Perception selects, and makes the world you see. It literally picks it
out as the mind directs. The laws of size and shape and brightness would
hold, perhaps, if other things were equal. They are NOT equal. For what
you look for you are far more likely to discover than what you would
prefer to overlook. The still small Voice for God is not drowned out by
all the ego’s raucous screams and senseless ravings to those who WANT to
hear it. Perception is a CHOICE, and not a fact. But on this choice
depends far more than you may realize as yet. For on the voice you
choose to hear, and on the sights you choose to see, depends entirely
your whole belief in what you ARE. Perception is a witness but to this,
and NEVER to reality. Yet it can show you the conditions in which
awareness of reality is possible, or those where it could never be.

Reality needs no cooperation from you to be itself. But your
awareness of it needs your help because it is your choice. Listen to
what the ego says and see what it directs you see, and it is sure that
you will see yourself as tiny, vulnerable and afraid. You will
experience depression, a sense of worthlessness, and feelings of
impermanence and unreality. You will believe that you are helpless prey
to forces far beyond your own control, and far more powerful than you.
And you will think the world you made directs your destiny. For this
will be your FAITH. But never believe because it is your faith it makes
reality.

There is another vision and another Voice in which your freedom lies,
awaiting but your choice. And if you place your faith in them, you will
perceive another Self in you. This other Self sees miracles as
natural. They are as simple and natural to It as breathing to the body.
They are the obvious response to calls for help, the only one It makes.
Miracles seem unnatural to the ego because it does not understand how
separate minds can influence each other. Nor COULD they do so. But minds
cannot BE separate. This other Self is perfectly aware of this. And thus
It recognizes that miracles do not affect another’s mind, only Its Own.
There IS no other.

You do not realize the whole extent to which the idea of separation has
interfered with reason. Reason lies in the other Self you have cut off
from your awareness. And nothing you have allowed to stay in it is
capable of reason. How can the segment of the mind devoid of reason
understand what reason is, or grasp the information it would give? All
sorts of questions may arise in it, but if the basic question stems from
reason, it will not ask it. Like all that stems from reason, the basic
question is obvious, simple, and remains unasked. But think not reason
could not answer it.

God’s plan for your salvation could not have been established without
your will and your consent. It must have been accepted by the Son of
God, for what God wills for him he MUST receive. For God wills not apart
from him, nor does the Will of God wait upon time to be accomplished.
Therefore, what joined the Will of God must be in you NOW, being
eternal. You must have set aside a place in which the Holy Spirit can
abide, and where He IS. He must have been there since the need for Him
arose, and was fulfilled in the same instant. Such would your reason
tell you, if you listened. Yet such is
clearly not the ego’s “reasoning.” Its alien nature to the ego is proof
you will not find the answer there. Yet if it must be so, it must exist.
And if it exists for you, and has your freedom as the purpose given it,
you must be free to FIND it.

God’s plan is simple; never circular and never self-defeating. He has no
Thoughts except the self-EXTENDING, and in this your will must be
included. Thus, there must be a part of you that knows His Will and
shares It. It is not meaningful to ask if what must be is so. But it IS
meaningful to ask why you are UNAWARE of what is so, for this must have
an answer if the plan of God for your salvation is complete. And it must
BE complete because its Source knows not of incompletion. Where would
the answer be but in the Source? And where are YOU but there, where this
same answer is? Your identity, as much a true effect of this same Source
as is the answer, must therefore be together and the same.

Oh yes, you know this, and more than this alone. Yet any part of
knowledge threatens dissociation as much as all of it. And all of it
WILL come with any part. Here is the part you can accept. What reason
points to you can see because the witnesses on its behalf are clear.
Only the totally insane can disregard them, and you have gone past this.
Reason is a means which serves the Holy Spirit’s purpose in its own
right. It is not re-interpreted and re-directed from the goal of sin, as
are the others. For reason is beyond the ego’s range of means.

Faith and perception and belief can be misplaced, and serve the great
deceiver’s needs as well as truth. But reason has no place at all in
madness, nor can it be adjusted to fit its end. Faith and belief are
strong in madness, guiding perception toward what the mind has valued.
But reason enters not at all in this. For the perception would fall away
at once, if reason were applied. There IS no reason in insanity, for it
depends entirely on reason’s absence. The ego never uses it because it
does not realize that it exists. The partially insane have access to it,
and only they have need of it. Knowledge does not depend on it, and
madness keeps it out.

The part of mind where reason lies was dedicated, by your will in union
with your Father’s, to the undoing of insanity. Here was the Holy
Spirit’s purpose accepted and accomplished, both at once. Reason is
alien to insanity, and those who use it have gained a means
which CANNOT be applied to sin. Knowledge is far beyond attainment of
any kind. But reason can serve to open doors you closed against it.

You have come very close to this. Faith and belief have shifted, and you
have asked the question which the ego will NEVER ask. Does not your
reason tell you now the question must have come from something that you
do not know, but must belong to you? Faith and belief, upheld by reason,
cannot fail to lead to changed perception. And in this change is room
made way for vision. Vision extends beyond itself, as does the purpose
which it serves and all the means for its accomplishment.