 We continue today with Chapter 17 The Conditions of Peace The holy instant is nothing more than a special case or an extreme example of what every situation is meant to be. The meaning that the Holy Spirit's purpose has given it is also given to every situation. It calls forth just the same suspension of faithlessness, withheld and left unused, that faith might answer to the call of truth. The holy instant is the shining example, the clear and unequivocal demonstration of the meaning of every relationship and every situation seen as a whole. Faith has accepted every aspect of the situation and faithlessness has not forced any exclusion on it. It is a situation of perfect peace simply because you have let it be what it is. The simple courtesy is all the Holy Spirit ask of you. Let truth be what it is. Do not intrude upon it. Do not attack it. Do not interrupt its coming. Let it encompass every situation and bring you peace. Not even faith is asked of you, for truth asks nothing. Let it enter, and it will call forth and secure for you the faith you need for peace. But rise you not against it, for against your opposition it cannot come. Would you not want to make a holy instant of every situation for such as the gift of faith freely given wherever faithlessness is laid aside, unused? And then the power of the Holy Spirit's purpose is free to use instead. This power instantly transform all situations into one sure and continuous means for establishing his purpose and demonstrating its reality. What has been demonstrated has called for faith and has been given it. Now it becomes a fact from which faith can no longer be withheld. The strain of refusing faith to truth is enormous and far greater than you realize. But to answer truth with faith entails no strain at all. To you who have acknowledged the call of your Redeemer, the strain of not responding to his call seems to be greater than before. This is not so. Before the strain was there, but you attributed it to something else, believing that the quote something else produced it. This was never true. For what does something else produce was sorrow and depression, sickness and pain, darkness and dim imaginings of terror, cold fantasies of fear and fiery dreams of hell. And it was nothing but the intolerable strain of refusing to give faith to truth and see its evident reality. Such was the crucifixion of the Son of God. His faithlessness did this to him. Think carefully before you let yourself use faithlessness against him, for he has risen and you have accepted the cause of his awakening as yours. You have assumed your part in his redemption and you are now fully responsible to him. Fail him not now, for it has been given you to realize what your lack of faith in him must mean to you. His salvation is your only purpose. See only this in every situation and it will be a means for bringing only this. When you accepted truth as the goal for your relationship, you became a giver of peace as surely as your father gave peace to you. For the goal of peace cannot be accepted apart from its conditions and you had faith in it for no one accepts what he does not believe is real. Your purpose has not changed and will not change for you accepted what can never change and nothing that it needs to be forever changeless can you now withhold from it. Your release is certain. Give as you have received and demonstrate that you have risen far beyond any situation that could hold you back and keep you separate from him whose call you answered. From the workbook, lesson 140, only salvation can be said to cure. Cure is a word that cannot be applied to any remedy the world accepts as beneficial. What the world perceives as therapeutic is but what will make the body, quote, better. When it tries to heal the mind, it sees no separation from the body where it thinks the mind exists. Its forms of healing thus must substitute illusion for illusion. One belief in sickness takes another form and so the patient now perceives himself as well. He is not healed. He merely had a dream that he was sick and in the dream he found a magic formula to make him well. Yet he is not awakened from the dream and so his mind remains exactly as it was before. He has not seen the light that would awaken him and end the dream. What difference does the content of a dream make in reality when either sleeps or awakens? There is nothing in between. The happy dreams the Holy Spirit brings are different from the dreaming of the world where one can merely dream he is awake. The dreams forgiveness lets the mind perceive do not induce another form of sleep so that the dreamer dreams another dream. His happy dreams are heralds of the dawn of truth upon the mind. They lead from sleep to gentle waking so that dreams are gone. And thus they cure for all eternity. Atonement heals with certainty and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take. Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible and that is cure indeed. For sickness now is gone with nothing left to which it can return. Peace be to you who have been cured in God and not in idle dreams. For cure must come from holiness and holiness cannot be found where sin is cherished. God abides in holy temples. He is barred where sin has entered, yet there is no place where he is not. And therefore sin can have no home in which to hide from his beneficence. There is no place where holiness is not. And nowhere sin and sickness can abide. This is the thought that cures. It does not make distinctions among unrealities. Nor does it seek to heal what is not sick, unmindful where they need for healing is. This is no magic. It is merely an appeal to truth which cannot fail to heal and heal forever. It is not a thought that judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is and knows that no illusion can be real. Let us not try today to seek to cure what cannot suffer sickness. Healing must be sought but where it is and then applied to what is sick so that it can be cured. There is no remedy the world provides that can affect the change in anything. The mind that brings illusions to the truth is really changed. There is no change but this. For how can one illusion differ from another but in attributes that have no substance, no reality, no core, and nothing that is truly different? Today we seek to change our minds about the source of sickness, for we seek a cure for all illusions, not another shift among them. We will try today to find the source of healing which is in our minds because our Father placed it there for us. It is not farther from us than ourselves. It is as near to us as our own thoughts. So close it is impossible to lose. We need but seek it and it must be found. We will not be misled today by what appears to us as sick. We go beyond appearances today and reach the source of healing from which nothing is exempt. We will succeed to the extent to which we realize that there can never be a meaningful distinction made between what is untrue and equally untrue. Here there are no degrees and no beliefs that what does not exist is truer in some forms than others. All of them are false and can be cured because they are not true. So do we lay aside our amulets, our charms and medicines, our chants and bits of magic, whatever form they take. We will be still and listen for the voice of healing which will cure all ills at once as one. Restoring sameness to the Son of God. No voice but this can cure. Today we hear a single voice which speaks to us of truth where all illusions end and peace returns to the eternal quiet home of God. We awaken hearing Him and let Him speak to us five minutes as the day begins and end the day by listening again five minutes more before we go to sleep. Our only preparation is to let our interfering thoughts be laid aside, not separately, but all of them as one. They are the same. We have no need to make them different and thus delay the time when we can hear our Father speak to us. We hear Him now. We come to Him today with nothing in our hands to which we cling, with lifted hearts and listening minds we pray. Only salvation can be said to cure. Speak to us, Father, that we may be healed and we will feel salvation cover us with soft protection and with peace so deep that no illusion can disturb our minds nor offer proof to us that it is real. This will be learned today and we will say our prayer for healing hourly and take a minute as the hour strikes to hear the answer to our prayer be given us as we attend in silence and enjoy. This is the day when healing comes to us. This is the day when separation ends and we remember who we really are. Amen.