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
Continue reading →Perception selects, and makes the world you see. It literally picks it out, as mind directs. The laws of size and shape and brightness would hold, perhaps, if other things were equal. They are NOT equal. For what you look for you are far more likely to discover, REGARDLESS of its color, shape, or size, than what you would prefer to overlook. The still small Voice for God,
Continue reading →The Holy Spirit will NEVER teach you that you are sinful. Errors He will correct, but this makes no-one fearful. You are indeed afraid to look within, and see the sin you think is there. This you would not be fearful to admit. Fear in association with sin the ego deems quite appropriate, and smiles approvingly. It has no fear to let you feel ashamed. It doubts not your belief and faith in sin.
Continue reading →All special relationships have sin as their goal. For they are bargains with reality, toward which the seeming union is adjusted. Forget not this; to bargain is to set a limit, and any brother with whom you have a limited relationship YOU HATE. You may attempt to keep the bargain in the name of fairness, sometimes demanding payment of your self, perhaps more often of the other.
Continue reading →We have repeated how little is asked of you to learn this course. It is the same small willingness you need to have your whole relationship transformed to joy. The little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit for which He gives you everything. The very little, on which salvation rests. The tiny change of mind by which the crucifixion is changed to Resurrection. And, being true, it is so simple that it cannot fail
Continue reading →Never forget the world the sightless “see” must be imagined. And what it really looks like is unknown to them. They must infer what could be seen, from evidence forever indirect, and reconstruct their inferences as they stumble and fall because of what they did not recognize, or walk unharmed through open doorways that they thought were closed. And so it is with you. You do not see.
Continue reading →Projection makes perception; the world you see is what you GAVE it, nothing more than that. But, though it is no more than that, it is not less. Therefore, to you, it is important. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the world, but will to change your mind ABOUT the world.
Continue reading →Do you not WANT to know your own identity? Would you not happily exchange your doubts for certainty? Would you not willingly be free of misery, and learn again of joy? Your holy relationship offers all this to you. As it was given you, so will be its effects. And as its holy purpose was not made by you, the means by which its happy end is yours is also not of you. Rejoice in what is yours but for the asking.
Continue reading →We have said much about discrepancies of means and end, and how these must be brought in line before your holy relationship can bring you only joy. But we have also said the means to meet the Holy Spirit’s goal will come from the same Source as does His purpose. Being so simple and direct, this course has nothing in it that is not consistent. The seeming inconsistencies,
Continue reading →The meaning of the Son of God lies solely in his relationship with his Creator. If it were elsewhere, it would rest upon contingency, but there IS nothing else. And this is wholly loving and forever. Yet has the Son of God invented an unholy relationship between him and his Father. His real relationship is one of perfect union, and unbroken continuity. The one he made is partial, self-centered,
Continue reading →In this world, God’s Son comes closest to himself in a holy relationship. There he begins to find the certainty his Father has in him. And there he finds his function of restoring his Father’s laws to what was held outside them, and finding what was lost. Only in time can anything be lost, but never lost forever. So do the parts of God’s Son gradually join in time, and with each joining is the end of time
Continue reading →Nothing can hurt you, unless you give it the power to do so. For you give power as the laws of this world interpret giving; as you give, you LOSE. It is not up to you to give power at all. Power is of God, GIVEN by Him, and re-awakened by the Holy Spirit, Who knows that, as you give you GAIN. He gives no power to sin, and therefore it HAS none. Nor to its results, as this world sees them;
Continue reading →The belief in sin is an ADJUSTMENT. And an adjustment is a CHANGE, a shift in perception, or a belief that what was so before has been made different. Every adjustment is therefore a distortion, and calls upon defenses to uphold it against reality. Knowledge requires NO adjustment, and, in fact, is lost if any shift or change is undertaken. For this reduces it at once to mere perception;
Continue reading →
