"T-22.III.5. 3 The body's eyes see only form. 4 They cannot see beyond what they were made to see. 5 And they were made to look on error and not see past it. 6 Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. 7 To this distorted form of vision the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true. 8 Yet how can sight that stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? 9 It is held back by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived." - ACIM

**** This is a very important part of the Course. ****

Jesus is telling is clearly here that the physical world of FORM, all objects, all matter, the physical universe, the world, are NOTHING, it is the way that we experience a 'wall of sin' which stands between us and God, and we are quite literally incapable of seeing God while we use the body's eyes to see.

It is also telling us that the physical universe is not reality. Perception of 'form', which means, physical materials, objects, people's bodies, the planet, etc... if you are seeing that, you are seeing an illusion.

This is very hard for many people to accept even intellectually yet alone to experience this truth. "There is no world" fits right in here.

So it's one thing to wake up to the point of still seeing the physical world and yet somehow 'seeing God in it' because God is in your mind. Okay, that's a step closer. BUT... that's not going all the way.

Jesus is telling us from a CHRIST perspective, that we have to become able to recognize that ALL FORMS ARE ILLUSIONS and that there is a REALITY that is beyond form, formless, in which you not only live your real life with God but you also are completely infinite and unlimited.

It's not enough just to find a different way of perceiving form. It's not enough to learn to not judge form. It's not enough to overlook your personal judgements or mental distortions or guilty attitudes about the world or yourself. That is not the end of the story.

We are asked to really go ALL THE WAY.... to go beyond form entirely. To go all the way to IMMORTAL SPIRIT. To transcend all forms and all physical matter and all of space and time. To go all the way to the complete and total and permanent awareness of the ONE REALITY. That reality is completely abstract and has NO FORMS IN IT. None. No objects. No bodies. No physical universe. No planets.

So that means, it's important to learn at some stage how even the body's senses are misleading you, how you are deceived by the appearance of differences and objects, how the physical world is actually set up to BLOCK you from God, and how the world PHYSICALLY STOPS YOU from being with God by completely deceiving your awareness.

You need a vision which transcends form. A vision which sees Christ. And that doesn't just mean seeing Christ in your brother or seeing Christ in the body-self of your brother. It means seeing past ALL FORM to the Christ and ONLY SEEING THAT.

Not just to see and be aware of God, but to see and be aware of NOTHING ELSE as well.

As Jesus says, "There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you." - ACIM

Pure heaven.

Jesus tells in ACIM things like:

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"You but condemn your brother of your own sins"

"You never hate your brother for his own sins but for your own"

In fact large sections of the Course really go into detail about how you put your stuff onto others, how you accuse them, how this accuses you, how you feel guiltier for this, and how you need to demonstrate your brother is innocent.

There is a very deep and simple truth in these statements.

Every time you ever believe it's someone else's fault, its your own stuff.

Every time you feel like some reaction in you is caused by someone else or something else, its really just your own stuff coming up inside you.

Every time you think someone has the power to influence you in any way whatsoever, you're mistaken because you can ONLY do stuff to yourself.

Every time you feel guilty that you have the power to do something to someone else, you are mistaken, because you cannot harm anyone.

It all boils down to this profound and life-altering fact:

Absolutely everything you are experiencing or have ever experienced is entirely contained within your SELF.

Its all from yourself, to yourself, about yourself, in yourself, as yourself. That's all.

There is no influence from others, there is no harm from others, no causes coming from others, nobody is capable of yet alone actually doing things to you against your will. Just as you are not capable of doing anything to anyone else.

Everyone is "Self-Contained". You are like a container of pure water (truth), and into that water you've spilled some oil - that you made up yourself - dark black thick oil which obscures the purity a little. So now you're walking around, still self-contained, and what you're attempting to do in an act of "ego" is to try to get rid of that oil by going outside your self containment. You're trying to give away ownership of it, trying to project it, trying to blame it, trying to shovel it onto someone else, trying to relinquish responsibility for it, and and you're trying to make out that every single time you notice the darkness in yourself it's someone else's fault for putting it there.

Nobody else has ever put darkness in you. Nobody else has ever influenced you or affected you or caused you to feel anything. Nothing.

Every single time you have a "re-action"... you're not really having a re-action to something outside your self containment. You are, instead, bringing up the dark oil inside your container and are experiencing it. And because YOU chose to bring that oil to the surface of awareness at the same time as some other person seeming to 'do something', you conveniently are thinking that they caused it. They didn't. Nobody else put that there but you and they are just reminding you that you need to clean yourself up.

Look at your life. Look at how every single time something happens you 're-act' in the belief that this something has 'caused' you to feel this way. It hasn't. You already feel this way. You just keep trying to bury the darkness out of sight so that you can escape from it. You need to learn to take responsibility for it and to transform your experience, internally, within your self containment, so that you can experience something better. You need to learn to catch yourself when you're believing and experiencing that someone or something else has put this upset into you, or caused you to feel unhappy, or pissed you off, or unloved you. Nobody has ANY power to do this. Its all you, because this is all about who you are and what you are.

You may believe that you need to get love from someone important. Maybe a spouse or a friend or a child or parent.

But this love that you think you need from them, is a substitute for the love of God.

Your attempt to need or depend on their love is a way for you to claim that you need to get love from outside of yourself, because you lack it, because God doesn't love you.

You'll be upset about how your need for love is not fulfilled by others, and why they are supposed to fulfill it, and why you feel so lost and empty because of their failure to do so.

But this so-called "need" that you have, is really your own belief and assertion that you're not lovable, an attempt to avoid being loved by God, and a way to hide from love.

The external seeking for that love when then look like a really deep desire to be loved and to want love, but it's really in truth a cover-up for an attempt to not want love to be inside of you.

So long as someone else is tasked with providing love for you, and so long as you keep them in that role, you are in denial and are trying to stop yourself from being actually loved.

You do not need other people to love you. You do not need to get special love from them.

Your "need" is a belief in, a choice for, and attempt to bring about, a lack of love, because it's part of your ego's defense against God. For it to then seem to yearn for love externally is a fake motivation, a cover-up story, to pretend to desire love very strongly, as a way to always move away from where love really is.

This so-called "need" for love is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that as soon as it's put into place, it stops love from being present. It's an avoidance of love, and an assertion that love does not exist. To then proceed to seek for love based on this is to guarantee you will not find it. "Seek and do not find" is your ego's primary mandate.

The only way you are going to experience love is to let all those people off the hook, to stop expecting or needing them to be the ones to love you, to recognize they themselves need love because they are resisting God, and that you need to get your love directly from God within. And the only way to do that is not to fulfill your need for love, but to get rid of your neediness because it's actually what's blocking you from love's presence.

You need to instead open up to accept and allow God to love you directly, to receive it, to experience it, to let it be true, and to be filled up with it from the inside. It means dropping your belief that you can't be loved or that it's someone else's job to do so. You need to learn to love yourself, and in so doing, allow God to love you also.

It's God's love that you really want. It's God's love that is the only real love, anyway.

God who is love created you lovingly, with love, through love, as love. You are permanently made of immortal love. When you are being true to yourself, you know that the love you are is shared with God, who is your love and who loves you and with you.

God is in you, and you are within you. There is only this inner experience of inclusion. In heaven, given God is everywhere, creation can only increase INTERNALLY through sharing. God shares his INNER being with you and HOSTS you inside of himself. Creation increase inwardly by adding hosts who share that which already is.

In heaven there is no such thing as "outside" or "external" or "excluded" or "separate". When you are everywhere, you encompass everything inside yourself. There, your brothers are not really outside of you surrounding you, they are WITHIN you and share your innermost being. This is the only real way to be intimate - to welcome your brother INSIDE of you psychologically.

"God who encompasses all being..."

The separation, or as I like to think of it more accurately as "the opposition or denial of God/reality", was an attempt to deny that you are inside of God, and to deny that you are host to him. It was an attempt to LEAVE God and go BEYOND the Kingdom, as though stepping OUTSIDE OF reality.

This produced the mad belief in spacetime, which is the idea of being EXILED from heaven, outside and external to the Kingdom, in a place where God could not exist or enter, seemingly separate and a kingdom you rule without him. The opposite to inner reality is obviously outer reality, which produced a kind of EXTERNALIZED idea of existence. The idea of this "world".

Basically, "you are at home in God, dreaming of exile", which means you are imagining that you are not WITHIN, and are WITHOUT. That you are outside of heaven in some other weird dimension (spacetime). It's an illusion of a separate realm outside the Kingdom. And everything in it is focused on the EXTERNAL.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death." "Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

Whereas in heaven, your brother is inside of you, as is God, because everyone shares and hosts the same stuff, "on earth" (in exile) it appears your brothers are OUTSIDE of you. It seems you are the only one allowed to inhabit your little speck of existence inside the body, the body fences you off from the universe, and everyone else is kept at arm's length. "The body is OUTSIDE you, and SEEMS to surround you, shutting you off from others, and keeping you APART from them, and them from you."

"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self from other parts. It is within this fence he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love."

So now the body experience becomes one of isolation and imprisonment inside a fence, where the fence ("the body is clearly a device for separation") comes BETWEEN you and others. It's designed like a thick wall to keep them out and keep you in, safe from love (joining/sharing).

You then focus entirely OUTWARD towards the external, as if the external world is all of reality. As you'll notice, all the body's senses are directed to the detection and validation of WHAT IS EXTERNAL to you, and not what is inside you. In fact, the inside of you is considered invisible. Yet it is the INNER WORLD that is the only reality. Heaven's reality is IN YOUR MIND, and God is inside your mind.

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen." "And what attracts you from BEYOND the veil, is also deep WITHIN you, unseparated from it, and COMPLETELY One." "He calls to you from deep within your mind where He abides. Hear Him today."

"Only at the altar of God will you find peace, and this altar is in you, because God put it there."

"For still deeper than the ego's foundation, and MUCH stronger than IT will ever be, is your intense and burning love of God, AND HIS FOR YOU."

God is really not external to you. Nor is heaven. It's not out there in the world. God only temporarily seems to be "in everything you see" ONLY because God is IN YOUR MIND FIRST, not because he is outside of it in the world. You don't look out there WITHOUT him in order to see him, and looking WITHOUT him you WILL NOT see him. This is also why such a large portion of workbook lessons are devoted to you going INSIDE behind your clouds and blocks and denials to try to find the door to heaven. Inside your mind, not outside you.

But when you have blocked access to God, who is inside your mind, your experience is that your "inner world" is lacking love and that the awareness of love's presence is blocked there. Because you seem not to have God IN you, as though you are denying your hosting of His love, you see yourself as deprived. Then you project this outward.

This projection of the seeming absence of love forms a dark hallucinated world, the unforgiven world, in which externals are the primary focus, body identification is emphasized, you cling to the physical, and you see yourself and others as separate objects. The body, external to you, looks on the external aspects of others ie their bodies, and regards this as total reality.

"Only the body makes the world seem real." What that means is that the body is designed to make the idea of "outside the Kingdom" real, to make EXTERNALS real, and to focus on illusions of exile, separation, exclusion, isolation and the absence of love (sin).

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

Failing to invite, welcome, and experience the love and presence of God INSIDE your mind, you reason that cause and love and presence and God must be OUTSIDE. If you are not the cause, then you are effect, and now you are a victim, at the seeming effect of an external world that you are putting there. Thus you are doing it to yourself. And yet you are convinced the world is externally objectively real, when it is nothing more than an illusion of BEING OUTSIDE the Kingdom.

"Sickness is a method, conceived in madness, for placing God's Son on his Father's throne. God is seen as outside, fierce and powerful, eager to keep all power for Himself." "What is seen outside must lie beyond forgiveness, for it seems to be forever sinful. "

"The good is seen OUTSIDE; the evil, IN."

"An idol is a wish, made tangible and given form, and thus perceived as real, and seen OUTSIDE the mind."

While you may have ideas of God being way out in the far reaches of the universe beyond the stars, I have news for you. God is SO close to you that he is under your skin, behind your body, deeper inside you than even your own split mind and ego, and so close to your soul as to represent the ultimate INNER intimacy. He calls to you FROM WITHIN, not from without. He's not calling to you from the mountain tops or in some external special body or through toys or favorites or any other idols.

This you see is the problem with external salvation. All forms of external searching result in sickness ie mental illness because they take you AWAY FROM where the answer it. The cause and the answer to your problems is INSIDE YOU not outside.

"Peace is an attribute in YOU. You cannot find it outside. All mental illness is some form of EXTERNAL searching. Mental health is INNER peace."

You cannot find peace by looking FOR it outside of yourself, in the bodies of others, in the planet, or in space or time. The truth IS NOT out there. The truth is an INNER truth. And the peace of God dwells ONLY INSIDE you in a shared inner experience.

You see, mind can only really experience INSIDE the confines of itself. It cannot go anywhere or be anywhere or experience anything that is truly beyond its own reach. Everything it sees and experiences has to be INTERNAL. And this is also why "ideas leave not their source." And also why you are an idea IN the mind of God, not outside of it.

When you see yourself as lacking love you WILL reason that it was caused to be lacking, as an effect, or an EXTERNAL cause. And now you will project cause, and see causation happening against your will by others doing it to you. And thus you accuse them of sin. And this is not forgiving. But to forgive them has nothing to do with reframing what they're doing, and everything to do with looking INSIDE YOURSELF for the responsibility of causing your own suffering. Just as also inside yourself you'll find freedom from your self-inflicted harm.

Seeking outside you WILL NOT FIND what you are looking for. Because in fact, the more you seek outside, the FURTHER AWAY you become from the thing you are trying to find. This is the ego's entire mantra of "seek and do not find."

It makes sense to you to seek ELSEWHERE when you fail to acknowledge, or be aware of, or accept or be open to, that which IS WITHIN you (God, light, truth, your soul etc). Because if it's not regarded as within, surely it is somewhere ELSE. And so you look somewhere else, and do not find it, because it is not there.

"...everyone who believes that the ego is salvation is intensely engaged in the SEARCH for love. Yet the ego, though encouraging the search very actively, makes one proviso; - do not FIND it. Its dictates, then, can be summed up simply as, "Seek and do NOT find.""

"Such is the ego's plan for your salvation. Surely you can see how it is in strict accord with the ego's basic doctrine, "Seek but do not find?" For what could more surely guarantee that you will not find salvation than to channelize all your efforts in searching for it where it is not?"

""Seek but do not find" remains this world's stern decree, and no-one who pursues the world's goals can do otherwise." You will not find God outside of you. You will not find God in the world or in a book or in a body or in a planet. You will not find God in this universe. This is the world of EXILE, of EXCLUSION, and of EXTERNALIZATION. It is an hallucination precisely because you DO "project out" what you wanted to see IN PLACE OF what is within you.

Searching to find love's SOURCE, will turn up empty handed, when you look to the idea of EXILE FROM the source, which has manifested as EXTERNAL "reality". What is outside the body is not there. Even the body itself is outside of you. It's constructed from the idea of the avoidance of your soul. This is why you can either identify with the body or with spirit - which really is a question of whether the EXTERNAL is real to you, or whether the INTERNAL is real to you.

You will not get love from external people. You do not want to. If you were to succeed in doing so you would no longer look within to find God and would be without him. This is the ego's promise and deception. Real love is not out there. You have to FIRST find it within, if you want to be IN it, enough to be able to EXTEND it, so that you can then RESULT in perceiving it. Remember that "perception is a RESULT not a cause". PROJECTION is the cause. And you project from what you have WITHIN. You can only seem to see God in the world IF you FIRST look within and find God, before projecting his love.

"It also shows some glimmering of sight into perception's law that what you see reflects the state of the PERCEIVER's mind."

"You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you WANT it there. Perception HAS no other law than this."

Realize then that you first must look INSIDE, and your INNER state of mind is all important. This is also why you have to become miracle minded in order to GIVE miracles. You cannot give what you do not have. "I can only give the miracles I have received." This is also why Jesus says you should look within and find out "there is no sin". You are supposed to find the love INSIDE YOU, which is where love IS. It is not separated off and made external.

When you are IN that INNER love, you are in God. You are IN the light. You are IN the heavenly experience. Then you can EXPRESS that love miraculously. You can SHARE it, but you have to be plugged into it. You cannot go looking for the end result outside of you and then hope this will trigger off the cause.

God is NOT in the world, the world is the idea of existing without him. But if God is IN YOUR MIND, then you will look inside and see God, and project God's love outward, and look upon the LOVE that you have projected, which you put there TO see. It it will reflect God. Not because an illusory world is made of God, but because God REPLACES the illusion of exile with presence.

It is so easy to be deceived by the dangling carrot of spacetime. The great TEMPATATION to draw you AWAY from yourself, to suck you OUT of your mind, to hurl you INTO the world, and to make you FIXATE on bodies. To draw you into hell and away from the heaven of your mind. But what if we simply say, THERE IS NO EXTERNAL WORLD?

"You are not the victim of the world you see because you invented it. You can give it up as easily as you made it up. You will see it or not see it, as you wish. While you want it you will see it; when you no longer want it, it will not be there for you to see."

"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? "

There is no life OUTSIDE of heaven. Outside of heaven life is an ILLUSION of life at best, at worst death. Outside of heaven is a sensless, lawless place, of space and time, governed by laws of death. Because God is not there. The "out there" is NOT OUT THERE. The "in here" IS IN HERE. You must go WITHIN, turn away from the world of distractions, find what you have BURIED deep in your mind, welcome Got back into your awareness, and open up the deep inner doorway to heaven. God is waiting for you INSIDE YOU. He always has been. He did not go anywhere. It's you who wandered off into exile. Turn around and go back to where you came from.

"At last the gate of Heaven (within you) opens and God's Son is free to enter in the home that stands ready to welcome him, and was prepared before time was and still but waits for him."

"The ego is the idea of selfishness."

At the very foundation of the entire ego thought system is the idea of selfishness. But more accurately, it is the idea of not sharing. It's an idea of being exclusive, the ownership of something which is considered "yours alone", and inaccessible to others.

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

God's Kingdom was set up so that everyone has everything. And this goes way beyond the kind of sharing that you experience on a physical level. In Heaven, every being has literally 100% of everything. Everyone has full access, simultaneously, to the totality of all that exists. Even your SELF is shared with everyone, as are all your creations.

This is oneness. And just because one person has full access to everything it does not shut out access to anyone else, there is no limitation, no compromise, no partitioning, no need to only access part of everything, and there is no private ownership. In reality is it possible for everyone to have everything always. You ARE everything always.

The entire idea of the ego is the idea of not sharing in this way. It's the idea of exclusivity. It's an attempt to own some portion of reality that you can call "yours alone", protected and fenced off by some kind of wall (such as the body), so that not only is your prized possession kept isolated inside the walls (such as within the body), but everyone else is also kept outside the walls (such as outside the body).

The desire not to share, is the entire basis of the separation. The ego is built on it. And this means that any attempt to have something for yourself that you want others NOT to have, or anything which is true of you and not true of them, or any sense of inequality of any kind, produces egotism. And this egotism is essentially SELFISHNESS.

The result of this selfishness is that you experience yourself as being fenced into a prison, ie the body. You see yourself as though everything which is "yours" is inside the prison. And everything outside the prison is not yours. In turn, you see that you are the only one allowed access to what is inside the prison walls, meaning that you experience yourself as being entirely alone within its confines.

This leads to the perception of yourself as though you are inside a body, you are the only one inside the body, the body is your private property, no other mind shares your body with you, you are alone and lonely and trapped inside of it, and the body's walls defend your hoard from the rest of the sonship.

This is how most people experience their sense of identity. That they are a single isolated "separated self", living within prison walls, everyone else is "outside" the walls, and nothing is shared across this boundary. The body acts then as a separation device, keeping them out and keeping you in, so that what is yours within is yours alone and your private possession.

"The body is clearly a device for separation"

From here, of course, upon seeing oneself as special, with a deeply rooted selfishness, a desire to be given special favor by God, and seeing oneself as excluded (separated) from sharing the Kingdom (exiled), so-called "relationships" with others take on the form of what we call special relationships. Basically this means that relating to others is always tainted with elements of selfishness, elements of exclusivity, elements of ownership or possession, and attempts to control and manipulate.

You see, a selfish self, ie a self that is "being selfish", has to believe that something is owned by others that it does not have access to. By cutting itself off from sharing it is able to believe in something privately hoarded and exclusive to it, but to do this it MUST also believe that others own something that it is excluded from. So now others are seen as hoarding privately hidden secret "stuff" that the selfish self wants and is jealous of, and so begins the attempts to wrestle it from others through what ultimately becomes attempted control and murder.

This is outlined in the "laws of chaos". Having seen yourself as an excluded, exclusive self, whose value is special and whose importance and truth is unequal to others, you believe other people also have something "special" locked up inside their bodies. And now you will seek to enter into relationship of some manner with them, to try to steal from the inside of their body the secret treasure that you believe should be yours.

So long as you lack what they have, you will feel an emptiness and a compulsion to steal it from them - a sense of "need" or neediness, in which you will make demands of them and place conditions on the relationship. This of course leads to conditional love and various forms of bargaining and betrayal. It can even become violent and lethal if it is strongly perceived that the other has what you significantly lack, is therefore guilty of stealing it from you, that you are justified in any action to retrieve it, and being denied it is a slap in the face that compels revenge.

All elements of this special way of relating stem from the foundation of the whole system of thinking. It all starts with this deeply rooted sense of selfishness, leading to isolation, leading to specialness and special relationships, and ultimately death.

The fundamental ONLY problem therefore is the unwillingness to share. The unwillingness to be equal. The consideration of one's own selfish made-up needs above and beyond the freedom and wishes of others. As you become presented with your own selfishness staring you in the face, you will learn to move past it and to start considering what other people want, on their terms, per their own choice, regardless of any "special interests" that you have. Once their interests become untainted by your selfishness, your interests become shared.

I should comment briefly that being "not selfish" does not in any way mean having no self, nor does it mean self sacrifice, or putting others first and you last, or any other form of inequality. It does not mean getting rid of your identity or individuality. All it means is changing your attitude, so that you are now SHARING EQUALLY with everyone, rather than isolating, excluding, or seeing to "get" something of special value "just for yourself".

"You cannot enter into real relationship with any of God's Sons unless you are willing to love them all AND equally."

Essentially our entire journey to undo the ego is simply to undo our selfishness. We have to look at this. We may be far more selfish than we want to admit to, or in ways that we had not realized. We may be more controlling than we'd like to admit. We may be claiming to put the interests of others first while secretly having needs or wants that depend on others fulfilling us in order for us to be satisfied.

To be not selfish might be what some (with ego thinking) would call the opposite - selflessness - but this can be misleading. We are not aiming here to have no self. We are aiming to SHARE, which some would refer to as joining in holy relationship. To truly think of others interests is to acknowledge that you have no needs that are interfering with being of service to them.

It means allowing and letting go and giving up controlling them. It means seeing them free from the tyranny of your control, dominance, interference, manipulation, selfish neediness, inferiority, superiority, judgement and specialness. The relinquishment of specialness is the relinquishment of selfishness.

This actually restores you to the fullness of your self, because by sharing everything you also share in all of yourself, and share all of yourself with others. You literally tried to steal yourself from God and keep it hidden. We have to open back up to allow God in and to let ourselves be visible and accessible to others, sharing fully with them and extending love with them. This is essentially a reunion with your own soul, in which all God's children share.

"The soul is the idea of self fulness."

What do you mean, you're not treating me exactly the way that I expect you to? How dare you! lol

"Respect" is a term that egos love to use. It's supposed to be a sign of treating someone right. But there's more going on than meets the eye.

When someone is in ego, they have a lot of insecurities. They're carrying guilt and shame, living in fear, feeling unworthy of love, etc. They are not treating themselves and others with love.

As a result, the person becomes irresponsible, disowning themselves and their power. They project causality outside themselves and attach it to other people. They then expect other people to be the ones who act responsibly toward them.

This is the same as the ego's form of "forgiveness to destroy", in which others are expected to change while the person stays the same.

Effectively the whole world revolves around the person as the ruler of their kingdom, as though they are sitting on a throne and everyone must worship them. If the inferior external people do not measure up or treat them right, anger and murder become justified.

You'll notice that people who NEED "respect" from others, also become intimidating, aggressive, abusive, threatening and violent. Especially if the respect is not given, as they see it.

Only a victim needs respect. Only an attacker demands respect. Only an unloving and truly "disrespectful" person wants others to respect them.

This idea of respect is completely backwards. It says that everyone else is to blame for your suffering, and its all their fault, they're sinners, and they have to change their wicked ways in order for you to be happy.

If they treat you how you think you want to be treated, you'll consider them "respecting you". But what that means is they are agreeing with your evaluation of yourself as some kind of important special figure.

If they go along with your inflated ego, they are "respecting" it, effectively worshipping it like a God. This triggers the special love. If they don't go along with your control and your dominance and your threat of revenge, out comes the special hate.

An immortal innocent holy son of God does not need the respect of others. It does not matter what other people do in their attempts to "treat" you in any way at all, because you cannot BE "treated". You choose what you experience, not them.

Someone who has taken full responsibility for causing everything they experience, including all of their feelings, cannot be caused by others. Not do they have a lack of love, or a need to coerce others into giving it to them.

A self-loving person doesn't become a terrorist, or an intimidator, or a crime boss, or a ruler over people, or a dictator, or a tyrant, or any kind of threatening person who DEMANDS that others AGREE with their evaluation of themselves.

You would actually be doing a service to someone who believes something FALSE about themselves, such as that they don't deserve love, and instead giving them that love.

Giving love is the higher "form" of true respect, but isn't there as some kind of idol worship. It's an agreement as to the true higher nature of a person in spirit, rather than pandering to their ego.

Yes we all want to be "respected" or at least "not attacked", preferably. But this is only a short-term goal. In the big picture we should be working towards NOT NEEDING people to treat us a certain way. We are supposed to meet whatever happens with forgiveness, not revenge.

Yes, sure, let's all be "reasonably respectful" to each other.. as in, how about let's not be trying to murder each other. But at the same time, we have to be careful not to believe that this "treatment" of people is there in order to appease their egos. It's not TRULY respectful of a person to insinuate that they need to be treated a certain way in order to avoid them being "hurt".

We are immortal beings who ultimately cannot be hurt, cannot be upset, cannot be offended, cannot be terrorized, cannot be attacked and cannot be destroyed. This has to be central and foremost in our view of ourselves and others. Recognizing this in others is the only sign of true respect and love.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes." UrT27I10

"We have emphasized that the miracle, or the EXPRESSION of Atonement, is always a sign of real respect from the worthy TO the worthy. This worth IS re-established by the Atonement." UrT2E3

"An Elder Brother is entitled to respect for his greater experience, and a reasonable amount of obedience for his greater wisdom. He is also entitled to love, because he is a brother, and also to devotion, if he is devoted. It is only my own devotion that entitles me to yours. But you will notice that I have knelt at your altar as readily as I would ever have you kneel at mine." UrT1B40X

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness." UrW190L5

When you resist something in life, when you can't accept the fact of what is, or what has seemingly happened, when you are fighting with it and don't want it and want it to be a different way, you WILL experience being unhappy.

Resistance itself, causes unhappiness.

As you resist, what is happening? You're putting up barriers, you're shutting down, you're trying to control, you're blocking out what is, you're fighting, you're wasting a lot of futile energy not being able to change any facts, you're draining yourself on impossible wishes, you're running up against reality, etc.. And all of these actions, are experienced AS feelings of unhappiness, feelings of anger, feelings of sadness and fear, feelings of exhaustion, feelings of threat and danger, feelings of intensity and tension.

Now, when you are resisting life, no matter what in particular, what you need to realize is that it is the resisting ITSELF that doesn't feel good. You will resist, thinking that you feel unhappy 'because of' the thing you are resisting. You'll think, you feel angry or outraged or upset 'because of' what you don't want to be happening. Whatever it is that you 'cannot accept', you will say that THAT is causing you to feel unhappy.

This is not true at all.

ALL of the feelings and experiences of unpleasantness, unhappiness, upset, anger etc... all of them are PART OF what it feels likes like to RESIST WHAT IS. And it doesn't matter what form your opponent takes, because ultimately 'what is' is God, and any form of resisting God shuts God out, and that does not feel good at all. If you shut God out, you will shut out love, light, happiness, joy, peace, harmony. So you can be pretty much guaranteed, if you resist what's happening, you MUST feel unhappy and upset.

So now, realize this. .... unhappy feelings are caused by RESIST-ING, not by what you are resisting against. Resistance in other words, is a form of skapegoating, in which you're trying to make out that 'they' - your enemy - are the cause of your problem. That they are causing all of the anger you feel, all of the unhappiness you feel, all of the tension and stress that you feel. It's all their fault. It's all the fault of 'what is' (ultimately blaming God). But this is not only spiritually irresponsible, it is also deluded. What you're resisting against or fighting against is NOT the cause of your upset. The cause of your upset is ONLY, the fact that YOU are choosing to resist it.

That's all. There is no other reason why you are unhappy other than that you are choosing to resist what is, and are then blaming or justifying 'why' you are resisting, onto the other person or situation. It's not their fault that you're resisting them. It's not their fault you are unhappy. It's not the 'now's fault that you are going off into the past and future on a tirade story of how you've been victimized.

Ultimately then, all of the experience of victimhood and suffering and upset and unhappiness is a DECISION YOU ARE MAKING, in order to justify and explain WHY you are choosing not to ACCEPT what is. Why you are not accepting God.

"You are never upset for the reason you think" - ACIM

"You are upset because you see something that is not really there" - ACIM

What you see that you think is there, is an enemy who has suddenly arisen out of 'what is', which you have labelled as wrong, having given it all the meaning it has, and now you are in a state of resisting, which you chose, and because of this choice, you are now experiencing suffering. AND THIS IS ALL YOUR OWN DOING TO YOURSELF.

"The secret to salvation is this, that you are but doing this all to yourself." - ACIM

SOOOOO..... what this means is... and here's the clincher....

*IF* you were to decide to stop resisting and fighting with what is, IF you were to choose to ACCEPT IT, instead of trying to move away from it, IF you were to choose to ALLOW IT, instead of trying to make it be something else, IF you were to choose to WELCOME IT, then guess what's going to happen to how you feel?

You're suddenly going to feel more peaceful, more happy, more calm, more joyous, more free, more empowered, more clear, more alive. All your feelings of suffering are going to just disappear. Just like that. All your upset, all your anger and outrage, all your depression, all your sickness, all your sadness, all of it is going to just disappear because you're choosing to welcome GOD. God is what is. Accepting what is is far closer to accepting God, and God is love, and accepting love HEALS YOU.

So.... realize this..... if you choose resistance, you will INVENT and manifest sickness and suffering, purely because you are resisting. And before you resisted, you did not have any of this. And as soon as you resisted, the suffering showed up. And now in your resistance you are suffering, but you're trying to blame the cause of it onto the thing you're resisting against. It's got nothing to do with that. Resist, you suffer. Don't resist, you be happy. That's all it boils down to. It's a black and white decision.

Either you accept what is and be happy and at peace.

Or you resist what is and experience suffering and unhappiness.

You cannot resist and be happy. You cannot fight and be at peace. You cannot blame and be at peace.

So really nothing is happening to you. The thing you resist is not causing your suffering. The people you don't like are not causing your suffering. The group you didn't want aren't causing your suffering. The suffering is YOUR WAY OF RESISTING THEM.

So you chose it. You're literally doing it to yourself. And the only way to NOT suffer, is to give up your position. You cannot maintain your position of resistance AND be at peace or happy. It is IMPOSSIBLE!

Choices:

a) resist what's happening and be unhappy and suffer and sick and die, you can never win and you will never get your way.

b) allow and accept what's happening and be completely happy and at peace and still not get your way, but at least you are happy.

So resistance is a smokescreen where you pretend to be justified in resisting. But resistance itself is what makes you suffer and is the sole CHOICE to cause yourself to suffer. You say, "I'd rather resist this and suffer and be upset". And then you project it. Your only other option is. ... accept the truth. Accept the facts. Surrender to what is. Allow it

Then you can be happy and at peace. And then what the fuck does it matter what's happening?

I've been getting hints for a while, that there is a disconnect between inner and outer states, or between how I experience the world and what the world does. That it's possible to remain in a state of happiness or love, in spite of what's happening externally. That my inner condition doesn't depend on the outer condition.

The question came up, what if I could just remain happy regardless of what happens? What if how I feel isn't actually tied to the world or events or people? If I were to be happy while something was happening, I probably wouldn't care so much about it. It isn't an issue of what happens, but of how I experience it internally.

So there's the external happenings, and then there's the internal experience of it. What that also tells me is that who and what I am, isn't part of the physical level. It isn't the body or an emotion or an event or a reaction. It's actually possible to step away from the external stuff and sit above it, out of reach of suffering.

In truth then there aren't actually any causes of suffering in the world. There is nothing outside of me that can bring oppression. It really is only my mind that can affect my experience. And if I so choose, I can in fact elect to be in a state of happiness and safety which the world can do NOTHING about. Just as the course says, the world cannot give you peace, OR take it away.

It's kind of like saying, when you're in a good mood, nothing can bother you. You just float above it and are much less affected. When you are happier and stronger in light and life and love, you laugh in the face of death.

The simple secret of salvation then is that you cannot suffer unless you make yourself suffer. You can't suffer unless you step down from your throne of love, in which you share God's strength and power, and see yourself as a victim in some way. As soon as you choose to go into a fear state, the whole world starts to seem like it is out to get you, unsettling you, topping you off balance, making you lose your center.

So I started thinking about.. well, if I could just remain in a state of inner happiness, love, peace etc, it would not matter what happens outside me. It wouldn't even matter if everything was falling apart and going wrong. I would just remain happy and laugh about it. Whether I am happy or not should not depend at all on the world or other people. It depends entirely on my state of mind. And "the world was made that problems could not be escaped. Seek not escape from problems here", so it's really how I use and see the world that offers me escape from it.

As Jesus says, if we identify with love, we will feel safe, and will enter into the protection of God. If we tune to love, our mind will become whole and happy and healthy and our body will follow suit. Love is the single main ingredient of all miracle working, as expressions of love, which is also the power of God. If you are close to love then what you are literally moves away from the bodily level into the mind/spirit, above the battleground and out of reach of threat. Because you are not of this world.

I think we've been so used to living in fear, being out of touch with safety, that we just assume the whole world is unsafe. Everything is seen as a threat or attack, then we become defensive and try to make ourselves safe. But it doesn't work. And then we're insecure and feeling vulnerable and attackable, weak and victimized, offended and upset. Then we get really lost in this idea that I'm afraid or upset because of the world.

The only reason I am ever afraid or upset is because I've gone into fear in my mind, having rejected love in my mind, and this is an attack upon myself by myself. And now I look out through fearful sight and this taints everything I see. It now seems like because I am unsafe, everything in the world is reminding me of that unsafely. Everything becomes a threat because my mind is in a state of threat. Everyone becomes an enemy because I have become enemy to myself.

The key is that it's not them that's the problem. They're not the cause of my fear or upset. They're not doing anything to me. They're not putting the fear in me, threatening me, attacking me, or victimizing me. I only think they are because I'm confused and am not realizing that I'm doing all that to myself. Either I identify with love and feel totally safe and SEE safety everywhere, or I identify with fear/ego and see reasons to be afraid everywhere I look.

As Jesus says, "you can escape the world you see by giving up attack thoughts", ie "your attack thoughts are attacking your invulnerability." "You can be hurt by nothing but your thoughts." "It can be but myself I crucify" etc. We do stuff to ourselves and then it flavors everything we see. The problem isn't out there, it's in our minds. It's in our minds before we even project and make perceptions. It's in our identification. Either we are identifying with the body and with the idea of a fearful fake self, or we're identifying with spirit and with strength and safety and invulnerability.

As a man thinketh. Here Jesus tells you that if you want the world to not appear to be frightening, you need to change YOUR MIND, so that you PROJECT safety from a loving mind, and then perceive it as a result. This isn't a statement about not changing the world, only that you can only make the world appear to be safe as a side-effect of choosing safety in your mind FIRST, and then projecting it. This will change how you interpret the world that's perceived, once projected from an inner state. The inner state comes first. Choose love and you are safe. And you are safe because you are body and cannot be attacked.

"Projection makes perception; the world you see is what you GAVE it, nothing more than that. But, though it is no MORE than that, it is NOT less. Therefore, to YOU, it IS important. It is the witness to your state of mind, the OUTSIDE picture of an INWARD condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the WORLD, but will to change your mind ABOUT the world. Perception is a RESULT, and NOT a cause."

"Destructiveness becomes benign, and sin is turned to blessing under His gentle gaze."

"When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and SEEN it change to sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of violence and death, and WATCHED them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away; who need PERSUADE you to accept the gift of vision? And AFTER vision, who is there who COULD refuse what MUST come after? Think but an instant just on this. YOU can behold the holiness God gave His Son. And NEVER need you think that there IS something else for you to see."

"There is a light which this world cannot give. Yet YOU can give it, as it was given YOU. And AS you give it, it shines forth to call you FROM the world, and follow it. For this light will attract you as nothing in this world can do. And you will lay aside the world and find another. This other world is bright with love WHICH YOU HAVE GIVEN IT. And here will everything remind you of your Father and his holy Son. Light is unlimited, and spreads across this world in quiet joy. All those you brought WITH you will shine on you, and you will shine on them in gratitude, because they brought you here. Your light will join with theirs, in power so compelling, that it will draw the others out of darkness as you look on them."

"What is the single requisite for this shift in perception? It is simply this; the recognition that sickness is of the mind, and has nothing to do with the body. What does this recognition "cost"? It costs the world we see, for the world will never again appear to rule the mind. For with this recognition is responsibility placed where it belongs; not with the world, but on him who looks on the world and sees it as it is not. He looks on what he chooses to see. No more and no less. The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it was. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea."

"Peace is an attribute in YOU. You cannot find it outside. All mental illness is some form of EXTERNAL searching. Mental health is INNER peace. It enables you to remain unshaken by lack of love from without, and capable, through your own miracles of correcting the external conditions, which proceed from lack of love in others."

I had a re-read of much of Chapter 21: Reason and perception, to try to better understand the workings of perception. Below are some takeaways. Feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken.

Typically, we look out upon a world which seems to be there independently, and however it looks to us, we take it to be how it is. If it seems like a horrible place, some kind of hell, we believe it actually IS that way. We don’t question it. We don’t for a moment think that there is something we are doing to make it LOOK that way.

But the Course is telling us that in fact, we are doing this all the time. It is telling us, there is a "forgiven world" right here in front of our faces, which has no guilt in it, no sin, which is shiny and sparkly and new, and even seems to have a reflection of heaven in it. But we’re not SEEING it, because our own minds have some kind of "gunk" in them which is making the world seem dim and dark and lonely and depressing.

In fact, it even tells us there is a reflection of Christ (the face of Christ) and God right here, that we can "See God" here, to a degree, if we have awareness of God in our mind. That we could look at flowers and tables and trees and such and see God twinkling back at us somehow. But that if we do not SEE that, due to some kind of "filtering" that is going on in our perception, the world becomes lackluster and dull and we don’t seem to see God at all.

There is a kind of perceptual trap, whereby if you believe that how the world looks, is how it IS, inherently, you will not realize that there is ANOTHER world hidden behind the one you’re seeing, that you COULD be seeing, if you were to change your mind. Since "projection makes perception", it produces CIRCULAR LOGIC in which a) you decide what you want to see, b) you project it, c) you see/perceive it, d) it tells YOU what is there, e) you believe what you perceive. Kind of a vicious cycle.

Not realizing that your mind has something to do with how things appear to you, you will just ASSUME that this world simply IS the way that you’ve always seen it to be. If it seems to really suck bad, if all your relationships seem strained by separation, if you feel lonely and cut off, if you are depressed and living in darkness, you may think that this is HOW THE WORLD IS, not realizing that you are actually MAKING IT look that way because of the content of your mind.

So in order to get out of that trap, you have to suspend belief for a moment, consider that what you are seeing is POSSIBLY not how the world actually is, that there is a world here you WANT to see - in which you’ll have to place some faith that it is here but simply hidden from view temporarily, and then take steps to change your mind so that you can finally SEE it. You almost have to IGNORE what you are perceiving now, stop accepting that you are stuck with the "results of past decisions", and that if you choose to believe differently, this shitty world will disappear and be replaced by a much lovelier version.

The course also basically says that when you are seeing the projected content of your own self-hate, sin etc, which makes the WHOLE WORLD look hateful and sinful to you, you are not SEEING correctly. Or rather, you are lacking VISION. Vision is the ability to see what is here, without distortion, without sin, without any dark content in your mind, so that you can see the forgiven world simply for how it IS.

Jesus says we need to become able to SEE, first, before we can RECOGNIZE what it is we are seeing as an illusory world. To see the "real world", relatively speaking, is to regain vision, ie to see without filtering it with your ego junk, such that you can simply look upon what’s there without adding or removing anything. This will show you clearly, correctly, what is THERE, without your contribution added to it, and in that clarity you will RECOGNIZE that even the real/forgiven world is an illusory world made as the opposite to heaven.

So right now, if you are having an experience that this world seems like a nightmare of hell, it’s not because it IS, it’s because you have a nightmare of hell happening in your MIND, which is making this world SEEM like it is hell. I’ve personally had experiences which at the time seemed like a horrible nightmare. Later, after much healing, the nightmare was over and the world did not seem so bad anymore.

The content of our mind massively influences what we see, because we will project that content out TO see, and WILL see it, overlaid on top of the "real world". It is imagined content, but it hugely influences our perception. False ego beliefs really have the "power", because we put faith in them, to greatly distort how the world registers with us, what we see it as, whether it seems harmless or harmful, and whether it feels like a happy place or a miserable place. It is not any of the things we project ONTO it. It is only what it is - a pretend planet that we dreamed, essentially neutral and meaningless.

"I have given the world all the meaning it has for me" is precisely talking about perception. You may not realize it, but your consciousness, your mind, your experience of "reality", can become significantly DISTORTED by any ego beliefs that you have, such that it will make you PERCEIVE things which are not even there at all. It causes you to hallucinate! To see imagined meaning or content where it does not exist. Your perception is capable of "shifting" from experiencing the "real word" as a nightmarish hell, to seemingly to be a reflection of heaven.

Have you ever had a day, where you are in a really bad mood... where you are perhaps having an emotional release of some heavy feelings. On that day, it seems to you as though everyone is in a bad mood! Everyone seems angry and intense and upset. Then you let yourself cry and you cathart this painful content. Suddenly, when you’re done, you feel better, but you also notice, what the heck happened to everyone else’s mood?

Suddenly other people don’t seem like they are unhappy at all? They don’t seem angry or stressed out or upset with you. You then find yourself wondering, were they really nightmarish figures who were against you and pissed off along with you or.... were you making that up this whole time? That all this time you thought they were also upset, they were actually happy?! That you just couldn’t see it and your mind was hallucinating that they were upset with you?

That’s because your ego beliefs that were in your conscious awareness were majorly distorting your perception of reality.

Jesus talks about how we get "stuck" in the circle of projecting then perceiving, whereby since we think that how the world looks is how it IS, that somehow IT decided to be the way it is, and that we didn’t MAKE IT BE that way at all, we simply accept it as if objectively real and then "make adjustments" to try to "live with it" or accomodate as though simply accepting it is really this way. We can spend a very long time living in a perceived "bad world" trying to cope with how it seems to be, making horizontal/linear adjustments instead of rising above it into "vertical perception", not even realizing that if we were to change our mind, our perception would shift UPWARDS, and we’d see a very different "higher vibrational" world that doesn’t call for any of those adjustments. ie, we don’t have to STAY in hell.

Another experience you might have is where you see the form of someone’s body, perhaps they have a broken arm or scars on their face from a fire. It will depend entirely on the content of your mind as to HOW you will perceive this, and what you will see IN it. If you believe in real sin and real sickness, and if that belief is heavy, when you see this person with theirs scars and a broken arm, you will not ONLY experience what’s there in form, their body in its condition, you will ALSO experience the content of your mind.

You might therefore be horrified, repulsed, upset, saddened, guilty, etc... seeing the disfigurement as something the person is stuck with for life, seeing sin in it like they must’ve done something wrong, holding it against them, fearing it like it will infect you if you get too close. The horror show in your mind has nothing to do with the person’s body or its form, it’s entirely to do with YOUR beliefs that you are seeing ON TOP OF what’s there. They still have a "broken body", but you are seeing "YOUR sickness" added to it.

If you then go away and do some forgiveness and undo these beliefs in real sin and real sickness, you may later be walking around and see that person again. And their body may well be in *exactly* the same condition, form-wise, because that’s something that they still believe in and they are still putting it there.

But instead of seeing it as attacking you, or repulsing you, or threatening, or being ugly, or judging them for it, or seeing it as irreversible, or hating them for it, you may instead see them with love and freedom and recognize, they are not bound by this, they are not this form, they are not this body, and you could offer them a miracle. *RECOGNIZING* what is there, versus failing to recognize what is there (seeing your own added shit), is the difference between true perception and false perception. Both of them perceive the form, but true perception does not ADD sin to it.

Someone close to me has paralysis. Her left arm can barely move and hardly any movement in any fingers. She had a stroke. When this first happened, each time that I saw this I was very upset. Or I should say... each time that I saw this form and ALSO some dark content in my own mind, I was very upset. I saw sickness as real. I believed in it. And this had apparently already been established in my belief system before this event happened. Instantly it would trigger off deep upset and guilt and grief whenever I saw it. However, it wasn’t the form or the tragedy or the paralysis that was actually upsetting, it was what I saw IN it.

Over time, I forgave this and more or less HAD to use this as a way to learn that sickness is not real, that I am not the cause of the sickness, that I am not guilty for otherse being sick, and that there is no TRUTH in that sickness. My personal perception of that person now, is that when I see this paralysis that she STILL HAS, and which has not changed whatsoever, I am not upset by it. I don’t see it as tragic or despairing. I don’t see guilt in it. I don’t see it as something having gone very wrong. I don’t see it as unfair or unchosen. It does not trigger me into deeply hurt feelings. All of that has been healed in me, and therefore in my perception. And yet, I still see - perceive - this person, and they stil have the symptoms of this stroke. They are still paralyzed. I simply do not see it with the ADDED content of my own personal beliefs in sin.

Quite possibly at some time, if I choose to really thoroughly excavate all trace of belief in sickness from my mind, maybe that will offer healing to her and undo that sickness. But if she is not ready to receive it, or if that would be frightening, it would not be appropriate to force it. This too is a lesson, that often the sick do not want to be healed against their will or readiness. My perception has changed of "what is there" and I now see it more squarely for what it IS... an illusion of sickness that doesn’t mean anything and has no power of its own. Of course this is still an area of experimental miracle-working so we’ll see what happens in future.

Regarding another’s sickness, since you are no longer believing in irreversible sin, you would not be holding their form "against them", or believing that they are stuck with it, or seeing them as victimized by it. You would not see it as "real sickness". It will strike you as an ILLUSION of sickness. Fake sickness. A simple choice to pretend to be hurt. You would not believe it has the power to stay on its own, and you could offer to heal it. It depends on the person as to whether they can accept and receive the healing, however. They have free will and their will is just as powerful as yours. Similarly Jesus cannot remove stuff from us that we are unwilling to give up because our will is as powerful as his.

One other thing I want to touch upon is the kind of experience you will have when in false perception vs true. In false perception, since you believe heavily that separation is real, and since you project what you will later perceive, you project separation. When you perceive it, you’re going to perceive that you are seeing something that has separations in it. The world is going to look to you as though it is separate from "you". It will seem like it has causal power, a will of its own, a mind of its own, and that it is not an effect, and therefore that because it is cause not effect, "you" surely did not cause IT.

You can see how this is a vicious cycle because if your mind has separation content in it, you will project that separation content onto the world, it will appear to be separate from you, and this will justify your belief that you DID NOT project it or cause it. This undermines the awareness that you projected in the first place, and somewhat "locks in" the idea that how the world appears to you is how IT IS inherently. That you are not contributing to how it appears at all. So false perception is its own trap, making it harder to tell that your mind alone determines what things look like to you.

The counter to this, is what happens in true perception.

There, your mind does not have a belief in separation. You don’t believe in real sin, or level confusions, nor do you see yourself as at the effect of anything outside of you. You recognize yourself as cause, and even see yourself projecting. Therefore, as you project, you are practically not projecting ANYTHING "onto" the world, or are not adding to it or removing anything from it, and so when you then PERCEIVE what’s there, you see it only for what it inherently IS. It shows YOU what is there, and you may even see God in it. This shows you the "real world", real in the sense that, in comparison to your unreal world of false perception and hallucinated hell, it is "real-er".

In true perception then, you will not be experiencing that the world is its own thing, that it has a will, or a mind or a power over you. You will not believe it has cause in it. You will recognize it as EFFECT only. And you will recognize that you are CAUSE only, not effect. Seeing God "in it" also will not mean that this world is "cause". God is cause, so seeing God "in" the world does NOT mean God IS the world or that the world is a cause! In this awareness, whatever the world ‘is’, MUST be coming entirely from you, and you see God IN it because God is IN your mind, not really out there. This means, you will also recognize, not simply what the world inherently IS (an illusion you made), but that EVERYTHING it is, is coming from YOU. You are dreaming it!

At this level, you are capable of manipulating it in any way you see fit simply by changing your mind, by adjusting your desire, or shifting your focus. "The word is only what you gave it" indicates that in false perception, there seemed to be you AND the world, and in true perception, there is only YOU. At this level, being aware that you are THE DREAMER of this world, reveals to you that it is 100% illusion, that the real world is an illusion, that even its forms are coming from your mind, and that therefore..... drumroll please..... THERE IS NO WORLD APART FROM WHAT YOU WISH. Meaning, there is literally no world there, just a bunch of wishes.

There is no world here because it is ONLY the content of our mind being projected. There is no world because even the real world, the "happy dream", is but a dream. When perception is perfected, it shows us there is NO SEPARATION between what is within and what is without. That planet out there, is inside our mind. It’s just an idea that has not left its source. "The real world is still an illusion". We made it up and are dreaming it, it’s not really there at all.

As dreaming ends, the entire content of this dream, this made-up world, this projected fantasy, will simply cease to be. It is not changed, it is simply unprotected. It does not live on, it simply vanishes. It is not converted into reality or heaven, ONLY THE TRUTH REMAINS and everything else NEVER REALLY EXISTED. Hence there is no world and Earth does not exist beyond our dreaming of it.

"I want the peace of God." W185

There's over 100 references in ACIM to "the peace of God". Years ago I wouldn't have thought that peace is something I want. It wasn't a priority. I just wanted all the stupid people to go away, lol.

But the more I've done the course the more it's becoming apparent that peace is very central to the experience I SHOULD be having.

I had a dream a few years ago which showed me an example of extraordinary peace.

In the dream there was a small outdoor scene with some trees and a wild grassy area, and a sort of sky with clouds, although the clouds seemed to be very nearby.

The clouds parted and as they did, they took on an extraordinary emerald green color, rich and vibrant and beautiful. An opening appeared and there floated in, from beyond the clouds, were a pair of beautiful orbs of light, which seemed to be radiating life and light and coloring the landscape as they went.

These orbs were spheres, and glowed gently from within. It wasn't like a dazzling light, just a soft glow. They seemed mostly transparent, and about the size of a bowling ball.

The two orbs floated very slowly and quietly past where I stood, and continued to float on forward, under their own will. But the thing that really struck me was the quality of the atmosphere and how it felt.

The orbs were alive, and were aware, and were extremely peaceful. They seemed to have no ounce of a sense of attack or irritation or disturbance. They were so incredibly calm and quiet, so perfectly innocent, holy even.

They could not not have been more pure, more simple, or more beautiful. They just glided along softly together, as though accompanying each other, and were perfectly unhurried and peaceful.

That's about where the dream ends. But I still think back on it and, when I do, I feel that same peace, and it becomes an inspiration. As I think about what that felt like, I can draw a number of ideas from it.

A total lack of all conflict, a total absence of war, a total lack of any sense of fighting or disturbance or angry aggression. A total innocence, so pure and gentle and simple, like it was just born from God.

No sense of irritation, or annoyance, or frustration or any kind of bitterness or resentment. No sense of guilt or sin or shame or unworthiness. Not the slightest speck of inflammation or agitation or interruption of any kind.

Perfectly calm and tranquil, with no force or pressure, no sense of threat or danger, no concern or worry or doubt or fear. Nothing complicated or distorted, no denial or rejection, no defences, and absolutely no sense of urgency.

Just total calm and total peace and total simple being. Total freedom, total beautiful innocent simplicity, and total calm gentle joy.

This I feel is what I really want, and what we all want. And it highlights how all these things that were absent - are all things that we are so accustomed to living with and tolerating. All the ego emotions and hurts, all the fighting and war and conflict, all the fear and guilt. All of it has to go.

I used to think somehow that the pinnacle of human experience might be some kind of heroic role in which we have superpowers and can do whatever we want, flying around the room with a cloak on. But this ego fantasy of being the savior to wretched peasants is being replaced with a simpler goal of humbleness and quiet.

And when all of that stuff goes, stuff that we think is normal and commonplace, all the sense of separation and tension and conflict goes with it. And what is left is just this lovely extremely calm peacefulness, lacking all sense of something being wrong in any way.

Perhaps that's what we are really. Just simple orbs of light floating around calmly and happily, in total surrender and total contentment, with no enemies and no reasons for concern. Just being at peace with God. Free and alive, floating along with not a care in the world.