1. Perception selects, and makes the world you see. ²It literally picks it out as the mind directs. ³The laws of size and shape and brightness would hold, perhaps, if other things were equal. ⁴They are not equal. ⁵For what you look for you are far more likely to discover than what you would prefer to overlook. ⁶The still, small Voice for God is not drowned out by all the ego’s raucous screams and senseless ravings to those who want to hear It. ⁷Perception is a choice and not a fact. ⁸But on this choice depends far more than you may realize as yet. ⁹For on the voice you choose to hear, and on the sights you choose to see, depends entirely your whole belief in what you are. ¹⁰Perception is a witness but to this, and never to reality. ¹¹Yet it can show you the conditions in which awareness of reality is possible, or those where it could never be.

2. Reality needs no cooperation from you to be itself. ²But your awareness of it needs your help, because it is your choice. ³Listen to what the ego says, and see what it directs you see, and it is sure that you will see yourself as tiny, vulnerable and afraid. ⁴You will experience depression, a sense of worthlessness, and feelings of impermanence and unreality. ⁵You will believe that you are helpless prey to forces far beyond your own control, and far more powerful than you. ⁶And you will think the world you made directs your destiny. ⁷For this will be your faith. ⁸But never believe because it is your faith it makes reality.

3. There is another vision and another Voice in which your freedom lies, awaiting but your choice. ²And if you place your faith in Them, you will perceive another self in you. ³This other self sees miracles as natural. ⁴They are as simple and as natural to it as breathing to the body. ⁵They are the obvious response to calls for help, the only one it makes. ⁶Miracles seem unnatural to the ego because it does not understand how separate minds can influence each other. ⁷Nor could they do so. ⁸But minds cannot be separate. ⁹This other self is perfectly aware of this. ¹⁰And thus it recognizes that miracles do not affect another’s mind, only its own. ¹¹They always change your mind. ¹²There is no other.

4. You do not realize the whole extent to which the idea of separation has interfered with reason. ²Reason lies in the other self you have cut off from your awareness. ³And nothing you have allowed to stay in your awareness is capable of reason. ⁴How can the segment of the mind devoid of reason understand what reason is, or grasp the information it would give? ⁵All sorts of questions may arise in it, but if the basic question stems from reason, it will not ask it. ⁶Like all that stems from reason, the basic question is obvious, simple and remains unasked. ⁷But think not reason could not answer it.

5. God’s plan for your salvation could not have been established without your will and your consent. ²It must have been accepted by the Son of God, for what God wills for him he must receive. ³For God wills not apart from him, nor does the Will of God wait upon time to be accomplished. ⁴Therefore, what joined the Will of God must be in you now, being eternal. ⁵You must have set aside a place in which the Holy Spirit can abide, and where He is. ⁶He must have been there since the need for Him arose, and was fulfilled in the same instant. ⁷Such would your reason tell you, if you listened. ⁸Yet such is clearly not the ego’s reasoning. ⁹Your reason’s alien nature to the ego is proof you will not find the answer there. ¹⁰Yet if it must be so, it must exist. ¹¹And if it exists for you, and has your freedom as the purpose given it, you must be free to find it.

6. God’s plan is simple; never circular and never self-defeating. ²He has no Thoughts except the Self-extending, and in this your will must be included. ³Thus, there must be a part of you that knows His Will and shares it. ⁴It is not meaningful to ask if what must be is so. ⁵But it is meaningful to ask why you are unaware of what is so, for this must have an answer if the plan of God for your salvation is complete. ⁶And it must be complete, because its Source knows not of incompletion.

7. Where would the answer be but in the Source? ²And where are you but there, where this same answer is? ³Your Identity, as much a true Effect of this same Source as is the answer, must therefore be together and the same. ⁴O yes, you know this, and more than this alone. ⁵Yet any part of knowledge threatens dissociation as much as all of it. ⁶And all of it will come with any part. ⁷Here is the part you can accept. ⁸What reason points to you can see, because the witnesses on its behalf are clear. ⁹Only the totally insane can disregard them, and you have gone past this. ¹⁰Reason is a means that serves the Holy Spirit’s purpose in its own right. ¹¹It is not reinterpreted and redirected from the goal of sin, as are the others. ¹²For reason is beyond the ego’s range of means.

8. Faith and perception and belief can be misplaced, and serve the great deceiver’s needs as well as truth. ²But reason has no place at all in madness, nor can it be adjusted to fit its end. ³Faith and belief are strong in madness, guiding perception toward what the mind has valued. ⁴But reason enters not at all in this. ⁵For the perception would fall away at once, if reason were applied. ⁶There is no reason in insanity, for it depends entirely on reason’s absence. ⁷The ego never uses it, because it does not realize that it exists. ⁸The partially insane have access to it, and only they have need of it. ⁹Knowledge does not depend on it, and madness keeps it out.

9. The part of mind where reason lies was dedicated, by your will in union with your Father’s, to the undoing of insanity. ²Here was the Holy Spirit’s purpose accepted and accomplished, both at once. ³Reason is alien to insanity, and those who use it have gained a means which cannot be applied to sin. ⁴Knowledge is far beyond attainment of any kind. ⁵But reason can serve to open doors you closed against it.

10. You have come very close to this. ²Faith and belief have shifted, and you have asked the question the ego will never ask. ³Does not your reason tell you now the question must have come from something that you do not know, but must belong to you? ⁴Faith and belief, upheld by reason, cannot fail to lead to changed perception. ⁵And in this change is room made way for vision. ⁶Vision extends beyond itself, as does the purpose that it serves, and all the means for its accomplishment.