Sometimes in teaching there is benefit to bring the focus back to practical concerns, particularly after the student has gone through lessons encompassing lofty ideas, and quite distant from what they have already learned. This we will do today. We will not speak of soaring, world-encompassing Thoughts, but dwell instead on benefits to you.

You do not ask too much of life, but far too little. When you let your mind be drawn to bodily concerns, to things you obtain, to standing as valued by the world, you ask for sorrow, not for Happiness. This Course does not attempt to take from you the little that you believe you have. It does not try to substitute utopian ideas in place of satisfactions that the world contains. There are no real satisfactions in the world made by fear.

Today we list the real criteria by which to evaluate all things you find valuable and think you want. Unless they meet these sound standards, they are not worth desiring at all, for they can only replace what is truly satisfying. The laws that govern choice you cannot make, no more than you can make alternatives from which to choose. The choosing you can do. Indeed you must. But it is wise to learn the laws you set in motion when you choose, and what alternatives you choose between.

This Course has already stressed the first law of evaluation of Value, which is that there are only two alternatives to choose between, however many there may appear to be. The range is set, and this we cannot change. It would be most ungenerous to you to let alternatives be limitless, and thus delay your final choice until you had considered all of them in time, and not been brought without distraction to the place where there is only one clear choice that can be made.

Another kindly and related law is that there is no compromise in what your choice must bring. It cannot give you some of what you want and just a little of what you don’t want, for in reality there is no in-between. Each choice you make either brings Everything to you or nothing. Therefore, if you learn the criteria by which you can distinguish Everything from nothing, you will make the better choice.

Within these two laws, the first criterion by which to evaluate all things you think you want is that if you choose a thing that will not last forever, what you chose is valueless. A temporary value is without all value. Time can never take away a value that is real. What fades and dies was never there, and makes no real offering of satisfaction to the person who chooses it. Be not deceived by nothing in a form you think you like.

It may reasonably be asked whether taking care of your temporal needs isn’t also valuable. Of course it is when in the service of your goal of awakening, because then your temporal needs find meaning in the context of Wholeness. And you will find that the closer you come to Wholeness, the more your temporal needs transform into the one great Need of the Divine Family and your own true creations for you to awaken and return Home. Let the meeting of all temporal needs be so directed, and your evaluation of Value in this regard will not lead you astray.

The second criterion by which to evaluate all things you think you want is that if you choose to take something away from someone else, nothing of it will remain for you to find true satisfaction in. This is because when you deny another’s Inheritance of Everything, you have denied your own, even if your understanding of Everything causing your denial was temporarily senseless. Through taking in order to get, you will not recognize the things you really have, denying they are there. Whoever seeks to take away has been deceived by the illusion that loss can offer gain. Yet loss, though impossible in Reality, must offer loss and nothing more to those who believe in it.

The third criterion is the one on which the others rest. Why is the choice you are considering of value to you? What attracts you to it? What purpose does it serve? Here is it easiest of all to mislead yourself if you are choosing the ego for your guide in the process of making choices. For, being a false idea itself, the ego is incapable of truly valuing anything. But it can still desire, and what the ego really wants it censors from awareness. It is not even honest with itself about this, for it feels the need to keep tarnish and rust from the fanciful halo it uses to protect its goals, that you may look upon how guileless the intentions it allows into consciousness are. The ego’s hidden intentions are, of course, those you projected onto it in order to be innocent of them yourself. But its camouflage is a thin veneer that could deceive only those who are content to be deceived. Its goals are obvious to anyone who cares to observe them.

Because of the duplicity or “hidden agendas” that always accompany the ego, mistakes easily become multiplied when following its guidance in the evaluation process. This is because those who are mistaken about what is truly valuable when they evaluate choices will not perceive, when they choose wrongly, that they have merely failed to gain real Satisfaction. They will secretly believe that they have served the ego’s hidden goals and thus “sinned.” Indeed, strengthening the belief in sin and then generating guilt for this sin are the hidden intentions projected onto the ego by the split mind that made it, to attack itself but believe itself to be a victim of such attack. Such is the madness by which the wounded mind attempts to keep itself separate.

Those whose minds engage in this strange process, and believe they have served the ego’s hidden goals when they find that their choices have not resulted in real Satisfaction, still try to keep the ego’s halo of “innocence” within their dimmed awareness. In spite of these efforts, they cannot avoid perceiving its tarnished edges and its rusted core. Their mistakes, which have no real effects, appear as flaws or sins to them because they look upon the tarnish as their own, the rust a sign of deep unworthiness within themselves. For they who would preserve the ego’s goals and serve them as their own do not merely make mistakes, according to the dictates of their guide. This guide teaches that it is folly to believe that sins are merely mistakes, for who would suffer for their sins if these were simply mistakes, and easily correctable?

And so we come to the criterion for choice that is the hardest to believe, because its obviousness is overlaid with many levels of obscurity. If you feel any guilt about your choice, then you have allowed the ego’s goals to come between the real alternatives, and thus you do not realize that there are only two. And the alternative you think you chose which brought no real Satisfaction seems fearful and too dangerous to be the nothingness it actually is.

All things are valuable or valueless, worthy or not of being sought at all, entirely desirable or not worth the slightest effort to obtain. Choosing is easy just because of this. Complexity is nothing but a smokescreen that hides the very simple fact that no decision can be difficult.

What is the gain to you in learning this? It is far more than merely letting you make choices easily and without pain. Heaven Itself is reached with empty hands, pure hearts and open minds that come with nothing in order to find Everything and receive It as their own.

We will attempt to reach this state today, with self-deception laid aside, and with an honest willingness to value only the truly valuable and the Real. Our two extended practice periods of fifteen minutes each begin with this:

“I will value only what is truly valuable,

and only that do I seek, for only that do I desire to find.”

And then receive what waits for everyone who reaches, unencumbered, for Truth and Reality, entering the Real World through their seeking.

Should you begin to let yourself collect some needless burdens, or believe you perceive some difficult decisions facing you during the day, be quick to respond with this simple thought:

“I will value only what is truly valuable,

for what is valuable belongs to me.”