llusions from the outside are not illusions at all. With the perspective of knowing everything about the illusion, the truth of it, you can't be deceived by it.

Being outside of an illusion is like knowing how the magic trick works. Or it's like solving a puzzle and never being able to go back and do the same puzzle again because you already know the trickery involved.

Once you've seen the truth, you can't go back. Once you know the answer, you can no longer pretend that the question is valid. Or even worse, it's like the joke that you heard several times already so it's just not funny any more.

This is also why the world is hell-bent on finding the next big illusion, because people keep wanting to be unconsciously absorbed into the trickery and deception of appearances. Once the 'show' has been experienced, it becomes 'old', and the ego keeps lusting after another illusion to replace it, in order to avoid the possibility that you might awaken.

Illusions can only be maintained while something is hidden from your awareness. And in fact what that means is, your awareness itself is hidden by something, because you can't see the whole picture - the answer eludes you. Only by being unaware of the whole truth can you be deceived by an illusion, so it requires your participation and willingness to become unconscious.

When some portion of your own awareness is unaware of what's really going on - you are in a state of semi-unconsciousness. And it's only in this state of unawareness that you can be deceived by an illusion. Only when some portion of your awareness has become hidden and blocked can something seem to make sense and yet be mistaken.

So let's say there are two characters standing on a stage in a play, doing their theatrical production. In the play, the two are enemies. The victim character has this big long story about how the perpetrator is against them, how they're so wrong and bad and guilty, and how they did this all to them. The perpetrator in the play sees the victim as some fake people-pleasing nutcase that needs to be taken down a peg or two, and they believe they are justified in attacking them. So the two are at war.

Now, in order for your awareness to believe the illusion of these characters, you have to have fallen for some kind of trick. The trick here is, that you believe both characters are being acted by two separate people. You also are somewhat absorbed into the story from each character's perspective and can see how each one seems justified in being enemies with the other. You see how they both are against each other, very much separate from each other, and want nothing really to do with each other. This entirely hinges around the appearance of SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES, and that a sense of IDENTITY has been associated with those differences. This reinforces the idea that these are two separate individuals, which is part of the power of the illusion.

What you suddenly find out, as the play ends, is that in fact, both characters have been acted by the same person, at the same time. Now, obviously this seems nonsense to the ego, impossible even. But to your mind this is perfectly possible. And when these two characters are actually inside your own mind, having a go at each other, your mind is in a state of unawareness - a split mind at war with itself with multiple artificial identities. The stories and the separate identities and the costumes and the drama and their relationship all goes towards painting this picture that each of them is separate. And given they are both characters in your mind, that means your mind has become split and is unconscious that it's actually playing both of them at once.

When it is revealed that in fact there are not two identities involved, but only one - and that this one is you - it then becomes impossible to believe in all of the illusions that suggest these two characters are two separate people. The cover is blown. The mask has come off. The truth is out. And now it becomes literally impossible, upon seeing that both characters are really one person, to believe any of the lies and stories that each was telling about the other. In fact their stories must be completely invalid and fictional and UNTRUE, because nothing that each one claims about the other can make sense if both of them are one person.

The victim can't possibly truthfully claim that the victimizer is out to get them, when the victimizer is the exact same person. Because then the victim would be literally attacking themselves through this person. And the victimizer can't be truthfully claiming that the victim deserves to die, because the victim is themselves also, and that means they'd have to believe about themselves what they believe about the other.

So when awareness comes, that there is a UNITY, a ONENESS, that spans what you THOUGHT was two separate things, illusions - obstacles to awareness - are blown and seen through and can no longer be believed. You only can have a single identity. There can only be one you. And if that one you has been pretending all this time to play out this drama with two identities who seem to be enemies, then admitting to having done BOTH of those roles has to reveal to you the truth. The truth is that you are one whole self, not two selves, and these two characters cannot be who you REALLY are, and their stories must be completely false.

So in order to step out of illusions we need to recognize where there is some sense of separation, or some story about how this is not that, or this person is not that person, or this person is separately doing something to that person without being affected by it, etc. That's the ego's illusion - that one part can be separate from another part and do stuff to them without any side effects. It's a total lie, because both parties are the same person attacking themselves. Once you admit to this and step outside of it, the bubble bursts, reality comes in and the lies are shown for what they are. You can no longer believe the story, or the joke, or the trick, or the question, or the puzzle, and now you SEE the truth. And you are whole.

This whole drama is going on inside you right now. There is a character in you which you think is all that there is to you - your persona self, which is trying to be all spiritual and special. And there is another character in you which you hate and want to be separate from and have nothing to do with, because it seems to victimize your little persona self, and you disassociate from that self and project it onto other people where you can keep attacking it to get rid of it. But it's really inside your mind and it's part of you. And all along, even if you block it out, YOU are playing the role of it at the same time as playing the role of this 'partial you'. And both are the same self.

When this truth comes to light and you accept it and recognize it, you can no longer believe the ILLUSION that someone else is doing stuff to you against your will. Or that someone else is victimizing you. Or that you are a victim in any way. Or even, that you are this small little persona self that's left over and separate from the other venomous hateful self that you tried to pretend was not you either. Neither of these selves are you, because they are both just illusory characters. Your ego - your persona self - is not you, and your 'alter ego', your shadow self, is also not you. And all along you've been pitting these two characters against themselves in your own mind and living out a nightmare. Wake up from that! You are one self, not two selves.

So illusions are just that, the illusion - the deception, the trickery, the appearance, the lie, the *seeming* truth, that what was one is two, and what is joined is separate, and that you are not your own enemy. And while you're inside of one or the other roles within that illusion, you will believe you are only that, and will be unaware, unconscious, of your whole self. Only when two become one will you snap out of the deception and become FULLY AWARE of who you really are, your whole self - your Holy Self, joined in Oneness with Holy Spirit. That's who you really are, behind the illusion of being unwhole and incomplete.

And if God created bodies, death would indeed be real. But God would not be loving."

Let's just be clear about something here. God creates or extends reality. Everything real is within God's being. Everything real comes from His Will. Ok. The entire "realm" of God is within Himself, and all of it is real and deliberately created BY HIM.

SO.....

If we claim, God created planet Earth, God created bodies, THEN... we have to also say this:

Earth, bodies, dog shit, death, war, terror, sickness, suffering, starvation, explosions, supernova, ice ages, being eaten alive, piles of puke and diarrhea, cannibalism, murder, destruction, rape and incest, etc... ALL OF IT.... MUST, be part of God, per God's will. If it is God's CREATION, there is no loopholes, no exceptions, no OTHER makers of this stuff. It is all God's. And it's all real. And you cannot escape any of it.

If whatever God creates is within HIS OWN BEING, and is part of HIS OWN SELF, per HIS OWN WILL, then absolutely EVERYTHING within his being must be in accord with His Will, CREATED BY HIM, without exception. And therefore everything "created" MUST reflect God's nature, intention, attitude.

This should be pretty obvious. The ENTIRE CONTENT of whatever "world" He creates must be 100% HIS DOING and entirely WHAT HE WANTED.

So this now means, every single thing in this world, good or bad, right or wrong, happy or sad, is HIS DOING. And this leaves NO ROOM for other wills to have other doings. There are no other causes. This makes God the AUTHOR of all hatred, pain, torture and decay. All suffering is HIS FAULT. HIS WILL.

God causes floods. God causes famines. God causes stars to explode destroying solar systems. God causes black holes to suck up galaxies and civilizations. God causes murder and attack and death. ALL OF IT MUST be part of God's mind and will, IF GOD CREATED THIS WORLD.

And if you can understand why this is entirely correct, you should also realize that if God WERE to do this, to have DONE this, God WOULD BE EXTREMELY CRUEL.

As the opening statement says, if God created BODIES, which includes all forms of bodies not just human, including planetary bodies, IF GOD created them, DEATH IS REAL. Because these bodies DO DIE. Flowers die. People die. Planets die. Galaxies die. IF God created these things, DEATH IS REALITY. And if death is reality, then you CANNOT UNDO IT, you cannot overcome it, you are guaranteed to die forever. And that means there is NO SUCH THING as eternal life. So you better be counting the days until your "inevitable death."

The idea that God made the world is the idea that GOD IS THE EGO!!!!

And that means, quite simply.... GOD WANTS YOU DEAD. That it is GOD'S WILL THAT YOU DIE.

So now, we're in a bit of a predicament, because unless you want this to be TRUE of God, you CANNOT be claiming that God made the world. It literally CANNOT BE POSSIBLE that God had ANYTHING to do with the making of any of this shit, if God is to be loving. It is absolutely ridiculous to suggest, God WANTED there to be suffering, sickness and death.

Now, some people, who are insane and in denial, and cannot accept this fact, try to find another way to look at this situation, so that they can do two things: 1) KEEP the world and keep believing God created it, 2) Explain it in such a way that it is NOT terrible, bad, ugly and murderous. And so what do they do?

They come up with this bullshit idea that if you will simply change your mind ABOUT it, you'll suddenly realize that MURDER AND DEATH are totally LOVELY. That it is NATURAL for animals to eat each other alive. That there is SUPPOSED to be seasons in which things are born, suffer, and die. That if we will just skew our perception enough, supposedly "truly", then we'll see it as GOD INTENDED, as though to say, the things which SEEM like death and cruelty, ARE NOT ACTUALLY that.

And so what does that mean? It means God is totally nuts. Because now God does CRUEL THINGS, on purpose, under the BELIEF that THEY ARE NOT. It makes God out to be an absolute idiot. It justifies murder. It justifies death. It tries to adjust to the world to MAKE IT OK. It sees true perception as a device for changing the MEANING of a meaningless world, to GIVE it meaning, so that it seems meaningful. It's an attempt to find a way to look at this world such that EVEN THE HELL of it SEEMS LOVELY AND ACCEPTABLE.

That, is totally nuts. But that is what some people are doing with ACIM.

This world cannot be God's will. God HAS TO BE CRUEL to produce ANY of this, regardless of how you perceive it, regardless of how you think it was conceived, regardless of how you think God views it. God could not construct EVEN THE POSSIBILITY for suffering. God could not come up with even a scenario where you MIGHT even die. Yet alone to accuse God of MAKING DEATH. And to then try to explain it away by saying it''s not death, really, it's actually totally natural part of life. BULL SHIT.

I want you to consider this deeply. Think about it. God HAS to be TOTALLY FUCKING CRUEL in order to make a world like this. Which,may I remind you...

"Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

And therefore, Because God IS NOT CRUEL AT ALL, He CANNOT have made it.

Nor does it STOP BEING cruel just because you try to LOVE IT. Just because you forgive it, look past it, or truly perceive it, this does not change what it is. A true perception of a world of death doesn't turn it into a world of life. Who can look on death and believe IT IS NOT THAT? No amount of forgiveness has ever stopped animals from eating each other alive, babies from dying at birth, planets colliding, or black holes swallowing whole entire civilizations.

THIS WORLD, is NOT God's creation.

THIS WORLD, is the world WE made when we were delusional and trying to DENY God's world. This is written all over the course. A delusional system of those driven made by guilt. A place where God could enter not. An attack on God. A picture of the crucifixion fo God's son. Make no mistake it is NOTHING LIKE God's creation, and crediting it to him is a MASSIVE disservice. God in his perfection could not come up with the shite that happens in this world. And all of the shit that happens would HAVE TO BE BECAUSE OF HIM if he created it.

God does not create hell, suffering, death, decay, destruction, sickness, meaninglessness, suicide, insanity or hatred. Look around you. This is not reality.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world.God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself."

"Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself, "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are no streets where people walk alone and separately. There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever." This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER."

If you want to SEE REALITY, you have to DENY THIS WORLD. There are two worlds. One you made, one God created. In God's world there are no bodies, no day and night, no stores, no stupid stuff you don't need, no sickness, no death, no muder or attack, no suffering, no time, no loss, no dog shit, and especially no bad weather that kills people. If you want to SEE IT, to see the world GOD ACTUALLY created, you have to STOP LOOKING AT THIS PLANET. Sight of it is COSTING YOU the ability to SEE CHRIST where HE IS, in God's Kingdom, BEYOND THIS WORLD.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust even as you made it.

This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world. But the REAL world (heaven) HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT (heaven). And what you call with love WILL come to you. Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made (earth), and do not want. The only effort you need make, ***to give this world away in glad exchange*** for what you did NOT make, is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

Heaven is not like this, folks. God can do a lot better.

Mind in its natural state, experiences a sense of safety. This safety is based on the fact that the mind doesn't see itself as at the effect of anything external. It does not believe in being caused against its will. It does not have backwards/false perception. It also does not position itself as a victim or at the effect of the world.

This produces a kind of internally supported strength, in which the mind is not undermining itself and it recognizes it has nothing to fear. It feels "self contained", whole, and undivided. This internal unity is experienced as protection and as immortality. The mind doesn't see itself as vulnerable to anything because it recognizes it cannot be attacked or threatened.

Reality cannot be attacked because reality is permanent truth. It is inherently immortal and exists forever. Anything real, which includes you and your mind, has eternal life. Permanence is your natural condition. And the mind in its sane state is in touch with this permanence, and so recognizes it can never be altered by anything, rendering it invulnerable.

If the mind decides to move into ego, it is moving into positioning itself as a victim. It begins to see itself as at the effect of external forces, and made to suffer against its will. Perception reverses because cause is seen as coming from the world towards the self rather than the other way around. And this brings with it all manner of threat and danger, based on the idea that causes outside of you can do something to you against your will.

This then results in a change in the internal experience of the sense of safety and invulnerability. It's as though the mind "breaks open" its shell of protection, and develops a "wound". The wound seems open and bleeding, psychologically. This wounded part of the mind feels exposed, raw, accessible, attackable and threatened.

When this happens you feel like you are vulnerable. It's as though you open up a doorway and take off your protective armor, and now it seems possible that the things of the world can come into you, past your boundaries, and directly attack the core of your being. This is because your sense of identity has shifted from immortal spirit to the mortal body.

Your sense of self sees itself as self conscious and descended onto the battlefield, identified with a body, viewing itself as frail and weak and limited and incapable, and it now seems as if others have power over you. This produces a feeling like your insides are opening up, have become brittle and thin. And you'll feel like people have direct access to who and what you are as an attackable thing.

This feeling of being vulnerable to attack, living in fear, feels like being very exposed and unsafe. It's as though you, who are supposed to be walking around inside a perfect suit of protection, have lost your armor and are now a weak helpless thing that anyone can attack at will. This makes you afraid and threatened and there is a constant feeling of dread and stress. And the ego is in this state all the time.

You may also find that you then conflict with someone or they try to attack you. Because of your identification with that which can be attacked, as a victim, your mind actually believes in horizontal cause and effect. Out of the exposed vulnerable wound in the mind, you form a kind of psychological artificial "bridge" to the other person. Or maybe better described as a "bond" or "cords of fear." It's as if by believing that the other person is the cause of you, you are "tied to" their will power, causally and psychologically.

By believing that someone else has power to attack and affect you, your mind sees itself as being controlled by, caused by, influenced by, some external power. And that produces a sense that you are being tossed around on the waves. You'll try to forget about the encounter but you won't be able to drop it, because you haven't forgiven it. And fear thoughts about it will keep being generated by your mind in response to the perceptual belief that you are being attacked by them.

These fear cords will feel like areas of exposure within yourself, as though you have opened up a direct line to the person and they can cross that bridge and attack your insides directly. By hanging onto the belief in their ability to cause you, you maintain this bridge across which flows attack and keeps you in a constant state of fear.

These bridges of fear are dismantled through a correction process of forgiveness, in which you recognize and affirm that you are NOT at the effect of that person. They are not causing you, cannot attack you, have no power over you, and are not guilty of anything. This actually psychologically dismantles these horizontal cause-effect fear cords and you can feel them disappearing or "closing off".

The removal of this psychological "funnel of attack" seems to "close off" your mind to this idea of external causes. It's like sealing up a wound or fixing a mental leak. And as the sense of exposure and threat is closed up, the closing up feels like the formation of a barrier of protection. And then you feel safer because you are no longer "bleeding mind", and no longer believe that something external has direct access to your innermost self.

Through forgiveness then, the undoing of false beliefs in being caused by things outside of you, you gradually "close up" the exposed wounds, and the mind stops "bulging out" and returns to a "deflated" state, where you feel much safer and more protected. Fear diminishes and you feel like external things can no longer come into you. They can't access you because you are not on the battlefield, you are not an illusion or a body or an attackable thing.

Eventually with practice this should result in a "sealing up" of those psychological woulds, breaking down of those bridges of horizontal causation, and a growing sense of being surrounded by naturally protective walls of truth. Invulnerability increases and you feel more like you are "out of reach" of illusory attacks. You no longer believe the world CAN do anything to you, not even death or sickness.

You sort of, reabsorb into heaven, into God's womb, into a deeply immersive sense of safety, protection, harmlessness, integration, wholeness, peace and fearlessness. Because in spirit identification, in truth, you are actually unattackable and immortal. You resume your sense of being invulnerable because you see yourself as innocent and harmless. And the more you can feel this sense of innocence and safety, the less you feel like the world can even get anywhere near to what you are. And where there is perfect safety there is perfect peace.

"As long as belief in God and His Kingdom is assailed by ANY doubts in your minds, His perfect Accomplishment is NOT apparent to you. This is why you MUST be vigilant ON GOD'S BEHALF."

"It is only your awareness that NEEDS protection, because your BEING cannot be assailed. But a real sense of being CANNOT be yours while you are doubtful of what you ARE. THIS IS WHY VIGILANCE IS ESSENTIAL. Doubts ABOUT being MUST not enter your mind, or you CANNOT know what you are with certainty."

"The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not prevail against it. Amen"

"Now are the lilies of his innocence untouched by guilt, and perfectly protected from the cold chill of fear and withering blight of sin alike."

"You always choose between your weakness and the strength of Christ in you."

"The strength of the Soul leaves no room for intrusions."

"The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible. ... Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgement or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer. Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself: "I have forgotten what I really am, For I mistook my body for myself. Sickness is a defence against the truth, But I am not a body. And my mind Cannot attack. So I can not be sick."

"The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is KNOW THYSELF. There is nothing else to learn. Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost. Whenever you are with anyone ELSE, you have another opportunity to find them. Your power and glory are in HIM BECAUSE they are yours. The ego tries to find them in YOURSELF, because he does not know where to look. But the Holy Spirit teaches you that if you look only at yourself you CANNOT find yourself because that is NOT what you are."

Each of us has an identity. God gave us an identity in and as part of Christ or the Sonship, which we share. But in the separation from God, we denied who we were and sought an identity that wasn't shared. That meant denying our mutual identity, placing us in a state of not being certain of who we are. Another way of saying that is that we became afraid of who we are.

Then we started trying to make an identity that would replace the identity we lost. We were out of touch with reality. So we started trying to assemble an identity from various illusions, and from things which are not really who or what we are. In particular we tried to identify with something isolated and alone, that you could call "only yours", rather than sharing an identity with others.

This included identifying with our bodies, believing that our body is our self. To do this our mind has to literally "attach" itself to "mix itself with" the body, trying to become "one" with it. As if to blur the lines between what is the body and what is our self. So that there is only one seeming self, not two. By trying to identify with a body, we're trying to hide our real identity and forget it, so that all that remains is the body self.

If I bind my definition of who and what I am, or what is true of me, to the body, then I am saying I AM a body. And then everything about the body I take personally as if it speaks of and defines me. Maybe I'll feel positive about my body for various reasons, due to how it looks or what it is capable of. Or maybe I'll feel negative about it based on it being ugly or defective. But both are still identifications with the body.

We can also shift to identifying with the mind, or with thoughts. When we have thoughts we can get a sense of an artificial sense of self, mixed in with the thinking. The mind can chatter away with its noise and the more it talks the more you mistake the talking for the person doing the talking. As if the sound of thought is the presence of someone. As if the thoughts are a self. And now you've identified with thinking, perhaps with intelligence or intellect, with memory or accumulation of knowledge.

You can also identify with social standing, your social background, class, race, gender, how much money you have, where your family seems to rank in terms of some social hierarchy, whether you are upper-class or lower, living in wealth or in poverty etc. You can also identify with failing to have much of a worthwhile identity in any of these areas, perhaps with a poor body and poor finances and poor living conditions, seeing yourself as identified as a helpless victim.

I think we can also identify with objects, with animals and pets, with places, with homes and cars etc. We can identify with our children, and literally feel as though what happens to them happens to us. As though they are a part of us, to such an extent that when they suffer we suffer, or we take everything that happens to them as a personal attack. This can lead to the identity of being a father or mother, someone who wants to keep that identity and not let it go, and who cannot deal with the empty nest.

These are all confused senses of who and what you are. And we're all looking for ourselves because think we lost ourselves. We sense that we are uncertain, thus afraid, of who and what we really are - or don't want to know. We don't remember our identity. It's like we have an amnesia. Whether it be an amnesia imposed by birth through crossing the barrier of dimensions and entering a body prison, or the illusion that every time you're born you start from scratch to build an identity.

"Each man makes one ego for himself, although it is subject to enormous variation because of its instability, and one for everyone he perceives, which is equally variable." "The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

So the big question really is, who are you? What are you? Are you the son of God as He created you? Or have you become something else? Do you want to be something else? Are you a body? Are you a relationship, or a child that you possess, or an object you own? Are you a social status or a financial position? Are you your job, or your role as a parent? Are you made of the guilt and fear and sin that you feel? Are you your thoughts and your thinking? Are you the intellect? Are you awareness? Do you have a soul?

Finding out who you really are, knowing yourself, is what Jesus says is the entire point of this course. It's about remembering and waking up to the recognition that you are still exactly the same identity that God created you to be forever. You are still Christ, you are still a soul, still part of the sonship, still perfect. Still a spiritual being. And your real identity is shared with all the other Sons of God.

So our whole process here is just sorting out, what are we experiencing as being our identity, who or what have we identified with or latched onto, what is it that we think is our self, and where have we put that? What have we tried to become "one with", other than God? What have we wrapped ourselves around in trying to portray ourselves as something God did not create?

If I think I am my body or my thoughts and have actually bound myself to them such that I seem to experience them "as me", then I am in need of correction. I am out of touch with who I really am and am believing I am something I am not. This means I lack awareness or awakening, or am unconscious. These mis-identifiations with things we are not, are blocks to awareness.

"I am not a body I am free, for I am still as God created me."

"Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. "

"The ego IS therefore a confusion in identification, which never had a consistent model, and never developed consistently."

"By accepting the Atonement for YOURSELF, you are deciding AGAINST the belief that you can BE alone, thus dispelling the idea of separation and affirming your true identification with the whole Kingdom as literally PART OF YOU. This identification is as beyond doubt as it is beyond belief. Your wholeness HAS no limits, because its being is in Infinity."

"EVERYTHING you perceive as the outside world, is merely your attempt to maintain your ego identification, for everyone believes that identification is salvation."

"They are reflections both of your own proper identification WITH your brothers, and of your own awareness that YOUR identification IS maintained by extension."

"The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it, MAKING it sick because of its identification WITH it."

"This false identification makes you incapable of understanding what anything is for."

"When you imprison yourself, you are losing sight of your true identification with me and with the Father. Your identification IS with the Father and with the Son. It CANNOT be with one and not the other. If you are part of one, you MUST be part of the other because they ARE One."

"In his complete identification with the Christ--the perfect Son of God, His one creation and His happiness, forever like Himself and One with Him - Jesus became what all of us must be."

"As long as your identification vacillates, (and B's is weak) you cannot accept the gift that belongs to you."

"Your identification with the Kingdom is totally beyond question except by you WHEN YOU ARE THINKING INSANELY."

"ALL attack is self attack. It cannot BE anything else. Arising from your OWN decision NOT to be what you ARE, IT IS AN ATTACK ON YOUR IDENTIFICATION. "

"Miracles praise God through men. They praise God by honoring his Creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because they deny body-identification and affirm Soul-identification. By perceiving the Spirit, they adjust the levels and see them in proper alignment. This places the Spirit at the center, where Souls can communicate directly."

"This is not my name alone, for ours is a shared identification. "

"The body is the ego's home by its own election. It is the only identification with which it feels safe, because the body's vulnerability is its own best argument that you CANNOT be of God."

"For example, if the identification is with the body, consciousness may distort superconscious impulses by denying their Source, and seeking their impact in the orgasm."

"You HAVE carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is TOTAL CONFUSION ABOUT EVERYTHING."

When we believed in separation from God, we entered into a very confused and backwards way of thinking. We shut out reality. We denied truth. We split and narrowed our minds and drove ourselves insane.

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

"This IS an insane world, and do not underestimate the actual extent of its insanity."

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt."

We swapped the meaning of everything. What was true became false. What was false became true. Innocence was considered a sin. Sin was considered innocence. God was regarded as an evil dictator. Ego was regarded as your saviour. Death was believed to be life, and sickness was believed to save you from God. Darkness was light and punishment was atonement.

You no longer recognize what anything actually is. When you look upon things you do not see what they are, you see what you made of them. You see the twisted meanings and deceptions that you made of them. You don't believe that God is love. And you think death is your friend. You do not even recognize your own self.

"There is no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this: I do not know the thing I am, and THEREFORE do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world and on myself."

"Nothing the world believes is true. It is a place whose purpose is to be a home where those who claim they do not know themselves can come to question what it is they are."

So now we have a world filled with crazy people. People who do not know which way is up. People whose priorities are all over the place purely because they think they've made a really great decision, when in fact they have poor judgement.

If your whole belief about what something is, is wrong, it changes how it looks to you and what it means to you. If it's something which in truth would hurt you, and you see it as helpful, you might choose it on purpose believing it will help you.

This is the case with sickness. "Sickness is a defense against the truth" tells you that you mis-perceive God. You think God or Truth is a threat to you, an enemy. You see attack and vengeance and danger in him. Having hallucinated these lies, you then react to them. And you reason, if God is trying to destroy me, I need to get away from God.

Then you will try to create a distance between you and God. And this is a problem because God is, in the big picture truth, life and wholeness and health and happiness. So you resist God, thinking God is your enemy, and by doing so choose to go away from these things. So you head towards sickness and death and limitation and weakness, all under the belief that you are saving your life from a real threat.

Then you end up suffering and you hate it and you think you didn't choose it. You don't want it because who could want it really, but you did want it because you chose it. And you chose it because you made a wrong decision.

"I must have made a wrong decision because I'm not at peace."

The decision was based on you thinking that you knew what everything is, when you didn't, and were misinformed and deceived. So you deceived yourself and lied to yourself and then followed that lie as guidance and ended up hurting yourself. But you didn't think it was going to hurt, you thought it was helpful.

So literally the people in the world believe that suffering is salvation. Punishment is seen as justified and right and a form of healing and education. More suffering for the guilty is seen as atonement. And people literally choose to die, in an attempt to claim their innocence. If someone else is to blame, you get to be exonerated, and you think this will save your life, but you die instead.

"Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die."

It's all to do with having a faulty guidance system. A screwed up navigation. The map is all wrong. The signposts are all backwards. You think you're going towards stuff which is truly good by choosing things which are definitely not. And all because you do not know what the fuck you are doing.

You do not know who you are, what you are, where you came from, how you got here, why you are here, what you are doing, why you are doing it. You even doubt whether you were even ever really created and suspect that you are an illusion that doesn't even exist.

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

So this is the problem we all have. We do not correctly recognize what anything actually is. And so we keep being in a state of self-deception. And then we make choices based on this deception, which turn out to move us towards "what we want", just as all choices do, except the stuff we've chosen is not in our best interests. But we thought it was.

So we keep hurting ourselves. We know not what we do. We are lost. We are insane. We need to be straightened out. We need help from outside the insanity (Holy Spirit etc). We need to be corrected. We need to be willing to be mistaken. We need to examine the beliefs and meanings we've given to everything and look for a better way.

"Do not, then, think that following the Holy Spirit's guidance is necessary merely because of your own inadequacies. It is the way out of hell for you."

Every strategy. Every form of problem solving. Every way of relating. Everything you think you'll gain or lose. Every scenario. It all has to be brought into question and re-evaluated by the One who knows. Your mind needs to be corrected and trained to line up with what is ACTUALLY TRUE, and what you can actually have, and want, and what is fully in accord with God's will.

"ALL real pleasure comes from doing God's will. Whenever it is NOT done an experience of lack results. This is because NOT doing the will of God IS a lack of self."

Recognition is the key. Properly discerning what something is or isn't. Being not deceived by anything. Correct clear accurate perception. Proper categorization of things. Is something true on God's terms, or is it false? Can it be real in God, or is it unreal? It is really what it appears to be, or is it something else? Are you mistaken? If you are not enlightened, you are mistaken.

"Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all."

If you could fully recognize what everything actually is, to see it clearly, without distortions of reality, without hallucinations, without fake meanings and artificial values, without wishful thinking or delusion, without denial and without attack or resistance, you would be enlightened.

"It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give."

When everything false is finally seen for what it is, recognized to be unreal and nothing, with no value and no further purpose, it will disappear.

"Illusion recognized must disappear. Accept not suffering, and you remove the thought of suffering. Your blessing lies on everyone who suffers when you choose to see all suffering as what it is."

"The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal? Could you have FAITH in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? AND WOULD YOU SEE IT? Hallucinations disappear when they are RECOGNIZED for what they are."

"Healing, then, is a way of APPROACHING knowledge by THINKING in accordance with the laws of God and RECOGNIZING THEIR UNIVERSALITY. WITHOUT this recognition, you have made the laws themselves meaningless TO you."

"Yet what makes them God's teachers is their recognition of the proper purpose of the body."

"In fact, the recognition that you do not understand is a prerequisite for undoing your false ideas."

"The ego will NEVER let you perceive this, for this recognition WILL make it homeless. For, when this recognition dawns clearly, you will NOT be deceived by ANY form the ego takes, to protect itself FROM your sight."

"Today we would experience ourselves at one with Him, so that the world may share our recognition of reality."

"He overlooks the mind and body, seeing only the Face of Christ shining in front of him, correcting all mistakes and healing all perception. Healing is the result of the recognition, by God's teacher, of Who it is that is in need of healing. This recognition has no special reference. It is true of all things that God created. In it are all illusions healed."

"Let us try to recognize this today, and experience the peace this recognition brings."

"The light is come today to bless the world, for you have recognized the Son of God, and in your recognition is the world's."

"That is why the recognition of your OWN invulnerability is so important in the restoration of your sanity."

"The recognition of God is the recognition of yourself."

"For recognition comes of vision and SUSPENDED judgment."

"The full awareness of the Atonement, then, is the recognition that the separation NEVER OCCURRED."

"The aim of our curriculum, unlike the goal of the world's learning, is the recognition that judgment in the usual sense is impossible."

"Your inheritance awaits only the recognition that you have BEEN redeemed."

"Think of the freedom in the recognition that you are not bound by all the strange and twisted laws which you have set up to save you."

"Your function here is only to decide AGAINST deciding what you want, in recognition that YOU DO NOT KNOW. How, then, CAN you decide what you should do? Leave ALL decisions to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as He KNOWS it."

"The real world is all that the Holy Spirit has saved for you, out of what you have made, and to perceive only this is salvation, because it is the recognition that reality is ONLY WHAT IS TRUE."

"Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point."

"The recognition of the real creative power in yourself AND others brings release because it brings peace."

"Truth must be all-inclusive if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposite and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely. Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true and nothing else is true."

"Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow HIS plan of Salvation, in recognition of the FACT that you do NOT know what it is." "Awaking unto Christ is following the laws of love OF YOUR FREE WILL, and out of quiet recognition of the truth in them."

"Defenselessness is strength. It testifies to recognition of the Christ in you."

In ACIM we're told we have an authority problem. If you read ACIM it speaks about us having an issue with "who authored who".

We're told that God is the author of us, because he is our creator and cause. We're told we are forever an effect of God. This means God is the author of us and he has authority over us. And because he IS AN AUTHOR (creator), we HAVE BEEN authored (created).

"I, who am host to God, AM worthy of Him. He Who ESTABLISHED His dwelling- place in me created it ***as He would have it be***."

"When God GAVE Himself to you in your creation, ***He ESTABLISHED you*** as host to Him forever. He has NOT left you, and YOU have not left HIM."

This means that in terms of heaven's reality, we are really SECONDARY creations, and thus co-creators. We did not come first. We did not create ourselves. We did not have any say in who or what we are. It is entirely up to God to create and sustain us. You have a REAL PARENT!

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind."

You are not the primary creator. You are not "God" in this sense. You are A CREATION of God, and a co-creator with him. You have a father, therefore. You are a CHILD of God. This puts you in a position of being second-in-command, not commander-in-chief. You are his "number two".

In the separation, we as second-generation creations, rebelled against our creator. We rebelled against the idea of having been created by God. We wanted to believe we could overpower God and be his equal, to rebel against him, to overthrow his kingdom, and to have authority at least as equal to if not greater than his. We wanted to be the CAUSE OF HIM, and not his effect, thus separating cause from effect (father from son) and inventing the idea of sinning against God.

This meant throwing his authorship out the window and believing that he was NOT the author of you. This meant that you believed you were the author of yourself, in a position to define and create and redefine yourself according to your wishes. And it was this wishful thinking which made the ego, a SECOND SELF designed to deny you are a SON of God and to portray yourself as ruler of a world where God doesn't exist - as though you had destroyed him and his son through death.

"The world was made as an attack on God" ... "A place where God could enter not."

"The issue of authority is really a question of authorship. When an individual has an "authority problem," it is ALWAYS because he believes he is the author of himself."

This led to the curious belief that you actually are convinced that God is not your father, that you are not a child of God, and that you have therefore not really been created at all.

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

"being uncertain of their true Authorship, men believe that their creation was anonymous. This has left them in a position where it SOUNDS meaningful to consider the possibility that they must have created themselves."

You then replaced God with a false God - a God of judgement and vengeance. An ego God and a God of sickness. A god unlike God. A god of suffering and evil.

"The "attack on God" made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression."

So now we have a problem with God's authority. We think we are orphans (separated fatherless selves). Our egos do not want God to have authority over us. We don't want to be second-in-command. Wd don't want to admit that we ARE A SELF that is SECONDARY to God, he having created something other than himself, and that therefore we are NOT HIS EQUAL.

"This is because God and man are NOT equal."

"If you created GOD and He created you, the KINGDOM could not increase through its OWN creative thought. Creation would therefore be limited, and you would NOT be co-creators WITH God. As God's creative Thought proceeds FROM Him TO you, so must YOUR creative thoughts proceed FROM you to YOUR creations."

"God's accomplishments are NOT yours. But yours are LIKE His. HE created the Sonship, and YOU increase it. You HAVE the power to ADD to the Kingdom, but NOT to add to the Creator OF the Kingdom."

We need to kind of bow-down and accept that God is greater than us. That we do exist as "lesser beings" in a sense. We are his effects. We are his creations, his children. There is something above and beyond us which is bigger than us, of which we should have awe. This requires HUMILITY to accept that your REAL SELF is NOT GOD in this regard, and thus heaven contains you AND God.

"This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND."

"But it WAS emphasized that awe IS a proper reaction of the Soul in the presence of its Creator."

"You who are in the image of the Father need bow only to HIM, before whom I kneel with you."

We don't want to admit to having been created "against our will." We don't like the idea that God was the only one who could decide what we are. We want to redefine ourselves and imagine that we're something we're not. And we reject God's will as if it means we're going to be forced to do something we don't want to do.

In order to undo the authority problem, it does in fact entail having to accept that God is your creator. God has to be seen as the source of you, the cause of you, the creator of you, and the reason WHY you are the way that you are in reality. If you are to be "still as God created you", then you have to accept that you are immortal BECAUSE OF him. You are his son, not his equal!

God maintains you in his mind forever and gives you eternal life. He shares his innocence and his power with you. He handed down everything he had to you in your creation, and you therefore share everything with him. But to get over your power-trip you will have to acknowledge that you COME FROM GOD. That you did not create yourself, and have no say in what you are.

This is where acceptance of atonement comes in, because now we're talking about your willingness to put aside all attempts to define yourself, to decide what is true of you, or making it your business to be the one who says what is real. This requires a surrendering of ego and a surrendering of the position of "I want to be first" and "I want to rule God" and "I will do everything without God" and "I want it thus."

To accept atonement and thus undo the problem with authority, you have to be willing to acknowledge that God has authority above you. He has the authority to create and cause you. Everything you are and everything you have not only comes from him but is chosen BY him. You have to accept that you have no say in your nature, what you can and cannot do, who you are, or what you are. You have to be willing to simply accept what you have been GIVEN with gratitude.

That means an end to inventing artificial identities, an end to identifying with bodies, an end to believing stuff about yourself that is out of line with God's will, an end to trying to portray yourself as mortal, and an end to acting like you're not Christ.

This isn't about you just being true to yourself or knowing yourself, it's also about you acknowledging that everything you are and have COMES FROM GOD, and therefore he is your creator and father and you acknowledge him as having power over you. Not a power that coerces or manipulates or dictates, but nevertheless you have NOTHING other than what HE decides you have. And you have to be okay with that.

Thankfully God has given everything good, and everything worth having, and everything meaningful. He has given you his own power and strength, his own light and love, and his own happiness and joy. He has given you the ability to create life and also in this world to heal and resurrect. And he ultimately is all that you want and what you want to be like.

You are literally the will of God. God has willed what you are. You therefore are what he wills. And you are thus an extension of his will. Your free will therefore wills like his and wills for the same things that he wills, ie the creation and sharing of eternal life. To align your will with God's is to accept your place in heaven, orient yourself to filling the shoes he made for you, and lining up with the "way of living" that he designed for you in perfection.

God has GIVEN you what you are, where you live, what is true, what is real, and how you can function. He has defined you, decided for you, created you, chosen you, wanted you, and maintains you forever. You are what you are BECAUSE OF him which is why your soul is grateful to him eternally. You have to RECEIVE him to host him. And you have to acknowledge that you have a REAL PARENT, which means you have to get over all your authority issues and be willing to BE A CHILD.

Then, by acknowledging that God is your father, and you are his holy child, you are now in a position to recognize that you are also a co-creator WITH him, and that he creates through you. By your extension you now create your own children and are father to them, just as God is father to you. And thus accepting HIS fatherhood you accept YOUR fatherhood and become reacquainted with your own children in heaven.

"A son of a father must have a son."

"As miracles in this world join you to your brothers, so do your creations establish your fatherhood in Heaven."

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The main difference between us as yet is that I have NOTHING ELSE. This leaves me in a state of true holiness, which is only a POTENTIAL in you."

"So would I look on everyone today. My brothers are Your Sons. Your Fatherhood created them, and gave them all to me as part of You and my own Self as well. Today I honor You through them, and thus I hope this day to recognize my Self."

"Without your Father you will not know your fatherhood. The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father. Know then the Sons of God, and you will know ALL Creation."

JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE AWAKE, DOES NOT MEAN OTHER PEOPLE WANT TO SHARE IT WITH YOU

JUST BECAUSE YOU PERCEIVE CORRECTLY, DOES NOT MEAN OTHER PEOPLE STOP PERCEIVING INCORRECTLY

Moving into the LIGHT, does not necessarily bring others with you, until they are WILLING to join you.

God is 100% awake right now. There is no sickness or death or suffering in God. It is "true" that these things do not exist, that separation is impossible, and no-one can die.

HOWEVER

It SEEMS. ... in an illusory way.... that we can SEEM to separate from God, to go off into a nightmare, have a bad dream, IMAGINE it is really happening, confuse it with reality temporarily, and SEEM to suffer and die.

Any such suffering, sickness or dying, is not real, and every single person who has sickness or suffering is not REALLY suffering. They are just having a bad dream.

But let's look at this with some compassion. Those "people", even if those people are not really individuals, no matter who or what they are, even if they are split of bits of the Son's mind, there is still some kind of ILLUSORY EXPERIENCE of terrible things happening.

A nightmare. A bad dream. Stuff that seems horrible, but in truth, is not happening. Yet still SEEMS to be happening to those "to whom" it seems to be happening.

And while these people are having these FALSE EXPERIENCES, God is already 100% awake, 100% healed and whole, 100% knowing that sickness and death are not possible.

WHY DOES GOD NOT UNDO THOSE NIGHTMARES IMMEDIATELY?

WHY DOESN'T GOD's INFINITE POWER AND IMMORTALITY stop people from killing themselves in the dream?

WHY DOESN'T THE FACT THAT GOD's MIND IS TOTALLY AWAKE, "cause" all "people" to NOT BE ABLE To create dreams of suffering?

Putting aside the illusion of linear time for a moment, God does not do that ONLY because those people having the nightmares keep REFUSING TO RECEIVE THE HELP. They use ILLUSIONS of denial, to pretend that they do not want the help, and that they need to suffer.

Even though God is offering 100% eternal life right now, immortal spirit is attempting to PRETEND to be stuck in a mortal body, confused with what can be sick and suffer and die.

And while we're in this illusion, having this nightmare, I think most people would AGREE that these "nightmares" can seem pretty dam real TO the person who is having them. Like if someone was mentally ill, having a terrible distorted vision of a horrible monster trying to eat them, freaking out and running around screaming because they THINK they're being attacked, even if they are NOT.... what is the loving response?

The loving response is TO LOVE.... always... the same.... unconditional love OFFERED at all times, but not being FORCED onto the person. Why not? Why doesn't God just wake us up out of the nightmare right now "against our will". Because we have FREE WILL, or at least love does not do that because it sees no NEED to do that, because it knows nothing real is happening.

Since God is 100% aware right now, and we, here, in this forum, for the most part, ARE NOT 100% AWARE RIGHT NOW, what that means is..... even though it's ultimately not true that we are unaware, it SEEMS like we are. We are having a false nightmare, a dream, a fantasy experience. Which SEEMS real to us.

And some of us here are experiencing what we think is real suffering. Maybe someone had a stroke, or has terrible pains, or anxiety about food, or had a heart attack, or their kidneys aren't working, or they have some "rare disease". Or maybe someone close to them is sick and it keeps them up at night worrying.

These are all false experiences, unreal nightmares, BUT the person having them DOES NOT KNOW THAT at this point. The illusion is so convincing, that we seem to have this twisted sense of "reality"... where we perceive and think these things are "really happening". And that produces ALL of the suffering, fear, and torment in this fictional world.

And none of it is real. And no-one is really sick. And there is no suffering. BUT.. .. that's not what people are SEEMING to experience.

What would love do about this? How would love respond to someone with mental illness, who hallucinates problems, who psychosomatically puts sickness into their body and writhes in torment over the pain they feel? What would love's response be?

TO LOVE THEM. TO OFFER A MIRACLE OF HEALING.

They might not accept the healing. Just as we seem to sleep "against God's will"... something which is really IMPOSSIBLE, yet which we are PRETENDING is possible....the person might refuse to JOIN YOU in being 100% awake. They might keep pretending that denial is real and possible and can block love. They might still manifesting artificial make-believe terrible sickness. They might PERCEIVE differently than you perceive.

Just because you go into true perception, or even go beyond perception to TOTAL AWARENESS of everything real, does NOT MEAN that other people automatically go there as well.

This is why Jesus was able to walk around the earth in a MORE HEALED state than other people, and OFFER THEM healing. He was still able to PERCEIVE that these "people" - whatever they are - parts of his mind or whatever - these people were having nightmares. Some split-off part of mind was still twisting "reality" and SEEMING to experience a terrible state of suffering. And to that piece of mind, that person, that suffering seemed VERY REAL and horrible.

Even though love knows that suffering is NOT REALLY THERE and has no real consequence and minds cannot be sick etc.... that none of this even happened.... IT IS STILL LOVING to offer miracles of healing to those "parts" which seem to be in need. This is part of the atonement process. The plan of salvation. That we are BRING LOVE to ALL PARTS OF MIND.

As Jesus says, he offers us salvation and love right now, but if we are not ready to receive it, HE WILL WAIT.

In time, people CAN REFUSE LOVE. Or at least seem to. They can produce forms of sickness in the body EVEN THOUGH God does not contain any real sickness. They can make illusions of being sick, and have horrible nightmares about those sicknesses being real. It is LOVING to alleviate that suffering IF THEY ARE WILLING to RECEIVE IT, through your offering of a miracle.

Just because there is total awareness or total perception, and even if that shows you there is NO DEATH and sickness is an IMPOSSIBLE ILLUSION, in time.. there is STILL a "need" for healing. That's why the Holy Spirit is here. His function here is healing, and we are supposed to share that with him, to OFFER HEALING to everyone who still seems to suffer from self-made nightmares. It is the loving thing to do, to offer a miracle, EVEN IF it is refused, and in spite of the fact that people can CHOOSE NOT TO PERCEIVE AS YOU DO.

Additionally, just because your perception is true and whole and healed, it does not STOP you from seeing what these "other people" or "split off bits of mind" - from the one whole son - are doing to themselves. It's possible to have COMPASSION for them, to recognize they are MISTAKEN and to not believe their sickness is REAL... yet to STILL OFFER HEALING of *THEIR BELIEF* that sickness is justified. And if they continue to spend time refusing to learn the curriculum, which is their free will right, they may well refuse to undo that illusion of sickness and will STILL EXPERIENCE SUFFERING, even if God can never suffer.

So yes, there IS no real sickness. Yes, there ARE no separate people. Yes, there are not even any bodies TO heal. Yes, no-one really needs real healing because healing is an illusion. BUT WHILE WE ARE HERE.... inside this dream illusion, where people DO choose to make illusions of attack and sickness, IT IS our role to offer and bring healing through love, to perform miracles, to heal the sick, to raise the dead, and to HELP "those" who seem to suffer. And they will thank you, because what they were experiencing before, even if it was an illusion, was WORSE to them than what they are experiencing now. How is that not KIND?

This is our function here. To offer love and truth to those who THINK they are really sick and suffering. To undo that suffering if they will ALLOW. To recognize they cannot be sick or suffer or die FOR THEM while they refuse to see it FOR THEMSELVES. Just because you wake up, does NOT mean "their sickness" disappears from THEIR EXPERIENCE. Otherwise, because God is awake NOW, it would be impossible for anyone to experience sickness. And truly they can't because sickness MUST therefore be AN ILLUSION, but people are still TEMPORARILY INSANE believing otherwise.

No-one needs saving, yet they do. In this dream, they do. There is healing to be performed. There are miracles to work. There are people who, if you walked up to them and asked, "would you like me to take away this cancerous growth", would say, "sure"... and you extend God's love in prayer and IT DISAPPEARS, and they are totally over the moon because they were suffering for years and thought they are going to have the NIGHTMARE of dying.

It's all mental illness, but love STILL HEALS IT. There is no real need to heal it, BUT LOVE DOES ANYWAY. Love just loves. While we dream, God wants us to awaken. While we refuse God's will, or try to, pretend to, God wills that we be happy and accept his will.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SUFFER, even if it is just a made-up dream of made-up suffering. You don't even NEED TO HAVE a nightmare dream. You can have a HAPPIER DREAM. A dream which is gentler and softer and precedes awakening in a smooth and non-jarring way. You do not need to be sick, or tolerate it, or try to transcend it in order to deny it. IT CAN BE REMOVED. No-one has to have dreams of death and suffering and sickness and pain, EVEN IF it is just a dream. This is not God's will.

It is God's will for you to EXPERIENCE PERMANENT HEALTH AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, to no longer have that broken leg, or that missing arm, or that defective lung, or that cancer, or any of it. A broken body proves the mind is not healed, so these breaks MUST BE HEALED if the mind is to be healed. We do not need to find ways to "be at peace with it". We need to UNDO IT, in form, in the body, to prove and demonstrate the truth that we cannot be hurt against our will. No-one needs to be having a dream of limitations.

The soul, which is your self, your real identity, and your true nature, can be thought of like a piece of machinery in the engine of heaven - in the mind of God.

Given that the soul is WHAT YOU ARE, it's useful to know the operating perameters of yourself. What are you? What are you capable of? What can and can't you do? What are your limits? What are your design specifications?

God is the DESIGNER of the soul. He is the manufacturer. HE ALONE determines the design of your self, gives your self its function, assigns it its abilities, specifies what it can and cannot do, and guarantees that it will always function as HE WILLS IT.

"The only function of spirit is to extend God's being."

Your soul is like a machine. It serves a function. It plays a role. It is used by God for a purpose. It operates according to HIS RULES ONLY. "I am under no laws but God's."

This means that in the overall picture of heaven, YOU are designed by God for a specific FUNCTION. Your functionality includes certain FREEDOMS or abilities.

These freedoms are inherited or BASED ON God's abilities. God can only design what He can conceive of, and He can only use Himself as a reference. He designs you to be LIKE HIM, and to operate WITHIN the confines of HIS abilities.

Your functionality includes the ability to extend God, to create, to know, to love, to experience joy and happiness, to co-create further creations, and to increase the Kingdom.

There are also some things which YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO DO. And thankfully these things are not things you'd WANT to be able to do. You cannot attack anything real. You cannot sin. You cannot hurt or be hurt. You cannot damage or be damaged. You cannot cause or experience any kind of sickness or suffering. And you cannot die.

God DID NOT GIVE YOU the ABILITY to sin, attack, suffer or die. You CANNOT DO THESE THINGS. You HAVE NEVER done these things. You WILL NEVER do these things.

In your design, you also have an INPUT and an OUTPUT. The INPUT to you is God Himself. You host Him. He plugs you into His power source and his light, and extends Himself to you. He POWERS your soul. He GIVES it life. It SUSTAINS it in His mind. AND, he also MAINTAINS YOUR FUNCTIONING AT ALL TIMES.

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind."

God Inc's equipment therefore comes with a GUARANTEE. It is a lifetime guarantee. And in fact God creates such excellent quality equipment that it is guaranteed to FUNCTION CORRECTLY FOREVER. He Himself makes sure of this by designing the soul PERFECTLY, ensuring it never needs maintenance and cannot go wrong. God PROTECTS his equipment permanently and really get's behind his product.

Everything the soul machinery is able to do, is determined solely by God. He is THE ONLY designer. He is the cause of you. Anything you can or cannot do, any function you do or do not have, is by HIS WILL alone. You cannot add to yourself or take anything away. No-one else can add to take away either.

This means that your soul is FIXED in its functionality. It cannot change itself. It cannot redefine what it is. It cannot modify itself. It can only operate WITHIN the parameters it was given. So let's say that the soul is given certain FREEDOMS, such as the free will to create. It IS possible that the soul can potentailly MIS-USE its power to create, to mis-create, but it CANNOT give itself the power to CREATE REAL damage. It cannot cause REAL sin. It can ONLY create constructively.

The other thing about this is, that the soul should generally ACCEPT its design, its functioning, its place in the Kingdom, and its overall abilities. It is in its best interests to do so. But sometimes souls decide to rebel against their creator. They want to be something they can never be. They deny their inherent nature. They imagine they are something they are not, and that they can do things which they CANNOT ever do.

When this happens, the soul isn't going OUTSIDE of its limitations, but it is PRETENDING that it is. Because it DOES have the power to FREELY CHOOSE, and so can freely PRETEND through denial that it is NOT what it is. This produces a "shut-down" mode, aka spiritual sleep. In this mode, by denying itself, the soul is shutting itself down. And when it is asleep, it dreams of impossibilities that CANNOT be really happening.

"What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

The soul IS FREE to do this, because it can use its freedom against its freedom, which is a mis-use of its own abilities. It can try to use free will to NOT WILL ANYTHING, which is an obvious contradiction in terms. When the soul tries to CAUSE something it was NOT DESIGNED TO OUTPUT, it merely causes nothing real to output. And instead dreams of imaginary outputs that don't exist.

The soul has been set up to have OUTPUT parameters as well as INPUT parameters. It can PRODUCE certain "products". It can generate living beings. It can CREATE LIFE. It can radiate love. And it can share joy and peace. It can experience relationship with other similar soul machinery (brothers), made by the same manfacturer. And it can enjoy perfection forever.

When the soul believes it is able to output something which God DID NOT MAKE POSSIBLE, it imagines it is producing things which it cannot possibly produce. These would include the making of bodies, planets, worlds, space and time, illusions of sickness, all forms of suffering, and death. None of these are REAL outputs, they are wishful thinking.

"Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

When the soul does this, it is akin to a toaster oven believing it can wash your car, or a tv set believing it can cook dinner. It still remains IMPOSSIBLE, but the soul is free to use its freedom against itself to DENY its inherent functioning, and to PRETEND that other things are possible.

Since God did not give you THE EQUIPMENT FOR SIN... because your "soul 2000 model" did not COME WITH "the ability to sin" built in, it literally CANNOT DO IT. It can pretend to do it, but it cannot really do it. It can only dream of sinning, and never really attack any thing real. Just as your vacuum cleaner cannot bake cookies."Nothing real can be threatened."

God did not give you the ABILITY to threaten anything real. He did not BUILD IN a FUNCTIONALITY that can in any way CAUSE suffering. He did not provide you the equipment or parts to PRODUCE death. You cannot undermine your perfect functioning. You cannot make yourself malfunction. You cannot interfere with your inner workings. YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE AND NOTHING ELSE.

"I am still as God created me."

For the sake of what we'll call your SANITY, or operating in your soul in the WAY IT WAS INTENDED, without running amok and going haywire with UNPRODUCTIVE distorted outputs, it is in your best interests to ACCEPT YOUR FUNCTION. This means not having grandiose ideas of BEING SOME OTHER EQUIPMENT. It means not being jealous of the GOD MACHINE. It means not wanting to REJECT YOUR NATURE. And it means therefore the end of the authority problem.

You can't experience the EFFORTLESSNESS that God gave you, while you are trying to DISTORT your function. You cannot BE YOURSELF, while you are denying what you are. And you cannot be CONTENT or AT PEACE, while you are trying to turn yourself into something YOU WERE NOT DESIGNED TO BE. This means a willingness to ACCEPT your design specifications, without question, as GOOD ENOUGH. And this isn't some kind of second-best or booby prize either, because God creates perfect machinery!

The willingness to BE ONLY AS GOD CREATED YOU, to accept only the function THAT WAS GIVEN YOU, to fulfill the ROLE that God assigned to you, and to ONLY BE, HAVE, AND DO, that which God WILLED for you to do IN YOUR CREATION, is what re-aligns you with God's will and enables you to FUNCTION correctly. Or rather, to not disguise your true function with artificial functions.

This means having a willingness to accept FROM GOD, the specifications of WHAT YOU ARE. To allow ONLY HIM to define the TRUTH about you. To let him be YOUR FATHER. To let him be the one that decides WHAT YOU CAN AND CANNOT DO. And to acknowledge that you ARE EXACTLY HOW HE WANTS YOU TO BE. When you line up with this, and be ONLY this, and have ONLY what God gave you, and DO only what God willed for you, without objection, only then will you be happy and at peace and free from illusions.

To accept "the atonement" is merely to RECEIVE the ORIGINAL BLUEPRINT from the manufacturer. To be willing to ACCEPT that you ARE ONLY what God has designed you to be, and to function optimally within his parameters. To WANT nothing else, and to cease the MIS-USE of your function. You thus RESUME your function of creation and merely carry on as if nothing had happened.

Nothing can change what you are. You cannot change yourself. You cannot change other people's souls. You have NEVER DONE ANYTHING AGAINST GOD'S WILL. You have not exceeded your operating parameters. You have not BROKEN, gone downhill, degraded, corrupted, caused unnatural side effects or damaged anything. YOU CANNOT SIN OR ATTACK OR DIE. You have NEVER DONE ANYTHING WRONG.

You therefore are still exactly the innocent, perfect, holy, acceptable, worthy, beautiful, loving, harmless, immaculate, immortal, eternal, happy, joyful, powerful, free, flawless and completely divine piece of machinery that GOD CAUSED YOU TO BE. Just by being TRUE TO YOURSELF, knowing yourself, and BEING YOUR SOUL, you need do nothing else.

All that God wants for you is to be true to yourself and fulfill the NATURAL INHERENT FUNCTION he gave you. And since that function includes happiness and joy, it is a function you WILL approve of.

"All true pleasure comes from doing God's will."

There really is only one problem in all the universe, and it's the sense of God's absence. The separation from God. Fix this one problem and everything is perfect.

"Separation from God is the only lack he really needs to correct." All symptoms of sickness, all forms of suffering, every justification for fear, all reasons for guilt, every form of death, all problems, every war, all unhappiness in all the world, is ENTIRELY and ONLY the result of you not being with God.

Therefore, in the simplest terms, reuniting with God is ALL you need to do. It's not even that you need for God to come along and heal your shit, or fix your problems, or answer your questions, or fix up your life, or make your enemies go away.

It's god HIMSELF that you NEED. A lack of God is precisely and literally the cause of every form of suffering. It was by denying God's reality that you INDUCED all suffering upon yourself.

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it."

What is it that you are constantly doing to yourself? As in the fact that the secret of salvation is. ... that you are doing this all to yourself? You are "separating from God". That's all you are doing that is causing all your suffering.

"If you deny Him" ...... your denying of God, or not allowing God to love you, or trying to live without him, or thinking you can go it alone, or depending on your own strength, or trying to kill him or, or whatever... any form of rejection or attack or unwillingness, is you trying to keep God away from you.

And the only reason you want to keep God away is because if he were allowed to come closer to you, his light and love would dispel all darkness, solve all problems, heal all sickness, undo all death, make you indescribably happy, and give you everything you ever wanted. God would obliterate all sense of separation and you would become aware again of your unlimited attraction to him. An attraction that you had to cover up in order to pretend you could ever want to live apart from him. And if you ever remembered how much you want God, you would leap into his arms and drop the entire world in an instant.

"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."

You've either got God, or you're in a hell of your own making. You're either experiencing God's love, which literally IS happiness, or you are unhappy. All love belongs to God and you cannot find love without including him. You cannot be happy without God himself literally taking up residence in your mind and awareness. God IS the happiness.

Everything you ever wanted - happiness, love, peace, joy, perfection, invulnerability, immortality, holiness, meaning, truth, relationship, etc.... it is what God himself IS. You can't find it or have it without him. And there is no substitute, there is no "other" God or second God or other source for happiness and health. You either get it from God and let God fill all your needs, or you are empty and bereft and withering and weak and dying alone.

Not to suggest in a religious type of way that, if you don't get with God you're going to hell. But it's more like, if you insist on not including God's attributes in your mind and experience, and want nothing to do with the qualities that he freely offers, you have no other choice but to make yourself suffer by lacking everything that is good and worth having. All suffering is a LACK of God, an artificial sense of need and loss and emptiness that comes from trying to make God go away.

God is everything. If you try to make everything go away you will end up with nothing. All you really need is love. In the most literal way possible, love LITERALLY contains happiness and IS happiness. If you will let yourself feel God's love for you even a little bit, you will immediately notice that there is a feeling of happiness that suddenly springs up and you suddenly smile because it feels good. Let God in and you'll be grinning for miles.

Even your very own SELF is a part of God, and without God you cannot have that self. You literally are not being true to yourself or loving yourself unless you also love God and let God love you. Either you love God and include yourself in God and are therefore loved, and have love to share, because YOU ARE LOVE, or you are devoid of love and are alone and feeling like shit.

Love is all you need. God is all you need. Get some God in you and your way will be made straight.

"And God Himself shall wipe away all tears."

"Its love is limitless, with an intensity which holds all things within it in the calm of quiet certainty. Its strength comes not from burning impulses which move the world, but from the boundless Love of God Himself."

"And it is given us to recognize it is a holiness in which we share; it is the Holiness of God Himself."

"This the decision not to be insane, and to accept myself as God Himself, "

"We need but tell our minds, with certainty, "The stillness of the peace of God is mine," and nothing can intrude upon the peace that God Himself has given to His Son."

"This gladness calls to every part of the Sonship to rejoice with them, and let God Himself go out into them and through them."

"It is your task to heal the sense of separation that has made him sick."

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father. By doing this, the mind awakens from its sleep, and the Soul remembers its Creator. All sense of Separation disappears, and level confusion vanishes."

"We have spoken before of the higher or true perception, which is so close to truth that God Himself can flow across the little gap."

"Your new-born purpose is nursed by angels, cherished by the Holy Spirit, and protected by God Himself. It NEEDS not your protection; it is YOURS. For it is deathless, and within it lies the END of death."

"While you are sad the light which God Himself appointed as the means to save the world is dim and lusterless."

"In the presence of my holiness, which I share with God Himself, all idols vanish."

"I am the holy home of God Himself. I am the Heaven where His Love resides. I am His holy Sinlessness Itself, for in my purity abides His own."

"But God Himself has protected EVERYTHING He created BY His laws. Therefore, everything that is not under them does not exist."

"Put all your faith in it, and God Himself will answer you."

"Now has fear made way for love, as God Himself replaces cruelty." "ou do NOT belong in time. Your place is ONLY in eternity, where God Himself placed you forever."

"Into this hopeless situation God sends His teachers. They bring the light of hope from God Himself."

"And as you see him shining in the space of light where God abides within the darkness, you will see that God Himself is where his body is."

"Your little effort and small determination call on the power of the universe to help you, and God Himself will raise you from darkness into light." "For God Himself created the only relationship that HAS meaning, and that is His relationship with YOU."

"God Himself gave you the perfect correction for everything you have made which is not in accord with His Holy Will."

"By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS."

"At one with God and with the universe, we go our way rejoicing, with the thought that God Himself goes everywhere with us."

"And God Himself and all the lights of Heaven, will gently lean to you, and hold you up."

"Whenever you question your value, say, "God Himself is incomplete without me."

"God calls on you to save His Son from death by offering the love of Christ to him. This is your need, and God Himself holds out this gift to you."

"Here you are led, that God Himself can take the final step unhindered."

"God Himself orders your thought, because your thought was created BY Him."

"But the function which God Himself GAVE your minds through His you may DENY but you CANNOT prevent."

"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness."

"You are mirrors of truth in which God Himself shines in perfect light."

"I will, with God Himself, that none of His Sons should suffer."

The ego mind is a mind of separation and conflict.

The ego mind always has two faces - a persona and a shadow.

Within the ego mind itself, one part of itself is against the other part. The ego mind attacks itself, being an idea of self attack.

The persona portion of the ego mind is what most people most often identify with, thinking that this is their entire 'self'.

The shadow portion of the ego mind is the part most people disassociate from, project onto others, and hide unconsciously. This part of the mind we do not identify with, and believe it is not even a part of ourself. Therefore we scapegoat it onto others and accuse other people of being it.

But at all times, both the positive and negative are within the confines of our ego mind. Both the stuff we think is good and the stuff we think is bad are within our mind. And the stuff we think is our 'self' and the stuff we think is 'not self' (i.e. 'others) is still within our own mind.

Both the enemies that we perceive as 'not me', or 'out there', and the innocent victim that we try to position ourselves as 'in here', are both a part of a single mind which is at war with itself.

This war is taking place between your mind and your mind. It is a war of self-attack. Within the arena of your mind, you have these two sides, comprising the persona judger and the shadow retaliator. Or, the persona victim and the shadow victimizer.

Most of the time the shadow is projected and disassociated from, meaning we see it outside of 'our self' (the persona self) and disconnected from it. We literally believe through disassociation that it is not our own self, we want nothing to do with it, we try to get rid of it, and we use the persona part of our mind to attack it. Even though it's a part of (not apart from) this one mind.

We become so deceived by this 'split' in consciousness, this mental delusion of two selves, that the persona part of us, which we most typically believe is the whole ego, does everything it can to disassociate itself from the projected sin/guilt/fear/wrongness. It wants nothing to do with it, entirely because this attitude increases the sense of *separation*, or the severity of the 'split' within the mind, between the good-favoring and bad-favoring parts.

We need to learn the secret to salvation, according to Jesus, which is that "you are doing this to yourself".

What this means is, our whole mind is a container in which there is both the ego persona and the ego shadow. The stuff we deny, reject, judge, project, and attack is the shadow part, but it's still a part of our own mind. And the persona part which tries to reject that part is also in our own mind. It is not that the good parts are good or that it is being attacked by the bad parts that's the issue. That's not the problem. The problem is the sense of *separation* between these two parts.

The sense that the 'bad stuff in me' is 'someone else', is our major error. The accusation of sin onto someone else, which is really our own sin, is a mistake. The belief that someone is not One with us, is a mistake. The projection of our darkness outward, and our cutting it off from ourselves to create an enemy, is a mistake.

The darkness of the shadow ONLY appears to be dark and unwanted because of how intensely the 'good-seeking' persona part of us, that we retain identification with, tries to increase the 'contrast' between the two. The darkness would not appear AS dark if this separation or rift or split were not as pronounced. But this would also have to mean that the good-focused part of the mind be diminished in its exclusivity, its favor and its judgement.

See it is not just the bad icky shadow stuff that we need to 'get rid of'. In fact it is the ego persona that tries to get rid of that stuff, which means the ego persona is kept, and therefore the ego is kept, making this a trap. The more you try to get rid of stuff the more you manufacture a story about how dark that stuff is, and it will grow stronger as an enemy of the persona. All enemies are pretty much tied into the persona's idea of what it does not want, in order to make itself look better. But if the persona is going to attack the shadow, then the mind is going to become more split, and both parts are still going to stay within the confines of the single mind. So you will suffer.

Enemies are not the problem. Separation between good and bad is the problem. Separation between good-loving persona and good-hating shadow is the problem. And not realizing that both of these parts of your experience are entirely WITHIN your own mind, and has NOTHING to do with anyone else, is the big realization here.

You need to come to a perspective, an awareness, where you are looking at the contents of your mind, and realize that both the persona part of your mind is within you, AND the shadow part - the enemy, the attacker, the things you don't want, the parts you think are 'other people', that is ALSO in your mind. And you need to get to where you can see BOTH at the same time as being part of YOU. It is that awareness, where a sense of Self 'spans' and INCLUDES both parts, that you are in the kind of space where you can see that you are, literally, doing this to yourself. You are the victim and the victimizer. You are the persona and the shadow. You are both parts of this separated ego.

When you see this, and hold this perspective for a moment, where you can see both 'characters' if you will, both parts of you at once, you will see in that light how ridiculous it is that you are against yourself. The awareness that who you thought was an enemy, is YOU, will wake you up. The awareness that you thought you were against some other person but were in fact against YOU, will wake you up. The awareness that the behavior of the enemy, which you thought you had nothing to do with, is actually just another puppet - another part of YOU, that YOU are using against yourself... seeing that will wake you up.

You have to get to where you can see and accept that both sides of the split-mind war are WITHIN your mind and are both parts of what's going on inside yourself. This awareness will show you the utter ridiculousness of the war that you are waging against yourself, the roles that you are playing in your mind which you thought were distinct, the Self that you are - the awareness which encompasses the persona and the shadow, which is your real PERSONALITY. You are the awareness in which you see the war that you are waging, and the fact that you are playing BOTH SIDES, that you are literally against yourself with two artificial personalities.

You have to see that you are BEING both of those fake personalities (persona and shadow, victim and victimizer), and that it makes absolutely no SENSE that you can possibly be truly both at once unless you lose sight of this awareness. And since you are in this awareness, the 'illusion' that you are only one of these two parts cannot be maintained. It's like realizing that two characters in a play - enemies - are both being played by the same actor. And that awareness will set you free from the illusion of a separation.

This awareness is the key to salvation, because in this awareness and in the admitting that you are both the victim and victimizer, you will see how utterly futile and ridiculous that is, as well as owning up to the awareness that you are the one doing this... nobody else is involved, because the 'other person' was actually your own shadow, which is part of your own mind, part of your split identity - one of two parts of you. This UNIFIES your awareness, because you are likely willing to drop this stupid activity as soon as you see it, because it is so obviously insane and self-defeating.

When you see this... just wait to see how long you need to have this awareness before the entire thing just disappears ... it only takes a moment. It only takes for you to glimpse this, and both the persona and the shadow will cancel each other out. As soon as you see that you've been doing this all to yourself, both sides will collapse. The awareness that saw both these parts as parts of itself, is the light which will dispel this darkness. The darkness was the *illusion* of a separation between these two parts - the idea that one of these parts was 'not you'. But it is you. And that undoes the separation, so both sides have to now cease to be separate. They come together, unify, all contrast disappears, and ONENESS is restored. And it will be like nothing even happened.

The secret to salvation... you are doing this to yourself.