 We continue today with Chapter 21. The function of reason. Perception selects and makes the world you see. It literally picks it out as the mind directs. The laws of size and shape and brightness would hold, perhaps, if other things were equal. They are not equal. For what you look for, you are far more likely to discover than what you would prefer to overlook. The still small voice for God is not drowned out by all the ego's raucous screams and senseless ravings to those who want to hear it. Perception is a choice and not a fact. But on this choice depends far more than you may realize as yet. For on the voice you choose to hear and on the sight you choose to see depends entirely your whole belief in what you are. Perception is a witness, but to this and never to reality. Yet it can show you the conditions in which awareness of reality is possible or those where it could never be. Reality needs no cooperation from you to be itself. But your awareness of it needs your help because it is your choice. Listen to what the ego says and see what it directs you see. And it is sure that you will see yourself as tiny and vulnerable and afraid. You will experience depression, a sense of worthlessness and feelings of impermanence and unreality. You will believe that you are helpless prey to forces far beyond your own control and far more powerful than you. And you will think the world you made directs your destiny. For this will be your faith, but never believe it because it is your faith it makes reality. There is another vision and another voice in which your freedom lies awaiting your choice. And if you place your faith in them, you will perceive another self in you. This other self sees miracles as natural. They are as simple and as natural to it as breathing to the body. They are the obvious response to calls for help, the only one it makes. Miracles seem unnatural to the ego because it does not understand how separate minds can influence each other. Nor could they do so, but minds cannot be separate. This other self is perfectly aware of this and thus it recognizes that miracles do not affect another's mind only its own. They always change your mind. There is no other. You do not realize the whole extent to which the idea of separation has interfered with reason. Reason lies in the other self you have cut off from your awareness and nothing you have allowed to stay in your awareness is capable of reason. How can the segment of the mind devoid of reason understand what reason is or grasp the information it would give? All sorts of questions may arise in it, but if the basic question stems from reason, it will not ask it. Like all that stems from reason, the basic question is obvious, simple and remains unasked. But think not reason could not answer it. God's plan for your salvation could not have been established without your will and your consent. It must have been accepted by the Son of God for what God wills for him he must receive. For God wills not apart from him, nor does the will of God wait upon time to be accomplished. Therefore what joined the will of God must be in you now, being eternal. You must have set aside a place in which the Holy Spirit can abide and where he is. He must have been there since the need for him arose and was fulfilled in the same instant. Such would your reason tell you if you listened. Yet such is clearly not the ego's reasoning. Your reason's alien nature to the ego is proof you will not find the answer there. If it must be so, it must exist. And if it exists for you and has your freedom as the purpose given it, you must be free to find it. God's plan is simple. Never circular and never self-defeating. He has no thoughts except the self-extending. And in this your will must be included. Thus there must be a part of you that knows his will and shares it. It is not meaningful to ask if what must be is so. But it is meaningful to ask why you are unaware of what is so. For this must have an answer if the plan of God for your salvation is complete. And it must be complete because its source knows not of incompletion. Where would the answer be but in the source? And where are you but there where the same answer is? Your identity as much a true effect of this same source as is the answer must therefore be together and the same. Oh yes, you know this and more than this alone. Yet any part of knowledge threatens dissociation as much as all of it. And all of it will come with any part. Here is the part you can accept. What reason points to you can see because the witnesses on its behalf are clear. Only the totally insane can disregard them and you have gone past this. Reason is a means that serves the Holy Spirit's purpose in its own right. It is not reinterpreted and redirected from the goal of sin as are the others. For reason is beyond the ego's range of means. Faith and perception and belief can be misplaced and serve the great deceiver's needs as well as truth. But reason has no place at all in madness nor can it be adjusted to fit its end. Faith and belief are strong in madness guiding perception toward what the mind has valued. But reason enters not at all in this. For the perception would fall away at once if reason were applied. There is no reason in insanity for it depends entirely on reason's absence. The ego never uses it because it does not realize that it exists. The partially insane have access to it and only they have need of it. Knowledge does not depend on it and madness keeps it out. The part of the mind where reason lies was dedicated by your will in union with your fathers to the undoing of insanity. Here was the Holy Spirit's purpose accepted and accomplished both at once. Reason is alien to insanity and those who use it have gained a means which cannot be applied to sin. Knowledge is far beyond attainment of any kind. But reason can serve to open doors you closed against it. You have come very close to this. Faith and belief have shifted and you have asked the question the ego will never ask. Does not your reason tell you now the question must have come from something that you do not know but must belong to you? Faith and belief upheld by reason cannot fail to lead to changed perception. And in this change is room made way for vision. Vision extends beyond itself as does the purpose that it serves and all the means for its accomplishment. And from the workbook, lesson 170. There is no cruelty in God and none in me. No one attacks without intent to hurt. This can have no exception. When you think that you attack in self-defense, you mean that to be cruel is protection. You are safe because of cruelty. You mean that you believe to hurt another brings you freedom. And you mean that to attack is to exchange the states in which you are for something better. Safer, more secure, from dangerous invasion and from fear. How thoroughly insane is the idea that to defend from fear is to attack. For here is fear begot and fed with blood to make it grow and swell and rage. And thus is fear protected, not escaped. Today we learn a lesson which can save you more delay and needless misery than you can possibly imagine. It is this. You make what you defend against and by your own defense against it, it is real and inescapable. Lay down your arms and only then do you perceive it false. It seems to be the enemy without that you attack. Yet your defense sets up an enemy within. An alien thought at war with you, depriving you of peace, splitting your mind into two camps which seem wholly irreconcilable. For love now has an, quote, enemy and opposite. And fear, the alien, now needs your defense against the threat of what you really are. If you consider carefully the means by which your fancy self defense proceeds on its own imagined way, you will perceive the premises on which the idea extends. First it is obvious ideas must leave their source, for it is you who make attack and must have first conceived of it. Yet you attack outside yourself and separate your mind from him who is to be attacked. With perfect faith the split you made is real. Next are the attributes of love bestowed upon its, quote, enemy. For fear becomes your safety and protector of your peace, to which you turn for solace and escape from doubts about your strength and hope of rest in dreamless quiet. And as love is shorn of what belongs to it and it alone, love is endowed with the attributes of fear. For love would ask you lay down all defense as merely foolish, and your arms indeed would crumble into dust for such they are. With love as enemy must cruelty become a God. And God's demand that those who worship them obey their dictates and refuse to question them. Harsh punishment is meted out relentlessly to those who ask if the demands are sensible or even sane. It is their enemies who are unreasonable and insane while they are always merciful and just. Today we look upon the cruel God dispassionately, and we note that though his lips are smeared with blood and fire seems to flame from him, he is but made of stone. He can do nothing. We need not defy his power. He has none. And those who see in him their safety have no guardian, no strength to call upon in danger, and no mighty warrior to fight for them. This moment can be terrible, but it can also be this time of your release from abject slavery. You make a choice standing before this idol, seeing him exactly as he is. Will you restore to love what you have sought to rest from it and lay before this mindless piece of stone? Or will you make another idol to replace it? For the God of cruelty takes many forms. Another can be found. Yet do not think that fear is the escape from fear. Let us remember what the text has stressed about the obstacles to peace. The final one, the hardest to believe, is nothing. And a seeming obstacle with the appearance of a solid block, impenetrable, fearful, and beyond surmounting is the fear of God himself. Here is the basic premise which enthrones the thought of fear as God. For fear is loved by those who worship it, and love appears to be invested now with cruelty. Where does the totally insane belief in God's vengeance come from? Love has not confused its attributes with those of fear. Yet must the worshippers of fear perceive their own confusion in fear's, quote, enemy? Its cruelty is now a part of love, and what becomes more fearful than the heart of love itself? The blood appears to be upon his lips, the fire comes from him, and he is terrible above all else, cruel beyond conception, striking down all who acknowledge him to be their God. The choice you make today is certain, for you look on for the last time this bit of carbon stone you made, and call it God no longer. You have reached this place before, but you have chosen that this cruel God remain with you in still another form. And so the fear of God returned with you. This time you leave it there, and you return to a new world unburdened by its weight, beheld not in its sightless eyes, but in the vision that your choice restored to you. Now do your eyes belong to Christ, and he looks through them. Now your voice belongs to God, and echoes his. And now your heart remains at peace forever. You have chosen him in place of idols, and your attributes, given by your Creator, are restored to you at last. The call for God is heard and answered. Now has fear made way for love, as God himself replaces cruelty. Father, we are like you. No cruelty abides in us, for there is none in you. Your peace is ours, and we bless the world with what we have received from you alone. We choose again, and make our choice for all our brothers, knowing they are one with us. We bring them your salvation, as we have received it now. And we give thanks for them, who render us complete. In them we see your glory, and in them we find our peace. Holy are we, because your holiness has set us free. And we give thanks. Amen.