1. The happy learner cannot feel guilty about learning. 2This is so essential to learning that it should never be forgotten. 3The guiltless learner learns easily because his thoughts are free. 4Yet this entails the recognition that guilt is interference, not salvation, and serves no useful function at all.
2. Perhaps you are accustomed to using guiltlessness merely to offset the pain of guilt, and do not look upon it as having value in itself. 2You believe that guilt and guiltlessness are both of value, each representing an escape from what the other does not offer you. 3You do not want either alone, for without both you do not see yourself as whole and therefore happy. 4Yet you are whole only in your guiltlessness, and only in your guiltlessness can you be happy. 5There is no conflict here. 6To wish for guilt in any way, in any form, will lose appreciation of the value of your guiltlessness, and push it from your sight.
3. There is no compromise that you can make with guilt, and escape the pain that only guiltlessness allays. 2Learning is living here, as creating is being in Heaven. 3Whenever the pain of guilt seems to attract you, remember that if you yield to it, you are deciding against your happiness, and will not learn how to be happy. 4Say therefore, to yourself, gently, but with the conviction born of the Love of God and of His Son:
5What I experience I will make manifest.
6If I am guiltless, I have nothing to fear.
7I choose to testify to my acceptance of the Atonement, not to its rejection.
8I would accept my guiltlessness by making it manifest and sharing it.
9Let me bring peace to God’s Son from his Father.
4. Each day, each hour and minute, even each second, you are deciding between the crucifixion and the resurrection; between the ego and the Holy Spirit. 2The ego is the choice for guilt; the Holy Spirit the choice for guiltlessness. 3The power of decision is all that is yours. 4What you can decide between is fixed, because there are no alternatives except truth and illusion. 5And there is no overlap between them, because they are opposites which cannot be reconciled and cannot both be true. 6You are guilty or guiltless, bound or free, unhappy or happy.
5. The miracle teaches you that you have chosen guiltlessness, freedom and joy. 2It is not a cause, but an effect. 3It is the natural result of choosing right, attesting to your happiness that comes from choosing to be free of guilt. 4Everyone you offer healing to returns it. 5Everyone you attack keeps it and cherishes it by holding it against you. 6Whether he does this or does it not will make no difference; you will think he does. 7It is impossible to offer what you do not want without this penalty. 8The cost of giving is receiving. 9Either it is a penalty from which you suffer, or the happy purchase of a treasure to hold dear.
6. No penalty is ever asked of God’s Son except by himself and of himself. 2Every chance given him to heal is another opportunity to replace darkness with light and fear with love. 3If he refuses it he binds himself to darkness, because he did not choose to free his brother and enter light with him. 4By giving power to nothing, he throws away the joyous opportunity to learn that nothing has no power. 5And by not dispelling darkness, he became afraid of darkness and of light. 6The joy of learning that darkness has no power over the Son of God is the happy lesson the Holy Spirit teaches, and would have you teach with Him. 7It is His joy to teach it, as it will be yours.
7. The way to teach this simple lesson is merely this: Guiltlessness is invulnerability. 2Therefore, make your invulnerability manifest to everyone. 3Teach him that, whatever he may try to do to you, your perfect freedom from the belief that you can be harmed shows him that he is guiltless. 4He can do nothing that can hurt you, and by refusing to allow him to think he can, you teach him that the Atonement, which you have accepted for yourself, is also his. 5There is nothing to forgive. 6No one can hurt the Son of God. 7His guilt is wholly without cause, and being without cause, cannot exist.
8. God is the only Cause, and guilt is not of Him. 2Teach no one he has hurt you, for if you do, you teach yourself that what is not of God has power over you. 3The causeless cannot be. 4Do not attest to it, and do not foster belief in it in any mind. 5Remember always that mind is one, and cause is one. 6You will learn communication with this oneness only when you learn to deny the causeless, and accept the Cause of God as yours. 7The power that God has given to His Son is his, and nothing else can His Son see or choose to look upon without imposing on himself the penalty of guilt, in place of all the happy teaching the Holy Spirit would gladly offer him.
9. Whenever you choose to make decisions for yourself you are thinking destructively, and the decision will be wrong. 2It will hurt you because of the concept of decision that led to it. 3It is not true that you can make decisions by yourself or for yourself alone. 4No thought of God’s Son can be separate or isolated in its effects. 5Every decision is made for the whole Sonship, directed in and out, and influencing a constellation larger than anything you ever dreamed of.
10. Those who accept the Atonement are invulnerable. 2But those who believe they are guilty will respond to guilt, because they think it is salvation, and will not refuse to see it and side with it. 3They believe that increasing guilt is self-protection. 4And they will fail to understand the simple fact that what they do not want must hurt them. 5All this arises because they do not believe that what they want is good. 6Yet will was given them because it is holy, and will bring to them all that they need, coming as naturally as peace that knows no limits. 7There is nothing their will fails to provide that offers them anything of value. 8Yet because they do not understand their will, the Holy Spirit quietly understands it for them, and gives them what they want without effort, strain, or the impossible burden of deciding what they want and need alone.
11. It will never happen that you must make decisions for yourself. 2You are not bereft of help, and Help that knows the answer. 3Would you be content with little, which is all that you alone can offer yourself, when He Who gives you everything will simply offer it to you? 4He will never ask what you have done to make you worthy of the gift of God. 5Ask it not therefore of yourself. 6Instead, accept His answer, for He knows that you are worthy of everything God wills for you. 7Do not try to escape the gift of God He so freely and so gladly offers you. 8He offers you but what God gave Him for you. 9You need not decide whether or not you are deserving of it. 10God knows you are.
12. Would you deny the truth of God’s decision, and place your pitiful appraisal of yourself in place of His calm and unswerving value of His Son? 2Nothing can shake God’s conviction of the perfect purity of everything that He created, for it is wholly pure. 3Do not decide against it, for being of Him it must be true. 4Peace abides in every mind that quietly accepts the plan God set for its Atonement, relinquishing its own. 5You know not of salvation, for you do not understand it. 6Make no decisions about what it is or where it lies, but ask the Holy Spirit everything, and leave all decisions to His gentle counsel.
13. The One Who knows the plan of God that God would have you follow can teach you what it is. 2Only His wisdom is capable of guiding you to follow it. 3Every decision you undertake alone but signifies that you would define what salvation is, and what you would be saved from. 4The Holy Spirit knows that all salvation is escape from guilt. 5You have no other “enemy,” and against this strange distortion of the purity of the Son of God the Holy Spirit is your only Friend. 6He is the strong protector of the innocence that sets you free. 7And it is His decision to undo everything that would obscure your innocence from your unclouded mind.
14. Let Him, therefore, be the only Guide that you would follow to salvation. 2He knows the way, and leads you gladly on it. 3With Him you will not fail to learn that what God wills for you is your will. 4Without His guidance you will think you know alone, and will decide against your peace as surely as you decided that salvation lay in you alone. 5Salvation is of Him to Whom God gave it for you. 6He has not forgotten it. 7Forget Him not and He will make every decision for you, for your salvation and the peace of God in you.
15. Seek not to appraise the worth of God’s Son whom He created holy, for to do so is to evaluate his Father and judge against Him. 2And you will feel guilty for this imagined crime, which no one in this world or Heaven could possibly commit. 3The Holy Spirit teaches only that the “sin” of self-replacement on the throne of God is not a source of guilt. 4What cannot happen can have no effects to fear. 5Be quiet in your faith in Him Who loves you, and would lead you out of insanity. 6Madness may be your choice, but not your reality. 7Never forget the Love of God, Who has remembered you. 8For it is quite impossible that He could ever let His Son drop from the loving Mind wherein he was created, and where his abode was fixed in perfect peace forever.
16. Say to the Holy Spirit only, “Decide for me,” and it is done. 2For His decisions are reflections of what God knows about you, and in this light, error of any kind becomes impossible. 3Why would you struggle so frantically to anticipate all you cannot know, when all knowledge lies behind every decision the Holy Spirit makes for you? 4Learn of His wisdom and His Love, and teach His answer to everyone who struggles in the dark. 5For you decide for them and for yourself.
17. How gracious it is to decide all things through Him Whose equal Love is given equally to all alike! 2He leaves you no one outside you. 3And so He gives you what is yours, because your Father would have you share it with Him. 4In everything be led by Him, and do not reconsider. 5Trust Him to answer quickly, surely, and with Love for everyone who will be touched in any way by the decision. 6And everyone will be. 7Would you take unto yourself the sole responsibility for deciding what can bring only good to everyone? 8Would you know this?
18. You taught yourself the most unnatural habit of not communicating with your Creator. 2Yet you remain in close communication with Him, and with everything that is within Him, as it is within yourself. 3Unlearn isolation through His loving guidance, and learn of all the happy communication that you have thrown away but could not lose.
19. Whenever you are in doubt what you should do, think of His Presence in you, and tell yourself this, and only this:
2He leadeth me and knows the way, which I know not.
3Yet He will never keep from me what He would have me learn.
4And so I trust Him to communicate to me all that He knows for me.
5Then let Him teach you quietly how to perceive your guiltlessness, which is already there.