Chapter 14: Teaching for Truth
1. Yes, you are indeed blessed. But in your perception of a world as reality you do not know it. However, you do have the means for learning it and seeing it quite clearly. The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily and as well as the personal mind but the Holy Spirit’s conclusions are Sane. They take a direction exactly opposite the personal mind’s direction, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the personal mind points to illusions andbdeath. In this course you have followed much of the personal mind’s logic, you have seen its logical conclusions, and you have realized that they can only be seen in illusions where alone they can seem clear. Now you will turn away from them and follow the simple logic of the Holy Spirit, Which teaches you the simple conclusions that speak for Truth and only Truth.
1. The Conditions of Learning
1. You are blessed and do not know it, and so you need to learn it must be so. God’s Blessing cannot be taught to you but you must acquire the conditions of knowing that you are blessed because this is what you have thrown away. You can extend only what you already have and you can extend blessing and learn that you already have it. You must accept blessing for yourself before you can extend it. This is why your experience of miracles offers you the testimony that you are blessed. If you offer complete forgiveness you must’ve let go of guilt, accepted correction for yourself, and learned of your Innocence. You learn What you have, even if It is unknown to you, by extending It.
2. You need indirect proof of Truth in a world that you made out of denial of Truth and without direction. You will perceive your need for this if you realize that “to deny” is “the decision to not know”. The logic of the world that you perceive therefore leads to nothing because its goal is “to not know”. If you decide to have and give and be nothing you must direct your thoughts to oblivion. And if you have and give and are Everything and have denied this then your thought system is closed off and wholly separated from the Truth. The world that you perceive is insane and do not underestimate the extent of its insanity. There is no area of your perception that insanity has not touched and your illusions are sacred to you. That is why God placed the Holy Spirit in your mind where you placed your illusions.
3. Your perceiving is always outward. If your thoughts were only of the personal mind your thought system would be forever dark. The thoughts that you project or extend have all the power that you give to them. In your identification with a personal mind the Thoughts that you share with God are beyond your belief but the thoughts that you have made are your beliefs. And it is these thoughts that you have chosen to defend and love. They will not be taken from you but they can be given up by you because the Source of their undoing is within you. There is nothing in the world that you perceive to teach you that the logic of the world is totally insane and leads to nothing. But in you who made this insane logic is One Which knows the world’s logic leads to nothing because It knows Everything.
4. Any direction in which the Holy Spirit does not lead you goes nowhere. Anything that you deny that the Holy Spirit knows to be True you have denied to yourself and the Holy Spirit must teach you to not deny It. Undoing is indirect, just as doing is indirect. You are One with God, in Which there is no perceiving or doing. Perceiving and doing are indirect expressions of your Will to Live, Which you have blocked with your unpredictable and unholy whim of death and murder that God does not share with you. You have set yourself the task of extending what cannot be extended. And while you think it is possible to learn to do this you will not believe What it is possible to learn to do.
5. The Holy Spirit must therefore begin Its teaching by showing you what you have tried to learn but that you can never learn. Its message is not indirect but the Holy Spirit must introduce the simple facts into your thought system, which has become so twisted and complex that you cannot see that it means nothing. The Holy Spirit merely looks at the personal mind’s foundation and dismisses it. You, however, cannot undo what you have made with the personal mind, nor see through the heavy burden of it on your mind. It deceives you because you chose to deceive yourself. When you choose to be deceived you attack direct approaches because they seem to encroach on and attack your deception.
2. The Happy Learner
1. The Holy Spirit needs a happy learner in whom Its Mission can be accomplished. You are steadfastly devoted to misery and you must recognize that you are miserable and not happy. The Holy Spirit cannot teach you without this contrast because you believe that misery is happiness. This has so confused you that you have tried to learn to do what you can never do, believing that unless you learn to be completely separate from God you will not be happy. You do not realize that the foundation that this peculiar learning goal depends on means absolutely nothing, so it seems to make sense to you. Have faith in nothing and you will find the “treasure” that you seek. You add another burden to your already burdened mind by valuing nothing. A diamond, a speck of dust, a body, or a war are all the same because if you value one thing made of nothing you believe that nothing can be precious and that you can learn to make the untrue true.
2. The Holy Spirit sees that you believe that you are in a world but knows that you are Elsewhere and so It begins Its lesson with the simple and fundamental teaching that only the Truth is True. This is the hardest lesson that you will ever learn and, in the end, the only one. Simplicity is very difficult for your twisted mind. Consider all the distortions that you have woven out of nothing: strange forms and feelings and actions and reactions. Nothing is so alien to you as the simple Truth and there is nothing to which you are less inclined to listen. The contrast between Truth and illusion is obvious but you do not see it. The simple and the obvious are not apparent to you who want to make illusions of great things out of nothing and believe that you are great because you make them.
3. The Holy Spirit sees all this and simply teaches that none of it is true. To you who want to teach yourself nothing and delude yourself into believing that it is not nothing the Holy Spirit says with Steadfast Quietness:
Only the Truth is true. Nothing else matters, nothing else is real, and nothing else is here. Let Me distinguish Truth from illusion for you, which you cannot do with a personal mind, but which you need to learn. Your faith in nothing is deceiving you. Offer your faith to Me and I will place it gently in the Truth, Where it belongs. You will not find deception There and you will love It because you will understand It.
4. Like you, the Holy Spirit did not make Truth. Like God, the Holy Spirit knows Truth. The Holy Spirit brings Love into your illusions and extends It to you. As you extend Love you will realize that you did not make Love and that you are more than what you have made. You will be a happy learner of the lesson Love brings because It teaches you release from nothing and all the works of nothing. The heavy illusions that you project from a personal mind and that seem to bind you to despair you do not see are nothing until you extend Love in their place. And then you see your illusions have disappeared and so they must have been nothing. Because you teach Happiness and Freedom you will see Happiness and Freedom reflected back to you.
5. When you teach that only the Truth is True by extending Truth you learn Truth. You learn that what seemed hardest is easiest. Learn to be a happy learner because you will never learn how to make nothing into Everything. But recognize that this has been your goal and recognize how foolish it is. Be glad that it is undone and when you look at it in simple honesty it is undone. Do not be content with nothing. You have believed that you could be content with nothing and it is not so.
6. To be a happy learner you must give everything that you have learned from the personal mind to the Holy Spirit to be unlearned for you. Then you will begin to learn the Joyous lessons that come quickly on the firm foundation that only the Truth is True. What you learn on this foundation is Truth and is built on Truth. The universe of learning will open up to you in all its gracious simplicity and with Truth before you, you will not look back.
7. As a happy learner you meet the conditions of learning at this foundation, just as you meet the Condition of God in Oneness. This foundation lies in the Holy Spirit’s plan to free you from the personal mind’s past. Truth is True; nothing else could ever be or ever was. This simple lesson undoes the fear that you thought could never be undone. You made fear and fear is nothing. This lesson is the Love that undoes the shapes and forms and fears of nothing. Accept Freedom from your Christ Mind, Which frees you to join in the Holy task of extending Love. Because you believe in a world of separation from God you do not realize that Love has come and freed you from that world’s dark illusions.
8. Behold Freedom in place of the world that you perceive and learn of It how to be Free. The Love in you will extend to be all that you perceive and you will not be left in illusions. The Vision of your Christ Mind is extended the very moment that you perceive It, making everything Clear and Holy to you. The Quietness of Its simplicity is so compelling that you will realize it is impossible for you to deny the simple Truth. There is nothing else. God is Everywhere and you are in God with Everything. You cannot be sorrowful when this is True.
3. The Decision for Guiltlessness
1. To be a happy learner you cannot feel guilty about learning. This is so essential to your learning that you should not forget it. When you are guiltless you learn easily because your thoughts are free. But this means you recognize that guilt is interference, not salvation, and serves no useful function at all.
2. Perhaps you are used to valuing your Innocence only to offset the pain of your guilt and you do not look at It as having value in Itself. You believe that your guilt and your Innocence are both of value, each representing escape from what the other does not offer to you. You do not want either alone because without both you do not see yourself as whole and therefore as happy. But you are Whole only in Innocence and only in your Innocence can you be Happy. There is no conflict in your Innocence. If you wish for guilt in any way, in any form, you will lose appreciation of the Value of your Innocence and push It from your sight.
3. There is no compromise that you can make with guilt and escape the pain that only your Innocence can allay. In the world that you perceive learning is living, as Oneness is Being in Heaven. Whenever you are attracted to the pain of guilt remember that if you give into it you are deciding against your Happiness and you will not learn how to be Happy. Say gently to yourself, with the conviction of God’s Love for you:
What I experience I will make manifest in my awareness.
I am Innocent, so I have nothing to fear.
I choose to testify to my acceptance of the correction of my perception that I am separate from God.
I accept my Innocence by extending It in my awareness.
Let me extend the Peace of God to be all that I perceive.
4. Each day, each hour, each minute, and every second you are deciding between crucifixion and resurrection; between the personal mind and the Holy Spirit. The personal mind is your choice for guilt; the Holy Spirit is your choice for Innocence. The power of decision is all that you have. You have only two choices because there are no alternatives but Truth and illusion. They cannot overlap because they are complete opposites that cannot join and cannot both be true. Your choices are: guilt or Innocence, limitedness or Limitlessness, unhappiness or Happiness.
5. Your experience of miracles teaches you that you have chosen Innocence, Limitlessness, and Joy. Your experience of miracles is not a cause but an effect; the natural result of your choosing right. It attests to your happiness in choosing to be free of guilt. Every extension of healing that you offer returns to you. Every attack that you make holds guilt and condemnation in your mind. It is impossible to offer what you do not want without this consequence. The cost of your giving is your receiving. Your giving is either a penalty from which you suffer or your happy purchase of a Treasure that you hold dear.
6. Only you ask for penalty of and for yourself. Every chance that you have to extend healing is another opportunity for you to replace illusions with Truth and fear with Love. If you refuse an opportunity to heal you bind yourself to illusions because you did not choose to free your mind with a Perception of Love. By giving power to nothing you lose a Joyous opportunity to learn that nothing has no power. By not dispelling your illusions you become afraid of Truth and Love. The Joy of learning that illusions have no power over you is the Happy lesson that the Holy Spirit teaches and wants you to teach yourself. It is the Holy Spirit’s Joy to teach this, as it will be your Joy.
7. The way to teach yourself that illusions have no power is to teach yourself that your Innocence cannot be harmed. Make your Invulnerability manifest by teaching yourself that no matter what another may try to do to you, you cannot be harmed because your Innocence is your Reality and It cannot be touched. No one can hurt you and by refusing to be hurt you teach yourself that you have accepted correction of your perception that you are separate from God and you undo all of your perceptions of guilt. There is nothing to forgive. No one can hurt your Christ Mind. Your guilt has no cause and therefore it does not exist.
8. God is the only Cause and God did not make guilt. Do not teach yourself that you can be hurt,or you teach yourself that what is not of God has power over you. The causeless cannot be. Do not attest to it or foster belief in it anywhere in your mind. Remember that Mind is One and Cause is One. You will learn of Oneness only when you learn to deny the causeless and to accept God as your Cause. The Power that God gives to you is yours and if you choose anything else to perceive you penalize yourself with guilt in place of all the Happy teaching that the Holy Spirit offers to you.
9. Whenever you choose to make a decision in your identification with a personal mind you are thinking destructively and the decision will be wrong. It will hurt you because of your concept of decision that led to it. It is not true that you can make decisions by and for the personal self alone. The effects of your thoughts are not isolated to the personal mind. Every decision that you make is for your entire mind, directed inward and out to all of your perceptions and influencing more than you can conceive.
10. When you accept correction of your perception that you are separate from God you are invulnerable. But if you believe that you are guilty of separating from God you will respond to guilt because you will think that separation is salvation and you will see it and side with it. You will believe that increasing separation, and therefore your guilt, is self-protection. You will fail to understand that you do not really want guilt and that what you do not want must hurt you. All this happens because you do not believe that What you really want is God and that God is Good. But your Holy Will brings to you all that you need as naturally as Peace without limit. What your Will does not provide has no value. But because you do not understand your Will the Holy Spirit quietly understands It for you and gives you What you do want without effort or strain or the burden of deciding in the isolation of a personal mind what you need and want.
11. You never have to make decisions alone with the personal mind. You have Help in the Holy Spirit, Which knows the Answer that you need. Do not be content with little, which is all that you can offer yourself alone in a personal mind, because the Holy Spirit offers you Everything. The Holy Spirit will never ask you what you have done to be worthy of God, so do not ask this of yourself. Instead, accept the Holy Spirit’s Answer because the Holy Spirit knows you are worthy of everything that God wills for you. Do not try to escape the Gift of God that the Holy Spirit so gladly offers to you. The Holy Spirit offers you What God gave It to give to you. You do not have to decide whether or not you are deserving of God. God knows you are.
12. Do not deny the Truth of God’s Decision by substituting the personal mind’s pitiful appraisal of you for God’s Calm and Unswerving Value of you. Nothing can shake God’s Conviction of the Perfect Purity of All that is One with God because It is Wholly Pure. Do not decide against It because being of God It must be True. Peace abides in your mind when you quietly accept the plan that God has set for your correction and you let go of the personal mind’s plan. You do not understand salvation in your identification with a personal self. Do no make any decisions with the personal mind about what your salvation is or where it lies but ask the Holy Spirit everything and leave all decisions to Its Gentle Counsel.
13. The Holy Spirit knows the plan that God wants you to follow and It can teach you what the plan is. Only the Holy Spirit’s Wisdom is capable of guiding you to follow It. Every decision that you undertake with the personal mind signifies that you want to define alone what your salvation is and what you need to be saved from. The Holy Spirit knows that your whole salvation is escape from guilt. You have no other “enemy” and against this strange distortion of your Purity the Holy Spirit is your only Friend. The Holy Spirit protects your Innocence, Which will set you free. And it is the Holy Spirit’s decision to undo everything that obscures your Innocence in your awareness.
14. Let the Holy Spirit be the only Guide that you want to follow to your salvation. It knows the way and It leads you gladly on it. With the Holy Spirit you will not fail to learn that What God wills for you is your Will. Without the Holy Spirit’s Guidance you will think that you know that your salvation is in the isolation of a personal mind and you will decide against your Peace. But salvation is of the Holy Spirit, given to the Holy Spirit by God for you. The Holy Spirit has not forgotten you so do not forget the Holy Spirit and It will make every decision for you, for your salvation, and for the Peace of God within you.
15. In your identification with a personal self do not seek to appraise the worth of you who are One with God because for you to do so is for you to evaluate God and to judge against God. You will feel guilty for this imagined crime, though it cannot really be committed. The Holy Spirit teaches you only that your “sin” of replacing God with the personal self is not a source for guilt because what cannot happen can have no effects for you to fear. Be quiet in your faith in the Holy Spirit, Which loves you and wants to lead you out of insanity. Madness may be your choice but it is not your Reality. Never forget God’s Love because God has not forgotten you. It is impossible that God will ever let you drop from the Loving Mind in Which you are One with God and Where your Home is secured in Perfect Peace Forever.
16. Only say to the Holy Spirit, “decide for me” and it is done. The Holy Spirit’s decisions are reflections of what God knows about you and in Light of this Love no error of any kind is possible. You do not have to struggle frantically to anticipate all that you cannot know when Knowledge of God lays behind every decision that the Holy Spirit makes for you. Learn from the Holy Spirit’s Wisdom and Love and extend them in your perception because you decide for your entire mind.
17. How gracious it is for you to decide all things through the Holy Spirit, Which loves your entire mind without exception! The Holy Spirit does not leave out one of your perceptions. The Holy Spirit gives you What is yours because God wants you to extend It with the Holy Spirit. Be led in everything by the Holy Spirit and do not reconsider. Trust the Holy Spirit to answer quickly, surely, and with Love for every perception of yours that will be touched by a decision in any way. And your entire mind will be touched. Do not give the personal mind the sole responsibility of deciding what can bring good to your entire mind because it does not know this.
18. You have taught yourself the most unnatural habit of not communicating with God. But you remain One with God and Everything in God is in you. Unlearn isolation through God’s Loving Guide and learn of all the Happy Communication that you have rejected but can never lose.
19. Whenever you are in doubt about what to do think of the Holy Spirit’s Presence in you and tell yourself only this:
The Holy Spirit leads me and knows the way to God.
The Holy Spirit will never keep from me What It wants me to learn.
And so I trust It to communicate to me all that It knows for me.
Then let the Holy Spirit quietly teach you how to perceive your Innocence, Which is already here.
4. Your Function in the Atonement
1. When you accept your Innocence in place of your perception of a world of separation you will see the correction of your perception that you are separate from God. By proclaiming your Innocence through your perception you make It yours because you see what you seek. You will not perceive Innocence while you still believe It is not there to be perceived. The Innocence that you perceive in place of your perception of a world of separation is your correction. Grant Innocence to your perceptions and you will see the Truth of What you have acknowledged. Truth is offered to you first and foremost to be received, as God extends It to you. [The first in time means nothing but God is the First in Eternity. God is both First and One. There is nothing beyond the First because there is no order in Oneness].
2. You who are One with God are more than merely without guilt. Your state of guiltlessness is the condition in which the guilt that is not there has been removed from your disordered mind, which thought it was there. This is the state you must attain with God beside you. Until you do you will still think that you are separate from God. You may feel God’s Presence next to you but you will not know that you are One with God. You cannot be taught Oneness. You must learn the condition of remembering your Oneness with God and then Oneness will happen of Itself.
3. When you have let all that obscured the Truth in your Holy Mind be undone for you and you stand in Grace before God you will be aware of God extending Itself to you as God has always done. Extending God is all God knows and so it is all Knowledge. What God does not know cannot be and therefore cannot be extended. Do not ask to be forgiven because that is already accomplished. Ask instead to learn how to forgive and to restore to your mind What always is. Correction will become real and visible to you when you use it. In the world that you perceive correction is your only function and you must learn that correction is all that you want to learn. You will feel guilty until you learn to correct your mind. Because in the end, whatever form it takes, your guilt arises from your failure to fulfill with your entire mind your Function of Oneness in God’s Mind. You cannot escape this guilt by failing to extend your Function to all that your mind perceives.
4. You do not need to understand Oneness to do what must be done before Knowledge of Oneness will be meaningful to you. God does not make barriers or break barriers. When you release them they are gone. God cannot fail you. Decide that you are wrong about yourself in your identification with a personal self and that God is right about you. You are One with God and God knows What you are. Remember, there is nothing but God and so there cannot be anything without God’s Holiness or anything unworthy of God’s Perfect Love. Do not fail in your function of extending Love in the loveless world of deceit and illusions in your mind because this is how deceit and illusions are undone for you. Do not fail yourself but offer to God and yourself God’s Innocent Oneness. For this small gift of appreciation for God’s Love God will give you the Gift of God.
5. Before you make any decisions remember that you have decided against your Function in Heaven by identifying with a personal self. Consider carefully whether you want to make decisions with the personal self for the “life” that you perceive you live in the world in your mind. Your function in the world that you perceive is only to decide against deciding with the personal mind what you want because with it you do not know what you want so you cannot decide what you should do. Leave all decisions to the Holy Spirit, Which speaks for God and for your Function. The Holy Spirit will teach you to remove the awful burden that you have laid upon yourself by not loving your Christ Mind and by trying to teach yourself guilt instead of Love. Give up this frantic and insane attempt that cheats you of the Joy of living with God and of being aware of the Love and Holiness within you that make you One with God.
6. When you have learned to decide with God all of your decisions will become as easy and as right as breathing. You will not make any effort and you will be led as gently as though you were being carried down a quiet path in summer. Only your perception that you have a separate will seems to make deciding with God difficult for you. The Holy Spirit will not delay in answering your every question about what to do because the Holy Spirit knows what to do. And the Holy Spirit will tell you and then do it for you. You who are tired will find this more restful than sleep because you can bring guilt into your sleeping but not into the Holy Spirit’s Guidance.
7. You cannot know God unless you are guiltless and God’s Will is that you know God so you must be guiltless. But if you do not recognize your guiltlessness you deny God and you do not recognize God though God is all around you. God cannot be known without you and your recognizing your guiltlessness is the condition for your knowing God. Accepting yourself as guilty is to deny God so completely that Knowledge of God is swept away from your mind, where God placed It. Learn how impossible this is! Do not endow God with attributes that you understand with the personal mind. You did not make God and anything that you understand with the personal mind is not of God.
8. Your task is not to make reality because Reality is here and you are Part of It. You who have tried to throw yourself away and have valued God so little, hear your Christ Mind speak for God and for yourself: You cannot understand how much God loves you because there is no parallel in your experience of the world that you perceive to help you understand this. There is nothing in the world with which God’s Love can compare and nothing that you have ever felt apart from God resembles God’s Love even faintly. You cannot yet give a blessing in perfect gentleness, so you do not know of One Which gives Forever and Which knows only giving.
9. You who are of Heaven live in the Blessing of God because you are without sin. The Atonement as correction of your perception of separation from God was established as the means of restoring your Innocence to your mind, which has denied It and so has denied Heaven to itself. Correction teaches you your True Condition of guiltlessness. It does not teach you What you are or What God is. The Holy Spirit remembers this for you and teaches you how to remove the blocks in your awareness that stand between you and What you know. The Holy Spirit’s Memory is yours. If you remember what you have made you are remembering nothing. But the Memory of Reality is in the Holy Spirit and so It is in you.
10. Your differing perceptions of yourself as guiltless and guilty cannot communicate because they are completely opposed. Communication is extension and can only occur between what is the same. God can communicate only to the Holy Spirit in your mind because only the Holy Spirit shares with God Knowledge of What you are. And only the Holy Spirit can answer God for you because only the Holy Spirit knows What God is. Everything else that you have placed in your mind does not exist because what cannot communicate with the Mind of God has never been. Your communication with God is Life. Nothing without God exists at all.
5. The Circle of Atonement
1. The only part of your mind that has any Reality is the Part that still links you with God. Let your entire mind be transformed into a Radiant Reflection of God’s Love by extending God’s Love in place of those perceptions which seem to deny God. God makes this possible. Do not deny God’s yearning to be known by you because you yearn for God as God yearns for you. This is Forever Changeless, so accept the Unchanging. Leave behind the world of death that you perceive and return quietly to Heaven. There is nothing of value in the world that you perceive and everything of Value is in Heaven. Listen to God through the Holy Spirit in you. The Holy Spirit speaks of you to you. There is no guilt in you because you are One with God.
2. You have a special part to play in the plan of the Atonement and the message of your part is always: I am Part of God and I am guiltless. You will teach and learn this in a way that is uniquely meaningful to you. But until you teach and learn this you will suffer the pain of a dim awareness that you are not fulfilling your True Function. Your burden of guilt is heavy but God does not want it so. God’s Plan for your correction is as Perfect as the personal mind’s plan is fallible. You know not what you do in your identification with a personal self but the Holy Spirit knows what you need to do and the Holy Spirit is with you. The Holy Spirit’s Gentleness is yours and all the Love that you share with God the Holy Spirit holds in trust for you. The Holy Spirit teaches you only how to be Happy.
3. Joy is for you who are blessed in your Oneness with God. You cannot condemn whom God has blessed. There is nothing in the Mind of God that does not share God’s Innocence because Perfect Purity naturally extends Itself. Your only calling in your perception of a world is to devote yourself with active willingness to the denial of guilt in all of its forms. To accuse is to not understand. When you are a happy learner of the correction of your perception that you are separate from God you become a teacher of the Innocence of God’s Oneness. Deny Innocence to anything that your mind perceives and you deny It to yourself.
4. Your Oneness with God is your Right. Do not try to make a reality to replace It or you will be asking for guilt and you will experience guilt. Protect the Purity of your Innocence from every thought of guilt that keeps your Innocence from your awareness. In answer to the Call of the plan of the Atonement bring Innocence into your awareness. Do not let your Purity remain hidden but undo the guilt in which you hide your Self from your sight.
5. Only the plan of the Atonement unites your mind into wholeness. The world of separation that your mind perceives will slip away and Full Communication will be restored between you and God through this correction. Your experience of miracles acknowledges the Innocence in yourself that you have denied to produce your need for healing. Extend God’s Love because your hope of Happiness and release from suffering of every kind lie in Its extension. You wish to be free from pain but you may not yet have learned how to exchange guilt for Innocence, nor yet realized that only in this exchange can you be free from pain. But when you fail to learn you need to be taught, not attacked. If you attack yourself when you need teaching you fail to learn.
6. As you teach yourself your Innocence you take up your unique part in the plan of the Atonement. This is the only unified and unifying lesson plan there is. There is no conflict in this lesson plan, which has One Aim no matter how It is taught. Every effort that you make on Its behalf you offer for the One Purpose of releasing yourself from guilt to the Eternal Glory of God’s Oneness. Your every teaching that points to this points straight to Heaven and the Peace of God. There is no pain, no trial, no fear that you cannot overcome by teaching yourself your Innocence. The Power of God supports this teaching and guarantees Its Limitless results.
7. Join your efforts to the Power of God, Which cannot fail and must result in Peace. Everything that you perceive must be touched by teaching such as this. You will not see yourself beyond the Power of God if you teach only Innocence. You will not be exempt from the Effects of this Most Holy Lesson Which seeks to restore What is your Right in your Oneness with God. From every perception of guilt that you release you will inevitably learn of your own Innocence. The Circle of Atonement has no end. You will find ever increasing confidence in your safe inclusion in this Circle with every perception that you correct within Its Safe and Perfect Peace.
8. Peace unto you who are becoming a teacher of Peace. Peace is your acknowledgment of Perfect Purity from Which nothing is excluded. Within the Atonement’s Holy Circle is God’s Oneness. Joy is Its Unifying Attribute and guilt is not left in anything that you perceive. The Power of God draws your entire mind to the Atonement’s Safe Embrace of Love and Oneness. Stand quietly within the Atonement and undo all torturous thoughts in the Safety of Its Peace and Holiness. Abide within It in your Christ Mind as a teacher of correction, not of guilt.
9. Blessed are you who teach yourself with your Christ Mind because your Power is of God. In your guiltlessness you know God as God knows that you are guiltless. Your Christ Mind stands in the Circle of Atonement and calls you to Peace. Teach yourself Peace with your Christ Mind and stand with your Christ Mind on Holy Ground. For your entire mind remember the Power of God that is given to you. Do not believe that you cannot teach yourself God’s Perfect Peace but join your Christ Mind within the Circle. Do not fail the only purpose to which Christ’s Teaching calls you. Restore God’s Oneness by teaching yourself your Innocence.
10. Jesus’ crucifixion had no part in the plan of the Atonement; only Christ’s resurrection was Jesus’ part in the Atonement. The resurrection of Christ is the symbol of your release from guilt by Innocence. When you perceive guilt anywhere you crucify yourself. But you restore Innocence to your mind when you perceive guiltlessness. The personal mind’s goal is always your crucifixion. It sees guilt everywhere and it wants to kill you with its condemnation. The Holy Spirit sees only guiltlessness and in Its Gentleness It wants to release you from fear and re-establish the reign of Love in your mind. The Power of Love is in the Holy Spirit’s Gentleness, Which is of God and therefore cannot crucify or be crucified. Restoring your mind to Innocence is your gift to God and everything that you extend to God is yours. In Heaven God extends God and this is Creation. In the “life” that you perceive yourself living in a world you restore your mind to God by extending your Innocence in your awareness.
11. Every perception that you have is either within the Holy Circle of Atonement or outside of It, depending on whether it is your judgment of crucifixion or your choice for correction. If you correct your perception you will rest in Purity with your perception. But if your perception is the personal mind’s judgment of condemnation you condemn yourself. Judge only in the Quietness of the Holy Spirit. Refuse any perception that is not a blessing of correction. You must extend Holiness because Holiness is extension. Come gladly to the Holy Circle of Atonement within you and look out in Peace at all that only seems outside of you. Do not deny Peace to anything that you perceive because Peace is what you seek. Join your entire mind in the Holy Place of Peace.
6. The Light of Communication
1. The journey that you undertake with your Christ Mind is the exchange of your denial of God for your acceptance of God and your ignorance of God for your understanding of God. What you understand you do not fear. It is only in your denial and ignorance of God that you perceive a justification for your fear of God and you shrink from God into further denial. But What is hidden terrifies you not for What it is but because It is hidden. The Obscure scares you because you do not understand Its meaning. If you did It would be clear and you would no longer be in ignorance. [“Hidden value” means nothing because you cannot extend what is hidden and so you cannot know its value. What is hidden is kept apart but Value always lies in What is universally extended.] You cannot love What you have concealed so you must fear It.
2. The Quiet Love in Which the Holy Spirit dwells within you is Perfectly Open and hides nothing so It is not frightening to you. Your thoughts which seem to separate you from God will always give in to Love if you bring them to Love and don’t hide them from Love. You have no belief in separation from God that Love will not dispel unless you conceal it from Love’s Beneficence. What you keep apart from Love cannot share Love’s healing power because you keep it been separated off from Love and denied. The personal mind carefully hides all the forms that your belief in separation from God take and you who made the illusion of the personal mind out of nothing are now afraid of it.
3. Do not continue to give the personal mind the power to protect you. It is not safe or unsafe; it cannot protect or attack. Being nothing it does nothing. The personal mind is your guardian of separation from God and you can only look to it for fear because by seeming to hide something it is frightening to you. Let go of the personal mind and fear will be gone from you. Only Love remains with you when your illusions are gone because only Love is Real and can live in openness. Everything else must disappear.
4. Death gives in to Life because destruction is not true. Innocence undoes guilt when they are brought together because the Truth of Innocence makes the falsity of guilt perfectly clear. It is meaningless for you to try to keep both your guilt and your Innocence and if you do they will both be meaningless to you because you will confuse them with each other. Only Innocence means anything; guilt makes no sense at all.
5. You have looked at the separation as a means of breaking Communication, or Oneness, with God. The Holy Spirit re-interprets your means of separation as the means of re-establishing your Communication with God, Which has not been broken, only obscured to you. All that you have made has use for the Holy Spirit for Its Most Holy Purpose. The Holy Spirit knows that you are not separate from God but perceives much in your mind that makes you think that you are. The Holy Spirit only wants to separate this perception from you. You made the power of decision to replace the Power of Oneness but the Holy Spirit will teach you how to decide on your own behalf. You made the concept of “deciding” to crucify yourself and you must learn from the Holy Spirit how to apply it to the Holy Cause of restoring you to God.
6. In your identification with a personal self you use dark and devious illusions to communicate with yourself but you cannot really understand them. They have no meaning because their purpose is not really communication but the disruption of True Communication, Which is your Oneness with God. Your illusions cannot communicate anything to you because their purpose is to not communicate. Yet even the strange and twisted world of illusions in your mind holds enough Love in it to make it meaningful if it is interpreted by the Holy Spirit and not your split mind, which made it. The world that you perceive is meant to communicate conflict back to you and the Holy Spirit wants to release you from conflict. Leave communication to the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit will interpret to you with perfect clarity since It knows that you are in Perfect Communication with God.
7. You do not know what you are communicating to yourself with the world that you perceive and so you do not know what it communicates to you. But the Holy Spirit interprets meaning in the world and will use it to communicate the Meaningful to you. The Holy Spirit will separate out all that reflects Meaning and will let go of the meaningless, offering you True Communication to extend so that True Communication will be returned to you. You try to communicate to yourself with both the personal mind and the Holy Spirit and this must lead to confused communication. But the personal mind communicates nothing and the Holy Spirit communicates Everything, so only the Holy Spirit is possible for True Communication. The personal mind only interferes with True Communication.
8. The Holy Spirit’s entire Function is True Communication so It must remove whatever interferes with True Communication in order to restore It to you. The personal mind is the source of interference so do not keep it from the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit will not attack it but will teach you in Gentleness and Love that the personal mind is not frightening and that it hides nothing. You must open your mind and let Love in because there is nothing hidden in God’s Mind. God’s Mind is open wide to greet you and you cannot fail to know that you are in God unless you choose to not be aware of this.
7. Sharing Perception With the Holy Spirit
1. Do you want awareness or denial, Knowledge or ignorance? Opposites conflict and you cannot have both. Your mind seems to be split by opposites and they must be brought together because your mind is healed by uniting. In your united mind what is not True in your mind disappears because Truth is union. As your denial of God is undone by your acceptance of God so your ignorance of God is undone when you accept Knowledge of God. Perception is the means by which your ignorance of God is brought to Knowledge of God. Yet your perception must be cleansed of deceit because otherwise it becomes the messenger of ignorance rather than a means for your remembering Truth.
2. To find Truth you must honestly search out everything in your mind that interferes with your awareness of Truth. Truth is. It cannot be lost or sought or found. It is here within you. But Truth can be recognized or not recognized, which makes It real or false to you. If you hide Truth by denying It, It becomes unreal to you because you hid It and made It frightening to you. Truth lies hidden under the fear on which your insane belief system rests. You do not know this because by hiding Truth in fear you see no reason to believe that the more you look at fear the less you see it and the clearer Truth becomes.
3. It is not possible to convince you that you know God when you believe that you don’t know God. From the point of view of not-knowing-God it is not true that you know God. But it is true because God knows it. These are clearly opposite points of view of what “not knowing God” is. To God it is impossible for you to not know God. It is therefore not a point of view at all but a belief in something untrue. If you think that you do not know God it is only a belief and you are wrong about yourself. Your Oneness with God is not a point of view but a Certainty. An untrue belief brought to Truth is undone.
4. The emphasis of this course has been on bringing what you do not want – separation from God - to What you do want - God. You will realize that your salvation must come to you this way if you consider what your separation from God is. Your separation from God is your maintenance by denial of two thought systems in your mind which cannot coexist – God and the personal mind. If they are brought together in your mind it will be impossible for you to accept both. So to maintain the personal mind as your identity you deny God either completely or you project God outside of you. From this point of view either the personal mind alone is real or the personal mind and a separate God are real but never only God is Real. So you are afraid to look at both God and the personal mind together in your mind because you know that you will withdraw your acceptance of one of them because they cancel out each other. When they are seen apart through denial you cannot see that they cancel out each other because they are each in a separate place – you see the personal mind within you and God outside of you – and so you can believe in both equally if you want to. But bring them together in your mind and you instantly see that they are incompatible. The personal mind will go because it is only an illusion and God is already in your mind.
5. Awareness of God cannot enter your mind when you believe in illusions and will not let them go. Truth does not struggle against illusion and Love does not attack fear. Truth is and does not need to defend Itself against what is not. You made defenses; God does not. The Holy Spirit uses your defenses on behalf of Truth only because you made defenses against Truth. The Holy Spirit’s perception of your defenses is used for Its Purpose and It changes your defenses into your call for God, Which your defenses were made to attack. Like everything else that you made, defenses must be gently turned to your Real Good, transformed by the Holy Spirit from a means for your self-destruction to a means for your preservation and release. The Holy Spirit’s Task is great but the Power of God is in the Holy Spirit. To the Holy Spirit Its Task was accomplished the instant It was given to the Holy Spirit for you. Do not delay your return to Peace by wondering how the Holy Spirit can fulfill What God has given It to do. Leave that to the Holy Spirit. You are not asked to do great tasks in your identification with a limited personal self; you are merely asked to do the little that the Holy Spirit suggests. Trust the Holy Spirit to the little extent that what It asks you to do you can do. You will see how easily you accomplish all that the Holy Spirit asks.
6. The Holy Spirit asks only this of you: Bring to It every secret that you have locked away from It in your identification with a personal self. Open your entire mind to the Holy Spirit and ask It to undo your illusions with Its Love. At your request the Holy Spirit will gladly enter your mind and undo your illusions when you reveal them to It. But what you hide the Holy Spirit cannot undo. The Holy Spirit is your Sight and unless you look with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit cannot see. The Vision of your Christ Mind is for you with the Holy Spirit so bring all your dark and secret thoughts to the Holy Spirit and look on them with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Love in your split mind and Love and fear cannot coexist in your mind when you look on fear with Love. The Holy Spirit’s judgment will prevail and it is yours when you join your perception with the Holy Spirit.
7. Seeing with the Holy Spirit is the way in which you learn to extend the interpretation of perception that leads to God. You cannot really see in the isolation of a personal mind. Perceiving with the Holy Spirit teaches you that what you see in the isolation of a personal mind means nothing. Seeing with the Holy Spirit will show you that all Meaning, even your own, comes not from your seeing with two minds but from your gentle fusing of everything into One meaning, One emotion, and One purpose. God has One Purpose, Which It shares with you. The single Vision which the Holy Spirit offers to you will bring this Oneness to your mind so clearly that you will not wish, for all that you perceive in a world, to reject What God gives to you. Perceive that your Will is God’s Will and all of God’s Love is yours.
8. The Holy Meeting Place
1. In your illusions you obscure the Glory God gives to you and the Power that God bestows on you as an Innocent Part of God. All of this lies hidden in your every illusion of separation, shrouded in guilt and in denial of your Innocence. Behind your denial is nothing real because nothing can obscure God’s Gift. It is the act of denial that interferes with your recognition of the Power of God within you. Do not banish Power from your mind but let all the illusions that you use to hide your Glory be brought to the judgment of the Holy Spirit to be undone. You whom the Holy Spirit wants to save for Glory are saved for It. The Holy Spirit is God’s Promise that you will be released from limitedness to Limitlessness. The Holy Spirit is faithful to this Promise because the Holy Spirit shares with God the Promise that was given to It from God to share with you.
2. And the Holy Spirit still shares It for you. Everything else that seems to promise otherwise, great or small, however much you value it, the Holy Spirit will replace with the One Promise given to It for your Mind in Its Oneness with God. God’s Mind is your Mind. Anything in your mind that is not equally worthy of both God and you will be replaced by Gifts wholly acceptable to Both. You cannot offer guilt to God so you cannot offer it to yourself. You are not separate from God and gifts offered to One are offered to the Other. You don’t seem to know God because you don’t seem to know this. But you do know God and you do know this. All of this is safe within you in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not in the separation but in the Meeting Place within you Where God, united to your Christ Mind, speaks to you through the Holy Spirit. You cannot be separate from God so Communication between you and God cannot cease. The Holy Meeting Place of the united God and Christ lies in the Holy Spirit within you. Any interruption in Communication between you and God is impossible Here because it is not God’s Will. Unbroken and Uninterrupted Communication flows constantly between you and God, as you Both want it to be. And so it is.
3. Don’t let your mind wander through illusions, away from Love’s Center. You may choose to lead yourself astray with the personal mind’s projections but your mind can be joined in wholeness by the Guide appointed for you by God. The Holy Spirit will surely lead you to Where God and your Christ Mind await your recognition. You are joined in Oneness with God through your Christ Mind and through this Gift all separation disappears. Unite with What you are; you can only join with Reality. God’s Glory belongs to you in Truth. It has no opposite and you cannot bestow anything else upon yourself.
4. There is no substitute for Truth. And Truth will make this plain to you as you are brought into a Place within you Where you can meet with Truth. And There you must be led through Gentle Understanding Which can lead you nowhere else. Where God is There you are; such is the Truth. Nothing can change this Knowledge, given to you by God, into untruth. Everything that is One with God knows God because Knowing God is what Oneness is. God and you and your Extension of God are joined in the Holy Meeting Place within you. God is the One Link that holds Oneness together.
5. The Link between you and God can never be dissolved. Heaven Itself is Oneness and Heaven remains God’s Will for you. Accept no other Gift in your mind because nothing else can exist with It. Your little illusions will be brought together with God’s Gift of Heaven and only What is worthy of God will be accepted by you for whom It was intended. To whom God gives Itself God is given. Your little gifts of separation will vanish in your mind where God has placed Its Own Gift of Oneness.
9. The Reflection of Holiness
1. The plan of the Atonement, which corrects your perception of separation from God, does not make you Holy. You are always Holy in your Oneness with God. Correction merely brings your perception of your unholiness to your Holiness, or what you made to What you are. Bringing illusions to Truth, or the personal mind to God, is the Holy Spirit’s only Function. Do not hide what you have made from God because hiding it has cost you Knowledge of God and of yourself. This Knowledge is safe but you do not feel safe apart from It. You made time to replace Timelessness in your decision to be not as you are. So Truth was made to seem past to you and you dedicated the present to illusion. And then you changed the past, too, and interposed it between What has always been and now. The personal past that you remember never was and represents your denial of What always is.
2. For you to bring the personal mind to God is for you to bring your error to Truth Where it is corrected because it is the opposite of Truth. Your error is undone because the impossible nature of the contradiction between your error and Truth can no longer stand. What disappears in Truth is not attacked; it merely vanishes because it is not true. It is meaningless to think that different realities can exist because Reality must be One. It cannot change with time or mood or chance. Its Changelessness is what makes It Real. You cannot undo this because undoing is for unreality. And undoing unreality is what Reality will do for you.
3. Merely by being What It is Truth releases you from everything that It is not. Correction is so gentle that you only need to whisper to the Holy Spirit and all of the Holy Spirit’s Power will rush to your assistance and support. You are not frail with God within you but without God you would be nothing. Correction offers you God and this Gift is Held by God within you through the Holy Spirit. God has not left your mind, though you worship the personal self. Your mind is still Holy because the Presence Which dwells within it is Holiness.
4. In your mind Holiness waits Quietly for you to return to It in Love. The Presence within you knows that you will return to Purity and Grace. The Graciousness of God will gently take you in and cover all of your sense of pain and loss with the Immortal Assurance of God’s Love. There your fear of death will be replaced with Joy of Life because God is Life and you live in God. Life is as Holy as God, with Which It is One. The Presence of Holiness lives in everything that lives because Holiness is One with Life and does not leave What is One with Itself.
5. Your mind can become a spotless mirror in which the Holiness of God shines forth through your perceptions. Through this process you can see a Reflection of Heaven in your mind but no images of the personal mind must dim the mirror that you want to hold God’s Reflection. God will shine of Itself on the mirror of your mind and you will perceive only the clear Reflection of God through it.
6. Reflections of your mind are seen clearly only in the Light of Truth. In the darkness of illusions your mind’s reflections are obscure and their meaning lies only in your shifting interpretations rather than in themselves. The Reflection of God needs no interpretation because It is clear. Clean the mirror of your mind and the Message that shines forth from your mind will cover everything that you see and you will not fail to understand It. It is the same Message that the Holy Spirit is holding in the mirror of your perceptions. You will recognize the Message because you have been taught your need for It but you did not know where to look for It. See It in you, then, and extend It to replace the world that you perceive.
7. If you realized for a single instant the Power of Healing that the Reflection of God shining in your perception can bring to all of your mind you would not wait to make the mirror of your perception ready to receive the Image of the Holiness that can heal your entire mind. The Image of Holiness that shines in your mind is not obscure and will not change. Its meaning to you is not obscure when you look upon Its Reflection everywhere in place of the world that you perceive. All of your problems find healing in It.
8. The Response of Holiness to any form of separation is always the same and there is no contradiction in what It calls forth. Its One Response is Healing, without regard to what is brought to It. When you have learned to offer only healing you will be ready at last for Heaven because of the Reflection of Holiness within you. In your perception Holiness can only be reflected. In Heaven Holiness is not a reflection but the actual Condition of God. God is not an image and What is One with God holds God within Itself in Truth. What is One with God does not merely reflect Truth; It is Truth.
10. The Equality of Miracles
1. When no perception stands between God and you or between you and your Extension of God your Knowledge of God’s Oneness will extend Forever. The reflections that you accept into the mirror of your mind in time bring Eternity nearer to, or push It further from, your awareness. But Eternity Itself is beyond time. Reach out of time and touch Eternity with the help of Eternity’s Reflection within you. You will turn away from time toward Holiness as surely as Holiness calls to you to let go of guilt in your entire mind. Reflect the Peace of Heaven in your perceptions and bring your entire mind to Heaven. The Reflection of Truth draws your entire mind to Truth and as you enter Truth you will leave all reflections behind.
2. In Heaven Reality is extended, not reflected. But by extending Reality’s Reflection to all of your perceptions Reality’s Truth becomes the only Perception that your Christ Mind accepts. This is how your Memory of God dawns on you and you will find you can no longer be satisfied with anything but your Reality. In the world that you seem to live in you have no conception of Limitlessness because it is a world of limits. In the world every action is classified and ranked according to how easy or difficult it is to perform in different circumstances so your experience of the miracle, being the same in every circumstance, has a unique function. It is motivated by the Holy Spirit, Which brings the Law of Oneness to all that you perceive. Extending God’s Love is the one thing you can do in the world that transcends categorization because it undoes differences by being exactly the same in every situation.
3. Miracles do not compete with each other or with your non-miraculous thoughts and you can extend them without limit. They can be simultaneous with each other and with your non-miraculous thoughts and they can occur in great numbers. This will not be difficult for you to understand once you can conceive of miracles as possible at all. What you may find more difficult to grasp is that the sameness of miracles stamps them as something that must come from Somewhere other than the world that you perceive. From the perspective of the world it is impossible for any two situations to be exactly the same or for you to respond to them in exactly the same way.
4. Perhaps you are aware that your thoughts do not compete, though they may conflict and can occur together in great numbers. You may be so used to this that you give it no thought at all. But you are also used to classifying some of your thoughts as more important, larger, better, more productive, or more valuable than other thoughts. This is how your split mind thinks because some of your thoughts reflect Heaven while others are motivated by the personal mind, which only seems to think.
5. The result of your thinking with a split mind is that your mind never rests and is never still because it is full of weaving, changing patterns. It is a mirror that is swept constantly with alternating reflections of Truth and illusion and the little sanity that you maintain is held together by a sense of order that you establish and that attests to the fact that you are not a personal mind. The personal mind is chaos and if you were only the personal mind ordering your thoughts would not be possible. But ordering your mind does not limit only the personal mind; it limits you. To order your mind is to arrange your thoughts through judgment, so it is really the Holy Spirit’s Function, not yours in your split state.
6. You must learn that in your identification with a personal self you have no basis at all for ordering your thoughts. The Holy Spirit teaches you this by giving you the experience of miracles to show you that there is a better way to order your thoughts. The miracle offers exactly the same response to every call for help without judging some calls as louder, greater, or more important. You may wonder how you can accept this when you are still so bound to judgment and the answer is very simple: The Power of God, not of the personal mind, engenders your experience of miracles. Your extension of God’s Love witnesses to the Power of God within you. The Power of God’s Love is Limitless and that is why every miracle extends to be all that you perceive and blesses your entire mind. God does not classify your calls for help. All calls for help are given help.
7. The Holy Spirit’s judgment divides every perception you have in the world into two categories Your extension of Love and your call for Love. You are too confused in your identification with a personal self to recognize Love or to believe that everything else is nothing but your own call for Love. The personal mind is bound to form and what it considers “content” is really another version of form. From the personal mind you do not respond to the opportunities to extend Love that the world that you perceive really offers to you; you respond to the particulars of the personal mind’s judgments and projections.
8. The personal mind is incapable of understanding content and is totally unconcerned with it. It assumes that if a form is acceptable to it the content must be, otherwise it will attack the form. If you believe you understand the personal mind’s “dynamics” you do not understand it from a personal mind because it cannot be understood by a personal mind. The personal mind enjoys studying itself and thoroughly approves of analyzing itself because doing so validates its reality. But the study of the personal mind, or “ego”, is not the study of the mind; it is the study of a form with meaningless content. A personal mind studying the personal mind is senseless, though this is carefully concealed behind impressive sounding words, and its conclusions lack any consistent sense.
9. It is characteristic of the personal mind’s judgments that separately they seem to stand but put them together and the personal mind’s thought system is revealed as incoherent and chaotic. Form is not enough for meaning and the lack of underlying content in the personal mind makes a cohesive system impossible. Separation remains the personal mind’s chosen condition because in the isolation of it you cannot find Truth. But extend your True Mind to encompass the world that you perceive with a personal mind and the personal mind can no longer defend its lack of content. The fact that what seems to be “your mind” and what seems to be a separate “world” can join means that the isolation of the personal mind is not your Truth.
10. It is impossible for you to remember God in the secret solitude of a personal mind because your remembering God means that you are not isolated to a personal mind and that you are willing to remember this. Do not think with the personal mind because its thoughts are not for you. If you want to remember God let the Holy Spirit order your thoughts and accept only the answer that the Holy Spirit gives to any question or problem. Your entire mind seeks for Love and if you join in Love with what your mind perceives then everything that you perceive will be given meaning for you. The isolated journey of a personal mind fails you because it excludes the Wholeness it is supposed to find.
11. As God communicates to the Holy Spirit in you, so does the Holy Spirit translate Its Communications through you to your perceptions so that you can understand Them. God has no secret communications because Everything of God is Perfectly Open and Freely Accessible to your entire mind because It is for your Whole Mind. Nothing lives in secret and what you hide from the Holy Spirit is nothing. Every interpretation of the personal mind’s perceptions of others that you make is senseless. Let the Holy Spirit show you how your perceptions are either Love or your call for Love. Your split mind holds only these two orders of thought.
12. In your experience of miracles you recognize that this is true. Where you perceive Love you must know that you have It because for you to perceive It, It must’ve been extended from you. And where you call for Love you must extend It because Love is What you are. This course will teach you how to remember What you are, restoring you to your Identity. This Identity extends everywhere and your experience of the miracle is your means of extending It. By supplying your Identity wherever you do not recognize It you will recognize It. God wills to be One with you Forever and every time that you recognize your Christ Mind God will bless you with all of the Love that God has for your Christ Mind. The Power of God’s Love is with every miracle that you extend and so every miracle is the same.
11. The Test of Truth
1. The essential thing for you to learn is that in your identification with a personal self you do not know anything. Knowledge is power and all Power is of God. You have God’s Power but in your attempt to keep power to a little self you have interposed so much between God’s Power and your awareness of It that you cannot use It. Everything that you have taught yourself through the personal mind has made your Power more and more obscure to you. You don’t know What or Where It is. You have made something that looks like power and is a show of strength so pitiful that it must fail you because Power is not a seeming strength and Truth is beyond appearances of any kind. All that stands between you and the Power of God in you is your learning of the false and your attempts to undo the Truth.
2. Be willing to have it all undone and be glad that you are not bound to your illusions forever. You have taught yourself how to limit your Christ Mind, a lesson so unthinkable that only in insanity could you think of it. God cannot learn how to be not-God and you who are One with God and who has been given all Power by God cannot learn to be powerless. Do you prefer to keep what you have taught yourself in place of What you have and What you are?
3. Correction teaches you how to escape forever from everything that you have taught yourself in the past in your identification with a personal mind by showing you only What you are now. You must learn something before the effects of what you have learned are made manifest to you, so your learning is in the past but its influence determines your present by giving it whatever meaning it holds for you. Your learning with the personal mind gives the present no meaning at all. Nothing that you have ever learned with it can help you understand the present or teach you how to undo the past. A personal past is what you have taught yourself through the personal mind. Let it all go. Do not attempt to understand anything in the “light” of a personal past because the illusions through which you try to see can only obscure. Do not put confidence in illusions to bring you understanding because you will contradict Truth and believe in separation. But you cannot really see illusions because they are nothing more than a condition in which your seeing Truth becomes impossible.
4. You have not yet brought all of the illusions that you have taught yourself to the Truth within you and so you can hardly judge the truth and value of this course. But God has not abandoned you and so you have another lesson already learned for you by the Holy Spirit, Which was given this lesson for you. This lesson shines with God’s Glory and in it lies God’s Power, Which God shares so gladly with you. Learn of the Happiness of God, Which is yours. But to accomplish this lesson you must willingly bring all of your thoughts of separation’s reality to Truth and joyously lay them down with a mind that is open to receive. Every thought of separation that you bring to the Holy Spirit It will gladly accept from you because you do not want separation. And the Holy Spirit will gladly exchange each one for the Happy lesson It has learned for you. Never believe that any lesson that you have learned apart from the Holy Spirit means anything.
5. You have one test by which to recognize if what you have learned is true: If you are wholly free of fear of any kind, and if everything that you see shares in your Perfect Peace, then you can be sure that you have learned God’s lesson and not the personal mind’s lesson. Unless this is true you still have thoughts of separation that hinder you and that you project onto your perception of a world. The absence of Perfect Peace means one thing: You think you do not will for yourself What God wills for you. Whatever form it takes, every lesson of separation teaches this. And every lesson of correction with which the Holy Spirit replaces your thoughts of separation teaches you that you will with God in your Christ Mind.
6. Do not be concerned with how you can learn a lesson so completely different from everything that you have taught yourself. Your part is very simple: You only need to recognize that you do not want anything that you have learned through the personal mind. Ask the Holy Spirit to teach you and do not use the personal self’s experiences to confirm what you learn. When your Peace is threatened or disturbed in any way say to yourself:
I do no know what anything, even this, means so I do not know how to respond to it. I will not use the personal mind’s past learning to guide me now.
By refusing to teach yourself through a personal mind that does not know you open yourself to the Holy Spirit’s Guidance. The Holy Spirit will take up Its rightful place in your awareness the instant that you open your awareness to the Holy Spirit.
7. In the isolation of a personal mind you cannot be your own guide to miracles because it is your identification with a personal mind that makes them necessary. But the Means on Which you can depend for the experience of miracles has been provided for you in the Holy Spirit. You can make no need that God cannot meet if you turn to God ever so little. But God cannot compel you to turn to God and still remain God because God does not compel. God cannot be unlike God because it is impossible for God to lose Its Identity because It is your Identity. And your Identity is Changeless. In your experience of the miracle you acknowledge God’s Changelessness by seeing yourself as you always are and not as you want to make yourself. Your experience of the miracle brings you the effects that only your Innocence can bring so it establishes the Fact that your Innocence must be True.
8. It is impossible for you to establish your Innocence when you are firmly bound to separation from God and committed to perceiving yourself as guilty. Be sure that you are willing to acknowledge that this is impossible because the Guidance of the Holy Spirit is limited when you think that you can run or deal with some aspects of your life in the world that you perceive without the Holy Spirit. By holding back parts of your life for the personal mind you make it appear as though it is the Holy Spirit that is undependable and you use this as further justification for holding back more. By limiting what guidance you will accept from the Holy Spirit you put yourself in a position where you cannot depend on the experience of miracles to answer all of your problems for you.
9. What the Holy Spirit wants you to give It does not withhold from you. You have no problems that the Holy Spirit cannot solve with an extension of God’s Love. Miracles are for you and every fear or pain or trial that you have has already been undone. The Holy Spirit has already brought them all to Love for you and has recognized that they never happened. There are no lessons of separation that the Holy Spirit has not already corrected for you and they do not exist in the Holy Spirit’s Mind at all. The personal self’s past does not limit the Holy Spirit; therefore it does not limit you. The Holy Spirit does not see time as you do and each miracle that It offers to you corrects your use of time and gives time to the Holy Spirit to use on your behalf.
10. Being your True Mind, the Holy Spirit has freed you from the personal self’s past and It wants to teach you that you are free of the past. The Holy Spirit wants you to accept Its accomplishments as yours because the Holy Spirit is you. The Holy Spirit has already freed you from what you made. You can deny the Holy Spirit but you cannot call on It in vain because the Holy Spirit always gives Its Gifts in place of what you offer to It. The Holy Spirit wants to establish its Teachings of Love firmly in your mind so that no lessons of guilt will abide in What is made Holy by the Holy Spirit’s Presence. Thank God that the Holy Spirit is here and that It works through you and that all that It does is yours. The Holy Spirit offers you the experience of the miracle with everything you let It do through you.
11. Your Christ Mind will always be indivisible. As you are One with God so do you learn with one, entire mind. The Holy Spirit is as like God as your Christ Mind is like God and through the Holy Spirit God proclaims God’s Oneness and yours. Listen in silence to the Holy Spirit and do not raise a voice against It because the Holy Spirit teaches you the miracle of Oneness and before this lesson all division disappears. Teach like the Holy Spirit in the world that you perceive and you will remember that you have always extended God as God extends God. The miracle of your Extension of God has never ceased because in its Holiness it is Immortal. Immortality is the Will of God and of God’s Oneness.
12. When you remember that you don’t know anything without the Holy Spirit and you become willing to learn Everything you will learn Everything. But when you trust that in the personal mind you already know everything then you will not learn anything because you will have destroyed your motivation for learning. Do not think that you know anything until you pass the test of Perfect Peace because Peace and Knowledge go together and cannot be found alone. It is the Law of God that Peace and Knowledge go together because they are cause and effect, each to the other, so that if one is absent so is the other.
13. You will really learn when you recognize that Peace is the evidence that you have Knowledge because for True Knowledge you must want Peace and nothing else. Whenever you think that you have Knowledge but really do not you will not have Peace because you will have abandoned the Holy Spirit. Whenever you fully realize that you do not have Knowledge Peace will return because you will have invited the Holy Spirit by abandoning the personal mind on the Holy Spirit’s behalf. The only thing that you need to do is to not call on the personal mind for anything. The Holy Spirit will fill your every perception if you make room for It.
14. If you want Peace you must abandon the teacher of attack. The Teacher of Peace will never abandon you. You can desert the Holy Spirit but It will never desert you because the Holy Spirit’s faith in you is Its Knowledge. It is as firm as Its faith in God because the Holy Spirit knows that faith in God must encompass faith in you who are One with God. In this constancy lies the Holy Spirit’s Holiness, Which It cannot abandon because it is not Its Will to do so. With your Perfection always in the Holy Spirit’s Sight the Holy Spirit extends Peace to your every perception that needs it. Make way for Peace and It will come to you because Knowledge is in you and from It Peace must come to you.
15. The Power of God, from Which both Knowledge and Peace arise, is yours as surely as It is God’s. You think that you don’t know God because in the isolation of a personal mind it is impossible for you to know God. But see the Mighty Works that God does through you and you will be convinced that you did them through God. You will not deny that God is the Source of effects so powerful because they could not be of the personal mind. Leave room for God in your mind and you will find yourself so filled with Power that nothing will touch your Peace. This will be the test by which you recognize that you know.
|