I Have the Power to Choose.
1. No one can suffer any loss unless it is by his own decision.
²No one can experience pain unless he chooses it.
³No one can grieve, feel fear, or think he is ill unless that is what he desires.
⁴And no one dies without his own consent.
⁵Everything that happens is a reflection of your wishes.I
⁶And nothing you desire is denied to you.
⁷Behold your world, complete in every detail.
⁸This is the only reality it holds for you.
⁹And it is here alone that salvation lies.
2. You may believe this is a radical position, and that it reaches too far to be true.
²But can truth have exceptions?
³If all has been given you, can loss be real?
⁴How can pain be part of peace, or sorrow of joy?
⁵How can fear and sickness enter a mind where Love and perfect Holiness abide?
⁶Truth must include all things if it is true.
⁷Accept no opposites and no exceptions, for doing so is to contradict the truth entirely.
3. Salvation is the recognition that truth is true, and nothing else is true.
²You have heard this before, but you may not yet accept both parts. II
³Without the first, the second has no meaning.
⁴But without the second, the first is no longer true.
⁵Truth cannot have an opposite.
⁶This cannot be emphasized too often or remembered too frequently.
⁷For if what is not true were as real as what is, then part of truth would be false, and truth would lose all meaning.
⁸Nothing but truth is true, and what is false is false.
4. This is the simplest of distinctions, yet the most difficult to grasp.
²Not because it is hard to see.
³But because it is hidden beneath a vast array of choices that seem to be beyond your control.
⁴And so, truth appears to have some aspects that deny its consistency.
⁵But they are not what they seem to be: contradictions that you yourself have projected upon the truth.
5. Because God created you, you must be changeless forever.
²And transient states are false by definition.
³This includes your shifting feelings, changes in the conditions of your body or your mind, and every alteration in your awareness and behavior.
⁴This is the universal condition that distinguishes truth from illusion.
⁵And it is what separates the true from the false, so that the false may be clearly seen for what it is.
6. Does it not seem strange to you to believe it is arrogant to think that you made the world you see?
²God did not make it.
³Of this you can be sure.
⁴What could He know of the ephemeral, the sinful and guilty, the fearful, the suffering and the lonely, or of a mind that lives within a body doomed to die?
⁵To think that God created a world where such things seem real is to accuse Him of madness.
⁶God is not insane.
⁷But only madness could have made a world like this.
7. To believe that God made chaos—contrary to His Will—invented the opposite of truth, and allows death to triumph over life, is nothing but arrogance.
²Humility would at once perceive these things could not have come from Him.
³And how could you see what God did not create?
⁴To think you can is merely to believe you can perceive what God did not will to be.
⁵And what could be more arrogant than this?
8. Let us today be truly humble and accept what we have made as it is.
²We have the power to choose.
³Simply choose to accept your rightful place as co-creator of the universe, and all you think you made will disappear.
⁴Then all that always was will rise to your awareness, eternal in its present state.
⁵And reality will replace the illusions with which you tried to deceive yourself, as you sought to usurp the altar of the Father and the Son.
9. Today we practice true humility, laying aside the false pretense through which the ego tries to prove that humility is arrogance.
²Only the ego can be arrogant.
³But truth is humble in acknowledging its power, its changelessness, and its eternal wholeness that encompasses everything: the perfect Gift of God to His beloved Son.
⁴We set aside the arrogance that claims we are sinners, guilty and afraid, and ashamed of what we are. III
⁵And instead, we lift our hearts with true humility to Him Who created us immaculate, like Himself in power and in Love.
10. We have the power to choose.
²We accept from God what we are, and humbly recognize His Son.
³To recognize the Son of God is also to abandon all the concepts we have made about ourselves, and acknowledge them as false.
⁴We have seen they are arrogant.
⁵And with humility, we joyfully accept as ours the splendor of the Son of God, his gentleness, his perfect sinlessness, his Father’s Love, his right to Heaven, and his release from hell.
11. Now we join in the joyful recognition that lies are false and only truth is true.
²As we awaken to the day, we think only of the truth and devote five minutes to the practice of its path, comforting our fearful minds with this:
³I have the power to choose.
⁴Today I will accept myself as my Father’s Will created me.
⁵Then we wait in silence, setting aside all the ideas with which we have deceived ourselves, as we humbly ask our Self to be revealed to us.
⁶And He Who never left will return to our awareness, grateful to restore to God His home, as it must be.
12. Wait patiently throughout the day for your Self, and invite Him every hour with the words with which you started the day.
²And end the day with that same invitation to your Self.
³The Voice for God will answer, for He speaks for you and for your Father.
⁴He will replace all your frantic thoughts with the Peace of God, your deceptions with His truth, and the illusions you hold about yourself with the truth of the Son of God. IV
I Everything that happens is the manifestation of your desires, Son of God.
You may tell yourself that this is not true—that you did not make the sun, the earth, or the stars; that you are not responsible for the world’s happiness or misery; that you did not choose to become ill of your own will. Well, in a sense, you are right. The person you believe yourself to be certainly cannot do such things; in fact, it can do nothing. It has never done anything, because it is an effect—a manifestation through which your fragmented mind expresses itself, affected by the belief that you are separate from God. You, Son of God.If that person believed it had such powers, it would be considered insane in the world that you—you, Son of God—have conceived in your holy mind. Yet you, Son of God, do have the power your Father gave you when He created you, to create as He does: by extending His Love. But, as you have heard many times, you can also misuse your mind to believe in fantasies that are real only to you, Son of God. It is you who have made that person appear to act on its own. You have always been behind the curtain, commanding everything and deceiving yourself by failing to recognize it.
Now you have transferred your identity to your illusions and think they are as real as you are, because you believe they are you. But they are not: your illusions are not real, because you have made them by infinitely limiting your infinite condition. Your illusions are precisely the myriad things you cannot be; they are the opposite of you in every way. For the world you see is the opposite of Heaven, which is your home and what you are.
You are real. You are an idea. You are not material. Matter is an idea you have conceived and projected outward. That does not mean you have cast it out of yourself, for there is nothing outside you; you have simply projected it there, considering in your consciousness that it was outside you. Nothing more.
Now then, once you have become enthralled with the idea that you are so-and-so, there is no other way to deal with you than to go along with your dream in order to lead you to a happy awakening, which, of course, will depend entirely on you. For remember: your will is always fulfilled. Jesus speaks to you in such terms because it makes little sense to insist on the ontological reasons that justify your true identity and the delusional nature of your hallucination, although at times it is essential to remind you of them, as right now.
Simply hold to this: while you are dreaming, you can only believe, and it is to your advantage to believe in things that lead you to awakening, because to some degree they are aligned with the truth. Yet there are other beliefs that will make your dream even deeper. Therefore, you will have to select and choose. But do not worry: you have with you unsurpassable Help, a magnificent Guide, a Teacher who will help you emerge from all this confusion. Listen to Him and trust Him.
One thing you can be sure of—whether you believe yourself to be a person or the Son of God—is that you always, always have the power to choose. Your will is fully operative, always. When you say that you have no will to do something or make a certain decision, it is because your will has voluntarily decided that it be so. The same occurs when, seemingly involuntarily, you do, refrain from doing, or forget something: be sure that all of it has been absolutely voluntary. Nothing happens without your express will. Again, whether you believe yourself to be a person or a celestial being, your will is always fulfilled, and everything in your mind is there because you have placed it there. Now, you may believe this or not. That too depends on your will.
If you decide to be ill, that person with whom you have identified will become ill. If you decide to punish yourself and suffer great pain, that person will suffer. If you decide to resolve that apparent conflict by placing your will in nothing, that person will surely die. You will not. You are the Son of God and cannot die. But if you wish to be yourself, and nothing but yourself, you will continue identifying with that person, or with another, or with anything else to which you decide to lend your imaginary consciousness of being separate from God.
To begin with, what now serves you best is to take the reins of your imaginary personal life and assume that you have the power to decide and to command your will. Please, recover a little sanity. How could you not have the power to decide!? Deceive yourself no longer.
II T-14.II.4:3-4: “Truth is truth. That is all that matters, only that is real, and everything else does not exist.”
W-138.4:6: “For only truth is true, and nothing else is real.”
III Stop thinking all those foolish things about yourself. Pause for a moment and reflect: why do you do it? What purpose does it serve? What do you intend to achieve with it? For what is quite evident is that you will not manage to become a better person or a better anything. You do it only to punish yourself. That is the sole purpose of harboring a poor idea of yourself. Nothing else. It serves only to suffer. The fact is that you are addicted to the pain produced by guilt, and for some utterly insane reason, it gives you a perverse pleasure. Do not go on with it.
Realize that at every instant you are born completely new and innocent into the eternal present. You have placed your will in making tremendous efforts to rescue the past and link it to the present, and thus you mortgage your future with all those distorted and guilty interpretations of what you did or failed to do. All that keeps you from exercising your will in the present and taking responsibility for your decisions now. The past is robbing you of your present. Do not allow it. You now have the power to decide. Do it. Be reborn to your true will.
IV Notice well how this work operates. It is not your little self that builds fantasies of childish vanities, no matter how spiritual or lofty they may seem; no, you remain awaiting the sure, humble, and infinitely magnificent guidance of your own Self. It has nothing to do with your person; it has to do with the limitless, with the real. And reality is something that does not depend on you, nor on your efforts to attain it, for it has always been there. In that equation, the only thing that has been in excess is the false idea you hold of yourself and from which you distort what you perceive and what you think. Nothing you think is true. Stop thinking about reality, for that only hinders your ability to experience it. Reality is simply what you are.