"First, the assumption is implicit that what God has Created can be changed by the mind of Man."

So even before having any sense of what you could change God's creation INTO, you started out with the idea that you COULD change God's creation at all. That includes the belief you can change God himself, change yourself, or change anything else real. This must include the 'mad idea' that things which literally are permanent and CANNOT be changed, can be changed. So this represent the first slip into believing something false, believing the impossible is possible, and thus denying reality.

"Second, the concept that what is perfect can be rendered imperfect (or wanting) is intruded."

So now having decided that you can change things that are permanently unchangeable, you start to explore what it can be changed INTO, and thus get this idea that the perfect can be made to be imperfect. That there can be something lacking, needs arising, problems developing, a sense of the absence of God growing.

"Third, the belief that man can distort the Creations of God (including himself) has arisen, and is tolerated."

This now includes the idea that even your own self, which God created to be permanent, is changeable, can be made to be imperfect, taken away from its perfection, converted into something else. And that YOU can be the one to do this, therefore CAUSING your own self to be whatever you decide to change it into.

"Fourth, that since man can create himself, the direction of his own creation is up to him."

So now you set about the belief that because you can change your own self, can make yourself imperfect, and can literally 'redefine' who and what you are "at will", you can determine the "direction of your own creation", ie whether or not you are created at all (life vs death), and that if you do continue to exist, what 'form' you take or what is true of your nature or how you function. You think you now have the power to "create yourself" or re-create yourself, in whatever way you please, which has to automatically deny the Father's role as your Creator.

"These related distortions represent a picture of what actually occurred in the Separation. None of this existed before, nor does it actually exist now."

You become "ego", by having taken on this position of believing you created yourself, God is not your father, God is absent, you have control over yourself, you can define yourself to be whatever you want to be, you are "constantly changing", you can destroy yourself, you have an ability to determine what you are, and that you have the power to redefine what is true and what is real. This is essentially what egotism is. It's this 'logical conclusion' we've come to on the basis of believing the permanent can be changed, and now we find ourselves in a state of constantly denying what's permanently real and trying to constantly change it into something that it's not.

ACIM: "The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end." (clarification of terms, chapter 5, paragraph 1).

Other religions that teach that the physical world is nothing but a dream/illusion...

1. Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta)

Concept: Maya (illusion) – The material world is an illusion created by ignorance (avidya), and ultimate reality (Brahman) is formless and unchanging.

Teachings: The Upanishads and Adi Shankaracharya’s Advaita Vedanta philosophy teach that individual identity (atman) is identical to Brahman, and the world of appearances is like a dream. Only through knowledge (jnana) can one realize this truth.

2. Buddhism

Concept: Śūnyatā (emptiness) & Māyā (illusion) – All phenomena lack intrinsic reality and are conditioned, much like dreams.

Teachings: The Buddha compared the world to an illusion, a mirage, and a dream in texts like the Diamond Sutra. The Madhyamaka school (founded by Nagarjuna) and Yogacara school (which emphasizes "mind-only" reality) both argue that what we perceive as reality is shaped by mental constructs.

3. Platonism & Neoplatonism

Concept: The Cave Allegory – The material world is a shadow of a higher, true reality.

Teachings: Plato described the sensory world as mere reflections of the eternal Forms. Neoplatonists like Plotinus argued that the material world emanates from the One and is a lesser, dreamlike version of true reality.

4. Gnosticism

Concept: The material world is a deceptive prison created by an ignorant or malevolent demiurge.

Teachings: Gnostic texts (like The Gospel of Thomas and The Apocryphon of John) describe the world as an illusion that traps the soul. True knowledge (gnosis) allows one to awaken from this illusion and return to the divine.

5. Taoism

Concept: The relativity of perception and the dream-like nature of experience.

Teachings: Zhuangzi’s famous parable of the butterfly dream questions whether reality is absolute or a shifting illusion. Taoism often portrays distinctions between waking and dreaming as fluid. 6. Sufism (Islamic Mysticism)

Concept: The world as a shadow or veil obscuring divine reality.

Teachings: Rumi and Ibn Arabi describe the world as an ephemeral illusion, with God (Al-Haqq, "the Real") being the only true existence. Sufi thought emphasizes awakening from worldly distractions to experience divine unity.

7. Christian Mysticism & Idealism

Concept: The world as a temporary illusion compared to eternal divine truth.

Teachings: Some Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme, emphasized that the physical world is fleeting and that true reality is found in union with God. Later, philosophers like George Berkeley argued that reality exists only as ideas in the mind of God. 8. Sikhism

Concept: Maya (illusion) – The world is transitory and deceptive, keeping people from realizing God.

Teachings: Sikh scriptures, including the Guru Granth Sahib, emphasize that attachment to worldly things is an illusion. True reality is found in devotion to God and spiritual awakening.

9. Hermeticism

Concept: The material world is a lower reflection of the divine mind. Teachings: The Kybalion and other Hermetic texts describe reality as mental in nature ("The All is Mind") and suggest that the physical world is a projection of higher consciousness.

10. Kabbalah (Jewish Mysticism)

Concept: The material world is a lower, imperfect manifestation of divine reality.

Teachings: In the Zohar, the world is described as a series of emanations from the Ein Sof (Infinite). The material realm is an illusion in the sense that it veils the deeper truth of divine unity.

11. Rosicrucianism

Concept: The physical world is a veil hiding spiritual truths. Teachings: Rosicrucian teachings, influenced by Hermeticism and Gnosticism, describe reality as a temporary, symbolic projection meant to teach spiritual lessons.

12. Manichaeism

Concept: The material world is a trap created by a lesser, evil power.

Teachings: This ancient dualistic religion, founded by Mani, teaches that the physical world is a deception created by darkness, while the true realm of light exists beyond it.

13. Jainism

Concept: The material world is impermanent and a source of bondage.

Teachings: Jainism teaches that the soul is trapped in illusion and karma. Liberation (moksha) is achieved by transcending attachments to the physical world.

14. Some Indigenous and Shamanic Traditions

Concept: Reality is fluid, dreamlike, and shaped by spiritual forces. Teachings: Many indigenous traditions, such as those in Native American, Aboriginal Australian, and Amazonian cultures, describe reality as a dream, a shifting landscape influenced by spirits, ancestors, or cosmic forces.

15. Pythagoreanism

Concept: The world is a mathematical illusion.

Teachings: Pythagoras and his followers believed that reality was structured by numbers and harmony, with the material world being a lesser, imperfect reflection of the perfect, mathematical order.

16. Theosophy

Concept: The physical world is an illusion created by spiritual ignorance.

Teachings: Helena Blavatsky and later Theosophists describe the world as maya, emphasizing that true knowledge comes through spiritual enlightenment and connection to the higher planes.

17. Catharism (12th–14th Century, Medieval Europe)

Beliefs: The Cathars, a dualist Christian sect, saw the physical world as an evil illusion created by Satan. They believed that the true, divine world was purely spiritual, and human souls had to escape material existence to reunite with God.

18. Eastern Orthodox Hesychasm (Byzantine Christianity)

Beliefs: Some interpretations of Hesychasm (a mystical tradition within Eastern Orthodoxy) suggest that the material world is not truly real compared to the divine presence of God, which can only be known through inner contemplation and prayer.

19. Christian Science (Founded in 19th Century)

Beliefs: Founded by Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science teaches that the material world, including sickness and death, is an illusion. True reality is purely spiritual, and healing comes through understanding this truth.

20. Some New Age and Esoteric Christian Movements

Some modern Christian esoteric groups, influenced by Theosophy or the New Thought movement, teach that the material world is a mental construct or illusion, similar to Hindu maya.

Denial has two applications. Either to deny reality, or to deny unreality. The ego uses it to deny God. You as a miracle worker are to USE DENIAL to deny anything NOT of God any power to do anything.

Miracle-working therefore entails DENYING that what is not of God exists at all. This strips it of all reality and power. You must withdraw all the power you GAVE it. You must not beleive in it. You must cancel its whole existence. What is not of God simply is not possible, and the illusion that it is possible can be undone by denying it any reality. To recognize illusions as nothing makes them disappear.

We are therefore asked to REJECT things which are not of God. To deny and reject sickness, suffering, and death. Not to pretend they aren't there, which is really a hidden belief in support of them. But to properly deny them. They are themselves denials of God, because sickness is the ego's religion of denying God.

To deny the world of illusions is to remain in strength and to not allow anything of the world to intrude upon you or another. Deny that your brother is a body. Deny that sickness is possible. Deny death can ever exist. Deny that "its true" that your brother has problems or is imperfect.

Denial couples with acceptance. To deny what is not real is to accept what is real. Just as to deny reality is to accept illusions into your mind. Whatever you DON'T deny, you accept and allow to remain. Acceptance is supportive. Denial is not. Using a "lack of support" AGAINST weakness and suffering and death, cancels it out, just as two negatives make a positive.

"The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH."

"To deny the denial of perfection is not so difficult as the denial of truth."

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

"THIS peace is totally incapable of being shaken by human errors of any kind. It denies the ability of anything which is not of God to effect you in any way. This is the PROPER use of denial. It is not used to HIDE anything, but it IS used to correct error."

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."

"Teach no-one he has hurt you, for, if you do, you teach YOURSELF that what is NOT of God, HAS POWER OVER YOU."

"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP. Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS."

"Do not ALLOW him to belittle himself in YOUR mind, but give him freedom from his belief in littleness, and escape from YOURS."

"Do not allow your brother to be sick, for if he is, have YOU abandoned him to his own dream, by SHARING it with him."

Somewhere seemingly inside you, there is a perfect self. The soul that God created, one in Christ. That's you. That's what you are.

This perfect self has nothing wrong with it at all. It is already absolutely perfect. God created it to be perfect with perfection, and it was created perfectly by perfection.

Your actual self, what you are, does not need fixing or healing or resurrecting or correcting. It is absolutely perfect right now.

This self already exists. It is NOT your job or role or function or ability to CREATE IT, to make it, to cause it, to define it, to add to it, to build it up, to produce it, or in any way to turn yourself into it.

All spiritual "learning" is geared towards typically trying to become something other than what you are. This has led you AWAY FROM what you are. Even if it seems like progress.

The truth of your being isn't actually something you need to gain or cause or accumulate. It's something you need to RECOGNIZE AN ACCEPT.

It's actually something that's already there. It's waiting for your acknowledgement. It's waiting for you to find it and see it and realize it's already there and it's always been there.

It was just covered up by your mind with its layers of denial and unwillingness and believing other things. As soon as you saw yourself as not yourself, you lost track of yourself, lost sight of yourself, and went off trying to reinvent yourself.

And the you thought that in order to become a better version of you you'd have to keep reinventing yourself, to become a spiritual being. But that's how you end up with a spiritualised ego. A converted polished tweaked alternative self that is still not the self that God created.

You'll find after a while that you cannot manipulate an artificial self into being real, you cannot perfect the imperfect, you cannot get your "not really my real self" to turn into something spiritual enough.

You can produce illusions and specialness and artificial forms of what may look more spiritual but you can't really escape the realm of illusions this way. You can polish a turd but it's still at turd. Or paint some lipstick on a skeleton, or put some clothes on a corpse. But you cannot convert this non-self into a self.

What you really need to do is very simply to seek within and find and become aware of, recognize, acknowledge, access, a self that is sitting there waiting for you to find it again. This is more an act of going within and just trying to become aware that you are ALREADY perfect.

Look for your pre-existing perfection, don't try to invent it. Look for your holy self, don't try to turn yourself into a holy self. Appreciate and acknowledge and become aware of what God has already created you to be. It's in you, lurking there behind the dark curtains.

It's in this sense that you need do nothing. You need do nothing to make yourself be perfect and happy and well, because God has already done this. He's give you absolute perfection. You tried to hide from it. Now you just need to stop hiding from it and own it.

You are Christ, already. You are sinless already. You are holy already. You are everything already, and always and forever. What was all this seeking and not finding for, but to pretend that's not true?

"Why wait for Heaven? Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all." UrW188L1

If God created you perfect, and you cannot change because you are permanent, then what the heck are you doing trying to change yourself?

Ultimately, being able to accept the truth about you is all that is asked of you. And that means, surrendering everything else that you're trying to do to define yourself or be different from how God intended.

God is the one who created you, and He is the one who knows your 'natural', Real Self. And you cannot change that. I repeat, you cannot change that. It is permanent.

So really what we're doing is we are fighting with reality, a reality that we cannot change. And yet we keep trying to change it. And we believe we already changed it.

The only way we're going to be able to accept the truth, is to completely surrender everything else we're doing to avoid the truth, and that actually includes being a 'seeker', and attempting to 'grow', and trying to become something you are not already in truth.

So really, if you can't change the FIXED reality that God has put in place for you, you only really have two options. Either you fully accept it and just settle into it and give up trying to fight it (and be tremendously happy and at peace), or you fight against it (and be unhappy).

It would be sane of us to accept the truth of who we are. It is insane not to. Because to not accept it is an attempt to suggest reality/God can be changed, and this is impossible, and will never be accomplished. So to try to do that anyway, is completely futile and a ridiculous waste of effort.

But can we accept this? Can we completely just drop everything and accept what is true? Eventually at some point we're going to be to be willing to do this if we want to wake up to reality.

You may think there are things about yourself that are unacceptable. But think about that. What realm do those things live in? Do they live in the realm of reality and truth, in which you can ONLY be acceptable? Or do they live in a realm of unacceptability where there is only lies? So that means... everything about yourself that you cannot accept, is not true anyway. So its not true that you are unloveable. Its not true that you are flawed. Its not true you are imperfect.

And who would want to accept their imperfections? Imperfections are not real. Who would want to try to find peace by accepting separation from God, or death? You can't. But you can transcend these things with true acceptance, which means accepting the truth. And the truth is, you are immortal, and you've never changed.

So if you've never changed, then you are already as God would have you be (in your true self). So why not accept this already? This is why you ultimately need do nothing - provided you're not doing anything ELSE.

The body is the idea of sin. It is an extension of the idea of being separate. The body cannot become sinless in and of itself, although it can be used for a holy purpose.

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh and then projected outward." - ACIM

"At no single instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but never experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely, for sin is never present. " - ACIM

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. " - ACIM

The body is always a symbol of being separate from God. It must be imperfect and it must be an illusion. Otherwise, if it were not, it would be possible for the body to have power over the mind and could prevent the Son of God from awakening or healing.

The body itself, in its fullness, must be fundamentally an illusion of separation, and therefore sin. IT MUST BE FALSE. It can't be a truth and it can't have any truth to it. If truth were associated with the body, we'd be totally stuck in the dream.

To say that the body is inherently holy or perfect or anything other than a symbol of sin is to say that God, who is holiness and perfection, is a body. That is a way the ego wants to make God be a body so that it can kill God, just as it makes the Son of God a body in order to kill him.

"Any thought system that confuses God and the body must be insane." - ACIM

At its core, metaphysically, the body is an illusion of sin. It cannot be the central truth of who or what you are. It cannot be holiness. It cannot be wholeness. It cannot be innocence. It can only exist inside of the dream of separation. It cannot enter heaven. It is never present. And it never really exists at all.

We need to learn to recognize that the body is the idea of sin, and then undo it. If we are to undo sin, the body must disappear, being an illusion that we believe is really there as a real sin. You can perceive the body with love or use it with love to give it a holier purpose, in which it can appear to be free from sickness and so on, but it is still a body. It is still an idea and representation of sin, and so long as it remains, the mind cannot be 100% free. This is why Jesus had to disappear his body in order to completely remove its blockage to the awareness of God's presence.

The body is never present. It cannot exist in the now. It does not live. It is always a memory or an idea of the future, with an artificial history and a fabricated illusion of continuation. The body IS the symbol of sin. It is false. It does not exist. It not who or what you are. You do not need it. You are immortal spirit.

"Miracles reawaken the awareness that the spirit, not the body, is the altar of truth. This is the recognition that leads to the healing power of the miracle." - ACIM

Ok so you might be feeling like you're incapable, always making mistakes, are clumsy, can't communicate with people well, or problems just keep happening that you can't seem to solve. But it's not just you. It's a systemic problem of the world in general.

The world is just fundamentally difficult.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

"Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

This also ties into the laws of chaos. Basically in the separation from God we invented all kinds of levels, degrees, amounts, variables, contrasts, divisions and differences.

This has set up an entire landscape of what we can only describe as a mismashed chaotic jumble of disjointed pieces and conflicting differences. Everything is in contrast, nothing gels, everything conflicts with everything else, the whole continuity is broken and every form seems to beg for a different response.

We automatically have made physical obstacles, difficult terrains, awkward weather, speech deficits, communication problems, incompatible personalities, loss of function, broken behaviors and dysfunctional relationships. Not to mention that pretty much everyone is insane.

This just automatically makes the whole world fundamentally a difficult place to be. Everything involves effort and struggle, adaptation and interpretation. You have to always have caution and be careful lest you perhaps hurt yourself. Who knows what crazy lune you might run into or what strange problem is going to erupt out of nowhere.

So don't take these things personally to mean something is wrong with you. It's not "just you" that has to struggle navigating this awkward environment. I used to beat myself up for being poor at communication until I realized the entire world is set up to break it. It's an imperfect world where nothing really works effortlessly or easily.

When we are not in heaven, or out of the body in spirit, we are in an environment that is fundamentally a strain. It is unnatural to us. In fact all things physical are totally opposite to our true nature. They are alien to us. It's like trying to live on an alien planet that you have no clue about, and no-one gave you the manual or prepared you for it.

So don't worry if life seems to just keep on sucking. It's just how the world is. We are tasked with recognizing this, then laughing at it and forgiving it. Because a world made by mistake can't help but be mistaken.

"Grace is the natural state of every Son of God. When he is NOT in a state of grace he IS out of his natural environment, and does NOT function well. Everything he does becomes a strain, because he was not created for the environment which he has made. He therefore CANNOT adapt to it, nor can he adapt IT to HIM. There is no point in trying. A Son of God is happy ONLY when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make."

"Every symptom which the ego has made involves a contradiction in terms."

"How strange indeed becomes this war against yourself!"

The ego does not take one side. The ego takes all sides, and pits them all against each other. It pretends to be on one team, while simultaneously being on the other team. It plays the part of both victim and its own victimizer. It attacks itself.

The ego is the idea of self attack, self denial, inner conflict, a split-mindedness. It is a state of being "in two minds", undecided and certain of nothing. It is a state of disassociation, in which there literally seem to be two halves or selves, one against the other. It represents a divided will, where one part of mind wills against the other.

In all wars, all conflicts, all arguments, all political debates, all fights between teams and nations, every form of taking sides, and all the various ways that we buy into the illusion that one person is ego and another is not, the ego delights in playing both parties off against each other.

It does not care who wins anything. It does not care whether one side is victorious while the other suffers. All it cares about is that it is perpetuated and persists because it has attacked and destroyed part of self, leaving only part left as victor, who must therefore suffer being less than whole.

The ego will happily attack itself provided some portion of it remains. It will side with something which seems good, positive, uplifting and true, provided to side with it permits a sacrifice where the "rest" of what is denied, hated, repelled and rejected is regarded as not self.

The ego split mind is divided into persona and shadow. The person is the part that is kept in conscious awareness and seems to allow and accept only that which it thinks is good enough - and nothing is good enough. Systematically it strips away portions of your self, deeming them unworthy and imperfect, relegating them to the unconscious shadow portion of mind. It is never satisfied, prompting you to put on a facade of perfection in order to truly destroy everything about you that you cannot accept. That which seems so innocent and holy is murderous.

Self attack takes on many forms and all of them are deceptive. If you buy into one such appearance and think, this person is a hero or savior, while this other person is guilty and a sinner, you have fallen for the trick. The ego is BOTH OF THEM. And it has no problem attacking itself in order to perpetuate the illusion that there is a *separation* between the two. That they are not the same identity or the same self. That is its aim. To split the mind and emphasize the differences.

It does not want people forgiving each other and seeing each other as equals. It wants war not peace. It has no interest or care as to whether you win or someone else wins. It couldn't care less if you are right or someone else is. All it's interested in that that rift between the two is increased, differences are amplified, the gap increases, and equality is lost.

If you play the game, if you take sides, if you buy into the illusion that one is a sinner and another innocent, you have fallen for its tricks. You have bought into separation. Only when you can see you and your brother as being in the same boat, as both striving toward the same goal, and recognize that the EGO is the third party here, the enemy, who would come between you and drive you apart, then you can join forces to agree NOT to attack each other, so that the EGO will disappear and not each other.

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

"He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

The world's got issues. But do you think the world will ever not have issues?

Certainly it's not actually able to be problem-free. Problems are its nature. They arise from differences, which produce incompatibilities and difficulty. And then from that we get things acting against other things, and before you know it hell breaks loose.

You can try to fix it up and solve some of its problems but at best it will only ever be temporary. And even the things you fix will develop problems. It all requires constant maintenance because it can't help falling apart at the seams.

It might be better to accept that the world is fundamentally flawed, than to keep fighting to try to force it to look like it can be perfect. No matter how hard we try to make it work better, it still will always have issues. The fact that it is based on space and time means it is based on murderousness and destruction and impossibility.

We'd probably be better off psychologically admitting that the world is just a broken system which can NEVER work right. Because then we can stop resisting its nature, and stop the futile insane efforts to work against its nature. You can't get blood out of a stone as they say.

If you can accept that the world is a limited system, designed to destroy itself, to eat itself alive, to undermine its own existence, filled with incompatilities and conflict and self-destruction, then you can let it have its ways.

The payoff isn't that you somehow solve unsolveable problems and make things seem better, it's that you psychologically enter a state of greater acceptance and allowing. It's not that you have to accept that the world is perfect - it isn't. But if you can accept that it is imperfect, and always will be, you drop all of the insane attempts to turn it into something better.

Acknowledging its brokenness and its dysfunction and its self-attack and recognizing that this is the ONLY way it CAN function - it was designed to be like this - allows you to be more forgiving toward it. You can recognize it is simply following orders and carrying out the desire of impossibility, conflict, nonsense, contradiction and frustration that it was designed to do.

At least then you can be in a state of greater peace and sanity and acceptance rather than trying to force something which CAN NEVER WORK, to work better. Then you can let go of the insane idea of saving it, against its will. And funnily enough, that will save it from projections of sin and guilt more than the impossible attempt to turn it into heaven.

The world is not heaven and it will never ever be heaven. It is opposite to heaven in every way. If you let it be heaven's opposite instead of mistaking it FOR heaven, you will enter a state of mind in which you can be closer to heaven within yourself.

Because to be heavenly you have to not resist reality, and have to accept atonement. So if you use the unacceptable world to reach acceptance, then you'll get into a more heaven'y state within. And when you'll project that out and see it reflected in the impossible world. And now you can linger for a while in a world which doesn't seem quite so intolerable, but only because you admit to just how intolerable it is.

You cannot convert a world that was designed to oppose the laws of God, into a world that obeys them. Separation is its foundation, not oneness. Everything in it is driven by relativity, not the absolute. You can't even have atoms and molecules bodies and planets without a separation idea. Let it have its separation and its murder and its death and don't deny it. You can't fight with its nature, there's no point.

The world was made to die and to follow death's purpose. It was made so that you cannot escape problems. It was made so that nothign ever works right. It was made in order to act like a prison and to keep everyone isolated. It is not meant to function perfectly or heaven-like or to be free from cruelty. Everone keeps trying to dress it up and figure out what went wrong to try to stop it happneing again, it it completley futile. All that leads to is a straight-jacket.

Let what dies die, it's not supposed to last forever. Then in the allowing you can be free to live.

There is a fundamental difficulty in choosing anything in this world. Everything in this world lacks everything else. Everything has taken a side, has separated itself off, has made itself different, and does not have what other things have. This means that nothing is whole, nothing has everything, and nothing is perfect.

There is a fiction perpetrated that suggests you can have it all, get it all, win everything, find the best, be the best, choose the best option, be on a perfect diet, get the perfect body, etc. These are all make-believe, achieve a dream, conquer the world etc.

The separation even applies to colors. Red lacks green, blue lacks orange, and yellow lacks purple. In order to get one color you have to lose its opposite. Picking one color denies aspects which other colors have. So none of the colors are the perfect whole divine color. And you can drive yourself up the wall trying to choose the best one.

So then as you're trying to choose between options, you find yourself in a state of paralysis. You seek to make the perfect choice, the best choice, and to entirely win and succeed in whichever choice to make. But the truth is that whichever thing you choose, will lack something. Whatever option to take, it's going to be defective and limited and lacking.

This drives you nuts, when you're trying to decide what is the best course of action, or the right thing to buy, or the most appropriate selection, or whether to do one thing or another. Both options appeal with equal potential, and with equal lack. Neither of them is completely ideal. So then most of the time you end up throwing your hands in the air and "settling" for whichever one seems the least offensive. Or whichever one seems to have more pros than cons.

I'll just go with this one. I'll settle for that one. I guess this one will do. That one's probably good enough. So then you learn that in this world you usually have to lower your standards, be willing to accept that everything is limited, be okay with scarcity and sacrifice, and realize that every single choice is a compromise. You cannot get anything without losing something. That's how it's all set up.

Some people will have higher standards and will try to fine-tune the selection process. They will have in their minds the idealistic idea that some choices are actually completely perfect. That you can win without losing. That you can gain without loss. That you can get without having to give. And much of society and industry is geared towards trying to maximize the "return on investment". To get as much of what seems perfect and ideal, with as little loss as possible. There's an art to it, but it can never succeed.

If you are perfectionistic, thus, usually because you see yourself as imperfect and are trying to find what you think you don't have, you'll find this familiar. It drives you nuts trying to ideally look for the absolute best possible outcome, the most amazing toy, the completely perfect choice. It literally can make you more insane by expecting, or rather misunderstanding, that the world has the capability of offering you something that is whole and complete. It can't.

You will feel far more at ease and sane about your interactions and goals in the world if you can recognize that, fundamentally, all physical matter is a state of partiality. It's based on separation, so everything has only a small portion of the whole. Each item is lacking something that the other items have. If you go for the TV with the bigger speakers you lose out on the TV with the cool remote. You can't win everything. You can't have it all.

If you can accept that every choice in the world falls short, every option is incomplete, every possible outcome is not ideal, and realize this is just how a world of separation must be, then you can stop fighting with it or setting yourself up for disappointment. As jesus says in the course, "the world has disappointed you since time began." That's because everything it promises, it fails to deliver. Everything it gives you, it takes away.

"The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

Nothing in the world is whole. It was designed to reject wholeness. Space is an assertion of the idea that nothing is everywhere and the everywhere (God) is nowhere. Every object, every piece of matter, every physical attribute, every choice, is divided. It is only because there has BEEN a division that you even have two things to choose between, and each of those options is only half of the whole. So at best, any choice you make leaves you empty handed, second-guessing, and wishing you picked the other one. And surely the best of the best will bring you salvation!

The world is two-faced, just as the ego is. It gives and takes away. If you gain you lose. If you win you lose. If you get you lack. If you want not to share anything with anyone you end up with nothing. What you get is taken from you. What you accomplish is destroyed. What you build comes tumbling down. Nothing lasts, nothing is whole, nothing completes you. That's how this world is. The sooner you accept that this is its nature you can work within its limits and use it for a higher purpose without trying to expect it to suddenly act like heaven. Pigs will never be able to fly.