Chapter 27 II. The Fear of Healing
1. Is healing frightening? ²To many, yes. ³For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies are accusers. ⁴They stand firmly in the way of trust and peace, proclaiming that the frail can have no trust and that the damaged have no grounds for peace. ⁵Who has been injured by his brother, and could love and trust him still? ⁶He has attacked and will attack again. ⁷Protect him not, because your damaged body shows that you must be protected from him. ⁸To forgive may be an act of charity, but not his due. ⁹He may be pitied for his guilt, but not exonerated. ¹⁰And if you forgive him his transgressions, you but add to all the guilt that he has really earned.
2. The unhealed cannot pardon. ²For they are the witnesses that pardon is unfair. ³They would retain the consequences of the guilt they overlook. ⁴Yet no one can forgive a sin that he believes is real. ⁵And what has consequences must be real, because what it has done is there to see. ⁶Forgiveness is not pity, which but seeks to pardon what it thinks to be the truth. ⁷Good cannot be returned for evil, for forgiveness does not first establish sin and then forgive it. ⁸Who can say and mean, “My brother, you have injured me, and yet, because I am the better of the two, I pardon you my hurt.” ⁹His pardon and your hurt cannot exist together. ¹⁰One denies the other and must make it false.
3. To witness sin and yet forgive it is a paradox that reason cannot see. ²For it maintains what has been done to you deserves no pardon. ³And by giving it, you grant your brother mercy but retain the proof he is not really innocent. ⁴The sick remain accusers. ⁵They cannot forgive their brothers and themselves as well. ⁶For no one in whom true forgiveness rests can suffer. ⁷He holds not the proof of sin before his brother’s eyes. ⁸And thus he must have overlooked it and removed it from his own. ⁹Forgiveness cannot be for one and not the other. ¹⁰Who forgives is healed. ¹¹And in his healing lies the proof that he has truly pardoned, and retains no trace of condemnation that he still would hold against himself or any living thing.
4. Forgiveness is not real unless it brings a healing to your brother and yourself. ²You must attest his sins have no effect on you to demonstrate they are not real. ³How else could he be guiltless? ⁴And how could his innocence be justified unless his sins have no effect to warrant guilt? ⁵Sins are beyond forgiveness just because they would entail effects that cannot be undone and overlooked entirely. ⁶In their undoing lies the proof that they are merely errors. ⁷Let yourself be healed that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother and yourself.
5. A broken body shows the mind has not been healed. ²A miracle of healing proves that separation is without effect. ³What you would prove to him you will believe. ⁴The power of witness comes from your belief. ⁵And everything you say or do or think but testifies to what you teach to him. ⁶Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. ⁷And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony of his innocence. ⁸It is this testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. ⁹For here is his forgiveness proved to him.
6. A miracle can offer nothing less to him than it has given unto you. ²So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did not do. ³And so is he convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you. ⁴Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never be undone. ⁵And hopelessness and death must disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. ⁶This call has power far beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. ⁷The ancient calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto His Own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. ⁸Brother, there is no death. ⁹And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. ¹⁰He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. ¹¹Yet it is given you to show him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream.
7. How just are miracles! ²For they bestow an equal gift of full deliverance from guilt upon your brother and yourself. ³Your healing saves him pain as well as you, and you are healed because you wished him well. ⁴This is the law the miracle obeys; that healing sees no specialness at all. ⁵It does not come from pity but from love. ⁶And love would prove all suffering is but a vain imagining, a foolish wish with no effects. ⁷Your health is a result of your desire to see your brother with no blood upon his hands, nor guilt upon his heart made heavy with the proof of sin. ⁸And what you wish is given you to see.
8. The “cost” of your serenity is his. ²This is the “price” the Holy Spirit and the world interpret differently. ³The world perceives it as a statement of the “fact” that your salvation sacrifices his. ⁴The Holy Spirit knows your healing is the witness unto his, and cannot be apart from his at all. ⁵As long as he consents to suffer, you will be unhealed. ⁶Yet you can show him that his suffering is purposeless and wholly without cause. ⁷Show him your healing, and he will consent no more to suffer. ⁸For his innocence has been established in your sight and his. ⁹And laughter will replace your sighs, because God’s Son remembered that he is God’s Son.
9. Who, then, fears healing? ²Only those to whom their brother’s sacrifice and pain are seen to represent their own serenity. ³Their helplessness and weakness represent the grounds on which they justify his pain. ⁴The constant sting of guilt he suffers serves to prove that he is slave, but they are free. ⁵The constant pain they suffer demonstrates that they are free because they hold him bound. ⁶And sickness is desired to prevent a shift of balance in the sacrifice. ⁷How could the Holy Spirit be deterred an instant, even less, to reason with an argument for sickness such as this? ⁸And need your healing be delayed because you pause to listen to insanity?
10. Correction is not your function. ²It belongs to One Who knows of fairness, not of guilt. ³If you assume correction’s role, you lose the function of forgiveness. ⁴No one can forgive until he learns correction is but to forgive, and never to accuse. ⁵Alone, you cannot see they are the same, and therefore is correction not of you. ⁶Identity and function are the same, and by your function do you know yourself. ⁷And thus, if you confuse your function with the function of Another, you must be confused about yourself and who you are. ⁸What is the separation but a wish to take God’s function from Him and deny that it is His? ⁹Yet if it is not His it is not yours, for you must lose what you would take away.
11. In a split mind, identity must seem to be divided. ²Nor can anyone perceive a function unified which has conflicting purposes and different ends. ³Correction, to a mind so split, must be a way to punish sins you think are yours in someone else. ⁴And thus does he become your victim, not your brother, different from you in that he is more guilty, thus in need of your correction, as the one more innocent than he. ⁵This splits his function off from yours, and gives you both a different role. ⁶And so you cannot be perceived as one, and with a single function that would mean a shared identity with but one end.
12. Correction you would do must separate, because that is the function given it by you. ²When you perceive correction is the same as pardon, then you also know the Holy Spirit’s Mind and yours are One. ³And so your own Identity is found. ⁴Yet must He work with what is given Him, and you allow Him only half your mind. ⁵And thus He represents the other half, and seems to have a different purpose from the one you cherish, and you think is yours. ⁶Thus does your function seem divided, with a half in opposition to a half. ⁷And these two halves appear to represent a split within a self perceived as two.
13. Consider how this self-perception must extend, and do not overlook the fact that every thought extends because that is its purpose, being what it really is. ²From an idea of self as two, there comes a necessary view of function split between the two. ³And what you would correct is only half the error, which you think is all of it. ⁴Your brother’s sins become the central target for correction, lest your errors and his own be seen as one. ⁵Yours are mistakes, but his are sins and not the same as yours. ⁶His merit punishment, while yours, in fairness, should be overlooked.
14. In this interpretation of correction, your own mistakes you will not even see. ²The focus of correction has been placed outside yourself, on one who cannot be a part of you while this perception lasts. ³What is condemned can never be returned to its accuser, who had hated it, and hates it still as symbol of his fear. ⁴This is your brother, focus of your hate, unworthy to be part of you and thus outside yourself; the other half, which is denied. ⁵And only what is left without his presence is perceived as all of you. ⁶To this remaining half the Holy Spirit must represent the other half until you recognize it is the other half. ⁷And this He does by giving you and him a function that is one, not different.
15. Correction is the function given both, but neither one alone. ²And when it is fulfilled as shared, it must correct mistakes in you and him. ³It cannot leave mistakes in one unhealed and set the other free. ⁴That is divided purpose, which can not be shared, and so it cannot be the goal in which the Holy Spirit sees His Own. ⁵And you can rest assured that He will not fulfill a function that He does not see and recognize as His. ⁶For only thus can He keep yours preserved intact, despite Your separate views of what your function is. ⁷If He upheld divided function, you were lost indeed. ⁸His inability to see His goal divided and distinct for you and him, preserves yourself from the awareness of a function not your own. ⁹And thus is healing given you and him.
16. Correction must be left to One Who knows correction and forgiveness are the same. ²With half a mind this is not understood. ³Leave, then, correction to the Mind that is united, functioning as one because it is not split in purpose, and conceives a single function as its only one. ⁴Here is the function given it conceived to be its Own, and not apart from that its Giver keeps because it has been shared. ⁵In His acceptance of this function lies the means whereby your mind is unified. ⁶His single purpose unifies the halves of you that you perceive as separate. ⁷And each forgives the other, that he may accept his other half as part of him.
