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Chapter 23: The Grace of the Holy Relationship

4. To See or Not to See

The introduction of Reason into the ego’s thought system is the beginning of the ego’s dissolution, because Reason and the ego are contradictory. Nor is it possible for them to coexist in your awareness. For Reason’s Goal is to make plain, and therefore obvious. You can see Reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a perception that has Meaning. Vision is true sense, quite literally. Perception will be understood if it is not the body’s perception. For vision is simple because what is obvious is not made ambiguous. It can be understood. And here do Reason and the ego separate, to go their different ways.

The ego’s entire continuance depends on your accepting its belief that you cannot learn awakening. If you share this belief, then Reason will be unable to make plain your errors to allow for their correction. For Reason sees through errors, telling you that what you thought was real is not. Reason can see the difference between mistakes, which are temporary, and flaw, which is believed to be permanent, because It wants correction, whereas belief in inherent flaw, or “sin,” is the belief that attempted correction will condemn or damn, and so correction is shunned. Therefore Reason tells you that what you thought was uncorrectable can be corrected, and therefore must have been merely an error. The ego’s opposition to correction leads to its fixed belief in unholiness and unworthiness, and disregard of errors as merely mistakes. It looks on nothing that can be truly corrected. Thus does the ego condemn and damn, whereas Reason awakens.

Reason is not awakening in Itself, but It makes way for Peace, and brings you to a state of mind in which awakening can be received by you with Joy. Sin, or the belief in flaw, unholiness and unworthiness, is a block, set like a heavy gate across the Path to Peace, locked and without a key. No one who perceives this block without the help of Reason would try to pass it. The body’s eyes look upon it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to even attempt to pass it. Yet Reason sees through it easily because it is an error. The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from Reason’s Seeing.

Only the form of error attracts the ego. It does not recognize Meaning, and therefore does not know if It is there or not. Everything that the body’s eyes look upon is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the Whole without the Meaning that the Whole would give. And yet mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected. The belief that some mistakes cannot be corrected is merely error in a special form that the ego venerates. It would preserve all errors, and make them into evidence of unworthiness. For here is its own stability, its heavy anchor in the shifting world it made, the rock on which its “church” is built, and where its worshippers are bound to bodies, and believe the body’s “freedom” to do as it wishes, and its death, are their own.

Reason will tell you that the form of error is not what makes it either a punishable and damnable transgression, as the ego believes, or merely a mistake, easily corrected, as Spirit teaches. If what the form conceals is merely a mistake – a mistaken thought, or lack of Love – then the form cannot prevent correction. The body’s eyes perceive only surface and form. They cannot see beyond what they were made to look upon. And they were made to look on error, and not to see through and beyond it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can perceive only illusions, unable to see beyond the granite block of appearance, and stopping at the outside surface and form of everything, which is really nothingness. To this distorted mode of perception, the wall that stands between you and the Truth seems entirely real.

Yet how can perception that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, perceive meaningfully? It is arrested and held back by appearance and form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but appearance and form will be perceived. These eyes, made specifically not to perceive clearly, will never see. For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that looks through them. What was its maker’s goal, but not to see? For this the body’s eyes are ideal means. But not for seeing.

See how the body’s eyes rest on externals, and cannot go beyond. Observe how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond appearance to Meaning. Nothing is so blinding as perception of form. For perception of form means that Understanding has been obscured. Only mistakes have different forms, and so they can deceive. Appearances can be changed because they are not true. Form cannot be Reality because it can be changed.

Reason will tell you that if form is not Reality, it must be illusion, and therefore is not there to see. And if you perceive it, you must be mistaken, for you are perceiving what cannot be real as if it were. What cannot see beyond what is not there must be distorted perception, and must perceive illusions as true. Could such perception, then, recognize the Truth?

Let not the form of anyone’s mistakes keep you from them, whose holiness is yours. Let not the vision of their holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body’s eyes can perceive. Let your awareness of your sisters and brothers not be blocked by your perception of their bodies, or of their mistakes as flaws or sins. What is there in them that you would attack except what you associate with what their bodies demonstrate, which you believe can be sin or flaw?

Beyond their errors is their holiness, and your awakening. You gave them not their holiness, but tried to look upon in them your belief in flaw, unholiness and unworthiness, to save yourself from these. And yet their holiness is your forgiveness. Can you be awakened by making flawed, unholy and unworthy the one whose holiness is your awakening?

Therefore a holy relationship, however newly born, must value Holiness above all else. Holding “unholy” values – values that counter one’s true best interests – will produce confusion in awareness. In an unholy relationship, each one is valued because they seem to justify the other’s belief in what isn’t whole, and therefore isn’t holy. Each perceives within the other what impels them to “sin against their will” or act against their best interests. And thus each lays their mistakes upon the other, and is attracted to the other to perpetuate their own mistakes. And so by their desire to make unholiness real it must become impossible for each to see themself as the cause of their own belief in unholiness.

Reason sees a holy relationship as what it is: a common state of mind, where both give errors gladly to Correction, that both may happily be healed as one.