Reason and the Forms of Error

Chapter 22 – 4. Reason and the Forms of Error

The introduction of reason into the ego’s thought system is the beginning of
its undoing, for reason and the ego are contradictory. Nor is it possible for
them to coexist in your awareness. For reason’s goal is to make plain, and
therefore obvious. You can see reason. This is not a play on words, for here
is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally.
 
If it is not the body’s sight, it must be understood. For it is plain, and what
is obvious is not ambiguous. It can be understood. And here do reason and
the ego separate, to go their separate ways.
 
The ego’s whole continuance depends on its belief you cannot learn this
course. Share this belief, and reason will be unable to see your errors and
make way for their correction. For reason sees through errors, telling you
what you thought was real is not. Reason can see the difference between sin
and mistakes, because it wants correction. Therefore, it tells you what you
thought was uncorrectable can be corrected, and thus it must have been an
error. The ego’s opposition to correction leads to its fixed belief in sin and
disregard of errors. It looks on nothing that can be corrected. Thus does the
ego damn, and reason save.
 
Reason is not salvation in itself, but it makes way for peace and brings you
to a state of mind in which salvation can be given you. Sin is a block, set
like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. No
one who looks on it without the help of reason would try to pass it. The
body’s eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to
attempt to pass it. Yet reason sees through it easily, because it is an error.
 
The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason’s eyes.
 
Only the form of error attracts the ego. Meaning it does not recognize, and
does not see if it is there or not. Everything the body’s eyes can see is a
mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole without
the meaning that the whole would give. And yet mistakes, regardless of
their form, can be corrected. Sin is but error in a special form the ego
venerates. It would preserve all errors and make them sins. For here is its
own stability, its heavy anchor in the shifting world it made; the rock on
which its church is built, and where its worshippers are bound to bodies,
believing the body’s freedom is their own.
 
Reason will tell you that the form of error is not what makes it a mistake. If
what the form conceals is a mistake, the form cannot prevent correction.
 
The body’s eyes see only form. They cannot see beyond what they were
made to see. And they were made to look on error and not see past it. Theirs
is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look
beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing.
 
To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that
stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. Yet how can sight that
stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? It is held back by
form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be
perceived.
 
These eyes, made not to see, will never see. For the idea they represent left
not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. What was its
maker’s goal but not to see? For this the body’s eyes are perfect means, but
not for seeing. See how the body’s eyes rest on externals and cannot go
beyond. Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form
to meaning. Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form
means understanding has been obscured.
 
Only mistakes have different forms, and so they can deceive. You can
change form because it is not true. It could not be reality because it can be
changed. Reason will tell you that if form is not reality it must be an
illusion, and is not there to see. And if you see it you must be mistaken, for
you are seeing what can not be real as if it were. What cannot see beyond
what is not there must be distorted perception, and must perceive illusions
as the truth. Could it, then, recognize the truth?
 
Let not the form of his mistakes keep you from him whose holiness is
yours. Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you
your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body’s eyes can see. Let
your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his
sins and of his body. What is there in him that you would attack except
what you associate with his body, which you believe can sin? Beyond his
errors is his holiness and your salvation. You gave him not his holiness, but
tried to see your sins in him to save yourself. And yet, his holiness is your
forgiveness. Can you be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness is
your salvation?
 
A holy relationship, however newly born, must value holiness above all
else. Unholy values will produce confusion, and in awareness. In an unholy
relationship, each one is valued because he seems to justify the other’s sin.
 
Each sees within the other what impels him to sin against his will. And thus
he lays his sins upon the other, and is attracted to him to perpetuate his sins.
 
And so it must become impossible for each to see himself as causing sin by
his desire to have sin real. Yet reason sees a holy relationship as what it is; a
common state of mind, where both give errors gladly to correction, that both
may happily be healed as one.