LISTEN...

This is an invitation to a great experiment. Just for a moment, lay aside the prejudices of your human establishment and listen to these words with your heart. Listen again, and still again.

Just for a moment, let this simple message of truth and love be beyond all reason and see how quickly reason will follow as your mind opens to the joyful light of your reunion with the eternally creating mind of God.

Whoever you think you are, wherever you appear to be in the desperate sea of chaos that is this world, let the breath of this timeless voice of resurrected mind rekindle in you the ancient memory of your own perfect reality.

Now are you being called to fulfill the only purpose that ever could have been given for your own sojourn into this meaningless world of loneliness and death. That purpose is your escape from it through the message of salvation that is now in your hands.

He Is Risen

He Is Risen, Indeed!

I love you.

I love you for the truth in you, as God does. Your deceptions may deceive you, but they cannot deceive me. Knowing what you are, I cannot doubt you. I hear only the Holy Spirit in you, Who speaks to me through you.

I come to you from our Father to offer you everything again. I love all that He created, and all my faith and my belief I offer unto it. My faith in you is as strong as all the love I give to my Father. My trust in you is without limit, and without the fear that you will hear me not.

Love's meaning is your own and shared by God Himself. For what you are is what He is. There is no love but His, and what He is, is everything there is.

Let the Love of God shine upon you by your acceptance of me. My reality is yours and His. By joining your mind with mine, you are signifying your awareness that the Will of God is one.

Would you know the Will of God for you? Ask it of me who knows it for you and you will find it. I will deny you nothing, as God denies me nothing. Ours is simply the journey back to God Who is our home.

The journey to God is merely the reawakening of the knowledge of where you are always, and what you are forever. It is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed. Truth can only be experienced. It cannot be described and it cannot be explained. I can make you aware of the conditions of truth, but the experience is of God. Together we can meet its conditions, but truth will dawn upon you of itself.

I give you the lamp and will go with you. You will not take this journey alone. I will lead you to your true Father, Who hath need of you, as I have.

Your Father loves you. All the world of pain is not His Will. Forgive yourself the thought He wanted this for you.

You cannot understand how much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in your experience of the world to help you understand it. There is nothing on earth with which it can compare, and nothing you have ever felt apart from Him resembles it ever so faintly.

Only the Love of God will protect you in all circumstances. It will lift you out of every trial, and raise you high above all the perceived dangers of this world into a climate of perfect peace and safety.

God's Will for you is perfect happiness because there is no sin, and suffering is causeless. Joy is just, and pain is but the sign you have misunderstood yourself. Fear not the Will of God. But turn to it in confidence that it will set you free from all the consequences sin has wrought in feverish imagination.

To your tired eyes I bring a vision of a different world, so new and clean and fresh you will forget the pain and sorrow that you saw before. Yet this a vision is which you must share with everyone you see, for otherwise you will behold it not. To give this gift is how to make it yours. And God ordained, in loving kindness, that it be for you.

It is not time we need for this. It is but willingness. For what would seem to need a thousand years can easily be done in just one instant by the grace of God.

His gift of grace is more than just an answer. It restores all memories the sleeping mind forgot; all certainty of what Love's meaning is.

This world is full of miracles. They stand in shining silence next to every dream of pain and suffering, of sin and guilt. Let us be glad that we can walk the world, and find so many chances to perceive another situation where God's gift can once again be recognized as ours!

And thus will all the vestiges of hell, the secret sins and hidden hates be gone. And all the loveliness which they concealed appear like lawns of Heaven to our sight, to lift us high above the thorny roads we traveled on before the Christ appeared.

God gives thanks to you, His Son, for being what you are.

You are His Own completion and the Source of love, along with Him. Your gratitude to Him is one with His to you. For love can walk no road except the way of gratitude, and thus we go who walk the way to God.

You do not walk alone. God's angels hover near and all about. His Love surrounds you, and of this be sure; that I will never leave you comfortless.

"Father, You stand before me and behind, beside me, in the place I see myself, and everywhere I go. You are in all the things I look upon, the sounds I hear, and every hand that reaches for my own. In You time disappears, and place becomes a meaningless belief. For what surrounds Your Son and keeps him safe is Love Itself. There is no Source but This, and nothing that does not share Its holiness; that stands beyond Your one creation, or without the Love Which holds all things within Itself. Father, Your Son is like Yourself. We come to You in Your Own Name today, to be at peace within Your everlasting Love."

When I said, "I am come as a light into the world," I meant that I came to share the light with you.

Who is the light of the world except God's Son? Each of us is the light of the world, and by joining our minds in this light we proclaim the Kingdom of God together and as one.

There is a light that this world cannot give. Yet you can give it, as it was given you. And as you give it, it shines forth to call you from the world and follow it.

This light will attract you as nothing in this world can do, and you will lay aside the world and find another. This new world is bright with love which you have given it. And here will everything remind you of your Father and His Holy Son.

Glory to God in the highest, and to you because He has so willed it. Ask and it shall be given you, because it has already been given. Ask for light and learn that you are light. If you want understanding and enlightenment you will learn it, because your decision to learn it is the decision to listen to the Teacher Who knows of light, and can therefore teach it to you.

I am come as a light into a world that does deny itself everything. It does this simply by dissociating itself from everything. It is therefore an illusion of isolation, maintained by fear of the same loneliness that is its illusion. I said that I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. That is why I am the light of the world. If I am with you in the loneliness of the world, the loneliness is gone. You cannot maintain the illusion of loneliness if you are not alone. My purpose, then, is still to overcome the world. I do not attack it, but my light must dispel it because of what it is. Light does not attack darkness, but it does shine it away. If my light goes with you everywhere, you shine it away with me. The light becomes ours, and you cannot abide in darkness any more than darkness can abide wherever you go. The remembrance of me is the remembrance of yourself, and of Him Who sent me to you.

It is your forgiveness that will bring the world of darkness to the light. It is your forgiveness that lets you recognize the light in which you see. Forgiveness is the demonstration that you are the light of the world. Through your forgiveness does the truth about yourself return to your memory. Therefore, in your forgiveness lies your salvation.

Forgiveness is acquired. It is not inherent in the mind, which cannot sin. As sin is an idea you taught yourself, forgiveness must be learned by you as well, but from a Teacher other than yourself, Who represents the other Self in you. Through Him you learn how to forgive the self you think you made, and let it disappear.

Do not be concerned about how you can learn a lesson so completely different from everything that you have taught yourself. How would you know? Your part is very simple. You need only recognize that everything you learned you do not want. Ask to be taught and do not use your experiences to confirm what you have learned.

When your peace is threatened or disturbed in any way say to yourself,

"I do not know what anything, including this, means. And so I do not know how to respond to it. And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now."

When the light comes and you have said, "God's Will is mine," you will see such beauty that you will know it is not of you. Out of your joy you will create beauty in His Name, for your joy could no more be contained than His.

How beautiful indeed are the Thoughts of God who live in His Light! Your worth is beyond perception because it is beyond doubt. Do not perceive yourself in different lights. Know yourself in the One Light where the miracle that is you is perfectly clear.

Let us join together, for my message is Light.

"Father, today I would but hear Your Voice. In deepest silence I would come to You, to hear Your Voice and to receive Your Word. I have no prayer but this: I come to You to ask You for the truth. And truth is but Your Will, which I would share with You today."

You have nailed yourself to a cross, and placed a crown of thorns upon your own head. Yet you cannot crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die.'s Son is the work of the redemption, in which everyone has a part of equal value.

His Son has been redeemed from his own crucifixion, and you cannot assign to death whom God has given eternal life.

The dream of crucifixion still lies heavy on your eyes, but what you see in dreams is not reality.

When you are tempted to yield to the desire for death, remember that I did not die.

You will realize that this is true when you look within and see me.

Would I have overcome death for myself alone? And would eternal life have been given me of the Father unless he had also given it to you?

My brother, child of our Father, this is a dream of death.

There is no funeral, no dark altars, no grim commandments nor twisted rituals of condemnation to which the body leads you.

Ask not release from the body. But free it from the merciless and unrelenting orders you laid upon it, and forgive it what you ordered it to do. In its exaltation you commanded it to die, for only death could conquer life. And what but insanity could look upon the defeat of God, and think it real?

You think that death is of the body. Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what is seen as physical. A thought is in the mind.

Everything is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the mind. The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who are life. If we share the same mind, you can overcome death because I did.

Do you really want to be in hell? Do you really want to weep and suffer and die? For death is total. Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible.

There is no death because what God created shares His life.

There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist.

There is no death because the Father and the Son are one.

What would you see without the fear of death? What could you feel and think if death held no attraction for you?

Very simply, you would remember your father. The Creator of life, the Source of everything that lives, the Father of the universe and of the universe of universes, and of everything that lies even beyond them would you remember.

Swear not to die, you holy Son of God! You made a bargain that you cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot be killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the universe that must be one.

This is your holy instant of eternal life.

And so each instant given unto God in passing, with the next one given Him already, is a time of your release from sadness, pain and death itself.

God holds your futures as He holds your past and present. They are one to Him, and so they should be one to you. Past, present and future are not continuous, unless you force continuity on them.

Yet in this world, the temporal progression still seems real. And so your are not asked to understand the lack of sequence really found in time. You are but asked to let the future go, and place it in God's Hands.

Now is the time of salvation, for now is the release from time. Now do we wait in quiet. God is here, because we wait together. I am sure that He will speak to you, and you will hear. Accept my confidence, for it is yours.

Our minds are joined. We wait with one intent; to hear our Father's answer to our call, to let our thoughts be still and find His peace, to hear Him speak to us of what we are, and to reveal Himself unto His Son.

"This day, my Father, would I spend with You, as You have chosen all my days should be. And what I will experience is not of time at all. The joy that comes to me is not of days nor hours, for it comes from Heaven to Your Son. This day will be Your sweet reminder to remember You. Your gracious calling to Your holy Son, the sign Your grace has come to me, and that it is Your Will I be set free today."

My word, which is the resurrection and the life, shall not pass away because life is eternal. You are the work of God, and His work is wholly lovable and wholly loving. This is how a man must think of himself in his heart, because this is what he is.

Your resurrection is your reawakening. I am the model for rebirth, but rebirth itself is merely the dawning on your mind of what is already in it. God placed it there Himself, and so it is true forever. I believed in it, and therefore accepted it as true for me.

I am your resurrection and your life. You live in me because you live in God. And everyone lives in you, as you live in everyone. Can you, then, perceive unworthiness in a brother and not perceive it in yourself? And can you perceive it in yourself and not perceive it in God?

Believe in the resurrection because it has been accomplished, and it has been accomplished in you. This is as true now as it will ever be, for the resurrection is the Will of God, which knows no time and no exceptions.

A little while and you will see me, for I am not hidden because you are hiding. I will awaken you as surely as I awakened myself, for I awoke for you. In my resurrection is your release. Our mission is to escape from crucifixion, not from redemption. Trust in my help, for I did no walk alone, and I will walk with you as our Father walked with me.

Let the dead and gone be peacefully forgotten. Resurrection has come to take its place. And now you are a part of resurrection, not of death.

Be you then witness to the miracle, and not the laws of sin. There is no need to suffer any more. But there is need that you may be healed, because the suffering and sorrow of the world have made it deaf to its salvation and deliverance.

The resurrection of the world awaits your healing and your happiness, that you may demonstrate the healing of the world.

I can heal you because I know you. I know your value for you, and it is this value that makes you whole.

Can the salvation of the world be a trivial purpose? And can the world be saved if you are not?

God has one Son, and He is the resurrection and the life. His will is done because all power is given him in Heaven and on earth.

Through your transfiguration is the world redeemed, and joyfully released from guilt.

Now do we lift our resurrected minds in gladness and in gratitude to Him Who has restored our sanity to us.

My resurrection comes again each time I lead a brother safely to the place at which the journey ends and is forgot. I am renewed each time a brother's mind turns to the light in him and looks for me. I have forgotten no one.

Help me now to lead you back to where the journey was begun, to make another choice with me.

You are my voice, my eyes, my feet, my hands through which I save the world. The Self from Which I call to you is but your own. To Him we go together.

Take your brother's hand, for this is not a way we walk alone. In him I walk with you, and you with me. Our Father wills His Son be one with Him. What lives but must not be one with you?

"Be in my mind, my Father, when I wake, and shine on me throughout the day today. Let every minute be a time in which I dwell with You. And let me not forget my hourly thanksgiving that You have remained with me, and always will be there to hear my call to You and answer me. As evening comes, let all my thoughts be still of You and of Your Love. And let me sleep sure of my safety, certain of Your care, and happily aware I am Your Son."

My Kingdom is not of this world because it is in you. And you are of your Father. Your Kingdom is not of this world because it was given you from beyond this world.

The world is not left by death but by truth, and the truth can be known by all those for whom the Kingdom was created, and for whom it waits.

If you will accept the fact that I am with you, you are denying the world and accepting God. My will is His, and your decision to hear me is the decision to hear His voice and abide in His Will.

The world can add nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it.

You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true. I am come to tell you the choice of which is truth is not yours to make. If it were, you would have destroyed yourself. Yet God did not will the destruction of His creations, having created them for eternity. His Will has saved you, not from yourself but from your illusion of yourself. He has saved you for yourself.

What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it.

The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist.

Here in the present is the world set free. As you let the past be lifted and release the future from your ancient fears, you find escape and give it to the world.

You have enslaved the world with all your fears, your doubts and miseries, your pains and tears, and all your sorrows press on it, and keep the world a prisoner to your beliefs. Death strikes it everywhere because you hold the bitter thoughts of death within your mind.

To free the world from every kind of pain is but to change your mind about yourself. There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and you maintain the world within your mind in thought.

Salvation, perfect and complete, asks but a little wish that what is true be true; a little willingness to overlook what is not there; a little sigh that speaks for Heaven as a preference to this world that death and desolation seem to rule.

In joyous answer will creation rise within you, to replace the world you see with Heaven, wholly perfect and complete.

What is forgiveness but a willingness that truth be true?

Yet you are not asked to dispel your hallucinations alone. You are merely asked to evaluate them in terms of their results to you. If you do not want them on the basis of loss of peace, they will be removed from your mind for you.

If you are willing to renounce the role of guardian of your thought system and open it to me, I will correct it very gently and lead you back to God.

Where concept of the self have been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is. When every concept has been raised to doubt and question, and been recognized as made on no assumptions that would stand the light, then is the truth free to enter in its sanctuary, clean and free of guilt.

There is no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this:

"I do not know the thing I am,
and therefore do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world or on myself."

Yet in learning this is salvation born. And what you are will tell you of Itself.

Come home. You have not found your happiness in foreign places and in alien forms that have no meaning to you, though you sought to make them meaningful. This world is not where you belong. You are a stranger here.

God's welcome waits for us all, and He will welcome us as I am welcoming you. Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world has to offer.

"Father, the truth belongs to me. My home is set in Heaven by Your Will and mine. Can dreams content me? Can illusions bring me happiness? What but Your memory can satisfy Your Son? I will accept no less than You have given me. I am surrounded by Your Love, forever still, forever gentle and forever safe. God's Son must be as You created him."

You who could give the Love of God to everything you see and touch and remember, are literally denying Heaven to yourself. I call upon you to remember that I have chosen you to teach the Kingdom to the Kingdom.

The Kingdom of Heaven is you. What else but you did the Creator create, and what else but you is His Kingdom?

Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, because that is where the laws of God operate truly, and they can operate only truly because they are the laws of truth. But seek this only, because you can find nothing else. There is nothing else.

Blessed are you who are willing to ask the truth of God without fear, for only thus can you learn that His answer is the release from fear.

Beautiful child of God, you are asking only for what I promised you. Do you believe I would deceive you? The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Believe that the truth is in me, for I know that it is in you.

Have faith in only one thing, and it will be sufficient: God wills you be in Heaven, and nothing can keep you from it, or it from you. Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares all mean nothing. They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you.

I bring God's peace back to all His children because I received it of Him for us all. Nothing can prevail against our united wills because nothing can prevail against God's.

There is nothing outside you. That is what you must ultimately learn, for it is the realization that the Kingdom of Heaven is restored to you. For God created only this, and He did not depart from it nor leave it separate from Himself.

The Kingdom of Heaven is the dwelling place of the Son of God, who left not his Father and dwells not apart from Him. Heaven is not a place nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else; nothing outside this oneness, and nothing else within.

Reason will tell you that there is no middle ground where you can pause uncertainly, waiting to choose between the joy of Heaven and the misery of hell. Until you choose Heaven, you are in hell and misery.

Why wait for Heaven? It is here today. Time is the great illusion it is past or in the future. Yet this cannot be, if it is where God wills His Son to be. How could the Will of God be in the past, or yet to happen? What He wills is now, without a past and wholly futureless. It is as far removed from time as is a tiny candle from a distant star, or what you chose from what you really want.

Heaven itself is reached with empty hands and open minds, which come with nothing to find everything and claim it as their own.

God would not have Heaven incomplete. It waits for you, as I do. I am incomplete without your part in me. And as I am made whole we go together to our ancient home, prepared for us before time was and kept unchanged by time, immaculate and safe, as it will be at last when time is done.

Together we will disappear into the Presence beyond the veil, not to be lost but found; not to be seen but known.

"Father, I was created in Your Mind, a holy Thought that never left its home. I am forever Your Effect, and You forever and forever are my Cause. As You created me I have remained. Where You established me I still abide. And all Your Attributes abide in me, because it is Your Will to have a Son so like his Cause that Cause and its Effect are indistinguishable. Let me Know that I am an Effect of God, and so I have the power to create like You. And as it is in Heaven, so on earth. Your plan I follow here, and at the end I know that You will gather Your effects into the tranquil Heaven of Your Love, where earth will vanish, and all separate thoughts unite in glory as the Son of God."

When I said, "I am with you always," I meant it literally. I am not absent to anyone in any situation. Because I am always with you, you are the way, the truth and the life.

My mind will always be like yours, because we were created as equals. It was only my decision that gave me all power in Heaven and earth. My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision.

This decision is the choice to share it, because the decision itself is the decision to share. It is made by giving, and is therefore the one choice that resembles true creation.

I am your model for decisions. By deciding for God I showed you that this decision can be made, and that you can make it.

My part in the Atonement is not complete until you join it and give it away.

Of yourself you can do nothing, because of yourself you are nothing. I am nothing without the Father and you are nothing without me, because by denying the Father you deny yourself.

A concept of the self is made by you. It bears no likeness to yourself at all. It is an idol, made to take the place of your reality as Son of God

The concept of yourself that now you hold would guarantee your function here remain forever unaccomplished and undone. And thus it dooms you to a bitter sense of deep depression and futility. Yet it need not be fixed, unless you choose to hold it past the hope of change and keep it static and concealed within your mind.

The secret of salvation is but this: That you are doing this unto yourself. No matter what the form of the attack, this still is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, still is this the truth. Whatever seems to be cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is still true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that you were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to recognize it is your dream.

Your goal is to find out who you are, having denied your Identity by attacking creation and its Creator. Now you are learning how to remember the truth. For this attack must be replaced by forgiveness, so that thoughts of life may replace thoughts of death.

Offer your faith to Me, and I will place it gently in the holy place where it belongs. You will find no deception there, but only the simple truth.

Deny me not the little gift I ask, when in exchange I lay before your feet the peace of God, and power to bring this peace to everyone who wanders in the world uncertain, lonely, and in constant fear.

As you teach so shall you learn. I will never leave you or forsake you, because to forsake you would be to forsake myself and God Who created me.

The world can teach no images of you unless you want to learn them. There will come a time when images have all gone by, and you will see you know not what you are. It is to this unsealed and open mind that truth returns, unhindered and unbound.

I take the journey with you. For I share your doubts and fears a little while, that you may come to me who recognize the road by which all fears and doubts are overcome. We walk together. I must understand uncertainty and pain, although I know they have no meaning.

Yet a savior must remain with those he teaches, seeing what they see, but still retaining in his mind the way that led him out, and now will lead you out with him.

I have called and you will answer. Miracles are natural, because they are expressions of love. My calling you is as natural as your answer, and as inevitable.

The way is open. Now we follow in peace together. You have reached your hand to me and I will never leave you.

We are one, and it is but this oneness that we seek, as we accomplish these few final steps which end a journey that was not begun.

"I thank You, Father, for these holy ones who are my brothers as they are Your Sons. My faith in them is Yours. I am as sure that they will come to me as You are sure of what they are, and will forever be. They will accept the gift I offer them, because You gave it me on their behalf. And as I would but do Your Will, so will they choose. And I give thanks for them. Salvation's song will echo through the world with every choice they make. For we are one in purpose, and the end of hell is near."

There is no need for help to enter Heaven for you have never left. But there is need for help beyond yourself as you are circumscribed by false beliefs of your Identity, which God alone established in reality.

Helpers are given you in many forms, although upon the altar they are one. Beyond each one there is a Thought of God, and this will never change. But they have names which differ for a time, for time needs symbols, being itself unreal. Their names are legion, but we will not go beyond the names the course itself employs.

God does not help because He knows no need. But He creates all Helpers of His Son while he believes his fantasies are true. Thank God for them for they will lead you home.

The name of Jesus is the name of one who was a man but saw the face of Christ in all his brothers and remembered God. So he became identified with Christ, a man no longer, but at one with God.

The man was an illusion, for he seemed to be a separate being, walking by himself, within a body that appeared to hold his self from Self, as all illusions do. Yet who can save unless he sees illusions and then identifies them as what they are?

Jesus remains a Savior because he saw the false without accepting it as true. And Christ needed his form that He might appear to men and save them from their own illusions.

In his complete identification with the Christ - the perfect Son of God, His one creation and His happiness, forever like Himself and one with Him - Jesus became what all of you must be. He led the way for you to follow him.

He leads you back to God because he saw the road before him, and he followed it. He made a clear distinction, still obscure to you, between the false and true. He offered you a final demonstration that it is impossible to kill God's Son; nor can his life in any way be changed by sin and evil, malice, fear or death.

And therefore all your sins have been forgiven because they carried no effects at all. And so they were but dreams.

Arise with him who showed you this because you owe him this who shared your dreams that they might be dispelled. And shares them still, to be at one with you.

Is he the Christ? O yes, along with you. His little life on earth was not enough to teach the mighty lesson that he learned for all of you. He will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God. And when you join your will with his, your sight will be his vision, for the eyes of Christ are shared.

Walking with him is just as natural as walking with a brother whom you knew since you were born, for such indeed he is. Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world. Forgive him your illusions, and behold how dear a brother he would be to you. For he will set your mind at rest at last and carry it with you unto your God.

Is he God's only Helper? No, indeed. For Christ takes many forms with different names until their oneness can be recognized. But Jesus is for you the bearer of Christ's single message of the Love of God. You need no other.

It is possible to read his words and benefit from them without accepting him into your life. Yet he would help you yet a little more if you will share your pains and joys with him, and leave them both to find the peace of God. Yet still it is his lesson most of all that he would have you learn, and it is this:

"There is no death because the Son of God is like his Father. Nothing you can do can change Eternal Love. Forget your dreams of sin and guilt, and come with me instead to share the resurrection of God's son. And bring with you all those whom He has sent to you to care for as I care for you."

This description of our Savior is from the Manual for Teachers of A Course in Miracles.