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Lesson 132

¹ What keeps the world in chains but your beliefs? And what can save the world except your Self? Belief is powerful indeed. The thoughts you hold are mighty, and illusions are as strong in their effects as is the truth. A madman thinks the world he sees is real and does not doubt it. Nor can he be swayed by questioning his thoughts' effects. It is but when their source is raised to question that the hope of freedom comes to him at last.

² Yet is salvation easily achieved, for anyone is free to change his mind, and all his thoughts change with it. Now the source of thought has shifted, for to change your mind means you have changed the source of all ideas you think or ever thought or yet will think.

³ You free the past from what you thought before. You free the future from all ancient thoughts of seeking what you do not want to find. The present now remains the only time. Here in the present is the world set free. For as you let the past be lifted and release the future from your ancient fears, you find escape and give it to the world.

⁴ You have enslaved the world with all your fears, with doubts and miseries, your pain and tears, and all your sorrows press upon it and keep it a prisoner to your beliefs. Death strikes it everywhere because you hold the bitter thought of death within your mind. The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real.

⁵ Perhaps you think you did not make the world but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came. There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly.

⁶ Ideas leave not their source. This central theme is often stated in the text and must be borne in mind if you would understand the Lesson for today. It is not pride which tells you that you made the world you see and that it changes as you change your mind. But it is pride that argues you have come into a world quite separate from yourself, impervious to what you think, and quite apart from what you chance to think it is.

⁷ There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again.

⁸ But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world and can accept the Lesson now. Their readiness will bring the Lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize. Some see it suddenly on point of death and rise to teach it. Others find it in experience that is not of this world, which shows them that the world does not exist because what they behold must be the truth, and yet it clearly contradicts the world. And some will find it in this course and in the exercises that we do today.

⁹ Today's idea is true because the world does not exist. And if it is indeed your own imagining, then you can loose it from all things you ever thought it was by merely changing all the thoughts that gave it these appearances. The sick are healed as you let go all thoughts of sickness, and the dead arise when you let thoughts of life replace all thoughts you ever held of death.

¹⁰ A lesson earlier repeated once must now be stressed again, for it contains the firm foundation for today's idea. You are as God created you. There is no place where you can suffer and no time that can bring change to your eternal state. How can a world of time and place exist if you remain as God created you?

¹¹ What is the lesson for today except another way of saying that to know your Self is the salvation of the world? To free the world from every kind of pain is but to change your mind about yourself. There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and you maintain the world within your mind in thought.

¹² Yet if you are as God created you, you cannot think apart from Him nor make what does not share His timelessness and love. Are these inherent in the world you see? Does it create like Him? Unless it does, it is not real and cannot be at all. If you are real, the world you see is false, for God's creation is unlike the world in every way. And as it was His Thought by which you were created, so it is your thoughts which made it and must set it free that you may know the Thoughts you share with God.

¹³ Release the world! Your real creations wait for this release to give you fatherhood, not of illusions, but as God in truth. God shares His Fatherhood with you who are His Son, for He makes no distinctions in what is Himself and what is still Himself. What He creates is not apart from Him, and nowhere does the Father end, the Son begin as something separate from Him.

¹⁴ There is no world because it is a thought apart from God and made to separate the Father and the Son and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere? Deny illusions, but accept the truth. Deny you are a shadow briefly laid upon a dying world. Release your mind, and you will look upon a world released.

¹⁵ Today our purpose is to free the world from all the idle thoughts we ever held about it and about all living things we see upon it. They can not be there—no more than we. For we are in the home our Father set for us along with them. And we who are as He created us would loose the world this day from every one of our illusions that we may be free.

¹⁶ Begin the 15 minute periods in which we practice twice today with this:

¹⁷ I who remain as God created me would loose the world from all I thought it was. For I am real because the world is not, and I would know my own reality.

¹⁸ Then merely rest, alert but with no strain, and let your mind in quietness be changed so that the world is freed along with you.

¹⁹ You need not realize that healing comes to many brothers far across the world as well as to the ones you see near by as you send out these thoughts to bless the world. But you will sense your own release, although you may not fully understand as yet that you could never be released alone.

²⁰ Throughout the day, increase the freedom sent through your ideas to all the world, and say whenever you are tempted to deny the power of your simple change of mind:

²¹ I loose the world from all I thought it was and choose my own reality instead.

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IX. Reality and Redemption

par 77-84

⁷⁷ Do you really believe that you can kill the Son of God? The Father has hidden His Son safely within Himself and kept him far away from your destructive thoughts, but you know neither the Father nor the Son because of them. You attack the real world every day and every hour and every minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot see it. If you seek love in order to attack it, you will never find it. For if love is sharing, how can you find it except through itself? Offer it and it will come to you because it is drawn to itself. But offer attack and it will remain hidden, for it can live only in peace.

⁷⁸ God's Son is as safe as his Father, for the Son knows his Father's protection and cannot fear. His Father's love holds him in perfect peace, and needing nothing, he asks for nothing. Yet he is far from you whose Self he is, for you chose to attack him, and he disappeared from your sight into his Father. He did not change, but you did. For a split mind and all its works were not created by the Father and could not live in the knowledge of Him.

⁷⁹ When you made what is not true visible, what is true became invisible. Yet it cannot be invisible in itself, for the Holy Spirit sees it with perfect clarity. It is invisible to you because you are looking at something else. Yet it is no more up to you to decide what is visible and what is invisible than it is up to you to decide what reality is. What can be seen is what the Holy Spirit sees. The definition of reality is God's, not yours. He created it, and He knows what it is. You who knew have forgotten, and unless He had given you a way to remember, you would have condemned yourselves to oblivion.

⁸⁰ Because of your Father's love you can never forget Him, for no one can forget what God Himself placed in his memory. You can deny it, but you cannot lose it. A Voice will answer every question you ask, and a Vision will correct the perception of everything you see. For what you have made invisible is the only truth, and what you have not heard is the only answer. God would reunite you with yourself and did not abandon you in your seeming distress. You are waiting only for Him and do not know it. Yet His memory shines in your minds and cannot be obliterated. It is no more past than future, being forever always.

⁸¹ You have but to ask for this memory, and you will remember. Yet the memory of God cannot shine in a mind which has made it invisible and wants to keep it so. For the memory of God can dawn only in a mind that wills to remember and that has relinquished the insane desire to control reality. You who cannot even control yourselves should hardly aspire to control the universe. But look upon what you have made of it and rejoice that it is not so. Son of God, be not content with nothing! What is not real cannot be seen and has no value. God could not offer His Son what has no value, nor could His Son receive it. You were redeemed the instant you thought you had deserted Him.

⁸² Everything you made has never been and is invisible because the Holy Spirit does not see it. Yet what He does see is yours to behold, and through His vision your perception is healed. You have made the invisible the only truth that this world holds. Valuing nothing, you have sought nothing and found nothing. By making nothing real to you, you have seen it. But it is not there. And Christ is invisible to you because of what you have made visible to yourselves. Yet it does not matter how much distance you have tried to interpose between your awareness and truth. God's Son can be seen because his vision is shared. The Holy Spirit looks upon him and sees nothing else in you. What is invisible to you is perfect in His sight and encompasses all of it. He has remembered you because He forgot not the Father.

⁸³ You looked upon the unreal and found despair. Yet by seeking the unreal, what else could you find? The unreal world is a thing of despair, for it can never be. And you who share God's Being with Him could never be content without reality. What God did not give you has no power over you, and the attraction of love for love remains irresistible. For it is the function of love to unite all things unto itself, and to hold all things together by extending its wholeness.

⁸⁴ The real world was given you by God in loving exchange for the world you made and which you see. But take it from the hand of Christ and look upon it. Its reality will make everything else invisible, for beholding it is total perception. And as you look upon it, you will remember that it was always so. Nothingness will become invisible, for you will at last have seen truly. Redeemed perception is easily translated into knowledge, for only perception is capable of error, and perception has never been. Being corrected, it gives place to knowledge, which is forever the only reality. The Atonement is but the way back to what was never lost. Your Father could not cease to love His Son.

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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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