Seek not outside yourself. For it will fail, and you will weep each time
an idol falls. Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be
no peace excepting there. Each idol that you worship when God calls will
never answer in His place. There IS no other answer you can substitute,
and find the happiness His answer brings. Seek not outside yourself. For
all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want,
insisting where it must be found. What if it is not there? Do you prefer
that you be right or happy? Be you glad that you are told where
happiness abides, and seek no longer elsewhere. You WILL fail. But it is
given you to know the truth, and not to seek for it outside yourself.

No-one who comes here but must still have hope, some lingering illusion,
or some dream that there is something outside of himself that will bring
happiness and peace to him. If everything is in
him, this cannot be so. And therefore, by his coming, he denies the
truth about himself, and seeks for something MORE than everything, as if
a part of it were separated off, and found where all the rest of it is
not. This is the purpose he bestows upon the body; that it seek for what
he lacks, and give him what would make himself complete. And thus he
wanders aimlessly about, in search of something that he cannot find,
believing that he is what he is not.

The lingering illusion will impel him to seek out a thousand idols, and
to seek beyond them for a thousand more. And each will fail him, all
excepting one; for he will die, and does not understand the idol that he
seeks IS but his death. Its form appears to be outside himself. Yet does
he seek to kill God’s Son within, and prove that he is victor over
him. This is the purpose every idol has, for this the role that is
assigned to it, and this the role that cannot BE fulfilled.

Whenever you attempt to reach a goal in which the body’s betterment is
cast as major beneficiary, you try to bring about your death. For you
believe that you can suffer lack, and lack IS death. To sacrifice is to
give up, and thus to be without, and to have suffered loss. And by this
giving up is life renounced. Seek not outside yourself. The search
implies you are not whole within, and fear to look upon your
devastation, and prefer to seek outside yourself for what you are.

Idols must fall BECAUSE they have no life, and what is lifeless IS a
sign of death. You came to die, and what would you expect but to PERCEIVE
the signs of death you seek? No sadness and no suffering proclaims a
message other than an idol found that represents a parody of life which,
in its lifelessness, is really death, conceived as real and given living
form. Yet each must fail and crumble and decay, because a form of death
cannot be life, and what is sacrificed cannot be whole.

All idols of this world were made to keep the truth within from being
known to you; and to maintain allegiance to the dream that you must find
what is outside yourself to be complete and happy. It is vain to worship
idols in the hope of peace. God dwells within, and your completion lies
in Him. No idol takes His place. Look not to idols. Do not seek outside
yourself. Let us forget the purpose of the world the past has given it.
For otherwise, the future WILL be like the past, and but a series of
depressing dreams, in which all idols fail you, one by one, and you see
death and disappointment everywhere.

To change all this, and open up a road of hope and of release in what
appeared to be an endless circle of despair, you need but to decide you
do not KNOW the purpose of the world. You give it goals it does not have,
and thus do you decide what it is for. You try to see in it a place of
idols found outside yourself, with power to make complete what is within
by splitting what you are between the two. You CHOOSE your dreams, for
they are what you wish, perceived as if it had been given you. Your
idols do what you would have them do, and have the power you ascribe to
them. And you pursue them vainly in the dream, because you want their
power as your own.

Yet where are dreams, but in a mind asleep? And can a dream succeed in
making real the pictures it projects outside itself? Save time, my
brothers; learn what time is FOR. And speed the end of idols in a world
made sad and sick by seeing idols there. Your holy minds are altars unto
God, and where He is no idols can abide. The fear of God is but the fear
of loss of idols. It is not the fear of loss of your reality. But you
have made of your reality an idol, which you must protect against the
light of truth. And all the world becomes the means by which this idol
can be saved. Salvation thus appears to threaten life, and offer death.

It is not so. Salvation seeks to prove there IS no death, and ONLY life
exists. The sacrifice of death is NOTHING lost. An idol CANNOT take the
place of God. Let Him remind you of His love for you, and do not seek to
drown His Voice in chants of deep despair to idols of yourself. Seek not
outside your Father for your hope. For hope of happiness is NOT despair.