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6The moment that you realize guilt is insane, wholly unjustified, and wholly without reason, you will not fear to look upon Atonement and accept it wholly.
6You cannot be as you believed you were.
4See only praise of Him in what He has created, for He will never cease His praise of you.
3Have faith in only this one thing and it will be sufficient: God wills you be in Heaven, and nothing can keep you from it, or it from you. 4Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares, all mean nothing. 5They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you.64 6The Holy Spirit will restore your sanity, because insanity is not the will of God. 7If that suffices Him, it is enough for you. 8You will not keep what God would have removed, because it breaks communication with you with whom He would communicate. 9His Voice will be heard. 6 The communication link
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The denial here seems to be the mind’s act of denying its true identity. The penalty of this denial is guilt. And the way the mind attempts to escape this penalty is by judging another mind as guilty.
“The crucifixion was...the perfect symbol of conflict between the ego and the Son of God.”
“Again the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?’ Jesus said, ‘I am....’
The “shadowy figures” (which will later be called shadow figures) are our one-sided images of people from our past who did not fulfill the roles we assigned to them. We project these shadow figures onto people in the present, so that on an emotional level, they are the ones we interact with. They are the ones we are really speaking to, and they are the ones we hear speak to us.
Alluding to this verse in this context implies that by seeing our brothers as shadow figures from our private past, we are crucifying them.
The above allusion likens us coming forth from our private worlds to Lazarus coming forth from his tomb.
In the Course, we made the world of “dust” (i.e., the lifeless), so to dust it shall return.
The above reference explains that love is fearless because it is guiltless, guilt being the cause of fear.
The Holy Spirit needs a happy learner, in whom His mission can be happily accomplished. 2You who are steadfastly devoted to misery must first recognize that you are miserable and not happy. 3The Holy Spirit cannot teach without this contrast, for you believe that misery is happiness.
7The simple and the obvious are not apparent to those who would make palaces and royal robes of nothing, believing they are kings with golden crowns because of them.3
And as it shines, your brothers see it, and realizing that this light is not what you have made, they see in you more than you see. 2They will be happy learners of the lesson which this light brings to them, because it teaches them release from nothing, and from all the works of nothing. 3The heavy chains which seem to bind them unto despair they do not see as nothing, until you bring the light to them.
6Because you taught them gladness and release, they will become your teachers in release and gladness. 7When you teach anyone that truth is true, you learn it with him.
7If you would be a happy learner, you must give everything that you have learned over to the Holy Spirit to be unlearned for you. 8And then begin to learn the joyous lessons that come quickly on the firm foundation that truth is true.
Learning will be commensurate with motivation, and the interference in your motivation for learning is exactly the same as that which interferes with all your thinking. 2The happy learner cannot feel guilty about learning. 3This is so essential to learning that it should never be forgotten. 4The guiltless learner learns so easily because his thoughts are free. 5But this entails the recognition that guilt is interference, not salvation, and serves no useful function at all.
You are whole only in your guiltlessness, and only in your guiltlessness can you be happy. 2There is no conflict here. 3To wish for guilt in any way, in any form, will block appreciation of the value of your guiltlessness and push it from your sight. 4There is no compromise that you can make with guilt and escape from the pain which only guiltlessness allays. 5Learning is living here, as creating is being in Heaven.
8What I experience I will make manifest. 9If I am guiltless, I have nothing to fear. 10I choose to testify to my acceptance of the Atonement, not to its rejection. 11I would accept my guiltlessness by making it manifest and sharing it. 12Let me bring peace to God’s Son from his Father.
4Everyone you offer healing to returns it. 5Everyone you attack keeps it and cherishes it by holding it against you. 6Whether he does this or does it not will make no difference; you will think he does. 7It is impossible to offer what you do not want without this penalty.
Guiltlessness is invulnerability. 4Therefore, make your invulnerability manifest to everyone you meet, and teach him that, whatever he may try to do to you, your perfect freedom from the belief that you can be harmed shows him he is guiltless. 5He can do nothing that can hurt you, and by refusing to allow him to think he can, you teach him that the Atonement, which you have accepted, is also his.
There is nothing to forgive. 2No one can hurt the Son of God. 3His guilt is wholly without cause, and being without cause, cannot exist. 4God is the only cause, and guilt is not of Him. 5Teach no one he has hurt you, for if you do, you teach yourself that what is not of God has power over you.
Whenever you decide to make decisions for yourself, you are thinking self-destructively, and the decision will be wrong.
4No thought of God’s Son can be separate, or isolated in its effects. 5Every decision is made for the whole Sonship, directed in and out, and influencing a constellation larger than anything you ever dreamed of.
4It will never happen that you will have to make decisions for yourself. 5You are not bereft of help, and help that knows the answer. 6Would you be content with little, which is all you can alone offer unto yourself, when He Who gives you everything will simply offer it to you?
Say to the Holy Spirit only, “Decide for me,” and it is done. 2For His decisions are reflections of what God knows about you, and in this light, error of any kind becomes impossible.
2He leadeth me and knows the way, which I know not.9 3Yet He will never keep from me what He would have me learn. 4And so I trust Him to communicate to me all that He knows for me.
5Then let Him teach you quietly how to perceive your guiltlessness, which is already there.
4Ask not to be forgiven, for this has already been accomplished. 5Ask rather how to learn forgiveness and restore what always was to your unforgiving mind. 6Atonement becomes real and visible to them that use it. 7On earth it is your only function, and you must learn that it is all you want to learn.
Decide that God is right and you are wrong about yourself. 2He created you out of Himself, but still within Him. 3He knows what you are. 4Remember that there is no second to Him. 5There cannot, therefore, be anyone without His holiness, nor anyone unworthy of His perfect love. 6Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception undone.
5Accepting His Son as guilty is denial of the Father so complete that knowledge is swept away from recognition in the very mind where God Himself has placed it.
2Would you have all of it transformed into a radiant message of God’s love, to share with all the lonely ones who have denied Him with you? 3God makes this possible.
3But until he teaches it and learns it, he will suffer the pain of dim awareness that his true function remains unfulfilled in him.
6Those who have failed to learn need teaching, not attack. 7To attack those who have need of teaching is to fail to learn from them.
5From everyone whom you accord release from guilt, you will inevitably learn your innocence. 6The circle of Atonement has no end. 7And you will find ever-increasing confidence in your safe inclusion in what is for all, in everyone you bring within its safety and its perfect peace.
6Stand quietly within this circle, and attract all who believe themselves to be outside to join you there. 7It is given you to call all tortured minds to join you in the safety of its peace and holiness.
Whomever you perceive as guilty you would crucify, but you restore to guiltlessness whomever you see as guiltless.
3If you leave him without, you join him there.
2Nothing you understand is fearful. 3It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the frightening, and you shrink away from it to further darkness. 4And yet it is only the hidden that can terrify, not for what it is, but for its hiddenness. 5The obscure is frightening because you do not understand its meaning.
3All things you made have use to Him for His most holy purpose.
7You who made it to crucify yourself must learn of Him how to apply it to the holy cause of restoration.
5We must open all doors and let the light come streaming through. 6There are no hidden chambers in God’s temple.
3It is there wherever you are, being within you.
You must have noticed that the emphasis has been on bringing what is undesirable to the desirable, what you do not want to what you do.
7What needs no protection does not defend itself.
He asks of you but this: Bring to Him every secret you have locked away from Him.
8Bring, therefore, all your dark and secret thoughts to Him, and look upon them with Him.
3It is the recognition that nothing you see means anything alone.
4Where God is, there are you.
