A Course in Miracles

Chapter 13 - From Perception to Knowledge

The Testimony of Miracles

Yes, you are blessed indeed. Yet in this world you do not know it. But you have the means for learning it and seeing it quite clearly.

The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily and as well as does the ego, except that His conclusions are not insane. They take a direction exactly opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death. We have followed much of the ego’s logic, and have seen its logical conclusions. And having seen them, we have realized that they can not be seen but in illusions, for there alone their seeming clearness seems to be clearly seen.

Let us now turn away from them, and follow the simple logic by which the Holy Spirit teaches you the simple conclusions that speak for truth, and only truth.

If you are blessed and do not know it, you need to learn it must be so. The knowledge is not taught, but its conditions must be acquired, for it is they that have been thrown away. You can learn to bless, and cannot give what you have not. If, then, you offer blessing, it must have come first to yourself. And you must also have accepted it as yours, for how else could you give it away?

That is why your miracles offer you the testimony that you are blessed.

If what you offer is complete forgiveness, you must have let guilt go, accepting the Atonement for yourself and learning you are guiltless. How could you learn what has been done for you, but which you do not know, unless you do what you would have to do if it had been done unto you? Indirect proof of truth is needed in a world made of denial and without direction. You will perceive the need for this if you will realize that to deny is the decision not to know. The logic of the world must therefore lead to nothing, for its goal is nothing.

If you decide to have and give and be nothing except a dream, you must direct your thoughts unto oblivion. And if you have and give and are everything, and all this has been denied, your thought system is closed off, and wholly separated from the truth.

This Is An Insane World

This is an insane world, and do not underestimate the actual extent of its insanity. There is no area of your perception that it has not touched, and your dream is sacred to you. That is why God placed the Holy Spirit in you, where you placed the dream.

Seeing is always outward. Were your thoughts wholly of you, the thought system which you made would be forever dark. The thoughts which the mind of God’s Son projects have all the power that he gives to them. The thoughts he shares with God are beyond his belief, but those he made are his beliefs. And it is these, and not the truth, that he has chosen to defend and love. They will not be taken from him. But they can be given up by him, for the Source of their undoing is in him. There is nothing in the world to teach him that the logic of the world is totally insane, and leads to nothing. Yet in him who made this insane logic there is One Who knows it leads to nothing, for He knows everything.

The Holy Spirit, therefore, must begin His teaching by showing you what you can never learn. His message is not indirect, but He must introduce the simple truth into a thought system which has become so twisted and so complex that you cannot see that it means nothing. He merely looks at its foundation and dismisses it. But you who cannot undo what you have made cannot see through it. It deceives you because you chose to deceive yourselves. Those who choose to be deceived will merely attack direct approaches, which would seem but to encroach upon deception and strike at it.