T. 18. I. 4 – 8. Jesus: “You who believe that God is fear, have made but one substitution! It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of illusion for truth; of fragmentation for eternal wholeness. Your perception has become so splintered and subdivided, and then divided again, over and over, that it is now almost impossible to recognize reality as it once was to you. Yet reality still is what it always was!
That one error, which brought you from truth to illusion, from eternity into the bounds of time, and from Life to death, was the basis of all errors you’ve made since. Your whole world rests upon it. Everything you see reflects it, and every special relationship that you have ever made is part of it. You may be surprised to hear how very different is reality from what you see around you!
You do not realize the magnitude of that one error! It was so vast and so completely incredible, that from it only a world of total ‘unreality’ could emerge. What else could come of it? As you begin to honestly look at its fragmented aspects, they are fearful enough!
But nothing you have seen begins to show you the enormity of the original error, the one which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and to force you to make seemingly endless further substitutions!
And then came the first projection of error outward. The world you see around you arose in your holy mind to hide the error, to become the screen on which the error was projected, and then drawn between you and the truth. For truth extends inward, where the idea of loss is meaningless and only increase is conceivable.
Do you really think it strange, then, that a world in which everything is ‘backwards and upside down’ arose from this projection of error? That was inevitable. For truth, covered over with all of this, could only remain within in quiet, taking no part at all in all the mad projection by which this world was made. Call it not sin but madness, for such it was and so it still remains!
Invest the error not with guilt, for guilt implies that it was really accomplished! And above all, be not afraid of it. When you seem to see some twisted form of the original error rising to frighten you, step back an instant in your thoughts. Then remind yourself, ‘God is not fear, but Love,’ and it will disappear. The truth will save you. It has not left you to be swallowed up in the mad, mad world, and so depart from you. Insanity is literally ‘outside of you,’ while inward still is sanity and truth. You have but chosen to believe it is the other way; that truth is outside, and error and guilt within.
Your little, senseless substitutions, touched with insanity and swirling lightly off on a mad course like feathers dancing insanely in the wind, have utterly no substance. They fuse and merge and separate, in ever-shifting and totally meaningless patterns that need not be judged at all. To judge them individually is pointless! Their tiny differences in form are no real differences at all. None of them matters. That is what they have in common and nothing else!
Yet what else is necessary to make them all the same? Let them all go, dancing in the wind, dipping and turning till 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!”