Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 5: Understanding the Holy Spirit’s Purpose

5. Strengthening through Sharing

An effective teacher uses their students’ own ideas, as much as possible and as is appropriate, to help them connect to and understand the focus of their studies together. An effective therapist does the same with their patients in the process of healing. You are learning to be loving, wise, and very understanding with others in general, and this should extend to include yourself. If you are an exception to your own empathy, this may give you something greater than perception for others because of what you understand in them, but it will give you less than knowing of your real relationships with them because you will not have made them part of you.

True Understanding is beyond perception because It introduces Meaning. But It doesn’t yet reach to Knowledge, even though It can grow toward It. It is possible, with great effort, to understand someone else and to be helpful to them, but the effort would be misdirected. The misdirection is quite apparent, because such efforts would be directed away from, and excluding, yourself. This does not mean that understanding directed away from yourself would be lost to you, but it does mean that you would not be aware of it. For understanding must include yourself and your sisters and brothers.

I have saved all of your kindnesses and every loving thought you’ve ever had, and I assure you that you have had myriad, most of which are not part of your conscious awareness. I have purified them of errors that hid their Light, and have kept them for you in their own perfect Radiance. They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. They came from the Holy Spirit within you, and we know that what the Divine creates is eternal.

Some understand Heaven in this way, that is, as a kind of repository for all the truth, beauty, and goodness they yearn for, because they have repressed these qualities in themselves through looking for them outside themselves. Some are much more afraid of what has been repressed than of repression itself, because it reminds them of their dissociation from it, which is more fearful to them. Dissociation is a splitting off from while repression is a covering up, and of the two mechanisms for dealing with the pain of separation and the fear of this pain, dissociation may be perceived as being the more neurotic. For splitting off from the perceived source of pain may be considered more extreme in someone’s self-image than merely covering it up.

Those who through their yearning have a stronger connection to what has been repressed or covered up in themselves may also find through that yearning the strength to retain in awareness the fear of the pain of being separated from it. But then they may resort to displacement, avoiding having to “come close” to others through focusing on what they have repressed in themselves. Those who understand this displacement defense mechanism and who are in close relationship with someone experiencing it can help them overcome it by demonstrating that closeness isn’t fearful. This may be done because they have no fear of repression themselves, and through their freedom from this type of fear they may be able to recognize that at least the other isn’t dissociating or splitting away entirely even if they are keeping others distant. These are examples of how two people’s different forms of fear and lack of fear may allow them to help each other overcome these fears and the defense mechanisms they have used to guard them and keep them in place.

Regardless of the form of fear delaying you in moving to embrace your “Treasures in Heaven,” joining with your sisters and brothers in Atonement, which I have asked you to do, is always a way out of fear. This does not mean that you can safely fail to acknowledge anything that is true – including what is taking place in your personal process, such as facing pain and fear – to become whole and free. But it does mean that the Holy Spirit will always help you reinterpret everything that you perceive as fearful, and teach you that only what is loving is true. Your Treasure House is beyond your ability to destroy, but entirely within your grasp to receive. It belongs to you because you created It. It is yours because It is part of you, just as you are Part of the Divine because It created you.

The Atonement is the Guarantee of the Safety of the Realm of Heaven. Nothing True, Beautiful, or Good can ever be lost because It comes from the Holy Spirit, the Voice for Creation. Nothing that is not True, Beautiful, or Good was ever created, and therefore cannot be protected.

What the ego makes it keeps to itself, and so it is without strength. Its unshared existence does not die; it was merely never born. Real birth is not a beginning; it is a continuing. Everything that can continue has already been born, or given continuity. But all that is True and Beautiful and Good can increase as you are willing to return the part of your mind that needs healing to your whole mind, and thus render your creating and its results undivided.

A wise therapist once always told their patients that the real difference between neurotic and “healthy” guilt feelings was that neurotic guilt feelings do not help anyone. This distinction is insightful, though incomplete. Let us make the distinction a little clearer. Neurotic guilt feelings are a device of the ego for “atoning” without sharing, and for asking for pardon without the requisite need for genuine change. The ego never calls for real Atonement, and cannot tolerate real forgiveness, which is genuine change, or transformation. The concept of “healthy guilt feelings” in the sense of seeking transformation has real potential as a tool for understanding, but without the concept of the Atonement it lacks the healing potential it would otherwise have.

A distinction can be made between neurotic and healthy guilt feelings in terms of which feelings lead to a decision not to repeat error, which is only part of healing. The other part is that of undoing the error. Only through including both parts can a real foundation be adopted. I have come to you to provide this foundation, so that your own thoughts can really set you free. You have carried the burden of the ideas you did not share, and that were therefore too weak to increase, but you did not recognize how to undo their existence because you had made them. You cannot cancel out your past errors alone. They will not disappear from your mind without remedy. The Remedy is not of your creation, any more than you are.

The Atonement cannot be understood except as a pure Act of Sharing. That is what is meant when this Course says that it is possible even in this world to listen only to one voice. If you are Part of the Divine, and the Divine Family or Creation is One, you cannot be limited to the self the ego perceives. Every loving Thought held in any Part of the Divine Family belongs to every Part. It is shared because It is loving. Sharing is the Creator’s Way of creating, and also yours. Your ego can keep you temporarily in exile from the Realm of Heaven, but in the Realm itself it has no power because it does not exist.

Your willingness to receive the message of this Course without interference by the ego enables something stated earlier to be clarified. It was stated previously that as long as your commitment is not yet total you will still have more to learn than to teach, and that when your equilibrium stabilizes, you will be able to teach as much as you learn, giving you the proper sense of balance. This time of now is drawing near because you are letting it be so. You cannot receive except by sharing, and you cannot learn except by teaching. I heard one Voice because I had learned that learning is attained by teaching. I understood that I could not atone for myself alone. Listening to one Voice means the will to share the Voice, in order to hear It yourself.

The Mind that was and is in me is still irresistibly drawn to every mind created by the Divine, because the Divine’s Wholeness is the Wholeness of Its Creation. Turning the other cheek does not mean that you should submit to violence without response or demonstration. It means that in truth you cannot be hurt, and that you do not want to respond or demonstrate to your sisters and brothers anything except Truth, which is your Wholeness. Respond and demonstrate to them that in truth they cannot hurt you, and hold nothing against them due to their insane behavior when they are not in their right mind, or you hold it against yourself.

Teaching is done in many ways: by formal and informal means, by guidance, and above all by example. If you will to learn, you must will to teach. Teaching is therapy because it means the sharing of ideas, and the awareness that to share them is to strengthen them.

The Union of the Divine Family is Its Protection. The ego cannot prevail against the Realm of Heaven because the ego fades away and is undone in the Presence of the Attraction of the Parts of the Divine Family that hear and respond to the Call of the Holy Spirit to be as One.

I always remember my need to teach what I have learned, a need that arose in me because I learned truly. I call upon you to teach what you have learned truly, because by so doing you will know that you can depend on it. Make it dependable in my name, because my name, like yours, is the Name of the Child of the Divine. What I learned I give you freely, and the Mind that was and is in me rejoices as you will to hear It. The Holy Spirit atones in all of us by undoing what was never real – the effects of error – and thus lifts the burden you have placed in your mind. By following Spirit It leads you to the Divine where you belong. And how can you find this Way except by taking your sisters and brothers with you?

My part in the Atonement is not complete until each of my sisters and brothers join It, and give It away, sharing It to strengthen It. As you teach so shall you learn. I will never leave you or forsake you, because to forsake you would be to forsake myself and the Divine Who created us. You forsake yourself and the Divine if you forsake any of your brothers or sisters. It is true that you are not their keeper. In fact, you do not want to keep them, which would imply holding them where they are. You must learn to perceive them as they truly are, and know that they belong to and with the Divine, as you do, no matter how insane their nightmares appear to be in the world of illusions. How could you treat your sisters and brothers better than by rendering unto the Divine the things that are the Divine’s?

Ideas do not leave the minds that think them and take on separate being. Nor do separate thoughts conflict with one another in space, because they do not occupy space at all. Human ideas can conflict in content because they can occur at different levels of consciousness, and can include opposite thoughts at the same level. It is impossible to share opposing thoughts. The Holy Spirit will ultimately not let you forsake your sisters and brothers, any more than It or I can forsake you. Therefore, you can only really share your thoughts that are of Spirit, which It also keeps for you. And of such is the Realm of Heaven. All your other thoughts remain with you until Spirit has helped you truly evaluate them, reinterpreting them in the Light of Heaven, rendering them, too, worthy of being shared whenever this is possible, or helping you release them to It so that they disappear forever, when appropriate. When these former thoughts have been cleared of all that isn’t true, Spirit rejoices in letting you give them away. The will to share them is their Purification.

The Atonement gives you the Power of a healed mind, but the Power to create is of the Divine. Therefore, those who know their forgiveness must devote themselves first to healing, because having received the Idea of healing they must give It to hold It. The full Power of Creation and Its Results cannot be expressed as long as any of the Children of the Divine are withholding anything from the Realm of Heaven. The joint Will of the whole Divine Family is the only Power that can create like the Creator. That is because only the whole can think wholly, and the Thought of the Divine is Whole, lacking nothing. Everything thought by anyone that is not through the Holy Spirit is lacking.

How can you who are holy suffer? All your past, except its beauty, is gone, and nothing is left except a Blessing. You can indeed depart from the dream of this world in peace, because I have loved you as I loved myself. You go with my blessing and for the Blessing of all. Hold this and share It, that It may always be ours. I see the Peace of the Divine in your heart and in your hands, to hold and share. The heart is pure to hold It, and the hands are strong to give It. We can only succeed in this journey.

My evaluation, like Spirit’s, is as strong as the Wisdom of the Divine, in whose Heart and Hands we have our Being. In Quiet Its Children are blessed. The Thoughts of Spirit are with us.