 The emptiness engendered by fear should be replaced by love, because love and its absence are in the same dimension, and correction cannot be undertaken except within a dimension. Otherwise, there has been a confusion of levels. Death is a human affirmation of a belief in fate or level confusion. That is why the Bible says there is no death, and why I demonstrated that death does not exist. I came to fulfill the law by reinterpreting it. The law itself, if properly understood, offers only protection to man. It is those who have not yet changed their minds who entered the Hellfire concept into it. I assure you that I will witness for anyone who lets me, and to whatever extent they permit it. Your witnessing demonstrates your belief, and thus strengthens it. Those who witness for me are expressing through their miracles that they have abandoned the belief in deprivation in favor of the abundance they have learned belongs to them. A major contribution of miracles is their strength in releasing man from his misplaced sense of isolation, deprivation and lack. Miracles are affirmations of sonship, which is a state of completion and abundance. Whatever is true and real is eternal, and cannot change or be changed. The soul is therefore unalterable because it is already perfect, but the mind can elect the level it chooses to serve. The only limit which is put on its choice is that it cannot serve two masters. The mind, if it elects to do so, becomes a medium by which the soul creates along the line of its own creation. If it does not freely elect to do so, it retains its creative potential, but places itself under tyranny rather than genuinely authoritative control. As a result, it imprisons because such are the dictates of tyrants. To change your mind means to place it at the disposal of true authority. The miracle is thus a sign that the mind has chosen to be led by Christ in his service. The abundance of Christ is the natural result of choosing to follow Him. All shallow roots must be uprooted because they are not deep enough to sustain you. The illusion that shallow roots can be deepened and thus made to hold is one of the distortions on which the reversal of the golden rule rests. As these false underpinnings are given up, the equilibrium is temporarily experienced as unstable. However, the fact is that nothing is less stable than an orientation that is upside down. Nor can anything which holds it that way be really conducive to greater stability. Miracles arise from a miraculous state of mind. By being one, this state of mind goes out to anyone, even without the awareness of the miracle worker himself. The impersonal nature of miracles is because the Atonement itself is one, uniting all creation with their Creator. The miracle is an expression of an inner awareness of Christ and the acceptance of His Atonement. The mind is then in the state of grace and naturally becomes gracious both to the host within and the stranger without. By bringing in the stranger, he becomes your brother. A miracle is never lost. It touches many people you do not even know and sometimes produces undreamed of changes in forces of which you are not even aware. This is not your concern. The miracle will always bless you. The miracle you are not asked to perform have not lost their value. They are still expressions over your own state of grace. But the action aspect of the miracle should be Christ's control because of His complete awareness of the whole plan. The impersonal nature of miracle-mindedness ensures your grace, but only Christ is in a position to know where grace can be bestowed. Miracle-mindedness means miracle-readiness. Readiness means that you should always keep your perception straight so that you will always be ready, willing and able. These are the essentials for listen, learn and do. You must be ready to listen, willing to learn and able to do. Only the last is involuntary because it is the application of miracles which must be Christ-controlled. The other two, which are the voluntary aspects of miracle-mindedness, are up to you. All is an inappropriate response to miracles. Revelation is literally unspeakable because it is an experience of unspeakable love. All should be reserved for revelation to which it is perfectly and correctly applicable. It is not appropriate for miracles because a state of all is worshipful. It implies that one of a lesser order stands before a great one. This is the case only when a soul stands before its creator. Souls are perfect creations and experience awe only in the presence of the creator of perfection. The miracle, on the other hand, is the sign of love among equals. Equals cannot be in awe of one another because awe implies inequality. It is therefore an inappropriate reaction to me. An elder brother is entitled to respect for his greater experience and a reasonable amount of obedience for his greater wisdom. He is also entitled to love because he is a brother. And also to devotion if he is devoted. It is only my devotion that entitles me to yours. There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The main difference between us as yet is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state of true holiness which is only potential in you. No man cometh unto the Father but by me. It is among the most misunderstood statements in the Bible. It does not mean that I am in any way separate or different from you except in time which does not really exist at all. Actually the quotation is more meaningful if it is considered on a vertical rather than a horizontal axis. Regarded along the vertical, man stands below me and I stand below God. In the process of rising up I am higher. This is because without me the distance between God and man would be too great for you to encompass. I bridge the distance as a brother of man on one hand as the Son of God on the other. My devotion to my brothers has placed me in charge of the sonship which I can render complete only to the extent to which I can share it. This may appear to contradict the statement I and my Father are one but there are still separate parts in the statement in recognition that the Father is greater. The original statement was R of one kind. The Holy Spirit is the bringer of revelations. Revelations are indirectly inspired by me because I am close to the Holy Spirit and alert to the revelation readiness of my brothers. I can thus bring down to them more than they can draw down to themselves. The Holy Spirit is the highest communication medium. Miracles do not involve this type of communication because they are temporary communication devices. When man returns to his original form of communication with God the need for miracles is over. The Holy Spirit mediates higher to lower communication keeping the direct channel from God to man open for revelation. Revelation is not reciprocal it is always from God to man. The miracle is reciprocal because it involves equality. The miracle is a learning device which lessens the need for time. In the longitudinal or horizontal plane the recognition of the true equality of all the members of the sonship appears to involve almost endless time. However the sudden shifts from horizontal to vertical perception which the miracle entails. Introduces an interval from which the doer and the receiver both emerge much farther along in time than they would otherwise have been. The miracle thus has the unique property of shortening time by rendering the space of time it occupies unnecessary. There is no relationship between the time a miracle takes and the time it covers. It substitutes for learning that might have taken thousands of years. It does this by the underlying recognition of perfect equality and holiness between the doer and the receiver on which the miracle rests. He said before that the miracle abolishes time. It does this by a process of collapsing it and thus abolishing certain intervals within it. It does this however within the larger temporal sequence. It establishes an outer pattern time interval which is not under the usual laws of time. Only in this sense is it timeless. By collapsing time it literally saves time much as daylight saving time does. It rearranges the distribution of light. The miracle is the only device which man has at his immediate disposal for controlling time. Only revelation transcends time having nothing to do with time at all. The miracle is much like the body in that both are learning aids which aim at facilitating a state in which they are unnecessary. When the soul's original state of direct communication is reached, neither the body nor the miracle serves any purpose. While he believes he is in a body however, a man can choose between loveless and miraculous channels of expression. He can make an empty shell but he cannot express nothing at all. He can wait, delay, paralyze himself, reduce his creativity to almost nothing and even introduce a developmental arrest or even a regression. But he cannot abolish his creativity. He can destroy his medium of communication but not his potential. Man was not created by his own free will alone. Only what he creates is his to decide. The basic decision of the miracle-minded is not to wait on time any longer than is necessary. Time can waste as well as be wasted. The miracle worker therefore accepts the time control factor gladly because he recognizes that every collapse of time brings all men closer to the ultimate release from time in which the son and the father are one. Equality does not imply a homogeneity now. When everyone recognizes that he has everything, individual contributions to the sonship will no longer be necessary. When the Atonement has been completed, all talents will be shared by all the sons of God. God is not partial. All his children have his total love and all his gifts are freely given to everyone alike. Except he becomes little children means that unless you fully recognize your complete dependence on God you cannot know the real power of the son and his true relationship with the father. You who want peace can find it only by complete forgiveness. You never really wanted peace before so there was no point in being told how to achieve it. No learning is acquired by anyone unless he wants to learn it and believes in some way that he needs it. While the concept of lack does not exist in the creation of God, it is very apparent in the creations of man. It is in fact the essential difference. A need implies lack by definition. It involves a recognition that you would be better off in a state which is somehow different from the one you are in. Until the separation which is a better term than the fall, nothing was lacking. This meant that man had no needs at all. If he had not deprived himself, he would never have experienced them. After the separation, needs became the most powerful source of motivation for human action. All behavior is essentially motivated by needs, but behavior itself is not a divine attribute. The body is the mechanism for behavior. The belief that he could be better off is the reason why man has this mechanism at his disposal. Each one acts according to the particular hierarchy of needs he establishes for himself. His hierarchy in turn depends on his perception of what he is, that is what he lacks. A sense of separation from God is the only lack he really needs to correct. This sense of separation would never have occurred if he had not distorted his perception of truth and thus perceived himself as lacking. The concept of any sort of need hierarchy arose because, having made this fundamental error, he had already fragmented himself into levels with different needs. As he integrates, he becomes one and his needs become one accordingly. Unified need produces unified action because it produces a lack of ambivalence. The concept of a need hierarchy, a corollary to the original error that man can be separated from God, requires correction at its own level before the error of perceiving levels at all can be corrected. Man cannot behave effectively while he operates at split levels. However, while he does, correction must be introduced from the bottom up. This is because he now operates in space where concepts such as up and down are meaningful. Ultimately, space is as meaningless as time. The concept is really one of space-time belief. The physical world exists only because man can use it to correct his unbelief, which placed him in it originally. He can never control the effects of fear himself because he made fear and believes in what he made. In attitude then, though not in content, he resembles his own Creator, who has perfect faith in his creations because he created them. Belief in a creation produces its existence. That is why a man can believe in what no one else thinks is true. It is true for him because it was made by him. Every aspect of fear proceeds from upside down perception. The more truly creative devote their efforts to correcting perceptual distortions, the neurotic devotes his to compromise. The psychotic tries to escape by establishing the certain truth of his own errors. It is most difficult to free him by ordinary means because he is more consistent in his own denial of truth. The miracle, however, makes no such distinctions. It corrects errors because they are errors. Thus the next point to remember about miracles is, the miracle makes no distinction among degrees of misperception. It is a device for perception correction, effective quite apart from either the degree or the direction of the error. This is its true indiscriminate awareness. Christ's controlled miracles are selective only in the sense that they are directed towards those who can use them for themselves. Since this makes it inevitable that they will extend them to others, a strong chain of atonement is welded. However, Christ's control takes no account at all of the magnitude of the miracle itself because the concept of size exists in a plane that is itself unreal. Since the miracle aims at restoring the awareness of reality, it would hardly be useful if it were bound by the laws which govern the errors it aims to correct. Only man makes this kind of mistake. It is an example of the foolish consistency which his own false beliefs have engendered. The power and strength of man's creative will must be understood before the real meaning of denial can be appreciated and relinquished. It is not mere negation. It is a positive miscreation. While the miscreation is necessarily believed in by its maker, it does not exist at all at the level of true creation. The miracle compares what man has made with the higher level creation, accepting what is an accord as true and rejecting the discordant as false. All aspects of fear are untrue because they do not exist at the higher creative levels and therefore do not exist at all. To whatever extent a man is willing to submit his beliefs to this test, that extent are his perceptions corrected. Sorting out the false from the true, the miracle proceeds along the following lines. If perfect love casts out fear and if fear exists, then there is not perfect love. But only perfect love really exists. If there is fear, it creates a state which does not exist. Believe this and you will be free. Only God can establish this solution and this faith is his gift. Distortions of miracle impulses. You are involved in unconscious distortions which are producing a dense cover of miracle impulses and which make it hard for them to reach consciousness. The nature of any interpersonal relationship is limited or defined by what you wanted to do. Relating is a way of achieving an outcome. The danger of defences lies in the propensity for holding misperceptions rigidly in place. All actions which stem from reverse thinking are literally the behavioral expressions of those who know not what they do. A rigid orientation can be extremely reliable even if it is upside down. In fact, the more consistently upside down it is, the more reliable it is. However, validity is still the ultimate goal which reliability can only serve. Hostility, triumph, vengeance, self debasement and all kinds of expressions of lack of love are often very clearly seen in the fantasies which accompany them. But it is a profound error to imagine that because these fantasies are so frequent or occur so reliably that this implies validity. Remember that while validity implies reliability, the relationship is not reversible. You can be wholly reliable and entirely wrong. While a reliable instrument does measure something, what uses it unless you discover what the something is? This course then will concentrate on validity and let reliability fall naturally into place. The confusion of miracle impulses with physical impulses is a major source of perceptual distortion because it induces rather than straightens out the basic level confusion which underlies the perception of all those who seek happiness with the instruments of this world. Inappropriate physical impulses or misdirected miracle impulses result in conscious guilt if expressed and depression if denied. All real pleasure comes from doing God's will. This is because not doing it is a denial of self. Denial of error results in projection. Correction of error brings release. Lead us not into temptation means do not let us deceive ourselves into believing that we can relate in peace to God or to our brothers with anything external. Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful and the holy. Do not lose sight of this. The love of God for a little while must still be expressed through one body to another because a real vision is still so dim. Everyone can use his body best by enlarging man's perception so he can seal the real vision. This vision is invisible to the physical eye. The ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary. Learning to do this is the only real reason for its creation.