The Judgment of the Holy Spirit

Chapter 12 – 1 – The Judgment of the Holy Spirit
 
You have been told not to make error real, and the way to do this is very
simple. If you want to believe in error, you would have to make it real
because it is not true. But truth is real in its own right, and to believe in truth
you do not have to do anything. Understand that you do not respond to
anything directly, but to your interpretation of it. Your interpretation thus
becomes the justification for the response. That is why analyzing the
motives of others is hazardous to you. If you decide that someone is really
trying to attack you or desert you or enslave you, you will respond as if he
had actually done so, having made his error real to you. To interpret error is
to give it power, and having done this you will overlook truth.
 
The analysis of ego motivation is very complicated, very obscuring, and
never without your own ego involvement. The whole process represents a
clear-cut attempt to demonstrate your own ability to understand what you
perceive. This is shown by the fact that you react to your interpretations as
if they were correct. You may then control your reactions behaviorally, but
not emotionally. This would obviously be a split or an attack on the
integrity of your mind, pitting one level within it against another.
 
There is but one interpretation of motivation that makes any sense. And
because it is the Holy Spirit’s judgment it requires no effort at all on your
part. Every loving thought is true. Everything else is an appeal for healing
and help, regardless of the form it takes. Can anyone be justified in
responding with anger to a brother’s plea for help? No response can be
appropriate except the willingness to give it to him, for this and only this is
what he is asking for. Offer him anything else, and you are assuming the
right to attack his reality by interpreting it as you see fit. Perhaps the danger
of this to your own mind is not yet fully apparent. If you believe that an
appeal for help is something else you will react to something else. Your
response will therefore be inappropriate to reality as it is, but not to your
perception of it.
 
There is nothing to prevent you from recognizing all calls for help as
exactly what they are except your own imagined need to attack. It is only
this that makes you willing to engage in endless “battles” with reality, in
which you deny the reality of the need for healing by making it unreal. You
would not do this except for your unwillingness to accept reality as it is, and
which you therefore withhold from yourself.
 
It is surely good advice to tell you not to judge what you do not understand.
 
No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness, for truth to him has
become what he wants it to be. If you are unwilling to perceive an appeal
for help as what it is, it is because you are unwilling to give help and to
receive it. To fail to recognize a call for help is to refuse help. Would you
maintain that you do not need it? Yet this is what you are maintaining when
you refuse to recognize a brother’s appeal, for only by answering his appeal
can you be helped. Deny him your help and you will not recognize God’s
 
Answer to you. The Holy Spirit does not need your help in interpreting
motivation, but you do need his.
 
Only appreciation is an appropriate response to your brother. Gratitude is
due him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help, for both are
capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly.
 
And all your sense of strain comes from your attempts not to do just this.
 
How simple, then, is God’s plan for salvation. There is but one response to
reality, for reality evokes no conflict at all. There is but one Teacher of
reality, Who understands what it is. He does not change his Mind about
reality because reality does not change. Although your interpretations of
reality are meaningless in your divided state, his remain consistently true.
 
He gives them to you because they are for you. Do not attempt to “help” a
brother in your way, for you cannot help yourself. But hear his call for the
help of God, and you will recognize your own need for the Father.
 
Your interpretations of your brother’s needs are your interpretation of yours.
 
By giving help you are asking for it, and if you perceive but one need in
yourself you will be healed. For you will recognize God’s answer as you
want it to be, and if you want it in truth, it will be truly yours. Every appeal
you answer in the Name of Christ brings the remembrance of your Father
closer to your awareness. For the sake of your need, then, hear every call for
help as what it is, so God can answer you.
 
By applying the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the reactions of others more
and more consistently, you will gain an increasing awareness that his
criteria are equally applicable to you. For to recognize fear is not enough to
escape from it, although the recognition is necessary to demonstrate the
need for escape. The Holy Spirit must still translate the fear into truth. If
you were left with the fear, once you had recognized it, you would have
taken a step away from reality, not towards it. Yet we have repeatedly
emphasized the need to recognize fear and face it without disguise as a
crucial step in the undoing of the ego. Consider how well the Holy Spirit’s
interpretation of the motives of others will serve you then. Having taught
you to accept only loving thoughts in others and to regard everything else as
an appeal for help, he has taught you that fear itself is an appeal for help.
 
This is what recognizing fear really means. If you do not protect it, he will
reinterpret it. That is the ultimate value in learning to perceive attack as a
call for love. We have already learned that fear and attack are inevitably
associated. If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for
help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn on you. For fear is a call for
love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied.
 
Fear is a symptom of your own deep sense of loss. If when you perceive it
in others you learn to supply the loss, the basic cause of fear is removed.
 
Thereby you teach yourself that fear does not exist in you. The means for
removing it is in yourself, and you have demonstrated this by giving it. Fear
and love are the only emotions of which you are capable. One is false, for it
was made out of denial; and denial depends on the belief in what is denied
for its own existence. By interpreting fear correctly as a positive affirmation
of the underlying belief it masks, you are undermining its perceived
usefulness by rendering it useless. Defenses that do not work at all are
automatically discarded. If you raise what fear conceals to clear-cut
unequivocal predominance, fear becomes meaningless. You have denied its
power to conceal love, which was its only purpose. The veil that you have
drawn across the face of love has disappeared.
 
If you would look upon love, which is the world’s reality, how could you do
better than to recognize, in every defense against it, the underlying appeal
for it? And how could you better learn of its reality than by answering the
appeal for it by giving it? The Holy Spirit’s interpretation of fear does dispel
it, for the awareness of truth cannot be denied. Thus does the Holy Spirit
replace fear with love and translate error into truth. And thus will you learn
of him how to replace your dream of separation with the fact of unity. For
the separation is only the denial of union, and correctly interpreted, attests
to your eternal knowledge that union is true.