John 17:4 Meaning I Glorified You on the Earth

A mind glorifies its Source not by grand deeds but by showing that fear has no power over it. This is the whole of the work given: to demonstrate, in the very place where separation seemed most real, that Love is what a mind is and cannot be undone by any illusion.

To finish this work is to complete forgiveness, to look on the dream and overlook it entirely, leaving nothing unhealed in how one sees. A mind that has done this shines the truth back to its Source, and the earth, the seeming stage of exile, becomes the ground where the memory of God returns.

Earth: the seeming stage of separation, the dreamed ground of exile, which forgiveness turns into the very place the memory of God is restored.

The work is finished not when the world changes but when the assumption is complete. A man glorifies the power within him by daring to occupy the state he wants, fully, as though the deed were done. At that moment the labor is over. The eye still sees the old condition, and everything after is only the outer world arranging itself to match.

So the work can be called finished while life looks unchanged. The doing was never in the hands or the world but in the acceptance, the inward turn by which a person becomes the one who already has the thing. Once that state is truly held, there is nothing left to add and nothing to strive for. The task was to believe, and the believing is the whole of it.