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¹ No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is.

² You may believe that this position is extreme and too inclusive to be true. Yet can truth have exceptions? If you have the gift of everything, can loss be real? Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where love and perfect holiness abide? Truth must be all-inclusive if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposite and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely.

³ Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true and nothing else is true. This you have heard before, but may not yet accept both parts of it. Without the first, the second has no meaning, but without the second is the first no longer true. Truth cannot have an opposite. This can not be too often said and thought about. For if what is not true is true as well as what is true, then part of truth is false, and truth has lost its meaning. Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false.

⁴ This is the simplest of distinctions, yet the most obscure. But not because it is a difficult distinction to perceive. It is concealed behind a vast array of choices which do not appear to be entirely your own. And thus the truth appears to have some aspects that belie consistency but do not seem to be but contradictions introduced by you.

⁵ As God created you, you must remain unchangeable with transitory states by definition false. And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in conditions of the body and the mind, in all awareness, and in all response. This is the all-inclusiveness which sets the truth apart from falsehood, and the false kept separate from the truth as what it is.

⁶ Is it not strange that you believe to think you made the world you see is arrogance? God made it not. Of this you can be sure. What can He know of the ephemeral, the sinful and the guilty, the afraid, the suffering and lonely, and the mind that lives within a body that must die? You but accuse Him of insanity, to think He made a world where such things seem to have reality. He is not mad. Yet only madness makes a world like this.

⁷ To think that God made chaos, contradicts His Will, invented opposites to truth, and suffers death to triumph over life—all this is arrogance. Humility would see at once these things are not of Him. And can you see what God created not? To think you can is merely to believe you can perceive what God willed not to be. And what could be more arrogant than this?

⁸ Let us today be truly humble and accept what we have made as what it is. The power of decision is our own. Decide but to accept your rightful place as co-creator of the universe, and all you think you made will disappear. What rises to awareness then will be all that there ever was, eternally as it is now. And it will take the place of self-deceptions made but to usurp the altar to the Father and the Son.

⁹ Today we practice true humility, abandoning the false pretense by which the ego seeks to prove it arrogant. Only the ego can be arrogant. But truth is humble in acknowledging its mightiness, its changelessness, and its eternal wholeness—all-encompassing, God's perfect gift to His beloved Son.

¹⁰ We lay aside the arrogance which says that we are sinners, guilty and afraid, ashamed of what we are. And we lift our hearts in true humility instead to Him Who has created us immaculate, like to Himself in power and in love. The power of decision is our own. And we accept of Him that which we are and humbly recognize the Son of God.

¹¹ To recognize God's Son implies as well that all self-concepts have been laid aside and recognized as false. Their arrogance has been perceived. And in humility the radiance of God's Son, his gentleness, his perfect sinlessness, his Father's Love, his right to Heaven and release from hell are joyously accepted as our own. Now do we join in glad acknowledgment that lies are false and only truth is true.

¹² We think of truth alone as we arise and spend five minutes practicing its ways, encouraging our frightened minds with this:

¹³ The power of decision is my own.

¹⁴ Then will we wait in silence, giving up all self-deceptions as we humbly ask our Self that He reveal Himself to us. And He Who never left will come again to our awareness, grateful to restore His home to God as it was meant to be.

¹⁵ In patience wait for Him throughout the day and hourly invite Him with the words with which the day began, concluding it with this same invitation to your Self. God's Voice will answer, for He speaks for you and for your Father. He will substitute the peace of God for all your frantic thoughts, the truth of God for self-deceptions, and God's Son for your illusions of yourself.

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Chapter 13

VII. The Happy Learner

par 54-63

⁵⁴ The Holy Spirit needs a happy learner in whom His mission can be happily accomplished. You who are steadfastly devoted to misery must first recognize that you are miserable and not happy. The Holy Spirit cannot teach without this contrast, for you believe that misery is happiness. This has so confused you that you have undertaken to learn to do what you can never do, believing that unless you learn it, you will not be happy. You do not realize that the foundation on which this most peculiar learning goal depends means absolutely nothing. It does make sense to you.

⁵⁵ Have faith in nothing, and you will find the "treasure" that you sought. Yet you will add another burden to your mind, already burdened or you would not have sought another. You will believe that nothing is of value and will value it. A little piece of glass, a speck of dust, a body or a war are one to you. For if you value one thing made of nothing, you have believed that nothing can be precious and that you can learn how to make the untrue true.

⁵⁶ The Holy Spirit, seeing where you are but knowing you are elsewhere, begins His lesson in simplicity with the fundamental teaching that truth is true. This is the hardest lesson you will ever learn, and in the end the only one. Simplicity is very difficult for twisted minds. Consider all the distortions you have made of nothing—all the strange forms and feelings and actions and reactions that you have woven out of it. Nothing is so alien to you as the simple truth, and nothing are you less inclined to listen to. The contrast between what is true and what is not is perfectly apparent, yet you do not see it.

⁵⁷ The simple and the obvious are not apparent to those who would make palaces and royal robes of nothing, believing they are kings with golden crowns because of them. All this the Holy Spirit sees and teaches simply that all this is not true. To these unhappy learners who would teach themselves nothing and delude themselves into believing that it is not nothing, the Holy Spirit says, with steadfast quietness:

⁵⁸ The truth is true. Nothing else matters, nothing else is real, and everything beside it is not there. Let Me make the one distinction for you which you cannot make but need to learn . Your faith in nothing is deceiving you. Offer our faith to Me, and I will place it gently in the holy place where it belongs. You will find no deception there but only the simple truth. And you will love it because you will understand it. 

⁵⁹ Like you, the Holy Spirit did not make truth. Like God, He knows it to be true. He brings the light of truth into the darkness and lets it shine on you. And as it shines, your brothers see it, and realizing that this light is not what you have made, they see in you more than you see. They will be happy learners of the lesson which this light brings to them because it teaches them release from nothing and from all the works of nothing. The heavy chains which seem to bind them unto despair they do not see as nothing until you bring the light to them. And then they see the chains have disappeared, and so they must have been nothing. And you will see it with them. Because you taught them gladness and release, they will become your teachers in release and gladness.

⁶⁰ When you teach anyone that truth is true, you learn it with him. And so you learn that what seemed hardest was the easiest. Learn to be happy learners. You will never learn how to make nothing everything. Yet see that this has been your goal and recognize how foolish it has been. Be glad it is undone, for when you look at it in simple honesty, it is undone. We said before, "Be not content with nothing," for you have believed that nothing could content you. It is not so.

⁶¹ If you would be a happy learner, you must give everything that you have learned over to the Holy Spirit to be unlearned for you. And then begin to learn the joyous lessons that come quickly on the firm foundation that truth is true. For what is builded there is true and built on truth. The universe of learning will open up before you in all its gracious simplicity. With truth before you, you will not look back.

⁶² The happy learner meets the conditions of learning here, as he also meets the conditions of knowledge in the Kingdom. All this lies in the Holy Spirit's plan to free you from the past and open up the way to freedom for you. For truth is true. What else could ever be or ever was? This simple lesson holds the key to the dark door which you believe is locked forever. You made this door of nothing and behind it is nothing. The key is only the light which shines away the shapes and forms and fears of nothing. Accept this key to freedom from the hands of Christ Who gives it to you that you may join Him in the holy task of bringing light to darkness. For, like your brothers, you do not realize the light has come and freed you from the sleep of darkness.

⁶³ Behold your brothers in their freedom and learn of them how to be free of darkness. The light in you will waken them, and they will not leave you asleep. The vision of Christ is given the very instant that it is perceived. Where everything is clear, it is all holy. The quietness of its simplicity is so compelling that you will realize it is impossible to deny the simple truth. For there is nothing else. God is everywhere, and His Son is in Him with everything. Can he sing the dirge of sorrow when this is true?

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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.