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351 My sinless brother is my guide to peace. My sinful brother
is my guide to pain. And which I choose to see I will behold.
MT: Where do I need to apply this idea, in my life, today?
JC: To yourself, of course.
MT: Why of course?
JC: Dear sister, you are punishing yourself with a cough and red eyes
and a cold.
MT: Nothing like a bad cold to remind me of The Body. I haven't transcended
a thing yet.
JC: There is nothing to transcend. There is nothing to seek. Behold aliveness
in, around, everywhere, as far as the eye can see. Aliveness shimmers
and dances.
MT: To a dancing God, someone entitled his book. The idea was startling,
yet I also thought, I've been waiting for it all my life. Waiting for
a dancing God.
JC: Come dance with me, with God, with your brother today.
352 Judgment and love are opposites. From one comes all the sorrows
of the world. But from the other comes the peace of God Himself.
MT: You really play the opposites, don't you? This is as black-and-white
as it gets.
JC: What about you, now? Are you in judgment, or in love?
MT: That was judgment. I wanted to show you how clever I am.
JC: And if I admired your cleverness, what would that get you?
MT: Guess I'd have to keep proving it with more cleverness.
JC: And thus you push God away. Clever/stupid is a misuse of the mind.
It does not exist in the Kingdom.
MT: Show me the Kingdom!
JC: Open your heart, to yourself, to others. Come whoilly empty-handed
unto your God.
MT: God knows the way to me . . . thank you, bro.
353 My eyes, my tongue, my hands, my feet today have but one purpose;
to be given Christ to use to bless the world with miracles.
MT: I don't feel very miracle-y today, JC. Tried to get into gratitude--I'm
alive, after all--but gratitude seems far, far away.
JC: You push it away any chance you get.
MT: Sheesh, you sound angry just like me.
JC: So you want a different JC, do you not?
MT: That would help. I don't need help to be separated, I do that quite
well myself, thank you.
JC: So how are you now?
MT: The problem shifted. I don't feel so alone.
JC: You are never alone, but you can dream it. Dreaming is free, if not
wholly without consequences.
MT: The consequences are in the dream too, aren't they?
JC: Yes. The world and its woes disappear when you realize there's nobody
here to suffer.
MT: I rebel against this lesson, JC. I don't want to save the world, I
just want to be happy. I just want to be left alone. For what purpose,
I don't know.
JC: You want to be left alone . . . but you are alone, not as God goes,
but as the world goes. You are free to do anything at all. Even to make
friends.
MT: There's the Censor in my head, constantly judging my tiniest action,
telling me I should be doing something else. This lesson feels like another
edition of the Censor.
JC: So for company you choose the Censor.
MT: How about that! I do! It's the point you made in Chapter 31, Rules
for Decision.
JC: Who walks with you today? Is it the Censor, or is it God?
354 We stand together, Christ and I, in peace and certainty of
purpose. And in Him is His Creator, as He is in me.
"My oneness with the Christ establishes me as Your Son, beyond the
reach of time, and wholly free of every law but Yours."
<I> am the Christ. This is the Second Coming, the moment that I
give up my search for the Savior and instead accept that I am It. A game
of tag with one player!
"I have no self except the Christ in me."
There is nothing to defend. No one can hurt me.
"I have no purpose but His Own."
I can let go of all striving, of stabbing at windmills, of pathetic attempts
to control the sun, the wind and the waves.
"And He is like His Father."
How could the Christ not be like the Father?
"Thus must I be one with You as well as Him."
I am one with the Christ, therefore one with the Father.
"For who is Christ except Your Son as You created Him?"
God did not create a non-Christ. What a cosmic joke that would be!
"And what am I except the Christ in me?"
My every attempt to fight the Christ in me is an attempt to fight God.
Enough of that!
355 There is no end to all the peace and joy, and all the miracles
that I will give, when I accept God’s Word. Why not today?
MT: Friend, I have a hard time with these words. They take me back to
Baptist days and appeals to accept you as my savior. I did, for a while.
I was baptized, at age 14 a sheep of the Baptist flock. But the utter
impossibility--for me--of doing all that the decision implied, preaching
in the street corner, saving all the other sinners--quickly pulled me
away from faith. I think you can understand.
JC: There was no one there to be saved. Salvation implied sin. You knew
there was a fallacy somewhere.
MT: I was a child, you see. It was time to find my place in the culture,
to find a mate, eventually to leave my parents' home. Happy times were
shadowed by the mental bottleneck of trying to do the impossible--to be
saved by good deeds. The push was constant--gotta do better, do more,
not good enough, keep trying. And in the end you get crucified! What a
!#&%! way to live!
JC: Having visited that ancient mental configuration, are you willing
to let it go now? Hear God's Word: let it go. It was a bad dream. The
world is waking up to a new dawn: the end of suffering.
MT: There is no need to preach to anyone! I can let that go. I can even
buy a cabin in the woods and be a hermit!
356 Sickness is but another name for sin. Healing is but another
name for God. The miracle is thus a call to Him.
MT: OK, I get it. You're talking to me, aren't you? The miracle is a call
to God. It's the moment when I change my mind about who I am and can say,
"I have no use for this sickness. The being of light that I am cannot
be sick, cannot die." One does not see these things for a long, long
time, but suddenly they become clear, and then it's as if they were right
in front of one's nose all along. I noticed a tendency in me, and I believe
it is in others too--the tendency to look at sickness, to examine the
defect: "the spots before my eyes, are they there still? Are they
bigger today?" "How is my cough this morning?" "Did
I gain weight last week?" I call it vigilance, but it too is making
the error real. I think it's really subtle, JC, it's a clever trap.
JC: Sooner or later, your sight must go forth to look upon Christ's face.
MT: That was an old lesson. I know about sight going beyond form.
JC: So you are ready to get it at a deeper level. Where is attention paid?
Attention can be paid to sickness, or it can be paid to the Light beyond.
Where attention is, that you make real.
MT: So if I focus on the sickness and then repeat 1,000 affirmations that
it's not there . . .
JC: You are then working through layers of your own making. I am offering
you a cosmic shortcut.
MT: Oh, I like that! A cosmic shortcut!
357 Truth answers every call we make to God, responding first
with miracles, and then returning unto us to be itself.
JC: How does this apply to your life, today, now?
MT: I've called to God and been answered with Truth, over and over. The
miracle of the reversal keeps happening--my problems are not what they
seem. They are not even chances for learning, they happen in a different
sphere. There's no one here to have a problem! There's only Mind playing
with Energy, making up what it calls a Problem but might as well call
Blue or Haricot or Petunia. But what do you mean, Truth returns unto us
to be itself? It goes around in circles?
JC: Truth will wash over you in ecstatic experience. It has done so before
and will do so again.
MT: I fought Truth with all my being. What's that all about?
JC: It is what I call ego. You fight the moment of recognition. You delay,
you deny, you avoid the instant when you must say: this is true, and nothing
else is true. That is God.
358 No call to God can be unheard nor left unanswered. And of
this I can be sure: His answer is the one I really want.
MT: In the call there is the answer already, I guess. They are one and
the same.
JC: The call ends the separation in the holy instant. Whatever form the
call takes--sickness, apparent loss, despair--God's answer is the same:
come back to Me.
MT: And so ends the search, back at the starting point. Nothing here ever
existed, because the impossible never happened. We cannot be separate
from God, any more than a tree can exist apart from soil, sun, or rain.
I feel blessed today, JC. Thank you for this day. Thank you for the sunrise
and the tides, the dolphins that ride the waves and the cougar that stalks
in the night. All God's creatures, and I one with them.
359 God's answer is some form of peace. All pain is healed; all misery
replaced with joy. All prison doors are opened. And all sin is understood
as merely a mistake.
>God's answer is some form of peace.
When I am not at peace, I am with the ego. I make the error real. I misuse
the Mind of God.
>All pain is healed; all misery replaced with joy.
Because pain and misery are equally forms of separation from God. With
God, joy is the only possible state.
>All prison doors are opened.
The musty, dark spaces of the mind are opened to the Great Rays. Let life
enter the abode of death.
>And all sin is understood as merely a mistake.
The Son of God gropes in the darkness in dusty clothes, with bleeding
feet, but this need not be! We can choose to return to the lush gardens
of our Father's House.
360 Peace be to me, the holy Son of God. Peace to my brother,
who is one with me. Let all the world be blessed with peace through us.
MT: As the year ends, we are called to extend peace. This is not a book
about religion or doctrine. It is a book about peace.
JC: Make no mistake. Without peace, you have nothing.
MT: We can march for peace, fast for peace, demonstrate for peace, but
what is needed is a change of mind.
JC: Today, here, now--who needs to be forgiven, and for what?
MT: Well, I still have a cough, so perhaps I'm attacking my body! And
I can't stop watching for deteriorating vision in my "bad" eye,
even as I know that the watching makes more of the problem I seek to solve.
JC: Do you believe you deserve to be well?
MT: Guess not, not yet. Somewhere in the cavernous depths of my mind echoes
a gloomy message: "better get holy fast! Time is running out!"
JC: Can you laugh at the idea of getting holy fast?
MT: To cram holiness for tomorrow's exam--yes, I can laugh at the very
idea.
JC: Peace is simple. It waits for welcome. Peace to you who are one with
me.
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