Corresponding Text Section
Chapter 22: True Reason and the Final Question
2. The Little Offering
It has been emphasized how little is asked of you to learn this Course. It is the same small willingness you need to have all your relationships transformed to Joy. It is the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit, for which It gives you Everything. It is the Spark on which awakening rests, the transformation of mind by which abandonment and martyrdom are changed to resurrection. And because it is true, this little is so simple that it cannot fail to be completely understood. It can be rejected, but not because it is ambiguous. And if you choose against it now, it will not be because it is obscure, but rather that this little willingness seemed, in your judgment, to be too much to exchange for Peace.
This very little is the only thing that you need do for vision, Happiness, liberation from pain, and the complete release from all effects from the former belief in separation and sin, all to be given you. Say only this, but mean it with no reservations, for here the Power of awakening is found:
I am responsible for what I conceive and then perceive. I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide on the goal I would achieve. And everything that seems to happen to me I ask for and receive, as I request.
Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what seems to be done to you. Simply acknowledge that you are responsible yet have been mistaken in your choices, and all effects of your mistakes will be lifted from you.
It is impossible that the Children of the Divine be merely driven by events outside themselves, for then the Universe would be ruled by laws other than the Divine’s, and the world of illusions would cease to be other than a dream. It is impossible that the happenings that come to them are not their choice or by their consent, even if on a level not currently accessible to their conscious awareness. The power of their decision of attention and perspective is the determiner of every situation in which they seem to find themselves, whether by intention or seeming chance or accident.
No chance or accident is possible within the Universe as the Divine created It, outside of which is nothing. Suffer, and you decided separation was your goal. Experience happiness, and you gave the power of decision to Spirit, Who must decide for the Divine for you. This is the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit, and even this It gave to you to give yourself. For by this gift is given you the Power to release your awakener, that they may give awakening unto you.
Begrudge not, then, this little offering. Withhold it and you keep the world as now you look upon and experience it. Give the power of the decision of your attention and perspective to the Holy Spirit, and everything you perceive goes with your gift. Never was so much given for so little. In the Holy Instant is this exchange effected and maintained. In the Holy Instant is the world you don’t want brought to the one you do want. And here the one you do want is given you because you want it. But for this to be accomplished, the power of your wanting must first be recognized by you. You must accept its strength, and not use it for weakness. You must perceive that what is strong enough to frame and make a world can also let that world go, accepting Correction as it is willing to see that it was mistaken.
The world you look upon is merely the idle witness to your belief that you weren’t mistaken. This witness is senseless. You trained it in its testimony, and as it gave this testimony to you, you listened and convinced yourself that what it witnessed was true. You did this to yourself. When you can just perceive this, you will also perceive how circular the reasoning is on which your old perspective or framing of the world and resulting perception rest. Neither this faulty reasoning nor the world it gave rise to were given to you. This was your “gift” to yourself and to your sisters and brothers. Be willing, then, to have it laid aside from yourself and them, to be replaced with Truth. And, as you behold the transformation in them, it will be given you to see it in yourself.
Perhaps you do not yet comprehend the need for you to give this little offering to the Holy Spirit. Observe closer, then, what this offering is. And, very simply, see in it the whole exchange of awakening in place of separation.
All that the ego is is an idea that it is possible that things could happen to the Children of the Divine without their will, and thus without the Will of their Creator, Whose Will cannot be separated from their own. The ego is the replacement of the separated ones for their true will, a mad revolt against what must forever be. The ego is the statement that they believe they do have the power to make the Divine powerless, and so to take their will from themselves, and leave themselves without what the Divine has willed for them. This is the mad idea that the separated ones have enshrined upon the altars of their split minds, and which they honor. And anything that threatens this seems to attack their faith in what they made. For here this faith is invested. Think not that you are faithless, for your belief and trust in this mad idea are strong indeed.
The Holy Spirit can easily give you faith in Holiness, and the Vision to see It. But you have not yet left open and unoccupied the Altar in yourself where the Gift belongs, and Spirit will never oppose you. Where Holiness and Vision should be, you have set up your replacements of the Memory of your Creator, your idols to something else. To this something else, this other “will” that seems to tell you what must happen, you gave the semblance of reality. And what would show you otherwise must therefore seem unreal.
All that is asked of you is to make room for Truth. You are not asked to make or do what is beyond your understanding. All you are asked to do is let in what is beyond your understanding; only to stop your interference with what will happen of Itself when allowed by you; simply to recognize again the Presence of what you thought you threw away. Be willing, for an Instant, to leave the Altar of your mind free of what you placed upon It, and what is really there you will succeed in seeing. The Holy Instant is not an Instant of creation, but of Recognition. For Recognition comes of suspended judgment and resulting vision. Then only is it possible to see within and behold what must be there, plainly in sight, and wholly free of inference and judgment. This is clear perspective, a framing of reality given by Spirit rather than by the ego.
Undoing is not your task, but it is up to you to welcome it. Desire and faith go hand in hand. For everyone believes in what they want. This Course has already said that wishful thinking is how the ego deals with what it wants, in order to make it seem to be so. There is no better demonstration of the power of wanting and therefore of faith to make its goals seem real and possible. Faith in the unreal leads to adjustments of reality to make it fit the goal and frame of madness. The goal and frame of separation and flaw induces the perception of a fearful world to justify their purpose. What you desire you will focus on, will frame, and therefore will perceive. And if its “reality” is false, you will uphold it by not realizing all the adjustments you have introduced to make it fit the frame of your perspective and seem real.
When vision is denied, confusion of cause and effect becomes inevitable. The purpose then becomes to keep obscure the cause (desire) of the effect, and make the effect (perception) appear to be a cause. This seeming independence of effect enables it to be regarded as standing by itself, and capable of serving as a cause of the events and feelings its maker thinks that perception causes.
This Course has spoken of your desire to make or be your own Maker, and be parent of and not child to it. The confusing of cause and effect is the same desire. The Child of the Divine is the Effect whose Cause – the Creator – this strange desire would deny. And so the effect seems to be the cause, producing real effects.
There can be no effects without their cause, and to confuse the two is merely to fail to understand them both. It is as needful that you recognize you made the world you look upon as that you recognize that you did not create yourself. Believing that you did not make the world you look upon and believing that you created yourself are the same mistake. Nothing your Creator didn’t create has any influence over you at all in reality. And if you think that what you have made can tell you what you perceive and feel, and you place your faith in its ability to do so, you are denying your Creator, and believing that you made yourself. For if you think the world you made has power to make you what it wills, you are confusing child and creator, effect and source.
The creations of the Children of the Divine are like their Creator’s. But in creating them the Children do not delude themselves that they are independent of their Source. Their Union with It is the Source of their true creating. Apart from this they have no Power to create, and what they make is meaningless. This mistake changes nothing in Creation, depends entirely upon the madness of its maker, and cannot serve to justify the madness.
Your sisters and brothers unconsciously think they made this world with you. Thus they also deny Creation. With you, they think the world that they made has made them. Thus they deny they made it. Yet the Truth is that you and they were both created by the only Creator, Who lovingly created you together and as One. Look upon what “proves” otherwise, and you deny all of Reality. But grant that everything that seems to stand between you, keeping you from each other and separate from your Creator, you made in secret, and the Instant of Release has come to you. All the effects of your mistake are gone, because its source has been uncovered. It was the seeming independence of its source that kept you prisoner. This is the same delusion that you are independent of the Source by which you were created, and have never left.
