy Spirit's curriculum is never depressing
because it is a curriculum of joy. Whenever the reaction to learning is
depression, it is only because the goal of the curriculum has been lost
sight of.
61
In the world, not even the body is perceived as whole. Its purpose is
seen as fragmented into many functions which bear little or no
relationship to each other, so that it appears to be ruled by chaos.
Guided by the ego, it is. Guided by the Holy Spirit, it is not.
It becomes only a means by which the part of the mind you have separated
from your Soul can reach beyond its distortions and return to
the Soul. The ego's temple thus becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit,
where devotion to Him replaces devotion to the ego. In this sense, the
body does become a temple to God because His Voice abides in it
by directing the use to which it is put.
62
Healing is the result of using the body solely for
communication. Since this is natural, it heals by making whole, which is
also natural. All mind is whole, and the belief that part of it
is physical, or not mind, is a fragmented (or sick)
interpretation. Mind cannot be made physical, but it can
be made manifest through the physical if it uses the body to go beyond
itself. By reaching out, the mind extends itself. It does not stop
at the body, for if it does, it is blocked in its purpose. A mind which
has been blocked has allowed itself to be vulnerable to attack because
it has turned
against itself.
63
The removal of the blocks, then, is the only way to guarantee
help and healing. Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind
which is working through the body but not in it. If the
mind believes the body is its goal, it will distort its
perception of the body and, by blocking its own extension beyond it,
will induce illness by fostering separation. Perceiving the body
as a separate entity cannot but foster illness because
it is not true. A medium of communication will lose its
usefulness if it is used for anything else. To use a medium of
communication as a medium of attack is an obvious confusion in
purpose.
64
To communicate is to join and to attack is to separate. How can you do
both simultaneously with the same thing and not suffer?
Perception of the body can be unified only by one purpose. This
releases the mind from the temptation to see the body in many lights and
gives it over entirely to the One Light in Which it can be
really understood at all. To confuse a learning device with a curriculum
goal is a fundamental confusion. Learning can hardly be arrested
at its own aids with hope of understanding either the aids or
the learning's real purpose. Learning must lead beyond the body
to the reestablishment of the power of the mind in it. This can be
accomplished only if the mind extends to other minds and does
not arrest itself in its extension.
65
The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness
because only extension is the mind's function. The opposite of joy is
depression. When your learning promotes depression instead of joy, you
cannot be listening to God's joyous Teacher, and you must be learning
amiss. To see a body as anything except a means of pure extension is to
limit your mind and hurt yourself. Health is therefore nothing
more than united purpose. If the body is brought under the purpose of
the mind, the body becomes whole because the mind's purpose is
one. Attack can only be an assumed purpose of the body because apart
from the mind the body has no purpose at all.
66
You are not limited by the body, and thought cannot be
made flesh. Yet mind can be manifested through the body if it goes
beyond it and does not interpret it as limitation. Whenever you
see another as limited to or by the body, you are
imposing this limit on yourself. Are you willing to accept
this, when your whole purpose for learning should be to escape
from limitations? To conceive of the body as a means of attack of any
kind and to entertain even the possibility that joy could possibly
result is a clear-cut indication of a poor learner. He has accepted a
learning goal in obvious contradiction to the unified purpose of the
curriculum and is interfering with his ability to accept its purpose as
his own.
67
Joy is unified purpose, and unified purpose is only God's. When
yours is unified, it is His. Interfere with His purpose, and you
need salvation. You have condemned yourself, but condemnation is
not of God. Therefore, it is not true. No more are any of the results
of your condemnation. When you see a brother as a body, you are
condemning him because you have condemned yourself. Yet if all
condemnation is unreal, and it must be unreal since it is a form
of attack, then it can have no results.
68
Do not allow yourselves to suffer from the results of what is not true.
Free your minds from the belief that this is possible. In its
complete impossibility and your full awareness of its complete
impossibility lie your only hope for release. But what other hope would
you want? Freedom from illusions lies only in not believing
them. There is no attack, but there is unlimited
communication and therefore unlimited power and wholeness. The power of
wholeness is extension. Do not arrest your thought in this world, and
you will open your mind to creation in God.
69
Attitudes toward the body are attitudes toward attack. The ego's
definitions of everything are childish and always based on what
it believes a thing is for. This is because it is incapable of
true generalizations and equates what it sees with the function it
ascribes to it. It does not equate it with what it is.
To the ego, the body is to attack with. Equating you
with the body, it teaches that you are to attack with, because
this is what it believes. The body, then, is not the source of its own
health. The body's condition lies solely in your interpretation of its
function.
70
The reason why definitions in terms of function are inferior is that
they may well be inaccurate. Functions are part of being since they
arise from it, but the relationship is not reciprocal. The whole does
define the part, but the part does not define the whole. This is
as true of knowledge as it is of perception. The reason to know
in part is to know entirely is because of the fundamental difference
between knowledge and perception. In perception the whole is built up of
parts, which can separate and reassemble in different
constellations. Knowledge never changes, so its constellation is
permanent. The only areas in which part-whole relationships have any
meaning are those in which change is possible. There is no
difference between the whole and the part where change is impossible.
71
The body exists in a world which seems to contain two voices
which are fighting for its possession. In this perceived constellation,
the body is regarded as capable of shifting its control from one to the
other, making the concept of both health and sickness possible.
The ego makes a fundamental confusion between means and ends, as it
always does. Regarding the body as an end, the ego has no real
use for it because it is not an end. You must have noticed an
outstanding characteristic of every end that the ego has accepted as its
own. When you have achieved it, it has not satisfied you. This
is why the ego is forced to shift from one end to another without
ceasing, so that you will continue to hope that it can yet offer
you something.
72
It has been particularly difficult to overcome the ego's belief in the
body as an end, because this is synonymous with the belief in attack
as an end. The ego has a real investment in sickness. If you are
sick, how can you object to the ego's firm belief that you are not
invulnerable? This is a particularly appealing argument from the ego's
point of view because it obscures the obvious attack which
underlies the sickness. If you accepted this and also decided against
attack, you could not give this false witness to the ego's stand.
73
It is hard to perceive sickness as a false witness because you
do not realize that it is entirely out of keeping with what you
want. This witness, then, appears to be innocent and trustworthy
because you have not seriously cross-examined him. If you did, you would
not consider sickness such a strong witness on behalf of the ego's
views.
74
A more honest statement would be as follows: Those who want
the ego are predisposed to defend it. Therefore, their choice of
witnesses should be suspect from the beginning. The ego does not call
upon witnesses who would disagree with its case, nor does the Holy
Spirit. We have said that judgment is the function of the
Holy Spirit and one which He is perfectly equipped to fulfill. The ego
as a judge gives anything but an impartial judgment. When the
ego calls on a witness, it has already made the witness an ally.
75
It is still true that the body has no function of itself, because it is
not an end. The ego, however, establishes it as an end
because as such it will lose its true function. This is the
purpose of everything the ego does. Its sole aim is to lose
sight of the function of everything. A sick body does not make any sense.
It could not make sense, because sickness is not what the body
is for. Sickness is meaningful only if the two basic premises on
which the ego's interpretation of the body rests are true. Specifically,
these are that the body is for attack and that you are a body.
Without these premises, sickness is completely inconceivable.
76
Sickness is a way of demonstrating that you can be hurt. It is a
witness to your frailty, your vulnerability, and your extreme need to
depend on external guidance. The ego uses this as its best
argument for your need for its guidance. It dictates endless
prescriptions for avoiding catastrophic outcomes. The Holy
Spirit, perfectly aware of the same data, does not bother to analyze
them at all. If the data are meaningless, there is no point in
considering them. The function of truth is to collect data which are true.
There is no point in trying to make sense out of meaningless data. Any
way you handle them results in nothing. The more complicated the results
become, the harder it may be to recognize their nothingness, but it is
not necessary to examine all possible outcomes to which premises
give rise to judge them truly.
77
A learning device is not a teacher. It cannot tell you
how you feel. You do not know how you feel because you
have accepted the ego's confusion, and you think that a
learning device can tell you how you feel. Sickness is merely
another example of your insistence on asking the guidance of a teacher who
does not know the answer. The ego is incapable of knowing
how you feel. When we said that the ego does not know anything,
we said the one thing about the ego that is wholly true. But
there is a corollary; if knowledge is being and the ego has no
knowledge, then the ego has no being.
78
You might well ask how the voice of something which does not exist can
be so insistent. Have you seriously considered the distorting power of
something you want, even if it is not true? You have had
many instances of how what you want can distort what you see and hear.
No one can doubt the ego's skill in building up false cases. Nor can
anyone doubt your willingness to listen until you will not to
tolerate anything except truth. When you lay the ego
aside, it will be gone. The Holy Spirit's Voice is as loud as your
willingness to listen. It cannot be louder without violating your will,
which the Holy Spirit seeks to free but never to command.
79
The Holy Spirit teaches you to use your body only to reach your
brothers, so He can teach His message through you. This will
heal them and therefore heal you. Everything used in
accordance with its function as the Holy Spirit sees it cannot
be sick. Everything used otherwise is. Do not allow the body to
be a mirror of a split mind. Do not let it be an image of your own
perception of littleness. Do not let it reflect your will to attack.
Health is the natural state of anything whose interpretation is left to
the Holy Spirit, Who perceives no attack on anything. Health is the
result of relinquishing all attempts to use the body lovelessly.
Health is the beginning of the proper perspective on life under the
guidance of the one Teacher Who knows what life is, being the
Voice for Life Itself.
80
We once said that the Holy Spirit is the Answer. He is the
Answer to everything because He knows what the answer to everything is.
The ego does not know what a real question is, although it asks an
endless number. Yet you can learn this as you learn to question
the value of the ego and thus establish your ability to evaluate its
questions. When the ego tempts you to sickness, do not ask the Holy
Spirit to heal the body, for this would merely be to accept the ego's
belief that the body is the proper aim for healing. Ask rather
that the Holy Spirit teach you the right perception of the body,
for perception alone can be distorted. Only perception can be
sick because only perception can be wrong.
81
Wrong perception is distorted willing, which wants things to be
as they are not. The reality of everything is totally harmless
because total harmlessness is the condition of its reality. It
is also the condition of your awareness of its reality. You do
not have to seek reality. It will seek you and find you when you
meet its conditions. Its conditions are part of what it is. And
this part only is up to you. The rest is of itself. You need do so
little because it is so powerful that your little part will bring the
whole to you. Accept then your little part, and let the
whole be yours.
82
Wholeness heals because it is of the mind. All forms of
sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of
awakening. They are attempts to reinforce unconsciousness
out of fear of consciousness. This is a pathetic way of trying not
to know by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual. "Rest in
peace" is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes
from waking, not from sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing; waking is
joining. Dreams are illusions of joining, taking on the ego's
distortions about what joining means if you are sleeping under its
guidance. Yet the Holy Spirit, too, has use for sleep and can use dreams
on behalf of waking if you will let Him.
83
How you wake is the sign of how you have used sleep. To whom did you
give it? Under which teacher did you place it? Whenever you wake
dispiritedly, it was not of the Holy Spirit. Only when
you awaken joyously have you utilized sleep according to the Holy
Spirit's purpose. You can indeed be "drugged by sleep," but this is
always because you have misused it on behalf of sickness. Sleep
is no more a form of death than death is a form of unconsciousness. Unconsciousness
is impossible. You can rest in peace only because you are
awake.
84
Healing is release from the fear of waking and the substitution of the will
to wake. The will to wake is the will to love, since all
healing involves replacing fear with love. The Holy Spirit cannot
distinguish among degrees of error, for if He taught that one form of
sickness is more serious than another, He would be teaching that one
error can be more real than another. His function is to
distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing
the false with the true.
85
The ego, which always weakens the will, wants to separate
the body from the mind. This is an attempt to destroy it, yet
the ego actually believes that it is protecting it. This is
because the ego believes that mind is dangerous and that to make
mindless is to heal. But to make mindless is impossible, since it
would mean to make nothing out of what God created. The ego despises
weakness, even though it makes every effort to induce it. The
ego wants only what it hates. To the ego this is perfectly
sensible. Believing in the power of attack, the ego wants
attack.
86
You have surely begun to realize that this is a very practical course
which means exactly what it says. So does the Bible, if it is
properly understood. There has been a marked tendency on the part of
many of the Bible's followers and also its translators to be entirely
literal about fear and its effects but not about love
and its results. Thus, "hellfire" means "burning," but raising
the dead becomes allegorical. Actually, it is particularly the
references to the outcomes of love which should be taken
literally because the Bible is about love, being about God.
87
The Bible enjoins you to be perfect, to heal all errors, to take
no thought of the body as separate, and to accomplish all things
in my name. This is not my name alone, for ours is a shared
identification. The name of God's Son is one, and you are enjoined to do
the works of love because we share this oneness. Our minds are
whole because they are one. If you are sick you are withdrawing
from me. Yet you cannot withdraw from me alone. You can only withdraw
from yourself and me.
88
I would not ask you to do the things you cannot do, and it is impossible
that I could do things you cannot do. Given this, and given this quite
literally, there can be nothing which prevents you from doing exactly
what I ask, and everything which argues for your doing it. I
give you no limits because God lays none upon you. When you limit yourself,
we are not of one mind and that is sickness. Yet
sickness is not of the body, but of the mind. All forms of
dysfunction are merely signs that the mind has split and does not accept
a unified purpose.
89
The unification of purpose, then, is the Holy Spirit's only
way of healing. This is because it is the only level at which healing
means anything. The re-establishing of meaning in a chaotic thought
system is the only way to heal it. We have said that your task
is only to meet the conditions for meaning since meaning itself
is of God. Yet your return to meaning is essential to His
because your meaning is part of His. Your healing, then, is part
of His health since it is part of His Wholeness. He cannot lose
this, but you can not know it. Yet it is still His Will
for you, and His Will must stand forever and in all things.
90
Fear of the Will of God is one of the strangest beliefs that the human
mind has ever made. This could not possibly have occurred unless the
mind were already profoundly split, making it possible for the
mind to be afraid of what it really is. It is apparent that
reality cannot "threaten" anything except illusions, since
reality can only uphold truth. The very fact that the Will of God, which
is what you are, is perceived as fearful to you demonstrates
that you are afraid of what you are. It is not, then, the Will
of God of which you are afraid, but yours. Your will is
not the ego's, and that is why the ego is against you. What seems to
be the fear of God is really only the fear of your own reality.
91
It is impossible to learn anything consistently in a state of panic. If
the purpose of this course is to learn what you are and if you have
already decided that what you are is fearful, then it must
follow that you will not learn this course. Yet you might
remember that the reason for the course is that you do not
know who you are. If you do not know your reality, how would you know
whether it is fearful or not?
92
The association of truth and fear, which would be highly artificial at
most, is particularly inappropriate in the minds of those who do not
know what truth is. All that this kind of association means is
that you are arbitrarily endowing something quite beyond your awareness
with something you do not want. It is evident, then, that you
are judging something of which you are totally unaware. You have
set this strange situation up so that it is completely impossible to
escape from it without a Guide who does know what your
reality is. The purpose of this Guide is merely to remind you of what
you want. He is not attempting to force an alien will upon
you. He is merely making every possible effort, within the limits you
impose on Him, to re-establish your own will in your
consciousness.
93
You have imprisoned your will in your unconscious, where
it remains available but cannot help you. When we said that the Holy
Spirit's function is to sort out the true from the false in your
unconscious, we meant that He has the power to look into what you
have hidden and perceive the Will of God there. His perception
of this Will can make it real to you because He is in your mind
and therefore He is your reality. If, then, His perception of
your mind brings its reality to you, He is teaching you
what you are.
94
The only source of fear in this whole process can only be what
you think you lose. Yet it is only what the Holy Spirit sees
that you can possibly have. We have emphasized many times that
the Holy Spirit will never call upon you to sacrifice anything.
But if you ask the sacrifice of reality of yourselves, the Holy
Spirit must remind you that this is not God's Will because
it is not yours. There is no difference between your will and
God's. If you did not have split minds, you would recognize that willing
is salvation because it is communication. It is impossible to
communicate in alien tongues. You and your Creator can communicate
through creation because that, and only that, is your
joint Will.
95
Divided wills do not communicate because they speak for different things
to the same mind. This loses the ability to communicate simply
because confused communication does not mean anything. A message
cannot be said to be communicated unless it makes sense. How
sensible can your messages be when you ask for what you do not
want? Yet as long as you are afraid of your will, this is
precisely what you will ask for. You may insist that the Holy
Spirit does not answer you, but it might be wiser to consider the kind
of asker you are.
96
You do not ask only for what you want. This is solely
because you are afraid you might receive it, and you would.
That is really why you persist in asking the teacher who could not
possibly teach you your will. Of him you can never learn
it, and this gives you the illusion of safety. Yet you cannot be safe from
truth but only in it. Reality is the only safety. Your
will is your salvation because it is the same as God's. The
separation is nothing more than the belief that it is different.
97
No mind can believe that its will is stronger than God's. If,
then, a mind believes that its will is different from His, it
can only decide either that there is no God or that God's
Will is fearful. The former accounts for the atheist and the
latter for the martyr. Martyrdom takes many forms, the category
including all doctrines which hold that God demands sacrifices
of any kind. Either basic type of insane decision will induce
panic, because the atheist believes he is alone, and the martyr believes
that God is crucifying him. Both really fear abandonment and
retaliation, but the atheist is more reactive against abandonment and
the martyr against retaliation.
98
The atheist maintains that God has left him, but he does not care. He
will, however, become very fearful and hence very angry if anyone
suggests that God has not left him. The martyr, on the other
hand, is more aware of guilt and, believing that punishment is
inevitable, attempts to teach himself to like it. The truth is,
very simply, that no one wants either abandonment or
retaliation. Many people seek both, but it is still true that
they do not want them. Can you ask the Holy Spirit for "gifts"
such as these and actually expect to receive them? [The Holy
Spirit is totally incapable of giving you anything that does not come
from God. His task is not to make anything for you.] He cannot make you
want something you do not want. When you ask the Universal Giver
for what you do not want, you are asking for what cannot be
given, because it was never created. It was never created,
because it was never your will for you.
99
Ultimately everyone must remember the Will of God because ultimately
everyone must recognize himself. This recognition is the
recognition that his will and God's are one. In the presence of
truth, there are no unbelievers and no sacrifices. In
the security of reality, fear is totally meaningless. To deny what is
can only seem to be fearful. Fear cannot be real without a
cause, and God is the only Cause. God is Love, and you do
want Him. This is your will. Ask for this and you will
be answered because you will be asking only for what belongs to
you.
100
When you ask the Holy Spirit for what would hurt you, He cannot answer,
because nothing can hurt you and so you are asking for
nothing. Any desire which stems from the ego is a
desire for nothing and to ask for it is not a request. It is
merely a denial in the form of a request. The Holy Spirit is not
concerned with form at all, being aware only of meaning. The ego
cannot ask the Holy Spirit for anything because there is complete
communication failure between them. Yet you can ask for everything
of the Holy Spirit because your requests are real, being of your
will. Would the Holy Spirit deny the Will of God? And could He fail to
recognize it in His Sons?
101
The energy which you withdraw from creation you expend on fear. This is
not because your energy is limited but because you have limited it.
You do not recognize the enormous waste of energy which you expend in
denying truth. What would you say of someone who persisted in attempting
the impossible, believing that to achieve it is success?
The belief that you must have the impossible in order to be
happy is totally at variance with the principle of creation. God could
not will that happiness depended on what you could never have.
102
The fact that God is love does not require belief, but it does
require acceptance. It is indeed possible for you to deny facts,
although it is impossible for you to change them. If you hold
your hands over your eyes, you will not see, because you are
interfering with the laws of seeing. If you deny love, you will not
know it, because your cooperation is the law of its being. You
cannot change laws you did not make, and the laws of happiness were
created for you, not by you.
103
Attempts of any kind to deny what is are fearful, and if they
are strong, they will induce panic. Willing against
reality, though impossible, can be made into a very persistent
goal, even though you do not want it. But consider the result of
this strange decision. You are devoting your mind to what you do
not want. How real can this devotion be? If you do not want it,
it was never created. If it was never created, it is nothing. Can you really
devote yourself to nothing?
104
God in His devotion to you created you devoted to everything and
gave you what you are devoted to. Otherwise, you would not have
been created perfect. Reality is everything, and therefore you
have everything because you are real. You cannot make the
unreal, because the absence of reality is fearful, and fear
cannot be created. As long as you believe that fear is possible,
you will not create. Opposing orders of reality make
reality meaningless, and reality is meaning.
105
Remember, then, that God's Will is already possible and nothing
else will ever be. This is the simple acceptance of reality
because only this is real. You cannot distort reality
and know what it is. And if you do distort reality, you
will experience anxiety, depression, and ultimately panic, because you
are trying to make yourself unreal. When you feel these things,
do not try to look beyond yourself for truth, for truth can only
be within you. Say, therefore,
107
Everyone who has ever tried to use prayer to request something has
experienced what appears to be failure. This is not only true in
connection with specific things which might be harmful but also in
connection with requests which are strictly in line with this course.
The latter, in particular, might be incorrectly interpreted as "proof"
that the course does not mean what it says. You must remember, however,
that the course does state, and repeatedly, that its purpose is the escape
from fear.
108
Let us suppose, then, that what you request of the Holy Spirit is
what you really want, but you are still afraid of it. Should
this be the case, your attainment of it would no longer be
what you want, even if it is. This accounts for why certain specific
forms of healing are not achieved, even though the state of healing is.
It frequently happens that an individual asks for physical healing
because he is fearful of bodily harm. At the same time, however,
if he were healed physically, the threat to his thought system
would be considerably more fearful to him than its physical
expression. In this case he is not really asking for release
from fear but for the removal of a symptom which he has
selected. This request is, therefore, not for healing at all.
109
The Bible emphasizes that all prayers are answered, and this
must be true if no effort is wasted. The very fact that one has asked
the Holy Spirit for anything will ensure a response. Yet it is
equally certain that no response given by the Holy Spirit will ever
be one which would increase fear. It is possible that His answer will
not be heard at all. It is impossible, however, that it will be
lost. There are many answers which you have already received but have
not yet heard. I assure you that they are waiting for you. It is
indeed true that no effort is wasted.
110
If you would know your prayers are answered, never doubt a Son of God.
Do not question him and do not confound him, for your faith in him is
your faith in yourself. If you would know God and His Answer,
believe in me whose faith in you cannot be shaken. Can you ask of the
Holy Spirit truly and doubt your brother? Believe his words are true
because of the truth which is in him. You will unite with the truth in
him, and his words will be true. As you hear him, you
will hear me. Listening to truth is the only way you can
hear it now and finally know it.
111
The message your brother gives you is up to you. What does he
say to you? What would you have him say? Your decision about
him determines the message you receive. Remember that the Holy Spirit is
in him, and His Voice speaks to you through him. What can so
holy a brother tell you except truth? But are you listening
to it? Your brother may not know who he is, but there is a light in his
mind which does know. This light can shine into yours, making his
words true and making you able to hear them. His words are
the Holy Spirit's answer to you. Is your faith in him strong enough to
let you hear?
112
Salvation is of your brother. The Holy Spirit extends from your mind to
his and answers you. You cannot hear the Voice for God in
yourself alone because you are not alone. And His answer is only
for what you are. You will not know the trust I have in you
unless you extend it. You will not trust the guidance of the
Holy Spirit or believe that it is for you unless you hear it in others.
It must be for your brother because it is for you. Would
God have created a Voice for you alone? Could you hear His answer except
as He answers all of God's Sons? Hear of your brother what you
would have me hear of you, for you would not want me to be
deceived.
113
I love you for the truth in you, as God does. Your deceptions may
deceive you, but they cannot deceive me. Knowing
what you are, I cannot doubt you. I hear only the Holy Spirit in
you, who speaks to me through you. If you would hear me,
hear my brothers in whom God's Voice speaks. The answer to all
prayers lies in them. You will be answered as you hear the answer in everyone.
Do not listen to anything else, or you will not hear truth.
114
Believe in your brothers because I believe in you, and you will
learn that my belief in you is justified. Believe in me by
believing in them for the sake of what God gave them. They will
answer you if you learn to ask truth of them. Do not ask for blessings
without blessing them, for only in this way can you learn how blessed you
are. By following this way, you are looking for the truth in
you. This is not going beyond yourself but toward
yourself. Hear only God's Answer in His Sons, and you are
answered.
115
To disbelieve is to side against or to attack. To believe is to
accept and to side with. To believe is not to be credulous but
to accept and appreciate. What you do not believe, you do not
appreciate, and you cannot be grateful for what you do not
value. There is a price you will pay for judgment because
judgment is the setting of a price. And as you set it, you will
pay it.
116
If paying is equated with getting, you will set the price low
but demand a high return. You will have forgotten [that to price
is to value, so] that your return is in proportion to
your judgment of worth. If paying is associated with giving, it
cannot be perceived as loss, and the reciprocal
relationship of giving and receiving will be recognized. The price will
then be set high because of the value of the return. The price for getting
is to lose sight of value, making it inevitable that you will not
value what you receive. Valuing it little, you will not appreciate it
and will not want it.
117
Never forget, then, that you have set the value on what you
receive and have priced it by what you give. To believe that it is
possible to get much for little is to believe that you can bargain with
God. God's laws are always fair and perfectly consistent. By
giving you receive. But to receive is to accept, not to get. It
is impossible not to have, but it is possible not to know
you have. The recognition of having is the willingness for giving,
and only by this willingness can you recognize what you have.
What you give is therefore the value you put on what you have, being the
exact measure of the value you put upon it. And this, in turn, is the
measure of how much you want it.
118
You can ask of the Holy Spirit, then, only by giving to
Him, and you can give to Him only where you see Him. If
you see Him in everyone, consider how much you will be asking of
Him and how much you will receive. He will deny you nothing
because you have denied Him nothing, and so you can share
everything. This is the way, and the only way, to have His
answer because His answer is all you can ask for and want.
Say, then, to everyone,
1
The alertness of the ego to the errors which other egos make is not the
kind of vigilance the Holy Spirit would have you maintain. Egos are
critical in terms of the kind of "sense" they stand for. They
understand this kind of sense because it is sensible to them. To
the Holy Spirit, it makes no sense at all. To the ego, it is kind and
right and good to point out errors and "correct" them. This makes
perfect sense to the ego, which is totally unaware of what errors are
and what correction is.
2
Errors are of the ego, and correction of errors of any kind lies
solely in the relinquishment of the ego. When you correct a
brother, you are telling him that he is wrong. He may be making no sense
at the time, and it is certain that if he is speaking from the ego, he will
be making no sense. But your task is still to tell him he is right.
You do not tell him this verbally if he is speaking foolishly because he
needs correction at another level, since his error is at
another level. He is still right because he is a Son of God. His
ego is always wrong, no matter what it says or does.
3
If you point out the errors of your brother's ego, you must be seeing
through yours, because the Holy Spirit does not perceive his
errors. This must be true if there is no communication at all between
the ego and the Holy Spirit. The ego makes no sense, and the Holy Spirit
does not attempt to understand anything that arises from it. Since He
does not understand it, He does not judge it, knowing that
nothing it engenders means anything.
4
When you react at all to errors, you are not listening to the
Holy Spirit. He has merely disregarded them, and if you attend to them,
you are not hearing Him. If you do not hear Him, you are
listening to your ego and making as little sense as the brother whose
errors you perceive. This cannot be correction. Yet it is more than
merely lack of correction for him. It is the giving up of correction in
yourself.
5
When a brother behaves insanely, you can heal him only by perceiving the
sanity in him. If you perceive his errors and accept
them, you are accepting yours. If you want to give yours over to
the Holy Spirit, you must do this with his. Unless this becomes the one
way in which you handle all errors, you cannot understand how
all errors are undone. How is this different from telling you
that what you teach you learn? Your brother is as right as you are, and
if you think he is wrong, you are condemning yourself.
6
You cannot correct yourself. Is it possible, then, for
you to correct another? Yet you can see him truly because it is
possible for you to see yourself truly. It is not up to you to
change him but merely to accept him as he is. His errors do not
come from the truth that is in him, and only this truth is yours. His
errors cannot change this and can have no effect at all on the truth in
you. To perceive errors in anyone and to react to them as if they
were real is to make them real to you. You will not escape
paying the price for this, not because you are being punished for it,
but because you are following the wrong guide and will lose your way.
7
Your brother's errors are not of him any more than yours are of you.
Accept his errors as real, and you have attacked yourself. If
you would find your way and keep it, see only truth beside you, for you
walk together. The Holy Spirit in you forgives all things in you and
in your brother. His errors are forgiven with yours.
Atonement is no more separate than love. Atonement cannot be separate
because it comes from love. Any attempt you make to
correct a brother means that you believe correction by you is
possible, and this can only be the arrogance of the ego.
Correction is of God, Who does not know of arrogance. The Holy Spirit
forgives everything because God created everything.
8
Do not undertake His function, or you will forget yours.
Accept only the function of healing in time because that is what
time is for. God gave you the function to create in
eternity. You do not need to learn this, but you do need to
learn to want this, and for this all learning was made. This is
the Holy Spirit's good use of an ability which you do not need,
but which you have made. Give it to Him! You do not know how to
use it. He will teach you how to see yourself without condemnation by
learning how to look on everything without it. Condemnation will
then not be real to you, and all your errors will be forgiven.
9
Atonement is for all, because it is the way to undo the belief
that anything is for you alone. To forgive is to overlook. Look,
then, beyond error, and do not let your perception rest upon
it, for you will believe what your perception holds. Accept as true only
what your brother is if you would know yourself. Perceive what
he is not, and you cannot know what you are because you
see him falsely. Remember always that your identity is shared and that
sharing is its reality.
10
You have a part to play in the Atonement, but the plan of the Atonement
is beyond you. You do not know how to overlook errors, or you
would not make them. It would merely be further error to think either
that you do not make them or that you can correct them without
a Guide to correction. And if you do not follow this Guide, your
errors will not be corrected. The plan is not yours because
of your limited ideas of what you are. This limitation is where all
errors arise. The way to undo them, therefore, is not of you but
for you.
11
The Atonement is a lesson in sharing which is given you because you
have forgotten how to do it. The Holy Spirit merely reminds you of
what is your natural ability. By reinterpreting the ability to attack,
which you did make, into the ability to share, He
translates what you have made into what God created. If you would
accomplish this through Him, you cannot look on your abilities
through the eyes of the ego or you will judge them as it does.
All their harmfulness lies in its judgment. All their helpfulness lies
in the judgment of the Holy Spirit.
12
The ego, too, has a plan of forgiveness because you are asking
for one, though not of the right teacher. The ego's plan, of course, makes
no sense and will not work. By following it, you will
merely place yourself in an impossible situation to which the ego always
leads you. The ego's plan is to have you see error clearly first
and then overlook it. Yet how can you overlook what you have
made real? By seeing it clearly, you have made it real and cannot
overlook it.
13
This is where the ego is forced to appeal to "mysteries" and begins to
insist that you must accept the meaningless to save yourself. Many have
tried to do this in my name, forgetting that my words make perfect
sense because they come from God. They are as sensible now as they ever
were because they speak of ideas which are eternal. Forgiveness that is
learned of me does not use fear to undo fear. Nor does
it make real the unreal and then destroy it.
14
Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error
from the beginning and thus keeping it unreal for you. Do not
let any belief in its realness enter your minds at all, or you
will also believe that you must undo what you have made in order
to be forgiven. What has no effect does not exist, and to the Holy
Spirit, the effects of error are totally non-existent. By
steadily and consistently canceling out all its effects everywhere
and in all respects, He teaches that the ego does not exist and
proves it. Follow His teaching in forgiveness then, because
forgiveness is His function, and He knows how to fulfill it
perfectly. That is what we meant when we once said that miracles are natural,
and when they do not occur, something has gone wrong.
15
Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow the Holy
Spirit's plan of salvation in recognition of the fact that you do not
know what it is. His work is not your function, and unless you
accept this, you cannot learn what your function is. The
confusion of functions is so typical of the ego that you should be quite
familiar with it by now. The ego believes that all functions
belong to it, even though it has no idea what they are. This is
more than mere confusion. It is a particularly dangerous combination of
grandiosity and confusion which makes it likely that the ego
will attack anyone and anything for no reason at all. This is exactly
what the ego does. It is totally unpredictable in its
responses because it has no idea of what it perceives.
16
If one has no idea of what is happening, how appropriately can you expect
him to react? You might still ask yourself, regardless of how you can account
for the reactions, whether they place the ego in a very sound position
as the guide for yours. It seems absurd to have to emphasize
repeatedly that the ego's qualifications as a guide are singularly
unfortunate and that it is a remarkably poor choice as a teacher of
salvation. Yet this question, ridiculous as it seems, is really the
crucial issue in the whole separation fantasy. Anyone who elects a
totally insane guide must be totally insane himself.
17
It is not true that you do not know the guide is insane. You
know it because I know it, and you have judged it by the
same standard as I have. The ego literally lives on borrowed time, and
its days are numbered. Do not fear the Last Judgment, but welcome it and
do not wait, for the ego's time is borrowed from your eternity.
This is the Second Coming, which was made for you as the
First was created. The Second Coming is merely the return of sense.
Can this possibly be fearful?
18
What can be fearful but fantasy, and no one turns to fantasy unless he
despairs of finding satisfaction in reality. Yet it is certain that he
will never find satisfaction in fantasy, so that his only hope
is to change his mind about reality. Only if the decision that
reality is fearful is wrong can God be right. And I assure you
that God is right. Be glad, then, that you have been
wrong, but this was only because you did not know who you were. Had you
remembered, you could no more have been wrong than God can. The
impossible can happen only in fantasy. When you search for
reality in fantasies, you will not find it. The symbols of fantasy are
of the ego, and of these you will find many. But do not look for
meaning in them. They have no more meaning than the fantasies into which
they are woven.
19
Fairy tales can be pleasant or fearful, pretty or ugly, but no one calls
them true. Children may believe them, and so for a while the
tales are true for them. Yet when reality dawns, the fantasies
are gone. Reality has not gone in the meanwhile. The Second
Coming is the awareness of reality, not its return.
Behold, my children, reality is here. It belongs to you and me and God
and is perfectly satisfying to all of us. Only this awareness
heals because it is the awareness of truth.
20
The ego's plan for forgiveness is far more widely used than God's. This
is because it is undertaken by unhealed healers and is therefore of the
ego. Let us consider the unhealed healer more carefully now. By
definition, he is trying to give what he has not received.
If he is a theologian, he may begin with the premise, "I am a miserable
sinner and so are you." If he is a psychotherapist, he is more likely to
start with the equally incredible idea that he really believes
in attack and so does the patient, but it does not matter in either
case.
21
We have repeatedly stated that beliefs of the ego cannot be shared, and
this is why they are unreal. How, then, can "uncovering" them make
them real? Every healer who searches fantasies for truth must be
unhealed because he does not know where to look for truth and
therefore does not have the answer to the problem of healing. There is
an advantage to bringing nightmares into awareness, but only to
teach that they are not real and that anything they contain is
meaningless. The unhealed healer cannot do this because he does not believe
it.
22
All unhealed healers follow the ego's plan for forgiveness in one form
or another. If they are theologians, they are likely to condemn
themselves, teach condemnation, and advocate a very fearful solution.
Projecting condemnation onto God, they make Him appear retaliative and
fear His retribution. What they have done is merely to identify
with the ego and, by perceiving clearly what it does, condemn
themselves because of this profound confusion. It is understandable that
there has been a revolt against this concept, but to revolt against
it is still to believe in it. The form of the revolt,
then, is different but not the content.
23
The newer forms of the ego's plan are as unhelpful as the older ones
because form does not matter to the Holy Spirit and therefore does not
matter at all. According to the newer forms of the ego's plan, the
therapist interprets the ego's symbols in the nightmare and then uses
them to prove that the nightmare is real. Having made it
real, he then attempts to dispel its effects by depreciating the
importance of the dreamer. This would be a healing
approach if the dreamer were properly identified as unreal. Yet if the
dreamer is equated with the mind, the mind's corrective power
through the Holy Spirit is denied.
24
It is noteworthy that this is a contradiction even in the ego's terms,
and one which it usually does note, even in its confusion. If
the way to counteract fear is to reduce the importance of the
fearer, how can this build ego strength? These perfectly
self-evident inconsistencies account for why, except in certain stylized
verbal accounts, no one can explain what happens in
psychotherapy. Nothing real does. Nothing real has happened to
the unhealed healer, and he learns from his own teaching.
25
Because his ego is involved, it always attempts to gain some
support from the situation. Seeking to get something for himself,
the unhealed healer does not know how to give and consequently
cannot share. He cannot correct because he is not working correctively.
He believes that it is up to him to teach the patient what is real,
but he does not know it himself. What, then, should happen? When
God said, "Let there be light," there was light. Can you find
light by analyzing darkness as the psychotherapist does or like the
theologian, by acknowledging darkness in yourself and looking for a
distant light to remove it while emphasizing the distance?
26
Healing is not mysterious. Nothing will occur unless you
understand it, since light is understanding. A "miserable
sinner" cannot be healed without magic, nor can an "unimportant mind"
esteem itself without magic. Both forms of the ego's approach, then,
must arrive at an impasse, the characteristic "impossible situation" to
which the ego always leads. It can be helpful to point
out to a patient where he is heading, but the point is lost unless he
can change his direction. The therapist cannot do this for him, but he
also cannot do this for himself.
27
The only meaningful contribution the therapist can make is to
present an example of one whose direction has been changed for
him and who no longer believes in nightmares of any kind. The
light in his mind will therefore answer the questioner,
who must decide with God that there is light because he sees
it. And by his acknowledgment, the therapist knows it is
there. That is how perception ultimately is translated into knowledge.
The miracle worker begins by perceiving light and translates his
perception into sureness by continually extending it and accepting its
acknowledgment. Its effects assure him it is there.
28
The therapist does not heal; he lets healing be. He can point to
darkness, but he cannot bring light of himself, for light is not
of him. Yet, being for him, it must also be for his patient. The
Holy Spirit is the only therapist. He makes healing perfectly
clear in any situation in which he is the Guide. The human
therapist can only let Him fulfill His function. He needs no
help for this. He will tell you exactly what to do to help anyone
He sends to you for help and will speak to him through you if you do not
interfere. Remember that you are choosing a guide for
helping, and the wrong choice will not help. But
remember also that the right one will. Trust Him, for
help is His function, and He is of God.
29
As you awaken other minds to the Holy Spirit through Him and not
yourself, you will understand that you are not obeying the laws of this
world, but that the laws you are obeying work. "The good is what
works" is a sound, though insufficient, statement. Only the good
can work. Nothing else works at all. This course is a guide to
behavior. Being a very direct and very simple learning situation, it
provides the Guide who tells you what to do. If you do it, you
will see that it works. Its results are more convincing
than its words. They will convince you that the words are true. By
following the right Guide you will learn the simplest of all lessons—
31
How can you become increasingly aware of the Holy Spirit in you except
by His effects? You cannot see Him with your eyes nor hear Him with your
ears. How, then, can you perceive Him at all? If you inspire joy, and
others react to you with joy even though you are not
experiencing joy yourself, there must be something in you that
is capable of producing it. If it is in you and can produce joy,
and if you see that it does produce joy in others, you must
be dissociating it in yourself.
32
It seems to you that the Holy Spirit does not produce joy
consistently in you only because you do not consistently arouse
joy in others. Their reactions to you are your evaluations of
His consistency. When you are inconsistent, you will not always give
rise to joy and so you will not always recognize His
consistency. What you offer to your brother, you offer to Him because He
cannot go beyond your offering in His giving. This is not
because He limits His giving, but simply because you have
limited your receiving. The will to receive is the will to
accept.
33
If your brothers are part of you, will you accept them?
Only they can teach you what you are, and your learning is the result of
what you taught them. What you call upon in them, you call upon in yourself.
And as you call upon it in them, it becomes real to you. God has
but one Son, knowing them all as one. Only God Himself is more
than they, but they are not less than He is. Would you know what this
means? If what you do to my brother you do to me, and if you do
everything for yourself because we are part of you, everything we
do belongs to you as well. Every Soul God created is part of you
and shares His glory with you. His Glory belongs to Him, but it
is equally yours. You cannot, then, be less glorious
than He is.
34
God is more than you only because He created you, but not even
this would He keep from you. Therefore you can create as He did,
and your dissociation will not alter this. Neither God's light nor
yours is dimmed because you do not see. Because the Sonship must
create as one, you remember creation whenever you recognize part
of creation. Each part you remember adds to your wholeness
because each part is whole. Wholeness is indivisible, but you
cannot learn of your wholeness until you see it everywhere. You
can know yourself only as God knows His Son, for knowledge is
shared with God. When you awake in Him you will know your
magnitude by accepting His limitlessness as yours, but meanwhile
you will judge it as you judge your brothers' and will accept it as you
accept theirs.
35
You are not yet awake, but you can learn how to awaken. Very
simply the Holy Spirit teaches you to awaken others. As you see them
waken, you will learn what waking means, and because you have
willed to wake them, their gratitude and their appreciation of what you
have given them will teach you its value. They will
become the witnesses to your reality, as you were created
witnesses to God's. Yet when the Sonship comes together and accepts
its oneness, it will be known by its creations, who witness to its
reality as the Son does to the Father.
36
Miracles have no place in eternity because they are reparative. Yet
while you still need healing, your miracles are the only witnesses to
your reality which you can recognize. You cannot perform a
miracle for yourself because miracles are a way of giving
acceptance and receiving it. In time, the giving comes first,
though they are simultaneous in eternity, where they cannot be
separated. When you have learned that they are the same, the
need for time is over.
37
Eternity is one time, its only dimension being "always." This
cannot mean anything to you, however, until you remember God's open arms
and finally know His open Mind. Like Him, you are "always"-in
His mind and with a mind like His. In your open mind are your
creations, in perfect communication born of perfect understanding. Could
you but accept one of them, you would not want anything the
world has to offer. Everything else would be totally meaningless. God's
meaning is incomplete without you, and you are incomplete without your
creations. Accept your brother in this world and accept nothing
else, for in him you will find your creations, because he created them with
you. You will never know that you are co-creator with God until you
learn that your brother is a co-creator with you.
38
God's Will is your salvation. Would He not have given you the means to
find it? If He wills you to have it, He must have made it
possible and very easy to obtain it. Your brothers are everywhere. You
do not have to seek far for salvation. Every minute and every second
gives you a chance to save yourself. Do not lose these chances,
not because they will not return, but because delay of joy is needless.
God wills you perfect happiness now. Is it possible that this is
not also your will? And is it possible that this is not also
the will of your brothers?
39
Consider, then, that in this joint will you are all united, and
in this only. There will be disagreement on anything else, but not
on this. This, then, is where peace abides. And you
abide in peace when you so decide. Yet you cannot abide in peace unless
you accept the Atonement, because the Atonement is the way to
peace. The reason is very simple and so obvious that it is often
overlooked. That is because the ego is afraid of the obvious
since obviousness is the essential characteristic of reality. Yet you
cannot overlook it unless you are not looking.
40
It is perfectly obvious that if the Holy Spirit looks with love
on all He perceives, He looks with love on you. His
evaluation of you is based on His knowledge of what you are, and so He
evaluates you truly. And this evaluation must be in your mind
because He is. The ego is also in your mind because you have accepted
it there. Its evaluation of you, however, is the exact opposite
of the Holy Spirit's because the ego does not love you. It is
unaware of what you are and wholly mistrustful of everything it
perceives because its own perceptions are so shifting. The ego is
therefore capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst.
That is its range. It cannot exceed it because of its uncertainty. And
it can never go beyond it because it can never be
certain.
41
You, then, have two conflicting evaluations of yourself in your
minds, and they cannot both be true. You do not yet realize how
completely different these evaluations are because you do not
understand how lofty the Holy Spirit's perception of you really is. He
is not deceived by anything you do because He never forgets what you are.
The ego is deceived by everything you do, even when you respond to the
Holy Spirit, because at such times its confusion increases. The
ego is, therefore, particularly likely to attack you when you react
lovingly because it has evaluated you as unloving, and you are
going against its judgment.
42
The ego will begin to attack your motives as soon as they become
clearly out of accord with its perception of you. This is when it will
shift abruptly from suspiciousness to viciousness, since its uncertainty
is increased. Yet it is surely pointless to attack in return. What can
this mean except that you are agreeing with the ego's evaluation
of what you are? If you are willing to see yourself as unloving, you
will not be happy. You are condemning yourself and must
therefore regard yourself as inadequate. Would you look to the ego to
help you escape from a sense of inadequacy it has produced and
must maintain for its existence? Can you escape from its
evaluation of you by using its methods for keeping this picture intact?
43
You cannot evaluate an insane belief system from within it. Its
own range precludes this. You can only go beyond it, look back
from a point where sanity exists, and see the contrast.
Only by this contrast can insanity be judged as insane. With the
grandeur of God in you, you have chosen to be little and to lament your
littleness. Within the system which dictated this choice, the
lament is inevitable. Your littleness is taken for granted
there, and you do not ask, "Who granted it?" The question is
meaningless within the ego's thought system because it opens the whole
thought system to question.
44
We said before that the ego does not know what a real question is. Lack
of knowledge of any kind is always associated with unwillingness
to know and produces a total lack of knowledge simply because knowledge
is total. Not to question your littleness, therefore, is
to deny all knowledge and keep the ego's whole thought
system intact. You cannot retain part of a thought system
because it can be questioned only at its foundation. And this
must be questioned from beyond it because, within it, its
foundation does stand. The Holy Spirit judges against the
reality of the ego's thought system merely because He knows its foundation
is not true. Therefore, nothing that arises from it means anything. The
Holy Spirit judges every belief you hold in terms of where it comes
from. If it comes from God, He knows it to be true. If it does not, He
knows that it is meaningless.
45
Whenever you question your value, say:
47
Remember this when the ego speaks, and you will not hear it. The truth
about you is so lofty that nothing unworthy of God is worthy of you.
Choose, then, what you want in these terms and accept nothing that you
would not offer to God as wholly fitting for Him, for you do not want
anything else. Return your part of Him, and He will give you all of
Himself in exchange for your return of what belongs to Him and renders
Him complete.
48
Grandeur is of God and only of Him. Therefore, it is in you.
Whenever you become aware of it, however dimly, you abandon the ego
automatically because in the presence of the grandeur of God the
meaninglessness of the ego becomes perfectly apparent. Though it does
not understand this, the ego believes that its "enemy" has struck and
attempts to offer gifts to induce you to return to its "protection." Self-inflation
of the ego is its alternative to the grandeur of God. Which will you
choose?
49
Grandiosity is always a cover for despair. It is without hope
because it is not real. It is an attempt to counteract your littleness,
based on the belief that the littleness is real. Without this
belief, grandiosity is meaningless, and you could not possibly want it.
The essence of grandiosity is competitiveness because it always
involves attack. It is a delusional attempt to outdo but not
to undo. We said before that the ego vacillates between suspiciousness
and viciousness. It remains suspicious as long as you despair of
yourself. It shifts to viciousness whenever you will not tolerate
self-abasement and seek relief. Then it offers you the illusion of
attack as a solution.
50
The ego does not know the difference between grandeur and grandiosity
because it does not know the difference between miracle impulses and
ego-alien beliefs of its own. We once said that the ego is aware
of threat, but does not make distinctions between two entirely different
kinds of threat to its existence. Its own profound sense of
vulnerability renders it incapable of judgment except in terms
of attack. When it experiences threat, its only decision is whether to
attack now or to withdraw to attack later. If you accept its
offer of grandiosity, it will attack immediately. If you do not, it will
wait.
51
The ego is immobilized in the presence of God's grandeur because His
grandeur establishes your freedom. Even the faintest hint of
your reality literally drives the ego from your mind because of complete
lack of investment in it. Grandeur is totally without illusions,
and because it is real, it is compellingly convincing. Yet the
conviction of reality will not remain with you unless you do not allow
the ego to attack it. The ego will make every effort to recover and
mobilize its energies against your release. It will tell you
that you are insane and argue that grandeur cannot be a real
part of you because of the littleness in which it believes.
52
Yet your grandeur is not delusional because you did not make it.
You have made grandiosity and are afraid of it because it is a
form of attack, but your grandeur is of God, Who created it out of His
Love. From your grandeur you can only bless, because your grandeur is
your abundance. By blessing, you hold it in your mind,
protecting it from illusions and keeping yourself in the Mind of God.
Remember always that you cannot be anywhere except in the Mind
of God. When you forget this, you will despair, and you will
attack.
53
The ego depends solely on your willingness to tolerate it. If
you are willing to look upon your grandeur, you cannot despair,
and therefore you cannot want the ego. Your grandeur is God's answer
to the ego because it is true. Littleness and grandeur cannot co-exist,
nor is it possible for them to alternate in your awareness. Littleness
and grandiosity can and must alternate in your awareness since
both are untrue and are therefore on the same level. Being the level of
shift, it is experienced as shifting, and extremes are its essential
characteristic.
54
Truth and littleness are denials of each other because grandeur
is truth. Truth does not vacillate; it is always true.
When grandeur slips away from you, you have replaced it with something you
have made. Perhaps it is the belief in littleness; perhaps it is the
belief in grandiosity. Yet it must be insane because it is not
true. Your grandeur will never deceive you, but your illusions always
will. Illusions are deceptions. You cannot triumph, but you are
exalted. And in your exalted state, you seek others like you and rejoice
with them.
55
It is easy to distinguish grandeur from grandiosity because love is
returned, but pride is not. Pride will not produce miracles and
therefore will deprive you of your true witnesses to your reality. Truth
is not obscure nor hidden, but its obviousness to you lies in
the joy you bring to its witnesses, who show it to you. They
attest to your grandeur, but they cannot attest to pride because pride
is not shared. God wants you to behold what He created because
it is His joy.
56
Can your grandeur be arrogant when God Himself witnesses to it? And what
can be real that has no witnesses? What good can come of it? And
if no good can come of it, the Holy Spirit cannot use it. What He cannot
transform to the Will of God does not exist at all. Grandiosity is
delusional because it is used to replace your grandeur. Yet what
God has created cannot be replaced. God is incomplete without
you because His grandeur is total, and you cannot be missing
from it.
57
You are altogether irreplaceable in the Mind of God. No one else can
fill your part of It, and while you leave your part of It empty, your
eternal place merely waits for your return. God, through His Voice,
reminds you of It, and God Himself keeps your extensions safe within It.
Yet you do not know them until you return to them. You cannot
replace the Kingdom, and you cannot replace yourself. God, Who knows
your value, would not have it so, and so it is not so. Your
value is in God's Mind and therefore not in yours alone. To
accept yourself as God created you cannot be arrogance because it is the
denial of arrogance. To accept your littleness is
arrogant because it means that you believe your evaluation of
yourself is truer than God's.
58
Yet if truth is indivisible, your evaluation of yourself must be
God's. You did not establish your value, and it needs no
defense. Nothing can attack it or prevail over it. It does not vary. It
merely is. Ask the Holy Spirit what it is and He will
tell you, but do not be afraid of His answer, for it comes from God. It
is an exalted answer because of its Source, but the Source is
true and so is Its answer. Listen and do not question what you hear, for
God does not deceive. He would have you replace the ego's belief in
littleness with His own exalted answer to the question of your being, so
that you can cease to question it and know it for what it is.
59
Nothing beyond yourself can make you fearful or loving because nothing is
beyond you. Time and eternity are both in your mind and will
conflict until you perceive time solely as a means to regain
eternity. You cannot do this as long as you believe that anything
which happens to you is caused by factors outside yourself. You
must learn that time is solely at your disposal, and that
nothing in the world can take this responsibility from you. You can violate
God's laws in your imagination, but you cannot escape from them.
They were established for your protection and are as inviolate as your
safety.
60
God created nothing beside you, and nothing beside you exists, for you
are part of Him. What except Him can exist? Nothing beyond
Him can happen because nothing except Him is real. Your
creations add to Him as you do, but nothing is added that is
different because everything has always been. What can upset you
except the ephemeral, and how can the ephemeral be real if you are God's
only creation, and He created you eternal? Your holy will
establishes everything that happens to you. Every
response you make to everything you perceive is up to you
because your will determines your perception of it.
61
God does not change His Mind about you, for He is not uncertain
of Himself. And what He knows can be known because He
does not know only for Himself. He created you for Himself, but He gave
you the power to create for your self so you could be like Him.
That is why your will is holy. Can anything exceed the love of
God? Can anything, then, exceed your will? Nothing can reach you
from beyond it because, being in God, you encompass everything.
Believe this, and you will realize how much is up to you. When
anything threatens your peace of mind, ask yourself,
63
Then accept His decision, for it is indeed changeless, and
refuse to change your mind about yourself. God will never decide
against you, or He would be deciding against Himself.
64
The reason you do not know your creations is simply that you
would decide against them as long as your minds are split, and to attack
what you have created is impossible. But remember that it is as
impossible for God. The law of creation is that you love your
creations as yourself because they are part of you. Everything
that was created is therefore perfectly safe because the laws of God
protect it by His Love. Any part of your mind that does not know this
has banished itself from knowledge because it has not met its
conditions.
65
Who could have done this but you? Recognize this gladly, for in this
recognition lies the realization that your banishment is not of
God and therefore does not exist. You are at home in God, dreaming of
exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality. Is it your will to
do so? You know from your own experience that what you see in dreams you
think is real as long as you are asleep. Yet the instant you waken, you
know that everything that seemed to happen did not happen
at all. You do not think this mysterious, even though all the laws of
what you awakened to were violated while you slept. Is it not
possible that you merely shifted from one dream to another, without really
wakening?
66
Would you bother to reconcile what happened in conflicting dreams, or
would you dismiss both together if you discovered that reality is in
accord with neither? You do not remember being awake. When you hear the
Holy Spirit, you merely feel better because loving seems possible
to you, but you do not remember yet that it once was so. And it
is in this remembering that you will know it can be so again. What is
possible has not yet been accomplished. Yet what has once been is so now
if it is eternal. When you remember, you will know what you remember is
eternal and therefore is now.
67
You will remember everything the instant you desire it wholly,
for if to desire wholly is to create, you will have willed away the
separation, returning your mind simultaneously to your Creator and your
creations. Knowing them, you will have no wish to sleep but only
the will to waken and be glad. Dreams will be impossible because you
will want only truth, and being at last your will, it will be
yours.
68
Unless you know something, you cannot dissociate it.
Knowledge therefore precedes dissociation, and dissociation is
nothing more than a decision to forget. What has been forgotten
then appears to be fearful, but only because the dissociation
was an attack on truth. You are fearful because you have
forgotten. And you have replaced your knowledge by an awareness
of dreams because you are afraid of your dissociation, not
of what you have dissociated. Even in this world's therapy, when
dissociated material is accepted,it ceases to be fearful, for
the laws of mind always hold.
69
Yet to give up the dissociation of reality brings more than
merely lack of fear. In this decision lie joy and peace and the
glory of creation. Offer the Holy Spirit only your will to remember, for
He retains the knowledge of God and of yourself for you, waiting
for your acceptance. Give up gladly everything that would stand
in the way of your remembering, for God is in your memory, and His Voice
will tell you that you are part of Him when you are willing to remember
Him and know your own reality again. Let nothing in this world delay
your remembering of Him, for in this remembering is the knowledge of yourself.
70
To remember is merely to restore to your mind what is already there.
You do not make what you remember; you merely accept again what
has been made but was rejected. The ability to accept truth in this
world is the perceptual counterpart of creating in the Kingdom. God will
do His part if you will do yours, and His return in exchange for
yours is the exchange of knowledge for perception. Nothing
is beyond His Will for you. But signify your will to remember Him and
behold! He will give you everything but for the asking.
71
When you attack, you are denying yourself. You are specifically
teaching yourself that you are not what you are. Your denial of
reality precludes the acceptance of God's gift because you have
accepted something else in its place. If you understand that the
misuse of defenses always constitutes an attack on truth and truth is
God, you will realize why this is always fearful. If you further
recognize that you are part of God, you will understand why it
is that you always attack yourself first.
72
[All attack is self-attack. It cannot be anything else.
Arising from your own decision not to be what you are,
it is an attack on your identification. Attack is thus the way in
which your identification is lost because, when you attack, you must
have forgotten what you are. And if your reality is God's, when you
attack you are not remembering Him. This is not because He is
gone, but because you are willing actively not to remember Him.]
73
If you realized the complete havoc this makes of your peace of mind, you
could not make such an insane decision. You make it only because you
still believe that it can get you something you want. It
follows, then, that you want something other than peace of mind,
but you have not considered what it must be. Yet the logical outcome of
your decision is perfectly clear if you will look at it. By
deciding against your reality, you have made yourself vigilant against
God and His Kingdom. And it is this vigilance that makes you
afraid to remember Him.
74
You have not attacked God, and you do love Him. Can you
change your reality? No one can will to destroy himself. When you think
you are attacking your self, it is a sure sign that you hate what you think
you are. And this, and only this, can be attacked by
you. What you think you are can be hateful, and what this
strange image makes you do can be very destructive. Yet the destruction
is no more real than the image, although those who make idols do
worship them. The idols are nothing, but their worshipers are the Sons
of God in sickness.
75
God would have them released from their sickness and returned to His
Mind. He will not limit your power to help them because He has given
it to you. Do not be afraid of it because it is your salvation. What
Comforter can there be for the sick Children of God except His power
through you? Remember that it does not matter where in
the Sonship He is accepted. He is always accepted for all, and
when your mind receives Him, the remembrance of Him awakens
throughout the Sonship. Heal your brothers simply by accepting God for
them.
76
Your minds are not separate, and God has only one channel for healing
because He has but one Son. His remaining communication link with all
His Children joins them together and them to Him. To be aware of this is
to heal them because it is the awareness that no one is separate, and so
no one is sick. To believe that a Son of God can be sick is to
believe that part of God can suffer. Love cannot suffer because
it cannot attack. The remembrance of love therefore brings
invulnerability with it.
77
Do not side with sickness in the presence of a Son of God even if he
believes in it, for your acceptance of God in him acknowledges
the love of God which he has forgotten. Your recognition of him as part
of God teaches him the truth about himself, which he is denying. Would
you strengthen his denial of God and thus lose sight of yourself?
Or would you remind him of his wholeness and remember your Creator with
him? To believe a Son of God is sick is to worship the same idol he
does. God created love, not idolatry. All forms of idolatry are
caricatures of creation, taught by sick minds which are too divided to
know that creation shares power and never usurps it.
Sickness is idolatry because it is the belief that power can be taken from
you. Yet this is impossible because you are part of God, Who is
all power.
78
A sick god must be an idol, made in the image of what its maker
thinks he is. And that is exactly what the ego does
perceive in a Son of God; a sick god, self-created, self-sufficient,
very vicious, and very vulnerable. Is this the idol you would
worship? Is this the image you would be vigilant to save?
[Are you really afraid of losing this?] Look calmly at
the logical conclusion of the ego's thought system and judge whether its
offering is really what you want, for this is what it offers
you. To obtain this you are willing to attack the divinity of
your brothers and thus lose sight of yours. And you are willing
to keep it hidden and to protect this idol, which you think will save
you from the dangers which the idol itself stands for, but which
do not exist.
79
There are no idolaters in the Kingdom, but there is great appreciation
for every Soul which God created because of the calm knowledge that each
one is part of Him. God's Son knows no idols, but he does know
his Father. Health in this world is the counterpart of value in Heaven.
It is not my merit that I contribute to you but my love, for you do not
value yourselves. When you do not value yourself, you become sick, but my
value of you can heal you because the value of God's Son is one. When I
said, "My peace I give unto you," I meant it. Peace came from God
through me to you. It was for you, although you did not ask.
80
When a brother is sick, it is because he is not asking for peace
and therefore does not know he has it. The acceptance of
peace is the denial of illusion, and sickness is an illusion.
Yet every Son of God has the power to deny illusions anywhere in
the Kingdom merely by denying them completely in himself. I can heal you
because I know you. I know your value for you, and it is this
value that makes you whole. A whole mind is not idolatrous and does not
know of conflicting laws. I will heal you merely because I have only one
message, and it is true. Your faith in it will make you whole when you
have faith in me.
81
I do not bring God's message with deception, and you will learn this as
you learn that you always receive as much as you accept. You
could accept peace now for everyone you meet and offer them
perfect freedom from all illusions because you heard.
But have no other gods before Him, or you will not hear. God is
not jealous of the gods you make, but you are. You would save
them and serve them because you believe that they made you. You
think they are your father because you are projecting onto them the
fearful fact that you made them to replace God. Yet when
they seem to speak to you, remember that nothing can replace
God, and whatever replacements you have attempted are nothing.
82
Very simply, then, you may believe you are afraid of
nothingness, but you are really afraid of nothing. And in that
awareness you are healed. You will hear the god you listen to.
You made the god of sickness, and by making him, you
made yourself able to hear him. Yet you did not create him because he is
not the Will of the Father. He is therefore not eternal and will
be unmade for you the instant you signify your willingness to
accept only the eternal. If God has but one Son, there is but
one God. You share reality with Him because reality is not divided. To
accept other gods before Him is to place other images before yourself.
83
You do not realize how much you listen to your gods and how vigilant you
are on their behalf. Yet they exist only because you honor them.
Place honor where it is due, and peace will be yours. It is your
inheritance from your real Father. You cannot make your father,
and the father you made did not make you. Honor is not due to illusions,
for to honor them is to honor nothing. Yet fear is not due them either,
for nothing cannot be fearful. You have chosen to fear love because
of its perfect harmlessness, and because of this fear, you have been
willing to give up your own perfect helpfulness and your own perfect
Help.
84
Only at the altar of God will you find peace. And this altar is in you
because God put it there. His Voice still calls you to return, and He
will be heard when you place no other gods before Him. You can give up
the god of sickness for your brothers; in fact, you would have
to do so if you give him up for yourself. For if you see him anywhere,
you have accepted him. And if you accept him, you will bow down
and worship him because he was made as God's replacement. He is the
belief that you can choose which god is real. Although it is
perfectly clear that this has nothing to do with reality, it is equally
clear that it has everything to do with reality as you perceive
it.
85
All magic is a form of reconciling the irreconcilable. All
religion is the recognition that the irreconcilable cannot be
reconciled. Sickness and perfection are irreconcilable. If God
created you perfect, you are perfect. If you believe you can be
sick, you have placed other gods before Him. God is not at war with the
god of sickness you made, but you are. He is the symbol of
willing against God, and you are afraid of him because
he cannot be reconciled with God's Will. If you attack him, you will
make him real to you. But if you refuse to worship him in whatever form
he may appear to you and wherever you think you see him, he will
disappear into the nothingness out of which he was made.
86
Reality can dawn only on an unclouded mind. It is always there to be
accepted, but its acceptance depends on your willingness to have
it. To know reality must involve the willingness to judge unreality
for what it is. This is the right use of selective perception.
To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of
your ability to evaluate it truly, to let it go. Knowledge
cannot dawn on a mind full of illusions because truth and illusions are
irreconcilable. Truth is whole and cannot be known by part of a
mind.
87
The Sonship cannot be perceived as partly sick because to
perceive it that way is not to perceive it at all. If the Sonship is
one, it is one in all respects. Oneness cannot be
divided. If you perceive other gods, your mind is split, and you will
not be able to limit the split because the split is the
sign that you have removed part of your mind from God's Will, and this
means it is out of control. To be out of control is to be out of reason,
and the mind does become unreasonable without reason. This is
merely a matter of definition. By defining the mind wrongly, you
perceive it as functioning wrongly.
88
God's laws will keep your minds at peace because peace is His Will, and
His laws are established to uphold it. His are the laws of freedom, but
yours are the laws of bondage. Since freedom and bondage are
irreconcilable, their laws cannot be understood together. The
laws of God work only for your good, and there are no other laws
beside His. Everything else is merely lawless and therefore chaotic. Yet
God Himself has protected everything He created by His laws.
Therefore, everything that is not under them does not exist. "Laws of
chaos" are meaningless by definition. Creation is perfectly lawful, and
the chaotic is without meaning because it is without God. You
have given your peace to the gods you made, but they are not there to
take it from you, and you are not able to give it to them.
89
You are not free to give up freedom, but only to deny
it. You cannot do what God did not intend because what He did
not intend does not happen. Your gods do not bring
chaos; you are endowing them with chaos and accepting it of
them. All this has never been. Nothing but the laws of God has ever
operated, and nothing except His Will will ever be. You were created
through His laws and by His Will, and the manner of your creation
established you as creators. What you have made is so unworthy
of you that you could hardly want it if you were willing to see it as
it is. You will see nothing at all. And your vision will
automatically look beyond it to what is in you and all around you.
Reality cannot break through the obstructions you interpose, but it will
envelop you completely when you let them go.
90
When you have experienced the protection of God, the making of idols
becomes inconceivable. There are no strange images in the Mind of God,
and what is not in His Mind cannot be in yours because you are of One
Mind and that Mind belongs to Him. It is yours because
it belongs to Him, for ownership is sharing to Him. And if it is so for
Him, it is so for you. His definitions are His laws, for by them
He established the universe as what it is. No false gods you attempt to
interpose between yourself and your reality affect truth at all. Peace
is yours because God created you. And He created nothing else.
91
The miracle is the act of a Son of God who has laid aside all false gods
and who calls on his brothers to do likewise. It is an act of faith
because it is the recognition that his brother can do it. It is a call
to the Holy Spirit in his mind, a call to Him which is strengthened by
this joining. Because the miracle worker has heard Him, he strengthens
His Voice in a sick brother by weakening his belief in sickness,
which he does not share. The power of one mind can shine
into another because all the lamps of God were lit by the same spark. It
is everywhere, and it is eternal.
92
In many only the spark remains, for the Great Rays are obscured. Yet God
has kept the spark alive so that the rays can never be completely
forgotten. If you but see the little spark, you will learn of the
greater light, for the rays are there unseen. Perceiving the spark will
heal, but knowing the light will create. Yet in the returning, the
little light must be acknowledged first, for the separation was a
descent from magnitude to littleness. But the spark is still as pure as
the great light because it is the remaining call of creation. Put all
your faith in it, and God Himself will answer you.
93
The rituals of the god of sickness are strange and very demanding. Joy
is never permitted, for depression is the sign of allegiance to him.
Depression means that you have foresworn God. Men are afraid of
blasphemy, but they do not know what it means. They do not realize that
to deny God is to deny their own identity, and in this sense the
wages of sin is death. The sense is very literal; denial of life
perceives its opposite, as all forms of denial replace what is
with what is not. No one can really do this, but that you can think
you can and believe you have is beyond dispute.
94
Do not forget, however, that to deny God will inevitably result in
projection, and you will believe that others, and not yourself,
have done this to you. You will receive the message you give because it
is the message you want. You may believe that you judge your
brothers by the messages they give you, but you have
judged them by the message you give to them. Do not
attribute your denial of joy to them, or you cannot see the spark in
them that could bring joy to you. It is the denial of
the spark that brings depression, and whenever you see your brothers without
it, you are denying God.
95
Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of
sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in
direct opposition to its own survival. But consider what this means to you.
Unless you are sick, you cannot keep the gods you made, for only in
sickness could you possibly want them. Blasphemy, then, is self-destructive,
not God-destructive. It means that you are willing not to
know yourself in order to be sick. This is the offering which
your god demands because, having made him out of your insanity,
he is an insane idea. He has many forms, but although he may seem like
many different things, he is but one idea—the denial of God.
96
Sickness and death entered the mind of God's Son against His
Will. The "attack on God" made His Son think he was fatherless, and out
of his depression, he made the god of depression. This was his
alternative to joy, because he would not accept the fact that, although
he was a creator, he had been created. Yet the Son is helpless
without the Father, Who alone is his help. We said before that of
yourselves you can do nothing, but you are not of yourselves. If
you were, what you have made would be true, and you could never
escape.
97
It is because you did not make yourselves that you need be
troubled by nothing. Your gods are nothing because your Father did not
create them. You cannot make creators who are unlike your Creator any
more than He could have created a Son who was unlike Him. If creation is
sharing, it cannot create what is unlike itself. It can share only what
it is. Depression is isolation, and so it could not have been
created.
98
Son of God, you have not sinned, but you have been much
mistaken. Yet this can be corrected, and God will help you, knowing
that you could not sin against Him. You denied Him because you
loved Him, knowing that if you recognized your love for Him, you
could not deny Him. Your denial of Him therefore means that you
love Him and that you know He loves you. Remember that
what you deny, you must have known. And if you accept denial,
you can accept its undoing.
99
Your Father has not denied you. He does not retaliate, but He does
call to you to return. When you think He has not answered your call, you
have not answered His. He calls to you from every part of the
Sonship because of His love for His Son. If you hear His
message, He has answered you, and you will learn of Him if you hear
aright. The love of God is in everything He created, for His Son is
everywhere. Look with peace upon your brothers, and God will come
rushing into your heart in gratitude for your gift to Him.
100
Do not look to the god of sickness for healing but only to the God of
love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him. When you
acknowledge Him, you will know that He has never ceased to
acknowledge you and that in His acknowledgment of you lies your
Being. You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you can confuse
yourself with things that do. Remember, though, that to do this is
blasphemy, for it means that you are looking without love on God and His
creation, from which He cannot be separated. Only the eternal
can be loved, for love does not die. What is of God is His forever, and
you are of God. Would He allow Himself to suffer? And would He
offer His Son anything that is not acceptable to Him?
101
If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of
suffering. Yet to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator.
This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because
your acknowledgment of your Father is the acknowledgment of
yourself as you are. Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly
without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him,
you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your own mind because of
the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it
can also deny what it creates because it is free.
102
You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God
in His love would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you
because He would not know His Son if he were not free. To interfere with
you would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane. When you denied
Him, you were insane. Would you have Him share your
insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never
cease to love Him. That was the condition of His Son's creation, fixed
forever in the Mind of God. To know that is sanity. To deny it is
insanity. God gave Himself to you in your creation, and His gifts are
eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him?
103
Out of your gifts to Him, the Kingdom will be restored to His Son. His
Son removed himself from His gift by refusing to accept what had
been created for him and what he himself had created in the Name of his
Father. Heaven waits for his return, for it was created as the dwelling
place of God's Son. You are not at home anywhere else or in any other
condition. Do not deny yourself the joy which was created for you for
the misery you have made for yourselves. God has given you the means for
undoing what you have made. Listen, and you will learn what you
are.
104
If God knows His Children as wholly sinless, it is blasphemous to
perceive them as guilty. If God knows His Children as wholly without
pain, it is blasphemous to perceive suffering anywhere. If God knows His
Children to be wholly joyous, it is blasphemous to feel depressed. All
of these illusions and the many other forms which blasphemy may take are
refusals to accept creation as it is. If God created His Son
perfect, that is how you must learn to see him to learn of his reality.
And as part of the Sonship, that is how you must see yourself
to learn of yours.
105
Do not perceive anything God did not create, or you are denying
Him. His is the only Fatherhood, and it is yours only
because He has given it to you. Your gifts to yourself are
meaningless, but your gifts to your creations are like His
because they are given in His Name. That is why your creations are as
real as His. Yet the real Fatherhood must be acknowledged if the real
Son is to be known. You believe that the sick things which you have made
are your real creations because you believe that the sick images you
perceive are the Sons of God.
106
Only if you accept the Fatherhood of God will you have anything
because His fatherhood gave you everything. That is why to deny
Him is to deny yourself. Arrogance is the denial of love because
love shares and arrogance withholds. As long as both
appear to you to be desirable, the concept of choice, which is not
of God, will remain with you. While this is not true in eternity, it is
true in time, so that while time lasts in your minds, there will
be choices. Time itself was your choice.
107
If you would remember eternity, you must learn to look only on
the eternal. If you allow yourselves to become preoccupied with the
temporal, you are living in time. As always, your choice is
determined by what you value. Time and eternity cannot both be real
because they contradict each other. If you will accept only what is
timeless as real, you will begin to understand eternity and make it
yours.
1
Either God or the ego is insane. If you will examine the evidence on
both sides fairly, you will realize that this must be true. Neither God
nor the ego proposes a partial thought system. Each is internally
consistent, but they are diametrically opposed in all respects so that
partial allegiance is impossible. Remember, too, that their results are
as different as their foundations, and their fundamentally
irreconcilable natures cannot be reconciled by your
vacillations. Nothing alive is fatherless, for life is creation.
Therefore, your decision is always an answer to the question, "Who is my
father?" And you will be faithful to the father you choose.
2
Yet what would you say to someone who really believed this question
involves conflict? If you made the ego, how can the ego have
made you? The authority problem remains the only source of perceived
conflict because the ego was made out of the wish of God's Son to father
Him. The ego, then, is nothing more than a delusional system in which
you made your own father. Make no mistake about this. It sounds insane
when it is stated with perfect honesty, but the ego never looks upon
what it does with perfect honesty. Yet that is its insane
premise, which is carefully hidden in the dark cornerstone of its
thought system. And either the ego, which you made, is your father,
or its whole thought system will not stand.
3
You have made by projection, but God has created by extension. The
cornerstone of God's creation is you, for His thought system is light.
Remember the rays that are there unseen. The more you approach the
center of His thought system, the clearer the light becomes. The closer
you come to [the foundation of] the ego's thought system, the darker and
more obscure becomes the way. Yet even the little spark in your mind is
enough to lighten it. Bring this light fearlessly with you and hold it
up to the foundation of the ego's thought system bravely. Be willing to
judge it with perfect honesty. Open the dark cornerstone of terror on
which it rests and bring it out into the light. There you will see that
it rests on meaninglessness and that everything of which you have been
afraid was based on nothing.
4
My brother, you are part of God and part of me. When you have at last
looked at the ego's foundation without shrinking, you will also have
looked upon ours. I come to you from our Father to offer you
everything again. Do not refuse it in order to keep a dark cornerstone
hidden, for its protection will not save you. I give you
the lamp and I will go with you. You will not take this journey
alone. I will lead you to your true Father, Who hath need of you as I
have. Will you not answer the call of love with joy?
5
You have learned your need of healing. Would you bring anything else to
the Sonship, recognizing your need of healing for yourself? For in this
lies the beginning of knowledge, the foundation on which God will help
you build again the thought system which you share with Him. Not one
stone you place upon it but will be blessed by Him, for you will be
restoring the holy dwelling place of His Son, where He wills His Son to
be and where he is. In whatever part of the mind of God's Son you
restore this reality, you restore it to yourself. For you dwell in the
Mind of God with your brother, for God Himself did not will to be alone.
6
To be alone is to be separated from infinity, but how can this be if
infinity has no end? No one can be beyond the limitless because
what has no limits must be everywhere. There are no beginnings and no
endings in God, Whose universe is Himself. Can you exclude yourself from
the universe or from God, Who is the universe? I and my Father
are one with you, for you are part of us. Do you really
believe that part of God can be missing or lost to Him?
7
If you were not part of God, His Will would not be unified. Is this
conceivable? Can part of His Mind contain nothing? If your place in His
Mind cannot be filled by anyone except you, and your filling it
was your creation, without you there would be an empty
place in God's Mind. Extension cannot be blocked, and it has no
voids. It continues forever, however much it is denied. Your denial of
its reality arrests it in time but not in eternity. That is why
your creations have not ceased to be extended and why so much is waiting
for your return.
8
Waiting is possible only in time, but time has no meaning. You
who made delay can leave time behind simply by recognizing that neither
beginnings nor endings were created by the Eternal, Who placed no limits
on His creation nor upon those who create like Him. You do not know this
simply because you have tried to limit what He created, and so
you believe that all creation is limited. How, then, could you
know your creations, having denied infinity? The laws of the
universe do not permit contradiction. What holds for God holds for you.
If you believe you are absent from God, you will believe
that He is absent from you.
9
Infinity is meaningless without you, and you are
meaningless without God. There is no end to God and His Son, for
we are the universe. God is not incomplete, and He is not
childless. Because He did not will to be alone, He created a Son like
Himself. Do not deny Him His Son, for your unwillingness to accept His
Fatherhood has denied you yours. See His creations as His
Son, for yours were created in honor of Him. The universe of love does
not stop because you do not see it, and your closed eyes have not lost
the ability to see. Look upon the glory of His creation, and you will
learn what God has kept for you.
10
God has given you a place in His Mind which is yours forever. Yet you
could keep it only by giving it, as it was given you.
Could you be alone there if it was given you because God did not
will to be alone? God's Mind cannot be lessened. It can only
be increased, and everything He creates has the function of creating.
Love does not limit, and what it creates is not limited. To give without
limit is God's Will for you because only this can bring you the joy
which is His and which He wills to share with you. Your love is
as boundless as His because it is His.
11
Could any part of God be without His love and could any part of
His love be contained? God is your heritage because His one gift is
Himself. How can you give except like Him if you would know His gift to
you? Give, then, without limit and without end to learn how much
He has given you. Your ability to accept Him
depends on your willingness to give as He gives. Your fatherhood and
your Father are one. God willed to create, and your will is His.
It follows, then, that you will to create since your will
follows from His. And being an extension of His Will, yours must be the
same.
12
Yet what you will you do not know. This is not strange when you realize
that to deny is to "not know." God's Will is that you are His
Son. By denying this, you denied your own will and therefore do
not know what it is. The reason you must ask what God's Will is
in everything is merely because it is yours. You do not know
what it is, but the Holy Spirit remembers it for you. Ask Him,
therefore, what God's Will is for you, and He will tell you yours.
It cannot be too often repeated that you do not know it.
Whenever what the Holy Spirit tells you appears to be coercive, it is
only because you do not recognize your own will.
13
The projection of the ego makes it appear as if God's Will is outside
yourself and therefore not yours. In this interpretation, it is
possible for God's Will and yours to conflict. God then may seem
to demand of you what you do not want to give and thus deprive you of
what you want. Would God, who wants only your will, be capable
of this? Your will is His Life, which He has given to you. Even in time
you cannot live apart from Him, for sleep is not death. What He created
can sleep, but it cannot die. Immortality is His Will for His
Son and His Son's will for himself. God's Son cannot will death
for himself because His Father is Life and His Son is like Him. Creation
is your will because it is His.
14
You cannot be happy unless you do what you will truly, and you cannot
change this because it is immutable. It is immutable by God's Will and
yours, for otherwise His Will would not have been extended. You
are afraid to know God's Will because you believe it is not
yours. This belief is your whole sickness and your whole fear. Every
symptom of sickness and fear arises here because this is the belief that
makes you want not to know. Believing this, you hide in
darkness, denying that the light is in you.
15
You are asked to trust the Holy Spirit only because He speaks for you.
He is the Voice for God, but never forget that God did not will to be
alone. He shares His Will with you; He does not thrust it upon
you. Always remember that what He gives, He holds, so that nothing He
gives can contradict Him. You who share His Life must share it to know
it, for sharing is knowing. Blessed are you who learn that to
hear the Will of your Father is to know your own. For it is your
will to be like Him, Whose Will it is that it be so. God's Will is that
His Son be one, and united with Him in His Oneness. That is why healing
is the beginning of the recognition that your will is His.
16
If sickness is separation, the will to heal and be healed is the first
step toward recognizing what you truly want. Every attack is a
step away from this, and every healing thought brings it closer. The Son
of God has both Father and Son because he is both Father
and Son. To unite having and being is only to unite your will with His,
for He wills you Himself. And you will yourself to Him because, in your
perfect understanding of Him, you know there is but One Will.
Yet when you attack any part of God and His Kingdom, your understanding
is not perfect, and what you will is therefore lost to you.
17
Healing thus becomes a lesson in understanding, and the more you
practice it, the better teacher and learner you become. If you
have denied truth, what better witnesses to its reality could you have
than those who have been healed by it? But be sure to count yourself
among them, for in your willingness to join them is your healing
accomplished. Every miracle which you accomplish speaks to you of the
Fatherhood of God. Every healing thought which you accept, either from
your brother or in your own mind, teaches you that you are God's Son. In
every hurtful thought you hold, wherever you perceive it, lies the
denial of God's Fatherhood and your Sonship.
18
And denial is as total as love. You cannot deny part of yourself because
the remainder will seem to be unintegrated and therefore without
meaning. And being without meaning to you, you will not understand it.
To deny meaning must be to fail to understand. You can heal only
yourself, for only God's Son needs healing. He needs it because
he does not understand himself and therefore knows not what he does.
Having forgotten his will, he does not know what he wants.
19
Healing is a sign that he wants to make whole. And this
willingness opens his own ears to the Voice of the Holy Spirit,
whose message is wholeness. He will enable you to go far beyond
the healing you would undertake, for beside your small
willingness to make whole, He will lay His own complete Will and
make yours whole. What can the Son of God not accomplish
with the Fatherhood of God in him? And yet the invitation must come from
you, for you have surely learned that whom you invite as your guest will
abide with you.
20
The Holy Spirit cannot speak to an unwelcoming host because He will not
be heard. The Eternal Guest remains, but His Voice grows faint in
alien company. He needs your protection, but only because your care is a
sign that you want Him. Think like Him ever so slightly, and the
little spark becomes a blazing light that fills your mind so that He
becomes your only Guest. Whenever you ask the ego to enter, you
lessen His welcome. He will remain, but you have allied yourself
against Him. Whatever journey you choose to take, He will go with
you, waiting. You can safely trust His patience, for He cannot leave a
part of God. Yet you need far more than patience.
21
You will never rest until you know your function and fulfill it,
for only in this can your will and your Father's be wholly joined. To have
Him is to be like Him, and He has given Himself to you. You who
have God must be as God, for His function became yours
with His gift. Invite this knowledge back into your minds, and let
nothing that will obscure it enter. The Guest whom God sent you will
teach you how to do this if you but recognize the little spark and are
willing to let it grow. Your willingness need not be perfect,
because His is. If you will merely offer Him a little place, He
will lighten it so much that you will gladly extend it. And by this
extending, you will begin to remember creation.
22
Would you be hostage to the ego or host to God? You will accept only
whom you invite. You are free to determine who shall be your
guest and how long he shall remain with you. Yet this is not real
freedom, for it still depends on how you see it. The Holy Spirit is there,
although He cannot help you without your invitation, and the ego is
nothing whether you invite it in or not. Real freedom depends on
welcoming reality, and of your guests, only He is real. Know,
then, who abides with you merely by recognizing what is there already
and do not be satisfied with imaginary comforters, for the Comforter of
God is in you.
23
When you are weary, remember you have hurt yourself. Your Comforter will
rest you, but you cannot. You do not know how, for if
you did you could never have grown weary. Unless you have hurt
yourselves, you could never suffer in any way, for that is not
God's Will for His Son. Pain is not of Him, for He knows no attack and
His peace surrounds you silently. God is very quiet, for there is no
conflict in Him. Conflict is the root of all evil, for being blind, it
does not see whom it attacks. Yet it always attacks the Son of
God, and the Son of God is you.
24
God's Son is indeed in need of comfort, for he knows not what he does,
believing his will is not his own. The Kingdom is his, and yet he
wanders homelessly. At home in God, he is lonely, and amid all his
brothers, he is friendless. Would God let this be real if He did
not will to be alone Himself? And if your will is His, it cannot be true
of you because it is not true of Him. Oh, my children, if you
knew what God wills for you, your joy would be complete! And what He
wills has happened, for it was always true.
25
When the light comes and you have said, "God's Will is mine," you will
see such beauty that you will know it is not of you. Out of your
joy you will create beauty in His name, for your joy could no
more be contained than His. The bleak little world will vanish into
nothingness, and your heart will be so filled with joy that it will leap
into Heaven and into the Presence of God. I cannot tell you what this
will be like, for your hearts are not ready. Yet I can tell you
and remind you often that what God wills for Himself He wills for you,
and what He wills for you is yours.
26
The way is not hard, but it is very different. Yours is the way
of pain, of which God knows nothing. That way is hard indeed and
very lonely. Fear and grief are your guests, and they go with you and
abide with you on the way. But the dark journey is not the way of God's
Son. Walk in light, and do not see the dark companions, for they are not
fit companions for the Son of God, who was created of light and
in light. The Great Light always surrounds you and shines out from
you. How can you see the dark companions in a light such as this? If you
see them, it is only because you are denying the light.
But deny them instead, for the light is here, and the way is
clear.
27
God hides nothing from His Son, even though His Son would hide himself.
Yet the Son of God cannot hide his glory, for God wills him to be
glorious and gave him the light that shines in him. You will never lose
your way, for God leads you. When you wander, you but undertake a
journey which is not real. The dark companions, the dark way, are all
illusions. Turn toward the light, for the little spark in you is part of
a light so great that it can sweep you out of all darkness forever. For
your Father is your Creator, and you are like Him.
28
The children of light cannot abide in darkness, for darkness is not in
them. Do not be deceived by the dark comforters, and never let them
enter the mind of God's Son, for they have no place in His temple. When
you are tempted to deny Him, remember that there are no other
gods that you can place before Him, and accept His Will for you in
peace. For you cannot accept it otherwise.
29
Only God's Comforter can comfort you. In the quiet of His
temple, He waits to give you the peace that is yours. Give His
peace that you may enter the temple and find it waiting for you. But be
holy in the Presence of God, or you will not know that you are there.
For what is unlike God cannot enter His Mind because it was not His
Thought and therefore does not belong to Him. And your minds
must be as pure as His if you would know what belongs to you.
Guard carefully His temple, for He Himself dwells there and abides in
peace. You cannot enter God's Presence with the dark companions beside
you, but you also cannot enter alone.
30All
your brothers must enter with you, for until you have accepted
them, you cannot enter. For you cannot understand Wholeness
unless you are whole, and no part of the Son can be excluded if
he would know the Wholeness of his Father. In your mind, you can accept
the whole Sonship and bless it with the light your Father gave it. Then
you will be worthy to dwell in the temple with Him because it is
your will not to be alone. God blessed His Son forever. If you
will bless him in time, you will be in eternity. Time cannot
separate you from God if you use it on behalf of the eternal.
31
Never forget that the Sonship is your salvation, for the Sonship is your
Soul. As God's creation, it is yours, and belonging to you, it is His.
Your Soul does not need salvation, but your mind needs to learn what
salvation is. You are not saved from anything, but you
are saved for glory. Glory is your inheritance, given your Soul
by its Creator that you might extend it. Yet if you hate part of
your own Soul, all your understanding is lost because you are
looking on what God created as yourself without love. And since
what He created is part of Him, you are denying Him His place in His own
altar.
32
Could you try to make God homeless and know that you are at
home? Can the Son deny the Father without believing that the
Father has denied him? God's laws hold only for your protection,
and they never hold in vain. What you experience when you deny your
Father is still for your protection, for the power of your will cannot
be lessened without the intervention of God against it, and any
limitation on your power is not the Will of God. Therefore, look only
to the power that God gave to save you, remembering that it is yours because
it is His, and join with your brothers in His peace.
33
The peace of your Soul lies in its limitlessness. Limit the peace you
share, and your own Soul must be unknown to you. Every altar to
God is part of your Soul because the light He created is one with Him.
Would you cut off a brother from the light that is yours? You would not
do so if you realized that you can only darken your own mind. As
you bring him back, so will your mind return. That is
the law of God for the protection of the wholeness of His Son.
34
Only you can deprive yourself of anything. Do not oppose this
realization, for it is truly the beginning of the dawn of light.
Remember also that the denial of this simple fact takes many forms, and
these you must learn to recognize and to oppose steadfastly and without
exception. This is a crucial step in the reawakening. The
beginning phases of this reversal are often quite painful for, as blame
is withdrawn from without, there is a strong tendency to harbor it
within. It is difficult at first to realize that this is exactly
the same thing, for there is no distinction between within and
without.
35
If your brothers are part of you and you blame them for your
deprivation, you are blaming yourself. And you cannot blame
yourself without blaming them. That is why blame must be undone,
not re-allocated. Lay it to yourself and you cannot know
yourself, for only the ego blames at all. Self-blame is
therefore ego identification and as strong an ego defense as blaming
others. You cannot enter God's Presence if you attack his Son.
When His Son lifts his voice in praise of his Creator, he will
hear the Voice of his Father. Yet the Creator cannot be praised without
His Son, for their glory is shared, and they are glorified together.
36
Christ is at God's altar, waiting to welcome His Son. But come wholly
without condemnation, for otherwise you will believe that the door is
barred and you cannot enter. The door is not barred, and it is
impossible for you to be unable to enter the place where God would have
you be. But love yourself with the love of Christ, for so does your
Father love you. You can refuse to enter, but you cannot
bar the door which Christ holds open. Come unto me who holds it open for
you, for while I live it cannot be shut, and I live forever. God is my
life and yours, and nothing is denied by God to His Son.
Remember that to deny is to refuse to accept, and everything
awaits only your acceptance.
37
At God's altar Christ waits for the restoration of Himself in you.
God knows His Son as wholly blameless as Himself, and He is approached
through the appreciation of His Son. Christ waits for your acceptance of
Him as yourself and of His wholeness as yours. For
Christ is the Son of God who lives in his Creator and shines with His
glory. Christ is the extension of the love and the loveliness of God, as
perfect as his Creator and at peace with Him.
38
Blessed is the Son of God, whose radiance is of his Father and whose
glory he wills to share as his Father shares it with him. There is no
condemnation in the Son, for there is no condemnation in the Father.
Sharing the perfect love of the Father, the Son must share what belongs
to Him, for otherwise he will not know the Father or the Son.
Peace be unto you who rest in God and in whom the whole Sonship rests.
39
No one can escape from illusions unless he looks at them, for not
looking is the way they are protected. There is no need to
shrink from illusions, for they cannot be dangerous. We are ready to
look more closely at the ego's thought system because together we have
the lamp that will dispel it, and since you realize you do not want
it, you must be ready. Let us be very calm in doing this, for we
are merely looking honestly for truth. The "dynamics" of the ego will be
our lesson for a while, for we must look first at this to look beyond it
since you have made it real. We will undo this error
quietly together and then look beyond it to truth.
40
What is healing but the removal of all that stands in the way of
knowledge? And how else can one dispel illusions except by
looking at them directly without protecting them? Be not afraid,
therefore, for what you will be looking at is the source of
fear, but you have surely learned by now that fear is not real.
We have accepted the fact already that its effects can be
dispelled merely by denying their reality. The next step is obviously to
recognize that what has no effects does not exist. Laws do not
operate in a vacuum, and what leads to nothing has not happened.
If reality is recognized by its extension, what extends to
nothing cannot be real.
41
Do not be afraid, then, to look upon fear, for it cannot be
seen. Clarity undoes confusion by definition, and to look upon darkness
through light must dispel it. Let us begin this lesson in "ego
dynamics" by understanding that the term itself does not mean anything.
In fact, it contains exactly the contradiction in terms which makes
it meaningless. "Dynamics" implies the power to do something, and the
whole separation fallacy lies in the belief that the ego has the
power to do anything. The ego is fearful to you because
you believe this. Yet the truth is very simple:
43
When we look at the ego, then, we are not considering dynamics but
delusions. We can surely regard a delusional system without fear, for it
cannot have any effects if its source is not true. Fear becomes more
obviously inappropriate if one recognizes the ego's goal, which
is so clearly senseless that any effort exerted on its behalf is necessarily
expended on nothing. The ego's goal is quite explicitly ego autonomy.
From the beginning, then, its purpose is to be separate,
sufficient unto itself, and independent of any power except its
own. This is why it is the symbol of separation.
44
Every idea has a purpose, and its purpose is always the natural
extension of what it is. Everything that stems from the ego is
the natural outcome of its central belief, and the way to undo its results
is merely to recognize that their source is not natural, being
out of accord with your true nature. We once said that to will
contrary to God is wishful thinking and not real willing. His Will is
one because the extension of His Will cannot be unlike itself. The real
conflict you experience, then, is between the ego's idle wishes and the
Will of God, which you share. Can this be a real conflict?
45
Yours is the independence of creation, not of autonomy. Your
whole creative function lies in your complete dependence on God,
Whose function He shares with you. By His willingness to
share it, He became as dependent on you as you are on Him. Do
not ascribe the ego's arrogance to Him, Who wills not to be independent
of you. He has included you in His Autonomy. Can you
believe that autonomy is meaningful apart from Him? The belief
in ego autonomy is costing you the knowledge of your dependence
on God in which your freedom lies. The ego sees all
dependency as threatening and has twisted even your longing for God into
a means of establishing itself. But do not be deceived by its
interpretation of your conflict.
46
The ego always attacks on behalf of separation. Believing it has
the power to do this, it does nothing else because its goal of autonomy
is nothing else. The ego is totally confused about reality, but
it does not lose sight of its goal. It is much more vigilant
than you are because it is perfectly certain of its purpose. You
are confused because you do not know yours.
47
What you must learn to recognize is that the last thing the ego
wishes you to realize is that you are afraid of it. For if the
ego gives rise to fear, it is diminishing your independence and
weakening your power. Yet its one claim to your allegiance is
that it can give power to you. Without this belief, you would
not listen to it at all. How, then, can its existence continue if you
realize that, by accepting it, you are belittling
yourself and depriving yourself of power?
48
The ego can and does allow you to regard yourself as supercilious,
unbelieving, "light-hearted," distant, emotionally shallow, callous,
uninvolved, and even desperate, but not really afraid. Minimizing
fear but not its undoing is the ego's constant effort and is
indeed the skill at which it is very ingenious. How can it preach
separation without upholding it through fear, and would you
listen to it if you recognized this is what it is doing?
49
Your recognition that whatever seems to separate you from God is
only fear, regardless of the form it takes and quite apart from
how the ego wants you to experience it, is therefore the basic
ego threat. Its dream of autonomy is shaken to its foundation by this
awareness. For though you may countenance a false idea of independence,
you will not accept the cost of fear if you recognize it.
Yet this is the cost, and the ego cannot minimize it.
For if you overlook love, you are overlooking yourself, and you
must fear unreality because you have denied yourself. By
believing that you have successfully attacked truth, you are
believing that attack has power. Very simply, then, you have
become afraid of yourself. And no one wills to learn what he
believes would destroy him.
50
If the ego's goal of autonomy could be accomplished, God's purpose could
be defeated, and this is impossible. Only by learning what fear
is, can you finally learn to distinguish the possible from the
impossible and the false from the true. According to the ego's teaching,
its goal can be accomplished, and God's purpose can not.
According to the Holy Spirit's teaching, only God's purpose is
accomplishment, and it is already accomplished.
51
God is as dependent on you as you are on Him because His autonomy encompasses
yours and is therefore incomplete without it. You can only
establish your autonomy by identifying with Him and fulfilling
your function as it exists in truth. The ego believes that to
accomplish its goal is happiness. But it is given you to
know that God's function is yours and happiness cannot be found
apart from your joint will. Recognize only that the ego's goal,
which you have pursued quite diligently, has only brought you fear,
and it becomes difficult to maintain that fear is happiness.
52
Upheld by fear, this is what the ego would have you
believe. Yet God's Son is not insane and cannot believe it. Let
him but recognize it, and he will not accept it. For
only the insane would choose fear in place of love, and only the
insane could believe that love can be gained by attack. But the sane
know that only attack could produce fear, from which the love of
God completely protects them.
53
The ego analyzes; the Holy Spirit accepts. The appreciation of
wholeness comes only through acceptance, for to analyze means to
separate out. The attempt to understand totality by breaking it up is
clearly the characteristically contradictory approach of the ego to
everything. Never forget that the ego believes that power,
understanding, and truth lie in separation, and to establish
this belief it must attack. Unaware that the belief cannot be
established and obsessed with the conviction that separation is
salvation, the ego attacks everything it perceives by breaking it up
into small and disconnected parts without meaningful relationships and
thus without meaning. The ego will always substitute chaos for
meaning, for if separation is salvation, harmony is threat.
54
The ego's interpretation of the laws of perception are, and would have
to be, the exact opposite of the Holy Spirit's. The ego focuses on error
and overlooks truth. It makes real every mistake it
perceives, and with characteristically circular reasoning concludes
that, because of the mistake, consistent truth must be
meaningless. The next step, then, is obvious. If consistent truth is
meaningless, inconsistency must be true if truth has meaning.
Holding error clearly in mind and protecting what it has made real, the
ego proceeds to the next step in its thought system—that error is real,
and truth is error.
55
The ego makes no attempt to understand this, and it is clearly not
understandable, but the ego does make every attempt to demonstrate
it, and this it does constantly. Analyzing to attack meaning, the
ego does succeed in overlooking it and is left with a series of
fragmented perceptions which it unifies on behalf of itself.
This, then, becomes the universe it perceives. And it is this universe
which, in turn, becomes its demonstration of its own reality.
56
Do not underestimate the appeal of the ego's demonstrations to those who
would listen. Selective perception chooses its witnesses carefully, and
its witnesses are consistent. The case for insanity is
strong to the insane. For reasoning ends at its beginning, and no
thought system transcends its source. Yet reasoning without meaning cannot
demonstrate anything, and those who are convinced by it must be
deluded. Can the ego teach truly when it overlooks truth? Can it
perceive what it has denied? Its witnesses do attest to
its denial but hardly to what it has denied! The ego looks straight at
the Father and does not see Him, for it has denied His Son.
57
Would you remember the Father? Accept His Son, and you will
remember Him. Nothing can demonstrate that His Son is unworthy, for
nothing can prove that a lie is true. What you see of His Son through
the eyes of the ego is a demonstration that His Son does not exist, yet
where the Son is, the Father must be. Accept what God does not
deny, and He will demonstrate its truth. The witnesses for God
stand in His light and behold what He created. Their silence is
the sign that they have beheld God's Son, and in the Presence of Christ
they need demonstrate nothing, for Christ speaks to them of Himself and
of His Father. They are silent because Christ speaks to them, and it is
His words that they speak.
58
Every brother you meet becomes a witness for Christ or for the ego,
depending on what you perceive in him. Everyone convinces you of what
you want to perceive and of the reality of the kingdom you have
chosen for your vigilance. Everything you perceive is a witness to the
thought system you want to be true. Every brother has the power
to release you if you will to be free. You cannot accept false
witness of him unless you have evoked false witnesses against
him. If he speaks not of Christ to you, you spoke not of
Christ to him. You hear but your own voice, and if Christ speaks
through you, you will hear Him.
59
It is impossible not to believe what you see, but it is equally
impossible to see what you do not believe. Perceptions are built
up on the basis of experience, and experience leads to beliefs. It is
not until beliefs are fixed that perceptions stabilize. In effect, then,
what you believe, you do see. That is what I meant when I said,
"Blessed are ye who have not seen and still believe," for those who
believe in the resurrection will see it. The resurrection is the
complete triumph of Christ over the ego, not by attack but by
transcendence. For Christ does rise above the ego and all its
works and ascends to the Father and His Kingdom.
60
Would you join in the resurrection or the crucifixion? Would you condemn
your brothers or free them? Would you transcend your prison and
ascend to the Father? For these questions are all the same and are
answered together. There has been much confusion about what perception
means because the same word is used both for awareness and for the interpretation
of awareness. Yet you cannot be aware without interpretation,
and what you perceive is your interpretation. This course is
perfectly clear. You do not see it clearly because you are interpreting
against it and therefore do not believe it. And if belief
determines perception, you do not perceive what it means and
therefore do not accept it.
61
Yet different experiences lead to different beliefs, [and with them,
different perceptions. For perceptions are learned with beliefs,] and
experience teaches. I am leading you to a new kind of experience, which
you will become less and less willing to deny. Learning of Christ is
easy, for to perceive with Him involves no strain at all. His
perceptions are your natural awareness, and it is only
distortions which you introduce that tire you. Let the Christ in
you interpret for you, and do not try to limit what you see by
narrow little beliefs which are unworthy of God's Son. For until Christ
comes into His own, the Son of God will see himself as
fatherless.
62
I am your resurrection and your life. You live in me
because you live in God. And everyone lives in you, as you
live in everyone. Can you, then, perceive unworthiness in a brother and
not perceive it in yourself? And can you perceive it in yourself
and not perceive it in God? Believe in the resurrection because
it has been accomplished, and it has been accomplished in
you. This is as true now as it will ever be, for the resurrection is the
Will of God, which knows no time and no exceptions. But make no
exceptions yourself, or you will not perceive what has been accomplished
for you. For we ascend unto the Father together, as it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be, for such is the nature of God's
Son as His Father created him.
63
Do not underestimate the power of the devotion of God's Son nor the
power of the god he worships over him. For he places himself at
the altar of his god, whether it be the god he made or the God who
created him. That is why his slavery is as complete as his freedom, for
he will obey only the god he accepts. The god of the crucifixion
demands that he crucify, and his worshipers obey. In his name they
crucify themselves, believing that the power of the Son of God
is born of sacrifice and pain. The God of the resurrection demands nothing,
for He does not will to take away. He does not require obedience, for
obedience implies submission. He would only have you learn your own
will and follow it, not in the spirit of sacrifice and submission, but
in the gladness of freedom.
64
Resurrection must compel your allegiance gladly because it is the symbol
of joy. Its whole compelling power lies in the fact that it represents
what you want to be. The freedom to leave behind everything that
hurts you and humbles you and frightens you cannot be thrust upon you,
but it can be offered you through the grace of God. And you can
accept it by His grace, for God is gracious to His Son,
accepting him without question as His own. Who, then, is your
own? The Father has given you all that is His, and He Himself is yours with
them. Guard them in their resurrection, for otherwise you will not awake
in God, safely surrounded by what is yours forever.
65
You will not find peace until you have removed the nails from the hands
of God's Son and taken the last thorn from his forehead. The love of God
surrounds His Son, whom the god of the crucifixion condemns. Teach not
that I died in vain. Teach rather that I did not die by
demonstrating that I live in you. For the undoing of the
crucifixion of God's Son is the work of the redemption, in which
everyone has a part of equal value. God does not judge His blameless
Son. Having given Himself to him, how could it be otherwise?
66
You have nailed yourself to a cross and placed a crown of thorns
upon your own head. Yet you cannot crucify God's Son,
for the Will of God cannot die. His Son has been redeemed from
his own crucifixion, and you cannot assign to death whom God has given
eternal life. The dream of crucifixion still lies heavy on your eyes,
but what you see in dreams is not reality. While you perceive the Son of
God as crucified, you are asleep. And as long as you believe that you
can crucify him, you are only having nightmares. You who are beginning
to wake are still aware of dreams and have not yet forgotten them. The
forgetting of dreams and the awareness of Christ comes with the
awakening of others to share your redemption.
67
You will awaken to your own call, for the Call to awake is within
you. If I live in you, you are awake. Yet you must see the works
I do through you, or you will not perceive that I have done them unto
you. Do not set limits on what you believe I can do through you, or you
will not accept what I can do for you. For it is done already,
and unless you give all that you have received, you will not know that
your Redeemer liveth and that you have awakened with
Him. Redemption is recognized only by sharing it.
68
God's Son is saved. Bring only this awareness to the
Sonship, and you will have a part in the redemption as valuable as mine.
For your part must be like mine if you learn it of me. If you
believe that yours is limited, you are limiting mine.
There is no order of difficulty in miracles because all of God's Sons
are of equal value, and their equality is their oneness. The whole power
of God is in every part of Him, and nothing contradictory to His Will is
either great or small. What does not exist has no size and no
measure. To God all things are possible. And to Christ it is
given to be like the Father.
69
The world as you perceive it cannot have been created by the
Father, for the world is not as you see it. God created only
the eternal, and everything you see is perishable. Therefore, there must
be another world which you do not see. The Bible speaks of a new
Heaven and a new earth, yet this cannot be literally true, for
the eternal are not re-created. To perceive anew is
merely to perceive again, implying that before, or in the
interval, you were not perceiving at all. What, then, is the
world that awaits your perception when you see it?
70
Every loving thought that the Son of God ever had is eternal. Those
which his mind perceived in this world are the world's only
reality. They are still perceptions because he still believes that he is
separate. Yet they are eternal because they are loving. And being
loving, they are like the Father and therefore cannot die. The real
world can actually be perceived. All that is necessary is a
willingness to perceive nothing else. For if you perceive both
good and evil, you are accepting both the false and the
true and making no distinction between them.
71
The ego sees some good but never only good. That is why
its perceptions are so variable. It does not reject goodness entirely,
for that you could not accept, but it always adds something that is not
real to the real, thus confusing illusion and reality. For
perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth and
illusion, you cannot tell which is true. To establish your personal
autonomy, you tried to create unlike your Father, believing what you
made to be capable of being unlike Him. Yet everything in what
you have made that is true is like Him. Only this is the
real world, and perceiving only this will lead you to the real
Heaven because it will make you capable of understanding it.
72
The perception of goodness is not knowledge, but the denial of the opposite
of goodness enables you to perceive a condition in which opposites do
not exist. And this is the condition of knowledge. Without
this awareness, you have not met its conditions, and until you do you
will not know that it is yours already. You have made many ideas which
you have placed between yourselves and your Creator, and these beliefs
are the world as you perceive it. Truth is not absent here, but it is
obscure. You do not know the difference between what you have made and
what God created, and so you do not know the difference between what you
have made and what you have created.
73
To believe that you can perceive the real world is to believe that you
can know yourself. You can know God because it is His Will to be
known. The real world is all that the Holy Spirit has saved for you out
of what you have made, and to perceive only this is salvation because it
is the recognition that reality is only what is true.
74
This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel that a course
which, in the end, teaches nothing more than that only reality is true
is necessary. But do you believe it? When you have perceived the
real world, you will recognize that you did not believe it. Yet
the swiftness with which your new and only real perception will
be translated into knowledge will leave you only an instant to realize
that this judgment is true.
75
And then everything you made will be forgotten, the good and the bad,
the false and the true. For as Heaven and earth become one, even the
real world will vanish from your sight. The end of the world is not its
destruction, but its translation into Heaven. The
re-interpretation of the world is the transfer of all perception
to knowledge. The Bible tells you to become as little children. Little
children recognize that they do not understand what they perceive, and
so they ask what it means. Do not make the mistake of believing
that you understand what you perceive, for its meaning is lost
to you. Yet the Holy Spirit has saved its meaning for you, and
if you will let Him interpret it for you, He will restore what
you have thrown away. As long as you think you know its meaning,
you will see no need to ask it of Him.
76
You do not know the meaning of anything you perceive. Not
one thought you hold is wholly true. The recognition of this is
your firm beginning. You are not misguided; you have accepted no guide
at all. Instruction in perception is your great need, for you understand
nothing. Recognize this but do not accept it, for understanding
is your inheritance. Perceptions are learned, and you are not without a
Teacher. Yet your willingness to learn of Him depends on your
willingness to question everything you have learned of yourself,
for you who have learned amiss should not be your own teachers.
77
No one can withhold truth except from himself. Yet God will not refuse
the answer He gave you. Ask, then, for what is yours but which
you did not make, and do not defend yourself against truth. You
made the problem which God has answered. Ask yourselves, therefore, but
one simple question—
79
Decide for the answer and you will have it, for you will see it as it
is, and it is yours already.
80
You complain that this course is not sufficiently specific for you to
understand it and use it. Yet it has been very specific,
and you have not done what it specifically advocates. This is
not a course in the play of ideas, but in their practical
application. Nothing could be more specific than to be told very
clearly that if you ask you will receive. The Holy Spirit will
answer every specific problem as long as you believe that
problems are specific. His answer is both many and one, as long
as you believe that the one is many. Realize that you are afraid
of His specificity for fear of what you think it will demand of
you. Yet only by asking will you learn that nothing that is of God
demands anything of you. God gives; He does not
take.
81
You are refusing to ask because you believe that asking is taking,
and you do not perceive it as sharing. The Holy Spirit will give
you only what is yours and will take nothing in return. For what
is yours is everything, and you share it with God. This is
its reality. Would the Holy Spirit, Who wills only to restore,
be capable of misinterpreting the question you must ask to learn His
answer?
82
You have heard the answer, but you have misunderstood the question.
You have believed that to ask for guidance of the Holy Spirit is to ask
for deprivation. Little Children of God, you do not understand
your Father. You believe in a world that takes, because you believe that
you can get by taking. And by that perception, you have
lost sight of the real world. You are afraid of the world as you
see it, but the real world is still yours for the asking. Do not deny it
to yourself, for it can only free you. Nothing of God will
enslave His Son, whom He created free and whose freedom is protected by
His Being.
83
Blessed are you who will ask the truth of God without fear, for only
thus can you learn that His answer is the release from fear.
Beautiful Child of God, you are asking only for what I promised you. Do
you believe I would deceive you? The Kingdom of Heaven is within
you. Believe that the truth is in me, for I know that it is in you.
God's Sons have nothing which they do not share. Ask for truth of any
Son of God, and you have asked it of me. No one of us but has the answer
in him, to give to anyone who asks it of him. Ask anything of God's Son
and His Father will answer you, for Christ is not deceived in His
Father, and His Father is not deceived in Him.
84
Do not, then, be deceived in your brother and see only his loving
thoughts as his reality, for by denying that his mind is split,
you will heal yours. Accept him as his Father accepts him and
heal him unto Christ, for Christ is his healing and yours.
Christ is the Son of God, who is in no way separate from His Father,
whose every thought is as loving as the Thought of His Father by
which He was created. Be not deceived in God's Son, for thereby you must
be deceived in yourself. And being deceived in yourself, you are
deceived in your Father in Whom no deceit is possible.
85
In the real world there is no sickness, for there is no separation and
no division. Only loving thoughts are recognized, and because no one is
without your help, the Help of God goes with you
everywhere. As you become willing to accept this Help by asking
for it, you will give it because you want it. Nothing will be
beyond your healing power because nothing will be denied your simple
request. What problems will not disappear in the presence of God's
answer? Ask, then, to learn of the reality of your brother because this
is what you will perceive in him, and you will see your
beauty reflected in him.
86
Do not accept your brother's variable perception of himself, for his
split mind is yours, and you will not accept your healing
without his. For you share the real world as you share Heaven, and his
healing is yours. To love yourself is to heal yourself,
and you cannot perceive part of you as sick and achieve your own
goal. Brother, we heal together as we live together and love together.
Be not deceived in God's Son, for he is one with himself and one with
his Father. Love him who is beloved of His Father, and you will learn of
the Father's Love for you.
87
If you perceive offense in a brother, pluck the offense from your mind,
for you are offended by Christ and are deceived in Him. Heal in
Christ and be not offended by Him, for there is no offense in
Him. If what you perceive offends you, you are offended in yourself
and are condemning God's Son, whom God condemneth not. Let the Holy
Spirit remove all offense of God's Son against himself and
perceive no one but through His guidance, for He would save you from all
condemnation. Accept His healing power and use it for all He sends you,
for He wills to heal the Son of God in whom He is not deceived.
88
Children perceive terrifying ghosts and monsters and dragons, and they
are terrified. Yet if they ask someone they trust for the real
meaning of what they perceive and are willing to let their
interpretations go in favor of reality, their fear goes with
them. When a child is helped to translate his "ghost" into a curtain,
his "monster" into a shadow, and his "dragon" into a dream, he is no
longer afraid and laughs happily at his own fear. You, my children, are
afraid of your brothers and of your Father and of yourselves.
But you are merely deceived in them.
89
Ask what they are of the Teacher of Reality, and hearing His
answer, you too will laugh at your fears and replace them with peace.
For fear lies not in reality, but in the minds of children who do not
understand reality. It is only their lack of understanding which
frightens them, and when they learn to perceive truly, they are not
afraid. And because of this, they will ask for truth again when they are
frightened. It is not the reality of your brothers or your
Father or yourself which frightens you. You do not know what they are,
and so you perceive them as ghosts and monsters and dragons. Ask
of their reality from the One who knows it, and He will tell you
what they are. For you do not understand them, and because you are
deceived by what you see, you need reality to dispel your fears.
90
Would you not exchange your fears for truth if the exchange is yours for
the asking? For if God is not deceived in you, you can be deceived only
in yourself. Yet you can learn the truth of yourself of the Holy
Spirit, who will teach you that, as part of God, deceit in you
is impossible. When you perceive yourself without deceit, you will
accept the real world in place of the false one you have made. And then
your Father will lean down to you and take the last step for you by
raising you unto Himself.
1
You have been told not to make error real, and the way to do this is
very simple. If you want to believe in error, you would have
to make it real because it is not true. But truth is real in its own
right, and to believe in truth, you do not have to do anything.
Understand that you do not respond to stimuli, but to stimuli as you
interpret them. Your interpretation thus becomes the justification
for the response. That is why analyzing the motives of others is
hazardous to you. If you decide that someone is really trying to
attack you or desert you or enslave you, you will respond as if
he had actually done so, because you have made his error real to
you. To interpret error is to give it power, and having done this, you will
overlook truth.
2
The analysis of ego-motivation is very complicated, very obscuring, and
never without the risk of your own ego-involvement. The whole
process represents a clear-cut attempt to demonstrate your own
ability to understand what you perceive. This is shown by the fact that
you react to your interpretations as if they were correct and
control your reactions behaviorally but not emotionally. This is quite
evidently a mental split in which you have attacked the integrity of
your mind and pitted one level within it against another.
3
There is but one interpretation of all motivation that makes any sense.
And because it is the Holy Spirit's judgment, it requires no effort at
all on your part. Every loving thought is true. Everything else is an
appeal for healing and help. That is what it is, regardless of the form
it takes. Can anyone be justified in responding with anger to a plea for
help? No response can be appropriate except the willingness to give it
to him, for this and only this is what he is asking for. Offer
him anything else, and you are assuming the right to attack his reality
by interpreting it as you see fit.
4
Perhaps the danger of this to your own mind is not yet fully apparent to
you, but this by no means signifies that it is not perfectly clear. If
you maintain that an appeal for help is something else, you will react
to something else, and your response will be inappropriate to reality as
it is but not to your perception of it. This is poor
reality testing by definition. There is nothing to prevent you from
recognizing all calls for help as exactly what they are except
your own perceived need to attack. It is only this that
makes you willing to engage in endless "battles" with reality in which
you deny the reality of the need for healing by making it
unreal. You would not do this except for your unwillingness to
perceive reality, which you withhold from yourself.
5
It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not
understand. No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness, for
truth to him has become what he wants it to be. If you are
unwilling to perceive an appeal for help as what it is, it is
because you are unwilling to give help and to receive it.
The analysis of the ego's "real" motivation is the modern equivalent of
the inquisition, for in both a brother's errors are "uncovered" and he
is then attacked for his own good. What can this be but
projection? For his errors lay in the minds of his interpreters,
for which they punished him.
6
Whenever you fail to recognize a call for help, you are refusing
help. Would you maintain that you do not need it? Yet this is
what you are maintaining when you refuse to recognize a brother's
appeal, for only by answering his appeal can you be
helped. Deny him your help, and you will not perceive God's answer to you.
The Holy Spirit does not need your help in interpreting motivation, but
you do need His. Only appreciation is an
appropriate response to your brother. Gratitude is due him for both his
loving thoughts and his appeals for help, for both are capable of
bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly.
And all your sense of strain comes from your attempts not
to do just this.
7
How simple, then, is God's plan for salvation. There is but one
response to reality, for reality evokes no conflict at all. There is but
one Teacher of reality, Who understands what it is. He
does not change His Mind about reality because reality does not
change. Although your interpretations of reality are meaningless
in your divided state, His remain consistently true. He gives
them to you because they are for you. Do not attempt to "help" a
brother in your way, for you cannot help yourselves. But hear
his call for the help of God, and you will recognize your own
need for the Father.
8
Your interpretations of your brother's need is your interpretation of yours.
By giving help you are asking for it, and if you
perceive but this one need in yourself, you will be healed. For
you will recognize God's answer as you want it to be, and if you want it
in truth, it will be truly yours. Every appeal you answer in the name of
Christ brings the remembrance of your Father closer to your
awareness. For the sake of your need, then, hear every call for
help as what it is, so God can answer you.
9
By applying the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the reactions of others
more and more consistently, you will gain an increasing awareness that His
criteria are equally applicable to you. For to recognize
fear is not enough to escape from it, although the recognition is
necessary to demonstrate the need for escape. The Holy Spirit must still
translate it into truth. If you were left with the fear,
having recognized it, you would have taken a step away from
reality, not towards it. Yet we have repeatedly emphasized the
need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as a crucial
step in the undoing of the ego. Consider how well the Holy Spirit's
interpretation of the motives of others will serve you then.
10
Having taught you to accept only loving thoughts in others and to regard
everything else as an appeal for help, He has taught you that fear
is an appeal for help. This is what recognizing it really means.
If you do not protect it, He will reinterpret it. That
is the ultimate value to you in learning to perceive attack as a
call for love. We have learned surely that fear and attack are
inevitably associated. If only attack produces fear and if you
see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of
fear must dawn upon you. For fear is a call for love in
unconscious recognition of what has been denied.
11
Fear is a symptom of your deep sense of loss. If when you perceive it in
others you learn to supply the loss, the basic cause of
fear is removed. Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist in
you, for you have in yourself the means for removing it and have
demonstrated this by giving it. Fear and love are the only
emotions of which you are capable. One is false, for it was made out of
denial, and denial depends on the real belief in what is denied for its
own existence.
12
By interpreting fear correctly as a positive affirmation of the
underlying belief it masks, you are undermining its perceived
usefulness by rendering it useless. Defenses which do not work at all
are automatically discarded. If you raise what fear conceals to
clear-cut, unequivocal predominance, fear becomes meaningless.
You have denied its power to conceal love, which was its only purpose.
The mask which you have drawn across the face of love has
disappeared.
13
If you would look upon love, which is the world's reality, how
could you do better than to recognize in every defense against
it the underlying appeal for it? And how could you better learn
of its reality than by answering the appeal for it by giving it?
The Holy Spirit's interpretation of fear does dispel it, for the
awareness of truth cannot be denied. Thus does the Holy
Spirit replace fear with love and translate error into truth. And thus
will you learn of Him how to replace your dream of separation
with the fact of unity. For the separation is only the denial of
union and, correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that
union is true.
14
Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth. If to love
oneself is to heal oneself, those who are sick do not
love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal
them but which they are denying to themselves. If they knew the truth
about themselves, they could not be sick. The task of the
miracle-worker thus becomes to deny the denial of truth. The
sick must heal themselves, for the truth is in them. Yet, having
obscured it, the light in another mind must shine into
theirs because that light is theirs.
15
The light in them shines as brightly, regardless of the density
of the fog that obscures it. If you give no power to the fog to
obscure the light, it has none, for it has power only because
the Son of God gave power to it. He must himself withdraw that
power, remembering that all power is of God. You can
remember this for all the Sonship. Do not allow your brother not
to remember, for his forgetfulness is yours. But your
remembering is his, for God cannot be remembered alone. This
is what you have forgotten. To perceive the healing of your
brother as the healing of yourself is thus the way to remember God. For
you forgot your brothers with Him, and God's answer to your
forgetting is but the way to remember.
16
Perceive in sickness but another call for love and offer your brother
what he believes he cannot offer himself. Whatever the sickness, there
is but one remedy. You will be made whole as you make
whole, for to perceive in sickness the appeal for health is to recognize
in hatred the call for love. And to give a brother what he really
wants is to offer it unto yourself, for your Father wills you to know
your brother as yourself. Answer his call for love and yours
is answered. Healing is the love of Christ for His Father and for Himself.
17
Remember what we said about the frightening perceptions of little
children which terrify them because they do not understand them. If they
ask for enlightenment and accept it, their fears vanish, but if
they hide their nightmares, they will keep them. It is
easy to help an uncertain child, for he recognizes that he does not know
what his perceptions mean. Yet you believe that you do know.
Little children, you are hiding your heads under the covers of the heavy
blankets you have laid upon yourselves. You are hiding your nightmares
in the darkness of your own certainty and refusing to open your eyes and
look at them.
18
Let us not save nightmares, for they are not fitting offerings for
Christ, and so they are not fit gifts for you. Take off the
covers and look at what you are afraid of. Only the anticipation
will frighten you, for the reality of nothingness cannot be
frightening. Let us not delay this, for your dream of hatred will not
leave you without help, and help is here. Learn to be quiet in the midst
of turmoil, for quietness is the end of strife and this is the journey
to peace. Look straight at every image that rises to delay you, for the
goal is inevitable because it is eternal. The goal of love is but your
right, and it belongs to you despite your preference.
19
You still want what God wills, and no nightmare can defeat a
Child of God in his purpose. For your purpose was given you by God, and
you must accomplish it because it is His Will. Awake and
remember your purpose, for it is your will to do so. What has
been accomplished for you must be yours. Do not let your hatred
stand in the way of love, for nothing can withstand the love of
Christ for His Father or His Father's love for Him.
20
A little while and you will see me, for I am not hidden because
you are hiding. I will awaken you as surely as I awakened myself,
for I awoke for you. In my resurrection is your
release. Our mission is to escape crucifixion, not redemption.
Trust in my help, for I did not walk alone, and I will walk with you as
our Father walked with me. Did you not know that I walked with Him in
peace? And does not that mean that peace goes with us on the
journey?
21
There is no fear in perfect love. We will but be making perfect to you
what is already perfect in you. You do not fear the unknown,
but the known. You will not fail in your mission because I
failed not in mine. Give me but a little trust in the name of the complete
trust I have in you, and we will easily accomplish the goal of
perfection together. For perfection is and cannot be
denied. To deny the denial of perfection is not so difficult as the
denial of truth, and what we can accomplish together must be
believed when you see it as accomplished.
22
You who have tried to banish love have not succeeded, but you who choose
to banish fear will succeed. The Lord is with you, but you know
it not. Yet your Redeemer liveth and abideth in you in the peace out of
which He was created. Would you not exchange this awareness for
the awareness of your fear? When we have overcome fear—not by hiding it,
not by minimizing it, not by denying its full import in any way—this is
what you will really see. You cannot lay aside the obstacle to real
vision without looking upon it, for to lay aside means to judge against.
If you will look, the Holy Spirit will judge and will judge
truly. He cannot shine away what you keep hidden, for you have
not offered it to Him, and He cannot take it from you.
23
We are therefore embarking on an organized, well-structured, and
carefully planned program aimed at learning how to offer to the Holy
Spirit everything you do not want. He knows what to do
with it. You do not know how to use what He knows. Whatever is
revealed to Him that is not of God is gone. Yet you must reveal it to yourself
in perfect willingness, for otherwise His knowledge remains useless to
you. Surely He will not fail to help you, since help is His only
purpose. Do you not have greater reason for fearing the world as you
perceive it than for looking at the cause of fear and letting it go
forever?
24
I once asked if you were willing to sell all you have and give to the
poor and follow me. This is what I meant: If you had no investment in
anything in this world, you could teach the poor where their treasure is.
The poor are merely those who have invested wrongly, and they are poor
indeed! Because they are in need, it is given you to help them since you
are among them. Consider how perfectly your lesson would be learned if
you were unwilling to share their poverty. For poverty is lack,
and there is but one lack since there is but one need.
25
Suppose a brother insists on having you do something you think you do
not want to do. The very fact of his 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 that 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
two-fold—first, what is to be saved, and second, how can
it be saved?
26
Whenever you become angry with a brother, for whatever reason,
you are believing that the ego is to be saved and to be saved by
attack. If he attacks, you are agreeing with this belief,
and if you attack, you are reinforcing it. Remember that
those who attack are poor. Their poverty asks for gifts, not
for further impoverishment. You who could help them are surely acting
destructively if you accept their poverty as yours. If you had
not invested as they had, it would never occur to you to
overlook their need.
27
Recognize what does not matter, and if your brothers ask you for
something "outrageous," do it because it does not matter. Refuse
and your opposition establishes that it does matter to you. It
is only you, therefore, who have made the request outrageous,
for nothing can be asked of you, and every request of a brother
is for you. Why would you insist in denying him? For to
do so is to deny yourself and impoverish both. He is asking for
salvation, as you are. Poverty is of the ego and never
of God. No "outrageous" request can be made of one who recognizes what
is valuable and wants to accept nothing else.
28
Salvation is for the mind, and it is attained through peace. This is the
only thing that can be saved and the only way to save it.
Any response other than love arises from a confusion about the
"what" and the "how" of salvation, and this is the only answer.
Never lose sight of this, and never allow yourself to believe even for
an instant that there is another answer. For you will surely
place yourself among the poor, who do not understand that they dwell in
abundance and that salvation is come.
29
To identify with the ego is to attack yourself and make yourself
poor. That is why everyone who identifies with the ego feels deprived.
What he experiences then is depression or anger, but what he did
is to exchange his self-love for self-hate, making him afraid of
himself. He does not realize this. Even if he is fully aware of
anxiety, he does not perceive its source as his own ego
identification, and he always tries to handle it by making
some sort of insane "arrangement" with the world. He always perceives
this world as outside himself, for this is crucial to his
adjustment. He does not realize that he makes this world, for
there is no world outside of him.
30
If only the loving thoughts of God's Son are the world's reality, the
real world must be in his mind. His insane thoughts, too, must
be in his mind, but an internal conflict of this magnitude he cannot
tolerate. A split mind is endangered, and the recognition that
it encompasses completely opposed thoughts within itself is
intolerable. Therefore the mind projects the split, not the
reality. Everything you perceive as the outside world is merely your
attempt to maintain your ego identification, for everyone believes that
identification is salvation. Yet consider what has happened, for
thoughts do have consequences to the thinker.
31
You are at odds with the world as you perceive it because you
think it is antagonistic to you. This is a necessary
consequence of what you have done. You have projected outward what is
antagonistic to what is inward, and therefore you would have to
perceive it this way. That is why you must realize that your hatred is in
your mind and not outside it before you can get rid of it and
why you must get rid of it before you can perceive the world as
it really is.
32
We once said that God so loved the world that He gave it to His
only-begotten Son. God does love the real world, and those who
perceive its reality cannot see the world of death. For
death is not of the real world, in which everything is eternal.
God gave you the real world in exchange for the one you made out of your
split mind, and which is the symbol of death. For if you could really
separate yourselves from the Mind of God, you would die, and the
world you perceive is a world of separation.
33
You were willing to accept even death to deny your Father. Yet He would
not have it so, and so it is not so. You still could not will
against Him, and that is why you have no control over the world you
made. It is not a world of will because it is governed by the desire to
be unlike Him, and this desire is not will. The world you made
is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless
"laws," and without meaning of any kind. For it was made out of
what you do not want, projected from your mind because you were
afraid of it.
34
Yet this world is only in the mind of its maker along with his real
salvation. Do not believe it is outside of yourself, for only by
recognizing where it is will you gain control over it. For you do
have control over your mind, since the mind is the mechanism of
decision. If you will recognize that all attack which you
perceive is in your own mind and nowhere else, you will at last
have placed its source, and where it began it must end. For in this same
place also lies salvation. The altar of God where Christ abideth is
there.
35
You have defiled the altar but not the world. Yet Christ has
placed the Atonement on the altar for you. Bring your
perceptions of the world to this altar, for it is the altar to truth.
There you will see your vision changed, and there you will learn to see
truly. From this place, where God and His Son dwell in peace and where
you are welcome, you will look out in peace and behold the world truly.
Yet to find the place, you must relinquish your investment in the world
as you have projected it, allowing the Holy Spirit to project
the real world to you from the altar of God.
36
The ego is certain that love is dangerous, and this is always its
central teaching. It never puts it this way; on the contrary,
everyone who believes that the ego is salvation is intensely engaged in
the search for love. Yet the ego, though encouraging the search very
actively, makes one proviso—do not find it. Its dictates, then,
can be summed up simply as, "Seek and do not find." This is the
one promise the ego holds out to you and the one promise it will keep.
For the ego pursues its goal with fanatic insistence, and its reality
testing, though severely impaired, is completely consistent.
37
The search which the ego undertakes is therefore bound to be defeated.
And since it also teaches that it is your identification, its
guidance leads you to a journey which must end in perceived self-defeat.
For the ego cannot love, and in its frantic search for love, it
is seeking what it is afraid to find. The search is inevitable
because the ego is part of your mind, and because of its source, the ego
is not wholly split off, or it could not be believed at all. For it is your
mind that believes in it and gives existence to it. Yet it is also your
mind that has the power to deny the ego's existence, and you
will surely do so when you realize exactly what the journey is on which
the ego sets you.
38
It is surely obvious that no one wants to find what would utterly
defeat him. Being unable to love, the ego would be totally inadequate in
love's presence, for it could not respond at all. You would have
to abandon the ego's guidance, for it would be quite apparent that it
had not taught you the response pattern you need. The ego will
therefore distort love and teach you that love calls forth the
responses which the ego can teach. Follow its teaching, then,
and you will search for love but will not recognize it.
39
Do you realize that the ego must set you on a journey which cannot but
lead to a sense of futility and depression? To seek and not to
find is hardly joyous. Is this the promise you would keep? The
Holy Spirit offers you another promise, and one that will lead to joy.
For His promise is always, "Seek and you will find," and
under His guidance you cannot be defeated. His is the journey to
accomplishment, and the goal He sets before you He will give
you. For He will never deceive God's Son, whom He loves with the love of
the Father.
40
You will undertake a journey because you are not at home
in this world. And you will search for your home whether you
know where it is or not. If you believe it is outside yourself, the
search will be futile, for you will be seeking it where it is not. You
do not know how to look within yourself, for you do not believe
your home is there. Yet the Holy Spirit knows it for you, and He
will guide you to your home because that is His mission. As He
fulfills His mission, He will teach you yours, for your
mission is the same as His. By guiding your brothers home, you
are but following Him.
41
Behold the Guide your Father gave you that you might learn you have
eternal life. For death is not your Father's Will nor yours, and
whatever is true is the Will of the Father. You pay no price for
life, for that was given you, but you do pay a price for death,
and a very heavy one. If death is your treasure, you will sell
everything else to purchase it. And you will believe that you have
purchased it because you have sold everything else. Yet you cannot
sell the Kingdom of Heaven. Your inheritance can neither be bought nor
sold. There can be no disinherited parts of the Sonship, for God
is whole, and all His extensions are like Him.
42
The Atonement was not the price of our wholeness, but it was the
price of your awareness of your wholeness. For what you chose to
"sell" had to be kept for you since you could not "buy" it back. Yet you
must invest in it, not with money but with your spirit. For
Spirit is will, and will is the "price" of the Kingdom. Your
inheritance awaits only the recognition that you have been
redeemed. The Holy Spirit guides you into life eternal, but you
must relinquish your investment in death, or you will not see
life though it is all around you.
43
Only love is strong because it is undivided. The strong do not
attack because they see no need to do so. Before the idea of
attack can enter your mind, you must have perceived yourself as
weak. Because you had attacked yourself and believed that the attack was
effective, you behold yourself as weakened. No longer perceiving
yourself and all your brothers as equal and regarding yourself as weaker,
you attempt to "equalize" the situation you have made. You use
attack to do so because you believe that attack was successful in
weakening you.
44
That is why the recognition of your own invulnerability is so
important in the restoration of your sanity. For if you accept your
invulnerability, you are recognizing that attack has no effect.
Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally, you will
demonstrate that nothing happened. Therefore, by attacking you
have not done anything. Once you realize this, there is no
longer any sense in attack, for it manifestly does not
work and cannot protect you. Yet the recognition of your
invulnerability has more than negative value. If your attacks on
yourself have failed to weaken you, you are still
strong. You therefore have no need to "equalize" the situation to
establish your strength.
45
You will never realize the utter uselessness of attack except by
recognizing that your attack on yourself had no effects. For
others do react to attack if they perceive it, and if you are
trying to attack them, you will be unable to avoid interpreting
this as reinforcement. The only place where you can cancel out
all reinforcement is in yourself. For you are always the
first point of your attack, and if this has never been, it has
no consequences.
46
The Holy Spirit's love is your strength, for yours is divided and
therefore not real. You could not trust your own love when you have attacked
it. You cannot learn of perfect love with a split mind because a split
mind has made itself a poor learner. You tried to make the
separation eternal because you wanted to retain the characteristics of
creation with your own content. Yet creation is not of
you, and poor learners need special teaching. You have learning
handicaps in a very literal sense.
47
There are areas in your learning skills which are so impaired that you
can progress only under constant, clear-cut direction provided by a
Teacher Who can transcend your limited resources. He becomes
your resource because, of yourself, you cannot learn.
The learning situation in which you placed yourself is
impossible, and in this situation you clearly require a special Teacher
and a special curriculum. Poor learners are not good choices for
teachers, either for themselves or for anyone else. You would hardly
turn to them to establish the curriculum by which they can escape
from their limitations. If they understood what is beyond them, they
would not be handicapped.
48
You do not know the meaning of love, and that is your handicap.
Do not attempt to teach yourselves what you do not understand, and do
not try to set up curriculum goals where yours have clearly failed. Your
learning goal has been not to learn, and this cannot
lead to successful learning. You cannot transfer what you have not
learned, and the impairment of the ability to generalize is a crucial
learning failure. Would you ask those who have failed to learn
what learning aids are for? They do not know. For if they could
interpret the aids correctly, they would have learned from them.
49
We have said that the ego's rule is, "Seek and do not find."
Translated into curricular terms, this is the same as saying, "Try
to learn but do not succeed." The result of this curriculum goal
is obvious. Every legitimate teaching aid, every real instruction, and
every sensible guide to learning will be misinterpreted. For
they are all for learning facilitation, which this strange curriculum
goal is against. If you are trying to learn how not to
learn and are using the aim of teaching to defeat itself, what
can you expect but confusion? The curriculum does not make sense.
50
This kind of "learning" has so weakened your mind that you cannot
love, for the curriculum you have chosen is against love and
amounts to a course in how to attack yourself. A necessary
minor, supplementing this major curriculum goal, is learning how not
to overcome the split which made this goal believable. And you can not
overcome it, for all your learning is on its behalf. Yet
your will speaks against your learning, as your learning speaks against
your will, and so you fight against learning and succeed, for
that is your will. But you do not realize even yet that there is
something you do will to learn, and that you can learn it
because it is your will to do so.
51
You who have tried to learn what you do not will should take
heart, for although the curriculum you set yourself is depressing
indeed, it is merely ridiculous if you look at it. Is it possible
that the way to achieve a goal is not to attain it? Resign now
as your own teachers. This resignation will not lead to
depression. It is merely the result of an honest appraisal of what you
have taught yourselves and of the learning outcomes which have resulted.
Under the proper learning conditions, which you can neither provide nor
understand, you will become excellent learners and teachers. But it is
not so yet and will not be so until the whole learning situation
as you have set it up is reversed.
52
Your learning potential, properly understood, is limitless
because it will lead you to God. You can teach the way to Him and
learn it if you follow the Teacher Who knows it and His curriculum for
learning it. The curriculum is totally unambiguous because the goal is not
divided, and the means and the end are in complete accord. You
need offer only undivided attention. Everything else will be given
you. For it is your will to learn aright, and nothing can oppose
the will of God's Son. His learning is as unlimited as he is.
53
The ego is trying to teach you how to gain the whole world and lose your
own Soul. The Holy Spirit teaches that you cannot lose your Soul
and there is no gain in the world, for of itself it
profits nothing. To invest in something without profit is surely to
impoverish yourself, and the overhead is high. Not only is there no
profit in the investment, but the cost to you is enormous. For
this investment costs you the world's reality by denying yours
and gives you nothing in return. You cannot sell your Soul, but
you can sell your awareness of it. You cannot perceive
your Soul, but you will not know it while you perceive anything
else as more valuable.
54
The Holy Spirit is your strength because He perceives nothing but
your Soul as you. He is perfectly aware that you do not know
yourselves and perfectly aware of how to teach you what you are. Because
He loves you, He will gladly teach you what He loves, for He wills to
share it. Remembering you always, He cannot let you forget your worth.
For the Father never ceases to remind Him of His Son, and He never
ceases to remind His Son of the Father. God is in your memory because
of Him. You chose to forget your Father, but you did not will to
do so, and therefore you can decide otherwise. As it was my
decision, so is it yours.
55
You do not want the world. The only thing of value in it is
whatever part of it you look upon with love. This gives it the only
reality it will ever have. Its value is not in itself, but yours
is in you. As self-value comes from self-extension, so
does the perception of self-value come from the projection of
loving thoughts outward. Make the world real unto yourself, for
the real world is the gift of the Holy Spirit, and so it belongs
to you.
56
Correction is for all who cannot see. To open the eyes of the blind is
the Holy Spirit's mission, for He knows that they have not lost their
vision but merely sleep. He would awaken them from the sleep of
forgetting to the remembering of God. Christ's eyes are open, and He
will look upon whatever you see with love if you accept His vision as
yours.
57
The Holy Spirit keeps the vision of Christ for every Son of God who
sleeps. In His sight the Son of God is perfect, and He longs to share
His vision with you. He will show you the real world because God gave
you Heaven. Through Him your Father calls His Son to remember. The
awakening of His Son begins with his investment in the real
world, and by this he will learn to reinvest in himself. For
reality is one with the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit
blesses the real world in their name.
58
When you have seen this real world, as you will surely do, you will
remember us. Yet you must learn the cost of sleeping and refuse
to pay it. Only then will you decide to awaken. And then the real world
will spring to your sight, for Christ has never slept. He is waiting to
be seen, for He has never lost sight of you. He looks quietly on
the real world, which He would share with you because He knows of the
Father's love for Him. And knowing this, He would give you what is
yours. In perfect peace He waits for you at His Father's altar, holding
out the Father's love to you in the quiet light of the Holy Spirit's
blessing. For the Holy Spirit will lead everyone home to his Father,
where Christ waits as his Self.
59
Every Child of God is one in Christ, for his Being is in Christ as
Christ's is in God. Christ's love for you is His love for His Father,
which He knows because He knows His Father's love for Him. When the Holy
Spirit has at last led you to Christ at the altar to His Father,
perception fuses into knowledge because perception has become so holy
that its transfer to holiness is merely its natural extension. Love
transfers to love without any interference, for the situations are
identical. [Only the ability to make this transfer is the product of
learning.] As you perceive more and more common elements in all
situations, the transfer of your training under the Holy Spirit's
guidance increases and becomes generalized. Gradually you learn to apply
it to everyone and everything, for its applicability is
universal. When this has been accomplished, perception and knowledge
have become so similar that they share the unification of the laws of
God.
60
What is one cannot be perceived as separate, and the denial of the
separation is the reinstatement of knowledge. At the altar of
God, the holy perception of God's Son becomes so enlightened that light
streams into it, and the Spirit of God's Son shines in the Mind of the
Father and becomes one with it. Very gently does God shine upon Himself,
loving the extension of Himself which is His Son. The world has no
purpose as it blends into the purpose of God. For the real world has
slipped quietly into Heaven, where everything eternal in it has always
been. There the Redeemer and the redeemed join in perfect love of God
and of each other. Heaven is your home, and being in God, it must also
be in you.
61
Miracles demonstrate that learning has occurred under the right
guidance, for learning is invisible, and what has been learned can be
recognized only by its results. Its generalization is
demonstrated as you use it in more and more situations. You will
recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in
miracles when you have applied them to all situations. There is
no situation to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them to all
situations, you will gain the real world. For in this holy perception,
you will be made whole, and the Atonement will radiate from your
acceptance of it for yourself to everyone the Holy Spirit sends
you for your blessing. In every Child of God His blessing lies, and in your
blessing of the Children of God is His blessing to you.
62
Everyone in the world must play his part in the redemption of the world
to recognize that the world has been redeemed. You cannot see
the invisible. Yet if you see its effects, you know it must be
there. By perceiving what it does, you recognize its being. And
by what it does, you learn what it is. You cannot see
your abilities, but you gain confidence in their existence as they
enable you to act. And the results of your actions you can
see.
63
The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you can see the results of His
Presence, and through them you will learn that He is there. What He
enables you to do is clearly not of this world, for miracles
violate every law of reality as this world judges it. Every law of time
and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control is
transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly
beyond all of them. Perceiving His results, you will understand
where He must be and finally know what He is.
64
You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you can see His manifestations. And
unless you do, you will not realize He is there. Miracles are His
witnesses and speak for His Presence. What you cannot see becomes real
to you only through the witnesses who speak for it. For you can be aware
of what you cannot see, and it can become compellingly real to you as
its presence becomes manifest through you. Do the Holy Spirit's
work, for you share in His function. As your function in Heaven
is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His
function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares His with you on
earth.
65
As long as you believe you have two functions, so long will you need
correction. For this belief is the destruction of peace, a goal
in direct opposition to the Holy Spirit's purpose. You see what you expect,
and you expect what you invite. Your perception is the result of
your invitation, coming to you as you sent for it. Whose manifestations
would you see? Of whose presence would you be convinced? For you will
believe in what you manifest, and as you look out, so will you
see in. Two ways of looking at the world are in your mind, and your
perception will reflect the guidance you chose.
66
I am the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, and when you see me, it will
be because you have invited Him. For He will send you His
witnesses if you will but look upon them. Remember always that you see
what you seek, for what you seek you will find. The ego finds
what it seeks and only that. It does not find love, for
that is not what it is seeking. Yet seeking and finding are the
same, and if you seek for two goals you will find them, but you will recognize
neither. For you will think they are the same because you want
them both. The mind always strives for integration, and if it is split
and wants to keep the split, it will believe it has one goal by
making it one.
67
We said before that what you project is up to you, but it is not
up to you whether to project, for projection is a law of mind.
Perception is projection, and you look in before you
look out. As you look in you choose the guide for seeing, and then
you look out and behold his witnesses. This is why you find what
you seek. What you want in yourself, you will make manifest by
projection, and you will accept it from the world because you
put it there by wanting it.
68
When you think you are projecting what you do not want, it is
still because you do want it. This leads directly to
dissociation, for it represents the acceptance of two goals, each
perceived in a different place, separated from each other because
you made them different. The mind then sees a divided world outside
itself but not within. This gives it an illusion of integrity
and enables it to believe that it is pursuing one goal. As long as you
perceive the world as split, you are not healed. For to be
healed is to pursue one goal because you have accepted only one
and want but one.
69
When you want only love you will see nothing else. The
contradictory nature of the witnesses you perceive is merely the
reflection of your conflicting invitations. You have looked upon your
minds and accepted opposition there, having sought it there. But
do not then believe that the witnesses for opposition are true, for they
attest only to your decision about reality, returning to you the
message you gave them. Love is recognized by its messengers. If
you make love manifest, its messengers will come to you because you invited
them.
70
The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of
this world. You can decide to see it right. What you
made of it is not its reality, for its reality is only what you
gave it. You cannot really give anything but love to anyone or
anything, nor can you really receive anything else from them. If
you think you have received anything else, it is because you have looked
within and thought you saw the power to give something else within
yourself. It was only this decision that determined what you
found, for it was the decision of what you sought.
71
You are afraid of me because you looked within and are afraid of what
you saw. Yet you could not have seen reality, for the reality of your
mind is the loveliest of God's creations. Coming only from God, its
power and grandeur could only bring you peace if you really looked
upon it. If you are afraid, it is because you saw something that
is not there. Yet in that same place, you could have looked upon
me and all your brothers in the perfect safety of the Mind which created
us. For we are there in the peace of the Father, Who wills to project
His peace through you.
72
When you have accepted your mission to project peace, you will find
it, for by making it manifest, you will see it. Its holy
witnesses will surround you because you called upon them and
they will come to you. I have heard your call and I have answered it,
but you will not look upon me nor hear the answer which you
sought. That is because you do not yet want only that. Yet as I
become more real to you, you will learn that you do want only
that. And you will see me as you look within, and we will look upon the
world as God created it together. Through the eyes of Christ, only
the real world exists and can be seen. As you decide, so will
you see. And all that you see but witnesses to your decision.
73
When you look within and see me, it will be because you have decided to
manifest truth. And as you manifest it, you will see it both without and
within, for you will see it without because you saw it first
within. Everything you behold without is a judgment of what you beheld
within. If it is your judgment, it will be wrong, for judgment
is not your function. If it is the judgment of the Holy Spirit, it will
be right, for judgment is His function. You share His function
only by judging as He does, reserving no judgment at all unto
yourselves. For you will judge against yourselves, but He
will judge for you.
74
Remember, then, that whenever you look without and react unfavorably to
what you see, you have judged yourself unworthy and have condemned
yourself to death. The death penalty is the ego's ultimate goal, for it
fully believes that you are a criminal, as deserving of death as God
knows you are deserving of life. The death penalty never leaves the
ego's mind, for that is what it always reserves for you in the end.
Wanting to kill you as the final expression of its feeling for you, it
lets you live but to await death. It will torment you while you live,
but its hatred is not satisfied until you die. For your destruction is
the one end toward which it works, and the only end with which it will
be satisfied.
75
The ego is not a traitor to God to Whom treachery is impossible, but it
is a traitor to you who believe you have been treacherous
to your Father. That is why the undoing of guilt is an essential
part of the Holy Spirit's teaching. For as long as you feel guilty, you
are listening to the voice of the ego, which tells you that you have
been treacherous to God and therefore deserve death. You will
think that death comes from God and not from the ego because, by
confusing yourself with the ego, you believe that you
want death. And from what you want, God does not save you.
76
When you are tempted to yield to the desire for death, remember that
I did not die. You will realize that this is true when you look
within and see me. Would I have overcome death for myself alone?
And would eternal life have been given me of the Father unless
He had also given it to you? When you learn to make me manifest,
you will never see death. For you will have looked upon the
deathless in yourself, and you will see only the eternal as you
look out upon a world that cannot die.
77
Do you really believe that you can kill the Son of God? The
Father has hidden His Son safely within Himself and kept him far away
from your destructive thoughts, but you know neither the Father
nor the Son because of them. You attack the real world every day and
every hour and every minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot
see it. If you seek love in order to attack it, you will never
find it. For if love is sharing, how can you find it except through itself?
Offer it and it will come to you because it is drawn to itself. But
offer attack and it will remain hidden, for it can live only in peace.
78
God's Son is as safe as his Father, for the Son knows his Father's
protection and cannot fear. His Father's love holds him in
perfect peace, and needing nothing, he asks for nothing. Yet he
is far from you whose Self he is, for you chose to attack him, and he
disappeared from your sight into his Father. He did not change,
but you did. For a split mind and all its works were not created
by the Father and could not live in the knowledge of Him.
79
When you made what is not true visible, what is true
became invisible. Yet it cannot be invisible in itself, for the
Holy Spirit sees it with perfect clarity. It is invisible to you because
you are looking at something else. Yet it is no more up to you
to decide what is visible and what is invisible than it is up to you to
decide what reality is. What can be seen is what the Holy Spirit
sees. The definition of reality is God's, not yours. He created
it, and He knows what it is. You who knew have forgotten, and
unless He had given you a way to remember, you would have condemned
yourselves to oblivion.
80
Because of your Father's love you can never forget Him, for no
one can forget what God Himself placed in his memory. You can deny
it, but you cannot lose it. A Voice will answer every question
you ask, and a Vision will correct the perception of everything you see.
For what you have made invisible is the only truth, and what you
have not heard is the only answer. God would reunite you with
yourself and did not abandon you in your seeming distress. You are
waiting only for Him and do not know it. Yet His memory shines in your
minds and cannot be obliterated. It is no more past than future,
being forever always.
81
You have but to ask for this memory, and you will remember. Yet
the memory of God cannot shine in a mind which has made it
invisible and wants to keep it so. For the memory of God can
dawn only in a mind that wills to remember and that has relinquished the
insane desire to control reality. You who cannot even control yourselves
should hardly aspire to control the universe. But look upon what you
have made of it and rejoice that it is not so. Son of God, be not
content with nothing! What is not real cannot be seen and has
no value. God could not offer His Son what has no value, nor could His
Son receive it. You were redeemed the instant you thought you had
deserted Him.
82
Everything you made has never been and is invisible because the Holy
Spirit does not see it. Yet what He does see is yours to behold,
and through His vision your perception is healed. You have made the
invisible the only truth that this world holds. Valuing nothing, you
have sought nothing and found nothing. By making nothing real
to you, you have seen it. But it is not there. And
Christ is invisible to you because of what you have made visible to yourselves.
Yet it does not matter how much distance you have tried to interpose
between your awareness and truth. God's Son can be seen because
his vision is shared. The Holy Spirit looks upon him and sees nothing
else in you. What is invisible to you is perfect in His sight
and encompasses all of it. He has remembered you because He
forgot not the Father.
83
You looked upon the unreal and found despair. Yet by seeking the unreal,
what else could you find? The unreal world is a thing of
despair, for it can never be. And you who share God's Being with Him
could never be content without reality. What God did not give you has no
power over you, and the attraction of love for love remains
irresistible. For it is the function of love to unite all things unto
itself, and to hold all things together by extending its wholeness.
84
The real world was given you by God in loving exchange for the world you
made and which you see. But take it from the hand of Christ and
look upon it. Its reality will make everything else invisible, for
beholding it is total perception. And as you look upon it, you
will remember that it was always so. Nothingness will become invisible,
for you will at last have seen truly. Redeemed perception is easily
translated into knowledge, for only perception is capable of
error, and perception has never been. Being corrected, it gives place to
knowledge, which is forever the only reality. The Atonement is
but the way back to what was never lost. Your Father could not cease to
love His Son.
85
If you did not feel guilty, you could not attack, for
condemnation is the root of attack. It is the judgment of one mind by
another as unworthy of love and deserving of punishment.
But herein lies the split. For the mind that judges perceives itself as
separate from the mind being judged, believing that by punishing
another, it will escape punishment. All this is but the
delusional attempt of the mind to deny itself and escape the penalty
of denial. It is not an attempt to relinquish denial but
to hold on to it. For it is guilt that has obscured the Father
to you, and it is guilt that has driven you insane.
86
The acceptance of guilt into the mind of God's Son was the beginning of
the separation, as the acceptance of the Atonement is its end. The world
you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look
carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this
world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern
it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in
pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow
and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and
its powers decline if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they
desert and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the
most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid
in the ground and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought
that God is cruel.
87
If this were the real world, God would be cruel. For no
father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation and
be loving. Love does not kill to save. If it did, attack
would be salvation, and this is the ego's interpretation,
not God's. Only the world of guilt could demand this, for only
the guilty could conceive of it. Adam's "sin" could have touched
none of you, had you not believed that it was the Father Who
drove him out of paradise. For in that belief, the knowledge of the
Father was lost, since only those who do not understand Him could
believe it.
88
This world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son. And
until you realize that God's Son cannot be crucified, this is
the world you will see. Yet you will not realize this until you accept
the eternal fact that God's Son is not guilty. He deserves
only love because he has given only love. He cannot be
condemned because he has never condemned. The Atonement is the final
lesson he need learn, for it teaches him that, never having sinned, he
has no need of salvation.
89
Long ago we said that the Holy Spirit shares the goal of all good
teachers, whose ultimate aim is to make themselves unnecessary by
teaching their pupils all they know. The Holy Spirit wills only
this, for sharing the Father's love for His Son, He wills to remove all
guilt from his mind that he may remember his Father in peace. For peace
and guilt are antithetical, and the Father can be remembered only
in peace. Love and guilt cannot coexist, and to accept one is to deny
the other. Guilt hides Christ from your sight, for it is the denial of
the blamelessness of God's Son.
90
In this strange world which you have made, the Son of God has
sinned. How could you see him, then? By making him invisible,
the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt which you
accepted, and you hold it dear. For the blamelessness of Christ is the
proof that the ego never was and can never be. Without guilt the ego has
no life, and God's Son is without guilt. As you look upon
yourselves and judge what you do honestly, as you have been asked to do,
you may be tempted to wonder how you can be guiltless.
91
Yet consider this: You are not guiltless in time, but in eternity.
You have "sinned" in the past, but there is no past.
Always has no direction. Time seems to go in one direction, but
when you reach its end, it will roll up like a long carpet which has
spread along the past behind you and will disappear. As long as you
believe the Son of God is guilty, you will walk along this carpet,
believing that it leads to death. And the journey will seem long and
cruel and senseless, for so it is.
92
The journey which the Son of God has set himself is foolish indeed, but
the journey on which his Father sets him is one of release and joy. The
Father is not cruel, and His Son cannot hurt himself.
The retaliation he fears and which he sees will never touch him,
for although he believes in it, the Holy Spirit knows it is not
true. The Holy Spirit stands at the end of time, where you
must be because He is with you. He has always undone
everything unworthy of the Son of God, for such was His mission, given
Him by God. And what God gives has always been.
93
You will see me as you learn the Son of God is guiltless. He has always
sought his guiltlessness, and he has found it. For everyone is
seeking to escape from the prison he has made, and the way to find
release is not denied him. Being in him, he has found
it. When he finds it is only a matter of time, and time is but
an illusion. For the Son of God is guiltless now, and the
brightness of his purity shines untouched forever in God's Mind. God's
Son will always be as he was created. Deny your world
and judge him not, for his eternal guiltlessness is in the Mind of his
Father, and protects him forever.
94
When you have accepted the Atonement for yourselves, you will realize
that there is no guilt in God's Son. And only as you
look upon him as guiltless can you understand his oneness. For the idea
of guilt brings a belief in condemnation of one by another, projecting
separation in place of unity. You can condemn only yourself, and
by so doing, you cannot know that you are God's Son. You have
denied the condition of his Being, which is his perfect blamelessness.
Out of love he was created, and in love he abides. Goodness and mercy
have always followed him, for he has always extended the love of his
Father.
95
As you perceive the holy companions who travel with you, you will
realize that there is no journey, but only an awakening. The Son
of God, who sleepeth not, has kept faith with his Father for
you. There is no road to travel on and no time to travel through. For
God waits not for His Son in time, being forever unwilling to be without
him. And so it has always been. Let the holiness of God's Son shine away
the cloud of guilt that darkens your mind, and by accepting his purity
as yours, learn of him that it is yours.
96
You are invulnerable because you are guiltless. You can hold on
to the past only through guilt. For guilt establishes that you
will be punished for what you have done and thus depends on
one-dimensional time, proceeding from past to future. No one who
believes this can understand what always means. And therefore
guilt must deprive you of the appreciation of eternity. You are
immortal because you are eternal and always must be now.
Guilt, then, is a way of holding past and future in your minds to ensure
the ego's continuity. For if what has been will be punished, the
ego's continuity is guaranteed. Yet the guarantee of your continuity is
God's, not the ego's. And immortality is the opposite of time, for time
passes away, while immortality is constant.
97
Accepting the Atonement teaches you what immortality is, for by
accepting your guiltlessness, you learn that the past has never been,
and so the future is needless. The future, in time, is always associated
with expiation, and only guilt could induce a sense of need
for expiation. Accepting the guiltlessness of the Son of God as yours
is therefore God's way of reminding you of His Son and what he is in
truth. For God has never condemned His Son, and being guiltless, he is
eternal.
98
You cannot dispel guilt by making it real and then atoning for
it. This is the ego's plan, which it offers instead of
dispelling it. The ego believes in atonement through attack,
being fully committed to the insane notion that attack is
salvation. And you who cherish guilt must also believe it, for
how else but by identifying with the ego could you hold dear
what you do not want?
99
The ego teaches you to attack yourself because you are guilty,
and this must increase the guilt, for guilt is the result
of attack. In the ego's teaching, then, there is no escape from
guilt. For attack makes guilt real, and if it is real, there is
no way to overcome it. The Holy Spirit dispels it simply through the
calm recognition that it has never been. As He looks upon the guiltless
Son of God, he knows this is true. And being true for you,
you cannot attack yourself, for without guilt, attack is
impossible. You, then, are saved because God's Son is guiltless.
And being wholly pure, you are invulnerable.
1
The ultimate purpose of projection, as the ego uses it, is always
to get rid of guilt. Yet, characteristically, the ego attempts to get
rid of guilt from its viewpoint only, for much as the ego wants
to retain guilt, you find it intolerable, since guilt stands in
the way of your remembering God, Whose pull is so strong that you cannot
resist it. On this issue, then, the deepest split of all occurs, for if
you are to retain guilt, as the ego insists, you cannot be you.
Only by persuading you that it is you could the ego possibly
induce you to project guilt and thereby keep it in your mind.
2
Yet consider how strange a solution the ego's arrangement is. You
project guilt to get rid of it, but you are actually merely concealing
it. You do experience guilt feelings, but you have no idea why.
On the contrary, you associate them with a weird assortment of ego
ideals which the ego claims you have failed. Yet you have no idea that
you are failing the Son of God by seeing him as guilty. Believing you
are no longer you, you do not realize that you are failing yourself.
3
The darkest of your hidden cornerstones holds your belief in guilt from
your awareness. For in that dark and secret place is the realization
that you have betrayed God's Son by condemning him to death. You do not
even suspect this murderous but insane idea lies hidden there, for the
ego's destructive urge is so intense that nothing short of the
crucifixion of God's Son can ultimately satisfy it. It does not know who
the Son of God is because it is blind. Yet let it perceive guiltlessness
anywhere, and it will try to destroy it because it is afraid.
4
Much of the ego's strange behavior is directly attributable to its
definition of guilt. To the ego, the guiltless are guilty. Those
who do not attack are its "enemies" because, by not valuing its
interpretation of salvation, they are in an excellent position to
let it go. They have approached the darkest and deepest
cornerstone in the ego's foundation, and while the ego can withstand
your raising all else to question, it guards this one secret with its
life, for its existence does depend on keeping this secret. So
it is this secret that we must look upon calmly, for the ego cannot
protect you against truth, and in its presence the ego is
dispelled.
5
In the calm light of truth, let us recognize that you believe you have
crucified God's Son. You have not admitted to this "terrible" secret
because you still wish to crucify him if you could find
him. Yet the wish has hidden him from you because it is very fearful,
and you are afraid to find him. You have handled this wish to
kill yourself by not knowing who you are and identifying
with something else. You have projected guilt blindly and
indiscriminately, but you have not uncovered its source. For the
ego does want to kill you, and if you identify with it,
you must believe its goal is yours.
6
We once said that the crucifixion is the symbol of the ego. When it was
confronted with the real guiltlessness of God's Son, it did
attempt to kill him, and the reason it gave was that guiltlessness is
blasphemous to God. To the ego the ego is god, and guiltlessness
must be interpreted as the final guilt which fully justifies
murder. You do not yet understand that all your fear of this course
stems ultimately from this interpretation, but if you will consider your
reactions to it, you will become increasingly convinced that this is so.
7
This course has explicitly stated that its goal for you is happiness and
peace. Yet you are afraid of it. You have been told again and
again that it will make you free, yet you react as if it is trying to
imprison you. Most of the time you dismiss it, but you do not
dismiss the ego's thought system. You have seen its
results and you still lack faith in it. You must, then,
believe that by not learning the course, you are protecting
yourself. And you do not realize that it is only your guiltlessness
which can protect you.
8
The Atonement has always been interpreted as the release from guilt, and
this is correct if it is understood. Yet even when I have interpreted it
for you, you have rejected it and have not accepted it
for yourself. You have recognized the futility of the ego and its
offerings, but though you do not want the ego, you do not look upon the
alternative with gladness. You are afraid of redemption, and you
believe it will kill you. Make no mistake about the depth of your fear.
For you believe that in the presence of truth you will turn on yourself
and destroy yourself.
9
Little children, this is not so. Your "guilty secret" is nothing, and if
you will but bring it to the light, the light will dispel it. And then
no dark cloud will remain between you and the remembrance of your
Father, for you will remember His guiltless Son, who did not die,
because he is immortal. And you will see that you were redeemed with
him and have never been separated from him. In this
understanding lies your remembering, for it is the recognition of love without
fear. There will be great joy in Heaven on your homecoming, and the joy
will be yours. For the redeemed son of man is the
guiltless Son of God, and to recognize him is your redemption.
10
You may wonder why it is so crucial that you look upon your hatred and
realize its full extent. You may also think that it would be easy enough
for the Holy Spirit to show it to you and dispel it, without the
need for you to raise it to awareness yourself. Yet there is one more
complication which you have interposed between yourself and the
Atonement, which you do not yet realize. We have said that no one will
countenance fear if he recognizes it. Yet in your disordered
state, you are not afraid of fear. You do not like it, but it is
not your desire to attack which really frightens you. You are
not seriously disturbed by your hostility. You keep it hidden because
you are more afraid of what it covers.
11
You could look even upon the ego's darkest cornerstone without
fear if you did not believe that, without the ego, you would
find within yourself something you fear even more. You are not
afraid of crucifixion. Your real terror is of redemption. Under
the ego's dark foundation is the memory of God, and it is of this
that you are really afraid. For this memory would instantly
restore you to your proper place, and it is this place that you have
sought to leave.
12
Your fear of attack is nothing compared to your fear of love. You would
be willing to look even upon your savage wish to kill God's Son if you
did not believe that it saves you from love. For this wish caused
the separation. You have protected it because you do not want
the separation healed, and you realize that, by removing the
dark cloud that obscures it, your love for your Father would impel you
to answer His call and leap into Heaven. You believe that attack is
salvation to prevent you from this. For still deeper than the
ego's foundation, and much stronger than it will ever be, is your
intense and burning love of God, and His for you. This is what you really
want to hide.
13
In honesty, is it not harder for you to say "I love" than "I hate"? You
associate love with weakness and hatred with strength, and your own real
power seems to you as your real weakness. For you could not
control your joyous response to the call of love if you heard it, and
the whole world you think you control would vanish. The Holy
Spirit, then, seems to be attacking your fortress, for you would shut
out God, and He does not will to be excluded.
14
You have built your whole insane belief system because you think you
would be helpless in God's Presence, and you would save yourself
from His love because you think it would crush you into nothingness. You
are afraid it would sweep you away from yourself and make you little.
For you believe that magnitude lies in defiance and that attack is
grandeur. You think you have made a world which God would destroy; and
by loving Him, which you do, you would throw this world away,
which you would. Therefore, you have used the world to cover
your love, and the deeper you go into the blackness of the ego's
foundation, the closer you come to the love that is hidden there. And
it is this that frightens you.
15
You can accept insanity because you made it, but you cannot accept love
because you did not. You would rather be slaves of the
crucifixion than Sons of God in redemption. For your individual
death is more valued than your living oneness, and what is given
you is not so dear as what you made. You are more afraid of God
than of the ego, and love cannot enter where it is not welcome. But
hatred can, for it enters of its will and cares not for yours.
16
The reason you must look upon your delusions and not keep them hidden is
that they do not rest on their own foundation. In concealment
they appear to do so, and thus they seem to be self-sustained.
This is the fundamental illusion on which they rest. For beneath
them and concealed as long as they are hidden is the loving mind
that thought it made them in anger. And the pain in this mind is
so apparent when it is uncovered that its need of healing cannot be
denied. Not all the tricks and games you offer it can heal it, for here
is the real crucifixion of God's Son.
17
And yet he is not crucified. Here is both his pain and
his healing, for the Holy Spirit's vision is merciful, and His remedy is
quick. Do not hide suffering from His sight, but bring it gladly
to Him. Lay before His eternal sanity all your hurt, and let
Him heal you. Do not leave any spot of pain hidden from His light, and
search your minds carefully for any thoughts which you may fear to
uncover. For He will heal every little thought which you have kept to
hurt you and cleanse it of its littleness, restoring it to the magnitude
of God.
18
Beneath all your grandiosity, which you hold so dear, is your real call
for help. For you call for love to your Father as your Father calls you
to Himself. In that place which you have hidden, you will only to unite
with the Father in loving remembrance of Him. You will find this place
of truth as you see it in your brothers, for though they may deceive
themselves, like you they long for the grandeur that is in them. And
perceiving it you will welcome it, and it will be yours. For
grandeur is the right of God's Son, and no illusions can
satisfy him or save him from what he is. Only his love is real,
and he will be content only with his reality.
19
Save him from his illusions that you may accept the magnitude of your
Father in peace and joy. But exempt no one from your love, or you will
be hiding a dark place in your mind where the Holy Spirit is not
welcome. And you will exempt yourself from His healing power,
for by not offering total love, you will not be healed completely.
Healing must be as complete as fear, for love cannot enter where there
is one spot of fear to mar its welcome.
20
You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right
minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did
not give it, for the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask
this of a Father Who truly loved His Son. Therefore you made of Him an
unloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father could give.
And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood
his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his real
Father, having attacked his own glorious equality with Him.
21
In peace he needed nothing and asked for nothing. In war he demanded
everything and found nothing. For how could the gentleness of
love respond to his demands except by departing in peace and
returning to the Father? If the Son did not wish to remain in peace, he
could not remain at all. For a darkened mind cannot live in the light,
and it must seek a place of darkness where it can believe it is where it
is not. God did not allow this to happen.Yet you demanded that
it happen and therefore believed that it was so.
22
To "single out" is to "make alone" and thus make lonely. God did
not do this to you. Could He set you apart, knowing that your
peace lies in His Oneness? He denied you only your request for pain, for
suffering is not of His creation. Having given you creation, He
could not take it from you. He could but answer your insane
request with a sane answer which would abide with you in your insanity.
[And this He did. No one who hears His answer but will give up
insanity.] For His answer is the reference point beyond
illusions from which you can look back on them and see them as
insane. But seek this place, and you will find it, for
love is in you and will lead you there.
23
And now the reason why you are afraid of this course should be apparent.
For this is a course on love because it is about you. You have
been told that your function in this world is healing, and your function
in Heaven is creating. The ego teaches that your function on earth is
destruction and that you have no function at all in Heaven. It would
thus destroy you here and bury you here, leaving you no inheritance
except the dust out of which it thinks you were made. As long as it is
reasonably satisfied with you, as its reasoning goes, it offers you
oblivion. When it becomes overtly savage, it offers you hell.
24
Yet neither oblivion nor hell is as unacceptable to you as Heaven. For
your definition of Heaven is hell and oblivion, and the real
Heaven is the greatest threat you think you could experience. For hell
and oblivion are ideas which you made up, and you are bent on
demonstrating their reality to establish yours. If their
reality is questioned, you believe that yours is. For you
believe that attack is your reality and that your destruction is
the final proof that you were right.
25
Under the circumstances, would it not be more desirable to have
been wrong, even apart from the fact that you were wrong? While
it could perhaps be argued that death suggests there was life,
no one would claim that it proves there is life. Even the past
life which death might indicate could only have been futile if it must
come to this and needs this to prove that it was. You question
Heaven, but you do not question this. You could heal and be
healed if you did question it. And even though you know not
Heaven, might it not be more desirable than death? You have been as
selective in your questioning as in your perception. An open mind is
more honest than this.
26
The ego has a very strange notion of time, and it is with this notion
that your questioning might well begin. The ego invests heavily in the
past and in the end believes that the past is the only aspect of
time that is meaningful. You will remember that we said its emphasis on
guilt enables it to ensure its continuity by making the future like
the past and thus avoiding the present. By the notion of paying
for the past in the future, the past becomes the determiner of
the future, making them continuous without an intervening
present. For the ego uses the present only as a brief transition
to the future, in which it brings the past to the future by
interpreting the present in past terms.
27
Now has no meaning to the ego. The present merely reminds it of
past hurts, and it reacts to the present as if it were the past.
The ego cannot tolerate release from the past, and although the
past is no more, the ego tries to preserve its image by responding as
if it were present. Thus it dictates reactions to those you meet
now from a past reference point, obscuring their present
reality. In effect, if you follow the ego's dictates, you will react to
your brothers as though they were someone else, and this will
surely prevent you from perceiving them as they are. And you
will receive messages from them out of your own past because, by
making it real in the present, you are forbidding yourself to let it
go. You thus deny yourself the message of release that every
brother offers you now.
28
The shadowy figures from the past are precisely what you must escape.
For they are not real and have no hold over you unless you bring them with
you. They carry the spots of pain in your minds, directing you to attack
in the present in retaliation for a past that is no more. And this
decision is one of future pain. Unless you learn that past pain
is delusional, you are choosing a future of illusions and losing the
endless opportunities which you could find for release in the present.
The ego would preserve your nightmares and prevent you
from awakening and understanding that they are past.
29
Would you recognize a holy encounter if you are merely
perceiving it as a meeting with your own past? For you are meeting no
one, and the sharing of salvation, which makes the
encounter holy, is excluded from your sight. The Holy Spirit teaches
that you always meet yourself and the encounter is holy because
you are. The ego teaches that you always encounter your past, and
because your dreams were not holy, the future cannot be,
and the present is without meaning. It is evident that the Holy Spirit's
perception of time is the exact opposite of the ego's. The reason is
equally clear, for they perceive the goal of time as diametrically
opposed.
30
The Holy Spirit interprets time's purpose as rendering the need for it
unnecessary. Thus does He regard the function of time as temporary,
serving only His teaching function, which is temporary by definition. His
emphasis is therefore on the only aspect of time which can
extend to the infinite, for now is the closest approximation of
eternity which this world offers. It is in the reality of now,
without past or future, that the beginning of the appreciation
of eternity lies. For only now is here, and it presents
the opportunities for the holy encounters in which salvation can be
found.
31
The ego, on the other hand, regards the function of time as one of
extending itself in place of eternity, for like the Holy Spirit,
the ego interprets the goal of time as its own. The continuity of past
and future under its direction is the only purpose the ego
perceives in time, and it closes over the present so that no gap in its
own continuity can occur. Its continuity, then, would keep
you in time, while the Holy Spirit would release you from it. It
is His interpretation of the means of salvation which you must
learn to accept if you would share His goal of salvation for you.
32
You too will interpret the function of time as you interpret yours. If
you accept your function in the world of time as healing, you will
emphasize only the aspect of time in which healing can occur.
For healing cannot be accomplished in the past and must
be accomplished in the present to release the future. This
interpretation ties the future to the present and extends the
present rather than the past. But if you interpret your function as
destruction, you will lose sight of the present and hold on to the past
to ensure a destructive future. And time will be as you
interpret it, for of itself it is nothing.
33
We have said that you have but two emotions, love and fear. One is
changeless but continually exchanged, being offered by the
eternal to the eternal. In this exchange it is extended, for it
increases as it is given. The other has many forms, for the
content of individual illusions differs greatly. Yet they have one thing
in common—they are all insane. They are made of sights which are not
seen and sounds which are not heard. They make up a private
world which cannot be shared. For they are meaningful only
to their maker, and so they have no meaning at all. In this world their
maker moves alone, for only he perceives them.
34
Each one peoples his world with figures from his individual past, and it
is because of this that private worlds do differ. Yet the
figures that he sees were never real, for they are made up only
of his reactions to his brothers and do not include their
reactions to him. Therefore he does not see that he made
them and that they are not whole. For these figures have no witnesses,
being perceived in one separate mind only.
35
It is through these strange and shadowy figures that the insane
relate to their insane world. For they see only those who remind
them of these images, and it is to them that they relate. Thus
do they communicate with those who are not there, and it is they
who answer them, and no one hears their answer save him who called upon
them, and he alone believes they answered him. Projection makes
perception, and you cannot see beyond it. Again and again have
men attacked each other because they saw in them a shadow figure in
their own private world. And thus it is that you must
attack yourself first, for what you attack is not in others. Its
only reality is in your own mind, and by attacking others, you
are literally attacking what is not there.
36
The delusional can be very destructive, for they do not recognize that
they have condemned themselves. They do not wish to die, yet
they will not let condemnation go. And so they separate into
their private worlds, where everything is disordered and where what is
within appears to be without. Yet what is within they do not
see, for the reality of their brothers they cannot see.
37
You have but two emotions, yet in your private world you react to each
of them as though it were the other. For love cannot abide in a
world apart, where when it comes it is not recognized. If you see your
own hatred as your brother, you are not seeing him.
Everyone draws nigh unto what he loves and recoils from what he fears.
And you react with fear to love and draw away from it. Yet fear attracts
you, and believing it is love, you call it to yourself. Your
private world is filled with the figures of fear you have invited into
it, and all the love your brothers offer you, you do not see. As
you look with open eyes upon your world, it must occur to you
that you have withdrawn into insanity.
38
You see what is not there, and you hear what is soundless. Your
behavioral manifestations of emotions are the opposite of what
the emotions are. You communicate with no one, and you are as isolated
from reality as if you were alone in all the universe. In your madness,
you overlook reality completely, and you see only your own
split mind everywhere you look. God calls you and you do not hear, for
you are preoccupied with your own voice. And the vision of Christ is not
in your sight, for you look upon yourself alone.
39
Little children, would you offer this to your Father? For if you
offer it to yourself, you are offering it to Him. And He will not
return it, for it is unworthy of you because it is unworthy of Him. Yet
He would release you from it and set you free. His sane answer
tells you that what you have offered yourself is not true, but His
offering to you has never changed. You who know not what you do can
learn what insanity is and look beyond it. It is given you to learn how
to deny insanity and come forth from your private world in
peace.
40
You will see all that you denied in your brothers because you
denied it in yourself. For you will love them, and by drawing nigh unto
them, you will draw them to yourself, perceiving them as witnesses to
your reality, which you share with God. I am with them as I am
with you, and we will draw them from their private worlds, for
as we are united, so would we unite with them. The Father welcomes all
of us in gladness, and gladness is what we should offer Him.
For every Son of God is given you to whom God gave Himself. And
it is God to Whom you must offer them to recognize His gift to you.
41
Vision depends on light, and you cannot see in darkness. Yet in the
darkness in the private world of sleep, you see in dreams,
although your eyes are closed. And it is here that what you see you made.
But let the darkness go, and all you made you will no longer see, for
sight of it depends upon denying vision. Yet from denying
vision, it does not follow that you cannot see. But this is what
denial does, for by it you accept insanity, believing
you can make a private world and rule your own perceptions. Yet
for this, light must be excluded. Dreams disappear when light
has come and you can see.
42
Do not seek vision through your eyes, for you made your
way of seeing that you might see in darkness, and in this you are
deceived. Beyond this darkness and yet still within you
is the vision of Christ, Who looks on all in light. Your vision comes
from fear, as His from love. And He sees for you as your witness
to the real world. He is the Holy Spirit's manifestation, looking always
on the real world and calling forth its witnesses and drawing them unto
you. For He loves what He sees within you, and He would extend
it. And He will not return unto the Father until He has extended your
perception even unto Him. And there perception is no more, for He has
returned you to the Father with Him.
43
You have but two emotions, and one you made and one was given you. Each
is a way of seeing, and different worlds arise from their
different visions. See through the vision that is given you, for through
Christ's vision He beholds Himself. And seeing what He is, He knows His
Father. Beyond your darkest dreams, He sees God's guiltless Son within
you, shining in perfect radiance, which is undimmed by your dreams. And
this you will see as you look with Him, for His vision is His
gift of love to you, given Him of the Father for you.
44
The Holy Spirit is the light in which Christ stands revealed. And all
who would behold Him can see Him, for they have asked for light.
Nor will they see Him alone, for He is no more alone than they
are. Because they saw the Son, they have risen in Him to the Father. And
all this will they understand because they looked within and saw beyond
the darkness the Christ in them and recognized Him. In the
sanity of His vision, they looked upon themselves with love, seeing
themselves as the Holy Spirit sees them. And with this vision of
the truth in them came all the beauty of the world to shine upon them.
45
To perceive truly is to be aware of all reality through the
awareness of your own. But for this no illusions can rise to
meet your sight, for all reality leaves no room for any
error. This means that you perceive a brother only as you see him now.
His past has no reality in the present, and you cannot
see it. Your past reactions to him are also not there,
and if it is to them that you react now, you see but an image of
him which you made and cherish instead of him. In your
questioning of illusions, ask yourself if it is really sane to
perceive what was now. If you remember the past as you look upon
your brother, you will be unable to perceive the reality that is now.
46
You consider it "natural" to use your past experience as the reference
point from which to judge the present. Yet this is unnatural
because it is delusional. When you have learned to look upon everyone
with no reference at all to the past, either his or yours as you
perceived it, you will be able to learn from what you see now.
For the past can cast no shadow to darken the present unless you are
afraid of light. And only if you are would you choose to
bring this darkness with you, and by holding it in your minds,
see it as a dark cloud that shrouds your brothers and conceals their
reality from your sight.
47
This darkness is in you. The Christ revealed to you now
has no past, for He is changeless, and in His changelessness
lies your release. For if He is as He was created, there is no
guilt in Him. No cloud of guilt has risen to obscure Him, and He stands
revealed in everyone you meet because you see Him through Himself.
To be born again is to let the past go and look without
condemnation upon the present. For the cloud which obscures God's Son to
you is the past, and if you would have it past and gone,
you must not see it now. If you see it now in your delusions, it
has not gone from you, although it is not there.
48
Time can release as well as imprison, depending on whose interpretation
of it you use. Past, present, and future are not continuous unless you force
continuity on them. You can perceive them as continuous and make
them so for you. But do not be deceived and then believe that
this is how it is, for to believe that reality is what you would
have it be according to your use for it is delusional.
You would destroy time's continuity by breaking it into past, present,
and future for your own purposes. You would anticipate the
future on the basis of your past experience and plan for it accordingly.
Yet by doing so, you are aligning past and future and not
allowing the miracle, which could intervene between them, to
free you to be born again.
49
The miracle enables you to see your brother without his past and
so perceive him as born again. His errors are all past,
and by perceiving him without them, you are releasing him. And
since his past is yours, you share in this release. Let
no dark cloud out of your past obscure him from you, for truth
lies only in the present, and you will find it if you seek it
there. You have looked for it where it is not and therefore have
not found it. Learn, then, to seek it where it is, and it will
dawn on eyes that see. Your past was made in anger, and if you use it to
attack the present, you will not see the freedom that the
present holds. Judgment and condemnation are behind you, and
unless you bring them with you, you will see that you are
free of them.
50
Look lovingly upon the present, for it holds the only things
that are forever true. All healing lies within it because its
continuity is real. It extends to all aspects of consciousness at
the same time and thus enables them to reach each other.
The present is before time was and will be when time is no more. In it
is everything that is eternal, and they are one. Their continuity is
timeless, and their communication is unbroken, for they are not
separated by the past. Only the past can separate, and it
is nowhere.
51
The present offers you your brothers in the light that would unite you
with them and free you from the past. Would you, then, hold the
past against them? For if you do, you are choosing to remain in
the darkness that is not there and refusing to accept the light that is
offered you. For the light of perfect vision is freely given as it is
freely received and can be accepted only without limit. In this
one still dimension of time, which does not change and where there is no
sight of what you were, you look at Christ and call His witnesses to
shine on you because you called them forth. And they
will not deny the truth in you because you looked for it in them and found
it there.
52
Now is the time of salvation, for now is the release from time.
Reach out to all your brothers and touch them with the touch of Christ.
In timeless union with them is your continuity, unbroken because
it is wholly shared. God's guiltless Son is only light. There is
no darkness in him anywhere, for he is whole. Call all your brothers to
witness to his wholeness, as I am calling you to join with me. Every
voice has a part in the song of redemption, the hymn of gladness and
thanksgiving for the light to the Creator of light. The holy light that
shines forth from God's Son is the witness that his light is of his
Father.
53
Shine on your brothers in remembrance of your Creator, for you will
remember Him as you call forth the witnesses to His creation. Those whom
you heal bear witness to your healing, for in their wholeness
you will see your own. And as your hymns of praise and gladness rise to
your Creator, He will return your thanks in His clear answer to your
call. For it can never be that His Son called upon Him and remained
unanswered. His call to you is but your call to Him. And in Him
you are answered by His peace.
54
Children of light, you know not that the light is in you. Yet you will
find it through its witnesses, for having given light to them,
they will return it. Everyone you see in light brings your
light closer to your own awareness. Love always leads to love.
The sick who ask for love are grateful for it, and in their joy, they
shine with holy thanks. And this they offer you, who gave them
joy. They are your guides to joy, for having received it of you, they
would keep it. You have established them as guides to peace, for you
have made it manifest in them. And seeing it, its beauty calls you
home.
55
There is a light which this world cannot give. Yet you can give
it, as it was given you. And as you give it, it shines forth to call you
from the world and follow it. For this light will attract you as nothing
in this world can do. And you will lay aside the world and find another.
This other world is bright with love, which you have given it.
And here will everything remind you of your Father and His Holy Son.
Light is unlimited and spreads across this world in quiet joy. All those
you brought with you will shine on you, and you will shine on them in
gratitude because they brought you here. Your light will join with
theirs in power so compelling that it will draw the others out of
darkness as you look on them.
56
Awakening unto Christ is following the laws of love of your free will
and out of quiet recognition of the truth in them. The attraction of
light must draw you willingly, and willingness is signified by giving.
Those who accept love of you become your willing witnesses to the love
you gave them, and it is they who hold it out to you. In
sleep you are alone, and your awareness is narrowed to yourself. And
that is why the nightmares come. You dream of isolation because
your eyes are closed. You do not see your brothers, and in the
darkness you cannot look upon the light you gave to them.
57
And yet the laws of love are not suspended because you sleep. And you
have followed them through all your nightmares and have been faithful in
your giving, for you were not alone. Even in sleep has Christ
protected you, ensuring the real world for you when you wake. In your
name He has given for you and given you the gifts He
gave. God's Son is still as loving as his Father. Continuous with
his Father, he has no past apart from Him. So he has never ceased to be
his Father's witness and his own. Although he slept, Christ's
vision did not leave him. And so it is that he can call unto himself the
witnesses that teach him that he never slept.
58
Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself,
60
The world you see must be denied, for sight of it is
costing you a different kind of vision. You cannot see both worlds,
for each of them involves a different kind of seeing and depends on what
you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have
denied the other. Both are not true, yet either one will seem as real to
you as the amount to which you hold it dear. And yet their power is not
the same because their real attraction to you is unequal.
61
You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you
since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The
roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has
withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the
mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired and
ready to return to dust even as you made it. This aching world has not
the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that,
and so although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it
the road that leads away from it into another world.
62
Yet the real world has the power to touch you even here because
you love it. And what you call with love will come to you.
Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help or not
to hear the cries of pain that rise to it from every part of this
strange world you made but do not want. The only effort you need make to
give this world away in glad exchange for what you did not make is
willingness to learn the one you made is false.
63
You have been wrong about the world because you have
misjudged yourself. From such a twisted reference point what could
you see? All vision starts with
the perceiver who judges what is true and what is false. And what
he judges false he does not see. You who would judge reality cannot
see it, for whenever judgment enters, reality has slipped away. The out
of mind is out of sight because what is denied is there but is not recognized.
Christ is still there, although you know Him not. His Being does not
depend upon your recognition. He lives within you in the quiet present
and waits for you to leave the past behind and enter into the world He
holds out to you in love.
64
No one in this distracted world but has seen some glimpses of the
other world about him. Yet while he still lays value on his own, he will
deny the vision of the other world, maintaining that he loves
what he loves not and following not the road that love points out. Love
leads so gladly! And as you follow Him, you will rejoice that you have
found His company and learned of Him the joyful journey home. You wait
but for yourself. To give this sad world over and exchange your
errors for the peace of God is but your will. And Christ will always
offer you the Will of God in recognition that you share it with Him.
65
It is God's Will that nothing touch His Son except Himself, and
nothing else comes nigh unto him. He is as safe from pain as God
Himself, Who watches over him in everything. The world about him shines
with love because God placed him in Himself where pain is not and love
surrounds him without end or flaw. Disturbance of his peace can never
be. In perfect sanity he looks on love, for it is all about him and
within him. He must deny the world of pain the instant he
perceives the arms of love around him. And from this point of safety, he
looks quietly about him and recognizes that the world is one with him.
66
The peace of God passeth your understanding only in the
past. Yet here it is, and you can understand it now. God
loves His Son forever, and His Son returns his Father's love
forever. The real world is the way that leads you to remembrance of this
one thing that is wholly true and wholly yours. For all else you
have lent yourself in time, and it will fade. But this one thing is always
yours, being the gift of God unto His Son. Your one reality was
given you, and by it God created you as one with Him.
67
You will first dream of peace and then awaken to it. Your first
exchange of what you made for what you want is the exchange of
nightmares for the happy dreams of love. In these lie your true
perceptions, for the Holy Spirit corrects the world of dreams, where all
perception is. Knowledge needs no correction. Yet the dreams of love
lead unto knowledge. In them you see nothing fearful, and
because of this, they are the welcome that you offer knowledge.
Love waits on welcome, not on time, and the real world is but
your welcome of what always was. Therefore, the call of joy is in it,
and your glad response is your awakening to what you have not lost.
Praise, then, the Father for the perfect sanity of His most holy Son.
68
Your Father knoweth that you have need of nothing. In Heaven this
is so, for what could you need in eternity? In your world you do
need things because it is a world of scarcity in which you find yourself
because you are lacking. Yet can you find yourself in
such a world? Without the Holy Spirit, the answer would be no. Yet
because of Him, the answer is a joyous yes! As Mediator between
the two worlds, He knows what you have need of and what will not hurt
you. Ownership is a dangerous concept if it is left to you. The ego
wants to have things for salvation, for possession is its law.
Possession for its own sake is the ego's fundamental creed, a
basic cornerstone in the churches that it builds unto itself. And at its
altar it demands you lay all of the things it bids you get,
leaving you no joy in them.
69
Everything that the ego tells you that you need will hurt you. For
although the ego urges you again and again to get, it leaves you
nothing, for what you get, it will demand of you. And even from
the very hands that grasped it, it will be wrenched and hurled into the
dust. For where the ego sees salvation, it sees separation, and
so you lose whatever you have gotten in its name. Therefore ask not of
yourselves what you need, for you do not know and your advice
unto yourself will hurt you. For what you think you need will
merely serve to tighten up your world against the light and
render you unwilling to question the value that this world can really
hold for you.
70
Only the Holy Spirit knows what you need. For He will give
you all things that do not block the way to light. And what else could
you need? In time He gives you all the things that you need have and
will renew them as long as you have need of them. He will take nothing
from you as long as you have any need of it. And yet He knows
that everything you need is temporary and will but last until you step
aside from all your needs and learn that all of them have
been fulfilled. Therefore He has no investment in the things that
He supplies except to make certain that you will not use them on behalf
of lingering in time. He knows that you are not at home there, and He
wills no delay to wait upon your joyous homecoming.
71
Leave, then, your needs to Him. He will supply them with no emphasis at
all upon them. What comes to you of Him comes safely, for He will ensure
it never can become a dark spot, hidden in your mind and kept to hurt
you. Under His guidance, you will travel light and journey lightly, for
His sight is ever on the journey's end which is His goal. God's Son is
not a traveler through outer worlds. However holy his perception
may become, no world outside himself holds his inheritance. Within
himself he has no needs, for light needs nothing but to shine in
peace and from itself to let the rays extend in quiet to infinity.
72
Whenever you are tempted to undertake a foolish journey that would lead
away from light, remember what you really want and say,
74
Then follow Him in joy, with faith that He will lead you safely through
all dangers to your peace of mind that this world sets before you. Kneel
not before the altars to sacrifice and seek not what you will surely
lose. Content yourselves with what you will as surely keep and
be not restless, for you undertake a quiet journey to the peace of God,
where He would have you be in quietness.
75
In me you have already overcome every temptation that would hold
you back. We walk together on the way to quietness that is the gift of
God. Hold me dear, for what except your brothers can you need?
We will restore to you the peace of mind that we must find together.
The Holy Spirit will teach you to awaken unto us and to yourself. This
is the only real need to be fulfilled in time. Salvation from
the world lies only here. My peace I give you. Take it
of me in glad exchange for all the world has offered but to take away.
And we will spread it like a veil of light across the world's sad face,
in which we hide our brothers from the world, and it from them.
76
We cannot sing redemption's hymn alone. My task is not completed until I
have lifted every voice with mine. And yet it is not mine, for
as it is my gift to you, so was it the Father's gift to me, given me
through His Spirit. The sound of it will banish sorrow from the mind of
God's most holy Son, where it cannot abide. Healing in time is
needed, for joy cannot establish its eternal reign where sorrow dwells.
You dwell not here, but in eternity. You travel but in dreams while safe
at home. Give thanks to every part of you that you have taught how to remember
you. Thus does the Son of God give thanks unto his Father for his
purity.
1
All therapy is release from the past. That is why the Holy Spirit is the
only therapist. He teaches that the past does not exist, a fact which
belongs to the sphere of knowledge and which therefore no one in the
world knows. It would indeed be impossible to be in the world
with this knowledge. For the mind that knows this unequivocally knows
also that it dwells in eternity and utilizes no perception at all. It
therefore does not consider where it is because the concept "where" does
not mean anything to it. It knows that it is everywhere, just as
it has everything, and forever.
2
The very real difference between perception and knowledge becomes quite
apparent if you consider this: There is nothing partial about knowledge.
Every aspect is whole, and therefore no aspect is separate. You
are an aspect of knowledge, being in the Mind of God, Who knows
you. All knowledge must be yours, for in you is all knowledge.
Perception at its loftiest is never complete. Even the perception of the
Holy Spirit, as perfect as perception can be, is without meaning in
Heaven. Perception can reach everywhere under His guidance, for the
vision of Christ beholds everything in light. Yet no perception, however
holy, will last forever.
3
Perfect perception, then, has many elements in common with knowledge,
making transfer to it possible. Yet the last step must be taken by God
because the last step in your redemption, which seems to be in the
future, was accomplished by God in your creation. The separation has not
interrupted it. Creation cannot be interrupted. The separation
is merely a faulty formulation of reality with no effect at all. The
miracle, without a function in Heaven, is needful here. Aspects
of reality can still be seen, and they will replace aspects of unreality.
Aspects of reality can be seen in everything and everywhere. Yet only
God can gather them together by crowning them as one with the final gift
of eternity.
4
Apart from the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit has no function. He
is not separate from either, being in the mind of both and knowing that
Mind is one. He is a Thought of God, and God has given Him to you
because He has no Thoughts He does not share. His message speaks of
timelessness in time, and that is why Christ's vision looks on
everything with love. Yet even Christ's vision is not His reality. The
golden aspects of reality which spring to light under His loving gaze
are partial glimpses of the Heaven that lies beyond them.
5
This is the miracle of creation; that it is one forever.
Every miracle you offer to the Son of God is but the true perception of
one aspect of the whole. Though every aspect is the whole, you
cannot know this until you see that every aspect is the same,
perceived in the same light and therefore one.
Everyone seen without the past thus brings you nearer to the end
of time by bringing healed and healing sight into the darkness and
enabling the world to see. For light must come into the darkened world
to make Christ's vision possible even here. Help Him to give His gift of
light to all who think they wander in the darkness, and let Him gather
them into His quiet sight that makes them one.
6
They are all the same; all beautiful and equal in their holiness. And He
will offer them unto His Father as they were offered unto Him. There is
one miracle, as there is one reality. And every miracle
you do contains them all, as every aspect of reality you see blends
quietly into the One Reality of God. The only miracle that ever was is
God's most holy Son, created in the One Reality that is his Father.
Christ's vision is His gift to you. His Being is His Father's gift to
Him.
7
Be you content with healing, for Christ's gift you can bestow,
and your Father's gift you cannot lose. Offer Christ's gift to
everyone and everywhere, for miracles offered the Son of God through the
Holy Spirit attune you to reality. The Holy Spirit knows your part in
the redemption and who are seeking you and where to find them. Knowledge
is far beyond your individual concern. You, who are part of it and all
of it, need only realize that it is of the Father, not of you.
Your role in the redemption leads you to it by reestablishing its
oneness in your minds.
8
When you have seen your brothers as yourself, you will be released
to knowledge, having learned to free yourself of Him Who knows of
freedom. Unite with me under the holy banner of His teaching, and as we
grow in strength, the power of God's Son will move in us, and we will
leave no one untouched and no one left alone. And suddenly time will be
over, and we will all unite in the eternity of God the Father. The holy
light you saw outside yourself in every miracle you offered to your
brothers will be returned to you. And knowing that the
light is in you, your creations will be there with you, as you
are in your Father.
9
As miracles in this world join you to your brothers, so do your
creations establish your fatherhood in Heaven. You are the
witnesses to the Fatherhood of God, and He has given you the power to
create the witnesses to your fatherhood in Heaven. The miracle which God
created is perfect, as are the miracles which you created in His
name. They need no healing, nor do you when you know them.
10
Yet in this world, your perfection is unwitnessed. God knows it, but you
do not, and so you do not share His witness to it. Nor do you witness
unto Him, for reality is witnessed to as one. God waits your witness to
His Son and to Himself. The miracles you do on earth are lifted up to
Heaven and to Him. They witness to what you do not know, and as they
reach the gates of Heaven, God will open them. For never would He leave
His own beloved Son outside them and beyond Himself.
11
Guilt remains the only thing that hides the Father, for guilt is the
attack upon His Son. The guilty always condemn, and having done
so, they will condemn, linking the future to the past as is the
ego's law. Fidelity unto this law lets no light in, for it demands
fidelity to darkness and forbids awakening. The ego's laws are
strict, and breaches are severely punished. Therefore give no obedience
to its laws, for they are laws of punishment. And those who follow them
believe that they are guilty, and so they must condemn. Between
the future and the past, the laws of God must intervene if you would
free yourselves. Atonement stands between them like a lamp that shines
so brightly that the chain of darkness in which you bound yourselves
will disappear.
12
Release from guilt is the ego's whole undoing. Make no one fearful,
for his guilt is yours, and by obeying the ego's harsh commandments, you
bring its condemnation of yourself, and you will not escape the
punishment it offers those who obey it. The ego rewards fidelity to it
with pain, for faith in it is pain. And faith can be rewarded
only in terms of the belief in which the faith was placed. Faith makes
the power of belief, and where it is invested determines its reward. For
faith is always given what is treasured, and what is treasured is
returned to you.
13
The world can give you only what you gave it, for being nothing but your
own projection, it has no meaning apart from what you found in
it and placed your faith in. Be faithful unto darkness and you will not
see, because your faith will be rewarded as you gave it. You
will accept your treasure, and if you place your faith in the past, the
future will be like it. Whatever you hold as dear, you think is
yours. The power of your valuing will make it so.
14
Atonement brings a re-evaluation of everything you cherish, for it is
the means by which the Holy Spirit can separate the false and the true,
which you have accepted into your minds without distinction.
Therefore, you cannot value one without the other, and guilt has
become as true for you as innocence. You do not believe the Son
of God is guiltless because you see the past and see him not.
When you condemn a brother, you are saying, "I who was guilty choose to
remain so." You have denied his freedom, and by so doing
you have denied the witness unto yours. You could as easily have
freed him from the past and lifted from his mind the cloud of
guilt that binds him to it. And in his freedom would have been
your own.
15
Lay not his guilt upon him, for his guilt lies in his secret that he
thinks that he has done this unto you. Would you, then, teach
him that he is right in his delusion? The idea that the
guiltless Son of God can attack himself and make himself guilty
is insane. In any form, in anyone, believe this not.
For sin and condemnation are the same, and the belief in one is faith in
the other, calling for punishment instead of love. Nothing
can justify insanity, and to call for punishment upon yourself must
be insane.
16
See no one, then, as guilty, and you will affirm the truth of
guiltlessness unto yourself. In every condemnation that you
offer the Son of God lies the conviction of your own guilt. If
you would have the Holy Spirit make you free of it, accept His offer of
Atonement for all your brothers. For so you learn that it is true for you.
Remember always that it is impossible to condemn the Son of God in
part. Those whom you see as guilty become the witnesses to guilt
in you, and you will see it there, for it is
there until it is undone. Guilt is always in your own mind,
which has condemned itself. Project it not, for while you do, it
cannot be undone. With everyone whom you release from guilt,
great is the joy in Heaven, where the witnesses to your fatherhood
rejoice.
17
Guilt makes you blind, for while you see one spot of guilt within you,
you will not see the light. And by projecting it, the world
seems dark and shrouded in your guilt. You throw a dark veil over it and
cannot see it because you cannot look within. You are afraid of
what you would see there, but it is not there. The thing you
fear is gone. If you would look within, you would see only the
Atonement, shining in quiet and in peace upon the altar to your Father.
18
Do not be afraid to look within. The ego tells you all is black with
guilt within you and bids you not to look. Instead, it bids you
look upon your brothers and see the guilt in them. Yet this you
cannot do without remaining blind. For those who see their brothers in
the dark, and guilty in the dark in which they shroud them, are too
afraid to look upon the light within. Within you is not what you
believe is there and what you put your faith in.
19
Within you is the holy sign of perfect faith your Father has in you. He
does not value you as you do. He knows Himself and knows the truth in you.
He knows there is no difference, for He knows not of
differences. Can you see guilt where God knows there is
perfect innocence? You can deny His knowledge, but you cannot change
it. Look, then, upon the light He placed within you and learn that what
you feared was there has been replaced with love.
20
You are accustomed to the notion that the mind can see the source of
pain where it is not. The doubtful service of displacement is to hide
the real source of your guilt and keep from your
awareness the full perception that it is insane. Displacement
always is maintained by the illusion that the source, from which
attention is diverted, must be true and must be fearful, or you
would not have displaced the guilt onto what you believed to be less
fearful. You are therefore willing with little opposition to look upon
all sorts of "sources" underneath awareness, provided that they are not
the deeper source to which they bear no real relationship at all.
21
Insane ideas have no real relationships, for that is why
they are insane. No real relationship can rest on guilt or even hold one
spot of it to mar its purity. For all relationships which guilt has
touched are used but to avoid the person and the guilt. What
strange relationships you have made for this strange purpose! And you
forgot that real relationships are holy and cannot be used by you
at all. They are used only by the Holy Spirit, and it is that which makes
them pure. [If you displace your guilt upon them, the Holy
Spirit cannot use them.] For by preempting for your own ends
what you should have given to Him, He cannot use them unto your
release. No one who would unite in any way with anyone
for his own salvation will find it in that strange relationship.
It is not shared, and so it is not real.
22
In any union with a brother in which you seek to lay your guilt upon him
or share it with him or perceive his own, you will feel guilty.
Nor will you find satisfaction and peace with him, because your union
with him is not real. You will see guilt in that relationship
because you put it there. It is inevitable that those who suffer
guilt will attempt to displace it, because they do
believe in it. Yet, though they suffer, they will not look within and
let it go. They cannot know they love and cannot understand what
loving is. Their main concern is to perceive the source of guilt
outside themselves, beyond their own control.
23
When you maintain that you are guilty but the source lies in the past,
you are not looking inward. The past is not in you. Your
weird associations to it have no meaning in the present. Yet you let
them stand between you and your brothers, with whom you find no real
relationships at all. Can you expect to use your brothers as a means to
"solve" the past and still to see them as they really are? Salvation is
not found by those who use their brothers to resolve problems which are
not there. You wanted not salvation in the past. Would you impose your
idle wishes on the present and hope to find salvation now?
24
Determine, then, to be not as you were. Use no relationship to hold you
to the past, but with each one each day be born again. A minute, even
less, will be enough to free you from the past and give your mind in
peace over to the Atonement. When everyone is welcome to you as you
would have yourself be welcome to your Father, you will see no guilt in
you. For you will have accepted the Atonement, which shone within you
all the while you dreamed of guilt and would not look within and see it.
25
As long as you believe that guilt is justified in any way in anyone
whatever he may do, you will not look within, where you would always
find Atonement. The end of guilt will never come as long as you believe
there is a reason for it. For you must learn that guilt is always
totally insane and has no reason. The Holy Spirit seeks not to
dispel reality. If guilt were real, Atonement would not
be. The purpose of Atonement is to dispel illusions, not to establish
them as real and then forgive them.
26
The Holy Spirit does not keep illusions in your mind to frighten you and
show them to you fearfully to demonstrate what He has saved you from.
What He has saved you from is gone. Give no reality to guilt,
and see no reason for it. The Holy Spirit does what God would
have Him do and has always done so. He has seen separation, but knows of
union. He teaches healing, but He also knows of creation. He would have
you see and teach as He does, and through Him. Yet what He knows, you do
not know, though it is yours.
27
Now it is given you to heal and teach, to make what will be now.
As yet it is not now. The Son of God believes that he is lost in
guilt, alone in a dark world where pain is pressing everywhere upon him
from without. When he has looked within and seen the radiance
there, he will remember how much his Father loves him. And it will seem
incredible that he has ever thought his Father loved him not and looked
upon him as condemned. The moment that you realize guilt is insane,
wholly unjustified, and wholly without reason, you will
not fear to look upon the Atonement and accept it wholly.
28
You who have been unmerciful unto yourselves do not remember your
Father's Love. And looking without mercy upon your brothers, you do not
remember how much you love Him. Yet it is forever true. In
shining peace within you is the perfect purity in which you were
created. Fear not to look upon the lovely truth in you. Look through
the cloud of guilt that dims your vision, and look past darkness
to the holy place where you will see the light. The altar to your Father
is as pure as He Who raised it to Himself. Nothing can keep from you
what Christ would have you see. His will is like His Father's, and He
offers mercy to every Child of God, as He would have you do.
29
Release from guilt as you would be released. There is no
other way to look within and see the light of love shining as steadily
and as surely as God Himself has always loved His Son. And as His
son loves Him. There is no fear in love, for love is guiltless.
You who have always loved your Father can have no fear for any
reason to look within and see your holiness. You cannot be as
you believed you were. Your guilt is without reason, because it is not
in the Mind of God where you are. And this is reason,
which the Holy Spirit would restore to you. He would remove only
illusions. All else He would have you see. And in Christ's vision, He
would show you the perfect purity that is forever within God's Son.
30
You cannot enter into real relationships with any of God's Sons
unless you love them all and equally. Love is not special. If
you single out part of the Sonship for your love, you are
imposing guilt on all your relationships and making them unreal.
You can love only as God loves. Seek not to love unlike Him, for
there is no love apart from His. Until you recognize that this
is true, you will have no idea what love is like. No one who condemns a
brother can see himself as guiltless in the peace of God. If he is
guiltless and in peace and sees it not, he is delusional and has
not looked upon himself. To him I say,
32
No illusion that you have ever held against him has touched his
innocence in any way. His shining purity, wholly untouched by guilt and
wholly loving, is bright within you. Let us look upon him together and
love him. For in our love of him is your guiltlessness. But look upon
yourself, and gladness and appreciation for what you see will banish
guilt forever. I thank You, Father, for the purity of Your most holy
Son, whom You have created guiltless forever.
33
Like you my faith and my belief are centered on what I treasure. The
difference is that I love only what God loves with me, and
because of this, I treasure you beyond the value that you set on
yourselves, even unto the worth that God has placed upon you. I love all
that He created, and all my faith and my belief I offer unto it. My
faith in you is strong as all the love I give my Father. My trust in you
is without limit and without the fear that you will hear me not. I thank
the Father for your loveliness and for the many gifts that you will let
me offer to the Kingdom in honor of its wholeness, which is of God.
34
Praise be unto you who make the Father one with His own Son. Alone we
are all lowly, but together we shine with brightness so intense that
none of us alone can even think on it. Before the glorious radiance of
the Kingdom, guilt melts away and, transformed into kindness, will never
more be what it was. Every reaction that you experience will be so
purified that it is fitting as a hymn of praise unto your Father. See
only praise of Him in what He has created, for He will never cease His
praise of you. United in this praise, we stand before the gates
of Heaven where we will surely enter in our blamelessness. God loves
you. Could I, then, lack faith in you and love Him perfectly?
35
Forgetfulness and sleep and even death become the ego's best advice for
how to deal with the perceived and harsh intrusion of guilt on peace.
Yet no one sees himself in conflict and ravaged by a cruel war unless he
believes that both opponents in the war are real. Believing
this, he must escape, for such a war would surely end his peace of mind
and so destroy him. Yet if he could but realize the war is between
forces that are real and unreal powers, he could look upon
himself and see his freedom. No one finds himself ravaged and
torn in endless battles which he himself perceives as wholly
without meaning.
36
God would not have His Son embattled, and so His Son's imagined "enemy,"
which he made, is totally unreal. You are but trying to escape a
bitter war from which you have escaped. The war is gone. For you
have heard the hymn of freedom rising unto Heaven. Gladness and joy
belong to God for your release, because you made it not. Yet as you made
not freedom, so you made not a war that could endanger freedom.
Nothing destructive ever was or will be. The war, the guilt, the past
are gone as one into the unreality from which they came.
37
When we are all united in Heaven, you will value nothing that
you value here. For nothing that you value here you value wholly, and so
you do not value it at all. Value is where God placed it, and the value
of what God esteems cannot be judged, for it has been established.
It is wholly of value. It can merely be appreciated or not. To
value it partially is not to know its value. In Heaven is
everything God valued and nothing else. Heaven is perfectly unambiguous.
Everything is clear and bright and calls forth one response.
There is no darkness, and there is no contrast. There is no variation.
There is no interruption. There is a sense of peace so deep that no
dream in this world has ever brought even a dim imagining of what it is.
38
Nothing in this world can give this peace, for nothing in this world is
wholly shared. Perfect perception can merely show you what is capable
of being wholly shared. It can also show you the results of
sharing while you still remember the results of not sharing. The
Holy Spirit points quietly to the contrast, knowing that you will
finally let Him judge the difference for you, allowing Him to
demonstrate which must be true. He has perfect faith in your
final judgment because He knows that He will make it for you. To
doubt this would be to doubt that His mission will be fulfilled. How is
this possible, when His mission is of God?
39
You whose minds are darkened by doubt and guilt, remember this: God gave
the Holy Spirit to you and gave Him the mission to remove all doubt and
every trace of guilt that His dear Son has laid upon himself. It is impossible
that this mission fail. Nothing can prevent what God would have
accomplished from accomplishment. Whatever your reactions to the Holy
Spirit's Voice may be, whatever voice you choose to listen to, whatever
strange thoughts may occur to you, God's will is done. You will
find the peace in which He has established you, because He does not
change His Mind. He is invariable as the peace in which you dwell and of
which the Holy Spirit reminds you.
40
You will not remember change and shift in Heaven. You have need of
contrast only here. Contrast and differences are necessary teaching
aids, for by them you learn what to avoid and what to seek. When you
have learned this, you will find the answer that makes the need for any
differences disappear. Truth comes of its own will unto its own. When
you have learned that you belong to truth, it will flow lightly
over you without a difference of any kind. For you will need no contrast
to help you realize that this is what you want, and only this.
Fear not the Holy Spirit will fail in what your Father has given Him to
do. The Will of God can fail in nothing.
41
Have faith in only this one thing, and it will be sufficient: God wills
you be in Heaven, and nothing can keep you from it or it
from you. Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your
blackest nightmares all mean nothing. They will not prevail against the
peace God wills for you. The Holy Spirit will restore your sanity,
because insanity is not the Will of God. If that suffices Him,
it is enough for you. You will not keep what God would have removed,
because it breaks communication with you with whom He would communicate.
His voice will be heard.
42
The Communication Link which God Himself placed within you, joining your
minds with His, cannot be broken. You may believe you want
it broken, and this belief does interfere with the deep peace in
which the sweet and constant communication which God would share with
you is known. Yet His channels of reaching out cannot be wholly closed
and separated from Him. Peace will be yours, because His peace still
flows to you from Him Whose Will is peace. You have it now.
The Holy Spirit will teach you how to use it and, by projecting
it, to learn that it is in you.
43
God willed you Heaven and will always will you nothing else. The
Holy Spirit knows only of His Will. There is no chance that
Heaven will not be yours, for God is sure, and what He wills is as sure
as He is. You will learn salvation, because you will learn how to
save. It will not be possible to exempt yourself from what the
Holy Spirit wills to teach you. Salvation is as sure as God. His
certainty suffices. Learn that even the darkest nightmare that disturbed
the mind of God's sleeping Son holds no power over him. He will
learn the lesson of awaking. God watches over him, and light surrounds
him.
44
Can God's Son lose himself in dreams when God has placed within
him the glad call to waken and be glad? He cannot separate himself
from what is in him. His sleep will not withstand the call to
wake. The mission of redemption will be fulfilled as surely as the
creation will remain unchanged throughout eternity. You do not have to
know that Heaven is yours to make it so. It is so. Yet the Will
of God must be accepted as your will to know it.
45
The Holy Spirit cannot fail to undo for you everything you have
learned that teaches you what is not true must be reconciled with truth.
This is the reconciliation which the ego would substitute for your
reconciliation unto sanity and unto peace. The Holy Spirit has a very
different kind of reconciliation in His Mind for you, and one which He will
effect as surely as the ego will not effect what it attempts.
46
Failure is of the ego, not of God. From Him you cannot
wander, and there is no possibility that the plan the Holy Spirit offers
to everyone for the salvation of everyone will not be perfectly
accomplished. You will be released, and you will not remember
anything you made that was not created for you and by
you in return. For how can you remember what was never true or not
remember what has always been? It is this reconciliation with truth, and
only truth, in which the peace of Heaven lies.
47
Yes, you are blessed indeed. Yet in this world, you do not know it. But
you have the means for learning it and seeing it quite clearly. The Holy
Spirit uses logic as easily and as well, as does the ego, except that
His conclusions are not insane. They take a direction exactly
opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness
and to death. We have followed much of the ego's logic and have seen its
logical conclusions. And having seen them, we have realized that they
cannot be seen but in illusions, for there alone their seeming clearness
seems to be clearly seen. Let us now turn away from them and
follow the simple logic by which the Holy Spirit teaches you the simple
conclusions that speak for truth and only truth.
48
If you are blessed and do not know it, you need to learn it must
be so. The knowledge is not taught, but its conditions must be
acquired, for it is they that have been thrown away. You can
learn to bless and cannot give what you have not. If, then, you
offer blessing, it must have come first to yourself. And
you must also have accepted it as yours, for how else could you
give it away?
49
That is why your miracles offer you the testimony that you are
blessed. If what you offer is complete forgiveness, you must
have let guilt go, accepting the Atonement for yourself and learning you
are guiltless. How could you learn what has been done for you, but which
you do not know, unless you do what you would have to do if it had
been done unto you? Indirect
proof of truth is needed in a world made of denial and without
direction. You will perceive the need for this if you will realize that
to deny is the decision not to know. The logic of the world must
therefore lead to nothing, for its goal is nothing.
50
If you decide to have and give and be nothing except a dream,
you must direct your thoughts unto oblivion. And if you have and
give and are everything, and all this has been denied,
your thought system is closed off and wholly separated from the truth.
This is an insane world, and do not underestimate the actual
extent of its insanity. There is no area of your perception that it has
not touched, and your dream is sacred to you. That is why God
placed the Holy Spirit in you, where you placed the dream.
51
Seeing is always outward. Were your thoughts wholly of you,
the thought system which you made would be forever dark. The thoughts
which the mind of God's Son projects have all the power that he gives to
them. The thoughts he shares with God are beyond his belief, but
those he made are his beliefs. And it is these, and not
the truth, that he has chosen to defend and love. They will not be taken
from him. But they can be given up by him, for the Source of
their undoing is in him. There is nothing in the world
to teach him that the logic of the world is totally insane and leads to
nothing. Yet in him who made this insane logic, there is One Who knows
it leads to nothing, for He knows everything.
52
Any direction which will lead you where the Holy Spirit leads you not
goes nowhere. Anything you deny which He knows to be true, you have
denied yourself, and He must therefore teach you not to
deny it. Undoing is indirect, as doing is. You were created only
to create, neither to see nor do. These are but indirect
expressions of the will to live, which has been blocked by the
capricious and unholy whim of death and murder that your Father shared
not with you. You have set yourselves the task of sharing what cannot be
shared. And while you think it possible to learn to do this, you
will not believe all that is possible to learn to do.
53
The Holy Spirit, therefore, must begin His teaching by showing you what
you can never learn. His message is not indirect, but He
must introduce the simple truth into a thought system which has become
so twisted and so complex that you cannot see that it means
nothing. He merely looks at its foundation and dismisses it. But
you, who cannot undo what you have made [nor escape the heavy
burden of its dullness that lies upon your minds], cannot see through
it. It deceives you because you chose to deceive yourselves. Those who
choose to be deceived will merely attack direct approaches,
which would seem but to encroach upon deception and strike at it.
54
The Holy Spirit needs a happy learner in whom His mission can be happily
accomplished. You who are steadfastly devoted to misery must first
recognize that you are miserable and not happy. The Holy
Spirit cannot teach without this contrast, for you believe that misery is
happiness. This has so confused you that you have undertaken to learn to
do what you can never do, believing that unless you
learn it, you will not be happy. You do not realize that the foundation
on which this most peculiar learning goal depends means absolutely
nothing. It does make sense to you.
55
Have faith in nothing, and you will find the "treasure" that you
sought. Yet you will add another burden to your mind, already
burdened or you would not have sought another. You will believe that
nothing is of value and will value it. A little piece of
glass, a speck of dust, a body or a war are one to you. For if you value
one thing made of nothing, you have believed that nothing
can be precious and that you can learn how to make the untrue true.
56
The Holy Spirit, seeing where you are but knowing you
are elsewhere, begins His lesson in simplicity with the fundamental
teaching that truth is true. This is the hardest lesson you will
ever learn, and in the end the only one. Simplicity is very
difficult for twisted minds. Consider all the distortions you have made
of nothing—all the strange forms and feelings and actions and reactions
that you have woven out of it. Nothing is so alien to you as the simple
truth, and nothing are you less inclined to listen to. The contrast
between what is true and what is not is perfectly apparent, yet
you do not see it.
57
The simple and the obvious are not apparent to those who would make
palaces and royal robes of nothing, believing they are kings with golden
crowns because of them. All this the Holy Spirit sees and teaches simply
that all this is not true. To these unhappy learners who would teach
themselves nothing and delude themselves into believing that it is not
nothing, the Holy Spirit says, with steadfast quietness:
59
Like you, the Holy Spirit did not make truth. Like God, He knows
it to be true. He brings the light of truth into the darkness and lets
it shine on you. And as it shines, your brothers see it, and realizing
that this light is not what you have made, they see in you more than you
see. They will be happy learners of the lesson which this light brings
to them because it teaches them release from nothing and from
all the works of nothing. The heavy chains which seem to bind them unto
despair they do not see as nothing until you bring the light to them.
And then they see the chains have disappeared, and so they must
have been nothing. And you will see it with them. Because
you taught them gladness and release, they will become your
teachers in release and gladness.
60
When you teach anyone that truth is true, you learn it with him.
And so you learn that what seemed hardest was the easiest. Learn to be
happy learners. You will never learn how to make nothing
everything. Yet see that this has been your goal and recognize
how foolish it has been. Be glad it is undone, for when you look at it
in simple honesty, it is undone. We said before, "Be not content
with nothing," for you have believed that nothing could content
you. It is not so.
61
If you would be a happy learner, you must give everything that
you have learned over to the Holy Spirit to be unlearned for
you. And then begin to learn the joyous lessons that come quickly on the
firm foundation that truth is true. For what is builded there is
true and built on truth. The universe of learning will open up
before you in all its gracious simplicity. With truth before you, you
will not look back.
62
The happy learner meets the conditions of learning here, as he also
meets the conditions of knowledge in the Kingdom. All this lies in the
Holy Spirit's plan to free you from the past and open up the way to
freedom for you. For truth is true. What else could ever be or
ever was? This simple lesson holds the key to the dark door which you
believe is locked forever. You made this door of nothing and
behind it is nothing. The key is only the light which shines
away the shapes and forms and fears of nothing. Accept this key to
freedom from the hands of Christ Who gives it to you that you may join
Him in the holy task of bringing light to darkness. For, like your
brothers, you do not realize the light has come and freed you
from the sleep of darkness.
63
Behold your brothers in their freedom and learn of them how to be free
of darkness. The light in you will waken them, and they will not leave you
asleep. The vision of Christ is given the very instant that it is
perceived. Where everything is clear, it is all holy. The quietness of
its simplicity is so compelling that you will realize it is impossible
to deny the simple truth. For there is nothing else. God is
everywhere, and His Son is in Him with everything. Can he sing the dirge
of sorrow when this is true?
64
Learning will be commensurate with motivation, and the interference in
your motivation for learning is exactly the same as that which
interferes with all your thinking. The happy learner cannot feel
guilty about learning. This is so essential to learning that it
should never be forgotten. The guiltless learner learns so easily
because his thoughts are free. Yet this entails the recognition that
guilt is interference, not salvation, and serves no useful
function at all.
65
You are accustomed to using guiltlessness merely to offset the pain of
guilt and do not look upon it as having value in itself. You
believe that guilt and guiltlessness are both of value, each
representing an escape from what the other does not offer you. You do
not want either alone, for without both, you do not see yourselves as
whole and therefore happy. Yet you are whole only in your
guiltlessness, and only in your guiltlessness can you be happy.
There is no conflict here. To wish for guilt in any way,
in any form, will lose appreciation of the value of your
guiltlessness and push it from your sight.
66
There is no compromise that you can make with guilt and escape the pain
which only guiltlessness allays. Learning is living here, as
creating is being in Heaven. Whenever the pain of guilt seems to
attract you, remember that, if you yield to it, you are deciding against
your happiness and will not learn how to be happy. Say therefore
to yourself gently, but with the conviction born of the love of God and
of His Son,
68
Each day, each hour and minute, even every second, you are deciding
between the crucifixion and the resurrection, between the ego and the
Holy Spirit. The ego is the choice for guilt; the Holy Spirit the
decision for guiltlessness. The power of decision is all that is yours.
What you can decide between is fixed because there are no
alternatives except truth and illusion. And there is no overlap between
them because they are opposites which cannot be reconciled and cannot
both be true. You are guilty or guiltless, bound or
free, happy or unhappy.
69
The miracle teaches you that you have chosen guiltlessness, freedom, and
joy. It is not a cause, but an effect. It is the natural result
of choosing right, attesting to your happiness that comes from choosing
to be free of guilt. Everyone you offer healing to returns it. Everyone
you attack keeps it and cherishes it by holding it against you. Whether
he does this or does it not will make no difference; you will think
he does. It is impossible to offer what you do not want without this
penalty. The cost of giving is receiving. Either it is a penalty
from which you suffer or the happy purchase of a treasure to hold dear.
70
No penalty is ever asked of God's Son except by himself and of
himself. Every chance given him to heal is another opportunity to
replace darkness with light and fear with love. If he refuses it, he
binds himself to darkness because he did not choose to free his brother
and enter light with him. By giving power to nothing, he threw
away the joyous opportunity to learn that nothing has no power.
And by not dispelling darkness, he became afraid of darkness and
of light. The joy of learning that darkness has no power over the Son of
God is the happy lesson the Holy Spirit teaches and would have you
teach with Him. It is His joy to teach it, as it will be yours.
71
The way to teach this simple lesson is merely this: guiltlessness is
invulnerability. Therefore, make your invulnerability manifest to
everyone, and teach him that whatever he may try to do to you,
your perfect freedom from the belief that you can be harmed shows him he
is guiltless. He can do nothing that can hurt you, and by
refusing to allow him to think he can, you teach him that the
Atonement, which you have accepted for yourself, is also his.
There is nothing to forgive. No one can hurt the Son of God. His
guilt is wholly without cause, and being without cause, cannot
exist.
72
God is the only Cause, and guilt is not of Him. Teach no one he
has hurt you, for if you do, you teach yourself that what is not of God
has power over you. The
causeless cannot be. Do not attest to it, and do not foster belief
in it in any mind. Remember always that mind is one and cause
is one. You will learn communication with this oneness only when
you learn to deny the causeless and accept the Cause of God as yours.
The power that God has given to His Son is his, and nothing else
can His Son see or choose to look upon without imposing on himself the
penalty of guilt in place of all the happy teaching the Holy
Spirit would gladly offer him.
73
Whenever you decide to make decisions for yourself, you are thinking
destructively, and the decision will be wrong. It will hurt you
because of the concept of decision which led to it. It is not true that
you can make decisions by yourself or for yourself
alone. No thought of God's Son can be separate or isolated in
its effects. Every decision is made for the whole Sonship,
directed in and out and influencing a constellation larger than anything
you ever dreamed of. Those who accept the Atonement are
invulnerable. But those who believe they are guilty will respond
to guilt because they think it is salvation and will not refuse to see
it and side with it. [They believe that increasing
guilt is self-protection.] And they will fail to understand the
simple fact that what they do not want must hurt them.
74
All this arises because they do not believe that what they want is good.
Yet will was given them because it is holy and will bring to
them all that they need, coming as naturally as peace that knows
no limits. There is nothing their wills will not provide that offers
them anything of value. Yet because they do not understand their
will, the Holy Spirit quietly understands it for them and gives
them what they will without effort, strain, or the impossible burden of
deciding what they want and need alone.
75
It will never happen that you will have to make decisions for yourself.
You are not bereft of help, and Help that knows the answer.
Would you be content with little, which is all that you alone can offer
yourself, when He Who gives you everything will simply offer it
to you? He will never ask what you have done to make you worthy of the
gift of God. Ask it not therefore of yourselves. Instead, accept His
answer, for He knows that you are worthy of everything God wills
for you. Do not try to escape the gift of God which He so freely
and so gladly offers you. He offers you but what God gave Him for
you. You need not decide whether or not you are deserving of it. God
knows you are.
76
Would you deny the truth of God's decision and place your pitiful
appraisal of yourself in place of His calm and unswerving value of His
Son? Nothing can shake God's conviction of the perfect purity of
everything that He created, for it is wholly pure. Do not decide
against it, for being of Him, it must be true. Peace abides in
every mind that quietly accepts the plan which God has set for his
Atonement, relinquishing his own. You know not of salvation, for
you do not understand it. Make no decisions about what it is or where it
lies, but ask of the Holy Spirit everything and leave all
decisions to His gentle counsel.
77
The One Who knows the plan of God which God would have you follow can
teach you what it is. Only His wisdom is capable of
guiding you to follow it. Every decision you undertake alone but
signifies that you would define what salvation is and what you
would be saved from. The Holy Spirit knows that all
salvation is escape from guilt. You have no other "enemy," and against
this strange distortion of the purity of the Son of God, the Holy Spirit
is your only friend. He is the strong protector of your
innocence, which sets you free. And it is His decision to undo
everything that would obscure your innocence from your unclouded mind.
78
Let Him, therefore, be the only Guide that you would follow to
salvation. He knows the way and leads you gladly on it. With Him
you will not fail to learn what God wills for you is your will.
Without His guidance, you will think you know alone and will
decide against your peace as surely as you made the wrong
decision in ever thinking that salvation lay in you alone. Salvation is
of Him to Whom God gave it for you. He has not forgotten it. Forget Him
not, and He will make every decision for you, for your salvation, and
the peace of God in you.
79
Seek not to appraise the worth of God's Son, whom He created holy, for
to do so is to evaluate his Father and judge against Him. And
you will feel guilty for this imagined crime, which no one in
this world or Heaven could possibly commit. God's Spirit teaches only
that the "sin" of self-replacement on the throne of God is not a
source of guilt. What cannot happen can have no effects to fear.
Be quiet in your faith in Him Who loves you and would lead you out of
insanity. Madness may be your choice, but not your reality.
Never forget the love of God, Who has remembered you. For it is
quite impossible that He could ever let His Son drop from His loving
Mind wherein he was created and where his abode was fixed in perfect
peace forever.
80
Say to the Holy Spirit only, "Decide for me," and it is done. For His
decisions are reflections of what God knows about you, and in
this light, error of any kind becomes impossible. Why would you
struggle so frantically to anticipate all that you cannot know
when all knowledge lies behind every decision which the Holy Spirit
makes for you? Learn of His wisdom and His love and teach His
answer to everyone who struggles in the dark. For you decide for them and
for yourself.
81
How gracious is it to decide all things through Him Whose equal love is
given equally to all alike! He leaves you no one outside
yourself, alone without you. And so He gives you what is yours
because your Father would have you share it with Him. In everything be
led by Him and do not reconsider. Trust Him to answer quickly, surely,
and with love for everyone who will be touched in any way by the
decision. And everyone will be. Would you take unto yourself the
sole responsibility for deciding what can bring only good to
everyone? Would you know this?
82
You taught yourselves the most unnatural habit of not
communicating with your Creator. Yet you remain in close communication
with Him and with everything that is within Him, as it is within
yourself. Unlearn isolation through His loving guidance and
learn of all the happy communication that you have thrown away but could
not lose.
83
Whenever you are in doubt what you should do, think of His Presence in
you and tell yourself this and only this:
85
Then let Him teach you quietly how to perceive your guiltlessness, which
is already there.
86
When you accept a brother's guiltlessness, you will see the Atonement in
him. For by proclaiming it in him, you make it yours, and you will
see what you sought. You will not see the symbol of your brother's
guiltlessness shining within him while you still believe it is not
there. His guiltlessness is your Atonement. Grant it to
him, and you will see the truth of what you have acknowledged. Yet truth
is offered first to be received, even as God gave it first to
His Son. The first in time means nothing, but the First in eternity is
God the Father, Who is both First and One. Beyond the First, there is no
other, for there is no order, no second or third and nothing but
the First.
87
You who belong to the First Cause, created by Him like unto Himself and
part of Him, are more than merely guiltless. The state of guiltlessness
is only the condition in which what is not there has been removed from
the disordered mind that thought it was. This state, and only
this, must you attain with God beside you. For until you do, you
will still think that you are separate from Him. You can feel His
Presence next to you but cannot know that you are one with Him.
This need not be taught. Learning applies only to the condition in which
it happens of itself.
88
When you have let all that obscured the truth in your most holy mind be
undone for you and stand in grace before your Father, He will give
Himself to you as He has always done. Giving Himself is all He knows,
and so it is all knowledge. For what He knows not cannot be and
therefore cannot be given. Ask not to be forgiven, for this has already
been accomplished. Ask, rather, to learn how to forgive and
restore what always was to your unforgiving mind. Atonement becomes real
and visible to them that use it. On earth this is your only
function, and you must learn that it is all you want to learn.
89
You will feel guilty till you learn this. For in the end,
whatever form it takes, your guilt arises from your failure to fulfill
your function in God's Mind with all of yours. Can you escape
this guilt by failing to fulfill your function here? You need not
understand creation to do what must be done before that knowledge would
be meaningful to you. God breaks no barriers; neither did He make
them. When you release them, they are gone. God will not fail
nor ever has in anything.
90
Decide that God is right and you are wrong about yourself. He
created you out of Himself but still within Him. He knows what
you are. Remember that there is no second to Him. There cannot,
therefore, be anyone without His Holiness nor anyone unworthy of His
perfect Love. Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place
made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deceit
undone. Fail not yourself, but instead offer to God and you
His blameless Son. For this small gift of appreciation for His Love, God
will Himself exchange your gift for His.
91
Before you make any decisions for yourself, remember that you
have decided against your function in Heaven and consider
carefully whether you want to make decisions here. Your function
here is only to decide against deciding what you want in
recognition that you do not know. How, then, can you decide what
you should do? Leave all decisions to the One Who speaks for God and for
your function as He knows it. So will He teach you to remove the
awful burden you have laid upon yourself by loving not the Son of God
and trying to teach him guilt instead of love. Give up this frantic and
insane attempt, which cheats you of the joy of living with your God and
Father, and awaking gladly to His love and holiness, which join together
as the truth in you, making you one with Him.
92
When you have learned how to decide with God, all decisions
become as easy and as right as breathing. There is no effort, and you
will be led as gently as if you were being carried along a quiet path in
summer. Only your own volition seems to make deciding hard. The Holy
Spirit will not delay at all in answering your every question
what to do. He knows. And He will tell you and then do
it for you. You who are tired might consider whether this is not
more restful than sleep. For you can bring your guilt into sleeping but
not into this.
1
Unless you are guiltless, you cannot know God, Whose Will is that you
know Him. Therefore, you must be guiltless. Yet if you do not
accept the necessary conditions for knowing Him, you have denied Him and
do not recognize Him, though He is all around you. He cannot be known
without His Son, whose guiltlessness is the condition for knowing Him.
Accepting His Son as guilty is denial of the Father so complete that
knowledge is swept away from recognition in the very mind where God
Himself has placed it. If you would but listen and learn how impossible
this is! Do not endow Him with attributes you understand. You made Him
not, and anything you understand is not of Him.
2
Your task is not to make reality. It is here without your making, but
not without you. You who have thrown your selves away and valued
God so little, hear me speak for Him and for yourselves. You cannot
understand how much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in
your experience of the world to help you understand it. There is nothing
on earth with which it can compare and nothing you have ever felt, apart
from Him, that resembles it ever so faintly. You cannot even give a
blessing in perfect gentleness. Would you know of One Who gives forever
and Who knows of nothing except giving?
3
The Children of Heaven live in the light of the blessing of their Father
because they know that they are sinless. The Atonement was
established as the means of restoring guiltlessness to the mind which
has denied it and thus denied Heaven to itself. Atonement teaches you
the true condition of the Son of God. It does not teach you what you are
or what your Father is. The Holy Spirit, Who remembers this for you,
merely teaches you how to remove the blocks that stand between you and
what you know. His memory is yours. If you remember what you
have made, you are remembering nothing. Remembrance of reality is in Him
and therefore in you.
4
The guiltless and the guilty are totally incapable of understanding one
another. Each perceives the other as like himself, making them unable to
communicate because each sees the other unlike the way he sees himself.
God can communicate only to the Holy Spirit in your mind because
only He shares the knowledge of what you are with God. And only the Holy
Spirit can answer God for you, for only He knows what God is.
Everything else that you have placed within your mind cannot
exist, for what is not in communication with the Mind of God has never
been. Communication with God is life. Nothing without it is at
all.
5
The only part of your mind that has reality is the part which links you
still with God. Would you have all of it transformed into a
radiant message of God's Love, to share with all the lonely ones who
denied Him with you? God makes this possible. Would you deny His
yearning to be known? You yearn for Him, as He for you. This is forever
changeless. Accept, then, the immutable. Leave the world of death
behind, and return quietly to Heaven. There is nothing of value
here and everything of value there. Listen to the Holy Spirit
and to God through Him. He speaks of you to you. There is
no guilt in you, for God is blessed in His Son as the Son is blessed in
Him.
6
Each one of you has a special part to play in the Atonement, but the
message given to each to share is always the same—God's Son is
guiltless. Each one teaches the message differently and learns it
differently. Yet until he teaches it and learns it, he will suffer the
pain of dim awareness that his true function remains unfulfilled in him.
The burden of guilt is heavy, but God would not have you bound by it.
His plan for your awaking is as perfect as yours is fallible. You know
not what you do, but He Who knows is with you. His gentleness is yours,
and all the love you share with God He holds in trust for you. He would
teach you nothing except how to be happy.
7
Blessed Son of a wholly blessing Father, joy was created for you.
Who can condemn whom God has blessed? There is nothing in the Mind of
God that does not share His shining innocence. Creation is the natural
extension of perfect purity. Your only calling here is to devote
yourself with active willingness to the denial of guilt in all its
forms. To accuse is not to understand. The happy learners of the
Atonement become the teachers of the innocence that is the right of all
that God created. Deny them not what is their due, for you will not
withhold it from them alone.
8
The inheritance of the Kingdom is the right of God's Son, given him in
his creation. Do not try to steal it from him, or you will ask
for guilt and will experience it. Protect his purity from every
thought that would steal it away and keep it from his sight. Bring
innocence to light in answer to the call of the Atonement. Never allow
purity to remain hidden, but shine away the heavy veils of guilt within
which the Son of God has hidden himself from his own sight. We are all
joined in the Atonement here, and nothing else can unite us in this
world. So will the world of separation slip away and full communication
be restored between the Father and the Son.
9
The miracle acknowledges the guiltlessness which must have been
denied to produce need of healing. Do not withhold this glad
acknowledgment, for hope of happiness and release from suffering of
every kind lie in it. Who is there but wishes to be free of pain? He may
not yet have learned how to exchange his guilt for innocence nor
realize that only in this exchange can freedom from pain be his. Yet
those who have failed to learn need teaching, not attack. To
attack those who have need of teaching is to fail to learn from them.
10
Teachers of innocence, each in his own way, have joined together, taking
their part in the unified curriculum of the Atonement. There is no unity
of learning goals apart from this. There is no conflict in this
curriculum, which has one aim however it is taught. Each effort
made on its behalf is offered for the single purpose of release
from guilt to the eternal glory of God and His creation. And every
teaching that points to this points straight to Heaven and to the peace
of God. There is no pain, no trial, no fear that teaching this can fail
to overcome. The power of God Himself supports this teaching and guarantees
its limitless results.
11
Join your own efforts to the power that cannot fail and must
result in peace. No one can be untouched by teaching such as this. You
will not see yourself beyond the power of God if you teach only this.
You will not be exempt from the effects of this most holy lesson, which
seeks but to restore what is the right of God's creation. From everyone
whom you accord release from guilt, you will inevitably learn your
innocence. The circle of Atonement has no end. And you will find
ever-increasing confidence in your safe inclusion in what is for all in
everyone you bring within its safety and its perfect peace.
12
Peace, then, be unto everyone who becomes a teacher of peace. For peace
is the acknowledgment of perfect purity from which no one is excluded.
Within its holy circle is everyone whom God created as His Son. Joy is
its unifying attribute, with no one left outside to suffer guilt alone.
The power of God draws everyone to its safe embrace of love and union.
Stand quietly within this circle and attract all tortured minds to join
with you in the safety of its peace and holiness. Abide with me within
it as teachers of Atonement, not of guilt.
13
Blessed are you who teach with me. Our power comes not of us but of our
Father. In guiltlessness we know Him, as He knows us guiltless. I stand
within the circle, calling you to peace. Teach peace with me and stand
with me on holy ground. Remember for everyone your Father's power that
He has given him. Believe not that you cannot teach His perfect peace.
Stand not outside but join with me within. Fail not the only purpose to
which my teaching calls you. Restore to God His Son as He created him by
teaching him his innocence.
14
The crucifixion has no part in the Atonement. Only the resurrection
became my part in it. That is the symbol of the release from guilt by
guiltlessness. Whom you perceive as guilty, you would crucify. Yet you restore
guiltlessness to whomever you see as guiltless. Crucifixion is always
the ego's aim. It sees as guilty, and by its condemnation, it
would kill. The Holy Spirit sees only guiltlessness, and in His
gentleness, He would release from fear and reestablish the reign of
love. The power of love is in His gentleness, which is of God and
therefore cannot crucify nor suffer crucifixion. The temple you restore
becomes your altar, for it was rebuilt through you. And
everything you give to God is yours. Thus He creates, and thus
must you restore.
15
Each one you see you place within the holy circle of Atonement or leave
outside, judging him fit for crucifixion or for redemption. If you bring
him into the circle of purity, you will rest there with him. If
you leave him without, you join him there. Judge not except in
quietness which is not of you. Refuse to accept anyone as without
the blessing of Atonement, and bring him into it by blessing
him. Holiness must be shared, for therein lies everything that makes it
holy. Come gladly to the holy circle, and look out in peace on all who
think they are outside. Cast no one out, for this is what he seeks,
along with you. Come, let us join him in the holy place of peace, which
is for all of us, united as one within the cause of peace.
16
The journey that we undertake together is the exchange of dark for
light, of ignorance for understanding. Nothing you understand is
fearful. It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the
frightening, and you shrink away from it to further darkness. And yet it
is only the hidden that can terrify, not for what it is, but for
its hiddenness. The obscure is frightening because you do not
understand its meaning. If you did, it would be clear, and you would be
no longer in the dark. Nothing has hidden value, for what is
hidden cannot be shared, and so its value is unknown. The hidden is kept
apart, but value always lies in joint appreciation. What is
concealed cannot be loved, and so it must be feared.
17
The quiet light in which the Holy Spirit dwells within you is merely
perfect openness in which nothing is hidden and therefore nothing is
fearful. Attack will always yield to love if it is brought
to love, not hidden from it. There is no darkness that the light
of love will not dispel, unless it is concealed from love's beneficence.
What is kept apart from love cannot share its healing power,
because it has been separated off and kept in darkness. The sentinels of
darkness watch over it carefully, and you who made these guardians of
illusion out of nothing are now afraid of them.
18
Would you continue to give imagined power to these strange ideas
of safety? They are neither safe nor unsafe. They do not protect;
neither do they attack. They do nothing at all, being nothing at
all. As guardians of darkness and of ignorance, look to them only for
fear, for what they keep obscure is fearful. But let them go,
and what was fearful will be so no longer. Without protection of
obscurity, only the light of love remains, for only this has
meaning and can live in light. Everything else must
disappear.
19
Death yields to life simply because destruction is not true. The
light of guiltlessness shines guilt away because, when they are brought
together, the truth of one must make the falsity of its
opposite perfectly clear. Keep not guilt and guiltlessness apart, for
your belief that you can have them both is meaningless. All you
have done by keeping them apart is lose their meaning by confusing them
with each other. And so you do not realize that only one means anything,
and the other is wholly without sense of any kind.
20
You have interpreted the separation as a means which you have made for
breaking your communication with your Father. The Holy Spirit
reinterprets it as a means of reestablishing what has not been broken
but has been made obscure. All things you made have use to Him
for His most holy purpose. He knows you are not separate from
God, but He perceives much in your mind that lets you think you
are. All this, and nothing else, would He separate from you. The power
of decision, which you made in place of the power of creation,
He would teach you how to use on your behalf. You who made it to
crucify yourselves must learn of Him how to apply it to the holy cause
of restoration.
21
You who speak in dark and devious symbols do not understand the language
you have made. It has no meaning, for its purpose is not
communication, but rather the disruption of communication. If
the purpose of language is communication, how can this tongue
mean anything? Yet even this strange and twisted effort to communicate
through not communicating holds enough of love to make
it meaningful if its interpreter is not its maker. You who made
it are but expressing conflict, from which the Holy Spirit would release
you. Leave what you would communicate to Him. He will interpret it to
you with perfect clarity, for He knows with Whom you are in
perfect communication.
22
You know not what you say, and so you know not what is said to you. Yet
your Interpreter perceives the meaning in your alien language. He will
not attempt to communicate the meaningless. But He will separate
out all that has meaning, dropping off the rest and offering your true
communication to those who would communicate as truly with you. You
speak two languages at once, and this must lead to
unintelligibility. Yet if one means nothing and the other everything,
only that one is possible for purposes of communication. The other but interferes
with it.
24
What do you want? Light or darkness, knowledge or ignorance are
yours, but not both. Opposites must be brought together and not kept
apart. For their separation is only in your mind, and they are
reconciled by union, as you are. In union, everything that is
not real must disappear, for truth is union. As darkness
disappears in light, so ignorance fades away when knowledge dawns.
Perception is the medium by which ignorance is brought to knowledge. Yet
the perception must be without deceit, for otherwise it becomes the
messenger of ignorance rather than a helper in the search for truth.
25
The search for truth is but the honest searching out of everything that
interferes with truth. Truth is. It can be neither lost nor
sought nor found. It is there, wherever you are, being within
you. Yet it can be recognized or unrecognized, real or false to
you. If you hide it, it becomes unreal to you because you
hid it and surrounded it with fear. Under each cornerstone of fear on
which you have erected your insane system of belief, the truth lies
hidden. Yet you cannot know this, for by hiding truth in fear, you see
no reason to believe the more you look at fear, the less
you see it, and the clearer what it conceals becomes.
26
It is not possible to convince the unknowing that they know. From their
point of view, it is not true. Yet it is true because God
knows it. These are clearly opposite viewpoints of what the "unknowing"
are. To God, unknowing is impossible. It is therefore not a point of
view at all but merely a belief in something that does not exist. It is
only this belief that the unknowing have, and by it they are wrong about
themselves. They have defined themselves as they were not
created. Their creation was not a point of view, but rather a certainty.
Uncertainty brought to certainty does not retain any conviction
of reality.
27
You must have noticed that the emphasis has been on bringing what is
undesirable to the desirable; what you do not want to
what you do. You will realize that salvation must come to you
this way if you consider what dissociation is. Dissociation is a
distorted process of thinking whereby two systems of belief which cannot
coexist are both maintained. It has been recognized that
if they were brought together their joint acceptance would
become impossible. But if one is kept in darkness from the other, their
separation seems to keep them both alive and equal in their
reality. Their joining thus becomes the source of fear, for if they
meet, acceptance must be withdrawn from one of them.
28
You cannot have them both, for each denies the other. Apart,
this fact is lost from sight, for each in a separate place can
be endowed with firm belief. Bring them together, and the fact
of their complete incompatibility is instantly apparent. One will go because
the other is seen in the same place. Light cannot enter darkness when a
mind believes in darkness and will not let it go. Truth does not
struggle against ignorance, and love does not attack fear. What needs no
protection does not defend itself. Defense is of your making.
God knows it not. The Holy Spirit uses defenses on behalf of
truth only because you made them against it. His perception of
them, according to His purpose, merely changes them into a call for
what you have attacked with them.
29
Defenses, like everything you made, must be gently turned to your own
good, translated by the Holy Spirit from means of self-destruction to
means of preservation and release. His task is mighty, but the power of
God is with Him. Therefore, to Him it is so easy that it was
accomplished the instant it was given Him for you. Do not delay
yourselves in your return to peace by wondering how He can fulfill what
God has given Him to do. Leave that to Him Who knows. You are not asked
to do mighty tasks yourself. You are merely asked to do the little He
suggests you do, trusting Him only to the small extent of believing that
if He asks it, you can do it. You will see how easily
all that He asks can be accomplished.
30
The Holy Spirit asks of you but this—bring to Him every secret you have
locked away from Him. Open every door to Him and bid Him enter the
darkness and lighten it away. At your request He enters gladly. He
brings the light to darkness if you make the darkness open to
Him. But what you hide He cannot look upon. For He sees for you,
and unless you look with Him, He cannot see. The vision of
Christ is not for Him alone but for Him with you. Bring,
therefore, all your dark and secret thoughts to Him and look upon them with
Him. He holds the light, and you the darkness. They cannot
coexist when both of you together look on them. His judgment must
prevail, and He will give it to you as you join your perception
to His. Joining with Him in seeing is the way in which you learn to
share with Him the interpretation of perception that leads to knowledge.
31
You cannot see alone. Sharing perception with Him Whom God has given you
teaches you how to recognize what you see. It is the recognition
that nothing you see means anything alone. Seeing with Him will
show you that all meaning, including yours, comes not from
double vision but from the gentle fusing of everything into one
meaning, one emotion, and one purpose. God has one
purpose which He shares with you. The single vision which the Holy
Spirit offers you will bring this oneness to your mind with clarity and
brightness so intense you could not wish for all the world not to accept
what God would have you have. Behold your will, accepting it as His,
with all His love as yours. All honor to you through Him, and through
Him unto God.
32
In the darkness you have obscured the glory God gave you and the power
He bestowed upon His guiltless Son. All this lies hidden in every
darkened place shrouded in guilt and in the dark denial of innocence.
Behind the dark doors which you have closed lies nothing, because
nothing can obscure the gift of God. It is the closing of the
doors that interferes with recognition of the power of God that shines
in you. Banish not power from your mind, but let all that would hide
your glory be brought to the judgment of the Holy Spirit and there
undone. Whom He would save for glory is saved for it. He has
promised the Father that through Him you would be released from
littleness to glory. To what He promised God He is wholly faithful, for
He shared with God the promise that was given Him to share with you.
33
He shares it still, for you. Everything that promises otherwise,
great or small, however much or little valued, He will replace with the
one promise given unto Him to lay upon the altar to your Father
and His Son. No altar stands to God without His Son. And nothing
brought there that is not equally worthy of both but will be replaced by
gifts wholly acceptable to Father and to Son. Can you offer
guilt to God? You cannot, then, offer it to His Son. For they are not
apart, and gifts to one are offered to the other.
34
You know not God because you know not this. And yet you do know
God and also this. All this is safe within you, where the Holy
Spirit shines. He shines not in division, but in the meeting place where
God, united with His Son, speaks to His Son through Him. Communication
between what cannot be divided cannot cease. The holy meeting
place of the unseparated Father and His Son lies in the Holy Spirit and
in you. All interference in the communication that God Himself
wills with His Son is quite impossible here. Unbroken and uninterrupted
love flows constantly between the Father and the Son, as both
would have it be. And so it is.
35
Let your minds wander not through darkened corridors, away from light's
center. You may choose to lead yourselves astray, but you can only be
brought together by the Guide appointed for you. He will surely
lead you to where God and His Son await your recognition. They are
joined in giving you the gift of oneness, before which all
separation vanishes. Unite with what you are. You cannot
join with anything except reality. God's glory and His Son's belong to
you in truth. They have no opposite, and nothing else can
you bestow upon yourselves.
36
There is no substitute for truth. And truth will make this plain to you
as you are brought into the place where you must meet with
truth. And there you must be led, through gentle understanding which can
lead you nowhere else. Where God is, there are you. Such is
the truth. Nothing can change the knowledge given you by God into
unknowingness. Everything God created knows its Creator. For this is how
creation is accomplished by the Creator and by His creations. In the
holy meeting place are joined the Father and His creations, and the
creations of His Son with them together. There is one link which joins
them all together, holding them in the oneness out of which creation
happens.
37
The link with which the Father joins Himself to those He gives the power
to create like Him can never be dissolved. Heaven itself is
union with all of creation and with its One Creator. And Heaven remains
the Will of God for you. Lay no gifts other than this upon your altars,
for nothing can coexist beside it. Here your meager offerings are
brought together with the gift of God, and only what is worthy of the
Father will be accepted by the Son, for whom it was intended. To whom
God gives Himself, He is given. Your little gifts will vanish on
the altar where He has placed His Own.
38
The Atonement does not make holy. You were created holy.
It merely brings unholiness to holiness, or what you made
to what you are. The bringing together of truth and illusion, of
the ego to God, is the Holy Spirit's only function. Keep not your making
from your Father, for hiding it has cost you knowledge of Him and of
yourselves. The knowledge is safe, but wherein is your safety
apart from it? The making of time to take the place of
timelessness lay in the decision to be not as you were. Thus, truth was
made past, and the present was dedicated to illusion. And the past, too,
was changed and interposed between what always was and now. The
past which you remember never was and represents only
the denial of what always was.
39
Bringing the ego to God is but to bring error to truth, where it stands
corrected because it is the opposite of what it meets and is
undone, because the contradiction can no longer stand. How long can
contradiction stand when its impossible nature is clearly revealed? What
disappears in light is not attacked. It merely vanishes because it is
not true. Different realities are meaningless, for reality must be one.
It cannot change with time or mood or chance. Its changelessness
is what makes it real. This cannot be undone. Undoing is
for unreality. And this reality will do for you.
40
Merely by being what it is does truth release you from everything that
it is not. The Atonement is so gentle you need but whisper to
it, and all its power will rush to your assistance and support. You are
not frail with God beside you. Yet without Him you are nothing. The
Atonement offers you God. The gift which you refused is held by Him in
you. His Spirit holds it there for you. God has not left His altar,
though His worshiper placed other gods upon it. The temple still is
holy, for the Presence that dwells within it is Holiness.
41
In the temple Holiness waits quietly for the return of them that love
it. The Presence knows they will return to purity and to grace. The
graciousness of God will take them gently in and cover all their sense
of pain and loss with the immortal assurance of their Father's Love.
There, fear of death will be replaced with joy of living. For God is
Life, and they abide in Life. [Life is as holy as the
Holiness by which it was created.] The Presence of Holiness lives in
everything that lives, for Holiness created life and leaves not
what It created holy as Itself.
42
In this world you can become a spotless mirror in which the Holiness of
your Creator shines forth from you to all around you. You can reflect
Heaven here. Yet no reflections of the images of other gods must
dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. Earth can reflect
Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean and
clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it. God
will shine upon it of Himself. Only the clear reflection of Himself can
be perceived upon it. Reflections are seen in light. In darkness
they are obscure, and their meaning seems to lie only in shifting
interpretations rather than in themselves.
43
The reflection of God needs no interpretation. It is clear.
Clean but the mirror, and the message which shines forth from what the
mirror holds out for everyone to see no one can fail to
understand. It is the message that the Holy Spirit is holding to the
mirror that is in him. He recognizes it because he has been taught his need
for it but knows not where to look to find it. Let him, then, see it in
you and share it with you.
44
Could you but realize for a single instant the power of healing that the
reflection of God, shining in you, can bring to all the world, you could
not wait to make the mirror of your mind clean to receive the image of
the holiness that heals the world. The image of holiness which shines in
your mind is not obscure and will not change. Its meaning to those who
look upon it is not obscure, for everyone perceives it as the same.
All bring their different problems to its healing light, but all their
problems are met only with healing there.
45
The response of holiness to any form of error is always the
same. There is no contradiction in what holiness calls forth. Its one
response is healing, without regard for what is brought to it. Those who
have learned to offer only healing because of the reflection of holiness
in them are ready at last for Heaven. There, holiness is not a
reflection but rather the actual condition of what was but reflected to
them here. God is no image, and His creations, as part of Him, hold Him
in them in truth. They do not merely reflect truth, for they are
truth.
46
When no perception stands between God and His creations, or between His
Children and their own, the knowledge of creation must continue forever.
The reflections which you accept into the mirror of your minds in time
but bring eternity nearer or farther. But eternity itself is beyond all
time. Reach out of time and touch it, with the help of its reflection in
you. And you will turn from time to holiness as surely as the reflection
of holiness calls everyone to lay all guilt aside. Reflect the peace of
Heaven here and bring this world to Heaven. For the reflection
of truth draws everyone to truth, and as they enter into it,
they leave all reflections behind.
47
In Heaven reality is shared and not reflected. By sharing its reflection
here, its truth becomes the only perception the Son of God accepts. And
thus, remembrance of his Father dawns on him, and he can no longer be
satisfied with anything but his own reality. You on earth have no
conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in is
a world of limits. In this world, it is not true that anything without
order of difficulty can occur. The miracle, therefore, has a unique
function and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of
another world to this one. The miracle is the one thing you can
do that transcends order, being based not on differences but on
equality.
48
Miracles are not in competition, and the number of them that you can do
is limitless. They can be simultaneous and legion. This is not difficult
to understand, once you conceive of them as possible at all. What is
more difficult to grasp is the lack of order of difficulty which stamps
the miracle as something that must come from elsewhere, not from here.
From the world's viewpoint, this is impossible. You have experienced
lack of competition among your thoughts, which, even though they may
conflict, can occur to you together and in great numbers. You are so
used to this that it can cause you little surprise.
49
Yet you are also used to classifying some of your thoughts as more
important, larger or better, wiser or more productive and valuable than
others. And this is true about the thoughts which cross the mind of
those who think they live apart. For some are reflections of Heaven,
while others are motivated by the ego, which but seems to think.
The result is a weaving, changing pattern which never rests and is never
still. It shifts unceasingly across the mirror of your mind, and the
reflections of Heaven last but a moment and grow dim as darkness blots
them out. Where there was light, darkness removes it in an instant, and
alternating patterns of light and darkness sweep constantly across your
minds.
50
The little sanity which still remains is held together by a sense of
order which you establish. Yet the very fact that you can do
this and bring any order into chaos shows you that you are not
an ego and that more than an ego must be in you. For the ego is
chaos, and if it were all of you, no order at all would be possible. Yet
though the order which you impose upon your minds limits the ego, it also
limits you. To order is to judge and to arrange by
judgment. [Therefore, it is not your function, but the Holy Spirit's.]
It will seem difficult for you to learn that you have no basis at
all for ordering your thoughts. This lesson the Holy Spirit
teaches by giving you shining examples to show you that your way of
ordering is wrong, but that a better way is offered you.
51
The miracle offers exactly the same response to every call for help. It
does not judge the call. It merely recognizes what it is and
answers accordingly. It does not consider which call is louder or
greater or more important. You may wonder how you who are still bound to
judgment can be asked to do that which requires no judgment of your own.
The answer is very simple. The power of God, and not of you,
engenders miracles. The miracle itself is but the witness that you have
the power of God in you. That is the reason why the miracle gives equal
blessing to all who share in it, and that is also why everyone
shares in it. The power of God is limitless. And being always maximal,
it offers everything to every call from anyone.
There is no order of difficulty here. A call for help is given
help.
52
The only judgment involved at all is the Holy Spirit's one
division into two categories—one of love and the other the call for
love. You cannot safely make this division, for you are much too
confused either to recognize love or to believe that everything else is
nothing but a need for love. You are too bound to form and not to
content. What you consider content is not content at all. It is merely
form, and nothing else. For you do not respond to what a brother really
offers you, but only to the particular perception of his offering by
which the ego judges it.
53
The ego is incapable of understanding content and is totally unconcerned
with it. To the ego, if the form is acceptable, the content must
be. Otherwise, it will attack the form. You who believe you understand
something of the dynamics of the mind, let me assure you that you know
nothing of it at all. For of yourselves you could not know of
it. The study of the ego is not the study of the mind. In fact,
the ego enjoys the study of itself and thoroughly approves the
undertakings of students who would analyze it, approving its importance.
Yet they but study form with meaningless content. For their teacher is
senseless, though careful to conceal this fact behind a lot of words
which sound impressive but which lack any consistent sense when they are
put together.
54
This is characteristic of the ego's judgments. Separately, they seem to
hold, but put them together and the system of thought which arises from
joining them is incoherent and utterly chaotic. For form is not enough
for meaning, and the underlying lack of content makes a cohesive system
impossible. Separation therefore remains the ego's chosen condition. For
no one alone can judge the ego truly. Yet when two or more join
together in searching for truth, the ego can no longer defend its
lack of content. The fact of union tells them it is not true.
55
It is impossible to remember God in secret and alone. For remembering
Him means you are not alone and willing to remember it. Take no
thought for yourself, for no thought you hold is for yourself.
If you would remember your Father, let the Holy Spirit order your
thoughts and give only the answer with which He answers you. Everyone
seeks for love as you do and knows it not unless he joins with you in
seeking it. If you undertake the search together, you bring with you a
light so powerful that what you see is given meaning. The lonely
journey fails because it has excluded what it would find.
56
As God communicates to the Holy Spirit in you, so does the Holy Spirit
translate His communications through you so you can
understand them. God has no secret communications, for everything of Him
is perfectly open and freely accessible to all, being for all.
Nothing lives in secret, and what you would hide from the Holy Spirit is
nothing. Every interpretation you would lay upon a brother is
senseless. Let the Holy Spirit show him to you and teach you
both his love and need for love. Neither his mind nor yours
holds more than these two orders of thought.
57
The miracle is the recognition that this is true. Where there is love,
your brother must give it to you because of what it is. But
where there is need for love, you must give it because
of what you are. Long ago we said this course will teach you
what you are, restoring to you your identity. We have already learned
that this identity is shared. The miracle becomes the means of
sharing it. By supplying your identity wherever it is not
recognized, you will recognize it. And God Himself, Who wills to
be with His Son forever, will bless each recognition of His Son with all
the love He holds for him. Nor will the power of all His love be
absent from any miracle you offer to His Son. How, then, can there be
any order of difficulty among them?
58
Yet the essential thing is learning that you do not know.
Knowledge is power, and all power is of God. You who have tried to keep
power for yourselves have lost it. You still have the power, but you
have interposed so much between it and your awareness of it that
you cannot use it. Everything you have taught yourselves has made your
power more and more obscure to you. You know not what it is nor
where. You have made a semblance of power and a show of strength
so pitiful that it must fail you. For power is not a seeming
strength, and truth is beyond semblance of any kind. Yet all that stands
between you and the power of God in you is but your learning of the
false and your attempts to undo the true.
59
Be willing, then, for all of it to be undone, and be glad that you are
not bound to it forever. For you have taught yourselves how to imprison
the Son of God, a lesson so unthinkable that only the insane, in deepest
sleep, could even dream of it. Can God learn how not to be God?
And can His Son, given all power by Him, learn to be powerless? What
have you taught yourselves that you can possibly prefer to keep in place
of what you have and what you are?
60
Atonement teaches you how to escape forever from everything that you
have taught yourselves in the past by showing you only what you are now.
Learning has been accomplished before its effects are manifest.
Learning is therefore in the past, but its influence determines the
present by giving it whatever meaning it holds for you. Your
learning gives the present no meaning at all. Nothing you have ever
learned can help you understand the present or teach you how to undo the
past. Your past is what you have taught yourselves. Let it
all go. Do not attempt to understand any event or anything or
anyone in its light, for the light of darkness by which you try to see
can only obscure.
61
Put no confidence at all in darkness to illuminate your understanding,
for if you do, you contradict the light and thereby think you
see the darkness. Yet darkness cannot be seen, for it is nothing
more than a condition in which seeing becomes impossible. You who have
not yet brought all of the darkness you have taught yourselves unto the
light in you can hardly judge the truth and value of this course. Yet
God did not abandon you. And so you have another lesson sent from Him, already
learned for every Child of light by Him to Whom God gave it. This lesson
shines with God's glory, for in it lies His power, which He shares so
gladly with His Son.
62
Learn of His happiness, which is yours. But to accomplish this,
all your dark lessons must be brought willingly to truth and joyously
laid down by hands open to receive, not closed to take. Every dark
lesson that you bring to Him Who teaches light He will accept from you
because you do not want it. And He will gladly exchange each one
for the bright lesson He has learned for you. Never believe that any
lesson you have learned apart from Him means anything.
63
You have one test, as sure as God, by which to recognize if what you
learned is true. If you are wholly free of fear of any kind, and if all
those who meet or even think of you share in your perfect peace, then
you can be sure that you have learned God's lesson and not yours. Unless
all this is true, there are dark lessons in your minds which
hurt and hinder you and everyone around you. The absence of
perfect peace means but one thing: you think you do not
will for God's Son what His Father wills for him. Every dark lesson
teaches this in one form or another. And each bright lesson, with which
the Holy Spirit will replace the dark ones you do not accept and hide,
teaches you that you will with the Father unto His Son.
64
Do not be concerned how you can learn a lesson so completely different
from everything you have taught yourselves. How would you know? Your
part is very simple. You need only recognize that everything you learned
you do not want. Ask to be taught and do not use your
experiences to confirm what you have learned. When your peace is
threatened or disturbed in any way, say to yourself,
66
By this refusal to attempt to teach yourself what you do not know, the
Guide Whom God has given you will speak to you. He will take His
rightful place in your awareness the instant you abandon it and
offer it to Him.
67
You cannot be your guide to miracles, for it is you who made them
necessary. And because you did, the means on which you can
depend for miracles has been provided for you. God's Son can
make no needs His Father will not meet if he but turn to Him ever so
little. Yet He cannot compel His Son to turn to Him and remain Himself.
It is impossible that God lose His Identity, for if He did, you would
lose yours. And being yours, He cannot change Himself, for your
identity is changeless. The miracle acknowledges His
changelessness by seeing His Son as he always was and not as he would
make himself. The miracle brings the effects which only
guiltlessness can bring and thus establishes the fact that guiltlessness
must be.
68
How can you, so firmly bound to guilt and committed so to remain,
establish for yourself your guiltlessness? That is impossible. But be
sure that you are willing to acknowledge that it is impossible.
It is only because you think that you can run some little part or deal
with certain aspects of your lives alone that the guidance of the Holy
Spirit is limited. Thus would you make Him undependable and use
this fancied undependability as an excuse for keeping certain dark
lessons from Him. And by so limiting the guidance that you would accept,
you are unable to depend on miracles to answer all your problems for
you.
69
Do you think that what the Holy Spirit would have you give He
would withhold from you? You have no problems which He
cannot solve by offering you a miracle. Miracles are for you.
And every fear or pain or trial you have has been undone. He has
brought all of them to light, having accepted them instead of
you and recognized they never were. There are no dark lessons He has not
already lightened for you. The lessons you would teach yourselves
He has corrected already. They do not exist in His Mind at all. For the
past binds Him not and therefore binds not you. He does not see time as
you do. And each miracle He offers you corrects your use of time and
makes it His.
70
He Who has freed you from the past would teach you are free of
it. He would but have you accept His accomplishments as yours
because he did them for you. And because he did, they are
yours. He has made you free of what you made. You can deny Him, but you
cannot call on Him in vain. He always gives what He has
made in place of you. He would establish His bright teaching so
firmly in your mind that no dark lessons of guilt can abide in what He
has established as holy by His Presence. Thank God that He is there and
works through you. And all His works are yours. He offers you a miracle
with every one you let Him do through you.
71
God's Son will always be indivisible. As we are held as one in
God, so do we learn as one in Him. God's Teacher is as like to His
Creator as is His Son, and through His Teacher does God proclaim His
Oneness and His Son's. Listen in silence, and do not raise your
voice against Him. For He teaches the miracle of oneness, and before His
lesson division disappears. Teach like Him here, and you will remember
that you have always created like your Father. The miracle of
creation has never ceased, having the holy stamp of immortality upon it.
This is the Will of God for all creation, and all creation joins in
willing this.
72
Those who remember always that they know nothing, but who have become
willing to learn everything, will learn it. But whenever they
trust themselves, they will not learn. They have destroyed their
motivation for learning by thinking they already know. Think not
you understand anything until you pass the test of perfect peace, for
peace and understanding go together and never can be found alone. Each
brings the other with it, for it is the law of God they be not
separate. They are cause and effect, each to the other, so where one is
absent the other cannot be.
73
Only those who see they cannot know unless the effects of
understanding are with them can really learn at all. And for this, it
must be peace they want and nothing else. Whenever you think you
know, peace will depart from you because you have abandoned the Teacher
of Peace. Whenever you fully realize that you know not, peace
will return, for you will have invited Him to do so by abandoning the
ego on behalf of Him. Call not upon the ego for anything. It is only this
that you need do. The Holy Spirit will, of Himself, fill every
mind that so makes room for Him.
74
If you want peace, you must abandon the teacher of attack. The Teacher
of peace will never abandon you. You can desert Him, but He will
never reciprocate, for His faith in you is His understanding. It
is as firm as is His faith in His Creator, and He knows that faith in
His Creator must encompass faith in His creation. In this
consistency lies His holiness, which He cannot abandon, for it is not
His Will to do so. With your perfection ever in His sight, He gives the
gift of peace to everyone who perceives the need for peace and who would
have it. Make way for peace, and it will come. For understanding is in
you, and from it peace must come.
75
The power of God, from which they both arise, is yours as surely as it
is His. You think you know Him not only because, alone, it is impossible
to know Him. Yet see the mighty works that He will do through you, and
you must be convinced you did them through Him. It is impossible to deny
the Source of effects so powerful they could not be of you.
Leave room for Him, and you will find yourself so filled with power that
nothing will prevail against your peace. And this will be the
test by which you recognize that you have understood.
1
Can you imagine what it means to have no cares, no worries, no
anxieties, but merely to be perfectly calm and quiet all the time? Yet
that is what time is for—to learn just that and nothing more.
God's Teacher cannot be satisfied with His teaching until it constitutes
all your learning. He has not fulfilled His teaching function
until you have become such a consistent learner that you learn only
of Him. When this has happened, you will no longer need a teacher or
time in which to learn.
2
One source of perceived discouragement from which you suffer is your
belief that this takes time, and that the results of the Holy Spirit's
teaching are far in the future. This is not so. For the Holy Spirit uses
time in His own way and is not bound by it. [Time is His friend in
teaching. It does not waste Him as it does you.] And all the waste that
time seems to bring with it is due but to your identification with the
ego, which uses time to support its belief in destruction. The ego, like
the Holy Spirit, uses time to convince you of the inevitability of the
goal and end of teaching. To the ego the goal is death, which is
its end. But to the Holy Spirit the goal is life, which has no
end.
3
The ego is an ally of time, but not a friend. For it is as mistrustful
of death as it is of life, and what it wants for you it cannot tolerate.
The ego wants you dead, but not itself. The outcome of
its strange religion must therefore be the conviction that it can pursue
you beyond the grave. And out of its unwillingness for you to find peace
even in the death it wants for you, it offers you immortality in hell.
It speaks to you of Heaven but assures you that Heaven is not for you.
How can the guilty hope for Heaven? The belief in hell is inescapable to
those who identify with the ego. Their nightmares and their fears are
all associated with it.
4
The ego teaches that hell is in the future, for this is what all
its teaching is directed to. Hell is its goal, for although the
ego aims at death and dissolution as an end, it does not believe
it. The goal of death, which it craves for you, leaves it unsatisfied.
No one who follows the ego's teaching is without the fear of death. Yet
if death were thought of merely as an end to pain, would it be feared?
We have seen this strange paradox in the ego's thought system before,
but never so clearly as here. For the ego must seem to keep fear
from you to keep your allegiance. Yet it must engender fear in
order to maintain itself.
5
Again the ego tries and all too frequently succeeds in doing both by
using dissociation for holding its contradictory aims together so that
they seem to be reconciled. The ego teaches thus: Death is the
end as far as hope of Heaven goes. Yet because you and itself cannot be
separated, and because it cannot conceive of its own death, it
will pursue you still because guilt is eternal. Such is the ego's
version of immortality. And it is this the ego's version of time
supports.
6
The ego teaches that Heaven is here and now because the future
is hell. Even when it attacks so savagely that it tries to take the life
of someone who hears it temporarily as the only voice, it speaks
of hell even to him. For it tells him hell is here and bids him
leap from hell into oblivion. The only time the ego allows anyone to
look upon with some amount of equanimity is the past. And even there its
only value is that it is no more.
7
How bleak and despairing is the ego's use of time! And how terrifying!
For underneath its fanatical insistence that the past and future be the
same is hidden a far more insidious threat to peace. The ego does not
advertise its final threat, for it would have its worshipers still
believe that it can offer the escape from it. But the belief in
guilt must lead to the belief in hell, and always
does. The only way in which the ego allows the fear of hell to be
experienced is to bring hell here, but always as a foretaste of
the future. For no one who considers himself as deserving hell can
believe that punishment will end in peace.
8
The Holy Spirit teaches thus: There is no hell. Hell is only
what the ego has made of the present. The belief in hell is what
prevents you from understanding the present, because you are afraid
of it. The Holy Spirit leads as steadily to Heaven as the ego drives to
hell. For the Holy Spirit, Who knows only the present, uses it
to undo the fear by which the ego would make the present useless. There
is no escape from fear in the ego's use of time. For time,
according to its teaching, is nothing but a teaching device for compounding
guilt until it becomes all-encompassing and demands vengeance forever.
9
The Holy Spirit would undo all of this now. Fear is not
of the present but only of the past and future, which do not exist.
There is no fear in the present when each instant stands clear and
separated from the past, without its shadow reaching out into the
future. Each instant is a clean, untarnished birth, in which the Son of
God emerges from the past into the present. And the present extends
forever. It is so beautiful and so clean and free of guilt that nothing
but happiness is there. No darkness is remembered, and immortality and
joy are now.
10
This lesson takes no time. For what is time without a past and
future? It has taken time to misguide you so completely, but it
takes no time at all to be what you are. Begin to practice the
Holy Spirit's use of time as a teaching aid to happiness and peace. Take
this very instant, now, and think of it as all there is
of time. Nothing can reach you here out of the past, and it is here that
you are completely absolved, completely free, and wholly
without condemnation. From this holy instant wherein holiness was born
again, you will go forth in time without fear and with no sense of
change with time.
11
Time is inconceivable without change, yet holiness does not change.
Learn from this instant more than merely hell does not exist. In this
redeeming instant lies Heaven. And Heaven will not change, for the birth
into the holy present is salvation from change. Change is an
illusion, taught by those who could not see themselves as guiltless.
There is no change in Heaven because there is no change in God. In the
holy instant in which you see yourself as bright with freedom, you will
remember God. For remembering Him is to remember freedom.
12
Whenever you are tempted to be dispirited by the thought of how long it
would take to change your mind so completely, ask yourself, "How long is
an instant?" Could you not give so short a time to the Holy Spirit for
your salvation? He asks no more, for He has no need of more. It takes
far longer to teach you how to be willing to give Him this than for Him
to use this tiny instant to offer you the whole of Heaven. In exchange
for this instant, He stands ready to give you the remembrance of
eternity.
13
You will never give this holy instant to the Holy Spirit on behalf of
your release while you are unwilling to give it to your brothers on
behalf of theirs. For the instant of holiness is shared, and
cannot be yours alone. Remember, then, when you are tempted to attack a
brother, that his instant of release is yours. Miracles are the
instants of release you offer and will receive. They attest to
your willingness to be released and to offer time to the Holy
Spirit for His use of it. How long is an instant? It is as short for
your brother as it is for you. Practice giving this blessed instant of
freedom to all who are enslaved by time and thus make time their friend
for them. The Holy Spirit gives their blessed instant to you
through your giving it. As you give it, He offers it to you.
14
Be not unwilling to give what you would receive of Him, for you join
with Him in giving. In the crystal cleanness of the release you give is
your instantaneous escape from guilt. You must be holy
if you offer holiness. How long is an instant? As long as it takes to
reestablish perfect sanity, perfect peace, and perfect love for
everyone, for God, and for yourself. As long as it takes to
remember immortality and your immortal creations who share it with you.
As long as it takes to exchange hell for Heaven. Long enough to
transcend all of the ego's making and ascend unto your Father.
15
Time is your friend if you leave it to the Holy Spirit to use. He needs
but very little to restore God's whole power to you. He Who transcends
time for you understands what time is for. Holiness lies not in
time but in eternity. There never was an instant in which God's Son
could lose his purity. His changeless state is beyond time, for his
purity remains forever beyond attack and without variability. Time
stands still in his holiness and changes not. And so it is no longer
time at all. For, caught in the single instant of the eternal sanctity
of God's creation, it is transformed into forever. Give the
eternal instant that eternity may be remembered for you in that
shining instant of perfect release. Offer the miracle of the holy
instant through the Holy Spirit and leave His giving it to you to Him.
16
The Atonement is in time but not for time. Being in you,
it is eternal. What holds remembrance of God cannot be bound by time. No
more are you. For unless God is bound, you cannot be. An instant
offered to the Holy Spirit is offered to God on your behalf, and in that
instant you will awaken gently in Him. In the blessed instant, you will
let go all your past learning, and the Holy Spirit will quickly offer
you the whole lesson of peace. What can take time, when all the
obstacles to learning it have been removed? Truth is so far beyond time
that all of it happens at once. For as it was created one, so its
oneness depends not on time at all.
17
Do not be concerned with time and fear not the instant of holiness which
will remove all fear. For the instant of peace is eternal because
it is wholly without fear. It will come, being the lesson God
gives you through the Teacher He has appointed to translate time into
eternity. Blessed is God's Teacher, Whose joy it is to teach God's holy
Son his holiness. His joy is not contained in time. His teaching is for
you because His joy is yours. Through Him you stand before God's
altar, where He gently translates hell into Heaven. For it is only in
Heaven that God would have you be.
18
How long can it take to be where God would have you? For you are
where you have forever been and will forever be. All that you have, you
have forever. The blessed instant reaches out to encompass time, as God
extends Himself to encompass you. You who have spent days, hours, and
even years in chaining your brothers to your egos in an attempt to
support it and uphold its weakness, do not perceive the Source of strength.
In the holy instant, you will unchain all your brothers and
refuse to support either their weakness or your own.
19
You do not realize how much you have misused your brothers by seeing
them as sources of ego support. As a result, they witness to the
ego in your perception and seem to provide reasons for not
letting it go. Yet they are far stronger and much more compelling
witnesses for the Holy Spirit. And they support His strength. It
is, therefore, your choice whether they support the ego or the Holy
Spirit in you. And you will know which you have chosen by their
reactions. A Son of God who has been released through the Holy Spirit in
a brother, if the release is complete, is always
recognized. He cannot be denied. As long as you remain
uncertain, it can be only because you have not given complete release.
And because of this, you have not given one single instant completely
to the Holy Spirit. For when you have, you will be sure you have. You
will be sure because the witness to Him will speak so clearly of
Him that you will hear and understand.
20
You will doubt until you hear one witness whom you have wholly
released through the Holy Spirit. And then you will doubt no more. The
holy instant has not yet happened to you. Yet it will, and you will
recognize it with perfect certainty. No gift of God is recognized in any
other way. You can practice the mechanics of the holy instant and will
learn much from doing so. Yet its shining and glittering brilliance,
which will literally blind you to this world by its own vision, you
cannot supply. And here it is, all in this instant, complete,
accomplished, and given wholly.
21
Start now to practice your little part in separating out the holy
instant. You will receive very specific instructions as you go along. To
learn to separate out this single second and begin to experience it as
timeless, is to begin to experience yourself as not separate.
Fear not that you will not be given help in this. God's Teacher and His
lesson will support your strength. It is only your weakness that will
depart from you in this practice, for it is the practice of the power of
God in you. Use it but for one instant, and you will never deny it
again. Who can deny the Presence of what the universe bows to in
appreciation and gladness? Before the recognition of the universe which
witnesses to It, your doubts must disappear.
22
Be not content with littleness, but be sure you understand what
littleness is and why you could never be content with it. Littleness is
the offering you gave yourself. You offered this in place of
magnitude, and you accepted it. Everything in this world is
little because it is a world made out of littleness in the strange
belief that littleness can content you. When you strive for anything in
this world with the belief that it will bring you peace, you are
belittling yourself and blinding yourself to glory. Littleness and glory
are the choices open to your striving and your vigilance. You will
always choose one at the expense of the other.
23
Yet what you do not realize each time you choose is that your choice is
your evaluation of yourself. Choose littleness and you will not
have peace, for you will have judged yourself unworthy of it. And
whatever you offer as a substitute is much too poor a gift to satisfy
you. It is essential that you accept the fact, and accept it gladly,
that there is no form of littleness that can ever content you.
You are free to try as many as you wish, but all you will be doing is to
delay your homecoming. For you will be content only in magnitude, which
is your home.
24
There is a deep responsibility you owe yourself, and one which you must
learn to remember all the time. The lesson will seem hard at first, but
you will learn to love it when you realize that it is true and
constitutes a tribute to your power. You who have sought and found
littleness, remember this: Every decision which you make stems from what
you think you are and represents the value that you put
upon yourself. Believe the little can content you, and by limiting
yourself, you will not be satisfied. For your function is not
little, and it is only by finding your function and fulfilling it that
you can escape from littleness.
25
There is no doubt about what your function is, for the Holy Spirit knows
what it is. There is no doubt about its magnitude, for it reaches you
through Him from Magnitude. You do not have to strive for it
because you have it. All your striving must be directed against
littleness, for it does require vigilance to protect your
magnitude in this world. To hold your magnitude in perfect awareness in
a world of littleness is a task the little cannot undertake. Yet it is
asked of you in tribute to your magnitude and not your
littleness. Nor is it asked of you alone.
26
The power of God will support every effort you make on behalf of His
dear Son. Search for the little, and you deny yourself His power. God is
not willing that His Son be content with less than everything. For He is
not content without His Son, and His Son cannot be content with less
than His Father has given him. We asked you once before, "Would you be
hostage to the ego or host to God?" Let this question be asked you by
the Holy Spirit in you every time you make a decision. For every
decision you make does answer this and invites sorrow or joy
accordingly.
27
When God gave Himself to you in your creation, He established you as
host to Him forever. He has not left you, and you have not left Him. All
your attempts to deny His magnitude and make His Son hostage to the ego
cannot make little whom God has joined with Him. Every decision you make
is for Heaven or for hell and will bring you awareness of what you
decided for. The Holy Spirit can hold your magnitude, clean of
all littleness, clearly and in perfect safety in your minds, untouched
by every little gift the world of littleness would offer you. But for
this, you cannot side against Him in what He wills for you.
28
Decide for God through Him. For littleness and the belief that you can
be content with littleness are the decisions you have made about
yourself. The power and the glory that lie in you from God are for all
who, like you, perceive themselves as little and have deceived
themselves into believing that littleness can be blown up by them into a
sense of magnitude that can content them. Neither give littleness, nor
accept it. All honor is due the host of God. Your littleness deceives
you, but your magnitude is of Him Who dwells in you and in Whom you
dwell. Touch no one, then, with littleness, in the name of Christ,
eternal Host unto His Father.
29
In this season (Christmas), which celebrates the birth of holiness into
this world, join with me, who decided for holiness for you. It
is our task together to restore the awareness of magnitude to
the host whom God appointed for Himself. It is beyond all your
littleness to give the gift of God, but not beyond you.
For God would give Himself through you. He reaches from you to
everyone and beyond everyone to His Son's creations, but without leaving
you. Far beyond your little world but still in you, He extends forever.
Yet He brings all his extensions to you as host to Him.
30
Is it a sacrifice to leave littleness behind and wander not in vain? It
is not sacrifice to wake to glory. But it is a sacrifice to
accept anything less than glory. Learn that you must be
worthy of the Prince of Peace, born in you in honor of Him Whose host
you are. You know not what love means because you have sought to
purchase it with little gifts, thus valuing it too little to be able to
understand its magnitude. Love is not little, and love dwells in
you, for you are host to Him. Before the greatness that lives in you,
your poor appreciation of yourself and all the little offerings you have
given slip into nothingness. Holy Child of God, when will you learn that
only holiness can content you and give you peace?
31
Remember that you learn not for yourself alone, no more than I did. It
is because I learned for you that you can learn of me. I would
but teach you what is yours, so that together we can replace the shabby
littleness that binds the host of God to guilt and weakness with the
glad awareness of the glory that is in him. My birth in you is your
awakening to grandeur. Welcome me not into a manger but into the altar
to holiness, where holiness abides in perfect peace. My Kingdom is not
of this world because it is in you. And you are of your Father.
Let us join in honoring you, who must remain forever beyond littleness.
32
Decide with me, who have decided to abide with you. I will as my Father
wills, knowing His Will is constant and at peace forever with Itself.
You will be content with nothing but His Will. Accept no less,
remembering that everything I learned is yours. What my Father loves, I
love as He does, and I can no more accept it as what it is not than He
can. And no more can you. When you have learned to accept what
you are, you will make no more gifts to offer to yourselves, for you
will know you are complete, in need of nothing, and unable to accept anything
for yourself. But you will gladly give, having received. The
host of God need not seek to find anything.
33
If you are wholly willing to leave salvation to the plan of God and
unwilling to attempt to grasp for peace yourself, salvation will be given
you. Yet think not you can substitute your plan for His. Rather, join
with me in His that we may release all those who would be bound,
proclaiming together that the Son of God is host to Him. Thus will we
let no one forget what you would remember. And thus will you
remember it.
34
Call forth in everyone only the remembrance of God and of the Heaven
that is in him. For where you would help your brother be, there will you
think you are. Hear not his call for hell and littleness, but
only his call for Heaven and greatness. Forget not that his call is
yours, and answer him with me. God's power is forever on the side of His
host, for it protects only the peace in which He dwells. Lay not
littleness before His holy altar, which rises above the stars and
reaches even to Heaven because of what is given it.
35
This course is not beyond immediate learning unless you prefer
to believe that what God wills takes time. And this means only that you
would rather delay the recognition that His Will is so. The holy
instant is this one and every one. The one you want
it to be it is. The one you would not have it be is lost to you.
You must decide on when it is. Delay it not. For beyond the past
and future, in which you will not find it, it stands in shimmering
readiness for your acceptance. Yet you cannot bring it into glad
awareness while you do not want it, for it holds the whole release from
littleness.
36
Your practice must therefore rest upon your willingness to let all
littleness go. The instant in which magnitude will dawn upon you is but
as far away as your desire for it. As long as you desire it not
and cherish littleness instead, by so much is it far from you. By so
much as you want it will you bring it nearer. Think not that you can
find salvation in your own way and have it. Give over every
plan that you have made for your salvation in exchange for God's. His
will content you, and there is nothing else that can bring you peace.
For peace is of God and of no one beside Him.
37
Be humble before Him and yet great in Him. And value no plan of
the ego before the plan of God. For you leave empty your place in His
plan, which you must fulfill if you would join with me, by your decision
to join in any plan but His. I call you to fulfill your holy
part in the plan that He has given to the world for its release from
littleness. God would have His host abide in perfect freedom. Every
allegiance to a plan of salvation that is apart from Him diminishes the
value of His Will for you in your own minds. And yet it is your mind
that is the host to Him.
38
Would you learn how perfect and immaculate is the holy altar on which
your Father has placed Himself? This you will recognize in the holy
instant in which you willingly and gladly give over every plan but His.
For there lies peace, perfectly clear because you have been willing to
meet its conditions. You can claim the holy instant any time and
anywhere you want it. In your practice, try to give over every plan you
have accepted for finding magnitude in littleness. It is not there.
Use the holy instant only to recognize that you alone cannot
know where it is and can only deceive yourself.
39
I stand within the holy instant, as clear as you would have me. And the
extent to which you learn to be willing to accept me is the measure of
the time in which the holy instant will be yours. I call to you to make
the holy instant yours at once, for the release from littleness in the
mind of the host of God depends on willingness and not on time.
The reason why this course is simple is that truth is simple.
Complexity is of the ego and is nothing more than the ego's attempt to
obscure the obvious.
40
You could live forever in the holy instant, beginning now and
reaching to eternity, but for a very simple reason. Do not obscure the
simplicity of this reason, for if you do, it will be only because you
prefer not to recognize it and not to let it go. The simple reason,
simply stated, is this: The holy instant is a time in which you receive
and give perfect communication. This means, however, that it is
a time in which your mind is open, both to receive and give. It
is the recognition that all minds are in communication. It
therefore seeks to change nothing, but merely to accept
everything.
41
How can you do this when you would prefer to have private
thoughts and keep them? The only way you could do that
is to deny the perfect communication that makes the holy instant
what it is. You believe that it is possible to harbor thoughts you would
not share and that salvation lies in keeping your thoughts to yourself alone.
For in private thoughts, known only to yourself, you think you find a
way to keep what you would have alone and share what you
would share. And then you wonder why it is that you are not in full
communication with those around you and with God Who surrounds all
of you together.
42
Every thought you would keep hidden shuts communication off because you
would have it so. It is impossible to recognize perfect
communication while breaking communication holds value to you.
Ask yourselves honestly, "Would I want to have perfect
communication, and am I wholly willing to let everything that interferes
with it go forever?" If the answer is no, then the Holy Spirit's
readiness to give it to you is not enough to make it yours, for you are
not ready to share it with Him. And it cannot come into a mind
that has decided to oppose it. For the holy instant is given and
received with equal willingness, being the acceptance of the
single Will that governs all thought.
43
The necessary condition for the holy instant does not require
that you have no thoughts which are not pure. But it does
require that you have none that you would keep. Innocence is not
of your making. It is given you the instant you would have it.
Yet it would not be Atonement if there were no need for
Atonement. You will not be able to accept perfect communication as long
as you would hide it from yourself. For what you would hide is
hidden from you.
44
In your practice, then, try only to be vigilant against deception and
seek not to protect the thoughts you would keep unto yourself. Let the
Holy Spirit's purity shine them away and bring all your awareness to the
readiness for purity He offers you. Thus will He make you ready to
acknowledge that you are host to God and hostage to no one and
nothing.
45
The holy instant is the Holy Spirit's most useful learning device for
teaching you love's meaning. For its purpose is to suspend judgment entirely.
Judgment always rests on the past, for past experience is the basis on
which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past, for
without it you do not understand anything. You would make no attempt to
judge because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not know
what anything means. You are afraid of this because you believe
that without the ego all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that
without the ego all would be love.
46
The past is the ego's chief learning device, for it is in the
past that you learned to define your own needs and acquired methods for
meeting them on your own terms. We said before that to limit love to part
of the Sonship is to bring guilt into your relationships and thus make
them unreal. If you seek to separate out certain aspects of the totality
and look to them to meet your imagined needs, you are attempting to use
separation to save you. How, then, could guilt not
enter? For separation is the source of guilt, and to appeal to
it for salvation is to believe you are alone. To be alone is to
be guilty. For to experience yourself as alone is to deny the oneness of
the Father and his Son and thus to attack reality.
47
You cannot love parts of reality and understand what love means. If you
would love unlike to God, Who knows no special love, how can
you understand it? To believe that special relationships, with special
love, can offer you salvation is the belief that separation is
salvation. For it is the complete equality of the Atonement in
which salvation lies. How can you decide that special aspects of the
Sonship can give you more than others? The past has taught you
this. Yet the holy instant teaches you it is not so.
48
Because of guilt, all special relationships have some elements
of fear in them. And this is why they shift and change so frequently.
They are not based on changeless love alone. And love where fear has
entered cannot be depended on because it is not perfect. In His function
as Interpreter of what you have made, the Holy Spirit uses
special relationships, which you have chosen to support the ego,
as a learning experience which points to truth. Under His teaching, every
relationship becomes a lesson in love.
49
The Holy Spirit knows no one is special. Yet He also perceives that you
have made special relationships, which He would purify and not
let you destroy. However unholy the reason why you made them may be, He
can translate them into holiness by removing as much fear as you will
let Him. You can place any relationship under His care and be sure that
it will not result in pain if you offer Him your willingness to have it
serve no need but His. All the guilt in it arises from your use
of it. All the love from His. Do not, then, be afraid to let go your
imagined needs, which would destroy the relationship. Your only
need is His.
50
Any relationship which you would substitute for another has not been
offered to the Holy Spirit for His use. There is no substitute
for love. If you would attempt to substitute one aspect of love for
another, you have placed less value on one and more on
the other. You have not only separated them, but you have also
judged against both. Yet you had judged against yourself first,
or you would never have imagined that you needed them as they were not.
Unless you had seen yourself as without love, you could not have
judged them so like you in lack.
51
The ego's use of relationships is so fragmented that it frequently goes
even further—one part of one aspect suits its purposes, while it prefers
different parts of another aspect. Thus does it assemble reality to its
own capricious liking, offering for your seeking a picture whose
likeness does not exist. For there is nothing in Heaven or earth that it
resembles, and so however much you seek for its reality, you cannot find
it because it is not real.
52
Everyone on earth has formed special relationships, and although this is
not so in Heaven, the Holy Spirit knows how to bring a touch of Heaven
to them here. In the holy instant no one is special, for your personal
needs intrude on no one to make them different. Without the values from
the past, you would see them all the same and like yourself.
Nor would you see any separation between yourself and them. In the holy
instant, you see in each relationship what it will be when you
perceive only the present.
53
God knows you now. He remembers nothing, having always
known you exactly as He knows you now. The holy instant parallels His
knowing by bringing all perception out of the past, thus
removing the frame of reference you have built by which to judge your
brothers. Once this is gone, the Holy Spirit substitutes His frame of
reference for it. His frame of reference is simply God. The Holy
Spirit's timelessness lies only here. For in the holy instant, free of
the past, you see that love is in you, and you have no need to look without
and snatch it guiltily from where you thought it was.
54
All your relationships are blessed in the holy instant because
the blessing is not limited. In the holy instant, the Sonship gains as
one. And united in your blessing, it becomes one to you.
The meaning of love is the meaning God gave to it. Give to it any
meaning apart from His, and it is impossible to understand it.
Every brother God loves as He loves you—neither less nor more. He needs
them all equally, and so do you. In time you have been told to
offer miracles as Christ directs and let the Holy Spirit bring to you
those who are seeking you. Yet in the holy instant, you unite directly
with God, and all your brothers join in Christ. Those who are
joined in Christ are in no way separate. For Christ is the Self the
Sonship shares, as God shares His Self with Christ.
55
Think you that you can judge the Self of God? God has created it beyond
judgment out of His need to extend His Love. With love in you, you have
no need except to extend it. In the holy instant, there is no
conflict of needs, for there is only one. For the holy instant
reaches to eternity and to the Mind of God. And it is only there love has
meaning, and only there can it be understood.
56
It is impossible to use one relationship at the expense of another and not
suffer guilt. And it is equally impossible to condemn part of a
relationship and find peace within it. Under the Holy Spirit's
teaching, all relationships are seen as total commitments, yet
they do not conflict with one another in any way. Perfect faith in each
one for its ability to satisfy you completely arises only from
perfect faith in yourself. And this you cannot have while guilt
remains. And there will be guilt as long as you accept the
possibility, and cherish it, that you can make a brother what he
is not because you would have him so.
57
You have so little faith in yourself because you are unwilling to accept
the fact that perfect love is in you. And so you seek without
for what you cannot find without. I offer you my perfect faith
in you in place of all your doubt. But forget not that my faith must be
as perfect in all your brothers as it is in you, or it would be a
limited gift to you. In the holy instant, we share our faith in
God's Son because we recognize together that he is wholly worthy of it,
and in our appreciation of his worth, we cannot doubt his
holiness. And so we love him.
58
All separation vanishes as holiness is shared. For holiness is power,
and by sharing it, it gains in strength. If you seek for
satisfaction in gratifying your needs as you perceive them, you
must believe that strength comes from another, and what you gain
he loses. Someone must always lose if you perceive
yourself as weak. Yet there is another interpretation of relationships
which transcends the concept of loss of power completely.
59
You do not find it difficult to believe that, when another calls on God
for love, your call remains as strong. Nor do you think that, by
God's answer to him, your hope of answer is diminished. On the
contrary, you are far more inclined to regard his success as witness to
the possibility of yours. That is because you recognize, however
dimly, that God is an idea, and so your faith in Him is strengthened
by sharing. What you find difficult to accept is the fact that, like
your Father, you are an idea. And like Him, you can give
yourself completely, wholly without loss, and only with
gain.
60
Herein lies peace, for here there is no conflict. In the world
of scarcity, love has no meaning, and peace is impossible. For gain and
loss are both accepted, and so no one is aware that perfect love
is in him. In the holy instant, you recognize the idea of love
in you and unite this idea with the Mind that thought it and could not relinquish
it. By holding it within itself, there was no loss. The holy
instant thus becomes a lesson in how to hold all of your brothers in
your mind, experiencing not loss, but completion. From this it
follows you can only give. And this is love, for this
alone is natural under the laws of God.
61
In the holy instant, the laws of God prevail, and only they have
meaning. The laws of this world cease to hold any meaning at all. When
the Son of God accepts the laws of God as what he gladly wills, it is
impossible that he be bound or limited in any way. In this instant, he
is as free as God would have him be. For the instant he refuses
to be bound, he is not bound.
62
In the holy instant, nothing happens that has not always been. Only the
veil that has been drawn across reality is lifted. Nothing has
changed. Yet the awareness of changelessness comes swiftly as
the veil of time is pushed aside. No one who has not yet experienced the
lifting of the veil and felt himself drawn irresistibly into the light
behind it can have faith in love without fear. Yet the Holy
Spirit gives you this faith because He offered it to me and I accepted
it. Fear not the holy instant will be denied you, for I denied it not.
And through me the Holy Spirit gave it unto you, as you will
give it. Let no need that you perceive obscure your need of this. For in
the holy instant, you will recognize the only need the aspects of the
Son of God share equally, and by this recognition you will join with me
in offering what is needed.
63
It is through us that peace will come. Join me in the idea
of peace, for in ideas minds can communicate. If you would give
yourself as your Father gives His Self, you will learn to
understand selfhood. And therein is love's meaning understood. But
remember that understanding is of the mind and only of
the mind. Knowledge is therefore of the mind, and its conditions are in
the mind with it. If you were not only an idea and nothing else,
you could not be in full communication with all that ever was. Yet as
long as you prefer to be something else, or would attempt to be
nothing else and something else together, the language of
communication, which you know perfectly, you will not remember.
64
In the holy instant God is remembered, and the language of communication
with all your brothers is remembered with Him. For communication is
remembered together, as is truth. There is no exclusion in the
holy instant because the past is gone and with it goes the whole basis
for exclusion. Without its source, exclusion vanishes. And this permits
your Source and that of all your brothers to replace it in your
awareness. God and the power of God will take their rightful place in
you, and you will experience the full communication of ideas with ideas.
Through your ability to do this, you will learn what you must
be, for you will begin to understand what your Creator is and what His
creation is along with Him.
65
Beyond the poor attraction of the special love relationship and always
obscured by it is the powerful attraction of the Father for His Son.
There is no other love that can satisfy you, because there is no
other love. This is the only love that is fully given and fully
returned. Being complete, it asks nothing. Being wholly pure, everyone
joined in it has everything. This is not the basis for any
relationship in which the ego enters. For every relationship on which
the ego embarks is special. The ego establishes relationships
only to get something. And it would keep the giver bound to
itself through guilt.
66
It is impossible for the ego to enter into any relationship without
anger, for the ego believes that anger makes friends. This is
not its statement, but it is its purpose. For the ego really believes
that it can get and keep by
making guilty. This is its one attraction; an attraction
so weak that it would have no hold at all, except that no one recognizes
it. For the ego always seems to attract through love and has no
attraction at all to anyone who perceives that it attracts through guilt.
67
The sick attraction of guilt must be recognized for what it is.
For having been made real to you, it is essential to look at it clearly,
and by withdrawing your investment in it, to learn to let it go.
No one would choose to let go what he believes has value. Yet the
attraction of guilt has value to you only because you have not
looked at what it is and have judged it completely in the dark. As we
bring it to light, your only question will be why it was you ever
wanted it. You have nothing to lose by looking open-eyed at this, for
ugliness such as this belongs not in your holy mind. The host of God can
have no real investment here.
68
We said before that the ego attempts to maintain and increase guilt, but
in such a way that you do not recognize what it would do to you.
For it is the ego's fundamental doctrine that what you do to others, you
have escaped. The ego wishes no one well. Yet its survival
depends on your belief that you are exempt from its evil
intentions. It counsels, therefore, that if you are host to it,
it will enable you to direct the anger that it holds outward, thus protecting
you. And thus it embarks on an endless, unrewarding chain of special
relationships, forged out of anger and dedicated to but one insane
belief—that the more anger you invest outside yourself, the
safer you become.
69
It is this chain that binds the Son of God to guilt, and it is this
chain the Holy Spirit would remove from his holy mind. For the chain of
savagery belongs not around the chosen host of God, who cannot
make himself host to the ego. In the name of his release, and in the
name of Him Who would release him, let us look more closely at the
relationships which the ego contrives, and let the Holy Spirit judge
them truly. For it is certain that, if you will look at them,
you will offer them gladly to Him. What He can make of them, you
do not know, but you will become willing to find out if you are willing,
first, to perceive what you have made of them.
70
In one way or another, every relationship which the ego makes is based
on the idea that by sacrificing itself, it becomes bigger.
The "sacrifice," which it regards as purification, is actually the root
of its bitter resentment. For it would much prefer to attack directly
and avoid delaying what it really wants. Yet the ego
acknowledges "reality" as it sees it and recognizes that no one could
interpret direct attack as love. Yet to make guilty is
direct attack but does not seem to be. For the guilty expect
attack, and having asked for it, they are attracted to
it.
71
In these insane relationships, the attraction of what you do not want
seems to be much stronger than the attraction of what you do.
For each one thinks that he has sacrificed something to the other and hates
him for it. Yet this is what he thinks he wants. He is not in
love with the other at all. He merely believes he is in love with sacrifice.
And for this sacrifice, which he demanded of himself, he demands
the other accept the guilt and sacrifice himself as well.
Forgiveness becomes impossible, for the ego believes that to forgive
another is to lose him. For it is only by attack without
forgiveness that the ego can ensure the guilt which holds all its
relationships together.
72
Yet they only seem to be together. For relationships, to the
ego, mean only that bodies are together. It is always physical
closeness that the ego demands, and it does not object where the mind
goes or what it thinks, for this seems unimportant. As long as
the body is there to receive its sacrifice, it is content. To the ego,
the mind is private, and only the body can be shared. Ideas are
basically of no concern, except as they draw the body of another closer
or farther. And it is in these terms that it evaluates ideas as good or
bad. What makes another guilty and holds him through guilt is
"good." What releases him from guilt is "bad," because he would
no longer believe that bodies communicate, and so he would be "gone."
73
Suffering and sacrifice are the gifts with which the ego would "bless"
all unions. And those who are united at its altar accept
suffering and sacrifice as the price of union. In their angry alliances,
born of the fear of loneliness and yet dedicated to the continuance
of loneliness, they seek relief from guilt by increasing it in the other.
For they believe that this decreases it in them. The other seems
always to be attacking and wounding them, perhaps in little
ways, perhaps "unconsciously," yet never without demand of sacrifice.
The fury of those joined at the ego's altar far exceeds your awareness
of it. For what the ego really wants, you do not realize.
74
Whenever you are angry, you can be sure that you have formed a special
relationship which the ego has "blessed," for anger is its
blessing. Anger takes many forms, but it cannot long deceive those who
will learn that love brings no guilt at all, and what brings guilt
cannot be love and must be anger. All anger is nothing
more than an attempt to make someone feel guilty, and this attempt is
the only basis which the ego accepts for special relationships.
Guilt is the only need the ego has, and as long as you identify with it,
guilt will remain attractive to you.
75
Yet remember this—to be with a body is not communication. And if
you think it is, you will feel guilty about communication and will be afraid
to hear the Holy Spirit, recognizing in His voice your own need
to communicate. The Holy Spirit cannot teach through fear. And
how can He communicate with you while you believe that to communicate is
to make yourself alone? It is clearly insane to believe that by
communicating you will be abandoned. And yet you do believe it.
For you think that your minds must be kept private or you will lose
them, and if your bodies are together your minds remain your
own. The union of bodies thus becomes the way in which you would keep minds
apart. For bodies cannot forgive. They can only do as the mind directs.
76
The illusion of the autonomy of the body and its ability to
overcome loneliness is but the working of the ego's plan to establish
its own autonomy. As long as you believe that to be with a body
is companionship, you will be compelled to attempt to keep your brother
in his body, held there by guilt. And you will see safety in
guilt and danger in communication. For the ego will always
teach that loneliness is solved by guilt and that communication is the cause
of loneliness. And despite the evident insanity of this lesson, you have
learned it.
77
Forgiveness lies in communication as surely as damnation lies in guilt.
It is the Holy Spirit's teaching function to instruct those who believe
that communication is damnation that communication is salvation.
And He will do so, for the power of God in Him and you is joined
in real relationship, so holy and so strong that it can overcome
even this without fear. It is through the holy instant that what
seems impossible is accomplished, making it evident that it is not
impossible. In the holy instant, guilt holds no attraction,
since communication has been restored. And guilt, whose only
purpose is to disrupt communication, has no function here.
78
Here there is no concealment and no private thoughts. The willingness to
communicate attracts communication to it and overcomes
loneliness completely. There is complete forgiveness here, for there is
no desire to exclude anyone from your completion in sudden recognition
of the value of his part in it. In the protection of your
wholeness, all are invited and made welcome. And you understand that
your completion is God's, Whose only need is to have you be
complete. For your completion makes you His in your awareness. And here
it is that you experience yourself as you were created and as you are.
79
The holy instant does not replace the need for learning, for the Holy
Spirit must not leave you as your Teacher until the holy instant has
extended far beyond time. For a teaching assignment such as His, He must
use everything in this world for your release. He must side with every
sign or token of your willingness to learn of Him what the truth must
be. He is swift to utilize whatever you offer Him on behalf of this. His
concern and care for you are limitless. In the face of your fear
of forgiveness, which He perceives as clearly as He knows forgiveness is
release, He will teach you to remember that forgiveness is not
loss but your salvation. And that in complete
forgiveness, in which you recognize that there is nothing to forgive, you
are absolved completely.
80
Hear Him gladly and learn of Him that you have need of no special
relationships at all. You but seek in them what you have thrown away.
And through them you will never learn the value of what you have cast
aside but what you still desire with all your hearts. Let us join
together in making the holy instant all that there is by desiring that
it be all that there is. God's Son has such great need of your
willingness to strive for this that you cannot conceive of need so
great. Behold the only need that God and His Son share and will to meet
together. You are not alone in this. The will of your creations call to
you to share your will with them. Turn, then, in peace from guilt to God
and them.
81
Relate only with what will never leave you and what you
can never leave. The loneliness of God's Son is the loneliness of his
Father. Refuse not the awareness of your completion and seek not to
restore it to yourselves. Fear not to give redemption over to your
Redeemer's love. He will not fail you, for He comes from One Who cannot
fail. Accept your sense of failure as nothing more than a
mistake in who you are. For the holy host of God is beyond failure, and
nothing that he wills can be denied. You are forever in a
relationship so holy that it calls to everyone to escape from loneliness
and join you in your love. And where you are must everyone seek and find
you there.
82
Think but an instant on this: God gave the Sonship to you to ensure your
perfect creation. This was His gift, for as He withheld Himself not from
you, He withheld not His creation. Nothing that ever was created but is
yours. Your relationships are with the universe. And this universe,
being of God, is far beyond the petty sum of all the separate bodies you
perceive. For all its parts are joined in God through Christ, where they
become like to their Father. For Christ knows of no separation from His
Father, Who is His one relationship, in which He gives as His Father
gives to Him.
83
The Holy Spirit is God's attempt to free you of what He does not
understand. And because of the Source of the attempt, it will succeed.
The Holy Spirit asks you to respond as God does, for He would teach you
what you do not understand. God would respond to every
need, whatever form it takes. And so He has kept this channel open to
receive His communication to you and yours to Him. God does not
understand your problem in communication, for He does not share it with
you. It is only you who believe that it is understandable.
84
The Holy Spirit knows that it is not understandable, and yet He
understands it because you have made it. In Him alone lies the
awareness of what God cannot know and what you do not understand. It is
His holy function to accept them both, and by removing every element of
disagreement, to join them into one. He will do this because it
is His function. Leave, then, what seems to you to be impossible to Him
Who knows it must be possible because it is the Will of God. And
let Him Whose teaching is only of God teach you the only
meaning of relationships. For God created the only relationship which
has meaning, and that is His relationship with you.
85
As the ego would limit your perception of your brothers to the body, so
would the Holy Spirit release your vision and let you see the Great Rays
shining from them, so unlimited that they reach to God. It is this shift
in vision which is accomplished in the holy instant. Yet it is needful
for you to learn just what this shift entails, so you will become
willing to make it permanent. Given this willingness, it will not leave
you, for it is permanent. For once you have accepted it as the
only perception you want, it is translated into knowledge by the
part which God Himself plays in the Atonement, for it is the only step
in it He understands. Therefore, in this there will be no delay when you
are ready for it. God is ready now, but you are not.
86
Our task is but to continue as fast as possible the necessary process of
looking straight at all the interference and seeing it exactly
as it is. For it is impossible to recognize as wholly without
gratification what you think you want. The body is the symbol of
the ego, as the ego is the symbol of the separation. And both are
nothing more than attempts to limit communication and thereby to make it
impossible. For communication must be unlimited in order to have
meaning, and deprived of meaning, it will not satisfy you
completely. Yet it remains the only means by which you can establish
real relationships.
87
Real relationships have no limits, having been established by
God. In the holy instant, where the Great Rays replace the body
in awareness, the recognition of relationships without limits is given
you. But to see this, it is necessary to give up every use the ego has
for the body and to accept the fact that the ego has no purpose
you would share with it. For the ego would limit everyone to a body for
its purposes, and while you think it has a purpose, you
will choose to utilize the means by which it tries to turn its
purpose into accomplishment. This will never be accomplished.
Yet you have surely recognized that the ego, whose goals are altogether
unattainable, will strive for them with all its might and will do so
with the strength which you have given it.
88
It is impossible to divide your strength between Heaven and hell, God
and the ego, and release your power unto creation, which is the only
purpose for which it was given you. Love would always give
increase. Limits are demanded by the ego, representing its demands to
make little and ineffectual. Limit your vision of a brother to his body,
which you will do as long as you would not release him from it,
and you have denied his gift to you. His body cannot
give it. And seek it not through yours. Yet your minds are already
continuous, and their union need only be accepted, and the loneliness in
Heaven is gone.
89
If you would but let the Holy Spirit tell you of the love of God for you
and the need your creations have to be with you forever, you would
experience the attraction of the eternal. No one can hear Him speak of
this and long remain willing to linger here. For it is your will
to be in Heaven, where you are complete and quiet in such sure and
loving relationships that any limit is impossible. Would you not
exchange your little relationships for this? For the body is
little and limited, and only those whom you would see without
the limits the ego would impose on them can offer you the gift of
freedom.
90
You have no conception of the limits you have placed on your perception
and no idea of all the loveliness that you could see. But this you must
remember—the attraction of guilt opposes the attraction of God.
His attraction for you remains unlimited, but because your power, being
His, is as great as His, you can turn away from love. What you invest in
guilt, you withdraw from God. And your sight grows weak and dim and
limited, for you have attempted to separate the Father from the Son and
limit their communication. Seek not Atonement in further
separation. And limit not your vision of God's Son to what interferes
with his release and what the Holy Spirit must undo to set him
free. For his belief in limits has imprisoned him.
91
When the body ceases to attract you and when you place no value on it as
a means for getting anything, then there will be no interference
in communication, and your thoughts will be as free as God's. As you let
the Holy Spirit teach you how to use the body only for purposes
of communication and renounce its use for separation and attack which
the ego sees in it, you will learn you have no need of a body at all. In
the holy instant there are no bodies, and you experience only
the attraction of God. Accepting it as undivided, you join Him wholly in
an instant. [For you would place no limits on your union with
Him.] The reality of this relationship becomes the only truth that you
could ever want. All truth is here.
92
It is in your power in time to delay the perfect union
of the Father and the Son. For in this world, the attraction of guilt does
stand between them. Neither time nor season means anything in eternity.
But here it is the Holy Spirit's function to use them both, though not
as the ego uses them. This is the season when you would celebrate my
birth into the world. Yet you know not how to do it. Let the Holy Spirit
teach you, and let me celebrate your birth through Him. The only
gift I can accept of you is the gift I gave to you. Release me
as I will your release. The time of Christ we celebrate together,
for it has no meaning if we are apart.
93
The holy instant is truly the time of Christ. For in this liberating
instant, no guilt is laid upon the Son of God, and his unlimited power
is thus restored to him. What other gift can you offer me, when only
this I will to offer you? And to see me is to see me in everyone
and offer everyone the gift you offer me. I am as incapable of receiving
sacrifice as God is, and every sacrifice you ask of yourself, you ask of
me. Learn now that sacrifice of any kind is nothing but a
limitation imposed on giving. And by this limitation, you have limited
acceptance of the gift I offer you.
94
We who are one cannot give separately. When you are willing to
accept our relationship as real, guilt will hold no
attraction for you. For in our union, you will accept all of our
brothers. The gift of union is the only gift that I was born to give.
Give it to me, that you may have it. The time of Christ is the
time appointed for the gift of freedom, offered to everyone. And by your
acceptance of it, you have offered it to everyone. It is
in your power to make this season holy, for it is in your power to make
the time of Christ be now.
95
It is possible to do this all at once because there is but one
shift in perception that is necessary, for you made but one
mistake. It seems like many, but it is all the same. For though the ego
takes many forms, it is always the same idea. What is not love
is always fear and nothing else. 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. Yet it is necessary to examine each one as long as you would
retain the principle which governs all of them. When 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. The idea is simply this—you believe that it is possible to be
host to the ego or hostage to God. This is the choice you think you
have, and the decision which you believe that you must make.
96
You see no other alternatives, for you cannot accept the fact that
sacrifice gets nothing. Sacrifice is so essential to your
thought system that salvation apart from sacrifice means nothing
to you. Your confusion of sacrifice and love is so profound that you
cannot conceive of love without sacrifice. And it is this that
you must look upon—sacrifice is attack, not love. If you would
accept but this one idea, your fear of love would vanish. Guilt
cannot last when the idea of sacrifice has been removed. For if
there is sacrifice, as you are convinced, someone must pay and someone
must get. And the only question which remains to be decided is how
much is the price for getting what.
97
As host to the ego, you believe that you can give all your guilt
away whatever you think and purchase peace. And the payment does
not seem to be yours. While it is obvious that the ego does
demand payment, it never seems to be demanding it of you. For
you are unwilling to recognize that the ego, which you invited, is
treacherous only to those who think they are its host. The ego will
never let you perceive this, since this recognition would make it
homeless. For when this recognition dawns clearly, you will not be
deceived by any form the ego takes to protect itself from your
sight.
98
Each form will be recognized as but a cover for the one idea that hides
behind them all—that love demands sacrifice and is therefore inseparable
from attack and fear. And that guilt is the price of love, which
must be paid by fear. How fearful, then, has God become to you,
and how great a sacrifice do you believe His love demands! For total
love would demand total sacrifice. And so the ego seems to demand less
of you than God, and of the two is judged as the lesser of two evils,
one to be feared a little, but the other to be destroyed. For you see
love as destructive, and your only question is who is to be
destroyed, you or another? You seek to answer this question in your
special relationships, in which you are both destroyer and destroyed in
part, but with the idea of being able to be neither completely. And this
you think saves you from God, Whose total love would completely destroy
you.
99
You think that everyone outside yourself demands your sacrifice,
but you do not see that only you demand sacrifice and only
of yourself. Yet the demand of sacrifice is so savage and so fearful
that you cannot accept it where it is. But the real
price of not accepting this has been so great that you have given God
away rather than look at it. For if God would demand total sacrifice of
you, you thought it safer to project Him outward and away from
you and not be host to Him. To Him you ascribed the ego's treachery,
inviting it to take His place to protect you from Him. And you
do not recognize that it is what you invited in that would
destroy you and does demand total sacrifice of you. No partial
sacrifice will appease this savage guest, for it is an invader who but seems
to offer kindness, but always to make the sacrifice complete.
100
You will not succeed in being partial hostage to the ego, for it keeps
no bargains and would leave you nothing. [Nor can you be partial host
to it.] You will have to choose between total freedom and total
bondage, for there are no alternatives but these. You have tried many
compromises in the attempt to avoid recognizing the one decision which
must be made. And yet it is the recognition of the decision just as
it is that makes the decision so easy! Salvation is simple, being
of God and therefore very easy to understand. Do not try to project it
from you and see it outside yourself. In you are both the
question and the answer—the demand for sacrifice and the peace of God.
101
Fear not to recognize the whole idea of sacrifice as solely of
your making. And seek not safety by attempting to protect yourself from
where it is not. Your brothers and your Father have become very fearful
to you. And you would bargain with them for a few special relationships
in which you think you see some scraps of safety. Do not try longer to
keep apart your thoughts and the Thought that has been given you. When
they are brought together and perceived where they are, the
choice between them is nothing more than a gentle awakening and as
simple as opening your eyes to daylight when you have no more need of
sleep.
102
The sign of Christmas is a star, a light in darkness. See it not outside
yourself but shining in the Heaven within and accept it as the sign the
time of Christ has come. He comes demanding nothing. No
sacrifice of any kind of anyone is asked by Him. In His Presence, the
whole idea of sacrifice loses all meaning. For He is Host to God. And
you need but invite Him in Who is there already, by recognizing
that His Host is One, and no thought alien to His Oneness can abide with
Him there. Love must be total to give Him welcome, for the Presence of
Holiness creates the holiness which surrounds it. No fear can
touch the host who cradles God in the time of Christ, for the Host is as
holy as the Perfect Innocence which He protects and Whose power protects
Him.
103
This Christmas, give the Holy Spirit everything that would hurt
you. Let yourself be healed completely that you may join with
Him in healing, and let us celebrate our release together by releasing
everyone with us. Leave nothing behind, for release is total, and when
you have accepted it with me, you will give it with me. All pain
and sacrifice and littleness will disappear in our relationship, which
is as innocent as our relationship with our Father, and as powerful.
Pain will be brought to us and disappear in our presence, and without
pain there can be no sacrifice. And without sacrifice, there
love must be.
104
You who believe that sacrifice is love must learn that sacrifice
is separation from love. For sacrifice brings guilt as surely as
love brings peace. Guilt is the condition of sacrifice, as peace
is the condition for the awareness of your relationship with God.
Through guilt you exclude your Father and your brothers from yourself.
Through peace you invite them back and realize that they are where your
invitation bids them be. What you excluded from yourself seems fearful,
for you endowed it with fear and tried to cast it out though it was part
of you. Who can perceive part of himself as loathsome and live within
himself in peace? And who can try to resolve the perceived conflict of
Heaven and hell in him by casting Heaven out and giving it the
attributes of hell without experiencing himself as incomplete and
lonely?
105
As long as you perceive the body as your reality, so long will you
perceive yourself as lonely and deprived. And so long will you also
perceive yourself as a victim of sacrifice, justified in sacrificing
others. For who could thrust Heaven and its Creator aside without
a sense of sacrifice and loss? And who can suffer sacrifice and loss
without attempting to restore himself? Yet how could you
accomplish this yourselves when the basis of your attempts is the belief
in the reality of the deprivation? For deprivation breeds
attack, being the belief that attack is justified. And as long
as you would retain the deprivation, attack becomes salvation, and
sacrifice becomes love.
106
So is it that in all your seeking for love, you seek for sacrifice and find
it. Yet you find not love. It is impossible to deny what love is and
still recognize it. The meaning of love lies in what you have
cast outside yourself, and it has no meaning at all apart from
you. It is what you preferred to keep that has no meaning, while
all that you would keep away holds all the meaning of the
universe and holds the universe together in its meaning. For unless the
universe were joined in you, it would be apart from God, and to
be without Him is to be without meaning.
107
In the holy instant, the condition of love is met, for minds are joined
without the body's interference, and where there is communication, there
is peace. The Prince of Peace was born to reestablish the condition of
love by teaching that communication remains unbroken, even if the body
is destroyed, provided that you see not the body as the necessary
means of communication. And if you understand this lesson, you will
realize that to sacrifice the body is to sacrifice nothing, and
communication, which must be of the mind, cannot be sacrificed.
Where, then, is sacrifice?
108
The lesson I was born to teach and still would teach to all my brothers
is that sacrifice is nowhere and love is everywhere. For communication
embraces everything, and in the peace it re-establishes, love
comes of itself. Let no despair darken the joy of Christmas, for the
time of Christ is meaningless apart from joy. Let us join in celebrating
peace by demanding no sacrifice of anyone, for so will you offer me the
love I offer you. What can be more joyous than to perceive we are
deprived of nothing? Such is the message of the time of Christ,
which I give you that you may give it and return it to the
Father, Who gave it to me. For in the time of Christ, communication is
restored, and He joins us in the celebration of His Son's creation.
109
God offers thanks to the holy host who would receive Him and let Him
enter and abide where He would be. And by your welcome does He welcome
you into Himself, for what is contained in you who welcome Him is returned
to Him. And we but celebrate His Wholeness as we welcome Him into
ourselves. Those who receive the Father are one with Him, being host to
Him Who created them. And by allowing Him to enter, the remembrance of
the Father enters with Him, and with Him they remember the only
relationship they ever had and ever want to have.
110
This is the weekend in which a new year will be born from the time of
Christ. I have perfect faith in you to do all that you would accomplish.
Nothing will be lacking, and you will make complete and not
destroy. Say and understand this:
112
So will the year begin in joy and freedom. There is much to do, and we
have been long delayed. Accept the holy instant as this year is born and
take your place, so long left unfulfilled, in the Great Awakening. Make
this year different by making it all the same. And let all
your relationships be made holy for you. This is our will. Amen.
1
To empathize does not mean to join in suffering, for that is
what you must refuse to understand. That is the ego's
interpretation of empathy and is always used to form a special
relationship in which the suffering is shared. The capacity to empathize
is very useful to the Holy Spirit, provided you let Him use it in His
way. [His way is very different.] He does not understand suffering and
would have you teach it is not understandable. When He relates
through you, He does not relate through the ego to another ego. He does
not join in pain, knowing that healing pain is not accomplished by
delusional attempts to enter into it and lighten it by sharing the
delusion.
2
The clearest proof that empathy as the ego uses it is destructive lies
in the fact that it is applied only to certain types of problems and in
certain people. These it selects out and joins with. And
it never joins except to strengthen itself. [Having identified
with what it thinks it understands, it sees itself and
would increase itself by sharing what is like itself.]
Make no mistake about this maneuver; the ego always empathizes to weaken,
and to weaken is always to attack. You do not know what
empathizing means. Yet of this you may be sure—if you will merely sit
quietly by and let the Holy Spirit relate through you, you will
empathize with strength and both of you will gain in
strength, and not in weakness.
3
Your part is only to remember this—you do not want anything you
value to come of the relationship. You will neither to hurt it nor to
heal it in your own way. You do not know what healing is. All you have
learned of empathy is from the past. And there is nothing from
the past that you would share, for there is nothing there that you would
keep. Do not use empathy to make the past real and so perpetuate
it. Step gently aside and let the healing be done for you. Keep
but one thought in mind and do not lose sight of it, however tempted you
may be to judge any situation and to determine your response by
judging it. Focus your mind only on this:
5
True empathy is of Him Who knows what it is. You will learn His
interpretation of it if you let Him use your capacity for strength
and not for weakness. He will not desert you, but be sure that you
desert not him. Humility is strength in this sense only—to
recognize and accept the fact that you do not know is to
recognize and accept the fact that He does know. You are not
sure that He will do His part because you have never yet done yours
completely. You will not know how to respond to what you do not
understand. Be tempted not in this, and yield not to the ego's
triumphant use of empathy for its glory.
6
The triumph of weakness is not what you would offer to a brother. And
yet you know no triumph but this. This is not knowledge, and the
form of empathy that would bring this about is so distorted that it
would imprison what it would release. The unredeemed cannot redeem, yet
they have a Redeemer. Attempt to teach Him not. You are
the learner; He the Teacher. Do not confuse your role with His, for this
will never bring peace to anyone. Offer your empathy to Him, for it is His
perception and His strength that you would share. And let Him
offer you His strength and His perception to be shared through you.
7
The meaning of love is lost in any relationship which looks to weakness
and hopes to find love there. The power of love, which is its
meaning, lies in the strength of God, which hovers over it and blesses
it silently by enveloping it in healing wings. Let this be, and
do not try to substitute your "miracle" for this. We once said
that if a brother asks a foolish thing of you, to do it. But be certain
that this does not mean to do a foolish thing that would hurt either him
or you, for what would hurt one will hurt the other.
Foolish requests are foolish for the simple reason that they conflict
because they contain an element of specialness. Only the Holy Spirit
recognizes foolish needs as well as real ones. And He will teach you how
to meet both without losing either.
8
You will attempt to do this only in secrecy. And you will think
that, by meeting the needs of one, you do not jeopardize another because
you keep them separate and secret from each other. That is not the way,
for it leads not to light and truth. No needs will long be left unmet if
you leave them all to Him Whose function is to meet them. That
is His function and not yours. He will not meet them
secretly, for He would share everything you give through Him. And that
is why He gives it.
9
What you give through Him is for the whole Sonship, not for part
of it. Leave Him His function, for He will fulfill it if you but ask Him
to enter your relationships and bless them for you.
10
You still think holiness is difficult because you cannot see how it can
be extended to include everyone. And you have learned that it must
include everyone to be holy. Concern yourselves not with the
extension of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do not understand.
Nor do you do them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits
you perceive, that demonstrates you did not do them. Why should
you worry how the miracle extends to all the Sonship when you do not
understand the miracle itself? One attribute is no more difficult to
understand than is the whole. If miracles are at all, their
attributes would have to be miraculous, being part of them.
11
There is a tendency to fragment and then to be concerned about the truth
of just a little part of the whole. And this is but a way of avoiding or
looking away from the whole to what you think you might be better
able to understand. For this is but another way in which you would still
try to keep understanding to yourself. A better and far
more helpful way to think of miracles is this: You do not understand
them, either in part or whole. Yet you have done them.
Therefore, your understanding cannot be necessary. Yet it is still
impossible to accomplish what you do not understand. And so there must
be something in you that does understand.
12
To you the miracle cannot seem natural because what you have
done to hurt your minds has made them so unnatural that they do
not remember what is natural to them. And when you are told
about it, you cannot understand it. The recognition of the part as whole
and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural. For it is
the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to
you. Wholly natural perception would show you instantly that order of
difficulty in miracles is quite impossible, for it involves a
contradiction of what miracles mean. And if you could understand their
meaning, their attributes could hardly cause you perplexity.
13
You have done miracles, but it is quite apparent that you have
not done them alone. You have succeeded whenever you have reached
another mind and joined with it. When two minds join as one and
share one idea equally, the first link in the awareness of the Sonship
as one has been made. When you have made this joining as the Holy Spirit
bids you and have offered it to Him to use as He knows how, His natural
perception of your gift enables Him to understand it and you
to use His understanding on your behalf. It is impossible to convince
you of the reality of what has clearly been accomplished through
your willingness, as long as you believe that you must
understand it or else it is not real.
14
You think your lack of understanding is a loss to you, and so
you are unwilling to believe that what has happened is true. But can you
really believe that all that has happened, even though you do not
understand it, has not happened? Yet this is your
position. You would have perfect faith in the Holy Spirit and in the
effects of His teaching if you were not afraid to acknowledge
what He taught you. For this acknowledgment means that what has happened
you do not understand but that you are willing to accept it because
it has happened.
15
How can faith in reality be yours while you are bent on making it
unreal? And are you really safer in maintaining the unreality of
what has happened than you would be in joyously accepting it for what it
is and giving thanks for it? Honor the truth that has been given you,
and be glad you do not understand it. Miracles are natural to God and to
the One Who speaks for Him. For His task is to translate the miracle
into the knowledge which it represents and which is lost to you. Let His
understanding of the miracle be enough for you, and do not turn away
from all the witnesses that He has given you to His reality.
16
No evidence will convince you of the truth of what you do not want. Yet
your relationship with Him is real and has been
demonstrated. Regard this not with fear but with rejoicing. The One you
called upon is with you. Bid Him welcome and honor His
witnesses, who bring you the glad tidings He has come. It is true, just
as you fear, that to acknowledge Him is to deny all that you
think you know. But it was never true. What gain is there to you
in clinging to it and denying the evidence for truth? For you have come
too near to truth to renounce it now, and you will yield to its
compelling attraction. You can delay this now but only a little while.
The host of God has called to you, and you have heard. Never
again will you be wholly willing not to listen.
17
This is a year of joy in which your listening will increase, and peace
will grow with its increase. The power of holiness and the weakness
of attack have both been brought into awareness. And this has
been accomplished in minds firmly convinced that holiness is weakness
and attack is power. Should not this be a sufficient miracle to teach
you that your Teacher is not of you? But remember also that
whenever you have listened to His interpretation, the results have
brought you joy. Would you prefer the results of your
interpretation, considering honestly what they have been? God wills you
better. Could you not look with greater charity on whom God loves with
perfect love?
18
Do not interpret against God's Love, for you have many witnesses
which speak of it so clearly that only the blind and deaf could fail to
see and hear them. This year, determine not to deny what has been given
you by God. [Awake and share it], for that is the only reason He has
called to you. His Voice has spoken clearly, and yet you have so little
faith in what you heard because you have preferred to place still
greater faith in the disaster you have made. Today let us
resolve together to accept the joyful tidings that disaster is
not real and that reality is not disaster.
19
Reality is safe and sure and wholly kind to everyone and everything.
There is no greater love than to accept this and be glad. For love asks
only that you be happy and will give you everything that makes
for happiness. You have never given any problem to the Holy Spirit He
has not solved for you, nor will you ever do so. You have never tried to
solve anything yourself and been successful. Is it not time you brought
these facts together and made sense of them?
20
This is the year for the application of the ideas which have
been given you. For the ideas are mighty forces to be used and not held
idly by. They have already proved their power sufficiently for you to
place your faith in them and not in their denial. This year invest in
truth, and let it work in peace. Have faith in what has faith in you.
Think what you have really seen and heard and recognize
it. Can you be alone with witnesses like these?
21
You have taught well, and yet you have not learned how to accept
the comfort of your teaching. If you will consider what you have taught
and how alien it is to what you thought you knew, you will be compelled
to recognize that your Teacher came from beyond your thought system and
so could look upon it fairly and perceive it was untrue. And He must
have done so from the basis of a very different thought system and one
with nothing in common with yours. For certainly what He has
taught, and what you have taught through Him, have nothing in common
with what you taught before He came. And the results have been to bring
peace where there was pain, and suffering has disappeared, to be
replaced by joy.
22
You have taught freedom, but you have not learned how to be free. We
once said, "By their fruits ye shall know them, and they shall know
themselves." For it is certain that you judge yourself according to your
teaching. The ego's teaching produces immediate results because its
decisions are immediately accepted as your choice. And this
acceptance means that you are willing to judge yourself accordingly.
Cause and effect are very clear in the ego's thought system because all
your learning has been directed towards establishing the
relationship between them. And would you not have faith in what you have
so diligently taught yourself to believe? Yet remember how much care you
have exerted in choosing its witnesses and in avoiding those which spoke
for the cause of truth and its effects.
23
Does not the fact that you have not learned what you have taught show
you that you do not perceive the Sonship as one? And does it not also
show you that you do not regard yourself as one? For it is
impossible to teach successfully wholly without conviction, and
it is equally impossible that conviction be outside of you. You
could never have taught freedom unless you did believe in it.
And it must be that what you taught came from yourself. And yet,
this Self you clearly do not know and do not recognize It even
though It functions. What functions must be there. And it is
only if you deny what It has done that you could possibly deny
Its Presence.
24
This is a course in how to know yourself. You have taught what
you are but have not let what you are teach you. You have been
very careful to avoid the obvious and not to see the real cause
and effect relationship that is perfectly apparent. Yet within you is everything
you taught. What can it be that has not learned it? It must be
this that is really outside yourself, not by your own
projection, but in truth. And it is this that you have taken in
that is not you. What you accept into your minds does not really
change them. Illusions are but beliefs in what is not there. And the
seeming conflict between truth and illusion can only be resolved by
separating yourself from the illusion and not from
truth.
25
Your teaching has already done this, for the Holy Spirit is part of you.
Created by God, He left neither God nor His creation. He is both God and
you, as you are God and Him together. For God's answer to the separation
added more to you than you tried to take away. He protected both your
creations and you together, keeping one with you what you would exclude.
And they will take the place of what you took in to replace them. They
are quite real as part of the Self you do not know. And they communicate
to you through the Holy Spirit, and their power and gratitude to you for
their creation they offer gladly to your teaching of yourself, who is
their home. You who are host to God are also host to them. For nothing
real has ever left the mind of its creator. And what is not real was
never there.
26
You are not two selves in conflict. What is beyond God? If you who hold
Him and whom He holds are the universe, all else must be outside,
where nothing is. You have taught this, and from far off in the
universe, yet not beyond yourself, the witnesses to your teaching have
gathered to help you learn. Their gratitude has joined with yours and
God's to strengthen your faith in what you taught. For what you taught
is true. Alone you stand outside your teaching and apart from
it. But with them you must learn that you but taught yourself
and learned from the conviction you shared with them.
27
This year you will begin to learn and make learning commensurate with
teaching. You have chosen this by your own willingness to teach. Though
you seemed to suffer for it, the joy of teaching will yet be yours. For
the joy of teaching is in the learner, who offers it to the
teacher in gratitude and shares it with him. As you learn, your
gratitude to your Self, Who teaches you what He is, will grow and help
you honor Him. And you will learn His power and strength and purity, and
love Him as His Father does. His Kingdom has no limits and no end, and
there is nothing in Him that is not perfect and eternal. All this is you,
and nothing outside of this is you.
28
To your most holy Self, all praise is due for what you are and for what
He is Who created you as you are. Sooner or later must everyone bridge
the gap which he imagines exists between his selves. Each one builds
this bridge which carries him across the gap as soon as he is
willing to expend some little effort on behalf of bridging it. His
little efforts are powerfully supplemented by the strength of Heaven and
by the united will of all who make Heaven what it is, being joined
within it. And so the one who would cross over is literally transported
there.
29
Your bridge is builded stronger than you think, and your foot is planted
firmly on it. Have no fear that the attraction of those who stand on the
other side and wait for you will not draw you safely across. For you will
come where you would be and where your Self awaits you.
30
Be not afraid to look upon the special hate relationship, for freedom
lies in looking at it. It would be impossible not to know the meaning of
love except for this. For the special love relationship, in which the
meaning of love is lost, is undertaken solely to offset the hate
but not to let it go. Your salvation will rise clearly before
your open eyes as you look on this. You cannot limit hate. The
special love relationship will not offset it but will merely drive it
underground and out of sight. It is essential to bring it into
sight and to make no attempt to hide it. For it is the attempt to
balance hate with love that makes love meaningless to you. The
extent of the split that lies in this you do not realize. And until
you do, the split will remain unrecognized and therefore unhealed.
31
The symbols of hate against the symbols of love play out a conflict
which does not exist. For symbols stand for something else, and
the symbol of love is without meaning if love is everything. You will go
through this last undoing quite unharmed and will at last emerge as
yourself. This is the last step in the readiness for God. Be not
unwilling now. You are too near, and you will cross the bridge in
perfect safety, translated quietly from war to peace. For the illusion
of love will never satisfy, but its reality, which awaits you on
the other side, will give you everything.
32
The special love relationship is an attempt to limit the destructive
effects of hate by finding a haven in the storm of guilt. It makes no
attempt to rise above the storm into the sunlight. On the
contrary, it emphasizes guilt outside the haven by attempting to
build barricades against it and keep within them. The special love
relationship is not perceived as a value in itself, but as a place of
safety from which hatred is split off and kept apart. The special love
partner is acceptable only as long as he serves this purpose. Hatred can
enter and indeed is welcome in some aspects of the relationship,
but it is still held together by the illusion of love. If the illusion
goes, the relationship is broken or becomes unsatisfying on the grounds
of disillusionment.
33
Love is not an illusion. It is a fact. Where disillusionment is
possible, there was not love but hate. For hate is an illusion,
and what can change was never love. It is certain that those who
select certain ones as partners in any aspect of living and use them for
any purpose which they would not share with others, are trying to live
with guilt rather than die of it. This is the choice they see.
And love to them is only an escape from death. They seek it desperately
but not in the peace in which it would gladly come quietly to
them. And when they find the fear of death is still upon them, the love
relationship loses the illusion that it is what it is not. For
then the barricades against it are broken, fear rushes in, and hatred
triumphs.
34
There are no triumphs of love. Only hate is concerned with the "triumph
of love" at all. The illusion of love can triumph over the
illusion of hate, but always at the price of making both
illusions. As long as the illusion of hatred lasts, so long will love be
an illusion to you. And then the only choice which remains possible is
which illusion you prefer. There is no conflict in the choice
between truth and illusion. Seen in these terms, no one would
hesitate. But conflict enters the instant the choice seems to be one
between illusions, for this choice does not matter. Where one
choice is as dangerous as the other, the decision must be one of
despair.
35
Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all
of the barriers within yourself which you have built against it.
It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is
necessary to seek for what is false. Every illusion is one of fear,
whatever form it takes. And the attempt to escape from one illusion into
another must fail. If you seek love outside yourself, you can be
certain that you perceive hatred within and are afraid of it.
Yet peace will never come from the illusion of love, but only
from its reality.
36
Recognize this, for it is true, and truth must be recognized if
it is to be distinguished from illusion: The special love relationship
is an attempt [to bring love into separation. And, as such, it
is nothing more than an attempt] to bring love into fear and make it real
in fear. In fundamental violation of love's condition, the special love
relationship would accomplish the impossible. How but in illusion could
this be done? It is essential that we look very closely at exactly what
it is you think you can do to solve the dilemma, which seems very real
to you, but which does not exist. You have come very close to truth, and
only this stands between you and the bridge that leads you into it.
37
Heaven waits silently, and your creations are holding out their hands to
help you cross and welcome them. For it is they you seek.
You seek but for your own completion, and it is they who render you
complete. The special love relationship is but a shabby substitute for
what makes you whole in truth, not in illusion. Your
relationship with them is without guilt, and this enables you to look on
all your brothers with gratitude because your creations were created in
union with them. Acceptance of your creations is the acceptance
of the oneness of creation, without which you could never be
complete. No specialness can offer you what God has given and what you
are joined with Him in giving.
38
Across the bridge is your completion, for you will be wholly in God,
willing for nothing special but only to be wholly like unto Him,
completing Him by your completion. Fear not to cross to the
abode of peace and perfect holiness. Only there is the completion of God
and of His Son established forever. Seek not for this in the bleak world
of illusion, where nothing is certain, and where everything fails to
satisfy. In the Name of God, be wholly willing to abandon all
illusions. In any relationship in which you are wholly willing to accept
completion, and only this, there is God completed and His Son
with Him.
39
The bridge that leads to union in yourself must lead to
knowledge, for it was built with God beside you and will lead you
straight to Him, where your completion rests wholly compatible with His.
Every illusion which you accept into your mind by judging it to be
attainable removes your own sense of completion and thus denies the
wholeness of your Father. Every fantasy, be it of love or hate, deprives
you of knowledge, for fantasies are the veil behind which truth is
hidden. To lift the veil which seems so dark and heavy, it is only
needful to value truth beyond all fantasy and to be entirely
unwilling to settle for illusion in place of truth.
40
Would you not go through fear to love? For such the journey
seems to be. Love calls, but hate would have you stay. Hear not the call
of hate, and see no fantasies[, for your completion lies in truth and nowhere
else]. See in the call of hate and in every fantasy that rises to
delay you but the call for help which rises ceaselessly from you to your
Creator. Would He not answer you whose completion is His? He loves you
wholly without illusion, as you must love. For love is wholly
without illusion and therefore wholly without fear. Whom God remembers must
be whole. And God has never forgotten what makes Him whole. In
your completion lies the memory of His wholeness and His gratitude to
you for His completion. In His link with you lie both His inability to
forget and your ability to remember. In Him are joined your willingness
to love and all the love of God, Who forgot you not.
41
Your Father can no more forget the truth in you than you can fail to
remember it. The Holy Spirit is the bridge to Him, made from your
willingness to unite with Him and created by His joy in union with you.
The journey that seemed to be endless is almost complete, for what is
endless is very near. You have almost recognized it. Turn with me firmly
away from all illusions now, and let nothing stand in the way of
truth. We will take the last foolish journey away from truth
together, and then together we go straight to God in joyous answer to
His call for His completion.
42
If special relationships of any kind would hinder God's completion, can
they have value to you? What would interfere with God must
interfere with you. Only in time does interference in God's completion
seem to be possible. The bridge that He would carry you across lifts you
from time into eternity. Waken from time and answer fearlessly the call
of Him Who gave eternity to you in your creation. On this side of the
bridge to timelessness you understand nothing. But as you step lightly
across it, upheld by timelessness, you are directed straight to
the Heart of God. At its center, and only there, you are safe
forever because you are complete forever. There is no veil the
love of God in us together cannot lift. The way to truth is open. Follow
it with me.
43
In looking at the special relationship, it is necessary first to realize
that it involves a great amount of pain. Anxiety, despair, guilt, and
attack all enter into it, broken into by periods in which they seem
to be gone. All these must be understood for what they are. Whatever
form they take, they are always an attack on the self to make the other
guilty. We have spoken of this before, but there are some aspects of
what is really being attempted that we have not touched upon.
44
Very simply, the attempt to make guilty is always directed
against God. For the ego would have you see Him, and Him alone,
as guilty, leaving the Sonship open to attack and unprotected from it.
The special love relationship is the ego's chief weapon for keeping you
from Heaven. It does not appear to be a weapon, but if you
consider how you value it and why, you will realize what
it must be. The special love relationship is the ego's most boasted
gift, and one which has the most appeal to those unwilling to relinquish
guilt. The "dynamics" of the ego are clearest here, for counting on the
attraction of this offering, the fantasies which center around it are
often quite open. Here they are usually judged to be acceptable and even
natural. No one considers it bizarre to love and hate together, and even
those who believe that hate is sin merely feel guilty and do not correct
it.
45
This is the "natural" condition of the separation, and those who
learn that it is not natural at all seem to be the unnatural
ones. For this world is the opposite of Heaven, being made
to be its opposite, and everything here takes a direction exactly
opposite of what is true. In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known,
love is the same as union. Here, where the illusion of love is
accepted in love's place, love is perceived as separation and exclusion.
46
It is in the special relationship, born of the hidden wish for special
love from God, that the ego's hatred triumphs. For the special
relationship is the renunciation of the love of God and the
attempt to secure for the self the specialness which He denied. It is
essential to the preservation of the ego that you believe this
specialness is not hell, but Heaven. For the ego would never have you
see that separation can only be loss, being the one condition in
which Heaven cannot be.
47
To everyone Heaven is completion. There can be no disagreement on this
because both the ego and the Holy Spirit accept it. They are, however,
in complete disagreement on what completion is and how
it is accomplished. The Holy Spirit knows that completion lies first in
union and then in the extension of union. To the ego, completion lies in
triumph and in the extension of the "victory" even to the final triumph
over God. In this it sees the ultimate freedom of the self, for nothing
would remain to interfere with it. This is its idea of
Heaven. From this it follows that union, which is a condition in which
the ego cannot interfere, must be hell.
48
The special relationship is a strange and unnatural ego device for
joining hell and Heaven and making them indistinguishable. And the
attempt to find the imagined "best" of both worlds has merely led to
fantasies of both and to the inability to perceive either one as it is.
The special relationship is the triumph of this confusion. It is a kind
of union from which union is excluded, and the basis for the attempt
at union rests on exclusion. What better example could there be of the
ego's maxim, "Seek but do not find?"
49
Most curious of all is the concept of the self which the ego fosters in
the special relationship. This "self" seeks the relationship to make
itself complete. Yet when it finds the special relationship in
which it thinks it can accomplish this, it gives itself away and
tries to "trade" itself for the self of another. This is not union, for
there is no increase and no extension. Each partner tries to sacrifice
the self he does not want for one he thinks he would prefer. And he
feels guilty for the "sin" of taking and of giving nothing of value in
return. For how much value can he place upon a self that he
would give away to get a better one?
50
The "better" self the ego seeks is always one that is more
special. And whoever seems to possess a special self is "loved" for what
can be taken from him. Where both partners see this special self
in each other, the ego sees "a union made in Heaven." For neither one
will recognize that he has asked for hell, and so he will not interfere
with the ego's illusion of Heaven, which it offered him to interfere
with Heaven. Yet if all illusions are of fear, and they can be
of nothing else, the illusion of Heaven is nothing more than an
"attractive" form of fear in which the guilt is buried deep and rises in
the form of "love."
51
The appeal of hell lies only in the terrible attraction of guilt, which
the ego holds out to those who place their faith in littleness. The
conviction of littleness lies in every special relationship, for
only the deprived could value specialness. The demand for
specialness and the perception of the giving of specialness as an act of
love would make love hateful. And the real purpose of the
special relationship, in strict accordance with the ego's goals, is to
destroy reality and substitute illusion. For the ego is itself
an illusion, and only illusions can be the witnesses to its
"reality."
52
If you perceived the special relationship as a triumph over God, would
you want it? Let us not think of its fearful nature nor of the
guilt it must entail nor of the sadness and the loneliness. For these
are only attributes of the whole religion of the separation and of the
total context in which it is thought to occur. The central theme in its
litany to sacrifice is that God must die so you can live. And it
is this theme which is acted out in the special relationship. Through
the death of your self, you think you can attack another self
and snatch it from the other to replace the self which you despise. And
you despise it because you do not think it offers the specialness which
you demand. And hating it, you have made it little and unworthy
because you are afraid of it.
53
How can you grant unlimited power to what you think you have attacked?
So fearful has the truth become to you that unless it is weak
and little, [and unworthy of value,] you would not dare to look upon it.
You think it safer to endow the little self which you have made with
power you wrested from truth, triumphing over it and leaving it
helpless. See how exactly is this ritual enacted in the special
relationship. An altar is erected in between two separate people on
which each seeks to kill his self and on his body raise another self
which takes its power from his death. Over and over and over this ritual
is enacted. And it is never completed nor ever will be
completed. For the ritual of completion cannot complete, and
life arises not from death, nor Heaven from hell.
54
Whenever any form of special relationship tempts you to seek for love in
ritual, remember love is content and not form of any
kind. The special relationship is a ritual of form, aimed at the
raising of the form to take the place of God at the expense of
content. There is no meaning in the form, and there will never
be. The special relationship must be recognized for what it is—a
senseless ritual in which strength is extracted from the death of God
and invested in His killer as the sign that form has triumphed over
content and love has lost its meaning. Would you want this to be
possible, even apart from its evident impossibility? For if it were
possible, you would have made yourself helpless. God is not
angry. He merely could not let this happen. You cannot change
His Mind.
55
No rituals that you have set up in which the dance of death delights you
can bring death to the eternal. Nor can your chosen substitute for the
wholeness of God have any influence at all upon it. See in the special
relationship nothing more than a meaningless attempt to raise other gods
before Him and by worshiping them to obscure their tininess and
His greatness. In the name of your completion, you do not want
this. For every idol which you raise to place before Him stands before you
in place of what you are.
56
Salvation lies in the simple fact that illusions are not fearful because
they are not true. They but seem to be fearful to the extent to
which you fail to recognize them for what they are, and you will
fail to do this to the extent to which you want them to be true.
And to the same extent you are denying truth, and so are making
yourself unable to make the simple choice between truth and illusion,
God and fantasy. Remember this and you will have no difficulty in
perceiving the decision as just what it is and nothing more.
57
The core of the separation delusion lies simply in the fantasy
of destruction of love's meaning. And unless love's meaning is restored
to you, you cannot know yourself, who shares its meaning.
Separation is only the decision not to know yourself. Its whole
thought system is a carefully contrived learning experience designed to
lead away from truth and into fantasy. Yet for every learning
that would hurt you, God offers you correction and complete escape from
all its consequences. The decision whether or not to listen to
this course and follow it is but the choice between truth and illusion.
For here is truth separated from illusion and not confused with
it at all.
58
How simple does this choice become when it is perceived as only what it
is. For only fantasies made confusion in choosing possible, and
they are totally unreal. This year is thus the time to make the easiest
decision that ever confronted you and also the only one. You
will cross the bridge into reality simply because you will recognize
that God is on the other side and nothing at all is here. It is
impossible not to make the natural decision as this is realized.
59
The search for the special relationship is the sign that you equate
yourself with the ego and not with God. For the special relationship has
value only to the ego. To the ego unless a relationship
has special value, it has no meaning, and it perceives all
love as special. Yet this cannot be natural, for it is unlike
the relationship of God and His Son, and all relationships that are
unlike this one must be unnatural. For God created love as He
would have it be and gave it as it is. Love has no meaning
except as its Creator defined it by His Will. It is impossible to define
it otherwise and understand it.
60
Love is freedom. To look for it by placing yourself in bondage
is to separate yourself from it. For the love of God, no longer
seek for union in separation nor for freedom in bondage! As you release,
so will you be released. Forget this not, or love will be unable to find
you and comfort you. There is a way in which the Holy Spirit asks your
help if you would have His. The holy instant is His most helpful tool in
protecting you from the attraction of guilt, the real lure in the
special relationship. You do not recognize that this is its real
appeal, for the ego has taught you that freedom lies in it. Yet
the closer you look at the special relationship, the more apparent it
becomes that it must foster guilt and therefore must
imprison.
61
The special relationship is totally without meaning without a body. And
if you value it, you must also value the body. And what you
value, you will keep. The special relationship is a device for
limiting your self to a body and for limiting your perception of
others to theirs. The Great Rays would establish the total lack
of value of the special relationship if they were seen. For in seeing
them, the body would disappear because its value would be lost.
And so your whole investment in seeing it would be withdrawn from it.
You see the world you value.
62
On this side of the bridge, you see the world of separate bodies seeking
to join each other in separate unions and to become one by losing. When
two individuals seek to become one, they are trying to decrease
their magnitude. Each would deny his power, for the separate
union excludes the universe. Far more is left outside than would be
taken in. For God is left without and nothing taken in. If one
such union were made in perfect faith, the universe would enter
into it. Yet the special relationship which the ego seeks does not
include even one whole individual. For the ego wants but part of
him and sees only this part and nothing else.
63
Across the bridge, it is so different! For a time the body is still seen
but not exclusively, as it is seen here. For the little spark which
holds the Great Rays within it is also visible, and this spark
cannot be limited long to littleness. Once you have crossed the bridge,
the value of the body is so diminished in your sight that you will see
no need at all to magnify it. For you will realize that the only value
which the body has is to enable you to bring your brothers to the bridge
with you and to be released together there.
64
The bridge itself is nothing more than a transition in your perspective
of reality. On this side, everything you see is grossly distorted and
completely out of perspective. What is little and insignificant is
magnified, and what is strong and powerful cut down to littleness. In
the transition there is a period of confusion in which a sense of actual
disorientation seems to occur. But fear it not, for it means nothing
more than that you have been willing to let go your hold on the
distorted frame of reference which seemed to hold your world together.
This frame of reference is built around the special relationship. Without
this illusion, there can be no meaning you would still seek
here.
65
Fear not that you will be abruptly lifted up and hurled into reality.
Time is kind, and if you use it for reality, it will keep gentle
pace with you in your transition. The urgency is only in dislodging your
minds from their fixed position here. This will not leave you homeless
and without a frame of reference. The period of disorientation which
precedes the actual transition is far shorter than the time it took to
fix your minds so firmly on illusions. Delay will hurt you now more than
before only because you realize it is delay and that escape from
pain is really possible. Find hope and comfort rather than despair in
this: You could no longer find even the illusion of love in any
special relationship here. For you are no longer wholly insane, and you
would recognize the guilt of self-betrayal for what it is.
66
Nothing you seek to strengthen in the special relationship is really
part of you. And you cannot keep part of the thought system which taught
you it was real and understand the Thought that really knows
what you are. You have allowed the Thought of your reality to
enter your minds, and because you invited it, it will abide with
you. Your love for it will not allow you to betray yourself, and you
could not enter into a relationship where it could not go with you, for
you would not be apart from it.
67
Be glad you have escaped the mockery of salvation which the ego offered
you and look not back with longing on the travesty it made of your
relationships. Now no one need suffer, for you have come too far to
yield to the illusion of the beauty and holiness of guilt. Only the
wholly insane could look on death and suffering, sickness and despair
and see it thus. What guilt has wrought is ugly, fearful, and very
dangerous. See no illusion of truth and beauty there. And be you
thankful that there is a place where truth and beauty wait for
you. Go on to meet them gladly, and learn how much awaits you for the
simple willingness to give up nothing because it is nothing.
68
The new perspective you will gain from crossing over will be the
understanding of where Heaven is. From here it seems to be
outside and across the bridge. Yet as you cross to join it, it will join
with you and become one with you. And you will think in glad
astonishment that for all this you gave up nothing! The joy of
Heaven, which has no limit, is increased with each light that returns to
take its rightful place within it. Wait no longer, for the love of God
and you. And may the holy instant speed you on the way, as it
will surely do if you but let it come to you.
69
The Holy Spirit asks only this little help of you. Whenever your
thoughts wander to a special relationship which still attracts you,
enter with Him into a holy instant and there let Him release you. He
needs only your willingness to share His perspective to give it
to you completely. And your willingness need not be complete because His
is perfect. It is His task to atone for your unwillingness by His
perfect faith, and it is His faith you share with Him there. Out of your
recognition of your unwillingness for your release, His perfect
willingness is given you. Call upon Him, for Heaven is at His call. And
let Him call on Heaven for you.
70
It is impossible to let the past go without relinquishing the special
relationship. For the special relationship is an attempt to reenact
the past and change it. Imagined slights, remembered pain, past
disappointments, perceived injustices, and deprivations all enter into
the special relationship, which becomes a way in which you seek to
restore your wounded self-esteem. What basis would you have for choosing
a special partner without the past? Every such choice is made
because of something "evil" in the past to which you cling and for which
must someone else atone.
71
The special relationship takes vengeance on the past. By seeking
to remove suffering in the past, it overlooks the present in its
preoccupation with the past and its total commitment to it. No
special relationship is experienced in the present. Shades of the past
envelop it and make it what it is. It has no meaning in the
present, and if it means nothing now, it cannot have any real
meaning at all. How can you change the past except in fantasy?
And who can give you what you think the past deprived you of? The past
is nothing. Do not seek to lay the blame for deprivation on it, for the
past is gone. You cannot really not let go what has already
gone. It must be, therefore, that you are maintaining the illusion that
it has not gone because you think it serves some purpose that
you want fulfilled. And it must also be that this purpose could
not be fulfilled in the present, but only in the past.
72
Do not underestimate the intensity of the ego's drive for vengeance on
the past. It is completely savage and completely insane. For the ego
remembers everything that you have done which offended it and seeks
retribution of you. The fantasies it brings to the special
relationships it chooses in which to act out its hate are fantasies of your
destruction. For the ego holds the past against you, and in your
escape from the past, it sees itself deprived of the vengeance it
believes that you so justly merit. Yet without your alliance in your own
destruction, the ego could not hold you to the past.
73
In the special relationship, you are allowing your destruction
to be. That this is insane is obvious. But what is less obvious to you
is that the present is useless to you while you pursue the ego's
goal as its ally. The past is gone; seek not to preserve it in the
special relationship, which binds you to it and would teach you that
salvation is past and that you must return to the past to find
salvation. There is no fantasy which does not contain the dream of
retribution for the past. Would you act out the dream or let it go?
74
In the special relationship, it does not seem to be an acting
out of vengeance which you seek. And even when the hatred and the
savagery break briefly through into awareness, the illusion of love is
not profoundly shaken. Yet the one thing which the ego never allows to
reach awareness is that the special relationship is the acting out of
vengeance on yourself. But what else could it be? In
seeking the special relationship, you look not for glory in yourself.
You have denied that it is there, and the relationship becomes
your substitute for it. And vengeance becomes your substitute
for Atonement, and the escape from vengeance becomes your loss.
75
Against the ego's insane notion of salvation, the Holy Spirit gently
lays the holy instant. We said before that the Holy Spirit must teach
through comparisons and uses opposites to point to truth. The holy
instant is the opposite of the ego's fixed belief in salvation
through vengeance for the past. In the holy instant, it is accepted that
the past is gone, and with its passing the drive for vengeance has been
uprooted and has disappeared. The stillness and the peace of now
enfolds you in perfect gentleness. Everything is gone except the truth.
76
For a time you may attempt to bring illusions into the holy instant to
hinder your full awareness of the complete difference in all
respects between your experience of truth and illusion. Yet you will not
attempt this long. In the holy instant, the power of the Holy Spirit
will prevail because you joined Him. The illusions you bring
with you will weaken the experience of Him for a while and will prevent
you from keeping the experience in your mind. Yet the holy instant is
eternal, and your illusions of time will not prevent the timeless from
being what it is nor you from experiencing it as it is.
77
What God has given you is truly given and will be truly received.
For God's gifts have no reality apart from your receiving them.
Your receiving completes His giving. You will receive because
it is His Will to give. He gave the holy instant to be given you, and it
is impossible that you receive it not, because He gave it. When
He willed that His Son be free, His Son was free. In the holy
instant is His reminder that His Son will always be exactly as
he was created. And everything the Holy Spirit teaches you is to remind
you that you have received what God has given you.
78
There is nothing you can hold against reality. All that must be forgiven
are the illusions you have held against your brothers. Their reality has
no past, and only illusions can be forgiven. God holds nothing
against anyone, for He is incapable of illusions of any kind.
Release your brothers from the slavery of their illusions by forgiving
them for the illusions which you perceive in them. Thus will you
learn that you have been forgiven, for it is you who
offered them illusions. In the holy instant, this is done for you in
time to bring to you the true condition of Heaven.
79
Remember that you always choose between truth and illusion—between the real
Atonement which would heal and the ego's "atonement" which would
destroy. The power of God and all His Love, without limit, will support
you as you seek only your place in the plan of Atonement arising from
His Love. Be an ally of God and not the ego in seeking how Atonement can
come to you. His help suffices, for His Messenger understands how to
restore the Kingdom to you and to place all your investment in
salvation in your relationship with Him.
80
Seek and find His message in the holy instant, where all
illusions are forgiven. From there the miracle extends to bless everyone
and to resolve all problems, be they perceived as great or small,
possible or impossible. There is nothing that will not give place to Him
and to His majesty. To join in close relationship with Him is to accept
relationships as real and through their reality to give over all
illusions for the reality of your relationship with God. Praise be to
your relationship with Him and to no other. The truth lies here and
nowhere else. You choose this or nothing.
81 Forgive
us our illusions, Father, and help us to accept our true relationship
with You in which there are no illusions and where none can ever
enter. Our holiness is Yours. What can there be in us that needs
forgiveness when Yours is perfect? The sleep of forgetfulness is only
the unwillingness to remember Your forgiveness and Your Love. Let us
not wander into temptation, for the temptation of the Son of God is
not Your Will. And let us receive only what you have given and accept
but this into the minds which You created and which You love.
Amen.
1
The betrayal of the Son of God lies only in illusions, and all his
"sins" are but his own imagining. His reality is forever sinless. He
need not be forgiven, but awakened. In his dreams he has betrayed
himself, his brothers, and his God. Yet what is done in dreams has not
been really done. It is impossible to convince the dreamer that this is
so, for dreams are what they are because of their illusion of
reality. Only in waking is the full release from them, for only then
does it become perfectly apparent that they had no effect on reality at
all and did not change it. Fantasies change reality. That is their
purpose. They cannot do so in reality, but they can do so in the
mind that would have reality different.
2
It is, then, only your wish to change reality that is fearful, because
by your wish you think you have accomplished what you wish. This strange
position in a sense acknowledges your power. Yet by distorting it and
devoting it to "evil," it also makes it unreal. You cannot be faithful
to two masters who ask of you conflicting things. What you use in
fantasy, you deny to truth. Yet what you give to truth to use for you is
safe from fantasy.
3
When you maintain that there must be order of difficulty in miracles,
all you mean is that there are some things you would withhold from
truth. You believe that truth cannot deal with them only because you
would keep them from truth. Very simply, your lack of faith in the power
that heals all pain arises from your wish to retain some aspects of
reality for fantasy. If you but realized what this must do to your
appreciation of the whole! What you reserve unto yourself, you take away
from Him Who would release you. Unless you give it back, it is
inevitable that your perspective on reality be warped and uncorrected.
4
As long as you would have it so, so long will the illusion of order of
difficulty in miracles remain with you. For you have established this
order in reality by giving some of it to one teacher and some to
another. And so you learn to deal with part of truth in one way and in
another way the other part. To fragment truth is to destroy it by
rendering it meaningless. Orders of reality is a perspective without
understanding, a frame of reference for reality to which it cannot
really be compared at all.
5
Think you that you can bring truth to fantasy and learn what truth means
from the perspective of illusions? Truth has no meaning in
illusion. The frame of reference for its meaning must be itself. When
you try to bring truth to illusions, you are trying to make illusions real
and keep them by justifying your belief in them. But to give illusions
to truth is to enable truth to teach that the illusions are unreal and
thus enable you to escape from them. Reserve not one idea aside from
truth, or you establish orders of reality which must imprison you. There
is no order in reality because everything there is true.
6
Be willing, then, to give all you have held outside the truth to Him who
knows the truth and in Whom all is brought to truth. [Salvation from
separation will be complete or will be not at all.] Be not concerned
with anything except your willingness to have this be accomplished. He
will accomplish it; not you. But forget not this: When you become
disturbed and lose your peace of mind because another is attempting to
solve his problems through fantasy, you are refusing to forgive yourself
for just this same attempt. And you are holding both of you away from
truth and from salvation. As you forgive him, you restore to truth what
was denied by both of you. And you will see forgiveness where you have
given it.
7
Can you imagine how beautiful those you forgive will look to you? In no
fantasy have you ever seen anything so lovely. Nothing you see here,
sleeping or waking, comes near to such loveliness. And nothing will you
value like unto this nor hold so dear. Nothing that you remember that
made your heart seem to sing with joy has ever brought you even a little
part of the happiness this sight will bring you. For you will see the
Son of God. You will behold the beauty which the Holy Spirit loves to
look upon and which He thanks the Father for. He was created to see this
for you until you learn to see it for yourself. And all His teaching
leads to seeing it and giving thanks with Him.
8
This loveliness is not a fantasy. It is the real world, bright and clean
and new with everything sparkling under the open sun. Nothing is hidden
here, for everything has been forgiven, and there are no fantasies to
hide the truth. The bridge between that world and this is so little and
so easy to cross that you could not believe it is the meeting place of
worlds so different. Yet this little bridge is the strongest thing that
touches on this world at all. This little step, so small it has escaped
your notice, is a stride through time into eternity and beyond all
ugliness into beauty that will enchant you and will never cease to cause
you wonderment at its perfection.
9
This step, the smallest ever taken by anything, is still the greatest
accomplishment of all in God's plan of Atonement. All else is learned,
but this is given, complete and wholly perfect. No one but Him Who
planned salvation could complete it thus. The real world, in its
loveliness, you learn to reach. Fantasies are all undone, and no one and
nothing remains still bound by them, and by your own forgiveness, you
are free to see. Yet what you see is only what you have made, with the
blessing of your forgiveness on it. And with this final blessing of
God's Son upon himself, the real perception, born of the new perspective
he has learned, has served its purpose.
10
The stars will disappear in light, and the sun which opened up the world
to beauty will vanish. Perception will be meaningless when it has been
perfected, for everything that has been used for learning will have no
function. Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no
differences, no variations which made perception possible will occur.
The perception of the real world will be so short that you will barely
have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly
when you have reached the real world and have been made ready for Him.
11
The real world is attained simply by the complete forgiveness of the
old, the world you see without forgiveness. The Great Transformer of
perception will undertake with you the careful searching of the mind
that made this world and uncover to you the seeming reasons for your
making it. In the light of the real reason which He brings, as you
follow Him, He will show you that there is no reason here at all. Each
spot His reason touches grows alive with beauty, and what seemed ugly in
the darkness of your lack of reason is suddenly released to loveliness.
Not even what the Son of God made in insanity could be without a hidden
spark of beauty which gentleness could release.
12
All this beauty will rise to bless your sight as you look upon the world
with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally transforms vision and
lets you see the real world reaching quietly and gently across chaos and
removing all illusions which had twisted your perception and fixed it on
the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder and a blade of
grass a sign of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of
God is lifted easily into his home. And there he knows that he has
always rested there in peace. Even salvation will become a dream and
vanish from his mind. For salvation is the end of dreams and with the
closing of the dream will have no meaning. Who awake in Heaven could
dream that there could ever be need of salvation?
13
How much do you want salvation? It will give you the real world,
trembling with readiness to be given you. The eagerness of the Holy
Spirit to give you this is so intense He would not wait, although He
waits in patience. Meet His patience with your impatience at delay in
meeting Him. Go out in gladness to meet with your Redeemer and walk with
him in trust out of this world and into the real world of beauty and
forgiveness.
14
To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you
gave in the past and those that were given you. All the rest must be
forgotten. Forgiveness is a selective remembering, based not on your
selection. For the shadow figures you would make immortal are "enemies"
of reality. Be willing to forgive the Son of God for what he did not do.
The shadow figures are the witnesses you bring with you to demonstrate
he did what he did not. Because you brought them, you will hear them.
And you who kept them by your own selection do not understand how they
came into your minds and what their purpose is.
15
They represent the evil that you think was done to you. You
bring them with you only that you may return evil for evil, hoping that
their witness will enable you to think guiltily of another and not harm
yourself. They speak so clearly for the separation that no one not
obsessed with keeping separation could hear them. They offer you the
"reasons" why you should enter into unholy alliances which support the
ego's goals and make your relationships the witness to its power. It is
these shadow figures which would make the ego holy in your sight and
teach you what you do to keep it safe is really love.
16
The shadow figures always speak for vengeance, and all relationships
into which they enter are totally insane. Without exception, these
relationships have as their purpose the exclusion of the truth about the
other and of yourself. This is why you see in both what is not there and
make of both the slaves of vengeance. And why whatever reminds you of
your past grievances, no matter how distorted the associations by which
you arrive at the remembrance may be, attracts you and seems to you to
go by the name of love. And finally why all such relationships become
the attempt at union through the body, for only bodies can be seen as
means for vengeance. That bodies are central to all unholy relationships
is evident. Your own experience has taught you this. But what you do not
realize are all the reasons which go to make the relationship unholy.
For unholiness seeks to reinforce itself, as holiness does, by gathering
to itself what it perceives as like itself.
17
In the unholy relationship, it is not the body of the other with which
union is attempted but the bodies of those who are not there. Even the
body of the other, already a severely limited perception of him, is not
the central focus as it is or in entirety. What can be used for
fantasies of vengeance and what can be most readily associated with
those on whom vengeance is really sought are centered on and separated
off as being the only parts of value. Every step taken in the making,
the maintaining, and the breaking off of the unholy relationship is a
move toward further fragmentation and unreality. The shadow figures
enter more and more, and the one in whom they seem to be decreases in
importance.
18
Time is indeed unkind to the unholy relationship. For time is
cruel in the ego's hands, as it is kind when used for gentleness. The
attraction of the unholy relationship begins to fade and to be
questioned almost at once. Once it is formed, doubt must enter in
because its purpose is impossible. The only such relationships which
retain the fantasies that center on them are those which have been
dreamed of but have not been made at all. Where no reality has entered,
there is nothing to intrude upon the dream of happiness. Yet consider
what this means—the more reality that enters into the unholy
relationship, the less satisfying it becomes. And the more the fantasies
can encompass, the greater the satisfaction seems to be.
19
The "ideal" of the unholy relationship thus becomes one in which the
reality of the other does not enter at all to "spoil" the dream. And the
less the other really brings to it, the "better" it becomes. Thus, the
attempt at union becomes a way of excluding even the one with whom the
union was sought. For it was formed to get him out of it and join with
fantasies in uninterrupted "bliss." How can the Holy Spirit bring His
interpretation of the body as a means of communication into
relationships whose only purpose is separation from reality? What
forgiveness is enables Him to do so.
20
If all but loving thoughts has been forgotten, what remains is eternal.
And the transformed past is made like the present. No longer does the
past conflict with now. This continuity extends the present by
increasing its reality and its value in your perception of it. In these
loving thoughts is the spark of beauty hidden in the ugliness of the
unholy relationship in which the hatred is remembered, yet there to come
alive as the relationship is given to Him Who gives it life and beauty.
That is why Atonement centers on the past, which is the source of
separation, and where it must be undone. For separation must be
corrected where it was made. The ego seeks to "resolve" its problems,
not at their source, but where they were not made. And thus it seeks to
guarantee there will be no solution.
21
The Holy Spirit wills only to make His resolutions complete and perfect,
and so He seeks and finds the source of problems where it is and there
undoes it. And with each step in His undoing is the separation more and
more undone and union brought closer. He is not at all confused by any
"reasons" for separation. All He perceives in separation is that it must
be undone. Let Him uncover the hidden spark of beauty in your
relationships and show it to you. Its loveliness will so attract
you that you will be unwilling ever to lose the sight of it again. And
you will let it transform the relationship so you can see it more and
more. For you will want it more and more and become increasingly
unwilling to let it be hidden from you. And you will learn to seek for
and establish conditions in which this beauty can be seen.
22
All this you will do gladly if you but let Him hold the spark before you
to light your way and make it clear to you. God's Son is one. Whom God
has joined as one, the ego cannot break apart. The spark of holiness
must be safe, however hidden it may be, in every relationship. For the
Creator of the one relationship has left no part of it without Himself.
23
This is the only part of the relationship the Holy Spirit sees because
He knows that only this is true. You have made the relationship unreal
and therefore unholy by seeing it where it is not and as it is not. Give
the past to Him Who can change your mind about it for you. But first be
sure you fully realize what you have made the past to represent and why.
24
In brief, the past is now your justification for entering into a
continuing, unholy alliance with the ego against the present. For the
present is forgiveness. Therefore, the relationships which the
unholy alliance dictates are not perceived nor felt as now. Yet
the frame of reference to which the present is referred for meaning is
an illusion of the past in which those elements which fit the
purpose of the unholy alliance are retained and all the rest let go. And
what is thus let go is all the truth the past could ever offer to the
present as witnesses for its reality, while what is kept but witnesses
to the reality of dreams.
25
It is still up to you to choose to be willing to join with truth or
illusion. But remember that to choose one is to let the other go. Which
one you choose, you will endow with beauty and reality because the
choice depends on which you value more. The spark of beauty or the veil
of ugliness, the real world or the world of guilt and fear, truth or
illusion, freedom or slavery—it is all the same. For you can never
choose except between God and the ego. Thought systems are but true or
false, and all their attributes come simply from what they are. Only the
Thoughts of God are true. And all that follows from them comes from what
they are and is as true as is the holy Source from which they came.
26
My holy brothers, I would enter into all your relationships and step
between you and your fantasies. Let my relationship to you be
real to you, and let me bring reality to your perception of your
brothers. They were not created to enable you to hurt yourselves through
them. They were created to create with you. This is the truth that I
would interpose between you and your goal of madness. Be not separate
from me, and let not the holy purpose of Atonement be lost to you in
dreams of vengeance. Relationships in which such dreams are cherished
have excluded me. Let me enter in the Name of God and bring you peace
that you may offer peace to me.
27
God established His relationship with you to make you happy, and nothing
you do which does not share His purpose can be real. The purpose God
ascribed to anything is its only function. Because of His reason for
creating His relationship with you, the function of relationships became
forever "to make happy." And nothing else. To fulfill this
function, you relate to your creations as God to His. For nothing God
created is apart from happiness, and nothing God created but would
extend happiness as its Creator did. Whatever fulfills this function not
cannot be real.
28
In this world it is impossible to create, yet it is possible to make
happy. We have said repeatedly that the Holy Spirit would not deprive
you of your special relationships but would transform them. And by that
all that is meant is that He will restore to them the function given
them by God. The function you have given them is clearly not to make
happy. But the holy relationship shares God's purpose, rather than
aiming to make a substitute for it. Every special relationship which you
have made is a substitute for God's Will and glorifies yours instead of
His because of the delusion that they are different.
29
You have made very real relationships even in this world which you do
not recognize simply because you have raised their substitutes to such
predominance that when truth calls to you, as it does constantly, you
answer with a substitute. Every special relationship which you have ever
undertaken has as its fundamental purpose the aim of occupying your
minds so completely that you will not hear the call of truth. In a sense
the special relationship was the ego's answer to the creation of the
Holy Spirit, Who was God's answer to the separation. For although the
ego did not understand what had been created, it was aware of threat.
30
The whole defense system which the ego evolved to protect the separation
from the Holy Spirit was in response to the gift with which God blessed
it and by His blessing enabled it to be healed. This blessing holds
within itself the truth about everything. And the truth is that the Holy
Spirit is in close relationship with you because in Him is your
relationship with God restored to you. The relationship with Him has
never been broken because the Holy Spirit has not been separate from
anyone since the separation. And through Him have all your holy
relationships been carefully preserved to serve God's purpose for you.
31
The ego is hyperalert to threat, and the part of your mind into which
the ego was accepted is very anxious to preserve its reason as it sees
it. It does not realize that it is totally insane. And you must realize
just what this means if you would be restored to sanity. The insane
protect their thought systems, but they do so insanely. And all their
defenses are as insane as what they are supposed to protect. The
separation has nothing in it, no part, no "reason," and no attribute
that is not insane. And its "protection" is part of it, as
insane as the whole. The special relationship, which is its chief
defense, must therefore be insane.
32
You have but little difficulty now in realizing that the thought system
which the special relationship protects is but a system of delusions.
You recognize, at least in general terms, that the ego is insane. Yet
the special relationship still seems to you somehow to be "different."
Yet we have looked at it far closer than at many other aspects of the
ego's thought system which you have been more willing to let go. While
this one remains, you will not let the others go. For this one is not
different. Retain this one, and you have retained the whole.
33
It is essential to realize that all defenses do what they would
defend. The underlying basis for their effectiveness is that they
offer what they defend. What they defend is placed in them for
safekeeping, and as they operate, they bring it to you. Every defense
operates by giving gifts, and the gift is always a miniature of the
thought system the defense protects, set in a golden frame. The frame is
very elaborate, all set with jewels and deeply carved and polished. Its
purpose is to be of value in itself and to divert your attention
from what it encloses. But the frame without the picture you cannot
have. Defenses operate to make you think you can.
34
The special relationship has the most imposing and deceptive frame of
all the defenses the ego uses. Its thought system is offered here,
surrounded by a frame so heavy and so elaborate that the picture is
almost obliterated by its imposing structure. Into the frame are woven
all sorts of fanciful and fragmented illusions of love, set with dreams
of sacrifice and self-aggrandizement and interlaced with gilded threads
of self-destruction. The glitter of blood shines like rubies, and the
tears are faceted like diamonds and gleam in the dim light in which the
offering is made.
35
Look at the picture. Do not let the frame distract you. This
gift is given you for your damnation, and if you take it, you will
believe that you are damned. You cannot have the frame without
the picture. What you value is the frame, for there you see no conflict.
Yet the frame is only the wrapping for the gift of conflict. The frame
is not the gift. Be not deceived by the most superficial aspects
of this thought system, for these aspects enclose the whole, complete in
every aspect. Death lies in this glittering gift. Let not your gaze
dwell on the hypnotic gleaming of the frame. Look at the picture,
and realize that death is offered you.
36
That is why the holy instant is so important in the defense of truth.
The truth itself needs no defense, but you do need
defense against your own acceptance of the gift of death. When you who
are truth accept an idea so dangerous to truth, you threaten truth with
destruction. And your defense must now be undertaken to keep truth
whole. The power of Heaven, the love of God, the tears of Christ, and
the joy of His eternal Spirit are marshaled to defend you from your own
attack. For you attack Them, being part of Them, and They must save you,
for They love Themselves.
37
The holy instant is a miniature of Heaven, sent you from Heaven.
It is a picture, too, set in a frame. Yet if you accept this gift, you
will not see the frame at all because the gift can only be accepted
through your willingness to focus all your attention on the picture.
The holy instant is a miniature of eternity. It is a picture of
timelessness, set in a frame of time. If you focus on the picture, you
will realize that it was only the frame that made you think it was
a picture. Without the frame, the picture is seen as what it represents.
For as the whole thought system of the ego lies in its gifts, so the
whole of Heaven lies in this instant, borrowed from eternity and set in
time for you.
38
Two gifts are offered you. Each is complete and cannot be partially
accepted. Each is a picture of all that you can have, seen very
differently. You cannot compare their value by comparing a picture to a
frame. It must be the pictures only that you compare, or the comparison
is wholly without meaning. Remember that it is the picture that is the
gift. And only on this basis are you really free to choose. Look at the
pictures. Both of them. One is a tiny picture, hard to see at
all beneath the heavy shadows of its enormous and disproportionate
enclosure. The other is lightly framed and hung in light, lovely to look
upon for what it is.
39
You who have tried so hard and are still trying to fit the better
picture into the wrong frame and so combine what cannot be combined,
accept this and be glad: these pictures are each framed perfectly for
what they represent. One is framed to be out of focus and not seen. The
other is framed for perfect clarity. The picture of darkness and of
death grows less convincing as you search it out amid its wrappings. As
each senseless stone which seems to shine in darkness from the frame is
exposed to light, it becomes dull and lifeless and ceases to distract
you from the picture. And finally you look upon the picture itself,
seeing at last that, unprotected by the frame, it has no meaning.
40
The other picture is lightly framed, for time cannot contain eternity.
There is no distraction here. The picture of Heaven and eternity grows
more convincing as you look at it. And now by real comparison a
transformation of both pictures can at last occur. And each is given its
rightful place, when both are seen in relation to each other. The dark
picture brought to light is not perceived as fearful, but the fact that
it is just a picture is brought home at last. And what you see
there, you will recognize as what it is—a picture of what you thought
was real and nothing more. For beyond this picture, you will see
nothing.
41
The picture of light, in clear cut and unmistakable contrast, is
transformed into what lies beyond the picture. As you look on this, you
realize that it is not a picture but a reality. This is
no figured representation of a thought system, but the Thought Itself.
What it represents is there. The frame fades gently, and God
rises to your remembrance, offering you the whole of creation in
exchange for your little picture, wholly without value and entirely
deprived of meaning.
42
As God ascends into His rightful place and you to yours, you will
experience again the meaning of relationship and know it to be
true. Let us ascend in peace together to the Father by giving Him
ascendance in our minds. We will gain everything by giving Him
the power and the glory and keeping no illusions of where they are. They
are in us through His ascendance. What He has given is His.
It shines in every part of Him as in the whole. The whole reality of
your relationship with Him lies in our relationship to one
another. The holy instant shines alike on all relationships, for in it
they are one. For here is only healing, already complete
and perfect. For here is God, and where He is, only the perfect and
complete can be.
43
The holy relationship is the expression of the holy instant in living in
this world. Like everything about salvation, the holy instant is a
practical device, witnessed to by its results. The holy instant never
fails. The experience of it is always felt. Yet without expression, it
is not remembered. The holy relationship is a constant reminder of the
experience in which the relationship became what it is. And as the
unholy relationship is a continuing hymn of hate in praise of its maker,
so is the holy relationship a happy song of praise to the Redeemer of
relationships.
44
The holy relationship, a major step toward the perception of the real
world, is learned. It is the old unholy relationship transformed and
seen anew. The holy relationship is a phenomenal teaching
accomplishment. In all its aspects, as it begins, develops, and becomes
accomplished, it represents the reversal of the unholy relationship. Be
comforted in this—the only difficult phase is the beginning. For here,
the goal of the relationship is abruptly shifted to the exact opposite
of what it was. This is the first result of offering the relationship to
the Holy Spirit to use for His purposes.
45
This invitation is accepted immediately, and the Holy Spirit wastes no
time in introducing the practical results of asking Him to enter. At
once His goal replaces yours. This is accomplished very rapidly, but it
makes the relationship seem disturbed, disjunctive, and even quite
distressing. The reason is quite clear. For the relationship as it is
is out of line with its own goal, and clearly unsuited to the purpose
which has been accepted for it. In its unholy condition, your
goal was all that seemed to give it meaning. Now it seems to make no
sense. Many relationships have been broken off at this point, and the
pursuit of the old goal reestablished in another relationship. For once
the unholy relationship has accepted the goal of holiness, it can never
again be what it was.
46
The temptation of the ego becomes extremely intense with this shift in
goals. For the relationship has not as yet been changed sufficiently to
make its former goal completely without attraction, and its structure is
"threatened" by the recognition of its inappropriateness for meeting its
new purpose. The conflict between the goal and the structure of the
relationship is so apparent that they cannot coexist. Yet now the goal
will not be changed. Set firmly in the unholy relationship, there is no
course except to change the relationship to fit the goal. Until this
happy solution is seen and accepted as the only way out of the conflict,
the relationship seems to be severely strained.
47
It would not be kinder to shift the goal more slowly, for the contrast
would be obscured and the ego given time to reinterpret each slow step
according to its liking. Only a radical shift in purpose could induce a
complete change of mind about what the whole relationship is for.
As this change develops and is finally accomplished, it grows
increasingly beneficent and joyous. But at the beginning, the situation
is experienced as very precarious. A relationship undertaken by two
individuals for their unholy purposes suddenly has holiness for
its goal. As these two contemplate their relationship from the point of
view of this new purpose, they are inevitably appalled. Their perception
of the relationship may even become quite disorganized. And yet, the
former organization of their perception no longer serves the purpose
they have agreed to meet.
48
This is the time for faith. You let this goal be set for you.
That was an act of faith. Do not abandon faith, now that the rewards of
faith are being introduced. If you believed the Holy Spirit was there to
accept the relationship, why would you now not still believe that He is
there to purify what He has taken under His guidance? Have faith in each
other in what but seems to be a trying time. The goal is set.
And your relationship has sanity as its purpose. For now you find
yourselves in an insane relationship, recognized as such in the light of
its goal.
49
Now the ego counsels thus—substitute for this another relationship to
which your former goal was quite appropriate. You can escape from your
distress only by getting rid of each other. You need not part entirely
if you choose not to do so. But you must exclude major areas of fantasy
from each other to save your sanity. Hear not this now! Have faith in
Him Who answered you. He heard. Has He not been very explicit in His
answer? You are not now wholly insane. Can you deny that He has given
you a most explicit statement? Now He asks for faith a little longer,
even in bewilderment. For this will go, and you will see the
justification for your faith emerge to bring you shining conviction.
Abandon Him not now, nor each other. This relationship has been reborn
as holy.
50
Accept with gladness what you do not understand, and let it be explained
to you as you perceive its purpose work in it to make it holy. You will
find many opportunities to blame each other for the "failure" of your
relationship, for it will seem at times to have no purpose. A sense of
aimlessness will come to haunt you and to remind you of all the ways you
once sought for satisfaction and thought you found it. Forget not now
the misery you really found, and do not now breathe life into your
failing egos. For your relationship has not been disrupted. It has been
saved.
51
You are very new in the ways of salvation and think you have lost your
way. Your way is lost, but think not this is loss. In
your newness, remember that you have started again together. And
take each other's hand to walk together along a road far more familiar
than you now believe. Is it not certain that you will remember a goal
unchanged throughout eternity? For you have chosen but the goal of God
from which your true intent was never absent.
52
Throughout the Sonship is the song of freedom heard in joyous echo of
your choice. You have joined with many in the holy instant, and they
have joined with you. Think not your choice will leave you comfortless,
for God Himself has blessed your holy relationship. Join in His
blessing, and withhold not yours upon it. For all it needs now is
your blessing that you may see that in it rests salvation. Condemn
salvation not, for it has come to you. And welcome it together, for it
has come to join you together in a relationship in which all the Sonship
is together blessed.
53
You undertook together to invite the Holy Spirit into your relationship.
He could not have entered otherwise. Although you may have made many
mistakes since then, you have also made enormous efforts to help Him do
His work. And He has not been lacking in appreciation for all you have
done for Him. Nor does He see the mistakes at all. Have you been
similarly grateful to each other? Have you consistently appreciated the
good efforts and overlooked mistakes? Or has your appreciation flickered
and grown dim in what seemed to be the light of the mistakes? You are
now entering upon a campaign to blame each other for the discomfort of
the situation in which you find yourselves. And by this lack of thanks
and gratitude, you make yourselves unable to express the holy instant,
and thus you lose sight of it.
54
The experience of an instant, however compelling it may be, is easily
forgotten if you allow time to close over it. It must be kept shining
and gracious in your awareness of time but not concealed within it. The
instant remains. But where are you? To give thanks to each other is to
appreciate the holy instant and thus enable its results to be accepted
and shared. To attack each other is not to lose the instant but to make
it powerless in its effects. You have received the holy instant,
but you have established a condition in which you cannot use it. As a
result, you do not realize that it is with you still. And by cutting
yourself off from its expression, you have denied yourself its benefit.
You reinforce this every time you attack each other, for the attack must
blind you to yourself. And it is impossible to deny yourself and
recognize what has been given and received by you.
55
You stand together in the holy presence of truth itself. Here is the
goal, together with you. Think you not the goal itself will gladly
arrange the means for its accomplishment? It is just this same
discrepancy between the purpose that has been accepted and the means as
they stand now which seems to make you suffer, but which makes Heaven
glad. If Heaven were outside you, you could not share in its gladness.
Yet because it is within, the gladness, too, is yours. You are
joined in purpose, but remain still separate and divided on the means.
56
Yet the goal is fixed, firm, and unalterable, and the means will surely
fall in place because the goal is sure. And you will share the gladness
of the Sonship that it is so. As you begin to recognize and accept the
gifts you have so freely given to each other, you will also accept the
effects of the holy instant and use them to correct all your mistakes
and free you from their results. And learning this, you will have also
learned how to release all the Sonship and offer it in gladness and
thanksgiving to Him Who gave you your release, and Who would extend it
through you.
57
The practical application of the Holy Spirit's purpose is extremely
simple, but it is
unequivocal. In fact in order to be simple, it must be unequivocal. The
simple is merely what is easily understood, and for this it is apparent
that it must be clear.
The setting of the Holy Spirit's goal is general. Now He will work with
you to make it specific [for application is specific]. There are
certain very specific guidelines He provides for any situation, but
remember that you do not yet realize their universal application.
Therefore it is essential at this point to use them in each situation
separately, until you can more safely look beyond each
situation in an understanding far broader than you now possess.
58
In any situation in which you are uncertain, the first thing to
consider, very simply, is, "What do I want to come of this? What is it for?"
The clarification of the goal belongs at the beginning, for it
is this which will determine the outcome. In the ego's procedure, this
is reversed. The situation becomes the determiner of the
outcome, which can be anything. The reason for this disorganized
approach is evident. The ego does not know what it wants to
come of it. It is aware of what it does not want, but only
that. It has no positive goal at all.
59
Without a clear cut positive goal, set at the outset, the situation just
seems to happen and makes no sense until it has already
happened. Then you look back at it and try to piece together
what it must have meant. And you will be wrong. Not only is
your judgment in the past, but you have no idea what should
happen. No goal was set with which to bring the means in line. And now
the only judgment left to make is whether or not the ego likes it—is it
acceptable, or does it call for vengeance? The absence of a criterion
for outcome set in advance makes understanding doubtful and
evaluation impossible.
60
The value of deciding in advance what you want to happen is
simply that you will perceive the situation as a means to make
it happen. You will therefore make every effort to overlook what
interferes with the accomplishment of your objective and concentrate on
everything which helps you meet it. It is quite noticeable that this
approach has brought you closer to the Holy Spirit's sorting out of
truth and falsity. The true becomes what can be used to meet the goal.
The false becomes the useless from this point of view. The situation now
has meaning, but only because the goal has made it meaningful.
61
The goal of truth has further practical advantages. If the situation is
used for truth and sanity, its outcome must be peace. And this
is quite apart from what the outcome is. If peace is
the condition of truth and sanity and cannot be without them,
where peace is they must be. Truth comes of itself. If you
experience peace, it is because the truth has come to you, and you will
see the outcome truly, for deception cannot prevail against you. And you
will recognize the outcome because you are at peace. Here again,
you see the opposite of the ego's way of looking, for the ego believes
the situation brings the experience. The Holy Spirit knows that
the situation is as the goal determines it and is experienced according
to the goal.
62
The goal of truth requires faith. Faith is implicit in the acceptance of
the Holy Spirit's purpose, and this faith is all-inclusive. Where the
goal of truth is set, there faith must be. The Holy Spirit
sees the situation as a whole. The goal establishes the fact
that everyone involved in it will play his part in its accomplishment.
This is inevitable. No one will fail in anything. This seems to ask for
faith beyond you and beyond what you can give. Yet this is so only from
the viewpoint of the ego, for the ego believes in "solving" conflict
through fragmentation and does not perceive the situation as a
whole. Therefore, it seeks to split off segments of the situation and
deal with them separately, for it has faith in separation and
not in wholeness.
63
Confronted with any aspect of the situation which seems to be difficult,
the ego will attempt to take this aspect elsewhere and resolve it there.
And it will seem to be successful, except that this attempt conflicts
with unity and must obscure the goal of truth. And peace will
not be experienced except in fantasy. Truth has not come because faith
has been denied, being withheld from where it rightfully belonged. Thus
do you lose the understanding of the situation the goal of truth would
bring. For fantasy solutions bring but the illusion of experience, and
the illusion of peace is not the condition in which the truth can enter.
64
The substitutes for aspects of the situation are the witnesses to your
lack of faith. They demonstrate that you did not believe that the
situation and the problem were in the same place. The problem
was the lack of faith, and it is this you demonstrate when you
remove it from its source and place it elsewhere. As a result, you do
not see the problem. Had you not lacked the faith it could be
solved, the problem would be gone. And the situation would have been
meaningful to you because the interference in the way of understanding
would have been removed. To remove the problem elsewhere is to keep
it. For you remove yourself from it and make it unsolvable.
65
There is no problem in any situation that faith will not solve. There is
no shift in any aspect of the problem but will make solution impossible.
For if you shift part of the problem elsewhere, the meaning of the
problem must be lost, and the solution to the problem is inherent in its
meaning. Is it not possible that all your problems have been solved, but
you have removed yourself from the solution? Yet faith must be where
something has been done and where you see it done. A situation is a
relationship, being the joining of thoughts. If problems are perceived,
it is because the thoughts are judged to be in conflict. But if the goal
is truth, this is impossible. Some idea of bodies must have entered, for
minds cannot attack.
66
The thought of bodies is the sign of faithlessness, for bodies cannot
solve anything. And it is their intrusion on the relationship, an error
in your thoughts about the situation, which then becomes the
justification for your lack of faith. You will make this error, but be
not at all concerned with that. The error does not matter. Faithlessness
brought to faith will never interfere with truth. But faithlessness used
against truth will always destroy faith. If you lack faith, ask that it
be restored where it was lost and seek not to have it made up to you
elsewhere as if you had been unjustly deprived of it.
67
Only what you have not given can be lacking in any situation.
But remember this: the goal of holiness was set for your relationship
and not by you. You did not set it because holiness cannot be seen
except through faith, and your relationship was not holy because your
faith in one another was so limited and little. Your faith must grow to
meet the goal that has been set. The goal's reality will call this
forth, for you will see that peace and faith will not come separately.
What situation can you be in without faith and remain faithful to each
other?
68
Every situation in which you find yourself is but a means to meet the
purpose set for your relationship. See it as something else, and you are
faithless. Use not your faithlessness. Let it enter and look upon it
calmly, but do not use it. Faithlessness is the servant of illusion and
wholly faithful to its master. Use it and it will carry you straight to
illusions. Be tempted not by what it offers you. It interferes not with
the goal, but with the value of the goal to you. Accept not the illusion
of peace it offers, but look upon its offering and recognize it is
illusion.
69
The goal of illusion is as closely tied to faithlessness as faith to
truth. If you lack faith in anyone to fulfill, and perfectly, his part
in any situation dedicated in advance to truth, your dedication is
divided. And so you have been faithless to each other and used your
faithlessness against each other. No relationship is holy unless its
holiness goes with it everywhere. As holiness and faith go hand in hand,
so must its faith go everywhere with it. The goal's reality will call
forth and accomplish every miracle needed for its fulfillment. Nothing
too small or too enormous, too weak or too compelling, but will be
gently turned to its use and purpose. The universe will serve it gladly,
as it serves the universe. But do not interfere.
70
The power set in you in whom the Holy Spirit's goal has been established
is so far beyond your little conception of the infinite that you have no
idea how great the strength that goes with you. And you can use this
in perfect safety. Yet for all its might, so great it reaches past the
stars and to the universe that lies beyond them, your little
faithlessness can make it useless if you would use the faithlessness
instead.
71
Yet think on this, and learn the cause of faithlessness: You think you
hold against the other what he has done to you. But what you really
blame him for is what you did to him. It is not his
past but yours you hold against him. And you lack faith in him
because of what you were. Yet you are as innocent of what you
were as he is. What never was is causeless and is not there to interfere
with truth. There is no cause for faithlessness, but there is a
Cause for faith. That Cause has entered any situation which shares Its
purpose. The light of truth shines from the center of the situation and
touches everyone to whom the situation's purpose calls. It calls to
everyone. There is no situation which does not involve your whole
relationship in every aspect and complete in every part. You can leave
nothing of yourself outside it and keep the situation holy. For it
shares the purpose of your whole relationship and derives its meaning
from it.
72
Enter each situation with the faith that you give to each other, or you
are faithless to your own relationship. Your faith will call the others
to share your purpose, as this same purpose called forth the faith in
you. And you will see the means you once employed to lead you to
illusions transformed to means for truth. [Truth calls for faith, and
faith makes room for truth.] When the Holy Spirit changed the
purpose of your relationship by exchanging yours for His, the goal He
placed there was extended to every situation in which you enter or will
ever enter. And every situation was thus made free of the past, which
would have made it purposeless.
73
You call for faith because of Him Who walks with you in every situation.
You are no longer wholly insane, nor no longer alone. For loneliness in
God must be a dream. You whose relationship shares the Holy Spirit's
goal are set apart from loneliness because the truth has come. Its call
for faith is strong. Use not your faithlessness against it, for it calls
you to salvation and to peace.
74
The holy instant is nothing more than a special case or an extreme
example of what every situation is meant to be. The meaning which the
Holy Spirit's purpose has given it is also given to every situation. It
calls forth just the same suspension of faithlessness, withheld and left
unused, that faith might answer to the call of truth. The holy instant
is the shining example, the clear and unequivocal demonstration of the
meaning of every relationship and every situation, seen as a whole.
Faith has accepted every aspect of the situation, and faithlessness has
not forced any exclusion on it. It is a situation of perfect peace
simply because you have let it be what it is.
75
This simple courtesy is all the Holy Spirit asks of you. Let truth be
what it is. Do not intrude upon it, do not attack it, do not interrupt
its coming. Let it encompass every situation and bring you peace. Not
even faith is asked of you, for truth asks nothing. Let it enter, and it
will call forth and secure for you the faith you need for peace. But
rise you not against it, for against your opposition it cannot come.
76
Would you not want to make a holy instant of every situation? For such
is the gift of faith, freely given wherever faithlessness is laid aside
unused. And then the power of the Holy Spirit's purpose is free to use
instead. This power instantly transforms all situations into one sure
and continuous means for establishing His purpose and demonstrating its
reality. What has been demonstrated has called for faith and has been
given it. Now it becomes a fact from which faith can no longer be
withheld. The strain of refusing faith to truth is enormous and far
greater than you realize. But to answer truth with faith entails no
strain at all.
77
To you who have acknowledged the call of your Redeemer, the strain of
not responding to His call seems to be greater than before. This is not
so. Before, the strain was there but you attributed it to something
else, believing that the "something else" produced it. This was never
true. For what the "something else" produced was sorrow and depression,
sickness and pain, darkness and dim imaginings of terror, cold fantasies
of fear and fiery dreams of hell. And it was nothing but the intolerable
strain of refusing to give faith to truth and see its evident reality.
78
Such was the crucifixion of the Son of God. His faithlessness did this
to him. Think carefully before you let yourself use faithlessness
against him. For he is risen, and you have accepted the cause of his
awakening as yours. You have assumed your part in his redemption, and
you are now fully responsible to him. Fail him not now, for it has been
given you to realize what your lack of faith in him must mean to you.
His salvation is your only purpose. See only this in every
situation, and it will be a means for bringing only this.
79
When you accepted truth as the goal for your relationship, you became
givers of peace as surely as your Father gave peace to you. For the goal
of peace cannot be accepted apart from its conditions, and you had faith
in it, for no one accepts what he does not believe is real. Your purpose
has not changed and will not change, for you accepted what can never
change. And nothing that it needs to be forever changeless can you now
withhold from it. Your release is certain. Give as you have received.
And demonstrate that you have risen far beyond any situation that could
hold you back and keep you separate from Him Whose call you answered.
1
To substitute is to accept instead. If you would but consider exactly
what this entails, you would perceive at once how much at variance this
is with the goal the Holy Spirit has given you and would accomplish for
you. To substitute is to choose between, renouncing one in favor of the
other. For this special purpose, one is judged more valuable and the
other is replaced by him. The relationship in which the substitution
occurred is thus fragmented and its purpose split accordingly. To
fragment is to exclude, and substitution is the strongest defense the
ego has for separation.
2
The Holy Spirit never uses substitutes. Where the ego perceives one
person as a replacement for another, the Holy Spirit sees them joined
and indivisible. He does not judge between them, knowing they are one.
Being united, they are one because they are the same.
Substitution is clearly a process in which they are perceived as
different. One would unite; the other separate. Nothing can come between
what God has joined and what the Holy Spirit sees as one. But everything
seems to come between the fragmented relationships the ego
sponsors to destroy.
3
The one emotion in which substitution is impossible is love. Fear
involves substitution by definition, for it is love's replacement. Fear
is both a fragmented and a fragmenting emotion. It seems to take many
forms, and each seems to require a different form of acting out for
satisfaction. While this appears to introduce quite variable behavior, a
far more serious effect lies in the fragmented perception from which the
behavior stems. No one is seen complete. The body is emphasized, with
special emphasis on certain parts, and used as the standard for
comparison for either acceptance or rejection of suitability for acting
out a special form of fear.
4
You who believe that God is fear made but one substitution. It has taken
many forms because it was the substitution of illusion for truth, of
fragmentation for wholeness. It has become so splintered and subdivided
and divided again, over and over, that it is now almost impossible to
perceive it once was one and still is what it was. That one error, which
brought truth to illusion, infinity to time, and life to death, was all
you ever made. Your whole world rests upon it. Everything you see
reflects it, and every special relationship which you have ever made is
part of it.
5
You have expressed surprise at hearing how very different is reality
from what you see. You do not realize the magnitude of that one error.
It was so vast and so completely incredible that from it a world of
total unreality had to emerge. What else could come of it? Its
fragmented aspects are fearful enough, as you begin to look at them. But
nothing you have seen begins to show you the enormity of the original
error, which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into
meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and to force you to further
substitutions.
6
That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide
it and became the screen on which it was projected and drawn between you
and the truth. For truth extends inward, where the idea of loss is
meaningless and only increase is conceivable. Do you really think it
strange that a world in which everything is backwards and upside-down
arose from this? [It was inevitable.] For truth brought to this
could only remain within in quiet and take no part in all the mad
projection by which this world was made. Call it not sin but madness,
for such it was, and so it still remains. Invest it not with guilt, for
guilt implies it was accomplished in reality. And above all, be not afraid
of it. When you seem to see some twisted form of the original error rise
to frighten you, say only, "God is not fear, but love," and it will
disappear.
7
The truth will save you. It has not left you to go out into the
mad world and so depart from you. Inward is sanity; insanity is outside
you. You but believe it is the other way; that truth is outside and
error and guilt within. Your little senseless substitutions, touched
with insanity and swirling lightly off on a mad course like feathers
dancing insanely in the wind, have no substance. They fuse and merge and
separate in shifting and totally meaningless patterns which need not be
judged at all. To judge them individually is pointless. Their tiny
differences in form are no real differences at all. None of them
matters. That they have in common and nothing else. Yet what else is
necessary to make them all the same?
8
Let them all go, dancing in the wind, dipping and turning till they
disappear from sight, far, far outside you. And turn you to the stately
calm within, where in holy stillness dwells the living God you never
left and Who never left you. The Holy Spirit takes you gently by the
hand and retraces with you your mad journey outside yourself, leading
you gently back to the truth and safety within. He brings all your
insane projections and your wild substitutions which you have placed
outside you to the truth. Thus He reverses the course of insanity and
restores you to reason.
9
In your relationship, where He has taken charge of everything at your
request, He has set the course inward to the truth you share. In the mad
world outside you, nothing can be shared but only substituted, and
sharing and substituting have nothing in common in reality. Within
yourselves you love each other with a perfect love. Here is holy ground
in which no substitution can enter and where only the truth about each
other can abide. Here you are joined in God, as much together as you are
with Him. The original error has not entered here, nor ever will. Here
is the radiant truth to which the Holy Spirit has committed your
relationship. Let Him bring it here, where you would have it be.
Give Him but a little faith in each other, to help Him show you that no
substitute you made for Heaven can keep you from it. In you there is
no separation, and no substitute can keep you from each other. Your
reality was God's creation and has no substitute.
10
You are so firmly joined in truth that only God is there. And He would
never accept something else instead of you. He loves you both, equally
and as one. And as He loves you, so you are. You are not joined
together in illusions but in the Thought so holy and so perfect that
illusions cannot remain to darken the holy place in which you stand
together. God is with you, my brothers. Let us join in Him in peace and
gratitude and accept His gift as our most holy and perfect reality,
which we share in Him.
11
Heaven is restored to all the Sonship through your relationship, for in
it lies the Sonship, whole and beautiful, safe in your love. Heaven has
entered quietly, for all illusions have been gently brought unto the
truth in you and love has shined upon you, blessing your relationship
with truth. God and His whole creation have entered it together. How
lovely and how holy is your relationship, with the truth shining upon
it! Heaven beholds it and rejoices that you have let it come to you.
[And God Himself is glad that your relationship is as it was created.]
The universe within you stands with you, together. And Heaven looks with
love on what is joined in it, along with its Creator.
12
Whom God has called should hear no substitutes. Their call is but an
echo of the original error which shattered Heaven. And what became of
peace in those who heard? Return with me to Heaven, walking together out
of this world and through another to the loveliness and joy the other
holds within it. Would you still further weaken and break apart what is
already broken and hopeless? Is it here that you would look for
happiness? Or would you not prefer to heal what has been broken and join
in making whole what has been ravaged by separation and disease?
13
You have been called together to the most holy function that this world
contains. It is the only one which has no limits and reaches out to
every broken fragment of the Sonship with healing and uniting comfort.
This is offered you in your holy relationship. Accept it here, and you
will give as you have accepted. The peace of God is given you with the
glowing purpose in which you join. The holy light that brought you
together must extend, as you accepted it.
14
Does not a world that seems quite real arise in dreams? Yet think what
this world is. It is clearly not the world you saw before you slept.
Rather, it is a distortion of the world, planned solely around what you
would have preferred. Here, you are "free" to make over whatever seemed
to attack you and change it into a tribute to your ego, which was
outraged by the "attack." This would not be your wish unless you
saw yourself as one with the ego, which always looks upon itself and
therefore on you as under attack and highly vulnerable to it.
15
Dreams are chaotic because they are governed by your conflicting wishes,
and therefore they have no concern with what is true. They are the best
example you could have of how perception can be utilized to substitute
illusions for truth. You do not take them seriously on awaking because
the fact that reality is so outrageously violated in them becomes
apparent. Yet they are a way of looking at the world and changing it to
suit the ego better. They provide striking examples both of the ego's
inability to tolerate reality and your willingness to change reality on
its behalf.
16
You do not find the differences between what you see in sleep and on
awaking disturbing. You recognize that what you see on waking is blotted
out in dreams. Yet on awakening, you do not expect it to be gone. In
dreams you arrange everything. People become what you would have
them be, and what they do you order. No limit on substitution is laid
upon you. For a time, it seems as if the world were given you, to make
it what you will. You do not realize that you are attacking it, trying
to triumph over it and make it serve you.
17
Dreams are perceptual temper tantrums in which you literally scream, "I
want it thus!" And thus it seems to be. And yet the dream cannot
escape its origin. Anger and fear pervade it, and in an instant, the
illusion of satisfaction is invaded by the illusion of terror. For the
dream of your ability to control reality by substituting a world which
you prefer is terrifying. Your attempts to blot out reality are
very fearful, but this you are not willing to accept. And so you
substitute the fantasy that reality is fearful, not what you
would do to it. And thus is guilt made real.
18
Dreams show you that you have the power to make a world as you would
have it be, and that because you want it, you see it. And while you see
it, you do not doubt that it is real. Yet here is a world, clearly
within your mind, that seems to be outside. You do not respond
to it as though you made it, nor do you realize that the emotions which
the dream produces must come from you. It is the figures in the dream
and what they do that seem to make the dream. You do not realize that
you are making them act out for you, for if you did, the guilt would not
be theirs, and the illusion of satisfaction would be gone. In dreams
these features are not obscure. You seem to waken, and the dream is
gone. Yet what you fail to recognize is that what caused the dream has
not gone with it.
19
Your wish to make another world that is not real remains with
you. And what you seem to wake to is but another form of this same world
you see in dreams. All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and
your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. Their content
is the same. They are your protest against reality and your fixed and
insane idea that you can change it. In your waking dreams, the special
relationship [has a special place. It is the means by which you try to
make your sleeping dreams come true. From this you do
not awaken. The special relationship] is your determination to keep your
hold on unreality and to prevent yourself from waking. And while you see
more value in sleeping than in waking, you will not let go of it.
20
The Holy Spirit, ever practical in His wisdom, accepts your dreams and
uses them as means for waking. You would have used them to remain
asleep. We once said that the first change, before dreams disappear, is
that your dreams of fear are changed to happy dreams. That is what the
Holy Spirit does in your special relationship. He does not destroy it
nor snatch it away from you. [But He does use it differently, as a help
to make His purpose real to you.] Your special
relationship will remain, not as a source of pain and guilt, but as a
source of joy and freedom. It will not be for you alone, for therein lay
its misery. As its unholiness kept it a thing apart, its holiness will
become an offering to everyone.
21
Your special relationship will be a means for undoing guilt in everyone
blessed through your holy relationship. It will be a happy dream, and
one which you will share with all who come within your sight. Through
it, the blessing which the Holy Spirit has laid upon it will be
extended. Think not that He has forgotten anyone in the purpose He has
given you. And think not that He has forgotten you to whom He gave the
gift. He uses everyone who calls on Him as means for the salvation of
everyone. And He will waken everyone through you who offered your
relationship to Him. If you but recognized His gratitude! Or mine
through His! For we are joined as in one purpose, being of One Mind with
Him.
22
Let not the dream take hold to close your eyes. It is not strange that
dreams can make a world that is unreal. The wish to make it is
incredible. Your relationship has become one in which the wish has been
removed because its purpose has been changed from one of dreams to one
of truth. You are not sure of this because you think it may be this
that is the dream. You are so used to choosing between dreams you do not
see that you have made, at last, the choice between the truth and all
illusions.
23
Yet Heaven is sure. This is no dream. Its coming means that you have
chosen truth, and it has come because you have been willing to let your
special relationship meet its conditions. In your relationship, the Holy
Spirit has gently laid the real world—the world of happy dreams from
which awaking is so easy and so natural. For as your sleeping and your
waking dreams represent the same wishes in your mind, so do the real
world and the truth of Heaven join in the Will of God. The dream of
waking is easily transferred to its reality. For this dream comes from
your will joined with the Will of God. And what this Will would have
accomplished has never not been done.
24
You who have spent your lives in bringing truth to illusion, reality to
fantasy, have walked the way of dreams. For you have gone from waking to
sleeping and on and on to a yet deeper sleep. Each dream has led to
other dreams, and every fantasy which seemed to bring a light into the
darkness but made the darkness deeper. Your goal was darkness in which
no ray of light could enter. And you sought a blackness so complete that
you could hide from truth forever in complete insanity. What you forgot
was simply that God cannot destroy Himself. The light is in you.
Darkness can cover it but cannot put it out.
25
As the light comes nearer, you will rush to darkness, shrinking from the
truth, sometimes retreating to the lesser forms of fear and sometimes to
stark terror. But you will advance because your goal is the
advance from fear to truth. You know this. The goal which you
accepted is the goal of knowledge, for which you signified your
willingness. Fear seems to live in darkness, and when you are afraid,
you have stepped back. Let us then join quickly in an instant of light,
and it will be enough to remind you that your goal is light.
Truth has rushed to meet you since you called upon it.
26
If you knew Who walks beside you on this way which you have chosen, fear
would be impossible. You do not know because the journey into darkness
has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it. A little
flicker of your eyelids, closed so long, has not yet been sufficient to
give you confidence in yourselves, so long despised. You go toward love,
still hating it and terribly afraid of its judgment upon you. And you do
not realize that you are not afraid of love, but only of what you have
made of it. You are advancing to love's meaning and away from all
illusions in which you have surrounded it. When you retreat to the
illusion, your fear increases, for there is little doubt that what you
think it means is fearful. Yet what is that to us who travel
surely and very swiftly away from fear?
27
You who hold each other's hand also hold mine, for when you joined each
other you were not alone. Do you believe that I would leave you in the
darkness you agreed to leave with me? In your relationship is this
world's light. And fear must disappear before you now. Be tempted not to
snatch away the gift of faith you offered to each other. You will
succeed only in frightening yourselves. The gift is given forever, for
God Himself received it. You cannot take it back. You have accepted God.
The holiness of your relationship is established in Heaven. You do not
understand what you accepted, but remember that your understanding is
not necessary. All that was necessary was merely the wish to
understand. That wish was the desire to be holy. The will of God is
granted you. For you desire the only thing you ever had or ever were.
28
Each instant that we spend together will teach you that this goal is
possible and will strengthen your desire to reach it. And in your desire
lies its accomplishment. Your desire is now in complete accord with all
the power of the Holy Spirit's Will. No little, faltering footsteps that
you may take can separate your desire from His Will and from His
strength. I hold your hand as surely as you agreed to take each other's.
You will not separate, for I stand with you and walk with you in your
advance to truth. And where we go, we carry God with us.
29
In your relationship, you have joined with me in bringing Heaven to the
Son of God, who hid in darkness. You have been willing to bring the
darkness to light, and this willingness has given strength to everyone
who would remain in darkness. Those who would see will see. And
they will join with me in carrying their light into the darkness when
the darkness in them is offered to the light and is removed forever. My
need for you, joined with me in the holy light of your relationship, is
your need for salvation. Would I not give you what you gave to me? For
when you joined each other, you answered me.
30
You who are now the bringers of salvation have the function of bringing
light to darkness. The darkness in you has been brought to
light. Carry it back to darkness from the holy instant to which you
brought it. We are made whole in our desire to make whole. Let not time
worry you, for all the fear that you experience is really past. Time has
been readjusted to help us do together what your separate pasts would
hinder. You have gone past fear, for no two minds can join in the desire
for love without love's joining them.
31
Not one light in Heaven but goes with you. Not one ray that shines
forever in the Mind of God but shines on you. Heaven is joined with you
in your advance to Heaven. When such great light has joined with you to
give the little spark of your desire the power of God Himself, can you
remain in darkness? You are coming home together after a long and
meaningless journey which you undertook apart and which led nowhere. You
have found each other and will light each other's way. And from this
light will the Great Rays extend back into darkness and forward unto God
to shine away the past and so make room for His eternal Presence, in
which everything is radiant in the light.
32
The holy instant is the result of your determination to be holy. It is
the answer. The desire and the willingness to let it come
precedes its coming. You prepare your minds for it only to the extent of
recognizing that you want it above all else. It is not necessary that
you do more; indeed, it is necessary that you realize that you cannot do
more. Do not attempt to give the Holy Spirit what He does not ask, or
you will add the ego unto Him and confuse the two. He asks but little.
It is He who adds the greatness and the might. He joins with you
to make the holy instant far greater than you can understand. It is your
realization that you need do so little that enables Him to give so much.
33
Trust not your good intentions. They are not enough. But trust
implicitly your willingness, whatever else may enter. Concentrate only
on this and be not disturbed that shadows surround it. That is why you
came. If you could come without them, you would not need the holy
instant. Come to it not in arrogance, assuming that you must achieve the
state its coming brings with it. The miracle of the holy instant lies in
your willingness to let it be what it is. And in your willingness for
this lies also your acceptance of yourself as you were meant to be.
34
Humility will never ask that you remain content with littleness. But it
does require that you be not content with less than
greatness, which comes not of you. Your difficulty with the holy instant
arises from your fixed conviction that you are not worthy of it. And
what is this but the determination to be as you would make yourself? God
did not create His dwelling-place unworthy of Him. And if you believe He
cannot enter where He wills to be, you must be interfering with His
Will. You do not need the strength of willingness to come from you,
but only from His Will.
35
The holy instant does not come from your little willingness alone. It is
always the result of your small willingness combined with the unlimited
power of God's Will. You have been wrong in thinking that it is needful
to prepare yourself for Him. It is impossible to make arrogant
preparations for holiness and not believe that it is up to you to
establish the conditions for peace. God has established them. They do
not wait upon your willingness for what they are. Your willingness is
needed only to make it possible to teach you what they are. If
you maintain you are unworthy of learning this, you are interfering with
the lesson by believing that you make the learner different. You
did not make the learner, nor can you make him different. Would you
first make a miracle yourself and then expect one to be made for
you?
36
You merely ask the question. The answer is given. Seek not to answer it,
but merely receive the answer as it is given. In preparing for the holy
instant, do not attempt to make yourself holy to be ready to receive it.
That is but to confuse your role with God's. Atonement cannot come to
those who think that they must first atone, but only to those who offer
it nothing more than simple willingness to make way for it. Purification
is of God alone and therefore for you. Rather than seek to prepare
yourself for Him, try to think thus:
38
And that is all. Add more and you will merely take away the little that
is asked. Remember you made guilt and that your plan for the escape from
guilt has been to bring Atonement to it and make salvation
fearful. And it is only fear that you will add if you prepare yourself
for love. The preparation for the holy instant belongs to Him Who gives
it. Release yourselves to Him Whose function is release. Do not assume
His function for Him. Give Him but what He asks, that you may learn how
little is your part and how great is His.
39
It is this that makes the holy instant so easy and so natural. You make
it difficult because you insist there must be more that you need do.
[You find it difficult to accept the idea that you need give so
little to receive so much.] And it is very hard for you to
realize that it is not personally insulting that your contribution and
the Holy Spirit's are so extremely disproportionate. You are still
convinced your understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth and
makes it what it is. Yet we have emphasized that you need understand
nothing. Salvation is easy just because it asks nothing that you
cannot give right now.
40
Forget not that it has been your decision to make everything that is
natural and easy for you impossible. What you believe to be impossible
will be if God so wills it, but you will remain quite unaware of it. If
you believe the holy instant is difficult for you, it is because you
have become the arbiter of what is possible and remain unwilling to give
place to One Who knows. The whole belief in orders of difficulty in
miracles is centered on this. Everything God wills is not only possible
but has already happened. And that is why the past has gone. It never
happened in reality. Only in your minds, which thought it did, is its
undoing needful.
41
Prepare you not for the undoing of what never was. If you
already understood the difference between truth and illusion, the
Atonement would have no meaning. The holy instant, your holy
relationship, the Holy Spirit's teaching, and all the means by which
salvation is accomplished would have no purpose. For they are all but
aspects of the plan to change your dreams of fear to happy dreams from
which you waken easily to knowledge. Put yourself not in charge of this,
for you cannot distinguish between advance and retreat. Some of your
greatest advances you have judged as failures, and some of your deepest
retreats you have evaluated as success.
42
Never approach the holy instant after you have tried to remove all fear
and hatred from your mind. That is its function. Never attempt
to overlook your guilt before you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is His
function. Your part is only to offer Him a little willingness to let
Him remove all fear and hatred and to be forgiven. On your
little faith, joined with His understanding, He will build your
part in the Atonement and make sure that you fulfill it easily. And with
Him you will build a ladder planted in the solid rock of faith and
rising even to Heaven. Nor will you use it to ascend to Heaven alone.
43
Through your holy relationship, reborn and blessed in every holy instant
which you do not arrange, thousands will rise to Heaven with you. Can
you plan for this? Or could you prepare yourselves for such a function?
Yet it is possible because God wills it. Nor will He change His Mind
about it. The means and purpose both belong to Him. You have accepted
one; the other will be provided. A purpose such as this without the
means is inconceivable. He will provide the means to anyone who shares
His purpose.
44
Happy dreams come true, not because they are dreams, but only
because they are happy. And so they must be loving. Their
message is, "Thy Will be done," and not, "I want it otherwise." The
alignment of means and purpose is an undertaking impossible for you to
understand. You do not even realize you have accepted the Holy
Spirit's purpose as your own, and you would merely bring unholy means to
its accomplishment. The little faith it needed to change the purpose is
all that is required to receive the means and use them.
45
It is no dream to love your brother as yourself. Nor is your holy
relationship a dream. All that remains of dreams within it is that it is
still a special relationship. Yet it is very useful to the Holy Spirit,
Who has a special function here. It will become the happy dream
through which He can spread joy to thousands on thousands who believe
that love is fear, not happiness. Let Him fulfill the function that He
gave to your relationship by accepting it for you, and nothing
will be wanting that would make of it what He would have it be.
46
When you feel the holiness of your relationship is threatened by
anything, stop instantly and offer the Holy Spirit your willingness in
spite of fear to let Him exchange this instant for the holy one
which you would rather have. He will never fail in this. But forget not
that your relationship is one, and so it must be that whatever threatens
the peace of one is an equal threat to the other. The power of joining
and its blessing lie in the fact that it is now impossible for either of
you to experience fear alone or to attempt to deal with it alone. Never
believe that this is necessary or even possible. Yet just as this is
impossible, so is it equally impossible that the holy instant come to
either of you without the other. And it will come to both at the request
of either.
47
Whichever is saner at the time when the threat is perceived should
remember how deep is his indebtedness to the other and how much
gratitude is due him and be glad that he can pay his debt by bringing
happiness to both. Let him remember this, and say:
49
There is nothing outside you. That is what you must ultimately
learn, for it is in that realization that the Kingdom of Heaven is
restored to you. For God created only this, and He did not depart from
it nor leave it separate from Himself. The Kingdom of Heaven is the
dwelling-place of the Son of God, who left not his Father and dwells not
apart from Him. Heaven is not a place nor a condition. It is merely an
awareness of perfect Oneness and the knowledge that there is nothing
else; nothing outside this Oneness and nothing else within.
50
What could God give but knowledge of Himself? What else is there to
give? The belief that you could give and get something else, something
outside yourself, has cost you the awareness of Heaven and the loss of
your Identity. And you have done a stranger thing than you yet realize.
You have displaced your guilt to your bodies from your minds. Yet a body
cannot be guilty, for it can do nothing of itself. You who think
you hate your bodies deceive yourselves. You hate your minds,
for guilt has entered into them, and they would remain separate, which
they cannot do.
51
Minds are joined; bodies are not. Only by assigning to the mind
the properties of the body does separation seem to be possible. And it
is mind that seems to be fragmented and private and alone. Its
guilt, which keeps it separate, is projected to the body, which suffers
and dies because it is attacked, to hold the separation in the mind and
let it not know its identity. Mind cannot attack, but it can
make fantasies and direct the body to act them out. Yet it is never what
the body does that seems to satisfy. Unless the mind believes the body
is actually acting out its fantasies, it will attack the body by
increasing the projection of its guilt upon it.
52
In this, the mind is clearly delusional. It cannot attack, but it
maintains it can and uses what it does to hurt the body to prove
it can. The mind cannot attack, but it can deceive itself. And
this is all it does when it believes it has attacked the body. It can
project its guilt, but it will not lose it through projection. And
though it clearly can misperceive the function of the body, it cannot
change its function from what the Holy Spirit establishes it to be. The
body was not made by love. Yet love does not condemn it and can use it
lovingly, respecting what the Son of God has made and using it to save
him from illusions.
53
Would you not have the instruments of separation reinterpreted as means
for salvation and used for purposes of love? Would you not welcome and
support the shift from fantasies of vengeance to release from them? Your
perception of the body can clearly be sick, but project not this upon
the body. For your wish to make destructive what cannot destroy can have
no real effect at all. And what God created is only what He would have
it be, being His Will. You cannot make His Will destructive. You can
make fantasies in which your will conflicts with His, but that is all.
54
It is insane to use the body as the scapegoat for guilt, directing its
attack and blaming it for what you wished it to do. It is impossible to
act out fantasies. For it is still the fantasies you want, and they have
nothing to do with what the body does. It does not dream of them, and
they but make it a liability where it could be an asset. For fantasies
have made your body your "enemy," weak, vulnerable, and treacherous,
worthy of the hate which you invest in it. How has this served you? You
have identified with this thing you hate, the instrument of
vengeance and the perceived source of your guilt. You have done this to
a thing that has no meaning, proclaiming it to be the dwelling-place of
the Son of God and turning it against him.
55
This is the host of God that you have made. And neither God nor
His most holy Son can enter an abode which harbors hate and where you
have sown the seeds of vengeance, violence, and death. This thing you
made to serve your guilt stands between you and other minds. The minds are
joined, but you do not identify with them. You see yourself locked in a
separate prison, removed and unreachable, incapable of reaching out as
being reached. You hate this prison you have made and would destroy it.
But you would not escape from it, leaving it unharmed, without your
guilt upon it.
56
Yet only thus can you escape. The home of vengeance is not
yours; the place you set aside to house your hate is not a prison but an
illusion of yourself. The body is a limit imposed on the universal
communication which is an eternal property of mind. But the
communication is internal. [It is not made up of different parts
which reach each other.] Mind reaches to itself. It does not go
out. Within itself it has no limits, and there is nothing outside
it. [It encompasses everything.] It encompasses you entirely;
you within it, and it within you. There is nothing else, anywhere or
ever.
57
The body is outside you, and but seems to surround you, shutting
you off from others and keeping you apart from them [and them from you].
It is not there. There is no barrier between God and His Son,
nor can His Son be separated from himself except in illusions. This is
not his reality, though he believes it is. Yet this could only be if God
were wrong. God would have had to create differently and to have
separated Himself from His Son to make this possible. He would have had
to create different things and to establish different orders of reality,
only some of which were love. Yet love must be forever like itself,
changeless forever and forever without alternative. And so it is. You
cannot put a barrier around yourself because God placed none between
Himself and you.
58
You can stretch out your hand and reach to Heaven. You whose hands are
joined have begun to reach beyond the body, but not outside yourselves,
to reach your shared Identity together. Could this be outside
you? Where God is not? Is He a body, and did He create
you as He is not and where He cannot be? You are surrounded only by Him.
What limit can there be on you whom He encompasses? Everyone has
experienced what he would call a sense of being transported beyond
himself. This feeling of liberation far exceeds the dream of freedom
sometimes experienced in special relationships. It is a sense of actual
escape from limitations.
59
If you will consider what this "transportation" really entails, you will
realize that it is a sudden unawareness of the body and a joining of
yourself and something else in which your mind enlarges to encompass it.
It becomes part of you as you unite with it. And both become whole as
neither is perceived as separate. What really happens is that you have
given up the illusion of a limited awareness and lost your fear of
union. The love that instantly replaces it extends to what has freed you
and unites with it. And while this lasts, you are not uncertain of your
Identity and would not limit it. You have escaped from fear to peace,
asking no questions of reality but merely accepting it. You have
accepted this instead of the body and have let yourself be one with
something beyond it simply by not letting your mind be limited
by it.
60
This can occur regardless of the physical distance which seems to be
between you and what you join, of your respective positions in space,
and of your differences in size and seeming quality. Time is not
relevant; it can occur with something past, present, or anticipated. The
"something" can be anything and anywhere—a sound, a sight, a thought, a
memory, and even a general idea without specific reference. Yet in every
case, you joined it without reservation because you love it and would be
with it. And so you rush to meet it, letting your limits melt away,
suspending all the "laws" your body obeys and gently setting them aside.
61
There is no violence at all in this escape. The body is not attacked,
but simply properly perceived. It does not limit you merely because you
would not have it so. You are not really "lifted out" of it; it cannot contain
you. You go where you would be, gaining, not losing, a sense of self. In
these instants of release from physical restrictions, you experience
much of what happens in the holy instant; the lifting of the barriers of
time and space, the sudden experience of peace and joy, and, above all,
the lack of awareness of the body and of the questioning whether or not
all this is possible.
62
It is possible because you want it. The sudden expansion of the
self which takes place with your desire for it is the irresistible
appeal the holy instant holds. It calls to you to be yourself within its
safe embrace. There are the laws of limit lifted for you, to
welcome you to openness of mind and freedom. Come to this place of
refuge, where you can be yourself in peace. Not through destruction, not
through a "breaking out," but merely by a quiet "melting in." For peace
will join you there simply because you have been willing to let go the
limits you have placed upon love and joined it where it is and where it
led you in answer to its gentle call to be at peace.
63
You still have too much faith in the body as a source of strength. What
plans do you make that do not involve its comfort or protection or
enjoyment in some way? This makes it an end and not a means in your
interpretation, and this always means you still find sin attractive. No
one accepts Atonement for himself who still accepts sin as his goal. You
have thus not met your one responsibility. Atonement is not
welcomed by those who prefer pain and destruction.
64
You have made much progress and are really trying to make still more,
but there is one thing you have never done—not for one instant have you
utterly forgotten the body. It has faded at times from your sight, but
it has not yet completely disappeared. You are not asked to let this
happen for more than an instant, yet it is in this instant that the
miracle of Atonement happens. Afterwards, you will see the body again,
but never quite the same. And every instant that you spend without
awareness of it gives you a different view of it when you return.
65
At no single instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered
or anticipated, but never experienced just now. Only its past
and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely, for sin is
never present. In any single instant, the attraction of guilt would be
experienced as pain and nothing else and would be avoided. It has no
attraction now. Its whole attraction is imaginary and therefore
must be thought of in the past or in the future.
66
It is impossible to accept the holy instant without reservation unless
just for an instant you are willing to see no past or future.
You cannot prepare for it without placing it in the future. Release is
given you the instant you desire it. Many have spent a lifetime in
preparation and have indeed achieved their instants of success. This
course does not attempt to teach more than they learned in time, but it
does aim at saving time. You are attempting to follow a very
long road to the goal you have accepted. It is extremely difficult to
reach Atonement by fighting against sin. [Enormous effort is expended in
the attempt to make holy what is hated and despised.] Nor is a lifetime
of contemplation and long periods of meditation aimed at detachment from
the body necessary. All such attempts will ultimately succeed because of
their purpose. Yet the means are tedious and very time consuming, for
all of them look to the future for release from a state of present
unworthiness and inadequacy.
67
Your way will be different, not in purpose but in means. A holy
relationship is a means of saving time. One instant spent
together restores the universe to both of you. You are prepared.
Now you need but to remember you need do nothing. It would be far more
profitable now merely to concentrate on this than to consider what you
should do. When peace comes at last to those who wrestle with temptation
and fight against the giving in to sin; when the light comes at last
into the mind given to contemplation; or when the goal is finally
achieved by anyone, it always comes with just one happy
realization: "I need do nothing."
68
Here is the ultimate release which everyone will one day find in his own
way, at his own time. We do not need this time. Time has been saved for
you because you are together. This is the special means this course is
using to save you time. You are not making use of the course if you
insist on using means which have served others well, neglecting what was
made for you. Save time for me by only this one preparation and
practice, doing nothing else. "I need do nothing" is a statement of
allegiance, a truly undivided loyalty. Believe it for just one instant,
and you will accomplish more than is given to a century of contemplation
or of struggle against temptation.
69
To do anything involves the body. And if you recognize you need
do nothing, you have withdrawn the body's value from your mind. Here is
the quick and open door through which you slip past centuries of effort
and escape from time. This is the way in which sin loses all attraction
right now. For here is time denied and past and future gone. Who need do
nothing has no need for time. To do nothing is to rest and make a place
within you where the activity of the body ceases to demand attention.
Into this place the Holy Spirit comes and there abides. He will remain
when you forget and the body's activities return to occupy your
conscious mind.
70
Yet there will always be this place of rest to which you can return. And
you will be more aware of this quiet center of the storm than all its
raging activity. This quiet center, in which you do nothing, will remain
with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you
are sent. For from this center will you be directed how to use the body
sinlessly. It is this center, from which the body is absent, that will
keep it so in your awareness of it.
71
It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For
the body is a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its
origin, and it was made to limit the unlimited. Think not that this is
merely allegorical, for it was made to limit you. Can you who
see yourselves within a body know yourself as an idea? Everything you
recognize you identify with externals, something outside itself. You
cannot even think of God without a body or some form you think you
recognize.
72
The body cannot know. And while you limit your awareness to its
tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur which surrounds you. God
cannot come into a body, nor can you join Him there. Limits on love will
always seem to shut Him out and to keep you apart from Him. The body is
a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and complete idea. It
draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven
splintered from the whole, proclaiming that within it is your kingdom,
where God can enter not.
73
Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And to defend this
little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe. This
fragment of your mind is such a tiny part of it that, could you but
appreciate the whole, you would see instantly that it is like the
smallest sunbeam to the sun or like the faintest ripple on the surface
of the ocean. In its amazing arrogance, this tiny sunbeam has decided it
is the sun; this almost imperceptible ripple hails itself as the
ocean. Think how alone and frightened is this little thought, this
infinitesimal illusion, holding itself apart against the universe. The
sun becomes the sunbeam's "enemy" which would devour it, and the ocean
terrifies the little ripple and wants to swallow it.
74
Yet neither sun nor ocean is even aware of all this strange and
meaningless activity. They merely continue, unaware that they are feared
and hated by a tiny segment of themselves. Even that segment is not lost
to them, for it could not survive apart from them. And what it thinks it
is in no way changes its total dependence on them for its being. Its
whole existence still remains in them. Without the sun the sunbeam would
be gone; the ripple without the ocean is inconceivable.
75
Such is the strange position in which those in a world inhabited by
bodies seem to be. Each body seems to house a separate mind, a
disconnected thought living alone and in no way joined to the Thought by
which it was created. Each tiny fragment seems to be self-contained,
needing each other for some things but by no means totally dependent on
their one Creator for everything and needing the whole to give them any
meaning, for by themselves they do mean nothing. Nor have they any life
apart and by themselves.
76
Like to the sun and ocean your Self continues, unmindful that this tiny
part regards itself as you. It is not missing; it could not
exist if it were separate, nor would the whole be whole without it. It
is not a separate kingdom, ruled by an idea of separation from the rest.
Nor does a fence surround it, preventing it from joining with the rest
and keeping it apart from its Creator. This little aspect is no
different from the whole, being continuous with it and at one with it.
It leads no separate life because its life is the oneness in which its
being was created.
77
Do not accept this little fenced-off aspect as yourself. The sun and
ocean are as nothing beside what you are. The sunbeam sparkles only in
the sunlight, and the ripple dances as it rests upon the ocean. Yet in
neither sun nor ocean is the power that rests in you. Would you remain
within your tiny kingdom, a sorry king, a bitter ruler of all he surveys
who looks on nothing, yet who would still die to defend it? This little
self is not your kingdom. Arched high above it and surrounding it with
love is the glorious whole, which offers all its happiness and deep
content to every part. The little aspect which you think you set apart
is no exception.
78
Love knows no bodies and reaches to everything created like itself. Its
total lack of limit is its meaning. It is completely impartial
in its giving, encompassing only to preserve and keep complete what it
would give. In your tiny kingdom, you have so little! Should it not,
then, be there that you would call on love to enter? Look at the desert,
dry and unproductive, scorched and joyless, which makes up your little
kingdom. And realize the life and joy which love would bring to it from
where it comes and where it would return with you.
79
The Thought of God surrounds your little kingdom, waiting at the barrier
you built to come inside and shine upon the barren ground. See how life
springs up everywhere! The desert becomes a garden, green and deep and
quiet, offering rest to those who lost their way and wander in the dust.
Give them a place of refuge, prepared by love for them where once a
desert was. And everyone you welcome will bring love with him from
Heaven for you. They enter one by one into this holy place, but they
will not depart as they had come, alone. The love they brought with them
will stay with them, as it will stay with you. And under its
beneficence, your little garden will expand and reach out to everyone
who thirsts for living water but has grown too weary to go on alone.
80
Go out and find them, for they bring your Self with them. And lead them
gently to your quiet garden and receive their blessing there. So will it
grow and stretch across the desert, leaving no lonely little kingdoms
locked away from love and leaving you inside. And you will recognize
yourself and see your little garden gently transformed into the Kingdom
of Heaven with all the love of its Creator shining upon it. The holy
instant is your invitation to love, to enter into your bleak and joyless
kingdom, and to transform it into a garden of peace and welcome.
81
Love's answer is inevitable. It will come because you came without the
body and interposed no barriers which would interfere with its glad
coming. In the holy instant, you ask of love only what it offers
everyone, neither less nor more. Asking for everything, you will receive
it. And your shining Self will lift the tiny aspect which you tried to
hide from Heaven straight into Heaven. No part of love calls on the
whole in vain. No Son of God remains outside His Fatherhood.
82
Be sure of this—love has entered your special relationship and entered
fully at your weak request. You do not recognize that love has come
because you have not yet let go of all the barriers you hold against
each other. And you will not be able to give love welcome separately.
You could no more know God alone than He knows you without your brother.
But together you could no more be unaware of love than love could know
you not or fail to recognize itself in you.
83
You have reached the end of an ancient journey, not realizing yet that
it is over. You are still worn and tired and the desert's dust still
seems to cloud your eyes and keep you sightless. Yet He Whom you
welcomed has come to you and would welcome you. He has waited long to
give you this. Receive it now of Him, for He would have you know Him.
Only a little wall of dust still stands between you. Blow on it lightly
and with happy laughter, and it will fall away. And walk into the garden
love has prepared for both of you.
84
You have been told to bring the darkness to the light and guilt to
holiness. And you have also been told that error must be corrected at
its source. Therefore, it is the tiny part of yourself, the little
thought that seems split off and separate, which the Holy Spirit needs.
The rest is fully in God's keeping and needs no guide. Yet this wild and
delusional thought needs help because in its delusions it thinks it is
the Son of God, whole and omnipotent, sole ruler of the kingdom it set
apart to tyrannize by madness into obedience and slavery.
85
This is the little part of you you think you stole from Heaven. Give it
back to Heaven. Heaven has not lost it, but you have lost sight of
Heaven. Let the Holy Spirit remove it from the withered kingdom in which
you set it off, surrounded by darkness, guarded by attack, and
reinforced by hate. Within its barricades is still a tiny segment of the
Son of God, complete and holy, serene and unaware of what you think
surrounds it. Be you not separate, for the One Who does surround it has
brought union to you, returning your little offering of darkness to the
eternal Light.
86
How is this done? It is extremely simple, being based on what this
little kingdom really is. The barren sands, the darkness and the
lifelessness are seen only through the body's eyes. Its vision is
distorted, and the messages it transmits to you who made it to limit
your awareness are little and limited and so fragmented they are
meaningless. From the world of bodies, made by insanity, insane messages
seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear
witness to this world, pronouncing it as true. For you sent forth these
messengers to bring this back to you.
87
Everything these messages relay to you is quite external. There are no
messages which speak of what lies underneath, for it is not the body
that could speak of this. Its eyes perceive it not; its senses remain
quite unaware of it; its tongue cannot relay its messages. Yet God can
bring you there if you are willing to follow the Holy Spirit through
seeming terror, trusting Him not to abandon you and leave you there. For
it is not His purpose to frighten you, but only yours. You are severely
tempted to abandon Him at the outside ring of fear, but He would lead
you safely through and far beyond.
88
The circle of fear lies just below the level the body sees and seems to
be the whole foundation on which the world is based. Here are all the
illusions, all the twisted thoughts, all the insane attacks, the fury,
vengeance, and betrayal that were made to keep the guilt in place, so
that the world could rise from it and keep it hidden. Its shadow rises
to the surface, enough to hold its most external manifestations in
darkness and to bring despair and loneliness to it and keep it joyless.
Yet its intensity is veiled by its heavy coverings and kept apart from
what was made to keep it hidden. The body cannot see this, for the body
arose from this for its protection, which must always depend on keeping
it not seen. The body's eyes will never look on it. Yet they will see
what it dictates.
89
The body will remain guilt's messenger and will act as it directs as
long as you believe that guilt is real. For the reality of guilt is the
illusion which seems to make it heavy and opaque, impenetrable, and a
real foundation for the ego's thought system. Its thinness and
transparency are not apparent until you see the light behind it.
And then you see it as a fragile veil before the light.
90
This heavy-seeming barrier, this artificial floor which looks like rock,
is like a bank of low dark clouds that seems to be a solid wall before
the sun. Its impenetrable appearance is wholly an illusion. It gives way
softly to the mountain tops which rise above it and has no power at all
to hold back anyone willing to climb above it and see the sun. It is not
strong enough to stop a button's fall nor hold a feather. [Nothing can
rest upon it, for it is but an illusion of a foundation.] Try
but to touch it and it disappears; attempt to grasp it and your hands
hold nothing.
91
Yet in this cloud bank, it is easy to see a whole world rising. A solid
mountain range, a lake, a city, all rise in your imagination, and from
the clouds the messengers of your perception return to you, assuring you
that it is all there. Figures stand out and move about, actions seem
real, and forms appear and shift from loveliness to the grotesque. And
back and forth they go, as long as you would play the game of children's
make-believe. Yet however long you play it, and regardless of how much
imagination you bring to it, you do not confuse it with the world below,
nor seek to make it real.
92
So should it be with the dark clouds of guilt, no more impenetrable and
no more substantial. You will not bruise yourself against them in
traveling through. Let your Guide teach you their unsubstantial nature
as He leads you past them, for beneath them is a world of light whereon
they cast no shadows. Their shadows lie upon the world beyond them,
still further from the light. Yet from them to the light their
shadows cannot fall.
93
This world of light, this circle of brightness, is the real world where
guilt meets with forgiveness. Here the world outside is seen anew,
without the shadow of guilt upon it. Here are you forgiven, for here you
have forgiven everyone. Here is the new perception, where everything is
bright and shining with innocence, washed in the waters of forgiveness,
and cleansed of every evil thought you had laid upon it. Here there is
no attack upon the Son of God, and you are welcome. Here is your
innocence, waiting to clothe you and protect you and make you ready for
the final step in the journey inward. Here are the dark and heavy
garments of guilt laid by and gently replaced by purity and love.
94
Yet even forgiveness is not the end. Forgiveness does make lovely, but
it does not create. It is the source of healing, but it is the messenger
of love and not its Source. Here you are led that God Himself can take
the final step unhindered, for here does nothing interfere with love,
letting it be itself. A step beyond this holy place [of forgiveness], a
step still further inward but the one you cannot take,
transports you to something completely different. Here is the Source of
light—nothing perceived, forgiven, nor transformed, but merely known.
95
This course will lead to knowledge, but knowledge itself is
still beyond the scope of our curriculum. Nor is there any need for us
to try to speak of what must forever lie beyond words. We need remember
only that whoever attains the real world, beyond which learning cannot
go, will go beyond it but in a different way. Where learning ends there
God begins, for learning ends before Him Who is complete where He begins
and where there is no end. It is not for us to dwell on what
cannot be attained. There is too much to learn. The readiness for
knowledge still must be attained.
96
Love is not learned. Its meaning lies in itself. And learning ends when
you have recognized all it is not. That is the interference;
that is what needs to be undone. Love is not learned because there never
was a time in which you knew it not. Learning is useless in the Presence
of your Creator, Whose acknowledgment of you and yours of Him so far
transcend all learning that everything you learned is meaningless,
replaced forever by the knowledge of love and its one meaning.
97
Your relationship has been uprooted from the world of shadows, and its
unholy purpose has been safely brought through the barriers of guilt,
washed with forgiveness, and set shining and firmly rooted in the world
of light. From there, it calls to you to follow the course it took,
lifted high above the darkness and gently placed before the gates of
Heaven. The holy instant in which you were united is but the messenger
of love, sent from beyond forgiveness to remind you of all that lies
beyond it. Yet it is through forgiveness that it will be remembered.
98
And when the memory of God has come to you in the holy place of
forgiveness, you will remember nothing else, and memory will be as
useless as learning, for your only purpose will be creating. Yet this
you cannot know until every perception has been cleansed and purified
and finally removed forever. Forgiveness removes only the untrue,
lifting the shadows from the world and carrying it safe and sure within
its gentleness to the bright world of new and clean perception. There is
your purpose now. And it is there that peace awaits you.
1
We said before that when a situation has been dedicated wholly to truth,
peace is inevitable. Its attainment is the criterion by which the
wholeness of the dedication can be safely assumed. Yet we also said that
peace without faith will never be attained, for what is wholly
dedicated to truth as its only goal is brought to truth by
faith. This faith encompasses everyone involved, for only thus the
situation is perceived as meaningful and as a whole. And everyone must
be involved in it, or else your faith is limited and your dedication
incomplete.
2
Every situation properly perceived becomes an opportunity to heal the
Son of God. And he is healed because you offered faith to him,
giving him to the Holy Spirit and releasing him from every demand your
ego would make of him. Thus do you see him free, and in this vision does
the Holy Spirit share. And since He shares it, He has given it, and so
He heals through you. It is this joining Him in a united purpose
which makes this purpose real because you make it whole. And this is
healing. The body is healed because you came without it and joined the
Mind in which all healing rests.
3
The body cannot heal because it cannot make itself sick. It needs
no healing. Its health or sickness depends entirely on how the mind
perceives it and the purpose which the mind would use it for.
And it is obvious that a segment of the mind can see itself as separated
from the Universal Purpose. When this occurs, the body becomes its
weapon used against this Purpose to demonstrate the "fact" that
separation has occurred. The body thus becomes the instrument of
illusion, acting accordingly; seeing what is not there, hearing what
truth has never said, and behaving insanely, being imprisoned by
insanity.
4
Do not overlook our earlier statement that faithlessness leads straight
to illusions. For faithlessness is the perception of a brother as a
body, and the body cannot be used for purposes of union. If, then, you
see your brother as a body, you have established a condition in which
uniting with him becomes impossible. Your faithlessness to him has
separated you from him and kept you both apart from being
healed. Your faithlessness has thus opposed the Holy Spirit's purpose
and brought illusions centered on the body to stand between you. And the
body will seem to be sick, for you have made of it an "enemy" of
healing and the opposite of truth.
5
It cannot be difficult to realize that faith must be the opposite of
faithlessness. Yet the difference in how they operate is less apparent,
though it follows directly from the fundamental difference in what they
are. Faithlessness would always limit and attack; faith would remove all
limitations and make whole. [Faithlessness would destroy and separate;
faith would unite and heal.] Faithlessness would interpose
illusions between the Son of God and his Creator; faith would remove all
obstacles that seem to rise between them. Faithlessness is wholly
dedicated to illusions; faith wholly to truth. Partial dedication is
impossible. Truth is the absence of illusion; illusion the absence of
truth.
6
Both cannot be together nor perceived in the same place. To
dedicate yourself to both is to set up a goal forever impossible to
attain, for part of it is sought through the body, thought of as a means
for seeking out reality through attack, while the other part would heal
and therefore calls upon the mind and not the body. The inevitable
compromise is the belief that the body must be healed, and not the mind.
For this divided goal has given both an equal reality, which could be
possible only if the mind is limited to the body and divided into little
parts of seeming wholeness but without connection. This will not harm
the body, but it will keep the delusional thought system in the
mind.
7
Here then is healing needed. And it is here that healing is. For
God gave healing not apart from sickness, nor established remedy where
sickness cannot be. They are together, and when they are seen together,
all attempts to keep both truth and illusion in the mind, where both
must be, are recognized as dedication to illusion and given up when
brought to truth and seen as totally irreconcilable with truth in any
respect or in any way.
8
Truth and illusion have no connection. This will remain forever
true, however much you seek to connect them. But illusions are always
connected, as is truth. Each is united, a complete thought system, but
totally disconnected to each other. Where there is no overlap, there
separation must be complete. And to perceive this is to recognize where
separation is and where it must be healed. The result of an idea is
never separate from its source. The idea of separation produced
the body and remains connected to it, making it sick because of its
identification with it. You think you are protecting the body by hiding
this connection, for this concealment seems to keep your identification
safe from the "attack" of truth.
9
If you but understood how much this strange concealment has hurt your
mind and how confused your own identification has become because of it!
You do not see how great the devastation wrought by your faithlessness.
For faithlessness is an attack which seems to be justified by its
results. For by withholding faith, you see what is unworthy of it and
cannot look beyond the barrier to what is joined with you.
10
To have faith is to heal. It is the sign that you have accepted the
Atonement for yourself and would therefore share it. By faith you offer
the gift of freedom from the past, which you received. You do not use
anything your brother has done before to condemn him now. You
freely choose to overlook his errors, looking past all barriers between
your self and his and seeing them as one. And in that one you see your
faith is fully justified. There is no justification for
faithlessness, but faith is always justified.
11
Faith is the opposite of fear, as much a part of love as fear is of
attack. Faith is the acknowledgment of union. It is the gracious
acknowledgment of everyone as a Son of your most loving Father, loved by
Him like you and therefore loved by you as yourself. It is His love that
joins you, and for His love you would keep no one separate from yours.
Each one appears just as he is perceived in the holy instant, united in
your purpose to be released from guilt. You saw the Christ in him, and
he was healed because you looked on what makes faith forever justified
in everyone.
12
Faith is the gift of God, through Him Whom God has given you.
Faithlessness looks upon the Son of God and judges him unworthy of
forgiveness. But through the eyes of faith, the Son of God is seen
already forgiven, free of all the guilt he laid upon himself. Faith sees
him only now because it looks not to the past to judge him, but
would see in him only what it would see in you. It sees not through the
body's eyes nor looks to bodies for its justification. It is the
messenger of the new perception sent forth to gather witnesses unto its
coming and to return their messages to you. Faith is as easily exchanged
for knowledge as is the real world. For faith arises from the Holy
Spirit's perception and is the sign you share it with Him. Faith is a
gift you offer to the Son of God through Him, and wholly acceptable to
his Father as to him. And therefore offered you.
13
Your holy relationship, with its new purpose, offers you faith to give
unto each other. Your faithlessness had driven you apart, and so you did
not recognize salvation in each other. Yet faith unites you in the
holiness you see, not through the body's eyes but in the sight of Him
Who joined you and in Whom you are united. Grace is not given to a body,
but to a mind. And the mind that receives it looks instantly
beyond the body and sees the holy place where it was healed. There is
the altar where the grace was given, in which it stands. Do you, then,
offer grace and blessing to each other, for you stand at the same altar
where grace was laid for both of you. And be you healed by grace
together, that you may heal through faith.
14
In the holy instant, you stand before the altar God has raised unto
Himself and both of you. Lay faithlessness aside and come to it
together. There will you see the miracle of your relationship as it was
made again through faith. And there it is that you will realize that
there is nothing faith cannot forgive. No error interferes with its calm
sight, which brings the miracle of healing with equal ease to all of
them. For what the messengers of love are sent to do they do,
returning the glad tidings that it was done to you who stand together
before the altar from which they were sent forth.
15
As faithlessness will keep your little kingdoms barren and separate, so
will faith help the Holy Spirit prepare the ground for the most holy
garden which He would make of it. For faith brings peace, and so it
calls on truth to enter and make lovely what has already been prepared
for loveliness. Truth follows faith and peace, completing the process of
making lovely which they begin. For faith is still a learning goal, no
longer needed when the lesson has been learned. Yet truth will stay
forever.
16
Let then your dedication be to the eternal and learn how not to
interfere with it and make it slave to time. For what you think you do
to the eternal you do to you. Whom God created as His Son is
slave to nothing, being lord of all along with his Creator. You can
enslave a body, but an idea is free, incapable of being kept in
prison or limited in any way except by the mind that thought it. For it
remains joined to its source, which is its jailor or its liberator,
according to which it chooses as its purpose for itself.
17
It is essential that error be not confused with "sin," and it is this
distinction which makes salvation possible. For error can be corrected,
and the wrong made right. But sin, were it possible, would be
irreversible. The belief in sin is necessarily based on the firm
conviction that minds, not bodies, can attack. And thus the mind
is guilty and will forever so remain unless a mind not part of it can
give it absolution. Sin calls for punishment as error for correction,
and the belief that punishment is correction is clearly insane.
18
Sin is not an error, for sin entails an arrogance which the idea of
error lacks. To sin would be to violate reality and to succeed. Sin is
the proclamation that attack is real and guilt is justified. It assumes
the Son of God is guilty and has thus succeeded in losing his innocence
and making himself what God created not. Thus is creation seen as not
eternal, and the Will of God open to opposition and defeat. Sin is the
"grand illusion" underlying all the ego's grandiosity. For by it, God
Himself is changed and rendered incomplete.
19
The Son of God can be mistaken; he can deceive himself; he can even turn
the power of his mind against himself. But he cannot sin. There
is nothing he can do that would really change his reality in any way nor
make him really guilty. That is what sin would do, for such is its
purpose. Yet for all the wild insanity inherent in the whole idea of
sin, it is impossible. For the wages of sin is death, and how can the
immortal die?
20
A major tenet in the ego's insane religion is that sin is not error but
truth, and it is innocence that would deceive. Purity is
seen as arrogance, and the acceptance of the self as sinful is perceived
as holiness. And it is this doctrine which replaces the reality of the
Son of God as his Father created him and willed that he be forever. Is
this humility? Or is it, rather, an attempt to wrest creation away from
truth and keep it separate?
21
Any attempt to reinterpret sin as error is always indefensible to the
ego. The idea of sin is wholly sacrosanct to its thought system and
quite unapproachable except through reverence and awe. It is the most
"holy" concept in the ego's system—lovely and powerful, wholly true, and
necessarily protected with every defense at its disposal. For here lies
its "best" defense which all the others serve. Here is its armor, its
protection, and the fundamental purpose of the special relationship in
its interpretation.
22
It can indeed be said the ego made its world on sin. Only in such a
world could everything be upside-down. This is the strange illusion
which makes the clouds of guilt seem heavy and impenetrable. The
solidness this world's foundation seems to have is found in this. For
sin has changed creation from an Idea of God to an ideal the ego wants;
a world it rules, made up of bodies, mindless and capable of
complete corruption and decay. If this is a mistake, it can be undone
easily by truth. Any mistake can be corrected, if truth be left to judge
it. But if the mistake is given the status of truth, to what can it be
brought? The "holiness" of sin is kept in place by just this strange
device. As truth it is inviolate, and everything is brought to it
for judgment. As a mistake, it must be brought to truth. It is
impossible to have faith in sin, for sin is faithlessness. Yet it is
possible to have faith that a mistake can be corrected.
23
There is no stone in all the ego's embattled citadel more heavily
defended than the idea that sin is real—the natural expression of what
the Son of God has made himself to be and what he is. To the
ego, this is no mistake. For this is its reality; this is the
"truth" from which escape will always be impossible. This is his past,
his present, and his future. For he has somehow managed to corrupt his
Father and changed His Mind completely. Mourn, then, the death of God,
Whom sin has killed! And this would be the ego's wish, which in its
madness it thinks it has accomplished.
24
Would you not rather that all this be nothing more than a mistake,
entirely correctable, and so easily escaped from that its whole
correction is like walking through a mist into the sun? For that is all
it is. Perhaps you would be tempted to agree with the ego that it is far
better to be sinful than mistaken. Yet think you carefully before you
allow yourself to make this choice. Approach it not lightly, for it is
the choice of hell or Heaven.
25
The attraction of guilt is found in sin, not error. Sin will be repeated
because of this attraction. Fear can become so acute that the sin is
denied the acting out, but while the guilt remains attractive the mind
will suffer and not let go of the idea of sin. For guilt still calls to
it, and the mind hears it and yearns for it, making itself a willing
captive to its sick appeal. Sin is an idea of evil that cannot be
corrected and will be forever desirable. As an essential part of what
the ego thinks you are, you will always want it. And only an avenger
with a mind unlike your own could stamp it out through fear.
26
The ego does not think it possible that love, not fear, is really called
upon by sin and always answers. For the ego brings sin to fear,
demanding punishment. Yet punishment is but another form of guilt's
protection, for what is deserving punishment must have been really done.
Punishment is always the great preserver of sin, treating it with
respect and honoring its enormity. [What must be punished must be
true. And what is true must be eternal and will be
repeated endlessly.] For what you think is real you want and will not
let it go. An error, on the other hand, is not attractive. What you see
clearly as a mistake you want corrected.
27
Sometimes a sin can be repeated over and over with obviously distressing
results but without the loss of its appeal. And suddenly you change its
status from a sin to a mistake. Now you will not repeat it; you will
merely stop and let it go unless the guilt remains. For then you will
but change the form of sin, granting that it was an error but keeping it
uncorrectable. This is not really a change in your perception, for it is
sin that calls for punishment, not error. The Holy Spirit cannot punish
sin. Mistakes He recognizes and would correct them all as God entrusted
Him to do. But sin He knows not, nor can He recognize mistakes which
cannot be corrected. For a mistake which cannot be corrected is
meaningless to Him.
28
Mistakes are for correction, and they call for nothing else.
What calls for punishment must call for nothing. Every mistake must
be a call for love. What, then, is sin? What could it be but a mistake
you would keep hidden—a call for help that you would keep unheard and
thus unanswered? In time the Holy Spirit clearly sees the Son of God can
make mistakes. On this you share His vision. Yet you do not share His
recognition of the difference between time and eternity. And when
correction is completed, time is eternity.
29
Time is like a downward spiral which seems to travel down from a long,
unbroken line along another plane but which in no way breaks the line or
interferes with its smooth continuousness. Along the spiral, it seems as
if the line must have been broken. Yet at the line, its wholeness is
apparent. Everything seen from the spiral is misperceived, but as you
approach the line, you realize that it was not affected by the drop into
another plane at all. Yet from the plane, the line seems discontinuous.
And this is but an error in perception which can be easily corrected in
the mind, although the body's eyes will see no change. The eyes see many
things the mind corrects, and you respond, not to the eyes' illusions,
but to the mind's corrections.
30
You see the line as broken, and as you shift to different aspects of the
spiral, the line looks different. Yet in your mind is One Who knows it
is unbroken and forever changeless. This One can teach you how to look
on time differently and see beyond it, but not while you believe in sin.
In error, yes; for this can be corrected by the mind. But sin is the
belief that your perception is unchangeable and that the mind must
accept as true what it is told through it. If it does not obey, the mind
is judged insane. The only power which could change perception is thus
kept impotent, held to the body by the fear of changed
perception which its teacher, who is one with it, would bring.
31
When you are tempted to believe that sin is real, remember this: If sin
is real, both God and you are not. If creation is extension, the Creator
must have extended Himself, and it is impossible that what is part of
Him is totally unlike the rest. If sin is real, God must be at war with
Himself. He must be split and torn between good and evil—partly sane and
partially insane. For He must have created what wills to destroy Him and
has the power to do so. Is it not easier to believe that you
have been mistaken than to believe in this?
32
While you believe that your reality or your brother's is bounded by a
body, you will believe in sin. While you believe that bodies can unite,
you will find guilt attractive and believe that sin is precious. For the
belief that bodies limit mind leads to a perception of the world in
which the proof of separation seems to be everywhere. And God and His
creation seem to be split apart and overthrown. For sin would prove what
God created holy could not prevail against it nor remain itself before
the power of sin. Sin is perceived as mightier than God, before
which God Himself must bow and offer His creation to its conqueror. Is
this humility or madness?
33
If sin were real, it would forever be beyond the hope of healing. For
there would be a power beyond God's, capable of making another will
which could attack His Will and overcome it and give His Son a
will apart from His and stronger. And each part of God's
fragmented creation would have a different will, opposed to His and in
eternal opposition to Him and to each other. Your holy relationship has
as its purpose now the goal of proving this is impossible. Heaven has
smiled upon it, and the belief in sin has been uprooted in its smile of
love. You see it still because you do not realize that its foundation
has gone. Its source has been removed, and so it can be cherished but a
little while before it vanishes. Only the habit of looking for it still
remains.
34
And yet you look with Heaven's smile upon your lips and Heaven's
blessing on your sight. You will not see it long. For in the new
perception, the mind corrects it when it seems to be seen, and it
becomes invisible. And errors are quickly recognized and quickly given
to correction to be healed, not hidden. You will be healed of sin and
all its ravages the instant that you give it no power over each other.
And you will help each other overcome mistakes by joyously releasing one
another from the belief in sin.
35
In the holy instant, you will see the smile of heaven shining on both of
you. And you will shine upon each other in glad acknowledgment of the
grace that has been given you. For sin will not prevail against a union
Heaven has smiled upon. Your perception was healed in the holy instant
Heaven gave you. Forget what you have seen and raise your eyes in faith
to what you now can see. The barriers to heaven will disappear before
your holy sight, for you who were sightless have been given vision, and
you can see. Look not for what has been removed but for the glory that
has been restored for you to see.
36
Look upon your Redeemer and behold what He would show you in each other,
and let not sin arise again to blind your eyes. For sin would keep you
separate, but your Redeemer would have you look upon each other as
yourself. Your relationship is now a temple of healing—a place where all
the weary ones can come and find rest. Here is the rest that waits for
all after the journey. And it is brought nearer to all by your
relationship.
37
As this peace extends from deep inside yourselves to embrace all the
Sonship and give it rest, it will encounter many obstacles. Some of them
you will try to impose. Others will seem to arise from elsewhere—from
your brothers and from various aspects of the world outside. Yet peace
will gently cover them, extending past completely unhindered. The
extension of the Holy Spirit's purpose from your relationship to others
to bring them gently in [has already begun. This is the way in which He
will bring means and goal in line. The peace He laid deep within both
of you] will quietly extend to every aspect of your lives, surrounding
both of you with glowing happiness and the calm awareness of complete
protection. And you will carry its message of love and safety and
freedom to everyone who draws nigh unto your temple, where healing waits
for him.
38
You will not wait to give him this, for you will call to him and he will
answer you, recognizing in your call the Call of God. And you will draw
him in and give him rest, as it was given you. All this will you do. Yet
the peace which already lies deeply within must first expand and flow
across the obstacles you placed before it. This will you do, for nothing
undertaken with the Holy Spirit remains unfinished. You can indeed be
sure of nothing you see outside you, but of this you can be
sure: the Holy Spirit asks that you offer Him a resting-place where you
will rest in Him. He answered you and entered your relationship. Would
you not now return His graciousness and enter into a relationship with
Him? For it is He Who offered your relationship the gift of holiness,
without which it would have been forever impossible to appreciate each
other.
39
The gratitude you owe to Him He asks but that you receive for Him. And
when you look with gentle graciousness upon each other, you are
beholding Him. For you are looking where He is and not apart
from Him. You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you can see your brothers
truly. And the light in them will show you all that you need to see.
When the peace in you has been extended to encompass everyone, the Holy
Spirit's function here will be accomplished. What need is there for
seeing then? When God has taken the last step Himself, the Holy Spirit
will gather all your thanks and gratitude which you have offered Him and
lay them gently before His Creator in the name of His most holy Son. And
the Father will accept them in His Name. What need is there of seeing in
the presence of His gratitude?
40
The first obstacle that peace must flow across is your desire to get rid
of it. For it cannot extend unless you keep it. You are the
center from which it radiates outward to call the others in. You are its
home, its tranquil dwelling-place from which it gently reaches out but
never leaving you. If you would make it homeless, how can it abide
within the Son of God? If it would spread across the whole creation, it
must begin with you and from you reach to everyone who calls and bring
him rest by joining you.
41
Why would you want peace homeless? What do you think that it must
dispossess to dwell with you? What seems to be the cost you are so
unwilling to pay? The little barrier of sand still stands between you.
Would you reinforce it now? You are not asked to let it go for
yourselves alone. Christ asks it of you for Himself. He would bring
peace to everyone, and how can He do this except through you? Would you
let a little bank of sand, a wall of dust, a tiny seeming barrier, stand
between your brothers and salvation? And yet, it is this little
remnant of attack you cherish still against each other that is the first
obstacle the peace in you encounters in its going forth. This little
wall of hatred would still oppose the Will of God and keep it limited.
42
The Holy Spirit's purpose rests in peace within you. Yet you are still
unwilling to let it join you wholly. You still oppose the Will of God,
just by a little. And that little is a limit you would place upon the
whole. God's Will is One, not many. It has no opposition, for there is
none beside it. What you would still contain behind your little barrier
and keep separate from each other seems mightier than the universe, for
it would hold back the universe and its Creator. This little wall would
hide the purpose of Heaven and keep it from Heaven.
43
Would you thrust salvation away from the giver of salvation? For such
have you become. Peace could no more depart from you than from God. Fear
not this little obstacle. It cannot contain the Will of God. Peace will
flow across it and join you without hindrance. Salvation cannot be
withheld from you. It is your purpose. You cannot will apart
from this. You have no purpose apart from each other nor apart
from the one you asked the Holy Spirit to share with you. The little
wall will fall away so quietly beneath the wings of peace! For peace
will send its messengers from you to all the world. And barriers will
fall away before their coming as easily as those which you would
interpose will be surmounted.
44
To overcome the world is no more difficult than to surmount your little
wall. For in the miracle of your relationship, without this barrier, is
every miracle contained. There is no order of difficulty in miracles,
for they are all the same. Each is a gentle winning over from the appeal
of guilt to the appeal of love. How can this fail to be accomplished,
wherever it is undertaken? Guilt can raise no real barriers against it.
And all that seems to stand between you must fall away because of the
appeal you answered. For from you who answered, He Who answered you
would call. His home is in your holy relationship. Do not attempt to
stand between Him and His holy purpose, for it is yours. But let Him
quietly extend the miracle of your relationship to everyone contained in
it, as it was given.
45
There is a hush in Heaven, a happy expectancy, a little pause of
gladness in acknowledgment of the journey's end. For Heaven knows you
well, as you know Heaven. No illusions stand between you now. Look not
upon the little wall of shadows. The sun has risen over it. How can a
shadow keep you from the sun? No more can you be kept by shadows from
the light in which illusions end. Every miracle is but the end of an
illusion. Such was the journey; such its ending. And in the goal of
truth which you accepted must all illusions end.
46
The little insane wish to get rid of Him Who you invited in and push Him
out must produce conflict. As you look upon the world, this
little wish, uprooted and floating aimlessly, can land and settle
briefly upon anything, for it has no purpose now. Before the Holy Spirit
entered to abide with you, it seemed to have a mighty purpose;
the fixed and unchangeable dedication to sin and its results. Now it is
aimless, wandering pointlessly, causing no more than tiny interruptions
in love's appeal.
47
This feather of a wish, this tiny illusion, this microscopic remnant of
the belief in sin, is all that remains of what once seemed to be the
world. It is no longer an unrelenting barrier to peace. Its pointless
wandering makes its results appear to be more erratic and unpredictable
than before. Yet what could be more unstable than a tightly-organized
delusional system? Its seeming stability is its pervasive weakness,
which extends to everything. The variability which the little remnant
induces merely indicates its limited results.
48
How mighty can a little feather be before the great wings of truth? Can
it oppose an eagle's flight or hinder the advance of summer? Can it
interfere with the effects of summer's sun upon a garden covered by the
snow? See but how easily this little wisp is lifted up and carried away,
never to return, and part with it in gladness, not regret. For it is
nothing in itself and stood for nothing when you had greater faith in
its protection. Would you not rather greet the summer sun than fix your
gaze upon a disappearing snowflake and shiver in remembrance of the
winter's cold?
49
The attraction of guilt produces fear of love, for love would never look
on guilt at all. It is the nature of love to look upon only the truth,
for there it sees itself, with which it would unite in holy union and
completion. As love must look past fear, so must fear see love not. For
love contains the end of guilt as surely as fear depends on it. [Love is
attracted only to love.] Overlooking guilt completely, it sees
no fear. Being wholly without attack, it could not be afraid. Fear is
attracted to what love sees not, and each believes that what the other
looks upon does not exist. Fear looks on guilt with just the same
devotion that love looks on itself. And each has messengers which they
send forth and which return to them with messages written in the
language in which their going forth was asked.
50
Love's messengers are gently sent and return with messages of love and
gentleness. The messengers of fear are harshly ordered to seek out guilt
and cherish every scrap of evil and of sin which they can find, losing
none of them on pain of death and laying them respectfully before their
lord and master. Perception cannot obey two masters, each asking for
messages of different things in different languages. What fear would
feed upon, love overlooks. What fear demands, love cannot even see.
51
The fierce attraction which guilt holds for fear is wholly absent from
love's gentle perception. What love would look upon is meaningless to
fear and quite invisible. Relationships in this world are the result of
how the world is seen. And this depends on which emotion was called on
to send its messengers to look upon it and return with word of what they
saw. Fear's messengers are trained through terror, and they tremble when
their master calls upon them to serve him. For fear is merciless even to
its friends. Its messengers steal guiltily away in hungry search of
guilt, for they are kept cold and starving and made very vicious by
their master, who allows them to feast only upon what they return to
him. No little shred of guilt escapes their hungry eyes. And in their
savage search for sin, they pounce on any living thing they see and
carry it screaming to their master to be devoured.
52
Send not these savage messengers into the world to feast upon it and to
prey upon reality. For they will bring you word of bones and skin and
flesh. They have been taught to seek for the corruptible and to return
with gorges filled with things decayed and rotted. To them such things
are beautiful because they seem to allay their savage pangs of hunger.
For they are frantic with the pain of fear and would avert the
punishment of him who sends them forth by offering him what they hold
dear.
53
The Holy Spirit has given you love's messengers to send instead of those
you trained through fear. They are as eager to return to you what they
hold dear as are the others. If you send them forth, they will see only
the blameless and the beautiful, the gentle and the kind. They will be
as careful to let no little act of charity, no tiny expression of
forgiveness, no little breath of love escape their notice. And they will
return with all the happy things they found, to share them lovingly with
you. Be not afraid of them. They offer you salvation. Theirs are
the messages of safety, for they see the world as kind.
54
If you send forth only the messengers the Holy Spirit gives you, wanting
no messages but theirs, you will see fear no more. The world will be
transformed before your sight, cleansed of all guilt and softly brushed
with beauty. The world contains no fear which you laid not upon it. And
none you cannot ask love's messengers to remove from it and see it
still. The Holy Spirit has given you His messengers to send to each
other and return to each with what love sees. They have been given to
replace the hungry dogs of fear you sent instead. And they go forth to
signify the end of fear.
55
Love, too, would set a feast before you on a table covered with a
spotless cloth, set in a quiet garden where no sound but singing and a
softly joyous whispering is ever heard. This is a feast which honors
your holy relationship and at which everyone is welcomed as an honored
guest. And in a holy instant, grace is said by everyone together as they
join in gentleness before the table of communion. And I will join you
there, as long ago I promised and promise still. For in your new
relationship am I made welcome. And where I am made welcome, there I
am.
56
I am made welcome in the state of grace, which means you have at last
forgiven me. For I became the symbol of your sin, and so I had to die
instead of you. To the ego sin means death, and so Atonement is achieved
through murder. Salvation is looked upon as a way by which the Son of
God was killed instead of you.
57
Yet would I offer you my body, you whom I love, knowing its
littleness? Or would I teach that bodies cannot keep us apart? Mine was
no greater value than yours; no better means for communication of
salvation, but not its Source. No one can die for anyone, and death does
not atone for sin. Yet you can live to show it is not real. The body
does appear to be the symbol of sin while you believe that it can get
you what you want. While you believe that it can give you pleasure, you
will also believe that it can bring you pain.
58
To think you could be satisfied and happy with so little is to hurt
yourself, and to limit the happiness that you would have calls upon pain
to fill your meager store and make your lives complete. This is
completion, as the ego sees it. For guilt creeps in where happiness has
been removed and substitutes for it. Communion is another kind of
completion which goes beyond guilt because it goes beyond the body.
59
We said that peace must first surmount the obstacle of your desire to
get rid of it. Where the attraction of guilt holds sway, peace is not
wanted. The second obstacle that peace must flow across, and closely
related to the first, is the belief that the body is valuable for what
it offers. For here is the attraction of guilt made manifest in the body
and seen in it.
60
This [is] the value that you think peace would rob you of. This is what
you believe that it would dispossess and leave you homeless. And it is
this for which you would deny a home to peace. This "sacrifice" you feel
to be too great to make, too much to ask of you.
61
Is it a sacrifice or a release? What has the body really given you that
justifies your strange belief that in it lies salvation? Do you not see
that this is the belief in death? Here is the focus of the perception of
Atonement as murder. Here is the source of the idea that love is fear.
The Holy Spirit's messengers are sent far beyond the body, calling the
mind to join in holy communion and be at peace. Such is the message that
I gave them for you.
62
It is only the messengers of fear that see the body, for they look for
what can suffer. Is it a sacrifice to be removed from what can suffer?
The Holy Spirit does not demand you sacrifice the hope of the body's
pleasure; it has no hope of pleasure. But neither can it bring
you fear of pain. Pain is the only "sacrifice" the Holy Spirit asks, and
this He would remove.
63
Peace is extended from you only to the eternal, and it reaches out from
the eternal in you. It flows across all else. The second obstacle is no
more solid than the first. For you will neither to get rid of peace nor
limit it. What are these obstacles which you would interpose between
peace and its going forth but barriers you place between your will and
its accomplishment? You want communion, not the feast of fear. You want
salvation, not the pain of guilt. And you want your Father, not a little
mound of clay, to be your home. In your holy relationship is your
Father's Son. He has not lost communion with Him nor with himself. When
you agreed to join each other, you acknowledged this is so. This has no
cost, but it has release from cost.
64
You have paid very dearly for your illusions, and nothing you have paid
for brought you peace. Are you not glad that Heaven cannot be
sacrificed, and sacrifice cannot be asked of you? There is no obstacle
which you can place before our union, for in your holy relationship, I
am there already. We will surmount all obstacles together, for we stand
within the gates and not outside. How easily the gates are opened from
within to let peace through to bless the tired world! Can it be
difficult for us to walk past barriers together when you have joined the
limitless? The end of guilt is in your hands to give. Would you stop now
to look for guilt in each other?
65
Let me be to you the symbol of the end of guilt, and look upon
each other as you would look on me. Forgive me all the sins you think
the Son of God committed. And in the light of your forgiveness, he will
remember who he is and forget what never was. I ask for your
forgiveness, for if you are guilty, so must I be. But if I surmounted
guilt and overcame the world, you were with me. Would you see in me the
symbol of guilt or of the end of guilt, remembering that what I signify
to you, you see within yourself?
66
From your holy relationship truth proclaims the truth, and love looks on
itself. Salvation flows from deep within the home you offered to my
Father and to me. And we are there together in the quiet communion in
which the Father and the Son are joined. Oh come ye faithful to the holy
union of the Father and Son in you! And keep you not apart from what is
offered you in gratitude for giving peace its home in Heaven. Send forth
to all the world the joyous message of the end of guilt, and all the
world will answer. Think of your happiness as everyone offers you
witness of the end of sin and shows you that its power is gone forever.
Where can guilt be, when the belief in sin is gone? And where is death,
when its great advocate is heard no more?
67
Forgive me your illusions and release me from punishment for what I have
not done. So will you learn the freedom that I taught by teaching
freedom to each other and so releasing me. I am within your holy
relationship, yet you would imprison me behind the obstacles you raise
to freedom and bar my way to you. Yet it is not possible to keep away
One Who is there already. And in Him it is possible that our
communion, where we are joined already, will be the focus of the new
perception that will bring light to all the world, contained in you.
68
Your little part is but to give the Holy Spirit the whole idea of
sacrifice. And to accept the peace He gave instead, without the limits
which would hold its extension back and so would limit your awareness of
it. For what He gives must be extended if you would have its limitless
power and use it for the Son of God's release. It is not this you would
be rid of, and having it you cannot limit it. If peace is homeless, so
are you and so am I. And He Who is our home is homeless with us. Is this
your will? Would you forever be a wanderer in search of peace? Would you
invest your hope of peace and happiness in what must fail?
69
Faith in the eternal is always justified, for the eternal is forever
kind, infinite in its patience, and wholly loving. It will accept you
wholly and give you peace. Yet it can unite only with what already is at
peace in you, immortal as itself. The body can bring you neither peace
nor turmoil; neither pain nor joy. It is a means and not an end. It has
no purpose of itself, but only what is given to it. The body will seem
to be whatever is the means for reaching the goal that you assign to it.
[Only the mind can set a purpose, and only mind can see the means for
its accomplishment and justify its use.] Peace and guilt are both
conditions of the mind to be attained. And these conditions are the home
of the emotion which called them forth and therefore is compatible with
them. But think you which it is that is compatible with you.
70
Here is your choice, and it is free. But all that lies in it
will come with it, and what you think you are can never be apart from
it. The body is the great seeming betrayer of faith. In it lies
disillusionment and the seeds of faithlessness, but only if you ask of
it what it cannot give. Can your mistake be reasonable grounds for
depression and disillusionment and for retaliative attack on what you
think has failed you? Use not your error as the justification for your
faithlessness. You have not sinned, but you have been mistaken in what
is faithful. And the correction of your mistake will give you grounds
for faith.
71
It is impossible to seek for pleasure through the body and not find
pain. It is essential that this relationship be understood, for it is
one the ego sees as proof of sin. It is not really punitive at all. It
is but the inevitable result of equating yourself with the body, which
is the invitation to pain. For it invites fear to enter and become your
purpose. The attraction of guilt must enter with it, and
whatever fear directs the body to do is therefore painful. It will share
the pain of all illusions, and the illusion of pleasure will be the same
as pain.
72
Is not this inevitable? Under fear's orders, the body will pursue guilt,
serving its master whose attraction to guilt maintains the whole
illusion of its existence. This, then, is the attraction of pain. Ruled
by this perception, the body becomes the servant of pain, seeking it
dutifully and obeying the idea that pain is pleasure. It is this idea
that underlies all of the ego's heavy investment in the body. And it is
this insane relationship which it keeps hidden and yet feeds upon. To
you it teaches that the body's pleasure is happiness. Yet to itself it
whispers, "It is death."
73
Why should the body be anything to you? Certainly what it is made of is
not precious. And just as certainly, it has no feeling. It transmits to
you the feelings that you want. Like any communication medium, the body
receives and sends the messages that it is given. It has no feeling for
them. All of the feeling with which they are invested is given by the
sender and the receiver. The ego and the Holy Spirit both recognize
this, and both also recognize that here the sender and receiver are the
same. The Holy Spirit tells you this with joy. The ego hides it, for it
would keep you unaware of it. Who would send messages of hatred and
attack if he but understood he sends them to himself? Who would
accuse, make guilty, and condemn himself?
74
The ego's messages are always sent away from you in the belief that for
your message of attack and guilt will someone other than yourself
suffer. And even if you suffer, yet someone else will suffer more. The
great deceiver recognizes that this is not so, but as the "enemy" of
peace, it urges you to send out all your messages of hate and free
yourself. And to convince you this is possible, it bids the body search
for pain in attack upon another, calling it pleasure and offering it to
you as freedom from attack.
75
Hear not its madness, and believe not the impossible is true. Forget not
that the ego has dedicated the body to the goal of sin and places in it
all its faith that this can be accomplished. Its sad disciples chant the
body's praise continually, in solemn celebration of the ego's rule. Not
one but must believe that yielding to the attraction of guilt is the
escape from pain. Not one but must regard the body as himself, without
which he would die, and yet within which is his death equally
inevitable.
76
It is not given to the ego's disciples to realize that they have
dedicated themselves to death. Freedom is offered them, but they have
not accepted it, and what is offered must also be received to be truly
given. For the Holy Spirit, too, is a communication medium, receiving
from the Father and offering His messages unto the Son. Like the ego,
the Holy Spirit is both the sender and the receiver. For what is sent
through Him returns to Him, seeking itself along the way and finding
what it seeks. So does the ego find the death it seeks, returning it to
you.
77
To you in whose special relationship the Holy Spirit entered, it is
given to release and be released from the dedication to death. For it
was offered you, and you accepted. Yet you must learn still more about
this strange devotion, for it contains the third of the obstacles which
peace must flow across. No one can die unless he chooses death. What
seems to be the fear of death is really its attraction. Guilt, too, is
feared and fearful. Yet it could have no hold at all except on those who
are attracted to it and seek it out. And so it is with death. Made by
the ego, its dark shadow falls across all living things because the ego
is the "enemy" of life.
78
And yet a shadow cannot kill. What is a shadow to the living? They but
walk past, and it is gone. But what of those whose dedication it is not
to live—the black-draped "sinners," the ego's mournful chorus, plodding
so heavily away from life, dragging their chains and marching in the
slow procession which honors their grim master, lord of death? Touch any
one of them with the gentle hands of forgiveness and watch the chains
fall away along with yours. See him throw aside the black robe he was
wearing to his funeral and hear him laugh at death. The sentence sin
would lay upon him he can escape through your forgiveness.
79
This is no arrogance. It is the Will of God. What is impossible to you
who chose His Will as yours? What is death to you? Your dedication is
not to death nor to its master. When you accepted the Holy Spirit's
purpose in place of the ego's, you renounced death, exchanging it for
life. We know that an idea leaves not its source. And death is the
result of the thought we call the ego as surely as life is the result of
the Thought of God.
80
From the ego came sin and guilt and death, in opposition to life and
innocence and to the Will of God Himself. Where can such opposition lie
but in the sick minds of the insane, dedicated to madness and set
against the peace of Heaven? One thing is sure—God, Who created neither
sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither
sin nor its results. The shrouded figures in the funeral procession
march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is they live. They
are not following it; they are opposing it.
81
And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body which they
dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, offered
to sin to feed upon and keep itself alive—a thing condemned, damned by
its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself.
You who believe you have condemned the Son of God to this are
arrogant. But you who would release him are but honoring the Will of his
Creator. The arrogance of sin, the pride of guilt, the sepulcher of
separation—all are part of your unrecognized dedication to death. The
glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would kill it. For what the ego
loves, it kills for its obedience. But what obeys it not, it cannot
kill.
82
You have another dedication which would keep the body incorruptible and
perfect as long as it is useful for your holy purpose. The body no more
dies than it can feel. It does nothing. Of itself, it is neither
corruptible nor incorruptible. It is nothing. It is the result
of a tiny mad idea of corruption which can be corrected. For God has
answered this insane idea with His own, an Answer which left Him not and
therefore brings the Creator to the awareness of every mind which heard
His Answer and accepted it.
83
You who are dedicated to the incorruptible have been given through your
acceptance the power to release from corruption. What better way to
teach the first and fundamental principle in a course on miracles than
by showing you the one which seems to be the hardest can be accomplished
first? The body can but serve your purpose. As you look upon it, so will
it seem to be. Death, were it true, would be the final and complete
disruption of communication which is the ego's goal.
84
Those who fear death see not how often and how loudly they call to it
and bid it come to save them from communication. For death is seen as
safety, the great dark savior from the light of truth, the answer to the
Answer, the silencer of the Voice that speaks for God. Yet the retreat
to death is not the end of conflict. Only God's Answer is its end. The
obstacle of your seeming love for death that peace must flow across
seems to be very great. For in it lies hidden all the ego's secrets, all
its strange devices for deception, all its sick ideas and weird
imaginings. Here is the final end of union, the triumph of the ego's
making over creation, the victory of lifelessness on Life Itself.
85
Under the dusty edge of its distorted world, the ego would lay the Son
of God, slain by its orders, proof in his decay that God Himself is
powerless before the ego's might, unable to protect the life that He
created against the ego's savage wish to kill. My brothers, children of
our Father, this is a dream of death. There is no funeral, no
dark altars, no grim commandments nor twisted rituals of condemnation to
which the body leads you. Ask not release of it. But free it from the
merciless and unrelenting orders you laid upon it and forgive it what
you ordered it to do. In its exaltation you commanded it to die, for
only death could conquer life. And what but insanity could look upon the
defeat of God and think it real?
86
The fear of death will go as its appeal is yielded to love's real
attraction. The end of sin, which nestles quietly in the safety of your
relationship, protected by your union, ready to grow into a mighty force
for God, is very near. The infancy of salvation is carefully guarded by
love, preserved from every thought that would attack it and quietly made
ready to fulfill the mighty task for which it was given you. Your
newborn purpose is nursed by angels, cherished by the Holy Spirit, and
protected by God Himself. It needs not your protection; it is yours.
For it is deathless, and within it lies the end of death.
87
What danger can assail the wholly innocent? What can attack the
guiltless? What fear can enter and disturb the peace of sinlessness?
What has been given you, even in its infancy, is in full communication
with God and you. In its tiny hands, it holds in perfect safety every
miracle you will perform, held out to you. The miracle of life is
ageless, born in time but nourished in eternity. Behold this infant to
whom you gave a resting-place by your forgiveness of each other, and see
in it the Will of God. Here is the babe of Bethlehem reborn. And
everyone who gives him shelter will follow him, not to the cross, but to
the Resurrection and the Life.
88
When anything seems to you to be a source of fear, when any situation
strikes you with terror and makes your body tremble and the cold sweat
of fear comes over it, remember it is always for one reason—the
ego has perceived it as a symbol of fear, a sign of sin and death.
Remember then that neither sign nor symbol should be confused with
source, for they must stand for something other than themselves. Their
meaning cannot lie in them but must be sought in what they represent.
And they may thus mean everything or nothing, according to the truth or
falsity of the idea which they reflect. Confronted with such seeming
uncertainty of meaning, judge it not. Remember the holy Presence of the
One given to you to be the Source of judgment. Give it to Him to judge
for you, and say:
90What
would you see without the fear of death? What would you feel and think
if death held no attraction for you? Very simply, you would remember
your Father. The Creator of life, the Source of everything that lives,
the Father of the universe and of the universe of universes and of
everything that lies even beyond them would you remember. And as this
memory rises in your mind, peace must still surmount a final obstacle
after which is salvation completed and the Son of God entirely restored
to sanity. For here your world does end.
91
The fourth obstacle to be surmounted hangs like a heavy veil before the
face of Christ. Yet as His face rises beyond it, shining with joy
because He is in His Father's Love, peace will lightly brush the veil
aside and run to meet Him and to join with Him at last. For this dark
veil, which seems to make the face of Christ Himself like to a leper's
and the bright rays of His Father's love which light His face with glory
appear as streams of blood, fades in the blazing light beyond it when
the fear of death is gone.
92
This is the darkest veil, upheld by the belief in death and protected by
its attraction. The dedication to death and to its sovereignty is but
the solemn vow, the promise made in secret to the ego never to lift this
veil, not to approach it nor even to suspect that it is there. This is
the secret bargain made with the ego to keep what lies beyond the veil
forever blotted out and unremembered. Here is your promise never to
allow union to call you out of separation; the great amnesia in which
the memory of God seems quite forgotten; the cleavage of your Self from
you—the fear of God, the final step in your dissociation.
93
See how the belief in death would seem to "save" you. For if this is
gone, what can you fear but life? It is the attraction of death
that makes life seem to be ugly, cruel, and tyrannical. You are no more
afraid of death than of the ego. These are your chosen friends. For in
your secret alliance with them, you have agreed never to let the fear of
God be lifted so you could look upon the face of Christ and join Him in
His Father.
94
Every obstacle that peace must flow across is surmounted in just the
same way; the fear that raised it yields to the love beneath, and so the
fear is gone. And so it is with this. The desire to get rid of peace and
drive the Holy Spirit from you fades in the presence of the quiet
recognition that you love Him. The exaltation of the body is given up in
favor of the Spirit, which you love as you could never love the body.
And the appeal of death is lost forever as love's attraction stirs and
calls to you. From beyond each of the obstacles to love, Love Itself has
called, and each has been surmounted by the power of the attraction of
what lies beyond. Your wanting fear seemed to be holding them in place.
Yet when you heard the voice of love beyond them, you answered and they
disappeared.
95
And now you stand in terror before what you swore never to look upon.
Your eyes look down, remembering your promise to your "friends." The
"loveliness" of sin, the delicate appeal of guilt, the "holy" waxen
image of death, and the fear of vengeance of the ego you swore in blood
not to desert, all rise and bid you not to raise your eyes. For you
realize that if you look on this and let the veil be lifted, they
will be gone forever. All of your "friends," your "protectors," and your
"home" will vanish. Nothing that you remember now will you remember.
96
It seems to you the world will utterly abandon you if you but raise your
eyes. Yet all that will occur is you will leave the world forever. This
is the reestablishment of your will. Look upon it open-eyed and
you will nevermore believe that you are at the mercy of things beyond
you, forces you cannot control, and thoughts that come to you against
your will. It is your will to look on this. No mad desire, no trivial
impulse to forget again, no stab of fear, nor the cold sweat of seeming
death can stand against your will. For what attracts you from beyond the
veil is also deep within you, unseparated from it and completely
one.
97
Forget not that you came this far together. And it was surely not the
ego that led you here. No obstacle to peace can be surmounted through
its help. It does not open up its secrets and bid you look on them and
go beyond them. It would not have you see its weakness and learn it has
no power to keep you from the truth. The Guide Who brought you here
remains with you, and when you raise your eyes, you will be ready to
look on terror with no fear at all. But first lift up your eyes and look
upon each other in innocence born of complete forgiveness of each
other's illusions and through the eyes of faith, which sees them not.
98
No one can look upon the fear of God unterrified unless he has accepted
the Atonement and learned illusions are not real. No one can stand
before this obstacle alone, for he could not have reached thus far
unless his brother walked beside him. And no one would dare to look on
it without complete forgiveness of his brother in his heart. Stand you
here a while and tremble not. You will be ready. Let us join together in
a holy instant, here in this place where the purpose given in a holy
instant has led you. And let us join in faith that He Who brought us
here together will offer you the innocence you need and that you will
accept it for my love and His.
99
Nor is it possible to look on this too soon. This is the place to which
everyone must come when he is ready. Once he has found his brother, he
is ready. Yet merely to reach the place is not enough. A journey without
a purpose is still meaningless, and even when it is over, it seems to
make no sense. How can you know that it is over unless you realize its
purpose is accomplished? Here, with the journey's end before you, you see
its purpose. And it is here you choose whether to look upon it or wander
on, only to return and make the choice again.
100
To look upon the fear of God does need some preparation. Only
the sane can look on stark insanity and raving madness with pity and
compassion but not with fear. For only if they share in it does it seem
fearful, and you do share in it until you look upon each other with
perfect faith and love and tenderness. Before complete forgiveness, you
still stand unforgiving. You are afraid of God because you fear
each other. Those you do not forgive you fear. And no one
reaches love with fear beside him.
101
This brother who stands beside you still seems to be a stranger. You do
not know him, and your interpretation of him is very fearful. And you
attack him still, to keep what seems to be yourself unharmed. Yet in his
hands is your salvation. You see his madness, which you hate because you
share it. And all the pity and forgiveness that would heal it gives way
to fear. Brothers, you need forgiveness of each other, for you will
share in madness or in Heaven together. And you will raise your eyes in
faith together or not at all.
102
Beside each of you is one who offers you the chalice of Atonement, for
the Holy Spirit is in him. Would you hold his sins against him or accept
his gift to you? Is this giver of salvation your friend or enemy? Choose
which he is, remembering that you will receive of him according to your
choice. He has in him the power to forgive your sins, as you for him.
Neither can give it to himself alone. And yet your savior stands beside
each one. Let him be what he is and seek not to make of love an enemy.
103
Behold your Friend, the Christ Who stands beside you. How holy and how
beautiful He is! You thought He sinned because you cast the veil of sin
upon Him to hide His loveliness. Yet still He holds forgiveness out to
you to share His holiness. This "enemy," this "stranger" still offers
you salvation as His Friend. The "enemies" of Christ, the worshipers of
sin, know not Whom they attack. This is your brother, crucified by sin,
and waiting for release from pain. Would you not offer him forgiveness,
when only he can offer it to you? For his redemption, he will give you
yours as surely as God created every living thing and loves it. And he
will give it truly, for it will be both offered and received.
104
There is no grace of Heaven that you cannot offer to each other and
receive from your most holy Friend. Let him withhold it not, for by
receiving it you offer it to him. [For he will receive of you
what you received of him.] Redemption has been given you to give
each other, and thus receive it. Whom you forgive is free, and what you
give you share. Forgive the sins your brother thinks he has committed
and all the guilt you think you see in him.
105
Here is the holy place of resurrection to which we come again; to which
we will return until redemption is accomplished and received. Think who
your brother is before you would condemn him. And offer thanks to God
that he is holy and has been given the gift of holiness for you. Join
him in gladness and remove all trace of guilt from his disturbed and
tortured mind. Help him to lift the heavy burden of sin you laid upon
him and he accepted as his own, and toss it lightly and with happy
laughter away from him. Press it not like thorns against his brow, nor
nail him to it unredeemed and hopeless.
106
Give each other faith, for faith and hope and mercy are yours to give.
Into the hands that give the gift is given. Look on your brother, and
see in him the gift of God you would receive. It is almost Easter, the
time of resurrection. Let us give redemption to each other and share in
it that we may rise as one in resurrection and not separate in death.
Behold the gift of freedom that I gave the Holy Spirit for both of you.
And be you free together, as you offer to the Holy Spirit this same
gift. And giving it, receive it of Him in return for what you gave. He
leadeth you and me together that we might meet here in this holy place
and make the same decision.
107
Free your brother here, as I freed you. Give him the self-same gift, nor
look upon him with condemnation of any kind. See him as guiltless as I
look on you, and overlook the sins he thinks he sees within himself.
Offer each other freedom and complete release from sin here in the
garden of seeming agony and death. So will we prepare together the way
unto the resurrection of God's Son and let him rise again to glad
remembrance of his Father, Who knows no sin, no death, but only life
eternal.
108
Together we will disappear into the Presence beyond the veil, not to be
lost, but found; not to be seen, but known. And knowing,
nothing in the plan God has established for salvation will be left
undone. This is the journey's purpose, without which is the journey
meaningless. Here is the peace of God, given to you eternally by Him.
Here is the rest and quiet that you seek, the reason for the journey
from its beginning. Heaven is the gift you owe each other, the debt of
gratitude you offer to the Son of God in thanks for what he is and what
his Father created him to be.
109
Think carefully how you would look upon the giver of this gift, for as
you look on him, so will the gift itself appear to be. As he is seen as
either the giver of guilt or of salvation, so will his offering be seen
and so received. The crucified give pain because they are in pain. But
the redeemed give joy because they have been healed of pain. Everyone
gives as he receives, but he must choose what it will be that he
receives. And he will recognize his choice by what he gives and what is
given him. Nor is it given anything in hell or Heaven to interfere with
his decision.
110
You came this far because the journey was your choice. And no one
undertakes to do what he believes is meaningless. What you had faith in
still is faithful and watches over you in faith so gentle yet so strong
that it would lift you far beyond the veil and place the Son of God
safely within the sure protection of his Father. Here is the only
purpose that gives this world and the long journey through this world
whatever meaning lies in them. Beyond this they are meaningless.
You stand together, still without conviction they have a purpose. Yet it
is given you to see this purpose in your holy Friend and recognize it is
your own.
1
This is Palm Sunday, the celebration of victory and the acceptance of
the truth. Let us not spend this holy week brooding on the crucifixion
of God's Son, but happily in the celebration of his release. For Easter
is the sign of peace, not pain. A slain Christ has no meaning. But a risen
Christ becomes the symbol of the Son of God's forgiveness of himself;
the sign he looks upon himself as healed and whole.
2
This week begins with palms and ends with lilies, the white and holy
sign the Son of God is innocent. Let no dark sign of crucifixion
intervene between the journey and its purpose; between the acceptance of
the truth and its expression. This week we celebrate life, not death.
And we honor the perfect purity of the Son of God and not his sins.
Offer each other the gift of lilies, not the crown of thorns; the gift
of love and not the "gift" of fear. You stand beside each other, thorns
in one hand and lilies in the other, uncertain which to give. Join now
with me and throw away the thorns, offering the lilies to replace them.
This Easter, I would have the gift of your forgiveness offered by you to
me and returned by me to you.
3
We cannot be united in crucifixion and in death. Nor can the
resurrection be complete till your forgiveness rests on Christ, along
with mine. A week is short, and yet this holy week is the symbol of the
whole journey the Son of God has undertaken. He started with the sign of
victory the promise of the resurrection already given him. Let him not
wander into the temptation of crucifixion and delay him there. Help him
to go in peace beyond it, with the light of his own innocence lighting
his way to his redemption and release. Hold him not back with thorns and
nails when his redemption is so near. But let the whiteness of your
shining gift of lilies speed him on his way to resurrection.
4
[Easter is not the celebration of the cost of sin but of its end.]
If you see glimpses of the face of Christ behind the veil looking
between the snow white petals of the lilies you have received and given
as your gift, you will behold each other's face and recognize it. I was
a stranger and you took me in, not knowing who I was. Yet for your gift
of lilies you will know. In your forgiveness of this stranger, alien to
you and yet your ancient Friend, lie his release and your redemption
with him. The time of Easter is a time of joy and not of mourning. Look
on your risen Friend and celebrate his holiness along with me. For
Easter is the time of your salvation, along with mine.
5
Look upon all the trinkets made to hang upon the body or to cover it or
for its use. See all the useless things made for its eyes to see. Think
on the many offerings made for its pleasure and remember all these were
made to make seem lovely what you hate. Would you employ this hated
thing to draw your brother to you and to attract his body's eyes? Learn
you but offer him a crown of thorns, not recognizing it for what it is
and trying to justify your own interpretation of its value by his
acceptance. Yet still the gift proclaims his worthlessness to you, as
his acceptance and delight acknowledges the lack of value he places on
himself.
6
Gifts are not made through bodies if they be truly given and received.
For bodies can neither offer nor accept; hold out nor take. Only the
mind can value, and only the mind decides on what it would receive and
give. And every gift it offers depends on what it wants. It will adorn
its chosen home most carefully, making it ready to receive the gifts it
wants by offering them to those who come unto its chosen home or those
it would attract to it. And there they will exchange their gifts,
offering and receiving what their minds judge to be worthy of them.
7
Each gift is an evaluation of the receiver and the giver. No one
but sees in his chosen home an altar to himself. No one but seeks to
draw to it the worshipers of what he placed upon it, making it worthy of
their devotion. And each has set a light upon his altar, that they may
see what he has placed upon it and take it for their own. Here is the
value that you lay upon your brother and on yourself. Here is your gift
to both; your judgment on the Son of God for what he is. Forget not that
it is your savior to whom the gift is offered. Offer him thorns and you
are crucified. Offer him lilies and it is yourself you free.
8
I have great need for lilies, for the Son of God has not forgiven me.
And can I offer him forgiveness when he offers thorns to me? For he who
offers thorns to anyone is against me still, and who is whole without
him? Be you his friend for me that I may be forgiven and you may look
upon the Son of God as whole. But look you first upon the altar in your
chosen home and see what you have laid upon it to offer me. If it be
thorns whose points gleam sharply in a blood-red light, the body is your
chosen home, and it is separation that you offer me. And yet the thorns
are gone. Look you still closer at them now, and you will see your altar
is no longer what it was.
9
You look still with the body's eyes, and they can see but thorns. Yet
you have asked for and received another sight. Those who accept the Holy
Spirit's purpose as their own share also His vision. And what enables
Him to see His purpose shine forth from every altar now is yours as well
as His. He sees no strangers, only dearly loved and loving friends. He
sees no thorns, but only lilies, gleaming in the gentle glow of peace
that shines on everything He looks upon and loves.
10
This Easter look with different eyes upon each other. You have
forgiven me. And yet I cannot use your gift of lilies while you see them
not. Nor can you use what I have given unless you share it. The Holy
Spirit's vision is no idle gift, no plaything to be tossed about a while
and laid aside. Listen and hear this carefully, nor think it but a
dream—a careless thought to play with or a toy you would pick up from
time to time and then put by. For if you do, so will it be to you.
11
You have the vision now to look past all illusions. It has been
given you to see no thorns, no strangers, and no obstacles to peace. The
fear of God is nothing to you now. Who is afraid to look upon illusions,
knowing his savior stands beside him? With him, your vision has become
the greatest power for the undoing of illusion that God Himself could
give. For what God gave the Holy Spirit, you have received. The Son of
God looks unto you for his release. For you have asked for and been
given the strength to look upon this final obstacle and see no thorns
nor nails to crucify the Son of God and crown him king of death. Your
chosen home is on the other side, beyond the veil. It has been carefully
prepared for you, and it is ready to receive you now. You will not see
it with the body's eyes. Yet all you need you have.
12
Your home has called to you since time began, nor have you ever failed
entirely to hear. You heard but knew not how to look nor where.
And now you know. In you the knowledge lies, ready to be unveiled and
freed from all the terror that kept it hidden. There is no fear
in love. The song of Easter is the glad refrain the Son of God was never
crucified. Let us lift up our eyes together, not in fear, but faith. And
there will be no fear in us, for in our vision will be no illusions—only
a pathway to the open door of Heaven, the home we share in quietness,
and where we live in gentleness and peace as one together.
13
Would you not have your holy brother lead you there? His innocence will
light your way, offering you its guiding light and sure protection, and
shining from the holy altar within him where you laid the lilies of
forgiveness. Let him be to you the savior from illusions, and look on
him with the new vision that looks upon the lilies and brings you joy.
We go beyond the veil of fear, lighting each other's way. The holiness
that leads us is within us, as is our home. So will we find what we were
meant to find by Him Who leads us.
14
This is the way to Heaven and to the peace of Easter, in which we join
in glad awareness that the Son of God is risen from the past and has
awakened to the present. Now is he free, unlimited in his communion with
all that is within him. Now are the lilies of his innocence untouched by
guilt and perfectly protected from the cold chill of fear and withering
blight of sin alike. Your gift has saved him from the thorns and nails,
and his strong arm is free to guide you safely through them and beyond.
Walk with him now rejoicing, for the savior from illusions has come to
greet you and lead you home with him.
15
Here is your savior and your friend, released from crucifixion through
your vision and free to lead you now where he would be. He will not
leave you nor forsake the savior from his pain. And gladly will you walk
the way of innocence together, singing as you behold the open door of
Heaven, and recognize the home that called to you. Give joyously to one
another the freedom and the strength to lead you there. And come before
each other's holy altar where the strength and freedom wait, to offer
and receive the bright awareness that leads you home. The lamp is lit in
both of you for one another. And by the hands that gave it to each other
shall both of you be led past fear to love.
16
The belief in sin is an adjustment. And an adjustment is a change; a
shift in perception or a belief that what was so before has been made
different. Every adjustment is therefore a distortion and calls upon
defenses to uphold it against reality. Knowledge requires no adjustment
and in fact is lost if any shift or change is undertaken. For this
reduces it at once to mere perception—a way of looking in which
certainty is lost and doubt has entered. To this impaired condition are
adjustments necessary because they are not true. Who need adjust to
truth, which calls on only what he is, to understand?
17
Adjustments of any kind are of the ego. For it is the ego's fixed belief
that all relationships depend upon adjustments to make of them what it
would have them be. Direct relationships, in which there are no
interferences, are always seen as dangerous. The ego is the
self-appointed mediator of all relationships, making whatever
adjustments it deems necessary and interposing them between those who
would meet to keep them separate and prevent their union. It is this
studied interference which makes it difficult for you to recognize your
holy relationship for what it is.
18
The holy do not interfere with truth. They are not afraid of it, for it
is within the truth they recognized their holiness and rejoiced at what
they saw. They looked on it directly, without attempting to adjust
themselves to it or it to them. And so they saw that it was in
them, not deciding first where they would have it be. Their
looking merely asked a question, and it was what they saw that answered
them. You make the world and then adjust to it, and it
to you. Nor is there any difference between yourself and it in your
perception, which made them both.
19
A simple question yet remains and needs an answer. Do you like
what you have made—a world of murder and attack through which you thread
your timid way through constant dangers, alone and frightened, hoping at
most that death will wait a little longer before it overtakes you and
you disappear? You made this up. It is a picture of what you
think you are, of how you see yourself. A murderer is frightened, and
those who kill fear death. All these are but the fearful thoughts of
those who would adjust themselves to a world made fearful by their
adjustments. And they look out in sorrow from what is sad within and see
the sadness there.
20
Have you not wondered what the world is really like; how it would look
through happy eyes? The world you see is but a judgment on yourself. It
is not there at all. Yet judgment lays a sentence on it, justifies it,
and makes it real. Such is the world you see—a judgment on
yourself and made by you. This sickly picture of yourself is carefully
preserved by the ego, whose image it is and which it loves, and placed
outside you in the world. And to this world must you adjust, as long as
you believe this picture is outside and has you at its mercy. This world
is merciless, and were it outside you, you should indeed be
fearful. Yet it was you who made it merciless, and now if
mercilessness seems to look back at you, it can be corrected.
21
Who in a holy relationship can long remain unholy? The world the holy
see is one with them, just as the world the ego looks upon is like
itself. The world the holy see is beautiful because they see their
innocence in it. They did not tell it what it was; they did not make
adjustments to fit their orders. They gently questioned it and
whispered, "What are you?" And He Who watches over all perception
answered. Take not the judgment of the world as answer to the question,
"What am I?"
22
The world believes in sin, but the belief that made it as you see it is
not outside you. Seek not to make the Son of God adjust to his insanity.
There is a stranger in him who wandered carelessly into the home of
truth, and who will wander off. He came without a purpose, but he will
not remain before the shining light the Holy Spirit offered and you
accepted. For there the stranger is made homeless and you are welcome.
23
Ask not this transient stranger, "What am I?" He is the only thing in
all the universe that does not know. Yet it is he you asked, and it is
to his answer that you would adjust. This one wild thought, fierce in
its arrogance and yet so tiny and so meaningless it slips unnoticed
through the universe of truth, becomes your guide. To it you turn to ask
the meaning of the universe. And of the one blind thing in all the
seeing universe of truth you ask, "How shall I look upon the Son of
God?"
24
Does one ask judgment of what is totally bereft of judgment? And if you
have, would you believe the answer and adjust to it as if it were the
truth? The world you look on is the answer that it gave you, and you
have given it power to adjust the world to make its answer true. You
asked this puff of madness for the meaning of your unholy relationship
and adjusted it according to its insane answer. How happy did it make
you? Did you meet with joy to bless the Son of God and give him thanks
for all the happiness which he held out to you? Did you recognize each
other as the eternal gift of God to you? Did you see the holiness that
shone in both of you to bless the other? That is the purpose of your
holy relationship. Ask not the means of its attainment of the one thing
that still would have it be unholy. Give it no power to adjust the means
and end.
25
Prisoners bound with heavy chains for years, starved and emaciated, weak
and exhausted and with eyes so long cast down in darkness they remember
not the light, do not leap up in joy the instant they are made free. It
takes a while for them to understand what freedom is. You groped
but feebly in the dust and found each other's hand, uncertain whether to
let it go or to take hold on life so long forgotten. Strengthen your
hold and raise your eyes unto your strong companion, in whom the meaning
of your freedom lies. He seemed to be crucified beside you. And yet his
holiness remained untouched and perfect, and with him beside you, you
shall this day enter with him to Paradise and know the peace of God.
26
Such is my will for both of you and for each of you for one another and
for himself. Here there is only holiness and joining without limit. For
what is Heaven but union, direct and perfect, and without the veil of
fear upon it? Here are we one, looking with perfect gentleness upon each
other and on ourselves. Here all thoughts of any separation between us
become impossible. You who were prisoners in separation are now made
free in Paradise. And here would I unite with you, my friends, my
brothers, and my Self. Your gift unto each other has given me the
certainty our union will be soon.
27
Share, then, this faith with me and know that it is justified. There is
no fear in perfect love because it knows no sin and it must look
on others as on itself. Looking with charity within, what can it fear without?
The innocent see safety, and the pure in heart see God within His Son
and look unto the Son to lead them to the Father. And where else would
they go but where they will to be? Each of you now will lead the other
to the Father as surely as God created His Son holy and kept him so. In
your brother is the light of God's eternal promise of your immortality.
See him as sinless, and there can be no fear in you.
28
Nothing can hurt you unless you give it the power to do so. For you give
power as the laws of this world interpret giving—as you give, you lose.
It is not up to you to give power at all. Power is of God, given by Him
and reawakened by the Holy Spirit, Who knows that as you give, you gain.
He gives no power to sin, and therefore it has none; nor to its results
as this world sees them—sickness and death and misery and pain. These
things have not occurred because the Holy Spirit sees them not and gives
no power to their seeming source. Thus would He keep you free of them.
Being without illusion of what you are, the Holy Spirit merely gives
everything to God, Who has already given and received all that is true.
The untrue He has neither received nor given.
29
Sin has no place in Heaven, where its results are alien and can no more
enter than can their source. And therein lies your need to see your
brother sinless. In him is Heaven. See sin in him instead, and Heaven is
lost to you. But see him as he is, and what is yours shines from him to
you. Your savior gives you only love, but what you would receive of him
is up to you. It lies in him to overlook all your mistakes, and therein
lies his own salvation. And so it is with yours. [Salvation is a lesson
in giving, as the Holy Spirit interprets it.] It is the reawakening of
the laws of God in minds that have established other laws and given them
power to enforce what God created not.
30
Your insane laws were made to guarantee that you would make mistakes and
give them power over you by accepting their results as your just due.
What could this be but madness? And is it this that you would see within
your savior from insanity? He is as free from this as you are, and in
the freedom that you see in him, you see your own. For this you share.
What God has given follows His laws and His alone. Nor is it possible
for those who follow them to suffer the results of any other source.
31
Those who choose freedom will experience only its results. Their power
is of God, and they will give it only to what God has given to share
with them. Nothing but this can touch them, for they see only this,
sharing their power according to the Will of God. And thus their freedom
is established and maintained. It is upheld through all temptation to
imprison and to be imprisoned. It is of them who learned of freedom that
you should ask what freedom is. Ask not the sparrow how the eagle soars,
for those with little wings have not accepted for themselves the power
to share with you.
32
The sinless give as they received. See, then, the power of sinlessness
within your brother and share with him the power of the release from sin
you offered him. To each who walks this earth in seeming solitude is a
savior given, whose special function here is to release him and so to
free himself. In the world of separation, each is appointed separately,
though they are all the same. Yet those who know that they are all the
same need not salvation. And each one finds his savior when he is ready
to look upon the face of Christ and see Him sinless.
33
The plan is not of you, nor need you be concerned with anything except
the part that has been given you to learn. For He Who knows the rest
will see to it without your help. But think not that He does not need
your part to help Him with the rest. For in your part lies all
of it, without which is no part complete, nor is the whole completed
without your part. The ark of peace is entered two by two, yet the
beginning of another world goes with them. Each holy relationship must
enter here to learn its special function in the Holy Spirit's plan, now
that it shares His purpose. And as this purpose is fulfilled, a new
world rises in which sin can enter not, and where the Son of God can
enter without fear, and where he rests a while to forget imprisonment
and to remember freedom. How can he enter, to rest and to remember,
without you? Except you be there, he is not complete. And it is his
completion that he remembers there.
34
This is the purpose given you. Think not that your forgiveness of each
other serves but you two alone. For the whole new world rests in the
hands of every two who enter here to rest. And as they rest, the face of
Christ shines on them, and they remember the laws of God, forgetting all
the rest and yearning only to have His laws perfectly fulfilled in them
and all their brothers. Think you when this has been achieved that you
will rest without them? You could no more leave one of them outside than
I could leave you and forget part of myself.
35
You may wonder how you can be at peace when, while you are in time,
there is so much that must be done before the way to peace is open.
Perhaps this seems impossible to you. But ask yourself if it is possible
that God would have a plan for your salvation that does not work. Once
you accept His plan as the one function that you would fulfill, there
will be nothing else the Holy Spirit will not arrange for you without
your effort.
36
He will go before you making straight your path and leaving in your way
no stones to trip on and no obstacles to bar your way. Nothing you need
will be denied you. Not one seeming difficulty but will melt away before
you reach it. You need take thought for nothing, careless of everything
except the only purpose that you would fulfill. As that was given you,
so will its fulfillment be. God's guarantee will hold against all
obstacles, for it rests on certainty and not contingency. It rests on you.
And what can be more certain than a Son of God?
37
In this world, God's Son comes closest to himself in a holy
relationship. There he begins to find the certainty his Father has in
him. And there he finds his function of restoring his Father's laws to
what was held outside them and finding what was lost. Only in time can anything
be lost, and never lost forever. So do the parts of God's Son
gradually join in time, and with each joining is the end of time brought
nearer. Each miracle of joining is a mighty herald of eternity. No one
who has a single purpose, unified and sure, can be afraid. No one who
shares his purpose with him can not be one with him.
38
Each herald of eternity sings of the end of sin and fear. Each speaks in
time of what is far beyond it. Two voices raised together call to the
hearts of everyone and let them beat as one. And in that single heart
beat is the unity of love proclaimed and given welcome. Peace to your
holy relationship, which has the power to hold the unity of the Son of
God together. You give to one another for everyone, and in your gift is
everyone made glad. Forget not Who has given you the gifts you give, and
through your not forgetting this will you remember Who gave the gifts to
Him to give to you.
39
It is impossible to overestimate your brother's value. Only the ego does
this, but all it means is that it wants the other for itself and
therefore values him too little. What is inestimable clearly
cannot be evaluated. Do you recognize the fear that rises from
the meaningless attempt to judge what lies so far beyond your judgment
you cannot even see it? Judge not what is invisible to you or you will
never see it, but wait in patience for its coming. It will be given you
to see your brother's worth when all you want for him is peace. And what
you want for him, you will receive.
40
How can you estimate the worth of him who offers peace to you? What
would you want except his offering? His worth has been established by
his Father, and you will recognize it as you receive his Father's gift
through him. What is in him will shine so brightly in your grateful
vision that you will merely love him and be glad. You will not think to
judge him, for who would see the face of Christ and yet insist that
judgment still has meaning? For this insistence is of those who do not
see. Vision or judgment is your choice, but never both of these.
41
Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is
used only as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function, for
minds need not the body to communicate. The sight that sees the body has
no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship. And while you
look upon each other thus, the means and end have not been brought in
line. Why should it take so many holy instants to let this be
accomplished, when one would do? There is but one. The little breath of
eternity that runs through time like golden light is all the
same—nothing before it, nothing afterwards.
42
You look upon each holy instant as a different point in time. It
never changes. All that it ever held or will ever hold is here right
now. The past takes nothing from it, and the future will add no more.
Here, then, is everything. Here is the loveliness of your relationship,
with means and end in perfect harmony already. Here is the perfect faith
that you will one day offer to each other already offered you.
And here the limitless forgiveness you will give each other already
given; the face of Christ you yet will look upon already seen.
43
Can you evaluate the giver of a gift like this? Would you exchange this
gift for any other? This gift returns the laws of God to your
remembrance. And merely by remembering them, the laws that held you
prisoner to pain and death must be forgotten. This is no gift your
brother's body offers you. The veil that hides the gift hides him as
well. He is the gift, and yet he knows it not. No more do you. And yet,
have faith that He Who sees the gift in both of you will offer and
receive it for you both. And through His vision will you see it, and
through His understanding recognize it and love it as your own.
44
Be comforted and feel the Holy Spirit watching over you in love and
perfect confidence in what He sees. He knows the Son of God and shares
his Father's certainty the universe rests in his gentle hands in safety
and in peace. Let us consider now what he must learn, to share his
Father's confidence in him. What is he, that the Creator of the universe
should offer it to him and know it rests in safety? He looks upon
himself not as his Father knows him. And yet it is impossible the
confidence of God should be misplaced.
45
The meaning of the Son of God lies solely in his relationship with his
Creator. If it were elsewhere, it would rest upon contingency, but there
is nothing else. And this is wholly loving and forever. Yet has
the Son of God invented an unholy relationship between him and his
Father. His real relationship is one of perfect union and unbroken
continuity. The one he made is partial, self-centered, broken into
fragments, and full of fear. The one created by his Father is wholly
self-encompassing and self-extending. The one he made is wholly
self-destructive and self-limiting.
46
Nothing can show the contrast better than the experience of both a holy
and an unholy relationship. The first is based on love and rests on it,
serene and undisturbed. The body does not intrude upon it. Any
relationship in which the body enters is based not on love, but on
idolatry. Love wishes to be known, completely understood, and shared. It
has no secrets; nothing that it would keep apart and hide. It walks in
sunlight, open-eyed and calm, in smiling welcome and in sincerity so
simple and so obvious it cannot be misunderstood. But idols do not
share.
47
Idols accept, but never make return. They can be loved, but cannot love.
They do not understand what they are offered, and any relationship in
which they enter has lost its meaning. They live in secrecy, hating the
sunlight and happy in the body's darkness where they can hide and keep
their secrets hidden along with them. And they have no relationships,
for no one else is welcome there. They smile on no one, and those who
smile on them they do not see.
48
Love has no darkened temples where mysteries are kept obscure and hidden
from the sun. It does not seek for power, but for relationships. The
body is the ego's chosen weapon for seeking power through
relationships. And its relationships must be unholy, for what they are,
it does not even see. It wants them solely for the offerings on which
its idols thrive. The rest it merely throws away, for all that it could
offer is seen as valueless. Homeless, the ego seeks as many bodies as it
can collect to place its idols in and so establish them as temples to
itself.
49
The Holy Spirit's temple is not a body, but a relationship. The body is
an isolated speck of darkness; a hidden secret room, a tiny spot of
senseless mystery, a meaningless enclosure carefully protected, yet
hiding nothing. Here the unholy relationship escapes reality and seeks
for crumbs to keep itself alive. Here it would drag its brothers,
holding them here in its idolatry. Here it is "safe," for here love
cannot enter. The Holy Spirit does not build His temples where love can
never be. Would He Who sees the face of Christ choose as His home the
only place in all the universe where it can not be seen?
50
You cannot make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will never
be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater and of love's
condemnation. For here is love made fearful and hope abandoned. Even the
idols that are worshiped here are shrouded in mystery and kept apart
from those who worship them. This is the temple dedicated to no
relationships and no return. Here is the "mystery" of separation
perceived in awe and held in reverence. What God would have not
be is here kept "safe" from Him. But what you do not realize is what you
fear within your brother and would not see in him is what makes God seem
fearful to you and kept unknown.
51
Idolaters will always be afraid of love, for nothing so severely
threatens them as love's approach. Let love draw near them and overlook
the body, as it will surely do, and they retreat in fear, feeling the
seeming firm foundation of their temple begin to shake and loosen.
Brothers, you tremble with them. Yet what you fear is but the herald of
escape. This place of darkness is not your home. Your temple is not
threatened. You are idolaters no longer. The Holy Spirit's purpose lies
safe in your relationship and not your bodies. You have escaped
the body. Where you are the body cannot enter, for the Holy Spirit has
set His temple there.
52
There is no order in relationships. They either are or not. An
unholy relationship is no relationship. It is a state of isolation which
seems to be what it is not. No more than that. The instant that the mad
idea of making your relationship with God unholy seemed to be possible,
all your relationships were made meaningless. In that unholy instant,
time was born and bodies made to house the mad idea and give it the
illusion of reality. And so it seemed to have a home that held together
for a little while in time and vanished. For what could house this mad
idea against reality but for an instant?
53
Idols must disappear and leave no trace behind their going. The
unholy instant of their seeming power is frail as is a snowflake, but
without its loveliness. Is this the substitute you want for the eternal
blessing of the holy instant and its unlimited beneficence? Is the
malevolence of the unholy relationship, so seeming powerful and so
bitterly misunderstood and so invested in a false attraction, your
preference to the holy instant which offers you peace and understanding?
Then lay aside the body and quietly transcend it, rising to welcome what
you really want. And from His holy temple, look you not back on what you
have awakened from. For no illusions can attract the minds that have
transcended them and left them far behind.
54
The holy relationship reflects the true relationship the Son of God has
with his Father in reality. The Holy Spirit rests within it in the
certainty it will endure forever. Its firm foundation is eternally
upheld by truth, and love shines on it with the gentle smile and tender
blessing it offers to its own. Here the unholy instant is exchanged in
gladness for the holy one of safe return. Here is the way to true
relationships held gently open, through which you walk together, leaving
the body thankfully behind and resting in the Everlasting Arms. Love's
arms are open to receive you and give you peace forever.
55
The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh and then
projected outward. This produces what seems to be a wall of flesh around
the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden
unto death and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die
in honor of its master. And this unholy instant seems to be life; an
instant of despair, a tiny island of dry sand, bereft of water and set
uncertainly upon oblivion. Here does the Son of God stop briefly by to
offer his devotion to death's idols, and then pass on. And here he is
more dead than living. Yet it is also here he makes his choice again
between idolatry and love.
56
Here it is given him to choose to spend this instant paying tribute to
the body or let himself be given freedom from it. Here he can accept the
holy instant, offered him to replace the unholy one he chose before. And
here can he learn relationships are his salvation and not his doom. You
who are learning this may still be fearful, but you are not immobilized.
The holy instant is of greater value now to you than its unholy seeming
counterpart, and you have learned you really want but one. This is no
time for sadness. Perhaps confusion, but hardly discouragement.
57
You have a real relationship, and it has meaning. It is
as like your real relationship with God as equal things are like unto
each other. Idolatry is past and meaningless. Perhaps you fear each
other a little yet; perhaps a shadow of the fear of God remains with
you. Yet what is that to those who have been given one true relationship
beyond the body? Can they be long held back from looking on the
face of Christ? And can they long withhold the memory of their
relationship with their Father from themselves and keep remembrance of
His love apart from their awareness?
58
We have said much about discrepancies of means and end and how these
must be brought in line before your holy relationship can bring you only
joy. But we have also said the means to meet the Holy Spirit's goal will
come from the same Source as does His purpose. Being so simple and
direct, this course has nothing in it that is not consistent. The
seeming inconsistencies or parts you find more difficult than others are
merely indications of areas where means and end are still discrepant.
And this produces great discomfort. This need not be. This course
requires almost nothing of you. It is impossible to imagine one that
asks so little or could offer more.
59
The period of discomfort that follows the sudden change in a
relationship from sin to holiness should now be almost over. To the
extent you still experience it, you are refusing to leave the means to
Him Who changed the purpose. You recognize you want the goal. Are you
not also willing to accept the means? If you are not, let us admit that
you are inconsistent. A purpose is attained by means, and if you
want a purpose, you must be willing to want the means as well. How can
one be sincere and say, "I want this above all else, and yet I do not
want to learn the means to get it"?
60
To obtain the goal, the Holy Spirit indeed asked little. He asks no more
to give the means as well. The means are second to the goal. And when
you hesitate, it is because the purpose frightens you, and not the
means. Remember this, for otherwise you will make the error of believing
the means are difficult. Yet how can they be difficult if they are
merely given you? They guarantee the goal, and they are perfectly in
line with it. Before we look at them a little closer, remember that if
you think they are impossible, your wanting of the purpose has been
shaken. For if a goal is possible to reach, the means to do so must be
possible as well.
61
It is impossible to see your brother as sinless and yet to look
upon him as a body. Is this not perfectly consistent with the goal of
holiness? For holiness is merely the result of letting the effects of
sin be lifted so what was always true is recognized. To see a sinless body
is impossible, for holiness is positive, and the body is merely neutral.
It is not sinful, but neither is it sinless. As nothing, which it is,
the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ or of
the ego. Either must be an error, for both would place the attributes
where they cannot be. And both must be undone for purposes of truth.
62
The body is the means by which the ego tries to make the unholy
relationship seem real. The unholy instant is the time of
bodies. But the purpose here is sin. It cannot be attained but
in illusion, and so the illusion of a brother as a body is quite in
keeping with the purpose of unholiness. Because of this consistency, the
means remain unquestioned while the end is cherished. Vision adapts to
wish, for sight is always secondary to desire. And if you see the body,
you have chosen judgment and not vision. For vision, like relationships,
has no order. You either see or not.
63
Who sees a brother's body has laid a judgment on him and sees him not.
He does not really see him as sinful; he does not see him at all. In the
darkness of sin, he is invisible. He can but be imagined in the
darkness, and it is here that the illusions you hold about him are not
held up to his reality. Here are illusions and reality kept separated.
Here are illusions never brought to truth and always hidden from it. And
here in darkness is your brother's reality imagined as a body, in unholy
relationships with other bodies, serving the cause of sin an instant
before he dies.
64
There is indeed a difference between this vain imagining and vision. The
difference lies not in them, but in their purpose. Both are but means,
each one appropriate to the end for which it is employed. Neither can
serve the purpose of the other, for each one is a choice of purpose,
employed on its behalf. Either is meaningless without the end for which
it was intended, nor is it valued as a separate thing apart from the
intention. The means seem real because the goal is valued. And judgment
has no value unless the goal is sin.
65
The body cannot be looked upon except through judgment. To see the body
is the sign that you lack vision and have denied the means the Holy
Spirit offers you to serve His purpose. How can a holy relationship
achieve its purpose through the means of sin? Judgment you taught
yourself; vision is learned from Him Who would undo your teaching. His
vision cannot see the body because it cannot look on sin. And thus it
leads you to reality. Your holy brother, sight of whom is your release,
is no illusion. Attempt to see him not in darkness, for your imaginings
about him will seem real there. You closed your eyes to shut him out.
Such was your purpose, and while this purpose seems to have any meaning,
the means for its attainment will be evaluated as worth the seeing, and
so you will not see.
66
Your question should not be, "How can I see my brother without the
body?" Ask only, "Do I really wish to see him sinless?" And as you ask,
forget not that his sinlessness is your escape from fear.
Salvation is the Holy Spirit's goal. The means is vision. For what the
seeing look upon is sinless. No one who loves can judge, and
what he sees is free of condemnation. And what he sees he did
not make, for it was given him to see, as was the vision which made his
seeing possible.
67
Vision will come to you at first in glimpses, but they will be enough to
show you what is given you who see your brother sinless. Truth is
restored to you through your desire, as it was lost to you through your
desire for something else. Open the holy place which you closed off by
valuing the "something else," and what was never lost will quietly
return. It has been saved for you. Vision would not be necessary had
judgment not been made. Desire now its whole undoing, and it is done for
you.
68
Do you not want to know your own Identity? Would you not happily
exchange your doubts for certainty? Would you not willingly be free of
misery and learn again of joy? Your holy relationship offers all this to
you. As it was given you, so will be its effects. And as its holy
purpose was not made by you, the means by which its happy end is yours
is also not of you. Rejoice in what is yours but for the asking and
think not that you need make either means or end. All this is given you
who would but see your brother sinless. All this is given, waiting on
your desire but to receive it. Vision is freely given to those who ask
to see.
69
Your brother's sinlessness is given you in shining light, to look on
with the Holy Spirit's vision and to rejoice in along with Him. For
peace will come to all who ask for it with real desire and sincerity of
purpose, shared with the Holy Spirit and at one with Him on what
salvation is. Be willing, then, to see your brother sinless that Christ
may rise before your vision and give you joy. And place no value on your
brother's body, which holds him to illusions of what he is. It is his
desire to see his sinlessness, as it is yours. And bless the Son of God
in your relationship, nor see in him what you have made of him.
70
The Holy Spirit guarantees that what God willed and gave you shall be
yours. This is your purpose now, and the vision that makes it yours is
ready to be given. You have the vision which enables each one to see the
body not. And as you look upon each other, you will see an altar to your
Father, holy as Heaven, glowing with radiant purity and sparkling with
the shining lilies you laid upon it. What can you value more than this?
Why do you think the body is a better home, a safer shelter for God's
Son? Why would you rather look on it than on the truth? How can the
engine of destruction be preferred and chosen to replace the holy home
the Holy Spirit offers, where He will dwell with you?
71
The body is the sign of weakness, vulnerability, and loss of power. Can
such a savior help you? Would you turn in your distress and need for
help unto the helpless? Is the pitifully little the perfect choice to
call upon for strength? Judgment will seem to make your savior weak. Yet
it is you who need his strength. There is no problem, no event
or situation, no perplexity that vision will not solve. All is redeemed
when looked upon with vision. For this is not your sight, and
brings with it the laws beloved of Him Whose sight it is.
72
Everything looked upon with vision falls gently into place according to
the laws brought to it by His calm and certain sight. The end for
everything He looks upon is always sure. For it will meet His purpose,
seen in unadjusted form and suited perfectly to meet it. Destructiveness
becomes benign, and sin is turned to blessing under His gentle gaze.
What can the body's eyes perceive, with power to correct? Its eyes adjust
to sin, unable to overlook it in any form and seeing it everywhere, in
everything. Look through its eyes, and everything will stand condemned
before you. All that could save you, you will never see. Your holy
relationship, the source of your salvation, will be deprived of meaning,
and its most holy purpose bereft of means for its accomplishment.
73
Judgment is but a toy, a whim, the senseless means to play the idle game
of death in your imagination. But vision sets all things right, bringing
them gently within the kindly sway of Heaven's laws. What if you
recognized this world is an hallucination? What if you really understood
you made it up? What if you realized that those who seem to walk about
in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are
wholly unreal? Could you have faith in what you see if you accepted
this? And would you see it?
74
Hallucinations disappear when they are recognized for what they are.
This is the healing and the remedy. Believe them not, and they are gone.
And all you need to do is recognize you did this. Once you
accept this simple fact and take unto yourself the power you gave them,
you are released from them. One thing is sure—hallucinations serve a
purpose, and when that purpose is no longer held, they disappear.
Therefore, the question never is whether you want them, but always, do
you want the purpose which they serve? This world seems to hold out many
purposes, each different and with different values. Yet they are all the
same. Again there is no order but a seeming hierarchy of values.
75
Only two purposes are possible. And one is sin, the other holiness.
Nothing is in between, and which you choose determines what you see. For
what you see is merely how you elect to meet your goal. Hallucinations
serve to meet the goal of madness. They are the means by which the
outside world, projected from within, adjusts to sin and seems to
witness to its reality. It still is true that nothing is without. Yet
upon nothing are all projections made. For it is the projection which
gives the "nothing" all the meaning that it holds.
76
What has no meaning cannot be perceived. And meaning always looks within
to find itself and then looks out. All meaning that you give the
world outside must thus reflect the sight you saw within; or better, if
you saw at all or merely judged against. Vision is the means by which
the Holy Spirit translates your nightmares into happy dreams; your wild
hallucinations that show you all the fearful outcomes of imagined sin
into the calm and reassuring sights with which He would replace them.
These gentle sights and sounds are looked on happily and heard with joy.
They are His substitutes for all the terrifying sights and screaming
sounds the ego's purpose brought to your horrified awareness. They step
away from sin, reminding you that it is not reality which frightens you
and that the errors which you made can be corrected.
77
When you have looked on what seemed terrifying and seen it change to
sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of
violence and death and watched them change to quiet views of gardens
under open skies, with clear, life-giving water running happily beside
them in dancing brooks that never waste away, who need persuade you to
accept the gift of vision? And after vision, who is there who could
refuse what must come after? Think but an instant just on this—you can
behold the holiness God gave His Son. And never need you think that
there is something else for you to see.
1
Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it,
nothing more than that. But though it is no more than that, it is not
less. Therefore, to you it is important. It is the witness to your state
of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. As a man thinketh,
so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the world, but will
to change your mind about the world. Perception is a result,
not a cause. And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is
meaningless. Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy.
Nothing perceived without it means anything. And where there is no
meaning, there is chaos.
2
Damnation is your judgment on yourself, and this you will
project upon the world. See it as damned, and all you see is what you
did to hurt the Son of God. If you behold disaster and catastrophe, you
tried to crucify him. If you see holiness and hope, you joined the Will
of God to set him free. There is no choice that lies between these two
decisions. And you will see the witness to the choice you made
and learn from this to recognize which one you chose. [The world
you see but shows you how much joy you have allowed yourself to
see in you and to accept as yours. And if this is its
meaning, then the power to give it joy must lie within
you.]
3
Never forget the world the sightless "see" must be imagined, for what it
really looks like is unknown to them. They must infer what could be seen
from evidence forever indirect and reconstruct their inferences as they
stumble and fall because of what they did not recognize, or walk
unharmed through open doorways which they thought were closed. And so it
is with you. You do not see. Your cues for inference are wrong, and so
you stumble and fall down upon the stones you did not recognize, but
fail to be aware you can go through the doors you thought were
closed but which stand open before unseeing eyes, waiting to welcome
you.
4
How foolish it is to attempt to judge what could be seen instead. It is
not necessary to imagine what the world must look like. It must be seen
before you recognize it for what it is. You can be shown which doors are
open, and you can see where safety lies and which way leads to darkness,
which to light. Judgment will always give you false directions,
but vision shows you where to go. Why should you guess?
5
There is no need to learn through pain. And gentle lessons are acquired
joyously and are remembered gladly. What gives you happiness you want
to learn and not forget. It is not this you would deny. Your
question is whether the means by which this course is learned will bring
to you the joy it promises. If you believed it would, the learning of it
would be no problem. You are not happy learners yet because you still
remain uncertain that vision gives you more than judgment does,
and you have learned that both you cannot have.
6
The blind become accustomed to their world by their adjustments to it.
They think they know their way about in it. They learned it, not through
joyous lessons, but through the stern necessity of limits they believed
they could not overcome. And still believing this, they hold those
lessons dear and cling to them because they cannot see. They do
not understand the lessons keep them blind. This they do not
believe. And so they keep the world they learned to "see" in their
imagination, believing that their choice is that or nothing. They hate
the world they learned through pain. And everything they think is in it
serves to remind them that they are incomplete and bitterly deprived.
7
Thus they define their life and where they live, adjusting to it
as they think they must, afraid to lose the little that they have. And
so it is with all who see the body as all they have and all their
brothers have. They try to reach each other, and they fail and fail
again. And they adjust to loneliness, believing that to keep the body is
to save the little that they have. Listen and try to think if you
remember what we will speak of now.
8
Listen—perhaps you catch a hint of an ancient state not quite forgotten;
dim, perhaps, and yet not altogether unfamiliar, like a song whose name
is long forgotten, and the circumstances in which you heard completely
unremembered. Not the whole song has stayed with you, but just a little
wisp of melody, attached not to a person or a place or anything
particular. But you remember from just this little part how lovely was
the song, how wonderful the setting where you heard it, and how you
loved those who were there and listened with you.
9
The notes are nothing. Yet you have kept them with you, not for
themselves, but as a soft reminder of what would make you weep if you
remembered how dear it was to you. You could remember, yet you are
afraid, believing you would lose the world you learned since then. And
yet you know that nothing in the world you learned is half so dear as
this. Listen and see if you remember an ancient song you knew so long
ago and held more dear than any melody you taught yourself to cherish
since.
10
Beyond the body, beyond the sun and stars, past everything you see and
yet somehow familiar, is an arc of golden light that stretches as you
look into a great and shining circle. And all the circle fills with
light before your eyes. The edges of the circle disappear, and what is
in it is no longer contained at all. The light expands and covers
everything, extending to infinity, forever shining and with no break or
limit anywhere. Within it everything is joined in perfect continuity.
Nor is it possible to imagine that anything could be outside, for there
is nowhere that this light is not.
11
This is the vision of the Son of God, whom you know well. Here is the
sight of him who knows his Father. Here is the memory of what you are—a
part of this, with all of it within and joined to all as surely as all
is joined in you. Accept the vision which can show you this and
not the body. You know the ancient song and know it well. Nothing will
ever be as dear to you as is this ancient hymn [of love] the Son of God
sings to his Father still.
12
And now the blind can see, for that same song they sing in honor of
their Creator gives praise to them as well. The blindness which they
made will not withstand the memory of this song. And they will look upon
the vision of the Son of God, remembering who he is they sing of. What
is a miracle but this remembering? And who is there in whom this memory
lies not? The light in one awakens it in all. And when you see it in
each other, you are remembering for everyone.
13
We have repeated how little is asked of you to learn this course. It is
the same small willingness you need to have your whole relationship
transformed to joy; the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit for
which He gives you everything; the very little on which salvation rests;
the tiny change of mind by which the crucifixion is changed to
resurrection. And being true, it is so simple that it cannot fail to be
completely understood. Rejected yes, but not ambiguous. And if
you choose against it now, it will not be because it is obscure, but
rather that this little cost seemed in your judgment to be too much to
pay for peace.
14
This is the only thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release
from pain, and the complete escape from sin, all to be given you. Say
only this, but mean it with no reservations, for here the power of
salvation lies:
16
Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is
done to you. Acknowledge but that you have been mistaken, and
all effects of your mistakes will disappear.
17
It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events outside of
him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were not his
choice. His power of decision is the determiner of every situation in
which he seems to find himself by chance or accident. No accident nor
chance is possible within the universe as God created it, outside of
which is nothing. Suffer, and you decided sin was your goal. Be happy,
and you gave the power of decision to Him Who must decide for God for
you. This is the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit, and even this
He gave to you to give yourself. For by this gift is given you the power
to release your savior that he may give salvation unto you.
18
Begrudge not, then, this little offering. Withhold it, and you keep the
world as now you see it. Give it away, and everything you see goes with
it. Never was so much given for so little. In the holy instant is this
exchange effected and maintained. Here is the world you do not want
brought to the one you do. And here the one you do is given you because
you want it. Yet for this, the power of your wanting must first be
recognized. You must accept its strength and not its weakness.
You must perceive that what is strong enough to make a world can let it
go and can accept correction if it is willing to see that it was wrong.
19
The world you see is but the idle witness that you were right. This
witness is insane. You trained it in its testimony, and as it gave it
back to you, you listened and convinced yourself that what it saw was
true. You did this to yourself. See only this, and you will also
see how circular the reasoning on which your "seeing" rests. This was
not given you. This was your gift to you and to your brother. Be
willing, then, to have it taken from him and be replaced with truth. And
as you look upon the change in him, it will be given you to see it in
yourself.
20
Perhaps you do not see the need for you to give this little offering.
Look closer, then, at what it is. And very simply see in it the
whole exchange of separation for salvation. All that the ego is, is an
idea that it is possible that things should happen to the Son of God without
his will and thus without the Will of his Creator, Whose Will cannot be
separate from his own.
21
This is the Son of God's replacement for his will, a mad revolt
against what must forever be. This is the statement that he has the
power to make God powerless and so to take it for himself and leave
himself without what God has willed for him. This is the mad idea you
have enshrined upon your altars and which you worship. And anything
which threatens this seems to attack your faith, for here is it
invested. Think not that you are faithless, for your belief and trust in
this is strong indeed.
22
The Holy Spirit can give you faith in holiness and vision to see it
easily enough. But you have not left open and unoccupied the altar where
the gifts belong. Where they should be, you have set up your
idols to something else. This other will, which seems to tell you what
must happen, you gave reality. And what would show you otherwise must
therefore seem unreal. All that is asked of you is to make room for
truth. You are not asked to make or do what lies beyond your
understanding. All you are asked to do is let it in; only to
stop your interference with what will happen of itself; simply to
recognize again the presence of what you thought you gave away.
23
Be willing for an instant to leave your altars free of what you placed
upon them, and what is really there you cannot fail to see. The
holy instant is not an instant of creation but of recognition. For
recognition comes of vision and suspended judgment. Then only is it
possible to look within and see what must be there plainly in
sight and wholly independent of inference and judgment. Undoing is not
your task, but it is up to you to welcome it or not. Faith and
desire go hand in hand, for everyone believes in what he wants.
24
We have already said that wishful thinking is how the ego deals with
what it wants to make it so. There is no better demonstration of the
power of wanting, and therefore of faith, to make its goals seem real
and possible. Faith in the unreal leads to adjustments of reality to
make it fit the goal of madness. The goal of sin induces the perception
of a fearful world to justify its purpose. What you desire you will
see. And if its reality is false, you will uphold it by not realizing
all the adjustments you have introduced to make it so.
25
When vision is denied, confusion of cause and effect becomes inevitable.
The purpose now becomes to keep obscure the cause of the effect and make
effect appear to be a cause. This seeming independence of effect
enables it to be regarded as standing by itself and capable of serving
as a cause of the events and feelings its maker thinks it causes. Long
ago we spoke of your desire to create your own Creator and be father and
not son to Him. This is the same desire. The Son is the effect, whose
Cause he would deny. And so he seems to be the cause, producing
real effects. Nothing can have effects without a cause and to confuse
the two is merely to fail to understand them both.
26
It is as needful that you recognize you made the world you see as that
you recognize that you did not create yourself. They are the same
mistake. Nothing created not by your Creator has any influence
over you. And if you think what you have made can tell you what you see
and feel and place your faith in its ability to do so, you are denying
your Creator and believing that you made yourself. For if you think the
world you made has power to make you what it wills, you are
confusing Son and Father, effect and Source.
27
The Son's creations are like his Father's. Yet in creating them, the Son
does not delude himself that he is independent of his Source. His union
with It is the Source of his creating. Apart from this he has no
power to create, and what he makes is meaningless. It changes nothing in
creation, depends entirely upon the madness of its maker, and cannot
serve to justify the madness. Your brother thinks he made the world with
you. Thus he denies creation. With you, he thinks the world he made,
made him. Thus he denies he made it.
28
Yet the truth is you were both created by a loving Father Who created
you together and as one. See what "proves" otherwise, and you deny your
whole reality. But grant that everything which seems to stand between
you, keeping you from each other and separate from your Father, you made
in secret, and the instant of release has come to you. All its effects
are gone because its source has been uncovered. It is its seeming
independence of its source that kept you prisoner. This is the same
delusion that you are independent of the Source by which you were
created and have never left.
29
All special relationships have sin as their goal. For they are bargains
with reality, toward which the seeming union is adjusted. Forget not
this—to bargain is to set a limit, and any brother with whom you have a
limited relationship you hate. You may attempt to keep the
bargain in the name of "fairness," sometimes demanding payment of
yourself, perhaps more often of the other. Thus in the "fairness" you
attempt to ease the guilt that comes from the accepted purpose of the
relationship. And that is why the Holy Spirit must change its purpose to
make it useful to him and harmless unto you.
30
If you accept this change, you have accepted the idea of making room for
truth. The source of sin is gone. You may imagine that you still
experience its effects, but it is not your purpose, and you no longer want
it. No one allows a purpose to be replaced while he desires it, for
nothing is so cherished and protected as is a goal the mind accepts.
This it will follow, grimly or happily, but always with faith and with
the persistence that faith inevitably brings. The power of faith is never
recognized if it is placed in sin. But it is always recognized
if it is placed in love.
31
Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a
little feat for such a power. For faith can keep the Son of God in
chains as long as he believes he is in chains. And when he is
released from them, it will be simply because he no longer believes in
them, withdrawing faith that they can hold him and placing it in his
freedom instead. It is impossible to place equal faith in opposite
directions. What faith you give to sin you take away from
holiness. And what you offer holiness has been removed from sin.
32
Faith and belief and vision are the means by which the goal of holiness
is reached. Through them the Holy Spirit leads you to the real world and
away from all illusions where your faith was laid. This is His
direction, the only one He ever sees. And when you wander, He reminds
you there is but one. His faith and His belief and vision are
all for you. And when you have accepted them completely instead of
yours, you will have need of them no longer. For faith and vision and
belief are meaningful only before the state of certainty is
reached. In Heaven they are unknown. Yet Heaven is reached through them.
33
It is impossible that the Son of God lack faith, but he can choose where
he would have it be. Faithlessness is not a lack of
faith, but faith in nothing. Faith given to illusions does not
lack power, for by it does the Son of God believe that he is powerless.
Thus is he faithless to himself, but strong in faith in his illusions about
himself. For faith, perception, and belief you made as means for
losing certainty and finding sin. This mad direction was your choice,
and by your faith in what you chose, you made what you desired.
34
The Holy Spirit has a use for all the means for sin by which you sought
to find it. But as He uses them, they lead away from sin because
His purpose lies in the opposite direction. He sees the means
you use but not the purpose for which you made them. He would
not take them from you, for He sees their value as a means for what He
wills for you. You made perception that you might choose among your
brothers and seek for sin with them. The Holy Spirit sees perception as
a means to teach you that the vision of a holy relationship is all you want
to see. Then will you give your faith to holiness, desiring and
believing in it because of your desire.
35
Faith and belief become attached to vision, as all the means that once
served sin are redirected now toward holiness. For what you think is sin
is limitation, and whom you try to limit to the body you hate
because you fear. In your refusal to forgive him, you would condemn him
to the body because the means for sin are dear to you. And so the body
has your faith and your belief. But holiness would set your brother
free, removing hatred by removing fear, not as a symptom, but at its
source.
36
Those who would free their brothers from the body can have no
fear. They have renounced the means for sin by choosing to let all
limitations be removed. Desiring to look upon their brothers in
holiness, the power of belief and faith goes far beyond the body, supporting
vision, not obstructing it. But first they chose to recognize how much
their faith had limited their understanding of the world, desiring to
place its power elsewhere should another point of view be given them.
The miracles which follow this decision are also born of faith. For all
who choose to look away from sin are given vision and are led to
holiness.
37
Those who believe in sin must think the Holy Spirit asks for
sacrifice, for this is how they think their purpose is
accomplished. Brothers, the Holy Spirit knows that sacrifice brings nothing.
He makes no bargains. And if you seek to limit Him, you will hate Him
because you are afraid. The gift that He has given you is more than
anything that stands this side of Heaven. The instant for its
recognition is at hand. Join your awareness to what has been already
joined. The faith you give each other can accomplish this. For He Who
loves the world is seeing it for you without one spot of sin upon it and
in the innocence which makes the sight of it as beautiful as Heaven.
38
Your faith in sacrifice has given it great power in your sight, except
you do not realize you cannot see because of it. For sacrifice
must be exacted of a body and by another body. The mind could neither
ask it nor receive it of itself. And no more could the body. The
intention is in the mind, which tries to use the body to carry out the
means for sin in which the mind believes. Thus is the joining of
mind and body an inescapable belief of those who value sin. And so is
sacrifice invariably a means for limitation and thus for hate.
39
Think you the Holy Spirit is concerned with this? He gives not
what it is His purpose to lead you from. You think He would
deprive you for your good. But "good" and "deprivation" are opposites
and cannot meaningfully join in any way. It is like saying that the moon
and sun are one because they come with night and day, and so they must
be joined. Yet sight of one is but the sign the other has disappeared
from sight. Nor is it possible that what gives light be one with what
depends on darkness to be seen. Neither demands the sacrifice of the
other. Yet on the absence of the other does each depend.
40
The body was made to be a sacrifice to sin, and in the darkness so it
still is seen. Yet in the light of vision, it is looked upon quite
differently. You can have faith in it to serve the Holy Spirit's
goal and give it power to serve as means to help the blind to see. But
in their seeing, they look past it, as do you. The faith and the
belief you gave it belongs beyond. You gave perception and
belief and faith from mind to body. Let them now be given back to what
produced them and can use them still to save itself from what it made.
41
The Holy Spirit will never teach you that you are sinful. Errors
He will correct, but this makes no one fearful. You are indeed afraid to
look within and see the sin you think is there. This you would not be
fearful to admit. Fear in association with sin the ego deems quite
appropriate and smiles approvingly. It has no fear to let you feel
ashamed. It doubts not your belief and faith in sin. Its temples do not
shake because of this. Your faith that sin is there but witnesses to
your desire that it be there to see. This merely seems to be the
source of fear.
42
Remember that the ego is not alone. Its rule is tempered, and
its unknown "enemy," Whom it cannot even see, it fears. Loudly the ego
tells you not to look inward, for if you do, your eyes will light on
sin, and God will strike you blind. This you believe, and so you do not
look. Yet this is not the ego's hidden fear, nor yours who serve it.
Loudly indeed the ego claims it is—too loudly and too
often. For underneath this constant shout and frantic proclamation, the
ego is not certain it is so. Beneath your fear to look within because of
sin is yet another fear and one which makes the ego tremble.
43
What if you looked within and saw no sin? This "fearful"
question is one the ego never asks. And you who ask it now are
threatening the ego's whole defensive system too seriously for it to
bother to pretend it is your friend. Those who have joined their
brothers have detached themselves from their belief that their
identity lies in the ego. A holy relationship is one in which you join
with what is part of you in truth. And your belief in sin has
been already shaken, nor are you now entirely unwilling to look
within and see it not.
44
Your liberation still is only partial—still limited and incomplete, yet
born within you. Not wholly mad, you have been willing to look on much
of your insanity and recognize its madness. Your faith is moving inward,
past insanity and on to reason. And what your reason tells you now, the
ego would not hear. The Holy Spirit's purpose was accepted by the part
of your mind the ego knows not of. No more did you. And yet this
part with which you now identify is not afraid to look upon itself. It knows
no sin. How, otherwise, could it have been willing to see the Holy
Spirit's purpose as its own?
45
This part has seen your brother and recognized him perfectly since time
began. And it desired nothing but to join with him and to be free again,
as once it was. It has been waiting for the birth of freedom, the
acceptance of release to come to you. And now you recognize that it was
not the ego that joined the Holy Spirit's purpose, and so there must
be something else. Think not that this is madness. For this your
reason tells you, and it follows perfectly from what you have
already learned.
46
There is no inconsistency in what the Holy Spirit teaches. This is the
reasoning of the sane. You have perceived the ego's madness and
not been made afraid because you did not choose to share in it. At times
it still deceives you. Yet in your saner moments, its ranting strikes no
terror in your hearts. For you have realized that all the gifts it would
withdraw from you in rage at your "presumptuous" wish to look within,
you do not want. A few remaining trinkets still seem to shine
and catch your eye. Yet you would not "sell" Heaven to have them.
47
And now the ego is afraid. Yet what it hears in terror, the
other part hears as the sweetest music—the song it longed to hear since
first the ego came into your minds. The ego's weakness is its strength.
The song of freedom, which sings the praises of another world, brings to
it hope of peace. For it remembers Heaven, and now it sees that
Heaven has come to earth at last, from which the ego's rule has kept it
out so long. Heaven has come because it found a home in your
relationship on earth. And earth can hold no longer what has been given
Heaven as its own.
48
Look gently on each other and remember the ego's weakness is revealed in
both your sight. What it would keep apart has met and joined, and looks
upon the ego unafraid. Little children, innocent of sin, follow in
gladness the way to certainty. Be not held back by fear's insane
insistence that sureness lies in doubt. This has no meaning. What
matters it to you how loudly it is proclaimed? The senseless is not made
meaningful by repetition and by clamor. The quiet way is open. Follow it
happily and question not what must be so.
49
Perception selects and makes the world you see. It literally picks it
out as the mind directs. The laws of size and shape and brightness would
hold, perhaps, if other things were equal. They are not equal.
For what you look for, you are far more likely to discover than what you
would prefer to overlook. The still small Voice for God is not drowned
out by all the ego's raucous screams and senseless ravings to those who
want to hear it. Perception is a choice and not a fact.
But on this choice depends far more than you may realize as yet. For on
the voice you choose to hear and on the sights you choose to see,
depends entirely your whole belief in what you are. Perception
is a witness but to this and never to reality. Yet it can show
you the conditions in which awareness of reality is possible or those
where it could never be.
50
Reality needs no cooperation from you to be itself. But your awareness
of it needs your help because it is your choice. Listen to what the ego
says and see what it directs you see, and it is sure that you will see
yourself as tiny, vulnerable, and afraid. You will experience
depression, a sense of worthlessness, and feelings of impermanence and
unreality. You will believe that you are helpless prey to forces far
beyond your own control and far more powerful than you. And you will
think the world you made directs your destiny. For this will be your faith.
But never believe because it is your faith it makes reality.
51
There is another vision and another Voice in which your freedom lies
awaiting but your choice. And if you place your faith in them, you will
perceive another Self in you. This other Self sees miracles as natural.
They are as simple and natural to It as breathing to the body. They are
the obvious response to calls for help, the only one It makes. Miracles
seem unnatural to the ego because it does not understand how separate
minds can influence each other. Nor could they do so. But minds
cannot be separate. This other Self is perfectly aware of this.
And thus It recognizes that miracles do not affect another's mind, only
Its own. [They always change your mind.] There is no
other.
52
You do not realize the whole extent to which the idea of separation has
interfered with reason. Reason lies in the other Self you have cut off
from your awareness. And nothing you have allowed to stay in it is
capable of reason. How can the segment of the mind devoid of reason
understand what reason is or grasp the information it would give? All
sorts of questions may arise in it, but if the basic question stems from
reason, it will not ask it. Like all that stems from reason, the basic
question is obvious, simple, and remains unasked. But think not reason
could not answer it.
53
God's plan for your salvation could not have been established without
your will and your consent. It must have been accepted by the Son of
God, for what God wills for him he must receive. For God wills
not apart from him, nor does the Will of God wait upon time to be
accomplished. Therefore, what joined the Will of God must be in you now,
being eternal. You must have set aside a place in which the Holy Spirit
can abide and where He is. He must have been there since the
need for Him arose and was fulfilled in the same instant. Such would
your reason tell you if you listened. Yet such is clearly not the ego's
"reasoning." Its alien nature to the ego is proof you will not find the
answer there. Yet if it must be so, it must exist. And if it exists for
you and has your freedom as the purpose given it, you must be free to find
it.
54
God's plan is simple—never circular and never self-defeating. He has no
Thoughts except the Self-extending, and in this your will must be
included. Thus, there must be a part of you that knows His Will and
shares it. It is not meaningful to ask if what must be is so. But it is
meaningful to ask why you are unaware of what is so, for this
must have an answer if the plan of God for your salvation is complete.
And it must be complete because its Source knows not of
incompletion. Where would the answer be but in the Source? And where are
you but there, where this same answer is? Your Identity, as much
a true effect of this same Source as is the answer, must therefore be
together and the same.
55
Oh yes, you know this and more than this alone. Yet any part of
knowledge threatens dissociation as much as all of it. And all of it will
come with any part. Here is the part you can accept. What reason points
to you can see because the witnesses on its behalf are clear. Only the
totally insane can disregard them, and you have gone past this. Reason
is a means which serves the Holy Spirit's purpose in its own right. It
is not reinterpreted and redirected from the goal of sin as are the
others. For reason is beyond the ego's range of means.
56
Faith and perception and belief can be misplaced and serve the great
deceiver's needs as well as truth. But reason has no place at all in
madness, nor can it be adjusted to fit its end. Faith and belief are
strong in madness, guiding perception toward what the mind has valued.
But reason enters not at all in this. For the perception would fall away
at once if reason were applied. There is no reason in insanity,
for it depends entirely on reason's absence. The ego never uses it
because it does not realize that it exists. The partially insane have
access to it, and only they have need of it. Knowledge does not depend
on it, and madness keeps it out.
57
The part of mind where reason lies was dedicated by your will in union
with your Father's to the undoing of insanity. Here was the Holy
Spirit's purpose accepted and accomplished both at once. Reason is alien
to insanity, and those who use it have gained a means which cannot
be applied to sin. Knowledge is far beyond attainment of any kind. But
reason can serve to open doors you closed against it.
58
You have come very close to this. Faith and belief have shifted, and you
have asked the question which the ego will never ask. Does not
your reason tell you now the question must have come from something that
you do not know but must belong to you? Faith and belief, upheld by
reason, cannot fail to lead to changed perception. And in this change is
room made way for vision. Vision extends beyond itself, as does the
purpose which it serves and all the means for its accomplishment.
59
Reason cannot see sin but can see errors and leads to their
correction. It does not value them, but their correction. Reason will
also tell you when you think you sin, you call for help. Yet if you will
not accept the help you call for, you will not believe that it is yours
to give. And so you will not give it, thus maintaining the
belief. For uncorrected error of any kind deceives you about the power
that is in you to make correction. If it can correct and you
allow it not to do so, you deny it to yourself and to your brother. And
if he shares this same belief, you both will think that you are damned.
This you could spare him and yourself. For reason would not make
way for correction in you alone.
60
Correction cannot be accepted or refused by you without your
brother. Sin would maintain it can. Yet reason tells you that you cannot
see your brother or yourself as sinful and still perceive the other
innocent. Who looks upon himself as guilty and sees a sinless world? And
who can see a sinful world and look upon himself apart from it? Sin
would maintain you must be separate. But reason tells you that this must
be wrong. If you are joined, how could it be that you have private
thoughts? And how could thoughts that enter into what but seems like
yours alone have no effect at all on what is yours? If minds are
joined, this is impossible.
61
No one can think but for himself, as God thinks not without His Son.
Only were both in bodies could this be. Nor could one mind think only
for itself unless the body were the mind. For only bodies can be
separate and therefore unreal. The home of madness cannot be the home of
reason. Yet it is easy to leave the home of madness if you see reason.
You do not leave insanity by going somewhere else. You leave it simply
by accepting reason where madness was. Madness and reason see the same
things, but it is certain that they look upon them differently.
62
Madness is an attack on reason that drives it out of mind and takes its
place. Reason does not attack but takes the place of madness quietly,
replacing madness if it be the will of the insane to listen to it. But
the insane know not their will. For they believe they see the body and
let their madness tell them it is real. Reason would be incapable of
this. And if you would defend the body against your reason, you will not
understand the body or yourself.
63
The body does not separate you from your brother, and if you think it
does, you are insane. But madness has a purpose and believes it also has
the means to make its purpose real. To see the body as a barrier between
what reason tells you must be joined must be insane. Nor could
you see it if you heard the voice of reason. What can there be that
stands between what is continuous? And if there is nothing in between,
how can what enters part be kept away from other parts? Reason would
tell you this. But think what you must recognize if it be so.
64
If you choose sin instead of healing, you would condemn the Son of God
to what can never be corrected. You tell him by your choice that he is
damned—separate from you and from his Father forever and without a hope
of safe return. You teach him this, and you will learn of him exactly
what you taught. For you can teach him only that he is as you would have
him, and what you choose he be is but your choice for you. Yet
think not this is fearful. That you are joined to him is but a fact, not
an interpretation. How can a fact be fearful unless it disagrees with
what you hold more dear than truth? Reason will tell you that this fact
is your release. Neither your brother nor yourself can be
attacked alone. But neither can accept a miracle instead without
the other being blessed by it and healed of pain.
65
Reason, like love, would reassure you and seeks not to frighten you. The
power to heal the Son of God is given you because he must be one
with you. You are responsible for how he sees himself. And
reason tells you it is given you to change his whole mind, which is one
with you, in just an instant. And any instant serves to bring complete
correction of his errors and make him whole. The instant that you choose
to let yourself be healed, in that same instant is his whole
salvation seen as complete with yours. Reason is given you to understand
that this is so. For reason, kind as is the purpose for which it is the
means, leads steadily away from madness toward the goal of truth. And
here you will lay down the burden of denying truth. This is the
burden that is terrible, and not the truth.
66
That you are joined is your salvation—the gift of Heaven, not the gift
of fear. Does Heaven seem to be a burden to you? In madness, yes. And
yet what madness sees must be dispelled by reason. Reason assures you
Heaven is what you want, and all you want. Listen to Him
Who speaks with reason and brings your reason into line with His. Be
willing to let reason be the means by which He would direct you how to
leave insanity behind. Hide not behind insanity in order to escape from
reason. What madness would conceal, the Holy Spirit still holds out for
everyone to look upon with gladness.
67
You are your brother's savior. He is yours. Reason
speaks happily indeed of this. This gracious plan was given love by
Love. And what Love plans is like Itself in this: being united, It would
have you learn what you must be. And being one with It, it must
be given you to give what It has given and gives still. Spend but an
instant in the glad acceptance of what is given you to give your
brother, and learn with him what has been given both of you. To
give is no more blessed than to receive. But neither is it less.
68
The Son of God is always blessed as one. And as his gratitude
goes out to you who blessed him, reason will tell you that it cannot be
you stand apart from blessing. The gratitude he offers you reminds you
of the thanks your Father gives you for completing Him. And here alone
does reason tell you that you can understand what you must be. Your
Father is as close to you as is your brother. Yet what is there that
could be nearer you than is your Self?
69
The power that you have over the Son of God is not a threat to his
reality. It but attests to it. Where could his freedom lie but
in himself if he be free already? And who could bind him but himself if
he deny his freedom? God is not mocked; no more His Son can be
imprisoned save by his own desire. And it is by his own desire that he
is freed. Such is his strength and not his weakness. He is at
his own mercy. And where he chooses to be merciful, there is he free.
But where he chooses to condemn instead, there is he held a prisoner,
waiting in chains his pardon on himself to set him free.
70
Do you not see that all your misery comes from the strange belief that
you are powerless? Being helpless is the cost of sin.
Helplessness is sin's condition—the one requirement that it demands to
be believed. Only the helpless could believe in it. Enormity has
no appeal save to the little. And only those who first believe that they
are little could see attraction there. Treachery to the Son of
God is the defense of those who do not identify with him. And you are
for him or against him; either you love him or attack him, protect his
unity or see him shattered and slain by your attack.
71
No one believes the Son of God is powerless. And those who see
themselves as helpless must believe that they are not the Son of
God. What can they be except his enemy? And what can they do but
envy him his power and by their envy make themselves afraid of it? These
are the dark ones, silent and afraid, alone and not communicating,
fearful the power of the Son of God will strike them dead and raising up
their helplessness against him. They join the army of the powerless, to
wage their war of vengeance, bitterness, and spite on him to make him
one with them. Because they do not know that they are one with
him, they know not whom they hate. They are indeed a sorry army, each
one as likely to attack his brother or turn upon himself as to remember
they thought they had a common cause.
72
Frantic and loud and strong the dark ones seem to be. Yet they know not
their enemy, except they hate him. In hatred they have come
together but have not joined each other. For had they done so, hatred
would be impossible. The army of the powerless must be disbanded in the
presence of strength. Those who are strong are never treacherous
because they have no need to dream of power and to act out their dream.
How would an army act in dreams? Any way at all. It could be seen
attacking anyone with anything. Dreams have no reason in them. A flower
turns into a poisoned spear, a child becomes a giant, and a mouse roars
like a lion. And love is turned to hate as easily. This is no army, but
a madhouse. What seems to be a planned attack is bedlam.
73
The army of the powerless is weak indeed. It has no weapons, and it has
no enemy. Yes, it can overrun the world and seek an enemy. But
it can never find what is not there. Yes, it can dream it found
an enemy, but this will shift even as it attacks, so that it runs at
once to find another and never comes to rest in victory. And as it runs,
it turns against itself, thinking it caught a glimpse of the great enemy
which always eludes its murderous attack by turning into something else.
How treacherous does this enemy appear, who changes so it is impossible
even to recognize him!
74
Yet hate must have a target. There can be no faith in sin without an
enemy. Who that believes in sin would dare believe he has no
enemy? Could he admit that no one made him powerless? Reason would
surely bid him seek no longer what is not there to find. Yet first he
must be willing to perceive a world where it is not. It is not necessary
that he understand how he can see it. Nor should he try. For if
he focuses on what he cannot understand, he will but emphasize his
helplessness and let sin tell him that his enemy must be himself.
But let him only ask himself these questions, which he must decide to
have it done for him:
76
You have already answered the first three questions but not yet the
last. For this one still seems fearful and unlike the others. Yet reason
would assure you they are all the same. We said this year would
emphasize the sameness of things that are the same. This final
question, which is indeed the last you need decide, still seems to hold
a threat the rest have lost for you. And this imagined difference
attests to your belief that truth may be the enemy you yet may find.
Here, then, would seem to be the last remaining hope of finding sin and
not accepting power.
77
Forget not that the choice of truth or sin, power or helplessness, is
the choice of whether to attack or heal. For healing comes of power and
attack of helplessness. Whom you attack you cannot want to heal.
And whom you would have healed must be the one you chose to be protected
from attack. And what is this decision but the choice whether to see him
through the body's eyes or let him be revealed to you through vision? How
this decision leads to its effects is not your problem. But what you want
to see must be your choice. This is a course in cause
and not effect.
78
Consider carefully your answer to the last question you have left
unanswered still. And let your reason tell you that it must be
answered and is answered in the other three. And then it will be
clear to you that, as you look on the effects of sin in any form, all
you need do is simply ask yourself,
80
This is your one decision; this the condition for what occurs.
It is irrelevant to how it happens but not to why. You have
control of this. And if you choose to see a world without an enemy in
which you are not helpless, the means to see it will be given
you.
81
Why is the final question so important? Reason will tell you why. It is
the same as are the other three except in time. The others are
decisions which can be made and then unmade and made again. But truth is
constant and implies a state where vacillations are impossible. You can
desire a world you rule which rules you not, and change your mind. You
can desire to exchange your helplessness for power, and lose this same
desire as a little glint of sin attracts you. And you can want to see a
sinless world and let an "enemy" tempt you to use the body's eyes and
change what you desire.
82
In content, all the questions are the same. For each one asks if
you are willing to exchange the world of sin for what the Holy Spirit
sees, since it is this the world of sin denies. And therefore those who
look on sin are seeing the denial of the real world. Yet the last
question adds the wish for constancy in your desire to see the
real world, so the desire becomes the only one you have. By
answering the final question "yes," you add sincerity to the decisions
you have already made to all the rest. For only then have you renounced
the option to change your mind again. When it is this you do not
want, the rest are wholly answered.
83
Why do you think you are unsure the others have been answered?
Could it be necessary they be asked so often, if they had? Until the
last decision has been made, the answer is both "yes" and "no." For you
have answered "yes" without perceiving that "yes" must mean "not
no." No one decides against his happiness, but he may do so if he does
not see he does it. And if he sees his happiness as ever changing, now
this, now that, and now an elusive shadow attached to nothing, he does
decide against it.
84
Elusive happiness, or happiness in changing form that shifts with time
and place, is an illusion which has no meaning. Happiness must
be constant because it is attained by giving up the wish for the inconstant.
Joy cannot be perceived except through constant vision. And
constant vision can be given only those who wish for constancy.
The power of the Son of God's desire remains the proof that he is wrong
who sees himself as helpless. Desire what you will, and you will
look on it and think it real. No thought but has the power to release or
kill. And none can leave the thinker's mind or leave him unaffected.
85
Are thoughts then dangerous? To bodies, yes! The thoughts that
seem to kill are those which teach the thinker that he can be
killed. And so he dies because of what he learned. He goes from
life to death, the final proof he valued the inconstant more than
constancy. Surely he thought he wanted happiness. Yet he did not
desire it because it was the truth and therefore must be
constant.
86
The constancy of joy is a condition quite alien to your understanding.
Yet if you could even imagine what it must be, you would desire it
although you understand it not.
87
The constancy of happiness has no exceptions—no change of any kind. It
is unshakable as is the love of God for His creation. Sure in its vision
as its Creator is in what He knows, it looks on everything and sees it
is the same. It sees not the ephemeral, for it desires that everything
be like itself and sees it so. Nothing has power to confound its
constancy because its own desire cannot be shaken. It comes as surely
unto those who see the final question is necessary to the rest, as peace
must come to those who choose to heal and not to judge.
88
Reason will tell you that you cannot ask for happiness
inconstantly. For if what you desire you receive and happiness is
constant, then you need ask for it but once to have it always.
And if you do not have it always, being what it is, you did not ask for
it. For no one fails to ask for his desire of something he believes
holds out some promise of the power of giving it. He may be wrong in
what he asks, where, and of what. Yet he will ask because desire
is a request, an asking for, and made by one whom God Himself will never
fail to answer. God has already given him all that he really
wants. Yet what he is uncertain of, God cannot give. For he does
not desire it while he remains uncertain, and God's giving must be
incomplete unless it is received.
89
You who complete God's Will and are His happiness, whose will is
powerful as His, a power that is not lost in your illusions, think
carefully why it should be you have not yet decided how you would answer
the final question. Your answer to the others has made it possible to
help you be but partially insane. And yet it is the final one that
really asks if you are willing to be wholly sane.
90
What is the holy instant but God's appeal to you to recognize what He
has given you? Here is the great appeal to reason; the awareness of what
is always there to see, the happiness that could be always yours. Here
is the constant peace you could experience forever. Here is what denial
has denied revealed to you. For here the final question is already
answered and what you ask for given. Here is the future now, for
time is powerless because of your desire for what will never change. For
you have asked that nothing stand between the holiness of your
relationship and your awareness of its holiness.
1
Take pity on yourselves, so long enslaved. Rejoice whom God hath joined
have come together and need no longer look on sin apart. No two can look
on sin together, for they could never see it in the same place and time.
Sin is a strictly individual perception, seen in the other yet believed
by each to be within himself. And each one seems to make a different
error, and one the other cannot understand. Brothers, it is the
same, made by the same, and forgiven for its maker in the same way.
2
The holiness of your relationship forgives you both, undoing the effects
of what you both believed and saw. And with their going is the need
for sin gone with them. Who has need for sin? Only the lonely and alone
who see their brothers different from themselves. It is this difference,
seen but not real, that makes the need for sin, not real but seen, seem
justified. And all this would be real if sin were so. For an unholy
relationship is based on differences, where each one thinks the other
has what he has not. They come together, each to complete himself and
rob the other. They stay until they think there's nothing left to steal
and then move on. And so they wander through a world of strangers unlike
themselves, living with their bodies perhaps under a common roof that
shelters neither—in the same room and yet a world apart.
3
A holy relationship starts from a different premise. Each one has looked
within and seen no lack. Accepting his completion, he would extend it by
joining with another, whole as himself. He sees no difference between
these selves, for differences are only of the body. Therefore, he looks
on nothing he would take. He denies not his own reality, because
it is the truth. Just under Heaven does he stand, but close enough not
to return to earth. For this relationship has Heaven's holiness. How far
from home can a relationship so like to Heaven be?
4
Think what a holy relationship can teach! Here is belief in differences
undone. Here is the faith in differences shifted to sameness. [And here
is sight of differences transformed to vision.]
And reason now can lead you to the logical conclusion of your union. It
must extend, as you extended when you joined. It must reach out beyond
itself, as you reached out beyond the body to let yourselves be
joined. And now the sameness which you saw extends and finally removes
all sense of differences so that the sameness that lies beneath them all
becomes apparent. Here is the golden circle where you recognize the Son
of God. For what is born into a holy relationship can never end.
5
Let reason take another step. If you attack whom God would heal and hate
the one He loves, then you and your Creator have a different
will. Yet if you are his Will, what you must then believe is
that you are not yourself. You can indeed believe this, and you
do. And you have faith in this and see much evidence on
its behalf. And where, you wonder, does your strange uneasiness, your
sense of being disconnected, and your haunting fear of lack of meaning
in yourself arise? It is as though you wandered in without a plan of any
kind except to wander off, for only that seems certain.
6
Yet we have heard a very similar description earlier, but it was not of
you. And yet this strange idea, which it does accurately
describe, you think is you. Reason would tell you that the world
you see through eyes which are not yours must make no sense to
you. To whom would vision such as this send back its messages? Surely
not you, whose sight is wholly independent of the eyes which look upon
the world. If this is not your vision, what can it show to you? The
brain cannot interpret what your vision sees. This you would
understand. The brain interprets to the body, of which it is a part. But
what it says, you cannot understand. Yet you have listened to
it. And long and hard you tried to understand its messages. You did not
realize it is impossible to understand what fails entirely to reach you.
7
You have received no messages at all you understand. For you have
listened to what can never communicate at all. Think, then, what
happened. Denying what you are and firm in faith that you are something
else, this "something else" which you have made to be yourself became
your sight. Yet it must be the "something else" which sees, and as not
you, explains its sight to you. Your vision would, of
course, render this quite unnecessary. Yet if your eyes are closed and
you have called upon this thing to lead you, asking it to explain to you
the world it sees, you have no reason not to listen nor to suspect that
what it tells you is not true. Reason would tell you it cannot be true because
you do not understand it. God has no secrets. He does not lead you
through a world of misery, waiting to tell you at the journey's end why
He did this to you.
8
What could be secret from God's Will? Yet you believe that you
have secrets. What could your secrets be except another will
that is your own, apart from His? Reason would tell you that this is no
secret that need be hidden as a sin. But a mistake indeed! Let not your
fear of sin protect it from correction, for the attraction of guilt is
only fear. Here is the one emotion that you made, whatever it may seem
to be. This is the emotion of secrecy, of private thoughts, and of the
body. This is the one emotion that opposes love and always leads to
sight of differences and loss of sameness. Here is the one emotion that
keeps you blind, dependent on the self you think you made to lead you
through the world it made for you.
9
Your sight was given you, along with everything that you can understand.
You will perceive no difficulty in understanding what this vision tells
you, for everyone sees only what he thinks he is. And what your
sight would show you, you will understand because it is the
truth. Only your vision can convey to you what you can see. It
reaches you directly without a need to be interpreted to you. What needs
interpretation must be alien. Nor will it ever be made
understandable by an interpreter you cannot understand.
10
Of all the messages you have received and failed to understand, this
course alone is open to your understanding and can be
understood. This is your language. You do not understand it yet,
only because your whole communication is like a baby's. The sounds a
baby makes and what he hears are highly unreliable, meaning different
things to him at different times. Neither the sounds he hears nor sights
he sees are stable yet. But what he hears and does not understand will
be his native tongue, through which he will communicate with those
around him, and they with him. And the strange, shifting ones he sees
about him will become to him his comforters, and he will recognize his
home and see them there with him.
11
So in each holy relationship is the ability to communicate instead of
separate reborn. Yet a holy relationship, so recently reborn itself from
an unholy relationship and yet more ancient than the old illusion that
it has replaced, is like a baby now in its rebirth. Yet in this
infant is your vision returned to you, and he will speak the language
both of you can understand. He is not nurtured by the "something else"
you thought was you. He was not given there, nor was received by
anything except yourself. For no two people can unite except through
Christ, Whose vision sees them one.
12
Think what is given you, my holy brothers. This child will teach you
what you do not understand and make it plain. For his will be no alien
tongue. He will need no interpreter to you, for it was you who taught
him what he knows because you knew it. He could not come to
anyone but you, never to "something else." Where Christ has entered, no
one is alone, for never could He find a home in separate ones. Yet must
He be reborn into His ancient home, so seeming new and yet as old as He,
a tiny newcomer, dependent on the holiness of your relationship to let
Him live.
13
Be certain God did not entrust His Son to the unworthy. Nothing but what
is part of Him is worthy of being joined. Nor is it possible that
anything not part of Him can join. Communication must have been
restored to those that join, for this they could not do through bodies.
What, then, has joined them? Reason will tell you that they must have
seen each other through a vision not of the body and communicated in a
language the body does not speak. Nor could it be a fearful sight or
sound that drew them gently into one. Rather, in each the other saw a
perfect shelter where his Self could be reborn in safety and in peace.
Such did his reason tell him; such he believed because it was
the truth.
14
Here is the first direct perception that you have made. You made it
through awareness older than perception and yet reborn in just an
instant. For what is time to what was always so? Think what that instant
brought—the recognition that the "something else" you thought was you is
an illusion. And truth came instantly to show you where your Self must
be. It is denial of illusions that calls on truth, for to deny
illusions is to recognize that fear is meaningless. Into the holy home,
where fear is powerless, love enters thankfully, grateful that it is one
with you who joined to let it enter.
15
Christ comes to what is like Himself; the same, not different. For He is
always drawn unto Himself. What is as like Him as a holy relationship?
And what draws you together draws Him to you. Here are His sweetness and
His gentle innocence protected from attack. And here can He return in
confidence, for faith in one another is always faith in Him. You are
indeed correct in looking on each other as His chosen home, for here you
will with Him and with His Father. This is your Father's Will for you,
and yours with His. And who is drawn to Christ is drawn to God as surely
as both are drawn to every holy relationship, the home prepared for them
as earth is turned to Heaven.
16
The opposite of illusions is not disillusionment, but truth. Only to the
ego, to which truth is meaningless, do they appear to be the only
alternatives and different from each other. In truth they are the same.
Both bring the same amount of misery, though each one seems to be the
way to lose the misery the other brings. Every illusion carries pain and
suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments with which it hides
its nothingness. Yet in these dark and heavy garments are those who seek
illusions covered and hidden from the joy of truth.
17
Truth is the opposite of illusions because it offers joy. What else but
joy could be the opposite of misery? To leave one kind of misery and
seek another is hardly an escape. To change illusions is to make no
change. The search for joy in misery is senseless, for how could joy be
found in misery? All that is possible in the dark world of misery is to
select some aspects out of it, see them as different, and define the
difference as joy. Yet to perceive a difference where none exists will
surely fail to make a difference.
18
Illusions carry only guilt and suffering, sickness and death to their
believers. The form in which they are accepted is irrelevant. No form of
misery in reason's eyes can be confused with joy. Joy is eternal. You
can be sure indeed that any seeming happiness that does not last is
really fear. Joy does not turn to sorrow, for the eternal cannot change.
But sorrow can be turned to joy, for time gives way to the
eternal. Only the timeless must remain unchanged, but everything in time
can change with time. Yet if the change be real and not imagined,
illusions must give way to truth and not to other dreams that are but
equally unreal. This is no difference.
19
Reason will tell you that the only way to escape from misery is to
recognize it and go the other way. Truth is the same and misery
the same, but they are different from each other in every way,
in every instance, and without exception. To believe that one exception
can exist is to confuse what is the same with what is different. One
illusion cherished and defended against the truth makes all
truth meaningless and all illusions real. Such is the power of
belief. It cannot compromise. And faith in innocence is faith in sin if
the belief excludes one living thing and holds it out apart from its
forgiveness.
20
Both reason and the ego will tell you this, but what they make
of it is not the same. The ego will assure you now that it is impossible
for you to see no guilt in anyone. And if this vision is the only
means by which escape from guilt can be attained, then the belief in sin
must be eternal. Yet reason looks on this another way, for reason sees
the source of an idea as what will make it true or false. This
must be so if the idea is like its source. Therefore, says
reason, if escape from guilt was given to the Holy Spirit as His
purpose, and by One to Whom nothing He wills can be impossible,
the means for its attainment are more than possible. They must
be there, and you must have them.
21
This is a crucial period in this course, for here the separation of you
and the ego must be made complete. For if you have the means to
let the Holy Spirit's purpose be accomplished, they can be used.
And through their use will you gain faith in them. Yet to the
ego this must be impossible, and no one undertakes to do what holds no
hope of ever being done. You know what your Creator wills is
possible, but what you made believes it is not so. Now must you choose
between yourself and an illusion of yourself. Not both,
but one. There is no point in trying to avoid this one decision.
It must be made. Faith and belief can fall to either side, but
reason tells you that misery lies only on one side and joy upon the
other.
22
Forsake not now each other. For you who are the same will not decide
alone nor differently. Either you give each other life or death; either
you are each other's savior or his judge, offering him sanctuary or
condemnation. This course will be believed entirely or not at all. For
it is wholly true or wholly false and cannot be but partially believed.
And you will either escape from misery entirely or not at all. Reason
will tell you that there is no middle ground where you can pause
uncertainly, waiting to choose between the joy of Heaven and the misery
of hell. Until you choose Heaven, you are in hell and misery.
23
There is no part of Heaven you can take and weave into illusions. Nor is
there one illusion you can enter Heaven with. A savior cannot be a
judge, nor mercy condemnation. And vision cannot damn, but only bless.
Whose function is to save will save. How he will do it is beyond
your understanding, but when must be your choice. For time you
made, and time you can command. You are no more a slave to time
than to the world you made.
24
Let us look closer at the whole illusion that what you made has power to
enslave its maker. This is the same belief that caused the separation.
It is the meaningless idea that thoughts can leave the thinker's mind,
be different from it, and in opposition to it. If this were
true, thoughts would not be the mind's extensions but its enemies. And
here we see again another form of the same fundamental illusion we have
seen many times before. Only if it were possible the Son of God could
leave his Father's Mind, make himself different, and oppose His Will,
would it be possible that the self he made and all it made should be his
master.
25
Behold the great projection, but look on it with the decision that it
must be healed and not with fear. Nothing you made has any power over
you unless you still would be apart from your Creator and with a will
opposed to His. For only if you would believe His Son could be His enemy
does it seem possible that what you made is yours. You would
condemn His joy to misery and make Him different. And all the misery you
made has been your own. Are you not glad to learn it is not
true? Is it not welcome news to hear not one of the illusions that you
made replaced the truth?
26
Only your thoughts have been impossible. Salvation cannot
be. It is impossible to look upon your savior as your enemy and
recognize him. Yet it is possible to recognize him for what he
is if God would have it so. What God has given to your holy relationship
is there. For what He gave the Holy Spirit to give to you, He
gave. Would you not look upon the savior that has been given you?
And would you not exchange in gratitude the function of an executioner
you gave him for the one he has in truth? Receive of him what God has
given him for you, not what you tried to give yourself.
27
Beyond the bodies that you interposed between you and shining in the
golden light which reaches it from the bright endless circle that
extends forever is your holy relationship, beloved of God Himself. How
still it rests, in time and yet beyond, immortal yet on earth. How great
the power that lies in it. Time waits upon its will, and earth will be
as it would have it be. Here is no separate will nor the desire that anything
be separate. Its will has no exceptions, and what it wills is true.
Every illusion brought to its forgiveness is gently overlooked and
disappears. For at its center Christ has been reborn to light His home
with vision that overlooks the world. Would you not have this holy home
be yours as well? No misery is here, but only joy.
28
All you need do to dwell in quiet here with Christ is share His vision.
Quickly and gladly is His vision given to anyone who is but willing to
see his brother sinless. And no one can remain beyond this willingness
if you would be released entirely from all effects of sin. Would you
have partial forgiveness for yourself? Can you reach Heaven while a
single sin still tempts you to remain in misery? Heaven is the home of
perfect purity, and God created it for you. Look on your holy
brother, sinless as yourself, and let him lead you there.
29
The introduction of reason into the ego's thought system is the
beginning of its undoing. For reason and the ego are contradictory. Nor
is it possible for them to co-exist in your awareness. And reason's goal
is to make plain and therefore obvious. You can see reason. This
is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has
meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally. If it is not the body's
sight, it must be understood. For it is plain, and what
is obvious is not ambiguous. It can be understood. And here do
reason and the ego separate to go their different ways.
30
The ego's whole continuance depends on its belief you cannot learn this
course. Share this belief, and reason will be unable to see your errors
and make way for their correction. For reason sees through
errors, telling you what you thought was real is not. Reason can see the
difference between sin and mistakes because it wants correction.
Therefore, it tells you what you thought was uncorrectable can
be corrected, and thus it must have been an error. The ego's opposition
to correction leads to its fixed belief in sin and disregard of errors.
It looks on nothing that can be corrected. Thus does the ego
damn and reason save.
31
Reason is not salvation in itself, but it makes way for peace and brings
you to a state of mind in which salvation can be given you. Sin is a
block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road
to peace. No one who looks on it without the help of reason would try to
pass it. The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would
be madness to attempt to pass it. Yet reason sees through it easily because
it is an error. The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from
reason's eyes.
32
Only the form of error attracts the ego. Meaning it does not
recognize and does not know if it is there or not. Everything which the
body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted
fragment of the whole, without the meaning that the whole would give.
And yet mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected. Sin is but
error in a special form the ego venerates. It would preserve all errors
and make them sins. For here is its own stability, its heavy anchor in
the shifting world it made—the rock on which its church is built and
where its worshipers are bound to bodies and believe the body's freedom
is their own.
33
Reason will tell you that the form of error is not what makes it a
mistake. If what the form conceals is a mistake, the form cannot
prevent correction. The body's eyes see only form. They cannot
see beyond what they were made to see. And they were made to
look on error and not see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange
perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the
granite block of sin and stopping at the outside form of nothing. To
this distorted form of vision, the outside of everything, the wall that
stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. Yet how can sight
which stops at nothingness as if it were a solid wall see truly? It is
held back by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but
form will be perceived.
34
These eyes, made not to see, will never see. For the
idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees
through them. What was its maker's goal but not to see? For this
the body's eyes are perfect means, but not for seeing. See how
the body's eyes rest on externals and cannot go beyond. Watch how they
stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning. Nothing so
blinding as perception of form. For sight of form means understanding
has been obscured.
35
Only mistakes have different forms, and so they can deceive. You
can change form because it is not true. It could not be reality,
because it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is
not reality, it must be an illusion and is not there to see. And
if you see it, you must be mistaken, for you are seeing what can not
be real as if it were. What cannot see beyond what is not there
must be distorted perception and must perceive illusions as the
truth. Could it then recognize the truth?
36
Let not the form of his mistakes keep you from him whose
holiness is yours. Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of
which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the
body's eyes can see. Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked
by your perception of his sins and of his body. What is there in him
that you would attack except what you associate with his body, which you
believe can sin? Beyond his errors is his holiness and your
salvation. You gave him not his holiness but tried to see your sins in
him to save yourself. And yet his holiness is your forgiveness.
Can you be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness is your
salvation?
37
A holy relationship, however newly born, must value holiness above all
else. Unholy values will produce confusion, and in awareness. In
an unholy relationship, each one is valued because he seems to justify
the other's sin. He sees within the other what impels him to sin against
his will. And thus he lays his sins upon the other and is attracted to
him to perpetuate his sins. And so it must become impossible for
each to see himself as causing sin by his desire to have sin
real. Yet reason sees a holy relationship as what it is—a common state
of mind, where both give errors gladly to correction that both may
happily be healed as one.
38
When you come to the place where the branch in the road is quite
apparent, you cannot go ahead. You must go either one way or the
other. For now if you go straight ahead, the way you went before you
reached the branch, you will go nowhere. The whole purpose of
coming this far was to decide which branch you will take now.
The way you came no longer matters. It can no longer serve. No one who
reaches this far can make the wrong decision, but he can
delay. And there is no part of the journey that seems more hopeless and
futile than standing where the road branches and not deciding on which
way to go.
39
It is but the first few steps along the right way that seem hard, for
you have chosen, although you still may think you can go back
and make the other choice. This is not so. A choice made with the power
of Heaven to uphold it cannot be undone. Your way is
decided. There will be nothing you will not be told if you acknowledge
this.
40
And so you stand, here in this holy place, before the veil of sin that
hangs between you and the face of Christ. Let it be lifted!
Raise it together, for it is but a veil that stands between you. Either
alone will see it as a solid block, nor realize how thin the drapery
that separates you now. Yet it is almost over in your awareness, and
peace has reached you even here before the veil. Think what will happen
after! The love of Christ will light your faces and shine from them into
a darkened world that needs the light. And from this holy place
He will return with you, not leaving it nor you. You will become His
messengers, returning Him unto Himself.
41
Think of the loveliness that you will see who walk with Him! And think
how beautiful will each of you look to the other! How happy you will be
to be together after such a long and lonely journey where you walked
alone. The gates of Heaven, open now for you, will you now open to the
sorrowful. And none who looks upon the Christ in you but will rejoice.
How beautiful the sight you saw beyond the veil which you will bring to
light the tired eyes of those as weary now as once you were. How
thankful will they be to see you come among them, offering Christ's
forgiveness to dispel their faith in sin.
42
Every mistake you make the other will gently have corrected for you, for
in his sight your loveliness is his salvation which he would protect
from harm. And each will be the other's strong protector from everything
that seems to rise between you. So shall you walk the world with me,
whose message has not yet been given to everyone. For you are here to
let it be received. God's offer still is open, yet it waits
acceptance. From you who have accepted it is it received. Into your
joined hands is it safely given, for you who share it have become its
willing guardians and protectors.
43
To all who share the love of God, the grace is given to be the givers of
what they have received. And so they learn that it is theirs forever.
All barriers disappear before their coming, as every obstacle was
finally surmounted which seemed to rise and block their way before. This
veil you lift together opens the way to truth to more than you. Those
who would let illusions be lifted from their minds are this world's
saviors, walking the world with their Redeemer and carrying His message
of hope and freedom and release from suffering to everyone who needs a
miracle to save him.
44
How easy is it to offer this miracle to everyone! No one who has
received it for himself could find it difficult. For by receiving it, he
learned it was not given him alone. Such is the function of a holy
relationship—to receive together and give as you received. Standing
before the veil, it still seems difficult. But hold out your joined
hands and touch this heavy-seeming block, and you will learn how easily
your fingers slip through its nothingness. It is no solid wall. And only
an illusion stands between you and the holy Self you share.
45
How does one overcome illusions? Surely not by force or anger nor by
opposing them in any way. Merely by letting reason tell you that they contradict
reality. They go against what must be true. The opposition comes from
them and not reality. Reality opposes nothing. What merely is
needs no defense and offers none. Only illusions need defense because of
weakness. And how can it be difficult to walk the way of truth when only
weakness interferes? You are the strong ones in this seeming
conflict. And you need no defense. Everything that needs defense you do
not want, for anything that needs defense will weaken you.
46
Consider what the ego wants defenses for—always to justify what
goes against the truth, flies in the face of reason, and makes no sense.
Can this be justified? What can this be except an invitation to
insanity to save you from the truth? And what would you be saved from
but what you fear? Belief in sin needs great defense and at enormous
cost. All that the Holy Spirit offers must be defended against and
sacrificed. For sin is carved into a block out of your peace and laid
between you and its return. Yet how can peace be so fragmented? It is
still whole, and nothing has been taken from it.
47
See how the means and the material of evil dreams are nothing. In truth
you stand together with nothing in between. God holds your hands, and
what can separate whom He has joined as one with Him? It is your Father
Whom you would defend against. Yet it remains impossible to keep love
out. God rests with you in quiet, undefended and wholly undefending, for
in this quiet state alone is strength and power. Here can no weakness
enter, for here is no attack and therefore no illusions. Love rests in
certainty. Only uncertainty can be defensive. And all uncertainty is
doubt about yourself.
48
How weak is fear—how little and how meaningless! How insignificant
before the quiet strength of those whom love has joined! This is your
"enemy"—a frightened mouse that would attack the universe. How likely is
it that it will succeed? Can it be difficult to disregard its feeble
squeaks that tell of its omnipotence and would drown out the hymn of
praise to its Creator which every heart throughout the universe forever
sings as one? Which is the stronger? Is it this tiny mouse or everything
that God created? You are not joined together by this mouse but by the
Will of God. And can a mouse betray whom God has joined?
49
If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness
of your union! Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and
thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the
body's eyes it looks like an enormous solid body, immovable as is a
mountain. Yet within you there is a Force which no illusions can resist.
This body only seems to be immovable; this Force is irresistible in
truth. What, then, must happen when they come together? Can the illusion
of immovability be long defended from what is quietly passed through and
gone beyond?
50
Forget not, when you feel the need arise to be defensive about anything,
you have identified yourself with an illusion. And therefore feel that
you are weak because you are alone. This is the cost of all
illusions. Not one but rests on the belief that you are separate. Not
one that does not seem to stand, heavy and solid and immovable, between
you and your brother. And not one that truth cannot pass over lightly
and so easily that you must be convinced, in spite of what you thought
it was, that it is nothing. If you forgive each other, this must
happen. For it is your unwillingness to overlook what seems to stand
between you that makes it look impenetrable and defends the illusion of
its immovability.
51
Do you want freedom of the body or of the mind? For both you cannot
have. Which do you value? Which is your goal? For one you see as means;
the other, end. And one must serve the other and lead to its
predominance, increasing its importance by diminishing its own. Means
serve the end, and as the end is reached, the value of the means
decreases, eclipsed entirely when they are recognized as functionless.
No one but yearns for freedom and tries to find it. Yet he will seek for
it where he believes it is and can be found. He will believe it possible
of mind or body, and he will make the other serve his choice as means to
find it.
52
Where freedom of the body has been chosen, the mind is used as means
whose value lies in its ability to contrive ways to achieve the body's
freedom. Yet freedom of the body has no meaning, and so the mind is
dedicated to serve illusions. This is a situation so contradictory and
so impossible that anyone who chooses this has no idea of what is
valuable. Yet even in this confusion, so profound it cannot be
described, the Holy Spirit waits in gentle patience, as certain of the
outcome as He is sure of His Creator's love. He knows this mad decision
was made by one as dear to His Creator as love is to itself.
53
Be not disturbed at all to think how He can change the role of means and
end so easily in what God loves and would have free forever. But be you
rather grateful that you can be the means to serve His end. This
is the only service which leads to freedom. To serve this end, the body
must be perceived as sinless because the goal is sinlessness.
The lack of contradiction makes the soft transition from means to end as
easy as is the shift from hate to gratitude before forgiving eyes. You will
be sanctified by one another, using your bodies only to serve the
sinless. And it will be impossible for you to hate what serves
what you would heal.
54
This holy relationship, lovely in its innocence, mighty in strength, and
blazing with a light far brighter than the sun which lights the sky you
see, is chosen of your Father as a means for His own plan. Be thankful
that it serves yours not at all. Nothing entrusted to it can be misused,
and nothing given it but will be used. This holy relationship has the
power to heal all pain, regardless of its form. Neither of you alone can
serve at all. Only in your joint will does healing lie. For here your
healing is and here will you accept Atonement. And in your healing is
the Sonship healed because your wills are joined.
55
Before a holy relationship there is no sin. The form of error is no
longer seen, and reason, joined with love, looks quietly on all
confusion, observing merely, "This was a mistake." And then the same
Atonement you accepted in your relationship corrects the error and lays
a part of Heaven in its place. How blessed are you who let this gift be
given! Each part of Heaven that you bring is given you. And
every empty place in Heaven that you fill again with the Eternal Light
you bring shines now on you. The means of sinlessness can know
no fear because they carry only love with them.
56
Children of peace, the light has come to you. The light you
bring you do not recognize, and yet you will remember. Who can deny
himself the vision that he brings to others? And who would fail to
recognize a gift he let be laid in Heaven through himself? The gentle
service that you give the Holy Spirit is service to yourself. You who
are now His means must love all that He loves. And what you bring is
your remembrance of everything that is eternal. No trace of anything in
time can long remain in minds that serve the timeless. And no illusion
can disturb the peace of a relationship which has become the means of
peace.
57
When you have looked upon each other with complete forgiveness from
which no error is excluded and nothing kept hidden what mistake can
there be anywhere you cannot overlook? What form of suffering could
block your sight, preventing you from seeing past it? And what illusion
could there be you will not recognize as a mistake—a shadow through
which you walk completely undismayed? God would let nothing interfere
with those whose wills are His[. And they will recognize their wills are
His, because they serve His Will] and serve it willingly. And could
remembrance of what they are be long delayed?
58
You will see your value through each other's eyes, and each one is
released as he beholds his savior in place of the attacker who he
thought was there. Through this releasing is the world released. This is
your part in bringing peace. For you have asked what is your function
here and have been answered. Seek not to change it nor to substitute
another goal. [This one was given you and only this.]
Accept this one and serve it willingly, for what the Holy Spirit does
with the gifts you give each other, to whom He offers them, and where
and when is up to Him. He will bestow them where they are received and
welcomed. He will use every one of them for peace. Nor will one little
smile or willingness to overlook the tiniest mistake be lost to anyone.
59
What can it be but universal blessing to look on what your Father loves
with charity? Extension of forgiveness is the Holy Spirit's function.
Leave this to Him. Let your concern be only that you give to Him that
which can be extended. Save no dark secrets that He cannot use,
but offer Him the tiny gifts He can extend forever. He will take each
one and make of it a potent force for peace. He will withhold no
blessing from it nor limit it in any way. He will join to it all the
power that God has given Him to make each little gift of love a source
of healing for everyone. Each little gift you offer to the other lights
up the world. Be not concerned with darkness; look away from it and
toward each other. And let the darkness be dispelled by Him Who knows
the light and lays it gently in each quiet smile of faith and confidence
with which you bless each other.
60
On your learning depends the welfare of the world. And it is only
arrogance that would deny the power of your will. Think you the Will of
God is powerless? Is this humility? You do not see what this belief has
done. You see yourself as vulnerable, frail, and easily destroyed and at
the mercy of countless attackers more powerful than you. Let us look
straight at how this error came about, for here lies buried the heavy
anchor that seems to keep the fear of God in place, unmovable and solid
as a rock. While this remains, so will it seem to be.
61
Who can attack the Son of God and not attack his Father? How can
God's Son be weak and frail and easily destroyed unless his
Father is? You do not see that every sin and every condemnation which
you perceive and justify is an attack upon your Father. And that
is why it has not happened nor could be real. You do not see
that this is your attempt because you think the Father and the Son are
separate. And you must think that they are separate because of
fear. For it seems safer to attack another or yourself than to attack
the great Creator of the universe, whose power you know.
62
If you were one with God and recognized this oneness, you would
know His power is yours. But you will not remember this while
you believe attack of any kind means anything. It is unjustified in any
form because it has no meaning. The only way it could be
justified is if each one of you were separate from the other, and all
were separate from your Creator. For only then would it be possible to
attack a part of the creation without the whole, the Son without the
Father, and to attack another without yourself or hurt yourself without
the other feeling pain. And this belief you want. Yet wherein
lies its value except in the desire to attack in safety? Attack is
neither safe nor dangerous. It is impossible. And this is so because
the universe is one. You would not choose attack on its reality if it
were not essential to attack to see it [separate from its Creator].
And thus it seems as if love could attack and become fearful.
63
Only the different can attack. So you conclude because
you can attack you must be different. Yet does the Holy Spirit
explain this differently. Because you are not different, you cannot
attack. Either position is a logical conclusion if only the different
can attack. Either could be maintained, but never both. The only
question to be answered to decide which must be true is whether you are
different. From the position of what you understand, you seem to be and
therefore can attack. Of the alternatives, this seems more natural and
more in line with your experience. And therefore it is necessary that
you have other experiences more in line with truth to teach you what is
natural and true.
64
This is the function of your holy relationship. For what one thinks the
other will experience with him. What can this mean except your
minds are one? Look not with fear upon this happy fact and think not
that it lays a heavy burden on you. For when you have accepted it with
gladness, you will realize that your relationship is a reflection of the
union of the Creator and His Son. From loving minds there is no
separation. And every thought in one brings gladness to the other because
they are the same. Joy is unlimited because each shining thought of love
extends its being and creates more of itself. There is no difference
anywhere in it, for every thought is like itself.
65
The light that joins you shines throughout the universe, and because it
joins you, so it makes you one with your Creator. And in Him is all
creation joined. Would you regret you cannot fear alone when your
relationship can also teach the power of love is there, which makes all
fear impossible? Do not attempt to keep a little of the ego with this
gift. For it was given you to be used and not obscured. What
teaches you you cannot separate, denies the ego. Let truth
decide if you be different or the same and teach you which is
true.
1Do
you not see the opposite of frailty and weakness is sinlessness?
Innocence is strength, and nothing else is strong. The sinless cannot
fear, for sin of any kind is weakness. The show of strength attack would
use to cover frailty conceals it not, for how can the unreal be hidden?
No one is strong who has an enemy, and no one can attack unless he
thinks he has. Belief in enemies is therefore the belief in weakness,
and what is weak is not the Will of God. Being opposed to it, it
is its "enemy." And God is feared as an opposing will.
2
How strange indeed becomes this war against yourself! You will believe
that everything you use for sin can hurt you and become your enemy. And
you will fight against it and try to weaken it because of this; and you
will think that you succeeded and attack again. It is as certain you
will fear what you attack as it is sure that you will love what you
perceive as sinless. He walks in peace who travels sinlessly along the
way love shows him. For love walks with him there, protecting him from
fear. And he will see only the sinless, who can not attack.
3
Walk you in glory with your head held high, and fear no evil. The
innocent are safe because they share their innocence. Nothing they see
is harmful, for their awareness of the truth releases everything from
the illusion of harmfulness. And what seemed harmful now stands shining
in their innocence, released from sin and fear, and happily returned to
love. They share the strength of love because they looked on
innocence. And every error disappeared because they saw it not. Who
looks for glory finds it where it is. Where could it be but in
the innocent?
4
Let not the little interferers pull you to littleness. There can
be no attraction of guilt in innocence. Think what a happy world you
walk with truth beside you! Do not give up this world of freedom for a
little sigh of seeming sin nor for a tiny stirring of guilt's
attraction. Would you, for all these meaningless distractions, lay
Heaven aside? Your destiny and purpose are far beyond them in the clean
place where littleness does not exist. Your purpose is at variance with
littleness of any kind. And so it is at variance with sin.
5
Let us not let littleness lead God's Son into temptation. His glory is beyond
it, measureless and timeless as eternity. Do not let time intrude upon
your sight of him. Leave him not frightened and alone in his temptation
but help him rise above it and perceive the light of which he is a part.
Your innocence will light the way to his, and so is yours protected and
kept in your awareness. For who can know his glory and perceive
the little and the weak about him? Who can walk trembling in a fearful
world and realize that Heaven's glory shines on him?
6
Nothing around you but is part of you. Look on it lovingly, and see the
light of Heaven in it. So will you come to understand all that is given
you. In kind forgiveness will the world sparkle and shine and everything
you once thought sinful now will be reinterpreted as part of Heaven. How
beautiful it is to walk clean and redeemed and happy through a world in
bitter need of the redemption that your innocence bestows upon it! What
can you value more than this? For here is your salvation and your
freedom. And it must be complete if you would recognize it.
7
The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is
conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal
gentleness. The means of war are not the means of peace, and what the
warlike would remember is not love. War is impossible unless belief in
victory is cherished. Conflict within you must imply that you believe
the ego has the power to be victorious. Why else would you
identify with it? Surely you realize the ego is at war with God. Certain
it is it has no enemy. Yet just as certain is its fixed belief it has
an enemy that it must overcome and will succeed.
8
Do you not realize a war against yourself would be a war on God?
Is victory conceivable? And if it were, is this a victory that you would
want? The death of God, if it were possible, would be your
death. Is this a victory? The ego always marches to
defeat because it thinks that triumph over you is possible. And God
thinks otherwise. This is no war—only the mad belief the Will of God can
be attacked and overthrown. You may identify with this belief,
but never will it be more than madness. And fear will reign in madness
and will seem to have replaced love there. This is the conflict's purpose.
And to those who think that it is possible, the means seem real.
9
Be certain that it is impossible God and the ego, or yourself and it,
will ever meet. You seem to meet and make your strange
alliances on grounds that have no meaning. For your beliefs converge
upon the body, the ego's chosen home, which you believe is yours.
You meet at a mistake—an error in your self-appraisal. The ego joins
with an illusion of yourself you share with it. And yet
illusions cannot join. They are the same, and they are nothing. Their
joining lies in nothingness; two are as meaningless as one or as a
thousand. The ego joins with nothing, being nothing. The victory
it seeks is meaningless as is itself.
10
Brothers, the war against yourself is almost over. The journey's end is
at the place of peace. Would you not now accept the peace offered you
here? This "enemy" you fought as an intruder on your peace is here
transformed before your sight into the giver of your peace. Your "enemy"
was God Himself, to Whom all conflict, triumph, and attack of any kind
are all unknown. He loves you perfectly, completely, and eternally. The
Son of God at war with his Creator is a condition as ridiculous as
nature roaring at the wind in anger and proclaiming that it is part of
itself no more.
11
Could nature possibly establish this and make it true? Nor is it
up to you to say what shall be part of you and what is kept apart. The
war against yourself was undertaken to teach the Son of God that he is
not himself and not his Father's Son. For this, the memory of
his Father must be forgotten. It is forgotten in the
body's life, and if you think you are a body, you will believe you have
forgotten it. Yet truth can never be forgotten by itself, and
you have not forgotten what you are. Only a strange illusion of
yourself, a wish to triumph over what you are, remembers not.
12
The war against yourself is but the battle of two illusions, struggling
to make them different from each other in the belief the one which
conquers will be true. There is no conflict between them and the
truth. Nor are they different from each other. Both are
not true. And so it matters not what form they take. What made them is
insane, and they remain part of what made them. Madness holds out no
menace to reality and has no influence upon it. Illusions cannot
triumph over truth, nor can they threaten it in any way. And the reality
which they deny is not a part of them.
13
What you remember is a part of you. For you must
be as God created you. Truth does not fight against illusions, nor do
illusions fight against the truth. Illusions battle only with
themselves. Being fragmented, they fragment. But truth is indivisible
and far beyond their little reach. You will remember what you know when
you have learned you cannot be in conflict. One illusion about
yourself can battle with another, yet the war of two illusions is a
state where nothing happens. There is no victor, and there is no
victory. And truth stands radiant, apart from conflict, untouched and
quiet in the peace of God.
14
Conflict must be between two forces. It cannot exist between one
power and nothingness. There is nothing you could attack that is not
part of you. And by attacking it, you make two illusions of
yourself in conflict with each other. And this occurs whenever you look
on anything that God created with anything but love. Conflict is
fearful, for it is the birth of fear. Yet what is born of
nothing cannot win reality through battle. Why would you fill your world
with conflicts with yourself? Let all this madness be undone for you and
turn in peace to the remembrance of God, still shining in your quiet
mind.
15
See how the conflict of illusions disappears when it is brought to
truth! For it seems real only as long as it is seen as war between
conflicting truths, the conqueror to be the truer, the more
real, and vanquisher of the illusion that was less real, made an
illusion by defeat. Thus, conflict is the choice between
illusions, one to be crowned as real, the other vanquished and despised.
Here will the Father never be remembered. Yet no illusion can
invade His home and drive Him out of what He loves forever. And what He
loves must be forever quiet and at peace because it is His home.
And you who are beloved of Him are no illusions, being as true and holy
as Himself.
16
The stillness of your certainty of Him and of yourself is home to both
of you, who dwell as one and not apart. Open the door of His most holy
home and let forgiveness sweep away all trace of the belief in sin that
keeps God homeless and His Son with Him. You are not strangers in the
house of God. Welcome your brother to the home where God has set him in
serenity and peace and dwells with him. Illusions have no place where
love abides, protecting you from everything that is not true. You dwell
in peace as limitless as its Creator, and everything is given those who
would remember Him. Over His home the Holy Spirit watches, sure that its
peace can never be disturbed.
17
How can the resting-place of God turn on itself and seek to overcome the
One Who dwells there? And think what happens when the house of God
perceives itself divided. The altar disappears, the light grows dim, the
temple of the Holy One becomes a house of sin. And nothing is remembered
except illusions. Illusions can conflict because their forms are
different. And they do battle only to establish which form is true.
18
Illusion meets illusion; truth, itself. The meeting of illusions leads
to war. Peace, looking on itself, extends itself. War is the condition
in which fear is born and grows and seeks to dominate. Peace is the
state where love abides and seeks to share itself. Conflict and peace
are opposites. Where one abides the other cannot be; where either goes
the other disappears. So is the memory of God obscured in minds that
have become illusion's battleground. Yet far beyond this senseless war
it shines, ready to be remembered when you side with peace.
19
The "laws" of chaos can be brought to light, though never understood.
Chaotic laws are hardly meaningful and therefore out of reason's sphere.
Yet they appear to constitute an obstacle to reason and to truth. Let
us, then, look upon them calmly, that we may look beyond them,
understanding what they are, not what they would maintain. It is
essential it be understood what they are for, because it is their
purpose to make meaningless and to attack the truth. Here are the laws
that rule the world you made. And yet they govern nothing and need not
be broken; merely looked upon and gone beyond.
20
The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. Like
all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate and has a
different set of thoughts which sets him off from others. This principle
evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are more
valuable and therefore true. Each one establishes this for himself and makes
it true by his attack on what another values. And this is justified
because the values differ and those who hold them seem to be unlike and
therefore enemies.
21
Think how this seems to interfere with the first principle of miracles.
For this establishes degrees of truth among illusions, making it appear
that some of them are harder to overcome than others. If it were
realized that they are all the same and equally untrue, it would be
easy, then, to understand that miracles apply to all of them.
Errors of any kind can be corrected because they are untrue.
When brought to truth instead of to each other, they merely
disappear. No part of nothing can be more resistant to the truth than
can another.
22
The second law of chaos, dear indeed to every worshiper of sin, is that
each one must sin and therefore deserves attack and death. This
principle, closely related to the first, is the demand that errors call
for punishment and not correction. For the destruction of the one who
makes the error places him beyond correction and beyond forgiveness.
What he has done is thus interpreted as an irrevocable sentence upon
himself, which God Himself is powerless to overcome. Sin cannot be
remitted, being the belief the Son of God can make mistakes for which
his own destruction becomes inevitable.
23
Think what this seems to do to the relationship between the Father and
the Son. Now it appears that they can never be one again. For one
must always be condemned and by the other. Now are they
different and enemies. And their relationship is one of
opposition, just as the separate aspects of the Son meet only to
conflict but not to join. One becomes weak, the other strong by his
defeat. And fear of God and of each other now appears as sensible, made
real by what the Son of God has done both to himself and his Creator.
The arrogance on which the laws of chaos stand could not be more
apparent than emerges here.
24
Here is a principle which would define what the Creator of reality must
be; what He must think and what He must believe; and how He must
respond, believing it. It is not seen as even necessary that He be asked
about the truth of what has been established for His belief. His Son can
tell Him this, and He has but the choice whether to take his word for it
or be mistaken. This leads directly to the third preposterous belief
that seems to make chaos eternal. For if God cannot be mistaken,
then He must accept his Son's belief in what he is and hate him
for it.
25
See how the fear of God is reinforced by this third principle. Now it
becomes impossible to turn to Him for help in misery. For now He has
become the "enemy" Who caused it and to Whom appeal is useless.
Nor can salvation lie within the Son, whose every aspect seems to be at
war with Him and justified in its attack. And now is conflict made
inevitable and beyond the help of God. And now salvation must remain
impossible because the savior has become the enemy.
26
There can be no release and no escape. Atonement thus becomes a myth,
and vengeance, not forgiveness, is the Will of God. From where all this
begins, there is no sight of help that can succeed. Only destruction can
be the outcome. And God Himself seems to be siding with it to
overcome His Son. Think not the ego will enable you to find escape from
what it wants. That is the function of this course, which does
not value what the ego cherishes.
27
The ego values only what it takes. This leads to the fourth law
of chaos, which, if the others are accepted, must be true. This seeming
law is the belief you have what you have taken. By this,
another's loss becomes your gain, and thus it fails to recognize that
you can never take away save from yourself. Yet all the other
laws must lead to this. For enemies do not give willingly to one
another, nor would they seek to share the things they value. And what
your enemies would keep from you must be worth having, just because they
keep it hidden from your sight.
28
All of the mechanisms of madness are seen emerging here: the "enemy,"
made strong by keeping hidden the valuable inheritance which should be
yours; your justified position and attack for what has been withheld;
and the inevitable loss the enemy must suffer to save yourself. Thus do
the guilty ones protest their "innocence." Were they not forced into
this foul attack by the unscrupulous behavior of the enemy, they would
respond with only kindness. But in a savage world, the kind cannot
survive, so they must take or else be taken from.
29
And now there is a vague unanswered question, not yet "explained." What
is this precious thing, this priceless pearl, this hidden secret
treasure, to be wrested in righteous wrath from this most treacherous
and cunning enemy? It must be what you want but never found. And now you
"understand" the reason why you found it not. For it was taken from you
by this enemy and hidden where you would not think to look. He hid it in
his body, making it the cover for his guilt, the hiding place for what
belongs to you. Now must his body be destroyed and sacrificed that you
may have that which belongs to you. His treachery demands his
death that you may live. And you attack only in self defense.
30
But what is it you want that needs his death? Can you be sure
your murderous attack is justified unless you know what it is for?
And here a final principle of chaos comes to the rescue. It
holds there is a substitute for love. This is the "magic" that
will cure all of your pain; the missing factor in your madness that
makes it "sane." This is the reason why you must attack. Here is what
makes your vengeance justified. Behold, unveiled, the ego's secret gift,
torn from your brother's body, hidden there in malice and in hatred for
the one to whom the gift belongs. He would deprive you of the secret
ingredient which would give meaning to your life. The substitute for
love, born of your enmity to one another, must be salvation. It has no
substitute, and there is only one. And all your relationships have but
the purpose of seizing it and making it your own.
31
Never is your possession made complete. And never will your brother
cease his attack on you for what you stole. Nor will God end His
vengeance upon both, for in His madness He must have this substitute for
love and kill you both. You who believe you walk in sanity, with feet on
solid ground and through a world where meaning can be found, consider
this: [These are the laws on which your "sanity" appears to
rest.] These are the principles which make the ground beneath
your feet seem solid. And it is here you look for meaning. These
are the laws you made for your salvation. They hold in place the
substitute for Heaven which you prefer. This is their purpose; they were
made for this. There is no point in asking what they mean. That is
apparent. The means of madness must be insane. Are you as certain that
you realize the goal is madness?
32
No one wants madness, nor does anyone cling to his madness if he
sees that this is what it is. What protects madness is the
belief that it is true. It is the function of insanity to take
the place of truth. It must be seen as truth to be believed. And
if it is the truth, then must its opposite, which was the truth before,
be madness now. Such a reversal, completely turned around, with madness
sanity, illusions true, attack a kindness, hatred love and murder
benediction, is the goal the laws of chaos serve. These are the means by
which the laws of God appear to be reversed. Here do the laws of sin
appear to hold love captive and let sin go free.
33
These do not seem to be the goals of chaos, for by the great
reversal, they appear to be the laws of order. How could it not
be so? Chaos is lawlessness and has no laws. To be believed, its
seeming laws must be perceived as real. Their goal of madness must be
seen as sanity. And fear, with ashen lips and sightless eyes, blinded
and terrible to look upon, is lifted to the throne of love, its dying
conqueror, its substitute, the savior from salvation. How lovely do the
laws of fear make death appear! Give thanks unto the hero on love's
throne, who saved the Son of God for fear and death!
34
And yet, how can it be that laws like these can be believed? There is a
strange device that makes it possible. Nor is it unfamiliar; we have
seen how it appears to function many times before. In truth it does not
function, yet in dreams, where only shadows play the major roles, it
seems most powerful. No law of chaos could compel belief but for the
emphasis on form and disregard of content. No one who
thinks that one of them is true sees what it says. Some forms it
takes seem to have meaning, and that is all.
35
How can some forms of murder not mean death? Can an attack in any
form be love? What form of condemnation is a blessing? Who makes
his savior powerless and finds salvation? Let not the form of
the attack on him deceive you. You cannot seek to harm him and
be saved. Who can find safety from attack by turning on himself? How can
it matter what the form this madness takes? It is a judgment
that defeats itself, condemning what it says it wants to save. Be not
deceived when madness takes a form you think is lovely. What is intent
on your destruction is not your friend.
36
You would maintain and think it true that you do not believe these
senseless laws nor act upon them. And when you look at what they say,
they cannot be believed. Brothers, you do believe them.
For how else could you perceive the form they take with content such as
this? Can any form of this be tenable? Yet you believe them for
the form they take and do not recognize the content. It never
changes. Can you paint rosy lips upon a skeleton, dress it in
loveliness, pet it and pamper it, and make it live? And can you
be content with an illusion that you are living?
37
There is no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life,
there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At
best, it seems like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments
on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life
not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere.
Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless,
impossible, and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal
barrier to Heaven. Illusions are but forms. Their content is never
true.
38
The laws of chaos govern all illusions. Their forms conflict, making it
seem quite possible to value some above the others. Yet each one rests
as surely on the belief the laws of chaos are the laws of order as do
the others. Each one upholds these laws completely, offering a certain
witness that these laws are true. The seeming gentler forms of the
attack are no less certain in their witnessing or their results. Certain
it is illusions will bring fear because of the beliefs that they imply,
not for their form. And lack of faith in love in any form
attests to chaos as reality.
39
From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos must follow. It is
because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion—a valid step
in ordered thought. The steps to chaos do follow neatly from
their starting point. Each is a different form in the progression of
truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror and away from truth.
Think not one step is smaller than another nor that return from one is
easier. The whole descent from Heaven lies in each one. And where your
thinking starts, there must it end.
40
Brothers, take not one step in the descent to hell. For having taken
one, you will not recognize the rest for what they are. And they will
follow. Attack in any form has placed your foot upon the twisted
stairway that leads from Heaven. Yet any instant it is possible to have
all this undone. How can you know whether you chose the stairs to Heaven
or the way to hell? Quite easily. How do you feel? Is peace in your
awareness? Are you certain which way you go? And are you sure the goal
of Heaven can be reached? If not, you walk alone. Ask, then,
your Friend to join with you and give you certainty of where you
go.
41
Is it not true you do not recognize some of the forms attack can take?
If it is true attack in any form will hurt you and will do so just as
much as in another form which you do recognize, then it must
follow that you do not always recognize the source of pain. Attack in any
form is equally destructive. Its purpose does not change. Its sole
intent is murder, and what form of murder serves to cover the massive
guilt and frantic fear of punishment the murderer must feel? He may deny
he is a murderer and justify his savagery with smiles as he attacks. Yet
he will suffer and will look on his intent in nightmares where the
smiles are gone and where the purpose rises to meet his horrified
awareness and pursue him still. For no one thinks of murder and escapes
the guilt the thought entails. If the intent is death, what
matter the form it takes?
42
Is death in any form, however lovely and charitable it may seem to be, a
blessing and a sign the Voice for God speaks through you to your
brother? The wrapping does not make the gift you give. An empty box,
however beautiful and gently given, still contains nothing. And neither
the receiver nor the giver is long deceived. Withhold forgiveness from
your brother, and you attack him. You give him nothing and receive of
him but what you gave.
43
Salvation is no compromise of any kind. To compromise is to accept but
part of what you want—to take a little and give up the rest. Salvation
gives up nothing. It is complete for everyone. Let the idea of
compromise but enter, and the awareness of salvation's purpose is lost
because it is not recognized. It is denied where compromise has been
accepted, for compromise is the belief salvation is impossible. It would
maintain you can attack a little, love a little, and know the difference.
Thus it would teach a little of the same can still be different, and yet
the same remain intact as one. Does this make sense? Can it be
understood?
44
This course is easy just because it makes no compromise. Yet it seems
difficult to those who still believe that compromise is possible. They
do not see that, if it is, salvation is attack. Yet it is
certain the belief that salvation is impossible cannot uphold a quiet,
calm assurance it has come. Forgiveness cannot be withheld a little. Nor
is it possible to attack for this and love for that and understand
forgiveness. Would you not want to recognize assault upon your
peace in any form, if only thus does it become impossible that you
lose sight of it? It can be kept shining before your vision, forever
clear and never out of sight if you defend it not.
45
Those who believe that peace can be defended and that attack is
justified on its behalf cannot perceive it lies within them. How could
they know? Could they accept forgiveness side by side with the belief
that murder takes some forms by which their peace is saved? Would they
be willing to accept the fact their savage purpose is directed against
themselves? No one unites with enemies nor is at one with them in
purpose. And no one compromises with an enemy but hates him still for
what he kept from him.
46
Mistake not truce for peace, nor compromise for the escape from
conflict. To be released from conflict means that it is over.
The door is open; you have left the battleground. You have not
lingered there in cowering hope because the guns are still an instant
and the fear that haunts the place of death is not apparent that it will
not return. There is no safety in a battleground. You can look
down on it in safety from above and not be touched. But from within it,
you can find no safety. Not one tree left standing still will
shelter you. Not one illusion of protection stands against the faith in
murder. Here stands the body, torn between the natural desire to
communicate and the unnatural intent to murder and to die. Think you the
form that murder takes can offer safety? Can guilt be absent
from a battlefield? [Do not remain in conflict, for there is no
war without attack.]
47
The fear of God is fear of life and not of death. Yet He remains
the only place of safety. In Him is no attack, and no illusion in any
form stalks Heaven. Heaven is wholly true. No difference enters, and
what is all the same cannot conflict. You are not asked to fight against
your wish to murder. But you are asked to realize the form it
takes conceals the same intent. And it is this you fear and not
the form. What is not love is murder. What is not loving must be
an attack. Every illusion is an assault on truth, and every one does
violence to the idea of love because it seems to be of equal
truth.
48
What can be equal to the truth yet different? Murder and love are
incompatible. Yet if they both are true, then must they be the same and
indistinguishable from one another. So will they be to those who see
God's Son a body. For it is not the body that is like the Son's Creator.
And what is lifeless cannot be the Son of Life. How can a body
be extended to hold the universe? Can it create and be what it
creates? And can it offer its creations all that it is and never suffer
loss?
49
God does not share His function with a body. He gave the function to
create unto His Son because it is His own. It is not sinful to believe
the function of the Son is murder, but it is insanity. What is
the same can have no different function. Creation is the means
for God's extension, and what is His must be His Son's as well. Either
the Father and the Son are murderers or neither is. Life makes
not death, creating like itself.
50
The lovely light of your relationship is like the love of God. It cannot
yet assume the holy function God gave His Son, for your forgiveness of
one another is not complete as yet, and so it cannot be extended to all
creation. Each form of murder and attack that still attracts you and
that you do not recognize for what it is limits the healing and the
miracles you have the power to extend to all. Yet does the Holy Spirit
understand how to increase your little gifts and make them mighty. Also
He understands how your relationship is raised above the battleground,
in it no more. This is your part—to realize that murder in any
form is not your will. The overlooking of the battleground is
now your purpose.
51
Be lifted up and from a higher place look down upon it. From there will
your perspective be quite different. Here in the midst of it, it does
seem real. Here you have chosen to be part of it. Here murder is
your choice. Yet from above, the choice is miracles instead of murder.
And the perspective coming from this choice shows you the battle is not
real and easily escaped. Bodies may battle, but the clash of forms is
meaningless. And it is over when you realize it never was begun. How can
a battle be perceived as nothingness when you engage in it? How can the
truth of miracles be recognized if murder is your choice?
52
When the temptation to attack rises to make your mind darkened and
murderous, remember you can see the battle from above. Even in
forms you do not recognize, the signs you know. There is a stab of pain,
a twinge of guilt, and above all, a loss of peace. This you know well.
When it occurs, leave not your place on high but quickly choose a
miracle instead of murder. And God Himself and all the lights of
Heaven will gently lean to you and hold you up. For you have chosen to
remain where He would have you, and no illusion can attack the
peace of God together with His Son.
53
See no one from the battleground, for there you look on him from
nowhere. You have no reference-point from where to look, where meaning
can be given what you see. For only bodies could attack and murder, and
if this is your purpose, then you must be one with them. Only a purpose
unifies, and those who share a purpose have a mind as one. The body has
no purpose and must be solitary. From below, it cannot be surmounted.
From above, the limits it exerts on those in battle still are gone and
not perceived. The body stands between the Father and the Heaven He
created for His Son because it has no purpose.
54
Think what is given those who share their Father's purpose and who know
that it is theirs! They want for nothing. Sorrow of any kind is
inconceivable. Only the light they love is in awareness, and only love
shines upon them forever. It is their past, their present, and their
future always the same, eternally complete, and wholly shared. They know
it is impossible their happiness could ever suffer change of any kind.
Perhaps you think the battleground can offer something that you can win.
Can it be anything that offers you a perfect calmness and a sense of
love so deep and quiet that no touch of doubt can ever mar your
certainty? And that will last forever?
55
Those with the strength of God in their awareness could never think of
battle. What could they gain but loss of their perfection? For
everything fought for on the battleground is of the body—something it
seems to offer or to own. No one who knows that he has everything could
seek for limitation, nor could he value the body's offerings. The
senselessness of conquest is quite apparent from the quiet sphere above
the battleground. What can conflict with everything? And what is there
that offers less, yet could be wanted more? Who with the love of God
upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make?
1
Forget not that the motivation for this course is the attainment and the
keeping of the state of peace. Given this state the mind is quiet, and
the condition in which God is remembered is attained. It is not
necessary to tell Him what to do. He will not fail. Where He can enter,
there He is already. And can it be He cannot enter where He wills to be?
Peace will be yours because it is His Will. Can you believe a
shadow can hold back the Will that holds the universe secure? God does
not wait upon illusions to let Him be Himself. No more His Son. They are.
And what illusion that idly seems to drift between them has the power to
defeat what is Their Will?
2
To learn this course requires willingness to question every value that
you hold. Not one can be kept hidden and obscure but it will jeopardize
your learning. No belief is neutral. Every one has the power to dictate
each decision you make. For a decision is a conclusion based on
everything that you believe. It is the outcome of belief and
follows it as surely as does suffering follow guilt and freedom
sinlessness. There is no substitute for peace. What God creates
has no alternative. The truth arises from what He knows.
And your decisions come from your beliefs as certainly as all creation
rose in His Mind because of what He knows.
3
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 that you can choose for love. Your choosing it has given it
all the reality it seems to have.
4
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. For it is at their mercy while you decide to leave
it there. The secret enemies of peace, your least decision to choose
attack instead of love, unrecognized and swift to challenge you to
combat and to violence far more inclusive than you think, are there by
your election. Do not deny their presence nor their terrible results.
All that can be denied is their reality, but not their outcome.
5
All that is ever cherished as a hidden belief, to be defended though
unrecognized, is faith in specialness. This takes many forms but always
clashes with the reality of God's creation and with the grandeur which
He gave His Son. What else could justify attack? For who could hate
someone whose Self is his and whom He knows? Only the special could have
enemies, for they are different and not the same. And difference of any
kind imposes orders of reality and a need to judge that cannot be
escaped.
6
What God created cannot be attacked, for there is nothing in the
universe unlike itself. But what is different calls for
judgment, and this must come from someone "better," someone incapable of
being like what he condemns, "above" it, sinless by comparison with it.
And thus does specialness become a means and end at once. For
specialness not only sets apart but serves as grounds from which attack
on those who seem "beneath" the special one is "natural" and "just." The
special ones feel weak and frail because of differences, for
what would make them special is their enemy. Yet they protect
its enmity and call it "friend." On its behalf they fight against the
universe, for nothing in the world they value more.
7
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. He who is "worse" than you must be attacked so that your
specialness can live on his defeat. For specialness is triumph, and its
victory is his defeat and shame. How can he live with all your sins upon
him? And who must be his conqueror but you?
8
Would it be possible for you to hate your brother if you were like him?
Could you attack him if you realized you journey with him to a goal that
is the same? Would you not help him reach it in every way you could if
his attainment of it were perceived as yours? You are his enemy
in specialness; his friend in a shared purpose. Specialness can never
share, for it depends on goals that you alone can reach. And he must
never reach them, or your goal is jeopardized. Can love have meaning
where the goal is triumph? And what decision can be made for this that
will not hurt you? Your brother is your friend because his
Father created him like you. There is no difference. You have
been given to each other that love might be extended, not cut off from
one another. What you keep is lost to you. God gave you both
Himself, and to remember this is now the only purpose that you share.
And so it is the only one you have.
9
Could you attack each other if you chose to see no specialness of any
kind between you? Look fairly at whatever makes you give each other only
partial welcome or would let you think that you are better off apart. Is
it not always your belief your specialness is limited by your
relationship? And is not this the "enemy" that makes you both illusions
to each other?
10
The fear of God and of each other comes from each unrecognized belief in
specialness. For each demands the other bow to it against his
will. And God Himself must honor it or suffer vengeance. Every twinge of
malice or stab of hate or wish to separate arises here. For here the
purpose which you share becomes obscured from both of you. You would
oppose this course because it teaches you you are alike. You
have no purpose that is not the same and none your Father does not share
with you. For your relationship has been made clean of special goals.
And would you now defeat the goal of holiness that Heaven gave
it? What perspective can the special have that does not change with
every seeming blow, each slight, or fancied judgment on itself?
11
Those who are special must defend illusions against the truth.
For what is specialness but an attack upon the Will of God? You love
your brother not while it is this you would defend against him. This is
what he attacks and you protect. Here is the ground of
battle which you wage against him. Here must he be your enemy and not
your friend. Never can there be peace among the different. He is your
friend because you are the same.
12
Comparison must be an ego device, for love makes none. Specialness always
makes comparisons. It is established by a lack seen in another and
maintained by searching for and keeping clear in sight all lacks it can
perceive. This does it seek, and this it looks upon. And always whom it
thus diminishes would be your savior, had you not chosen to make of him
a tiny measure of your specialness instead. Against the littleness you
see in him, you stand as tall and stately, clean and honest, pure and
unsullied by comparison with what you see. Nor do you understand it is yourself
that you diminish thus.
13
Pursuit of specialness is always at the cost of peace. Who can attack
his savior and cut him down yet recognize his strong support?
Who can detract from his omnipotence yet share his power? And
who can use him as the gauge of littleness and be released from
limits? You have a function in salvation. Its pursuit will bring you
joy. But the pursuit of specialness must bring you pain. Here is
a goal that would defeat salvation and thus run counter to the Will of
God. To value specialness is to esteem an alien will to which illusions
of yourself are dearer than the truth.
14
Specialness is the idea of sin made real. Sin is impossible even to
imagine without this base. For sin arose from it out of nothingness; an
evil flower with no roots at all. Here is the self-made "savior," the
"creator" who creates unlike the Father and which made His Son like to
itself and not like unto Him. His "special" sons are many, never
one, each one in exile from himself and Him of Whom they are a part. Nor
do they love the Oneness Which created them as one with Him. They chose
their specialness instead of Heaven and instead of peace and wrapped it
carefully in sin to keep it "safe" from truth.
15
You are not special. If you think you are and would defend your
specialness against the truth of what you really are, how can
you know the truth? What answer that the Holy Spirit gives can reach you
when it is your specialness to which you listen and which asks and
answers? Its tiny answer, soundless in the melody which pours from God
to you eternally in loving praise of what you are, is all you listen to.
And that vast song of honor and of love for what you are seems silent
and unheard before its "mightiness." You strain your ears to hear its
soundless voice, and yet the Call of God Himself is soundless to you.
16
You can defend your specialness, but never will you hear the Voice for
God beside it. They speak a different language and they fall on
different ears. To every special one a different message, and one with
different meaning, is the truth. Yet how can truth be different to each
one? The special messages the special hear convince them they are
different and apart—each in his special sins and "safe" from love, which
does not see his specialness at all. Christ's vision is their "enemy,"
for it sees not what they would look upon, and it would show them that
the specialness they think they see is an illusion. What would
they see instead?
17
The shining radiance of the Son of God—so like his Father that the
memory of Him springs instantly to mind. And with this memory, the Son
remembers his own creations, as like to him as he is to his Father. And
all the world he made and all his specialness and all the sins he held
in its defense against himself will vanish as his mind accepts the truth
about himself as it returns to take their place. This is the only "cost"
of truth: you will no longer see what never was, nor hear what makes no
sound. Is it a sacrifice to give up nothing and to receive the love of
God forever?
18
You who have chained your savior to your specialness and given it his
place, remember this: He has not lost the power to forgive you all the
sins you think you placed between him and the function of salvation
given him for you. Nor will you change his function, any more than you
can change the truth in him and in yourself. But be you certain that the
truth is just the same in both. It gives no different messages and has one
meaning. And it is one you both can understand, and one which
brings release to both of you. Here stands your brother with the
key to Heaven in his hand held out to you. Let not the dream of
specialness remain between you. What is one is joined in truth.
19
Think of the loveliness that you will see within yourself when you have
looked on him as on a friend. He is the enemy of specialness but
only friend to what is real in you. Not one attack you thought you made
on him has taken from him the gift that God would have him give to you.
His need to give it is as great as yours to have it. Let him forgive you
all your specialness and make you whole in mind and one with him. He
waits for your forgiveness only that he may return it unto you. It is
not God Who has condemned His Son. But only you, to save his specialness
and kill his Self.
20
You have come far along the way of truth—too far to falter now. Just one
step more and every vestige of the fear of God will melt away in love.
Your brother's specialness and yours are enemies and bound in
hate to kill each other and deny they are the same. Yet it is not
illusions which have reached this final obstacle that seems to make God
and His Heaven so remote that they cannot be reached. Here in this holy
place does truth stand waiting to receive you both in silent blessing
and in peace so real and so encompassing that nothing stands outside.
Leave all illusions of yourself outside this place to which you come in
hope and honesty.
21
Here is your savior from your specialness. He is in need of your
acceptance of himself as part of you, as you for his. You are alike to
God as God is to Himself. He is not special, for He would not keep one
part of what He is unto Himself, not given to His Son but kept for Him
alone. And it is this you fear, for if He is not special, then He willed
His Son be like Him, and your brother is like you. Not special,
but possessed of everything including you.
22
Give him but what he has, remembering God gave Himself to both of you in
equal love that both might share the universe with Him Who chose that
love could never be divided and kept separate from what it is and must
forever be. You are your brother's; part of love was not denied
to him. But can it be that you have lost because he is
complete? What has been given him makes you complete, as it does
him. God's love gave you to him and him to you because He gave Himself.
What is the same as God is one with Him. And only specialness could make
the truth of God and you as one seem anything but Heaven and the
hope of peace at last in sight.
23
Specialness is the seal of treachery upon the gift of love. Whatever
serves its purpose must be given to kill. No gift that bears its seal
but offers treachery to giver and receiver. Not one glance from
eyes it veils but looks on sight of death. Not one believer in its
potency but seeks for bargains and for compromise that would establish
sin love's substitute and serve it faithfully. And no relationship that
holds its purpose dear but clings to murder as safety's weapon and the
great defender of all illusions from the "threat" of love.
24
The hope of specialness makes it seem possible God made the body as the
prison-house which keeps His Son from Him. For it demands a special
place God cannot enter and a hiding-place where none is welcome but your
tiny self. Nothing is sacred here but unto you and you alone, apart and
separate from all your brothers, safe from all intrusions of sanity upon
illusions, safe from God, and safe for conflict everlasting. Here are
the gates of hell you closed upon yourself, to rule in madness and in
loneliness your special kingdom, apart from God, away from truth and
from salvation.
25
The key you threw away God gave your brother, whose holy hands would
offer it to you when you were ready to accept His plan for your
salvation in place of yours. How could this readiness be reached save
through the sight of all your misery and the awareness that your plan
has failed and will forever fail to bring you peace and joy of any kind?
Through this despair you travel now, yet it is but illusion of
despair. The death of specialness is not your death but your
awaking into life eternal. You but emerge from an illusion of what you
are to the acceptance of yourself as God created you.
26
Forgiveness is the end of specialness. Only illusions can be forgiven,
and then they disappear. Forgiveness is release from all
illusions, and that is why it is impossible but partly to forgive. No
one who clings to one illusion can see himself as sinless, for he holds
one error to himself as lovely still. And so he calls it "unforgivable"
and makes it sin. How can he then give his forgiveness wholly,
when he would not receive it for himself? For it is sure he would
receive it wholly the instant that he gave it so. And thus his secret
guilt would disappear, forgiven by himself.
27
Whatever form of specialness you cherish, you have made sin. Inviolate
it stands, strongly defended with all your puny might against the Will
of God. And thus it stands against yourself; your enemy, not
God's. So does it seem to split you off from God and make you separate
from Him as its defender. You would protect what God created not. And
yet this idol that seems to give you power has taken it away.
For you have given your brother's birthright to it, leaving him alone
and unforgiven and yourself in sin beside him, both in misery before the
idol that can save you not.
28
It is not you that is so vulnerable and open to attack that just
a word, a little whisper that you do not like, a circumstance that suits
you not, or an event that you did not anticipate upsets your world and
hurls it into chaos. Truth is not frail. Illusions leave it perfectly
unmoved [and undisturbed]. But specialness is not the truth in
you. It can be thrown off balance by anything. What rests on
nothing never can be stable. However large and overblown it
seems to be, it still must rock and turn and whirl about with every
breeze.
29
Without foundation nothing is secure. Would God have left His Son in
such a state, where safety has no meaning? No, His Son is safe, resting
on Him. It is your specialness that is attacked by everything that walks
and breathes or creeps or crawls or even lives at all. Nothing is safe
from its attack, and it is safe from nothing. It will forever more be
unforgiving, for that is what it is—a
secret vow that what God wants for you will never be and that you will
oppose His Will forever. Nor is it possible the two can ever be the same
while specialness stands like a flaming sword of death between them and
makes them "enemies."
30
God asks for your forgiveness. He would have no separation, like an
alien will, rise between what He wills for you and what you will. They are
the same, for neither one wills specialness. How could they will the
death of love itself? Yet they are powerless to make attack upon
illusions. They are not bodies; as One Mind they wait for all illusions
to be brought to them and left behind. Salvation challenges not even
death. And God Himself, Who knows that death is not your will, must say,
"Thy will be done" because you think it is.
31
Forgive the great Creator of the universe, the Source of life, of love
and holiness, the perfect Father of a perfect Son, for your illusions of
your specialness. Here is the hell you chose to be your home. He chose
not this for you. Ask not He enter this. The way is barred to love and
to salvation. Yet if you would release your brother from the depths of
hell, you have forgiven Him Whose Will it is you rest forever in the
arms of peace in perfect safety and without the heat and malice of one
thought of specialness to mar your rest. Forgive the Holy One the
specialness He could not give and which you made instead.
32
The special ones are all asleep, surrounded by a world of loveliness
they do not see. Freedom and peace and joy stand there beside the bier
on which they sleep and call them to come forth and waken from their
dream of death. Yet they hear nothing. They are lost in dreams of
specialness. They hate the call that would awaken them, and they curse
God because He did not make their dream reality. Curse God and die, but
not by Him Who made not death, but only in the dream. Open your eyes a
little; see the savior God gave to you that you might look on him and
give him back his birthright. It is yours.
33
The slaves of specialness will yet be free. Such is the Will of God and
of His Son. Would God condemn Himself to hell and to damnation?
And do you will that this be done unto your savior? God calls to
you from him to join His Will to save you both from hell. Look
on the print of nails upon his hands that he holds out for your
forgiveness. God asks your mercy on His Son and on Himself. Deny them
not. They ask of you but that your will be done. They seek your love
that you may love yourself. Love not your specialness instead of them.
The print of nails are on your hands as well. Forgive your Father. It
was not His Will that you be crucified.
34
Specialness is a lack of trust in anyone except yourself. Faith is
invested in yourself alone. Everything else becomes your enemy—feared
and attacked, deadly and dangerous, hated and worthy only of
destruction. Whatever gentleness it offers is but deception, but its
hate is real. In danger of destruction, it must kill, and you are drawn
to it to kill it first. And such is guilt's attraction. Here is death
enthroned as savior; crucifixion is now redemption, and salvation can
only mean destruction of the world, except yourself.
35
What could the purpose of the body be but specialness? And it is
this that makes it frail and helpless in its own defense. It was
conceived to make you frail and helpless. The goal of separation
is its curse. Yet bodies have no goal. Purpose is of the mind.
And minds can change as they desire. What they are and all their
attributes, they cannot change. But what they hold as purpose can
be changed, and body states must shift accordingly. Of itself the body
can do nothing. See it as means to hurt, and it is hurt. See it as means
to heal, and it is healed.
36
You can but hurt yourself. This has been oft repeated but is
difficult to grasp as yet. To minds intent on specialness, it is
impossible. Yet to those who wish to heal and not attack, it is quite
obvious. The purpose of attack is in the mind, and its effects
are felt but where it is. Nor is mind limited; so must it be
that harmful purpose hurts the mind as one. Nothing could make less
sense to specialness. Nothing could make more sense to miracles.
For miracles are merely change of purpose from hurt to healing.
37
This shift in purpose does "endanger" specialness but only in
the sense that all illusions are "threatened" by the truth. They will not
stand before it. Yet what comfort has ever been in them that you would
keep the gift your Father asks from Him and give it there instead? Given
to Him, the universe is yours. Offered to them, no gifts
can be returned. What you have given specialness has left you bankrupt
and your treasure house barren and empty with an open door inviting
everything that would disturb your peace to enter and destroy.
38
Long ago we said consider not the means by which salvation is attained
nor how to reach it. But do consider, and consider well, whether
it is your wish that you might see your brother sinless. To specialness
the answer must be "no." A sinless brother is its enemy, while
sin, if it were possible, would be its friend. Your brother's sins would
justify itself and give it meaning that the truth denies. All that is
real proclaims his sinlessness. All that is false proclaims his sins as
real. If he is sinful, then is your reality not real but
just a dream of specialness which lasts an instant, crumbling into dust.
39
Do not defend this senseless dream in which God is bereft of what He
loves and you remain beyond salvation. Only this is certain in this
shifting world which has no meaning in reality: when peace is not with
you entirely and when you suffer pain of any kind, you have beheld some
sin within your brother and have rejoiced at what you thought
was there. Your specialness seemed safe because of it. And thus you
saved what you appointed to be your savior and crucified the one
whom God has given you instead. So are you bound with him, for you are
one. And so is specialness his "enemy" and yours as well.
40
The Christ in you is very still. He looks on what He loves and knows it
as Himself. And thus does He rejoice at what He sees because He knows
that it is one with Him and with His Father. Specialness, too, takes joy
in what it sees, although it is not true. Yet what you seek for is
a source of joy as you conceive it. What you wish is true for you. Nor
is it possible that you can wish for something and lack faith that it is
so. Wishing makes real, as surely as does will create. The power
of a wish upholds illusions as strongly as does love extend itself,
except that one deludes; the other heals.
41
There is no dream of specialness—however hidden or disguised the form,
however lovely it may seem to be, however much it delicately offers the
hope of peace and the escape from pain—in which you suffer not your
condemnation. In dreams, effect and cause are interchanged, for here the
maker of the dream believes that what he made is happening to him. He
does not realize he picked a thread from here, a scrap from there, and
wove a picture out of nothing. For the parts do not belong together, and
the whole contributes nothing to the parts to give them meaning.
42
Where could your peace arise but from forgiveness? The Christ in
you looks only on the truth and sees no condemnation that could need
forgiveness. He is at peace because He sees no sin. Identify
with Him, and what has He that you have not? He is your eyes, your ears,
your hands, your feet. How gentle are the sights He sees, the sounds He
hears. How beautiful His hand that holds His brother's, and how lovingly
He walks beside him, showing him what can be seen and heard and where he
will see nothing and there is no sound to hear.
43
Yet let your specialness direct his way, and you will follow.
And both will walk in danger, each intent, in the dark forest of
the sightless, unlit but by the shifting tiny gleams that spark an
instant from the fireflies of sin and then go out, to lead the other to
a nameless precipice and hurl him over it. For what can specialness
delight in but to kill? What does it seek for but the sight of death?
Where does it lead but to destruction? Yet think not that it looked upon
your brother first, nor hated him before it hated you. The sin its eyes
behold in him and love to look upon, it saw in you and looks on
still with joy. Yet is it joy to look upon decay and madness and
believe this crumbling thing, with flesh already loosened from the bone
and sightless holes for eyes, is like yourself?
44
Rejoice you have no eyes with which to see, no ears to listen,
and no hands to hold nor feet to guide. Be glad that only Christ can
lend you His while you have need of them. They are illusions too, as
much as yours. And yet, because they serve a different purpose, the
strength their purpose holds is given them. And what they see and hear
and hold and lead is given light that you may lead as you were led.
45
The Christ in you is very still. He knows where you are going, and He
leads you there in gentleness and blessing all the way. His love for God
replaces all the fear you thought you saw within yourself. His holiness
shows you Himself in him whose hand you hold and whom you lead to Him.
And what you see is like yourself. For what but Christ is there to see
and hear and love and follow home? He looked upon you first but
recognized that you were not complete. And so He sought for your
completion in each living thing that He beholds and loves. And seeks it
still, that each might offer you the love of God.
46
Yet is He quiet, for He knows that love is in you now and safely held in
you by that same hand that holds your brother's in your own. Christ's
hand holds all His brothers in Himself. He gives them vision for their
sightless eyes and sings to them of Heaven that their ears may hear no
more the sound of battle and of death. He reaches through them, holding
out His hand that everyone may bless all living things and see their
holiness. And He rejoices that these sights are yours to look upon with
Him and share His joy. His perfect lack of specialness He offers you
that you may save all living things from death, receiving from each one
the gift of life that your forgiveness offers to your Self. The sight of
Christ is all there is to see. The song of Christ is all there is to
hear. The hand of Christ is all there is to hold. There is no
journey but to walk with Him.
47
You who would be content with specialness and seek salvation in a war
with love, consider this: the holy Lord of Heaven has Himself come down
to you to offer you your own completion. What is His is yours because in
your completion is His Own. He Who willed not to be without His Son
could never will that you be brotherless. And would He give a brother
unto you except he be as perfect as yourself and just as like to Him in
holiness as you must be?
48
There must be doubt before there can be conflict. And every doubt must
be about yourself. Christ has no doubt, and from His certainty His quiet
comes. He will exchange His certainty for all your doubts if you agree
that He is one with you and that this Oneness is endless, timeless, and
within your grasp because your hands are His. He is within you,
yet He walks beside you and before, leading the way that He must go to
find Himself complete. His quietness becomes your certainty. And where
is doubt when certainty has come?
49
Before your brother's holiness the world is still and peace descends on
it in gentleness and blessing so complete that not one trace of conflict
still remains to haunt you in the darkness of the night. He is your
savior from the dreams of fear. He is the healing of your sense of
sacrifice and fear that what you have will scatter with the wind and
turn to dust. In him is your assurance God is here and with you now.
While he is what he is, you can be sure that God is knowable and will
be known to you. For He could never leave His own creation. And the sign
that this is so lies in your brother, offered you that all your doubts
about yourself may disappear before his holiness. See in him God's
creation. For in him, his Father waits for your acknowledgment that He
created you as part of Him.
50
Without you there would be a lack in God, a Heaven incomplete, a Son
without a Father. There could be no universe and no reality. For what
God wills is whole and part of Him because His Will is One. Nothing
alive that is not part of Him, and nothing is but is alive in
Him. Your brother's holiness shows you that God is one with him and
you—that what he has is yours because you are not separate from
him nor from his Father.
51
Nothing is lost to you in all the universe. Nothing that God created has
He failed to lay before you lovingly as yours forever. And no thought
within His Mind is absent from your own. It is His Will you share His
love for you and look upon yourself as lovingly as He conceived of you
before the world began and as He knows you still. God changes not His
Mind about His Son with passing circumstance, which has no meaning in
eternity where He abides and you with Him. Your brother is as He
created him. And it is this that saves you from a world that He created
not.
52
Forget not that the healing of God's Son is all the world is for.
That is the only purpose the Holy Spirit sees in it and thus the only
one it has. Until you see the healing of the Son as all you wish to be
accomplished by the world, by time, and all appearances, you will not
know the Father nor yourself. For you will use the world for what is not
its purpose and will not escape its laws of violence and death. Yet it
is given you to be beyond its laws in all respects, in every
way, and every circumstance, in all temptation to
perceive what is not there and all belief God's Son can suffer
pain because he sees himself as he is not.
53
Look on your brother and behold in him the whole reversal of the laws
that seem to rule this world. See in his freedom yours, for such
it is. Let not his specialness obscure the truth in him, for not one law
of death you bind him to will you escape. And not one sin you
see in him but keeps you both in hell. Yet will his perfect
sinlessness release you both, for holiness is quite impartial,
with one judgment made for all it looks upon. And that is made, not of
itself, but through the Voice that speaks for God in everything that
lives and shares His Being.
54
It is His sinlessness that eyes which see can look upon. It is His
loveliness they see in everything. And it is He they look for
everywhere and find no sight nor place nor time where He is not. Within
your brother's holiness, the perfect frame for your salvation and the
world's, is set the shining memory of Him in Whom your brother lives and
you along with him. Let not your eyes be blinded by the veil of
specialness that hides the face of Christ from him, and you as well. And
let the fear of God no longer hold the vision you were meant to see from
you. Your brother's body shows not Christ to you. He is set
forth within his holiness.
55
Choose, then, his body or his holiness as what you want to see,
and which you choose is yours to look upon. Yet will you choose in
countless situations and through time which seems to have no end until
the truth be your decision. For eternity is not regained by still one
more denial of Christ in him. And where is your salvation if he is but a
body? Where is your peace but in his holiness? And where is God Himself
but in that part of Him He set forever in your brother's holiness that
you might see the truth about yourself set forth at last in terms you
recognized and understood?
56
Your brother's holiness is sacrament and benediction unto you. His
errors cannot withhold God's blessing from himself nor you who see him
truly. His mistakes can cause delay, which it is given you to take from
him that both may end a journey that has never been begun and needs no
end. What never was is not a part of you. Yet you will think it
is until you realize that it is not a part of him who stands beside you.
He is the mirror of yourself wherein you see the judgment you have laid
on both of you. The Christ in you beholds his holiness. Your specialness
looks on his body and beholds him not.
57
See him as what he is that your deliverance may not be long. A
senseless wandering, without a purpose and without accomplishment of any
kind, is all the other choice can offer you. Futility of function not
fulfilled will haunt you while your brother lies asleep, till what has
been assigned to you is done and he is risen from the past. He who
condemned himself, and you as well, is given you to save from
condemnation along with you. And both shall see God's glory in
His Son, whom you mistook as flesh and bound to laws that have no power
over him at all.
58
Would you not gladly realize these laws are not for you? Then see him
not as prisoner to them. It cannot be what governs part of God holds not
for all the rest. You place yourself under the laws you see as ruling
him. Think, then, how great the love of God for you must be that He has
given you a part of Him to save from pain and give you happiness. And
never doubt but that your specialness will disappear before the Will of
God, Who loves each part of Him with equal love [and care]. The Christ
in you can see your brother truly. Would you decide
against the holiness He sees?
59
Specialness is the function which you gave yourself. It stands for you
alone, as self-created, self-maintained, in need of nothing, and
unjoined with anything beyond the body. In its eyes, you are a separate
universe with all the power to hold itself complete within itself, with
every entry shut against intrusion and every window barred against the
light. Always attacked and always furious, with anger always fully
justified, you have pursued this goal with vigilance you never thought
to yield and effort that you never thought to cease. And all this grim
determination was for this—you wanted specialness to be the truth.
60
Now you are merely asked that you pursue another goal with far less
vigilance—with little effort and with little time and with the power of
God maintaining it and promising success. Yet of the two, it is this
one you find more difficult. The "sacrifice" of self you understand, nor
do you deem this cost too heavy. But a tiny willingness, a nod to God, a
greeting to the Christ in you, you find a burden wearisome and tedious,
too heavy to be borne. Yet to the dedication to the truth as God
established it no sacrifice is asked, no strain called forth, and all
the power of Heaven and the might of truth itself is given to provide
the means and guarantee the goal's accomplishment.
61
You who believe it easier to see your brother's body than his holiness,
be sure you understand what made this judgment. Here is the voice of
specialness heard clearly, judging against the Christ and setting forth
for you the purpose that you can attain and what you cannot do. Forget
not that this judgment must apply to what you do with it as your
ally. For what you do through Christ it does not know. To Him this
judgment makes no sense at all, for only what His Father wills is
possible, and there is no alternative for Him to see. Out of His lack of
conflict comes your peace. And from His purpose comes the means for
effortless accomplishment and rest.
62
How bitterly does everyone tied to this world defend the specialness he
wants to be the truth! His wish is law unto him, and he obeys. Nothing
his specialness demands does he withhold. Nothing it needs does he deny
to what he loves. And while it calls to him, he hears no other Voice. No
effort is too great, no cost too much, no price too dear to save his
specialness from the least slight, the tiniest attack, the whispered
doubt, the hint of threat, or anything but deepest reverence. This is
your son, beloved of you as you are to your Father. Yet it stands in
place of your creations, who are son to you, that you might share
the Fatherhood of God, not snatch it from Him. What is this son that you
have made to be your strength? What is this child of earth on whom such
love is lavished? What is this parody of God's creation that takes the
place of yours? And where are they, now that the host of God has
found another son which he prefers to them?
63
The memory of God shines not alone. What is within your brother still
contains all of creation, everything created and creating, born and
unborn as yet, still in the future or apparently gone by. What is in him
is changeless, and your changelessness is recognized in its
acknowledgment. The holiness in you belongs to him. And by your seeing
it in him, returns to you. All of the tribute you have given specialness
belongs to him and thus returns to you. All of the love and care, the
strong protection, the thought by day and night, the deep concern, the
powerful conviction this is you belong to him. Nothing you gave to
specialness but is his due. And nothing due him is not due to you.
64
How can you know your worth while specialness claims you instead? How
can you fail to know it is in his holiness? Seek not to make your
specialness the truth, for if it were, you would be lost indeed. Be
thankful, rather, it is given you to see his holiness because it
is the truth. And what is true in him must be as true in you.
65
Ask yourself this: can you protect the mind? The body, yes, a
little—not from time, but temporarily. And much you think you save, you
hurt. What would you save it for? For in that choice lie both
its health and harm. Save it for show, as bait to catch another fish, to
house your specialness in better style or weave a frame of loveliness
around your hate, and you condemn it to decay and death. And if you see
this purpose in your brother's, such is your condemnation of your own.
Weave, rather then, a frame of holiness around him that the truth may
shine on him and give you safety from decay.
66
The Father keeps what He created safe. You cannot touch it with the
false ideas you made because it was created not by you. Let not your
foolish fancies frighten you. What is immortal cannot be
attacked; what is but temporal has no effect. Only the purpose
that you see in it has meaning, and if that is true, its safety rests
secure. If not, it has no purpose and is means for nothing. Whatever is
perceived as means for truth shares in its holiness and rests in light
as safely as itself. Nor will that light go out when it is gone. Its
holy purpose gave it immortality, setting another light in Heaven, where
your creations recognize a gift from you, a sign that you have not
forgotten them.
67
The test of everything on earth is simply this: "What is it for?"
The answer makes it what it is for you. It has no meaning of itself, yet
you can give reality to it according to the purpose which you serve.
Here you are but means, along with it. God is a Means as well as End. In
Heaven, means and end are one, and one with Him. This is the state of
true creation, found not within time, but in eternity. To no one here is
this describable. Nor is there any way to learn what this condition
means. Not till you go past learning to the Given; not till you make
again a holy home for your creations is it understood.
68
A co-creator with the Father must have a Son. Yet must this Son have
been created like Himself. A perfect being, all-encompassing and
all-encompassed, nothing to add and nothing taken from—not born of size
nor weight nor time nor held to limits or uncertainties of any kind.
Here do the means and end unite as one, nor does this one have any end
at all. All this is true, and yet it has no meaning to anyone who still
retains one unlearned lesson in his memory, one thought with purpose
still uncertain, or one wish with a divided aim.
69
This course makes no attempt to teach what cannot easily be learned. Its
scope does not exceed your own, except to say that what is yours will
come to you when you are ready. Here are the means and purpose separate
because they were so made and so perceived. And therefore do we deal
with them as if they were. It is essential it be kept in mind that all
perception still is upside down until its purpose has been understood.
Perception does not seem to be a means. And it is this that
makes it hard to grasp the whole extent to which it must depend on what
you see it for. Perception seems to teach you what you
see. Yet it but witnesses to what you taught. It is the outward
picture of a wish—an image that you wanted to be true.
70
Look at yourself, and you will see a body. Look at this body in a
different light, and it looks different. And without a light, it seems
that it is gone. Yet you are reassured that it is there because you
still can feel it with your hands and hear it move. Here is an image
that you want to be yourself. It is the means to make your wish come
true. It gives the eyes with which you look on it, the hands that feel
it, and the ears with which you listened to the sounds it makes. It proves
its own reality to you.
71
Thus is the body made a theory of yourself with no provisions made for
evidence beyond itself and no escape within its sight. Its course is
sure when seen through its own eyes. It grows and withers, flourishes
and dies. And you cannot conceive of you apart from it. You brand it
sinful, and you hate its acts, judging it evil. Yet your specialness
whispers, "Here is my own beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." Thus
does the "son" become the means to serve his "father's" purpose. Not
identical, not even like, but still a means to offer to the "father"
what he wants. Such is the travesty on God's creation. For as
His Son's creation gave Him joy and witness to His love and
shared His purpose, so does the body testify to the idea that made it
and speak for its reality and truth.
72
And thus are two sons made, and both appear to walk this earth without a
meeting-place and no encounter. One do you see outside yourself, your
own beloved son. The other rests within, His Father's Son, within your
brother as he is in you. Their difference does not lie in how they look,
nor where they go, nor even what they do. They have a different purpose.
It is this that joins them to their like and separates each from all
aspects with a different purpose. The Son of God retains His Father's
Will. The son of man perceives an alien will and wishes it were so. And
thus does his perception serve his wish by giving it appearances of
truth. Yet can perception serve another goal. It is not bound to
specialness but by your choice. And it is given you to make a
different choice and use perception for a different purpose. And what
you see will serve that purpose well and prove its own reality
to you.
1
The Christ in you inhabits not a body. Yet He is in you. And thus it
must be that you are not within a body. What is within you
cannot be outside. And it is certain that you cannot be apart from what
is at the very center of your life. What gives you life cannot be housed
in death. No more can you. Christ is within a frame of holiness whose
only purpose is that He may be made manifest to those who know Him not,
that He may call to them to come to Him and see Him where they thought
their bodies were. Then will their bodies melt away that they may frame
His holiness in them.
2
No one who carries Christ in him can fail to recognize Him everywhere. Except
in bodies. And as long as they believe they are in bodies, where
they think they are He cannot be. And so they carry Him unknowingly and
do not make Him manifest. And thus they do not recognize Him where He
is. The son of man is not the risen Christ. Yet does the Son of God
abide exactly where he is and walks with him within his holiness, as
plain to see as is his specialness set forth within his body.
3
The body needs no healing. But the mind that thinks it is
a body is sick indeed! And it is here that Christ sets forth the remedy.
His purpose folds the body in His light and fills it with the holiness
that shines from Him. And nothing that the body says or does but makes
Him manifest. To those who know Him not, it carries Him in gentleness
and love to heal their minds. Such is the mission that your brother has
for you. And such it must be that your mission is for him.
4
It cannot be that it is hard to do the task that Christ appointed you to
do, since it is He Who does it. And in the doing of it will you learn
the body merely seems to be the means to do it. For the Mind is His. And
so it must be yours. His holiness directs the body through the mind at
one with Him. And you are manifest unto your holy brother, as he to you.
Here is the meeting of the holy Christ unto Himself; nor are any
differences perceived to stand between the aspects of His holiness,
which meet and join and raise Him to His Father, whole and pure and
worthy of His everlasting Love.
5
How can you manifest the Christ in you except you look on holiness and
see Him there? Perception tells you you are manifest in what you
see. Behold the body, and you will believe that you are there. And every
body that you look upon reminds you of yourself—your sinfulness, your
evil, and above all, your death. And would you not despise the one who
tells you this and seek his death instead? The message and the messenger
are one. And you must see your brother as yourself. Framed in
his body, you will see your sinfulness wherein you stand condemned. Set
in his holiness, the Christ in him proclaims himself as you.
6
Perception is a choice of what you want yourself to be—the world you
want to live in and the state in which you think your mind will be
content and satisfied. It chooses where you think your safety lies, at
your decision. It reveals yourself to you as you would have you be. And
always is it faithful to your purpose from which it never separates nor
gives the slightest witness unto anything the purpose in your mind
upholdeth not. Perception is a part of what it is your purpose to
behold, for means and end are never separate. And thus you learn what
seems to have a life apart has none.
7
You are the means for God—not separate nor with a life apart from
His. His Life is manifest in you who are His Son. Each aspect of Himself
is framed in holiness and perfect purity, in love celestial and so
complete it wishes only that it may release all that it looks upon unto
itself. Its radiance shines through each body that it looks upon and
brushes all its darkness into light merely by looking past it to
the light. The veil is lifted through its gentleness, and nothing hides
the face of Christ from its beholders. And both of you stand there,
before Him now, to let Him draw aside the veil that seems to keep you
separate and apart.
8
Since you believe that you are separate, Heaven presents itself
to you as separate too. Not that it is in truth, but that the link that
has been given you to join the truth may reach to you through what you
understand. Father and Son and Holy Spirit are as One, as all your
brothers join as one in truth. Christ and His Father never have been
separate, and Christ abides within your understanding in the part of you
that shares His Father's Will. The Holy Spirit links the other part, the
tiny mad desire to be separate, different, and special, to the Christ,
to make the oneness clear to what is really one. In this world,
this is not understood but can be taught.
9
The Holy Spirit serves Christ's purpose in your mind, so that the aim of
specialness can be corrected where the error lies. Because His purpose
still is one with both the Father and the Son, He knows the Will of God
and what you really will. But this is understood by mind
perceived as one, aware that it is one and so experienced. It is
the Holy Spirit's function to teach you how this oneness is
experienced, what you must do that it can be experienced, and where
you should go to do it.
10
All this takes note of time and place as if they were discrete, for
while you think that part of you is separate, the concept of a oneness
joined as one is meaningless. It is apparent that a mind so split could
never be the teacher of a Oneness which unites all things within itself.
And so What is within this mind and does unite all
things together must be its Teacher. Yet must It use the language which
this mind can understand in the condition in which it thinks it is. And
It must use all learning to transfer illusions to the truth, taking all
false ideas of what you are and leading you beyond them to the truth
that is beyond them. All this can very simply be reduced to
this:
12
Is it not evident that what the body's eyes perceive fills you with
fear? Perhaps you think you find a hope of satisfaction there. Perhaps
you fancy to attain some peace and satisfaction in the world as you
perceive it. Yet it must be evident the outcome does not change. Despite
your hopes and fancies, always does despair result. And there is
no exception, nor will there ever be. The only value that the past can
hold is that you learn it gave you no rewards that you would want to
keep. For only thus will you be willing to relinquish it and have it
gone forever.
13
Is it not strange that you should cherish still some hope of
satisfaction from the world you see? In no respect at any time or place
has anything but fear and guilt been your reward. How long is needed for
you to realize the chance of change in this respect is hardly
worth delaying change that might result in better outcome? For one thing
is sure—the way you see, and long have seen, gives no support to base
your future hopes and no suggestions of success at all. To place your
hopes where no hope lies must make you hopeless. Yet is this
hopelessness your choice, while you would seek for hope where none is
ever found.
14
Is it not also true that you have found some hope apart from
this—some glimmering, inconstant, wavering, yet dimly seen, that
hopefulness is warranted on grounds that are not in this world? And yet
your hope that they may still be here prevents you still from giving up
the hopeless and unrewarding task you set yourself. Can it make sense to
hold the fixed belief that there is reason to uphold pursuit of what has
always failed on grounds that it will suddenly succeed and bring what it
has never brought before?
15
Its past has failed. Be glad that it is gone within your mind to
darken what is there. Take not the form for content, for the form is but
a means for content. And the frame is but a means to hold the
picture up so that it can be seen. A frame that hides the picture has no
purpose. It cannot be a frame if it is what you see. Without the
picture is the frame without its meaning. Its purpose is to set
the picture off and not itself.
16
Who hangs an empty frame upon a wall and stands before it, deep in
reverence, as if a masterpiece were there to see? Yet if you see your
brother as a body, it is but this you do. The masterpiece that
God has set within this frame is all there is to see. The body holds it
for a while without obscuring it in any way. Yet what God has created
needs no frame, for what He has created He supports and frames within
Himself. His masterpiece He offers you to see. And would you rather see
the frame instead of this? And see the picture not at all?
17
The Holy Spirit is the frame God set around the part of Him that you
would see as separate. Yet its frame is joined to its Creator, one with
Him and with His masterpiece. This is its purpose, and you do not make
the frame into the picture when you choose to see it in its place. The
frame that God has given it but serves His purpose, not yours apart from
His. It is your separate purpose that obscures the picture and
cherishes the frame instead of it. Yet God has set His masterpiece
within a frame that will endure forever when yours has crumbled into
dust. But think you not the picture is destroyed in any way. What God
creates is safe from all corruption, unchanged and perfect in eternity.
18
Accept God's frame instead of yours, and you will see the masterpiece.
Look at its loveliness, and understand the Mind that thought it, not in
flesh and bones, but in a frame as lovely as Itself. Its holiness lights
up the sinlessness the frame of darkness hides and casts a veil of light
across the picture's face, which but reflects the light that shines from
it to its Creator. Think not this face was ever darkened because you saw
it in a frame of death. God kept it safe that you might look on it and
see the holiness that He has given it.
19
Within the darkness, see the savior from the dark and understand
your brother as his Father's Mind shows him to you. He will step forth
from darkness as you look on him, and you will see the dark no more. The
darkness touched him not, nor you who brought him forth for you to look
upon. His sinlessness but pictures yours. His gentleness becomes your
strength, and both will gladly look within and see the holiness that
must be there because of what you looked upon in him. He is the
frame in which your holiness is set, and what God gave him must be given
you. However much he overlooks the masterpiece in him and sees only a
frame of darkness, it is still your only function to behold in him what
he sees not. And in this seeing is the vision shared that looks on
Christ instead of seeing death.
20
How could the Lord of Heaven not be glad if you appreciate His
masterpiece? What could He do but offer thanks to you who love His Son
as He does? Would He not make known to you His love if you but share His
praise of what He loves? God cherishes creation as the perfect Father
that He is. And so His joy is made complete when any part of Him joins
in His praise, to share His joy. This brother is His perfect gift to
you. And He is glad and thankful when you thank His perfect Son for
being what he is. And all His thanks and gladness shine on you who would
complete His joy along with Him. And thus is yours completed.
Not one ray of darkness can be seen by those who will to make their
Father's happiness complete and theirs along with His. The gratitude of
God Himself is freely offered to everyone who shares His purpose. It is
not His Will to be alone. And neither is it yours.
21
Forgive your brother, and you cannot separate yourself from him nor from
his Father. You need no forgiveness, for the wholly pure have
never sinned. Give then what He has given you that you may see His Son
as one and thank his Father as He thanks you. Nor believe that all His
praise is given not to you. For what you give is His, and giving it you
learn to understand His gift to you. And give the Holy Spirit what He
offers unto the Father and the Son alike. Nothing has power over you
except His Will and yours, who but extend His Will. It was for this you
were created and your brother with you and at one with you.
22
You are the same, as God Himself is one and not divided in His Will. And
you must have one purpose, since He gave the same to both of you. His
Will is brought together as you join in will that you be made complete
by offering completion to your brother. See not in him the sinfulness he
sees, but give him honor that you may esteem yourself and him. To each
of you is given the power of salvation that escape from darkness into
light be yours to share; that you may see as one what never has been
separate nor apart from all God's love as given equally.
23
To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive
a world in which attack is justified. To the extent to which you
recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent will you perceive
attack cannot be justified. This is in strict accord with
vision's fundamental law: you see what you believe is there, and you
believe it there because you want it there. Perception has no
other law than this. The rest but stems from this, to hold it up and
offer it support. This is perception's form adapted to this world of
God's more basic law that love creates itself and nothing but
itself.
24
God's laws do not obtain directly to a world perception rules, for such
a world could not have been created by the Mind to which perception has
no meaning. Yet are His laws reflected everywhere. Not that the world
where this reflection is, is real at all. Only because His Son believes
it is, and from His Son's belief He could not let Himself be separate
entirely. He could not enter His Son's insanity with him, but He could
be sure His sanity went there with him so he could not be lost forever
in the madness of his wish.
25
Perception rests on choosing; knowledge does not. Knowledge has but one
law because it has but one Creator. But this world has two who made it,
and they do not see it as the same. To each it has a different purpose,
and to each it is a perfect means to serve the goal for which it is
perceived. For specialness it is the perfect frame to set it off—the
perfect battleground to wage its wars, the perfect shelter for the
illusions which it would make real. Not one but it upholds in its
perception; not one but can be fully justified.
26
There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the
mad belief that anything could be established and maintained without
some link that kept it still within the laws of God; not as the law
itself upholds the universe as God created it, but in some form adapted
to the need the Son of God believes he has. Corrected error is the
error's end. And thus has God protected still His Son, even in error.
There is another purpose in the world that error made because it has
another Maker Who can reconcile its goal with His Creator's purpose. In
His perception of the world, nothing is seen but justifies forgiveness
and the sight of perfect sinlessness. Nothing arises but is met with
instant and complete forgiveness.
27
Nothing remains an instant to obscure the sinlessness that shines
unchanged beyond the pitiful attempts of specialness to put it out of
mind where it must be and light the body up instead of it. The
lamps of Heaven are not for it to choose to see them where it will. If
it elects to see them elsewhere from their home, as if they lit a place
where they could never be, and you agree, then must the Maker of
the world correct your error, lest you remain in darkness where the
lamps are not. Everyone here has entered darkness, yet no one has
entered it alone. [Nor need he stay more than an instant.] For he has
come with Heaven's Help within him ready to lead him out of
darkness into light at any time.
28
The time he chooses can be any time, for help is there, awaiting
but his choice. And when he chooses to avail himself of what is given
him, then will he see each situation that he thought before was means to
justify his anger turned to an event which justifies his love. He will
hear plainly that the calls to war he heard before are really calls to
peace. He will perceive that where he gave attack is but another altar
where he can with equal ease and far more happiness bestow forgiveness.
And he will reinterpret all temptation as just another chance to bring
him joy. How can a misperception be a sin? Let all your brother's errors
be to you nothing except a chance for you to see the workings of the
Helper given you to see the world He made, instead of yours.
29
What then is justified? What do you want? For these two
questions are the same. And when you see them as the same, your
choice is made. For it is seeing them as one that brings release from
the belief there are two ways to see. This world has much to
offer to your peace and many chances to extend your own forgiveness.
Such its purpose is to those who want to see peace and
forgiveness descend on them and offer them the light.
30
The Maker of the world of gentleness has perfect power to offset the
world of violence and hate that seems to stand between you and His
gentleness. It is not there in His forgiving eyes. And therefore it need
not be there in yours. Sin is the fixed belief perception cannot
change. What has been damned is damned and damned forever, being forever
unforgivable. If then it is forgiven, sin's perception must have
been wrong. And thus is change made possible. The Holy Spirit too sees
what He sees as far beyond the chance of change. But on His vision sin
cannot encroach, for sin has been corrected by His sight. And
thus it must have been an error, not a sin. For what it claimed could
never be has been. Sin is attacked by punishment and so preserved. But
to forgive it is to change its state from error into truth.
31
The Son of God could never sin, but he can wish for what would
hurt him. And he has the power to think he can be hurt. What
could this be except a misperception of himself? Is this a sin or a
mistake, forgivable or not? Does he need help or condemnation? Is it
your purpose that he be saved or damned? Forgetting not that what he is
to you will make this choice your future? For you make it now,
the instant when all time becomes a means to reach a goal. Make then
your choice. But recognize that in this choice the purpose of
the world you see is chosen and will be justified.
32
Minds that are joined and recognize they are can feel no guilt.
For they cannot attack, and they rejoice that this is so, seeing their
safety in this happy fact. Their joy is in the innocence they see. And
thus they seek for it because it is their purpose to behold it and
rejoice. Everyone seeks for what will bring him joy as he defines it. It
is not the aim as such that varies. Yet it is the way in which the aim
is seen that makes the choice of means inevitable and beyond the
hope of change unless the aim is changed. And then the means are chosen
once again, as what will bring rejoicing is defined another way and
sought for differently.
33
Perception's basic law could thus be said, "You will rejoice at what you
see because you see it to rejoice." And while you think that
suffering and sin will bring you joy, so long will they be there for you
to see. Nothing is harmful or beneficent apart from what you wish. It is
your wish that makes it what it is in its effects on you. Because you chose
it as a means to gain these same effects, believing them to be the
bringers of rejoicing and of joy. Even in Heaven does this law obtain.
The Son of God creates to bring him joy, sharing his Father's purpose in
his own creation that his joy might be increased and God's along with
his.
34
You makers of a world that is not so, take rest and comfort in another
world where peace abides. This world you bring with you to all the weary
eyes and tired hearts that look on sin and beat its sad refrain. From
you can come their rest. From you can rise a world they will rejoice to
look upon and where their hearts are glad. In you there is a vision
which extends to all of them and covers them in gentleness and light.
And in this widening world of light, the darkness they thought was there
is pushed away until it is but distant shadows, far away, not long to be
remembered as the sun shines them to nothingness. And all their "evil"
thoughts and "sinful" hopes, their dreams of guilt and merciless
revenge, and every wish to hurt and kill and die will disappear before
the sun you bring.
35
Would you not do this for the love of God? And for yourself? For
think what it would do for you. Your "evil" thoughts that haunt you now
will seem increasingly remote and far away from you. And they go farther
and farther off because the sun in you has risen that they may be pushed
away before the light. They linger for a while, a little while,
in twisted forms too far away for recognition and are gone forever. And
in the sunlight you will stand in quiet, in innocence, and wholly
unafraid. And from you will the rest you found extend, so that your
peace can never fall away and leave you homeless. Those who offer peace
to everyone have found a home in Heaven the world cannot destroy. For it
is large enough to hold the world within its peace.
36
In you is all of Heaven. Every leaf that falls is given life in you.
Each bird that ever sang will sing again in you. And every flower that
ever bloomed has saved its perfume and its loveliness for you. What aim
can supersede the Will of God and of His Son that Heaven be restored to
him for whom it was created as his only home? Nothing before and nothing
after it. No other place, no other state nor time. Nothing beyond nor
nearer. Nothing else. In any form. This can you bring to all the world
and all the thoughts that entered it and were mistaken for a little
while. How better could your own mistakes be brought to truth than by
your willingness to bring the light of Heaven with you as you walk
beyond the world of darkness into light?
37
The state of sinlessness is merely this: the whole desire to attack is
gone, and so there is no reason to perceive the Son of God as other than
he is. The need for guilt is gone because it has no purpose and is
meaningless without the goal of sin. Attack and sin are bound as one
illusion, each the cause and aim and justifier of the other. Each is
meaningless alone, but seems to draw a meaning from the other. Each
depends upon the other for whatever sense it seems to have. And no one
could believe in one unless the other were the truth, for each attests
the other must be true.
38
Attack makes Christ your enemy and God along with Him. Must you not be
afraid with "enemies" like these? And must you not be fearful of yourself?
For you have hurt yourself and made your Self your "enemy." And now you
must believe you are not you but something alien to yourself and
"something else," a "something" to be feared instead of loved. Who would
attack whatever he perceives as wholly innocent? And who, because
he wishes to attack, can fail to think it must be guilty to deserve the
wish and leave him innocent? And who would see the Son of God as
innocent and wish him dead? Christ stands before you both each time you
look on one another. He has not gone because your eyes are closed. But
what is there to see by searching for your savior, seeing Him through
sightless eyes?
39
It is not Christ you see by looking thus. It is the "enemy" confused
with Christ you look upon. And hate because there is no sin in him for
you to see. Nor do you hear his plaintive call, unchanged in content in
whatever form the call is made, that you unite with him and join with
him in innocence and peace. And yet beneath the ego's senseless shrieks,
such is the call that God has given him that you might hear in
him His Call to you and answer by returning unto God what is His own.
40
The Son of God asks only this of you—that you return to him what is his
due that you may share in it with him. Alone does neither have
it. So must it remain useless to both. Together, it will give to each an
equal strength to save the other and save himself along with him.
Forgiven by you, your savior offers you salvation. Condemned by you, he
offers death to you. In everyone you see but the reflection of what you
chose to have him be to you. If you decide against his proper function,
the only one he has in truth, you are depriving him of all the joy he
would have found if he fulfilled the role God gave to him. But think not
Heaven is lost to him alone. Nor can it be regained unless the way is
shown to him through you that you may find it, walking by his side.
41
It is no sacrifice that he be saved, for by his freedom will you gain
your own. To let his function be fulfilled is but the means to let yours
be. And so you walk toward Heaven or toward hell, but not alone. How
beautiful his sinlessness will be when you perceive it! And how great
will be your joy, when he is free to offer you the gift of sight God
gave to him for you! He has no need but this—that you allow him freedom
to complete the task God gave to him. Remembering but this—that what he
does you do along with him. And as you see him, so do you define the
function he will have for you until you see him differently and let
him be what God appointed that he be to you.
42
Against the hatred that the Son of God may cherish toward himself is God
believed to be without the power to save what He created from the pain
of hell. But in the love he shows himself is God made free to let
His Will be done. In each of you, you see the picture of your own belief
in what the Will of God must be for you. In your forgiveness will you
understand His love for you; through your attack believe He hates you,
thinking Heaven must be hell. Look once again upon your brother, not
without the understanding that he is the way to Heaven or to hell as you
perceive him. But forget not this—the role you give to him is given you,
and you will walk the way you pointed out to him because it is
your judgment on yourself.
43
The grace of God rests gently on forgiving eyes, and everything they
look on speaks of Him to the beholder. He can see no evil, nothing in
the world to fear, and no one who is different from himself. And as he
loves them, so he looks upon himself with love and gentleness. He would
no more condemn himself for his mistakes than damn another. He is not an
arbiter of vengeance nor a punisher of sin. The kindness of his sight
rests on himself with all the tenderness it offers others. For he would
only heal and only bless. And being in accord with what God wills, he
has the power to heal and bless all those he looks on with the grace of
God upon his sight.
44
Eyes become used to darkness, and the light of brilliant day seems
painful to the eyes grown long accustomed to the dim effects perceived
at twilight. And they turn away from sunlight and the clarity it brings
to what they look upon. Dimness seems better—easier to see and better
recognized. Somehow, the vague and more obscure seems easier to look
upon; less painful to the eyes than what is wholly clear and
unambiguous. Yet this is not what eyes are for. And who can say
that he prefers the darkness and maintain he wants to see? The wish
to see calls down the grace of God upon your eyes and brings the gift of
light that makes sight possible.
45
Will you behold your brother? God is glad to have you look on him. He
does not will your savior be unrecognized by you. Nor does He will that
he remain without the function that He gave to him. Let him no more be
lonely, for the lonely ones are those who see no function in the world
for them to fill, no place where they are needed, and no aim which only
they can perfectly fulfill.
46
Such is the Holy Spirit's kind perception of specialness—His use of what
you made, to heal instead of harm. To each He gives a special function
in salvation he alone can fill—a part for only him. Nor is the plan
complete until he finds his special function and fulfills the part
assigned to him to make himself complete within a world where
incompletion rules.
47
Here, where the laws of God do not prevail in perfect form, can he yet
do one perfect thing and make one perfect choice. And by
this act of special faithfulness to one perceived as other than himself,
he learns the gift was given to himself, and so they must be
one. Forgiveness is the only function meaningful in time. It is the
means the Holy Spirit uses to translate specialness from sin into
salvation. Forgiveness is for all. But when it rests on all, it is
complete and every function of this world completed with it. Then is
time no more.
48
Yet while in time, there is still much to do. And each must do what is
allotted him, for on his part does all the plan depend. He has
a special part in time, for so he chose, and choosing it, he made it for
himself. His wish was not denied but changed in form to let it serve his
brother and himself and thus become a means to save instead of
lose. Salvation is no more than a reminder this world is not your home;
its laws are not imposed on you; its values are not yours. [And nothing
that you think you see in it is really there at all.]
And this is seen and understood as each one takes his part in its
undoing, as he did in making it. He has the means for either, as he
always did. The specialness he chose to hurt himself did God appoint to
be the means for his salvation from the very instant that the choice was
made. His special sin was made his special grace. His special hate
became his special love.
49
The Holy Spirit needs your special function that His may be
fulfilled. Think not you lack a special value here. You wanted it, and
it is given you. All that you made can serve salvation easily
and well. The Son of God can make no choice the Holy Spirit cannot
employ on his behalf and not against himself. Only in darkness
does your specialness appear to be attack. In light, you see it as your
special function in the plan to save the Son of God from all
attack and let him understand that he is safe, as he has always been and
will remain in time and in eternity alike. This is the function given
each of you for one another. Take it gently then from one another's
hand, and let salvation be perfectly fulfilled in both of you. Do this one
thing, that everything be given you.
50
And if the Holy Spirit can commute each sentence that you laid upon
yourself into a blessing, then it cannot be a sin. Sin is the one thing
in all the world that cannot change. It is immutable. And on its
changelessness the world depends. The magic of the world can seem to
hide the pain of sin from sinners and deceive with glitter and with
guile. Yet each one knows the cost of sin is death. And so it is.
For sin is a request for death, a wish to make this world's
foundation sure as love, dependable as Heaven, and as strong as God
Himself. The world is safe from love to everyone who thinks sin
possible. Nor will it change. Yet is it possible what
God created not should share the attributes of His creation when it
opposes it in every way?
51
It cannot be the "sinner's" wish for death is just as strong as
is God's Will for life. Nor can the basis of a world He did not make be
firm and sure as Heaven. How could it be that hell and Heaven are the
same? And is it possible that what He did not will cannot be changed?
What is immutable besides His Will? And what can share Its attributes
except Itself? What wish can rise against His Will and be immutable? If
you could realize nothing is changeless but the Will of God,
this course would not be difficult for you. For it is this that you do
not believe. Yet there is nothing else you could believe if you
but looked at what it really is.
52
Let us go back to what we said before and think of it more carefully. It
must be so that either God is mad or is this world a place of madness.
Not one Thought of His makes any sense at all within this world. And
nothing that the world believes as true has any meaning in His Mind at
all. What makes no sense and has no meaning is insanity. And
what is madness cannot be the truth. If one belief so deeply
valued here were true, then every Thought God ever had is an illusion.
And if but one Thought of His is true, then all beliefs the world gives
any meaning to are false and make no sense at all. This is the
choice you make. Do not attempt to see it differently nor twist it into
something it is not. For only this decision can you make. The
rest is up to God and not to you.
53
To justify one value that the world upholds is to deny your Father's
sanity and yours. For God and His beloved Son do not think
differently. And it is the agreement of their thought that makes the Son
a co-creator with the Mind Whose Thought created him. And if he chooses
to believe one thought opposed to truth, he has decided he is not his
Father's Son because the Son is mad, and sanity must lie apart from both
the Father and the Son. This you believe. Think not that
this belief depends upon the form it takes. Who thinks the world is sane
in any way, is justified in anything it thinks, or is
maintained by any form of reason believes this to be true. Sin
is not real because the Father and the Son are not insane. This
world is meaningless because it rests on sin. Who could create
the changeless if it does not rest on truth?
54
The Holy Spirit has the power to change the whole foundation of the
world you see to something else—a basis not insane on which a sane
perception can be based, another world perceived. And one in which
nothing is contradicted that would lead the Son of God to sanity and
joy. Nothing attests to death and cruelty, to separation, and to
differences. For here is everything perceived as one, and no one loses
that each one may gain.
55
Test everything that you believe against this one requirement.
And understand that everything that meets this one demand is worthy of
your faith. But nothing else. What is not love is sin, and either one
perceives the other as insane and meaningless. Love is the basis for a
world perceived as wholly mad to sinners who believe theirs is the way
to sanity. But sin is equally insane within the sight of love, whose
gentle eyes would look beyond the madness and rest peacefully on truth.
Each sees a world immutable, as each defines the changeless and eternal
truth of what you are. And each reflects a view of what the Father and
the Son must be to make that viewpoint meaningful and sane.
56
Your special function is the special form in which the fact that God is
not insane appears most sensible and meaningful to you. The content is
the same. The form is suited to your special needs and to the special
time and place in which you think you find yourself and where you can be
free of place and time and all that you believe must limit you. The Son
of God cannot be bound by time nor place nor anything God did not will.
Yet if His Will is seen as madness, then the form of sanity which makes
it most acceptable to those who are insane requires special choice. Nor
can this choice be made by the insane, whose problem is their
choices are not free and made with reason in the light of sense.
57
It would be madness to entrust salvation to the insane. Because
He is not mad has God appointed One as sane as He to raise a
saner world to meet the sight of everyone who chose insanity as his
salvation. To this One is given the choice of form most suitable to him;
one which will not attack the world he sees, but enter into it in
quietness and show him he is mad. This One but points to an
alternative, another way of looking at what he has seen before
and recognizes as the world in which he lives and thought he understood
before.
58
Now must he question this because the form of the alternative is
one which he cannot deny nor overlook nor fail completely to perceive at
all. To each his special function is designed to be perceived as
possible and more and more desired as it proves to him that it
is an alternative he really wants. From this position does his
sinfulness and all the sin he sees within the world offer him less and
less—until he comes to understand it cost him his sanity and
stands between him and whatever hope he has of being sane. Nor
is he left without escape from madness, for he has a special part in
everyone's escape. He can no more be left outside without a special
function in the hope of peace than could the Father overlook His Son and
pass him by in careless thoughtlessness.
59
What is dependable except God's Love? And where does sanity
abide except in Him? The One Who speaks for Him can show you
this in the alternative He chose especially for you. It is God's Will
that you remember this and so emerge from deepest mourning into perfect
joy. Accept the function that has been assigned to you in God's Own plan
to show His Sons that hell and Heaven are different, not the
same. And that in Heaven they are all the same, without the
differences which would have made a hell of Heaven and a heaven of hell,
had such insanity been possible.
60
The whole belief that someone loses but reflects the underlying tenet
God must be insane. For in this world, it seems that one must gain because
another lost. If this were true, then God is mad indeed! But
what is this belief except a form of the more basic tenet, "Sin is real
and rules the world"? For every little gain must someone lose and pay
exact amount in blood and suffering. For otherwise would evil triumph
and destruction be the total cost of any gain at all. You who believe
that God is mad, look carefully at this and understand that it must be
that either God or this must be insane, but hardly both.
61
Salvation is rebirth of the idea no one can lose for anyone to
gain. And everyone must gain if anyone would be a gainer. Here
is sanity restored. And on this single rock of truth can faith in God's
eternal saneness rest in perfect confidence and perfect peace. Reason is
satisfied, for all insane beliefs can be corrected here. And sin must
be impossible if this is true. This is the rock on which
salvation rests, the vantage point from which the Holy Spirit gives
meaning and direction to the plan in which your special function has a
part. For here your special function is made whole because it shares the
function of the whole.
62
Remember all temptation is but this—a mad belief that God's insanity
would make you sane and give you what you want. That either God or you
must lose to madness because your aims can not be
reconciled. Death demands life, but life is not maintained at any cost.
No one can suffer for the Will of God to be fulfilled. Salvation is His
Will because you share it. Not for you alone but for the Self
which is the Son of God. He cannot lose, for if he could, the
loss would be his Father's, and in Him no loss is possible. And this is
sane because it is the truth.
63
The Holy Spirit can use all that you give to Him for your salvation. But
He cannot use what you withhold, for He cannot take it from you without
your willingness. For if He did, you would believe He wrested it from
you against your will. And so you would not learn it is your
will to be without it. You need not give it to Him wholly willingly, for
if you could, you'd have no need of Him. But this He needs—that you
prefer He take it than that you keep it for yourself alone and recognize
that what brings loss to no one you would not know. This much is
necessary to add to the idea no one can lose for you to gain. And
nothing more.
64
Here is the only principle salvation needs. Nor is it necessary that
your faith in it be strong, unswerving, and without attack from all
beliefs opposed to it. You have no fixed allegiance. But
remember salvation is not needed by the saved. You are not called upon
to do what one divided still against himself would find impossible. Have
little faith that wisdom could be found in such a state of mind. But be
you thankful that only little faith is asked of you. What but
a little faith remains to those who still believe in sin? What could
they know of Heaven and the justice of the saved?
65
There is a kind of justice in salvation of which the world knows
nothing. To the world, justice and vengeance are the same, for
sinners see justice only as their punishment, perhaps sustained by
someone else but not escaped. The laws of sin demand a victim.
Who it may be makes little difference. But death must be the cost and
must be paid. This is not justice but insanity. Yet how could justice be
defined without insanity where love means hate and death is seen as
victory and triumph over eternity and timelessness and life?
66
You who know not of justice still can ask and learn the answer. Justice
looks on all in the same way. It is not just that one should lack for
what another has. For that is vengeance in whatever form it takes.
Justice demands no sacrifice, for any sacrifice is made that sin
may be preserved and kept. It is a payment offered for the cost of sin,
but not the total cost. The rest is taken from another, to be laid
beside your little payment to "atone" for all that you would keep and
not give up. So is the victim seen as partly you, with someone else by
far the greater part. And in the total cost, the greater his, the less
is yours. And justice, being blind, is satisfied by being paid, it
matters not by whom. Can this be justice? God knows not of this.
But justice does He know and knows it well. For He is wholly
fair to everyone.
67
Vengeance is alien to God's Mind because He knows of justice. To
be just is to be fair and not be vengeful. Fairness and
vengeance are impossible, for each one contradicts the other and denies
that it is real. It is impossible for you to share the Holy Spirit's
justice with a mind that can conceive of specialness at all. Yet how
could He be just if He condemns a sinner for the crimes he did not do
but thinks he did? And where would justice be if He demanded of
the ones obsessed with the idea of punishment that they lay it aside
unaided and perceive it is not true? It is extremely hard for those who
still believe sin meaningful to understand the Holy Spirit's justice.
68
They must believe He shares their own confusion and cannot avoid
the vengeance that their own belief in justice must entail. And so they
fear the Holy Spirit and perceive the "wrath" of God in Him. Nor can
they trust Him not to strike them dead with lightning bolts torn from
the "fires" of Heaven by God's own angry hand. They do believe
that Heaven is hell and are afraid of love. And deep suspicion
and the chill of fear comes over them when they are told that they have
never sinned. Their world depends on sin's stability. And they perceive
the "threat" of what God knows as justice to be more destructive to
themselves and to their world than vengeance, which they understand and
love.
69
So do they think the loss of sin a curse. And flee the Holy Spirit as if
He were a messenger from hell sent from above in treachery and guile to
work God's vengeance on them in the guise of a deliverer and friend.
What could He be to them except a devil dressed to deceive within an
angel's cloak. And what escape has He for them except a door to hell
that seems to look like Heaven's gate?
70 Yet justice cannot punish those who ask for punishment but
have a Judge Who knows that they are wholly innocent in truth. In
justice, He is bound to set them free and give them all the honor they
deserve and have denied themselves because they are not fair and cannot
understand that they are innocent. Love is not understandable to sinners
because they think that justice is split off from love and stands for
something else.
71
And thus is love perceived as weak and vengeance strong. For love has lost
when judgment left its side and is too weak to save from punishment. But
vengeance without love has gained in strength by being separate
and apart from love. And what but vengeance now can help and save, while
love stands feebly by with helpless hands, bereft of justice and
vitality and powerless to save? What can Love ask of you who think that
all of this is true? Could He, in justice and in love believe in your
confusion you have much to give? You are not asked to trust Him far. No
further than what you see He offers you and what you recognize you could
not give yourself.
72
In God's own justice does He recognize all you deserve but understands
as well that you cannot accept it for yourself. It is His special
function to hold out to you the gifts the innocent deserve. And
every one that you accept brings joy to Him as well as you. He knows
that Heaven is richer made by each one you accept. And God rejoices as
His Son receives what loving justice knows to be his due. For love and
justice are not different. Because they are the same
does mercy stand at God's right hand and give the Son of God the power
to forgive himself of sin.
73
To him who merits everything, how can it be that anything be kept from
him? For that would be injustice and unfair indeed to all the holiness
that is in him, however much he recognize it not. God knows of no
injustice. He would not allow His Son be judged by those who seek his
death and could not see his worth at all. What honest witnesses could
they call forth to speak on his behalf? And who would come to plead for
him and not against his life? No justice would be given him by you. Yet
God ensured that justice would be done unto the Son He loves and
would protect from all unfairness you might seek to offer, believing
vengeance is his proper due.
74
As specialness cares not who pays the cost of sin, so it be paid, the
Holy Spirit heeds not who looks on innocence at last, provided it is
seen and recognized. For just one witness is enough if he sees
truly. Simple justice asks no more. Of each one does the Holy Spirit ask
if he will be that one, so justice may return to love and there be
satisfied. Each special function He allots is but for this—that each one
learn that love and justice are not separate. And both are strengthened
by their union with each other. Without love is justice prejudiced and
weak. And love without justice is impossible. For love is fair and
cannot chasten without cause. What cause can be to warrant an
attack upon the innocent? In justice then does love correct mistakes,
but not in vengeance. For that would be unjust to innocence.
75
You can be perfect witness to the power of love and justice if
you understand it is impossible the Son of God could merit vengeance.
You need not perceive in every circumstance that this is true. Nor need
you look to your experience within the world, which is but shadows of
all that is really happening within yourself. The understanding
which you need comes not of you but from a larger Self, so great and
holy that He could not doubt His innocence. Your special function is a
call to Him that He may smile on you whose sinlessness He shares. His
understanding will be yours. And so the Holy Spirit's special
function has been fulfilled. God's Son has found a witness unto his
sinlessness and not his sin. How little need you give the Holy Spirit
that simple justice may be given you!
76
Without impartiality there is no justice. How can specialness be just?
Judge not because you cannot, not because you are a miserable sinner
too. How can the special really understand that justice is the
same for everyone? To take from one to give another must be an injustice
to them both, since they are equal in the Holy Spirit's sight. Their
Father gave the same inheritance to both. Who would have more or less is
not aware that he has everything. He is no judge of what must be
another's due, because he thinks he is deprived. And so must he
be envious and try to take away from whom he judges. He is not impartial
and cannot fairly see another's rights because his own have been
obscured to him.
77
You have the right to all the universe—to perfect peace,
complete deliverance from all effects of sin, and to the life eternal,
joyous and complete in every way, as God appointed for His holy Son.
This is the only justice Heaven knows, and all the Holy Spirit brings to
earth. Your special function shows you nothing else but perfect justice
can prevail for you. And you are safe from vengeance in all
forms. The world deceives, but it cannot replace God's justice with a
version of its own. For only love is just and can
perceive what justice must accord the Son of God. Let love decide and
never fear that you in your unfairness will deprive yourself of what
God's justice has allotted you.
78
What can it be but arrogance to think your little errors cannot be
undone by Heaven's justice? And what could this mean except that they
are sins and not mistakes, forever uncorrectable, and to be met with
vengeance not with justice? Are you willing to be released from all
effects of sin? You cannot answer this until you see all that the answer
must entail. For if you answer "yes," it means you will forgo all values
of this world in favor of the peace of Heaven. Not one sin would
you retain. And not one doubt that this is possible will you
hold dear that sin be kept in place. You mean that truth has greater
value now than all illusions. And you recognize that truth must
be revealed to you because you know not what it is.
79
To give reluctantly is not to gain the gift because you are reluctant to
accept it. It is saved for you until reluctance to receive it
disappears, and you are willing it be given you. God's justice warrants
gratitude, not fear. Nothing you give is lost to you or anyone, but
cherished and preserved in Heaven, where all of the treasures given to
God's Son are kept for him and offered anyone who but holds out his hand
in willingness they be received. Nor is the treasure less as it is given
out. Each gift but adds to the supply. For God is fair. He does
not fight against His Son's reluctance to perceive salvation as a gift
from Him. Yet would His justice not be satisfied until it is received by
everyone.
80
Be certain any answer to a problem the Holy Spirit solves will always be
one in which no one loses. And this must be true because He asks no
sacrifice of anyone. An answer which demands the slightest loss to
anyone has not resolved the problem but has added to it and made it
greater, harder to resolve, and more unfair. It is impossible
the Holy Spirit could see unfairness as a resolution. To Him, what is
unfair must be corrected because it is unfair. And every error
is a perception in which one at least is seen unfairly. Thus is justice
not accorded to the Son of God. When anyone is seen as losing, he has
been condemned. And punishment becomes his due instead of justice.
81
The sight of innocence makes punishment impossible and justice sure. The
Holy Spirit's perception leaves no ground for an attack. Only a loss
could justify attack, and loss of any kind He cannot see. The world
solves problems in another way. It sees a resolution as a state in which
it is decided who shall win and who shall lose—how much the one shall
take and how much can the loser still defend.
82
Yet does the problem still remain unsolved, for only justice can
set up a state in which there is no loser, no one left unfairly treated
and deprived, and thus with grounds for vengeance. Problem solving
cannot be vengeance, which at best can bring another problem added to
the first, in which the murder is not obvious. The Holy Spirit's problem
solving is the way in which the problem ends. It has been solved
because it has been met with justice. Until it has, it will recur
because it has not yet been solved. The principle that justice means no
one can lose is crucial to this course. For miracles depend on
justice. Not as it is seen through this world's eyes, but as God knows
it, and as knowledge is reflected in the sight the Holy Spirit gives.
83
No one deserves to lose. And what would be unjust to him cannot
occur. Healing must be for everyone because he does not merit an
attack of any kind. What order can there be in miracles, unless someone
deserves to suffer more and others less? And is this justice to
the wholly innocent? A miracle is justice. It is not a special
gift to some to be withheld from others as less worthy, more condemned,
and thus apart from healing. Who is there who can be separate from
salvation if its purpose is the end of specialness? Where is
salvation's justice if some errors are unforgivable and warrant
vengeance in place of healing and return of peace?
84
Salvation cannot seek to help God's Son be more unfair than he
has sought to be. If miracles, the Holy Spirit's gift, were given
specially to an elect and special group and kept apart from others as
less deserving, then is He ally to specialness. What He cannot
perceive He bears no witness to. And everyone is equally entitled to His
gift of healing and deliverance and peace. To give a problem to the Holy
Spirit to solve for you means that you want it solved. To keep
it for yourself to solve without His help is to decide it should remain
unsettled, unresolved, and lasting in its power of injustice and attack.
No one can be unjust to you, unless you have decided first to be
unjust. And then must problems rise to block your way and peace be
scattered by the winds of hate.
85
Unless you think that all your brothers have an equal right to miracles
with you, you will not claim your right to them because you were unjust
to one with equal rights. Seek to deny, and you will feel
denied. Seek to deprive, and you have been deprived. A miracle
can never be received because another could receive it not.
Only forgiveness offers miracles. And pardon must be just to everyone.
86
The little problems that you keep and hide become your secret sins
because you did not choose to let them be removed for you. And so they
gather dust and grow until they cover everything that you perceive and
leave you fair to no one. Not one right do you believe you have. And
bitterness, with vengeance justified and mercy lost, condemns you as
unworthy of forgiveness. The unforgiven have no mercy to bestow
upon another. That is why your sole responsibility must be to take
forgiveness for yourself. The miracle that you receive you give.
Each one becomes an illustration of the law on which salvation
rests—that justice must be done to all if anyone is to be healed. No one
can lose, and everyone must benefit.
87
Each miracle is an example of what justice can accomplish when it is
offered to everyone alike. It is received and given equally. It is
awareness that giving and receiving are the same. Because it does not
make the same unlike, it sees no differences where none exist. And thus
it is the same for everyone because it sees no differences in them.
Its offering is universal, and it teaches but one message:
1
In the "dynamics" of attack is sacrifice a key idea. It is the pivot
upon which all compromise, all desperate attempts to
strike a bargain, and all conflicts achieve a seeming balance. It is the
symbol of the central theme that somebody must lose. Its focus
on the body is apparent, for it is always an attempt to limit loss.
The body is itself a sacrifice—a giving up of power in the name of
saving just a little for yourself. To see a brother in another body
separate from yours is the expression of a wish to see a little part of
him and sacrifice the rest. Look at the world, and you will see nothing
attached to anything beyond itself. All seeming entities can come a
little nearer or go a little farther off but cannot join.
2
The world you see is based on "sacrifice" of oneness. It is a picture of
a complete disunity and total lack of joining. Around each entity is
built a wall so seeming solid that it looks as if what is inside can
never reach without, and what is out can never reach and join with what
is locked away within the wall. Each part must sacrifice the other part
to keep itself complete. For if they joined, each one would lose its own
identity, and by their separation are their selves maintained.
3
The little that the body fences off becomes the self, preserved
through sacrifice of all the rest. And all the rest must lose
this little part, remaining incomplete to keep its own identity intact.
In this perception of yourself, the body's loss would be a sacrifice
indeed. For sight of bodies becomes the sign that sacrifice is limited
and something still remains for you alone. And for this little to belong
to you are limits placed on everything outside, just as they are on
everything you think is yours. For giving and receiving are the
same. And to accept the limits of a body is to impose these limits on
each brother whom you see. For you must see him as you see yourself.
4
The body is a loss and can be made to sacrifice. And
while you see your brother as a body, apart from you and separate in his
cell, you are demanding sacrifice of him and you. What greater
sacrifice could be demanded than that God's Son perceive himself without
his Father? And his Father be without His Son? Yet every sacrifice
demands that they be separate and without the other. The memory of God must
be denied if any sacrifice is asked of anyone. What witness to the
wholeness of God's Son is seen within a world of separate bodies,
however much he witnesses to truth? He is invisible in such a
world. Nor can his song of union and of love be heard at all. Yet is it
given him to make the world recede before his song and sight of him
replace the body's eyes.
5
Those who would see the witnesses to truth instead of to illusion merely
ask that they might see a purpose in the world that gives it sense and
makes it meaningful. Without your special function has this
world no meaning for you. Yet it can become a treasure house as rich and
limitless as Heaven itself. No instant passes here in which your
brother's holiness cannot be seen, to add a limitless supply to every
meager scrap and tiny crumb of happiness that you allot yourself.
6
You can lose sight of oneness, but can not make
sacrifice of its reality. Nor can you lose what you would
sacrifice nor keep the Holy Spirit from His task of showing you that it
has not been lost. Hear then the song your brother sings to you. And let
the world recede and take the rest his witness offers on behalf of
peace. But judge him not, for you will hear no song of liberation for
yourself nor see what it is given him to witness to that you may see it
and rejoice with him. Make not his holiness a sacrifice to your belief
in sin. You sacrifice your innocence with his and die each time
you see in him a sin deserving death.
7
Yet every instant can you be reborn and given life again. His holiness
gives life to you, who cannot die because his sinlessness is known to
God and can no more be sacrificed by you than can the light in you be
blotted out because he sees it not. You who would make a sacrifice of
life and make your eyes and ears bear witness to the death of God and of
His holy Son, think not that you have power to make of them what God
willed not they be. In Heaven God's Son is not imprisoned in a body nor
is sacrificed in solitude to sin.
8
And as he is in Heaven, so must he be eternally and everywhere. He is
the same forever—born again each instant, untouched by time, and far
beyond the reach of any sacrifice of life or death. For neither did he
make, and only one was given him by One Who knows His gifts can never
suffer sacrifice and loss. God's justice rests in gentleness upon His
Son and keeps him safe from all injustice the world would lay upon him.
Could it be that you could make his sins reality and sacrifice
his Father's Will for him?
9
Condemn him not by seeing him within the rotting prison where he sees
himself. It is your special function to ensure the door be opened that
he may come forth to shine on you and give you back the gift of freedom
by receiving it of you. What is the Holy Spirit's special function but
to release the holy Son of God from the imprisonment he made to keep
himself from justice? Could your function be a task apart and separate
from His Own?
10
It is not difficult to understand the reasons why you do not ask the
Holy Spirit to solve all problems for you. He has not greater
difficulty in resolving some than others. Every problem is the same to
Him because each one is solved in just the same respect and
through the same approach. The aspects which need solving do not
change, whatever form the problem seems to take. A problem can appear in
many forms, and it will do so while the problem lasts. It serves no
purpose to attempt to solve it in a special form. It will recur and then
recur again and yet again until it has been answered for all time and
will not rise again in any form. And only then are you released from it.
11
The Holy Spirit offers you release from every problem that you
think you have. They are the same to Him because each one, regardless of
the form it seems to take, is a demand that someone suffer loss and make
a sacrifice that you might gain. And when the situation is worked out so
no one loses, is the problem gone because it was an error in perception
which now has been corrected. One mistake is not more difficult for Him
to bring to truth than is another. For there is but one
mistake—the whole idea that loss is possible and could result in gain
for anyone. If this were true, then God would be unfair, sin would be
possible, attack be justified, and vengeance fair.
12
This one mistake in any form has one correction. There is
no loss; to think there is, is a mistake. You have no problems,
though you think you have. And yet you could not think so if you saw
them vanish one by one without regard to size, complexity, or place and
time, or any attribute which you perceive that makes each one seem
different from the rest. Think not the limits you impose on what you see
can limit God in any way.
13
The miracle of justice can correct all errors. Every problem is
an error. It does injustice to the Son of God and therefore is not true.
The Holy Spirit does not evaluate injustices as great or small or more
or less. They have no properties to Him. They are mistakes from which
the Son of God is suffering, but needlessly. And so He takes the thorns
and nails away. He does not pause to judge whether the hurt be large or
little. He makes but one judgment—that to hurt God's Son must be
unfair and therefore is not so.
14
You who believe it safe to give but some mistakes to be corrected while
you keep the others to yourself, remember this: justice is total. There
is no such thing as partial justice. If the Son of God is guilty, then
is he condemned, and he deserves no mercy from the God of justice. But
ask not God to punish him because you find him guilty and would
have him die. God offers you the means to see his innocence. Would it be
fair to punish him because you will not look at what is there to see?
Each time you keep a problem for yourself to solve or judge that it is
one which has no resolution, you have made it great and past the hope of
healing. You deny the miracle of justice can be fair.
15
If God is just, then can there be no problems that justice cannot solve.
But you believe that some injustices are fair and good and necessary to
preserve yourself. It is these problems that you think are great and
cannot be resolved. For there are those you want to suffer loss
and no one whom you wish to be preserved from sacrifice entirely.
Consider once again your special function. One is given you to
see in him his perfect sinlessness. And you will ask no sacrifice of him
because you could not will he suffer loss. The miracle of justice you
call forth will rest on you as surely as on him. Nor will the Holy
Spirit be content until it is received by everyone. For what you give to
Him is everyone's, and by your giving it can He ensure that
everyone receives it equally.
16
Think then how great your own release will be when you are willing to
receive correction for all your problems. You will not keep one, for
pain in any form you will not want. And you will see each little hurt
resolved before the Holy Spirit's gentle sight. For all of them are
little in His sight and worth no more than just a tiny sigh before they
disappear, to be forever undone and unremembered. What seemed once to be
a special problem, a mistake without a remedy, or an affliction without
a cure, has been transformed into a universal blessing. Sacrifice is
gone. And in its place the love of God can be remembered and will shine
away all memory of sacrifice and loss.
17
God cannot be remembered until justice is loved instead of feared. He
cannot be unjust to anyone or anything because He knows that everything
that is belongs to Him and will forever be as He created it. Nothing He
loves but must be sinless and beyond attack. Your special function opens
wide the door beyond which is the memory of His love kept perfectly
intact and undefiled. And all you need to do is but to wish that Heaven
be given you instead of hell, and every bolt and barrier that seems to
hold the door securely barred and locked will merely fall away and
disappear. For it is not your Father's Will that you should offer or
receive less than He gave when He created you in perfect love.
18
Complexity is not of God. How could it be, when all He knows is one? He
knows of one creation, one reality, one truth,
and but one Son. Nothing conflicts with oneness. How, then,
could there be complexity in Him? What is there to decide? For it is
conflict that makes choice possible. The truth is simple—it is one,
without an opposite. And how could strife enter in its simple presence
and bring complexity where oneness is? The truth makes no decisions, for
there is nothing to decide between. And only if there were could
choosing be a necessary step in the advance toward oneness. What is
everything leaves room for nothing else.
19
Yet is this magnitude beyond the scope of this curriculum. Nor is it
necessary we dwell on anything that cannot be immediately grasped. There
is a borderland of thought which stands between this world and Heaven.
It is not a place, and when you reach it is apart from time. Here is the
meeting-place where thoughts are brought together—where conflicting
values meet and all illusions are laid down beside the truth where they
are judged to be untrue. This borderland is just beyond the gate of
Heaven. Here is every thought made pure and wholly simple. Here is
sin denied and everything that is received instead.
20
This is the journey's end. We have referred to it as the real world. And
yet there is a contradiction here in that the words imply a limited
reality, a partial truth, a segment of the universe made true. This is
because knowledge makes no attack upon perception. They are brought
together, and only one continues past the gate where Oneness is.
Salvation is a borderland where place and time and choice have meaning
still, and yet it can be seen that they are temporary, out of place, and
every choice has been already made.
21
Nothing the Son of God believes can be destroyed. But what is truth to
him must be brought to the last comparison that he will ever make, the
last evaluation that will be possible, the final judgment upon this
world. It is the judgment of the truth upon illusion, of knowledge on
perception—it has no meaning and does not exist. This is not your
decision. It is but a simple statement of a simple fact. But in this
world, there are no simple facts because what is the same and
what is different remain unclear. The one essential thing to make a
choice at all is this distinction. And herein lies the difference
between the worlds. In this one, choice is made impossible. In the real
world is choosing simplified.
22
Salvation stops just short of Heaven, for only perception needs
salvation. Heaven was never lost and so cannot be saved. Yet who can
make a choice between the wish for Heaven and the wish for hell unless
he recognizes they are not the same? This difference is the
learning goal this course has set. It will not go beyond this aim. Its
only purpose is to teach what is the same and what is different, leaving
room to make the only choice which can be made.
23
There is no basis for choice in this complex and over-complicated world.
For no one understands what is the same and seems to choose where no
choice really is. The real world is the area of choice made real, not in
the outcome but in the perception of alternatives for choice.
That there is choice is an illusion. Yet within this one lies
the undoing of every illusion, not excepting this.
24
Is not this like your special function, where the separation is undone
by change of purpose in what once was specialness and now is union? All
illusions are but one. And in the recognition this is so lies the
ability to give up all attempts to choose between them and to make
them different. [How simple is the choice between two things so clearly
unalike.] There is no conflict here. No sacrifice is
possible in the relinquishment of an illusion recognized as
such. Where all reality has been withdrawn from what was never true, can
it be hard to give it up and choose what must be true?
25
Forgiveness is this world's equivalent of Heaven's justice. It
translates the world of sin into a simple world where justice can be
reflected from beyond the gate behind which total lack of limits lies.
Nothing in boundless love could need forgiveness. And what is charity
within the world gives way to simple justice past the gate that opens
into Heaven. No one forgives unless he has believed in sin and still
believes that he has much to be forgiven. Forgiveness thus becomes the
means by which he learns he has done nothing to forgive. Forgiveness
always rests upon the one who offers it until he sees himself as needing
it no more. And thus is he returned to his real function of creating,
which his forgiveness offers him again.
26
Forgiveness turns the world of sin into a world of glory, wonderful to
see. Each flower shines in light, and every bird sings of the joy of
Heaven. There is no sadness, and there is no parting here, for
everything is totally forgiven. And what has been forgiven must join,
for nothing stands between to keep them separate and apart. The sinless
must perceive that they are one, for nothing stands between to push the
other off. And in the space which sin left vacant do they join as one,
in gladness recognizing what is part of them has not been kept apart and
separate.
27
The holy place on which you stand is but the space that sin has left.
And here you see the face of Christ arising in its place. Who could
behold the face of Christ and not recall His Father as He really is? Who
could fear love and stand upon the ground where sin has left a place for
Heaven's altar to rise and tower far above the world and reach beyond
the universe to touch the heart of all creation? What is Heaven but a
song of gratitude and love and praise by everything created to the
Source of its creation? The holiest of altars is set where once sin was
believed to be. And here does every light of heaven come to be rekindled
and increased in joy. For here is what was lost restored to them and all
their radiance made whole again.
28
Forgiveness brings no little miracles to lay before the gate of Heaven.
Here the Son of God Himself comes to receive each gift that brings him
nearer to his home. Not one is lost, and none is cherished more than any
other. Each reminds him of His Father's love as surely as the rest. And
each one teaches him that what he feared he loves the most. What but
a miracle could change his mind, so that he understands that love cannot
be feared? What other miracle is there but this? And what else need
there be to make the space between you disappear?
29
Where sin once was perceived will rise a world which will become an
altar to the truth, and you will join the lights of Heaven there
and sing their song of gratitude and praise. And as they come to you to
be complete, so will you go with them. For no one hears the song of
Heaven and remains without a voice that adds its power to the song and
makes it sweeter still. And each one joins the singing at the altar
which was raised within the tiny spot that sin proclaimed to be its own.
And what was tiny then has soared into a magnitude of song in which the
universe has joined with but a single voice. This tiny spot of sin that
stands between you still is holding back the happy opening of Heaven's
gate. How little is the hindrance which withholds the wealth of Heaven
from you! And how great will be the joy in Heaven when you join the
mighty chorus to the love of God!
30
A little hindrance can seem large indeed to those who do not understand
that miracles are all the same. Yet teaching that is what this course is
for. This is its only purpose, for only that is all there is to
learn. And you can learn it many different ways. All learning is a help
or hindrance to the gate of Heaven. Nothing in between is possible.
There are two teachers only, who point in different ways. And you will
go along the way your chosen teacher leads. There are but two directions
you can take while time remains and choice is meaningful. For never will
another road be made except the way to Heaven. You but choose whether to
go toward Heaven or away to nowhere. There is nothing
else to choose.
31
Nothing is ever lost but time, which in the end is [nothing. It is] but
a little hindrance to eternity, quite meaningless to the real Teacher of
the world. Yet since you do believe in [its reality], why should
you waste it going nowhere when it can be used to reach a goal
as high as learning can achieve? Think not the way to Heaven's gate is
difficult at all. Nothing you undertake with certain purpose and high
resolve and happy confidence, holding each other's hand and keeping step
to Heaven's song, is difficult to do. But it is hard indeed to wander
off, alone and miserable, down a road which leads to nothing and which
has no purpose.
32
God gave His Teacher to replace the one you made, not to conflict with
it. And what He would replace has been replaced. Time lasted but an
instant in your mind, with no effect upon eternity. And so is all time
passed and everything exactly as it was before the way to nothingness
was made. The tiny tick of time in which the first mistake was made, and
all of them within that one mistake, held also the correction
for that one and all of them that came within the first. And in that
tiny instant time was gone, for that was all it ever was. What God gave
answer to is answered and is gone.
33
To you who still believe you live in time and know not it is gone, the
Holy Spirit still guides you through the infinitely small and senseless
maze you still perceive in time, though it has long since gone. You
think you live in what is past. Each thing you look upon you saw but for
an instant, long ago before its unreality gave way to truth. Not one
illusion still remains unanswered in your mind. Uncertainty was brought
to certainty so long ago that it is hard indeed to hold it to your heart
as if it were before you still.
34
The tiny instant you would keep and make eternal passed away in Heaven
too soon for anything to notice it had come. What disappeared too
quickly to affect the simple knowledge of the Son of God can hardly
still be there for you to choose to be your teacher. Only in the past—an
ancient past, too short to make a world in answer to creation—did this
world appear to rise. So very long ago, for such a tiny interval of time
that not one note in Heaven's song was missed.
35
Yet in each unforgiving act or thought, in every judgment, and in all
belief in sin, is that one instant still called back, as if it could be
made again in time. You keep an ancient memory before your eyes. And he
who lives in memories alone is unaware of where he is.
36
[Forgiveness is the great release from time. It is the key to learning
that the past is over. Madness speaks no more. There is no other
teacher and no other way. For what has been undone no longer is.
And who can stand upon a distant shore and dream himself across an ocean
to a place and time that have long since gone by? How real a
hindrance can this dream be to where he really is? For this is
fact and does not change whatever dreams he has. Yet can he
still imagine he is elsewhere and in another time. In the
extreme, he can delude himself that this is true and pass from mere
imagining into belief and into madness, quite convinced that where he
would prefer to be, he is.]
37
Is this a hindrance to the place whereon he stands? Is any echo
from the past that he may hear a fact in what is there to hear where he
is now? And how much can his own delusions about time and place affect a
change in where he really is? The unforgiven is a voice that calls out
from a past forever more gone by. And everything which points to it as
real is but a wish that what is gone could be made real again and seen
as here and now in place of what is really now and here. Is this
a hindrance to the truth the past is gone and cannot be returned to you?
And do you want that fearful instant kept, when Heaven seemed to
disappear and God was feared and made a symbol of your hate?
38
Forget the time of terror that has been so long ago corrected and
undone. Can sin withstand the Will of God? Can it be up to you to see
the past and put it in the present? You can not go back. And
everything that points the way in the direction of the past but sets you
on a mission whose accomplishment can only be unreal. Such is the
justice your ever-loving Father has ensured must come to you. And from
your own unfairness to yourself has He protected you. You cannot
lose your way because there is no way but His and nowhere can you go
except to Him.
39
Would God allow His Son to lose his way along a road long since a memory
of time gone by? [This course will teach you only what is now.] A
dreadful instant in a distant past, now perfectly corrected, is of no
concern nor value. Let the dead and gone be peacefully forgotten.
Resurrection has come to take its place. And now you are a part of
resurrection, not of death. No past illusions have the power to
keep you in a place of death, a vault God's Son entered an instant, to
be instantly restored unto His Father's perfect Love. And how can he be
kept in chains long since removed and gone forever from his mind?
40
The Son that God created is as free as God created him. He was reborn
the instant that he chose to die instead of live. And will you not
forgive him now because he made an error in the past that God remembers
not and is not there? Now you are shifting back and forth between the
past and present. Sometimes the past seems real, as if it were the
present. Voices from the past are heard and then are doubted. You are
like to one who still hallucinates but lacks conviction in what he
perceives. This is the borderland between the worlds, the bridge between
the past and present. Here the shadow of the past remains, but still a
present light is dimly recognized. Once it is seen, this light can never
be forgotten. It must draw you from the past into the present, where you
really are.
41
The shadow voices do not change the laws of time or of eternity. They
come from what is past and gone and hinder not the true existence of the
here and now. The real world is the second part of the hallucination
time and death are real and have existence which can be
perceived. This terrible illusion was denied in but the time it took for
God to give His answer to illusion for all time and every circumstance.
And then it was no more, to be experienced as there.
42
Each day and every minute in each day and every instant that each minute
holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror was
replaced by love. And so you die each day to live again until you cross
the gap between past and present, which is not a gap at all. Such is
each life—a seeming interval from birth to death and on to life again, a
repetition of an instant gone by long ago, which cannot be
relived. And all of time is but the mad belief that what is over is
still here and now.
43
Forgive the past and let it go, for it is gone. You stand no
longer on the ground that lies between the worlds. You have gone on and
reached the world that lies at Heaven's gate. There is no hindrance to
the Will of God nor any need that you repeat again a journey that was
over long ago. Look gently on each other and behold the world in which
perception of your hate has been transformed into a world of love.
47
This is a course in miracles. And as such, the laws of healing must be
understood before the purpose of the course can be accomplished. Let us
review the principles that we have covered and arrange them in a way
that summarizes all that must occur for healing to be possible. For when
it once is possible, it must occur. All sickness comes from
separation. When the separation is denied, it goes. For it is gone as
soon as the idea which brought it has been healed and been replaced by
sanity. Sickness and sin are seen as consequence and cause in a
relationship kept hidden from awareness that it may be carefully
preserved from reason's light.
48
Guilt asks for punishment, and its request is granted—not in
truth but in the world of shadows and illusions built on sin. The Son of
God perceives what he would see, because perception is a wish
fulfilled. Perception changes, made to take the place of changeless
knowledge. Yet is truth unchanged. It cannot be perceived, but only
known. What is perceived takes many forms, but none has meaning. Brought
to truth, its senselessness is quite apparent. Kept apart from truth, it
seems to have a meaning and be real.
49
Perception's laws are opposite to truth, and what is true of knowledge
is not true of anything that is apart from it. Yet has God given answer
to the world of sickness which applies to all its forms. God's
answer is eternal, though it operates in time where it is needed. Yet
because it is of God, the laws of time do not affect its
workings. It is in this world, but not a part of it. For it is real and
dwells where all reality must be. Ideas leave not their source, and
their effects but seem to be apart from them. Ideas are of the mind.
What is projected out and seems to be external to the mind is not
outside at all but an effect of what is in and has not left its source.
50
God's answer lies where the belief in sin must be, for only there can
its effects be utterly undone and without cause. Perception's laws must
be reversed, because they are reversals of the laws of truth.
The laws of truth forever will be true and cannot be reversed, yet can
be seen as upside-down. And this must be corrected where the
illusion of reversal lies.
51
It is impossible that one illusion be less amenable to truth than are
the rest. But it is possible that some are given greater value
and less willingly offered to truth for healing and for help. No
illusion has any truth in it. Yet it appears some are more true than
others, although this clearly makes no sense at all. All that a
hierarchy of illusions can show is preference, not reality. What
relevance has preference to the truth? Illusions are illusions and are
false. Your preference gives them no reality. Not one is true in any
way, and all must yield with equal ease to what God gave as answer to
them all. God's Will is One. And any wish that seems to go against His
Will has no foundation in the truth.
52
Sin is not error, for it goes beyond correction to impossibility. Yet
the belief that it is real has made some errors seem forever past the
hope of healing and the lasting grounds for hell. If this were so, would
Heaven be opposed by its own opposite, as real as it. Then would God's
Will be split in two and all creation be subjected to the laws of two
opposing powers until God becomes impatient, splits the world apart, and
relegates attack unto Himself. Thus has He lost His Mind, proclaiming
sin has taken His reality from Him, and brought His love at last to
vengeance's heels. For such an insane picture, an insane defense can be
expected but cannot establish that the picture must be true.
53
Nothing gives meaning where no meaning is. And truth needs no
defense to make it true. Illusions have no witnesses and no effects. Who
looks on them is but deceived. Forgiveness is the only function here and
serves to bring the joy this world denies to every aspect of God's Son
where sin was thought to rule. Perhaps you do not see the role
forgiveness plays in ending death and all beliefs that rise from mists
of guilt.
54 Sins are beliefs which you impose between your brother and yourself. They limit you to time and place and give a little space to you, another little space to him. This separating off is symbolized in your perception by a body which is clearly separate and a thing apart. Yet what this symbol represents is but your wish to be apart and separate. Forgiveness takes away what stands between your brother and yourself. It is the wish that you be joined with him and not apart. We call it "wish" because it still conceives of other choices and has not yet reached beyond the world of choice entirely.
55
Yet is this wish in line with Heaven's state and not in opposition to
God's Will. Although it falls far short of giving you your full
inheritance, it does remove the obstacles which you have placed
between the Heaven where you are and recognition of where and what you
are. Facts are unchanged. Yet facts can be denied and thus unknown,
though they were known before they were denied.
56
Salvation, perfect and complete, asks but a little wish that what is
true be true; a little willingness to overlook what is not there; a
little sigh that speaks for Heaven as a preference to this world which
death and desolation seem to rule. In joyous answer will creation rise
within you to replace the world you see with Heaven, wholly perfect and
complete. What is forgiveness but a willingness that truth be true? What
can remain unhealed and broken from a Unity Which holds all things
within Itself? There is no sin. And every miracle is possible
the instant that the Son of God perceives his wishes and the Will of God
are one.
57
What is the Will of God? He wills His Son have everything. And this He
guaranteed when He created him as everything. It is impossible
that anything be lost if what you have is what you are.
This is the miracle by which creation became your function, sharing it
with God. It is not understood apart from Him and therefore has no
meaning in this world.
58
Here does the Son of God ask not too much but far too little. He would
sacrifice his own identity with everything to find a little treasure of
his own. And this he cannot do without a sense of isolation, loss, and
loneliness. This is the treasure he has sought to find. And he could
only be afraid of it. Is fear a treasure? Can uncertainty be what you want?
Or is it a mistake about your will and what you really are? Let
us consider what the error is, so it can be corrected, not protected.
59
Sin is belief attack can be projected outside the mind where the belief
arose. Here is the firm conviction that ideas can leave their
source made real and meaningful. And from this error does the world of
sin and sacrifice arise. This world is an attempt to prove your
innocence while cherishing attack. Its failure lies in that you still
feel guilty, though without understanding why. Effects are seen
as separate from their source and seem to be beyond you to control or to
prevent. What is thus kept apart can never join.
60
Cause and effect are one, not separate. God wills you learn what always
has been true—that He created you as part of Him, and this must still be
true because ideas leave not their source. Such is creation's
law—that each idea the mind conceives but adds to its abundance,
never takes away. This is as true of what is idly wished as what
is truly willed, because the mind can wish to be deceived but cannot
make it be what it is not. And to believe ideas can leave their source
is to invite illusions to be true, without success. For never
will success be possible in trying to deceive the Son of God.
61
The miracle is possible when cause and consequence are brought together,
not kept separate. The healing of effect without the cause can merely
shift effects to other forms. And this is not release. God's Son
could never be content with less than full salvation and escape from
guilt. For otherwise he still demands that he must make some sacrifice
and thus denies that everything is his, unlimited by loss of any kind. A
tiny sacrifice is just the same in its effects as is the whole idea of
sacrifice. If loss in any form is possible, then is God's Son made
incomplete and not himself. [Nor will he know himself nor recognize his
will.] He has forsworn his Father and himself and made them both
his enemies in hate.
62
Illusions serve the purpose they were made to serve. And from their
purpose, they derive whatever meaning that they seem to have. God gave
to all illusions that were made another purpose that would
justify a miracle, whatever form they took. In every miracle all healing
lies, for God gave answer to them all as one. And what is one to Him
must be the same. If you believe what is the same is different, you but
deceive yourself. What God calls one will be forever one, not separate.
His Kingdom is united—thus it was created, and thus will it ever
be.
63
The miracle but calls your ancient name, which you will recognize
because the truth is in your memory. And to this name, your brother
calls for his release and yours. Heaven is shining on the Son of God.
Deny him not, that you may be released. Each instant is the Son of God
reborn, until he chooses not to die again. In every wish to hurt, he
chooses death instead of what his Father wills for him. Yet every
instant offers life to him because his Father wills that he should live.
64
In crucifixion is redemption laid, for healing is not needed where there
is no pain or suffering. Forgiveness is the answer to attack of any
kind. So is attack deprived of its effects, and hate is answered in the
name of love. To you to whom it has been given to save the Son of God
from crucifixion and from hell and death, all glory be forever. For you
have power to save the Son of God because his Father willed that it be
so. And in your hands does all salvation lie, to be both offered and
received as one.
65
To use the power God has given you as He would have it used is natural.
It is not arrogant to be as He created you or to make use of what He
gave to answer all His Son's mistakes and set him free. But it is
arrogant to lay aside the power that He gave and choose a little
senseless wish instead of what He wills. The gift of God to you is
limitless. There is no circumstance it cannot answer and no problem
which is not resolved within its gracious light.
66
Abide in peace, where God would have you be, and be the means whereby
your brother finds the peace in which your wishes are fulfilled. Let us
unite in bringing blessing to the world of sin and death. For what can
save each one of us can save us all. There is no difference among the
Sons of God. The unity that specialness denies will save them all, for
what is one can have no specialness. And everything belongs to each of
them. No wishes lie between a brother and his own. To get from one is to
deprive them all. And yet to bless but one gives blessing to them all as
one.
67
Your ancient name belongs to everyone, as theirs to you. Call on your
brother's name and God will answer, for on Him you call. Could He refuse
to answer when He has already answered all who call on Him? A
miracle can make no change at all. But it can make what always
has been true be recognized by those who know it not. And by this little
gift of truth but let to be itself—the Son of God allowed to be himself
and all creation freed to call upon the Name of God as one.
68
The one remaining problem that you have is that you see an interval
between the time when you forgive and will receive the benefits of
trust. This but reflects the little you would keep between yourselves
that you might be a little separate. For time and space are one illusion
which takes different forms. If it has been projected beyond your minds,
you think of it as time. The nearer it is brought to where it is, the
more you think of it in terms of space.
69
There is a distance you would keep apart from one another, and this
space you see as time because you still believe you are external to each
other. This makes trust impossible. And you cannot believe that trust
would settle every problem now. Thus do you think it safer to
remain a little careful and a little watchful of interests perceived as
separate. From this perception you cannot conceive of gaining what
forgiveness offers now. The interval you think lies in between
the giving and receiving of the gift seems to be one in which you
sacrifice and suffer loss. You see eventual salvation, not immediate
results.
70
Salvation is immediate. Unless you so perceive it, you will be
afraid of it, believing that the risk of loss is great between the time
its purpose is made yours and its effects will come to you. In this form
is the error still obscured that is the source of fear. Salvation would
wipe out the space you see between you still and let you instantly
become as one. And it is here you fear the loss would lie. Do
not project this fear to time, for time is not the enemy that you
perceive. Time is as neutral as the body is except in terms of what you
see it for. If you would keep a little space between you still,
you want a little time in which forgiveness is withheld a little while.
This makes the interval between the time in which forgiveness is
withheld and given seem dangerous, with terror justified.
71
Yet space between you is apparent now and cannot be perceived in
future time. No more can it be overlooked except within the present.
Future loss is not your fear. But present joining is your dread.
Who can feel desolation except now? A future cause as yet has no
effects. And therefore must it be that if you fear, there is a present
cause. And it is this that needs correction, not a future state.
72
The plans you make for safety all are laid within the future, where you
cannot plan. No purpose has been given it as yet, and what will
happen has as yet no cause. Who can predict effects without a cause? And
who could fear effects unless he thought they had been caused
and judged disastrous now? Belief in sin arouses fear and, like
its cause, is looking forward, looking back but overlooking what
is here and now. Yet only here and now its cause must be if its effects
already have been judged as fearful. And in overlooking this, is it
protected and kept separate from healing. For a miracle is now.
It stands already here in present grace, within the only interval of
time which sin and fear have overlooked but which is all there is
to time. The working out of all correction takes no time at all.
73
Yet the acceptance of the working out can seem to take forever.
The change of purpose the Holy Spirit brought to your relationship has
in it all effects that you will see. They can be looked at now.
Why wait till they unfold in time and fear they may not come, although
already there? You have been told that everything brings good that comes
from God. And yet it seems as if this is not so. Good in disaster's form
is difficult to credit in advance. Nor is there really sense in this
idea.
74
Why should the good appear in evil's form? And is it not deception if it
does? Its cause is here if it appears at all. Why are not its effects
apparent then? Why in the future? And you seek to be content with
sighing and with "reasoning" you do not understand it now but will some
day. And then its meaning will be clear. This is not reason, for it is
unjust and clearly hints at punishment until the time of liberation is
at hand. Given a change of purpose for the good, there is no reason for
an interval in which disaster strikes, to be perceived as "good" some
day but now in form of pain. This is a sacrifice of now, which
could not be the cost the Holy Spirit asks for what He gave without a
cost at all.
75
Yet this illusion has a cause which, though untrue, must be already in
your mind. And this illusion is but one effect which it engenders and
one form in which its outcome is perceived. This interval in time, when
retribution is perceived to be the form in which the "good" appears, is
but one aspect of the little space that lies between you, unforgiven
still.
76
Be not content with future happiness. It has no meaning and is not
your just reward. For you have cause for freedom now. What
profits freedom in a prisoner's form? Why should deliverance be
disguised as death? Delay is senseless, and the "reasoning" which would
maintain effects of present cause must be delayed until a future time is
merely a denial of the fact that consequence and cause must come as one.
Look not to time but to the little space between you still to be
delivered from. And do not let it be disguised as time and so preserved
because its form is changed and what it is cannot be recognized.
The Holy Spirit's purpose now is yours. Should not His happiness
be yours as well?
77
Think but how holy you must be from whom the Voice for God calls
lovingly unto your brother, that you may awake in him the Voice that
answers to your call! And think how holy he must be when in him sleeps
your own salvation with his freedom joined! However much you wish he be
condemned, God is in him. And never will you know He is in you as well,
while you attack His chosen home and battle with His host. Regard him
gently. Look with loving eyes on him who carries Christ within him, that
you may behold His glory and rejoice that Heaven is not separate from
you.
78
Is it too much to ask a little trust for him who carries Christ to you,
that you may be forgiven all your sins and left without a single one you
cherish still? Forget not that a shadow held between your brother and
yourself obscures the face of Christ and memory of God. And would you
trade Them for an ancient hate? The ground whereon you stand is holy
ground because of Them Who, standing there with you, have blessed it
with Their innocence and peace.
79
The blood of hatred fades to let the grass grow green again and let the
flowers be all white and sparkling in the summer sun. What was a place
of death has now become a living temple in a world of light. Because of
Them. It is Their Presence which has lifted holiness again to take its
ancient place upon an ancient throne. Because of Them have miracles
sprung up as grass and flowers on the barren ground which hate had
scorched and rendered desolate. What hate has wrought have They undone.
And now you stand on ground so holy Heaven leans to join with it and
make it like itself. The shadow of an ancient hate has gone, and all the
blight and withering have passed forever from the land where They have
come.
80
What is a hundred or a thousand years to Them, or tens of thousands?
When They come, time's purpose is fulfilled. What never was passes to
nothingness when They have come. What hatred claimed is given up to
love, and freedom lights up every living thing and lifts it into Heaven,
where the lights grow ever brighter as each one comes home. The
incomplete is made complete again, and Heaven's joy has been increased
because what is its own has been restored to it. The bloodied earth is
cleansed, and the insane have shed their garments of insanity to join
Them on the ground whereon you stand.
81
Heaven is grateful for this gift of what has been withheld so long. For
They have come to gather in Their Own. What has been locked is opened;
what was held apart from light is given up, that light may shine on it,
and leave no space nor distance lingering between the light of Heaven
and the world.
82
The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has
become a present love. And They come quickly to the living temple, where
a home for Them has been set up. There is no place in Heaven holier. And
They have come to dwell within the temple offered them, to be Their
resting-place as well as yours. What hatred has released to love becomes
the brightest light in Heaven's radiance. And all the lights in Heaven
brighter grow, in gratitude for what has been restored.
83
Around you angels hover lovingly, to keep away all darkened thoughts of
sin and keep the light where it has entered in. Your footprints lighten
up the world, for where you walk forgiveness gladly goes with you. No
one on earth but offers thanks to one who has restored his home and
sheltered him from bitter winter and the freezing cold. And shall the
Lord of Heaven and His Son give less in gratitude for so much more?
84
Now is the temple of the Living God rebuilt as host again to Him by Whom
it was created. Where He dwells, His Son dwells with Him, never
separate. And They give thanks that They are welcome made at last. Where
stood a cross stands now the risen Christ, and ancient scars are healed
within His sight. An ancient miracle has come to bless and to replace an
ancient enmity that came to kill. In gentle gratitude do God the Father
and the Son return to what is Theirs and will forever be. Now is the
Holy Spirit's purpose done. For They have come! For They have come at
last!
85
What then remains to be undone for you to realize Their Presence? Only
this—you have a differential view of when attack is justified and when
you think it is unfair and not to be allowed. When you perceive it as
unfair, you think that a response of anger now is just. And thus you see
what is the same as different. Confusion is not limited. If it occurs at
all, it will be total. And its presence, in whatever form, will hide
Their Presence. They are known with clarity or not at all. Confused
perception will block knowledge. It is not a question of the size of the
confusion or how much it interferes. Its simple presence shuts the door
to Theirs and keeps Them there unknown.
86
What does it mean if you perceive attack in certain forms to be unfair
to you? It means that there must be some forms in which you think it fair.
For otherwise, how could some be evaluated as unfair? Some then are
given meaning and perceived as sensible. And only some are seen as
meaningless. And this denies the fact that all are
senseless—equally without a cause or consequence and cannot have effects
of any kind. Their Presence is obscured by any veil which stands
between Their shining innocence and your awareness it is your own and equally
belongs to every living thing along with you. God limits not. And what
is limited can not be Heaven. So it must be hell.
87
Unfairness and attack are one mistake, so firmly joined that
where one is perceived, the other must be seen. You cannot be
unfairly treated. The belief you are is but another form of the idea you
are deprived by someone not yourself. Projection of the cause of
sacrifice is at the root of everything perceived to be unfair and not
your just deserts. Yet it is you who ask this of yourself in
deep injustice to the Son of God. You have no enemy except yourself, and
you are enemy indeed to him because you do not know him as
yourself. What could be more unjust than that he be deprived of what he
is, denied the right to be himself, and asked to sacrifice his
Father's love and yours as not his due?
88
Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated. In this
view, you seek to find an innocence which is not Theirs but yours alone
and at the cost of someone else's guilt. Can innocence be purchased by
the giving of your guilt to someone else? And is this innocence
which your attack on him attempts to get? Is it not retribution for your
own attack upon the Son of God you seek? Is it not safer to believe that
you are innocent of this and victimized despite your innocence? Whatever
way the game of guilt is played, there must be loss. Someone
must lose his innocence that someone else can take it from him, making
it his own.
89
You think your brother is unfair to you because you think that one must
be unfair to make the other innocent. And in this game do you perceive
one purpose for your whole relationship. And this you seek to add unto
the purpose given it. The Holy Spirit's purpose is to let the Presence
of your holy Guests be known to you. And to this purpose, nothing can
be added, for the world is purposeless except for this. To add or take
away from this one goal is but to take away all purpose from the
world and from yourself. And each unfairness that the world appears to
lay upon you, you have laid on it by rendering it
purposeless, without the function that the Holy Spirit sees. And simple
justice has been thus denied to every living thing upon the earth.
90
What this injustice does to you who judge unfairly and who see as you
have judged, you cannot calculate. The world grows dim and threatening,
and not a trace of all the happy sparkle that salvation brought can you
perceive to lighten up your way. And so you see yourself deprived of
light, abandoned to the dark, unfairly left without a purpose in a
futile world. The world is fair because the Holy Spirit has brought
injustice to the light within, and there has all unfairness been
resolved and been replaced with justice and with love. If you perceive
injustice anywhere, you need but say:
1
The wish to be unfairly treated is a compromise attempt that would
combine attack and innocence. Who can combine the wholly
incompatible and make a unity of what can never join? Walk you the
gentle way, and you will fear no evil and no shadows in the night. But
place no terror symbols on your path, or you will weave a crown of
thorns from which your brother and yourself will not escape. You cannot
crucify yourself alone. And if you are unfairly treated, he must suffer
the unfairness that you see. You cannot sacrifice yourself alone. For
sacrifice is total. If it could occur at all, it would entail the whole
of God's creation and the Father with the sacrifice of his beloved Son.
2
In your release from sacrifice is his made manifest and shown to
be his own. But every pain you suffer do you see as proof that he is
guilty of attack. Thus would you make yourself to be the sign that he
has lost his innocence and need but look on you to realize that he has
been condemned. And what to you has been unfair will come to him in
righteousness. The unjust vengeance that you suffer now belongs to him,
and when it rests on him are you set free. Wish not to make yourself a
living symbol of his guilt, for you will not escape the death you made
for him. But in his innocence, you find your own.
3
Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated,
or in need of anything, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's
Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes that he may
see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death and go before
him, closing off the gate and damning him to hell. Yet this is writ in
hell and not in Heaven, where you are beyond attack and prove his innocence.
The picture of yourself you offer him you show yourself and give
it all your faith. The Holy Spirit offers you to give to him a picture
of yourself in which there is no pain and no reproach at all. And what
was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his innocence.
4
The power of witness is beyond belief because it brings conviction in
its wake. The witness is believed because he points beyond himself to
what he represents. A sick and suffering you but represents your
brother's guilt—the witness which you send lest he forget the injuries
he gave from which you swear he never will escape. This sick and sorry
picture you accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick
are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death
seems an easy price if they can say, "Behold me, brother; at your hand I
die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove
his errors must be sins.
5
Sickness is but a "little" death; a form of vengeance not yet total. Yet
it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The bleak and bitter
picture you have sent your brother you have looked upon in
grief. And everything that it has shown to him have you believed because
it witnessed to the guilt in him which you perceived and loved. Now in
the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a
different you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you really
are cannot be seen nor pictured. Yet this one has not been used for
purpose of attack and therefore never suffered pain at all. It witnesses
to the eternal truth that you cannot be hurt and points beyond
itself to both your innocence and his.
6
Show this unto your brother, who will see that every scar is
healed and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will
look on his forgiveness there and with healed eyes will look beyond it
to the innocence that he beholds in you. Here is the proof that he has
never sinned—that nothing which his madness bid him do was ever done or
ever had effects of any kind; that no reproach he laid upon his heart
was ever justified, and no attack can ever touch him with the poisoned
and relentless sting of fear. Attest his innocence and not his
guilt. Your healing is his comfort and his health because it proves
illusions are not true.
7
It is not will for life, but wish for death that is the motivation for
this world. Its only purpose is to prove guilt real. No worldly thought
or act or feeling has a motivation other than this one. These are the
witnesses that are called forth to be believed and lend conviction to
the system they speak for and represent. And each has many voices,
speaking to your brother and yourself in different tongues. And yet to
both the message is the same. Adornment of the body seeks to show how
lovely are the witnesses for guilt. Concerns about the body demonstrate
how frail and vulnerable is your life, how easily destroyed is what you
love. Depression speaks of death and vanity of real concern with
anything at all. The strongest witness to futility, which bolsters all
the rest and helps them paint the picture in which sin is justified, is
sickness in whatever form it takes.
8
The sick have reason for each one of their unnatural desires and strange
needs. For who could live a life so soon cut short and not esteem the
worth of passing joys? What pleasures could there be that will endure?
Are not the frail entitled to believe that every stolen scrap of
pleasure is their righteous payment for their little lives? Their death
will pay the price for all of them if they enjoy their benefits or not.
The end of life must come, whatever way that life be spent. And so take
pleasure in the quickly passing and ephemeral.
9
These are not sins, but witnesses unto the strange belief that sin and
death are real, and innocence and sin will end alike within the
termination of the grave. If this were true, there would be
reason to remain content to seek for passing joys and cherish little
pleasures where you can. Yet in this picture is the body not perceived
as neutral and without a goal inherent in itself. For it becomes the
symbol of reproach, the sign of guilt whose consequences still are there
to see, so that the cause can never be denied.
10
Your function is to show your brother sin can have no cause. How
futile must it be to see yourself a picture of the proof that what your
function is can never be! The Holy Spirit's picture changes not the body
into something it is not. It only takes away from it all signs of
accusation and of blamefulness. Pictured without a purpose, it is seen
as neither sick nor well, nor bad nor good. No grounds are offered that
it may be judged in any way at all. It has no life, but neither is it
dead. It stands apart from all experience of fear or love. For now it
witnesses to nothing yet, its purpose being open and the mind made free
again to choose what it is for. Now is it not condemned, but
waiting for a purpose to be given that it may fulfill the function that
it will receive.
11
Into this empty space, from which the goal of sin has been removed, is
Heaven free to be remembered. Here its peace can come and perfect
healing take the place of death. The body can become a sign of life, a
promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick
of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its
purpose. Then will it send forth the message it received and by its
health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents.
Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever
unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother;
at your hand I live."
12
The simple way to let this be achieved is merely this—to let the body
have no purpose from the past, when you were sure you knew its purpose
was to foster guilt. For this insists your crippled picture is a lasting
sign of what it represents. This leaves no space in which a different
view, another purpose, can be given it. You do not know its
purpose. You but gave illusions of a purpose to a thing you made
to hide your function from yourself. This thing without a purpose cannot
hide the function that the Holy Spirit gave. Let, then, its purpose and
your function both be reconciled at last and seen as one.
13
Is healing frightening? To many, yes. For accusation is a bar to love,
and damaged bodies are accusers. They stand firmly in the way of trust
and peace, proclaiming that the frail can have no trust and that the
damaged have no grounds for peace. Who has been injured by his brother
and could love and trust him still? He has attacked and will attack
again. Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be
protected from him. To forgive may be an act of charity, but not his
due. He may be pitied for his guilt, but not exonerated. And if you
forgive him his transgressions, you but add to all the guilt that he has
really earned.
14
The unhealed cannot pardon. For they are the witnesses that
pardon is unfair. They would retain the consequences of the guilt they
overlook. Yet no one can forgive a sin which he believes is real. And
what has consequences must be real because what it has done is
there to see. Forgiveness is not pity which but seeks to pardon what it
knows to be the truth. Good cannot be returned for evil, for
forgiveness does not first establish sin and then forgive it.
Who can say and mean, "My brother, you have injured me, and yet because
I am the better of the two, I pardon you my hurt." His pardon and your
hurt cannot exist together. One denies the other and must make
it false.
15
To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox which reason cannot see.
For it maintains what has been done to you deserves no pardon. And by
giving it, you grant your brother mercy but retain the proof he is not
really innocent. The sick remain accusers. They cannot forgive their
brothers and themselves as well. For no one in whom true forgiveness
reigns can suffer. He holds not the proof of sin before his brother's
eyes. And thus he must have overlooked it and removed it from his own.
Forgiveness cannot be for one and not the other. Who forgives is
healed. And in his healing lies the proof that he has truly pardoned and
retains no trace of condemnation that he still would hold against
himself or any living thing.
16
Forgiveness is not real unless it brings a healing to your
brother and yourself. You must attest his sins had no effect on
you to demonstrate they were not real. How else could he be guiltless?
And how could his innocence be justified unless his sins have no effect
to warrant guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just because they would
entail effects which cannot be undone and overlooked entirely. In their
undoing lies the proof that they were merely errors. Let
yourself be healed that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your
brother and yourself. A broken body shows the mind has not been healed.
A miracle of healing proves that separation is without effect. What you
would prove to him, you will believe. The power of witness comes
from your belief. And everything you say or do or think but testifies to
what you teach to him.
17
Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because
of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony of his
innocence. It is this testimony which can speak with power greater than
a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness proved to him. A
miracle can offer nothing less to him than it has given unto you. So
does your healing show your mind is healed and has forgiven what he did
not do. And so is he convinced his innocence was never lost and healed
along with you.
18
Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never be
undone. And hopelessness and death must disappear before the ancient
clarion call of life. This call has power far beyond the weak and
miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient calling of the Father to
His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that
the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this
you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of
him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned.
Yet it is given you to show him by your healing that his guilt is but
the fabric of a senseless dream.
19
How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance
from guilt upon your brother and yourself. Your healing saves him pain
as well as you, and you are healed because you wished him well. This is
the law the miracle obeys; that healing sees no specialness at all. It
does not come from pity but from love. And love would prove all
suffering is but a vain imagining, a foolish wish with no effects. Your
health is a result of your desire to see your brother with no blood upon
his hands nor guilt upon his heart made heavy with the proof of sin. And
what you wish is given you to see.
20
The "cost" of your serenity is his. This is the "price" the Holy Spirit
and the world interpret differently. The world perceives it as a
statement of the "fact" that your salvation sacrifices his. The
Holy Spirit knows your healing is the witness unto his and
cannot be apart from his at all. As long as he consents to suffer, you
will be unhealed. Yet you can show him that his suffering is purposeless
and wholly without cause. Show him your healing, and he will consent no
more to suffer. For his innocence has been established in your sight and
his. And laughter will replace your sighs because God's Son remembered
that he is God's Son.
21
Who then fears healing? Only those to whom their brother's sacrifice and
pain are seen to represent their own serenity. Their helplessness and
weakness represent the grounds on which they justify his pain.
The constant sting of guilt he suffers serves to prove that he is slave
but they are free. The constant pain they suffer demonstrates that they
are free because they hold him bound. And sickness is desired to
prevent a shift of balance in the sacrifice. How could the Holy Spirit
be deterred an instant, even less, to reason with an argument for
sickness such as this? And need your healing be delayed because you
pause to listen to insanity?
22
[Correction is not your function. It belongs to One Who knows of
fairness, not of guilt. If you assume correction's role, you lose
the function of forgiveness. No one can forgive until he learns
correction is but to forgive and never to accuse. Alone,
you cannot see they are the same, and therefore is correction not
of you. Identity and function are the same, and by your function
do you know yourself. And thus, if you confuse your function with the
function of Another, you must be confused about yourself and who
you are. What is the separation but a wish to take God's function from
Him and deny that it is His? Yet if it is not His, it is
not yours, for you must lose what you would take away.
23
[In a split mind, identity must seem to be divided. Nor can
anyone perceive a function unified which has conflicting purposes and
different ends. Correction, to a mind so split, must be a way to
punish sins you think are yours in someone else. And thus does
he become your victim, not your brother, different from
you in that he is more guilty, thus in need of your correction
as the one more innocent than he. This splits his
function off from yours and gives you both a different role. And
so you cannot be perceived as one and, with a single function,
that would mean a shared identity with but one end.
24
[Correction you would do must separate, because that is
the function given it by you. When you perceive correction is
the same as pardon, then you also know the Holy Spirit's Mind
and yours are one. And so your own Identity is found. Yet must
He work with what is given Him, and you allow Him only half
your mind. And thus He represents the other half and seems to
have a different purpose from the one you cherish and you think
is yours. Thus does your function seem divided, with a half in
opposition to a half. And these two halves appear to represent a
split within a self perceived as two.]
25
Consider how this self perception must extend, and do not overlook the
fact that every thought extends because that is its purpose,
being what it really is. From an idea of self as two, there comes a
necessary view of function split between the two. And what you would
correct is only half the error, which you think is all of it. Your
brother's sins become the central target for correction, lest your
errors and his own be seen as one. Yours are mistakes, but his are sins
and not the same as yours. His merit punishment, while yours in fairness
should be overlooked.
26
In this interpretation of correction, your own mistakes you will not
even see. The focus of correction has been placed outside yourself on
one who cannot be a part of you while this perception lasts. What is
condemned can never be returned to its accuser, who hated it and hates
it still. This is your brother, focus of your hate, unworthy to be part
of you and thus outside yourself—the other half which is denied. And
only what is left without his presence is perceived as all of you. To
this remaining half the Holy Spirit must represent the other half until
you recognize it is the other half. And this He does by giving
both of you a function that is one, not different.
27
Correction is the function given both, but neither one alone.
And when it is fulfilled as shared, it must correct
mistakes in both of you. It cannot leave mistakes in one unhealed and
set the other free. That is divided purpose which cannot be shared, and
so it cannot be the function which the Holy Spirit sees as His. And you
can rest assured that He will not fulfill a function He cannot
understand and recognize as His. For only thus can He keep yours
preserved intact, despite your separate views of what your function is.
If He upheld divided function, you were lost indeed. His inability to
see His goal divided and distinct for each of you preserves your Self
from being made aware of any function other than Its own. And thus is
healing given both of you.
28
Correction must be left to One Who knows correction and forgiveness are
the same. With half a mind, this is not understood. Leave then
correction to the Mind that is united, functioning as one
because It is not split in purpose, and conceives a single function as
Its only one. Here is the function given It conceived to be Its
own and not apart from that Its Giver keeps because it has been
shared. In His acceptance of this function lies the means whereby your
mind is unified. His single purpose unifies the halves of you which you
perceive as separate. And each forgives the other, that he may accept
his other half as part of him.
29
Power cannot oppose. For opposition would weaken it, and weakened power
is a contradiction in ideas. Weak strength is meaningless, and power
used to weaken is employed to limit. And therefore it must be limited
and weak because that is its purpose. Power is unopposed, to be itself.
No weakness can intrude on it without changing it into something it is
not. To weaken is to limit and impose an opposite that contradicts the
concept which it attacks. And by this does it join to the idea a
something it is not and make it unintelligible. Who can understand a
double concept, such as "weakened-power" or as "hateful-love?"
30
You have decided that your brother is a symbol for a "hateful-love," a
"weakened-power," and above all, a "living-death." And so he has no
meaning to you, for he stands for what is meaningless. He represents a
double thought, where half is cancelled out by the remaining half. Yet
even this is quickly contradicted by the half it cancelled out, and so
they both are gone. And now he stands for nothing. Symbols which but
represent ideas that cannot be must stand for empty space and
nothingness. Yet nothingness and empty space can not be
interference. What can interfere with the awareness of reality
is the belief that there is something there.
31
The picture of your brother that you see means nothing. There is nothing
to attack or to deny, love, or hate, or to endow with power or to see as
weak. The picture has been wholly cancelled out because it symbolized a
contradiction which cancelled out the thought it represents. And
thus the picture has no cause at all. Who can perceive effect without a
cause? What can the causeless be but nothingness? The picture of your
brother that you see is wholly absent and has never been. Let then the
empty space it occupies be recognized as vacant, and the time
devoted to its seeing be perceived as idly spent, a time unoccupied.
32
An empty space which is not seen as filled, an unused interval of time
not seen as spent and fully occupied, becomes a silent invitation to the
truth to enter and to make itself at home. No preparation can be made
that would enhance the invitation's real appeal. For what you leave as
vacant, God will fill, and where He is, there must the truth
abide. Unweakened power with no opposite is what creation is.
For this there are no symbols. Nothing points beyond the truth,
for what can stand for more than everything? Yet true undoing must be
kind. And so the first replacement for your picture is another picture
of another kind.
33
As nothingness cannot be pictured, so there is no symbol for totality.
Reality is ultimately known without a form, unpictured and unseen.
Forgiveness is not yet a power known as wholly free of limits. Yet it
sets no limits you have chosen to impose. Forgiveness is the means by
which the truth is represented temporarily. It lets the Holy Spirit make
exchange of pictures possible until the time when aids are meaningless
and learning done. No learning aid has use which can extend beyond the
goal of learning. When its aim has been accomplished, it is
functionless. Yet in the learning interval it has a use which now you
fear, but yet will love.
34
The picture of your brother given you to occupy the space so lately left
unoccupied and vacant will not need defense of any kind. For you will
give it overwhelming preference. Nor delay an instant in deciding that
it is the only one you want. It does not stand for double concepts.
Though it is but half the picture and is incomplete, within itself it is
the same. The other half of what it represents remains unknown but is
not cancelled out. And thus is God left free to take the final step
Himself. [For this you need no pictures and no learning
aids.] And what will ultimately take the place of every learning aid
will merely be. Forgiveness vanishes and symbols fade, and
nothing which the eyes have ever seen, or ears have heard, remains to be
perceived.
35
A Power wholly limitless has come, not to destroy, but to receive Its
own. There is no choice of function anywhere. The choice you fear to
lose you never had. Yet only this appears to interfere with power
unlimited and single thoughts, complete and happy, without opposite. You
do not know the peace of power which opposes nothing. Yet no other kind
can be at all. Give welcome to the Power beyond forgiveness and beyond
the world of symbols and of limitations. He would merely be, and
so He merely is.
36
In quietness are all things answered and is every problem quietly
resolved. In conflict there can be no answer and no resolution,
for its purpose is to make no resolution possible and to ensure no
answer will be plain. A problem set in conflict has no answer,
for it is seen in different ways. And what would be an answer from one
point of view is not an answer in another light. You are in
conflict. Thus it must be clear you cannot answer anything at all, for
conflict has no limited effects. Yet if God gave an answer, there must
be a way in which your problems are resolved, for what He wills already
has been done.
37
Thus it must be that time is not involved, and every problem can be
answered now. Yet it must also be that in your state of mind
solution is impossible. Therefore, God must have given you a way of
reaching to another state of mind in which the answer is already there.
Such is the holy instant. It is here that all your problems should be
brought and left. Here they belong, for here their answer is.
[And where its answer is, a problem must be simple and be easily
resolved.] It must be pointless to attempt to solve a problem where the
answer cannot be. Yet just as surely it must be resolved if it is
brought to where the answer is.
38
Attempt to solve no problems but within the holy instant's surety. For
there the problem will be answered and resolved. Outside there
will be no solution, for there is no answer there that could be found.
Nowhere outside a single simple question is ever asked. The world can
only ask a double question with many answers, none of which will do. It
does not ask a question to be answered, but only to restate its point of
view. All questions asked within this world are but a way of looking,
not a question asked. A question asked in hate cannot be answered,
because it is an answer in itself. A double question asks and answers,
both attesting the same thing in different form.
39
The world asks but one question. It is this: "Of these
illusions, which of them are true? Which ones establish peace and offer
joy? And which can bring escape from all the pain of which this world is
made?" Whatever form the question takes, its purpose is the same. It
asks but to establish sin is real and answers in the form of preference.
"Which sin do you prefer? That is the one which you should choose. The
others are not true. What can the body get that you would want the most
of all? It is your servant and your friend. But tell it what you want,
and it will serve you lovingly and well." And this is not a question,
for it tells you what you want and where to go for it. It leaves no room
to question its beliefs, except that what it states takes question's form.
40
A pseudo-question has no answer. It dictates the answer even as
it asks. Thus is all questioning within the world a form of propaganda
for itself. Just as the body's witnesses are but the senses from within
itself, so are the answers to the questions of the world contained
within the questions. Where answers represent the questions, they add
nothing new, and nothing has been learned.
41
An honest question is a learning tool which asks for something that you
do not know. It does not set conditions for response, but merely
asks what the response should be. But no one in a conflict state is free
to ask this question, for he does not want an honest answer where the
conflict ends. Only within the holy instant can an honest question
honestly be asked. And from the meaning of the question does the
meaningfulness of the answer come. Here is it possible to separate your
wishes from the answer, so it can be given you and also be received.
The answer is provided everywhere. Yet it is only here it can be heard.
42
An honest answer asks no sacrifice because it answers questions truly
asked. The questions of the world but ask of whom is sacrifice demanded,
asking not if sacrifice is meaningful at all. And so unless the
answer tells "of whom," it will remain unrecognized, unheard, and thus
the question is preserved intact because it gave the answer to itself.
The holy instant is the interval in which the mind is still enough to
hear an answer which is not entailed within the question asked. It
offers something new and different from the question. How could it be
answered if it but repeats itself?
43
Therefore, attempt to solve no problems in a world from which the answer
has been barred. But bring the problem to the only place which holds the
answer lovingly for you. Here are the answers which will solve your
problems because they stand apart from them, and see what can be
answered—what the question is. Within the world the answers
merely raise another question, though they leave the first unanswered.
In the holy instant, you can bring the question to the answer and
receive the answer that was made for you.
44
The only way to heal is to be healed. The miracle extends without your
help, but you are needed that it can begin. Accept the miracle
of healing, and it will go forth because of what it is. It is
its nature to extend itself the instant it is born. And it is born the
instant it is offered and received. No one can ask another to be
healed. But he can let himself be healed and thus offer the
other what he has received. Who can bestow upon another what he does not
have? And who can share what he denies himself? The Holy Spirit speaks
to you. He does not speak to someone else. Yet by your
listening, His Voice extends because you have accepted what He
says.
45
Health is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it
remains without conviction. Only when demonstrated has it been proved
and must compel belief. No one is healed through double
messages. If you wish only to be healed, you heal. Your single
purpose makes this possible. But if you are afraid of healing, then it
cannot come through you. The only thing that is required for a healing
is a lack of fear. The fearful are not healed and cannot heal. This does
not mean the conflict must be gone forever from your mind. For if it
were, there'd be no need for healing then. But it does mean, if
only for an instant, you love without attack. An instant is sufficient.
Miracles wait not on time.
46
The holy instant is the miracle's abiding-place. From there each one is
born into this world as witness to a state of mind which has transcended
conflict and has reached to peace. It carries comfort from the place of
peace into the battleground and demonstrates that war has no effects.
For all the hurt that war has sought to bring, the broken bodies and the
shattered limbs, the screaming dying and the silent dead, are gently
lifted up and comforted. There is no sadness where a miracle has
come to heal. And nothing more than just one instant of your
love without attack is necessary that all this occur. In that one
instant are you healed, and in that single instant is all healing done.
47
What stands apart from you when you accept the blessing that the holy
instant brings? Be not afraid of blessing, for the One Who blesses you
loves all the world and leaves nothing within the world that could be
feared. But if you shrink from blessing will the world indeed seem
fearful, for you have withheld its peace and comfort, leaving it to die.
Would not a world so bitterly bereft be looked on as a condemnation by
the one who could have saved it but stepped back because he was afraid
of being healed? The eyes of all the dying bring reproach, and suffering
whispers, "What is there to fear?" Consider well its question. It is
asked of you on your behalf. A dying world asks only that you rest an
instant from attack upon yourself, that it be healed.
48
Come to the holy instant and be healed, for nothing that is there
received is left behind on your returning to the world. And being
blessed, you will bring blessing. Life is given you to give the dying
world. And suffering eyes no longer will accuse, but shine in thanks to
you who blessing gave. The holy instant's radiance will light your eyes
and give them sight to see beyond all suffering and see Christ's face
instead. Healing replaces suffering. Who looks on one cannot
perceive the other, for they cannot both be there. And what you see the
world will witness, and will witness to.
49
Thus is your healing everything the world requires that it may be
healed. It needs one lesson which has perfectly been learned.
And then when you forget it will the world remind you gently of what you
have taught. No reinforcement will its thanks withhold from you who let
yourself be healed that it might live. It will call forth its witnesses
to show the face of Christ to you who brought the sight to them by which
they witnessed it. The world of accusation is replaced by one in which
all eyes look lovingly upon the Friend who brought them their release.
And happily your brother will perceive the many friends he thought were
enemies.
50
Problems are not specific, but they take specific forms, and these
specific shapes make up the world. And no one understands the nature of
his problem. If he did, it would be there no more for him to see. Its
very nature is that it is not. And thus while he perceives it,
he can not perceive it as it is. But healing is apparent
in specific instances and generalizes to include them all. This is
because they really are the same despite their different forms. All
learning aims at transfer, which becomes complete within two situations
which are seen as one, for only common elements are there. Yet
this can only be attained by One Who does not see the differences you
see. The total transfer of your learning is not made by you. But that it
has been made in spite of all the differences you see convinces you that
they could not be real.
51
Your healing will extend and will be brought to problems that you
thought were not your own. And it will also be apparent that your many
different problems will be solved as any one of them has been escaped.
It cannot be their differences which made this possible, for learning
does not jump from situations to their opposites and bring the same
results. All healing must proceed in lawful manner in accord with laws
which have been properly perceived but never violated. Fear you not the
way that you perceive them. You are wrong, but there is One within you
Who is right.
52
Leave, then, the transfer of your learning to the One Who really
understands its laws and Who will guarantee that they remain unviolated
and unlimited. Your part is merely to apply what He has taught you to yourself,
and He will do the rest. And thus the power of your learning will be
proved to you by all the many different witnesses it finds. Your brother
first among them will be seen, but thousands stand behind him, and
beyond each one there are a thousand more. Each one may seem to have a
problem which is different from the rest. Yet they are solved together.
And their common answer shows the questions could not have been
separate.
53
Peace be to you to whom is healing offered. And you will learn that
peace is given you when you accept the healing for yourself. Its total
value need not be appraised by you to let you understand that you have
benefited from it. What occurred within the instant which love entered
in without attack will stay with you forever. Your healing will be one
of its effects, as will your brother's. Everywhere you go will you
behold its multiplied effects. Yet all the witnesses that you behold
will be far less than all there really are. Infinity cannot be
understood by merely counting up its separate parts. God thanks you for
your healing, for He knows it is a gift of love unto His Son, and
therefore is it given unto Him.
54
Pain demonstrates the body must be real. It is a loud, obscuring voice
whose shrieks would silence what the Holy Spirit says and keep His words
from your awareness. Pain compels attention, drawing it away from Him
and focusing upon itself. Its purpose is the same as pleasure, for they
both are means to make the body real. What shares a common purpose is
the same. This is the law of purpose, which unites all those who share
in it within itself. Pleasure and pain are equally unreal, because their
purpose cannot be achieved. Thus are they means for nothing, for
they have a goal without a meaning. And they share the lack of meaning
which their purpose has.
55
Sin shifts from pain to pleasure and again to pain. For either witness
is the same and carries but one message: "You are here within this body,
and you can be hurt. You can have pleasure, too, but only at the cost of
pain." These witnesses are joined by many more. Each one seems different
because it has a different name, and so it seems to answer to a
different sound. Except for this, the witnesses of sin are all alike.
Call pleasure pain, and it will hurt. Call pain a pleasure, and the pain
behind the pleasure will be felt no more. Sin's witnesses but shift from
name to name, as one steps forward and another back. Yet which is
foremost makes no difference. Sin's witnesses hear but the call of
death.
56
This body, purposeless within itself, holds all your memories and all
your hopes. You use its eyes to see, its ears to hear, and let it tell
you what it is it feels. It does not know. It tells you but the
names you gave it to use when you call forth the witnesses to
its reality. You cannot choose among them which are real, for any one
you choose is like the rest. This name or that, but nothing more, you
choose. You do not make a witness true because you called him by truth's
name. The truth is found in him if it is truth he represents.
And otherwise he lies, if you should call him by the holy Name of God
Himself.
57
God's Witness sees no witnesses against the body. Neither does
He harken to the witnesses by other names which speak in other ways for
its reality. He knows it is not real. For nothing could contain
what you believe it holds within. Nor could it tell a part of God
Himself what it should feel and what its function is. Yet must He love
whatever you hold dear. And for each witness to the body's death He
sends a witness to your life in Him Who knows no death. Each miracle He
brings is witness that the body is not real. Its pains and pleasures
does He heal alike, for all sin's witnesses do His replace.
58
The miracle makes no distinctions in the names by which sin's witnesses
are called. It merely proves that what they represent has no effects.
And this it proves because its own effects have come to take their
place. It matters not the name by which you called your suffering. It is
no longer there. The One Who brings the miracle perceived them all as
one and called by name of fear. As fear is witness unto death, so is the
miracle the witness unto life. It is a witness no one can deny, for it
is the effects of life it brings. The dying live, the dead
arise, and pain has vanished. Yet a miracle speaks not but for itself,
but what it represents.
59
Love, too, has symbols in a world of sin. The miracle forgives because
it stands for what is past forgiveness and is true. How foolish and
insane it is to think a miracle is bound by laws which it came solely to
undo! The laws of sin have different witnesses with different strengths.
And they attest to different sufferings. Yet to the One Who sends forth
miracles to bless the world, a tiny stab of pain, a little worldly
pleasure, and the throes of death itself are but a single sound—a call
for healing and a plaintive cry for help within a world of misery. It is
their sameness that the miracle attests. It is their sameness
that it proves.
60
The laws which call them different are dissolved and shown as
powerless. The purpose of a miracle is to accomplish this. And God
Himself has guaranteed the strength of miracles for what they witness
to. Be witnesses unto the miracle and not the laws of sin. There is no
need to suffer any more. But there is need that you be healed,
because the suffering of the world has made it deaf to its salvation and
deliverance.
61
The resurrection of the world awaits your healing and your happiness,
that you may demonstrate the healing of the world. The holy instant will
replace all sin if you but carry its effects with you. And no one will
elect to suffer more. What better function could you serve than this? Be
healed that you may heal, and suffer not the laws of sin to be applied
to you. And truth will be revealed to you who chose to let love's
symbols take the place of sin.
62
Suffering is an emphasis upon all that the world has done to injure you.
Here is the world's demented version of salvation clearly shown. Like to
a dream of punishment in which the dreamer is unconscious of what
brought on the attack against himself, he sees himself attacked unjustly
and by something not himself. He is the victim of this "something else,"
a thing outside himself for which he has no reason to be held
responsible. He must be innocent because he knows not what he does, but
what is done to him. Yet is his own attack upon himself apparent still,
for it is he who bears the suffering. And he cannot escape because its
source is seen outside himself.
63
Now you are being shown you can escape. All that is needed is
you look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that you
have set it up. How could there be another way to solve a problem which
is very simple but has been obscured by heavy clouds of complication
which were made to keep the problem unresolved? Without the
clouds, the problem will emerge in all its primitive simplicity. The
choice will not be difficult, because the problem is absurd when clearly
seen. No one has difficulty making up his mind to let a simple problem
be resolved if it is seen as hurting him and also very easily
removed.
64
The "reasoning" by which the world is made, on which it rests, by which
it is maintained, is simply this: "You are the cause of what I
do. Your presence justifies my wrath, and you exist and think apart
from me. While you attack, I must be innocent. And what I suffer from is
your attack." No one who looks upon this "reasoning" exactly as it is
could fail to see it does not follow, and it makes no sense. Yet it
seems sensible because it looks as if the world were hurting
you. And so it seems as if there is no need to go beyond the obvious in
terms of cause.
65
There is indeed a need. The world's escape from condemnation is
a need which those within the world are joined in sharing. Yet they do
not recognize their common need. For each one thinks that if he does his
part, the condemnation of the world will rest on him. And it is this
that he perceives to be his part in its deliverance. Vengeance
must have a focus. Otherwise is the avenger's knife in his own hand and
pointed to himself. And he must see it in another's hand if he would be
a victim of attack he did not choose. And thus he suffers from the
wounds a knife he does not hold has made upon himself. This is the purpose
of the world he sees. And looked at thus, the world provides the means
by which this purpose seems to be fulfilled.
66
The means attest the purpose but are not themselves a cause. Nor
will the cause be changed by seeing it apart from its effects. The cause
produces the effects which then bear witness to the cause and not
themselves. Look, then, beyond effects. It is not here the cause of
suffering and sin must lie. And dwell not on the suffering and sin, for
they are but reflections of their cause.
67
The part you play in salvaging the world from condemnation is your own
escape. Forget not that the witness to the world of evil cannot speak
except for what has seen a need for evil in the world. And this is where
your guilt was first beheld. In separation from your brother was the
first attack upon yourself begun. And it is this the world bears witness
to. Seek not another cause nor look among the mighty legions of its
witnesses for its undoing. They support its claim on your
allegiance. What conceals the truth is not where you should look to find
the truth. The witnesses to sin all stand within one little space. And
it is here you find the cause of your perspective on the world.
68
Once you were unaware of what the cause of everything the world appeared
to thrust upon you, uninvited and unasked, must really be. Of one thing
you were sure—of all the many causes you perceived as bringing pain and
suffering to you, your guilt was not among them. Nor did you in any way
request them for yourself. This is how all illusions come about.
The one who makes them does not see himself as making them, and their
reality does not depend on him. Whatever cause they have is something
quite apart from him, and what he sees is separate from his
mind. He cannot doubt his dreams' reality because he does not see the
part he plays in making them and making them seem real.
69
No one can waken from a dream the world is dreaming for him. He
becomes a part of someone else's dream. He cannot choose to waken from a
dream he did not make. Helpless he stands, a victim to a dream conceived
and cherished by a separate mind. Careless indeed of him this mind must
be, as thoughtless of his peace and happiness as is the weather or the
time of day. It loves him not but casts him as it will in any role that
satisfies its dream. So little is his worth that he is but a dancing
shadow, leaping up and down according to a senseless plot conceived
within the idle dreaming of the world.
70
This is the only picture you can see, the one alternative that you can
choose, the other possibility of cause if you be not the dreamer
of your dreams. And this is what you choose, if you deny the cause of
suffering is in your mind. Be glad indeed it is, for thus are
you the one decider of your destiny in time. The choice is yours
to make between a sleeping death and dreams of evil or a happy wakening
and joy of life. What could you choose between but life or
death, waking or sleeping, peace or war, your dreams or your reality?
Yet if the choice is really given you, then you must see the causes of
the things you choose between exactly as they are and where
they are. What choices can be made between two states, but one of which
is clearly recognized? Who could be free to choose between effects when
only one is seen as up to him?
71
An honest choice could never be perceived as one in which the choice is
split between a tiny you and an enormous world, with different dreams
about the truth in you. The gap between reality and dreams lies not
between the dreaming of the world and what you dream in secret. They
are one. The dreaming of the world is but a part of your own dream you
gave away and saw as if it were its start and ending both. Yet was it
started by your secret dream, which you do not perceive,
although it caused the part you see and do not doubt is real. How could
you doubt it while you lie asleep and dream in secret that its cause is
real?
72
A brother separated from yourself, an ancient enemy, a murderer who
stalks you in the night and plots your death, yet plans that it be
lingering and slow—of this you dream. Yet underneath this dream is yet
another in which you become the murderer, the secret enemy, the
scavenger and the destroyer of your brother and the world alike. Here is
the cause of suffering, the space between your dreams and your
reality. The little gap you do not even see, the birthplace of illusions
and of fear, the time of terror and of ancient hate, the instant of
disaster, all are here. Here is the cause of unreality. And it
is here that it will be undone.
73
You are the dreamer of the world of dreams. No other cause it
has, nor ever will. Nothing more fearful than an idle dream has
terrified God's Son and made him think that he has lost his innocence,
denied his Father, and made war upon himself. So fearful is the dream,
so seeming real, he could not waken to reality without the sweat of
terror and a scream of mortal fear unless a gentler dream preceded his
awaking and allowed his calmer mind to welcome, not to fear, the Voice
that calls with love to waken him. [A gentler dream, in which his
suffering was healed and where his brother was his friend.] God willed
he waken gently and with joy. And gave him means to waken without fear.
Accept the dream He gave instead of yours. It is not difficult to change
a dream when once the dreamer has been recognized.
74
Rest in the Holy Spirit and allow His gentle dreams to take the place of
those you dreamed in terror and in fear of death. He brings forgiving
dreams in which the choice is not who is the murderer and who shall be
the victim. In the dreams He brings, there is no murder and
there is no death. The dream of guilt is fading from your sight,
although your eyes are closed. A smile has come to lighten up your
sleeping face. The sleep is peaceful now, for these are happy dreams.
75
Dream softly of your sinless brother, who unites with you in holy
innocence. And from this dream, the Lord of Heaven will Himself awaken
His beloved Son. Dream of your brother's kindnesses instead of dwelling
in your dreams on his mistakes. Select his thoughtfulness to dream about
instead of counting up the hurts he gave. Forgive him his illusions and
give thanks to him for all the helpfulness he gave. And do not brush
aside his many gifts because he is not perfect in your dreams.
76
He represents his Father, Whom you see as offering both life and death
to you. Brother, He gives but life. Yet what you see as gifts your
brother offers represent the gifts you dream your Father gives to you.
Let all your brother's gifts be seen in light of charity and kindness
offered you. And let no pain disturb your dream of deep appreciation for
his gifts to you.
77
The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There is no
dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream, in which it acts
as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed. It takes the central
place in every dream, which tells the story of how it was made by other
bodies, born into the world outside the body, lives a little while and
dies, to be united in the dust with other bodies dying like itself. In
the brief time allotted it to live, it seeks for other bodies as its
friends and enemies. Its safety is its main concern. Its comfort is its
guiding rule. It tries to look for pleasure and avoid the things that
would be hurtful. Above all, it tries to teach itself its pains and joys
are different and can be told apart.
78
The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in
many ways to prove it is autonomous and real. It puts things on itself
which it has bought with little metal discs or paper strips the world
proclaims as valuable and good. It works to get them, doing senseless
things, and tosses them away for senseless things it does not need and
does not even want. It hires other bodies, that they may protect it, and
collect more senseless things that it can call its own. It looks about
for special bodies which can share its dream. Sometimes it dreams it is
a conqueror of bodies weaker than itself. But in some phases of the
dream, it is the slave of bodies that would hurt and torture it.
79
The body's serial adventures from the time of birth to dying is the
theme of every dream the world has ever had. The "hero" of this dream
will never change nor will its purpose. Though the dream itself takes
many forms and seems to show a great variety of places and events
wherein its "hero" finds itself, the dream has but one purpose, taught
in many ways. This single lesson does it try to teach again, and still
again, and yet once more that it is cause and not
effect. And you are its effect and cannot be its cause.
80
Thus are you not the dreamer but the dream. And so you wander
idly in and out of places and events which it contrives. That
this is all the body does is true, for it is but a figure in a
dream. But who reacts to figures in a dream unless he sees them as if
they were real? The instant that he sees them as they are, they
have no more effects on him because he understands he gave them
their effects by causing them and making them seem real.
81
How willing are you to escape effects of all the dreams the world has
ever had? Is it your wish to let no dream appear to be the cause of what
it is you do? Then let us merely look upon the dream's beginning, for
the part you see is but the second part, whose cause lies in the first.
No one asleep and dreaming in the world remembers his attack upon
himself. No one believes there really was a time when he knew nothing of
a body and could never have conceived this world as real. He would have
seen at once that these ideas are one illusion, too ridiculous for
anything but to be laughed away. How serious they now appear to be! And
no one can remember when they would have met with laughter and with
disbelief.
82
We can remember this if we but look directly at their cause. And
we will see the grounds for laughter, not a cause for fear. Let us
return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer who perceives the dream
as separate from himself and done to him. Into eternity, where all is
one, there crept a tiny mad idea at which the Son of God remembered not
to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea and
possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh
them both away and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It
is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity,
which means there is no time.
83
A timelessness in which is time made real; a part of God which can
attack itself; a separate brother as an enemy; a mind within a body, all
are forms of circularity whose ending starts at its beginning, ending at
its cause. The world you see depicts exactly what you thought you did.
Except that now you think that what you did is being done to you. The
guilt for what you thought is being placed outside yourself and on a
guilty world which dreams your dreams and thinks your thoughts instead
of you. It brings its vengeance, not your own. It keeps you narrowly
confined within a body, which it punishes because of all the sinful
things the body does within its dream. You have no power to make the
body stop its evil deeds because you did not make it and cannot control
its actions or its purpose or its fate.
84
The world but demonstrates an ancient truth—you will believe that others
do to you exactly what you think you did to them. But once
deluded into blaming them, you will not see the cause of what they do
because you want the guilt to rest on them. How childish is this
petulant device to keep your innocence by pushing guilt outside yourself
but never letting go! It is not easy to perceive the jest when all
around you do your eyes behold its heavy consequences, but without their
trifling cause. Without the cause do its effects seem serious and sad
indeed. Yet they but follow. And it is their cause which follows
nothing and is but a jest.
85
In gentle laughter does the Holy Spirit perceive the cause and looks not
to effects. How else could He correct your error, who have overlooked
the cause entirely? He bids you bring each terrible effect to Him that
you may look together on its foolish cause and laugh with Him a while. You
judge effects, but He has judged their cause. And by His
judgment are effects removed. Perhaps you come in tears, but hear Him
say, "My brother, Holy Son of God, behold your idle dream in which this
could occur," and you will leave the holy instant with your laughter and
your brother's joined with His.
86
The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this
unto yourself. No matter what the form of the attack, this still is
true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, still is this the
truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you
feel, this is still true. For you would not react at all to figures in a
dream you knew that you were dreaming. Let them be as hateful
and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you
failed to recognize it is your dream. This single lesson learned
will set you free from suffering, whatever form it takes.
87
The Holy Spirit will repeat this one inclusive lesson of deliverance
until it has been learned, regardless of the form of suffering that
brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him He will make answer with
this very simple truth. For this one answer takes away the cause
of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at
all, for He would teach you but the single cause of all of them, no
matter what their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect
the simple statement,
89
Bring, then, all forms of suffering to Him Who knows that every one is
like the rest. He sees no differences where none exist, and He will
teach you how each one is caused. None has a different cause from all
the rest, and all of them are easily undone by but a single lesson truly
learned. Salvation is a secret you have kept but from yourself. The
universe proclaims it so. Yet to its witnesses you pay no heed at all.
For they attest the thing you do not want to know. They seem to
keep it secret from you. Yet you need but learn you choose but not
to listen, not to see. How differently will you perceive the
world when this is recognized! When you forgive the world your guilt, you
will be free of it. Its innocence does not demand your guilt,
nor does your guiltlessness rest on its sins.
90
This is the obvious—a secret kept from no one but yourself. And it is
this that has maintained you separate from the world and kept your
brother separate from you. Now need you but to learn that both
of you are innocent or guilty. The one thing that is impossible is that
you be unlike each other; that they both be true. This is the
only secret yet to learn. And it will be no secret you are healed.
1
The miracle does nothing. All it does is to undo. And thus it
cancels out the interference to what has been done. It does not add, but
merely takes away. And what it takes away is long since gone, but being
kept in memory, appears to have immediate effects. This world was over
long ago. The thoughts that made it are no longer in the mind that
thought of them and loved them for a little while. The miracle but shows
the past is gone, and what has truly gone has no effects. Remembering a
cause can but produce illusions of its presence, not effects.
2
All the effects of guilt are here no more. For guilt is over. In its
passing went its consequences, left without a cause. Why would you cling
to it in memory if you did not desire its effects? Remembering
is as selective as perception, being its past tense. It is perception of
the past as if it were occurring now and still were there to see.
Memory, like perception, is a skill made up by you to take the place of
what God gave in your creation. And like all the things you made, it can
be used to serve another purpose and to be the means for something else.
It can be used to heal and not to hurt if you so wish it be.
3
Nothing employed for healing represents an effort to do anything at all.
It is a recognition that you have no needs which mean that something
must be done. It is an unselective memory, which is not used to
interfere with truth. All things the Holy Spirit can employ for healing
have been given Him, without the content and the purposes for which they
have been made. They are but skills without an application. They await
their use. They have no dedication and no aim.
4
The Holy Spirit can indeed make use of memory, for God Himself is there.
Yet this is not a memory of past events, but only of a present state.
You are so long accustomed to believe that memory holds only what is
past that it is hard for you to realize it is a skill that can remember
now. The limitations on remembering the world imposes on it are
as vast as those you let the world impose on you. There is no
link of memory to the past. If you would have it there, then there it
is. But only your desire made the link, and only you have held
it to a part of time where guilt appears to linger still.
5
The Holy Spirit's use of memory is quite apart from time. He does not
seek to use it as a means to keep the past, but rather as a way to let
it go. Memory holds the message it receives and does what it is
given it to do. It does not write the message nor appoint what it is
for. Like to the body, it is purposeless within itself. And if it seems
to serve to cherish ancient hate and offers you the pictures of
injustices and hurts which you were saving, this is what you asked its
message be, and this is what it is. Committed to its vaults, the history
of all the body's past is hidden there. All of the strange associations
made to keep the past alive, the present dead, are stored within it,
waiting your command that they be brought to you and lived again. And
thus do their effects appear to be increased by time, which took away
their cause.
6
Yet time is but another phase of what does nothing. It works hand in
hand with all the other attributes with which you seek to keep concealed
the truth about yourself. Time neither takes away nor can restore. And
yet you make strange use of it, as if the past had caused the present,
which is but a consequence in which no change can be made possible
because its cause has gone. Yet change must have a cause that will
endure or else it will not last. No change can be made in the present if
its cause is past. Only the past is held in memory as you make use of
it, and so it is a way to hold the past against the now.
7
Remember nothing that you taught yourself, for you were badly
taught. And who would keep a senseless lesson in his mind when he can
learn and can preserve a better one? When ancient memories of hate
appear, remember that their cause is gone. And so you cannot understand
what they are for. Let not the cause that you would give them now be
what it was which made them what they were or seemed to be. Be glad that
it is gone, for this is what you would be pardoned from. And see instead
the new effects of cause accepted now, with consequences here.
They will surprise you with their loveliness. The ancient new ideas they
bring will be the happy consequences of a cause so ancient that it far
exceeds the span of memory which your perception sees.
8
This is the Cause the Holy Spirit has remembered for you, when you would
forget. It is not past because He let It not be unremembered. It has
never changed because there never was a time in which He did not keep It
safely in your mind. Its consequences will indeed seem new because you
thought that you remembered not their Cause. Yet was It never absent
from your mind, for it was not your Father's Will that He be
unremembered by His Son.
9
What you remember never was. It came from causelessness which
you confused with cause. It can deserve but laughter when you learn you
have remembered consequences which were causeless and could never
be effects. The miracle reminds you of a Cause forever present,
perfectly untouched by time and interference—never changed from what It
is. And you are Its effects, as changeless and as perfect
as Itself. Its memory does not lie in the past nor await the future. It
is not revealed in miracles. They but remind you that It has not gone.
When you forgive It for your sins, It will no longer be denied.
10
You who have sought to lay a judgment on your own Creator cannot
understand it is not He Who laid a judgment on His Son. You would deny
Him His effects, yet have they never been denied. There was no time in
which His Son could be condemned for what was causeless and against His
Will. What your remembering would witness to is but the fear of God. He
has not done the thing you fear. No more have you. And so your innocence
has not been lost. You need no healing to be healed. In quietness, see
in the miracle a lesson in allowing Cause to have Its own
effects and doing nothing that would interfere.
11
The miracle comes quietly into the mind that stops an instant and is
still. It reaches gently from that quiet time, and from the mind it
healed in quiet then, to other minds to share its quietness. And they
will join in doing nothing to prevent its radiant extension back into
the Mind Which caused all minds to be. Born out of sharing, there can be
no pause in time to cause the miracle delay in hastening to all unquiet
minds and bringing them an instant's stillness when the memory of God
returns to them. Their own remembering is quiet now, and what has come
to take its place will not be wholly unremembered afterwards.
12
He to Whom time is given offers thanks for every quiet instant given
Him. For in that instant is His memory allowed to offer all its
treasures to the Son of God, for whom they have been kept. How gladly
does He offer them unto the one for whom He has been given them! And His
Creator shares His thanks because He would not be deprived of His
effects. The instant's silence that His Son accepts gives welcome to
eternity and Him and lets Them enter where They would abide. For in that
instant does the Son of God do nothing that would make himself afraid.
13
How instantly the memory of God arises in the mind that has no fear to
keep the memory away. Its own remembering has gone. There is no past to
keep its fearful image in the way of glad awakening to present peace.
The trumpets of eternity resound throughout the stillness, yet disturb
it not. And what is now remembered is not fear, but rather is the cause
that fear was made to render unremembered and undone. The stillness
speaks in gentle sounds of love the Son of God remembers from before his
own remembering came in between the present and the past to shut them
out.
14
Now is the Son of God at last aware of present Cause and Its benign
effects. Now does he understand what he has made is causeless, making no
effects at all. He has done nothing. And in seeing this, he understands
he never had a need for doing anything and never did. His Cause is
its effects. There never was a cause beside It that could generate a
different past or future. Its effects are changelessly eternal, beyond
fear, and past the world of sin entirely.
15
What has been lost, to see the causeless not? And where is sacrifice,
when memory of God has come to take the place of loss? What better way
to close the little gap between illusions and reality than to allow the
memory of God to flow across it, making it a bridge an instant will
suffice to reach beyond? For God has closed it with Himself. His memory
has not gone by and left a stranded Son forever on a shore where he can
glimpse another shore which he can never reach. His Father wills that he
be lifted up and gently carried over. He has built the bridge,
and it is He Who will transport His Son across it. Have no fear that He
will fail in what He wills. Nor that you be excluded from the Will that
is for you.
16
Without a cause there can be no effects, and yet without effects there
is no cause. The cause a cause is made by its effects; the
Father is a father by His Son. Effects do not create their cause, but
they establish its causation. Thus, the Son gives fatherhood to his
Creator and receives the gift that he has given Him. It is because
he is God's Son that he must also be a father who creates as God created
him. The circle of creation has no end. Its starting and its ending are
the same. But in itself it holds the universe of all creation, without
beginning and without an end.
17
Fatherhood is creation. Love must be extended. Purity is not
confined. It is the nature of the innocent to be forever uncontained,
without a barrier or limitation. Thus is purity not of the body. Nor can
it be found where limitation is. The body can be healed by its effects,
which are as limitless as is itself. Yet must all healing come about
because the mind is recognized as not within the body, and its innocence
is quite apart from it and where all healing is. Where then is
healing? Only where its cause is given its effects. For sickness is a
meaningless attempt to give effects to causelessness and make it
be a cause.
18
Always in sickness does the Son of God attempt to make himself his cause
and not allow himself to be his Father's Son. For this impossible
desire, he does not believe that he is Love's effect and must be cause
because of what he is. The cause of healing is the only Cause of
everything. It has but one effect. And in that recognition,
causelessness is given no effects and none are seen. A mind within a
body and a world of other bodies, each with separate minds, are your
"creations," you the "other" mind, creating with effects unlike
yourself. And as their "father," you must be like them. Nothing at all
has happened but that you have put yourself to sleep and dreamed a dream
in which you were an alien to yourself and but a part of someone else's
dream.
19
The miracle does not awaken you but merely shows you who the dreamer is.
It teaches you there is a choice of dreams while you are still asleep,
depending on the purpose of your dreaming. Do you wish for dreams of
healing or for dreams of death? A dream is like a memory in that it
pictures what you wanted shown to you. An empty storehouse with
an open door holds all your shreds of memories and dreams. Yet if you
are the dreamer, you perceive this much at least—that you have
caused the dream and can accept another dream as well. But for this
change in content of the dream, it must be realized that it is you who
dreamed the dreaming that you do not like. It is but an effect which you
have caused, and you would not be cause of this effect.
20
In dreams of murder and attack are you the victim in a dying body slain.
But in forgiving dreams is no one asked to be the victim and the
sufferer. These are the happy dreams the miracle exchanges for your own.
It does not ask you make another—only that you see you made the one you
would exchange for this. This world is causeless, as is every dream that
anyone has dreamed within the world. No plans are possible and no design
exists that could be found and understood.
21
What else could be expected from a thing that has no cause? Yet if it
has no cause, it has no purpose. You may cause a dream, but never will
you give it real effects. For that would change its cause, and it is
this you cannot do. The dreamer of a dream is not awake but does not
know he sleeps. He sees illusions of himself as sick or well, depressed
or happy, but without a stable cause with guaranteed effects.
22
The miracle establishes you dream a dream and that its content is not
true. This is a crucial step in dealing with illusions. No one is afraid
of them when he perceives he made them up. The fear was held in place because
he did not see that he was author of the dream, and not a figure in the
dream. He gives himself the consequences which he dreams he gave
his brother. And it is but this the dream has put together and has
offered him to show him that his wishes have been done. Thus does he
fear his own attack but sees it at another's hands. As victim,
he is suffering from its effects but not their cause. He authored not
his own attack, and he is innocent of what he caused. The miracle does
nothing but to show him that he has done nothing. What he fears is cause
without the consequences which would make it cause. And so it
never was.
23
The separation started with the dream the Father was deprived of His
effects and powerless to keep them since He was no longer their Creator.
In the dream, the dreamer made himself, but what he made has turned
against him, taking on the role of its creator as the dreamer had. And
as he hated his Creator, so the figures in the dream have hated him. His
body is their slave which they abuse because the motives he has given it
have they adopted as their own. And hate it for the vengeance it would
offer them. It is their vengeance on the body which appears to prove the
dreamer could not be the maker of the dream. Effect and cause are first
split off and then reversed, so that effect becomes a cause; the cause,
effect.
24
This is the separation's final step with which salvation, which proceeds
to go the other way, begins. This final step is an effect of
what has gone before, appearing as a cause. The miracle is the first
step in giving back to cause the function of causation, not effect. For
this confusion has produced the dream, and while it lasts, will wakening
be feared. Nor will the call to wakening be heard, because it seems to
be the call to fear.
25
Like every lesson which the Holy Spirit requests you learn, the miracle
is clear. It demonstrates what He would have you learn and shows you its
effects are what you want. In His forgiving dreams are the
effects of yours undone and hated enemies perceived as friends with
merciful intent. Their enmity is seen as causeless now, because they did
not make it. And you can accept the role of maker of their hate, because
you see that it has no effects. Now are you freed from this much
of the dream; the world is neutral, and the bodies which still seem to
move about as separate things need not be feared. And so they are not
sick.
26
The miracle returns the cause of fear to you who made it. But it also
shows that, having no effects, it is not cause because the function of
causation is to have effects. And where effects are gone, there is
no cause. Thus is the body healed by miracles because they show the mind
made sickness and employed the body to be victim or effect of
what it made. Yet half the lesson will not teach the whole. The miracle
is useless if you learn but that the body can be healed, for this is not
the lesson it was sent to teach. The lesson is the mind was sick
that thought the body could be sick; projecting out its guilt caused
nothing and had no effects.
27
This world is full of miracles. They stand in shining silence next to
every dream of pain and suffering, of sin and guilt. They are the
dream's alternative, the choice to be the dreamer rather than deny the
active role in making up the dream. They are the glad effects of taking
back the consequence of sickness to its cause. The body is released
because the mind acknowledges "this is not done to me, but I am
doing this." And thus the mind is free to make another choice instead.
Beginning here, salvation will proceed to change the course of every
step in the descent to separation, until all the steps have been
retraced, the ladder gone, and all the dreaming of the world undone.
28
What waits in perfect certainty beyond salvation is not our concern. For
you have barely started to allow your first uncertain steps to be
directed up the ladder separation led you down. The miracle alone is
your concern at present. Here is where we must begin. And having
started, will the way be made serene and simple in the rising up to
waking and the ending of the dream. When you accept a miracle, you do
not add your dream of fear to one that is already being dreamed. Without
support, the dream will fade away without effects. For it is your
support that strengthens it.
29
No mind is sick until another mind agrees that they are separate. And
thus it is their joint decision to be sick. If you withhold
agreement and accept the part you play in making sickness real,
the other mind cannot project its guilt without your aid in letting it
perceive itself as separate and apart from you. Thus is the body not
perceived as sick by both your minds, from separate points of view.
Uniting with a brother's mind prevents the cause of sickness and
perceived effects. Healing is the effect of minds which join, as
sickness comes from minds which separate.
30
The miracle does nothing just because the minds are joined and
cannot separate. Yet in the dreaming has this been reversed, and
separate minds are seen as bodies which are separated and which cannot
join. Do not allow your brother to be sick, for if he is, have you
abandoned him to his own dream by sharing it with him. He has not seen
the cause of sickness where it is, and you have overlooked the gap
between you, where the sickness has been bred. Thus are you joined
in sickness, to preserve the little gap unhealed, where sickness is kept
carefully protected, cherished, and upheld by firm belief, lest God
should come to bridge the little gap that leads to Him. Fight not His
coming with illusions, for it is His coming that you want above all
things that seem to glisten in the dream.
31
The end of dreaming is the end of fear, and love was never in the world
of dreams. The gap is little. Yet it holds the seeds of
pestilence and every form of ill because it is a wish to keep apart and
not to join. And thus it seems to give a cause to sickness which is not
its cause. The purpose of the gap is all the cause that sickness
has. For it was made to keep you separated in a body which you see as if
it were the cause of pain.
32
The cause of pain is separation, not the body, which is only its effect.
Yet separation is but empty space, enclosing nothing, doing nothing, and
as unsubstantial as the empty place between the ripples that a ship has
made in passing by. And covered just as fast, as water rushes in to
close the gap and as the waves in joining cover it. Where is the gap
between the waves when they have joined and covered up the space which
seemed to keep them separate for a little while? Where are the grounds
for sickness when the minds have joined to close the little gap between
them where the seeds of sickness seemed to grow?
33
God builds the bridge, but only in the space left clean and vacant by
the miracle. The seeds of sickness and the shame of guilt He cannot
bridge, for He cannot destroy the alien will that He created not. Let
its effects be gone and clutch them not with eager hands, to keep them
for yourself. The miracle will brush them all aside and thus make room
for Him Who wills to come and bridge His Son's returning to Himself.
34
Count, then, the silver miracles and golden dreams of happiness as all
the treasures you would keep within the storehouse of the world. The
door is open, not to thieves but to your starving brothers who mistook
for gold the shining of a pebble and who stored a heap of snow that
shone like silver. They have nothing left behind the open door. What is
the world except a little gap perceived to tear eternity apart and break
it into days and months and years? And what are you who live within the
world except a picture of the Son of God in broken pieces, each
concealed within a separate and uncertain bit of clay?
35
Be not afraid, but let your world be lit by miracles. And where the gap
was seen to stand between you, join your brother there. And sickness
will be seen without a cause. The dream of healing in
forgiveness lies and gently shows you that you never sinned. The miracle
would leave no proof of guilt to bring you witness to what never was.
And in your storehouse it will make a place of welcome for your Father
and your Self. The door is open that all those may come who would no
longer starve and would enjoy the feast of plenty set before them there.
And they will meet with your invited Guests the miracle has asked to
come to you.
36
This is a feast unlike indeed to those the dreaming of the world has
shown. For here, the more that anyone receives, the more is left for all
the rest to share. The Guests have brought unlimited supply with Them.
And no one is deprived or can deprive. Here is a feast the Father lays
before His Son and shares it equally with him. And in Their sharing
there can be no gap in which abundance falters and grows thin.
Here can the lean years enter not, for time waits not upon this feast,
which has no end. For Love has set Its table in the space that seemed to
keep your Guests apart from you.
37
Accepting the Atonement for yourself means not to give support to
someone's dream of sickness and of death. It means that you share not
his wish to separate and let him turn illusions on himself. Nor do you
wish that they be turned instead on you. Thus have they no
effects. And you are free of dreams of pain because you let him be.
Unless you help him, you will suffer pain with him because that is your
wish. And you become a figure in his dream of pain, as he in yours. So
do you both become illusions and without identity. You could be anyone
or anything, depending on whose evil dream you share. You can be sure of
just one thing—that you are evil, for you share in dreams of fear.
38
There is a way of finding certainty right here and now.
Refuse to be a part of fearful dreams whatever form they take, for you will
lose identity in them. You find yourself by not accepting them
as causing you and giving you effects. You stand apart from them but not
apart from him who dreams them. Thus you separate the dreamer from the
dream and join in one but let the other go. The dream is but
illusion in the mind. And with the mind you would unite, but never
with the dream. It is the dream you fear and not the mind. You
see them as the same because you think that you are but a dream.
And what is real and what is but illusion in yourself you do not know
and cannot tell apart.
39
Like you, your brother thinks he is a dream. Share not in his illusion
of himself, for your identity depends on his reality. Think rather of
him as a mind in which illusions still persist, but as a mind which
brother is to you. He is not brother made by what he dreams, nor is his
body, "hero" of the dream, your brother. It is his reality that
is your brother, as is yours to him. Your mind and his are joined in
brotherhood. His body and his dreams but seem to make a little gap,
where yours have joined with his.
40
And yet, between your minds there is no gap. To join his dreams
is thus to meet him not because his dreams would separate from you.
Therefore, release him, merely by your claim on brotherhood and not on
dreams of fear. Let him acknowledge who he is by not supporting his
illusions by your faith, for if you do, you will have faith in yours.
With faith in yours, he will not be released, and you
are kept in bondage to his dream. And dreams of fear will haunt the
little gap, inhabited but by illusions which you have supported in each
other's minds.
41
Be certain, if you do your part, he will do his, for he will join you
where you stand. Call not to him to meet you in the gap between you, or
you must believe that it is your reality as well as his. You cannot
do his part, but this you do when you become a passive figure in
his dream instead of dreamer of your own. Identity in dreams is
meaningless because the dreamer and the dream are one. Who shares
a dream must be the dream he shares because by sharing is a
cause produced.
42
You share confusion and you are confused, for in the gap no
stable self exists. What is the same seems different because what is the
same appears to be unlike. His dreams are yours because you let
them be. But if you took your own away would he be free of them and of
his own as well. Your dreams are witnesses to his, and his attest the
truth of yours. Yet if you see there is no truth in yours, his
dreams will [disappear before his eyes], and he will understand what made
the dream.
43
The Holy Spirit is in both your minds, and He is One because
there is no gap that separates His Oneness from Itself. The gap between
your bodies matters not, for what is joined in Him is always
one. No one is sick if someone else accepts his union with him. His
desire to be a sick and separated mind can not remain without a witness
or a cause. And both are gone if someone wills to be united with
him. He has dreams that he was separated from his brother who, by
sharing not his dream, has left the space between them vacant. And the
Father comes to join His Son the Holy Spirit joined.
44
The Holy Spirit's function is to take the broken picture of the Son of
God and put the pieces into place again. This holy picture, healed
entirely, does He hold out to every separate piece that thinks it is a
picture in itself. To each he offers his identity, which the whole
picture represents, instead of just a little broken bit which he
insisted was himself. And when he sees this picture, he will
recognize himself. If you share not your brother's evil dream, this is
the picture that the miracle will place within the little gap, left
clean of all the seeds of sickness and of sin. And here the Father will
receive His Son, because His Son was gracious to himself.
45
I thank you, Father, knowing you will come to close each little gap that
lies between the broken pieces of Your holy Son. Your holiness, complete
and perfect, lies in every one of them. And they are joined
because what is in one is in them all. How holy is the smallest grain of
sand when it is recognized as being part of the completed picture of
God's Son! The forms the broken pieces seem to take mean nothing. For
the whole is in each one. And every aspect of the Son of God is just the
same as every other part.
46
Join not your brother's dreams but join with him, and where you
join His Son, the Father is. Who seeks for substitutes when he perceives
he has lost nothing? Who would want to have the "benefits" of
sickness when he has received the simple happiness of health? What God
has given cannot be a loss, and what is not of Him has no
effects. What then would you perceive within the gap? The seeds of
sickness come from the belief that there is joy in separation,
and its giving up would be a sacrifice. But miracles are the
result when you do not insist on seeing in the gap what is not there.
Your willingness to let illusions go is all the Healer of God's
Son requires. He will place the miracle of healing where the seeds of
sickness were. And there will be no loss, but only gain.
47
What is a sense of sickness but a sense of limitation? Of a splitting off
and separating from? A gap perceived between yourselves and what
is seen as health? The good is seen outside; the evil, in. And thus is
sickness separating off the self from good and keeping evil in. God is
the alternate to dreams of fear. Who shares in them can never
share in Him. But who withdraws his mind from sharing them is
sharing Him. There is no other choice. Except you share it, nothing can
exist. And you exist because God shared His Will with you, that
His creation might create.
48
It is the sharing of the evil dreams of hate and malice,
bitterness and death, of sin and suffering and pain and loss, that makes
them real. Unshared, they are perceived as meaningless. The fear is gone
from them because you did not give them your support. Where fear has
gone, there love must come because there are but these
alternatives. Where one appears, the other disappears. And which you
share becomes the only one you have. You have the one which you accept,
because it is the only one you wish to have. You share no evil
dreams if you forgive the dreamer and perceive that he is not the dream
he made. And so he cannot be a part of yours, from which you both
are free. Forgiveness separates the dreamer from the evil dream and thus
releases him.
49
Remember if you share an evil dream, you will believe you are
the dream you share. And fearing it, you will not want to know
your own Identity because you think that it is fearful. And you
will deny your Self and walk upon an alien ground which your
Creator did not make and where you seem to be a something you are not.
You will make war upon your Self, which seems to be your enemy,
and will attack your brother as a part of what you hate. There is
no compromise. You are your Self or an illusion. What can be between
illusion and the truth? A middle ground where you can be a thing that is
not you must be a dream and cannot be the truth.
50
You have conceived a little gap between illusions and the truth to be
the place where all your safety lies and where your Self is safely
hidden by what you have made. Here is a world established that is sick,
and this the world the body's eyes perceive. Here are the sounds it
hears—the voices which its ears were made to hear. Yet sights and sounds
the body can perceive are meaningless. It cannot see nor hear. It does
not know what seeing is, what listening is for. It is as
little able to perceive as it can judge or understand or know. Its eyes
are blind; its ears are deaf. It cannot think, and so it cannot have
effects.
51
What is there God created to be sick? And what that He created not can
be? Let not your eyes behold a dream, your ears bear witness to
illusion. They were made to look upon a world that is not there, to hear
the voices that can make no sound. Yet are there other sounds and other
sights which can be seen and heard and understood. For eyes and
ears are senses without sense, and what they see and hear they but
report. It is not they that hear and see, but you, who put
together every jagged piece, each senseless scrap and shred of evidence,
and make a witness to the world you want. Let not the body's ears and
eyes perceive these countless fragments seen within the gap which you
imagined, and let them persuade their maker his imaginings are real.
52
Creation proves reality because it shares the function all creation
shares. It is not made of little bits of glass, a piece of wood, a
thread or two perhaps, all put together to attest its truth. Reality
does not depend on this. There is no gap which separates the
truth from dreams and from illusions. Truth has left no room for them in
any place or time. For it fills every place and every time and makes
them wholly indivisible.
53
You who believe there is a little gap between you, do not
understand that it is here that you are kept as prisoners in a world
perceived to be existing here. The world you see does not exist because
the place where you perceive it is not real. The gap is carefully
concealed in fog, and misty pictures rise to cover it with vague,
uncertain forms and changing shapes, forever unsubstantial and unsure.
Yet in the gap is nothing. And there are no awesome
secrets and no darkened tombs where terror rises from the bones of
death. Look at the little gap, and you behold the innocence and
emptiness of sin that you will see within yourself when you have lost
the fear of recognizing love.
54
Who punishes the body is insane. For here the little gap is seen, and
yet it is not here. It has not judged itself nor made itself to be what
it is not. It does not seek to make of pain a joy and look for lasting
pleasure in the dust. It does not tell you what its purpose is and
cannot understand what it is for. It does not victimize because it has
no will, no preferences, and no doubts. It does not wonder what it is.
And so it has no need to be competitive. It can be victimized
but cannot feel itself as victim. It accepts no role but does
what it is told, without attack.
55
It is indeed a senseless point of view to hold responsible for sight a
thing that cannot see and blame it for the sounds you do not like,
although it cannot hear. It suffers not the punishment you give because
it has no feeling. It behaves in ways you want but never makes the
choice. It is not born and does not die. It can but follow aimlessly the
path on which it has been set. And if that path is changed, it walks as
easily another way. It takes no sides and judges not the road it
travels. It perceives no gap because it does not hate. It can be used
for hate, but it cannot be hateful made thereby.
56
The thing you hate and fear and loathe and want, the body does
not know. You send it forth to seek for separation and to be a separate
thing. And then you hate it, not for what it is, but for the
uses you have made of it. You shrink from what it sees and what it hears
and hate its frailty and littleness. And you despise its acts but not
your own. It sees and acts for you. It hears your voice.
And it is frail and little by your wish. It seems to punish you
and thus deserve your hatred for the limitations which it brings to you.
Yet you have made of it a symbol for the limitations which you want your
mind to have and see and keep.
57
The body represents the gap between the little bit of mind you
call your own and all the rest of what is really yours. You hate
it, yet you think it is your self and that without it would your
self be lost. This is the secret vow which you have made with every
brother who would walk apart. This is the secret oath you take again,
whenever you perceive yourself attacked. No one can suffer if he does
not see himself attacked and losing by attack. Unstated and
unheard in consciousness is every pledge to sickness. Yet it is a
promise to another to be hurt by him and to attack him in return.
58
Sickness is anger taken out upon the body, so that it will
suffer pain. It is the obvious effect of what was made in secret, in
agreement with another's secret wish to be apart from you, as you would
be apart from him. Unless you both agree that is your wish, it
can have no effects. Whoever says, "There is no gap between my
mind and yours" has kept God's promise, not his tiny oath to be forever
faithful unto death. And by his healing is his brother healed.
59
Let this be your agreement with each one—that you be one with him and
not apart. And he will keep the promise that you make with him because
it is the one which he has made to God, as God has made to him. God
keeps His promises; His Son keeps his. In his creation did his Father
say, "You are beloved of Me and I of you forever. Be you perfect as
Myself, for you can never be apart from Me." His Son remembers not that
he replied "I will," though in that promise he was born. Yet God reminds
him of it every time he does not share a promise to be sick but lets his
mind be healed and unified. His secret vows are powerless before the
Will of God, Whose promises he shares. And what he substitutes is not
his will, who has made promise of himself to God.
60
God asks for nothing, and His Son, like Him, need ask for nothing. For
there is no lack in him. An empty space, a little gap, would be a lack.
And it is only there that he could want for something he has not. A
space where God is not, a gap between the Father and the Son is not the
Will of either, who have promised to be one. God's promise is a promise
to Himself, and there is no one who could be untrue to what He
wills as part of what He is. The promise that there is no gap
between Himself and what He is cannot be false. What will can come
between what must be one, and in Whose wholeness there can be
no gap?
61
The beautiful relationship you have with all your brothers is a part of
you because it is a part of God Himself. Are you not sick if you deny
yourself your wholeness and your health, the Source of help, the Call to
healing, and the Call to heal? Your savior waits for healing, and the
world waits with him. Nor are you apart from it. For healing will be one
or not at all, its oneness being where the healing lies. What could
correct for separation but its opposite? There is no middle ground in
any aspect of salvation. You accept it wholly or accept it not. What is
unseparated must be joined. And what is joined cannot be separate.
62
Either there is a gap between you and your brother, or you are
as one. There is no in between, no other choice, and no allegiance to be
split between the two. A split allegiance is but faithlessness to both
and merely sets you spinning round, to grasp uncertainly at any straw
that seems to hold some promise of relief. Yet who can build his home
upon a straw and count on it as shelter from the wind? The body can be
made a home like this because it lacks foundation in the truth. And yet,
because it does, it can be seen as not your home but
merely as an aid to help you reach the home where God abides.
63
With this as purpose is the body healed. It is not used
to witness to the dream of separation and disease. Nor is it idly blamed
for what it did not do. It serves to help the healing of God's Son, and
for this purpose it cannot be sick. It will not join a
purpose not your own, and you have chosen that it not be sick.
All miracles are based upon this choice and given you the instant it is
made. No forms of sickness are immune because the choice cannot be made
in terms of form. The choice of sickness seems to be a form, yet
it is one, as is its opposite. And you are sick or well
accordingly.
64
But never you alone. This world is but the dream that you can be
alone and think without affecting those apart from you. To be alone must
mean you are apart, and if you are, you cannot but be sick. This
seems to prove that you must be apart. Yet all it means is that you
tried to keep a promise to be true to faithlessness. Yet faithlessness is
sickness. It is like the house set upon straw. It seems to be quite
solid and substantial in itself. Yet its stability cannot be judged
apart from its foundation. If it rests on straw, there is no need to bar
the door and lock the windows and make fast the bolts. The wind will
topple it, and rain will come and carry it into oblivion.
65
What is the sense in seeking to be safe in what was made for
danger and for fear? Why burden it with further locks and chains and
heavy anchors when its weakness lies not in itself but in the frailty of
the little gap of nothingness whereon it stands? What can be
safe which rests upon a shadow? Would you build your home upon what will
collapse beneath a feather's weight?
66
Your home is built upon your brother's health, upon his happiness, his
sinlessness, and everything his Father promised him. No secret promise
you have made instead has shaken the Foundation of his home. The winds
will blow upon it, and the rain will beat against it but with no effect.
The world will wash away, and yet this house will stand forever, for its
strength lies not within itself alone. It is an ark of safety, resting
on God's promise that His Son is safe forever in Himself. What gap can
interpose itself between the safety of this shelter and its Source? From
here the body can be seen as what it is and neither less nor more in
worth than the extent to which it can be used to liberate God's Son unto
his home. And with this holy purpose is it made a home of holiness a
little while because it shares your Father's Will with you.
1
There is no time, no place, no state where God is absent. There is
nothing to be feared. There is no way in which a gap could be conceived
of in the wholeness that is His. The compromise the least and littlest
gap would represent in His eternal love is quite impossible. For it
would mean His love could harbor just a hint of hate; His gentleness
turn sometimes to attack; and His eternal patience sometimes fail. All
this do you believe, when you perceive a gap between your brother and
yourself. How could you trust Him, then? For He must be deceptive in His
Love. Be wary, then; let Him not come too close, and leave a gap between
you and His love through which you can escape if there be need for you
to flee.
2
Here is the fear of God most plainly seen. For love is
treacherous to those who fear, since fear and hate can never be apart.
No one who hates but is afraid of love and therefore must he be
afraid of God. Certain it is he knows not what love means. He fears to
love and loves to hate, and so he thinks that love is fearful—hate is
love. This is the consequence the little gap must bring to those who
cherish it and think that it is their salvation and their hope.
3
The fear of God! The greatest obstacle that peace must flow across has
not yet gone. The rest are past, but this one still remains to block
your path and make the way to light seem dark and fearful, perilous and
bleak. You had decided that your brother is your enemy. Sometimes a
friend, perhaps, provided that your separate interests made your
friendship possible a little while. But not without a gap between you,
lest he turn again into an enemy. [Let him come close to you, and you
jumped back; as you approached, he instantly withdrew.] A cautious
friendship, limited in scope and carefully restricted in amount, became
the treaty you had made with him. You shared a qualified entente in
which a clause of separation was a point on which you both agreed to
keep intact. And violating this was thought to be a breach of treaty not
to be allowed.
4
The gap between you is not one of space between two separate bodies.
This but seems to be dividing off your separate minds. It is the symbol
of a promise made to meet when you prefer and separate until you both
elect to meet again. And then your bodies seem to get in touch and
signify a meeting-place to join. But always is it possible to go your
separate ways. Conditional upon the "right" to separate will you agree
to meet from time to time and keep apart in intervals of separation,
which protect you from the "sacrifice" of love. The body saves
you, for it gets away from total sacrifice and gives you time in which
to build again your separate selves, which you believe diminish as you
meet.
5
The body could not separate your minds unless you wanted it to
be a cause of separation and of distance seen between you. Thus do you
endow it with a power that lies not within itself. And herein lies its
power over you. For now you think that it determines when you
meet and limits your ability to make communion with each other's mind.
And now it tells you where to go and how to go there, what is feasible
for you to undertake, and what you cannot do. It dictates what its
health can tolerate and what will tire it and make it sick. And its
"inherent" weaknesses set up the limitations on what you would do and
keep your purpose limited and weak.
6
The body will accommodate to this if you would have it so. It
will allow but limited indulgences in "love," with intervals of hatred
in between. And it will take command of when to "love" and when to
shrink more safely into fear. It will be sick because you do not know
what loving means. And so you must misuse each circumstance and
everyone you meet and see in them a purpose not your own.
7
It is not love that asks a sacrifice. But fear demands the
sacrifice of love, for in love's presence fear cannot abide. For hate to
be maintained love must be feared and only sometimes present,
sometimes gone. Thus is love seen as treacherous because it seems to
come and go uncertainly and offer no stability to you. You do not see
how limited and weak is your allegiance and how frequently you have
demanded that love go away and leave you quietly alone in "peace."
8
The body, innocent of any goal, is your excuse for variable goals you
hold and force the body to maintain. You do not fear its weakness, but
its lack of strength or weakness. Would you recognize that
nothing stands between you? Would you know there is no gap
behind which you can hide? There is a shock that comes to those who
learn their savior is their enemy no more. There is a wariness that is
aroused by learning that the body is not real. And there are overtones
of seeming fear around the happy message, "God is love."
9
Yet all that happens when the gap is gone is peace eternal. Nothing more
than that, and nothing less. Without the fear of God, what could induce
you to abandon Him? What toys or trinkets in the gap could serve to hold
you back an instant from His love? Would you allow the body to say "no"
to Heaven's calling, were you not afraid to find a loss of self in
finding God? Yet can your Self be lost by being found?
10
Why would you not perceive it as release from suffering to learn that
you are free? Why would you not acclaim the truth, instead of looking on
it as an enemy? Why does an easy path, so clearly marked it is
impossible to lose the way, seem thorny, rough, and far too difficult
for you to follow? Is it not because you see it as the road to hell
instead of looking on it as a simple way, without a sacrifice or any
loss, to find yourself in Heaven and in God? Until you realize you give
up nothing, until you understand there is no loss, you will have
some regrets about the way that you have chosen. And you will not see
the many gains your choice has offered you. Yet though you do not see
them, they are there. Their cause has been effected, and they
must be present where their cause has entered in.
11
You have accepted healing's Cause, and so it must be you are healed. And
being healed, the power to heal must also now be yours. The miracle is
not a separate thing which happens suddenly, as an effect without a
cause. Nor is it in itself a cause. But where its cause is must it be.
Now is it caused, though not as yet perceived. And its effects are
there, though not yet seen. Look inward now, and you will not behold a
reason for regret but cause indeed for glad rejoicing and for hope of
peace.
12
It has been hopeless to attempt to find the hope of peace upon a
battleground. It has been futile to demand escape from sin and
pain of what was made to serve the function of retaining sin and
pain. For pain and sin are one illusion, as are hate and fear, attack
and guilt but one. Where they are causeless, their effects are gone, and
love must come wherever they are not. Why are you not rejoicing? You are
free of pain and sickness, misery and loss, and all effects of hatred
and attack. No more is pain your friend and guilt your god, and you
should welcome the effects of love.
13
Your Guest has come. You asked Him, and He came. You did not
hear Him enter, for you did not wholly welcome Him. And yet His gifts
came with Him. He has laid them at your feet and asks you now that you
will look on them and take them for your own. He needs your help
in giving them to all who walk apart believing they are separate and
alone. They will be healed when you accept your gifts, because your
Guest will welcome everyone whose feet have touched the holy ground
whereon you stand and where His gifts for them are laid.
14
You do not see how much you now can give because of everything you have
received. Yet He Who entered in but waits for you to come where
you invited Him to be. There is no other place where He can find His
host nor where His host can meet with Him. And nowhere else His gifts of
peace and joy and all the happiness His Presence brings can be obtained.
For they are where He is Who brought them with Him that they might be
yours. You cannot see your Guest, but you can see the gifts He
brought. And when you look on them, you will believe His Presence must
be there. For what you now can do could not be done without the love and
grace His Presence holds.
15
Such is the promise of the living God—His Son have life and every living
thing be part of him, and nothing else have life. What you have
given "life" is not alive and symbolizes but your wish to be alive apart
from life, alive in death, with death perceived as life, and living,
death. Confusion follows on confusion here, for on confusion has this
world been based, and there is nothing else it rests upon. Its basis
does not change, although it seems to be in constant change. Yet what is
that except the state confusion really means? Stability to those who are
confused is meaningless, and shift and change become the law on which
they predicate their lives.
16
The body does not change. It represents the larger dream that change is
possible. To change is to attain a state unlike the one in which you
found yourself before. There is no change in immortality, and
Heaven knows it not. Yet here on earth it has a double purpose, for it
can be made to teach opposing things. And they reflect the teacher who
is teaching them. The body can appear to change with time, with
sickness or with health, and with events that seem to alter it. Yet this
but means the mind remains unchanged in its belief of what the purpose
of the body is.
17
Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not. Its nothingness
is guarantee that it can not be sick. In your demand
that it be more than this lies the idea of sickness. For it asks that
God be less than all He really is. What, then, becomes of you, for it is
you of whom the sacrifice is asked? For He is told that part of Him
belongs to Him no longer. He must sacrifice your self, and in His
sacrifice are you made more, and He is lessened by the loss of you. And
what is gone from Him becomes your god, protecting you from being part
of Him.
18
The body that is asked to be a god will be attacked because its
nothingness has not been recognized. And so it seems to be a thing with
power in itself. As something, it can be perceived and thought to feel
and act and hold you in its grasp as prisoner to itself. And it can fail
to be what you demanded that it be. And you will hate it for its
littleness, unmindful that the failure does not lie in that it is not
more than it should be but only in your failure to perceive that it is
nothing. Yet its nothingness is your salvation, from which you would
flee.
19
As "something" is the body asked to be God's enemy, replacing what He is
with littleness and limit and despair. It is His loss you celebrate when
you behold the body as a thing you love, or look upon it as a thing you
hate. For if He be the sum of everything, then what is not in Him does
not exist, and His completion is its nothingness. Your savior is
not dead, nor does he dwell in what was built as temple unto death. He
lives in God, and it is this that makes him savior unto you, and only
this. His body's nothingness releases yours from sickness and from
death. For what is yours cannot be more nor less than what is his.
20
Condemn your savior not because he thinks he is a body. For beyond his
dreams is his reality. But he must learn he is a savior first, before he
can remember what he is. And he must save who would be saved. On saving
you depends his happiness. For who is savior but the one who gives
salvation? Thus he learns it must be his to give. Unless he gives, he
will not know he has, for giving is the proof of having. Only
those who think that God is lessened by their strength could fail to
understand this must be so. For who could give unless he has,
and who could lose by giving what must be increased thereby?
21
Think you the Father lost Himself when He created you? Was He made weak
because He shared His love? Was He made incomplete by your perfection?
Or are you the proof that He is perfect and complete? Deny Him
not His witness in the dream His Son prefers to his reality. He must be
savior from the dream he made, that he be free of it. He must
see someone else as not a body, one with him, without the wall
the world has built to keep apart all living things who know not that
they live. Within the dream of bodies and of death is yet one theme of
truth—no more, perhaps, than just a tiny spark, a space of light created
in the dark, where God still shines.
22
You cannot wake yourself. Yet you can let yourself be wakened.
You can overlook your brother's dreams. So perfectly can you forgive him
his illusions, he becomes your savior from your dreams. And as you see
him shining in the space of light where God abides within the darkness,
you will see that God Himself is where his body is. Before this light
the body disappears, as heavy shadows must give way to light. The
darkness cannot choose that it remain. The coming of the light means
it is gone. In glory will you see your brother then and understand what
really fills the gap so long perceived as keeping you apart.
23
There, in its place, God's Witness has set forth the gentle way of
kindness to God's Son. Whom you forgive is given power to forgive you
your illusions. By your gift of freedom is it given unto you. Make way
for love, which you did not create, but which you can extend. On
earth this means forgive your brother, that the darkness may be lifted
from your mind. When light has come to him through your forgiveness, he
will not forget his savior, leaving him unsaved. For it was in your
face he saw the light that he would keep beside him as he walks through
darkness to the everlasting light.
24
How holy are you, that the Son of God can be your savior in the midst of
dreams of desolation and disaster. See how eagerly he comes and steps
aside from heavy shadows that have hidden him and shines on you in
gratitude and love. He is himself, but not himself alone. And as his
Father lost not part of Him in your creation, so the light in him is
brighter still because you gave your light to him to save him from the
dark. And now the light in you must be as bright as shines in him. This
is the spark that shines within the dream—that you can help him waken
and be sure his waking eyes will rest on you. And in his glad salvation,
you are saved.
25
Do you believe that truth can be but some illusions? They are
dreams because they are not true. Their equal lack of truth
becomes the basis for the miracle, which means that you have understood
that dreams are dreams and that escape depends not on the dream, but
only on awaking. Could it be some dreams are kept and others wakened
from? The choice is not between which dreams to keep, but only if you
want to live in dreams or to awaken from them. Thus it is the miracle
does not select some dreams to leave untouched by its beneficence. You
cannot dream some dreams and wake from some, for you are either sleeping
or awake. And dreaming goes with only one of these.
26
The dreams you think you like would hold you back as much as those in
which the fear is seen. For every dream is but a dream of fear,
no matter what the form it seems to take. The fear is seen within,
without, or both. Or it can be disguised in pleasant form. But never is
it absent from the dream, for fear is the material of dreams from which
they all are made. Their form can change, but they cannot be made of
something else. The miracle were treacherous indeed if it allowed you
still to be afraid because you did not recognize the fear. You
would not then be willing to awake, for which the miracle prepares the
way.
27
In simplest form it can be said attack is a response to function
unfulfilled as you perceive the function. It can be in you or
someone else, but where it is perceived, it will be there it is
attacked. Depression or assault must be the theme of every dream, for
they are made of fear. The thin disguise of pleasure and of joy in which
they may be wrapped but slightly veils the heavy lump of fear which is
their core. And it is this the miracle perceives, and not the
wrappings in which it is bound.
28
When you are angry, is it not because someone has failed to fill the
function you allotted him? And does not this become the "reason"
your attack is justified? The dreams you think you like are those in
which the functions you have given have been filled, the needs which you
ascribe to you are met. It does not matter if they be fulfilled or
merely wanted. It is the idea that they exist from which the
fears arise. Dreams are not wanted more or less. They are desired or
not. And each one represents some function which you have assigned, some
goal which an event, or body, or a thing should represent and should
achieve for you. If it succeeds, you think you like the dream. If it
should fail, you think the dream is sad. But whether it succeeds or
fails is not its core but just the flimsy covering.
29
How happy would your dreams become if you were not the one who
gave the "proper" role to every figure which the dream contains. No one
can fail but your idea of him, and there is no betrayal but
of this. The core of dreams the Holy Spirit gives is never one
of fear. The coverings may not appear to change, but what they mean has
changed because they cover something else. Perceptions are determined by
their purpose in that they seem to be what they are for.
A shadow figure who attacks becomes a brother giving you a chance to
help if this becomes the function of the dream. And dreams of sadness
thus are turned to joy.
30
What is your brother for? You do not know because your
function is obscure to you. Do not ascribe a role to him which you
imagine would bring happiness to you. And do not try to hurt him when he
fails to take the part which you assigned to him in what you dream your
life was meant to be. He asks for help in every dream he has, and you
have help to give him if you see the function of the dream as He
perceives its function, Who can utilize all dreams as means to serve the
function given Him. Because He loves the dreamer not the dream, each
dream becomes an offering of love. For at its center is His love for
you, which lights whatever form it takes with love.
31
There is a place in you where this whole world has been forgotten, where
no memory of sin and of illusion lingers still. There is a place in you
which time has left, and echoes of eternity are heard. There is a
resting place so still no sound except a hymn to Heaven rises up to
gladden God the Father and the Son. Where both abide are They
remembered, both. And where They are is Heaven and is peace. Think not
that you can change Their dwelling place. For your Identity abides in
Them, and where They are, forever must you be.
32
The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in
this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen. The still infinity of
endless peace surrounds you gently in its soft embrace, so strong and
quiet, tranquil in the might of its Creator; nothing can intrude upon
the sacred Son of God within. Here is the role the Holy Spirit gives to
you who wait upon the Son of God and would behold him waken and be glad.
He is a part of you, and you of him because he is his Father's Son and
not for any purpose you may see in him. Nothing is asked of you but to
accept the changeless and eternal that abide in him, for your Identity
is there. The peace in you can but be found in him. And every thought of
love you offer him but brings you nearer to your wakening to peace
eternal and to endless joy.
33
This sacred Son of God is like yourself—the mirror of his Father's love
for you, the soft reminder of his Father's love by which he was created
and which still abides in him, as it abides in you. Be very still and
hear God's Voice in him and let It tell you what his function is. He was
created that you might be whole, for only the complete can be a part of
God's completion, Which created you.
34
There is no gift the Father asks of you but that you see in all creation
but the shining glory of His gift to you. Behold His Son, His perfect
gift in whom his Father shines forever and to whom is all creation given
as his own. Because he has it is it given you, and where it lies in him,
behold your peace. The quiet that surrounds you dwells in him, and from
this quiet come the happy dreams in which your hands are joined in
innocence. These are not hands that grasp in dreams of pain. They hold
no sword, for they have left their hold on every vain illusion of the
world. And being empty, they received instead a brother's hand in which
completion lay.
35
If you but knew the glorious goal that lies beyond forgiveness, you
would not keep hold on any thought, however light the touch of evil on
it may appear to be. For you would understand how great the cost of
holding anything God did not give in minds that can direct the hand to
bless and lead God's Son unto his Father's house. Would you not want
to be a friend to him, created by his Father as His home? If God esteems
him worthy of Himself, would you attack him with the hands of
hate? Who would lay bloody hands on Heaven itself and hope to find its
peace? Your brother thinks he holds the hand of death. Believe him not.
But learn instead how blessed are you who can release him just by
offering him yours.
36
A dream is given you in which he is your savior, not your enemy in hate.
A dream is given you in which you have forgiven him for all his dreams
of death—a dream of hope you share with him instead of dreaming evil
separate dreams of hate. Why does it seem so hard to share this dream?
Because unless the Holy Spirit gives the dream its function, it was made
for hate and will continue in death's services. Each form it takes in
some way calls for death. And those who serve the lord of death have
come to worship in a separated world, each with his tiny spear and
rusted sword to keep his ancient promises to die.
37
Such is the core of fear in every dream that has been kept apart from
use by Him Who sees a different function for a dream. When dreams are
shared, they lose the function of attack and separation, even though it
was for this that every dream was made. Yet nothing in the world of
dreams remains without the hope of change and betterment, for here is
not where changelessness is found. Let us be glad indeed that this is so
and seek not the eternal in this world. Forgiving dreams are means to
step aside from dreaming of a world outside yourself. And leading
finally beyond all dreams unto the peace of everlasting life.
38
How willing are you to forgive your brother? How much do you desire
peace instead of endless strife and misery and pain? These questions are
the same in different form. Forgiveness is your peace, for
herein lies the end of separation and the dream of danger and
destruction, sin, and death; of madness and of murder, grief and loss.
This is the "sacrifice" salvation asks and gladly offers peace instead
of this.
39
Swear not to die, you holy Son of God! You make a bargain that you
cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot be killed. He is immortal as his
Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the
universe that must be one. What seems eternal all will have an
end. The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All
things that come and go, the tides, the seasons, and the lives of men;
all things that change with time and bloom and fade will not return.
Where time has set an end is not where the eternal is. God's Son can
never change by what men made of him. He will be as he was and as he is,
for time appointed not his destiny nor set the hour of his birth and
death. Forgiveness will not change him. Yet time waits upon forgiveness
that the things of time may disappear because they have no use.
40
Nothing survives its purpose. If it be conceived to die, then die it
must unless it does not take this purpose as its own. Change is the only
thing that can be made a blessing here, where purpose is not fixed,
however changeless it appears to be. Think not that you can set a goal
unlike God's purpose for you and establish it as changeless and eternal.
You can give yourself a purpose that you do not have. But you can
not remove the power to change your mind and see another purpose
there. Change is the greatest gift God gave to all that you would make
eternal, to ensure that only Heaven would not pass away.
41
You were not born to die. You cannot change, because your function has
been fixed by God. All other goals are set in time and change that time
might be preserved, excepting one. Forgiveness does not aim at
keeping time but at its ending when it has no use. Its purpose ended; it
is gone. And where it once held seeming sway is now restored the
function God established for His Son in full awareness. Time can set no
end to its fulfillment nor its changelessness. There is no death because
the living share the function their Creator gave to them. Life's
function cannot be to die. It must be life's extension, that it be as
one forever and forever without end.
42
This world will bind your feet and tie your hands and kill your body
only if you think that it was made to crucify God's Son. For even though
it was a dream of death, you need not let it stand for this to you. Let
this be changed, and nothing in the world but must be changed as
well. For nothing here but is defined as what you see it for. How lovely
is the world whose purpose is forgiveness of God's Son! How free from
fear, how filled with blessing and with happiness! And what a joyous
thing it is to dwell a little while in such a happy place! Nor can it be
forgot in such a world, it is a little while till timelessness
comes quietly to take the place of time.
43
Seek not outside yourself. For it will fail, and you will weep each time
an idol falls. Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be
no peace excepting there. Each idol that you worship when God calls will
never answer in His place. There is no other answer you can
substitute and find the happiness His answer brings. Seek not outside
yourself. For all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what
you want, insisting where it must be found. What if it is not there? Do
you prefer that you be right or happy? Be you glad that you are told
where happiness abides and seek no longer elsewhere. You will
fail. But it is given you to know the truth and not to seek for it
outside yourself.
44
No one who comes here but must still have hope, some lingering illusion,
or some dream that there is something outside of himself that will bring
happiness and peace to him. If everything is in him, this cannot be so.
And therefore by his coming, he denies the truth about himself and seeks
for something more than everything, as if a part of it were
separated off and found where all the rest of it is not. This is the
purpose he bestows upon the body—that it seek for what he lacks and give
him what would make himself complete. And thus he wanders aimlessly
about in search of something that he cannot find, believing that he is
what he is not.
45
The lingering illusion will impel him to seek out a thousand idols and
to seek beyond them for a thousand more. And each will fail him, all
excepting one; for he will die and does not understand the idol that he
seeks is but his death. Its form appears to be outside himself.
Yet does he seek to kill God's Son within and prove that he is victor
over him. This is the purpose every idol has, for this the role that is
assigned to it, and this the role that cannot be fulfilled.
46
Whenever you attempt to reach a goal in which the body's betterment is
cast as major beneficiary, you try to bring about your death. For you
believe that you can suffer lack, and lack is death. To
sacrifice is to give up and thus to be without and to have suffered
loss. And by this giving up is life renounced. Seek not outside
yourself. The search implies you are not whole within and fear to look
upon your devastation and prefer to seek outside yourself for what you
are.
47
Idols must fall because they have no life, and what is lifeless
is a sign of death. You came to die, and what would you expect
but to perceive the signs of death you seek? No sadness and no
suffering proclaims a message other than an idol found that represents a
parody of life which in its lifelessness is really death, conceived as
real and given living form. Yet each must fail and crumble and decay
because a form of death cannot be life, and what is sacrificed cannot be
whole.
48
All idols of this world were made to keep the truth within from being
known to you and to maintain allegiance to the dream that you must find
what is outside yourself to be complete and happy. It is vain to worship
idols in the hope of peace. God dwells within, and your completion lies
in Him. No idol takes His place. Look not to idols. Do not seek outside
yourself. Let us forget the purpose of the world the past has given it.
For otherwise, the future will be like the past and but a series
of depressing dreams in which all idols fail you one by one, and you see
death and disappointment everywhere.
49
To change all this and open up a road of hope and of release in what
appeared to be an endless circle of despair, you need but to decide you
do not know the purpose of the world. You give it goals it does
not have, and thus do you decide what it is for. You try to see in it a
place of idols found outside yourself, with power to make complete what
is within by splitting what you are between the two. You choose
your dreams, for they are what you wish, perceived as if it had been
given you. Your idols do what you would have them do and have the power
you ascribe to them. And you pursue them vainly in the dream because you
want their power as your own.
50
Yet where are dreams but in a mind asleep? And can a dream succeed in
making real the pictures it projects outside itself? Save time, my
brothers; learn what time is for. And speed the end of idols in
a world made sad and sick by seeing idols there. Your holy minds are
altars unto God, and where He is, no idols can abide. The fear of God is
but the fear of loss of idols. It is not the fear of loss of your
reality. But you have made of your reality an idol which you must
protect against the light of truth. And all the world becomes the means
by which this idol can be saved. Salvation thus appears to threaten life
and offer death.
51
It is not so. Salvation seeks to prove there is no death, and only
life exists. The sacrifice of death is nothing lost. An idol cannot
take the place of God. Let Him remind you of His love for you, and do
not seek to drown His Voice in chants of deep despair to idols of
yourself. Seek not outside your Father for your hope. For hope of
happiness is not despair.
52
What is an idol? Do you think you know? For idols are unrecognized as
such and never seen for what they really are. That is the only power
which they have. Their purpose is obscure, and they are feared
and worshipped both because you do not know what they are for
and why they have been made. An idol is an image of your brother which
you would value more than what he is. Idols are made that he may
be replaced, no matter what their form. And it is this which never is
perceived and recognized. Be it a body or a thing, a place, a situation
or a circumstance, an object owned or wanted, or a right demanded or
achieved, it is the same.
53
Let not their form deceive you. Idols are but substitutes for your
reality. In some way, you believe they will complete your little self
for safety in a world perceived as dangerous, with forces massed against
your confidence and peace of mind. They have the power to supply your
lacks and add the value which you do not have. No one believes in idols
who has not enslaved himself to littleness and loss. And thus must seek
beyond his little self for strength to raise his head and stand apart
from all the misery the world reflects. This is the penalty for looking
not within for certainty and quiet calm which liberates you from the
world and lets you stand apart in quiet and in peace.
54
An idol is a false impression or a false belief—some form of anti-Christ
which constitutes a gap between the Christ and what you see. An idol is
a wish made tangible and given form and thus perceived as real and seen
outside the mind. Yet it is still a thought and cannot leave the mind
that is its source. Nor is its form apart from the idea it represents.
All forms of anti-Christ oppose the Christ and fall before His face like
a dark veil which seems to shut you off from Him, alone in darkness. Yet
the light is there. A cloud does not put out the sun. No more a veil can
banish what it seems to separate nor darken by one whit the light
itself.
55
This world of idols is a veil across the face of Christ because
its purpose is to separate your brother from yourself. A dark
and fearful purpose, yet a thought without the power to change one blade
of grass from something living to a sign of death. Its form is nowhere,
for its source abides within your mind, where God abideth not. Where is
this place where what is everywhere has been excluded and been kept
apart? What hand could be held up to block God's way? Whose voice could
make demand He enter not? The "more-than-everything" is not a thing to
make you tremble and to quail in fear. Christ's enemy is nowhere. He can
take no form in which he ever will be real.
56
What is an idol? Nothing! It must be believed before it seems to come to
life and given power that it may be feared. Its life and power
are its believer's gift, and this is what the miracle restores to what has
life and power worthy of the gift of Heaven and eternal peace. The
miracle does not restore the truth, the light the veil between has not
put out. It merely lifts the veil and lets the truth shine
unencumbered, being what it is. It does not need belief to be itself,
for it has been created, so it is. An idol is established
by belief, and when it is withdrawn, the idol "dies."
57
This is the anti-Christ—the strange idea there is a power past
omnipotence, a place beyond the infinite, a time transcending the
eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and
place and time are given form and shape the world where the impossible
has happened. Here the deathless come to die, the all-encompassing to
suffer loss, the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the
changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things,
gives way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless and as
loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and
finally to die.
58
Where is an idol? Nowhere! Can there be a gap in what is infinite, a
place where time can interrupt eternity? A place of darkness set where
all is light, a dismal alcove separated off from what is endless, has
no place to be. An idol is beyond where God has set all things forever
and has left no room for anything to be except His Will. Nothing
and nowhere must an idol be while God is everything and everywhere.
59
What purpose has an idol, then? What is it for? This is the only
question which has many answers, each depending on the one of whom the
question has been asked. The world believes in idols. No one
comes unless he worshipped them and still attempts to seek for one that
yet might offer him a gift reality does not contain. Each worshiper of
idols harbors hope his special deities will give him more than other men
possess. It must be more. It does not really matter more of
what—more beauty, more intelligence, more wealth, or even more
affliction and more pain. But more of something is an idol for.
And when one fails, another takes its place with hope of finding more of
something else. Be not deceived by forms the "something" takes. An idol
is a means for getting more. And it is this that is
against God's Will.
60
God has not many sons, but only One. Who can have more, and who be given
less? In Heaven would the Son of God but laugh if idols could intrude
upon his peace. It is for him the Holy Spirit speaks and tells you idols
have no purpose here. For more than Heaven can you never have. If
Heaven is within, why would you seek for idols which would make of
Heaven less, to give you more than God bestowed upon your brother and on
you as one with Him? God gave you all there is. And to be sure
you could not lose it, did He also give the same to every living thing
as well. And thus is every living thing a part of you, as of
Himself. No idol can establish you as more than God. But you
will never be content with being less.
61
The slave of idols is a willing slave. For willing he must be to
let himself bow down in worship to what has no life and seek for power
in the powerless. What happened to the holy Son of God that this could
be his wish—to let himself fall lower than the stones upon the ground
and look to idols that they raise him up? Hear then your story in the
dream you made, and ask yourself if it be not the truth that you believe
that it is not a dream. A dream of judgment came into the mind
that God created perfect as Himself. And in that dream was Heaven
changed to hell, and God made enemy unto His Son.
62
How can God's Son awaken from the dream? It is a dream of judgment. So
must he judge not, and he will waken. For the dream will seem to
last while he is part of it. Judge not, for he who judges will
have need of idols which will hold the judgment off from resting on
himself. Nor can he know the Self he has condemned. Judge not, because
you make yourself a part of evil dreams where idols are your "true"
identity and your salvation from the judgment laid in terror and in
guilt upon yourself.
63
All figures in the dream are idols made to save you from the dream. Yet
they are part of what they have been made to save you from.
Thus does an idol keep the dream alive and terrible, for who
could wish for one unless he were in terror and despair? And this the
idol represents, and so its worship is the worship of despair
and terror and the dream from which they come. Judgment is an injustice
to God's Son, and it is justice that who judges him will not
escape the penalty he laid upon himself within the dream he made. God
knows of justice, not of penalty. But in the dream of judgment, you
attack and are condemned and wish to be the slave of idols which are
interposed between your judgment and the penalty it brings.
64
There can be no salvation in the dream as you are dreaming it.
For idols must be part of it to save you from what you believe you have
accomplished and have done to make you sinful and put out the light
within you. Little children, it is there. You do but dream, and idols
are the toys you dream you play with. Who has need of toys but children?
They pretend they rule the world and give their toys the power to move
about and talk and think and feel and speak for them. Yet
everything their toys appear to do is in the minds of those who play
with them. But they are eager to forget that they made up the dream in
which their toys are real, nor recognize their wishes are their own.
65
Nightmares are childish dreams. The toys have turned against the child
who thought he made them real. Yet can a dream attack? Or can
a toy grow large and dangerous and fierce and wild? This does the child
believe because he fears his thoughts and gives them to the toys
instead. And their reality becomes his own because they seem to save
him from his thoughts. Yet do they keep his thoughts alive and real but
seen outside himself, where they can turn against him for his treachery
to them. He thinks he needs them that he may escape his
thoughts, because he thinks the thoughts are real. And so he makes of
anything a toy to make his world remain outside himself, and play that he
is but a part of it.
66
There is a time when childhood should be passed and gone forever. Seek
not to retain the toys of children. Put them all away, for you have need
of them no more. The dream of judgment is a children's game in which the
child becomes the father, powerful, but with the little wisdom of a
child. What hurts him is destroyed; what helps him, blessed. Except he
judges this as does a child, who does not know what hurts and what will
heal. And bad things seem to happen, and he is afraid of all the chaos
in a world he thinks is governed by the laws he made. Yet is the real
world unaffected by the world he thinks is real. Nor have its laws been
changed because he did not understand.
67
The real world still is but a dream. Except the figures have been
changed. They are not seen as idols which betray. It is a dream in which
no one is used to substitute for something else nor interposed between
the thoughts the mind conceives and what it sees. No one is used for
something he is not, for childish things have all been put away. And
what was once a dream of judgment now has changed into a dream where all
is joy because that is the purpose which it has. Only forgiving
dreams can enter here, for time is almost over. And the forms which
enter in the dream are now perceived as brothers, not in judgment but in
love.
68
Forgiving dreams have little need to last. They are not made to separate
the mind from what it thinks. They do not seek to prove the dream is
being dreamed by someone else. And in these dreams a melody is heard
which everyone remembers, though he has not heard it since before all
time began. Forgiveness, once complete, brings timelessness so close the
song of Heaven can be heard, not with the ears, but with the holiness
which never left the altar which abides forever deep within the Son of
God. And when he hears this song again, he knows he never heard it not.
And where is time, when dreams of judgment have been put away?
69
Whenever you feel fear in any form—and you are fearful if you do
not feel a deep content, a certainty of help, a calm assurance Heaven
goes with you—be sure you made an idol and believe it will betray you.
For beneath your hope that it will save you lie the guilt and pain of
self-betrayal and uncertainty, so deep and bitter that the dream cannot
conceal completely all your sense of doom. Your self-betrayal must
result in fear, for fear is judgment, leading surely to the
frantic search for idols and for death.
70
Forgiving dreams remind you that you live in safety and have not
attacked yourself. So do your childish terrors melt away and dreams
become a sign that you have made a new beginning, not another try to
worship idols and to keep attack. Forgiving dreams are kind to
everyone who figures in the dream. And so they bring the dreamer full
release from dreams of fear. He does not fear his judgment, for he has
judged no one, nor has sought to be released through judgment from what
judgment must impose. And all the while he is remembering what he forgot
when judgment seemed to be the way to save him from its penalty.
1
The new beginning now becomes the focus of the curriculum. The goal is
clear, but now you need specific methods for attaining it. The speed by
which it can be reached depends on this one thing alone—your willingness
to practice every step. Each one will help a little every time it is
attempted. And together will these steps lead you from dreams of
judgment to forgiving dreams and out of pain and fear. They are not new
to you, but they are more ideas than rules of thought to you as yet. So
now we need to practice them awhile, until they are the rules by which
you live. We seek to make them habits now, so you will have them ready
for whatever need.
2
Decisions are continuous. You do not always know when you are making
them. But with a little practice with the ones you recognize, a set
begins to form which sees you through the rest. It is not wise to let
yourself become preoccupied with every step you take. The proper set,
adopted consciously each time you wake, will put you well ahead. And if
you find resistance strong and dedication weak, you are not ready. Do
not fight yourself. But think about the kind of day you want and
tell yourself there is a way in which this very day can happen
just like that. Then try again to have the day you want.
1.
3 The outlook starts with this:
5
This means that you are choosing not to be the judge of what to do. But
it must also mean you will not judge the situations where you will be
called upon to make response. For if you judge them, you have set the
rules for how you should react to them. And then another answer cannot
but produce confusion and uncertainty and fear.
6
This is your major problem now. You still make up your mind and then
decide to ask what you should do. And what you hear may not resolve the
problem as you saw it first. This leads to fear because it
contradicts what you perceive, and so you feel attacked. And therefore
angry. There are rules by which this will not happen. But it does occur
at first, while you are learning how to hear.
2.
7 Throughout the day, at any time you think of it and have a
quiet moment for reflection, tell yourself again the kind of day you
want, the feelings you would have, the things you want to happen to you,
and the things you would experience and say,
9
These two procedures, practiced well, will serve to let you be directed
without fear, for opposition will not first arise and then become a
problem in itself.
10
But there will still be times when you have judged already. Now the
answer will provoke attack unless you quickly straighten out your mind
to want an answer that will work. Be certain this has happened if you
feel yourself unwilling to sit by and ask to have the answer given you.
This means you have decided by yourself and cannot see the question.
Now you need a quick restorative before you ask.
3.
11 Remember once again the day you want and recognize that
something has occurred which is not part of it. Then realize that you
have asked a question by yourself and must have set an answer in your
terms. Then say,
13
This cancels out the terms which you have set and lets the answer show
you what the question must have really been.
14
Try to observe this rule without delay despite your opposition. For you
have already gotten angry, and your fear of being answered in a
different way from what your version of the question asks will gain
momentum until you believe the day you want is one in which you get your
answer to your question. And you will not get it, for it would
destroy the day by robbing you of what you really want. This can
be very hard to realize when once you have decided by yourself the rules
which promise you a happy day. Yet this decision still can be undone by
simple methods which you can accept.
4.
15 If you are so unwilling to receive you cannot even let
your question go, you can begin to change your mind with this:
17
This much is obvious and paves the way for the next easy step.
5.
18 Having decided that you do not like the way you feel, what
could be easier than to continue with,
20
This works against the sense of opposition and reminds you that help is
not being thrust upon you but is something that you want and that you
need, because you do not like the way you feel. This tiny opening will
be enough to let you go ahead with just a few more steps you need to let
yourself be helped.
21
Now you have reached the turning point, because it has occurred to you
that you will gain if what you have decided is not so. Until
this point is reached, you will believe your happiness depends on being
right. But this much reason have you now attained—you would be
better off if you were wrong.
6.
22 This tiny grain of wisdom will suffice to take you
further. You are not coerced but merely hope to get a thing you want.
And you can say in perfect honesty,
24
Now you have changed your mind about the day and have remembered what
you really want. Its purpose has no longer been obscured by the
insane belief you want it for the goal of being right when you are
wrong. Thus is the readiness for asking brought to your awareness, for
you cannot be in conflict when you ask for what you want and see that it
is this for which you ask.
7.
25 This final step is but acknowledgment of lack of
opposition to be helped. It is a statement of an open mind, not certain
yet, but willing to be shown:
27
Thus you now can ask a question that makes sense, and so the answer will
make sense as well. Nor will you fight against it, for you see that it
is you who will be helped by it.
28
It must be clear that it is easier to have a happy day if you prevent
unhappiness from entering at all. But this takes practice in the rules
which will protect you from the ravages of fear. When this has been
achieved, the sorry dream of judgment has forever been undone. But
meanwhile, you have need for practicing the rules for its undoing. Let
us, then, consider once again the very first of the decisions which are
offered here.
29
We said you can begin a happy day with the determination not to make
decisions by yourself. This seems to be a real decision in itself. And
yet, you cannot make decisions by yourself. The only question
really is with what you choose to make them. That is really all.
The first rule, then, is not coercion but a simple statement of a simple
fact. You will not make decisions by yourself whatever you
decide. For they are made with idols or with God. And you ask help of
Christ or anti-Christ, and which you choose will join with you and tell
you what to do.
30
Your day is not at random. It is set by what you choose to live it with
and how the friend whose counsel you have sought perceives your
happiness. You always ask advice before you can decide on anything. Let
this be understood, and you can see there cannot be coercion here
nor grounds for opposition that you may be free. There is no
freedom from what must occur. And if you think there is, you must be
wrong.
31
The second rule as well is but a fact. For you and your advisor must
agree on what you want before it can occur. It is but this agreement
which permits all things to happen. Nothing can be caused without some
form of union, be it with a dream of judgment or the Voice for God.
Decisions cause results because they are not made in isolation.
They are made by you and your advisor for yourself and for the world as
well. The day you want you offer to the world, for it will be what you
have asked for and will reinforce the rule of your advisor in the world.
Whose kingdom is the world for you today? What kind of day will you
decide to have?
32
It needs but two who would have happiness this day to promise it to all
the world. It needs but two to understand that they cannot decide alone
to guarantee the joy they asked for will be wholly shared. For they have
understood the basic law that makes decision powerful and gives it all
effects that it will ever have. It needs but two. These two are joined
before there can be a decision. Let this be the one reminder
that you keep in mind, and you will have the day you want and give it to
the world by having it yourself. Your judgment has been lifted from the
world by your decision for a happy day. And as you have received, so
must you give.
33
Do you not understand that to oppose the Holy Spirit is to fight yourself?
He tells you but your will; He speaks for you. In His
divinity is but your own. And all He knows is but your knowledge, saved
for you that you may do your will through Him. God asks you do
your will. He joins with you. He did not set His Kingdom up
alone. And Heaven itself but represents your will, where everything
created is for you. No spark of life but was created with your glad
consent, as you would have it be. And not one Thought that God has ever
had but waited for your blessing to be born. God is no enemy to you. He
asks no more than that He hear you call Him "Friend."
34
How wonderful it is to do your will! For that is freedom. There is
nothing else that ever should be called by freedom's name. Unless you do
your will, you are not free. And would God leave His Son without what he
has chosen for himself? God but ensured that you would never lose your
will when He gave you His perfect answer. Hear it now that you may be
reminded of His love and learn your will. God would not have His Son
made prisoner to what he does not want. He joins with you in
willing you be free. And to oppose Him is to make a choice against yourself
and choose that you be bound.
35
Look once again upon your enemy, the one you chose to hate instead of
love. For thus was hatred born into the world, and thus the rule of fear
established there. Now hear God speak to you through Him Who is His
Voice and yours as well, reminding you that it is not your will to hate
and be a prisoner to fear, a slave to death, a little creature with a
little life. Your will is boundless; it is not your will that it be
bound. What lies in you has joined with God Himself in all creation's
birth. Remember He Who has created you and through your will created
everything. Not one created thing but gives you thanks, for it is by
your will that it was born. No light of Heaven shines except for you,
for it was set in Heaven by your will.
36
What cause have you for anger in a world which merely waits your
blessing to be free? If you be prisoner, then God Himself could not be
free. For what is done to him whom God so loves is done to God Himself.
Think not He wills to bind you, Who has made you co-creator of the
universe along with Him. He would but keep your will forever and forever
limitless.
37
This world awaits the freedom you will give when you have recognized
that you are free. But you will not forgive the world until you
have forgiven Him Who gave your will to you. For it is by your
will the world is given freedom. Nor can you be free apart from Him
Whose holy Will you share. God turns to you to ask the world be saved,
for by your own salvation it is healed. And no one walks upon the earth
but must depend on your decision, that he learn death has no power over
him because he shares your freedom as he shares your will. It is
your will to heal him, and because you have decided with him, he
is healed. And now is God forgiven, for you chose to look upon your
brother as a friend.
38
Idols are quite specific. But your will is universal, being limitless.
And so it has no form nor is content for its expression in the terms of
form. Idols are limits. They are the belief that there are forms which
will bring happiness and that, by limiting, is all attained. It
is as if you said, "I have no need of everything. This little thing I
want, and it will be as everything to me." And this must fail to satisfy
because it is your will that everything be yours. Decide for
idols, and you ask for loss. Decide for truth, and everything is
yours.
39
It is not form you seek. What form can be a substitute for God the
Father's love? What form can take the place of all the love in the
divinity of God the Son? What idol can make two of what is one? And can
the limitless be limited? You do not want an idol. It is not
your will to have one. It will not bestow on you the gift you seek. When
you decide upon the form of what you want, you lose the understanding of
its purpose. So you see your will within the idol, thus reducing it to a
specific form. Yet this could never be your will because what
shares in all creation cannot be content with small ideas and little
things.
40
Behind the search for every idol lies the yearning for completion.
Wholeness has no form because it is unlimited. To seek a special person
or a thing to add to you to make yourself complete can only mean that
you believe some form is missing. And by finding this, you will achieve
completion in a form you like. This is the purpose of an
idol—that you will not look beyond it to the source of the belief that
you are incomplete. Only if you had sinned could this be
so. For sin is the idea you are alone and separated off from what is
whole. And thus it would be necessary for the search for wholeness to be
made beyond the boundaries of limits on yourself.
41
It never is the idol that you want. But what you think it offers
you, you want indeed and have the right to ask for. Nor could it
be possible it be denied. Your will to be complete is but God's will,
and this is given you by being His. God knows not form. He
cannot answer you in terms which have no meaning. And your will could
not be satisfied with empty forms made but to fill a gap which is not
there. It is not this you want. Creation gives no separate
person and no separate thing the power to complete the Son of God. What
idol can be called upon to give the Son of God what he already has?
42
Completion is the function of God's Son. He has no need to seek
for it at all. Beyond all idols stands his holy will to be but what he
is. For more than whole is meaningless. If there were change in him, if
he could be reduced to any form and limited to what is not in him, he
would not be as God created him. What idol can he need to be himself?
For can he give a part of him away? What is not whole cannot make whole.
But what is really asked for cannot be denied. Your will is
granted. Not in any form that would content you not, but in the whole
completely lovely Thought God holds of you.
43
Nothing that God knows not exists. And what He knows exists forever,
changelessly. For thoughts endure as long as does the mind that thought
of them. And in the Mind of God there is no ending nor a time in which
His Thoughts were absent or could suffer change. Thoughts are not born
and cannot die. They share the attributes of their creator, nor have
they a separate life apart from his. The thoughts you think are in your
mind, as you are in the Mind Which thought of you. And so there are no
separate parts in what exists within God's Mind. It is forever one,
eternally united and at peace.
44
Thoughts seem to come and go. Yet all this means is that you are
sometimes aware of them and sometimes not. An unremembered thought is
born again to you when it returns to your awareness. Yet it did not die
when you forgot it. It was always there, but you were unaware of it. The
Thought God holds of you is perfectly unchanged by your forgetting. It
will always be exactly as it was before the time when you forgot and
will be just the same when you remember. And it is the same within the
interval when you forgot.
45
The Thoughts of God are far beyond all change and shine forever. They
await not birth. They wait for welcome and remembering. The Thought God
holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in
Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there. Yet
still and white and lovely will it shine through all eternity. There was
no time it was not there; no instant when its light grew dimmer or less
perfect ever was.
46
Who knows the Father knows this light, for He is the eternal sky which
holds it safe, forever lifted up, and anchored sure. Its perfect purity
does not depend on whether it is seen on earth or not. The sky embraces
it and softly holds it in its perfect place, which is as far from earth
as earth from Heaven. It is not the distance nor the time which keeps
this star invisible to earth. But those who seek for idols cannot know
this star is there.
47
Beyond all idols is the Thought God holds of you. Completely unaffected
by the turmoil and the terror of the world, the dreams of birth and
death that here are dreamed, the myriad of forms that fear can take;
quite undisturbed, the Thought God holds of you remains exactly as it
always was. Surrounded by a stillness so complete no sound of battle
comes remotely near, it rests in certainty and perfect peace. Here is
your one reality kept safe, completely unaware of all the world that
worships idols and that knows not God. In perfect sureness of its
changelessness and of its rest in its eternal home, the Thought God
holds of you has never left the Mind of its Creator Whom it knows, as
its Creator knows that it is there.
48
Where could the Thought God holds of you exist but where you
are? Is your reality a thing apart from you and in a world which your
reality knows nothing of? Outside you there is no eternal sky, no
changeless star, and no reality. The Mind of Heaven's Son in Heaven is,
for there the Mind of Father and Son joined in creation which can have
no end. You have not two realities, but one. Nor can you be aware
of more than one. An idol or the Thought God holds of you is
your reality. Forget not, then, that idols must keep hidden what you
are, not from the Mind of God, but from your own. The star shines still;
the sky has never changed. But you, the holy Son of God Himself, are
unaware of your reality.
49
You will attack what does not satisfy, and thus you will not see
you made it up. You always fight illusions. For the truth behind
them is so lovely and so still in loving gentleness, were you aware of
it you would forget defensiveness entirely and rush to its embrace. The
truth could never be attacked. And this you knew when you made idols.
They were made that this might be forgotten. You attack but false ideas
and never truthful ones. All idols are the false ideas you made to fill
the gap you think arose between yourself and what is true. And you
attack them for the things you think they represent. What lies beyond
them cannot be attacked.
50
The wearying, dissatisfying gods you made are blown-up children's toys.
A child is frightened when a wooden head springs up as a closed box is
opened suddenly or when a soft and silent wooly bear begins to squeak as
he takes hold of it. The rules he made for boxes and for bears have
failed him and have broken his "control" of what surrounds him. And he
is afraid because he thought the rules protected him. Now must he learn
the boxes and the bears did not deceive him, broke no rules, nor mean
his world is made chaotic and unsafe. He was mistaken. He
misunderstood what made him safe and thought that it had left.
51
The gap that is not there is filled with toys in countless forms. And
each one seems to break the rules you set for it. It never was
the thing you thought. It must appear to break your rules for safety,
since the rules were wrong. But you are not endangered. You can
laugh at popping heads and squeaking toys, as does the child who learns
they are no threat to him. Yet while he likes to play with them, he
still perceives them as obeying rules he made for his enjoyment. So
there still are rules which they can seem to break and frighten him. Yet
is he at the mercy of his toys? And can they represent a
threat to him?
52
Reality observes the laws of God, and not the rules you set. It is His
laws which guarantee your safety. All illusions that you believe about
yourself obey no laws. They seem to dance a little while,
according to the rules you set for them. But then they fall and cannot
rise again. They are but toys, my children. Do not grieve for them.
Their dancing never brought you joy. But neither were they things to
frighten you nor make you safe if they obeyed your rules. They must be
neither cherished nor attacked but merely looked upon as children's toys
without a single meaning of their own. See one in them, and you will see
them all. See none in them, and they will touch you not.
53
Appearances deceive because they are appearances and not
reality. Dwell not on them in any form. They but obscure reality, and
they bring fear because they hide the truth. Do not attack what
you have made to let you be deceived, for thus you prove that
you have been deceived. Attack has power to make
illusions real. Yet what it makes is nothing. Who could be made fearful
by a power that can have no real effects at all? What could it be but an
illusion, making things appear like to itself? Look calmly at its toys
and understand that they are idols which but dance to vain desires. Give
them not your worship, for they are not there. Yet this is equally
forgotten in attack. God's Son needs no defense against his dreams. His
idols do not threaten him at all. His one mistake is that he thinks them
real. What can the power of illusions do?
54
Appearances can but deceive the mind that wants to be deceived.
And you can make a simple choice that will forever place you far beyond
deception. You need not concern yourself with how this will be done, for
this you cannot understand. But you will understand that mighty
changes have been quickly brought about when you decide one very simple
thing—you do not want whatever you believe an idol gives. For
thus the Son of God declares that he is free of idols. And thus is
he free.
55
Salvation is a paradox indeed! What could it be except a happy dream? It
asks you but that you forgive all things that no one ever did, to
overlook what is not there, and not to look upon the unreal as reality.
You are but asked to let your will be done and seek no longer for the
things you do not want. And you are asked to let yourself be free of all
the dreams of what you never were and seek no more to substitute the
strength of idle wishes for the Will of God.
56
Here does the dream of separation start to fade and disappear. For here
the gap that is not there begins to be perceived without the toys of
terror that you made. No more than this is asked. Be glad indeed
salvation asks so little, not so much. It asks for nothing in
reality. And even in illusions it but asks forgiveness be the substitute
for fear. Such is the only rule for happy dreams. The gap is emptied of
the toys of fear, and then its unreality is plain. Dreams are for nothing.
And the Son of God can have no need of them. They offer him no single
thing that he could ever want. He is delivered from illusions by his
will and but restored to what he is. What could God's plan for his
salvation be, except a means to give him to Himself?
57
The real world is the state of mind in which the only purpose of the
world is seen to be forgiveness. Fear is not its goal, and the escape
from guilt becomes its aim. The value of forgiveness is perceived and
takes the place of idols which are sought no longer, for their "gifts"
are not held dear. No rules are idly set, and no demands are made of
anyone or anything to twist and fit into the dream of fear. Instead,
there is a wish to understand all things created as they really are. And
it is recognized that all things must be first forgiven, and then
understood.
58
Here, it is thought that understanding is acquired by attack.
There, it is clear that by attack is understanding lost. The
folly of pursuing guilt as goal is fully recognized. And idols are not
wanted there, for guilt is understood as the sole cause of pain in any
form. No one is tempted by its vain appeal, for suffering and death have
been perceived as things not wanted and not striven for. The possibility
of freedom has been grasped and welcomed, and the means by which it can
be gained can now be understood. The world becomes a place of hope
because its only purpose is to be a place where hope of happiness can be
fulfilled. And no one stands outside this hope because the world has
been united in belief the purpose of the world is one which all must
share if hope be more than just a dream.
59
Not yet is Heaven quite remembered, for the purpose of forgiveness still
remains. Yet everyone is certain he will go beyond forgiveness, and he
but remains until it is made perfect in himself. He has no wish for
anything but this. And fear has dropped away because he is united in his
purpose with himself. There is a hope of happiness in him so sure and
constant he can barely stay and wait a little longer with his feet still
touching earth. Yet is he glad to wait till every hand is joined and
every heart made ready to arise and go with him. For thus is he
made ready for the step in which is all forgiveness left behind.
60
The final step is God's because it is but God Who could create a perfect
Son and share His Fatherhood with him. No one outside of Heaven knows
how this can be, for understanding this is Heaven itself. Even the real
world has a purpose still beneath creation and eternity. But fear is
gone because its purpose is forgiveness, not idolatry. And so is
Heaven's Son prepared to be himself, and to remember that the Son of God
knows everything his Father understands and understands it perfectly
with Him.
61
The real world still falls short of this, for this is God's own
purpose—only His, and yet completely shared and perfectly fulfilled. The
real world is a state in which the mind has learned how easily do idols
go when they are still perceived, but wanted not. How willingly the mind
can let them go when it has understood that idols are nothing and
nowhere and are purposeless. For only then can guilt and sin be seen
without a purpose and as meaningless.
62
Thus is the real world's purpose gently brought into awareness, to
replace the goal of sin and guilt. And all that stood between your image
of yourself and what you are, forgiveness washes joyfully away. Yet God
need not create His Son again that what is his be given back to him. The
gap between your brother and yourself was never there. And what
the Son of God knew in creation, he must know again.
63
When brothers join in purpose in the world of fear, they stand already
at the edge of the real world. Perhaps they still look back and think
they see an idol that they want. Yet has their path been surely set away
from idols toward reality. For when they joined their hands, it was
Christ's hand they took, and they will look on Him Whose hand they hold.
The face of Christ is looked upon before the Father is remembered. For
He must be unremembered till His Son has reached beyond forgiveness to
the love of God. Yet is the love of Christ accepted first. And then will
come the knowledge They are One.
64
How light and easy is the step across the narrow boundaries of the world
of fear when you have recognized Whose hand you hold! Within your hand
is everything you need to walk with perfect confidence away from fear
forever and to go straight on and quickly reach the gate of Heaven
itself. For He Whose hand you hold was waiting but for you to join Him.
Now that you have come, would He delay in showing you the way
that He must walk with you? His blessing lies on you as surely as His
Father's love rests upon Him. His gratitude to you is past your
understanding, for you have enabled Him to rise from chains and go with
you together to His Father's house.
65
An ancient hate is passing from the world. And with it goes all hatred
and all fear. Look back no longer, for what lies ahead is all you ever
wanted in your hearts. Give up the world! But not to sacrifice. You
never wanted it. What happiness have you sought here that did
not bring you pain? What moment of content has not been bought at
fearful price in coins of suffering? Joy has no cost. It is your
sacred right, and what you pay for is not happiness. Be speeded on your
way by honesty, and let not your experiences here deceive in retrospect.
They were not free from bitter cost and joyless consequence.
66
Do not look back except in honesty. And when an idol tempts you, think
of this:
68
Be merciful unto your brother, then. And do not choose an idol
thoughtlessly, remembering that he will pay the cost as well as you. For
he will be delayed when you look back, and you will not perceive Whose
loving hand you hold. Look forward, then, and walk in confidence with
happy hearts that beat in hope and do not pound in fear.
69
The Will of God forever lies in those whose hands are joined. Until they
joined, they thought He was their enemy. But when they joined and shared
a purpose, they were free to learn their will is one. And thus the Will
of God must reach to their awareness. Nor can they forget for long that
it is but their own.
70
Anger is never justified. Attack has no foundation. It
is here escape from fear begins and will be made complete. Here is the
real world given in exchange for dreams of terror. For it is on this
forgiveness rests and is but natural. You are not asked to offer pardon
where attack is due and would be justified. For this would mean that you
forgive a sin by overlooking what is really there. This is not pardon.
For it would assume that, by responding in a way which is not justified,
your pardon will become the answer to attack that has been made. And
thus is pardon inappropriate, by being granted where it is not due.
71
Pardon is always justified. It has a sure foundation.
You do not forgive the unforgivable nor overlook a real attack that
calls for punishment. Salvation does not lie in being asked to make
unnatural responses which are inappropriate to what is real. Instead, it
merely asks that you respond appropriately to what is not real by not
perceiving what has not occurred. If pardon were unjustified, you would
be asked to sacrifice your rights when you return forgiveness for
attack. But you are merely asked to see forgiveness as the natural
reaction to distress which rests on error and thus calls for help.
Forgiveness is the only sane response. It keeps your
rights from being sacrificed.
72
This understanding is the only change that lets the real world rise to
take the place of dreams of terror. Fear cannot arise unless attack is
justified, and if it had a real foundation, pardon would have none. The
real world is achieved when you perceive the basis of forgiveness is
quite real and fully justified. While you regard it as a gift
unwarranted, it must uphold the guilt you would "forgive."
Unjustified forgiveness is attack. And this is all the world can
ever give. It pardons "sinners" sometimes but remains aware that they
have sinned. And so they do not merit the forgiveness that it gives.
73
This is the false forgiveness which the world employs to keep
the sense of sin alive. And recognizing God is just, it seems impossible
His pardon could be real. Thus is the fear of God the sure result of
seeing pardon as unmerited. No one who sees himself as guilty can avoid
the fear of God. But he is saved from this dilemma if he can forgive.
The mind must think of its Creator as it looks upon itself. If you can
see your brother merits pardon, you have learned forgiveness is your
right as much as his. Nor will you think that God intends for you a
fearful judgment which your brother does not merit. For it is the truth
that you can merit neither more nor less than he.
74
Forgiveness recognized as merited will heal. It gives the miracle its
strength to overlook illusions. This is how you learn that you must be
forgiven too. There can be no appearance that can not be
overlooked. For if there were, it would be necessary first there be some
sin which stands beyond forgiveness. There would be an error that is
more than a mistake—a special form of error which remains unchangeable,
eternal, and beyond correction or escape. There would be one mistake
which had the power to undo creation and to make a world which could
replace it and destroy the Will of God. Only if this were possible could
there be some appearances which could withstand the miracle and not be
healed by it.
75
There is no surer proof idolatry is what you wish than a belief there
are some forms of sickness and of joylessness forgiveness cannot heal.
This means that you prefer to keep some idols and are not prepared as
yet to let all idols go. And thus you think that some appearances are
real and not appearances at all. Be not deceived about the meaning of a
fixed belief that some appearances are harder to look past than others
are. It always means you think forgiveness must be limited. And
you have set a goal of partial pardon and a limited escape from guilt
for you. What can this be except a false forgiveness of yourself
and everyone who seems apart from you?
76
It must be true the miracle can heal all forms of sickness, or
it cannot heal. Its purpose cannot be to judge which forms are real and
which appearances are true. If one appearance must remain apart from
healing, one illusion must be part of truth. And you could not escape
all guilt, but only some of it. You must forgive God's Son entirely.
Or you will keep an image of yourself that is not whole and will remain
afraid to look within and find escape from every idol there. Salvation
rests on faith there cannot be some forms of guilt which you
cannot forgive. And so there cannot be appearances which have replaced
the truth about God's Son.
77
Look on your brother with the willingness to see him as he is. And do
not keep a part of him outside your willingness that he be healed. To
heal is to make whole. And what is whole can have no missing parts that
have been kept outside. Forgiveness rests on recognizing this and being
glad there cannot be some forms of sickness which the miracle must lack
the power to heal.
78
God's Son is perfect, or he cannot be God's Son. Nor will you
know him if you think he does not merit the escape from guilt in all
its forms and all its consequence. There is no way to think of
him but this if you would know the truth about yourself:
80
Here is the joyful statement that there are no forms of evil which can
overcome the Will of God—the glad acknowledgment that guilt has not
succeeded by your wish to make illusions real. And what is this except a
simple statement of the truth?
81
Look on your brother with this hope in you, and you will understand he
could not make an error that could change the truth in him. It is not
difficult to overlook mistakes that have been given no effects. But what
you see as having power to make an idol of the Son of God you will not
pardon. For he has become to you a graven image and a sign of death. Is
this your savior? Is his Father wrong about His Son? Or have you
been deceived in him who has been given you to heal, for your
salvation and deliverance?
82
Would God have left the meaning of the world to your interpretation? If
He had, it has no meaning. For it cannot be that meaning changes
constantly and yet is true. The Holy Spirit looks upon the world as with
one purpose, changelessly established. And no situation can affect its
aim but must be in accord with it. For only if its aim could change with
every situation could each one be open to interpretation which is
different every time you think of it. You add an element into the script
you write for every minute in the day, and all that happens now means
something else. You take away another element, and every meaning shifts
accordingly.
83
What do your scripts reflect except your plans for what the day should
be? And thus you judge disaster and success, advance, retreat, and gain
and loss. These judgments all are made according to the roles the script
assigns. The fact they have no meaning in themselves is demonstrated by
the ease with which these labels change with other judgments made on
different aspects of experience. And then in looking back you think you
see another meaning in what went before. What have you really done
except to show there was no meaning there? But you assigned a
meaning in the light of goals that change, with every meaning shifting
as they change.
84
Only a constant purpose can endow events with stable meaning. But it
must accord one meaning to them all. If they are given different
meanings, it must be that they reflect but different purposes. And this
is all the meaning that they have. Can this be meaning? Can
confusion be what meaning means? Perception cannot be in constant flux
and make allowance for stability of meaning anywhere. Fear is a judgment
never justified. Its presence has no meaning but to show you wrote a
fearful script and are afraid accordingly. But not because the thing you
fear has fearful meaning in itself.
85
A common purpose is the only means whereby perception can be
stabilized and one interpretation given to the world and all experiences
here. In this shared purpose is one judgment shared by everyone and
everything you see. You do not have to judge, for you have learned one
meaning has been given everything, and you are glad to see it
everywhere. It cannot change because you would perceive it
everywhere, unchanged by circumstance. And so you offer it to
all events, and let them offer you stability.
86
Escape from judgment simply lies in this—all things have but one purpose
which you share with all the world. And nothing in the world can be
opposed to it, for it belongs to everything as it belongs to you. In
single purpose is the end of all ideas of sacrifice, which must assume a
different purpose for the one who gains and him who loses. There could
be no thought of sacrifice apart from this idea. And it is this idea of
different goals which makes perception shift and meaning change. In one
united goal does this become impossible, for your agreement makes
interpretation stabilize and last.
87
How can communication really be established while the symbols which are
used mean different things? The Holy Spirit's goal gives one
interpretation, meaningful to you and to your brother. Thus can you
communicate with him and he with you. In symbols which you both can
understand, the sacrifice of meaning is undone. All sacrifice entails
the loss of your ability to see relationships among events. And looked
at separately, they have no meaning. For there is no light by
which they can be seen and understood. They have no purpose. And what
they are for cannot be seen. In any thought of loss, there is no
meaning. No one has agreed with you on what it means. It is a part of a
distorted script which cannot be interpreted with meaning. It must be
forever unintelligible. This is not communication. Your dark dreams are
but the senseless, isolated scripts you write in sleep. Look not to
separate dreams for meaning. Only dreams of pardon can be shared. They
mean the same to both of you.
88
Do not interpret out of solitude, for what you see means nothing. It
will shift in what it stands for, and you will believe the world is an
uncertain place in which you walk in danger and uncertainty. It is but
your interpretations which are lacking in stability, for they
are not in line with what you really are. This is a state so seemingly
unsafe that fear must rise. Do not continue thus, my brothers.
We have one Interpreter. And through His use of symbols are we
joined so that they mean the same to all of us. Our common language lets
us speak to all our brothers and to understand with them forgiveness has
been given to us all, and thus we can communicate again.
89
Appearances deceive but can be changed. Reality is changeless. It does
not deceive at all, and if you fail to see beyond appearances, you are
deceived. For everything you see will change, and yet you thought it
real before, and now you think it real again. Reality is thus reduced to
form and capable of change. Reality is changeless. It is this that makes
it real and keeps it separate from all appearances. It must
transcend all form to be itself. It cannot change.
90
The miracle is means to demonstrate that all appearances can change
because they are appearances and cannot have the changelessness
reality entails. The miracle attests salvation from appearances by showing
they can change. Your brother has a changelessness in him beyond
appearance and deception both. It is obscured by changing views of him
which you perceive as his reality. The happy dream about him
takes the form of the appearance of his perfect health, his perfect
freedom from all forms of lack, and safety from disaster of all kinds.
The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form
because it can so easily be changed. This demonstrates that it
was never real and could not stem from his reality. For that is
changeless and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could
ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal because they
change.
91
What is temptation but a wish to make illusions real? It does not seem
to be the wish that no reality be so. Yet it is an assertion that some
forms of idols have a powerful appeal which makes them harder to resist
than those you would not want to have reality. Temptation, then,
is nothing more than this—a prayer the miracle touch not some dreams but
keep their unreality obscure and give to them reality instead. And
Heaven gives no answer to the prayer, nor can a miracle be given you to
heal appearances you do not like. You have established limits.
What you ask is given you, but not of God Who knows no limits.
You have limited yourself.
92
Reality is changeless. Miracles but show what you have interposed
between reality and your awareness is unreal and does not interfere at
all. The cost of the belief there must be some appearances beyond the
hope of change is that the miracle cannot come forth from you
consistently. For you have asked it be withheld from power to
heal all dreams. There is no miracle you cannot have when you desire
healing. But there is no miracle that can be given you unless
you want it. Choose what you would heal, and He Who gives all miracles
has not been given freedom to bestow His gifts upon God's Son. When he
is tempted, he denies reality. And he becomes the willing slave of what
he chose instead.
93
Because reality is changeless is a miracle already there to heal
all things that change and offer them to you to see in happy form,
devoid of fear. It will be given you to look upon your brother thus. But
not while you would have it otherwise in some respects. For this but
means you would not have him healed and whole. The Christ in him is
perfect. Is it this that you would look upon? Then let there be no
dreams about him which you would prefer to seeing this. And you will see
the Christ in him because you let Him come to you. And when He
has appeared to you, you will be certain you are like Him, for He is the
changeless in your brother and in you.
94
This will you look upon when you decide there is not one appearance you
would hold in place of what your brother really is. Let no temptation to
prefer a dream allow uncertainty to enter here. Be not made guilty and
afraid when you are tempted by a dream of what he is. But do not give it
power to replace the changeless in him in your sight of him. There is no
false appearance but will fade if you request a miracle instead. There
is no pain from which he is not free if you would have him be but what
he is. Why should you fear to see the Christ in him? You but behold your
Self in what you see. As he is healed are you made free of guilt,
for his appearance is your own to you.
1
How simple is salvation! All it says is what was never true is not true
now and never will be. The impossible has not occurred and can have no
effects. And that is all. Can this be hard to learn by anyone who wants
it to be true? Only unwillingness to learn it could make such an easy
lesson difficult. How hard is it to see that what is false cannot be
true, and what is true cannot be false? You can no longer say that you
perceive no differences in false and true. You have been told exactly
how to tell one from the other and just what to do if you become
confused. Why then do you persist in learning not such simple things?
2
There is a reason. But confuse it not with difficulty in the
simple things salvation asks you learn. It teaches but the very obvious.
It merely goes from one apparent lesson to the next in easy steps which
lead you gently from one to another with no strain at all. This cannot
be confusing, yet you are confused. For somehow you believe that
what is totally confused is easier to learn and understand. What you
have taught yourselves is such a giant learning feat it is indeed
incredible. But you accomplished it because you wanted to and did not
pause in diligence to judge it hard to learn, or too complex to grasp.
3
No one who understands what you have learned, how carefully you have
learned it, and the pains to which you went to practice and repeat the
lessons endlessly in every form you could conceive of them could ever
doubt the power of your learning skill. There is no greater power in the
world. The world was made by it and even now depends on nothing else.
The lessons you have taught yourselves have been so overlearned and
fixed they rise like heavy curtains to obscure the simple and the
obvious. Say not you cannot learn them. For your power to learn
is strong enough to teach you that your will is not your own, your
thoughts do not belong to you, and even you are someone else.
4
Who could maintain that lessons such as these are easy? Yet you have
learned more than this. You have continued, taking every step, however
difficult, without complaint until a world was built that suited you.
And every lesson that makes up the world arises from the first
accomplishment of learning—an enormity so great the Holy Spirit's Voice
seems small and still before its magnitude. The world began with one
strange lesson, powerful enough to render God forgotten and His Son an
alien to himself, in exile from the home where God Himself established
him. You who have taught yourselves the Son of God is guilty, say not
that you cannot learn the simple things salvation teaches you!
5
Learning is an ability you made and gave yourselves. It was not made to
do the Will of God but to uphold a wish that It could be opposed, and
that a will apart from It was yet more real than It. And this has
learning sought to demonstrate, and you have learned what it was made to
teach. Now does your ancient overlearning stand implacable before the
Voice of truth and teach you that Its lessons are not true, too hard to
learn, too difficult to see, and too opposed to what is really true. Yet
you will learn them, for their learning is the only purpose for
your learning skill the Holy Spirit sees in all the world. His simple
lessons in forgiveness have a power mightier than yours because they
call from God and from your Self to you.
6
Is this a little Voice, so small and still It cannot rise above
the senseless noise of sounds which have no meaning? God willed not His
Son forget Him. And the power of His Will is in the Voice that speaks
for Him. Which lesson will you learn? What outcome is inevitable, sure
as God, and far beyond all doubt and question? Can it be your little
learning, strange in outcome and incredible in difficulty, will
withstand the simple lessons being taught to you in every moment of each
day, since time began and learning had been made?
7
The lessons to be learned are only two. Each has its outcome in a
different world. And each world follows surely from its source. The
certain outcome of the lesson that God's Son is guilty is the world you
see. It is a world of terror and despair. Nor is there hope of
happiness in it. There is no plan for safety you can make that ever will
succeed. There is no joy that you can seek for here and hope to find.
Yet this is not the only outcome which your learning can produce.
However much you may have overlearned your chosen task, the lesson which
reflects the love of God is stronger still. And you will learn
God's Son is innocent and see another world.
8
The outcome of the lesson that God's Son is guiltless is a world in
which there is no fear and everything is lit with hope and sparkles with
a gentle friendliness. Nothing but calls to you in soft appeal to be
your friend and let it join with you. And never does a call remain
unheard, misunderstood, nor left unanswered in the selfsame tongue in
which the call was made. And you will understand it was this call that
everyone and everything within the world has always made, but
you had not perceived it as it was. And now you see you were mistaken.
You had been deceived by forms the call was hidden in. And so you did
not hear it and had lost a friend who always wanted to be part of you.
The soft, eternal calling of each part of God's creation to the whole is
heard throughout the world this second lesson brings.
9
There is no living thing which does not share the universal will that it
be whole and that you do not leave its call unheard. Without your answer
is it left to die, as it is saved from death when you have heard its
calling as the ancient call to life and understood that it is but your
own. The Christ in you remembers God with all the certainty with which
He knows His love. But only if His Son is innocent can He be Love. For
God were fear indeed if he whom He created innocent could be a slave to
guilt. God's perfect Son remembers his creation. But in guilt he has
forgotten what he really is.
10
The fear of God results as surely from the lesson that His Son is guilty
as God's love must be remembered when he learns his innocence. For hate
must father fear and look upon its father as itself. How wrong are you
who fail to hear the call that echoes past each seeming call to death,
that sings behind each murderous attack and pleads that love restore the
dying world! You do not understand Who calls to you beyond each form of
hate, each call to war. Yet you will recognize Him as you give Him
answer in the language that He calls. He will appear when you have
answered Him, and you will know in Him that God is Love.
11
What is temptation but a wish to make the wrong decision on what you
would learn and have an outcome that you do not want? It is the
recognition that it is a state of mind unwanted that becomes the means
whereby the choice is reassessed; another outcome seen to be preferred.
You are deceived if you believe you want disaster and disunity and pain.
Hear not the call for this within yourself. But listen, rather, to the
deeper call beyond it that appeals for peace and joy. And all the world
will give you joy and peace. For as you hear, you answer. And
behold! Your answer is the proof of what you learned. Its outcome is the
world you look upon.
12
Let us be still an instant and forget all things we ever learned, all
thoughts we had, and every preconception which we hold of what things
mean and what their purpose is. Let us remember not our own ideas of
what the world is for. We do not know. Let every image held of everyone
be loosened from our minds and swept away. Be innocent of judgment,
unaware of any thoughts of evil or of good that ever crossed your mind
of anyone. Now do we know him not. But you are free to learn of
him and learn of him anew. Now is he born again to you, and you are born
again to him without the past that sentenced him to die, and you with
him. Now is he free to live, as you are free because an ancient learning
passed away and left a place for truth to be reborn.
13
An ancient lesson is not overcome by the opposing of the new and old. It
is not vanquished that the truth be known nor fought against to lose to
truth's appeal. There is no battle which must be prepared, no time to be
expended, and no plans that need be laid for bringing in the new. There
is an ancient battle being waged against the truth, but
truth does not respond. Who could be hurt in such a war unless he hurts
himself? He has no enemy in truth. And can he be assailed by dreams?
14
Let us review again what seems to stand between you and the truth of
what you are. For there are steps in its relinquishment. The first is a
decision that you make. But afterwards the truth is given
you. You would establish truth. And by your wish, you set two
choices to be made each time you think you must decide on anything.
Neither is true. Nor are they different. Yet must we see them both
before you can look past them to the one alternative that is a
different choice. But not in dreams you made that this might be obscured
to you.
15
What you would choose between is not a choice and gives but the
illusion it is free, for it will have one outcome either way. Thus is it
really not a choice at all. The leader and the follower emerge as
separate roles, each seeming to possess advantages you would not want to
lose. So in their fusion there appears to be the hope of satisfaction
and of peace. You see yourself divided into both these roles, forever
split between the two. And every friend or enemy becomes a means to help
you save yourself from this.
16
Perhaps you call it love. Perhaps you think that it is murder justified
at last. You hate the one you gave the leader's role when you would have
it, and you hate as well his not assuming it at times you want to let
the follower in you arise and give away the role of leadership. And this
is what you made your brother for and learned to think that this
his purpose is. Unless he serves it, he has not fulfilled the
function that was given him by you. And thus he merits death because he
has no purpose and no usefulness to you.
17
And what of him? What does he want of you? What could he want, but what
you want of him? Herein is life as easily as death, for what you choose,
you choose as well for him. Two calls you make to him, as he to you.
Between these two is choice because from them there is
a different outcome. If he be the leader or the follower to you, it
matters not, for you have chosen death. But if he calls for death or
calls for life, for hate or for forgiveness and for help, is not the
same in outcome. Hear the one, and you are separate from him and are
lost. But hear the other, and you join with him, and in your answer is
salvation found. The voice you hear in him is but your own. What does he
ask you for? And listen well! For he is asking what will come to you
because you see an image of yourself and hear your voice
requesting what you want.
18
Before you answer, pause to think of this:
20
Then let us wait an instant and be still, forgetting everything we
thought we heard; remembering how much we do not know. This brother
neither leads nor follows us but walks beside us on the selfsame road.
He is like us, as near or far away from what we want as we will let him
be. We make no gains he does not make with us, and we fall back if he
does not advance. Take not his hand in anger but in love, for in his
progress do you count your own. And we go separately along the way
unless you keep him safely by your side.
21
Because he is your equal in God's love, you will be saved from all
appearances and answer to the Christ Who calls to you. Be still and
listen. Think not ancient thoughts. Forget the dismal lessons that you
learned about this Son of God who calls to you. Christ calls to all with
equal tenderness, seeing no leaders and no followers and hearing but one
answer to them all. Because He hears one Voice, He cannot hear a
different answer from the one He gave when God appointed Him His only
Son.
22
Be very still an instant. Come without all thought of what you ever
learned before and put aside all images you made. The old will fall away
before the new without your opposition or intent. There will be no
attack upon the things you thought were precious and in need of care.
There will be no assault upon your wish to hear a call that never has
been made. Nothing will hurt you in this holy place to which you come to
listen silently and learn the truth of what you really want. No more
than this will you be asked to learn. But as you hear it, you will
understand you need but come away without the thoughts you did not want
and that were never true.
23
Forgive your brother all appearances, which are but ancient lessons that
you taught yourself about the sinfulness in you. Hear but his
call for mercy and release from all the fearful images he holds of what
he is and of what you must be. He is afraid to walk with you and thinks
perhaps a bit behind, a bit ahead, would be a safer place for him to be.
Can you make progress if you think the same, advancing only when
he would step back and falling back when he would go ahead? For so do
you forget the journey's goal, which is but to decide to walk with
him, so neither leads nor follows. Thus it is a way you go together,
not alone. And in this choice is learning's outcome changed, for Christ
has been reborn to both of you.
24
An instant spent without your old ideas of who your great companion is
and what he should be asking for will be enough to let this
happen. And you will perceive his purpose is the same as yours. He asks
for what you want and needs the same as you. It takes
perhaps a different form in him, but it is not the form you answer to.
He asks and you receive, for you have come with but one purpose—that you
both may learn you love each other with a brother's love. And as a
brother, must his Father be the same as yours, as he is like yourself.
25
Together is your joint inheritance remembered and accepted by you both.
Alone it is denied to both of you. Is it not clear that while you still
insist on leading or on following, you think you walk alone with no one
by your side? This is the road to nowhere, for the light cannot be given
while you walk alone, and so you cannot see which way you go. And thus
there is confusion and a sense of endless doubting as you stagger back
and forward in the darkness and alone. Yet these are but appearances of
what the journey is and how it must be made. For next to you is One Who
holds the light before you so that every step is made in certainty and
sureness of the road. A blindfold can indeed obscure your sight but
cannot make the way itself grow dark. And He Who travels with you has
the light.
26
Only the self-accused condemn. As you prepare to make a choice that will
result in different outcomes, there is first one thing that must be
overlearned. It must become a habit of response so typical of everything
you do that it becomes your first response to all temptation and to
every situation that occurs. Learn this and learn it well, for it is
here delay of happiness is shortened by a span of time you cannot
realize. You never hate your brother for his sins, but only for
your own. Whatever form his sins appear to take, it but obscures the
fact that you believe them to be yours and therefore meriting a "just"
attack.
27
Why should his sins be sins if you did not believe they could
not be forgiven in you? Why are they real in him if you did not believe
that they are your reality? And why do you attack them everywhere,
except you hate yourself? Are you a sin? You answer "yes"
whenever you attack, for by attack do you assert that you are guilty and
must give as you deserve. And what can you deserve but what you are?
If you did not believe that you deserved attack, it never would occur to
you to give attack to anyone at all. Why should you? What would
be the gain to you? What could the outcome be that you would want?
And how could murder bring you benefit?
28
Sins are in bodies. They are not perceived in minds. They are not seen
as purposes but actions. Bodies act, and minds do not. And therefore
must the body be at fault for what it does. It is not seen to be a
passive thing, obeying your commands and doing nothing of itself at all.
If you are sin you are a body, for the mind acts not. And
purpose must be in the body, not the mind. The body must act on its own
and motivate itself. If you are sin, you lock the mind within the body,
and you give its purpose to its prison-house, which acts instead of it.
A jailer does not follow orders, but enforces orders on the
prisoner.
29
Yet is the body prisoner and not the mind. The body
thinks no thoughts. It has no power to learn, to pardon, nor enslave. It
gives no orders that the mind need serve nor sets conditions that it
must obey. It holds in prison but the willing mind that would abide in
it. It sickens at the bidding of the mind that would become its
prisoner. And it grows old and dies because that mind is sick within
itself. Learning is all that causes change. And so the body, where no
learning can occur, could never change unless the mind preferred the
body change in its appearances to suit the purpose given by the mind.
For it can learn, and there is all change made.
30
The mind that thinks it is a sin has but one purpose—that the body be
the source of sin and keep it in the prison-house it chose and guard and
hold itself at bay, a sleeping prisoner to the snarling dogs of hate and
evil, sickness and attack, of pain and age, of grief and suffering. Here
are the thoughts of sacrifice preserved, for here guilt rules and orders
that the world be like itself—a place where nothing can find mercy or
survive the ravages of fear except in murder and in death. For here are
you made sin, and sin cannot abide the joyous and the free, for they are
enemies which sin must kill. In death is sin preserved, and those who
think that they are sin must die for what they think they are.
31
Let us be glad that you will see what you believe, and that it
has been given you to change what you believe. The body will but
follow. It can never lead you where you would not be. It does not guard
your sleep nor interfere with your awakening. Release your body from
imprisonment, and you will see no one as prisoner to what you have
escaped. You will not want to hold in guilt your chosen enemies nor keep
in chains to the illusion of a changing love the ones you think are
friends.
32
The innocent release in gratitude for their release. And what
they see upholds their freedom from imprisonment and death. Open your
mind to change, and there will be no ancient penalty exacted from your
brother or yourself. For God has said there is no
sacrifice that can be asked; there is no sacrifice that can be
made.
33
There is a tendency to think the world can offer consolation and escape
from problems which its purpose is to keep. Why should this be?
Because it is a place where choice among illusions seems to be the only
choice. And you are in control of outcomes of your choosing. Thus you
think within the narrow band from birth to death a little time is given
you to use for you alone, a time when everyone conflicts with you, but
you can choose which road will lead you out of conflict and away from
difficulties which concern you not. Yet they are your concern.
How then can you escape from them by leaving them behind? What must go
with you, you will take with you whatever road you choose to walk along.
34Real
choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. All its roads
but lead to disappointment, nothingness, and death. There is no
choice in its alternatives. Seek not escape from problems here. The
world was made that problems could not be escaped. Be not
deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but
one end. And each is but the means to gain that end, for it is here that
all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start, however
differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no
choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel
gaily for a while before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns
are felt at once. The choice is not what will the ending be but
when it comes.
35
There is no choice where every end is sure. Perhaps you would prefer to
try them all before you really learn they are but one. The roads this
world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come
when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. Men have
died on seeing this because they saw no way except the pathways offered
by the world. And learning they led nowhere, lost their hope. And yet
this was the time they could have learned their greatest lesson. All
must reach this point and go beyond it. It is true indeed there is no
choice at all within the world. But this is not the lesson in itself.
The lesson has a purpose, and in this you come to understand
what it is for.
36
Why would you seek to try another road, another person, or another place
when you have learned the way the lesson starts but do not yet perceive
what it is for? Its purpose is the answer to the search that all
must undertake who still believe there is another answer to be found.
Learn now, without despair, there is no hope of answer in the world. But
do not judge the lesson which is but begun with this. Seek not
another signpost in the world which seems to point to still another
road. No longer look for hope where there is none. Make fast your
learning now, and understand you but waste time unless you go
beyond what you have learned to what is yet to learn. For from this
lowest point will learning lead to heights of happiness in which you see
the purpose of the lesson shining clear, and perfectly within your
learning grasp.
37
Who would be willing to be turned away from all the roadways of the
world unless he understood their real futility? Is it not needful that
he should begin with this, to seek another way instead? For while he
sees a choice where there is none, what power of decision can he use?
The great release of power must begin with learning where it really has
a use. And what decision has power if it be applied in
situations without choice?
38
The learning that the world can offer but one choice, no matter what its
form may be, is the beginning of acceptance that there is a real
alternative instead. To fight against this step is to defeat your
purpose here. You did not come to learn to find a road the world does
not contain. The search for different pathways in the world is but the
search for different forms of truth. And this would keep the
truth from being reached.
39
Think not that happiness is ever found by following a road away
from it. This makes no sense and cannot be the way. To you who
seem to find this course to be too difficult to learn, let me repeat
that to achieve a goal you must proceed in its direction, not
away from it. And every road that leads the other way will not advance
the purpose to be found. If this be difficult to understand,
then is this course impossible to learn. But only then. For
otherwise, it is a simple teaching in the obvious.
40
There is a choice which you have power to make when you have
seen the real alternatives. Until that point is reached, you have
no choice, and you can but decide how you would choose the better to
deceive yourself again. This course attempts to teach no more than that
the power of decision cannot lie in choosing different forms of what is
still the same illusion and the same mistake. All
choices in the world depend on this—you choose between your brother and
yourself, and you will gain as much as he will lose, and what you lose
is what is given him. How utterly opposed to truth is this, when the
lesson's purpose is to teach that what your brother loses you
have lost and what he gains is what is given you.
41
He has not left His Thoughts! But you forgot His Presence and remembered
not His Love. No pathway in the world can lead to Him, nor any worldly
goal is one with His. What road in all the world will lead within, when
every road was made to separate the journey from the purpose it must
have unless it be but futile wandering? All roads that lead away from
what you are will lead you to confusion and despair. Yet has He never
left His Thoughts to die, without their Source forever in themselves. He
has not left His Thoughts! He could no more depart from them than they
could keep Him out. In unity with Him do they abide, and in their
Oneness both are kept complete.
42
There is no road that leads away from Him. A journey from yourself
does not exist. How foolish and insane it is to think that there could
be a road with such an aim! Where could it go? And how could you be made
to travel on it, walking there without your own reality at one with you?
Forgive yourself your madness and forget all senseless journeys and all
goal-less aims. They have no meaning. You can not escape from what you
are. For God is merciful and did not let His Son abandon Him.
For what He is, be thankful, for in that is your escape from madness and
from death. Nowhere but where He is can you be found. There is
no path that does not lead to Him.
43
The learning of the world is built upon a concept of the self adjusted
to the world's reality. It fits it well. For this an image is that suits
a world of shadows and illusions. Here it walks at home, where what it
sees is one with it. The building of a concept of the self is what the
learning of the world is for. This is its purpose—that you come
without a self and make one as you go along. And by the time you reach
"maturity," you have perfected it to meet the world on equal terms, at
one with its demands.
44
A concept of the self is made by you. It bears no
likeness to yourself at all. It is an idol, made to take the place of
your reality as Son of God. The concept of the self the world would
teach is not the thing that it appears to be. For it is made to serve
two purposes, but one of which the mind can recognize. The first
presents the face of innocence, the aspect acted on. It is this
face that smiles and charms and even seems to love. It searches for
companions, and it looks at times with pity on the suffering and
sometimes offers solace. It believes that it is good within an evil
world.
45
This aspect can grow angry, for the world is wicked and unable to
provide the love and shelter innocence deserves. And so this face is
often wet with tears at the injustices the world accords to those who
would be generous and good. This aspect never makes the first attack.
But every day a hundred little things make small assaults upon its
innocence, provoking it to irritation and at last to open insult and
abuse.
46
The face of innocence the concept of the self so proudly wears can
tolerate attack in self-defense, for is it not a well-known fact the
world deals harshly with defenseless innocence? No one who makes a
picture of himself omits this face, for he has need of it. The other
side he does not want to see. Yet it is here the learning of the
world has set its sights, for it is here the world's "reality" is set to
see to it the idol lasts.
47
Beneath the face of innocence there is a lesson that the concept of the
self was made to teach. It is a lesson in a terrible displacement and a
fear so devastating that the face which smiles above it must forever
look away, lest it perceive the treachery it hides. The lesson teaches
this: "I am the thing you made of me, and as you look on me, you stand
condemned because of what I am." On this conception of the self the
world smiles with approval, for it guarantees the pathways of the world
are safely kept and those who walk on them will not escape.
48
Here is the central lesson that ensures your brother is condemned
eternally. For what you are has now become his sin. For this is
no forgiveness possible. No longer does it matter what he does, for your
accusing finger points to him, unwavering and deadly in its aim. It
points to you as well, but this is kept still deeper in the mists below
the face of innocence. And in these shrouded vaults are all his sins and
yours preserved and kept in darkness where they cannot be perceived as
errors, which the light would surely show. You can be neither blamed for
what you are, nor can you change the things it makes you do. And you are
each the symbol of your sins to one another, silently, and yet with
ceaseless urgency condemning still your brother for the hated thing you
are.
49
Concepts are learned. They are not natural. Apart from learning, they do
not exist. They are not given, and they must be made. Not one of them is
true, and many come from feverish imaginations, hot with hatred and
distortions born of fear. What is a concept but a thought to which its
maker gives a meaning of his own? Concepts maintain the world. But they
cannot be used to demonstrate the world is real. For all of them are
made within the world, born in its shadow, growing in its ways, and
finally "maturing" in its thought. They are ideas of idols painted with
the brushes of the world, which cannot make a single picture
representing truth.
50
A concept of the self is meaningless, for no one here can see what it is
for and therefore cannot picture what it is. Yet is all
learning which the world directs begun and ended with the single aim of
teaching you this concept of yourself, that you will choose to follow
this world's laws and never seek to go beyond its roads nor realize the
way you see yourself. Now must the Holy Spirit find a way to help you
see this concept of the self must be undone if any peace of mind is to
be given you. Nor can it be unlearned except by lessons aimed to teach
that you are something else. For otherwise you would be asked to
make exchange of what you now believe for total loss of self, and
greater terror would arise in you.
51
Thus are the Holy Spirit's lesson plans arranged in easy steps that
though there be some lack of ease at times and some distress, there is
no shattering of what was learned, but just a re-translation of what
seems to be the evidence on its behalf. Let us consider then what proof
there is that you are what your brother made of you. For even though you
do not yet perceive that this is what you think, you surely learned by
now that you behave as if it were. Does he react for you?
And did he know exactly what would happen? Could he see your future and
ordain before it came what you should do in every circumstance? He must
have made the world as well as you to have such prescience in the things
to come.
52
That you are what your brother made of you seems most unlikely. Even if
he did, who gave the face of innocence to you? Is this your
contribution? Who is, then, the "you" who made it? And who is deceived
by all your goodness and attacks it so? Let us forget the concept's
foolishness and merely think of this—there are two parts to what you
think yourself to be. If one was generated by your brother, who was
there to make the other? And from whom must something be kept hidden? If
the world be evil, there is still no need to hide what you are
made of. Who is there to see? And what but is attacked could need
defense?
53
Perhaps the reason why this concept must be kept in darkness is that in
the light the one who would not think it true is you. And what
would happen to the world you know if all its underpinnings were
removed? Your concept of the world depends upon this concept of
the self. And both would go if either one were ever raised to doubt. The
Holy Spirit does not seek to throw you into panic. So He merely asks if
just a little question might be raised.
54
There are alternatives about the thing that you must be. You might for
instance be the thing you chose to have your brother be. This
shifts the concept of the self from what is wholly passive and at least
makes way for active choice and some acknowledgment that interaction
must have entered in. There is some understanding that you chose for
both of you, and what he represents has meaning that was given it by
you. It also shows some glimmering of sight into perception's law that
what you see reflects the state of the perceiver's mind. Yet who
was it that did the choosing first? If you are what you chose your
brother be, alternatives were there to choose among, and someone must
have first decided on the one to choose and let the others go.
55
Although this step has gains, it does not yet approach a basic question.
Something must have gone before these concepts of the self. And
something must have done the learning which gave rise to them. Nor can
this be explained by either view. The main advantage of the shifting to
the second from the first is that you somehow entered in the
choice by your decision. But this gain is paid in almost equal loss, for
now you stand accused of guilt for what your brother is. And you
must share his guilt because you chose it for him in the image of your
own. While only he was treacherous before, now must you be condemned
along with him.
56
The concept of the self has always been the great preoccupation of the
world. And everyone believes that he must find the answer to the riddle
of himself. Salvation can be seen as nothing more than the escape
from concepts. It does not concern itself with content of the mind, but
with the simple statement that it thinks. And what can think has
choice and can be shown that different thoughts have different
consequence. So it can learn that everything it thinks reflects the deep
confusion that it feels about how it was made and what it is. And
vaguely does the concept of the self appear to answer what it does not
know.
57
Seek not your Self in symbols. There can be no concept that can
stand for what you are. What matters it which concept you accept while
you perceive a self which interacts with evil and reacts to wicked
things? Your concept of yourself will still remain quite meaningless.
And you will not perceive that you can interact but with yourself. To
see a guilty world is but the sign your learning has been guided by the
world, and you behold it as you see yourself. The concept of the self
embraces all you look upon, and nothing is outside of this perception.
If you can be hurt by anything, you see a picture of your secret wishes.
Nothing more than this. And in your suffering of any kind, you see your
own concealed desire to kill.
58
You will make many concepts of the self as learning goes along. Each one
will show the changes in your own relationships as your perception of
yourself is changed. There will be some confusion every time there is a
shift, but be you thankful that the learning of the world is loosening
its grasp upon your mind. And be you sure and happy in the confidence
that it will go at last and leave your mind at peace. The role of the
accuser will appear in many places and in many forms. And each will seem
to be accusing you. Yet have no fear it will not be undone.
59
The world can teach no images of you unless you want to learn
them. There will come a time when images have all gone by, and you will
see you know not what you are. It is to this unsealed and open mind that
truth returns, unhindered and unbound. Where concepts of the self have
been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is. When every
concept has been raised to doubt and question and been recognized as
made on no assumptions which would stand the light, then is the truth
left free to enter in its sanctuary, clean and free of guilt. There is
no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this:
61
Yet in this learning is salvation born. And what you are will tell
you of Itself.
62
You see the flesh or recognize the Spirit. There is no compromise
between the two. If one is real the other must be false, for what is
real denies its opposite. There is no choice in vision but this one.
What you decide in this determines all you see and think is real
and hold as true. On this one choice does all your world depend, for
here have you established what you are, as flesh or Spirit in your own
belief. If you choose flesh, you never will escape the body as your own
reality, for you have chosen that you want it so. But choose the
Spirit, and all Heaven bends to touch your eyes and bless your holy
sight, that you may see the world of flesh no more except to heal and
comfort and to bless.
63
Salvation is undoing. If you choose to see the body, you behold a world
of separation, unrelated things, and happenings that make no sense at
all. This one appears and disappears in death; that one is doomed to
suffering and loss. And no one is exactly as he was an instant previous,
nor will he be the same as he is now an instant hence. Who could have
trust where so much change is seen, for who is worthy if he be but dust?
Salvation is undoing of all this. And constancy arises in the sight of
those whose eyes salvation has released from looking at the cost of
keeping guilt because they chose to let it go instead.
64
Salvation does not ask that you behold the Spirit and perceive the body
not. It merely asks that this should be your choice. For you can
see the body without help but do not understand how to behold a world
apart from it. It is your world salvation will undo and let you see
another world your eyes could never find. Be not concerned how
this could ever be. You do not understand how what you see arose to meet
your sight. For if you did, it would be gone. The veil of ignorance is
drawn across the evil and the good and must be passed that both may
disappear, so that perception finds no hiding place. How is this done?
It is not done at all. What could there be within the universe which God
created that must still be done?
65
Only in arrogance could you conceive that you must make the way
to Heaven plain. The means are given you by which to see the world that
will replace the one you made. Your will be done! In Heaven as on earth,
this is forever true. It matters not where you believe you are nor what
you think the truth about yourself must really be. It makes no
difference what you look upon nor what you choose to feel or think or
wish. For God Himself has said, "Your will be done." And it is
done to you accordingly.
66
You who believe that you can choose to see the Son of God as you would
have him be, forget not that no concept of yourself will stand against
the truth of what you are. Undoing truth would be impossible. But
concepts are not difficult to change. One vision, clearly seen,
that does not fit the picture as it was perceived before will change the
world for eyes that learn to see, because the concept of the self
has changed. Are you invulnerable? Then the world is harmless in
your sight. Do you forgive? Then is the world forgiving, for you
have forgiven it its trespasses and so it looks on you with eyes that
see as yours. Are you a body? So is all the world perceived as
treacherous and out to kill.
67
Are you a spirit, deathless and without the promise of corruption and
the stain of sin upon you? So the world is seen as stable, fully worthy
of your trust; a happy place to rest in for a while, where nothing need
be feared but only loved. Who is unwelcome to the kind in heart? And
what could hurt the truly innocent? Your will be done, you holy Child of
God. It does not matter if you think you are in earth or Heaven. What
your Father wills for you can never change. The truth in you remains as
radiant as a star, as pure as light, as innocent as Love Itself. And you
are worthy that your will be done!
68
Learning is change. Salvation does not seek to use a means as yet too
alien to your thinking to be helpful nor to make the kinds of change you
could not recognize. Concepts are needed while perception lasts, and changing
concepts is salvation's task. For it must deal in contrasts, not in
truth, which has no opposite and cannot change. In this world's concepts
are the guilty "bad;" the "good" are innocent. And no one here but holds
a concept of himself in which he counts the "good" to pardon him the
"bad." Nor does he trust the "good" in anyone, believing that the "bad"
must lurk behind. This concept emphasizes treachery, and trust becomes
impossible. Nor could it change while you perceive the "bad" in you.
69
You could not recognize your "evil" thoughts as long as you see
value in attack. You will perceive them sometimes, but will not see them
as meaningless. And so they come in fearful form, with content still
concealed, to shake your sorry concept of yourself and blacken it with
still another "crime." You cannot give yourself your innocence, for you
are too confused about yourself. But should one brother dawn
upon your sight as wholly worthy of forgiveness, then your concept of
yourself is wholly changed. Your "evil" thoughts have
been forgiven with his, because you let them all affect you not. No
longer did you choose that you should be the sign of evil and of guilt
in him. And as you gave your trust to what is good in him, you gave it
to the good in you.
70
In terms of concepts, it is thus you see him more than just a body, for
the good is never what the body seems to be. The actions of the body are
perceived as coming from the "baser" part of you and thus of him as
well. By focusing upon the good in him, the body grows decreasingly
persistent in your sight and will at length be seen as little more than
just a shadow circling round the good. And this will be your concept of
yourself, when you have reached the world beyond the sight your
eyes alone can offer you to see. For you will not interpret what you see
without the Aid that God has given you. And in His sight there is
another world.
71
You live in that world just as much as this. For both are concepts of
yourself which can be interchanged, but never jointly held. The contrast
is far greater than you think, for you will love this concept of
yourself because it was not made for you alone. Born as a gift for
someone not perceived to be yourself, it has been given you. For
your forgiveness, offered unto him, has been accepted now for both
of you.
72
Have faith in him who walks with you, so that your fearful concept of
yourself may change. And look upon the good in him that you may not be
frightened by your "evil" thoughts because they do not cloud your view
of him. And all this shift requires is that you be willing that
this happy change occur. No more than this is asked. On its behalf,
remember what the concept of yourself which now you hold has brought you
in its wake, and welcome the glad contrast offered you. Hold out your
hand that you may have the gift of kind forgiveness which you offer one
whose need for it is just the same as yours. And let the cruel concept
of yourself be changed to one which brings the peace of God.
73
The concept of yourself which now you hold would guarantee your function
here remain forever unaccomplished and undone. And thus it dooms you to
a bitter sense of deep depression and futility. Yet it need not be fixed
unless you choose to hold it past the hope of change and keep it static
and concealed within your mind. Give it instead to Him Who understands
the changes that it needs to let it serve the function given you to
bring you peace that you may offer peace to have it yours. Alternatives
are in your mind to use, and you can see yourself another way.
Would you not rather look upon yourself as needed for salvation
of the world instead of as salvation's enemy?
74
The concept of the self stands like a shield, a silent barricade before
the truth, and hides it from your sight. All things you see are images
because you look on them as through a barrier which dims your sight and
warps your vision, so that you behold nothing with clarity. The light is
kept from everything you see. At most, you glimpse a shadow of what lies
beyond. At least, you merely look on darkness and perceive the terrified
imaginings that come from guilty thoughts and concepts born of fear. And
what you see is hell, for fear is hell. All that is given you is
for release—the sight, the vision, and the inner Guide all lead you out
of hell with those you love beside you and the universe with them.
75
Behold your role within the universe! To every part of true creation has
the Lord of Love and Life entrusted all salvation from the
misery of hell. And to each one has He allowed the grace to be a savior
to the holy ones especially entrusted to his care. And this he learns
when first he looks upon one brother as he looks upon himself
and sees the mirror of himself in him. Thus is the concept of himself
laid by, for nothing stands between his sight and what he looks upon to
judge what he beholds. And in this single vision does he see the face of
Christ and understands he looks on everyone as he beholds this One. For
there is light where darkness was before, and now the veil is lifted
from his sight.
76
The veil across the face of Christ, the fear of God and of salvation,
and the love of guilt and death, they all are different names for just
one error—that there is a space between you and your brother, kept apart
by an illusion of yourself which holds him off from you and you away
from him. The sword of judgment is the weapon which you give to the
illusion of yourself that it may fight to keep the space that holds your
brother off unoccupied by love. Yet while you hold this sword, you must
perceive the body as yourself, for you are bound to separation from the
sight of him who holds the mirror to another view of what he is and thus
what you must be.
77
What is temptation but the wish to stay in hell and misery? And
what could this give rise to but an image of yourself that can
be miserable and remain in hell and torment? Who has learned to see his
brother not as this has saved himself, and thus is he a savior
to the rest. To everyone has God entrusted all, because a partial savior
would be one who is but partly saved. The holy ones whom God has given
each of you to save are everyone you meet or look upon, not knowing who
they are, all those you saw an instant and forgot, and those you knew a
long while since, and those you will yet meet, the unremembered and the
not yet born. For God has given you His Son to save from every concept
that he ever held.
78
Yet while you wish to stay in hell, how could you be the savior of the
Son of God? How would you know his holiness while you see him apart from
yours? For holiness is seen through holy eyes that look upon the
innocence within and thus expect to see it everywhere. And so they call
it forth in everyone they look upon that he may be what they expect of
him. This is the savior's vision—that he see his innocence in all he
looks upon and sees his own salvation everywhere. He holds no concept of
himself between his calm and open eyes and what he sees. He brings
the light to what he looks upon, that he may see it as it really is.
79
Whatever form temptation seems to take, it always but reflects a wish to
be a self which you are not. And from that wish, a concept rises,
teaching that you are the thing you wish to be. It will remain
your concept of yourself until the wish that fathered it no longer is
held dear. But while you cherish it, you will behold your brother in the
likeness of the self whose image has the wish begot of you. For
vision can but represent a wish, because it has no power to
create. Yet it can look with love or look with hate, depending only on
the simple choice of whether you would join with what you see or keep
yourself apart and separate.
80
The savior's vision is as innocent of what your brother is as it is free
of any judgment made upon yourself. It sees no past in anyone at all.
And thus it serves a wholly open mind, unclouded by old concepts and
prepared to look on only what the present holds. It cannot judge because
it does not know. And recognizing this, it merely asks, "What is
the meaning of what I behold?" Then is the answer given. And the door
held open for the face of Christ to shine upon the one who asks in
innocence to see beyond the veil of old ideas and ancient concepts held
so long and dear against the vision of the Christ in you.
81
Be vigilant against temptation, then, remembering that it is but a wish,
insane and meaningless, to make yourself a thing which you are not. And
think as well upon the thing that you would be instead. It is a thing of
madness, pain, and death; a thing of treachery and black despair, of
failing dreams and no remaining hope except to die and end the dream of
fear. This is temptation, nothing more than this. Can this
be difficult to choose against? Consider what temptation is,
and see the real alternatives you choose between. There are but
two. Be not deceived by what appears as many choices. There is hell or
Heaven, and of these you choose but one.
82
Let not the world's light, given unto you, be hidden from the world. It
needs the light, for it is dark indeed, and men despair because
the savior's vision is withheld, and what they see is death. Their
savior stands, unknowing and unknown, beholding them with eyes unopened.
And they cannot see until he looks on them with seeing eyes and offers
them forgiveness with his own. Can you to whom God says, "Release My
Son!" be tempted not to listen when you learn that it is you for
whom He asks release? And what but this is what this course would teach?
And what but this is there for you to learn?
83
Temptation has one lesson it would teach in all its forms wherever it
occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what
must die, unable to escape its frailty and bound by what it orders him
to feel. It sets the limits on what he can do; its power is the only
strength he has; his grasp cannot exceed its tiny reach. Would you be
this if Christ appeared to you in all His glory, asking you but this:
85
For He has come, and He is asking this.
86
How do you make the choice? How easily is this explained! You always
choose between your weakness and the strength of Christ in you. And what
you choose is what you think is real. Simply by never using weakness to
direct your actions, you have given it no power. And the light of Christ
in you is given charge of everything you do. For you have brought your
weakness unto Him, and He has given you His strength instead.
87
Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again,
so where you made a faulty choice before, you now can make a better one
and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you.
In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity Christ calls to
you and gently says, "My brother, choose again." He would not leave one
source of pain unhealed nor any image left to veil the truth. [He would
remove all misery from you, whom God created altars unto joy.] He would
not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release
your minds from everything that hides His face from you. His holiness is
yours because He is the only power that is real in you. His
strength is yours because He is the Self that God created as His only
Son.
88
The images you make can not prevail against what God Himself
would have you be. Be never fearful of temptation then, but see it as it
is—another chance to choose again and let Christ's strength prevail in
every circumstance and every place you raised an image of yourself
before. For what appears to hide the face of Christ is powerless before
His majesty and disappears before His holy sight. The saviors of the
world who see like Him are merely those who chose His strength instead
of their own weakness, seen apart from Him. They will redeem the world,
for they are joined in all the power of the Will of God. And what they
will is only what He wills.
89
Learn then the happy habit of response to all temptation to perceive
yourself as weak and miserable with these words:
91
Thus is Christ's strength invited to prevail, replacing all your
weakness with the strength that comes from God and that can never fail.
And thus are miracles as natural as fear and agony appeared to be before
the choice for holiness was made. For in that choice are false
distinctions gone, illusory alternatives laid by, and nothing left to
interfere with truth.
92
You are as God created you, and so is every living thing you
look upon, regardless of the images you see. What you behold as sickness
and as pain, as weakness and as suffering and loss is but temptation to
perceive yourself defenseless and in hell. Yield not to this, and you
will see all pain in every form wherever it occurs but disappear as
mists before the sun. A miracle has come to heal God's Son and close the
door upon his dreams of weakness, opening the way to his salvation and
release. Choose once again what you would have him be, remembering that
every choice you make establishes your own identity as you will see it
and believe it is.
93
Deny me not the little gift I ask when in exchange I lay before your
feet the peace of God and power to bring this peace to everyone who
wanders in the world uncertain, lonely, and in constant fear. For it is
given you to join with him, and through the Christ in you unveil his
eyes and let him look upon the Christ in him. My brothers in salvation,
do not fail to hear my voice and listen to my words. I ask for nothing
but your own release. There is no place for hell within a world
whose loveliness can yet be so intense and so inclusive it is but a step
from there to Heaven. To your tired eyes I bring a vision of a different
world, so new and clean and fresh you will forget the pain and sorrow
that you saw before. Yet this a vision is which you must share with
everyone you see, for otherwise you will behold it not. To give this
gift is how to make it yours. And God ordained in loving kindness that
it be for you.
94
Let us be glad that we can walk the world and find so many chances to
perceive another situation where God's gift can once again be recognized
as ours! And thus will all the vestiges of hell, the secret "sins," and
hidden hates be gone. And all the loveliness which they concealed appear
like lawns of Heaven to our sight to lift us high above the thorny roads
we travelled on before the Christ appeared. Hear me, my brothers, hear
and join with me. God has ordained I cannot call in vain, and in His
certainty I rest content. For you will hear, and you will
choose again. And in this choice is everyone made free.
95
I thank You, Father, for these holy ones who are my brothers as they
are Your Sons. My faith in them is Yours. I am as sure that they will
come to me as You are sure of what they are and will forever be. They
will accept the gift I offer them because You gave it me on their
behalf. And as I would but do Your holy Will, so will they choose. And
I give thanks for them. Salvation's song will echo through the world
with every choice they make. For we are one in purpose, and the end of
hell is near.
96
In joyous welcome is my hand outstretched to every brother who would
join with me in reaching past temptation and who looks with fixed
determination toward the light that shines beyond in perfect
constancy. Give me my own, for they belong to You. And can You fail in
what is but Your Will? I give You thanks for what my brothers are. And
as each one elects to join with me, the song of thanks from earth to
Heaven grows from tiny scattered threads of melody to one inclusive
chorus from a world redeemed from hell and giving thanks to You.
97
And now we say "Amen." For Christ has come to dwell in the abode You
set for Him before time was, in calm eternity. The journey closes,
ending at the place where it began. No trace of it remains. Not one
illusion is accorded faith, and not one spot of darkness still remains
to hide the face of Christ from anyone. Thy Will is done, complete and
perfectly, and all creation recognizes You and knows You as the only
Source it has. Clear in Your Likeness does the Light shine forth from
everything that lives and moves in You. For we have reached where all
of us are One, and we are home, where You would have us be.