The Secret Of Salvation

[Miracles Are Seen In Light]

"The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself. No
matter what the form of the attack, this still is true. Whoever takes the role of
enemy and of attacker, still is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of
any pain and suffering you feel, this is still true. For you would not react at
all to figures in a dream you knew that you were dreaming. Let them be as hateful
and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to
recognize it is your dream."
- A Course in Miracles, Chapter 27, Section 8


The above can only be concluded to be saying that you are in control of other's
thoughts and actions.


Verily, that's what it's saying. But:

"Freedom cannot be learned by tyranny of any kind, and the perfect equality of all
God's Sons cannot be recognized through the dominion of one mind over another.
God's Sons are equal in will, all being the Will of their Father. This is the
only lesson I came to teach."
- A Course in Miracles, Chapter 8, Section 4

[Miracles Are Seen In Light]

The Responsibility for Sight

We have repeated how little is asked of you to learn this course. It is the same
small willingness you need to have your whole relationship transformed to joy; the
little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit for which he gives you everything; the
very little on which salvation rests; the tiny change of mind by which the
crucifixion is changed to resurrection. And being true, it is so simple that it
cannot fail to be completely understood. Rejected yes, but not ambiguous. And if
you choose against it now it will not be because it is obscure, but rather that
this little cost seemed, in your judgment, to be too much to pay for peace.

This is the only thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release from pain
and the complete escape from sin, all to be given you. Say only this, but mean it
with no reservations, for here the power of salvation lies:


_I am responsible for what I see_.

_I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would achieve_.

_And everything that seems to happen to me I ask for and receive as I have asked_.


Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done to
you. Acknowledge but that you have been mistaken, and all effects of your
mistakes will disappear.

It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events outside of him. It is
impossible that happenings that come to him were not his choice. His power of
decision is the determiner of every situation in which he seems to find himself by
chance or accident. No accident nor chance is possible within the universe as God
created it, outside of which is nothing. Suffer, and you decided sin was your
goal. Be happy, and you gave the power of decision to him who must decide for God
for you. This is the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit, and even this he
gives to you to give yourself. For by this gift is given you the power to release
your savior, that he may give salvation unto you.

Begrudge not then this little offering. Withhold it, and you keep the world as
now you see it. Give it away, and everything you see goes with it. Never was so
much given for so little. In the holy instant is this exchange effected and
maintained. Here is the world you do not want brought to the one you do. And
here the one you do is given you because you want it. Yet for this, the power of
your wanting must first be recognized. You must accept its strength, and not its
weakness. You must perceive that what is strong enough to make a world can let it
go, and can accept correction if it is willing to see that it was wrong.

The world you see is but the idle witness that you were right. This witness is
insane. You trained it in its testimony, and as it gave it back to you, you
listened and convinced yourself that what it saw was true. You did this to
yourself. See only this, and you will also see how circular the reasoning on
which your "seeing" rests. This was not given you. This was your gift to you and
to your brother. Be willing, then, to have it taken from him and be replaced with
truth. And as you look upon the change in him, it will be given you to see it in
yourself.

Perhaps you do not see the need for you to give this little offering. Look
closer, then, at what it is. And, very simply, see in it the whole exchange of
separation for salvation. All that the ego is, is an idea that it is possible
that things should happen to the Son of God without his will; and thus without the
Will of his Creator, Whose Will cannot be separate from his own. This is the Son
of God's replacement for his will, a mad revolt against what must forever be. This
is the statement that he has the power to make God powerless and so to take it for
himself, and leave himself without what God has willed for him. This is the mad
idea you have enshrined upon your altars, and which you worship. And everything
that threatens this seems to attack your faith, for here is it invested. Think
not that you are faithless, for your belief and trust in this is strong indeed.

The Holy Spirit can give you faith in holiness and vision to see it easily enough.
But you have not left open and unoccupied the altar where the gifts belong.
Where they should be, you have set up your idols to something else. This other
"will," which seems to tell you what must happen, you give reality. And what
would show you otherwise must therefore seem unreal. All that is asked of you is
to make room for truth. You are not asked to make or do what lies beyond your
understanding. All you are asked to do is *let it in* ; only to stop your
interference with what will happen of itself; simply to recognize again the
presence of what you thought you gave away.

Be willing, for an instant, to leave your altars free of what you placed upon
them, and what is really there you cannot fail to see. The holy instant is not an
instant of creation, but of recognition. For recognition comes of vision and
suspended judgment. Then only it is possible to look within and see what must be
there, plainly in sight, and wholly independent of inference and judgment. Undoing
is not your task, but it is up to you to welcome it or not. Faith and desire go
hand in hand, for everyone believes in what he wants.

We have already said that wishful thinking is how the ego deals with what it
wants, to make it so. There is no better demonstration of the power of wanting,
and therefore of faith, to make its goals seem real and possible. Faith in the
unreal leads to adjustments of reality to make it fit the goal of madness. The
goal of sin induces the perception of a fearful world to justify its purpose. What
you desire, you will see. And if its reality is false, you will uphold it by not
realizing all the adjustments you have introduced to make it so.

When vision is denied, confusion of cause and effect becomes inevitable. The
purpose now becomes to keep obscure the cause of the effect, and make effect
appear to be a cause. This seeming independence of effect enables it to be
regarded as standing by itself, and capable of serving as a cause of the events
and feelings its maker thinks it causes. Earlier, we spoke of your desire to
create your own creator, and be father and not son to him. This is the same
desire. The Son is the Effect, whose Cause he would deny. And so he seems to
*be* the cause, producing real effects. Nothing can have effects without a cause,
and to confuse the two is merely to fail to understand them both.

It is as needful that you recognize you made the world you see, as that you
recognize that you did not create yourself. *They are the same mistake* . Nothing
created not by your Creator has any influence over you. And if you think what you
have made can tell you what you see and feel, and place your faith in its ability
to do so, you are denying your Creator and believing that you made yourself. For
if you think the world you made has power to make you what it wills, you are
confusing Son and Father; effect and Source.

The Son's creations are like his Father's. Yet in creating them the Son does not
delude himself that he is independent of his Source. His union with It is the
source of his creating. Apart from this he has no power to create, and what he
makes is meaningless. It changes nothing in creation, depends entirely upon the
madness of its maker, and cannot serve to justify the madness. Your brother
thinks he made the world with you. Thus he denies creation. With you, he thinks
the world he made, made him. Thus he denies he made it.

Yet the truth is you were both created by a loving Father, who created you
together and as one. See what "proves" otherwise, and you deny your whole
reality. But grant that everything that seems to stand between you, keeping you
from each other and separate from your Father, you made in secret, and the instant
of release has come to you. All its effects are gone, because its source has been
uncovered. It is its seeming independence of its source that keeps you prisoner.
This is the same mistake as thinking you are independent of the Source by which
you were created, and have never left.

- A Course in Miracles, Chapter 21, Section 2 (3pdf)
https://tinyurl.com/A-Course-In-Miracles-pdf

[Miracles Are Seen In Light]

Salvation Is For The Mind, And It Is Attained Through Peace

"Salvation is for the mind, and it is attained through peace. This is the only
thing that can be saved and the only way to save it. Any response other than love
arises from a confusion about the "what" and the "how" of salvation, and this is
the only answer. Never lose sight of this, and never allow yourself to believe,
even for an instant, that there is another answer. For you will surely place
yourself among the poor, who do not understand that they dwell in abundance and
that salvation is come.

To identify with the ego is to attack yourself and make yourself poor. That is
why everyone who identifies with the ego feels deprived. What he experiences then
is depression or anger, because what he did was to exchange self-love for
self-hate, making him afraid of himself. He does not realize this. Even if he is
fully aware of anxiety he does not perceive its source as his own ego
identification, and he always tries to handle it by making some sort of insane
"arrangement" with the world. He always perceives this world as outside himself,
for this is crucial to his adjustment. He does not realize that he makes this
world, for there is no world outside of him.

If only the loving thoughts of God's Son are the world's reality, the real world
must be in his mind. His insane thoughts, too, must be in his mind, but an
internal conflict of this magnitude he cannot tolerate. A split mind is
endangered, and the recognition that it encompasses completely opposed thoughts
within itself is intolerable. Therefore the mind projects the split, not the
reality. Everything you perceive as the outside world is merely your attempt to
maintain your ego identification, for everyone believes that identification is
salvation. Yet consider what has happened, for thoughts do have consequences to
the thinker. You have become at odds with the world as you perceive it, because
you think it is antagonistic to you. This is a necessary consequence of what you
have done. You have projected outward what is antagonistic to what is inward, and
therefore you would have to perceive it this way. That is why you must realize
that your hatred is in your mind and not outside it before you can get rid of it;
and why you must get rid of it before you can perceive the world as it really is.

I said before that God so loved the world that he gave it to his only begotten
Son. God does love the real world, and those who perceive its reality cannot see
the world of death. For death is not of the real world, in which everything
reflects the eternal. God gave you the real world in exchange for the one you
made out of your split mind, and which is the symbol of death. For if you could
really separate yourself from the Mind of God you would die.

The world you perceive is a world of separation. Perhaps you are willing to
accept even death to deny your Father. Yet he would not have it so, and so it is
not so. You still cannot will against him, and that is why you have no control
over the world you made. It is not a world of will because it is governed by the
desire to be unlike God, and this desire is not will. The world you made is
therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without
meaning of any kind. For it is made out of what you do not want, projected from
your mind because you are afraid of it. Yet this world is only in the mind of its
maker, along with his real salvation. Do not believe it is outside of yourself,
for only by recognizing where it is will you gain control over it. For you do
have control over your mind, since the mind is the mechanism of decision.

If you will recognize that all the attack you perceive is in your own mind and
nowhere else, you will at last have placed its source, and where it begins it must
end. For in this same place also lies salvation. The altar of God where Christ
abideth is there. You have defiled the altar, but not the world. Yet Christ has
placed the Atonement on the altar for you. Bring your perceptions of the world to
this altar, for it is the altar to truth. There you will see your vision changed,
and there you will learn to see truly. From this place, where God and his Son
dwell in peace and where you are welcome, you will look out in peace and behold
the world truly. Yet to find the place, you must relinquish your investment in
the world as you project it, allowing the Holy Spirit to extend the real world to
you from the altar of God."

- A Course in Miracles, Chapter 12, Section 3
"The Holy Spirit's Curriculum," "The Investment in Reality"

[Miracles Are Seen In Light]

Bump