Chapter 7. THE GIFTS OF THE KINGDOM I. The Last Step T-7.I.1. The creative power of God and His creations is limitless, but they are not in reciprocal relationship. 2 You communicate fully with God, as He does with you. 3 This is an ongoing process in which you share, and because you share it, you are inspired to create like God. 4 Yet in creation you are not in a reciprocal relation to God, since He created you but you did not create Him. 5 I have already told you that only in this respect your creative power differs from His. 6 Even in this world there is a parallel. 7 Parents give birth to children, but children do not give birth to parents. 8 They do, however, give birth to their children, and thus give birth as their parents do. T-7.I.2. If you created God and He created you, the Kingdom could not increase through its own creative thought. 2 Creation would therefore be limited, and you would not be co-creator with God. 3 As God's creative Thought proceeds from Him to you, so must your creative thought proceed from you to your creations. 4 Only in this way can all creative power extend outward. 5 God's accomplishments are not yours, but yours are like His. 6 He created the Sonship and you increase it. 7 You have the power to add to the Kingdom, though not to add to the Creator of the Kingdom. 8 You claim this power when you become vigilant only for God and His Kingdom. 9 By accepting this power as yours you have learned to remember what you are. T-7.I.3. Your creations belong in you, as you belong in God. 2 You are part of God, as your sons are part of His Sons. 3 To create is to love. 4 Love extends outward simply because it cannot be contained. 5 Being limitless it does not stop. 6 It creates forever, but not in time. 7 God's creations have always been, because He has always been. 8 Your creations have always been, because you can create only as God creates. 9 Eternity is yours, because He created you eternal. T-7.I.4. The ego, on the other hand, always demands reciprocal rights, because it is competitive rather than loving. 2 It is always willing to strike a bargain, but it cannot understand that to be like another means that no bargains are possible. p112 3 To gain you must give, not bargain. 4 To bargain is to limit giving, and this is not God's Will. 5 To will with God is to create like Him. 6 God does not limit His gifts in any way. 7 You His gifts, and so your gifts must be like His. 8 Your gifts to the Kingdom must be like His gifts to you. T-7.I.5. I gave only love to the Kingdom because I believed that was what I was. 2 What you believe you are determines your gifts, and if God created you by extending Himself as you, you can only extend yourself as He did. 3 Only joy increases forever, since joy and eternity are inseparable. 4 God extends outward beyond limits and beyond time, and you who are co-creator with Him extend His Kingdom forever and beyond limit. 5 Eternity is the indelible stamp of creation. 6 The eternal are in peace and joy forever. T-7.I.6. To think like God is to share His certainty of what you are, and to create like Him is to share the perfect Love He shares with you. 2 To this the Holy Spirit leads you, that your joy may be complete because the Kingdom of God is whole. 3 I have said that the last step in the reawakening of knowledge is taken by God. 4 This is true, but it is hard to explain in words because words are symbols, and nothing that is true need be explained. 5 However, the Holy Spirit has the task of translating the useless into the useful, the meaningless into the meaningful, and the temporary into the timeless. 6 He can therefore tell you something about this last step. T-7.I.7. God does not take steps, because His accomplishments are not gradual. 2 He does not teach, because His creations are changeless. 3 He does nothing last, because He created first and for always. 4 It must be understood that the word "first" as applied to Him is not a time concept. 5 He is first in the sense that He is the First in the Holy Trinity Itself. 6 He is the Prime Creator, because He created His co-creators. 7 Because He did, time applies neither to Him nor to what He created. 8 The "last step" that God will take was therefore true in the beginning, is true now, and will be true forever. 9 What is timeless is always there, because its being is eternally changeless. 10 It does not change by increase, because it was forever created to increase. 11 If you perceive it as not increasing you do not know what it is. 12 You also do not know Who created it. 13 God does not reveal this to you because it was never hidden. 14 His light was never obscured, because it is His Will to share it. p113 15 How can what is fully shared be withheld and then revealed? II. The Law of the Kingdom T-7.II.1. To heal is the only kind of thinking in this world that resembles the Thought of God, and because of the elements they share, can transfer easily to it. 2 When a brother perceives himself as sick, he is perceiving himself as not whole, and therefore in need. 3 If you, too, see him this way, you are seeing him as if he were absent from the Kingdom or separated from it, thus making the Kingdom itself obscure to both of you. 4 Sickness and separation are not of God, but the Kingdom is. 5 If you obscure the Kingdom, you are perceiving what is not of God. T-7.II.2. To heal, then, is to correct perception in your brother and yourself by sharing the Holy Spirit with him. 2 This places you both within the Kingdom, and restores its wholeness in your mind. 3 This reflects creation, because it unifies by increasing and integrates by extending. 4 What you project or extend is real for you. 5 This is an immutable law of the mind in this world as well as in the Kingdom. 6 However, the content is different in this world, because the thoughts it governs are very different from the Thoughts in the Kingdom. 7 Laws must be adapted to circumstances if they are to maintain order. 8 The outstanding characteristic of the laws of mind as they operate in this world is that by obeying them, and I assure you that you must obey them, you can arrive at diametrically opposed results. 9 This is because the laws have been adapted to the circumstances of this world, in which diametrically opposed outcomes seem possible because you can respond to two conflicting voices. T-7.II.3. Outside the Kingdom, the law that prevails inside is adapted to "What you project you believe." 2 This is its teaching form, because outside the Kingdom learning is essential. 3 This form implies that you will learn what you are from what you have projected onto others, and therefore believe they are. 4 In the Kingdom there is no teaching or learning, because there is no belief. 5 There is only certainty. 6 God and His Sons, in the surety of being, know that what you extend you are. 7 That form of the law is not adapted at all, being the law of creation. 8 God Himself created the law by creating it. 9 And His Sons, who create like Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the increase of the Kingdom depends on it, just as their own creation did. p114 T-7.II.4. Laws must be communicated if they are to be helpful. 2 In effect, they must be translated for those who speak different languages. 3 Nevertheless, a good translator, although he must alter the form of what he translates, never changes the meaning. 4 In fact, his whole purpose is to change the form so that the original meaning is retained. 5 The Holy Spirit is the Translator of the laws of God to those who do not understand them. 6 You could not do this yourself because a conflicted mind cannot be faithful to one meaning, and will therefore change the meaning to preserve the form. T-7.II.5. The Holy Spirit's purpose in translating is exactly the opposite. 2 He translates only to preserve the original meaning in all respects and in all languages. 3 Therefore, He opposes the idea that differences in form are meaningful, emphasizing always that 4 The meaning of His message is always the same; only the meaning matters. 5 God's law of creation does not involve the use of truth to convince His Sons of truth. 6 The extension of truth, which the law of the Kingdom, rests only on the knowledge of what truth is. 7 This is your inheritance and requires no learning at all, but when you disinherited yourself you became a learner of necessity. T-7.II.6. No one questions the connection of learning and memory. 2 Learning is impossible without memory since it must be consistent to be remembered. 3 That is why the Holy Spirit's teaching is a lesson in remembering. 4 I said before that He teaches remembering and forgetting, but the forgetting is only to make the remembering consistent. 5 You forget in order to remember better. 6 You will not understand His translations while you listen to two ways of interpreting them. 7 Therefore you must forget or relinquish one to understand the other. 8 This is the only way you can learn consistency, so that you can finally consistent. T-7.II.7. What can the perfect consistency of the Kingdom mean to those who are confused? 2 It is apparent that confusion interferes with meaning, and therefore prevents the learner from appreciating it. 3 There is no confusion in the Kingdom, because there is only one meaning. 4 This meaning comes from God and God. 5 Because it is also you, you share it and extend it as your Creator did. 6 This needs no translation because it is perfectly understood, but it does need extension because it extension. 7 Communication is perfectly direct and perfectly united. p115 8 It is totally free, because nothing discordant ever enters. 9 That is why it is the Kingdom of God. 10 It belongs to Him and is therefore like Him. 11 That is its reality, and nothing can assail it. III. The Reality of the Kingdom T-7.III.1. The Holy Spirit teaches one lesson, and applies it to all individuals in all situations. 2 Being conflict-free, He maximizes all efforts and all results. 3 By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that all power is yours. 4 Its application does not matter. 5 It is always maximal. 6 Your vigilance does not establish it as yours, but it does enable you to use it always and in all ways. 7 When I said "I am with you always," I meant it literally. 8 I am not absent to anyone in any situation. 9 Because I am always with you, are the way, the truth and the life. 10 You did not make this power, any more than I did. 11 It was created to be shared, and therefore cannot be meaningfully perceived as belonging to anyone at the expense of another. 12 Such a perception makes it meaningless by eliminating or overlooking its real and only meaning. T-7.III.2. God's meaning waits in the Kingdom, because that is where He placed it. 2 It does not wait in time. 3 It merely rests in the Kingdom because it belongs there, as you do. 4 How can you who are God's meaning perceive yourself as absent from it? 5 You can see yourself as separated from your meaning only by experiencing yourself as unreal. 6 This is why the ego is insane; it teaches that you are not what you are. 7 That is so contradictory it is clearly impossible. 8 It is therefore a lesson you cannot really learn, and therefore cannot really teach. 9 Yet you are always teaching. 10 You must, therefore, be teaching something else, even though the ego does not know what it is. 11 The ego, then, is always being undone, and does suspect your motives. 12 Your mind cannot be unified in allegiance to the ego, because the mind does not belong to it. 13 Yet what is "treacherous" to the ego is faithful to peace. 14 The ego's "enemy" is therefore your friend. T-7.III.3. I said before that the ego's friend is not part of you, because the ego perceives itself at war and therefore in need of allies. 2 You who are not at war must look for brothers and recognize all whom you see as brothers, because only equals are at peace. 3 Because God's equal Sons have everything, they cannot compete. p116 4 Yet if they perceive any of their brothers as anything other than their perfect equals, the idea of competition has entered their minds. 5 Do not underestimate your need to be vigilant this idea, because all your conflicts come from it. 6 It the belief that conflicting interests are possible, and therefore you have accepted the impossible as true. 7 Is that different from saying you perceive yourself as unreal? T-7.III.4. To be in the Kingdom is merely to focus your full attention on it. 2 As long as you believe you can attend to what is not true, you are accepting conflict as your choice. 3 Is it really a choice? 4 It seems to be, but seeming and reality are hardly the same. 5 You who the Kingdom are not concerned with seeming. 6 Reality is yours because you are reality. 7 This is how and are ultimately reconciled, not in the Kingdom, but in your mind. 8 The altar there is the only reality. 9 The altar is perfectly clear in thought, because it is a reflection of perfect Thought. 10 Your right mind sees only brothers, because it sees only in its own light. T-7.III.5. God has lit your mind Himself, and keeps your mind lit by His light because His light is what your mind is. 2 This is totally beyond question, and when you question it you are answered. 3 The Answer merely undoes the question by establishing the fact that to question reality is to question meaninglessly. 4 That is why the Holy Spirit never questions. 5 His sole function is to undo the questionable and thus lead to certainty. 6 The certain are perfectly calm, because they are not in doubt. 7 They do not raise questions, because nothing questionable enters their minds. 8 This holds them in perfect serenity, because this is what they share, knowing what they are. IV. Healing as the Recognition of Truth T-7.IV.1. Truth can only recognized and only be recognized. 2 Inspiration is of the Holy Spirit, and certainty is of God according to His laws. 3 Both, therefore, come from the same Source, since inspiration comes from the Voice for God and certainty comes from the laws of God. 4 Healing does not come directly from God, Who knows His creations as perfectly whole. 5 Yet healing is still of God, because it proceeds from His Voice and from His laws. 6 It is their result, in a state of mind that does not know Him. 7 The state is unknown to Him and therefore does not exist, but those who sleep are unaware. p117 8 Because they are unaware, they do not know. T-7.IV.2. The Holy Spirit must work you to teach you He is you. 2 This is an intermediary step toward the knowledge that you are in God because you are part of Him. 3 The miracles the Holy Spirit inspires can have no order of difficulty, because every part of creation is of one order. 4 This is God's Will and yours. 5 The laws of God establish this, and the Holy Spirit reminds you of it. 6 When you heal, you are remembering the laws of God and forgetting the laws of the ego. 7 I said before that forgetting is merely a way of remembering better. 8 It is therefore not the opposite of remembering when it is properly perceived. 9 Perceived improperly, it induces a perception of conflict with something else, as all incorrect perception does. 10 Properly perceived, it can be used as a way out of conflict, as all proper perception can. T-7.IV.3. The ego does not want to teach everyone all it has learned, because that would defeat its purpose. 2 Therefore it does not really learn at all. 3 The Holy Spirit teaches you to use what the ego has made, to teach the opposite of what the ego has "learned." 4 The kind of learning is as irrelevant as is the particular ability that was applied to the learning. 5 All you need do is make the effort to learn, for the Holy Spirit has a unified goal for the effort. 6 If different abilities are applied long enough to one goal, the abilities themselves become unified. 7 This is because they are channelized in one direction, or in one way. 8 Ultimately, then, they all contribute to one result, and by so doing, their similarity rather than their differences is emphasized. T-7.IV.4. All abilities should therefore be given over to the Holy Spirit, Who understands how to use them properly. 2 He uses them only for healing, because He knows you only as whole. 3 By healing you learn of wholeness, and by learning of wholeness you learn to remember God. 4 You have forgotten Him, but the Holy Spirit understands that your forgetting must be translated into a way of remembering. T-7.IV.5. The ego's goal is as unified as the Holy Spirit's, and it is because of this that their goals can never be reconciled in any way or to any extent. 2 The ego always seeks to divide and separate. 3 The Holy Spirit always seeks to unify and heal. 4 As you heal you are healed, because the Holy Spirit sees no order of difficulty in healing. 5 Healing is the way to undo the belief in differences, being the only way of perceiving the Sonship as one. p118 6 This perception is therefore in accord with the laws of God, even in a state of mind that is out of accord with His. 7 The strength of right perception is so great that it brings the mind into accord with His, because it serves His Voice, which is in all of you. T-7.IV.6. To think you can oppose the Will of God is a real delusion. 2 The ego believes that it can, and that it can offer you its own "will" as a gift. 3 4 It is not a gift. 5 It is nothing at all. 6 God has given you a gift that you both and 7 When you do not use it, you forget that you have it. 8 By not remembering it, you do not know what you are. 9 Healing, then, is a way of approaching knowledge by thinking in accordance with the laws of God, and recognizing their universality. 10 Without this recognition, you have made the laws meaningless to you. 11 Yet the laws are not meaningless, since all meaning is contained by them and in them. T-7.IV.7. Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, because that is where the laws of God operate truly, and they can operate only truly because they are the laws of truth. 2 But seek this only, because you can find nothing else. 3 There nothing else. 4 God is All in all in a very literal sense. 5 All being is in Him Who is all Being. 6 You are therefore in Him since your being is His. 7 Healing is a way of forgetting the sense of danger the ego has induced in you, by not recognizing its existence in your brother. 8 This strengthens the Holy Spirit in both of you, because it is a refusal to acknowledge fear. 9 Love needs only this invitation. 10 It comes freely to all the Sonship, being what the Sonship is. 11 By your awakening to it, you are merely forgetting what you are not. 12 This enables you to remember what you are. V. Healing and the Changelessness of Mind T-7.V.1. The body is nothing more than a framework for developing abilities, which is quite apart from what they are used for. 2 is a decision. 3 The effects of the ego's decision in this matter are so apparent that they need no elaboration, but the Holy Spirit's decision to use the body only for communication has such a direct connection with healing that it does need clarification. 4 The unhealed healer obviously does not understand his own vocation. p119 T-7.V.2. Only minds communicate. 2 Since the ego cannot obliterate the impulse to communicate because it is also the impulse to create, it can only teach you that the body can both communicate and create, and therefore does not need the mind. 3 The ego thus tries to teach you that the body can act like the mind, and is therefore self-sufficient. 4 Yet we have learned that behavior is not the level for either teaching or learning, since you can act in accordance with what you do not believe. 5 To do this, however, will weaken you as a teacher and a learner because, as has been repeatedly emphasized, you teach what you believe. 6 An inconsistent lesson will be poorly taught and poorly learned. 7 If you teach both sickness healing, you are both a poor teacher and a poor learner. T-7.V.3. Healing is the one ability everyone can develop and must develop if he is to be healed. 2 Healing is the Holy Spirit's form of communication in this world, and the only one He accepts. 3 He recognizes no other, because He does not accept the ego's confusion of mind and body. 4 Minds can communicate, but they cannot hurt. 5 The body in the service of the ego can hurt other bodies, but this cannot occur unless the body has already been confused with the mind. 6 This situation, too, can be used either for healing or for magic, but you must remember that magic always involves the belief that healing is harmful. 7 This belief is its totally insane premise, and so it proceeds accordingly. T-7.V.4. Healing only strengthens. 2 Magic always tries to weaken. 3 Healing perceives nothing in the healer that everyone else does not share with him. 4 Magic always sees something "special" in the healer, which he believes he can offer as a gift to someone who does not have it. 5 He may believe that the gift comes from God to him, but it is quite evident that he does not understand God if he thinks he has something that others lack. T-7.V.5. The Holy Spirit does not work by chance, and healing that is of Him works. 2 Unless the healer always heals by Him the results will vary. 3 Yet healing itself is consistent, since only consistency is conflict-free, and only the conflict-free are whole. 4 By accepting exceptions and acknowledging that he can sometimes heal and sometimes not, the healer is obviously accepting inconsistency. 5 He is therefore in conflict, and is teaching conflict. 6 Can anything of God not be for all and for always? 7 Love is incapable of any exceptions. 8 Only if there is fear does the idea of exceptions seem to be meaningful. 9 Exceptions are fearful because they are made by fear. p120 10 The "fearful healer" is a contradiction in terms, and is therefore a concept that only a conflicted mind could possibly perceive as meaningful. T-7.V.6. Fear does not gladden. 2 Healing does. 3 Fear always makes exceptions. 4 Healing never does. 5 Fear produces dissociation, because it induces separation. 6 Healing always produces harmony, because it proceeds from integration. 7 It is predictable because it can be counted on. 8 Everything that is of God can be counted on, because everything of God is wholly real. 9 Healing can be counted on because it is inspired by His Voice, and is in accord with His laws. 10 Yet if healing is consistent it cannot be inconsistently understood. 11 Understanding means consistency because God means consistency. 12 Since that is His meaning, it is also yours. 13 Your meaning cannot be out of accord with His, because your whole meaning and your only meaning comes from His and is like His. 14 God cannot be out of accord with Himself, and you cannot be out of accord with Him. 15 You cannot separate your Self from your Creator, Who created you by sharing His Being with you. T-7.V.7. The unhealed healer wants gratitude from his brothers, but he is not grateful to them. 2 That is because he thinks he is giving something to them, and is not receiving something equally desirable in return. 3 His teaching is limited because he is learning so little. 4 His healing lesson is limited by his own ingratitude, which is a lesson in sickness. 5 True learning is constant, and so vital in its power for change that a Son of God can recognize his power in one instant and change the world in the next. 6 That is because, by changing his mind, he has changed the most powerful device that was ever given him for change. 7 This in no way contradicts the changelessness of mind as God created it, but you think that you have changed it as long as you learn through the ego. 8 This places you in a position of needing to learn a lesson that seems contradictory;-you must learn to change your mind about your mind. 9 Only by this can you learn that it changeless. T-7.V.8. When you heal, that is exactly what you learning. 2 You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by realizing that he could not have changed his mind. 3 That is how you perceive the Holy Spirit in him. 4 It is only the Holy Spirit in him that never changes His Mind. 5 He himself may think he can, or he would not perceive himself as sick. 6 He therefore does not know what his Self is. 7 If you see only the changeless in him you have not really changed him. p121 8 By changing your mind about his him, you help him undo the change his ego thinks it has made in him. T-7.V.9. As you can hear two voices, so you can see in two ways. 2 One way shows you an image, or an idol that you may worship out of fear, but will never love. 3 The other shows you only truth, which you will love because you will understand it. 4 Understanding is appreciation, because what you understand you can identify with, and by making it part of you, you have accepted it with love. 5 That is how God Himself created you; in understanding, in appreciation and in love. 6 The ego is totally unable to understand this, because it does not understand what it makes, does not appreciate it and does not love it. 7 It incorporates to take away. 8 It literally believes that every time it deprives someone of something, it has increased. 9 I have spoken often of the increase of the Kingdom by your creations, which can only be created as you were. 10 The whole glory and perfect joy that the Kingdom lies in you to give. 11 Do you not want to give it? T-7.V.10. You cannot forget the Father because I am with you, and I cannot forget Him. 2 To forget me is to forget yourself and Him Who created you. 3 Our brothers are forgetful. 4 That is why they need your remembrance of me and of Him Who created me. 5 Through this remembrance, you can change their minds about themselves, as I can change yours. 6 Your mind is so powerful a light that you can look into theirs and enlighten them, as I can enlighten yours. 7 I do not want to share my body in communion because this is to share nothing. 8 Would I try to share an illusion with the most holy children of a most holy Father? 9 Yet I do want to share my mind with you because we are of one Mind, and that Mind is ours. 10 See only this Mind everywhere, because only this is everywhere and in everything. 11 It is everything because it encompasses all things within itself. 12 Blessed are you who perceive only this, because you perceive only what is true. T-7.V.11. Come therefore unto me, and learn of the truth in you. 2 The mind we share is shared by all our brothers, and as we see them truly they will be healed. 3 Let your mind shine with mine upon their minds, and by our gratitude to them make them aware of the light in them. 4 This light will shine back upon you and on the whole Sonship, because this is your proper gift to God. 5 He will accept it and give it to the Sonship, because it is acceptable to Him and therefore to His Sons. 6 This is true communion with the Holy Spirit, Who sees the altar of God in everyone, and by bringing it to your appreciation, He calls upon you to love God and His creation. p122 7 You can appreciate the Sonship only as one. 8 This is part of the law of creation, and therefore governs all thought. VI. From Vigilance to Peace T-7.VI.1. Although you can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceive it as fragmented. 2 It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you will not attribute to all of it. 3 That is why attack is never discrete, and why it must be relinquished entirely. 4 If it is not relinquished entirely it is not relinquished at all. 5 Fear and love make or create, depending on whether the ego or the Holy Spirit begets or inspires them, but they return to the mind of the thinker and they will affect his total perception. 6 That includes his concept of God, of His creations and of his own. 7 He will not appreciate any of Them if he regards Them fearfully. 8 He will appreciate all of Them if he regards Them with love. T-7.VI.2. The mind that accepts attack cannot love. 2 That is because it believes it can destroy love, and therefore does not understand what love is. 3 If it does not understand what love is, it cannot perceive itself as loving. 4 This loses the awareness of being, induces feelings of unreality and results in utter confusion. 5 Your thinking has done this because of its power, but your thinking can also save you from this because its power is not of your making. 6 Your ability to direct your thinking as you choose is part of its power. 7 If you do not believe you can do this you have denied the power of your thought, and thus rendered it powerless in your belief. T-7.VI.3. The ingeniousness of the ego to preserve itself is enormous, but it stems from the very power of the mind the ego denies. 2 This means that the ego attacks what is preserving it, which must result in extreme anxiety. 3 That is why the ego never recognizes what it is doing. 4 It is perfectly logical but clearly insane. 5 The ego draws upon the one source that is totally inimical to its existence its existence. 6 Fearful of perceiving the power of this source, it is forced to depreciate it. 7 This threatens its own existence, a state which it finds intolerable. 8 Remaining logical but still insane, the ego resolves this completely insane dilemma in a completely insane way. 9 It does not perceive existence as threatened by projecting the threat onto and perceiving your being as nonexistent. p123 10 This ensures its continuance if you side with it, by guaranteeing that you will not know your own safety. T-7.VI.4. The ego cannot afford to know anything. 2 Knowledge is total, and the ego does not believe in totality. 3 This unbelief is its origin, and while the ego does not love you it faithful to its own antecedents, begetting as it was begotten. 4 Mind always reproduces as it was produced. 5 Produced by fear, the ego reproduces fear. 6 This is its allegiance, and this allegiance makes it treacherous to love because you love. 7 Love is your power, which the ego must deny. 8 It must also deny everything this power gives you it gives you everything. 9 No one who has everything wants the ego. 10 Its own maker, then, does not want it. 11 Rejection is therefore the only decision the ego could possibly encounter, if the mind that made it knew itself. 12 And if it recognized any part of the Sonship, it know itself. T-7.VI.5. The ego therefore opposes all appreciation, all recognition, all sane perception and all knowledge. 2 It perceives their threat as total, because it senses that all commitments the mind makes are total. 3 Forced, therefore, to detach itself from you, it is willing to attach itself to anything else. 4 But there nothing else. 5 The mind can, however, make up illusions, and if it does so it will believe in them, because that is how it made them. T-7.VI.6. The Holy Spirit undoes illusions without attacking them, because He cannot perceive them at all. 2 They therefore do not exist for Him. 3 He resolves the apparent conflict they engender by perceiving conflict as meaningless. 4 I have said before that the Holy Spirit perceives the conflict exactly as it is, and it meaningless. 5 The Holy Spirit does not want you to understand conflict; He wants you to realize that, because conflict is meaningless, it is not understandable. 6 As I have already said, understanding brings appreciation and appreciation brings love. 7 Nothing else can be understood, because nothing else is real and therefore nothing else has meaning. T-7.VI.7. If you will keep in mind what the Holy Spirit offers you, you cannot be vigilant for anything God and His Kingdom. 2 The only reason you may find this hard to accept is because you may still think there is something else. 3 Belief does not require vigilance unless it is conflicted. 4 If it is, there are conflicting components within it that have led to a state of war, and vigilance has therefore become essential. 5 Vigilance has no place in peace. 6 It is necessary against beliefs that are not true, and would never have been called upon by the Holy Spirit if you had not believed the untrue. p124 7 When you believe something, you have made it true for you. 8 When you believe what God does not know, your thought seems to contradict His, and this makes it appear as if you are attacking Him. T-7.VI.8. I have repeatedly emphasized that the ego does believe it can attack God, and tries to persuade you that you have done this. 2 If the mind cannot attack, the ego proceeds perfectly logically to the belief that you must be a body. 3 By not seeing you as you are, it can see itself as it wants to be. 4 Aware of its weakness the ego wants your allegiance, but not as you really are. 5 The ego therefore wants to engage your mind in its own delusional system, because otherwise the light of your understanding would dispel it. 6 It wants no part of truth, because the ego itself is not true. 7 If truth is total, the untrue cannot exist. 8 Commitment to either must be total; they cannot coexist in your mind without splitting it. 9 If they cannot coexist in peace, and if you want peace, you must give up the idea of conflict entirely and for all time. 10 This requires vigilance only as long as you do not recognize what is true. 11 While you believe that two totally contradictory thought systems share truth, your need for vigilance is apparent. T-7.VI.9. Your mind is dividing its allegiance between two kingdoms, and you are totally committed to neither. 2 Your identification with the Kingdom is totally beyond question except by you, when you are thinking insanely. 3 What you are is not established by your perception, and is not influenced by it at all. 4 Perceived problems in identification at any level are not problems of fact. 5 They are problems of understanding, since their presence implies a belief that what you are is up to you to decide. 6 The ego believes this totally, being fully committed to it. 7 It is not true. 8 The ego therefore is totally committed to untruth, perceiving in total contradiction to the Holy Spirit and to the knowledge of God. T-7.VI.10. You can be perceived with meaning only by the Holy Spirit because your being the knowledge of God. 2 Any belief you accept apart from this will obscure God's Voice in you, and will therefore obscure God to you. 3 Unless you perceive His creation truly you cannot know the Creator, since God and His creation are not separate. 4 The Oneness of the Creator and the creation is your wholeness, your sanity and your limitless power. 5 This limitless power is God's gift to you, because it is what you are. 6 If you dissociate your mind from it you are perceiving the most powerful force in the universe as if it were weak, because you do not believe you are part of it. p125 T-7.VI.11. Perceived without your part in it, God's creation is seen as weak, and those who see themselves as weakened do attack. 2 The attack must be blind, however, because there is nothing to attack. 3 Therefore they make up images, perceive them as unworthy and attack them for their unworthiness. 4 That is all the world of the ego is. 5 Nothing. 6 It has no meaning. 7 It does not exist. 8 Do not try to understand it because, if you do, you are believing that it can be understood and is therefore capable of being appreciated and loved. 9 That would justify its existence, which cannot be justified. 10 You cannot make the meaningless meaningful. 11 This can only be an insane attempt. T-7.VI.12. Allowing insanity to enter your mind means that you have not judged sanity as wholly desirable. 2 If you want something else you will make something else, but because it is something else, it will attack your thought system and divide your allegiance. 3 You cannot create in this divided state, and you must be vigilant against this divided state because only peace can be extended. 4 Your divided mind is blocking the extension of the Kingdom, and its extension is your joy. 5 If you do not extend the Kingdom, you are not thinking with your Creator and creating as He created. T-7.VI.13. In this depressing state the Holy Spirit reminds you gently that you are sad because you are not fulfilling your function as co-creator with God, and are therefore depriving yourself of joy. 2 This is not God's choice but yours. 3 If your mind could be out of accord with God's, you would be willing without meaning. 4 Yet because God's Will is unchangeable, no conflict of will is possible. 5 This is the Holy Spirit's perfectly consistent teaching. 6 Creation, not separation, is your will it is God's, and nothing that opposes this means anything at all. 7 Being a perfect accomplishment, the Sonship can only accomplish perfectly, extending the joy in which it was created, and identifying itself with both its Creator and its creations, knowing They are One. p126 VII. The Totality of the Kingdom T-7.VII.1. Whenever you deny a blessing to a brother will feel deprived, because denial is as total as love. 2 It is as impossible to deny part of the Sonship as it is to love it in part. 3 Nor is it possible to love it totally at times. 4 You cannot be totally committed sometimes. 5 Denial has no power in itself, but you can give it the power of your mind, whose power is without limit. 6 If you use it to deny reality, reality is gone for you. 7 cannot be partly appreciated. 8 That is why denying any part of it means you have lost the awareness of all of it. 9 Yet denial is a defense, and so it is as capable of being used positively as well as negatively. 10 Used negatively it will be destructive, because it will be used for attack. 11 But in the service of the Holy Spirit, it can help you recognize part of reality, and thus appreciate all of it. 12 Mind is too powerful to be subject to exclusion. 13 You will never be able to exclude yourself from your thoughts. T-7.VII.2. When a brother acts insanely, he is offering you an opportunity to bless him. 2 His need is yours. 3 You need the blessing you can offer him. 4 There is no way for you to have it except by giving it. 5 This is the law of God, and it has no exceptions. 6 What you deny you lack, not because it is lacking, but because you have denied it in another and are therefore not aware of it in yourself. 7 Every response you make is determined by what you think you are, and what you want to be what you think you are. 8 What you want to be, then, must determine every response you make. T-7.VII.3. You do not need God's blessing because that you have forever, but you do need yours. 2 The ego's picture of you is deprived, unloving and vulnerable. 3 You cannot love this. 4 Yet you can very easily escape from this image by leaving it behind. 5 You are not there and that is not you. 6 Do not see this picture in anyone, or you have accepted it you. 7 All illusions about the Sonship are dispelled together as they were made together. 8 Teach no one that he is what you would not want to be. 9 Your brother is the mirror in which you see the image of yourself as long as perception lasts. 10 And perception will last until the Sonship knows itself as whole. 11 You made perception and it must last as long as you want it. T-7.VII.4. Illusions are investments. 2 They will last as long as you value them. 3 Values are relative, but they are powerful because they are mental judgments. 4 The only way to dispel illusions is to withdraw all investment from them, and they will have no life for you because you will have put them out of your mind. p127 5 While you include them in it, you are giving life to them. 6 Except there is nothing there to receive your gift. T-7.VII.5. The gift of life is yours to give, because it was given you. 2 You are unaware of your gift because you do not give it. 3 You cannot make nothing live, since nothing cannot be enlivened. 4 Therefore, you are not extending the gift you both and and so you do not know your being. 5 All confusion comes from not extending life, because that is not the Will of your Creator. 6 You can do nothing apart from Him, and you do nothing apart from Him. 7 Keep His way to remember yourself, and teach His way lest you forget yourself. 8 Give only honor to the Sons of the living God, and count yourself among them gladly. T-7.VII.6. Only honor is a fitting gift for those whom God Himself created worthy of honor, and whom He honors. 2 Give them the appreciation God accords them always, because they are His beloved Sons in whom He is well pleased. 3 You cannot be apart from them because you are not apart from Him. 4 Rest in His Love and protect your rest by loving. 5 But love everything He created, of which you are a part, or you cannot learn of His peace and accept His gift for yourself and as yourself. 6 You cannot know your own perfection until you have honored all those who were created like you. T-7.VII.7. One child of God is the only teacher sufficiently worthy to teach another. 2 One Teacher is in all minds and He teaches the same lesson to all. 3 He always teaches you the inestimable worth of every Son of God, teaching it with infinite patience born of the infinite Love for which He speaks. 4 Every attack is a call for His patience, since His patience can translate attack into blessing. 5 Those who attack do not know they are blessed. 6 They attack because they believe they are deprived. 7 Give, therefore, of your abundance, and teach your brothers theirs. 8 Do not share their illusions of scarcity, or you will perceive yourself as lacking. T-7.VII.8. Attack could never promote attack unless you perceived it as a means of depriving you of something you want. 2 Yet you cannot lose anything unless you do not value it, and therefore do not want it. 3 This makes you feel deprived of it, and by projecting your own rejection you then believe that others are taking it from you. 4 You must be fearful if you believe that your brother is attacking you to tear the Kingdom of Heaven from you. 5 This is the ultimate basis for all the ego's projection. p128 T-7.VII.9. Being the part of your mind that does not believe it is responsible for itself, and being without allegiance to God, the ego is incapable of trust. 2 Projecting its insane belief that you have been treacherous to your Creator, it believes that your brothers, who are as incapable of this as you are, are out to take God from you. 3 Whenever a brother attacks another, that what he believes. 4 Projection always sees your wishes in others. 5 If you choose to separate yourself from God, that is what you will think others are doing to you. T-7.VII.10. You the Will of God. 2 Do not accept anything else as your will, or you are denying what you are. 3 Deny this and you will attack, believing you have been attacked. 4 But see the Love of God in you, and you will see it everywhere because it everywhere. 5 See His abundance in everyone, and you will know that you are in Him with them. 6 They are part of you, as you are part of God. 7 You are as lonely without understanding this as God Himself is lonely when His Sons do not know Him. 8 The peace of God is understanding this. 9 There is only one way out of the world's thinking, just as there was only one way into it. 10 Understand totally by understanding totality. T-7.VII.11. Perceive any part of the ego's thought system as wholly insane, wholly delusional and wholly undesirable, and you have correctly evaluated all of it. 2 This correction enables you to perceive any part of creation as wholly real, wholly perfect and wholly desirable. 3 Wanting this only you will this only, and giving this only you will only this. 4 The gifts you offer to the ego are always experienced as sacrifices, but the gifts you offer to the Kingdom are gifts to you. 5 They will always be treasured by God because they belong to His beloved Sons, who belong to Him. 6 All power and glory are yours because the Kingdom is His. VIII. The Unbelievable Belief T-7.VIII.1. We have said that without projection there can be no anger, but it is also true that without extension there can be no love. 2 These reflect a fundamental law of the mind, and therefore one that always operates. 3 It is the law by which you create and were created. 4 It is the law that unifies the Kingdom, and keeps it in the Mind of God. 5 To the ego, the law is perceived as a means of getting rid of something it does not want. p129 6 To the Holy Spirit, it is the fundamental law of sharing, by which you give what you value in order to keep it in your mind. 7 To the Holy Spirit it is the law of extension. 8 To the ego it is the law of deprivation. 9 It therefore produces abundance or scarcity, depending on how you choose to apply it. 10 This choice is up to you, but it is not up to you to decide whether or not you will utilize the law. 11 Every mind must project or extend, because that is how it lives, and every mind is life. T-7.VIII.2. The ego's use of projection must be fully understood before the inevitable association between projection and anger can be finally undone. 2 The ego always tries to preserve conflict. 3 It is very ingenious in devising ways that seem to diminish conflict, because it does not want you to find conflict so intolerable that you will insist on giving it up. 4 The ego therefore tries to persuade you that can free you of conflict, lest you give the ego up and free yourself. 5 Using its own warped version of the laws of God, the ego utilizes the power of the mind only to defeat the mind's real purpose. 6 It projects conflict from your mind to other minds, in an attempt to persuade you that you have gotten rid of the problem. T-7.VIII.3. There are two major errors involved in this attempt. 2 First, strictly speaking, conflict cannot be projected because it cannot be shared. 3 Any attempt to keep part of it and get rid of another part does not really mean anything. 4 Remember that a conflicted teacher is a poor teacher and a poor learner. 5 His lessons are confused, and their transfer value is limited by his confusion. 6 The second error is the idea that you can get rid of something you do not want by giving it away. 7 Giving it is how you it. 8 The belief that by seeing it outside you have excluded it from within is a complete distortion of the power of extension. 9 That is why those who project are vigilant for their own safety. 10 They are afraid that their projections will return and hurt them. 11 Believing they have blotted their projections from their own minds, they also believe their projections are trying to creep back in. 12 Since the projections have not left their minds, they are forced to engage in constant activity in order not to recognize this. T-7.VIII.4. You cannot perpetuate an illusion about another without perpetuating it about yourself. 2 There is no way out of this, because it is impossible to fragment the mind. 3 To fragment is to break into pieces, and mind cannot attack or be attacked. 4 The belief that it can, an error the ego always makes, underlies its whole use of projection. p130 5 It does not understand what mind is, and therefore does not understand what are. 6 Yet its existence is dependent on your mind, because the ego is your belief. 7 The ego is a confusion in identification. 8 Never having had a consistent model, it never developed consistently. 9 It is the product of the misapplication of the laws of God by distorted minds that are misusing their power. T-7.VIII.5. 2 It depends on your mind, and as you made it by believing in it, so you can dispel it by withdrawing belief from it. 3 Do not project the responsibility for your belief in it onto anyone else, or you will preserve the belief. 4 When you are willing to accept sole responsibility for the ego's existence you will have laid aside all anger and all attack, because they come from an attempt to project responsibility for your own errors. 5 But having accepted the errors as yours, do not keep them. 6 Give them over quickly to the Holy Spirit to be undone completely, so that all their effects will vanish from your mind and from the Sonship as a whole. T-7.VIII.6. The Holy Spirit will teach you to perceive beyond your belief, because truth is beyond belief and His perception is true. 2 The ego can be completely forgotten at any time, because it is a totally incredible belief, and no one can keep a belief he has judged to be unbelievable. 3 The more you learn about the ego, the more you realize that it cannot be believed. 4 The incredible cannot be understood because it is unbelievable. 5 The meaninglessness of perception based on the unbelievable is apparent, but it may not be recognized as being beyond belief, because it is made belief. T-7.VIII.7. The whole purpose of this course is to teach you that the ego is unbelievable and will forever be unbelievable. 2 You who made the ego by believing the unbelievable cannot make this judgment alone. 3 By accepting the Atonement for yourself, you are deciding against the belief that you can be alone, thus dispelling the idea of separation and affirming your true identification with the whole Kingdom as literally part of you. 4 This identification is as beyond doubt as it is beyond belief. 5 Your wholeness has no limits because being is infinity. p131 IX. The Extension of the Kingdom T-7.IX.1. Only you can limit your creative power, but God wills to release it. 2 He no more wills you to deprive yourself of your creations than He wills to deprive Himself of His. 3 Do not withhold your gifts to the Sonship, or you withhold yourself from God! 4 Selfishness is of the ego, but Self-fullness is of spirit because that is how God created it. 5 The Holy Spirit is in the part of the mind that lies between the ego and the spirit, mediating between them always in favor of the spirit. 6 To the ego this is partiality, and it responds as if it were being sided against. 7 To spirit this is truth, because it knows its fullness and cannot conceive of any part from which it is excluded. T-7.IX.2. Spirit knows that the awareness of all its brothers is included in its own, as it is included in God. 2 The power of the whole Sonship and of its Creator is therefore spirit's own fullness, rendering its creations equally whole and equal in perfection. 3 The ego cannot prevail against a totality that includes God, and any totality include God. 4 Everything He created is given all His power, because it is part of Him and shares His Being with Him. 5 Creating is the opposite of loss, as blessing is the opposite of sacrifice. 6 Being be extended. 7 That is how it retains the knowledge of itself. 8 Spirit yearns to share its being as its Creator did. 9 Created by sharing, its will is to create. 10 It does not wish to contain God, but wills to extend His Being. T-7.IX.3. The extension of God's Being is spirit's only function. 2 Its fullness cannot be contained, any more than can the fullness of its Creator. 3 Fullness is extension. 4 The ego's whole thought system blocks extension, and thus blocks your only function. 5 It therefore blocks your joy, so that you perceive yourself as unfulfilled. 6 Unless you create you unfulfilled, but God does not know unfulfillment and therefore you must create. 7 You may not know your own creations, but this can no more interfere with their reality than your unawareness of your spirit can interfere with its being. T-7.IX.4. The Kingdom is forever extending because it is in the Mind of God. 2 You do not know your joy because you do not know your own Self-fullness. 3 Exclude any part of the Kingdom from yourself and you are not whole. 4 A split mind cannot perceive its fullness, and needs the miracle of its wholeness to dawn upon it and heal it. 5 This reawakens the wholeness in it, and restores it to the Kingdom because of its acceptance of wholeness. p132 6 The full appreciation of the mind's Self-fullness makes selfishness impossible and extension inevitable. 7 That is why there is perfect peace in the Kingdom. 8 Spirit is fulfilling its function, and only complete fulfillment is peace. T-7.IX.5. Your creations are protected for you because the Holy Spirit, Who is in your mind, knows of them and can bring them into your awareness whenever you will let Him. 2 They are there as part of your own being, because your fulfillment includes them. 3 The creations of every Son of God are yours, since every creation belongs to everyone, being created for the Sonship as a whole. T-7.IX.6. You have not failed to increase the inheritance of the Sons of God, and thus have not failed to secure it for yourself. 2 Since it was the Will of God to give it to you, He gave it forever. 3 Since it was His Will that you have it forever, He gave you the means for keeping it. 4 5 Disobeying God's Will is meaningful only to the insane. 6 In truth it is impossible. 7 Your Self-fullness is as boundless as God's. 8 Like His, It extends forever and in perfect peace. 9 Its radiance is so intense that It creates in perfect joy, and only the whole can be born of Its Wholeness. T-7.IX.7. Be confident that you have never lost your Identity and the extensions which maintain It in wholeness and peace. 2 Miracles are an expression of this confidence. 3 They are reflections of both your proper identification with your brothers, and of your awareness that your identification is maintained by extension. 4 The miracle is a lesson in total perception. 5 By including any part of totality in the lesson, you have included the whole. X. The Confusion of Pain and Joy T-7.X.1. The Kingdom is the result of premises, just as this world is. 2 You may have carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is total confusion about everything. 3 If you really saw this result you could not want it. 4 The only reason you could possibly want any part of it is because you do not see the whole of it. 5 You are willing to look at the ego's premises, but not at their logical outcome. 6 Is it not possible that you have done the same thing with the premises of God? 7 Your creations are the logical outcome of His premises. 8 His thinking has established them for you. 9 They are exactly where they belong. 10 They belong in your mind as part of your identification with His, but your state of mind and your recognition of what is in it depend on what you believe about your mind. p133 11 Whatever these beliefs may be, they are the premises that will determine what you accept into your mind. T-7.X.2. It is surely clear that you can both accept into your mind what is not there, and deny what is. 2 Yet the function God Himself gave your mind through His you may deny, but you cannot prevent. 3 It is the logical outcome of what you are. 4 The ability to see a logical outcome depends on the willingness to see it, but its truth has nothing to do with your willingness. 5 Truth is God's Will. 6 Share His Will and you share what He knows. 7 Deny His Will as yours, and you are denying His Kingdom yours. T-7.X.3. The Holy Spirit will direct you only so as to avoid pain. 2 Surely no one would object to this goal if he recognized it. 3 The problem is not whether what the Holy Spirit says is true, but whether you want to listen to what He says. 4 You no more recognize what is painful than you know what is joyful, and are, in fact, very apt to confuse the two. 5 The Holy Spirit's main function is to teach you to tell them apart. 6 What is joyful to you is painful to the ego, and as long as you are in doubt about what you are, you will be confused about joy and pain. 7 This confusion is the cause of the whole idea of sacrifice. 8 Obey the Holy Spirit, and you will be giving up the ego. 9 But you will be sacrificing nothing. 10 On the contrary, you will be gaining everything. 11 If you believed this, there would be no conflict. T-7.X.4. That is why you need to demonstrate the obvious to yourself. 2 It is not obvious to you. 3 You believe that doing the opposite of God's Will can be better for you. 4 You also believe that it is possible to the opposite of God's Will. 5 Therefore, you believe that an impossible choice is open to you, and one which is both fearful and desirable. 6 Yet God wills. 7 He does not wish. 8 Your will is as powerful as His because it His. 9 The ego's wishes do not mean anything, because the ego wishes for the impossible. 10 You can wish for the impossible, but you can will only with God. 11 This is the ego's weakness and your strength. T-7.X.5. The Holy Spirit always sides with you and with your strength. 2 As long as you avoid His guidance in any way, you want to be weak. 3 Yet weakness is frightening. 4 What else, then, can this decision mean except that you want to be fearful? 5 The Holy Spirit never asks for sacrifice, but the ego always does. 6 When you are confused about this distinction in motivation, it can only be due to projection. p134 7 Projection is a confusion in motivation, and given this confusion, trust becomes impossible. 8 No one gladly obeys a guide he does not trust, but this does not mean that the guide is untrustworthy. 9 In this case, it always means that the follower is. 10 However, this, too, is merely a matter of his own belief. 11 Believing that he can betray, he believes that everything can betray him. 12 Yet this is only because he has elected to follow false guidance. 13 Unable to follow this guidance without fear, he associates fear with guidance, and refuses to follow any guidance at all. 14 If the result of this decision is confusion, this is hardly surprising. T-7.X.6. The Holy Spirit is perfectly trustworthy, as you are. 2 God Himself trusts you, and therefore your trustworthiness is beyond question. 3 It will always remain beyond question, however much you may question it. 4 I said before that you are the Will of God. 5 His Will is not an idle wish, and your identification with His Will is not optional, since it is what you are. 6 Sharing His Will with me is not really open to choice, though it may seem to be. 7 The whole separation lies in this error. 8 The only way out of the error is to decide that you do not have to decide anything. 9 Everything has been given you by God's decision. 10 That is His Will, and you cannot undo it. T-7.X.7. Even the relinquishment of your false decision-making prerogative, which the ego guards so jealously, is not accomplished by your wish. 2 It was accomplished for you by the Will of God, Who has not left you comfortless. 3 His Voice will teach you how to distinguish between pain and joy, and will lead you out of the confusion you have made. 4 There is no confusion in the mind of a Son of God, whose will must be the Will of the Father, because the Father's Will His Son. T-7.X.8. Miracles are in accord with the Will of God, Whose Will you do not know because you are confused about what will. 2 This means that you are confused about what you are. 3 If you are God's Will and do not accept His Will, you are denying joy. 4 The miracle is therefore a lesson in what joy is. 5 Being a lesson in sharing it is a lesson in love, which joy. 6 Every miracle is thus a lesson in truth, and by offering truth you are learning the difference between pain and joy. p135 XI. The State of Grace T-7.XI.1. The Holy Spirit will always guide you truly, because your joy is His. 2 This is His Will for everyone because He speaks for the Kingdom of God, which joy. 3 Following Him is therefore the easiest thing in the world, and the only thing that is easy, because it is not of the world. 4 It is therefore natural. 5 The world goes against your nature, being out of accord with God's laws. 6 The world perceives orders of difficulty in everything. 7 This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable. 8 By demonstrating to yourself there is no order of difficulty in miracles, you will convince yourself that, in your natural state, there is no difficulty at all it is a state of grace. T-7.XI.2. Grace is the natural state of every Son of God. 2 When he is not in a state of grace, he is out of his natural environment and does not function well. 3 Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment that he has made. 4 He therefore cannot adapt to it, nor can he adapt it to him. 5 There is no point in trying. 6 A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is with God. 7 That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. 8 It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond anything he can make. T-7.XI.3. Consider the kingdom you have made and judge its worth fairly. 2 Is it worthy to be a home for a child of God? 3 Does it protect his peace and shine love upon him? 4 Does it keep his heart untouched by fear, and allow him to give always, without any sense of loss? 5 Does it teach him that this giving is his joy, and that God Himself thanks him for his giving? 6 That is the only environment in which you can be happy. 7 You cannot make it, any more than you can make yourself. 8 It has been created for you, as you were created for it. 9 God watches over His children and denies them nothing. 10 Yet when they deny Him they do not know this, because they deny themselves everything. 11 You who could give the Love of God to everything you see and touch and remember, are literally denying Heaven to yourself. T-7.XI.4. I call upon you to remember that I have chosen you to teach the Kingdom the Kingdom. 2 There are no exceptions to this lesson, because the lack of exceptions the lesson. 3 Every Son who returns to the Kingdom with this lesson in his heart has healed the Sonship and given thanks to God. 4 Everyone who learns this lesson has become the perfect teacher, because he has learned it of the Holy Spirit. p136 T-7.XI.5. When a mind has only light, it knows only light. 2 Its own radiance shines all around it, and extends out into the darkness of other minds, transforming them into majesty. 3 The Majesty of God is there, for you to recognize and appreciate and know. 4 Recognizing the Majesty of God as your brother is to accept your own inheritance. 5 God gives only equally. 6 If you recognize His gift in anyone, you have acknowledged what He has given you. 7 Nothing is so easy to recognize as truth. 8 This is the recognition that is immediate, clear and natural. 9 You have trained yourself not to recognize it, and this has been very difficult for you. T-7.XI.6. Out of your natural environment you may well ask, "What is truth?" since truth is the environment by which and for which you were created. 2 You do not know yourself, because you do not know your Creator. 3 You do not know your creations because you do not know your brothers, who created them with you. 4 I have already said that only the whole Sonship is worthy to be co-creator with God, because only the whole Sonship can create like Him. 5 Whenever you heal a brother by recognizing his worth, you are acknowledging his power to create and yours. 6 He cannot have lost what you recognize, and you must have the glory you see in him. 7 He is a co-creator with God with you. 8 Deny his creative power, and you are denying yours and that of God Who created you. T-7.XI.7. You cannot deny part of truth. 2 You do not know your creations because you do not know their creator. 3 You do not know yourself because you do not know yours. 4 Your creations cannot establish your reality, any more than you can establish God's. 5 But you can both. 6 Being is known by sharing. 7 Because God shared His Being with you, you can know Him. 8 But you must also know all He created, to know what they have shared. 9 Without your Father you will not know your fatherhood. 10 The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are as like the Sons as they are like the Father. 11 Know, then, the Sons of God, and you will know all creation. p137 Chapter 8. THE JOURNEY BACK I. The Direction of the Curriculum T-8.I.1. Knowledge is not the motivation for learning this course. 2 Peace is. 3 This is the prerequisite for knowledge only because those who are in conflict are not peaceful, and peace is the condition of knowledge because it is the condition of the Kingdom. 4 Knowledge can be restored only when you meet its conditions. 5 This is not a bargain made by God, Who makes no bargains. 6 It is merely the result of your misuse of His laws on behalf of an imaginary will that is not His. 7 Knowledge His Will. 8 If you are opposing His Will, how can you have knowledge? 9 I have told you what knowledge offers you, but perhaps you do not yet regard this as wholly desirable. 10 If you did you would not be so ready to throw it away when the ego asks for your allegiance. T-8.I.2. The distractions of the ego may seem to interfere with your learning, but the ego has no power to distract you unless you give it the power to do so. 2 The ego's voice is an hallucination. 3 You cannot expect it to say "I am not real." 4 Yet you are not asked to dispel your hallucinations alone. 5 You are merely asked to evaluate them in terms of their results to you. 6 If you do not want them on the basis of loss of peace, they will be removed from your mind for you. T-8.I.3. Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war does deprive you of peace. 2 Yet in this war there is no opponent. 3 This is the reinterpretation of reality that you must make to secure peace, and the only one you need ever make. 4 Those whom you perceive as opponents are part of your peace, which you are giving up by attacking them. 5 How can you have what you give up? 6 You share to have, but you do not give it up yourself. 7 When you give up peace, you are excluding yourself from it. 8 This is a condition so alien to the Kingdom that you cannot understand the state that prevails within it. T-8.I.4. Your past learning must have taught you the wrong things, simply because it has not made you happy. 2 On this basis alone its value should be questioned. 3 If learning aims at change, and that is always its purpose, are you satisfied with the changes your learning has brought you? p138 4 Dissatisfaction with learning outcomes is a sign of learning failure, since it means that you did not get what you wanted. T-8.I.5. The curriculum of the Atonement is the opposite of the curriculum you have established for yourself, but so is its outcome. 2 If the outcome of yours has made you unhappy, and if you want a different one, a change in the curriculum is obviously necessary. 3 The first change to be introduced is a change in direction. 4 A meaningful curriculum cannot be inconsistent. 5 If it is planned by two teachers, each believing in diametrically opposed ideas, it cannot be integrated. 6 If it is carried out by these two teachers simultaneously, each one merely interferes with the other. 7 This leads to fluctuation, but not to change. 8 The volatile have no direction. 9 They cannot choose one because they cannot relinquish the other, even if it does not exist. 10 Their conflicted curriculum teaches them that directions exist, and gives them no rationale for choice. T-8.I.6. The total senselessness of such a curriculum must be fully recognized before a real change in direction becomes possible. 2 You cannot learn simultaneously from two teachers who are in total disagreement about everything. 3 Their joint curriculum presents an impossible learning task. 4 They are teaching you entirely different things in entirely different ways, which might be possible except that both are teaching you about yourself. 5 Your reality is unaffected by both, but if you listen to both, your mind will be split about what your reality is. II. The Difference between Imprisonment and Freedom T-8.II.1. There a rationale for choice. 2 Only one Teacher knows what your reality is. 3 If learning to remove the obstacles to that knowledge is the purpose of the curriculum, you must learn it of Him. 4 The ego does not know what it is trying to teach. 5 It is trying to teach you what you are without knowing what you are. 6 It is expert only in confusion. 7 It does not understand anything else. 8 As a teacher, then, the ego is totally confused and totally confusing. 9 Even if you could disregard the Holy Spirit entirely, which is impossible, you could still learn nothing from the ego, because the ego knows nothing. T-8.II.2. Is there any possible reason for choosing a teacher such as this? p139 2 Does the total disregard of anything it teaches make anything but sense? 3 Is this the teacher to whom a Son of God should turn to find himself? 4 The ego has never given you a sensible answer to anything. 5 Simply on the grounds of your own experience with its teaching, should not this alone disqualify it as your future teacher? 6 Yet the ego has done more harm to your learning than this alone. 7 Learning is joyful if it leads you along your natural path, and facilitates the development of what you have. 8 When you are taught against your nature, however, you will lose by your learning because your learning will imprison you. 9 Your will is your nature, and therefore cannot go against it. T-8.II.3. The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free, because you will not listen to it. 2 It is not your will to be imprisoned because your will is free. 3 That is why the ego is the denial of free will. 4 It is never God Who coerces you, because He shares His Will with you. 5 His Voice teaches only in accordance with His Will, but that is not the Holy Spirit's lesson because that is what you 6 The lesson is that your will and God's cannot be out of accord because they are one. 7 This is the undoing of everything the ego tries to teach. 8 It is not, then, only the direction of the curriculum that must be unconflicted, but also the content. T-8.II.4. The ego tries to teach that you want to oppose God's Will. 2 This unnatural lesson cannot be learned, and the attempt to learn it is a violation of your own freedom, making you afraid of your will it is free. 3 The Holy Spirit opposes any imprisoning of the will of a Son of God, knowing that the Will of the Son is the Father's. 4 The Holy Spirit leads you steadily along the path of freedom, teaching you how to disregard or look beyond everything that would hold you back. T-8.II.5. We have said that the Holy Spirit teaches you the difference between pain and joy. 2 That is the same as saying He teaches you the difference between imprisonment and freedom. 3 You cannot make this distinction without Him because you have taught yourself that imprisonment is freedom. 4 Believing them to be the same, how can you tell them apart? 5 Can you ask the part of your mind that taught you to believe they are the same, to teach you how they are different? T-8.II.6. The Holy Spirit's teaching takes only direction and has only goal. 2 His direction is freedom and His goal is God. 3 Yet He cannot conceive of God without you, because it is not God's Will to without you. 4 When you have learned that your will is God's, you could no more will to be without Him than He could will to be without you. p140 5 This is freedom and this is joy. 6 Deny yourself this and you are denying God His Kingdom, because He created you for this. T-8.II.7. When I said, "All power and glory are yours because the Kingdom is His," this is what I meant: The Will of God is without limit, and all power and glory lie within it. 2 It is boundless in strength and in love and in peace. 3 It has no boundaries because its extension is unlimited, and it encompasses all things because it created all things. 4 By creating all things, it made them part of itself. 5 You are the Will of God because that is how you were created. 6 Because your Creator creates only like Himself, you are like Him. 7 You are part of Him Who is all power and glory, and are therefore as unlimited as He is. T-8.II.8. To what else except all power and glory can the Holy Spirit appeal to restore God's Kingdom? 2 His appeal, then, is merely to what the Kingdom is, and for its own acknowledgment of what it is. 3 When you acknowledge this you bring the acknowledgment automatically to everyone, because you acknowledged everyone. 4 By your recognition you awaken theirs, and through theirs yours is extended. 5 Awakening runs easily and gladly through the Kingdom, in answer to the Call for God. 6 This is the natural response of every Son of God to the Voice for his Creator, because It is the Voice for his creations and for his own extension. III. The Holy Encounter T-8.III.1. Glory to God in the highest, and to you because He has so willed it. 2 Ask and it shall be given you, because it has already given. 3 Ask for light and learn that you light. 4 If you want understanding and enlightenment you will learn it, because your decision to learn it is the decision to listen to the Teacher Who knows of light, and can therefore teach it to you. 5 There is no limit on your learning because there is no limit on your mind. 6 There is no limit on His teaching because He was created to teach. 7 Understanding His function perfectly He fulfills it perfectly, because that is His joy and yours. T-8.III.2. To fulfill the Will of God perfectly is the only joy and peace that can be fully known, because it is the only function that can be fully experienced. 2 When this is accomplished, then, there is no other experience. p141 3 Yet the wish for other experience will block its accomplishment, because God's Will cannot be forced upon you, being an experience of total willingness. 4 The Holy Spirit understands how to teach this, but you do not. 5 That is why you need Him, and why God gave Him to you. 6 Only His teaching will release your will to God's, uniting it with His power and glory and establishing them as yours. 7 You share them as God shares them, because this is the natural outcome of their being. T-8.III.3. The Will of the Father and of the Son are One, by Their extension. 2 Their extension is the result of Their Oneness, holding Their unity together by extending Their joint Will. 3 This is perfect creation by the perfectly created, in union with the perfect Creator. 4 The Father must give fatherhood to His Son, because His Own Fatherhood must be extended outward. 5 You who belong in God have the holy function of extending His Fatherhood by placing no limits upon it. 6 Let the Holy Spirit teach you how to do this, for you can know what it means only of God Himself. T-8.III.4. When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. 2 As you see him you will see yourself. 3 As you treat him you will treat yourself. 4 As you think of him you will think of yourself. 5 Never forget this, for in him you will find yourself or lose yourself. 6 Whenever two Sons of God meet, they are given another chance at salvation. 7 Do not leave anyone without giving salvation to him and receiving it yourself. 8 For I am always there with you, in remembrance of T-8.III.5. The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is "Know thyself." 2 There is nothing else to seek. 3 Everyone is looking for himself and for the power and glory he thinks he has lost. 4 Whenever you are with anyone, you have another opportunity to find them. 5 Your power and glory are in him because they are yours. 6 The ego tries to find them in yourself alone, because it does not know where to look. 7 The Holy Spirit teaches you that if you look only at yourself you cannot find yourself, because that is not what you are. 8 Whenever you are with a brother, you are learning what you are because you are teaching what you are. 9 He will respond either with pain or with joy, depending on which teacher you are following. 10 He will be imprisoned or released according to your decision, and so will you. 11 Never forget your responsibility to him, because it is your responsibility to yourself. 12 Give him his place in the Kingdom and you will have yours. p142 T-8.III.6. The Kingdom cannot be found alone, and you who are the Kingdom cannot find yourself alone. 2 To achieve the goal of the curriculum, then, you cannot listen to the ego, whose purpose is to defeat its own goal. 3 The ego does not know this, because it does not know anything. 4 But you can know it, and you will know it if you are willing to look at what the ego would make of you. 5 This is your responsibility, because once you have really looked at it you accept the Atonement for yourself. 6 What other choice could you make? 7 Having made this choice you will understand why you once believed that, when you met someone else, you thought he someone else. 8 And every holy encounter in which you enter fully will teach you this is not so. T-8.III.7. You can encounter only part of yourself because you are part of God, Who is everything. 2 His power and glory are everywhere, and you cannot be excluded from them. 3 The ego teaches that your strength is in you alone. 4 The Holy Spirit teaches that all strength is in God and in you. 5 God wills no one suffer. 6 He does not will anyone to suffer for a wrong decision, including you. 7 That is why He has given you the means for undoing it. 8 Through His power and glory all your wrong decisions are undone completely, releasing you and your brother from every imprisoning thought any part of the Sonship holds. 9 Wrong decisions have no power, because they are not true. 10 The imprisonment they seem to produce is no more true than they are. T-8.III.8. Power and glory belong to God alone. 2 So do you. 3 God gives whatever belongs to Him because He gives of Himself, and everything belongs to Him. 4 Giving of yourself is the function He gave you. 5 Fulfilling it perfectly will let you remember what you of Him, and by this you will remember also what you in Him. 6 You cannot be powerless to do this, because this is your power. 7 Glory is God's gift to you, because that is what He is. 8 See this glory everywhere to remember what you are. IV. The Gift of Freedom T-8.IV.1. If God's Will for you is complete peace and joy, unless you experience only this you must be refusing to acknowledge His Will. 2 His Will does not vacillate, being changeless forever. 3 When you are not at peace it can only be because you do not believe you are in Him. 4 Yet He is All in all. 5 His peace is complete, and you must be included in it. p143 6 His laws govern you because they govern everything. 7 You cannot exempt yourself from His laws, although you can disobey them. 8 Yet if you do, and only if you do, you will feel lonely and helpless, because you are denying yourself everything. T-8.IV.2. I am come as a light into a world that does deny itself everything. 2 It does this simply by dissociating itself from everything. 3 It is therefore an illusion of isolation, maintained by fear of the same loneliness that its illusion. 4 I said that I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. 5 That is why I am the light of the world. 6 If I am with you in the loneliness of the world, the loneliness is gone. 7 You cannot maintain the illusion of loneliness if you are not alone. 8 My purpose, then, is still to overcome the world. 9 I do not attack it, but my light must dispel it because of what it is. 10 Light does not attack darkness, but it does shine it away. 11 If my light goes with you everywhere, you shine it away with me. 12 The light becomes ours, and you cannot abide in darkness any more than darkness can abide wherever you go. 13 The remembrance of me is the remembrance of yourself, and of Him Who sent me to you. T-8.IV.3. You were in darkness until God's Will was done completely by any part of the Sonship. 2 When this was done, it was perfectly accomplished by all. 3 How else could it be perfectly accomplished? 4 My mission was simply to unite the will of the Sonship with the Will of the Father by being aware of the Father's Will myself. 5 This is the awareness I came to give you, and your problem in accepting it is the problem of this world. 6 Dispelling it is salvation, and in this sense I the salvation of the world. 7 The world must therefore despise and reject me, because the world the belief that love is impossible. 8 If you will accept the fact that I am with you, you are denying the world and accepting God. 9 My will is His, and your decision to hear me is the decision to hear His Voice and abide in His Will. 10 As God sent me to you so will I send you to others. 11 And I will go to them with you, so we can teach them peace and union. T-8.IV.4. Do you not think the world needs peace as much as you do? 2 Do you not want to give it to the world as much as you want to receive it? 3 For unless you do, you will not receive it. 4 If you want to have it of me, you must give it. 5 Healing does not come from anyone else. 6 You must accept guidance from within. 7 The guidance must be what you want, or it will be meaningless to you. p144 8 That is why healing is a collaborative venture. 9 I can tell you what to do, but you must collaborate by believing that I know what you should do. 10 Only then will your mind choose to follow me. 11 Without this choice you could not be healed because you would have decided against healing, and this rejection of my decision for you makes healing impossible. T-8.IV.5. Healing reflects our joint will. 2 This is obvious when you consider what healing is for. 3 Healing is the way in which the separation is overcome. 4 Separation is overcome by union. 5 It cannot be overcome by separating. 6 The decision to unite must be unequivocal, or the mind itself is divided and not whole. 7 Your mind is the means by which you determine your own condition, because mind is the mechanism of decision. 8 It is the power by which you separate or join, and experience pain or joy accordingly. 9 My decision cannot overcome yours, because yours is as powerful as mine. 10 If it were not so the Sons of God would be unequal. 11 All things are possible through our joint decision, but mine alone cannot help you. 12 Your will is as free as mine, and God Himself would not go against it. 13 I cannot will what God does not will. 14 I can offer my strength to make yours invincible, but I cannot oppose your decision without competing with it and thereby violating God's Will for you. T-8.IV.6. Nothing God created can oppose your decision, as nothing God created can oppose His Will. 2 God gave your will its power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of His. 3 If you want to be like me I will help you, knowing that we are alike. 4 If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind. 5 I can teach you, but only you can choose to listen to my teaching. 6 How else can it be, if God's Kingdom is freedom? 7 Freedom cannot be learned by tyranny of any kind, and the perfect equality of all God's Sons cannot be recognized through the dominion of one mind over another. 8 God's Sons are equal in will, all being the Will of their Father. 9 This is the only lesson I came to teach. T-8.IV.7. If your will were not mine it would not be our Father's. 2 This would mean you have imprisoned yours, and have not let it be free. 3 Of yourself you can do nothing, because of yourself you nothing. 4 I am nothing without the Father and you are nothing without me, because by denying the Father you deny yourself. 5 I will always remember you, and in my remembrance of you lies your remembrance of yourself. 6 In our remembrance of each other lies our remembrance of God. 7 And in this remembrance lies your freedom because your freedom is in Him. p145 8 Join, then, with me in praise of Him and you whom He created. 9 This is our gift of gratitude to Him, which He will share with all His creations, to whom He gives equally whatever is acceptable to Him. 10 Because it is acceptable to Him it is the gift of freedom, which is His Will for all His Sons. 11 By offering freedom you will be free. T-8.IV.8. Freedom is the only gift you can offer to God's Sons, being an acknowledgment of what they are and what He is. 2 Freedom is creation, because it is love. 3 Whom you seek to imprison you do not love. 4 Therefore, when you seek to imprison anyone, including yourself, you do not love him and you cannot identify with him. 5 When you imprison yourself you are losing sight of your true identification with me and with the Father. 6 Your identification is with the Father with the Son. 7 It cannot be with One and not the Other. 8 If you are part of One you must be part of the Other, because They are One. 9 The Holy Trinity is holy It is One. 10 If you exclude yourself from this union, you are perceiving the Holy Trinity as separated. 11 You must be included in It, because It is everything. 12 Unless you take your place in It and fulfill your function as part of It, the Holy Trinity is as bereft as you are. 13 No part of It can be imprisoned if Its truth is to be known. V. The Undivided Will of the Sonship T-8.V.1. Can you be separated from your identification and be at peace? 2 Dissociation is not a solution; it is a delusion. 3 The delusional believe that truth will assail them, and they do not recognize it because they prefer the delusion. 4 Judging truth as something they do not want, they perceive their illusions which block knowledge. 5 Help them by offering them your unified mind on their behalf, as I am offering you mine on behalf of yours. 6 Alone we can do nothing, but together our minds fuse into something whose power is far beyond the power of its separate parts. 7 By not being separate, the Mind of God is established in ours and as ours. 8 This Mind is invincible because it is undivided. T-8.V.2. The undivided will of the Sonship is the perfect creator, being wholly in the likeness of God, Whose Will it is. 2 You cannot be exempt from it if you are to understand what it is and what you are. p146 3 By the belief that your will is separate from mine, you are exempting yourself from the Will of God which yourself. 4 Yet to heal is still to make whole. 5 Therefore, to heal is to unite with those who are like you, because perceiving this likeness is to recognize the Father. 6 If your perfection is in Him and only in Him, how can you know it without recognizing Him? 7 The recognition of God is the recognition of yourself. 8 There is no separation of God and His creation. 9 You will realize this when you understand that there is no separation between your will and mine. 10 Let the Love of God shine upon you by your acceptance of me. 11 My reality is yours and His. 12 By joining your mind with mine you are signifying your awareness that the Will of God is One. T-8.V.3. God's Oneness and ours are not separate, because His Oneness encompasses ours. 2 To join with me is to restore His power to you because we are sharing it. 3 I offer you only the recognition of His power in you, but in that lies all truth. 4 As we unite, we unite with Him. 5 Glory be to the union of God and His holy Sons! 6 All glory lies in Them They are united. 7 The miracles we do bear witness to the Will of the Father for His Son, and to our joy in uniting with His Will for us. T-8.V.4. When you unite with me you are uniting without the ego, because I have renounced the ego in myself and therefore cannot unite with yours. 2 Our union is therefore the way to renounce the ego in you. 3 The truth in both of us is beyond the ego. 4 Our success in transcending the ego is guaranteed by God, and I share this confidence for both of us and all of us. 5 I bring God's peace back to all His children because I received it of Him for us all. 6 Nothing can prevail against our united wills because nothing can prevail against God's. T-8.V.5. Would you know the Will of God for you? 2 Ask it of me who know it for you and you will find it. 3 I will deny you nothing, as God denies me nothing. 4 Ours is simply the journey back to God Who is our home. 5 Whenever fear intrudes anywhere along the road to peace, it is because the ego has attempted to join the journey with us and cannot do so. 6 Sensing defeat and angered by it, the ego regards itself as rejected and becomes retaliative. 7 You are invulnerable to its retaliation because I am with you. 8 On this journey you have chosen me as your companion of the ego. 9 Do not attempt to hold on to both, or you will try to go in different directions and will lose the way. p147 T-8.V.6. The ego's way is not mine, but it is also not yours. 2 The Holy Spirit has one direction for all minds, and the one He taught me is yours. 3 Let us not lose sight of His direction through illusions, for only illusions of another direction can obscure the one for which God's Voice speaks in all of us. 4 Never accord the ego the power to interfere with the journey. 5 It has none, because the journey is the way to what is true. 6 Leave all illusions behind, and reach beyond all attempts of the ego to hold you back. 7 I go before you because I am beyond the ego. 8 Reach, therefore, for my hand because you want to transcend the ego. 9 My strength will never be wanting, and if you choose to share it you will do so. 10 I give it willingly and gladly, because I need you as much as you need me. VI. The Treasure of God T-8.VI.1. We are the joint will of the Sonship, whose Wholeness is for all. 2 We begin the journey back by setting out together, and gather in our brothers as we continue together. 3 Every gain in our strength is offered for all, so they too can lay aside their weakness and add their strength to us. 4 God's welcome waits for us all, and He will welcome us as I am welcoming you. 5 Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world has to offer. T-8.VI.2. The world can add nothing to the power and the glory of God and His holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. 2 You cannot behold the world and know God. 3 Only one is true. 4 I am come to tell you that the choice of which is true is not yours to make. 5 If it were, you would have destroyed yourself. 6 Yet God did not will the destruction of His creations, having created them for eternity. 7 His Will has saved you, not from yourself but from your illusion of yourself. 8 He has saved you yourself. T-8.VI.3. Let us glorify Him Whom the world denies, for over His Kingdom the world has no power. 2 No one created by God can find joy in anything except the eternal; not because he is deprived of anything else, but because nothing else is worthy of him. 3 What God and His Sons create is eternal, and in this and this only is their joy. T-8.VI.4. Listen to the story of the prodigal son, and learn what God's treasure is and yours: This son of a loving father left his home and thought he had squandered everything for nothing of any value, although he had not understood its worthlessness at the time. p148 2 He was ashamed to return to his father, because he thought he had hurt him. 3 Yet when he came home the father welcomed him with joy, because the son himself his father's treasure. 4 He wanted nothing else. T-8.VI.5. God wants only His Son because His Son is His only treasure. 2 You want your creations as He wants His. 3 Your creations are your gift to the Holy Trinity, created in gratitude for your creation. 4 They do not leave you any more than you left your Creator, but they extend your creation as God extended Himself to you. 5 Can the creations of God Himself take joy in what is not real? 6 And what is real except the creations of God and those that are created like His? 7 Your creations love you as you love your Father for the gift of creation. 8 There is no other gift that is eternal, and therefore there is no other gift that is true. 9 How, then, can you accept anything else or give anything else, and expect joy in return? 10 And what else but joy would you want? 11 You made neither yourself nor your function. 12 You made only the decision to be unworthy of both. 13 Yet you cannot make yourself unworthy because you are the treasure of God, and what He values is valuable. 14 There can be no question of its worth, because its value lies in God's sharing Himself with it and establishing its value forever. T-8.VI.6. Your function is to add to God's treasure by creating yours. 2 His Will you is His Will you. 3 He would not withhold creation from you because His joy is in it. 4 You cannot find joy except as God does. 5 His joy lay in creating you, and He extends His Fatherhood to you so that you can extend yourself as He did. 6 You do not understand this because you do not understand Him. 7 No one who does not accept his function can understand what it is, and no one can accept his function unless he knows what is. 8 Creation is the Will of God. 9 His Will created you to create. 10 Your will was not created separate from His, and so you must will as He wills. T-8.VI.7. An "unwilling will" does not mean anything, being a contradiction in terms that actually means nothing. 2 When you think you are unwilling to will with God, you are not thinking. 3 God's Will Thought. 4 It cannot be contradicted thought. 5 God does not contradict Himself, and His Sons, who are like Him, cannot contradict themselves or Him. 6 Yet their thought is so powerful that they can even imprison the mind of God's Son, if they so choose. p149 7 This choice does make the Son's function unknown to him, but never to his Creator. 8 And because it is not unknown to his Creator, it is forever knowable to him. T-8.VI.8. There is no question but one you should ever ask of yourself;-"Do I want to know my Father's Will for me?" 2 He will not hide it. 3 He has revealed it to me because I asked it of Him, and learned of what He had already given. 4 Our function is to work together, because apart from each other we cannot function at all. 5 The whole power of God's Son lies in all of us, but not in any of us alone. 6 God would not have us be alone because does not will to be alone. 7 That is why He created His Son, and gave him the power to create with Him. 8 Our creations are as holy as we are, and we are the Sons of God Himself, as holy as He is. 9 Through our creations we extend our love, and thus increase the joy of the Holy Trinity. 10 You do not understand this, because you who are God's Own treasure do not regard yourself as valuable. 11 Given this belief, you cannot understand anything. T-8.VI.9. I share with God the knowledge of the value He puts upon you. 2 My devotion to you is of Him, being born of my knowledge of myself and Him. 3 We cannot be separated. 4 Whom God has joined cannot be separated, and God has joined all His Sons with Himself. 5 Can you be separated from your life and your being? 6 The journey to God is merely the reawakening of the knowledge of where you are always, and what you are forever. 7 It is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed. 8 Truth can only be experienced. 9 It cannot be described and it cannot be explained. 10 I can make you aware of the conditions of truth, but the experience is of God. 11 Together we can meet its conditions, but truth will dawn upon you of itself. T-8.VI.10. What God has willed for you yours. 2 He has given His Will to His treasure, whose treasure it is. 3 Your heart lies where your treasure is, as His does. 4 You who are beloved of God are wholly blessed. 5 Learn this of me, and free the holy will of all those who are as blessed as you are. p150 VII. The Body as a Means of Communication T-8.VII.1. Attack is always physical. 2 When attack in any form enters your mind you are equating yourself with a body, since this is the ego's interpretation of the body. 3 You do not have to attack physically to accept this interpretation. 4 You are accepting it simply by the belief that attack can get you something you want. 5 If you did not believe this, the idea of attack would have no appeal for you. 6 When you equate yourself with a body you will always experience depression. 7 When a child of God thinks of himself in this way he is belittling himself, and seeing his brothers as similarly belittled. 8 Since he can find himself only in them, he has cut himself off from salvation. T-8.VII.2. Remember that the Holy Spirit interprets the body only as a means of communication. 2 Being the Communication Link between God and His separated Sons, the Holy Spirit interprets everything you have made in the light of what He is. 3 The ego separates through the body. 4 The Holy Spirit reaches through it to others. 5 You do not perceive your brothers as the Holy Spirit does, because you do not regard bodies solely as a means of joining minds and uniting them with yours and mine. 6 This interpretation of the body will change your mind entirely about its value. 7 Of itself it has none. T-8.VII.3. If you use the body for attack, it is harmful to you. 2 If you use it only to reach the minds of those who believe they are bodies, and teach them the body that this is not so, you will understand the power of the mind that is in you. 3 If you use the body for this and only for this, you cannot use it for attack. 4 In the service of uniting it becomes a beautiful lesson in communion, which has value until communion 5 This is God's way of making unlimited what you have limited. 6 The Holy Spirit does not see the body as you do, because He knows the only reality of anything is the service it renders God on behalf of the function He gives it. T-8.VII.4. Communication ends separation. 2 Attack promotes it. 3 The body is beautiful or ugly, peaceful or savage, helpful or harmful, according to the use to which it is put. 4 And in the body of another you will see the use to which you have put yours. 5 If the body becomes a means you give to the Holy Spirit to use on behalf of union of the Sonship, you will not see anything physical except as what it is. 6 Use it for truth and you will see it truly. p151 7 Misuse it and you will misunderstand it, because you have already done so misusing it. 8 Interpret anything apart from the Holy Spirit and you will mistrust it. 9 This will lead you to hatred and attack and loss of peace. T-8.VII.5. Yet all loss comes only from your own misunderstanding. 2 Loss of any kind is impossible. 3 But when you look upon a brother as a physical entity, his power and glory are "lost" to you and so are yours. 4 You have attacked him, but you must have attacked yourself first. 5 Do not see him this way for your own salvation, which must bring him his. 6 Do not allow him to belittle himself in your mind, but give him freedom from his belief in littleness, and thus escape from yours. 7 As part of you, he is holy. 8 As part of me, you are. 9 To communicate with part of God Himself is to reach beyond the Kingdom to its Creator, through His Voice which He has established as part of you. T-8.VII.6. Rejoice, then, that of yourself you can do nothing. 2 You are not yourself. 3 He of Whom you are has willed your power and glory for you, with which you can perfectly accomplish His holy Will for you when you accept it for yourself. 4 He has not withdrawn His gifts from you, but you believe you have withdrawn them from Him. 5 Let no Son of God remain hidden for His Name's sake, because His Name is yours. T-8.VII.7. The Bible says, "The Word (or thought) was made flesh." 2 Strictly speaking this is impossible, since it seems to involve the translation of one order of reality into another. 3 Different orders of reality merely appear to exist, just as different orders of miracles do. 4 Thought cannot be made into flesh except by belief, since thought is not physical. 5 Yet thought is communication, for which the body can be used. 6 This is the only natural use to which it can be put. 7 To use the body unnaturally is to lose sight of the Holy Spirit's purpose, and thus to confuse the goal of His curriculum. T-8.VII.8. There is nothing so frustrating to a learner as a curriculum he cannot learn. 2 His sense of adequacy suffers, and he must become depressed. 3 Being faced with an impossible learning situation is the most depressing thing in the world. 4 In fact, it is ultimately why the world itself is depressing. 5 The Holy Spirit's curriculum is never depressing, because it is a curriculum of joy. 6 Whenever the reaction to learning is depression, it is because the true goal of the curriculum has been lost sight of. T-8.VII.9. In this world, not even the body is perceived as whole. 2 Its purpose is seen as fragmented into many functions with little or no relationship to each other, so that it appears to be ruled by chaos. p152 3 Guided by the ego, it 4 Guided by the Holy Spirit, it is not. 5 It becomes a means by which the part of the mind you tried to separate spirit can reach beyond its distortions and return spirit. 6 The ego's temple thus becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit, where devotion to Him replaces devotion to the ego. 7 In this sense the body does become a temple to God; His Voice abides in it by directing the use to which it is put. T-8.VII.10. Healing is the result of using the body solely for communication. 2 Since this is natural it heals by making whole, which is also natural. 3 All mind is whole, and the belief that part of it is physical, or not mind, is a fragmented or sick interpretation. 4 Mind cannot be made physical, but it can be made manifest the physical if it uses the body to go beyond itself. 5 By reaching out, the mind extends itself. 6 It does not stop at the body, for if it does it is blocked in its purpose. 7 A mind that has been blocked has allowed itself to be vulnerable to attack, because it has turned against itself. T-8.VII.11. The removal of blocks, then, is the only way to guarantee help and healing. 2 Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind that is working through the body, but not it. 3 If the mind believes the body is its goal it will distort its perception of the body, and by blocking its own extension beyond it, will induce illness by fostering separation. 4 Perceiving the body as a separate entity cannot but foster illness, because it is not true. 5 A medium of communication loses its usefulness if it is used for anything else. 6 To use a medium of communication as a medium of attack is an obvious confusion in purpose. T-8.VII.12. To communicate is to join and to attack is to separate. 2 How can you do both simultaneously with the same thing and not suffer? 3 Perception of the body can be unified only by one purpose. 4 This releases the mind from the temptation to see the body in many lights, and gives it over entirely to the One Light in which it can be really understood. 5 To confuse a learning device with a curriculum goal is a fundamental confusion that blocks the understanding of both. 6 Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind in it. 7 This can be accomplished only if the mind extends to other minds, and does not arrest itself in its extension. 8 This arrest is the cause of all illness, because only extension is the mind's function. p153 T-8.VII.13. The opposite of joy is depression. 2 When your learning promotes depression instead of joy, you cannot be listening to God's joyous Teacher and learning His lessons. 3 To see a body as anything except a means of communication is to limit your mind and to hurt yourself. 4 Health is therefore nothing more than united purpose. 5 If the body is brought under the purpose of the mind, it becomes whole because the mind's purpose is one. 6 Attack can only be an assumed purpose of the body, because apart from the mind the body has no purpose at all. T-8.VII.14. You are not limited by the body, and thought cannot be made flesh. 2 Yet mind can be manifested through the body if it goes beyond it and does not interpret it as limitation. 3 Whenever you see another as limited to or by the body, you are imposing this limit on yourself. 4 Are you willing to accept this, when your whole purpose for learning should be to escape from limitations? 5 To conceive of the body as a means of attack and to believe that joy could possibly result, is a clear-cut indication of a poor learner. 6 He has accepted a learning goal in obvious contradiction to the unified purpose of the curriculum, and one that is interfering with his ability to accept its purpose as his own. T-8.VII.15. Joy is unified purpose, and unified purpose is only God's. 2 When yours is unified it is His. 3 Believe you can interfere with His purpose, and you need salvation. 4 You have condemned yourself, but condemnation is not of God. 5 Therefore it is not true. 6 No more are any of its seeming results. 7 When you see a brother as a body, you are condemning him because you have condemned yourself. 8 Yet if all condemnation is unreal, and it must be unreal since it is a form of attack, then it can no results. T-8.VII.16. Do not allow yourself to suffer from imagined results of what is not true. 2 Free your mind from the belief that this is possible. 3 In its complete impossibility lies your only hope for release. 4 But what other hope would you want? 5 Freedom from illusions lies only in not believing them. 6 There is no attack, but there unlimited communication and therefore unlimited power and wholeness. 7 The power of wholeness is extension. 8 Do not arrest your thought in this world, and you will open your mind to creation in God. p154 VIII. The Body as Means or End T-8.VIII.1. Attitudes toward the body are attitudes toward attack. 2 The ego's definitions of anything are childish, and are always based on what it believes the thing is 3 This is because it is incapable of true generalizations, and equates what it sees with the function it ascribes to it. 4 It does not equate it with what it 5 To the ego the body is to attack 6 Equating you with the body, it teaches that are to attack with. 7 The body, then, is not the source of its own health. 8 The body's condition lies solely in your interpretation of its function. 9 Functions are part of being since they arise from it, but the relationship is not reciprocal. 10 The whole does define the part, but the part does not define the whole. 11 Yet to know in part is to know entirely because of the fundamental difference between knowledge and perception. 12 In perception the whole is built up of parts that can separate and reassemble in different constellations. 13 But knowledge never changes, so its constellation is permanent. 14 The idea of part-whole relationships has meaning only at the level of perception, where change is possible. 15 Otherwise, there is no difference between the part and whole. T-8.VIII.2. The body exists in a world that seems to contain two voices fighting for its possession. 2 In this perceived constellation the body is seen as capable of shifting its allegiance from one to the other, making the concepts of both health and sickness meaningful. 3 The ego makes a fundamental confusion between means and end as it always does. 4 Regarding the body as an end, the ego has no real use for it because it is an end. 5 You must have noticed an outstanding characteristic of every end that the ego has accepted as its own. 6 When you have achieved it, 7 This is why the ego is forced to shift ceaselessly from one goal to another, so that you will continue to hope it can yet offer you something. T-8.VIII.3. It has been particularly difficult to overcome the ego's belief in the body as an end, because it is synonymous with the belief in attack as an end. 2 The ego has a profound investment in sickness. 3 If you are sick, how can you object to the ego's firm belief that you are not invulnerable? 4 This is an appealing argument from the ego's point of view, because it obscures the obvious attack that underlies the sickness. 5 If you recognized this and also decided against attack, you could not give this false witness to the ego's stand. p155 T-8.VIII.4. It is hard to perceive sickness as a false witness, because you do not realize that it is entirely out of keeping with what you want. 2 This witness, then, appears to be innocent and trustworthy because you have not seriously cross-examined him. 3 If you had, you would not consider sickness such a strong witness on behalf of the ego's views. 4 A more honest statement would be that those who want the ego are predisposed to defend it. 5 Therefore, their choice of witnesses should be suspect from the beginning. 6 The ego does not call upon witnesses who would disagree with its case, nor does the Holy Spirit. 7 I have said that judgment is the function of the Holy Spirit, and one He is perfectly equipped to fulfill. 8 The ego as a judge gives anything but an impartial judgment. 9 When the ego calls on a witness, it has already made the witness an ally. T-8.VIII.5. It is still true that the body has no function of itself, because it is not an end. 2 The ego, however, establishes it as an end because, as such, its true function is obscured. 3 This is the purpose of everything the ego does. 4 Its sole aim is to lose sight of the function of everything. 5 A sick body does not make any sense. 6 It could not make sense because sickness is not what the body is for. 7 Sickness is meaningful only if the two basic premises on which the ego's interpretation of the body rests are true; that the body is for attack, and that you are a body. 8 Without these premises sickness is inconceivable. T-8.VIII.6. Sickness is a way of demonstrating that you can be hurt. 2 It is a witness to your frailty, your vulnerability, and your extreme need to depend on external guidance. 3 The ego uses this as its best argument for your need for guidance. 4 It dictates endless prescriptions for avoiding catastrophic outcomes. 5 The Holy Spirit, perfectly aware of the same situation, does not bother to analyze it at all. 6 If data are meaningless there is no point in analyzing them. 7 The function of truth is to collect information that is true. 8 Times New Roman",SR> way you handle error results in nothing. 9 The more complicated the results become the harder it may be to recognize their nothingness, but it is not necessary to examine all possible outcomes to which premises give rise in order to judge them truly. T-8.VIII.7. A learning device is not a teacher. 2 It cannot tell you how you feel. 3 You do not know how you feel because you have accepted the ego's confusion, and you therefore believe that a learning device tell you how you feel. p156 4 Sickness is merely another example of your insistence on asking guidance of a teacher who does not know the answer. 5 The ego is incapable of knowing how you feel. 6 When I said that the ego does not know anything, I said the one thing about the ego that is wholly true. 7 But there is a corollary; if only knowledge has being and the ego has no knowledge, then the ego has no being. T-8.VIII.8. You might well ask how the voice of something that does not exist can be so insistent. 2 Have you thought about the distorting power of something you want, even if it is not real? 3 There are many instances of how what you want distorts perception. 4 No one can doubt the ego's skill in building up false cases. 5 Nor can anyone doubt your willingness to listen until you choose not to accept anything except truth. 6 When you lay the ego aside, it will be gone. 7 The Holy Spirit's Voice is as loud as your willingness to listen. 8 It cannot be louder without violating your freedom of choice, which the Holy Spirit seeks to restore, never to undermine. T-8.VIII.9. The Holy Spirit teaches you to use your body only to reach your brothers, so He can teach His message through you. 2 This will heal them and therefore heal you. 3 Everything used in accordance with its function as the Holy Spirit sees it cannot be sick. 4 Everything used otherwise is. 5 Do not allow the body to be a mirror of a split mind. 6 Do not let it be an image of your own perception of littleness. 7 Do not let it reflect your decision to attack. 8 Health is seen as the natural state of everything when interpretation is left to the Holy Spirit, Who perceives no attack on anything. 9 Health is the result of relinquishing all attempts to use the body lovelessly. 10 Health is the beginning of the proper perspective on life under the guidance of the one Teacher Who knows what life is, being the Voice for Life Itself. IX. Healing as Corrected Perception T-8.IX.1. I said before that the Holy Spirit is the Answer. 2 He is the Answer to everything, because He knows what the answer to everything is. 3 The ego does not know what a real question is, although it asks an endless number. 4 Yet you can learn this as you learn to question the value of the ego, and thus establish your ability to evaluate its questions. 5 When the ego tempts you to sickness do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body, for this would merely be to accept the ego's belief that the body is the proper aim of healing. p157 6 Ask, rather, that the Holy Spirit teach you the right of the body, for perception alone can be distorted. 7 Only perception can be sick, because only perception can be wrong. T-8.IX.2. Wrong perception is the wish that things be as they are not. 2 The reality of everything is totally harmless, because total harmlessness is the condition of its reality. 3 It is also the condition of your awareness of its reality. 4 You do not have to seek reality. 5 It will seek you and find you when you meet its conditions. 6 Its conditions are part of what it is. 7 And this part only is up to you. 8 The rest is of itself. 9 You need do so little because your little part is so powerful that it will bring the whole to you. 10 Accept, then, your little part, and let the whole be yours. T-8.IX.3. Wholeness heals because it is of the mind. 2 All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. 3 They are attempts to reinforce sleeping out of fear of waking. 4 This is a pathetic way of trying not to see by rendering the faculties for seeing ineffectual. 5 "Rest in peace" is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes from waking, not from sleeping. 6 Sleep is withdrawing; waking is joining. 7 Dreams are illusions of joining, because they reflect the ego's distorted notions about what joining is. 8 Yet the Holy Spirit, too, has use for sleep, and can use dreams on behalf of waking if you will let Him. T-8.IX.4. How you wake is the sign of how you have used sleep. 2 To whom did you give it? 3 Under which teacher did you place it? 4 Whenever you wake dispiritedly, it was not given to the Holy Spirit. 5 Only when you awaken joyously have you utilized sleep according to His purpose. 6 You can indeed be "drugged" by sleep, if you have misused it on behalf of sickness. 7 Sleep is no more a form of death than death is a form of unconsciousness. 8 Complete unconsciousness is impossible. 9 You can rest in peace only because you are awake. T-8.IX.5. Healing is release from the fear of waking and the substitution of the decision to wake. 2 The decision to wake is the reflection of the will to love, since all healing involves replacing fear with love. 3 The Holy Spirit cannot distinguish among degrees of error, for if He taught that one form of sickness is more serious than another, He would be teaching that one error can be more real than another. p158 4 His function is to distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing the false with the true. T-8.IX.6. The ego, which always wants to weaken the mind, tries to separate it from the body in an attempt to destroy it. 2 Yet the ego actually believes that it is protecting it. 3 This is because the ego believes that mind is dangerous, and that to make mindless is to heal. 4 But to make mindless is impossible, since it would mean to make nothing out of what God created. 5 The ego despises weakness, even though it makes every effort to induce it. 6 The ego wants only what it hates. 7 To the ego this is perfectly sensible. 8 Believing in the power of attack, the ego wants attack. T-8.IX.7. The Bible enjoins you to be perfect, to heal all errors, to take no thought of the body as separate and to accomplish all things in my name. 2 This is not my name alone, for ours is a shared identification. 3 The Name of God's Son is One, and you are enjoined to do the works of love because we share this Oneness. 4 Our minds are whole because they are one. 5 If you are sick you are withdrawing from me. 6 Yet you cannot withdraw from me alone. 7 You can only withdraw from yourself me. T-8.IX.8. You have surely begun to realize that this is a very practical course, and one that means exactly what it says. 2 I would not ask you to do things you cannot do, and it is impossible that I could do things you cannot do. 3 Given this, and given this quite literally, nothing can prevent you from doing exactly what I ask, and everything argues your doing it. 4 I give you no limits because God lays none upon you. 5 When you limit yourself we are not of one mind, and that is sickness. 6 Yet sickness is not of the body, but of the mind. 7 All forms of sickness are signs that the mind is split, and does not accept a unified purpose. T-8.IX.9. The unification of purpose, then, is the Holy Spirit's only way of healing. 2 This is because it is the only level at which healing means anything. 3 The re-establishing of meaning in a chaotic thought system the way to heal it. 4 Your task is only to meet the conditions for meaning, since meaning itself is of God. 5 Yet your return to meaning is essential to His, because your meaning is part of His. 6 Your healing, then, is part of His health, since it is part of His Wholeness. 7 He cannot lose this, but you not know it. 8 Yet it is still His Will for you, and His Will must stand forever and in all things. p159 Chapter 9. THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE ATONEMENT I. The Acceptance of Reality T-9.I.1. Fear of the Will of God is one of the strangest beliefs the human mind has ever made. 2 It could not possibly have occurred unless the mind were already profoundly split, making it possible for it to be afraid of what it really is. 3 Reality cannot "threaten" anything except illusions, since reality can only uphold truth. 4 The very fact that the Will of God, which is what you are, is perceived as fearful, demonstrates that you afraid of what you are. 5 It is not, then, the Will of God of which you are afraid, but yours. T-9.I.2. Your will is not the ego's, and that is why the ego is against you. 2 What seems to be the fear of God is really the fear of your own reality. 3 It is impossible to learn anything consistently in a state of panic. 4 If the purpose of this course is to help you remember what you are, and if you believe that what you are is fearful, then it must follow that you will not learn this course. 5 Yet the reason for the course is that you do not know what you are. T-9.I.3. If you do not know what your reality is, why would you be so sure that it is fearful? 2 The association of truth and fear, which would be highly artificial at most, is particularly inappropriate in the minds of those who do not know what truth is. 3 All this could mean is that you are arbitrarily associating something beyond your awareness with something you do not want. 4 It is evident, then, that you are judging something of which you are totally unaware. 5 You have set up this strange situation so that it is impossible to escape from it without a Guide Who know what your reality is. 6 The purpose of this Guide is merely to remind you of what you want. 7 He is not attempting to force an alien will upon you. 8 He is merely making every possible effort, within the limits you impose on Him, to re-establish your own will in your awareness. T-9.I.4. You have imprisoned your will beyond your own awareness, where it remains, but cannot help you. 2 When I said that the Holy Spirit's function is to sort out the true from the false in your mind, I meant that He has the power to look into what you have hidden and recognize the Will of God there. p160 3 His recognition of this Will can make it real to you because He is in your mind, and therefore He is your reality. 4 If, then, His perception of your mind brings its reality to you, He helping you to remember what you are. 5 The only source of fear in this process is what you think you will lose. 6 Yet it is only what the Holy Spirit sees that you can possibly have. T-9.I.5. I have emphasized many times that the Holy Spirit will never call upon you to sacrifice anything. 2 But if you ask the sacrifice of reality of yourself, the Holy Spirit must remind you that this is not God's Will because it is not yours. 3 There is no difference between your will and God's. 4 If you did not have a split mind, you would recognize that willing is salvation because it is communication. T-9.I.6. It is impossible to communicate in alien tongues. 2 You and your Creator can communicate through creation, because that, and only that is Your joint Will. 3 A divided mind cannot communicate, because it speaks for different things to the same mind. 4 This loses the ability to communicate simply because confused communication does not mean anything. 5 A message cannot be communicated unless it makes sense. 6 How sensible can your messages be, when you ask for what you do not want? 7 Yet as long as you are afraid of your will, that is precisely what you are asking for. T-9.I.7. You may insist that the Holy Spirit does not answer you, but it might be wiser to consider the kind of questioner you are. 2 You do not ask only for what you want. 3 This is because you are afraid you might receive it, and you would. 4 That is why you persist in asking the teacher who could not possibly give you what you want. 5 Of him you can never learn what it is, and this gives you the illusion of safety. 6 Yet you cannot be safe truth, but only truth. 7 Reality is the only safety. 8 Your will is your salvation because it is the same as God's. 9 The separation is nothing more than the belief that it is different. T-9.I.8. No right mind can believe that its will is stronger than God's. 2 If, then, a mind believes that its will is different from His, it can only decide either that there is no God or that God's Will is fearful. 3 The former accounts for the atheist and the latter for the martyr, who believes that God demands sacrifices. 4 Either of these insane decisions will induce panic, because the atheist believes he is alone, and the martyr believes that God is crucifying him. 5 Yet no one really wants either abandonment or retaliation, even though many may seek both. p161 6 Can you ask the Holy Spirit for "gifts" such as these, and actually expect to receive them? 7 He cannot give you something you do not want. 8 When you ask the Universal Giver for what you do not want, you are asking for what cannot be given because it was never created. 9 It was never created, because it was never your will for T-9.I.9. Ultimately everyone must remember the Will of God, because ultimately everyone must recognize himself. 2 This recognition is the recognition that his will and God's are one. 3 In the presence of truth, there are no unbelievers and no sacrifices. 4 In the security of reality, fear is totally meaningless. 5 To deny what is can only to be fearful. 6 Fear cannot be real without a cause, and God is the only Cause. 7 God is Love and you do want Him. 8 This your will. 9 Ask for this and you will be answered, because you will be asking only for what belongs to you. T-9.I.10. When you ask the Holy Spirit for what would hurt you He cannot answer because nothing can hurt you, and so you are asking for nothing. 2 Any wish that stems from the ego is a wish for nothing, and to ask for it is not a request. 3 It is merely a denial in the form of a request. 4 The Holy Spirit is not concerned with form, being aware only of meaning. 5 The ego cannot ask the Holy Spirit for anything, because there is complete communication failure between them. 6 Yet can ask for everything of the Holy Spirit, because your requests to Him are real, being of your right mind. 7 Would the Holy Spirit deny the Will of God? 8 And could He fail to recognize it in His Son? T-9.I.11. You do not recognize the enormous waste of energy you expend in denying truth. 2 What would you say of someone who persists in attempting the impossible, believing that to achieve it is to succeed? 3 The belief that you must have the impossible in order to be happy is totally at variance with the principle of creation. 4 God could not will that happiness depended on what you could never have. 5 The fact that God is Love does not require belief, but it does require acceptance. 6 It is indeed possible for you to deny facts, although it is impossible for you to change them. 7 If you hold your hands over your eyes, you will not see because you are interfering with the laws of seeing. 8 If you deny love, you will not know it because your cooperation is the law of its being. 9 You cannot change laws you did not make, and the laws of happiness were created for you, not by you. p162 T-9.I.12. Any attempt to deny what must be fearful, and if the attempt is strong it will induce panic. 2 Willing against reality, though impossible, can be made into a very persistent goal even though you do not want it. 3 But consider the result of this strange decision. 4 You are devoting your mind to what you do not want. 5 How real can this devotion be? 6 If you do not want it, it was never created. 7 If it were never created, it is nothing. 8 Can you really devote yourself to nothing? T-9.I.13. God in His devotion to you created you devoted to everything, and gave you what you are devoted 2 Otherwise you would not have been created perfect. 3 Reality is everything, and you have everything because you are real. 4 You cannot make the unreal because the absence of reality is fearful, and fear cannot be created. 5 As long as you believe that fear is possible, you will not create. 6 Opposing orders of reality make reality meaningless, and reality meaning. T-9.I.14. Remember, then, that God's Will is already possible, and nothing else will ever be. 2 This is the simple acceptance of reality, because only that is real. 3 You cannot distort reality and know what it is. 4 And if you do distort reality you will experience anxiety, depression and ultimately panic, because you are trying to make yourself unreal. 5 When you feel these things, do not try to look beyond yourself for truth, for truth can only be within you. 6 Say, therefore: 7 Christ is in me, and where He is God must be, for Christ is part of Him. II. The Answer to Prayer T-9.II.1. Everyone who ever tried to use prayer to ask for something has experienced what appears to be failure. 2 This is not only true in connection with specific things that might be harmful, but also in connection with requests that are strictly in line with this course. 3 The latter in particular might be incorrectly interpreted as "proof" that the course does not mean what it says. 4 You must remember, however, that the course states, and repeatedly, that its purpose is the escape from fear. T-9.II.2. Let us suppose, then, that what you ask of the Holy Spirit is what you really want, but you are still afraid of it. 2 Should this be the case, your attainment of it would no longer what you want. p163 3 This is why certain specific forms of healing are not achieved, even when the state of healing is. 4 An individual may ask for physical healing because he is fearful of bodily harm. 5 At the same time, if he were healed physically, the threat to his thought system might be considerably more fearful to him than its physical expression. 6 In this case he is not really asking for release from fear, but for the removal of a symptom that he himself selected. 7 This request is, therefore, not for healing at all. T-9.II.3. The Bible emphasizes that all prayer is answered, and this is indeed true. 2 The very fact that the Holy Spirit has been asked for anything will ensure a response. 3 Yet it is equally certain that no response given by Him will ever be one that would increase fear. 4 It is possible that His answer will not be heard. 5 It is impossible, however, that it will be lost. 6 There are many answers you have already received but have not yet heard. 7 I assure you that they are waiting for you. T-9.II.4. If you would know your prayers are answered, never doubt a Son of God. 2 Do not question him and do not confound him, for your faith in him is your faith in yourself. 3 If you would know God and His Answer, believe in me whose faith in you cannot be shaken. 4 Can you ask of the Holy Spirit truly, and doubt your brother? 5 Believe his words are true because of the truth that is in him. 6 You will unite with the truth in him, and his words will true. 7 As you hear him you will hear me. 8 Listening to truth is the only way you can hear it now, and finally know it. T-9.II.5. The message your brother gives you is up to you. 2 What does he say to you? 3 What would you have him say? 4 Your decision about him determines the message you receive. 5 Remember that the Holy Spirit is in him, and His Voice speaks to you through him. 6 What can so holy a brother tell you except truth? 7 But are you listening to it? 8 Your brother may not know who he is, but there is a light in his mind that does know. 9 This light can shine into yours, giving truth to his words and making you able to hear them. 10 His words are the Holy Spirit's answer to you. 11 Is your faith in him strong enough to let you hear? T-9.II.6. You can no more pray for yourself alone than you can find joy for yourself alone. 2 Prayer is the restatement of inclusion, directed by the Holy Spirit under the laws of God. 3 Salvation is of your brother. 4 The Holy Spirit extends from your mind to his, and answers 5 You cannot hear the Voice for God in yourself alone, because you are not alone. p164 6 And His answer is only for what you are. 7 You will not know the trust I have in you unless you extend it. 8 You will not trust the guidance of the Holy Spirit, or believe that it is for you unless you hear it in others. 9 It must be for your brother it is for you. 10 Would God have created a Voice for you alone? 11 Could you hear His answer except as He answers all of God's Sons? 12 Hear of your brother what you would have me hear of you, for you would not want me to be deceived. T-9.II.7. I love you for the truth in you, as God does. 2 Your deceptions may deceive you, but they cannot deceive me. 3 Knowing what you are, I cannot doubt you. 4 I hear only the Holy Spirit in you, Who speaks to me through you. 5 If you would hear me, hear my brothers in whom God's Voice speaks. 6 The answer to all prayers lies in them. 7 You will be answered as you hear the answer in everyone. 8 Do not listen to anything else or you will not hear truly. T-9.II.8. Believe in your brothers because I believe in you, and you will learn that my belief in you is justified. 2 Believe in me believing in them, for the sake of what God gave them. 3 They will answer you if you learn to ask only truth of them. 4 Do not ask for blessings without blessing them, for only in this way can you learn how blessed you are. 5 By following this way you are seeking the truth in you. 6 This is not going beyond yourself but toward yourself. 7 Hear only God's Answer in His Sons, and you are answered. T-9.II.9. To disbelieve is to side against, or to attack. 2 To believe is to accept, and to side with. 3 To believe is not to be credulous, but to accept and appreciate. 4 What you do not believe you do not appreciate, and you cannot be grateful for what you do not value. 5 There is a price you will pay for judgment, because judgment is the setting of a price. 6 And as you set it you will pay it. T-9.II.10. If paying is equated with getting, you will set the price low but demand a high return. 2 You will have forgotten, however, that to price is to value, so that your return is in proportion to your judgment of worth. 3 If paying is associated with giving it cannot be perceived as loss, and the reciprocal relationship of giving and receiving will be recognized. 4 The price will then be set high, because of the value of the return. 5 The price for getting is to lose sight of value, making it inevitable that you will not value what you receive. 6 Valuing it little, you will not appreciate it and you will not want it. T-9.II.11. Never forget, then, that you set the value on what you receive, and price it by what you give. p165 2 To believe that it is possible to get much for little is to believe that you can bargain with God. 3 God's laws are always fair and perfectly consistent. 4 By giving you receive. 5 But to receive is to accept, not to get. 6 It is impossible not to have, but it is possible not to know you have. 7 The recognition of having is the willingness for giving, and only by this willingness can you recognize what you have. 8 What you give is therefore the value you put on what you have, being the exact measure of the value you put upon it. 9 And this, in turn, is the measure of how much you want it. T-9.II.12. You can ask of the Holy Spirit, then, only by giving to Him, and you can give to Him only where you recognize Him. 2 If you recognize Him in everyone, consider how much you will be asking of Him, and how much you will receive. 3 He will deny you nothing because you have denied Him nothing, and so you can share everything. 4 This is the way, and the only way to have His answer, because His answer is all you can ask for and want. 5 Say, then, to everyone: 6 Because I will to know myself, I see you as God's Son and my brother. III. The Correction of Error T-9.III.1. The alertness of the ego to the errors of other egos is not the kind of vigilance the Holy Spirit would have you maintain. 2 Egos are critical in terms of the kind of "sense" they stand for. 3 They understand this kind of sense, because it is sensible to them. 4 To the Holy Spirit it makes no sense at all. T-9.III.2. To the ego it is kind and right and good to point out errors and "correct" them. 2 This makes perfect sense to the ego, which is unaware of what errors are and what correction is. 3 Errors are of the ego, and correction of errors lies in the relinquishment of the ego. 4 When you correct a brother, you are telling him that he is wrong. 5 He may be making no sense at the time, and it is certain that, if he is speaking from the ego, he will not be making sense. 6 But your task is still to tell him he is right. 7 You do not tell him this verbally, if he is speaking foolishly. 8 He needs correction at another level, because his error is at another level. 9 He is still right, because he is a Son of God. 10 His ego is always wrong, no matter what it says or does. p166 T-9.III.3. If you point out the errors of your brother's ego you must be seeing through yours, because the Holy Spirit does not perceive his errors. 2 This be true, since there is no communication between the ego and the Holy Spirit. 3 The ego makes no sense, and the Holy Spirit does not attempt to understand anything that arises from it. 4 Since He does not understand it, He does not judge it, knowing that nothing the ego makes means anything. T-9.III.4. When you react at all to errors, you are not listening to the Holy Spirit. 2 He has merely disregarded them, and if you attend to them you are not hearing Him. 3 If you do not hear Him, you are listening to your ego and making as little sense as the brother whose errors you perceive. 4 This cannot be correction. 5 Yet it is more than merely a lack of correction for him. 6 It is the giving up of correction in yourself. T-9.III.5. When a brother behaves insanely, you can heal him only by perceiving the sanity in him. 2 If you perceive his errors and accept them, you are accepting yours. 3 If you want to give yours over to the Holy Spirit, you must do this with his. 4 Unless this becomes the one way in which you handle all errors, you cannot understand how all errors are undone. 5 How is this different from telling you that what you teach you learn? 6 Your brother is as right as you are, and if you think he is wrong you are condemning yourself. T-9.III.6. cannot correct yourself. 2 Is it possible, then, for you to correct another? 3 Yet you can see him truly, because it is possible for you to see yourself truly. 4 It is not up to you to change your brother, but merely to accept him as he is. 5 His errors do not come from the truth that is in him, and only this truth is yours. 6 His errors cannot change this, and can have no effect at all on the truth in you. 7 To perceive errors in anyone, and to react to them as if they were real, is to make them real to you. 8 You will not escape paying the price for this, not because you are being punished for it, but because you are following the wrong guide and will therefore lose your way. T-9.III.7. Your brother's errors are not of him, any more than yours are of you. 2 Accept his errors as real, and you have attacked yourself. 3 If you would find your way and keep it, see only truth beside you for you walk together. 4 The Holy Spirit in you forgives all things in you and in your brother. 5 His errors are forgiven with yours. 6 Atonement is no more separate than love. 7 Atonement cannot be separate because it comes from love. p167 8 Any attempt you make to correct a brother means that you believe correction by you is possible, and this can only be the arrogance of the ego. 9 Correction is of God, Who does not know of arrogance. T-9.III.8. The Holy Spirit forgives everything because God created everything. 2 Do not undertake His function, or you will forget yours. 3 Accept only the function of healing in time, because that is what time is for. 4 God gave you the function to create in eternity. 5 You do not need to learn that, but you do need to learn to want it. 6 For that all learning was made. 7 This is the Holy Spirit's use of an ability that you do not need, but that you made. 8 Give it to Him! 9 You do not understand how to use it. 10 He will teach you how to see yourself without condemnation, by learning how to look on everything without it. 11 Condemnation will then not be real to you, and all your errors will be forgiven. IV. The Holy Spirit's Plan of Forgiveness T-9.IV.1. Atonement is for all, because it is the way to undo the belief that anything is for you alone. 2 To forgive is to overlook. 3 Look, then, beyond error and do not let your perception rest upon it, for you will believe what your perception holds. 4 Accept as true only what your brother is, if you would know yourself. 5 Perceive what he is not and you cannot know what you are, because you see him falsely. 6 Remember always that your Identity is shared, and that Its sharing is Its reality. T-9.IV.2. You have a part to play in the Atonement, but the plan of the Atonement is beyond you. 2 You do not understand how to overlook errors, or you would not make them. 3 It would merely be further error to believe either that you do not make them, or that you can correct them without a Guide to correction. 4 And if you do not follow this Guide, your errors will not be corrected. 5 The plan is not yours because of your limited ideas about what you are. 6 This sense of limitation is where all errors arise. 7 The way to undo them, therefore, is not you but you. T-9.IV.3. The Atonement is a lesson in sharing, which is given you because 2 The Holy Spirit merely reminds you of the natural use of your abilities. 3 By reinterpreting the ability to attack into the ability to share, He translates what you have made into what God created. 4 If you would accomplish this through Him you cannot look on your abilities through the eyes of the ego, or you will judge them as does. p168 5 All their harmfulness lies in the ego's judgment. 6 All their helpfulness lies in the judgment of the Holy Spirit. T-9.IV.4. The ego, too, has a plan of forgiveness because you are asking for one, though not of the right teacher. 2 The ego's plan, of course, makes no sense and will not work. 3 By following its plan you will merely place yourself in an impossible situation, to which the ego always leads you. 4 The ego's plan is to have you see error clearly first, and then overlook it. 5 Yet how can you overlook what you have made real? 6 By seeing it clearly, you have made it real and overlook it. 7 This is where the ego is forced to appeal to "mysteries," insisting that you must accept the meaningless to save yourself. 8 Many have tried to do this in my name, forgetting that my words make perfect sense because they come from God. 9 They are as sensible now as they ever were, because they speak of ideas that are eternal. T-9.IV.5. Forgiveness that is learned of me does not use fear to undo fear. 2 Nor does it make real the unreal and then destroy it. 3 Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus keeping it unreal for you. 4 Do not let any belief in its realness enter your mind, or you will also believe that you must undo what you have made in order to be forgiven. 5 What has no effect does not exist, and to the Holy Spirit the effects of error are nonexistent. 6 By steadily and consistently cancelling out all its effects, everywhere and in all respects, He teaches that the ego does not exist and proves it. T-9.IV.6. Follow the Holy Spirit's teaching in forgiveness, then, because forgiveness is His function and He knows how to fulfill it perfectly. 2 That is what I meant when I said that miracles are natural, and when they do not occur something has gone wrong. 3 Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow the Holy Spirit's plan of salvation, recognizing that you do not understand what it is. 4 His work is not your function, and unless you accept this you cannot learn what your function is. T-9.IV.7. The confusion of functions is so typical of the ego that you should be quite familiar with it by now. 2 The ego believes that all functions belong to it, even though it has no idea what they are. 3 This is more than mere confusion. 4 It is a particularly dangerous combination of grandiosity and confusion that makes the ego likely to attack anyone and anything for no reason at all. 5 This is exactly what the ego does. p169 6 It is unpredictable in its responses, because it has no idea of what it perceives. T-9.IV.8. If you have no idea what is happening, how appropriately can you expect to react? 2 You might ask yourself, regardless of how you may account for the reaction, whether its unpredictability places the ego in a sound position as your guide. 3 Let me repeat that the ego's qualifications as a guide are singularly unfortunate, and that it is a remarkably poor choice as a teacher of salvation. 4 Anyone who elects a totally insane guide must be totally insane himself. 5 Nor is it true that you do not realize the guide is insane. 6 You realize it because I realize it, and you have judged it by the same standard I have. T-9.IV.9. The ego literally lives on borrowed time, and its days are numbered. 2 Do not fear the Last Judgment, but welcome it and do not wait, for the ego's time is "borrowed" from your eternity. 3 This is the Second Coming that was made for you as the First was created. 4 The Second Coming is merely the return of sense. 5 Can this possibly be fearful? T-9.IV.10. What can be fearful but fantasy, and who turns to fantasy unless he despairs of finding satisfaction in reality? 2 Yet it is certain that you will never find satisfaction in fantasy, so that your only hope is to change your mind about reality. 3 Only if the decision that reality is fearful is wrong can God be right. 4 And I assure you that God right. 5 Be glad, then, that you have been wrong, but this was only because you did not know who you were. 6 Had you known, you could no more have been wrong than God can. T-9.IV.11. The impossible can happen only in fantasy. 2 When you search for reality in fantasies you will not find it. 3 The symbols of fantasy are of the ego, and of these you will find many. 4 But do not look for meaning in them. 5 They have no more meaning than the fantasies into which they are woven. 6 Fairy tales can be pleasant or fearful, but no one calls them true. 7 Children may believe them, and so, for a while, the tales are true for them. 8 Yet when reality dawns, the fantasies are gone. 9 Reality has not gone in the meanwhile. 10 The Second Coming is the awareness of reality, not its return. T-9.IV.12. Behold, my child, reality is here. 2 It belongs to you and me and God, and is perfectly satisfying to all of Us. 3 Only this awareness heals, because it is the awareness of truth. p170 V. The Unhealed Healer T-9.V.1. The ego's plan for forgiveness is far more widely used than God's. 2 This is because it is undertaken by unhealed healers, and is therefore of the ego. 3 Let us consider the unhealed healer more carefully now. 4 By definition, he is trying to give what he has not received. 5 If an unhealed healer is a theologian, for example, he may begin with the premise, "I am a miserable sinner, and so are you." 6 If he is a psychotherapist, he is more likely to start with the equally incredible belief that attack is real for both himself and the patient, but that it does not matter for either of them. T-9.V.2. I have repeatedly said that beliefs of the ego cannot be shared, and this is why they are unreal. 2 How, then, can "uncovering" them make them real? 3 Every healer who searches fantasies for truth must be unhealed, because he does not know where to look for truth, and therefore does not have the answer to the problem of healing. T-9.V.3. There is an advantage to bringing nightmares into awareness, but only to teach that they are not real, and that anything they contain is meaningless. 2 The unhealed healer cannot do this because he does not believe it. 3 All unhealed healers follow the ego's plan for forgiveness in one form or another. 4 If they are theologians they are likely to condemn themselves, teach condemnation and advocate a fearful solution. 5 Projecting condemnation onto God, they make Him appear retaliative, and fear His retribution. 6 What they have done is merely to identify with the ego, and by perceiving what does, condemn themselves because of this confusion. 7 It is understandable that there have been revolts against this concept, but to revolt against it is still to believe in it. T-9.V.4. Some newer forms of the ego's plan are as unhelpful as the older ones, because form does not matter and the content has not changed. 2 In one of the newer forms, for example, a psychotherapist may interpret the ego's symbols in a nightmare, and then use them to prove that the nightmare is real. 3 Having made it real, he then attempts to dispel its effects by depreciating the importance of the dreamer. 4 This would be a healing approach if the dreamer were also identified as unreal. 5 Yet if the dreamer is equated with the mind, the mind's corrective power through the Holy Spirit is denied. 6 This is a contradiction even in the ego's terms, and one which it usually notes even in its confusion. p171 T-9.V.5. If the way to counteract fear is to reduce the importance of the mind, how can this build ego strength? 2 Such evident inconsistencies account for why no one has really explained what happens in psychotherapy. 3 Nothing really does. 4 Nothing real has happened to the unhealed healer, and he must learn from his own teaching. 5 His ego will always seek to get something from the situation. 6 The unhealed healer therefore does not know how to give, and consequently cannot share. 7 He cannot correct because he is not working correctively. 8 He believes that it is up to him to teach the patient what is real, although he does not know it himself. T-9.V.6. What, then, should happen? 2 When God said, "Let there be light," there light. 3 Can you find light by analyzing darkness, as the psychotherapist does, or like the theologian, by acknowledging darkness in yourself and looking for a distant light to remove it, while emphasizing the distance? 4 Healing is not mysterious. 5 Nothing will change unless it is understood, since light understanding. 6 A "miserable sinner" cannot be healed without magic, nor can an "unimportant mind" esteem itself without magic. T-9.V.7. Both forms of the ego's approach, then, must arrive at an impasse; the characteristic "impossible situation" to which the ego always leads. 2 It may help someone to point out where he is heading, but the point is lost unless he is also helped to change his direction. 3 The unhealed healer cannot do this for him, since he cannot do it for himself. 4 The only meaningful contribution the healer can make is to present an example of one whose direction has been changed him, and who no longer believes in nightmares of any kind. 5 The light in his mind will therefore answer the questioner, who must decide with God that there is light he sees it. 6 And by his acknowledgment the healer knows it is there. 7 That is how perception ultimately is translated into knowledge. 8 The miracle worker begins by perceiving light, and translates his perception into sureness by continually extending it and accepting its acknowledgment. 9 Its effects assure him it is there. T-9.V.8. A therapist does not heal; 2 He can point to darkness but he cannot bring light of himself, for light is not of him. 3 Yet, being him, it must also be for his patient. 4 The Holy Spirit is the only Therapist. 5 He makes healing clear in any situation in which He is the Guide. 6 You can only let Him fulfill His function. p172 7 He needs no help for this. 8 He will tell you exactly what to do to help anyone He sends to you for help, and will speak to him through you if you do not interfere. 9 Remember that you choose the guide for helping, and the wrong choice will not help. 10 But remember also that the right one will. 11 Trust Him, for help is His function, and He is of God. 12 As you awaken other minds to the Holy Spirit through Him, and not yourself, you will understand that you are not obeying the laws of this world. 13 But the laws you are obeying work. 14 "The good is what works" is a sound though insufficient statement. 15 Only the good work. 16 Nothing else works at all. T-9.V.9. This course offers a very direct and a very simple learning situation, and provides the Guide Who tells you what to do. 2 If you do it, you will see that it works. 3 Its results are more convincing than its words. 4 They will convince you that the words are true. 5 By following the right Guide, you will learn the simplest of all lessons: 6 By their fruits ye shall know them, and they shall know themselves. VI. The Acceptance of Your Brother T-9.VI.1. How can you become increasingly aware of the Holy Spirit in you except by His effects? 2 You cannot see Him with your eyes nor hear Him with your ears. 3 How, then, can you perceive Him at all? 4 If you inspire joy and others react to you with joy, even though you are not experiencing joy yourself there must be something in you that is capable of producing it. 5 If it is in you and can produce joy, and if you see that it does produce joy in others, you must be dissociating it in yourself. T-9.VI.2. It seems to you that the Holy Spirit does not produce joy consistently in you only because you do not consistently arouse joy in others. 2 Their reactions to you are your evaluations of His consistency. 3 When you are inconsistent you will not always give rise to joy, and so you will not always recognize His consistency. 4 What you offer to your brother you offer to Him, because He cannot go beyond your offering in His giving. 5 This is not because He limits His giving, but simply because you have limited your receiving. 6 The decision to receive is the decision to accept. p173 T-9.VI.3. If your brothers are part of you, will you accept them? 2 Only they can teach you what you are, for your learning is the result of what you taught them. 3 What you call upon in them you call upon in yourself. 4 And as you call upon it in them it becomes real to you. 5 God has but one Son, knowing them all as One. 6 Only God Himself is more than they but they are not less than He is. 7 Would you know what this means? 8 If what you do to my brother you do to me, and if you do everything for yourself because we are part of you, everything we do belongs to you as well. 9 Everyone God created is part of you and shares His glory with you. 10 His glory belongs to Him, but it is equally yours. 11 You cannot, then, be less glorious than He is. T-9.VI.4. God is more than you only because He created you, but not even this would He keep from you. 2 Therefore you can create as He did, and your dissociation will not alter this. 3 Neither God's light nor yours is dimmed because you do not see. 4 Because the Sonship must create as one, you remember creation whenever you recognize part of creation. 5 Each part you remember adds to your wholeness because each part whole. 6 Wholeness is indivisible, but you cannot learn of your wholeness until you see it everywhere. 7 You can know yourself only as God knows His Son, for knowledge is shared with God. 8 When you awake in Him you will know your magnitude by accepting His limitlessness as yours. 9 But meanwhile you will judge it as you judge your brother's, and will accept it as you accept his. T-9.VI.5. You are not yet awake, but you can learn how to awaken. 2 Very simply, the Holy Spirit teaches you to awaken others. 3 As you see them waken you will learn what waking means, and because you have chosen to wake them, their gratitude and their appreciation of what you have given them will teach you its value. 4 They will become the witnesses to your reality, as you were created witness to God's. 5 Yet when the Sonship comes together and accepts its Oneness it will be known by its creations, who witness to its reality as the Son does to the Father. T-9.VI.6. Miracles have no place in eternity, because they are reparative. 2 Yet while you still need healing, your miracles are the only witnesses to your reality that you can recognize. 3 You cannot perform a miracle for yourself, because miracles are a way of giving acceptance and receiving it. 4 In time the giving comes first, though they are simultaneous in eternity, where they cannot be separated. 5 When you have learned they are the same, the need for time is over. p174 T-9.VI.7. Eternity is one time, its only dimension being "always." 2 This cannot mean anything to you until you remember God's open Arms, and finally know His open Mind. 3 Like Him, are "always"; in His Mind and with a mind like His. 4 In your open mind are your creations, in perfect communication born of perfect understanding. 5 Could you but accept one of them you would not want anything the world has to offer. 6 Everything else would be totally meaningless. 7 God's meaning is incomplete without you, and you are incomplete without your creations. 8 Accept your brother in this world and accept nothing else, for in him you will find your creations because he created them with you. 9 You will never know that you are co-creator with God until you learn that your brother is co-creator with you. VII. The Two Evaluations T-9.VII.1. God's Will is your salvation. 2 Would He not have given you the means to find it? 3 If He wills you to have it, He must have made it possible and easy to obtain it. 4 Your brothers are everywhere. 5 You do not have to seek far for salvation. 6 Every minute and every second gives you a chance to save yourself. 7 Do not lose these chances, not because they will not return, but because delay of joy is needless. 8 God wills you perfect happiness now. 9 Is it possible that this is not also your will? 10 And is it possible that this is not also the will of your brothers? T-9.VII.2. Consider, then, that in this joint will you are all united, and in this only. 2 There may be disagreement on anything else, but not on this. 3 This, then, is where peace abides. 4 And you abide in peace when you so decide. 5 Yet you cannot abide in peace unless you accept the Atonement, because the Atonement the way to peace. 6 The reason is very simple, and so obvious that it is often overlooked. 7 The ego is afraid of the obvious, since obviousness is the essential characteristic of reality. 8 Yet cannot overlook it unless you are not looking. T-9.VII.3. It is perfectly obvious that if the Holy Spirit looks with love on all He perceives, He looks with love on you. 2 His evaluation of you is based on His knowledge of what you are, and so He evaluates you truly. 3 And this evaluation must be in your mind, because He is. 4 The ego is also in your mind, because you have accepted it there. p175 5 Its evaluation of you, however, is the exact opposite of the Holy Spirit's, because the ego does not love you. 6 It is unaware of what you are, and wholly mistrustful of everything it perceives because its perceptions are so shifting. 7 The ego is therefore capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst. 8 That is its range. 9 It cannot exceed it because of its uncertainty. 10 And it can never go beyond it because it can never certain. T-9.VII.4. You, then, have two conflicting evaluations of yourself in your mind, and they cannot both be true. 2 You do not yet realize how completely different these evaluations are, because you do not understand how lofty the Holy Spirit's perception of you really is. 3 He is not deceived by anything you do, because He never forgets what you are. 4 The ego is deceived by everything you do, especially when you respond to the Holy Spirit, because at such times its confusion increases. 5 The ego is, therefore, particularly likely to attack you when you react lovingly, because it has evaluated you as unloving and you are going against its judgment. 6 The ego will attack your motives as soon as they become clearly out of accord with its perception of you. 7 This is when it will shift abruptly from suspiciousness to viciousness, since its uncertainty is increased. 8 Yet it is surely pointless to attack in return. 9 What can this mean except that you are agreeing with the ego's evaluation of what you are? T-9.VII.5. If you choose to see yourself as unloving you will not be happy. 2 You are condemning yourself and must therefore regard yourself as inadequate. 3 Would you look to the ego to help you escape from a sense of inadequacy it has produced, and must maintain for its existence? 4 Can you escape from its evaluation of you by using its methods for keeping this picture intact? T-9.VII.6. You cannot evaluate an insane belief system from within it. 2 Its range precludes this. 3 You can only go beyond it, look back from a point where sanity exists and 4 Only by this contrast can insanity be judged as insane. 5 With the grandeur of God in you, you have chosen to be little and to lament your littleness. 6 Within the system that dictated this choice the lament is inevitable. 7 Your littleness is taken for granted there and you do not ask, "Who granted it?" 8 The question is meaningless within the ego's thought system, because it would open the whole thought system to question. T-9.VII.7. I have said that the ego does not know what a real question is. p176 2 Lack of knowledge of any kind is always associated with unwillingness to know, and this produces a total lack of knowledge simply because knowledge is total. 3 Not to question your littleness therefore is to deny all knowledge, and keep the ego's whole thought system intact. 4 You cannot retain part of a thought system, because it can be questioned only at its foundation. 5 And this must be questioned from beyond it, because within it its foundation does stand. 6 The Holy Spirit judges against the reality of the ego's thought system merely because He knows its foundation is not true. 7 Therefore, nothing that arises from it means anything. 8 He judges every belief you hold in terms of where it comes from. 9 If it comes from God, He knows it to be true. 10 If it does not, He knows that it is meaningless. T-9.VII.8. Whenever you question your value, say: 2 God Himself is incomplete without me. 3 Remember this when the ego speaks, and you will not hear it. 4 The truth about you is so lofty that nothing unworthy of God is worthy of you. 5 Choose, then, what you want in these terms, and accept nothing that you would not offer to God as wholly fitting for Him. 6 You do not want anything else. 7 Return your part to Him, and He will give you all of Himself in exchange for the return of what belongs to Him and renders Him complete. VIII. Grandeur versus Grandiosity T-9.VIII.1. Grandeur is of God, and only of Him. 2 Therefore it is in you. 3 Whenever you become aware of it, however dimly, you abandon the ego automatically, because in the presence of the grandeur of God the meaninglessness of the ego becomes perfectly apparent. 4 When this occurs, even though it does not understand it, the ego believes that its "enemy" has struck, and attempts to offer gifts to induce you to return to its "protection." 5 Self- inflation is the only offering it can make. 6 The grandiosity of the ego is its alternative to the grandeur of God. 7 Which will you choose? T-9.VIII.2. Grandiosity is always a cover for despair. 2 It is without hope because it is not real. 3 It is an attempt to counteract your littleness, based on the belief that the littleness is real. 4 Without this belief grandiosity is meaningless, and you could not possibly want it. p177 5 The essence of grandiosity is competitiveness, because it always involves attack. 6 It is a delusional attempt to outdo, but not to undo. 7 We said before that the ego vacillates between suspiciousness and viciousness. 8 It remains suspicious as long as you despair of yourself. 9 It shifts to viciousness when you decide not to tolerate self-abasement and seek relief. 10 Then it offers you the illusion of attack as a "solution." T-9.VIII.3. The ego does not understand the difference between grandeur and grandiosity, because it sees no difference between miracle impulses and ego- alien beliefs of its own. 2 I told you that the ego is aware of threat to its existence, but makes no distinctions between these two very different kinds of threat. 3 Its profound sense of vulnerability renders it incapable of judgment except in terms of attack. 4 When the ego experiences threat, its only decision is whether to attack now or to withdraw to attack later. 5 If you accept its offer of grandiosity it will attack immediately. 6 If you do not, it will wait. T-9.VIII.4. The ego is immobilized in the presence of God's grandeur, because His grandeur establishes your freedom. 2 Even the faintest hint of your reality literally drives the ego from your mind, because you will give up all investment in it. 3 Grandeur is totally without illusions, and because it is real it is compellingly convincing. 4 Yet the conviction of reality will not remain with you unless you do not allow the ego to attack it. 5 The ego will make every effort to recover and mobilize its energies against your release. 6 It will tell you that you are insane, and argue that grandeur cannot be a real part of you because of the littleness in which it believes. 7 Yet your grandeur is not delusional because you did not make it. 8 You made grandiosity and are afraid of it because it is a form of attack, but your grandeur is of God, Who created it out of His Love. T-9.VIII.5. From your grandeur you can only bless, because your grandeur is your abundance. 2 By blessing you hold it in your mind, protecting it from illusions and keeping yourself in the Mind of God. 3 Remember always that you cannot be anywhere except in the Mind of God. 4 When you forget this, you despair and you attack. T-9.VIII.6. The ego depends solely on your willingness to tolerate it. 2 If you are willing to look upon your grandeur you cannot despair, and therefore you cannot want the ego. 3 Your grandeur is God's answer to the ego, because it is true. 4 Littleness and grandeur cannot coexist, nor is it possible for them to alternate. 5 Littleness and grandiosity can and must alternate, since both are untrue and are therefore on the same level. p178 6 Being the level of shift, it is experienced as shifting and extremes are its essential characteristic. T-9.VIII.7. Truth and littleness are denials of each other because grandeur is truth. 2 Truth does not vacillate; it is always true. 3 When grandeur slips away from you, you have replaced it with something you have made. 4 Perhaps it is the belief in littleness; perhaps it is the belief in grandiosity. 5 Yet it must be insane because it is not true. 6 Your grandeur will never deceive you, but your illusions always will. 7 Illusions are deceptions. 8 You cannot triumph, but you exalted. 9 And in your exalted state you seek others like you and rejoice with them. T-9.VIII.8. It is easy to distinguish grandeur from grandiosity, because love is returned and pride is not. 2 Pride will not produce miracles, and will therefore deprive you of the true witnesses to your reality. 3 Truth is not obscure nor hidden, but its obviousness to you lies in the joy you bring to its witnesses, who show it to you. 4 They attest to your grandeur, but they cannot attest to pride because pride is not shared. 5 God wants you to behold what He created because it is His joy. T-9.VIII.9. Can your grandeur be arrogant when God Himself witnesses to it? 2 And what can be real that has no witnesses? 3 What good can come of it? 4 And if no good can come of it the Holy Spirit cannot use it. 5 What He cannot transform to the Will of God does not exist at all. 6 Grandiosity is delusional, because it is used to replace your grandeur. 7 Yet what God has created cannot be replaced. 8 God is incomplete without you because His grandeur is total, and you cannot be missing from it. T-9.VIII.10. You are altogether irreplaceable in the Mind of God. 2 No one else can fill your part in it, and while you leave your part of it empty your eternal place merely waits for your return. 3 God, through His Voice, reminds you of it, and God Himself keeps your extensions safe within it. 4 Yet you do not know them until you return to them. 5 You cannot replace the Kingdom, and you cannot replace yourself. 6 God, Who knows your value, would not have it so, and so it is not so. 7 Your value is in God's Mind, and therefore not in yours alone. 8 To accept yourself as God created you cannot be arrogance, because it is the denial of arrogance. 9 To accept your littleness arrogant, because it means that you believe your evaluation of yourself is truer than God's. p179 T-9.VIII.11. Yet if truth is indivisible, your evaluation of yourself must God's. 2 You did not establish your value and it needs no defense. 3 Nothing can attack it nor prevail over it. 4 It does not vary. 5 It merely 6 Ask the Holy Spirit what it is and He will tell you, but do not be afraid of His answer, because it comes from God. 7 It is an exalted answer because of its Source, but the Source is true and so is Its answer. 8 Listen and do not question what you hear, for God does not deceive. 9 He would have you replace the ego's belief in littleness with His Own exalted Answer to what you are, so that you can cease to question it and know it for what it is. p180