VIII. The Inner Shift

T-21.VIII.1. Are thoughts, then, dangerous? 2 To bodies, yes! 3 The thoughts that seem to kill are those that teach the thinker that he can be killed. 4 And so he "dies" because of what he learned. 5 He goes from life to death, the final proof he valued the inconstant more than constancy. 6 Surely he thought he wanted happiness. 7 Yet he did not desire it because it was the truth, and therefore must be constant.

T-21.VIII.2. The constancy of joy is a condition quite alien to your understanding. 2 Yet if you could even imagine what it must be, you would desire it although you understand it not. 3 The constancy of happiness has no exceptions; no change of any kind. 4 It is unshakable as is the Love of God for His creation. 5 Sure in its vision as its Creator is in what He knows, happiness looks on everything and sees it is the same. 6 It sees not the ephemeral, for it desires everything be like itself, and sees it so. 7 Nothing has power to confound its constancy, because its own desire cannot be shaken. 8 It comes as surely unto those who see the final question is necessary to the rest, as peace must come to those who choose to heal and not to judge.

T-21.VIII.3. Reason will tell you that you cannot ask for happiness inconstantly. 2 For if what you desire you receive, and happiness is constant, then you need ask for it but once to have it always. 3 And if you do not have it always, being what it is, you did not ask for it. 4 For no one fails to ask for his desire of something he believes holds out some promise of the power of giving it. 5 He may be wrong in what he asks, where, and of what. 6 Yet he will ask because desire is a request, an asking for, and made by one whom God Himself will never fail to answer. 7 God has already given all that he really wants. 8 Yet what he is uncertain of, God cannot give. 9 For he does not desire it while he remains uncertain, and God's giving must be incomplete unless it is received.

T-21.VIII.4. You who complete God's Will and are His happiness, whose will is powerful as His, a power that is not lost in your illusions, think carefully why you have not yet decided how you would answer the final question. 2 Your answer to the others has made it possible to help you be already partly sane. 3 And yet it is the final one that really asks if you are willing to be wholly sane.

T-21.VIII.5. What is the holy instant but God's appeal to you to recognize what He has given you? 2 Here is the great appeal to reason; the awareness of what is always there to see, the happiness that could be always yours. 3 Here is the constant peace you could experience forever. 4 Here is what denial has denied revealed to you. 5 For here the final question is already answered, and what you ask for given. 6 Here is the future now, for time is powerless because of your desire for what will never change. 7 For you have asked that nothing stand between the holiness of your relationship and your awareness of its holiness.