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Chapter 22: True Reason and the Final Question

5. The Basic Question

Perspective selects, interprets, and makes the world you perceive. It literally picks it out and constructs it, as mind directs. The laws of size and shape and brightness would hold, perhaps, if other things were equal. They are not equal. For what you look for, regardless of its color, shape, or size, you are far more likely to discover than what you would prefer to overlook.

For those who want to hear It, the still, small Voice of the Divine is not drowned out by all the ego’s raucous screams and senseless ravings. Perspective and perception are a choice, and not a fact. But on this choice depends far more than you may realize as yet. For your entire belief of what you are depends entirely on the voice you choose to listen to, and on the sights you then choose to perceive based on this listening. Perception is a witness only to this choice, and never to Reality. Yet it can show you the conditions in which awareness of Reality is possible, or those where It could never be. Reality needs no cooperation from you to be Itself. But your awareness of It needs your help, because this is your choice.

Listen to the ego’s perspective, to what it says, and look upon what it directs you to perceive, and it is sure that you will perceive yourself as tiny, vulnerable, and afraid. You will experience depression, a sense of worthlessness, and feelings of impermanence and unreality. You will believe that you are helpless prey to forces far beyond your own control, and far more powerful than you. And you will think that the world you made directs your destiny. For this will be your faith. But understand that just because it is your faith and has become your belief doesn’t make it reality.

There is another Voice in your mind that leads to another perspective and resulting perception, and these are those in which your Freedom is found, simply awaiting your choice. And as you place your faith in these, you will perceive another Self in you. This other Self knows that miracles as Expressions of Love are innate. They are as simple and as natural to It as breathing is to the body. Miracles as intercessions are the obvious response to all lacks of Love and calls for help, and the only response to these It makes.

Miracles seem unnatural to the ego because it does not understand how separate minds can influence each other. Nor could they do so. But minds cannot be separate in truth. This other Self is perfectly aware of this, and thus It recognizes that miracles do not affect another’s mind, only Its Own. There is no other.

You have not yet realized the entire extent to which the idea of separation has interfered with Reason in your mind. Reason resides in the other Self, which you have until now cut off from your awareness, and nothing you have allowed to stay in your mind until now has been capable of Reason. How can the segment of the mind devoid of Reason understand what Reason is, or grasp the perspective It would give? This question stems from the basic question: What is the Answer to the problem of this world?

All sorts of questions may arise in the split mind, but because the basic question stems from Reason, the split aspect of the mind will not ask it, because it would be questioning its own existence. Like all that stems from Reason, the basic question is obvious and simple, yet it remains unasked in the split mind. But think not that Reason could not answer it.

The Divine’s Plan for your awakening could not have been established without your will and your consent. It must have been accepted by the Children of the Divine, for what the Divine wills for Its Children they must receive. For the Divine wills not apart from Its Children. Nor does the Will of the Divine wait upon time to be accomplished. What It willed to accomplish was accomplished the Instant It willed it. Therefore, what joined the Will of the Divine in the Accomplishment of Its Will must be in you now, being Eternal. You must have willed a place in your mind in which the Holy Spirit can abide, and where It is. Spirit must have been there since the need for It arose at the beginning of the illusion of time, and this need was answered and fulfilled in the same Instant. Such would your Reason tell you, if you listened and heard.

Yet such is clearly not the ego’s “reasoning.” The “alien nature” of Reasoning from the ego’s perspective is proof to it that you will not find the answer to the basic question there. Yet if there must be an answer to the question: “What will Reason tell you?,” then Reason must exist. And if It exists for you, and has your Freedom as the Purpose given It, then you must be free to find It.

The Divine’s Plan of Atonement, which is the Answer to the problem of the world, is simple. The Divine is never circular and never self-defeating. It has no thoughts except those that are Self-Extending, and in this your will must be included. Thus there must be a part of you that knows Its Will and shares It.

It is not meaningful to ask if what must be is so. But it is meaningful to ask why you are unaware of what must be and therefore is so. For this question must have an answer, if the Plan of the Divine for your awakening is already complete in Eternity. And It must be complete, because Its Source knows not of incompletion nor of time.

Where would the Answer to the basic question be but in the Source of All? And where are you but there where this same Answer is? Your Identity, as much a true Effect of this same Source as is this Answer, must therefore be together with It, and the same.

Oh yes, your Reason knows this, and more than this alone. It knows that any Part of Knowledge undoes your dissociation from Reality as much as all of Knowledge. And all of It will come with any Part. Your Reason is the Part of Knowledge you can accept currently. What Reason points to, you can see, because the Witnesses on Its Behalf are clear. Only the totally deluded can disregard these Witnesses, and you have gone past that.

Reason is a means that serves the Holy Spirit’s Purpose in Its own right. It is not reinterpreted and redirected by Spirit from the goal of separation, as are other means Spirit uses on your behalf. For Reason is beyond the ego’s range of misdirected means. Faith, belief, and perception can be misplaced, and therefore can serve the needs of the ego as well as those of Truth. But Reason has no place at all in madness, nor can Its Means be adjusted to fit madness’s ends. Faith and belief can be strong in madness, guiding perception toward what the mind has misvalued. But Reason enters not at all in this. For false perception falls away at once as Reason is applied to faith and belief.

There is no reason, human or Divine, in insanity, for it depends entirely on reason’s absence. The ego never uses Reason, because it does not realize that It exists. Yet the partially insane do have access to It, and only they have need of It. Knowledge does not depend on Reason for Its Being, as Reason is Knowledge that is currently accessible to the separated ones, and madness shuts It out.

The part of your mind where Reason resides was dedicated to the undoing of insanity by your will in Union with your Creator’s. Here was the Holy Spirit’s Purpose accepted and accomplished, both at once. Reason is alien to insanity, and those who use It have gained a Means that cannot be misappropriated to the mad belief in separation. Knowledge is far beyond attainment of any kind, but Reason can serve to open doors you closed against Knowledge.

You have come very close to this. Your faith and belief have shifted, and you have asked the basic question that the ego will never ask. Your Reason will tell you now that the question must have come from something that you do not currently know, but that must belong to you. Faith and belief, upheld by Reason, cannot fail to lead to transformed perception. And in this transformation is vision welcomed. And vision extends beyond itself, as does the Purpose which it serves, and all the Means for this Purpose’s Accomplishment.