T. 22. I. 1 – 3. Jesus: “Having come this far, let reason now take another step! If you attack whom God would have be whole and hate the one He loves, then you and your Creator must have a different will. Yet if you are His Will, what you must then believe is that you are something ‘not yourself!’
You can indeed believe this, and in fact, you do! And to your own detriment, you actually have faith in this and ‘see’ much evidence on its behalf. And where then, you wonder, does your strange uneasiness, your sense of being disconnected, and your haunting fear of lack of meaning in your life arise? It is as though you wandered in without a plan of any kind except to wander off again, for only that seems certain!
Yet earlier in this course, we have heard a very similar description. And it was not of you, either, but of the body. But still this strange idea of a separate self, which it does accurately describe, is what you think is you! Reason would quickly tell you that the world you see through ‘eyes that are not yours’ must make no sense to you.
To whom would ‘seeing’ such as this send back its messages? Surely not to you, whose vision is wholly independent of the body’s eyes that look upon the world. If this is not your vision, what meaning can it show to you? The brain cannot interpret what your vision sees. This, with reason, you would understand!
The brain interprets and translates your thoughts to the body, of which it, the brain, is a part. But what the body says to you, you cannot understand! Yet you have listened to it anyway! And long and hard you’ve tried to make sense of its messages. You have not realized it is impossible to understand what fails entirely to reach to you. In fact, you have received no messages at all that you do understand! For you have been listening to something that, of itself, can never really communicate.
Think, then, what happens! Denying what you really are, and firm in faith that you are something else, this ‘something else’ that you have made to be your ‘self’ becomes your means of sight! Yet it must be the ‘something else’ that sees, and as ‘not you,’ then explains its sight to you! Your real vision would, of course, render this quite unnecessary and obviously incorrect! Yet if your real vision is blocked and you have called upon this thing to lead you, asking it to explain to you the world it sees, you have no reason not to listen, nor to suspect that what it tells you is not true!
Reason would tell you it cannot be true because you do not understand it! God has no secrets. He does not lead you through a world of misery, waiting to tell you, at the journey’s end, why He did this thing to you!”