I'm trying to clarify what the real world is or it not. I'm just going to waffle on about it here as I look at each quote.

"The real world is a symbol, like the rest of what perception offers. Yet it stands for what is opposite to what you made.

This suggests the real world is something perceptual because dreams contain symbols, and since perception does not exist in heaven (only knowledge), this suggests the real world is not heaven. Yet it appears to be a "reflection of reality". (As I typed this, Jesus said "true").

"The real world holds a counterpart for each unhappy thought reflected in your world"

Suggesting it is also a reflection, or at least opposite to all illusions and lies. As real as perception can get?

"The real world shows a world seen differently, through quiet eyes and with a mind at peace. Nothing but rest is there. There are no cries of pain and sorrow heard, for nothing here remains outside forgiveness. And the sights are gentle. Only happy sights and sounds can reach the mind that has forgiven itself."

It sounds quite advanced that in this state of mind, there is no apparent registering of pain and sorrow coming from other people. These things are perhaps seen in a different light, as calls for love, and therefore there is a recognition that there is no "real sorrow". "The sights are gentle" seems to suggest you wouldn't even see war and death happening? But perhaps it is the WAY you look at them which shows them to you in a way which isn't upsetting any more. OR, possibly, the real world is seen AT THE SAME TIME as perception sees the physical world, since it is like "looking at heaven" vs looking at the world of form. This would be similar to the Holy Spirit being "fixated on God" while also perceiving.

"The real world is the symbol that the dream of sin and guilt is over, and God’s Son no longer sleeps. His waking eyes perceive the sure reflection of his Father’s Love; the certain promise that he is redeemed. The real world signifies the end of time, for its perception makes time purposeless."

Again the real world is referred to as a SYMBOL, meaning it is part of the dream. And also it is referred to as a REFLECTION (not the actual thing, but a reflection of it, once removed). This suggests the term "real world" refers not to that state of mind being "real" in the truest sense, but "real-er" than other ways of perceiving.

"Its perception"... tells us it's something perceived, so we are still in the realm of the world and are not in heaven yet.

"Across the bridge, it is so different! For a time the body is still seen, but NOT exclusively, as it is seen here. For the little spark that holds the Great Rays within it, is ALSO visible, and this spark cannot be limited long to littleness. Once you have crossed the bridge, the VALUE of the body is so diminished in YOUR sight, that you will see no need at all to MAGNIFY it. For you will realize that the ONLY value that the body has, is to enable you to bring your brothers TO the bridge WITH you. And to be RELEASED TOGETHER there."

This lingo sort of seems confusing because it seems you cross a bridge and are on the other side (as if in heaven?) and yet you are still in a body, and yet the ability to remain in the body is very limited due to the magnitude of the mind. So this suggests a state of being still in a body and perceiving but being as pure of mind as is possible while in a body. Again a reflection of heaven rather than pure heaven.

"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."

In this sense, it seems that Jesus talks about the real world as if talking about heaven. If he is being very literal (which he usually is) then a state of mind where there are no buildings and people and stuff, ... does not really sound like the world or forms. Above he spoke of only seeing gentle sights and so on, as a "way" of seeing the world. Here he talks of a "place" where there IS no buildings or streets or other forms. This suggests to me that when He speaks of the real world he is a bit "loose" in terms of what it means. ie, the "real world" literally is Heaven, but when we are in a body and still perceiving we see a GLIMPSE of it and a REFLECTION of it, and so it now sounds "as if" the real world is within perception still, but more like... it is just touching on perception lightly and is actually mostly beyond perception and beyond bodies and beyond this world. Like peeking its head in the door. This also reminds me of "the kingdom of heaven is laid out upon the world but you do not see it" and "god is in everything I see because God is in my mind"... referring to states of perception still (seeing the world) but starting to glimpse a heavenly "reality" or "real world" beyond it.

The one word that confused me here at first was "shines forever". If the real world shines forever, that makes it permanent. If the real world were permanent it must be the same thing as heaven. And so since Jesus uses the term to refer sometimes to the reflection of heaven and sometimes to what is fully heaven, since the "real world" in perception reflects reality, it can seem to imply a real perceived world is permanent, but it is not. Because the UNREAL world is let go and disappears, the real world builds a bridge to heaven, and then the true real world is fully experienced as heaven, forever.

"Yet the real world has the power to touch you even here because you love it. And what you call with love will come to you. Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it from every part of this strange world you made but do not want. The only effort you need make to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did not make is willingness to learn the one you made is false."

Like here, Jesus says the real world "touches you even here", suggesting that it is NOT here, but is heaven, and yet it is so close that it "touches you" like when two worlds bump up against each other, but you are not yet IN IT. Which again suggests the real world is actually heaven (not this universe whatsoever), but can be "touched upon" while here.

"You will first dream of peace and then awaken to it. Your first exchange of what you made for what you want is the exchange of nightmares for the happy dreams of love. In these lie your true perceptions, for the Holy Spirit corrects the world of dreams, where all perception is. Knowledge needs no correction. Yet the dreams of love lead unto knowledge. In them you see nothing fearful, and because of this, they are the welcome that you offer knowledge. Love waits on welcome, not on time, and the real world is but your welcome of what always was. Therefore, the call of joy is in it, and your glad response is your awakening to what you have not lost. Praise, then, the Father for the perfect sanity of His most holy Son."

The "dream of peace" also sounds like another way to say that "perceiving" the real world while here in a body is still a dream of reality - that's why its a reflection or symbol, and not the actual thing. The real world seems like a bridge that bridges the gaps between heaven and earth, or at least is a joining place or state of mind which is sort of experiencing both temporarily.

"The bridge itself is nothing more than a transition in your PERSPECTIVE of reality. On this side, everything you see is grossly distorted, and COMPLETELY out of perspective. What IS little and insignificant is magnified, and what is strong and powerful, cut down to littleness."

Jesus does refer to a bridge, which suggests that the perception of the reality (truth, heaven) while still in a body is a glimpse of the real world that is on the other side of the bridge, and you can sort of position yourself on the other side and be very close to having heaven in your awareness, but still remaining temporarily in the world. This also correlates to what Jesus says about the body being able to be supernaturally protected, and a sign of immortality, while it is useful, and when used to bring the word of God to those who have it not.

Also I want to make a note about perspective. When there are clouds, the sun is above the clouds and always shining. When you are up there above the clouds, from that perspective, clouds are not blocking the light (awareness). When you move below the clouds however, from "this side", looking back towards the light having been separated from it, it SEEMS as if the clouds block the light. The bottom of the clouds become dark symbolizing their ability to block light and having resulted in the illusion of darkness.

When you are in a state of perception which is level confused, backwards and upside down, ie in the ego more, you see this way and regard darkness as a real block and as if light is hidden. But when you get past the clouds and are aligned with the light and ORIENTED in the direction the light is shining, then you no longer are limited by the clouds and see only light everywhere. From this vantage point or perspective, this is similar to seeing "from" the real world. So you could say that the bridge Jesus refers to, is really the "transition" from being in the dark to being in the light, shifting from false to true perception, and another word for true perception is perception of the "real world". Being on the "other side" of the bridge thus could be referring to being in true perception, since the bridge is somewhere between true and false perception, rather than between the perceptual world and heaven.

"Both are not true, yet either one will seem as real to you, as the amount to which you hold it dear."

Here Jesus refers to both the real world and the fictional world as "not true". So again he's saying, the real world is kind of a term for the "slice" of reality which is partly seen while still in the fictional physical world. The glimpse of reality will become real to you and then act like a bridge TO heaven. The real world is what's perceived when perception is true and accurate, showing you that this world is false and unreal, and opening up to see Christ "beyond" it or "in" it. And eventually the world itself disappears and what was "beyond" and "in it" now becomes a fully present (and only) experience.

"God loves His Son forever, and His Son RETURNS his Father’s Love forever. The real world is the way that leads you to remembrance of this one thing that is wholly true and WHOLLY YOURS. For all else you have LENT yourself in time, and it WILL fade. But this one thing is ALWAYS yours, being the gift of God unto His Son. Your ONE reality was GIVEN you, and BY it, God created you as one with Him."

Here he said "the WAY that LEAD YOU TO remembrance"... like a bridge, or as the meeting point of two worlds or sort of the preparation for going to heaven.

"Love waits on welcome, NOT on time. And the real world is but your welcome of what always was. Therefore the call of joy is in it, and your glad response is your awakening to what you have NOT lost. "

Welcoming what always was is sort of an invitation or openness to it, but not necessarily being in it yet.

"Is it a loss to find a world instead where losing is impossible, where love endures forever, hate cannot exist, and vengeance has no meaning? Is it loss to find all things you really want and know they have no ending, and they will remain exactly as you want them throughout time?

The world mentioned here I think is heaven. But it could apply apply to "Real world".

Yet even they will be exchanged at last for what we cannot speak of, for you go from there to where words fail entirely, into a silence where the language is unspoken and yet surely understood. Communication, unambiguous and plain as day, remains unlimited for all eternity. And God Himself speaks to His Son as His Son speaks to Him. Their language has no words, for what they say cannot be symbolized. Their knowledge is direct and wholly shared and wholly one."

Here then Jesus speaks of what happens when you make the transition FULLY to heaven, which is a world that you cannot see while seeing the physical world (you cannot see two worlds, you cannot behold the world and see heaven). In heaven, fully and completely, BEYOND perception, and BEYOND the slice of the real world that you saw as a reflection (also referred to as the face of christ - his FACE, not his WHOLE SELF), is the world God created which is Heaven, where all is one, and the "real world's" lack of buildings and streets and people is fully experienced.

"Can what has no beginning really end? The world will end in an illusion, as it began. Yet will its ending be an illusion of mercy. The illusion of forgiveness, complete, excluding no one, limitless in gentleness, will cover it, hiding all evil, concealing all sin and ending guilt forever. So ends the world that guilt had made, for now it has no purpose and is gone."

Bye bye planet Earth and the physical universe.

"The world will end in joy, because it is a place of sorrow. When joy has come, the purpose of the world has gone. The world will end in peace, because it is a place of war. When peace has come, what is the purpose of the world? The world will end in laughter, because it is a place of tears. Where there is laughter, who can longer weep? And only complete forgiveness brings all this to bless the world. In blessing it departs, for it will not end as it began. To turn hell into Heaven is the function of God’s teachers, for what they teach are lessons in which Heaven is reflected. And now sit down in true humility, and realize that all God would have you do you can do. Do not be arrogant and say you cannot learn His Own curriculum. His Word says otherwise. His Will be done. It cannot be otherwise. And be you thankful it is so."

"Any split in mind must involve a rejection of part of it, and this is the belief in separation."

What is a WHOLE mind? A whole mind is at least as large as the universe. As Jesus states, "both heaven and earth are in your mind" and "you maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts". Realize that your mind has to be LARGER than planet Earth in order for Earth to be in your mind. It's not appropriate to try to imagine that your tiny little self inside your body is projecting this entire world. In fact, "the world" is this entire universe, and so let's say a WHOLE mind is large enough to contain THE WHOLE of everything.

A SPLIT mind, is a mind which believes in separation. The split is like a division, which literally seems to divide your mind into TWO halves. The division is upheld by some kind of "wall of sin", which comes between the two halves. This wall is made of illusions. This wall IS THE WORLD YOU SEE and the world you made. It is the physical matter of this universe. "The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son."

So if your whole mind is larger than the universe, what does a split mind mean? It means you place a wall WITHIN the universe, to separate off one part of your mind from another. What is that wall? It's all physical matter, actually, but more symbolically it is your BODY. Your body is the wall of flesh that you surround a part of your mind with.

The body is a device for separation. It has two functions. It keeps part of your mind INSIDE, and keeps the other part of your mind OUTSIDE. Remember you were WHOLE before, you were unlimited in size, and now you've SECTIONED OFF only a PART of your mind and placed it "inside the body", so all the stuff outside the body is THE REST OF YOUR MIND. You, who seem to be in a body, are only PART OF YOURSELF.

You're used to thinking in terms of everything applying only to the mind that seems to be inside the body, as if that is "you". And as if everything outside the body is "not you". And THEN you think that the whole of ACIM applies only to this "is me" that's inside the body. But it DOES NOT! THAT is part of the illusion of the split. It's a state of massive disassociation. In fact this is also part of how you pretend to be a figure in a dream.

When you dream, you dream an entire ENVIRONMENT. A world. But then you divide up that world, you fence off part of it as a body, and then place a fragment of the mind seemingly INSIDE that body. That part of mind now peers out through the body's eyes upon the environment, but because it is a DISASSOCIATED part, it does not believe that the environment is part of ITSELF. It thinks it is "not me". And it also does not believe it PUT IT THERE.

It doesn't see itself as the DREAMING mind, only as PART of the dream. And you in your human body right now experience exactly the same disassociation - you do not believe or perceive that this ENTIRE WORLD is inside your mind, or that you are dreaming it from a larger mind. You think you are ONLY the thing "inside" the body. This is part of being a split mind.

When you have a split mind, one half of your mind disassociates from the other. The ego splits off some parts of you and labels them as sinful, guilty, wrong, bad, and tries to destroy them. It does this in order to try to only preserve the appearance of being "good" and successful and perfect and innocent. In psychology terms, this is the PERSONA, which is ONE HALF of your mind and yet believes it is ALL of yourself. This is to do with where the course talks about the sunbeam believing it is the sun. This split off part of mind thinks it is ALL of you.

The parts of your mind that it disassociates FROM, and keeps believing is "not myself", it sees as "outside of me". Separate from me. And the wall of flesh that is the body acts as the divider between your persona and the REST of you. The rest of you is OUTSIDE the body. Due to disassociation you do not believe that the outside world is you AT ALL, or has anything to do with you. That you didn't put it there nor is it the location of your SELF. But it is, and you did put it there. You needed to make a world outside the body in order to be able to have a world to disassociate from.

What then happens is, within your mind, within the whole of your mind, there are now two seeming selves. There is the part that you think is all of you, and there is another part that you think is not you at all. That "not me" part is hidden behind a wall of denial, which is a block to awareness, which makes the REST of your mind unconscious. Since your persona self sees the REST of your mind as "outside of me", or separate from itself, it regards the "shadow" as OUTSIDE the persona. Now, the BODY IS the persona. Within the dream, it represents this fake "face of innocence", and everything OUTSIDE the body is YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND.

Within your mind, then, since "ideas leave not their source", everything that your mind can ever experience HAS to be within your mind, otherwise the mind cannot be aware of it. So that means your "inside self" is in your mind, your BODY is in your mind, and the outside WORLD is in your mind. And your mind is larger than all of them.

Within your mind, you will experience that there is war happening between one half of you and the other half. There will be a perception of "your self" (one half) as "the innocent victim", and it will seem that "the not me" self (outside "you") is the sinful victimizer. Your will is going to be divided against itself, because both parts of your mind are not in agreement. They conflict. And so the inner you, your persona, believes that it is under attack by "an alien will", that it THINKS is "outside of it", but which really is just another part of the mind.

You have this fully INTERNAL war with yourself, between these two parts, but because of the disassociation, your inner part BELIEVES that the "other me" is OUTSIDE the body. That your enemy is out there and is "not myself". So it is seen as "beyond yourself". And since your idea of yourself is confined within the body, that means you think it's outside the body. Even though it's in your mind.

It then becomes very EASY, to "project" or map this dynamic of a split mind, ONTO The world. Whereby you seem to "project" your sin onto your brother. But it's not really projection as such. It's more like, your mind actually believes that YOUR sinful parts are separated off from your "self" and are SEEN outside of you, beyond the body, and so you see them IN the world as if they are external. Your mind locates them externally because that seems to make sense in terms of them being disassociated from what's inside your body.

And so if you're believing/perceiving that the sinful part of YOUR mind, your "inner enemy", the "not me self", is OUTSIDE of your body, it's VERY VERY easy to assign or associate that with OTHER BROTHERS in the dream, whose bodies are walking around the same environment having split minds. Since you already believe "the sin is not in me, it's outside me", and since you believe" I am inside the body", you'll easily believe "the sinners are outside the body". And so there's a very small step from there to actually being deluded that some actual OTHER brother is the separate self who is sinful. And so you attach your split mind TO him and accuse him of your sins.

But in truth, all of this is really taking place inside your larger mind. Both what is inside your body and what is outside your body is WITHIN the confines of your larger mind. The innocent seeming victim that you see your PARTIAL self as, and the external victimizer evil sinful menace, are BOTH parts of YOUR mind. And this is what the secret of salvation is designed to show you. To merely look and realize that your brother has NOTHING to do with you being attacked, there is actually ANOTHER PART OF YOUR MIND ATTACKING THIS PART OF YOUR MIND. You are at war with yourself, and you literally are your enemy.

ACIM: "The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true." - that external attacker IS PART OF YOUR MIND.

So that means you are ACTING the part of being the victim, AND you are acting the part of the victimizer. You are BOTH. You are the inside and the outside. And until you can recognize that what you see in another is part of your own larger mind, you won't stop projecting it onto them. When you own it, and take responsibility for it, that means realizing that this "separate enemy" is actually a character IN your larger mind, seeming to interact with this other persona character IN your mind, and BOTH of them are like puppets that your LARGER mind is operating. Your larger mind is pitting parts of ITSELF against each other.

What makes it SEEM as if there are two identities or characters, is illusions. Illusions present a picture of images and appearances and behaviors that SEEM to make it look like there are TWO distinct persons, two wills, two minds, to selves. But the challenge you have, is to OVERLOOK (forgive) those illusions. When you do so, you should come to realize that your larger mind is responsible for playing the roles of BOTH of those two characters. That who YOU are, as a whole, is WITHIN BOTH of them. If you can see that YOU are literally playing BOTH sides and ARE both of them, that "unity" will transcend the illusions, and it will dissolve the split.

You won't be able to believe in the split, or in being only one of the two halves of the split, if you can see how your WHOLE mind is in BOTH sides. It's like owning up to being one who has been pulling all the strings, MAKING THE DREAM ENVIRONMENT, and causing all things to happen. That means moving UPWARDS, from a position of "I am only this little self in a body" to " I am the whole of everything everywhere". And it is from that larger WHOLE mind that you are the DREAMER OF THE WORLD.

ACIM: "For you would not react at all to figures in a dream (as a smaller part of mind) you knew that YOU (your larger mind) were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you (your larger self), unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR (whole mind's) dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes." - this is a shift in identity from "I am a PART of mind in a body" to " I am ALL of mind everywhere."

If your mind transcends the separation, ie you stop believing illusions of separation, you will become aware of your wholeness. That's a transition from being two selves on a lower level, to being one unified self on a higher level.

What that also means in terms of the fact that your mind is the size of the universe, is that you should eventually heal the separation that is DIVIDING THE WORLD, which means removing the WALLS that the world is made of, which means undoing physical matter which is the illusion of separation, and that also means ERASING THE BODY. The body IS the device that acts to implement the split mind, WITHIN the larger scope of what you are.

In order NOT to have a split mind, your body HAS to be undone. It acts like a wall that is literally keeping part of you inside it and the rest of you outside it. It is made of illusions. "The body cannot stay without illusions". That means without the idea of being PART OF the world and not ALL of it, there cannot be a body there, representing the split in the mind and dividing and separating your universe-sized mind into two parts.

The body must vanish. It must be transcended and it must disappear. It is made of the illusion of separtion. "The body is a dream." And it is also the way by which the whole dream is maintained. There is no dream WITHOUT the body, because you have to MAKE a separation - a split in your larger mind, in order to go INTO dreaming. A split mind is a dreaming mind. And MAKING that split in your mind MAKES a body. It puts a wall there. Therefore when this dream of "opposition" and "competition" and "taking sides" is ironed out and ends, so too does the body wall disappear, and so too does the dream disappear, and that includes the Earth.

In effect, the undoing of the belief in separation is the undoing of the WALL within your split mind which IS the body, and this cancels out the differences between the inner and outer parts of mind, makes the mind WHOLE, and a whole mind CANNOT BE ASLEEP DREAMING. A whole mind cannot have a body. And a whole mind cannot be IN a dream world. The dream world only lasts so long as there is an illusion of separation, which depends ENTIRELY on having a split in your universe-sized mind. And this is also why "you cannot remain in this world, with this knowledge." Knowledge collapses spacetime.

As you return to being whole, you will also return to a state of mind where what is inside you is also seen outside you. ie it is everywhere the same. That means seeing the holy spirit in all your brothers because he is in your mind. Seeing God "in the world" because God is in your mind. Your wholeness reunites you with THE REST OF YOURSELF WHICH IS IN YOUR BROTHER. Your wholeness rejoins and reconnects YOUR mind, to the REST of your mind, which is currently believed to be "not inside you". Your sense of SELF, therefore, has to expand from "I am that which is inside the body" to "I AM EVERYWHERE". That results in oneness with all brothers.

To be whole is to be restored to an awareness that YOU are everywhere, you are larger than the universe, you are unlimited and infinite and immortal, you are not partial, you are not located in space or time, and you are beyond the dream of death. You are beyond the world. The world was merely YOUR SPLIT MIND, while you were dreaming. It's forms were YOUR SPLITS. Its walls were your illusions of disassociation. Without you having a split mind there can be no dream world. Waking up is waking up to WHOLENESS. Wholeness is reality. In wholeness, there is no world and there are no bodies and no walls.

You are unlimited. You made this entire world as a result of splitting your mind. When your mind is whole, the world will disappear. You are a huge, unlimited, spiritual being and this TINY world is nothing against your magnitude.

THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD (and why many sons)

Understand omnipresence and you will understand how God created many sons.

The course appears here to contradict itself, saying there is only one son, and yet that there are many sons, in the same paragraph. But it is not contradictory...

"It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts."

Here it is further clarified that God has one son AND many sons (souls) all of whom make up the sonship....

"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. "

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The question is, how it is possible for God to have one son AND many sons and for both facts to be true at the same time, without contradicting?

God is omnipresent. What does that mean? It means God is fully present everywhere. But let's draw some analogies to what the ego thinks that means, to show why it is not what the ego thinks it means.

A cloud .... may seem to be the same everywhere. Today here the sky is overcast and gray, as if one cloud. But there are particles of cloud "over there" which are not "over here". All of the particles are separated out and cut off from each other. It is an illusion of oneness, simply a gathering of many separate parts huddled together. This is not what omnipresence means.

A human body - may seem to be "one body", joined together with its arms and legs. But the arms are not the legs. The hands and feet are separate. A hand is not a foot or vice versa. All of the parts are separated out. They seem to share to some degree but there are clear separations between parts. What is in the hand is not in the foot. What is in the eye is not in the knee. This is an illusion of a "blob", or semi-oneness. A collection of parts again huddled together to make an illusion of a whole or sharing, but where there is no sharing at all. All of the body's cells and particles are separate. It is a collections of separate parts. This is ego.

Omnipresence is not like this. Omnipresence defies every single property of matter. It transcends space time. The laws of omnipresence totally ignore every single law of physicality and physical limitation.

In omnipresence, it is possible, for the entirety of God, to be entirely present in one location. This sounds reasonable to the ego so far. But what does not sound reasonable is this additional fact: While God is being fully and completely present in one location, showing up with all of his being and all of his attention in that location, He is ALSO SIMULTANEOUSLY fully showing up and fully present in another location. ALL of His presence and attention and being are in that other location AT THE SAME TIME.

To the ego, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It can only think in terms of finite amounts or volumes. To it, if God is fully present over here, there is nothing left to be present over there. Or rather, this is the idea of conditional love, in that there is only so much "amount" of love to go around, so if all the love is showing up in one place or given to one person, it must be exclusive, and there is no love left for anyone else. This is not what God is like.

God loves unconditionally. A part of unconditionality means that God can FULLY LOVE every single PART of existence. Without reservation. This does not mean He is spread thin, either. He has no limitation. It does not mean He has a really great big huge amount of love, like a 10 gallon container of water, and happens to be so much "bigger' than a row of glasses that he can fill all of them and have some left over. That's more ego logic. What really happens is, God puts ALL of Himself into every glass, to the point where there should to the ego be nothing left to put in another. And yet, there's God, fully present in the other glass. And all the rest equally. ALL OF HIM, IN ALL LOCATIONS, SIMULTANEOUSLY. This concept is completely alien to the ego.

If you can get a sense of this in your mind, it will help you to understand the metaphysics of God's creation, and will allow you to make sense of HOW it is possible that God has MANY SONS, and how all of them are also simultaneously one.

If God shares ALL of Himself, in order to create "the first son", the ego will then say, well, God just used up all of what he has, and now there is nothing left to share with any other son or to create again. But this is not true. God has not reduced whatsoever by sharing Himself. He has in fact increased. "Creation is increased only by sharing". AND, his omnipresent nature means He is perfectly capable of putting ALL of Himself into A BILLION SONS, without diminishing in any way, and without lacking anything, and without "running out" of Himself. Every single one of them has ALL of Him.

And here is the crucial point, as to why God creates MANY Sons and not just one...

When God shares all of Himself to create the first son, this in no way - due to his omnipresent nature - confines him or limits Him. He is able to be FULLY PRESENT and to create wholeness, EVERYWHERE, simultaneously. The creation of one son is merely the radiation of God in "one location", and... there are a lot of other locations! Other locations can simultaneously express all of God, to create a Son, in EVERY location. Simultaneously.

Here is an analogy.

A single point of light may seem to create a single photon. That photon is one created son. However, if the light source spans a large volume of space, such as a fluorescent tube, or an array of LED's, then it is capable of producing, simultaneously, an extraordinary number of photons i.e. creations. This is completely NATURAL to the nature of God, to simultaneously create MANY instances/wholes, because God is actually INFINITE in His ability to be present fully in every location. It is totally natural to God to create INFINITE SONS and to create each of them unlimited.

It is not natural for God, to claim that He can only therefore "create one son" and, be confined to that. That's as if to say, He uses all His creative juice, because the fullness of him is a limited "amount" (ego logic) and therefore if He puts all of Himself into ONE son, there is nothing left. BUT THERE IS. Not only is there something left, EVERYTHING IS LEFT. God has not reduced AT ALL. And as such, God goes on CREATING MULTIPLE SONS... perhaps INFINITE SONS.

That is his Omnipresent nature. To create many children, not just one. If there will be creation at all, given the massive expanse of God, and given that God will create in ALL locations simultaneously, and that He will give ALL of Himself in EVERY location, he will create WHOLE SONS in every single location.

Each son is a WHOLE, because ALL of the Father is shared with Him. Not just some parts. Not just a little bit of God. ALL of God is shared with every created soul. And every single soul has EVERYTHING, lacking nothing, because it does not lack ANY of God. The fullness of God is in every part of His Sonship. His entire creation thus contains many, many, many sons, each one of them is experiencing ALL OF GOD, simultaneously, and yet each one is therefore a WHOLE in and of itself. It must be, because God is a whole and can only create more wholes. Again, this makes NO SENSE to the ego's way of thinking, but it makes perfect sense holographically. The all is in every part and every part is a whole.

There is no "unnatural division" in this (ego separation). There is only "natural division".

The so-called "one son", aka Christ, is simply the entire "sum total" of all the individual free-willed Sons that God created. Yet it is more than just a sum of its parts. Again this is to do with holographic creation. Since ALL of God is in EVERY Son, adding up the number of Sons does not tell you what is there. The sum total of all Sons is not the totality. Since every sons SHARES ALL OF GOD, there is MORE to each Son than just "himself". He is SHARING GOD. So the Sonship, is more than the sum of its parts, because they are all sharing and extending a wholeness which is far bigger than any of them - the One Father.

To God, since he is IN all of the sons fully, shared with them, one with them, yet they are distinct, his experience of "all the sons" is simultaneous. As such he experiences the total as "one son" or "one unified experience". Another word for this one son is Christ. It is a sense of, every son sharing one parent. Of every son having ALL of God in them. That unity, that, connectedness, is "christ". But the christ is not just "one son", it is the immediate shared experience of the fact that ALL of God is in every son. Every son experiences and shares the whole of creation.

So it then is true to say, that each individual son, is in fact

1) A distinct son, a whole, containing the whole of God or made from the whole of God

and

2) Also intimately connected to and sharing God with every other son, as christ.

Therefore every son is christ. He is both "the whole sonship" AND "one son" simultaneously. The all, and the part, simultaneously.

Every creation of God also inherits God's omnipresent nature. Every single son, every being of light, every angel, every son of a son of a son, is OMNIPRESENT as well. It can be everywhere. And it can manifest multiple occurrences of images of an identity simultaneously, at any point in time or space, if needed. For example, angels are capable of being with MANY people simultaneously. This is only possible because they are omnipresent, otherwise they'd be jumping all over the place trying to keep up. This is true of them and it is also true of every Son.

Jesus is able to appear to MANY people individually, simultaneously, because he is EVERYWHERE, and is OMNIPRESENT, and is not limited in these finite ego-logical ways. Jesus can be FULLY present here with me right now, and be FULLY present with you right now wherever you are. This is NATURAL for all creations of God. This is part of our divine nature.

It is only this world of FORM and matter and time and objects and bodies, that APPEARS totally the opposite of this. In form, it is suggested that what is in one location IS NOT in any other location AT ALL. Matter also suggests that there *IS* no "all" in ANY of the parts. That all parts are separate, all parts are NOT JOINED, none of the parts are SHARING at all, and there is NO ONENESS. That was the POINT of making this universe of illusion, to be the TOTAL OPPOSITE of the nature of Heaven, God, and the Sonship.

Every single object in this world testifies that there is no God and that every son is separated. Every single body demonstrates this. "The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards". The planet itself, Earth, is a physical expression of the idea of separation, in which it is "OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN IN EVERY WAY", because it does not demonstrate ANY omnipresence whatsoever. It does not appear to be a hologram (though it is), it does not show that the all is in any of the parts, no two parts share anything, there is no true joining, nothing overlaps, and basically every single physical particle of matter says "God is not here".

This is why this world is a bullshit lie, and no matter HOW you look at it or perceive it, its FORM is fundamentally in opposition to the nature of Heaven and God and the Sonship. It is NOT divine. It opposes divinity in every way. Every single particle of matter or energy is an expression of the idea of separation. Every subatomic particle. Every wave. Every quantum. However you deep you want to go, this universes is the OPPOSITE of omnipresence. And that was on purpose. The ego MADE THIS on purpose to try to create a picture of SHUTTING OUT GOD.

This is also the meaning of "this world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son". In every way, the separateness of matter is an attempt to claim that the son is CUT OFF from his father, because he no longer shares anything with the whole and no part contains ANY of God. That is an idea of the DEATH of God's Son, portrayed as physical particles which make up a demonstration of the Son being so completely devoid of God's presence that he must not be alive at all.

This is why we are not to make this world SPECIAL, or to worship it, or to want to keep it, or to try to have it somehow turn into heaven, or to put it on a pedestal, or to suggest God created it, or that it will be a permanent part of Creation. It CANNOT BE, because ALL that it is made of is this suggested idea of being UNLIKE HEAVEN. So there is no way that it can BECOME like heaven and still exist. Its entire NATURE is to be OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN. It exists AS "what God is not like". ... so it can't be IN what God is like and still exist. It cannot enter heaven or be part of it. This is why ... "THERE IS NO WORLD."

God's creation is one of holographic omnipresence. Every one of his MANY sons is a holographic omnipresent creation. Every single part of God's creation is the same everywhere and fully present in all parts. This is utterly IMPOSSIBLE to be expressed in form or matter, although any of God's children DOES have the ability to materialize illusory forms in any and MANY simultaneous locations if they choose to do so.

Every time I see a body, I am tempted to believe I'm seeing a person. The person seems separate from me, they are not me at all, their body belongs exclusively to them, it's not my body, we are not in any way connected to each other. What applies to them does not apply to me at all.

That is the horrendous lie that bodies present to us. The temptation that your brother, who in truth is literally one with and a part of your self, is somehow cut off from you. On the basis of assuming that people are "not me", we then proceed with an entire culture and way of relating that revolves around "I am separate from you."

Ultimately this boils down to a question of, are you living by God's law of the Golden Rule, or are you denying it and trying to break God's law? First let's be clear that the Golden Rule is not some optional thing, it's fundamental to the nature of reality and all creations. We are all one with each other, part of each other, joined together and sharing, like a collective consciousness hive mind. In that arrangement we are still individual beings but we also share everything.

Within that thought system of sharing, overlap and oneness, the natural way to relate to someone is to regard them as YOURSELF. They are thus your brother, an equal, as perfect and whole as you, and literally part of yourself. This produces shared interests and an automatic motivation to ONLY treat them with love so that you are directly treating yourself - the part of you that's in them - with love. Everything belongs to everyone, everyone has everything, and everything is mutual.

In the ego's rendition, the body is a separation device. And make no mistake that the body literally symbolically CUTS YOU OFF from the hive mind. It represents the idea of being separate, disconnected, not sharing, not joined, not a part of anyone else, and completely alone. It is absolutely the opposite of the true nature of our collective sonship and brotherhood, and is totally unnatural.

This means that if you are in a body being identified with a body, believing bodies are separate people, you are literally LOOKING AT the denial of the laws of God. You are looking at the opposite of the golden rule, manifested as images of forms walking around, testifying that separation is real. The body ITSELF is nothing less than a demonstration of the idea of being completely separate.

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind"

"This separating off is symbolized, in your perception, by a body which is clearly separate and a thing apart. Yet what this symbol REPRESENTS is but your wish to BE apart and separate."

Therefore just the mere sight of a body is enough to tempt you into the belief that God's law has been broken, the Golden Rule does not apply to anyone, and you are NOT in any way sharing anything with your brothers. You don't even have to act or relate to people or treat people a certain way for God's law to be broken by the mere appearance of the body.

Therefore, as the course is teaching, if you see a body, you are seeing WITH specialness, with selfishness, and thus with the ego. And the result is false perception, which fixates on physical form and makes bodies real to you. Upon seeing this, you have already believed in separation, and now the body is lit up and appears to you as a separation device, anchoring and fixing your brother into a prison within space and time, and cutting you off from them.

As soon as you are relating on a basis of "I am not you", ie your body is separate from my body, and I see you AS a body, and regard myself as my body, and we are NOT each other, we are in a state of special relationship. And that literally means we are at war. We have withdrawn the shared part of ourselves from each other and have gone to our separate corners, ready to fight.

We are at war merely by the very fact that we are identifying who and what we are with a device for separation, and have therefore believed that we ARE separate, and therefore are different, and thus not equals, and thus competitors.

Any time that I associate anything at all exclusively with a body, whether it be my own or that of another, I am in the ego and at war. I am having a special relationship, taking sides, judging, projecting guilt, attacking, accusing, and trying to destroy. Just by seeing a body and regarding it as the anchor and prison wall which is surrounding and sectioning off you or another, you are taking sides.

Once you've taken sides, you will not be able to help but relate to the other person AS a body, ie as a separated off, exclusive, isolated, distinctly separate being. One with whom you are NOT sharing, are not one, and they are NOT seen OR recognized as being a part of yourself. The entire vision of recognition and enlightenment which would show you that your brother IS part of you, is obscured by the body.

"the BODY of the other, ALREADY a severely limited perception of him"

"For sin is the IDEA you are alone, and separated OFF from what is whole."

Then you will proceed to go to war. You will find it effortless to accuse someone of being, doing, having, making, causing something, which ONLY they are doing, and you are not. You will now be into the realm of "getting away with murder", because it now seems that what applies to the other does NOT apply to you. What applies to what their body is doing, is not what your body is doing. Their separated-off will is now disconnected from your own, and you are not sharing or cooperating or willing in accord. Therefore you are against each other.

The loss of the awareness that you are one with your brother has devastating consequences. As soon as you have slipped away from unity ie holy relationship even slightly, you've pulled away from being joined to the other and have identified yourself as exclusive. That exclusivity is selfish and special, and will manifest as a body, which will show up in the mind to testify HOW you are separated off from the other. The body literally symbolizes your separateness.

"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."

By believing that you are not your brother, you are not a part of him and he is not a part of you, you cannot help but see yourself and your brother as separated off by a body. This identifies both of you with your bodies, and holds you apart from each other like inmates in separate prison cells. This is a breakdown in communication and an attack on love. It is a lack of relationship and a disconnect from each other.

It doesn't matter if the other person is someone you are allegedly married to, a spouse or partner, a lover, a sibling or child or parent, some stranger or neighbor, a boss or remote stranger, any time that we are unaware of our oneness with each other we have moved inside an entirely separate thought system of separation, in which the ONLY culture is "me not you".

Nor will you be able to sufficiently repair the relationship and bring it to a state of holiness WITHOUT questioning whether or not you and your brother are a body. The belief that they ARE their body, automatically cuts them off from you, and your believing this is HOW you imprison them.

"The special relationship is a device for limiting YOUR self to a body, and for limiting your perception of others to THEIRS."

"For the ego would limit everyone TO a body for ITS purposes, and, while you think it HAS a purpose, you will choose to utilize the means by which IT tries to turn its purpose into accomplishment."

"As long as you believe that, to be with a body, is companionship, you will be COMPELLED to attempt to keep your brother IN his body, HELD THERE BY GUILT."

No matter what you think your relationship is, regardless of how close or intimate you seem to be with another body-person, you are NOT intimate if you are not one. You are also not happily married if you are married to a body. Nor are you head over heels in love if what you're in love with is a body. To love a body is to separate yourself from the other person, to NOT SEE them, and to keep them at arm's length, pun intended.

If you want to overcome the conflict, the war, the fighting, the disagreements, the arguments, the special hate, the special love, the lack of communication and connection, your only choice is to transcend bodies. You have to get your mind out of the separation-oriented culture and resume an entirely opposite culture based on the Golden Rule. You have to learn that you ARE part of the other person, neither of you is separated off BY a body, and the bodies are not even there. You have to see yourself INCLUDED in them as you look upon them, and NOT look to their bodies to identify them.

If you are heavily into the association that the person IS their body, and you've bound their identity to it, and every time you see the body you think that's them, you have a lot of work to do. And it could take some considerable time to undo all the ways that you've taught yourself to separate people off, bind them to physical objects, identify them by those objects, and therefore stay separate from them.

The ego culture of exclusivity and separateness is completely opposite to God's natural culture of sharing and unity. Bodies cannot and will not ever depict or accomplish God's culture. They have to be bypassed and transcended and overlooked. Your whole sense of who and what you are has to expand to INCLUDE others. And then how you relate to them, WHO you are defending, WHAT you are relating with and to, radically changes.

"Minds need not bodies to communicate."

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU."

If you have relationship issues which, guaranteed, every body-to-body relationship HAS, the real problem is THE BODY. Allowing, supporting, and facilitating the use of the body as a separation device, anchoring people TO bodies, is the whole foundation of your relationship woes. Nor can you overcome those woes and KEEP the body. You have to be willing to stop identifying people with bodies, including yourself, and including your "loved ones."

"The body cannot KNOW. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds you."

Any time that you fall for the trap of believing "that person is not me", because you've seen their body and have witnessed to the belief that their body IS SEPARATE FROM YOU, you have gone into the ego culture of separation and war. Any time that you do not recognize your brother as yourself, you will fall into a special relationship. Any time that you can see PAST the bodies, and identify the person with a SHARED IDENTITY in Christ, which is part of your own identity as Christ, you have moved into holiness and union.

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of ***loving your neighbor as yourself***. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

"***It is impossible for a Child of God to love his neighbor EXCEPT as himself.*** That is why the healer's prayer is, "let me know this brother as I know myself."

If you want to perform miracles, you have to transcend the entire mindset, thought system and culture of "separate me versus them". You have to join minds with the other so that your mind can share its light with the other mind and heal it. You cannot save or be saved without doing this, and bodies will always interfere with this.

If you pay any attention to the body AT ALL, you are looking at and emphasizing the separation. The body is separation's symbol. It is the wall around the mind that keeps it separated off from other minds. As long as you are having relationships WITH BODIES, you are not having real relationships with your brothers as God created them.

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used ONLY as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function. For minds NEED not the body to communicate. ***The sight that SEES the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship***. And while you look upon each other thus, the means and end have NOT been brought in line."

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, ***keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time***, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master."

"Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

"The urgency is only in dislodging your minds from their FIXED POSITION here."

"The special relationship is totally without meaning WITHOUT A BODY. And, if you VALUE it, you must also VALUE THE BODY."

"To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

"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."

"And BOTH of you stand there before Him now, to let HIM draw aside the veil that SEEMS to keep you separate and apart."

"If you WITHHOLD agreement, and accept the part YOU play in making sickness real, the other mind cannot project its guilt without your aid in LETTING it perceive itself as separate and apart from YOU. Thus is the body NOT perceived as sick by BOTH your minds, from SEPARATE points of view. UNITING with a brother's mind prevents the CAUSE of sickness, and perceived effects."

MY SICKNESS IS MY RESPONSIBILITY

OTHER PEOPLE'S SICKNESS IS THEIR RESPONSIBILITY

YOU CAN’T WAKE PEOPLE UP FOR THEM

Jesus has the power to undo all sickness in a brother right now, BUT WILL NOT if they do not want it. Love cannot enter where it is not welcome!

I am responsible for everything I experience. Other people are responsible for everything they experience. This is directly supportive of the secret to salvation, that "we are doing this to ourselves".

All sickness we are experiencing is something we are doing TO OURSELF.

Right now, God is 100% awake, and because of this, it IS IMPOSSIBLE that there be sickness in any mind anywhere. In reality anyway. However, Sons of God have the illusory "ability" to DENY GOD. When they do so, they put denial in place, which is a block to life, which implements sickness. This is a FREE WILL CHOICE.

Love does not force anyone to be healed of this against their will. Jesus will simply WAIT for us until we are ready to accept the truth.

This is also why we must have A LITTLE WILLINGNESS, because only when we are WILLING to receive the truth, can the Holy Spirit take the opportunity to heal us. And he WILL take any opportunity we give him, no matter how small. But if we do not give that willingness, we will stay in our illusions of sickness for as long as we choose to against His will.

If we are not willing with God, doing God's will, we are willing against God. That's the entire point of the separation, the idea of sin being that we willed against God (yes, its fiction). If we BELIEVE it, individually, we will enter into a dream of suffering and death. And sickness will feature heavily in that dream because it is what we choose. It won't be real sickness at all, but we'll believe it is, using it as a device for keeping God's love at bay. Sickness is a DEFENSE against the truth. A block to awareness.

To understand this correctly REQUIRES that you believe that there are multiple sons of God, each with their own individual free will. Because if you don't, it will not make sense. To be able to have "your own choice" as to whether you are WILLING to receive healing, your own choice as to whether to ALLOW LOVE IN, is necessary in order to have a "separate will" which acts against God's will. There are many separate wills.

This is also required in order to understand how Jesus could wake up completely and yet that the rest of us are dragging our feet in snoozeville. We do not have the free will to set the curriculum ("learning to love"), but we DO have the free will to DELAY it or to choose WHEN to take it. That means we can choose NOT to accept God's will or God's healing. We can deliberately KEEP sickness if we want to, against God's will, and against Jesus's will. And it is true that there is NOTHING they will or can do about this, except gently lead us to see the error of our ways over time.

Jesus tells us that our will is AS POWERFUL as His, and that this is why he cannot forcibly take away our fears or sicknesses against our will. If we want them or hold onto them, he cannot take them. We have to be WILLING TO LET GO. Just because we are using our powerful will to make an illusion of being weak and little and powerless, doesn't mean our will is diminished at all. Mind retains its creative power at all times. Jesus CANNOT and WILL NOT go against this.

This means that even though AWARENESS OF LOVE can be complete in one brother (e.g. Jesus), it can be highly absent in another, at the same time. "Miracles are gifts given by those who temporarily have more, to those who temporarily have less." This is because IT IS POSSIBLE in illusions for some individuals to be MORE AWAKE THAN OTHERS. That means, it is NOT TRUE, that one person's healed perception automatically heals everyone. It does not. It OFFERS healing to everyone, but other people CAN REFUSE IT. And they CAN retain forms of sickness as long as they want "against your will."

Awakening to the awareness of love's presence cannot extend to the entire sonship UNTIL the sonship is FREELY WILLING to receive it, every single "individual son" has to choose it and be willing to accept it. IF they do not, the sonship remains incomplete, and there's nothing it can do about it other than to keep OFFERING love and waiting patiently for the rest of the sonship to wake up. Love is not forceful. It has INFINITE PATIENCE, which would not be NEEDED unless people weren’t so resistant.

It is true AT SOME LEVEL that your mind is ONE with the mind of others. That you share a mind. You share a mind with Jesus. However, awareness of that sharing can only be fully experienced when both of you are completely purified and healed. And then you will SHARE that state of love.

But until then, it is perfectly possible within illusions for you to REJECT that union, to deny reality, and to choose against God's will. Thus you will retain your own freely chosen sickness and problems, regardless of whether you are surrounded by infinite love and healing or not. God surrounds us RIGHT NOW with unlimited healing, and yet we STILL keep projecting images of sickness in order to REFUSE IT.

This is also why it was possible for Jesus to go around giving a GIFT OF HEALING to those who were suffering, sick, missing limbs, blind, even dead, unable to help themselves due to their own unawareness that they were doing this to themselves, and yet who had enough FAITH in HIS ability, enough trust, enough willingness, to ALLOW Him to heal them for them. You do NOT need to be fully awake in order to receive a miracle! And you CAN only receive it if you TRULY WANT IT.

"The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it.."

Having enough FAITH i.e. trust and WILLINGNESS to receive HELP, from outside of yourself, from a brother who has more love than you do right now, who is more ABLE to help right now, is enough to RECEIVE help from beyond your own current abilities. All you need is ENOUGH trust to allow the Holy Spirit HIMSELF to perform the miracle FOR YOU, from beyond your awareness, showing up as demonstrations of TANGIBLE CHANGES (witnesses), which helps you to learn that HE REALLY IS THERE, and HE REALLY CAN HEAL. This develops trust.

Jesus went around performing miracles for those who temporarily had less, who temporarily were blind, who temporarily were sinful, who temporarily were UNAWARE of the whole truth. He did NOT do this by having a mind which was "pure yet contained sick people". His mind could NOT have been WHOLE, if it was "one with sick people", or had "sick parts" in it. The presence of sick parts in his mind would've rendered him UNCONSCIOUS, just as the presence of ego persona/shadow in our own mind right now renders us UNABLE to be aware of the WHOLE of our identity. Mis-identifying with ego BLINDS YOU. Jesus was WHOLE MINDED, and yet could still perceive the "unwholeness" others were experiencing, without their unwholeness affecting HIS.

Jesus had true perception. Jesus could SEE. He was aware of the truth. He was able to RECOGNIZE that sickness is a complete illusion, not real, and posing no problem whatsoever. This gave HIM this ability to extend the HOLY SPIRIT who is the mechanism of miracles, to perform a healing WHERE it was welcome. And where it was not welcome, HE COULD NOT PERFORM ANY MIRACLES. He had to leave entire villages in suffering because their minds were too resistant to receive healing. His state of awakening did not FORCE anyone else to wake up!

Even if He saw those other people as one with Him, even if He knew them to be "himself" or "ourself", even if He was connected to the entire Power of God, there was NOTHING he could do to help those, at that time, who DID NOT WANT IT. This is because, YOU are responsible for YOUR sickness, and for your willingness. If you are unwilling, healing will not "happen to you". Sick people, with broken limbs and defective organs, will not be healed by your true perception, UNLESS they want it. And thinking that you are "healing yourself" by healing what is showing up "as their sickness" is NOT going to work if they do not want it, because IT IS THEIR RESPONSIBILITY. THEY MADE IT, NOT YOU.

You are responsible for choosing the atonement for yourself. You are responsible for being WILLING to REJOIN the sonship's oneness for yourself. You are responsible for every sickness you experience within yourself, NOT outside of you in others. You are responsible for your own belief in sin. You never attack anyone else, you never affect anyone else, you never do anything to anyone else. And the reverse is true. No-one ever affects you, no-one ever does anything against your will. You are not at the effect of the world. And no-one is at the effect of you. Your attack does not affect others whatsoever, and nor does your love, unless THEY CHOOSE WHAT THEY WILL EXPEIRNCE.

Love can be shared, WHEN it is welcome, and when it is welcome, the person is effectively giving it to themselves. It can be given to those who have a "lack" of it, BY those who have an abundance of it, BECAUSE people are in different states of perception simultaneously. This IS possible because people have an individual will and mind, even if at the highest level they are the One Son. Jesus’s resurrection DID NOT CURE EVERYONE because they did not want to be cured. YOU MUST CHOOSE IT.

Trying to bring about healing by assuming that other people are "you" and therefore their sickness is "your sickness" and that if you undo "that sickness" it will heal the other person, is a twisting of what happens. First of all, it's true that you and your brother are one, yet you are BROTHERS, with your own free will. Secondly, "their sickness" is THEIR CHOICE, not yours, and it is NOT PART OF YOUR MIND, and it is NOT YOUR SICKNESS OR SIN.

When you project YOUR sin, it DOES NOT LEAVE YOUR MIND. Ideas leave not their source. IT stays inside of you. You become split minded and perceive this sin as a separate attacker, attacking some other split off part of yourself. You interact with it as though it is outside of this part of you, as though not yours, but it is ALWAYS IN YOU. It never ever even leaves you and goes over to someone else.

It does NOT put sickness into other people against their will! To suggest you can heal someone else’s sickness "because its really your own" is actually to suggest YOU CAN MAKE SOMEONE SICK AGAINST THEIR WILL AND TAKE IT AWAY AGAIN. This is FALSE! If someone else were choosing never to be sick, your attempted projection of sin could not put sickness into them. And if someone else was choosing never to be sick, YOU COULD STILL be believing that you are a sinner and STILL be trying to project your sin and STILL seeing it in the other person. Your projection has NOTHING to do with other people’s state of mind. Withdrawing your projected sin WILL NOT HEAL THEM, if they have chosen to be sick on their own and want to keep it. Go ahead and try to heal someone who does not want to be healed. It will fail!

Otherwise, if someone could be causing someone else to be sick against their will, which is an EGO BELIEF, someone's sickness would INFECT JESUS by the power of their will. This is an extension of the idea that we CAN sin and hurt God, which is impossible. Our sickness is OUR CHOICE against ourselves. Thirdly, just because you RECOGNIZE that their sickness is entirely an illusion, that does not disappear it FOR THEM if they continue to WILL TO KEEP IT. You cannot override their will. You getting healed WILL NOT wake everyone up. You will wake up FROM them, FROM the illusion, FROM the ego, INTO a state of awareness, but if other people choose to stay in the ego, THEY WILL.

The ACT of attempting to undo that sickness, by cancelling it or not believing in it or asserting it is not there or pushing it away or shining love onto it or whatever, that ACT of trying to FORCE IT TO GO is actually the EGO attempting to have power OVER something it made real. This is the attempt to "heal to destroy", to first make real then try to undo what you made real. That’s you fighting with your own sin. It won’t heal the person’s sickness or yours.

The Holy Spirit MUST BE INVOLVED in all miracles, because He is the mechanism of miracles. HE is the one who heals. HE is the one who is capable of raising the dead. He must be the one who performs the healing of the mind because healing must come from outside of separation. While He does not perceive sickness as REAL, He still nevertheless KNOWS that people are experiencing nightmares and that they NEED HEALING, in spite of the fact that HE is already in a state of TOTAL AWARENESS AND LOVE. He will not FORCE himself onto anyone, and just because HE is healed/healing it does not mean PEOPLE WANT TO RECEIVE HIM. This is why we have to CHOOSE to be willing to listen to his voice rather than the ego. It’s up to us.

It is difficult to accept that some people DO NOT WANT TO BE HAPPY. It is difficult to accept that some people WILL AGAINST GOD AND REFUSE TO ACCEPT LOVE. It is difficult to accept that PEOPLE CHOOSE TO BE SICK and that they want to keep being sick to protect themselves. It is difficult to accept PEOPLE DON'T WANT A MIRACLE, and they DON’T WANT YOUR HEALING. And that's their right. And their freedom. And we are to respect that and be patient in waiting for them to BECOME willing. Love isn't forceful. Miracles don't happen to people against their will.

Believe me I've tried... I've tried many times to heal someone who is very sick, and who was not ready to heal, and it did not work. It was very upsetting to me that I could not heal it. It was a difficult lesson personally, but a necessary one, because until we can see how healing might FAIL (be blocked by the recipient), we may not come to LET GO of the belief in sickness for ourselves.

I eventually asked Jesus why this wasn't working. Despite many prayers and attempts at miracles. Even one time I did a miracle-working act where angels came to help and I felt it was very powerful, and Jesus said that "it was fully given". But.... just because it was fully given, DOES NOT mean it was fully received. I asked Him, why didn't it seem to work.

Why was the person still sick?! And I don’t mean... why was I still believing in sickness... the question was, why did that person still maintain an illusion of symptoms of sickness.

His answer simply... "they are not ready to receive it."

This was discouraging, because I used to believe, like many, that it SHOULD BE POSSIBLE to HEAL EVERONE if I just learn HOW. But it does not work that way. It was, however, encouraging to me to also be told that at some point THEY WILL become ready to receive it, which is heartwarming, but we still have to learn, just because WE are waking up to love and are willing to be miraculous, it does NOT mean other people will suddenly stop being sick or unloving. It is their lesson. It is their choice. We have to allow other people to be sick IF they want to. It's not God's will, but it's that person's will. God does not condone sickness, he offers to HEAL IT RIGHT NOW, but people refuse.

Trying to heal everyone, or to "perform miracles indiscriminately", is what Jesus tells us NOT to do. He knows WHO is willing and ready to receive them, and He will send the appropriate WILLING people to us. This won't be EVERYONE. It will only be those who are ready to receive. Some people are, some people aren't. We won’t get to be hero saviors or "ego healers" because other people are NOT playing along with our fantasy.

And just because Jesus COULD POTENTIALLY heal everyone in an instant, THEY DO NOT WANT IT. I asked Jesus time and again to heal someone and do you know what he said, "I cannot". And I asked why - why would someone so powerful and capable and miraculous NOT be able to heal it. "They don’t want it."

Sorry to say... this is why TIME is still ticking over with events happening and lessons being learned RATHER THAN God simply snapping his fingers and waking everyone up RIGHT NOW "against their will". God ALLOWED US to have our free will dream illusion of separation, knowing that at some point we would return to him unscathed. It is not happening because God wills it. If God had his way we never would’ve even DREAMED of separation. But WE had the free will to choose to pretend it’s possible, and it’s still our free will to keep doing that, EACH OF US, if we want to. Individually.

So please let's get off this perspective that if you heal YOUR perception, everyone else will suddenly be free of sickness. That if YOU don't perceive "sickness", you will not SEE anyone suffering with sickness. That if you gain true perception for yourself, you will be incapable of seeing anyone suffering. Or that their sickness is part of your own mind and therefore you need healing. You are only responsible for what YOU DO TO YOURSELF. And even though at a HIGHER LEVEL they are one with you, THEIR CHOICE is their own.

You will still see the form of people’s bodies being projected with sick characteristics, because that's the will of you brother! But you won't see it AS real sickness, you'll see THROUGH it, and recognize it is JUST AN ILLUSION. Just because you don’t believe sickness is REAL, doesn’t mean you will be incapable of seeing that OTHER PEOPLE still think it is real, or that they are still projecting bodies that are sick. Jesus was perfectly CAPABLE of SEEING people who were in need, people who were suffering, and people who were dying or dead, EVEN THOUGH His perception did not INTERPRET those things as reality. Your recognition of it being an illusion WILL NOT BE SHARED by them until they are WILLING AND READY.

Believe me I've tried many many times to heal indiscriminately and to alleviate suffering and it's not necessarily because I can't, but because the people involved were not willing to be healed. THEY HAVE THE POWER TO REFUSE LOVE. They already HAVE refused love. They already DID reject God's eternal life and totally healed condition. They already HAVE attempted to block miracles and to reject life. (Yes, its an illusion) Even GOD did not overthrow their free will to do this. (yes I know its an illusion, didn't happen)... but God RESPECTS free will and will ALLOW people to keep being sick IF THEY WANT TO. And so did Jesus.

This unfortunately is a hard lesson to learn, that some people simply do not want to be well, want to be sick, want to keep being sick, and there IS nothing you can do about that right now. All you can do is keep praying and offering and extending love that MAYBE they will accept and receive it BY their will, and therefore CHOOSE to be well BY THEIR OWN WILL, and therefore CONCUR with the will of God, and thus RECEIVE the love that heals them. Receiving is a choice. You can still attempt to perform miracles, but even if you give a bucketload of love, it STILL won’t produce effects if it is not welcome or goes against the person’s will.

Until you can receive the atonement or even a small piece of atonement on one particular issue you will not be willing to RECEIVE LOVE AT ALL. The first time that I did a really thorough forgiveness and took it all the way to the atonement principle, becoming WILLING TO ACCEPT THAT IT IS TRUE that I was innocent on a particular topic, I became willing to RECEIVE LOVE FROM GOD finally on that topic, and Jesus said to me "Now you will be able to perform miracles". Because I had be WILLING TO RECEIVE for myself. "You can only give the miracles you have received".!

We can offer healing. We cannot force it. We will not undo everyone’s suffering just by undoing our own. Even if we go to Heaven as Jesus did, knowing sickness is impossible, brothers will STILL be dreaming of sickness for as long as they want to. We can but OFFER love to them and pray for them and send miracles to them, but it’s up to them to let go of their resistance, to CLAIM the healing that has already been given.

God has ALREADY GIVEN ALL HEALING, He has already given eternal life, and yet we refuse it. It’s our choice

The world of physical form is a projection of the ego thought system. It is based on a belief in separation, which has produced 3D images of physical objects, all of which appear to be different and unique. And every form screams "we are not one" or "I am not the same."

Miracle mindedness, on the other hand, is an opposite state, in which there is no regard for differences, forms or appearances. All differences are completely ignored. All forms are recognized as a deception. All illusions are the same. All seeming levels and degrees and variations and intensities and difficulties and measures are completely irrelevant.

The world of bodies is the world of form. And form takes on many forms, being the forms of the same one error. The single belief in separation has produced a fragmented world, with an entire hierarchy of differences. Big and small and heavy and light and round and square and near and far and every other conceivable difference is represented here. But they are all forms of separation.

Separateness produces form, and form pictures the ways in which the separate parts are separate. One object sticks out more, another is smaller, another a different color. One has extra parts, which the others lack. One moves in a different way, while the others seem more or less alive. And this results in an entire world filled with contrast and conflict, competition and inequality. A world of a trillion truths.

"Illusions are always illusions of differences."

"Where do all these differences come from? Certainly they seem to be in the world outside."

"The belief in order of difficulties is the basis for the world's perception. It rests on differences; on uneven background and shifting foreground, on unequal heights and diverse sizes, on varying degrees of darkness and light, and thousands of contrasts in which each thing seen competes with every other in order to be recognized. A larger object overshadows a smaller one. A brighter thing draws the attention from another with less intensity of appeal. And a more threatening idea, or one conceived of as more desirable by the world's standards, completely upsets the mental balance. What the body's eyes behold is only conflict. Look not to them for peace and understanding."

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation."

"He has one answer to appearances regardless of their form, their size, their depth, or any attribute they seem to have"

"You HAVE no problems, though you THINK you have. And yet you COULD not think so, if you saw them vanish one by one, WITHOUT regard to size, complexity, or place and time, or ANY attribute which you perceive that makes each one seem different from the rest."

"the concept of size exists only in a plane that is itself unreal."

But miracle mindedness is not deceived by any of this. It is a state of mind of wholeness, not fragmentation. It completely ignores all forms of difference, all measures of value, all sense of degrees and proportions and ratios. It has absolutely no regard for the infinite ways in which separation shows up. It does not buy into the temptation to believe that one thing is NOT another thing, seeing ALL illusions as the same and equal.

To live in a world of form is to live as though surrounded by many different things. Countless objects, each with many parts and sub-parts. Even to the extent of all things being formed from tiny little microscopic parts. All of them different, all of them unique. No two objects are even alike.

And so you believe this is normal and natural. You think this is reality. You accept it as if the form of an object defines its meaning, its true inherent nature. As if apples are apples and oranges are oranges, and they have no thing in common. As if cars are not houses and dogs are not cats and Earth is not Mars and one body is not another body.

But moving toward miracle mindedness must entail the questioning of appearances. The questioning of ALL forms. Every disguise. Every temptation to believe that the form of an object is truth. To recognize that all objects are disguises. They are all projected images from an egoic belief in separation. Not one of them is anything else other than just another form of the same one error, the same one problem, the same one illusion.

This must entail moving away from a dependency on different forms. Believing that life is normal when you use a car key to open the car door, and a house key to open your home. Or that one food is different to another. Or that some kinds of weather are better. Or that some relationships are more special. Or that one piece of clothing is different to another and changes your whole appearance.

This whole "lifestyle" of living in a world of differences, has to go. We can't continue believing that there are in fact many things here. That is the deception. We can't keep believing that we're surrounded with an utter buffet of choices. As if there are even any different choices at all. As if things are really any different.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives."

We have to stop being dependent on unique special forms, and particular options, and conditions and styles and themes and preferences. We have to let go all prejudices and all ways that we make some parts of the world special.

We should not believe that one form of sickness is different to another, just based on how it looks or its severity or its size or appearance or how it seemed to arrive. We should not be deceived that a dead body is more dead than a living one. Or that a small wound is more difficult to heal than a gaping hole. Or that there is any such thing as "orders of difficulty."

The illusion of separation has not only taken on many forms, it has resulted in a vast hierarchy. A tremendous amount of different values, different amounts, severities, intensities, difficulties, degrees of problem, sizes of activity, degree of value or credit, amount of importance, etc. We've built our whole lives on the basis of fictional differences, buying into illusion after illusion of how "this is not the same as that".

We have to put all of this aside and recognize that ALL FORMS ARE LIES. Every way that one form says "this is how I am not the same", is a lie. They are ALL doing this. Every object is doing this, claiming to be different somehow. And we buy into it. And now we believe in the differences, and set up a whole egoic thought structure of rules and laws and limits of freedom, about how one thing is more or less something than something else.

Miracle mindedness is the state you reach when all of this is undone. When you are not convinced by ANY forms. When you see clearly and recognize the truth that ALL forms are a temptation to believe something that isn't true. You are not deceived by size or weight or severity or strength or proportions or values or importance or colors or shapes or types or classifications. You just put them ALL into one category - they are all equally unreal, equally the same, ONE ILLUSION, ONE PROBLEM, ONE SOLUTION.

This is why in miracle mindedness there are NO ORDERS. There is no hierarchy, no levels, no separations, no divisions. There is no sense of one thing being different to another. No belief in the deception that a slightly broken body is different to a severely damaged one. Why raising the dead is really on different than curing a headache. Why converting water into wine is effortless. Why walking on water is no more special or different than walking on land.

Once all things are equalized, once all differences no longer deceive, once all problems are recognized as one problem, once all forms are seen to be untrue, and once you stop living in a world of many reactions and many relationships and many separate conditions, your mind becomes WHOLE. It becomes unified and singular and "one with itself." It is not divided or twisted or mis-shapen by differences of any kind.

"You are one within yourself, and One with Him. Yours is the unity of all creation. Your perfect unity makes change in you impossible."

Such a mind is miraculous because it utterly ignores differences. It can have power over them all because it is not deceived by them. It sees that to change one small illusion is in fact NOT different to changing a "big one".

That to raise the dead is NOT really a bigger feat than curing a headache. And it is precicely this equality and singularity which gives the mind its POWER. A power which is derived from being undivided and singular. You are a singular whole unified one being, presently confronted with a world of many differences and separations, learning to disregard all of these alien separations so that you can be restored to ONE SINGULAR STATE. One mind. One voice. One will. One power. One wholeness. One capability. And this capability has the power to move mountains, just as much as to reconfigure objects, or materialize different body images, or to do anything at all. Because a mind free from differences is a mind free from limits, and there is nothing your holiness cannot do.

The course is moving us away from fragmentation, towards INTEGRATION. Away from a split mind, towards WHOLENESS. Away from many, towards ONE. Away from separation, towards ATONEMENT. Away from hierarchies, towards UNIFORMITY. Away from exclusion, towards INCLUSION. And away from isolation, towards UNION. Away from rejection towards JOINING. Away from selfishness towards SHARING. Away from the eseparation, towards GOD.

"In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

"When you maintain that there MUST be order of difficulty in miracles, all you mean is that there are some things you would WITHHOLD from truth."

"As long as you would have this be, so long will the ILLUSION of order of difficulty in miracles REMAIN with you. For YOU have established this order in REALITY"

"there is no order of difficulty in healing."

"Once the professional therapist has realized that minds are joined, he can also recognize that order of difficulty in healing is meaningless."

"To understand there is no order of difficulty in healing, he must also recognize the equality of himself and the patient."

"This is the message of the crucifixion; there is no order of difficulty in miracles."

"The first thing to remember about miracles is that there is no order of difficulty among them. One is not harder or bigger than another. They are all the same."

"To the Holy Spirit THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES."

"Without a range, order of difficulty IS meaningless, and there must BE no range in what you offer to each other."

"There can be no order of difficulty in healing merely because all sickness is illusion. Is it harder to dispel the belief of the insane in a larger hallucination as opposed to a smaller one?"

"By DEMONSTRATING to yourselves that THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES, you will convince yourselves that in your NATURAL state there IS no difficulty, because it is a state of Grace."

"Healing and Atonement are not related; they are identical. There is no order of difficulty in miracles because there are no degrees of Atonement. It is the one complete concept possible in this world, because it is the source of a wholly unified perception."

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles, for they ARE all the same."

"WHOLLY natural perception would show you instantly that order of difficulty in miracles is quite impossible, for it involves a contradiction of what miracles MEAN."

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles because all of God's Sons are of equal value, and their equality is their Oneness."

"He need make no distinctions among the problems he perceives, for He to Whom he turns with all of them recognizes no order of difficulty in resolving them."

"I raised the dead by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do."

"You will recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in miracles, when you have applied them to ALL situations. For there IS no situation to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them TO all situations, you will gain the REAL world."

"It is emphasized here that these differences have no effect at all on the miracle, which can heal any of them with equal ease. This is because of the miracle's inherent avoidance of within-error distinctions. Its SOLE concern is to distinguish between truth, on the one hand, and ALL kinds of error, on the other. This is why some miracles SEEM to be of greater magnitude than others. But remember the first point in this course, i.e., that there is no order of difficulty in miracles."

"The illusion of orders of difficulty is an obstacle the teacher of God must learn to pass by and leave behind."

"The world perceives orders of difficulty in EVERYTHING. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable."

"As you survey your inner world, merely let whatever thoughts cross your mind come into your awareness, each to be considered for a moment and then replaced by the next. Try not to establish any thought of hierarchy among them. "

"The concept of ANY sort of need HIERARCHY arose because, having made this fundamental error, he had already fragmented himself into levels with DIFFERENT needs. As he integrates, HE becomes one, and his ONE need becomes one accordingly."

"What is seen as "reality" is simply what the mind prefers. Its hierarchy of values is projected outward, and it sends the body's eyes to find it. The body's eyes will never see except through differences. Yet it is not the messages they bring on which perception rests. Only the mind evaluates their messages, so only the mind is responsible for seeing."

"Again, there is no order, but a SEEMING hierarchy of values."

"It is impossible that one illusion be LESS amenable to truth than are the rest. But it IS possible that some are given greater VALUE, and less willingly OFFERED to truth for healing and for help. NO illusion has ANY truth in it. Yet it appears some are MORE true than others, although this clearly makes no sense at all. All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is PREFERENCE, NOT reality."

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate, and has a different set of thoughts which SETS HIM OFF from others. This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are MORE valuable, and THEREFORE true."

"It is not a thought which judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real."

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal."

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs."

There is a statement in A Course in Miracles which describes how God thinks. This is a very important statement because it gives us a strong idea of the workings of God's mind. And let's not forget that GOD IS REALITY, so how God functions is how reality functions...

"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."

Notice that it says there are PARTS in God's mind. EACH of those parts, which are therefore MANY parts, contains the WHOLE. God thinks of "whole parts". God has many thoughts in his mind, in reality, which produce many parts, each of which contains the same ONE whole.

When you ponder what kind of relationships are going on between these parts, you may realize that this is THE SAME as the holographic principle. The principle states that there is a whole, and the whole also has parts, and the whole is in every part, and every part contains or IS the whole, and therefore every part is whole.

If you read up a bit on how true holograms work, and I don't mean hollywood's "projected images" which are NOT holograms, you find the same thing happening. In a holographic image, such as those on your credit cards, EACH PART of the image actually contains THE WHOLE image. All of the information is crammed into each speck of the picture. Every part is whole.

That is very different to how things usually work in the world. Usually a part of something does NOT contain the whole. Usually parts are only PART OF the whole, are limited, finite, and lacking some of the information. For example an apple lacks the qualities of a banana. Apples don't contain bananas parts, nor do bananas contain apple parts. But it's not like that in God.

In reality, according to ACIM, God's mind is unlike spacetime. God's mind HAS parts which DO contain the whole. EACH PART IS the whole. Notice that it does not say that there "are no parts" in God. It quite explicitly says that the whole of God is in EVERY PART. And therefore there are many parts in God. Yes, that means multiplicity, and no, that does not mean the same as duality.

There is a key difference between many whole parts in God, and duality. In duality, each of the parts is NOT the whole, and each of the parts does NOT contain the whole. The parts are all different and separate. They do not SHARE anything. Parts which do not share is duality, or illusion. But this does not mean that you have to get rid of parts, in general, in order to find the opposite of duality.

The opposite of "parts which do not share anything", is actually "parts which share everything." The TRUE opposite of duality, is not non-duality, it is a holographic system in which EVERYTHING IS SHARED by the parts.

To put it into other words, God is the whole, and God also contains parts, because God has a mind which has thoughts. God has many thoughts, not just one. Each of these thoughts is a part of God's mind. Each of these thoughts is alive, and is a thought of life, and is in fact a living being. Each thought is a thought of WHOLENESS, because God is whole and can only think in whole terms, so EVERY thought contains the whole of God.

Therefore, as God thinks a thought, a WHOLE BEING comes into existence, which is a PART OF God, AND which shares the whole of God. "I am forever host to God." Sharing the whole of God is what "your inheritance" means. Each part of God inherits the whole of God. Each part of God, each thought of God, is A SON OF GOD - a soul. Or one of God's creations.

"God created His Sons (plural in reality) 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 because they were created neither partially nor in part."

Notice how ACIM states clearly that God has many thoughts: "the extensions (plural)" "ALL His Thoughts (pural)". This is a fact of reality. God has many thoughts. There is a multiplicity of thoughts in God and this is completely natural and real.

Notice how ACIM also states that all of his thoughts (his parts), EACH of his parts, "are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other". EACH son of God, each thought of God, is WHOLE WITHIN ITSELF, AND it shares the whole with the other sons of God. There is one whole - God - which is shared FULLY, by each and every thought of God. All of them are united (whole, one) within themselves as WHOLE BEINGS, AND are united (whole, one) across their RELATIONSHIPS with each other as a SONSHIP.

Notice how ACIM also states that each of these many thought-creations are not created "in part", or "partially". They are fully created. Which causes them to be, in effect, "fully standalone whole beings". In effect, "separate beings". I know people don't like the word separation but, it does not always mean ego. If there are separate beings (thoughts of God) which are THE WHOLE, simultaneously "many and one", their separateness is there at the same time as their unity. And THAT is what most people find hard to get their head around.

This is where most ACIM students fall flat on their faces attempting to understand how it can be possible that something can be separate AND one at the same time. It is not possible on Earth, for example, so we are not used to this idea. When two objects are separate, they are not one. When you join them together, they become one, and are no longer two. So we think that nothing can be one AND two at the same time. This has become HOW WE THINK. But it is NOT how God thinks. And thinking that God thinks (that reality functions) in this way is an error.

God does NOT think in terms of "either this or that" or "this is not that" or "it can be this or that but not both". Those are ego thoughts based in a separation thought system. They are ideas of parts which do not share anything. They are ideas of a lack of unity and oneness. They are selfish egoic unsharing ideas. And they also lead to a majorly false conclusion, that you would have to get rid of the many in order to have the one. That oneness means "not two" and "non-dual" and "not many". That is completely false.

It's false because God's mind does not function in the same way that spacetime functions. God's mind does NOT follow laws of separation of objects. God DOES have many thoughts, DOES contain many parts, AND STILL maintains oneness at the same time. That's what's so hard for many people to get their heads around, to understand it logically and to make sense of it.

It will not make sense when you think of it in normal logical terms. It will not make sense when you try to ask yourself, "is it this, or that?" It will not make sense when you demand that everything within God has to put be into one box, or another box, and that nothing can span the boxes. It will also not make sense when you demand that it's not POSSIBLE for there to be one AND many at the same time, or have an ASSUMPTION that reality HAS to be "only one thing" in order to have oneness.

This is why many parts of ACIM seem to be "contradictions", when considered using normal egoic logic. It becomes apparent that they are NOT CONTRADICTIONS when you consider them in terms of the holgoraphic principle. Because the holographic principle allows there to be MANY AND ONE at the same time, through sharing of the same whole, which DEFIES the contradiction. And btw the proper term for this relationship is MIRACULOUSNESS, which is the true nature of God.

"God has but one Son, knowing them all as One. Only God Himself is more than they, but they are not less than He is."

"Each Soul knows God completely (each part is the whole). This IS the miraculous power of the Soul (holographic relationship = miraculous). The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking (separation-based logic), in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

This statement for example contains two major claims. 1) That God has only one son, and 2) That God knows ALL of his sons - meaning there are many of them. And since they are his sons, they are his direct creations, and MUST therefore exist in reality together. It goes on to reinforce that "they are not less", meaning there is more than one.

So now YOUR mind is going to look at this, and it's going to look at it WITH SEPARATION (alienating thinking). You're going to think in terms of, "it has to be either this, or that, and it can't be both". You will PROJECT SEPARATION onto it. You don't realize you do this because you do it all the time and have not questioning how you think, and have not realized that you are NOT thinking like God, and that your insistence on separating everything is corrupting reality.

So what you'll end up doing is you're going to try to SEPARATE OUT the two parts in the statement. You will identify that "God has one son", and you'll put that in one separate box, which does not SHARE with anything else. And then you will identify the idea "God has many sons", which you will put into a second SEPARATE box. THEN you will reason WITH THE EGO, that they can't both be true. That it has to either be one or many. That the two boxes do not share anything.

The conclusion that you'll come to, which will seem to make sense to you, based on how you think, is that EITHER God has one son OR many sons. And you will probably steer towards the "one son" because you see it as larger or more encompassing. Then you will side with HALF OF THE TRUTH, and HALF of ACIM's statements of fact, and claim that God only has one Son, and will go look and find quotes abut God having only one son, which you'll think backs up this idea. It's true, but it's not the whole story.

The truth is that in a holographic system, there is many AND one, that BOTH parts are true, that God does indeed only have one son, BUT, at the same time, that one son IS MANY sons. And their manyness coexists with their oneness. Without any ego in a PRE-SEPARATION STATE. This is because they SHARE EVERYTHING and overlap. Each son HOSTS all of God. Each son HAS everything. The many sons of God ARE the one son of God. They all make up the sonship. God experiences them as individual wholes AND as one whole son.

Note that there is no "exclusion" in this. Reality runs on laws of inclusion. Being the one son does NOT stop the many sons from being many. And being many sons does NOT imply they they are not one. In a holographic system the rules are very different. It is OKAY AND NATURAL for "many parts" to exist, provided they are ALSO THE WHOLE. It is the sharing of the wholeness that is the true ACIM definition of "oneness", NOT a "count of one to the exclusion of many".

This is largely why A Course in Miracles is NOT a non-duality teaching. Or to put it more accurately, non-duality only touches on HALF the story, identifying that there is a oneness, but with complete disregard for the many. Thus it focuses on only the wholeness of the hologram and not its parts. You can just as easily pull up many quotes about God's MANY creations, children, beings, individuals, minds etc, all of which are JUST AS VALID AND EQUAL as the quotes about the one son, AND are on the same level.

One of the very unfortunate things which happens when people cannot understand that God's reality is holographic and not linear, is that they cannot accept "the many" as being part of and coexisting with "the one". So they instead see the many as a separation idea, and separation in general becomes taboo. To remove all separation becomes a goal, EVEN IF it means destroying all of God's creations in the process. Driving everything toward "oneness only" EXCLUDES creation and is blind to reality's nature.

And then the only way to logically seem to RESOLVE the conflict, to undo the contradiction in the statements, is to relegate the many to the realm of the ego, wihch people think is the only place that manyness can exist. This does "make perfect sense" when you think in EGO TERMS, using separation-based logical reasoning, but it DOES NOT make sense in holographic terms. In holographic terms, it is a total mangling of A Course in Miracles, taking the perfectly valid whole parts of God's creation, his many whole children, and shoving them into a box with the ego, to try to get rid of them. This is a horrible BANDAID, and it turns FACTS INTO METAPHORS and REALITIES INTO ILLUSIONS.

This all leads to non-sense notions, which SEEM LIKE logical sense, that 1) there is only one son of God, 2) this one son must have split apart to form many, 3) the many sons is an ego illusion and not part of reality, 4) there is no-one else to have a relationship with, 5) when you wake up everyone is awake so you should selfishly focus on your own atonement etc.. Notice any popularly held beliefs here? Commonly distributed ideas of what ACIM is saying? Non-duality based interpretations handed down from teacher to teacher all making the same logical error?

This has literally become an entire MISREPRESENTATION of A Course in Miracles, taught by very prominent teachers the world over. It is a horrible logical bandaid placed over ACIM's holographic metaphysics by people who think using the ego's rules and do not even realize they're doing it. It has led to a "version" of ACIM that does not allow for sons of God or souls, does not permit free will, does not include relationships, does not support co-creators, does not acknowledge the Holy Spirit or Jesus, does not support performing miracles to help others, and in general points solely towards the non-dualistic eradication of God's Kingdom and the death of the self. Literally, it is UPSIDE DOWN and destructive and an attempt to destroy reality and its contents.

All of this has arisen PURELY because of a faulty logical reasoning, based on a lack of comprehension of the subtle SYSTEM of God's mind and its properties. God is not just another "space". God is not like space or time. God is transcendental and holographic in his nature. All of God thinks at once, and when all of God thinks, EACH thought contains all of God, because it is a thought OF wholeness BY wholeness. And this produces WHOLE creations, which are FULLY created, which are inherently therefore "independent individuals", but WHO ALSO are STILL the whole.

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in him."

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite, and everywhere without all limit."

Thus we have this perfectly legitimate and perfectly accurately worded statement in the urtext AND in FIP 3rd edition:

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless ***created separate beings*** who have everything ***individually***, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself created you."

Notice a few things here. It is stating that God does encompass all being - he is the whole of being, all of existence. It is stating that regardless of this fact, GOD HAS CREATED. It is stating also that God has created many things, because he has created a PLURAL of beings as his many thoughts. Note also that while it uses the term "separate beings", which is ENTIRELY VALID, because each of these beings IS a WHOLE BEING, this does NOT imply that these beings are egos or that they do not share in oneness. It also states that EACH of these whole beings "has everything individually", which again reflects the holographic principle that the whole is in every part and every part (being/self) is whole. And this of course does mean that EACH being is an INDIVIDUAL, but NOT CUT OFF.

This again goes on to confirm not only that God created individual beings, but also that individuality and having a SELF is perfectly natural. "I am still as God created me." As in the first quote I gave, "what is natural to him is natural to you". YOU have a self that lives in heaven. You also have brothers in heaven who have selves, as individuals. This is because each of God's MANY thoughts are living beings, and you have relationships of wholeness with these selves making them PART OF YOU as well. The whole of God is shared by EACH brother, making your brother contain the SAME whole as you, and therefore each brother IS you also, and is part of God - while still being a separate distinct brother.

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

This again is a seemingly highly cryptic and contradictory statement WHEN you consider it in terms of separate boxes. When you think about it with the ego, you come to false conclusions. When one brother is all brothers, it DOES NOT mean that there is a single person standing alone. Or more to the point, there IS a oneness, but there also are still MANY brothers, many in number. They ARE brothers because they share the same parent - the same whole in the hologram. EACH brother is a brother (whole part), all the brothers are equals (share the same whole as one), and they each contain EACH OTHER. But they are still many!

Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. This again is a holographic principle, not a linear principle. It means that there are in fact many minds "(all the minds God created one with me)", and EACH of those minds contains ALL the minds. The fact that EACH mind contains the WHOLE of mind, does NOT eradicate the fact that there are many minds. The manyness, and the oneness, exist SIMULTANEOUSLY in a holographic system. And God's mind IS a holgoraphic system.

Unfortunately all of this is very rarely understood by ACIM students. It is not something I properly understood until recent years after a great deal of exploration. I rarely hear ACIM people talking about this, and I even more rarely hear ACIM people understanding it. Yet it is absolutely the CORE of A Course in Miracles's metaphysics. That God is not a solitary lonely figure, but in fact has many thoughts and many children, many co-creators who even themselves have many children. That REALITY in fact comprises ONE AND MANY, and NOT JUST ONE. That oneness is ALSO manyness.

Until there is a full grasp of this, ACIM students will continue to misunderstand and misrepresent A Course in Miracles. This isn't just something that a select few teachers have done, it is very widespread among teachers and students at all levels. The lack of recognition that the WAY YOU THINK is firmly rooted in separation, is the real culprit. The fact that we are all so used to thinking in terms of "separation of objects", because the physical world is set up this way and it works very well when describing SEPARATE THINGS. But it is HORRENDOUS when it is used to describe a state of reality which is nothing like "the separation" of space.

It is solely because everyone thinks in compartmentalizing terms of "either this or that" or "not that" or "not both", which is thinking WITH AND LIKE the ego, that we've resulted in these extraordinary skewings of the ACIM teachings. Especially in terms of trying to foce reality into a non-dualistic model, which is completely inappropriate and inaccurate. Also in terms of the very basic and wrong interpretation that "oneness" means "there's only God". Yes there is only God.... PLUS the many parts of God which God shares all of himself with, which are MANY in number, AND which are fully "separate" creations. Non-duality is only HALF of the story.

Even the term "separation" has become taboo because people think "the separation" is a bad thing and getting rid of separation is a good thing. This is a fallacy because God in fact does include many separate parts. It's just that those parts are ALSO joined. They are separate, AND they are joined. The true logical system of God's mind and thus reality is not "either this or that". It"s "this is BOTH this AND that." This is what the Golden Rule is based on - what is true of me is true of you. Either/or always means ego, and both/and always is true to God. Using any kind of either/or logic to describe reality is an ABSOLUTELY FAILURE.

Major teachers of ACIM never realized this. They came to faulty conclusions about the nature of reality and taught it to many people. They used the ego to reason as to what reality is like, and came to egoic conclusions about God's system of thought. This led them AUTOMATICALLY to the ONLY conclusions that an egoic thought process COULD come to, because their LOGIC drove them there. This results in these ideas of "only one son", "one dreamer", "fragmented son", "no others", "no free will", "no relationships", "no miracles", etc. This whole "model" of ACIM is completely false and has resulted PURELY form BAD THINKING. By people who do not understand the logic of God's mind.

This highly distorted and soul-destroying self-denying anti-creation version of ACIM needs to be pushed aside and replaced with a much more accurate holographic model. One which supports, is open to, allows for, and accounts for, the presence of many beings in heaven's reality. The fact even that you have real brothers, with real relationships, and that God has a real family, and that all of this is permanently real. That reality itself is not JUST oneneses, it is also an entire Kingdom of absolute creations.

This is the true form of A Course in Miracles. Not a non-dualistic flattening of God, not a creation-ignoring blob of singularity, but in fact a sort of "hybrid" idea which joins the one with the many in a perfectly natural system. Perhaps we can call it trans-duality. But it is definitely not non-duality. Yes duality is not real, yes bodies are not real, yes separate things are not real. But in God, there are also separate things which SHARE, and that guarantees they are still one. You DO have brothers, God DOES have children, and you ARE part of a divine family.

We have to open our minds to thinking WAY outside the box, and to stop thinking WITH boxes, if we want to understand what A Course in Miracles is really saying.