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You would have to work mightily to turn the lessons of this course into a tool, but many of you will not tire of this work until you succeed. This is how truths become dogma and dogma becomes tyranny. This happens by accepting a static state. A static state is not a living state because creation is not occurring within it. This is a living course. This is why you are called to live it rather than to take it. This is why you are called to be a teacher and a learner both. This is how the exchange of giving and receiving as one occurs. This exchange is unity.

10.2 Thinking that needs can be met only in certain ways is akin to another belief that has been replaced. This belief was first expressed in A Course in Miracles by the saying Resign as your own teacher. This belief in the self as teacher has now been replaced with the belief that you only learn in unity.

10.3 I ask you to think for a moment of a time when you attempted to recall a specific memory. This may have been a memory of a name or address, of a dream, or an attempt to recall a specific event. At such times, you often feel as if, just as the memory is about to return to you, it is swatted away as easily and routinely as a hand swats away a fly. You know that the information is contained within you and still you are often forced to accept an inability to have access to this information. It is forced from your awareness by something you know not. It is there and yet swatted away as if by some unseen hand. Where has this information gone and what keeps it from you? You might feel frustrated with your memory at such a time and even say something such as “my brain just isn’t working right today.” I want you now to keep this example in mind as we explore learning in unity.

10.3 You might think of unity as you have so often thought of your brain, but rather than thinking of it in the singular, think of it as a storehouse or giant brain in which all that has ever been known or thought is contained. The technology that has created super-computers will immediately come to mind from this illustration. While this illustration may be distasteful to some and intriguing to others, how many of you would not want to replace your ability to know with the ability of a super-computer?

10.5 While just an illustration, the reverse of this is akin to what you have done by replacing unity with singularity. You have narrowed your ability to know to an ability to know that which you have experienced. While what we are speaking of as knowing has little to do with the information stored in super-computers, it is still a worthy illustration. For just as a super-computer needs a knowledgeable operator in order to provide the information sought, so too do you need to become knowledgeable in order to access all that is available to you.

10.6 Just as needs have been shown to be shared in like measure by all, so too is true knowing. Just as needs were shown to be distinguishable from wants by a discussion of their shared nature, so too now must knowing be distinguished from what you consider intelligence.

10.7 While you are being told that you can no longer believe that what you know is related to experience, you are not being told that you have exactly the same knowledge as does every person of every variety and level of experience. Yet no one can know more of the truth than another, and no one can know less.

10.8 Just beyond your mind’s ability to call it forth lies the truth that you and all other beings know. The access to what seems to lie beyond your ability lies in the Christ in you. You might think of the ego as the hand that swats away this knowing.

10.9 The ego is the teacher you have relied upon when you have relied upon your self as your own teacher.

10.10 You forget constantly that the Christ in you is the learner here. What need is there for a computer brain or for the ego to be your teacher when the learner in you is the all-powerful? The learner in you is the unifying force of the universe. The learning you are in need of is the learning that will call who you are back to your united mind and heart. This is the knowing that already exists, the memory that is swatted away by the ego.

10.11 Why, then, is this called learning? Learning simply means to come to know. If what you know has been forgotten, you still are in need of the learning that assists you in coming to know once again.

10.12 But as long as you continue to attempt to learn with your ego, or in other words, as long as you would continue to attempt to learn in the same way that you have previously learned, you will not learn because the “you” that will be involved in the learning process will not be the real you.

10.13 The Christ in you is the real you. The Christ in you is the Self you become when you have united heart and mind once again in wholeheartedness. The union of mind and heart is the first union, the union that must precede all the rest. You are in a state of unity when you have achieved wholeheartedness. You are in a state in which you are able to learn. I am here to show you the way to the Christ in you. I began my teaching by appealing to your heart so as to ready you for the return of wholeheartedness, the state of union in which all that you learn is shared, first by mind and heart, and then in unity with your brothers and sisters. You achieve this state only by listening to one voice, or, in other words, by ending the separated state which is the state in which the ego exists. The end of the separated state or the ego, is the beginning of your ability to hear only one voice, the voice we all share in unity.

10.14 This voice speaks to you in a thousand ways. It is the voice of love, the voice of creation, the voice of life. It is the voice of certainty that allows you to move through each day and all the experiences within it as who you are in truth. It releases you from the feeling of needing to control or protect your treasure. It releases you as well from the static state of trying to hang on to who you were yesterday, or trying to prevent change tomorrow.

10.15 As was said in the beginning, it is realized that it is hard for you to believe that the Christ in you is in need of learning. Think a moment of why this should be so. Is there ever a moment in which coming to know is not appropriate? Is there any reason that coming to know should not be seen as something continuous and ongoing?

10.16 Again your desire for a static state would make you rather listen to your ego as it prescribes learning for certain circumstances that would be quickly put behind you or chosen for specific outcomes. While many love to learn for the sake of learning alone, still they would be loath to give up or let go the ability to choose their lessons. And still we are only talking about learning as you have perceived of it rather than learning from life.

10.17 What difference does it make to your concepts of learning when you think of life as your course work? Would you be any more willing to let another choose your lessons for you?
10.18 What are your plans and dreams but chosen lessons? While you do not think of them as such you do not think of life as your learning ground. You still think of lessons as being about specific subject matter. When life does not go as you have planned, you feel as if your chosen path has been denied to you. You often feel a sense of loss and rarely one of gain. Unless life goes the way you have intended for it to go, you do not feel gifted or blessed, not even when you may have looked back on other situations that did not go as you had planned and seen that they nevertheless gifted you with experiences or opportunities that would not have arisen had your chosen plan come to fruition.

10.19 The Christ in you has no need to plan. A need to come to know…yes. But a need to plan…no. The Christ in you needs not for you to choose a lesson plan, but to let life itself be your chosen way of learning.
chapter 11
the Belief: We Exist in Relationship & Unity



11.1 The Christ in you is relationship. As you were told within the pages of this course, you are a being who exists in relationship. This is how you were created and how you remain. This is the truth of who you are and even, in your own terms, a fact of your existence. Earlier this was pointed out to you so that you would come to accept who you are and so that you would extend forgiveness to yourself and all you hold responsible for this truth. This forgiveness has now extended in two distinct ways. First in forgiving your Creator for creating you in such a way, and second in forgiving a world that has taught you to want to be other than who you are. Now our aim is to show you how to integrate the belief that you are a being who exists in relationship into the living of your life.

11.2 Even though you no longer want to be other than who you are, and even though you now have a much clearer understanding of who you are, you will find living as who you are in the world difficult as long as you perceive others as living under the old rules: the laws of man rather than the laws of God or love. It will seem all but impossible to live in relationship when those around you are still convinced of their separation and still seeking to glorify it. You will still perceive the world as operating under the laws of man and as long as you perceive the world in such a way, you will be forced to live by its laws. This will cause struggle, and as you now know that struggle of any kind alerts you to the presence of ego, you will continue to do battle with the ego rather than leaving it forever behind.
11.3 Doing battle with the ego has become the pre-occupation of many gifted and learned people. This is the classic battle revealed in all myths and tales of war and strife. It is the battle that in your imaginings has extended even to the angels. The ego is the dragon that must be slain, the evil of the despot to be toppled, the one-on-one conflict of all heroes who would take sides and do battle.

11.4 You are called to peace, a peace that begins and ends with ceasing to do battle with the ego. As the ego has been the known identity of your existence until now, it will, in a sense, be forever with you, much as the body that is your form will remain with you until your death. But while your perception of your body as your identity and your home has given way to an idea of it as a form that can be of service to you and your expression, there is no service the ego can do you. The ego is the one untruth, given many names and many faces and the only thing given by you the power to do battle with the truth, or with God. Remember now and always that you and God are one and that what you invite to do battle with God you but battle yourself.

11.5 A God of love does not do battle, for truth needs no protection. The truth is not threatened by untruth. The truth simply exists, as love exists, and as you exist. When we say something is this is of what we speak. When we say all truth is generalizable, all needs are shared, all knowing is shared, this is of what we speak.

11.6 All cannot be threatened by nothing.

11.7 This is why we spent a fair amount of time addressing needs in a way we had not previously addressed them. Only with your understanding that all that is real is shared does the ego lose its power. The ego was made from the belief in separation and all that followed from it. Your true identity must be re-created from the belief in unity that is inherent in the acceptance that you exist in relationship. Separation is all that opposes relationship, and the ego is all that opposes your true identity.

11.8 The ego, having been with you from your earliest remembering, will continue to be with you in the way that all learned behaviors and ideas are with you, until it is totally replaced by new learning. Your new learning must complement your new beliefs. The ultimate goal of this learning is the end of the need for beliefs at all.

11.9 This learning, then, must be seen for what it is. It is the holiest of work and the final evidence of means and end being the same. Your devotion to this learning must now be complete, your willingness total, your way of learning that of a mind and heart joined in wholeheartedness.

11.10 Realize that when you think that this total reversal of thought concerning your self and your world will be difficult you are listening to your ego. The Christ in you knows not of difficulty.

11.11 How can it be that we speak both of the Christ in you and of Christ as being relationship itself? How can it be that we have spoken of Christ being both wholly human and wholly divine? These statements can only be true if there is no division between you and relationship, if there is no division between the human and the divine.

11.12 Separate things must still exist in relationship. This is the key to understanding the truth of these statements. For even while you have chosen separation, this choice did not preclude the existence of relationship and it is in relationship that union still exists. If you had been able to choose separation without relationship, then the image of yourself the ego has put forth would have been a true image. But as life cannot exist apart from relationship, this choice was not available and did not overturn the laws of God. The ego is but your belief that this has occurred; that what could never be true has become the truth.

11.13 So let us now, for the sake of continued learning, speak of separation in a new way. Let us speak of separation as a state that exists rather than as a state that does not exist. If you exist as a separate being but your being is contingent upon relationship for its existence, is this not the same as saying that you are a being who exists in relationship? Is this not similar to saying that a living human body does not exist without its heart? Is not what is essential to a living body a fact of that body’s existence? While this illustration is not attempting to say that life does not exist apart from the body, it is attempting to reveal, in an easily understandable way, that there is a condition under which you are here and able to experience life as a separate being. That condition is relationship and relationship is what keeps you forever one with your Creator.

11.14 Here that relationship is being called Christ in order to keep the holiness and importance of this relationship forever and foremost in your mind. Here, that relationship has been given a name, as we have given your relationship with your separate identity the name of ego. Here, we are asking you to choose the one real relationship and to vanquish the one unreal relationship.

11.15 It is from these two separate ideas of relationship that the concept of doing battle has emerged. This concept of doing battle can only remain if you remain convinced that the ego is real. As long as you believe that the ego is real, you will feel as if there are two identities that exist within you and you will see yourself as doing battle in countless ways and forms. There will never actually be a battle going on between Christ and the ego, but you will perceive that such battles exist. You will be prone to calling upon the Christ as your higher self to defend you against the ego self. This is highly akin to your former notion of prayer and assumes that there is something real that you need defense against or saving from. This is how the notion of Christ as savior arose. This is the belief in a good self and a bad self with Christ acting as conscience and defender of good and the ego acting as devil and defender of evil. This is nonsense, or but a form of the insanity that is prevalent still, even in your thinking. You do not realize that this source of conflict is the source of all conflict that seems real to you within your world. This battle of good and evil, while you believe in it still, will be demonstrated before you just as it has been from time immemorial. Is this what you would have continue? Does this not but reveal to you a fraction of the power of your thinking and its ability to shape the world you see?

11.16 An alternative to this insanity exists. The alternative is removing all faith from your belief in the ego self. The alternative is replacing belief in an ego self with belief in a Christ self. Total replacement. As long as you hang on to both identities the world will not change and you will not know who you are. You may think you know, and you may waste much time in perceived battles, valiantly fighting for good to win out over evil. But this is not the new way and the lack of value from this type of effort can surely now be seen.

11.17 I have said that the ego will remain with you as the identity you have learned since birth until you replace it with new learning. While you have learned much here, you may be thinking that your ego is still very much with you, and wondering, if you have not yet replaced it, how this miracle will come about. This replacement is indeed a miracle and the very miracle you have been prepared for within this course of learning.
chapter 12
the Belief: Correction and Atonement


12.1 Miracles are thoughts and I am the corrector of false thinking. You have been made ready for this correction and your belief in correction, or atonement, is the final belief that must be put into practice.

12.2 Miracles are a service provided through love. Your readiness for miracles has been achieved through the learning you have accomplished. Miracles cannot be used, and so your learning needed to include an ability to distinguish between service and use. Service, or devotion, leads to harmony through right action. Until you were able to distinguish the false from the true, you were not able to receive the power of miracles.

12.3 The power of miracles is but the culmination and the integration of the beliefs we have put forth here. The miracle I am offering you here is the service I offer you, the precursor of the service you will offer to others.

12.4 Miracles are intercessions. As such they are agreements. They do not take away free will but free the will to respond to truth. They are the ultimate acceptance of giving and receiving being one in truth.

12.5 While you continue to feel as if you do not understand miracles, you will be reluctant to believe in them or to see yourself as a miracle worker. Your belief in miracles and your belief in atonement or correction are the same. When you
believe there is anything other than your own thinking that is in need of correction you think falsely. Right-thinking is the realm of miracles.

12.6 As with the learning goal being set here of going beyond belief to simply knowing, the learning goal in relation to the miracle is the same — it is one of going beyond belief in the miracle to simply knowing. Knowing is knowing the truth. Knowing is right-thinking. Your return to knowing or right-thinking is both the miracle and the end for the need of miracles. As you live in the world as who you are, you become a miracle and the constant expression of the miracle.

12.7 The power of thought and the power of prayer, once aligned, call constantly upon the same power of intercession that is the miracle. This is why we also devoted a fair amount of this treatise to a discussion of calling. Calling is not only something you receive but something you must learn to give. As you have come to see calling as a gift and a treasure as well as a learning device, so you must come to see your own ability to call forth intercession as a gift and treasure you are able to give in service to your brothers and sisters.

12.8 If callings come to alert you to the treasure within, how can it be that you, as a miracle-minded being, are not called upon to also call forth the treasure that exists around you? When you call to those whom you meet in relationship, you call but to the already accomplished.

12.9 There, between you and the “other” whom you have previously only perceived, is the relationship and the miracle waiting to happen. As we spoke within A Course of Love of relationship being not one thing or another but a third something, this is what we speak of here again. If Christ is relationship, and if the Christ in you is the real you, then this all-encompassing relationship, both within you and without you, both you and all you are in relationship with, is that third something that is the holy relationship.

12.10 This holy relationship is what you are called to cultivate as a gardener cultivates her garden. The gardener knows that although the plant exists fully realized within its seed, it also needs the relationship of earth and water, light and air. The gardener knows that tending the garden will help it to flourish and show its abundance. The gardener knows she is part of the relationship that is the garden. A true gardener believes not in bad seeds. A true gardener believes not that she is in control. A true gardener accepts the grandeur that is the garden and finds it beautiful to behold.

12.11 This metaphor is akin to acceptance of the holy relationship. It is acceptance of what occurs with the joining of many factors, one no more important than another. While the Christ in you has been compared to the seed of all you are, what you have had revealed to you here is that the Christ is also the relationship of all that would bring the seed to fruition. The ego could be here compared to a gardener who believes that the seed alone is all that is important. As intently as this gardener might struggle to cause the seed to grow, without the relationship of earth and water, light and air, the seed would but remain a source of struggle. The ego would hang on to what is already there within you, and never let you express, through relationship, all that you are. As valuable as the ego would tell you that you are, it still would thwart you from being who you are through its denial of the relationships essential to that which you truly are.

12.12 This cultivation then, of the all-encompassing holy relationship that exists within you and without you, both in all you are and all you are in relationship with, is how you are called to live your life and the call you are asked to sound to all your brothers and sisters.

12.13 Let the beliefs we have set forth become one with you so that they enable you to live and express and act as who you are in every moment and in every circumstance. Let these abilities serve you and your brothers and sisters. Let this way of living be the expression of who you are and all that you now remember. Let this remembrance grow and flourish as the garden that is you.

12.14 Recognize now that unity is within you and without you, in all you are and in all with whom you are in relationship. Feel the embrace and the love that is this unity and know that it is you, and me, and our Creator, and all that was created.