 We continue today with chapter 17. The two pictures. God established His relationship with you to make you happy, and nothing you do that does not share His purpose can be real. The purpose God ascribed to anything is its only function. Because of His reason for creating His relationship with you, the function of relationships became forever to make happy. And nothing else. To fulfill this function you relate to your creations as God to His. For nothing God created is apart from happiness. And nothing God created but would extend happiness as it's created. Whatever does not fulfill this function cannot be real. In this world it is impossible to create. Yet it is possible to make happy. I have said repeatedly that the Holy Spirit would not deprive you of your special relationships, but would transform them. And all that is meant by that, is that He will restore to them the function given them by God. The function you have given them is clearly not to make happy. But the Holy relationship shares God's purpose rather than aiming to make a substitute for it. Every special relationship you have made is a substitute for God's will. And glorifies yours instead of His because of the illusion that they are different. You have made very real relationships even in this world. Yet you do not recognize them because you have raised their substitutes to such predominance when truth calls to you as it does constantly. You answer with a substitute. Every special relationship you have made has, as its fundamental purpose, the aim of occupying your mind so completely that you will not hear the call of truth. In a sense, the special relationship was the ego's answer to the creation of the Holy Spirit who was God's answer to the separation. For although the ego did not understand what had been created, it was aware of threat. The whole defense system the ego evolved to protect the separation from the Holy Spirit was in response to the gift with which God blessed it and by His blessing enabled it to be healed. This blessing holds within itself the truth about everything. And the truth is that the Holy Spirit is in close relationship with you because in Him is your relationship with God restored to you. The relationship with Him has never been broken because the Holy Spirit has not been separate from anyone since the separation. And through Him have all your holy relationships been carefully preserved to serve God's purpose for you. The ego is alert to threat and the part of your mind into which the ego was accepted is very anxious to preserve its reason as it sees it. It does not realize that it is totally insane and you must realize just what this means if you would be restored to sanity. The insane protect their thought systems but they do so insanely and all their defenses are as insane as what they are supposed to protect. Separation has nothing in it, no part, no quote reason and no attribute that is not insane. And its quote protection is part of it as insane as the whole. The special relationship which is its chief defense must therefore be insane. You have but little difficulty now in realizing that the thought system the special relationship protects is but a system of delusions. You recognize at least in general terms that the ego is insane yet the special relationship still seems to you somehow to be quote different. Yet we have looked at it far closer than we have at many other aspects of the ego's thought system that you have been willing to let go. While this one remains you will not let the others go for this one is not different. Retain this one and you have retained the whole. It is essential to realize that all defenses do what they would defend. The underlying basis for their effectiveness is that they offer what they defend. What they defend is placed in them for safe keeping and as they operate they bring it to you. Every defense operates by giving gifts and the gift is always a miniature of the thought system the defense protects set in a golden frame. The frame is very elaborate all set with jewels and deeply carved and polished. This is to be a value in itself and to divert your attention from what it encloses but the frame without the picture you cannot have. Defenses operate to make you think you can. The special relationship has the most imposing and deceptive frame of all the defenses the ego uses. Its thought system is offered here surrounded by a frame so heavy and so elaborate that the picture is almost obliterated by its imposing structure. Into the frame are woven all sorts of fanciful and fragmented illusions of love set with dreams of sacrifice and self-aggrandizement and interlaced with gilded threads of self-destruction. The glitter of blood shines like rubies and the tears are faceted like diamonds and gleam in the dim light in which the offering is made. Look at the picture. Do not let the frame distract you. This gift is given you for your damnation and if you take it you will believe you are damned. You cannot have the frame without the picture. What you value is the frame for there you see no conflict yet the frame is only the wrapping for the gift of conflict. The frame is not the gift. Be not deceived by the most superficial aspects of this thought system for these aspects enclose the whole, complete in every aspect. Death lies in this glittering gift. Let not your gaze dwell on the hypnotic gleaming of the frame. Look at the picture and realize that death is offered you. That is why the holy instant is so important in the defense of truth. The truth itself needs no defense but you do need defense against your acceptance of the gift of death. When you who are truth accept an idea so dangerous to truth you threaten truth with destruction and your defense must now be undertaken to keep truth whole. The power of heaven, the love of God, the tears of Christ and the joy of his eternal spirit are marshaled to defend you from your own attack. For you attack them being part of them and they must save you for they love themselves. The holy instant is a miniature of heaven sent you from heaven. It is a picture to set in a frame. Yet if you accept this gift you will not see the frame at all because the gifts can only be accepted through your willingness to focus all your attention on the picture. The holy instant is a miniature of eternity. It is a picture of timelessness set in a frame of time. If you focus on this picture you will realize that it was only the frame that made you think it was a picture. Without the frame the picture is seen as what it represents for as the whole thought system of the ego lies in its gifts so the whole of heaven lies in this instant borrowed from eternity and set in time for you. Two gifts are offered you. Each is complete and cannot be partially accepted. Each is a picture of all that you can have seen very differently. You cannot compare their value by comparing a picture to a frame. It must be the pictures only that you compare or the comparison is holy without meaning. Remember that it is the picture that is the gift and only on this basis are you really free to choose. Look at the pictures, both of them. One is a tiny picture, hard to see at all beneath the heavy shadows of its enormous and disproportionate enclosure. The other is a lightly framed and hung in light. Lovely to look upon for what it is. You who have tried so hard and are still trying to fit the better picture into the wrong frame and so combine what cannot be combined, accept this and be glad. These pictures are each framed perfectly for what they represent. One is framed to be out of focus and not seen. The other is framed for perfect clarity. The picture of darkness and of death grows less convincing as you search it out amid its wrappings. As each senseless stone that seems to shine from the frame in darkness is exposed to light, it becomes dull and lifeless and ceases to distract you from the picture. And finally you look upon the picture itself, seeing at last that unprotected by the frame, it has no meaning. The dark picture is lightly framed for time cannot contain eternity. There is no distraction here. The picture of heaven and eternity grows more convincing as you look at it. And now by real comparison, a transformation of both pictures can at least last occur. And each is given its rightful place when both are seen in relation to each other. The dark picture brought to light is not perceived as fearful, but the fact that it is just a picture is brought home at last. And what you see there you will recognize as what it is, a picture of what you thought was real and nothing more. For beyond this picture you will see nothing. The picture of light in clear-cut and unmistakable contrast is transformed into what lies beyond the picture. As you look on this you realize that it is not a picture, but a reality. This is no figured representation of a thought system, but the thought itself. What it represents is here. The frame fades gently and God rises to your remembrance, offering you the whole of creation in exchange for your little picture, wholly without value and entirely deprived of meaning. As God ascends into his rightful place and you to yours, you will experience again the meaning of relationship and know it to be true. Let us ascend in peace together to the Father by giving him ascendance in our minds. We will gain everything by giving him the power and the glory and keeping no illusions of where they are. They are in us through his ascendance. What he has given is his. It shines in every part of him as in the whole. The whole reality of your relationship with him lies in our relationship to one another. The Holy Instance shines alike on all relationships, for in it they are one. For here is only healing, already complete and perfect. For here is God, and where he is, only the perfect and complete can be. And from the workbook, Lesson 136. Sickness is a defense against the truth. No one can heal unless he understands what the purpose of sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. When this is seen, healing is automatic. It dispels the meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth and merely leaves them there to disappear. Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it, inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole. The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself. All defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious, but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that it is done. Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real. All this cannot be done consciously. But afterwards, your plan requires that you must forget you made it, so it seems to be external to your own intent. A happening beyond your state of mind, an outcome with a real effect on you, instead of one affected by yourself. It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your quote reality that makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control. But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion. Your not remembering is but the sign that this decision still remains in force, as far as your desires are concerned. Mistake not this for fact. Defenses must make facts unrecognizable. They aim at doing this, and it is this they do. Every defense takes fragments of the whole, assembles them without regard to all their true relationships, and thus constructs illusions of the whole that is not there. It is this process that imposes threat, and not whatever outcome may result. When parts are rested from the whole and seen as separate and whole within themselves, they become symbols standing for attack upon the whole, successful in effect and never to be seen as whole again. And yet you have forgotten that they stand but for your own decision of what should be real to take the place of what is real. Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more? How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth. You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain you are made one with it. Thus is your, quote, true identity preserved, and the strange, haunting thoughts that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust, silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be. Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live but cannot overcome your choice to die. And so the body is more powerful than everlasting life, heaven more frail than hell, and God's design for salvation of His Son, opposed by a decision stronger than His will. His Son is dust, the Father incomplete, and chaos sits in triumph on His throne. Such is your planning for your own defense, and you believe that heaven quails for such mad attacks as these, with God made blind by your illusions, truth turned into lies, and all the universe made slave to laws which your defenses would impose on it. Yet who believes illusions but the one who made them up? Who else can see them and react to them as if they were true? God knows not of your plans to change His will. The universe remains unheating of the laws which you thought to govern it, and heaven has not bowed to hell nor life to death. You can but choose to think you die or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change, and what is wholly sinless cannot sin. Such is the simple truth. It does not make appeal to might nor triumph. It does not command obedience nor seek to prove how pitiful and futile your attempts to plan defenses that would alter it. Truth merely wants to give you happiness for such its purposes. Perhaps it sighs a little when you throw away its gifts, and yet it knows with perfect certainty that what God wills for you must be received. It is this fact that demonstrates that time is an illusion. For time lets you think what God has given you is not the truth right now, as it must be. The thoughts of God are quite apart from time. For time is but another meaningless defense you made against the truth. Yet what He wills is here, and you remain as He created you. Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where truth has been allowed to enter. And it comes to any mind that would lay down its arms and cease to play with folly. It is found at any time, today, if you will choose to practice giving welcome to the truth. This is our aim today, and we will give a quarter of an hour twice to ask the truth to come to us and set us free. And truth will come, for it has never been apart from us. It merely waits for just this invitation which we give today. We introduce it with a healing prayer to help us rise above defensiveness that truth be as it has always been. Sickness is a defense against the truth. I will accept the truth of what I am and let my mind be wholly healed today. Healing will flash across your open mind as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corner sickness can conceal and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures from your dreams or their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes and samely thought remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that tried to authorize the body to obey. Now is the body healed because the source of sickness has been opened to relief. And you will recognize you practiced well by this. The body should not feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what the body does. Its usefulness remains and nothing more. Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well for sickness has become impossible. Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself and made a bodily identity which will attack the body for the mind is sick. Give instant remedy should this occur by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer. Do not be confused about what must be healed but tell yourself, I have forgotten what I really am for I mistook my body for myself. Sickness is a defense against the truth but I am not a body and my mind cannot attack so I cannot be sick.