Table of Contents
Whatever you do makes you happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled. To operate from Love will always leave you happy. To act unlovingly will always make you feel guilty. You may not be aware of the guilt, but the feeling you will have will be some form of fear. Fear is pain, and pain never stops as long as you are fearful. You are long accustomed to fear; your mind has dulled itself in an attempt to lessen the effects of fear. You have given its different forms many names in order to disguise it and dissociate from it. Fear cannot be escaped; it forms the very core of the identity you have given yourself. To heal and release all fear brings the self to an end. Where there is no self, Love will rush in to take its place.
Whatever you do takes you closer to God or away from Him. God and illusion never meet, yet you who are surrounded by the illusory creations of your mind, can yet find God if that is your true desire. God is not far from you; you are far from Him, not in fact, but in your experience which is as illusory as you are. You rest in God, move in God, and have your Being in God. Your Mind is part of His, and your life also. The Light that shines so brightly within you is God’s Light, and the Love you feel and express is His Love.
God has never forgotten you but you have forgotten Him. It is a deliberate forgetting and must be just as deliberately undone. This undoing does not happen all at once, for the fear of God which lies deep within your mind, can seldom be directly uncovered without preparation and purification. All the fear that lives in your mind has taken the place of Love; it must be healed though the practice of forgiveness and non-judgment before you are ready to face the deepest fear of all. When you are ready, with the Holy Spirit’s help, you will stand before the final veil between you and your Father; it will be penetrated by your willing awareness and you will be free.
In no other way can you return to the freedom you once knew than to become aware of the self created bonds that deny your freedom, and let them go. No other has taken your freedom from you; it was given up under the impact of the belief in separation and the fear it engendered. Only your fear has robbed you of freedom and peace, for fear took Love’s place in your mind. There is no freedom without Love; Love is unconstrained by anything of this world. It knows no boundaries or limitations of any kind.
Nothing you see in the world of form and separation means anything in and of itself. The things you see are like the experiences you have; they are not bad or good, they are meaningless. Nothing in this world calls for judgment of any kind. Through the act of judgment and discrimination, you make the world around you real, and give it seeming solidity. Let all judgment go and the world you judge will disappear. Forgiveness does not judge. To forgive is to recognize no judgment is necessary or possible; in that recognition, you are freed of all need to judge. When you lay down all judgment, never to pick it up again, you will find a happiness you have never known.
Happiness is impossible while you judge your brothers, for judgment is condemnation and condemnation is attack. To attack your brother is to attack yourself; to attack yourself is to be fearful, not happy. While you expect attack and justify your need to attack in defense, fear will never be absent from your mind. The purpose of judgment is to keep fear alive in your mind, that you may not see your brother as he is, and thus not know the truth about yourself.
Fear has usurped the place of Love and kindness in your mind; it has taken on the role of motivator in your life though you are not aware of this fact. Fear is the hidden motivator in much of human life. It does not matter whether you are aware of it or not, if fear drives your motivation as is so often the case, suffering and limitation will be the result. And you will wonder why happiness eludes you no matter how much you try to establish the conditions under which you think it will be found. Fear and happiness are mutually incompatible, as is fear and Love. Love brings happiness as surely as fear begets sorrow.
Now is the time to remember your Father for His call goes out unceasingly. All the activities you use to avoid hearing the call, are meaningless and as nothing compared to God’s Love. If you truly felt His Love, even for a moment, you would drop everything you are doing, let go of all that you value, and turn towards God with all your heart and mind. Nothing else in this world is even remotely valuable in comparison to your Father’s Love. Through His Love were you created, and through His Love you will return to Him. There is no other place to go for God is your Being and your very life. The search outside yourself for satisfaction and fulfillment is the search for something to take the place of your relationship with God. There is no substitute for God. When that becomes your realization, you will avoid Him no more.
Whenever you feel the need to do something you should not, something you know is harmful to yourself, stop and ask yourself this question. Do I really want to attack myself and thereby cause pain and suffering? Is this an intelligent and rational thing to do? You must learn to look honestly and with open eyes at all your actions. The self destructiveness, the self hatred, that lies hidden deep in your mind, must be uncovered and brought to the Light. The purpose of the Atonement is to correct your mind. All the levels of your mind that have been given over to illusion must be brought to awareness and healed. Everything in your mind, whether conscious or unconscious, is the result of a decision you once made. All decisions of the mind remain in effect until they are changed; they cannot be changed unless you become aware of them.
Only by becoming completely aware of your thoughts, feelings, and actions, will your mind be revealed to you as it is. Through the willingness to know your mind as it is, not as you wish it to be, the deeper levels of mind below the threshold of consciousness will be uncovered. As you become aware of them, you will be able, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to choose again. All that is false, all fear, hatred, and guilt, must be undone and released. All illusion must be healed that your mind be made clean and empty, a fitting vessel to which Truth can return. Your holiness must be restored to your awareness, that the memory of God may return and set you free.
The desire to hurt and destroy yourself is not natural. This is a part of the madness that came over you in the separation from Reality. The belief in the reality of separation produced the ego, which became both your ‘new identity’ and the solution to the terror and guilt of separation from God. You have experienced yourself as an ego, a separate identity complete in itself with its own will, ever since.
The ego is not you. It was invited into your mind and given your allegiance at the time of separation; it appears to be who you are because you have forgotten, and think you are something else instead. The ego is the part of your mind that believes in separation, and has chosen the body as its home. The core of the ego is fear, its foundation stone is guilt, and its purpose is to maintain separation from God and your Self at all costs. The ego bases its argument for the reality of separation and your identity as a body on the reality of death. In fact, the ego believes you merit nothing but death, and leads you steadily and inexorably to your destruction.
Even now in the condition of insanity that prevails in your mind, you need not cooperate with the ego in your own destruction and death. The ego is but a part of your mind, and has existence only because of what you give it. Withdraw your allegiance and protection and it will disappear, leaving your mind whole and undivided once again. The Holy Spirit will guide you in this process of freeing and healing your mind; you must learn to trust Him and give Him your full willingness and cooperation if you are to return to Truth. Let Him do His part, and be sure that you do yours.
Now is the only time there is, do not waste it. Your mind is constantly wandering in the past or imagining a future that is a continuation of the past. All such thinking is meaningless and without substance. Seldom are you present and fully aware in the present. The energy of your mind is used to go nowhere and do nothing. The most powerful and creative force in the universe, is used in an uncreative and wasteful manner. The good you could do and would do, is not done. That which you should not do, which brings you nothing, is given all your time and energy, and therein you accomplish nothing.
You who share the creative power of life with God Himself, are not using it. Your mind is used uncreatively to maintain the illusion of a futile existence that does nothing but perpetuate itself in an endless circle of repetition. Is this what you truly want? Would you continue if you were able to stand clear of insanity, even for a moment, and really see what you are doing? Caught in an endless cycle of life and death for so long, you do not remember the Truth that was yours nor the life that is eternal. The deep peace and joy that is yours is long forgotten, beyond hope of recall.
You cannot reach the memory of Truth that lies buried deep in your mind without help. Help must come from beyond the dream of separation. Help is given from the realm of knowledge, not perception, though the One Who aids you must be aware of both. The Holy Spirit was created by God in answer to the loss of communication with a part of Creation. He is in God’s Mind, the realm of knowledge, and He is in your Christ Mind, the part of you that is real. He is aware of the realm of perception, the dream world in which you seemingly find yourself. He holds for you the memory of your Father and your Self, while also being aware of the illusions that characterize your present experience. Thus is He the perfect and complete Answer to all the problems you think you have, including the one problem of which all others are just variations meant to disguise their content. Separation from God is the only problem you have, and to this the Holy Spirit has the only answer.
The Holy Spirit is the Mind of the Atonement; He will guide you unerringly through the undoing and correction of your mind until it has been freed of all illusion. He is unfailingly right because He is part of Truth and has all knowledge. The Holy Spirit is unfailingly patient and gentle, for He knows the illusions under which you suffer, and the fear, confusion, and ignorance that make real learning so difficult for you. Do not be afraid to turn over decisions to Him. His function is to guide your decisions, as yours is to turn them over to Him.
The present is the only time when you can get to know yourself. You cannot understand yourself in the past or in the future for neither exists. Something can be learned by evaluating past behavior, but such learning is only superficial. To become deeply aware of your own mind, its constant activity, its compulsions, desires, and motivations, you must be aware of it in action, as it functions in the present. This requires an alertness you do not possess unless you commit to the process of self awareness, and train your mind to be aware of itself. In and of itself, this is not a difficult process, but the mind as you have made it is very undisciplined and constantly wandering.
When you begin this discipline of watching your mind, you will quickly notice two things. The mind is always busy, amazingly busy, like a dog chasing its own tail. And, if you really pay attention, you will notice the repetitive and unnecessary nature of much of your thinking. Over time, it will become clear to you if you are honest, that much of the thought process that dominates your mind seems to have its own agenda, an agenda that is not necessarily the same as yours.
Your basic and continuous thought process is, in fact, an expression of the ego’s agenda. Although you identify with the ego and its chosen home, the body, you are not the ego. You have given it your mind and your allegiance; consequently it seems to be you. Yet is the ego not you but a part of your mind, a part of your belief about yourself. The ego seems to be all of your mind, yet it is only a part. If you would be free of the fear and uncertainty that plague human life, you must take back your mind from this stranger who claims to be you. Until then, you are caught in a repeating pattern of action and reaction determined by the past, for the ego is of the past and devotes itself to maintaining the past at all costs.
You must learn to see your mind as it is, with complete honesty. Only then is it possible to free yourself from the habitual and constant restraints it imposes on you; restraints on your freedom, happiness, perception, understanding, and behavior. So much of your life is simply a repetition of the ego’s agenda. Over and over, in many seemingly different forms, you act out the maintenance of separation, attack and defense in many different ways, pursuit of pleasure, and the avoidance of fear. Never do you look seriously within and question why you do what you do except in the most superficial way. Though your thoughts, feelings, actions, and responses seem to change constantly, the content remains the same: avoidance of the deep fear and emptiness within. Thus the fear which darkens your days and literally poisons your mind, is never recognized for what it is and what it does. In this condition, a true and lasting happiness is impossible though you seek it unceasingly.
My brother, there is nothing to fear in this world. Your belief that there is, keeps fear alive and unhealed. There is nothing you fear more than the actual experience of fear. Fear in all its forms is experienced as unpleasant, uncomfortable, even intolerable. The direct experience of fear is universally avoided. Whatever you need to do to keep fear from your awareness, you will do.
Your life is built around the need for security, for protection from the uncertainties and instability of life as you have known it. Although you think you are thereby avoiding the circumstances you fear, and to a certain extent this is true, what you are really doing is protecting yourself from the fear within. Virtually all human activity, all motivation, carries within it the stain of fear. Life in the condition of separation is inherently fearful. Without the original response of fear to fear, separation could not have occurred. Separation is based on fear, and all life in separation carries its mark. Existence as a separate and fragile bodily identity in a world seemingly filled with possible danger and indifferent to your welfare, induces an unconscious sense of threat that reinforces the fear within.
Fear is thus multilayered and all pervasive in human life, and in the human mind. You can deny it, dissociate, suppress, and avoid it, but you cannot escape it. It is impossible to escape from anything that is in your mind. Fear can be healed and released, it can be transformed, but it cannot be escaped through denial. Fear is a part of your mind for it makes up the core of the ego, your chosen identity.
To renounce the ego is to renounce fear. The process of ego renunciation, of undoing the entire egoic belief system and its thought process, is the undoing of fear and guilt in all forms and all expressions. To do so is required, for there is no other way to recover your true identity. The self you have made, the ego, is both a substitute for the Self and the defense against It. The ego is the denial of Truth in every way; that is its purpose, function, and expression. Constantly it is busy maintaining its position as your identity, and defending its interests which are not yours. Because you do not realize this, you act out the ego’s agenda faithfully. Your actions and understanding stem from the egoic thought system of separation, for you have accepted its belief that attack is salvation, and is necessary to protect yourself from the attacks of others. There are no others! Certain it is that in the dream, separate figures seem to go about pursuing different interests, and taking turns attacking each other. They are simply doing what you have assigned them to do.
The world of separation is made real through the projection of guilt and the apparent necessity to attack and defend. This purpose was given it when it was made and projected from your mind. Perception goes out to seek what it would find, to seek what was put there for it to find. Nothing could be further from the Truth than to believe the world is ‘out there’, independent of your mind, with its own objective existence. The world does not exist outside of your mind; you are responsible for it in every way. To really accept this fact absolves the world of all guilt and blame, and places responsibility for all that happens to you squarely on your shoulders. In this lies the escape from all fear and guilt, for who could be afraid of what he had made and endowed with the attributes of reality? Nothing can attack you unless that is your request. You have forgotten that you are dreaming, and so have given the dream figures a terrible autonomy that seems to threaten you. It is not so my brother, it is not so. Do not fear the imagery of your own mind; it is only your own thoughts that seem to attack and injure and kill.
The Holy Spirit is the guide to salvation. This is His function given Him by God. He fulfills His function perfectly, and never ceases to offer the help needed in each and every situation. He knows your strengths and weaknesses, and how to work with both. To fulfill your function perfectly, you must turn over decision making to Him consistently and in all ways. Do not hold back some areas of your life that you would still control. The ‘you’ that would maintain control is the egoic identity. The ego opposes the Holy Spirit and salvation in every way. Do not place your trust where it is not warranted. The ego is not your friend.
You do not know the way back to your Father and your Self. You have wandered alone and friendless through an alien land, seeking what you cannot find. It is not here. Yet there is a Friend Who walks with you and will never leave you comfortless. Take His hand and let Him lead you down the way of peace, which leads back to where you are at Home. Heaven is a state of Unity, of Oneness with God and all He has created. So far beyond the world of separation even the imagination cannot conceive of it, Heaven is always close at hand. Not within the dream, yet is It reflected here if you would have it so. The Holy Spirit will show you the real world, the forgiven world, wherein the Light of Heaven is reflected, if you will accept His vision in place of your own.
Your vision is not vision, it is image making. You see what you want to see, what you put out there to see. What is but projection and imagination driven by desire, can hardly be called vision. The Holy Spirit will give you real vision, a unified vision that sees truly. You must be willing to share His vision and release your own if you would see the Truth that is reflected everywhere. Through a unified, purified vision, you will set yourself and your brothers free.
The consistent practice of forgiveness will lead to the Vision of Christ. To see truly, you must be willing to see the Truth, the Light in your brothers. You must be willing to see them as they truly are, in the shining Light of their innocence. They are not bodies nor are they guilty. Your eyes were made to see bodies; your mind judges them and finds them guilty. So long as you are willing to see your brother guilty, reduced to a bodily appearance, so long will real vision be impossible for you. Your brother is as guiltless as you are. He is not a body as you are not a body. To see him as what he is not, is a denial of what he is. You will not see the Christ in your brother while you prefer to see him as something else.
Do not underestimate the gifts forgiveness provides. The world does not understand true forgiveness nor is it aware of its many gifts. Forgiveness will transform your mind and set you free. The power of Love Itself flows through forgiveness, transforming both giver and receiver. To forgive without conditions is to love unconditionally. Love will bring you back to your Father and your Self; nothing else will accomplish this. Do not make the mistake of overlooking what will restore the memory of God to your awareness. God is Love as are you. Only through the acceptance of yourself as you are, will the Self be able to reclaim your mind.
True vision will be given when you want it above all else. The body’s eyes cannot see truly, for they were made to perceive illusion and establish it as real. Do not rely on the body’s senses. The ability to see comes from God, and is a part of your mind that is beyond the ego’s reach. Real vision occurs through the mind, not the senses. Through the Mind of the Holy Spirit does vision reach to you, allowing you to see the Light that is reflected everywhere. When once you begin to see the Light in your brother, you will not close your mind to vision ever again. The loveliness that is your brother will replace the mask the body’s eyes see; you will find the same Light in yourself, and It will lead you Home.
There is no need for help to be the Truth, the One Self, the Christ, for you have always been that and always will be. You cannot help being what you are. However, you have lost awareness of what you are and invented a substitute in its place. Through the identification with the false self you have made, you have surrounded and filled your mind with false beliefs about yourself. These beliefs are like a wall that encircles your mind, keeping it a prisoner to illusion. You cannot find your way through this wall without help, for it is experienced as part of your reality and is beyond question.
Help is offered you from beyond the heavy veil of illusion that obscures your mind. You must accept it if you are to leave your prison behind and reclaim the freedom you replaced with a dream of death. There is no single more important understanding to reach than this: I need help for I know nothing. All I have taught myself is false. This realization, when truly accepted, will bring you to surrender to a Higher Power. No matter the spiritual path you walk, surrender is fundamental, the basis for real awakening. Without surrender, you are relying on yourself and what you learned in the past. In other words, you are following the ego as your guide.
The ego will not take you beyond the prison walls; the ego is the prison walls. Would you ask your jailor to show you the way to freedom? The ego knows only the way to nowhere and there it gladly takes you, keeping you busy along the way so you will not notice what waits for you at the end. Death waits at the end of all roads you walk with the ego as your guide.
Surrender is the key to spiritual consciousness. Without surrender to a true teaching, one of the forms of the universal curriculum, you will continue to wander in ignorance, acting out the past over and over. This cannot be over emphasized: unaided, you cannot find your way out of the self created prison that holds your mind. To try to do it yourself is to continue employing the ego as your guide. This will continue and perpetuate the condition in which you find yourself. Help comes from a level of Mind that is beyond your reach. Whether from the Teacher of teachers, the Holy Spirit, or a teacher in human form who represents the Holy Spirit, help will come. Do not waste any more time following the voice of ignorance, the ego. Realize and accept your own ignorance and make the only choice that can be made. The world is weary, weighed down by suffering and sorrow. Your brothers need your help. Do not abandon them but remember they go with you on your journey. You do this not for yourself alone. Your awakening benefits all; your Love goes out to all. When you are healed of your separation from God, you are not healed alone.
Do not let the cares of the world weigh you down. It was made to be a place of sorrow and woe, where fear and death rule supreme. The belief in fear and suffering makes the world real in your mind and chains you to it. To see pain as real hurts your brother also for minds are joined, and in their mutual recognition of illusion, they confirm the reality of suffering to each other. Refuse to see all illusion as real; do not reinforce your brother’s belief that binds him to sorrow. Set him free by offering him the Truth, by seeing the Light in your brother that proclaims his innocence. His Light will join with the Light in you and set you both free.
Only the Truth has the power to return you to the state of freedom you once knew. Illusion has made the chains that seem to bind you. In the healing of all illusion that limits your mind, does the Self become your identity again. The Self is forever free, unbound by illusion, joyous and at peace. Only as the Self will you be free. The quest for freedom is not a quest within the boundaries of the past, the known. It does not take place within the constraints represented by the ego. The movement towards freedom is a movement beyond the ego, beyond the identity you have known, into Spirit Itself. To awaken in Spirit is to find the Source and the home of freedom. Nowhere else can it be found; not within the experiences of this world or the physical conditions of life in separation. Money will not buy anything that is truly precious including freedom. The body will never be free, as it was made to take away your freedom and replace it with nothingness. Let the Holy Spirit show you where freedom awaits, and take you there.
Nowhere in the world of separation will you find a home. All the homes you have labored so hard to construct are but temporary shelters, easily washed away by rushing waters or blown down by the next mighty storm. They will not withstand the winds of time, nor will they protect you from the vicissitudes of life. To build a home as a refuge from chaos and constant change, is to labor in vain. You cannot find what does not exist but in dreams. Give up the meaningless search for what cannot be found.
Your home is in God. This is a fact not to be disputed or argued against, but to be accepted. Allow the Holy Spirit to gently guide you through the chaotic maze of your own mind, past the resistance of many lifetimes, beyond the fear that veils the Truth, to the memory of your Father that He may take the last step that returns you to your true Home forever. God has always been your Home; you rest in Him in deepest peace, undisturbed by idle dreams and passing fantasies. The constant noise of this world, the cries of pain that arise from the suffering ones, the clash of arms and the constant conflict; all this cannot reach you or diminish the peace and security you experience when you rest in God. Nothing can reach you there but what belongs to you in Truth, what is part of you forever. My brothers, you are not forsaken; you have not been left comfortless. Even in a world of dreams, you carry your Home with you always. Within you It waits for your recognition that It may shelter you from the battle that rages without. Please accept It now, turn within and find peace.
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