The Responsibility for Sight

Chapter 21 – 3. The Responsibility for Sight

We have repeated how little is asked of you to learn this course. It is the
same small willingness you need to have your whole relationship
transformed to joy; the little gift you offer to the Holy Spirit for which he
gives you everything; the very little on which salvation rests; the tiny
change of mind by which the crucifixion is changed to resurrection. And
being true, it is so simple that it cannot fail to be completely understood.
 
Rejected yes, but not ambiguous. And if you choose against it now it will
not be because it is obscure, but rather that this little cost seemed, in your
judgment, to be too much to pay for peace.
 
This is the only thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release from
pain and the complete escape from sin, all to be given you. Say only this,
but mean it with no reservations, for here the power of salvation lies:
 
I am responsible for what I see.
 
I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would
achieve.
 
And everything that seems to happen to me I ask for, and receive as I have
asked.
 
Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done
to you. Acknowledge but that you have been mistaken, and all effects of
your mistakes will disappear.
 
It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events outside of him.
 
It is impossible that happenings that come to him were not his choice. His
power of decision is the determiner of every situation in which he seems to
find himself by chance or accident. No accident nor chance is possible
within the universe as God created it, outside of which is nothing. Suffer,
and you decided sin was your goal. Be happy, and you gave the power of
decision to him who must decide for God for you. This is the little gift you
offer to the Holy Spirit, and even this he gives to you to give yourself. For
by this gift is given you the power to release your savior, that he may give
salvation unto you.
 
Begrudge not then this little offering. Withhold it, and you keep the world
as now you see it. Give it away, and everything you see goes with it. Never
was so much given for so little. In the holy instant is this exchange effected
and maintained. Here is the world you do not want brought to the one you
do. And here the one you do is given you because you want it. Yet for this,
the power of your wanting must first be recognized. You must accept its
strength, and not its weakness. You must perceive that what is strong
enough to make a world can let it go, and can accept correction if it is
willing to see that it was wrong.
 
The world you see is but the idle witness that you were right. This witness
is insane. You trained it in its testimony, and as it gave it back to you, you
listened and convinced yourself that what it saw was true. You did this to
yourself. See only this, and you will also see how circular the reasoning on
which your “seeing” rests. This was not given you. This was your gift to
you and to your brother. Be willing, then, to have it taken from him and be
replaced with truth. And as you look upon the change in him, it will be
given you to see it in yourself.
 
Perhaps you do not see the need for you to give this little offering. Look
closer, then, at what it is. And, very simply, see in it the whole exchange of
separation for salvation. All that the ego is, is an idea that it is possible that
things should happen to the Son of God without his will; and thus without
the Will of his Creator, Whose Will cannot be separate from his own. This
is the Son of God’s replacement for his will, a mad revolt against what must
forever be. This is the statement that he has the power to make God
powerless and so to take it for himself, and leave himself without what God
has willed for him. This is the mad idea you have enshrined upon your
altars, and which you worship. And everything that threatens this seems to
attack your faith, for here is it invested. Think not that you are faithless, for
your belief and trust in this is strong indeed.
 
The Holy Spirit can give you faith in holiness and vision to see it easily
enough. But you have not left open and unoccupied the altar where the gifts
belong. Where they should be, you have set up your idols to something else.
 
This other “will,” which seems to tell you what must happen, you give
reality. And what would show you otherwise must therefore seem unreal.
 
All that is asked of you is to make room for truth. You are not asked to
make or do what lies beyond your understanding. All you are asked to do is
let it in; only to stop your interference with what will happen of itself;
simply to recognize again the presence of what you thought you gave away.
 
Be willing, for an instant, to leave your altars free of what you placed upon
them, and what is really there you cannot fail to see. The holy instant is not
an instant of creation, but of recognition. For recognition comes of vision
and suspended judgment. Then only it is possible to look within and see
what must be there, plainly in sight, and wholly independent of inference
and judgment. Undoing is not your task, but it is up to you to welcome it or
not. Faith and desire go hand in hand, for everyone believes in what he
wants.
 
We have already said that wishful thinking is how the ego deals with what it
wants, to make it so. There is no better demonstration of the power of
wanting, and therefore of faith, to make its goals seem real and possible.
 
Faith in the unreal leads to adjustments of reality to make it fit the goal of
madness. The goal of sin induces the perception of a fearful world to justify
its purpose. What you desire, you will see. And if its reality is false, you
will uphold it by not realizing all the adjustments you have introduced to
make it so.
 
When vision is denied, confusion of cause and effect becomes inevitable.
 
The purpose now becomes to keep obscure the cause of the effect, and make
effect appear to be a cause. This seeming independence of effect enables it
to be regarded as standing by itself, and capable of serving as a cause of the
events and feelings its maker thinks it causes. Earlier, we spoke of your
desire to create your own creator, and be father and not son to him. This is
the same desire. The Son is the Effect, whose Cause he would deny. And so
he seems to be the cause, producing real effects. Nothing can have effects
without a cause, and to confuse the two is merely to fail to understand them
both.
 
It is as needful that you recognize you made the world you see, as that you
recognize that you did not create yourself. They are the same mistake.
 
Nothing created not by your Creator has any influence over you. And if you
think what you have made can tell you what you see and feel, and place
your faith in its ability to do so, you are denying your Creator and believing
that you made yourself. For if you think the world you made has power to
make you what it wills, you are confusing Son and Father; effect and
Source.
 
The Son’s creations are like his Father’s. Yet in creating them the Son does
not delude himself that he is independent of his Source. His union with It is
the source of his creating. Apart from this he has no power to create, and
what he makes is meaningless. It changes nothing in creation, depends
entirely upon the madness of its maker, and cannot serve to justify the
madness. Your brother thinks he made the world with you. Thus he denies
creation. With you, he thinks the world he made, made him. Thus he denies
he made it.
 
Yet the truth is you were both created by a loving Father, who created you
together and as one. See what “proves” otherwise, and you deny your whole
reality. But grant that everything that seems to stand between you, keeping
you from each other and separate from your Father, you made in secret, and
the instant of release has come to you. All its effects are gone, because its
source has been uncovered. It is its seeming independence of its source that
keeps you prisoner. This is the same mistake as thinking you are
independent of the Source by which you were created, and have never left.