1. The Holy Spirit will never teach you that you are sinful. 2Errors He will correct, but this makes no one fearful. 3You are indeed afraid to look within and see the sin you think is there. 4This you would not be fearful to admit. 5Fear in association with sin the ego deems quite appropriate, and smiles approvingly. 6It has no fear to let you feel ashamed. 7It doubts not your belief and faith in sin. 8Its temples do not shake because of this. 9Your faith that sin is there but witnesses to your desire that it be there to see. 10This merely seems to be the source of fear.
2. Remember that the ego is not alone. 2Its rule is tempered, and its unknown “enemy,” Whom it cannot even see, it fears. 3Loudly the ego tells you not to look inward, for if you do your eyes will light on sin, and God will strike you blind. 4This you believe, and so you do not look. 5Yet this is not the ego’s hidden fear, nor yours who serve it. 6Loudly indeed the ego claims it is; too loudly and too often. 7For underneath this constant shout and frantic proclamation, the ego is not certain it is so. 8Beneath your fear to look within because of sin is yet another fear, and one which makes the ego tremble.
3. What if you looked within and saw no sin? 2This “fearful” question is one the ego never asks. 3And you who ask it now are threatening the ego’s whole defensive system too seriously for it to bother to pretend it is your friend. 4Those who have joined their brothers have detached themselves from their belief that their identity lies in the ego. 5A holy relationship is one in which you join with what is part of you in truth. 6And your belief in sin has been already shaken, nor are you now entirely unwilling to look within and see it not.
4. Your liberation still is only partial; still limited and incomplete, yet born within you. 2Not wholly mad, you have been willing to look on much of your insanity and recognize its madness. 3Your faith is moving inward, past insanity and on to reason. 4And what your reason tells you now the ego would not hear. 5The Holy Spirit’s purpose was accepted by the part of your mind the ego knows not of. 6No more did you. 7And yet this part, with which you now identify, is not afraid to look upon itself. 8It knows no sin. 9How, otherwise, could it have been willing to see the Holy Spirit’s purpose as its own?
5. This part has seen your brother, and recognized him perfectly since time began. 2And it desired nothing but to join with him and to be free again, as once it was. 3It has been waiting for the birth of freedom; the acceptance of release to come to you. 4And now you recognize that it was not the ego that joined the Holy Spirit’s purpose, and so there must be something else. 5Think not that this is madness. 6For this your reason tells you, and it follows perfectly from what you have already learned.
6. There is no inconsistency in what the Holy Spirit teaches. 2This is the reasoning of the sane. 3You have perceived the ego’s madness, and not been made afraid because you did not choose to share in it. 4At times it still deceives you. 5Yet in your saner moments, its ranting strikes no terror in your heart. 6For you have realized that all the gifts it would withdraw from you, in rage at your “presumptuous” wish to look within, you do not want. 7A few remaining trinkets still seem to shine and catch your eye. 8Yet you would not “sell” Heaven to have them.
7. And now the ego is afraid. 2Yet what it hears in terror, the other part hears as the sweetest music; the song it longed to hear since first the ego came into your mind. 3The ego’s weakness is its strength. 4The song of freedom, which sings the praises of another world, brings to it hope of peace. 5For it remembers Heaven, and now it sees that Heaven has come to earth at last, from which the ego’s rule has kept it out so long. 6Heaven has come because it found a home in your relationship on earth. 7And earth can hold no longer what has been given Heaven as its own.
8. Look gently on your brother, and remember the ego’s weakness is revealed in both your sight. 2What it would keep apart has met and joined, and looks upon the ego unafraid. 3Little child, innocent of sin, follow in gladness the way to certainty. 4Be not held back by fear’s insane insistence that sureness lies in doubt. 5This has no meaning. 6What matters it to you how loudly it is proclaimed? 7The senseless is not made meaningful by repetition and by clamor. 8The quiet way is open. 9Follow it happily, and question not what must be so.