A Course in Miracles Workbook 100-199

LESSON 100

ACIM Daily Lesson 100 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

My part is essential to God\’s plan for salvation.

W-100.1. Just as God\’s Son completes his Father, so your part in it completes your Father\’s plan. 2 Salvation must reverse the mad belief in separate thoughts and separate bodies, which lead separate lives and go their separate ways. 3 One function shared by separate minds unites them in one purpose, for each one of them is equally essential to them all.

W-100.2. God\’s Will for you is perfect happiness. 2 Why should you choose to go against His Will? 3 The part that He has saved for you to take in working out His plan is given you that you might be restored to what He wills. 4 This part is as essential to His plan as to your happiness. 5 Your joy must be complete to let His plan be understood by those to whom He sends you. 6 They will see their function in your shining face, and hear God calling to them in your happy laugh.

W-100.3. You are indeed essential to God\’s plan. 2 Without your joy, His joy is incomplete. 3 Without your smile, the world cannot be saved. 4 While you are sad, the light that God Himself appointed as the means to save the world is dim and lusterless, and no one laughs because all laughter can but echo yours.

W-100.4. You are indeed essential to God\’s plan. 2 Just as your light increases every light that shines in Heaven, so your joy on earth calls to all minds to let their sorrows go, and take their place beside you in God\’s plan. 3 God\’s messengers are joyous, and their joy heals sorrow and despair. 4 They are the proof that God wills perfect happiness for all who will accept their Father\’s gifts as theirs.

W-100.5. We will not let ourselves be sad today. 2 For if we do, we fail to take the part that is essential to God\’s plan, as well as to our vision. 3 Sadness is the sign that you would play another part, instead of what has been assigned to you by God. 4 Thus do you fail to show the world how great the happiness He wills for you. 5 And so you do not recognize that it is yours.

W-100.6. Today we will attempt to understand joy is our function here. 2 If you are sad, your part is unfulfilled, and all the world is thus deprived of joy, along with you. 3 God asks you to be happy, so the world can see how much He loves His Son, and wills no sorrow rises to abate his joy; no fear besets him to disturb his peace. 4 You are God\’s messenger today. 5 You bring His happiness to all you look upon; His peace to everyone who looks on you and sees His message in your happy face.

W-100.7. We will prepare ourselves for this today, in our five-minute practice periods, by feeling happiness arise in us according to our Father\’s Will and ours. 2 Begin the exercises with the thought today\’s idea contains. 3 Then realize your part is to be happy. 4 Only this is asked of you or anyone who wants to take his place among God\’s messengers. 5 Think what this means. 6 You have indeed been wrong in your belief that sacrifice is asked. 7 You but receive according to God\’s plan, and never lose or sacrifice or die.

W-100.8. Now let us try to find that joy that proves to us and all the world God\’s Will for us. 2 It is your function that you find it here, and that you find it now. 3 For this you came. 4 Let this one be the day that you succeed! 5 Look deep within you, undismayed by all the little thoughts and foolish goals you pass as you ascend to meet the Christ in you.

W-100.9. He will be there. 2 And you can reach Him now. 3 What could you rather look upon in place of Him Who waits that you may look on Him? 4 What little thought has power to hold you back? 5 What foolish goal can keep you from success when He Who calls to you is God Himself?

W-100.10. He will be there. 2 You are essential to His plan. 3 You are His messenger today. 4 And you must find what He would have you give. 5 Do not forget the idea for today between your hourly practice periods. 6 It is your Self Who calls to you today. 7 And it is Him you answer, every time you tell yourself you are essential to God\’s plan for the salvation of the world.

LESSON 101

ACIM Daily Lesson 101 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

God\’s Will for me is perfect happiness.

W-101.1. Today we will continue with the theme of happiness. 2 This is a key idea in understanding what salvation means. 3 You still believe it asks for suffering as penance for your \”sins.\” 4 This is not so. 5 Yet you must think it so while you believe that sin is real, and that God\’s Son can sin.

W-101.2. If sin is real, then punishment is just and cannot be escaped. 2 Salvation thus cannot be purchased but through suffering. 3 If sin is real, then happiness must be illusion, for they cannot both be true. 4 The sinful warrant only death and pain, and it is this they ask for. 5 For they know it waits for them, and it will seek them out and find them somewhere, sometime, in some form that evens the account they owe to God. 6 They would escape Him in their fear. 7 And yet He will pursue, and they can not escape.

W-101.3. If sin is real, salvation must be pain. 2 Pain is the cost of sin, and suffering can never be escaped, if sin is real. 3 Salvation must be feared, for it will kill, but slowly, taking everything away before it grants the welcome boon of death to victims who are little more than bones before salvation is appeased. 4 Its wrath is boundless, merciless, but wholly just.

W-101.4. Who would seek out such savage punishment? 2 Who would not flee salvation, and attempt in every way he can to drown the Voice which offers it to him? 3 Why would he try to listen and accept Its offering? 4 If sin is real, its offering is death, and meted out in cruel form to match the vicious wishes in which sin is born. 5 If sin is real, salvation has become your bitter enemy, the curse of God upon you who have crucified His Son.

W-101.5. You need the practice periods today. 2 The exercises teach sin is not real, and all that you believe must come from sin will never happen, for it has no cause. 3 Accept Atonement with an open mind, which cherishes no lingering belief that you have made a devil of God\’s Son. 4 There is no sin. 5 We practice with this thought as often as we can today, because it is the basis for today\’s idea.

W-101.6. God\’s Will for you is perfect happiness because there is no sin, and suffering is causeless. 2 Joy is just, and pain is but the sign you have misunderstood yourself. 3 Fear not the Will of God. 4 But turn to it in confidence that it will set you free from all the consequences sin has wrought in feverish imagination. 5 Say:

6 God\’s Will for me is perfect happiness.

7 There is no sin; it has no consequence.

8 So should you start your practice periods, and then attempt again to find the joy these thoughts will introduce into your mind.

W-101.7. Give these five minutes gladly, to remove the heavy load you lay upon yourself with the insane belief that sin is real. 2 Today escape from madness. 3 You are set on freedom\’s road, and now today\’s idea brings wings to speed you on, and hope to go still faster to the waiting goal of peace. 4 There is no sin. 5 Remember this today, and tell yourself as often as you can:

6 God\’s Will for me is perfect happiness.

7 This is the truth, because there is no sin.

LESSON 102

ACIM Daily Lesson 102 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

I share God\’s Will for happiness for me.

W-102.1. You do not want to suffer. 2 You may think it buys you something, and may still believe a little that it buys you what you want. 3 Yet this belief is surely shaken now, at least enough to let you question it, and to suspect it really makes no sense. 4 It has not gone as yet, but lacks the roots that once secured it tightly to the dark and hidden secret places of your mind.

W-102.2. Today we try to loose its weakened hold still further, and to realize that pain is purposeless, without a cause and with no power to accomplish anything. 2 It cannot purchase anything at all. 3 It offers nothing, and does not exist. 4 And everything you think it offers you is lacking in existence, like itself. 5 You have been slave to nothing. 6 Be you free today to join the happy Will of God.

W-102.3. For several days we will continue to devote our periods of practicing to exercises planned to help you reach the happiness God\’s Will has placed in you. 2 Here is your home, and here your safety is. 3 Here is your peace, and here there is no fear. 4 Here is salvation. 5 Here is rest at last.

W-102.4. Begin your practice periods today with this acceptance of God\’s Will for you:

2 I share God\’s Will for happiness for me, and I accept it as my function now.

3 Then seek this function deep within your mind, for it is there, awaiting but your choice. 4 You cannot fail to find it when you learn it is your choice, and that you share God\’s Will.

W-102.5. Be happy, for your only function here is happiness. 2 You have no need to be less loving to God\’s Son than He Whose Love created him as loving as Himself. 3 Besides these hourly five-minute rests, pause frequently today, to tell yourself that you have now accepted happiness as your one function. 4 And be sure that you are joining with God\’s Will in doing this.

LESSON 103

ACIM Daily Lesson 103 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

God, being Love, is also happiness.

W-103.1. Happiness is an attribute of love. 2 It cannot be apart from it. 3 Nor can it be experienced where love is not. 4 Love has no limits, being everywhere. 5 And therefore joy is everywhere as well. 6 Yet can the mind deny that this is so, believing there are gaps in love where sin can enter, bringing pain instead of joy. 7 This strange belief would limit happiness by redefining love as limited, and introducing opposition in what has no limit and no opposite.

W-103.2. Fear is associated then with love, and its results become the heritage of minds that think what they have made is real. 2 These images, with no reality in truth, bear witness to the fear of God, forgetting being Love, He must be joy. 3 This basic error we will try again to bring to truth today, and teach ourselves:

4 God, being Love, is also happiness.

5 To fear Him is to be afraid of joy.

6 Begin your periods of practicing today with this association, which corrects the false belief that God is fear. 7 It also emphasizes happiness belongs to you, because of what He is.

W-103.3. Allow this one correction to be placed within your mind each waking hour today. 2 Then welcome all the happiness it brings as truth replaces fear, and joy becomes what you expect to take the place of pain. 3 God, being Love, it will be given you. 4 Bolster this expectation frequently throughout the day, and quiet all your fears with this assurance, kind and wholly true:

5 God, being Love, is also happiness.

6 And it is happiness I seek today.

7 I cannot fail, because I seek the truth.

LESSON 104

ACIM Daily Lesson 104 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

I seek but what belongs to me in truth.

W-104.1. Today\’s idea continues with the thought that joy and peace are not but idle dreams. 2 They are your right, because of what you are. 3 They come to you from God, Who cannot fail to give you what He wills. 4 Yet must there be a place made ready to receive His gifts. 5 They are not welcomed gladly by a mind that has instead received the gifts it made where His belong, as substitutes for them.

W-104.2. Today we would remove all meaningless and self-made gifts which we have placed upon the holy altar where God\’s gifts belong. 2 His are the gifts that are our own in truth. 3 His are the gifts that we inherited before time was, and that will still be ours when time has passed into eternity. 4 His are the gifts that are within us now, for they are timeless. 5 And we need not wait to have them. 6 They belong to us today.

W-104.3. Therefore, we choose to have them now, and know, in choosing them in place of what we made, we but unite our will with what God wills, and recognize the same as being one. 2 Our longer practice periods today, the hourly five minutes given truth for your salvation, should begin with this:

3 I seek but what belongs to me in truth, And joy and peace are my inheritance.

4 Then lay aside the conflicts of the world that offer other gifts and other goals made of illusions, witnessed to by them, and sought for only in a world of dreams.

W-104.4. All this we lay aside, and seek instead that which is truly ours, as we ask to recognize what God has given us. 2 We clear a holy place within our minds before His altar, where His gifts of peace and joy are welcome, and to which we come to find what has been given us by Him. 3 We come in confidence today, aware that what belongs to us in truth is what He gives. 4 And we would wish for nothing else, for nothing else belongs to us in truth.

W-104.5. So do we clear the way for Him today by simply recognizing that His Will is done already, and that joy and peace belong to us as His eternal gifts. 2 We will not let ourselves lose sight of them between the times we come to seek for them where He has laid them. 3 This reminder will we bring to mind as often as we can:

4 I seek but what belongs to me in truth.

5 God\’s gifts of joy and peace are all I want.

LESSON 105

ACIM Daily Lesson 105 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

God\’s peace and joy are mine.

W-105.1. God\’s peace and joy are yours. 2 Today we will accept them, knowing they belong to us. 3 And we will try to understand these gifts increase as we receive them. 4 They are not like to the gifts the world can give, in which the giver loses as he gives the gift; the taker is the richer by his loss. 5 Such are not gifts, but bargains made with guilt. 6 The truly given gift entails no loss. 7 It is impossible that one can gain because another loses. 8 This implies a limit and an insufficiency.

W-105.2. No gift is given thus. 2 Such \”gifts\” are but a bid for a more valuable return; a loan with interest to be paid in full; a temporary lending, meant to be a pledge of debt to be repaid with more than was received by him who took the gift. 3 This strange distortion of what giving means pervades all levels of the world you see. 4 It strips all meaning from the gifts you give, and leaves you nothing in the ones you take.

W-105.3. A major learning goal this course has set is to reverse your view of giving, so you can receive. 2 For giving has become a source of fear, and so you would avoid the only means by which you can receive. 3 Accept God\’s peace and joy, and you will learn a different way of looking at a gift. 4 God\’s gifts will never lessen when they are given away. 5 They but increase thereby.

W-105.4. As Heaven\’s peace and joy intensify when you accept them as God\’s gift to you, so does the joy of your Creator grow when you accept His joy and peace as yours. 2 True giving is creation. 3 It extends the limitless to the unlimited, eternity to timelessness, and love unto itself. 4 It adds to all that is complete already, not in simple terms of adding more, for that implies that it was less before. 5 It adds by letting what cannot contain itself fulfill its aim of giving everything it has away, securing it forever for itself.

W-105.5. Today accept God\’s peace and joy as yours. 2 Let Him complete Himself as He defines completion. 3 You will understand that what completes Him must complete His Son as well. 4 He cannot give through loss. 5 No more can you. 6 Receive His gift of joy and peace today, and He will thank you for your gift to Him.

W-105.6. Today our practice periods will start a little differently. 2 Begin today by thinking of those brothers who have been denied by you the peace and joy that are their right under the equal laws of God. 3 Here you denied them to yourself. 4 And here you must return to claim them as your own.

W-105.7. Think of your \”enemies\” a little while, and tell each one, as he occurs to you:

2 My brother, peace and joy I offer you, That I may have God\’s peace and joy as mine.

3 Thus you prepare yourself to recognize God\’s gifts to you, and let your mind be free of all that would prevent success today. 4 Now are you ready to accept the gift of peace and joy that God has given you. 5 Now are you ready to experience the joy and peace you have denied yourself. 6 Now you can say, \”God\’s peace and joy are mine,\” for you have given what you would receive.

W-105.8. You must succeed today, if you prepare your mind as we suggest. 2 For you have let all bars to peace and joy be lifted up, and what is yours can come to you at last. 3 So tell yourself, \”God\’s peace and joy are mine,\” and close your eyes a while, and let His Voice assure you that the words you speak are true.

W-105.9. Spend your five minutes thus with Him each time you can today, but do not think that less is worthless when you cannot give Him more. 2 At least remember hourly to say the words which call to Him to give you what He wills to give, and wills you to receive. 3 Determine not to interfere today with what He wills. 4 And if a brother seems to tempt you to deny God\’s gift to him, see it as but another chance to let yourself receive the gifts of God as yours. 5 Then bless your brother thankfully, and say:

6 My brother, peace and joy I offer you, That I may have God\’s peace and joy as mine.

LESSON 106

ACIM Daily Lesson 106 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

Let me be still and listen to the truth.

W-106.1. If you will lay aside the ego\’s voice, however loudly it may seem to call; if you will not accept its petty gifts that give you nothing that you really want; if you will listen with an open mind, that has not told you what salvation is; then you will hear the mighty Voice of truth, quiet in power, strong in stillness, and completely certain in Its messages.

W-106.2. Listen, and hear your Father speak to you through His appointed Voice, which silences the thunder of the meaningless, and shows the way to peace to those who cannot see. 2 Be still today and listen to the truth. 3 Be not deceived by voices of the dead, which tell you they have found the source of life and offer it to you for your belief. 4 Attend them not, but listen to the truth.

W-106.3. Be not afraid today to circumvent the voices of the world. 2 Walk lightly past their meaningless persuasion. 3 Hear them not. 4 Be still today and listen to the truth. 5 Go past all things which do not speak of Him Who holds your happiness within His Hand, held out to you in welcome and in love. 6 Hear only Him today, and do not wait to reach Him longer. 7 Hear one Voice today.

W-106.4. Today the promise of God\’s Word is kept. 2 Hear and be silent. 3 He would speak to you. 4 He comes with miracles a thousand times as happy and as wonderful as those you ever dreamed or wished for in your dreams. 5 His miracles are true. 6 They will not fade when dreaming ends. 7 They end the dream instead; and last forever, for they come from God to His dear Son, whose other name is you. 8 Prepare yourself for miracles today. 9 Today allow your Father\’s ancient pledge to you and all your brothers to be kept.

W-106.5. Hear Him today, and listen to the Word which lifts the veil that lies upon the earth, and wakes all those who sleep and cannot see. 2 God calls to them through you. 3 He needs your voice to speak to them, for who could reach God\’s Son except his Father, calling through your Self? 4 Hear Him today, and offer Him your voice to speak to all the multitude who wait to hear the Word that He will speak today.

W-106.6. Be ready for salvation. 2 It is here, and will today be given unto you. 3 And you will learn your function from the One Who chose it in your Father\’s Name for you. 4 Listen today, and you will hear a Voice which will resound throughout the world through you. 5 The bringer of all miracles has need that you receive them first, and thus become the joyous giver of what you received.

W-106.7. Thus does salvation start and thus it ends; when everything is yours and everything is given away, it will remain with you forever. 2 And the lesson has been learned. 3 Today we practice giving, not the way you understand it now, but as it is. 4 Each hour\’s exercises should begin with this request for your enlightenment:

5 I will be still and listen to the truth.

6 What does it mean to give and to receive?

W-106.8. Ask and expect an answer. 2 Your request is one whose answer has been waiting long to be received by you. 3 It will begin the ministry for which you came, and which will free the world from thinking giving is a way to lose. 4 And so the world becomes ready to understand and to receive.

W-106.9. Be still and listen to the truth today. 2 For each five minutes spent in listening, a thousand minds are opened to the truth and they will hear the holy Word you hear. 3 And when the hour is past, you will again release a thousand more who pause to ask that truth be given them, along with you.

W-106.10. Today the holy Word of God is kept through your receiving it to give away, so you can teach the world what giving means by listening and learning it of Him. 2 Do not forget today to reinforce your choice to hear and to receive the Word by this reminder, given to yourself as often as is possible today:

3 Let me be still and listen to the truth.

4 I am the messenger of God today, My voice is His, to give what I receive.

LESSON 107

ACIM Daily Lesson 107 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

Truth will correct all errors in my mind.

W-107.1. What can correct illusions but the truth? 2 And what are errors but illusions that remain unrecognized for what they are? 3 Where truth has entered errors disappear. 4 They merely vanish, leaving not a trace by which to be remembered. 5 They are gone because, without belief, they have no life. 6 And so they disappear to nothingness, returning whence they came. 7 From dust to dust they come and go, for only truth remains.

W-107.2. Can you imagine what a state of mind without illusions is? 2 How it would feel? 3 Try to remember when there was a time,-perhaps a minute, maybe even less-when nothing came to interrupt your peace; when you were certain you were loved and safe. 4 Then try to picture what it would be like to have that moment be extended to the end of time and to eternity. 5 Then let the sense of quiet that you felt be multiplied a hundred times, and then be multiplied another hundred more.

W-107.3. And now you have a hint, not more than just the faintest intimation of the state your mind will rest in when the truth has come. 2 Without illusions there could be no fear, no doubt and no attack. 3 When truth has come all pain is over, for there is no room for transitory thoughts and dead ideas to linger in your mind. 4 Truth occupies your mind completely, liberating you from all beliefs in the ephemeral. 5 They have no place because the truth has come, and they are nowhere. 6 They can not be found, for truth is everywhere forever, now.

W-107.4. When truth has come it does not stay a while, to disappear or change to something else. 2 It does not shift and alter in its form, nor come and go and go and come again. 3 It stays exactly as it always was, to be depended on in every need, and trusted with a perfect trust in all the seeming difficulties and the doubts that the appearances the world presents engender. 4 They will merely blow away, when truth corrects the errors in your mind.

W-107.5. When truth has come it harbors in its wings the gift of perfect constancy, and love which does not falter in the face of pain, but looks beyond it, steadily and sure. 2 Here is the gift of healing, for the truth needs no defense, and therefore no attack is possible. 3 Illusions can be brought to truth to be corrected. 4 But the truth stands far beyond illusions, and can not be brought to them to turn them into truth.

W-107.6. Truth does not come and go nor shift nor change, in this appearance now and then in that, evading capture and escaping grasp. 2 It does not hide. 3 It stands in open light, in obvious accessibility. 4 It is impossible that anyone could seek it truly, and would not succeed. 5 Today belongs to truth. 6 Give truth its due, and it will give you yours. 7 You were not meant to suffer and to die. 8 Your Father wills these dreams be gone. 9 Let truth correct them all.

W-107.7. We do not ask for what we do not have. 2 We merely ask for what belongs to us, that we may recognize it as our own. 3 Today we practice on the happy note of certainty that has been born of truth. 4 The shaky and unsteady footsteps of illusion are not our approach today. 5 We are as certain of success as we are sure we live and hope and breathe and think. 6 We do not doubt we walk with truth today, and count on it to enter into all the exercises that we do this day.

W-107.8. Begin by asking Him Who goes with you upon this undertaking that He be in your awareness as you go with Him. 2 You are not made of flesh and blood and bone, but were created by the selfsame Thought which gave the gift of life to Him as well. 3 He is your Brother, and so like to you your Father knows that You are both the same. 4 It is your Self you ask to go with you, and how could He be absent where you are?

W-107.9. Truth will correct all errors in your mind which tell you you could be apart from Him. 2 You speak to Him today, and make your pledge to let His function be fulfilled through you. 3 To share His function is to share His joy. 4 His confidence is with you, as you say:

5 Truth will correct all errors in my mind, And I will rest in Him Who is my Self.

6 Then let Him lead you gently to the truth, which will envelop you and give you peace so deep and tranquil that you will return to the familiar world reluctantly.

W-107.10. And yet you will be glad to look again upon this world. 2 For you will bring with you the promise of the changes which the truth that goes with you will carry to the world. 3 They will increase with every gift you give of five small minutes, and the errors that surround the world will be corrected as you let them be corrected in your mind.

W-107.11. Do not forget your function for today. 2 Each time you tell yourself with confidence, \”Truth will correct all errors in my mind,\” you speak for all the world and Him Who would release the world, as He would set you free.

LESSON 108

ACIM Daily Lesson 108 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

To give and to receive are one in truth.

W-108.1. Vision depends upon today\’s idea. 2 The light is in it, for it reconciles all seeming opposites. 3 And what is light except the resolution, born of peace, of all your conflicts and mistaken thoughts into one concept which is wholly true? 4 Even that one will disappear, because the Thought behind it will appear instead to take its place. 5 And now you are at peace forever, for the dream is over then.

W-108.2. True light that makes true vision possible is not the light the body\’s eyes behold. 2 It is a state of mind that has become so unified that darkness cannot be perceived at all. 3 And thus what is the same is seen as one, while what is not the same remains unnoticed, for it is not there.

W-108.3. This is the light that shows no opposites, and vision, being healed, has power to heal. 2 This is the light that brings your peace of mind to other minds, to share it and be glad that they are one with you and with themselves. 3 This is the light that heals because it brings single perception, based upon one frame of reference, from which one meaning comes.

W-108.4. Here are both giving and receiving seen as different aspects of one Thought whose truth does not depend on which is seen as first, nor which appears to be in second place. 2 Here it is understood that both occur together, that the Thought remain complete. 3 And in this understanding is the base on which all opposites are reconciled, because they are perceived from the same frame of reference which unifies this Thought.

W-108.5. One thought, completely unified, will serve to unify all thought. 2 This is the same as saying one correction will suffice for all correction, or that to forgive one brother wholly is enough to bring salvation to all minds. 3 For these are but some special cases of one law which holds for every kind of learning, if it be directed by the One Who knows the truth.

W-108.6. To learn that giving and receiving are the same has special usefulness, because it can be tried so easily and seen as true. 2 And when this special case has proved it always works, in every circumstance where it is tried, the thought behind it can be generalized to other areas of doubt and double vision. 3 And from there it will extend, and finally arrive at the one Thought which underlies them all.

W-108.7. Today we practice with the special case of giving and receiving. 2 We will use this simple lesson in the obvious because it has results we cannot miss. 3 To give is to receive. 4 Today we will attempt to offer peace to everyone, and see how quickly peace returns to us. 5 Light is tranquility, and in that peace is vision given us, and we can see.

W-108.8. So we begin the practice periods with the instruction for today, and say:

2 To give and to receive are one in truth.

3 I will receive what I am giving now.

4 Then close your eyes, and for five minutes think of what you would hold out to everyone, to have it yours. 5 You might, for instance, say:

6 To everyone I offer quietness.

7 To everyone I offer peace of mind.

8 To everyone I offer gentleness.

W-108.9. Say each one slowly and then pause a while, expecting to receive the gift you gave. 2 And it will come to you in the amount in which you gave it. 3 You will find you have exact return, for that is what you asked. 4 It might be helpful, too, to think of one to whom to give your gifts. 5 He represents the others, and through him you give to all.

W-108.10. Our very simple lesson for today will teach you much. 2 Effect and cause will be far better understood from this time on, and we will make much faster progress now. 3 Think of the exercises for today as quick advances in your learning, made still faster and more sure each time you say, \”To give and to receive are one in truth.\”

LESSON 109

ACIM Daily Lesson 109 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

I rest in God.

W-109.1. We ask for rest today, and quietness unshaken by the world\’s appearances. 2 We ask for peace and stillness, in the midst of all the turmoil born of clashing dreams. 3 We ask for safety and for happiness, although we seem to look on danger and on sorrow. 4 And we have the thought that will answer our asking with what we request.

W-109.2. \”I rest in God.\” 2 This thought will bring to you the rest and quiet, peace and stillness, and the safety and the happiness you seek. 3 \”I rest in God.\” 4 This thought has power to wake the sleeping truth in you, whose vision sees beyond appearances to that same truth in everyone and everything there is. 5 Here is the end of suffering for all the world, and everyone who ever came and yet will come to linger for a while. 6 Here is the thought in which the Son of God is born again, to recognize himself.

W-109.3. \”I rest in God.\” 2 Completely undismayed, this thought will carry you through storms and strife, past misery and pain, past loss and death, and onward to the certainty of God. 3 There is no suffering it cannot heal. 4 There is no problem that it cannot solve. 5 And no appearance but will turn to truth before the eyes of you who rest in God.

W-109.4. This is the day of peace. 2 You rest in God, and while the world is torn by winds of hate your rest remains completely undisturbed. 3 Yours is the rest of truth. 4 Appearances cannot intrude on you. 5 You call to all to join you in your rest, and they will hear and come to you because you rest in God. 6 They will not hear another voice than yours because you gave your voice to God, and now you rest in Him and let Him speak through you.

W-109.5. In Him you have no cares and no concerns, no burdens, no anxiety, no pain, no fear of future and no past regrets. 2 In timelessness you rest, while time goes by without its touch upon you, for your rest can never change in any way at all. 3 You rest today. 4 And as you close your eyes, sink into stillness. 5 Let these periods of rest and respite reassure your mind that all its frantic fantasies were but the dreams of fever that has passed away. 6 Let it be still and thankfully accept its healing. 7 No more fearful dreams will come, now that you rest in God. 8 Take time today to slip away from dreams and into peace.

W-109.6. Each hour that you take your rest today, a tired mind is suddenly made glad, a bird with broken wings begins to sing, a stream long dry begins to flow again. 2 The world is born again each time you rest, and hourly remember that you came to bring the peace of God into the world, that it might take its rest along with you.

W-109.7. With each five minutes that you rest today, the world is nearer waking. 2 And the time when rest will be the only thing there is comes closer to all worn and tired minds, too weary now to go their way alone. 3 And they will hear the bird begin to sing and see the stream begin to flow again, with hope reborn and energy restored to walk with lightened steps along the road that suddenly seems easy as they go.

W-109.8. You rest within the peace of God today, and call upon your brothers from your rest to draw them to their rest, along with you. 2 You will be faithful to your trust today, forgetting no one, bringing everyone into the boundless circle of your peace, the holy sanctuary where you rest. 3 Open the temple doors and let them come from far across the world, and near as well; your distant brothers and your closest friends; bid them all enter here and rest with you.

W-109.9. You rest within the peace of God today, quiet and unafraid. 2 Each brother comes to take his rest, and offer it to you. 3 We rest together here, for thus our rest is made complete, and what we give today we have received already. 4 Time is not the guardian of what we give today. 5 We give to those unborn and those passed by, to every Thought of God, and to the Mind in which these Thoughts were born and where they rest. 6 And we remind them of their resting place each time we tell ourselves, \”I rest in God.\”

LESSON 110

ACIM Daily Lesson 110 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

I am as God created me.

W-110.1. We will repeat today\’s idea from time to time. 2 For this one thought would be enough to save you and the world, if you believed that it is true. 3 Its truth would mean that you have made no changes in yourself that have reality, nor changed the universe so that what God created was replaced by fear and evil, misery and death. 4 If you remain as God created you fear has no meaning, evil is not real, and misery and death do not exist.

W-110.2. Today\’s idea is therefore all you need to let complete correction heal your mind, and give you perfect vision that will heal all the mistakes that any mind has made at any time or place. 2 It is enough to heal the past and make the future free. 3 It is enough to let the present be accepted as it is. 4 It is enough to let time be the means for all the world to learn escape from time, and every change that time appears to bring in passing by.

W-110.3. If you remain as God created you, appearances cannot replace the truth, health cannot turn to sickness, nor can death be substitute for life, or fear for love. 2 All this has not occurred, if you remain as God created you. 3 You need no thought but just this one, to let redemption come to light the world and free it from the past.

W-110.4. In this one thought is all the past undone; the present saved to quietly extend into a timeless future. 2 If you are as God created you, then there has been no separation of your mind from His, no split between your mind and other minds, and only unity within your own.

W-110.5. The healing power of today\’s idea is limitless. 2 It is the birthplace of all miracles, the great restorer of the truth to the awareness of the world. 3 Practice today\’s idea with gratitude. 4 This is the truth that comes to set you free. 5 This is the truth that God has promised you. 6 This is the Word in which all sorrow ends.

W-110.6. For your five-minute practice periods, begin with this quotation from the text:

2 I am as God created me. 3 His Son can suffer nothing.

4 And I am His Son.

W-110.7. Then, with this statement firmly in your mind, try to discover in your mind the Self Who is the holy Son of God Himself.

W-110.8. Seek Him within you Who is Christ in you, the Son of God and brother to the world; the Savior Who has been forever saved, with power to save whoever touches Him, however lightly, asking for the Word that tells him he is brother unto Him.

W-110.9. You are as God created you. 2 Today honor your Self. 3 Let graven images you made to be the Son of God instead of what he is be worshipped not today. 4 Deep in your mind the holy Christ in you is waiting your acknowledgment as you. 5 And you are lost and do not know yourself while He is unacknowledged and unknown.

W-110.10. Seek Him today, and find Him. 2 He will be your Savior from all idols you have made. 3 For when you find Him, you will understand how worthless are your idols, and how false the images which you believed were you. 4 Today we make a great advance to truth by letting idols go, and opening our hands and hearts and minds to God today.

W-110.11. We will remember Him throughout the day with thankful hearts and loving thoughts for all who meet with us today. 2 For it is thus that we remember Him. 3 And we will say, that we may be reminded of His Son, our holy Self, the Christ in each of us:

4 I am as God created me.

5 Let us declare this truth as often as we can. 6 This is the Word of God that sets you free. 7 This is the key that opens up the gate of Heaven, and that lets you enter in the peace of God and His eternity.

REVIEW III

Introduction to Review III

W-rIII.in.1. Our next review begins today. 2 We will review two recent lessons every day for ten successive days of practicing. 3 We will observe a special format for these practice periods, that you are urged to follow just as closely as you can.

W-rIII.in.2. We understand, of course, that it may be impossible for you to undertake what is suggested here as optimal each day and every hour of the day. 2 Learning will not be hampered when you miss a practice period because it is impossible at the appointed time. 3 Nor is it necessary that you make excessive efforts to be sure that you catch up in terms of numbers. 4 Rituals are not our aim, and would defeat our goal.

W-rIII.in.3. But learning will be hampered when you skip a practice period because you are unwilling to devote the time to it that you are asked to give. 2 Do not deceive yourself in this. 3 Unwillingness can be most carefully concealed behind a cloak of situations you cannot control. 4 Learn to distinguish situations that are poorly suited to your practicing from those that you establish to uphold a camouflage for your unwillingness.

W-rIII.in.4. Those practice periods that you have lost because you did not want to do them, for whatever reason, should be done as soon as you have changed your mind about your goal. 2 You are unwilling to cooperate in practicing salvation only if it interferes with goals you hold more dear. 3 When you withdraw the value given them, allow your practice periods to be replacements for your litanies to them. 4 They gave you nothing. 5 But your practicing can offer everything to you. 6 And so accept their offering and be at peace.

W-rIII.in.5. The format you should use for these reviews is this: Devote five minutes twice a day, or longer if you would prefer it, to considering the thoughts that are assigned. 2 Read over the ideas and comments that are written down for each day\’s exercise. 3 And then begin to think about them, while letting your mind relate them to your needs, your seeming problems and all your concerns.

W-rIII.in.6. Place the ideas within your mind, and let it use them as it chooses. 2 Give it faith that it will use them wisely, being helped in its decisions by the One Who gave the thoughts to you. 3 What can you trust but what is in your mind? 4 Have faith, in these reviews, the means the Holy Spirit uses will not fail. 5 The wisdom of your mind will come to your assistance. 6 Give direction at the outset; then lean back in quiet faith, and let the mind employ the thoughts you gave as they were given you for it to use.

W-rIII.in.7. You have been given them in perfect trust; in perfect confidence that you would use them well; in perfect faith that you would see their messages and use them for yourself. 2 Offer them to your mind in that same trust and confidence and faith. 3 It will not fail. 4 It is the Holy Spirit\’s chosen means for your salvation. 5 Since it has His trust, His means must surely merit yours as well.

W-rIII.in.8. We emphasize the benefits to you if you devote the first five minutes of the day to your reviews, and also give the last five minutes of your waking day to them. 2 If this cannot be done, at least try to divide them so you undertake one in the morning, and the other in the hour just before you go to sleep.

W-rIII.in.9. The exercises to be done throughout the day are equally important, and perhaps of even greater value. 2 You have been inclined to practice only at appointed times, and then go on your way to other things, without applying what you learned to them. 3 As a result, you have gained little reinforcement, and have not given your learning a fair chance to prove how great are its potential gifts to you. 4 Here is another chance to use it well.

W-rIII.in.10. In these reviews, we stress the need to let your learning not lie idly by between your longer practice periods. 2 Attempt to give your daily two ideas a brief but serious review each hour. 3 Use one on the hour, and the other one a half an hour later. 4 You need not give more than just a moment to each one. 5 Repeat it, and allow your mind to rest a little time in silence and in peace. 6 Then turn to other things, but try to keep the thought with you, and let it serve to help you keep your peace throughout the day as well.

W-rIII.in.11. If you are shaken, think of it again. 2 These practice periods are planned to help you form the habit of applying what you learn each day to everything you do. 3 Do not repeat the thought and lay it down. 4 Its usefulness is limitless to you. 5 And it is meant to serve you in all ways, all times and places, and whenever you need help of any kind. 6 Try, then, to take it with you in the business of the day and make it holy, worthy of God\’s Son, acceptable to God and to your Self.

W-rIII.in.12. Each day\’s review assignments will conclude with a restatement of the thought to use each hour, and the one to be applied on each half hour as well. 2 Forget them not. 3 This second chance with each of these ideas will bring such large advances that we come from these reviews with learning gains so great we will continue on more solid ground, with firmer footsteps and with stronger faith.

W-rIII.in.13.

Do not forget how little you have learned.

2 Do not forget how much you can learn now.

3 Do not forget your Father\’s need of you,

As you review these thoughts He gave to you.

LESSON 111

ACIM Daily Lesson 111 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

For morning and evening review:

W-111.1. (91) Miracles are seen in light.

2 I cannot see in darkness. 3 Let the light of holiness and truth light up my mind, and let me see the innocence within.

W-111.2. (92) Miracles are seen in light, and light and strength are one.

2 I see through strength, the gift of God to me. 3 My weakness is the dark His gift dispels, by giving me His strength to take its place.

W-111.3. On the hour:

2 Miracles are seen in light.

3 On the half hour:

4 Miracles are seen in light, and light and strength are one.

LESSON 112

ACIM Daily Lesson 112 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

For morning and evening review:

W-112.1. (93) Light and joy and peace abide in me.

2 I am the home of light and joy and peace. 3 I welcome them into the home I share with God, because I am a part of Him.

W-112.2. (94) I am as God created me.

2 I will remain forever as I was, created by the Changeless like Himself. 3 And I am one with Him, and He with me.

W-112.3. On the hour:

2 Light and joy and peace abide in me.

3 On the half hour:

4 I am as God created me.

LESSON 113

ACIM Daily Lesson 113 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

For morning and evening review:

W-113.1. (95) I am one Self, united with my Creator.

2 Serenity and perfect peace are mine, because I am one Self, completely whole, at one with all creation and with God.

W-113.2. (96) Salvation comes from my one Self.

2 From my one Self, Whose knowledge still remains within my mind, I see God\’s perfect plan for my salvation perfectly fulfilled.

W-113.3. On the hour:

2 I am one Self, united with my Creator.

3 On the half hour:

4 Salvation comes from my one Self.

LESSON 114

ACIM Daily Lesson 114 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

For morning and evening review:

W-114.1. (97) I am spirit.

2 I am the Son of God. 3 No body can contain my spirit, nor impose on me a limitation God created not.

W-114.2. (98) I will accept my part in God\’s plan for salvation.

2 What can my function be but to accept the Word of God, Who has created me for what I am and will forever be?

W-114.3. On the hour:

2 I am spirit.

3 On the half hour:

4 I will accept my part in God\’s plan for salvation.

LESSON 115

ACIM Daily Lesson 115 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

For morning and evening review:

W-115.1. (99) Salvation is my only function here.

2 My function here is to forgive the world for all the errors I have made. 3 For thus am I released from them with all the world.

W-115.2. (100) My part is essential to God\’s plan for salvation.

2 I am essential to the plan of God for the salvation of the world. 3 For He gave me His plan that I might save the world.

W-115.3. On the hour:

2 Salvation is my only function here.

3 On the half hour:

4 My part is essential to God\’s plan for salvation.

LESSON 116

ACIM Daily Lesson 116 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

For morning and evening review:

W-116.1. (101) God\’s Will for me is perfect happiness.

2 God\’s Will is perfect happiness for me. 3 And I can suffer but from the belief there is another will apart from His.

W-116.2. (102) I share God\’s Will for happiness for me.

2 I share my Father\’s Will for me, His Son. 3 What He has given me is all I want. 4 What He has given me is all there is.

W-116.3. On the hour:

2 God\’s Will for me is perfect happiness.

3 On the half hour:

4 I share God\’s Will for happiness for me.

LESSON 117

ACIM Daily Lesson 117 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

For morning and evening review:

W-117.1. (103) God, being Love, is also happiness.

2 Let me remember love is happiness, and nothing else brings joy. 3 And so I choose to entertain no substitutes for love.

W-117.2. (104) I seek but what belongs to me in truth.

2 Love is my heritage, and with it joy. 3 These are the gifts my Father gave to me. 4 I would accept all that is mine in truth.

W-117.3. On the hour:

2 God, being Love, is also happiness.

3 On the half hour:

4 I seek but what belongs to me in truth.

LESSON 118

ACIM Daily Lesson 118 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

For morning and evening review:

W-118.1. (105) God\’s peace and joy are mine.

2 Today I will accept God\’s peace and joy, in glad exchange for all the substitutes that I have made for happiness and peace.

W-118.2. (106) Let me be still and listen to the truth.

2 Let my own feeble voice be still, and let me hear the mighty Voice for Truth Itself assure me that I am God\’s perfect Son.

W-118.3. On the hour:

2 God\’s peace and joy are mine.

3 On the half hour:

4 Let me be still and listen to the truth.

LESSON 119

ACIM Daily Lesson 119 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

For morning and evening review:

W-119.1. (107) Truth will correct all errors in my mind.

2 I am mistaken when I think I can be hurt in any way. 3 I am God\’s Son, whose Self rests safely in the Mind of God.

W-119.2. (108) To give and to receive are one in truth.

2 I will forgive all things today, that I may learn how to accept the truth in me, and come to recognize my sinlessness.

W-119.3. On the hour:

2 Truth will correct all errors in my mind.

3 On the half hour:

4 To give and to receive are one in truth.

LESSON 120

ACIM Daily Lesson 120 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

For morning and evening review:

W-120.1. (109) I rest in God.

2 I rest in God today, and let Him work in me and through me, while I rest in Him in quiet and in perfect certainty.

W-120.2. (110) I am as God created me.

2 I am God\’s Son. 3 Today I lay aside all sick illusions of myself, and let my Father tell me Who I really am.

W-120.3. On the hour:

2 I rest in God.

3 On the half hour:

4 I am as God created me.

LESSON 121

ACIM Daily Lesson 121 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

Forgiveness is the key to happiness.

W-121.1. Here is the answer to your search for peace. 2 Here is the key to meaning in a world that seems to make no sense. 3 Here is the way to safety in apparent dangers that appear to threaten you at every turn, and bring uncertainty to all your hopes of ever finding quietness and peace. 4 Here are all questions answered; here the end of all uncertainty ensured at last.

W-121.2. The unforgiving mind is full of fear, and offers love no room to be itself; no place where it can spread its wings in peace and soar above the turmoil of the world. 2 The unforgiving mind is sad, without the hope of respite and release from pain. 3 It suffers and abides in misery, peering about in darkness, seeing not, yet certain of the danger lurking there.

W-121.3. The unforgiving mind is torn with doubt, confused about itself and all it sees; afraid and angry, weak and blustering, afraid to go ahead, afraid to stay, afraid to waken or to go to sleep, afraid of every sound, yet more afraid of stillness; terrified of darkness, yet more terrified at the approach of light. 2 What can the unforgiving mind perceive but its damnation? 3 What can it behold except the proof that all its sins are real?

W-121.4. The unforgiving mind sees no mistakes, but only sins. 2 It looks upon the world with sightless eyes, and shrieks as it beholds its own projections rising to attack its miserable parody of life. 3 It wants to live, yet wishes it were dead. 4 It wants forgiveness, yet it sees no hope. 5 It wants escape, yet can conceive of none because it sees the sinful everywhere.

W-121.5. The unforgiving mind is in despair, without the prospect of a future which can offer anything but more despair. 2 Yet it regards its judgment of the world as irreversible, and does not see it has condemned itself to this despair. 3 It thinks it cannot change, for what it sees bears witness that its judgment is correct. 4 It does not ask, because it thinks it knows. 5 It does not question, certain it is right.

W-121.6. Forgiveness is acquired. 2 It is not inherent in the mind, which cannot sin. 3 As sin is an idea you taught yourself, forgiveness must be learned by you as well, but from a Teacher other than yourself, Who represents the other Self in you. 4 Through Him you learn how to forgive the self you think you made, and let it disappear. 5 Thus you return your mind as one to Him Who is your Self, and Who can never sin.

W-121.7. Each unforgiving mind presents you with an opportunity to teach your own how to forgive itself. 2 Each one awaits release from hell through you, and turns to you imploringly for Heaven here and now. 3 It has no hope, but you become its hope. 4 And as its hope, do you become your own. 5 The unforgiving mind must learn through your forgiveness that it has been saved from hell. 6 And as you teach salvation, you will learn. 7 Yet all your teaching and your learning will be not of you, but of the Teacher Who was given you to show the way to you.

W-121.8. Today we practice learning to forgive. 2 If you are willing, you can learn today to take the key to happiness, and use it on your own behalf. 3 We will devote ten minutes in the morning, and at night another ten, to learning how to give forgiveness and receive forgiveness, too.

W-121.9. The unforgiving mind does not believe that giving and receiving are the same. 2 Yet we will try to learn today that they are one through practicing forgiveness toward one whom you think of as an enemy, and one whom you consider as a friend. 3 And as you learn to see them both as one, we will extend the lesson to yourself, and see that their escape included yours.

W-121.10. Begin the longer practice periods by thinking of someone you do not like, who seems to irritate you, or to cause regret in you if you should meet him; one you actively despise, or merely try to overlook. 2 It does not matter what the form your anger takes. 3 You probably have chosen him already. 4 He will do.

W-121.11. Now close your eyes and see him in your mind, and look at him a while. 2 Try to perceive some light in him somewhere; a little gleam which you had never noticed. 3 Try to find some little spark of brightness shining through the ugly picture that you hold of him. 4 Look at this picture till you see a light somewhere within it, and then try to let this light extend until it covers him, and makes the picture beautiful and good.

W-121.12. Look at this changed perception for a while, and turn your mind to one you call a friend. 2 Try to transfer the light you learned to see around your former \”enemy\” to him. 3 Perceive him now as more than friend to you, for in that light his holiness shows you your savior, saved and saving, healed and whole.

W-121.13. Then let him offer you the light you see in him, and let your \”enemy\” and friend unite in blessing you with what you gave. 2 Now are you one with them, and they with you. 3 Now have you been forgiven by yourself. 4 Do not forget, throughout the day, the role forgiveness plays in bringing happiness to every unforgiving mind, with yours among them. 5 Every hour tell yourself:

6 Forgiveness is the key to happiness. 7 I will awaken from the dream that I am mortal, fallible and full of sin, and know I am the perfect Son of God.

LESSON 122

ACIM Daily Lesson 122 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

Forgiveness offers everything I want.

W-122.1. What could you want forgiveness cannot give? 2 Do you want peace? 3 Forgiveness offers it. 4 Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world? 5 Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always? 6 Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep, abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset?

W-122.2. All this forgiveness offers you, and more. 2 It sparkles on your eyes as you awake, and gives you joy with which to meet the day. 3 It soothes your forehead while you sleep, and rests upon your eyelids so you see no dreams of fear and evil, malice and attack. 4 And when you wake again, it offers you another day of happiness and peace. 5 All this forgiveness offers you, and more.

W-122.3. Forgiveness lets the veil be lifted up that hides the face of Christ from those who look with unforgiving eyes upon the world. 2 It lets you recognize the Son of God, and clears your memory of all dead thoughts so that remembrance of your Father can arise across the threshold of your mind. 3 What would you want forgiveness cannot give? 4 What gifts but these are worthy to be sought? 5 What fancied value, trivial effect or transient promise, never to be kept, can hold more hope than what forgiveness brings?

W-122.4. Why would you seek an answer other than the answer that will answer everything? 2 Here is the perfect answer, given to imperfect questions, meaningless requests, halfhearted willingness to hear, and less than halfway diligence and partial trust. 3 Here is the answer! 4 Seek for it no more. 5 You will not find another one instead.

W-122.5. God\’s plan for your salvation cannot change, nor can it fail. 2 Be thankful it remains exactly as He planned it. 3 Changelessly it stands before you like an open door, with warmth and welcome calling from beyond the doorway, bidding you to enter in and make yourself at home, where you belong.

W-122.6. Here is the answer! 2 Would you stand outside while all of Heaven waits for you within? 3 Forgive and be forgiven. 4 As you give you will receive. 5 There is no plan but this for the salvation of the Son of God. 6 Let us today rejoice that this is so, for here we have an answer, clear and plain, beyond deceit in its simplicity. 7 All the complexities the world has spun of fragile cobwebs disappear before the power and the majesty of this extremely simple statement of the truth.

W-122.7. Here is the answer! 2 Do not turn away in aimless wandering again. 3 Accept salvation now. 4 It is the gift of God, and not the world. 5 The world can give no gifts of any value to a mind that has received what God has given as its own. 6 God wills salvation be received today, and that the intricacies of your dreams no longer hide their nothingness from you.

W-122.8. Open your eyes today and look upon a happy world of safety and of peace. 2 Forgiveness is the means by which it comes to take the place of hell. 3 In quietness it rises up to greet your open eyes, and fill your heart with deep tranquility as ancient truths, forever newly born, arise in your awareness. 4 What you will remember then can never be described. 5 Yet your forgiveness offers it to you.

W-122.9. Remembering the gifts forgiveness gives, we undertake our practicing today with hope and faith that this will be the day salvation will be ours. 2 Earnestly and gladly will we seek for it today, aware we hold the key within our hands, accepting Heaven\’s answer to the hell we made, but where we would remain no more.

W-122.10. Morning and evening do we gladly give a quarter of an hour to the search in which the end of hell is guaranteed. 2 Begin in hopefulness, for we have reached the turning point at which the road becomes far easier. 3 And now the way is short that yet we travel. 4 We are close indeed to the appointed ending of the dream.

W-122.11. Sink into happiness as you begin these practice periods, for they hold out the sure rewards of questions answered and what your acceptance of the answer brings. 2 Today it will be given you to feel the peace forgiveness offers, and the joy the lifting of the veil holds out to you.

W-122.12. Before the light you will receive today the world will fade until it disappears, and you will see another world arise you have no words to picture. 2 Now we walk directly into light, and we receive the gifts that have been held in store for us since time began, kept waiting for today.

W-122.13. Forgiveness offers everything you want. 2 Today all things you want are given you. 3 Let not your gifts recede throughout the day, as you return again to meet a world of shifting change and bleak appearances. 4 Retain your gifts in clear awareness as you see the changeless in the heart of change; the light of truth behind appearances.

W-122.14. Be tempted not to let your gifts slip by and drift into forgetfulness, but hold them firmly in your mind by your attempts to think of them at least a minute as each quarter of an hour passes by. 2 Remind yourself how precious are these gifts with this reminder, which has power to hold your gifts in your awareness through the day:

3 Forgiveness offers everything I want.

4 Today I have accepted this as true.

5 Today I have received the gifts of God.

LESSON 123

ACIM Daily Lesson 123 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

I thank my Father for His gifts to me.

W-123.1. Today let us be thankful. 2 We have come to gentler pathways and to smoother roads. 3 There is no thought of turning back, and no implacable resistance to the truth. 4 A bit of wavering remains, some small objections and a little hesitance, but you can well be grateful for your gains, which are far greater than you realize.

W-123.2. A day devoted now to gratitude will add the benefit of some insight into the real extent of all the gains which you have made; the gifts you have received. 2 Be glad today, in loving thankfulness, your Father has not left you to yourself, nor let you wander in the dark alone. 3 Be grateful He has saved you from the self you thought you made to take the place of Him and His creation. 4 Give Him thanks today.

W-123.3. Give thanks that He has not abandoned you, and that His Love forever will remain shining on you, forever without change. 2 Give thanks as well that you are changeless, for the Son He loves is changeless as Himself. 3 Be grateful you are saved. 4 Be glad you have a function in salvation to fulfill. 5 Be thankful that your value far transcends your meager gifts and petty judgments of the one whom God established as His Son.

W-123.4. Today in gratitude we lift our hearts above despair, and raise our thankful eyes, no longer looking downward to the dust. 2 We sing the song of thankfulness today, in honor of the Self that God has willed to be our true Identity in Him. 3 Today we smile on everyone we see, and walk with lightened footsteps as we go to do what is appointed us to do.

W-123.5. We do not go alone. 2 And we give thanks that in our solitude a Friend has come to speak the saving Word of God to us. 3 And thanks to you for listening to Him. 4 His Word is soundless if it be not heard. 5 In thanking Him the thanks are yours as well. 6 An unheard message will not save the world, however mighty be the Voice that speaks, however loving may the message be.

W-123.6. Thanks be to you who heard, for you become the messenger who brings His Voice with you, and lets It echo round and round the world. 2 Receive the thanks of God today, as you give thanks to Him. 3 For He would offer you the thanks you give, since He receives your gifts in loving gratitude, and gives them back a thousand and a hundred thousand more than they were given. 4 He will bless your gifts by sharing them with you. 5 And so they grow in power and in strength, until they fill the world with gladness and with gratitude.

W-123.7. Receive His thanks and offer yours to Him for fifteen minutes twice today. 2 And you will realize to Whom you offer thanks, and Whom He thanks as you are thanking Him. 3 This holy half an hour given Him will be returned to you in terms of years for every second; power to save the world eons more quickly for your thanks to Him.

W-123.8. Receive His thanks, and you will understand how lovingly He holds you in His Mind, how deep and limitless His care for you, how perfect is His gratitude to you. 2 Remember hourly to think of Him, and give Him thanks for everything He gave His Son, that he might rise above the world, remembering his Father and his Self.

LESSON 124

ACIM Daily Lesson 124 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

Let me remember I am one with God.

W-124.1. Today we will again give thanks for our Identity in God. 2 Our home is safe, protection guaranteed in all we do, power and strength available to us in all our undertakings. 3 We can fail in nothing. 4 Everything we touch takes on a shining light that blesses and that heals. 5 At one with God and with the universe we go our way rejoicing, with the thought that God Himself goes everywhere with us.

W-124.2. How holy are our minds! 2 And everything we see reflects the holiness within the mind at one with God and with itself. 3 How easily do errors disappear, and death give place to everlasting life. 4 Our shining footprints point the way to truth, for God is our Companion as we walk the world a little while. 5 And those who come to follow us will recognize the way because the light we carry stays behind, yet still remains with us as we walk on.

W-124.3. What we receive is our eternal gift to those who follow after, and to those who went before or stayed with us a while. 2 And God, Who loves us with the equal love in which we were created, smiles on us and offers us the happiness we gave.

W-124.4. Today we will not doubt His Love for us, nor question His protection and His care. 2 No meaningless anxieties can come between our faith and our awareness of His Presence. 3 We are one with Him today in recognition and remembrance. 4 We feel Him in our hearts. 5 Our minds contain His Thoughts; our eyes behold His loveliness in all we look upon. 6 Today we see only the loving and the lovable.

W-124.5. We see it in appearances of pain, and pain gives way to peace. 2 We see it in the frantic, in the sad and the distressed, the lonely and afraid, who are restored to the tranquility and peace of mind in which they were created. 3 And we see it in the dying and the dead as well, restoring them to life. 4 All this we see because we saw it first within ourselves.

W-124.6. No miracle can ever be denied to those who know that they are one with God. 2 No thought of theirs but has the power to heal all forms of suffering in anyone, in times gone by and times as yet to come, as easily as in the ones who walk beside them now. 3 Their thoughts are timeless, and apart from distance as apart from time.

W-124.7. We join in this awareness as we say that we are one with God. 2 For in these words we say as well that we are saved and healed; that we can save and heal accordingly. 3 We have accepted, and we now would give. 4 For we would keep the gifts our Father gave. 5 Today we would experience ourselves at one with Him, so that the world may share our recognition of reality. 6 In our experience the world is freed. 7 As we deny our separation from our Father, it is healed along with us.

W-124.8. Peace be to you today. 2 Secure your peace by practicing awareness you are one with your Creator, as He is with you. 3 Sometime today, whenever it seems best, devote a half an hour to the thought that you are one with God. 4 This is our first attempt at an extended period for which we give no rules nor special words to guide your meditation. 5 We will trust God\’s Voice to speak as He sees fit today, certain He will not fail. 6 Abide with Him this half an hour. 7 He will do the rest.

W-124.9. Your benefit will not be less if you believe that nothing happens. 2 You may not be ready to accept the gain today. 3 Yet sometime, somewhere, it will come to you, nor will you fail to recognize it when it dawns with certainty upon your mind. 4 This half an hour will be framed in gold, with every minute like a diamond set around the mirror that this exercise will offer you. 5 And you will see Christ\’s face upon it, in reflection of your own.

W-124.10. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, you will see your own transfiguration in the glass this holy half an hour will hold out to you, to look upon yourself. 2 When you are ready you will find it there, within your mind and waiting to be found. 3 You will remember then the thought to which you gave this half an hour, thankfully aware no time was ever better spent.

W-124.11. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, you will look into this glass, and understand the sinless light you see belongs to you; the loveliness you look on is your own. 2 Count this half hour as your gift to God, in certainty that His return will be a sense of love you cannot understand, a joy too deep for you to comprehend, a sight too holy for the body\’s eyes to see. 3 And yet you can be sure someday, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, you will understand and comprehend and see.

W-124.12. Add further jewels to the golden frame that holds the mirror offered you today, by hourly repeating to yourself:

2 Let me remember I am one with God, at one with all my brothers and my Self, in everlasting holiness and peace.

LESSON 125

ACIM Daily Lesson 125 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

In quiet I receive God\’s Word today.

W-125.1. Let this day be a day of stillness and of quiet listening. 2 Your Father wills you hear His Word today. 3 He calls to you from deep within your mind where He abides. 4 Hear Him today. 5 No peace is possible until His Word is heard around the world; until your mind, in quiet listening, accepts the message that the world must hear to usher in the quiet time of peace.

W-125.2. This world will change through you. 2 No other means can save it, for God\’s plan is simply this: The Son of God is free to save himself, given the Word of God to be his Guide, forever in his mind and at his side to lead him surely to his Father\’s house by his own will, forever free as God\’s. 3 He is not led by force, but only love. 4 He is not judged, but only sanctified.

W-125.3. In stillness we will hear God\’s Voice today without intrusion of our petty thoughts, without our personal desires, and without all judgment of His holy Word. 2 We will not judge ourselves today, for what we are can not be judged. 3 We stand apart from all the judgments which the world has laid upon the Son of God. 4 It knows him not. 5 Today we will not listen to the world, but wait in silence for the Word of God.

W-125.4. Hear, holy Son of God, your Father speak. 2 His Voice would give to you His holy Word, to spread across the world the tidings of salvation and the holy time of peace. 3 We gather at the throne of God today, the quiet place within the mind where He abides forever, in the holiness that He created and will never leave.

W-125.5. He has not waited until you return your mind to Him to give His Word to you. 2 He has not hid Himself from you, while you have wandered off a little while from Him. 3 He does not cherish the illusions which you hold about yourself. 4 He knows His Son, and wills that he remain as part of Him regardless of his dreams; regardless of his madness that his will is not his own.

W-125.6. Today He speaks to you. 2 His Voice awaits your silence, for His Word can not be heard until your mind is quiet for a while, and meaningless desires have been stilled. 3 Await His Word in quiet. 4 There is peace within you to be called upon today, to help make ready your most holy mind to hear the Voice for its Creator speak.

W-125.7. Three times today, at times most suitable for silence, give ten minutes set apart from listening to the world, and choose instead a gentle listening to the Word of God. 2 He speaks from nearer than your heart to you. 3 His Voice is closer than your hand. 4 His Love is everything you are and that He is; the same as you, and you the same as He.

W-125.8. It is your voice to which you listen as He speaks to you. 2 It is your word He speaks. 3 It is the Word of freedom and of peace, of unity of will and purpose, with no separation nor division in the single Mind of Father and of Son. 4 In quiet listen to your Self today, and let Him tell you God has never left His Son, and you have never left your Self.

W-125.9. Only be quiet. 2 You will need no rule but this, to let your practicing today lift you above the thinking of the world, and free your vision from the body\’s eyes. 3 Only be still and listen. 4 You will hear the Word in which the Will of God the Son joins in his Father\’s Will, at one with it, with no illusions interposed between the wholly indivisible and true. 5 As every hour passes by today, be still a moment and remind yourself you have a special purpose for this day; in quiet to receive the Word of God.

LESSON 126

ACIM Daily Lesson 126 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

All that I give is given to myself.

W-126.1. Today\’s idea, completely alien to the ego and the thinking of the world, is crucial to the thought reversal that this course will bring about. 2 If you believed this statement, there would be no problem in complete forgiveness, certainty of goal, and sure direction. 3 You would understand the means by which salvation comes to you, and would not hesitate to use it now.

W-126.2. Let us consider what you do believe, in place of this idea. 2 It seems to you that other people are apart from you, and able to behave in ways which have no bearing on your thoughts, nor yours on theirs. 3 Therefore, your attitudes have no effect on them, and their appeals for help are not in any way related to your own. 4 You further think that they can sin without affecting your perception of yourself, while you can judge their sin, and yet remain apart from condemnation and at peace.

W-126.3. When you \”forgive\” a sin, there is no gain to you directly. 2 You give charity to one unworthy, merely to point out that you are better, on a higher plane than he whom you forgive. 3 He has not earned your charitable tolerance, which you bestow on one unworthy of the gift, because his sins have lowered him beneath a true equality with you. 4 He has no claim on your forgiveness. 5 It holds out a gift to him, but hardly to yourself.

W-126.4. Thus is forgiveness basically unsound; a charitable whim, benevolent yet undeserved, a gift bestowed at times, at other times withheld. 2 Unmerited, withholding it is just, nor is it fair that you should suffer when it is withheld. 3 The sin that you forgive is not your own. 4 Someone apart from you committed it. 5 And if you then are gracious unto him by giving him what he does not deserve, the gift is no more yours than was his sin.

W-126.5. If this be true, forgiveness has no grounds on which to rest dependably and sure. 2 It is an eccentricity, in which you sometimes choose to give indulgently an undeserved reprieve. 3 Yet it remains your right to let the sinner not escape the justified repayment for his sin. 4 Think you the Lord of Heaven would allow the world\’s salvation to depend on this? 5 Would not His care for you be small indeed, if your salvation rested on a whim?

W-126.6. You do not understand forgiveness. 2 As you see it, it is but a check upon overt attack, without requiring correction in your mind. 3 It cannot give you peace as you perceive it. 4 It is not a means for your release from what you see in someone other than yourself. 5 It has no power to restore your unity with him to your awareness. 6 It is not what God intended it to be for you.

W-126.7. Not having given Him the gift He asks of you, you cannot recognize His gifts, and think He has not given them to you. 2 Yet would He ask you for a gift unless it was for you? 3 Could He be satisfied with empty gestures, and evaluate such petty gifts as worthy of His Son? 4 Salvation is a better gift than this. 5 And true forgiveness, as the means by which it is attained, must heal the mind that gives, for giving is receiving. 6 What remains as unreceived has not been given, but what has been given must have been received.

W-126.8. Today we try to understand the truth that giver and receiver are the same. 2 You will need help to make this meaningful, because it is so alien to the thoughts to which you are accustomed. 3 But the Help you need is there. 4 Give Him your faith today, and ask Him that He share your practicing in truth today. 5 And if you only catch a tiny glimpse of the release that lies in the idea we practice for today, this is a day of glory for the world.

W-126.9. Give fifteen minutes twice today to the attempt to understand today\’s idea. 2 It is the thought by which forgiveness takes its proper place in your priorities. 3 It is the thought that will release your mind from every bar to what forgiveness means, and let you realize its worth to you.

W-126.10. In silence, close your eyes upon the world that does not understand forgiveness, and seek sanctuary in the quiet place where thoughts are changed and false beliefs laid by. 2 Repeat today\’s idea, and ask for help in understanding what it really means. 3 Be willing to be taught. 4 Be glad to hear the Voice of truth and healing speak to you, and you will understand the words He speaks, and recognize He speaks your words to you.

W-126.11. As often as you can, remind yourself you have a goal today; an aim which makes this day of special value to yourself and all your brothers. 2 Do not let your mind forget this goal for long, but tell yourself:

3 All that I give is given to myself. 4 The Help I need to learn that this is true is with me now. 5 And I will trust in Him.

6 Then spend a quiet moment, opening your mind to His correction and His Love. 7 And what you hear of Him you will believe, for what He gives will be received by you.

LESSON 127

ACIM Daily Lesson 127 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

There is no love but God\’s.

W-127.1. Perhaps you think that different kinds of love are possible. 2 Perhaps you think there is a kind of love for this, a kind for that; a way of loving one, another way of loving still another. 3 Love is one. 4 It has no separate parts and no degrees; no kinds nor levels, no divergencies and no distinctions. 5 It is like itself, unchanged throughout. 6 It never alters with a person or a circumstance. 7 It is the Heart of God, and also of His Son.

W-127.2. Love\’s meaning is obscure to anyone who thinks that love can change. 2 He does not see that changing love must be impossible. 3 And thus he thinks that he can love at times, and hate at other times. 4 He also thinks that love can be bestowed on one, and yet remain itself although it is withheld from others. 5 To believe these things of love is not to understand it. 6 If it could make such distinctions, it would have to judge between the righteous and the sinner, and perceive the Son of God in separate parts.

W-127.3. Love cannot judge. 2 As it is one itself, it looks on all as one. 3 Its meaning lies in oneness. 4 And it must elude the mind that thinks of it as partial or in part. 5 There is no love but God\’s, and all of love is His. 6 There is no other principle that rules where love is not. 7 Love is a law without an opposite. 8 Its wholeness is the power holding everything as one, the link between the Father and the Son which holds Them both forever as the same.

W-127.4. No course whose purpose is to teach you to remember what you really are could fail to emphasize that there can never be a difference in what you really are and what love is. 2 Love\’s meaning is your own, and shared by God Himself. 3 For what you are is what He is. 4 There is no love but His, and what He is, is everything there is. 5 There is no limit placed upon Himself, and so are you unlimited as well.

W-127.5. No law the world obeys can help you grasp love\’s meaning. 2 What the world believes was made to hide love\’s meaning, and to keep it dark and secret. 3 There is not one principle the world upholds but violates the truth of what love is, and what you are as well.

W-127.6. Seek not within the world to find your Self. 2 Love is not found in darkness and in death. 3 Yet it is perfectly apparent to the eyes that see and ears that hear love\’s Voice. 4 Today we practice making free your mind of all the laws you think you must obey; of all the limits under which you live, and all the changes that you think are part of human destiny. 5 Today we take the largest single step this course requests in your advance towards its established goal.

W-127.7. If you achieve the faintest glimmering of what love means today, you have advanced in distance without measure and in time beyond the count of years to your release. 2 Let us together, then, be glad to give some time to God today, and understand there is no better use for time than this.

W-127.8. For fifteen minutes twice today escape from every law in which you now believe. 2 Open your mind and rest. 3 The world that seems to hold you prisoner can be escaped by anyone who does not hold it dear. 4 Withdraw all value you have placed upon its meager offerings and senseless gifts, and let the gift of God replace them all.

W-127.9. Call to your Father, certain that His Voice will answer. 2 He Himself has promised this. 3 And He Himself will place a spark of truth within your mind wherever you give up a false belief, a dark illusion of your own reality and what love means. 4 He will shine through your idle thoughts today, and help you understand the truth of love. 5 In loving gentleness He will abide with you, as you allow His Voice to teach love\’s meaning to your clean and open mind. 6 And He will bless the lesson with His Love.

W-127.10. Today the legion of the future years of waiting for salvation disappears before the timelessness of what you learn. 2 Let us give thanks today that we are spared a future like the past. 3 Today we leave the past behind us, nevermore to be remembered. 4 And we raise our eyes upon a different present, where a future dawns unlike the past in every attribute.

W-127.11. The world in infancy is newly born. 2 And we will watch it grow in health and strength, to shed its blessing upon all who come to learn to cast aside the world they thought was made in hate to be love\’s enemy. 3 Now are they all made free, along with us. 4 Now are they all our brothers in God\’s Love.

W-127.12. We will remember them throughout the day, because we cannot leave a part of us outside our love if we would know our Self. 2 At least three times an hour think of one who makes the journey with you, and who came to learn what you must learn. 3 And as he comes to mind, give him this message from your Self:

4 I bless you, brother, with the Love of God, which I would share with you. 5 For I would learn the joyous lesson that there is no love but God\’s and yours and mine and everyone\’s.

LESSON 128

ACIM Daily Lesson 128 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

The world I see holds nothing that I want.

W-128.1. The world you see holds nothing that you need to offer you; nothing that you can use in any way, nor anything at all that serves to give you joy. 2 Believe this thought, and you are saved from years of misery, from countless disappointments, and from hopes that turn to bitter ashes of despair. 3 No one but must accept this thought as true, if he would leave the world behind and soar beyond its petty scope and little ways.

W-128.2. Each thing you value here is but a chain that binds you to the world, and it will serve no other end but this. 2 For everything must serve the purpose you have given it, until you see a different purpose there. 3 The only purpose worthy of your mind this world contains is that you pass it by, without delaying to perceive some hope where there is none. 4 Be you deceived no more. 5 The world you see holds nothing that you want.

W-128.3. Escape today the chains you place upon your mind when you perceive salvation here. 2 For what you value you make part of you as you perceive yourself. 3 All things you seek to make your value greater in your sight limit you further, hide your worth from you, and add another bar across the door that leads to true awareness of your Self.

W-128.4. Let nothing that relates to body thoughts delay your progress to salvation, nor permit temptation to believe the world holds anything you want to hold you back. 2 Nothing is here to cherish. 3 Nothing here is worth one instant of delay and pain; one moment of uncertainty and doubt. 4 The worthless offer nothing. 5 Certainty of worth can not be found in worthlessness.

W-128.5. Today we practice letting go all thought of values we have given to the world. 2 We leave it free of purposes we gave its aspects and its phases and its dreams. 3 We hold it purposeless within our minds, and loosen it from all we wish it were. 4 Thus do we lift the chains that bar the door to freedom from the world, and go beyond all little values and diminished goals.

W-128.6. Pause and be still a little while, and see how far you rise above the world, when you release your mind from chains and let it seek the level where it finds itself at home. 2 It will be grateful to be free a while. 3 It knows where it belongs. 4 But free its wings, and it will fly in sureness and in joy to join its holy purpose. 5 Let it rest in its Creator, there to be restored to sanity, to freedom and to love.

W-128.7. Give it ten minutes rest three times today. 2 And when your eyes are opened afterwards, you will not value anything you see as much as when you looked at it before. 3 Your whole perspective on the world will shift by just a little, every time you let your mind escape its chains. 4 The world is not where it belongs. 5 And you belong where it would be, and where it goes to rest when you release it from the world. 6 Your Guide is sure. 7 Open your mind to Him. 8 Be still and rest.

W-128.8. Protect your mind throughout the day as well. 2 And when you think you see some value in an aspect or an image of the world, refuse to lay this chain upon your mind, but tell yourself with quiet certainty:

3 This will not tempt me to delay myself.

4 The world I see holds nothing that I want.

LESSON 129

ACIM Daily Lesson 129 Plus Text with Prayer by David Hoffmeister

Beyond this world there is a world I want.

W-129.1. This is the thought that follows from the one we practiced yesterday. 2 You cannot stop with the idea the world is worthless, for unless you see that there is something else to hope for, you will only be depressed. 3 Our emphasis is not on giving up the world, but on exchanging it for what is far more satisfying, filled with joy, and capable of offering you peace. 4 Think you this world can offer that to you?

W-129.2. It might be worth a little time to think once more about the value of this world. 2 Perhaps you will concede there is no loss in letting go all thought of value here. 3 The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. 4 It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. 5 No lasting love is found, for none is here. 6 This is the world of time, where all things end.

W-129.3. Is it a loss to find a world instead where losing is impossible; where love endures forever, hate cannot exist and vengeance has no meaning? 2 Is it loss to find all things you really want, and know they have no ending and they will remain exactly as you want them throughout time? 3 Yet even they will be exchanged at last for what we cannot speak of, for you go from there to where words fail entirely, into a silence where the language is unspoken and yet surely understood.

W-129.4. Communication, unambiguous and plain as day, remains unlimited for all eternity. 2 And God Himself speaks to His Son, as His Son speaks to Him. 3 Their language has no words, for what They say cannot be symbolized. 4 Their knowledge is direct and wholly shared and wholly one. 5 How far away from this are you who stay bound to this world. 6 And yet how near are you, when you exchange it for the world you want.

W-129.5. Now is the last step certain; now you stand an instant\’s space away from timelessness. 2 Here can you but look forward, never back to see again the world you do not want. 3 Here is the world that comes to take its place, as you unbind your mind from little things the world sets forth to keep you prisoner. 4 Value them not, and they will disappear. 5 Esteem them, and they will seem real to you.

W-129.6. Such is the choice. 2 What loss can be for you in choosing not to value nothingness? 3 This world holds nothing that you really want, but what you choose instead you want indeed! 4 Let it be given you today. 5 It waits but for your choosing it, to take the place of all the things you seek but do not want.

W-129.7. Practice your willingness to make this change ten minutes in the morning and at night, and once more in between. 2 Begin with this:

3 Beyond this world there is a world I want. 4 I choose to see that world instead of this, for here is nothing that I really want.

5 Then close your eyes upon the world you see, and in the silent darkness watch the lights that are not of this world light one by one, until where one begins another ends loses all meaning as they blend in one.

W-129.8. Today the lights of Heaven bend to you, to shine upon your eyelids as you rest beyond the world of darkness. 2 Here is light your eyes can not behold. 3 And yet your mind can see it plainly, and can understand. 4 A day of grace is given you today, and we give thanks. 5 This day we realize that what you feared to lose was only loss.

W-129.9. Now do we understand there is no loss. 2 For we have seen its opposite at last, and we are grateful that the choice is made. 3 Remember your decision hourly, and take a moment to confirm your choice by laying by whatever thoughts you have, and dwelling briefly only upon this:

4 The world I see holds nothing that I want.

5 Beyond this world there is a world I want.

LESSON 130

It is impossible to see two worlds.

W-130.1. Perception is consistent. 2 What you see reflects your thinking. 3 And your thinking but reflects your choice of what you want to see. 4 Your values are determiners of this, for what you value you must want to see, believing what you see is really there. 5 No one can see a world his mind has not accorded value. 6 And no one can fail to look upon what he believes he wants.

W-130.2. Yet who can really hate and love at once? 2 Who can desire what he does not want to have reality? 3 And who can choose to see a world of which he is afraid? 4 Fear must make blind, for this its weapon is: That which you fear to see you cannot see. 5 Love and perception thus go hand in hand, but fear obscures in darkness what is there.

W-130.3. What, then, can fear project upon the world? 2 What can be seen in darkness that is real? 3 Truth is eclipsed by fear, and what remains is but imagined. 4 Yet what can be real in blind imaginings of panic born? 5 What would you want that this is shown to you? 6 What would you wish to keep in such a dream?

W-130.4. Fear has made everything you think you see. 2 All separation, all distinctions, and the multitude of differences you believe make up the world. 3 They are not there. 4 Love\’s enemy has made them up. 5 Yet love can have no enemy, and so they have no cause, no being and no consequence. 6 They can be valued, but remain unreal. 7 They can be sought, but they can not be found. 8 Today we will not seek for them, nor waste this day in seeking what can not be found.

W-130.5. It is impossible to see two worlds which have no overlap of any kind. 2 Seek for the one; the other disappears. 3 But one remains. 4 They are the range of choice beyond which your decision cannot go. 5 The real and the unreal are all there are to choose between, and nothing more than these.

W-130.6. Today we will attempt no compromise where none is possible. 2 The world you see is proof you have already made a choice as all-embracing as its opposite. 3 What we would learn today is more than just the lesson that you cannot see two worlds. 4 It also teaches that the one you see is quite consistent from the point of view from which you see it. 5 It is all a piece because it stems from one emotion, and reflects its source in everything you see.

W-130.7. Six times today, in thanks and gratitude, we gladly give five minutes to the thought that ends all compromise and doubt, and go beyond them all as one. 2 We will not make a thousand meaningless distinctions, nor attempt to bring with us a little part of unreality, as we devote our minds to finding only what is real.

W-130.8. Begin your searching for the other world by asking for a strength beyond your own, and recognizing what it is you seek. 2 You do not want illusions. 3 And you come to these five minutes emptying your hands of all the petty treasures of this world. 4 You wait for God to help you, as you say:

5 It is impossible to see two worlds. 6 Let me accept the strength God offers me and see no value in this world, that I may find my freedom and deliverance.

W-130.9. God will be there. 2 For you have called upon the great unfailing power which will take this giant step with you in gratitude. 3 Nor will you fail to see His thanks expressed in tangible perception and in truth. 4 You will not doubt what you will look upon, for though it is perception, it is not the kind of seeing that your eyes alone have ever seen before. 5 And you will know God\’s strength upheld you as you made this choice.

W-130.10. Dismiss temptation easily today whenever it arises, merely by remembering the limits of your choice. 2 The unreal or the real, the false or true is what you see and only what you see. 3 Perception is consistent with your choice, and hell or Heaven comes to you as one.

W-130.11. Accept a little part of hell as real, and you have damned your eyes and cursed your sight, and what you will behold is hell indeed. 2 Yet the release of Heaven still remains within your range of choice, to take the place of everything that hell would show to you. 3 All you need say to any part of hell, whatever form it takes, is simply this:

4 It is impossible to see two worlds. 5 I seek my freedom and deliverance, and this is not a part of what I want.

LESSON 131

No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.

W-131.1. Failure is all about you while you seek for goals that cannot be achieved. 2 You look for permanence in the impermanent, for love where there is none, for safety in the midst of danger; immortality within the darkness of the dream of death. 3 Who could succeed where contradiction is the setting of his searching, and the place to which he comes to find stability?

W-131.2. Goals that are meaningless are not attained. 2 There is no way to reach them, for the means by which you strive for them are meaningless as they are. 3 Who can use such senseless means, and hope through them to gain in anything? 4 Where can they lead? 5 And what could they achieve that offers any hope of being real? 6 Pursuit of the imagined leads to death because it is the search for nothingness, and while you seek for life you ask for death. 7 You look for safety and security, while in your heart you pray for danger and protection for the little dream you made.

W-131.3. Yet searching is inevitable here. 2 For this you came, and you will surely do the thing you came for. 3 But the world can not dictate the goal for which you search, unless you give it power to do so. 4 Otherwise, you still are free to choose a goal that lies beyond the world and every worldly thought, and one that comes to you from an idea relinquished yet remembered, old yet new; an echo of a heritage forgot, yet holding everything you really want.

W-131.4. Be glad that search you must. 2 Be glad as well to learn you search for Heaven, and must find the goal you really want. 3 No one can fail to want this goal and reach it in the end. 4 God\’s Son can not seek vainly, though he try to force delay, deceive himself and think that it is hell he seeks. 5 When he is wrong, he finds correction. 6 When he wanders off, he is led back to his appointed task.

W-131.5. No one remains in hell, for no one can abandon his Creator, nor affect His perfect, timeless and unchanging Love. 2 You will find Heaven. 3 Everything you seek but this will fall away. 4 Yet not because it has been taken from you. 5 It will go because you do not want it. 6 You will reach the goal you really want as certainly as God created you in sinlessness.

W-131.6. Why wait for Heaven? 2 It is here today. 3 Time is the great illusion it is past or in the future. 4 Yet this cannot be, if it is where God wills His Son to be. 5 How could the Will of God be in the past, or yet to happen? 6 What He wills is now, without a past and wholly futureless. 7 It is as far removed from time as is a tiny candle from a distant star, or what you chose from what you really want.

W-131.7. Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. 2 God made no contradictions. 3 What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. 4 He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other\’s sorry outcome which is Heaven\’s opposite in every way.

W-131.8. God does not suffer conflict. 2 Nor is His creation split in two. 3 How could it be His Son could be in hell, when God Himself established him in Heaven? 4 Could he lose what the Eternal Will has given him to be his home forever? 5 Let us not try longer to impose an alien will upon God\’s single purpose. 6 He is here because He wills to be, and what He wills is present now, beyond the reach of time.

W-131.9. Today we will not choose a paradox in place of truth. 2 How could the Son of God make time to take away the Will of God? 3 He thus denies himself, and contradicts what has no opposite. 4 He thinks he made a hell opposing Heaven, and believes that he abides in what does not exist, while Heaven is the place he cannot find.

W-131.10. Leave foolish thoughts like these behind today, and turn your mind to true ideas instead. 2 No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth, and it is truth we seek to reach today. 3 We will devote ten minutes to this goal three times today, and we will ask to see the rising of the real world to replace the foolish images that we hold dear, with true ideas arising in the place of thoughts that have no meaning, no effect, and neither source nor substance in the truth.

W-131.11. This we acknowledge as we start upon our practice periods. 2 Begin with this:

3 I ask to see a different world, and think a different kind of thought from those I made. 4 The world I seek I did not make alone, the thoughts I want to think are not my own.

5 For several minutes watch your mind and see, although your eyes are closed, the senseless world you think is real. 6 Review the thoughts as well which are compatible with such a world, and which you think are true. 7 Then let them go, and sink below them to the holy place where they can enter not. 8 There is a door beneath them in your mind, which you could not completely lock to hide what lies beyond.

W-131.12. Seek for that door and find it. 2 But before you try to open it, remind yourself no one can fail who seeks to reach the truth. 3 And it is this request you make today. 4 Nothing but this has any meaning now; no other goal is valued now nor sought, nothing before this door you really want, and only what lies past it do you seek.

W-131.13. Put out your hand, and see how easily the door swings open with your one intent to go beyond it. 2 Angels light the way, so that all darkness vanishes, and you are standing in a light so bright and clear that you can understand all things you see. 3 A tiny moment of surprise, perhaps, will make you pause before you realize the world you see before you in the light reflects the truth you knew, and did not quite forget in wandering away in dreams.

W-131.14. You cannot fail today. 2 There walks with you the Spirit Heaven sent you, that you might approach this door some day, and through His aid slip effortlessly past it, to the light. 3 Today that day has come. 4 Today God keeps His ancient promise to His holy Son, as does His Son remember his to Him. 5 This is a day of gladness, for we come to the appointed time and place where you will find the goal of all your searching here, and all the seeking of the world, which end together as you pass beyond the door.

W-131.15. Remember often that today should be a time of special gladness, and refrain from dismal thoughts and meaningless laments. 2 Salvation\’s time has come. 3 Today is set by Heaven itself to be a time of grace for you and for the world. 4 If you forget this happy fact, remind yourself with this:

5 Today I seek and find all that I want.

6 My single purpose offers it to me.

7 No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.

LESSON 132

I loose the world from all I thought it was.

W-132.1. What keeps the world in chains but your beliefs? 2 And what can save the world except your Self? 3 Belief is powerful indeed. 4 The thoughts you hold are mighty, and illusions are as strong in their effects as is the truth. 5 A madman thinks the world he sees is real, and does not doubt it. 6 Nor can he be swayed by questioning his thoughts\’ effects. 7 It is but when their source is raised to question that the hope of freedom comes to him at last.

W-132.2. Yet is salvation easily achieved, for anyone is free to change his mind, and all his thoughts change with it. 2 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. 4 You free the future from all ancient thoughts of seeking what you do not want to find.

W-132.3. The present now remains the only time. 2 Here in the present is the world set free. 3 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, your doubts and miseries, your pain and tears; and all your sorrows press on it, and keep the world a prisoner to your beliefs. 5 Death strikes it everywhere because you hold the bitter thoughts of death within your mind.

W-132.4. The world is nothing in itself. 2 Your mind must give it meaning. 3 And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real. 4 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. 5 Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came.

W-132.5. There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. 2 Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly. 3 Ideas leave not their source. 4 This central theme is often stated in the text, and must be borne in mind if you would understand the lesson for today. 5 It is not pride which tells you that you made the world you see, and that it changes as you change your mind.

W-132.6. 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. 2 There is no world! 3 This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. 4 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. 5 He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again.

W-132.7. But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now. 2 Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize. 3 Some see it suddenly on point of death, and rise to teach it. 4 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.

W-132.8. And some will find it in this course, and in the exercises that we do today. 2 Today\’s idea is true because the world does not exist. 3 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. 4 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.

W-132.9. A lesson earlier repeated once must now be stressed again, for it contains the firm foundation for today\’s idea. 2 You are as God created you. 3 There is no place where you can suffer, and no time that can bring change to your eternal state. 4 How can a world of time and place exist, if you remain as God created you?

W-132.10. What is the lesson for today except another way of saying that to know your Self is the salvation of the world? 2 To free the world from every kind of pain is but to change your mind about yourself. 3 There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and you maintain the world within your mind in thought.

W-132.11. Yet if you are as God created you, you cannot think apart from Him, nor make what does not share His timelessness and Love. 2 Are these inherent in the world you see? 3 Does it create like Him? 4 Unless it does, it is not real, and cannot be at all. 5 If you are real the world you see is false, for God\’s creation is unlike the world in every way. 6 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.

W-132.12. Release the world! 2 Your real creations wait for this release to give you fatherhood, not of illusions, but as God in truth. 3 God shares His Fatherhood with you who are His Son, for He makes no distinctions in what is Himself and what is still Himself. 4 What He creates is not apart from Him, and nowhere does the Father end, the Son begin as something separate from Him.

W-132.13. 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. 2 Can a world which comes from this idea be real? 3 Can it be anywhere? 4 Deny illusions, but accept the truth. 5 Deny you are a shadow briefly laid upon a dying world. 6 Release your mind, and you will look upon a world released.

W-132.14. 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. 2 They can not be there. 3 No more can we. 4 For we are in the home our Father set for us, along with them. 5 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.

W-132.15. Begin the fifteen-minute periods in which we practice twice today with this:

2 I who remain as God created me would loose the world from all I thought it was. 3 For I am real because the world is not, and I would know my own reality.

4 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.

W-132.16. You need not realize that healing comes to many brothers far across the world, as well as to the ones you see nearby, as you send out these thoughts to bless the world. 2 But you will sense your own release, although you may not fully understand as yet that you could never be released alone.

W-132.17. 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:

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

LESSON 133

I will not value what is valueless.

W-133.1. Sometimes in teaching there is benefit, particularly after you have gone through what seems theoretical and far from what the student has already learned, to bring him back to practical concerns. 2 This we will do today. 3 We will not speak of lofty, world-encompassing ideas, but dwell instead on benefits to you.

W-133.2. You do not ask too much of life, but far too little. 2 When you let your mind be drawn to bodily concerns, to things you buy, to eminence as valued by the world, you ask for sorrow, not for happiness. 3 This course does not attempt to take from you the little that you have. 4 It does not try to substitute utopian ideas for satisfactions which the world contains. 5 There are no satisfactions in the world.

W-133.3. Today we list the real criteria by which to test all things you think you want. 2 Unless they meet these sound requirements, they are not worth desiring at all, for they can but replace what offers more. 3 The laws that govern choice you cannot make, no more than you can make alternatives from which to choose. 4 The choosing you can do; indeed, you must. 5 But it is wise to learn the laws you set in motion when you choose, and what alternatives you choose between.

W-133.4. We have already stressed there are but two, however many there appear to be. 2 The range is set, and this we cannot change. 3 It would be most ungenerous to you to let alternatives be limitless, and thus delay your final choice until you had considered all of them in time; and not been brought so clearly to the place where there is but one choice that must be made.

W-133.5. Another kindly and related law is that there is no compromise in what your choice must bring. 2 It cannot give you just a little, for there is no in between. 3 Each choice you make brings everything to you or nothing. 4 Therefore, if you learn the tests by which you can distinguish everything from nothing, you will make the better choice.

W-133.6. First, if you choose a thing that will not last forever, what you chose is valueless. 2 A temporary value is without all value. 3 Time can never take away a value that is real. 4 What fades and dies was never there, and makes no offering to him who chooses it. 5 He is deceived by nothing in a form he thinks he likes.

W-133.7. Next, if you choose to take a thing away from someone else, you will have nothing left. 2 This is because, when you deny his right to everything, you have denied your own. 3 You therefore will not recognize the things you really have, denying they are there. 4 Who seeks to take away has been deceived by the illusion loss can offer gain. 5 Yet loss must offer loss, and nothing more.

W-133.8. Your next consideration is the one on which the others rest. 2 Why is the choice you make of value to you? 3 What attracts your mind to it? 4 What purpose does it serve? 5 Here it is easiest of all to be deceived. 6 For what the ego wants it fails to recognize. 7 It does not even tell the truth as it perceives it, for it needs to keep the halo which it uses to protect its goals from tarnish and from rust, that you may see how \”innocent\” it is.

W-133.9. Yet is its camouflage a thin veneer, which could deceive but those who are content to be deceived. 2 Its goals are obvious to anyone who cares to look for them. 3 Here is deception doubled, for the one who is deceived will not perceive that he has merely failed to gain. 4 He will believe that he has served the ego\’s hidden goals.

W-133.10. Yet though he tries to keep its halo clear within his vision, still must he perceive its tarnished edges and its rusted core. 2 His ineffectual mistakes appear as sins to him, because he looks upon the tarnish as his own; the rust a sign of deep unworthiness within himself. 3 He who would still preserve the ego\’s goals and serve them as his own makes no mistakes, according to the dictates of his guide. 4 This guidance teaches it is error to believe that sins are but mistakes, for who would suffer for his sins if this were so?

W-133.11. And so we come to the criterion for choice that is the hardest to believe, because its obviousness is overlaid with many levels of obscurity. 2 If you feel any guilt about your choice, you have allowed the ego\’s goals to come between the real alternatives. 3 And thus you do not realize there are but two, and the alternative you think you chose seems fearful, and too dangerous to be the nothingness it actually is.

W-133.12. All things are valuable or valueless, worthy or not of being sought at all, entirely desirable or not worth the slightest effort to obtain. 2 Choosing is easy just because of this. 3 Complexity is nothing but a screen of smoke, which hides the very simple fact that no decision can be difficult. 4 What is the gain to you in learning this? 5 It is far more than merely letting you make choices easily and without pain.

W-133.13. Heaven itself is reached with empty hands and open minds, which come with nothing to find everything and claim it as their own. 2 We will attempt to reach this state today, with self-deception laid aside, and with an honest willingness to value but the truly valuable and the real. 3 Our two extended practice periods of fifteen minutes each begin with this:

4 I will not value what is valueless, and only what has value do I seek, for only that do I desire to find.

W-133.14. And then receive what waits for everyone who reaches, unencumbered, to the gate of Heaven, which swings open as he comes. 2 Should you begin to let yourself collect some needless burdens, or believe you see some difficult decisions facing you, be quick to answer with this simple thought:

3 I will not value what is valueless, for what is valuable belongs to me.

LESSON 134

Let me perceive forgiveness as it is.

W-134.1. Let us review the meaning of \”forgive,\” for it is apt to be distorted and to be perceived as something that entails an unfair sacrifice of righteous wrath, a gift unjustified and undeserved, and a complete denial of the truth. 2 In such a view, forgiveness must be seen as mere eccentric folly, and this course appear to rest salvation on a whim.

W-134.2. This twisted view of what forgiveness means is easily corrected, when you can accept the fact that pardon is not asked for what is true. 2 It must be limited to what is false. 3 It is irrelevant to everything except illusions. 4 Truth is God\’s creation, and to pardon that is meaningless. 5 All truth belongs to Him, reflects His laws and radiates His Love. 6 Does this need pardon? 7 How can you forgive the sinless and eternally benign?

W-134.3. The major difficulty that you find in genuine forgiveness on your part is that you still believe you must forgive the truth, and not illusions. 2 You conceive of pardon as a vain attempt to look past what is there; to overlook the truth, in an unfounded effort to deceive yourself by making an illusion true. 3 This twisted viewpoint but reflects the hold that the idea of sin retains as yet upon your mind, as you regard yourself.

W-134.4. Because you think your sins are real, you look on pardon as deception. 2 For it is impossible to think of sin as true and not believe forgiveness is a lie. 3 Thus is forgiveness really but a sin, like all the rest. 4 It says the truth is false, and smiles on the corrupt as if they were as blameless as the grass; as white as snow. 5 It is delusional in what it thinks it can accomplish. 6 It would see as right the plainly wrong; the loathsome as the good.

W-134.5. Pardon is no escape in such a view. 2 It merely is a further sign that sin is unforgivable, at best to be concealed, denied or called another name, for pardon is a treachery to truth. 3 Guilt cannot be forgiven. 4 If you sin, your guilt is everlasting. 5 Those who are forgiven from the view their sins are real are pitifully mocked and twice condemned; first, by themselves for what they think they did, and once again by those who pardon them.

W-134.6. It is sin\’s unreality that makes forgiveness natural and wholly sane, a deep relief to those who offer it; a quiet blessing where it is received. 2 It does not countenance illusions, but collects them lightly, with a little laugh, and gently lays them at the feet of truth. 3 And there they disappear entirely.

W-134.7. Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. 2 It sees their nothingness, and looks straight through the thousand forms in which they may appear. 3 It looks on lies, but it is not deceived. 4 It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. 5 It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, \”My brother, what you think is not the truth.\”

W-134.8. The strength of pardon is its honesty, which is so uncorrupted that it sees illusions as illusions, not as truth. 2 It is because of this that it becomes the undeceiver in the face of lies; the great restorer of the simple truth. 3 By its ability to overlook what is not there, it opens up the way to truth, which has been blocked by dreams of guilt. 4 Now are you free to follow in the way your true forgiveness opens up to you. 5 For if one brother has received this gift of you, the door is open to yourself.

W-134.9. There is a very simple way to find the door to true forgiveness, and perceive it open wide in welcome. 2 When you feel that you are tempted to accuse someone of sin in any form, do not allow your mind to dwell on what you think he did, for that is self-deception. 3 Ask instead, \”Would I accuse myself of doing this?\”

W-134.10. Thus will you see alternatives for choice in terms that render choosing meaningful, and keep your mind as free of guilt and pain as God Himself intended it to be, and as it is in truth. 2 It is but lies that would condemn. 3 In truth is innocence the only thing there is. 4 Forgiveness stands between illusions and the truth; between the world you see and that which lies beyond; between the hell of guilt and Heaven\’s gate.

W-134.11. Across this bridge, as powerful as love which laid its blessing on it, are all dreams of evil and of hatred and attack brought silently to truth. 2 They are not kept to swell and bluster, and to terrify the foolish dreamer who believes in them. 3 He has been gently wakened from his dream by understanding what he thought he saw was never there. 4 And now he cannot feel that all escape has been denied to him.

W-134.12. He does not have to fight to save himself. 2 He does not have to kill the dragons which he thought pursued him. 3 Nor need he erect the heavy walls of stone and iron doors he thought would make him safe. 4 He can remove the ponderous and useless armor made to chain his mind to fear and misery. 5 His step is light, and as he lifts his foot to stride ahead a star is left behind, to point the way to those who follow him.

W-134.13. Forgiveness must be practiced, for the world cannot perceive its meaning, nor provide a guide to teach you its beneficence. 2 There is no thought in all the world that leads to any understanding of the laws it follows, nor the Thought that it reflects. 3 It is as alien to the world as is your own reality. 4 And yet it joins your mind with the reality in you.

W-134.14. Today we practice true forgiveness, that the time of joining be no more delayed. 2 For we would meet with our reality in freedom and in peace. 3 Our practicing becomes the footsteps lighting up the way for all our brothers, who will follow us to the reality we share with them. 4 That this may be accomplished, let us give a quarter of an hour twice today, and spend it with the Guide Who understands the meaning of forgiveness, and was sent to us to teach it. 5 Let us ask of Him:

6 Let me perceive forgiveness as it is.

W-134.15. Then choose one brother as He will direct, and catalogue his \”sins,\” as one by one they cross your mind. 2 Be certain not to dwell on any one of them, but realize that you are using his \”offenses\” but to save the world from all ideas of sin. 3 Briefly consider all the evil things you thought of him, and each time ask yourself, \”Would I condemn myself for doing this?\”

W-134.16. Let him be freed from all the thoughts you had of sin in him. 2 And now you are prepared for freedom. 3 If you have been practicing thus far in willingness and honesty, you will begin to sense a lifting up, a lightening of weight across your chest, a deep and certain feeling of relief. 4 The time remaining should be given to experiencing the escape from all the heavy chains you sought to lay upon your brother, but were laid upon yourself.

W-134.17. Forgiveness should be practiced through the day, for there will still be many times when you forget its meaning and attack yourself. 2 When this occurs, allow your mind to see through this illusion as you tell yourself:

3 Let me perceive forgiveness as it is. 4 Would I accuse myself of doing this? 5 I will not lay this chain upon myself.

6 In everything you do remember this:

7 No one is crucified alone, and yet no one can enter Heaven by himself.

LESSON 135

If I defend myself I am attacked.

W-135.1. Who would defend himself unless he thought he were attacked, that the attack were real, and that his own defense could save himself? 2 And herein lies the folly of defense; it gives illusions full reality, and then attempts to handle them as real. 3 It adds illusions to illusions, thus making correction doubly difficult. 4 And it is this you do when you attempt to plan the future, activate the past, or organize the present as you wish.

W-135.2. You operate from the belief you must protect yourself from what is happening because it must contain what threatens you. 2 A sense of threat is an acknowledgment of an inherent weakness; a belief that there is danger which has power to call on you to make appropriate defense. 3 The world is based on this insane belief. 4 And all its structures, all its thoughts and doubts, its penalties and heavy armaments, its legal definitions and its codes, its ethics and its leaders and its gods, all serve but to preserve its sense of threat. 5 For no one walks the world in armature but must have terror striking at his heart.

W-135.3. Defense is frightening. 2 It stems from fear, increasing fear as each defense is made. 3 You think it offers safety. 4 Yet it speaks of fear made real and terror justified. 5 Is it not strange you do not pause to ask, as you elaborate your plans and make your armor thicker and your locks more tight, what you defend, and how, and against what?

W-135.4. Let us consider first what you defend. 2 It must be something that is very weak and easily assaulted. 3 It must be something made easy prey, unable to protect itself and needing your defense. 4 What but the body has such frailty that constant care and watchful, deep concern are needful to protect its little life? 5 What but the body falters and must fail to serve the Son of God as worthy host?

W-135.5. Yet it is not the body that can fear, nor be a thing of fear. 2 It has no needs but those which you assign to it. 3 It needs no complicated structures of defense, no health-inducing medicine, no care and no concern at all. 4 Defend its life, or give it gifts to make it beautiful or walls to make it safe, and you but say your home is open to the thief of time, corruptible and crumbling, so unsafe it must be guarded with your very life.

W-135.6. Is not this picture fearful? 2 Can you be at peace with such a concept of your home? 3 Yet what endowed the body with the right to serve you thus except your own belief? 4 It is your mind which gave the body all the functions that you see in it, and set its value far beyond a little pile of dust and water. 5 Who would make defense of something that he recognized as this?

W-135.7. The body is in need of no defense. 2 This cannot be too often emphasized. 3 It will be strong and healthy if the mind does not abuse it by assigning it to roles it cannot fill, to purposes beyond its scope, and to exalted aims which it cannot accomplish. 4 Such attempts, ridiculous yet deeply cherished, are the sources for the many mad attacks you make upon it. 5 For it seems to fail your hopes, your needs, your values and your dreams.

W-135.8. The \”self\” that needs protection is not real. 2 The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over. 3 Who would want to keep it when its usefulness is done?

W-135.9. Defend the body and you have attacked your mind. 2 For you have seen in it the faults, the weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. 3 You will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions. 4 And you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source.

W-135.10. These are the thoughts in need of healing, and the body will respond with health when they have been corrected and replaced with truth. 2 This is the body\’s only real defense. 3 Yet is this where you look for its defense? 4 You offer it protection of a kind from which it gains no benefit at all, but merely adds to your distress of mind. 5 You do not heal, but merely take away the hope of healing, for you fail to see where hope must lie if it be meaningful.

W-135.11. A healed mind does not plan. 2 It carries out the plans that it receives through listening to wisdom that is not its own. 3 It waits until it has been taught what should be done, and then proceeds to do it. 4 It does not depend upon itself for anything except its adequacy to fulfill the plans assigned to it. 5 It is secure in certainty that obstacles can not impede its progress to accomplishment of any goal that serves the greater plan established for the good of everyone.

W-135.12. A healed mind is relieved of the belief that it must plan, although it cannot know the outcome which is best, the means by which it is achieved, nor how to recognize the problem that the plan is made to solve. 2 It must misuse the body in its plans until it recognizes this is so. 3 But when it has accepted this as true, then is it healed, and lets the body go.

W-135.13. Enslavement of the body to the plans the unhealed mind sets up to save itself must make the body sick. 2 It is not free to be the means of helping in a plan which far exceeds its own protection, and which needs its service for a little while. 3 In this capacity is health assured. 4 For everything the mind employs for this will function flawlessly, and with the strength that has been given it and cannot fail.

W-135.14. It is, perhaps, not easy to perceive that self-initiated plans are but defenses, with the purpose all of them were made to realize. 2 They are the means by which a frightened mind would undertake its own protection, at the cost of truth. 3 This is not difficult to realize in some forms which these self-deceptions take, where the denial of reality is very obvious. 4 Yet planning is not often recognized as a defense.

W-135.15. The mind engaged in planning for itself is occupied in setting up control of future happenings. 2 It does not think that it will be provided for, unless it makes its own provisions. 3 Time becomes a future emphasis, to be controlled by learning and experience obtained from past events and previous beliefs. 4 It overlooks the present, for it rests on the idea the past has taught enough to let the mind direct its future course.

W-135.16. The mind that plans is thus refusing to allow for change. 2 What it has learned before becomes the basis for its future goals. 3 Its past experience directs its choice of what will happen. 4 And it does not see that here and now is everything it needs to guarantee a future quite unlike the past, without a continuity of any old ideas and sick beliefs. 5 Anticipation plays no part at all, for present confidence directs the way.

W-135.17. Defenses are the plans you undertake to make against the truth. 2 Their aim is to select what you approve, and disregard what you consider incompatible with your beliefs of your reality. 3 Yet what remains is meaningless indeed. 4 For it is your reality that is the \”threat\” which your defenses would attack, obscure, and take apart and crucify.

W-135.18. What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? 2 Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. 3 But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. 4 While you made plans for death, He led you gently to eternal life.

W-135.19. Your present trust in Him is the defense that promises a future undisturbed, without a trace of sorrow, and with joy that constantly increases, as this life becomes a holy instant, set in time, but heeding only immortality. 2 Let no defenses but your present trust direct the future, and this life becomes a meaningful encounter with the truth that only your defenses would conceal.

W-135.20. Without defenses, you become a light which Heaven gratefully acknowledges to be its own. 2 And it will lead you on in ways appointed for your happiness according to the ancient plan, begun when time was born. 3 Your followers will join their light with yours, and it will be increased until the world is lighted up with joy. 4 And gladly will our brothers lay aside their cumbersome defenses, which availed them nothing and could only terrify.

W-135.21. We will anticipate that time today with present confidence, for this is part of what was planned for us. 2 We will be sure that everything we need is given us for our accomplishment of this today. 3 We make no plans for how it will be done, but realize that our defenselessness is all that is required for the truth to dawn upon our minds with certainty.

W-135.22. For fifteen minutes twice today we rest from senseless planning, and from every thought that blocks the truth from entering our minds. 2 Today we will receive instead of plan, that we may give instead of organize. 3 And we are given truly, as we say:

4 If I defend myself I am attacked. 5 But in defenselessness I will be strong, and I will learn what my defenses hide.

W-135.23. Nothing but that. 2 If there are plans to make, you will be told of them. 3 They may not be the plans you thought were needed, nor indeed the answers to the problems which you thought confronted you. 4 But they are answers to another kind of question, which remains unanswered yet in need of answering until the Answer comes to you at last.

W-135.24. All your defenses have been aimed at not receiving what you will receive today. 2 And in the light and joy of simple trust, you will but wonder why you ever thought that you must be defended from release. 3 Heaven asks nothing. 4 It is hell that makes extravagant demands for sacrifice. 5 You give up nothing in these times today when, undefended, you present yourself to your Creator as you really are.

W-135.25. He has remembered you. 2 Today we will remember Him. 3 For this is Eastertime in your salvation. 4 And you rise again from what was seeming death and hopelessness. 5 Now is the light of hope reborn in you, for now you come without defense, to learn the part for you within the plan of God. 6 What little plans or magical beliefs can still have value, when you have received your function from the Voice for God Himself?

W-135.26. Try not to shape this day as you believe would benefit you most. 2 For you can not conceive of all the happiness that comes to you without your planning. 3 Learn today. 4 And all the world will take this giant stride, and celebrate your Eastertime with you. 5 Throughout the day, as foolish little things appear to raise defensiveness in you and tempt you to engage in weaving plans, remind yourself this is a special day for learning, and acknowledge it with this:

6 This is my Eastertime. 7 And I would keep it holy. 8 I will not defend myself, because the Son of God needs no defense against the truth of his reality.

LESSON 136

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

W-136.1. No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. 2 For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. 3 Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. 4 When this is seen, healing is automatic. 5 It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear.

W-136.2. Sickness is not an accident. 2 Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. 3 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. 4 The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole. 5 The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.

W-136.3. Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. 2 They are secret, magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. 3 They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. 4 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.

W-136.4. 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? 2 All this cannot be done unconsciously. 3 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 yourself.

W-136.5. It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your \”reality\” that makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control. 2 But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion. 3 Your not remembering is but the sign that this decision still remains in force, as far as your desires are concerned. 4 Mistake not this for fact. 5 Defenses must make facts unrecognizable. 6 They aim at doing this, and it is this they do.

W-136.6. Every defense takes fragments of the whole, assembles them without regard to all their true relationships, and thus constructs illusions of a whole that is not there. 2 It is this process that imposes threat, and not whatever outcome may result. 3 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. 4 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.

W-136.7. Sickness is a decision. 2 It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. 3 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. 4 Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more.

W-136.8. How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? 2 Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth. 3 You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it. 4 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. 5 For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be.

W-136.9. Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live, but cannot overcome your choice to die. 2 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. 3 His Son is dust, the Father incomplete, and chaos sits in triumph on His throne.

W-136.10. Such is your planning for your own defense. 2 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. 3 Yet who believes illusions but the one who made them up? 4 Who else can see them and react to them as if they were the truth?

W-136.11. God knows not of your plans to change His Will. 2 The universe remains unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it. 3 And Heaven has not bowed to hell, nor life to death. 4 You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. 5 What is created is apart from all of this. 6 Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. 7 What is unalterable cannot change. 8 And what is wholly sinless cannot sin.

W-136.12. Such is the simple truth. 2 It does not make appeal to might nor triumph. 3 It does not command obedience, nor seek to prove how pitiful and futile your attempts to plan defenses that would alter it. 4 Truth merely wants to give you happiness, for such its purpose is. 5 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.

W-136.13. It is this fact that demonstrates that time is an illusion. 2 For time lets you think what God has given you is not the truth right now, as it must be. 3 The Thoughts of God are quite apart from time. 4 For time is but another meaningless defense you made against the truth. 5 Yet what He wills is here, and you remain as He created you.

W-136.14. Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where truth has been allowed to enter. 2 And it comes to any mind that would lay down its arms, and cease to play with folly. 3 It is found at any time; today, if you will choose to practice giving welcome to the truth.

W-136.15. This is our aim today. 2 And we will give a quarter of an hour twice to ask the truth to come to us and set us free. 3 And truth will come, for it has never been apart from us. 4 It merely waits for just this invitation which we give today. 5 We introduce it with a healing prayer, to help us rise above defensiveness, and let truth be as it has always been:

6 Sickness is a defense against the truth. 7 I will accept the truth of what I am, and let my mind be wholly healed today.

W-136.16. Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. 2 There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal, and keep defended from the light of truth. 3 There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. 4 It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey.

W-136.17. Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to relief. 2 And you will recognize you practiced well by this: The body should not feel at all. 3 If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. 4 No response at all is in the mind to what the body does. 5 Its usefulness remains and nothing more.

W-136.18. Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. 2 As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. 3 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. 4 You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.

W-136.19. Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. 2 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.

W-136.20. Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer. 2 Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself:

3 I have forgotten what I really am, for I mistook my body for myself. 4 Sickness is a defense against the truth. 5 But I am not a body. 6 And my mind cannot attack. 7 So I can not be sick.

LESSON 137

When I am healed I am not healed alone.

W-137.1. Today\’s idea remains the central thought on which salvation rests. 2 For healing is the opposite of all the world\’s ideas which dwell on sickness and on separate states. 3 Sickness is a retreat from others, and a shutting off of joining. 4 It becomes a door that closes on a separate self, and keeps it isolated and alone.

W-137.2. Sickness is isolation. 2 For it seems to keep one self apart from all the rest, to suffer what the others do not feel. 3 It gives the body final power to make the separation real, and keep the mind in solitary prison, split apart and held in pieces by a solid wall of sickened flesh, which it can not surmount.

W-137.3. The world obeys the laws that sickness serves, but healing operates apart from them. 2 It is impossible that anyone be healed alone. 3 In sickness must he be apart and separate. 4 But healing is his own decision to be one again, and to accept his Self with all Its parts intact and unassailed. 5 In sickness does his Self appear to be dismembered, and without the unity that gives It life. 6 But healing is accomplished as he sees the body has no power to attack the universal Oneness of God\’s Son.

W-137.4. Sickness would prove that lies must be the truth. 2 But healing demonstrates that truth is true. 3 The separation sickness would impose has never really happened. 4 To be healed is merely to accept what always was the simple truth, and always will remain exactly as it has forever been. 5 Yet eyes accustomed to illusions must be shown that what they look upon is false. 6 So healing, never needed by the truth, must demonstrate that sickness is not real.

W-137.5. Healing might thus be called a counter-dream, which cancels out the dream of sickness in the name of truth, but not in truth itself. 2 Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins that never were accomplished, healing but removes illusions that have not occurred. 3 Just as the real world will arise to take the place of what has never been at all, healing but offers restitution for imagined states and false ideas which dreams embroider into pictures of the truth.

W-137.6. Yet think not healing is unworthy of your function here. 2 For anti-Christ becomes more powerful than Christ to those who dream the world is real. 3 The body seems to be more solid and more stable than the mind. 4 And love becomes a dream, while fear remains the one reality that can be seen and justified and fully understood.

W-137.7. Just as forgiveness shines away all sin and the real world will occupy the place of what you made, so healing must replace the fantasies of sickness which you hold before the simple truth. 2 When sickness has been seen to disappear in spite of all the laws that hold it cannot but be real, then questions have been answered. 3 And the laws can be no longer cherished nor obeyed.

W-137.8. Healing is freedom. 2 For it demonstrates that dreams will not prevail against the truth. 3 Healing is shared. 4 And by this attribute it proves that laws unlike the ones which hold that sickness is inevitable are more potent than their sickly opposites. 5 Healing is strength. 6 For by its gentle hand is weakness overcome, and minds that were walled off within a body free to join with other minds, to be forever strong.

W-137.9. Healing, forgiveness, and the glad exchange of all the world of sorrow for a world where sadness cannot enter, are the means by which the Holy Spirit urges you to follow Him. 2 His gentle lessons teach how easily salvation can be yours; how little practice you need undertake to let His laws replace the ones you made to hold yourself a prisoner to death. 3 His life becomes your own, as you extend the little help He asks in freeing you from everything that ever caused you pain.

W-137.10. And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you. 2 Perhaps you will not recognize them all, nor realize how great your offering to all the world, when you let healing come to you. 3 But you are never healed alone. 4 And legions upon legions will receive the gift that you receive when you are healed.

W-137.11. Those who are healed become the instruments of healing. 2 Nor does time elapse between the instant they are healed, and all the grace of healing it is given them to give. 3 What is opposed to God does not exist, and who accepts it not within his mind becomes a haven where the weary can remain to rest. 4 For here is truth bestowed, and here are all illusions brought to truth.

W-137.12. Would you not offer shelter to God\’s Will? 2 You but invite your Self to be at home. 3 And can this invitation be refused? 4 Ask the inevitable to occur, and you will never fail. 5 The other choice is but to ask what cannot be to be, and this can not succeed. 6 Today we ask that only truth will occupy our minds; that thoughts of healing will this day go forth from what is healed to what must yet be healed, aware that they will both occur as one.

W-137.13. We will remember, as the hour strikes, our function is to let our minds be healed, that we may carry healing to the world, exchanging curse for blessing, pain for joy, and separation for the peace of God. 2 Is not a minute of the hour worth the giving to receive a gift like this? 3 Is not a little time a small expense to offer for the gift of everything?

W-137.14. Yet must we be prepared for such a gift. 2 And so we will begin the day with this, and give ten minutes to these thoughts with which we will conclude today at night as well:

3 When I am healed I am not healed alone. 4 And I would share my healing with the world, that sickness may be banished from the mind of God\’s one Son, Who is my only Self.

W-137.15. Let healing be through you this very day. 2 And as you rest in quiet, be prepared to give as you receive, to hold but what you give, and to receive the Word of God to take the place of all the foolish thoughts that ever were imagined. 3 Now we come together to make well all that was sick, and offer blessing where there was attack. 4 Nor will we let this function be forgot as every hour of the day slips by, remembering our purpose with this thought:

5 When I am healed I am not healed alone. 6 And I would bless my brothers, for I would be healed with them, as they are healed with me.

LESSON 138

Heaven is the decision I must make.

W-138.1. In this world Heaven is a choice, because here we believe there are alternatives to choose between. 2 We think that all things have an opposite, and what we want we choose. 3 If Heaven exists there must be hell as well, for contradiction is the way we make what we perceive, and what we think is real.

W-138.2. Creation knows no opposite. 2 But here is opposition part of being \”real.\” 3 It is this strange perception of the truth that makes the choice of Heaven seem to be the same as the relinquishment of hell. 4 It is not really thus. 5 Yet what is true in God\’s creation cannot enter here until it is reflected in some form the world can understand. 6 Truth cannot come where it could only be perceived with fear. 7 For this would be the error truth can be brought to illusions. 8 Opposition makes the truth unwelcome, and it cannot come.

W-138.3. Choice is the obvious escape from what appears as opposites. 2 Decision lets one of conflicting goals become the aim of effort and expenditure of time. 3 Without decision, time is but a waste and effort dissipated. 4 It is spent for nothing in return, and time goes by without results. 5 There is no sense of gain, for nothing is accomplished; nothing learned.

W-138.4. You need to be reminded that you think a thousand choices are confronting you, when there is really only one to make. 2 And even this but seems to be a choice. 3 Do not confuse yourself with all the doubts that myriad decisions would induce. 4 You make but one. 5 And when that one is made, you will perceive it was no choice at all. 6 For truth is true, and nothing else is true. 7 There is no opposite to choose instead. 8 There is no contradiction to the truth.

W-138.5. Choosing depends on learning. 2 And the truth cannot be learned, but only recognized. 3 In recognition its acceptance lies, and as it is accepted it is known. 4 But knowledge is beyond the goals we seek to teach within the framework of this course. 5 Ours are teaching goals, to be attained through learning how to reach them, what they are, and what they offer you. 6 Decisions are the outcome of your learning, for they rest on what you have accepted as the truth of what you are, and what your needs must be.

W-138.6. In this insanely complicated world, Heaven appears to take the form of choice, rather than merely being what it is. 2 Of all the choices you have tried to make this is the simplest, most definitive and prototype of all the rest, the one which settles all decisions. 3 If you could decide the rest, this one remains unsolved. 4 But when you solve this one, the others are resolved with it, for all decisions but conceal this one by taking different forms. 5 Here is the final and the only choice in which is truth accepted or denied.

W-138.7. So we begin today considering the choice that time was made to help us make. 2 Such is its holy purpose, now transformed from the intent you gave it; that it be a means for demonstrating hell is real, hope changes to despair, and life itself must in the end be overcome by death. 3 In death alone are opposites resolved, for ending opposition is to die. 4 And thus salvation must be seen as death, for life is seen as conflict. 5 To resolve the conflict is to end your life as well.

W-138.8. These mad beliefs can gain unconscious hold of great intensity, and grip the mind with terror and anxiety so strong that it will not relinquish its ideas about its own protection. 2 It must be saved from salvation, threatened to be safe, and magically armored against truth. 3 And these decisions are made unaware, to keep them safely undisturbed; apart from question and from reason and from doubt.

W-138.9. Heaven is chosen consciously. 2 The choice cannot be made until alternatives are accurately seen and understood. 3 All that is veiled in shadows must be raised to understanding, to be judged again, this time with Heaven\’s help. 4 And all mistakes in judgment that the mind had made before are open to correction, as the truth dismisses them as causeless. 5 Now are they without effects. 6 They cannot be concealed, because their nothingness is recognized.

W-138.10. The conscious choice of Heaven is as sure as is the ending of the fear of hell, when it is raised from its protective shield of unawareness, and is brought to light. 2 Who can decide between the clearly seen and the unrecognized? 3 Yet who can fail to make a choice between alternatives when only one is seen as valuable; the other as a wholly worthless thing, a but imagined source of guilt and pain? 4 Who hesitates to make a choice like this? 5 And shall we hesitate to choose today?

W-138.11. We make the choice for Heaven as we wake, and spend five minutes making sure that we have made the one decision that is sane. 2 We recognize we make a conscious choice between what has existence and what has nothing but an appearance of the truth. 3 Its pseudo-being, brought to what is real, is flimsy and transparent in the light. 4 It holds no terror now, for what was made enormous, vengeful, pitiless with hate, demands obscurity for fear to be invested there. 5 Now it is recognized as but a foolish, trivial mistake.

W-138.12. Before we close our eyes in sleep tonight, we reaffirm the choice that we have made each hour in between. 2 And now we give the last five minutes of our waking day to the decision with which we awoke. 3 As every hour passed, we have declared our choice again, in a brief quiet time devoted to maintaining sanity. 4 And finally, we close the day with this, acknowledging we chose but what we want:

5 Heaven is the decision I must make. 6 I make it now, and will not change my mind, because it is the only thing I want.

LESSON 139

I will accept Atonement for myself.

W-139.1. Here is the end of choice. 2 For here we come to a decision to accept ourselves as God created us. 3 And what is choice except uncertainty of what we are? 4 There is no doubt that is not rooted here. 5 There is no question but reflects this one. 6 There is no conflict that does not entail the single, simple question, \”What am I?\”

W-139.2. Yet who could ask this question except one who has refused to recognize himself? 2 Only refusal to accept yourself could make the question seem to be sincere. 3 The only thing that can be surely known by any living thing is what it is. 4 From this one point of certainty, it looks on other things as certain as itself.

W-139.3. Uncertainty about what you must be is self-deception on a scale so vast, its magnitude can hardly be conceived. 2 To be alive and not to know yourself is to believe that you are really dead. 3 For what is life except to be yourself, and what but you can be alive instead? 4 Who is the doubter? 5 What is it he doubts? 6 Whom does he question? 7 Who can answer him?

W-139.4. He merely states that he is not himself, and therefore, being something else, becomes a questioner of what that something is. 2 Yet he could never be alive at all unless he knew the answer. 3 If he asks as if he does not know, it merely shows he does not want to be the thing he is. 4 He has accepted it because he lives; has judged against it and denied its worth, and has decided that he does not know the only certainty by which he lives.

W-139.5. Thus he becomes uncertain of his life, for what it is has been denied by him. 2 It is for this denial that you need Atonement. 3 Your denial made no change in what you are. 4 But you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth. 5 You are yourself. 6 There is no doubt of this. 7 And yet you doubt it. 8 But you do not ask what part of you can really doubt yourself. 9 It cannot really be a part of you that asks this question. 10 For it asks of one who knows the answer. 11 Were it part of you, then certainty would be impossible.

W-139.6. Atonement remedies the strange idea that it is possible to doubt yourself, and be unsure of what you really are. 2 This is the depth of madness. 3 Yet it is the universal question of the world. 4 What does this mean except the world is mad? 5 Why share its madness in the sad belief that what is universal here is true?

W-139.7. Nothing the world believes is true. 2 It is a place whose purpose is to be a home where those who claim they do not know themselves can come to question what it is they are. 3 And they will come again until the time Atonement is accepted, and they learn it is impossible to doubt yourself, and not to be aware of what you are.

W-139.8. Only acceptance can be asked of you, for what you are is certain. 2 It is set forever in the holy Mind of God, and in your own. 3 It is so far beyond all doubt and question that to ask what it must be is all the proof you need to show that you believe the contradiction that you know not what you cannot fail to know. 4 Is this a question, or a statement which denies itself in statement? 5 Let us not allow our holy minds to occupy themselves with senseless musings such as this.

W-139.9. We have a mission here. 2 We did not come to reinforce the madness that we once believed in. 3 Let us not forget the goal that we accepted. 4 It is more than just our happiness alone we came to gain. 5 What we accept as what we are proclaims what everyone must be, along with us. 6 Fail not your brothers, or you fail yourself. 7 Look lovingly on them, that they may know that they are part of you, and you of them.

W-139.10. This does Atonement teach, and demonstrates the Oneness of God\’s Son is unassailed by his belief he knows not what he is. 2 Today accept Atonement, not to change reality, but merely to accept the truth about yourself, and go your way rejoicing in the endless Love of God. 3 It is but this that we are asked to do. 4 It is but this that we will do today.

W-139.11. Five minutes in the morning and at night we will devote to dedicate our minds to our assignment for today. 2 We start with this review of what our mission is:

3 I will accept Atonement for myself, For I remain as God created me.

4 We have not lost the knowledge that God gave to us when He created us like Him. 5 We can remember it for everyone, for in creation are all minds as one. 6 And in our memory is the recall how dear our brothers are to us in truth, how much a part of us is every mind, how faithful they have really been to us, and how our Father\’s Love contains them all.

W-139.12. In thanks for all creation, in the Name of its Creator and His Oneness with all aspects of creation, we repeat our dedication to our cause today each hour, as we lay aside all thoughts that would distract us from our holy aim. 2 For several minutes let your mind be cleared of all the foolish cobwebs which the world would weave around the holy Son of God. 3 And learn the fragile nature of the chains that seem to keep the knowledge of yourself apart from your awareness, as you say:

4 I will accept Atonement for myself, For I remain as God created me.

LESSON 140

Only salvation can be said to cure.

W-140.1. \”Cure\” is a word that cannot be applied to any remedy the world accepts as beneficial. 2 What the world perceives as therapeutic is but what will make the body \”better.\” 3 When it tries to heal the mind, it sees no separation from the body, where it thinks the mind exists. 4 Its forms of healing thus must substitute illusion for illusion. 5 One belief in sickness takes another form, and so the patient now perceives himself as well.

W-140.2. He is not healed. 2 He merely had a dream that he was sick, and in the dream he found a magic formula to make him well. 3 Yet he has not awakened from the dream, and so his mind remains exactly as it was before. 4 He has not seen the light that would awaken him and end the dream. 5 What difference does the content of a dream make in reality? 6 One either sleeps or wakens. 7 There is nothing in between.

W-140.3. The happy dreams the Holy Spirit brings are different from the dreaming of the world, where one can merely dream he is awake. 2 The dreams forgiveness lets the mind perceive do not induce another form of sleep, so that the dreamer dreams another dream. 3 His happy dreams are heralds of the dawn of truth upon the mind. 4 They lead from sleep to gentle waking, so that dreams are gone. 5 And thus they cure for all eternity.

W-140.4. Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. 2 For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take. 3 Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. 4 Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. 5 It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. 6 And that is cure indeed. 7 For sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return.

W-140.5. Peace be to you who have been cured in God, and not in idle dreams. 2 For cure must come from holiness, and holiness can not be found where sin is cherished. 3 God abides in holy temples. 4 He is barred where sin has entered. 5 Yet there is no place where He is not. 6 And therefore sin can have no home in which to hide from His beneficence. 7 There is no place where holiness is not, and nowhere sin and sickness can abide.

W-140.6. This is the thought that cures. 2 It does not make distinctions among unrealities. 3 Nor does it seek to heal what is not sick, unmindful where the need for healing is. 4 This is no magic. 5 It is merely an appeal to truth, which cannot fail to heal and heal forever. 6 It is not a thought that judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. 7 It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real.

W-140.7. Let us not try today to seek to cure what cannot suffer sickness. 2 Healing must be sought but where it is, and then applied to what is sick, so that it can be cured. 3 There is no remedy the world provides that can effect a change in anything. 4 The mind that brings illusions to the truth is really changed. 5 There is no change but this. 6 For how can one illusion differ from another but in attributes that have no substance, no reality, no core, and nothing that is truly different?

W-140.8. Today we seek to change our minds about the source of sickness, for we seek a cure for all illusions, not another shift among them. 2 We will try today to find the source of healing, which is in our minds because our Father placed it there for us. 3 It is not farther from us than ourselves. 4 It is as near to us as our own thoughts; so close it is impossible to lose. 5 We need but seek it and it must be found.

W-140.9. We will not be misled today by what appears to us as sick. 2 We go beyond appearances today and reach the source of healing, from which nothing is exempt. 3 We will succeed to the extent to which we realize that there can never be a meaningful distinction made between what is untrue and equally untrue. 4 Here there are no degrees, and no beliefs that what does not exist is truer in some forms than others. 5 All of them are false, and can be cured because they are not true.

W-140.10. So do we lay aside our amulets, our charms and medicines, our chants and bits of magic in whatever form they take. 2 We will be still and listen for the Voice of healing, which will cure all ills as one, restoring saneness to the Son of God. 3 No voice but this can cure. 4 Today we hear a single Voice which speaks to us of truth, where all illusions end, and peace returns to the eternal, quiet home of God.

W-140.11. We waken hearing Him, and let Him speak to us five minutes as the day begins, and end the day by listening again five minutes more before we go to sleep. 2 Our only preparation is to let our interfering thoughts be laid aside, not separately, but all of them as one. 3 They are the same. 4 We have no need to make them different, and thus delay the time when we can hear our Father speak to us. 5 We hear Him now. 6 We come to Him today.

W-140.12. With nothing in our hands to which we cling, with lifted hearts and listening minds we pray:

2 Only salvation can be said to cure.

3 Speak to us, Father, that we may be healed.

4 And we will feel salvation cover us with soft protection, and with peace so deep that no illusion can disturb our minds, nor offer proof to us that it is real. 5 This will we learn today. 6 And we will say our prayer for healing hourly, and take a minute as the hour strikes, to hear the answer to our prayer be given us as we attend in silence and in joy. 7 This is the day when healing comes to us. 8 This is the day when separation ends, and we remember Who we really are.

REVIEW IV

Introduction to Review IV

W-rIV.in.1. Now we review again, this time aware we are preparing for the second part of learning how the truth can be applied. 2 Today we will begin to concentrate on readiness for what will follow next. 3 Such is our aim for this review, and for the lessons following. 4 Thus, we review the recent lessons and their central thoughts in such a way as will facilitate the readiness that we would now achieve.

W-rIV.in.2. There is a central theme that unifies each step in the review we undertake, which can be simply stated in these words:

2 My mind holds only what I think with God.

3 That is a fact, and represents the truth of What you are and What your Father is. 4 It is this thought by which the Father gave creation to the Son, establishing the Son as co-creator with Himself. 5 It is this thought that fully guarantees salvation to the Son. 6 For in his mind no thoughts can dwell but those his Father shares. 7 Lack of forgiveness blocks this thought from his awareness. 8 Yet it is forever true.

W-rIV.in.3. Let us begin our preparation with some understanding of the many forms in which the lack of true forgiveness may be carefully concealed. 2 Because they are illusions, they are not perceived to be but what they are; defenses that protect your unforgiving thoughts from being seen and recognized. 3 Their purpose is to show you something else, and hold correction off through self-deceptions made to take its place.

W-rIV.in.4. And yet, your mind holds only what you think with God. 2 Your self-deceptions cannot take the place of truth. 3 No more than can a child who throws a stick into the ocean change the coming and the going of the tides, the warming of the water by the sun, the silver of the moon on it by night. 4 So do we start each practice period in this review with readying our minds to understand the lessons that we read, and see the meaning that they offer us.

W-rIV.in.5. Begin each day with time devoted to the preparation of your mind to learn what each idea you will review that day can offer you in freedom and in peace. 2 Open your mind, and clear it of all thoughts that would deceive, and let this thought alone engage it fully, and remove the rest:

3 My mind holds only what I think with God.

4 Five minutes with this thought will be enough to set the day along the lines which God appointed, and to place His Mind in charge of all the thoughts you will receive that day.

W-rIV.in.6. They will not come from you alone, for they will all be shared with Him. 2 And so each one will bring the message of His Love to you, returning messages of yours to Him. 3 So will communion with the Lord of Hosts be yours, as He Himself has willed it be. 4 And as His Own completion joins with Him, so will He join with you who are complete as you unite with Him, and He with you.

W-rIV.in.7. After your preparation, merely read each of the two ideas assigned to you to be reviewed that day. 2 Then close your eyes, and say them slowly to yourself. 3 There is no hurry now, for you are using time for its intended purpose. 4 Let each word shine with the meaning God has given it, as it was given to you through His Voice. 5 Let each idea which you review that day give you the gift that He has laid in it for you to have of Him. 6 And we will use no format for our practicing but this:

W-rIV.in.8. Each hour of the day, bring to your mind the thought with which the day began, and spend a quiet moment with it. 2 Then repeat the two ideas you practice for the day unhurriedly, with time enough to see the gifts that they contain for you, and let them be received where they were meant to be.

W-rIV.in.9. We add no other thoughts, but let these be the messages they are. 2 We need no more than this to give us happiness and rest, and endless quiet, perfect certainty, and all our Father wills that we receive as the inheritance we have of Him. 3 Each day of practicing, as we review, we close as we began, repeating first the thought that made the day a special time of blessing and of happiness for us; and through our faithfulness restored the world from darkness to the light, from grief to joy, from pain to peace, from sin to holiness.

W-rIV.in.10. God offers thanks to you who practice thus the keeping of His Word. 2 And as you give your mind to the ideas for the day again before you sleep, His gratitude surrounds you in the peace wherein He wills you be forever, and are learning now to claim again as your inheritance.

LESSON 141

My mind holds only what I think with God

W-141.1. (121) Forgiveness is the key to happiness.

W-141.2. (122) Forgiveness offers everything I want.

LESSON 142

My mind holds only what I think with God.

W-142.1. (123) I thank my Father for His gifts to me.

W-142.2. (124) Let me remember I am one with God.

LESSON 143

My mind holds only what I think with God.

W-143.1. (125) In quiet I receive God\’s Word today.

W-143.2. (126) All that I give is given to myself.

LESSON 144

My mind holds only what I think with God.

W-144.1. (127) There is no love but God\’s.

W-144.2. (128) The world I see holds nothing that I want.

LESSON 145

My mind holds only what I think with God.

W-145.1. (129) Beyond this world there is a world I want.

W-145.2. (130) It is impossible to see two worlds.

LESSON 146

My mind holds only what I think with God.

W-146.1. (131) No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.

W-146.2. (132) I loose the world from all I thought it was.

LESSON 147

My mind holds only what I think with God.

W-147.1. (133) I will not value what is valueless.

W-147.2. (134) Let me perceive forgiveness as it is.

LESSON 148

My mind holds only what I think with God.

W-148.1. (135) If I defend myself I am attacked.

W-148.2. (136) Sickness is a defense against the truth.

LESSON 149

My mind holds only what I think with God.

W-149.1. (137) When I am healed I am not healed alone.

W-149.2. (138) Heaven is the decision I must make.

LESSON 150

My mind holds only what I think with God.

W-150.1. (139) I will accept Atonement for myself.

W-150.2. (140) Only salvation can be said to cure.

LESSON 151

All things are echoes of the Voice for God.

W-151.1. No one can judge on partial evidence. 2 That is not judgment. 3 It is merely an opinion based on ignorance and doubt. 4 Its seeming certainty is but a cloak for the uncertainty it would conceal. 5 It needs irrational defense because it is irrational. 6 And its defense seems strong, convincing, and without a doubt because of all the doubting underneath.

W-151.2. You do not seem to doubt the world you see. 2 You do not really question what is shown you through the body\’s eyes. 3 Nor do you ask why you believe it, even though you learned a long while since your senses do deceive. 4 That you believe them to the last detail which they report is even stranger, when you pause to recollect how frequently they have been faulty witnesses indeed! 5 Why would you trust them so implicitly? 6 Why but because of underlying doubt, which you would hide with show of certainty?

W-151.3. How can you judge? 2 Your judgment rests upon the witness that your senses offer you. 3 Yet witness never falser was than this. 4 But how else do you judge the world you see? 5 You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. 6 You think your fingers touch reality, and close upon the truth. 7 This is awareness that you understand, and think more real than what is witnessed to by the eternal Voice for God Himself.

W-151.4. Can this be judgment? 2 You have often been urged to refrain from judging, not because it is a right to be withheld from you. 3 You cannot judge. 4 You merely can believe the ego\’s judgments, all of which are false. 5 It guides your senses carefully, to prove how weak you are; how helpless and afraid, how apprehensive of just punishment, how black with sin, how wretched in your guilt.

W-151.5. This thing it speaks of, and would yet defend, it tells you is yourself. 2 And you believe that this is so with stubborn certainty. 3 Yet underneath remains the hidden doubt that what it shows you as reality with such conviction it does not believe. 4 It is itself alone that it condemns. 5 It is within itself it sees the guilt. 6 It is its own despair it sees in you.

W-151.6. Hear not its voice. 2 The witnesses it sends to prove to you its evil is your own are false, and speak with certainty of what they do not know. 3 Your faith in them is blind because you would not share the doubts their lord can not completely vanquish. 4 You believe to doubt his vassals is to doubt yourself.

W-151.7. Yet you must learn to doubt their evidence will clear the way to recognize yourself, and let the Voice for God alone be Judge of what is worthy of your own belief. 2 He will not tell you that your brother should be judged by what your eyes behold in him, nor what his body\’s mouth says to your ears, nor what your fingers\’ touch reports of him. 3 He passes by such idle witnesses, which merely bear false witness to God\’s Son. 4 He recognizes only what God loves, and in the holy light of what He sees do all the ego\’s dreams of what you are vanish before the splendor He beholds.

W-151.8. Let Him be Judge of what you are, for He has certainty in which there is no doubt, because it rests on Certainty so great that doubt is meaningless before Its face. 2 Christ cannot doubt Himself. 3 The Voice for God can only honor Him, rejoicing in His perfect, everlasting sinlessness. 4 Whom He has judged can only laugh at guilt, unwilling now to play with toys of sin; unheeding of the body\’s witnesses before the rapture of Christ\’s holy face.

W-151.9. And thus He judges you. 2 Accept His Word for what you are, for He bears witness to your beautiful creation, and the Mind Whose Thought created your reality. 3 What can the body mean to Him Who knows the glory of the Father and the Son? 4 What whispers of the ego can He hear? 5 What could convince Him that your sins are real? 6 Let Him be Judge as well of everything that seems to happen to you in this world. 7 His lessons will enable you to bridge the gap between illusions and the truth.

W-151.10. He will remove all faith that you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering and loss. 2 He gives you vision which can look beyond these grim appearances, and can behold the gentle face of Christ in all of them. 3 You will no longer doubt that only good can come to you who are beloved of God, for He will judge all happenings, and teach the single lesson that they all contain.

W-151.11. He will select the elements in them which represent the truth, and disregard those aspects which reflect but idle dreams. 2 And He will reinterpret all you see, and all occurrences, each circumstance, and every happening that seems to touch on you in any way from His one frame of reference, wholly unified and sure. 3 And you will see the love beyond the hate, the constancy in change, the pure in sin, and only Heaven\’s blessing on the world.

W-151.12. Such is your resurrection, for your life is not a part of anything you see. 2 It stands beyond the body and the world, past every witness for unholiness, within the Holy, holy as Itself. 3 In everyone and everything His Voice would speak to you of nothing but your Self and your Creator, Who is One with Him. 4 So will you see the holy face of Christ in everything, and hear in everything no sound except the echo of God\’s Voice.

W-151.13. We practice wordlessly today, except at the beginning of the time we spend with God. 2 We introduce these times with but a single, slow repeating of the thought with which the day begins. 3 And then we watch our thoughts, appealing silently to Him Who sees the elements of truth in them. 4 Let Him evaluate each thought that comes to mind, remove the elements of dreams, and give them back again as clean ideas that do not contradict the Will of God.

W-151.14. Give Him your thoughts, and He will give them back as miracles which joyously proclaim the wholeness and the happiness God wills His Son, as proof of His eternal Love. 2 And as each thought is thus transformed, it takes on healing power from the Mind which saw the truth in it, and failed to be deceived by what was falsely added. 3 All the threads of fantasy are gone. 4 And what remains is unified into a perfect Thought that offers its perfection everywhere.

W-151.15. Spend fifteen minutes thus when you awake, and gladly give another fifteen more before you go to sleep. 2 Your ministry begins as all your thoughts are purified. 3 So are you taught to teach the Son of God the holy lesson of his sanctity. 4 No one can fail to listen, when you hear the Voice for God give honor to God\’s Son. 5 And everyone will share the thoughts with you which He has retranslated in your mind.

W-151.16. Such is your Eastertide. 2 And so you lay the gift of snow-white lilies on the world, replacing witnesses to sin and death. 3 Through your transfiguration is the world redeemed, and joyfully released from guilt. 4 Now do we lift our resurrected minds in gladness and in gratitude to Him Who has restored our sanity to us.

W-151.17. And we will hourly remember Him Who is salvation and deliverance. 2 As we give thanks, the world unites with us and happily accepts our holy thoughts, which Heaven has corrected and made pure. 3 Now has our ministry begun at last, to carry round the world the joyous news that truth has no illusions, and the peace of God, through us, belongs to everyone.

LESSON 152

The power of decision is my own.

W-152.1. No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. 2 No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. 3 No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. 4 And no one dies without his own consent. 5 Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. 6 Here is your world, complete in all details. 7 Here is its whole reality for you. 8 And it is only here salvation is.

W-152.2. You may believe that this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. 2 Yet can truth have exceptions? 3 If you have the gift of everything, can loss be real? 4 Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? 5 Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where love and perfect holiness abide? 6 Truth must be all-inclusive, if it be the truth at all. 7 Accept no opposites and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely.

W-152.3. Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true, and nothing else is true. 2 This you have heard before, but may not yet accept both parts of it. 3 Without the first, the second has no meaning. 4 But without the second, is the first no longer true. 5 Truth cannot have an opposite. 6 This can not be too often said and thought about. 7 For if what is not true is true as well as what is true, then part of truth is false. 8 And truth has lost its meaning. 9 Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false.

W-152.4. This is the simplest of distinctions, yet the most obscure. 2 But not because it is a difficult distinction to perceive. 3 It is concealed behind a vast array of choices that do not appear to be entirely your own. 4 And thus the truth appears to have some aspects that belie consistency, but do not seem to be but contradictions introduced by you.

W-152.5. As God created you, you must remain unchangeable, with transitory states by definition false. 2 And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in conditions of the body and the mind; in all awareness and in all response. 3 This is the all-inclusiveness which sets the truth apart from falsehood, and the false kept separate from the truth, as what it is.

W-152.6. Is it not strange that you believe to think you made the world you see is arrogance? 2 God made it not. 3 Of this you can be sure. 4 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? 5 You but accuse Him of insanity, to think He made a world where such things seem to have reality. 6 He is not mad. 7 Yet only madness makes a world like this.

W-152.7. To think that God made chaos, contradicts His Will, invented opposites to truth, and suffers death to triumph over life; all this is arrogance. 2 Humility would see at once these things are not of Him. 3 And can you see what God created not? 4 To think you can is merely to believe you can perceive what God willed not to be. 5 And what could be more arrogant than this?

W-152.8. Let us today be truly humble, and accept what we have made as what it is. 2 The power of decision is our own. 3 Decide but to accept your rightful place as co-creator of the universe, and all you think you made will disappear. 4 What rises to awareness then will be all that there ever was, eternally as it is now. 5 And it will take the place of self-deceptions made but to usurp the altar to the Father and the Son.

W-152.9. Today we practice true humility, abandoning the false pretense by which the ego seeks to prove it arrogant. 2 Only the ego can be arrogant. 3 But truth is humble in acknowledging its mightiness, its changelessness and its eternal wholeness, all-encompassing, God\’s perfect gift to His beloved Son. 4 We lay aside the arrogance which says that we are sinners, guilty and afraid, ashamed of what we are; and lift our hearts in true humility instead to Him Who has created us immaculate, like to Himself in power and in love.

W-152.10. The power of decision is our own. 2 And we accept of Him that which we are, and humbly recognize the Son of God. 3 To recognize God\’s Son implies as well that all self-concepts have been laid aside, and recognized as false. 4 Their arrogance has been perceived. 5 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.

W-152.11. Now do we join in glad acknowledgment that lies are false, and only truth is true. 2 We think of truth alone as we arise, and spend five minutes practicing its ways, encouraging our frightened minds with this:

3 The power of decision is my own. 4 This day I will accept myself as what my Father\’s Will created me to be.

5 Then will we wait in silence, giving up all self-deceptions, as we humbly ask our Self that He reveal Himself to us. 6 And He Who never left will come again to our awareness, grateful to restore His home to God, as it was meant to be.

W-152.12. 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. 2 God\’s Voice will answer, for He speaks for you and for your Father. 3 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.

LESSON 153

In my defenselessness my safety lies.

W-153.1. You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the \”gifts\” it merely lends to take away again; attend this lesson well. 2 The world provides no safety. 3 It is rooted in attack, and all its \”gifts\” of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. 4 It attacks, and then attacks again. 5 No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus.

W-153.2. The world gives rise but to defensiveness. 2 For threat brings anger, anger makes attack seem reasonable, honestly provoked, and righteous in the name of self-defense. 3 Yet is defensiveness a double threat. 4 For it attests to weakness, and sets up a system of defense that cannot work. 5 Now are the weak still further undermined, for there is treachery without and still a greater treachery within. 6 The mind is now confused, and knows not where to turn to find escape from its imaginings.

W-153.3. It is as if a circle held it fast, wherein another circle bound it and another one in that, until escape no longer can be hoped for nor obtained. 2 Attack, defense; defense, attack, become the circles of the hours and the days that bind the mind in heavy bands of steel with iron overlaid, returning but to start again. 3 There seems to be no break nor ending in the ever-tightening grip of the imprisonment upon the mind.

W-153.4. Defenses are the costliest of all the prices which the ego would exact. 2 In them lies madness in a form so grim that hope of sanity seems but to be an idle dream, beyond the possible. 3 The sense of threat the world encourages is so much deeper, and so far beyond the frenzy and intensity of which you can conceive, that you have no idea of all the devastation it has wrought.

W-153.5. You are its slave. 2 You know not what you do, in fear of it. 3 You do not understand how much you have been made to sacrifice, who feel its iron grip upon your heart. 4 You do not realize what you have done to sabotage the holy peace of God by your defensiveness. 5 For you behold the Son of God as but a victim to attack by fantasies, by dreams, and by illusions he has made; yet helpless in their presence, needful only of defense by still more fantasies, and dreams by which illusions of his safety comfort him.

W-153.6. Defenselessness is strength. 2 It testifies to recognition of the Christ in you. 3 Perhaps you will recall the text maintains that choice is always made between Christ\’s strength and your own weakness, seen apart from Him. 4 Defenselessness can never be attacked, because it recognizes strength so great attack is folly, or a silly game a tired child might play, when he becomes too sleepy to remember what he wants.

W-153.7. Defensiveness is weakness. 2 It proclaims you have denied the Christ and come to fear His Father\’s anger. 3 What can save you now from your delusion of an angry god, whose fearful image you believe you see at work in all the evils of the world? 4 What but illusions could defend you now, when it is but illusions that you fight?

W-153.8. We will not play such childish games today. 2 For our true purpose is to save the world, and we would not exchange for foolishness the endless joy our function offers us. 3 We would not let our happiness slip by because a fragment of a senseless dream happened to cross our minds, and we mistook the figures in it for the Son of God; its tiny instant for eternity.

W-153.9. We look past dreams today, and recognize that we need no defense because we are created unassailable, without all thought or wish or dream in which attack has any meaning. 2 Now we cannot fear, for we have left all fearful thoughts behind. 3 And in defenselessness we stand secure, serenely certain of our safety now, sure of salvation; sure we will fulfill our chosen purpose, as our ministry extends its holy blessing through the world.

W-153.10. Be still a moment, and in silence think how holy is your purpose, how secure you rest, untouchable within its light. 2 God\’s ministers have chosen that the truth be with them. 3 Who is holier than they? 4 Who could be surer that his happiness is fully guaranteed? 5 And who could be more mightily protected? 6 What defense could possibly be needed by the ones who are among the chosen ones of God, by His election and their own as well?

W-153.11. It is the function of God\’s ministers to help their brothers choose as they have done. 2 God has elected all, but few have come to realize His Will is but their own. 3 And while you fail to teach what you have learned, salvation waits and darkness holds the world in grim imprisonment. 4 Nor will you learn that light has come to you, and your escape has been accomplished. 5 For you will not see the light, until you offer it to all your brothers. 6 As they take it from your hands, so will you recognize it as your own.

W-153.12. Salvation can be thought of as a game that happy children play. 2 It was designed by One Who loves His children, and Who would replace their fearful toys with joyous games, which teach them that the game of fear is gone. 3 His game instructs in happiness because there is no loser. 4 Everyone who plays must win, and in his winning is the gain to everyone ensured. 5 The game of fear is gladly laid aside, when children come to see the benefits salvation brings.

W-153.13. You who have played that you are lost to hope, abandoned by your Father, left alone in terror in a fearful world made mad by sin and guilt; be happy now. 2 That game is over. 3 Now a quiet time has come, in which we put away the toys of guilt, and lock our quaint and childish thoughts of sin forever from the pure and holy minds of Heaven\’s children and the Son of God.

W-153.14. We pause but for a moment more, to play our final, happy game upon this earth. 2 And then we go to take our rightful place where truth abides and games are meaningless. 3 So is the story ended. 4 Let this day bring the last chapter closer to the world, that everyone may learn the tale he reads of terrifying destiny, defeat of all his hopes, his pitiful defense against a vengeance he can not escape, is but his own deluded fantasy. 5 God\’s ministers have come to waken him from the dark dreams this story has evoked in his confused, bewildered memory of this distorted tale. 6 God\’s Son can smile at last, on learning that it is not true.

W-153.15. Today we practice in a form we will maintain for quite a while. 2 We will begin each day by giving our attention to the daily thought as long as possible. 3 Five minutes now becomes the least we give to preparation for a day in which salvation is the only goal we have. 4 Ten would be better; fifteen better still. 5 And as distraction ceases to arise to turn us from our purpose, we will find that half an hour is too short a time to spend with God. 6 Nor will we willingly give less at night, in gratitude and joy.

W-153.16. Each hour adds to our increasing peace, as we remember to be faithful to the Will we share with God. 2 At times, perhaps, a minute, even less, will be the most that we can offer as the hour strikes. 3 Sometimes we will forget. 4 At other times the business of the world will close on us, and we will be unable to withdraw a little while, and turn our thoughts to God.

W-153.17. Yet when we can, we will observe our trust as ministers of God, in hourly remembrance of our mission and His Love. 2 And we will quietly sit by and wait on Him and listen to His Voice, and learn what He would have us do the hour that is yet to come; while thanking Him for all the gifts He gave us in the one gone by.

W-153.18. In time, with practice, you will never cease to think of Him, and hear His loving Voice guiding your footsteps into quiet ways, where you will walk in true defenselessness. 2 For you will know that Heaven goes with you. 3 Nor would you keep your mind away from Him a moment, even though your time is spent in offering salvation to the world. 4 Think you He will not make this possible, for you who chose to carry out His plan for the salvation of the world and yours?

W-153.19. Today our theme is our defenselessness. 2 We clothe ourselves in it, as we prepare to meet the day. 3 We rise up strong in Christ, and let our weakness disappear, as we remember that His strength abides in us. 4 We will remind ourselves that He remains beside us through the day, and never leaves our weakness unsupported by His strength. 5 We call upon His strength each time we feel the threat of our defenses undermine our certainty of purpose. 6 We will pause a moment, as He tells us, \”I am here.\”

W-153.20. Your practicing will now begin to take the earnestness of love, to help you keep your mind from wandering from its intent. 2 Be not afraid nor timid. 3 There can be no doubt that you will reach your final goal. 4 The ministers of God can never fail, because the love and strength and peace that shine from them to all their brothers come from Him. 5 These are His gifts to you. 6 Defenselessness is all you need to give Him in return. 7 You lay aside but what was never real, to look on Christ and see His sinlessness.

LESSON 154

I am among the ministers of God.

W-154.1. Let us today be neither arrogant nor falsely humble. 2 We have gone beyond such foolishness. 3 We cannot judge ourselves, nor need we do so. 4 These are but attempts to hold decision off, and to delay commitment to our function. 5 It is not our part to judge our worth, nor can we know what role is best for us; what we can do within a larger plan we cannot see in its entirety. 6 Our part is cast in Heaven, not in hell. 7 And what we think is weakness can be strength; what we believe to be our strength is often arrogance.

W-154.2. Whatever your appointed role may be, it was selected by the Voice for God, Whose function is to speak for you as well. 2 Seeing your strengths exactly as they are, and equally aware of where they can be best applied, for what, to whom and when, He chooses and accepts your part for you. 3 He does not work without your own consent. 4 But He is not deceived in what you are, and listens only to His Voice in you.

W-154.3. It is through His ability to hear one Voice which is His Own that you become aware at last there is one Voice in you. 2 And that one Voice appoints your function, and relays it to you, giving you the strength to understand it, do what it entails, and to succeed in everything you do that is related to it. 3 God has joined His Son in this, and thus His Son becomes His messenger of unity with Him.

W-154.4. It is this joining, through the Voice for God, of Father and of Son, that sets apart salvation from the world. 2 It is this Voice which speaks of laws the world does not obey; which promises salvation from all sin, with guilt abolished in the mind that God created sinless. 3 Now this mind becomes aware again of Who created it, and of His lasting union with itself. 4 So is its Self the one reality in which its will and that of God are joined.

W-154.5. A messenger is not the one who writes the message he delivers. 2 Nor does he question the right of him who does, nor ask why he has chosen those who will receive the message that he brings. 3 It is enough that he accept it, give it to the ones for whom it is intended, and fulfill his role in its delivery. 4 If he determines what the messages should be, or what their purpose is, or where they should be carried, he is failing to perform his proper part as bringer of the Word.

W-154.6. There is one major difference in the role of Heaven\’s messengers, which sets them off from those the world appoints. 2 The messages that they deliver are intended first for them. 3 And it is only as they can accept them for themselves that they become able to bring them further, and to give them everywhere that they were meant to be. 4 Like earthly messengers, they did not write the messages they bear, but they become their first receivers in the truest sense, receiving to prepare themselves to give.

W-154.7. An earthly messenger fulfills his role by giving all his messages away. 2 The messengers of God perform their part by their acceptance of His messages as for themselves, and show they understand the messages by giving them away. 3 They choose no roles that are not given them by His authority. 4 And so they gain by every message that they give away.

W-154.8. Would you receive the messages of God? 2 For thus do you become His messenger. 3 You are appointed now. 4 And yet you wait to give the messages you have received. 5 And so you do not know that they are yours, and do not recognize them. 6 No one can receive and understand he has received until he gives. 7 For in the giving is his own acceptance of what he received.

W-154.9. You who are now the messenger of God, receive His messages. 2 For that is part of your appointed role. 3 God has not failed to offer what you need, nor has it been left unaccepted. 4 Yet another part of your appointed task is yet to be accomplished. 5 He Who has received for you the messages of God would have them be received by you as well. 6 For thus do you identify with Him and claim your own.

W-154.10. It is this joining that we undertake to recognize today. 2 We will not seek to keep our minds apart from Him Who speaks for us, for it is but our voice we hear as we attend Him. 3 He alone can speak to us and for us, joining in one Voice the getting and the giving of God\’s Word; the giving and receiving of His Will.

W-154.11. We practice giving Him what He would have, that we may recognize His gifts to us. 2 He needs our voice that He may speak through us. 3 He needs our hands to hold His messages, and carry them to those whom He appoints. 4 He needs our feet to bring us where He wills, that those who wait in misery may be at last delivered. 5 And He needs our will united with His Own, that we may be the true receivers of the gifts He gives.

W-154.12. Let us but learn this lesson for today: We will not recognize what we receive until we give it. 2 You have heard this said a hundred ways, a hundred times, and yet belief is lacking still. 3 But this is sure; until belief is given it, you will receive a thousand miracles and then receive a thousand more, but will not know that God Himself has left no gift beyond what you already have; nor has denied the tiniest of blessings to His Son. 4 What can this mean to you, until you have identified with Him and with His Own?

W-154.13. Our lesson for today is stated thus:

2 I am among the ministers of God, and I am grateful that I have the means by which to recognize that I am free.

W-154.14. The world recedes as we light up our minds, and realize these holy words are true. 2 They are the message sent to us today from our Creator. 3 Now we demonstrate how they have changed our minds about ourselves, and what our function is. 4 For as we prove that we accept no will we do not share, our many gifts from our Creator will spring to our sight and leap into our hands, and we will recognize what we received.

LESSON 155

I will step back and let Him lead the way.

W-155.1. There is a way of living in the world that is not here, although it seems to be. 2 You do not change appearance, though you smile more frequently. 3 Your forehead is serene; your eyes are quiet. 4 And the ones who walk the world as you do recognize their own. 5 Yet those who have not yet perceived the way will recognize you also, and believe that you are like them, as you were before.

W-155.2. The world is an illusion. 2 Those who choose to come to it are seeking for a place where they can be illusions, and avoid their own reality. 3 Yet when they find their own reality is even here, then they step back and let it lead the way. 4 What other choice is really theirs to make? 5 To let illusions walk ahead of truth is madness. 6 But to let illusion sink behind the truth and let the truth stand forth as what it is, is merely sanity.

W-155.3. This is the simple choice we make today. 2 The mad illusion will remain awhile in evidence, for those to look upon who chose to come, and have not yet rejoiced to find they were mistaken in their choice. 3 They cannot learn directly from the truth, because they have denied that it is so. 4 And so they need a Teacher Who perceives their madness, but Who still can look beyond illusion to the simple truth in them.

W-155.4. If truth demanded they give up the world, it would appear to them as if it asked the sacrifice of something that is real. 2 Many have chosen to renounce the world while still believing its reality. 3 And they have suffered from a sense of loss, and have not been released accordingly. 4 Others have chosen nothing but the world, and they have suffered from a sense of loss still deeper, which they did not understand.

W-155.5. Between these paths there is another road that leads away from loss of every kind, for sacrifice and deprivation both are quickly left behind. 2 This is the way appointed for you now. 3 You walk this path as others walk, nor do you seem to be distinct from them, although you are indeed. 4 Thus can you serve them while you serve yourself, and set their footsteps on the way that God has opened up to you, and them through you.

W-155.6. Illusion still appears to cling to you, that you may reach them. 2 Yet it has stepped back. 3 And it is not illusion that they hear you speak of, nor illusion that you bring their eyes to look on and their minds to grasp. 4 Nor can the truth, which walks ahead of you, speak to them through illusions, for the road leads past illusion now, while on the way you call to them, that they may follow you.

W-155.7. All roads will lead to this one in the end. 2 For sacrifice and deprivation are paths that lead nowhere, choices for defeat, and aims that will remain impossible. 3 All this steps back as truth comes forth in you, to lead your brothers from the ways of death, and set them on the way to happiness. 4 Their suffering is but illusion. 5 Yet they need a guide to lead them out of it, for they mistake illusion for the truth.

W-155.8. Such is salvation\’s call, and nothing more. 2 It asks that you accept the truth, and let it go before you, lighting up the path of ransom from illusion. 3 It is not a ransom with a price. 4 There is no cost, but only gain. 5 Illusion can but seem to hold in chains the holy Son of God. 6 It is but from illusions he is saved. 7 As they step back, he finds himself again.

W-155.9. Walk safely now, yet carefully, because this path is new to you. 2 And you may find that you are tempted still to walk ahead of truth, and let illusions be your guide. 3 Your holy brothers have been given you, to follow in your footsteps as you walk with certainty of purpose to the truth. 4 It goes before you now, that they may see something with which they can identify; something they understand to lead the way.

W-155.10. Yet at the journey\’s ending there will be no gap, no distance between truth and you. 2 And all illusions walking in the way you travelled will be gone from you as well, with nothing left to keep the truth apart from God\’s completion, holy as Himself. 3 Step back in faith and let truth lead the way. 4 You know not where you go. 5 But One Who knows goes with you. 6 Let Him lead you with the rest.

W-155.11. When dreams are over, time has closed the door on all the things that pass and miracles are purposeless, the holy Son of God will make no journeys. 2 There will be no wish to be illusion rather than the truth. 3 And we step forth toward this, as we progress along the way that truth points out to us. 4 This is our final journey, which we make for everyone. 5 We must not lose our way. 6 For as truth goes before us, so it goes before our brothers who will follow us.

W-155.12. We walk to God. 2 Pause and reflect on this. 3 Could any way be holier, or more deserving of your effort, of your love and of your full intent? 4 What way could give you more than everything, or offer less and still content the holy Son of God? 5 We walk to God. 6 The truth that walks before us now is one with Him, and leads us to where He has always been. 7 What way but this could be a path that you would choose instead?

W-155.13. Your feet are safely set upon the road that leads the world to God. 2 Look not to ways that seem to lead you elsewhere. 3 Dreams are not a worthy guide for you who are God\’s Son. 4 Forget not He has placed His Hand in yours, and given you your brothers in His trust that you are worthy of His trust in you. 5 He cannot be deceived. 6 His trust has made your pathway certain and your goal secure. 7 You will not fail your brothers nor your Self.

W-155.14. And now He asks but that you think of Him a while each day, that He may speak to you and tell you of His Love, reminding you how great His trust; how limitless His Love. 2 In your Name and His Own, which are the same, we practice gladly with this thought today:

3 I will step back and let Him lead the way, For I would walk along the road to Him.

LESSON 156

I walk with God in perfect holiness.

W-156.1. Today\’s idea but states the simple truth that makes the thought of sin impossible. 2 It promises there is no cause for guilt, and being causeless it does not exist. 3 It follows surely from the basic thought so often mentioned in the text; ideas leave not their source. 4 If this be true, how can you be apart from God? 5 How could you walk the world alone and separate from your Source?

W-156.2. We are not inconsistent in the thoughts that we present in our curriculum. 2 Truth must be true throughout, if it be true. 3 It cannot contradict itself, nor be in parts uncertain and in others sure. 4 You cannot walk the world apart from God, because you could not be without Him. 5 He is what your life is. 6 Where you are He is. 7 There is one life. 8 That life you share with Him. 9 Nothing can be apart from Him and live.

W-156.3. Yet where He is, there must be holiness as well as life. 2 No attribute of His remains unshared by everything that lives. 3 What lives is holy as Himself, because what shares His life is part of Holiness, and could no more be sinful than the sun could choose to be of ice; the sea elect to be apart from water, or the grass to grow with roots suspended in the air.

W-156.4. There is a light in you which cannot die; whose presence is so holy that the world is sanctified because of you. 2 All things that live bring gifts to you, and offer them in gratitude and gladness at your feet. 3 The scent of flowers is their gift to you. 4 The waves bow down before you, and the trees extend their arms to shield you from the heat, and lay their leaves before you on the ground that you may walk in softness, while the wind sinks to a whisper round your holy head.

W-156.5. The light in you is what the universe longs to behold. 2 All living things are still before you, for they recognize Who walks with you. 3 The light you carry is their own. 4 And thus they see in you their holiness, saluting you as savior and as God. 5 Accept their reverence, for it is due to Holiness Itself, which walks with you, transforming in Its gentle light all things unto Its likeness and Its purity.

W-156.6. This is the way salvation works. 2 As you step back, the light in you steps forward and encompasses the world. 3 It heralds not the end of sin in punishment and death. 4 In lightness and in laughter is sin gone, because its quaint absurdity is seen. 5 It is a foolish thought, a silly dream, not frightening, ridiculous perhaps, but who would waste an instant in approach to God Himself for such a senseless whim?

W-156.7. Yet you have wasted many, many years on just this foolish thought. 2 The past is gone, with all its fantasies. 3 They keep you bound no longer. 4 The approach to God is near. 5 And in the little interval of doubt that still remains, you may perhaps lose sight of your Companion, and mistake Him for the senseless, ancient dream that now is past.

W-156.8. \”Who walks with me?\” 2 This question should be asked a thousand times a day, till certainty has ended doubting and established peace. 3 Today let doubting cease. 4 God speaks for you in answering your question with these words:

5 I walk with God in perfect holiness. 6 I light the world, I light my mind and all the minds which God created one with me.

LESSON 157

Into His Presence would I enter now.

W-157.1. This is a day of silence and of trust. 2 It is a special time of promise in your calendar of days. 3 It is a time Heaven has set apart to shine upon, and cast a timeless light upon this day, when echoes of eternity are heard. 4 This day is holy, for it ushers in a new experience; a different kind of feeling and awareness. 5 You have spent long days and nights in celebrating death. 6 Today you learn to feel the joy of life.

W-157.2. This is another crucial turning point in the curriculum. 2 We add a new dimension now; a fresh experience that sheds a light on all that we have learned already, and prepares us for what we have yet to learn. 3 It brings us to the door where learning ceases, and we catch a glimpse of what lies past the highest reaches it can possibly attain. 4 It leaves us here an instant, and we go beyond it, sure of our direction and our only goal.

W-157.3. Today it will be given you to feel a touch of Heaven, though you will return to paths of learning. 2 Yet you have come far enough along the way to alter time sufficiently to rise above its laws, and walk into eternity a while. 3 This you will learn to do increasingly, as every lesson, faithfully rehearsed, brings you more swiftly to this holy place and leaves you, for a moment, to your Self.

W-157.4. He will direct your practicing today, for what you ask for now is what He wills. 2 And having joined your will with His this day, what you are asking must be given you. 3 Nothing is needed but today\’s idea to light your mind, and let it rest in still anticipation and in quiet joy, wherein you quickly leave the world behind.

W-157.5. From this day forth, your ministry takes on a genuine devotion, and a glow that travels from your fingertips to those you touch, and blesses those you look upon. 2 A vision reaches everyone you meet, and everyone you think of, or who thinks of you. 3 For your experience today will so transform your mind that it becomes the touchstone for the holy Thoughts of God.

W-157.6. Your body will be sanctified today, its only purpose being now to bring the vision of what you experience this day to light the world. 2 We cannot give experience like this directly. 3 Yet it leaves a vision in our eyes which we can offer everyone, that he may come the sooner to the same experience in which the world is quietly forgot, and Heaven is remembered for a while.

W-157.7. As this experience increases and all goals but this become of little worth, the world to which you will return becomes a little closer to the end of time; a little more like Heaven in its ways; a little nearer its deliverance. 2 And you who bring it light will come to see the light more sure; the vision more distinct. 3 The time will come when you will not return in the same form in which you now appear, for you will have no need of it. 4 Yet now it has a purpose, and will serve it well.

W-157.8. Today we will embark upon a course you have not dreamed of. 2 But the Holy One, the Giver of the happy dreams of life, Translator of perception into truth, the holy Guide to Heaven given you, has dreamed for you this journey which you make and start today, with the experience this day holds out to you to be your own.

W-157.9. Into Christ\’s Presence will we enter now, serenely unaware of everything except His shining face and perfect Love. 2 The vision of His face will stay with you, but there will be an instant which transcends all vision, even this, the holiest. 3 This you will never teach, for you attained it not through learning. 4 Yet the vision speaks of your rememberance of what you knew that instant, and will surely know again.

LESSON 158

Today I learn to give as I receive.

W-158.1. What has been given you? 2 The knowledge that you are a mind, in Mind and purely mind, sinless forever, wholly unafraid, because you were created out of love. 3 Nor have you left your Source, remaining as you were created. 4 This was given you as knowledge which you cannot lose. 5 It was given as well to every living thing, for by that knowledge only does it live.

W-158.2. You have received all this. 2 No one who walks the world but has received it. 3 It is not this knowledge which you give, for that is what creation gave. 4 All this cannot be learned. 5 What, then, are you to learn to give today? 6 Our lesson yesterday evoked a theme found early in the text. 7 Experience cannot be shared directly, in the way that vision can. 8 The revelation that the Father and the Son are one will come in time to every mind. 9 Yet is that time determined by the mind itself, not taught.

W-158.3. The time is set already. 2 It appears to be quite arbitrary. 3 Yet there is no step along the road that anyone takes but by chance. 4 It has already been taken by him, although he has not yet embarked on it. 5 For time but seems to go in one direction. 6 We but undertake a journey that is over. 7 Yet it seems to have a future still unknown to us.

W-158.4. Time is a trick, a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic. 2 Yet there is a plan behind appearances that does not change. 3 The script is written. 4 When experience will come to end your doubting has been set. 5 For we but see the journey from the point at which it ended, looking back on it, imagining we make it once again; reviewing mentally what has gone by.

W-158.5. A teacher does not give experience, because he did not learn it. 2 It revealed itself to him at its appointed time. 3 But vision is his gift. 4 This he can give directly, for Christ\’s knowledge is not lost, because He has a vision He can give to anyone who asks. 5 The Father\’s Will and His are joined in knowledge. 6 Yet there is a vision which the Holy Spirit sees because the Mind of Christ beholds it too.

W-158.6. Here is the joining of the world of doubt and shadows made with the intangible. 2 Here is a quiet place within the world made holy by forgiveness and by love. 3 Here are all contradictions reconciled, for here the journey ends. 4 Experience-unlearned, untaught, unseen-is merely there. 5 This is beyond our goal, for it transcends what needs to be accomplished. 6 Our concern is with Christ\’s vision. 7 This we can attain.

W-158.7. Christ\’s vision has one law. 2 It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. 3 It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. 4 It sees no separation. 5 And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees.

W-158.8. This can be taught; and must be taught by all who would achieve it. 2 It requires but the recognition that the world can not give anything that faintly can compare with this in value; nor set up a goal that does not merely disappear when this has been perceived. 3 And this you give today: See no one as a body. 4 Greet him as the Son of God he is, acknowledging that he is one with you in holiness.

W-158.9. Thus are his sins forgiven him, for Christ has vision that has power to overlook them all. 2 In His forgiveness are they gone. 3 Unseen by One they merely disappear, because a vision of the holiness that lies beyond them comes to take their place. 4 It matters not what form they took, nor how enormous they appeared to be, nor who seemed to be hurt by them. 5 They are no more. 6 And all effects they seemed to have are gone with them, undone and never to be done.

W-158.10. Thus do you learn to give as you receive. 2 And thus Christ\’s vision looks on you as well. 3 This lesson is not difficult to learn, if you remember in your brother you but see yourself. 4 If he be lost in sin, so must you be; if you see light in him, your sins have been forgiven by yourself. 5 Each brother whom you meet today provides another chance to let Christ\’s vision shine on you, and offer you the peace of God.

W-158.11. It matters not when revelation comes, for that is not of time. 2 Yet time has still one gift to give, in which true knowledge is reflected in a way so accurate its image shares its unseen holiness; its likeness shines with its immortal love. 3 We practice seeing with the eyes of Christ today. 4 And by the holy gifts we give, Christ\’s vision looks upon ourselves as well.

LESSON 159

I give the miracles I have received.

W-159.1. No one can give what he has not received. 2 To give a thing requires first you have it in your own possession. 3 Here the laws of Heaven and the world agree. 4 But here they also separate. 5 The world believes that to possess a thing, it must be kept. 6 Salvation teaches otherwise. 7 To give is how to recognize you have received. 8 It is the proof that what you have is yours.

W-159.2. You understand that you are healed when you give healing. 2 You accept forgiveness as accomplished in yourself when you forgive. 3 You recognize your brother as yourself, and thus do you perceive that you are whole. 4 There is no miracle you cannot give, for all are given you. 5 Receive them now by opening the storehouse of your mind where they are laid, and giving them away.

W-159.3. Christ\’s vision is a miracle. 2 It comes from far beyond itself, for it reflects eternal love and the rebirth of love which never dies, but has been kept obscure. 3 Christ\’s vision pictures Heaven, for it sees a world so like to Heaven that what God created perfect can be mirrored there. 4 The darkened glass the world presents can show but twisted images in broken parts. 5 The real world pictures Heaven\’s innocence.

W-159.4. Christ\’s vision is the miracle in which all miracles are born. 2 It is their source, remaining with each miracle you give, and yet remaining yours. 3 It is the bond by which the giver and receiver are united in extension here on earth, as they are one in Heaven. 4 Christ beholds no sin in anyone. 5 And in His sight the sinless are as one. 6 Their holiness was given by His Father and Himself.

W-159.5. Christ\’s vision is the bridge between the worlds. 2 And in its power can you safely trust to carry you from this world into one made holy by forgiveness. 3 Things which seem quite solid here are merely shadows there; transparent, faintly seen, at times forgot, and never able to obscure the light that shines beyond them. 4 Holiness has been restored to vision, and the blind can see.

W-159.6. This is the Holy Spirit\’s single gift; the treasure house to which you can appeal with perfect certainty for all the things that can contribute to your happiness. 2 All are laid here already. 3 All can be received but for the asking. 4 Here the door is never locked, and no one is denied his least request or his most urgent need. 5 There is no sickness not already healed, no lack unsatisfied, no need unmet within this golden treasury of Christ.

W-159.7. Here does the world remember what was lost when it was made. 2 For here it is repaired, made new again, but in a different light. 3 What was to be the home of sin becomes the center of redemption and the hearth of mercy, where the suffering are healed and welcome. 4 No one will be turned away from this new home, where his salvation waits. 5 No one is stranger to him. 6 No one asks for anything of him except the gift of his acceptance of his welcoming.

W-159.8. Christ\’s vision is the holy ground in which the lilies of forgiveness set their roots. 2 This is their home. 3 They can be brought from here back to the world, but they can never grow in its unnourishing and shallow soil. 4 They need the light and warmth and kindly care Christ\’s charity provides. 5 They need the love with which He looks on them. 6 And they become His messengers, who give as they received.

W-159.9. Take from His storehouse, that its treasures may increase. 2 His lilies do not leave their home when they are carried back into the world. 3 Their roots remain. 4 They do not leave their source, but carry its beneficence with them, and turn the world into a garden like the one they came from, and to which they go again with added fragrance. 5 Now are they twice blessed. 6 The messages they brought from Christ have been delivered, and returned to them. 7 And they return them gladly unto Him.

W-159.10. Behold the store of miracles set out for you to give. 2 Are you not worth the gift, when God appointed it be given you? 3 Judge not God\’s Son, but follow in the way He has established. 4 Christ has dreamed the dream of a forgiven world. 5 It is His gift, whereby a sweet transition can be made from death to life; from hopelessness to hope. 6 Let us an instant dream with Him. 7 His dream awakens us to truth. 8 His vision gives the means for a return to our unlost and everlasting sanctity in God.

LESSON 160

I am at home. Fear is the stranger here.

W-160.1. Fear is a stranger to the ways of love. 2 Identify with fear, and you will be a stranger to yourself. 3 And thus you are unknown to you. 4 What is your Self remains an alien to the part of you which thinks that it is real, but different from yourself. 5 Who could be sane in such a circumstance? 6 Who but a madman could believe he is what he is not, and judge against himself?

W-160.2. There is a stranger in our midst, who comes from an idea so foreign to the truth he speaks a different language, looks upon a world truth does not know, and understands what truth regards as senseless. 2 Stranger yet, he does not recognize to whom he comes, and yet maintains his home belongs to him, while he is alien now who is at home. 3 And yet, how easy it would be to say, \”This is my home. 4 Here I belong, and will not leave because a madman says I must.\”

W-160.3. What reason is there for not saying this? 2 What could the reason be except that you had asked this stranger in to take your place, and let you be a stranger to yourself? 3 No one would let himself be dispossessed so needlessly, unless he thought there were another home more suited to his tastes.

W-160.4. Who is the stranger? 2 Is it fear or you who are unsuited to the home which God provided for His Son? 3 Is fear His Own, created in His likeness? 4 Is it fear that love completes, and is completed by? 5 There is no home can shelter love and fear. 6 They cannot coexist. 7 If you are real, then fear must be illusion. 8 And if fear is real, then you do not exist at all.

W-160.5. How simply, then, the question is resolved. 2 Who fears has but denied himself and said, \”I am the stranger here. 3 And so I leave my home to one more like me than myself, and give him all I thought belonged to me.\” 4 Now is he exiled of necessity, not knowing who he is, uncertain of all things but this; that he is not himself, and that his home has been denied to him.

W-160.6. What does he search for now? 2 What can he find? 3 A stranger to himself can find no home wherever he may look, for he has made return impossible. 4 His way is lost, except a miracle will search him out and show him that he is no stranger now. 5 The miracle will come. 6 For in his home his Self remains. 7 It asked no stranger in, and took no alien thought to be Itself. 8 And It will call Its Own unto Itself in recognition of what is Its Own.

W-160.7. Who is the stranger? 2 Is he not the one your Self calls not? 3 You are unable now to recognize this stranger in your midst, for you have given him your rightful place. 4 Yet is your Self as certain of Its Own as God is of His Son. 5 He cannot be confused about creation. 6 He is sure of what belongs to Him. 7 No stranger can be interposed between His knowledge and His Son\’s reality. 8 He does not know of strangers. 9 He is certain of His Son.

W-160.8. God\’s certainty suffices. 2 Who He knows to be His Son belongs where He has set His Son forever. 3 He has answered you who ask, \”Who is the stranger?\” 4 Hear His Voice assure you, quietly and sure, that you are not a stranger to your Father, nor is your Creator stranger made to you. 5 Whom God has joined remain forever one, at home in Him, no stranger to Himself.

W-160.9. Today we offer thanks that Christ has come to search the world for what belongs to Him. 2 His vision sees no strangers, but beholds His Own and joyously unites with them. 3 They see Him as a stranger, for they do not recognize themselves. 4 Yet as they give Him welcome, they remember. 5 And He leads them gently home again, where they belong.

W-160.10. Not one does Christ forget. 2 Not one He fails to give you to remember, that your home may be complete and perfect as it was established. 3 He has not forgotten you. 4 But you will not remember Him until you look on all as He does. 5 Who denies his brother is denying Him, and thus refusing to accept the gift of sight by which his Self is clearly recognized, his home remembered and salvation come.

LESSON 161

Give me your blessing, holy Son of God.

W-161.1. Today we practice differently, and take a stand against our anger, that our fears may disappear and offer room to love. 2 Here is salvation in the simple words in which we practice with today\’s idea. 3 Here is the answer to temptation which can never fail to welcome in the Christ where fear and anger had prevailed before. 4 Here is Atonement made complete, the world passed safely by and Heaven now restored. 5 Here is the answer of the Voice for God.

W-161.2. Complete abstraction is the natural condition of the mind. 2 But part of it is now unnatural. 3 It does not look on everything as one. 4 It sees instead but fragments of the whole, for only thus could it invent the partial world you see. 5 The purpose of all seeing is to show you what you wish to see. 6 All hearing but brings to your mind the sounds it wants to hear.

W-161.3. Thus were specifics made. 2 And now it is specifics we must use in practicing. 3 We give them to the Holy Spirit, that He may employ them for a purpose which is different from the one we gave to them. 4 Yet He can use but what we made, to teach us from a different point of view, so we can see a different use in everything.

W-161.4. One brother is all brothers. 2 Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. 3 Such is the truth. 4 Yet do these thoughts make clear the meaning of creation? 5 Do these words bring perfect clarity with them to you? 6 What can they seem to be but empty sounds; pretty, perhaps, correct in sentiment, yet fundamentally not understood nor understandable. 7 The mind that taught itself to think specifically can no longer grasp abstraction in the sense that it is all-encompassing. 8 We need to see a little, that we learn a lot.

W-161.5. It seems to be the body that we feel limits our freedom, makes us suffer, and at last puts out our life. 2 Yet bodies are but symbols for a concrete form of fear. 3 Fear without symbols calls for no response, for symbols can stand for the meaningless. 4 Love needs no symbols, being true. 5 But fear attaches to specifics, being false.

W-161.6. Bodies attack, but minds do not. 2 This thought is surely reminiscent of our text, where it is often emphasized. 3 This is the reason bodies easily become fear\’s symbols. 4 You have many times been urged to look beyond the body, for its sight presents the symbol of love\’s \”enemy\” Christ\’s vision does not see. 5 The body is the target for attack, for no one thinks he hates a mind. 6 Yet what but mind directs the body to attack? 7 What else could be the seat of fear except what thinks of fear?

W-161.7. Hate is specific. 2 There must be a thing to be attacked. 3 An enemy must be perceived in such a form he can be touched and seen and heard, and ultimately killed. 4 When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death as surely as God\’s Voice proclaims there is no death. 5 Fear is insatiable, consuming everything its eyes behold, seeing itself in everything, compelled to turn upon itself and to destroy.

W-161.8. Who sees a brother as a body sees him as fear\’s symbol. 2 And he will attack, because what he beholds is his own fear external to himself, poised to attack, and howling to unite with him again. 3 Mistake not the intensity of rage projected fear must spawn. 4 It shrieks in wrath, and claws the air in frantic hope it can reach to its maker and devour him.

W-161.9. This do the body\’s eyes behold in one whom Heaven cherishes, the angels love and God created perfect. 2 This is his reality. 3 And in Christ\’s vision is his loveliness reflected in a form so holy and so beautiful that you could scarce refrain from kneeling at his feet. 4 Yet you will take his hand instead, for you are like him in the sight that sees him thus. 5 Attack on him is enemy to you, for you will not perceive that in his hands is your salvation. 6 Ask him but for this, and he will give it to you. 7 Ask him not to symbolize your fear. 8 Would you request that love destroy itself? 9 Or would you have it be revealed to you and set you free?

W-161.10. Today we practice in a form we have attempted earlier. 2 Your readiness is closer now, and you will come today nearer Christ\’s vision. 3 If you are intent on reaching it, you will succeed today. 4 And once you have succeeded, you will not be willing to accept the witnesses your body\’s eyes call forth. 5 What you will see will sing to you of ancient melodies you will remember. 6 You are not forgot in Heaven. 7 Would you not remember it?

W-161.11. Select one brother, symbol of the rest, and ask salvation of him. 2 See him first as clearly as you can, in that same form to which you are accustomed. 3 See his face, his hands and feet, his clothing. 4 Watch him smile, and see familiar gestures which he makes so frequently. 5 Then think of this: What you are seeing now conceals from you the sight of one who can forgive you all your sins; whose sacred hands can take away the nails which pierce your own, and lift the crown of thorns which you have placed upon your bleeding head. 6 Ask this of him, that he may set you free:

7 Give me your blessing, holy Son of God. 8 I would behold you with the eyes of Christ, and see my perfect sinlessness in you.

W-161.12. And He will answer Whom you called upon. 2 For He will hear the Voice for God in you, and answer in your own. 3 Behold him now, whom you have seen as merely flesh and bone, and recognize that Christ has come to you. 4 Today\’s idea is your safe escape from anger and from fear. 5 Be sure you use it instantly, should you be tempted to attack a brother and perceive in him the symbol of your fear. 6 And you will see him suddenly transformed from enemy to savior; from the devil into Christ.

LESSON 162

I am as God created me.

W-162.1. This single thought, held firmly in the mind, would save the world. 2 From time to time we will repeat it, as we reach another stage in learning. 3 It will mean far more to you as you advance. 4 These words are sacred, for they are the words God gave in answer to the world you made. 5 By them it disappears, and all things seen within its misty clouds and vaporous illusions vanish as these words are spoken. 6 For they come from God.

W-162.2. Here is the Word by which the Son became his Father\’s happiness, His Love and His completion. 2 Here creation is proclaimed, and honored as it is. 3 There is no dream these words will not dispel; no thought of sin and no illusion which the dream contains that will not fade away before their might. 4 They are the trumpet of awakening that sounds around the world. 5 The dead awake in answer to its call. 6 And those who live and hear this sound will never look on death.

W-162.3. Holy indeed is he who makes these words his own; arising with them in his mind, recalling them throughout the day, at night bringing them with him as he goes to sleep. 2 His dreams are happy and his rest secure, his safety certain and his body healed, because he sleeps and wakens with the truth before him always. 3 He will save the world, because he gives the world what he receives each time he practices the words of truth.

W-162.4. Today we practice simply. 2 For the words we use are mighty, and they need no thoughts beyond themselves to change the mind of him who uses them. 3 So wholly is it changed that it is now the treasury in which God places all His gifts and all His Love, to be distributed to all the world, increased in giving; kept complete because its sharing is unlimited. 4 And thus you learn to think with God. 5 Christ\’s vision has restored your sight by salvaging your mind.

W-162.5. We honor you today. 2 Yours is the right to perfect holiness you now accept. 3 With this acceptance is salvation brought to everyone, for who could cherish sin when holiness like this has blessed the world? 4 Who could despair when perfect joy is yours, available to all as remedy for grief and misery, all sense of loss, and for complete escape from sin and guilt?

W-162.6. And who would not be brother to you now; you, his redeemer and his savior. 2 Who could fail to welcome you into his heart with loving invitation, eager to unite with one like him in holiness? 3 You are as God created you. 4 These words dispel the night, and darkness is no more. 5 The light is come today to bless the world. 6 For you have recognized the Son of God, and in that recognition is the world\’s.

LESSON 163

There is no death. The Son of God is free.

W-163.1. Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. 2 It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. 3 All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release.

W-163.2. Embodiment of fear, the host of sin, god of the guilty and the lord of all illusions and deceptions, does the thought of death seem mighty. 2 For it seems to hold all living things within its withered hand; all hopes and wishes in its blighting grasp; all goals perceived but in its sightless eyes. 3 The frail, the helpless and the sick bow down before its image, thinking it alone is real, inevitable, worthy of their trust. 4 For it alone will surely come.

W-163.3. All things but death are seen to be unsure, too quickly lost however hard to gain, uncertain in their outcome, apt to fail the hopes they once engendered, and to leave the taste of dust and ashes in their wake, in place of aspirations and of dreams. 2 But death is counted on. 3 For it will come with certain footsteps when the time has come for its arrival. 4 It will never fail to take all life as hostage to itself.

W-163.4. Would you bow down to idols such as this? 2 Here is the strength and might of God Himself perceived within an idol made of dust. 3 Here is the opposite of God proclaimed as lord of all creation, stronger than God\’s Will for life, the endlessness of love and Heaven\’s perfect, changeless constancy. 4 Here is the Will of Father and of Son defeated finally, and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the holy Son of God.

W-163.5. Unholy in defeat, he has become what death would have him be. 2 His epitaph, which death itself has written, gives no name to him, for he has passed to dust. 3 It says but this: \”Here lies a witness God is dead.\” 4 And this it writes again and still again, while all the while its worshippers agree, and kneeling down with foreheads to the ground, they whisper fearfully that it is so.

W-163.6. It is impossible to worship death in any form, and still select a few you would not cherish and would yet avoid, while still believing in the rest. 2 For death is total. 3 Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. 4 No compromise is possible. 5 For here again we see an obvious position, which we must accept if we be sane; what contradicts one thought entirely can not be true, unless its opposite is proven false.

W-163.7. The idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it. 2 For it implies that God was once alive and somehow perished; killed, apparently, by those who did not want Him to survive. 3 Their stronger will could triumph over His, and so eternal life gave way to death. 4 And with the Father died the Son as well.

W-163.8. Death\’s worshippers may be afraid. 2 And yet, can thoughts like these be fearful? 3 If they saw that it is only this which they believe, they would be instantly released. 4 And you will show them this today. 5 There is no death, and we renounce it now in every form, for their salvation and our own as well. 6 God made not death. 7 Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. 8 This the stand we take today. 9 And it is given us to look past death, and see the life beyond.

W-163.9. Our Father, bless our eyes today. 2 We are Your messengers, and we would look upon the glorious reflection of Your Love which shines in everything. 3 We live and move in You alone. 4 We are not separate from Your eternal life. 5 There is no death, for death is not Your Will. 6 And we abide where You have placed us, in the life we share with You and with all living things, to be like You and part of You forever. 7 We accept Your Thoughts as ours, and our will is one with Yours eternally. 8 Amen.

LESSON 164

Now are we one with Him Who is our Source.

W-164.1. What time but now can truth be recognized? 2 The present is the only time there is. 3 And so today, this instant, now, we come to look upon what is forever there; not in our sight, but in the eyes of Christ. 4 He looks past time, and sees eternity as represented there. 5 He hears the sounds the senseless, busy world engenders, yet He hears them faintly. 6 For beyond them all He hears the song of Heaven, and the Voice for God more clear, more meaningful, more near.

W-164.2. The world fades easily away before His sight. 2 Its sounds grow dim. 3 A melody from far beyond the world increasingly is more and more distinct; an ancient call to which He gives an ancient answer. 4 You will recognize them both, for they are but your answer to your Father\’s Call to you. 5 Christ answers for you, echoing your Self, using your voice to give His glad consent; accepting your deliverance for you.

W-164.3. How holy is your practicing today, as Christ gives you His sight and hears for you, and answers in your name the Call He hears! 2 How quiet is the time you give to spend with Him, beyond the world. 3 How easily are all your seeming sins forgot, and all your sorrows unremembered. 4 On this day is grief laid by, for sights and sounds that come from nearer than the world are clear to you who will today accept the gifts He gives.

W-164.4. There is a silence into which the world can not intrude. 2 There is an ancient peace you carry in your heart and have not lost. 3 There is a sense of holiness in you the thought of sin has never touched. 4 All this today you will remember. 5 Faithfulness in practicing today will bring rewards so great and so completely different from all things you sought before, that you will know that here your treasure is, and here your rest.

W-164.5. This is the day when vain imaginings part like a curtain, to reveal what lies beyond them. 2 Now is what is really there made visible, while all the shadows which appeared to hide it merely sink away. 3 Now is the balance righted, and the scale of judgment left to Him Who judges true. 4 And in His judgment will a world unfold in perfect innocence before your eyes. 5 Now will you see it with the eyes of Christ. 6 Now is its transformation clear to you.

W-164.6. Brother, this day is sacred to the world. 2 Your vision, given you from far beyond all things within the world, looks back on them in a new light. 3 And what you see becomes the healing and salvation of the world. 4 The valuable and valueless are both perceived and recognized for what they are. 5 And what is worthy of your love receives your love, while nothing to be feared remains.

W-164.7. We will not judge today. 2 We will receive but what is given us from judgment made beyond the world. 3 Our practicing today becomes our gift of thankfulness for our release from blindness and from misery. 4 All that we see will but increase our joy, because its holiness reflects our own. 5 We stand forgiven in the sight of Christ, with all the world forgiven in our own. 6 We bless the world, as we behold it in the light in which our Savior looks on us, and offer it the freedom given us through His forgiving vision, not our own.

W-164.8. Open the curtain in your practicing by merely letting go all things you think you want. 2 Your trifling treasures put away, and leave a clean and open space within your mind where Christ can come, and offer you the treasure of salvation. 3 He has need of your most holy mind to save the world. 4 Is not this purpose worthy to be yours? 5 Is not Christ\’s vision worthy to be sought above the world\’s unsatisfying goals?

W-164.9. Let not today slip by without the gifts it holds for you receiving your consent and your acceptance. 2 We can change the world, if you acknowledge them. 3 You may not see the value your acceptance gives the world. 4 But this you surely want; you can exchange all suffering for joy this very day. 5 Practice in earnest, and the gift is yours. 6 Would God deceive you? 7 Can His promise fail? 8 Can you withhold so little, when His Hand holds out complete salvation to His Son?

LESSON 165

Let not my mind deny the Thought of God.

W-165.1. What makes this world seem real except your own denial of the truth that lies beyond? 2 What but your thoughts of misery and death obscure the perfect happiness and the eternal life your Father wills for you? 3 And what could hide what cannot be concealed except illusion? 4 What could keep from you what you already have except your choice to see it not, denying it is there?

W-165.2. The Thought of God created you. 2 It left you not, nor have you ever been apart from it an instant. 3 It belongs to you. 4 By it you live. 5 It is your Source of life, holding you one with it, and everything is one with you because it left you not. 6 The Thought of God protects you, cares for you, makes soft your resting place and smooth your way, lighting your mind with happiness and love. 7 Eternity and everlasting life shine in your mind, because the Thought of God has left you not, and still abides with you.

W-165.3. Who would deny his safety and his peace, his joy, his healing and his peace of mind, his quiet rest, his calm awakening, if he but recognized where they abide? 2 Would he not instantly prepare to go where they are found, abandoning all else as worthless in comparison with them? 3 And having found them, would he not make sure they stay with him, and he remain with them?

W-165.4. Deny not Heaven. 2 It is yours today, but for the asking. 3 Nor need you perceive how great the gift, how changed your mind will be before it comes to you. 4 Ask to receive, and it is given you. 5 Conviction lies within it. 6 Till you welcome it as yours, uncertainty remains. 7 Yet God is fair. 8 Sureness is not required to receive what only your acceptance can bestow.

W-165.5. Ask with desire. 2 You need not be sure that you request the only thing you want. 3 But when you have received, you will be sure you have the treasure you have always sought. 4 What would you then exchange for it? 5 What would induce you now to let it fade away from your ecstatic vision? 6 For this sight proves that you have exchanged your blindness for the seeing eyes of Christ; your mind has come to lay aside denial, and accept the Thought of God as your inheritance.

W-165.6. Now is all doubting past, the journey\’s end made certain, and salvation given you. 2 Now is Christ\’s power in your mind, to heal as you were healed. 3 For now you are among the saviors of the world. 4 Your destiny lies there and nowhere else. 5 Would God consent to let His Son remain forever starved by his denial of the nourishment he needs to live? 6 Abundance dwells in him, and deprivation cannot cut him off from God\’s sustaining Love and from his home.

W-165.7. Practice today in hope. 2 For hope indeed is justified. 3 Your doubts are meaningless, for God is certain. 4 And the Thought of Him is never absent. 5 Sureness must abide within you who are host to Him. 6 This course removes all doubts which you have interposed between Him and your certainty of Him.

W-165.8. We count on God, and not upon ourselves, to give us certainty. 2 And in His Name we practice as His Word directs we do. 3 His sureness lies beyond our every doubt. 4 His Love remains beyond our every fear. 5 The Thought of Him is still beyond all dreams and in our minds, according to His Will.

LESSON 166

I am entrusted with the gifts of God.

W-166.1. All things are given you. 2 God\’s trust in you is limitless. 3 He knows His Son. 4 He gives without exception, holding nothing back that can contribute to your happiness. 5 And yet, unless your will is one with His, His gifts are not received. 6 But what would make you think there is another will than His?

W-166.2. Here is the paradox that underlies the making of the world. 2 This world is not the Will of God, and so it is not real. 3 Yet those who think it real must still believe there is another will, and one that leads to opposite effects from those He wills. 4 Impossible indeed; but every mind that looks upon the world and judges it as certain, solid, trustworthy and true believes in two creators; or in one, himself alone. 5 But never in one God.

W-166.3. The gifts of God are not acceptable to anyone who holds such strange beliefs. 2 He must believe that to accept God\’s gifts, however evident they may become, however urgently he may be called to claim them as his own, is to be pressed to treachery against himself. 3 He must deny their presence, contradict the truth, and suffer to preserve the world he made.

W-166.4. Here is the only home he thinks he knows. 2 Here is the only safety he believes that he can find. 3 Without the world he made is he an outcast; homeless and afraid. 4 He does not realize that it is here he is afraid indeed, and homeless, too; an outcast wandering so far from home, so long away, he does not realize he has forgotten where he came from, where he goes, and even who he really is.

W-166.5. Yet in his lonely, senseless wanderings, God\’s gifts go with him, all unknown to him. 2 He cannot lose them. 3 But he will not look at what is given him. 4 He wanders on, aware of the futility he sees about him everywhere, perceiving how his little lot but dwindles, as he goes ahead to nowhere. 5 Still he wanders on in misery and poverty, alone though God is with him, and a treasure his so great that everything the world contains is valueless before its magnitude.

W-166.6. He seems a sorry figure; weary, worn, in threadbare clothing, and with feet that bleed a little from the rocky road he walks. 2 No one but has identified with him, for everyone who comes here has pursued the path he follows, and has felt defeat and hopelessness as he is feeling them. 3 Yet is he really tragic, when you see that he is following the way he chose, and need but realize Who walks with him and open up his treasures to be free?

W-166.7. This is your chosen self, the one you made as a replacement for reality. 2 This is the self you savagely defend against all reason, every evidence, and all the witnesses with proof to show this is not you. 3 You heed them not. 4 You go on your appointed way, with eyes cast down lest you might catch a glimpse of truth, and be released from self-deception and set free.

W-166.8. You cower fearfully lest you should feel Christ\’s touch upon your shoulder, and perceive His gentle hand directing you to look upon your gifts. 2 How could you then proclaim your poverty in exile? 3 He would make you laugh at this perception of yourself. 4 Where is self-pity then? 5 And what becomes of all the tragedy you sought to make for him whom God intended only joy?

W-166.9. Your ancient fear has come upon you now, and justice has caught up with you at last. 2 Christ\’s hand has touched your shoulder, and you feel that you are not alone. 3 You even think the miserable self you thought was you may not be your Identity. 4 Perhaps God\’s Word is truer than your own. 5 Perhaps His gifts to you are real. 6 Perhaps He has not wholly been outwitted by your plan to keep His Son in deep oblivion, and go the way you chose without your Self.

W-166.10. God\’s Will does not oppose. 2 It merely is. 3 It is not God you have imprisoned in your plan to lose your Self. 4 He does not know about a plan so alien to His Will. 5 There was a need He did not understand, to which He gave an Answer. 6 That is all. 7 And you who have this Answer given you have need no more of anything but this.

W-166.11. Now do we live, for now we cannot die. 2 The wish for death is answered, and the sight that looked upon it now has been replaced by vision which perceives that you are not what you pretend to be. 3 One walks with you Who gently answers all your fears with this one merciful reply, \”It is not so.\” 4 He points to all the gifts you have each time the thought of poverty oppresses you, and speaks of His Companionship when you perceive yourself as lonely and afraid.

W-166.12. Yet He reminds you still of one thing more you had forgotten. 2 For His touch on you has made you like Himself. 3 The gifts you have are not for you alone. 4 What He has come to offer you, you now must learn to give. 5 This is the lesson that His giving holds, for He has saved you from the solitude you sought to make in which to hide from God. 6 He has reminded you of all the gifts that God has given you. 7 He speaks as well of what becomes your will when you accept these gifts, and recognize they are your own.

W-166.13. The gifts are yours, entrusted to your care, to give to all who chose the lonely road you have escaped. 2 They do not understand they but pursue their wishes. 3 It is you who teach them now. 4 For you have learned of Christ there is another way for them to walk. 5 Teach them by showing them the happiness that comes to those who feel the touch of Christ, and recognize God\’s gifts. 6 Let sorrow not tempt you to be unfaithful to your trust.

W-166.14. Your sighs will now betray the hopes of those who look to you for their release. 2 Your tears are theirs. 3 If you are sick, you but withhold their healing. 4 What you fear but teaches them their fears are justified. 5 Your hand becomes the giver of Christ\’s touch; your change of mind becomes the proof that who accepts God\’s gifts can never suffer anything. 6 You are entrusted with the world\’s release from pain.

W-166.15. Betray it not. 2 Become the living proof of what Christ\’s touch can offer everyone. 3 God has entrusted all His gifts to you. 4 Be witness in your happiness to how transformed the mind becomes which chooses to accept His gifts, and feel the touch of Christ. 5 Such is your mission now. 6 For God entrusts the giving of His gifts to all who have received them. 7 He has shared His joy with you. 8 And now you go to share it with the world.

LESSON 167

There is one life, and that I share with God.

W-167.1. There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. 2 It does not have degrees. 3 It is the one condition in which all that God created share. 4 Like all His Thoughts, it has no opposite. 5 There is no death because what God created shares His life. 6 There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. 7 There is no death because the Father and the Son are One.

W-167.2. In this world, there appears to be a state that is life\’s opposite. 2 You call it death. 3 Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. 4 It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. 5 It is the alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. 6 All sorrow, loss, anxiety and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a slight discomfort or the merest frown, acknowledge death. 7 And thus deny you live.

W-167.3. You think that death is of the body. 2 Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what is seen as physical. 3 A thought is in the mind. 4 It can be then applied as mind directs it. 5 But its origin is where it must be changed, if change occurs. 6 Ideas leave not their source. 7 The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. 8 It is the reason you can heal. 9 It is the cause of healing. 10 It is why you cannot die. 11 Its truth established you as one with God.

W-167.4. Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator. 2 It is the belief conditions change, emotions alternate because of causes you cannot control, you did not make, and you can never change. 3 It is the fixed belief ideas can leave their source, and take on qualities the source does not contain, becoming different from their own origin, apart from it in kind as well as distance, time and form.

W-167.5. Death cannot come from life. 2 Ideas remain united to their source. 3 They can extend all that their source contains. 4 In that, they can go far beyond themselves. 5 But they can not give birth to what was never given them. 6 As they are made, so will their making be. 7 As they were born, so will they then give birth. 8 And where they come from, there will they return.

W-167.6. The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. 2 It cannot change what is its waking state. 3 It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. 4 What is alien to the mind does not exist, because it has no source. 5 For mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state. 6 It cannot make the physical. 7 What seems to die is but the sign of mind asleep.

W-167.7. The opposite of life can only be another form of life. 2 As such, it can be reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite in truth. 3 Its form may change; it may appear to be what it is not. 4 Yet mind is mind, awake or sleeping. 5 It is not its opposite in anything created, nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps.

W-167.8. God creates only mind awake. 2 He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them. 3 The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. 4 Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly, but yet within themselves, for they are everywhere.

W-167.9. What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. 2 When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. 3 It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. 4 When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was.

W-167.10. Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy heritage. 2 Our life is not as we imagine it. 3 Who changes life because he shuts his eyes, or makes himself what he is not because he sleeps, and sees in dreams an opposite to what he is? 4 We will not ask for death in any form today. 5 Nor will we let imagined opposites to life abide even an instant where the Thought of life eternal has been set by God Himself.

W-167.11. His holy home we strive to keep today as He established it, and wills it be forever and forever. 2 He is Lord of what we think today. 3 And in His Thoughts, which have no opposite, we understand there is one life, and that we share with Him, with all creation, with their thoughts as well, whom He created in a unity of life that cannot separate in death and leave the Source of life from where it came.

W-167.12. We share one life because we have one Source, a Source from which perfection comes to us, remaining always in the holy minds which He created perfect. 2 As we were, so are we now and will forever be. 3 A sleeping mind must waken, as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there. 4 And now it is no more a mere reflection. 5 It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes reflection possible. 6 No vision now is needed. 7 For the wakened mind is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness.

LESSON 168

Your grace is given me. I claim it now.

W-168.1. God speaks to us. 2 Shall we not speak to Him? 3 He is not distant. 4 He makes no attempt to hide from us. 5 We try to hide from Him, and suffer from deception. 6 He remains entirely accessible. 7 He loves His Son. 8 There is no certainty but this, yet this suffices. 9 He will love His Son forever. 10 When his mind remains asleep, He loves him still. 11 And when his mind awakes, He loves him with a never-changing Love.

W-168.2. If you but knew the meaning of His Love, hope and despair would be impossible. 2 For hope would be forever satisfied; despair of any kind unthinkable. 3 His grace His answer is to all despair, for in it lies remembrance of His Love. 4 Would He not gladly give the means by which His Will is recognized? 5 His grace is yours by your acknowledgment. 6 And memory of Him awakens in the mind that asks the means of Him whereby its sleep is done.

W-168.3. Today we ask of God the gift He has most carefully preserved within our hearts, waiting to be acknowledged. 2 This the gift by which God leans to us and lifts us up, taking salvation\’s final step Himself. 3 All steps but this we learn, instructed by His Voice. 4 But finally He comes Himself, and takes us in His Arms and sweeps away the cobwebs of our sleep. 5 His gift of grace is more than just an answer. 6 It restores all memories the sleeping mind forgot; all certainty of what Love\’s meaning is.

W-168.4. God loves His Son. 2 Request Him now to give the means by which this world will disappear, and vision first will come, with knowledge but an instant later. 3 For in grace you see a light that covers all the world in love, and watch fear disappear from every face as hearts rise up and claim the light as theirs. 4 What now remains that Heaven be delayed an instant longer? 5 What is still undone when your forgiveness rests on everything?

W-168.5. It is a new and holy day today, for we receive what has been given us. 2 Our faith lies in the Giver, not our own acceptance. 3 We acknowledge our mistakes, but He to Whom all error is unknown is yet the One Who answers our mistakes by giving us the means to lay them down, and rise to Him in gratitude and love.

W-168.6. And He descends to meet us, as we come to Him. 2 For what He has prepared for us He gives and we receive. 3 Such is His Will, because He loves His Son. 4 To Him we pray today, returning but the word He gave to us through His Own Voice, His Word, His Love:

5 Your grace is given me. 6 I claim it now. 7 Father, I come to You. 8 And You will come to me who ask. 9 I am the Son You love.

LESSON 169

By grace I live. By grace I am released.

W-169.1. Grace is an aspect of the Love of God which is most like the state prevailing in the unity of truth. 2 It is the world\’s most lofty aspiration, for it leads beyond the world entirely. 3 It is past learning, yet the goal of learning, for grace cannot come until the mind prepares itself for true acceptance. 4 Grace becomes inevitable instantly in those who have prepared a table where it can be gently laid and willingly received; an altar clean and holy for the gift.

W-169.2. Grace is acceptance of the Love of God within a world of seeming hate and fear. 2 By grace alone the hate and fear are gone, for grace presents a state so opposite to everything the world contains, that those whose minds are lighted by the gift of grace can not believe the world of fear is real.

W-169.3. Grace is not learned. 2 The final step must go beyond all learning. 3 Grace is not the goal this course aspires to attain. 4 Yet we prepare for grace in that an open mind can hear the Call to waken. 5 It is not shut tight against God\’s Voice. 6 It has become aware that there are things it does not know, and thus is ready to accept a state completely different from experience with which it is familiarly at home.

W-169.4. We have perhaps appeared to contradict our statement that the revelation of the Father and the Son as One has been already set. 2 But we have also said the mind determines when that time will be, and has determined it. 3 And yet we urge you to bear witness to the Word of God to hasten the experience of truth, and speed its advent into every mind that recognizes truth\’s effects on you.

W-169.5. Oneness is simply the idea God is. 2 And in His Being, He encompasses all things. 3 No mind holds anything but Him. 4 We say \”God is,\” and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. 5 There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something not itself. 6 It has united with its Source. 7 And like its Source Itself, it merely is.

W-169.6. We cannot speak nor write nor even think of this at all. 2 It comes to every mind when total recognition that its will is God\’s has been completely given and received completely. 3 It returns the mind into the endless present, where the past and future cannot be conceived. 4 It lies beyond salvation; past all thought of time, forgiveness and the holy face of Christ. 5 The Son of God has merely disappeared into his Father, as his Father has in him. 6 The world has never been at all. 7 Eternity remains a constant state.

W-169.7. This is beyond experience we try to hasten. 2 Yet forgiveness, taught and learned, brings with it the experiences which bear witness that the time the mind itself determined to abandon all but this is now at hand. 3 We do not hasten it, in that what you will offer was concealed from Him Who teaches what forgiveness means.

W-169.8. All learning was already in His Mind, accomplished and complete. 2 He recognized all that time holds, and gave it to all minds that each one might determine, from a point where time was ended, when it is released to revelation and eternity. 3 We have repeated several times before that you but make a journey that is done.

W-169.9. For oneness must be here. 2 Whatever time the mind has set for revelation is entirely irrelevant to what must be a constant state, forever as it always was; forever to remain as it is now. 3 We merely take the part assigned long since, and fully recognized as perfectly fulfilled by Him Who wrote salvation\’s script in His Creator\’s Name, and in the Name of His Creator\’s Son.

W-169.10. There is no need to further clarify what no one in the world can understand. 2 When revelation of your oneness comes, it will be known and fully understood. 3 Now we have work to do, for those in time can speak of things beyond, and listen to words which explain what is to come is past already. 4 Yet what meaning can the words convey to those who count the hours still, and rise and work and go to sleep by them?

W-169.11. Suffice it, then, that you have work to do to play your part. 2 The ending must remain obscure to you until your part is done. 3 It does not matter. 4 For your part is still what all the rest depends on. 5 As you take the role assigned to you, salvation comes a little nearer each uncertain heart that does not beat as yet in tune with God.

W-169.12. Forgiveness is the central theme that runs throughout salvation, holding all its parts in meaningful relationships, the course it runs directed and its outcome sure. 2 And now we ask for grace, the final gift salvation can bestow. 3 Experience that grace provides will end in time, for grace foreshadows Heaven, yet does not replace the thought of time but for a little while.

W-169.13. The interval suffices. 2 It is here that miracles are laid; to be returned by you from holy instants you receive, through grace in your experience, to all who see the light that lingers in your face. 3 What is the face of Christ but his who went a moment into timelessness, and brought a clear reflection of the unity he felt an instant back to bless the world? 4 How could you finally attain to it forever, while a part of you remains outside, unknowing, unawakened, and in need of you as witness to the truth?

W-169.14. Be grateful to return, as you were glad to go an instant, and accept the gifts that grace provided you. 2 You carry them back to yourself. 3 And revelation stands not far behind. 4 Its coming is ensured. 5 We ask for grace, and for experience that comes from grace. 6 We welcome the release it offers everyone. 7 We do not ask for the unaskable. 8 We do not look beyond what grace can give. 9 For this we can give in the grace that has been given us.

W-169.15. Our learning goal today does not exceed this prayer. 2 Yet in the world, what could be more than what we ask this day of Him Who gives the grace we ask, as it was given Him?

3 By grace I live. 4 By grace I am released.

5 By grace I give. 6 By grace I will release.

LESSON 170

There is no cruelty in God and none in me.

W-170.1. No one attacks without intent to hurt. 2 This can have no exception. 3 When you think that you attack in self-defense, you mean that to be cruel is protection; you are safe because of cruelty. 4 You mean that you believe to hurt another brings you freedom. 5 And you mean that to attack is to exchange the state in which you are for something better, safer, more secure from dangerous invasion and from fear.

W-170.2. How thoroughly insane is the idea that to defend from fear is to attack! 2 For here is fear begot and fed with blood, to make it grow and swell and rage. 3 And thus is fear protected, not escaped. 4 Today we learn a lesson which can save you more delay and needless misery than you can possibly imagine. 5 It is this:

6 You make what you defend against, and by your own defense against it is it real and inescapable. 7 Lay down your arms, and only then do you perceive it false.

W-170.3. It seems to be the enemy without that you attack. 2 Yet your defense sets up an enemy within; an alien thought at war with you, depriving you of peace, splitting your mind into two camps which seem wholly irreconcilable. 3 For love now has an \”enemy,\” an opposite; and fear, the alien, now needs your defense against the threat of what you really are.

W-170.4. If you consider carefully the means by which your fancied self-defense proceeds on its imagined way, you will perceive the premises on which the idea stands. 2 First, it is obvious ideas must leave their source, for it is you who make attack, and must have first conceived of it. 3 Yet you attack outside yourself, and separate your mind from him who is to be attacked, with perfect faith the split you made is real.

W-170.5. Next, are the attributes of love bestowed upon its \”enemy.\” 2 For fear becomes your safety and protector of your peace, to which you turn for solace and escape from doubts about your strength, and hope of rest in dreamless quiet. 3 And as love is shorn of what belongs to it and it alone, love is endowed with attributes of fear. 4 For love would ask you lay down all defense as merely foolish. 5 And your arms indeed would crumble into dust. 6 For such they are.

W-170.6. With love as enemy, must cruelty become a god. 2 And gods demand that those who worship them obey their dictates, and refuse to question them. 3 Harsh punishment is meted out relentlessly to those who ask if the demands are sensible or even sane. 4 It is their enemies who are unreasonable and insane, while they are always merciful and just.

W-170.7. Today we look upon this cruel god dispassionately. 2 And we note that though his lips are smeared with blood, and fire seems to flame from him, he is but made of stone. 3 He can do nothing. 4 We need not defy his power. 5 He has none. 6 And those who see in him their safety have no guardian, no strength to call upon in danger, and no mighty warrior to fight for them.

W-170.8. This moment can be terrible. 2 But it can also be the time of your release from abject slavery. 3 You make a choice, standing before this idol, seeing him exactly as he is. 4 Will you restore to love what you have sought to wrest from it and lay before this mindless piece of stone? 5 Or will you make another idol to replace it? 6 For the god of cruelty takes many forms. 7 Another can be found.

W-170.9. Yet do not think that fear is the escape from fear. 2 Let us remember what the text has stressed about the obstacles to peace. 3 The final one, the hardest to believe is nothing, and a seeming obstacle with the appearance of a solid block, impenetrable, fearful and beyond surmounting, is the fear of God Himself. 4 Here is the basic premise which enthrones the thought of fear as god. 5 For fear is loved by those who worship it, and love appears to be invested now with cruelty.

W-170.10. Where does the totally insane belief in gods of vengeance come from? 2 Love has not confused its attributes with those of fear. 3 Yet must the worshippers of fear perceive their own confusion in fear\’s \”enemy\”; its cruelty as now a part of love. 4 And what becomes more fearful than the Heart of Love Itself? 5 The blood appears to be upon His Lips; the fire comes from Him. 6 And He is terrible above all else, cruel beyond conception, striking down all who acknowledge Him to be their God.

W-170.11. The choice you make today is certain. 2 For you look for the last time upon this bit of carven stone you made, and call it god no longer. 3 You have reached this place before, but you have chosen that this cruel god remain with you in still another form. 4 And so the fear of God returned with you. 5 This time you leave it there. 6 And you return to a new world, unburdened by its weight; beheld not in its sightless eyes, but in the vision that your choice restored to you.

W-170.12. Now do your eyes belong to Christ, and He looks through them. 2 Now your voice belongs to God and echoes His. 3 And now your heart remains at peace forever. 4 You have chosen Him in place of idols, and your attributes, given by your Creator, are restored to you at last. 5 The Call for God is heard and answered. 6 Now has fear made way for love, as God Himself replaces cruelty.

W-170.13. Father, we are like You. 2 No cruelty abides in us, for there is none in You. 3 Your peace is ours. 4 And we bless the world with what we have received from You alone. 5 We choose again, and make our choice for all our brothers, knowing they are one with us. 6 We bring them Your salvation as we have received it now. 7 And we give thanks for them who render us complete. 8 In them we see Your glory, and in them we find our peace. 9 Holy are we because Your Holiness has set us free. 10 And we give thanks. 11 Amen.

REVIEW V

Introduction to Review V

W-rV.in.1. We now review again. 2 This time we are ready to give more effort and more time to what we undertake. 3 We recognize we are preparing for another phase of understanding. 4 We would take this step completely, that we may go on again more certain, more sincere, with faith upheld more surely. 5 Our footsteps have not been unwavering, and doubts have made us walk uncertainly and slowly on the road this course sets forth. 6 But now we hasten on, for we approach a greater certainty, a firmer purpose and a surer goal.

W-rV.in.2. Steady our feet, our Father. 2 Let our doubts be quiet and our holy minds be still, and speak to us. 3 We have no words to give to You. 4 We would but listen to Your Word, and make it ours. 5 Lead our practicing as does a father lead a little child along a way he does not understand. 6 Yet does he follow, sure that he is safe because his father leads the way for him.

W-rV.in.3. So do we bring our practicing to You. 2 And if we stumble, You will raise us up. 3 If we forget the way, we count upon Your sure remembering. 4 We wander off, but You will not forget to call us back. 5 Quicken our footsteps now, that we may walk more certainly and quickly unto You. 6 And we accept the Word You offer us to unify our practicing, as we review the thoughts that You have given us.

W-rV.in.4. This is the thought which should precede the thoughts that we review. 2 Each one but clarifies some aspect of this thought, or helps it be more meaningful, more personal and true, and more descriptive of the holy Self we share and now prepare to know again:

3 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

4 This Self alone knows Love. 5 This Self alone is perfectly consistent in Its Thoughts; knows Its Creator, understands Itself, is perfect in Its knowledge and Its Love, and never changes from Its constant state of union with Its Father and Itself.

W-rV.in.5. And it is this that waits to meet us at the journey\’s ending. 2 Every step we take brings us a little nearer. 3 This review will shorten time immeasurably, if we keep in mind that this remains our goal, and as we practice it is this to which we are approaching. 4 Let us raise our hearts from dust to life, as we remember this is promised us, and that this course was sent to open up the path of light to us, and teach us, step by step, how to return to the eternal Self we thought we lost.

W-rV.in.6. I take the journey with you. 2 For I share your doubts and fears a little while, that you may come to me who recognize the road by which all fears and doubts are overcome. 3 We walk together. 4 I must understand uncertainty and pain, although I know they have no meaning. 5 Yet a savior must remain with those he teaches, seeing what they see, but still retaining in his mind the way that led him out, and now will lead you out with him. 6 God\’s Son is crucified until you walk along the road with me.

W-rV.in.7. My resurrection comes again each time I lead a brother safely to the place at which the journey ends and is forgot. 2 I am renewed each time a brother learns there is a way from misery and pain. 3 I am reborn each time a brother\’s mind turns to the light in him and looks for me. 4 I have forgotten no one. 5 Help me now to lead you back to where the journey was begun, to make another choice with me.

W-rV.in.8. Release me as you practice once again the thoughts I brought to you from Him Who sees your bitter need, and knows the answer God has given Him. 2 Together we review these thoughts. 3 Together we devote our time and effort to them. 4 And together we will teach them to our brothers. 5 God would not have Heaven incomplete. 6 It waits for you, as I do. 7 I am incomplete without your part in me. 8 And as I am made whole we go together to our ancient home, prepared for us before time was and kept unchanged by time, immaculate and safe, as it will be at last when time is done.

W-rV.in.9. Let this review be then your gift to me. 2 For this alone I need; that you will hear the words I speak, and give them to the world. 3 You are my voice, my eyes, my feet, my hands through which I save the world. 4 The Self from which I call to you is but your own. 5 To Him we go together. 6 Take your brother\’s hand, for this is not a way we walk alone. 7 In him I walk with you, and you with me. 8 Our Father wills His Son be one with Him. 9 What lives but must not then be one with you?

W-rV.in.10. Let this review become a time in which we share a new experience for you, yet one as old as time and older still. 2 Hallowed your Name. 3 Your glory undefiled forever. 4 And your wholeness now complete, as God established it. 5 You are His Son, completing His extension in your own. 6 We practice but an ancient truth we knew before illusion seemed to claim the world. 7 And we remind the world that it is free of all illusions every time we say:

8 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-rV.in.11. With this we start each day of our review. 2 With this we start and end each period of practice time. 3 And with this thought we sleep, to waken once again with these same words upon our lips, to greet another day. 4 No thought that we review but we surround with it, and use the thoughts to hold it up before our minds, and keep it clear in our rememberance throughout the day. 5 And thus, when we have finished this review, we will have recognized the words we speak are true.

W-rV.in.12. Yet are the words but aids, and to be used, except at the beginning and the end of practice periods, but to recall the mind, as needed, to its purpose. 2 We place faith in the experience that comes from practice, not the means we use. 3 We wait for the experience, and recognize that it is only here conviction lies. 4 We use the words, and try and try again to go beyond them to their meaning, which is far beyond their sound. 5 The sound grows dim and disappears, as we approach the Source of meaning. 6 It is Here that we find rest.

LESSON 171

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-171.1. (151) All things are echoes of the Voice for God.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-171.2. (152) The power of decision is my own.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

LESSON 172

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-172.1. (153) In my defenselessness my safety lies.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-172.2. (154) I am among the ministers of God.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

LESSON 173

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-173.1. (155) I will step back and let Him lead the way.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-173.2. (156) I walk with God in perfect holiness.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

LESSON 174

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-174.1. (157) Into His Presence would I enter now.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-174.2. (158) Today I learn to give as I receive.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

LESSON 175

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-175.1. (159) I give the miracles I have received.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-175.2. (160) I am at home. 2 Fear is the stranger here.

3 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

LESSON 176

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-176.1. (161) Give me your blessing, holy Son of God.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-176.2. (162) I am as God created me.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

LESSON 177

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-177.1. (163) There is no death. 2 The Son of God is free.

3 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-177.2. (164) Now are we one with Him Who is our Source.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

LESSON 178

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-178.1. (165) Let not my mind deny the Thought of God.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-178.2. (166) I am entrusted with the gifts of God.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

LESSON 179

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-179.1. (167) There is one life, and that I share with God.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-179.2. (168) Your grace is given me. 2 I claim it now.

3 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

LESSON 180

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-180.1. (169) By grace I live. 2 By grace I am released.

3 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

W-180.2. (170) There is no cruelty in God and none in me.

2 God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

Introduction to Lessons 181-200

WpI.in.181-200.1. Our next few lessons make a special point of firming up your willingness to make your weak commitment strong; your scattered goals blend into one intent. 2 You are not asked for total dedication all the time as yet. 3 But you are asked to practice now in order to attain the sense of peace such unified commitment will bestow, if only intermittently. 4 It is experiencing this that makes it sure that you will give your total willingness to following the way the course sets forth.

WpI.in.181-200.2. Our lessons now are geared specifically to widening horizons, and direct approaches to the special blocks that keep your vision narrow, and too limited to let you see the value of our goal. 2 We are attempting now to lift these blocks, however briefly. 3 Words alone can not convey the sense of liberation which their lifting brings. 4 But the experience of freedom and of peace that comes as you give up your tight control of what you see speaks for itself. 5 Your motivation will be so intensified that words become of little consequence. 6 You will be sure of what you want, and what is valueless.

WpI.in.181-200.3. And so we start our journey beyond words by concentrating first on what impedes your progress still. 2 Experience of what exists beyond defensiveness remains beyond achievement while it is denied. 3 It may be there, but you cannot accept its presence. 4 So we now attempt to go past all defenses for a little while each day. 5 No more than this is asked, because no more than this is needed. 6 It will be enough to guarantee the rest will come.

LESSON 181

I trust my brothers, who are one with me.

W-181.1. Trusting your brothers is essential to establishing and holding up your faith in your ability to transcend doubt and lack of sure conviction in yourself. 2 When you attack a brother, you proclaim that he is limited by what you have perceived in him. 3 You do not look beyond his errors. 4 Rather, they are magnified, becoming blocks to your awareness of the Self that lies beyond your own mistakes, and past his seeming sins as well as yours.

W-181.2. Perception has a focus. 2 It is this that gives consistency to what you see. 3 Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly. 4 Your vision now will shift, to give support to the intent which has replaced the one you held before. 5 Remove your focus on your brother\’s sins, and you experience the peace that comes from faith in sinlessness. 6 This faith receives its only sure support from what you see in others past their sins. 7 For their mistakes, if focused on, are witnesses to sins in you. 8 And you will not transcend their sight and see the sinlessness that lies beyond.

W-181.3. Therefore, in practicing today, we first let all such little focuses give way to our great need to let our sinlessness become apparent. 2 We instruct our minds that it is this we seek, and only this, for just a little while. 3 We do not care about our future goals. 4 And what we saw an instant previous has no concern for us within this interval of time wherein we practice changing our intent. 5 We seek for innocence and nothing else. 6 We seek for it with no concern but now.

W-181.4. A major hazard to success has been involvement with your past and future goals. 2 You have been quite preoccupied with how extremely different the goals this course is advocating are from those you held before. 3 And you have also been dismayed by the depressing and restricting thought that, even if you should succeed, you will inevitably lose your way again.

W-181.5. How could this matter? 2 For the past is gone; the future but imagined. 3 These concerns are but defenses against present change of focus in perception. 4 Nothing more. 5 We lay these pointless limitations by a little while. 6 We do not look to past beliefs, and what we will believe will not intrude upon us now. 7 We enter in the time of practicing with one intent; to look upon the sinlessness within.

W-181.6. We recognize that we have lost this goal if anger blocks our way in any form. 2 And if a brother\’s sins occur to us, our narrowed focus will restrict our sight, and turn our eyes upon our own mistakes, which we will magnify and call our \”sins.\” 3 So, for a little while, without regard to past or future, should such blocks arise we will transcend them with instructions to our minds to change their focus, as we say:

4 It is not this that I would look upon.

5 I trust my brothers, who are one with me.

W-181.7. And we will also use this thought to keep us safe throughout the day. 2 We do not seek for long-range goals. 3 As each obstruction seems to block the vision of our sinlessness, we seek but for surcease an instant from the misery the focus upon sin will bring, and uncorrected will remain.

W-181.8. Nor do we ask for fantasies. 2 For what we seek to look upon is really there. 3 And as our focus goes beyond mistakes, we will behold a wholly sinless world. 4 When seeing this is all we want to see, when this is all we seek for in the name of true perception, are the eyes of Christ inevitably ours. 5 And the Love He feels for us becomes our own as well. 6 This will become the only thing we see reflected in the world and in ourselves.

W-181.9. The world which once proclaimed our sins becomes the proof that we are sinless. 2 And our love for everyone we look upon attests to our remembrance of the holy Self which knows no sin, and never could conceive of anything without Its sinlessness. 3 We seek for this remembrance as we turn our minds to practicing today. 4 We look neither ahead nor backwards. 5 We look straight into the present. 6 And we give our trust to the experience we ask for now. 7 Our sinlessness is but the Will of God. 8 This instant is our willing one with His.

LESSON 182

I will be still an instant and go home.

W-182.1. This world you seem to live in is not home to you. 2 And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. 3 A memory of home keeps haunting you, as if there were a place that called you to return, although you do not recognize the voice, nor what it is the voice reminds you of. 4 Yet still you feel an alien here, from somewhere all unknown. 5 Nothing so definite that you could say with certainty you are an exile here. 6 Just a persistent feeling, sometimes not more than a tiny throb, at other times hardly remembered, actively dismissed, but surely to return to mind again.

W-182.2. No one but knows whereof we speak. 2 Yet some try to put by their suffering in games they play to occupy their time, and keep their sadness from them. 3 Others will deny that they are sad, and do not recognize their tears at all. 4 Still others will maintain that what we speak of is illusion, not to be considered more than but a dream. 5 Yet who, in simple honesty, without defensiveness and self-deception, would deny he understands the words we speak?

W-182.3. We speak today for everyone who walks this world, for he is not at home. 2 He goes uncertainly about in endless search, seeking in darkness what he cannot find; not recognizing what it is he seeks. 3 A thousand homes he makes, yet none contents his restless mind. 4 He does not understand he builds in vain. 5 The home he seeks can not be made by him. 6 There is no substitute for Heaven. 7 All he ever made was hell.

W-182.4. Perhaps you think it is your childhood home that you would find again. 2 The childhood of your body, and its place of shelter, are a memory now so distorted that you merely hold a picture of a past that never happened. 3 Yet there is a Child in you Who seeks His Father\’s house, and knows that He is alien here. 4 This childhood is eternal, with an innocence that will endure forever. 5 Where this Child shall go is holy ground. 6 It is His Holiness that lights up Heaven, and that brings to earth the pure reflection of the light above, wherein are earth and Heaven joined as one.

W-182.5. It is this Child in you your Father knows as His Own Son. 2 It is this Child Who knows His Father. 3 He desires to go home so deeply, so unceasingly, His voice cries unto you to let Him rest a while. 4 He does not ask for more than just a few instants of respite; just an interval in which He can return to breathe again the holy air that fills His Father\’s house. 5 You are His home as well. 6 He will return. 7 But give Him just a little time to be Himself, within the peace that is His home, resting in silence and in peace and love.

W-182.6. This Child needs your protection. 2 He is far from home. 3 He is so little that He seems so easily shut out, His tiny voice so readily obscured, His call for help almost unheard amid the grating sounds and harsh and rasping noises of the world. 4 Yet does He know that in you still abides His sure protection. 5 You will fail Him not. 6 He will go home, and you along with Him.

W-182.7. This Child is your defenselessness; your strength. 2 He trusts in you. 3 He came because He knew you would not fail. 4 He whispers of His home unceasingly to you. 5 For He would bring you back with Him, that He Himself might stay, and not return again where He does not belong, and where He lives an outcast in a world of alien thoughts. 6 His patience has no limits. 7 He will wait until you hear His gentle Voice within you, calling you to let Him go in peace, along with you, to where He is at home and you with Him.

W-182.8. When you are still an instant, when the world recedes from you, when valueless ideas cease to have value in your restless mind, then will you hear His Voice. 2 So poignantly He calls to you that you will not resist Him longer. 3 In that instant He will take you to His home, and you will stay with Him in perfect stillness, silent and at peace, beyond all words, untouched by fear and doubt, sublimely certain that you are at home.

W-182.9. Rest with Him frequently today. 2 For He was willing to become a little Child that you might learn of Him how strong is he who comes without defenses, offering only love\’s messages to those who think he is their enemy. 3 He holds the might of Heaven in His hand and calls them friend, and gives His strength to them, that they may see He would be Friend to them. 4 He asks that they protect Him, for His home is far away, and He will not return to it alone.

W-182.10. Christ is reborn as but a little Child each time a wanderer would leave his home. 2 For he must learn that what he would protect is but this Child, Who comes defenseless and Who is protected by defenselessness. 3 Go home with Him from time to time today. 4 You are as much an alien here as He.

W-182.11. Take time today to lay aside your shield which profits nothing, and lay down the spear and sword you raised against an enemy without existence. 2 Christ has called you friend and brother. 3 He has even come to ask your help in letting Him go home today, completed and completely. 4 He has come as does a little child, who must beseech his father for protection and for love. 5 He rules the universe, and yet He asks unceasingly that you return with Him, and take illusions as your gods no more.

W-182.12. You have not lost your innocence. 2 It is for this you yearn. 3 This is your heart\’s desire. 4 This is the voice you hear, and this the call which cannot be denied. 5 The holy Child remains with you. 6 His home is yours. 7 Today He gives you His defenselessness, and you accept it in exchange for all the toys of battle you have made. 8 And now the way is open, and the journey has an end in sight at last. 9 Be still an instant and go home with Him, and be at peace a while.

LESSON 183

I call upon God\’s Name and on my own.

W-183.1. God\’s Name is holy, but no holier than yours. 2 To call upon His Name is but to call upon your own. 3 A father gives his son his name, and thus identifies the son with him. 4 His brothers share his name, and thus are they united in a bond to which they turn for their identity. 5 Your Father\’s Name reminds you who you are, even within a world that does not know; even though you have not remembered it.

W-183.2. God\’s Name can not be heard without response, nor said without an echo in the mind that calls you to remember. 2 Say His Name, and you invite the angels to surround the ground on which you stand, and sing to you as they spread out their wings to keep you safe, and shelter you from every worldly thought that would intrude upon your holiness.

W-183.3. Repeat God\’s Name, and all the world responds by laying down illusions. 2 Every dream the world holds dear has suddenly gone by, and where it seemed to stand you find a star; a miracle of grace. 3 The sick arise, healed of their sickly thoughts. 4 The blind can see; the deaf can hear. 5 The sorrowful cast off their mourning, and the tears of pain are dried as happy laughter comes to bless the world.

W-183.4. Repeat the Name of God, and little names have lost their meaning. 2 No temptation but becomes a nameless and unwanted thing before God\’s Name. 3 Repeat His Name, and see how easily you will forget the names of all the gods you valued. 4 They have lost the name of god you gave them. 5 They become anonymous and valueless to you, although before you let the Name of God replace their little names, you stood before them worshipfully, naming them as gods.

W-183.5. Repeat the Name of God, and call upon your Self, Whose Name is His. 2 Repeat His Name, and all the tiny, nameless things on earth slip into right perspective. 3 Those who call upon the Name of God can not mistake the nameless for the Name, nor sin for grace, nor bodies for the holy Son of God. 4 And should you join a brother as you sit with him in silence, and repeat God\’s Name along with him within your quiet mind, you have established there an altar which reaches to God Himself and to His Son.

W-183.6. Practice but this today; repeat God\’s Name slowly again and still again. 2 Become oblivious to every name but His. 3 Hear nothing else. 4 Let all your thoughts become anchored on this. 5 No other word we use except at the beginning, when we say today\’s idea but once. 6 And then God\’s Name becomes our only thought, our only word, the only thing that occupies our minds, the only wish we have, the only sound with any meaning, and the only Name of everything that we desire to see; of everything that we would call our own.

W-183.7. Thus do we give an invitation which can never be refused. 2 And God will come, and answer it Himself. 3 Think not He hears the little prayers of those who call on Him with names of idols cherished by the world. 4 They cannot reach Him thus. 5 He cannot hear requests that He be not Himself, or that His Son receive another name than His.

W-183.8. Repeat God\’s Name, and you acknowledge Him as sole Creator of reality. 2 And you acknowledge also that His Son is part of Him, creating in His Name. 3 Sit silently, and let His Name become the all-encompassing idea that holds your mind completely. 4 Let all thoughts be still except this one. 5 And to all other thoughts respond with this, and see God\’s Name replace the thousand little names you gave your thoughts, not realizing that there is one Name for all there is, and all that there will be.

W-183.9. Today you can achieve a state in which you will experience the gift of grace. 2 You can escape all bondage of the world, and give the world the same release you found. 3 You can remember what the world forgot, and offer it your own remembering. 4 You can accept today the part you play in its salvation, and your own as well. 5 And both can be accomplished perfectly.

W-183.10. Turn to the Name of God for your release, and it is given you. 2 No prayer but this is necessary, for it holds them all within it. 3 Words are insignificant, and all requests unneeded when God\’s Son calls on his Father\’s Name. 4 His Father\’s Thoughts become his own. 5 He makes his claim to all his Father gave, is giving still, and will forever give. 6 He calls on Him to let all things he thought he made be nameless now, and in their place the holy Name of God becomes his judgment of their worthlessness.

W-183.11. All little things are silent. 2 Little sounds are soundless now. 3 The little things of earth have disappeared. 4 The universe consists of nothing but the Son of God, who calls upon his Father. 5 And his Father\’s Voice gives answer in his Father\’s holy Name. 6 In this eternal, still relationship, in which communication far transcends all words, and yet exceeds in depth and height whatever words could possibly convey, is peace eternal. 7 In our Father\’s Name, we would experience this peace today. 8 And in His Name, it shall be given us.

LESSON 184

The Name of God is my inheritance.

W-184.1. You live by symbols. 2 You have made up names for everything you see. 3 Each one becomes a separate entity, identified by its own name. 4 By this you carve it out of unity. 5 By this you designate its special attributes, and set it off from other things by emphasizing space surrounding it. 6 This space you lay between all things to which you give a different name; all happenings in terms of place and time; all bodies which are greeted by a name.

W-184.2. This space you see as setting off all things from one another is the means by which the world\’s perception is achieved. 2 You see something where nothing is, and see as well nothing where there is unity; a space between all things, between all things and you. 3 Thus do you think that you have given life in separation. 4 By this split you think you are established as a unity which functions with an independent will.

W-184.3. What are these names by which the world becomes a series of discrete events, of things ununified, of bodies kept apart and holding bits of mind as separate awarenesses? 2 You gave these names to them, establishing perception as you wished to have perception be. 3 The nameless things were given names, and thus reality was given them as well. 4 For what is named is given meaning and will then be seen as meaningful; a cause of true effect, with consequence inherent in itself.

W-184.4. This is the way reality is made by partial vision, purposefully set against the given truth. 2 Its enemy is wholeness. 3 It conceives of little things and looks upon them. 4 And a lack of space, a sense of unity or vision that sees differently, become the threats which it must overcome, conflict with and deny.

W-184.5. Yet does this other vision still remain a natural direction for the mind to channel its perception. 2 It is hard to teach the mind a thousand alien names, and thousands more. 3 Yet you believe this is what learning means; its one essential goal by which communication is achieved, and concepts can be meaningfully shared.

W-184.6. This is the sum of the inheritance the world bestows. 2 And everyone who learns to think that it is so accepts the signs and symbols that assert the world is real. 3 It is for this they stand. 4 They leave no doubt that what is named is there. 5 It can be seen, as is anticipated. 6 What denies that it is true is but illusion, for it is the ultimate reality. 7 To question it is madness; to accept its presence is the proof of sanity.

W-184.7. Such is the teaching of the world. 2 It is a phase of learning everyone who comes must go through. 3 But the sooner he perceives on what it rests, how questionable are its premises, how doubtful its results, the sooner does he question its effects. 4 Learning that stops with what the world would teach stops short of meaning. 5 In its proper place, it serves but as a starting point from which another kind of learning can begin, a new perception can be gained, and all the arbitrary names the world bestows can be withdrawn as they are raised to doubt.

W-184.8. Think not you made the world. 2 Illusions, yes! 3 But what is true in earth and Heaven is beyond your naming. 4 When you call upon a brother, it is to his body that you make appeal. 5 His true Identity is hidden from you by what you believe he really is. 6 His body makes response to what you call him, for his mind consents to take the name you give him as his own. 7 And thus his unity is twice denied, for you perceive him separate from you, and he accepts this separate name as his.

W-184.9. It would indeed be strange if you were asked to go beyond all symbols of the world, forgetting them forever; yet were asked to take a teaching function. 2 You have need to use the symbols of the world a while. 3 But be you not deceived by them as well. 4 They do not stand for anything at all, and in your practicing it is this thought that will release you from them. 5 They become but means by which you can communicate in ways the world can understand, but which you recognize is not the unity where true communication can be found.

W-184.10. Thus what you need are intervals each day in which the learning of the world becomes a transitory phase; a prison house from which you go into the sunlight and forget the darkness. 2 Here you understand the Word, the Name which God has given you; the one Identity which all things share; the one acknowledgment of what is true. 3 And then step back to darkness, not because you think it real, but only to proclaim its unreality in terms which still have meaning in the world that darkness rules.

W-184.11. Use all the little names and symbols which delineate the world of darkness. 2 Yet accept them not as your reality. 3 The Holy Spirit uses all of them, but He does not forget creation has one Name, one meaning, and a single Source which unifies all things within Itself. 4 Use all the names the world bestows on them but for convenience, yet do not forget they share the Name of God along with you.

W-184.12. God has no name. 2 And yet His Name becomes the final lesson that all things are one, and at this lesson does all learning end. 3 All names are unified; all space is filled with truth\’s reflection. 4 Every gap is closed, and separation healed. 5 The Name of God is the inheritance He gave to those who chose the teaching of the world to take the place of Heaven. 6 In our practicing, our purpose is to let our minds accept what God has given as the answer to the pitiful inheritance you made as fitting tribute to the Son He loves.

W-184.13. No one can fail who seeks the meaning of the Name of God. 2 Experience must come to supplement the Word. 3 But first you must accept the Name for all reality, and realize the many names you gave its aspects have distorted what you see, but have not interfered with truth at all. 4 One Name we bring into our practicing. 5 One Name we use to unify our sight.

W-184.14. And though we use a different name for each awareness of an aspect of God\’s Son, we understand that they have but one Name, which He has given them. 2 It is this Name we use in practicing. 3 And through Its use, all foolish separations disappear which kept us blind. 4 And we are given strength to see beyond them. 5 Now our sight is blessed with blessings we can give as we receive.

W-184.15. Father, our Name is Yours. 2 In It we are united with all living things, and You Who are their one Creator. 3 What we made and call by many different names is but a shadow we have tried to cast across Your Own reality. 4 And we are glad and thankful we were wrong. 5 All our mistakes we give to You, that we may be absolved from all effects our errors seemed to have. 6 And we accept the truth You give, in place of every one of them. 7 Your Name is our salvation and escape from what we made. 8 Your Name unites us in the oneness which is our inheritance and peace. 9 Amen.

LESSON 185

I want the peace of God.

W-185.1. To say these words is nothing. 2 But to mean these words is everything. 3 If you could but mean them for just an instant, there would be no further sorrow possible for you in any form; in any place or time. 4 Heaven would be completely given back to full awareness, memory of God entirely restored, the resurrection of all creation fully recognized.

W-185.2. No one can mean these words and not be healed. 2 He cannot play with dreams, nor think he is himself a dream. 3 He cannot make a hell and think it real. 4 He wants the peace of God, and it is given him. 5 For that is all he wants, and that is all he will receive. 6 Many have said these words. 7 But few indeed have meant them. 8 You have but to look upon the world you see around you to be sure how very few they are. 9 The world would be completely changed, should any two agree these words express the only thing they want.

W-185.3. Two minds with one intent become so strong that what they will becomes the Will of God. 2 For minds can only join in truth. 3 In dreams, no two can share the same intent. 4 To each, the hero of the dream is different; the outcome wanted not the same for both. 5 Loser and gainer merely shift about in changing patterns, as the ratio of gain to loss and loss to gain takes on a different aspect or another form.

W-185.4. Yet compromise alone a dream can bring. 2 Sometimes it takes the form of union, but only the form. 3 The meaning must escape the dream, for compromising is the goal of dreaming. 4 Minds cannot unite in dreams. 5 They merely bargain. 6 And what bargain can give them the peace of God? 7 Illusions come to take His place. 8 And what He means is lost to sleeping minds intent on compromise, each to his gain and to another\’s loss.

W-185.5. To mean you want the peace of God is to renounce all dreams. 2 For no one means these words who wants illusions, and who therefore seeks the means which bring illusions. 3 He has looked on them, and found them wanting. 4 Now he seeks to go beyond them, recognizing that another dream would offer nothing more than all the others. 5 Dreams are one to him. 6 And he has learned their only difference is one of form, for one will bring the same despair and misery as do the rest.

W-185.6. The mind which means that all it wants is peace must join with other minds, for that is how peace is obtained. 2 And when the wish for peace is genuine, the means for finding it is given, in a form each mind that seeks for it in honesty can understand. 3 Whatever form the lesson takes is planned for him in such a way that he can not mistake it, if his asking is sincere. 4 But if he asks without sincerity, there is no form in which the lesson will meet with acceptance and be truly learned.

W-185.7. Let us today devote our practicing to recognizing that we really mean the words we say. 2 We want the peace of God. 3 This is no idle wish. 4 These words do not request another dream be given us. 5 They do not ask for compromise, nor try to make another bargain in the hope that there may yet be one that can succeed where all the rest have failed. 6 To mean these words acknowledges illusions are in vain, requesting the eternal in the place of shifting dreams which seem to change in what they offer, but are one in nothingness.

W-185.8. Today devote your practice periods to careful searching of your mind, to find the dreams you cherish still. 2 What do you ask for in your heart? 3 Forget the words you use in making your requests. 4 Consider but what you believe will comfort you, and bring you happiness. 5 But be you not dismayed by lingering illusions, for their form is not what matters now. 6 Let not some dreams be more acceptable, reserving shame and secrecy for others. 7 They are one. 8 And being one, one question should be asked of all of them, \”Is this what I would have, in place of Heaven and the peace of God?\”

W-185.9. This is the choice you make. 2 Be not deceived that it is otherwise. 3 No compromise is possible in this. 4 You choose God\’s peace, or you have asked for dreams. 5 And dreams will come as you requested them. 6 Yet will God\’s peace come just as certainly, and to remain with you forever. 7 It will not be gone with every twist and turning of the road, to reappear, unrecognized, in forms which shift and change with every step you take.

W-185.10. You want the peace of God. 2 And so do all who seem to seek for dreams. 3 For them as well as for yourself, you ask but this when you make this request with deep sincerity. 4 For thus you reach to what they really want, and join your own intent with what they seek above all things, perhaps unknown to them, but sure to you. 5 You have been weak at times, uncertain in your purpose, and unsure of what you wanted, where to look for it, and where to turn for help in the attempt. 6 Help has been given you. 7 And would you not avail yourself of it by sharing it?

W-185.11. No one who truly seeks the peace of God can fail to find it. 2 For he merely asks that he deceive himself no longer by denying to himself what is God\’s Will. 3 Who can remain unsatisfied who asks for what he has already? 4 Who could be unanswered who requests an answer which is his to give? 5 The peace of God is yours.

W-185.12. For you was peace created, given you by its Creator, and established as His Own eternal gift. 2 How can you fail, when you but ask for what He wills for you? 3 And how could your request be limited to you alone? 4 No gift of God can be unshared. 5 It is this attribute that sets the gifts of God apart from every dream that ever seemed to take the place of truth.

W-185.13. No one can lose and everyone must gain whenever any gift of God has been requested and received by anyone. 2 God gives but to unite. 3 To take away is meaningless to Him. 4 And when it is as meaningless to you, you can be sure you share one Will with Him, and He with you. 5 And you will also know you share one Will with all your brothers, whose intent is yours.

W-185.14. It is this one intent we seek today, uniting our desires with the need of every heart, the call of every mind, the hope that lies beyond despair, the love attack would hide, the brotherhood that hate has sought to sever, but which still remains as God created it. 2 With Help like this beside us, can we fail today as we request the peace of God be given us?

LESSON 186

Salvation of the world depends on me.

W-186.1. Here is the statement that will one day take all arrogance away from every mind. 2 Here is the thought of true humility, which holds no function as your own but that which has been given you. 3 It offers your acceptance of a part assigned to you, without insisting on another role. 4 It does not judge your proper role. 5 It but acknowledges the Will of God is done on earth as well as Heaven. 6 It unites all wills on earth in Heaven\’s plan to save the world, restoring it to Heaven\’s peace.

W-186.2. Let us not fight our function. 2 We did not establish it. 3 It is not our idea. 4 The means are given us by which it will be perfectly accomplished. 5 All that we are asked to do is to accept our part in genuine humility, and not deny with self-deceiving arrogance that we are worthy. 6 What is given us to do, we have the strength to do. 7 Our minds are suited perfectly to take the part assigned to us by One Who knows us well.

W-186.3. Today\’s idea may seem quite sobering, until you see its meaning. 2 All it says is that your Father still remembers you, and offers you the perfect trust He holds in you who are His Son. 3 It does not ask that you be different in any way from what you are. 4 What could humility request but this? 5 And what could arrogance deny but this? 6 Today we will not shrink from our assignment on the specious grounds that modesty is outraged. 7 It is pride that would deny the Call for God Himself.

W-186.4. All false humility we lay aside today, that we may listen to God\’s Voice reveal to us what He would have us do. 2 We do not doubt our adequacy for the function He will offer us. 3 We will be certain only that He knows our strengths, our wisdom and our holiness. 4 And if He deems us worthy, so we are. 5 It is but arrogance that judges otherwise.

W-186.5. There is one way, and only one, to be released from the imprisonment your plan to prove the false is true has brought to you. 2 Accept the plan you did not make instead. 3 Judge not your value to it. 4 If God\’s Voice assures you that salvation needs your part, and that the whole depends on you, be sure that it is so. 5 The arrogant must cling to words, afraid to go beyond them to experience which might affront their stance. 6 Yet are the humble free to hear the Voice which tells them what they are, and what to do.

W-186.6. Arrogance makes an image of yourself that is not real. 2 It is this image which quails and retreats in terror, as the Voice for God assures you that you have the strength, the wisdom and the holiness to go beyond all images. 3 You are not weak, as is the image of yourself. 4 You are not ignorant and helpless. 5 Sin can not tarnish the truth in you, and misery can come not near the holy home of God.

W-186.7. All this the Voice for God relates to you. 2 And as He speaks, the image trembles and seeks to attack the threat it does not know, sensing its basis crumble. 3 Let it go. 4 Salvation of the world depends on you, and not upon this little pile of dust. 5 What can it tell the holy Son of God? 6 Why need he be concerned with it at all?

W-186.8. And so we find our peace. 2 We will accept the function God has given us, for all illusions rest upon the weird belief that we can make another for ourselves. 3 Our self-made roles are shifting, and they seem to change from mourner to ecstatic bliss of love and loving. 4 We can laugh or weep, and greet the day with welcome or with tears. 5 Our very being seems to change as we experience a thousand shifts in mood, and our emotions raise us high indeed, or dash us to the ground in hopelessness.

W-186.9. Is this the Son of God? 2 Could He create such instability and call it Son? 3 He Who is changeless shares His attributes with His creation. 4 All the images His Son appears to make have no effect on what he is. 5 They blow across his mind like wind-swept leaves that form a patterning an instant, break apart to group again, and scamper off. 6 Or like mirages seen above a desert, rising from the dust.

W-186.10. These unsubstantial images will go, and leave your mind unclouded and serene, when you accept the function given you. 2 The images you make give rise to but conflicting goals, impermanent and vague, uncertain and ambiguous. 3 Who could be constant in his efforts, or direct his energies and concentrated drive toward goals like these? 4 The functions which the world esteems are so uncertain that they change ten times an hour at their most secure. 5 What hope of gain can rest on goals like this?

W-186.11. In lovely contrast, certain as the sun\’s return each morning to dispel the night, your truly given function stands out clear and wholly unambiguous. 2 There is no doubt of its validity. 3 It comes from One Who knows no error, and His Voice is certain of Its messages. 4 They will not change, nor be in conflict. 5 All of them point to one goal, and one you can attain. 6 Your plan may be impossible, but God\’s can never fail because He is its Source.

W-186.12. Do as God\’s Voice directs. 2 And if It asks a thing of you which seems impossible, remember Who it is that asks, and who would make denial. 3 Then consider this; which is more likely to be right? 4 The Voice that speaks for the Creator of all things, Who knows all things exactly as they are, or a distorted image of yourself, confused, bewildered, inconsistent and unsure of everything? 5 Let not its voice direct you. 6 Hear instead a certain Voice, which tells you of a function given you by your Creator Who remembers you, and urges that you now remember Him.

W-186.13. His gentle Voice is calling from the known to the unknowing. 2 He would comfort you, although He knows no sorrow. 3 He would make a restitution, though He is complete; a gift to you, although He knows that you have everything already. 4 He has Thoughts which answer every need His Son perceives, although He sees them not. 5 For Love must give, and what is given in His Name takes on the form most useful in a world of form.

W-186.14. These are the forms which never can deceive, because they come from Formlessness Itself. 2 Forgiveness is an earthly form of love, which as it is in Heaven has no form. 3 Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. 4 In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still. 5 Salvation of the world depends on you who can forgive. 6 Such is your function here.

LESSON 187

I bless the world because I bless myself.

W-187.1. No one can give unless he has. 2 In fact, giving is proof of having. 3 We have made this point before. 4 What seems to make it hard to credit is not this. 5 No one can doubt that you must first possess what you would give. 6 It is the second phase on which the world and true perception differ. 7 Having had and given, then the world asserts that you have lost what you possessed. 8 The truth maintains that giving will increase what you possess.

W-187.2. How is this possible? 2 For it is sure that if you give a finite thing away, your body\’s eyes will not perceive it yours. 3 Yet we have learned that things but represent the thoughts that make them. 4 And you do not lack for proof that when you give ideas away, you strengthen them in your own mind. 5 Perhaps the form in which the thought seems to appear is changed in giving. 6 Yet it must return to him who gives. 7 Nor can the form it takes be less acceptable. 8 It must be more.

W-187.3. Ideas must first belong to you, before you give them. 2 If you are to save the world, you first accept salvation for yourself. 3 But you will not believe that this is done until you see the miracles it brings to everyone you look upon. 4 Herein is the idea of giving clarified and given meaning. 5 Now you can perceive that by your giving is your store increased.

W-187.4. Protect all things you value by the act of giving them away, and you are sure that you will never lose them. 2 What you thought you did not have is thereby proven yours. 3 Yet value not its form. 4 For this will change and grow unrecognizable in time, however much you try to keep it safe. 5 No form endures. 6 It is the thought behind the form of things that lives unchangeable.

W-187.5. Give gladly. 2 You can only gain thereby. 3 The thought remains, and grows in strength as it is reinforced by giving. 4 Thoughts extend as they are shared, for they can not be lost. 5 There is no giver and receiver in the sense the world conceives of them. 6 There is a giver who retains; another who will give as well. 7 And both must gain in this exchange, for each will have the thought in form most helpful to him. 8 What he seems to lose is always something he will value less than what will surely be returned to him.

W-187.6. Never forget you give but to yourself. 2 Who understands what giving means must laugh at the idea of sacrifice. 3 Nor can he fail to recognize the many forms which sacrifice may take. 4 He laughs as well at pain and loss, at sickness and at grief, at poverty, starvation and at death. 5 He recognizes sacrifice remains the one idea that stands behind them all, and in his gentle laughter are they healed.

W-187.7. Illusion recognized must disappear. 2 Accept not suffering, and you remove the thought of suffering. 3 Your blessing lies on everyone who suffers, when you choose to see all suffering as what it is. 4 The thought of sacrifice gives rise to all the forms that suffering appears to take. 5 And sacrifice is an idea so mad that sanity dismisses it at once.

W-187.8. Never believe that you can sacrifice. 2 There is no place for sacrifice in what has any value. 3 If the thought occurs, its very presence proves that error has arisen and correction must be made. 4 Your blessing will correct it. 5 Given first to you, it now is yours to give as well. 6 No form of sacrifice and suffering can long endure before the face of one who has forgiven and has blessed himself.

W-187.9. The lilies that your brother offers you are laid upon your altar, with the ones you offer him beside them. 2 Who could fear to look upon such lovely holiness? 3 The great illusion of the fear of God diminishes to nothingness before the purity that you will look on here. 4 Be not afraid to look. 5 The blessedness you will behold will take away all thought of form, and leave instead the perfect gift forever there, forever to increase, forever yours, forever given away.

W-187.10. Now are we one in thought, for fear has gone. 2 And here, before the altar to one God, one Father, one Creator and one Thought, we stand together as one Son of God. 3 Not separate from Him Who is our Source; not distant from one brother who is part of our one Self Whose innocence has joined us all as one, we stand in blessedness, and give as we receive. 4 The Name of God is on our lips. 5 And as we look within, we see the purity of Heaven shine in our reflection of our Father\’s Love.

W-187.11. Now are we blessed, and now we bless the world. 2 What we have looked upon we would extend, for we would see it everywhere. 3 We would behold it shining with the grace of God in everyone. 4 We would not have it be withheld from anything we look upon. 5 And to ensure this holy sight is ours, we offer it to everything we see. 6 For where we see it, it will be returned to us in form of lilies we can lay upon our altar, making it a home for Innocence Itself, Who dwells in us and offers us His Holiness as ours.

LESSON 188

The peace of God is shining in me now.

W-188.1. Why wait for Heaven? 2 Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. 3 The light is in them now. 4 Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all. 5 Light is not of the world, yet you who bear the light in you are alien here as well. 6 The light came with you from your native home, and stayed with you because it is your own. 7 It is the only thing you bring with you from Him Who is your Source. 8 It shines in you because it lights your home, and leads you back to where it came from and you are at home.

W-188.2. This light can not be lost. 2 Why wait to find it in the future, or believe it has been lost already, or was never there? 3 It can so easily be looked upon that arguments which prove it is not there become ridiculous. 4 Who can deny the presence of what he beholds in him? 5 It is not difficult to look within, for there all vision starts. 6 There is no sight, be it of dreams or from a truer Source, that is not but the shadow of the seen through inward vision. 7 There perception starts, and there it ends. 8 It has no source but this.

W-188.3. The peace of God is shining in you now, and from your heart extends around the world. 2 It pauses to caress each living thing, and leaves a blessing with it that remains forever and forever. 3 What it gives must be eternal. 4 It removes all thoughts of the ephemeral and valueless. 5 It brings renewal to all tired hearts, and lights all vision as it passes by. 6 All of its gifts are given everyone, and everyone unites in giving thanks to you who give, and you who have received.

W-188.4. The shining in your mind reminds the world of what it has forgotten, and the world restores the memory to you as well. 2 From you salvation radiates with gifts beyond all measure, given and returned. 3 To you, the giver of the gift, does God Himself give thanks. 4 And in His blessing does the light in you shine brighter, adding to the gifts you have to offer to the world.

W-188.5. The peace of God can never be contained. 2 Who recognizes it within himself must give it. 3 And the means for giving it are in his understanding. 4 He forgives because he recognized the truth in him. 5 The peace of God is shining in you now, and in all living things. 6 In quietness is it acknowledged universally. 7 For what your inward vision looks upon is your perception of the universe.

W-188.6. Sit quietly and close your eyes. 2 The light within you is sufficient. 3 It alone has power to give the gift of sight to you. 4 Exclude the outer world, and let your thoughts fly to the peace within. 5 They know the way. 6 For honest thoughts, untainted by the dream of worldly things outside yourself, become the holy messengers of God Himself.

W-188.7. These thoughts you think with Him. 2 They recognize their home. 3 And they point surely to their Source, Where God the Father and the Son are One. 4 God\’s peace is shining on them, but they must remain with you as well, for they were born within your mind, as yours was born in God\’s. 5 They lead you back to peace, from where they came but to remind you how you must return.

W-188.8. They heed your Father\’s Voice when you refuse to listen. 2 And they urge you gently to accept His Word for what you are, instead of fantasies and shadows. 3 They remind you that you are the co-creator of all things that live. 4 For as the peace of God is shining in you, it must shine on them.

W-188.9. We practice coming nearer to the light in us today. 2 We take our wandering thoughts, and gently bring them back to where they fall in line with all the thoughts we share with God. 3 We will not let them stray. 4 We let the light within our minds direct them to come home. 5 We have betrayed them, ordering that they depart from us. 6 But now we call them back, and wash them clean of strange desires and disordered wishes. 7 We restore to them the holiness of their inheritance.

W-188.10. Thus are our minds restored with them, and we acknowledge that the peace of God still shines in us, and from us to all living things that share our life. 2 We will forgive them all, absolving all the world from what we thought it did to us. 3 For it is we who make the world as we would have it. 4 Now we choose that it be innocent, devoid of sin and open to salvation. 5 And we lay our saving blessing on it, as we say:

6 The peace of God is shining in me now.

7 Let all things shine upon me in that peace, And let me bless them with the light in me.

LESSON 189

I feel the Love of God within me now.

W-189.1. There is a light in you the world can not perceive. 2 And with its eyes you will not see this light, for you are blinded by the world. 3 Yet you have eyes to see it. 4 It is there for you to look upon. 5 It was not placed in you to be kept hidden from your sight. 6 This light is a reflection of the thought we practice now. 7 To feel the Love of God within you is to see the world anew, shining in innocence, alive with hope, and blessed with perfect charity and love.

W-189.2. Who could feel fear in such a world as this? 2 It welcomes you, rejoices that you came, and sings your praises as it keeps you safe from every form of danger and of pain. 3 It offers you a warm and gentle home in which to stay a while. 4 It blesses you throughout the day, and watches through the night as silent guardian of your holy sleep. 5 It sees salvation in you, and protects the light in you, in which it sees its own. 6 It offers you its flowers and its snow, in thankfulness for your benevolence.

W-189.3. This is the world the Love of God reveals. 2 It is so different from the world you see through darkened eyes of malice and of fear, that one belies the other. 3 Only one can be perceived at all. 4 The other one is wholly meaningless. 5 A world in which forgiveness shines on everything, and peace offers its gentle light to everyone, is inconceivable to those who see a world of hatred rising from attack, poised to avenge, to murder and destroy.

W-189.4. Yet is the world of hatred equally unseen and inconceivable to those who feel God\’s Love in them. 2 Their world reflects the quietness and peace that shines in them; the gentleness and innocence they see surrounding them; the joy with which they look out from the endless wells of joy within. 3 What they have felt in them they look upon, and see its sure reflection everywhere.

W-189.5. What would you see? 2 The choice is given you. 3 But learn and do not let your mind forget this law of seeing: You will look upon that which you feel within. 4 If hatred finds a place within your heart, you will perceive a fearful world, held cruelly in death\’s sharp-pointed, bony fingers. 5 If you feel the Love of God within you, you will look out on a world of mercy and of love.

W-189.6. Today we pass illusions, as we seek to reach to what is true in us, and feel its all-embracing tenderness, its Love which knows us perfect as itself, its sight which is the gift its Love bestows on us. 2 We learn the way today. 3 It is as sure as Love itself, to which it carries us. 4 For its simplicity avoids the snares the foolish convolutions of the world\’s apparent reasoning but serve to hide.

W-189.7. Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. 2 Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. 3 Hold onto nothing. 4 Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. 5 Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God.

W-189.8. Is it not He Who knows the way to you? 2 You need not know the way to Him. 3 Your part is simply to allow all obstacles that you have interposed between the Son and God the Father to be quietly removed forever. 4 God will do His part in joyful and immediate response. 5 Ask and receive. 6 But do not make demands, nor point the road to God by which He should appear to you. 7 The way to reach Him is merely to let Him be. 8 For in that way is your reality proclaimed as well.

W-189.9. And so today we do not choose the way in which we go to Him. 2 But we do choose to let Him come. 3 And with this choice we rest. 4 And in our quiet hearts and open minds, His Love will blaze its pathway of itself. 5 What has not been denied is surely there, if it be true and can be surely reached. 6 God knows His Son, and knows the way to him. 7 He does not need His Son to show Him how to find His way. 8 Through every opened door His Love shines outward from its home within, and lightens up the world in innocence.

W-189.10. Father, we do not know the way to You. 2 But we have called, and You have answered us. 3 We will not interfere. 4 Salvation\’s ways are not our own, for they belong to You. 5 And it is unto You we look for them. 6 Our hands are open to receive Your gifts. 7 We have no thoughts we think apart from You, and cherish no beliefs of what we are, or Who created us. 8 Yours is the way that we would find and follow. 9 And we ask but that Your Will, which is our own as well, be done in us and in the world, that it become a part of Heaven now. 10 Amen.

LESSON 190

I choose the joy of God instead of pain.

W-190.1. Pain is a wrong perspective. 2 When it is experienced in any form, it is a proof of self-deception. 3 It is not a fact at all. 4 There is no form it takes that will not disappear if seen aright. 5 For pain proclaims God cruel. 6 How could it be real in any form? 7 It witnesses to God the Father\’s hatred of His Son, the sinfulness He sees in him, and His insane desire for revenge and death.

W-190.2. Can such projections be attested to? 2 Can they be anything but wholly false? 3 Pain is but witness to the Son\’s mistakes in what he thinks he is. 4 It is a dream of fierce retaliation for a crime that could not be committed; for attack on what is wholly unassailable. 5 It is a nightmare of abandonment by an Eternal Love, which could not leave the Son whom It created out of love.

W-190.3. Pain is a sign illusions reign in place of truth. 2 It demonstrates God is denied, confused with fear, perceived as mad, and seen as traitor to Himself. 3 If God is real, there is no pain. 4 If pain is real, there is no God. 5 For vengeance is not part of love. 6 And fear, denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead, has shown that death is victor over life. 7 The body is the Son of God, corruptible in death, as mortal as the Father he has slain.

W-190.4. Peace to such foolishness! 2 The time has come to laugh at such insane ideas. 3 There is no need to think of them as savage crimes, or secret sins with weighty consequence. 4 Who but a madman could conceive of them as cause of anything? 5 Their witness, pain, is mad as they, and no more to be feared than the insane illusions which it shields, and tries to demonstrate must still be true.

W-190.5. It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. 2 Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. 3 There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. 4 No one but yourself affects you. 5 There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. 6 But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. 7 As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. 8 And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness.

W-190.6. My holy brother, think of this awhile: The world you see does nothing. 2 It has no effects at all. 3 It merely represents your thoughts. 4 And it will change entirely as you elect to change your mind, and choose the joy of God as what you really want. 5 Your Self is radiant in this holy joy, unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable, forever and forever. 6 And would you deny a little corner of your mind its own inheritance, and keep it as a hospital for pain; a sickly place where living things must come at last to die?

W-190.7. The world may seem to cause you pain. 2 And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. 3 As an effect, it cannot make effects. 4 As an illusion, it is what you wish. 5 Your idle wishes represent its pains. 6 Your strange desires bring it evil dreams. 7 Your thoughts of death envelop it in fear, while in your kind forgiveness does it live.

W-190.8. Pain is the thought of evil taking form, and working havoc in your holy mind. 2 Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free. 3 In pain is God denied the Son He loves. 4 In pain does fear appear to triumph over love, and time replace eternity and Heaven. 5 And the world becomes a cruel and a bitter place, where sorrow rules and little joys give way before the onslaught of the savage pain that waits to end all joy in misery.

W-190.9. Lay down your arms, and come without defense into the quiet place where Heaven\’s peace holds all things still at last. 2 Lay down all thoughts of danger and of fear. 3 Let no attack enter with you. 4 Lay down the cruel sword of judgment that you hold against your throat, and put aside the withering assaults with which you seek to hide your holiness.

W-190.10. Here will you understand there is no pain. 2 Here does the joy of God belong to you. 3 This is the day when it is given you to realize the lesson that contains all of salvation\’s power. 4 It is this: Pain is illusion; joy, reality. 5 Pain is but sleep; joy is awakening. 6 Pain is deception; joy alone is truth.

W-190.11. And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven. 2 Let our gratitude unto our Teacher fill our hearts, as we are free to choose our joy instead of pain, our holiness in place of sin, the peace of God instead of conflict, and the light of Heaven for the darkness of the world.

LESSON 191

I am the holy Son of God Himself.

W-191.1. Here is your declaration of release from bondage of the world. 2 And here as well is all the world released. 3 You do not see what you have done by giving to the world the role of jailer to the Son of God. 4 What could it be but vicious and afraid, fearful of shadows, punitive and wild, lacking all reason, blind, insane with hate?

W-191.2. What have you done that this should be your world? 2 What have you done that this is what you see? 3 Deny your own Identity, and this is what remains. 4 You look on chaos and proclaim it is yourself. 5 There is no sight that fails to witness this to you. 6 There is no sound that does not speak of frailty within you and without; no breath you draw that does not seem to bring you nearer death; no hope you hold but will dissolve in tears.

W-191.3. Deny your own Identity, and you will not escape the madness which induced this weird, unnatural and ghostly thought that mocks creation and that laughs at God. 2 Deny your own Identity, and you assail the universe alone, without a friend, a tiny particle of dust against the legions of your enemies. 3 Deny your own Identity, and look on evil, sin and death, and watch despair snatch from your fingers every scrap of hope, leaving you nothing but the wish to die.

W-191.4. Yet what is it except a game you play in which Identity can be denied? 2 You are as God created you. 3 All else but this one thing is folly to believe. 4 In this one thought is everyone set free. 5 In this one truth are all illusions gone. 6 In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything, the central core of its existence and its guarantee of immortality.

W-191.5. But let today\’s idea find a place among your thoughts and you have risen far above the world, and all the worldly thoughts that hold it prisoner. 2 And from this place of safety and escape you will return and set it free. 3 For he who can accept his true Identity is truly saved. 4 And his salvation is the gift he gives to everyone, in gratitude to Him Who pointed out the way to happiness that changed his whole perspective of the world.

W-191.6. One holy thought like this and you are free: You are the holy Son of God Himself. 2 And with this holy thought you learn as well that you have freed the world. 3 You have no need to use it cruelly, and then perceive this savage need in it. 4 You set it free of your imprisonment. 5 You will not see a devastating image of yourself walking the world in terror, with the world twisting in agony because your fears have laid the mark of death upon its heart.

W-191.7. Be glad today how very easily is hell undone. 2 You need but tell yourself:

3 I am the holy Son of God Himself. 4 I cannot suffer, cannot be in pain; I cannot suffer loss, nor fail to do all that salvation asks.

5 And in that thought is everything you look on wholly changed.

W-191.8. A miracle has lighted up all dark and ancient caverns, where the rites of death echoed since time began. 2 For time has lost its hold upon the world. 3 The Son of God has come in glory to redeem the lost, to save the helpless, and to give the world the gift of his forgiveness. 4 Who could see the world as dark and sinful, when God\’s Son has come again at last to set it free?

W-191.9. You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given unto you in earth and Heaven. 2 There is nothing that you cannot do. 3 You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. 4 Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you.

W-191.10. Then let the Son of God awaken from his sleep, and opening his holy eyes, return again to bless the world he made. 2 In error it began, but it will end in the reflection of his holiness. 3 And he will sleep no more and dream of death. 4 Then join with me today. 5 Your glory is the light that saves the world. 6 Do not withhold salvation longer. 7 Look about the world, and see the suffering there. 8 Is not your heart willing to bring your weary brothers rest?

W-191.11. They must await your own release. 2 They stay in chains till you are free. 3 They cannot see the mercy of the world until you find it in yourself. 4 They suffer pain until you have denied its hold on you. 5 They die till you accept your own eternal life. 6 You are the holy Son of God Himself. 7 Remember this, and all the world is free. 8 Remember this, and earth and Heaven are one.

LESSON 192

I have a function God would have me fill.

W-192.1. It is your Father\’s holy Will that you complete Himself, and that your Self shall be His sacred Son, forever pure as He, of love created and in love preserved, extending love, creating in its name, forever one with God and with your Self. 2 Yet what can such a function mean within a world of envy, hatred and attack?

W-192.2. Therefore, you have a function in the world in its own terms. 2 For who can understand a language far beyond his simple grasp? 3 Forgiveness represents your function here. 4 It is not God\’s creation, for it is the means by which untruth can be undone. 5 And who would pardon Heaven? 6 Yet on earth, you need the means to let illusions go. 7 Creation merely waits for your return to be acknowledged, not to be complete.

W-192.3. Creation cannot even be conceived of in the world. 2 It has no meaning here. 3 Forgiveness is the closest it can come to earth. 4 For being Heaven-born, it has no form at all. 5 Yet God created One Who has the power to translate in form the wholly formless. 6 What He makes are dreams, but of a kind so close to waking that the light of day already shines in them, and eyes already opening behold the joyful sights their offerings contain.

W-192.4. Forgiveness gently looks upon all things unknown in Heaven, sees them disappear, and leaves the world a clean and unmarked slate on which the Word of God can now replace the senseless symbols written there before. 2 Forgiveness is the means by which the fear of death is overcome, because it holds no fierce attraction now and guilt is gone. 3 Forgiveness lets the body be perceived as what it is; a simple teaching aid, to be laid by when learning is complete, but hardly changing him who learns at all.

W-192.5. The mind without the body cannot make mistakes. 2 It cannot think that it will die, nor be the prey of merciless attack. 3 Anger becomes impossible, and where is terror then? 4 What fears could still assail those who have lost the source of all attack, the core of anguish and the seat of fear? 5 Only forgiveness can relieve the mind of thinking that the body is its home. 6 Only forgiveness can restore the peace that God intended for His holy Son. 7 Only forgiveness can persuade the Son to look again upon his holiness.

W-192.6. With anger gone, you will indeed perceive that, for Christ\’s vision and the gift of sight, no sacrifice was asked, and only pain was lifted from a sick and tortured mind. 2 Is this unwelcome? 3 Is it to be feared? 4 Or is it to be hoped for, met with thanks and joyously accepted? 5 We are one, and therefore give up nothing. 6 But we have indeed been given everything by God.

W-192.7. Yet do we need forgiveness to perceive that this is so. 2 Without its kindly light we grope in darkness, using reason but to justify our rage and our attack. 3 Our understanding is so limited that what we think we understand is but confusion born of error. 4 We are lost in mists of shifting dreams and fearful thoughts, our eyes shut tight against the light; our minds engaged in worshipping what is not there.

W-192.8. Who can be born again in Christ but him who has forgiven everyone he sees or thinks of or imagines? 2 Who could be set free while he imprisons anyone? 3 A jailer is not free, for he is bound together with his prisoner. 4 He must be sure that he does not escape, and so he spends his time in keeping watch on him. 5 The bars that limit him become the world in which his jailer lives, along with him. 6 And it is on his freedom that the way to liberty depends for both of them.

W-192.9. Therefore, hold no one prisoner. 2 Release instead of bind, for thus are you made free. 3 The way is simple. 4 Every time you feel a stab of anger, realize you hold a sword above your head. 5 And it will fall or be averted as you choose to be condemned or free. 6 Thus does each one who seems to tempt you to be angry represent your savior from the prison house of death. 7 And so you owe him thanks instead of pain.

W-192.10. Be merciful today. 2 The Son of God deserves your mercy. 3 It is he who asks that you accept the way to freedom now. 4 Deny him not. 5 His Father\’s Love for him belongs to you. 6 Your function here on earth is only to forgive him, that you may accept him back as your Identity. 7 He is as God created him. 8 And you are what he is. 9 Forgive him now his sins, and you will see that you are one with him.

LESSON 193

All things are lessons God would have me learn.

W-193.1. God does not know of learning. 2 Yet His Will extends to what He does not understand, in that He wills the happiness His Son inherited of Him be undisturbed; eternal and forever gaining scope, eternally expanding in the joy of full creation, and eternally open and wholly limitless in Him. 3 That is His Will. 4 And thus His Will provides the means to guarantee that it is done.

W-193.2. God sees no contradictions. 2 Yet His Son believes he sees them. 3 Thus he has a need for One Who can correct his erring sight, and give him vision that will lead him back to where perception ceases. 4 God does not perceive at all. 5 Yet it is He Who gives the means by which perception is made true and beautiful enough to let the light of Heaven shine upon it. 6 It is He Who answers what His Son would contradict, and keeps his sinlessness forever safe.

W-193.3. These are the lessons God would have you learn. 2 His Will reflects them all, and they reflect His loving kindness to the Son He loves. 3 Each lesson has a central thought, the same in all of them. 4 The form alone is changed, with different circumstances and events; with different characters and different themes, apparent but not real. 5 They are the same in fundamental content. 6 It is this:

7 Forgive, and you will see this differently.

W-193.4. Certain it is that all distress does not appear to be but unforgiveness. 2 Yet that is the content underneath the form. 3 It is this sameness which makes learning sure, because the lesson is so simple that it cannot be rejected in the end. 4 No one can hide forever from a truth so very obvious that it appears in countless forms, and yet is recognized as easily in all of them, if one but wants to see the simple lesson there.

W-193.5. Forgive, and you will see this differently.

2 These are the words the Holy Spirit speaks in all your tribulations, all your pain, all suffering regardless of its form. 3 These are the words with which temptation ends, and guilt, abandoned, is revered no more. 4 These are the words which end the dream of sin, and rid the mind of fear. 5 These are the words by which salvation comes to all the world.

W-193.6. Shall we not learn to say these words when we are tempted to believe that pain is real, and death becomes our choice instead of life? 2 Shall we not learn to say these words when we have understood their power to release all minds from bondage? 3 These are words which give you power over all events that seem to have been given power over you. 4 You see them rightly when you hold these words in full awareness, and do not forget these words apply to everything you see or any brother looks upon amiss.

W-193.7. How can you tell when you are seeing wrong, or someone else is failing to perceive the lesson he should learn? 2 Does pain seem real in the perception? 3 If it does, be sure the lesson is not learned. 4 And there remains an unforgiveness hiding in the mind that sees the pain through eyes the mind directs.

W-193.8. God would not have you suffer thus. 2 He would help you forgive yourself. 3 His Son does not remember who he is. 4 And God would have him not forget His Love, and all the gifts His Love brings with it. 5 Would you now renounce your own salvation? 6 Would you fail to learn the simple lessons Heaven\’s Teacher sets before you, that all pain may disappear and God may be remembered by His Son?

W-193.9. All things are lessons God would have you learn. 2 He would not leave an unforgiving thought without correction, nor one thorn or nail to hurt His holy Son in any way. 3 He would ensure his holy rest remain untroubled and serene, without a care, in an eternal home which cares for him. 4 And He would have all tears be wiped away, with none remaining yet unshed, and none but waiting their appointed time to fall. 5 For God has willed that laughter should replace each one, and that His Son be free again.

W-193.10. We will attempt today to overcome a thousand seeming obstacles to peace in just one day. 2 Let mercy come to you more quickly. 3 Do not try to hold it off another day, another minute or another instant. 4 Time was made for this. 5 Use it today for what its purpose is. 6 Morning and night, devote what time you can to serve its proper aim, and do not let the time be less than meets your deepest need.

W-193.11. Give all you can, and give a little more. 2 For now we would arise in haste and go unto our Father\’s house. 3 We have been gone too long, and we would linger here no more. 4 And as we practice, let us think about all things we saved to settle by ourselves, and kept apart from healing. 5 Let us give them all to Him Who knows the way to look upon them so that they will disappear. 6 Truth is His message; truth His teaching is. 7 His are the lessons God would have us learn.

W-193.12. Each hour, spend a little time today, and in the days to come, in practicing the lesson in forgiveness in the form established for the day. 2 And try to give it application to the happenings the hour brought, so that the next one is free of the one before. 3 The chains of time are easily unloosened in this way. 4 Let no one hour cast its shadow on the one that follows, and when that one goes, let everything that happened in its course go with it. 5 Thus will you remain unbound, in peace eternal in the world of time.

W-193.13. This is the lesson God would have you learn: There is a way to look on everything that lets it be to you another step to Him, and to salvation of the world. 2 To all that speaks of terror, answer thus:

3 I will forgive, and this will disappear.

4 To every apprehension, every care and every form of suffering, repeat these selfsame words. 5 And then you hold the key that opens Heaven\’s gate, and brings the Love of God the Father down to earth at last, to raise it up to Heaven. 6 God will take this final step Himself. 7 Do not deny the little steps He asks you take to Him.

LESSON 194

I place the future in the Hands of God.

W-194.1. Today\’s idea takes another step toward quick salvation, and a giant stride it is indeed! 2 So great the distance is that it encompasses, it sets you down just short of Heaven, with the goal in sight and obstacles behind. 3 Your foot has reached the lawns that welcome you to Heaven\’s gate; the quiet place of peace, where you await with certainty the final step of God. 4 How far are we progressing now from earth! 5 How close are we approaching to our goal! 6 How short the journey still to be pursued!

W-194.2. Accept today\’s idea, and you have passed all anxiety, all pits of hell, all blackness of depression, thoughts of sin, and devastation brought about by guilt. 2 Accept today\’s idea, and you have released the world from all imprisonment by loosening the heavy chains that locked the door to freedom on it. 3 You are saved, and your salvation thus becomes the gift you give the world, because you have received.

W-194.3. In no one instant is depression felt, or pain experienced or loss perceived. 2 In no one instant sorrow can be set upon a throne, and worshipped faithfully. 3 In no one instant can one even die. 4 And so each instant given unto God in passing, with the next one given Him already, is a time of your release from sadness, pain and even death itself.

W-194.4. God holds your future as He holds your past and present. 2 They are one to Him, and so they should be one to you. 3 Yet in this world, the temporal progression still seems real. 4 And so you are not asked to understand the lack of sequence really found in time. 5 You are but asked to let the future go, and place it in God\’s Hands. 6 And you will see by your experience that you have laid the past and present in His Hands as well, because the past will punish you no more, and future dread will now be meaningless.

W-194.5. Release the future. 2 For the past is gone, and what is present, freed from its bequest of grief and misery, of pain and loss, becomes the instant in which time escapes the bondage of illusions where it runs its pitiless, inevitable course. 3 Then is each instant which was slave to time transformed into a holy instant, when the light that was kept hidden in God\’s Son is freed to bless the world. 4 Now is he free, and all his glory shines upon a world made free with him, to share his holiness.

W-194.6. If you can see the lesson for today as the deliverance it really is, you will not hesitate to give as much consistent effort as you can, to make it be a part of you. 2 As it becomes a thought that rules your mind, a habit in your problem-solving repertoire, a way of quick reaction to temptation, you extend your learning to the world. 3 And as you learn to see salvation in all things, so will the world perceive that it is saved.

W-194.7. What worry can beset the one who gives his future to the loving Hands of God? 2 What can he suffer? 3 What can cause him pain, or bring experience of loss to him? 4 What can he fear? 5 And what can he regard except with love? 6 For he who has escaped all fear of future pain has found his way to present peace, and certainty of care the world can never threaten. 7 He is sure that his perception may be faulty, but will never lack correction. 8 He is free to choose again when he has been deceived; to change his mind when he has made mistakes.

W-194.8. Place, then, your future in the Hands of God. 2 For thus you call the memory of Him to come again, replacing all your thoughts of sin and evil with the truth of love. 3 Think you the world could fail to gain thereby, and every living creature not respond with healed perception? 4 Who entrusts himself to God has also placed the world within the Hands to which he has himself appealed for comfort and security. 5 He lays aside the sick illusions of the world along with his, and offers peace to both.

W-194.9. Now are we saved indeed. 2 For in God\’s Hands we rest untroubled, sure that only good can come to us. 3 If we forget, we will be gently reassured. 4 If we accept an unforgiving thought, it will be soon replaced by love\’s reflection. 5 And if we are tempted to attack, we will appeal to Him Who guards our rest to make the choice for us that leaves temptation far behind. 6 No longer is the world our enemy, for we have chosen that we be its friend.

LESSON 195

Love is the way I walk in gratitude.

W-195.1. Gratitude is a lesson hard to learn for those who look upon the world amiss. 2 The most that they can do is see themselves as better off than others. 3 And they try to be content because another seems to suffer more than they. 4 How pitiful and deprecating are such thoughts! 5 For who has cause for thanks while others have less cause? 6 And who could suffer less because he sees another suffer more? 7 Your gratitude is due to Him alone Who made all cause of sorrow disappear throughout the world.

W-195.2. It is insane to offer thanks because of suffering. 2 But it is equally insane to fail in gratitude to One Who offers you the certain means whereby all pain is healed, and suffering replaced with laughter and with happiness. 3 Nor could the even partly sane refuse to take the steps which He directs, and follow in the way He sets before them, to escape a prison that they thought contained no door to the deliverance they now perceive.

W-195.3. Your brother is your \”enemy\” because you see in him the rival for your peace; a plunderer who takes his joy from you, and leaves you nothing but a black despair so bitter and relentless that there is no hope remaining. 2 Now is vengeance all there is to wish for. 3 Now can you but try to bring him down to lie in death with you, as useless as yourself; as little left within his grasping fingers as in yours.

W-195.4. You do not offer God your gratitude because your brother is more slave than you, nor could you sanely be enraged if he seems freer. 2 Love makes no comparisons. 3 And gratitude can only be sincere if it be joined to love. 4 We offer thanks to God our Father that in us all things will find their freedom. 5 It will never be that some are loosed while others still are bound. 6 For who can bargain in the name of love?

W-195.5. Therefore give thanks, but in sincerity. 2 And let your gratitude make room for all who will escape with you; the sick, the weak, the needy and afraid, and those who mourn a seeming loss or feel apparent pain, who suffer cold or hunger, or who walk the way of hatred and the path of death. 3 All these go with you. 4 Let us not compare ourselves with them, for thus we split them off from our awareness of the unity we share with them, as they must share with us.

W-195.6. We thank our Father for one thing alone; that we are separate from no living thing, and therefore one with Him. 2 And we rejoice that no exceptions ever can be made which would reduce our wholeness, nor impair or change our function to complete the One Who is Himself completion. 3 We give thanks for every living thing, for otherwise we offer thanks for nothing, and we fail to recognize the gifts of God to us.

W-195.7. Then let our brothers lean their tired heads against our shoulders as they rest a while. 2 We offer thanks for them. 3 For if we can direct them to the peace that we would find, the way is opening at last to us. 4 An ancient door is swinging free again; a long forgotten Word re-echoes in our memory, and gathers clarity as we are willing once again to hear.

W-195.8. Walk, then, in gratitude the way of love. 2 For hatred is forgotten when we lay comparisons aside. 3 What more remains as obstacles to peace? 4 The fear of God is now undone at last, and we forgive without comparing. 5 Thus we cannot choose to overlook some things, and yet retain some other things still locked away as \”sins.\” 6 When your forgiveness is complete you will have total gratitude, for you will see that everything has earned the right to love by being loving, even as your Self.

W-195.9. Today we learn to think of gratitude in place of anger, malice and revenge. 2 We have been given everything. 3 If we refuse to recognize it, we are not entitled therefore to our bitterness, and to a self-perception which regards us in a place of merciless pursuit, where we are badgered ceaselessly, and pushed about without a thought or care for us or for our future. 4 Gratitude becomes the single thought we substitute for these insane perceptions. 5 God has cared for us, and calls us Son. 6 Can there be more than this?

W-195.10. Our gratitude will pave the way to Him, and shorten our learning time by more than you could ever dream of. 2 Gratitude goes hand in hand with love, and where one is the other must be found. 3 For gratitude is but an aspect of the Love which is the Source of all creation. 4 God gives thanks to you, His Son, for being what you are; His Own completion and the Source of love, along with Him. 5 Your gratitude to Him is one with His to you. 6 For love can walk no road except the way of gratitude, and thus we go who walk the way to God.

LESSON 196

It can be but myself I crucify.

W-196.1. When this is firmly understood and kept in full awareness, you will not attempt to harm yourself, nor make your body slave to vengeance. 2 You will not attack yourself, and you will realize that to attack another is but to attack yourself. 3 You will be free of the insane belief that to attack a brother saves yourself. 4 And you will understand his safety is your own, and in his healing you are healed.

W-196.2. Perhaps at first you will not understand how mercy, limitless and with all things held in its sure protection, can be found in the idea we practice for today. 2 It may, in fact, appear to be a sign that punishment can never be escaped because the ego, under what it sees as threat, is quick to cite the truth to save its lies. 3 Yet must it fail to understand the truth it uses thus. 4 But you can learn to see these foolish applications, and deny the meaning they appear to have.

W-196.3. Thus do you also teach your mind that you are not an ego. 2 For the ways in which the ego would distort the truth will not deceive you longer. 3 You will not believe you are a body to be crucified. 4 And you will see within today\’s idea the light of resurrection, looking past all thoughts of crucifixion and of death, to thoughts of liberation and of life.

W-196.4. Today\’s idea is one step we take in leading us from bondage to the state of perfect freedom. 2 Let us take this step today, that we may quickly go the way salvation shows us, taking every step in its appointed sequence, as the mind relinquishes its burdens one by one. 3 It is not time we need for this. 4 It is but willingness. 5 For what would seem to need a thousand years can easily be done in just one instant by the grace of God.

W-196.5. The dreary, hopeless thought that you can make attacks on others and escape yourself has nailed you to the cross. 2 Perhaps it seemed to be salvation. 3 Yet it merely stood for the belief the fear of God is real. 4 And what is that but hell? 5 Who could believe his Father is his deadly enemy, separate from him, and waiting to destroy his life and blot him from the universe, without the fear of hell upon his heart?

W-196.6. Such is the form of madness you believe, if you accept the fearful thought you can attack another and be free yourself. 2 Until this form is changed, there is no hope. 3 Until you see that this, at least, must be entirely impossible, how could there be escape? 4 The fear of God is real to anyone who thinks this thought is true. 5 And he will not perceive its foolishness, or even see that it is there, so that it would be possible to question it.

W-196.7. To question it at all, its form must first be changed at least as much as will permit fear of retaliation to abate, and the responsibility returned to some extent to you. 2 From there you can at least consider if you want to go along this painful path. 3 Until this shift has been accomplished, you can not perceive that it is but your thoughts that bring you fear, and your deliverance depends on you.

W-196.8. Our next steps will be easy, if you take this one today. 2 From there we go ahead quite rapidly. 3 For once you understand it is impossible that you be hurt except by your own thoughts, the fear of God must disappear. 4 You cannot then believe that fear is caused without. 5 And God, Whom you had thought to banish, can be welcomed back within the holy mind He never left.

W-196.9. Salvation\’s song can certainly be heard in the idea we practice for today. 2 If it can but be you you crucify, you did not hurt the world, and need not fear its vengeance and pursuit. 3 Nor need you hide in terror from the deadly fear of God projection hides behind. 4 The thing you dread the most is your salvation. 5 You are strong, and it is strength you want. 6 And you are free, and glad of freedom. 7 You have sought to be both weak and bound, because you feared your strength and freedom. 8 Yet salvation lies in them.

W-196.10. There is an instant in which terror seems to grip your mind so wholly that escape appears quite hopeless. 2 When you realize, once and for all, that it is you you fear, the mind perceives itself as split. 3 And this had been concealed while you believed attack could be directed outward, and returned from outside to within. 4 It seemed to be an enemy outside you had to fear. 5 And thus a god outside yourself became your mortal enemy; the source of fear.

W-196.11. Now, for an instant, is a murderer perceived within you, eager for your death, intent on plotting punishment for you until the time when it can kill at last. 2 Yet in this instant is the time as well in which salvation comes. 3 For fear of God has disappeared. 4 And you can call on Him to save you from illusions by His Love, calling Him Father and yourself His Son. 5 Pray that the instant may be soon,-today. 6 Step back from fear, and make advance to love.

W-196.12. There is no Thought of God that does not go with you to help you reach that instant, and to go beyond it quickly, surely and forever. 2 When the fear of God is gone, there are no obstacles that still remain between you and the holy peace of God. 3 How kind and merciful is the idea we practice! 4 Give it welcome, as you should, for it is your release. 5 It is indeed but you your mind can try to crucify. 6 Yet your redemption, too, will come from you.

LESSON 197

It can be but my gratitude I earn.

W-197.1. Here is the second step we take to free your mind from the belief in outside force pitted against your own. 2 You make attempts at kindness and forgiveness. 3 Yet you turn them to attack again, unless you find external gratitude and lavish thanks. 4 Your gifts must be received with honor, lest they be withdrawn. 5 And so you think God\’s gifts are loans at best; at worst, deceptions which would cheat you of defenses, to ensure that when He strikes He will not fail to kill.

W-197.2. How easily are God and guilt confused by those who know not what their thoughts can do. 2 Deny your strength, and weakness must become salvation to you. 3 See yourself as bound, and bars become your home. 4 Nor will you leave the prison house, or claim your strength, until guilt and salvation are not seen as one, and freedom and salvation are perceived as joined, with strength beside them, to be sought and claimed, and found and fully recognized.

W-197.3. The world must thank you when you offer it release from your illusions. 2 Yet your thanks belong to you as well, for its release can only mirror yours. 3 Your gratitude is all your gifts require, that they be a lasting offering of a thankful heart, released from hell forever. 4 Is it this you would undo by taking back your gifts, because they were not honored? 5 It is you who honor them and give them fitting thanks, for it is you who have received the gifts.

W-197.4. It does not matter if another thinks your gifts unworthy. 2 In his mind there is a part that joins with yours in thanking you. 3 It does not matter if your gifts seem lost and ineffectual. 4 They are received where they are given. 5 In your gratitude are they accepted universally, and thankfully acknowledged by the Heart of God Himself. 6 And would you take them back, when He has gratefully accepted them?

W-197.5. God blesses every gift you give to Him, and every gift is given Him, because it can be given only to yourself. 2 And what belongs to God must be His Own. 3 Yet you will never realize His gifts are sure, eternal, changeless, limitless, forever giving out, extending love and adding to your never-ending joy while you forgive but to attack again.

W-197.6. Withdraw the gifts you give, and you will think that what is given you has been withdrawn. 2 But learn to let forgiveness take away the sins you think you see outside yourself, and you can never think the gifts of God are lent but for a little while, before He snatches them away again in death. 3 For death will have no meaning for you then.

W-197.7. And with the end of this belief is fear forever over. 2 Thank your Self for this, for He is grateful only unto God, and He gives thanks for you unto Himself. 3 To everyone who lives will Christ yet come, for everyone must live and move in Him. 4 His Being in His Father is secure, because Their Will is One. 5 Their gratitude to all They have created has no end, for gratitude remains a part of love.

W-197.8. Thanks be to you, the holy Son of God. 2 For as you were created, you contain all things within your Self. 3 And you are still as God created you. 4 Nor can you dim the light of your perfection. 5 In your heart the Heart of God is laid. 6 He holds you dear, because you are Himself. 7 All gratitude belongs to you, because of what you are.

W-197.9. Give thanks as you receive it. 2 Be you free of all ingratitude to anyone who makes your Self complete. 3 And from this Self is no one left outside. 4 Give thanks for all the countless channels which extend this Self. 5 All that you do is given unto Him. 6 All that you think can only be His Thoughts, sharing with Him the holy Thoughts of God. 7 Earn now the gratitude you have denied yourself when you forgot the function God has given you. 8 But never think that He has ever ceased to offer thanks to you.

LESSON 198

Only my condemnation injures me.

W-198.1. Injury is impossible. 2 And yet illusion makes illusion. 3 If you can condemn, you can be injured. 4 For you have believed that you can injure, and the right you have established for yourself can be now used against you, till you lay it down as valueless, unwanted and unreal. 5 Then does illusion cease to have effects, and those it seemed to have will be undone. 6 Then are you free, for freedom is your gift, and you can now receive the gift you gave.

W-198.2. Condemn and you are made a prisoner. 2 Forgive and you are freed. 3 Such is the law that rules perception. 4 It is not a law that knowledge understands, for freedom is a part of knowledge. 5 To condemn is thus impossible in truth. 6 What seems to be its influence and its effects have not occurred at all. 7 Yet must we deal with them a while as if they had. 8 Illusion makes illusion. 9 Except one. 10 Forgiveness is illusion that is answer to the rest.

W-198.3. Forgiveness sweeps all other dreams away, and though it is itself a dream, it breeds no others. 2 All illusions save this one must multiply a thousandfold. 3 But this is where illusions end. 4 Forgiveness is the end of dreams, because it is a dream of waking. 5 It is not itself the truth. 6 Yet does it point to where the truth must be, and gives direction with the certainty of God Himself. 7 It is a dream in which the Son of God awakens to his Self and to his Father, knowing They are One.

W-198.4. Forgiveness is the only road that leads out of disaster, past all suffering, and finally away from death. 2 How could there be another way, when this one is the plan of God Himself? 3 And why would you oppose it, quarrel with it, seek to find a thousand ways in which it must be wrong; a thousand other possibilities?

W-198.5. Is it not wiser to be glad you hold the answer to your problems in your hand? 2 Is it not more intelligent to thank the One Who gives salvation, and accept His gift with gratitude? 3 And is it not a kindness to yourself to hear His Voice and learn the simple lessons He would teach, instead of trying to dismiss His words, and substitute your own in place of His?

W-198.6. His words will work. 2 His words will save. 3 His words contain all hope, all blessing and all joy that ever can be found upon this earth. 4 His words are born in God, and come to you with Heaven\’s love upon them. 5 Those who hear His words have heard the song of Heaven. 6 For these are the words in which all merge as one at last. 7 And as this one will fade away, the Word of God will come to take its place, for it will be remembered then and loved.

W-198.7. This world has many seeming separate haunts where mercy has no meaning, and attack appears as justified. 2 Yet all are one; a place where death is offered to God\’s Son and to his Father. 3 You may think They have accepted. 4 But if you will look again upon the place where you beheld Their blood, you will perceive a miracle instead. 5 How foolish to believe that They could die! 6 How foolish to believe you can attack! 7 How mad to think that you could be condemned, and that the holy Son of God can die!

W-198.8. The stillness of your Self remains unmoved, untouched by thoughts like these, and unaware of any condemnation which could need forgiveness. 2 Dreams of any kind are strange and alien to the truth. 3 And what but truth could have a Thought which builds a bridge to it that brings illusions to the other side?

W-198.9. Today we practice letting freedom come to make its home with you. 2 The truth bestows these words upon your mind, that you may find the key to light and let the darkness end:

3 Only my condemnation injures me.

4 Only my own forgiveness sets me free.

5 Do not forget today that there can be no form of suffering that fails to hide an unforgiving thought. 6 Nor can there be a form of pain forgiveness cannot heal.

W-198.10. Accept the one illusion which proclaims there is no condemnation in God\’s Son, and Heaven is remembered instantly; the world forgotten, all its weird beliefs forgotten with it, as the face of Christ appears unveiled at last in this one dream. 2 This is the gift the Holy Spirit holds for you from God your Father. 3 Let today be celebrated both on earth and in your holy home as well. 4 Be kind to Both, as you forgive the trespasses you thought Them guilty of, and see your innocence shining upon you from the face of Christ.

W-198.11. Now is there silence all around the world. 2 Now is there stillness where before there was a frantic rush of thoughts that made no sense. 3 Now is there tranquil light across the face of earth, made quiet in a dreamless sleep. 4 And now the Word of God alone remains upon it. 5 Only that can be perceived an instant longer. 6 Then are symbols done, and everything you ever thought you made completely vanished from the mind that God forever knows to be His only Son.

W-198.12. There is no condemnation in him. 2 He is perfect in his holiness. 3 He needs no thoughts of mercy. 4 Who could give him gifts when everything is his? 5 And who could dream of offering forgiveness to the Son of Sinlessness Itself, so like to Him Whose Son he is, that to behold the Son is to perceive no more, and only know the Father? 6 In this vision of the Son, so brief that not an instant stands between this single sight and timelessness itself, you see the vision of yourself, and then you disappear forever into God.

W-198.13. Today we come still nearer to the end of everything that yet would stand between this vision and our sight. 2 And we are glad that we have come this far, and recognize that He Who brought us here will not forsake us now. 3 For He would give to us the gift that God has given us through Him today. 4 Now is the time for your deliverance. 5 The time has come. 6 The time has come today.

LESSON 199

I am not a body. I am free.

W-199.1. Freedom must be impossible as long as you perceive a body as yourself. 2 The body is a limit. 3 Who would seek for freedom in a body looks for it where it can not be found. 4 The mind can be made free when it no longer sees itself as in a body, firmly tied to it and sheltered by its presence. 5 If this were the truth, the mind were vulnerable indeed!

W-199.2. The mind that serves the Holy Spirit is unlimited forever, in all ways, beyond the laws of time and space, unbound by any preconceptions, and with strength and power to do whatever it is asked. 2 Attack thoughts cannot enter such a mind, because it has been given to the Source of love, and fear can never enter in a mind that has attached itself to love. 3 It rests in God. 4 And who can be afraid who lives in Innocence, and only loves?

W-199.3. It is essential for your progress in this course that you accept today\’s idea, and hold it very dear. 2 Be not concerned that to the ego it is quite insane. 3 The ego holds the body dear because it dwells in it, and lives united with the home that it has made. 4 It is a part of the illusion that has sheltered it from being found illusory itself.

W-199.4. Here does it hide, and here it can be seen as what it is. 2 Declare your innocence and you are free. 3 The body disappears, because you have no need of it except the need the Holy Spirit sees. 4 For this, the body will appear as useful form for what the mind must do. 5 It thus becomes a vehicle which helps forgiveness be extended to the all-inclusive goal that it must reach, according to God\’s plan.

W-199.5. Cherish today\’s idea, and practice it today and every day. 2 Make it a part of every practice period you take. 3 There is no thought that will not gain thereby in power to help the world, and none which will not gain in added gifts to you as well. 4 We sound the call of freedom round the world with this idea. 5 And would you be exempt from the acceptance of the gifts you give?

W-199.6. The Holy Spirit is the home of minds that seek for freedom. 2 In Him they have found what they have sought. 3 The body\’s purpose now is unambiguous. 4 And it becomes perfect in the ability to serve an undivided goal. 5 In conflict-free and unequivocal response to mind with but the thought of freedom as its goal, the body serves, and serves its purpose well. 6 Without the power to enslave, it is a worthy servant of the freedom which the mind within the Holy Spirit seeks.

W-199.7. Be free today. 2 And carry freedom as your gift to those who still believe they are enslaved within a body. 3 Be you free, so that the Holy Spirit can make use of your escape from bondage, to set free the many who perceive themselves as bound and helpless and afraid. 4 Let love replace their fears through you. 5 Accept salvation now, and give your mind to Him Who calls to you to make this gift to Him. 6 For He would give you perfect freedom, perfect joy, and hope that finds its full accomplishment in God.

W-199.8. You are God\’s Son. 2 In immortality you live forever. 3 Would you not return your mind to this? 4 Then practice well the thought the Holy Spirit gives you for today. 5 Your brothers stand released with you in it; the world is blessed along with you, God\’s Son will weep no more, and Heaven offers thanks for the increase of joy your practice brings even to it. 6 And God Himself extends His Love and happiness each time you say:

7 I am not a body. 8 I am free. 9 I hear the Voice that God has given me, and it is only this my mind obeys.