Corresponding Text Section
Chapter 25: Undoing the Spell of Specialness
8. The Test of Everything on Earth (The Two Children)
How bitterly does everyone tied to this world defend the specialness they want to be the truth! Its wish is law to them, and they obey. Nothing their specialness demands do they withhold. Nothing it “needs” do they deny, because it is what they love. And they hear no other voice while specialness calls to them. No effort is too great, no cost too much, no price too dear, to save their specialness from the least slight, the tiniest attack, the whispered doubt, the hint of threat, or anything but deepest reverence. This is your child in this world of illusions, beloved of you as you are to your Creator. Yet does your specialness stand in place of your true creations, who are Children to you, that you might share the Creatorship of the Divine, not attempt to snatch It from It.
What is this thing that you have made to be your strength? What is this child of Earth, on whom such love is lavished? What is this parody of the Divine’s Creation that takes the place of your creations? And where are your true Children, while you who are Host to the Divine believe that you have found another child that you prefer to Them?
The Memory of the Divine is shared. What is within you and your sisters and brothers still contains all of Creation, everything created and creating and yet to be created. What is in you is changeless, and your Changelessness is recognized in Its acknowledgment. The holiness in you also belongs to your sisters and brothers, and through your seeing it in them, returns to you.
All of the devotion and loyalty you have given specialness belongs to your sisters and brothers, and when given to them returns to you. All of the love and care, the strong protection, the thought by day and night, the deep concern, the powerful conviction that this is you, belongs to them. Everything you give to specialness is their due. And everything due to them is also due to you. How will you know your Worth while specialness claims you instead? How can you fail to know It in your sisters and brothers’ holiness? Seek not to make your specialness the truth, for if it were, you would be lost indeed. Be thankful, rather, that it is given you to see your sisters and brothers’ holiness because it is the Truth. And what is true in them must be as true in you.
Ask yourself this: Can you protect the mind? The body, yes, a little, not from time, but temporarily in time. And much that you intend to protect you hurt. What would you protect the body from, and save it for? For in that choice rests either the body’s health or harm. Protect and save the body for show, as bait to “catch” another body, to house your specialness in better style, or weave a frame of loveliness around your disdain, and you condemn the body to decay and pain. And if you perceive this purpose in your sisters and brothers’ bodies, such is your condemnation of your own. Weave rather, then, a frame of holiness around them, that the Truth may shine in them, and give you safety from pain and decay.
The Creator keeps safe what It created. This Safety cannot be touched with false ideas, because It was not created by them. Let not your foolish fancies frighten you. What is Immortal cannot be attacked. What is only temporal has no effect. Only the purpose that you perceive in anything has meaning, and if that purpose and meaning are true, its Safety rests secure. If not, it has no purpose, and is means for nothing. Whatever is perceived as Means for Truth shares in Its Holiness, and rests in Light as safe as Itself. Nor will that Light go out when these Means are completed. Their holy Purpose gives them Immortality, setting another Light in Heaven where your creations recognize a gift from you, a sign that you have not forgotten them.
The test of everything on Earth is simply this: “What is it for?” The answer makes anything what it must be for you. It has no meaning of itself, being temporal, yet you can give reality to it, according to the purpose that you serve, and therefore would have it serve. Here in this world, you are only means, along with it. In Heaven, Means and End are One, and One with the Creator. There the Divine is Means as well as End. This is the State of true Creation, found not within time, but in Eternity. To no one here is this describable. Nor is there any way to learn what this Condition means. Not until you go past all learning to the Given, not until you make again a holy Home for your creations, is It understood.
A Cocreator with the Creator must have a Cocreation or Child. Yet must this Child have been created like Its Creator—a perfect Being, all-encompassing and all-encompassed, nothing to add to or to take from, not born of size or weight or time, nor held to limits or uncertainties of any kind. Here do Means and End unite as One, and this One is infinite and eternal. All this is true, and yet it has no meaning to anyone who still retains one unlearned lesson of awakening in their memory, one thought with purpose still uncertain, or one wish with a divided aim.
This Course makes no attempt to teach what is beyond learning. Its scope does not exceed your own learning capabilities, except to say that your true creations will come to you when you are ready. In this are the Means and Purpose perceived as separate, because it was believed that they must so be made. And therefore do we deal with them as if they were. It is essential that it be kept in mind that all perception still is upside down until its true Purpose has been understood. Perception does not seem to be a means. And it is this that makes it hard to grasp the entire extent to which it must depend on what you use it for.
Perception seems to teach you what you perceive through showing this to you. Yet it only witnesses to what you taught in making the perception. It is the outward picture of a wish, an image that you wanted to be true. Look at yourself, and you will look upon a body. Perceive this body in a different light, and it will be perceived differently. Without an external source of light, the body will seem to be gone. Yet you are reassured that it is there because you still can sense it with the body’s other senses.
The body is an image that you wanted to be yourself. It became the means to make your wish come true. It provides the eyes with which you look on it, the hands that feel it, and the ears with which you listen to the sounds it makes. It thus proves its own reality to you. In this way is the body made a theory of yourself, with no provisions made for evidence beyond itself, and no escape within its tiny range of perception. Its path is fixed when perceived through its own means of perception. It seems to grow and flourish a while, then to decay and die. And you cannot conceive of yourself apart from it. Yet you perceive it as flawed, and secretly you deplore its limitations and it acts, judging it unworthy of achieving your aspirations. But your specialness whispers, “Here is my own beloved child, with whom I am well pleased.”
Thus does the child of your creative power in this world that is the body become the means to serve its creator’s purpose. Creator and created are here not identical, not even like, but what has been made is still a means to offer to its creator what it wants. Such is the distortion of the Divine’s Creation. For as the creation of Its Children gave Joy to the Divine, and this Creation witnesses to Its Love and shares Its Purpose, so does the body testify to the idea that made it, and speak for this idea’s apparent reality and truth. And thus do there seem to be two children, the one you made and the one created as your Self, and both appear to walk this Earth without a meeting place, and with no encounter. One, the body, your own beloved child, do you look upon outside yourself. The other rests within, Its Creator’s Child, within your sisters and brothers as It is in you.
Their essential difference is not in how they appear, or where they go, or even what they do. Their core difference is that they each have a different purpose. It is this that joins them to what is like them, and separates each from all aspects that have a different purpose. The will of the Children of the Divine is their Creator’s Will. The child of the world of illusions perceives a separate will, and wishes it were real. And thus does its perception serve its wish by giving this wish appearances of realness.
Yet perception can serve another goal. It is not bound to specialness, but it is bound by your choice. And it is given you to make a different choice, and use perception for a different purpose. And your new perception will serve that Purpose well, and prove Its Reality to you.
