V. Weakness and Defensiveness

1. How does one overcome illusions? ²Surely not by force or anger, nor by opposing them in any way. ³Merely by letting reason tell you that they contradict reality. ⁴They go against what must be true. ⁵The opposition comes from them, and not reality. ⁶Reality opposes nothing. ⁷What merely is needs no defense, and offers none. ⁸Only illusions need defense because of weakness. ⁹And how can it be difficult to walk the way of truth when only weakness interferes? ¹⁰_You_ are the strong one in this seeming conflict. ¹¹And you need no defense. ¹²Everything that needs defense you do not want, for anything that needs defense will weaken you.

2. Consider what the ego wants defenses for. ²Always to justify what goes against the truth, flies in the face of reason and makes no sense. ³Can this be justified? ⁴What can this be except an invitation to insanity, to save you from the truth? ⁵And what would you be saved from but what you fear? ⁶Belief in sin needs great defense, and at enormous cost. ⁷All that the Holy Spirit offers must be defended against and sacrificed. ⁸For sin is carved into a block out of your peace, and laid between you and its return.

3. Yet how can peace be so fragmented? ²It is still whole, and nothing has been taken from it. ³See how the means and the material of evil dreams are nothing. ⁴In truth you and your brother stand together, with nothing in between. ⁵God holds your hands, and what can separate whom He has joined as one with Him? ⁶It is your Father Whom you would defend against. ⁷Yet it remains impossible to keep love out. ⁸God rests with you in quiet, undefended and wholly undefending, for in this quiet state alone is strength and power. ⁹Here can no weakness enter, for here is no attack and therefore no illusions. ¹⁰Love rests in certainty. ¹¹Only uncertainty can be defensive. ¹²And all uncertainty is doubt about yourself.

4. How weak is fear; how little and how meaningless. ²How insignificant before the quiet strength of those whom love has joined! ³This is your “enemy,”—a frightened mouse that would attack the universe. ⁴How likely is it that it will succeed? ⁵Can it be difficult to disregard its feeble squeaks that tell of its omnipotence, and would drown out the hymn of praise to its Creator that every heart throughout the universe forever sings as one? ⁶Which is the stronger? ⁷Is it this tiny mouse or everything that God created? ⁸You and your brother are not joined together by this mouse, but by the Will of God. ⁹And can a mouse betray whom God has joined?

5. If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of your union with your brother! ²Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity and firmness of foundation. ³Yes, to the body’s eyes it looks like an enormous solid body, immovable as is a mountain. ⁴Yet within you is a Force that no illusions can resist. ⁵This body only seems to be immovable; this Force is irresistible in truth. ⁶What, then, must happen when they come together? ⁷Can the illusion of immovability be long defended from what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?

6. Forget not, when you feel the need arise to be defensive about anything, you have identified yourself with an illusion. ²And therefore feel that you are weak because you are alone. ³This is the cost of all illusions. ⁴Not one but rests on the belief that you are separate. ⁵Not one that does not seem to stand, heavy and solid and immovable, between you and your brother. ⁶And not one that truth cannot pass over lightly, and so easily that you must be convinced, in spite of what you thought it was, that it is nothing. ⁷If you forgive your brother, this must happen. ⁸For it is your unwillingness to overlook what seems to stand between you and your brother that makes it look impenetrable, and defends the illusion of its immovability. (https://acim.org/acim/en/s/266#1:1-6:8 | T-22.V.1:1–6:8)