We have repeated how little is asked of you to learn this course. It is
the same small willingness you need to have your whole relationship
transformed to joy; the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit for
which He gives you everything; the very little on which salvation rests;
the tiny change of mind by which the crucifixion is changed to
resurrection. And being true, it is so simple that it cannot fail to be
completely understood. Rejected yes, but NOT ambiguous. And if you
choose against it now, it will not be because it is obscure, but rather
that this little cost seemed, in your judgement, to be too much to pay
for peace.

This is the only thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release
from pain and the complete escape from sin, all to be given you. Say
only this, but mean it with no reservations, for here the power of
salvation lies:

“I AM responsible for what I see.

I chose the feelings I experience, and I decided on the goal I would
achieve.

And everything that seems to happen to me I asked for, and received
as I had asked.”

Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is
done to you. Acknowledge but that you have been MISTAKEN, and all
effects of your mistakes will disappear.

It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events outside of
him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were not his
choice. His power of decision is the determiner of every situation in
which he seems to find himself by chance or accident. No accident nor
chance is possible within the universe as God created it, outside of
which is nothing. Suffer, and you decided sin was your goal. Be happy,
and you gave the power of decision to Him Who must decide for God for
you. This is the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit, and even this
He gave to you to give yourself. For by this gift is given you the power
to release your Savior, that he may give salvation unto you.

Begrudge not then this little offering. Withhold it, and you keep the
world as now you see it. Give it away, and everything you see goes with
it. Never was so much given for so little. In the holy instant is this
exchange effected and maintained. Here is the world you do not want
brought to the one you do. And here the one you do is given you BECAUSE
you want it. Yet for this, the power of your wanting must first be
recognized. You must accept its STRENGTH, and not its weakness. You must
perceive that what is strong enough to make a world can let it go, and
can accept correction if it is willing to see that it was wrong.

The world you see is but the idle witness that you were right. This
witness is insane. You trained it in its testimony, and as it gave it
back to you, you listened and convinced yourself that what it saw was
true. You did this to YOURSELF. See only this, and you will also see how
circular the reasoning on which your “seeing” rests. This was not given
you. This was your gift to you and to your brother. Be willing, then, to
have it taken from him and be replaced with truth. And as you look upon
the change in him, it will be given you to see it in yourself.

Perhaps you do not see the need for you to give this little offering.
Look closer, then, at what it IS. And, very simply, see in it the whole
exchange of separation for salvation. All that the ego is, is an idea
that it is possible that things should happen to the Son of God WITHOUT
his will; and thus without the Will of his Creator, Whose Will cannot BE
separate from his own.

This is the Son of God’s REPLACEMENT for his will, a mad revolt against
what must forever be. This is the statement that he has the power to
make God powerless, and so to take it for himself, and leave himself
without what God has willed for him. This is the mad idea you have
enshrined upon your altars, and which you worship. And anything which
threatens this seems to attack your faith, for here is it invested. Think
not that you are faithless, for your belief and trust in this is strong
indeed.

The Holy Spirit can give you faith in holiness and vision to see it
easily enough. But you have not left open and unoccupied the altar where
the gifts belong. Where THEY should be, you have set up your idols to
something else. This other will, which seems to tell you what must
happen, you gave reality. And what would show you otherwise must
therefore seem unreal. All that is asked of you is to make room for
truth. You are not asked to make or do what lies beyond your
understanding. All you are asked to do is LET IT IN; only to stop your
interference with what will happen of itself; simply to recognize again
the presence of what you thought you gave away.

Be willing, for an instant, to leave your altars free of what you placed
upon them, and what is really there you CANNOT fail to see. The holy
instant is not an instant of creation, but of recognition. For
recognition comes of vision and suspended judgement. Then only it is
possible to look within and see what MUST be there, plainly in sight,
and wholly independent of inference and judgement. Undoing is not your
task, but it IS up to you to welcome it or not. Faith and desire go hand
in hand, for everyone believes in what he wants.

We have already said that wishful thinking is how the ego deals with
what it wants, to make it so. There is no better demonstration of the
power of wanting, and therefore of faith, to make its goals seem real
and possible. Faith in the unreal leads to adjustments of reality to
make it fit the goal of madness. The goal of sin induces the perception
of a fearful world to justify its purpose. What you desire you WILL see.
And if its reality is false, you will uphold it by not realizing all the
adjustments you have introduced, to make it so.

When vision is denied, confusion of cause and effect becomes inevitable.
The purpose now becomes to keep obscure the cause of the effect, and
make effect appear to be a CAUSE. This seeming independence of effect
enables it to be regarded as standing by itself, and capable of serving
as a cause of the events and feelings its maker thinks it causes. Long
ago, we spoke of your desire to create your own Creator, and be father
and not son to Him. This is the same desire. The Son is the effect,
whose Cause he would deny. And so he seems to BE the cause, producing
real effects. Nothing can have effects without a cause, and to confuse
the two is merely to fail to understand them both.

It is as needful that you recognize you made the world you see as that
you recognize that you did not create yourself. THEY ARE THE SAME
MISTAKE. Nothing created not by your Creator has any influence over you.
And if you think what you have made can tell you what you see and feel,
and place your faith in its ability to do so, you are denying your
Creator, and believing that you made yourself. For if you think the
world you made has power to make you what it wills, you ARE confusing
Son and Father; effect and Source.

The Son’s creations are like his Father’s. Yet in creating them, the Son
does not delude himself that he is independent of his Source. His union
with It is the Source of his creating. APART from this he has no power
to create, and what he makes is meaningless. It changes nothing in
creation, depends entirely upon the madness of its maker, and cannot
serve to justify the madness. Your brother thinks he made the world with
you. Thus he denies creation. With you, he thinks the world he made made
him. Thus he DENIES he made it.

Yet the truth is you were both created by a loving Father, Who created
you together and as one. See what “proves” otherwise, and you deny your
whole reality. But grant that everything which seems to stand between
you, keeping you from each other and separate from your Father, you made
in secret, and the instant of release has come to you. All its effects
are gone because its source has been uncovered. It is its seeming
independence of its source that kept you prisoner. This is the same
delusion that you are independent of the Source by which you were
created, and have never left.