 We continue today with chapter 21, the Responsibility for Sight. We have repeated how little is asked of you to learn this course. It is the same small willingness you need to have your whole relationship transformed to joy. The little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit, for which He gives you everything. The very little on which salvation rests. The tiny change of mind by which the crucifixion is changed to resurrection. And being true, it is so simple that it cannot fail to be completely understood. Rejected, yes, but not ambiguous. And if you choose against it now, it will not be because it is obscure, but rather that this little cost seemed in your judgment to be too much to pay for peace. This is the only thing that you need due for vision, happiness, released from pain and the complete escape from sin, all to be given you. Say only this, but mean it with no reservations, for here the power of salvation lies. I am responsible for what I see. I choose the feelings I experience and I decide upon the goal I would achieve and everything that seems to happen to me I ask for and receive as I have asked. Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done to you. Acknowledge but that you have been mistaken and all effects of your mistakes will disappear. It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events outside of him. It is impossible that happenings that come to him were not of his choice. His power of decision is the determiner of every situation in which he seems to find himself by chance or accident. No accident nor chance is possible within the universe as God created it outside of which is nothing. Suffer and you decided sin was your goal. Be happy and you gave the power of decision to him who must decide for God for you. This is the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit and even this he gives to you to give yourself. For by this gift is given you the power to release your Savior that he may give salvation unto you. Be grudged not then this little offering. Withhold it and you keep the world as you now see it. Give it away and everything you see goes with it. Never was so much given for so little. In the Holy Instant is this exchange affected and maintained. Here is the world you do not want brought to the one you do. And here the one you do is given you because you want it. Yet for this the power of your wanting must first be recognized. You must accept its strength and not its weakness. You must perceive that what is strong enough to make a world can let it go and can accept correction if it is willing to see that it was wrong. The world you see is but the idol witness that you were right. This witness is insane. You trained it in its testimony and as it gave it back to you you listened and convinced yourself that what it saw was true. You did this to yourself. See only this. And you will also see how circular the reasoning on which your quote seeing rests. This was not given you. This was your gift to you and to your brother. Be willing then to have it taken from him and be replaced with truth. As you look upon the change in him it will be given you to see it in yourself. Perhaps you do not see the need for you to give this little offering. Look closer then at what it is. And very simply see in it the whole exchange of separation for salvation. All that the ego is is an idea that it is possible that things should come to the Son of God without His will and thus without the will of His Creator whose will cannot be separate from His own. This is the Son of God's replacement for His will. A mad revolt against what must be forever true. This is the statement that He has the power to make God powerless and so to take it for Himself and leave Himself without what God has willed for Him. This is the mad idea you have enshrined upon your altars in which you worship. And everything that threatens this seems to attack your faith. For here it is infested. Think not that you are faithless. For your belief and trust in this is strong indeed. The Holy Spirit can give you faith and holiness and vision to see it easily enough. But you have not left open and unoccupied the altar where the gifts belong where they should be. You have set up your idols to something else. This other, quote, will, which seems to tell you what must happen, you give reality. And what would show you otherwise must therefore seem unreal. All that is asked of you is to make room for truth. You are not asked to make or do what lies beyond your understanding. All you are asked to do is let it in only to stop your interference with what will happen of itself. Simply to recognize again the presence of what you thought you gave away. Be willing for an instant to leave your altars free of what you placed upon them and what is really there you cannot fail to see. The Holy Instant is not an instant of creation but of recognition. For recognition comes a vision and suspended judgment. Then only is it possible to look within and see what must be there plainly in sight and wholly independent of interference and judgment. Undoing is not your task but it is up to you to welcome it or not. Faith and desire go hand in hand for everyone believes in what he wants. We have already said that wishful thinking is how the ego deals with what it wants to make it so. There is no better demonstration of the power of wanting and therefore of faith to make its goal seem real and possible. Faith in the unreal leads to adjustments of reality to make it fit the goal of madness. The goal of sin induces the perception of a fearful world to justify its purpose. What you desire you will see and if its reality is false you will uphold it by not realizing all the adjustments you have introduced to make it so. When vision is denied confusion of cause and effect becomes inevitable. The purpose now becomes to keep obscure the cause of the effect and make effect appear to be a cause. The seeming independence of effect enables it to be regarded as standing by itself and capable of serving as a cause of the events and feelings its maker thinks it causes. Earlier we spoke of your desire to create your own creator and be father and not son to him. This is the same desire the son is the effect whose cause he would deny and so he seems to be the cause producing real effects. Nothing can have effects without a cause and to confuse the two is merely to fail to understand them both. It is as needful that you recognize you made the world you see as that you recognize that you did not create yourself. They are the same mistake. Nothing created not by your creator has any influence over you and if you think what you have made can tell you what you see and feel and place your faith in this ability to do so you are denying your creator and believing that you made yourself. For if you think the world you made has power to make you what it wills you are confusing son and father effect and source. The son's creations are like his father's yet in creating them the son does not delude himself that he is independent of his source. His union with it is the source of his creating. Apart from this he has no power to create and what he makes is meaningless. It changes nothing in creation depends entirely upon the madness of its maker and cannot serve to justify the madness. Your brother thinks he made the world with you. Thus he denies creation with you. He thinks the world he made made him. Thus he denies he made it. Yet the truth is you were both created by a loving father who created you together and as one. See what quote proves otherwise and you deny your whole reality but grant that everything that seems to stand between you keeping you from each other and separate from your father you made in secret and the instant of release has come to you. All its effects are gone because its source has been uncovered. It is its seeming independence of its source that keeps you prisoner. This is the same mistake as thinking you are independent of the source by which you were created and have never left. And from the workbook lesson 167 there is one life and that I share with God. There are not different kinds of life for life is like the truth. It does not have degrees. It is the one condition in which all that God created share. Like all his thoughts it has no opposite. There is no death because what God created shares his life. There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. There is no death because the father and the son are one. In this world there appears to be a state that is life's opposite. You call it death. Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. It is the alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. All sorrow, loss, anxiety and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a slight discomfort or the nearest frown acknowledge death and thus deny you live. You think that death is of the body. Yet it is but an idea irrelevant to what is seen as physical. A thought is in the mind. It can be then applied as mind directs it. But its origin is where it must be changed if change occurs. Ideas leave not their source. The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. It is the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die. Its truth established you as one with God. Death is the thoughts that you are separate from your creator. It is the belief conditions change. Emotions alternate because of causes you cannot control. You did not make and you can never change. It is the fixed belief that ideas can leave their source and take on qualities the source does not contain becoming different from their own origin. Apart from it in kind as well as distance, time and form. Death cannot come from life. Ideas remain united to their source. They can extend all that their source contains. In that they can go far beyond themselves. But they cannot give birth to what was never given them. As they are made, so will they are making be. As they were born, so will they then give birth. And where they come from, there will they return. The mind can sink, it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what it is, it's waking state. It cannot make a body nor abide within a body. What is alien to the mind does not exist because it has no source. For mind creates all things that are and cannot give them attributes it lacks nor change its own eternal mindful state. It cannot make the physical. What seems to die is but the sign of mind asleep. The opposite of life can only be another form of life. As such it can be reconciled with what created it because it is not opposite in truth. Its form may change, it may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind, awake or sleeping. It is not its opposite in anything created nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps. God creates only mind awake, he does not sleep and his creations cannot share what he gives not nor make conditions which he does not share with them. The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind the thoughts of God remain forever changeless with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within themselves for they are everywhere. What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not and to assume an alien power which it does not have a foreign state it cannot enter or a false condition not within its source it merely seems to go to sleep awhile. It dreams of time, an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred. The changes wrought are substancesless and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes it but continues as it always was. Let us today be children of the truth and not deny our holy heritage. Our life is not as we imagine it. Who changes life because he shuts his eyes or makes himself what he is not because he sleeps and sees in dreams an opposite to what he is. We will not ask for death in any form today nor will we let imagined opposites to life abide even an instant where the thought of life eternal has been set by God himself. His holy home we strive to keep today as he established it and wills it be forever and ever. He is the Lord of what we think today and in his thoughts which have no opposite we understand there is one life and that we share with him with all creation with their thoughts as well whom he created in a unity of life that cannot separate in death and leave the source of life from where it came. We share one life because we have one source a source from which perfection comes to us remaining always in the holy minds which he created perfect. As we were so are we now and will forever be. A sleeping mind must waken as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there and now it is no more a mere reflection it becomes the thing reflected and the light which makes reflection possible no vision now is needed for the waken mind is one that knows its source itself its holiness Amen