 We continue on today with Chapter 2-CAUSE AND EFFECT You may still complain about fear, but you nevertheless persist in making yourself fearful. I have already indicated that you cannot ask me to release you from fear. I know it does not exist, but you do not. If I intervene between your thoughts and their results, I would be tampering with the basic law of cause and effect. The most fundamental law there is. I would hardly help you if I depreciated the power of your own thinking. This would be in direct opposition to the purpose of this course. It is much more helpful to remind you that you do not guard your thoughts carefully enough. You may feel that at this point it would take a miracle to enable you to do this, which is perfectly true. You are not used to miracle-minded thinking, but you can be trained to think that way. All miracle workers need that kind of training. I cannot let you leave your mind unguarded, or you will not be able to help me. Miracle working entails a full realization of the power of thought in order to avoid miscreation. Otherwise a miracle will be necessary to set the mind itself straight, a circular process that would not foster the time-collapse for which the miracle was intended. The miracle worker must have genuine respect for true cause and effect as a necessary condition for the miracle to occur. Both miracles and fear come from thoughts. If you are not free to choose one, you would also not be free to choose the other. By choosing the miracle, you have rejected fear, if only temporarily. You have been fearful of everyone and everything. You are afraid of God, of me, and of yourself. You have misperceived or miscreated us and believe in what you have made. You would not have done this if you were not afraid of your own thoughts. The fearful must miscreate because they misperceive creation. When you miscreate, you are in pain. The cause and effect principle now becomes a real expediter, though only temporarily. Actually, cause is a term properly belonging to God, and His effect is His Son. This entails a set of cause and effect relationships totally different from those you introduce into miscreation. The fundamental conflict in this world, then, is between creation and miscreation. All fear is implicit in the second, and all love in the first. The conflict is therefore one between love and fear. It has already been said that you believe you cannot control fear because you yourself made it, and your belief in it seems to render it out of your control. Yet any attempt to resolve the error through attempting the mastery of fear is useless. In fact, it asserts the power of fear by the very assumption that it need be mastered. The true resolution rests entirely on mastery through love. In the interim, however, the sense of conflict is inevitable, since you have placed yourself in a position where you believe in the power of what does not exist. Nothing and everything cannot coexist. To believe in one is to deny the other. Fear is really nothing, and love is everything. Whenever light enters darkness, the darkness is abolished. What you believe is true for you. In this sense, the separation has occurred, and to deny it is merely to use denial inappropriately. However, to concentrate on error is only a further error. The initial corrective procedure is to recognize temporarily that there is a problem, but only as an indication that immediate correction is needed. This establishes a state of mind in which the atonement can be accepted without delay. It should be emphasized, however, that ultimately no compromise is possible between everything and nothing. Time is essentially a device by which all compromise in this respect can be given up. It only seems to be abolished by degrees, because time itself involves intervals that do not exist. Miscreation made this necessary as a corrective device. The statement for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life needs only one slight correction to be meaningful in this context. He gave it to His only begotten Son. It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His sons, everyone must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts. However, this is obscured as long as any of its parts is missing. That is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all the parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then can the meaning of wholeness in the true sense be understood. Any part of the Sonship can believe in error or in completeness if he so chooses. However, if he does so, he is believing in the existence of nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement. I have already briefly spoken about readiness, but some additional points might be helpful here. Readiness is only the prerequisite for accomplishment. The two should not be confused. As soon as the state of readiness occurs, there is usually some degree of desire to accomplish, but it is by no means necessarily undivided. States does not imply more than a potential for change of mind. Confidence cannot develop fully until mastery has been accomplished. We have already attempted to correct the fundamental error that fear can be mastered and have emphasized that the only real mastery is through love. Readiness is only the beginning of confidence. You may think this implies that an enormous amount of time is necessary between readiness and mastery, but let me remind you that time and space are under my control. And from the workbook, lesson number 14. God did not create a meaningless world. The idea for today is, of course, the reason why a meaningless world is impossible. What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist. The exercises for today are to be practiced with eyes closed throughout. The mind searching period should be short a minute at most. Do not have more than three practice periods with today's idea unless you find them comfortable. If you do, it will be because you really understand what they are for. The idea for today is another step in learning to let go the thoughts that you have written on the world and see the Word of God in their place. The early steps in this exchange, which can truly be called salvation, can be quite difficult and even quite painful. Some of them will lead you directly into fear. You will not be left there. You will go far beyond it. Our direction is toward perfect safety and perfect peace. With eyes closed, think of all the horrors in the world that cross your mind. Name each one as it occurs to you and then deny its reality. God did not create it, and so it is not real. Say, for example, God did not create that war, and so it is not real. God did not create that airplane crash, and so it is not real. God did not create that disaster, specify, and so it is not real. Suitable subjects for the application of today's idea also include anything you are afraid might happen to you or to anyone about whom you are concerned. In each case, name the disaster quite specifically. Do not use general terms. For example, do not say God did not create illness, but God did not create cancer or heart attacks, or whatever may arouse fear in you. This is your personal repertory of horrors at which you are looking. These things are part of the world you see. Some of them are shared illusions, and others are part of your personal hell. It does not matter. What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His. Therefore, it has no meaning. In recognition of this fact, conclude the practice periods by repeating today's idea. God did not create a meaningless world. The idea for today can, of course, be applied to anything that disturbs you during the day, aside from the practice periods. Be very specific in applying it. Say, God did not create a meaningless world. He did not create, specify the situation which is disturbing you. And so, it is not real. Lesson number 14. God did not create a meaningless world. So today, we come to the reason why fear is impossible. We've just learned from the previous lesson that a meaningless world engenders fear. But if God did not create a meaningless world, then this is not an effect of God. Christ, as we learned from our text reading today, Christ is an effect of God. God as cause, Christ as effect. This is a true cause-effect relationship in which no miscreation has been introduced. And yet, what we have been discovering about a meaningless world and meaningless thoughts that seem to produce that meaningless world, this is beginning to see the power of the mind and begin to see that the seat of the miscreation is in the sleeping mind or the deceived mind. So we are beginning to uncover fear. We are just beginning to see that Jesus cannot take fear away. You could just show us the conditions by which the fear was set up so that the fear can be removed, seem to be nothing, as we awaken from this dream of fear. We are opening now to see that fear, a miscreation of the ego, must be exposed for what it is, because God did not create it, because perfect love casts out fear, because there can be no compromise between love and fear or everything and nothing that we must make our minds ready to choose the correction. Readiness does not imply mastery, as we learned in the text reading today. Readiness precedes mastery through love, which is accomplishment. And every time we look to these erroneous thoughts of the ego, these meaningless thoughts, or to the meaningless world that is the projection or out-picturing of these meaningless thoughts, whenever we look to those for our peace, our happiness, our salvation, we are looking amiss. Every time we try to handle things in form, believing that that will truly handle things, we are tinkering around with meaningless thoughts and not seeing them as meaningless thoughts. This is the attempt at mastery through fear. Mastery through meaningless thoughts will never succeed. There is no mastery through education or learning, as the world calls learning. There is no mastery through wealth or material possession and accumulation. There is no mastery through possessive relationships. My husband, my wife, my child, my parents, my family. As long as there is a my in there and it doesn't include the whole universe, this is an attempt at mastery through fear. And this will not succeed. Who is my father, mother, sister, brother? But he that does the will of my father in heaven is my father, mother, sister, brother. We have a glorious purpose called forgiveness that unifies perception. But this perception is far, far beyond the broken, fragmented, distorted, fictitious perception of parts and roles in which there is a belief that you must fulfill the role, the specific role, to be good, to be worthy. Forgiveness is the purpose. The Holy Spirit has given the world now. And the Holy Spirit will give the roles or exchange the roles as part of unwinding the mind from this false self-concept. This is the only way. You cannot excel at a role as if there is some meaning or value in the role itself. The roles that the Holy Spirit offers in exchange, one after the next, is in one sense like a stairway to the gates of heaven. As you take on broader and more open roles which begin to approach forgiveness, the all-encompassing blanket of peace that covers the world, that spreads throughout the world, that embraces and engulfs all tiny little roles into one experience of unified perception in the quantum field the physicists speak of. And so today we lay aside all thoughts that induce fear. We lay them on the altar. We give them to the Holy Spirit as gifts. And then we wait in silence to receive the love and the blessing of the Holy Spirit. We rejoice that today's idea is the reason why the first 13 lessons we have been doing are true. This lesson, number 14. God did not create a meaningless world. It's the reason why nothing I see means anything. It's the reason why I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me. And it just goes on and on. It's the reason I am never upset for the reason I think. It's the reason why I am upset because I see something that is not there. It's the reason why I see only the past. It's the reason why my meaningless thoughts, that my mind is preoccupied with these meaningless thoughts. It's the beautiful cause-effect relationship As we remember that God creates in spirit and God creates in eternity. God does not create linear time and space. God does not create images. This is the meaning of the saying in the Bible, hold no grave in images before the Lord thy God. Why is that true? Why should I not hold grave in images before the Lord thy God? Because God did not create a meaningless world, a world of grave in images. Grave in images, images that seem to exist in and of themselves as parts, as specifics in a world of linear time and space. This is fiction. This is miscreation. And guilt and pain, and specifically fear, is associated with this attempt at miscreation. And why do I emphasize the word attempt? Because, again, God did not create a meaningless world. The ego is nothing more than an attempt at fear. And why would you identify your holy mind with an attempt at fear? Instead of love. Instead of that which God created as perfect, eternal, changeless, divine. And so we go forward today with devotion, with commitment to accept this lesson as the opening of our hearts, as we return to love in awareness, in truth we never left. But in awareness, today, we sincerely open to the idea that God did not create a meaningless world.