¹ Today's idea but states the simple truth that makes the thought of sin impossible. It promises there is no cause for guilt, and being causeless it does not exist. It follows surely from the basic thought so often mentioned in the text—ideas leave not their source. If this be true, how can you be apart from God? How could you walk the world alone and separate from your Source?

² We are not inconsistent in the thoughts that we present in our curriculum. Truth must be true throughout if it be true. It cannot contradict itself nor be in parts uncertain and in others sure. You cannot walk the world apart from God because you could not be without Him. He is what your life is. Where you are, He is. There is one Life. That Life you share with Him. Nothing can be apart from Him and live.

³ Yet where He is there must be holiness as well as life. No attribute of His remains unshared by everything that lives. What lives is holy as Himself because what shares His life is part of Holiness and could no more be sinful than the sun could choose to be of ice, the sea elect to be apart from water, or the grass to grow with roots suspended in the air.

⁴ There is a Light in you Which cannot die, Whose Presence is so holy that the world is sanctified because of you. All things that live bring gifts to you and offer them in gratitude and gladness at your feet. The scent of flowers is their gift to you. The waves bow down before you, and the trees extend their arms to shield you from the heat and lay their leaves before you on the ground that you may walk in softness, while the wind sinks to a whisper round your holy head.

⁵ The Light in you is what the universe longs to behold. All living things are still before you, for they recognize Who walks with you. The light you carry is their own, and thus they see in you their holiness, saluting you as savior and as God. Accept their reverence, for it is due to Holiness itself Which walks with you, transforming in Its gentle Light all things into Its likeness and Its purity.

⁶ This is the way salvation works. As you step back, the Light in you steps forward and encompasses the world. It heralds not the end of sin in punishment and death. In lightness and in laughter is it gone, because its quaint absurdity is seen. It is a foolish thought, a silly dream, not frightening, ridiculous perhaps, but who would waste an instant in approach to God Himself for such a senseless whim?

⁷ Yet you have wasted many, many years on just this foolish thought. The past is gone with all its fantasies. They keep you bound no longer. The approach to God is near. And in the little interval of doubt which still remains, you may perhaps lose sight of your Companion, and mistake Him for the senseless, ancient dream that now is past.

^{8 "}Who walks with me?" This question should be asked a thousand times a day, till certainty has ended doubting and established peace. Today let doubting cease. God speaks for you in answering your question with these words:

⁹ I walk with God in perfect holiness. I light the world, I light my mind and all the minds which God created one with me.

Course in Miracles

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TEXT

Chapter 14

Bringing Illusions to Truth



III. Out of the Darkness

Par 16-23

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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