⁹³ The rituals of the god of sickness are strange and very demanding. Joy is never permitted, for depression is the sign of allegiance to him. Depression means that you have foresworn God. Men are afraid of blasphemy, but they do not know what it means. They do not realize that to deny God is to deny their own identity, and in this sense the wages of sin is death. The sense is very literal; denial of life perceives its opposite, as all forms of denial replace what is with what is not. No one can really do this, but that you can think you can and believe you have is beyond dispute.

 

⁹⁴ Do not forget, however, that to deny God will inevitably result in projection, and you will believe that others, and not yourself, have done this to you. You will receive the message you give because it is the message you want. You may believe that you judge your brothers by the messages they give you, but you have judged them by the message you give to them. Do not attribute your denial of joy to them, or you cannot see the spark in them that could bring joy to you. It is the denial of the spark that brings depression, and whenever you see your brothers without it, you are denying God.

 

⁹⁵ Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival. But consider what this means to you. Unless you are sick, you cannot keep the gods you made, for only in sickness could you possibly want them. Blasphemy, then, is self-destructive, not God-destructive. It means that you are willing not to know yourself in order to be sick. This is the offering which your god demands because, having made him out of your insanity, he is an insane idea. He has many forms, but although he may seem like many different things, he is but one idea-the denial of God.

 

⁹⁶ Sickness and death entered the mind of God's Son against His Will. The "attack on God" made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression, he made the god of depression. This was his alternative to joy, because he would not accept the fact that, although he was a creator, he had been created. Yet the Son is helpless without the Father, Who alone is his help. We said before that of yourselves you can do nothing, but you are not of yourselves. If you were, what you have made would be true, and you could never escape.

 

⁹⁷ It is because you did not make yourselves that you need be troubled by nothing. Your gods are nothing because your Father did not create them. You cannot make creators who are unlike your Creator any more than He could have created a Son who was unlike Him. If creation is sharing, it cannot create what is unlike itself. It can share only what it is. Depression is isolation, and so it could not have been created.

 

⁹⁸ Son of God, you have not sinned, but you have been much mistaken. Yet this can be corrected, and God will help you, knowing that you could not sin against Him. You denied Him because you loved Him, knowing that if you recognized your love for Him, you could not deny Him. Your denial of Him therefore means that you love Him and that you know He loves you. Remember that what you deny, you must have known. And if you accept denial, you can accept its undoing.

 

⁹⁹ Your Father has not denied you. He does not retaliate, but He does call to you to return. When you think He has not answered your call, you have not answered His. He calls to you from every part of the Sonship because of His love for His Son. If you hear His message, He has answered you, and you will learn of Him if you hear aright. The love of God is in everything He created, for His Son is everywhere. Look with peace upon your brothers, and God will come rushing into your heart in gratitude for your gift to Him.

 

¹⁰⁰ Do not look to the god of sickness for healing but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him. When you acknowledge Him, you will know that He has never ceased to acknowledge you and that in His acknowledgment of you lies your Being. You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do. Remember, though, that to do this is blasphemy, for it means that you are looking without love on God and His creation, from which He cannot be separated. Only the eternal can be loved, for love does not die. What is of God is His forever, and you are of God. Would He allow Himself to suffer? And would He offer His Son anything that is not acceptable to Him?

 

¹⁰¹ If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. Yet to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father is the acknowledgment of yourself as you are. Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your own mind because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also deny what it creates because it is free.

 

¹⁰² You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God in His love would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you because He would not know His Son if he were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane. When you denied Him, you were insane. Would you have Him share your insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. That was the condition of His Son's creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. To know that is sanity. To deny it is insanity. God gave Himself to you in your creation, and His gifts are eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him?

 

¹⁰³ Out of your gifts to Him, the Kingdom will be restored to His Son. His Son removed himself from His gift by refusing to accept what had been created for him and what he himself had created in the Name of his Father. Heaven waits for his return, for it was created as the dwelling place of God's Son. You are not at home anywhere else or in any other condition. Do not deny yourself the joy which was created for you for the misery you have made for yourselves. God has given you the means for undoing what you have made. Listen and you will learn what you are.

 

¹⁰⁴ If God knows His Children as wholly sinless, it is blasphemous to perceive them as guilty. If God knows His Children as wholly without pain, it is blasphemous to perceive suffering anywhere. If God knows His Children to be wholly joyous, it is blasphemous to feel depressed. All of these illusions and the many other forms which blasphemy may take are refusals to accept creation as it is. If God created His Son perfect, that is how you must learn to see him to learn of his reality. And as part of the Sonship, that is how you must see yourself to learn of yours.

 

¹⁰⁵ Do not perceive anything God did not create, or you are denying Him. His is the only Fatherhood, and it is yours only because He has given it to you. Your gifts to yourself are meaningless, but your gifts to your creations are like His because they are given in His Name. That is why your creations are as real as His. Yet the real Fatherhood must be acknowledged if the real Son is to be known. You believe that the sick things which you have made are your real creations because you believe that the sick images you perceive are the Sons of God.

 

¹⁰⁶ Only if you accept the Fatherhood of God will you have anything because His fatherhood gave you everything. That is why to deny Him is to deny yourself. Arrogance is the denial of love because love shares and arrogance withholds. As long as both appear to you to be desirable, the concept of choice, which is not of God, will remain with you. While this is not true in eternity, it is true in time, so that while time lasts in your minds, there will be choices. Time itself was your choice.

  

¹⁰⁷ If you would remember eternity, you must learn to look only on the eternal. If you allow yourselves to become preoccupied with the temporal, you are living in time. As always, your choice is determined by what you value. Time and eternity cannot both be real because they contradict each other. If you will accept only what is timeless as real, you will begin to understand eternity and make it yours.