If you meet a person who complains a lot, they frame themselves as a victim and then tell you all the many many ways that someone or some group of people are wrong. They go on and on and on and on and on endlessly. And meanwhile you feel like you are being held hostage and can't get away and you can't shut them up. And then as you try to leave, they follow you and keep on going with their diatribe.

What's happening is the person is full of guilt and shame and secretly condemns themselves a lot. They see themselves as victimised by all the many things in the world that they seem to not like. But they are not being spiritually responsible, for their experiences and feelings, so constantly accuse the world of causing it. They feel justified in pointing a finger of blame and listing off all the many sins they see outside themselves, but really because they themselves believe they are sinful. They hate themselves, so they like to hate others. Their shit don't stink, and they portray themselves as always idyllic and harmless and justified in being righteous.

The payoff for them is that if they can project their sins onto other people and find everyone to be guilty, it makes them have a certain sense of psychological relief from the heavy burden of their own hidden guilts. They get to come off as innocent and not like those who sin, separated off from them, and therefore not the guilty one. It produces an illusion that they believe they are not guilty, which is a form of denial.

Meanwhile, the more that they do this, the more they are basically imprisoning others. They are projecting their own imprisonment, and in effect really see themselves as imprisoned by their own guilt. They are locked in and stuck in their own confinement, so are expressing confinement to you. And that makes you feel like you are being locked in confinement. Whether or not they actually target you or complain about something you are believing or doing, it doesn't matter, because they want your indirect acknowledgement that they're right and that you are bearing witness to their innocence.

So long as you agree with them, don't stop them, allow them to spew, and go along with it as though condoning it and not challenging it, they will keep going and never end. They find validation by your passive receipt of it. Meanwhile their condemning blaming imprisoning vibe can make you feel like you're being held hostage and that the other person is using you, like you're chained to them and have to hear the long list of sins, so that they'll feel better about themselves. They don't want to let you go or be free because they won't be able to scapegoat and get rid of their guilt. It's really a guilt dump onto you so that they feel better, in illusion.

There is another way that this plays out. I've noticed if someone sees themselves as a victim and isn't being spiritually responsible, they'll believe that things you personally do make them feel unpleasant, guilty, shameful etc. They will then accuse you of being the cause of their suffering, even though they did it to themselves by taking something personally. They will twist what you said and use it against you as though you caused them to have a reaction. And now they'll start to get angry at you and scapegoat you and demand an apology.

This becomes a form of intimidation, where responsibility has been shifted, and now you supposedly are responsible for making them feel better. They hold what they did to themselves against you, and now you feel like it's your fault, you feel guilty, and now you feel like you have to atone or make it up to them. You have to now grovel and lower yourself and make an apology, after which they grin with delight that they forced it out of you and made themselves feel superior.

It becomes a kind of tyrannical relationship of control and blame, where you are accused of causing them what they're supposed to be responsible for. You feel imprisoned by this accusation, and supposedly guilty for causing them. They get this angry strong opinion about how you're wrong. They totally depend externally on someone apologising or meeting their needs or sucking up to them, in order for them to feel better, because they are not being responsible for how they feel. They depend externally on this positive feedback and getting positivity from others, to make up for their lack of responsibility for feeling shit. And meanwhile they judge the living shit out of everyone and everything.

So then you start to feel obligated and held hostage and like you can't tell them they're wrong. Since they depend so heavily on external validation, you also sense that if you were to say anything against them or that they might take as an attack or that they might think of as not validating their bullshit, they will become even more angry and negative and scapegoating, and then they'll become a big monster and do something even more threatening and aggressive and controlling. So then you become afraid that they'll have power over you, control you, manipulate you, and that you're not good enough.

This kind of person is so victimy and so dependent on externals and so believing the physical world and generally likely atheistic and non-spiritual, such that they act like a gatekeeper and superior person whose opinion has to be requested on all matters. Like they are really important and special. And if you agree with them they shower you with ultra positivity and loveliness, and if they don't agree with you they go into an angry pout mode and become aggressive.

The special love flips to special hate. So now it's very hard to question their motives or to point out their flaws or to push back on their strong opinion because you know they'll just go into attack mode and make you an enemy. So instead they get to stay in a kind of 'everything's wonderful' state of illusion and fake special love relationship and dishonesty and irresponsibility, acting like they have the face of innocence all pleasant and nice to everyone, only to become an enraged monster when anyone points out their bullshit.

Either way you can end up feeling held hostage by someone's ego, with demands that you act a certain way, or indirectly demands that others act a certain way, in order for them to be happy. It can be difficult to stand up to and to draw a boundary with these people, to stop them from their spewing or to raise doubts about their motives. In both cases the person is a scapegoater, a judger and a hater of the things in the world that they consider wrong.

They segment the world into positives and negative, side heavily with what they like and side heavily against what they don't like. This is a spilritualizaiton of the world, an attempt by their egos to make out that some parts of the illusion are better than others, and leads to believing that they themselves are better than others. In their siding with the face of innocence they become overpowering and seeing themselves as holier than thou. In effect, those who portray themselves as the innocent victims tend to be the most vicious accusers.

"The partly innocent are apt to be quite stupid at times." UrT3D3

"This is particularly unfortunate, because frightened people are apt to be vicious" UrT3C15

"The first presents the face of innocence, the aspect acted ON. It is this face that smiles and charms and even seems to love. It searches for companions, and it looks at times with pity on the suffering, and sometimes offers solace. It believes that it is good, within an evil world. This aspect can grow angry, for the world is wicked, and unable to provide the love and shelter innocence deserves. And so this face is often wet with tears, at the injustices the world accords to those who would be generous and good." UrT31E2

"Beneath the face of innocence there is a lesson that the concept of the self was made to teach. It is a lesson in a terrible displacement, and a fear so devastating that the face which smiles above it must forever look away, lest it perceive the treachery it hides. The lesson teaches this; "I am the thing you made of me, and as you look on me you stand condemned, because of what I am." UrT31E4

We have allowed ourselves to LEARN what we think the truth is, based on how the physical world seems to function.

We think that there are causes out there which have effects on other things.

We think that the world is able to harm us, do things to us, and that events just happen to use against our will.

We've learned a great deal from the appearance of this world, and we think that this world is actually real and that, therefore, we need to learn the truth from it.

We have mis-learned. Our assumption that this world is reality has led us to take on board so many mistaken ideas, mistaken ways of functioning, mistaken ways of deciding how relationships should work, mistaken forms of idol worship and possession and loss and gain.

So many things we've taken away from our exposure to this world, thinking that it is showing us a world of truth. We think this world is actually objectively real and that how it appears is completely normal, natural, obvious and clear.

It is not.

This world is vast illusion. It is extremely deceptive. It is showing you something which is impossible. It is a depiction of an idea of being separate from God and what it would seem to be like if that were possible, even though it is not possible.

This world shows you people who are suffering, people who are sick, people who are affected, people who are victimized, and people who die. That isn't truth. There is no truth to learn from that, other than that it is not true.

So we've been hanging out in this place a lot and just taking for granted everything we see as though it is factual reality, that there is not any kind of illusion happening, that things are as they seem to be, and that we can take everything at face value.

Big mistake.

We need to therefore UNLEARN everything we have tough ourselves to be true based on what we've witnessed here, because it has been nothing but an exercise in opposition to truth.

There is a truth elsewhere, in God's reality, which is not of this world. It does not function as this world functions. The laws are not the same. The rules are different. There is no attack or sickness or victimhood or violence or death in God's world. Things are not born, only later to die. Things do not come and go. Stuff does not happen out of the blue. Events don't just happen to you. It's an entirely different 'world' from which to learn the nature of the truth.

So we have been taught extremely poorly in this world, made to believe that it contains all kinds of truth, made to digest vast volumes of information about how it "really works" and what it means and how it functions. Taught how to relate to it and what to see in it and how to use it. And yet, it is all an illusion. All of that education was a lie.

There is no world here. Hello!

There are some major mistakes some people make with the course with regards to how perception works.

Many people start out with believing they're a person in a body, having perceptions of an objectively real physical world. And then they read the course and it seems to be saying that they're supposed to change their mind about the world.

So they think ok, in this real world there is a different way to look at things, so I should find another way to look at this SAME world. Which means there's a layer of interpretation between me and this world, and if I change my mind I'll see it in a different way.

One problem here is this in no way questions whether the world is even real or not. It also glosses over a major ACIM teaching - that projection makes perecption.

So then people encounter this idea and they interpret it to mean, I'm projecting some bad shit onto the objectively real world and I need to stop "projecting my stuff" onto it and see it in a friendlier way.

But this bypasses the fact that Jesus is telling you how perception works. We're practically saying that 1) I perceive the world to exist 2) Then I project onto it 3) Then I see my projections. Jesus doesn't say that.

He says projection MAKES perception. Which means that 1) You project, 2) THEN you perceive. "Perception is a RESULT, not a cause." Not that I first perceive a world then project onto it.

Many people seem to think that they first perceive that there is a world, and then you project on top of it. This is backwards. There IS no world there UNTIL you project a world. That's the whole point of this teaching. You are making up the world with your mind.

"You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts."

Rather than consider that the physical world does not exist AT ALL beyond YOU dreaming it up, YOU making it, YOU hallucinating it entirely, people will rather stay far within the confines of a very basic worldview - that this world and universe are real and exist and this is all there is.

So what happens is people keep firmly ahold of basic assumptions. 1) That they are a small little weak limited person in a body who can't possibly have made this world. 2) This world and universe is real existence.

This ego-based worldview is not questioned whatsoever, the person doesn't even conceive if there being another reality, nor do they want to question whether bodies are real or whether this world could possibly be "just a dream."

"The body is a dream." "God did not create the body."

This results in a strangely adjusted view of ACIM that basically is locked into spacetime, does not question the reality or validity of anything physical, is threatened by any suggestion to the contrary, and wants to just focus on "seeing this world in a better way."

While this approach has some merit, in that the person might form at least a partially more loving approach to their life, it also falls short and is necessarily "capped" at how far they can go. Holding onto the reality of the world and body makes it impossible to rise up out of the dream, or to even consider that the world is a dream.

So there are some people doing some semblance of ACIM who are not really breaking out of the ego illusion. And their entire approach to the course is one that stays squarely within this world, in this body, finding ways to twist the course to make it "fit" into this narrow worldview. And that's a huge distance away from what the course is really trying to say.

"There is no world apart from what you wish" doesn't merely mean that your wishes project interpretations onto the world. It means that you WISH the world exists and so you make it up and dream it. And when you dream something else you make a different dream. And eventually you'll stop making up these dreams and return to heaven.

But that's not what these people want. They want to keep the world as their home and reality and never leave. And all of this is because of unquestioned assumptions. And nothing's really changes since they started the course because they just kept what they believed already and never doubted it.

"The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with FREE WILL because all loving creation is FREELY GIVEN."

God has unlimited presence and enjoys complete freedom.

God is creative.

God creates in his own likeness.

Therefore God creates things like himself, which are also free. If God has a son, His son MUST have permanent freedom. This "freedom to be free" is a "natural division". It is not separation.

In order for God to give his creative ability to His creation, which he shares with His creation fully, he HAS to give His creation freedom.

That freedom automatically means, his creation is FREE to will on its own.

That freedom also automatically means, the creation’s freedom is never REVOKED by God, nor is it possible for that freedom to be lost. God guarantees it because God’s creative expression which creates the son is CONTINUOUS and permanent.

Therefore the creation (son) has permanent freedom.

This makes it impossible for the son to "become God".

If the Son were to become God in the literal sense of "oneness" as it’s usually understood, it would ALSO mean the son can ACTUALLY develop the authority problem in reality. That he can replace God with HIMSELF.

This is never possible because God has permanence and permanent freedom, and so does the son.

The son’s permanent freedom, free will, will never be undone by God. It makes it impossible for the son to become "uncreated". For him to be literally "one" with God, as in, there is only God, would UNCREATE Him. This is impossible.

The son(s) of God we’re FREELY GIVEN. And freedom was given TO them. And they are free. In this sense only, they are "free of God", so to speak. But in their freedom and joy, they subsequently SHARE everything they are, lovingly, with God.

Oneness then does not mean one big mushy blob of a single identity and no parts. A Course in Miracles is not non-duality or pure non-duality. God DID CREATE many sons each with free will. His freedom is his Gift, from God, and to his own creations.

There is nothing unnatural about many "free" beings being free together, but sharing a love so deep and full that it seems almost as if they are "one". Sharing can be extremely maximal, to the point where only the "free will" itself seems to stand between them. The soul. And souls are permanent.

The son only figuratively disappears into the father because he cannot stop being free. Yet the unity between Father and Son is so great, essentially nothing can come between them other than the honoring of that freedom. Freedom does not mean separation. Especially given the Son lovingly wills to share his love and joy as fully as possible with the father and with all other creations.

The people who are touting "oneness" and non-duality as the core truth of ACIM, are not acknowledging that God - the infinite - has FREEDOM. And because it is infinite, there are no limits, meaning it is natural for infinity to "expand" permanently and unlimitedly, which is "Creation". And infinity must also mean sharing beacuse sharing means unlimited giving and unlimited receiving. And therefore God is both creative and free and creates freedom.

"God did not create the body."

"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."

"Love did not create the body."

"A mind and body cannot both exist."

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's condemnation."

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom. The body is the symbol of what you THINK you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist."

"For minds need not the body to communicate."

"How can a body be extended to hold the universe? Can it create, and BE what it creates? And can it offer its creation all that it is, and never suffer loss? God does not share His function with a body."

"I am not of this world." "I am not a body I am free."

"Yet God did not will the destruction of His creations, having created them for eternity."

"The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream, in which it acts as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed."

"The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to PROVE it is autonomous and real."

"That this is all the BODY does is true, for it IS but a figure in a dream. But who REACTS to figures in a dream UNLESS he sees them as if they were real?"

"And if God created bodies, death would indeed be real. But God would not be loving."

"Yet could God's Son as He created him abide in form or in a world of form?"

"(Pain) Its purpose is the same as pleasure, for they both are means TO MAKE THE BODY REAL."

"It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured."

"The Great Rays would establish the total LACK of value of the special relationship, IF THEY WERE SEEN. For, in seeing THEM, the body WOULD disappear, BECAUSE ITS VALUE WOULD BE LOST. And so your whole INVESTMENT in seeing it would be WITHDRAWN from it."

"It is impossible to seek for pleasure through the body and NOT find pain."

"A miracle reawakens the awareness that the spirit, and not the body, is the altar of Truth."

"All separation, all distinctions, and the multitude of differences you believe make up the world. They are not there. Love s enemy has made them up."

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

"The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards."

"Perception involves the body even in its most spiritualized form."

"Forgive the world, and you will understand that everything that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real."

"(The body) Leave it behind, it cannot enter Heaven."

"The mind that made the body can make another because all form is illusion."

All of the problems in the world, every sickness, every war, every argument, every lack and death, all separations, all special relationships, are all symptoms of the absence of God and nothing else.

Here's how Jesus puts it:

"A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct. This sense of separation would never have arisen if you had not distorted your perception of truth, and had thus perceived yourself as lacking.

The idea of order of needs arose because, having made this fundamental error, you had already fragmented yourself into levels with different needs. As you integrate you become one, and your needs become one accordingly. Unified needs lead to unified action, because this produces a lack of conflict."

Now, this is a huge thing to get your mind around but essentially, it means that being with God solves everything. It also means that the ENTIRE CONTENT of this universe is coming from a single idea of not being with God, and without that idea this entire universe would disappear.

It informs us also about how to pray. When we pray and we go to God with all kinds of problems and questions, what we're really doing is asking for these things to be solved or go away. But we often ask God, hey, fix this shit for me. But there's an unspoken premise - that God will fix the issues and then we'll remain separate from God, enjoying a better separation. That's absolutely impossible. The only solution to ANYTHING is becoming closer to God.

All suffering, every conflict, all sickness, all unhappiness, every broken relationship, all problems, all sense of lack, every death, it is all what LACK OF GOD looks like. When there is not a lack of God, these things CANNOT EXIST.

We had NO NEEDS when we were with God. There was no world. There was no "life and death". There were no problems. No lack. No sickness. Everything was perfect. So when any of these things are showing up, there IS a belief in being separate from God. These things CANNOT show up unless there is such a belief, because these things are merely the FORM of the illusion of God's absence.

War is MADE OF "God is not here". Sickness is MADE OF "I am guilty and separate". Death is made of "Sin is real". Broken cars are made of "I am limited". Cancellation of your favorite TV show is made of "God hates me". I'm not kidding. There is NOTHING in this entire world that can exist unless there is some degree of a belief in God being absent.

So what happens when God IS PRESENT? What happens when we simply return to awareness of God's presence and allow and accept and receive it? What happens to all this STUFF which is completely meaningless which showed up only after the separation? It simply DISAPPEARS. It must disappear because light shines away darkness and all of this shit is just the form of darkness. When God is present, death is impossible. When God is present, there can be no suffering or lack or tears.

So you think, well, there are many many separate problems. There are not. There is only one problem. It encompasses THIS ENTIRE UNIVERSE and everything in it. Every collision of every particle, every planet blowing up, ever sun being born, every murder, every success story, every sunset, every fire hydrant, it's all part of the "I'm not with God" experience.

So when you go to God to pray, if you're putting all this shit on the table and asking for it to be fixed but you're not asking for the NEED for it existing to be undone, or for God's presence to increase, or for you to be One with God, then you're not asking for a solution. You're asking to make shit real, to keep it, and to have God change it into an even more appealing illusion. The only true prayer is to commune with God and be one with Him, which SOLVES ALL PROBLEMS, makes all questions disappear, resolves all needs and lacks, heals all sickness, and reverses all death.

So you do not need to learn a whole bunch of techniques and strategies for coping with hell. You don't need to figure out how to get more. You don't need to figure out what caused certain problems. There is only one thing you need. It's God. And if you get God, you are done. All the rest, will be simply forgotten and disappeared like it never existed or mattered, because it doesn't. There is nothing to learn, only a whole bunch of crap to unlearn. All you need is love.

"You are NOT limited by the body, and thought CANNOT be made flesh. But mind can be manifested through the body if it goes beyond it and DOES NOT INTERPRET IT AS LIMITATION. Whenever you see another as limited TO or BY the body, you are imposing this limit ON YOURSELF. Are you willing to ACCEPT this, when your whole purpose for learning should be to escape FROM limitations?" UrT8G16

Bodies don't really matter in a relationship. The soul is androgynous and perfect. It isn't male or female. It has no limits and loves unconditionally.

It uses a body temporarily and then moves on. It might've had lifetimes as men and women, children and the elderly, as parents or alone. It could've had a gay body or a straight body, an overweight body or a skinny body. Whatever. Across its experience of so many different types of bodies, it cannot help but generalise the learning and detach from the specifics of each of them. It learns again to love regardless of form.

There could be a lifetime where two souls meet and they have certain types of bodies. They may or may not even be attracted to each other's bodies, or be compatible physically. Perhaps they are man and woman but one of them is gay. Perhaps they are from different cultures or races. It doesn't matter.

The body really is just a kind of tool that the soul uses. The body has its severe limitations and its limited scope of expression, which means that as the soul uses it, it has to work with what it's got. If it wants to talk, the words are likely to come out sounding the way that the body instrument allows to happen. If it wants to have intercourse, it has to work with whatever appendages or holes are available. If it wants to hug it has to deal with its length of arms and its roundness of belly.

If the soul is not heavily body identified, its view of the body is very detached and transcendental. The body doesn't really matter to it, nor does the bodies of others. When the soul is more identified with and lost in its current body, taking it to define itself and to be itself, this narrow perspective will inhibit relationship and make it more conditional. The bodies of others then matter more, relationships have more criteria, and everything has to be acceptable within limits. There is also more hell to pay when the rules are broken.

Ultimately we're meant to learn to love ourselves and everyone equally and fully, regardless of their bodies. We are to use the body as best we can to relate though and beyond, without placing so much emphasis on the body itself of what appear to be very limited categorisations of types.

Jesus suggests in the course for example that everyone should love everyone regardless of specific bodily appendages. A soul-to-soul communication is more important than cutting off a brother because their body is a certain type or style. This even applies to people having disabilities and sicknesses, learning to love them regardless of what their bodies are doing, and looking past the body to the immortal spirit within.

In my marriage for example, I was a male-gendered body person married to a female-gendered body person. She was 18 years older than me, which didn't matter. I had some attractions towards men as well, which didn't matter to her. She was from a different country thousands of miles away, which didn't matter. She grew up in a different culture, which didn't matter either.

Regardless of the sense of specialness and exclusivity in the relationship, there was also a more transcendental and unconditional element. I had some attractions to men for example, which she knew about, and she found it interesting and a curiosity instead of judging against it. She was willing even to encourage me toward it even if it meant her and I possibly not being together. Just as she at times wanted to be with other men.

We still had intimate relations which entailed a biological compatibility, even if in some way we might not have been entirely on the same page. We used what we had and made it work, because it was really more important that we were together and loving each other. A love that transcended the physical. A love between souls that spanned many lifetimes and many bodies. We could've been even more extremely different on the physical level and I think we would still have had a deep soul connection.

Ultimately what this has taught me is that the physicality of the body is not really that important. It is much more important to love a person and be open and honest and trusting. To share deeply and intimately, emotionally and psychologically. This can happen even if the bodies appear to be what the world would consider thoroughly incompatible. We turned heads with our weirdness and our age gap, for example. This can happen for gay or straight people, for people with any kind of body and any kind of persuasion. Every relationship has the potential to be holy.

What I realise now is that for any future relationship, it doesn't really matter if the person is male or female, or looks a certain way. It doesn't have to be a 'mr right' or a 'mrs right', or some kind of ideal model of perfection. The person is more important, the mind-to-mind is more important. If it comes with a certain type of body, and even if that body has certain limitations, it doesn't really matter.

Having a full whole relationship is more important than just some physical sexual hookup that's empty and cold and full of ego. If the person has certain genetalia, or types thereof, what does it matter, really, if the love transcends it? The two souls potentially relating on a higher and more whole level is what's important. This can even take place without any physical interaction or proximity or anything that the world might think of as a relationship. It can happen with strangers. It can happen anywhere, and beyond any type of body.

Looking past the body to the soul/mind is what's really important. The holy spirit's home is in our relationship to the christ in ourselves and others, which overlooks bodies and regards them as nothing but tools. If you still use them to interact then so be it, within the limits and specifics that the body allows. Sex is a limitation just as gender is but you can still use it while the mind is in a higher state. We're supposed to learn to love people as beings, as children of God, regardless of what their bodies are doing. Because ultimately no-one is really a body anyway.

The trend I see in ACIM is an unequivocal all-or-nothing "siding with God". A total commitment to his reality, truth, laws, and thought system. Being of God and not of this world.

If you imagine that this world doesn't exist at all, you live in heaven, you are identified with spirit, you are one with all brothers in Christ, you know yourself as God created you, and you have nothing that God hasn't given, then this is the natural state we are trying to return to.

But that also means, not believing a single thing about this world, having no identification with the body at all, not believing that sickness even EXISTS yet alone is happening, not believing that death is even POSSIBLE yet alone is happening, being not deceived by anything you see or anything the body senses, regarding yourself experientially as not being bound by the laws of physics whatsoever, and generally recognizing that there isn't even a world here!

It's a total complete shifting of allegiance and reality and location and identity to God's system, to such an extent that you completely forget about this world. You see yourself as under no laws but God's laws, created by His will, with our will in total alignment and agreement with his rather than having a separate will. Creating with God, extending perfect unconditional universal love to everyone equally, in relationship with everyone simultaneously.

Not to mention the ability to work miracles all the time naturally. For example, there is a guy in Europe who was called Bruno Groenig that worked a ton of miracles, and believed that not only did sickness not exist at all, but that it was also unwise to even speak of it. And because he believed ONLY in health and wholeness, he miraculously healed many people.

This is the goal that we're striving for. And we may not be able to relate to it, because right now we're probably somewhere in-between - committed to ego, sickness, suffering, fear, guilt and death. We think we are in a body in space time. We think stuff is really happening. We think we have real problems. That we can't escape and have no power.

We think the people we see as bodies have real sicknesses and that sickness and death are realities that exist. That we can suffer real loss and be deprived and unhappy. That we are still victims stuck in a prison world trying to find the way out, while being inundated with the ego's false advertising campaign.

So it seems a bit of a tall order to completely get out of all this, and I'm sure you recognize this too - a sense that there's still so much to seemingly do in order to get yourself into a state of being TOTALLY sided with God ONLY. In which ONLY God's truth is true and NOTHING else is true. In which you achieve the resurrection and ASSERT ONLY LIFE, with no trace of death or the belief in death whatsoever.

To live it and experience it, to see from it, to act based on it. Yet this is what we need to do - to completely give ourselves over to God in EVERY way, in EVERY area of life. To completely uproot our entire belief system about our life here and not for a second give this world even the slightest sense of belief or value. Only then are we ready to go home to heaven and to God.

"This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel that a course which, in the end, teaches nothing more than that only reality is true is necessary. BUT DO YOU BELIEVE IT?"

"What God did not give you has no power over you, and the attraction of love for love remains irresistible."

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it was. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea."

"Here again is the paradox often referred to in the course. To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. As God created you, you have all power. The image you made of yourself has none."

"Here is the perfect statement of my freedom. I am under no laws but God's. I am constantly tempted to make up other laws, and give them power over me. I suffer only because of my belief in them. They have no real effect on me at all. I am perfectly free of the effects of all laws save God's. And His are the laws of freedom."

"Loss is not loss when properly perceived. Pain is impossible. There is no grief with any cause at all and suffering of any kind is nothing but a dream. Such is the truth, at first to be but said, and then repeated many times, and next to be accepted as but partly true, with many reservations, then to be considered seriously more and more, and finally accepted as the truth."

"Miracles make time and tide wait for all men. They can heal the sick and raise the dead because man himself made both death and taxes, and can abolish both."

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. Love is no longer feared but gladly welcomed. Idols have disappeared, and the remembrance of God shines unimpeded across the world. Christ's face is seen in every living thing, and nothing is held in darkness apart from the light of forgiveness. There is no sorrow still upon the earth. The joy of Heaven has come upon it."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient Calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

When you're first starting to apply A Course in Miracle's idea of forgiveness, it begins with where you're at and what kind of a perception you have.

Most people will be starting out with a mind that is quite strongly convinced that everything external is real, that there are many very distinctly separate problems, that other people are very wrong and are the cause of all their problems.

With that way of perceiving, as you start learning to apply forgiveness it can be quite difficult. The idea that you've even been scapegoating at all is something of a revelation, or that blame is an attempt to project guilt, or that the person who is upset and accusing someone is actually the person who has the problem and not the person they're blaming.

Attempting to forgive when your mind is spending most of its time in that kind of a way of believing/looking at the world, seems like a big challenge and a big mess. It's hard to even remember the basics and harder still sometimes to get your mind out of the basic belief that you've been victimized by someone.

Taking back some sense of the projecting you've been doing at first appears to be the vast majority of what you "do" to forgive, because it at least is taking some steps to recognize that there may be more going on here than meets the eye. Appearances may not necessarily be true, and its possible there is another explanation for why it *seems* like someone else is guilty.

You can potentially spend some years just in that mode alone, learning each time you forgive that what you perceive happening has an explanation that's got something to do with you. That maybe you have some kind of perceptual or distorting problem going on in your mind which is changing how you see things. So then it seems that you go to town on your perception and learning to correct it.

After a while, because learning becomes generalized, and because correction of the mind becomes permanent, you gradually learn to form a clearer picture. You gradually peel away your conviction that problems are about other people. Each time each individual problem is forgiven, even if the forgiveness is not complete in its undoing (and early on it usually isn't), each example of you teaching yourself that there is a different way to look starts to turn into an overall different way of looking. It's like building a new way of perceiving one block at a time.

So eventually it's like, you've seen the same trick presented to you by the ego over and over again, and each time you've applied some kind of forgiveness, even if its a very sloppy inaccurate forgiveness riddled with mistakes, you gradually become clearer about what the truth is. And this gives you a firmer footing in the truth. You become less susceptible to being tricked by the *illusion* that there are many separate problems, or that the problems that show up are unlike each other.

Gradually it sinks in that "this" problem is actually pretty much the same scenario as "that" problem and you start to *transcend* the surface appearances. You at least begin to chisel away at the more obvious distractions and illusions, tending to fall mainly for the subtler ones or those that you didn't really tackle before. But you're still making progress and your mind is gradually learning to see *all* problems differently.

So with time, pretty soon you are not so easy to fool. You've seen the trick one too many times and have learned how it is not the truth. So it's kind of then like, you will notice the trick quicker and catch yourself and not fall into the trap so easily.

Also what happens over time then is you go "deeper" into your truth, which means your mind is waking up and you're examining and sorting out true from false at subtler or more abstract levels. Your refinement of "how" to forgive continues and you just keep collecting more and more insights. As you develop the right minded thought system and open up to Holy Spirit's truth, gradually it builds upon itself and lightbulbs go off more and more often. Things click together more and make more sense, and you get this sense that you are "getting it" with aha moments.

Some years later perhaps you might notice that you're no longer really fooled by the major surface appearances of problems and issues, but instead are operating at a much deeper level of forgiveness. What needs still to be undone are more fundamental beliefs, core values, major perceptual errors, profound beliefs about the basic nature of what is real or not real, etc.

When shit happens, most of it will not stick. The part that continues to stick continues to show you ways that you need to refine your grasp of the truth. But your forgiveness in general, the activity of what you need to do to correct your mind, dwells more often in the realm of what's going on within yourself. Having taken back a lot of your power and responsibility and owned up more to your part in what you experience, it becomes more a matter of just continually owning up to the truth rather than having to deal with lots of projections or blame or being heavily lost in stories and dramas.

It becomes more about what you are doing to yourself, what's happening in your own mind, recognizing that you've been inside your own private world and so have others, and also the growing awareness that intellectualizing the course does not lead to love. And yet, growing within you will also be an ever stronger sense that love, as simple as it sounds, is the key to everything. It is the truth that you want, it is the experience you want to have, it is what you want to share, and it becomes ever clear that simply love is the answer you've been homing in on this whole time.

It's all just a long process of refinement and clarification and chiseling away at beliefs in separation until your mind is returning to an awareness of wholeness and a truly forgiving attitude. Just being love.

Your mind is very powerful and it chooses what to create. Your thoughts enact real influence. You can change the contents of the world using your mind.

There is a huge amount of scientific evidence for this, from scientists and medical science experiments to psychology experiments. All showing that mind has great influence over matter.

There is the placebo effect which has been shown in some cases to cause people to have the same effect of medications just by believing in it. That a person could have the same pain relief of morphine just by believing they had been given it when they hadn't.

People's cancerous tumors have appeared and disappeared on the basis of whether they believed they were getting a treatment. Some have experienced telekinetic activity where objects in the room move around in different ways depending on their mood. While others have materialized objects out of thin air.

Jesus indeed demonstrated the power of the mind over matter in many ways, including defying gravity, transforming objects into other objects, healing sickness, generating body parts, multiplying food, calming storms and so on.

The problem we have is that we generally DO NOT believe that our minds have ANY power. We believe our thoughts have NO influence over the world or the body or each other. We seem rarely to notice or recognize any changes in our lives that we attribute to some thought or feeling we had. We just don't seem to see the connection between what we think and what happens.

But this is something ACIM is training us to be able to do. It requires a recognition of the mind's power, and it also therefore requires taking RESPONSIBILITY for having that power. The simple fact that what's going to show up and happen is based on what's going on in your mind, and that therefore, you are making stuff up as you go along.

It's YOU that is making sickness show up. It is YOU that is making healing show up. It is YOU that is influencing the weather and adjusting the environment. It's YOU that is orchestrating events and making stuff happen. If you could recognize this you would realize you have to be careful about WHAT you think and where your mind is at, because it produces EFFECTS.

This is the recognition that you are a CAUSE, and not an effect. That you are a CREATOR and not merely a perceiver or victim. That stuff is coming out of you with causal power and influence. And therefore it's your responsibility to carefully and mindfully and constructively use that power for good.

When you realize that "you are doing this to yourself", per the secret of salvation, you also should realize that this means you are CAUSING all of your own suffering and by the POWER OF DECISION you can choose something else.

"Very few people appreciate the real power of the mind. Nobody remains fully aware of it all the time. This is inevitable in this world, because the human being has many things he must do, and cannot engage in constant thought-watching. However, if he hopes to spare himself from fear, there are some things he must realize, and realize them fully, at least some of the time. ... The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will." UrT2E8

"People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them." UrT2E12

"Learning must lead BEYOND the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it." UrT8G14

"I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body AND the power of the mind, by uniting MY will with that of my Creator, which naturally remembered the Soul and its own real purpose." UrT3F21

"While expressions like "think big" give some recognition to the power of thought, they still come nowhere near the truth. You do not expect to grow when you say it, because you don't really believe it. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains." UrT2E10

"Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a little feat for such a power. For faith can keep the Son of God in chains, as long as he believes he IS in chains. And, when he is RELEASED from them, it will be simply because he no longer BELIEVES in them, WITHDRAWING faith that they can hold him, and placing it in his freedom INSTEAD." UrT21D3

"All miracle-workers HAVE to be trained that way. I have to be able to count on them. This means that I cannot allow them to leave their mind unguarded, or they will not be able to help me. Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation." UrT2E18

"There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly." UrW132L4

"You cannot resolve your authority problem by depreciating the power of your minds. It CAN hurt you if you misuse it, because you KNOW its strength." UrT3I3

"The Son of God CAN be mistaken; he CAN deceive himself; he can even turn the power of his mind AGAINST himself." UrT19C3

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts." W19

"Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do." W38