 We continue on today with chapter 10. The end of sickness. All magic is an attempt at reconciling the irreconcilable. All religion is the recognition that the irreconcilable cannot be reconciled. Sickness and perfection are irreconcilable. If God created you perfect, you are perfect. If you believe you can be sick, you have placed other gods before Him. God is not at war with the God of sickness you made, but you are. He is the symbol of deciding against God, and you are afraid of Him because He cannot be reconciled with God's will. If you attack Him, you will make Him real to you. But if you refuse to worship Him in whatever form He may appear to you wherever you think you see Him, He will disappear into the nothingness out of which He was made. Reality can dawn only on an unclouded mind. It is always there to be accepted, but its acceptance depends on your willingness to have it. To know reality must involve the willingness to judge unreality for what it is. To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly because of your ability to evaluate it truly to let it go. Knowledge cannot dawn on a mind full of illusions because truth and illusions are irreconcilable. Truth is whole and cannot be known by part of a mind. The sonship cannot be perceived as partly sick because to perceive it that way is not to perceive it at all. If the sonship is one, it is one in all respects. Oneness cannot be divided. If you perceive other gods, your mind is split, and you will not be able to limit the split because it is the sign that you have removed part of your mind from God's will. This means it is out of control. To be out of control is to be out of reason, and then the mind does become unreasonable. By defining the mind wrongly, you perceive it as functioning wrongly. God's laws will keep your mind at peace because peace is His will, and His laws are established to uphold it. His laws are the laws of freedom, but yours are the laws of bondage. Since freedom and bondage are irreconcilable, their laws cannot be understood together. The laws of God work only for your good, and there are no other laws besides His. Everything else is merely lawless, and therefore chaotic. Yet God Himself has protected everything He created by His laws. Everything that is not under them does not exist. Laws of chaos is a meaningless term. Creation is perfectly lawful, and the chaotic is without meaning because it is without God. You have given your peace to the Gods you made, but they are not there to take it from you, and you cannot give it to them. You are not free to give up freedom, but only to deny it. You cannot do what God did not intend because what He did not intend does not happen. Your Gods do not bring chaos. You are endowing them with chaos and accepting it of them. All this has never been. Nothing but the laws of God has ever been, and nothing but His will will ever be. You were created through His laws and by His will, and the manner of your creation established you, a Creator. What you have made is so unworthy of you that you could hardly want it. If you are willing to see it as it is, you will see nothing at all, and your vision will automatically look beyond it to what is in you and all around you. Reality cannot break through the obstructions you interpose, but it will envelop you completely when you let them go. When you have experienced the protection of God, the making of idols becomes inconceivable. There are no strange images in the mind of God, and what is not in His mind cannot be in yours because you are of one mind and that mind belongs to Him. It is yours because it belongs to Him, for to Him ownership is sharing, and if it is so for Him, it is so for you. His definitions are His laws, for by them He established the universe as what it is. No false gods you attempt to interpose between yourself and your reality affect truth at all. Peace is yours because God created you and He created nothing else. The miracle is the act of a Son of God who has laid aside all false gods and calls on His brothers to do likewise. It is an act of faith because it is the recognition that His brother can do it. It is a call to the Holy Spirit in his mind, a call that is strengthened by joining. Because the miracle worker has heard God's voice, he strengthens it in a sick brother by weakening his belief in sickness, which he does not share. The power of one mind can shine into another because all the lamps of God were lit by the same spark. It is everywhere, and it is eternal. In many, only the spark remains, for the great rays are obscured. Yet God has kept the spark alive so that the rays can never be completely forgotten. If you but see the little spark, you will learn of the greater light. For the rays are there unseen. Perceiving the spark will heal, but knowing the light will create. Yet in the returning, the little light must be acknowledged first, for the separation was a descent from magnitude to littleness. But the spark is still as pure as the great light because it is the remaining call of creation. Put all your faith in it, and God himself will answer you. And from the workbook, lesson 76, I am under no laws but God's. We have observed before how many senseless things seem to you to be salvation. Each has imprisoned you with laws as senseless as itself. You are not bound by them. Yet to understand that this is so, you must first realize salvation lies not there. While you would seek for it in things that have no meaning, you bind yourself to laws that make no sense. Thus do you seek to prove salvation is where it is not. Today we will be glad you cannot prove it. For if you could, you would forever seek salvation where it is not, and never find it. The idea for today tells you once again how simple is salvation. Look for it where it waits for you, and there it will be found. Look nowhere else, for it is nowhere else. Think of the freedom and the recognition that you are not bound by all the strange and twisted laws you have set up to save you. You really think that you would starve unless you have stacks of green paper strips and piles of metal discs. You really think a small round pellet or some fluid pushed into your veins through a sharpened needle will ward off disease and death. You really think that you are alone unless another body is with you. It is insanity that thinks these things. You call them laws and put them under different names in a long catalog of rituals that have no use and serve no purpose. You think you must obey the laws of medicine, of economics, and of health. Protect the body and you will be saved. These are not laws, but madness. The body is endangered by the mind that hurts itself. The body suffers just in order that the mind will fail to see it is the victim of itself. The body's suffering is a mask the mind holds up to hide what really suffers. It would not understand it is its own enemy that it attacks itself and wants to die. It is from this your quote laws would save the body. It is for this you think you are a body. There are no laws except the laws of God. This needs repeating over and over until you realize it applies to everything that you have made in opposition to God's will. Your magic has no meaning. What is it meant to save does not exist. Only what it is meant to hide will save you. The laws of God can never be replaced. We will devote today to rejoicing that this is so. It is no longer a truth we would hide. We realize instead it is a truth that keeps us free forever. Magic imprisons, but the laws of God make free. The light has come because there are no laws but His. We will begin the longer practice periods today with a short review of the different kinds of laws we have believed we must obey. These would include, for example, the laws of nutrition, of immunization, of medication, and of the body's protection in innumerable ways. Think further. You believe in the laws of friendship, of good relationships, and reciprocity. Perhaps you even think that there are laws which set forth what is God's and what is yours. Many religions have been based on this. They would not save but damn in Heaven's name. Yet they are no more strange than other laws you hold must be obeyed to make you safe. There are no laws but God's. Dismiss all foolish, magical beliefs today and hold your mind in silent readiness to hear the voice that speaks the truth to you. You will be listening to one who says there is no loss under the laws of God. Payment is neither given nor received. Exchange cannot be made. There are no substitutes, and nothing is replaced by something else. God's laws forever give and never take. Hear him who tells you this and realize how foolish are the laws you thought upheld the world you thought you saw. Then listen further. He will tell you more about the love your Father has for you, about the endless joy he offers you, about his yearning for his only Son, created as his channel for creation, denied to him by his belief in hell. Let us today open God's channels to him and let his will extend through us to him. Thus his creation endlessly increased. His voice will speak of this to us as well as of the joys of heaven which his laws keep limitless forever. We will repeat today's idea until we have listened and understood there are no laws but God's. Then we will tell ourselves as a dedication with which the practice period concludes, I am under no laws but God's. We will repeat this dedication as often as possible today, at least four or five times an hour, as well as in response to any temptation to experience ourselves as subject to other laws throughout the day. It is our statement of freedom from all danger and all tyranny. It is our acknowledgement that God is our Father and that his Son is saved. I am under no laws but God's. So, both the text and the workbook today focus on God's laws. Contrast God's laws with the magic of the world, of the belief in external laws. We are assured that our safety, our security, our peace, our happiness, our joy, our very identity is part of the laws of God. And when the mind is given over to ego beliefs, beliefs in other laws, beliefs that there is something other than the love that God created, then the mind feels guilt and sleeps. Today we are assured that there are no laws but the laws of God. In the text, Jesus reminded us, God's laws will keep your mind at peace because peace is his will and his laws are established to uphold it. His are the laws of freedom but yours are the laws of bondage. Since freedom and bondage are irreconcilable, their laws cannot be understood together. The laws of God work for your good, only for your good. And there are no other laws besides his. Everything else is merely lawless and therefore chaotic. And then in the workbook, lesson 76, Jesus gets very, very specific about this lawlessness of the ego. Laws that aren't really laws at all. He's pointing out the senselessness of these make-believe laws and telling us that you are not bound by them. How are these illusory laws upheld? By searching for salvation outside the mind. Searching for salvation in form. Jesus tells us, while you would seek for it in things that have no meaning, you bind yourself to laws that make no sense. Thus do you seek to prove salvation is where it is not. What I find most helpful about this workbook lesson is the specificity, the specific application of the idea for today under no laws but God's. Jesus pokes fun at these illusory laws, these make-believe laws, these fantasy laws. He says you really think that you would starve unless you have stacks of green paper strips and piles of metal discs poking fun at the system of money, at the need for economics for survival. Then he shifts to medicine, saying you really think a small round pellet or some fluid pushed into your veins through a sharpened needle will ward off disease and death. He talks about relationship laws, companionship. He says you really think you are alone unless another body is with you. What is the commonality to all these senseless laws that the ego made? It is insanity that thinks these things. You call them laws and put them under different names and a long catalog of rituals that have no use and serve no purpose. He gives more names to them. Laws of medicine, of economics, of health. These are not laws but madness. The body is endangered by the mind that hurts itself. The error is in the mind. The error is distorted perception. Distorted perception is the problem. The body and the world of images is not the problem. Fragmented distorted perception is the problem. A mind that believes that it can attack itself and attack God is the problem. And the solution, the correction, the atonement is stated this way. There are no laws except the laws of God. This needs repeating over and over until you realize it applies to everything that you have made in opposition to God's will. Today, we rejoice that these laws cannot be true. We realize that it is the truth that keeps us free forever. While it is magic that imprisons, the laws of God make free, forever free. The light has come because there are no laws but His is under no laws.