PART I
LESSON 152.
The power of decision is my own.
W-152.1. No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. 2 No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. 3 No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. 4 And no one dies without his own consent. 5 Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. 6 Here is your world, complete in all details. 7 Here is its whole reality for you. 8 And it is only here salvation is.
W-152.2. You may believe that this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. 2 Yet can truth have exceptions? 3 If you have the gift of everything, can loss be real? 4 Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? 5 Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where love and perfect holiness abide? 6 Truth must be all-inclusive, if it be the truth at all. 7 Accept no opposites and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely.
W-152.3. Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true, and nothing else is true. 2 This you have heard before, but may not yet accept both parts of it. 3 Without the first, the second has no meaning. 4 But without the second, is the first no longer true. 5 Truth cannot have an opposite. 6 This can not be too often said and thought about. 7 For if what is not true is true as well as what is true, then part of truth is false. 8 And truth has lost its meaning. 9 Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false.
W-152.4. This is the simplest of distinctions, yet the most obscure. 2 But not because it is a difficult distinction to perceive. 3 It is concealed behind a vast array of choices that do not appear to be entirely your own. 4 And thus the truth appears to have some aspects that belie consistency, but do not seem to be but contradictions introduced by you.
W-152.5. As God created you, you must remain unchangeable, with transitory states by definition false. 2 And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in conditions of the body and the mind; in all awareness and in all response. 3 This is the all-inclusiveness which sets the truth apart from falsehood, and the false kept separate from the truth, as what it is.
W-152.6. Is it not strange that you believe to think you made the world you see is arrogance? 2 God made it not. 3 Of this you can be sure. 4 What 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? 5 You but accuse Him of insanity, to think He made a world where such things seem to have reality. 6 He is not mad. 7 Yet only madness makes a world like this.
W-152.7. To think that God made chaos, contradicts His Will, invented opposites to truth, and suffers death to triumph over life; all this is arrogance. 2 Humility would see at once these things are not of Him. 3 And can you see what God created not? 4 To think you can is merely to believe you can perceive what God willed not to be. 5 And what could be more arrogant than this?
W-152.8. Let us today be truly humble, and accept what we have made as what it is. 2 The power of decision is our own. 3 Decide but to accept your rightful place as co-creator of the universe, and all you think you made will disappear. 4 What rises to awareness then will be all that there ever was, eternally as it is now. 5 And it will take the place of self-deceptions made but to usurp the altar to the Father and the Son.
W-152.9. Today we practice true humility, abandoning the false pretense by which the ego seeks to prove it arrogant. 2 Only the ego can be arrogant. 3 But truth is humble in acknowledging its mightiness, its changelessness and its eternal wholeness, all-encompassing, God's perfect gift to His beloved Son. 4 We 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.
W-152.10. The power of decision is our own. 2 And we accept of Him that which we are, and humbly recognize the Son of God. 3 To recognize God's Son implies as well that all self-concepts have been laid aside, and recognized as false. 4 Their arrogance has been perceived. 5 And 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.
W-152.11. Now do we join in glad acknowledgment that lies are false, and only truth is true. 2 We think of truth alone as we arise, and spend five minutes practicing its ways, encouraging our frightened minds with this:
3 The power of decision is my own. 4 This day I will accept myself as what my Father's Will created me to be.
5 Then will we wait in silence, giving up all self-deceptions, as we humbly ask our Self that He reveal Himself to us. 6 And He Who never left will come again to our awareness, grateful to restore His home to God, as it was meant to be.
W-152.12. In 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. 2 God's Voice will answer, for He speaks for you and for your Father. 3 He 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.