A Course in Miracles

Chapter 11 - God's Plan of Salvation

The Sane Curriculum

Only love is strong because it is undivided.

The strong do not attack because they see no need to do so. Before the idea of attack can enter your mind you must have perceived yourself as weak.

Because you had attacked yourself and believed that the attack was effective, you behold yourself as weakened. No longer perceiving yourself and all your brothers as equal, and regarding yourself as weaker, you attempt to “equalize” the situation you have made. You use
attack to do so because you believe that attack was successful in weakening you.

That is why the recognition of your own invulnerability is so important in the restoration of your sanity.

For if you accept your invulnerability, you are recognizing that attack has no effect. Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally, you will demonstrate that nothing happened. Therefore, by attacking you have not done anything.

Once you realize this there is no longer any sense in attack, for it manifestly does not work, and cannot protect you.

Yet the recognition of your invulnerability has more than negative value. If your attacks on yourself have failed to weaken you you are still strong. You therefore have no need to “equalize” the situation to establish your strength.

You will never realize the utter uselessness of attack except by recognizing that your attack on yourself had no effects. For others do react to attack if they perceive it, and if you are trying to attack them you will be unable to avoid interpreting this as re-inforcement.

The only place where you can cancel out all re-inforcement is in yourself. For you are always the first point of your attack, and if this has never been it has no consequences.

The Holy Spirit’s love is your strength, for yours is divided and therefore not real.

You could not trust your own love when you have attacked it. You cannot learn of perfect love with a split mind because a split mind had made itself a poor learner.

You tried to make the separation eternal because you wanted to retain the characteristics of creation with your own content. Yet creation is not of you, and poor learners need special teaching. You have learning handicaps in a very literal sense.

There are areas in your learning skills which are so impaired that you can progress only under constant, clear-cut direction, provided by a Teacher Who can transcend your limited resources.

He becomes your Resource, because of yourself you cannot learn. The learning situation in which you placed yourself is impossible, and in this situation you clearly require a special Teacher and a special curriculum. Poor learners are not good choices for teachers, either for themselves or for anyone else. You would hardly turn to them to establish the curriculum by which they can escape from their limitations. If they understood what is beyond them they would not be handicapped.

You do not know the meaning of love, and that is your handicap.

Do not attempt to teach yourselves what you do not understand, and do not try to set up curriculum goals where yours have clearly failed.

Your learning goal has been not to learn, and this cannot lead to successful learning. You cannot transfer what you have not learned, and the impairment of the ability to generalize is a crucial learning failure.

Would you ask those who have failed to learn what learning aids are for?

They do not know. For if they could interpret the aids correctly they would have learned from them.

We have said that the ego’s rule is, “Seek and do not find.” Translated into curricular terms, this is the same as saying, “Try to learn but do not succeed.”

The result of this curriculum goal is obvious. Every legitimate teaching aid, every real instruction, and every sensible guide to learning will be misinterpreted. For they are all for learning facilitation, which this strange curriculum goal is against.

If you are trying to learn how not to learn, and are using the aim of teaching to defeat itself, what can you expect but confusion?

The curriculum does not make sense.
This kind of “learning” has so weakened your mind that you cannot love, for the curriculum you have chosen is
against love, and amounts to a course in how to attack yurself.

A necessary minor, supplementing this major curriculum goal, is learning how not to overcome the split which made this goal believable. And you can not overcome it, for all your learning is on its behalf.

Yet your will speaks against your learning as your learning speaks against your will, and so you fight against learning and succeed, for that is your will.

But you do not realize, even yet, that there is something you do will to learn, and that you can learn it because it is your will to do so.