Specialness is a lack of trust in anyone except yourself. Faith is invested in yourself alone. Everything else becomes your enemy, feared and attacked, deadly and dangerous, hated and worthy only of destruction. Whatever gentleness it offers is but deception, but its hate is real. In danger of destruction, it MUST kill, and YOU are drawn to it, to kill it first. And such is guilt’s attraction.
Continue reading →Forgiveness is the end of specialness. Only illusions can BE forgiven, and then they disappear. Forgiveness is release from ALL illusions, and that is why it is impossible but PARTLY to forgive. No-one who clings to ONE illusion can see himself as sinless, for he holds one error to himself as lovely still. And so he calls it “unforgivable,” and makes it sin. How can he then give HIS forgiveness wholly,
Continue reading →Comparison MUST be an ego device, for love makes none. Specialness ALWAYS makes comparisons. It is ESTABLISHED by a lack seen in another, and maintained by searching for and keeping clear in sight all lacks it can perceive. This does it seek, and this it looks upon. And ALWAYS whom it thus diminishes would be your Savior, had you not chosen to make of him
Continue reading →Love IS extension. To withhold the smallest gift is not to know love’s purpose. Love offers everything forever. Hold back but ONE belief, ONE offering, and love is gone, because you asked a substitute to take its place. And now must war, the SUBSTITUTE for peace, come with the one alternative that you CAN choose for love. Your CHOOSING it has given it ALL the reality it seems to have.
Continue reading →To learn this course requires willingness to question EVERY value that you hold. Not one can be kept hidden and obscure, but it will jeopardize your learning. NO belief is neutral; every one has power to dictate each decision you make. For a decision is a CONCLUSION, based on EVERYTHING that you believe. It is the OUTCOME of belief, and follows it as surely as does suffering follow guilt,
Continue reading →Think you the FORM that murder takes can offer safety? Can guilt be ABSENT from a battlefield? The fear of God is fear of life, and not of death. Yet He remains the only place of safety. In Him is no attack, and no illusion in any form stalks Heaven. Heaven is wholly true. No difference enters. And what is all the same cannot conflict. You are not asked to fight against your wish to murder.
Continue reading →Is it not true you do not recognize some of the forms attack can take? If it is true attack in any form will hurt you, and will do so just as much as in another form which you DO recognize, then it must follow that you do not always recognize the source of pain. Attack in ANY form is equally destructive. Its purpose does not change. Its sole intent is murder, and what form of murder serves to cover
Continue reading →The “laws of chaos” can be brought to light, though never understood. Chaotic laws are hardly meaningful, and therefore out of reason’s sphere. Yet they appear to constitute an obstacle to reason and to truth. Let us, then, look upon them calmly, that we may look beyond them, understanding what they are, not what they would maintain. It is essential it be understood what they are for,
Continue reading →The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness. The means of war are not the means of peace. And what the warlike would remember is not love. War is impossible unless belief in victory is cherished. Conflict within you must imply that you believe the ego has the power
Continue reading →Do you not see the opposite of frailty and weakness is sinlessness? Innocence is strength, and nothing else is strong. The sinless cannot fear. And fear of any kind is weakness. The show of strength attack would use to cover frailty, conceals it not. For how can the unreal be hidden? No-one is strong who has an enemy. And no-one can attack, unless he thinks he has.
Continue reading →Do you want freedom of the body, or of the mind? For both you cannot have. Which do you value? Which is your goal? For one you see as means; the other, end. And one must serve the other, and lead to its predominance, increasing its importance by diminishing its own. Means serve the end, and as the end is reached, the value of the means decreases, and is eclipsed entirely
Continue reading →How does one overcome illusions? Surely not by force or anger. Nor by opposing them in any way. Merely by letting reason tell you that they CONTRADICT reality. They go against what must be true. The opposition comes from them, and not reality. Reality opposes nothing. What merely is, needs no defense, and offers none. Only illusions need defense, because of weakness.
Continue reading →When you come to the place where the branch in the road is quite apparent, you cannot go ahead. You MUST go either one way or the other. For now if you go straight ahead, the way you went before you reached the branch, you will go NOWHERE. The whole purpose of coming this far was to decide which branch you will take NOW. The way you came no longer matters.
Continue reading →The introduction of reason into the ego’s thought system is the beginning of its undoing. For reason and the ego are contradictory. Nor is it possible for them to co-exist in your awareness. And reason’s goal is to make plain, and therefore obvious. You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally.
Continue reading →The opposite of illusions is not disillusionment, but truth. Only to the ego, to which truth is meaningless, do they appear to be the only alternatives, and different from each other. In truth, they are the same. Both bring the same amount of misery, though each one seems to be the way to lose the misery the other brings. Every illusion carries pain and suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments
Continue reading →Let reason take another step. If you attack whom God would heal, and hate the one He loves, then you and your Creator have a DIFFERENT will. Yet, if you ARE His Will, what you MUST then believe is that you are not yourself. You can, indeed, believe this, and you DO. And you HAVE faith in this, and see much evidence on its behalf. And where, you wonder, does your strange uneasiness,
Continue reading →Take pity on yourselves, so long enslaved. Rejoice whom God hath joined have come together, and need no longer look on sin apart. No two can look on sin together, for they could never see it in the same place and time. Sin is a strictly individual perception, seen in the other, yet believed by each to be within himself.
Continue reading →Are thoughts, then, dangerous? To bodies, YES. The thoughts that seem to kill are those which teach the thinker that he CAN be killed. And so he dies, BECAUSE of what he learned. He goes from life to death, the final proof he valued the inconstant more than constancy. Surely he THOUGHT he wanted happiness. Yet he did not desire it BECAUSE it was the truth, and therefore MUST be constant.
Continue reading →Do you not see that all your misery comes from the strange belief that you are powerless? Being helpless is the COST of sin. Helplessness is sin’s condition; the one requirement that it demands, to be believed. Only the helpless COULD believe in it. Enormity has no appeal, save to the little. And only those who first believe that they are little, could see attraction there.
Continue reading →Reason cannot see sin, but CAN see errors, and leads to their correction. It does not value them, but their correction. But reason will also tell you when you think you sin you call for help, but if you will not accept the help you call for, you will not believe that it is yours to GIVE. And so you will not give it, thus MAINTAINING the belief. For uncorrected error of any kind deceives you about the power
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