OrEd-T-21.3-Responsibility For Sight.2
22. The Holy Spirit can easily give me faith in holiness, and the vision to see holiness. However, the altar where these gifts belong has not been left open and unoccupied. I have set up my idols to something else where faith in holiness should be. This something else seems real to me, and it seems to tell me what I must do. Faith in holiness that would show me otherwise, must seem unreal. I am not asked to make or do what lies beyond my understanding. I am asked to make room for truth, to let truth in. All I am asked to do is to stop my interference with what will happen of itself, and to recognize again the presence of the truth I thought I gave away.
23. I will be willing, for an instant, to leave my altars free of what I placed on them, and I will see what is really there. The holy instant is not an instant of creation, but of recognition. For recognition comes of vision and suspended judgment. Then it is possible to look within, and see what must be there, wholly independent of inference and judgment, in plain sight. Faith and desire go hand in hand, for everyone believes in what he wants. Undoing is not my task, but it is up to me to welcome it, or not.
24. Wishful thinking is how the ego deals with what it wants, to make it so. There is no better demonstration of the power of wanting, and therefore of faith, to make the ego's goals seem real and possible. Faith in the unreal leads to adjustments of reality, to make it fit the goal of madness. The goal of sin induces the perception of a fearful world, to justify its purpose. What I desire I will see. And if what I see is not real, I will still uphold it, by not seeing all the adjustments I have made to make it seem real.
25. When vision is denied, confusion of cause and effect becomes inevitable. Now the purpose becomes to keep the cause of the effect obscure, and make the effect appear to be a cause. This seeming independence of effect enables the effect to be regarded as standing by itself. Now, its maker thinks the effect is capable of serving as "cause" of events and feelings. Jesus spoke of my desire to create my own Creator and be father, not son, to Him. This is the same desire. The Son is the effect, and would deny his Cause. And so the Son seems to be the cause, producing real effects. Nothing can have effects without a cause, and to confuse the two is to fail to understand them both.
26. It is as needed that I recognize I made the world I see, as it is that I recognize I did not create myself. They are the same mistake. By believing I made myself, I am denying my Creator. I think, and have faith, that what I have made, can tell me what I see and feel. For if I think the world I made has power to make me what it will, I am confusing Son and Father, effect and Source. Only what is created by my Creator can have any influence over me.
27. The Son's creations are like his Father's. Yet in creating them, the Son does not delude himself that he is independent of his Source. His union with God is the Source of his creating. Apart from this, he has no power to create. What he makes is meaningless, and depends on his madness. What he makes changes nothing in creation. My brother thinks he made the world with me, denying creation. With me, he thinks the world he made, made him, denying that he made the world.
28. Yet the truth is, we were both created by a loving Father, Who created us together and as one. If we see anything that "proves" otherwise, we deny our whole reality. However, grant that, in secret, we made everything that seems to stand between us, keeping us from each other, and from our Father, then the instant of release has come to us. It is separation's seeming independence from its source that kept me prisoner. The belief that I am independent of the Source which created me, is the same mistake. Because separation's source has been uncovered, all separation's effects are gone.
