Corresponding Text Section
Chapter 26: Divine Justice
7. The Rock of Truth and Sanity
If the Holy Spirit can commute into a Blessing each sentence that you laid upon yourself, then what you laid upon yourself must be temporal and forgivable. Yet is the belief in unforgivable flaw the one illusion in all this world that is believed to be immutable and that therefore cannot change. And on its changelessness the world depends.
The enchantment magic of the world can seem to hide the pain of the belief in flaw, unholiness and unworthiness from those who hold it about themselves and others, and deceive with glitter and with guile. Yet each one knows that the cost of separation and sin would be death, were they real. And so it is for those for who have accepted them as real. For the belief in flaw, unholiness and unworthiness is a request for death, a wish to make this world’s foundation as sure as Love, dependable as Heaven, and as strong as the Divine Itself. The world is safe from Love to everyone who thinks separation and sin possible. Nor will it change until they fundamentally change their minds about it.
Is it possible that what the Divine did not create could share the Attributes of Its Creation, when this thing, this idea and wish, opposes the Divine in every way? It cannot be that the “sinner’s” wish for death is just as strong as the Divine’s Will for Life. Nor can the basis of a world the Divine did not create be as firm and sure as Heaven. How could it be that the decision for hell and Heaven are the same except in madness? And is it conceivable that what the Divine did not will can be unalterable? What is immutable besides Its Will? And what can share Its Attributes except Itself? What wish against Its Will could be real?
This Course will not be difficult for you to learn when you realize that nothing is changeless but the Will of the Divine. Yet it is this that you may not yet believe. But there is nothing else you could believe, if you saw what this realization really is. Let us consider more carefully what this Course has said before. It must be so that either the Divine is insane or is this world a place of madness, but both cannot be Sane. Not one Thought of the Divine makes any sense at all within this world. And nothing that the world believes as true has any meaning at all in the Divine’s Mind. What makes no sense and has no meaning is insanity, and insanity cannot be the Truth.
If even one deeply-held belief in this world were true, then every Thought the Divine ever had would be an illusion. And if even one Thought of the Divine is true, then all beliefs the world gives any meaning to are false, and make no sense at all. This is the choice you have. Do not attempt to frame it differently, or twist it into something it is not. For deciding between these two choices is the only decision you can make. The rest is up to the Divine, and not to you.
To attempt to justify even one value that the world upholds is to deny your Creator’s Sanity, and yours. For the Divine and Its beloved Children think with the same Mind, when the Children truly think at all. And it is the Oneness of their Thought that make the Children Cocreators with the Mind Whose Thought created them. Therefore if anyone chooses to believe one thought opposed to Truth, then they have decided that they are not their Creator’s Child, and that sanity must lie apart from both the Creator and Its Children. This you have believed, and in doing so you have been deluded. Think not that this belief depends upon the form it takes. Who thinks the world of illusions is sane in any way, is justified in any belief it holds, or is maintained by any form of reality, believes insanity to be Truth.
The belief in separation in any of its forms is not real just because the Creator and Its Children are Sane. This world is meaningless because it rests on the belief in separation and therefore on insanity. How could the Changeless rest on a lie?
The Holy Spirit has the Power to transform to Sanity the entire foundation of the world you perceive. On this new Foundation a sane conception can be based and a sane world perceived, one in which nothing attests to differences and separation, cruelty and death, and in which everything that would lead the Children of the Divine to Sanity and Joy is joined. For in this new world is everything perceived as connected, and so the healing of one mind is everyone’s healing. Evaluate everything you believe with Connectedness as your measure, and understand that everything that is truly joined is worthy of your faith, but nothing else is.
What is not seen as Love must be believed as separation and fear, and both Love and fear perceive the other as meaningless. Love is the basis for a world perceived as nonsensical to those who believe they are powerless to transcend the world of limitation they look upon and experience, and who believe theirs is the only interpretation of the world that is sensible. But powerlessness is equally nonsensical in the Sight of Love, whose gentle Eyes see beyond madness and rest peacefully on Truth. Each perceives a world immutable, as each defines the changelessness of what you are. And each reflects a view of what the world and its maker must be in order to make its viewpoint sensible and meaningful.
Your unique role given you by Spirit is the special form in which the fact that the Divine is sane appears most sensible and meaningful to you. The content is the same for everyone. The form of understanding is suited to each one’s unique needs, to the specific time and place in which they think they find themself, and where they can be free of place and time and all that they believe must limit them. The Children of the Divine cannot be bound to or by time or place, or anything the Divine does not will. Yet if Its Will is perceived as madness, then the form of Sanity that makes It most acceptable to those who are temporarily insane requires special choice. Nor can this choice be made by the insane, whose problem is that their choices are not free and made with Reason in the Light of Truth.
It would be mad to entrust awakening to the insane. Because the Divine is sane, It has appointed One as sane as Itself to raise a saner world to meet the perception of everyone who chose insanity as their thought system and home. To this One is given the choice of form most suitable to each one, a form that will not attack the world they perceive in their madness, but enter into it in quietness and gently demonstrate to them that their world is not real and not their will. This One simply points to an alternative, another way of perceiving what they have perceived previously and recognized as the world in which they live and thought they understood before. Now can they question this previous world, because the form of the new alternative is one that they cannot deny, or fail to notice, or not succeed in some way to perceive and recognize.
To each person their unique part in the Plan of Awakening is designed to be perceived as possible, and more and more desired, as it proves to them that it is an alternative that they want. From this position does their belief in separation and all the error they look upon within the world offer them less and less, until they come to understand that this belief cost them their sanity, and stands between them and whatever hope they have of becoming sane again. And they find that they are provided with release from delusion, for they have a unique part to fulfill in everyone’s release. They can no more be left outside of the Hope of Peace, or be without a unique role in It, than could the Creator overlook Its Children, and pass them by in careless thoughtlessness.
What is dependable except the Divine’s Love? And where does Sanity abide except in It? The One Who speaks for It can show you this, in the alternative experience It chose especially for you. It is the Divine’s Will that you remember this, and so emerge from deepest sadness into perfect Joy. Accept the function that has been assigned to you in the Divine’s Own Plan to show Its Children that hell and Heaven are different, not the same. And that in Heaven Its Children are all the same, without the differences that would have made a hell of Heaven, and a heaven of hell, had such insanity been possible.
The entire belief that anyone can lose anything, which undergirds this world, merely reflects the fundamental tenet that the Divine must be insane. In this world it does seem that one can gain because another loses. If this were true, then the Divine would be mad indeed. But what is this belief except a form of the ego’s more basic tenet, “Separation is real, and rules the world”? For in this world Oneness, Extension, and Increase without limit make no sense. Here it is fervently believed that gain and loss are simply separate aspects of the same limited source; that every gain demands that someone must lose or pay the exact amount gained, or otherwise would pandemonium triumph and destruction be the total cost of any gain at all. And you who believe that the Divine was mad and made or even allowed such a world, observe this carefully, and understand that either the Divine or this world must be insane, but hardly both.
Awakening is rebirth of the Idea that no one can lose for anyone to truly gain, and that everyone must gain if anyone truly gains. In this Idea is your sanity restored, as well as your understanding of your Creator’s Sanity. And on this single Rock of Truth can faith in the Divine’s eternal Saneness rest, with perfect Confidence and perfect Peace. Reason is satisfied, for all delusional beliefs can be corrected here. And separation must be impossible if this is true. This is the Rock on which awakening rests, the Perspective from which the Holy Spirit gives Meaning and Direction to the Plan in which your unique part is essential. For here your unique part is made whole, because it shares the Function of the Whole.
Remember that all temptation to miscreate is merely a mad belief that the Divine’s becoming insane would make you sane, and give you what you want; that either the Divine or you must lose to madness because your aims cannot be reconciled. The belief in death prerequisites a belief in life, but Life does not require any belief, nor demand any payment at all. No one can suffer or lose for the Will of the Divine to be fulfilled. Awakening is Its Will because you share it. It is not for you alone, but for the holy Self that is the Child of the Divine. The Divine’s Children cannot lose, for if they could, the loss would be their Creator’s, and in It no loss is possible. And this is sane because it is the Truth.
