| The Message of A Course in Miracles: A Translation of the Text in Plain Language |
Chapter 11: God or the Ego 1. Either God or the personal mind is insane and if you examine them both fairly you will realize that this is true. Both thought systems are whole and consistent within themselves but they are diametrically opposed to each other so your allegiance must be to one or the other. Their results, too, are as different as their foundations and you cannot reconcile them by vacillating between them. Everything has a source but God, Which is the Source of Everything. Your decision as to whether God or the personal mind is insane is your answer to your question “What is my source?” and you will be faithful to the source that you choose. 2. It does not make sense that the answer to your question “What is my source?” involves conflict. You made the personal mind so how could it have made you? The source of all of your conflict, then, is that the personal mind was made out of your wish to replace God with your own god. The personal mind is a delusional thought system in which you made your own source. Looked upon with perfect honesty the personal mind is clearly insane but the personal mind never looks on anything with perfect honesty. Its insane premise is buried in the dark foundation of its thought system and either you accept that the personal mind, which you made, is your source or its whole thought system will crumble for you. 3. The personal mind makes a world seem real through projection but God extends God Infinitely and this is Reality. You are God’s Extension and as you approach the Foundation of God’s Thought System your mind becomes clearer. But the closer you get to the foundation of the personal mind’s thought system the more unclear and confused your mind becomes. But God is always with you and you must bring your awareness of God with you as you look at the foundation of the personal mind’s thought system and judge it honestly. Look at the terror at the center of the personal mind’s thought system and see that it rests on the meaningless idea that you have replaced God and so all of your fears rest on nothing. 4. In your Christ Mind you are One with God and when you have at last looked at the personal mind’s thought system without fear you will find the foundation of God’s Thought System, Which it seemed to hide. Christ within you is of God and offers you Everything. Do not deny Christ to keep the personal mind’s dark foundation hidden because protecting it will not save you. With your Christ mind look closely at the personal mind and Christ will lead you to God to be Whole again in your awareness. Answer the Call of your Christ Mind with Joy. 1. The Gifts of Fatherhood 1. You have learned of your need of healing and you must bring healing to your entire mind to be healed. In this lies the beginning of your return to God and it is the foundation on which God’s Thought System will be rebuilt within you again. God blesses every thought of healing that you have because you are restoring yourself to Oneness with God. Whenever you extend God’s Love in place of any perception of the world that you perceive you restore yourself to God’s Oneness. You live in the Mind of God with your entire mind because God wills to be Whole. 2. For you to be limited to the personal mind is for you to be separated from Infinity but how can you be limited when Infinity has no limits? You cannot be beyond the Limitless because What has no limits is Everywhere. God has no beginning and no ending so God’s Universe is God. You cannot exclude yourself from the Universe because the Universe is God. You are One with God in your Christ Mind. Part of God cannot be missing or lost to God. 3. If you are not One with God, God’s Will is not One. God’s Mind cannot contain nothing. You are One with God and without you there would be an empty place in God’s Mind. God’s Extension cannot be blocked and It has no voids. It continues Forever, even though you deny It. Your denial of God’s Extension stops It in time but not in Eternity and that is why your Extension of God continues and waits for your return to God. 4. You can wait in time but time has no meaning. You made delay and you could leave all time behind by realizing that what has a beginning and an ending is not of God. God places no limits on Its Own extension to you and through you. You do not know this because you have tried to limit God’s Oneness so you believe that God is limited. You cannot know your own Extension of God by denying Infinity. 5. There is no contradiction in God’s Universe. What is true for God is true for you. If you believe that you are separate from God you will believe that God is separate from you. Infinity is meaningless without you and you are meaningless without God. God’s Oneness has no end and this is the Universe. God is not incomplete and God extends Everywhere. Because God does not will to be separate from Infinity God extends God Infinitely. Do not deny God Its Extension because denying God as your Source denies your own Extension of God. God’s Extension is God’s Oneness and your Extension of God honors God’s Oneness. The Universe of Love does not stop because you do not see It, nor does your denial of It mean that you cannot know It. Look on the Glory of God’s Oneness and you will learn What God has kept for you. 6. Your Place in God’s Mind is yours Forever. You can keep It in your awareness only by extending It as It was extended to you. You cannot be limited in God because God extends God to you so that God will not be limited. God’s Mind cannot be lessened but it can be increased because All of God extends Infinitely. Love does not limit and What It extends is not limited. Your extending God without limit is God’s Will for you because only this will bring you God’s Joy. Your Love is as Boundless as God’s Love because your Love is God’s Love. 7. No Part of God can be without God’s Love and no Part of God’s Love can be contained. God is your Legacy because God’s One Gift to you is God. You must extend God as God extends God to you to know God’s Gift to you. Extend God without limit and without end to learn how much God has given to you. Your willingness to accept God is demonstrated by your willingness to extend God as God extends God. God and your Extension of God are One. God Wills to extend God and your Will is God’s Will. 8. In the personal mind you do not know your Will because you deny It and your denial means that you refuse to acknowledge Its existence. Your Oneness with God is God’s Will and by denying This you deny your own Will and therefore do not know What it is. You must learn to ask what is God’s Will in everything because It is your Will. You do not know what It is in the personal mind but the Holy Spirit in you remembers It for you. Ask the Holy Spirit what is God’s Will for you and the Holy Spirit will tell you your Will. Whenever it feels like the Holy Spirit is coercing you it is only because you have not recognized your Will. 9. The personal mind projects God’s Will outside of you so that it seems as though It is not your Will. This makes it seem possible for your will to conflict with God’s Will, for God to demand of you what you do not want to give, and for God to deprive you of what you do want. But God only wants your shared Will and God is not capable of demanding or depriving. Your Will is God’s Life, Which God has extended to you. Even in time you cannot live apart from God. Denial is not death and while you can deny you cannot die. Immortality is God’s Will for you and your Will for yourself. You cannot will death for yourself because God is Life and you are One with God. Oneness with God is your Will because it is God’s Will. 10. You will not be happy unless you do what you Truly Will. You cannot change this because it is unchangeable by God’s Will and your Will; otherwise God’s Will will not be extended. You are afraid of God’s Will because you believe that It is not yours. This belief is your whole sickness and all of your fear and your every symptom of sickness and fear comes from this belief because it makes you want to deny God. Believing that God’s Will is not yours you hide from God and deny that God is within you. 11. You are asked to trust the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit speaks for you. The Holy Spirit is the Voice for God but remember that God does not Will to be limited so God extends Itself to you but does not thrust Itself on you. What God extends is still One with God so that nothing can contradict God. You who share God’s Life must extend It to know It because extending It is the way for you to know that you are One with It. You are blessed when you learn that to hear God’s Will is to know your own Will. It is your Will to be One with God as It is God’s Will to be One with you. Your healing is the beginning of your recognition that your Will is God’s Will. 2. The Invitation to Healing 1. Sickness is your separation from God and your decision to be healed is the first step toward recognizing that you truly want God. Your every perception of separation that you believe in is an attack that is a step away from healing and your every extension of God’s Love is a step toward full healing. You have God and God’s Extension because you are God and God’s Extension. Your Will is God’s Will because God wills you God. In Truth you Will yourself to God because, understanding God perfectly, you know There is only One Will. But when you attack your mind with any perception of separation you attack God’s Oneness, you do not understand God, and the Peace that you really want is lost to you. 2. Your healing, then, is a lesson in understanding God and the more you practice it the better a teacher and learner you become. When you have denied God what better Witness is there to God’s Reality than your own extension of God’s Love? But It must be extended from you not projected away from you for you to be healed. Every miracle you extend reminds you that God is your Source. Every healing thought that you accept within your mind and through your extensions teaches you that you are One with God. In every hurtful thought, wherever you perceive it, lies your denial of God and of your Oneness with God. 3. Denial is as total as Love. You cannot deny that the world is in your mind and that everything in the world is in your min or your Christ Mind will also seem to be separate and without meaning and you will not understand any of your mind. You can only heal yourself because only you need healing. You need it because you do not understand yourself and therefore you do not know what you do. Having forgotten your Will you do not know what you want. 4. Your willingness to heal is a sign that you want to be whole and it opens you to the Holy Spirit’s Message of Wholeness. With Its Own Complete Will the Holy Spirit takes you far beyond your own small willingness to be whole to make your will Whole again. What can you not accomplish with God within you? But you must allow God into your awareness because what you allow into your awareness is what is real to you. 5. If you do not welcome the Holy Spirit you will not hear the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is always within you but you cannot hear It when you choose to listen to the personal mind. Your effort to hear the Holy Spirit is the sign that you want the Holy Spirit. Think like the Holy Spirit just slightly and the Holy Spirit will fill your mind. But whenever you turn to the personal mind you lessen your awareness of the Holy Spirit because you have turned away from It. Wherever you go and whatever you do the Holy Spirit goes with you and waits for you to turn back to It. You can trust Its Patience because It cannot leave a Part of God. But you need more than patience. 6. You will not rest until you know your Function and fulfill It because this is your Joint Will with God. To have God is to be like God and God has given God to you to have. God’s Function, then, is your Function. Invite knowledge of this into your mind again and do not let anything obscure it. The Holy Spirit will teach you how to do this if you are even a little aware of God and you are willing to let this awareness grow. Your willingness does not need to be perfect because the Holy Spirit’s is. Offer the Holy Spirit even a little place in your mind and you will be so relieved you will offer It even more. As your awareness of the Holy Spirit increases you will begin to remember your Oneness with God. 7. You can be limited by the personal mind or Limitless in God and you will accept whichever is your choice. You are free to listen to either and to determine how long you will listen. But this is not real freedom because you are choosing between What is Real and what is not. The Holy Spirit is always within you but It cannot help you unless you are open to It. And the personal mind is always nothing whether you are open to it or not. Your real freedom means your welcoming Reality and only the Holy Spirit is Real. You do not need imaginary comforters because the Comforter from God is already within you. 3. From Darkness to Light 1. Whenever you are weary it is because you have attacked yourself. The Holy Spirit will rest you. You cannot rest yourself because if you knew how you would never have grown weary. You cannot suffer unless you hurt yourself because suffering is not God’s Will for you. Pain is not of God because God does not attack and God’s Peace surrounds you Silently. God is very Quiet because there is no conflict in God. Your conflict is the root of all evil because it attacks blindly and does not see what it attacks. But it always attacks you in your Oneness with God. 2. You are indeed in need of comfort because you know not what you do and you believe that your True Will is not your will. At Home in God, you wander homeless and isolated in your denial. God does not let this be Real because God is One with you. Your Will is God’s Will so it cannot be true of you because it is not true of God. 3. If you knew What God wills for you your Joy would be complete. What God Wills is always True. When the Truth dawns on you and you say, “God’s Will is mine” you will see such Beauty that you will know that It does not come from the personal mind. Out of your Joy you will extend this Beauty in God because your Joy cannot be contained anymore than God’s Joy can be contained. The bleak little world will vanish and you will be so filled with Joy that you will leap into Heaven and into the Presence of God. You cannot be told what this is like and you are not yet ready. But you can remember often that What God wills for God, God wills for you and What God wills for you is yours. 4. The way to God is not hard but it is very different from the way of the personal mind. The way of the personal mind is the way of pain, which God does not know. It is hard and lonely and filled with fear and grief. But this is not the way for you who are One with God. Walk to God and do not see the hard way because it is not fit for you who are One with God. God always surrounds you and extends through you. You cannot see the hard way when you walk to God but if you do it is because you are denying God. Deny the hard way instead because God is with you and your way is clear. 5. God hides nothing from you, even though you want to hide yourself from God. But you cannot hide your Glory because God wills you to be Glorious. You will never lose your way because God leads you and when you wander you go nowhere. The hard way is an illusion. Turn toward God and the Part of you that is One with God will sweep you out of illusions Forever. God is your Source and you are like God. 6. You who are One with God cannot live in illusion because what is not real is not in you. Do not be deceived by the illusions of the personal mind and do not let them enter your mind because they have no place in What is One with God. When you are tempted to deny God remember that there are no gods to place before God and accept that God’s Will for you is Peace. Peace is the only way for you to accept God’s Will. 7. Only the Holy Spirit can comfort you. In the 8. In your mind you can accept God’s Oneness and Bless It with God’s Blessing. Then you will be ready to dwell in Quiet with God because it is your Will to be One with God. God Blesses you Forever. If you extend God’s Blessing in time you will be in Eternity. Time cannot separate you from God if you use it on behalf of Eternity. 4. The Inheritance of God’s Son 1. Do not forget that your Mind’s Wholeness is your salvation because It is your Self. Being One with God It is yours and belonging to you It belongs to God. Your Self does not need salvation but your split mind needs to learn what salvation is. You are not saved from anything but for Glory. Glory is given to you by God to extend It. But if you hate a perception in your mind you hate your Self and you do not understand your Self because you are looking on What is One with God without Love. And in so doing you deny God Its Place in your Mind. 2. If you try to make God Homeless by denying God in your perception you will not know that you are Home in God. You cannot reject God without believing that God rejects you. God’s Law keeps you safe even in your denial of God because God cannot intervene against your Will or lessen your Power. So look only to the Power that God gave to you to save you and remember that It is yours because It is God’s and unite your entire mind in God’s Peace. 3. Your Peace lies in the Limitlessness of Peace. If you limit the Peace that you extend you will not know your Self. Every extension of God that you make is part of you because it is Part of God. Do not fail to replace every projection of the personal mind with an extension of the Love of God that is yours. If you do this you will know that God’s Love is yours. As you make this exchange you will return to God. That is God’s Law for your Wholeness. 4. Only you can deprive yourself of anything. Your realizing this is the beginning of your reawakening to God. Your denial of this takes many forms and you must learn to recognize every form of denial and to undo it without exception. In the beginning this reversal in your thinking can be painful because as you withdraw blame from others you may turn it inward on yourself. But these are exactly the same thing because there is no difference between the mind that you project outward and the mind that you see within. 5. Your projections onto others are part of your mind so when you blame others for your sense of deprivation you are still holding blame in your mind. And even when you blame yourself alone you will not be able to avoid perceiving guilt in some form in the world that your mind perceives. Everything that you perceive is in your mind and what is in your mind you will perceive and that is why you must undo blame altogether not shift it around your mind. All blame comes from the personal mind so when you blame you cannot know yourself. Blaming yourself and blaming others are both forms of identifying with and defending the reality of the personal self. You cannot enter God’s Presence when you attack yourself by identifying with a personal self. When you value God you will hear the Holy Spirit. But you cannot value God without yourself because your Glory is shared with God. 6. Your Christ Mind waits within you to welcome you. You must come to your Christ Mind without guilt in your mind or you will believe that you are barred from Christ. But it is impossible for you to be barred from Where God wants you to be. Love yourself with the Love of Christ as God loves you. You can refuse your Christ Mind but you cannot be barred from your Christ Mind, Which is open to you Forever. God is Christ’s Life and therefore yours and God does not deny you anything. 7. Within your mind Christ waits to be restored to your awareness. God knows you are as wholly blameless as God is blameless and God is approached by you through your Christ Mind. Christ waits for your acceptance of Christ as your Self and of Christ’s Wholeness as yours. For Christ is One with God and lives in God and shines with God’s Glory. Christ is the Extension of God’s Love and Loveliness, as Perfect as God and at Peace in God. 8. You are Blessed as Part of God and you will to extend God’s Glory as God extends Its Glory to you. There is no guilt in you because there is no guilt in God. Sharing God’s Perfect Love you must extend It to know both God and the Christ in you. Peace to you who rests in God and in whom your Whole Mind rests. 5. The “Dynamics” of the Ego 1. You cannot escape illusions without looking at them because your not looking at them is the way that they are protected. You do not need to shrink from your illusions because they are not dangerous. If you realize that you do not want the personal mind you are ready to look at its thought system more closely. The Holy Spirit is with you and together you can dispel the personal mind’s thought system. You can be calm in doing this because you are only looking honestly for Truth. The “dynamics” of the personal mind will be your lesson for a while because you must look at it before you can look beyond it because you have made it real to you. With the Holy Spirit you will undo error quietly and then look beyond it to Truth. 2. Your healing is your removal of all that stands in the way of your awareness of Reality. You can only dispel illusions by not protecting them and looking directly at them. Do not be afraid because you will be looking at the source of fear and you are beginning to learn that fear is not real because it does not come from Reality. You are also learning that the effects of fear can be dispelled by recognizing that they do not affect Reality. The next step is for you to recognize that what does not affect Reality does not exist. What leads to nothing has not happened. You recognize Reality by Its extension and what leads to nothing is not Real. Do not be afraid to look on fear because there is nothing real there to be seen. Clarity undoes confusion and Reality is clear so for you to look on illusions from Truth must dispel illusions for you. 3. Your lesson in the personal mind’s “dynamics” begins with your understanding that the personal mind has no “dynamics”. The word implies a power to do something and your whole illusion of separation lies in your mistaken belief that the personal mind has the power to do something real. The personal mind is fearful to you because you believe it has done something real. But the Truth is very simple: All Power is of God. What is not of God has no power to do anything real. 4. When you look at the personal mind you are not considering dynamics, then, but delusions. You can regard a delusional thought system without fear because it is not real so its effects are not real. Fear becomes more obviously inappropriate when you recognize the personal mind’s goal, which makes no sense because it is diametrically opposed to the Reality of Oneness. The personal mind’s goal is to be autonomous. Its purpose is to be separate, self-sufficient, and independent of any power but its own. This is why it is the symbol of separation from God. 5. Everything that stems from the personal mind is the natural outcome of its central belief in separation and the way for you to undo its results is for you to recognize that separation is not natural because it is out of accord with your True Nature. To will in contradiction to God is not really willing but wishing. God’s Will is One because the Extension of God’s Will is God. The real conflict you experience in your identification with the personal mind, then, is between the personal mind’s idle wish to be separate from God and the Will of God, Which you share in Reality. This is not a real conflict. 6. You are Free in your Oneness with God, not in the limitedness of the personal mind. Your whole Function lies in your Oneness with God because God’s Function is yours. In God’s Willingness to extend Its Function to you God is One with you. Do not project onto God the personal mind’s arrogant wish to be separate because God’s Will is Oneness and you are included in God’s Oneness. Freedom has no meaning for you apart from God because God is your Reality. Your identification with the personal mind’s limited separate self is costing you knowledge of your Oneness and Freedom in God. The personal mind sees all joining as threatening and twists even your longing for God into a means of establishing its own reality through religions that validate the separation. But do not be deceived by its interpretations of your conflict. 7. The personal mind always attacks on behalf of separation from God. It believes it has the power to make separation from God real and it does nothing else because its goal of autonomy is separation. The personal mind is totally wrong about what reality is but it does not lose sight of its goal. It puts much more effort into its goal than you put into remembering God because it is certain of its purpose and you are confused because you do not yet wholly recognize your Purpose. 8. The last thing that the personal mind wants you to realize is that by identifying with it you are identifying with fear. If you do realize this you will withdraw your identification and your power from it. But its one claim on you is that it teaches you that your identification with it gives power to you through the autonomy it offers. If you did not believe this you would not listen to it at all. Its existence will not continue if you realize that by identifying with it you are limiting yourself and depriving yourself of Real Power. 9. The personal mind does allow you to see yourself in unflattering ways that isolate you from others and from God but it does not let you see the guilt and fear behind these postures. It constantly minimizes your fear in ingenious ways but it never undoes it. It can only teach you separation by you teaching fear of God but you would not listen to it if you recognized what it was doing. 10. The basic threat to the personal mind, then, is your recognition that all fear, in any form, is your fear of God and that you only fear God because you identify with a personal self. The personal mind’s illusion of autonomy is shaken to its foundation by your awareness of this because while you may tolerate a false idea of freedom by identifying with it you will not accept fear if you recognize that it costs you God. And your awareness of God is the cost of fear and the personal mind cannot minimize this. If you overlook God you overlook yourself and you fear your illusions because they represent the attack on God that you believe is real. Believing attack is real you feel guilty and afraid of your own Reality and you do not want to find It because you think It will retaliate against you. 11. The personal mind’s goal of separation can only be accomplished if God can be undone and this is impossible. You will finally learn to distinguish the Possible from the impossible and the True from the false when you learn that all of your fear is fear of God because you mistakenly believe that you have attacked God and that God will punish you. According to the personal mind’s teaching only its purpose of separation can be accomplished and God’s Purpose of Eternal Oneness cannot. According to the Holy Spirit only God’s Purpose is possible and It is always so. 12. You and God are One and God’s Freedom encompasses yours and would be incomplete without you. You can only be free in your Identification with God and by fulfilling your Function in God. The personal mind believes that if you accomplish its goal of complete separation from God you will be happy. But within you, you know God’s Function is yours and that you cannot find happiness apart from your Joint Will with God. If you recognize that the personal mind’s goal of separation, which you have pursued so well, has only brought you fear you will not be able to maintain that its goal is happiness. Since fear is the foundation of the personal mind it needs you to believe that fear is happiness. Yet in your True Mind you are not insane and you can never believe this. Recognize what the personal mind is trying to do and you will not accept it. Only through the insane personal mind do you choose fear in place of God’s Love and only through its insanity can you believe that you can gain Love by attacking God. In your True Mind, Which is Sane and completely protected by God’s Love, you know that attacking God will only produce fear in you. 13. The personal mind analyzes; the Holy Spirit accepts. To analyze means to break down, or to separate out, but Wholeness can only be appreciated through acceptance. In its characteristically contradictory thinking the personal mind attempts to understand totality by breaking it down into separate parts. The personal mind believes that power, understanding, and truth lie in separation and to establish this belief as real it must attack to separate. It is unaware that separation cannot be made real and it is obsessed with separation as salvation. So it attacks everything it perceives by breaking it into small disconnected parts without meaningful relationships and therefore without any meaning at all. The personal mind will always substitute chaos for meaning because to it separation is salvation so harmony is a threat. 14. The personal mind’s use of the Law of Perception that you see what you believe is real is the exact opposite of the Holy Spirit’s use of the Law. The personal mind focuses on illusions and overlooks Reality. It makes real to itself every illusion that it perceives and then, with circular reasoning, concludes that because what it sees is chaotic Oneness is meaningless. And if Oneness is meaningless then chaos must be real. Holding illusions in its mind and protecting them because it has made them real the personal mind concludes that chaos is reality and Oneness is illusion. 15. The personal mind makes no attempt to understand this because it is clearly not understandable but it does make every attempt to demonstrate that chaos is real and it does this constantly. It fragments your Mind, Which is One, into parts and thereby loses the meaning of Oneness. It is left with a series of fragmented perceptions which it then unifies with a meaning it makes for itself. This, then, is the universe that it perceives and then uses as a demonstration of its own reality. 16. Do not underestimate the personal mind’s appeal to you who wants to listen to it. It selectively chooses its witnesses and its witnesses are consistent. The case for separation is strong when you want to be separated. You cannot transcend the thought system that you choose but a thought system without meaning cannot demonstrate anything real and if you are convinced by it you are deluded. The personal mind cannot teach What it denies so it cannot teach you truly because it overlooks Truth. Its witnesses attest to its denial but not to What it denies. The personal mind looks straight at God and does not see God because it is the denial that God is in you. 17. If you want to remember God accept your Oneness with God and you will remember God. Nothing can prove that you are unworthy of God because nothing can prove a lie is true. The part of your mind that you perceive through the personal mind seems to demonstrate that God does not exist but where God’s Extension is God must be. Extend God’s Love in place of your perception of a world and your Extension will demonstrate the Truth. You witness to God by beholding God’s Oneness and in the Silence of your Christ Mind you need demonstrate nothing because All is One. 18. In every relationship with others in the world that you perceive you either project the personal mind’s perception of separation or you extend God’s Love so that they witness either to the personal mind or to your Christ Mind. They convince you of the reality of the world or of God’s Oneness, depending on which you want to perceive. Everything that you perceive is a witness to the thought system that you want to be true and every relationship can set you free if you choose to extend to it God’s Love instead of the personal mind’s projections. Your relationship with another cannot witness to the reality of the personal mind unless you project the personal mind onto it. If you do not see your Christ Mind it is because you have not extended your Christ Mind. You hear only your own voice and if you teach yourself that you are Christ you will hear only Christ. 6. Waking to Redemption 1. Not only do you believe what you see but you see what you believe. Your perceptions are built on your experience and your experience leads to your beliefs. When your beliefs are stabilized your perceptions become stabilized. So what you believe you do see. When Jesus said, “Blessed are ye who have not seen and still believe” he meant that those who believe in the resurrection of Christ will see it. The resurrection of Christ is the complete undoing of the personal mind by your Christ Mind, not by attack but by transcendence. Christ does rise above the personal mind and lifts your mind to an awareness of its Oneness with God. 2. Do you want to join the resurrection or the crucifixion of Christ? Do you want to project separation or to extend God’s Love? Do you want to transcend the limitations that you impose on yourself and be aware of God again? These questions are all the same and are answered together. The word “perception” is used both for awareness and for interpretation but you cannot be aware without interpretation because what you perceive is your interpretation of yourself. 3. This course is perfectly clear and if you do not see it clearly it is because you are interpreting against it and you do not believe it. Your belief determines your perception so if you do not perceive what this course means it is because you do not accept it. But different experiences lead you to different beliefs and therefore to different perceptions. Your perceptions are learned with beliefs that you learn from experience. Your Christ Mind is leading you to a new kind of experience that you will become less and less willing to deny. Learning from your Christ Mind is easy for you because for you to perceive with Christ involves no strain since Its Perceptions are your Natural Awareness. It is only the distortions in perception that you introduce through the personal mind that tire you. Let your Christ Mind interpret for you and do not limit what you see by the limited beliefs that are unworthy of you as Part of God. Until you see Christ as your Self you will believe that you are without God. 4. The Christ Mind manifested by Jesus is your resurrection and your Life. You live in Christ because you live in God. Everything that you see lives in you as you live in it. You cannot perceive unworthiness in the world in your mind and not perceive unworthiness in yourself. And if you perceive unworthiness in yourself you perceive it in God. You can believe in the resurrection manifested by Jesus because it has been accomplished in you. This is true now and always because the resurrection of Jesus is the Will of God, Which does not know time or exceptions. Make no exceptions yourself or you will not perceive what has been accomplished for you. Your mind rises in its Wholeness to God, as it was in the beginning, is now, and Forever will be because Wholeness is your Nature in your Oneness with God. 5. Do not underestimate the power of your devotion to your god, the personal self, or the power that you have given it to have over you. You worship the god you choose: either the god you made or the God with Which you are One. Your limitation will be as complete as your Limitlessness because you will obey the god that you accept. The god of crucifixion that you made demands that you crucify yourself and you obey, believing that power is yours through sacrifice and pain. But the God of resurrection demands nothing because It does not Will to take anything from you. God does not require obedience because God does not require submission. God only want you to learn of your Will and follow It, not to sacrifice and submit but to be Happy and Free. 6. Resurrection inspires your happy allegiance because it is the symbol of Joy. It is compelling to you because it represents what you want to be the Truth. The freedom to leave behind everything that hurts and humbles and frightens you cannot be forced on you but it can be offered to you through the Grace of God. You can accept Freedom by God’s Grace because God Graciously accepts you as God’s Own. Who is your own? God had given you All that is God’s and God Itself is yours in your Whole Mind. Guard your Whole Mind in your resurrection because otherwise you will not be aware of God and that you are safely surrounded by What is yours Forever. 7. You will not find Peace until you have removed the nails from your hands and taken the last thorn from your forehead by extending only God’s Love in place of the personal mind’s perception of a world. The Love of God surrounds you whom the god of crucifixion condemns. Jesus did not die in vain but taught that Christ can not die and you must teach that Christ lives in you. Your redemption is the undoing of the crucifixion of Christ in you and your every perception must be brought to it. God does not judge you who are guiltless because God gives God to you. 8. In your identification with a personal self you have nailed yourself to a cross and placed a crown of thorns on your own head. But you cannot crucify the Christ within you because God’s Will cannot die. Christ has been redeemed from your crucifixion because you cannot kill What God has given Eternal Life. Your illusion of crucifixion may still hang heavy before your eyes but it is not Reality. While you still perceive crucifixion, either for yourself or for others, you are perceiving illusion. You are beginning to be aware of Truth but you still believe in illusions. You will forget illusions and become aware of the Christ in you as you let go of the illusions that you project onto others and extend God’s Love in their place. 9. The Call to be aware of God is within you and It comes from you. Christ is in you but you must see Its extension of God’s Love to know that It is there. Do not set limits on what you believe your Christ Mind can do through you or you will not accept what It can do in you. It is done already but you will not know this until you extend God’s Love to be all that you see. You will recognize redemption only by extending it. 10. You are saved. Bring only this awareness with you everywhere in the world that you perceive and your part in the redemption will belong to Christ. Your part must be Christ’s part if you learn it of Christ. Your every extension of God’s Love is equal to every other extension because the Whole Power of God is in every part of your mind and anything that contradicts God is nothing because it does not exist. To God all things are possible and in your Christ Mind you are like God. 7. The Condition of Reality 1. The “reality” that you perceive as a world is not of God because Reality is not as you see it with your split mind. What is of God is Eternal and everything that the personal mind sees is perishable. So there must be another Reality that you do not see. The Bible speaks of a new Heaven and a new earth but this cannot be literally true because Heaven is Eternal and cannot be made again. To perceive anew is to perceive again, meaning that in the interval in between you did not perceive at all. What, then, is the Real Perception that awaits your being open to seeing It? 2. Every Loving thought that you have ever had is Eternal. The only reality any of your perceptions has is when it extends Love. These are still perceptions because you still believe in your separation from God but they are Eternal because they are Loving. Being Loving they are like God and cannot die. You can attain Real Perception and all that is necessary is your willingness to give up all other perception. But if you continue to perceive both Good and evil you will believe that both Truth and illusion are real and you will make no distinction between them. 3. The personal mind may see some good but never only Good and that is why its perceptions are always variable. It cannot reject goodness entirely because you would not accept that. But it always adds something that is not real and therefore confuses illusions with reality. You cannot accept perceptions as partly true so if you believe in both Truth and illusion you will not be able to tell which is true. To establish the autonomy of the personal mind you made a world unlike God and you believed that what you made was real. But everything Real is like God. Through Real Perception you will be lead to Heaven because you will understand It. 4. Perceiving Goodness is not the same as knowing God but accepting that only Goodness exists enables you to recognize a condition in which opposites do not exist - like the Condition of God. Accepting no opposite to God is the condition that you must meet to know God again. You have made many beliefs that you have placed between you and God and these make up the world that you perceive with the personal mind. Truth is not absent in your perception of a world but It is obscured. You do not know the difference between what you have made and God and so you do not know the difference between what you have made and your Extension of God. If you believe that you can attain Real Perception then you believe that you can know yourself again. You can know God because it is God’s Will that God be known by you. Your Real Perception is all that the Holy Spirit has saved for you out of the perception that you made. For you to use only Real Perception is your salvation because it is your recognition that Reality is only What reflects Truth. 8. The Problem and the Answer 1. This is a very simple course. You may feel that you do not need a course which in the end teaches you that only Reality is True but do you believe it? When you see What Real Perception can show you, you will recognize that you did not believe it. But the swiftness with which your new and only Real Perception will be translated into God will leave you only an instant to realize that only God is True. Then you will forget everything that you made – the good, the bad, the false, the true. As what your mind perceives comes to resemble Heaven even this Real Perception will vanish from your awareness. The end of the world is not its destruction but its translation into Heaven for you. This reinterpretation of the world leads to your corrected perception, which transfers easily to God. 2. The Bible tells you to become as little children because little children recognize that they do not understand what they perceive and so they ask about it. Do not believe that you understand what you perceive with the personal mind because its meaning is lost to you. But the Holy Spirit has saved its meaning for you and if you will let the Holy Spirit reinterpret your perceptions for you It will restore to you What you have thrown away. But while you think that you know what anything means you will not ask the Holy Spirit what anything means. 3. You do not know the meaning of anything that you perceive with the personal mind. Not one thought that you hold with it is wholly true. Recognizing this is your firm beginning. You are not misguided because you have not accepted a real guide at all. Your greatest need is to be instructed through corrected perception because you understand nothing. Recognize this but don’t accept it because understanding is your Natural Right. Your perceptions are learned and you have a Teacher within you. But your willingness to learn of the Holy Spirit depends on your willingness to question everything that you have taught yourself through the personal mind. You have taught yourself amiss and you should not be your own teacher when you identify with the personal self. 4. You can withhold the Truth only from yourself. God does not refuse you the Answer to any problem that you perceive. Ask for the Answer that is yours but that you did not make with the personal mind and do not defend yourself against the Holy Spirit. You made the problem of separation and God has answered with the Holy Spirit. Ask yourself this one simple question: Do I want the problem or do I want the Answer? Decide for the Answer and you will have It because It is already yours. 5. You may complain that this course is not specific enough for you to understand and use but perhaps you have not done what it specifically advocates. This is not a course in the play of ideas but in the practical application of ideas. It is very specific to be told that if you ask you will receive the Answer. The Holy Spirit will answer every specific problem as long as you believe problems are specific. Its answer is both many and one as long as you believe that the One is many. You may be afraid of the Holy Spirit’s specific answers because you are afraid of what It will demand of you. But only by asking can you learn that What is of God does not demand anything of you. God gives; God does not take. When you refuse to ask the Holy Spirit it is because you believe that asking is a form of taking something away from the Holy Spirit rather than the opening of your awareness to the Holy Spirit. 6. The Holy Spirit gives you only What is yours and takes nothing in return. Everything is yours and you share It with God. This is Reality. The Holy Spirit Wills only to restore Reality to you and It cannot misinterpret the question you must ask to have Reality restored to you. You have heard the Answer but you misunderstood your own question. You believe that when you ask for guidance from the Holy Spirit you are asking for deprivation. 7. You who are One with God seem to not understand God. You believe that you can get by taking so you believe in a world that takes and you have lost sight of Real Perception. You are afraid of the world that you see but Real Perception is still yours for the asking. Do not deny It to yourself because It can set you free. Nothing of God will limit you who are One with God and whose Freedom is protected by God’s Limitless Being. You are Blessed when you are willing to ask the Truth of God without fear because only then can you learn that God’s Answer is your release from fear. 8. You who are a Beautiful Part of God are asking only for what your Christ Mind promises you and your Christ Mind will not deceive you. Heaven is within you. Believe that the Truth is in your Christ Mind because your Christ Mind knows It is in you and your Mind is Whole in Truth. Extend God’s Love in place of any of the personal mind’s projections and you have asked your Christ Mind for the Truth. You can see the Truth anywhere that you ask to see It. 9. Ask anything of your Christ Mind and God will answer you because your Christ Mind is not deceived in God and God is not deceived in your Christ Mind. Do not, then, be deceived by the personal mind’s projections onto others and see only God’s Love in their place because you heal your mind by denying that it is split. Accept your entire mind as God accepts it and heal your mind in Christ because Christ is your healed mind. Christ is One with God and Christ’s every Thought is as Loving as the Thought by Which God holds Christ in Oneness. Do not be deceived by the personal mind’s projections because then you will be deceived in yourself. When you are deceived in yourself you are deceived in God and no deceit is possible in God. 10. In your Real Perception there is no sickness because there is no separation and division. You recognize only Loving thoughts and the Help of God goes with you to extend everywhere. As you become willing to accept the Holy Spirit’s Help by asking for It you will extend It because you will want to keep It in your awareness. Nothing will be beyond your power to heal because the Holy Spirit will not deny your simple request. What problems will not disappear in the Presence of the Holy Spirit? Ask to learn of the Reality of the Holy Spirit by extending God’s Love in place of the personal mind’s projections and you will see your Beauty reflected. 11. Do not accept the variable perceptions of the personal mind’s projections because it is your mind that you perceive and you cannot accept healing without your mind’s perceptions. You extend Real Perception as you extend Heaven and this is how you heal your mind. To love yourself is to heal yourself and you cannot perceive sickness as real and achieve your goal. Your Christ Mind and your mind’s perceptions are healed together as they live together and love together. Do not be deceived by your perception of a world because your mind is One and it is One with God. Extend God’s Love in place of the world that you perceive and you will learn of God’s Love for you. 12. If you are offended by another pluck the offense from your own mind because it is the personal mind’s projection that you are seeing. When you are offended by the personal mind’s projections you are deceiving yourself and denying your Christ Mind, in Which there is no offense, only healing. When you perceive offense you are doing it to yourself and condemning yourself, whom God does not condemn. Let the Holy Spirit remove all offenses in your mind and perceive everything through the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit wants to save you from your own condemnation. Accept the Holy Spirit’s Healing Power and extend It to everything that comes into your awareness because the Holy Spirit Wills to heal you in whom It is not deceived. 13. You are like a child that is terrified by his perception of ghosts, monsters, and dragons. And like a child, if you are willing to let go of your own interpretations and ask someone you trust for the meaning of what you perceive you will be shown Reality and your fears will go away. When a child is shown that the “ghost” is a curtain, the “monster” is a shadow, and the “dragon” is a dream he is no longer afraid and laughs at his own fear. And so the Holy Spirit can translate your misinterpretations into Reality so that you can laugh at your fears. 14. You are afraid of the world that you perceive, of God, and of yourself. But you are merely deceived by your perceptions of these. Ask the Holy Spirit what they are and you will laugh at your fears and replace them with Peace. Fear does not lie in Reality but in your split mind which does not understand What Reality is. Only your lack of understanding frightens you and when you learn to perceive truly you will be motivated to ask again for Truth when you are afraid. It is not the reality of the world, of God, and of yourself that frightens you. You perceive these as ghosts, monsters, and dragons. Ask the Holy Spirit for their reality and It will tell you what it is. Because you are deceived by what you see you need Reality to dispel your fears. 15. The exchange of your fears for Truth is yours for the asking. God is not deceived in you so you can only be deceived in yourself. But you can learn the Truth about yourself from the Holy Spirit, Which will teach you that as Part of God deceit in you is impossible. When you perceive yourself without deceit you will accept Real Perception in place of the false world that you made. And then God will raise you into Heaven. |
| Copyright 2009 Elizabeth A. Cronkhite |