Chapter 5: Healing and Wholeness

V. Therapy and Teaching

¹ You must have noticed how often I have used your own ideas to help you. You have learned to be a loving, wise and very understanding therapist except for yourself. That exception has given you more than perception for others because of what you saw in them, but less than knowledge of your real relationships to them because you did not accept them as part of you. 

Understanding is beyond perception because it introduces meaning. It is, however, below knowledge, even though it can grow toward it. It is possible, with great effort, to understand someone else to some extent and to be quite helpful to him, but the effort is misdirected. The misdirection is quite apparent; it is directed away from you.

² This does not mean that it is lost to you, but it does mean that you are not aware of it. I have saved all your kindnesses and every loving thought you have had. I have purified them of the errors which hid their light, and have kept them for you in their own perfect radiance. They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. They came from the Holy Spirit within you, and we know what God creates is eternal. What fear has hidden still is part of you.

³ Joining the Atonement, which I have repeatedly asked you to do, is always a way out of fear. This does not mean that you can safely fail to acknowledge anything that is true. However, the Holy Spirit will not fail to help you re‐interpret everything that you perceive as fearful, and teach you that only what is loving is true. Truth is beyond your ability to destroy, but entirely within your grasp. It belongs to you because you created it. It is yours because it is a part of you, just as you are part of God because He created you.

⁴ The Atonement is the guarantee of the safety of the Kingdom. Nothing good is lost because it comes from the Holy Spirit, the Voice for creation. Nothing that is not good was ever created, and therefore cannot be protected. What the ego makes it keeps to itself, and so it is without strength. Its unshared existence does not die; it was merely never born. Real birth is not a beginning; it is a continuing. Everything that can continue has been born, but it can increase as you are willing to return the part of your mind that needs healing to the higher part, and thus render your creating undivided.

⁵ As a therapist, you yourself tell your patients that the real difference between neurotic and “healthy” guilt feelings is that neurotic guilt feelings do not help anyone. This distinction is wise though incomplete. Let us make the distinction a little sharper now. Neurotic guilt feelings are a device of the ego for “atoning” without sharing, and for asking pardon without change. The ego never calls for real Atonement, and cannot tolerate forgiveness, which is change.

⁶ Your concept of “healthy guilt feelings” has merit, but without the concept of the Atonement it lacks the healing potential it holds. You made the distinction in terms of feelings which led to a decision not to repeat the error, which is only part of healing. Your concept lacked the idea of undoing it. What you were really advocating, then, was adopting a policy of sharing without a real foundation. I have come to give you the foundation, so your own thoughts can make you really free. You have carried the burden of the ideas you did not share and which were therefore too weak to increase, but you did not recognize how to undo their existence because you had made them.

⁷ You cannot cancel out your past errors alone. They will not disappear from your mind without remedy. The remedy is not of your making, any more than you are. The Atonement cannot be understood except as a pure act of sharing. That is what is meant when we said it is possible, even in this world, to listen to one voice. If you are part of God and the Sonship is one, you cannot be limited to the “self” the ego sees. Every loving thought held in any part of the Sonship belongs to every part. It is shared because it is loving. Sharing is Godʹs way of creating, and also yours. Your ego can keep you in exile from the Kingdom, but in the Kingdom itself it has no power.

⁸ You have become willing to receive my messages as I give them without interference by the ego, so we can clarify an earlier point. We said that you will one day teach as much as you learn, and that will keep you in balance. The time is now because you have let it be now. You cannot learn except by teaching. I heard one voice because I had learned that learning is attained by teaching. I understood that I could not atone for myself alone. Listening to one voice means the will to share the voice in order to hear it yourself. The mind that was in me is still irresistibly drawn to every mind created by God because Godʹs Wholeness is the wholeness of His Son.

⁹ Turning the other cheek does not mean that you should submit to violence without protest. It means that you cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness. Show him that he cannot hurt you and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself.

Teaching is done in many ways, ‐ by formal means, by guidance, and above all by example. Teaching is therapy because it means the sharing of ideas, and the awareness that to share them is to strengthen them. The union of the Sonship is its protection. The ego cannot prevail against the Kingdom because it is united, and the ego fades away and is undone in the presence of the attraction of the parts of the Sonship which hear the call of the Holy Spirit to be as One.

¹⁰ I cannot forget my need to teach what I have learned, which arose in me because I learned it. I call upon you to teach what you have learned because, by so doing, you can depend on it. Make it dependable in my name because my name is the name of Godʹs Son. What I learned I give you freely, and the mind which was in me rejoices as you choose to hear it.

The Holy Spirit atones in all of us by undoing, and thus lifts the burden you have placed in your mind. By following Him, He leads you back to God where you belong, and how can you find this way except by taking your brother with you?

¹¹ My part in the Atonement is not complete until you join it and give it away. 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. You will forsake yourselves and God if you forsake any of your brothers.

You are more than your brotherʹs keeper. In fact, you do not want to keep him. You must learn to see him as he is, and know that he belongs to God as you do. How could you treat your brother better than by rendering unto God the things which are Godʹs?

¹² Ideas do not leave the mind which thought them to have a separate being, nor do separate thoughts conflict with one another in space because they do not occupy space at all. However, human ideas can conflict in content because they occur at different levels, and include opposite thoughts at the same level.

It is impossible to share opposing thoughts. The Holy Spirit does not let you forsake your brothers. Therefore, you can really share only the parts of your thoughts which are of Him, and which He also keeps for you. And of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. All the rest remains with you until He has re‐interpreted them in the light of the Kingdom, making them, too, worthy of being shared. When they have been sufficiently purified He lets you give them away. The will to share them is their purification.

¹³ The Atonement gives you the power of a healed mind, but the power to create is of God. Therefore, those who have been forgiven must devote themselves first to healing because, having received the idea of healing, they must give it to hold it.

The full power of creation cannot be expressed as long as any of Godʹs ideas withhold it from the Kingdom. The joint will of all the Sonship is the only creator that can create like the Father, because only the complete can think completely, and the thinking of God lacks nothing. Everything you think that is not through the Holy Spirit is lacking.

¹⁴ How can you who are so holy suffer? All your past, except its beauty, is gone, and nothing is left except a blessing. You can indeed depart in peace because I have loved you as I loved myself. You go with my blessing and for my blessing. Hold it and share it, that it may always be ours. I place the peace of God in your heart and in your hands, to hold and share. The heart is pure to hold it and the hands are strong to give it. We cannot lose. My judgment is as strong as the wisdom of God, in Whose Heart and Hands we have our being. His quiet children are His blessed Sons. The Thoughts of God are with you.

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