It would seem that one of the things we can do to help heal the world is to bring Truth to illusions and Love to separation in order to dispel the illusions and heal the separation. Of course, this noble impulse is true in principle, but in practice it could have one major drawback. It forgets that the world is nothing in itself, but is merely an effect of thought. The world of illusions is the effect of thoughts that are not sane. To heal the world we must heal the mind that projected sick thoughts onto the world. If we attempt instead to heal the effect, or symptom, that is the world, our efforts will at best be wasted, and at worst will have the reverse effect of what we intend, in that by trying to dispel illusions rather than their source we make the illusions seem real in our minds and merely prolong our experience of them.
Thus, the Course advises us to bring all that isn’t real: separation, darkness, fear, illusions, fantasy, guilt, hate, death, etc., to what is real: Love, Light, Truth, Reality, Holiness, Life, etc. By the time we reach what is real, what isn’t real will have been dispelled because it had no reality in the first place, and the closer it gets to what is real the more apparent its unreality becomes. When we reach Reality, the unreal thing being brought has entirely disappeared.
“You have been advised to bring the darkness to the Light, and guilt to Holiness.” “Remember that you made guilt, and that your plan for the escape from guilt has been to bring atonement to guilt, that is, to make guilt a means of atonement, and thus to make awakening fearful.”
“You who have spent your life trying to bring Truth into the realm of illusion, and Reality into the realm of fantasy, have walked the way of dreams. For in your dreams that illusion could be made true, and fantasy could become reality, you have gone from waking to sleeping, and on and on to a yet deeper sleep. Each dream has led to other dreams, and every fantasy that seemed to bring a light into the darkness only made the darkness deeper.”
To bring darkness to Light and illusions to Truth we must first sort these out in our minds so that they are not all mixed up together there. Such a mishmash in our minds is meaningless because it conflates what is different as if it were the same. We must be clear what Truth is and what illusions are, and cease trying to make true for ourselves even one illusion that still appeals to us. Once Light and darkness and Truth and illusions are clearly distinguished in this way, then we can bring what isn’t true to what is true.
“Death yields to Life simply because destruction is not true and therefore has no being. The Light of Innocence shines guilt away because when they are brought together, the Truth of one must make the falsity of Its opposite perfectly clear. Keep not guilt and Guiltlessness apart, for this will make you believe that you can have them both, and this belief is meaningless. All you have done by keeping them apart is to lose their meaning, by confusing them with each other. And so you do not realize that only one means anything, and the other is entirely without sense of any kind.”
“Attack will always yield to Love if it is brought to Love, not hidden from It. There is no darkness that the Light of Love will not dispel, unless it is concealed from Love’s Beneficence. What is kept apart from Love cannot share Love’s healing Power, because it has been separated off, and kept in darkness.”
“The special love relationship is an attempt to bring Love into separation. And, as such, it is nothing more than an attempt to bring Love into fear, and thus to make fear real. In fundamental violation of Love’s one Condition, the special love relationship would thus attempt to accomplish the impossible. How but in illusion could this be attempted?”
“You must have noticed that the emphasis has been on bringing what is undesirable to the desirable, and what you do not want to what you do want. If you consider what dissociation is, you will realize that awakening must come to you this way. Dissociation is a distorted process of thinking, whereby two systems of belief that cannot coexist are both maintained in the mind by keeping them apart. The mind that dissociates recognizes that if the two belief systems were brought together, their joint acceptance would become impossible. But if they are kept in darkness from each other, their separation seems to keep them both alive, and equal in their reality. Their joining thus becomes the source of fear [unless it is understood], for if they meet then acceptance must be withdrawn from one of them.”
It should be noted that it is only we who must bring all that isn’t real to what is real, because it is only we who are confused about the two. Spirit, Divine Essence, and all who have fulfilled their parts in Atonement do not suffer from this confusion, and therefore can bring the Light directly into darkness, and the Truth to dispel what is false.
The one exception to this principle of our bringing what is unreal to what is real is that those who have gone through the process of bringing darkness to Light, and thus dispelled the darkness in themselves, even though they haven’t yet completed their parts in Atonement, then have the ability to bring the Light back into the darkness, to illuminate the way for those still in the darkness. In this case we are bringing Light into darkness with the clarity of the Light Itself leading our way.
“In your holy relationship you have joined with me [Jesus] in bringing Heaven to the Children of the Divine, who hid in darkness. You have been willing to bring the darkness to Light, and fantasies to Reality, and this willingness has given Strength to everyone who otherwise would remain in darkness. Those who want to see will see. And they will join with me in carrying their Light into the darkness, when the darkness in them is offered to the Light and removed forever. My need for you, joined with me in the holy Light of your relationship, is your need for awakening. Would I not give you what you gave to me? For when you joined each other, you answered me.
“You who are now the bringers of awakening have the function of bringing Light to darkness. The darkness in you has been brought to Light. Carry the Light back to darkness from the Holy Instant to which you brought the darkness, that the darkness be dispelled.”