Day 300 - A Course in Miracles

Day 300 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Nine: The Awakening
I. Introduction

1 There is no time, no place, no state where God is absent. There is nothing to be feared. There is no way in which a gap could be conceived of in the wholeness that is His. The compromise the least and littlest gap would represent in His eternal love is quite impossible. For it would mean His love could harbor just a hint of hate; His gentleness turn sometimes to attack; and His eternal patience sometimes fail. All this do you believe, when you perceive a gap between your brother and yourself. How could you trust Him, then? For He must be deceptive in His Love. Be wary, then; let Him not come too close, and leave a gap between you and His love through which you can escape if there be need for you to flee.

Day 299 - A Course in Miracles

Day 299 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Eight: The Undoing of Fear

VIII. The Beautiful Relationship

60 God asks for nothing, and His Son, like Him, need ask for nothing. For there is no lack in him. An empty space, a little gap, would be a lack. And it is only there that he could want for something he has not. A space where God is not, a gap between the Father and the Son is not the Will of either, who have promised to be one. God's promise is a promise to Himself, and there is no one who could be untrue to what He wills as part of what He is.The promise that there is no gap between Himself and what He is cannot be false. What will can come between what must be one, and in Whose wholeness there can be no gap?

Day 298 - A Course in Miracles

Day 298 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Eight: The Undoing of Fear

VI. The Alternate to Dreams of Fear

47 What is a sense of sickness but a sense of limitation? Of a splitting off and separating from? A gap perceived between yourselves and what is seen as health? The good is seen outside; the evil, in. And thus is sickness separating off the self from good and keeping evil in. God is the alternate to dreams of fear. Who shares in them can never share in Him. But who withdraws his mind from sharing them is sharing Him. There is no other choice. Except you share it, nothing can exist. And you exist because God shared His Will with you, that His creation might create.

Day 297 - A Course in Miracles

Day 297 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Eight: The Undoing of Fear

V. The Greater Joining

37 Accepting the Atonement for yourself means not to give support to someone's dream of sickness and of death. It means that you share not his wish to separate and let him turn illusions on himself. Nor do you wish that they be turned instead on you. Thus have they no effects. And you are free of dreams of pain because you let him be.

Day 296 - A Course in Miracles

Day 296 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Eight: The Undoing of Fear

IV. The Agreement to Join

28 What waits in perfect certainty beyond salvation is not our concern. For you have barely started to allow your first uncertain steps to be directed up the ladder separation led you down. The miracle alone is your concern at present. Here is where we must begin. And having started, will the way be made serene and simple in the rising up to waking and the ending of the dream. When you accept a miracle, you do not add your dream of fear to one that is already being dreamed. Without support, the dream will fade away without effects. For it is your support that strengthens it.

Day 295 - A Course in Miracles

Day 295 - A Course in Miracles

Day 295

Yet, if you see your brother as a body, it IS but this [stand before an empty frame as if it were a masterpiece] you do. The masterpiece that God has set within this frame is all there IS to

see. The body holds it, for a while, without obscuring it in any way. But what God has created NEEDS no frame, for what He has created HE supports, and frames within Himself. His masterpiece He offers YOU to see. And would you rather see the frame INSTEAD of this? And see the picture not at all? The Holy Spirit is the frame God set around the part of Him that YOU would see as separate. Yet its frame is JOINED to its Creator, One with Him AND with His masterpiece.

Day 294 - A Course in Miracles

Day 294 - A Course in Miracles

DAY 294

The Holy Spirit serves Christ’s purpose in your mind, so that the aim of specialness CAN be corrected where the error lies. Because His purpose still is One with both the Father AND the Son, He KNOWS the Will of God, and what you REALLY will. But this is understood by mind PERCEIVED as one, AWARE that it is one, AND SO EXPERIENCED. It is the Holy Spirit’s function to teach you HOW this Oneness is experienced; WHAT you must do that it can BE experienced; and WHERE you should go to do it. All this takes note of time and place AS IF they were discrete, for while YOU think that part of YOU is separate, the concept of a Oneness JOINED as one is meaningless.

Day 293 - A Course in Miracles

Day 293 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Eight: The Undoing of Fear

III. Reversing Effect and Cause

16 Without a cause there can be no effects, and yet without effects there is no cause. The cause a cause is made by its effects; the Father is a father by His Son. Effects do not create their cause, but they establish its causation. Thus, the Son gives fatherhood to his Creator and receives the gift that he has given Him. It is because he is God's Son that he must also be a father who creates as God created him. The circle of creation has no end. Its starting and its ending are the same. But in itself it holds the universe of all creation, without beginning and without an end.

Day 292 - A Course in Miracles

Day 292 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Eight: The Undoing of Fear

I. Introduction

1 The miracle does nothing. All it does is to undo. And thus it cancels out the interference to what has been done. It does not add, but merely takes away. And what it takes away is long since gone, but being kept in memory, appears to have immediate effects. This world was over long ago. The thoughts that made it are no longer in the mind that thought of them and loved them for a little while. The miracle but shows the past is gone, and what has truly gone has no effects. Remembering a cause can but produce illusions of its presence, not effects.

Day 291 - A Course in Miracles

Day 291 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Body and the Dream

IX. The "Hero" of the Dream

77 The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There is no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream in which it acts as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed. It takes the central place in every dream, which tells the story of how it was made by other bodies, born into the world outside the body, lives a little while and dies, to be united in the dust with other bodies dying like itself. In the brief time allotted it to live, it seeks for other bodies as its friends and enemies. Its safety is its main concern. Its comfort is its guiding rule. It tries to look for pleasure and avoid the things that would be hurtful. Above all, it tries to teach itself its pains and joys are different and can be told apart.

Day 290 - A Course in Miracles

Day 290 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Body and the Dream
VIII. The Illusion of Suffering

62 Suffering is an emphasis upon all that the world has done to injure you. Here is the world's demented version of salvation clearly shown. Like to a dream of punishment in which the dreamer is unconscious of what brought on the attack against himself, he sees himself attacked unjustly and by something not himself. He is the victim of this "something else," a thing outside himself for which he has no reason to be held responsible.

Day 289 - A Course in Miracles

Day 289 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Body and the Dream

VII. The Purpose of Pain

54 Pain demonstrates the body must be real. It is a loud, obscuring voice whose shrieks would silence what the Holy Spirit says and keep His words from your awareness. Pain compels attention, drawing it away from Him and focusing upon itself. Its purpose is the same as pleasure, for they both are means to make the body real. What shares a common purpose is the same.

Day 288 - A Course in Miracles

Day 288 - A Course in Miracles

Day 288

The Resolution of the Dream

The Christ in you is very still. He looks on what He loves, and knows it as Himself. And thus does He rejoice at what He sees, because He knows that it is one with Him, and with His Father. Specialness, too, takes joy in what it sees, although it is not true. Yet what you seek for IS a source of joy, as you conceive it.

Day 287 - A Course in Miracles

Day 287 - A Course in Miracles

Day 287

The special ones are all asleep, surrounded by a world of loveliness they do not see. Freedom and peace and joy stand there, beside the bier on which they sleep, and call them to come forth and waken from their dream of death. Yet they hear nothing. They are lost in dreams of specialness. They hate the call that would awaken them.

Day 286 - A Course in Miracles

Day 286 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Body and the Dream

VI. The Healing Example

44 The only way to heal is to be healed. The miracle extends without your help, but you are needed that it can begin. Accept the miracle of healing, and it will go forth because of what it is. It is its nature to extend itself the instant it is born. And it is born the instant it is offered and received. No one can ask another to be healed. But he can let himself be healed and thus offer the other what he has received. Who can bestow upon another what he does not have? And who can share what he denies himself? The Holy Spirit speaks to you. He does not speak to someone else. Yet by your listening, His Voice extends because you have accepted what He says.

Day 285 - A Course in Miracles

Day 285 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Body and the Dream

IV. The Symbol of the Impossible

29 Power cannot oppose. For opposition would weaken it, and weakened power is a contradiction in ideas. Weak strength is meaningless, and power used to weaken is employed to limit. And therefore it must be limited and weak because that is its purpose. Power is unopposed, to be itself. No weakness can intrude on it without changing it into something it is not. To weaken is to limit and impose an opposite that contradicts the concept which it attacks. And by this does it join to the idea a something it is not and make it unintelligible. Who can understand a double concept, such as "weakened-power" or as "hateful-love?"

Day 284 - A Course in Miracles

Day 284 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Body and the Dream

III. The Fear of Healing

13 Is healing frightening? To many, yes. For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies are accusers. They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, proclaiming that the frail can have no trust and that the damaged have no grounds for peace. Who has been injured by his brother and could love and trust him still? He has attacked and will attack again. Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be protected from him. To forgive may be an act of charity, but not his due. He may be pitied for his guilt, but not exonerated. And if you forgive him his transgressions, you but add to all the guilt that he has really earned.

Day 283 - A Course in Miracles

Day 283 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Body and the Dream
I. Introduction

1 The wish to be unfairly treated is a compromise attempt that would combine attack and innocence. Who can combine the wholly incompatible and make a unity of what can never join? Walk you the gentle way, and you will fear no evil and no shadows in the night. But place no terror symbols on your path, or you will weave a crown of thorns from which your brother and yourself will not escape. You cannot crucify yourself alone.

Day 282 - A Course in Miracles

Day 282 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Six: The Transition

X. For They Have Come

77 Think but how holy you must be from whom the Voice for God calls lovingly unto your brother, that you may awake in him the Voice that answers to your call! And think how holy he must be when in him sleeps your own salvation with his freedom joined! However much you wish he be condemned, God is in him.

Day 281 - A Course in Miracles

Day 281 - A Course in Miracles

Day 281

You who believe you walk in sanity, with feet on solid ground, and through a world where meaning CAN be found, consider this: These ARE the laws on which your “sanity” appears to rest. These ARE the principles which make the ground beneath your feet seem solid. And it IS here you look for meaning.

Day 280 - A Course in Miracles

Day 280 - A Course in Miracles

Day 280
The second law of chaos, dear indeed to every worshipper of sin, is that each one MUST sin, and therefore DESERVES attack and death. This principle, closely related to the first, is the demand that errors call for punishment, and NOT correction. For the DESTRUCTION of the one who makes the error places him BEYOND correction, and beyond forgiveness. What he has done is thus interpreted as an irrevocable sentence on himself, which God Himself is powerless to overlook. Sin cannot BE remitted, being the belief the Son of God can make mistakes for which his own destruction becomes inevitable.

Day 279 - A Course in Miracles

Day 279 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Six: The Transition

IX. The Immediacy of Salvation

68 The one remaining problem that you have is that you see an interval between the time when you forgive and will receive the benefits of trust. This but reflects the little you would keep between yourselves that you might be a little separate. For time and space are one illusion which takes different forms. If it has been projected beyond your minds, you think of it as time. The nearer it is brought to where it is, the more you think of it in terms of space.

Day 278 - A Course in Miracles

Day 278 - A Course in Miracles

Day 278

Let not the little interferers pull you to littleness. There CAN be no attraction of guilt in innocence. Think what a happy world you walk, with truth beside you! Do not give up this world of freedom, for a little sigh of seeming sin, nor for a tiny stirring of guilt’s attraction. Would you, for all these meaningless distractions, lay Heaven aside? Your destiny and purpose are far beyond them, in the clean peace where littleness does not exist. Your purpose is at variance with littleness of any kind. And so it is at variance with sin.

Day 277 - A Course in Miracles

Day 277 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Six: The Transition

VII. The Appointed Friend

44 Anything in this world that you believe is good and valuable and worth striving for can hurt you and will do so. Not because it has the power to hurt, but just because you have denied it is but an illusion and made it real. And it is real to you. It is not nothing and through its perceived reality has entered all the world of sick illusions. All belief in sin, in power of attack, in hurt and harm, in sacrifice and death has come to you. For no one can make one illusion real and still escape the rest.

Day 276 - A Course in Miracles

Day 276 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Six: The Transition

V. Where Sin Has Left

25 Forgiveness is this world's equivalent of Heaven's justice. It translates the world of sin into a simple world where justice can be reflected from beyond the gate behind which total lack of limits lies. Nothing in boundless love could need forgiveness. And what is charity within the world gives way to simple justice past the gate that opens into Heaven.

Day 275 - A Course in Miracles

Day 275 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Six: The Transition

III. The Forms of Error

10 It is not difficult to understand the reasons why you do not ask the Holy Spirit to solve all problems for you. He has not greater difficulty in resolving some than others. Every problem is the same to Him because each one is solved in just the same respect and through the same approach. The aspects which need solving do not change, whatever form the problem seems to take.

Day 274 - A Course in Miracles

Day 274 - A Course in Miracles

Day 274

The Branching of the Road

Special Message:

When you come to the place where the branch in the road is quite apparent, you cannot go ahead. You MUST go one way or the other. For now, if you go straight ahead, the way you were going before you came to the branch, YOU WILL GO NOWHERE. The whole purpose of coming this far is to decide WHICH BRANCH YOU WILL TAKE FROM HERE ON. The way you came no longer matters. IT CAN NO LONGER SERVE.

Day 273 - A Course in Miracles

Day 273 - A Course in Miracles

Day 273

Reason and the Holy Relationship

The introduction of reason into the ego’s thought system is the beginning of its undoing. For reason and the ego are CONTRADICTORY. Nor is it possible for them to co-exist in your AWARENESS. And reason’s goal IS to make plain, and therefore obvious. You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally. If it is not the body’s sight, it MUST be understood. FOR IT IS PLAIN, and what is obvious is NOT ambiguous. It CAN be understood. And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their DIFFERENT ways.

Day 272 - A Course in Miracles

Day 272 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Six: The Transition

I. Introduction

1 In the "dynamics" of attack is sacrifice a key idea. It is the pivot upon which all compromise, all desperate attempts to strike a bargain, and all conflicts achieve a seeming balance. It is the symbol of the central theme that somebody must lose. Its focus on the body is apparent, for it is always an attempt to limit loss. The body is itself a sacrifice—a giving up of power in the name of saving just a little for yourself. To see a brother in another body separate from yours is the expression of a wish to see a little part of him and sacrifice the rest. Look at the world, and you will see nothing attached to anything beyond itself. All seeming entities can come a little nearer or go a little farther off but cannot join.

Day 271 - A Course in Miracles

Day 271 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Five: The Remedy

X. The Justice of Heaven

78 What can it be but arrogance to think your little errors cannot be undone by Heaven's justice? And what could this mean except that they are sins and not mistakes, forever uncorrectable, and to be met with vengeance not with justice? Are you willing to be released from all effects of sin? You cannot answer this until you see all that the answer must entail. For if you answer "yes," it means you will forgo all values of this world in favor of the peace of Heaven. Not one sin would you retain. And not one doubt that this is possible will you hold dear that sin be kept in place. You mean that truth has greater value now than all illusions. And you recognize that truth must be revealed to you because you know not what it is.

Day 269 - A Course in Miracles

Day 269 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Five: The Remedy

VIII. Commuting the Sentence

50 And if the Holy Spirit can commute each sentence that you laid upon yourself into a blessing, then it cannot be a sin. Sin is the one thing in all the world that cannot change. It is immutable. And on its changelessness the world depends. The magic of the world can seem to hide the pain of sin from sinners and deceive with glitter and with guile. Yet each one knows the cost of sin is death. And so it is. For sin is a request for death, a wish to make this world's foundation sure as love, dependable as Heaven, and as strong as God Himself. The world is safe from love to everyone who thinks sin possible. Nor will it change. Yet is it possible what God created not should share the attributes of His creation when it opposes it in every way?

Day 270 - A Course in Miracles

Day 270 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Five: The Remedy

IX. The Principle of Salvation

63 The Holy Spirit can use all that you give to Him for your salvation. But He cannot use what you withhold, for He cannot take it from you without your willingness. For if He did, you would believe He wrested it from you against your will. And so you would not learn it is your will to be without it. You need not give it to Him wholly willingly, for if you could, you'd have no need of Him. But this He needs—that you prefer He take it than that you keep it for yourself alone and recognize that what brings loss to no one you would not know. This much is necessary to add to the idea no one can lose for you to gain. And nothing more.

Day 268 - A Course in Miracles

Day 268 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Five: The Remedy

VI. The State of Sinlessness

37 The state of sinlessness is merely this: the whole desire to attack is gone, and so there is no reason to perceive the Son of God as other than he is. The need for guilt is gone because it has no purpose and is meaningless without the goal of sin. Attack and sin are bound as one illusion, each the cause and aim and justifier of the other. Each is meaningless alone, but seems to draw a meaning from the other. Each depends upon the other for whatever sense it seems to have. And no one could believe in one unless the other were the truth, for each attests the other must be true.

Day 267 - A Course in Miracles

Day 267 - A Course in Miracles

Day 267

Reason, like love, would REASSURE you, and NOT seek to frighten you. The power to HEAL the Son of God is given you, BECAUSE he MUST be one with you. You ARE responsible for how he sees himself. But reason tells you it is GIVEN you to change his whole mind, which is one with YOU, in just an instant. And ANY instant serves to bring COMPLETE correction of his errors, and make him whole. The instant that you choose to let YOURSELF be healed, in that same instant is his whole salvation seen as complete WITH yours. Reason is given you to UNDERSTAND that this is so. For reason, kind as is the purpose for which it is the means, leads steadily AWAY from madness, toward the goal of truth.

Day 266 - A Course in Miracles

Day 266 - A Course in Miracles

Day 266

Reason and Correction

Reason cannot see sin, but CAN see errors, and LEADS to their correction. It does not value THEM, but their CORRECTION. But reason will also tell you when you THINK you sin you call for help, but if you will not ACCEPT the help you call for, you will not believe that it is yours to give. And so you WILL not give it, thus MAINTAINING the belief. For uncorrected error of ANY kind deceives you about the power that is IN you, to MAKE correction. If it CAN correct, and YOU allow it not to do so, you deny it to yourself AND TO YOUR BROTHER. And, if he SHARES this same belief, you BOTH will think that you are damned.

Day 265 - A Course in Miracles

Day 265 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Five: The Remedy

IV. The Fundamental Law of Perception

23 To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified. To the extent to which you recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent will you perceive attack cannot be justified. This is in strict accord with vision's fundamental law: you see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you want it there. Perception has no other law than this. The rest but stems from this, to hold it up and offer it support. This is perception's form adapted to this world of God's more basic law that love creates itself and nothing but itself.

Day 264 - A Course in Miracles

Day 264 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Five: The Remedy

III. The Savior From the Dark

12 Is it not evident that what the body's eyes perceive fills you with fear? Perhaps you think you find a hope of satisfaction there. Perhaps you fancy to attain some peace and satisfaction in the world as you perceive it. Yet it must be evident the outcome does not change. Despite your hopes and fancies, always does despair result. And there is no exception, nor will there ever be. The only value that the past can hold is that you learn it gave you no rewards that you would want to keep. For only thus will you be willing to relinquish it and have it gone forever.

Day 263 - A Course in Miracles

Day 263 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Five: The Remedy

I. Introduction

1 The Christ in you inhabits not a body. Yet He is in you. And thus it must be that you are not within a body. What is within you cannot be outside. And it is certain that you cannot be apart from what is at the very center of your life. What gives you life cannot be housed in death. No more can you. Christ is within a frame of holiness whose only purpose is that He may be made manifest to those who know Him not, that He may call to them to come to Him and see Him where they thought their bodies were. Then will their bodies melt away that they may frame His holiness in them.

Day 262 - A Course in Miracles

Day 262 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Four: Specialness and Separation

VIII. The Meeting Place

62 How bitterly does everyone tied to this world defend the specialness he wants to be the truth! His wish is law unto him, and he obeys. Nothing his specialness demands does he withhold. Nothing it needs does he deny to what he loves. And while it calls to him, he hears no other Voice. No effort is too great, no cost too much, no price too dear to save his specialness from the least slight, the tiniest attack, the whispered doubt, the hint of threat, or anything but deepest reverence. This is your son, beloved of you as you are to your Father.

Day 261 - A Course in Miracles

Day 261 - A Course in Miracles

Day 261

It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events OUTSIDE him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were NOT his choice. His power of decision is the DETERMINER of every situation in which he seems to FIND himself by chance or accident. No accident or chance is POSSIBLE within the universe as God created it, OUTSIDE of which is nothing. Suffer, and YOU decided sin was your goal. Be happy, and you GAVE the power of decision to Him Who MUST decide for God for you. This is the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit, and even this He gave to you to give yourself. For, BY this gift, is given you the power to release your Savior, that HE may give salvation unto YOU.

Day 260 - A Course in Miracles

Day 260 - A Course in Miracles

Day 260

Listen, and try to think if you remember what we will speak of now. Listen—perhaps you catch a hint of an ancient state not quite forgotten; dim, perhaps, and yet not altogether unfamiliar. Like a song whose name is long forgotten, and the circumstances in which you heard completely unremembered. 

Day 259 - A Course in Miracles

Day 259 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Four: Specialness and Separation

V. Specialness and Salvation

34 Specialness is a lack of trust in anyone except yourself. Faith is invested in yourself alone. Everything else becomes your enemy—feared and attacked, deadly and dangerous, hated and worthy only of destruction. Whatever gentleness it offers is but deception, but its hate is real. In danger of destruction, it must kill, and you are drawn to it to kill it first. And such is guilt's attraction. Here is death enthroned as savior; crucifixion is now redemption, and salvation can only mean destruction of the world, except yourself.

Day 258 - A Course in Miracles

Day 258 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Four: Specialness and Separation

VI. The Resolution of the Dream

40 The Christ in you is very still. He looks on what He loves and knows it as Himself. And thus does He rejoice at what He sees because He knows that it is one with Him and with His Father. Specialness, too, takes joy in what it sees, although it is not true. Yet what you seek for is a source of joy as you conceive it. What you wish is true for you. Nor is it possible that you can wish for something and lack faith that it is so. Wishing makes real, as surely as does will create. The power of a wish upholds illusions as strongly as does love extend itself, except that one deludes; the other heals.

Day 257 - A Course in Miracles

Day 257 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Four: Specialness and Separation

IV. The Forgiveness of Specialness

26 Forgiveness is the end of specialness. Only illusions can be forgiven, and then they disappear. Forgiveness is release from all illusions, and that is why it is impossible but partly to forgive. No one who clings to one illusion can see himself as sinless, for he holds one error to himself as lovely still. And so he calls it "unforgivable" and makes it sin. How can he then give his forgiveness wholly, when he would not receive it for himself? For it is sure he would receive it wholly the instant that he gave it so. And thus his secret guilt would disappear, forgiven by himself.

Day 256 - A Course in Miracles

Day 256 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Four: Specialness and Separation

III. The Treachery of Specialness

12 Comparison must be an ego device, for love makes none. Specialness always makes comparisons. It is established by a lack seen in another and maintained by searching for and keeping clear in sight all lacks it can perceive. This does it seek, and this it looks upon. And always whom it thus diminishes would be your savior had you not chosen to make of him a tiny measure of your specialness instead. Against the littleness you see in him, you stand as tall and stately, clean and honest, pure and unsullied by comparison with what you see. Nor do you understand it is yourself that you diminish thus.

Day 255 - A Course in Miracles

Day 255 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Four: Specialness and Separation

II. Specialness as a Substitute For Love

3 Love is extension. To withhold the smallest gift is not to know love's purpose. Love offers everything forever. Hold back but one belief, one offering, and love is gone because you asked a substitute to take its place. And now must war, the substitute for peace, come with the one alternative that you can choose for love. Your choosing it has given it all the reality it seems to have.

Day 254 - A Course in Miracles

Day 254 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Three: The War Against Yourself

V. The Fear of Life

47 The fear of God is fear of life and not of death. Yet He remains the only place of safety. In Him is no attack, and no illusion in any form stalks Heaven. Heaven is wholly true. No difference enters, and what is all the same cannot conflict. You are not asked to fight against your wish to murder. But you are asked to realize the form it takes conceals the same intent. And it is this you fear and not the form. What is not love is murder. What is not loving must be an attack. Every illusion is an assault on truth, and every one does violence to the idea of love because it seems to be of equal truth.

Day 253 - A Course in Miracles

Day 253 - A Course in Miracles

Day 253

Entering the Ark

Nothing can hurt you, unless you give it the power to do so. For YOU give power as the laws of this world INTERPRET giving; as you give, you LOSE. It is not up to you to give power at all. Power is of God, GIVEN by Him, and RE-AWAKENED by the Holy Spirit, Who knows that, as you give you GAIN. He gives NO power to sin, and therefore it HAS none. Nor to its results, as this world sees them; sickness and death and misery and pain. These things have not occurred, because the Holy Spirit sees them not, and gives no power to their seeming source. Thus would He keep you free of them.

Day 252 - A Course in Miracles

Day 252 - A Course in Miracles

Day 252

Have you wondered what the world is REALLY like? How would it look through HAPPY eyes? The world you see is but a judgment on YOURSELF. IT is not there at all. But judgment lays a sentence on it, JUSTIFIES it, and MAKES IT REAL. Such is the world you see; a judgment on yourself, and made by YOU. This sickly picture of yourself is carefully preserved by the ego, whose image it IS and which it loves, and placed OUTSIDE you, in the world. And TO this world must YOU adjust, as long as you believe this picture IS outside, and has you at its mercy.

Day 251 - A Course in Miracles

Day 251 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Twenty Three: The War Against Yourself

IV. Salvation Without Compromise

41 Is it not true you do not recognize some of the forms attack can take? If it is true attack in any form will hurt you and will do so just as much as in another form which you do recognize, then it must follow that you do not always recognize the source of pain. Attack in any form is equally destructive. Its purpose does not change. Its sole intent is murder, and what form of murder serves to cover the massive guilt and frantic fear of punishment the murderer must feel? He may deny he is a murderer and justify his savagery with smiles as he attacks. Yet he will suffer and will look on his intent in nightmares where the smiles are gone and where the purpose rises to meet his horrified awareness and pursue him still. For no one thinks of murder and escapes the guilt the thought entails. If the intent is death, what matter the form it takes?