A Course in Miracles

by Helen Schucman

What you desire, you will see.

not realizing all the adjustments you have introduced to make it so.

apparent that a mind so split could never be the Teacher of a Oneness which unites all things within Itself.

Salvation is no more than a reminder this world is not your home. Its laws are not imposed on you, its values are not yours. And nothing that you think you see in it is really there at all. This is seen and understood as each one takes his part in its undoing, as he did in making it.

purposeless within itself,

It does not know.

But there is need that you be healed, because the suffering and sorrow of the world have made it deaf to its salvation and deliverance.

What conceals the truth is not where you should look to find the truth.

Of all the many causes you perceived as bringing pain and suffering to you, your guilt was not among them.

The one who makes them does not see himself as making them, and their reality does not depend on him. Whatever cause they have is something quite apart from him, and what he sees is separate from his mind. He cannot doubt his dreams’ reality, because he does not see the part he plays in making them and making them seem real.

The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to prove it is autonomous and real.

Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects.

The world you see depicts exactly what you thought you did. Except that now you think that what you did is being done to you.

is not easy to perceive the jest when all around you do your eyes behold its heavy consequences, but without their trifling cause. Without the cause do its effects seem serious and sad indeed. Yet they but follow. And it is their cause that follows nothing and is but a jest.

You judge effects, but He has judged their cause. And by His judgment are effects removed.

that you are doing this unto yourself.

Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to recognize it is your dream.

The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the single cause of all of them, no matter what their form.

When you forgive the world your guilt, you will be free of it. Its innocence does not demand your guilt, nor does your guiltlessness rest on its sins.

The thoughts that made it are no longer in the mind that thought of them and loved them for a little while. The miracle but shows the past is gone, and what has truly gone has no effects. Remembering a cause can but produce illusions of its presence, not effects.

Remembering is as selective as perception, being its past tense.

All things the Holy Spirit can employ for healing have been given Him, without the content and the purposes for which they have been made. They are but skills without an application. They await their use. They have no dedication and no aim.

The miracle comes quietly into the mind that stops an instant and is still. It reaches gently from that quiet time, and from the mind it healed in quiet then, to other minds to share its quietness.

But for this change in content of the dream, it must be realized that it is you who dreamed the dreaming that you do not like.

This world is causeless, as is every dream that anyone has dreamed within the world.

The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and that its content is not true.

Effect and cause are first split off, and then reversed, so that effect becomes a cause; the cause, effect.

The miracle is the first step in giving back to cause the function of causation, not effect.

Their enmity is seen as causeless now, because they did not make it. And you can accept the role of maker of their hate, because you see that it has no effects.

Now are you freed from this much of the dream; the world is neutral, and the bodies that still seem to move about as separate things need not be feared. And so they are not sick.

The lesson is the mind was sick that thought the body could be sick; projecting out its guilt caused nothing, and had no effects.

The body is released because the mind acknowledges “this is not done to me, but I am doing this.” And thus the mind is free to make another choice instead.

The end of dreaming is the end of fear, and love was never in the world of dreams.

Refuse to be a part of fearful dreams whatever form they take, for you will lose identity in them. You find yourself by not accepting them as causing you, and giving you effects.

It is the dream you fear, and not the mind.

And what is real and what is but illusion in yourself you do not know and cannot tell apart.

The Holy Spirit is in both your minds, and He is One because there is no gap that separates His Oneness from Itself.

Such is the promise of the living God; His Son have life and every living thing be part of him, and nothing else have life. What you have given “life” is not alive, and symbolizes but your wish to be alive apart from life, alive in death, with death perceived as life, and living, death.

Be innocent of judgment, unaware of any thoughts of evil or of good that ever crossed your mind of anyone. Now do you know him not. But you are free to learn of him, and learn of him anew. Now is he born again to you, and you are born again to him,

without

the past that sentenced him to die, and you with him....

live as you are free, because an ancient learning passed away, and left a place...

He holds no concept of himself between his calm and open eyes and what he sees. He brings the light to what he looks upon, that he may see it as it really is.

form does not matter,

Recognizing that your mind has been merely blank, rather than believing that it is filled with real ideas, is the first step to opening the way to vision.

But this way cannot fail. Every thought you have makes up some segment of the world you see.

If the cause of the world you see is attack thoughts, you must learn that it is these thoughts which you do not want. There is no point in lamenting the world.

There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world.

Here you are changing the cause. The effect will chan...

The world you see is a vengeful world, and everything in it is a symbol of vengeance. Each of your perceptions of “external reality” is a pictorial r...