Simple ACIM
Original Edition
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v1.0 · Course text used under CIMS license
The Text
Contents
Opening
Introduction
Tx.In
Chapter I
Introduction to Miracles
2 sections
Chapter II
The Illusion of Separation
6 sections
Chapter III
Retraining the Mind
9 sections
Chapter IV
The Root of All Evil
9 sections
Chapter V
Healing and Wholeness
9 sections
Chapter VI
Attack and Fear
8 sections
Chapter VII
The Consistency of the Kingdom
12 sections
Chapter VIII
The Journey Back
11 sections
Chapter IX
The Correction of Error
11 sections
Chapter X
God and the Ego
8 sections
Chapter XI
God's Plan For Salvation
10 sections
Chapter XII
The Problem of Guilt
7 sections
Chapter XIII
From Perception to Knowledge
9 sections
Chapter XIV
Bringing Illusions to Truth
7 sections
Chapter XV
The Purpose of Time
11 sections
Chapter XVI
The Forgiveness of Illusions
8 sections
Chapter XVII
Forgiveness and Healing
9 sections
Chapter XVIII
The Dream and the Reality
11 sections
Chapter XIX
Beyond the Body
8 sections
Chapter XX
The Promise of the Resurrection
9 sections
Chapter XXI
The Inner Picture
9 sections
1.Introduction
Tx.21.I
2.The Imagined World
Tx.21.II
3.The Responsibility For Sight
Tx.21.III
4.Faith, Belief, and Vision
Tx.21.IV
5.The Fear to Look Within
Tx.21.V
6.Reason and Perception
Tx.21.VI
7.Reason and Correction
Tx.21.VII
8.Perception and Wishes
Tx.21.VIII
9.The Inner Shift
Tx.21.IX
Chapter XXII
Salvation and the Holy Relationship
7 sections
Chapter XXIII
The War Against Yourself
5 sections
Chapter XXIV
Specialness and Separation
8 sections
Chapter XXV
The Remedy
10 sections
Chapter XXVI
The Transition
11 sections
Chapter XXVII
The Body and the Dream
9 sections
Chapter XXVIII
The Undoing of Fear
8 sections
Chapter XXIX
The Awakening
10 sections
Chapter XXX
The New Beginning
9 sections
Chapter XXXI
The Simplicity of Salvation
8 sections
Back
Chapter 21 · The Inner Picture
Reason and Perception
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49Perception selects and makes the world you see. It literally picks it out as the mind directs. The laws of size and shape and brightness would hold, perhaps, if other things were equal. They are not equal. For what you look for, you are far more likely to discover than what you would prefer to overlook. The still small Voice for God is not drowned out by all the ego's raucous screams and senseless ravings to those who want to hear it. Perception is a choice and not a fact. But on this choice depends far more than you may realize as yet. For on the voice you choose to hear and on the sights you choose to see, depends entirely your whole belief in what you are. Perception is a witness but to this and never to reality. Yet it can show you the conditions in which awareness of reality is possible or those where it could never be.
50Reality needs no cooperation from you to be itself. But your awareness of it needs your help because it is your choice. Listen to what the ego says and see what it directs you see, and it is sure that you will see yourself as tiny, vulnerable, and afraid. You will experience depression, a sense of worthlessness, and feelings of impermanence and unreality. You will believe that you are helpless prey to forces far beyond your own control and far more powerful than you. And you will think the world you made directs your destiny. For this will be your faith. But never believe because it is your faith it makes reality.
51There is another vision and another Voice in which your freedom lies awaiting but your choice. And if you place your faith in them, you will perceive another Self in you. This other Self sees miracles as natural. They are as simple and natural to It as breathing to the body. They are the obvious response to calls for help, the only one It makes. Miracles seem unnatural to the ego because it does not understand how separate minds can influence each other. Nor could they do so. But minds cannot be separate. This other Self is perfectly aware of this. And thus It recognizes that miracles do not affect another's mind, only Its own. [They always change your mind.] There is no other.
52You do not realize the whole extent to which the idea of separation has interfered with reason. Reason lies in the other Self you have cut off from your awareness. And nothing you have allowed to stay in it is capable of reason. How can the segment of the mind devoid of reason understand what reason is or grasp the information it would give? All sorts of questions may arise in it, but if the basic question stems from reason, it will not ask it. Like all that stems from reason, the basic question is obvious, simple, and remains unasked. But think not reason could not answer it.
53God's plan for your salvation could not have been established without your will and your consent. It must have been accepted by the Son of God, for what God wills for him he must receive. For God wills not apart from him, nor does the Will of God wait upon time to be accomplished. Therefore, what joined the Will of God must be in you now, being eternal. You must have set aside a place in which the Holy Spirit can abide and where He is. He must have been there since the need for Him arose and was fulfilled in the same instant. Such would your reason tell you if you listened. Yet such is clearly not the ego's "reasoning." Its alien nature to the ego is proof you will not find the answer there. Yet if it must be so, it must exist. And if it exists for you and has your freedom as the purpose given it, you must be free to find it.
54God's plan is simple—never circular and never self-defeating. He has no Thoughts except the Self-extending, and in this your will must be included. Thus, there must be a part of you that knows His Will and shares it. It is not meaningful to ask if what must be is so. But it is meaningful to ask why you are unaware of what is so, for this must have an answer if the plan of God for your salvation is complete. And it must be complete because its Source knows not of incompletion. Where would the answer be but in the Source? And where are you but there, where this same answer is? Your Identity, as much a true effect of this same Source as is the answer, must therefore be together and the same.
55Oh yes, you know this and more than this alone. Yet any part of knowledge threatens dissociation as much as all of it. And all of it will come with any part. Here is the part you can accept. What reason points to you can see because the witnesses on its behalf are clear. Only the totally insane can disregard them, and you have gone past this. Reason is a means which serves the Holy Spirit's purpose in its own right. It is not reinterpreted and redirected from the goal of sin as are the others. For reason is beyond the ego's range of means.
56Faith and perception and belief can be misplaced and serve the great deceiver's needs as well as truth. But reason has no place at all in madness, nor can it be adjusted to fit its end. Faith and belief are strong in madness, guiding perception toward what the mind has valued. But reason enters not at all in this. For the perception would fall away at once if reason were applied. There is no reason in insanity, for it depends entirely on reason's absence. The ego never uses it because it does not realize that it exists. The partially insane have access to it, and only they have need of it. Knowledge does not depend on it, and madness keeps it out.
57The part of mind where reason lies was dedicated by your will in union with your Father's to the undoing of insanity. Here was the Holy Spirit's purpose accepted and accomplished both at once. Reason is alien to insanity, and those who use it have gained a means which cannot be applied to sin. Knowledge is far beyond attainment of any kind. But reason can serve to open doors you closed against it.
58You have come very close to this. Faith and belief have shifted, and you have asked the question which the ego will never ask. Does not your reason tell you now the question must have come from something that you do not know but must belong to you? Faith and belief, upheld by reason, cannot fail to lead to changed perception. And in this change is room made way for vision. Vision extends beyond itself, as does the purpose which it serves and all the means for its accomplishment.