This sounds like a tall order, but ACIM is saying we should not in any way be at the effect of the world. It should not do anything to us. We should regard other people as having not done anything to us. That is forgiveness. You are immortal and unchanged.

Forgiveness therefore is being causal and not an effect of the world. In forgiveness nothing happens to you, no-one offends you, nothing upsets you, nothing can hurt you, nothing can be taken from you. The world does absolutely nothing to you at all.

There is a very strong thread through the course that teaches this. It basically means you should be having absolutely no reaction to the world for any reason. You should be in a calm and whole state of mind which is always unconditionally loving, always deliberately acts, always gives the same one response to everything, and never re-acts to anything.

A "re-action" is an indirect action, a response, to a seeming provocation from outside yourself. Something happens first, and then you act, rather than acting first. And the action you perform is determined by what was done to you, rather than by what you truly will to do from love.

Reaction means you are a victim. It happens when you believe that stuff in the world is doing something to you. This happens when you believe it is REAL. This applies to everything physical. Everything the body can see and sense. All physical things are illusions, with a nature that is designed to tempt you all the time.

The world tempts you to believe that bad things are happening, cruelty and injustice, threats and dangers, wars and attacks, sicknesses and suffering. It shows this to you as pictures of crucifixion, pictures of bodies, pictures of things going wrong. It presents this to you as physical images, as physical objects, suggesting to you - look at this, it's true!

All physical things are forms of sin. Even the body is made from the idea of sin and deception. They give rise easily to a sense of guilt and fear, IF you buy into them. If you look at them and you start to buy into it, believe it, trust it, want it, you'll be giving it power over you. And then you'll perceive that it is causing you. Which means you are being affected by it.

This then causes you to be changed BY the world, seemingly. Or rather, you are using the world to pretend you are affected by the world. The result is that your mind will believe the external world is causing it, and it will manufacture effects to correspond to it. Your feelings will change, you will be "made" to feel a certain way, and you'll start having all kinds of effects - reactions, to what you've perceived.

Basically, if you believe that anything in the world is true, you are giving it power and truth and reality, which in your mind will set you up as the victim of it, and that will cause a reaction. If you are reacting in any way, with upset, fear, guilt, anger, anything at all, you have bought into the illusion that the world exists and is truly causing you.

The aim then is that you need to get to where you recognize that the world - which is a dream - is only a dream, which you are dreaming. And because it is only a dream, it is not a cause, and is only an effect. You must withdraw all power from it, all truth, and all reality. You must recognize it as nothing, doing nothing, causing nothing. All of its physical testimonies and states and forms must be recognized as lies - false - untrue.

Anything you see with the body's eyes, do not believe it. if you believe it, you will become deceived. It means you've bought into a temptation, and temptation puts you in hell. Anything that seems to be happening or existing in the physical world is NOT OF GOD and is not true. It must be denied. To deny it you must withdraw all belief in it, not play along with it, not go into false empathy, not join with it or become one with it.

The aim is to reach a state where you recognize that the world does nothing whatsoever, it has no power and no cause over you. You dominate it because you are all-powerful and causal. You are its dreamer. And as a result you cannot react to anything. It means the end of victimhood, the end of being affected or upset, the end of suffering because of anything other than yourself.

It does sound like a tall order - to not react to anything here whatsoever. To not react to a war, or a murder, or an abuse, or a fire, or a loss, or a threat. To be completely calm and still and unmoved and uncaused by anything in the world. But it is the goal we're seeking to achieve. If we are to be forgiving, it means we must be overlooking the world, which means not resting on the world, and not giving the world things it does not have.

In full recognition of being the cause or dreamer of the dream, you no longer can go along with believing that people are really suffering, or that sickness is true, or that death has any power to suppress anyone, or that bad things can make you unhappy, or that anything in the world can take anything away from you by any means.

It means the end of all effects from the world, all shifts to emotion, all fluctuating state and responses. It means being singular and unconditional, with one response to everything. I am not at the effect of the world I see. I will not react to the world I see. The world I see does nothing to me. I am immortal spirit and nothing in the world can change me or do anything to alter me in any way.

"That this is all the BODY does, is true. For it IS but a figure in a dream. But who REACTS to figures in a dream, UNLESS he sees them as if they were real?" UrT27I4

"For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes." UrT27I10

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within YOU, there is a force which NO illusions can resist." UrT22F5

"Be not deceived by the form of problems today." UrW79L10

"Now it becomes your task to let the illusion be carried to the truth. Be steadfast but in this; be not deceived by the "reality" of any changing form." UrM28A7

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs." UrM13A6

"For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take." UrW140L4

"Be not deceived by forms the "something" takes." UrT29I8

"You have need to use the symbols of the world a while. But be you not deceived by them as well. They do not stand for anything at all, and in your practicing it is this thought which will release you from them." UrW184L4

"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." UrT31D2

"Be not deceived by what appears as many choices." UrT41G14

"Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done TO you. Acknowledge but that YOU have been mistaken, and ALL effects of your mistakes will disappear." UrT21C2

"He looks on what he chooses to see. No more and no less. The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did." UrM6C3

"for the world will never again appear to rule the mind" UrM6C3

"Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are." UrW190L5

"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power" UrT11C5

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal." UrM9A6

"The purpose of the world you see is to obscure your function of forgiveness, and provide you with a justification for forgetting it. It is the temptation to abandon God and His Son, taking on a physical appearance. It is this which the body's eyes look upon." UrW64L1

"Nothing the body's eyes seem to see can be anything but a form of temptation, since this was the purpose of the body itself." UrW64L2

"Temptation has ONE lesson it would teach, in ALL its forms, WHEREVER it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel. It sets the limits on what he can do; its power is the only strength he has; his grasp cannot exceed its tiny reach." UrT31H1

"What you behold as sickness and as pain, as weakness and as suffering and loss, is but temptation to perceive YOURSELF defenseless and in hell. Yield NOT to this" UrT31H6

"For all temptation is nothing more than the attempt to substitute another will for God's." UrM17A9

"Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated." UrT27K4 "The world I see has nothing that I want." UrW128

"God's teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children's toys?" UrM14A4

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way." UrW137L7

"Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself, "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are no streets where people walk alone and separately. There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever." This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS, for each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have denied the other." UrT12G1

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son. And until you realize that God's Son CANNOT be crucified, this is the world you will see." UrT11J4

In ACIM the term "solid" or "solidity" obviously refers to what we recognize it to mean..... things which seem solid to us. Physical matter, heavy objects, solid materials, walls, bodies, planets, all things which science would tell us are in a solid state of matter. Hard, tangible, measurable, biological, chemical, physical. Planet earth.

The course goes on to tell us that these things which appear to be solid will eventually be seen as transparent, like a shadow, or a smoke-screen, or a veil of illusions. And that these solid things stand in front of the face of Christ, initially blocking its view entirely but later moving aside and fading away to reveal the true light of the real world. That the "world", ie the solid earth, is nothing but a wall of illusions standing in the way of reality.

Christ vision becomes able to "see through" solid matter, kind of like x-ray vision. This is because it is forgiving, and "to forgive is to overlook." To overlook something is to not see it, which is why what you forgive must disappear. By forgiving the physical material solid world, therefore, you become able to see through and past and beyond it to the light of another world. A world which is not earth and is not the physical solid material plane.

In fact, Jesus says that it is the guilt in our minds which makes the veil of illusions - earth and spacetime - appear to have solidity. It is guilt which drags our mind down into false perceptions, blinded by perception of form, looking through and believing the body's eyesight which is completely incapable of forgiving or looking past the solidity of matter.

It is our belief in guilt and sin and fear and death which locks us in to the prison of solid matter and makes it appear opaque to our minds. It is only because we are not forgiving that the world appears to show up at all as "solid". And once we forgive completely, the whole world must disappear, and that does mean the solid physical world will fade into nothingness, leaving behind only the light of heaven, because the world IS nothing but a veil of illusions we made to cover up reality.

The physical material solid world literally was made as a kind of curtain or screen or wall to come "between" you and yourself, between you and God, to hide God and block out heaven. It is like a layer of dirt covering over what should be bright and obvious, a stain upon the creation of God, a shadow of darkness. Belief in it causes the body to be lit up and made to seem real and solid, emphasizing the rift of the gap of separation which contains the entire separation from God in the split mind.

Christ vision looks past this world to the light. It does not mistake the body for the son of God. It does not fixate on physical forms. It does not believe the world of separate objects is real. It doesn't merely look upon and regard it as unified, it looks fully beyond it entirely. It glances at the disappearing thin veil of nothingness as it leave the mind's awareness and opens up fully to perceiving only the light of reality. Then it is game over for the world, which was nothing to begin with.

This is then the end of solidity, the end of matter, the end of the physical, the end of the world of shadows, the end of darkness, the end of separation, and the end of death. The world is at first forgiven, seen past, overlooked, and ignored, and then ultimately returns to nothing at all which it is. There is no world, and only heaven remains.

"It can indeed be said the ego MADE its world on sin. Only in such a world COULD everything be upside down. This IS the strange illusion which makes the clouds of guilt seem heavy and impenetrable. The solidness this world's foundation SEEMS to have is FOUND in this. For sin HAS changed creation from an Idea of God to an IDEAL the EGO wants; a world IT rules, made up of bodies, mindless, and capable of COMPLETE corruption and decay."

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. "

"Sin is impossible, and on this fact forgiveness rests upon a certain base more solid than the shadow world we see."

"And so you stand, here in this holy place, before the veil of sin that hangs between you and the face of Christ. LET it be lifted! Raise it together, for it is but a veil that stands between you. Either alone will see it as a solid block, nor realize how thin the drapery that separates you now."

"Standing BEFORE the veil, it still seems difficult. But hold out your JOINED hands and touch this heavy-seeming block, and you will learn how easily your fingers slip through its nothingness. It is no solid wall. And only an illusion stands between you and the holy Self you share."

"The mechanisms of illusion have been born instead. And now they go to find what has been given them to seek. Their aim is to fulfill the purpose which the world was made to witness and make real. They see in its illusions but a solid base where truth exists, upheld apart from lies. Yet everything which they report is but illusion which is kept apart from truth."

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and WITHOUT a key, across the road to peace. No-one who looks on it without the help of reason, would TRY to pass it. The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to ATTEMPT to pass it. Yet reason sees through it easily BECAUSE it is an error. The FORM it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from REASON's eyes."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it WERE a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else BUT form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see."

"Sickness is isolation. For it seems to keep one self apart from all the rest, to suffer what the others do not feel. It gives the body final power to make separation real and keep the mind in solitary prison, split apart and held in pieces by a solid wall of sickened flesh which it can not surmount."

"For anti-Christ becomes more powerful than Christ to those who dream the world is real. The body seems to be more solid and more stable than the mind. And love becomes a dream, while fear remains the one reality which can be seen and justified and fully understood."

"This heavy-seeming barrier, this artificial floor that looks like rock, is like a bank of low, dark clouds that seem to be a solid wall before the sun. Its impenetrable appearance is WHOLLY an illusion."

"Yet in this cloud bank it is easy to see a whole world rising. A solid mountain range, a lake, a city, all arise in your imagination, and FROM the clouds, the messengers of your perception return to you, assuring you that it is all THERE. Figures stand out and move about, actions seem real, and forms appear and shift from loveliness to the grotesque. And back and forth they go, as long as you would play the game of children's "make believe.""

"Christ's vision is the bridge between the worlds, and in its power can you safely trust to carry you from this world into one made holy by forgiveness. Things which seem quite solid here are merely shadows there, transparent, faintly seen, at times forgot, and never able to obscure the light that shines beyond them. Holiness has been restored to vision, and the blind can see."

"If you are not a body, what are you? You need to be aware of what the Holy Spirit uses to replace the image of a body in your mind. You need to feel something to put your faith in, as you lift it from the body. You need a real experience of something else, something more solid and more sure; more worthy of your faith, and really there."

"The world you see is based on SACRIFICE of oneness. It is a picture of a COMPLETE disunity and total LACK of joining. Around each entity is built a wall so seeming solid that it looks as if what is inside can never reach without, and what is out can never reach and join with what is locked away within the wall."

"The final one, the hardest to believe is nothing, and a seeming obstacle with the appearance of a solid block, impenetrable, fearful and beyond surmounting, is the fear of God Himself."

"You who believe you walk in sanity, with feet on solid ground, and through a world where meaning CAN be found, consider this: These ARE the laws on which your "sanity" appears to rest. These ARE the principles which makes the ground beneath your feet seem solid. And it IS here you look for meaning. These are the laws YOU made for your salvation. They hold in place the substitute for Heaven that you prefer."

"This world is not the Will of God, and so it is not real. Yet those who think it real must still believe there is another will, and one which leads to opposite effects from those He wills. Impossible indeed; but every mind which looks upon the world and judges it as certain, solid, trustworthy and true believes in two creators; or in one, himself alone. But never in One God."

"The actions of the body are perceived as coming from the "baser" part of you, and thus of him as well. By focusing upon the "good" in him, the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the "good."

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

"Beyond the body, beyond the sun and stars, past EVERYTHING you see and yet somehow familiar, is an arc of golden light that stretches, as you look, into a great and shining circle. And all the circle fills with light before your eyes."

"Such is your resurrection, for your life is not a part of anything you see. It stands beyond the body and the world, past every witness for unholiness, within the Holy, holy as Itself."

"Desiring to look upon their brothers in holiness, the power of belief and faith goes far BEYOND the body, SUPPORTING vision, NOT obstructing it."

"Grace is not given to a BODY, but to a MIND. And the mind that RECEIVES it, looks INSTANTLY beyond the body, and sees the holy place where IT was healed."

"And now God's KNOWLEDGE, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its Kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

This is possibly the most threatening and mind-blowing teaching in A Course in Miracles. There is in fact NOT a world here! It's not even a matter of who made the world, it's the even higher truth that it DOES NOT EXIST. Earth is in fact NOTHING.

"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it"

"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere?"

Everything that happened in the separation from God, involves a belief in something existing which does not exist, something being true which is false, something being real which is unreal.

For example, we made a separate self which seems to have free will to do as it pleases. However, this self is in fact the DENIAL of self, which is why it results in death. But it APPEARS to be the presence of a self. This is why it's an illusion - it seems to be showing you something which is not there, as if it is. It's supposed freedom of will is in fact an imprisoned will, which is not free, but SEEMS free.

Take a look at the body. "The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist." The body SEEMS to picture "you", presenting an appearance and form, it seems to positively exist and move and do stuff. But, the body is NOT you, it is a replacement for you, and is only an image of what you THINK you are. What it SEEMS to be, is the opposite of what it actually is. The body is the ABSENCE OF YOU. And you do not look like your body. "What you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

It is the same thing with regards the difference between light and darkness. Darkness is not possible. Where there seems to be an absence of light, there must be an ILLUSION of darkness. If you believe the darkness is real, you are giving it false reality and are claiming it "is a something." But a shadow on a wall is not the PRESENCE of darkness, it is the absence of light. It appears to be a something, but is really the lack of a something.

It is also the same with regards to sin and error. Error or mistakes are just illusions of impossibilities, recognized as false. In their "true form" it is clear they cannot be true. But if you invest belief in them, are deceived and tempted by them, and buy into them, they turn into sin. And now it seems that they assert that something has REALLY happened, and something is REALLY possible, that isn't. So sin is really a lie, depicting stuff happening that CANNOT happen, as though it is really happening. It is deceptive.

The same applies to this world. This world is in fact NOTHING. But by believing in it and investing it with reality, it turns from an illusion of a something to an ACTUAL something. It seems to exist. It seems to host events and happenings. Things in it seem possible. But the world is impossible, and the things which happen are impossible, and sin is not real. The world was made to try to prove that sin and guilt are real.

"Their aim is to fulfill the purpose which the world was made to witness and make real. They see in its illusions but a solid base where truth exists, upheld apart from lies."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin."

So basically, we have a world that SEEMS to be here, which is made of sin, which testifies and proves that impossible things are possible, which hosts the idea of the death and murder of reality, and SEEMS to have real consequences. But it has none. And it does nothing. And it causes nothing. And it has no power. And it isn't really there at all.

"It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere."

"The world does nothing to him."

"There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

The really deep thing to realize is this. The world is in fact, the ABSENCE OF EXISTENCE. It is the antithesis of heaven. It is the LACK OF HEAVEN. It is a HOLE, which we call the spacetime bubble, in which are housed impossibilities and unrealities. It is an hallucinated world, because it seems to be there to see, but isn't. You are projecting it and making it up as you go along.

The idea that there is no world isn't simply that the world "exists" and it has to be "undone". It's really the RECOGNITION that the world you thought was here, does not exist. And this doesn't mean there's a better view of it. It means the WHOLE THING IS GONE. It has no reality at all. No presence. No life.

"There is no life outside of heaven."

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

"He does NOT realize that HE MAKES THIS WORLD, for there IS no world outside him."

Through unwillingness, we resisted God. We failed to create. We wanted not to shine. We tried to end eternal life. We wanted to stop reality. We opposed the Kingdom. We attacked will. We tried to deny our own existence. We blocked awareness. We tried to destroy. And ultimately this is all a matter of TRYING NOT TO EXIST.

In so doing, we seemed to make a world which SEEMS to exist, which is really actually the LACK OF A WORLD. It's like you took a part of heaven and DRAINED IT of all life. Held it back and prevented its extension. As though you could attack heaven and remove its presence. This world, which includes the Earth, is the ANTI-world. It is a mis-creation. It is empty and it is nothing.

We have GIVEN the world, the fake world, all manner of belief in trying to MAKE IT BE SIN, so that it is GIVEN reality, so that we can try to make it exist. It's our attempt to give it life and immortality. But we can't. We tried to make the world be a cause. We tried to make it have power. We gave our power to it to try to animate it. We tried to make it appear to be alive with "life forms", which are illusions of life. We tried to imagine it has a mind and alien will of its own. We tried to make ourselves subject to it and affected by it, to confirm its reality. We made bodies to sense it and to tell us that it is there.

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

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

Quite simply, this world, this planet, this galaxy, all the stars, all bodies, all animals and "life forms", are NOTHING. They are life's ABSENCE. They are the LACK OF LIFE. They are something that is really NOT there, appearing to be there. Like an hallucination. A lack of light, appearing to be the presence of a real darkness. And to believe in it is to believe that evil is real, asserting that the world has power OVER heaven. That the world CAN CAUSE immortal beings to die. Believing this world is real is level confusion.

Our task in forgiveness, then, is not to find a way to give EXTRA reality to the world, but to recognize ITS UNREALITY, and see finally that it SO NOTHING, that it disappears and fades into nothingness. All it is is a veil of illusions, a block, hanging in front of the face of christ, pretending to exist. Our guilt makes it seem solid. Our fear gives it reality. Our belief in sin anchors it in our minds. But it is not there at all. It is an empty shell.

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within YOU, there is a force which NO illusions can resist."

"What can the causeless BE but nothingness. The picture of your brother that you see is wholly absent, and has never been."

"Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not. Its NOTHINGNESS is guarantee that it can NOT be sick."

"The body that is asked to be a god WILL be attacked, because its nothingness has not been recognized. "

"Yet its nothingness IS your salvation, from which you would flee."

"His body's nothingness releases yours from sickness and from death."

"For here is nothingness, where neither birth nor death is real"

"The final judgment on ****the world**** contains no condemnation. For it sees the world as totally forgiven, without sin, and wholly purposeless. Without a cause, and now without a function in Christ's sight, ****it merely slips away to nothingness.****"

"Your faith is placed in the most trivial and insane symbols; pills, money, "protective" clothing, "influence," "prestige," being liked, knowing the "right" people, and an endless list of forms of nothingness which you endow with magical powers."

"To recognize this is to recognize nothingness when you think you see it. As such, it is the prerequisite for vision."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it WERE a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else BUT form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see."

"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."

"But if you refuse to worship him, in whatever form he may appear to you, and wherever you think you see him, he will disappear into the nothingness out of which he was made."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"The "changes" the ego seeks to make are not really changes. They are but deeper shadows, or perhaps different cloud patterns. Yet what is made of nothingness cannot be called new or different."

"We can but go from nothingness to everything; from hell to Heaven." "What loss can be for you in choosing not to value nothingness? This world holds nothing that you really want, but what you choose instead you want indeed!"

"***The world stands like a block*** before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just ***a fragile veil***, so easily dispelled that it can ***last no longer than an instant***. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it ***cannot fail to disappear***, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant ***is the world forgot***, with time forever ended as ***the world spins into nothingness*** from where it came."

"What is the ego? Nothingness, but in a form that seems like something. In a world of form the ego cannot be denied for it alone seems real. How could God's Son as He created him abide in form or in a world of form?"

"What can correct illusions but the truth? And what are errors but illusions which remain unrecognized for what they are? Where truth has entered errors disappear. They merely vanish, leaving not a trace by which to be remembered. They are gone because without belief they have no life, and so they disappear to nothingness, returning whence they came. From dust to dust they come and go, for only truth remains."

"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."

"God wills salvation be received today, and that the intricacies of your dreams no longer hide their nothingness from you."

"Nothingness will become invisible, for you will at last have seen truly." "Like all things in the world its meaning is temporary, and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it."

"All that is veiled in shadows must be raised to understanding to be judged again, this time with Heaven's help, and all mistakes in judgment which the mind had made before are open to correction as the truth dismisses them as causeless. Now are they without effects. They cannot be concealed because their nothingness is recognized."

"How can a battle be perceived as nothingness, when you ENGAGE in it?" "There is a silence covering the world that was an ancient dream so long ago no one remembers now. Its time is done, and in the little space it seemed to have is nothingness. The dream has gone, and all its dreams of gifts have disappeared as well."

"Pursuit of the imagined leads to death because it is the search for nothingness, and while you seek for life you ask for death.

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

"The more complicated the results become, the harder it may be to recognize their nothingness, but it is not necessary to examine ALL possible outcomes to which premises give rise to judge the PREMISES truly."

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth.""

"EVERY illusion carries pain and suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments with which it hides its nothingness."

"And so is ALL time past, and everything EXACTLY as it was before the way to nothingness was made. The tiny tick of time, in which the first mistake was made, and ALL of them within that ONE mistake, held also the Correction for that one, and ALL of them that came within the first. And in that tiny instant time was gone, for that was all it ever was. What God gave Answer to IS answered, and IS gone."

"Specialness is the idea of sin MADE REAL. Sin is impossible even to imagine, without this base. For sin rose from it, out of nothingness, an evil flower with no roots at all."

"In the Divine psyche, the Father and the Holy Spirit are not incomplete at all. The Sonship has the unique faculty of believing in error, or incompleteness, if he so elects. However, it is quite apparent that so to elect IS to believe in the existence of nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement."

The world of physical form is a projection of the ego thought system. It is based on a belief in separation, which has produced 3D images of physical objects, all of which appear to be different and unique. And every form screams "we are not one" or "I am not the same."

Miracle mindedness, on the other hand, is an opposite state, in which there is no regard for differences, forms or appearances. All differences are completely ignored. All forms are recognized as a deception. All illusions are the same. All seeming levels and degrees and variations and intensities and difficulties and measures are completely irrelevant.

The world of bodies is the world of form. And form takes on many forms, being the forms of the same one error. The single belief in separation has produced a fragmented world, with an entire hierarchy of differences. Big and small and heavy and light and round and square and near and far and every other conceivable difference is represented here. But they are all forms of separation.

Separateness produces form, and form pictures the ways in which the separate parts are separate. One object sticks out more, another is smaller, another a different color. One has extra parts, which the others lack. One moves in a different way, while the others seem more or less alive. And this results in an entire world filled with contrast and conflict, competition and inequality. A world of a trillion truths.

"Illusions are always illusions of differences."

"Where do all these differences come from? Certainly they seem to be in the world outside."

"The belief in order of difficulties is the basis for the world's perception. It rests on differences; on uneven background and shifting foreground, on unequal heights and diverse sizes, on varying degrees of darkness and light, and thousands of contrasts in which each thing seen competes with every other in order to be recognized. A larger object overshadows a smaller one. A brighter thing draws the attention from another with less intensity of appeal. And a more threatening idea, or one conceived of as more desirable by the world's standards, completely upsets the mental balance. What the body's eyes behold is only conflict. Look not to them for peace and understanding."

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation."

"He has one answer to appearances regardless of their form, their size, their depth, or any attribute they seem to have"

"You HAVE no problems, though you THINK you have. And yet you COULD not think so, if you saw them vanish one by one, WITHOUT regard to size, complexity, or place and time, or ANY attribute which you perceive that makes each one seem different from the rest."

"the concept of size exists only in a plane that is itself unreal."

But miracle mindedness is not deceived by any of this. It is a state of mind of wholeness, not fragmentation. It completely ignores all forms of difference, all measures of value, all sense of degrees and proportions and ratios. It has absolutely no regard for the infinite ways in which separation shows up. It does not buy into the temptation to believe that one thing is NOT another thing, seeing ALL illusions as the same and equal.

To live in a world of form is to live as though surrounded by many different things. Countless objects, each with many parts and sub-parts. Even to the extent of all things being formed from tiny little microscopic parts. All of them different, all of them unique. No two objects are even alike.

And so you believe this is normal and natural. You think this is reality. You accept it as if the form of an object defines its meaning, its true inherent nature. As if apples are apples and oranges are oranges, and they have no thing in common. As if cars are not houses and dogs are not cats and Earth is not Mars and one body is not another body.

But moving toward miracle mindedness must entail the questioning of appearances. The questioning of ALL forms. Every disguise. Every temptation to believe that the form of an object is truth. To recognize that all objects are disguises. They are all projected images from an egoic belief in separation. Not one of them is anything else other than just another form of the same one error, the same one problem, the same one illusion.

This must entail moving away from a dependency on different forms. Believing that life is normal when you use a car key to open the car door, and a house key to open your home. Or that one food is different to another. Or that some kinds of weather are better. Or that some relationships are more special. Or that one piece of clothing is different to another and changes your whole appearance.

This whole "lifestyle" of living in a world of differences, has to go. We can't continue believing that there are in fact many things here. That is the deception. We can't keep believing that we're surrounded with an utter buffet of choices. As if there are even any different choices at all. As if things are really any different.

"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."

We have to stop being dependent on unique special forms, and particular options, and conditions and styles and themes and preferences. We have to let go all prejudices and all ways that we make some parts of the world special.

We should not believe that one form of sickness is different to another, just based on how it looks or its severity or its size or appearance or how it seemed to arrive. We should not be deceived that a dead body is more dead than a living one. Or that a small wound is more difficult to heal than a gaping hole. Or that there is any such thing as "orders of difficulty."

The illusion of separation has not only taken on many forms, it has resulted in a vast hierarchy. A tremendous amount of different values, different amounts, severities, intensities, difficulties, degrees of problem, sizes of activity, degree of value or credit, amount of importance, etc. We've built our whole lives on the basis of fictional differences, buying into illusion after illusion of how "this is not the same as that".

We have to put all of this aside and recognize that ALL FORMS ARE LIES. Every way that one form says "this is how I am not the same", is a lie. They are ALL doing this. Every object is doing this, claiming to be different somehow. And we buy into it. And now we believe in the differences, and set up a whole egoic thought structure of rules and laws and limits of freedom, about how one thing is more or less something than something else.

Miracle mindedness is the state you reach when all of this is undone. When you are not convinced by ANY forms. When you see clearly and recognize the truth that ALL forms are a temptation to believe something that isn't true. You are not deceived by size or weight or severity or strength or proportions or values or importance or colors or shapes or types or classifications. You just put them ALL into one category - they are all equally unreal, equally the same, ONE ILLUSION, ONE PROBLEM, ONE SOLUTION.

This is why in miracle mindedness there are NO ORDERS. There is no hierarchy, no levels, no separations, no divisions. There is no sense of one thing being different to another. No belief in the deception that a slightly broken body is different to a severely damaged one. Why raising the dead is really on different than curing a headache. Why converting water into wine is effortless. Why walking on water is no more special or different than walking on land.

Once all things are equalized, once all differences no longer deceive, once all problems are recognized as one problem, once all forms are seen to be untrue, and once you stop living in a world of many reactions and many relationships and many separate conditions, your mind becomes WHOLE. It becomes unified and singular and "one with itself." It is not divided or twisted or mis-shapen by differences of any kind.

"You are one within yourself, and One with Him. Yours is the unity of all creation. Your perfect unity makes change in you impossible."

Such a mind is miraculous because it utterly ignores differences. It can have power over them all because it is not deceived by them. It sees that to change one small illusion is in fact NOT different to changing a "big one".

That to raise the dead is NOT really a bigger feat than curing a headache. And it is precicely this equality and singularity which gives the mind its POWER. A power which is derived from being undivided and singular. You are a singular whole unified one being, presently confronted with a world of many differences and separations, learning to disregard all of these alien separations so that you can be restored to ONE SINGULAR STATE. One mind. One voice. One will. One power. One wholeness. One capability. And this capability has the power to move mountains, just as much as to reconfigure objects, or materialize different body images, or to do anything at all. Because a mind free from differences is a mind free from limits, and there is nothing your holiness cannot do.

The course is moving us away from fragmentation, towards INTEGRATION. Away from a split mind, towards WHOLENESS. Away from many, towards ONE. Away from separation, towards ATONEMENT. Away from hierarchies, towards UNIFORMITY. Away from exclusion, towards INCLUSION. And away from isolation, towards UNION. Away from rejection towards JOINING. Away from selfishness towards SHARING. Away from the eseparation, towards GOD.

"In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."

"When you maintain that there MUST be order of difficulty in miracles, all you mean is that there are some things you would WITHHOLD from truth."

"As long as you would have this be, so long will the ILLUSION of order of difficulty in miracles REMAIN with you. For YOU have established this order in REALITY"

"there is no order of difficulty in healing."

"Once the professional therapist has realized that minds are joined, he can also recognize that order of difficulty in healing is meaningless."

"To understand there is no order of difficulty in healing, he must also recognize the equality of himself and the patient."

"This is the message of the crucifixion; there is no order of difficulty in miracles."

"The first thing to remember about miracles is that there is no order of difficulty among them. One is not harder or bigger than another. They are all the same."

"To the Holy Spirit THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES."

"Without a range, order of difficulty IS meaningless, and there must BE no range in what you offer to each other."

"There can be no order of difficulty in healing merely because all sickness is illusion. Is it harder to dispel the belief of the insane in a larger hallucination as opposed to a smaller one?"

"By DEMONSTRATING to yourselves that THERE IS NO ORDER OF DIFFICULTY IN MIRACLES, you will convince yourselves that in your NATURAL state there IS no difficulty, because it is a state of Grace."

"Healing and Atonement are not related; they are identical. There is no order of difficulty in miracles because there are no degrees of Atonement. It is the one complete concept possible in this world, because it is the source of a wholly unified perception."

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles, for they ARE all the same."

"WHOLLY natural perception would show you instantly that order of difficulty in miracles is quite impossible, for it involves a contradiction of what miracles MEAN."

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles because all of God's Sons are of equal value, and their equality is their Oneness."

"He need make no distinctions among the problems he perceives, for He to Whom he turns with all of them recognizes no order of difficulty in resolving them."

"I raised the dead by KNOWING that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God Created. Why do you believe that it is harder for me to inspire the dis-spirited or to stabilize the unstable? I do not believe that there is an order of difficulty in miracles: YOU do."

"You will recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in miracles, when you have applied them to ALL situations. For there IS no situation to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them TO all situations, you will gain the REAL world."

"It is emphasized here that these differences have no effect at all on the miracle, which can heal any of them with equal ease. This is because of the miracle's inherent avoidance of within-error distinctions. Its SOLE concern is to distinguish between truth, on the one hand, and ALL kinds of error, on the other. This is why some miracles SEEM to be of greater magnitude than others. But remember the first point in this course, i.e., that there is no order of difficulty in miracles."

"The illusion of orders of difficulty is an obstacle the teacher of God must learn to pass by and leave behind."

"The world perceives orders of difficulty in EVERYTHING. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable."

"As you survey your inner world, merely let whatever thoughts cross your mind come into your awareness, each to be considered for a moment and then replaced by the next. Try not to establish any thought of hierarchy among them. "

"The concept of ANY sort of need HIERARCHY arose because, having made this fundamental error, he had already fragmented himself into levels with DIFFERENT needs. As he integrates, HE becomes one, and his ONE need becomes one accordingly."

"What is seen as "reality" is simply what the mind prefers. Its hierarchy of values is projected outward, and it sends the body's eyes to find it. The body's eyes will never see except through differences. Yet it is not the messages they bring on which perception rests. Only the mind evaluates their messages, so only the mind is responsible for seeing."

"Again, there is no order, but a SEEMING hierarchy of values."

"It is impossible that one illusion be LESS amenable to truth than are the rest. But it IS possible that some are given greater VALUE, and less willingly OFFERED to truth for healing and for help. NO illusion has ANY truth in it. Yet it appears some are MORE true than others, although this clearly makes no sense at all. All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is PREFERENCE, NOT reality."

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate, and has a different set of thoughts which SETS HIM OFF from others. This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are MORE valuable, and THEREFORE true."

"It is not a thought which judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real."

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal."

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs."

This is a MAJOR axis in the course, transitioning from false perception to true perception. Learning to overlook the world of bodies and see beyond it to the light of the real world, so that you are ready to move on to Heaven. It is VERY CLEAR that the physical world of bodies is ONLY SEEN through the body's eyes, and learning to OVERLOOK it and not believe any of it is forgiveness.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant."

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. No-one who looks on it without the help of reason, would try to pass it. The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. Yet reason sees through it easily, BECAUSE it is an error. The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason's eyes."

"ONLY the form of error attracts the ego. Meaning it does not recognize, and does not know if it is there or not. Everything that the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole, without the meaning that the whole would give. And yet mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected. Sin is but error in a special form the ego venerates. It would preserve all errors, and make them sins. For here is its own stability, its heavy anchor in the shifting world it made; the rock on which its church is built, and where its worshippers are bound to bodies, and believe the body's freedom is their own."

"If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of your union! Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within you, there is a force which no illusions can resist. This body only seems to be immovable. This force is irresistible in truth. What, then, must happen when they come together? Can the illusion of immovability be long defended for what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?"

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see beyond what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and not see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see only illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside form of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the outside of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

"It is not Will for Life, but wish for death, that is the motivation for this world. Its ONLY purpose is TO PROVE GUILT REAL."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

"The body's eyes will NEVER look on it. Yet they will SEE what it dictates. The body will remain guilt's messenger, and will act as it directs, as long as YOU believe that guilt is real. For the REALITY of guilt is the illusion which seems to make it heavy and opaque, impenetrable, and a REAL foundation for the ego's thought system. Its thinness and transparency are not apparent, until you see the light BEHIND it. And then you see it as a fragile veil, before the light."

"This world you see (with the body's eyes) MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision (christ vision). YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER."

"You do not really want the world you see (with the body), 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."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"The purpose of these exercises (workbook intro) is to train the mind to a different perception of everything in the world. The workbook is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the undoing of what you see now, and the second with the restoration of sight."

"Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

"Corrective learning always begins with awakening the spiritual eye, and turning away from belief in physical sight. The reason this entails fear is because man is afraid of what his spiritual eye will see, which was why he closed it in the first place. We said before that the spiritual eye cannot see error, and is capable only of looking beyond it to the defense of Atonement. There is no doubt that the spiritual eye does produce extreme discomfort by what it sees. The thing that man forgets is that the discomfort is not the final outcome of its perception. When the spiritual eye is permitted to look upon the defilement of the altar, it also looks immediately toward Atonement. Nothing which the spiritual eye perceives can induce fear. Everything that results from accurate spiritual awareness merely is channelized toward correction. Discomfort is aroused only to bring the need to correct forcibly into awareness.

What the physical eye sees is not corrective, nor can it be corrected by any device which can be physically seen. As long as a man believes in what his physical sight tells him, all his corrective behavior will be misdirected. The reason why the real vision is obscured is because man cannot endure to see his own defiled altar. But since the altar has BEEN defiled, this fact becomes doubly dangerous unless it IS perceived. This perception is totally not-threatening because of the Atonement. The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. The fear arises because of the necessary willingness to look at what man has done to himself."

"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. The alternating investment in the two types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a long time, and can become very acute."

"But the outcome is as certain as God. The spiritual eye literally CANNOT SEE error, and merely looks for Atonement. All the solutions which the physical eyes seek, dissolve in its sight. The spiritual eye, which looks within, recognizes immediately that the altar has been defiled, and needs to be repaired and protected."

"The REAL beauty of the Temple cannot be seen with the physical eye. The spiritual eye, on the other hand, cannot see the building at all, but it perceives the altar within with perfect clarity. This is because the spiritual eye has perfect vision."

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

"By focusing upon the "good" in him, the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the "good".

"The concept of the self stands like a shield, a silent barricade before the truth, and hides it from your sight. All things you see are images because you look on them as through a barrier which dims your sight and warps your vision, so that you behold nothing with clarity. The light is kept from everything you see. At most, you glimpse a shadow of what lies beyond. At least you merely look on darkness, and perceive the terrified imaginings that come from guilty thoughts and concepts born of fear. And what you see is hell, for fear IS hell. All that is given you is for release; the sight, the vision and the inner Guide all lead you out of hell with those you love beside you, and the universe with them."

"And this he learns when first he looks upon ONE brother as he looks upon himself, and sees the mirror of himself in him. Thus is the concept of himself laid by, for nothing stands between his sight and what he looks upon, to judge what he beholds. And in this single vision does he see the Face of Christ, and understands he looks on everyone as he beholds this One. For there is light where darkness was before, and now the veil is lifted from his sight.

The veil across the Face of Christ, the fear of God and of salvation, and the love of guilt and death, - they all are different names for just one error; that there is a space between you and your brother, kept apart by an illusion of yourself which holds him off from you, and you away from him. The sword of judgment is the weapon which you give to the illusion of yourself, that it may fight to keep the space that holds your brother off unoccupied by love. Yet while you hold this sword, you must perceive the body as yourself, for you are bound to separation from the sight of him who holds the mirror to another view of what he is, and thus what YOU must be."

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used only as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function. For minds need not the body to communicate. The sight that sees the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship. And while you look upon each other thus, the means and end have not been brought in line."

"If you send forth ONLY the messengers the Holy Spirit gave you, WANTING no messages but theirs, you will see fear no more. The world will be transformed before your sight, cleansed of all guilt, and softly brushed with beauty. The world contains no fear that you laid not upon it. And none you cannot ask love's messengers to REMOVE from it, and see it still. The Holy Spirit has given you HIS messengers, to send each other, and return to each with what love sees. They have been given to REPLACE the hungry dogs of fear you sent instead. And they go forth to signify the END of fear."

"My holy vision sees all things as pure" - "And while we still remain outside the gate of Heaven, let us look on all we see through holy vision and the eyes of Christ. Let all appearances seem pure to us, that we may pass them by in innocence, and walk together to our Father's house as brothers and the holy Sons of God."

"Be willing, then, to see your brother sinless, that Christ may rise before your vision and give you joy. And place no value on your brother's body, which held him to illusions of what he is."

"Vision is freely given to those who ask to see. Your brother's sinlessness is given you in shining light, to look on with the Holy Spirit's vision, and to rejoice in, along with Him."

"There is no problem, no event or situation, no perplexity, that vision will not solve. All is redeemed, when looked upon with vision. For this is not YOUR sight, and brings with it the laws beloved of Him Whose sight it IS. Everything looked upon with vision falls gently into place, according to the laws brought to it by His calm and certain sight. The end, for everything He looks upon, is always sure. For it will meet His purpose, seen in unadjusted form, and suited perfectly to meet it. Destructiveness becomes benign, and sin is turned to blessing under His gentle gaze.

What can the body's eyes perceive, with power to CORRECT? Its eyes ADJUST to sin, unable to overlook it in any form, and seeing it everywhere, in everything. Look through its eyes, and everything will stand condemned before you. All that could save you, you will never see. Your holy relationship, the source of your salvation, will be deprived of meaning, and its most holy purpose bereft of means for its accomplishment. Judgment is but a toy, a whim, the senseless means to play the idle game of death in your imagination. But vision sets all things right, bringing them gently within the kindly sway of Heaven's laws."

"The barren sands, the darkness, and the lifelessness are seen only through the body's eyes. ITS vision IS distorted, and the messages IT transmits to you, who MADE it to limit your awareness, ARE little and limited, so fragmented that they are meaningless. From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true. For YOU sent forth these messengers, to bring this BACK to you."

"Anger but screeches, "Guilt is real!" Reality is blotted out as this insane belief is taken as replacement for God's Word. The body's eyes now "see"; its ears alone can "hear." Its little space and tiny breath become the measure of reality. And truth becomes diminutive and meaningless."

"Reason would tell you that the world you see through eyes that are not yours, MUST make no sense to you. To whom would vision such as this send back its messages? Surely not you, whose sight is wholly independent of the eyes which look upon the world. If this is not your vision, what can it show to you? The brain can not interpret what YOUR vision sees. This you would understand. The brain interprets to the body, of which it is a part. But what it says, YOU cannot understand.

Yet you have listened to it. And long and hard you tried to understand its messages. You did not realize it is impossible to understand what fails entirely to reach you. You have received no messages at all you understood. For you have listened to what can never communicate at all. Think, then, what happened. Denying what you are, and firm in faith that you are something else, this something else, which you have made to be yourself, BECAME your sight. Yet it must be the SOMETHING ELSE which sees, and, as NOT you, explains its sight to you.

YOUR vision would, of course, render this quite unnecessary. But, if your eyes are closed, and you have called upon this thing to lead you, asking it to explain to you the world it sees, you have no reason not to listen, nor to suspect that what it tells you is not true. Reason would tell you that it can't be true, BECAUSE you do not understand it. God has no secrets. He does not lead you through a world of misery, waiting to tell you, at the journey's end, why He did this to you. What could be secret from His Will? Yet you believe that YOU have secrets. What could your secrets be except ANOTHER will, that is your own, APART from His? "

"Your sight was given you, along with everything that you can understand. You will perceive no difficulty in understanding what this vision tells you. For everyone sees only what he thinks he IS. And what your sight will show you, you will understand BECAUSE it is the truth. Only your vision can convey to you what YOU can see. It reaches you directly, without a need to be interpreted to you. What needs interpretation MUST be alien. Nor will it ever be made understandable, by an interpreter you cannot understand. Of all the messages you have received and failed to understand, this course alone is OPEN to your understanding, and CAN be understood."

"Reason will tell you that they must have seen each other through a vision not of the body, and communicated in a language the body does not speak"

"My condemnation keeps my vision dark, and through my sightless eyes I cannot see the vision of my glory."

"The love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another. That is because the real vision is still so dim."

"Miracles are seen in light" "It is important to remember that miracles and vision necessarily go together. This needs repeating and frequent repeating. It is a central idea in your new thought system and the perception which it produces. The miracle is always there. Its presence is not caused by your vision; its absence is not the result of your failure to see. It is only your awareness of miracles that is affected. You will see it in the light; you will not see it in the dark."

"Only be quiet. You will need no rule but this to let your practicing today lift you above the thinking of the world, and free your vision from the body's eyes."

"To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified. To the extent to which you recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent you will perceive attack cannot BE justified. This is in strict accord with vision's FUNDAMENTAL law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you WANT it there. Perception HAS no other law than this."

"But on His Vision sin can NOT encroach, for sin HAS BEEN corrected by His sight."

"What is the resurrection?" "Here the curriculum ends. From here on, no directions are needed. Vision is wholly corrected and all mistakes undone."

"Now there are no distinctions. Differences have disappeared and Love looks on Itself. What further sight is needed? What remains that vision could accomplish? We have seen the face of Christ, His sinlessness, His Love behind all forms, beyond all purposes."

"These things await us all, but we are not prepared as yet to welcome them with joy. As long as any mind remains possessed of evil dreams, the thought of hell is real. God's teachers have the goal of wakening the minds of those asleep, and seeing there the vision of Christ's face to take the place of what they dream. The thought of murder is replaced with blessing."

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"These are among the many magical beliefs that come from the conviction you are a body, and the body's eyes can see. You also believe the body's brain can think. If you but understood the nature of thought, you could but laugh at this insane idea." " Yet this is no more foolish than to believe the body's eyes can see; the brain can know."

"It is your weakness that sees through the body's eyes, peering about in darkness to behold the likeness of itself; the small, the weak, the sickly and the dying, those in need, the helpless and afraid, the sad, the poor, the starving and the joyless. These are seen through eyes which cannot see and cannot bless. Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them. It unites with light, of which it is a part. It sees itself. It brings the light in which your Self appears. In darkness you perceive a self that is not there."

"The body's eyes are closed, and as you think of him who grieved you, let your mind be shown the light in him beyond your grievances."

"You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally. If it is not the body's sight, it MUST be understood. For it is PLAIN, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. It CAN be understood. And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their different ways."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see. For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. What was its maker's GOAL, but not to see? For this the body's eyes are perfect means. But not for seeing. 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."

"Let not the FORM of his mistakes keep you from him whose holiness is yours. Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body's eyes can see. Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins, and of his body. What is there in him that you would attack, except what you associate with his body, which YOU believe can sin? Beyond his errors is his holiness, and YOUR salvation. You gave him not his holiness, but tried to see your sins in him, to save yourself. And yet his holiness IS your forgiveness. Can YOU be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness is your salvation?"

"There has been some controversy (in human terms) as to whether seeing is an attribute of the eyes, or an expression of the integrative powers of the brain. Correctly understood, the issue revolves around the question of whether the body or the mind can see (or understand). This is not really open to question at all." " The body is not capable of understanding. Only the mind KNOWS anything." "Only the mind sees".

"Your world is seen through eyes of fear, and brings the witnesses of terror to your mind. The real world cannot be perceived except through eyes forgiveness"

"I would bless the world by looking on it through the eyes of Christ."

"You keep an ancient memory before your eyes. And he who lives in memories alone is unaware of where he IS."

"The real world is attained simply by the COMPLETE forgiveness of the old; the world you see WITHOUT forgiveness. The Great Transformer of perception will undertake WITH you the careful searching of the mind that MADE this world, and uncover TO YOU the SEEMING reasons for your making it. In the light of the REAL reason that He brings, as you follow Him, He will SHOW you that there is NO reason here at all. Each spot HIS reason touches, grows alive with beauty. And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release.

All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing ALL illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there, in peace."

"Forgiveness is the home of miracles. The eyes of Christ deliver them to all they look upon in mercy and in love. Perception stands corrected in His sight, and what was meant to curse has come to bless. Each lily of forgiveness offers all the world the silent miracle of love. And each is laid before the Word of God upon the universal altar to Creator and creation, in the Light of perfect purity and endless joy."

"Seen through understanding eyes the holiness of the world is all I see, for I can picture only the thoughts I hold about myself."

"Vision is the means by which the Holy Spirit translates your nightmares into happy dreams; your wild hallucinations, that show you all fearful outcomes of imagined sin, into the calm and reassuring sights with which He would replace them. These gentle sights and sounds are looked on happily, and heard with joy. They are His substitutes for all the terrifying sights and screaming sounds the ego's purpose brought to your horrified awareness. They step away from sin, reminding you that it is not reality that frightens you, and that the errors which you made CAN be corrected.

When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and seen it change to sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of violence and death, and watched them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away; who need persuade you to accept the gift of vision? And after vision, who is there who could refuse what MUST come after? Think but an instant just on this. You can behold the holiness God gave His Son. And never need you think that there is something else for you to see."

"This is your purpose now, and the vision that makes it yours is ready to be given. You have the vision that enables you to see the body not. And as you look upon each other, you will see an altar to your Father, holy as Heaven, glowing with radiant purity, and sparkling with the shining lilies you laid upon it."

And this will be your concept of YOURSELF, when you have reached the world beyond the sight your eyes alone can offer you to see. For you will not interpret what you see without the Aid that God has given you. And in His sight there IS another world. You live in that world just as much as this, for both are concepts of yourself, which can be interchanged, but never jointly held. The contrast is far greater than you think, for you will love this concept of yourself, because it was not made for you alone. Born as a gift for someone not perceived to be yourself, it has been given YOU. For your forgiveness, offered unto him, has been accepted now for BOTH of you."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals."

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

"Now is there silence all around the world. Now is there stillness where before there was a frantic rush of thoughts that made no sense. Now is there tranquil light across the face of earth, made quiet in a dreamless sleep. And now the Word of God alone remains upon it. Only That can be perceived an instant longer. Then are symbols done, and everything you ever thought you made completely vanished from the mind which God forever knows to be His only Son."

"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

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

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