A Course in Miracles

Chapter 29 - The Awakening

Forgiveness & Peace

How willing are you to forgive your brother?

How much do you desire peace instead of endless strife and misery and pain?

These questions are the same, in different form. Forgiveness is your peace, for herein lies the end

• of separation, and the dream
• of danger and destruction, sin and death;
• of madness and of murder, grief and loss.

This is the “sacrifice” salvation asks, and gladly offers peace instead of this.

Swear not to die, you holy Son of God!

You make a bargain that you cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot be killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed.

He is the only thing in all the universe that must be one. What seems eternal all will have an end. The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that come and go, the tides, the seasons, and the lives of man; all things that change with time, and bloom and fade, will not return.

Where time has set an end is not where the eternal is. God’s Son can never change by what man made of him. He will be as he was and as he is, for time appointed not his destiny, nor set the hour of his birth and death.

Forgiveness will not change him. Yet time waits upon forgiveness that the things of time may disappear because they have no use. Nothing survives its purpose. If it be conceived to die, then die it must, unless it does not take this purpose as its own.

Change is the only thing that can be made a blessing here, where purpose is not fixed, however changeless it appears to be.

Think not that you can set a goal unlike God’s purpose for you, and establish it as changeless and eternal. You can give yourself a purpose that you do not have, but you can not remove the power to change your mind, and see another purpose there.

Change is the greatest gift God gave to all that you would make eternal, to ensure that only Heaven would not pass away.

You were not born to die.

You cannot change, because your function has been fixed by God. All other goals are set in time and change that time might be preserved, excepting one.

Forgiveness does not aim at keeping time, but at its ending, when it has no use.

Its purpose ended, it is gone. And where it once held seeming sway is now restored the function God established for His Son in full awareness. Time can set no end to its fulfillment, nor its changelessness.

Death Is Not Real

There is no death because the living share the function their Creator gave to them.

Life’s function cannot be to die.

It (life's function) must be life’s extension, that it be as one forever and forever, without end.

This world will bind your feet and tie your hands and kill your body, only if you think that it was made to crucify God’s Son, for even though it was a dream of death, you need not let it stand for this to you.

Let this be changed and nothing in the
world but must be changed as well, for nothing here but is defined as what you see it for.

How lovely is the world whose purpose is forgiveness of God’s Son!

How free from fear, how filled with blessing and with happiness!

And what a joyous thing it is to dwell a little while in such a happy place!

Nor can it be forgot, in such a world, it is a little while till timelessness comes
quietly to take the place of time.

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 29 - The Awakening

The Lingering Illusion

Seek not outside yourself.

For it will fail, and you will weep each time an idol falls. Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be no peace excepting there.

Each idol that you worship when God calls will never answer in His place. There is no other answer you can substitute, and find the happiness His answer brings.

Seek not outside yourself.

For all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want, insisting where it must be found.

What if it is not there?

Do you prefer that you be right or happy?

Be you glad that you are told where happiness abides, and seek no longer elsewhere. You will fail. But it is given you to know the truth, and not to seek for it outside yourself.

No one who comes here but must still have hope, some lingering illusion, or some dream that there is something outside of himself that will bring happiness and peace to him.

If everything is in him, this cannot be so. And therefore, by his coming, he denies the truth about himself—and seeks for something more than everything—as if a part of it were separated off and found where all the rest of it is not.

This is the purpose he bestows upon the body; that it seek for what he lacks, and give him what would make himself complete. And thus he wanders aimlessly about, in search of something that he cannot find, believing that he is what he is not.

The lingering illusion will impel him to seek out a thousand idols, and to seek beyond them for a thousand more. And each will fail him, all excepting one; for he will die, and does not understand the idol that he seeks is but his death.

Its form appears to be outside himself. Yet does he seek to kill God’s Son within and prove that he is victor over him. This is the purpose every idol has, for this the role that is assigned to it, and this the role that cannot be fulfilled.

Whenever you attempt to reach a goal in which the body’s betterment is cast as major beneficiary, you try to bring about your death. For you believe that you can suffer lack, and lack is death.

To sacrifice is to give up, and thus to be without, and to have suffered loss. And by this giving up is life renounced.

Seek not outside yourself.

The search implies you are not whole within, and fear to look upon your devastation, and prefer to seek outside yourself for what you are.

Idols Must Fall Because They Have No LIfe

Idols must fall because they have no life. And what is lifeless is a sign of death. You came to die, and what would you expect but to perceive the signs of death you seek?

No sadness and no suffering proclaims a message other than an idol found—that represents a parody of life, which in its lifelessness, is really death—conceived as real and given living form.

Yet each must fail and crumble and decay, because a form of death cannot be life, and what is sacrificed cannot be whole.

All idols of this world were made to keep the truth within from being known to you, and to maintain allegiance to the dream that you must find what is outside yourself to be complete and happy.

It is vain to worship idols in the hope of peace.

God dwells within, and your completion lies in Him. No idol takes His place.

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 29 - The Awakening

Chapter 29 - Christ & Anti-Christ

What is an idol? Do you think you know?

For idols are unrecognized as such, and never seen for what they really are.

That is the only power which they have. Their purpose is obscure, and they are feared and worshipped, both, because you do not know what they are for, and why they have been made.

An idol is an image of your brother which you would value more than what he is. Idols are made that he may be replaced, no matter what their form. And it is this which never is perceived and
recognized.

Be it a body or a thing, a place, a situation or a circumstance, an object owned or wanted, or a right demanded or achieved, it is the same. Let not their form deceive you.

Idols are but substitutes for your reality.

In some way, you believe they will complete your
little self, for safety in a world perceived as dangerous, with forces massed against your confidence and peace of mind. They have the power to supply your lacks, and add the value which you do not have.

No one believes in idols who has not enslaved himself to littleness and loss.

And thus must seek beyond his little self for strength to raise his head, and stand apart from all the misery the world reflects. This is the penalty for looking not within for certainty and quiet calm which liberates you from the world, and lets you stand apart, in quiet and in peace.

An idol is a false impression, or a false belief; some form of anti-Christ, which constitutes a gap between the Christ and what you see.

An idol is a wish, made tangible and given form, and thus perceived as real, and seen outside the mind. Yet it is still a thought, and cannot leave the mind that is its source. Nor is its form apart from the idea it represents.

All forms of anti-Christ oppose the Christ. And fall before His face like a dark veil which seems to shut you off from Him, alone in darkness. Yet the light is there. A cloud does not put out the sun. No more a veil can banish what it seems to separate, nor darken by one whit the light itself.

This world of idols is a veil across the face of Christ, because its purpose is to separate your brother from yourself.

A dark and fearful purpose, yet a thought without the power to change one blade of grass from something living to a sign of death.

Its form is nowhere, for its source abides within your mind, where God abideth not. Where is this place where what is everywhere has been excluded, and been kept apart?

What hand could be held up to block God’s way? Whose voice could make demand He enter not?

The “more-than-everything” is not a thing to make you tremble, and to quail in fear. Christ’s enemy is nowhere. He can take no form in which he ever will be real.

What is an idol?

Nothing! It must be believed before it seems to come to life, and given power that it may be feared. Its life and power are its believer’s gift. And this (life & power) is what the miracle restores to what has life and power, worthy of the gift of Heaven and eternal peace.

The miracle does not restore the truth—the light the veil between has not put out—it merely lifts the veil and lets the truth shine unencumbered, being what it is. It does not need belief to be itself, for it has been created, so it is.

An idol is established by belief, and when it is withdrawn, the idol “dies.” This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is

• a power past omnipotence,
• a place beyond the infinite,
• a time transcending the eternal.

• the deathless come to die,
• the all-encompassing to suffer loss,
• the timeless to be made the slaves of time.

• the changeless change;
• the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos, and
• the Son of God, as perfect, sinless and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die.

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 29 - The Awakening

Chapter 29 - The Forgiving Dream

The slave of idols is a willing slave, for willing he must be to let himself bow down in worship to what has no life, and seek for power in the powerless.

What happened to the holy Son of God that this could be his wish; to let himself fall lower than the stones upon the ground, and look to idols that they raise him up?

Hear, then, your story in the dream you made, and ask yourself if it be not the truth that you believe that it is not a dream:

A dream of judgment came into the mind that God created perfect as Himself, and in that dream was Heaven changed to hell, and God made enemy unto His Son.

How To Wake Up

How can God’s Son awaken from the dream?

It is a dream of judgement, so must he judge not, and he will waken, for the dream will seem to last while he is part of it.

Judge not, for he who judges will have need of idols which will hold the judgment off from resting on himself, nor can he know the Self he has condemned.

Judge not, because you make yourself a
part of evil dreams where idols are your “true” identity, and your salvation from the judgment laid in terror and in guilt upon yourself.

All figures in the dream are idols made to save you from the dream, yet they are part of what they have been made to save you from.

Thus does an idol keep the dream alive and terrible, for who could wish for one (an idol) unless he were in terror and despair?

And this (terror and despair) the idol represents, and so its worship is the worship of despair and terror and the dream from which they come.

Judgment is an injustice to God’s Son; and it is justice that, who judges him, will not escape the penalty he laid upon himself within the dream he made. God knows of justice, not of penalty. But in the dream of judgment, you attack and are condemned, and wish to be the slave of idols which are interposed between your judgment and the penalty it brings.

Idols Are The Toys You Dream You Play With

There can be no salvation in the dream as you are dreaming it, for idols must be part of it to save you from what you believe you have accomplished and have done to make you sinfu, and put out the Light within you.

Little children, It is there. You do but dream. And idols are the toys you dream you play with.

Who has need of toys but children?

They pretend they rule the world, and give their toys the power to move about, and talk and think and feel, and speak for them.

Yet everything their toys appear to do is in the minds of those who play with them, but they are eager to forget that they made up the dream in which their toys are real, nor recognize their wishes are their own.

Nightmares are childish dreams.

The toys have turned against the child who thought he made them real.

Yet can a dream attack?

Or can a toy grow large and dangerous and fierce and wild?

This does the child believe, because he fears his thoughts and gives them to the toys instead, and their reality becomes his own, because they seem to save him from his thoughts. Yet do they keep his thoughts alive and real, but seen outside himself, where they can turn against him for his treachery to them.

He thinks he needs them that he may escape his thoughts, because he thinks the thoughts are real.

And so he makes of anything a toy, to make his world remain outside himself and play that he is but a part of it.

There is a time when childhood should be passed and gone forever. Seek not to retain the toys of children. Put them all away, for you have need of them no more.

The dream of judgment is a children’s game in which the child becomes the father, powerful, but with the little wisdom of a child.

What hurts him is destroyed; what helps him, blessed.

Except he judges this as does a child, who does not know what hurts and what will heal, and bad things seem to happen, and he is afraid of all the chaos in a world he thinks is governed by the laws he made.

Yet is the real world unaffected by the world he thinks is real, nor have its laws been changed because he did not understand.