I call upon the Name of God and on my own.
1. The Name of God is holy, but no more so than your own.
²To call upon His Name is but to call upon your own.
³A father gives his son his name, and thus identifies the son with him.
⁴His brothers share his name, and thus are they united in a bond through which they recognize their oneness.
⁵The Name of your Father reminds you of who you are, even within a world that does not know, and though you have forgotten.
2. It is impossible to hear the Name of God without a response.I
²Nor can you pronounce it and fail to hear an echo in your mind that calls you to remember.
³Say His Name, and you invite the angels of God to surround the ground on which you stand, to sing to you, and to spread their wings to keep you safe and shelter you from every worldly thought that would intrude upon your holiness.II
3. Repeat the Name of God, and all the world responds by leaving every illusion behind.
²All the dreams the world holds dear suddenly vanish, and in their place you find a star, a miracle of grace.
³The sick rise, healed of all their sickly thoughts.III
⁴The blind can see, and the deaf can hear.IV
⁵The mourners cast aside their grief, and their tears are dried, for laughter and happiness come now to bless the world.V
4. Repeat the Name of God, and every petty name loses all meaning.VI
²Before the Name of God, all temptation becomes unspeakable and no longer desired.
³Repeat His Name, and see how easily you forget the names of all the idols you once held dear.
⁴They have lost the name of god that you once gave them.
⁵Now they are nameless and no longer hold any value for you—though before you allowed the Name of God to replace their meaningless names, you knelt before them, reverently calling them your gods.VII
5. Repeat the Name of God, and you call upon your Self, Whose Name is His.
²Repeat His Name, and all the little nameless things of earth assume the proper place you gave them when you laid aside confusion.
³Those who call upon the Name of God cannot mistake the nameless for the Name, nor sin for Grace, nor bodies for the holy Son of God.VIII
⁴And if you join a brother and sit with him in silence, and together you repeat God’s Name within your quiet minds, you raise an altar that reaches God Himself and to His Son.IX
6. Practice only this today: repeat God’s Name slowly, again and again.
²Forget all other names but His.
³Hear nothing else.
⁴Let all your thoughts become anchored on This.
⁵We speak no other word today but at the start, when we say today’s idea just once.
⁶And then the Name of God becomes our only thought, our only word, the only thing that occupies our minds, our sole desire, the one meaningful sound, and the only Name of everything we wish to see and claim as ours.X
7. This is the invitation that cannot be refused.
²And God will come, and He Himself will answer it.
³Think not He hears the empty prayers of those who call upon Him with the names of idols the world worships.
⁴They cannot reach Him thus.
⁵God does not respond to prayers that ask Him to be what He is not, nor that His Son receive a name not His.
⁶Repeat His Name, and you acknowledge Him as the one Creator of Reality.
⁷And you acknowledge, too, that His Son is part of Him and creates in His Name.
8. Sit quietly, and let His Name become the all-encompassing idea that absorbs your mind entirely.
²Let every thought be still, except This.
³And answer any wandering thought with This, and you will see the Name of God replace a thousand little names you gave your thoughts, not knowing that there is One Name for all that is and will be evermore.XI
9. Today you can achieve a state in which you will experience the gifts of Grace.
²Today you can escape all bondage of the world and give the world the same release you found.
³Today you can remember what the world forgot, and offer it your own remembering.
⁴Today you can accept the role you play in both its salvation and your own.
⁵And both will be accomplished perfectly today.
10. Call on the Name of God to set you free, and you will be released.
²No other prayer is needed, for His Name includes them all.
³When the Son of God calls on his Father’s Name, all words are gone, and every prayer is silent.XII
⁴His Father’s Thoughts become his own.
⁵And he claims all that his Father gave, gives still, and will forever give.
⁶Call on God now, to let all things the Son thought he had made be nameless, and God’s holy Name shall be the proof that he has recognized their worthlessness.
11. Now all the little things are still.
²The quiet sounds of earth are stilled.
³The little noises of the world fade out.
⁴The universe consists now of only the Son of God calling upon his Father.
⁵And the Voice of his Father speaks in the holy Name He gave.
⁶In this eternal, still relationship, in which communication far transcends all words, is Peace eternal found.
⁷For here is depth and height beyond what words can ever possibly convey.
⁸Today we seek to experience this Peace by saying the Name of our Father.
⁹And in His Name it shall be given us.
I The Name of God is power—a power that does not reside in the word that names Him, but in the profound idea it conveys. The Name of God—whatever it may be—whenever it awakens in you the sense of the divine and the paternal, will be your vehicle of healing.
Use it as you are instructed, and you will perceive its effects. There is nothing magical in this practice, only the inherent power of the feeling of belonging to an infinite reality that has conceived you in love. This is the idea of God that, at this moment, will truly serve you.
The power of pronouncing His Name arises from the sincerity with which you invoke it, for to speak the Name of your Father is to call upon Him to come to you and rescue you from tribulation. Therefore, do not underestimate this ever-available help, to which you may turn in any circumstance. There is no prayer simpler or more powerful. Never forget it. It is always there—for you.
This lesson is an experiment in identity. Jesus is not asking you to understand God, but to invoke His Name as if it were your own. And it is. Yet what is decisive here is not the repetition of a holy word, but the understanding of how the mind works: the mind is a mirror, not a generator; it becomes what it contemplates. And identity, as you experience it, is not a solid set of memories or traits, but a function of the present. Hence the law of the last idea: in time, you are always your last thought about yourself.
This has immense implications. Every time you think “I have failed,” “I’m worthless,” “I’m such an idiot,” your mind assumes that form. And with that form, it relates to the world, judges, suffers, and perpetuates its story. It does not matter how false the idea is: if it is the last, it defines you now. The mind has no real memory or continuity—only presence. Your biography weighs nothing unless you think it now. That is why repeating the Name of God is not a ritual but a strategy for reclaiming identity: you are choosing the only idea capable of giving you a stable, eternal perception—one that does not depend on the state of your body, your emotions, or your past.
When you invoke God, you are breaking the chain of limited self-definitions. It is a spiritual reset. You are no longer “a tired mother,” “a stressed man,” “a victim of childhood”—you are the Son of God, now. The mind, when invoking that idea, tries—as it always does—to become it. And it succeeds. Not through effort, but by the very nature of the mind. That is the true alchemy of the Course: to redeem the present with a single true idea, and to allow that idea to re-create you.
II Matthew 23:37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often have I desired to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!”
Psalm 91:4 “He will cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you will find refuge.”
And several psalms (17:8, 36:7, 57:1) speak of finding refuge “in the shadow of Your wings.”
In the earlier image, the wings of angels do not protect you from external dangers, but “from every worldly thought.” And from what else, indeed, would you need protection?
III Matthew 9:6 “But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins—‘Rise, take up your bed, and go to your house,’” says Jesus to the paralytic.
IV Luke 7:22 “And He answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.’”
V Isaiah 25:8 “He will swallow up death forever; the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and remove the disgrace of His people from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken.”
Revelation 7:17 “For the Lamb who is at the center of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of living water; and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
Revelation 21:4 “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor mourning, nor crying, nor pain, for the former things have passed away.”
VI The names you give to the things of the world mean nothing, for they were invented by you, driven blindly by your urge to separate and fragment the totality, which in itself is whole. But you will understand this more clearly in the next Lesson.
VII Those gods you once worshiped are all the things of the world you thought you desired: bodies, money, recognition, possessions, or even personal traits with which you sought to adorn your “personality.”
VIII In this Lesson, the “nameless things” constantly represent illusions—those things that are nothing, that have no cause, no origin, no father, and therefore no name that could confer identity upon them.
IX To pronounce silently the Name of God together with a brother multiplies its effects—but that practice is so sacred that you may not yet be ready for it… or perhaps you are.
X To grasp the importance and meaning of the Name, consider the theological prologue of the Gospel of John—the cosmogony of the Father, the Son, and Creation:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1–3).The text continues, revealing the presence of the Word in the world as the manifestation of the divine Will:
“He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him; but to all who received Him, who believed in His Name, He gave power to become children of God. These are they who are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:10–14).
XI How could there exist anything that is not God?
XII Understand that the Name of God encompasses all things; it contains all reality, all that exists. Therefore, any word you would add distorts your practice, for it shows that you do not understand what you are doing. And for the same reason, every request becomes unnecessary and, ultimately, counterproductive. Focus on the Name of your Father and forget everything else, for none of it is needed and all of it is but an obstacle.