T-21.II:The Responsibility for Sight

1. 1We have repeated how little is asked of you to learn this course. 2It is the same small willingness you need to have your whole relationship transformed to joy; the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit for which He gives you everything; the very little on which salvation rests; the tiny change of mind by which the crucifixion is changed to resurrection. 3And being true, it is so simple that it cannot fail to be completely understood. 4Rejected yes, but not ambiguous. 5And if you choose against it now it will not be because it is obscure, but rather that this little cost seemed, in your judgment, to be too much to pay for peace.

2. 1This is the only thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release from pain and the complete escape from sin, all to be given you. 2Say only this, but mean it with no reservations, for here the power of salvation lies:

3I am responsible for what I see.
4I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would achieve.
5And everything that seems to happen to me I ask for, and receive as I have asked.

6Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done to you. 7Acknowledge but that you have been mistaken, and all effects of your mistakes will disappear.

3. 1It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events outside of him. 2It is impossible that happenings that come to him were not his choice. 3His power of decision is the determiner of every situation in which he seems to find himself by chance or accident. 4No accident nor chance is possible within the universe as God created it, outside of which is nothing. 5Suffer, and you decided sin was your goal. 6Be happy, and you gave the power of decision to Him Who must decide for God for you. 7This is the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit, and even this He gives to you to give yourself. 8For by this gift is given you the power to release your savior, that he may give salvation unto you.

4. 1Begrudge not then this little offering. 2Withhold it, and you keep the world as now you see it. 3Give it away, and everything you see goes with it. 4Never was so much given for so little. 5In the holy instant is this exchange effected and maintained. 6Here is the world you do not want brought to the one you do. 7And here the one you do is given you because you want it. 8Yet for this, the power of your wanting must first be recognized. 9You must accept its strength, and not its weakness. 10You must perceive that what is strong enough to make a world can let it go, and can accept correction if it is willing to see that it was wrong.

5. 1The world you see is but the idle witness that you were right. 2This witness is insane. 3You trained it in its testimony, and as it gave it back to you, you listened and convinced yourself that what it saw was true. 4You did this to yourself. 5See only this, and you will also see how circular the reasoning on which your “seeing” rests. 6This was not given you. 7This was your gift to you and to your brother. 8Be willing, then, to have it taken from him and be replaced with truth. 9And as you look upon the change in him, it will be given you to see it in yourself.

6. 1Perhaps you do not see the need for you to give this little offering. 2Look closer, then, at what it is. 3And, very simply, see in it the whole exchange of separation for salvation. 4All that the ego is, is an idea that it is possible that things could happen to the Son of God without his will; and thus without the Will of his Creator, Whose Will cannot be separate from his own. 5This is the Son of God’s replacement for his will, a mad revolt against what must forever be. 6This is the statement that he has the power to make God powerless and so to take it for himself, and leave himself without what God has willed for him. 7This is the mad idea you have enshrined upon your altars, and which you worship. 8And anything that threatens this seems to attack your faith, for here is it invested. 9Think not that you are faithless, for your belief and trust in this is strong indeed.

7. 1The Holy Spirit can give you faith in holiness and vision to see it easily enough. 2But you have not left open and unoccupied the altar where the gifts belong. 3Where they should be, you have set up your idols to something else. 4This other “will,” which seems to tell you what must happen, you give reality. 5And what would show you otherwise must therefore seem unreal. 6All that is asked of you is to make room for truth. 7You are not asked to make or do what lies beyond your understanding. 8All you are asked to do is let it in; only to stop your interference with what will happen of itself; simply to recognize again the presence of what you thought you gave away.

8. 1Be willing, for an instant, to leave your altars free of what you placed upon them, and what is really there you cannot fail to see. 2The holy instant is not an instant of creation, but of recognition. 3For recognition comes of vision and suspended judgment. 4Then only it is possible to look within and see what must be there, plainly in sight, and wholly independent of inference and judgment. 5Undoing is not your task, but it is up to you to welcome it or not. 6Faith and desire go hand in hand, for everyone believes in what he wants.

9. 1We have already said that wishful thinking is how the ego deals with what it wants, to make it so. 2There is no better demonstration of the power of wanting, and therefore of faith, to make its goals seem real and possible. 3Faith in the unreal leads to adjustments of reality to make it fit the goal of madness. 4The goal of sin induces the perception of a fearful world to justify its purpose. 5What you desire, you will see. 6And if its reality is false, you will uphold it by not realizing all the adjustments you have introduced to make it so.

10. 1When vision is denied, confusion of cause and effect becomes inevitable. 2The purpose now becomes to keep obscure the cause of the effect, and make effect appear to be a cause. 3This seeming independence of effect enables it to be regarded as standing by itself, and capable of serving as a cause of the events and feelings its maker thinks it causes. 4Earlier, we spoke of your desire to create your own creator, and be father and not son to him. 5This is the same desire. 6The Son is the Effect, whose Cause he would deny. 7And so he seems to be the cause, producing real effects. 8Nothing can have effects without a cause, and to confuse the two is merely to fail to understand them both.

11. 1It is as needful that you recognize you made the world you see, as that you recognize that you did not create yourself. 2They are the same mistake. 3Nothing created not by your Creator has any influence over you. 4And if you think what you have made can tell you what you see and feel, and place your faith in its ability to do so, you are denying your Creator and believing that you made yourself. 5For if you think the world you made has power to make you what it wills, you are confusing Son and Father; effect and Source.

12. 1The Son’s creations are like his Father’s. 2Yet in creating them the Son does not delude himself that he is independent of his Source. 3His union with It is the source of his creating. 4Apart from this he has no power to create, and what he makes is meaningless. 5It changes nothing in creation, depends entirely upon the madness of its maker, and cannot serve to justify the madness. 6Your brother thinks he made the world with you. 7Thus he denies creation. 8With you, he thinks the world he made, made him. 9Thus he denies he made it.

13. 1Yet the truth is you and your brother were both created by a loving Father, Who created you together and as one. 2See what “proves” otherwise, and you deny your whole reality. 3But grant that everything that seems to stand between you and your brother, keeping you from each other and separate from your Father, you made in secret, and the instant of release has come to you. 4All its effects are gone, because its source has been uncovered. 5It is its seeming independence of its source that keeps you prisoner. 6This is the same mistake as thinking you are independent of the Source by which you were created, and have never left.