1. The introduction of reason into the ego’s thought system is the beginning of its undoing, for reason and the ego are contradictory. ²Nor is it possible for them to coexist in your awareness. ³For reason’s goal is to make plain, and therefore obvious. ⁴You can see reason. ⁵This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. ⁶Vision is sense, quite literally. ⁷If it is not the body’s sight, it must be understood. ⁸For it is plain, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. ⁹It can be understood. ¹⁰And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their separate ways.

2. The ego’s whole continuance depends on its belief you cannot learn this course. ²Share this belief, and reason will be unable to see your errors and make way for their correction. ³For reason sees through errors, telling you what you thought was real is not. ⁴Reason can see the difference between sin and mistakes, because it wants correction. ⁵Therefore, it tells you what you thought was uncorrectable can be corrected, and thus it must have been an error. ⁶The ego’s opposition to correction leads to its fixed belief in sin and disregard of errors. ⁷It looks on nothing that can be corrected. ⁸Thus does the ego damn, and reason save.

3. Reason is not salvation in itself, but it makes way for peace and brings you to a state of mind in which salvation can be given you. ²Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. ³No one who looks on it without the help of reason would try to pass it. ⁴The body’s eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. ⁵Yet reason sees through it easily, because it is an error. ⁶The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason’s eyes.

4. Only the form of error attracts the ego. ²Meaning it does not recognize, and does not see if it is there or not. ³Everything the body’s eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole without the meaning that the whole would give. ⁴And yet mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected. ⁵Sin is but error in a special form the ego venerates. ⁶It would preserve all errors and make them sins. ⁷For here is its own stability, its heavy anchor in the shifting world it made; the rock on which its church is built, and where its worshippers are bound to bodies, believing the body’s freedom is their own.

5. Reason will tell you that the form of error is not what makes it a mistake. ²If what the form conceals is a mistake, the form cannot prevent correction. ³The body’s eyes see only form. ⁴They cannot see beyond what they were made to see. ⁵And they were made to look on error and not see past it. ⁶Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. ⁷To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. ⁸Yet how can sight that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? ⁹It is held back by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived.

6. These eyes, made not to see, will never see. ²For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. ³What was its maker’s goal but not to see? ⁴For this the body’s eyes are perfect means, but not for seeing. ⁵See how the body’s eyes rest on externals and cannot go beyond. ⁶Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning. ⁷Nothing so blinding as perception of form. ⁸For sight of form means understanding has been obscured.

7. Only mistakes have different forms, and so they can deceive. ²You can change form because it is not true. ³It could not be reality because it can be changed. ⁴Reason will tell you that if form is not reality it must be an illusion, and is not there to see. ⁵And if you see it you must be mistaken, for you are seeing what can not be real as if it were. ⁶What cannot see beyond what is not there must be distorted perception, and must perceive illusions as the truth. ⁷Could it, then, recognize the truth?

8. Let not the form of his mistakes keep you from him whose holiness is yours. ²Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body’s eyes can see. ³Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins and of his body. ⁴What is there in him that you would attack except what you associate with his body, which you believe can sin? ⁵Beyond his errors is his holiness and your salvation. ⁶You gave him not his holiness, but tried to see your sins in him to save yourself. ⁷And yet, his holiness is your forgiveness. ⁸Can you be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness is your salvation?

9. A holy relationship, however newly born, must value holiness above all else. ²Unholy values will produce confusion, and in awareness. ³In an unholy relationship, each one is valued because he seems to justify the other’s sin. ⁴Each sees within the other what impels him to sin against his will. ⁵And thus he lays his sins upon the other, and is attracted to him to perpetuate his sins. ⁶And so it must become impossible for each to see himself as causing sin by his desire to have sin real. ⁷Yet reason sees a holy relationship as what it is; a common state of mind, where both give errors gladly to correction, that both may happily be healed as one.