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The world in and of itself is completely hopeless. You think it isn't. You think there are ways it can work out. You think there is hope to be had. And most likely you have confused a more positive hopeful outlook with the world. Which makes you believe it's the world that has some hope. So let's separate it out VERY clearly and carefully.

The world ITSELF, physical form, the laws of physics, spacetime, all of it, IS HOPELESS. 100% hopeless. Occasionally things seem to go a little better than others, but eventually it all turns to shit. This it the absolute fact of it. Time is death and anything that changes will die. All things in the world will be destroyed. It all ends in death because it begins in death.

"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."

"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."

This has absolutely NOTHING to do with perception. It has nothing to do with your beliefs or values or interpretations or how you see the world or what you use it for. The world itself is hopeless. There cannot be hope in it because everything in it ends in death. Everything is destroyed. The very same seeming force of "time" that seems to allow flowers to grow and bloom is the very same force that kills them off.

ALL the world's roads lead to death. Sometimes there is a temporary illusions of peace in which the "thorns are not felt" at once, but later it settles in and takes everything away from you. The world was made SO THAT problems could not BE escaped. That means there is NO END to problems, no matter how much you are in denial or how ingeniously you keep insisting they can all be solved. You wilL NEVER solve them. It was made TO disappoint. It HAS disappointed you since time began.

"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."

So let's be completely clear. The world in and of itself has NO hope. What hope can there be when everything you do, everything you try to build, everything you make, everything you achieve, it is all going to eventually be DESTROYED by time. All the cities will fall. All the bodies will die. It is a BLEAK outlook because the world IS bleak. In and of itself has nothing to offer and nothing to give and nothing of value.

The people of the world are hell-bent in DENIAL, trying to find ways to constantly turn the world into a better place. A better place in terms of trying to civilize it. This is in effect an attempt to tame hell. It's a form of denial where we keep trying to take something which STILL will be destroyed, EVEN from the outset of making shiny new things, in one more futile attempt to get the dead world to live. To be renewed, refreshed, worth staying in. Until it dies. Until a supernova blows it all to shit and renders the human race totally irrelevant.

You should not look to the world FOR your hope. You should not look to the world for your salvation. You should not look to it for things to value and treasure and keep. It should not hold out hope to you, because it WILL take it away. This is the way of the world itself. This has nothing to do with the people or what the people think or how they perceive. It does this even WITHOUT any people around. It destroys and takes away and reduces and decays and rots. That is its nature.

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds It from awareness like a shield held to obscure the sun. The grimness of the symbol is enough to show it cannot co-exist with God. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction. Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life."

Those poor worms. They thought they had a chance, living off the rotting fetid flesh of death, but they too were doomed to die even since they were born. This is the world's FUNCTION. This is what it was DESIGNED to to. It cannot function any other way because it was made to BE an opposite to how God functions. It was made to attack his function and be the opposite of life. It cannot succeed, it cannot work, it cannot provide, it cannot protect, it cannot produce life, it cannot save you, and it cannot love you. The world wants you dead.

You have to become very clear about this, because so long as you keep confusing your "trying to look on the bright side" with the world itself, you'll think the world itself has hope in it. You have to sort out the fact of what the world IS from your USE of it. Then you will realize that regardless of perceptions, the world ITSELF is just a piece of trash not worth anything. It is NOTHINGNESS pretending to be something.

So long as you believe that the world itself is SOMETHING, and can therefore GIVE you something, make you something, cause you something you prefer, and provide for you, you will WANT it. You will idolize it and treasure it and want to keep it. And the COST of this is that you will REJECT GOD. The price of choosing to believe in a made-up world is the DENIAL of the Kingdom, which is inherently the denial of life and happiness and real hope.

This is what people do not want to look at. You cannot get to realizing that you WANT heaven, until you realize that the world IS NOT heaven. So long as you think the world IS heaven, which all insane people do, you will want to keep it. You will seek and not find salvation and solutions IN AND OF the world which will always disappoint you. They will fail and will only partly work. And if you keep trusting them you will not be able to trust God.

Only when you can admit and accept that the world just fundamentally SUCKS, that it was made to BE broken and NEVER work, only then will you realize the inner stirring that happens. The sense that, surely, given how horrendously stupid the world is, this CAN'T BE THE WORLD GOD CREATED. It just can't be reality. It can't be true. It can't be how the laws of existence really function. it can't be where you're supposed to be living. And it can't really exist.

THEN.... you will be willing to turn around and look for A REAL ALTERNATIVE. The real alternative comes from the inner insistence that there MUST BE A BETTER WAY. There must be some kind of world or reality where all of this shite does not happen. There MUST be a reality where sickness and death don't exist. There MUST be a way to see that doesn't make hell seem like a nightmare. And there MUST be a whole different mindset that WORKS AND NEVER FAILS.

This is the opening up of the spiritual eye. This is where the physical sight begins to be not believed. Because you now realize that nothing in OR OF the world can show you reality.

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

"Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight."

So you now start to realize that there MUST BE another world, another light, a higher mind, another thought system, another POSSIBILITY, and a REAL HOPE, that comes from BEYOND THIS WORLD. It is the light of heaven, the REAL potential of happiness that lasts and is never disappointed, and the actual accessible possibility of eternal life. It is what God has GIVEN, and is opposite to everything in the world. It is completely alien to everything everyone in the world thinks, and it reveals that the world holds NOTHING that you want.

Only by not wanting the world can you want God. You can't want both because they are opposites. Only be realizing there IS NO HOPE in the world can you open up to the fact that there must be a world where there IS HOPE. There has to be a real hope, rather than the false idle wishful thinking and fake denial and pretense that you've used your whole life to RESIST HELL and to try to make the world stop falling apart. Let the world fall apart and realize that's all it CAN do. And then bring the light of ANOTHER world where things do NOT fall apart, to this world, to perform miracles.

This higher healthier saner attitude of optimism and true hope and possibility must be rooted in God. It must be founded on the real truth and the DENIAL OF THE WORLD. To ACCEPT the other world at all is the acceptance of atonement. It's to accept that you are under no laws but God's and there is no truth but God's. That salvation is OF ANOTHER WORLD. That the only hope you have is God's HELP. That the only POWER there is, the only POSSIBILITY without limits, is the power of God - a power not of this world, which ENABLES YOU instead of disabling you.

The world has no hope whatsoever. It is already made of the idea of death.

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

Your false perceptions OF the world emphasize its hopelessness and pull out its pictures of hate and put borders around its scenes of crime and sickness and decay. Your true perceptions reinterpret these hopeless scenes and GIVE them hope from another world. Not a hope the world HAS, or is made of, but a hope that you find only by giving it, through projection onto it. An invitation TO those in the world, a signpost which points to ANOTHER world, which says "this way to happiness." This is the road out of hell, a road which the world itself will never offer.

"Fear not to cross to the abode of peace and perfect holiness. Only there is the completion of God and of His Son established forever. Seek not for this in the bleak world of illusion, where nothing is certain, and where everything fails to satisfy."

"The holy instant is your invitation to love, to enter into your bleak and joyless kingdom, and transform it into a garden of peace and welcome."

"The bleak little world will vanish into nothingness, and your heart will be so filled with joy that it will leap into Heaven and into the presence of God."

"Separation" is an ACIM buzzword and yet often misunderstood. Most people associate separation with something unnatural, something to remove, and a sign of the ego. Separation is bad, oneness is good. Anything that even hints at a sign of separation is considered to be wrong, some kind of "duality" which is opposite to the truth. But this is actually incorrect in ACIM terms.

If you look deeply at the course you may eventually realize that heaven's reality is not the same as the world of space and time. Heaven entails the sharing of everything. Spacetime entails NOT sharing anything. As you look deeper, you discover that God in fact isn't "arranged" like objects in spacetime. His whole mind and system and creation are in fact more like a holgoram.

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you." The holographic principle is that there is a whole, and there are also parts. But each part isn't merely "a part of" the whole, lacking in some way. Each part in fact contains ALL of the whole. Every part is whole in and of itself, and is host to the whole. ACIM refers to this for example as "I am forever host to God." And "You had everything when you were created just as everyone did."

Each of the parts of a hologram experiences immense SHARING with the whole. And the whole includes all of God, and all other parts. This means that every part IS every other part, and is also host to God. This sharing, however, is not like sharing in spacetime. It does not mean that there are two separate things and something is transferred between them. Each part "houses" the whole, and therefore IS the same whole as the other parts. One part IS another part.

ACIM again expresses this in statements such as: "One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth." This is not easy to understand in linear terms or by drawing analogies to spacetime objects, because in spacetime each object is "apart" from others, is NOT a whole, does NOT share anything, and is "separated off". This is not what it's like in a hologram. In the hologram, that which is in one part is located in all the other parts as well. It TRANSCENDS space and time, beyond spatial separations.

This also parallels very closely the idea of omnipresence, which is an attribute of God and everything he created. This doesn't just mean God is everywhere, it also means that THE WHOLE of God is in EVERY location. Not just one part of him over here, and another part of him over there. But ALL of him is simultaneously in multiple places. This again transcends the limits of space and time.

Now, in ACIM terms, the main whole is referred to as God, and the "whole parts" are referred to as souls, or God's children. There are a great many creations, which are many thoughts of God. Each thought of God IS whole, because God can only think wholly and in terms of wholeness. What he thinks of "creates another whole", which SHARES everything with the original whole and with all other wholes. Each whole is FUSED to all the others and effectively IS them.

This is the real meaning of oneness - a shared experience in which EACH wholly existing distinct "part" is united with and sharing everything with all the others. "The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been fully created." This is part of the miraculous nature of God, that a part of God is the whole of God, a creation of God contains all of God, and therefore every part "is one", and yet there are parts. These parts are not PARTIAL parts, or lacking what other parts have. Every part is A WHOLE.

Then we come to the idea of "the separation from God". This is where paople start to demonize the idea of separation or of "many things". When people don't recognize that heaven's natural state is one of TOTAL SHARING AND UNION, they may think of it more in terms of space-time objects. Such as the son of God is one "object". And then the only way to conceive of separation is to "split the object" so that there are now two or more objects. But this is NOT what happened in the separation, because heaven is not object-oriented or spatially separated.

In the separation, or "the fall of man", basically some of the WHOLE PARTS which were aspects of the hologram of God's thought, chose to STOP SHARING EVERYTHING. They wanted to become selfish. Their innate nature is to share everything with everyone. Everyone in heaven has everything. Everything belongs to everyone. Everyone IS everyone. "We are the Kingdom, WE, the sons of God." But "the ego" is actually the idea of trying NOT to share. And "the separation from God" was actually moreso an act of OPPOSING God's holographic family unit.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness. The soul is the idea of self-fullness."

The separation from God was a movement AWAY from sharing, towards selfishness. Selfishness goes by many names, all of which are efforts to "separate off", to withdraw, to hoard, and to move into a small isolated part which is NOT SHARED with the rest. This results in SPECIALNESS, which is the desire to have an exclusive special "something" true for you, which is not true for others.

Another way to view the separation is to say, individual whole parts of the hologram, rejected their union and shared totality with the whole, and tried to become "parts which do not share". They tried to orphan themselves. They did not want to be "part of" the collective sonship. They did not want to have the total holy relationship of sharing everything with everyone. They wanted to go of by themselves and have something special and exclusive just for them. "You were at peace until you asked for special favor, and God did not give it."

It's important to note then, that in fact in the creation of God, in the hologram of the Kingdom, there were in fact MANY INDIVIDUAL BEINGS prior to "the separation." God had created the sonship which comprised many souls, who are permanently brothers, and who were joined and sharing everything happily. These were INDIVIDUALS, but at the same time each individual was ONE WITH all the other individuals. Each one, is one and many, because the truth of a holographic system is that the one is many and the many are one.

The existence of many individual beings DID NOT MEAN that there were many "separate people" standing around like disconencted objects sharing nothing. That is not what multitudes are like in heaven. In heaven, many beings are individually present, AND YET at the same time, they are so intimately joined to and ONE WITH all other beings, that they ALL ARE one thing at the same time.

The separation from God did not actually INVENT "many selves". Many selves existed before that, and is completely natural. Nor did the separation produce individuality. But it DID produce a SECOND SELF, which was the idea of being not yourself and unlike how God created you - the ego. The denial of your joined identity (in christ - every soul is christ), formed a false self image.

"God who encompasses all being, nevertheless created separate beings (who SHARE, not who are isolated), who have everything individually and want **to share** it to increase their joy." "Nothing real can be increased except by sharing."

God had already created "many beings", not separate OBJECTS, or isolated cut-off individuals, but individuals who were ALSO joined together. They wanted to SHARE everything with each other, even their own souls. One soul IS another soul. There are many souls and each of them is an individual being, but also IS the other beings. The possibility of this is the "miraculousness" of the soul. You can see Jesus contrasting the WRONG way of thinking about the soul, here:

"Each Soul knows God completely (is the whole). This IS the miraculous power of the Soul (that it can be both a self and the whole at the same time). The fact that ***each Soul has this power*** completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

Indeed when we think in terms of spatially separated objects, we would conclude that if I have everything or am the whole, there is nothing ELSE for another soul to have. But in heaven, EACH individual being IS THE WHOLE. YOU are the whole sonship. "The Kingdom of Heaven IS you." I am the whole sonship. So are you. And WE are both there as brothers. Each PART of the sonship is the whole sonship. All the many children of God, which will always be many children of God and equal brothers, are the whole of heaven.

So in "the separation" event, some of the whole parts of the hologram rejected their SHARED nature, and wanted to ISOLATE. They didn't want to be included, they wanted to exclude. Thus they used denial and unwillingness and attack to reject the hologram. They were ALREADY individual beings, that have a total relationship of sharing with all others. But they tried to CUT OFF COMMUNICATION to end their shared relationships.

This turned them INTO "the separated ones." They BECAME separated, precicely because they existed in a NOT separated state before that. But this does NOT mean they didn't have an individual self before this. The only thing that changed was the loss of sharing (aka communication).

"Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply BEING. The ego is thus AGAINST communication, except in so far as it is utilized to ESTABLISH separateness, rather than to abolish it."

"The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a failure in COMMUNICATION."

Some of the beings, who existed as whole beings, who had everything, who shared and WERE everything, "cut themselves off" from sharing anything, and isolated themselves. They wanted to have something SPECIAL for themselves. They tried to end their RELATIONSHIP with God. They wanted God to treat them with special favor. They wanted to be different and have something of their own. They wanted to be SELFISH.

Selfishenss is the opposite of sharing. Separation means a desire to be exclusive and selfish and to NOT SHARE. Which is why JOINING is its correction. And joining does not mean undoing your SELF!

To "be separate" therefore really means to NOT JOIN, or to not share. Spacetime is very obviously a state of not sharing. Each object is separated off. One car does not share with another car. One thing does not exist in two places at onces. Two things are not one thing. You cannot be located in one place and another at the same time. No two objects can overlap, otherwise they'd destroy each other. Spacetime was an attack on the SHARING of the sonship, resulting in a realm in which everything is separated off and excluded.

The body arose from the idea that you wanted to be isolated from the collective. You wanted to have something exclusive to you which others did not have - your own body. You wanted to be different than everyone else and not like them - your own appearance. You wanted to have some small portion of heaven that you thought of as exclusively yours, locked up inside a fence, surrounded by a wall, to keep others out and to keep you in. And you wanted to inhabit this small area of existence as exclusively yours, so that ONLY YOU exist within it and everything else is outside. This is what the BODY is based on. It is a separation device. And within it you are lonely and isolated, unless you are willing to extend or join PAST it.

"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self (holographic shared self) from other parts (your brothers who ARE also you). It is within this fence he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love (wholeness/sharing)."

The UNDOING of separation, the atonement, healing, does NOT therefore necessarily mean ... ."let's get rid of anything that hints at separation". God had already created "separate beings" in heaven before the ego came along. They were separate in the sense that they were MANY, but they were ALSO JOINED. That which is BOTH many and one, is heaven's natural holographic condition. This is NATURAL. There is nothing wrong with it. It's perfectly legitimate that God has a family of souls. This has nothing to do with the ego.

"Ultimately, every member of the family of God must return."

Heaven means separate beings who are not separate. Whole parts which are parts but also the whole. There is an aspect of separation to that, because there ARE many beings. But they are not ISOLATED because they share everything. So the "attack on separateness" is NOT correct. The attempt to remove all sense of "separation" in all cases is NOT correct. We are not supposed to be removing the holographic aspects of reality. We are not supposed to be undoing the sonship. And we are NOT supposed to be getting rid of individuality!! You and your brothers all have permanent souls, created by God, which can never be destroyed.

What we ARE supposed to be doing, is realizing that we threw away what CONNECTS us. We threw away joining and sharing and RELATIONSHIP. We threw away holographic wholeness. We want to undo isolation, specialness, selfishness, possessiveness, ownership, exclusivity, localization, littleness, unwillingness to share etc. These are what being "separated off" really means. But we are not supposed to take it to the point of erasing ALL hints of "many things". God having many children is NOT a dualistic idea, because all of those many things ARE ONE as well.

Duality really means that there are many things which DO NOT SHARE. This is a false experience and is the basis for spacetime.

Nonduality is the idea that there are NOT many things. This is an attack upon heaven's creation and an attempt to claim that God is NOT holographic. It is ignorant and false and an ego conclusion.

Reality is in fact a kind of "trans-duality", a hologram, a paralogical and omnipresent system, in which many parts DO exist but they are NOT "separated off" parts like in spacetime. It is NOT duality to say that God has many sons, because while there are a count of many, they ALSO are fused together as one. They are WHOLE beings, who are each ALL the whole. And therefore each child of God is ALL children. This is why the sonship itself is united via the ONE MIND of christ, yet EACH INDIVIDUALLY is christ.

So we have to be careful when dealing with "undoing the separation" that we're not mistaken in trying to also undo the holographic aspects of creation. We can't just remove ALL trace of separation, because this undoes God's Kingdom. We can't just use a blanket statement to wipe out all notion of separateness because this kills off all the souls that God created. Separateness is therefore not really the PROBLEM. The problem is that the separate individuals are being selfish and don't want to SHARE THEMSELVES. It is a breakdown in communication and relationship that needs fixing, NOT individuality.

"Heaven includes all God's children and their creations." We can't just say "separation is a bad thing". It depends on whether or not the separate things are including or excluding each other. INCLUSIVE SEPARATION is perfectly normal. EXCLUSIVE SEPARATION is ego. The undoing of the ego is NOT the undoing of separation. It is the reversal of EXCLUDING OTHERS. This does not result in the erasing of individuality, nor of the undoing of multiple individuals. It results in a REUNION OF BROTHERHOOD in the sonship of God, in which all God's children are one big happy family who share everything with each other forever.

God who is love created you lovingly, with love, through love, as love. You are permanently made of immortal love. When you are being true to yourself, you know that the love you are is shared with God, who is your love and who loves you and with you.

God is in you, and you are within you. There is only this inner experience of inclusion. In heaven, given God is everywhere, creation can only increase INTERNALLY through sharing. God shares his INNER being with you and HOSTS you inside of himself. Creation increase inwardly by adding hosts who share that which already is.

In heaven there is no such thing as "outside" or "external" or "excluded" or "separate". When you are everywhere, you encompass everything inside yourself. There, your brothers are not really outside of you surrounding you, they are WITHIN you and share your innermost being. This is the only real way to be intimate - to welcome your brother INSIDE of you psychologically.

"God who encompasses all being..."

The separation, or as I like to think of it more accurately as "the opposition or denial of God/reality", was an attempt to deny that you are inside of God, and to deny that you are host to him. It was an attempt to LEAVE God and go BEYOND the Kingdom, as though stepping OUTSIDE OF reality.

This produced the mad belief in spacetime, which is the idea of being EXILED from heaven, outside and external to the Kingdom, in a place where God could not exist or enter, seemingly separate and a kingdom you rule without him. The opposite to inner reality is obviously outer reality, which produced a kind of EXTERNALIZED idea of existence. The idea of this "world".

Basically, "you are at home in God, dreaming of exile", which means you are imagining that you are not WITHIN, and are WITHOUT. That you are outside of heaven in some other weird dimension (spacetime). It's an illusion of a separate realm outside the Kingdom. And everything in it is focused on the EXTERNAL.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death." "Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is NOT in Heaven is not ANYWHERE. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

Whereas in heaven, your brother is inside of you, as is God, because everyone shares and hosts the same stuff, "on earth" (in exile) it appears your brothers are OUTSIDE of you. It seems you are the only one allowed to inhabit your little speck of existence inside the body, the body fences you off from the universe, and everyone else is kept at arm's length. "The body is OUTSIDE you, and SEEMS to surround you, shutting you off from others, and keeping you APART from them, and them from you."

"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self from other parts. It is within this fence he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love."

So now the body experience becomes one of isolation and imprisonment inside a fence, where the fence ("the body is clearly a device for separation") comes BETWEEN you and others. It's designed like a thick wall to keep them out and keep you in, safe from love (joining/sharing).

You then focus entirely OUTWARD towards the external, as if the external world is all of reality. As you'll notice, all the body's senses are directed to the detection and validation of WHAT IS EXTERNAL to you, and not what is inside you. In fact, the inside of you is considered invisible. Yet it is the INNER WORLD that is the only reality. Heaven's reality is IN YOUR MIND, and God is inside your mind.

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen." "And what attracts you from BEYOND the veil, is also deep WITHIN you, unseparated from it, and COMPLETELY One." "He calls to you from deep within your mind where He abides. Hear Him today."

"Only at the altar of God will you find peace, and this altar is in you, because God put it there."

"For still deeper than the ego's foundation, and MUCH stronger than IT will ever be, is your intense and burning love of God, AND HIS FOR YOU."

God is really not external to you. Nor is heaven. It's not out there in the world. God only temporarily seems to be "in everything you see" ONLY because God is IN YOUR MIND FIRST, not because he is outside of it in the world. You don't look out there WITHOUT him in order to see him, and looking WITHOUT him you WILL NOT see him. This is also why such a large portion of workbook lessons are devoted to you going INSIDE behind your clouds and blocks and denials to try to find the door to heaven. Inside your mind, not outside you.

But when you have blocked access to God, who is inside your mind, your experience is that your "inner world" is lacking love and that the awareness of love's presence is blocked there. Because you seem not to have God IN you, as though you are denying your hosting of His love, you see yourself as deprived. Then you project this outward.

This projection of the seeming absence of love forms a dark hallucinated world, the unforgiven world, in which externals are the primary focus, body identification is emphasized, you cling to the physical, and you see yourself and others as separate objects. The body, external to you, looks on the external aspects of others ie their bodies, and regards this as total reality.

"Only the body makes the world seem real." What that means is that the body is designed to make the idea of "outside the Kingdom" real, to make EXTERNALS real, and to focus on illusions of exile, separation, exclusion, isolation and the absence of love (sin).

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

Failing to invite, welcome, and experience the love and presence of God INSIDE your mind, you reason that cause and love and presence and God must be OUTSIDE. If you are not the cause, then you are effect, and now you are a victim, at the seeming effect of an external world that you are putting there. Thus you are doing it to yourself. And yet you are convinced the world is externally objectively real, when it is nothing more than an illusion of BEING OUTSIDE the Kingdom.

"Sickness is a method, conceived in madness, for placing God's Son on his Father's throne. God is seen as outside, fierce and powerful, eager to keep all power for Himself." "What is seen outside must lie beyond forgiveness, for it seems to be forever sinful. "

"The good is seen OUTSIDE; the evil, IN."

"An idol is a wish, made tangible and given form, and thus perceived as real, and seen OUTSIDE the mind."

While you may have ideas of God being way out in the far reaches of the universe beyond the stars, I have news for you. God is SO close to you that he is under your skin, behind your body, deeper inside you than even your own split mind and ego, and so close to your soul as to represent the ultimate INNER intimacy. He calls to you FROM WITHIN, not from without. He's not calling to you from the mountain tops or in some external special body or through toys or favorites or any other idols.

This you see is the problem with external salvation. All forms of external searching result in sickness ie mental illness because they take you AWAY FROM where the answer it. The cause and the answer to your problems is INSIDE YOU not outside.

"Peace is an attribute in YOU. You cannot find it outside. All mental illness is some form of EXTERNAL searching. Mental health is INNER peace."

You cannot find peace by looking FOR it outside of yourself, in the bodies of others, in the planet, or in space or time. The truth IS NOT out there. The truth is an INNER truth. And the peace of God dwells ONLY INSIDE you in a shared inner experience.

You see, mind can only really experience INSIDE the confines of itself. It cannot go anywhere or be anywhere or experience anything that is truly beyond its own reach. Everything it sees and experiences has to be INTERNAL. And this is also why "ideas leave not their source." And also why you are an idea IN the mind of God, not outside of it.

When you see yourself as lacking love you WILL reason that it was caused to be lacking, as an effect, or an EXTERNAL cause. And now you will project cause, and see causation happening against your will by others doing it to you. And thus you accuse them of sin. And this is not forgiving. But to forgive them has nothing to do with reframing what they're doing, and everything to do with looking INSIDE YOURSELF for the responsibility of causing your own suffering. Just as also inside yourself you'll find freedom from your self-inflicted harm.

Seeking outside you WILL NOT FIND what you are looking for. Because in fact, the more you seek outside, the FURTHER AWAY you become from the thing you are trying to find. This is the ego's entire mantra of "seek and do not find."

It makes sense to you to seek ELSEWHERE when you fail to acknowledge, or be aware of, or accept or be open to, that which IS WITHIN you (God, light, truth, your soul etc). Because if it's not regarded as within, surely it is somewhere ELSE. And so you look somewhere else, and do not find it, because it is not there.

"...everyone who believes that the ego is salvation is intensely engaged in the SEARCH for love. Yet the ego, though encouraging the search very actively, makes one proviso; - do not FIND it. Its dictates, then, can be summed up simply as, "Seek and do NOT find.""

"Such is the ego's plan for your salvation. Surely you can see how it is in strict accord with the ego's basic doctrine, "Seek but do not find?" For what could more surely guarantee that you will not find salvation than to channelize all your efforts in searching for it where it is not?"

""Seek but do not find" remains this world's stern decree, and no-one who pursues the world's goals can do otherwise." You will not find God outside of you. You will not find God in the world or in a book or in a body or in a planet. You will not find God in this universe. This is the world of EXILE, of EXCLUSION, and of EXTERNALIZATION. It is an hallucination precisely because you DO "project out" what you wanted to see IN PLACE OF what is within you.

Searching to find love's SOURCE, will turn up empty handed, when you look to the idea of EXILE FROM the source, which has manifested as EXTERNAL "reality". What is outside the body is not there. Even the body itself is outside of you. It's constructed from the idea of the avoidance of your soul. This is why you can either identify with the body or with spirit - which really is a question of whether the EXTERNAL is real to you, or whether the INTERNAL is real to you.

You will not get love from external people. You do not want to. If you were to succeed in doing so you would no longer look within to find God and would be without him. This is the ego's promise and deception. Real love is not out there. You have to FIRST find it within, if you want to be IN it, enough to be able to EXTEND it, so that you can then RESULT in perceiving it. Remember that "perception is a RESULT not a cause". PROJECTION is the cause. And you project from what you have WITHIN. You can only seem to see God in the world IF you FIRST look within and find God, before projecting his love.

"It also shows some glimmering of sight into perception's law that what you see reflects the state of the PERCEIVER's mind."

"You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you WANT it there. Perception HAS no other law than this."

Realize then that you first must look INSIDE, and your INNER state of mind is all important. This is also why you have to become miracle minded in order to GIVE miracles. You cannot give what you do not have. "I can only give the miracles I have received." This is also why Jesus says you should look within and find out "there is no sin". You are supposed to find the love INSIDE YOU, which is where love IS. It is not separated off and made external.

When you are IN that INNER love, you are in God. You are IN the light. You are IN the heavenly experience. Then you can EXPRESS that love miraculously. You can SHARE it, but you have to be plugged into it. You cannot go looking for the end result outside of you and then hope this will trigger off the cause.

God is NOT in the world, the world is the idea of existing without him. But if God is IN YOUR MIND, then you will look inside and see God, and project God's love outward, and look upon the LOVE that you have projected, which you put there TO see. It it will reflect God. Not because an illusory world is made of God, but because God REPLACES the illusion of exile with presence.

It is so easy to be deceived by the dangling carrot of spacetime. The great TEMPATATION to draw you AWAY from yourself, to suck you OUT of your mind, to hurl you INTO the world, and to make you FIXATE on bodies. To draw you into hell and away from the heaven of your mind. But what if we simply say, THERE IS NO EXTERNAL WORLD?

"You are not the victim of the world you see because you invented it. You can give it up as easily as you made it up. You will see it or not see it, as you wish. While you want it you will see it; when you no longer want it, it will not be there for you to see."

"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? "

There is no life OUTSIDE of heaven. Outside of heaven life is an ILLUSION of life at best, at worst death. Outside of heaven is a sensless, lawless place, of space and time, governed by laws of death. Because God is not there. The "out there" is NOT OUT THERE. The "in here" IS IN HERE. You must go WITHIN, turn away from the world of distractions, find what you have BURIED deep in your mind, welcome Got back into your awareness, and open up the deep inner doorway to heaven. God is waiting for you INSIDE YOU. He always has been. He did not go anywhere. It's you who wandered off into exile. Turn around and go back to where you came from.

"At last the gate of Heaven (within you) opens and God's Son is free to enter in the home that stands ready to welcome him, and was prepared before time was and still but waits for him."

A Course in Miracles - Urtext material - reproduced with permission from the Foundation for Inner Peace (acim.org), and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles (facim.org).
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