1. Earlier, I said that the Holy Spirit shares the goal of all good teachers, whose ultimate aim is to make themselves unnecessary by teaching their pupils all they know. ²The Holy Spirit wants only this, for sharing the Father’s Love for His Son, He seeks to remove all guilt from his mind that he may remember his Father in peace. ³Peace and guilt are antithetical, and the Father can be remembered only in peace. ⁴Love and guilt cannot coexist, and to accept one is to deny the other. ⁵Guilt hides Christ from your sight, for it is the denial of the blamelessness of God’s Son.
2. In the strange world that you have made the Son of God has sinned. ²How could you see him, then? ³By making him invisible, the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt that you accepted, and you hold it dear. ⁴For the blamelessness of Christ is the proof that the ego never was, and can never be. ⁵Without guilt the ego has no life, and God’s Son is without guilt.
3. As you look upon yourself and judge what you do honestly, you may be tempted to wonder how you can be guiltless. ²Yet consider this: You are not guiltless in time, but in eternity. ³You have “sinned” in the past, but there is no past. ⁴Always has no direction. ⁵Time seems to go in one direction, but when you reach its end it will roll up like a long carpet spread along the past behind you, and will disappear. ⁶As long as you believe the Son of God is guilty you will walk along this carpet, believing that it leads to death. ⁷And the journey will seem long and cruel and senseless, for so it is.
4. The journey the Son of God has set himself is useless indeed, but the journey on which his Father sets him is one of release and joy. ²The Father is not cruel, and His Son cannot hurt himself. ³The retaliation that he fears and that he sees will never touch him, for although he believes in it the Holy Spirit knows it is not true. ⁴The Holy Spirit stands at the end of time, where you must be because He is with you. ⁵He has already undone everything unworthy of the Son of God, for such was His mission, given Him by God. ⁶And what God gives has always been.
5. You will see me as you learn the Son of God is guiltless. ²He has always sought his guiltlessness, and he has found it. ³For everyone is seeking to escape from the prison he has made, and the way to find release is not denied him. ⁴Being in him, he has found it. ⁵When he finds it is only a matter of time, and time is but an illusion. ⁶For the Son of God is guiltless now, and the brightness of his purity shines untouched forever in God’s Mind. ⁷God’s Son will always be as he was created. ⁸Deny your world and judge him not, for his eternal guiltlessness is in the Mind of his Father, and protects him forever.
6. When you have accepted the Atonement for yourself, you will realize there is no guilt in God’s Son. ²And only as you look upon him as guiltless can you understand his oneness. ³For the idea of guilt brings a belief in condemnation of one by another, projecting separation in place of unity. ⁴You can condemn only yourself, and by so doing you cannot know that you are God’s Son. ⁵You have denied the condition of his being, which is his perfect blamelessness. ⁶Out of love he was created, and in love he abides. ⁷Goodness and mercy have always followed him, for he has always extended the Love of his Father.
7. As you perceive the holy companions who travel with you, you will realize that there is no journey, but only an awakening. ²The Son of God, who sleepeth not, has kept faith with his Father for you. ³There is no road to travel on, and no time to travel through. ⁴For God waits not for His Son in time, being forever unwilling to be without him. ⁵And so it has always been. ⁶Let the holiness of God’s Son shine away the cloud of guilt that darkens your mind, and by accepting his purity as yours, learn of him that it is yours.
8. You are invulnerable because you are guiltless. ²You can hold on to the past only through guilt. ³For guilt establishes that you will be punished for what you have done, and thus depends on one-dimensional time, proceeding from past to future. ⁴No one who believes this can understand what “always” means, and therefore guilt must deprive you of the appreciation of eternity. ⁵You are immortal because you are eternal, and “always” must be now. ⁶Guilt, then, is a way of holding past and future in your mind to ensure the ego’s continuity. ⁷For if what has been will be punished, the ego’s continuity is guaranteed. ⁸Yet the guarantee of your continuity is God’s, not the ego’s. ⁹And immortality is the opposite of time, for time passes away, while immortality is constant.
9. Accepting the Atonement teaches you what immortality is, for by accepting your guiltlessness you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless and will not be. ²The future, in time, is always associated with expiation, and only guilt could induce a sense of a need for expiation. ³Accepting the guiltlessness of the Son of God as yours is therefore God’s way of reminding you of His Son, and what he is in truth. ⁴For God has never condemned His Son, and being guiltless he is eternal.
10. You cannot dispel guilt by making it real, and then atoning for it. ²This is the ego’s plan, which it offers instead of dispelling it. ³The ego believes in atonement through attack, being fully committed to the insane notion that attack is salvation. ⁴And you who cherish guilt must also believe it, for how else but by identifying with the ego could you hold dear what you do not want?
11. The ego teaches you to attack yourself because you are guilty, and this must increase the guilt, for guilt is the result of attack. ²In the ego’s teaching, then, there is no escape from guilt. ³For attack makes guilt real, and if it is real there is no way to overcome it. ⁴The Holy Spirit dispels it simply through the calm recognition that it has never been. ⁵As He looks upon the guiltless Son of God, He knows that this is true. ⁶And being true for you, you cannot attack yourself, for without guilt attack is impossible. ⁷You, then, are saved because God’s Son is guiltless. ⁸And being wholly pure, you are invulnerable.