Library of Christ Mind Teachings
ACIM Original Edition
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47 Yes, you are blessed indeed. Yet in this world, you do not know it.
But you have the means for learning it and seeing it quite clearly. The
Holy Spirit uses logic as easily and as well as does the ego, except
that His conclusions are not insane. They take a direction exactly
opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness
and to death. We have followed much of the ego’s logic and have seen its
logical conclusions. And having seen them, we have realized that they
cannot be seen but in illusions, for there alone their seeming clearness
seems to be clearly seen. Let us now turn away from them and follow
the simple logic by which the Holy Spirit teaches you the simple
conclusions that speak for truth and only truth.
48 If you are blessed and do not know it, you need to learn it must be
so. The knowledge is not taught, but its conditions must be acquired,
for it is they that have been thrown away. You can learn to bless and
cannot give what you have not. If, then, you offer blessing, it
must have come first to yourself. And you must also have accepted it
as yours, for how else could you give it away?
49 That is why your miracles offer you the testimony that you are
blessed. If what you offer is complete forgiveness, you must have
let guilt go, accepting the Atonement for yourself and learning you are
guiltless. How could you learn what has been done for you, but which you
do not know, unless you do what you would have to do if it had been
done unto you? Indirect proof of truth is needed in a world made of
denial and without direction. You will perceive the need for this if you
will realize that to deny is the decision not to know. The logic of
the world must therefore lead to nothing, for its goal is nothing.
50 If you decide to have and give and be nothing except a dream, you
must direct your thoughts unto oblivion. And if you have and give and
are everything, and all this has been denied, your thought system is
closed off and wholly separated from the truth. This is an insane
world, and do not underestimate the actual extent of its insanity. There
is no area of your perception that it has not touched, and your dream
is sacred to you. That is why God placed the Holy Spirit in you,
where you placed the dream.
51 Seeing is always outward. Were your thoughts wholly of you, the
thought system which you made would be forever dark. The thoughts which
the Mind of God’s Son projects have all the power that he gives to them.
The thoughts he shares with God are beyond his belief, but those he
made are his beliefs. And it is these, and not the truth, that he
has chosen to defend and love. They will not be taken from him. But they
can be given up by him, for the Source of their undoing is in him.
There is nothing in the world to teach him that the logic of the world
is totally insane and leads to nothing. Yet in him who made this insane
logic, there is One Who knows it leads to nothing, for He knows
everything.
52 Any direction which will lead you where the Holy Spirit leads you not
goes nowhere. Anything you deny which He knows to be true, you have
denied yourself, and He must therefore teach you not to deny it.
Undoing is indirect, as doing is. You were created only to create,
neither to see nor do. These are but indirect expressions of the will
to live, which has been blocked by the capricious and unholy whim of
death and murder that your Father shared not with you. You have set
yourselves the task of sharing what cannot be shared. And while you
think it possible to learn to do this, you will not believe all that
is possible to learn to do.
53 The Holy Spirit, therefore, must begin His teaching by showing you
what you can never learn. His message is not indirect, but He must
introduce the simple truth into a thought system which has become so
twisted and so complex that you cannot see that it means nothing. He
merely looks at its foundation and dismisses it. But you, who cannot
undo what you have made [nor escape the heavy burden of its dullness
that lies upon your minds], cannot see through it. It deceives you
because you chose to deceive yourselves. Those who choose to be
deceived will merely attack direct approaches, which would seem but to
encroach upon deception and strike at it.