LESSON 131 No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.

1. 1Failure is all about you while you seek for goals that cannot be achieved. 2You look for permanence in the impermanent, for love where there is none, for safety in the midst of danger; immortal­ity within the darkness of the dream of death. 3Who could succeed where contradiction is the setting of his searching, and the place to which he comes to find stability?

2. 1Goals that are meaningless are not attained. 2There is no way to reach them, for the means by which you strive for them are meaningless as they are. 3Who can use such senseless means, and hope through them to gain in anything? 4Where can they lead? 5And what could they achieve that offers any hope of being real? 6Pursuit of the imagined leads to death because it is the search for nothingness, and while you seek for life you ask for death. 7You look for safety and security, while in your heart you pray for danger and protection for the little dream you made.

3. 1Yet searching is inevitable here. 2For this you came, and you will surely do the thing you came for. 3But the world can not dictate the goal for which you search, unless you give it power to do so. 4Otherwise, you still are free to choose a goal that lies beyond the world and every worldly thought, and one that comes to you from an idea relinquished yet remembered, old yet new; an echo of a heritage forgot, yet holding everything you really want.

4. 1Be glad that search you must. 2Be glad as well to learn you search for Heaven, and must find the goal you really want. 3No one can fail to want this goal and reach it in the end. 4God’s Son can not seek vainly, though he try to force delay, deceive himself and think that it is hell he seeks. 5When he is wrong, he finds correction. 6When he wanders off, he is led back to his ap­pointed task.

5. 1No one remains in hell, for no one can abandon his Creator, nor affect His perfect, timeless and unchanging Love. 2You will find Heaven. 3Everything you seek but this will fall away. 4Yet not because it has been taken from you. 5It will go because you do not want it. 6You will reach the goal you really want as certainly as God created you in sinlessness.

6. 1Why wait for Heaven? 2It is here today. 3Time is the great illusion it is past or in the future. 4Yet this cannot be, if it is where God wills His Son to be. 5How could the Will of God be in the past, or yet to happen? 6What He wills is now, without a past and wholly futureless. 7It is as far removed from time as is a tiny candle from a distant star, or what you chose from what you re­ally want.

7. 1Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. 2God made no contradictions. 3What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. 4He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad ef­fect of one, and earth the other’s sorry outcome which is Heaven’s opposite in every way.

8. 1God does not suffer conflict. 2Nor is His creation split in two. 3How could it be His Son could be in hell, when God Himself established him in Heaven? 4Could he lose what the Eternal Will has given him to be his home forever? 5Let us not try longer to impose an alien will upon God’s single purpose. 6He is here because He wills to be, and what He wills is present now, beyond the reach of time.

9. 1Today we will not choose a paradox in place of truth. 2How could the Son of God make time to take away the Will of God? 3He thus denies himself, and contradicts what has no opposite. 4He thinks he made a hell opposing Heaven, and believes that he abides in what does not exist, while Heaven is the place he cannot find.

10. 1Leave foolish thoughts like these behind today, and turn your mind to true ideas instead. 2No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth, and it is truth we seek to reach today. 3We will devote ten minutes to this goal three times today, and we will ask to see the rising of the real world to replace the foolish images that we hold dear, with true ideas arising in the place of thoughts that have no meaning, no effect, and neither source nor substance in the truth.

11. 1This we acknowledge as we start upon our practice periods. 2Begin with this:

3I ask to see a different world, and think a different kind of thought from those I made. 4The world I seek I did not make alone, the thoughts I want to think are not my own.

5For several minutes watch your mind and see, although your eyes are closed, the senseless world you think is real. 6Review the thoughts as well which are compatible with such a world, and which you think are true. 7Then let them go, and sink below them to the holy place where they can enter not. 8There is a door beneath them in your mind, which you could not completely lock to hide what lies beyond.

12. 1Seek for that door and find it. 2But before you try to open it, remind yourself no one can fail who seeks to reach the truth. 3And it is this request you make today. 4Nothing but this has any meaning now; no other goal is valued now nor sought, nothing before this door you really want, and only what lies past it do you seek.

13. 1Put out your hand, and see how easily the door swings open with your one intent to go beyond it. 2Angels light the way, so that all darkness vanishes, and you are standing in a light so bright and clear that you can understand all things you see. 3A tiny moment of surprise, perhaps, will make you pause before you realize the world you see before you in the light reflects the truth you knew, and did not quite forget in wandering away in dreams.

14. 1You cannot fail today. 2There walks with you the Spirit Heaven sent you, that you might approach this door some day, and through His aid slip effortlessly past it, to the light. 3Today that day has come. 4Today God keeps His ancient promise to His holy Son, as does His Son remember his to Him. 5This is a day of gladness, for we come to the appointed time and place where you will find the goal of all your searching here, and all the seek­ing of the world, which end together as you pass beyond the door.

15. 1Remember often that today should be a time of special gladness, and refrain from dismal thoughts and meaningless laments. 2Salvation’s time has come. 3Today is set by Heaven itself to be a time of grace for you and for the world. 4If you forget this happy fact, remind yourself with this:

5Today I seek and find all that I want.

6My single purpose offers it to me.

7No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.