1 Our next few lessons make a special point of firming up your willingness to make your weak commitment strong, your scattered goals blend into one intent. You are not asked for total dedication all the time, as yet. But you are asked to practice now in order to attain the sense of peace such unified commitment will bestow, if only intermittently. It is experiencing this which makes it sure that you will give your total willingness to following the way the course sets forth.

¹ There is a light in you the world can not perceive. And with its eyes you will not see this light, for you are blinded by the world. Yet you have eyes to see it. It is there for you to look upon. It was not placed in you to be kept hidden from your sight. This light is a reflection of the thought we practice now. To feel the Love of God within you is to see the world anew, shining in innocence, alive with hope, and blessed with perfect charity and love.

² Who could feel fear in such a world as this? It welcomes you, rejoices that you came, and sings your praises as it keeps you safe from every form of danger and of pain. It offers you a warm and gentle home in which to stay a while. It blesses you throughout the day and watches through the night as silent guardian of your holy sleep. It sees salvation in you and protects the light in you in which it sees its own. It offers you its flowers and its snow in thankfulness for your benevolence.

³ This is the world the Love of God reveals. It is so different from the world you see through darkened eyes of malice and of fear that one belies the other. Only one can be perceived at all. The other one is wholly meaningless. A world in which forgiveness shines on everything and peace offers its gentle light to everyone is inconceivable to those who see a world of hatred, rising from attack, poised to avenge, to murder and destroy.

⁴ Yet is the world of hatred equally unseen and inconceivable to those who feel God's Love in them. Their world reflects the quietness and peace that shines in them, the gentleness and innocence they see surrounding them, the joy with which they look out from the endless wells of joy within. What they have felt in them they look upon and see its sure reflection everywhere.

⁵ What would you see? The choice is given you. But learn and do not let your mind forget this law of seeing: 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 look out upon a world of mercy and of love.

⁶ Today we pass illusions as we seek to reach to what is true in us and feel Its all-embracing tenderness, Its Love Which knows us perfect as Itself, Its sight which is the gift Its Love bestows on us. We learn the way today. It is as sure as Love Itself, to Which it carries us. For its simplicity avoids the snares the foolish convolutions of the world's apparent reasoning but serve to hide.

⁷ Simply do this: be still and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is, all concepts you have learned about the world, all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God.

⁸ Is it not He Who knows the way to you? You need not know the way to Him. Your part is simply to allow all obstacles that you have interposed between the Son and God the Father to be quietly removed forever. God will do His part in joyful and immediate response. Ask and receive. But do not make demands nor point the road to God by which He should appear to you. The way to reach Him is merely to let Him be. For in that way is your reality acclaimed as well.

⁹ And so today we do not choose the way in which we go to Him. But we do choose to let Him come. And with this choice we rest. And in our quiet hearts and open minds His Love will blaze its pathway of itself. What has not been denied is surely there if it be true, and can be surely reached. God knows His Son and knows the way to him. He does not need His Son to show Him how to find His way. Through every opened door His Love shines outward from its home within and lightens up the world in innocence.

¹⁰ Father, we do not know the way to You. But we have called, and You have answered us. We will not interfere. Salvation's ways are not our own, for they belong to You. And it is unto You we look for them. Our hands are open to receive Your gifts. We have no thoughts we think apart from You and cherish no beliefs of what we are or who created us. Yours is the way that we would find and follow. And we ask but that Your Will, which is our own as well, be done in us and in the world, that it become a part of Heaven now. Amen.

Course in Miracles

Original Edition

TEXT

Chapter 17

Forgiveness and Healing



IV. Shadows of the Past

Par 14-26

¹⁴ To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past and those that were given you. All the rest must be forgotten. Forgiveness is a selective remembering, based not on your selection. For the shadow figures you would make immortal are "enemies" of reality. Be willing to forgive the Son of God for what he did not do. The shadow figures are the witnesses you bring with you to demonstrate he did what he did not. Because you brought them, you will hear them. And you who kept them by your own selection do not understand how they came into your minds and what their purpose is.

¹⁵ They represent the evil that you think was done to you. You bring them with you only that you may return evil for evil, hoping that their witness will enable you to think guiltily of another and not harm yourself. They speak so clearly for the separation that no one not obsessed with keeping separation could hear them. They offer you the "reasons" why you should enter into unholy alliances which support the ego's goals and make your relationships the witness to its power. It is these shadow figures which would make the ego holy in your sight and teach you what you do to keep it safe is really love.

¹⁶ The shadow figures always speak for vengeance, and all relationships into which they enter are totally insane. Without exception, these relationships have as their purpose the exclusion of the truth about the other and of yourself. This is why you see in both what is not there and make of both the slaves of vengeance. And why whatever reminds you of your past grievances, no matter how distorted the associations by which you arrive at the remembrance may be, attracts you and seems to you to go by the name of love. And finally why all such relationships become the attempt at union through the body, for only bodies can be seen as means for vengeance. That bodies are central to all unholy relationships is evident. Your own experience has taught you this. But what you do not realize are all the reasons which go to make the relationship unholy. For unholiness seeks to reinforce itself, as holiness does, by gathering to itself what it perceives as like itself.

¹⁷ In the unholy relationship, it is not the body of the other with which union is attempted but the bodies of those who are not there. Even the body of the other, already a severely limited perception of him, is not the central focus as it is or in entirety. What can be used for fantasies of vengeance and what can be most readily associated with those on whom vengeance is really sought are centered on and separated off as being the only parts of value. Every step taken in the making, the maintaining, and the breaking off of the unholy relationship is a move toward further fragmentation and unreality. The shadow figures enter more and more, and the one in whom they seem to be decreases in importance.

¹⁸ Time is indeed unkind to the unholy relationship. For time is cruel in the ego's hands, as it is kind when used for gentleness. The attraction of the unholy relationship begins to fade and to be questioned almost at once. Once it is formed, doubt must enter in because its purpose is impossible. The only such relationships which retain the fantasies that center on them are those which have been dreamed of but have not been made at all. Where no reality has entered, there is nothing to intrude upon the dream of happiness. Yet consider what this means—the more reality that enters into the unholy relationship, the less satisfying it becomes. And the more the fantasies can encompass, the greater the satisfaction seems to be.

¹⁹ The "ideal" of the unholy relationship thus becomes one in which the reality of the other does not enter at all to "spoil" the dream. And the less the other really brings to it, the "better" it becomes. Thus, the attempt at union becomes a way of excluding even the one with whom the union was sought. For it was formed to get him out of it and join with fantasies in uninterrupted "bliss." How can the Holy Spirit bring His interpretation of the body as a means of communication into relationships whose only purpose is separation from reality? What forgiveness is enables Him to do so.

²⁰ If all but loving thoughts has been forgotten, what remains is eternal. And the transformed past is made like the present. No longer does the past conflict with now. This continuity extends the present by increasing its reality and its value in your perception of it. In these loving thoughts is the spark of beauty hidden in the ugliness of the unholy relationship in which the hatred is remembered, yet there to come alive as the relationship is given to Him Who gives it life and beauty. That is why Atonement centers on the past, which is the source of separation, and where it must be undone. For separation must be corrected where it was made. The ego seeks to "resolve" its problems, not at their source, but where they were not made. And thus it seeks to guarantee there will be no solution.

²¹ The Holy Spirit wills only to make His resolutions complete and perfect, and so He seeks and finds the source of problems where it is and there undoes it. And with each step in His undoing is the separation more and more undone and union brought closer. He is not at all confused by any "reasons" for separation. All He perceives in separation is that it must be undone. Let Him uncover the hidden spark of beauty in your relationships and show it to you. Its loveliness will so attract you that you will be unwilling ever to lose the sight of it again. And you will let it transform the relationship so you can see it more and more. For you will want it more and more and become increasingly unwilling to let it be hidden from you. And you will learn to seek for and establish conditions in which this beauty can be seen.

²² All this you will do gladly if you but let Him hold the spark before you to light your way and make it clear to you. God's Son is one. Whom God has joined as one, the ego cannot break apart. The spark of holiness must be safe, however hidden it may be, in every relationship. For the Creator of the one relationship has left no part of it without Himself.

²³ This is the only part of the relationship the Holy Spirit sees because He knows that only this is true. You have made the relationship unreal and therefore unholy by seeing it where it is not and as it is not. Give the past to Him Who can change your mind about it for you. But first be sure you fully realize what you have made the past to represent and why.

²⁴ In brief, the past is now your justification for entering into a continuing, unholy alliance with the ego against the present. For the present is forgiveness. Therefore, the relationships which the unholy alliance dictates are not perceived nor felt as now. Yet the frame of reference to which the present is referred for meaning is an illusion of the past in which those elements which fit the purpose of the unholy alliance are retained and all the rest let go. And what is thus let go is all the truth the past could ever offer to the present as witnesses for its reality, while what is kept but witnesses to the reality of dreams.

²⁵ It is still up to you to choose to be willing to join with truth or illusion. But remember that to choose one is to let the other go. Which one you choose, you will endow with beauty and reality because the choice depends on which you value more. The spark of beauty or the veil of ugliness, the real world or the world of guilt and fear, truth or illusion, freedom or slavery—it is all the same. For you can never choose except between God and the ego. Thought systems are but true or false, and all their attributes come simply from what they are. Only the Thoughts of God are true. And all that follows from them comes from what they are and is as true as is the holy Source from which they came.

²⁶ My holy brothers, I would enter into all your relationships and step between you and your fantasies. Let my relationship to you be real to you, and let me bring reality to your perception of your brothers. They were not created to enable you to hurt yourselves through them. They were created to create with you. This is the truth that I would interpose between you and your goal of madness. Be not separate from me, and let not the holy purpose of Atonement be lost to you in dreams of vengeance. Relationships in which such dreams are cherished have excluded me. Let me enter in the Name of God and bring you peace that you may offer peace to me.

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