A Course in Miracles

Chapter 27 - The Body and The Dream & The Picture of the Crucifixion

The wish to be (perceive yourself as) unfairly treated is a compromise attempt that would combine

• attack and
• innocence.

Who can combine the wholly incompatible, and make a unity of what can never join?

Walk you the gentle way, and you will fear no evil and no shadows in the night; but place no terror symbols on your path, or you will weave a crown of thorns from which your brother and yourself will not escape.

You cannot crucify yourself alone, and if you are (perceive yourself as) unfairly treated, he must suffer the unfairness that you see. You cannot sacrifice yourself alone, for sacrifice is total. If it could occur at all, it would entail the whole of God’s creation, and the Father with the sacrifice of his beloved Son.

In your release from sacrifice is his made manifest and shown to be his own.

But every pain you suffer, do you see as proof that he is guilty of attack.

Thus would you make yourself to be the sign that he has lost his innocence, and need but look on you to realize that he has been condemned. And what to you has been unfair will come to him in righteousness—the unjust vengeance that you suffer, now belongs to him, and when it rests on him, are you set free.

Living Symbol of His Guilt

Wish not to make yourself a living symbol of his guilt, for you will not escape the death you made for him. But in his innocence you find your own.

Whenever you consent

• to suffer pain,
• to be deprived,
• unfairly treated or
• in need of anything,

you but accuse your brother of attack upon God’s Son.

You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate and damning him to hell. Yet this is writ in hell and not in Heaven—where you are beyond attack and prove his innocence—the picture of yourself you offer him you show yourself and give it all your faith.

The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself in which there is no pain, and no reproach at all. And what was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his innocence.

The power of witness is beyond belief because it brings conviction in its wake. The witness is believed because he points beyond himself to what he represents.

A sick and suffering you but represents your brother’s guilt; the witness which you send lest he forget the injuries he gave, from which you swear he never will escape.

This sick and sorry picture you accept, if only it can serve to punish him. The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say,

“Behold me, brother, at your hand I die,” for sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors must be sins.

Sickness is but a “little” death; a form of vengeance not yet total. Yet it speaks with certainty for what it represents. The bleak and bitter picture you have sent your brother you have looked upon in grief, and everything that it has shown to him, have you believed, because it witnessed to the guilt in him, which you perceived and loved.

Now in the hands made gently by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a different you.

It is a picture of a body still—for what you really are cannot be seen nor pictured—yet this one has not been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all.

It witnesses to the eternal truth that you cannot be hurt, and points beyond itself to both your innocence and his.

Show this unto your brother, who will see that every scar is healed, and every tear is wiped away in laughter and in love. And he will look on his forgiveness there, and with healed eyes will look beyond it to the innocence that he beholds in you.

Here is the proof that he has never sinned; that nothing which his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind—that no reproach he laid upon his heart was ever justified and no attack can ever touch him with the poisoned and relentless sting of fear.

Attest his innocence and not his guilt.

Your healing is his comfort and his health because it proves illusions are not true.

Wish For Death

It is not will for life, but wish for death that is the motivation for this world.

Its only purpose is to prove guilt real.

No worldly thought or act or feeling has a motivation other than this one. These are the witnesses that are called forth to be believed, and lend conviction to the (ego thought) system they speak for and represent. And each has many voices, speaking to your brother and yourself in different tongues, and yet to both the message is the same.

• Adornment of the body seeks to show how lovely are the witnesses for guilt.
• Concerns about the body demonstrate how frail and vulnerable is your life; how easily destroyed is what you love.
• Depression speaks of death.
• And vanity of no real concern with anything at all.

The strongest witness to futility—which bolsters all the rest and helps them paint the picture in which sin (guilt) is justified—is sickness in whatever form it takes.

The sick have reason for each one of their unnatural desires and strange needs, for who could live a life so soon cut short and not esteem the worth of passing joys?

What pleasures could there be that will endure? Are not the frail entitled to believe that every stolen scrap of pleasure is their righteous payment for their little lives?

Their death will pay the price for all of them, if they enjoy their benefits or not. The end of life must come, whatever way that life be spent, and so take pleasure in the quickly passing and ephemeral.

These are not sins, but witnesses unto the strange belief that sin and death are real, and innocence and sin will end alike within the termination of the grave.

If this were true, there would be reason to remain content to seek for passing joys, and cherish little pleasures where you can. Yet in this picture is the body not perceived as neutral and without a goal inherent in itself. For it becomes

• the symbol of reproach,
• the sign of guilt whose consequences still are there to see, so that the cause can never be denied.

Be a Witness To His Innocence

Your function is to show your brother sin (guilt) can have no cause.

How futile must it be to see yourself a picture of the proof that what your function is can never be!

The Holy Spirit’s picture changes not the body into something it is not.

It only takes away from it all signs of accusation and of blamefulness.

Pictured without a purpose, it is seen as neither sick nor well, nor bad nor good.

No grounds are offered that it may be judged in any way at all.

It has no life, but neither is it dead.

It stands apart from all experience of fear or love, for now it witnesses to nothing yet, its purpose being open, and the mind made free again to choose what it is for.

Now is it not condemned, but waiting for a purpose to be given, that it may fulfill the function that it will receive.

Into this empty space, from which the goal of sin has been removed, is Heaven free to be remembered.

Here its peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death.

The body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death.

Let it have healing as its purpose.

Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents.

Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked.

And to your brother let its message be,

“Behold me, brother, at your hand I live.”

The simple way to let this be achieved is merely this; to let the body have no purpose from the past, when you were sure you knew its purpose was to foster guilt.

For this insists your crippled picture is a lasting sign of what it represents.

This leaves no space in which a different view, another purpose, can be given it.

You do not know its purpose.

You but gave illusions of a purpose to a thing you made to hide your function from yourself.

This thing without a purpose cannot hide the function that the Holy Spirit gave.

Let, then, its purpose and your function both be reconciled at last, and seen as one.

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 27 - Fear of Healing

Is healing frightening? To many, yes.

For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies are accusers.

They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, proclaiming that the frail can have no trust, and that the damaged have no grounds for peace.

Who has been injured by his brother, and could love and trust him still?

He has attacked, and will attack again. Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be protected from him. To forgive may be an act of charity, but not his due. He may be pitied for his guilt, but not exonerated. And if you forgive him his transgressions, you but add to all the guilt that he has really earned.

The unhealed cannot pardon, for they are the witnesses that pardon is unfair.

They would retain the consequences of the guilt they overlook. Yet no one can forgive a sin which he believes is real, and what has consequences must be real, because what it has done is there to see.

Forgiveness is not pity, which but seeks to pardon what it knows to be the truth.

Good cannot be returned for evil, for forgiveness does not first establish sin and then forgive it. Who can say and mean,

“My brother, you have injured me, and yet, because I am the better of the two, I pardon you my hurt.”

His pardon and your hurt cannot exist together. One denies the other, and must make it false. To witness sin, and yet forgive it, is a paradox which reason cannot see, for it maintains what has been done to you deserves no pardon. And by giving it, you grant your brother mercy, but retain the proof he is not really innocent.

The sick remain accusers.

They cannot forgive their brothers, and themselves as well, for no one in whom true forgiveness reigns can suffer. He holds not the proof of sin before his brother’s eyes, and thus he must have overlooked it and removed it from his own.

Forgiveness cannot be for one and not the other. Who forgives is healed, and in his healing lies the proof that he has truly pardoned, and retains no trace of condemnation that he still would hold against himself or any living thing.

Forgiveness is not real unless it brings a healing to your brother and yourself.

You must attest his sins had no effect on you, to demonstrate they were not real.

How else could he be guiltless? And how could his innocence be justified unless his sins have no effect to warrant guilt?

Sins are beyond forgiveness, just because they would entail effects which cannot be undone and overlooked entirely. In their undoing lies the proof that they were merely errors.

Let yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother and yourself.

A broken body shows the mind has not been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is without effect.

What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness comes from your belief, and everything you say or do or think, but testifies to what you teach to him.

Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him, and in its healing can it offer him mute testimony of his innocence.

It is this testimony which can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues, for here is his forgiveness proved to him.

A miracle can offer nothing less to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did not do. And so is he convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you.

Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never be undone.

And hopelessness and death must disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power far beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt.

The ancient calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear.

Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him.

He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. Yet it is given you to show him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream.

How just are miracles! For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance from guilt upon your brother and yourself. Your healing saves him pain as well as you, and you are healed because you wished him well.

This is the law the miracle obeys; that healing sees no specialness at all.

It does not come from pity, but from love, and love would prove all suffering is but a vain imagining, a foolish wish, with no effects. Your health is a result of your desire to see your brother with no blood upon his hands, nor guilt upon his heart made heavy with the proof of sin.

And what you wish is given you to see.

The “cost” of your serenity is his.

This is the “price” the Holy Spirit and the world interpret differently. The world perceives it as a statement of the “fact” that your salvation sacrifices his. The Holy Spirit knows your healing is the witness unto his, and cannot be apart from his at all. As long as he consents to suffer, you will be unhealed. Yet you can show him that his suffering is purposeless and wholly without cause.

Show him your healing, and he will consent no more to suffer, for his innocence has been established in your sight and his. And laughter will replace your sighs, because God’s Son remembered that he is God’s Son.

How could the Holy Spirit be deterred an instant, even less, to reason with an argument for sickness such as this?

And need your healing be delayed because you pause to listen to insanity?

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 27 - Symbol of the Impossible

Power cannot oppose, for opposition would weaken it; and weakened power is a contradiction in ideas.

Weak strength is meaningless. And power used to weaken is employed to limit, and therefore it must be limited and weak because that is its purpose.

Power is unopposed, to be itself.

No weakness can intrude on it without changing it into something it is not.

To weaken is to limit and impose an opposite that contradicts the concept which it attacks, and by this does it join to the idea a "something" it is not and make it unintelligible.

Who can understand a double concept, such as “weakened-power” or as “hateful-love?”

You have decided that your brother is a symbol for a “hateful-love,” a “weakened-power,” and above all, a “living-death,” and so he has no meaning to you, for he stands for what is meaningless.

He represents a double thought, where half is cancelled out by the remaining half. Yet even this is quickly contradicted by the half it cancelled out, and so they both are gone, and now he stands for nothing.

Symbols which but represent ideas that cannot be must stand for empty space and nothingness.

Yet nothingness and empty space can not be interference. What can interfere with the awareness of reality is the belief that there is something there.

The picture of your brother that you see means nothing.

There is nothing to attack or to deny; love or hate, or to endow with power or to see as weak. The picture has been wholly cancelled out, because it symbolized a contradiction which cancelled
out the thought it represents, and thus the picture has no cause at all.

Who can perceive effect without a cause?

What can the causeless be but nothingness?

The picture of your brother that you see is wholly absent, and has never been.

Let, then, the empty space it occupies be recognized as vacant, and the time devoted to its seeing be perceived as idly spent, a time unoccupied.

An empty space which is not seen as filled, an unused interval of time not seen as spent and fully occupied, become a silent invitation to the truth to enter, and to make itself at home.

No preparation can be made that would enhance the invitation’s real appeal, for what you leave as vacant God will fill, and where He is, there must the truth abide.

Unweakened power, with no opposite, is what creation is.

For this there are no symbols. Nothing points beyond the truth, for what can stand for more than everything? Yet true undoing must be kind, and so the first replacement for your picture is another picture, of another kind.

As nothingness cannot be pictured, so there is no symbol for totality. Reality is ultimately known without a form, unpictured and unseen.

You do not know the peace of power which opposes nothing, yet no other kind can be at all. Give welcome to the Power beyond forgiveness, and beyond the world of symbols and of limitations.

He would merely BE, and so He merely IS.

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 27 - The Quiet Answer

In quietness are all things answered, and is every problem quietly resolved.

In conflict there can be no answer and no resolution, for its purpose is to make no resolution possible, and to ensure no answer will be plain. A problem set in conflict has no answer, for it is seen in different ways, and what would be an answer from one point of view is not an answer in another light.

You are in conflict.

Thus it must be clear you cannot answer anything at all, for conflict has no limited effects. Yet if God gave an answer, there must be a way in which your problems are resolved, for what He wills already has been done. Thus it must be that time is not involved, and every problem can be answered NOW.

Yet it must also be that, in your state of mind, solution is impossible. Therefore, God must have given you a way of reaching to another state of mind, in which the answer is already there.

Such is the holy instant.

It is here that all your problems should be brought and left. Here they belong, for here their answer is. It must be pointless to attempt to solve a problem where the answer cannot be. Yet just as surely it must be resolved, if it is brought to where the answer is.

Attempt to solve no problems but within the holy instant’s surety, for there the problem will be answered and resolved.

Outside, there will be no solution, for there is no answer there that could be found. Nowhere outside a single, simple question is ever asked.

The world can only ask a double question, with many answers, none of which will do. It does not ask a question to be answered, but only to restate its point of view. All questions asked within this world are but a way of looking, not a question asked. A question asked in hate cannot be answered, because it is an answer in itself. A double question asks and answers, both attesting the same thing in different form.

The world asks but one question. It is this:

“Of these illusions, which of them are true?

Which ones establish peace and offer joy?

And which can bring escape from all the pain of which this world is made?”

Whatever form the question takes, its purpose is the same. It asks but to establish sin (guilt) is real, and answers in the form of preference.

"Which sin do you prefer? That is the one which you should choose. The others are not true.

What can the body get that you would want the most of all? It is your servant and your friend. But tell it what you want, and it will serve you lovingly and well.”

And this is not a question, for it tells you what you want, and where to go for it. It leaves no room to question its beliefs, except that what it states takes
question’s form.

A pseudo-question has no answer. It dictates the answer even as it asks. Thus is all questioning within the world a form of propaganda for itself. Just as the body’s witnesses are but the senses from within itself, so are the answers to the questions of the world contained within the questions.

Where answers represent the questions they add nothing new, and nothing has been learned.

An honest question is a learning tool which asks for something that you do not know.

It does not set conditions for response, but merely asks what the response should be. But no one in a conflict state is free to ask this question, for he does not want an honest answer, where the conflict ends.

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 27 - The Healing Example

The only way to heal is to be healed. The miracle extends without your help, but you are needed that it can begin.

Accept the miracle of healing, and it will go forth because of what it is.

It is its nature to extend itself the instant it is born, and it is born the instant it is offered and received. No one can ask another to be healed, but he can let himself be healed, and thus offer the other what he has received.

Who can bestow upon another what he does not have? And who can share what he denies himself?

The Holy Spirit speaks to you. He does not speak to someone else. Yet by your listening, His Voice extends because you have accepted what He says. Health is the witness unto health. As long as it is unattested, it remains without conviction. Only when demonstrated has it been proved, and must compel belief.

No one is healed through double messages. If you wish only to be healed, you heal. Your single purpose makes this possible, but if you are afraid of healing, then it cannot come through you.

The only thing that is required for a healing is a lack of fear.

The fearful are not healed, and cannot heal. This does not mean the conflict must be gone forever from your mind, for if it were, there were no need for healing then. But it does mean, if only for an instant, you love without attack. An instant is sufficient.

Miracles wait not on time.

The holy instant is the miracle’s abiding-place. From there, each one is born into this world as witness to a state of mind which has transcended conflict and has reached to peace. It carries comfort from the place of peace into the battle-ground, and demonstrates that war has no effects. For all the hurt that war has sought to bring,

• the broken bodies and the shattered limbs,
• the screaming dying and the silent dead,

are gently lifted up and comforted.

What stands apart from you, when you accept the blessing that the holy instant brings?

Would not a world so bitterly bereft be looked on as a condemnation by the one who could have saved it, but stepped back because he was afraid of being healed?

The eyes of all the dying bring reproach, and suffering whispers, “What is there to fear?” Consider well its question. It is asked of you on your behalf.

A dying world asks only that you rest an instant from attack upon yourself, that it be healed.

Life is given you to give the dying world.

Healing replaces suffering.

Thus is your healing everything the world requires, that it may be healed.

It needs one lesson which has perfectly been learned, and then, when you forget it, will the world remind you gently of what you have taught. No reinforcement will its thanks withhold from you who let yourself be healed that it might live.

It will call forth its witnesses to show the face of Christ to you who brought the sight to them, by which they witnessed it.

Peace be to you whom is healing offered, and you will learn that peace is given you when you accept the healing for yourself.

Its total value need not be appraised by you to let you understand that you have benefited from it.

What occurred within the instant which love entered in without attack will stay with you forever. Your healing will be one of its effects, as will your brother’s.

Everywhere you go will you behold its multiplied effects, yet all the witnesses that you behold will be far less that all there really are. Infinity cannot be understood by merely counting up its separate parts.

God thanks you for your healing, for He knows it is a gift of love unto His Son, and therefore is it given unto Him.