The Inner Shift

Chapter 21 – 9. The Inner Shift

Are thoughts, then, dangerous? To bodies, yes! The thoughts that seem to
kill are those that teach the thinker that he can be killed. And so he “dies”
because of what he learned. He goes from life to death, the final proof he
valued the inconstant more than constancy. Surely he thought he wanted
happiness. Yet he did not desire it because it was the truth, and therefore
must be constant.
 
The constancy of joy is a condition quite alien to your understanding. Yet if
you could even imagine what it must be, you would desire it although you
understand it not. The constancy of happiness has no exceptions; no change
of any kind. It is unshakable as is the Love of God for his creation. Sure in
its vision as its Creator is in what he knows, happiness looks on everything
and sees it is the same. It sees not the ephemeral, for it desires everything be
like itself, and sees it so. Nothing has power to confound its constancy,
because its own desire cannot be shaken. It comes as surely unto those who
see the final question is necessary to the rest, as peace must come to those
who choose to heal and not to judge.
 
Reason will tell you that you cannot ask for happiness inconstantly. For if
what you desire you receive, and happiness is constant, then you need ask
for it but once to have it always. And if you do not have it always, being
what it is, you did not ask for it. For no one fails to ask for his desire of
something he believes holds out some promise of the power of giving it. He
may be wrong in what he asks, where, and of what. Yet he will ask because
desire is a request, an asking for, and made by one whom God himself will
never fail to answer. God has already given all that he really wants. Yet
what he is uncertain of, God cannot give. For he does not desire it while he
remains uncertain, and God’s giving must be incomplete unless it is
received.
 
You who complete God’s will and are his happiness, whose will is powerful
as his, a power that is not lost in your illusions, think carefully why you
have not yet decided how you would answer the final question. Your
answer to the others has made it possible to help you be already partly sane.
 
And yet it is the final one that really asks if you are willing to be wholly
sane.
 
What is the holy instant but God’s appeal to you to recognize what he has
given you? Here is the great appeal to reason; the awareness of what is
always there to see, the happiness that could be always yours. Here is the
constant peace you could experience forever. Here is what denial has denied
revealed to you. For here the final question is already answered, and what
you ask for given. Here is the future now, for time is powerless because of
your desire for what will never change. For you have asked that nothing
stand between the holiness of your relationship and your awareness of its
holiness.