 We continue now with Chapter 3, Beyond Perception. I have said that abilities you possess are only shadows of your real strength and that perception, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the separation. No one has been sure of anything since. I have also made it clear that the resurrection was the means for the return to knowledge, which was accomplished by the union of my will with the Fathers. We can now establish a distinction that will clarify some of your subsequent statements. Since the separation, the words create and make have become confused. When you make something, you do so out of a specific sense of lack or need. Anything made for a specific purpose has no true generalizability. When you make something to fill a perceived lack, you are tacitly implying that you believe in separation. The ego has invented many ingenious thought systems for this purpose. None of them is creative. Inventiveness is wasted effort, even in its most ingenious form. The highly specific nature of invention is not worthy of the abstract creativity of God's creations. Knowing, as we have already observed, does not lead to doing. The confusion between your real creation and what you have made of yourself is so profound that it has become literally impossible for you to know anything. Knowledge is always stable and it is quite evident that you are not. Nevertheless, you are perfectly stable as God created you. In this sense, when your behavior is unstable, you are disagreeing with God's idea of your creation. You can do this if you choose, but you would hardly want to do it if you were in your right mind. The fundamental question you continually ask yourself cannot properly be directed to you yourself at all. You keep asking what it is you are. This implies that the answer is not only one you know, but is also one that is up to you to supply. Yet you cannot perceive yourself correctly. You have no image to be perceived. The word image is always perception related and not a part of knowledge. Images are symbolic and stand for something else. The idea of changing your image recognizes the power of perception, but also implies that there is nothing stable to know. Knowing is not open to interpretation. You may try to interpret meaning, but this is always open to error because it refers to the perception of meaning. Such incongruities are not the result of attempts to regard yourself as separated and unseparated at the same time. It is impossible to make so fundamental a confusion without increasing your overall confusion still further. Your mind may have become very ingenious, but as always happens when method and content are separated, it is utilized in a futile attempt to escape from an inescapable impasse. Ingenuity is totally divorced from knowledge because knowledge does not require ingenuity. Ingenious thinking is not the truth that shall set you free, but you are free of the need to engage in it when you are willing to let it go. Prayer is a way of asking for something. It is the medium of miracles, but the only meaningful prayer is for forgiveness because those who have been forgiven have everything. Once forgiveness has been accepted, prayer in the usual sense becomes utterly meaningless. The prayer for forgiveness is nothing more than a request that you may be able to recognize what you already have. In electing perception instead of knowledge, you placed yourself in a position where you could resemble your father only by perceiving miraculously. You have lost the knowledge that you yourself are a miracle of God. Creation is your source and your only real function. The statement God created man in his own image and likeness needs reinterpretation. Image can be understood as thought and likeness as of a like quality. God did create spirit in his own thought and of a like quality to his own. There is nothing else. Perception, on the other hand, is impossible without a belief in more and less. At every level, it involves selectivity. Perception is a continual process of accepting and rejecting, organizing and reorganizing, shifting and changing. Evaluation is an essential part of perception because judgments are necessary in order to select. What happens to perceptions if there are no judgments and nothing but perfect equality? Perception becomes impossible. Truth can only be known. All of it is equally true and knowing any part of it is to know all of it. Only perception involves partial awareness. Knowledge transcends the law's governing perception because partial knowledge is impossible. It is all one and has no separate parts. You who are really one with it need but know yourself and your knowledge is complete. To know God's miracle is to know him. Forgiveness is the healing of the perception of separation. Correct perception of your brother is necessary because minds have chosen to see themselves as separate. Spirit knows God completely. That is its miraculous power. The fact that each one has this power completely is a condition entirely alien to the world's thinking. The world believes that if anyone has everything, there is nothing left. But God's miracles are as total as his thoughts because they are his thoughts. As long as perception lasts, prayer has a place. Since perception rests on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the atonement and given themselves over to truth. Perception is based on a separated state so that anyone who perceives it all needs healing. Communion, not prayer, is the natural state of those who know. God and his miracle are inseparable. How beautiful indeed are the thoughts of God who live in his light. Your worth is beyond perception because it is beyond doubt. Do not perceive yourself in different lights. Know yourself in the one light where the miracle, that is you, is perfectly clear. And from the workbook, lesson number 20, I am determined to see. We have been quite casual about our practice periods thus far. There has been virtually no attempt to direct time for undertaking them. Minimal effort has been required and not even active cooperation and interests have been asked. This approach has been intentional and very carefully planned. We have not lost sight of the crucial importance of the reversal of your thinking. The salvation of the world depends on it. That you will not see if you regard yourself as being coerced and if you give in to resentment and opposition. This is our first attempt to introduce structure. Do not misconstru it as an effort to exert force or pressure. You want salvation. You want to be happy. You want peace. You do not have them now because your mind is totally undisciplined and you cannot distinguish between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, love and fear. You are now learning to tell them apart and great indeed will be your reward. Your decision to see is all that vision requires. What you want is yours. Do not mistake the little effort that is asked of you for an indication that our goal is of little worth. Can the salvation of the world be a trivial purpose? And can the world be saved if you are not? God has one son and he is the resurrection and the life. His will is done because all power is given him in heaven and on earth. In your determination to see is vision given you. The exercises for today consist in reminding yourself throughout the day that you want to see. Today's idea also tacitly implies the recognition that you do not see now. Therefore, as you repeat the idea, you are stating that you are determined to change your present state for a better one and one you really want. Repeat today's idea slowly and positively at least twice an hour today attempting to do so every half hour. Do not be distressed if you forget to do so, but make a real effort to remember. The extra repetitions should be applied to any situation, person or event that upsets you. You can see them differently and you will. What you desire, you will see. Such is the real law of cause and effect as it operates in the world. So today we sit quietly and open our hearts determined to see with the vision of Christ, with a vision not of the body's eyes, not of images, not of appearances, but pure light. Today we acknowledge that perception is not natural. It is most natural to know God, to know our Creator, to abide in love and light and eternity. It is not natural to abide in time, a cosmos of images. It is not natural to abide in fiction or fantasy. Today we are determined to know our natural inheritance, our beingness, our I am presence. We sink deep inward beyond all thoughts and concepts of time and space, beyond all thoughts of the past and the future. We are entitled to this vision that was given us in our creation. We come back to the awareness that to see and to understand are one and the same, but they do not involve perception in any way. Times we allow our eyes, the body's eyes to close, close on the world of perception, closing on the images. Thinking inward, we let this determination rise up in us. We feel the strength of our determination, apply it to vision, determined to have the experience of true vision. So today is devoted in a single way, in a single purpose to our inner spiritual life. Today we let thine eye be single as we say, I am determined to see.