Lesson 151 All things are echoes of the Voice for God
No one can judge on partial evidence. ²That is not judgment. ³It is merely an opinion based on ignorance and doubt. ⁴Its seeming certainty is but a cloak for the uncertainty it would conceal. ⁵It needs irrational defense because it is irrational. ⁶And its defense seems strong, convincing, and without a doubt because of all the doubting underneath. You do not seem to doubt the world you see. ²You do not really question what is shown you through the body’s eyes. ³Nor do you ask why you believe it, even though you learned a long while since your senses do deceive. ⁴That you believe them to the last detail which they report is even stranger, when you pause to recollect how frequently they have been faulty witnesses indeed! ⁵Why would you trust them so implicitly? ⁶Why but because of underlying doubt, which you would hide with show of certainty? How can you judge? ²Your judgment rests upon the witness that your senses offer you. ³Yet witness never falser was than this. ⁴But how else do you judge the world you see? ⁵You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. ⁶You think your fingers touch reality, and close upon the truth. ⁷This is awareness that you understand, and think more real than what is witnessed to by the eternal Voice for God Himself. Can this be judgment? ²You have often been urged to refrain from judging, not because it is a right to be withheld from you. ³You cannot judge. ⁴You merely can believe the ego’s judgments, all of which are false. ⁵It guides your senses carefully, to prove how weak you are; how helpless and afraid, how apprehensive of just punishment, how black with sin, how wretched in your guilt. This thing it speaks of, and would yet defend, it tells you is yourself. ²And you believe that this is so with stubborn certainty. ³Yet underneath remains the hidden doubt that what it shows you as reality with such conviction it does not believe. ⁴It is itself alone that it condemns. ⁵It is within itself it sees the guilt. ⁶It is its own despair it sees in you.