The answer to this question is “one.” One wholly perfect teacher, whose
learning is complete, suffices. This One, sanctified and redeemed,
becomes the Self Who is the Son of God. He who was always wholly spirit
now no longer sees Himself as a body or even as in a body. Therefore He
is limitless. And being limitless, His thoughts are joined with God’s
forever and ever. His perception of himself is based upon God’s
Judgement, not His own. Thus does He share God’s Will, and bring His
thoughts to still deluded minds. He is forever One because He is as God
created Him. He has accepted Christ, and He is safe.

Thus does the son of man become the Son of God. It is not really a
change; it is a change of mind. Nothing external alters, but everything
internal now reflects only the Love of God. God can no longer be feared,
for the mind sees no cause for punishment. God’s teachers appear to be
many, for that is the world’s need. Yet being joined in one purpose, and
one they share with God, how could they be separate from each other?
What does it matter if they then appear in many forms? Their minds are
one; their joining is complete. And God works through them now as One,
for that is what they are.

Why is the illusion of many necessary? Only because reality is not
understandable to the deluded. Only a very few can hear God’s Voice at
all, and even they cannot communicate His messages directly through the
Spirit Which gave them. They need a medium through which communication
becomes possible to those who do not realize that they are Spirit. A
body they can see. A voice they understand and listen to without the
fear that truth would encounter (find) in them. Do not forget that truth
can come only where it is welcomed without fear. So do God’s teachers
need a body for their unity could not be recognized directly.

Yet what makes them God’s teachers is their recognition of the proper
purpose of the body. As they advance in their profession, they become
more and more certain that the body’s function is but to let God’s Voice
speak through it to human ears. And these ears will carry
to the mind of the hearer messages which are not of this world, and the
mind will understand because of their Source. From this understanding
will come the recognition, in this new teacher of God, of what the
body’s purpose really is; the only use there really is for it. This
lesson is enough to let the Thought of Unity come in, and what is One is
recognized as One. The teachers of God appear to share the illusion of
separation, but because of what they use the body for, they do not
believe in the illusion despite appearances.

The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for, it
will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as
sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and
being weak it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to
those who have It not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it
cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done, it is laid
by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all
decisions which are responsible for the body’s condition. Yet the
teacher of God does not make this decision alone. To do that would be to
give the body another purpose from the one that keeps it holy. God’s
Voice will tell him when he has fulfilled his role, just as It tells him
what his function is. He does not suffer either in going or remaining.
Sickness is now impossible to him.

Oneness and sickness cannot co-exist. God’s teachers choose to look on
dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all
choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences.
The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams, once
they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real
function of God’s teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go,
shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they
see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate
is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone
is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God’s teachers acknowledge as
behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs.