Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God. This is how a course in miracles begins. It makes a fundamental distinction between the real and the unreal. Between knowledge and perception, knowledge is truth under one law. The law of love or God’s truth is unalterable eternal, and unambiguous. It can be unrecognized, but it cannot be changed. It applies to everything God created; only what He created is real. It is beyond learning because it is beyond time and process. It has no opposite, no beginning, and no end. It is merely the world of perception.
On the other hand, it is the world of the time, of change of beginnings and endings. It is based on interpretation, not on facts. It is a world of birth and death founded on a belief in scarcity. Law separation and death are learned rather than given selectively. Its perceptual emphasis needs to be more stable, functioning, and accurate in its interpretations of knowledge and perception. Two distinct thought systems arise, opposite in every knowledge respect. no thoughts exist apart from God because God and His creation share one will. The world of perception, however, is made by the belief in opposites and separate wills in perpetual conflict. God is what perception sees and hears and appears to be real because it permits awareness of only what conforms to the wishes of the perceiver. This leads to a world of illusions that needs constant defense because it is not real. When you have been caught in the world of perception, you are cut into a dream you cannot escape without help because everything your senses show merely witnesses to the reality of the dream. God has provided the answer.
The only way out is the truth helper. It is the function of his voice, his Holy Spirit, to mediate between the two worlds. He can do this because while, on the one hand, he knows the truth, on the other hand, he also recognizes our illusions without believing in them. The Holy Spirit’s goal is to help us escape from the dream world by teaching us how to reverse our thinking and unlearn our mistakes. Forgiveness is the Holy Spirit’s great learning aid in bringing this thought reversal about. However, this course has its own definition of what forgiveness really is. Just as it defines the world in its own way, the world we see merely reflects our own internal frame of reference. The dominant ideas we wish for, and emotions in the projection of our mind make our perception. We look inside first to decide the kind of world we want to see and then project the world outside, making it the truth as we see it.
We make it true by our interpretation of what it is we are seen if we are using perception to justify our own mistakes, our anger, our impulses to attack our lack of love, and whatever form it may take, we will see a world of evil, destruction malice envy and despair all this we must learn to forgive not because we are being good and charitable but because what we are seen is not true we have distorted the world by our twisted defenses and therefore seen what is not there as we learn to recognize the perceptual errors we also learn to look past them or forgive at the same time, we are forgiving ourselves, looking past our distorted self-concepts to the self that God created in us. Sin is defined as a lack of love since love is all there is. Sin in the sight of the Holy Spirit is a mistake to be corrected rather than an evil to be punished. Our sense of inadequacy, weakness, and incompletion comes from the strong investment in the scarcity principle that governs the world of illusions from that point of view. We seek in others what we feel is wanting in ourselves.
We love another to get something for ourselves. That, in fact, is what passes for love. In the dream world, there can be no greater mistake than that, for love cannot ask for anything. Only minds can really join whom God has joined, and no man can put them asunder. It is, however, only at the level of Christ’s mind that true Union is possible and has never been lost. The little I seeks to enhance itself through external approval, external possessions, and external love. The self that God created needs nothing. It is forever completely safe, loved, and loving. it seeks to share rather than to get to extend rather than project it has no needs and wants to join with others out of their mutual awareness of abundance. The special relationship of the world is destructive, selfish, and childishly egocentric, yet it’s given to the Holy Spirit.
These relationships can become the holiest things on earth. Miracles that show us how to go back to paradise. The world uses its special relationship as a final weapon of exclusion and a demonstration of separateness. The holy spirit transforms them into perfect lessons and forgiveness, and in awakening from the dream, each one is an opportunity to let perceptions be healed and errors corrected. Each is another chance to forgive oneself by forgiving the other, and each one becomes another invitation to the Holy Spirit and to the remembrance of God. Perception is a function of the body and therefore represents a limit on awareness. Perception sees through the body’s eyes and hears through the body’s ears. It evokes a limited response, making the body largely self-motivated and independent. Yet it actually responds only to misperceptions, and with nothing from the past to hold us back, we can remember God. Beyond this, learning cannot go when we are ready. God Himself will take the final step in our return to Him, and so it is you
