A Course in Miracles

Chapter 14 - Out of the Darkness

The journey that we undertake together is the exchange of dark for light, of ignorance for understanding. Nothing you
understand is fearful. It is only in darkness and in ignorance that you perceive the frightening, and you shrink away from it to further darkness.

And yet it is only the hidden that can terrify, not for what it IS, but for its hiddenness. The obscure is frightening BECAUSE you do not understand its meaning. If you did, it would be clear and you would be no longer in the dark.

Nothing has HIDDEN value, for what is hidden cannot be shared, and so its value is unknown. The hidden is KEPT APART, but value always lies in joint appreciation. What is concealed cannot be loved, and so it MUST be feared.

The quiet light in which the Holy Spirit dwells within you is merely perfect openness, in which nothing is hidden, and
therefore nothing is fearful.

Attack will ALWAYS yield to love if it is BROUGHT to love, not hidden FROM it. There is no darkness that the light of love will not dispel, unless it is concealed from love’s beneficence.

What is kept APART from love cannot share its healing power because it has been separated off and kept in darkness. The sentinels of darkness watch over it carefully, and you who made these guardians of illusion out of nothing are now afraid of them.

Would you CONTINUE to give imagined power to these strange ideas of safety?

They are neither safe nor unsafe. They do not protect; neither do they attack. They do nothing at all, BEING nothing at all. As guardians of darkness and of ignorance, look to them only for fear, for what they keep obscure IS fearful. But let them go, and what was fearful will be so no longer.

Without protection of obscurity ONLY the light of love remains, for only this HAS meaning and CAN live in light. Everything else MUST disappear.

Death yields to life simply because destruction is not TRUE. The light of guiltlessness shines guilt away because, when they are brought TOGETHER, the truth of one MUST make the falsity of its opposite perfectly clear. Keep not guilt and
guiltlessness apart, for your belief that you can have them BOTH is meaningless.

All you have done by keeping them apart is lose their meaning by confusing them with each other. And so you do not realize that only one means anything, and the other
is wholly without sense of ANY kind.

You have interpreted the separation as a means which you have made for breaking your communication with your Father. The Holy Spirit re-interprets it as a means of re-establishing what has not been broken but HAS been made obscure. All things you made have use to Him, for His most holy purpose. He KNOWS you are not separate from God, but He perceives much in your mind that lets you THINK you are. All this, and nothing else, would He separate from you.

The power of decision, which you made IN PLACE of the power of creation, He would teach you how to use on your BEHALF. You who made it to crucify yourselves must learn of Him how to apply it to the holy cause of restoration.

You who speak in dark and devious symbols do not understand the language you have made. It HAS no meaning, for its purpose is not communication, but rather, the DISRUPTION of communication.

If the purpose of language IS communication, how can this tongue mean anything?

Yet even this strange and twisted effort to communicate through NOT communicating holds enough of love to MAKE it meaningful, if its interpreter is NOT its maker. You who made it are but expressing conflict, from which the Holy Spirit would release you.

Leave what you would communicate to Him. He will interpret it to you with perfect clarity, for He knows with Whom you ARE in perfect communication. You know not what you say, and so you know not what is said to you. Yet your Interpreter perceives the meaning in your alien language. He will not attempt to communicate the meaningless. But He WILL separate out all that has meaning, dropping off the rest and offering your true communication to those who would communicate as truly with you.

You speak two languages at once, and this MUST lead to unintelligibility. Yet if one means nothing and the other everything, only that one is possible for purposes of communication. The other but INTERFERES with it.

The Holy Spirit’s function is ENTIRELY communication.

He therefore must remove whatever interferes with it in order to RESTORE it. Therefore, keep no source of interference from His sight, for He will not attack your sentinels. But bring them to Him, and let His gentleness teach you that, in the light, they are not fearful, and CANNOT serve to guard the dark doors behind which nothing at all is carefully concealed. We must open all doors and let the light come streaming through. There are no hidden chambers in God’s temple. Its gates are open wide to greet