Publisher of A Course In Miracles, Exams of Voice

Download Publisher of A Course In Miracles and more Exams Voice in PDF only on Docsity! A Course in Miracles Original Edition— text workbook for students manual for teachers Helen Schucman and William T. Thetford, Editors Course in Miracles Society 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. If learning aims at change, and that is always its purpose, are you satisfied with the changes your learn- ing 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 nec- essary. T8:4-5 A Course In Miracles T E x T Course in MiraCles soCiety iii ix F i F t e e n t h e p u r p o s e o F t i M e i. Introduction ..................................................................................292 ii. Uses of Time ................................................................................292 iii. Time and Eternity ........................................................................295 iv. Littleness Versus Magnitude ...........................................................297 v. Practicing the Holy Instant ............................................................299 vi. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships ..................................302 vii. The Holy Instant and the Laws of God ........................................304 viii. The Holy Instant and Communication ........................................306 ix. The Holy Instant and Real Relationships .....................................309 x. The Time of Christ .......................................................................312 xi. The End of Sacrifice ....................................................................315 s i x t e e n t h e F o r g i v e n e s s o F i l l u s i o n s i. Introduction .................................................................................. 318 ii. True Empathy ................................................................................ 319 iii. The Magnitude of Holiness ........................................................... 320 iv. The Reward of Teaching ................................................................ 322 v. Illusion and Reality of Love ............................................................ 324 vi. Specialness and Guilt ..................................................................... 327 vii. The Bridge to the Real World ...................................................... 331 viii. The End of Illusions .................................................................... 334 s e v e n t e e n F o r g i v e n e s s a n d h e a l i n g i. Introduction ..................................................................................337 ii. Fantasy and Distorted Perception ..................................................337 iii. The Forgiven World .....................................................................338 iv. Shadows of the Past ......................................................................340 v. Perception and the Two Worlds ......................................................343 vi. The Healed Relationship .............................................................346 vii. Practical Forgiveness ...................................................................350 viii. The Need for Faith .....................................................................352 ix. The Conditions of Forgiveness .....................................................354 e i g h t e e n t h e d r e a M a n d t h e r e a l i t y i. Introduction .................................................................................. 356 ii. Substitution as a Defense ................................................................ 357 iii. The Basis of the Dream ................................................................. 359 iv. Light in the Dream ........................................................................ 361 v. The Little Willingness ................................................................... 363 vi. The Happy Dream ........................................................................ 365 vii. Dreams and the Body .................................................................. 367 viii. I Need Do Nothing .................................................................... 370 ix. The Purpose of the Body .............................................................. 372 x. The Delusional Thought System ..................................................... 374 xi. The Passing of the Dream ............................................................. 377 n i n e t e e n B e y o n d t h e B o d y i. Introduction .................................................................................. 378 ii. Healing and the Mind ................................................................... 378 iii. Sin Versus Error ........................................................................... 381 iv. The Unreality of Sin ..................................................................... 383 v. Obstacles to Peace ......................................................................... 387 t w e n t y t h e p r o M i s e o F t h e r e s u r r e C t i o n i. Introduction .................................................................................. 402 ii. Holy Week ..................................................................................... 402 iii. Thorns and Lilies ......................................................................... 403 iv. Sin as an Adjustment ..................................................................... 405 v. Entering the Ark ........................................................................... 408 vi. Heralds of Eternity ...................................................................... 410 vii. The Temple of the Holy Spirit ...................................................... 412 viii. The Consistency of Means and End ........................................... 415 ix. The Vision of Sinlessness .............................................................. 417 t w e n t y o n e t h e i n n e r p i C t u r e i. Introduction ..................................................................................420 ii. The Imagined World .....................................................................420 iii. The Responsibility For Sight ........................................................422 iv. Faith, Belief, and Vision .................................................................425 v. The Fear to Look Within ...............................................................428 vi. Reason and Perception ................................................................430 vii. Reason and Correction ...............................................................432 viii. Perception and Wishes ...............................................................434 ix. The Inner Shift ............................................................................437 t w e n t y t w o s a l v a t i o n a n d t h e h o l y r e l a t i o n s h i p i. Introduction .................................................................................. 439 ii. The Message of the Holy Relationship .......................................... 440 iii. Your Brother’s Sinlessness ............................................................. 442 iv. Reason and the Holy Relationship ............................................... 445 v. The Branching of the Road ........................................................... 447 vi. Weakness and Defensiveness ......................................................... 449 vii. Freedom and the Holy Spirit ...................................................... 450 t w e n t y t h r e e t h e wa r a g a i n s t yo u r s e l F i. Introduction ...................................................................................455 ii. The Irreconcilable Beliefs ................................................................456 iii. The Laws of Chaos .......................................................................459 iv. Salvation Without Compromise .....................................................463 v. The Fear of Life ..............................................................................465 ContentsA COURSE IN MIRACLES x xi t w e n t y F o u r s p e C i a l n e s s a n d s e p a r a t i o n i. Introduction .................................................................................. 468 ii. Specialness as a Substitute For Love ............................................... 468 iii. The Treachery of Specialness ........................................................ 471 iv. The Forgiveness of Specialness ...................................................... 474 v. Specialness and Salvation ............................................................... 475 vi. The Resolution of the Dream ..................................................... 477 vii. Salvation From Fear .................................................................... 479 viii. The Meeting Place ..................................................................... 482 t w e n t y F i v e t h e r e M e d y i. Introduction ..................................................................................485 ii. The Appointed Task ......................................................................485 iii. The Savior From the Dark ...........................................................487 iv. The Fundamental Law of Perception .............................................490 v. The Joining of Minds .....................................................................492 vi. The State of Sinlessness ................................................................493 vii. The Special Function .................................................................495 viii. Commuting the Sentence ..........................................................496 ix. The Principle of Salvation ............................................................499 x. The Justice of Heaven ...................................................................503 t w e n t y s i x th e t r a n s i t i o n i. Introduction .................................................................................. 506 ii. The “Sacrifice” of Oneness ............................................................ 506 iii. The Forms of Error ...................................................................... 508 iv. The Borderland ............................................................................ 510 v. Where Sin Has Left ....................................................................... 511 vi. The Little Hindrance .................................................................... 513 vii. The Appointed Friend ................................................................. 515 viii. Review of Principles ................................................................. 516 ix. The Immediacy of Salvation ......................................................... 520 x. For They Have Come ................................................................... 522 xi. The Remaining Task .................................................................... 524 t w e n t y s e v e n t h e B o d y a n d t h e d r e a M i. Introduction ...................................................................................526 ii. The Picture of the Crucifixion .......................................................526 iii. The Fear of Healing ......................................................................529 iv. The Symbol of the Impossible ........................................................532 v. The Quiet Answer ..........................................................................533 vi. The Healing Example ...................................................................535 vii. The Purpose of Pain .....................................................................538 viii. The Illusion of Suffering .............................................................539 ix. The “Hero” of the Dream .............................................................543 t w e n t y e i g h t t h e u n d o i n g o F F e a r i. Introduction .................................................................................. 546 ii. The Present Memory .................................................................... 547 iii. Reversing Effect and Cause ......................................................... 549 iv. The Agreement to Join .................................................................. 552 v. The Greater Joining ....................................................................... 554 vi. The Alternate to Dreams of Fear ................................................... 556 vii. The Secret Vows .......................................................................... 558 viii. The Beautiful Relationship ........................................................ 559 t w e n t y n i n e . . t h e a w a k e n i n g i. Introduction .................................................................................. 561 ii. The Closing of the Gap ................................................................. 562 iii. The Coming of the Guest ............................................................ 563 iv. God’s Witnesses ............................................................................ 565 v. Dream Roles ................................................................................. 566 vi. The Changeless Dwelling Place .................................................... 568 vii. Forgiveness and Peace ................................................................. 569 viii. The Lingering Illusion ............................................................... 570 ix. Christ and Anti-Christ .................................................................. 572 x. The Forgiving Dream ................................................................... 574 t h i r t y th e n e w B e g i n n i n g i. Introduction ..................................................................................578 ii. Rules For Decision .......................................................................578 iii. Freedom of Will ...........................................................................582 iv. Beyond All Idols ...........................................................................583 v. The Truth Behind Illusions ............................................................585 vi. The Only Purpose .......................................................................587 vii. The Justification For Forgiveness ................................................589 viii. The New Interpretation .............................................................592 ix. Changeless Reality .......................................................................593 t h i r t y o n e t h e s i M p l i C i t y o F s a l v a t i o n i. Introduction .................................................................................. 596 ii. The Illusion of an Enemy .............................................................. 599 iii. The Self-Accused ......................................................................... 601 iv. The Real Alternative ..................................................................... 603 v. Self Concept Versus Self ................................................................. 605 vi. Recognizing the Spirit ................................................................. 609 vii. The Savior’s Vision ...................................................................... 611 viii. Choose Once Again ................................................................... 614 A p p e n d i x i - g l o s s a r y o F C o u r s e te r M s ............................................. 619 A p p e n d i x i i - t h e e a r l y e d i t i o n s a n d e d i t i n g o F A C o u r s e i n M i r A C l e s ................................................................... 627 A COURSE IN MIRACLES Contents xiii Fo r eword This course is a beginning, not an end. Your Friend goes with you. You are not alone. No one who calls on Him can call in ain. Whateer troubles you, be certain that He has the answer and will gladly gie it to you if you simply turn to Him and ask it of Him. He will not withhold all answers that you need for anything that seems to trouble you. He knows the way to sole all problems and resole all doubts. His certainty is yours. You need but ask it of Him, and it will be gien you. You are as certain of arriing home as is the pathway of the sun laid down before it rises, after it has set, and in the half-lit hours in between. Indeed, your pathway is more certain still, for it cannot be possible to change the course of those whom God has called to Him. Therefore obey your will, and follow Him Whom you accepted as your Voice, to speak of what you really want and really need. His is the Voice for God, and also yours. And thus He speaks of freedom and of truth. 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 motiation for learning this course. Peace is.”  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, 1 W365:2-3.. 2 T8:1. 3 For example, see T9:29, 10:74 , and 15:39.  O N E Introduction to Miracles i. prinCiples oF MiraCles 1. 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 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. 4 5 spective. 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 night- mare 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 di- mensions 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 eerything to you, or rather to restore it to your awareness. You were gien 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. 32 The power to work miracles belongs to you. I will provide the opportuni- ties 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 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 more blessed to give than 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 minds one in God. 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 per- 1 The term “Spiritual eye” is later replaced by the Holy Spirit, and the “physical eye” becomes the ego. The emphasis on the two ways of seeing, however, remains throughout. Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION TO MIRACLES i. PrinCiPles oF MirACles   40 Revelation induces a state in which fear has already been abolished. Miracles are thus a means, and revelation is an end. 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 action. Miracles are more useful now because of their interpersonal 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-identi- fication 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 com- munion 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 through accomplishment. The ability is the potential; the achievement is its ex- pression; 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 themseles 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 light, shall not pass away because light 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 interper- sonal and result in real closeness to others. This can be misunderstood by a person- ally willful consciousness as impulses toward physical gratification. 38 Revelation unites Souls directly with God. Miracles unite minds directly with each other. Neither emanates from consciousness, but both are experienced there. This is essential since consciousness is the state which induces 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 the subconscious always contain the impulse to miracles, but man 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 his actions, then, his relationships also become superficial, and miracle-inspired relating becomes impossible. 29. 39 Miracles are a way of earning release from fear. Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION TO MIRACLES i. PrinCiPles oF MirACles   munication, 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 recipro- cal 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 shifts 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 render- ing the space of time it occupies unnecessary. There is no relationship between the time a miracle takes and the time it coers. 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 interals 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 col- lapsing 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 which are the oluntary 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 un- speakable 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 differ- ence 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 misun- derstood 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 com- Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION TO MIRACLES i. PrinCiPles oF MirACles 4 5 concepts such as “up” and “down” are meaningful. Ultimately, space is as mean- ingless 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 themseles. Since this makes it inevi- table 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 discord as false. All aspects of fear are untrue because they do not exist at the higher creative level, and there- fore 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. 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 ery 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 am- bivalence. 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 Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION TO MIRACLES i. PrinCiPles oF MirACles   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. 99 In sorting out the false from the true, the miracle proceeds along the following lines: 100 If perfect loe casts out fear, And if fear exists, Then there is not perfect loe. But only perfect loe really exists. If there is fear, It creates a state which does not exist. 101 Believe this and you will be free. Only God can establish this solution, and this faith is His gift. ii. distortions oF MiraCle iMpulses 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 Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION TO MIRACLES ii. distortions oF MirACle iMPulses   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. 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 Chapter 2: THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION ii. the reinterPretAtion oF deFenses 4 5 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 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 Chapter 2: THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION ii. the reinterPretAtion oF deFenses   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 are 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 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. iii. healing as release FroM Fear 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 Chapter 2: THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION iii. heAling As releAse FroM FeAr   the Atonement as the remedy. These steps can be summarized as follows: 1. 82 Know first that this is fear. 2. 83 Fear arises from lack of love. 3. 84 The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love. 4. 85 Perfect love is the Atonement. 86 We have emphasized that the miracle, or the expression of the 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. 87 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. 88 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. 89 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 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 behae as you think you should but without entirely willing to do so. This produces consistent behavior but entails great strain within the self. 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. 79 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. 80 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. v. the CorreCtion For laCk oF love 81 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 that 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 Chapter 2: THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION v. the CorreCtion For lACk oF love 4 5 miracle, you hae 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. 95 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 aboe 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. 96 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 loe is inherent in the first. Because of this difference, the basic conflict is one between love and fear. 97 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 loe. 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. 98 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. whatever he wants without any real effect at all. 90 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. 91 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. 92 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. 93 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. 94 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 Chapter 2: THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION v. the CorreCtion For lACk oF love   between readiness and mastery, let me remind you that time and space are under my control. 104 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. vi. the Meaning oF the last JudgMent 105 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. 106 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. 107 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. 108 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 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. 99 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 on 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.” 100 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. 101 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. 102 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. 103 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 loe can be mastered. You have attested only to your readiness. Mastery of love involved 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 Chapter 2: THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION vi. the MeAning oF the lAst JudgMent 4 4 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 eerything 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 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 themseles. 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 in the sense that he sees Him as He is and realizes that the Atonement, not sacrifice, is the only appropriate gift to His own altar, where nothing except true perfection belongs. The understanding of the innocent is truth. That is why their altars are truly radiant. iv. MiraCles as aCCurate perCeption 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 joint possibilities. 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 thing. This makes everyone iv. MirACles As ACCurAte PerCePtionChapter 3: RETRAINING THE MIND 44 45 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 neer 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. v. perCeption versus knowledge 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 v. PerCePtion versus knowledgeChapter 3: RETRAINING THE MIND 4 4 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. Perceie 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 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. vi. ConFliCt and the ego 38 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. 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. 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 perceier 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 neer 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 vi. ConFliCt And the egoChapter 3: RETRAINING THE MIND 5 5 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 ery 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 gien 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 hae 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.” ix. Creating versus the selF-iMage 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. ix. CreAting versus the selF-iMAgeChapter 3: RETRAINING THE MIND 54 55 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 beliee 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 ery real and ery 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. ix. CreAting versus the selF-iMAgeChapter 3: RETRAINING THE MIND 5 5 F O U R The Root of All Eil i. introduCtion 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. 4:2 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 oercome 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. ii. right teaChing and right learning 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 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 whateer 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. ii. right teAChing And right leArning   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 hae 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 neer 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 the 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 Chapter 4: THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL iii. the ego And FAlse AutonoMy 4 5 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. Eery 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. iv. love without ConFliCt 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. 4 The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not preail against it. Amen. 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 salation 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 Chapter 4: THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL iv. love without ConFliCt   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 gien you eerything. 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 hae 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 haing 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? v. the esCape FroM Fear 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. Chapter 4: THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL v. the esCAPe FroM FeAr   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 neer asked by those who pursue them is, “What for?” 78 This is the question which you must learn to ask in connection with eerything 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. vii. the Constant state 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 beliee 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 disassociate. 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 Chapter 4: THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL vii. the ConstAnt stAte 4 5 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? viii. Creation and CoMMuniCation 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 Chapter 4: THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL viii. CreAtion And CoMMuniCAtion   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 haing 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. ix. true rehaBilitation 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. Chapter 4: THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL ix. true rehAbilitAtion 8 8 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 motiation 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. iv. the voiCe For god 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 creatie 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 deotions. Yet you have iv. the voiCe For godChapter 5: HEALING AND WHOLENESS 84 85 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 giing 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 behaior, but no one denies the basic law that behavior is a response to motivation, and motiation 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. v. the guide to salvation 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 v. the guide to sAlvAtionChapter 5: HEALING AND WHOLENESS 8 8 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 themseles 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 gier. 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. vi. therapy and teaChing 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 Chapter 5: HEALING AND WHOLENESS vi. therAPy And teAChing   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 positie 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 alternaties 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. viii. tiMe and eternity 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 preserers 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 Chapter 5: HEALING AND WHOLENESS viii. tiMe And eternity 4 5 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 gae 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 be 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 God’s 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 gien 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 Chapter 5: HEALING AND WHOLENESS viii. tiMe And eternity   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. ix. the eternal Fixation 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 neer 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. Chapter 5: HEALING AND WHOLENESS ix. the eternAl FixAtion 0 0 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 beliee 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 you 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 neer 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: 8 Teach only loe, for that is what you are. 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 ii. the MessAge oF the CruCiFixionChapter 6: ATTACK AND FEAR 04 05 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 belieed 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 iii. the uses oF ProJeCtion 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. iii. the uses oF proJeCtion 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 beliee 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 that 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. Chapter 6: ATTACK AND FEAR 0 0 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. Eerything 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 perceie 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 reach 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 iii. the uses oF ProJeCtion 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 beliee 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 neer 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 neer 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 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. Chapter 6: ATTACK AND FEAR   to eradicate it would be to attack it. Being questioned, He did not question. He merely gave the Answer. His Answer is your Teacher. a. To Have, Give All to All 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 beliee 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 beliee 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 themseles 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 neer 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 v. the only Answer 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. Eerything 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 motiation 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. 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 Chapter 6: ATTACK AND FEAR 4 5 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 gie to all. He never takes anything back because He wants you to keep it. Therefore, His teaching begins with the lesson:  To have, give all to all. 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 ery 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. b. To Have Peace, Teach Peace to Learn It 70 All the separated ones have a basic fear of retaliation and abandonment. This is because they beliee 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 yourseles 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 beliee in it therefore perceive this as an attack on them. This is because everyone identifies himself with his thought system, and eery thought system centers on what you beliee 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 motiation 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 v. the only Answer 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 hae, gie 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 Chapter 6: ATTACK AND FEAR   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: 8 To have peace, teach peace to learn it. 79 This is still a preliminary step since haing and being are still not equated. It is, however, more advanced than the first step, which is really only a thought reersal. 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. c. Be Vigilant Only for God and His Kingdom 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. v. the only Answer 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 neer 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 yourseles. He would hardly be consistent if He allowed you to strengthen what you must learn to aoid. 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: 85 Be igilant only for God and His Kingdom. 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 igilance. 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 Chapter 6: ATTACK AND FEAR   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. iii. the laws oF Mind 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 argu- ment 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 similar error in that it refers to something that exists among different or separate people. When we spoke before of iii. the lAws oF Mind 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 beliee.” 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, neer 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 presere the form. 16 The Holy Spirit’s purpose in translating is naturally exactly the opposite. He translates only to presere 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 Chapter 7: THE CONSISTENCY OF THE KINGDOM 4 5 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 preents 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 eer 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. iv. the uniFied CurriCuluM 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 ariable 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 v. the reCognition oF truth 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 ery useful for His. If different abilities are applied long enough to one goal, the abilities themseles 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 it 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. v. the reCognition oF truth 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 Chapter 7: THE CONSISTENCY OF THE KINGDOM   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. This is totally beyond question, and when you questioned it 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 neer 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. v. the reCognition oF truth 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 still 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 Chapter 7: THE CONSISTENCY OF THE KINGDOM   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. vii. FroM vigilanCe to peaCe 54 Although you can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceie 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 neer 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 God, 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 presering it, and this must be a source of extreme anxiety. That is why the ego neer 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 beliee in totality. This unbelief is its origin and, while the ego does vii. FroM vigilAnCe to PeACe 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 eerything. 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 make 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 Chapter 7: THE CONSISTENCY OF THE KINGDOM 4 5 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. 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 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. viii. the totAl CoMMitMent 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. viii. the total CoMMitMent 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 requires you to recognize only part of reality to appreciate all of it. Mind is too powerful to be subject to exclusion. You will neer 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 Chapter 7: THE CONSISTENCY OF THE KINGDOM   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 giing 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 hae 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 eerything 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. viii. the totAl CoMMitMent One Teacher is in all your minds, and He teaches the same lesson to all. He always teaches you the inestimable worth of eery 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 depried. 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 depried 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 hae 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. Chapter 7: THE CONSISTENCY OF THE KINGDOM 4 4 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. xi. the ConFusion oF strength and weakness 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 eerything. If you believed this, there would be no conflict. 102 That is why you need to demonstrate the obvious to yourselves. 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 neer asks for sacrifice, but the ego always does. When you are confused about this ery clear distinction in motivation, it can only be due to projection. xii. the stAte oF grACe Projection of this kind is a confusion in motivation and, gien 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. 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. xii. the state oF graCe 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 Chapter 7: THE CONSISTENCY OF THE KINGDOM 44 45 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 themseles 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 so 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 xii. the stAte oF grACe 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. Chapter 7: THE CONSISTENCY OF THE KINGDOM 4 4 E I G H T The Journey Back i. introduCtion 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. 8:2 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 gie it the power. 3 The ego’s voice is an 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 eer make. ii. the direCtion oF the CurriCuluM 4 Those whom you perceive as opponents are part of your peace, which you are giving up by attacking them. How can you hae 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 hae 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. iii. the rationale For ChoiCe 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 iii. the rAtionAle For ChoiCe 5 5 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 peace and union. 29 Do you not think the world needs peace as much as you do? Do you not want to gie it to the world as much as you want to receie 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 be 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. Motiation 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 oercome 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 gae 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 v. the light oF the worldChapter 8: THE JOURNEY BACK 54 55 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 hae gone beyond it toward truth. Our success in transcending the ego is guaranteed by God, and I can share 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, since 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 neer 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. vi. the power oF Joint deCision 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 vi. the Power oF Joint deCisionChapter 8: THE JOURNEY BACK 5 5 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 gie 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, being a contradiction in terms which actually leaves nothing. 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 minds of God’s Sons if they so choose. This choice does make the Son’s function unknown to him, but neer 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. vii. CoMMuniCation and the ego-Body equation 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 vii. CoMMuniCAtion And the ego-body equAtion Chapter 8: THE JOURNEY BACK   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 inestment 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 eerything 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 aoiding 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 neer 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. ix. healing as CorreCted perCeption 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 ix. heAling As CorreCted PerCePtionChapter 8: THE JOURNEY BACK 4 5 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 x. the aCCeptanCe oF reality 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. x. the ACCePtAnCe oF reAlity Chapter 8: THE JOURNEY BACK   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 help you 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 hae. 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 yourself, 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 receie 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 neer 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 receie them? 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 neer 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 x. the ACCePtAnCe oF reAlityChapter 8: THE JOURNEY BACK   N I N E The Correction of Error i. introduCtion 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. 9:2 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. ii. sanity and perCeption 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 gae 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 hae 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 eerything without it. Condemnation will then not be real to you, and all your errors will be forgiven. ii. sAnity And PerCePtion 4 5 iii. atoneMent as a lesson in sharing 9 Atonement is for all because it is the way to undo the belief that anything is for you alone. To forgive is to oerlook. 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 its 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 hae 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 hae 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 proes 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 hae 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 neer 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 hae 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 Chapter 9: THE CORRECTION OF ERROR iii. AtoneMent As A lesson in shAring   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. iv. the unhealed healer 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 gie what he has not receied. 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 beliee 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 was been a revolt against this concept, but to revolt against it is still to beliee 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 gie and consequently cannot share. He cannot correct because he is not working correctiely. 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 perceiing 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 Chapter 9: THE CORRECTION OF ERROR iv. the unheAled heAler