Table of Contents
The only way to accept your Father’s Love is to love your brothers as He does. Your brothers are a part of God; they share His Being as do you. To Love God is to Love His children. It cannot be otherwise. Unless you love as He does, you will not know God. The quickest way back to your Father is to abandon yourself to Love, for God is Love.
When the time comes to leave this world, will you be ready? I am not speaking of death. You cannot leave the world through dying, but through awakening to the Truth. The time will come for everyone who walks the dusty roads of this world when the recognition arises that it is time to go; time to lay down your burdens and give up your attachment to pain and sorrow. This recognition may come as a shock or as a relief. If you are not ready to face this realization, you will simply suppress it, and it will vanish from your awareness. A chance to begin the journey back will be lost until, at some future time, the idea will rise again and take root in your mind where it will grow into a mighty force for change.
What is the best thing you can do anywhere, at anytime? Remember your Father. If you are constantly remembering your Father’s Love for you, you will discover your great Love for Him, and this Love will clear all obstacles between God and your awareness of Him. Only the blocks to the awareness of God’s Presence within you keep you a prisoner in a world of separation. Remove them and you would immediately find yourself in Heaven and realize you never left.
If you could instantly withdraw all investment in the illusions which so fascinate your mind, they would disappear forever, leaving you in a state of Grace. The withdrawal of allegiance must be total for one illusion contains all illusions. Heaven cannot be reached while one illusion remains to limit your mind, for Heaven is a state of limitlessness and Unity. There is no compromise between Truth and illusion. Where one is, the other is not. No matter what the cost of Truth, you will gladly pay it when once you realize its inestimable value.
All you are asked to do is to give up what is valueless and has only hurt you, causing untold pain and suffering, for what has total value and will set you free. Can the motivation for such an exchange be difficult to arouse if you see it for what it is? The problem is really this: you refuse to recognize the absolute worthlessness of everything the world holds out to you; you still think there is something to be gained, something valuable or desirable that will bring happiness or fulfillment. This split in loyalty, a lack of fidelity to a single purpose, prevents illusion from vanishing from your holy mind. A process of gradual relinquishment of the falsity that characterizes your split mind then becomes necessary and this takes time, even a long time.
The goal of A Course in Miracles is to bring you to a single dedication, a single purpose. This will unify your mind over time until the requisite wholeness is attained, and the mind made ready for God to take the last step. He cannot enter a mind that is not ready to welcome Him wholly.
What can be achieved must be achieved. What cannot be accomplished must be recognized as such. You will never make illusion real no matter what you do. Give up the attempt for it will never succeed. Turn your mind back toward Truth once and for all time. Let Truth back into your life and It will set you free.
Truth and illusion cannot coexist in your mind. The presence of one denies the other. One makes up the prison in which you live, and the other is the freedom that waits for you just beyond the prison walls. If you would be free, you must stop defending yourself and welcome freedom with open arms.
Freedom threatens all the careful plans you have made, the meticulous defenses you have erected. Its only concern is to return you to the Self you left but in dreams. You cannot rediscover the Self unless you are free of the fear that makes you deny It. The ego seeks security and safety always, for it perceives a world that threatens and denies it at every turn. Surrounded by hostile forces, or so it believes, the ego obsessively seeks to insure its safety through its plans and defenses. The ego thinks its present defenses and careful plans against future uncertainties will insure the survival and continuation of its chosen home, the body.
So long as you identify with the body, you will not be free. The body itself is wholly neutral. It can be used to imprison the mind or to help you learn the lessons that set the mind free. Your decision determines how it is used and the consequences that follow. Identify with the body as the ego would have you do, and the mind has become its own jailor. Recognize that the body’s usefulness is its function as a learning aid and not as a home, and you have opened the door to freedom.
When you are willing to accept the idea of the body as simply a means to communicate the Truth, which is how the Holy Spirit regards it, you will be free of the need to overemphasize its importance. When the body is seen in proper perspective, its role as means by which to limit and imprison your mind is renounced, and the body is then free to serve the Holy Spirit’s purpose. Its safety and health are thus assured as long as you have need of it.
That the body is a part of your experience is undeniable. There is no need to escape from the body while it is needed as a learning and teaching aid. While you have need of it, while your learning is not complete, it can be used and used well to serve the purpose the Holy Spirit gives it. But you must see that it serves His purpose and not the ego’s. The body is the ego’s chosen home; to identify with the body is to accept the ego’s thought system of separation, and the body will then be used to defend and maintain separation.
Accept the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the body’s function and it will be used to go beyond itself. The body does not separate you from your brothers unless you assign it that purpose. As your chosen identity, your home, the body symbolizes safety through separation. All the belief in the need for defense and attack thus arises. The body is not the citadel of safety you imagine it to be, it is your prison. By your own hand, you have closed the prison doors and condemned yourself to captivity.
What is meant by the belief in sin? To believe in sin is to believe it is possible to act unlovingly, and that such acts call for punishment or vengeance. And some acts must remain forever unforgiveable. Such beliefs imprison the mind, locking it into a position where fear and conflict are inevitable and peace cannot be found. Peace is impossible for a mind committed to belief in sin. The belief in sin is the belief that God’s Son can be other than what He was created to be; that God’s Holy Creation can separate Itself from Its Creator and take on qualities It was not given by God; and that a separate will opposed to God’s Will is possible and capable of having real effects. All this is included in the belief in the reality of sin.
Peace is impossible to attain while the mind is committed to find and defend that which denies peace in every way. Those who believe in sin are committed to conflict, and will never be free of it until they renounce the belief which gives conflict and guilt their existence. To have peace, you must give up what opposes it and makes its presence in your life impossible. Peace is God’s gift to His guiltless Son. Being part of Love, peace does not exclude or oppose for any reason. Peace, like Love, is for all, and will return to any mind that sincerely desires it and is willing to meet the conditions for its return.
Let no one tell you what to do or guide your actions but the Holy Spirit. No one else is capable of guiding you truly. The ego has been your guide for too long, and the road it has placed you on leads nowhere. To go nowhere over and over while believing you are going somewhere is beyond futility, it is meaningless.
There is nowhere to go but back to God; all other roads lead to oblivion. If you are tired of useless journeys that lead to imagined goals that do not exist, let go your reliance on the guide who knows nothing and turn to the One Who will lead you to the one goal that has meaning and is capable of accomplishment. Let all the goals you have pursued or will pursue be replaced by the one goal you truly desire above all others. In truth, there are no other goals, only temporary substitutes that obscure your heart’s desire for a little while. If you will let yourself be led in the direction that you truly want to go, your mind will, little by little, become clear and capable of recognizing your true destination. Once this understanding is established, the illusory pursuits of this world will no longer attract you. With the mind fixed on the eternal and meaningful as the only goal worth striving for, nothing will be able to delay your homecoming, and your return to your Father’s House will be met with joy and celebration. On that day you will know again who you are in Truth, and you will know your Father as He wills to be known.
In the world of perception, your Father is unknown to you for knowledge has vanished from your awareness. Yet has God not forgotten you; He calls to you unceasingly and you will hear His call. The constant activity of mind and body, and the ego’s shrill voice, prevent His call from reaching your awareness. His call will continue until you are ready to hear it, be it sooner or later. Do not delay that time unnecessarily. Only your willingness is needed; everything else will be given when you are ready to receive.
The ego’s strategy is to keep you too busy, too occupied with the activities of this world to hear any voice but its own. Yet you will hear God’s call for you have been waiting for it since time began. You cannot not hear your Father calling to you for it is His Will that you return to Him, and what He wills waits not on time, being already perfectly accomplished. You can but delay your awareness of what is always and already true, and while you do, it will be lost to you. The loss of awareness of the Truth that waits for recognition in your mind, is the root cause of all your suffering. The darkness of ignorance is drawn like a veil across the face of Christ, and so long as you desire not to lift it, it will remain. It matters not the many forms that ignorance may take, all are the same in content: the wish to be as you are not, to be separate.
Separation was once a tiny, mad idea that mistakenly became capable of accomplishment, not in reality but in dreams, and you have been dreaming ever since. A choice was made and then multiplied many times over; the world you see is the result. The choice was not real nor did its consequences have any real effects, yet the mind believes in what it makes and gives power to its miscreations just as to its real creations. The effects of illusion are as strong in the mind that made them as are the effects of Truth, but there is one important difference. The Truth can be truly shared and illusions cannot be.
In the dream of separation do illusions seem to be shared, for only that which is shared can be experienced as real. Yet it is but a sharing of nothingness, and nothingness is shared only by those lost in the darkness of illusion. In the absence of Light, the darkness appears as if real, and all kinds of fantastic shapes are seen and believed. Witnessing to one another the reality of the shadows that appear and disappear, convinces the mind that would believe in separation that it has been accomplished. Believing that you are where you are not, has hidden your true home from your awareness and left you adrift, at the mercy of a decision made long ago that was but an error in identification.
To correct this error that lives on in your mind is the function of the Holy Spirit. The process of correction and undoing is the Atonement. When the Atonement is complete in your mind, having been fully accepted, there will be no more need for learning and perception. The mind freed of all its errors and guided in its perception by Christ’s vision, will not stay long where it is not at home. Unburdened by the heavy weight of constant judgment and the belief in sin and guilt, filled with Love and Light, it will rise to Heaven for there is nothing to hold it back. When the earthly bonds are loosed, you will leave this world as it vanishes from your mind never to return.
If you were to love your brothers totally, asking nothing in return, all your relationships would be transformed. Holy relationships contain only Love and follow no laws but God’s. The real purpose of all relationships is to bring you closer to God through the opportunity they provide to love and forgive. If you use them for this purpose, they become holy and lead you back to the holiness that lives within you as you.
Only through the total transformation of all your relationships, will your life be transformed into the expression of Love. Love is expressed in many ways, through thought, word, and action. It is the action of Love that heals and helps those in need. When Love rules your mind, you will be helpful and kind at all times and in all circumstances to everyone. No child of Love will ever be forsaken by His Father or by his brothers, for it is Love’s function to join with and include always. Only that which has its origin in Love is truly helpful. All else is but fear and will only weaken you. Do not be afraid of Love. Love will set you free while fear will perpetuate your imprisonment.
If Love is what you are, and you do not experience yourself as loving, then you do not experience yourself as you are. How can that be? Ask yourself this question. Would I be as God created me, as I am in Truth, or would I be the self that I have made, that I have imagined myself to be? Your answer to this question determines how you experience yourself. One answer is made with the help of the Holy Spirit, the other is made on behalf of the ego, the belief in separation.
Would you be separate and fearful or would you be Love and fearless? These are always the only choices that can be made. If you see this clearly at all times and in all situations, the correct choice would be obvious. Because of the confusion that clouds your mind, you cannot tell the difference between Love and fear, and indeed are very likely to confuse the two. This is not readily apparent however, as long as you think that Love and fear can coexist as in the special relationship.
If you would free yourself of fear and return to Love, you must learn to recognize fear in all its forms and renounce them. When the obstacles to Love’s Presence are removed, It will return of Itself. You need do nothing but choose against fear without exception by becoming aware of all the disguises it wears and refusing to countenance fear in any form. This will free your mind to love.
Whatever the reasons for your refusal to do God’s Will, underneath them all despite their differences, lies the same root: fear. All actions arise from one of two sources, Love or fear. If your motivation comes through the ego, it is the action of fear. When it arises through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the result will be Love. To be aware of what you do and why you do it is therefore very important. All action resulting from fear will have limited results, but Love’s results are always limitless.
You are called upon to offer the world, to offer your brothers always and only what is highest and most beneficial. To act from fear is to offer death; to act from Love is to give eternal life. When you realize that whatever you give, regardless of the nature of the gift, you give yourself, the importance of what you give others becomes apparent for its effect on you is inescapable. We have said before that you should give others only what you would yourself receive because you are receiving it. The ignorance of this fact allows you to give and do unto others what you would not want given or done to you, for you literally know not what you do.
The consequences of your actions may not be associated with their cause, but this does not prevent their effects from appearing in your life. What you give, you will get always. This is another way of saying what you teach, you will learn. Remember always that you are giving only to yourself, forgiving only yourself, hating or loving only yourself, and all your thoughts and actions will come into sharp focus. In that awareness, you will be able to choose consciously what you would give and receive and what you would teach and learn.
There is no better way to assure a future unlike the past than to be aware of what you are doing in the present, and how that will determine the future. If you are choosing as the ego would have you do, you are perpetuating the past and losing the opportunity the present holds out to you. If you decide with the Holy Spirit, you are breaking with the past, utilizing the present, and freeing the future. Only the repetition of the past keeps you in bondage and drives freedom from your mind.
What you do with time is all important for time is yours to use as you desire. Time itself is neutral and serves the purpose you give it. Which purpose you assign depends on the guide you choose to follow. As always there are only two: the Holy Spirit or the ego, and they use time to accomplish exactly opposite purposes.
The ego uses time to keep the past alive and assure a future that is a continuation of the past. The present is thus effectively covered over and bypassed. If you accept the ego’s use of time, you will live in bondage to the past and in fear of the future. The present will evade you, and thus any hope of real change, of freedom, will be lost. Only in the present can change take place as the present is the only part of time that is real. If you were truly present, you would see the ego as the nothingness it is, and you would realize that the past is over and the future can be determined not by the past but by present decisions. Until you understand this, the present will be lost to you.
The Holy Spirit uses time in a very different way. He sees the purpose of time is to use time to go beyond time. Time is something you have invented, and like everything else you have made, it can be given another purpose. The Holy Spirit will help you bring your mind into the present, and will help you learn how to use time wisely. To use time wisely is to abide in present awareness and thus be conscious of the constant activity of your mind. Through moment to moment awareness, you begin to understand your mind as it is and become aware of the choices you are constantly making. Through awareness and understanding of this whole process of constant mind activity, you become capable of changing your mind, of making conscious choices for Truth on an ongoing basis.
Whenever you act from self will, which is to act from the belief in separation, you are moving away from God and rejecting Love. To do so is an error, and errors need correction; correction requires willingness and surrender. All errors can and must be corrected and their consequences undone if you are to know God again, and you will know Him again. He wills that His Son return to full communication with Him, and so it is done. In time, this appears to be somewhere in the future, yet is time but illusion. You must choose when you will leave time forever; it can be done now or postponed till some later date. To wait is to perpetuate fear and suffering unnecessarily. To move away from God is to turn your back on Love and freedom; where God and Love are absent, fear will rule. The kingdom of fear is a barren land where suffering is never far away and joy cannot be found. This land is not your home and never will be, though you have long walked its dusty roads with bowed head and a heavy heart.
Now is the time to give up the attachment to all that you do not truly want. You never really wanted all the things you seek, all the experiences you seem to value. You came to them honestly, believing that was where your safely and fulfillment would be found. Due to the confusion in your mind, the appearances presented to you seemed to be real and capable of making you happy. Yet all you ever found was temporary relief of a kind that was never wholly satisfying. A state of confusion in the mind as the origin of all action will never bring lasting or consistent results. All action originates in the mind, for it is the mind that provides the motivation and the impulse to act. Your state of mind is therefore very important for the results you want to achieve. Both the goal and the means by which it is reached are determined by your thinking.
Thinking that arises from the belief in the reality of separation, from the thought system of separation, is by nature chaotic, confused, and inconsistent. It will never have results that do not reflect its essential characteristics. There will be no peace in the mind given to the perpetuation of confused thinking. This need not be. Only the unconscious habits of a mind misidentified as a body, prevent clarity from returning to your awareness. Therefore it is of utmost importance to become aware of all that passes through awareness and its effects on your state of mind. To do otherwise is to lose the chance to direct your mind as you would have it be. Without clarity of purpose, you will accept a thousand different goals, all of which have one thing in common: they are meaningless and lead nowhere. The preoccupation with goals that offer nothing of real value serves only to keep you distracted from life’s true purpose. This is characteristic of a mind that has chosen the ego as its guide. The ego itself knows nothing and understands nothing. It can lead you nowhere but round and round in an endless circle that goes nowhere until you become so exhausted that death is welcomed as a relief. Yet death itself has no meaning and will not bring your suffering to an end.
It is life you seek, not death, and what is part of life shares its meaning. To turn away from the ego’s direction is to reject confusion, pain, fear, and death, choosing Love and life in their place. You choose always between what is nothing and what is everything. To see this choice clearly as it is, is to recognize that no choice is actually possible. Recognition and remembrance of the Truth will remove all confusion and doubt from your mind, leaving it clear and empty. A mind that is clear and empty is a quiet mind, and to such a mind Truth will return.
Whatever the choices that confront you seem to be, whatever the appearance, remember always that you choose content not form. The form serves to mask or to represent the content it serves. You must learn to look beyond form to the underlying content if you would choose truly. Form is multiple but content is only two. Countless forms and situations mask the content of illusion they represent. The ego would have you choose form over content, for it must always hide from you the truth of what it offers: pain, suffering and death. Nothingness is still meaningless no matter how attractive the wrapping. Do not allow yourself to be fooled any longer into choosing what you do not truly want. The confusion in your mind and the momentum of tendencies long established, prevent you from perceiving truly.
Either you want what you are deciding for or you do not. Nothing could be simpler than this. What basis for choice could be clearer than to choose what you want and choose against what you do not want? In order for this clarity to be present however, you must be truly aware of whether what you are choosing is desirable. If fact, you have been consistently confused about the nature of what attracts you and impels your choice. This has led to choosing what has hurt you and complete unawareness of what would only help. Only that which is beneficial in every sense of the word can be said to be desirable and thus worthy of your choosing.
To choose consistently that which is only helpful and supportive of your goal, requires the establishment in your mind of accurate perception of what your choices are in each and every situation. You must learn to look past all forms and see the real content of each situation and possibility. If you would choose Truth over illusion, Love over fear, you must recognize the difference between them, and see the content before you for what it is. Without this understanding, you will choose blindly and will take alternating steps forward and backward. Do not waste time vacillating between what you truly want and what you think you want. Let the Holy Spirit teach you to recognize the only choice to be made in every situation without exception.
In order to be free of all that holds you back, all attachment to what is not true must be given up. The desire for illusion, for separation, and what you think it offers, has blinded you to what is truly helpful. There is no other way back to Truth than to cut directly through the obstacles to Truth in your mind that have taken Its place. As has been so often stated, Truth has never been lost. Even now It remains as the reality by which and in which you live. Yet has the awareness of Truth as your life and Being, been lost through your decision to replace It with your own mistaken ideas. Illusions long cherished in place of Truth do not yield their hold on your mind easily. They hold you in bondage only through your consent. Withdraw your consent, your support, and they will collapse like a house of cards, returning to the nothingness from which they came. However, you cannot withdraw consent from what you are unaware of, for decisions once made no matter how long ago, remain in effect until revisited at which time they can be corrected.
Within the context in which your life takes place, there is a seeming continuity. This continuity convinces you that what you experience is real and lasting despite the fact that it is constantly changing. You do not regard its constantly changing nature as unnatural or as possible proof of its unreality. Yet you will find, if you pay careful attention, that all things, circumstances, and situations are unstable and do not last. How can what is changeable, unstable, and untrustworthy, be real? Can certainty be found under such conditions? Reality is not something one day, and the next day changed into something else. Reality is wholly unchanged and unchanging, now and forever. Nowhere else can certainty be found. To put your faith in what is constantly changing and unreal, is to invite fear, uncertainty, and suffering. And your invitation will be accepted as your tears flow unceasingly.
Without your consent, nothing can be done. Only your consent enables the Holy Spirit to do what must be done. He needs your willingness every step of the way if He is to set you free. Your willingness, consistently exercised, allows your mind to be undone and the Truth to be revealed as you. Do not underestimate the importance of your little willingness. It was your choice made long ago and endlessly repeated since, that made the world in which you find yourself, and it is your willingness to choose again that is used to undo the world and restore you to the Kingdom.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that you can be free without letting go what is responsible for your imprisonment in the world of separation: the self you have made. What has taken the place of what God created as you, has been accepted as your identity. This acceptance has resulted in your experience of yourself as a body, separate from other bodies and objects that seem to surround you, and your mind seeming to be limited to the little space the body occupies. From this little space, you reach out to others who are also limited by the body’s dimensions, and each, from their little space, attempts to communicate with others through movement and sound.
Communication is always partial and limited; never is it complete while the belief in separation rules your mind. Minds in separation can never communicate fully, for the decision to be separate is the decision to withhold communication. To communicate wholly is to give yourself entirely, to join without reservation, without fear. This cannot be done while the ego rules your mind. The need to defend and attack makes real communication impossible. To overcome separation, you must be willing to recognize your brother as part of yourself. Thereby do you choose against limitation, and choose instead to remember your Unity which is all-embracing and unlimited. This will open the door in time through which you will walk into the sunshine of God’s eternal Love. Love Itself is communication, and Light also. Although the perception of bodies will remain, the mind restored to Love and shining brightly again as the One Light, is not prevented by this perception from experiencing its true dimensions. Mind is not confined to a body. It extends everywhere without limit, and in It are all things included, part of It, and in full communication forever.
When the time comes to put away what has never been needed, will you be able to do so? Your willingness is all that is required, but first you must recognize the impossibility of sacrifice. The belief in sacrifice lies beneath all sense of loss, of deprivation. So long as the idea of sacrifice attracts you and influences your thinking, so long will you struggle mightily to hold on to the past and resist the changes that are needed. In Reality, is sacrifice impossible, for what must be given up and left behind has no value. Your failure to recognize this gives rise to the resistance you feel at letting go what holds you back.
What would be the point, the reason, to gather the things of this world; to surround yourself with what has no meaning? Why would a human mind decide that its security lay in the possession of physical objects? How can concrete things provide satisfaction to something as non-concrete as a mind? Only a mind misidentified as a body could possibly make such an erroneous assumption. Once the mind has decided it is what it is not, this error begins to multiply, to build on itself. What follows is a proliferation of errors that take the mind further and further from Truth, from its original state of knowledge. Lost in the increasing complexity that surrounds, penetrates, and confuses it, the mind does not know where to turn, leaving it vulnerable to fear, confusion, and further misunderstanding.
The original error has been forgotten, buried so deep that memory cannot reach it. No longer aware of what you are, and seeming to be something else entirely, you can only respond to the ‘reality’ that seems to contain you and surround you. This ‘reality’ imposes certain conditions and limitations on your life and these in turn determine your needs. As Mind, you had no needs, only the privilege to create unceasingly by extending your Self, the Light and Love that is you. How can that which was created by God to have and be everything eternally, need anything?
The Truth that you are has not deserted you. The awareness of It has been lost through a process of forgetting and substitution. This loss has left you with a sense of emptiness within that is so deep you cannot face it. And this too has been buried deep in your mind and covered over by the sleep of forgetfulness. What could ever take the place of what you have lost? Nothing in this world could ever fill that deep sense of emptiness, the void that lies deeply buried where your heart used to be. Your true heart has been left behind, for the heart is Love, and the world was made to be a place where Love could not enter and be Itself. The Source of love, the Creator of all that is, is feared and denied, and likewise refused entry to what you have made to take Love’s place.
Your Father has not forgotten you. He calls to you unceasingly; and you will, somewhere in time, answer His call. When in time you decide to listen can be sooner or later, for it is your decision. No one can make this decision for you; the Holy Spirit waits for your willingness to turn towards Truth. He will respond to every thought, to every movement in that direction, adding His willingness to yours. When in time you remember your Father has already been determined. You need not wait however, for you can shorten time immeasurably by what you do now. There is no good reason to delay though you will invent many, and then many more. The reasons to delay your homecoming are simply your substitutions for the Love of God. If you could see them as the shabby, pale, meaningless forms they are, you would choose again. Your belief in your replacements for the Love of God is what keeps you here, lingering in a place of empty hopes and unfulfilling dreams. And stay you will until the Light dawns in your mind, showing you the futility of what you do and what you believe.
To begin again to live truly is a decision that must be made. Life in separation is not real life, but an empty imitation. The mind dulled by fear, perceiving guilt, sin, and attack all around it, is incapable of loving itself or anyone else. Love is displaced onto objects, be they bodies or things desired, and always is it limited and conditioned. Life is not possible unless your mind is free to love. Even in this world, the freedom to love can be given you but you must be willing to accept it. Freedom and Love go together as do Love and Life. Life without Love is no life at all; and where Love is, there is freedom also.
The mind must be free in order to be a fit vessel for Love’s return. Fear must be uncovered, understood, recognized in all its forms, and healed that Love may reclaim Its own. To be free is to be free of fear, for it is only fear that limits and imprisons the mind. You must learn to see the role played by fear in your life, how it restricts and binds you, preventing happiness and peace from establishing themselves. When this fact is deeply recognized and understood, you will be ready to reject fear in all its forms. Unrecognized, fear will continue to affect your life in every way as your invisible companion, the stranger who has taken over your home and made you a stranger to yourself.
This great tragedy need not be. You invited fear into your home and gave it power over you. You can as well withdraw the invitation and recognize that fear has only the power you gave it. Withdraw you allegiance, your commitment to honor it; realize its nothingness as the invention of your mind, a mistake made long ago. Fear will lose its hold over your mind to the degree you refuse to believe in it, to the degree you refuse to act it out. Let not fear influence and drive your decisions or determine your state of mind. Decide resolutely to free yourself from its influence by asking the Holy Spirit to guide you in all things. He will always guide you to your strength and thus away from fear and pain.
There is never any reason to be afraid of anything at anytime. You are never in danger except from your own thoughts. Even then the danger is not real though you will experience the effect of your beliefs. Fear is kept alive in your mind by the misidentification with the body and the sense of being a separate person or entity different from other persons. As long as this error dominates your thinking and experience, fear will be your constant companion. The belief in a separate identity is the basis of fear in this world. Never will you be free of fear as long as you persist in being that whose core is fear.
Whatever the cost of escaping from Reality, you have paid it gladly, and will continue to pay it until you realize your error. The cost of escaping from what you truly are to be what you are not except in dreams, is pain, fear, suffering, and death. How could it be otherwise? To leave behind your true state of eternal peace and Love will only lead to a dream of madness in which chaos rules, for madness is chaos. There is no safety to be found in a world ruled by the laws of chaos. Such a world is indeed untrustworthy, and will be home to fear, and all suffering will follow.
Coming to your senses in the spiritual sense means to wake up. To look around you and realize this world is not your home; it is but a temporary resting place through which you travel. To return to sanity is to recover the capacity to make sense out of nothingness. The only sensible thing to do regarding nothingness is to recognize it for what it is and cease to think of it as what it is not. The whole problem with separation begins with believing that what was not created by God could nonetheless have real existence. Letting the mind then turn this mad idea into something that could be experienced as if real, launched the entire projection of the world of separation and everything that came with it. What left your awareness, replaced by the fantasy you had made, was the knowledge of Truth and the ability to recognize error.
No one who has forgotten the one distinction that can be made in truth, has any basis whatsoever by which to recognize error. Lost in the one big error you had made and the subsequent ones that followed, all ability to discriminate accurately between Truth and illusion was also lost. The only thing left to you was the power of decision. This cannot be taken from you although you may use it rightly or wrongly as you wish. To use the power of decision rightly, to choose Truth, you must be able to recognize Truth and error for what they are, as they are. In this, you need help from beyond the territory of the original error. Truth was lost so long ago that you cannot reach It unaided. The Holy Spirit has the task to bring you back to the Truth you left behind.
To return to Truth requires the development of trust on your part; without trust, nothing can be done. The Holy Spirit must begin by reinforcing every little movement or inclination towards Truth, thus teaching you to begin to move in Its direction. This part of the journey back can take a long time as the mind begins dimly to realize there is another purpose to life. What it thought before is now recognized as incomplete at best. At this stage, your allegiance is still divided and progress proceeds by fits and starts. If you persist, you will slowly gain momentum as the attraction of Truth will begin to draw you towards Itself. Sooner or later the recognition will dawn in your mind that you are being helped, and that this help is your way out of ignorance into the Light of Truth.
The active recognition of the Holy Spirit and the importance of the role He plays, is extremely helpful in developing trust and willingness. Willingness and trust go together; the more you learn to trust the Holy Spirit, the more willing you are to ask for and accept the help He offers. He cannot help you if you are unwilling to accept His help. All you need give Him is your little willingness to work with Him; to ask for help and act on the guidance you receive. He will do the rest. God’s plan for your release is perfect and the Holy Spirit fulfills His role perfectly. You must accept and complete your part of the Great Plan, nothing more and nothing less.
What is very important to realize is that you do not know your part in the Great Plan. The Holy Spirit, Who has assigned you your part, knows it perfectly and will help you complete it if you let Him. You need not figure it out yourself. Indeed, to attempt to do so is to add the ego to your part. This will result in the failure to do what is needed, for you will be doing something else in place of what has been assigned. To try to add to what is already perfect, is to deny and obstruct. Your role is to listen and learn. Listen to what the Holy Spirit is teaching you, learn what you are to do each day, and do it. Of yourself, you need do nothing. You cannot come to understanding by yourself. To try to understand from the perspective of the self you have made and act from that understanding, is to choose the ego as your guide. The ego’s purpose is to keep separation real in your mind, and not allow you to do anything that would thwart its purpose.
The only way out of the endless maze of separation will not be shown to you by the one who guards its twisted corridors and bars the exit. Accepting salvation and the plan by which it is accomplished, must be recognized for what it is: surrender of the belief you know what must be done, and accepting that the Holy Spirit does know. In fact, you know nothing. It is extremely important to remember this always; thereby you do become willing to let yourself be guided in all things, at all times.
Never should you rely on your understanding alone for you are never alone; your decisions are made always with a guide. The Holy Spirit or the ego guide your learning, your understanding, and your actions. And which guide you choose will determine the course of your life, its conditions, its purpose, its goal, and its results.
If your goal is salvation, the escape from separation, suffering, and death, you must choose the right guide. The Holy Spirit will not fail you if you will trust Him and give Him your cooperation. The way home is sure if you allow Him to guide your footsteps and direct your mind. Do not waste time following the time worn paths that lead nowhere. Do not grasp at shadows. Turn over your mind to the One Who knows the way.
What is the worst thing that can happen to you in this life? What do you fear more than anything? The thought of death haunts your mind and casts its shadow across your life day and night. There is no fear that does not have its origin in the thought of death. Death represents to you the worst that could happen. Human life is lived always with the awareness that it will end someday. All your hopes, dreams, and ambitions, are a vain attempt to deny its coming, to occupy the mind with activities and give life seeming meaning and purpose in the face of death. You cannot live each day, taking yourself and your life seriously, unless you somehow blot out this awful fact from your consciousness.
Yet is death always with you. The evidence of impermanence surrounds you on all sides. Plants, animals, and people are born, arise, flourish for a while, then through change and decay they come to an end. All that is born will die. All that begins will have an end. Such is life in separation, a mad parody, a distorted reflection of life as it truly is.
Life itself is of God. All of Creation shares one life with its Creator. Life is of Spirit, of Mind. It does not come and go; It is not born to die. Life has not its origin in the birth of form nor an ending in form’s dissolution. Life is eternal and beyond change of any kind. It is not life that dies as a body; the body never lived and it never dies. The body is an idea in your mind that reflects your wishes. It is wholly neutral, having no volition of its own. Death is an idea in your mind that is visited upon the body. You have never died and you never will.
Let us consider what is true. Life was given you by God in your Creation. It does not come and go nor change itself into something unrecognizable. Life is existence and existence does not end. You are a whole part of Life and Life is part of you. Creation is Life and Life is Creation. Life and Love extend themselves as One, endlessly creating, endlessly increasing.
Death and Life appear to be opposites because the state of separation is a state of opposites. They are not opposites; they are not in opposition. Life is real and One while death is simply the sign of mind asleep and dreaming what could never be. Even in the dream however, you need not experience death as an ending, but rather as the final act in a dream of awakening. The door opens and all is Love and Light as the world and all its memories disappear and only Truth remains.
Your duty as a Teacher of God is to represent Truth in all your relationships, in all your actions in the world. To do so requires a single minded dedication to a single purpose. Your only purpose is to awaken completely as the Christ, the Self of all, and thereby to help all of life awaken with you. You want only to help in any way you can, and to offer Love to everyone in all circumstances. The Teacher of God will always strive to see the Christ in all, the Presence of the Holy Spirit in all situations. Love is what you are and Love is all you want to see. When all the world reflects only Love back to you, you will be free. To be Love Itself is to be free in every sense of the word; to be truly free is to be Love and only Love. In the state of freedom, only Love remains.
What is to be done in every situation no matter the circumstances? Give Love, see the Christ in everyone, let your words and actions be guided, and give the help that is needed in every way you can. To do this is to give your brothers everything that can be given. Your task will always be to remember that the interest of your brothers and yourself are one and the same. What is helpful to one is helpful to all. In any situation into which the Holy Spirit is invited, there will be only gain for all. He, and He only, has the vision, understanding, and the power to do this.
If you let the Holy Spirit into your life, you will be taking a big step towards peace and happiness. He knows the way, knowledge given Him by God, and He has the responsibility to introduce you to it and guide your footsteps along the path if you will let Him. The Holy Spirit assigns your part in the Great Plan of Atonement, and He helps you complete it. There is no need you have that He does not know about; He has a miracle solution for every problem you may perceive. All problems disappear with equal ease if you turn them over to Him.
The problem you still have is the lack of trust in the Holy Spirit’s answers to your request for help. All too often do you have limits in your mind that you would impose on His answer. The answer He gives must fall within those limits to be acceptable to you. In such a case, you are not really asking for His answer, but rather for confirmation of your own ideas which are usually inadequate or incomplete. You do not have the knowledge or the overview to respond to the problems that seem to confront you in a way that truly solves them. Your solutions are partial, fragmentary, and result in a temporary fix that postpones the real solution.
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