IV. The Fear to Look Within

T-21.IV.1. The Holy Spirit will never teach you that you are sinful. 2 Errors He will correct, but this makes no one fearful. 3 You are indeed afraid to look within and see the sin you think is there. 4 This you would not be fearful to admit. 5 Fear in association with sin the ego deems quite appropriate, and smiles approvingly. 6 It has no fear to let you feel ashamed. 7 It doubts not your belief and faith in sin. 8 Its temples do not shake because of this. 9 Your faith that sin is there but witnesses to your desire that it be there to see. 10 This merely seems to be the source of fear.

T-21.IV.2. Remember that the ego is not alone. 2 Its rule is tempered, and its unknown "enemy," Whom it cannot even see, it fears. 3 Loudly the ego tells you not to look inward, for if you do your eyes will light on sin, and God will strike you blind. 4 This you believe, and so you do not look. 5 Yet this is not the ego's hidden fear, nor yours who serve it. 6 Loudly indeed the ego claims it is; too loudly and too often. 7 For underneath this constant shout and frantic proclamation, the ego is not certain it is so. 8 Beneath your fear to look within because of sin is yet another fear, and one which makes the ego tremble.

T-21.IV.3. What if you looked within and saw no sin? 2 This "fearful" question is one the ego never asks. 3 And you who ask it now are threatening the ego's whole defensive system too seriously for it to bother to pretend it is your friend. 4 Those who have joined their brothers have detached themselves from their belief that their identity lies in the ego. 5 A holy relationship is one in which you join with what is part of you in truth. 6 And your belief in sin has been already shaken, nor are you now entirely unwilling to look within and see it not.

T-21.IV.4. Your liberation still is only partial; still limited and incomplete, yet born within you. 2 Not wholly mad, you have been willing to look on much of your insanity and recognize its madness. 3 Your faith is moving inward, past insanity and on to reason. 4 And what your reason tells you now the ego would not hear. 5 The Holy Spirit's purpose was accepted by the part of your mind the ego knows not of. 6 No more did you. 7 And yet this part, with which you now identify, is not afraid to look upon itself. 8 It knows no sin. 9 How, otherwise, could it have been willing to see the Holy Spirit's purpose as its own?

T-21.IV.5. This part has seen your brother, and recognized him perfectly since time began. 2 And it desired nothing but to join with him and to be free again, as once it was. 3 It has been waiting for the birth of freedom; the acceptance of release to come to you. 4 And now you recognize that it was not the ego that joined the Holy Spirit's purpose, and so there must be something else. 5 Think not that this is madness. 6 For this your reason tells you, and it follows perfectly from what you have already learned.

T-21.IV.6. There is no inconsistency in what the Holy Spirit teaches. 2 This is the reasoning of the sane. 3 You have perceived the ego's madness, and not been made afraid because you did not choose to share in it. 4 At times it still deceives you. 5 Yet in your saner moments, its ranting strikes no terror in your heart. 6 For you have realized that all the gifts it would withdraw from you, in rage at your "presumptuous" wish to look within, you do not want. 7 A few remaining trinkets still seem to shine and catch your eye. 8 Yet you would not "sell" Heaven to have them.

T-21.IV.7. And now the ego is afraid. 2 Yet what it hears in terror, the other part hears as the sweetest music; the song it longed to hear since first the ego came into your mind. 3 The ego's weakness is its strength. 4 The song of freedom, which sings the praises of another world, brings to it hope of peace. 5 For it remembers Heaven, and now it sees that Heaven has come to earth at last, from which the ego's rule has kept it out so long. 6 Heaven has come because it found a home in your relationship on earth. 7 And earth can hold no longer what has been given Heaven as its own.

T-21.IV.8. Look gently on your brother, and remember the ego's weakness is revealed in both your sight. 2 What it would keep apart has met and joined, and looks upon the ego unafraid. 3 Little child, innocent of sin, follow in gladness the way to certainty. 4 Be not held back by fear's insane insistence that sureness lies in doubt. 5 This has no meaning. 6 What matters it to you how loudly it is proclaimed? 7 The senseless is not made meaningful by repetition and by clamor. 8 The quiet way is open. 9 Follow it happily, and question not what must be so.