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Chapter 30: The Happy Dreams of the Real World

1. Demanding That the Body Be More Than Nothing

You will experience it as release from suffering when you learn that you are free. Then you will acclaim the Truth, instead of looking on It as an adversary. The easy Path to awakening, so clearly marked that it is not possible to lose the Way, will no longer seem thorny, rough, and far too difficult for you to follow, because It will not be looked upon as the road to hell. You will see It instead as a simple way to find yourself again in Heaven and in the Divine, requiring no sacrifice or loss. This will all be because you realize that you can give up nothing real, and understand that there is no loss, and therefore no regrets about the Way that you have chosen. And you will see the many gains your choice offers you.

For, though you may not yet see them, the gains are there. Their Cause has been accomplished, and Its Effects must be present where their Cause has entered in. You have accepted healing’s Cause, and so it must be that you are healed. And being healed, the power to heal must also now be yours. The miracle is not a separate thing that happens suddenly as an effect without a cause, nor is it in itself a cause. But where its Cause is must it be. Now is it caused, though its benefits may not yet be seen. But this Cause’s Effects are there, even if not yet beheld. Now see within, and you will behold no reason for regret, but cause indeed for glad rejoicing and for hope of Peace.

It has been hopeless to attempt to find the hope of Peace upon a battleground. It has been futile to demand escape from separation and pain of what was made to serve the function of retaining separation and pain. For separation and pain are one illusion, as are hate and fear, attack and guilt. Where these are causeless their effects are gone in truth, even if still lingering a moment in mist and mirage. And Love must come wherever they are not. This is cause for true rejoicing! In Truth you are free of pain and sickness, misery and loss, and all effects of hatred and attack. No longer is fear your friend and guilt your god, and you can indeed be grateful for the Effects of Love.

Your Guest has come! You invited It and It has come. You did not hear It enter, for you did not wholly welcome It. And yet Its Gifts came with It. It has laid Them at your feet, and asks you now to behold Them and take Them for your own. It needs your help in giving Them to all who walk apart, believing they are separate and alone. They will be healed when you accept your Gifts, because your Guest will welcome everyone whose feet have touched the holy ground whereon you both stand, and where Its Gifts for them are laid.

You do not yet see how much you now can give because of everything you have received. Yet It Who entered in waits only for you to come where you invited It to be. There is no other place where It can find Its Host, nor where Its Host can meet with It. And there is nowhere else Its Gifts of Peace and Strength, Truth and Freedom, and all the Happiness Its Presence brings, can be received. For these Gifts are where It is Who brought Them with It, that They might be yours. You do not yet see your Guest, but you can see the Gifts It has brought in all who are touched by Them. And when you behold Its Gifts there, you will believe Its Presence must be there. For what you now can do could not be done without the Love and Grace Its Presence holds.

Such is the Promise of the loving Creator: that Its Children have Life, and that Everything that truly lives and has Being is part of them. Nothing else has Life. The things you made and tried to animate are not alive, and merely symbolize your wish to be alive apart from Life, alive in death, with death perceived as life, and living as death. Confusion follows on confusion in this world, for on confusion has this world been based, and there is nothing else it rests upon. Its basis does not change, although it seems to be in constant change. But that state is what confusion really means. Stability to those who are confused is meaningless. And shift and change become the law on which they predicate their lives.

The body does not really change from day to day and year to year. It simply represents the larger dream that change is possible. To change is to attain a state unlike the one in which you found yourself before. There is no change in Immortality, and Heaven knows it not. Yet here on Earth change has a double purpose, for it can be made to teach opposing things. And each reflects the teacher who is teaching it. The body does appear to change with time, with sickness or with health, and with events that seem to alter it. And this merely means that the mind remains unchanged in its belief of what the purpose of the body is. Anything less than full health and vitality reflects a demand that the body be a thing that it is not. Yet the body’s nothingness is a guarantee that it cannot be sick or deficient in truth. In your demand that the body be more than nothing lies the idea of unwholeness. For this demand asks that the Divine be less than all It really is.

What, then, becomes of you? For it is you of whom the sacrifice of being apart from your Creator is asked by the ego. For the Divine is told by you that Part of It belongs to It no longer. It is told that It must sacrifice your Self, and you are told by the ego that in this sacrifice are you made more, and that It to Whom no loss is possible is decreased by the loss of you. And what is projected into the gap of separation becomes your savior, protecting you from being Part of the Divine.

The body that is asked to be a savior will be attacked, because its nothingness has not been recognized. And so it seems to be a thing with power in itself. As something instead of nothing the body can be perceived, and thought to feel and act, and hold you in its grasp as prisoner to itself. And it can and will fail to be what you demanded it to be. And you will disdain it for its littleness, unmindful that the failure is not because the body isn’t more than you think it should be, but only in your failure to perceive it clearly, with its new Purpose given it by Spirit. Yet its neutrality is your awakening, from which the ego would flee.

As something is the body asked to be the Divine’s adversary, replacing what the Divine is with littleness and limit and despair. It is the Divine’s loss you celebrate when you look upon the body as a thing you love or hate. For if the Divine is the Sum of Everything, then what is not in It does not exist. And Its Completeness is the body’s nothingness.

Your awakeners are not dead, nor do they dwell in what was constructed as a temple unto death. They live in the Divine, and it is this, and only this, that makes them awakeners unto you. Their bodies’ nothingness and yours releases yours from sickness and from death. For what is yours cannot be more nor less than what is theirs.