 We continue on today with Chapter 3 Error and the Ego The abilities you now possess are only shadows of your real strength. All of your present functions are divided and open to question and doubt. This is because you are not certain how you will use them and are therefore incapable of knowledge. You are also incapable of knowledge because you can still perceive lovelessly. Perception did not exist until a separation introduced degrees, aspects, and intervals. Spirit has no levels and all conflict arises from the concept of levels. Only the levels of the Trinity are capable of unity. The levels created by the separation cannot but conflict. They are meaningless to each other. Consciousness, the level of perception, was the first split introduced into the mind after the separation, making the mind a perceiver rather than a creator. Consciousness is correctly identified as the domain of the ego. The ego is a wrong-minded attempt to perceive yourself as you wish to be rather than as you are. Yet you can know yourself only as you are because that is all you can be sure of. Everything else is open to question. The ego is the questioning aspect of the post-separation self, which was made rather than created. It is capable of asking questions but not of perceiving meaningful answers, because these would involve knowledge and cannot be perceived. The mind is therefore confused because only one-mindedness can be without confusion. A separated or divided mind must be confused. It is necessarily uncertain about what it is. It has to be in conflict because it is out of accord with itself. This makes its aspects stranger to each other, and this is the essence of the fear-prone condition in which attack is always possible. You have every reason to feel afraid as you perceive yourself. This is why you cannot escape from fear until you realize that you did not and could not create yourself. You can never make your misperceptions true, and your creation is beyond your own error. That is why you must eventually choose to heal the separation. Right-mindedness is not to be confused with the knowing mind because it is applicable only to right perception. You can be right-minded or wrong-minded, and even this is subject to degrees, clearly demonstrating that knowledge is not involved. The term right-mindedness is properly used as the correction for wrong-mindedness and applies to the state of mind that induces accurate perception. It is miracle-minded because it heals misperception, and this is indeed a miracle in view of how you perceive yourself. Perception always involves some misuse of mind because it brings the mind into areas of uncertainty. The mind is very active. When it chooses to be separate, it chooses to perceive. Until then, it wills only to know. Afterwards, it can only choose ambiguously, and the only way out of ambiguity is clear perception. The mind returns to its proper function only when it wills to know. This places it in the service of spirit because it is from spirit that it derives its whole power to make or create. Even in miscreation, the mind is affirming its source, or it would merely cease to be. This is impossible because the mind belongs to spirit which God created and which is therefore eternal. The ability to perceive made the body possible because you must perceive something and with something. That is why perception involves an exchange or a translation, which knowledge does not need. The interpretive function of perception, a distorted form of creation, then permits you to interpret the body as yourself in an attempt to escape from the conflict you have induced. Spirit, which knows, could not be reconciled with the loss of power because it is incapable of darkness. This makes spirit almost inaccessible to the mind and entirely inaccessible to the body. Thereafter, spirit is perceived as a threat because light abolishes darkness merely by showing you it is not there. Truth will always overcome error in this way. This cannot be an active process of correction because, as I have already emphasized, knowledge does not do anything. It can be perceived as an attacker, but it cannot attack. What you perceive as its attack is your own vague recognition that knowledge can always be remembered, never having been destroyed. God and his creations remain in shirty and therefore know that no miscreation exists. Truth cannot deal with errors that you want. I was a man who remembered spirit and its knowledge. As a man I did not attempt to counteract error with knowledge, but to correct error from the bottom up. I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body and the power of the mind. By uniting my will with that of my creator, I naturally remembered spirit and its real purpose. I cannot unite your will with God's for you, but I can erase all misperceptions from your mind if you will bring it under my guidance. Only your misperceptions stand in your way. Without them, your choice is certain. Same perception induces same choosing. I cannot choose for you, but I can help you make your own right choice. Many are called but few are chosen, should be, all are called, but few choose to listen. Therefore they do not choose right. The quote chosen ones are merely those who chose right sooner. Right minds can do this now, and they will find rest unto their souls. God knows you only in peace, and this is your reality. And from the workbook, lesson number 19, I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts. The idea for today is obviously the reason why your seeing does not affect you alone. You will notice that at times the ideas related to thinking precede those related to perceiving, while at other times the order is reversed. The reason is that the order does not matter. Thinking and its results are really simultaneous, for cause and effect are never separate. Today we are again emphasizing the fact that minds are joined. This is rarely a holy welcome idea at first, since it seems to carry with it an enormous sense of responsibility, and may even be regarded as an, quote, invasion of privacy. Yet it is a fact that there are no private thoughts. Despite your initial resistance to this idea, you will yet understand that it must be true if salvation is possible at all. And salvation must be possible because it is the will of God. The minute or so of mind searching, which today's exercises require, is to be undertaken with eyes closed. The idea for today is to be repeated first, and then the mind should be carefully searched for the thoughts it contains at that time. As you consider each one, name it in terms of the central person or theme it contains, and holding it in your mind, as you do so say, I am not alone in experiencing the effects of this thought about, like, the requirement of as much indiscriminateness as possible in selecting subjects for the practice periods should be quite familiar to you by now. It will no longer be repeated each day, although it will occasionally be included as a reminder. Do not forget, however, that random selection of subjects for all practice periods remains essential throughout. Lack of order in this connection will ultimately make the recognition of lack of order in miracles meaningful to you. Apart from the, quote, as needed application of today's idea, at least three practice periods are required. Shortening the length of time involved, if necessary. Do not attempt more than four. I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts. So as we sit quietly to receive and experience the lesson today, we are first reminded that the order of thoughts presented in these lessons does not matter. It does not matter whether we think that thinking precedes perceiving or perceiving precedes thinking. They are simultaneous. Thinking and its results are simultaneous. Cause and effect are never separate. This is what contemporary quantum physicists called the quantum field. Everything is simultaneous. Everything is connected. Thinking and its results are really simultaneous. Cause and effect are never separate. And this is followed up by a very powerful sentence and we have to open ourselves to the certainty of this idea. Jesus tells us, yet it is a fact that there are no private thoughts. There are no private thoughts. Nothing can be kept hidden. Nothing can be a secret. Nothing can truly be pushed out of awareness. In truth, it has been a game, a pretense, a ruse to think that there could be private minds with private thoughts. The very basis of the human condition are private minds with private thoughts, private bodies, private parts. Humans seem to have a value of privacy, a value of autonomy, a value of independence. It is said that these things make the human being and that's a good word, make. These unreal concepts and ideas make or generate a fiction of the human race, a fiction of individuality, a fiction of separateness. As if each person goes their own way, leads their own life, walking apart only to meet at certain times. So today we would see the folly of individuality, the folly of personality, the folly of attempting to exert a will apart from God. Because God wills for us perfect happiness and this sense of private minds and private thoughts has never brought us joy or happiness, peace, contentment. This belief in separation has just brought a sense of being lost, of wandering lost in time and space. I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts. This is showing me that everything that I perceive, everything in the entire cosmos without exception are just thoughts, everything. And it opens up the crack, the possibility that I could go beyond these meaningless thoughts, meaningless images, meaningless perceptions and sink deep, deep inward into a stillness so deep, so restful, so godlike that I will be able to remember this stillness, this peace is my essence, this is reality. So in deep, deep sincerity we practice today, I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.