Corresponding Text Section
Chapter 22: True Reason and the Final Question
3. Faith, Belief, and Vision
All special relationships have unholiness, or separation, as their secret goal. For they are attempted bargains with Reality, away from which the seeming union is adjusted. Forget not this: to bargain is to set a limit, and any brother or sister with whom you have a limited relationship you will secretly resent for what you believe they are doing to you. You may attempt to keep the bargain in the name of fairness, sometimes demanding payment of yourself, perhaps more often of the other. And in this “fairness” you attempt to ease the guilt that comes from the accepted purpose of the relationship. And that is why the Holy Spirit must change its purpose, to make it helpful to you and to It.
If you accept this change of the purpose of your relationship, you have accepted the idea of making room for Truth. The source of the belief in separation in your mind will be gone. You may imagine that you still experience its effects, but it is not your purpose now, because you no longer want what it brings. No one allows a purpose to be replaced while they desire what they believe it brings. For nothing is so cherished and protected as is a goal the mind desires and accepts. This it will follow, happily or grimly, but always with faith, and with the persistence that faith inevitably brings.
The power of faith is never recognized if it is placed in the false belief of separation. But it is always recognized if it is placed in Love. Why would it seem strange that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a simple feat for such a power. For faith can keep the Children of the Divine in chains, as long as they believe that they are in chains. And when they are released from them, it will be simply because they no longer believe in them, withdrawing faith that these chains can hold them, and placing it in their Freedom instead.
It is impossible to place equal faith in opposite directions. What faith you give to your belief in separation and limitation you take away from Holiness and Freedom. And what you offer Holiness has been removed from what isn’t holy and therefore isn’t real.
Faith and belief and vision are the means by which the Goal of Holiness is reached. Through them, the Holy Spirit leads you to the Real World, and away from all illusions where your faith was laid before. This is Spirit’s Direction, the only one It ever sees. And when you wander, Spirit reminds you that there is only one Direction. Its Faith, Belief and Vision are all for you. And when you have accepted Them completely instead of your former faith in the unreal, you will have need of Them no longer. For even Spirit’s Faith and Vision and Belief are meaningful only before you reach the State of Certainty. In the Realm of Heaven They are unknown. Yet the Gate of Heaven is reached through Them.
It is impossible that the Children of the Divine lack faith. But they must choose where they would place their faith. Faithlessness is not a lack of faith, but rather faith in nothingness. Faith given to illusions does not lack power, for by it do the Children of the Divine believe that they are powerless. Thus are they faithless to themselves, but strong in faith in their illusions about themselves. For the separated ones made misplaced faith, belief, and perception as means for losing certainty, and finding separation. This mad direction was each one’s choice, and by their faith in their choice they made what they desired.
The Holy Spirit has a use for all the means by which you sought to find separation and make it real. But as It uses them, they lead away from separation and into Union, because Spirit’s Purpose is in the opposite direction. It sees the means you use, but not the purpose for which you made them. It would not take them from you, for It sees their value as a means for what It wills for you. You made perception so that you might choose among your sisters and brothers, and seek for separation from them. The Holy Spirit sees perception as a means to teach you that the vision of a holy relationship is all you want to perceive. Then will you give your faith to Holiness and Union, desiring These, and believing in Them because of your desire.
Faith and belief will then become attached to vision, as all the means that once served the belief in separation and sin are redirected now toward Union and Holiness. For what you think are separation and sin is simply limitation, which can only be limited perspective because there can be no limitation of Reality. Whom you fear you will seek to limit in order to limit your fear. And whom you try to limit to the body you will secretly resent because you know this limits you. In your refusal to forgive them for your resentment, you would condemn them to the body, because the means for separation and for the belief in limitation – the body – has become dear to you. And so the body has your faith and your belief, and is the means of your perception. But Holiness would set you and your sisters and brothers free, removing resentment by removing fear, not as a symptom, but at its source.
Those who would free their sisters and brothers from the limitations that the body represents will have no fear. They have relinquished the means for separation by choosing to let all limitations be removed. Desiring to behold their sisters and brothers in Holiness and Union and Truth, the power of belief and faith goes far beyond the body, supporting vision rather than obstructing it. First they choose to recognize how much their misplaced faith limits their understanding of the world, and then they desire to place its power elsewhere, as another point of view is given them. The miracles that follow this decision are also born of faith. For all who choose to see beyond separation are given vision, and are led to Holiness and Union.
Those who believe in separation must think that the Holy Spirit asks for sacrifice of them to reach Its Goal, for sacrifice is how they think the purpose they once held dear was accomplished. Sisters and brothers, the Holy Spirit knows that sacrifice brings nothing. Spirit makes no bargains. And if you seek to limit It, you will reject It because you will be afraid. The Gift that It has given you is greater than anything on this side of Heaven, and the Instant for Its Recognition is at hand. Join your awareness to what has been already joined in Spirit. The faith you give each other will accomplish this. For Spirit, Who loves the Real World, is seeing it for you, without one spot of separation or flaw upon it, and in the Innocence that makes the vision of it as beautiful as Heaven.
Your faith in sacrifice has given it power in your perception. But you have not yet realized that you cannot see because of this misplaced faith. For sacrifice must be exacted of a body, and by another body. The mind in reality could neither ask sacrifice nor receive it of itself. And no more could the body. The intention for sacrifice is in the split mind, which tries to use the body to carry out the means for separation and limitation, in which this mind believes. Thus is the joining of mind and body an inescapable belief of those who value illusion. And so is sacrifice invariably a means for limitation, and thus a justification for rejection.
Think you the Holy Spirit is concerned with this madness? It doesn’t give you what is Its Purpose to lead you from. You may think and fear that It would deprive you of your good. But “good” and “deprivation” are opposites and cannot meaningfully join in any way. It is like saying that because the Moon and Sun are in the sky they must be joined. Yet perception of one merely signifies that the other has receded from sight. Nor is it possible that what is the source of light is the same as what depends on that source to be perceived. And neither demands the sacrifice of the other.
The body was made to be a sacrifice to the belief in separation and limitation. And in darkness so it still is believed to be. Yet in the Light of Vision it is perceived quite differently. You can have faith in it to serve the Holy Spirit’s Goal, and give it power to serve as means to help the blind to see. But in their beholding they will see beyond the body, as will you. The faith and the belief you gave the body belong beyond it. You gave faith and belief and perception from mind to body. Let faith, belief and perception as vision now be given back to the mind that produced them, and can use them still to awaken itself from what it made.
