What's happening with all this projection that everyone is doing, is basically a mass dis-owning of Self and a mass-disowning of responsibility for each person's own experience.

We're all walking around constantly shoveling ourselves and our own stuff onto other people and onto the environment. We're trying to get rid of ourselves all over the place. It's like, we're taking our insides and we're saying to everyone else, here, you take care of this for me, I don't want it. We're saying that we don't want who we are and that we refuse to do anything to change it.

When this gets really strong it turns to gossip, skapegoating, blame, judgement, victimhood, feeling stuck and apathetic. We dis-empower ourselves this way, by giving away this responsibility for ourselves, allowing someone or something else to have 'the power' and the responsibility to decide for us who we are, what we are, what we experience and what our truth is.

We just plain don't want to own our own truth or be true to ourselves. We want to get all lost in everyone else's business, what everyone else is doing to everyone else, and what the whole world is doing to us. We need to take care of our own business and mind our own business. "Be passerby"!

When we're in the irresponsibility role, we are expecting everyone other than ourselves to own up to who we are, for us, and to deal with our upsets and problems for us. And yet at the same time, we don't really want them to do this, because we don't really want this stuff to be fixed. We want to keep believing we are guilty and sinful and yet at the same time demand that other people remove all the experience of that guilt - usually by them having to change. That's the ego's version of forgiveness - continue to suffer while claiming you don't want to. And that's how you be a victim.

So being a victim really means, you deliberately disowning yourself and responsibility for your inner truth and identity, and then shoving it onto someone else's plate and expecting them to change or deal with it for you, while refusing to allow any change to happen, so that you feel like they're not giving you what you need or want. And yet this is all because of your own irresponsibility. This is why taking back that power and responsibility literally makes it impossible to be a victim, because you're getting out of the entire passive-aggressive "I refuse to be me" stubborn resistance.

We're all sitting around complaining about things which we have the POWER TO CHANGE, as if we do not have the power to change, and waiting for someone else to come along and rescue us. You can put a lot of energy into worshipping some idol or teacher or resource hoping for them to be your savior. But at the same time as asserting that you need a savior to 'do it for you' you're also asserting that you refuse to do it yourself, which means you really will refuse to accept that person's help anyway. You'll end up having a clash with the teacher because you are saying you want mega help but really you don't want any. You instead want to hold onto sitting on the fence of your own life and staying stuck and hoping someone is going to be your hero.

You don't think you have the power precisely because you've given it away. And so you don't see your options of freedom because you think they are not available to you. Yet you are only disempowered by giving your power away in the first place and taking back that power/responsibility gives you the tools you need to make any corrections needed. You can get yourself unstuck. You have the power to do it. You have the ability to wake up. You just need the willingness to not be a victim and to OWN your life and your freedom again.

Funny to think you don't own your own life and you think someone else has control over you. This is your life. Own it. Live it.

To the ego, in order to have something you must take it from someone else. To the ego, there is limited quantity because everything is considered to be finite. It has no concept of sharing. It only has a concept of compromise. If you are to have anything at all, someone else must lose. And by their loss, the ego believes that it can gain. This is part of the ego's laws of chaos.

The ego therefore is the belief that when you receive something, whoever gave it has diminished their supply. And this is also part of the belief that, if you give something, you will diminish your own supply, will increase your own lack, and will now suffer and be in need.

This is why everyone is so reluctant to let go of their possessions or money and tries to get as much "bang for buck" as possible, to get a deal or a discount or some great big receipt of value with the minimal amount of sacrifice/loss possible. And all commercial ventures play into this ego quality by constantly dwelling on how much more you will be receiving than giving, which is a lie, because they don't tell you how cheaply they got the shit for in the first place. Anyway...

So the ego only has this sense that there is an "exchange" or a negotiated deal or some kind of weighing up of what you will get vs what you will lose. It has absolutely no concept of something increasing, of two people being able to partake of the same thing without limiting each other's enjoyment, and it believes that there is a huge difference between giving and receiving. It in fact believes that giving is sacrifice, and that receiving is salvation provided you only receive from outside yourself and not from God.

The ego also is a murderous thought system and any time that there is an inbalance between giving and receiving there is "murder" happening. That is, either you are perceiving that you are having to give more than you are getting, meaning you are losing, which is a form of death, or you are taking more than the other person is willing to give, which means you are trying to destroy them.

To God, this is all nonsense of course and God's laws do not operate this way at all. Instead, anything real can be shared without it diminishing. All parties can experience FULLY what is being offered without anyone having to sacrifice or only get a small slice of the pie. There is no compromise. There is no limitation or finite amounts of anything. Everyone is able to share fully and equally. If I get 100% of God's love, it does not mean that there is no love left to go around. It means there is still 100% of love to go around. Everyone partakes in and SHARES SIMULTANEOUSLY in the same "stuff" without loss or sacrifice or hoarding or possessiveness of trying to "own" it or make it your own. This again reinforces the that God operates holographically because the 'whole' can be fully presence in more than one place at a time.

God's laws also tell us that in order to have anything we must give it and be willing to share it. Nothing real can be "owned" by egoic concepts of selfishness or isolation. You cannot section off a piece of God and claim it as yours without it also belonging to everyone. And when something real is given, it is not lost to the giver at all. In fact it increases. If I have unlimited light and I give some light to someone, my light simply shines more, it does not decrease, it brightens. To God, anything real that is given is increased, its receipt intensifies, sacrifice is reversed, there is no lack or loss possible anywhere, and there is an absolute unlimited abundance of everything which is only growing and increasing at all times, not diminishing at all. It is the perfect "economy" in a constant state of growth and abundance.

God's abundance is freely and fully given, is available to everyone equally, there is no limitation on its supply, it is infinite and unlimited, it can only be shared and increased, and there is no such thing as lack or sacrifice.

All sense of loss arises from believing that a changing world is real. If it is real, and if something goes away, a part of reality has been lost. If it is real, there has been a real separation. And if that's true, you absolutely must be in a state of deprivation. Time itself induces loss every second, and time is death.

"The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. 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."

Something that you thought was real and valuable has been taken away. A part of reality or God itself has been destroyed and kept apart. The mind reasons that, because it's real and because it's not there, there is an absence, and a part of yourself has been ripped away.

The feelings of grief then rise up to correspond to that belief that something real is lost. The mind invents them to make sense of the situation. Then people in the world who believe in bodies will tell you that it's completely normal and natural to grieve. It does make perfect logical sense, given the premise that this world is real and loss has happened, but it is not natural at all.

In God's immortal reality nothing real can ever be lost, suffer attack, be ripped away or destroyed, forgotten about or separated from. No-one can suffer or be sick or die. Everyone is a part of everyone forever, by God's will. Impermanence of any kind is impossible, and nothing real can be threatened.

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today."

What it then boils down to is, that if you to any degree believe this world or bodies is reality, you will be constantly in varying degrees of loss. If anything at all so much as moves an inch, it implies a separation. If something bigger and more important seems to go away, you will miss it. If a body person dies off and stops being around, you'll notice it intensely. And then there will be the logical conclusion of a loss of something real - a real loss and a real grief.

The problem we have is that we're still working on waking up to God's truth and we still believe in bodies. We still confuse people for their physical bodies and still regard this world as reality. And that sets us up for the consequences of our wrong decision. It means that we're primed to experience losses before they even happen. We've set ourselves up for a fall, by choosing to believe that something temporary can be depended upon forever.

It's our attachment to bodies, our valuing of bodies, and our confusion of bodies with souls/minds, that lays the foundation for devastation and despair and grief. If and when they do go away, which everything in the world of form does eventually, its cruelty will induce all manner of egoic reactions.

"They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

An important dynamic that I've experienced is the belief that the person dying is causing you to be upset. If they have gone way, they have attacked you and caused you to grieve. How dare they die. And how dare they stop being there. This will produce anger and resentment. And of course this means you will scapegoat the dead person and project guilt onto them to blame them for causing a loss, which will have nothing to do with them at all and everything to do with you trying to get rid of your own guilt.

Then even further, underneath the anger will be a sense of hurt, as though you have been hurt by the death. And of course that boils down to a belief that the death of anything can infect you and cause you to die along with it. And so now the person who has left the body has returned to life in heaven, and you are left behind in a state of death and suffering, and you are the one who is dead.

"The black-draped "sinners," the ego's mournful chorus, plodding so heavily AWAY from life, dragging their chains and marching in the slow procession that honors their grim master, lord of death."

Death isn't real and doesn't really exist. It doesn't do anything to anything real and nothing real can ever die. But if you believe in a world that dies all the time, you can be sure you'll be upset before long. This is why the world is a constant disappointment, because you expect it to last forever. You'll be torn between efforts to wake up and acknowledge God's truth, and the continued belief that death is real which constantly pulls you back into hell like an anchor.

To try to forgive death really means forgiving the entire world of space and time and everything in it. To focus on the reality that a person has not really died, still lives on, and is still a part of me in communication and sharing is of course helpful. But at the same time, the other part of me which is ego aligned and trusts death, is continually pulled into the consequences of that belief. And that means the constant nagging reminder of "yes she really is dead isn't she!"

Feelings of grief, loss, absence, deprivation, anger, etc arise. The seeming "fact" that a person has died slaps you in the face, telling you that you have "suffered" a serious loss. As if the serious loss has happened to you against your will. You might be in grief and feeling like a victim, but at the same time it's true that nothing has really happened. And how can you have been caused to grieve against you will?

But this focus on truth can cause a hurdle to the grieving, because while you try to align yourself with God's truth of immortality, the rest of you is pulled horribly into a dark place of sadness and hopelessness and loss. You can't properly deal with the loss, in a typically dysfunctional way at best, because trying to be holy and perfect all the time makes it seem like a guilty sin to give it any time and attention. And yet it calls to you constantly to deal with it.

At some point then, if you're going to persist in believing in the world, you have left yourself with little choice but to go through a grieving process. If you are not yet ready to completely eradicate all belief in death and thus spacetime ("without the idea of death there is no world"), you're probably going to have to settle at least in part for second-best, failure, impossible struggle, and forced grief that seems pointless. If the world is real and the body is real and the body is lost, your ego is going to suffer about it.

So then at some point you have to turn to the grief and just go through it and feel the horrible shit, acknowledge it and be terribly upset. And this is the part that people call natural, but it is far from it. It's like being stuck in a state that you're not supposed to be in and having to deal with it in a totally conflicted way. And even when you egoically have a total spaz about it, which seems to make it go away for a while, it still doesn't solve it completely.

You can't possibly find peace and acceptance about the situation if the situation is real. There is no atonement there, so there is no cure. Grief will keep regurgitating and producing more upset emotions. There is no freedom while the world is still a reality. So then you're in a situation where you can't find peace and are forced face-to-face with a horrible loss, and all you can do is cry and feel unhappy and be a victim.

People will tell you that you then must allow yourself to grieve - embrace the victimhood, as though this is healthy, and perhaps it is at least better than bottling it up or going into less healthy forms of handling it. You are just going to have to feel it, grieve, and go through the loss. And that does indeed totally suck because it's not really a sane solution. And that means turning away from the constant barrage of God-truths and forgiveness statements and just letting yourself feel the horror for a while. Sometimes you just have to do something even if it's bullshit.

So then you cry, and you cry again, and you do some more and you have a huge catharsis. And somehow this is what the world calls healing. And supposedly you adjust and adapt, as though that's some kind of transformation or coming to terms with it, but that really isn't an awakening either.

It's more like a putting up with and a tolerating and a gradually undoing of the special relationship dynamics, attachments and so on. It's more like learning to let the person be ripped away and trying to just tolerate the pain of that until it stops hurting so much. And until the separation is truly undone it will keep coming back and haunting you for years to come.

It then seems like you pretty much have to grieve and be miserable and mourn and all that, which is a total course failure given that it means you're now part of the "black draped mourners" who are in the funeral procession and not doing God's will, per ACIM's teaching. But since you are where you are with this whole thing, and are not ready to totally surrender into atonement, you just have to go through the bumpy road rollercoaster of despair until it eases up somehow. Hopefully you can use all this as an opportunity to forgive and let go of the belief in death and the world.

"One thing is sure; God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither sin NOR its result. The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is they LIVE. They are not FOLLOWING it; they are OPPOSING it. And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body THEY dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, OFFERED to sin to feed upon, and keep ITSELF alive. A thing condemned, damned by its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself."

I'd like to say I personally am beyond all this but I'm definitely not. Last week was horrendous, entering into states of victimhood and terrible strong emotions and crying and being bedridden for several days trying to avoid vertigo and sinus stress. The body wasn't too happy about the grieving process either - feel the feelings and it becomes stressed out - don't feel the feelings and it develops physical symptoms instead. It's a lose-lose situation until you somehow just get through it. And it keeps coming.

Moral of the story is, if you're not enlightened it's going to suck. And that's your fault because you chose it, and you're not ready to stop choosing it, so get ready to suck. And then hopefully after some severe sucking you can free yourself from death's nipple and actually find some sense of happiness again.

You'll have to just deal with an impossible situation as best you can until it sucks less. And meanwhile do your forgiveness shit and hopefully someday you'll find true salvation about it all. You can't avoid the inevitable production of grief feelings if you believe there has really been a loss, and until you can face the fact that you do believe there's been a loss and feel through it, you'll just be in denial.

At least something we have to look forward to is the day when we remember to laugh at all this and realize that none of it was ever true anyway.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but the more you try to rely on your own separate self, the more afraid you will become.

This means you are trusting the ego, and since the ego is completely unfounded and uncertain, it can only lead to a lack of reliability.

People the world over champion the idea of learning more, developing more skills, becoming moresuccessful, being independent, relying on yourself, gaining confidence, being a superhero, etc... but all of these are goals of the ego trying to bolster itself up to be a stronger ego.

What we really need is to let go of this and learn to trust Spirit/God. We don't have to tackle this life all on our own. We don't have to deal with the crap that happens all by ourselves. We are ill equipped. We are limited. We need help from beyond our 'self' - beyond our ego self.

And that means we're going to have to learn to trust God. Not just as an intellectual exercise, but actual real trust, openness, dependence on and teamwork with God.

When we share in God's power we are far more powerful and secure and confident than we can EVER be trusting the ego.

Usually we want to get rid of everything we do not like, everything that feels harmful, every fear, every upset, every ounce of grief or loss. We want to get rid of all our enemies and things that hurt.

But this is actually the ego in action. It wants to get rid of these things because there is a potential that these things might be used to wake you up.

So long as you're in the midst of a lesson, in which something seems to be against your will, you will have this sense of "I don't want this and it shouldn't be happening". This is the ego's reaction. It does not want you to use this opportunity for forgiveness. It does not want you to learn the lesson.

Not that the ego is arbitrarily against you. You made it and you asked it to do this for you. You wanted it to deflect you away from sources of healing, from anything that might trigger an awakening to truth. You wanted it to keep telling you that stuff isn't supposed to happen to you, and you wanted it to make you see things as if they are happening against your will. That way you could stay asleep.

But each time you try to 'get rid of' what you do not like, or be free of a lesson, or fix a problem, or make a bad person go away, or stop something from happening, you're really using ego denial. And you do this in the name of spirituality.

You think it is spiritual to have a life where there are no problems, where nothing is happening to you, where you have no enemies, where everything goes well, where people seem to just adore you, and where you aren't hurt or offended by anyone. I mean, as a goal that's great... That could be true of real spirituality, but the ego wants this goal WITHOUT awakening.

So that means, getting rid of all protagonists, all offenders, all enemies, and all threats. It tells you you shouldn't be afraid and that fear is a bad thing. It tells you not to be guilty. It even tells you you should be constantly happly or people-pleasing. These are all deceptive ways the ego gets you to NOT deal with your shit, and it forms a spiritualized ego.

When you are afraid, that's very good, because you are being confronted with the results of some belief that you have and it's coming into your awareness. This is a great opportunity. Instead of the fear hiding out in the back of your mind, it's being brought into awareness. You don't like it, for sure, but recognize it is an opportunity because now some normally hidden dark shit has come out into the open where you can take a look at it.

It's all about how you use things - whether you use it to deny your shit or use it to bring light to your shit and undo it. So you could take the fact you're scared as a great opportunity to look at WHY you are scared, rather than to just want the fear to go away. It's pretty normal to want the fear to go away, but it's not healthy. It is healthier to take a look at it with Holy Spirit and find out why you are afraid... What guilt is the fear based on? What's the deeper cause of it? Why do you want it? How's it serving you to keep you in the dark? Where is the so-called truth that surrounds the fear to make it seem justified? What is the real truth of this situation?

Its the same with feeling guilty, upset, angry, offended, whatever... Each time this stuff comes to your awareness it's a great opportunity to heal and undo. So don't try to hide this stuff away. Don't shove it back down or want to get rid of it or to avoid it. And don't blame people for triggering it off - they're trying to help you to look at the stuff you don't want to look at. You're better off dealing with it and then being done with it, rather than constantly hiding from it and feeling its torment in the back of your mind, only to keep resurfacing saying "please acknowledge me and recognize my message to help you grow, and please use me for awakening."

This is all great material. Great opportunities to make progress. It's hard work but it's worth it, and it's far better for you than to want to just keep making this stuff go away. You can be free of it permanently if you deal with it properly and heal it. Isn't that better?

Know this. It is not possible to objectively and neutrally try to determine what the truth is, using the ego, without avoiding the truth.

There is no 'innocently seeking for the answer'. There is no mode that you can be in where you are not in some way contributing to the situation.

So either you are seeking the ego's truth, which makes the problem worse, or you are accepting God's truth, which undoes the problem. There is no other choice.

There is no time where you can just be neutrally looking at the situation and working on finding an answer, as though that 'activity' isn't actually a part of the problem, or that it is having no effect on the situation. You are choosing for or against God all the time.

This is why in quantum physics the heisenberg principle shows that if you observe something you change it. The ego mind is not capable of neutrality, it is only capable of PROJECTING and then 'perceiving' what it projected (projection makes perception).

There are no neutral thoughts. And that means, there are no neutral BELIEFS. Beliefs are thoughts or collections of thoughts. Attitudes.

Either you believe in the ego's truth, which is a lie, or you believe in God's truth.

Knowing you cannot 'deal' with the problem without making it worse, which truth do you choose? Do you keep trying to solve a problem, by adding to it, or do you step back and detach and surrender?

If someone told you that you couldn't go into the water to save a drowning animal without disturbing the water such that it would seal the animal's fate, what would you do?

Every attempt you make to solve ego problems adds to them.

There has to be a better way.

"My Father gives all power unto me."

"all power and glory are yours because the Kingdom is His"

"By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS."

"All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do."

"But the truth is very simple; ALL POWER IS OF GOD. What is NOT of Him has no power to do ANYTHING."

Our natural relationship with God is quite different to how we think of ourselves in a separated state.

Here we might think of ourselves as independent, relying on no-one, having our own power and our own abilities. We walk in separate bodies and think of ourselves as self-sufficient and reliant on ourselves. But this isn't a natural state to be in, and it isn't how God set it up.

From God's point of view, he does not create separate things, which stand apart from him as though disconnected. He doesn't create things which have special stuff of their own, or powers that they don't share with others. Nor does he let go of them or cut the off or stop being a part of them.

When God creates you he extends his own self, gives everything he has, and includes you within his own being as part of himself. It's like living and staying in the womb forever. You have nothing that you've gathered for yourself, and nothing that didn't come from God. And everything you do have, remains his as well, but shared simultaneously with you.

Your natural condition then is to actually be completely dependent on God, in which you host God within yourself. It's like, without him you are an empty vessel, and he places his own power, mind, will, thought, life, love, peace etc, into you. And now you act as a host to him. And this mean that unless you are hosting him, you don't really have anything. No power, no mind, no love, nothing.

So in order to be in your natural state, functioning the way God intended, you actually have to rely on God and depend on him to BE the qualities that are best in you. There is no other source and you literally cannot live without him.

The sense of strength that you have does not come from you, it is actually the presence of God in you. The light which you see in isn't a light that you put there, it's his light shining in your mind from God. The will you will with, the thoughts you think, the freedom you share, your very own life, is actually all HIS. He shares it with you and you therefore have a symbiotic relationship with him.

This really means that not only do you have nothing that is exclusively your own, you literally have nothing at all without him. You are nothing and do not exist without him. However, with him you share and have everything that he has. You have all his gifts, all his power, all his thought and mind, all his will and freedom, all his love and life. It is in you, but it is not of you. Yet it is yours, because it is his, and you are part of him.

This means the only way to function naturally is to acknowledge God in everything, to let him BE the strength in you, to let his light shine through you so that you can see, to align with his will and thoughts, to do his will, and to function as a team with him. He does protect you and strengthen you and provide for you.

This plugs you into his power, and regardless of having NO power of your own, you have ALL of his power. By allowing your power to be his power, shared with him and expressing through you, his power becomes your own. He has given it to you, but without losing it himself, and so both of you have it. Without what God has given you, you have no power to do anything.

This is why the model of your body and your ego are against your inherent nature. They are ways to cut you off from everything and to have nothing. They disconnect you from God and from the only source of anything real. And once you are orphaned, you basically have nothing but scraps of lifelessnes and weakness and incapability with which to function. You can't live life like that, as an exclusively autonomous prisoner, captive to nothingness.

You can only really live and be happy and have strength and sanity by sharing life with God. He has to be acknowledged, interfaced with, and allowed to be a part of you. He has to be integrated into who and what you are. You have to make room for him. You have to let go and let him deal with stuff through you, because you simply cannot do it alone. He lives withiin you at your inner altar.

Depending on your own strength will only make you afraid because you know you are too weak to deal with anything without God. Depending on God however, you become all-powerful, strong, confident, certain and capable. And then there is nothing your holiness cannot do, miraculously, because he does it for and with you. God has taken care of everything.

Ok so, some people think it's not that big of a deal whether you think ACIM is non-duality or not. But it can have significant mental health effects which are no joke.

Let's remember that ACIM is a course in mind training, it is affecting and uprooting your whole belief system and bringing into question all your values. It's making you think about who and what you are, your identity, you relationship to others and the world. If you're going to undertake this course it's going to seriously threaten your sense of self and your worldview and everything you believe. This is THERAPY, and you're messing with your MIND here.

If you believe for example the non-dual lie that "there is no one out there", you become sociopathic. You stop caring about people, you start treating people like they don't matter or don't exist, and you stop respecting people's free will. You become apathetic and depressed and lonely. That is not good.

If you believe that no-one really has a self and your self does not exist, you will enter self denial and self destruction. You'll reason that it's the ego false self that doesn't want to be undone, but this far too often gets lumped in with not having any kind of a self at all. The son of God gets thrown under the bus. This produces self repression and depression.

When you also believe that there are no others or no real brothers or no permanent individuals, it radically affects how you relate to "people". You stop respecting people's free will because apparently they don't have any. Your sense of relationships breaks down. The people in your family that you love are all suddenly regarded as mindless illusory robots. None of this is good for your mental health.

Believing that you are one with everyone and there is only one of you here, that you are everyone, also can lead to massive guilt. You will start taking on responsible for everything that's happening in the world as though you are the one who is choosing it and making it happen. And now you have to carry the burden of everyone else's suffering, which can produce massive guilt.

There is merit to opening up to oneness but not at the expense of the self. Jesus refers to a massive expansion of the self (e.g. in the holy instant) - an expansion, not an annihilation. When oneness is taken too far to mean "you don't exist at all" or "you were never created', we're now into the authority problem. We're denying God's fatherhood, we're rejecting being his creation, we're denying that anyone else was ever created, and we're basically attacking the sonship. None of that is healthy for the mind.

People will claim it's not a big deal what you believe, but if you believe something that is so against the truth and start following that and living like it and behaving based on it, your entire relationship to the world and other people is going to change. And not for the better. If you're believing that ACIM is telling you you don't exist, other people don't exist, you were never created, there is no holy spirit, jesus is a metaphor, and other such nonsense, and you're believing it, you're going to be far WORSE off.

Can you imagine how distorted your mind will become when you start trying to regard all of the other people in the world as 100% fake? That they don't even have real minds or spirit or anything beyond the body? It's as bad as the belief that God made the world of illusions. It's going to send your mind down a totally wrong path towards even more ego, under the guise of trying to reduce the ego. It's going to split the mind further and make your mental health even worse.

I've had more than one person come to me in a state of feeling like near suicide because of gross misunderstandings about the course. One person was using our oneness as justification for why everyone's suffering was all her fault and felt horrendously guilty and paralysed. Another saw that the death of their partner was somehow a part of the non-duality teaching and was having horrible grief that they couldn't reconcile and so began to blame God for making the partner go away, harming their relationship with God and their own self.

Many quite serious and quite harmful things can come about if you get your facts misaligned and start following a belief system that is fundamentally flawed. There are people doing this course who for example develop physical sicknesses as defences against the truth. Just as it describes in the book. We're not just playing with ideas here. This isn't about discussing and debating on facebook. People's actual lives and minds are being distorted and damaged and made to be more insane by incorrect beliefs about what it's teaching. Some people are quite seriously lost and distraught and feeling awful because of the non-duality lie.

I know I was. I bought into it and believed it. I believed, just as some prominent ACIM teachers taught, that I didn't really have a self and other people didn't really exist. All in the name of being more 'oneness'. And I felt depressed by this. And I was told that this was just the ego not wanting to be found to be non-existent. An attempt to justify it. But when I finally realised this is NOT what ACIM is teaching, I felt such incredible relief that I cried with joy at realising that I actually AM a child of God, permanently. And I never looked back.

We need to stop perpetuating bullshit lies about A Course in Miracles. It is not just a matter of being right or debating or having heated discussions or following what people think it means. It's having significant affects on people that believe and follow these models of reality. It's not helping anyone to tell them that they don't exist and that everyone they love doesn't exist and no-one is out there and there's no basis for miracles and no reason to help anyone and all you gotta do is selfishly accept atonement and get out of here.

"I trust my brothers, who are one with me." W181

"In the holy instant, God is remembered, and the language of communication with ALL your brothers, is remembered WITH Him. " UrT15G8

"YOU, who are NOT at war, must look for brothers and RECOGNIZE all you see AS brothers, because ONLY EQUALS ARE AT PEACE." UrT7E2

"For you dwell in the Mind of God WITH your brother, for God Himself did not will to be alone." UrT10B3

"WHAT IS NOT LOVE IS MURDER" - ACIM

Here's how this works.

A mind which is fully awake and aware, recognizes that it actually shares a mind with everyone. It is at one with them. It sees its own identity within others, and knows that they are part of itself.

A mind of oneness therefore recognizes that whatever applies to others directly applies to itself. It is aware enough to see that, because it is "in" others, if it were to attack others, it would be attacking itself. And because this is very obvious to the awake mind, it recognizes that such actions would be completely self-defeating, and so does not attack.

When the mind can see clearly that it is one with others, it will treat others only with love, because to do anything else would hurt its own self.

However, when the mind enters into a belief in separation, what it's doing is it's introducing an illusion of denial inbetween itself and others. This denial makes it seem as if other people do not have "shared interests" with itself, other people are different somehow, other people are disconnected from itself, and therefore what applies to them does not apply to itself. It does not recognize or see itself in others so does not believe that what applies to them applies to itself.

On these terms, the mind is now partly unaware that it is one with other minds, does not see itself in others, and does not recognize that to hurt others would hurt itself. It now seems plausible that there is an `option`, a possibility, to do something unto others that is not done unto itself.

Another way to put this is that a separation is introduced in-between cause and effect. The mind now believes it is capable of causing effects in others which are not caused in itself. It does not see that attempting to hurt others hurts itself, so it think it can "get away with" or be excluded from those effects.

The idea of being able to do something to others which does not directly affect yourself, is the idea of "getting away with murder." It means you can now seem to attack another without experiencing the consequences. This is attempted murder. The entire ego thought system is based on this, and absolutely everything that happens in the ego thought system is murderous!

The problem of the mind then is that even though it believes it is not one with other minds, and that it can get away with attacking/causing without being affected, it's actually not true that it gets away with it. In one way or another, the mind IS still attacking itself, and it is hurting itself when it tries to hurt others. The ego will claim this is not true, and that you can escape from the consequences, but it is in denial. If the mind attacks another, it itself will be attacked BY itself.

This then becomes the ego trap of believing that you can get away with projecting your sin onto others without having to deal with the consequences. It sets up the entire foundation of how you will deal with your sin/separation, by trying to make someone else receive the consequences of it, supposedly making you innocent or rather, letting you "get away with" your murderous intentions by having someone else be blamed for them. In this way, the ego creates a state of "fake innocence"... where you seem innocent because someone ELSE has taken the blame for your attack.

Therefore to the ego, innocence is murderous. To the ego, it is possible for the innocent to sin, and for the innocent to insanely destroy others without destroying itself. Can you imagine how ridiculous and twisted it is to believe that someone can be free of responsibility even though they're standing there with the murder weapon having just attacked their brother, believing they are completely free of all consequences? Within the dream, this is insanity, given they did not and will not escape the consequences. The cost of attack is the loss of their own identity.

When we say "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", this does not really mean that other people are separate from you and you should just treat them well. This would mean that maybe, maybe not, they might treat you well in return. This is still a breakdown in cause and effect, leaving open the possibility that even if you treat others well, they may still attack you.

The real meaning of this is that, in the mind aware of its oneness, how it treats others IS how IT treats itself. Therefore it is in its own vested interest ("shared interest") to treat others as it DOES treat itself, because whatever it does to another it IS DOING to itself. This does not rely on others to decide whether or not to reciprocate, because if you treat others with love you WILL experience the effect of love. This is also the true meaning of "karma", not that separate causes will decide to attack you in retaliation, but that YOU attack yourself. All attack is self attack.

What is not love, is murder. Any belief in attack, any sin, any guilt, and anger, any argument, any belief that something applies to others and not you, any way you come between people, any sense of separation, any illusion of being innocent while secretly scapegoating your sin onto others, means you are being murderous. You are trying to "get away with" having sinned and to not suffer the consequences.

The fact is, you do not escape the consequences of sin. If you believe in it, it will destroy you. It's not possible for something to apply to someone else that you don't also believe applies to yourself. You never really get to be "right" and others wrong, because if you are right, you are wrong. You never get to "succeed" in the ego's terms, because that means you have failed. You never get to "win" the ego's game, because that means you have used separation and have lost.

The only way to end the murderousness is to return to love. That means removing the blocks to awareness which prevent you from being able to RECOGNIZE yourself in others, to be aware of your ONENESS with others, and to therefore KNOW that if you do even one tiny thing to hurt anyone, it's going to hurt you. That's a pretty big incentive to always remain loving, because to attack is to be attacked by yourself, and who in their right mind, a sane mind, would want to do that? There is no sense to it.

The fact that what is not love is murder should not be used by the ego right now to make you feel guilty, or to say, well, this means that I'm being murderous because I'm not awake yet, therefore I'm even more sinful. Don't let the ego use this information to accuse you even more than you already have. Simply recognize this is what's happening and continue with your forgiveness of yourself. Murder is not REAL, it is an illusion. There is no REAL attack or REAL separation. It is just a state of being mistaken and thinking that it's possible to accomplish murder and to get away with it, when in fact it's not possible, AND you cannot really hurt who you really are.

There is no murder in heaven. There is no murder in God's reality. Only love is real.

It is any form of DENIAL, which actually PREVENTS you from being consciously aware of something that has been repressed.

That means that while the block remains, it is not merely a matter of you having to deal with "what you believe" consciously, it's actually about how you are USING this belief in order to HIDE something else that is OUTSIDE of your conscious awareness. Something that you DO NOT BELIEVE IS THERE.

You implemented the block by covering it over with something. This made the thing UNCONSCIOUS to you. Therefore you do not think it exists. You then think that you are in a state of FULL AWARENESS, and that if you do not SEE or are not aware of something in you, it does NOT EXIST. But this is not true.

The block to awareness has MADE the problem unconscious, outside of your awareness, and so you do NOT see it and do not therefore FIND it when you look around you. Thus you think it is not there.

This is why buried underneath DENIAL, there is stuff like unconscious guilt and unconscious sin, lurking in the depths of darkness or unawareness, blocked from sight on purpose, so that you will KEEP IT and not undo it.

Literally, "out of sight, out of mind." or "Swept under the carpet".

This is why fixing blocks to awareness is NOT just the taking back of projections. Projections are just displacements of material, usually coming FROM the unconscious content, but experienced consciously as external or separate from you. That's what the denial MADE HAPPEN.

The block to awareness ITSELF *IS* the layer of denial which has MADE the problem unconscious to you. Everything which supports that denial KEEPS the problem in the dark and beyond your ability to be conscious of it. Blocks of denial must be questioned and undone to REVEAL the unconscious hidden hates and secret sins, otherwise you are dealing only with what you THINK are the problems in your mind while simultaneously AVOIDING the deeper problems you did not want to look at. It was by not wanting to look at the problem that you MADE it unconscious so that you could PRETEND it is not there.

Blocks to awareness LITERALLY BLOCK AWARENESS. Until they are removed, AWARENESS has not been increased. But once they are removed, awareness HAS increased, and you have woken up to more of what you are.