LESSON 152 The power of decision is my own.

1. 1No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. 2No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. 3No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the out­comes that he wants. 4And no one dies without his own consent. 5Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. 6Here is your world, complete in all details. 7Here is its whole reality for you. 8And it is only here salvation is.

2. 1You may believe that this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. 2Yet can truth have exceptions? 3If you have the gift of everything, can loss be real? 4Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? 5Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where love and perfect holiness abide? 6Truth must be all-inclusive, if it be the truth at all. 7Accept no opposites and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely.

3. 1Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true, and nothing else is true. 2This you have heard before, but may not yet accept both parts of it. 3Without the first, the second has no meaning. 4But without the second, is the first no longer true. 5Truth cannot have an opposite. 6This can not be too often said and thought about. 7For if what is not true is true as well as what is true, then part of truth is false. 8And truth has lost its meaning. 9Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false.

4. 1This is the simplest of distinctions, yet the most obscure. 2But not because it is a difficult distinction to perceive. 3It is concealed behind a vast array of choices that do not appear to be entirely your own. 4And thus the truth appears to have some aspects that belie consistency, but do not seem to be but contradictions introduced by you.

5. 1As God created you, you must remain unchangeable, with transitory states by definition false. 2And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in conditions of the body and the mind; in all awareness and in all response. 3This is the all-inclusiveness which sets the truth apart from falsehood, and the false kept separate from the truth, as what it is.

6. 1Is it not strange that you believe to think you made the world you see is arrogance? 2God made it not. 3Of this you can be sure. 4What can He know of the ephemeral, the sinful and the guilty, the afraid, the suffering and lonely, and the mind that lives within a body that must die? 5You but accuse Him of insanity, to think He made a world where such things seem to have reality. 6He is not mad. 7Yet only madness makes a world like this.

7. 1To think that God made chaos, contradicts His Will, invented opposites to truth, and suffers death to triumph over life; all this is arrogance. 2Humility would see at once these things are not of Him. 3And can you see what God created not? 4To think you can is merely to believe you can perceive what God willed not to be. 5And what could be more arrogant than this?

8. 1Let us today be truly humble, and accept what we have made as what it is. 2The power of decision is our own. 3Decide but to accept your rightful place as co-creator of the universe, and all you think you made will disappear. 4What rises to awareness then will be all that there ever was, eternally as it is now. 5And it will take the place of self-deceptions made but to usurp the altar to the Father and the Son.

9. 1Today we practice true humility, abandoning the false pretense by which the ego seeks to prove it arrogant. 2Only the ego can be arrogant. 3But truth is humble in acknowledging its mightiness, its changelessness and its eternal wholeness, all-encompassing, God’s perfect gift to His beloved Son. 4We lay aside the arrogance which says that we are sinners, guilty and afraid, ashamed of what we are; and lift our hearts in true humility instead to Him Who has created us immaculate, like to Himself in power and in love.

10. 1The power of decision is our own. 2And we accept of Him that which we are, and humbly recognize the Son of God. 3To recog­nize God’s Son implies as well that all self-concepts have been laid aside, and recognized as false. 4Their arrogance has been per­ceived. 5And in humility the radiance of God’s Son, his gentle­ness, his perfect sinlessness, his Father’s Love, his right to Heaven and release from hell, are joyously accepted as our own.

11. 1Now do we join in glad acknowledgment that lies are false, and only truth is true. 2We think of truth alone as we arise, and spend five minutes practicing its ways, encouraging our fright­ened minds with this:

3The power of decision is my own. 4This day I will accept myself as what my Father’s Will created me to be.

5Then will we wait in silence, giving up all self-deceptions, as we humbly ask our Self that He reveal Himself to us. 6And He Who never left will come again to our awareness, grateful to restore His home to God, as it was meant to be.

12. 1In patience wait for Him throughout the day, and hourly invite Him with the words with which the day began, concluding it with this same invitation to your Self. 2God’s Voice will answer, for He speaks for you and for your Father. 3He will substitute the peace of God for all your frantic thoughts, the truth of God for self-deceptions, and God’s Son for your illusions of yourself.