 We continue today with chapter 24, the meeting place. How bitterly does everyone tied to this world defend the specialness he wants to be the truth? His wish is law to him and he obeys. Nothing his specialist demands does he withhold. Nothing it needs does he deny to what he loves. And while it calls to him he hears no other voice. No effort is too great, no cost too much, no price too dear to save his specialness from the least slight, the tiniest attack, the whispered doubt, the hint of threat or anything but deepest reverence. This is your son, beloved of you, as you are to your father. Yet it stands in place of your creations who are son to you that you might share the fatherhood of God, not snatch it from him. What is this son that you have made to be your strength? What is this child of earth on whom such love is lavished? What is this parody of God's creation that takes the place of yours? And where are they now that the host of God has found another son in whom he prefers to them? The memory of God shines not alone. What is within your brother still contains all of creation, everything created and creating, born and unborn as yet, still in the future or apparently gone by. What is in him is changeless, and your changelessness is recognized in its acknowledgement. The holiness in you belongs to him, and by your seeing it in him returns to you. All of the tribute you have given specialness belongs to him and thus returns to you. All the love and care, the strong protection, the thought by day and night, the deep concern, the powerful conviction, this is you, belong to him. Nothing you gave to specialness but is his due, and nothing do him is not due to you. How can you know your worth while specialness claims you instead? How can you fail to know it in his holiness? Seek not to make your specialness the truth, for if it were you would be lost in deep. Be thankful whether it has given you to see his holiness because it is the truth. And what is true in him must be as true in you. Ask yourself this, can you protect the mind? The body, yes, a little, not from time but temporarily. And much you think you save, you hurt. What would you save it for? For in that choice lie both its health and harm. Save it for show as bait to catch another fish, to house your specialness in better style, or weave a frame of loveliness around your hate, and you condemn it to decay and death. And if you see this purpose in your brothers, such is your condemnation of your own. Weave rather than a frame of holiness around him that the truth may shine on him and give you safety from decay. The Father keeps what he created safe. You cannot touch it with the false ideas you made because it was created not by you, that not your foolish fancies frighten you. What is immortal cannot be attacked. What is but temporal has no effect. Only the purpose that you see in it has meaning. And if that is true, its safety rests secure. If not, it has no purpose and is means for nothing. Whatever is perceived as means for truth shares its holiness and rests in light as safely as itself. Nor will that light go out when it is gone. Its holy purpose gave it immortality, setting another light in heaven, where your creations recognize a gift from you, a sign that you have not forgotten them. The test of everything on earth is simply this. What is it for? The answer makes it what it is for you. It has no meaning of itself if you can give reality to it according to the purpose that you serve. Here you are but means along with it. God is a means as well as end. In heaven means an end or one and one with him. This is the state of true creation found not within time but in eternity. To no one here is this describable, nor is there any way to learn what this condition means. Not till you go past learning to the given, not till you make again a holy home for your creations, as it understood. A co-creator with the Father must have a son, yet must his son have been created like himself. A perfect being, all encompassing in all encompassed, nothing to add and nothing taken from, not born of size nor place nor time nor held to limits or uncertainties of any kind. Here do the means and the end unite as one, nor does this one have any end at all. All this is true and yet it has no meaning to anyone who still retains one unlearned lesson in his memory, one thought with purpose still uncertain, or one wish with a divided aim. This course makes no attempt to teach what cannot easily be learned. Its scope does not exceed your own except to say that what is yours will come to you when you are ready. Here are the means and the purpose separate because they were so made and so perceived, and therefore do we deal with them as if they were. It is essential it be kept in mind that all perception still is upside down until its purpose has been understood. Perception does not seem to be a means, and it is this that makes it hard to grasp the whole extent to which it must depend on what you see it for. Perception seems to teach you what you see, yet it but witnesses to what you taught. It is the outward picture of a wish, an image that you wanted to be true. Look at yourself and you will see a body. Look at this body in a different light and it looks different. And without a light it seems that it is gone. You are reassured that it is there because you still can feel it with your hands and hear it move. Here is an image that you want to be yourself. It is the means to make your wish come true. It gives the eyes with which you look on it, the hands that feel it, and the ears with which you listen to the sounds it makes. It proves its own reality to you. Thus is the body made a theory of yourself with no provisions made for evidence beyond itself and no escape within its sight. Its course is sure when seen through its own eyes. It grows and withers, flourishes and dies. And you cannot conceive of you apart from it. You brand it sinful and you hate its acts, judging it evil. Yet your specialist whispers, Here is my own beloved son in whom I am well pleased. Thus does the quote son become the means to serve his quote father's purpose. Not identical, not even like, but still a means to offer to the quote father what he wants. Such is the travesty on God's creation. For as his son's creation gave him joy and witness to his love and shared his purpose, so does the body testify to the idea that made it and speak for its reality and truth. Thus are two sons made and both appear to walk this earth without a meeting place and no encounter. One do you perceive outside yourself, your own beloved son, the other rest within his father's son, within your brother as he is in you. Their difference does not lie in how they look nor where they go nor even what they do. They have a different purpose. Is this that joins them to their like and separates each from all aspects with a different purpose. The son of God retains his father's will. The son of man perceives an alien will and wishes it were so. And thus does his perception serve his wish by giving it appearances of truth. Yet can perception serve another goal? It is not bound to specialness but by your choice. And it is given you to make a different choice and use perception for a different purpose. And what you see will serve that purpose well and prove its own reality to you. And from the workbook lesson 190, I choose the joy of God instead of pain. Pain is a wrong perspective. When it is experienced in any form, it is a proof of self-deception. It is not a fact at all. There is no form it takes that will not disappear if seen or right. For pain proclaims God cruel. How could it be real in any form? It witnesses to God the father's hatred of his son, the sinfulness he sees in him, and his insane desire for a rigid binge and death. Can such projections be attested to? Can they be anything but holy false? Pain is but witness to the son's mistakes and what he thinks he is. It is a dream of fierce retaliation for a crime that could not be committed for attack on what is wholly unassailable. It is a nightmare of abandonment by an eternal love which could not leave the son whom it created out of love. Pain is a sign illusions reign in place of truth. It demonstrates God is denied, confused with fear, perceived as mad and seen as traitor to himself. If God is real, there is no pain. If pain is real, there is no God. For vengeance is not part of love and fear denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead has shown that death is victor over life. The body is the son of God, corruptible in death, as mortal as the father, he has slain. Peace to such foolishness. The time has come to laugh at such insane ideas. There is no need to think of them as savage crimes or secret sins with weighty consequence. Who but a madman could conceive of them as cause of anything? Their witness, pain, is mad as they and no more to be feared than the insane illusions which it shields and tries to demonstrate must still be true. It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness. My holy brother, think of this a while. The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all. It merely represents your thoughts. And it will change entirely as you elect to change your mind and choose the joy of God as what you really want. Your self is radiant in this holy joy, unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable forever and ever. And would you deny a little corner of your mind its own inheritance and keep it as a hospital for pain, a sickly place where living things must come at last to die. The world may seem to cause you pain and yet the world as causeless has no power to cause. As an effect it cannot make effects. As an illusion it is what you wish. Your idle wishes represent its pains. Your strange desires bring it evil dreams. Your thoughts of death envelop it in fear while in your kind forgiveness does it live. Pain is the thought of evil taking form and working havoc on in your holy mind. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free. In pain is God denied the son he loves. In pain does fear appear to triumph over love and time replace eternity in heaven. And the world becomes a cruel and bitter place where sorrow rules and little joys give way before the onslaught of the salvation. Pain that waits to end all joy in misery. Lay down your arms and come without defense into the quiet place where heaven's peace holds all things still at last. Lay down all thoughts of danger and of fear. Let no attack enter with you. Lay down the cruel sword of judgment that you hold against your throat and put aside the withering assaults with which you seek to hide your holiness. Here will you understand there is no pain. Here does the joy of God belong to you. This is the day when it is given you to realize the lesson that contains all of salvation's power. It is this. Pain is illusion. Joy, reality. Pain is but sleep. Joy is awakening. Pain is deception. Joy alone is truth. And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made. We choose between illusions and the truth where pain and joy are hell and heaven. Let our gratitude unto our teacher fill our hearts as we are free to choose our joy instead of pain. Our holiness in place of sin, the peace of God instead of conflict, and the light of heaven for the darkness of the world. Amen.