Weakness and Defensiveness

Chapter 22 – 6. Weakness and Defensiveness

How does one overcome illusions? Surely not by force or anger, nor by
opposing them in any way. Merely by letting reason tell you that they
contradict reality. They go against what must be true. The opposition comes
from them, and not reality. Reality opposes nothing. What merely is needs
no defense, and offers none. Only illusions need defense because of
weakness. And how can it be difficult to walk the way of truth when only
weakness interferes? You are the strong one in this seeming conflict. And
you need no defense. Everything that needs defense you do not want, for
anything that needs defense will weaken you.
 
Consider what the ego wants defenses for. Always to justify what goes
against the truth, flies in the face of reason and makes no sense. Can this be
justified? What can this be except an invitation to insanity, to save you from
the truth? And what would you be saved from but what you fear? Belief in
sin needs great defense, and at enormous cost. All that the Holy Spirit offers
must be defended against and sacrificed. For sin is carved into a block out
of your peace, and laid between you and its return.
 
Yet how can peace be so fragmented? It is still whole, and nothing has been
taken from it. See how the means and the material of evil dreams are
nothing. In truth you and your brother stand together, with nothing in
between. God holds your hands, and what can separate whom he has joined
as one with him? It is your Father whom you would defend against. Yet it
remains impossible to keep love out. God rests with you in quiet,
undefended and wholly undefending, for in this quiet state alone is strength
and power. Here can no weakness enter, for here is no attack and therefore
no illusions. Love rests in certainty. Only uncertainty can be defensive. And
all uncertainty is doubt about yourself.
 
How weak is fear; how little and how meaningless. How insignificant
before the quiet strength of those whom love has joined! This is your
“enemy,”–a frightened mouse that would attack the universe. How likely is
it that it will succeed? Can it be difficult to disregard its feeble squeaks that
tell of its omnipotence, and would drown out the hymn of praise to its
 
Creator that every heart throughout the universe forever sings as one?
 
Which is the stronger? Is it this tiny mouse or everything that God created?
You are not joined together by this mouse, but by the Will of God. And can
a mouse betray whom God has joined?
 
If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of
your union! Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and
thickness, weight, solidity and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body’s
eyes it looks like an enormous solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet
within you is a Force that no illusions can resist. This body only seems to be
immovable; this Force is irresistible in truth. What, then, must happen when
they come together? Can the illusion of immovability be long defended
from what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?
 
Forget not, when you feel the need arise to be defensive about anything, you
have identified yourself with an illusion. And therefore feel that you are
weak because you are alone. This is the cost of all illusions. Not one but
rests on the belief that you are separate. Not one that does not seem to stand,
heavy and solid and immovable, between you and your brother. And not
one that truth cannot pass over lightly, and so easily that you must be
convinced, in spite of what you thought it was, that it is nothing. If you
forgive each other, this must happen. For it is your unwillingness to
overlook what seems to stand between you that makes it look impenetrable,
and defends the illusion of its immovability.