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¹ Although you are One Self, you experience yourself as two—as both good and evil, loving and hating, mind and body. This sense of being split into opposites induces feelings of acute and constant conflict and leads to frantic attempts to reconcile the contradictory aspects of this self-perception. You have sought many such solutions, and none of them has worked. The opposites you see in you will never be compatible. But one exists.

² The fact that truth and illusion cannot be reconciled, no matter how you try, what means you use, and where you see the problem, must be accepted if you would be saved. Until you have accepted this, you will attempt endless lists of goals you cannot reach; a senseless series of expenditures of time and effort, hopefulness and doubt, each one as futile as the one before and failing as the next one surely will.

³ Problems that have no meaning cannot be resolved within the framework they are set. Two selves in conflict could not be resolved, and good and evil have no meeting place. The self you made can never be your Self, nor can your Self be split in two and still be what it is and must forever be.

⁴ A mind and body cannot both exist. Make no attempt to reconcile the two, for one denies the other can be real. If you are physical, your mind is gone from your self-concept, for it has no place in which it could be really part of you. If you are Spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality.

⁵ Spirit makes use of mind as means to find its Self-expression. And the mind which serves the Spirit is at peace and filled with joy. Its power comes from Spirit, and it is fulfilling happily its function here. Yet mind can also see itself divorced from Spirit and perceive itself within a body it confuses with itself. Without its function then, it has no peace, and happiness is alien to its thoughts.

⁶ Yet mind apart from Spirit cannot think. It has denied its Source of strength and sees itself as helpless, limited, and weak. Dissociated from its function now, it thinks it is alone and separate, attacked by armies massed against itself and hiding in the body's frail support. Now must it reconcile unlike with like, for this is what it thinks that it is for.

⁷ Waste no more time on this. Who can resolve the senseless conflicts which a dream presents? What could the resolution mean in truth? What purpose could it serve? What is it for? Salvation cannot make illusions real and solve a problem that does not exist. Perhaps you hope it can. Yet would you have God's plan for the release of His dear Son bring pain to him and fail to set him free?

⁸ Your Self retains its thoughts, and they remain within your mind and in the Mind of God. The Holy Spirit holds salvation in your mind and offers it the way to peace. Salvation is a thought you share with God, because His Voice accepted it for you and answered in your name that it was done. Thus is salvation kept among the thoughts your Self holds dear and cherishes for you.

⁹ We will attempt today to find this thought, whose presence in your mind is guaranteed by Him Who speaks to you from your One Self. Our hourly five minute practicing will be a search for Him within your mind. Salvation comes from this One Self through Him Who is the bridge between your mind and it.

¹⁰ Wait patiently, and let Him speak to you about your Self, and what your mind can do, restored to it and free to serve its will.

¹¹ Begin by saying this:

¹² Salvation comes from my One Self. Its thoughts are mine to use.

¹³ Then seek its thoughts, and claim them as your own.

¹⁴ These are your own real thoughts you have denied, and let your mind go wandering in a world of dreams, to find illusions in their place. Here are your thoughts, the only ones you have. Salvation is among them; find it there.

¹⁵ If you succeed, the thoughts that come to you will tell you you are saved and that your mind has found the function that it sought to lose. Your Self will welcome it and give it peace. Restored in strength, it will again flow out from Spirit to the Spirit in all things created by the Spirit as Itself. Your mind will bless all things. Confusion done, you are restored, for you have found your Self.

¹⁶ Your Self knows that you cannot fail today. Perhaps your mind remains uncertain yet a little while. Be not dismayed by this. The joy your Self experiences It will save for you, and it will yet be yours in full awareness. Every time you spend five minutes of the hour seeking Him Who joins your mind and Self, you offer Him another treasure to be kept for you.

¹⁷ Each time today you tell your frantic mind salvation comes from your One Self, you lay another treasure in your growing store. And all of it is given everyone who asks for it and will accept the gift. Think, then, how much is given unto you to give this day, that it be given you!

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⁸⁰ We once said that the Holy Spirit is the Answer. He is the Answer to everything because He knows what the answer to everything is. The ego does not know what a real question is, although it asks an endless number. Yet you can learn this as you learn to question the value of the ego and thus establish your ability to evaluate its questions. When the ego tempts you to sickness, do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body, for this would merely be to accept the ego's belief that the body is the proper aim for healing. Ask rather that the Holy Spirit teach you the right perception of the body, for perception alone can be distorted. Only perception can be sick because only perception can be wrong.

⁸¹ Wrong perception is distorted willing, which wants things to be as they are not. The reality of everything is totally harmless because total harmlessness is the condition of its reality. It is also the condition of your awareness of its reality. You do not have to seek reality. It will seek you and find you when you meet its conditions. Its conditions are part of what it is. And this part only is up to you. The rest is of itself. You need do so little because it is so powerful that your little part will bring the whole to you. Accept then your little part, and let the whole be yours.

⁸² Wholeness heals because it is of the mind. All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. They are attempts to reinforce unconsciousness out of fear of consciousness. This is a pathetic way of trying not to know by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual. "Rest in peace" is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes from waking, not from sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing; waking is joining. Dreams are illusions of joining, taking on the ego's distortions about what joining means if you are sleeping under its guidance. Yet the Holy Spirit, too, has use for sleep and can use dreams on behalf of waking if you will let Him.

⁸³ How you wake is the sign of how you have used sleep. To whom did you give it? Under which teacher did you place it? Whenever you wake dispiritedly, it was not of the Holy Spirit. Only when you awaken joyously have you utilized sleep according to the Holy Spirit's purpose. You can indeed be "drugged by sleep," but this is always because you have misused it on behalf of sickness. Sleep is no more a form of death than death is a form of unconsciousness. Unconsciousness is impossible. You can rest in peace only because you are awake.

⁸⁴ Healing is release from the fear of waking and the substitution of the will to wake. The will to wake is the will to love, since all healing involves replacing fear with love. The Holy Spirit cannot distinguish among degrees of error, for if He taught that one form of sickness is more serious than another, He would be teaching that one error can be more real than another. His function is to distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing the false with the true.

⁸⁵ The ego, which always weakens the will, wants to separate the body from the mind. This is an attempt to destroy it, yet the ego actually believes that it is protecting it. This is because the ego believes that mind is dangerous and that to make mindless is to heal. But to make mindless is impossible, since it would mean to make nothing out of what God created. The ego despises weakness, even though it makes every effort to induce it. The ego wants only what it hates. To the ego this is perfectly sensible. Believing in the power of attack, the ego wants attack.

⁸⁶ You have surely begun to realize that this is a very practical course which means exactly what it says. So does the Bible, if it is properly understood. There has been a marked tendency on the part of many of the Bible's followers and also its translators to be entirely literal about fear and its effects but not about love and its results. Thus, "hellfire" means "burning," but raising the dead becomes allegorical. Actually, it is particularly the references to the outcomes of love which should be taken literally because the Bible is about love, being about God.

⁸⁷ The Bible enjoins you to be perfect, to heal all errors, to take no thought of the body as separate, and to accomplish all things in my name. This is not my name alone, for ours is a shared identification. The name of God's Son is one, and you are enjoined to do the works of love because we share this oneness. Our minds are whole because they are one. If you are sick you are withdrawing from me. Yet you cannot withdraw from me alone. You can only withdraw from yourself and me.

⁸⁸ I would not ask you to do the things you cannot do, and it is impossible that I could do things you cannot do. Given this, and given this quite literally, there can be nothing which prevents you from doing exactly what I ask, and everything which argues for your doing it. I give you no limits because God lays none upon you. When you limit yourself, we are not of one mind and that is sickness. Yet sickness is not of the body, but of the mind. All forms of dysfunction are merely signs that the mind has split and does not accept a unified purpose.

⁸⁹ The unification of purpose, then, is the Holy Spirit's only way of healing. This is because it is the only level at which healing means anything. The re-establishing of meaning in a chaotic thought system is the only way to heal it. We have said that your task is only to meet the conditions for meaning since meaning itself is of God. Yet your return to meaning is essential to His because your meaning is part of His. Your healing, then, is part of His health since it is part of His Wholeness. He cannot lose this, but you can not know it. Yet it is still His Will for you, and His Will must stand forever and in all things.

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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.”

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