Our eyes

Let not your eyes behold a dream; your ears bear witness to illusion.

They were made to look upon a world that is not there; to hear the voices that can make no sound.

Yet are there other sounds and other sights that can be seen and heard and understood.

For eyes and ears are senses without sense, and what they see and hear they but report.

It is not they that hear and see, but you, who put together every jagged piece, each senseless scrap and shred of evidence, and make a witness to the world you want.

Let not the body's ears and eyes perceive these countless fragments seen within the gap that you imagined, and let them persuade their maker his imaginings are real.

Praise be to You

Praise be to you who make the Father one with His Own Son.

Alone we are all lowly, but together we shine with brightness so intense that none of us alone can even think of it.

Before the glorious radiance of the Kingdom guilt melts away, and transformed into kindness will never more be what it was.

Every reaction you experience will be so purified that it is fitting as a hymn of praise unto your Father.

See only praise of Him in what He has created, for He will never cease His praise of you.

United in this praise we stand before the gates of Heaven where we will surely enter in our sinlessness. God loves you.

Could I, then, lack faith in you and love Him perfectly?

A Gap

The gap between you and your brother is not one of space between two separate bodies.

  And this but seems to be dividing off your separate minds.

It is the symbol of a promise made to meet when you prefer, and separate till you and he elect to meet again.

And then your bodies seem to get in touch, and thereby signify a meeting place to join.

But always is it possible for you and him to go your separate ways.

Conditional upon the "right" to separate will you and he agree to meet from time to time, and keep apart in intervals of separation, which do protect you from the "sacrifice" of love.

The body saves you, for it gets away from total sacrifice and gives to you the time in which to build again your separate self, which you truly believe diminishes as you and your brother meet.

Holiness

Holiness can never be really hidden in darkness, but you can deceive yourself about it.

This deception makes you fearful because you realize in your heart it is a deception, and you exert enormous efforts to establish its reality.

The miracle sets reality where it belongs.

Reality belongs only to spirit, and the miracle acknowledges only truth.

It thus dispels illusions about yourself, and puts you in communion with yourself and God.

The miracle joins in the Atonement by placing the mind in the service of the Holy Spirit.

Witness

You need not fear the Higher Court will condemn you.

It will merely dismiss the case against you.

There can be no case against a child of God, and every witness to guilt in God's creations is bearing false witness to God Himself.

Appeal everything you believe gladly to God's Own Higher Court, because it speaks for Him and therefore speaks truly.

It will dismiss the case against you, however carefully you have built it up.

The case may be fool-proof, but it is not God-proof. The Holy Spirit will not hear it, because He can only witness truly.

His verdict will always be "thine is the Kingdom," because He was given to you to remind you of what you are.

An Example from Joel Goldsmith

When we appear to be good, it is the activity of God operating through us. When we appear to be evil, it is the activity of material sense which is only a sense of separation from God.

For example, if you saw a thief whom you wanted to help, you would not accept into your consciousness a person needing to be healed of dishonesty: you would separate the dishonesty from the person and you would recognize this as a universal belief in a selfhood apart from God, a universal belief in lack and limitation, or a universal belief in the possibility that someone can get good from another, all of which beliefs are without power.

In other words, whatever form the error assumes, it is not an error belonging to any person:

It is simply a universal belief. Never forget that error is nothing but a universal belief.

Counterpart

The real world holds a counterpart for each unhappy thought reflected in your world; a sure correction for the sights of fear and sounds of battle which your world contains.

The real world shows a world seen differently, through quiet eyes and with a mind at peace.

Nothing but rest is there.

There are no cries of pain and sorrow heard, for nothing there remains outside forgiveness.

And the sights are gentle. Only happy sights and sounds can reach the mind that has forgiven itself.

Timelessness

A timelessness in which is time made real; a part of God that can attack itself; a separate brother as an enemy; a mind within a body all are forms of circularity whose ending starts at its beginning, ending at its cause.


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.

The guilt for what you thought is being placed outside yourself, and on a guilty world that dreams your dreams and thinks your thoughts instead of you. 

It brings its vengeance, not your own.

It keeps you narrowly confined within a body, which it punishes because of all the sinful things the body does within its dream.

You have no power to make the body stop its evil deeds because you did not make it, and cannot control its actions nor its purpose nor its fate.

Happy Learner

The Holy Spirit needs a happy learner, in whom His mission can be happily accomplished.

You who are steadfastly devoted to misery must first recognize that you are miserable and not happy.

The Holy Spirit cannot teach without this contrast, for you believe that misery is happiness.

This has so confused you that you have undertaken to learn to do what you can never do, believing that unless you learn it you will not be happy.

You do not realize that the foundation on which this most peculiar learning goal depends means absolutely nothing.

Reason

  Let reason take another step.

If you attack whom God would heal and hate the one He loves, then you and your Creator have a different will.

Yet if you are His Will, what you must then believe is that you are not yourself. You can indeed believe this, and you do.

And you have faith in this and see much evidence on its behalf.

And where, you wonder, does your strange uneasiness, your sense of being disconnected, and your haunting fear of lack of meaning in yourself arise?

It is as though you wandered in without a plan of any kind except to wander off, for only that seems certain.

God's Relationship

God established His relationship with you to make you happy, and nothing you do that does not share His purpose can be real.

The purpose God ascribed to anything is its only function.

Because of His reason for creating His relationship with you, the function of relationships became forever "to make happy."

And nothing else. To fulfill this function you relate to your creations as God to His.

For nothing God created is apart from happiness, and nothing God created but would extend happiness as its Creator did.

Whatever does not fulfill this function cannot be real.

Pleasure

All real pleasure comes from doing God's Will.

This is because not doing it is a denial of Self. 
Denial of Self results in illusions, while correction of the error brings release from it.

Do not deceive yourself into believing that you can relate in peace to God or to your brothers with anything external.

Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful and the holy. Do not forget this.

The Love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another, because vision is still so dim.

You can use your body best to help you enlarge your perception so you can achieve real vision, of which the physical eye is incapable.

Learning to do this is the body's only true usefulness.

Through Life

When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that you will last forever.

Perhaps you think this is accomplished through death, but nothing is accomplished through death, because death is nothing.

Everything is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the mind.

The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who are life.

If we share the same mind, you can overcome death because I did.

Death is an attempt to resolve conflict by not deciding at all. Like any other impossible solution the ego attempts, it will not work.

Transported

Everyone has experienced what he would call a sense of being transported beyond himself.

This feeling of liberation far exceeds the dream of freedom sometimes hoped for in special relationships.

It is a sense of actual escape from limitations.

If you will consider what this "transportation" really entails, you will realize that it is a sudden unawareness of the body, and a joining of yourself and something else in which your mind enlarges to encompass it. It becomes part of you, as you unite with it.

And both become whole, as neither is perceived as separate.

Spiritual vision

Spiritual vision literally cannot see error, and merely looks for Atonement.

All solutions the physical eye seeks dissolve.

Spiritual vision looks within and recognizes immediately that the altar has been defiled and needs to be repaired and protected.

Perfectly aware of the right defense it passes over all others, looking past error to truth.

Because of the strength of its vision, it brings the mind into its service.

This re-establishes the power of the mind and makes it increasingly unable to tolerate delay, realizing that it only adds unnecessary pain.

As a result, the mind becomes increasingly sensitive to what it would once have regarded as very minor intrusions of discomfort.

Experience ( Joel Goldsmith)

    Our entire experience of frustration and mistakes comes from our reluctance to wait long enough for the Christ to take over.

Most of us are unwilling to wait until the moment in which a decision is necessary, but insist on knowing the answer in advance.

Spiritual illumination comes to us in a measure with our first investigation of truth. We believe that we are seeking good, or truth; whereas the light has begun to shine in our consciousness compelling us to take the steps we have since taken.

Every increase of our spiritual understanding has more light appearing and dispelling the darkness of sense. This inflow of illumination will continue until we come to the full realization of our true identity as “the light of the world.”

Without illumination, we struggle with the forces of the world; we labor for a living; we struggle to maintain our place and position; we compete for riches and honors.

Often we war with our own friends and even find ourselves at war with ourselves. There is no security in personal possessions even after the battle to acquire them has been won.

The law of creation

The law of creation is that you love your creations as yourself, because they are part of you.

Everything that was created is therefore perfectly safe, because the laws of God protect it by His Love.

Any part of your mind that does not know this has banished itself from knowledge, because it has not met its conditions.

Who could have done this but you?

 Recognize this gladly, for in this recognition lies the realization that your banishment is not of God, and therefore does not exist.

God's Word

Perhaps God's Word is truer than your own. Perhaps His gifts to you are real.

Perhaps He has not wholly been outwitted by your plan to keep His Son in deep oblivion, and go the way you chose without your Self.

God's Will does not oppose. It merely is. It is not God you have imprisoned in your plan to lose your Self.

He does not know about a plan so alien to His Will.

There was a need He did not understand, to which He gave an Answer.

That is all. And you who have this Answer given you have need no more of anything but This.

Holy Trinity

The Son of God is part of the Holy Trinity, but the Trinity Itself is one.

There is no confusion within Its Levels, because They are of one Mind and one Will.

This single purpose creates perfect integration and establishes the peace of God.

Yet this vision can be perceived only by the truly innocent.

Because their hearts are pure, the innocent defend true perception instead of defending themselves against it.

Understanding the lesson of the Atonement they are without the wish to attack, and therefore they see truly.

This is what the Bible means when it says, "When He shall appear (or be perceived) we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is."

Motivation

All good teachers realize that only fundamental change will last, but they do not begin at that level.

Strengthening motivation for change is their first and foremost goal.

It is also their last and final one. Increasing motivation for change in the learner is all that a teacher need do to guarantee change.

Change in motivation is a change of mind, and this will inevitably produce fundamental change because the mind is fundamental.