Healing and Wholeness

“. . . the only possible whole state is the wholly joyous. . . If you do not choose to be wholly joyous, your mind cannot have what it does not choose to be.

“Thoughts increase by being given away. The more who believe in them the stronger they become. . . The idea of the Holy Spirit shares the property of other ideas because it follows the laws of the Universe of which it is part. It is strengthened by being given away. It increases in you as you give it to your brother.

“. . . the Holy Spirit is God’s answer to the ego. . . The Holy Spirit has the task of undoing what the ego has made.

“Joining the Atonement [perfect love] is the way out of fear. The Holy Spirit will help you reinterpret everything that you perceive as fearful, and teach you that only what is loving is true. . . you are part of God because he created you.

“Teaching should be healing, because it is the sharing of ideas and the recognition that to share ideas is to strengthen them.

“The Holy Spirit atones in all of us by undoing, and thus lifts the burden you have placed in your mind. By following Him you are led back to God where you belong, and how can you find the way except by taking your brother with you?

“Guilt is always disruptive. Anything that engenders fear is divisive because it obeys the laws of division.”

“Whatever you accept into your mind has reality for you. . . If you enthrone the ego in your mind, your allowing it to enter makes it your reality.

“The Holy Spirit, like the ego, is a decision. Together they constitute all the alternatives the mind can accept and obey. The Holy Spirit and the ego are the only choices open to you. God created one, and so you cannot eradicate it. You made the other, and so you can.

“Your mind does make your future, and it will turn it back to full creation at any minute if it accepts the Atonement first.

“Nothing the ego perceives is interpreted correctly.

“It is still true that where you look to find yourself is up to you. Your patience with your brother is your patience with yourself. Is not a child of God worth patience?

“. . . you need merely cast your cares upon Him because he careth for you. You are His care because he loves you. His Voice reminds you always that all hope is yours because of His care. You cannot choose to escape His care because that is not His Will, but you can choose to accept His care and use the infinite power of His care for all those He created by it.

“Unless the healer heals himself, he cannot believe that there is no order of difficulty in miracles. He has not learned that every mind God created is equally worthy of being healed because God created it whole. You are merely asked to return to God the mind as He created it. He asks you only for what He gave, knowing that this giving will heal you. Sanity is wholeness, and the sanity of your brothers is yours.

“Why should you listen to endless insane calls you think are made upon you, when you can know the Voice of God is in you? God commended His Spirit to you, and asks that you commend yours to Him. He wills to keep it in perfect peace, because you are of one mind and spirit with Him. Excluding yourself from the Atonement is the ego’s last-ditch defense of its own existence. It reflects both the ego’s need to separate, and your willingness to side with its separateness. This willingness means that you do not want to be healed.

“Whenever you are not wholly joyous, it is because you have reacted with a lack of love to one of God’s creations. . . . you must already have decided not ot be wholly joyous if that is how you feel. . . Be very firm with yourself in this, and keep yourself fully aware that the undoing process, which does not come from you, is nevertheless within you because God placed it there. Your part is merely to return your thinking to the point at which the error was made, and give it over to the Atonement in peace. . . the Holy Spirit will respond fully to your slightest invitation.”

--from A Course in Miracles, by Foundation for Inner Peace