What appears to be the physical world is not actually "direct reality". It is in fact once removed. It is an effect of an entirely other layer of causality which seems hidden. Just as in the holographic model, the underlying "source" of the appearances you see, is obscured by "sight of form" and you end up believing that this physical world is "verbatim", ie this is all there is.

In understanding why miracles are supernatural, it is very important to recognize this. In order to be supernatural there has to be an order or layer of reality deeper or higher than what appears to be the physical surface of this universe. We have to recognize that bodies and objects are not "immediate reality", they are once removed, and are EFFECTS caused by some other hidden level of causality. There is a whole other layer of causality, and everything in this world is "coming from" that hidden realm, making this world entirely an secondary effect.

When observing just the appearances of the surface of this world, there is a tremendous vast illusion before your eyes, which seems to operate in terms of "horizontal cause and effect". It seems as if some parts of the world cause and effect other parts. But this IS entirely an illusion. It's not what is happening. Anything which looks like being "different" in this world, ie one thing is a cause and another thing is an effect, is an illusion.

What secretly is happening is a higher, hidden level, a more immediate level of reality, is causing this entire universe all at once. Causality moves in a "vertical" direction from above, downwards, projecting the universe below. This means that there is a realm where you are "outside of" or above the entire field of horizontal illusions, outside the dream, where you are under absolutely none of the illusory horizontal laws and free of ALL limitations.

In that realm, you essentially are like a movie editor, someone who can reach into the movie and rearrange parts of it, orchestrate what goes where, and make significant changes. While within the movie itself it seems there is this consistent "story" playing, which utterly depends on the existence of many limitations and props and illusions of things which "must" happen according to certain rules or laws, realize that all of these stories of causality are entirely a fiction, where nothing seems to betray the illusion, nothing hints at this not being all there is, and nothing "blows the illusion" of horizontal or linear causality.

An example is a movie that you go to the cinema to watch. When you watch the movie you believe it is a single seamless story, in which certain limits and rules have been put in place in order to paint a seemingly "consistent" picture. But the fact is, if you could've been in the studio when the movie was being created, you would realize it was simply a bunch of people "acting" and a bunch of computers producing CGI special effects, working "behind the scenes". You as as a miracle worker as a BEHIND THE SCENES OPERATOR who orchestrates and produces the second-hand "effects" or "results" of a creative process. We used this same process initially when FORMING the physical universe, which is an entire order of reality removed from those who pull the strings.

When expression is made from the higher level, the more immediate level of causality, that expression is able to cause changes to the expressed world below. Just as an editor would make changes to a movie sequence from outside the movie which has the potentially to "break the illusion" of linear consistency within the movie itself. And when it DOES "perform a miracle", it literally BREAKS the illusion of linear cause and effect - the horizontal consistency or predictability of one thing leading only to another specific consequence. It's like someone editing the movie, and to those observing from WITHIN the movie, it will look like reality just did something "impossible".

If you seem to be living in the movie and you think that all that can happen is what's inside the movie, then suddenly a spaceship appears out of nowhere because the movie director decided to insert one, you will "witness" what appears to be a miracle. Something happening that seems impossible based on the linear laws. If you think of The Truman Show - a great movie, the same laws and rules and limitations had to happen day after day to maintain an illusion that nothing could happen outside the law, but when the main character started to "wake up" and see through the limitations, the world around him started to "break" and he eventually stepped outside of the whole illusion, coming face to face with the "directory" of the movie. You as a miracle worker are a director of the physical movie.

Or similarly, if it appears that there is a law of gravity where, over time, objects are attracted towards the center of the earth, and therefore human bodies are almost glued to the surface (you can jump, but only so high before you are attracted back down), and if suddenly a human body were to fly up in the air or walk on water, this would BREAK the illusion of horizontal laws. That means, the laws "within" the linear dream, within appearances of horizontal causality, could not have "resulted in" this effect, and it must have required someone to reach in from OUTSIDE of the laws and make an adjustment that the laws themselves are incapable of producing.

The key point to realize is that all of the linear laws are VERY LIMITING. We are confined by them. We are trapped by them. They seem to play out as if having a force or power over us. We don't seem able to escape gravity, time seems to proceed in one direction, one object seems to collide with another, no objects share the same space, very large heavy objects like mountains seem completely immovable, even sickness seems to have a causality in the body or due to external forces. These are all very limiting illusions of things on the SAME LEVEL causing other things on the SAME LEVEL to change.

From the point of view of the miracle worker, who is under no laws but God's, there are NO LIMITS. And so when the miracle worker manipulates the limitations in ways which defy and BREAK the linear laws, this appears to those in the horizontal dream as SUPERNATURAL MIRACLES. Things which should technically be "impossible" according to the limits we have accepted, suddenly become possible. Things we have assumed to be "normal" or "natural" are shown to be ARTIFICIAL LIMITATIONS.

Since we don't generally recognize that we LIVE IN WORLD OF LIMITATIONS, we don't realize that there are additional FREEDOMS and flexibilities that we have decided are off-limits or impossible. Miracles are capable of exercising that freedom and of PROVING that you are NOT BOUND by the horizontal laws of the ego's illusory world. This is why miracles are super-natural, they have a freedom of potential way beyond what any physical law in this second-hand universe suggests is possible.

There is therefore literally NOTHING that they cannot do. We have to open our minds to see past the limitations of physical illusion and realize that even the things we think are impossible are perfectly possible. There is NO REASON why you cannot do anything you can imagine. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

So the main keys to this are:

1) This physical world is once removed from true cause, it is not immediate reality

2) This world has no real causes in it, they are all effects of a higher reality

3) Cause-and-effect in this world are totally fictional illusions designed BY a higher level causer, to create a "story" in which limited things happen according to limited rules

4) Miracles wield a freedom way beyond the limitations of this world and express and demonstrate that ANYTHING is possible because they originate in the FIRST ORDER of causal reality, and therefore can BREAK and OVERRIDE any of the limitations or laws present on the physical level, since those laws are limitations PUT IN PLACE BY someone from the more primal level of reality. This is why Jesus says "you made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

Here's what ACIM says:

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you can see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance and limits of any kind. Your holiness is totally unlimited in its power because it establishes you as a Son of God, at one with the Mind of his Creator. Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do."

"You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you can see His manifestations. And unless you do, you will not realize He is there. Miracles are His witnesses, and speak for his Presence."

God's Kingdom is the level of primary reality. We then made a SECOND world, with the power of our minds. When we made the world we also invented all the rules of the world, all of the laws of physics, all of the ways spacetime would function, and populated it with every object and body and planet and galaxy.

What this means is there are now two levels. There is the level of source, actual reality, and then there is the lower level of the world. The lower level is sometimes referred to as a lower-order reality. This lower level was made, well within the confines of what is possible for the higher order to accomplish. It was a limited mis-creation, is filled with limitations, and its rules are completely invented restrictions.

We who live within this lower order world, who take it at face value, might believe that this world is first-hand reality. And we might believe that the very strictly enforced laws of spacetime physics cannot be broken. We accept all kinds of limitations as being "normal" for this universe. There are so many things that seem impossible, so many things which proceed according to certain rules... it's "just the way thing work here".

But what we might not realize is that this world is not primary reality, its laws are not actually the most fundamental lowest-level limitations, all limits are artificial, and every single "impossibility" is an illusion. In science now the holographic theory is starting to point to this, recognizing that this world is NOT primary reality but a secondary by-product, and is therefore once removed from source.

There are a couple of good analogies. The first is that of a movie director. The director is outside of the movie at the level of what we'll think of as actual reality. The director decides to piece together a set, to populate it with characters, to assemble a scene and make it appear as though certain stories are playing out.

The director will even play a bit with the rules/laws, perhaps they will devise some illusory special effects which LOOK as if they are believable when you look through the camera and don't see all the strings being pulled and all the behind-the-scenes stuff that is going on. And the illusion depends on not seeing the secret workings of the scene in order to maintain believability. To the casual observer, the romantic tale playing out in the movie is believable and "happening". Limitations are accepted as normal and not questioned.

But the movie director could decide to do something completely outside the realm of this little illusion. They could decide to suddenly walk onto the set in front of the camera. This would blow the whole illusion of a scene set in the 1950s. They could decide to move the camera to see the set from a certain vantage point that reveals the buildings aren't real buildings. They could "break" the laws that seem to run the world.

Another analogy is that of someone who builds 3D CGI scenes in a computer. At first the scene is empty. The modeler wants to make a scene where a CGI car crashes into a lamp post. They put the car into the scene, then the lamp post. But there are no laws in place to govern any kind of collision. There is no physics. They have to tell the computer what they want to happen.

They have to invent some physics laws and implement them, so that it SEEMS that when the car touches the lamp post the post bends in a way that makes it look AS IF the car caused the damage. And perhaps the front of the car needs to be remodeled to make it appear AS IF it has been dented.

They also have to make the car move, define how fast, and configure every parameter of what happens. It's sort of similar to how a child plays with a toy car and pretends the car crashes and has to make the object it crashes into move as well to pretend it caused something to happen. In truth the car does not cause anything to happen, the lamp post is not at the effect of the car, and there is no "real damage". It's all pieced together to make an illusion. To seem as if it's believable. There is no actual cause and effect here.

It's possible for the modeller to decide to do something to the car which would "break" the normal laws of physics. They could make the car float, they could change its color, they could turn it into an apple. These would be "unbelievable" to someone who bought into the illusion of the scene, and would appear miraculous.

Which is another point. Within this world we're used to living in, we believe there is cause and effect on the horizontal level. That a brick thrown through a window causes the window to break. One thing is a cause, another thing is an effect. And sometimes the thing that caused becomes affected. We buy into this as if it's a closed system. As if the dream that we caused is causing us.

But in truth, the director has VERTICAL causality over the movie scene. The 3D modeller has VERTICAL causality over the entire contents of the what happens. And so too the MAKER of this world has entire power OVER everything that happens in this world.

Since you MADE PHYSICS, you can BREAK it. You can decide, hey, I am under no laws but God's, I am not bound WITHIN the laws of physics, I made the laws, I will transcend them and break them. I will do something OUTSIDE the laws. I will walk on water, breaking the law of gravity. I can ignore gravity because I made gravity myself. Since you are above, beyond, and outside of, the level of the laws, you have the FREEDOM to exercise your will to bend, break, and totally override the rules.

You who made the world are PRIOR to the world. You are able to pull the strings. You can do thing to the laws and the scene that the laws and the scene itself says are impossible. Things which cannot seemingly be undone or reversed, are reversible with miracles. You can control space and time. Your mind has power over matter. You can literally move a mountain. You can reverse death and sickness. There is nothing beyond your ability to rewrite the dream. You're the dreamer, YOU call the shots.

When you break the laws of the world, the effects or "what happens" is seen by the natives as "miraculous". Or "impossible". When you walk on water, breaking gravity, this seems impossible. Such a demonstration shows that because you are DOING IT, the law of gravity must be an illusion. This is why "miracles are teaching devices."

Also since miracles "do the impossible", this is often why many people do not believe in them as being capable, as if such things are just "magic", as a way to try to explain why miracles CANNOT BE supernatural. This is due to a belief that the world is real. Those to have fallen for the illusion of the lower-order scene are convinced by appearances and made-up laws and believe they cannot BE broken.

Demonstrations of your power over the world reveals that all the limitations and laws you thought you were bound by, you are NOT bound by. When a few loaves of bread and some fish are multiplied out of nowhere to feed 5000 people, this seems miraculous. But he who is operating on laws OUTSIDE the laws of this world is merely exercising their freedom. Anything goes when you are literally above the law!

When a dead body is suddenly resurrected to life and the person starts walking around as if nothing happened, this is considered a miracle by the people who anticipate that death cannot be reversed. In total defiance of all the laws of this world, the laws of decay and time and chemical decomposition, can be broken. Even bodies that have been dead for years can be resurrected. Even when the pieces are scattered and decayed and beyond help. This should not be considered "difficult". There is NO order of difficulty.

You are not bound by ANY LAW of this universe. It is all an entire level removed from the level at which you exercise your creative freedom. This world is further down the chain of causality than the starting point, and you at the starting point can therefore change your mind and change the whole world. It doesn't matter how irreversible, solid, permanent or impossible something seems to be, all of that is overridden when you operate from a higher level of causality.

"Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly."

Since you are operating from a level above the world, you are having vertical causality over the world. You even cause the causality of the word. You cause the causes, and the effects. You set up the causes and the effects to PRETEND that the causes caused the effects. You can violate the illusion of causality at any time. You are above the world. This is why the coures says:

"41. The miracle is a learning device which lessens the need for time. The sudden shifts from horizontal to vertical perception which the miracle entails..."

Vertical perception is a state of seeing yourself as prior to the world, above the battlefield, causal over everything below, overriding all horizontal causality, under no laws but God's. Miracle working ENTAILS shifting INTO vertical perception, SO THAT you can be miraculous. What you then perform FROM vertical perception breaks the laws of the world. Miracle mindedness is vertical perception.

Since super" means above, and "natural" is of course to do with the nature of things, super-natural means "above nature". Being above the nature of the world. Beyond and above the laws of the world. This is why miracles are rightfully "supernatural". At least in terms of looking at them from below. In truth they are completely natural and should be happening all the time. Miraculousness is actually the NATURE of God's Kingdom, which has UNLIMITED POWER.

Everything that is of God is supernatural and naturally so. "God's miracles" "You are a miracle" "You are a miracle not of your own making" "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life" "The miraculous nature of the soul" "Miracles are a universal blessing from God" etc. Being miraculous is natural, being UN-miraculous is UNNATURAL.

Being BOUND by the laws of space time is UN NATURAL. And the NATURE of everything within space time is NOT NATURAL. What we affectionately call "mother nature" is OPPOSITE to the nature of God. "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way." And "miracles are natural and should be happening all the time. When they aren't, something has gone wong."

So being a miracle worker means being supernatural. Miracles are supernatural acts. They CAN BE spectacular. "A miracle is MISUNDERSTOOD when it is REGARDED as a spectacle". "The use of miracles to INDUCE BELIEF is a misunderstanding of their purpose. They are for and by believers." Nothing wrong with throwing a mountain into the sea. Nothing wrong with materializing objects or turning a snake into a branch. Nothing wrong with multiplying food and walking on water. Nothing wrong with reversing death or sickness and giving eyeballs to those born without them. This is *natural*.

"The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form, because it can so easily be CHANGED. This demonstrates that it was never real, and could not stem from his reality. For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

Miracles express from above and outside of the nature of this world. They are supernatural, and what they are capable of IS UNLIMITED.

"Your mind has the power to make worlds."

"There is nothing your holiness cannot do."

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world."

"Miracles reflect the laws of eternity, not of time."

"I am under no laws but God's."

"one point already tells you that miracles reverse the physical or lower order laws."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. "

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you can see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His results, you will understand where He must be, and finally KNOW what He is."

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

I think that for years I have been mistaken about the course. Mainly in terms of the orientation of my mind and the direction in which it was heading.

We start out in false perception, in ego, in body identification. As if we are down in hell at the bottom of a ladder. And then we think of heaven or light or truth or atonement as being higher up the ladder, and so we start the process of climbing out of hell.

Along the way we're told of particularly "high" things which become goals to strive for, like true perception, accepting atonement, the real world, christ vision. And we wonder how to achieve these things. We kind of come at it from a "I don't have it, how do I get it?" point of view.

But the thing is, this is all backwards. We're literally starting out in a backwards thought system, moving in the wrong direction, looking in the wrong direction, and trying to get our heads around what the truth is.

I think as we gradually learn more about the truth, God, soul, reality etc over time, we open up to it more. We do more forgiveness, we heal, we let go of old pain etc. Our identity starts to shift away from the body. We begin questioning the reality of the world etc.

Then at some point, perhaps a kind of tipping point, where for a while we've had our feet in both worlds - heaven and earth - we start to lean more towards reality. We start to side more with the truth than with the false. We develop more truth and find a surer footing that anchors us in reality.

The interesting thing then is that our whole orientation seems to do a 180 degree shift. We start looking from the top down instead of from the bottom up. And we feel more secure in the truth of God and more accepting of what's real as "where we are coming from".

I have found it extremely helpful and clarifying to spend time investigating the nature of God, heaven, creation, souls, sonship, mind, free will, causation, etc. Not the things of this world. This has really fleshed out some solid "facts" that I can depend upon.

I see the simple truth that God, who is truth, has extended himself to create me, and whatever is true of me ONLY comes from God. And that I in turn ONLY have what I inherited from God, and can only be and extend that which I have been given. This has now become a kind of "starting point" for me. A rock solid core of truth within my being. Not even I have any real say in what I am or what I can do.

Now I find myself basing my whole thought process on that truth. Regarding myself as not of this world. Recognizing that only the Kingdom is real. Feeling into and aligning myself with God's will and with my real function. Embedding myself in heaven and looking outward from there. This is orienting me from "the top down" to look at everything the course says from a new vantage point. And it's as if I am seeing things in a way I never saw before.

I'm finding is just an avalanche of clarification and insight about what it's getting at. I find for example that while many "bottom-uppers" believe their whole mission is to escape from hell and return home, really the whole course is aimed towards anchoring yourself in your true nature and expressing that, shining a light into the world to produce healing. As if what's at the top of the ladder reaches down to the bottom of the ladder, to either shine it away or raise it up.

There are in fact many parts of the course related to bringing heaven into the world. Shining God's light as a reflection of his being. The extension of miracles which we are literally told fall DOWN like drops of healing rain FROM heaven ONTO the earth.

The fact that christ works through our bodies, that the holy spirit uses the body for his purposes, and that we extend through the body to form holy relationships. Even forgiveness is a matter of allowing the light of heaven's truth to infuse the mind to correct it's perceptions. Where do we get any kind of truth from if not from outside of perception itself? Truth is of God!

It's not so much a "let's just get out of here" thing. It's more of a, let's remember who we really are anchored in heaven's reality and shine outward from that core truth into the world, to be the light of the world, a healing presence, a teacher/extender of God into the dream, and to help shine away the world. This isn't escape from hell, it's a DISPELLING OF DARKNESS by shining the light of heaven onto it. And this will seem "backwards" to those who believe their only goal is to get out of here asap.

I also think that all the discussions about true perception, christ vision, the face of christ, the real world, atonement etc, are all quite misleading. Mainly because it's very clear to me now that true perception is merely a SIDE EFFECT of a mind which is anchoring itself on the OTHER side of the separation. A mind which is identifying with the spirit being that is BEYOND the realm of perception entirely.

Even the perception of the real world is clearly infused with the light of heaven and is really just a stopping point just prior to entering heaven, on the way to TOTAL immersion in heaven. It just represents a state of being ALMOST entirely spirit identified. And giving yourself over entirely to the atonement merely means becoming FULLY dependent on the truth, having been previously only "mostly" dependent upon it. And truth is not of this world.

"Since perception rests on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the Atonement (but have partly accepted it) and given themselves over to truth. Perception is based on a separated state, so that anyone who perceives at all needs healing. Communion, not prayer, is the natural state of those who know."

This really tells us that the acceptance of atonement is at first a GRADUAL TRANSITION out of hell towards heaven, out of false perception towards truth, and it is only FULLY or FINALLY accepted at the end, where you are 100% willing to accept the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Until then, you are PARTLY atoned, just as Jesus says you are "not now wholy insane." Truth has corrected your mind to SOME extent.

Indeed the whole idea of forgiveness is riddled with confusion and misunderstanding. To forgive really means, that you recognize what is true - which IS HEAVEN, and to then "defend" that truth through the proper use of denial, to REJECT that anything not of God is real or has any power. It's a recognition that illusions are false, BECAUSE OF what is true. AND what is true is God - not of this world. Forgiveness thus is rooted in and depends on recognizing God's nature, which is itself BEYOND forgiveness.

The most obvious point is that, here we are in bodies starting out in false perception, blind to God and in denial of reality. The question then is how do we solve that. And obviously the only real way to solve that is in "leaving the desert". That means that in order to become more loving, more light, more truthful, more sane, you have to actually identify with something BEYOND the dream, with a real eternal truth that is entirely OUTSIDE of perception, so that your perception transforms to line up with it. The blueprint for right mindedness is the one mind.

You can't just work on perception in a closed box. True perception in fact has to be BASED UPON knowledge. And knowledge is the real truth. Believing that the real truth is true - a truth which is OUTSIDE of spacetime - causes perception to be transformed to line up with it. It's almost like, you have to reach outside of ALL perception first, get a hold of reality, then infuse that reality into your mind so that your perception becomes lighter. This was not at all evident in years of past study and in the common interpretations of the course.

We're also told about miracle working and the fact that miracles in fact come from God and fall down from heaven like healing rain, onto the earth. This is similar to how forgiveness works, in that the light that is higher and more true, shines into the mind and into the world, and bestows life where there was death.

Because "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life" and "Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers". That means they're starting out IN HEAVEN and are expressing FROM God through our minds, transforming perception and healing the world. That's a TOP DOWN mechanic, which is why they cannot be received when fear (false perception) is too strong.

I've also found that until you can get a really solid metaphysical, logical grasp of the nature of God and creation, you can't really have anything clear and true enough to compare anything to. You really need a solid idea of the light, in order for it to clearly contradict the darkness. You need to know the truth of heaven and of your being and nature, in order to compare that to other things that happen in the world, to recognize WHY those things are false and unreal. You can't just compare illusions to true perception, you have to compare them to God, then perception will follow.

"Perception (even true perception) is a RESULT, not a cause".And so it sort of comes down to not just the question of what things are, but of the question of WHY they are that way. The understanding or logical reason that they are based on. Illusions are illusions BECAUSE of what the truth is. Sickness is unreal BECAUSE of the immortal nature of God. The world is a dream BEACUSE reality is not like it. Miracles can raise the dead BEACUSE of their expression of eternal life. If you don't have your mind anchored in heaven, you really don't have any solid ground to stand on at all.

For me, my whole orientation with the course is quite strongly transitioning to a totally top-down view at the moment. This reflects the changes in myself which are transitioning to a "going within in order to be able to express outward", or seeking the higher mind in order to shine FROM it into the world. Or aligning myself with a higher light, so that I can shine darkness way. I am finding out WHO I AM, so that I can REJECT what I am not.

"Yet when they find their own Reality is even here, then they step back and let It lead the way. What other choice is really theirs to make?"

"And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven."

Ultimately what we're really doing is we are rising up from the pits of hell and ascending into heaven. But the closer you get to heaven the more you feel like you are IN heaven, looking back downward towards hell. It's most like returning to HERE, having been AWAY. Or becoming more PRESENT, having been absent. Or becoming more authentic, having been artificial.

That orientation of "peering out from the truth" or "operating under the laws of God" or "being true to yourself first" or "having innocence in you first which you project out", is what MAKES the real world and true perception be what they are. They are reflections of the light that is IN you, which you have stepped into and are radiating. The love which you give in order to see love. "Love looks upon itself."

So it's really about you deciding to change which ROOM you are located in. Are you in hell, or in heaven. When you seek for a better way than suffering, to any degree at all, you are seeking to be in the room of heaven, where you are happy. And then you start to move between the rooms. You want to get yourself as much immersed in heaven as possible, so that almost all of you is very close to being in heaven just before you leave the world. That means you are practically a REFLECTION OF DIVINITY, while in the dream, allowing you to perform miracles and heal the world. To extend God's love and light and to keep illusions from tempting you.

It's all top-down. All the correction is top-down. All the extension of love and light and power is top-down. All of the being true to yourself is top-down. All of the health of the body is caused from the top-down. All dispelling of illusions and the sanity of the mind is brought about from the top-down. Death is conquered throught the top-down expression of eternal life. True perception and the forgiven world and the real world all come about through the top-down application and expression of your true nature. And eventually the goal is to be SO completely vigilant for the Kingdom, or to seek first the Kingdom of God, so that you put God FIRST in all things, and everything else just follows naturally from there.

The ego is a devious, cunning, manipulative, deceptive monster, acting in deep unconsciousness, unaware of truth, unaware of the present, threatened by everything, threatening to everything, vicious and vile, mean and hateful, deeply suspicious, riddled with terror, certain of the death of itself and everyone else, deeply sick, distorted and distorting, murderous, vengeful and spiteful, dark and twisted, powerless, victimized and a victimizer, deeply sorrowful, alone, separate, lost, confused, uncertain of anything, knowing nothing, and thoroughly deluded.

This 'mind', when present in another person, will attempt to 'tempt' you to agree with it. Particularly if the 'pain body' of another person has activated and is taking over their consciousness, or rather, rendering the person unconscious and unaware of who they are or what the truth is. The ego will distort everything and yet is seemingly extremely cunning and clever at knowing when to strike, how to do so, and how to get what it wants. It can be seemingly formidable and a vicious enemy.

It wants to 'tempt' you to believe what it believes, by attempting to pull you into a drama, to lower your awareness, to distract you from truth, to mislead you, to push your buttons, to trigger off your unhealed upsets which may even entail triggering things that are deeply buried in yourself of which you are also mostly unconscious, just so that it can get you to react negatively and to enter into a state of separation. Once accomplished the ego is then 'feeding off of you' by attempting to take power from you, to possess you with its 'evil' intentions, to convert you to its thought system, to get you to be persuaded that its version of truth is the real truth, and to essentially corrupt you and diminish your light.

It is therefore a significant, deep challenge, to be around someone who is strongly in this kind of mindset, or who is having a pain-body attack, or who has a lot of negative emotion that is unhealed, or who has identified strongly with their ego self. Everything the ego does through another person or in them attempts to 'attract' you out of your peace and out of your mind, to 'tempt' you to believe things which are not true, and to get you to basically side with it so that you are resonating with it. Even as you begin to resonate with it, it is aligning with you and merging with you and thereby accessing you and absorbing you into it like a sponge. It is magnetic in its appeal that death is real and that you should be at war, in conflict with the other person, resisting of them, hating of them, rejecting of them, judging of them, reacting to their lies, or being drawn to basically lose your cool over the way the ego is behaving.

This is especially hard to deal with when you are attached to the person and depend on them, or when you rely on them being sane and sensible, or when you have expectations that the person should be a certain way in order to please your own unconscious bullshit, or that you have 'special bargains' with them in your 'special relationship' that you are still trying to fulfill but which are being ripped apart by the ego's refusal to honor the 'facade' or 'persona' that covers up its darkness (the shadow). When the gloves are off, all hell seems to break loose and at this time it can be extremely difficult to remain unaffected.

It is, however, a tremendous opportunity for learning and growth. Like it or not you will be driven to have to confront the things in yourself that cause you to become deceived by the ego in the other person, including having to examine and let go of attachments, having to look at and release and let go of special relationships and artificial ways of relating, to question why you have reactions or are deeply triggered by certain behaviors, to seek out God even more fervently in order to stay present in the truth, to come to realize that unconditional love is called for at all times because nothing else works, to be confronted with the ways in which your own ego is powerless to solve problems and how you yourself cannot fix anything, to question the motivation for fixing and saving, to be confronted with why it is that you fall for temptations or buy into the drama which is being put there as a deliberate provocation, to recognize where you are coming from your head and not your heart, to find levels of surrender and letting go that you never thought was possible, and to propel you into a greater awareness of God and yourself.

See, the bullshit drives you to awaken, when you allow it to, and when you use it to do so, by deciding that you will learn the lesson that it presents and that you will use it for the purpose of becoming even more honest. As such then it is not a curse but a blessing. And what may at first seem to be a horrendous terrifying unwanted attack may turn into a reason for salvation and a doorway to awakening. It is a catalyst (thank you for that word Holy Spirit). A catalyst for awakening, by getting you to be heavily triggered and to have to look at all the reasons why you are reacting so that you can heal and take responsibility for yourself.

All the ways you fail will be highlighted intensely because the ego in the other person will be very suspicious and rejective and quick to point out your faults and failures. It will not tolerate even tiny suggestions that you are innocent and will insinuate and accuse you of a great many things, some of which you are in fact doing that you do not want to admit to, and some things which you are in fact not doing which still cause you to react in some way.

The ego is like a highly highly untrusting scared sensitive little mouse that has absolutely no trust and no allegiance and no willingness to live or to see anything other than your sins. And because it powerfully highlights your sins, this presents a wonderful opportunity for you to confront false beliefs in yourself and to seek healing for your own sins. It is intense and painful and unpleasant, perhaps, but at the same time, you could think of it as a service, helping you to awaken by being as provocative and triggering of and pointing out all the ways you are being even slightly unloving, so that you will be forced to have to 'cunjour' up other-worldly amounts of love and forgiveness and unconditionality.

Ultimately it is for your good, even though being faced with the profound unconsciousness of ego and its pain can be terrifying and disempowering. For that you can be thankful, if you can finally let go enough to learn that the other person, who seems to have this evil ego inside them, is in fact NOT that ego, and that everything they believe is true about themselves and you is FALSE. They then become your savior, or at least, they provide the 'material' which you can USE to learn to recognize what is true and what is false. They can provide the catalyst for awakening and give motivation to your heart. And you can learn to forgive them, and overlook them, and see instead the light in them, and dismiss and filter out all of the ego's noise and screeches of suffering, which can be very difficult.

In this way and this way alone you could say that the ego is there to wake you up, or at least to provide the 'curriculum' and learning materials and role-play that may be necessary for you to be forced to take a really hard, deep look at yourself and what you believe. And it may be that the ONLY thing that seems to possibly 'work' with an ego-driven person is to COMPLETELY ignore what their ego is asserting, to learn to RECOGNIZE the sometimes subtle deviousness of the ego so that you can stop listening to it, and so that you can become aware that unconditional love is the ONLY TRULY HELPFUL REMEDY that you can offer.

In a way, the vicious 'evil' ego in another person is like a 'test' or exam, a very hard one, in which even slight unholiness in yourself will be pointed out in a big way and used against you. In fact, all of the ways in which you are yourself unconscious or unholy will become your own undoing, as you fall into a cascade of reactions and ego drama, trying desperately to 'fight off' the attacks that you believe are coming from the other person, but which in fact are your OWN self-attacks that you are now projecting onto them. The person in 'pain' is now like a final examiner, determining whether you are still easily fooled, whether you fall for ego lies, whether you still believe dark things about yourself, whether you still use ego yourself, and therefore whether you are truly 'clean' of ego to be in any kind of position to judge the other person. In this way, the ego becomes your motivation for admitting to and healing yourself, rising out of your own ego attitudes, removing your own darkness from your own mind, and stepping into light and power at an entirely higher level of functioning.

There is a way out of hell, but we have lessons to learn and a curriculum to undertake and things that we need to let go of and stop doing and there are also things we have yet to 'access' and become empowered by that we have yet to develop trust in. It's a journey - a journey without distance, and we are guaranteed to find our way home to love. Only in the context that the ego is helping you to awaken, to recognize how the ego is completely false, how it is INSANE, and ultimately does not exist, is the ONLY way it in which it is ever by any stretch of the imagination 'your friend'. Only be using it as a MIRROR or 'tester' to weed out the unconscious darkness within yourself, and to then correct it with Holy Spirit's truth, can you then be 'using' the ego for awakening. Coexisting with it is not the goal, or possible. Freedom from the ego is the goal and it is perfectly attainable. In a way, you 'need' the ego to help you awaken, but you awaken FROM it's and in spite of it.

And then you return to who you really are: invulnerable, unassailable, immortal, unconditional, innocent and holy.

There is a non-duality model which is frequently projected on ACIM's teachings. It suggests that in truth there is only "one", and that in the separation from God many individuals were formed. This however is very unlike what ACIM actually says when you go read it.

ACIM's teaching is that God created many individual beings - souls - who also share everything simultaneously. This comprises the sonship, which is a permanent family of living beings who each have their own self and yet share identity through the Christ mind, creating as one. Individuality was given to each soul/mind and therefore everyone has a real self. It is not a "blob" of one being sitting there all alone. It is a community.

In the separation from God, it was not an event where individuality was invented. It was an event where pre-existing individuals tried to be selfish. They didn't want to share everything with everyone, so they tried to separate themselves off. They became selfish, hoarding, possessive, owning, isolating, exclusive, special and rejecting of others.

The separation then was a breakdown in communication or a disruption of the family unit of the sonship. It's where some individuals became "the separated ones", by freely choosing individually to not share with others. It was like an attempt to rebel against the family and go off on their own as prodigal sons. But there is nothing about being a prodigal son that deletes you from existence when you return home.

What actually happened in the separation was you attempted to reject your wholeness and your self and your family. You tried to stop sharing with your permanent brothers. You wanted some special favor from God, which he would give you alone and not anyone else. It was simply an attitudinal problem, one of selfishness, and not an issue of trying to be an individual."The ego is the idea of selfishness."

Selfishness is an attitude. You can have a person who is an individual who shares, and you can have the same person who adopts a selfish attitude. Just because you're being selfish doesn't mean you suddenly invent an individuality.

In the separation, in denying our shared identity and family coherence, we actually tried to deny that we had a self. The ego is the idea of self denial, repression, hiding and withdrawal. It was an attempt to reject your self and to not be a self. In fact the ego idea even takes it so far as to try to eradicate your self entirely, which is why it is so murderous and always has the goal of the death of the sons of God in mind.

In death the ego reports that it is triumphant in erasing your self and removing your individuality. It is in death that you stop being an individual or having a self at all. Death is the attempt to destroy who and what you really are. And death is not about the production of an individual life, it's about ending it.

This also means that when you go in the opposite direction towards heaven, towards eternal life, you are moving away from the lack of individuality, towards individuality. Towards having a self. It's a movement back towards the family of God and towards the sonship and your equal brothers. It's a reintegration of self and a return to wholeness. It's a reclaiming of your identity and a recognizing that you do exist as an individual being. As a soul.

Jesus also states in the course that as you awaken, your sense of self actually expands, becoming more full and complete. This doesn't mean you are simply returning to one big blob in the sky, it means you are returning to being yourself. And the goal of the course is to "know thyself."

So in fact the traditional models of individuality are upside down. Especially in some eastern traditions which suggests that reality is no-self while illusion is self. This is completely backwards. The fact is that when you decide to try to reject your self, to deny your soul, you bring illusions of separation into your mind. Blocks and walls and grievances and attack thoughts etc enter the mind to try to cut down, isolate, narrow, limit, confine and section off who and what you are from the rest.

These walls and limits seem to form a restricted or reduced sense of self, surrounded with pictures of bodies and things that are too small to encompass what you really are, so that you'll believe that you are not the magnitude or scope of your unlimited self. And as you "identify with" these things, such as with the body, you believe that you are something small and little and cut off and separate. And this "bodily identity" in your mind forms a sense of who and what you are, which is a false sense of identity. But really it's a false IDENTIFICATION WITH something, not the invention of identity itself.

Those who are deceived, believe that this false sense of identity is their self. Such as believing you are your body. And it is this false sense of self which ends when you wake up to reality. It is this sense of being separated off and not sharing and not being whole, that ends. Which means you actually return to a greater fullness of self, more expansive and inclusive. You actually become full of self. You identity WITH your spiritual self and DIS-IDENTIFY from the false body."The soul is the idea of self fullness."

But self here does not mean selfishness, or an isolated self. It means a self that shares all of itself with other selves, in unity and oneness, as in having a real open and full relationship with all other individual beings in reality. God included.

So you have to then realize that ego is actually the attempted denial of your self and the denial of individuality. It's the attempt to suggest you do not exist and do not have any self and are dead. And just because this denial of self shows up as the seeming "presence" of an artificial identity, it does not mean that you have created an individuality. It's actually an ILLUSION OF an individual, which is ACTUALLY NOT an individual. Because remember the ego is always deceptive, being an illusion.

Your ego is really the absence of self, the absence of individuality, the suppression of personality, the denial of wholeness, and the rejection of being as God created you. The illusion of a separated off, selfish self, is undone as you awaken. This does not mean that your individuality is thrown out with the bathwater. What it means is that your individuality opens back up to sharing with the rest of your God-given family. It is actually a return to having a self. It is self acknowledgement, acceptance and awareness.

So when you have people teaching that ACIM is non-duality, or that you have no real self, or that you do not exist, or that you're supposed to deny yourself, or that your entire identity is going to just disappear someday, they are teaching absolute bullshit. They are teaching you that you do not exist, which is an ego teaching. It is an improper use of denial.

You're supposed to deny the DENIAL OF self, not deny that you have a self. You are to deny the ego, which is an illusion of a self, but which is actually the attempt to not have a self. You are to deny that you do not have a self. That is how you return to what you really are as a self in heaven. As an individual being which God created to share with others and co-create with Him.

"God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."When you project these non-duality teachings onto ACIM and you start to claim that the path to enlightenment is self repression or self denial or "you don't exist" and trying to be so neutral and passive as if you don't even have a self at all, that is actually SELF DESTRUCTION, which is completely in accord with the ego. It is the ego attempting to be spiritual, in fact. The absolute pinnacle of the spiritualized ego is to deny that you exist, in the name of being spiritual and growing in size. It is arrogant and narcissistic and a mistake.

This is why ACIM's teaching is not the same as the teachings that people keep projecting onto it. It is not a non-duality teaching and it is NOT about trying to get rid of yourself. Remember you were created by God to HAVE a self in the first place. Your self is divine and holy and perfect. You also have equal brothers who are divine and holy and perfect, created by God as well. And you share everything with everyone always. That produces a perfect harmony of souls in the sonship who have and share everything with each other, as the family of God.

That is what is written in ACIM and that is what it teaches. That you had a self before the ego came along, and you will have a self again when the ego is erased. This is not a course in self destruction or repression of the sonship or the depressing argument of trying to not exist. You should not deny your soul, or you are denying reality. This is a course in awakening to who and what you are as created by God, as one of many of his beloved children in heaven.

All anti-individuality sentiment is therefore destructive and death-worshipping and depressing and a rejection of God's will. Ego does not mean or equate to individuality. It equates only to an ATTITUDE which an individual has that runs contrary to the sharing nature of the sonship. Removing the attitude problem does not have to entail you destroying yourself. You are in fact supposed to embrace yourself and your freedom and thank God that you have been given life to share with others forever.

Your true self in God is a beautiful soul, who is whole and holy. Your wholeness is shared with the wholeness of all other souls, forming the sonship, and sharing everything with God. The rejection of sharing began the ego's selfishness - your attempt to be exclusive and excluded.

"Selfishness is of the ego but self-fullness is of the Soul because that is how He created it."

In the separation, a PART of your mind attempted to believe it could attack the whole - to attack God and your real self and the union of the sonship, which is also the Son of God. This part of mind believes in sin because it believes it can and has attacked the whole, in order to set itself apart.

"The ego IS the part of the mind which believes in division. But how can part of God detach itself WITHOUT believing it is attacking Him?"

"The ego is the questioning (fearing/attacking) compartment in the post-Separation psyche which man created for himself."

"The ego does NOT regard itself as part of you. Herein lies its primary perceptual error, the foundation of its whole thought system."

A PART of the mind therefore formed a PART of your belief about yourself and others. It results in a split mind, whereby a larger portion of your mind is allegiant to your soul, while this small split-off part of mind sees itself as what's left of you. In effect you then seem to have two selves, living TWO lives.

"From an idea of self AS TWO, there comes a NECESSARY view of function split BETWEEN the two."

"The ego is nothing more than a PART of your belief about yourselves. Your other life has continued without interruption, and has been and always will be totally unaffected by your attempts to dissociate."

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not."

This part of the mind which sees itself as separate, believes that it is completely alone. That it has divorced from God and from the rest of you and others. It sees itself as autonomous, a God of its own Kingdom, and dependent on no-one. It has no relationships and does not want to share anything.

"The ego IS the belief of the mind that it is completely on its own."

"They live in secrecy, hating the sunlight, and happy in the body's darkness, where they can hide, and keep their secrets hidden, along with them. And they have NO relationships, for no-one else is welcome there."

"This is the temple dedicated to no relationships, and no return." - "The unholy relationship is NO relationship." "The ego's goal is quite explicitly EGO AUTONOMY. From the beginning, then, its PURPOSE is to be separate, sufficient unto itself, and independent of any power EXCEPT ITS OWN. This is WHY it is the symbol of separation."

The ego, being a kind of symbol in the mind representing the idea of a "self who is separated off", is completely selfish. It has only self interest. It is not interested in you as a soul, or the rest of your mind. It is almost like a kind of cancer in the mind, an unnatural growth which is not supposed to be there.

"The ego is the symbol of the Separation, just as the Holy Spirit is the symbol of peace."

"If the ego is the symbol of the separation, it is also the symbol of guilt."

The ego is NOT your real self, or your real identity. It is an artificial sense of identity, mistaken and untrue, whereby this small part of your mind is at war with the rest of you, and with God.

"Your will is NOT the ego's, and that is why the ego is against you."

"The ego's fundamental wish is to replace God. In fact, the ego is the physical embodiment of this wish. For it is this wish which seems to surround the mind with a body, keeping it separate and alone, and unable to reach other minds except through the body which was made to imprison it."

"The ego is afraid of the Soul's joy, because once you have experienced this, you will withdraw all protection from your ego and become totally without investment in fear. Your investment is great now, because fear is a witness to the Separation, and your ego rejoices when you witness to it."

"When you feel guilty, KNOW that your ego has indeed violated the laws of God, but YOU have not. Leave the sins of the ego to me. That is what the Atonement is for."

The ego is like the anti-christ. It is the idea of a complete opposite to christ, to sharing, to love, to unity and peace. It sits in the dark recesses of your mind, plotting your death and finding ways to see itself as a victim. It uses the body as its chosen home, as a weapon through which to attack others and keep them separate.

"The body is the symbol of the ego, as the ego is the symbol of separation. And both are nothing more than attempts to LIMIT communication, and thereby TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE."

"not because the EGO is a separate thing, but because you want to believe that YOU are. The ego is a device for maintaining this belief, but it is still only YOUR willingness to use the device that enables it to endure."

You have an ego in you, in your mind. Much of the time it may seem to be hidden, and you might regard youself as relatively friendly. But when the gloves come off the ego comes out to play.

If you'll notice, the ego is the idea of both victims and victimizers. It attacks and sees itself as heinously attacked. It sees itself as overpowering others with tyranny, while also seeing itself as terrorized and weak.

Whenever you are playing a victim role, you are being extremely selfish. This of course sounds like some kind of vicious accusation, to the ego in people, but it's true. Being a victim, you see yourself as lacking and in need, deprived and weakened, threatened and undermined. And these are all hallmarks of making yourself small and limited. They're all actually attempts to put ALL of the focus on you as a separate self.

In victimhood you yourself as separated off, alone, threatened, vulnerable, confused, insane, afraid, vicious, attacking, vengeful, angry, hurt, justified, unfairly treated, sick and suffering. The whole bag of ego tricks comes flying out. Precicely when you think OTHERS are being selfish in their neglect of your needs, it's because YOU are being selfish.

The ego is all about selfishness because it's totally the idea of rejecting sharing. Of confining and limiting and hoarding and possessing, owning and getting and being exclusive. Whenever the focus shifts to "only me", like "poor me I"m the only victim", you are contracting into a ball of fear to try to separate yourself off. And the reason you want to be separted off is always beacause you don't want to share with anyone. Your own interests become your ONLY interests.

The thing to realize is, that YOU, who and what you are, is in fact a WHOLE self, your SOUL, as created by God, sharing everything with everyone. The ego is a PARTIAL self, not even a full self, and resides only in part of your mind. YOU get to decide whether or not to side with the ego, to identify with it, to think of it as your whole self, and whether to see out through its insane eyes.

What YOU are, is distinct from what the ego is. The ego is a fictional framework of make-believe wishful-thinking confused nonsense, jumbled up together and screwed tightly into a ball of hatred. It wants to keep guilt, maintain fear, suffer, and induce death. It actually wants the REST of you to die, for your soul to be exterminated, and for ITSELF to perpetuate. "The ego wants YOU dead, but NOT itself."

When you feel stressed out and upset and overwhelmed and in need, and others are trying to take from you, and you are thinking of them as selfish assholes, YOU are in fact being selfish. You're seeing yourself in an egoic way, as a self in pain, a suffering victimy weak self, who has nothing to give and is lacking everything. The ego sees this way because it is deprived of God. And this means you are aligning and associating yourself with it.v You do have the freedom still to choose WHETHER to align with the ego in the mind, or to deny it and align with the Holy Spirit, or the wholeness of your soul. Moving towards wholeness, the ego in you will remain vicious and backwards, and will likely try to attack you more, or to tempt you away from the truth with its lies and slander. But what it cannot do is decide for you, or take your power away against your will. YOU can withdraw your power from it at any time. "If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God."

Ultimately in truth the ego does not really exist. The Holy Spirit knows it is nothing at all, nothing but a collection of mistaken beliefs which can be undone. The atonement IS the undoing of the ego, because in the light there is no sin and no separation. The ego in - the SELFISHNESS in you - must be completely recognized and undone.

"For the Holy Spirit is THERE, although He cannot help you without your invitation, and the ego is nothing, whether you invite it in or not."

"By steadily and consistently canceling out ALL its effects, EVERYWHERE AND IN ALL RESPECTS, He teaches that the ego does not exist, and PROVES IT. Follow His teaching in forgiveness, then, because forgiveness IS His function, and HE knows how to fulfill it perfectly."

"The ego is totally confused about reality"

"The ego is the "proof" that strength is weak and love is fearful, life is really death, and what opposes God alone is true."

"So it is with death. Made by the ego, its dark shadow falls across all living things, because the ego is the "enemy" of life."

"of pride, of arrogance, or of self-deception"

"The ego does not advertise its final threat, for it would have its worshippers still believe that IT can offer the ESCAPE from it. But the belief in guilt MUST lead to the BELIEF IN HELL, and ALWAYS DOES."

"GOD HAS GIVEN YOU EVERYTHING. This is the one fact which MEANS that the ego does not exist, and which therefore makes it profoundly afraid."

"Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war DOES deprive you of peace."

"Yet the ego is the only alternative to the Holy Spirit's Voice."

"That is why the ego IS the denial of free will. It is NEVER God Who coerces you, because He SHARES His Will WITH you."

"The ego is the self-appointed mediator of ALL relationships, making whatever adjustments it deems necessary, and INTERPOSING them BETWEEN those who would meet, to keep them separate and PREVENT their union."

"The ego is a form of ARREST, but arrest is merely delay."

"The ego IS a contradiction. Man's self and God's Self ARE in opposition. They are opposed in creation, in will, and in outcome. They are fundamentally irreconcilable because the Soul cannot perceive, and the ego cannot know. They are therefore NOT IN COMMUNICATION, and can never BE in communication."

"The full appreciation of its (the soul's) self-fullness (wholeness) makes selfishness impossible, and extension inevitable."

"The unhealed healer may be arrogant, selfish, unconcerned, and actually dishonest."

"The essential thing to remember always is that the ego DOES NOT RECOGNIZE the real source of its perceived threat. And if YOU associate yourself WITH the ego, YOU do not perceive the whole situation as it really is. Only your allegiance to it gives the ego ANY power over you. We have spoken of the ego as if it were a separate thing, acting on its own. This was necessary to persuade you that you cannot dismiss it lightly, and MUST realize how much of your thinking is ego-directed." "The ego is the choice for guilt, the Holy Spirit the decision for blamelessness."

"This is the Voice for God, reminding you of your Father and of your Self. This is the Voice of truth, replacing everything that the ego tells you about yourself with the simple truth about the Son of God. You were created by Love like Itself."

"Everything that stems from the ego is the natural outcome of its central belief, and the way to undo its RESULTS, is merely to recognize that their SOURCE is NOT natural, being out of accord with your TRUE nature."

Jesus in ACIM talks quite a lot about saving the world. This obviously can lead to some confusion. Does it mean the world is to be kept? Does it mean we need to save the animals? Is it a temporary step? Why would we save it only to have it disappear? And how do you save it, and from what?

On the matter of what the world is to be saved FROM, he says this:

"True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist."

"save the world from all ideas of sin."

"The world is saved from what you thought it was. And what it is, is wholly uncondemned and wholly pure."

"What keeps the world in chains but your beliefs?"

Essentially he is saying that "ideas of sin" can somehow be lifted away from the world. Apparently this means the idea of the world being sinful is optional. And since you can change your idea of what you THOUGHT the world "was", you can think of it either as sinful or as not sinful.

And what does it then mean that the world is SAVED? "And what it is, is wholly uncondemned and wholly pure." So the world is effectively saved FROM your condemnations, your accusations of sin, your projections of guilt, your judgements, your hate, your anger, your attempts to destroy. When you stop doing these things to yourself and stop projecting them UPON the world, the real world is revealed.

Jesus asks us to save the world from our projection of sin, of guilty meaning, of fear and attack. To lift the veil of illusions away from the world, so that we can see it for what it is. To have accurate, true perception of it. Then we will see it as a forgiven world, a world onto which we have not PUT condemnation, sin, attack or ideas of danger. Our forgiveness will be upon it and we will see reflected IN it an image of God, a reflection of heaven, and the face of Christ.

Once this is accomplished, the world, and the real world, both simply dreams, will disappear, as we are lifted into heaven and unto God once again.

"You ATTACK the real world every day and every hour and every minute, and yet you are surprised that you cannot SEE it."

"Damnation is your judgment on YOURSELF. And this you WILL project upon the world. See IT as damned, and all you see is what YOU did to hurt the Son of God."

"There is another way of looking at the world."

"And with this vision I will look upon the world and upon myself with charity and love."

"Yet first true healing must have come to bless the mind with loving pardon for the sins it dreamed about and laid upon the world."

"Since the purpose of the world is not the one I ascribed to it, there must be another way of looking at it. I see everything upside-down, and my thoughts are the opposite of truth. I see the world as a prison for God's Son. It must be, then, that the world is really a place where he can be set free. I would look upon the world as it is, and see it as a place where the Son of God finds his freedom."

"There IS another purpose in the world that error made because it has another Maker, Who CAN reconcile its goal with His Creator's Purpose." "For you will not interpret what you see without the Aid that God has given you. And in His sight there IS another world. You live in that world just as much as this, for BOTH are concepts of yourself, which can be interchanged, but never jointly held."

"Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean, and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it."

"But it is true that the world must be looked at differently, if His promises are to be accepted. What the world is, is but a fact. You cannot choose what this should be. But you can choose how you would see it. Indeed, you must choose this."

“Have you wondered what the world is REALLY like? How would it look through HAPPY eyes? The world you see is but a judgment on YOURSELF. IT is not there at all. But judgment lays a sentence on it, JUSTIFIES it, and MAKES IT REAL. Such is the world you see; a judgment on yourself, and made by YOU. This sickly picture of yourself is carefully preserved by the ego, whose image it IS and which it loves, and placed OUTSIDE you, in the world.”

"Brother, come and join with me today. We save the world when we are joined. For in our vision it becomes as holy as the Light in us."

"Let us not rest content until the world has joined our changed perception. Let us not be satisfied until forgiveness has been made complete. And let us not attempt to change our function. We must save the world. For we who made it must behold it through the eyes of Christ, that what was made to die can be restored to Everlasting Life."

"Are you ready yet to help Me save the world?"

"If you are to save the world, you first accept salvation for yourself. But you will not believe that this is done until you see the miracles it brings to everyone you look upon."

"It unites all wills on earth in Heaven's plan to save the world, restoring it to Heaven's peace."

"Be certain not to dwell on any one of them, but realize that you are using his "offenses" but to save the world from all ideas of sin."

"What keeps the world in chains but your beliefs? And what can save the world except your Self?"

"We will not play such childish games today, for our true purpose is to save the world, and we would not exchange for foolishness the endless joy our function offers us."

""My part is essential to God's plan for salvation. I am essential to the plan of God for the salvation of the world. For He gave me His plan that I might save the world."

"Father, forgiveness is the light You chose to shine away all conflict and all doubt, and light the way for our return to You. No light but this can end our evil dreams. No light but this can save the world."

"Now my mind is healed, and all I need to save the world is given me." "I am as God created me. ... This single thought, held firmly in the mind, would save the world."

""Spirit am I, a holy Son of God, free of all limits, safe and healed and whole, free to forgive, and free to save the world."

"Christ asks that He may use my eyes today, and thus redeem the world. He asks this gift that He may offer peace of mind to me, and take away all terror and all pain. And as they are removed from me, the dreams that seemed to settle on the world are gone. Redemption must be one. As I am saved, the world is saved with me."

"For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one. They are the one beginning with the end to lead to Oneness far beyond themselves. True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is this that true perception sees."

"Holy indeed is he who makes these words his own; arising with them in his mind, recalling them throughout the day, at night bringing them with him as he goes to sleep. His dreams are happy and his rest secure; his safety certain and his body healed, because he sleeps and wakens with the truth before him always. He will save the world because he gives the world what he receives each time he practices the words of truth."

""Are you ready yet to help Me save the world?" Ask this instead of what the ego is, and you will see a sudden brightness cover up the world the ego made. No miracle is now withheld from anyone. The world is saved from what you thought it was. And what it is, is wholly uncondemned and wholly pure."

"And now in all your doings be you blessed.

God turns to you for help to save the world.

Teacher of God, His thanks He offers you,

And all the world stands silent in the grace

You bring from Him. You are the Son He loves,

And it is given you to be the means

Through which His Voice is heard around the world

To close all things of time, to end the sight

Of all things visible; and to undo

All things that change. Through you is ushered in

A world unseen, unheard, yet truly there.

Holy are you, and in your light the world

Reflects your holiness, for you are not

Alone and friendless. I give thanks for you,

And join your efforts on behalf of God,

Knowing they are on my behalf as well

And for all those who walk to God with me."

"All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing all illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there, he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there in peace."

"And you will see me as you look within, and we will look upon the world as God created it together. Through the eyes of Christ, ONLY the real world exists, and can BE seen."

"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."

"For as Heaven and earth become one, even the real world will vanish from your sight. The end of the world is not its destruction, but its TRANSLATION into Heaven. The RE-INTERPRETATION of the world is the transfer of ALL perception to knowledge."

OK.

This is going to have to be pretty long because this is a very difficult subject to explain, so bear with me. Some of you may be willing to accept what I'm going to say, some will not.

Oneness. What does it seem to mean? God is whole. God is complete. God is "all there is". God is everywhere, omnipresent, lacking nothing. God is the same everywhere. So... if this is true in terms of ego logic, it means the following:

God has no son. God is dreaming this world. God is a murderer. God created death. God makes people suffer. The separation happened inside God. God is mistaken. God is afraid. God is all people. God is experiencing "himself" through and as all people in the world. There is nothing other than God. We are God. Separation is real. God created this world. etc.

Absolutely none of that is true. That is the purest most logically accurate definition of what non-duality means to the ego. It is the most precise conclusion you can draw from how the EGO understands oneness or what it means to be "one". If oneness truly means "there is only one", the God is responsible for hell. And it is grossly mistaken.

If God is one, then God cannot even create anything because there is nowhere for the creation to occur and nothing to add which wasn't already there and so, literally, "there is only God". This is the conclusion many many Course folk have come to. It seems to in some ways make sense TO EGO THINKERS and those who use linear logic who think that such linear logic is capable of encompassing and understanding the nature of God.

God is not like this. And oneness does not mean "there is only God". And non-duality, as the opposite of duality, does not properly describe the holographic creative nature of God or reality. Non-duality is CLOSE to being correct, and is more correct than duality, but it is still a concept and it falls way short, as you will see. If there is non-duality there should be just "one thing". In that, there can be no Son of God at all, no creation, no love, no extension, no sharing, no sonship, and no holy relationship.

In fact, what's happened widespread in ACIM folk is various false conclusions which have established themselves as if written in stone "what the course says". And yet the consequences of these errors are quite horrific. To believe God is all there is is to equate God with ego and death. To claim that God is all there is also denies and murders every Son of God.

OK.

Now, let's talk about how God actually exists and thinks and creates and the nature of His creation. If the strictest definition of oneness or non duality is true, then God cannot even create anything. And in a sense, PARTS of the Course speak to this. E.g. "God is". And also, "nothing real can be increased except by sharing". So anything real, like God, is permanent, fixed, unchanging, does not increase or decrease, and therefore there can be no creation whatsoever. Which means no son. UNLESS, this thing called "sharing" happens.

Recognize that God is love, and because of what love is, it automatically goes out and shares and extends. It shares because it has no reason to hold anything back. It is fundamentally a state of sharing, including, giving, and this radiation of love is another way of describing the act of creation.

God in and of Himself is whole, complete, lacking nothing, needing nothing, and is already permanent. Like a solid rock. Unchanging. That does not really sound like something that can create, does it? It seems very fixed. Like absolutely nothing is happening or possible. That's strictly what most definitions of "oneness" imply also. That nothing else is possible besides God existing. That's false.

God loves, and in that love, God radiates, extends, shares, creates, miraculously. Ego logic will NEVER account for "the miraculous", and God's creative ability is truly miraculous, which is why YOU ARE A MIRACLE. To the ego, God CANNOT create, and the act of His creating defies ALL EGO LOGIC and demonstrates that God is a miracle worker. Something happens in God which defies explanation and seems impossible yet happens. God SHARES AND CREATES something "other" than Himself, out of nowhere.

If you think of God like a light bulb, God is the fixed light bulb which does not move or change really, but the bulb radiates and SHINES light. The light goes outward and illuminates. That "shining", that light radiating, that is creation. The light radiating is not necessarily the same thing as God Himself. God is complete and whole already, but God SHARES Himself by shining light and radiating and extending, and that which extends outward is creation.

It is in this way that God created the world of Heaven. Here is how the Course describes it is a NATURAL division:

"The world was made as "a natural grand division," or a projecting outward of God. That is why everything that He created is like Him. Projection, as undertaken by God, is very similar to the kind of inner radiance which the Children of the Father inherit from Him. It is important to note that the term "project outward" necessarily implies that the real source of projection is internal. This is as true of the Son as of the Father."

So God in and of Himself is complete and whole, but He "projects outward" (extends) and that which is projected forms a "world" (heaven). This world is, in a sense, "divided from" God in a natural way, in that it comes FROM God and is God SHARING, but God as its SOURCE still remains in a sense, beyond it.

This is because God is the "first cause" and what God radiates is the "effect" of God. His Thought/Shining is the effect of Him as the "thinker". The effect of God is not capable of turning around and "causing God" in reverse, or of making God its effect. The creation (the Son/sonship) is being constantly sustained by, projected by God, forever, is coming FROM God, and therefore the Son is ONLY "as God created Him" and cannot change what He is. The Son has no real say in what He is at all, He merely gives thanks for having been created perfect.

God is cause, not effect. God cannot be affected. This causal extension or "creating of effect" in a way puts up a kind of "wall" or division you could say, just on a causality level, which in a sense, separates the creation from God's own Self, but only in the sense that the created Son cannot cause God back. But the Son CAN share love with Him.

This is not the same thing as the "separation" that we are accustomed to thinking of as what the ego does or relating to the "separation from God" which was a different matter. The "separation from God" happened when the Son, who is only effect and not capable of causing God, attempted to cause God. That means the Son tried to will against God's will or to undo what God has created, trying to replace it with something else. That was an act of impossible denial, which brought about the separation and the "fall of man".

That's an entirely different thing to the "natural division" between God and His Son. The division between God and Son is NATURAL in that this is How God intended it, that the Son is imbued with the SAME WILL TO CREATE, the same love, the same completeness, the same wholeness, AND SHARING the WHOLE OF GOD within itself, as well as sharing THE WHOLE OF CREATION within itself. All of God is in the Son, shared with the Son, and yet the Son is in some way also "divided" from God as a creation of God or thought of God.

In nonduality and oneness concepts there is no accounting for God thinking anything at all, yet alone creating a son. It completely glosses over the fact that God is LOVE, and love radiates and extends and creates. When people tell you what the definition of oneness is they become very clinical and ego-specific in describing God as a kind of "single blob". There is no love in that concept, nor does it appreciate the NATURE of Oneness, which is to share, extend everywhere, create, increase, and to experience JOY. Do you equate oneness with joy, or power, or love, or creativity, or miracles? As a logical device, no. But God is joyful and creative and all powerful and miraculous.

Now, it is possible for God to create AT LEAST One Son, and the Course references the "one son of God" in various places. And due to misunderstandings, many people have come to believe God only has one Son. So now there are two camps - a set of people believing that God is one therefore has no son or "I am God", and a camp of people accepting there is One Son (somehow) but not more. It relates to how much of the nature of God is grasped.

OK. So holograms. Did you know God thinks holographically? Do you know what a hologram is or why this is totally different to how the ego thinks? If you are thinking about God's creation or oneness without thinking about holograms, then you WILL come to false conclusions, such as that there are no divisions in heaven or God has only one Son or no son, because non-holographic logic CAN ONLY arrive at these conclusions. Ego logic is FAULTY and limited.

The essential idea of a hologram is that the whole is able to express in many "parts" and yet each part contains ALL of the whole. This makes NO SENSE to the ego, because it thinks in terms of separated space, where it is impossible for all of God to be in one part AND all of God to be in another part simultaneously. The ego will wager, "there is not enough God for God to be elsewhere, if God is fully here". And that's why the ego is BLIND to the nature of heaven. It does not account for SHARING.

Here's what the Course says about the holographic nature of God and the Sonship - note how ILLOGICAL and CONTRADICTORY these all sound, at first:

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you."

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness does transcend the sum of its parts."

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite."

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other."

So Jesus is saying two things, which seem to clash. 1) God created One Son. 2) God created many sons. The conclusion here, to THE EGO, is either, a) God only created one Son, or b) The "many" or "multitude" nature of the sonship tells us that it is OF THE EGO and is therefore not real. Are either of these conclusions true? NO! They are both mistakes, and reveal the limitations of the ego's thought system when it tires to understand the EGO DEFYING nature of God.

In a hologram, the whole is present in EVERY part. Now, if you think in terms you are familiar with in this world, like physical objects and space, you think ok, if I take 1 gallon of water and I pour it into a 1 gallon container, there is no water left to fill another container. Yes? This is ego thinking. And ego thinking gave rise to this ENTIRE universe, including all physical forms, and all laws of physics, to paint a picture that attempts to PROVE that God's NATURE is NOT the way things are. And we have used physical form as a way to understand the nature of existence. This is a major error. We are BLINDED by sight of form, because forms express the EGO IDEA of separation, limitation, "measuring" how much of something there is in a finite way, and then concluding that there is lack and limitation.

When ALL of God is poured into one creation, how much God is there left to pour into another? ALL OF HIM! He does not run out. He INCREASES BY SHARING. The ego cannot believe this. The multiplying of fish and bread to feed 5000 people is a good example of this principle. Giving ALL to something does not diminish it AT ALL, it merely increases by being given away.

God puts ALL of the whole of his nature into His creation, in EACH thought. And what He creates is FULL, complete, and whole, AND shares ALL of itself with God, and includes all of God, and all of any other creation God creates. So then God has another thought, creates another WHOLE, and then another WHOLE, and another. You should get the idea then, spatially, even in ego terms, that adding more wholes INCREASES the sum total - and this is How the Kingdom expands.

To the ego, it is impossible that God be fully in one location and yet fully in another. This is completely impossible in terms of a physical object. However, bi-location is a miracle because it demonstrates that we are not bound by space or by instances or amounts. The Course says that God has many thoughts, INFINITE IN NUMBER. That amounts to an INFINITE number of Sons of God. And each Son of God is WHOLE and complete and perfect in itself, has free will just like God, extends and creates just like God (you have your own creations in Heaven), and radiates love just like God. This means each son is not just some "partial person" or limited or unlike the rest, it means EVEY son is FULL, whole, complete, absolutely unlimited, and shares EVERYTHING with God in perfection. And so do all the rest.

That God does not diminish when sharing himself fully to create a WHOLE SON, means automatically that God can create MANY sons without any diminishing of Himself at all. And all of God is in every Son. AND every Son is within every Son. And the ENTIRE SONSHIP is within every Son. This is entirely NATURAL AND NORMAL in Heaven. Heaven therefore contains INFINITE "naturally divided" (causally divided) INDIVIDUAL WHOLES - which are souls or Sons of God - each one holy and perfect.

Ok.

So now we need to talk about why some people are confused in constantly saying that God has One Son or there is "only oneness" or the Sonship is an part of separation etc. It's because people are getting PART of the picture and not the whole picture, because EGO LOGIC is telling them to EXCLUDE some parts of the holographic nature of God. They can "see" that God's oneness makes sense, but this seems to imply there is no son or at least not more than one. They can't see HOW God can have created many sons OR how a "division" is natural. And so they just can't get their heads around the nature of God or how it's possible for there to be a sonship at all.

And if you will go looking, ACIM contains specific quotes which SEEM to support the ego's interpretations by focusing on only one PART of the holographic picture, using that as justification for why "the course said this". For example, "God has but one Son", or countless references to "God's Son". Well, this leads God people to conclude that the Course is saying God doesn't have more sons. It's a mistake. With no grasp of God's NATURE - which is holographic, it makes sense people will be in error. And then they will say well, since God has only one Son, the sonship is a lie, or I do not exist, or I am God, or I do not have a self, or there is no-one here, or whatever else.

These are NON-DUALITY concepts which FAIL to appreciate God's nature. And you can see how, if it is true that God has many sons, these kind of "beliefs" are HARMFUL. They basically DESTROY the sonship, DENY the Self, and render God impotent.

When I finally understood how God thinks holographically and realized that non-duality is bullshit and a limited EGO concept of God, I felt great RELIEF about the simple recognition that "GOD CREATED ME". Me, as an INDIVIDUAL. Not me as an EGO, that's different, but that I have a HOLY SELF, which is sharing with other holy selves, and all of us are PERMANENT and INTENDED by God to have free will. When I saw this, I cried tears of joy, and also release of sadness, which had built up from the non-duality teachers, who have MISLED countless students and spread LIES ABOUT HEAVEN, resulting in the belief that "I do not exist", which can only lead to despair and depression because it DENIES GOD'S CREATION.

A course in miracles is NOT non-duality at all. The principle of Oneness is NOT that there is "only one and nothing else". Oneness truly means, sharing, creation, unlimited extension, INFINITE wholes, and a heaven filled with SOULS that live forever in a state of perfection and wholeness, sharing everything they are with ALL OTHERS including God. Why do you think Jesus refers to you as a brother? It's not just a temporary thing. You will ALWAYS be equal to and a brother of Jesus, AND at the same time, one with Him, and literally sharing everything WITH Him, AND still having your own soul, and still having your own free will which happens to be the same in focus as God's.

So now we have a very different picture of Heaven, and it has NOTHING to do with Earth or this universe. "Heaven and Earth are opposite in EVERY way." Heaven is a PLACE in the sense that it EXISTS as God's creation and you can experience it and BE there in it/with it. There are many references in the course where Jesus says "in Heaven" and also referring to Heaven as a "world" and as something God created. And given that THIS world - earth, physical universe, DOES NOT EXIST BECAUSE THERE IS NO WORLD - where IS there to BE or live or exist other than Heaven? In that sense, it IS a place, far more a REAL place than planet earth. Earth is not a place at all.

Heaven is within the mind of God. "The kingdom of God is you" is another reference to you being The Son of God and one of may sons of God. You are part of and all of heaven. Something you can be INSIDE OF and BE, and where there are infinite souls and angels, plus the Holy Spirit, plus an entire sonship of equal souls, all equal with Jesus, all individually a Son of God, AND also every one of those souls is THE Son of God as well. And each soul continues to CREATE MORE. There is nothing unnatural about this at all. All PARTS of heaven are of ONE ORDER.

Per Jesus: "The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects are of the same order." (Here "man" is the same thing as soul or son of God, not humans.)

One final word then. Each Son of God, being a hologram of God, is whole and complete in and of itself, lacking nothing. And AT THE SAME TIME, is so OPEN and so SHARING, that it is wired into the ENTIRE CREATION of God. Picture it as your mind is so expanded that you are "one with" ie sharing in, the entire sonship. God therefore experiences ALL of his many thoughts, as ONE, while simultaneously allowing them to be many.

This is why there are many references to God having only one son. When it's speaking of this, it refers to how God experiences all Sons as though they are all the same and one, experienced simultaneously and so sharing that they do not seem "separate". Yet they are still divided. And then when the course speaks 250+ times about the many sons of God, this is not contradictory because God DOES have many sons AND one son.

God thinks holographically. All of God is in every son and all of every son is in every son. The whole sonship is in every son and every son in the sonship. You are the ONE SON of God, AND you are one of many. This is heavenly logic, not ego logic. When every individual PART of the sonship has returned to its true nature, all of the sonship as a whole communicates with God again.

The only other point to make I think is the difference between division and ego separation. In heaven you are divided from others and from God. But only in the sense that you are a loving family who shares everything together. Loving families are still individuals yet joined. The individuality does not go away. When walls are erected between family members, ie artificial separations are introduced, there is denial of the sharing, denial of the oneness, and denial of wholeness. This UNNATURAL DIVISION is the ego. This is what the course refers to as separation.

You have to get your head around the idea that you can be individual AND joined and that this is normal, natural and real. It is not your individual soul nature that makes you an ego. It is not that you are PART of a huge family of souls (sonship) that makes you an ego. What makes you an ego is that you withdraw your connection from God, withdraw your connection from the sonship, and become ISOLATED behind artificial imaginary walls of denial. It's got nothing to do with whether you are an individual or not.

Perhaps the most misunderstood thing about ACIM is the belief that ego means separate self, and therefore means individuality, and therefore having an individuality is ego. THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!! Individuality is not the problem. Cutting your individuality off from sharing with the whole is the problem. Trying to be a "part" of the hologram that does NOT contain the whole. Trying to not be an effect of God. Trying to cause God and change Him and affect Him. Cutting yourself off from the sonship. Believing you are not equal to all brothers. Being special. THAT is the problem and that is what the ego is made of, not your individuality.

Individuality does not mean you are separate from God, it means you are one of God's Son's. YOU DO EXIST. Just not as an illusion of an isolated self who has no connection to others. What is death but the end of all connection and the bringing about of total separation from Life? Joining with Life does not make you disappear! It's not about "you're not really out there". It's more like, "you are MORE than you APPEAR to be." You are God's Son and one of many sons. You are one with God and with all others and you SHARE with them all, one in sharing, not in number.

ACIM is not non-duality. And ACIM is not about the ego's idea of what oneness means. ACIM is not teaching that God only has a single son "separate from" the many sons. Heaven is a cascade of creation and miracles and light and souls and beauty and sharing and union and freedom. This is why YOU are responsible for everything YOU CHOOSE. Choose again.

The world is kind of like a "rendering" of a world, a picture or image. It's not really a place with actual bodies and objects. It's pictures of them. Three-dimensional animated pictures. These images are projected by the mind as it "draws" the world.

Since the body and other objects are just pictures, they can be changed by the thing which is projecting the pictures, which is the mind. The mind is unlimited in its power to do this.

Within the "scene" that the pictures produce, such as an environment or a room or place, it may SEEM as though, based just on the pictures alone, that there are certain laws in place. We call it the laws of physics, the seeming rules or behaviors or limited ways in which the pictures in the scene can interact with each other. The limited restrictions which WE as its unlimited authors have placed upon it.

And then we might be convinced by these laws and think of them as what is "running" the environment, governing what happens and what is possible. But these are secondary artificial laws. They are in fact just more images of laws. And they too are being projected and rendered by the mind. By the movie-maker.

What you therefore need to realize is that the world is just an effect and is not really a cause, and the causes or laws of operation within it are not really the laws that produce the world. They are not really what governs what shows up in the world. They only seem to describe some of the inner workings of the picture itself, but they don't define how the picture really gets there.

The mind is actually the dreamer of the world and is responsible for the making of the world. It is projecting the world out using its unlimited power. It is making the planet and the bodies that seem to inhabit it. It is responsible for all the image-making.

When you see the picture of a world and you are deceived by it, because it is in fact an ILLUSION of a world, you will fall for the belief that you are bound by its laws and forced to operate entirely within what it says is possible. But this is deception and is not true at all. You are the CAUSE of the world, not its effect, and it has no power over you.

As a miracle worker, with a miraculous powerful mind, you are actually able to change the world, the body, the objects, by electing what the dream will contain. By choosing what images you will project. You actually override and re-write and modify the dream images with your mind. You can therefore "steer" the dream in any direction you so please, completely ignorant of any laws that the pictures themselves might suggest would limit what's possible.

This means that you are actually OPERATING the dream from outside of the dream itself. You are able to modify it at will. You can take objects out of it, and put objects into it. It will appear to the eyes in the dream world that objects are just "miraculously" appearing and disappearing out of nowhere, in violation of the laws of physics. But the mind can do this.

It's sort of similar to in "The Matrix" movies where, when the agents are tracking down the rebels they make a sudden "adjustment" to the matrix, sort of from outside of the matrix, and it causes what appear to be sudden physical changes in the environment. What once was a door becomes a brick wall. Exits are suddenly closed off and so on. The "black cat" walking past twice, a sign of deja-vu, hints to them that someone has tampered with the matrix itself, as though hacking the world from the outside.

As our minds awaken and become aware that the world is our dream, that we are dreaming it, and therefore our mind is actually producing the PICTURES in the environment, we also then realize that we can put whatever pictures there that we want. We have total power OVER the dream world. Nothing in it can do anything without our consent and anything we decide to cause to happen must happen. This is why you are ruler of the universe.

You are like the hand of God. You are the operator outside of the dream playing with chess pieces, moving things around, shuffling the scenery using back-door access. You have access to the 'code' that writes the images. You can rewrite the planet. You can modify bodies. You can switch objects out. You can transform anything into anything, from the outside. You pull all the strings. You are the puppet master.

This is what you get to when you are being miracle-minded, because miracle-mindedness means you are aware that this is nothing but a dream your mind is producing. You get in touch with what many people avoid, which is the fact that you are VERY POWERFUL. The mind is extremely powerful and can produce entire worlds, so moving a mountain from one place to another is in fact "easy" for such a power.

Jesus demonstrated that he had his hands on the controls and was able to modify the dream from its SOURCE, once removed from the seeming laws of the world. He showed that the law of gravity didn't mean anything to someone who can switch the laws OFF. He showed that objects were not locked into certain forms because the mind that was PICTURING the forms was able to change what it wanted to see. He showed therefore also that what we call sickness and death could easily be reversed and modified by mind-power alone.

To those in the dream, who think that the dream is reality, and who think it has causal power over them, which causes them to believe they are bound by its illusory laws and limitations, such changes are perceived as "miraculous". Quite literally miracles - physical reality distorting/violating miracles. Adjustments to "the matrix" suddenly show up as what they would think of as "impossible" changes. Changes which violate the seeming laws of reality as this world knows it.

"What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them." What you are able to do TO this world, is a result of the recognition that you are not OF this world, OR in it. You are not really a part OF the dream. You are not a body. This is why learning that you are the DREAMER, that you are mind/spirit, is essentially in order to wake up FROM the dream and realize that you are the one making the world.

"Learning must lead BEYOND the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it."

You bring and use the power of God from outside spacetime, the power of heaven. You can get behind the scenes of the physical bubble of illusory laws and break ALL the laws. Walking on water is nothing for such a power. Calming storms, raising the dead, walking through walls, making food appear out of nowhere, preventing wars, erasing wounds, absolutely anything you can imagine to modify the world's pictures you can do it. There is nothing that your holiness cannot do.

You are under no laws but God's. You are under the laws of heaven. You are the dreamer and maker of the world of images. Spacetime is entirely RUN BY YOU. You are the ruler of the universe. "You have the power to dominate everything you see merely by recognizing what you are." You have power OVER DEATH because you can literally rewrite the body.

You can even if you so will cause the body to be unattackable. You can override anything that does seem to attack it by simply producing another body. You are indestructible and you can make the images of your dream appear to symbolize this. You can therefore make the body incapable of being sick or dying because you can maintain it indefinitely with supernatural mind-power. You can force it to remain in a state of showing up as unharmed and undamaged, making it IMPOSSIBLE for sickness or death to change it.

The world itself does not really have ANY POWER to change you or the body, if you do not wish it. It does not have the power to make you sick or to kill you. If you so will, you can hold the body in a state of suspended animation and semi-permanent symbolic perfection for as long as you see fit. You can force it to maintain perfect health even if the world is attempting to sicken it, and nothing will happen to it. What can possibly change an IMAGE which is being constantly RE-PROJECTED by a projector? You can do nothing to it within the projection.

"It is the dream in which the body functions perfectly, having no function except communication."

"Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have It not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die." "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."

Realize then that the reason you are SO POWERFUL and SO MIRACULOUS and you have total power OVER everything in spacetime, is because you are not IN it. You are not part of a dream. You are not an EFFECT of dreaming. You are totally causal. God has given you total absolute power over everything. You are unlimited in your power because your power is shared with him and inherited from him. There is literally nothing you cannot do, and moving mountains is MINOR.

All this entails is the proper recognition that you are the cause of the world, and not the opposite. You are not affected BY it whatsoever because YOU are the one who is DOING it. You are putting the world there. Projection makes perception. Perception is a result not a cause. What you project can be changed, producing a different world. By being totally responsible for CAUSATION and not being in any way identified with the EFFECTS you have produced, including the body, you become freed-up to manipulate the dream as much as you wish.

Now, in the big picture of course the point of all this isn't that you just carry on dreaming and stay in the dream playing with your miraculous (not magical) power. The main purpose is to help everyone in the sonship to be restored TO this power so that everyone realizes THEY TOO are dreaming the world. And in this awakening FROM the backwards false perception of the world, they can be restored to sanity and to EMPOWERMENT, returning to their permanently miraculous nature. And when everyone becomes lucid to the fact of dreaming, the dream can be ended.

Meanwhile, in time, and in terms of where the world is at now, we can use this miraculous power to serve God's will and to help others. It can be used to alleviate suffering. It can be used as a demonstration to PROVE to the minds of those willing, that they are NOT bound by the laws of this world. That they are not an effect of the dream, but that it is possible to have power OVER everything they were ever a victim of. This is why "miracles are teaching devices", they are capable of showing people they are under no laws but God's and have the power to set themselves and others free from bondage.

The proper use of miracles in this world is therefore for purposes of helping everyone to wake up, alleviating unnecessary burdens, showing the power of God, teaching people what the real laws of God are, showing them that they are not stuck and limited and small, and producing sometimes spectacular demonstrations of what is really possible as sons of God.

When Jesus performed his miracles sometimes it was to teach a lesson in this regard, and sometimes to simply be compassionate and kind to help those who were in need, starving and lacking, in pain and misery. And sometimes that meant raising the dead and healing the sick. Sometimes it means overriding body states. Sometimes it meant projecting different bodies entirely. And sometimes it meant demonstrating that the mind had total power over the crucifixion and was utterly unaffected by what appeared to be physical destruction.

You have total power over this world because you are not OF this world or bound by it in any way. We are to become teachers of God and masters of the universe. We are unlimited in our power and freedom. And there is literally nothing our holiness cannot do here. You can wipe away all suffering and heal all sickness and correct all minds and forgive all sins. You have the AUTHORITY OF CHRIST with which to command anything, and nothing can prevail against you. You made this world, and now you must unmake it.

"And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

"It is the witness to your state of mind, the OUTSIDE picture of an INWARD condition."

"YOU MADE THIS UP. It is a picture of what you think YOU are; of how you SEE yourself."

"Your picture of the world can only mirror what is within."

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"It is because the thoughts you think you think appear as images that you do not recognize them as nothing. You think you think them, and so you think you see them. This is how your "seeing" was made. This is the function you have given your body's eyes. It is not seeing. It is image-making. It takes the place of seeing, replacing vision with illusions."

Disassociation plays a big part in making your forgiveness seem much more difficult.

Disassociation means that you are "not associating your self" with something. You're trying to put distance between you and something.

The problem is that you use disassociation on your SELF. You split off a part of your own self, the content of your mind, by having an unforgiving attitude of judgement. Then you try to reject that part of yourself, label it, judge it, hate it. You try to think of it as something you don't want, that is not your self.

You use these tools of separation against it because this helps you to have the impression that it's got nothing to do with you. You want nothing to do with it, like you want nothing to do with an enemy.

It is possible with your mind, to so thoroughly disassociate yourself from this "part" of yourself that you've decided to hate, and to have such a strong sense of rejection against it, that you come to believe it is NOT YOU.

So now that this part of you seems like it is not you, you quite literally perceive, experience, and belief that this thing is 'someone else'. You believe it is "not me".

If you've ever had an enemy in the form of a person, someone who perhaps seemed to abuse or hurt you a lot or who you were really angry with, or who over time you built up a hate towards, it could be a family member or an old friend or lover or a politician etc... notice how you had this sense of wanting nothing to do with them. You did not want to associate yourself with them, didn't want to be near them, even wanted to "get rid of them" from your experience. Maybe you even wouldn't have minded if they were dead or something.

Well this is what happens with a part of yourself that you disassociate from. You attack this part of yourself so strongly and pull yourself away from it, split yourself off from it, and there is this seeming "rift" between you. A separation. You use denial and illusions to make it SEEM like it is not part of your "self". You dis-identify with it, and form a different sense of identity that shuts it out. And the way that you perceive this part - which now appears like an 'other', with an alien will - looks to you like someone completely separate from you.

So as you break off parts of yourself and reject them, you form an attitude of tremendous rejection and attack towards them, and this makes them change how they appear to you. They look like something you don't want, like an enemy. And your sense of 'self' is disconnected from it. You say it is not you. You perceive it not you. You isolate your sense of "self" from it so much that you really believe it is not you. And that means, it's not "inside you". It's not part of yourself. And therefore, it has to be NOT YOU. So... if it's not you, it must be someone else's stuff, right? It must belong to someone else.

So this is where you then perceive that this rejected part of yourself is in fact intimately tied into someone else. And as you walk around the planet and meet people, you will still continue to experience this condemned part of yourself, within yourself, but you will have disassociated from it so much that you will perceive it's part of other people. You will think it is theirs. And this is what we usually refer to as "projection". This is how you seem to project things onto other people. You overlay your disassociated self onto others.

So then when you're in this situation where it seems like someone is an enemy, and you hate their guts, they really have nothing to do with this. There is a portion of your mind that you hate the guts of, and you're seeing this on top of the person. And you're so dis-identified with that part of you, that you think it's not you, or yours.

Like, it seems like it the other person is quite literally the one who is doing this stuff to you, because you think that this hated part of yourself is attacking or enemy of what remains of your "self". And so is born the idea and perception that you are being victimized by "other" people, by "not me". And this also means, you are now completely irresponsible because you are allegedly not the one who is doing this to you. And simultaneously this paints whats left of you as "innocent" - the innocent victim who has nothing to do with this evil thing.

But you are not really in a victim/victimizer relationship with other people. You're in this relationship with this broken-off part of your own self, which you hate, which is STILL within the confines of your own mind. So the question arises, who are you? What is left of you, if you are not this part you rejected?

Well when you've broken off part of yourself and judged it and disowned it, the part that remains is what we call the ego persona. You think it is the part of you that you are identified with and which is your "self". You think it is all of your self, your whole self, because it's the only parts of you that you have accepted and allowed. It's the parts of you related to what you want to be, how you want to be seen, the good citizen, the successful achiever, the strong personality, whatever. The parts you "keep" are the parts that you have not disassociated from, so you think this is still you. You don't realize that the other parts you've cut off within yourself are also you.

So now within your total mind, there is this small portion that remains, the persona, which is who you THINK you are, and this persona self focuses on including what it wants and rejecting what it doesn't want. And what it doesn't want are the things that it judges and attacks, within you. So this persona attacks you. And it relegates part of you off as not worthy, not allowed, not acceptable, not lovable, not forgivable, not good enough, bad, evil, etc. All of those parts form this disassociated self, another word for which is the "shadow".

This shadow portion of your own self is still within your mind, and there is a war going on between it and your persona. The persona wants to get rid of it at all costs, and does so by continually refining and trimming down what's left of you, chopping off parts it doesn't like with goal of artificial perfection. If it were to succeed with that goal, there would be nothing left of you because it will have relegated so much of you to the hated shadow. The shadow part of you, the disassociated self, which you think is in other people, is really still within your mind, and there is a war waging between these two parts.

So the stuff you hate about you, projected onto others, is believed to be attacking the stuff you exalt about you, which now sees itself as under attack and needing to defend itself. But the hilariously ridiculous, insane thing is, both of these perspectives, these two identities, are both inside of YOU. You have a split mind. Everything you think is inside you, inside your body, you have kept, and now the surface of your body shows this 'mask' of the persona to represent where you stop and where "otherness" starts. And anything outside your body that you think of as "not you" is where you DUMP all of the parts of you that you cannot love. And by relegating all these parts to "not me", "other", "external", it is very easy to perceive that this stuff belongs to someone else.

So now it's someone else'e fault that you nice tidy ego persona is being attacked. Or someone else is doing it to you. Or there is a cause outside of you - so you think. Or you are being affected and upset by something, some separate self, some alien will, that is outside of what you think is 'you', attacking you and trying to destroy you. But it's really part of you. It wants to be integrated and it wants to be unified and it wants to actually cancel out the persona so that your IDENTITY can become WHOLE.

The separation between these two parts of you is the problem. The fact that the persona attacks you by saying only a part of you is acceptable, and the rest is not, creates a split in your mind and therefore creates the shadow. So now the persona has become the defender of a false idea of self, and the shadow that it ITSELF has created, now becomes its apparent enemy.

This makes forgiveness difficult at first because you walk around this planet constantly perceiving that everything to do with "other people" has nothing to do with you, is not your stuff, is not your problem, is not in your mind, is not something you put there, you can do nothing about, you are a victim of it, and you want nothing to do with it. This is disassociation. It IS your stuff. It IS your self. It IS your content. So you have to see that your upset about so-called "other people" has NOTHING to do with them. It's your upset about a part of your own self. It's your persona being upset about the shadow. Part A being upset about Part B, of you.

So you are at war with yourself. And you are attacking yourself. And both sides of yourself are attacking each other. And there is a separation between them. And you hallucinate that the separated-off you is not yourself. So this has to be healed somehow. The separateness of these two split parts needs to be undone.

The only way this can be achieved is when you become willing and able to see, and recognize, that this whole drama is taking place WITHIN YOU. It's really not outside of you. It's got absolutely nothing to do with other people. The problem you see in them is YOUR STUFF. It's your power. It's your attack. So there's this victimizer that you think is out there, and this victim that you think is in here, and BOTH of these characters are inside the whole of your own mind. Both of them are being PLAYED BY YOU. You are simultaneously being the victim and the victimizer. The part of you that you think remains - your persona self, is being animated by your mind. And the part of you you think is not you, the projected shadow, is also being animated by your mind - like a remote puppet on a string.

Now, when you see this, it is very powerful because no longer are you paralyzed by believing in disassociation. No longer are you locked in from being able to do anything about this as a result of believing it's totally under someone else's control, is not within the realm of your mind and is not something you can wield control over. By seeing that you are the actor who is playing BOTH SIDES, the person and the shadow, the wanted and the unwanted, the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the innocent and the guilty, the attacker and the attackee, you will see this war going on INSIDE YOURSELF.... and recognizing that YOU are the one who is playing both parts, that must snap you out of falling for this ILLUSION that it's got something to do with someone else. You must see that your identity, your actual identity, is "behind" both of these split characters, and therefore YOU are doing this, YOU are creating this 'performance', and YOU are the one who is having a war with yourself.

So if you can see this, that you're doing this to yourself, that you're playing both roles, and nobody else is involved, then this AWARENESS unmasks both characters, because it is so utterly ridiculously that you can no longer be deceived by it, and you recognize that they're both you. So now you have become INCLUSIVE, instead of exclusive. Inclusivity is healing, unifying. The awareness in which you see both characters simultaneously shows you that it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to have been one and not the other. It's impossible for you to be maintaining this position of "I'm the victim who isn't doing this to myself". And it's impossible to also maintain the position of "I'm the victimizer who is doing it to the persona". The cover is blown. The illusion is broken. They're both you. And you're doing it to yourself. It can be shocking to see this. But it is liberating. It sets you free to see the truth of what's going on.

Anyone who sees this, that they are doing this to themselves, will be set free. The persona and the shadow both will be undone, and an awareness will take their place. This awareness is your real self. Or in other words, your WHOLE SELF, which does not have these parts disassociated from each other. Your whole self is not stuck inside the illusion of victim/victimizer roles. It is not deluded that someone is doing something to it, or that it is doing something to someone. So now you are set free by the light of truth.

This also then means, automatically, that you will stop believing that this has got anything to do with other people, and that they're not really your enemies, and they really had nothing to do with this from the start. You thought it was to do with them because you were projecting your shadow self onto them and accusing it, attacking it, trying to get rid of it. Jesus describes this completely clearly in the course, that we project our own sin onto others and then attack it in attempting to destroy it. But other people are all innocent. This war was never with anyone else, it was with yourself.

This is the secret to salvation. You are doing this to yourself. You are your own enemy - but not just the receiver of attack, but also the one who attacks. You are both parties. And its you that needs healing and forgiveness between what has become two parts of you.