OrEd-T-22.4-Reason and Holy Relationship
29. Reason's goal is to make plain and obvious. I can see reason, but not with the body's eyes. Vision is sense, quite literally. This is the beginning of vision that has meaning. Vision must, and can be understood, for it is plain, obvious, and not ambiguous. The ego and reason are contradictory, and cannot co-exist in my awareness. Here, reason and the ego go their separate ways. The introduction of reason into the ego's thought system is the beginning of its undoing.
30. Reason sees through errors, telling me what I thought was real, is not real. Reason sees the difference between sin and mistakes and it wants corrections. What I thought was uncorrectable, reason tells me is an error and can be corrected. Consistent with its fixed belief in sin and disregard of errors, the ego sees nothing that can be corrected. The ego's survival depends on its belief that I cannot learn this course. If I share this belief, reason won't be able to see my errors to correct them. Thus does the ego damn.
31. In itself, reason is not salvation, but it makes way for peace, and brings me to a state of mind in which I can receive salvation. Sin is a block across the road to peace, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key. Without the help of reason no one would try to pass it. The body's eyes behold sin as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass. Yet, because it is an error, reason sees through it easily. The form does not hide the error from reason's eyes.
32. The ego is attracted only to the form of error. A special form of error the ego venerates is sin. The ego would preserve all errors and make them sins. It does not know if there is meaning or not, because it does not recognize meaning. This is the ego's stability, its anchor in the shifting world it made--the rock on which its church is built. The ego's worshipers are bound to a body, and believe the body's freedom is their own. Yet, everything the body's eyes can see is a distorted perception, a mistake, a fragment of the whole, without the meaning the whole would give. And yet, mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected.
33. Reason tells me that the form of an error is not the mistake. If form conceals a mistake, the form cannot prevent correction. The body's eyes cannot see beyond what they were made to see. They were made to see error, but not look past it. The body's eyes see only form. Theirs is a strange perception indeed, for they see only illusions. This sight was made to guarantee that nothing but form will be perceived. Unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, they are stopped at the outside form of nothing. The wall that stands between myself and truth is believed to be true. Yet, this distorted form of vision that is stopped by nothingness as if it were a solid wall, cannot see truth.
34. Made not to see, these eyes will never see. For the ego made and looks through these eyes, and the idea did not leave its maker. The maker's goal was not to see, and the body's eyes are perfect means for not seeing. Notice how the body's eyes rest on externals, and cannot go beyond. Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning. Nothing is so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form means understanding has been obscured.
35. Because it can be changed, form can not be reality. Only mistakes have different forms, so they can deceive. Reason tells me that if form is not reality, it must be an illusion and is not there to see. If I see form, I must be mistaken, for I am seeing what cannot be real as if it were real. Distorted perception cannot see beyond what is not there (illusion), and must perceive illusion as the truth. Could distorted perception, then, recognize the truth?
36. I cannot be saved by making the one sinful, whose holiness is my salvation. I will not let the vision of his holiness be kept from me by what the body's eyes can see. I will not let my awareness of my brother be blocked by my perception of his body and his sins. What is there in him that I would attack, except what I associate with his body, which I believe can sin? I tried to see MY sins in him to save myself. I will not let the form of his mistakes keep me from him whose holiness is mine. I did not give him his holiness, and yet his holiness is my forgiveness. The sight of his holiness would show me my forgiveness. Beyond his errors is his holiness and my salvation.
37. Unholy values will produce confusion in awareness. In an unholy relationship, each one is seen to justify the other's sin. He sees within the other what impels him to sin against his will. He lays his sins upon the other, is attracted to the other, perpetuating his own sins. And so it becomes impossible for each to see himself as causing sin, by his desire to have sin real. Yet a holy relationship must value holiness above all else, however newly born. Reason sees a holy relationship as what it is--a common state of mind, where both give errors gladly to correction that both may happily be healed as one.
