All Things Are Echoes of the Voice for God.I
1. No one can judge based on partial evidence.
²That is not judgment.
³It is merely an opinion founded in ignorance and doubt.
⁴Its apparent certainty is no more than a veil concealing uncertainty.
⁵It requires an irrational defense because it is irrational.
⁶And its defense appears firm, persuasive, and beyond question only because of the underlying doubt.
2. It does not seem that you doubt the world you see.
²You do not truly question what your body’s eyes show you.
³Nor do you ask yourself why you believe it, even though you long ago learned your senses deceive you.
⁴That you believe your senses down to the last detail they present is all the more strange when you pause to recall how often they have, in truth, been unreliable witnesses.
⁵Why do you trust them so blindly?
⁶Could it not be because of the underlying doubt you are trying to hide beneath a show of certainty?
3. How, then, can you judge at all?
²Your judgments are based on the testimony your senses offer you.
³Yet no witness could be more false than this.
⁴But how else could you judge the world you see?
⁵You place pitiful faith in what your eyes and ears report.
⁶You believe what your fingers touch is real and true.
⁷This is what you perceive, and you consider it more real than what is witnessed to you by the eternal Voice for God Himself.
4. Can this be called judgment?
²You have often been urged to refrain from judging, not to deprive you of a right. II
³You truly cannot judge.
⁴All you can do is believe the ego’s judgments, which are all false.
⁵The ego carefully directs your senses to show you how weak, helpless, and fearful you are; how sinful, miserable in guilt, and afraid of righteous punishment.
5. The ego tells you that this thing it speaks of and claims to protect is what you are.
²And you believe it with stubborn certainty.
³Yet deep within lies the hidden doubt that even it does not believe what it so convincingly shows you.
⁴The ego condemns itself alone.
⁵And it sees guilt only within itself.
⁶And what it sees in you is its own despair.
6. Do not listen to its voice.
²The witnesses it sends to prove to you that its evil is your own, and who speak with certainty of what they do not know, are false. III
³You trust them blindly because you do not wish to recognize the doubts their master cannot entirely dispel.
⁴You believe that to doubt its minions is to doubt yourself.
7. But you must learn to doubt that its witnesses can help you know yourself, and let the Voice that speaks for God be the only one to judge what is worthy of your faith.
²He will not tell you to judge your brother by what your eyes see in him, nor by what his mouth tells your ears, nor by what your fingers report of him.
³He disregards those useless witnesses, who give false testimony of the Son of God. IV
8. He sees only what God loves, and in the holy Light of what He sees, all the ego’s dreams about what you are vanish before the splendor He beholds.
²Let Him judge what you are, for His certainty is free of any shadow of doubt, resting as it does upon a Truth so vast that before His Face doubt makes no sense. V
³Christ cannot doubt Himself. VI
⁴The Voice for God can only honor Him and delight in His perfect and unchanging sinlessness.
9. Let Him judge what you are, for His certainty is free of any shadow of doubt, resting as it does upon a Truth so vast that before His Face doubt makes no sense. VII
²This is how He judges you.
³Accept His Word about what you are, for He bears witness to the beauty of your creation and to the Mind Whose Thought created your reality.
10. What could the body mean to One Who knows the Glory of the Father and the Son?
²How could He listen to the ego’s whispers?
³What could convince Him that your sins are real?
⁴Let Him also judge all that seems to happen to you in this world.
⁵His lessons will enable you to bridge the gap between illusions and the truth. VIII
11. He will remove all the faith you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering, and loss.
²The Holy Spirit will give you a vision that can see beyond such dark appearances, and behold the gentle Face of Christ within them all.
³And you will no longer doubt that only good can come to you, who are so deeply loved by God.
⁴For He will judge all happenings, and teach you the one lesson each of them contains. IX
12. He will select in them the elements that represent the truth, and disregard those aspects that reflect but idle dreams.
²And all you see, all events, each circumstance, and every happening that seems to touch you, He will reinterpret in the light of His one frame of reference, which is wholly unified and sure.
³And you will see Love beyond the hate, the constant in the change, the pure in sin, and Heaven’s blessing resting on the world.
13. This is your resurrection, for your life is not a part of anything you see.
²Your life is beyond the body and the world, beyond all witnesses of the profane, within the holy, and as holy as Itself. X
³His Voice will speak to you, in everyone and everything, of your Self and of your Creator, Who is One with Him.
⁴And so you will behold the holy Face of Christ in all things, and hear in everything the echo of the Voice for God.
14. Today we practice without words, except at the beginning of the time we spend with God.
²We begin these times by slowly repeating once the idea with which the day begins.
³Then we watch our thoughts, calling silently upon the One Who sees the elements of truth within them.
⁴Let Him evaluate each thought that arises in your mind, remove the dream-like elements, and return it to you as a pure idea that does not contradict the Will of God.
15. Give Him your thoughts, and He will give them back as miracles, joyfully proclaiming the fullness and happiness God wills for His Son as proof of His eternal Love.
²And as each thought is thus transformed, it takes on the healing power of the Mind that saw the truth in it and was not deceived by what was falsely added.
³All trace of fantasy disappears, and what remains is unified into a perfect Thought, extending Its perfection everywhere.
16. Give this fifteen minutes when you wake, and gladly give another fifteen more before you go to sleep.
²Your ministry begins when all your thoughts have been purified.
³Thus are you taught to teach the Son of God the holy lesson of his holiness.
⁴No one can fail to hear you when you listen to the Holy Spirit honor the Son of God.
⁵And all will share with you the thoughts He has reinterpreted in your mind. XI
17. This is your Easter.
²And thus you lay upon the world the gift of lilies white as snow, to take the place of witnesses to sin and death.
³Through your transfiguration is the world redeemed, and joyfully released from guilt. XII
⁴Now we raise our resurrected minds with joy and gratitude to Him Who has restored our sanity.
18. And every hour we will remember Him Who is our salvation and our freedom.
²And in our gratitude the world will join with us, and gladly take our holy thoughts, which Heaven has corrected and made pure.
³Now at last our ministry begins, to carry throughout the world the happy news that there are no illusions in the truth, and that through us the Peace of God belongs to everyone. XIII
I After concluding the Fourth Review, this lesson marks a turning point in the pedagogy of theWorkbook. In a sense, the preceding lessons have been preparatory for what is to come. These earlier lessons explain and undo the old thought system, and prepare the mind for a new way of thinking: right-mindedness, or miracle-mindedness. Thus, you will see that what is now being told to you has an assertive and purely positive tone. It is assumed that you have already purified and trained your mind, and that you are now ready to claim your true condition and exercise your new ministry. Now we get down to work.
II The biblical warning “Judge not” (Matthew 7:1) is repeated many times in theCourse. See, for example, T-25.VIII.13:3: “Judge not, but NOT because you are a miserable sinner, but because you cannot.”
III The witnesses the ego sends you are the appearances of the world as interpreted by itself.
IV Exodus 20:16 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
Matthew 19:18 “Jesus said, ‘… You shall not bear false witness.’”This lesson begins by putting a definitive end to the ego’s interpretations of what you call “reality.” It is not that; that is not reality, but only the interpretations the ego has fabricated out of perception, and which you have accepted without question. None of that is true. It is all false. And not only false, but counterproductive as well.
Those interpretations are making your life bitter; they serve no good purpose, and it is absolutely essential that you discard them completely. Pay no attention to them ever again. Whenever you feel bad, realize that what you are thinking is not true: it is the ego’s voice seeking to deceive you. You need no other criterion than this: your heart will tell you with certainty whether what you think is true or not.
Remember that the only thing you know—the only thing you relate to—are your own interpretations. Life, for you, is nothing more than a story you tell yourself. Sometimes you tell yourself that you are happy, and at other times that you are miserable, and all of it is based on premises, on rules of the game that you yourself—your ego—have established.
Well, you are not that, and those rules mean absolutely nothing. Let go of it all and begin a new life. You are now being offered the opportunity to think, decide, and act in a new way. Do it. Put this new thought system to the test. You have nothing to lose. Well, yes—you will indeed begin to lose the mental illness that has gripped your mind, and you will learn the meaning of love and freedom.
V Along these lines appear two figures: the first is the Holy Spirit, and the second is the Christ in you, which is what the Holy Spirit beholds in you and in all your brothers.
VI And here it is speaking of the Christ in you.
VII And here it speaks of you at the beginning of the line, and of the Christ in you at the end.
VIII That gap is the imaginary space where illusions seem to occur, giving rise to an illusory world.
IX There is nothing—absolutely nothing—that happens to you that is not for your good. The world is a school in which the deranged mind learns to regain sanity. See it this way, and everything will take on a new meaning for you. If you view it thus, you cannot help but be permanently grateful for everything you encounter along the way. Surely, what you face will not meet your expectations.
But wake up! Your expectations were sheer madness! You have never known what was best for you! You have had a dreadful teacher—one who also hates you. He has always misled you, if you understand and accept that the goal must be happiness. That malevolent teacher has never truly made you happy, precisely because that was not his goal. He has led you only, and with firm steps, toward despair and death.
It is important that you understand and accept this fundamental idea: everything happens for your good. You are still dreaming, and your mind still retains a powerful inertia that leads it to cling to old interpretations and expectations. You will have to be very alert and put all your will into sustaining your new resolve, with the confidence that you are now being correctly guided. Your spiritual vision is still weak and faint. But that will change, and little by little a new way of seeing will emerge within you, based on very concrete and real achievements. You are healing, and you are becoming a healer.
All learning takes time and requires some effort. But realize that if learning—that is, changing—seems difficult, it is because you are fighting against yourself. There is no one in your mind but you. You have no need to struggle against anything, nor, in truth, do you need any time at all to change. So what you must decide is how much time you will give yourself to be, at last, free and happy. You hold all the power… but that is tomorrow’s lesson.
X Exodus 26:33 “And you shall hang up the veil under the clasps, and bring in the Ark of the Covenant there, within the veil. The veil shall serve you as a separation between the holy place and the Most Holy.”
XI Pay attention to these last four lines, for here begins the discussion of your task as a miracle worker. Notice how the seventh principle of miracles is repeated: “Everyone is entitled to miracles. But before this is possible, purification is necessary.” And here it becomes clear what that purification consists of: “… that (the Holy Spirit) remove the elements of dream, and return them to you as pure ideas that do not contradict the Will of God […] each thought is thus transformed […] he saw the truth it contained and was not deceived by what had been falsely added […] All traces of fantasy disappear, and what remains is unified in a perfect Thought that offers Its perfection everywhere.” And then, when you speak with a purified mind, “no one can fail to listen to you…”
XII Matthew 17:2 “And He was transfigured before them; His face shone like the sun, and His garments became white as the light.”
XIII Remember: now your new ministry truly begins; now, at last, you begin to fulfill the role God assigned you in the plan of salvation; now, at last, you begin to be happy.