A Course in Miracles

by Helen Schucman

Vision already holds a replacement for everything you think you see now.

its cause can be changed.

both your thoughts of attacking and of being attacked.

You perceive the world and everything in it as meaningful in terms of ego goals. These goals have nothing to do with your own best interests, because the ego is not you. This false identification makes you incapable of understanding what anything is for. As a result, you are bound to misuse it. When you believe this, you will try to withdraw the goals you have assigned to the world, instead of attempting to reinforce them.

It is crucial to your learning to be willing to give up the goals you have established for everything. The recognition that they are meaningless, rather than “good” or “bad,” is the only way to accomplish this. The idea for today is a step in this direction.

That is because you believe that you can really attack. And what would have effects through you must also have effects on you. It is this law that will ultimately save you, but you are misusing it now. You must therefore learn how it can be used for your own best interests, rather than against them.

Because your attack thoughts will be projected, you will fear attack. And if you fear attack, you must believe that you are not invulnerable.

Attack thoughts therefore make you vulnerable in your own mind, which is where the attack thoughts are. Attack thoughts and invulnerability cannot be acc...

you always attack yours...

A false image of yourself has come to take the place of what you are.

Nothing except your thoughts can attack you.

You can never be deprived of your perfect holiness because its Source goes with you wherever you go. You can never suffer because the Source of all joy goes with you wherever you go. You can never be alone because the Source of all life goes with you wherever you go. Nothing can destroy your peace of mind because God goes with you wherever you go.

We will deny the world in favor of truth.

thoughts that you thought with God in the beginning. They are there in your mind now, completely unchanged. They will always be in your mind, exactly as they always were. Everything you have thought since then will change, but the Foundation on which it rests is wholly changeless.

Those who forgive are thus releasing themselves from illusions, while those who withhold forgiveness are binding themselves to them.

How can I be the victim of a world that can be completely undone if I so choose? My chains are loosened. I can drop them off merely by desiring to do so. The prison door is open. I can leave simply by walking out. Nothing holds me in this world. Only my wish to stay keeps me a prisoner. I would give up my insane wishes and walk into the sunlight at last.

The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over.

A healed mind does not plan. It carries out the plans that it receives through listening to wisdom that is not its own. It waits until it has been taught what should be done, and then proceeds to do it. It does not depend upon itself for anything except its adequacy to fulfill the plans assigned to it.

here and now is everything it needs to guarantee a future quite unlike the past, without a continuity of any old ideas and sick beliefs.

Let no defenses but your present trust direct the future, and this life becomes a meaningful encounter with the truth that only your defenses would conceal.

Is it not strange that you believe to think you made the world you see is arrogance?

God made it not. Of this you can be sure. What can He know of the ephemeral, the sinful and the guilty, the afraid, the suffering and lonely, and the mind that lives within a body that must die? You but accuse Him of insanity, to think He made a world where such things seem to have reality. He is not mad. Yet only madness makes a world like this. To think that God made chaos, contradicts His Will, invented opposites to truth, and suffers death to triumph over life; all this is arrogance. Humility would see at once these things are not of Him. And can you see what God created not? To think you can is merely to believe you can perceive what God willed not to be. And what could be more arrogant than this?

You do not realize what you have done to sabotage the holy peace of God by your defensiveness.

Defenselessness is strength.

Defenselessness can never be attacked, because it recognizes strength so great attack is folly, or a silly game a tired child might play, when he becomes too sleepy to remember what he wants.

Now we cannot fear, for we have left all fearful thoughts behind.

His game instructs in happiness because there is no loser. Everyone who plays must win, and in his winning is the gain to everyone ensured.

we will find that half an hour is too short a time to spend with God. Nor will we willingly give less at night, in gratitude and joy.

Whatever your appointed role may be, it was selected by the Voice for God, Whose function is to speak for you as well.

The world is an illusion. Those who choose to come to it are seeking for a place where they can be illusions, and avoid their own reality.

We walk to God. Pause and reflect on this. Could any way be holier, or more deserving of your effort, of your love and of your full intent?

It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain.

My holy brother, think of this awhile: The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all. It merely represents your thoughts. And it will change entirely as

you elect to change your mind, and choose the joy of God as what you really want.

Pain is illusion; joy, reality. Pain is but sleep; joy is awakening. Pain is deception; joy alone is truth.

Let no one hour cast its shadow on the one that follows, and when that one goes, let everything that happened in its course go with it. Thus will you remain unbound, in peace eternal in the world of time.

I will forgive, and this will disappear.

me?

The text explains that the Holy Spirit is the Answer to all problems you have made. These problems are not real, but that is meaningless to those who believe in them. And everyone believes in what he made, for it was made by his believing it.

Nothing external alters, but everything internal now reflects only the Love of God.

And God works through them now as one, for that is what they are.

Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful.

The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body’s condition.

Sickness is now impossible to him.

And to possess them must he sacrifice his hope of Heaven and remembrance of his Father’s Love.

“Seek but do not find” remains this world’s stern decree, and no one who pursues the world’s goals can do otherwise.

It is denied if you attack any brother for anything. For it is here the split with God occurs. A split that is impossible. A split that cannot happen. Yet a split in which you surely will believe, because you have set up a situation that is impossible.

Decide for God, and everything is given you at no cost at all.

It is concerned only with Atonement, or the correction of perception.

To study the error itself does not lead to correction, if you are indeed to succeed in overlooking the error.