A Course in Miracles

Chapter 11 - God's Plan For Salvation

You have been told not to make error real, and the way to do this is very simple.

But truth is real in its own right, and to believe in truth, you do not have to do anything.

Understand that you do not respond to stimuli, but to stimuli as you interpret them. Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response. That is why analyzing the motives of others is hazardous to you.

To interpret error is to give it power, and having done this, you will overlook truth.

The analysis of ego-motivation is very complicated, very obscuring, and never without the risk of your own ego involvement. The whole process represents a clearcut attempt to demonstrate your own ability to understand what you perceive. This is shown by the fact that you react to your interpretations as if they were correct, and control your reactions behaviorally, but not emotionally.

This is quite evidently a mental split, in which you have attacked the integrity of your mind, and pitted one level within it against another.

The Judgment of the Holy Spirit

There is but one interpretation of all motivation that makes any sense. And because it is the Holy Spirit’s judgment, it requires no effort at all on your part.

No response can be appropriate except the willingness to give it to him, for this and only this is what he is asking for. Offer him anything else, and you are assuming the right to attack his reality by interpreting it as you see fit.

Perhaps the danger of this to your own mind is not yet fully apparent to you, but this by no means signifies that it is not perfectly clear.

If you maintain that an appeal for help is something else you will react to something else, and your response will be inappropriate to reality as it is, but not to your perception of it. This is poor reality testing by definition.

There is nothing to prevent you from recognizing all calls for help as exactly what they are except your own perceived need to attack. It is only this that makes you willing to engage in endless “battles” with reality, in which you deny the reality of the need for healing by making it unreal. You would not do this except for your unwillingness to perceive reality, which you withhold from yourself.

It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand. No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness, for truth to him has become what he wants it to be.

If you are unwilling to perceive an appeal for help as what it is, it is because you are unwilling to give help and to receive it.

Analysis of Ego Motivation

The analysis of the ego’s “real” motivation is the modern equivalent of the inquisition, for in both a brother’s errors are “uncovered” and he is then attacked for his own good.

What can this be but projection?

For his errors lay in the minds of his interpreters, for which they punished him.

Whenever you fail to recognize a call for help you are refusing help. Would you maintain that you do not need it?

Yet this is what you are maintaining when you refuse to recognize a brother’s appeal, for only by answering his appeal can you be helped. Deny him your help and you will not perceive God’s answer to you.

Gratitude is due him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help, for both are capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly. And all your sense of strain comes from your attempts not to do just this.

God's Plan For Salvation

How simple, then, is God’s plan for salvation...

He does not change His Mind about reality because reality does not change. Although your interpretations of reality are meaningless in your divided state, His remain consistently true. He gives them to you because they are for you.

Do not attempt to “help” a brother in your way, for you cannot help yourselves. But hear his call for the help of God, and you will recognize your own need for the Father.

Your interpretations of your brother’s need is your interpretation of yours. By giving help you are asking for it, and if you perceive but one need in yourself you will be healed. For you will recognize God’s answer as you want it to be, and if you want it in truth it will be truly yours.

Every appeal you answer in the Name of Christ brings the remembrance of your Father closer to your awareness. For the sake of your need, then, hear every call for help as what it is, so God can answer you.

By applying the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the reactions of others more and more consistently, you will gain an increasing awareness that His criteria are equally applicable to you. For to recognize fear is not enough to escape from it, although the recognition is necessary to demonstrate the need for escape.

The Holy Spirit must still translate it into truth.

If you were left with the fear, having recognized it, you would have taken a step away from reality, not towards it. Yet we have repeatedly emphasized the need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as a crucial step in the undoing of the ego.

Consider how well the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the motives of others will serve you then.

Having taught you to accept only loving thoughts in others and to regard everything else as an appeal for help, He has taught you that fear is an appeal for help. This is what recognizing it really means. If you do not protect it, He will re-interpret it. That is the ultimate value to you in learning to perceive attack as a call for love.

We have learned surely that fear and attack are inevitably associated. If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn upon you. For fear is a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied.