1. How does one overcome illusions? 2Surely not by force or anger, nor by opposing them in any way. 3Merely by letting reason tell you that they contradict reality. 4They go against what must be true. 5The opposition comes from them, and not reality. 6Reality opposes nothing. 7What merely is needs no defense, and offers none. 8Only illusions need defense because of weakness. 9And how can it be difficult to walk the way of truth when only weakness interferes? 10You are the strong one in this seeming conflict. 11And you need no defense. 12Everything that needs defense you do not want, for anything that needs defense will weaken you.
2. Consider what the ego wants defenses for. 2Always to justify what goes against the truth, flies in the face of reason and makes no sense. 3Can this be justified? 4What can this be except an invitation to insanity, to save you from the truth? 5And what would you be saved from but what you fear? 6Belief in sin needs great defense, and at enormous cost. 7All that the Holy Spirit offers must be defended against and sacrificed. 8For sin is carved into a block out of your peace, and laid between you and its return.
3. Yet how can peace be so fragmented? 2It is still whole, and nothing has been taken from it. 3See how the means and the material of evil dreams are nothing. 4In truth you and your brother stand together, with nothing in between. 5God holds your hands, and what can separate whom He has joined as one with Him? 6It is your Father Whom you would defend against. 7Yet it remains impossible to keep love out. 8God rests with you in quiet, undefended and wholly undefending, for in this quiet state alone is strength and power. 9Here can no weakness enter, for here is no attack and therefore no illusions. 10Love rests in certainty. 11Only uncertainty can be defensive. 12And all uncertainty is doubt about yourself.
4. How weak is fear; how little and how meaningless. 2How insignificant before the quiet strength of those whom love has joined! 3This is your “enemy,”—a frightened mouse that would attack the universe. 4How likely is it that it will succeed? 5Can it be difficult to disregard its feeble squeaks that tell of its omnipotence, and would drown out the hymn of praise to its Creator that every heart throughout the universe forever sings as one? 6Which is the stronger? 7Is it this tiny mouse or everything that God created? 8You and your brother are not joined together by this mouse, but by the Will of God. 9And can a mouse betray whom God has joined?
5. If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of your union with your brother! 2Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity and firmness of foundation. 3Yes, to the body’s eyes it looks like an enormous solid body, immovable as is a mountain. 4Yet within you is a Force that no illusions can resist. 5This body only seems to be immovable; this Force is irresistible in truth. 6What, then, must happen when they come together? 7Can the illusion of immovability be long defended from what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?
6. Forget not, when you feel the need arise to be defensive about anything, you have identified yourself with an illusion. 2And therefore feel that you are weak because you are alone. 3This is the cost of all illusions. 4Not one but rests on the belief that you are separate. 5Not one that does not seem to stand, heavy and solid and immovable, between you and your brother. 6And not one that truth cannot pass over lightly, and so easily that you must be convinced, in spite of what you thought it was, that it is nothing. 7If you forgive your brother, this must happen. 8For it is your unwillingness to overlook what seems to stand between you and your brother that makes it look impenetrable, and defends the illusion of its immovability.