 We continue today with Chapter 9, The Acceptance of Your Brother. How can you become increasingly aware of the Holy Spirit in you except by His effects? You cannot see Him with your eyes nor hear Him with your ears. How then can you perceive Him at all? If you inspire joy and others react to joy in you, even though you are not experiencing joy yourself, there must be something in you that is capable of producing it. If it is in you and can produce joy, and if you see that it does produce joy in others, you must be dissociating it in yourself. It seems to you that the Holy Spirit does not produce joy consistently in you only because you do not consistently arouse joy in others. Their reactions to you are your evaluations of His consistency. When you are inconsistent, you will not always give rise to joy, and so you will not always recognize His consistency. For what you offer to your brother, you offer to him because he cannot go beyond your offering in his giving. This is not because he limits his giving, but simply because you have limited your receiving. The decision to receive is the decision to accept. If your brothers are part of you, will you accept them? Only they can teach you what you are for your learning is the result of what you taught them. What you call upon in them, you call upon in yourself, and as you call upon it in them, it becomes real to you. God has but one son, knowing them all as one. Only God himself is more than they, but they are not less than he is. Would you know what this means? If what you do to my brother, you do to me, and if you do everything for yourself because we are part of you, everything we do belongs to you as well. Everyone God created is part of you and shares his glory with you. His glory belongs to him, but it is equally yours. You cannot then be less glorious than he is. God is more than you only because he created you, but not even this would he keep from you. Therefore you can create as he did, and your dissociation will not alter this. Neither God's light nor yours is dimmed because you do not see. Because the sonship must create as one, you remember creation whenever you recognize part of creation. Each part you remember as to your wholeness because each part is whole. Wholeness is indivisible, but you cannot learn of your wholeness until you see it everywhere. You can know yourself only as God knows his son, for knowledge is shared with God. When you awaken him, you will know your magnitude by accepting his limitlessness as yours. But meanwhile, you will judge it as you judge your brothers and will accept it as you accept his. You are not yet awake, but you can learn how to awaken. Very simply, the Holy Spirit teaches you to awaken others. As you see them awaken, you will learn what waking means, and because you have chosen to wake them, their gratitude and their appreciation of what you have given them will teach you its value. They will become the witnesses to your reality as you were created witnesses to God's. Yet when the sonship comes together and accepts its oneness, it will be known by its creations, who witness to its reality as the son does to the father. Miracles have no place in eternity because they are reparative. Yet while you still need healing, your miracles are the only witnesses to your reality that you can recognize. You cannot perform a miracle for yourself because miracles are a way of giving acceptance and receiving it. In time the giving comes first, though they are simultaneous in eternity, where they cannot be separated. When you have learned they are the same, the need for time is over. Eternity is one time, its only dimension being always. This cannot mean anything to you until you remember God's open arms and finally know His open mind. Like Him, you are always in His mind and with a mind like His. In your open mind you are your creations in perfect communication, born of perfect understanding. Could you but accept one of them, you would not want anything of the world has to offer. Everything else would be totally meaningless. God's meaning is incomplete without you and you are incomplete without your creations. Accept your brother in this world and accept nothing else, for in Him you will find your creations because He created them with you. You will never know that you are co-creator with God until you learn that your brother is co-creator with you. And from the workbook, lesson 70, my salvation comes from me. All temptation is nothing more than some form of the basic temptation not to believe the idea for today. Salvation seems to come from anywhere except from you. So too does the source of guilt. You see neither guilt nor salvation as in your own mind and nowhere else. When you realize that all guilt is solely an invention of your mind, you also realize that guilt and salvation must be in the same place. In understanding this, you are saved. The seeming cost of accepting today's idea is this. It means that nothing outside yourself can save you. Nothing outside yourself can give you peace. But it also means that nothing outside yourself can hurt you or disturb your peace or upset you in any way. Today's idea places you in charge of the universe where you belong because of what you are. This is not a role that can be partially accepted. And you must surely begin to see that accepting it is salvation. It may not, however, be clear to you why the recognition that guilt is in your own mind entails the realization that salvation is there as well. God would not have put the remedy for the sickness where it cannot help. That is the way your mind has worked, but hardly his. He wants you to be healed, so he has kept the source of healing where the need for healing lies. You have tried to do just the opposite, making every attempt, however distorted and fantastic it might be, to separate healing from the sickness for which it was intended and thus keep the sickness. Your purpose was to ensure that healing did not occur. God's purpose was to ensure that it did. Today we practice realizing that God's will and ours are really the same in this. God wants us to be healed, and we do not really want to be sick because it makes us unhappy. Therefore, in accepting the idea for today, we are really in agreement with God. He does not want us to be sick, neither do we. He wants us to be healed, so do we. We are ready for two longer practice periods today, each of which should last some 10 to 15 minutes. We will, however, still let you decide when to undertake them. We will follow this practice for a number of lessons, and it would again be well to decide in advance when would be a good time to lay aside for each of them, and then adhering to your own decisions as closely as possible. Begin these practice periods by repeating the idea for today, adding a statement signifying your recognition that salvation comes from nothing outside of you. You might put it this way, my salvation comes from me. It cannot come from anywhere else. Then devote a few minutes with your eyes closed to reviewing some of the external places where you have looked for salvation in the past, in other people, in possessions, in various situations and events, and in self-concepts that you sought to make real. Recognize that it is not there. And tell yourself, my salvation cannot come from any of these things. My salvation comes from me, and only from me. Now we will try again to reach the light in you, which is where your salvation is. You cannot find it in the clouds that surround the light, and it is in them you have been looking for it. It is not there. It is past the clouds and in the light beyond. Remember that you will have to go through the clouds before you can reach the light. But remember also that you have never found anything in the cloud patterns you imagined that endured, or that you wanted. Since all illusions of salvation have failed you, surely you do not want to remain in the clouds, looking vainly for idols there, when you could so easily walk on into the light of the real salvation. Try to pass the clouds by whatever means appeals to you. If it helps you, think of me holding your hand and leading you. And I assure you this will be no idol fantasy. In short and frequent practice periods today, remind yourself that your salvation comes from you, and nothing but your own thoughts can hamper your progress. You are free from all external interference. You are in charge of your salvation. You are in charge of the salvation of the world. Today then, my salvation comes from me. Nothing outside of me can hold me back. Within me is the world salvation and my own. My salvation comes from me. So today we sink down inward again toward the light, realizing that we take our brothers and sisters with us, realizing we can only find salvation in joy, in the Holy Spirit, in inspiring joy in everyone we meet. The text reminds us that that is the way to heaven. In the inspiration of spirit we inspire joy consistently in everyone. Today we accept all our brothers as ourself. We sink inward to the light, allowing all thoughts to arise, all thoughts in which we have sought for meaning and purpose in people and places and things, in situations of this world, in future goals, in ambitions. We have sought to accomplish salvation through form. Today we let these thoughts of form drift away. We let them go in awareness. We will not seek to find our completion in another person, in a worldly goal, in something that we have been striving for in the world. God did not place the answer where the problem was not. God placed the answer for separation in the mind, where separation was believed to be real. Whenever there is an experience of guilt, it is being generated by the ego. Whenever there is experience of joy, this flows so easily from the Holy Spirit's teaching, so easily from the Atonement. This joy spreads to cover the entire cosmos because there is nothing outside of mind. There is no cause outside of mind. In sincerity and earnesty, we sink deep into the presence of love. As we remember, my salvation comes from me. Amen.