 We continue today with Chapter 17 The Forgiven World Can you imagine how beautiful those you forgive will look to you? In no fantasy have you ever seen anything so lovely. Nothing you see here, sleeping or waking, comes near to such loveliness. And nothing will you value like unto this, nor hold so dear. Nothing that you remember that made your heart sing with joy has ever brought you even a little part of the happiness this sight will bring you. For you will see the Son of God. You will behold the beauty the Holy Spirit loves to look upon, in which he thanks the Father for. He was created to see this for you, until you learned to see it for yourself. And all his teaching leads to seeing it and giving thanks with him. This loveliness is not a fantasy. It is the real world, bright and clean and new, with everything sparkling under the open sun. Nothing is hidden here, for everything has been forgiven and there are no fantasies to hide the truth. The bridge between that world and this is so little and so easy to cross, that you could not believe it is the meeting place of worlds so different. Yet this little bridge is the strongest thing that touches on this world at all. This little step, so small it has escaped your notice, is astride through time into eternity, beyond all ugliness into beauty that will enchant you and will never cease to cause you wonderment at its perfection. This step, the smallest ever taken, is still the greatest accomplishment of all in God's plan of atonement. All else is learned, but this is given, complete and holy perfect. No one but him who planned salvation could complete it thus. The real world in its loveliness you learn to reach. Fantasies are all undone and no one and nothing remains still bound by them and by your own forgiveness you are free to see. Yet what you see is only what you made with the blessing of your forgiveness on it and with this final blessing of God's Son upon himself, the real perception born of the new perspective he has learned has served his purpose. The stars will disappear in light and the sun that opened up the world to beauty will vanish. Perception will be meaningless when it has been perfected for everything that has been used for learning will have no function. Nothing will ever change, no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that perception made possible will still occur. The perception of the real world will be so short that you will barely have time to thank God for it for God will take his last step swiftly when you have reached the real world and have been made ready for him. The real world is attained simply by the complete forgiveness of the old, the world you see without forgiveness. The great transformer of perception will undertake with you the careful searching of the mind that made this world and then cover to you the seeming reasons for your making it. In the light of the real reason that he brings, as you follow him, he will show you that there is no reason here at all. Each spot his reason touches grows alive with beauty and what seemed ugly in the darkness of your lack of reason is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity could be without a hidden spark of beauty that gentleness could release. All this beauty will rise to bless your sight as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes for forgiveness literally transforms vision and lets you see the real world reaching quietly and gently across chaos removing all illusions that had twisted your perception and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder in a blade of grass, a sign of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily into his home and there he knows he has always rested there in peace. Even salvation will become a dream and vanish from his mind. For salvation is the end of dreams and with the closing of the dream will have no meaning. Who, awake in heaven, could dream that there could ever be need of salvation? How much do you want salvation? It will give you the real world trembling with readiness to be given you. The eagerness of the Holy Spirit to give you this is so intense he would not wait, although he waits in patience. Meet his patience with your impatience at delay in meeting him. Go out in gladness to meet with your Redeemer and walk with him in trust out of this world and into the real world of beauty and forgiveness. And from the workbook lesson 134, let me perceive forgiveness as it is. Let us review the meaning of forgive for it is apt to be distorted and to be perceived as something that entails an unfair sacrifice of righteous wrath, a gift unjustified and undeserved and a complete denial of the truth. In such a view, forgiveness must be seen as mere eccentric folly and this course appear to rest salvation on a whim. This twisted view of what forgiveness means is easily corrected when you can accept the fact that pardon is not asked for what is true. It must be limited to what is false. It is irrelevant to everything except illusions. Truth is God's creation and to pardon that is meaningless. All truth belongs to him, reflects his laws and radiates his love. Does this need pardon? How can you forgive the sinless and eternally benign? The major difficulty that you find in genuine forgiveness on your part is that you still believe you must forgive the truth and not illusions. You conceive of pardon as a vain attempt to look past what is there to overlook the truth in an unfounded effort to deceive yourself by making an illusion true. This twisted viewpoint but reflects the hold that the idea of sin retains as yet upon your mind as you regard yourself. Because you think your sins are real, you look on pardon as deception for it is impossible to think of sin as true and not believe forgiveness as a lie. Thus is forgiveness really but a sin like all the rest. It says the truth is false and smiles on the corrupt as if they were as blameless as the grass, as white as snow. It is delusional in what it thinks it can accomplish. It would see as right, the plainly wrong, the loathsome as the good. Pardon is no escape in such a view. It merely is a further sign that sin is unforgivable, at best to be concealed, denied, or called another name for pardon is treachery to truth. Guilt cannot be forgiven if you sin, your guilt is everlasting. Those who are forgiven from the view their sins are real are pitifully mocked and twice condemned, first by themselves for what they think they did and once again by those who pardon them. It is sin's unreality that makes forgiveness natural and the Holy Sane a deep relief to those who offer it, a quiet blessing where it is received. It does not countenance illusions but collects them lightly with a little laugh and gently lays them at the feet of truth and there they disappear entirely. Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness and looks straight through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes and merely says to them, My brother, what you think is not the truth. The strength of pardon is its honesty which is so uncorrupted that it sees illusions as illusions, not as truth. It is because of this that it becomes the undeceiver in the face of lies, the great restorer of the simple truth. By its ability to overlook what is not there, it opens up the way to truth which has been blocked by dreams of guilt. Now are you free to follow in the way your true forgiveness opens up to you for if one brother has received this gift of you, the door is open to yourself. There is a simple way to find the door to true forgiveness and perceive that it is open wide and welcome. When you feel that you are tempted to accuse someone of sin in any form, do not allow your mind to dwell on what you think he did for that is self-deception. Ask instead, would I accuse myself of doing this? Thus will you see alternatives for choice in terms that render choosing meaningful and keep your mind as free of guilt and pain as God himself intended it to be and as it is in truth. It is but lies that would condemn. In truth is innocence the only thing there is. Forgiveness stands between illusions and the truth, between the world you see and that which lies beyond, between the hell of guilt and heaven's gate. Across this bridge is powerful as love which laid its blessing on it, art all dreams of evil and of hatred and attack brought silently to truth. They are not kept to swell and bluster and to terrify the foolish dreamer who believes in them. He has been gently wakened from his dream by understanding what he thought he saw was never there. And now he cannot feel that all escape has been denied to him. He does not have to fight to save himself. He does not have to kill the dragons which he sought pursued him. Nor need he erect the heavy walls of stone and iron doors he thought would make him safe. He can remove the ponderous and useless armor made to chain his mind to fear and misery. His step is light. As he lifts his foot to stride ahead, a star is left behind to point the way to those who follow him. Forgiveness must be practiced for the world cannot perceive its meaning, nor provide a guide to teach you its benevolence. There is no thought in all the world that leads to any understanding of the laws it follows, nor the thought that it reflects. It is as alien to the world as is your own reality, and yet it joins your mind with the reality in you. Today we practice true forgiveness at the time of joining be no more delayed, for we would meet with our reality in freedom and in peace. Our practicing becomes the footsteps lighting the way for all our brothers who will follow us to the reality we share with them. That this may be accomplished, let us give a quarter of an hour twice a day and spend it with the guide who understands the meaning of forgiveness and was sent to us to teach it. Let us ask of him, let me perceive forgiveness as it is, then choose one brother as he will direct and catalog his, quote, sins, as one by one they cross your mind. Be certain not to dwell on any one of them, but realize that you are using his, quote, offenses, but to save the world from all ideas of sin. Briefly consider all the evils, the evil things you thought of him. And each time ask yourself, what I condemn myself for doing this, let him be freed of all the thoughts you had of sin in him. And now you are prepared for freedom. If you have been practicing this far in willingness and honesty, you will begin to sense a lifting up, a lightning of weight across your chest, a deep and certain feeling of relief. The time remaining should be given to experiencing the escape from all the heavy change you sought to lay upon your brother, but were laid upon yourself. Forgiveness should be practiced through the day, for there will still be many times when you forget its meaning and attack yourself. When this occurs, allow your mind to see through this illusion. As you tell yourself, let me perceive forgiveness as it is. Would I accuse myself of doing this? I will not lay this chain upon myself. In everything you do, remember this, no one is crucified alone, and yet no one can enter heaven by himself. Amen.