V. The Function of Reason

T-21.V.1. Perception selects, and makes the world you see. ² It literally picks it out as the mind directs. ³ The laws of size and shape and brightness would hold, perhaps, if other things were equal. ⁴ They are not equal. ⁵ For what you look for you are far more likely to discover than what you would prefer to overlook. ⁶ The still, small Voice for God is not drowned out by all the ego's raucous screams and senseless ravings to those who want to hear It. ⁷ Perception is a choice and not a fact. ⁸ But on this choice depends far more than you may realize as yet. ⁹ For on the voice you choose to hear, and on the sights you choose to see, depends entirely your whole belief in what you are. ¹⁰ Perception is a witness but to this, and never to reality. ¹¹ Yet it can show you the conditions in which awareness of reality is possible, or those where it could never be.

T-21.V.2. Reality needs no cooperation from you to be itself. ² But your awareness of it needs your help, because it is your choice. ³ Listen to what the ego says, and see what it directs you see, and it is sure that you will see yourself as tiny, vulnerable and afraid. ⁴ You will experience depression, a sense of worthlessness, and feelings of impermanence and unreality. ⁵ You will believe that you are helpless prey to forces far beyond your own control, and far more powerful than you. ⁶ And you will think the world you made directs your destiny. ⁷ For this will be your faith. ⁸ But never believe because it is your faith it makes reality.

T-21.V.3. There is another vision and another Voice in which your freedom lies, awaiting but your choice. ² And if you place your faith in Them, you will perceive another self in you. ³ This other self sees miracles as natural. ⁴ They are as simple and as natural to it as breathing to the body. ⁵ They are the obvious response to calls for help, the only one it makes. ⁶ Miracles seem unnatural to the ego because it does not understand how separate minds can influence each other. ⁷ Nor could they do so. ⁸ But minds cannot be separate. ⁹ This other self is perfectly aware of this. ¹⁰ And thus it recognizes that miracles do not affect another's mind, only its own. ¹¹ They always change your mind. ¹² There is no other.

T-21.V.4. You do not realize the whole extent to which the idea of separation has interfered with reason. ² Reason lies in the other self you have cut off from your awareness. ³ And nothing you have allowed to stay in your awareness is capable of reason. ⁴ How can the segment of the mind devoid of reason understand what reason is, or grasp the information it would give? ⁵ All sorts of questions may arise in it, but if the basic question stems from reason, it will not ask it. ⁶ Like all that stems from reason, the basic question is obvious, simple and remains unasked. ⁷ But think not reason could not answer it.

T-21.V.5. God's plan for your salvation could not have been established without your will and your consent. ² It must have been accepted by the Son of God, for what God wills for him he must receive. ³ For God wills not apart from him, nor does the Will of God wait upon time to be accomplished. ⁴ Therefore, what joined the Will of God must be in you now, being eternal. ⁵ You must have set aside a place in which the Holy Spirit can abide, and where He is. ⁶ He must have been there since the need for Him arose, and was fulfilled in the same instant. ⁷ Such would your reason tell you, if you listened. ⁸ Yet such is clearly not the ego's reasoning. ⁹ Your reason's alien nature to the ego is proof you will not find the answer there. ¹⁰ Yet if it must be so, it must exist. ¹¹ And if it exists for you, and has your freedom as the purpose given it, you must be free to find it.

T-21.V.6. God's plan is simple; never circular and never self-defeating. ² He has no Thoughts except the Self-extending, and in this your will must be included. ³ Thus, there must be a part of you that knows His Will and shares it. ⁴ It is not meaningful to ask if what must be is so. ⁵ But it is meaningful to ask why you are unaware of what is so, for this must have an answer if the plan of God for your salvation is complete. ⁶ And it must be complete, because its Source knows not of incompletion.

T-21.V.7. Where would the answer be but in the Source? ² And where are you but there, where this same answer is? ³ Your Identity, as much a true Effect of this same Source as is the answer, must therefore be together and the same. ⁴ O yes, you know this, and more than this alone. ⁵ Yet any part of knowledge threatens dissociation as much as all of it. ⁶ And all of it will come with any part. ⁷ Here is the part you can accept. ⁸ What reason points to you can see, because the witnesses on its behalf are clear. ⁹ Only the totally insane can disregard them, and you have gone past this. ¹⁰ Reason is a means that serves the Holy Spirit's purpose in its own right. ¹¹ It is not reinterpreted and redirected from the goal of sin, as are the others. ¹² For reason is beyond the ego's range of means.

T-21.V.8. Faith and perception and belief can be misplaced, and serve the great deceiver's needs as well as truth. ² But reason has no place at all in madness, nor can it be adjusted to fit its end. ³ Faith and belief are strong in madness, guiding perception toward what the mind has valued. ⁴ But reason enters not at all in this. ⁵ For the perception would fall away at once, if reason were applied. ⁶ There is no reason in insanity, for it depends entirely on reason's absence. ⁷ The ego never uses it, because it does not realize that it exists. ⁸ The partially insane have access to it, and only they have need of it. ⁹ Knowledge does not depend on it, and madness keeps it out.

T-21.V.9. The part of mind where reason lies was dedicated, by your will in union with your Father's, to the undoing of insanity. ² Here was the Holy Spirit's purpose accepted and accomplished, both at once. ³ Reason is alien to insanity, and those who use it have gained a means which cannot be applied to sin. ⁴ Knowledge is far beyond attainment of any kind. ⁵ But reason can serve to open doors you closed against it.

T-21.V.10. You have come very close to this. ² Faith and belief have shifted, and you have asked the question the ego will never ask. ³ Does not your reason tell you now the question must have come from something that you do not know, but must belong to you? ⁴ Faith and belief, upheld by reason, cannot fail to lead to changed perception. ⁵ And in this change is room made way for vision. ⁶ Vision extends beyond itself, as does the purpose that it serves, and all the means for its accomplishment.