 We continue on today with Chapter 5, Introduction. To heal is to make happy. I have told you to think how many opportunities you have had to gladden yourself and how many you have refused. This is the same as telling you that you have refused to heal yourself. The light that belongs to you is the light of joy. Redience is not associated with sorrow. Joy calls forth an integrated willingness to share it and promotes the mind's natural impulse to respond as one. Those who attempt to heal without being wholly joyous themselves call forth different kinds of responses at the same time and thus deprive others of the joy of responding wholeheartedly. To be wholehearted, you must be happy. If fear and love cannot coexist, and if it is impossible to be wholly fearful and remain alive, the only possible whole state is that of love. There is no difference between love and joy. Therefore, the only possible whole state is the holy joyous. To heal or to make joyous is therefore the same as to integrate and to make one. That is why it makes no difference to what part or by what part of the sonship the healing is offered. Every part benefits and benefits equally. You are being blessed by every beneficent thought of any of your brothers anywhere. You should want to bless them in return out of gratitude. You need not know them individually or they you. The light is so strong that it radiates throughout the sonship and returns thanks to the Father for radiating His joy upon it. Only God's holy children are worthy channels of His beautiful joy because only they are beautiful enough to hold it by sharing it. It is impossible for a child of God to love his neighbor except as himself. That is why the healer's prayer is, Let me know this brother as I know myself. The invitation to the Holy Spirit. Healing is a thought by which two minds perceive their oneness and become glad. This gladness calls to every part of the sonship to rejoice with them and lets God go out into them and through them. Only the healed mind can experience revelation with lasting effect because revelation is an experience of pure joy. If you do not choose to be holy joyous, your mind cannot have what it does not choose to be. Remember that spirit knows no difference between having and being. The higher mind thinks according to the law's spirit of base and therefore honors only the laws of God. To spirit getting is meaningless and giving is all. Having everything, spirit holds everything by giving it and thus creates as the Father created. While this kind of thinking is totally alien to having things, even to the lower mind it is quite comprehensible in connection with ideas. If you share a physical possession, you do divide its ownership. If you share an idea, however, you do not lessen it. All of it is still yours although all of it has been given away. Further, if the one to whom you give it accepts it as his, he reinforces it in your mind and thus increases it. If you can accept the concept that the world is one of ideas, the whole belief in the false association the ego makes between giving and losing is gone. Let us start our process of reawakening with just a few simple concepts. Thoughts increase by being given away. The more I believe in them, the stronger they become. Everything is an idea. How then can giving and losing be associated? This is the invitation to the Holy Spirit. I have said already that I can reach up and bring the Holy Spirit down to you, but I can bring him to you only at your own invitation. The Holy Spirit is in your right mind as he was in mine. The Bible says, may the mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus and uses this as a blessing. It is the blessing of miracle-mindfulness. It asks that you may think as I thought, joining with me in Christ thinking. The Holy Spirit is the only part of the Holy Trinity that has a symbolic function. He is referred to as the healer, the comforter, and the guide. He is also described as something, quote, separate, apart from the Father and from the Son. I myself said, if I go, I will send you another comforter and he will abide with you. His symbolic function makes the Holy Spirit difficult to understand because symbolism is open to different interpretations. As a man and also one of God's creations, my right thinking, which came from the Holy Spirit or the universal inspiration, taught me first and foremost that this inspiration is for all. I could not have it myself without knowing this. The word no is proper in this context because the Holy Spirit is so close to knowledge that he calls it forth or better allows it to come. I have spoken before of the higher or true perception which is so near to truth that God himself can flow across the little gap. Knowledge is always ready to flow everywhere but it cannot oppose. Therefore you can obstruct it although you can never lose it. The Holy Spirit is the Christ mind which is aware of the knowledge that lies beyond perception. He came into being with the separation as a protection inspiring the Atonement Principle at the same time. Before that there was no need for healing for no one was comfortless. The voice of the Holy Spirit is the call to Atonement or the resurrection of the integrity of the mind. When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed there will be no call to return. But what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God to bless their creations and keep them in the light of joy. God honored even the miscreations of his children because they had made them. But he also blessed his children with a way of thinking that could raise their perceptions so high they could reach almost back to him. The Holy Spirit is the mind of the Atonement. He represents a state of mind close enough to one-mindedness that transferred to it as at last possible. Perception is not knowledge but it can be transferred to knowledge or crossover into it. It might even be more helpful here to use the literal meaning of transferred or carried over since the last step is taken by God. The Holy Spirit, the shared inspiration of all the Sonship induces a kind of perception in which many elements are like those in the Kingdom of Heaven itself. First, its universality is perfectly clear and no one who attains it could believe for one instant that sharing it involves anything but gain. Second, it is incapable of attack and is therefore truly open. This means that although it does not engender knowledge, it does not obstruct it in any way. Finally, it points the way beyond the healing that brings and leads the mind beyond its own integration toward the path of creation. It is at this point that sufficient quantitative change occurs to produce a real qualitative shift. And from the workbook, lesson 30, God is in everything I see because God is in my mind. The idea for today is the springboard for vision. From this idea, will the world open up before you and you will look upon it and see in it what you have never seen before, nor will what you saw before be even faintly visible to you. Today, we are trying to use a new kind of, quote, projection. We are not attempting to get rid of what we do not like by seeing it outside. Instead, we are trying to see in the world what is in our minds and what we want to recognize is there. Thus, we are trying to join with what we see rather than keeping it apart from us. That is the fundamental difference between vision and the way you see. Today's idea should be applied as often as possible throughout the day. Whenever you have a moment or so, repeat it to yourself slowly, looking about you and trying to realize that the idea applies to everything you do see now or could see now if it were within the range of your sight. Real vision is not limited to concepts such as near and far to help you begin to get used to this idea. Try to think of things beyond your present range as well as those you can actually see as you apply today's idea. Real vision is not only unlimited by space and distance, but it does not depend on the body's eyes at all. The mind is its only source. To aid in helping you to become more accustomed to this idea as well, devote several practice periods to applying today's idea with your eyes closed, using whatever subjects come to mind and looking within rather than without. Today's idea applies equally to both. God is in everything I see because God is in my mind. So the springboard for vision follows from our beautiful lesson yesterday. God is in everything I see and this tells us how this works when it brings in the causation of the light and love in the mind being radiated to everything and everyone without exception. It brings in the reason why God is in everything I see. It truly shows the impossibility of pantheism, the belief that God indwells in objects by bringing God back solely to the mind and seeing that the mind radiates to everything and everyone. As Jesus teaches in the Course, mind reaches to itself. It does not go out. There really is nothing else but light, whoosh past ideas of time and space and distance, of location, of coordinates in the cosmos. As we see this one pure idea of light, this beautiful source, God is in my mind and therefore is in everything without exception. So the light of God is in me and radiates through me to the whole universe, the whole cosmos. And unlike projection, which is the attempt to get rid of something that is not liked by seeing it outside, now in opening to vision we are trying to see in the world what is in our minds and what we want to recognize is there. God is there. God is in the mind. God has never left. With the power of God in our mind we can join with everything that we seem to see in perception. There is nothing that is apart from God. There is nothing apart from this light within. This is so different from the body's eyes which were made by the ego as the body was made by the ego, as part of distorted perception, as part of the focus on differences. Today we sink deep inside into God, looking for the sameness that God brings to everything and everyone, releasing the belief that anything or anyone could be apart from who we are and who God is. We lay aside these limiting beliefs of near and far, of galaxies, of light-years, of black holes. We lay aside all thoughts of astronomy, astrology. God is in me. God is in my mind. There can be no opposite to God. Seeing is light. Seeing does not depend on the body's eyes at all. Vision has the mind as its only source. We are free in God. Today we pray for vision, the vision of Christ, the vision of pure, pure light as we practice the idea for today. God is in everything I see because God is in my mind.