Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 12: The Holy Spirit’s Course of Instruction

2. Rendering Fear Useless

By applying the Holy Spirit’s Interpretation of the motivations of others more and more consistently, you will gain an increasing awareness that Spirit’s Criteria are equally applicable to you. For to recognize fear is not enough to release yourself from it, although the recognition is necessary to demonstrate the need for release. The Holy Spirit must still dissolve fear by your allowing it to be brought to Truth. If, having recognized the fear, you were left with it, you would have taken a step away from Reality, not toward It. Yet this Course has repeatedly emphasized the need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as crucial steps in the undoing of the ego. Consider how well the Holy Spirit’s Interpretation of the motives of others will serve you then.

Teaching you to accept only loving Thoughts in others as true, and to regard everything else as an appeal for help, Spirit is teaching you that fear is an appeal for help. This is what recognizing it really means. If you do not protect or hide fear from recognition, Spirit will reinterpret it for you. That is the ultimate value to you in learning to perceive even attack as a call for Love. We have learned surely that fear and attack are inevitably associated. If attack always produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the truth about fear must dawn upon you. For fear is a call for Love, in unconscious recognition of the Love that has been denied by fear.

Fear is a symptom of the deep sense of loss from feeling separated from the Creator. (Attack only increases the experience of separation, which is why it always produces fear.) If, when you perceive fear in others, you learn to allow to be supplied through a miracle through you what your brother or sister believes is lacking in them that is causing the feeling of loss, then the basic cause of fear is removed. It does not matter that their perception of what is lacking or what is causing fear is not the actual thing that is lacking (Love) or causing fear (separation), for if they were clear about that, their calls for help would become a direct request to Spirit for awakening. It is through their having their calls for help and healing responded to appropriately with miracles that they will become clear about their real need. And it is through responding appropriately to the appeals from your sisters and brothers that you allow yourself to learn that fear need not exist in you, for you have in yourself the Means for removing it, and demonstrate this by using these Means with others.

Fear and Love are the only emotions the separated ones are capable of experiencing. One is false, for it was made out of denial, and denial depends for its own existence on the belief in what is denied. By interpreting fear correctly – as a positive affirmation of the longing for the Love of and Connection with the Divine that the fear masks – and providing for this lack through the miracle, you are undermining fear’s perceived usefulness by rendering it useless. Defenses that are experienced as not working at all are automatically discarded by the mind. If you raise the need that fear conceals to clearcut, unequivocal predominance, and address this need, fear becomes meaningless. You have denied its power to conceal Love, which was its only actual purpose. The mask that has been drawn across the Face of Divine Essence has disappeared.

If you would behold Love, which is Reality, how could you do better than to recognize in every defense against this Reality the underlying appeal for It? And how could you better learn of Reality than by answering the appeal for It by giving It? The Holy Spirit’s Interpretation of fear does dispel it, for the awareness of Truth cannot be denied. Thus does the Holy Spirit replace fear with Love, and reinterpret error into Truth. And thus will you learn of Spirit how to replace your dream of separation with the Fact of Unity. For the separation is only the denial of Union, and, correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal Knowledge that Union is true.

Miracles are merely the translation of denial backward and inward into what has been denied: Truth and Reality. In this way they undo the false outward seeking for what has been denied within. They reverse the flow of attention from an inner belief in lack that has led to a confirmation of this lack experienced outwardly, to a call for help that leads to the Source of Help deep within.

If to love oneself is to heal oneself, those who are sick have not loved themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the Love that would heal them but that they are denying themselves. Those who know the Truth about themselves cannot be sick. The task of the miracle worker thus becomes to deny the denial of Truth. The sick must heal themselves, for the Truth is in them. But having obscured It, the Light in another mind must shine into theirs, because that Light is also in theirs. The Light in them shines as brightly, regardless of the density of the fog that obscures It. If you give no power to the fog to obscure the Light, then it has none, for it has power only because the Children of the Divine give power to it. Everyone must themself withdraw that power, remembering that all Power is of the Divine. You can remember this for the whole Divine Family.

Do not accept the forgetting of Reality by your sisters and brothers, for their forgetfulness is yours. But your remembering is theirs, for the Divine must be remembered together. This is what has been forgotten. To perceive the healing of your sisters and brothers as the healing of yourself is thus the way to remember the Divine. For you forgot your sisters and brothers along with forgetting the Divine, and the Divine’s Answer to your forgetting is the way to remember.

Perceive in sickness just another call for Love, and offer your sisters and brothers what they believe they cannot offer themselves. Whatever the form of sickness, there is only one Remedy. You will be made whole as you make whole, for to perceive in sickness the appeal for health is to recognize in hatred the call for Love. And to give a brother or sister what they really want is to offer it to yourself. For your Creator wills you to know your sisters and brothers as yourself. Answer Its Call for Love and yours is answered. Healing is the Love of Divine Essence for Its Creator, and for Itself Which encompasses all of Creation.