Day 178 - A Course in Miracles

Day 178 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Sixteen: The Forgiveness of Illusions

IV. The Reward of Teaching

21 You have taught well, and yet you have not learned how to accept the comfort of your teaching. If you will consider what you have taught and how alien it is to what you thought you knew, you will be compelled to recognize that your Teacher came from beyond your thought system and so could look upon it fairly and perceive it was untrue. And He must have done so from the basis of a very different thought system and one with nothing in common with yours. For certainly what He has taught, and what you have taught through Him, have nothing in common with what you taught before He came. And the results have been to bring peace where there was pain, and suffering has disappeared, to be replaced by joy.

Day 177 - A Course in Miracles

Day 177 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Sixteen: The Forgiveness of Illusions

III. The Magnitude of Holiness

10 You still think holiness is difficult because you cannot see how it can be extended to include everyone. And you have learned that it must include everyone to be holy. Concern yourselves not with the extension of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do not understand. Nor do you do them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that demonstrates you did not do them. Why should you worry how the miracle extends to all the Sonship when you do not understand the miracle itself? One attribute is no more difficult to understand than is the whole. If miracles are at all, their attributes would have to be miraculous, being part of them.

Day 176 - A Course in Miracles

Day 176 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Sixteen: The Forgiveness of Illusions

II. True Empathy

5 True empathy is of Him Who knows what it is. You will learn His interpretation of it if you let Him use your capacity for strength and not for weakness. He will not desert you, but be sure that you desert not him. Humility is strength in this sense only—to recognize and accept the fact that you do not know is to recognize and accept the fact that He does know. You are not sure that He will do His part because you have never yet done yourscompletely. You will not know how to respond to what you do not understand. Be tempted not in this, and yield not to the ego's triumphant use of empathy for its glory.

Day 175 - A Course in Miracles

Day 175 - A Course in Miracles

Day 175

The Happy Learner

The Holy Spirit needs a happy learner, in whom His mission can be happily accomplished. You, who are steadfastly devoted unto misery, MUST first recognize that you ARE miserable and NOT happy. The Holy Spirit cannot teach WITHOUT this contrast, for you believe that misery IS happiness. This has so confused you, that you have undertaken to learn to do what you can NEVER do, believing that, UNLESS you learn it, you will NOT be happy. You do NOT realize that the foundation on which this most peculiar learning goal depends, means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. This DOES make sense to you.

Day 174 - A Course in Miracles

Day 174 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Sixteen: The Forgiveness of Illusions

I. Introduction

1 To empathize does not mean to join in suffering, for that is what you must refuse to understand. That is the ego's interpretation of empathy and is always used to form a special relationship in which the suffering is shared. The capacity to empathize is very useful to the Holy Spirit, provided you let Him use it in His way. [His way is very different.] He does not understand suffering and would have you teach it is not understandable. When He relates through you, He does not relate through the ego to another ego. He does not join in pain, knowing that healing pain is not accomplished by delusional attempts to enter into it and lighten it by sharing the delusion.

Day 173 - A Course in Miracles

Day 173 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

XI. The End of Sacrifice

101 Fear not to recognize the whole idea of sacrifice as solely of your making. And seek not safety by attempting to protect yourself from where it is not. Your brothers and your Father have become very fearful to you. And you would bargain with them for a few special relationships in which you think you see some scraps of safety. Do not try longer to keep apart your thoughts and the Thought that has been given you. When they are brought together and perceived where they are, the choice between them is nothing more than a gentle awakening and as simple as opening your eyes to daylight when you have no more need of sleep.

Day 172 - A Course in Miracles

Day 172 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

X. The Time of Christ

92 It is in your power in time to delay the perfect union of the Father and the Son. For in this world, the attraction of guilt does stand between them. Neither time nor season means anything in eternity. But here it is the Holy Spirit's function to use them both, though not as the ego uses them. This is the season when you would celebrate my birth into the world. Yet you know not how to do it. Let the Holy Spirit teach you, and let me celebrate your birth through Him. The only gift I can accept of you is the gift I gave to you. Release me as I will your release. The time of Christ we celebrate together, for it has no meaning if we are apart.

Day 171 - A Course in Miracles

Day 171 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

IX. The Holy Instant and Real Relationships

79 The holy instant does not replace the need for learning, for the Holy Spirit must not leave you as your Teacher until the holy instant has extended far beyond time. For a teaching assignment such as His, He must use everything in this world for your release. He must side with every sign or token of your willingness to learn of Him what the truth must be. He is swift to utilize whatever you offer Him on behalf of this. His concern and care for you are limitless. In the face of your fear of forgiveness, which He perceives as clearly as He knows forgiveness isrelease, He will teach you to remember that forgiveness is not loss but your salvation. And that in completeforgiveness, in which you recognize that there is nothing to forgive, you are absolved completely.

Day 170 - A Course in Miracles

Day 170 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

VIII. The Holy Instant and Communication

65 Beyond the poor attraction of the special love relationship and always obscured by it is the powerful attraction of the Father for His Son. There is no other love that can satisfy you, because there is no other love. This is the only love that is fully given and fully returned. Being complete, it asks nothing. Being wholly pure, everyone joined in it has everything. This is not the basis for any relationship in which the ego enters. For every relationship on which the ego embarks is special. The ego establishes relationships only to get something. And it would keep the giver bound to itself through guilt.

Day 169 - A Course in Miracles

Day 169 - A Course in Miracles

Day 169

Be you content with healing, for Christ’s gift you CAN bestow, and your Father’s gift you CANNOT lose. Offer Christ’s gift to everyone and everywhere. For miracles, offered the Son of God through the Holy Spirit, attune YOU to reality. The Holy Spirit knows your part in the Redemption, and who is seeking you, and where to find them. Knowledge is far beyond your individual concern. You who are part of it, and all of it, need only realize that it is of the Father, NOT of you. Your role in the redemption LEADS you to it, by re-establishing its oneness in your minds.

Day 168 - A Course in Miracles

Day 168 - A Course in Miracles

Day 168

In me, you have ALREADY overcome EVERY temptation that would hold you back. We walk together on the way to quietness that is the gift of God. Hold me dear, for what EXCEPT your brothers CAN you need? We will restore to you the peace of mind that we MUST find together. The Holy Spirit will teach you to awaken unto us, and to yourself. THIS is the only REAL need to be fulfilled in time. Salvation FROM the world lies ONLY here. My peace I GIVE you. TAKE it of me, in glad exchange for all the world has offered but to TAKE AWAY. And we will spread it, like a veil of light, across the world’s sad face, in which we hide our brothers FROM the world, and it from them.

Day 167 - A Course in Miracles

Day 167 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

VII. The Holy Instant and the Laws of God

58 All separation vanishes as holiness is shared. For holiness is power, and by sharing it, it gains in strength. If you seek for satisfaction in gratifying your needs as you perceive them, you must believe that strength comes from another, and what you gain he loses. Someone must always lose if you perceive yourself as weak. Yet there is another interpretation of relationships which transcends the concept of loss of power completely.

Day 166 - A Course in Miracles

Day 166 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

VI. The Holy Instant and Special Relationships

45 The holy instant is the Holy Spirit's most useful learning device for teaching you love's meaning. For its purpose is to suspend judgment entirely. Judgment always rests on the past, for past experience is the basis on which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past, for without it you do not understand anything. You would make no attempt to judge because it would be quite apparent to you that you do not know what anythingmeans. You are afraid of this because you believe that without the ego all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego all would be love.

Day 165 - A Course in Miracles

Day 165 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

V. Practicing the Holy Instant

35 This course is not beyond immediate learning unless you prefer to believe that what God wills takes time. And this means only that you would rather delay the recognition that His Will is so. The holy instant is this one and everyone. The one you want it to be it is. The one you would not have it be is lost to you. You must decide on when it is. Delay it not. For beyond the past and future, in which you will not find it, it stands in shimmering readiness for your acceptance. Yet you cannot bring it into glad awareness while you do not want it, for it holds the whole release from littleness.

Day 164 - A Course in Miracles

Day 164 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

IV. Littleness Versus Magnitude

22 Be not content with littleness, but be sure you understand what littleness is and why you could never be content with it. Littleness is the offering you gave yourself. You offered this in place of magnitude, and you acceptedit. Everything in this world is little because it is a world made out of littleness in the strange belief that littleness can content you. When you strive for anything in this world with the belief that it will bring you peace, you are belittling yourself and blinding yourself to glory. Littleness and glory are the choices open to your striving and your vigilance. You will always choose one at the expense of the other.

Day 163 - A Course in Miracles

Day 163 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

III. Time and Eternity

16 The Atonement is in time but not for time. Being in you, it is eternal. What holds remembrance of God cannot be bound by time. No more are you. For unless God is bound, you cannot be. An instant offered to the Holy Spirit is offered to God on your behalf, and in that instant you will awaken gently in Him. In the blessed instant, you will let go all your past learning, and the Holy Spirit will quickly offer you the whole lesson of peace. What can take time, when all the obstacles to learning it have been removed? Truth is so far beyond time that all of it happens at once. For as it was created one, so its oneness depends not on time at all.

Day 162 - A Course in Miracles

Day 162 - A Course in Miracles

Day 162

Would you RECOGNIZE a holy encounter, if you are merely perceiving it as a meeting with your OWN past? For you are meeting no one, and the SHARING of salvation, WHICH MAKES THE ENCOUNTER HOLY, is excluded from your sight. The Holy Spirit teaches that you always meet YOURSELF, and the encounter is holy because YOU are. The ego teaches that you always encounter your PAST, and because your dreams WERE not holy, the future CANNOT be, and the present is without meaning. It is evident that the Holy Spirit’s perception of time is the exact opposite of the ego’s. And the reason is equally clear, for they perceive the GOAL of time as diametrically opposed.

Day 161 - A Course in Miracles

Day 161 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

I. Introduction

1 Can you imagine what it means to have no cares, no worries, no anxieties, but merely to be perfectly calm and quiet all the time? Yet that is what time is for—to learn just that and nothing more. God's Teacher cannot be satisfied with His teaching until it constitutes all your learning. He has not fulfilled His teaching function until you have become such a consistent learner that you learn only of Him. When this has happened, you will no longer need a teacher or time in which to learn.

Day 160 - A Course in Miracles

Day 160 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fifteen: The Purpose of Time

II. Uses of Time

3 The ego is an ally of time, but not a friend. For it is as mistrustful of death as it is of life, and what it wants for you it cannot tolerate. The ego wants you dead, but not itself. The outcome of its strange religion must therefore be the conviction that it can pursue you beyond the grave. And out of its unwillingness for you to find peace even in the death it wants for you, it offers you immortality in hell. It speaks to you of Heaven but assures you that Heaven is not for you. How can the guilty hope for Heaven? The belief in hell is inescapable to those who identify with the ego. Their nightmares and their fears are all associated with it.

Day 159 - A Course in Miracles

Day 159 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fourteen: Bringing Illusions to Truth

VII. The Test of Truth

58 Yet the essential thing is learning that you do not know. Knowledge is power, and all power is of God. You who have tried to keep power for yourselves have lost it. You still have the power, but you have interposed so much between it and your awareness of it that you cannot use it. Everything you have taught yourselves has made your power more and more obscure to you. You know not what it is nor where. You have made a semblance of power and a show of strength so pitiful that it must fail you. For power is not a seeming strength, and truth is beyond semblance of any kind. Yet all that stands between you and the power of God in you is but your learning of the false and your attempts to undo the true.

Day 158 - A Course in Miracles

Day 158 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fourteen: Bringing Illusions to Truth

VI. The Shift to Miracles

46 When no perception stands between God and His creations, or between His Children and their own, the knowledge of creation must continue forever. The reflections which you accept into the mirror of your minds in time but bring eternity nearer or farther. But eternity itself is beyond all time. Reach out of time and touch it, with the help of its reflection in you. And you will turn from time to holiness as surely as the reflection of holiness calls everyone to lay all guilt aside. Reflect the peace of Heaven here and bring this world to Heaven. For the reflection of truth draws everyone to truth, and as they enter into it, they leave all reflections behind.

Day 157 - A Course in Miracles

Day 157 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fourteen: Bringing Illusions to Truth

V. The Recognition of Holiness

38 The Atonement does not make holy. You were created holy. It merely brings unholiness to holiness, or what you made to what you are. The bringing together of truth and illusion, of the ego to God, is the Holy Spirit's only function. Keep not your making from your Father, for hiding it has cost you knowledge of Him and of yourselves. The knowledge is safe, but wherein is your safety apart from it? The making of time to take the place of timelessness lay in the decision to be not as you were. Thus, truth was made past, and the present was dedicated to illusion. And the past, too, was changed and interposed between what always was and now. The past which youremember never was and represents only the denial of what always was.

Day 156 - A Course in Miracles

Day 156 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fourteen: Bringing Illusions to Truth

IV. Perception Without Deceit

24 What do you want? Light or darkness, knowledge or ignorance are yours, but not both. Opposites must be brought together and not kept apart. For their separation is only in your mind, and they are reconciled by union, asyou are. In union, everything that is not real must disappear, for truth is union. As darkness disappears in light, so ignorance fades away when knowledge dawns. Perception is the medium by which ignorance is brought to knowledge. Yet the perception must be without deceit, for otherwise it becomes the messenger of ignorance rather than a helper in the search for truth.

Day 155 - A Course in Miracles

Day 155 - A Course in Miracles

Day 155

Reality and Redemption

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

Day 154 - A Course in Miracles

Day 154 - A Course in Miracles

Day 154

The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you CAN see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His RESULTS, you will learn of Him. And recognizing that He works through YOU, you will understand where He MUST be, and finally KNOW what He is.

Day 153 - A Course in Miracles

Day 153 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fourteen: Bringing Illusions to Truth

III. Out of the Darkness

16 The journey that we undertake together is the exchange of dark for light, of ignorance for understanding. Nothing you understand is fearful. It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the frightening, and you shrink away from it to further darkness. And yet it is only the hidden that can terrify, not for what it is, but for its hiddenness. The obscure is frightening because you do not understand its meaning. If you did, it would be clear, and you would be no longer in the dark. Nothing has hidden value, for what is hidden cannot be shared, and so its value is unknown. The hidden is kept apart, but value always lies in joint appreciation. What is concealed cannot be loved, and so it must be feared.

Day 152 - A Course in Miracles

Day 152 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Fourteen: Bringing Illusions to Truth

I. Introduction

1 Unless you are guiltless, you cannot know God, Whose Will is that you know Him. Therefore, you must be guiltless. Yet if you do not accept the necessary conditions for knowing Him, you have denied Him and do not recognize Him, though He is all around you. He cannot be known without His Son, whose guiltlessness is the condition for knowing Him. Accepting His Son as guilty is denial of the Father so complete that knowledge is swept away from recognition in the very mind where God Himself has placed it. If you would but listen and learn how impossible this is! Do not endow Him with attributes you understand. You made Him not, and anything you understand is not of Him.

Day 151 - A Course in Miracles

Day 151 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Thirteen: From Perception to Knowledge

IX. The Way of Salvation

86 When you accept a brother's guiltlessness, you will see the Atonement in him. For by proclaiming it in him, you make it yours, and you will see what you sought. You will not see the symbol of your brother's guiltlessness shining within him while you still believe it is not there. His guiltlessness is your Atonement. Grant it to him, and you will see the truth of what you have acknowledged. Yet truth is offered first to be received, even as God gave it first to His Son. The first in time means nothing, but the First in eternity is God the Father, Who is both First and One. Beyond the First, there is no other, for there is no order, no second or third and nothing but the First.

Day 150 - A Course in Miracles

Day 150 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Thirteen: From Perception to Knowledge

VIII. The Decision For Guiltlessness

64 Learning will be commensurate with motivation, and the interference in your motivation for learning is exactly the same as that which interferes with all your thinking. The happy learner cannot feel guilty about learning. This is so essential to learning that it should never be forgotten. The guiltless learner learns so easily because his thoughts are free. Yet this entails the recognition that guilt is interference, not salvation, and serves no useful function at all.

Day 149 - A Course in Miracles

Day 149 - A Course in Miracles

Chapter Thirteen: From Perception to Knowledge

VII. The Happy Learner

54 The Holy Spirit needs a happy learner in whom His mission can be happily accomplished. You who are steadfastly devoted to misery must first recognize that you are miserable and not happy. The Holy Spirit cannot teach without this contrast, for you believe that misery is happiness. This has so confused you that you have undertaken to learn to do what you can never do, believing that unless you learn it, you will not be happy. You do not realize that the foundation on which this most peculiar learning goal depends means absolutely nothing. It does make sense to you.