1. Why would you not perceive it as release from suffering to learn that you are free? 2Why would you not acclaim the truth instead of looking on it as an enemy? 3Why does an easy path, so clearly marked it is impossible to lose the way, seem thorny, rough and far too difficult for you to follow? 4Is it not because you see it as the road to hell instead of looking on it as a simple way, without a sacrifice or any loss, to find yourself in Heaven and in God? 5Until you realize you give up nothing, until you understand there is no loss, you will have some regrets about the way that you have chosen. 6And you will not see the many gains your choice has offered you. 7Yet though you do not see them, they are there. 8Their cause has been effected, and they must be present where their cause has entered in.
2. You have accepted healing’s cause, and so it must be you are healed. 2And being healed, the power to heal must also now be yours. 3The miracle is not a separate thing that happens suddenly, as an effect without a cause. 4Nor is it, in itself, a cause. 5But where its cause is must it be. 6Now is it caused, though not as yet perceived. 7And its effects are there, though not yet seen. 8Look inward now, and you will not behold a reason for regret, but cause indeed for glad rejoicing and for hope of peace.
3. It has been hopeless to attempt to find the hope of peace upon a battleground. 2It has been futile to demand escape from sin and pain of what was made to serve the function of retaining sin and pain. 3For pain and sin are one illusion, as are hate and fear, attack and guilt but one. 4Where they are causeless their effects are gone, and love must come wherever they are not. 5Why are you not rejoicing? 6You are free of pain and sickness, misery and loss, and all effects of hatred and attack. 7No more is pain your friend and guilt your god, and you should welcome the effects of love.
4. Your Guest has come. 2You asked Him, and He came. 3You did not hear Him enter, for you did not wholly welcome Him. 4And yet His gifts came with Him. 5He has laid them at your feet, and asks you now that you will look on them and take them for your own. 6He needs your help in giving them to all who walk apart, believing they are separate and alone. 7They will be healed when you accept your gifts, because your Guest will welcome everyone whose feet have touched the holy ground whereon you stand, and where His gifts for them are laid.
5. You do not see how much you now can give, because of everything you have received. 2Yet He Who entered in but waits for you to come where you invited Him to be. 3There is no other place where He can find His host, nor where His host can meet with Him. 4And nowhere else His gifts of peace and joy, and all the happiness His Presence brings, can be obtained. 5For they are where He is Who brought them with Him, that they might be yours. 6You cannot see your Guest, but you can see the gifts He brought. 7And when you look on them, you will believe His Presence must be there. 8For what you now can do could not be done without the love and grace His Presence holds.
6. Such is the promise of the living God; His Son have life and every living thing be part of him, and nothing else have life. 2What you have given “life” is not alive, and symbolizes but your wish to be alive apart from life; alive in death, with death perceived as life, and living, death. 3Confusion follows on confusion here, for on confusion has this world been based, and there is nothing else it rests upon. 4Its basis does not change, although it seems to be in constant change. 5Yet what is that except the state confusion really means? 6Stability to those who are confused is meaningless, and shift and change become the law on which they predicate their lives.
7. The body does not change. 2It represents the larger dream that change is possible. 3To change is to attain a state unlike the one in which you found yourself before. 4There is no change in immortality, and Heaven knows it not. 5Yet here on earth it has a double purpose, for it can be made to teach opposing things. 6And they reflect the teacher who is teaching them. 7The body can appear to change with time, with sickness or with health, and with events that seem to alter it. 8Yet this but means the mind remains unchanged in its belief of what the purpose of the body is.
8. Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not. 2Its nothingness is guarantee that it can not be sick. 3In your demand that it be more than this lies the idea of sickness. 4For it asks that God be less than all He really is. 5What, then, becomes of you, for it is you of whom the sacrifice is asked? 6For He is told that part of Him belongs to Him no longer. 7He must sacrifice your self, and in His sacrifice are you made more and He is lessened by the loss of you. 8And what is gone from Him becomes your god, protecting you from being part of Him.
9. The body that is asked to be a god will be attacked, because its nothingness has not been recognized. 2And so it seems to be a thing with power in itself. 3As something, it can be perceived and thought to feel and act, and hold you in its grasp as prisoner to itself. 4And it can fail to be what you demanded that it be. 5And you will hate it for its littleness, unmindful that the failure does not lie in that it is not more than it should be, but only in your failure to perceive that it is nothing. 6Yet its nothingness is your salvation, from which you would flee.
10. As “something” is the body asked to be God’s enemy, replacing what He is with littleness and limit and despair. 2It is His loss you celebrate when you behold the body as a thing you love, or look upon it as a thing you hate. 3For if He be the sum of everything, then what is not in Him does not exist, and His completion is its nothingness. 4Your savior is not dead, nor does he dwell in what was built as temple unto death. 5He lives in God, and it is this that makes him savior unto you, and only this. 6His body’s nothingness releases yours from sickness and from death. 7For what is yours cannot be more or less than what is his.