A Course in Miracles

Chapter 11 - God's Plan For Salvation

The Investment in Reality

I once asked if you were willing to sell all you have and give to the poor and follow me.

This is what I meant:

The poor are merely those who have invested wrongly, and they are poor indeed! Because they are in need it is given you to help them, since you are among them.

Consider how perfectly your lesson would be learned if you were unwilling to share their poverty. For poverty is lack, and there is but one lack since there is but one need.

Suppose a brother insists on having you do something you think you do not want to do. The very fact of his insistence should tell you that he believes salvation lies in it. If you insist on refusing and experience a quick response of opposition, you are believing that your salvation lies in not doing it. You, then, are making the same mistake that he is, and are making his error real to both of you.

Whenever You Become Angry

Insistence means investment, and what you invest in is always related to your notion of salvation.

Whenever you become angry with a brother, for whatever reason, you are believing that the ego is to be saved, and to be saved by attack.

If he attacks you are agreeing with this belief, and if you attack you are reinforcing it.

Remember that those who attack are poor.Their poverty asks for gifts, not for further impoverishment. You who could help them are surely acting destructively if you accept their poverty as yours. If you had not invested as they had, it would never occur to you to overlook their need.

Recognize what does not matter, and if your brothers ask you for something “outrageous,” do it because it does not matter. Refuse, and your opposition establishes that it does matter to you. It is only you, therefore, who have made the request outrageous, for nothing can be asked of you, and every request of a brother is for you.

Why would you insist in denying him?

For to do so is to deny yourself and impoverish both. He is asking for salvation, as you are. Poverty is of the ego, and never of God. No “outrageous” request can be made of one who recognizes what is valuable and wants to accept nothing else.

Salvation Is For The Mind

Salvation is for the mind, and it is attained through peace. This is the only thing that can be saved and the only way to save it.

Any response other than love arises from a confusion about the “what” and the “how” of salvation, and this is the only answer.

Never lose sight of this, and never allow yourself to believe, even for an instant, that there is another answer. For you will surely place yourself among the poor, who do not understand that they dwell in abundance and that salvation is come.

To identify with the ego is to attack yourself and make yourself poor. That is why everyone who identifies with the ego feels deprived. What he experiences then is

but what he did is to exchange his self-love for self-hate, making him afraid of himself.

He does not realize this. Even if he is fully aware of anxiety he does not perceive its source as his own ego identification, and he always tries to handle it by making some sort of insane “arrangement” with the world.

He always perceives this world as outside himself, for this is crucial to his adjustment.

He does not realize that he makes this world, for there is no world outside of him.

If only the loving thoughts of God’s Son are the world’s reality, the real world must be in his mind. His insane thoughts, too, must be in his mind, but an internal conflict of this magnitude he cannot tolerate.

A split mind IS endangered, and the recognition that it encompasses completely opposed thoughts within itself is intolerable. Therefore the mind projects the split, not the reality.

Everything you perceive as the outside world is merely your attempt to maintain your ego identification, for everyone believes that identification is salvation.

Yet consider what has happened, for thoughts do have consequences to the thinker...

You are at odds with the world as you perceive it because you think it is antagonistic to you. This is a necessary consequence of what you have done.

You have projected outward what is antagonistic to what is inward, and therefore you would have to perceive it this way.

That is why...