T. 18. I. 7 – 10. Jesus: “When you seem to see some twisted form of the original error, substituting the illusion of separation for the truth, suddenly rising in your perception to frighten you, say only, ‘God is not fear, but Love,’ and it will disappear.
The truth will save you! It has not left you to go out into the maddened world and so depart from you. Inward is sanity; insanity is outside you. You merely ‘believe’ it is the other way; that truth is outside, and error and guilt within.
Touched with insanity, your many little ‘substitutions,’ swirling lightly off on their own mad course like feathers dancing in the wind, have no substance to them. They come together, fuse and merge like clouds, then separate again, in ever-shifting and totally meaningless patterns, not worthy of the slightest judgment. To seek for meaning in them or to judge them individually is pointless. Their tiny differences in form are no real differences at all. None of them matters! That is all they have in common and nothing else!
What else must you learn, for you to see them all the same? Let them all go, dancing off in the wind, dipping and turning until they disappear from sight, far, far outside of you! And turn you to the stately calm within, where, in holy stillness dwells the living God you never left, and Who never left you.
The Holy Spirit takes you gently by the hand, and retraces with you the journey home, leading you gently back to the truth and safety within, your mad journey outside yourself behind you. He brings all your insane projections, and the wild substitutions that you have placed outside you, to the truth at last. Thus does He reverse the course of insanity, and He restores you to reason.
In your relationship with your brother, where He has taken charge of everything at your request, the Holy Spirit has set the course inward to the truth you share. In the mad, mad world outside you, nothing can be shared but only substituted, and sharing and substituting have nothing in common in reality. Within yourself you love your brother with a perfect love, no aspect left apart from it. Here is holy ground, in which no substitution can enter, and where only the truth in your brother can abide. Here you and your brother are joined in God, as much together as you are with Him.
The original error has not entered here, nor ever will! Here is the radiant truth, to which the Holy Spirit has committed your relationship. Let Him bring it here, where you would have it be. Give Him but a little faith in your brother, to help Him show you that no substitute you made for Heaven can keep you from it.
In you, there is no separation, and no substitute can keep you from your brother. Your reality was God’s creation, and has no substitute. You are so firmly joined in truth that only God is there. And He would never accept something else instead of you. He loves you both, equally and as one. And as He loves you, so you are. You are not joined together in illusions, but in the Thought so holy and so perfect, that illusions cannot remain to darken the holy place in which you stand together.
God is with you, my brother. Let us join in Him in peace and gratitude, and accept His gift as our most holy and perfect reality, which we share in Him.”
Note: “The Glory of Venice,” exhibit until February 12th at the Hamilton Building, Denver Museum of Art. Spiritual symbolism in early renaissance paintings by Venetian artists. Symbolism: The two levels, the seven great rays, the two pictures, the ladder of prayer and more. Very inspiring!