¹ It is important to remember that miracles and vision necessarily go together. This needs repeating and frequent repeating. It is a central idea in your new thought system and the perception which it produces. The miracle is always there. Its presence is not caused by your vision; its absence is not the result of your failure to see. It is only your awareness of miracles that is affected. You will see it in the light; you will not see it in the dark.

² To you, then, light is crucial. While you remain in darkness, the miracle remains unseen. Thus you are convinced it is not there. This follows from the premises from which the darkness comes. Denial of light leads to failure to perceive it. Failure to perceive light is to perceive darkness. The light is useless to you then, even though it is there. You cannot use it because its presence is unknown to you. And the seeming reality of the darkness makes the idea of light meaningless.

³ To be told that what you do not see is there sounds like insanity. It is very difficult to become convinced that it is insanity not to see what is there and to see what is not there instead. You do not doubt that the body's eyes can see. You do not doubt the images they show you are reality. Your faith lies in the darkness, not the light.

⁴ How can this be reversed? For you it is impossible, but you are not alone in this. Your efforts, however little they may be, have strong support. Did you but realize how great this strength, your doubts would vanish. Today we will devote ourselves to the attempt to let you feel this strength. When you have felt the strength in you which makes all miracles within your easy reach, you will not doubt. The miracles your sense of weakness hides will leap into awareness as you feel the strength in you.

⁵ Three times today, set aside about ten minutes for a quiet time in which you try to leave your weakness behind. This is accomplished very simply, as you instruct yourself that you are not a body. Faith goes to what you want, and you instruct your mind accordingly. Your will remains your teacher, and your will has all the strength to do what it desires. You can escape the body if you choose. You can experience the strength in you.

⁶ Begin the longer practice periods with this statement of true cause and effect relationships:

⁷ Miracles are seen in light.

The body's eyes do not perceive the light. But I am not a body. What am I?

⁸ The question with which this statement ends is needed for our exercises today. What you think you are is a belief to be undone. But what you really are must be revealed to you. The belief you are a body calls for correction, being a mistake. The truth of what you are calls on the strength in you to bring to your awareness what the mistake concealed.

⁹ If you are not a body, what are you? You need to be aware of what the Holy Spirit uses to replace the image of a body in your mind. You need to feel something to put your faith in, as you lift it from the body. You need a real experience of something else, something more solid and more sure, more worthy of your faith, and really there.

¹⁰ If you are not a body, what are you? Ask this in honesty, and then devote several minutes to allowing your mistaken thoughts about your attributes to be corrected, and their opposites to take their place. Say, for example:

¹¹ I am not weak, but strong.

 I am not helpless, but all powerful.

 I am not limited, but unlimited.

 I am not doubtful, but certain.

 I am not an illusion, but a reality.

 I cannot see in darkness, but in light.

¹² In the second phase of the exercise period, try to experience these truths about yourself. Concentrate particularly on the experience of strength. Remember that all sense of weakness is associated with the belief you are a body, a belief that is mistaken and deserves no faith. Try to remove your faith from it, if only for a moment. You will become accustomed to keeping faith with the more worthy in you as we go along.

¹³ Relax for the rest of the practice period, confident that your efforts, however meager, are fully supported by the strength of God and all His Thoughts. It is from Them your strength will come. It is through Their strong support that you will feel the strength in you. They are united with you in this practice period in which you share a purpose like Their own. Theirs is the light in which you will see miracles because Their strength is yours. Their strength becomes your eyes that you may see.

¹⁴ Five or six times an hour at reasonably regular intervals remind yourself that miracles are seen in light. Also, be sure to meet temptation with today's idea. This form would be helpful for this special purpose:

¹⁵ Miracles are seen in light. Let me not close my eyes because of this.

Course in Miracles

Original Edition

TEXT

Chapter 8

The Journey Back



V. The Light of the World

par 25-41

²⁵ If God's Will for you is complete peace and joy, unless you experience only this you must be refusing to acknowledge His Will. His Will does not vacillate, being changeless forever. When you are not at peace, it can only be because you do not believe you are in Him. Yet He is all in all. His peace is complete, and you must be included in it. His laws govern you, because they govern everything. You cannot exempt yourself from His laws, although you can disobey them. Yet if you do, and only if you do, you will feel lonely and helpless, because you are denying yourself everything.

²⁶ I am come as a light into a world that does deny itself everything. It does this simply by dissociating itself from everything. It is therefore an illusion of isolation, maintained by fear of the same loneliness which is its illusion. I have told you that I am with you always, even to the end of the world. That is why I am the light of the world. If I am with you in the loneliness of the world, the loneliness is gone. You cannot maintain the illusion of loneliness if you are not alone. My purpose, then, is to overcome the world. I do not attack it, but my light must dispel it because of what it is.

²⁷ Light does not attack darkness, but it does shine it away. If my light goes with you everywhere, you shine it away with me. The light becomes ours, and you cannot abide in darkness any more than darkness can abide wherever you go. The remembrance of me is the remembrance of yourself and of Him Who sent me to you. You were in darkness until God's Will was done completely by any part of the Sonship. When this was done, it was perfectly accomplished by all. How else could it be perfectly accomplished? My mission was simply to unite the will of the Sonship with the Will of the Father by being aware of the Father's Will myself. This is the awareness I came to give you, and your problem in accepting it is the problem of this world. Dispelling it is salvation, and in this sense I am the salvation of the world.

²⁸ The world must despise and reject me, because the world is the belief that love is impossible. Your reactions to me are the reactions of the world to God. If you will accept the fact that I am with you, you are denying the world and accepting God. My will is His, and your will to hear me is the decision to hear His Voice and abide in His Will. As God sent me to you, so will I send you to others, and I will go to them with you so we can teach them [union and peace].

²⁹ Do you not think the world needs peace as much as you do? Do you not want to give it to the world as much as you want to receive it? For unless you do, you will not receive it. If you will to have it of me, you must give it. Rehabilitation does not come from anyone else. You can have guidance from without, but you must accept it from within. The guidance must [become] what you want, or it will be meaningless to you. That is why rehabilitation is a collaborative venture.

³⁰ I can tell you what to do, but this will not help you unless you collaborate by believing that I know what to do. Only then will your mind choose to follow me. Without your will, you cannot be rehabilitated. Motivation to be healed is the crucial factor in rehabilitation. Without this you are deciding against healing, and your veto of my will for you makes healing impossible. If healing is our joint will, unless our wills are joined you cannot be healed. This is obvious when you consider what healing is for. Healing is the way in which the separation is overcome. Separation is overcome by union. It cannot be overcome by separating.

³¹ The will to unite must be unequivocal, or the will itself is divided or not whole. Your will is the means by which you determine your own condition, because will is the mechanism of decision. It is the power by which you separate or join and experience pain or joy accordingly. My will cannot overcome yours, because yours is as powerful as mine. If it were not so, the Sons of God would be unequal. All things are possible through our joint will, but my will alone cannot help you. Your will is as free as mine, and God Himself would not go against it. I cannot will what God does not will. I can offer you my will to make yours invincible by this sharing, but I cannot oppose yours without competing with it and thereby violating God's Will for you.

³² Nothing God created can oppose your will, as nothing God created can oppose His. God gave your will its power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of His. If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing that we are alike. If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind. I can teach you, but only you can choose to listen to my teaching. How else can it be, if God's Kingdom is freedom? Freedom cannot be learned by tyranny of any kind, and the perfect equality of all God's Sons cannot be recognized through the dominion of one will over another. God's Sons are equal in will, all being the Will of their Father. This is the only lesson I came to teach, knowing that it is true.

³³ When your will is not mine, it is not our Father's. This means that you have imprisoned yours and have not let it be free. Of yourselves you can do nothing, because of yourselves you are nothing. I am nothing without the Father, and you are nothing without me, because by denying the Father you deny yourself. I will always remember you, and in my remembrance of you lies your remembrance of yourself. In our remembrance of each other lies our remembrance of God, and in this remembrance lies your freedom because your freedom is in Him. Join then with me in praise of Him and you whom He created. This is our gift of gratitude to Him, which He will share with all His creations, to whom He gives equally whatever is acceptable to Him. Because it is acceptable to Him, it is the gift of freedom, which is His Will for all His Sons. By offering freedom, you will be free.

³⁴ Freedom is the only gift you can offer to God's Sons, being an acknowledgment of what they are and what He is. Freedom is creation because it is love. What you seek to imprison you do not love. Therefore, when you seek to imprison anyone, including yourself, you do not love him, and you cannot identify with him. When you imprison yourself, you are losing sight of your true identification with me and with the Father. Your identification is with the Father and with the Son. It cannot be with one and not the other. If you are part of one, you must be part of the other because they are one.

³⁵ The Holy Trinity is holy because it is one. If you exclude yourself from this union, you are perceiving the Holy Trinity as separated. You must be included in It because It is everything. Unless you take your place in It and fulfill your function as part of It, It is as bereft as you are. No part of It can be imprisoned if Its truth is to be known. Can you be separated from your identification and be at peace? Dissociation is not a solution; it is a delusion. The delusional believe that truth will assail them, and so they do not see it because they prefer the delusion. Judging truth as something they do not want, they perceive deception and block knowledge.

³⁶ Help them by offering them your unified will on their behalf, as I am offering you mine on yours. Alone we can do nothing, but together our wills fuse into something whose power is far beyond the power of its separate parts. By not being separate, the Will of God is established in ours and as ours. This Will is invincible because it is undivided. The undivided will of the Sonship is the perfect creator, being wholly in the likeness of God, Whose Will it is. You cannot be exempt from it if you are to understand what it is and what you are. By separating your will from mine, you are exempting yourself from the Will of God, which is yourself.

³⁷ Yet to heal is still to make whole. Therefore, to heal is to unite with those who are like you, because perceiving this likeness is to recognize the Father. If your perfection is in Him and only in Him, how can you know it without recognizing Him? The recognition of God is the recognition of yourself. There is no separation of God and His creation. You will learn this as you learn that there is no separation of your will and mine. Let the love of God shine upon you by your acceptance of me. My reality is yours and His. By joining your will with mine, you are signifying your awareness that the Will of God is one.

³⁸ God's Oneness and ours are not separate, because His Oneness encompasses ours. To join with me is to restore His power to you, because we are sharing it. I offer you only the recognition of His power in you, but in that lies all truth. As we unite, we unite with Him. Glory be to the union of God and His holy Sons! All glory lies in them because they are united. The miracles we do bear witness to the Will of the Father for His Son and to our joy in uniting with His Will for us.

³⁹ When you unite with me, you are uniting without the ego, because I have renounced the ego in myself and therefore cannot unite with yours. Our union is therefore the way to renounce the ego in yourself. The truth in both of us is beyond the ego. By willing that, you have gone beyond it toward truth. Our success in transcending the ego is guaranteed by God, and I can share [my perfect confidence in His promise because I know He gave me] this confidence for both of us and all of us. I bring God's peace back to all His Children because I received it of Him for us all. Nothing can prevail against our united wills because nothing can prevail against God's. Would you know the Will of God for you? Ask it of me who knows it for you, and you will find it. I will deny you nothing, as God denies me nothing.

⁴⁰ Ours is simply the journey back to God, Who is our home. Whenever fear intrudes anywhere along the road to peace, it is always because the ego has attempted to join the journey with us and cannot do so. Sensing defeat and angered by it, the ego regards itself as rejected and becomes retaliative. You are invulnerable to its retaliation because I am with you. On this journey, you have chosen me as your companion instead of the ego. Do not try to hold on to both, or you will try to go in different directions and will lose the way.

⁴¹ The ego's way is not mine, but it is also not yours. The Holy Spirit has one direction for all minds, and the one He taught me is yours. Let us not lose sight of His direction through illusions, for only illusions of another direction can obscure the one for which God's Voice speaks in all of us. Never accord the ego the power to interfere with the journey, because it has none, [and] the journey is the way to what is true. Leave all deception behind and reach beyond all attempts of the ego to hold you back. I go before you because I am beyond the ego. Reach therefore for my hand because you want to transcend the ego. My will will never be wanting, and if you want to share it you will. I give it willingly and gladly because I need you as much as you need me.

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