¹ No one can give what he has not received. To give a thing requires first you have it in your own possession. Here the laws of Heaven and the world agree. But here they also separate. The world believes that to possess a thing, it must be kept. Salvation teaches otherwise. To give is how to recognize you have received. It is the proof that what you have is yours.

² You understand that you are healed when you give healing. You accept forgiveness as accomplished in yourself when you forgive. You recognize your brother as yourself and thus do you perceive that you are whole. There is no miracle you cannot give, for all are given you. Receive them now by opening the storehouse of your mind where they are laid and giving them away.

³ Christ's vision is a miracle. It comes from far beyond itself, for it reflects eternal love and the rebirth of love which never died but has been kept obscure. Christ's vision pictures Heaven, for it sees a world so like to Heaven that what God created perfect can be mirrored there. The darkened glass the world presents can show but twisted images in broken parts. The real world pictures Heaven's innocence.

⁴ Christ's vision is the miracle in which all miracles are born. It is their source, remaining with each miracle you give and yet remaining yours. It is the bond by which the giver and receiver are united in extension here on earth as they are one in Heaven. Christ beholds no sin in anyone, and in His sight the sinless are as one. Their holiness was given by His Father and Himself.

⁵ Christ's vision is the bridge between the worlds. And in its power can you safely trust to carry you from this world into one made holy by forgiveness. Things which seem quite solid here are merely shadows there, transparent, faintly seen, at times forgot, and never able to obscure the light that shines beyond them. Holiness has been restored to vision, and the blind can see.

⁶ This is the Holy Spirit's single gift—the treasure house to which you can appeal with perfect certainty for everything that can contribute to your happiness. All are laid here already. All can be received but for the asking. Here the door is never locked, and no one is denied his least request or his most urgent need. There is no sickness not already healed, no lack unsatisfied, no need unmet within this golden treasury of Christ.

⁷ Here does the world remember what was lost when it was made. For here it is repaired, made new again but in a different light. What was to be the home of sin becomes the center of redemption and the hearth of mercy where the suffering are healed and welcome. No one will be turned away from this new home where his salvation waits. No one is stranger to him. No one asks for anything of him except the gift of his acceptance of his welcoming.

⁸ Christ's vision is the holy ground in which the lilies of forgiveness set their roots. This is their home. They can be brought from here back to the world, but they can never grow in its unnourishing and shallow soil. They need the light and warmth and kindly care Christ's charity provides. They need the love with which He looks on them. And they become His messengers who give as they received.

⁹ Take from His storehouse that its treasures may increase. His lilies do not leave their home when they are carried back into the world. Their roots remain. They do not leave their source, but carry its beneficence with them and turn the world into a garden like the one they came from and to which they go again with added fragrance. Now are they twice blessed. The messages they brought from Christ have been delivered and returned to them. And they return them gladly unto Him.

¹⁰ Behold the store of miracles set out for you to give. Are you not worth the gift when God appointed it be given you? Judge not God's Son, but follow in the way He has established. Christ has dreamed the dream of a forgiven world. It is His gift whereby a sweet transition can be made from death to life, from hopelessness to hope. Let us an instant dream with Him. His dream awakens us to truth. His vision gives the means for a return to our unlost and everlasting sanctity in God.

Course in Miracles

Original Edition

TEXT

Chapter 14

Bringing Illusions to Truth



IV. Perception Without Deceit

Par 24-37

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, as you 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.

²⁵ The search for truth is but the honest searching out of everything that interferes with truth. Truth is. It can be neither lost nor sought nor found. It is there, wherever you are, being within you. Yet it can be recognized or unrecognized, real or false to you. If you hide it, it becomes unreal to you because you hid it and surrounded it with fear. Under each cornerstone of fear on which you have erected your insane system of belief, the truth lies hidden. Yet you cannot know this, for by hiding truth in fear, you see no reason to believe the more you look at fear, the less you see it, and the clearer what it conceals becomes.

²⁶ It is not possible to convince the unknowing that they know. From their point of view, it is not true. Yet it is true because God knows it. These are clearly opposite viewpoints of what the "unknowing" are. To God, unknowing is impossible. It is therefore not a point of view at all but merely a belief in something that does not exist. It is only this belief that the unknowing have, and by it they are wrong about themselves. They have defined themselves as they were not created. Their creation was not a point of view, but rather a certainty. Uncertainty brought to certainty does not retain any conviction of reality.

²⁷ You must have noticed that the emphasis has been on bringing what is undesirable to the desirable; what you do not want to what you do. You will realize that salvation must come to you this way if you consider what dissociation is. Dissociation is a distorted process of thinking whereby two systems of belief which cannot coexist are both maintained. It has been recognized that if they were brought together their joint acceptance would become impossible. But if one is kept in darkness from the other, their separation seems to keep them both alive and equal in their reality. Their joining thus becomes the source of fear, for if they meet, acceptance must be withdrawn from one of them.

²⁸ You cannot have them both, for each denies the other. Apart, this fact is lost from sight, for each in a separate place can be endowed with firm belief. Bring them together, and the fact of their complete incompatibility is instantly apparent. One will go because the other is seen in the same place. Light cannot enter darkness when a mind believes in darkness and will not let it go. Truth does not struggle against ignorance, and love does not attack fear. What needs no protection does not defend itself. Defense is of your making. God knows it not. The Holy Spirit uses defenses on behalf of truth only because you made them against it. His perception of them, according to His purpose, merely changes them into a call for what you have attacked with them.

²⁹ Defenses, like everything you made, must be gently turned to your own good, translated by the Holy Spirit from means of self-destruction to means of preservation and release. His task is mighty, but the power of God is with Him. Therefore, to Him it is so easy that it was accomplished the instant it was given Him for you. Do not delay yourselves in your return to peace by wondering how He can fulfill what God has given Him to do. Leave that to Him Who knows. You are not asked to do mighty tasks yourself. You are merely asked to do the little He suggests you do, trusting Him only to the small extent of believing that if He asks it, you can do it. You will see how easily all that He asks can be accomplished.

³⁰ The Holy Spirit asks of you but this—bring to Him every secret you have locked away from Him. Open every door to Him and bid Him enter the darkness and lighten it away. At your request He enters gladly. He brings the light to darkness if you make the darkness open to Him. But what you hide He cannot look upon. For He sees for you, and unless you look with Him, He cannot see. The vision of Christ is not for Him alone but for Him with you. Bring, therefore, all your dark and secret thoughts to Him and look upon them with Him. He holds the light, and you the darkness. They cannot coexist when both of you together look on them. His judgment must prevail, and He will give it to you as you join your perception to His. Joining with Him in seeing is the way in which you learn to share with Him the interpretation of perception that leads to knowledge.

³¹ You cannot see alone. Sharing perception with Him Whom God has given you teaches you how to recognize what you see. It is the recognition that nothing you see means anything alone. Seeing with Him will show you that all meaning, including yours, comes not from double vision but from the gentle fusing of everything into one meaning, one emotion, and one purpose. God has one purpose which He shares with you. The single vision which the Holy Spirit offers you will bring this oneness to your mind with clarity and brightness so intense you could not wish for all the world not to accept what God would have you have. Behold your will, accepting it as His, with all His love as yours. All honor to you through Him, and through Him unto God.

³² In the darkness you have obscured the glory God gave you and the power He bestowed upon His guiltless Son. All this lies hidden in every darkened place shrouded in guilt and in the dark denial of innocence. Behind the dark doors which you have closed lies nothing, because nothing can obscure the gift of God. It is the closing of the doors that interferes with recognition of the power of God that shines in you. Banish not power from your mind, but let all that would hide your glory be brought to the judgment of the Holy Spirit and there undone. Whom He would save for glory is saved for it. He has promised the Father that through Him you would be released from littleness to glory. To what He promised God He is wholly faithful, for He shared with God the promise that was given Him to share with you.

³³ He shares it still, for you. Everything that promises otherwise, great or small, however much or little valued, He will replace with the one promise given unto Him to lay upon the altar to your Father and His Son. No altar stands to God without His Son. And nothing brought there that is not equally worthy of both but will be replaced by gifts wholly acceptable to Father and to Son. Can you offer guilt to God? You cannot, then, offer it to His Son. For they are not apart, and gifts to one are offered to the other.

³⁴ You know not God because you know not this. And yet you do know God and also this. All this is safe within you, where the Holy Spirit shines. He shines not in division, but in the meeting place where God, united with His Son, speaks to His Son through Him. Communication between what cannot be divided cannot cease. The holy meeting place of the unseparated Father and His Son lies in the Holy Spirit and in you. All interference in the communication that God Himself wills with His Son is quite impossible here. Unbroken and uninterrupted love flows constantly between the Father and the Son, as both would have it be. And so it is.

³⁵ Let your minds wander not through darkened corridors, away from light's center. You may choose to lead yourselves astray, but you can only be brought together by the Guide appointed for you. He will surely lead you to where God and His Son await your recognition. They are joined in giving you the gift of oneness, before which all separation vanishes. Unite with what you are. You cannot join with anything except reality. God's glory and His Son's belong to you in truth. They have no opposite, and nothing else can you bestow upon yourselves.

³⁶ There is no substitute for truth. And truth will make this plain to you as you are brought into the place where you must meet with truth. And there you must be led, through gentle understanding which can lead you nowhere else. Where God is, there are you. Such is the truth. Nothing can change the knowledge given you by God into unknowingness. Everything God created knows its Creator. For this is how creation is accomplished by the Creator and by His creations. In the holy meeting place are joined the Father and His creations, and the creations of His Son with them together. There is one link which joins them all together, holding them in the oneness out of which creation happens.

³⁷ The link with which the Father joins Himself to those He gives the power to create like Him can never be dissolved. Heaven itself is union with all of creation and with its One Creator. And Heaven remains the Will of God for you. Lay no gifts other than this upon your altars, for nothing can coexist beside it. Here your meager offerings are brought together with the gift of God, and only what is worthy of the Father will be accepted by the Son, for whom it was intended. To whom God gives Himself, He is given. Your little gifts will vanish on the altar where He has placed His Own.

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