When shit happens and stuff goes badly wrong and life sucks bigtime, you have one of two conclusions:

a) Shit happened and where was God? God is either cruel or he doesn't exist, because the shit is "real". Or...

b) Shit only appeared to happen and is not REAL, precisely BECAUSE God is loving and real, and God wants to heal it.

Many people conclude the first option because they cannot conceive of this world being unreal, or of very real-seeming sicknesses, pains and struggles being unreal. They seem like intense, real experiences that you can do nothing about. And that cements the idea that God is dead.

So then you lose hope, because you think God does not give a rats arse about you, or that God is cruel, or that there is no reason to have FAITH.

But what you haven't considered is that, EITHER this shit is true and God is dead, OR God is real and this shit is dead.

The shit is dead.

God is real.

And that requires you to completely question your entire foundation of reality, your belief in everything that your eyes see and your body experiences, and a faith which completely bypasses ALL appearances and bodily sensation, to BELIEVE IN GOD stronger than you believe in this shithole.

Find strength in God regardless of and in spite of what appears to be an absolutely fucked up life. God did not will this. God is love and God is real and God wants you to be fully convinced of His position, and to not doubt His reality, but instead to doubt THIS reality... this world, which is nothing more than a shit on top of another shit. It is not real. And God has miracles for you if you will accept this.

P.S. Jesus' response to my writing this is.... "Its a lesson". The only reason crap is happening is so that you will stop believing that crap really happens, so that you can enjoy the shitless life that God intends.

If someone is afraid, reassuring them won't help remove the fear at all unless you can remove their belief that they are guilty. Trying to tell them that the punishment isn't going to happen will be hard to believe if they still think they deserve it.

Only if they are guilty do they have any reason to fear punishment. If they are not guilty, they can be reassured in knowing that they do not deserve punishment, and therefore will not believe in punishment, and therefore will stop scaring themselves.

The person is not afraid because of what is going to happen to them, they are afraid because they BELIEVE that it is going to happen to them, because they believe they deserve it. Having believing they are guilty, they actually believe in their own deserving of punishment, and so they KNOW it is going to come, because they themselves are going to MAKE it come, and they therefore see the punishment as inevitable. They cannot escape their OWN belief in self punishment, and so are frightened by their very own will and determination to harm themselves!

They are really afraid of their own punishment. This must be undone at the cause which is guilt, and not the effect, which is a projected cause of fear.

Beyond this, if someone is feeling guilty, you can't reassure them that they're not guilty either. Instead, you need to reassure them that they did not really sin at all. Sin produces guilt and the belief in sinfulness makes a person feel guilty. Undo the belief that they are sinful and there can be no need for guilt. Only the sinful will feel guilty.

If the person believes they sinned, they will attack themselves and condemn themselves with guilt. The condemnation is coming from themselves, not from anyone else. Even if it seems like shame or misplaced causes for guilt, the decision to be guilty is their own, based on their own belief in their own sinfulness. They themselves WANT to find themselves guilty, and so cannot help but feel that way, because they don't want to undo the belief that they sinned at all. Sin is not real. Nobody sinned. Hey presto, no guilt.

If you are fully and completely responsible for yourself, for everything you feel, everything you experience, and every causality, then

1) You will not have any reactions because reactions require you to see yourself as a victim

2) You will not see yourself as victimized or caused by anyone or anything else

3) You will be free and invulnerable and immortal

You will know that you and what you experience are kind of .... enclosed... insulated.... invulnerable to.... detached from... shielded from.... protected from.... everything that is 'out there'. It will be like you're walking around completely invulnerable to everything, unaffected by anyone.

"Be passerby"

So if you see that this is kind of the 'goal' of total responsibility and acceptance of yourself and unconditionally being the love you are, then you can see what happens when you DON'T do this.

Without this responsibility you disown, you victimize, you see yourself threatened and vulnerable, you become imprisoned, you develop reactions, you go unconscious, you disown your feelings, you accuse everyone else of being the "reason why" your life now sucks, and you disassociate from your Self, trying to get others to live your life for you. And then instead of being yourself, you will try to be THEM, because now you are reflecting outward what is within - if you are not yourself, and you're expecting others to be you for you, you will start to become other people and lose yourself.

So no matter the situation, no matter what's happening, no matter who is doing what to whom, we need to get to this place of true responsibility where nothing outside of us is seen as the cause of anything we experience, other than God. We need to disengage. Detach from the drama that involves others.

All of the 'involvement' with others in an ego way creases an ego dependency relationship where it feels like you are joined to the other person and are exposed to them and that they can do stuff to you directly. That's the opposite of invulnerability. And that's doing stuff to yourself through them.

They are two MECHANISMS for seeing, and they REPORT in two entirely different ways, and it's to you to decide WHICH OF THEM you are going to listen to. And you cannot listen to them both, fully, at once.

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see beyond what they were MADE to see."

"for they can see only illusions"

"Everything the body sees is an illusion."

"Everything that the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception"

The body, has 100% permanent false perception. It is a fixed, PHYSICAL form of perception which CANNOT EVER see anything other than form, error and illusion.

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body"

"The spiritual eye, on the other hand, cannot see the building at all,"

"Vision adapts to wish, for sight is always secondary to desire. And if you see the body, you have chosen judgment, and not vision. For vision, like relationships, has no order. You either SEE, or not."

"Everyone sees only what he thinks he is."

"Forgiveness does not look upon bodies."

Christ vision, also, is a FIXED STATE. It is the spiritual eye. The spiritual eye CAN ONLY SEE THE LIGHT. Can only look upon the real world. It CANNOT SEE BODIES.

"the world forgotten, all its weird beliefs forgotten with it, as the Face of Christ appears unveiled"

"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."

Let's be clear about this.

There are two worlds. The world of false perception which is the physical world of bodies and sin and forms and errors and illusions. "Only the body makes the world seem real."

There is also the REAL WORLD, where there are NO BUILDINGS, no streets, bodies, forms, errors, not even the sun.

These are two separate fixed STATES.

1) False perception - TOTAL ERROR.

2) True perception - TOTAL SENSE.

The body's form of perception - the *physical sight*, USES the body's physical eyeballs to see. "These eyes made not to see will never see" reality. They CANNOT in any way be adapted to SEE in any way OTHER than they were made to see. They will NEVER see the real world. They are fixated on hell, on the illusory world. Physical. This is a fixed state of false perception.

Christ vision is an entirely different KIND of perception, which DOES NOT rely on the body whatsoever, does not USE the body whatsoever, does not NEED the body's eyeballs, and can SEE WITHOUT A BODY. This vision LOOKS ONLY AT THE REAL WORLD - at the face of christ. It is FIXED, in a position of TRUE PERCEPTION.

Now, this flies in the face of common belief that you "transition your ONE perception" from false to true. False perception is an illusory hell. True perception is an illusory heaven. You however can choose WHICH FORM OF SEEING YOU USE. You can also TRADE OFF one for the other.

Using 60% christ vision causes you to use 40% body sight. Using 90% christ vision causes you to use 10% body sight. You CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS.

So what actually happens is, your MIND is electing HOW MUCH TO BELIEVE in each of these TWO WAYS OF SEEING. Will it believe the body totally? Will it believe the spiritual eye totally? And how much? And as you believe one, you do NOT believe the other.

The spiritual eye is just as much a WAY OF SEEING as the physical eye is a way of seeing. Your MIND elects WHICH to pay attention to. And if you pay attention to one, it is because you have DENIED the other. You cannot FULLY use both at once. It's one or the other. You can't BOTH have physical sight AND christ vision operating FULLY at once.

"The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER."

So instead of thinking of your perception as being this SINGLE thing that you need to "shift" out of falseness into trueness, instead thinking there being TWO RADIO CHANNELS, you can TUNE INTO one, by TUNING OUT of the other. You can't listen to both. As you TUNE IN to christ vision's station, you begin to see the LIGHT that christ vision can see. As you tune out of that, into the body's sight, you begin to see the WORLD OF BODIES (which is the world of sin). And doing this BLOCKS your RECEPTION of the christ vision station. It blocks your sight.

You cannot EVER make the body see reality. You also cannot ever make christ vision see the body. YOU, as mind, have to choose WHICH of them you will see, and how much. And only when you choose to see christ vision FULLY, will you STOP SEEING THE PHYSICAL WORLD. "The world is forgotten". The VEIL of physical matter becomes transparent and disappears!

"Its thinness and transparency are not apparent, until you see the light BEHIND it. And then you see it as a fragile veil, before the light."

"For there is light where darkness was before, and now the veil is lifted from his sight."

"Accept the one illusion which proclaims there is no condemnation in God's Son, and Heaven is remembered instantly; the world forgotten, all its weird beliefs forgotten with it, as the Face of Christ appears unveiled at last in this one dream. This is the gift the Holy Spirit holds for you from God your Father."

"Only That can be perceived an instant longer. Then are symbols done, and everything you ever thought you made completely vanished from the mind which God forever knows to be His only Son."

The physical world THUS VANISHES FROM YOUR MIND. You cease using the body entirely. You stop seeing physical matter. You stop interacting with the PHYSICAL world, which does NOT EXIST.

"Heaven is all that remains."

"Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God."

"here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that come and go, the tides, the seasons, and the lives of men; all things that change with time and bloom and fade, will not return."

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function. Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that made perception possible, will occur. The perception of the real world will be so short, that you will barely have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world, and have been made ready for Him.""

Ok so Jesus lets the cat out of the bag in the section titled "The real alternative." Here he speaks of how utterly disappointing and hopeless the world is. He talks of how all the world's roads lead to death, how there is no real choice among them, and how every path or answer or solution or hope you ever had in the world is secretly hell-bent on the same failure.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death." UT31D2

"Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped." UrT31D2

He goes on to say that EVERYONE must look at this eventually. Everyone must come to the awareness that the world is utterly completely disappointing, hopeless, worthless, ridiculous, insane, and without hope of redemption or salvation. And that within its closed system there is absolutely no way out and not a single road truly leads to a real solution.

"Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end." UrT31D2

"Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death." UrT31D2

"On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes." UrT31D2

He describes also that if you come to linger on this, and if you do not sense that "there must be a better way", or "this can't possibly be God's will for me", and if you make the world real or think it is all that exists, you WILL become depressed. In fact, Jesus even says somethings startling here - that "men have died" when looking upon this. And I expect he literally means they dropped dead on the spot because they couldn't handle the bleak hopelessness that arises from this view that the hopeless world is "all there is."

"There IS no choice where every end is sure. Perhaps you would prefer to try them all, before you REALLY learn they are but one. The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another." UrT31D3

"Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way EXCEPT the pathways offered by the world. And, learning THEY led nowhere, lost their hope. And yet this was the time they COULD have learned their greatest lesson." UrT31D3

Then of course he urges us that we should, as well as reaching this point, be sure not to linger there and that we MUST go beyond this. We must become willing to recognize that there MUST be a better way. Yet for many it will require that our "tolerance for pain" has not hit its limit, or you have not scraped to the bottom of the barrel and hit "rock bottom" with the world's bullshit and pain enough to get you to open your mind.

"All must reach this point, and go BEYOND it. It is true indeed there is no choice at all within the world. But this is NOT the lesson in itself. The lesson has a PURPOSE" UrT31D3

However, he also speaks of there being a great potential in this "lesson", in that seeing the world in such stark clarity, such obviousness of its failure and its impossibility and its hell-bent laws of death and punishment, there is a much higher potential that you will suddenly REJECT it, as a whole.

What your mind HAS to do is it has to become open enough to NOT ACCEPTING this as "the only reality", even when faced with the world's UTTER BULLSHIT, slapping you upside the head on a daily basis. There has to be some light of true hope and sanity in you which stops BUYING into the world's empty promises.

"Why would you seek to try another road, another person or another place, when you HAVE learned the way the lesson starts, but do not yet perceive what it is for? Its purpose is the ANSWER to the search that all must undertake who still believe there is another answer to be found." UrT31D4

"Learn now, WITHOUT despair, there is no hope of answers in the world. But do not judge the lesson which is but BEGUN with this. Seek not another signpost in the world which seems to point to still another road. No longer look for hope where there is none." T31D4

You have to be willing to see that you've been seeking for salvation in all the wrong places, and every place you've looked you have come up empty handed and disappointed. That nothing in the world has lasted, nor will it ever. And everything has always disappointed and betrayed you, no matter its appearance, no matter its form, no matter how much it shone and sparkled in its frame of death.

If you can get in touch within yourself with a sense that there MUST be a better way, there must be something more than this, there must be a better reality, there must be ANOTHER WORLD, where God's will is supreme an all the Earth's stupid bullshit is utterly impossible, then your mind will open up instead of shut down. It becomes a "perceptual turning point", which in fact causes a rejection of PHYSICAL SIGHT (having lost all faith in the physical) and an opening of the spiritual eye (willingness to see the spirit world).

"For from ***this lowest point*** will learning lead to heights of happiness, in which you see the PURPOSE of the lesson shining clear, and perfectly within your learning grasp." UrT31D4

"Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight."

It means you are suddenly recognizing EN-MASS and in total GENERALIZATION, that the WHOLE world is utterly flawed and NOT what you want. That it HAS failed you, and CANNOT give you what you wanted it to give you. And now you turn from it, turn your back on the whole thing in disgust, or perhaps quiet recognition, and now your WHOLE AIM focused squarely on the Kingdom of God.

"Who would be willing to be turned AWAY from all the roadways of the world, UNLESS he understood their real futility? Is it not needful that he should BEGIN with this to seek another way instead? For while he sees a choice where there is none, what power of decision can he use?" UrT31D5

You're whole attention and sense of VALUE and hope is placed on the other world, where there is a REAL HOPE and where there is a real sanity and a real potential to find what you have always wanted. And as such heaven becomes "the real alternative" to you, and your faith in it becomes massively focused.

He says that everyone must come to look at this eventually. EVERYONE has to be willing to look upon the freak-show without flinching and without making it real, or at least with enough of an opening to an alternative that it doesn't just turn into a horrible depressing dark-night of the soul kind of thing. A night in which you seem SO FAR from God, and yet are SO CLOSE to turning your back on the darkness forever.

"The learning that the world can offer but ONE choice, no matter what its form may be, is the beginning of acceptance that there is a REAL alternative instead. To fight AGAINST this step is to defeat your purpose here. You did not come to learn to find a road the world does not contain." UrT31D5

Once you see just how horrendously stupid the world is, how pointless and disappointing, how hopeless and short-lived, how false in its empty promises and how it is set up only to destroy, you can also potentially see that it CAN ONLY EVER BE THIS WAY. You can see also that since you MADE IT, YOU wanted it to function like this. And you can see that since it is opposite to heaven's reality, it HAS TO FAIL this way. It has no hope because it was made to oppose hope.

"The search for DIFFERENT pathways in the world is but the search for different FORMS of truth. And this would KEEP the truth from being reached. Think not that happiness is EVER found by following a road AWAY from it. This makes NO sense, and CANNOT be the way." UrT31D6

"And EVERY road that goes the other way will NOT advance the purpose to be found." UrT31D6

And this is a great thing to recognize because it means you can forgive the world for being impossibly incapable and utterly flawed. It's only that way because an alternative to heaven CAN ONLY BE that way. And so now you can forgive it and laugh at it and find peace because it is NOT what you want, and because you see NO merit in it, and there is nothing in it that you want to use to keep your false hopes and wishful thinking alive.

"There IS a choice which you have power to make, when you have seen the real alternatives. UNTIL that point is reached you HAVE no choice, and you can but decide how you would choose the better to deceive yourself again. This course attempts to teach no more than that the power of decision cannot lie in choosing different forms of what is still the SAME illusion and the SAME mistake." UrT31D7

"No pathway in the world can lead to Him, nor any worldly goal is one with His. What road in all the world will lead within, when EVERY road was made to separate the journey and the purpose it MUST have, unless it be but futile wandering? All roads that lead AWAY from what you are will lead you to confusion and despair." UrT31D8

"There IS no road that leads away from Him (your brother/self). A journey FROM yourself does not exist. How foolish and insane it is to think that there COULD be a road with such an aim. Where could it go? And how could you be made to travel on it, walking there without your own Reality at one with you? Forgive yourself your madness, and forget all senseless journeys and all goal-less aims." UrT31D9

All we have to do is be willing to look at the UTTER SHIT HOLE with the light of the Holy Spirit and with a willingness to be honest in recognizing its nothingness, and then we will TURN AROUND and vehemently and passionately embrace heaven. And now our vigilance for the Kingdom will be super clarified and magnified and glorified. And then we will walk straight out of hell into the light.

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it into another world." UrT12G3

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way." UrW131L7

When you be afraid of something, you are attempting to increase a sense of separation between you and something. You hope that if you can separate yourself from it more, you will feel safer.

It doesn't work. It is the opposite.

The more you try to resist or push away or separate from what you think is the thing you do not want, the more intense it will become, the more threatening it will appear, and the more you will be magnetized to it.

It is as though, as you pull away from it, using a psychological 'force' of withdrawal, you simultaneously create a great 'pull' of equal and opposite effect, which draws that very scary thing to you.

Perhaps you've had a dream, where in the dream you are afraid and are running away from someone who is chasing you. It seems that the more you fight to get away, the more versatile they become at closing in on you. Eventually, however, you might find (if you chose well) that you surrender the fight, and you stop running. What happens when you stop running? The person stops chasing. And not only do they stop chasing, but they stop seeming like they even wanted to catch up to you, and they don't even attack you. How about that? This is the mind symbolizing what is happening in the psyche when you become afraid - what you resist persists, until you stop resisting and then it literally becomes your friend instead of your enemy.

It is hilarious that, therefore, the very thing you are trying to get rid of, you are intensely CAUSING to come after you. The very thing you try to separate yourself from, tries to come closer to you. The very thing you don't want, seems to show up even more as though you want it very much. This is the simple functioning of the mind. You are literally creating your own enemies because intensifying the sense of separation between you and your enemy simultaneously renders them appearing to be an even stronger enemy.

Surrender is the antidote of fear, whereby you stop fighting with yourself and give up the pursuit of freedom from enemies, which causes you to be free from enemies. A paradox it seems, but this is how the mind works. Stop fighting and your enemies stop fighting you back. Stop attacking and your enemies stop being attackers. Stop fearing and things stop seeming so fear-inducing.

Stop.

I was thinking about why we seem to have a body at all.

It occurred to me that all ego illusions are put in place as a form of level confusion. When the dream (effect) seems to have a causal ability, it does something "to you". This produces illusions of effects in you, and in your body. Believing that cause is outside of you instead of inside of you, makes the world basically tell you what you are. And you comply.

The body showing up, then, shows us not so much that it's being projected from inside the body itself, but is showing up as an image which is being "caused by" the world. By all of the ego's laws, the body is only there because the world put it there. It's only there because there is level confusion. It's only there because you believe in magic. And it's only there because you see yourself as an effect of your dream.

Effects within dreams show up as "forms". All thoughts produce form at some level and all ego thoughts produce illusions of forms. Belief in ego therefore means you believe the world is the cause of you, and this belief ALONE places an IMAGE of a body over your mind. It is a picture of what is seen from OUTSIDE of you looking inwards (reversed cause-effect), which is why everyone ELSE sees it.

But really the body is nothing but a state of a belief in external causes, a projection of ego sin. "The body is the belief in sin projected outward and made flesh." - ACIM

So we believe in sin, which sets up a reversal of cause and effect, which creates level confusion, which makes it seem like our dream is dreaming us, which feeds back towards us as a body which is perceived, from the outside in. Projection makes perception.

This is also why when level confusion is completely corrected, what is true is recognized as true, and what is false is false, THERE CANNOT BE A BODY. The body cannot SEPARATE YOU from what is or from yourself. You are no longer being "caused" by the world. There is no longer proof that you were made by matter. You now have mind over matter and your inverted perception from the outside-in will now turn inside out and be in its correct order. The body cannot show up at all when there is no belief in separation or illusions. This is why Jesus's body disappeared.

In the separation from God we made what seems to be a world, opposite to God - space and time and bodies etc. But we're told this world is unreal. What does "unreal" mean? Because while we're told it's unreal we're also told we believe in it, and that by believing in it it becomes real to us.

Being unreal is a way to say it's not ultimately true and isn't how God creates. So in a sense, it is dream-like. But people DO have dreams, and the mind IS dreaming of a world of space and time. This dream can seem very real and solid and effectual to the dreamer.

As such even though the world is ultimately unreal, which would seem to write off anything that seems to happen in it, while we are still in it believing in it we do still have experience of it AS IF it were real. In fact we can make it extremely real to ourselves and have a horrible nightmare.

"anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist."

"The mind can make the belief in Separation VERY real and VERY fearful. And this belief IS the devil. It is powerful, active, destructive, and clearly in opposition to God, because it literally denies His Fatherhood. Never underestimate the power of this denial. Look at your lives and see what the devil has made. But KNOW that this making will surely dissolve in the light of truth, because its foundation IS a lie."

But nightmares do in fact seem very real and frightening and full of suffering and stress to the believer. To the believer, even if they are hallucinating, even if what they experence is total fantasy and not possible in God's laws, it nevertheless can seem VERY real and true to a mind that belives in it.

How do we overcome this nightmarish experience of a world in which everything suffers and dies? What is NEEDED? What is called for? If the problem is that the mind is believing in it and giving it power, then the mind has to withdraw that power and stop believing in it. And by not believing in it, the mind will ultimately stop seeing it.

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

Here the course doesn't say that the remedy or approach we're supposed to take is to just write the world off with labels like "unreal, illusion, nothing, doesn't exist" ESPECIALLY when the mind IS honestly still believing in it and giving it reality. That's a form of denial. Instead it says we are to use RECOGNITION to realize that the world isn't real and isn't true, WHILE still in it. That's different from PRETENDING TO BE OUTSIDE IT.

A hallucinated world will disappear only when RECOGNIZED that it is a dream and not a reality. This is what "awareness of dreaming" is about. Awareness of dreaming isn't denial. It's in fact a state in which you are still asleep and dreaming, but you have the awareness of what you're doing.

We're not supposed to keep bypassing the world in an attempt to overcome or escape it. In fact, Jesus's remedy for us is to CHANGE PERCEPTION so that we will come to first see this world from a different vantage point. That does require us to "love the world" and to find peace in the world. Before we can leave it. As the course says:

"First you will dream of peace, then you will awaken to it."

If we try to skip the dream of peace, or the happy dream, or the forgiven world, and just try to jump from false perception to knowledge, we're doing a bypass.

"Knowledge is not the remedy for false perception since, being another level, they can never meet. The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception. It will not endure. But for the time it lasts it comes to heal. For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one. They are the one beginning with the end to lead to Oneness far beyond themselves. True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is this that true perception sees."

Those who use non-dual-seeming statements like "the world doesn't exist so it doen't matter what you do", "the body isn't real so don't bother healing it" etc... are trying to use truths from the level of KNOWLEDGE, to correct the problem. But Jesus says this will not really work. THE ONE CORRECTION for false perception is true perception. We can't skip having true perception. We have to find a way to forgive this world and everything in it first instead of trying to jump ahead to being what is only really experienced AFTER we complete the curriculum.

"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

"We have discussed the fall or Separation before, but its meaning must be clearly understood, without symbols. The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity. All beliefs are real to the believer."

"You have expressed surprise at hearing how VERY different is reality from what YOU see. You do not realize the magnitude of that ONE error. It was so vast and so COMPLETELY incredible, that from it, a world of total unreality HAD to emerge."

"You looked upon the unreal and found despair. But by SEEKING the unreal, what else COULD you find? The UNreal world IS a thing of despair, for it can never be."

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."

"The separation is merely a faulty formulation of reality, WITH NO EFFECT AT ALL. The miracle, without a function in Heaven, IS needful here. ASPECTS of reality can still be seen, and they will replace aspects of UNREALITY. Aspects of reality can be seen IN EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE. Yet only God can gather them together by crowning them AS ONE with the final gift of eternity."

It's interesting that it is people with egos who seek to become more spiritual.

This is based on the ego belief that they are not already perfect, complete, holy, innocent etc. Life probably sucks in some way, and this compels them to search for greater meaning or truth.

The problem is we have two identities rolled into one. The ego is one identity. Our Real Self is the other. The problem is we've become attached to, identified with, and confused with the ego. It wants us to think it is what we are and that we are nothing else. This gives us the impression we have one self, a separate self, but in fact we have another self - a Real Self, which is actually all of who we are.

So then as we become compelled by pain and suffering to 'seek for a better way', it's who we THINK we are that starts to seek. And that means, it's us plus the ego. The ego is along for the ride. And the ego will bring with it all of its baggage and misunderstanding and misinterpretation. And that's also what happens when anyone starts to study A Course in Miracles - they will filter it through their ego, bigtime, not really understand or accept it, and will distort the living crap out of it. I know because I did this too.

So what's happening is, the ego wants to compel us to be always seeking and never finding. It wants to take us away from accepting or having or being. So then we - the ego-infested self, starts to seek for the truth. And this might surprise you that the ego seeks for the truth, but seeking the truth and actually finding the truth are very different things. Seeking does NOT lead to finding! It's a trick. Seeking the truth actually takes you AWAY from the truth, because the truth is always PRESENT already. Any form of searching is actually a blindfold.

So at first, we want to be more spiritual because we cannot see that we already HAVE everything God gave us. That's because we have blocks to awareness. And so we'll go off seeking, and actually will take ourselves onto tangents and directions that actually lead AWAY from truth. And you will find as you do this, that you start to SACRIFICE. Ie you'll start to give up on things that were in your life that you suspect maybe are the definition of 'not spiritual'. You'll misinterpret the truth and think it's calling for you to give up stuff, to give up forms and people and things you enjoy, because your ego does not understand the truth. It comes to its own conclusions.

And then as you get to grips with the Course a bit more the ego gets undone a bit and you make some progress, but you also start to become a 'spiritual ego', or rather, you start trying to act like you are 'special' in your spirituality. You will spiritualize things in the world. You'll try to sound like you are spiritual. You'll try to act like you're spiritual. You'll basically try to 'integrate' spiritual truth into your EGO life, which is a realm of form and behavior. So the ego is trying to keep its life and the ways of living that it is used to, but bring the truth 'into' that realm so that the ego is retained. Yet it's quite possible to fill your life with a combination of sacrifice and spiritual specialness, to create the ILLUSION that you are becoming more truth-filled. The ego loves that you're thinking of being a spiritual savior/hero ;-)

At some point after this if you are making true progress through sincere honesty, purification, letting go, healing, surrender, and seeing through your OWN ego lies, you will see through the ego's efforts to seek, and all of these activities you've been doing even with the Course to try to 'get to' where the truth is. You'll learn more that the truth is already present, and that God is already present, and that even in your spiritual seeking it has been taking you AWAY from what is. So now your 'path', what's left of it, now becomes more like a form of surrendering, stopping searching, relinquishing trying so hard, maybe even letting go of sacrifice and opening up to reclaiming into your life things which are 'okay' that you thought were 'un-spiritual' before. You may start to bring joy back into your life. And you will start practice a simpler art of acceptance, listening to God, communing with God, being present, becoming aware of what is, and letting go of every 'block' that was telling you you needed to be a spiritual seeker to get back everything you don't have.

Even though the Course says you need to undo the blocks to awareness, to reveal the love that cannot be taught, which is hidden but already present underneath those blocks, the spiritual ego seeks to find love by seeking for it where it does not exist - externally. And instead of actually working on the undoing of those blocks, it would happily spend its time working on the 'accumulation' of 'spiritual information', intellectual understanding, special powers and so on, so long as you avoid actually healing the root cause of the spiritual seeking itself.

If you were to actually look within and see there is no sin, and heal the sense of lack, you would find the truth, but the ego does not want that, so it has you seeking everywhere that the truth is not. And then when you don't find the truth, the ego is happy that you might give up seeking and go back to ignorant unconsciousness. But what if instead you decide the ego was lying to you and you learn to stop trusting its voice? Maybe you become aware of a deeper truth that transcends it, and which is already in you. And maybe, as you realize the ego led you in the wrong direction, this will finally teach you what the right direction is - within! And so the ego has helped you awaken.

The real truth then starts to reveal itself. That you already have everything God gave you. You already are how he wants you (in Spirit, not form). That you are already loveable. That you are already forgiven. That nothing has really happened etc. And so you approach the real atonement, and true forgiveness, and Holy Spirit's mind of stillness and peace. You stop so much being a spiritual seeker as a spiritual finder, realizing the seeking stops you from finding, and the truth is already here. It was here in front of your nose all along, this whole time that you thought it was somewhere else. And so now you have uncovered the truth of who and what you are and have returned home to yourself in God. This is "the journey without distance", back to the True Self that you already are.

What comes next I have no idea, haha! To be continued...