The first corrective step is KNOW FIRST that this is an expression of
fear. Then say to yourself that you must somehow have willed not to
love or the fear which arises from behavior-will conflict could not
have arisen, then the whole process is nothing more than a series of
pragmatic steps in the larger process of accepting the Atonement as
THE remedy. These steps can be summarized as follows:

1. Know first that this is fear.

2. Fear arises from lack of love.

3. The ONLY remedy for lack of love is perfect love.

4. Perfect love is the Atonement.

We have emphasized that the miracle, or the EXPRESSION of Atonement is
always a sign of real respect FROM the worthy TO the worthy. This worth
is re-established by the Atonement. It is obvious, then, that when you
are afraid you have placed yourself in a position where you NEED
Atonement, because you have done something loveless, having willed
without love.This is precisely the situation for which the Atonement was
offered.The need for the remedy inspired its creation. As long as you
recognize only the need for the remedy, you will remain fearful.
However, as soon as you REMEDY it, you have also abolished the fear.
This is how true healing occurs.

Everyone experiences fear, and no-one enjoys it. Yet it would take very
little right-thinking to realize why fear occurs. Very few people
appreciate the real power of the mind, and no-one remains fully aware of
it all the time. However, if anyone hopes to spare himself from fear,
there are some things he must realize, and realize fully. The mind is a
very powerful creator and it never loses its creative force. It never
sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will. Many of
your ordinary expressions reflect this. For example, when you say,“Don’t
give it a thought,” you imply that if you do not think about something,
it will have no effect on you. And this is true enough.

On the other hand, many other expressions clearly illustrate the
prevailing LACK of awareness of thought-power. For example, you say,
“Just an idle thought,” and mean that the thought has no effect. You
also speak of some actions as “thoughtless,” implying that if the person
had thought, he would not behave as he did.While expressions like “think
big” give some recognition to the power of thought, they still come
nowhere near the truth.You do not expect to grow when you say it,
because you do not really think that you will.

It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power
surge that can literally move mountains. It appears at first glance that
to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not
the real reason why you do not believe it. People PREFER to believe that
their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally
AFRAID of them. Many psychotherapists attempt to help people who are
afraid, say, of their death wishes by depreciating the power of the
wish. They even try to “free” the patient by persuading him that he can
think whatever he wants without any REAL effect at all.

There is a real dilemma here which only the truly right-minded can
escape. Death wishes do not kill in the physical sense, but they DO kill
spiritual awareness. ALL destructive thinking is dangerous. Given a
death wish, a man has no choice except to ACT upon the thought, or
behave CONTRARY to it. He thus chooses only between homicide and fear.
The other possibility is that he depreciates the power of his thought.
This is the usual psychoanalytic approach. It DOES allay guilt, but at
the cost of rendering thinking impotent. If you believe that what you
think is ineffectual you may cease to be overly afraid of it, but you
are hardly likely to respect it.

The world is full of examples of how man has depreciated himself because
he is afraid of his own thoughts. In some forms of insanity thoughts are
glorified, but this is only because the underlying depreciation was too
effective for tolerance. The truth is that there ARE no “idle” thoughts.
ALL thinking produces form at some level. The reason people are afraid
of ESP and so often react against it is because they KNOW that thoughts
can hurt them. Their own thoughts have made them vulnerable.

You who constantly complain about fear still persist in creating it. I
told you before that you cannot ask ME to release you from fear because
I KNOW it does not exist, but YOU do not. If I merely intervened between
your thoughts and their results, I would be tampering with a basic law
of cause and effect, the most fundamental law there is in this world. I
would hardly help if I depreciated the power of your own thinking. This
would be in direct opposition to the purpose of this course. It is much
more helpful to remind you that you do not guard your thoughts carefully
except for a small part of the day, and somewhat inconsistently even
then. You may feel at this point that it would take a miracle to enable
you to do this, which is perfectly true.

Men are not used to miraculous thinking, but they can be TRAINED to
think that way. All miracle workers need that kind of training. I cannot
let them leave their minds unguarded or they will not be able to help
me. Miracle working entails a full realization of the power of thought,
and real avoidance of miscreation. Otherwise a miracle will be necessary
to set the mind ITSELF straight, a circular process which would hardly
foster the time collapse for which the miracle was intended. Nor would
it induce the healthy respect for
true cause and effect which every miracle worker must have.

Both miracles AND fear come from thoughts, and if you were not free to
choose one, you would also not be free to choose the other. By choosing
the miracle you HAVE rejected fear. You have been afraid of God, of me,
of yourselves, and of practically everyone you know at one time or
another. This is because you have misperceived or miscreated us, and
believe in what you have made. You would never have done this if you
were not afraid of your own thoughts. The vulnerable are essentially
miscreators because they misperceive creation.

You persist in believing that, when you do not consciously watch your
mind, it is unmindful. It is time, however, to consider the whole world
of the unconscious or “unwatched” mind. This may well frighten you
because it is the SOURCE of fear. The unwatched mind is responsible for
the whole content of the unconscious which lies ABOVE the miracle level.
All psychoanalytic theorists have made some contribution in this
connection, but none of them has seen it in its true entirety. They have
all made one common error in that they attempted to uncover unconscious
CONTENT. You cannot understand unconscious activity in these terms
because “content” is applicable ONLY to the more superficial unconscious
levels, to which the individual himself contributes. This is the level
at which he can readily introduce fear, and usually does.

When man miscreates he is in pain. The cause and effect principle here
is temporarily a real expeditor. Actually, “Cause” is a term properly
belonging to God, and “Effect,” which should also be capitalized, is His
Son. This entails a set of Cause and Effect relationships which are
totally different from those which man introduced into his own
miscreations.The fundamental opponents in the real basic conflict are
Creation and miscreation. All FEAR is implicit in the second, just as
all LOVE is inherent in the first. Because of this difference, the basic
conflict IS one between love and fear.

It has already been said that man believes he CANNOT control fear
because he himself created it. His belief in it seems to render it out
of his control by definition.Yet any attempt to resolve the basic
conflict through the concept of MASTERY of fear is meaningless. In fact,
it asserts the POWER of fear by the simple assumption that it
NEED be mastered. The essential resolution rests entirely on the mastery
of LOVE. In the interim, the SENSE of conflict is inevitable, since man
has placed himself in a strangely illogical position. He believes in the
power of what does not exist.

Two concepts which CANNOT coexist are “nothing” and “everything.” To
whatever extent one is believed in, the other HAS BEEN denied. In the
conflict fear is really nothing, and love is everything. This is because
whenever light enters darkness, the darkness IS abolished. What man
believes IS true for him. In this sense the separation HAS occurred, and
to deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on
error is merely a further misuse of defenses. The true corrective
procedure is to recognize error temporarily, but ONLY as an indication
that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory.This establishes a state of mind
in which the Atonement can be accepted WITHOUT delay.

It should be emphasized, however, that ultimately there IS no compromise
possible between everything and nothing. Time is essentially a device by
which all compromise in this respect can be given up. It seems to be
abolished by degrees because time itself involves a concept of intervals
which do not really exist. The faulty use of creation made this
necessary as a corrective device. “And God so loved the world that He
gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him shall not
perish, but have eternal life” needs only one slight correction to be
entirely meaningful in this context. It should read, “He gave it TO His
only begotten Son.”

It should especially be noted that God has only ONE Son. If all the
Souls God created ARE His Sons, then every Soul MUST be an integral part
of the whole Sonship.You do not find the concept that the whole is
greater than its parts difficult to understand.You should, therefore,
not have too much trouble in understanding this. The Sonship in its
Oneness DOES transcend the sum of its parts. However, this is obscured
as long as any of its parts are missing. That is why the conflict cannot
ultimately be resolved until ALL the parts of the Sonship have returned.
Only then can the meaning of wholeness, in the true sense, be fully
understood.

Any part of the Sonship can believe in error or incompleteness, if he so
elects. However, if he does so, he is believing in the existence
of nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement. We have
already briefly spoken about readiness, but there are some additional
points which might be helpful here. Readiness is nothing more than the
PREREQUISITE for accomplishment. The two should not be confused. As soon
as a state of readiness occurs, there is usually some will to
accomplish, but this is by no means necessarily undivided. The state
does not imply more than a POTENTIAL for a shift of will.

Confidence cannot develop fully until mastery has been accomplished.We
have already attempted to correct the fundamental error that fear can be
mastered, and have emphasized that only LOVE can be mastered.You have
attested only to your readiness. Mastery of love involved a much more
complete confidence than either of you has attained. However, the
readiness at least is an indication that you believe this is possible.
That is only the beginning of confidence. In case this be misunderstood
to imply that an enormous amount of time will be necessary between
readiness and mastery, let me remind you that time and space are under
my control.

One of the chief ways in which man can correct his magic-miracle
confusion is to remember that he did not create himself. He is apt to
forget this when he becomes egocentric, and this places him in a
position where the belief in magic in some form is virtually inevitable.
His will to create was given him by his own Creator,Who was expressing
the same Will in His Creation. Since creative ability rests in the mind,
everything that man creates is necessarily a matter of will. It also
follows that whatever he creates is real in his own sight, but not
necessarily in the Sight of God.This basic distinction leads us directly
into the real meaning of the Last Judgement.