T-4.VI The Rewards of God
1. The ego does not recognize the real source of “threat”, and if you associate yourself with the ego, you do not understand the situation as it is. ²Only your allegiance to it gives the ego any power over you. ³I have spoken of the ego as if it were a separate thing, acting on its own. ⁴This was necessary to persuade you that you cannot dismiss it lightly, and must realize how much of your thinking is ego-directed. ⁵We cannot safely let it go at that, however, or you will regard yourself as necessarily conflicted as long as you are here, or as long as you believe that you are here. ⁶The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about yourself. ⁷Your other life has continued without interruption, and has been and always will be totally unaffected by your attempts to dissociate it.
2. In learning to escape from illusions, your debt to your brother is something you must never forget. ²It is the same debt that you owe to me. ³Whenever you act egotistically towards another, you are throwing away the graciousness of your indebtedness and the holy perception it would produce. ⁴The term “holy” can be used here because, as you learn how much you are indebted to the whole Sonship, which includes me, you come as close to knowledge as perception can. ⁵The gap is then so small that knowledge can easily flow across it and obliterate it forever.
3. You have very little trust in me as yet, but it will increase as you turn more and more often to me instead of to your ego for guidance. ²The results will convince you increasingly that this choice is the only sane one you can make. ³No one who learns from experience that one choice brings peace and joy while another brings chaos and disaster needs additional convincing. ⁴Learning through rewards is more effective than learning through pain, because pain is an ego illusion, and can never induce more than a temporary effect. ⁵The rewards of God, however, are immediately recognized as eternal. ⁶Since this recognition is made by you and not the ego, the recognition itself establishes that you and your ego cannot be identical. ⁷You may believe that you have already accepted this difference, but you are by no means convinced as yet. ⁸The fact that you believe you must escape from the ego shows this; but you cannot escape from the ego by humbling it or controlling it or punishing it.
4. The ego and the spirit do not know each other. ²The separated mind cannot maintain the separation except by dissociating. ³Having done this, it denies all truly natural impulses, not because the ego is a separate thing, but because you want to believe that you are. ⁴The ego is a device for maintaining this belief, but it is still only your decision to use the device that enables it to endure.
5. How can you teach someone the value of something he has deliberately thrown away? ²He must have thrown it away because he did not value it. ³You can only show him how miserable he is without it, and slowly bring it nearer so he can learn how his misery lessens as he approaches it. ⁴This teaches him to associate his misery with its absence, and the opposite of misery with its presence. ⁵It gradually becomes desirable as he changes his mind about its worth. ⁶I am teaching you to associate misery with the ego and joy with the spirit. ⁷You have taught yourself the opposite. ⁸You are still free to choose, but can you really want the rewards of the ego in the presence of the rewards of God?
6. My trust in you is greater than yours in me at the moment, but it will not always be that way. ²Your mission is very simple. ³You are asked to live so as to demonstrate that you are not an ego, and I do not choose God’s channels wrongly. ⁴The Holy One shares my trust, and accepts my Atonement decisions because my will is never out of accord with His. ⁵I have said before that I am in charge of the Atonement. ⁶This is only because I completed my part in it as a man, and can now complete it through others. ⁷My chosen channels cannot fail, because I will lend them my strength as long as theirs is wanting.
7. I will go with you to the Holy One, and through my perception He can bridge the little gap. ²Your gratitude to your brother is the only gift I want. ³I will bring it to God for you, knowing that to know your brother is to know God. ⁴If you are grateful to your brother, you are grateful to God for what He created. ⁵Through your gratitude you come to know your brother, and one moment of real recognition makes everyone your brother because each of them is of your Father. ⁶Love does not conquer all things, but it does set all things right. ⁷Because you are the Kingdom of God I can lead you back to your own creations. ⁸You do not recognize them now, but what has been dissociated is still there.
8. As you come closer to a brother you approach me, and as you withdraw from him I become distant to you. ²Salvation is a collaborative venture. ³It cannot be undertaken successfully by those who disengage themselves from the Sonship, because they are disengaging themselves from me. ⁴God will come to you only as you will give Him to your brothers. ⁵Learn first of them and you will be ready to hear God. ⁶That is because the function of love is one.