1. The rituals of the god of sickness are strange and very demanding. ²Joy is never permitted, for depression is the sign of allegiance to him. ³Depression means that you have forsworn God. ⁴Many are afraid of blasphemy, but they do not understand what it means. ⁵They do not realize that to deny God is to deny their own Identity, and in this sense the wages of sin is death. ⁶The sense is very literal; denial of life perceives its opposite, as all forms of denial replace what is with what is not. ⁷No one can really do this, but that you can think you can and believe you have is beyond dispute.

2. Do not forget, however, that to deny God will inevitably result in projection, and you will believe that others and not yourself have done this to you. ²You must receive the message you give because it is the message you want. ³You may believe that you judge your brothers by the messages they give you, but you have judged them by the message you give to them. ⁴Do not attribute your denial of joy to them, or you cannot see the spark in them that would bring joy to you. ⁵It is the denial of the spark that brings depression, for whenever you see your brothers without it, you are denying God.

3. Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego’s religion. ²The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival. ³But consider what this means to you. ⁴Unless you are sick you cannot keep the gods you made, for only in sickness could you possibly want them. ⁵Blasphemy, then, is self-destructive, not God-destructive. ⁶It means that you are willing not to know yourself in order to be sick. ⁷This is the offering your god demands because, having made him out of your insanity, he is an insane idea. ⁸He has many forms, but although he may seem to be many different things he is but one idea;—the denial of God.

4. Sickness and death seemed to enter the mind of God’s Son against His Will. ²The “attack on God” made His Son think he was Fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression. ³This was his alternative to joy, because he would not accept the fact that, although he was a creator, he had been created. ⁴Yet the Son is helpless without the Father, Who alone is his Help.

5. I said before that of yourself you can do nothing, but you are not of yourself. ²If you were, what you have made would be true, and you could never escape. ³It is because you did not make yourself that you need be troubled over nothing. ⁴Your gods are nothing, because your Father did not create them. ⁵You cannot make creators who are unlike your Creator, any more than He could have created a Son who was unlike Him. ⁶If creation is sharing, it cannot create what is unlike itself. ⁷It can share only what it is. ⁸Depression is isolation, and so it could not have been created.

6. Son of God, you have not sinned, but you have been much mistaken. ²Yet this can be corrected and God will help you, knowing that you could not sin against Him. ³You denied Him because you loved Him, knowing that if you recognized your love for Him, you could not deny Him. ⁴Your denial of Him therefore means that you love Him, and that you know He loves you. ⁵Remember that what you deny you must have once known. ⁶And if you accept denial, you can accept its undoing.

7. Your Father has not denied you. ²He does not retaliate, but He does call to you to return. ³When you think He has not answered your call, you have not answered His. ⁴He calls to you from every part of the Sonship, because of His Love for His Son. ⁵If you hear His message He has answered you, and you will learn of Him if you hear aright. ⁶The Love of God is in everything He created, for His Son is everywhere. ⁷Look with peace upon your brothers, and God will come rushing into your heart in gratitude for your gift to Him.

8. Do not look to the god of sickness for healing but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him. ²When you acknowledge Him you will know that He has never ceased to acknowledge you, and that in His acknowledgment of you lies your being. ³You are not sick and you cannot die. ⁴But you can confuse yourself with things that do. ⁵Remember, though, that to do this is blasphemy, for it means that you are looking without love on God and His creation, from which He cannot be separated.

9. Only the eternal can be loved, for love does not die. ²What is of God is His forever, and you are of God. ³Would He allow Himself to suffer? ⁴And would He offer His Son anything that is not acceptable to Him? ⁵If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. ⁶Yet to do this you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. ⁷This is not because you will be punished otherwise. ⁸It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father is the acknowledgment of yourself as you are. ⁹Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain and wholly without suffering of any kind. ¹⁰If you deny Him you bring sin, pain and suffering into your own mind because of the power He gave it. ¹¹Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also deny what it creates because it is free.

10. You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His Love, would not have it so. ²Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free. ³To interfere with you would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane. ⁴When you deny Him you are insane. ⁵Would you have Him share your insanity? ⁶God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. ⁷That was the condition of His Son’s creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. ⁸To know that is sanity. ⁹To deny it is insanity. ¹⁰God gave Himself to you in your creation, and His gifts are eternal. ¹¹Would you deny yourself to Him?

11. Out of your gifts to Him the Kingdom will be restored to His Son. ²His Son removed himself from His gift by refusing to accept what had been created for him, and what he had created in the Name of his Father. ³Heaven waits for his return, for it was created as the dwelling place of God’s Son. ⁴You are not at home anywhere else, or in any other condition. ⁵Do not deny yourself the joy that was created for you for the misery you have made for yourself. ⁶God has given you the means for undoing what you have made. ⁷Listen, and you will learn how to remember what you are.

12. If God knows His children as wholly sinless, it is blasphemous to perceive them as guilty. ²If God knows His children as wholly without pain, it is blasphemous to perceive suffering anywhere. ³If God knows His children to be wholly joyous, it is blasphemous to feel depressed. ⁴All of these illusions, and the many other forms that blasphemy may take, are refusals to accept creation as it is. ⁵If God created His Son perfect, that is how you must learn to see him to learn of his reality. ⁶And as part of the Sonship, that is how you must see yourself to learn of yours.

13. Do not perceive anything God did not create or you are denying Him. ²His is the only Fatherhood, and it is yours only because He has given it to you. ³Your gifts to yourself are meaningless, but your gifts to your creations are like His, because they are given in His Name. ⁴That is why your creations are as real as His. ⁵Yet the real Fatherhood must be acknowledged if the real Son is to be known. ⁶You believe that the sick things you have made are your real creations, because you believe that the sick images you perceive are the Sons of God. ⁷Only if you accept the Fatherhood of God will you have anything, because His Fatherhood gave you everything. ⁸That is why to deny Him is to deny yourself.

14. Arrogance is the denial of love, because love shares and arrogance withholds. ²As long as both appear to you to be desirable the concept of choice, which is not of God, will remain with you. ³While this is not true in eternity it is true in time, so that while time lasts in your mind there will be choices. ⁴Time itself is your choice. ⁵If you would remember eternity, you must look only on the eternal. ⁶If you allow yourself to become preoccupied with the temporal, you are living in time. ⁷As always, your choice is determined by what you value. ⁸Time and eternity cannot both be real, because they contradict each other. ⁹If you will accept only what is timeless as real, you will begin to understand eternity and make it yours.