1. Are thoughts, then, dangerous? ²To bodies, yes! ³The thoughts that seem to kill are those that teach the thinker that he can be killed. ⁴And so he “dies” because of what he learned. ⁵He goes from life to death, the final proof he valued the inconstant more than constancy. ⁶Surely he thought he wanted happiness. ⁷Yet he did not desire it because it was the truth, and therefore must be constant.

2. The constancy of joy is a condition quite alien to your understanding. ²Yet if you could even imagine what it must be, you would desire it although you understand it not. ³The constancy of happiness has no exceptions; no change of any kind. ⁴It is unshakable as is the Love of God for His creation. ⁵Sure in its vision as its Creator is in what He knows, happiness looks on everything and sees it is the same. ⁶It sees not the ephemeral, for it desires everything be like itself, and sees it so. ⁷Nothing has power to confound its constancy, because its own desire cannot be shaken. ⁸It comes as surely unto those who see the final question is necessary to the rest, as peace must come to those who choose to heal and not to judge.

3. Reason will tell you that you cannot ask for happiness inconstantly. ²For if what you desire you receive, and happiness is constant, then you need ask for it but once to have it always. ³And if you do not have it always, being what it is, you did not ask for it. ⁴For no one fails to ask for his desire of something he believes holds out some promise of the power of giving it. ⁵He may be wrong in what he asks, where, and of what. ⁶Yet he will ask because desire is a request, an asking for, and made by one whom God Himself will never fail to answer. ⁷God has already given all that he really wants. ⁸Yet what he is uncertain of, God cannot give. ⁹For he does not desire it while he remains uncertain, and God’s giving must be incomplete unless it is received.

4. You who complete God’s Will and are His happiness, whose will is powerful as His, a power that is not lost in your illusions, think carefully why you have not yet decided how you would answer the final question. ²Your answer to the others has made it possible to help you be already partly sane. ³And yet it is the final one that really asks if you are willing to be wholly sane.

5. What is the holy instant but God’s appeal to you to recognize what He has given you? ²Here is the great appeal to reason; the awareness of what is always there to see, the happiness that could be always yours. ³Here is the constant peace you could experience forever. ⁴Here is what denial has denied revealed to you. ⁵For here the final question is already answered, and what you ask for given. ⁶Here is the future now, for time is powerless because of your desire for what will never change. ⁷For you have asked that nothing stand between the holiness of your relationship and your awareness of its holiness.