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Love does not conquer all things,

but it does set all things right. T.4.90

Part 1

¹ No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. When this is seen, healing is automatic. It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth and merely leaves them there to disappear.

² Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole. The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.

³ Defenses are not unintentional nor are they made without awareness. They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do and then proceed to think that it is done.

⁴ Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real? All this cannot be done unconsciously. But afterwards your plan requires that you must forget you made it, so it seems to be external to your own intent-a happening beyond your state of mind, an outcome with a real effect on you instead of one effected by your self.

⁵ It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your "reality" which makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control. But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion. Your not remembering is but the sign that this decision still remains in force as far as your desires are concerned.

⁶ Mistake this not for fact. Defenses must make facts unrecognizable. They aim at doing this, and this they seem to do. Every defense takes fragments of the whole, assembles them without regard to all their true relationships, and thus constructs illusions of a whole which is not there. It is this process which imposes threat, and not whatever outcome may result.

⁷ When parts are wrested from the whole and seen as separate and wholes within themselves, they become symbols standing for attack upon the whole, successful in effect, and never to be seen as whole again. And yet you have forgotten that they stand but for your own decision of what should be real, to take the place of what is real.

⁸ Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more.

⁹ How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth. You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it. Thus is your "true" identity preserved and the strange, haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs, and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be.

¹⁰ Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live but cannot overcome your choice to die. And so the body is more powerful than everlasting life, Heaven more frail than hell, and God's design for the salvation of His Son opposed by a decision stronger than His Will. His Son is dust, the Father incomplete, and chaos sits in triumph on His throne.

¹¹ Such is your planning for your own defense. And you believe that Heaven quails before such mad attacks as these, with God made blind by your illusions, truth turned into lies, and all the universe made slave to laws which your defenses would impose on it. Yet who believes illusions but the one who made them up? Who else can see them and react to them as if they were the truth?

¹² God knows not of your plans to change His Will. The universe remains unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it. And Heaven has not bowed to hell, nor life to death. You can but choose to think you die or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin.

¹³Such is the simple truth. It does not make appeal to might nor triumph. It does not command obedience nor seek to prove how pitiful and futile are your attempts to plan defenses which would alter it. It merely wants to give you happiness, for such its purpose is. Perhaps it sighs a little when you throw away its gifts, and yet it knows with perfect certainty that what God wills for you must be received.

¹⁴ It is this fact which demonstrates that time is an illusion. For it lets you think what God has given you is not the truth right now, as it must be. The Thoughts of God are quite apart from time. For time is but another meaningless defense you made against the truth. Yet what God wills is here, and you remain as He created you.

¹⁵ Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where it has been allowed to enter. And it comes to any mind that would lay down its arms and cease to play with folly. It is found at any time-today, if you will choose to practice giving welcome to the truth. This is our aim today. And we will give a quarter of an hour twice to ask the truth to come to us and set us free.

¹⁶ And truth will come, for it has never been apart from us. It merely waits for just this invitation which we give today. We introduce it with a healing prayer to help us rise above defensiveness and let truth be as it has always been:

¹⁷ Sickness is a defense against the truth. I will accept the truth of what I am

¹⁸ Healing will flash across your open mind as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures from your dreams nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey.

¹⁹ Now is the body healed because the source of sickness has been opened to relief. And you will recognize you practiced well by this-the body should not feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what the body does. Its usefulness remains and nothing more.

²⁰ Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.

²¹ Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment, or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. Give instant remedy should this occur by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer. Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself:

²² I have forgotten what I really am, for I mistook my body for myself. Sickness is a defense against the truth, but I am not a body. And my mind cannot attack. So I can not be sick.

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PART I 220-1 ~ PART II 365-221

PART 1 ~ PART 2

Chapter 11

X. Guiltlessness and Invulnerability

par 85-99

⁸⁵ If you did not feel guilty, you could not attack, for condemnation is the root of attack. It is the judgment of one mind by another as unworthy of love and deserving of punishment. But herein lies the split. For the mind that judges perceives itself as separate from the mind being judged, believing that by punishing another, it will escape punishment. All this is but the delusional attempt of the mind to deny itself and escape the penalty of denial. It is not an attempt to relinquish denial but to hold on to it. For it is guilt that has obscured the Father to you, and it is guilt that has driven you insane.

⁸⁶ The acceptance of guilt into the mind of God's Son was the beginning of the separation, as the acceptance of the Atonement is its end. The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its powers decline if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel.

⁸⁷ If this were the real world, God would be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation and be loving. Love does not kill to save. If it did, attack would be salvation, and this is the ego's interpretation, not God's. Only the world of guilt could demand this, for only the guilty could conceive of it. Adam's "sin" could have touched none of you, had you not believed that it was the Father Who drove him out of paradise. For in that belief, the knowledge of the Father was lost, since only those who do not understand Him could believe it.

⁸⁸ This world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son. And until you realize that God's Son cannot be crucified, this is the world you will see. Yet you will not realize this until you accept the eternal fact that God's Son is not guilty. He deserves only love because he has given only love. He cannot be condemned because he has never condemned. The Atonement is the final lesson he need learn, for it teaches him that, never having sinned, he has no need of salvation.

⁸⁹ Long ago we said that the Holy Spirit shares the goal of all good teachers, whose ultimate aim is to make themselves unnecessary by teaching their pupils all they know. The Holy Spirit wills only this, for sharing the Father's love for His Son, He wills to remove all guilt from his mind that he may remember his Father in peace. For peace and guilt are antithetical, and the Father can be remembered only in peace. Love and guilt cannot coexist, and to accept one is to deny the other. Guilt hides Christ from your sight, for it is the denial of the blamelessness of God's Son.

⁹⁰ In this strange world which you have made, the Son of God has sinned. How could you see him, then? By making him invisible, the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt which you accepted, and you hold it dear. For the blamelessness of Christ is the proof that the ego never was and can never be. Without guilt the ego has no life, and God's Son is without guilt. As you look upon yourselves and judge what you do honestly, as you have been asked to do, you may be tempted to wonder how you can be guiltless.

⁹¹ Yet consider this: You are not guiltless in time, but in eternity. You have "sinned" in the past, but there is no past. Always has no direction. Time seems to go in one direction, but when you reach its end, it will roll up like a long carpet which has spread along the past behind you and will disappear. As long as you believe the Son of God is guilty, you will walk along this carpet, believing that it leads to death. And the journey will seem long and cruel and senseless, for so it is.

⁹² The journey which the Son of God has set himself is foolish indeed, but the journey on which his Father sets him is one of release and joy. The Father is not cruel, and His Son cannot hurt himself. The retaliation he fears and which he sees will never touch him, for although he believes in it, the Holy Spirit knows it is not true. The Holy Spirit stands at the end of time, where you must be because He is with you. He has always undone everything unworthy of the Son of God, for such was His mission, given Him by God. And what God gives has always been.

⁹³ You will see me as you learn the Son of God is guiltless. He has always sought his guiltlessness, and he has found it. For everyone is seeking to escape from the prison he has made, and the way to find release is not denied him. Being in him, he has found it. When he finds it is only a matter of time, and time is but an illusion. For the Son of God is guiltless now, and the brightness of his purity shines untouched forever in God's Mind. God's Son will always be as he was created. Deny your world and judge him not, for his eternal guiltlessness is in the Mind of his Father, and protects him forever.

⁹⁴ When you have accepted the Atonement for yourselves, you will realize that there is no guilt in God's Son. And only as you look upon him as guiltless can you understand his oneness. For the idea of guilt brings a belief in condemnation of one by another, projecting separation in place of unity. You can condemn only yourself, and by so doing, you cannot know that you are God's Son. You have denied the condition of his Being, which is his perfect blamelessness. Out of love he was created, and in love he abides. Goodness and mercy have always followed him, for he has always extended the love of his Father.

⁹⁵ As you perceive the holy companions who travel with you, you will realize that there is no journey, but only an awakening. The Son of God, Who sleepeth not, has kept faith with his Father for you. There is no road to travel on and no time to travel through. For God waits not for His Son in time, being forever unwilling to be without him. And so it has always been. Let the holiness of God's Son shine away the cloud of guilt that darkens your mind, and by accepting His purity as yours, learn of Him that it is yours.

⁹⁶ You are invulnerable because you are guiltless. You can hold on to the past only through guilt. For guilt establishes that you will be punished for what you have done and thus depends on one-dimensional time, proceeding from past to future. No one who believes this can understand what always means. And therefore guilt must deprive you of the appreciation of eternity. You are immortal because you are eternal and always must be now. Guilt, then, is a way of holding past and future in your minds to ensure the ego's continuity. For if what has been will be punished, the ego's continuity is guaranteed. Yet the guarantee of your continuity is God's, not the ego's. And immortality is the opposite of time, for time passes away, while immortality is constant.

⁹⁷ Accepting the Atonement teaches you what immortality is, for by accepting your guiltlessness, you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless. The future, in time, is always associated with expiation, and only guilt could induce a sense of need for expiation. Accepting the guiltlessness of the Son of God as yours is therefore God's way of reminding you of His Son and what he is in truth. For God has never condemned His Son, and being guiltless, he is eternal.

⁹⁸ You cannot dispel guilt by making it real and then atoning for it. This is the ego's plan, which it offers instead of dispelling it. The ego believes in atonement through attack, being fully committed to the insane notion that attack is salvation. And you who cherish guilt must also believe it, for how else but by identifying with the ego could you hold dear what you do not want?

⁹⁹ The ego teaches you to attack yourself because you are guilty, and this must increase the guilt, for guilt is the result of attack. In the ego's teaching, then, there is no escape from guilt. For attack makes guilt real, and if it is real, there is no way to overcome it. The Holy Spirit dispels it simply through the calm recognition that it has never been. As He looks upon the guiltless Son of God, he knows this is true. And being true for you, you cannot attack yourself, for without guilt, attack is impossible. You, then, are saved because God's Son is guiltless. And being wholly pure, you are invulnerable.

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Allen Watson joined Robert Perry to form the Circle of Atonement in 1993 in Sedona, Arizona where Allen led retreats and workshops and authored many books based on “A Course in Miracles.”

One of his most popular books is: “A Workbook Companion: Vol I and II.”

Please send gifts of gratitude via PayPal to watsona@innocent.com.