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4No one who lives in fear is really alive.
Your own final judgment cannot be directed toward yourself, because you are not your own creation. 2You can apply it meaningfully and at any time, however, to everything you have ever made, and retain in your real memory only what is good. 3This is what your own right-mindedness cannot but dictate. 4The purpose of time is solely to “give you time” to achieve this judgment. 5It is your own perfect judgment of what you have made. 6When everything that you retain is lovable, there is no reason for any fear to remain in you. 7This is your part in the Atonement.
We have an irresistible attraction to God, an innate drive to be “possessed” by God (i.e., to wholly belong to Him). We fear this drive yet cannot extinguish it, so we distort it into four false versions, four conventional desires for possession: 1) possessing (or being possessed by) other bodies (as in sexuality), 2) possessing things, 3) being possessed by (or possessing/controlling) the Spirit or spirits, and 4) possessing knowledge (in the conventional sense of the word). Not being true expressions of the possession drive, these do not satisfy it, and also cause negative symptoms in their
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The “fallacy of depreciation” is the idea that destructive thoughts do not matter as long as you don’t act them out.
5God does not believe in karmic retribution at all. 6His divine Mind does not create that way. 7He does not hold the evil deeds of a person even against himself.
2Good can withstand any form of evil, because light abolishes all forms of darkness.
7Sacrificing others in any way is a clear-cut violation of God’s Own injunction that you should be merciful even as your Father in Heaven is merciful.36
6Misperception produces fear, and true perception induces love.
3When you love someone, you have perceived him as he is, and this makes it possible for you to know him. 4But it is not until you recognize him that you know him. 5Only then are you able to stop asking questions about him.
If you attack another’s error, you will hurt yourself. 2You do not recognize him when you attack. 3Attack is always made on a stranger. 4You are making him a stranger by misperceiving him, so that you cannot know him. 5It is because you have made him into a stranger that you are afraid of him.
13Jesus, help me see my brother [name] as he really is, and thus release both him and me.
14Anytime there is anything unloving that crosses your mind,58 you should immediately recognize that you do not want to hurt your brother.
I cannot unite your will with God’s for you. 2But I can erase all misperceptions from your mind if you will bring it under my guidance.
10Strong wills can do this now, and they will find rest for their souls.82 11God knows you only in peace, and this is your reality.
4In this sense, when your behavior is unstable, you are obviously disagreeing with God’s idea of the creation. 5This is a fundamental right of yours, although not one you would care to exercise if you were in your right mind.
2This point requires clarification, because abilities are beliefs which are based on the scarcity fallacy, since an ability does not mean anything apart from comparisons to the ability as it appears in others.
What happens to perceptions if there are no judgments, and there is nothing but perfect equality? 2Perception is automatically useless. 3Truth can only be known.
Forgiveness is the healing of the perception of separation.
Any form of mental illness can truthfully be described as an expression of viciousness.
3If we were willing to forgive other people’s misperceptions of us, they could not possibly affect us at all.
Why should anyone accord an obvious misperception so much power? 2There cannot be any real justification for it, because even you yourself recognize the real problem when you say, “How could they do this to me?”107 3The answer is they didn’t.
2We said before that the purpose of the resurrection was to demonstrate that no amount of misperception has any influence at all on a Son of God.
4Your question, which you must ask yourself very honestly, is whether you are willing to demonstrate that your parents have not hurt you. 5Unless you are willing to do this, you have not forgiven them.
You have no justification whatever for perpetuating any image of yourself at all. 2You are not an image. 3Whatever is true of you is wholly benign.
4It is essential that you know this about yourself, but you cannot know it while you choose to interpret yourself as vulnerable enough to be hurt.
3It is still true that you believe they did something to you. 4This belief is extremely dangerous to your perception and wholly destructive of your knowledge. 5This is not only true of your attitudes toward your parents, but also of your misuse of your friends. 6You still think that you must respond to their errors as if they were true. 7By reacting self-destructively, you are giving them approval for their misperceptions.
It is your duty to establish beyond doubt that you are totally unwilling to side with (identify with) anyone’s misperceptions of you, including your own.
It is not true that the difference between pupil and teacher is lasting. 2They meet in order to abolish the difference.
A teacher with an authority problem is merely a pupil who refuses to teach others.117 2He wants to maintain himself in a position where he can be misused and misperceived. 3This makes him resentful of teaching, because of what he insists it has done to him. 4The only way out of this particular aspect of the desert is still to leave.118 5The way this is left is to release everyone involved, by absolutely refusing to engage in any form of honoring error.
The role of a teacher, properly conceived, is one of leading himself and others out of the desert.
2The ultimate purpose of all learning is to abolish fear. 3This is necessary so that knowledge can happen.
You have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting yourself and your brothers totally without judgment.
5If you wish to be the author of reality, which is totally impossible anyway, then you will insist on holding on to judgment. 6You will also use the term with considerable fear and believe that judgment will someday be used against you. 7To whatever extent it is used against you, it is due only to your belief in its efficacy as a weapon of defense for your own authority.
2When an individual has an “authority problem,” it is always because he believes he is the author of himself and resents his own projection of this delusion onto others.
It involves voluntarily internalizing another’s low opinion of us so that we can make him appear guilty of hurting us (when in truth we hurt ourselves).
“The thing to do with a desert is to leave.”
Teaching and learning are your greatest strengths now, because you must change your own mind and help others change theirs.
Your worth is not established by your teaching. 2Your worth was established by God. 3As long as you dispute this, everything you do will be fearful, and particularly any situation which lends itself to the fallacy of superiority and inferiority. 4Teachers must be patient and repeat their lessons until they are learned.
The ego is afraid of the spirit’s joy, because once you have experienced this, you will withdraw all protection from your ego and become totally without investment in fear.
The ego has built a shabby and unsheltering home for you, because it cannot build otherwise. 2Do not try to make this impoverished house stand. 3Its weakness is your strength.
The reason why I can be entrusted with your body and your ego is simply because this enables you not to be concerned with them, and me to teach you their unimportance. 2I could not understand their importance to you if I had not once been tempted to believe in them myself.
I need devoted teachers.
2Babies scream in rage if you take away a knife or scissors, even though they may well harm themselves if you do not. 3In this sense you are a baby. 4You have no sense of real self-preservation and are very likely to decide that you need precisely what would hurt you most.
4The ego cannot survive without judgment, and is laid aside accordingly.
5You cannot conceive of the true relationship that exists between God and His Sons because of the hatred you have for the self you have made.
Watch your mind for the scraps of meanness, or you will be unable to ask me to do so. 2I can help you only as our Father created us. 3I will love you and honor you and maintain complete respect for what you have made. 4But I will neither love nor honor it unless it is true. 5Ask me truly, and I will come. 6Do not ask me truly, and I will wait. 7I will never forsake you, any more than God will.64 8But I must wait as long as you will to forsake yourself. 9Because I wait in love and not in impatience, you will surely ask me truly. 10I will come gladly in response to a single unequivocal call.
3Depression always arises ultimately from a sense of being deprived of something you want and do not have. 4Know you are deprived of nothing except by your own decisions, and then decide otherwise.
When you feel guilty, know that your ego has indeed violated the laws of God, but you have not. 2Leave the sins of the ego to me. 3That is what the Atonement is for. 4But until you change your mind about those your ego has hurt, the Atonement cannot release you. 5As long as you feel guilty, your ego is in command, because only the ego can experience guilt. 6This need not be.
5When they exert real efforts to give up this voluntary dispiriting, they will see how their minds can focus and rise above fatigue and heal. 6But they are not sufficiently vigilant against their egos’ demand to disengage themselves. 7This need not be.
2There is no limit to the power of a Son of God, but he himself can limit the expression of his power as much as he wills.
