1. You have been told not to make error real, and the way to do this is very simple. 2If you want to believe in error, you would have to make it real because it is not true. 3But truth is real in its own right, and to believe in truth you do not have to do anything. 4Understand that you do not respond to anything directly, but to your interpretation of it. 5Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response. 6That is why analyzing the motives of others is hazardous to you. 7If you decide that someone is really trying to attack you or desert you or enslave you, you will respond as if he had actually done so, having made his error real to you. 8To interpret error is to give it power, and having done this you will overlook truth.
2. The analysis of ego motivation is very complicated, very obscuring, and never without your own ego involvement. 2The whole process represents a clear-cut attempt to demonstrate your own ability to understand what you perceive. 3This is shown by the fact that you react to your interpretations as if they were correct. 4You may then control your reactions behaviorally, but not emotionally. 5This would obviously be a split or an attack on the integrity of your mind, pitting one level within it against another.
3. There is but one interpretation of motivation that makes any sense. 2And because it is the Holy Spirit’s judgment it requires no effort at all on your part. 3Every loving thought is true. 4Everything else is an appeal for healing and help, regardless of the form it takes. 5Can anyone be justified in responding with anger to a brother’s plea for help? 6No response can be appropriate except the willingness to give it to him, for this and only this is what he is asking for. 7Offer him anything else, and you are assuming the right to attack his reality by interpreting it as you see fit. 8Perhaps the danger of this to your own mind is not yet fully apparent. 9If you believe that an appeal for help is something else you will react to something else. 10Your response will therefore be inappropriate to reality as it is, but not to your perception of it.
4. There is nothing to prevent you from recognizing all calls for help as exactly what they are except your own imagined need to attack. 2It is only this that makes you willing to engage in endless “battles” with reality, in which you deny the reality of the need for healing by making it unreal. 3You would not do this except for your unwillingness to accept reality as it is, and which you therefore withhold from yourself.
5. It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand. 2No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness, for truth to him has become what he wants it to be. 3If you are unwilling to perceive an appeal for help as what it is, it is because you are unwilling to give help and to receive it. 4To fail to recognize a call for help is to refuse help. 5Would you maintain that you do not need it? 6Yet this is what you are maintaining when you refuse to recognize a brother’s appeal, for only by answering his appeal can you be helped. 7Deny him your help and you will not recognize God’s Answer to you. 8The Holy Spirit does not need your help in interpreting motivation, but you do need His.
6. Only appreciation is an appropriate response to your brother. 2Gratitude is due him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help, for both are capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly. 3And all your sense of strain comes from your attempts not to do just this. 4How simple, then, is God’s plan for salvation. 5There is but one response to reality, for reality evokes no conflict at all. 6There is but one Teacher of reality, Who understands what it is. 7He does not change His Mind about reality because reality does not change. 8Although your interpretations of reality are meaningless in your divided state, His remain consistently true. 9He gives them to you because they are for you. 10Do not attempt to “help” a brother in your way, for you cannot help yourself. 11But hear his call for the Help of God, and you will recognize your own need for the Father.
7. Your interpretations of your brother’s needs are your interpretation of yours. 2By giving help you are asking for it, and if you perceive but one need in yourself you will be healed. 3For you will recognize God’s Answer as you want It to be, and if you want It in truth, It will be truly yours. 4Every appeal you answer in the Name of Christ brings the remembrance of your Father closer to your awareness. 5For the sake of your need, then, hear every call for help as what it is, so God can answer you.
8. By applying the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the reactions of others more and more consistently, you will gain an increasing awareness that His criteria are equally applicable to you. 2For to recognize fear is not enough to escape from it, although the recognition is necessary to demonstrate the need for escape. 3The Holy Spirit must still translate the fear into truth. 4If you were left with the fear, once you had recognized it, you would have taken a step away from reality, not towards it. 5Yet we have repeatedly emphasized the need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as a crucial step in the undoing of the ego. 6Consider how well the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the motives of others will serve you then. 7Having taught you to accept only loving thoughts in others and to regard everything else as an appeal for help, He has taught you that fear itself is an appeal for help. 8This is what recognizing fear really means. 9If you do not protect it, He will reinterpret it. 10That is the ultimate value in learning to perceive attack as a call for love. 11We have already learned that fear and attack are inevitably associated. 12If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn on you. 13For fear is a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied.
9. Fear is a symptom of your own deep sense of loss. 2If when you perceive it in others you learn to supply the loss, the basic cause of fear is removed. 3Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist in you. 4The means for removing it is in yourself, and you have demonstrated this by giving it. 5Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable. 6One is false, for it was made out of denial; and denial depends on the belief in what is denied for its own existence. 7By interpreting fear correctly as a positive affirmation of the underlying belief it masks, you are undermining its perceived usefulness by rendering it useless. 8Defenses that do not work at all are automatically discarded. 9If you raise what fear conceals to clear-cut unequivocal predominance, fear becomes meaningless. 10You have denied its power to conceal love, which was its only purpose. 11The veil that you have drawn across the face of love has disappeared.
10. If you would look upon love, which is the world’s reality, how could you do better than to recognize, in every defense against it, the underlying appeal for it? 2And how could you better learn of its reality than by answering the appeal for it by giving it? 3The Holy Spirit’s interpretation of fear does dispel it, for the awareness of truth cannot be denied. 4Thus does the Holy Spirit replace fear with love and translate error into truth. 5And thus will you learn of Him how to replace your dream of separation with the fact of unity. 6For the separation is only the denial of union, and correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true.