How does one overcome illusions? Surely not by force or anger, nor by opposing them in any way. Merely by letting reason tell you that they CONTRADICT reality. They go against what must be true. The opposition comes from them, and not reality. Reality opposes nothing. What merely IS needs no defense, and offers none.…

Are thoughts, then, dangerous? To bodies, YES! The thoughts that seem to kill are those which teach the thinker that he CAN be killed. And so he dies BECAUSE of what he learned. He goes from life to death, the final proof he valued the inconstant more than constancy. Surely he THOUGHT he wanted happiness.…

Do you not see that all your misery comes from the strange belief that you are powerless? Being helpless is the COST of sin. Helplessness is sin’s condition; the one requirement that it demands to be believed. Only the helpless COULD believe in it. Enormity has no appeal save to the little. And only those…

Take pity on yourselves, so long enslaved. Rejoice whom God hath joined have come together, and need no longer look on sin apart. No two can look on sin together, for they could never see it in the same place and time. Sin is a strictly individual perception, seen in the other, yet believed by…

The opposite of illusions is not disillusionment, but truth. Only to the ego, to which truth is meaningless, do they appear to be the only alternatives, and different from each other. In truth they are the same. Both bring the same amount of misery, though each one seems to be the way to lose the…

Let reason take another step. If you attack whom God would heal and hate the one He loves, then you and your Creator HAVE a different will. Yet if you ARE His Will, what you must then believe is that you are not YOURSELF. You can indeed believe this, and you DO. And you HAVE…

The introduction of reason into the ego’s thought system is the beginning of its undoing. For reason and the ego are contradictory. Nor is it possible for them to co-exist in your awareness. And reason’s goal is to make plain, and therefore obvious. You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for…

Never forget the world the sightless “see” must be imagined, for what it really looks like is unknown to them. They must infer what could be seen from evidence forever indirect; and reconstruct their inferences as they stumble and fall because of what they did not recognize, or walk unharmed through open doorways which they…

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…

All special relationships have sin as their goal. For they are bargains with reality, toward which the seeming union is adjusted. Forget not this; to bargain is to set a limit, and any brother with whom you have a limited relationship YOU HATE. You may attempt to keep the bargain in the name of “fairness,”…