How can illusions satisfy the Son of God?
1. Father,
truth belongs to me.
²Your Will and mine have placed my home in Heaven.
³How could dreams content me? I
⁴How could illusions bring me happiness?
⁵What else but Your remembrance could ever satisfy Your Son?
⁶I will accept no less than what You have given me.
⁷Your Love surrounds me—
forever still,
forever gentle,
and forever sure.
⁸The Son of God will be forever just as You created him.
2. Today we let illusions go.
²And if we hear temptation call to us to linger in a dream, we will pause and ask ourselves if we, the Sons of God, would be content with dreams when Heaven can so easily be chosen as our home, and Love can gladly take the place of fear.
I You are not absolutely happy. You do not enjoy total peace. You do not feel perfectly safe. You do not possess a certainty without a shadow of doubt. You cannot create with the unlimited Power of God. You are not complete.
And all of this is because you are dreaming. You dream that you are a specific, limited person living in a random world, and that false idea disturbs you. The character you think you are cannot save you, for he is the dream and the very root of the problem. You, Son of God, need be saved from nothing—but your “personal self” seems to have problems.
This is a Course for the salvation of that imaginary self—which in truth does not exist—through the recognition of Truth. The most merciful solution to this impossible situation is for that “personal self” to be happy and align itself with its true Identity. To do so, it must cease to fear, cease to blame and to blame itself, and learn to forgive its fantasies. That is the end of a dream that never happened.
The instruction is clear: take no interest in what is nothing. Fear not, nor let your idle imaginings deceive you. Manage your dream through forgiveness, and thus you will remember Who you are—not by despising the world (for to despise is to attack and to give reality to what has none), but simply by not valuing its illusions. Do not set your heart upon them, do not seek your salvation in them, and thus they will fade away without resistance.
How could illusions satisfy the Son of God? Father, Truth belongs to me. Your Will and mine have established my home in Heaven. How could dreams content me? How could illusions offer me happiness?
The world cannot give me what You have already given: Your eternal Love, forever serene, forever secure, surrounding me always. Today I renounce the foolish pretense of finding peace in shadows. I do not despise the world; I simply place no faith or hope in it. I do not deceive myself with what can give me nothing.
The difference is decisive: if I curse the world, I bind myself to its shadows; if I cease to value them, I am free. And then I can turn my gaze toward what is real—what has always been with me, what has never left me: Your Love.
The lesson reminds me that it is possible to choose. Today I choose not to be deceived by what changes and crumbles, but to open myself to what endures. Today I choose not to seek outside myself what can be found only in You.
Father, I will not accept less than what You have given me.
Let me not set my heart upon dreams or illusions, but remember instead Your eternal Love—my only home and my only joy.
Amen.