An ancient miracle has come to bless and to replace an ancient enmity that came to kill.
It’s important to understand, if you’re with Jesus in this Course in Miracles, to understand that the world itself is an attack: The world is an attack on reality, the body is an attack on yourself and perception is a perversion that has destroyed your awareness of the knowledge of divine perfection.
The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself.
The whole schism that gave rise to the dream of separation was the result of an idea so alien to truth, a thought of judgment, that truth became obscure to the mind in which that alien thought was given reality. This being the first ‘attack’ upon yourself and your inviolate and perfect nature in eternity.
To be born into the world is to enter into a state of terror; too late! The separate ego-identity is the terrorist, maintained by a narrative of arrogance and defiance in the assertion of a terrifying virtual sub-reality. Life is a continuing sense of fear and foreboding, a disaster, a Frankensteinian substitute creation for all the grace, power and beauty of the infinite illuminate reality of Eternal Love.
You cannot be saved from the world, but you can escape from its cause. This is what salvation means, for where is the world you see when its cause is gone? Vision already holds a replacement for everything you think you see now. Loveliness can light your images, and so transform them that you will love them, even though they were made of hate. For you will not be making them alone.
Forgiveness is the given method and means for the undoing of this great projection of hate. Firstly by correctly identifying the cause so that it can then be let go of and finally replaced.
There will never be an end to conflict until it is recognized this is a fabrication of the mind. All conflict is false, an intrinsic characteristic of illusions you cannot escape and every attempt to resolve conflict will fail until you see its cause is in the mind that wishes to be a separate self within a body. All conflict is false simply because it is an attempt to solve a problem that is imagined and not real. The only possible solution is to recognize the problem as it is and where it is; the problem of separation, or the wish to be separate.
If you desire to find the end of conflict in the world you must find it in yourself, and then you will see it in the world. It sounds simple, and I assure you it is not complicated, but the identity of an individual consciousness must undergo a radical and fundamental re-association with the world, all its relationships and itself. To undo the state of terrorism in yourself is to accept the truth about yourself and by your acceptance be changed entirely. To lose the little me you call yourself and accept instead the grandeur and power of your innate eternal being. The state of grace is the state of joy and no-one suffers conflict if they have attached themselves to grace.
I feel the Love of God within me now… You will look upon that which you feel within. If hatred finds a place within your heart, you will perceive a fearful world, held cruelly in death’s sharp-pointed, bony fingers. If you feel the Love of God within you, you will look out on a world of mercy and of love.
The primary obstacle to forgiveness is the belief there is a world and that this world that appears so real exists outside, apart and independent from yourself; that there exists a separation between the mind as cause and what is also mind as effect. This is the correction forgiveness teaches, the purpose of the miracle, lifting the mind out of ignorance and in doing so restoring true understanding of the nature of phenomenal existence. And this is the beginning of the appreciation of the fundamental nature of mind, wholly unchanged and untouched by all the dramas of existence within the dream of separation, pain and death.
The miracle is the first step in giving back to cause the function of causation, not effect. For this confusion has produced the dream, and while it lasts will wakening be feared. Nor will the call to wakening be heard, because it seems to be the call to fear.
This is the shift that true perception brings: What was projected out is seen within, and there forgiveness lets it disappear.
What is seen outside must lie beyond forgiveness, for it seems to be forever sinful. Where is hope while sin is seen as outside? What remedy can guilt expect? But seen within your mind, guilt and forgiveness for an instant lie together, side by side, upon one altar. There at last are sickness and its single remedy joined in one healing brightness. God has come to claim His Own. Forgiveness is complete.
If the cause of this world is attack thoughts, the terrorist is in each and every mind that experiences itself as separate, for the idea itself is an attack on God and His Creation. The temptation of judgment, anger and attack in all its forms will persist until complete responsibility for what you made has been accepted. That’s the work of the individual, right there as the imperative for a real awakening, that you find your way to the place where you are at cause. Only there can it be undone only there can redemption be found.
Do not be afraid of the ego. It depends on your mind, and as you made it by believing in it, so you can dispel it by withdrawing belief from it. Do not project the responsibility for your belief in it onto anyone else, or you will preserve the belief. 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. But having accepted the errors as yours, do not keep them. 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.
To escape from the world you see is to give up attack thoughts. This implies that you don’t always recognize attack thoughts and why attack is not relinquished unless it is relinquished entirely. And also why recognition of Love’s Presence is impossible where attack in any regard is accepted as justified.
Miracles make minds one in God. Forgiveness is the way and the means, miracles are the natural effect. They are simultaneous and legion, they are beyond the laws of space and time, and there is no order of difficulty among them. There is no situation that will not yield to the compelling power of their love. You will be healed when you look with forgiving eyes upon your brother, upon the world and upon yourself.
The holy instant is the miracle’s abiding place. From there, each one is born into this world as witness to a state of mind that has transcended conflict, and has reached to peace. It carries comfort from the place of peace into the battleground, and demonstrates that war has no effects. For all the hurt that war has sought to bring, the broken bodies and the shattered limbs, the screaming dying and the silent dead, are gently lifted up and comforted.
There is no sadness where a miracle has come to heal. And nothing more than just one instant of your love without attack is necessary that all this occur. In that one instant you are healed, and in that single instant is all healing done.
Who is the terrorist? What is the terrorist? Where is the terrorist? No-one, nothing and nowhere – a false sense of self that believes it has existence, has meaning, can be seen and be believed and understood, and could actually ‘know’ something. That is all, it exists in the imagination of a mind asleep and when it awakens it disappears.
This world is a picture of the crucifixion of God’s Son. And until you realize that God’s Son cannot be crucified, this is the world you will see. Yet you will not realize this until you accept the eternal fact that God’s Son is not guilty. He deserves only love because he has given only love. He cannot be condemned because he has never condemned. The Atonement is the final lesson he need learn, for it teaches him that, never having sinned, he has no need of salvation.
You are not who you think you are and What you are is Who you are as God created you. You are the light of the world, you are the perfect Son of God in eternal joy, in perfection and wholeness and in love without end or limit. Your forgiveness is the demonstration of the reality of this fact. And for this we lift up our hearts as one together, in gratitude, for finding the means by which all our nightmares are undone, all dreaming ended and the Light of Truth returned to our minds in a brightness of incomparable joy.
You are as God created you, and so is every living thing you look upon, regardless of the images you see.
What you behold as sickness and as pain, as weakness and as suffering and loss, is but temptation to perceive yourself defenseless and in hell. Yield not to this, and you will see all pain, in every form, wherever it occurs, but disappear as mists before the sun. A miracle has come to heal God’s Son, and close the door upon his dreams of weakness, opening the way to his salvation and release.
In Heaven reality is shared and not reflected. By sharing its reflection here, its truth becomes the only perception the Son of God accepts. And thus, remembrance of his Father dawns on him, and he can no longer be satisfied with anything but his own reality.
And now, in the dark place of death, insanity and chaos, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die, life-giving waters of healing and forgiving love spring up everywhere to show That Which is one with God in everlasting life cannot die, cannot be killed and cannot be attacked or crucified – There is no death for the Son of God is like His Father, and –what has life has immortality.
My heart is beating in the peace of God.
Surrounding me is all the life that God created in His Love. It calls to me in every heartbeat and in every breath; in every action and in every thought. Peace fills my heart, and floods my body with the purpose of forgiveness. Now my mind is healed, and all I need to save the world is given me. Each heartbeat brings me peace; each breath infuses me with strength. I am a messenger of God, directed by His Voice, sustained by Him in love, and held forever quiet and at peace within His loving Arms. Each heartbeat calls His Name, and every one is answered by His Voice, assuring me I am at home in Him.
