 We continue today with chapter 12, the Holy Spirit's curriculum, the judgment of the Holy Spirit. You have been told not to make error real, and the way to do this is very simple. If you want to believe in error, you would have to make it real because it is not true. Both truth is real in its own right, and to believe in truth you do not have to do anything. Understand that you do not respond to anything directly, but to your interpretation of it. Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response. That is why analyzing the motives of others is hazardous to you. If you decide that someone is really trying to attack you, or desert you, or enslave you, you will respond as if he had actually done so, having made his error real to you. To interpret error is to give it power, and having done this, you will overlook truth. The analysis of ego motivation is very complicated, very obscuring, and never without your own ego involvement. The whole process represents a clear-cut attempt to demonstrate your own ability to understand what you perceive. This is shown by the fact that you react to your interpretations as if they were correct. You may then control your reactions behaviorally, but not emotionally. This would obviously be a split or an attack on the integrity of your mind, pitting one level within it against another. There is but one interpretation of motivation that makes any sense. And because it is the Holy Spirit's judgment, it requires no effort at all on your part. Every loving thought is true. Everything else is an appeal for healing and help, regardless of the form it takes. Can anyone be justified in responding with anger to a brother's plea for help? No response can be appropriate except the willingness to give it to him, for this and only this is what he is asking for. Offer him anything else and you are assuming the right to attack his reality by interpreting it as you see fit. Perhaps the danger of this to your own mind is not yet fully apparent. If you believe that an appeal for help is something else, you will react to something else. Your response will therefore be inappropriate to reality as it is, but not to your perception of it. There is nothing to prevent you from recognizing all calls for help as exactly what they are except your own imagined need to attack. It is only this that makes you willing to engage in endless, quote, battles with reality in which you deny the reality of the need for healing by making it unreal. You would not do this except for your unwillingness to accept reality as it is and which you therefore withhold from yourself. It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand. No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness, for truth to him has become what he wants it to be. If you are unwilling to perceive an appeal for help as what it is, it is because you are unwilling to give help and to receive it. To fail to recognize a call for help is to refuse help. Would you maintain that you do not need it? Yet this is what you are maintaining when you refuse to recognize a brother's appeal, for only by answering his appeal can you be helped. Deny him your help and you will not recognize God's answer to you. The Holy Spirit does not need your help in interpreting motivation, but you do need his. Only appreciation is an appropriate response to your brother. Gratitude is due to him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help, for both are capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly. And all your sense of strain comes from your attempts not to do just this. How simple, then, is God's plan for salvation. There is but one response to reality, for reality evokes no conflict at all. There is but one teacher of reality who understands what it is. He does not change his mind about reality because reality does not change. Although your interpretations of reality are meaningless in your divided state, his remained consistently true. He gives them to you because they are for you. Do not attempt to, quote, help a brother in your way, for you cannot help yourself. But hear his call for the help of God and you will recognize your own need for the Father. Your interpretations of your brother's needs are your interpretations of yours. By giving help, you are asking for it. And if you perceive but one need in yourself, you will be healed. For you will recognize God's answer as you want it to be. And if you want it in truth, it will be truly yours. Every appeal you answer in the name of Christ brings remembrance of your Father closer to your awareness. For the sake of your need, then, hear every call for help as what it is so God can answer you. By applying the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the reactions of others more and more consistently, you will gain an increasingly awareness that his criteria are equally applicable to you. For to recognize fear is not enough to escape from it, although the recognition is necessary to demonstrate the need for escape. The Holy Spirit must still translate fear into truth. If you were left with the fear, once you had recognized it, you would have taken a step away from reality, not towards it. Yet we have repeatedly emphasized the need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as a crucial step in the undoing of the ego. Consider how well the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the motives of others will serve you then. Having taught you to accept everything else as an appeal for help, he has taught you that fear itself is an appeal for help. This is what recognizing fear really means. If you do not protect it, he will reinterpret it. That is the ultimate value in learning to perceive attack as a call for love. We have already learned that fear and attack are inevitably associated. If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn on you. For fear is a call for love in unconscious recognition of what has been denied. Fear is a symptom of your own deep sense of loss. If when you perceive it in others you learn to supply the loss, the basic cause of fear is removed. Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist in you. This means of removing it, it is in yourself, and you have demonstrated this by giving it. Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable. One is false for it was made out of denial, and denial depends on the belief in what it is denied for its own existence. By interpreting fear correctly as the positive affirmation of the underlying belief at mask, you are undermining its perceived usefulness by rendering it useless. Defenses that do not work at all are automatically discarded. If you raise what fear conceals to clear-cut unequivocal predominance, fear becomes meaningless. You have denied its power to conceal love, which was its only purpose. The veil that you have drawn across the face of love has disappeared. If you would look upon love, which is the world's reality, how could you do better than to recognize in every defense against it the underlying appeal for it? And how could you better learn of its reality than by answering the appeal for it by giving it? The Holy Spirit's interpretation of fear does dispel it for the unawareness of error cannot be denied. The awareness of truth cannot be denied. Thus does the Holy Spirit replace the fear with love and translates error into truth. And thus will you learn of Him how to replace your dream of separation with the fact of unity. For the separation is only the denial of union and correctly interpreted a test to your eternal knowledge that union is true. And from the workbook, Lesson 86 These ideas are for review today. Only God's plan for salvation will work. It is senseless for me to search wildly about for salvation. I have seen it in many people and in many things, but when I reached for it, it was not there. I was mistaken about where it is. I was mistaken about what it is. I will undertake no more idle seeking. Only God's plan for salvation will work. And I will rejoice because His plan can never fail. These are some suggested forms for applying this idea specifically. God's plan for salvation will save me from my perception of this. This is no exception in God's plan for my salvation. Let me perceive this only in the light of God's plan for salvation. Holding grievances is an attack on God's plan for salvation. Holding grievances is an attempt to prove that God's plan for salvation will not work. It only His plan will work. By holding grievances, I am therefore excluding my only hope of salvation from my awareness. I would no longer defeat my own best interest in this insane way. I would accept God's plan for salvation and be happy. I think applications of this idea might be in these forms. I am choosing between misperception and salvation as I look on this. If I see grounds for grievances in this, I will not see the grounds for my salvation. This calls for salvation, not attack. Only God's plan for salvation will work. Holding grievances is an attack on God's plan for salvation. So today we dive into the acceptance of the Holy Spirit's curriculum. Today we open to the judgment of the Holy Spirit, realizing that the Holy Spirit never makes error real. The Holy Spirit consistently overlooks error and looks to the light of truth. The Holy Spirit is the correction and there is no correction in form. Just another way of perceiving or interpreting the world. And most importantly, to believe in truth you do not have to do anything. So it's not a matter of doing or not doing. It's opening to understand perception. And the only way perception can be understood is with the Holy Spirit's interpretation of perception. Jesus begins teaching the mechanics of the mind. And he says, Understand that you do not respond to anything directly but to your interpretation of it. Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response. So clearly the only thing required is a shift in the interpretation. There is no point in analyzing the motives of others because in doing that the shift in interpretation is prevented. When you see that there are not others to analyze, that there are not external motives, you focus on your own motive, your own desire for peace, for the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the world. You release the linear interpretation of the world of time and space and open to the present moment, to the Holy Spirit's simultaneous interpretation of all of time and space. Everything is collapsed in the miracle. There is but one interpretation of motivation that makes any sense. And it's because of this that the Holy Spirit's judgment requires no effort at all on your part. Very simply, every loving thought is true. Everything else is an appeal for healing and help regardless of the form it takes. We are open today to seeing an appeal for help as what it is, to give the help that is asked for. It is our own mind that needs this help. And we practice by recognizing our brothers and sisters appeal for help and answering them with help from the Holy Spirit. And in this way, our mind is helped to see its wholeness, its perfection, its completeness, gratitude. Only appreciation is an appropriate response to our brothers and sisters. Both for loving thoughts and for appeals for help, for both are capable of bringing love into our awareness if we perceive them truly. So we are seeing that fear itself is an appeal for love. It's an appeal for the love that the fear seemed to hide. And as we answer this call for love, this appeal for love consistently, our mind gains awareness of love itself. We perceive love as a call for help. We perceive today love as the answer. Fear is a call for love, an unconscious recognition of what has been denied. So this is a mechanism for accepting into awareness what was denied from awareness in the separation. This is a way for showing the impossibility of separation in a practical way. Love ye one another as I have loved you. Love thy neighbor as thyself. So we are going to see every call for love, every appeal for love exactly as it is in our mind, a recognition of the reality of love and be shown by the Holy Spirit, the impossibility of fear. We practice this with our lessons of the day, our review lessons. My grievances hide the light of the world in me. My salvation comes from me.