7. What is the Holy Spirit?
1. The Holy Spirit is the Mediator between illusions and truth, and thus He bridges the gap between reality and dreams.I
²By the grace God has given Him, He leads perception to Knowledge.
³This is His gift to all who turn to Him in search of truth.
⁴Through the bridge He provides, all dreams are brought to truth, so that there the light of Knowledge may dispel them.
⁵Before truth, all sights and sounds are quietly laid aside forever.
⁶For forgiveness makes possible the peaceful end of perception, where once perception seemed to be.
2. The purpose of the Holy Spirit’s teaching is, indeed, to bring all dreams to an end.
²For sights and sounds must be transformed from witnesses of fear into witnesses of Love.
³And when this is fully accomplished, learning will have achieved the only goal it ever truly had.
⁴For learning, as the Holy Spirit guides it toward the purpose He perceives in it, becomes the means by which it goes beyond itself, to be replaced by Eternal Truth.
3. If you but knew how deeply your Father longs for you to recognize your sinlessness, you would not let His Voice call to you in vain, nor turn away from what He offers to replace the fearful images and dreams you made.
²The Holy Spirit knows how to use all means you made to reach unreal goals.
³And if you offer them to Him, He will employ those very means you made to exile yourself, to restore your mind to where it truly is at home.
4. The Holy Spirit calls to you from Knowledge—where God placed Him—urging you to forgive your dreams and return to sanity and peace.
²If you do not forgive, your dreams will still terrify you.
³And then the memory of all your Father’s Love cannot return to your mind to testify that dreams are done.
5. Accept the Gift your Father gives.
²It is the Call that Love makes to Love, to be what it has always been.
³The Holy Spirit is God’s Gift by which the stillness of Heaven returns to His beloved Son.
⁴Will you refuse to take your part in the completion of God, when His only Will is that you be complete?
I The Son of God has not separated from His Father; that is impossible. God has no need to call His Son to awaken, for in Him there is no lack. God requires no intermediaries to communicate with His Son, since needs belong to the realm of illusion. Reality is, has been, and will remain perfect for all eternity. Yet God does not communicate directly with the fragmented mind, for that mind does not truly exist, and God knows only what He has created. This is the reason for the Holy Spirit—unfathomable from a strictly ontological standpoint, yet necessary in this world, where He functions as the point of contact between Reality and illusion.
The Holy Spirit is the Communication between God and His Creation—the eternal Communication between the Father and the Son. In the world, moreover, He is presented to us as the Voice that speaks for God, and as a symbol He serves a function within illusion: to be the link that keeps you joined to Reality, speaking to you in the terms you can understand, for you know only of illusions. That function, though temporary, is real because it was given by God. For this reason the Holy Spirit, the Atonement, the miracles, and this Course itself are necessary within this illusory realm, even though illusion itself—your personal identity, the world, the fragmented mind, the very idea of salvation—is not.
His task is to build a bridge between perception and knowledge. That bridge is formed each time you accept to see something “in another way,” that is, without fear and without guilt. It is not so much that the Holy Spirit destroys illusions at once, but rather that He gently dissolves the fear that sustains them, softly reinterpreting what you see so that it ceases to bear witness to fear and becomes a witness to love. In this way perception is gradually purified until, at last, it gives way to knowledge. The world then becomes a happy dream—a forgiven world in which you no longer perceive threats, but reflections of God’s Love.
That is the true function of the Holy Spirit within you: to transform your way of seeing, to undo fear, and to restore you little by little to certainty. While your dream endures, His Voice will be your guide, and each time you choose to listen to it you will come closer to remembering what you are.
Holy Spirit, Voice of God in my mind, dissolve my fears today and show me the real world—the reflection of His Love.
LESSON 281
Only my own thoughts can hurt me.
1. Father, Your Son is perfect.
²When I believe that something or someone has harmed me,
it is because I have forgotten Who I am,
and that I remain as You created me.
³Your Thoughts can only bring me happiness.
⁴If ever I feel sad,
hurt, or sick,
it is because I have forgotten what You think,
and have placed my petty and absurd ideas
in the place where Your Thoughts rightly belong.
⁵Only my own thoughts can hurt me.I
⁶The Thoughts I think with You can only bless.
⁷Only the Thoughts I think with You are true.
2. Today I will not hurt myself.
²For I am far beyond all pain.
³My Father has placed me safely in Heaven and watches over me.
⁴And I will not attack the Son He loves, for what He loves I, too, must love.
I For you, to live is to think that you live. You call life the content of your thoughts. You live in your mind, and those thoughts belong to a fragmented mind that believes itself alone and separate from everything—a belief that is itself just another thought upon which all others rest, and which, moreover, is not true.
That idea of being separated from God is the fundamental mistaken thought upon which all illusions are built. It is not a true thought and in no way corresponds to your reality, yet to you it is entirely real. It is a fearful and guilty thought that projects its inherent pain outward, and thus imagines an unreal world that is nothing but a dream.
That basic thought is your personal and exclusive identity, installed in a tiny fragment of your limitless mind. From there you conceive personal thoughts: some you call “your own,” and to others you attribute the quality of being external, calling them “things” or “the world.” But in truth that individual fragmented mind relates only to its own thoughts.
Seeing itself alone and limited, it feels vulnerable and threatened by the figures it believes it sees in its dream and by the stories it tells itself. That is inevitable, and so it will remain while it clings to its cherished “treasure” of individuality. Its fears are unfounded, yet being its own inventions, it believes in them, venerates them, follows their dictates, and protects them.
That tormented mind is the one that seeks salvation—and surely it will find it, for that is only a matter of time: the time it allows itself to learn to love and to remember its true condition. Therefore, do not be afraid. Forgive and trust. To remember is to forgive the error and forget it. Only a little remains, and it grows easier each time. Make haste.
Father, teach me to forget my thoughts and to remember Yours, which is my only life.