A Course in Miracles 

Chapter Two

The Illusion of Separation

V. The Correction for Lack of Love
continued   

⁹³ You who constantly complain about fear still persist in creating it. I told you before that you cannot ask me to release you from fear because I know it does not exist, but you do not. If I merely intervened between your thoughts and their results, I would be tampering with a basic law of cause and effect, the most fundamental law there is in this world. I would hardly help if I depreciated the power of your own thinking. This would be in direct opposition to the purpose of this course. It is much more helpful to remind you that you do not guard your thoughts carefully except for a small part of the day and somewhat inconsistently even then. You may feel at this point that it would take a miracle to enable you to do this, which is perfectly true.

⁹⁴ Men are not used to miraculous thinking, but they can be trained to think that way. All miracle workers need that kind of training. I cannot let them leave their minds unguarded, or they will not be able to help me. Miracle working entails a full realization of the power of thought and real avoidance of miscreation. Otherwise, a miracle will be necessary to set the mind itself straight, a circular process which would hardly foster the time collapse for which the miracle was intended. Nor would it induce the healthy respect for true cause and effect which every miracle worker must have.

⁹⁵ Both miracles and fear come from thoughts, and if you were not free to choose one, you would also not be free to choose the other. By choosing the miracle, you have rejected fear. You have been afraid of God, of me, of yourselves, and of practically everyone you know at one time or another. This is because you have misperceived or miscreated us and believe in what you have made. You would never have done this if you were not afraid of your own thoughts. The vulnerable are essentially miscreators because they misperceive creation.

⁹⁶ You persist in believing that when you do not consciously watch your mind, it is unmindful. It is time, however, to consider the whole world of the unconscious or "unwatched" mind. This may well frighten you because it is the source of fear. The unwatched mind is responsible for the whole content of the unconscious which lies above the miracle level. All psychoanalytic theorists have made some contribution in this connection, but none of them has seen it in its true entirety. They have all made one common error in that they attempted to uncover unconscious content. You cannot understand unconscious activity in these terms because "content" is applicable only to the more superficial unconscious levels, to which the individual himself contributes. This is the level at which he can readily introduce fear and usually does.

⁹⁷ When man miscreates he is in pain. The cause and effect principle here is temporarily a real expediter. Actually, "Cause" is a term properly belonging to God, and "Effect," which should also be capitalized, is His Son. This entails a set of Cause and Effect relationships which are totally different from those which man introduced into his own miscreations. The fundamental opponents in the real basic conflict are creation and miscreation. All fear is implicit in the second, just as all love is inherent in the first. Because of this difference, the basic conflict is one between love and fear.

⁹⁸ It has already been said that man believes he cannot control fear because he himself created it. His belief in it seems to render it out of his control by definition. Yet any attempt to resolve the basic conflict through the concept of mastery of fear is meaningless. In fact it asserts the power of fear by the simple assumption that it need be mastered. The essential resolution rests entirely on the mastery of love. In the interim, the sense of conflict is inevitable since man has placed himself in a strangely illogical position. He believes in the power of what does not exist.

⁹⁹ Two concepts which cannot coexist are "nothing" and "everything." To whatever extent one is believed in, the other has been denied. In the conflict fear is really nothing, and love is everything. This is because whenever light enters darkness, the darkness is abolished. What man believes is true for him. In this sense the separation has occurred, and to deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of defenses. The true corrective procedure is to recognize error temporarily but only as an indication that immediate correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay.

¹⁰⁰ It should be emphasized, however, that ultimately there is no compromise possible between everything and nothing. Time is essentially a device by which all compromise in this respect can be given up. It seems to be abolished by degrees because time itself involves a concept of intervals which do not really exist. The faulty use of creation made this necessary as a corrective device. "And God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life" needs only one slight correction to be entirely meaningful in this context. It should read, "He gave it to His only begotten Son."

¹⁰¹ It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all the Souls God created are His Sons, then every Soul must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too much trouble in understanding this.

¹⁰² The Sonship in its oneness does transcend the sum of its parts. However, this is obscured as long as any of its parts are missing. That is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all the parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then can the meaning of wholeness, in the true sense, be fully understood.

¹⁰³ Any part of the Sonship can believe in error or incompleteness if he so elects. However, if he does so, he is believing in the existence of nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement. We have already briefly spoken about readiness, but there are some additional points which might be helpful here. Readiness is nothing more than the prerequisite for accomplishment. The two should not be confused. As soon as a state of readiness occurs, there is usually some will to accomplish, but this is by no means necessarily undivided. The state does not imply more than a potential for a shift of will.

¹⁰⁴ Confidence cannot develop fully until mastery has been accomplished. We have already attempted to correct the fundamental error that fear can be mastered and have emphasized that only love can be mastered. You have attested only to your readiness. Mastery of love involves a much more complete confidence than either of you has attained. However, the readiness at least is an indication that you believe this is possible. That is only the beginning of confidence. In case this be misunderstood to imply that an enormous amount of time will be necessary between readiness and mastery, let me remind you that time and space are under my control.

¹⁰⁵ One of the chief ways in which man can correct his magic-miracle confusion is to remember that he did not create himself. He is apt to forget this when he becomes egocentric, and this places him in a position where the belief in magic in some form is virtually inevitable. His will to create was given him by his own Creator, Who was expressing the same will in His creation. Since creative ability rests in the mind, everything that man creates is necessarily a matter of will. It also follows that whatever he creates is real in his own sight but not necessarily in the sight of God. This basic distinction leads us directly into the real meaning of the Last Judgment.

 ACIM OE TX. CH 2, V    

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