Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 28: The Two Dreams

4. The Power beyond Limitations

True Strength cannot oppose. For any real opposition would weaken It, and weakened strength is a contradiction. Weak power is meaningless. Power used to weaken is employed to limit, and thus it must be limited and weak, because that is its purpose. And thus it is not true Strength.

Real Strength must be unopposed in truth to be Itself. It is impossible that weakness could intrude upon It, which is why It is true Strength: all-encompassing, giving Strength to all that It touches, so that all things are strong like Itself. If weakness seems to have any reality at all then true Strength has been forgotten, changed in the unseeing mind into something It is not. To weaken is an attempt to limit Strength, and impose an opposite that contradicts what It is. And this contradiction is itself an attempt to join to Strength a something It is not in an attempt to make It meaningless. Who can understand a contradictory concept such as “weakened power” or “fearful love”?

The deluded have decided that their sisters and brothers are symbols of a “fearful-love,” a “weakened-power,” and, above all, a “living-death.” And so their awakeners have been made meaningless to them. They represent a contradictory concept where half is cancelled out by the other half, and the other half is negated by the half it cancelled out, and so both are gone. And now they stand for nothing. Symbols that represent ideas that cannot be must stand for nothingness. Yet nothingness does not exist and therefore cannot oppose or interfere with anything in reality. What can interfere with the awareness of Reality is the belief that there is something actually present interfering with and opposing It.

The image you have held of your sisters and brothers means nothing. There is nothing in it to attack or to deny, to love or hate, to endow with power or to perceive as weak. The image has been entirely cancelled out, because it symbolized a contradiction that negated the thought it represented. And thus the image has no cause at all. Who can perceive effect without a cause? What can that without a cause be but nothingness? The image of your sisters and brothers that you perceive with the body’s eyes is entirely absent, and has never been. Let, then, the empty space it occupies be recognized as vacant, and the time devoted to perceiving it be understood as idly spent, a time unoccupied, a blankness.

An empty space that is not perceived as filled, an unused interval of time not perceived as spent and fully occupied, become a silent invitation to the Truth to enter, and to make Itself at home. No preparation can be made that would enhance the invitation’s real appeal. For what you acknowledge as empty and intentionally leave vacant the Divine will fill, and where It is, there must the Truth abide.

Limitless Power with no opposite is what Creation is. For this there are no symbols or images. Nothing points beyond the Truth, for what could stand for more than Everything? Yet true undoing must be kind, and so the first replacement for your image is another image, of another kind.

Just as nothingness cannot be pictured, so there is no symbol for Totality. Reality is ultimately known without a form, unpictured and unperceived. Forgiveness is not yet a Strength known by you as wholly free of limits. Yet it sets no limits that you have chosen to impose. Forgiveness is the Means by which the Truth is represented temporarily. It lets the Holy Spirit make the exchange of Its Image of your sisters and brothers for yours possible, until the time when learning is complete and learning aids are meaningless. No learning aid has use that can extend beyond the goal of learning. When the learning aim of a learning aid has been accomplished, the aid is functionless. Yet in the learning interval it has a use which now you mistrust, but yet will love.

The Image of your sisters and brothers given you by Spirit to occupy the space so lately left unoccupied and vacant will need no defense of any kind, for you will give It overwhelming preference. And you will not delay an instant in deciding that It is the only image you want. It does not stand for contradictory concepts. Though It is only half the picture of your whole mind – the half that is your sisters and brothers – and is therefore incomplete, within Itself there is no contradiction. The other half of your whole mind that Spirit’s Image represents – the half that is individually you – remains temporarily unknown, but is not cancelled out by the Image. And thus is the Divine left free to take the Final Step Itself. For this Step to take place you need no images and no learning aids. And what will ultimately take the place of every learning aid will merely be.

Forgiveness fades and symbols and images vanish, and nothing that the eyes have ever beheld or ears have heard remains to be perceived. A Power wholly limitless has come, not to limit or destroy, but to receive Its Own. There is no choice of function anywhere.

The choice you feared to lose you never actually had. Yet only this seeming choice appears to interfere with Strength unlimited and unified Thoughts, complete and happy, without opposite. You do not yet know the Peace of the Power that opposes nothing. Yet no other kind can be at all.

Give welcome to the Power beyond forgiveness, and beyond the world of symbols and of limitations. It would merely be, and so It merely is.