T. 31. III. 1 – 4. Jesus: “Only the self-accused condemn! As you prepare to make a choice that will result in different outcomes than before, there is first one thing that must be over-learned. It must become a habit of response so typical of everything you do that it becomes your first response to all temptation, and to every situation that occurs. Learn this, and learn it well, for it is here that the delay of happiness is shortened by a span of time you cannot even comprehend:
You never hate your brother for his sins, but only for your own. Whatever form his sins appear to take, it but obscures the fact that you believe the sin is yours, and therefore meriting a ‘just’ attack!
Why would his sins be sins to you at all, if you did not believe them present in yourself and unforgivable? Why are they seen as ‘real in him,’ if you do not believe that they are your reality? And why, except that you must hate yourself, do you attack the appearances of sin you see everywhere?
Are you a sin, an offense to your Creator? Whenever you attack, you answer ‘yes,’ for by attack do you affirm that you are guilty, and simply give as you deserve. And what can you deserve that does not accord with what you think you are?
If you did not believe that you deserved attack, it never would occur to you to give attack to anyone. Why should you? What would be the gain to you? What could the outcome be that you would want? And how could murder of any sort bring you benefit?
Notice that these sins are all perceived as taking place in bodies. They are not perceived in minds! They are not seen as chosen purposes, but as actions, ‘things doing things.’ Bodies act, and minds do not, you say! And therefore must it be the body itself that is at fault for what it does!
To the ego, the body is not seen as but a passive thing, obeying your mind’s commands, and doing nothing of itself at all. If you are sin, you surely are a body, for it seems the mind acts not! And purpose, then, must be determined by the body, not the mind. The body must be ‘acting on its own,’ and must surely motivate itself! If you are sin, you have ‘locked yourself’ within the body, and identified with it. So you attribute what is really the mind’s purpose, separation, to its prison house, which then acts out the thoughts instead of mind. A jailer does not follow orders, but enforces orders on the prisoner! Yet here the body is the prisoner, and not the mind!
The body thinks no thoughts. It has no power to learn, to pardon, nor enslave. It gives no orders that the mind need serve, nor sets conditions that it must obey. It holds imprisoned but the willing mind that would abide in it. And then it sickens at the bidding of the sick mind that would become its prisoner. So it grows old and dies, because that mind is sick within itself!
Learning is the only ability that causes change! And so the body, where no learning can occur, could never change unless it changed to match a change of purpose by the mind. For mind can learn another way, and that is where all change is made!”