 We continue today with chapter 24, the goal of specialness introduction. Forget not that the motivation for this course is the attainment and the keeping of the state of peace. Given this state, the mind is quiet and the condition in which God is remembered is attained. It is not necessary to tell him what to do. He will not fail. Where he can enter, there he is already. And can it be, he cannot enter where he wills to be. Peace will be yours because it is his will. Can you believe a shadow can hold back the will that holds the universe secure? God does not wait upon illusions to let him be himself. No more his son. They are. And what illusion that idly seems to drift between them has the power to defeat what is their will. To learn this course requires willingness to question every value that you hold. Not one can be kept hidden and obscure, but it will jeopardize your learning. No belief is neutral. Everyone has the power to dictate each decision you make. For a decision is a conclusion based on everything that you believe. It is the outcome of belief and follows it as surely as does suffering follow guilt and freedom, sinlessness. There is no substitute for peace. What God creates has no alternative. The truth arises from what he knows. And your decisions come from your beliefs as certainly as all creation rose in his mind because of what he knows. Specialness as a substitute for love. Love is extension to withhold the smallest gift is not to know love's purpose. Love offers everything forever. Hold back one belief, one offering, and love is gone. Because you asked the substitute to take its place. And now must war, the substitute for peace, come with the one alternative that you can choose for love. Your choosing it has given it all the reality it seems to have. Beliefs will never openly attack each other because conflicting outcomes are impossible. But an unrecognized belief is a decision to war in secret where the results of conflict are kept unknown and never brought to reason to be considered sensible or not. And many senseless outcomes have been reached and meaningless decisions have been made and kept hidden to become beliefs now given power to direct all subsequent decisions. Mistake you not the power of these hidden warriors to disrupt your peace. For it is at their mercy while you decide to leave it here. The secret enemies of peace, your least decision to choose attack instead of love, unrecognized and swift to challenge you to combat and to violence far more or far more inclusive than you think, are there by your election. Do not deny their presence nor their terrible results. All that can be denied is their reality but not their outcome. All that is ever cherished as a hidden belief to be defended though unrecognized is faith in specialness. This takes many forms but always clashes with the reality of God's creation and with the grandeur that he gave his son. What else could justify attack? For who could hate someone whose self is his and whom he knows? Only the special could have enemies for they are different and not the same. And difference of any kind imposes orders of reality and a need to judge that cannot be escaped. What God created cannot be attacked for there is nothing in the universe unlike itself. But what is different calls for judgment and this must come from someone quote better. Someone incapable of being like what he condemns quote above it sinless by comparison with it. And thus the specialness become a means and an end at once. For specialness not only sets apart but serves as grounds from which attack on those who seem quote beneath the special one is quote natural and quote just. The special ones feel weak and frail because of differences for what would make them special is their enemy. Yet they protect its enmity and call it quote friend. On its behalf they fight against the universe for nothing in the world they value more. Specialness is the great dictator of the wrong decisions. Here is the grand illusion of what you are and what your brother is. And here is what must make the body dear and worth preserving. Specialness must be defended illusions can attack it and they do for what your brother must become to keep your specialness is an illusion. He who is quote worse than you must be attacked so that your specialness can live on his defeat. For specialness is triumph and its victory is his defeat and shame. How can he live with all your sins upon him and who must be his conqueror but you? Would it be possible for you to hate your brother if you were like him? Could you attack him if you realized you journey with him to a goal that is the same? Would you not help him reach it in every way you could if his attainment of it were perceived as yours? You are his enemy and specialness his friend in a shared purpose. Specialness can never share for it depends on goals that you alone can reach and he must never reach them or your goal is jeopardized. Can love have meaning where the goal is triumph and what decision can be made for this that will not hurt you? Your brother is your friend because his father created him like you. There is no difference. You have been given to your brother that love might be extended not cut off from him. What you keep is lost to you. God gave you and your brother himself and to remember this is how and now the only purpose that you share and so it is the only one you have. Could you attack your brother if you chose to see no specialness of any kind between you and him? Look fairly at whatever makes you give your brother only partial welcome or would let you think that you are better off apart. Is it not always your belief your specialness is limited by your relationship? And is not this the quote enemy that makes you and your brother illusions to each other? The fear of God and of your brother comes from each unrecognized belief in specialness. For you demand your brother bow to it against his will and God himself must honor it or suffer vengeance. Every twinge of malice or stab of hate or wish to separate arises here. For here the purpose that you and your brother share becomes obscured from both of you. You would oppose this course because it teaches you and your brother are alike. You have no purpose that is not the same and none your father does not share with you. For your relationship has been made clean of special goals and would you now defeat the goal of holiness that heaven gave it? What perspective can the special have that does not change with every seeming blow, each slight or fancy judgment on itself? Those who are special must defend illusions against the truth for what is specialness but an attack upon the will of God? You love your brother not while it is this you would defend against him. This is what he attacks and you protect. Here is the ground of battle which you wage against him. Here must he be your enemy and not your friend. Never can there be peace among the different. He is your friend because you are the same. And from the workbook lesson 184, the name of God is my inheritance. You live by symbols. You have made up names for everything you see. Each one becomes a separate entity identified by its own name. By this you carve it out of unity. By this you designate its special attributes and set it off from other things by emphasizing space surrounding it. This space you lay between all things to which you give a different name. All happenings in terms of place and time. All bodies which are greeted by a name. This space you see is setting off all things from one another is the means by which the world's perception is achieved. You see something where there is nothing and see as well nothing where there is unity. A space between all things, between all things in you. Thus do you think that you have given life in separation. By this split you think you are established as a unity which functions with an independent will. What are these names by which the world becomes a series of discreet events of things ununified, of bodies kept apart and holding bits of mind as separate awarenesses? You gave these names to them establishing perception as you wished to have perception be. The nameless things were given names and thus reality was given them as well for what is named is given meaning and will then be seen as meaningful a cause of true effect with consequence inherent in itself. This is the way reality is made by partial vision purposefully set against the given truth. Its enemy is wholeness. It conceives of little things and looks upon them and the lack of space a sense of unity or vision that sees differently become the threats which it must overcome, conflict with and deny. Yet does this other vision still remain a natural direction for the mind to channel its perception? It is hard to teach the mind a thousand alien names and thousands more. Yet you believe this is what learning means. It's one essential goal by which communication is achieved and concepts can be meaningfully shared. This is the sum of the inheritance the world bestows and everyone who learns to think that it is so accepts the signs and symbols that assert the world is real. It is for this they stand. They leave no doubt that what is named is there. It can be seen as it is anticipated. What denies that it is true is by delusion for it is the ultimate reality. To question it is madness to accept its presence is the proof of sanity. Such is the teaching of the world. It is the phase of learning everyone who comes must go through. But the sooner he perceives on what it rests, how questionable are its premises, how doubtful its results, the sooner does he question its effects. Learning that stops with what the world would teach stops short of meaning. In its proper place it serves but as a starting point from which another kind of learning can begin. A new perception can be gained and all the arbitrary names the world bestows can be withdrawn as they are raised to doubt. Think not you made the world. Illusions yes but what is true in earth and heaven is beyond your naming. When you call upon a brother it is to his body that you make appeal. His true identity is hidden from you by what you believe he really is. His body makes response to what you call him for his mind consents to take the name you give him as his own. And thus his unity is twice denied for you perceive him separate from you as he accepts this separate name as his. It would indeed be strange if you were asked to go beyond all symbols of the world for getting them forever. Yet we're asked to take a teaching function. You have need to use the symbols of the world a while but be you not deceived by them as well. They do not stand for anything at all and in your practicing it is this thought that will release you from them. They become but means by which you can communicate in ways the world can understand but which you recognize is not the unity where true communication can be found. Thus what you need are intervals each day in which the learning of the world becomes a transitory phase a prison house from which you go into the sunlight and forget the darkness. Here you understand the word the name which God has given you the one identity which all things share the one acknowledgement of what is true and then step back to darkness not because you think it real but only to proclaim its unreality in terms which still have meaning in the world that darkness rules. Use all the little names and symbols which delineate the world of darkness yet accept them not as your reality. The Holy Spirit uses all of them but he does not forget creation has one name one meaning and a single source which unifies all things within itself. Use all the names the world bestows on them but for convenience yet do not forget they share the name of God along with you. God has no name and yet his name becomes the final lesson that all things are one and at this lesson does all learning end. All names are unified all space is filled with truth reflection every gap is closed and separation healed. The name of God is the inheritance he gave to those who chose the teaching of the world to take the place of heaven. In our practicing our purpose is to let our minds accept what God has given as the answer to the pitiful inheritance you made as a fitting tribute to the Son he loves. No one can fail who seeks the meaning of the name of God experience must come to supplement the word but first you must accept the name for all reality and realize the many names you gave its aspects have distorted what you see but have not interfered with truth at all. One name we bring into our practicing one name we use to unify our sight and through and though we use a different name for each awareness of an aspect of God's Son we understand that they have but one name which he has given them it is this name we use in practicing and through its use all foolish separations disappear which kept us blind and we are given strength to see beyond them now our sight is blessed with blessings we can give as we receive Father our name is yours in it we are united with all living things and you who are their one creator what we made and called by many different names is but a shadow we have tried to cast across your own reality and we are glad and thankful we were wrong all our mistakes we give to you that we may be absolved from all effects our errors seem to have and we accept the truth you give in place of every one of them your name is our salvation and escape from what we made your name unites us in the oneness which is our inheritance and peace amen