You
may still complain about fear, but you nevertheless persist in making yourself fearful. I
have already indicated that you cannot ask me to release you from fear. I know it does not
exist, but you do not. If I intervened between your thoughts and their results, I would be
tampering with a basic law of cause and effect; the most fundamental law there is. I would
hardly help you if I depreciated the power of your own thinking. This would be in direct
opposition to the purpose of this course. It is much more helpful to remind you that you
do not guard your thoughts carefully enough. You may feel that at this point it would take
a miracle to enable you to do this, which is perfectly true. You are not used to
miracle-minded thinking, but you can be trained to think that way. All miracle workers
need that kind of training.
I
cannot let you leave your mind unguarded, or you will not be able to help me. Miracle
working entails a full realization of the power of thought in order to avoid miscreation.
Otherwise a miracle will be necessary to set the mind itself straight, a circular process
that would not foster the time collapse for which the miracle was intended. The miracle
worker must have genuine respect for true cause and effect as a necessary condition for
the miracle to occur.
Both
miracles and fear come from thoughts. If you are not free to choose one, you would also
not be free to choose the other. By choosing the miracle you have rejected fear, if only
temporarily. You have been fearful of everyone and everything. You are afraid of God, of
me and of yourself. You have misperceived or miscreated us, and believe in what you have
made. You would not have done this if you were not afraid of your own thoughts. The
fearful must miscreate, because they misperceive creation. When you miscreate you are in
pain. The cause and effect principle now becomes a real expediter, though only
temporarily. Actually, “Cause” is a term properly belonging to God, and His
“Effect” is His Son. This entails a set of Cause and Effect relationships
totally different from those you introduce into miscreation. The fundamental conflict in
this world, then, is between creation and miscreation. All fear is implicit in the second,
and all love in the first. The conflict is therefore one between love and fear.
It
has already been said that you believe you cannot control fear because you yourself made
it, and your belief in it seems to render it out of your control. Yet any attempt to
resolve the error through attempting the mastery of fear is useless. In fact, it asserts
the power of fear by the very assumption that it need be mastered. The true resolution
rests entirely on mastery through love. In the interim, however, the sense of conflict is
inevitable, since you have placed yourself in a position where you believe in the power of
what does not exist.
Nothing
and everything cannot coexist. To believe in one is to deny the other. Fear is really
nothing and love is everything. Whenever light enters darkness, the darkness is abolished.
What you believe is true for you. In this sense the separation has occurred, and to deny
it is merely to use denial inappropriately. However, to concentrate on error is only a
further error. The initial corrective procedure is to recognize temporarily that there is
a problem, but only as an indication that immediate correction is needed. This establishes
a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay. It should be
emphasized, however, that ultimately no compromise is possible between everything and
nothing. Time is essentially a device by which all compromise in this respect can be given
up. It only seems to be abolished by degrees, because time itself involves intervals that
do not exist. Miscreation made this necessary as a corrective device. The statement
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” needs only one slight
correction to be meaningful in this context; “He gave it to His only begotten
Son.”
It
should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons,
every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness
transcends the sum of its parts. However, this is obscured as long as any of its parts is
missing. That is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all the parts of the
Sonship have returned. Only then can the meaning of wholeness in the true sense be
understood. Any part of the Sonship can believe in error or incompleteness if he so
chooses. However, if he does so, he is believing in the existence of nothingness. The
correction of this error is the Atonement.
I
have already briefly spoken about readiness, but some additional points might be helpful
here. Readiness is only the prerequisite for accomplishment. The two should not be
confused. As soon as a state of readiness occurs, there is usually some degree of desire
to accomplish, but it is by no means necessarily undivided. The state does not imply more
than a potential for a change of mind. Confidence cannot develop fully until mastery has
been accomplished. We have already attempted to correct the fundamental error that fear
can be mastered, and have emphasized that the only real mastery is through love. Readiness
is only the beginning of confidence. You may think this implies that an enormous amount of
time is necessary between readiness and mastery, but let me remind you that time and space
are under my control.
A Course in Miracles
Chapter 2
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