Perhaps one of the key features about the ego which many people do not realize, is that it is constantly attacking itself.

The ego IS the idea of self attack. It is the idea of you, attacking you. It is self destructive, which is why it leads to sabotage and suicide. It is just another word for your own will to will against your own will.

It would perhaps seem too insane to consider that the ego actually attacks itself on purpose, and this alone might deter you from even considering it. But the ego is not sane.

The ego is not like the kinds of people that you think are normal people. You think that due to separation, what one person does to another they do not do to themselves. You think that you can attack without consequences, or be attacked by another without them receiving the attack.

The ego's main plot here is the idea that, because you are separate from your brother, what applies to him does not apply to you. This allows both parties to get away with murder. Or appear to. And this creates an illusion in this world, as though it is "ego" to attack someone and get away with it.

But beware. This is a decoy!

If you fixate on this idea that one person does something to someone else, causing effects in them, without receiving the effects - which certainly APPEARS to be the case almost all the time due to separation, then you will not notice the ego's underlying insanity. You'll think that it makes total sense that something can apply to one person and not another, or that you can cause effects which you do not receive - ie giving and receiving at not one.

The ego's secret insanity is that it deliberately attacks itself, and it is NOT escaping the effects of the attacks it tries to cause, nor does it want to. It is both its own attacker and its own victim. It deliberately wants to hurt itself. It also seems to simultaneously want to get away from that hurt. It should be fairly obvious that it is completely insane, to the highest degree, for someone to want to intentionally harm themselves, consciously and deliberately, and to simultaneously enjoy and suffer doing so.

Anyone in their right mind would recognize that they are one with all brothers, and share a mind of oneness, and therefore what applies to you applies to everyone equally. In this mind of oneness it is impossible to cause or do anything without receiving the effects. It is therefore in your vested interest to share only love, that you will receive only love. But when you enter into the ego and attempt to give without receiving (which is attack), you can be sure you will experience attack.

The ego is clever at making cause and effect unconscious. It makes it SEEM as if attacking another will not attack yourself. But the ego is fundamentally insane. It IS the idea of self attack, and so attacks itself on purpose. It would sacrifice itself in the name of saving itself. It is constantly two-faced. You think that normal people have "one face" or one personality or one side to them.

The insane ego is never one-sided, it is always contradictory, hipocritical, self denying, a liar, a cheat, manipulative, and it is even capable of showing up as "good cop" and "bad cop" simultaneously.

I had a dream once where some creepy man was trying to get to me, and so I ran to escape and I did escape, and met another man on a hill who appeared at first to be helpful and welcoming. It seemed like he would help me to be safe. But what quickly became apparent, was that in fact this man was the same "person" as the other man - as if he was the same man in disguise. He was both of them. And so the ego's two-faced secret was revealed, that it is perfectly capable of playing the part of victim and victimizer, attacker and savior, enemy and hero, or any other polarities which makes it SEEM as if they are two completely unrelated separate things.

The ego's illusions are ALWAYS geared towards getting you to believe that one kind of illusion is better than another. That one way of behaving or less evil than another. That something will actually help you without hurting you. That a solution will work without any side effects. It's always bullshit. The ego is fundamentally insane and so always has in its back pocket some kind of "clause" or excuse or secret that disguises the fact that it has NO intention of making its solutions work, and it has NO interest in being truly helpful, because ALL of its sides and solutions take you away from wholeness.

We have to be careful to discern and listen and recognize, that both positive and negative are part of the ego thought system. Both good and bad, right and wrong, all opposites. The ego plays both sides of every argument and does not care who sins. It will happily fund every war and conflict on both sides just for the sake of increasing the conflict. It is fundamentally existing in a state of self conflict and being divided against itself, thwarting its own moves, willing against its own will etc.

This is why we have to learn that "this world holds nothing that I want"... because everything it offers, the "good" and the "bad", are both ego deceptions designed to get you to take a side and fall for one of two of its traps. It does not care one shit about which side you take or whether you go light or dark or right or wrong, so long as you fall for the trap of believing that one of two choices is better than the other and will save you. There is no salvation in the ego. All of its roads lead to hell.

I kind of feel like, all this time doing the course I've been generally "pulling away" from the world. Seeing the world as out there and sort of trying to detach from it and rise above it. Or rather, to withdraw from it and get away from it.

But I'm getting this intuition that, maybe this is backwards. That the darkness and confusion and illusions and ego stuff isn't "out there in the world", but rather than I am IN that stuff within myself.

The result being that I need to get OUT of myself and "embrace reality", ie attune to the reality of the world - the real world - through forgiveness and awakening. To experience "loving the world", as that vital stepping stone towards ascension to heaven.

Not that this means like, regarding spacetime as God's creation or as ultimate reality but... I'm wondering if my whole approach has been fundamentally wrong this whole time, due to the projection of judgments onto the world and associating them with it, and then trying to get away from those projections.

If I stop judging the world, then it's obviously not the world that's "in the wrong", it's my mind. There could be a "lovable real world" "out there" that I'm not seeing because I keep trying to "separate from it", because I'm lost internally in the ego darkness and judgments and stuff.

The course is clearly pointing toward finding a way to see what the world is in the present moment, without condemnation, without my ego judgments, without guilt projection, and with the Holy Spirit's holiness and eyes of Christ. To look upon that "out there" I obviously can't be trying to "remove myself from it".

Perhaps the defensive posture of "get away from the world" has been a backwards ego decoy this whole time, laden with projected judgments designed to justify not engaging with it or opening up to it. Because who would want to become in some way "closer to" something "judged" to be evil and cruel.

Maybe my judgements of it have been unfair and unwarranted and incorrect, and maybe the forgiven world is there to be seen when I'm not projecting internal confusions onto it. Maybe there is a way to love the world, for what it is - not to give it reality or permanence or confuse it with heaven but, at least to look at it with a greater embrace of "what it is" without all the projections of "what it is not" that I keep putting onto it.

The world has been my favourite scapegoat for many years, presumably my whole life. Maybe the world isn't really the problem. Maybe the problem is in my mind. And maybe I've been lost in an internal "dream" of reality distortion and denial of the truth.

It seems we're meant to learn to see "with accurate perception", the world "as it is". To recognize it, to see past the differences and contrasts. To see an underlying "reflection of heaven" in it. Actually seemingly "out there". Such that we experience the world from a whole-minded forgiven vantage point of openness and welcome and sharing rather than attack and rejection.

Perhaps ultimately we give the world we made a big hug and then watch as it dissolves away.

"Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does so. "

"From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home."

"Father, Christ's vision is Your gift to me, and it has power to translate all that the body's eyes behold into the sight of a forgiven world. How glorious and gracious is this world! Yet how much more will I perceive in it than sight can give. The world forgiven signifies Your Son acknowledges his Father, lets his dreams be brought to truth, and waits expectantly the one remaining instant more of time, which ends forever as Your memory returns to him."

"The teachers of God have trust in the world, because they have learned it is not governed by the laws the world made up. It is governed by a Power which is in them but not of them. It is this Power that keeps all things safe. It is through this Power that the teachers of God look on a forgiven world."

"Can the world seem bright and clear and safe and welcoming, with all my past mistakes oppressing it, and showing me distorted forms of pain? Yet in the present love is obvious, and its effects apparent. All the world shines in reflection of its holy light, and I perceive a world forgiven at last."

"Can the world seem bright and clear and safe and welcoming, with all my past mistakes oppressing it, and showing me distorted forms of pain? Yet in the present love is obvious, and its effects apparent. All the world shines in reflection of its holy light, and I perceive a world forgiven at last."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there is a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

A fear years ago, I was at an ACIM retreat and we were doing a breathing exercise. I became filled up with some kind of energy, which lifted my "vibration" very high. My mind started to see past the physical and reach out and started to see God BEYOND the veil. In that moment I would've left the entire world behind to be with Him.

I'll skip some details but after that, I was seeing with true perception. The amount of awareness and wakefulness I had was off the charts. Everywhere I looked, still seeing physical objects with my eyes, I saw God. God was in everything I saw and God was in my mind. My mind had expanded in some way, moving up the hologram, to where my ego self seemed dissipated and diffused into the back of my awareness, as though I had no center. My mind somehow pulled back away from the world and I began to feel like I was melting into the background, one with it. I felt like I was becoming Christ.

My awareness for some days after, entailed the ability to see a profound gentleness in everything. Everywhere I looked there was unconditional love, in all things. This love seemed so whole and complete, no matter where I looked, that I felt I had no need to look anywhere else to go find anything. I saw it in a chair leg. In a water bottle. In the shadows on a wall.

People were still going about their business doing exactly everything in the same egoic way as before - nothing changed there, because the body's eyes can ONLY see the physical form of things. But at the same time, there was awareness of a love and presence. I was aware of something that it seemed no-one knew was there, even though it seemed obvious. I became so soft. God was so gentle, so soft and joyous. And he was very, very intimate, which was shocking at first because I had previously always put God far away in the sky and here he was well under my skin.

I also became aware of the higher levels of the hologram, an experience of unity, in which the whole was in each part. All of God was in each object I saw. I therefore recognized for the first time in experience, that even though physical objects seemed to assert that "nothing is the same anywhere" or "there is nothing that is whole" or "the whole is not in any of the parts", here in my awareness I could still see this forms and yet, simultaneously, my mind was aware that a single consistent unified whole was present in all parts, fully, transcending their limitations and differences. This taught me the way in which physical matter is a lie, a deception designed to shut out awareness of God's nature.

I was in an altered state for a couple of weeks. I was very ungrounded. I could barely do tasks because my mind was quite expanded and out of body. Yet each time I did something "grounding", this energy that was in me started to funnel down, and this produced immense joy. Joy would beam out of my face toward others as I started at them very directly, something I had shy'd away from before, recognizing I had no needs, no lack, and that there was only outward extension. Nothing could "come in" to me from the outside. I felt so safe and protected and free from needs. I didn't even want to eat food, it felt so alien.

Gradually as I grounded back into my body my expanded awareness narrowed down, became more focused into and through the body, and I became more immersed in the physical body again. This was like receiving some kind of brain damage. My awareness diminished greatly and it felt like being greatly subdued and suppressed, shut down and locked inside a prison suit. This also stripped away most of the intense wakefulness that I had, which felt like "leaving God", which was VERY upsetting.

This made it impossible for me to have God in my mind, and thus I stopped seeing God outside of me in all things. It seemed God left. I kept trying to find God outside of me because I thought that He was out there, having seen Him there, but I couldn't find Him because I was no longer aware of Him WITHIN my mind. And for weeks this was depressing and infuriating, although gradually I adjusted and was reassured by a few momentary glimpses that God was still with me. Returning to my body felt like a huge isolation. As my eye sight returned to looking out solely through the body's eyes, it was like building a brick wall "behind" me such that I could no longer have any sense of what was there. The body cut me off from awareness of God, and so I got to see first hand just how limiting bodies are.

What I later came to realize was this was an experience of true perception. A state of seeing a forgiven world. It was as though layer upon layer of thick "judgement" had been scraped off the surface of the world revealing an extremely gently held picture of something very lovable. And yet at the same time, the physicality was the same. The appearance physically to my eyes was the same. It was what I saw IN it, in SPITE of the physicality, that I longed to reconnect with.

This is why, for me personally, I know that this physical world is not real. I know how much the body lies. I know how the body's sense are massively limiting. I know how matter lies to try to obscure the holographic nature of God and his omnipresence. I've seen it and experienced the transition back and forth. God gave me a glimpse of awakening and it was the most profoundly directly educational experience of my entire life.

This is why I know first hand that there is something very much beyond this world, a reality which is completely obscured by forms and trapped by bodies. This world is not my home. I have grieved for the "loss of God" and gradually over time use this as incentive, a taste of what's to come, to find my way back to God again.

The attraction to Him was SO STRONG that I would've leapt into His arms in an instant without so much as a consideration for anything else in all the world. We have protected ourselves from remembering just how appealing God is, and why NOTHING else means anything even remotely close to Him. We only block awareness in order to hide this extreme attraction. Otherwise we would awaken in a heartbeat.

"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists."

When you are in your true self, there is no fear.

When you deny your true self, you enter into a state of fear.

In the state of fear, it seems there are "things to be afraid of".

It would even reason that you are afraid of your true self.

But if you were to LEAVE the state of fear, and RETURN TO your true self, there would BE NO FEAR THERE. The reasons WHY you were SUPPOSED to be afraid of God, were LIES!

What does this tell you?

Everything the ego suggests is true while IN the ego state of mind, IS NOT TRUE OUTSIDE OF IT.

Similarly with the fear of God.

We have a fear of God, but the PURPOSE of having the fear, is to KEEP GOD AWAY. Because we know that, deep down, there is NO REASON TO FEAR GOD. And if you were to REMEMBER God, you would be instantly happy to approach and embrace him fully. His attraction would be unlimited and you would rush to meet Him, recognizing His perfect safety and welcome.

It's only when you go into the ego, that you develop ARTIFICIAL fears. The fears only ARISE when you are in the ego state of separation. And the things the fear SAYS or claims, can only seem to be true WHILE you are in that state. And being in that state TENDS to persuade you to STAY in that state, because of the lies it says.

But step out of that state, into the light, and you find THERE IS NO FEAR there. There is no reason to. You are only afraid when you are AWAY from God. And you are afraid BECAUSE you are away from God. And the fear exists ONLY IN the distance from God. And as soon as you are with God, the SOURCE or substance of the fear is not there, because fear is the ABSENCE of God/Love.

So everything the ego says is a lie. It's not that there IS a reason to fear being with God. It's that you need to maintain the LIE that there is a reason not to be with God, because without a LIE, you would run to Him.

It's simply not TRUE, anything the ego claims. There IS NO reason for you to be afraid, because you are immortal. There is no reason to be afraid, because God loves you. So what does the fear say? It INVENTS REASONS to be afraid. It LIES. It is not telling you about a real fear, it's telling you a made-up fear. An unfounded fear. And the fear is designed to KEEP YOU AWAY FROM THE TRUTH.

The ego knows that if you were to IGNORE IT, actually approach the light, THE EGO would be dispelled, and its LIES would be shown for what they are. Illusions would be recognized AS illusions, instead of a TRUTHS. And in this recognition they would be dispelled. Because they only SEEM real WHILE you are deceived, while you believe their stories. But all their stories are fiction and have no truth to them at all.

You are simply not really afraid. You are PRETENDING to be afraid. And you are MAKING UP reasons to be afraid. And all of your fears are unfounded lies. Because in truth, there IS no reason to be afraid, because only God exists and nothing real can be threatened.

So beware of the ego's deceptions. Fear works this way, as do all illusions. They tempt you to believe something is true which ISN'T, and spin stories to JUSTIFY THEMSELVES, and if you fall for it, it forms its own explanation for why. It tries to prove its own existence, which is what the ego is all about.

It's kind of like, you have this person who is telling you about a situation happening down the street, but not only is this person LYING about what is happening there, they are INVENTING a story about WHY you should avoid going down the street yourself to find out what's there. The lie becomes an attempt to KEEP YOU AWAY from finding out the truth. Because the truth is, nothing is happening and everything is fine. And if you GO THERE YOURSELF (accept atonement) you will find that out.

The ego has invented all fears, AND has invented ALL of the explanations for WHY you should be afraid. It has fed you fear, AND it is the one inventing the stories that the fears are based on. The making real of illusions presents a fictional story, which the ego makes real, and then uses it to JUSTIFY why you SHOULD be afraid. It's all bullshit. You are being lied to. THERE IS NO VALID REASON FOR FEAR. NOTHING HAS GONE WRONG. THERE IS NO REAL ATTACK.

There is no fear in God. There is no attack in God. There is no attack in you. There is no sin anywhere. And nothing real can be threatened. So there is no basis for ANY FEAR EVER. So when the fear says, "STAY AWAY FROM GOD, HE'S DANGEROUS!!!", the secret purpose of it is to SLANDER God, to blaspheme God, to LIE about God, to KEEP YOU AWAY FROM A GOOD THING. Because the ego knows that if you listen and believe it, it has deceived you with an unfounded excuse and kept ITSLEF going and kept YOU away from the real facts.

The ego hurls abuse at God, hates God, wants God dead, slanders God, makes libel about God, invents lies about God, and tells completely fake stories about God. It is HIGHLY BIASED, and is NOT an impartial OR objective party. It's like a totally one-sided liar that pretends to be neutral.

It wants YOU to listen to this and believe it. And by doing so, YOU USE these things to KEEP YOURSELF away from God. Because really there is NO REASON NOT TO BE WITH GOD. So you INVENT reasons, you INVENT blocks, you INVENT lies, you INVENT fear, you INVENT sins, you INVENT unworthiness, all as ways to RESIST the unlimited attractiveness of God, otherwise if you didn't you'd be instantly awakened to the truth.

You tell God he can't love you because you're not worthy of His love. That is a lie. You are worthy of His love. You think you are doing God a service by NOTIFYING Him of WHY he should not love you, to SAVE HIM from the bother of even trying. But this has nothing to do with you being worthy or you deserving God's love OR of God loving you. It' entirely an effort to PREVENT God from loving you. It's a refusal to accept or allow the love, IN ORDER TO maintain the fiction that you are unworthy. Because the unworthiness is another self-fulfilling, self-justifying, pile of bullshit.

The truth about you is simply that you are STILL EXACTLY as you were created by God. Absolutely perfect, immortal, permanent, changeless, eternal, powerful, innocent, holy, happy, loving, joyful, peaceful. There has not been even a slight change in what you are.

This you that is altogether perfect in every way, is still "in you", buried under layers of bullshit lies which you have placed sort of "between yourself and yourself" to try to pretend that you are NOT the perfect holy immortal innocent being that God created.

The fact that you don't seem to experience yourself AS a perfect immortal innocent spiritual being is simply because your mind has chosen to believe in a whole bunch of things which are DISTORTING your view of yourself. So much so that it makes you believe that your perfect self doesn't even exist, that deep down in your core you are corrupt and evil, and that there is something very wrong with you - as if you have literally transformed into a guilty mother#($*#)(.

These are ALL LIES. They are lies that we tell ourselves on a daily basis. Lies which attempt to slander and accuse God's perfectly innocent children and make out that they are faulty, flawed, malfunctioning, corrupt, damaged, evil, and have been changed into something totally unrecognisable. And recognition really is a huge part of this because if you COULD recognize precisely what is REALLY true of you, you wouldn't doubt for a second that you are EXACTLY as God created you, and not some hideous creature that you made up.

The issue then is that God has established the truth about you, which is ALWAYS true and is STILL true right now. But then you have attempted to throw away this truth - which is a matter of dishonesty and not accepting/admitting the truth - a matter of denial, in which you are trying to be something you are not, are claiming things are true of you which are not, and are generally trying to make yourself into a "false self" - or an ego as we call it.

Ego then is nothing but a cloud of lies that swirls around the perfect undefiled perfection of your being like vultures waiting to feast upon your corpse, swarming such that their numbers seem to blot out the light and make it seem like you are not even in there anymore. And yet at the core of this scene you ARE STILL exactly the perfect loving light-filled being that God created, shining away without the slightest dimming of your perfection.

So the ego lies are all designed to basically HIDE THE TRUTH, not that they have any power to actually cause the truth to go away or change or stop existing, but to simply COVER IT UP to make it SEEM like it's not there. And this then leads to believing that you HAVE literally changed into something corrupt and full of sin, because you have lost sight of yourself. But YOU ARE STILL IN THERE!

Believing things that are not true of you is madness, and is the insanity of what we call the ego thought system. A kind of delusional twisting of the truth, a mis-perception of your reality. YOU REMAIN exactly perfect as God created you right now and forever, you are just DENYING that you are perfect. You are a perfect immortal being PRETENDING to be mortal and imperfect. Trying to convince yourself that there is something horrendously wrong with you WHEN THERE ISN'T.

Listening to the ego means nothing more than simply listening to your own lies. The ego is nothing more than a part of YOUR BELIEF ABOUT YOURSELF, which means a FALSE belief about what is true of you. IF you could just stop lying to yourself about yourself, you would rediscover the truth about you and melt into a state of being much more calm, relaxed, happy and peaceful. Simply because all the lies ever do is stir up shit, create drama, intensify contrasts, enforce separations, magnify tensions, amplify war, and make out that some kind of nightmare is happening to scare the living daylights out of you.

The ego is the idea of the anti-christ. It is anti - christ ... ie AGAINST Christ. You are christ. It is AGAINST YOU. It is the idea of being something opposite to what you are. It is A LIE. The ego is a lie, the body is a lie, the world is a lie, space and time are a lie. This is why we call them an illusion - a claim to be something they are not. And all the ego can ever do is LIE ABOUT YOU, while trying to pass it off as truth. A lie which is has been confused with truth is a sin. A lie which is recognized as false is merely an error.

You are unmoved, you are peace itself, you are permanence, you are fixed and eternal, you cannot change in any way, nothing in the world HAS EVER changed you, nothing the world believes or says about you is true, EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS A LIE, and YOU are the living truth of God expressed forever. It is only ever then a matter of, when will you be willing to accept that there is nothing wrong with you whatsoever?

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception."

"Atonement remedies the strange idea that it is possible to doubt yourself and be unsure of what you really are. This is the depth of madness. Yet it is the universal question of the world. What does this prove except the world is mad? Why share its madness in the sad belief that what is universal here is true? Nothing the world believes is true. It is a place whose purpose is to be a home where those who claim they do not know themselves can come to question what it is they are."

"This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is a power PAST omnipotence, a place BEYOND the infinite, a time transcending the eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

Here is something that many people will reject as totally bullshit. But if you will consider it carefully you may see that it makes sense.

Your mind is not just inside your body. Your mind is bigger than the universe. The world is inside of it! Therefore your psychological ERRORS have taken the form of PHYSICAL OBJECTS!!!

The physical world is in your mind as a THOUGHT FORM. A physicalization or condensing of the thought of SIN BEING REAL.

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

Physical objects are literally ***SIN*** contained by your mind!!!

(e.g. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards." "To see a sinless body is impossible.")

Your mind, bigger than the universe, is dreaming of a WORLD, inside of your mind, which is hosted by your mind, and clouds your mind with IMAGINED OBSTRUCTIONS, which manifest as PHYSICAL FORMS, which are thought images WITHIN you.

You made the little body, within your mind, as part of the world that's in your mind, to look AT that world, to look at SIN, as if it's real and not see past it. The body can only see the form of error, and all physical forms represent the idea of sin being "apparently real." You actually perceive the world from the outside in.

You perceive "physical sins" with the body's eyes!!!

When you consider that the world and the body are WITHIN your mind, both of them are ILLUSORY PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVICES your mind is using to hide from reality. You've constructed a dream of deception, within your mind, in the shape of a world, to hide reality. "The world was made as an attack on God."

Your mind - a universe-sized CONTAINER, has invented a world, inside of itself, designed to block THE CONTAINER, from **SEEING THE CONTAINER**. And now the container is seemingly UNAWARE OF ITSELF, asleep and lost in its own IMAGINED WORLD. A dream world.

Physical sight through the body, looking at FORMS (physical objects), is your mind's attempt to NOT LOOK PAST SIN, given that physical objects are SINS within your larger mind.

The eyes fixate on sin and make it real. This is what they were MADE TO DO. If the world seems real, you have MADE SIN REAL and are looking at an ILLUSION, which seems outside your body, but the world and the body are SMALLER THAN YOU. If you believe what the body sees is reality, you are blind and insane. "Nothing so blinding as perception of form."

The body's vision is a device for NOT SEEING THE TRUTH, to blind the mind and keep it from looking PAST ALL PHYSICAL FORMS - which are MIND BLOCKAGES - to reality which lies beyond them.

"The world IS false perception." "The world IS perception." This means you, who are a universe-sized container, are visualizing WITHIN yourself, an entire planet, which is the FORM that "perceiving incorrectly" takes, as a visualization of an UNREAL WORLD, so that you are lost in your own INNER planet-sized dream. The physical world IS your universe-sized mind PERCEIVING!! "Perception is a separated state". You are projecting it!

"Blocks to awareness" include PHYSICAL MATTER. Spacetime itself IS A BELIEF, smaller than your mind, within your mind!

The body has been made as a device IN YOUR MIND to block your VISION. Your mind is HOST to an imaginary world, which it is looking AT, so that it does not look PAST it, to ITSELF.

Your mind, and your correction of perception, is not just taking place within the safe confines of your body-mind, as if trapped in a body and totally confined to "whats inside my body."

Realize instead that your mind is also OUT THERE. Physical matter is a BLOCK. It is an IMAGE in your mind. Not merely an image within your mind in a body. An image in your mind BIGGER THAN THE UNIVERSE. YOU are supposed to LITERALLY see past it in order to be aware of YOURSELF and to look upon CHRIST just as the Holy Spirit does.

When your mind - your universe-sized mind, changes its mind, and starts to use reason to SEE PAST the illusory world, it will stop believing in the dream it's having, and realize it is the dreamer. This will DISAPPEAR THE DREAM, which includes the literally disappearing of ALL PHYSICAL OBJECTS, which ARE ALWAYS FORMS OF ERROR AND SIN.

In the atonement therefore, you have the recognition that THERE IS NO WORLD, because "the world you made" was merely a fictional vision you were holding inside your mind temporarily, while you dreamed, and now the dreaming has ended. THERE IS NO WORLD to block your *awareness* of your SELF, and thus you return to looking ONLY UPON your Christ Self, which is formless and timeless, OUTSIDE OF SPACETIME, which has now ended.

YOU, are the Kingdom of Heaven.

Here is how Jesus puts it:

"SIN IS A BLOCK (to awareness), set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. 3 No one who LOOKS ON IT without the help of reason would try to pass it. 4 THE BODY'S EYES BEHOLD IT AS SOLID (yes, your fricking EYES are LOOKING AT SIN) granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. 5 Yet reason SEES THROUGH IT (sees through physical matter), because IT IS AN ERROR (all physical matter is an ERROR!). 6 The FORM (physical form) it takes cannot conceal its EMPTINESS (there IS NO PHYSICAL WORLD - IT IS EMPTINESS) from reason's eyes."

"Everything that the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception" ... "The body's eyes see ONLY form." .... "These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see." .... " See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and cannot go beyond.".... "Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning. "

"There is nothing SO BLINDING as PERCEPTION OF FORM (physical matter). For SIGHT OF FORM means ***understanding has been obscured***. Only MISTAKES have different forms (physical objects are mistakes), and so they can deceive (physical objects deceive). You can change form (you can change objects), BECAUSE it is not true (because physical objects are NOT TRUE).

IT COULD NOT BE REALITY (physical matter IS NOT REALITY!), BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is not reality, IT MUST BE AN ILLUSION (physical FORMS ARE ILLUSIONS), and ****IS NOT THERE TO SEE**** - the physical world DOES NOT EXIST - there is no world.). And, if you see it, you MUST BE MISTAKEN, for you are seeing what CAN NOT BE REAL, AS IF IT WERE. What cannot see beyond what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions as the truth. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth? "

For many, ACIM is about self help and doing the lessons and trying to get back to a simplified idea of God/reality. But the scenario of what is happening in this world, why we're here, and what we're returning to, is part of a big picture "story" that I don't really see talked about a whole lot. At least not in fully encompassing terms.

Basically we existed as eternal beings in heaven, God's sons, and he had also created the angels etc... and everything was groovy, and then this separation thing happened, there was "war in heaven", a split, and the descent into "hell" through the making of hierarchies of illusions, levels, dimensions, worlds etc... and we ended up with this physical universe.

And now God has created the Holy Spirit and is sending his angels to guide and support and educate us, to help us to come back home to our heavenly home. Which means... drumroll.. this entire world is like a DEVICE which heaven is using as a mechanism for bringing home all of the lost souls who attempted to war against God. And the whole purpose of this world is for the lessons and learning - the curriculum, which has been set up by God, by which we might learn the truth and return willingly to cooperation with God's will, freely.

When people for example have near-death experiences they go and encounter these situations, where they are having life reviews and meeting with God and talking to spiritual beings and all this stuff, and then being sent back and "its not your time" and so on... script to be fulfilled, lessons to learn etc.... and so you get this overall picture that this world is not just some random world that we're trying to wake up from, and we're not just trying to wake up to an nice sanitary idea of "reality" or "oneness" or "non-duality".

There's way more to this story. And there's an entire foundation for "the fall of man" and how we got into this mess, and realizing that this world IS the mess we made of reality, and how we now need to clean up the mess and go home. And that means that despite all the theories that various people have, despite all the religious beliefs, despite all the concepts of why we are here, the scientific models, bla bla bla, agnostics, atheists, whatever, basically underneath everything it's TRUE that we all descended from heaven, fell in the "tiny mad idea" which really was a huge monstrous idea, are now having go through a special curriculum for salvation, and eventually will be ready to return to God's Kingdom.

So all this sort of Christian-religious stuff about heaven, making hell, believing in sin, suffering, death, illusions, trying to be separate from God, authority problem trying to oppose his will, angels helping us, there being scripts and curriculums, life lessons that are orchestrated before birth, all this stuff, it's all actually quite correct. It's all part of this huge PLAN, the atonement plan. And all because of what went on in heaven, the fall of man, the descent into hell, and the subsequent need for the atonement to correct us and restore us to awareness of love's presence.

But I think we get really out of touch with this a lot in the course community, drifting off into these intellectual models of what the course is about, vague ideas of oneness/reality, somewhat clinical God-less models, and a whole bunch of skepticism about anything not "explicitly" mentioned in the course text. We get rather narrow and start to see things through a kind of "ACIM filter", through which we filter OUT stuff that doesn't seem like it's mentioned in course lingo etc. But if you look all this stuff is in there. It lines up quite significantly with what the bible says albeit that a lot of the bible stuff is somewhat distorted. But it has the basics down.

We are part of a giant classroom, in which the atonement plan/curriculum is playing out. And this is precisely the same atonement plan that is to do with our incarnations, our themes and scripts for our lives, our lessons that we agree to, the mighty companions and angels that help us, spirit guides, the astral plane and other dimensions, and the fact that no matter what anyone in the world believes they are ALL part of this same scenario. We're all in the boat of "wanted to be separate from God" and "made worlds to live in apart form God" and are all in various ways trying to find our way back because that's what God wants.

For some it's more accepted than others. For others they don't even think any of this is true, and fixate on various other explanations for why we exist. For many ACIM is just some nice little tiny behind-closed-doors self-study "course" with very little to do with this huge big story of how we got here.

But we can't change the facts. We're living the curriculum that God established to correct the separation. This world isn't just some scientific experiment. It's not some virtual reality. It's not just a random chaotic environment. It's a school - repurposed from the hell we made, designed to lead *everyone* of *every kind* of civilization back towards the reality of heaven, our true home. There's no way to avoid this fact. We can deny it and believe other things but this is the underlying "framework" that encapsulates this whole world.

God is using this world as a device to bring us back to God. The whole thing. It's one giant school for learning, to lead us back to awareness of love - back to God, back to the Kingdom that we fell from - where we are safe in God, dreaming of exile. This world is the exile. Going home to God is the goal for everyone, regardless of how much they accept it or are aware of it. This is why Jesus calls it "the universal curriculum". Everyone is part of the plan. There are no exceptions. Even people not "doing ACIM". Even the atheists and scientists. Everyone is part of this. "The great awakening".

It may seem at first that all events in this world are random, sometimes negative, difficult, cruel and should not be happening. We try to avoid some events and promote others. We want the bad stuff to go away and escape into only the good stuff, to prolong the good stuff as long as possible and have some sense of control.

But one thing that has become glaringly obvious to me in recent weeks of turmoil and trust-development, is that there absolutely is a higher plan whose reach spans everything that happens here, including the timing of meetings between individuals and groups and everything that occurs.

The plan of atonement, or the universal curriculum, orchestrates all events, encounters and occurrences. "Those who are to meet will meet". The Holy Spirit has laid out this plan, and it includes both what seem to be positive and negative events, or rather, the re-purposing of them for awakening.

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that ***everything which happens***, ***all events***, past, present and to come, ***are gently planned by One*** Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal life."

We are willing to endure "trials" and "lessons" only because, in the much bigger long-term picture, we know that the outcome of these, when we elect to learn the curriculum of truth, brings us closer to God. No one in their right mind would deliberately choose to endure suffering and difficulty, except if they knew that such things would educate them and eventually persuade them towards a better way.

"***Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn*** presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you. ***In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face***, Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again." He would not leave one source of pain unhealed, nor any image left to veil the truth. He would remove all misery from you whom God created alters unto joy. He would not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release your minds from everything that hides His Face from you."

This world is not a collection of random occurrences. I see it now more as a winding, twisting dream sequence, with threads of stories and encounters and happenings, where designated people are supposed to be exactly where they are, where environments and events transpire on purpose to present lessons, in the hope that we will use these situations with the Holy Spirit towards the goal of awakening rather than as a way to strengthen our belief in hell. The world is just one big school of classrooms in which to unlearn the lies of the ego. And all of this is planned, somewhat like a form of voluntary destiny.

Before our lifetime we consent to various such classrooms. We may agree upon a body, a family, a location, a lifestyle. We may even agree that certain physical problems arise at certain times, seemingly triggered by certain events. But we have to realize that behind these seemingly random events, such as a car-crash for example, there is orchestration. There is purpose. It is meant to happen, because these trials need to be revisited so that certain stimuli will be presented to offer an opportunity for spiritual growth. And we sign on the dotted line to say, ok, I will be willing to go through all this if it will lead me closer home to God.

Sometimes really awful stuff happens. If a person is in a car crash and even perhaps dies for a while, perhaps this is to facilitate that they can visit Heaven, be healed, be restored and enlightened to some degree, so that upon returning they are a new person and live in a new way, making possible new avenues of expression and help. We might think some things happening are horrendous and cruel but when it's part of a much bigger plan, even the most awful of occurrences might well be divinely intended, not to cause suffering but to create circumstances and consequences that are ultimately beneficial spiritually.

In the really big picture, everything that happens here is entirely designed and repurposed as a tool to bring you home. The whole world is one big rescue mission, gently trying to get us to become willing to see sense and let go of our ego toys. God has protected us and is using space and time to present a curriculum that applies to all entities here, using scripts and events to present lessons that we agree to, so that we will gradually learn of the truth and awaken from our sleep.

We would only be willing to go through difficulties if we knew that it was in fact a purposeful lesson, and one which would point us eventually in the direction of love and happiness. Lessons that make us grow and present opportunities for forgiveness. We learn by applying the truth and forgiving what seems to occur, which in turn collapses periods of time and scripts that we no longer need.

The appearance that events and encounters and meetings are entirely at random is complete fiction. The Holy Spirit has control over all of this, with his plan for salvation. As you atune to this plan and trust it rather than fight against events, it becomes more obvious that He speaks through a variety of persons, He works through a variety of happenings, and that regardless of surface chance, some things simply are meant to happen a certain way, and will, by His will.

How else could we develop trust than if it were true that there is a plan to trust in, an ability of the Holy Spirit and God to guide and direct what transpires, and not just some chaotic random mishmash of cruelty and crime that we keep trying to escape. To trust in the plan is to learn the curriculum. To overlook the chaos and see the order is forgiveness. Everything happening here is an intricate symphony of education and opportunities to choose once again. And all of it continually points us towards reunion with God.

"Anger is never justified." - ACIM

Anger is not natural. It is very common, but not natural or healthy. Anger isn't really a valid feeling. It's actually a device for projecting something. Usually we use it to project guilt or some other hurt. It's a way of hurling stuff out of the mind and trying to pin it on someone or something else. It's a form of irresponsibility.

Anger is also caused by something other than itself, so it's not like some kind of core feeling or inherent central nature. It's a reaction to something else, twice removed from the problem, and only comes about when denial is also being used.

If you have a pain or hurt or guilt or whatever and you try to deny it, you're trying to dissociate yourself from it, disown it, and want to get it out of your awareness/mind. You do that by projecting it and trying to associate it with someone or something else. And the main skapegoating device used to accomplish this is anger.

Behind anger there is always something else going on. Deeper than the anger there is some kind of hurt or pain or fear. It's very easy for fears and hurts and guilts to transform into what appears to be anger, but this ins't their true form. Anger is always a way of hiding something else.

Not because you actually have anger, but because denying deeper feelings leads to an attempt to project those pains or put them out of your mind, which hurls them outward in a kind of broadcast. If you deny being afraid, you will feel angry instead. If you deny feeling guilty you'll become angry. If you deny that you feel hurt or at a loss or deprived in some way it can turn into anger. But the anger always comes after a perceived attack.

The anger is not a primary core feeling, it's a secondary layer on top of it designed to cover feelings up. You first see yourself as hurt or attacked, you then justify that because you didn't seem to ask for it (weren't aware of how you chose it) you are justified in being angry, and then you use that justification to hurl the blame outward.

Ego likes to use anger because it splits the mind and increases separation and insanity. While you are in denial and projecting pain outwardly your mind is dissociating and splitting and trying to pretend that the pain is not inside itself. But ideas do not leave the mind that conceive of them, so it stays in the mind in a disguised form, hidden behind a layer of denial.

Essentially anger doesn't work. It's an attempt to get rid of something deeper while keeping it. It doesn't make the pain go away. It doesn't heal anything. All it does is disguise and hide and make it seem like it doesn't belong to you. It's just a projected form of denial that says "this is not mine."

Anger is always unjustified because it's always based on a lie. But while the lie is kept in place, it seems as though the only problem solving solution is to project the pain. This won't work, but the mind will believe it's working, but that it needs to intensify the projection in order to get more pain out.

By becoming even more angry your mind reasons that it will be saved, or that by pinning the blame for the wound on something else you can be alleviated of the pain. This leads to a closed kind of scenario in which it seems all you can do is rage more to try to induce more relief, and the more you rage the better off you'll be. But this doesn't actually work because the mind is just splitting and becoming more and more insane. Ans besides, rage is not peace and attack will never induce healing.

Anger never ever works. It is a faulty coping mechanism. It's an attempt not to solve the real problem and to keep it hidden. Behind the anger if you look you'll always find something deeper like some kind of feeling of hurt or loss or guilt or fear. Something that came before it. And all you're doing is using the anger to try to make it go away. Anger is like an absence of feeling, ultimately an absence of love.

Feelings of hurt and attack and pain are always based on faulty perceptions that something outside of you has done something against your will, and that you are suffering as a result. This can NEVER be true because you are an immortal being that is permanently perfect and can never be attacked. Nothing real can be threatened.

So it always starts off with your mind going into a self attack, insinuating that you are not invulnerable, disowning the power of decision and pretending you are not the one causing your own experience, projecting out that responsibility onto others and the world, accusing them of sin, resulting in a perception that they're attacking you and you didn't ask for it, leading to hurt and pain which your mind itself puts into you to correspond to the projection, which pictures you as a victim, which justifies being angry, so then you project out anger in retaliation against the feedback loop of your own projected belief. It's pretty convoluted and crazy and a bottomless pit of hell.

You have to get further into your mind and find out the real deeper causes of things, the root issue behind all problems. It's never to do with what the world has done to you and always to do with your choice to perceive yourself unfairly treated, hurt, attacked, vulnerable etc... some kind of victim role that isn't true of your immortal nature. In that sense you are always and only the one who attacks yourself, undermining yourself first and then blaming it on the world. "Only the self-accused condemn."

This is why anger is totally unfounded and completely irrelevant in all scenarios and situations. You simply have no reason to be upset if you are immortal being that can never be hurt, made guilty, caused to be afraid or hurt for any reason. If you are not happy or at peace you have made a wrong decision and have chosen to see yourself as deprived. And no amount of blaming that on anyone or anything will make it go away. But you can always choose again.

I seem to be operating through a male body in this lifetime. It has a certain appearance. A certain shape. It functions in a given way and has certain seeming abilities and inabilities. There are appendages and shapes and features which other bodies don't seem to have. It seems to have a physical gender. It seems to have needs. When it looks upon itself in the mirror using its own eyes it sees an image of what it seems to be.

But this body is not who I am. I am not a male, or a humanoid. I do not really have arms and legs or a head. This strange creature I inhabit is not my self. It is but one of many possible iterations of bodies, all of which are distinctly different, and none of which are an accurate representation of my soul. None of them, not even this one, depicts who I really am.

"What you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

Your face is not how you look, any more than the face of another person's body is how they look. The face is a disguise designed to present a picture of what appears to be a "person", or someone looking, or someone speaking. But this face is just an instrument, a device, a facade, like the outside of a building. It actually hides the invisible self which cannot be seen with the body's eyes. This face is merely an arrangement of bones and flesh and muscles and sensory organs operating in a certain, very specific way.

What you are as a permanent, perfect creation of God, cannot possibly bend to become the shape of a particular body. In one lifetime you might show up as a woman, in another as a man, and in another as a woman again. Shapes and features of different sizes and proportions and colors and behaviors. None of these conform precisely to the true nature of what you are, and not one of them is wholly a perfect depiction of yourself.

In fact, because the core of you is so perfect and formless, every single body that you could ever utilize cannot come close to or even touch upon your true nature. Every one of them is distanced from your identity and set apart from or is external to your soul's true nature. They are all strange pictures of persons, who are not really persons, portraying physicalized images of artificial identity, as temporary substitutes for who and what you are.

When you identify with or as this body, believing it is completely yourself, there must be quite a jump of the gap between your true nature and the nature of this strange image. You must distort yourself, confine yourself, mangle yourself, in order to consider yourself to BE IT. You must be not yourself, in the most extreme way, in order to regard it as who and what you are. Are you at toe? Are you a buttock? Are you teeth? Do you chop off parts of yourself when you get a haircut? Do you shed yourself? Are you constantly changing? You are not these things. And trying to identify as these things, alone, must induce mental illness simply because these things are so unlike you.

There was a gospel of Judas which was discovered, I think it was part of the dead sea scrolls. I watched this on tv some years ago... in which, for one thing, Judas was properly recognized as being the one who was closest to Jesus and most believing him, which is why the authorities later depicted him as the worst traitor, to slander him. And in this gospel there were accounts that Jesus had already accomplished such spirit identification that he was able to transfigure in and out of different bodies. Sometimes appearing as a woman, sometimes as a child, or an old man, depending on what form was suitable to meet with particular people.

I don't find this to be improbable or impossible. Some of the great masters of the East have acquired similar abilities, dissolving the body and turning into a ball of light which then flies over the land and then rematerializes as a body later. Clearly when one has total clarity about what one is, and has power over the body and all forms, this kind of thing becomes easy and possible.

We are not bodies. We are spirit beings. And we do not need bodies in order to exist. "To be without a body is to be in your natural state." You do not need a body to be with God, or to be yourself. "God did not create the body." and so it is not a natural part of you or your inheritance. We must learn to correctly recognize that even the body we have right now, is not our identity. I am not a 6-foot caucasian male in his 40's. This is just the particular picture that my mind is projecting or that I chose to show up as or "incarnate into". In my last life, I was probably a woman.

In order to love yourself and to love everyone equally you cannot be offended by, putt of by, judging of, preferring, or being biased in any way about particular types of bodies. Fat or thin, large or small, tall or short, gay or straight, masculine or feminine, hairy or bald, ugly or beautiful, it should not matter, because these are all just clothing. Just flesh suits which our real selves are temporarily using. And no matter how a particular body appears, it is not the person.

Holding the body against them is like accusing them of sin. You must learn to look beyond your body and theirs, to recognize that deep within, there is a shining light, a perfect soul, just the same as yours, and all the children of God are perfectly identical and equal in Christ.