Table of Contents
Do not be afraid of what you have made; it is not real. Its hold over you is but part of the dream. You have given it the power it seems to have, and you can withdraw it at any time. Nothing need trouble you; despite appearances, you are not in danger and cannot suffer loss or be deprived in any way. All such experiences are the result of wrong understanding. You do not see the help that is always with you; you do not hear the Holy Spirit Who is always guiding you. Behind every problem, every experience of fear, pain, or suffering, stands a miracle waiting for your acceptance that it may enter your life and set your mind free.
All of life stands ready to join with you in singing hymns of praise and gratitude to your Creator. Everything is communicating its Self to you, but you must be willing to enter this communion. There is no separation here. Even while dreaming the mind is One. Everything you see is a part of you; all bodies, all forms, are but images that appear in your mind. Nothing is separate. Open your mind to receive the communication that fills the universe. Open your heart to Love that you may join with your brothers and offer salvation to a tired world that longs for the Light. Remember who you are and who your brother is. Separated from each other, you are afraid and powerless; together, you will leave this world and walk hand in hand through the gates of Heaven.
Whatever you do, remember this: you are not alone nor do your actions affect you only. All are affected by what you think and do. There are no private thoughts or actions in isolation; you are always thinking and acting for the Whole. You are responsible for the whole world, not just for yourself alone. To fulfill this responsibility rightly, you must recognize the importance of everything you do and think. You cannot be careless or casual in anything. Your life is your gift to all your brothers as their lives are to you. The only gift worthy of being given to any Son of God is Love.
Your true desire is to be helpful to all, and this is accomplished through Love. No other motivation is truly worthy of you. Your brother is yourself, and you love him as you love yourself, or you would, if you but let yourself love. Fear of your brother keeps your mind and heart closed to him, and obscures the Love you really feel. All your actions and perceptions have the aim of maintaining separation and the belief your safety lies apart from your brother. Guilt must be maintained to uphold the specialness you feel and justify your failure to love.
The failure to love is not just a problem in itself; it also contributes to the maintenance and continuance of the allegiance to guilt, which preserves judgment and the belief in attack and defense that follow. When Love is absent, all manner of errors rush in to take Its place. Yet are all errors but forms of fear no matter their appearance. In this world, fear has taken Love’s place, even masquerading as Love at times. Fear is not Love whatever the disguise it may be wearing. Only those who have forgotten the meaning of Love could possibly make that error.
Clearing your mind of the basic confusion and misunderstanding around Love and fear is essential. Little progress can be made while you continue to love fear and fear Love. This confusion has made peace impossible and conflict inevitable. You live in a state of constant conflict, within and without, that has left you feeling vulnerable and in a state of constant anxiety. Under these conditions, believing yourself open to attack from all around you, you have adopted a posture of attack and defense that greatly distorts communication. Your relationships are never free from the need to limit and control communication. This control makes real openness impossible; without real openness, Love will elude you.
Nothing can be done without real surrender. To surrender to the Higher Power, to trust, and to tum over decision making to the Holy Spirit, is essential if you are to free your mind and return to Truth. The idea of giving up control of your life arouses great fear in the separated ones. The control you attempt to exercise over your life and mind arose as a response to the terror of the original separation, and you have tried to maintain control ever since. Yet is this control just another part of the illusion. The belief in control helps maintain the illusion, but does not keep you safe, which is its intended purpose.
The fear you would keep hidden and protect yourself from, lives on in your mind and exerts a constant influence on your life. You can, temporarily at least, keep naked fear from awareness and seem to be comfortable and secure. This state or condition cannot last. The instability of ego mind and the many external conditions beyond your control, make the whole idea of controlling life just another ego fantasy, impossible of accomplishment.
Your safety lies not in the futile attempt to control but in the relinquishment of control. Surrender to that which alone deserves your allegiance, will bring you the security you try vainly to achieve on your own. The attempt to control life according to your liking, is the attempt to establish as real the identity you have made. Here is the real failure of all egoically motivated activity. What is illusion through and through can never be made real, no matter how much energy and effort is expended for that purpose.
One of your greatest fears is that you have no real existence. Some have seen this clearly, but were unprepared, and descended into madness. Yet at this time is your greatest opportunity to break through the barrier of fear and reach the Love that waits just beyond. Help is needed to make this transition; it will be given if you are willing to ask for help and accept what is given.
Surrender to the Love that is what you are and fear will disappear. The Light of Love shines away all darkness. With fear gone, you will realize that you are safe and always have been. Your Father holds you safe and secure within Himself, where you abide eternally.
Do not let the stories you tell yourself interfere with what you truly want and need. All stories are meaningless, meant to keep your mind too busy to notice the state you are in. Do not believe the tales the ego has invented to keep your allegiance and cloud your mind. Everything the ego has told you is not true. Your belief in what is not true has robbed you of your sanity, your freedom, and your Self. Do not continue this pointless charade. Nothing can take the place of Truth in your mind. To lose awareness of Truth is a loss too enormous to comprehend.
If all you know is of existence on a very small island surrounded by fog, the vastness of the ocean around you cannot be comprehended. If someone were to tell you there is a great ocean surrounding us, you would not believe as you are unable to understand what is so far beyond your experience. The mind asleep is like that, unable to recognize anything beyond its dream world. Yet there comes a time for every mind when the desire for Truth, so long repressed, begins to rise to awareness. This desire must be nurtured that it may strengthen and develop into real commitment. To let the longing for Truth be lost among the many conflicting voices of the ego, is a great tragedy. Do not let the Light of Truth go out or wither away when once It begins to shine.
The Light has always been a part of you, the natural radiance of Christ Mind. The Light is not visible or accessible, however, while you are asleep and dreaming, for you have chosen darkness to take its place. Like all of Truth, the Light cannot go where It is not welcome; Truth enters not into conflict with illusion. When you have cleared your mind, making a clean and empty place for the return of Truth, It will be there. Your mind is Its rightful home despite your willful ignorance.
There is no need to search or struggle to find Truth for it has not been lost, it has been forgotten. All true spiritual practice is the seeking out of all obstructions to Truth in your mind, and the healing of them. To heal is to release, to renounce and let go of what denies Truth and actively prevents Its return to awareness. This is the purpose of the Atonement. The Holy Spirit, the Mind of the Atonement, is the means by which this is done with your help, dedication, and cooperation. Illusion cannot withstand your commitment to let it go. Only through your support and continuing defense of illusion, does it maintain its apparent hold on your mind.
What is the solution to the apparently false condition in which you find yourself as a human being? It begins with the willingness to recognize and accept that what I experience is not the Truth, is not real. The identity I have given myself, a self in separation, is not what I am. You must be willing to accept at least the possibility that all you thought you knew is not true. You know nothing. This willingness is essential, that you may begin to make room for what the Holy Spirit will teach you. He cannot teach a mind that is full of its own ideas and beliefs and unwilling to let them go.
Purification is the letting go of all that is false, of all that denies, obstructs, and attacks the Truth. To let go is to renounce, to withdraw your investment and expel from your mind. The cessation of the false identification of yourself as a body, must be accomplished before your true identity can be revealed. You do not have two selves, one real and one unreal. There is only one Self, the Self of All. The self you have made is a dream, nothing more, despite its apparent existence.
Whatever the distance you are asked to go, do it. The Holy Spirit does not ask of you lightly; all He asks is for your own benefit. Do not refuse Him the cooperation He needs to lead you to freedom. He alone knows what is needed at all times and in every situation. If you would learn to trust and to cooperate in every way, He will show you again and again that your trust is completely justified. Do not give in to doubt. Doubt is of the ego; it will come and go. Remember its source and let it go, for doubt will simply delay the restoration of freedom. It has po other purpose.,
Do your best to become aware of the various delaying tactics of the ego. Try not to let the resistance in your mind get in the way of what must be done. Too often do you choose against your own best interest. Resistance always arises from fear and the belief in sacrifice. To give up what you never wanted, what has brought only suffering and limitation, is no sacrifice. You are never asked to give up what is truly valuable and necessary. So long accustomed to value what is valueless and deny what is of immeasurable worth, you do not recognize the difference between them. Thus do you have no real basis from which to make the only choice that can be made.
The power of choice must be used wisely. Used wrongly, in the service of the ego, choice maintains illusion and perpetuates separation. The ego would have you choose where choice is not possible; to choose nothingness is but the illusion of choosing. Used rightly, guided by the Holy Spirit, choice is used to set you free. You must learn to choose against what brings pain and sorrow, and choose instead what will bring freedom and happiness.
Today is the only day there is just as now is the only time. To recognize this is very important. The future is like a carrot the ego holds out before you to hypnotize and divert your attention from the present. By operating from the past, from accumulated memory, and keeping your eye on the future, attention is focused on what is already over or what does not yet exist. The present is effectively bypassed, leaving you always somewhere in limbo. Thus you are always in actuality nowhere. In this state of confusion, your life is limited by the past and lost in the future. Is it then any wonder that you become exhausted by the ego’s constant demands? Never are you focused and resting in the present wherein are your strength and Being. To have no access to the Source of life while being constantly busy but never present is exhausting. To keep you busy and distracted chasing shadows, is the ego’s strategy that assures its continued existence.
If you were present, really present in full awareness, you would discover the ego does not exist. The source of the continuing experience of separation would be seen for what it is. That this is not your experience is obvious. Yet this is a choice you are making, a choice to identify with the past and project a future that is the continuation of the past. Thus is learning in the present limited by what was found acceptable in the past.
Real learning takes place in the present independent of the past, and with no already established reference to the future. Real learning is not determined by past likes and dislikes, but is rather an open-ended process of receiving in the now. The mind must be open, free of clinging to the past, and receptive without preconditions. Real learning takes place in a mind that recognizes it does not know, that opens itself to the unknown. Only then can that which comes from beyond the mind be received without fear.
To learn what the Holy Spirit would teach, requires just this openness, receptivity, and presence of mind. You do not understand what you need or even why. He will lead you to where you want to go, to where you need to go. You must give Him your willingness to learn and your trust. He will provide the rest.
Freedom is always freedom from the past. It is the memory of the past that imprisons you now. The past and its history of separation lies across your mind like a heavy weight. Like a dark and cloudy lens, it obscures and colors all you see and experience. The core of this lens, this distortion, is the self, the identity you have given yourself to replace what God created as you. The self, the ego’s expression in experience, cannot be anything other than a distortion of your mind in every way, and a severe limit on your experience. In addition to its constant busyness which distracts your attention from the now, the only moment in which you can truly and directly experience, the self is in itself a contraction of fear that prevents true openness.
Real openness is necessary for authentic learning to occur. An open mind is receptive, free of pre-established limits on what it would receive. This allows its horizons to be expanded, knowledge far beyond its previous limits of experience to be given. All true learning aims at taking the mind back to its true nature as the Self. This is the only learning that is truly helpful. All other learning is based on and maintains separation though it may be helpful in day to day life. Let yourself be given what you need, and learn to let go of what you do not need. Only what is truly helpful in the light of your highest purpose, is of any use to you at all. You will be shown the difference between what is helpful and what is not. As you learn to recognize this consistently, you will have a real basis from which to evaluate every choice, every decision that seemingly needs to be made. Until you have established in your mind a stable understanding of what benefits you and what hurts you, you will be unable to consistently choose rightly. From right understanding, you are able to look past the bewildering variety of forms and circumstances that confront you and perceive the content of every choice. Until this consistency of perception stabilizes, your choosing will likewise be erratic and inconsistent.
Do not underestimate the importance of accurate perception for your life’s purpose. So long as perception proceeds from past associations, from memory and habit, so long will real understanding be absent from your life. Without authentic understanding, your mind will simply fluctuate within the narrow limits established by the ego and accepted by you long ago. Perception must be purified, must be corrected, to free your mind from its narrow range of experience. This tiny space in which your life seems to take place, is nothing but a dream of separation and limitation. To be separate from everything you see is to live in fear. To live in fear is to suffer. Is this what you want? You have lived in a state of fear and suffering long enough. Too long has Love and the healing It brings been absent from your life. This need not be. This need not be.
If you were to seriously consider whether you are happy living the way you have always lived, what would be your conclusion? Happy or unhappy? Do you think happiness and fulfillment can be found by continuing down the same dusty road? Have you ever found a peace, a sense of contentment that was lasting, no matter the changing events and circumstances of life? Perhaps it is time to consider the possibility of traveling a different road, of marching to the beat of a different drum. Your life is the result of the choices you have made, and these choices are determined by your beliefs, by your thought system. Your mind determines the conditions of your life, nothing else. If you are not happy with what you are getting, then it’s time to change your mind. Your life will change accordingly.
Now is the time to begin again, to find another way. There is a way to find the real meaning of life, and to live in accordance with it. Do you know where that way lies? Within you is the way home and the destination. Nowhere else can it be found; do not look outside yourself. Nothing is outside yourself, everything is in your mind.
What is the next step to take after the recognition that change is needed? Just listen. Just listen. Openness is essential. Openness will take you far. The human condition is the opposite of openness. The mind is closed, imprisoned by its false beliefs. The heart is closed, limited by the fear of Love. Feeling is contracted, limited by the senses and the misuse of the body. All in all, the human being is in a state of contraction, configured in a dynamic of attack and defense. This is true on all levels of experience, both obvious and subtle. The thought system of separation is a kind of prison you have built around your mind to keep out Reality, to keep God away. And it has succeeded, but at what cost? It has cost you happiness, peace, and freedom. Your relationship with your Creating Source has been lost. Your true strength lies in God. To lose the awareness of your Father’s Presence within you is to live in a weakened condition. Thus is fear inevitable.
Fear has taken the place of Love in the mind of separation. It cannot be otherwise. To exclude God from your awareness is to exclude Love. Where Love is absent, fear rushes in to take Its place. Life in a world of separation can be characterized most simply as a condition in which Love has been replaced by fear. In the Great Reversal, Love returns to banish fear, Truth returns to banish ignorance, Light returns to shine away the darkness. The spiritual journey leads to the undoing of all that is false, the reversal of all the thinking of the world, and the return of Truth to the mind that forgot It for a little while.
Openness and the willingness to listen will take you far. As the mind opens more and more to the Truth it needs to learn and directly experience, the false beliefs that have crippled it begin to fall away. The limitations on experience that arise from the false belief system began to dissolve. A momentum develops that begins to feed on itself. Openness lets more experience in, and greater experience leads to more openness. Crucial to this whole process is the willingness to listen. Help must be given and received. The Truth lies forgotten deep in your mind. Help is not needed to be what you are for that was established by God. However, help is needed to reach the Truth, for you have driven It from your awareness and have erected many defenses against It.
The Holy Spirit is ever ready to help. Without the help He brings, you would be lost indeed. He will direct you in every way, informing you always of what you need to know in any given situation, at any given time. He will guide your thoughts, words, and actions. To stay in communication with Him is essential as you go about your day, for He gently and surely guides you along the journey homeward until the goal is reached, the journey over, and His help needed no more. Until that day, remember the help that is available and continue to invite it into your life.
The now is crucial in the understanding of time’s purpose. Time must be used, and used well, if you are to free yourself from the limitations it imposes. Whatever you do in this world is subject to time and the changes is brings. The task is this: you must discover and open to the timeless while living under the laws of time. The changeless must be realized in the midst of the constantly changing. The eternal is always with you in the present, but is not noticed. The mind is very busy, so preoccupied with the past and the future that the present is overlooked and passed by. So long as you identify with the ego, with the constant activity of the mind, with its unceasing stream of thoughts, feelings, images, impulses, and desires, so long will you bypass the present. Your life takes place now, not in the past or future. If you would reclaim your life as it really is from the illusion you thought it was, you must return your attention to the present. Nowhere else does real learning take place; nowhere else can your mind be healed.
All the limitations self imposed on the mind will be lifted when you no longer want them. To identify with and cherish the body is to cherish limitation. To identify with the sense of separate self which is the ego, is to cherish limitation. To act out the constant attack and defense scenario of the ego, is to cherish limitation. To hold to the belief in sin and guilt and the projections it fosters, is to cherish limitation. There are many different ways by which you cherish and maintain limitation. All attachment to being a separate identity, a body, is a vote for limitation. To accept is to perpetuate for there is no desire to change. The changing of your mind, freeing it from what has held it prisoner for so long, requires real determination, real understanding, and real intent. Without the intent to free yourself and persistent effort, no real change is possible.
To uncover all the hidden motivations and attachments that help maintain the sense of separate identity, you must apply yourself to the task. For too long has your mind been ruled by habitual patterns of thought and feeling. Yet you remain unaware of them in any deep or true sense; this unawareness keeps you a prisoner to the past. What you are unaware of can and does hurt you. What drives your behavior and shapes your mind can hardly be considered harmless. Yet that is what you unconsciously believe when you let the ego’s agenda control your life and determine your future. There is no road to real freedom that does not lead you into greater awareness of your own mind and all that is hidden there.
What you need to learn, you will learn if that is your intent. Whatever you learn to value, will become part of your life because you want it to be. Greater awareness and the freedom it brings must be valued or you will not make the necessary effort. All your life has been spent using great effort to maintain the position of mind, the state of mind, that you have always known. Tremendous energy has been expended to continue the past and avoid what waits for you in the present. You can just as well use that energy in service to a true purpose.
However, you must first accept the idea that a true purpose for life is a possibility, and that it is valuable, infinitely valuable, or you will not be willing to take the necessary steps and welcome the necessary changes. As always, willingness is an indispensable part of the journey; without it, nothing can be done. The Holy Spirit’s task is to help arouse in you the willingness needed, and He adds His willingness to yours, thus making it a mighty force for change.
The first step in the journey back is the recognition of both the necessity and the great value of living in the light of life’s true purpose. The only purpose of life in this world is to awaken to Truth, to recover the memory of who you are and your real relationship with your brothers and your Creator. No other purpose is worthy of you, for you were not created to crawl across the surface of the earth for a little while, lost in the darkness of sin and guilt, till your little life ends with your return to the dust from which you came. This is not the Truth of God’s Holy Son, but a dream arising from the fear and madness of separation.
When recognition of life’s purpose has led to willingness and determination, the journey back begins in earnest. Now the Holy Spirit can take you by the hand and show you the way and its requirements. The way the journey unfolds is highly individualized, yet the same requirements must be met by all, and the mind purified of everything that obstructs the Truth. The undoing of the mind is a process that takes time; its purpose is the ending of time. When the mind is clear and empty, open and receptive, Truth will return and eternity will bring time to a close.
Today is the only day there is. To remember this is to use the time each day gives you well. Every day provides you with the opportunities to remember Truth by practicing forgiveness and seeing the Light in your brother. If you rise each morning with a prayer of gratitude on your lips, you will be ready for whatever the day brings. Throughout the day, remain in contact with the Holy Spirit, always remembering your single purpose. In the evening, before sleeping, give thanks to our Father and the Holy Spirit after reviewing the events of the day to clear any unforgiveness that may remain. A day so spent is a day well utilized to further your life’s purpose. Do not waste a day or even an hour by forgetting who you are and why you are here.
To do what must be done requires that you know what must be done. As you know nothing, you must learn what is required of you from the One Who knows. The Holy Spirit is the Source of all guidance and help. If you are willing, He will teach you everything you need to know.
The question you should ask yourself is this: Do you want to be free? Do you know what freedom is? Obviously, in order to attain something, you must have an idea of what it is, that you may move in its general direction. No one in the state of separation has a real answer to this question. So long accustomed to living under the constraints of time and space and the limitations of a bodily identity, freedom, if thought about at all, is considered a result of physical conditions that are favorable or as a state of acting out your desires as you wish. Acting out your desires and impulses, however that may look, is not freedom but slavery. Your desires and impulses arise from the ego, and have as their purpose to keep you in a state of bondage to illusion. Bondage is the state in which there is no freedom, only the perpetuation of the past. To live in the past, which is the condition of ego based bodily identification, is not freedom. Only in the present can freedom be found, for it is a part of what you are in Truth; and Truth is always and only in the present where time and eternity intersect. Thus is freedom not limited by the bonds of time or the conditions of illusion.
Always and only in the present will you find the freedom that is your birthright. Freedom has nothing to do with the body; in fact, freedom is the recognition that you are not a body. Freedom is of the mind and is entirely independent of physical conditions of any kind. Thus is freedom unlimited and not subject to the restrictions of this world. As Reality Itself, you are free and have always been. Even now you are free, though it is hidden from your awareness by the false identification with what is in bondage.
Do the bonds of time and the limitations of space have any real effect? Only in your mind are the restrictions of any kind experienced as real. This is due solely to the power of belief through which you give illusions reality. You cannot make illusions real but you can make them seem real in your experience, and give them effects that are as strong as Truth. The mind believes in what it makes; through this belief, what has been made is experienced as real and seems to have real effects. Withdraw your belief in and your investment in illusions, and they will disappear and their effects along with them.
When is the time to give up what was never real and has brought you nothing disguised as something, pain disguised as pleasure, and loss presented as gain? How about right now? There is not only no time like the present, there is no time but the present. The past is over and the future is imagination. To refuse to begin right here and right now is to postpone the only thing worth doing. To postpone is to lose time and happiness. Nothing is gained by waiting. Because you do not see rightly, you think you can take your time. You do not realize the condition you are in, and what you lose by refusing to act now. In the condition of separation with its uncertainties and constant changes, you do not have the luxury of wasting time. The belief that you do is part of the illusion and keeps you bound to it. Whatever else you do, do not postpone the only thing here worth doing. To delay is to lose ground, for you are either moving in the direction of Truth or you are moving away from It. There are no neutral thoughts or actions. Everything you do, say, or think, supports Truth or multiplies illusion. There is no neutral ground.
Do you believe that Truth, freedom and peace are worth having? This is the real question. No one will seek or expend effort for anything unless it is seen as valuable. If you recognize that it brings you something you want, you will desire it and try to obtain it. Do you want freedom, peace, and the end of suffering? Do you truly want to be happy? Every human being desires happiness; this is intrinsic to the mind. The question then becomes where do you think happiness can be found? This is the point where the search can and does flounder. The mind wedded to illusion and unwilling to look elsewhere, will seek happiness where it cannot be found. It will seek and seek, and seek again, but never will it find.
Happiness cannot be found outside yourself for it is not there. Happiness is a state of mind, a part of your real Mind. Happiness waits for you within; it waits for you to reestablish the conditions under which it can return to awareness. You have thrown happiness away by choosing separation. Yet it has not left your mind, for the Holy Spirit holds it for you and gladly returns it when you are ready. If happiness be your true desire, and you are willing to begin letting go what has taken its place, it will return to your awareness.
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