¹ What has been given you? The knowledge that you are a mind, in Mind and purely mind, sinless forever, wholly unafraid because you were created out of Love. Nor have you left your Source, remaining as you were created. This was given you as knowledge which you cannot lose. It was given as well to every living thing, for by that knowledge only does it live.

² You have received all this. No one who walks the world but has received it. It is not this knowledge which you give, for that is what creation gave. All this cannot be learned. What, then, are you to learn to give today? Our lesson yesterday evoked a theme found early in the text. Experience cannot be shared directly in the way that vision can. The revelation that the Father and the Son are one will come in time to every mind. Yet is that time determined by the mind itself, not taught.

³ The time is set already. It appears to be quite arbitrary. Yet there is no step along the road that anyone takes but by chance. It has already been taken by him, although he has not yet embarked on it. For time but seems to go in one direction. We but undertake a journey that is over. Yet it seems to have a future still unknown to us.

⁴ Time is a trick-a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic. Yet there is a plan behind appearances which does not change. The script is written. When experience will come to end your doubting has been set. For we but see the journey from the point at which it ended, looking back on it, imagining we make it once again; reviewing mentally what has gone by.

⁵ A teacher does not give experience because he did not learn it. It revealed itself to him at its appointed time. But vision is his gift. This he can give directly, for Christ's knowledge is not lost because He has a vision He can give to anyone who asks. The Father's Will and His are joined in knowledge. Yet there is a vision which the Holy Spirit sees because the mind of Christ beholds it too.

⁶Here is the joining of the world of doubt and shadows made with the intangible. Here is a quiet place within the world made holy by forgiveness and by love. Here are all contradictions reconciled, for here the journey ends. Experience, unlearned, untaught, unseen, is merely there. This is beyond our goal, for it transcends what needs to be accomplished. Our concern is with Christ's vision. This we can attain.

⁷ Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body, an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings, and all events without the slightest fading of the light it sees.

⁸ This can be taught and must be taught by all who would achieve it. It requires but the recognition that the world cannot give anything that faintly can compare with this in value; nor set up a goal which does not merely disappear when this has been perceived. And this you give today-see no one as a body. Greet him as the Son of God he is, acknowledging that he is one with you in holiness.

⁹ Thus are his sins forgiven him, for Christ has vision which has power to overlook them all. In His forgiveness, they are gone. Unseen by One, they merely disappear because a vision of the holiness which lies beyond them comes to take their place. It matters not what form they took nor how enormous they appeared to be nor who seemed to be hurt by them. They are no more, and all effects they seemed to have are gone with them, undone and never to be done.

¹⁰Thus do you learn to give as you receive. And thus Christ's vision looks on you as well. This lesson is not difficult to learn if you remember in your brother you but see yourself. If he be lost in sin so must you be; if you see light in him your sins have been forgiven by yourself. Each brother whom you meet today provides another chance to let Christ's vision shine on you and offer you the peace of God.

¹¹ It matters not when revelation comes, for that is not of time. Yet time has still one gift to give in which true knowledge is reflected in a way so accurate its image shares its unseen holiness; its likeness shines with its immortal love. We practice seeing with the eyes of Christ today. And by the holy gifts we give, Christ's vision looks upon ourselves as well.

Course in Miracles

Original Edition

TEXT

Chapter 14

Bringing Illusions to Truth



III. Out of the Darkness

Par 16-23

[READING PAUSED FOR WEEKEND]

¹⁶ The journey that we undertake together is the exchange of dark for light, of ignorance for understanding. Nothing you understand is fearful. It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the frightening, and you shrink away from it to further darkness. And yet it is only the hidden that can terrify, not for what it is, but for its hiddenness. The obscure is frightening because you do not understand its meaning. If you did, it would be clear, and you would be no longer in the dark. Nothing has hidden value, for what is hidden cannot be shared, and so its value is unknown. The hidden is kept apart, but value always lies in joint appreciation. What is concealed cannot be loved, and so it must be feared.

¹⁷ The quiet light in which the Holy Spirit dwells within you is merely perfect openness in which nothing is hidden and therefore nothing is fearful. Attack will always yield to love if it is brought to love, not hidden from it. There is no darkness that the light of love will not dispel, unless it is concealed from love's beneficence. What is kept apart from love cannot share its healing power, because it has been separated off and kept in darkness. The sentinels of darkness watch over it carefully, and you who made these guardians of illusion out of nothing are now afraid of them.

¹⁸ Would you continue to give imagined power to these strange ideas of safety? They are neither safe nor unsafe. They do not protect; neither do they attack. They do nothing at all, being nothing at all. As guardians of darkness and of ignorance, look to them only for fear, for what they keep obscure is fearful. But let them go, and what was fearful will be so no longer. Without protection of obscurity, only the light of love remains, for only this has meaning and can live in light. Everything else must disappear.

¹⁹ Death yields to life simply because destruction is not true. The light of guiltlessness shines guilt away because, when they are brought together, the truth of one must make the falsity of its opposite perfectly clear. Keep not guilt and guiltlessness apart, for your belief that you can have them both is meaningless. All you have done by keeping them apart is lose their meaning by confusing them with each other. And so you do not realize that only one means anything, and the other is wholly without sense of any kind.

²⁰ You have interpreted the separation as a means which you have made for breaking your communication with your Father. The Holy Spirit reinterprets it as a means of reestablishing what has not been broken but has been made obscure. All things you made have use to Him for His most holy purpose. He knows you are not separate from God, but He perceives much in your mind that lets you think you are. All this, and nothing else, would He separate from you. The power of decision, which you made in place of the power of creation, He would teach you how to use on your behalf. You who made it to crucify yourselves must learn of Him how to apply it to the holy cause of restoration.

²¹ You who speak in dark and devious symbols do not understand the language you have made. It has no meaning, for its purpose is not communication, but rather the disruption of communication. If the purpose of language is communication, how can this tongue mean anything? Yet even this strange and twisted effort to communicate through not communicating holds enough of love to make it meaningful if its interpreter is not its maker. You who made it are but expressing conflict, from which the Holy Spirit would release you. Leave what you would communicate to Him. He will interpret it to you with perfect clarity, for He knows with Whom you are in perfect communication.

²² You know not what you say, and so you know not what is said to you. Yet your Interpreter perceives the meaning in your alien language. He will not attempt to communicate the meaningless. But He will separate out all that has meaning, dropping off the rest and offering your true communication to those who would communicate as truly with you. You speak two languages at once, and this must lead to unintelligibility. Yet if one means nothing and the other everything, only that one is possible for purposes of communication. The other but interferes with it.

²³ The Holy Spirit's function is entirely communication. He therefore must remove whatever interferes with it in order to restore it. Therefore, keep no source of interference from His sight, for He will not attack your sentinels. But bring them to Him, and let His gentleness teach you that in the light they are not fearful and cannot serve to guard the dark doors behind which nothing at all is carefully concealed. We must open all doors and let the light come streaming through. There are no hidden chambers in God's temple. Its gates are open wide to greet His Son. No one can fail to come where God has called him if he close not the door himself upon his Father's welcome.

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