¹ Fear is a stranger to the ways of love. Identify with fear, and you will be a stranger to yourself. And thus you are unknown to you. What is your Self remains an alien to the part of you which thinks that it is real but different from yourself. Who could be sane in such a circumstance? Who but a madman could believe he is what he is not and judge against himself?

² There is a stranger in our midst who comes from an idea so foreign to the truth he speaks a different language, looks upon a world truth does not know, and understands what truth regards as senseless. Stranger yet, he does not recognize to whom he comes and yet maintains his home belongs to him, while he is alien now who is at home.

³And yet how easy it would be to say, "This is my home. Here I belong and will not leave because a madman says I must." What reason is there for not saying this? What could the reason be except that you had asked this stranger in to take your place and let you be a stranger to yourself? No one would let himself be dispossessed so needlessly unless he thought there was another home more suited to his tastes.

⁴ Who is the stranger? Is it fear or you that is unsuited to the home which God provided for His Son? Is fear His own, created in His likeness? Is it fear that love completes and is completed by? There is no home can shelter love and fear. They cannot coexist. If you are real, then fear must be illusion. And if fear is real, then you do not exist at all.

⁵ How simply, then, the question is resolved. Who fears has but denied himself and said, "I am the stranger here. And so I leave my home to one more like me than myself and give him all I thought belonged to me." Now is he exiled of necessity, not knowing who he is, uncertain of all things but this—that he is not himself and that his home has been denied to him.

⁶ What does he search for now? What can he find? A stranger to himself can find no home wherever he may look, for he has made return impossible. His way is lost except a miracle will search him out and show him that he is no stranger now. The miracle will come. For in his home his Self remains. It asked no stranger in and took no alien thought to be Itself. And It will call its own unto Itself, in recognition of what is Its own.

⁷ Who is the stranger? Is he not the one your Self calls not? You are unable now to recognize this stranger in your midst, for you have given him your rightful place. Yet is your Self as certain of Its own as God is of His Son. He cannot be confused about creation. He is sure of what belongs to Him. No stranger can be interposed between His knowledge and His Son's reality. He does not know of strangers. He is certain of His Son.

⁸ God's certainty suffices. Who He knows to be His Son belongs where He has set His Son forever. He has answered you who ask, "Who is the stranger?" Hear His Voice assure you, quietly and sure, that you are not a stranger to your Father, nor is your Creator stranger made to you. Whom God has joined remains forever one, at home in Him, no stranger to Himself.

⁹Today we offer thanks that Christ has come to search the world for what belongs to Him. His vision sees no strangers, but beholds His own and joyously unites with them. They see Him as a stranger, for they do not recognize themselves. Yet as they give Him welcome, they remember. And He leads them gently home again where they belong.

¹⁰Not one does Christ forget. Not one He fails to give you to remember that your home may be complete and perfect as it was established. He has not forgotten you. But you will not remember Him until you look on all as He does. Who denies his brother is denying Him and thus refusing to accept the gift of sight by which his Self is clearly recognized, his home remembered, and salvation come.

Course in Miracles

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TEXT

Chapter 14

Bringing Illusions to Truth



V. The Recognition of Holiness

Par 38-45

³⁸ The Atonement does not make holy. You were created holy. It merely brings unholiness to holiness, or what you made to what you are. The bringing together of truth and illusion, of the ego to God, is the Holy Spirit's only function. Keep not your making from your Father, for hiding it has cost you knowledge of Him and of yourselves. The knowledge is safe, but wherein is your safety apart from it? The making of time to take the place of timelessness lay in the decision to be not as you were. Thus, truth was made past, and the present was dedicated to illusion. And the past, too, was changed and interposed between what always was and now. The past which you remember never was and represents only the denial of what always was.

³⁹ Bringing the ego to God is but to bring error to truth, where it stands corrected because it is the opposite of what it meets and is undone, because the contradiction can no longer stand. How long can contradiction stand when its impossible nature is clearly revealed? What disappears in light is not attacked. It merely vanishes because it is not true. Different realities are meaningless, for reality must be one. It cannot change with time or mood or chance. Its changelessness is what makes it real. This cannot be undone. Undoing is for unreality. And this reality will do for you.

⁴⁰ Merely by being what it is does truth release you from everything that it is not. The Atonement is so gentle you need but whisper to it, and all its power will rush to your assistance and support. You are not frail with God beside you. Yet without Him you are nothing. The Atonement offers you God. The gift which you refused is held by Him in you. His Spirit holds it there for you. God has not left His altar, though His worshiper placed other gods upon it. The temple still is holy, for the Presence that dwells within it is Holiness.

⁴¹ In the temple Holiness waits quietly for the return of them that love it. The Presence knows they will return to purity and to grace. The graciousness of God will take them gently in and cover all their sense of pain and loss with the immortal assurance of their Father's Love. There, fear of death will be replaced with joy of living. For God is Life, and they abide in Life. [Life is as holy as the Holiness by which it was created.] The Presence of Holiness lives in everything that lives, for Holiness created life and leaves not what It created holy as Itself.

⁴² In this world you can become a spotless mirror in which the Holiness of your Creator shines forth from you to all around you. You can reflect Heaven here. Yet no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it. God will shine upon it of Himself. Only the clear reflection of Himself can be perceived upon it. Reflections are seen in light. In darkness they are obscure, and their meaning seems to lie only in shifting interpretations rather than in themselves.

⁴³ The reflection of God needs no interpretation. It is clear. Clean but the mirror, and the message which shines forth from what the mirror holds out for everyone to see no one can fail to understand. It is the message that the Holy Spirit is holding to the mirror that is in him. He recognizes it because he has been taught his need for it but knows not where to look to find it. Let him, then, see it in you and share it with you.

⁴⁴ Could you but realize for a single instant the power of healing that the reflection of God, shining in you, can bring to all the world, you could not wait to make the mirror of your mind clean to receive the image of the holiness that heals the world. The image of holiness which shines in your mind is not obscure and will not change. Its meaning to those who look upon it is not obscure, for everyone perceives it as the same. All bring their different problems to its healing light, but all their problems are met only with healing there.

⁴⁵ The response of holiness to any form of error is always the same. There is no contradiction in what holiness calls forth. Its one response is healing, without regard for what is brought to it. Those who have learned to offer only healing because of the reflection of holiness in them are ready at last for Heaven. There, holiness is not a reflection but rather the actual condition of what was but reflected to them here. God is no image, and His creations, as part of Him, hold Him in them in truth. They do not merely reflect truth, for they are truth.

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