Corresponding Text Section
Chapter 32: The Final Vision
1. The Only Two Lessons
How simple is awakening! All it says is that what was never true is not true now, and never will be. The impossible has not occurred, and can have no effects. And that is all. Can this be hard to learn by anyone who wants to learn it? Only unwillingness to learn it could make such an easy lesson difficult. How hard is it to see that what is false cannot be true, and what is true cannot be false? You can no longer say that you perceive no differences in what is false and true. You have been told exactly how to tell one from the other, and just what to do if you become confused. Why persist in not learning such simple things?
There is a reason, but confuse it not with difficulty in the simple things awakening asks you learn. Awakening teaches only the very obvious. It merely goes from one clear lesson to the next, in easy steps that lead you gently from one to another, with no strain at all. This cannot be confusing, yet you may still feel confused. For somehow it may be believed that what is totally confused is easier to learn and understand than what is completely simple and clear. Such confusion would be the effect of previous learning. For what you taught yourself in the past was such a giant learning feat that it is indeed incredible. And you accomplished it because you wanted to, and did not pause in your diligence to judge it as hard to learn, or too complex to grasp, even though it was not true.
No one who understands what you have learned, how carefully you studied it, and the pains to which you went to practice and repeat the lessons endlessly, in every form you could conceive of them, could ever doubt the power of your learning skill. There is no greater power in this world. The world was made by it, and even now depends on nothing else. The lessons you have taught yourself have been so overlearned and become so fixed that they rise like heavy curtains to obscure the simple and the obvious. Say not that you cannot learn these Lessons of awakening. For your power to learn has been strong enough to teach you that your true will is not your own, that your real Thoughts do not belong to you, and even that you are someone other than who you really are.
Who could maintain that lessons in delusion such as these are easy to learn? Yet you have learned more than this. You have continued this path of learning, taking every step, however difficult, with fortitude, until a world was built that suited the learning goals you accepted. And every lesson that makes up the world you look upon arose from your first accomplishment of learning, an enormity so great that the Holy Spirit’s Voice seems small and still before its magnitude. The world began with one strange lesson, powerful enough to render the Divine forgotten and Its Children alien to themselves, in exile from the Home the Divine Itself established for them. You who taught yourself that the Child of the Divine was guilty of unforgivable error and irreparable separation, say not that you cannot learn the simple things awakening teaches you.
Learning is an ability you made and gave yourself. It was not made to do the Will of the Divine, but to uphold a wish that this Will could be opposed, and that a “will” apart from It was yet more real than It. And this has learning sought to demonstrate, and you have learned what it was made to teach. Now does your ancient overlearning seem to stand implacable before the Voice of Truth, and teach you that Its Lessons are not true, are too hard to learn, too difficult to see, and too opposed to what you believe is really true. Yet you will learn them, for their learning is the only Purpose for your learning skill that the Holy Spirit sees in all the world.
Spirit’s simple Lessons in forgiveness have a Power mightier than the dark lessons you taught yourself because they call to you from the Divine and from your holy Self. Could this be a little Voice, so small and still It cannot rise above the senseless noise of sounds that have no meaning? The Divine wills that Its separated Children remember It. And the Power of Its Will is in the Voice That speaks for It. Which lessons will you ultimately learn? Which outcome is inevitable, sure as the Divine, and far beyond all doubts or question? Can it be that your learning of delusion, incredible in difficulty and strange in outcome, will ultimately withstand the simple Lessons of Spirit being offered to you in every moment of each day, and that have been yours to choose since time began and learning first was made?
The lessons you can choose to learn are only two. Each produces a different world. And each world follows surely from its source. The certain outcome of the lesson that the Divine’s Children are guilty is the world that can be looked upon. It is a world of fear and despair, nor is there hope of happiness in it. In this world that is not actually there there is no plan for safety that you can make that ever will succeed. There is no joy that you can seek for here and hope to find.
But this is not the only outcome that learning can produce. However much you may have overlearned your chosen learning goal, the Lesson that reflects the Love of the Divine is stronger still. And you will learn that the Divine’s Children are innocent, and you will perceive another world – the Real World – because that world reflects the Truth.
The Outcome of the Lesson that the Divine’s Children are innocent is a world in which there is no fear, and everything is lit with Hope and sparkles with a gentle friendliness. Everything in this world calls to you in soft appeal to be your friend, and let it join with you. And never does a call for help and for Love remain unheard, misunderstood, or left unanswered in the language in which the call itself was made. And you will understand that it was this call that everyone and everything within the world has always made if they were not expressing the Love of the Divine, but you had not perceived this appeal as it was. And now you see you were mistaken. You had been deceived by forms the call for help was hidden in. And so you did not hear it, and thought you had lost a friend who always wanted to be joined with you.
The soft, eternal Calling of each Part of the Divine’s Creation to the Whole is heard throughout the world that awakening’s Lesson brings. Every separated one shares the universal Will that it be Whole, and that you hear and answer its call for awakening to Wholeness. Without your response is each separated one left to suffer and seemingly to perish, as it is awakened from suffering and the appearance of death when you have heard its calling as the ancient Call to Life, and understood that It is but your own.
Divine Essence in you remembers the Creator with all the Certainty with which It knows Its Love. But only if the Divine’s Children are innocent and One can the Divine be Love. For the Divine were fear indeed if they whom It created innocent could become imprisoned in guilt. In innocence the Divine’s Children naturally remember their perfect creation, but in guilt they have forgotten who and what they really are.
The fear of the Divine results as surely from the lesson that Its Children are guilty as the Divine’s Love must be remembered when they learn their Innocence. For fear must spawn hate and must look upon what it made as itself. How mistaken it is to fail to hear the call for help and Love that echoes past each seeming attack and call to death, and pleads that Love restore the dying world! You do not yet understand Who calls to you beyond each form of fear and call to conflict. But you will recognize Divine Essence, your holy Self, as you give It answer in the language that It calls—the language in which your sisters and brothers call to you for you to awaken them, and yourself. It will appear when you have answered Its Call, and you will know in It that the Divine is Love.
What is temptation but a wish to make the wrong decision on what lesson you would learn, to produce an outcome you do not want? The recognition that temptation is a state of mind you choose to walk past and go beyond becomes the Means whereby the choice is reassessed, and another outcome seen to be preferred. You were merely deceived when you believed you wanted, or were willing to accept, disunity and disaster and pain. Hear not the call for this within yourself, but listen, rather, to the deeper Call beyond it, that appeals for Peace and Joy. And all the world will give you Joy and Peace. For as you hear the Call you answer It, and behold! Your answer is the proof of what you learned. Its outcome is the world you perceive.
