1. The introduction of reason into the ego’s thought system is the beginning of its undoing, for reason and the ego are contradictory. 2Nor is it possible for them to coexist in your awareness. 3For reason’s goal is to make plain, and therefore obvious. 4You can see reason. 5This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. 6Vision is sense, quite literally. 7If it is not the body’s sight, it must be understood. 8For it is plain, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. 9It can be understood. 10And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their separate ways.
2. The ego’s whole continuance depends on its belief you cannot learn this course. 2Share this belief, and reason will be unable to see your errors and make way for their correction. 3For reason sees through errors, telling you what you thought was real is not. 4Reason can see the difference between sin and mistakes, because it wants correction. 5Therefore, it tells you what you thought was uncorrectable can be corrected, and thus it must have been an error. 6The ego’s opposition to correction leads to its fixed belief in sin and disregard of errors. 7It looks on nothing that can be corrected. 8Thus does the ego damn, and reason save.
3. Reason is not salvation in itself, but it makes way for peace and brings you to a state of mind in which salvation can be given you. 2Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. 3No one who looks on it without the help of reason would try to pass it. 4The body’s eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. 5Yet reason sees through it easily, because it is an error. 6The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason’s eyes.
4. Only the form of error attracts the ego. 2Meaning it does not recognize, and does not see if it is there or not. 3Everything the body’s eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole without the meaning that the whole would give. 4And yet mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected. 5Sin is but error in a special form the ego venerates. 6It would preserve all errors and make them sins. 7For here is its own stability, its heavy anchor in the shifting world it made; the rock on which its church is built, and where its worshippers are bound to bodies, believing the body’s freedom is their own.
5. Reason will tell you that the form of error is not what makes it a mistake. 2If what the form conceals is a mistake, the form cannot prevent correction. 3The body’s eyes see only form. 4They cannot see beyond what they were made to see. 5And they were made to look on error and not see past it. 6Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. 7To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. 8Yet how can sight that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? 9It is held back by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived.
6. These eyes, made not to see, will never see. 2For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. 3What was its maker’s goal but not to see? 4For this the body’s eyes are perfect means, but not for seeing. 5See how the body’s eyes rest on externals and cannot go beyond. 6Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning. 7Nothing so blinding as perception of form. 8For sight of form means understanding has been obscured.
7. Only mistakes have different forms, and so they can deceive. 2You can change form because it is not true. 3It could not be reality because it can be changed. 4Reason will tell you that if form is not reality it must be an illusion, and is not there to see. 5And if you see it you must be mistaken, for you are seeing what can not be real as if it were. 6What cannot see beyond what is not there must be distorted perception, and must perceive illusions as the truth. 7Could it, then, recognize the truth?
8. Let not the form of his mistakes keep you from him whose holiness is yours. 2Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body’s eyes can see. 3Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins and of his body. 4What is there in him that you would attack except what you associate with his body, which you believe can sin? 5Beyond his errors is his holiness and your salvation. 6You gave him not his holiness, but tried to see your sins in him to save yourself. 7And yet, his holiness is your forgiveness. 8Can you be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness is your salvation?
9. A holy relationship, however newly born, must value holiness above all else. 2Unholy values will produce confusion, and in awareness. 3In an unholy relationship, each one is valued because he seems to justify the other’s sin. 4Each sees within the other what impels him to sin against his will. 5And thus he lays his sins upon the other, and is attracted to him to perpetuate his sins. 6And so it must become impossible for each to see himself as causing sin by his desire to have sin real. 7Yet reason sees a holy relationship as what it is; a common state of mind, where both give errors gladly to correction, that both may happily be healed as one.