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Fear has made everything you think you see.
All separation, all distinctions, and the multitude of differences you believe make up the world.
They are not there. Love's enemy has made them up.
Yet love can have no enemy, and so they have no cause, no being and no consequence.
They can be valued, but remain unreal. They can be sought, but they can not be found.
Today we will not seek for them, nor waste this day in seeking what can not be found.
It is impossible to see two worlds which have no overlap of any kind. Seek for the one; the other disappears.
But one remains.
They are the range of choice beyond which your decision cannot go.
The real and the unreal are all there are to choose between, and nothing more than these.
Remember nothing that you taught yourself, for you were badly taught.
And who would keep a senseless lesson in his mind, when he can learn and can preserve a better one?
When ancient memories of hate appear, remember that their cause is gone.
And so you cannot understand what they are for.
Let not the cause that you would give them now be what it was that made them what they were, or seemed to be.
Be glad that it is gone, for this is what you would be pardoned from.
And see, instead, the new effects of cause accepted now, with consequences here.
They will surprise you with their loveliness. The ancient new ideas they bring will be the happy consequences of a Cause so ancient that it far exceeds the span of memory which your perception sees.
We are all joined in the Atonement here, and nothing else can unite us in this world.
So will the world of separation slip away, and full communication be restored between the Father and the Son.
The miracle acknowledges the guiltlessness that must have been denied to produce the need of healing.
Do not withhold this glad acknowledgment, for hope of happiness and release from suffering of every kind lie in it.
Who is there but wishes to be free of pain? He may not yet have learned how to exchange guilt for innocence, nor realize that only in this exchange can freedom from pain be his.
Yet those who have failed to learn need teaching, not attack. To attack those who have need of teaching is to fail to learn from them.
Accepting the Atonement teaches you what immortality is, for by accepting your guiltlessness you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless and will not be.
The future, in time, is always associated with expiation, and only guilt could induce a sense of a need for expiation.
Accepting the guiltlessness of the Son of God as yours is therefore God's way of reminding you of His Son, and what he is in truth.
For God has never condemned His Son, and being guiltless he is eternal.
Forgiveness is an empty gesture unless it entails correction.
Without this it is essentially judgmental, rather than healing.
Miracle-minded forgiveness is only correction.
It has no element of judgment at all.
The statement "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" in no way evaluates what they do.
It is an appeal to God to heal their minds.
There is no reference to the outcome of the error. That does not matter.
God's Name can not be heard without response, nor said without an echo in the mind that calls you to remember.
Say His Name, and you invite the angels to surround the ground on which you stand, and sing to you as they spread out their wings to keep you safe, and shelter you from every worldly thought that would intrude upon your holiness.
You operate from the belief you must protect yourself from what is happening because it must contain what threatens you.
A sense of threat is an acknowledgment of an inherent weakness; a belief that there is danger which has power to call on you to make appropriate defense.
The world is based on this insane belief.
And all its structures, all its thoughts and doubts, its penalties and heavy armaments, its legal definitions and its codes, its ethics and its leaders and its gods, all serve but to preserve its sense of threat.
For no one walks the world in armature but must have terror striking at his heart.
Every good teacher hopes to give his students so much of his own learning that they will one day no longer need him.
This is the one true goal of the teacher. It is impossible to convince the ego of this, because it goes against all of its own laws.
But remember that laws are set up to protect the continuity of the system in which the lawmaker believes.
It is natural for the ego to try to protect itself once you have made it, but it is not natural for you to want to obey its laws unless you believe them.
The ego cannot make this choice because of the nature of its origin.
You can, because of the nature of yours.
What do your scripts reflect except your plans for what the day should be?
And thus you judge disaster and success, advance, retreat, and gain and loss.
These judgments all are made according to the roles the script assigns.
The fact they have no meaning in themselves is demonstrated by the ease with which these labels change with other judgments, made on different aspects of experience.
And then, in looking back, you think you see another meaning in what went before.
What have you really done, except to show there was no meaning there?
But you assigned a meaning in the light of goals that change, with every meaning shifting as they change.
Adam's "sin" could have touched no one, had he not believed it was the Father Who drove him out of paradise.
For in that belief the knowledge of the Father was lost, since only those who do not understand Him could believe it.
This world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son.
And until you realize that God's Son cannot be crucified, this is the world you will see.
Yet you will not realize this until you accept the eternal fact that God's Son is not guilty. He deserves only love because he has given only love.
He cannot be condemned because he has never condemned.
The Atonement is the final lesson he need learn, for it teaches him that, never having sinned, he has no need of salvation.
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?
The ability to learn has no value when change is no longer necessary.
The eternally creative have nothing to learn.
You can learn to improve your perceptions, and can become a better and better learner.
This will bring you into closer and closer accord with the Sonship; but the Sonship itself is a perfect Creation and perfection is not a matter of degree.
Only while there is a belief in differences is learning meaningful.
No one who comes here but must still have hope, some lingering illusion, or some dream that there is something outside of himself that will bring happiness and peace to him.
If everything is in him this cannot be so.
And therefore by his coming, he denies the truth about himself, and seeks for something more than everything, as if a part of it were separated off and found where all the rest of it is not.
This is the purpose he bestows upon the body; that it seek for what he lacks, and give him what would make himself complete.
And thus he wanders aimlessly about, in search of something that he cannot find, believing that he is what he is not.
The Kingdom cannot be found alone, and you who are the Kingdom cannot find yourself alone.
To achieve the goal of the curriculum, then, you cannot listen to the ego, whose purpose is to defeat its own goal.
The ego does not know this, because it does not know anything. But you can know it, and you will know it if you are willing to look at what the ego would make of you.
This is your responsibility, because once you have really looked at it you will accept the Atonement for yourself.
What other choice could you make? Having made this choice you will understand why you once believed that, when you met someone else, you thought he was someone else.
And every holy encounter in which you enter fully will teach you this is not so.
Dreams show you that you have the power to make a world as you would have it be, and that because you want it you see it.
And while you see it you do not doubt that it is real. Yet here is a world, clearly within your mind, that seems to be outside.
You do not respond to it as though you made it, nor do you realize that the emotions the dream produces must come from you. It is the figures in the dream and what they do that seem to make the dream.
You do not realize that you are making them act out for you, for if you did the guilt would not be theirs, and the illusion of satisfaction would be gone.
In dreams these features are not obscure. You seem to waken, and the dream is gone.
Yet what you fail to recognize is that what caused the dream has not gone with it.
Your wish to make another world that is not real remains with you. And what you seem to waken to is but another form of this same world you see in dreams.
All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all.
Their content is the same.
Leave, then, your needs to Him. He will supply them with no emphasis at all upon them.
What comes to you of Him comes safely, for He will ensure it never can become a dark spot, hidden in your mind and kept to hurt you.
Under His guidance you will travel light and journey lightly, for His sight is ever on the journey's end, which is His goal.
God's Son is not a traveller through outer worlds. However holy his perception may become, no world outside himself holds his inheritance.
Within himself he has no needs, for light needs nothing but to shine in peace, and from itself to let the rays extend in quiet to infinity.
Whenever you are tempted to undertake a useless journey that would lead away from light, remember what you really want, and say:
The Holy Spirit leads me unto Christ, and were else would I go?
What need have I but to awake in Him
It is possible to reach a state in which you bring your mind under my guidance without conscious effort, but this implies a willingness that you have not developed as yet.
The Holy Spirit cannot ask more than you are willing to do.
The strength to do comes from your undivided decision.
There is no strain in doing God's Will as soon as you recognize that it is also your own.
The lesson here is quite simple, but particularly apt to be overlooked. I will therefore repeat it, urging you to listen.
Only your mind can produce fear. It does so whenever it is conflicted in what it wants, producing inevitable strain because wanting and doing are discordant.
This can be corrected only by accepting a unified goal.
