Chapter 22.

SALVATION AND THE HOLY RELATIONSHIP

Introduction

T-22.in.1. Take pity on yourself, so long enslaved. 2 Rejoice whom God hath joined have come together and need no longer look on sin apart. 3 No two can look on sin together, for they could never see it in the same place and time. 4 Sin is a strictly individual perception, seen in the other yet believed by each to be within himself. 5 And each one seems to make a different error, and one the other cannot understand. 6 Brother, it is the same, made by the same, and forgiven for its maker in the same way. 7 The holiness of your relationship forgives you and your brother, undoing the effects of what you both believed and saw. 8 And with their going is the need for sin gone with them.

T-22.in.2. Who has need for sin? 2 Only the lonely and alone, who see their brothers different from themselves. 3 It is this difference, seen but not real, that makes the need for sin, not real but seen, seem justified. 4 And all this would be real if sin were so. 5 For an unholy relationship is based on differences, where each one thinks the other has what he has not. 6 They come together, each to complete himself and rob the other. 7 They stay until they think that there is nothing left to steal, and then move on. 8 And so they wander through a world of strangers, unlike themselves, living with their bodies perhaps under a common roof that shelters neither; in the same room and yet a world apart.

T-22.in.3. A holy relationship starts from a different premise. 2 Each one has looked within and seen no lack. 3 Accepting his completion, he would extend it by joining with another, whole as himself. 4 He sees no difference between these selves, for differences are only of the body. 5 Therefore, he looks on nothing he would take. 6 He denies not his own reality <because> it is the truth. 7 Just under Heaven does he stand, but close enough not to return to earth. 8 For this relationship has Heaven's Holiness. 9 How far from home can a relationship so like to Heaven be?

T-22.in.4. Think what a holy relationship can teach! 2 Here is belief in differences undone. 3 Here is the faith in differences shifted to sameness. 4 And here is sight of differences transformed to vision. p467 5 Reason now can lead you and your brother to the logical conclusion of your union. 6 It must extend, as you extended when you and he joined. 7 It must reach out beyond itself, as you reached out beyond the body, to let you and your brother be joined. 8 And now the sameness that you saw extends and finally removes all sense of differences, so that the sameness that lies beneath them all becomes apparent. 9 Here is the golden circle where you recognize the Son of God. 10 For what is born into a holy relationship can never end.

I. The Message of the Holy Relationship

T-22.I.1. Let reason take another step. 2 If you attack whom God would heal and hate the one He loves, then you and your Creator have a different will. 3 Yet if you <are> His Will, what you must then believe is that you are not yourself. 4 You can indeed believe this, and you do. 5 And you have faith in this and see much evidence on its behalf. 6 And where, you wonder, does your strange uneasiness, your sense of being disconnected, and your haunting fear of lack of meaning in yourself arise? 7 It is as though you wandered in without a plan of any kind except to wander off, for only that seems certain.

T-22.I.2. Yet we have heard a very similar description earlier, but it was not of you. 2 But still this strange idea which it does accurately describe, you <think> is you. 3 Reason would tell you that the world you see through eyes that are not yours must make no sense to you. 4 To whom would seeing such as this send back its messages? 5 Surely not you, whose sight is wholly independent of the eyes that look upon the world. 6 If this is not your vision, what can it show to you? 7 The brain cannot interpret what your vision sees. 8 This <you> would understand. 9 The brain interprets to the body, of which it is a part. 10 But what it says you cannot understand. 11 Yet you have listened to it. 12 And long and hard you tried to understand its messages.

T-22.I.3. You have not realized it is impossible to understand what fails entirely to reach you. 2 You have received no messages at all you understand. 3 For you have listened to what can never communicate at all. 4 Think, then, what happens. 5 Denying what you are, and firm in faith that you are something else, this "something else" that you have made to be yourself becomes your sight. 6 Yet it must be the "something else" that sees, and as <not> you, explains its sight <to> you. p468 7 Your vision would, of course, render this quite unnecessary. 8 Yet if your eyes are closed and you have called upon this thing to lead you, asking it to explain to you the world it sees, you have no reason not to listen, nor to suspect that what it tells you is not true. 9 Reason would tell you it cannot be true <because> you do not understand it. 10 God has no secrets. 11 He does not lead you through a world of misery, waiting to tell you, at the journey's end, why He did this to you.

T-22.I.4. What could be secret from God's Will? 2 Yet you believe that you have secrets. 3 What could your secrets be except another "will" that is your own, apart from His? 4 Reason would tell you that this is no secret that need be hidden as a sin. 5 But a mistake indeed! 6 Let not your fear of sin protect it from correction, for the attraction of guilt is only fear. 7 Here is the one emotion that you made, whatever it may seem to be. 8 This is the emotion of secrecy, of private thoughts and of the body. 9 This is the one emotion that opposes love, and always leads to sight of differences and loss of sameness. 10 Here is the one emotion that keeps you blind, dependent on the self you think you made to lead you through the world it made for you.

T-22.I.5. Your sight was given you, along with everything that you can understand. 2 You will perceive no difficulty in understanding what this vision tells you, for everyone sees only what he thinks he is. 3 And what your sight would show you, you will understand <because> it is the truth. 4 Only your vision can convey to you what you can see. 5 It reaches you directly, without a need to be interpreted to you. 6 What needs interpretation must be alien. 7 Nor will it ever be made understandable by an interpreter you cannot understand.

T-22.I.6. Of all the messages you have received and failed to understand, this course alone is open to your understanding and can be understood. 2 This is <your> language. 3 You do not understand it yet only because your whole communication is like a baby's. 4 The sounds a baby makes and what he hears are highly unreliable, meaning different things to him at different times. 5 Neither the sounds he hears nor sights he sees are stable yet. 6 But what he hears and does not understand will be his native tongue, through which he will communicate with those around him, and they with him. 7 And the strange, shifting ones he sees about him will become to him his comforters, and he will recognize his home and see them there with him. p469

T-22.I.7. So in each holy relationship is the ability to communicate instead of separate reborn. 2 Yet a holy relationship, so recently reborn itself from an unholy relationship, and yet more ancient than the old illusion it has replaced, is like a baby now in its rebirth. 3 Still in this infant is your vision returned to you, and he will speak the language you can understand. 4 He is not nurtured by the "something else" you thought was you. 5 He was not given there, nor was received by anything except yourself. 6 For no two brothers can unite except through Christ, Whose vision sees them one.

T-22.I.8. Think what is given you, my holy brother. 2 This child will teach you what you do not understand, and make it plain. 3 For his will be no alien tongue. 4 He will need no interpreter to you, for it was you who taught him what he knows <because> you knew it. 5 He could not come to anyone but you, never to "something else." 6 Where Christ has entered no one is alone, for never could He find a home in separate ones. 7 Yet must He be reborn into His ancient home, so seeming new and yet as old as He, a tiny newcomer, dependent on the holiness of your relationship to let Him live.

T-22.I.9. Be certain God did not entrust His Son to the unworthy. 2 Nothing but what is part of Him is worthy of being joined. 3 Nor is it possible that anything not part of Him <can> join. 4 Communication must have been restored to those who join, for this they could not do through bodies. 5 What, then, has joined them? 6 Reason will tell you that they must have seen each other through a vision not of the body, and communicated in a language the body does not speak. 7 Nor could it be a fearful sight or sound that drew them gently into one. 8 Rather, in each the other saw a perfect shelter where his Self could be reborn in safety and in peace. 9 Such did his reason tell him; such he believed <because> it was the truth.

T-22.I.10. Here is the first direct perception that you can make. 2 You make it through awareness older than perception, and yet reborn in just an instant. 3 For what is time to what was always so? 4 Think what that instant brought; the recognition that the "something else" you thought was you is an illusion. 5 And truth came instantly, to show you where your Self must be. 6 It is denial of illusions that calls on truth, for to deny illusions is to recognize that fear is meaningless. 7 Into the holy home where fear is powerless love enters thankfully, grateful that it is one with you who joined to let it enter. p470

T-22.I.11. Christ comes to what is like Himself; the same, not different. 2 For He is always drawn unto Himself. 3 What is as like Him as a holy relationship? 4 And what draws you and your brother together draws Him to you. 5 Here are His sweetness and His gentle innocence protected from attack. 6 And here can He return in confidence, for faith in another is always faith in Him. 7 You are indeed correct in looking on your brother as His chosen home, for here you will with Him and with His Father. 8 This is your Father's Will for you, and yours with His. 9 And who is drawn to Christ is drawn to God as surely as Both are drawn to every holy relationship, the home prepared for Them as earth is turned to Heaven.

II. Your Brother's Sinlessness

T-22.II.1. The opposite of illusions is not disillusionment but truth. 2 Only to the ego, to which truth is meaningless, do they appear to be the only alternatives, and different from each other. 3 In truth they are the same. 4 Both bring the same amount of misery, though each one seems to be the way to lose the misery the other brings. 5 Every illusion carries pain and suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments in which it hides its nothingness. 6 Yet by these dark and heavy garments are those who seek illusions covered, and hidden from the joy of truth.

T-22.II.2. Truth is the opposite of illusions because it offers joy. 2 What else but joy could be the opposite of misery? 3 To leave one kind of misery and seek another is hardly an escape. 4 To change illusions is to make no change. 5 The search for joy in misery is senseless, for how could joy be found in misery? 6 All that is possible in the dark world of misery is to select some aspects out of it, see them as different, and define the difference as joy. 7 Yet to perceive a difference where none exists will surely fail to make a difference.

T-22.II.3. Illusions carry only guilt and suffering, sickness and death, to their believers. 2 The form in which they are accepted is irrelevant. 3 No form of misery in reason's eyes can be confused with joy. 4 Joy is eternal. 5 You can be sure indeed that any seeming happiness that does not last is really fear. 6 Joy does not turn to sorrow, for the eternal cannot change. 7 But sorrow can be turned to joy, for time gives way to the eternal. p471 8 Only the timeless must remain unchanged, but everything in time can change with time. 9 Yet if the change be real and not imagined, illusions must give way to truth, and not to other dreams that are but equally unreal. 10 This is no difference.

T-22.II.4. Reason will tell you that the only way to escape from misery is to recognize it <and go the other way>. 2 Truth is the same and misery the same, but they are different from each other in every way, in every instance and without exception. 3 To believe that one exception can exist is to confuse what is the same with what is different. 4 One illusion cherished and defended against the truth makes all truth meaningless, and all illusions real. 5 Such is the power of belief. 6 It cannot compromise. 7 And faith in innocence is faith in sin, if the belief excludes one living thing and holds it out, apart from its forgiveness.

T-22.II.5. Both reason and the ego will tell you this, but what they make of it is not the same. 2 The ego will assure you now that it is impossible for you to see no guilt in anyone. 3 And if this seeing is the only means by which escape from guilt can be attained, then the belief in sin must be eternal. 4 Yet reason looks on this another way, for reason sees the source of an idea as what will make it either true or false. 5 This must be so, if the idea is like its source. 6 Therefore, says reason, if escape from guilt was given to the Holy Spirit as His purpose, and by One to Whom nothing He wills can be impossible, the means for its attainment are more than possible. 7 They must be there, and you must have them.

T-22.II.6. This is a crucial period in this course, for here the separation of you and the ego must be made complete. 2 For if you have the means to let the Holy Spirit's purpose be accomplished, they can be used. 3 And through their use will you gain faith in them. 4 Yet to the ego this must be impossible, and no one undertakes to do what holds no hope of ever being done. 5 <You> know what your Creator wills is possible, but what you made believes it is not so. 6 Now must you choose between yourself and an illusion of yourself. 7 Not both, but one. 8 There is no point in trying to avoid this one decision. 9 It must be made. 10 Faith and belief can fall to either side, but reason tells you misery lies only on one side and joy upon the other.

T-22.II.7. Forsake not now your brother. 2 For you who are the same will not decide alone nor differently. 3 Either you give each other life or death; either you are each other's savior or his judge, offering him sanctuary or condemnation. p472 4 This course will be believed entirely or not at all. 5 For it is wholly true or wholly false, and cannot be but partially believed. 6 And you will either escape from misery entirely or not at all. 7 Reason will tell you that there is no middle ground where you can pause uncertainly, waiting to choose between the joy of Heaven and the misery of hell. 8 Until you choose Heaven, you <are> in hell and misery.

T-22.II.8. There is no part of Heaven you can take and weave into illusions. 2 Nor is there one illusion you can enter Heaven with. 3 A savior cannot be a judge, nor mercy condemnation. 4 And vision cannot damn, but only bless. 5 Whose function is to save, will save. 6 <How> He will do it is beyond your understanding, but <when> must be your choice. 7 For time you made, and time you can command. 8 You are no more a slave to time than to the world you made.

T-22.II.9. Let us look closer at the whole illusion that what you made has power to enslave its maker. 2 This is the same belief that caused the separation. 3 It is the meaningless idea that thoughts can leave the thinker's mind, be different from it and in opposition to it. 4 If this were true, thoughts would not be the mind's extensions, but its enemies. 5 And here we see again another form of the same fundamental illusion we have seen many times before. 6 Only if it were possible the Son of God could leave his Father's Mind, make himself different and oppose His Will, would it be possible that the self he made, and all it made, should be his master.

T-22.II.10. Behold the great projection, but look on it with the decision that it must be healed, and not with fear. 2 Nothing you made has any power over you unless you still would be apart from your Creator, and with a will opposed to His. 3 For only if you would believe His Son could be His enemy does it seem possible that what you made is yours. 4 You would condemn His joy to misery, and make Him different. 5 And all the misery you made has been your own. 6 Are you not glad to learn it is not true? 7 Is it not welcome news to hear not one of the illusions that you made replaced the truth?

T-22.II.11. Only <your> thoughts have been impossible. 2 Salvation cannot be. 3 It <is> impossible to look upon your savior as your enemy and recognize him. 4 Yet it is possible to recognize him for what he is, if God would have it so. 5 What God has given to your holy relationship is there. 6 For what He gave the Holy Spirit to give to you <He gave>. 7 Would you not look upon the savior that has been given you? p473 8 And would you not exchange, in gratitude, the function of an executioner you gave him for the one he has in truth? 9 Receive of him what God has given him for you, not what you tried to give yourself.

T-22.II.12. Beyond the body that you interposed between you and your brother, and shining in the golden light that reaches it from the bright, endless circle that extends forever, is your holy relationship, beloved of God Himself. 2 How still it rests, in time and yet beyond, immortal yet on earth. 3 How great the power that lies in it. 4 Time waits upon its will, and earth will be as it would have it be. 5 Here is no separate will, nor the desire that anything be separate. 6 Its will has no exceptions, and what it wills is true. 7 Every illusion brought to its forgiveness is gently overlooked and disappears. 8 For at its center Christ has been reborn, to light His home with vision that overlooks the world. 9 Would you not have this holy home be yours as well? 10 No misery is here, but only joy.

T-22.II.13. All you need do to dwell in quiet here with Christ is share His vision. 2 Quickly and gladly is His vision given anyone who is but willing to see his brother sinless. 3 And no one can remain beyond this willingness, if you would be released entirely from all effects of sin. 4 Would you have partial forgiveness for yourself? 5 Can you reach Heaven while a single sin still tempts you to remain in misery? 6 Heaven is the home of perfect purity, and God created it for you. 7 Look on your holy brother, sinless as yourself, and let him lead you there.

III. Reason and the Forms of Error

T-22.III.1. The introduction of reason into the ego's thought system is the beginning of its undoing, for reason and the ego are contradictory. 2 Nor is it possible for them to coexist in your awareness. 3 For reason's goal is to make plain, and therefore obvious. 4 You can <see> reason. 5 This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. 6 Vision is sense, quite literally. 7 If it is not the body's sight, it <must> be understood. 8 For it is plain, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. 9 It can be understood. 10 And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their separate ways.

T-22.III.2. The ego's whole continuance depends on its belief you cannot learn this course. p474 2 Share this belief, and reason will be unable to see your errors and make way for their correction. 3 For reason sees through errors, telling you what you thought was real is not. 4 Reason can see the difference between sin and mistakes, because it wants correction. 5 Therefore, it tells you what you thought was uncorrectable can be corrected, and thus it must have been an error. 6 The ego's opposition to correction leads to its fixed belief in sin and disregard of errors. 7 It looks on nothing that can be corrected. 8 Thus does the ego damn, and reason save.

T-22.III.3. Reason is not salvation in itself, but it makes way for peace and brings you to a state of mind in which salvation can be given you. 2 Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. 3 No one who looks on it without the help of reason would try to pass it. 4 The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. 5 Yet reason sees through it easily, because it is an error. 6 The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason's eyes.

T-22.III.4. Only the form of error attracts the ego. 2 Meaning it does not recognize, and does not see if it is there or not. 3 Everything the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole without the meaning that the whole would give. 4 And yet mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected. 5 Sin is but error in a special form the ego venerates. 6 It would preserve all errors and make them sins. 7 For here is its own stability, its heavy anchor in the shifting world it made; the rock on which its church is built, and where its worshippers are bound to bodies, believing the body's freedom is their own.

T-22.III.5. Reason will tell you that the form of error is not what makes it a mistake. 2 If what the form conceals is a mistake, the form cannot prevent correction. 3 The body's eyes see only form. 4 They cannot see beyond what they were made to see. 5 And they were made to look on error and not see past it. 6 Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. 7 To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. 8 Yet how can sight that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? 9 It is held back by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived.

T-22.III.6. These eyes, made not to see, will never see. 2 For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. p475 3 What was its maker's goal but not to see? 4 For this the body's eyes are perfect means, but not for seeing. 5 See how the body's eyes rest on externals and cannot go beyond. 6 Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning. 7 Nothing so blinding as perception of form. 8 For sight of form means understanding has been obscured.

T-22.III.7. Only mistakes have different forms, and so they can deceive. 2 You can change form <because> it is not true. 3 It could not be reality <because> it can be changed. 4 Reason will tell you that if form is not reality it must be an illusion, and is not there to see. 5 And if you see it you must be mistaken, for you are seeing what can <not> be real as if it were. 6 What cannot see beyond what is not there must be distorted perception, and must perceive illusions as the truth. 7 Could it, then, recognize the truth?

T-22.III.8. Let not the form of his mistakes keep you from him whose holiness is yours. 2 Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body's eyes can see. 3 Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins and of his body. 4 What is there in him that you would attack except what you associate with his body, which you believe can sin? 5 Beyond his errors is his holiness and your salvation. 6 You gave him not his holiness, but tried to see your sins in him to save yourself. 7 And yet, his holiness <is> your forgiveness. 8 Can you be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness is your salvation?

T-22.III.9. A holy relationship, however newly born, must value holiness above all else. 2 Unholy values will produce confusion, and in awareness. 3 In an unholy relationship, each one is valued because he seems to justify the other's sin. 4 Each sees within the other what impels him to sin against his will. 5 And thus he lays his sins upon the other, and is attracted to him to perpetuate his sins. 6 And so it must become impossible for each to see himself as causing sin by his desire to have sin real. 7 Yet reason sees a holy relationship as what it is; a common state of mind, where both give errors gladly to correction, that both may happily be healed as one. p476

IV. The Branching of the Road

T-22.IV.1. When you come to the place where the branch in the road is quite apparent, you cannot go ahead. 2 You must go either one way or the other. 3 For now if you go straight ahead, the way you went before you reached the branch, you will go nowhere. 4 The whole purpose of coming this far was to decide which branch you will take now. 5 The way you came no longer matters. 6 It can no longer serve. 7 No one who reaches this far can make the wrong decision, although he can delay. 8 And there is no part of the journey that seems more hopeless and futile than standing where the road branches, and not deciding on which way to go.

T-22.IV.2. It is but the first few steps along the right way that seem hard, for you have chosen, although you still may think you can go back and make the other choice. 2 This is not so. 3 A choice made with the power of Heaven to uphold it cannot be undone. 4 Your way is decided. 5 There will be nothing you will not be told, if you acknowledge this.

T-22.IV.3. And so you and your brother stand, here in this holy place, before the veil of sin that hangs between you and the face of Christ. 2 Let it be lifted! 3 Raise it together with your brother, for it is but a veil that stands between you. 4 Either you or your brother alone will see it as a solid block, nor realize how thin the drapery that separates you now. 5 Yet it is almost over in your awareness, and peace has reached you even here, before the veil. 6 Think what will happen after. 7 The Love of Christ will light your face, and shine from it into a darkened world that needs the light. 8 And from this holy place He will return with you, not leaving it nor you. 9 You will become His messenger, returning Him unto Himself.

T-22.IV.4. Think of the loveliness that you will see, who walk with Him! 2 And think how beautiful will you and your brother look to the other! 3 How happy you will be to be together, after such a long and lonely journey where you walked alone. 4 The gates of Heaven, open now for you, will you now open to the sorrowful. 5 And none who looks upon the Christ in you but will rejoice. 6 How beautiful the sight you saw beyond the veil, which you will bring to light the tired eyes of those as weary now as once you were. 7 How thankful will they be to see you come among them, offering Christ's forgiveness to dispel their faith in sin.

T-22.IV.5. Every mistake you and your brother make, the other will gently have corrected for you. p477 2 For in his sight your loveliness is his salvation, which he would protect from harm. 3 And you will be your brother's strong protector from everything that seems to rise between you both. 4 So shall you walk the world with me, whose message has not yet been given everyone. 5 For you are here to let it be received. 6 God's offer still is open, yet it waits acceptance. 7 From you who have accepted it is it received. 8 Into your hand, joined with your brother's, is it safely given, for you who share it have become its willing guardian and protector.

T-22.IV.6. To all who share the Love of God the grace is given to be the givers of what they have received. 2 And so they learn that it is theirs forever. 3 All barriers disappear before their coming, as every obstacle was finally surmounted that seemed to rise and block their way before. 4 This veil you and your brother lift together opens the way to truth to more than you. 5 Those who would let illusions be lifted from their minds are this world's saviors, walking the world with their Redeemer, and carrying His message of hope and freedom and release from suffering to everyone who needs a miracle to save him.

T-22.IV.7. How easy is it to offer this miracle to everyone! 2 No one who has received it for himself could find it difficult. 3 For by receiving it, he learned it was not given him alone. 4 Such is the function of a holy relationship; to receive together and give as you received. 5 Standing before the veil, it still seems difficult. 6 But hold out your hand, joined with your brother's, and touch this heavy-seeming block, and you will learn how easily your fingers slip through its nothingness. 7 It is no solid wall. 8 And only an illusion stands between you and your brother, and the holy Self you share together.

V. Weakness and Defensiveness

T-22.V.1. How does one overcome illusions? 2 Surely not by force or anger, nor by opposing them in any way. 3 Merely by letting reason tell you that they contradict reality. 4 They go against what must be true. 5 The opposition comes from them, and not reality. 6 Reality opposes nothing. 7 What merely is needs no defense, and offers none. 8 Only illusions need defense because of weakness. 9 And how can it be difficult to walk the way of truth when only weakness interferes? 10 <You> are the strong one in this seeming conflict. p478 11 And you need no defense. 12 Everything that needs defense you do not want, for anything that needs defense will weaken you.

T-22.V.2. Consider what the ego wants defenses for. 2 Always to justify what goes against the truth, flies in the face of reason and makes no sense. 3 Can this <be> justified? 4 What can this be except an invitation to insanity, to save you from the truth? 5 And what would you be saved from but what you fear? 6 Belief in sin needs great defense, and at enormous cost. 7 All that the Holy Spirit offers must be defended against and sacrificed. 8 For sin is carved into a block out of your peace, and laid between you and its return.

T-22.V.3. Yet how can peace be so fragmented? 2 It is still whole, and nothing has been taken from it. 3 See how the means and the material of evil dreams are nothing. 4 In truth you and your brother stand together, with nothing in between. 5 God holds your hands, and what can separate whom He has joined as one with Him? 6 It is your Father Whom you would defend against. 7 Yet it remains impossible to keep love out. 8 God rests with you in quiet, undefended and wholly undefending, for in this quiet state alone is strength and power. 9 Here can no weakness enter, for here is no attack and therefore no illusions. 10 Love rests in certainty. 11 Only uncertainty can be defensive. 12 And all uncertainty is doubt about yourself.

T-22.V.4. How weak is fear; how little and how meaningless. 2 How insignificant before the quiet strength of those whom love has joined! 3 This is your "enemy,"-a frightened mouse that would attack the universe. 4 How likely is it that it will succeed? 5 Can it be difficult to disregard its feeble squeaks that tell of its omnipotence, and would drown out the hymn of praise to its Creator that every heart throughout the universe forever sings as one? 6 Which is the stronger? 7 Is it this tiny mouse or everything that God created? 8 You and your brother are not joined together by this mouse, but by the Will of God. 9 And can a mouse betray whom God has joined?

T-22.V.5. If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of your union with your brother! 2 Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity and firmness of foundation. 3 Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous solid body, immovable as is a mountain. 4 Yet within you is a Force that no illusions can resist. 5 This body only seems to be immovable; this Force is irresistible in truth. 6 What, then, must happen when they come together? p479 7 Can the illusion of immovability be long defended from what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?

T-22.V.6. Forget not, when you feel the need arise to be defensive about anything, you have identified yourself with an illusion. 2 And therefore feel that you are weak because you are alone. 3 This is the cost of all illusions. 4 Not one but rests on the belief that you are separate. 5 Not one that does not seem to stand, heavy and solid and immovable, between you and your brother. 6 And not one that truth cannot pass over lightly, and so easily that you must be convinced, in spite of what you thought it was, that it is nothing. 7 If you forgive your brother, this <must> happen. 8 For it is your unwillingness to overlook what seems to stand between you and your brother that makes it look impenetrable, and defends the illusion of its immovability.

VI. The Light of the Holy Relationship

T-22.VI.1. Do you want freedom of the body or of the mind? 2 For both you cannot have. 3 Which do you value? 4 Which is your goal? 5 For one you see as means; the other, end. 6 And one must serve the other and lead to its predominance, increasing its importance by diminishing its own. 7 Means serve the end, and as the end is reached the value of the means decreases, eclipsed entirely when they are recognized as functionless. 8 No one but yearns for freedom and tries to find it. 9 Yet he will seek for it where he believes it is and can be found. 10 He will believe it possible of mind or body, and he will make the other serve his choice as means to find it.

T-22.VI.2. Where freedom of the body has been chosen, the mind is used as means whose value lies in its ability to contrive ways to achieve the body's freedom. 2 Yet freedom of the body has no meaning, and so the mind is dedicated to serve illusions. 3 This is a situation so contradictory and so impossible that anyone who chooses this has no idea of what is valuable. 4 Yet even in this confusion, so profound it cannot be described, the Holy Spirit waits in gentle patience, as certain of the outcome as He is sure of His Creator's Love. 5 He knows this mad decision was made by one as dear to His Creator as love is to itself.

T-22.VI.3. Be not disturbed at all to think how He can change the role of means and end so easily in what God loves, and would have free forever. p480 2 But be you rather grateful that you can be the means to serve His end. 3 This is the only service that leads to freedom. 4 To serve this end the body must be perceived as sinless, because the goal is sinlessness. 5 The lack of contradiction makes the soft transition from means to end as easy as is the shift from hate to gratitude before forgiving eyes. 6 You will be sanctified by your brother, using your body only to serve the sinless. 7 And it will be impossible for you to hate what serves whom you would heal.

T-22.VI.4. This holy relationship, lovely in its innocence, mighty in strength, and blazing with a light far brighter than the sun that lights the sky you see, is chosen of your Father as a means for His Own plan. 2 Be thankful that it serves yours not at all. 3 Nothing entrusted to it can be misused, and nothing given it but will be used. 4 This holy relationship has the power to heal all pain, regardless of its form. 5 Neither you nor your brother alone can serve at all. 6 Only in your joint will does healing lie. 7 For here your healing is, and here will you accept Atonement. 8 And in your healing is the Sonship healed <because> your will and your brother's are joined.

T-22.VI.5. Before a holy relationship there is no sin. 2 The form of error is no longer seen, and reason, joined with love, looks quietly on all confusion, observing merely, "This was a mistake." 3 And then the same Atonement you accepted in your relationship corrects the error, and lays a part of Heaven in its place. 4 How blessed are you who let this gift be given! 5 Each part of Heaven that you bring is given you. 6 And every empty place in Heaven that you fill again with the eternal light you bring, shines now on you. 7 The means of sinlessness can know no fear because they carry only love with them.

T-22.VI.6. Child of peace, the light <has> come to you. 2 The light you bring you do not recognize, and yet you will remember. 3 Who can deny himself the vision that he brings to others? 4 And who would fail to recognize a gift he let be laid in Heaven through himself? 5 The gentle service that you give the Holy Spirit is service to yourself. 6 You who are now His means must love all that He loves. 7 And what you bring is your remembrance of everything that is eternal. 8 No trace of anything in time can long remain in a mind that serves the timeless. 9 And no illusion can disturb the peace of a relationship that has become the means of peace.

T-22.VI.7. When you have looked upon your brother with complete forgiveness, from which no error is excluded and nothing kept hidden, what mistake can there be anywhere you cannot overlook? p481 2 What form of suffering could block your sight, preventing you from seeing past it? 3 And what illusion could there be you will not recognize as a mistake; a shadow through which you walk completely undismayed? 4 God would let nothing interfere with those whose wills are His, and they will recognize their wills are His, <because> they serve His Will. 5 And serve it willingly. 6 And could remembrance of what they are be long delayed?

T-22.VI.8. You will see your value through your brother's eyes, and each one is released as he beholds his savior in place of the attacker who he thought was there. 2 Through this releasing is the world released. 3 This is your part in bringing peace. 4 For you have asked what is your function here, and have been answered. 5 Seek not to change it, nor to substitute another goal. 6 This one was given you, and only this. 7 Accept this one and serve it willingly, for what the Holy Spirit does with gifts you give your brother, to whom He offers them, and where and when, is up to Him. 8 He will bestow them where they are received and welcomed. 9 He will use every one of them for peace. 10 Nor will one little smile or willingness to overlook the tiniest mistake be lost to anyone.

T-22.VI.9. What can it be but universal blessing to look on what your Father loves with charity? 2 Extension of forgiveness is the Holy Spirit's function. 3 Leave this to Him. 4 Let your concern be only that you give to Him that which can be extended. 5 Save no dark secrets that He cannot use, but offer Him the tiny gifts He can extend forever. 6 He will take each one and make of it a potent force for peace. 7 He will withhold no blessing from it, nor limit it in any way. 8 He will join to it all the power that God has given Him, to make each little gift of love a source of healing for everyone. 9 Each little gift you offer to your brother lights up the world. 10 Be not concerned with darkness; look away from it and toward your brother. 11 And let the darkness be dispelled by Him Who knows the light, and lays it gently in each quiet smile of faith and confidence with which you bless your brother.

T-22.VI.10. On your learning depends the welfare of the world. 2 And it is only arrogance that would deny the power of your will. 3 Think you the Will of God is powerless? 4 Is this humility? 5 You do not see what this belief has done. 6 You see yourself as vulnerable, frail and easily destroyed, and at the mercy of countless attackers more powerful than you. 7 Let us look straight at how this error came about, for here lies buried the heavy anchor that seems to keep the fear of God in place, immovable and solid as a rock. p482 8 While this remains, so will it seem to be.

T-22.VI.11. Who can attack the Son of God and not attack his Father? 2 How can God's Son be weak and frail and easily destroyed unless his Father is? 3 You do not see that every sin and every condemnation that you perceive and justify <is> an attack upon your Father. 4 And that is why it has not happened, nor could be real. 5 You do not see that this is your attempt because you think the Father and the Son are separate. 6 And you must think that They are separate, because of fear. 7 For it seems safer to attack another or yourself than to attack the great Creator of the universe, Whose power you know.

T-22.VI.12. If you were one with God and recognized this oneness, you would know His power is yours. 2 But you will not remember this while you believe attack of any kind means anything. 3 It is unjustified in any form, because it has no meaning. 4 The only way it could be justified is if you and your brother were separate from the other, and all were separate from your Creator. 5 For only then would it be possible to attack a part of the creation without the whole, the Son without the Father; and to attack another without yourself, or hurt yourself without the other feeling pain. 6 And this belief you want. 7 Yet wherein lies its value, except in the desire to attack in safety? 8 Attack is neither safe nor dangerous. 9 It is impossible. 10 And this is so because the universe is one. 11 You would not choose attack on its reality if it were not essential to attack to see it separated from its maker. 12 And thus it seems as if love could attack and become fearful.

T-22.VI.13. Only the different can attack. 2 So you conclude <because> you can attack, you and your brother must be different. 3 Yet does the Holy Spirit explain this differently. 4 <Because> you and your brother are not different, you cannot attack. 5 Either position is a logical conclusion. 6 Either could be maintained, but never both. 7 The only question to be answered in order to decide which must be true is whether you and your brother are different. 8 From the position of what you understand you seem to be, and therefore can attack. 9 Of the alternatives, this seems more natural and more in line with your experience. 10 And therefore it is necessary that you have other experiences, more in line with truth, to teach you what <is> natural and true.

T-22.VI.14. This is the function of your holy relationship. 2 For what one thinks, the other will experience with him. p483 3 What can this mean except your mind and your brother's are one? 4 Look not with fear upon this happy fact, and think not that it lays a heavy burden on you. 5 For when you have accepted it with gladness, you will realize that your relationship is a reflection of the union of the Creator and His Son. 6 From loving minds there <is> no separation. 7 And every thought in one brings gladness to the other because they are the same. 8 Joy is unlimited, because each shining thought of love extends its being and creates more of itself. 9 There is no difference anywhere in it, for every thought is like itself.

T-22.VI.15. The light that joins you and your brother shines throughout the universe, and because it joins you and him, so it makes you and him one with your Creator. 2 And in Him is all creation joined. 3 Would you regret you cannot fear alone, when your relationship can also teach the power of love is there, which makes all fear impossible? 4 Do not attempt to keep a little of the ego with this gift. 5 For it was given you to be used, and not obscured. 6 What teaches you that you cannot separate denies the ego. 7 Let truth decide if you and your brother be different or the same, and teach you which is true. p484

Chapter 23.

THE WAR AGAINST YOURSELF

Introduction

T-23.in.1. Do you not see the opposite of frailty and weakness is sinlessness? 2 Innocence is strength, and nothing else is strong. 3 The sinless cannot fear, for sin of any kind is weakness. 4 The show of strength attack would use to cover frailty conceals it not, for how can the unreal be hidden? 5 No one is strong who has an enemy, and no one can attack unless he thinks he has. 6 Belief in enemies is therefore the belief in weakness, and what is weak is not the Will of God. 7 Being opposed to it, it is God's "enemy." 8 And God is feared as an opposing will.

T-23.in.2. How strange indeed becomes this war against yourself! 2 You will believe that everything you use for sin can hurt you and become your enemy. 3 And you will fight against it, and try to weaken it because of this; and you will think that you succeeded, and attack again. 4 It is as certain you will fear what you attack as it is sure that you will love what you perceive as sinless. 5 He walks in peace who travels sinlessly along the way love shows him. 6 For love walks with him there, protecting him from fear. 7 And he will see only the sinless, who can not attack.

T-23.in.3. Walk you in glory, with your head held high, and fear no evil. 2 The innocent are safe because they share their innocence. 3 Nothing they see is harmful, for their awareness of the truth releases everything from the illusion of harmfulness. 4 And what seemed harmful now stands shining in their innocence, released from sin and fear and happily returned to love. 5 They share the strength of love <because> they looked on innocence. 6 And every error disappeared because they saw it not. 7 Who looks for glory finds it where it is. 8 Where could it be but in the innocent?

T-23.in.4. Let not the little interferers pull you to littleness. 2 There can be no attraction of guilt in innocence. 3 Think what a happy world you walk, with truth beside you! 4 Do not give up this world of freedom for a little sigh of seeming sin, nor for a tiny stirring of guilt's attraction. 5 Would you, for all these meaningless distractions, lay Heaven aside? 6 Your destiny and purpose are far beyond them, in the clean place where littleness does not exist. p485 7 Your purpose is at variance with littleness of any kind. 8 And so it is at variance with sin.

T-23.in.5. Let us not let littleness lead God's Son into temptation. 2 His glory is beyond it, measureless and timeless as eternity. 3 Do not let time intrude upon your sight of him. 4 Leave him not frightened and alone in his temptation, but help him rise above it and perceive the light of which he is a part. 5 Your innocence will light the way to his, and so is yours protected and kept in your awareness. 6 For who can know his glory, and perceive the little and the weak about him? 7 Who can walk trembling in a fearful world, and realize that Heaven's glory shines on him?

T-23.in.6. Nothing around you but is part of you. 2 Look on it lovingly, and see the light of Heaven in it. 3 So will you come to understand all that is given you. 4 In kind forgiveness will the world sparkle and shine, and everything you once thought sinful now will be reinterpreted as part of Heaven. 5 How beautiful it is to walk, clean and redeemed and happy, through a world in bitter need of the redemption that your innocence bestows upon it! 6 What can you value more than this? 7 For here is your salvation and your freedom. 8 And it must be complete if you would recognize it.

I. The Irreconcilable Beliefs

T-23.I.1. The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. 2 It cannot come where there is conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness. 3 The means of war are not the means of peace, and what the warlike would remember is not love. 4 War is impossible unless belief in victory is cherished. 5 Conflict within you must imply that you believe the ego has the power to be victorious. 6 Why else would you identify with it? 7 Surely you realize the ego is at war with God. 8 Certain it is it has no enemy. 9 Yet just as certain is its fixed belief it has an enemy that it must overcome and will succeed.

T-23.I.2. Do you not realize a war against yourself would be a war on God? 2 Is victory conceivable? 3 And if it were, is this a victory that you would want? 4 The death of God, if it were possible, would be your death. 5 Is this a victory? 6 The ego always marches to defeat, because it thinks that triumph over you is possible. 7 And God thinks otherwise. 8 This is no war; only the mad belief the Will of God can be attacked and overthrown. 9 You may identify with this belief, but never will it be more than madness. p486 10 And fear will reign in madness, and will seem to have replaced love there. 11 This is the conflict's purpose. 12 And to those who think that it is possible, the means seem real.

T-23.I.3. Be certain that it is impossible God and the ego, or yourself and it, will ever meet. 2 You seem to meet, and make your strange alliances on grounds that have no meaning. 3 For your beliefs converge upon the body, the ego's chosen home, which you believe is yours. 4 You meet at a mistake; an error in your self-appraisal. 5 The ego joins with an illusion of yourself you share with it. 6 And yet illusions cannot join. 7 They are the same, and they are nothing. 8 Their joining lies in nothingness; two are as meaningless as one or as a thousand. 9 The ego joins with nothing, being nothing. 10 The victory it seeks is meaningless as is itself.

T-23.I.4. Brother, the war against yourself is almost over. 2 The journey's end is at the place of peace. 3 Would you not now accept the peace offered you here? 4 This "enemy" you fought as an intruder on your peace is here transformed, before your sight, into the giver of your peace. 5 Your "enemy" was God Himself, to Whom all conflict, triumph and attack of any kind are all unknown. 6 He loves you perfectly, completely and eternally. 7 The Son of God at war with his Creator is a condition as ridiculous as nature roaring at the wind in anger, proclaiming it is part of itself no more. 8 Could nature possibly establish this, and make it true? 9 Nor is it up to you to say what shall be part of you and what is kept apart.

T-23.I.5. The war against yourself was undertaken to teach the Son of God that he is not himself, and <not> his Father's Son. 2 For this, the memory of his Father must be forgotten. 3 It <is> forgotten in the body's life, and if you think you are a body, you will believe you have forgotten it. 4 Yet truth can never be forgotten by itself, and you have not forgotten what you are. 5 Only a strange illusion of yourself, a wish to triumph over what you are, remembers not.

T-23.I.6. The war against yourself is but the battle of two illusions, struggling to make them different from each other, in the belief the one that conquers will be true. 2 There <is> no conflict between them and the truth. 3 Nor are they different from each other. 4 Both are not true. 5 And so it matters not what form they take. 6 What made them is insane, and they remain part of what made them. 7 Madness holds out no menace to reality, and has no influence upon it. 8 Illusions cannot triumph over truth, nor can they threaten it in any way. 9 And the reality that they deny is not a part of them. p487

T-23.I.7. What <you> remember <is> a part of you. 2 For you must be as God created you. 3 Truth does not fight against illusions, nor do illusions fight against the truth. 4 Illusions battle only with themselves. 5 Being fragmented, they fragment. 6 But truth is indivisible, and far beyond their little reach. 7 You will remember what you know when you have learned you cannot be in conflict. 8 One illusion about yourself can battle with another, yet the war of two illusions is a state where nothing happens. 9 There is no victor and there is no victory. 10 And truth stands radiant, apart from conflict, untouched and quiet in the peace of God.

T-23.I.8. Conflict must be between two forces. 2 It cannot exist between one power and nothingness. 3 There is nothing you could attack that is not part of you. 4 And <by> attacking it you make two illusions of yourself, in conflict with each other. 5 And this occurs whenever you look on anything that God created with anything but love. 6 Conflict is fearful, for it is the birth of fear. 7 Yet what is born of nothing cannot win reality through battle. 8 Why would you fill your world with conflicts with yourself? 9 Let all this madness be undone for you, and turn in peace to the rememberance of God, still shining in your quiet mind.

T-23.I.9. See how the conflict of illusions disappears when it is brought to truth! 2 For it seems real only as long as it is seen as war between conflicting truths; the conqueror to be the truer, the more real, and the vanquisher of the illusion that was less real, made an illusion by defeat. 3 Thus, conflict is the choice between illusions, one to be crowned as real, the other vanquished and despised. 4 Here will the Father never be remembered. 5 Yet no illusion can invade His home and drive Him out of what He loves forever. 6 And what He loves must be forever quiet and at peace <because> it is His home.

T-23.I.10. You who are beloved of Him are no illusion, being as true and holy as Himself. 2 The stillness of your certainty of Him and of yourself is home to Both of You, Who dwell as One and not apart. 3 Open the door of His most holy home, and let forgiveness sweep away all trace of the belief in sin that keeps God homeless and His Son with Him. 4 You are not a stranger in the house of God. 5 Welcome your brother to the home where God has set him in serenity and peace, and dwells with him. 6 Illusions have no place where love abides, protecting you from everything that is not true. 7 You dwell in peace as limitless as its Creator, and everything is given those who would remember Him. p488 8 Over His home the Holy Spirit watches, sure that its peace can never be disturbed.

T-23.I.11. How can the resting place of God turn on itself, and seek to overcome the One Who dwells there? 2 And think what happens when the house of God perceives itself divided. 3 The altar disappears, the light grows dim, the temple of the Holy One becomes a house of sin. 4 And nothing is remembered except illusions. 5 Illusions can conflict, because their forms are different. 6 And they do battle only to establish which form is true.

T-23.I.12. Illusion meets illusion; truth, itself. 2 The meeting of illusions leads to war. 3 Peace, looking on itself, extends itself. 4 War is the condition in which fear is born, and grows and seeks to dominate. 5 Peace is the state where love abides, and seeks to share itself. 6 Conflict and peace are opposites. 7 Where one abides the other cannot be; where either goes the other disappears. 8 So is the memory of God obscured in minds that have become illusions' battleground. 9 Yet far beyond this senseless war it shines, ready to be remembered when you side with peace.

II. The Laws of Chaos

T-23.II.1. The "laws" of chaos can be brought to light, though never understood. 2 Chaotic laws are hardly meaningful, and therefore out of reason's sphere. 3 Yet they appear to be an obstacle to reason and to truth. 4 Let us, then, look upon them calmly, that we may look beyond them, understanding what they are, not what they would maintain. 5 It is essential it be understood what they are for, because it is their purpose to make meaningless, and to attack the truth. 6 Here are the laws that rule the world you made. 7 And yet they govern nothing, and need not be broken; merely looked upon and gone beyond.

T-23.II.2. The <first> chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. 2 Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate and has a different set of thoughts that set him off from others. 3 This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are more valuable and therefore true. 4 Each one establishes this for himself, and makes it true by his attack on what another values. 5 And this is justified because the values differ, and those who hold them seem to be unlike, and therefore enemies. p489

T-23.II.3. Think how this seems to interfere with the first principle of miracles. 2 For this establishes degrees of truth among illusions, making it seem that some of them are harder to overcome than others. 3 If it were realized that they are all the same and equally untrue, it would be easy, then, to understand that miracles apply to all of them. 4 Errors of any kind can be corrected <because> they are untrue. 5 When brought to truth instead of to each other, they merely disappear. 6 No part of nothing can be more resistant to the truth than can another.

T-23.II.4. The <second> law of chaos, dear indeed to every worshipper of sin, is that each one <must> sin, and therefore deserves attack and death. 2 This principle, closely related to the first, is the demand that errors call for punishment and not correction. 3 For the destruction of the one who makes the error places him beyond correction and beyond forgiveness. 4 What he has done is thus interpreted as an irrevocable sentence upon himself, which God Himself is powerless to overcome. 5 Sin cannot be remitted, being the belief the Son of God can make mistakes for which his own destruction becomes inevitable.

T-23.II.5. Think what this seems to do to the relationship between the Father and the Son. 2 Now it appears that They can never be One again. 3 For One must always be condemned, and by the Other. 4 Now are They different, and enemies. 5 And Their relationship is one of opposition, just as the separate aspects of the Son meet only to conflict but not to join. 6 One becomes weak, the other strong by his defeat. 7 And fear of God and of each other now appears as sensible, made real by what the Son of God has done both to himself and his Creator.

T-23.II.6. The arrogance on which the laws of chaos stand could not be more apparent than emerges here. 2 Here is a principle that would define what the Creator of reality must be; what He must think and what He must believe; and how He must respond, believing it. 3 It is not seen as even necessary that He be asked about the truth of what has been established for His belief. 4 His Son can tell Him this, and He has but the choice whether to take his word for it or be mistaken. 5 This leads directly to the <third> preposterous belief that seems to make chaos eternal. 6 For if God cannot be mistaken, He must accept His Son's belief in what he is, and hate him for it.

T-23.II.7. See how the fear of God is reinforced by this third principle. 2 Now it becomes impossible to turn to Him for help in misery. p490 3 For now He has become the "enemy" Who caused it, to Whom appeal is useless. 4 Nor can salvation lie within the Son, whose every aspect seems to be at war with Him, and justified in its attack. 5 And now is conflict made inevitable, beyond the help of God. 6 For now salvation must remain impossible, because the Savior has become the enemy.

T-23.II.8. There can be no release and no escape. 2 Atonement thus becomes a myth, and vengeance, not forgiveness, is the Will of God. 3 From where all this begins, there is no sight of help that can succeed. 4 Only destruction can be the outcome. 5 And God Himself seems to be siding with it, to overcome His Son. 6 Think not the ego will enable you to find escape from what it wants. 7 That is the function of this course, which does not value what the ego cherishes.

T-23.II.9. The ego values only what it takes. 2 This leads to the <fourth> law of chaos, which, if the others are accepted, must be true. 3 This seeming law is the belief you have what you have taken. 4 By this, another's loss becomes your gain, and thus it fails to recognize that you can never take away save from yourself. 5 Yet all the other laws must lead to this. 6 For enemies do not give willingly to one another, nor would they seek to share the things they value. 7 And what your enemies would keep from you must be worth having, because they keep it hidden from your sight.

T-23.II.10. All of the mechanisms of madness are seen emerging here: the "enemy" made strong by keeping hidden the valuable inheritance that should be yours; your justified position and attack for what has been withheld; and the inevitable loss the enemy must suffer to save yourself. 2 Thus do the guilty ones protest their "innocence." 3 Were they not forced into this foul attack by the unscrupulous behavior of the enemy, they would respond with only kindness. 4 But in a savage world the kind cannot survive, so they must take or else be taken from.

T-23.II.11. And now there is a vague unanswered question, not yet "explained." 2 What is this precious thing, this priceless pearl, this hidden secret treasure, to be wrested in righteous wrath from this most treacherous and cunning enemy? 3 It must be what you want but never found. 4 And now you "understand" the reason why you found it not. 5 For it was taken from you by this enemy, and hidden where you would not think to look. 6 He hid it in his body, making it the cover for his guilt, the hiding place for what belongs to you. 7 Now must his body be destroyed and sacrificed, that you may have that which belongs to you. p491 8 His treachery demands his death, that you may live. 9 And you attack only in self-defense.

T-23.II.12. But what is it you want that needs his death? 2 Can you be sure your murderous attack is justified unless you know what it is for? 3 And here a <final> principle of chaos comes to the "rescue." 4 It holds there is a substitute for love. 5 This is the magic that will cure all of your pain; the missing factor in your madness that makes it "sane." 6 This is the reason why you must attack. 7 Here is what makes your vengeance justified. 8 Behold, unveiled, the ego's secret gift, torn from your brother's body, hidden there in malice and in hatred for the one to whom the gift belongs. 9 He would deprive you of the secret ingredient that would give meaning to your life. 10 The substitute for love, born of your enmity to your brother, must be salvation. 11 It has no substitute, and there is only one. 12 And all your relationships have but the purpose of seizing it and making it your own.

T-23.II.13. Never is your possession made complete. 2 And never will your brother cease his attack on you for what you stole. 3 Nor will God end His vengeance upon both, for in His madness He must have this substitute for love, and kill you both. 4 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. 5 These <are> the principles which make the ground beneath your feet seem solid. 6 And it <is> here you look for meaning. 7 These are the laws you made for your salvation. 8 They hold in place the substitute for Heaven which you prefer. 9 This is their purpose; they were made for this. 10 There is no point in asking what they mean. 11 That is apparent. 12 The means of madness must be insane. 13 Are you as certain that you realize the goal is madness?

T-23.II.14. No one wants madness, nor does anyone cling to his madness if he sees that this is what it is. 2 What protects madness is the belief that it is true. 3 It is the function of insanity to take the place of truth. 4 It must be seen as truth to be believed. 5 And if it is the truth, then must its opposite, which was the truth before, be madness now. 6 Such a reversal, completely turned around, with madness sanity, illusions true, attack a kindness, hatred love, and murder benediction, is the goal the laws of chaos serve. 7 These are the means by which the laws of God appear to be reversed. 8 Here do the laws of sin appear to hold love captive, and let sin go free. p492

T-23.II.15. These do not seem to be the goals of chaos, for by the great reversal they appear to be the laws of order. 2 How could it not be so? 3 Chaos is lawlessness, and has no laws. 4 To be believed, its seeming laws must be perceived as real. 5 Their goal of madness must be seen as sanity. 6 And fear, with ashen lips and sightless eyes, blinded and terrible to look upon, is lifted to the throne of love, its dying conqueror, its substitute, the savior from salvation. 7 How lovely do the laws of fear make death appear. 8 Give thanks unto the hero on love's throne, who saved the Son of God for fear and death!

T-23.II.16. And yet, how can it be that laws like these can be believed? 2 There is a strange device that makes it possible. 3 Nor is it unfamiliar; we have seen how it appears to function many times before. 4 In truth it does not function, yet in dreams, where only shadows play the major roles, it seems most powerful. 5 No law of chaos could compel belief but for the emphasis on form and disregard of content. 6 No one who thinks that one of these laws is true sees what it says. 7 Some forms it takes seem to have meaning, and that is all.

T-23.II.17. How can some forms of murder not mean death? 2 Can an attack in any form be love? 3 What form of condemnation is a blessing? 4 Who makes his savior powerless and finds salvation? 5 Let not the form of the attack on him deceive you. 6 You cannot seek to harm him and be saved. 7 Who can find safety from attack by turning on himself? 8 How can it matter what the form this madness takes? 9 It is a judgment that defeats itself, condemning what it says it wants to save. 10 Be not deceived when madness takes a form you think is lovely. 11 What is intent on your destruction is not your friend.

T-23.II.18. You would maintain, and think it true, that you do not believe these senseless laws, nor act upon them. 2 And when you look at what they say, they cannot be believed. 3 Brother, you <do> believe them. 4 For how else could you perceive the form they take, with content such as this? 5 Can any form of this be tenable? 6 Yet you believe them <for> the form they take, and do not recognize the content. 7 It never changes. 8 Can you paint rosy lips upon a skeleton, dress it in loveliness, pet it and pamper it, and make it live? 9 And can you be content with an illusion that you are living?

T-23.II.19. There is no life outside of Heaven. 2 Where God created life, there life must be. 3 In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. p493 4 At best it seems like life; at worst, like death. 5 Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. 6 Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. 7 Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. 8 Illusions are but forms. 9 Their content is never true.

T-23.II.20. The laws of chaos govern all illusions. 2 Their forms conflict, making it seem quite possible to value some above the others. 3 Yet each one rests as surely on the belief the laws of chaos are the laws of order as do the others. 4 Each one upholds these laws completely, offering a certain witness that these laws are true. 5 The seeming gentler forms of the attack are no less certain in their witnessing, or their results. 6 Certain it is illusions will bring fear because of the beliefs that they imply, not for their form. 7 And lack of faith in love, in any form, attests to chaos as reality.

T-23.II.21. From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos must follow. 2 It is because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion; a valid step in ordered thought. 3 The steps to chaos do follow neatly from their starting point. 4 Each is a different form in the progression of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror and away from truth. 5 Think not one step is smaller than another, nor that return from one is easier. 6 The whole descent from Heaven lies in each one. 7 And where your thinking starts, there must it end.

T-23.II.22. Brother, take not one step in the descent to hell. 2 For having taken one, you will not recognize the rest for what they are. 3 And they <will> follow. 4 Attack in any form has placed your foot upon the twisted stairway that leads from Heaven. 5 Yet any instant it is possible to have all this undone. 6 How can you know whether you chose the stairs to Heaven or the way to hell? 7 Quite easily. 8 How do you feel? 9 Is peace in your awareness? 10 Are you certain which way you go? 11 And are you sure the goal of Heaven can be reached? 12 If not, you walk alone. 13 Ask, then, your Friend to join with you, and give you certainty of where you go. p494

III. Salvation without Compromise

T-23.III.1. Is it not true you do not recognize some of the forms attack can take? 2 If it is true attack in any form will hurt you, and will do so just as much as in another form that you <do> recognize, then it must follow that you do not always recognize the source of pain. 3 Attack in any form is equally destructive. 4 Its purpose does not change. 5 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? 6 He may deny he is a murderer and justify his savagery with smiles as he attacks. 7 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. 8 For no one thinks of murder and escapes the guilt the thought entails. 9 If the intent is death, what matter the form it takes?

T-23.III.2. Is death in any form, however lovely and charitable it may seem to be, a blessing and a sign the Voice for God speaks through you to your brother? 2 The wrapping does not make the gift you give. 3 An empty box, however beautiful and gently given, still contains nothing. 4 And neither the receiver nor the giver is long deceived. 5 Withhold forgiveness from your brother and you attack him. 6 You give him nothing, and receive of him but what you gave.

T-23.III.3. Salvation is no compromise of any kind. 2 To compromise is to accept but part of what you want; to take a little and give up the rest. 3 Salvation gives up nothing. 4 It is complete for everyone. 5 Let the idea of compromise but enter, and the awareness of salvation's purpose is lost because it is not recognized. 6 It is denied where compromise has been accepted, for compromise is the belief salvation is impossible. 7 It would maintain you can attack a little, love a little, and know the difference. 8 Thus it would teach a little of the same can still be different, and yet the same remain intact, as one. 9 Does this make sense? 10 Can it be understood?

T-23.III.4. This course is easy just because it makes no compromise. 2 Yet it seems difficult to those who still believe that compromise is possible. 3 They do not see that, if it is, salvation is attack. 4 Yet it is certain the belief that salvation is impossible cannot uphold a quiet, calm assurance it has come. 5 Forgiveness cannot be withheld a little. 6 Nor is it possible to attack for this and love for that and understand forgiveness. p495 7 Would you not want to recognize assault upon your peace in any form, if only thus does it become impossible that you lose sight of it? 8 It can be kept shining before your vision, forever clear and never out of sight, if you defend it not.

T-23.III.5. Those who believe that peace can be defended, and that attack is justified on its behalf, cannot perceive it lies within them. 2 How could they know? 3 Could they accept forgiveness side by side with the belief that murder takes some forms by which their peace is saved? 4 Would they be willing to accept the fact their savage purpose is directed against themselves? 5 No one unites with enemies, nor is at one with them in purpose. 6 And no one compromises with an enemy but hates him still, for what he kept from him.

T-23.III.6. Mistake not truce for peace, nor compromise for the escape from conflict. 2 To be released from conflict means that it is over. 3 The door is open; you have left the battleground. 4 You have not lingered there in cowering hope that it will not return because the guns are stilled an instant, and the fear that haunts the place of death is not apparent. 5 There <is> no safety in a battleground. 6 You can look down on it in safety from above and not be touched. 7 But from within it you can find no safety. 8 Not one tree left still standing will shelter you. 9 Not one illusion of protection stands against the faith in murder. 10 Here stands the body, torn between the natural desire to communicate and the unnatural intent to murder and to die. 11 Think you the form that murder takes can offer safety? 12 Can guilt be absent from a battlefield?

IV. Above the Battleground

T-23.IV.1. Do not remain in conflict, for there <is> no war without attack. 2 The fear of God is fear of life, and not of death. 3 Yet He remains the only place of safety. 4 In Him is no attack, and no illusion in any form stalks Heaven. 5 Heaven is wholly true. 6 No difference enters, and what is all the same cannot conflict. 7 You are not asked to fight against your wish to murder. 8 But you are asked to realize the form it takes conceals the same intent. 9 And it is this you fear, and not the form. 10 What is not love is murder. 11 What is not loving must be an attack. 12 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. p496

T-23.IV.2. What can be equal to the truth, yet different? 2 Murder and love are incompatible. 3 Yet if they both are true, then must they be the same, and indistinguishable from one another. 4 So will they be to those who see God's Son a body. 5 For it is not the body that is like the Son's Creator. 6 And what is lifeless cannot be the Son of Life. 7 How can a body be extended to hold the universe? 8 Can it create, and be what it creates? 9 And can it offer its creations all that it is and never suffer loss?

T-23.IV.3. God does not share His function with a body. 2 He gave the function to create unto His Son because it is His Own. 3 It is not sinful to believe the function of the Son is murder, but it <is> insanity. 4 What is the same can have no different function. 5 Creation is the means for God's extension, and what is His must be His Son's as well. 6 Either the Father and the Son are murderers, or neither is. 7 Life makes not death, creating like itself.

T-23.IV.4. The lovely light of your relationship is like the Love of God. 2 It cannot yet assume the holy function God gave His Son, for your forgiveness of your brother is not complete as yet, and so it cannot be extended to all creation. 3 Each form of murder and attack that still attracts you and that you do not recognize for what it is, limits the healing and the miracles you have the power to extend to all. 4 Yet does the Holy Spirit understand how to increase your little gifts and make them mighty. 5 Also He understands how your relationship is raised above the battleground, in it no more. 6 This is your part; to realize that murder in any form is not your will. 7 The overlooking of the battleground is now your purpose.

T-23.IV.5. Be lifted up, and from a higher place look down upon it. 2 From there will your perspective be quite different. 3 Here in the midst of it, it does seem real. 4 Here you have chosen to be part of it. 5 Here murder is your choice. 6 Yet from above, the choice is miracles instead of murder. 7 And the perspective coming from this choice shows you the battle is not real, and easily escaped. 8 Bodies may battle, but the clash of forms is meaningless. 9 And it is over when you realize it never was begun. 10 How can a battle be perceived as nothingness when you engage in it? 11 How can the truth of miracles be recognized if murder is your choice?

T-23.IV.6. When the temptation to attack rises to make your mind darkened and murderous, remember you <can> see the battle from above. 2 Even in forms you do not recognize, the signs you know. 3 There is a stab of pain, a twinge of guilt, and above all, a loss of peace. p497 4 This you know well. 5 When they occur leave not your place on high, but quickly choose a miracle instead of murder. 6 And God Himself and all the lights of Heaven will gently lean to you, and hold you up. 7 For you have chosen to remain where He would have you, and no illusion can attack the peace of God together with His Son.

T-23.IV.7. See no one from the battleground, for there you look on him from nowhere. 2 You have no reference point from where to look, where meaning can be given what you see. 3 For only bodies could attack and murder, and if this is your purpose, then you must be one with them. 4 Only a purpose unifies, and those who share a purpose have a mind as one. 5 The body has no purpose of itself, and must be solitary. 6 From below, it cannot be surmounted. 7 From above, the limits it exerts on those in battle still are gone, and not perceived. 8 The body stands between the Father and the Heaven He created for His Son <because> it has no purpose.

T-23.IV.8. Think what is given those who share their Father's purpose, and who know that it is theirs. 2 They want for nothing. 3 Sorrow of any kind is inconceivable. 4 Only the light they love is in awareness, and only love shines upon them forever. 5 It is their past, their present and their future; always the same, eternally complete and wholly shared. 6 They know it is impossible their happiness could ever suffer change of any kind. 7 Perhaps you think the battleground can offer something you can win. 8 Can it be anything that offers you a perfect calmness, and a sense of love so deep and quiet that no touch of doubt can ever mar your certainty? 9 And that will last forever?

T-23.IV.9. Those with the strength of God in their awareness could never think of battle. 2 What could they gain but loss of their perfection? 3 For everything fought for on the battleground is of the body; something it seems to offer or to own. 4 No one who knows that he has everything could seek for limitation, nor could he value the body's offerings. 5 The senselessness of conquest is quite apparent from the quiet sphere above the battleground. 6 What can conflict with everything? 7 And what is there that offers less, yet could be wanted more? 8 Who with the Love of God upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make? p498

Chapter 24.

THE GOAL OF SPECIALNESS

Introduction

T-24.in.1. Forget not that the motivation for this course is the attainment and the keeping of the state of peace. 2 Given this state the mind is quiet, and the condition in which God is remembered is attained. 3 It is not necessary to tell Him what to do. 4 He will not fail. 5 Where He can enter, there He is already. 6 And can it be He cannot enter where He wills to be? 7 Peace will be yours <because> it is His Will. 8 Can you believe a shadow can hold back the Will that holds the universe secure? 9 God does not wait upon illusions to let Him be Himself. 10 No more His Son. 11 They <are.> 12 And what illusion that idly seems to drift between Them has the power to defeat what is Their Will?

T-24.in.2. To learn this course requires willingness to question every value that you hold. 2 Not one can be kept hidden and obscure but it will jeopardize your learning. 3 No belief is neutral. 4 Every one has the power to dictate each decision you make. 5 For a decision is a conclusion based on everything that you believe. 6 It is the outcome of belief, and follows it as surely as does suffering follow guilt and freedom sinlessness. 7 There is no substitute for peace. 8 What God creates has no alternative. 9 The truth arises from what He knows. 10 And your decisions come from your beliefs as certainly as all creation rose in His Mind <because> of what He knows.

I. Specialness as a Substitute for Love

T-24.I.1. Love is extension. 2 To withhold the smallest gift is not to know love's purpose. 3 Love offers everything forever. 4 Hold back but one belief, one offering, and love is gone, because you asked a substitute to take its place. 5 And now must war, the substitute for peace, come with the one alternative that you can choose for love. 6 Your choosing it has given it all the reality it seems to have.

T-24.I.2. Beliefs will never openly attack each other because conflicting outcomes are impossible. 2 But an unrecognized belief is a decision to war in secret, where the results of conflict are kept unknown and never brought to reason, to be considered sensible or not. p499 3 And many senseless outcomes have been reached, and meaningless decisions have been made and kept hidden, to become beliefs now given power to direct all subsequent decisions. 4 Mistake you not the power of these hidden warriors to disrupt your peace. 5 For it is at their mercy while you decide to leave it there. 6 The secret enemies of peace, your least decision to choose attack instead of love, unrecognized and swift to challenge you to combat and to violence far more inclusive than you think, are there by your election. 7 Do not deny their presence nor their terrible results. 8 All that can be denied is their reality, but not their outcome.

T-24.I.3. All that is ever cherished as a hidden belief, to be defended though unrecognized, is faith in specialness. 2 This takes many forms, but always clashes with the reality of God's creation and with the grandeur that He gave His Son. 3 What else could justify attack? 4 For who could hate someone whose Self is his, and Whom he knows? 5 Only the special could have enemies, for they are different and not the same. 6 And difference of any kind imposes orders of reality, and a need to judge that cannot be escaped.

T-24.I.4. What God created cannot be attacked, for there is nothing in the universe unlike itself. 2 But what is different calls for judgment, and this must come from someone "better," someone incapable of being like what he condemns, "above" it, sinless by comparison with it. 3 And thus does specialness become a means and end at once. 4 For specialness not only sets apart, but serves as grounds from which attack on those who seem "beneath" the special one is "natural" and "just." 5 The special ones feel weak and frail because of differences, for what would make them special <is> their enemy. 6 Yet they protect its enmity and call it "friend." 7 On its behalf they fight against the universe, for nothing in the world they value more.

T-24.I.5. Specialness is the great dictator of the wrong decisions. 2 Here is the grand illusion of what you are and what your brother is. 3 And here is what must make the body dear and worth preserving. 4 Specialness must be defended. 5 Illusions can attack it, and they do. 6 For what your brother must become to keep your specialness <is> an illusion. 7 He who is "worse" than you must be attacked, so that your specialness can live on his defeat. 8 For specialness is triumph, and its victory is his defeat and shame. p500 9 How can he live, with all your sins upon him? 10 And who must be his conqueror but you?

T-24.I.6. Would it be possible for you to hate your brother if you were like him? 2 Could you attack him if you realized you journey with him, to a goal that is the same? 3 Would you not help him reach it in every way you could, if his attainment of it were perceived as yours? 4 You are his enemy in specialness; his friend in a shared purpose. 5 Specialness can never share, for it depends on goals that you alone can reach. 6 And he must never reach them, or your goal is jeopardized. 7 Can love have meaning where the goal is triumph? 8 And what decision can be made for this that will not hurt you?

T-24.I.7. Your brother is your friend because his Father created him like you. 2 There is no difference. 3 You have been given to your brother that love might be extended, not cut off from him. 4 What you keep is lost to you. 5 God gave you and your brother Himself, and to remember this is now the only purpose that you share. 6 And so it is the only one you have. 7 Could you attack your brother if you chose to see no specialness of any kind between you and him? 8 Look fairly at whatever makes you give your brother only partial welcome, or would let you think that you are better off apart. 9 Is it not always your belief your specialness is limited by your relationship? 10 And is not this the "enemy" that makes you and your brother illusions to each other?

T-24.I.8. The fear of God and of your brother comes from each unrecognized belief in specialness. 2 For you demand your brother bow to it against his will. 3 And God Himself must honor it or suffer vengeance. 4 Every twinge of malice, or stab of hate or wish to separate arises here. 5 For here the purpose that you and your brother share becomes obscured from both of you. 6 You would oppose this course because it teaches you you and your brother are alike. 7 You have no purpose that is not the same, and none your Father does not share with you. 8 For your relationship has been made clean of special goals. 9 And would you now defeat the goal of holiness that Heaven gave it? 10 What perspective can the special have that does not change with every seeming blow, each slight, or fancied judgment on itself?

T-24.I.9. Those who are special must defend illusions against the truth. 2 For what is specialness but an attack upon the Will of God? 3 You love your brother not while it is this you would defend against him. 4 This is what he attacks, and you protect. 5 Here is the ground of battle which you wage against him. p501 6 Here must he be your enemy and not your friend. 7 Never can there be peace among the different. 8 He is your friend <because> you are the same.

II. The Treachery of Specialness

T-24.II.1. Comparison must be an ego device, for love makes none. 2 Specialness always makes comparisons. 3 It is established by a lack seen in another, and maintained by searching for, and keeping clear in sight, all lacks it can perceive. 4 This does it seek, and this it looks upon. 5 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. 6 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. 7 Nor do you understand it is yourself that you diminish thus.

T-24.II.2. Pursuit of specialness is always at the cost of peace. 2 Who can attack his savior and cut him down, yet recognize his strong support? 3 Who can detract from his omnipotence, yet share his power? 4 And who can use him as the gauge of littleness, and be released from limits? 5 You have a function in salvation. 6 Its pursuit will bring you joy. 7 But the pursuit of specialness must bring you pain. 8 Here is a goal that would defeat salvation, and thus run counter to the Will of God. 9 To value specialness is to esteem an alien will to which illusions of yourself are dearer than the truth.

T-24.II.3. Specialness is the idea of sin made real. 2 Sin is impossible even to imagine without this base. 3 For sin arose from it, out of nothingness; an evil flower with no roots at all. 4 Here is the self-made "savior," the "creator" who creates unlike the Father, and which made His Son like to itself and not like unto Him. 5 His "special" sons are many, never one, each one in exile from himself, and Him of Whom they are a part. 6 Nor do they love the Oneness which created them as one with Him. 7 They chose their specialness instead of Heaven and instead of peace, and wrapped it carefully in sin, to keep it "safe" from truth.

T-24.II.4. You are not special. 2 If you think you are, and would defend your specialness against the truth of what you really are, how can you know the truth? 3 What answer that the Holy Spirit gives can reach you, when it is your specialness to which you listen, and which asks and answers? p502 4 Its tiny answer, soundless in the melody that pours from God to you eternally in loving praise of what you are, is all you listen to. 5 And that vast song of honor and of love for what you are seems silent and unheard before its "mightiness." 6 You strain your ears to hear its soundless voice, and yet the Call of God Himself is soundless to you.

T-24.II.5. You can defend your specialness, but never will you hear the Voice for God beside it. 2 They speak a different language and they fall on different ears. 3 To every special one a different message, and one with different meaning, is the truth. 4 Yet how can truth be different to each one? 5 The special messages the special hear convince them they are different and apart; each in his special sins and "safe" from love, which does not see his specialness at all. 6 Christ's vision is their "enemy," for it sees not what they would look upon, and it would show them that the specialness they think they see is an illusion.

T-24.II.6. What would they see instead? 2 The shining radiance of the Son of God, so like his Father that the memory of Him springs instantly to mind. 3 And with this memory, the Son remembers his own creations, as like to him as he is to his Father. 4 And all the world he made, and all his specialness, and all the sins he held in its defense against himself, will vanish as his mind accepts the truth about himself, as it returns to take their place. 5 This is the only "cost" of truth: You will no longer see what never was, nor hear what makes no sound. 6 Is it a sacrifice to give up nothing, and to receive the Love of God forever?

T-24.II.7. You who have chained your savior to your specialness, and given it his place, remember this: He has not lost the power to forgive you all the sins you think you placed between him and the function of salvation given him for you. 2 Nor will you change his function, any more than you can change the truth in him and in yourself. 3 But be you certain that the truth is just the same in both. 4 It gives no different messages, and has one meaning. 5 And it is one you and your brother both can understand, and one that brings release to both of you. 6 Here stands your brother with the key to Heaven in his hand, held out to you. 7 Let not the dream of specialness remain between you. 8 What is one is joined in truth.

T-24.II.8. Think of the loveliness that you will see within yourself, when you have looked on him as on a friend. 2 He <is> the enemy of specialness, but only friend to what is real in you. 3 Not one attack you thought you made on him has taken from him the gift that God would have him give to you. p503 4 His need to give it is as great as yours to have it. 5 Let him forgive you all your specialness, and make you whole in mind and one with him. 6 He waits for your forgiveness only that he may return it unto you. 7 It is not God Who has condemned His Son, but you, to save his specialness and kill his Self.

T-24.II.9. You have come far along the way of truth; too far to falter now. 2 Just one step more, and every vestige of the fear of God will melt away in love. 3 Your brother's specialness and yours <are> enemies, and bound in hate to kill each other and deny they are the same. 4 Yet it is not illusions that have reached this final obstacle which seems to make God and His Heaven so remote that They cannot be reached. 5 Here in this holy place does truth stand waiting to receive you and your brother in silent blessing, and in peace so real and so encompassing that nothing stands outside. 6 Leave all illusions of yourself outside this place, to which you come in hope and honesty.

T-24.II.10. Here is your savior <from> your specialness. 2 He is in need of your acceptance of himself as part of you, as you for his. 3 You are alike to God as God is to Himself. 4 He is not special, for He would not keep one part of what He is unto Himself, not given to His Son but kept for Him alone. 5 And it is this you fear, for if He is not special, then He willed His Son to be like Him, and your brother <is> like you. 6 Not special, but possessed of everything, including you. 7 Give him but what he has, remembering God gave Himself to you and your brother in equal love, that both might share the universe with Him Who chose that love could never be divided, and kept separate from what it is and must forever be.

T-24.II.11. You <are> your brother's; part of love was not denied to him. 2 But can it be that you have lost because he is complete? 3 What has been given him makes you complete, as it does him. 4 God's Love gave you to him and him to you because He gave Himself. 5 What is the same as God is one with Him. 6 And only specialness could make the truth of God and you as one seem anything but Heaven, with the hope of peace at last in sight.

T-24.II.12. Specialness is the seal of treachery upon the gift of love. 2 Whatever serves its purpose must be given to kill. 3 No gift that bears its seal but offers treachery to giver and receiver. 4 Not one glance from eyes it veils but looks on sight of death. 5 Not one believer in its potency but seeks for bargains and for compromise that would establish sin love's substitute, and serve it faithfully. p504 6 And no relationship that holds its purpose dear but clings to murder as safety's weapon, and the great defender of all illusions from the "threat" of love.

T-24.II.13. The hope of specialness makes it seem possible God made the body as the prison house that keeps His Son from Him. 2 For it demands a special place God cannot enter, and a hiding place where none is welcome but your tiny self. 3 Nothing is sacred here but unto you, and you alone, apart and separate from all your brothers; safe from all intrusions of sanity upon illusions; safe from God and safe for conflict everlasting. 4 Here are the gates of hell you closed upon yourself, to rule in madness and in loneliness your special kingdom, apart from God, away from truth and from salvation.

T-24.II.14. The key you threw away God gave your brother, whose holy hands would offer it to you when you were ready to accept His plan for your salvation in the place of yours. 2 How could this readiness be reached save through the sight of all your misery, and the awareness that your plan has failed, and will forever fail to bring you peace and joy of any kind? 3 Through this despair you travel now, yet it is but illusion of despair. 4 The death of specialness is not your death, but your awaking into life eternal. 5 You but emerge from an illusion of what you are to the acceptance of yourself as God created you.

III. The Forgiveness of Specialness

T-24.III.1. Forgiveness is the end of specialness. 2 Only illusions can be forgiven, and then they disappear. 3 Forgiveness is release from all illusions, and that is why it is impossible but partly to forgive. 4 No one who clings to one illusion can see himself as sinless, for he holds one error to himself as lovely still. 5 And so he calls it "unforgivable," and makes it sin. 6 How can he then give his forgiveness wholly, when he would not receive it for himself? 7 For it is sure he would receive it wholly the instant that he gave it so. 8 And thus his secret guilt would disappear, forgiven by himself.

T-24.III.2. Whatever form of specialness you cherish, you have made sin. 2 Inviolate it stands, strongly defended with all your puny might against the Will of God. 3 And thus it stands against yourself; <your> enemy, not God's. 4 So does it seem to split you off from God, and make you separate from Him as its defender. 5 You would protect what God created not. p505 6 And yet, this idol that seems to give you power has taken it away. 7 For you have given your brother's birthright to it, leaving him alone and unforgiven, and yourself in sin beside him, both in misery, before the idol that can save you not.

T-24.III.3. It is not <you> who are so vulnerable and open to attack that just a word, a little whisper that you do not like, a circumstance that suits you not, or an event that you did not anticipate upsets your world, and hurls it into chaos. 2 Truth is not frail. 3 Illusions leave it perfectly unmoved and undisturbed. 4 But specialness is not the truth in you. 5 <It> can be thrown off balance by anything. 6 What rests on nothing never can be stable. 7 However large and overblown it seems to be, it still must rock and turn and whirl about with every breeze.

T-24.III.4. Without foundation nothing is secure. 2 Would God have left His Son in such a state, where safety has no meaning? 3 No, His Son is safe, resting on Him. 4 It is your specialness that is attacked by everything that walks and breathes, or creeps or crawls, or even lives at all. 5 Nothing is safe from its attack, and it is safe from nothing. 6 It will forevermore be unforgiving, for that is what it is; a secret vow that what God wants for you will never be, and that you will oppose His Will forever. 7 Nor is it possible the two can ever be the same, while specialness stands like a flaming sword of death between them, and makes them enemies.

T-24.III.5. God asks for your forgiveness. 2 He would have no separation, like an alien will, rise between what He wills for you and what you will. 3 They <are> the same, for neither One wills specialness. 4 How could They will the death of love itself? 5 Yet They are powerless to make attack upon illusions. 6 They are not bodies; as one Mind They wait for all illusions to be brought to Them, and left behind. 7 Salvation challenges not even death. 8 And God Himself, Who knows that death is not your will, must say, "Thy will be done" because you think it is.

T-24.III.6. Forgive the great Creator of the universe, the Source of life, of love and holiness, the perfect Father of a perfect Son, for your illusions of your specialness. 2 Here is the hell you chose to be your home. 3 He chose not this for you. 4 Ask not He enter this. 5 The way is barred to love and to salvation. 6 Yet if you would release your brother from the depths of hell, you have forgiven Him Whose Will it is you rest forever in the arms of peace, in perfect safety, and without the heat and malice of one thought of specialness to mar your rest. p506 7 Forgive the Holy One the specialness He could not give, and that you made instead.

T-24.III.7. The special ones are all asleep, surrounded by a world of loveliness they do not see. 2 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. 3 Yet they hear nothing. 4 They are lost in dreams of specialness. 5 They hate the call that would awaken them, and they curse God because He did not make their dream reality. 6 Curse God and die, but not by Him Who made not death; but only in the dream. 7 Open your eyes a little; see the savior God gave to you that you might look on him, and give him back his birthright. 8 It is yours.

T-24.III.8. The slaves of specialness will yet be free. 2 Such is the Will of God and of His Son. 3 Would God condemn Himself to hell and to damnation? 4 And do you will that this be done unto your savior? 5 God calls to you from him to join His Will to save you both from hell. 6 Look on the print of nails upon his hands that he holds out for your forgiveness. 7 God asks your mercy on His Son and on Himself. 8 Deny Them not. 9 They ask of you but that your will be done. 10 They seek your love that you may love yourself. 11 Love not your specialness instead of Them. 12 The print of nails is on your hands as well. 13 Forgive your Father it was not His Will that you be crucified.

IV. Specialness versus Sinlessness

T-24.IV.1. Specialness is a lack of trust in anyone except yourself. 2 Faith is invested in yourself alone. 3 Everything else becomes your enemy; feared and attacked, deadly and dangerous, hated and worthy only of destruction. 4 Whatever gentleness it offers is but deception, but its hate is real. 5 In danger of destruction it must kill, and you are drawn to it to kill it first. 6 And such is guilt's attraction. 7 Here is death enthroned as savior; crucifixion is now redemption, and salvation can only mean destruction of the world, except yourself.

T-24.IV.2. What could the purpose of the body be but specialness? 2 And it is this that makes it frail and helpless in its own defense. 3 It was conceived to make <you> frail and helpless. 4 The goal of separation is its curse. 5 Yet bodies have no goal. 6 Purpose is of the mind. 7 And minds can change as they desire. p507 8 What they are, and all their attributes, they cannot change. 9 But what they hold as purpose can be changed, and body states must shift accordingly. 10 Of itself the body can do nothing. 11 See it as means to hurt, and it is hurt. 12 See it as means to heal, and it is healed.

T-24.IV.3. You can but hurt yourself. 2 This has been oft repeated, but is difficult to grasp as yet. 3 To minds intent on specialness it is impossible. 4 Yet to those who wish to heal and not attack, it is quite obvious. 5 The purpose of attack is in the mind, and its effects are felt but where it is. 6 Nor is the mind limited; so must it be that harmful purpose hurts the mind as one. 7 Nothing could make less sense to specialness. 8 Nothing could make more sense to miracles. 9 For miracles are merely change of purpose from hurt to healing. 10 This shift in purpose does "endanger" specialness, but only in the sense that all illusions are "threatened" by the truth. 11 They will not stand before it. 12 Yet what comfort has ever been in them, that you would keep the gift your Father asks from Him, and give it there instead? 13 Given to Him, the universe is yours. 14 Offered to them, no gifts can be returned. 15 What you have given specialness has left you bankrupt and your treasure house barren and empty, with an open door inviting everything that would disturb your peace to enter and destroy.

T-24.IV.4. Earlier I said consider not the means by which salvation is attained, nor how to reach it. 2 But do consider, and consider well, whether it is your wish that you might see your brother sinless. 3 To specialness the answer must be "no." 4 A sinless brother <is> its enemy, while sin, if it were possible, would be its friend. 5 Your brother's sin would justify itself, and give it meaning that the truth denies. 6 All that is real proclaims his sinlessness. 7 All that is false proclaims his sins as real. 8 If he is sinful, then is your reality not real, but just a dream of specialness that lasts an instant, crumbling into dust.

T-24.IV.5. Do not defend this senseless dream, in which God is bereft of what He loves, and you remain beyond salvation. 2 Only this is certain in this shifting world that has no meaning in reality: When peace is not with you entirely, and when you suffer pain of any kind, you have beheld some sin within your brother, and have rejoiced at what you thought was there. 3 Your specialness seemed safe because of it. 4 And thus you saved what you appointed to be your savior, and crucified the one whom God has given you instead. 5 So are you bound with him, for you are one. 6 And so is specialness his "enemy," and yours as well. p508

V. The Christ in You

T-24.V.1. The Christ in you is very still. 2 He looks on what He loves, and knows it as Himself. 3 And thus does He rejoice at what He sees, because He knows that it is one with Him and with His Father. 4 Specialness, too, takes joy in what it sees, although it is not true. 5 Yet what you seek for is a source of joy as you conceive it. 6 What you wish is true for you. 7 Nor is it possible that you can wish for something and lack faith that it is so. 8 Wishing makes real, as surely as does will create. 9 The power of a wish upholds illusions as strongly as does love extend itself. 10 Except that one deludes; the other heals.

T-24.V.2. There is no dream of specialness, however hidden or disguised the form, however lovely it may seem to be, however much it delicately offers the hope of peace and the escape from pain, in which you suffer not your condemnation. 2 In dreams effect and cause are interchanged, for here the maker of the dream believes that what he made is happening to him. 3 He does not realize he picked a thread from here, a scrap from there, and wove a picture out of nothing. 4 For the parts do not belong together, and the whole contributes nothing to the parts to give them meaning.

T-24.V.3. Where could your peace arise <but> from forgiveness? 2 The Christ in you looks only on the truth, and sees no condemnation that could need forgiveness. 3 He is at peace <because> He sees no sin. 4 Identify with Him, and what has He that you have not? 5 He is your eyes, your ears, your hands, your feet. 6 How gentle are the sights He sees, the sounds He hears. 7 How beautiful His hand that holds His brother's, and how lovingly He walks beside him, showing him what can be seen and heard, and where he will see nothing and there is no sound to hear.

T-24.V.4. Yet let your specialness direct his way, and you will follow. 2 And both will walk in danger, each intent, in the dark forest of the sightless, unlit but by the shifting tiny gleams that spark an instant from the fireflies of sin and then go out, to lead the other to a nameless precipice and hurl him over it. 3 For what can specialness delight in but to kill? 4 What does it seek for but the sight of death? 5 Where does it lead but to destruction? 6 Yet think not that it looked upon your brother first, nor hated him before it hated you. 7 The sin its eyes behold in him and love to look upon it saw in you, and looks on still with joy. 8 Yet is it joy to look upon decay and madness, and believe this crumbling thing, with flesh already loosened from the bone and sightless holes for eyes, is like yourself? p509

T-24.V.5. Rejoice you have no eyes with which to see; no ears to listen, and no hands to hold nor feet to guide. 2 Be glad that only Christ can lend you His, while you have need of them. 3 They are illusions, too, as much as yours. 4 And yet because they serve a different purpose, the strength their purpose holds is given them. 5 And what they see and hear and hold and lead is given light, that you may lead as you were led.

T-24.V.6. The Christ in you is very still. 2 He knows where you are going, and He leads you there in gentleness and blessing all the way. 3 His Love for God replaces all the fear you thought you saw within yourself. 4 His Holiness shows you Himself in him whose hand you hold, and whom you lead to Him. 5 And what you see is like yourself. 6 For what but Christ is there to see and hear and love and follow home? 7 He looked upon you first, but recognized that you were not complete. 8 And so He sought for your completion in each living thing that He beholds and loves. 9 And seeks it still, that each might offer you the Love of God.

T-24.V.7. Yet is He quiet, for He knows that love is in you now, and safely held in you by that same hand that holds your brother's in your own. 2 Christ's hand holds all His brothers in Himself. 3 He gives them vision for their sightless eyes, and sings to them of Heaven, that their ears may hear no more the sound of battle and of death. 4 He reaches through them, holding out His hand, that everyone may bless all living things, and see their holiness. 5 And He rejoices that these sights are yours, to look upon with Him and share His joy. 6 His perfect lack of specialness He offers you, that you may save all living things from death, receiving from each one the gift of life that your forgiveness offers to your Self. 7 The sight of Christ is all there is to see. 8 The song of Christ is all there is to hear. 9 The hand of Christ is all there is to hold. 10 There is no journey but to walk with Him.

T-24.V.8. You who would be content with specialness, and seek salvation in a war with love, consider this: The holy Lord of Heaven has Himself come down to you, to offer you your own completion. 2 What is His is yours because in your completion is His Own. 3 He Who willed not to be without His Son could never will that you be brotherless. 4 And would He give a brother unto you except he be as perfect as yourself, and just as like to Him in holiness as you must be? p510

T-24.V.9. There must be doubt before there can be conflict. 2 And every doubt must be about yourself. 3 Christ has no doubt, and from His certainty His quiet comes. 4 He will exchange His certainty for all your doubts, if you agree that He is One with you, and that this Oneness is endless, timeless, and within your grasp because your hands are His. 5 He is within you, yet He walks beside you and before, leading the way that He must go to find Himself complete. 6 His quietness becomes your certainty. 7 And where is doubt when certainty has come?

VI. Salvation from Fear

T-24.VI.1. Before your brother's holiness the world is still, and peace descends on it in gentleness and blessing so complete that not one trace of conflict still remains to haunt you in the darkness of the night. 2 He is your savior from the dreams of fear. 3 He is the healing of your sense of sacrifice and fear that what you have will scatter with the wind and turn to dust. 4 In him is your assurance God is here, and with you now. 5 While he is what he is, you can be sure that God is knowable and will be known to you. 6 For He could never leave His Own creation. 7 And the sign that this is so lies in your brother, offered you that all your doubts about yourself may disappear before his holiness. 8 See in him God's creation. 9 For in him his Father waits for your acknowledgment that He created you as part of Him.

T-24.VI.2. Without you there would be a lack in God, a Heaven incomplete, a Son without a Father. 2 There could be no universe and no reality. 3 For what God wills is whole, and part of Him because His Will is One. 4 Nothing alive that is not part of Him, and nothing is but is alive in Him. 5 Your brother's holiness shows you that God is One with him and you; that what he has is yours because you are not separate from him nor from his Father.

T-24.VI.3. Nothing is lost to you in all the universe. 2 Nothing that God created has He failed to lay before you lovingly, as yours forever. 3 And no Thought within His Mind is absent from your own. 4 It is His Will you share His Love for you, and look upon yourself as lovingly as He conceived of you before the world began, and as He knows you still. 5 God changes not His Mind about His Son with passing circumstance which has no meaning in eternity where He abides, and you with Him. 6 Your brother <is> as He created him. p511 7 And it is this that saves you from a world that He created not.

T-24.VI.4. Forget not that the healing of God's Son is all the world is for. 2 That is the only purpose the Holy Spirit sees in it, and thus the only one it has. 3 Until you see the healing of the Son as all you wish to be accomplished by the world, by time and all appearances, you will not know the Father nor yourself. 4 For you will use the world for what is not its purpose, and will not escape its laws of violence and death. 5 Yet it is given you to be beyond its laws in all respects, in every way and every circumstance, in all temptation to perceive what is not there, and all belief God's Son can suffer pain because he sees himself as he is not.

T-24.VI.5. Look on your brother, and behold in him the whole reversal of the laws that seem to rule this world. 2 See in his freedom yours, for such it is. 3 Let not his specialness obscure the truth in him, for not one law of death you bind him to will you escape. 4 And not one sin you see in him but keeps you both in hell. 5 Yet will his perfect sinlessness release you both, for holiness is quite impartial, with one judgment made for all it looks upon. 6 And that is made, not of itself, but through the Voice that speaks for God in everything that lives and shares His Being.

T-24.VI.6. It is His sinlessness that eyes that see can look upon. 2 It is His loveliness they see in everything. 3 And it is He they look for everywhere, and find no sight nor place nor time where He is not. 4 Within your brother's holiness, the perfect frame for your salvation and the world's, is set the shining memory of Him in Whom your brother lives, and you along with him. 5 Let not your eyes be blinded by the veil of specialness that hides the face of Christ from him, and you as well. 6 And let the fear of God no longer hold the vision you were meant to see from you. 7 Your brother's body shows not Christ to you. 8 He <is> set forth within his holiness.

T-24.VI.7. Choose, then, his body or his holiness as what you want to see, and which you choose is yours to look upon. 2 Yet will you choose in countless situations, and through time that seems to have no end, until the truth be your decision. 3 For eternity is not regained by still one more denial of Christ in him. 4 And where is your salvation, if he is but a body? 5 Where is your peace but in his holiness? 6 And where is God Himself but in that part of Him He set forever in your brother's holiness, that you might see the truth about yourself, set forth at last in terms you recognized and understood? p512

T-24.VI.8. Your brother's holiness is sacrament and benediction unto you. 2 His errors cannot withhold God's blessing from himself, nor you who see him truly. 3 His mistakes can cause delay, which it is given you to take from him, that both may end a journey that has never begun, and needs no end. 4 What never was is not a part of you. 5 Yet you will think it is, until you realize that it is not a part of him who stands beside you. 6 He is the mirror of yourself, wherein you see the judgment you have laid on both of you. 7 The Christ in you beholds his holiness. 8 Your specialness looks on his body and beholds him not.

T-24.VI.9. See him as what he is, that your deliverance may not be long. 2 A senseless wandering, without a purpose and without accomplishment of any kind, is all the other choice can offer you. 3 Futility of function not fulfilled will haunt you while your brother lies asleep, till what has been assigned to you is done and he is risen from the past. 4 He who condemned himself, and you as well, is given you to save from condemnation, along with you. 5 And both shall see God's glory in His Son, whom you mistook as flesh, and bound to laws that have no power over him at all.

T-24.VI.10. Would you not gladly realize these laws are not for you? 2 Then see him not as prisoner to them. 3 It cannot be what governs part of God holds not for all the rest. 4 You place yourself under the laws you see as ruling him. 5 Think, then, how great the Love of God for you must be, that He has given you a part of Him to save from pain and give you happiness. 6 And never doubt but that your specialness will disappear before the Will of God, Who loves each part of Him with equal love and care. 7 The Christ in you can see your brother truly. 8 Would you decide against the holiness He sees?

T-24.VI.11. Specialness is the function that you gave yourself. 2 It stands for you alone, as self-created, self-maintained, in need of nothing, and unjoined with anything beyond the body. 3 In its eyes you are a separate universe, with all the power to hold itself complete within itself, with every entry shut against intrusion, and every window barred against the light. 4 Always attacked and always furious, with anger always fully justified, you have pursued this goal with vigilance you never thought to yield, and effort that you never thought to cease. 5 And all this grim determination was for this; you wanted specialness to be the truth.

T-24.VI.12. Now you are merely asked that you pursue another goal with far less vigilance; with little effort and with little time, and with the power of God maintaining it, and promising success. p513 2 Yet of the two, it is this one you find more difficult. 3 The "sacrifice" of self you understand, nor do you deem this cost too heavy. 4 But a tiny willingness, a nod to God, a greeting to the Christ in you, you find a burden wearisome and tedious, too heavy to be borne. 5 Yet to the dedication to the truth as God established it no sacrifice is asked, no strain called forth, and all the power of Heaven and the might of truth itself is given to provide the means, and guarantee the goal's accomplishment.

T-24.VI.13. You who believe it easier to see your brother's body than his holiness, be sure you understand what made this judgment. 2 Here is the voice of specialness heard clearly, judging against the Christ and setting forth for you the purpose that you can attain, and what you cannot do. 3 Forget not that this judgment must apply to what you do with it as your ally. 4 For what you do through Christ it does not know. 5 To Him this judgment makes no sense at all, for only what His Father wills is possible, and there is no alternative for Him to see. 6 Out of His lack of conflict comes your peace. 7 And from His purpose comes the means for effortless accomplishment and rest.

VII. The Meeting Place

T-24.VII.1. How bitterly does everyone tied to this world defend the specialness he wants to be the truth! 2 His wish is law to him, and he obeys. 3 Nothing his specialness demands does he withhold. 4 Nothing it needs does he deny to what he loves. 5 And while it calls to him he hears no other Voice. 6 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. 7 This is your son, beloved of you as you are to your Father. 8 Yet it stands in place of your creations, who <are> son to you, that you might share the Fatherhood of God, not snatch it from Him. 9 What is this son that you have made to be your strength? 10 What is this child of earth on whom such love is lavished? 11 What is this parody of God's creation that takes the place of yours? 12 And where are they, now that the host of God has found another son whom he prefers to them? p514

T-24.VII.2. The memory of God shines not alone. 2 What is within your brother still contains all of creation, everything created and creating, born and unborn as yet, still in the future or apparently gone by. 3 What is in him is changeless, and your changelessness is recognized in its acknowledgment. 4 The holiness in you belongs to him. 5 And by your seeing it in him, returns to you. 6 All of the tribute you have given specialness belongs to him, and thus returns to you. 7 All of the love and care, the strong protection, the thought by day and night, the deep concern, the powerful conviction this is you, belong to him. 8 Nothing you gave to specialness but is his due. 9 And nothing due him is not due to you.

T-24.VII.3. How can you know your worth while specialness claims you instead? 2 How can you fail to know it in his holiness? 3 Seek not to make your specialness the truth, for if it were you would be lost indeed. 4 Be thankful, rather, it is given you to see his holiness <because> it is the truth. 5 And what is true in him must be as true in you.

T-24.VII.4. Ask yourself this: Can <you> protect the mind? 2 The body, yes, a little; not from time, but temporarily. 3 And much you think you save, you hurt. 4 What would you save it <for?> 5 For in that choice lie both its health and harm. 6 Save it for show, as bait to catch another fish, to house your specialness in better style, or weave a frame of loveliness around your hate, and you condemn it to decay and death. 7 And if you see this purpose in your brother's, such is your condemnation of your own. 8 Weave, rather, then, a frame of holiness around him, that the truth may shine on him, and give <you> safety from decay.

T-24.VII.5. The Father keeps what He created safe. 2 You cannot touch it with the false ideas you made, because it was created not by you. 3 Let not your foolish fancies frighten you. 4 What is immortal cannot be attacked; what is but temporal has no effect. 5 Only the purpose that you see in it has meaning, and if that is true, its safety rests secure. 6 If not, it has no purpose, and is means for nothing. 7 Whatever is perceived as means for truth shares in its holiness, and rests in light as safely as itself. 8 Nor will that light go out when it is gone. 9 Its holy purpose gave it immortality, setting another light in Heaven, where your creations recognize a gift from you, a sign that you have not forgotten them.

T-24.VII.6. The test of everything on earth is simply this; "What is it <for>?" 2 The answer makes it what it is for you. 3 It has no meaning of itself, yet you can give reality to it, according to the purpose that you serve. p515 4 Here you are but means, along with it. 5 God is a Means as well as End. 6 In Heaven, means and end are one, and one with Him. 7 This is the state of true creation, found not within time, but in eternity. 8 To no one here is this describable. 9 Nor is there any way to learn what this condition means. 10 Not till you go past learning to the Given; not till you make again a holy home for your creations is it understood.

T-24.VII.7. A co-creator with the Father must have a Son. 2 Yet must this Son have been created like Himself. 3 A perfect being, all-encompassing and all-encompassed, nothing to add and nothing taken from; not born of size nor place nor time, nor held to limits or uncertainties of any kind. 4 Here do the means and end unite as one, nor does this one have any end at all. 5 All this is true, and yet it has no meaning to anyone who still retains one unlearned lesson in his memory, one thought with purpose still uncertain, or one wish with a divided aim.

T-24.VII.8. This course makes no attempt to teach what cannot easily be learned. 2 Its scope does not exceed your own, except to say that what is yours will come to you when you are ready. 3 Here are the means and the purpose separate because they were so made and so perceived. 4 And therefore do we deal with them as if they were. 5 It is essential it be kept in mind that all perception still is upside down until its purpose has been understood. 6 Perception does not seem to be a means. 7 And it is this that makes it hard to grasp the whole extent to which it must depend on what you see it for. 8 Perception seems to teach you what you see. 9 Yet it but witnesses to what you taught. 10 It is the outward picture of a wish; an image that you wanted to be true.

T-24.VII.9. Look at yourself, and you will see a body. 2 Look at this body in a different light and it looks different. 3 And without a light it seems that it is gone. 4 Yet you are reassured that it is there because you still can feel it with your hands and hear it move. 5 Here is an image that you want to be yourself. 6 It is the means to make your wish come true. 7 It gives the eyes with which you look on it, the hands that feel it, and the ears with which you listen to the sounds it makes. 8 It proves its own reality to you.

T-24.VII.10. Thus is the body made a theory of yourself, with no provisions made for evidence beyond itself, and no escape within its sight. 2 Its course is sure, when seen through its own eyes. 3 It grows and withers, flourishes and dies. 4 And you cannot conceive of you apart from it. 5 You brand it sinful and you hate its acts, judging it evil. p516 6 Yet your specialness whispers, "Here is my own beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." 7 Thus does the "son" become the means to serve his "father's" purpose. 8 Not identical, not even like, but still a means to offer to the "father" what he wants. 9 Such is the travesty on God's creation. 10 For as His Son's creation gave Him joy and witness to His Love and shared His purpose, so does the body testify to the idea that made it, and speak for its reality and truth.

T-24.VII.11. And thus are two sons made, and both appear to walk this earth without a meeting place and no encounter. 2 One do you perceive outside yourself, your own beloved son. 3 The other rests within, his Father's Son, within your brother as he is in you. 4 Their difference does not lie in how they look, nor where they go, nor even what they do. 5 They have a different purpose. 6 It is this that joins them to their like, and separates each from all aspects with a different purpose. 7 The Son of God retains his Father's Will. 8 The son of man perceives an alien will and wishes it were so. 9 And thus does his perception serve his wish by giving it appearances of truth. 10 Yet can perception serve another goal. 11 It is not bound to specialness but by your choice. 12 And it is given you to make a different choice, and use perception for a different purpose. 13 And what you see will serve that purpose well, and prove its own reality to you. p517

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