 We continue this morning with chapter 4, the rewards of God. The ego does not recognize the real source of threat, and if you associate yourself with the ego, you do not understand the situation as it is. Only your allegiance to it gives the ego any power over you. I have spoken of the ego as if it were a separate thing, acting on its own. This was necessary to persuade you that you cannot dismiss it lightly and must realize how much of your thinking is ego directed. We cannot safely let it go at that, however, or you will regard yourself as necessarily conflicted as long as you are here or as long as you believe that you are here. The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about yourself. Your other life has continued without interruption and has been and always will be totally unaffected by your attempts to dissociate it. In learning to escape from illusions, your debt to your brother is something you must never forget. It is the same debt that you owe to me. Whenever you act egotistically towards another, you are throwing away the graciousness of your indebtedness and the holy perception it would produce. The term holy can be used here because as you learn how much you are indebted to the whole Sonship, which includes me, you come as close to knowledge as perception can. The gap is then so small that knowledge can easily flow across it and obliterate it forever. You have very little trust in me as yet, but it will increase as you turn more and more often to me instead of to your ego for guidance. The results will convince you increasingly that this choice is the only sane one you can make. No one who learns from experience that one choice brings peace and joy while another brings chaos and disaster needs additional convincing. Learning through rewards is more effective than learning through pain because pain is an illusion and can never induce more than a temporary effect. The rewards of God, however, are immediately recognized as eternal. Since this recognition is made by you and not the ego, the recognition itself establishes that you and your ego cannot be identical. You may believe that you have already accepted this difference, but you are by no means convinced as yet. The fact that you believe you must escape from the ego shows this, but you cannot escape from the ego by humbling it or controlling it or punishing it. The ego and the spirit do not know each other. The separated mind cannot maintain the separation except by dissociating. Having done this, it denies all truly natural impulses, not because the ego is a separate thing, but because you want to believe that you are. The ego is a device for maintaining this belief, but it is still only your decision to use the device that enables it to endure. How can you teach someone the value of something he has deliberately thrown away? He must have thrown it away because he did not value it. You can only show him how miserable he is without it and slowly bring it nearer so he can learn how his misery lessens as he approaches it. This teaches him to associate his misery with its absence and the opposite of misery with its presence. It gradually becomes desirable as he changes his mind about its worth. I am teaching you to associate misery with the ego and joy with the spirit. You have taught yourself the opposite. You are still free to choose, but can you really want the rewards of the ego in the presence of the rewards of God? My trust in you is greater than yours in me at the moment, but it will not always be that way. Your mission is very simple. You are asked to live so as to demonstrate that you are not an ego and I do not choose God's channels wrongly. The Holy One shares my trust and accepts my atonement decisions because my will is never out of accord with His. I have said before that I am in charge of the atonement. This is only because I completed my part in it as a man and can now complete it through others. My chosen channels cannot fail because I will lend them my strength as long as theirs is wanting. I will go with you to the Holy One and through my perception he can bridge the little gap. Your gratitude to your brother is the only gift I want. I will bring it to God for you knowing that to know your brother is to know God. If you are grateful to your brother, you are grateful to God for what he created. Through your gratitude you come to know your brother and one moment of real recognition makes everyone your brother because each of them is of your father. Love does not conquer all things, but it does set all things right. Because you are the Kingdom of God, I can lead you back to your own creations. You do not recognize them now, but what has been dissociated is still there. As you come closer to a brother, you approach me and as you withdraw from him, I become distant to you. Salvation is a collaborative venture. It cannot be undertaken successfully by those who disengage themselves from the sonship because they are disengaging themselves from me. God will come to you only as you will give him to your brothers. Learn first of them and then you will be ready to hear God. That is because the function of love is one. And from the workbook, lesson number 28, Above All Else, I want to see things differently. Today we are really giving specific application to the idea for yesterday. In these practice periods, you will be making a series of definite commitments. The question of whether you will keep them in the future is not our concern here. If you are willing at least to make them now, you have started on the way to keeping them. And we are still at the beginning. You may wonder why it is important to say, for example, Above All Else, I want to see this table differently. In itself, it is not important at all. Yet what is by itself and what does in itself mean? You see a lot of separate things about you, which really means you are not seeing at all. You either see or not. When you have seen one thing differently, you will see all things differently. The light you will see in any one of them is the same light you will see in them all. When you say, Above All Else, I want to see this table differently, you are making a commitment to withdraw your preconceived ideas about the table and open your mind to what it is and what it is for. You are not defining it in past terms. You are asking what it is rather than telling it what it is. You are not binding its meaning to your tiny experience of tables. Nor are you limiting its purpose to your little personal thoughts. You will not question what you have already defined and the purpose of these exercises is to ask questions and receive the answers. In saying, Above All Else, I want to see this table differently, you are committing yourself to seeing. It is not an exclusive commitment. It is a commitment that applies to the table just as much to anything else, neither more nor less. You could, in fact, gain vision from just that table if you would withdraw all your own ideas from it and look upon it with a completely open mind. It has something to show you, something beautiful and clean and of infinite value, full of happiness and hope hidden under all your ideas about it is its real purpose, the purpose it shares with all the universe. In using the table as a subject for applying the idea for today, you are therefore really asking to see the purpose of the universe. You will be making the same request of each subject that you use in the practice periods and you are making a commitment to each of them to let its purpose be revealed to you instead of placing your own judgment upon it. We will have six two-minute practice periods today in which the idea for the day is stated first and then applied to whatever you see about you. Not only should the subjects be chosen randomly, but each one should be accorded equal sincerity as today's idea is applied to it in an attempt to acknowledge the equal value of them all in their contribution to your seeing. As usual, the applications should include the name of the subject your eyes happen to light on and you should rest your eyes on it while saying, above all else I want to see this blank differently. Each application should be made quite slowly and as thoughtfully as possible. There is no hurry. Listen 28, above all else I want to see things differently. So today we are making a commitment to vision, to the vision of Christ, to light, to true seeing, seeing in the mind, not with the body's eyes, which is not seeing at all. And today's lesson focuses on using a table, a table as an entryway into the Kingdom of Heaven within a table of a familiar object that is only familiar because of the past and if we are to open to Christ's vision to the I AM presence that's prior to time, the I AM-ness of before Abraham was I AM in order to sink into that experience within, we first must allow all definitions to disappear. It's as if we open our mind to what is this table, what is this table for and in silence we wait to have vision revealed to us, gain vision from this table by allowing all ideas to be removed, all ideas that were never there, ideas such as height and width, length, texture, substance, color and of course words. We let go of the word table, we let go of descriptions, we let go of all memory of tables, that the table is special because our purpose is to let go of all memories, all definitions and descriptors of everything. We open our mind to this profound idea, what if nothing exists in and of itself? What if there is no existence of objects? What if it's impossible to define an object because everything is whole, everything is complete, everything is one? What if we've been longing to behold forgiveness, unified perception, the quantum field instead of these misperceptions of objects, of a subject viewing objects different from the subject? We're praying for a fundamentally different way to see everything differently, not just a person, a place or a situation, but everything. Above all else, I want to see things differently. Everything, we feel clueless and cared for, we feel safe and undefined, we feel guided and directed and unresponsive to the images of the world, asking in our heart to be shown what truly is asking to see, really, really see. Today, that's our priority, wanting to see, to see things differently. And so we rest with this single pointed desire, above all else, I want to see things differently.