Perhaps one of the key features about the ego which many people do not realize, is that it is constantly attacking itself.

The ego IS the idea of self attack. It is the idea of you, attacking you. It is self destructive, which is why it leads to sabotage and suicide. It is just another word for your own will to will against your own will.

It would perhaps seem too insane to consider that the ego actually attacks itself on purpose, and this alone might deter you from even considering it. But the ego is not sane.

The ego is not like the kinds of people that you think are normal people. You think that due to separation, what one person does to another they do not do to themselves. You think that you can attack without consequences, or be attacked by another without them receiving the attack.

The ego's main plot here is the idea that, because you are separate from your brother, what applies to him does not apply to you. This allows both parties to get away with murder. Or appear to. And this creates an illusion in this world, as though it is "ego" to attack someone and get away with it.

But beware. This is a decoy!

If you fixate on this idea that one person does something to someone else, causing effects in them, without receiving the effects - which certainly APPEARS to be the case almost all the time due to separation, then you will not notice the ego's underlying insanity. You'll think that it makes total sense that something can apply to one person and not another, or that you can cause effects which you do not receive - ie giving and receiving at not one.

The ego's secret insanity is that it deliberately attacks itself, and it is NOT escaping the effects of the attacks it tries to cause, nor does it want to. It is both its own attacker and its own victim. It deliberately wants to hurt itself. It also seems to simultaneously want to get away from that hurt. It should be fairly obvious that it is completely insane, to the highest degree, for someone to want to intentionally harm themselves, consciously and deliberately, and to simultaneously enjoy and suffer doing so.

Anyone in their right mind would recognize that they are one with all brothers, and share a mind of oneness, and therefore what applies to you applies to everyone equally. In this mind of oneness it is impossible to cause or do anything without receiving the effects. It is therefore in your vested interest to share only love, that you will receive only love. But when you enter into the ego and attempt to give without receiving (which is attack), you can be sure you will experience attack.

The ego is clever at making cause and effect unconscious. It makes it SEEM as if attacking another will not attack yourself. But the ego is fundamentally insane. It IS the idea of self attack, and so attacks itself on purpose. It would sacrifice itself in the name of saving itself. It is constantly two-faced. You think that normal people have "one face" or one personality or one side to them.

The insane ego is never one-sided, it is always contradictory, hipocritical, self denying, a liar, a cheat, manipulative, and it is even capable of showing up as "good cop" and "bad cop" simultaneously.

I had a dream once where some creepy man was trying to get to me, and so I ran to escape and I did escape, and met another man on a hill who appeared at first to be helpful and welcoming. It seemed like he would help me to be safe. But what quickly became apparent, was that in fact this man was the same "person" as the other man - as if he was the same man in disguise. He was both of them. And so the ego's two-faced secret was revealed, that it is perfectly capable of playing the part of victim and victimizer, attacker and savior, enemy and hero, or any other polarities which makes it SEEM as if they are two completely unrelated separate things.

The ego's illusions are ALWAYS geared towards getting you to believe that one kind of illusion is better than another. That one way of behaving or less evil than another. That something will actually help you without hurting you. That a solution will work without any side effects. It's always bullshit. The ego is fundamentally insane and so always has in its back pocket some kind of "clause" or excuse or secret that disguises the fact that it has NO intention of making its solutions work, and it has NO interest in being truly helpful, because ALL of its sides and solutions take you away from wholeness.

We have to be careful to discern and listen and recognize, that both positive and negative are part of the ego thought system. Both good and bad, right and wrong, all opposites. The ego plays both sides of every argument and does not care who sins. It will happily fund every war and conflict on both sides just for the sake of increasing the conflict. It is fundamentally existing in a state of self conflict and being divided against itself, thwarting its own moves, willing against its own will etc.

This is why we have to learn that "this world holds nothing that I want"... because everything it offers, the "good" and the "bad", are both ego deceptions designed to get you to take a side and fall for one of two of its traps. It does not care one shit about which side you take or whether you go light or dark or right or wrong, so long as you fall for the trap of believing that one of two choices is better than the other and will save you. There is no salvation in the ego. All of its roads lead to hell.

A Course in Miracles is a teaching us to leave a dream of mortality, and return to a state of immortality. Everything in the course points to this. You are not merely substituting one limited illusion for another. You are literally substituting DEATH for ETERNAL LIFE. That is why the curriculum culminates in RESURRECTION.

Resurrection is the return to ETERNAL life. The atonement is your acceptance of the fact, that you already have eternal life, eternal life is the only thing true of you, and you have always been immortal. Immortality is your natural state of being. God created you to live FOREVER, without ever suffering, being sick, afraid, dead, or unhappy.

Every single part of ACIM is geared towards you disassociating from illusions of death, vulnerability, victimhood, being affected, being hurt, sickness and all forms of suffering, and re-associating yourself with your IMMORTAL SPIRIT.

As the Course states.

1) You are immortal and you cannot die.

2) You already have eternal life, given by God, and it is permanent.

3) You cannot change your immortality.

4) You are always immortal but when you deny your immortality, you PRETEND to be mortal. You dream of being attackable, suffering and dying, but this has NO EFFECT on your immortality.

5) Those who are sane would never use the dream body to demonstrate SYMBOLS of attack, suffering, sickness or death. To do so is a mixed teaching combining PROOF of belief in attack, with an attempt to teach otherwise. The teaching is only PURE when you are demonstrating the immortality of the body, at least as a SYMBOL of immortality. The body can become a symbol of eternal life, a breath of fresh air to those grown sick of the fetid stench of death.

Life is eternal life. There is no life that is not eternal. This is why there is no life outside of heaven, and life "in the dream world" is an illusion of life.

The entire course is trying to get you to own up to being immortal, invulnerable, completely beyond all forms of attack. You are absolutely permanent. And any time that you ACT as if you are not, as if you have been hurt, affected, caused, damaged, made to suffer against your will, you are LYING, you are in denial, and you are PRETENDING that you are not immortal.

You can see this truth throughout all of ACIM's teachings. e.g.

Deny anything not of God the power to affect you (you cannot BE affected, you are immortal)

Nothing in the world can bring oppression or make you ill or sad or weak or afraid (you cannot be ill or weak or afraid or upset because you are immortal)

There is no cause in the world, it is just an effect (the world cannot cause you in any way because you are unchangeable)

You are not a victim of the world you see (you are incapable of being a victim because you are immortal)

Your attack thoughts are attacking your *invulnerability* (your invulnerability cannot BE attacked because you are immortal, but you can pretend it can)

You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself (because you are immortal, and even your hurt of yourself is fake)

You are immortal and cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do (simply, you are immortal)

My self is ruler of the universe. Nothing comes to me unbidden by myself (because you are immortal)

It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. 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. (because you are fucking immortal)

It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. (because nothing can CAUSE YOU, because you are NOT AN EFFECT of anything but God, and you are immortal)

If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this. (because the mind has immortality)

He MUST deny the world of pain, the instant he perceives the arms of love around him. (deny the world because it is an attempt to prove you are not immortal, and its a lie)

This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. (you must deny all illusions of death, because you are immortal)

Teachers of God choose to look upon dreams a while... they are not deceived by what they see. (because they are immortal and know "death is the CENTRAL ILLUSION from which is all dreams stem" and you cannot die, because you are immortal)

I am not weak but strong. I am not afraid but all powerful. (because you are immortal, nothing has power over you)

YOU ARE IMMORTAL AND YOU CANNOT DIE. And any attempt you are making to PROVE otherwise, is futile and pointless and a form of self deception. When you stop deceiving yourself and others with this denial, you will stop trying to kill yourself, will stop making the body sick or dead, and will OVERCOME DEATH FOREVER.

Immortality is the only truth about you. Ask yourself, why am I trying to prove I am not immortal? Why am I accusing someone of being ABLE to hurt me? Why am I BELIEVING that I have BEEN hurt? Nothing can affect you. It is your own mis-belief that it CAN, that affects you. You hurt yourself, and nothing in the world can cause you suffering of any kind.

Owning up to your immortality is the key to the atonement, the resurrection and the life. THIS is A Course in Miracles. This is the way home to God. Accept your immortality, live by your immortality, demonstrate your immortality, and deny everything else any reality.

Nothing real can be threatened, and YOU ARE REAL. So YOU CANNOT BE THREATENED. Because you are immortal!

So any attempt you make to act as if you are not immortal, to believe someone affected you, something happened to you, something went against your will, you're victimized, you're suffering, etc... it all you PRETENDING TO SUFFER by pretending you are the body, making *IT* suffer, to try to prove that "you" are suffering. Your immortal is unaffected by suffering, sickness and death.

There is no REAL death. The son of God is FREE. But the Son of God can PRETEND to die, by using ILLUSIONS of things that seem to die, to try to prove he is NOT the son of God and not immortal. It's a lie. Do not believe it. Own your immortality and use it to contrast what you are doing that betrays your immortality. Compare your immortality to your victimhood. Can you REALLY have been affected if you have immortality? Can you be justified in TRYING to prove you can suffer?

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt". "A damaged body is proof the mind has not been healed." ie if the mind believes it is NOT immortal, it uses the body to TRY to prove that "it" is attackable and vulnerable. And this is always a self deception. You hurt yourself on purpose to try to prove you are not yourself. That has to end in order to accept the atonement and live the resurrection. Your return to ETERNAL LIFE is the goal fo this course.

I never really knew how much my 'mind' seems to think that it has an answer about everything. It can't seem to shut up. I am completely addicted to the belief that "thinking equals knowing". And it's becoming apparent that it will come up with an answer even if it has really no grounds for knowing. And it will share that answer like it's some kind of fact. I go around clucking like a chicken making all these mental noises and thinking that I'm actually speaking truth, when in fact all of the things that come out are just stories and ego-based comments. I'm some kind of babbling idiot.

All of these activities seem to make up a 'me' that I really thought was aware and speaking truth. But everything coming from my ego mind is deception and illusion. In every way possible, my mind is constantly attempting to seek for the truth outside of it, and separate from where truth is.

I realize more and more, that God is the ONLY location of truth. The ego quite literally is running around this world believing 'it' knows everything, when in fact it knows absolutely nothing. It thinks it knows what is true, but it absolutely doesn't know any truth at all because truth is GOD!

The ego is not a faculty of knowing and the ego mind is NOT CAPABLE of knowing anything. All it can do is imagine and think and believe that it can obtain and hold the truth. Yet it is not a faculty of connection to Truth (capital T). It is not a device that can even perceive what the truth really is. It is obsessed with finding partial answers in amongst an absolute minefield of fragmented possibilities, seeking deeply to have the 'intelligence' to 'solve' apparent problems by delving into them even deeper, which makes them worse, and which turns into an exasperatingly frustrating experience of loss and failure.

It relies completely on analysis of the situation. In other words, it has already made everything seem real and now goes into detail trying to explain 'why' whatever is happening is happening. And as it digs for this answer in a swampland of confusion, it always comes up empty handed. It never finds any sense of absolute certainty, although instead it comes up with what it thinks is certainty, which is really, honestly, not complete certainty. And no matter how many times I take this trip with it, even if it comes up with what the world would think of as 'the' answer, it STILL is not the answer.

There is still no sense of completion in the search, no sense of complete acceptance, no sense of finding a truth which encompasses everything so fully that there is no doubt left. It is quite literally incapable of finding such a Total Truth within the realm of partial ideas, partially perceived distorted perceptions, false ideas, cleverly imagined possibilities, carefully explained analysis or any other approach to trying to find truth IN the illusion. All the time this ego mind has been looking for truth outside of it, in everything and everywhere other than in God, believing it is actually POSSIBLE to find truth outside of itself.

All of this activity is geared towards a completely impractical waste of time, to always avoid a real solution or answer, to avoid healing, to ignore God and to shut out the correction which would undo the perception of there being a problem in the first place. The ego is absolutely not interested in truly solving any problems whatsoever, or of really succeeding at finding 'the' answer that gives a satisfying and acceptable explanation for 'what is' (i.e. it is not interested in accepting God). It is only interested in dissecting and studying them deeply, wearing a hat which says "worlds best problem solver" on it. It seeks and does not find, all of the time.

It constantly fails to find a real answer, anywhere, about anything, in spite of the fact that it fervently believes it CAN find an answer, which makes it an obsession. And since the answer can never be found, going looking for it (seeking) always comes up empty handed, frustrated, lost and confused, obsessed over why there 'should' be an answer, and simply not letting go of the total absorption with its own reliance on itself.

Absolutely every ego activity, thought, behavior and process, entirely stems from this ... insane search, which is absolutely guaranteed to fail, because the very thing that would actually conclude the search and bring an answer is the very thing which would inherently UNDO the entire ego. God is the answer and God is the only truth. God is the only place where you will experience a sense of wholeness or completion or a sense of peace at having 'found' something which actually completely SOLVES all problems. And the problem is only solved by rejoining and being one with God/Holy Spirit, which the ego has absolutely no interest in.

The ego would have to SURRENDER, which means stopping searching, stopping seeking, stopping looking for, stopping figuring out, stopping imagining outcomes, stopping trying to control the situation, stopping giving energy to fruitless pointless conceptualizing and storytelling, stopping running away from God, and stopping believing in separation in all its forms. The ego mind is only even in a state of doing things 'on its own' BECAUSE OF the separation from God which gave birth to it. The separation from God was a separation from truth, answers, facts, reality and peace of mind. For the ego to believe it can find any of these things is insanity.

It seems to want to now be in the driver's seat, in charge of running the show, playing God, depending on its own prowess and utilizing its own separate intelligence and intellect to solve aaaaaaaaaall of the problems that have arisen because of its own seeming existence. How can the ego solve its own existence when IT is the problem it's trying to solve? How can it be free of a problem when its attempt to solve it creates it? How can it pursue the truth where it is not, expecting to find it, and have any hope of doing so?

The only truth is God. The only answer is love. The only response to any situation is love. The only sane practical solution is to extend God. The only response to the world is unconditional love. The only practical and wise response to any problem is to HEAL IT NOW through the miracle. And the only way for the problems to all 'go away' is for the EGO to go away. It is our very own ego self, our intellectual mind, our reliance on our separate faculties, and our intent to never surrender to actually ASK GOD FOR THE ANSWER, that ensures we will just keep spinning our wheels in suffering.

The ego will never be the truth. It will never find the truth. It cannot know the truth. And it is not the truth. The ego is FALSE. Your ego self is false.

Your TRUE SELF is in God. The truth is in God. And who you really are is in God. The answer to every problem is in God. The end of suffering is in God. The practical application of healing and correction that truly ANSWERS all problems is in God. And God is all there is.

God created you by using his infinite power, and you therefore inherited his infinite power. And that means you are infinitely powerful. You have the power of God in you, and there is nothing the power of God cannot do.

Having power means that you can CAUSE things to happen. You can create life. It means there's an expression of a kind of "force" that comes out of you which is so strong that it can cause anything to occur.

This in turn means that you are not something that is just passive. You are not some observer or some fence-sitting person that just watches stuff. The idea of the mind being passive was the state of consciousness produces by the first split in the mind at the separation from God. It made the mind a perceiver, as though things happen to it and tell it what exists, rather than as a creator which simply chooses and causes what to exist and puts it in place. What you say goes, and no thing else goes.

"Consciousness was the first split that man introduced into himself. He became a PERCEIVER rather than a creator in the true sense."

The truth though is that you are not a perceiver, you are a knower. And knowledge is power. You do not need senses to sense the world and report back what they find, as though you do not know anything at all and have to wait to be told. Instead, you are the cause of what exists, you put it in place, you will it with your mind, with the power of God that you share.

You should think of yourself as an extremely powerful, causal, creative force, which has the power to create entire worlds through will alone. You mis-created space and time, and the planets, and the bodies.

There are no neutral thoughts. Your thoughts have power to produce effects. You are not alone in experiencing the effects of your thoughts. Your mind has the power of God in it that can part oceans, raise the dead, heal the sick, convert objects, move planets, without limit.

The course is geared towards you learning to take back your power, and to reclaim your inheritance from God, which includes the power of God. This means regaining the ability to do anything through your holiness. You should think of yourself as a powerful causal being, so strong (God is your strength) such that things only come out of you, they do not come into you from the outside. You are cause, not effect.

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

"If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

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

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. 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."

"The Soul's functions are NOT relative. They are ABSOLUTE. They are OF God and FROM God, and therefore God-like."

"Therefore, being is never threatened. Your Godlike mind can never be defiled."

"It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth. My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision FOR YOURSELF."

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do."

"God is my strength."

"Knowledge is power, and all power is of God. You who have tried to keep power for yourselves, have lost it. You still HAVE the power, but you have interposed so much between it and your AWARENESS of it, that you cannot use it. EVERYTHING you have taught yourselves has made your power more and more obscure to you. You know not WHAT it is, nor WHERE."

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

"I am not weak, but strong."

"I am not helpless, but all powerful."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance, and limits of any kind. Your holiness is totally unlimited in its power because it establishes you as a Son of God, at one with the Mind of his Creator. Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do."

"The power of God, and NOT of you, engenders miracles. The miracle ITSELF is but the witness that you HAVE the power of God in you."

"It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events OUTSIDE him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were NOT his choice. His power of decision is the DETERMINER of every situation in which he seems to FIND himself"

A deep message in ACIM is very simply, that God created you as a perfect being, and if you would just BE YOURSELF, the way God intended, there would be no problem. If you would just be clearly in touch with who you really are, without trying to be anything else, there would be no suffering, no death, no sickness, no unhappiness.

Jesus is in this state of the perfect acceptance of what is really true, where he has accepted as true of Himself ONLY what God has established as true of Him, and nothing else.

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The main difference between us as yet is that I have NOTHING ELSE. This leaves me in a state of true holiness, which is only a POTENTIAL in you."

The entire curriculum is aimed at you re-discovering, being aligned with, squarely in ownership of, completely living out from, totally clear about, WHAT YOU REALLY ARE. The soul, the Son of God, the perfect spirit being of light that God created.

It's extraordinarily simple. If we would just stop denying ourselves, attacking ourselves, condemning ourselves with sin, splitting our mind through trying to reject the whole of ourselves, repressing ourselves, trying to be something we are not, being identified with a body, believing we are made of something we're not made of, having a self image, trying to be unconscious, trying to be suicidal to bring about sickness and death, if we would just STOP doing all these things that take us AWAY from what God already created perfect, we'd be done.

So Jesus, in a state of the recognition, acknowledgement and acceptance of his atonement, is merely BEING HIMSELF, as God created Him. He knows that what he HAS or what he IS is merely and ONLY what God established as his reality. He has a function given by God which he fulfills perfectly. And so he is being what GOD WILLS HE BE, therefore is carrying out God's will and is in accord with it.

Jesus has nothing about himself, no self image or concept, no idea of identity, no mistaken sense of what is his or is not, that was not given to him. What is given to him is his inheritance from God. It is this inheritance that we threw away - our very self - our real identity - when attempting to be separate. As soon as we went into denial of reality, putting our mind to sleep and dreaming, we instantly were AVOIDING being ourselves, trying to be something we are not.

So the entire course, the whole curriculum, is simply geared towards trying to get us to stop pretending. To become truthful. To be true to our real self. To own up to being Christ. To accept what is true of us as specified by God instead of MAKING UP stuff that isn't. To be willing to accept that and ONLY that (only the truth is true), and to be willing to LET GO OF anything else which was NOT CREATED BY GOD. Which means, the whole world, and all bodies.

Believing that we are a body, or that bodies even exist, is a denial of our real identity in God. Believing that this world exists and is real is simultaneously an attempt to HAVE something that God DID NOT create. "The world was made as a place where God could enter not." If there is anything that we WANT in the world, or the body, we are wanting it INSTEAD OF wanting our soul. And Jesus tells us what the consequence of that is:

"The ego is trying to teach you how to gain the whole world, and lose your own soul. The Holy Spirit teaches that you CANNOT lose your soul and there IS no gain in the world, for OF ITSELF, it profits nothing. To invest in something without profit is surely to impoverish yourself, and the overhead is high. Not only is there no profit in the investment, but the cost to YOU is enormous. For this investment costs you the world's reality, by denying YOURS, and gives you nothing in return. You CANNOT sell your soul, but you CAN sell your AWARENESS of it."

And Jesus goes on to say:

"You cannot perceive the soul, but you will not KNOW it while you perceive anything ELSE as more valuable. The Holy Spirit is your strength because He perceives nothing BUT your soul as you. He is perfectly aware that you do NOT know yourselves, and perfectly aware of how to teach you what you are. BECAUSE He loves you, He will gladly teach you what He loves, for He wills to share it. Remembering you always, He cannot let you forget your worth. For the Father never ceases to remind Him of His Son, and He never ceases to remind His Son of the Father. God is in your memory BECAUSE of Him."

Simply put, the whole curriculum is all about AWARENESS. Do you want to be aware of, thus own up to, accept, acknowledge, know, BE, the factual real permanent absolute truth about yourself which is GIVEN YOU by God and YOU CANNOT DEFINE YOURSELF, OR do you want some other self-made, self-defined, made-up, invented, personally controlled, artificial sense of identity which is OPPOSITE to your true nature and in conflict with God's will.

This is why there is a "great awakening". The Atonement Plan is for the purpose of bringing about the total awakening of all those who do not want to be AWARE of the truth of reality. Who do not want Heaven. And who want to be something OTHER THAN God intended or created. Either we are willing to see and acknowledge what is real, then moving beyond perception to knowledge of the Kingdom as our self, OR we are wanting to stay asleep in a dream world that WE MADE UP in an effort to destroy ourselves by identifying with illusions. A dream of death, an impossible world, made of nothing.

Know thyself. Be as God created you. Accept what you ARE. Uncover yourself. Remove the blocks to the awareness of YOUR presence. To the recognition of your SOUL. And return to being ONLY what God intended you be. You need be nothing else, or do anything else to be anything else, because God created you PERFECT and you cannot improve upon perfection.

"Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world has to offer. The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true."

"I am come to tell you that the choice of which is true is not yours. If it were, you would have destroyed yourselves. But God did not will the destruction of His Creations, having created them for eternity. His Will has saved you, not from yourselves, but from your illusions of yourselves. He has saved you for yourselves. Let us glorify Him Whom the world denies, for over His Kingdom it has no power."

If you'll take a look, willingly, for a while, you'll notice that everything in the world goes wrong sooner or later.

The food goes moldy. The leaves die off. The cars break down. The tv stops working. The shoes develop a hole. The carpet gathers dirt. The river drowns someone. The volcanos explode. The lightning strikes a cow. Suns go supernova etc.

Do you notice a trend? If you look for long enough without denial?

Are you expecting these things not to happen?

What part of life is it that gets our hopes up that these things won't occur? Have we become clever at building an illusory sense of safety, a little oasis in the desert, a barricade against death?

Jesus says the main purpose of special relationships is to draw a little circle around a portion of hell to keep attack out and create an illusion of safety within. Why do we do that? Some kind of denial that the food is going to go moldy, the house windows are going to break, the trains are going to rust, the babies are going to die?

We find ourselves in this hellish world we made which, if you sit and look at it, you can see it "dying" all the time. If you take off the rose tinted glasses, the hopes and dreams, the wishful thinking, the defenses, the attempts to protect yourself from its onslaught, just sit and watch it. Everything dies here sooner or later.

That isn't pleasant. It's not pretty. It's built into the system.

We can be quite heavily in denial of this. In fact there's a whole lot of motivation and activity in the world geared towards brushing this fact under the carpet. The denial of it, while you go pursue successful careers and happy families and build your houses on ground that will, eventually, swallow them up.

I'm not trying to be morbid here, or negative. I'm not passing any judgement. Just look at it. This is what the world is like. Do we want to stay in denial of this? Do we want to keep pretending it's not how it is, and keep running away from death? Not that we should run towards it either, but we have to be willing to recognize what this world's nature is without flinching.

Jesus says "The world is false perception". He also says "without the idea of death there is no world." He also says "The body's eyes are not the means by which the real world can be seen." and "Only the body makes the world seem real."

What this tells you is that this world, which is always in a state of death and dying and decay, is fundamentally ONLY existing in a state of FALSE perception. And when you move toward true perception, opening the spiritual eye, and seeing with Christ Vision, you are looking using a non-body apparatus, a non-false apparatus, a true perception, which looks past this world entirely and looks to reality. And in that reality this world doesn't exist, because you can only see it when your mind is in error. Because it's an hallucination.

The world was made to be the opposite of life. It's a dream of death. It's not a dream of life. It sometimes appears to contain illusions of life, spring, birth, renewal, regeneration, growth and so on. But these are all illusions. Flowers all die in the end, that's a fact. There is no life form anywhere that lives forever. Everything is always transitioning from spurts of what appear to be life, towards death. That's what the world does. It's built in, fundamental to its nature.

Do you think you can make this world stop doing that? By all means you can override this behavior through miracles, because the power of the mind trumps false perception and can easily change illusions. But nevertheless the world will still keep dying, destroying, eating and consuming everything else. It denies even its own existence and is against itself. The world is suicidal. This whole universe is.

The ego has a massive effort to try to save the world. It's a farce. The effort is to suggest that a world which is fundamentally made of death can be made to live. That death can be avoided, even though all its efforts to avoid death attract it and make it real. The world only contains a seeming mixture and the living and dying because we introduced an "opposite to life" into our minds and now try to live in a contradictory world where both life and death happen. And now we've made both life and death into an illusion.

Even as you awaken towards true perception, people will still continue to experience body death and sickness. There will still be wars. In case you didn't notice, doing the workbook does not cause the workbook to disappear. Nor does it change much what's on the news. Pandemics have happened in the lifetime of ACIM students. Because they do, because they're part of this world's functioning. This world has a function of failure and that does not change.

The effort to make this world change or to turn it into a physical form appearance of heaven, is impossible. It's an attempt to spiritualize an illusion and turn a illusion into something real and sacred and worth keeping. If you could do that you'd be stuck in hell forever with no reason to go home. You can't make an equivalent as attractive as God's creation. As Jesus says:

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world. "

There are no roads, in hell, that lead out of hell. Darkness cannot become light while keeping the darkness. Ego cannot turn itself into holiness. Death cannot be alive. And non-existence cannot take on an existence. It's a closed system.

Life isn't here. Life is in heaven. If you want to be where life is, you go to where life is. You don't try to polish up a turd and turn it into something special. Your home and your natural environment are in the Kingdom with God, where you were designed to be. You cannot be comfortable in another world that's alien to you. This world is an alien world and the people on it are all aliens.

Can we let it be what it is, recognize its shortcoming, and turn away from it to the light, knowing that "this world holds nothing that I want"? Can we recognize its offerings of idols, pleasures, toys, temptations, treasures, as nothing but scraps of hell that we do not really want? And can we recognize as Jesus says that you CANNOT really WANT the world? Not really. It's fundamentally lacking.

We are to forgive the world, and shine a light of truth upon it, and recognize it for what it is WITHOUT the judgement that "sin is real" or "its really hell". But this merely lifts away from it any confusion about what it is. We then recognize it is simply false and nothing and not your home. A world of illusions. Not really sinful, not really anything. But not your home. You can love it, unconditionally, but you can't be in love with it if you want to be with God.

The world is dying. It was already dead when we made it.

"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.

Both are not true, yet either one will seem as real to you, as the amount to which you hold it dear. And yet their power is NOT the same, because their real attraction to you IS unequal. 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.

This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world. But the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT. And what you call with love WILL come to you."

Say you have some illusions. Something that isn't true. It could be a physical thing, or some belief or whatever.

If your mind is open, it is open to the possibility of being mistaken, the possibility of not knowing, the possibility that the thing could be true or false. The mind isn't locked into some position or defending some viewpoint or prior belief. It's open to considering possibilities.

This openness allows you to "see" all of what is there, without filtering anything out with some kind of bias. It lets you recognize what things are, without distortions and without preferences. It's just sort of a way of saying, "tell me what you are", "what is this really?". it requires honesty and a willingness to be mistaken.

Open mindedness can allow you to see a mistake, recognize it as a mistake, and recognize that it needs correcting. It is a light which is open to everything, so it can see all sides and all angles, all perspectives. Including being able to see from a perspective of wholeness, which holds things in its light and in its true perspective to reveal what things really are.

Open-mindedness could be said to be the same thing as forgiveness. It's a mind that is willing to accept the truth regardless of what the truth is, and is not deceived by appearances. It's open to questioning what it sees and considering that it may or may not be true or real. It's the same thing as true perception - openness to the whole truth.

Sin on the other hand is a state of close-mindedness, which we could call false perception. You could call it narrow-mindedness as well. The mind narrows down and instead of being open to the whole, to everything, it becomes very focused and specific. It shuts out the peripheral vision, so to speak, and focuses only on what things appear to be on the surface.

A closed mind is not open to considering that anything is mistaken, or to questioning the reality or truth of anything at all. It takes everything at face value. Illusions are taken to be reality, lies are considered truth. Whatever seems to happen is believed to be really happening.

A closed mind also narrows down and homes in on specific things, so will focus on "what someone did" to the exclusion of all else. Even if the person has merit or does good dees in addition to their mistakes, sin focuses only on the mistakes and shuts out the good deeds.

Thus a closed mind becomes a darkened mind, focusing only on what people are doing wrong - given that everything in form is basically a mistake it turns everything into a sin. It mistakes illusions for truth and believes that whatever appears to be happening is permanently irreversibly true.

Sin has no openness to correction, to healing, to another viewpoint. It is very rigid and stuck and fixated on nothingness. It will not budge or allow any change to its viewpoint, or any way by which anything can be questioned. It takes everything as gospel and without question at all, accepting illusions into the mind without any sense of real perspective.

A sinful false perception therefore, a closed mind, does not see that there is even a possibility of mistakenness, a possibility of unintentionally, or of a need for gentle correction. It sees only deliberate evil acts, which appear to be utterly unforgivable, and sees that there is no other way to look at anything. It does not allow any openness to consider its position being flawed, or to register any sense of sin itself being a mistaken view.

As such a closed mind is an unforgiving mind, a mind which will not allow forgiveness because it will not question whether or not what happens is really happening. Whether that it sees is really there to see, or the truth at all. It believes it knows everything already, has all of the truth already, cannot be told anything new, and will not listen to reason. It won't consider the possibility of any alternative viewpoint, because to sin there is only one factual truth - you sinned and you should die for it.

As we awaken, we are moving from the viewpoint of sin - or closed-mindedness, and are opening up the mind and expanding our viewpoint so that we are more inclusive, more open, considerate, willing to question, willing to be mistaken, and willing to recognize that other people's choices are mistakes and not sins. This requires broadening the focal point and expanding it out to see the whole picture. To reframe everything in the light of the whole.

In forgiveness, everything false is recognised as false, without judgement. And everything true is recognised as true without distortion. It recognizes that all illusions are just mistakes, and there is no sin, because there is nothing closed off from the light of truth. The whole is recognised, perception is open to wholeness, and the whole informs everything. To forgive, you must open your mind and question illusions and let go of trying to make everything into a sin. There is no sin.

"What is forgiveness, but a willingness that truth be true? What can remain unhealed and broken from a Unity Which holds all things within Itself? There is NO sin. And EVERY miracle is possible the INSTANT that the Son of God perceives his wishes and the Will of God are One." UrT26H9

"Our lessons now are geared specifically to widening horizons, and direct approaches to the special blocks which keep your vision narrow, and too limited to let you see the value of our goal." UrW180 "Only by doing this is it possible to transcend the narrow boundaries the ego would impose upon the self." UrP3C8

"And if I need but stillness and a tranquil, open mind, these are the gifts I will receive of Him." UrW365

"It is therefore essential that you keep a perfectly open mind, unhampered by judgment, in selecting the things to which the idea for the day is to be applied." UrW3L2

"Accept atonement with an open mind which cherishes no lingering belief that you have made a devil of God's Son." UrW101

"Dwell not upon the past today. Keep a completely open mind, washed of all past ideas and clean of every concept you have made." UrW75L5

"An open mind is more honest than this." UrT12D3

"Healing will flash across your open mind as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings." UrW136L16

"The Savior's vision is as innocent of what your brother is as it is free of any judgment made upon yourself. It sees no past in anyone at all. And thus it serves a wholly open mind, unclouded by old concepts and prepared to look on ONLY what the present holds." UrT31G13

"It is to this unsealed and open mind that truth returns, unhindered and unbound. Where concepts of the self have been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is." UrT31E16

On of the most life-changing things I've learned from ACIM, is simply realising this idea that we "scapegoat" in order to get rid of our own guilt. That we start out first attacking ourselves, making ourselves guilty, and then we project that guilt through seemingly justified anger onto other people. This whole "blame game" is of finger pointing and finding people to be sinful, trying to enforce people's guilt through anger and attack, so that we can get rid of our own guilt and come off innocent.

Most people in the world are blameful and believe that who they are angry at is the one who is wrong. When I first got this idea that "the person who is blaming is the one with the PROBLEM", it was a 180-degree paradigm shift. It was a revelation that it's not the person being blamed that has the problem, it's the person doing the blaming. Because for the most part it is easy to believe that anger is justified, and the person we're angry at must be the one who is wrong. But it's always the projecting person who has a problem.

If more people could adopt this, relationships would be 90% healthier. In a vast majority of special relationships in the world, even marriages, there is rampant scapegoating, anger and blame. People essentially have unhealed wounds, inner guilts, unforgiven sins etc, which are triggered off, which lead to an eruption of emotion and a hurling outward of it to try to pin it on someone else. When it gets really bad, it's just one reaction after another back and forth, keeping score and trying hard to make sure the other person is guilty.

To realize that we have to take responsibility for what we feel and experience is key. Instead of it being other people or the world who are responsible for what we're feeling, we have to take back that power and recognize WE are the ones doing it to ourselves. WE are the ones who are "to blame" for this suffering. It's the secret of salvation. If they aren't the ones with the problem, it must be me. And that takes honesty.

If I am upset, something is wrong with me, not anyone else. If I am getting angry at someone, something is wrong with me and not anyone else. The more angry I get, the more I am in denial that I have a problem. The more I am in denial, the more I split my mind, the more I reinforce separation, and the more I dissociate my mind from itself. The more dissociated I become the more I believe something "not me" is to blame, and become extremely convinced that I am NOT the one with the problem.

The key is that we have to forgive ourselves all the guilts that we've piled onto ourselves. All the self-accusation and self-hate and self-destruction. All the hidden sins and hates and unworthiness and all the rest of the ways we attack ourselves. Without that guilt, we have nothing to project, and no reason to project it.

I think one thing I feel quite good about is that after all these 20+ years of working on this with ACIM, I've managed to heal quite a lot of guilts and shames and hidden sins and hates and all that - to do with myself, that I don't very often scapegoat anymore. You can't scapegoat unless you need one, and if you aren't full of guilt it's harder to be triggered by stuff. I have become more benevolent and softer and more loving, kinder and more peaceful, and that's a good thing.

I see a lot of relationships where this simple thing hasn't been learned. The absolute default for the ego is to just go into rage mode whenever someone triggers off some guilt. Then there's defensiveness and anger and hurling abuse and separation. There a war of words, broken relationships, abuse and all the rest of it, all springing from wounded people getting their insecurities and unhealed stuff triggered off. And not taking responsibility for it.

It's tough at times to keep having to come back to this idea that, I'm the one who is responsible for this suffering. But it's a vital practice. If I'm upset, it is never for the reason I think. If I am angry and I think it is justified, anger is never justified. The cause and reason of the problem is in my mind, not out in the world or in anyone else. No-one is doing anything to me or causing me to be upset for any reason. It's all an inside job. If the world could learn this we'd have absolutely incredible relationships and the end of so much conflict.

If someone or something outside of you is the cause of you, you are powerless to stop it affecting you and are playing a victim role. Only if you are invulnerable to the world are you no longer affected by it. Its a transition from victimhood to the impossibility of being a victim, from vulnerability to invulnerability, from mortality to immortality, from effect to cause.

And that means recognising your immortality. It always comes back to you being an immortal being, nothing can happen against your will, so if you think someone's causing you to suffer, you're deceiving yourself. You have to get really honest and own up to what you are doing to yourself and admit you are mistaken, be willing to have humility and step back with the blame game. To totally own your causal power and how you are using it against yourself, is forgiveness. Coming from a position of not being in conflict and at war with yourself, so that you look out from that peace onto others.

Blaming someone splits your mind. The mind hallucinates that it's talking to another separate person in third-person speak like "you're doing this" while the person isn't even in front of them. The more angry we become the more we enforce separation and guilt. That's literal insanity, to project guilt in an attempt to get rid of it, while causing it to get worse.

Anger increases separation and splits the mind producing mental illness and ultimately physical illness. It's in all our best interests that we learn to own up to who and what we are, take responsibility for our own shit, and stop putting it onto everyone else.

Whenever we feel compelled to look outside ourselves for a cause or will or power to explain why something is happening, we're lost. If we can totally take full responsibility for what we are, such that we no longer accuse anyone of being the reason why we are what we are, we will be completely forgiving and kind and benevolent - to ourselves and others.

The whole of ACIM is simply geared toward this goal of complete undoing of the separation in the mind, the removal of all guilt, the end of all blame, and the complete reversal of all conflict. And without guilt there is no ego.

"I am never upset for the reason I think." W5

"Anger is NEVER justified. Attack has NO foundation. It is here escape from fear begins, and will be made complete. Here is the real world given in exchange for dreams of terror. For it is on this forgiveness rests, AND IS BUT NATURAL." UrT30G1

"I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts." W281

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. 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" UrW195L5

"It can be but myself I crucify." W196

"Only the self-accused condemn." UrT31C

"You NEVER hate your brother for HIS "sins", but ONLY for your own. Whatever form his sins appear to take, the form obscures the fact that you believe it to be yours, and THEREFORE meriting a just attack." UrT31C

"Projection will ALWAYS hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its ONLY purpose is to KEEP THE SEPARATION GOING. It is solely a device of the ego to make you feel DIFFERENT from your brothers and separated FROM them. The ego justifies this on the wholly spurious grounds that it makes you seem better than they are, thus obscuring equality WITH them still further." UrT6C3

"Guilt hides Christ from your sight, for it is the denial of the blamelessness of God's Son. In this strange world which you have made, the Son of God HAS sinned. How could you SEE him, then? By making HIM invisible, the world of retribution rose in the black cloud of guilt which you accepted, and you hold it dear. For the blamelessness of Christ is the proof that the ego never was, and can never be. Without guilt the ego HAS no life, and God's Son IS without guilt." UrT11J6

Here’s what I‘ve learned from ACIM and recent experiences.

1. The body does not really exist at all, except as a temporary projected 3D image coming from the mind. It is an illusion. It has no mind, soul, will, power, or causality.

2. When the mind believes in separation and goes into ‘ego’, it regards its identity as an illusion and materializes an illusory self image, which shows up as the form of a body - a device for separation. It then confuses its identity with the body and becomes unaware that it is making it show up. Even tough the mind is projecting the body, and continues doing so unconsciously, it now believes it IS the body. (The body needs no healing for it cannot make itself sick, but a mind that believes it is a body is sick indeed.)

3. When the mind believes it is the body it’s projecting, and starts reading ACIM talking about how you are not a body, and since the mind in this state is unaware it is projecting the body, it takes this to mean 1) the body exists separate from the mind, 2) the mind isn’t putting it there, and 3) therefore I must "detach" from and transcend everything to do with the body and go into my mind. "Seek not to change the world", "I am not a body I am free" etc is all geared toward DIS-IDENTIFYING with the body. Remembering that you are NOT the 3D image you are projecting.

4. Since mind in that state is unaware it’s projecting the body, it tends to think this means "body and mind are separate", and "I must change my perception OF the body, and the world, and this is all I CAN do", as though the body and the world exist ON THEIR OWN (separate from your mind), and not because of your mind. So the mind sets about divorcing itself from the body and trying to shift away from it. This is accompanied by the belief that you must learn to accept the body and the world "as it is", in whatever state it is in, and do NOTHING to try to change it. This justifies never performing miracles, and not being responsible for having power over sickness and death.

5. As mind takes notice of all the teachings which speak of changing your perception OF the body and the world, in order to transition your IDENTITY back to mind/cause, you will start to experience increasing AWARENESS that you are causal. Level confusion and cause-effect are corrected. You realize more and more that mind causes everything, including the state of the body and the world. You have to now question the prior belief that you just "ignore" the world and go home, and realize now that it is coming from you.

6. The previously unconscious projective power of the mind, which is making the body show up, starts to become unavoidable and conscious. To be not a victim does not just mean transcending a sick body and letting it die, it now means acknowledging the second piece of the puzzle that you were not aware of before: your body is coming FROM your mind, at all times. While it’s still true that you must learn to NOT BE THE BODY, you must now take charge of what it is and the form it takes, what it represents, what it symbolizes, what it teaches and what it demonstrates. Because the body is now starting to become TRANSPARENT, meaning it is becoming a window into the mind, rather than a cover over the mind.

7. You realize eventually that even though "you are not the body" is a huge central teaching of the course, and you’re supposed to recognize yourself as not being affected BY it, that inevitably leads to a causal relationship where you are the CAUSE OF IT, rather than it being the cause of you. There is no middle ground of "body doesn’t cause me but it exists on its own." The body MUST have a causer. Someone is making it show up. YOU ARE!

8. This is the deeper KEY to the mind-body relationship that few ACIM students are willing to see or accept. It’s not just about changing your perception OF things, it’s about realizing YOU ARE THE CAUSE OF THEM. "Projection makes perception" doesn’t just mean that you project ONTO what is there. It means you LITERALLY PUT STUFF OUT THERE and THEN perceive what you put there and interpret your perception! "There is no world apart from what you wish" "The world IS perception". You also have power over your projections - you are a creator. And when you exercise that power, miracles happen. "The mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this." It’s not JUST about dis-identifying with the body, the world and external causes. It’s ALSO about realizing YOU ARE THE DREAMER, and if you weren’t dreaming, there WOULDN’T EVEN BE A WORLD TO PERCEIVE! "There is no world."

9. This leads to having to admit that there is a CONNECTION between your mind and your body. It is not merely something to transcend or separate from or leave behind. There is a direct line of causality coming from the mind to MATERIALIZE the body. MInd is the projector. And this is the TIE that "unconscious projectors" deny even exists - a reason why your body is under the authority of your mind, why it symbolizes and represents your state of mental health, and why "sick bodies are accusers". Your body is an image you hold up to represent what your MIND believes is true of you and others. Your body is an image IN YOUR MIND, that your mind is fully responsible for.

10. This ultimately MUST lead to the resurrection state, in which the mind FULLY IDENTIFIES WITH SPIRIT. This doesn’t mean it just separates from, denies, drops dead, or leaves behind the body. How can the body STAY showing up WITHOUT a mind to project it? It cannot lay on the ground looking dead WITHOUT a mind putting it there AND MAINTAINING IT. "The mind being sane, heals the body." And when the mind is fully sane, and is done with dreaming, it will STOP DREAMING THE BODY. It will stop projecting one. The body DISAPPEARS, literally! When the mind regards its identity as SPIRIT, it becomes empty of all illusions, and does not hold a picture of an illusory body in place. The body becomes *transparent*, its image fades, and it CEASES TO EXIST becaue the light shines it away. "Illusions recognized must disappear." This is the only way out of the dream, not through death or sickness or old age!

"The mind makes this decision as it makes every decision that is responsible for the body’s condition."

"The mind that made the body can make another."

"At no time does the body exist."

This is the central teaching of the course. It is simply the principle that MIND is the CAUSE of everything - your body and your world. It has power OVER everything it projects. It chooses WHAT will appear out there, and then perceives it. It PUTS OBJECTS THERE. It materializes matter. "Your mind has the power to create worlds." There IS NO WORLD other than the one YOU ARE PROJECTING. It’s NOT just about you projecting ONTO stuff, onto the world, onto people, or onto your body. You are the one who puts that stuff there in the first place! This is the responsibility we all have to own up to. "Your brother thinks he made the world with you."

The world is a fluid, flexible, non-fixed liquid pool of mental possibilities and illusions. MINDS are dreaming it into being. Bodies are showing up because body-identified minds, which are sick, are trying to manifest illusions and make them seem real. None of this is really here. We’re just collaborating in a grand dream. The world is NOT OBJECTIVELY REAL and nor is the body.

I summary, your task is to:

1) Dis-identify from being a body and realize you are immortal spirit and causality is in your mind.

2) Remember that your mind is MAKING your body show up and the state or health of your body REFLECTS your mental health.

3) Recognize your body is an illusion that YOU were believing in, and without your belief it CANNOT EXIST. Thus you reach resurrection, your illusion of death disappears, and you return to what you alway were - pure spirit in heaven.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made" .... "earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way".

We made this world, the physical world, complete with stars and galaxies and planets and bodies, in an attempt to be COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to God's reality. It therefore HAS to have the properties that are OPPOSITE to God.

Heaven is everything, and so the world you made LACKED EVERYTHING and IS therefore nothing. Heaven is entirely meaningful, and so the world you made LACKS ALL MEANING and is utterly meaningless. Heaven is reality, and so the world you made IS COMPLETELY UNREAL. Heaven exists, and so the world you made DOES NOT EXIST. Heaven is the truth, and so the world you made IS COMPLETELY FALSE. Heaven is all possibility, and so the world you made is IMPOSSIBLE.

So what you have ended up with is an imagined, hallucinated world, within your mind, which presents an illusion of a world. An image of a world which seems to be there, but isn't. Which seems to do things which are impossible in truth. And which seems to exist in some way, but still doesn't. It is a fiction, a dream, a make-believe wishful-thinking desire to have something be possible that isn't. As a result, "the world" in and of itself IS NOTHING AT ALL. It has NO meaning, NO truth, NO life, NO reality, NO power, NO will, NO mind, NOTHING AT ALL. And we're talking here about what the world IS, not about your interpretations and perceptions of it.

"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth."

"We also have observed that man can create an empty shell, but cannot create nothing at all. This emptiness provides the screen for the misuse of projection."

In the separation we made "an empty shell", which has no inherent meaning or reality of its own, which becomes a seemingly "neutral screen", ONTO which we project meaning. This is because the world in and of itself has NO meaning and IS NOTHING. It can only act like a mirror to reflect back whatever meaning you GIVE to it.

"It is essential, therefore, that you learn to recognize the meaningless, and accept it without fear. If you are fearful, it is certain that you will endow the world with attributes which it does not possess, and crowd it with images that do not exist. To the ego illusions are safety devices, as they must also be to you who equate yourself with the ego." "That is all the world of the ego is. NOTHING. It has no meaning. It does not exist."

So what happened was, we made this NOTHING world, a meaningless empty mirror devoid of ANY meaning, good or bad. And then what we call "the ego", really the ATTEMPTED BELIEF that an opposite to God HAS the attributes of God, began to project ITS meanings onto the meaningless world. It wanted the world to be real, to have truth, to mean something, to be alive, to have power and mind and will, and to replace heaven as a real existence.

All of that was meaning PROJECTED ONTO the meaningless world by the ego in the mind. The belief in, or the desire to WANT the world to BE something it can never be, has pushed our minds into egoic states of insanity where we believe this world is reality.

We have fallen for illusions, given value to stuff that doesn't exist, have interpreted NOTHING as SOMETHING, have GIVEN the world meanings so that the forms of objects mean different things, we have decided that the world has power over us, and have tried to force it to act as if it is alive.

All in an attempt to turn what is really essentially NOTHING into something that seems like it really exists. We've tried to MAKE it be real, even though it can NEVER BE. By doing this, we've now failed to recognize that the world simply is still a "neutral mirror", or basically a NOTHINGNESS, which is empty in every way and lacks any kind of meaning. It is not positive, or negative. It is not light or dark. It is not evil or holy. It is not ANYTHING. It's not even really there at all. But we've tried to invest it with attributes of SOMETHING, whether it be that we've tried to give it ego attributes or holy attributes. And BOTH are incorrect, because it in and of itself IS NOT THERE.

"Earth can reflect (because it has no truth of its own) Heaven or hell; God or the ego."

"To see a SINLESS body is impossible. For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless. ***As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego.*** EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

"What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be. It is this you see in it. It is this that is meaningless in truth."

"All these attributes are given it by you. The world is meaningless in itself."

"I am looking at a meaningless world."

So Jesus is really trying to get us to realize that "the world" is in fact absolutely utterly NOTHING. It is not this or that, or up or down, or good or bad, or anything. That ANY kind of judgement about it is wrong. That even trying to assign it positive meanings is invalid. It can't BE holy, because it doesn't exist. It can't BE given life, because it cannot be eternal. It isn't an evil hell, nor is it a heaven. It is an empty lifeless nothing mirror in which you see, at best, a REFLECTION of what YOU PUT THERE TO SEE. It can REFLECT heaven, but it cannot ever BE heaven.

This is where perception comes in. Or rather, projection makes perception. Your mind is always projecting something. If it projects from ego then it GIVES the meaningless world EGO meanings, and this somewhat transforms the NOTHING world into a "hell on earth" kind of experience. It makes the world a nightmare for you because your mind is now ASSIGNING all kinds of unnatural, inappropriate, incorrect meanings to everything you see.

This in turn makes the world SEEM dark and foreboding and frightening and dangerous. It sets up a hierarchy of illusions in which different forms seem to have different meanings or importance or severity. And now your whole experience of a NOTHING WORLD transforms into a NEGATIVE experience of hellish nightmares, victimhood, victory, and everything in between.

The whole of ACIM is geared towards lifting AWAY these projected false meanings that you've "given to everything you see", so that you stop trying to turn NOTHING into SOMETHING. Which really is the definition of making mountains out of molehills - creating drama from nothing at all.

Jesus is then saying that if you lift away from the world all of the ego meaning, sin, attack, giult, fear etc, that you PUT ONTO IT unnaturally, then a light will shine in your mind from the Holy Spirit which will "light up" the meaningless world, and you will GIVE IT A HAPPY MEANING.

This happier meaning, aligned with God, is in turn STILL an illusion and a projection of meaning. The world is GIVEN a sense of innocence, purity, love, etc. Not because it HAS that, and not because it is inherent to it. In fact the world is STILL NOTHING. But your mind is able to "bless it" with the giving of love, so that what you "see in it" is a REFLECTION of the love you gave.

You then look upon "what you made" with forgiving eyes, and see the forgiven world. Not a world that's REAL or TRUE, but a REFLECTION in a MEANINGLESS world that is shining back at you the light that you are PUTTING there to see in it. This is how "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind", NOT because God is in the world or as the world.

And eventually this will give way to the complete DISAPPEARING OF THE MIRROR as "the world" disappears in light and is no more. It never was really anything to begin with. It has always been nothing and never really became anything. And so "the world was over long ago."

What this means for us is that in ACIM there is a very powerful and deep thread which basically says, the central lesson is, "there is no world." Not that the world is inherently anything, it is not hell or heaven, it can at best REFLECT them but cannot BE them. It's just an empty shell, a meaningless nothingness which, IF you invest it with belief, seems to become a "something" with real existence and life, but when seen truly, is RECOGNIZED as NOTHING AT ALL.

"The eyes of Christ look on a world forgiven. In His sight are all its sins forgiven, for He sees no sin in anything He looks upon."

"And as we look upon a world forgiven, it is He Who calls to us and comes to take us home, reminding us of our Identity Which our forgiveness has restored to us."

"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."

The central core message then is simply this. The world is nothing at all. The body is nothing at all. There is no war. There is no death. There is no sickness. There is no attack. There is no sin. There is no guilt. There are no victims. There is no suffering. There is no unhappiness. There is no history of the human race. There is no space or time or galaxies. There are no civilizations of bodies. There are no cities or streets. There is no devouring nature. There is no decay or loss or deprivation or sacrifice. There is NOTHING HERE AT ALL.

It is only when we mistake this nothingness for SOMETHING, that we become upset. Now we have made it real and given it belief. Now we have confused it for having a life and mind and will of its own. Now we think the world we made as nothing, has become something, and has risen up out of nowhere to do something by a will of its own, against our will. And now we are victims and are afraid and suffering and dying at its hand. And now we accuse others who seem to populate the world of being the cause of sin against us. And all of this is confused, insane and mistaken, because the entire world IS NOT DOING ANYTHING AT ALL.

"******The world is nothing in itself.***** Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real. Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already (as if it objectively exists), hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came. There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly."

"*****There is no world!***** This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again. But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now. Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize."

"*****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."

"Without the idea of death *****there is no world*****. All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions."

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