THE  GREAT  AWAKENING

 PART I

CHAPTER 6

Sin is the belief that what was so before has been made different.  To sin would be to violate Reality and to succeed.  Sin is the proclamation that attack is real and guilt is justified.  It assumes that the Son of God is guilty, and has thus succeeded in losing his Innocence and making himself what God created not.  Thus is creation seen as not eternal.

Your disordered mind thinks that you are guilty.  In the dream, sin is not seen as error but truth, and it is Innocence that would deceive.  Purity is seen as arrogance, and the acceptance of the self as sinful is perceived as holiness.  And it is this doctrine that replaces the Reality of the Son of God as his Father Created Him and willed that he be forever.  Is this humility?  Or, is it, rather an attempt to wrest creation away from Truth, and keep it separate?

The Son of God can be mistaken; he can deceive himself; he can even turn the power of his mind against himself.  But he cannot sin.  There is nothing he can do that would really change his Reality in any way, nor make him really guilty.  The Immortal cannot die.  It is impossible.  Can God lose His Own Certainty?  Can God learn how not to be God?  Death is the "enemy" of Life and in the dream, its dark shadow falls across all living things.  And yet a shadow cannot kill.  In the dream is sin, and guilt, and death, in opposition to Life, and Innocence, and to the Will of God Himself.

Does not a world that seems quite real arise in dreams?  Dreams are your protest against Reality, and your fixed idea that you can change it.  The Son of God could never sin, but he can wish for what would hurt him.  And he has the power to think he can be hurt.  What could this be but a misperception of himself?  Is this a sin or a mistake, forgivable or not?  Does he need help, or condemnation?  Is it your purpose that he be saved, or damned?

You are the dreamer of the world of dreams.  No other cause it has, nor ever will.  You made but one mistake.  The substitution of illusion for Truth; of fragmentation for Wholeness.  That one error, which brought Truth to illusion, Infinity to time, and Life to death, was all you ever made.  Your whole world rests upon it.  Yet it is nothing more than the Son of God's mad revolt against what must forever be.  And God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them.  He knows of neither sin, nor its results.

The world is not left by death, but by Truth, and Truth can be known by all those for whom the Kingdom was created, and for whom it waits.  The impossible can happen only in fantasy.  Fairy tales can be pleasant or fearful, but no one calls them true.  Children may believe in them, and so, for a while, the tales are true for them.  Yet when Reality dawns, the fantasies are gone.  Reality has not gone in the meantime.  Reality belongs to everyone and God, and is perfectly satisfying to all of us.