The title for this article is adapted from an 1804 letter Beethoven wrote to his childhood friend, Stephen von Bruening, after an argument had driven them apart. (1) It echoes what Jesus says to us on every page of A Course in Miracles . Indeed, one could say that his purpose in the Course is to have us -- once and for all -- choose against the ego thought system of separation and judgment that has kept us so divided from each other; a division that has existed since the beginning of time, and will end only when time has “cease(d) to seem to be” (M-14.2:12).

It is this need to keep ourselves separate from others, even our closest friends and family, that reinforces and preserves our belief that the separated identity we seemingly stole from God is real. Moreover, it is our guilt over this self-perceived sin that ensures that this belief can never be looked at and chosen against, for guilt roots us firmly in the ego's mindless world of time, from which there is no apparent escape. Thus what temporarily seemed to come between us and our Source has become a quasi-permanent reality, held firmly in place by guilt and nourished by the special relationships in our lives.

The Blinding Barrier of Guilt

If we had to choose one word to encapsulate the ego thought system, guilt would perhaps head the list. It looks back to our past sin, being the emotional response to that belief, at the same time it looks forward to a future filled with dread of God's wrathful punishment for such sin. Guilt, therefore, divides us from God and from each other, and roots us solidly in a world of time -- a sinful past, a guilt-laden present, and a fearful future:

The ego invests heavily in the past, and in the end believes that the past is the only aspect of time that is meaningful.…its emphasis on guilt enables it to ensure its continuity by making the future like the past, and thus avoiding the present. By the notion of paying for the past in the future, the past becomes the determiner of the future, making them continuous without an intervening present (T-13.IV.4:2-4).

Moreover, guilt blinds us to the truth of the Atonement, at the same time, through projection, blinding us to the mind in general by rooting us in the mindless world of bodies, a most effective shield that prevents us from recognizing the inherent unreality of the ego's thought system of sin, guilt, and fear:

Guilt makes you blind, for while you see one spot of guilt within you, you will not see the light. And by projecting it the world seems dark, and shrouded in your guilt. You throw a dark veil over it, and cannot see it because you cannot look within. You are afraid of what you would see there, but it is not there. The thing you fear is gone. If you would look within you would see only the Atonement, shining in quiet and in peace upon the altar to your Father (T-13.IX.7).

And so we choose to preserve our belief in guilt, and therefore in our separated self, by projecting it onto others, perceiving them as the hated sinners while we no longer have awareness of our self-accusations, the searing hatred of ourselves for what we believe we did to God and His perfect Love. Inevitably, then, we seek objects in our world to project onto, hating them so that God would not hate us for our believed attacks on Him and His Son. We should never underestimate the intense need in all of us to protect our guilt by attacking others, and it is this vicious dynamic of projection that literally makes our world go round and round and round, seemingly forever:

Hate is specific. There must be a thing to be attacked. An enemy must be perceived in such a form he can be touched and seen and heard, and ultimately killed.… Who sees a brother as a body sees him as fear's symbol. And he will attack, because what he beholds is his own fear external to himself, poised to attack, and howling to unite with him again. Mistake not the intensity of rage projected fear must spawn. It shrieks in wrath, and claws the air in frantic hope it can reach to its maker and devour him (W-pI.161.7:1-3; 8).

We all therefore walk the earth looking for people, objects, or causes to be upset about. Without enemies out there -- our special love and hate partners -- we would be forced to confront our own personal enemy, the guilt that our minds chose over Christ's innocence, our true Identity. These attack thoughts can be minor or major, but their relative intensity is irrelevant. As long as we believe we can be affected by something external to us, we are making the ego's dualistic thought system real, giving power to illusions and rendering illusory the truth of Heaven's perfect Oneness. Thus we read from two passages, from the workbook and manual for teachers:

…anger may take the form of any reaction ranging from mild irritation to rage. The degree of the emotion you experience does not matter.…a slight twinge of annoyance is nothing but a veil drawn over intense fury .… It does not matter. All of these reactions are the same. They obscure the truth, and this can never be a matter of degree. Either truth is apparent, or it is not. It cannot be partially recognized. Who is unaware of truth must look upon illusions (W-pI.21:3-5; M-17.4.6-11).

Since our ego's goal is to obscure the truth of the mind's decision to attack and supplant Heaven's truth, we exist in a world in which we are blinded by guilt to the light that shines in each of us: the light of Christ -- the Great Rays -- is perfectly unified. This blindness is supported, for the people in our lives are blinded by the same guilt, the same need to protect the guilt through projection, and the same pledge to sustain our mutually separated states by preserving guilt in our special relationships.

The Secret Vow

We each come into the world having uttered a secret vow to all the relationships that comprise our worldly experience: the families into which we are born, our circle of friends, our work associates, our lovers, spouses, children, etc. To each we solemnly pledge to uphold the hidden “truths” of separation and specialness that would forever come between us, thus ensuring the permanency of what would forever come between us and our Source. The body is the keeper of this pledge, for by their very nature bodies demarcate the beginning and end of every seemingly separated fragment of the Sonship -- the gap that is represented by our special, differentiated selves:

The body represents the gap between the little bit of mind you call your own and all the rest of what is really yours. You hate it, yet you think it is your self, and that, without it, would your self be lost. This is the secret vow that you have made with every brother who would walk apart. This is the secret oath you take again, whenever you perceive yourself attacked. No one can suffer if he does not see himself attacked, and losing by attack. Unstated and unheard in consciousness is every pledge to sickness. Yet it is a promise to another to be hurt by him, and to attack him in return (T-28.VI.4; italics mine).

This, then, is the ego's purpose for all our relationships: the means of preserving its thought system of separation and differentiation. In a sense, therefore, each victim is matched with a victimizer, for one has no meaning without the other, which is no different from any pair of opposites in the dualistic world. As an early workbook lesson points out:

… remember that a “good world” implies a “bad” one, and a “satisfying world” implies an “unsatisfying” one (W-pI.12.3:6).

Thus do we pair off with each other, our special love and hate partners: those who abuse us or are abused by us; those we think we love and those we think love us. No matter the form, for the underlying content of upholding our secret vow is what drives all relationships in this world. This is why Jesus in his course places such emphasis on the healing of relationships. In truth, of course, the only relationship that needs healing is the mind's mistaken choice for the ego, the original and only special relationship that exists in the illusion. Yet because we have become mindless and believe that relationships exist among bodies, Jesus presents his teachings in this context -- the dualistic (or physical) condition in which we think we exist (T-25.I.7:4). This is why Jesus tells us that A Course in Miracles “remains within the ego framework, where it is needed” (C-in.3:1).

If we look openly and honestly at our past and present (or even anticipated) relationships, we can see how our lives have derived their meaning from others, beginning with our parents or parental surrogates. All these relationships, at least in part, have been characterized by the need to be unfairly treated, our secret wish. Thus Jesus urges us to “Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated” (T-26.X.4:1). Why, we may ask, such evident and patently unkind insanity, given the pain it inevitably brings us and others? The passage continues with the answer:

In this view, you seek to find an innocence that is not Theirs [God's and Christ's] but yours alone, and at the cost of someone else's guilt (T-26.X.4:2).

We need to have someone else be perceived as guilty for this is how the wrathful God of our insane fantasies is thwarted in His designs upon our sinful lives. The manual for teachers presents the situation to us, as the ego has framed it:

“You have usurped the place of God. Think not He has forgotten.”… An angry father pursues his guilty son. Kill or be killed, for here alone is choice. Beyond this there is none, for what was done cannot be done without. The stain of blood can never be removed, and anyone who bears this stain on him must meet with death (M-17.7:3-4,10-13).

Given this impossible situation in which our destruction is an imminent certainty, the ego counsels us to play a trick on God, to convince Him that His sinful Son is someone other than ourselves. And so we transfer the stain of our sin onto others, so that they will surely meet with death. Following the ego's principle of one or the other, the projected sinners will be the ones to suffer damnation and eternal punishment in hell, while we are returned to God's good graces and happily return home with Him.

Thus we all need our abusers, victimizers, and enemies, for they allow us to keep our ego's cake of separation and enjoy it, too, without the sin and guilt that would poison the pleasure of our “justified” attack thoughts. Being fragments of the original ego thought system of sin, guilt, and projection, we all play the same murderous game of specialness with each other, ever- faithful to the solemn and secret vow to uphold the thought of separation that gave us existence. Unkindness, therefore, becomes the ego's means of sustaining its life at another's expense, and therefore it eschews with a vengeance all attempts at kindness and forgiveness. This pledge to every living thing is upheld until the pain of our decision becomes intolerable. Only then, in the throes of our miserable state of existence, can we ask for the help that would shift the object of our fidelity from the ego to the Holy Spirit, from the goal of attack and murder to kindness and love.

Shifting the Goal: Attack to Kindness

Beethoven's words should be in our minds and on our lips the minute we are tempted to choose an unkind thought about someone. We need to be mindful of how seductive it is to be unkind, for that is how we maintain the separation thought that has come between us, as it came first between us and our Source. Moreover, we need to recognize the ego's hidden agenda behind our attack thoughts, for they are purposive indeed. These thoughts of judgment are the magic wands the ego waves before us when we are fearful of the loving truth that lies behind the ego's dreams of separation and specialness: the decision- making mind's mistaken choice for the ego's nightmares, the insane substitute for the reality of Heaven. Replacing the word anger for sickness, we read the following exposé of the ego's tactics:

Anger is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception.… Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret, magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them.… But afterwards, your plan requires that you must forget you made it, so it seems to be external to your own intent; a happening beyond your state of mind, an outcome with a real effect on you, instead of one effected by yourself (W-pI. 136.2:1-2; 3:1-3; 4:3; italics mine).

Recognizing the ego's goal for what it is allows us to change it; shifting from the ego's purpose for relationships of miring us still further in the slime of guilt and keeping us asleep, to Jesus' purpose of undoing our insane belief system and gently awakening us from the dreams of one or the other: one wins, another loses; one lives, another dies. Thus do we open our eyes each morning and reaffirm our goal for the day: to be kind instead of angry, to share Christ's vision of the universal sameness of God's Son in place of the ego's misperceptions of differences and separate interests. The goal we set is everything, for it determines how we will think, feel, and behave throughout the day. And so, as Jesus teaches in the text, we will practice our lessons of forgiveness very specifically in each of our relationships and in the situations within which we find ourselves, learning to generalize our goal and purpose to everything that occurs throughout our lives:

The setting of the Holy Spirit's goal is general. Now He will work with you to make it specific, for application is specific.… Therefore, it is essential at this point to use them [the Holy Spirit's guidelines] in each situation separately, until you can more safely look beyond each situation, in an understanding far broader than you now possess.

In any situation in which you are uncertain, the first thing to consider, very simply, is “What do I want to come of this? What is it for?” The clarification of the goal belongs at the beginning, for it is this which will determine the outcome.… The value of deciding in advance what you want to happen is simply that you will perceive the situation as a means to make it happen. You will therefore make every effort to overlook what interferes with the accomplishment of your objective, and concentrate on everything that helps you meet it (T-17.VI.1:4-5,7-2:1-3; 4:1-2).

The implications of this procedure are enormous, for they provide a radical shift from how the world perceives itself, wherein situations and relationships determine how we feel, not the decisions made by our minds. We are the ones who choose the goal -- forgiveness or attack, sleeping or awakening -- and this provides the psychological set for how we will perceive our world and react to it. And this is always independent of the external: content always precedes form; the exact opposite of the ego's special relationships, within which form has substituted for content, the core, for example, of every formal religion:

… love is content, and not form of any kind. The special relationship is a ritual of form, aimed at raising the form…at the expense of content. There is no meaning in the form, and there will never be. The special relationship must be recognized for what it is; a senseless ritual…the sign that form has triumphed over content, and love has lost its meaning (T- 16.V.12:1-4).

Restoring our attention to the mind's content of forgiveness, we perceive our everyday experiences as the means of attaining the goal of continuing the journey of awakening. Indeed, these experiences have no other purpose now but to be our pathway home. The forms of our lives, therefore, have no meaning other than the one given them by our decision-making minds. This then means that if we are upset for any reason by anything, it is only because we have forgotten our right-minded purpose, substituting instead the ego's purpose of preserving our self by denying the power of our minds to choose. Yet there is never any other cause for our disquiet, which is why Jesus tells us that we are never upset for the reason we think (W-pI.5). The true cause of our distress is that we shifted our goal back to the ego's need to keep us asleep and dreaming its mindless nightmares of attack, pain, and victimization. A Course in Miracles reminds us:

You recognize you want the goal. Are you not also willing to accept the means?… A purpose is attained by means, and if you want a purpose you must be willing to want the means as well. How can one be sincere and say, “I want this above all else, and yet I do not want to learn the means to get it”? (T-20.VII.2:3- 4,6-7)

The decision to maintain the barriers of separation in our relationships, therefore, is the decision not to undo the barrier between ourselves and God and return to His loving Arms. Again, one cannot be serious about the goal if one is not also serious about practicing the daily lessons of forgiveness that would help us achieve it.

The centerpoint of the mind's means is the body, for its inherent neutrality (W-pII.294), once it has been made, allows it to be either the ego's means of preserving its specialness, or the Holy Spirit's means by which we are taught the real meaning of holiness. It can be used as a furtherance of our reliance on form, thereby maintaining the guilt that has kept us separate from each other, or as an instrument that reverses the ego's projections and returns us to the mind that can choose again; the shift from form to content, from judgment to vision.

The body is the means by which the ego tries to make the unholy relationship seem real.… But the purpose here is sin. It cannot be attained but in illusion, and so the illusion of a brother as a body is quite in keeping with the purpose of unholiness. Because of this consistency, the means remain unquestioned while the end is cherished. Seeing adapts to wish, for sight is always secondary to desire. And if you see the body, you have chosen judgment and not vision (T-20. VII.5:1,3-7).

Since we are the ones who assigned the goal to the body -- ours and another's -- we are the only ones who can shift it. Choosing Jesus as our teacher instead of the ego, we accept his purpose of learning kindness instead of judgment and are willing to share his vision of the universal sameness of God's Son. This undoes the underlying thought of separation and differentiation, for it reflects Heaven's unbroken Oneness that we experience here as the fragments of God's Son sharing equally the same split mind: wrong mind, right mind, and decision maker with the power to choose between guilt and innocence, attack and forgiveness:

Lay not his guilt upon him, for his guilt lies in his secret thought that he has done this unto you. Would you, then, teach him he is right in his delusion?… See no one, then, as guilty, and you will affirm the truth of guiltlessness unto yourself. In every condemnation that you offer the Son of God lies the conviction of your own guilt. If you would have the Holy Spirit make you free of it, accept His offer of Atonement for all your brothers. For so you learn that it is true for you (T-13. IX.5:1-2; 6:1-4).

And so we look past the egos of our brothers to their yearning to be increasingly right-minded. With no guilt in our minds to distort our perception, we see them as Jesus does: their wrong-minded attack thoughts being the defense against their fear, which in turn expresses their call for the love they have denied (T-12.I.8-10). In other words, we do not take their apparent attacks on us personally, but recognize, to say it in different words, that frightened people can be vicious (T-3.I.4:2), and that fear is a defense against remembering their true, undifferentiated reality as spirit. This enables us to look on others as companions on the journey home, all sharing in the desire to remember the innocence of God's Son. Our kind forgiveness opens the door that passes through nightmares to happy dreams, and then on to the gentle awakening that returns us to the Heaven we never left:

Dream softly of your sinless brother, who unites with you in holy innocence. And from this dream the Lord of Heaven will Himself awaken His beloved Son. Dream of your brother's kindnesses instead of dwelling in your dreams on his mistakes. Select his thoughtfulness to dream about instead of counting up the hurts he gave. Forgive him his illusions, and give thanks to him for all the helpfulness he gave. And do not brush aside his many gifts because he is not perfect in your dreams (T-27.VII.15:1-6).

The kindness of our thoughts softly undoes the secret vows we made with each other, allowing the sacred vow of Heaven's unity to replace them with its gentle love, reflecting the promise we made as one Son in our creation.

The Sacred Vow

This is the sacred vow we pledged once to God, and which returns to our awareness when we forgive -- the correction for the secret vow we had made to the ego, long, long ago, before time even seemed to be:

Let this be your agreement with each one; that you be one with him and not apart. And he will keep the promise that you make with him, because it is the one that he has made to God, as God has made to him. God keeps His promises; His Son keeps his. In his creation did his Father say, “You are beloved of Me and I of you forever. Be you perfect as Myself, for you can never be apart from Me.” His Son remembers not that he replied “I will,” though in that promise he was born. Yet God reminds him of it every time he does not share a promise to be sick, but lets his mind be healed and unified. His secret vows are powerless before the Will of God, Whose promises he shares. And what he substitutes is not his will, who has made promise of himself to God (T-28.VI.6).

This vow is renewed each and every time we have a kind thought about God's Sons, regardless of their form, regardless of their history, regardless of their ego. Each thought reflects Heaven's love, perfect in its oneness, by undoing the barriers of separation and specialness that had driven apart the different aspects of God's Son. Seeing the cost to us of such a gap, we gladly choose again and undo what had temporarily come between us and our brothers. And as we do, Heaven leans down in gratitude for our great and loving gift, for if God could speak, this is what He would say to His Son: “Let there be forever undone what temporarily came between us.” Thus He asks us to open the door, behind which we had kept hidden the thoughts of separation and guilt that had seemingly shattered our inherent unity, behind which lay concealed the even more secret door that reveals the infinite space of God's eternal Love. Now at last our minds are open to the truth. Now at last we come home. Now at last we hear the words we had yearned to hear through all of time, never dreaming they would still be there for us, patiently awaiting our readiness. In His great Love, our Father says to us, in the inspiring words given at the end of Helen Schucman's prose poem, The Gifts of God:

You are My Son, and I do not forget the secret place in which I still abide, knowing you will remember. Come, My Son, open your heart and let Me shine on you, and on the world through you. You are My light and dwelling place. You speak for Me to those who have forgotten. Call them now to Me, My Son, remember now for all the world. I call in love, as you will answer Me, for this the only language that we know. Remember love, so near you cannot fail to touch its heart because it beats in you.

Do not forget. Do not forget, My child. Open the door before the hidden place, and let Me blaze upon a world made glad in sudden ecstasy. I come, I come. Behold Me. I am here for I am You; in Christ, for Christ, My Own beloved Son, the glory of the infinite, the joy of Heaven and the holy peace of earth, returned to Christ and from His hand to Me. Say now Amen, My Son, for it is done. The secret place is open now at last. Forget all things except My changeless Love. Forget all things except that I am here (The Gifts of God, p. 128).

FOOTNOTES:
1. In his original letter, Beethoven used the word “hidden” instead of “undone.” I made the substitution to keep the statement in line with A Course in Miracles, as Beethoven's word has the connotation that what is hidden is real and is still present.