Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 27: The Transition to Holy Ground

9. The Temptation to Perceive Unfairness

What, then, remains to be undone for you to realize the Presence of Divine Essence and Its Creator, Who have come? Only this: You have a split view of when you believe that attack is justified, and when you think it is unfair and not to be tolerated. When you perceive a situation or an attack as unfair, you then think that a response of anger is justified. And thus you perceive what is the same as different, believing that anger and attack are sometimes justified, at other times not.

Confusion is not limited. If it occurs at all it will be total. And its presence in any form will hide the Presence of the Creator and Divine Essence. They are known with Clarity, or not at all. Confused perception will block Knowledge. It is not a question of the size of the confusion, or how much it interferes. Its simple presence shuts the door to Their Presence in your awareness, and keeps Them there unknown.

What does it mean if you perceive attack toward or from a brother or sister in certain forms to be unfair? It means that there must be some forms and situations in which you think anger and attack are fair. For otherwise, how could some be judged as unfair? Some, then, are given meaning and perceived as sensible. And only some are perceived as meaningless. And this denies the fact that all are senseless, equally without a cause or consequence in truth, and that they cannot have actual effects of any kind in reality.

The Presence of the Creator and Divine Essence is obscured by any veil that stands between Their radiant Innocence and your awareness that It is your own, and equally belongs to every created thing along with you. The Divine never limits. Therefore what is limited cannot be Heaven, so it must be believed to be a kind of hell.

Unfairness and attack are the same mistake, so firmly joined that where one is perceived, the other must be present. Yet you cannot in truth be unfairly treated. The belief that you can or are is only another form of the idea that you can be deprived of anything truly yours by anyone or anything other than yourself. Projection of the cause of sacrifice – the belief in separation – is at the root of everything perceived to be unfair, which means someone being deprived of what is rightly theirs. Because your will, and that of your sisters and brothers, is honored by its Creator, it can only be you who can deprive yourself of what you justly deserve, in deep injustice to the Children of the Divine that you are. You have no adversary except your mistaken beliefs, and you are adversary indeed to yourself when you do not know yourself as you are. What could be more unjust than that you deny yourself the right to be your holy Self, and ask yourself to sacrifice your Creator’s Love and yours as not your due, depriving yourself of all the Peace and Joy that is yours to give and to receive in this holy moment?

Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated. In this perception you seek to find an innocence that is not the Innocence of the Creator and Divine Essence, but yours alone, and at the cost of someone else’s guilt. Can innocence be found by the casting of guilt onto someone else? And is it Innocence that attack attempts to find, or retribution that is actually sought? Those who are confused believe that it is safer to project that they are innocent of their attacks because these were in reaction to unfairness, and that they’ve been victimized despite their innocence. Whatever way the game of guilt is played, there must be loss. Someone must seem to lose their innocence so that someone else can seem to take it from them, making it their own.

If you think you have been unfairly treated it is because you believe that innocence is revealed by unfair treatment. And in this perspective is one core purpose perceived for your entire relationship: to keep your innocence by demonstrating your brother or sister’s unfairness and subsequent guilt. But this purpose cannot be reconciled with the Purpose given your relationship by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s Purpose is to let the Presence of your holy Guests be known to you. And to this Purpose nothing can be added, for the world is purposeless except for this. To add or take away from this one Goal is to take away all Purpose from the world and from yourself. And each unfairness that the world appears to lay upon you, you have laid on it by rendering it purposeless, without the Function that the Holy Spirit sees. And simple Justice has been thus denied to every living thing upon the Earth.

You cannot conceive what this injustice does to you who judge, and to those who perceive as you have judged. The world grows dim and threatening, and not a trace of all the Peace and Happiness that awakening to the Presence of Divine Essence and Its Creator brings can you perceive to lighten up your way. And so you perceive yourself deprived of Light, abandoned to the dark, and unfairly left without a purpose in a futile world.

The world is fair because the Holy Spirit has brought injustice to the Light within, and there has all unfairness been resolved, and been replaced with Justice and with Love. Therefore, if you perceive injustice anywhere, you need only say:

By this perception do I deny the Presence of the Creator and Its perfect Creation, Divine Essence. And I would rather know of Them than look upon injustice, which Their Presence shines away.