 We continue today with chapter 16, The Bridge to the Real World. The search for the special relationship is the sign that you equate yourself with the ego and not with God. For the special relationship has value only to the ego. To the ego, unless a relationship has special value, it has no meaning, for it perceives all love as special. Yet this cannot be natural, for it is unlike the relationship of God and His Son, and all relationships that are unlike this one must be unnatural. For God created love as He would have it be and gave it as it is. Love has no meaning except as its Creator defined it by His will. It is impossible to define it otherwise and understand it. Love is freedom. To look for it by placing yourself in bondage is to separate yourself from it. For the love of God no longer seek for union and separation nor for freedom and bondage. As you release, so will you be released. Forget this not, or love will be unable to find you and comfort you. There is a way in which the Holy Spirit asks your help if you would have His. The Holy Instant is His most helpful aid in protecting you from the attraction of guilt, the real lure in the special relationship. You do not recognize that this is its real appeal, for the ego has taught you that freedom lies in it. If the closer you look at the special relationship, the more apparent it becomes that it must foster guilt and therefore must imprison. The special relationship is totally meaningless without a body. If you value it, you must also value the body. And what you value, you will keep. The special relationship is a device for limiting yourself to a body and for limiting your perception of others to theirs. The great rays would establish the total lack of value of the special relationship if they were seen. For in seeing them, the body would disappear because its value would be lost. And so your whole investment in seeing it would be withdrawn from it. You see the world you value. On this side of the bridge, you see the world of separate bodies seeking to join each other in separate unions and to become one by losing. When two individuals seek to become one, they are trying to decrease their magnitude. Each would deny his power, for the separate union excludes the universe. Far more is left outside than would be taken in, for God is left without and nothing taken in. If one such union were made in perfect faith, the universe would enter into it. Yet the special relationship the ego seeks does not include even one whole individual. The ego wants but part of him and sees only this part and nothing else. Across the bridge it is so different for a time the body is still seen but not exclusively as it is seen here. The little spark that holds the great rays within it is also visible and this spark cannot be limited long to littleness. Once you have crossed the bridge, the value of the body is so diminished in your sight that you will see no need at all to magnify it. For you will realize that only value the body has is to enable you to bring your brothers to the bridge with you and to be released together there. The bridge itself is nothing more than a transition in the perspective of reality. On this side, everything you see is grossly distorted and completely out of perspective. What is little and insignificant is magnified and what is strong and powerful cut down to littleness. In the transition there is a period of confusion in which a sense of actual disorientation may occur. But fear it not for it means only that you have been willing to let go your hold on the distorted frame of reference that seemed to hold your world together. This frame of reference is built around this special relationship. Without this illusion there could be no meaning you would still seek here. Fear not that you will be abruptly lifted up and hurled into reality. Time is kind and if you use it on behalf of reality you will keep gentle pace with you in your transition. The urgency is only in dislodging your mind from its fixed position here. This will not leave you homeless and without a frame of reference. The period of disorientation which precedes the actual transition is far shorter than the time it took to fix your mind so firmly on illusions. Delay will hurt you now more than before only because you realize it is delay and that escape from pain is really possible. Find hope and comfort rather than despair in this. You could not long find even the illusion of love in any special relationship here where you are no longer wholly insane and you would soon recognize the guilt of self-betrayal for what it is. Nothing you seek to strengthen in this special relationship is really part of you and you cannot keep part of the thought system that taught you it was real and understand the thought that knows what you are. You have allowed the thought of your reality to enter your mind and because you invited it it will abide with you. Your love for it will not allow you to betray yourself and you could not enter into a relationship where it could not go with you for you would not want to be apart from it. Be glad you have escaped the mockery of salvation the ego offered you and look not back with longing on the travesty it made of your relationships. Now no one needs suffer for you have come too far to yield to the illusion of the beauty and the holiness of guilt. Only the holy insane could look on death and suffering, sickness and despair and see it thus. What guilt has wrought is ugly, fearful and very dangerous. See no illusion of truth and beauty there. And be you thankful there is a place where truth and beauty wait for you. Go on to meet them gladly and learn how much waits you for the simple willingness to give up nothing because it is nothing. The new perspective you will gain from crossing over will be the understanding of where heaven is. From this side it seems to be outside and across the ridge. It as you cross to join it it will join with you and become one with you. And you will think in glad astonishment that for all this you gave up nothing. The joy of heaven which has no limit is increased with each light that returns to take its rightful place within it. Wait no longer for the love of God and you and may the holy instant speed you on the way as it will surely do if you let it come to you. The Holy Spirit ask only this little help of you. Whenever your thoughts wander to a special relationship which still attracts you, enter with him into a holy instant and there let him release you. He needs only your willingness to share his perspective to give it to you completely. And your willingness need not be complete because his is perfect. It is his task to atone for your unwillingness by his perfect faith and it is his faith you share with him there. Out of your recognition of your unwillingness for your release his perfect willingness is giving you. Call upon him for heaven is at his call and let him call on heaven for you. And from the workbook lesson 131, no one can fail who seeks to reach the truth. Failure is all about you while you seek for goals that cannot be achieved. You look for permanence in the impermanent, for love where there is none, for safety in the midst of danger, immortality within the darkness of the dream of death. Who could succeed where contradiction is the setting of his searching and the place to which he comes to find stability? Goals that are meaningless are not attained. There is no way to reach them for the means by which you strive for them are meaningless as they are. Who can use such senseless means and hope through them to gain in anything? Where can they lead and what could they achieve that offers any hope of being real? Pursuit of the imagined needs leads to death because it is the search for nothingness. And while you seek for life you ask for death. You look for safety and security while in your heart you pray for danger and protection for the little dream you made. Yet searching is inevitable here for this you came and you surely will do the thing you came for. But the world cannot dictate the goal for which you search unless you give it the power to do so. Otherwise you are still free to choose a goal that lies beyond the world in every worldly thought and one that comes to you from an idea relinquished yet remembered, old yet new, an echo of a heritage for God yet holding everything you really want. Be glad that search you must. Be glad as well to learn you search for heaven and must find the goal you really want. No one can fail to want this goal and reach it in the end. God's son cannot seek vainly though he tried to force delay to seep himself and think that it is hell he seeks. When he is wrong he finds correction. When he wanders off he is led back to his appointed task. No one remains in hell for no one can abandon his creator nor affect his perfect timeless and unchanging love. You will find heaven. Everything you seek but this will fall away. Yet not because it has been taken from you it will go because you do not want it. You will reach the goal you really want as certain as God created you in sinlessness. Why wait for heaven? It is here today. Time is the great illusion. It is past or in the future. Yet this cannot be if it is where God wills his son to be. How could the will of God be in the past or yet to happen? What he wills is now without a past and holy futureless. It is as far removed from time as is a tiny candle from distant star or what you chose from what you really want. Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways. Its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of him. He did not make two minds with heaven as the glad effect of one and earth the other's sorry outcome which is heaven's opposite in every way. God does not suffer conflict nor is his creation split in two. How could it be his son could be in hell when God himself established him in heaven? Could he lose what the eternal will has given him to be his home forever? Let us not try longer to impose an alien will upon God's single purpose. He is here because he wills to be and what he wills is present now beyond the reach of time. Today we will not choose a paradox in place of truth. How could the son of God make time to take away the will of God? He thus denies himself and contradicts what has no opposite. He thinks he made a hell opposing heaven and believes that he abides in what does not exist. While heaven is the place he cannot find. Leave foolish thoughts like these behind today and turn your mind to true ideas instead. No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth and it is truth we seek to reach today. We will devote ten minutes to this goal three times today and we will ask to see the rising of the real world to replace the foolish images that we hold dear with true ideas arising in the place of thoughts that have no meaning, no effect, and neither source nor substance in truth. This we acknowledge as we start upon our practice periods. Begin with this. I ask to see a different world and think a different kind of thought from those I made. The world I seek I did not make alone. The thoughts I want to think are not my own. For several minutes watch your mind and see although your eyes are closed the senseless world you think is real. Review the thoughts as well which are compatible with such a world in which you think are true. Then let them go and sink below them to the holy place where they cannot enter. There is a door beneath them in your mind which you could not completely lock to hide what lies beyond. Seek for that door and find it. But before you try to open it, remind yourself no one can fail who seeks to reach the truth and it is this request you make today. Nothing but this has any meaning now. No other goal is valued now nor sought. Nothing before this door you really want and only what lies past it do you seek. Put out your hand and see how easily the door swings open with your one intent to go beyond it. Angels light the way so that all darkness vanishes and you are standing in a light so bright and clear that you can understand all things you see. A tiny moment of surprise perhaps will make you pause before you realize the world you see before you in the light reflects the truth you knew and did not quite forget in wandering away in dreams. You cannot fail today. There walks with you the spirit heaven sent you that you might approach this door someday and through his aid slip effortlessly past it to the light. Today that day has come. Today God keeps his ancient promise to his holy son as does his son remember his to him. This is a day of gladness for we come to the appointed time and place where you will find the goal of all your searching here and all the seeking of the world which end together as you pass beyond the door. Remember often that today should be a time of special gladness and refrain from dismal thoughts and meaningless laments. Salvation's time has come. Today is set by heaven itself to be a time of grace for you and for the world. If you forget this happy fact, remind yourself with this. Today I seek and find all that I want. My single purpose offers it to me. Anyone can fail who seeks to reach the truth.