You think your life is your own life. It is not. Your life is belongs to God.

It is God's life, living through you. You are His extension, created by His Will, for His Purpose. Not that you are some kind of slave or unwilling servant - you are free, and you SHARE in life, but it's not really 'your life'.

The life that you are, comes from God, and is shared with God. It's His as much as yours.

That which flows through you or extends love through you, that's God's love, which you can share in, but you cannot possess it. It's not your love. It's not exclusive to you. You don't get to control it.

You could spend your whole 'life' in control and believing that you own this life, that you own yourself, that you own all rights to decide and to live as you please. That you 'have' rights. It's not your life to own. God owns you.

God shares His love with you, He provides you with everything you need in total abundance, He extends everything He has to you, as you, and you do not need anything else. You are completely sustained by the love of God. You are not sustained by yourself or the things in your life.

Without God you would not exist, not just in the sense that He gave birth and therefore you owe Him, but in the sense that you exist because He is permanently creating you. You are as God created you and nothing else. You cannot add to yourself or remove from yourself against His will, but in a fairytale.

The ego is the device which you have made to seem to take over ownership of life, to possess it, to control it, to direct it, to decide about it, to make it how you think it should be, to manipulate it, to build it and rearrange it, to judge it, to reject it, and to do with and to it whatever you seem to want. But it's not your life. Your ego has stolen it from God.

You belong to God. Your life belongs to God. You can share it fully, abundantly and freely, but you cannot make it your private property.

Where is there room in your life for God? Where are you allowing God to live in you? Where are you sharing in God's love? Where are you extending God's love and doing your Father's business? Where are you allowing and accepting the Authority that God has as your Creator? Where are you standing in the way of God trying to be a separate authority that stands against His and opposes His will?

If you are against God you are against love. And since God created you, being against God is being against yourself. So while you try to be a separate self with a separate will in a separate world having a separate life, you are actually against your life. And you then think your life is yours, but it isn't... this farce of a life you own actually means you have disowned your real life. You've disowned your life with God. You've passed off ownership as a substitute for being owned by God. You think you'd rather be the one who owns God, but you can't. Not even if you try. But you try.

God loves you, always has, always will. You are His to love forever.

You believe that it is true that you are meant to suffer and die and that doing so is right and happy and is your salvation. How nuts is that? Even worse, you do not even REALIZE you are suffering because you think it's your idea of heaven.

But here we are, in the middle of suffering, asking for more suffering, wanting to keep suffering, because we falsely believe that suffering and attack is SAVING US from something even worse.

What could be worse than suffering a death? Happiness and eternal life? The ego actually believes this. It's replaced the truth with what is false and identified what's false as true and something ELSE is where all the suffering lies.

So if you believe suffering is happiness, death is your way to be free, you deserve to suffer more because you don't deserve love, or that it's true that you need to keep the ego because it is totally your friend, then you're going to keep on suffering. The only reason you will keep suffering is because you think it is perfectly sane and real and true.

Jesus has told us, you do not need to suffer. Period. There is no call for, justification for, need for, or purpose for suffering. All you need is God's love. Yet to the ego, it has all these reasons 'why' you need to suffer more... reasons which justify suffering, reasons which build up a picture to defend suffering, to protect suffering, to want it and to keep it, because you're convinced it's actually in your best interests.

Whatever you think is true you will defend because you believe that, conversely, whatever is NOT true is against you and is your enemy. And this is how you defend against God because you think God is not the truth. Why would ANYONE want to deliberately stay away from God? Not in their right mind! Nobody has any valid reason to. But people have a LOT of really invalid reasons to. A lot of beliefs that all reinforce this conviction that what the EGO is offering is better, truer, more correct, more safe, more reliable, more trustable. We've put a lot of faith into the ego.

There is no reason to not be with God. There is no reason to suffer. There is nothing keeping you away from God other than your own desire to not be with God, based on your beliefs that tell you God is not what you want. The only way you can not want God is to not be aware of God's true nature. You MUST cover it up and distort it otherwise, if you were to RECOGNIZE God you would jump into His arms in an instant. The attraction to love is very powerful. And it is this attraction to love that you are trying to HIDE underneath and using your ego beliefs. Their only purpose is to cover up God so that you don't remember how much you want and love Him.

If you've got reasons to not accept God's love... you're definitely deceived by the ego and definitely mistaken in your grasp of what God is like. Its good to admit that. God's got a whole shitload of love coming your way.

Somewhere seemingly inside you, there is a perfect self. The soul that God created, one in Christ. That's you. That's what you are.

This perfect self has nothing wrong with it at all. It is already absolutely perfect. God created it to be perfect with perfection, and it was created perfectly by perfection.

Your actual self, what you are, does not need fixing or healing or resurrecting or correcting. It is absolutely perfect right now.

This self already exists. It is NOT your job or role or function or ability to CREATE IT, to make it, to cause it, to define it, to add to it, to build it up, to produce it, or in any way to turn yourself into it.

All spiritual "learning" is geared towards typically trying to become something other than what you are. This has led you AWAY FROM what you are. Even if it seems like progress.

The truth of your being isn't actually something you need to gain or cause or accumulate. It's something you need to RECOGNIZE AN ACCEPT.

It's actually something that's already there. It's waiting for your acknowledgement. It's waiting for you to find it and see it and realize it's already there and it's always been there.

It was just covered up by your mind with its layers of denial and unwillingness and believing other things. As soon as you saw yourself as not yourself, you lost track of yourself, lost sight of yourself, and went off trying to reinvent yourself.

And the you thought that in order to become a better version of you you'd have to keep reinventing yourself, to become a spiritual being. But that's how you end up with a spiritualised ego. A converted polished tweaked alternative self that is still not the self that God created.

You'll find after a while that you cannot manipulate an artificial self into being real, you cannot perfect the imperfect, you cannot get your "not really my real self" to turn into something spiritual enough.

You can produce illusions and specialness and artificial forms of what may look more spiritual but you can't really escape the realm of illusions this way. You can polish a turd but it's still at turd. Or paint some lipstick on a skeleton, or put some clothes on a corpse. But you cannot convert this non-self into a self.

What you really need to do is very simply to seek within and find and become aware of, recognize, acknowledge, access, a self that is sitting there waiting for you to find it again. This is more an act of going within and just trying to become aware that you are ALREADY perfect.

Look for your pre-existing perfection, don't try to invent it. Look for your holy self, don't try to turn yourself into a holy self. Appreciate and acknowledge and become aware of what God has already created you to be. It's in you, lurking there behind the dark curtains.

It's in this sense that you need do nothing. You need do nothing to make yourself be perfect and happy and well, because God has already done this. He's give you absolute perfection. You tried to hide from it. Now you just need to stop hiding from it and own it.

You are Christ, already. You are sinless already. You are holy already. You are everything already, and always and forever. What was all this seeking and not finding for, but to pretend that's not true?

"Why wait for Heaven? Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all." UrW188L1

Although God's kingdom is a state of changelessness and permanence, THIS world isn't. This world is a world of shifts and changes, transformations, beginnings and endings. Nothing here remains the same whatsoever.

In and of itself this wouldn't be a problem if we would LET IT CHANGE. If we would not fight against, resist, or try to control its fundamental changing nature. If we would not hold onto its states and conditions, not want it to be a certain way, not prefer even that it stay in a certain configuration, we would be better off. But to do this we would have to let the entire world go and be attached to nothing.

The world has to be allowed to change because that's all it CAN DO. And it will be a bit of a rude awakening to say this, but, regardless of what you WANT, you WILL NOT be able to stop it changing. And everything that came will go, and everything that arrived will leave, and everything that was born will die.

This is the nature of illusions, of unreality, or dreams. They are not permanent, they are not immortal, they are not eternal. They canont stay the same. They depend on relativity and differences. They have to constantly fluctuate and move and change form in order to seem to exist at all. There is no stillness, no peace, no rest, no constancy of any kind in spacetime.

In order to recognize this and allow the world to be like this, it means you have to stay entirely in the present moment, in which you resist nothing and have no issue whatsoever about how anything else. No resistance against what arrives, no holding on to what is leaving. And that would be enlightenment.

The problem we have is that we tend to live in a way that assumes things can NOT CHANGE. We form relationships, we build houses and cities, we spend time accumulating, we become attached, we develop favorites, we form emotional bonds, we cling to treasures. All of this is an attempt really to DENY that the world IS going to change, to dream a little while that we can find a way to make the world stay the way we want it.

Most of our urges to do something in the world are based on a drive to try to make it permanent in some way. We build the house we want to live in and decorate it and fill it with objects hoping to make a home that will last. We work on relationships and deepening bonds and falling in love with bodies in the hope that they will always be there. But inevitably it all comes tumbling down because the harsh truth is that the world MUST change, and it will.

"It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

The suffering we experience is the direct result of attempting to CONTROL THE CHANGE. To resist it, to deny that the world has a fundamental nature of change, and attempting to keep things how we want them. Every time that we become invested in NEEDING or WANTING something to stay a certain way, we are going to suffer. Because it IS going to change, and then we are going to be unhappy because we've come to depend on it being that way.

We develop expectations that things will stay how we want them. And then our expectations are dashed and smashed. We set the world up to CAUSE US, to give us what we think we want in a certain specific form that we agreed to. And then it changes, and it fails to give, and then we are left hanging.

When there is a disconnect, a gap, a distance of spacetime, a contrast, between how the world IS NOW in its present configuration, and how we WANT it to be, that contrast is LOSS. It is discord and tension and stress and war. The ego says "I want it thus!", and the world just repeatedly says "no". And so the world moves on and you stay in the past, clinging to what once was, hoping it will continue, hoping it will return, and it never does.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

As such, the world disappoints you over and over again WHEN you are expecting it to be a certain way that you prefer. It can't satisfy your wishes. It can't give you what you want. You can manipulate it and control it and manage it and rearrange it to try to fend off change (death), to try to keep an illusion that it is going to stay the same. You can repaint the walls and repair the rotten wood and redo the garden but again and again the onslaught of time - which is change and death - will keep happening.

The degree to which you have strings attached, psychological investment in, and desire to KEEP the things of the world, to that degree you will suffer when it ignores your wishes and changes anyway. Because it can't help it. You hold onto possessions, places, things, relationships, people, bodies. You resist them changing, you don't want to lose them, you fear loss, you try to preserve bodies for as long as possible, and maybe you don't even conceive of your favorite things coming to an end at some point. But they will.

This is not to be morbid. The world is a dream of death and it can't help but keep recycling itself. It transforms from birth to death and back to birth again. It is utterly incapable of staying the same forever. Expecting that it can and trying to live as though it can will make you suffer.

When something changes "against your will", and you cling to how it was, and live in the past, and don't want to accept the change, you will experience loss and despair. In order to "move on" from the perceived loss and stop perceiving it as a loss, you have to let go of CONTROL, and of wanting things to be how you want them. That means, to move on, is to move WITH the change and let it happen, accepting that change HAS occurred and surrendering to the fact that you can do nothing to stop it.

In a way that seems like beign powerless and a victim, in that you have to accept the change and LET IT change. To let go is to let go of the resistance against change, to admit it has changed, and to stop fighting against it. When you fight change you fight the world. When you fight the world you are also fighting reality and moving away from the present. The only way to live, is to live in the present and go with the flow of whatever happens with no resistance to it.

That means letting go of all your wishes, all your wants and desires and needs, all your dependencies, reclaiming all the power you gave to wordly things to affect you how you preferred, letting all bodies go, letting people come and go, surrendering control and allowing whatever happens. Ultimately you can only fully do that in the present, in the holy instant, in the eternal now. And it means relinquishing all attachmen to everything you value here, because the world holds NOTHING that you want.

It's in the present that you really transcend change, and become changeless, as you observe changes come and go without resistance. It's in the present that you find peace, and God, and love, and become open to what is. It's in the present that you gain "reality contact". And it's in the present that you find freedom from suffering. Dropping the "unreasonable expectation" that the world can be something it can never be, sets you free. Accepting how it is NOW, is the only way.

"Whenever we move from one instant to the next, the previous one no longer exists."

"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. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. 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."

"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."

"Simply do this: Be still and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false or good or bad; of every thought it judges worthy and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."

To truly be a student, you have to be willing to recognize and admit that you DO NOT KNOW.

If you do not know, then you are in a position of NEEDING TO LEARN.

Because you do not know, YOU CANNOT teach yourself what you do not know, so MUST resign as your own teacher.

Therefore you need a teacher who DOES KNOW, other than yourself, and you must turn to them, listen to and trust them.

If you can accept that you do not know, then you will be willing to turn to the Holy Spirit and ask for his Help. He is there to help and to guide, to comfort and to heal. He is there to provide therapy and to teach you what you do NOT know.

But here is the problem. Everyone who does not know, does not recognize that they do not know, and believes that they do know.

Similarly everyone who does not know, believes that they DO know, and thinks that they are CAPABLE of telling themselves what they need to know.

So now you have a person who is blind to knowledge, who does NOT know what anything really is, who is turning to themselves and whispering IN THEIR OWN EAR, TELLING THEMSELVES what things are.

How can a person tell themselves what anything is, if they do not know what anything is? But this is what we are all doing all of the time.

It's like saying, I have no clue what anything really is, so I'm going to tell myself what it is anyway. This is obviously insane and a mistake. But we keep doing it over and over, telling ourselves what everything is.

We judge on our own, we decide on our own, we depend on our own strength and experience, we tell ourselves what we think is true, we make it all up as we go along, and we convince ourselves that we're experts.

We then develop a kind of pride in believing that we are in a position of authority, that we are educated and knowledgeable, with all the facts and trivia and information that we need, along with greatly developed "judgement", allegedly autonomous and capable of discerning anything and everything.

But we're totally clueless. We're lost in the dark, we're completely out of touch with real knowledge - which is an aspect of heaven only, we have no real clue what anything is or means, we're making up all these meanings as we go along, and we're trying to constantly talk ourselves into things.

It's obvious therefore that we all "start out" doing this course in a position of believing that we are the ones who are going to get ourselves to the goal. It is even a widespread teaching that we OURSELVES need to "do a forgiveness". That WE ourselves are going to figure out what's wrong with us, how we are insane, and what we need to do to fix it.

But ACIM is quite clear that we are in fact supposed to surrender and admit that we do not know, recognize that we are in a position of NEEDING HELP, and then TURN TO the Holy Spirit to join with him FIRST, BEFORE we even attempt to overlook sins.

We are not going to do that if we are not being true students. We are so busy being teachers. So in fact we start off believing we know, with fake authority and made-up knowledge, and ponce around as if authoritative teachers. And it isn't usually until much LATER in our progress that we start to relinquish the role of "fake teacher" and adopt a greater role of being a true STUDENT.

To be a true student, or happy learner, we have to have enough humility and humbleness to drop the ROLE of trying to do everything on our own. We have to be willing to admit that we cannot judge anything correctly, we are rather stupid, we have no knowledge or true certainty about anything, have no clue what anything really means, and have failed at teaching ourselves.

This then gives way for opening up to LISTEN and to hear the Voice for God, to direct us, to decide everything for us, to tell us what everything means, to direct us what to do, where to go, what to say. To even step aside enough to allow him to use our body, to speak through it, to manipulate our hands, to heal through us. Such that we become more like a medium for God and Christ.

All of this takes the removal of the egotism, the arrogance, the pretentiousness, the righteousness, the self importance, the pride, the holier-than-thou, and all of the sense of self-reliance and not needing God for anything. We are here to do God's will, not our own separate will. We are here to serve, not to dictate from our own sources.

We are not our own source. Anything and everything we have is part of God and has been LOANED to us through sharing and inheritance. Our strength is the strength of God in us. Our power is the power of God is us. Our light and love are God's light and love. We are symbiotic and dependent on God. We should not be taking a position of standalone agents, thinking we have something exclusively of our own, something special, that others lack.

To be a student is to drop the role of being an exclusive teacher. Then only as a student can you truly become a teacher of God. A teacher of God is a student of the Holy Spirit and not their own ego.

"Resign NOW as your own teachers. THIS resignation will NOT lead to depression. It is merely the result of an honest appraisal of what you have taught yourselves, and of the learning outcomes which have resulted. Under the proper learning conditions, which you can neither provide nor understand, you will become excellent learners AND teachers." UrT11F11

"EVERYTHING you have taught yourselves has made your power more and more obscure to you." UrT14G1

"The lessons you have taught yourselves have been so overlearned and fixed they rise like heavy curtains, to obscure the simple and the obvious." UrT31A3

"You taught YOURSELVES the most unnatural habit of NOT communicating with your Creator. Yet you remain in close communication with Him, and with everything that is within Him, as it is within YOURSELF. UNlearn isolation through His loving guidance, and learn of all the happy communication that you have thrown away, but could NOT lose." UrT13H16

"Do not attempt to teach YOURSELVES what you do not understand, and do not try to set up curriculum goals, where yours have clearly failed. For YOUR learning goal has been NOT TO LEARN, and this CANNOT lead to successful learning." UrT11F6

"The aim of our curriculum, unlike the goal of the world's learning, is the recognition that judgment in the usual sense is impossible. This is not an opinion but a fact. In order to judge anything rightly, one would have to be fully aware of an inconceivably wide range of things; past, present and to come. One would have to recognize in advance all the effects of his judgments on everyone and everything involved in them in any way. And one would have to be certain there is no distortion in his perception, so that his judgment would be wholly fair to everyone on whom it rests now and in the future. Who is in a position to do this? Who except in grandiose fantasies would claim this for himself?" UrM11A3

"When your peace is threatened, or disturbed in ANY way, say to yourself, "I do not know what anything, INCLUDING THIS, means. And so I do NOT know HOW TO RESPOND TO IT. And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now." By this refusal to attempt to teach yourself what you do not know, the Guide Whom God has given you, will speak to you. HE will take His rightful place in your awareness, the instant YOU abandon it, and offer it to Him." UrT14G7

"Never approach the holy instant AFTER you have tried to remove all fear and hatred from your mind. That is ITS function. Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven. On your little faith, joined with HIS understanding, HE will build your part in the Atonement, and MAKE SURE that you fulfill it easily. And WITH Him, YOU will build a ladder planted in the solid rock of faith, and rising even to Heaven. Nor will you use it to ascend to Heaven alone." UrT18F2

If when you feel angry you can actually acknowledge that you really feel afraid, the anger will often deflate in a matter of seconds, if not instantly.

Energetically speaking, the fear energy turns into anger when it intensifies and projects, or when the apparent cause of the fear seems to be getting worse.

Being afraid means you see yourself as a victim and as attacked, which means you also see yourself as unfairly treated, which means you think you are justified in being angry because something's happening that you didn't ask for. So anger arises out of a perceived fearful situation.

Since the anger is based on the fear and doesn't really have its own foundation, and is made to DENY the fear, if you acknowledge that you're actually really afraid, it completely shuts off the generation of anger. It doesn't deny it or hide it, it simply disappears. What this means is you've moved up the ladder, or rewound the chain of cause and effect, to where you are now willing to 'stay with' the fear rather than build upon it. The anger will simply disappear when you admit to this.

So let's say something is happening to someone close to you and it scares the shit out of you. And maybe there doesn't seem to be anything you can do about it. And maybe you depend on that person and if that person has an issue, then .... who is going to look after you, or where are you going to get your ego needs met? So then you perceive that your own needs are going downhill as a result of the other person, which is frightening. And because you perceive that you depend on the other person to save you, and they can't even save themselves, you're going to get angry at them for failing to give you what your ego wants. This will make you snowball into a spiral of fear and anger, as you practically demand that the other person get out of their situation.

Secretly this is based on ego selfishness and your own dependent and fearful ego needs, which if unmet by the special relationship, sends you into a spiral of desperation. As soon as you can admit this and realize that YOU have a problem, YOU are afraid, YOU need help, this will dissolve the entire expression of desperation and demands, deflate all of the 'anger' completely, and put you in touch with what really needs to be healed ... your ego ego attachment and dependency and belief in your OWN inadequacy, which the other person is just triggering off to show you.

Once you admit to being afraid, you might have an emotional release, and this will actually shed a lot of light on the situation and show you that it is not as bad as you thought. The other person was probably being attacked by your dependency on them, and by your fear, and by your own neediness, and this was showing you a worse perception than was really called for. Things are not as bad as they seemed, once you do this. And then you can work with Holy Spirit on healing your OWN issues of desperation, whether they be fear of abandonment or rejection or 'who is going to love me' or 'how do I get my needs met be other people'.

There is a plan for salvation. Honestly is the vehicle, Holy Spirit is the destination.

When we are playing the role of victim, of being at the effect of anything, we are out of touch with the power of decision. We think that stuff is happening against our will. Then we enter into a problem-solving mode, where we ask, "how am I going to deal with this?"

In the victimhood we feel trapped and disempowered, as if we have no choice. We seem forced to deal with whatever is happening, as though it is happening all on its own. We seem to be left with no option but to deal with it, and then we start trying to find ways to make it go away, or to mitigate it and find the least painful way out.

The thing we're then missing is that we actually chose whatever is happening, we are making it happen, and we can choose again. We have a power of decision and we are the rulers of the universe. We do not have things happen to us. We are immortal beings. We act deliberately and intentionally and everything that occurs is consciously chosen.

If we do not like what we are getting, we must have made a wrong decision because we are not at peace. We have to recognize we made that decision and we want to choose otherwise because we want to be happy. So this means owning our power and owning our choice and owning what we have already chosen, so that we can choose something else.

We then have to step into the position of decisiveness, which is fearlessness, in which we exclaim that we have the power to choose and we decide what WILL happen. Instead of dealing with cleaning up problems or trying to fix issues or trying to find ways to build defences against these horrible things that are threatening us, we simply elect to stop making such bullshit and we powerfully choose something else.

I must have chosen whatever is happening, because nothing can happen against my will or without my consent. If I do not like it or feel like it is looming over me or happening without my consent or as if it is random or chaotic or just came out of nowhere, them I am very mistaken and am not being responsible. Spiritual responsibility requires owning the power of God and using it to make a better choice.

Instead of playing with options or trying to mitigate problems, we instead decide what we do want, we completely ignore the problem, we don't bother getting into problem management or problem solving or defences, and instead we simply flip the entire mental conversation to a new path. I choose this, instead of that, and this will be my future, and this is what I want, and I elect that this happen as I have requested. And so it is.

We no longer are in the business of putting up with things, tolerating, making do, putting out fires, diminishing, avoiding, fixing things up, or trying to prevent a bigger disaster. We are now in the business of choosing what we want, and only this can happen, and nothing else can happen. We are not at the effect of the world or anything in it. We are choosers and creators and wielders of God's power.

"My Self is ruler of the universe. ... It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences."

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is."

If you start with "I'm defective, I need to improve", you will end up with an ego.

If you start with "I'm perfect, I need not change", you will end up with a perfect self.

Most of us start with the approach that we're defective, full of guilt, unhappy, broken, lost, etc.... and then we start seeking on the basis of this premise.

But when you do that, there is huge risk of not questioning the premise itself, which is false. The premise says "there's something wrong with me, I need to improve myself." That's NOT true. But if you believe it, you'll start the "seek and do not find" spiritual journey.

Then you'll be trying to make yourself better, be more loving, have more wakefulness, gain more growth etc. The trouble is, this will cause you to AVOID the real problem. The real problem is your belief that you are defective in the first place.

If you start with "I'm not defective, I only need to accept I am already perfect", then you're starting out on the right foot. And it results in you questioning any belief that says otherwise, without you going off on a tangent based on a false premise.

So it's another sort of paradoxical thing. You have to start out as you mean to finish. You have to start as though you're already at the end, and sort of work backwards to accepting a pre-existing God-created condition of perfection.

If you do it the other way around, starting with lack and guilt and not good enough and all that, thinking this is true, and reacting to it, and feeling compelled to do something based on it, you'll be led astray by the ego. And then you'll become a spiritualised ego.

We've all fallen for this trap. Believing we even NEED to seek for a perfection, or to make it happen, or to construct a better self, when in fact God has already done the hard work.

If we adopt the ego's view that we need to perfect ourselves, then we avoid looking at the fact that we are IN DENIAL. We have DENIED that we are perfect, and this denial is the problem. We have DENIED happiness and peace and love, and the removal of the denial is necessary in order to become AWARE OF it again.

If we are in the business of trying to focus on the positives and the being more loving and more kindness and all these sort of non-denial happy-go-lucky perspectives, then we may inadvertently NOT LOOK at the DENIAL that we have. We may not look at the actual problem - the block to awareness - the barriers that we have built against a PRE-EXISTING perfection.

So in general we have it all backwards. We are looking for something in the wrong place and in the wrong way. The spiritual path is actually back to front. We need to be melting within, going within, finding the truth that God has already put there, finding the solution God has already established, accepting, recognizing, rather than going out of our minds trying to make it, build it, change it, author it, transform into it.

If you can't look at and question the ASSUMPTION of the belief "I'm not perfect", "there's something wrong with me", then you're not really making any headway. The trick is not to answer the question of what you have done wrong, it's to question WHETHER OR NOT you have done anything wrong.

There is nothing wrong with you. You're just pretending, and you don't really need fixing. But your belief that you need fixing needs fixing.

"We will but be making perfect TO you, what is ALREADY perfect IN you."

"To repeat an earlier statement, and also to extend it somewhat, the Soul is already perfect, and therefore does not require correction."

"Whatever is true and real is eternal, and CANNOT change or be changed. The Soul is therefore unalterable because it is ALREADY perfect, but the mind can elect the level it chooses to serve. The only limit which is put on its choice is that it CANNOT serve two masters."

All our lives we've given the world meaning.

"I've given the world all the meaning that it has for me."

The world in and of ITSELF has NO meaning whatseover.

"The world is meaningless in itself."

"Because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be. It is this you see in it. It is this that is meaningless in truth."

You thought the world was SOMETHING, and that therefore it MEANT something. That it had value, purpose, places to go things to see, people to meet, important stuff that had to be done, cities to build, achievements to attain, items to posses, idols to worship, civilizations to conquer.

But this is all fake. The world itself does not mean anything because it is actually nothing. It is an illusion of a world. It is an idea of nothing pretending to be something. An impossibility, pretending to be possible.

Nothing in the world makes any sense because the world is not made of sanity. It is a rebellion against sanity and against existence. Rebelling against existence means it does not exist and is an attempt not to exist.

By trying to go from being everything in God, to being nothing on your own, you are attempting to die. But even your death is nothing and meaningless. Death doesn't mean anything whatsoever because it isn't real and has no existence. It is nothing.

"There is no death, the Son of God is free."

This entire cosmos, all of the universe, every expansive galaxy, all the stars and the sun and moon and the earth, is all absolutely nothing whatseover.

And instead of recognizing this FACT, perhaps the ONLY FACT in the whole world, we instead have set about BELIEVING that the world is something, that it exists, has importance, has merit, is created, is alive, is doing something for a reason, can be lived in, is your home, and somewhere to spend your existence.

But all of this is nothing but a fantasy in a dream. We are walking around in dream bodies inside a dream world pretending to be dead.

"The body is a dream." "All your time is spent in dreaming." It can seem extremely difficult to entertain the idea that the world is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER. That it isn't even really there, and as such is some kind of psychological massive hallucination which WILL disappear when you wake up to sanity.

"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."

"It takes great learning to both recognize and accept that the world has nothing to offer." "The world holds nothing that I want."

It can't GIVE you anything because it IS nothing. This is why giving up the world and returning to God is to give up NOTHING WHATSOEVER, and to GAIN EVERYTHING.

Because in truth you have hidden yourself from everything and have tried to accomplish nothing. And you have been successful in that, because you HAVE DONE NOTHING AT ALL. This is why "there is no sin." You can't do what isn't possible in God.

"It is the world you see that is impossible."

The world is not there. Space and time are fake. Bodies don't exist. There is no human race. There is only the Kingdom of God and the Trinity, the souls he created, the angels and our creations, and the Holy Spirit, hanging out with God in an endless choir of celebration and thanks as we extend real creation and real existence.

"There is no world. This is the CENTRAL LESSON the course would attempt to teach."

"Perhaps there is a fear of failure and shame associated with a sense of inadequacy."

"As long as you perceive the body as your reality, so long will you perceive yourself as lonely and deprived. And so long will you also perceive yourself as a victim of sacrifice, justified in sacrificing others."

If there is some way that you are found, or find yourself to be, not equal, it will induce a sense of inadequacy. This is based on a perceive lack of value or worth. And this in turn will induce a feeling of shame and unworthiness.

Whatever is considered the ideal, or the optimum or best way to be, if you do not "measure up", or you are evaluated to be less than or lacking, this inadequacy will present shameful feelings. As if you are lacking something.

Ultimately if you look at the body, the body was made on purpose to limit you, confine you, define you as very restricted, with only a small handful of abilities. It can only move so fast, perform so good, look so attractive, etc. If you identify with a body, you fundamentally identify with being inadequate. Which produces automatic shame.

So anyone who has identified with a body is automatically grandfathered in to feeling a sense of shame and unworthiness. Because no body, no matter how great it seems to be, is free of limitations. And every body was made from the idea of imperfection and is inehrently inadequate.

It doesn't therefore matter how beautiful you make it look, how much muscle you build, how tall and hansom it is, how fair and lovely, it can never fully represent your perfection. It can never be "good enough". So if you think of it as your self, and you take personally anything about it, you are doomed to find yourself not good enough.No-one who believes they are a body can be satisfied with their "self image". Even those who believe their body is god-like and fantastic, must at some level suspect their flawed and limited nature. Any amount of body identification is going to condemn you as less than whole and less than perfect.

Sometimes also the things that bodies do, or the we use them for, fall far short of perfection. And that means that almost everything we do with them is prone to result in a judgement of inadequacy. It doesn't even matter if you try to be proud of it or pleased with it or amazed by its greatness, these are all forms of denial of the inherent limitation and lack that the body represents.

There is also a fear of failure that automatically must be present for anyone who considers themselves a body. Since it is recognized how limited you are, that you do not know how to do something, or be guaranteed to do it perfectly, it presents an inherent recognition that it WILL fail to some degree. And this induces fear. So the inadequate and the shameful are afraid of failure, knowing that they ARE a failure, having identified with failure.

The only way to transcend inadequacy and be fully released from shame, is to embrace your REAL perfection, which is your spirit. To be spirit identified is to overcome all limitation and thus all inability, insufficiency and incapability. There can be no grounds for shame in owning up to being immortal and divine.

"This perception places you in a position in which your problem solving must be inadequate, and failure must be inevitable. ""Being unable to love, the ego would be totally inadequate in Love's presence, for it could not respond at all. You would HAVE to abandon its guidance, for it would be quite apparent that it had not taught you the response pattern you NEED."

"But the means are tedious and very time consuming, for all of them LOOK TO THE FUTURE for release from a state of present unworthiness and inadequacy."

"God is the strength in which I trust. Now try to slip past all concerns related to your own sense of inadequacy."