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3There, fear of death will be replaced with joy of living. 4For God is life, and they abide in life.
In this world, you can become a spotless mirror in which the holiness of your Creator shines forth from you to all around you. 2You can reflect Heaven here.
4Earth can reflect Heaven or hell, God or the ego. 5You need but leave the mirror clean, and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it.
7Could you but realize, for a single instant, the power of healing that the reflection of God, shining in you, can bring to all the world, you could not wait to make the mirror of your mind clean to receive the image of the holiness that heals the world.
4The response of holiness to any form of error is always the same. 5There is no contradiction in what holiness calls forth. 6Its one response is healing, without any regard for what is brought to it.
Those who have learned to offer only healing because of the reflection of holiness in them are ready at last for Heaven.
4It will seem very difficult to you to learn that you have no basis at all for ordering your thoughts. 5This lesson the Holy Spirit teaches by giving you shining examples, to show you that your way of ordering is wrong, but that a better way is offered you.
6For you do not respond to what a brother really offers you, but only to the particular perception of his offering by which your ego judges it.
It is impossible to remember God in secret and alone. 2For remembering Him means you are not alone, and are willing to remember it. 3Take no thought for yourself,35 for no thought you hold is for yourself. 4If you would remember your Father, let the Holy Spirit order your thoughts, and give only the answer with which He answers you. 5Everyone seeks for love as you do, and knows it not unless he joins with you in seeking it.
3Nothing lives in secret, and what you would hide from the Holy Spirit is nothing. 4Every interpretation you would lay upon a brother is senseless. 5Let the Holy Spirit show him to you and teach you both his love and need for love.
The miracle is the recognition that this is true. 2Where there is love, your brother must give it to you, because of what it is. 3But where there is need for love, you must give it, because of what you are.
2Everything you have learned is false.
If you are wholly free of fear of any kind, and if all those who meet or even think of you share in your perfect peace, then you can be sure that you have learned God’s lesson and not yours. 2Unless all this is true, there are dark lessons in your mind, which hurt and hinder you and everyone around you.
6I do not know what anything, including this, means. 7And so I do not know how to respond to it. 8And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now.
4It is only your thought that you can run some little part or deal with certain aspects of your life alone that limits the Holy Spirit’s guidance.
Those who remember always that they know nothing, but who have become willing to learn everything, will learn it. 2But whenever they trust themselves, they will not learn. 3They have destroyed their motivation for learning by thinking they already know.
Only those who see they cannot know unless the effects of understanding are with them can really learn at all. 2And for this, it must be peace they want and nothing else.
8If you want peace, you must abandon the teacher of attack.
5Leave room for Him, and you will find yourself so filled with power that nothing will prevail against your peace.42 6And this will be the test by which you recognize that you have understood.
This reference implies that we should not assume the Jacob role, in which we try to steal our brother’s inheritance, presumably by condemning him so that we can take his purity for ourselves.
3Remember, then, when you are tempted to attack a brother, that his instant of release is yours.
In the blessed instant, you will let go all your past learning, and the Holy Spirit will quickly offer you the whole lesson of peace.
2In the holy instant you will unchain all of your brothers and refuse to support either their weakness or your own.
3To learn to separate out this single second and begin to experience it as timeless is to begin to experience yourself as not separate.
5Everything in this world is little, because it is a world made out of littleness, in the strange belief that littleness can content you. 6When you strive for anything in the world with the belief that it will bring you peace, you are belittling yourself and blinding yourself to glory.
5We asked you once before, “Would you be hostage to the ego or host to God?”11 6Let this question be asked you by the Holy Spirit in you every time you make a decision.
Holy child of God, when will you learn that only holiness can content you and give you peace?
When you have learned to accept what you are, you will make no gifts to offer to yourself. 2For you will know you are complete, in need of nothing, and unable to accept anything for yourself. 3But you will gladly give, having received.
4The host of God need not seek to find anything.
3Call forth in everyone only the remembrance of God and of the Heaven that is in him.
5Hear not his call for hell and littleness, but only his call for Heaven and greatness.
2Your practice must therefore rest upon your willingness to let all littleness go.
2His will content you, for there is nothing else that can bring you peace.
3For peace is of God, and of no one beside Him.
8It therefore seeks to change nothing, but merely to accept everything.
4Would I want to have perfect communication, and am I wholly willing to let everything that interferes with it go forever?
The necessary condition for the holy instant does not require that you have no thoughts that are not pure. 2But it does require that you have none that you would keep.
2We said before that to limit love to part of the Sonship is to bring guilt into your relationships, and thus make them unreal.
5To believe that special relationships, with special love, can offer you salvation is the belief that separation is salvation.
7How can you decide that special aspects of the Sonship can give you more than others?
Because of guilt, all special relationships have some elements of fear in them. 2And this is why they shift and change so frequently. 3They are not based on changeless love alone.
5In His function as interpreter of what you have made, the Holy Spirit uses special relationships, which you have chosen to support the ego, as learning experiences which point to truth. 6Under His teaching, every relationship becomes a lesson in love.
The Holy Spirit knows no one is special. 2But He also perceives that you have made special relationships, which He would purify and not let you destroy. 3However unholy the reason why you made them may be, He can translate them into holiness by removing as much fear as you will let Him.
4You can place any relationship under His care and be sure that it will not result in pain, if you offer Him your willingness to have it serve no needs but His. 5All the guilt in it arises from your use of it; all the love from His. 6Do not, then, be afraid to let go your imagined need, which would destroy the relationship. 7Your only need is His.
2There is no substitute for love. 3If you would attempt to substitute one aspect of love for another,26 you have placed less value on one and more on another. 4You have not only separated them, but have also judged against both. 5Yet you had judged against yourself first, or you would never have imagined that you needed them as they were not.
6Unless you had seen yourself as without love, you could not have judged them to be like you in lack.
The ego’s use of relationships is so fragmented that it frequently goes even further: One part of one aspect suits its purposes, while it prefers different parts of another.27 2Thus does it assemble reality to its own capricious liking, offering for your seeking a picture whose likeness does not exist. 3For there is nothing in Heaven or earth that it resembles, and so, however much you seek for its reality, you cannot find it because it is not real.
2In the holy instant no one is special, for your personal needs intrude on no one to make your brothers different.
3Without the values from the past you would see them all the same, and like yourself. 4Nor would you see any separation between yourself and them. 5In the holy instant you see in each relationship what it will be when you perceive only the present.
7For in the holy instant, free of the past, you see that love is in you, and you have no need to look without and snatch it guiltily from where you thought it was.
