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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a world based on limitation, relativity, differences and lack.

What one thing has, another thing does not.

This is what makes everything different. Apples lack the color of oranges. Bananas lack the shape of apples. You can eat an apple but you can't eat your car, etc.

This is a fundamental built-in law - giving and receiving are not one, and what you give you lose. And so what you have, is lacking, and to gain something is to lose something else.

This unfortunately means that nothing in the world is whole, there are no perfect choices, anything you choose will only give you a partial solution, and every single thiing you choose will be lacking something.

You are very familiar with this. You think of whether to choose A or B. A seems to appeal with its particular attributes, but then again, B has something that A doesn't. But then again, if you pick B, it lacks the things that A has.

After a while of driving yourself mad trying to make a choice, trying to make the right choice, you can't help but get a nagging feeling that if you choose either of them it won't be a complete answer. It won't really totally solve things. It won't be perfect.

So you think to choose A, but then you recognize that B has something going for it. But then, you can't choose B, because it has something missing. And then you think, well, shit, I just can't choose, because both options are not ideal, neither of them is perfect, none of them give me the wholeless I'm looking for, and I can't be satisfied with either of them.

So then you throw up your arms in frustration at the stupidly impossible situation and decide to be done with this whole stupid choosing business, and just compromise and settle and make do and put up with and tolerate, because dis-satisfaction and imperfection are all that's really on offer.

And then you regret your decision because not only did you only have totally incomplete lacking options to choose from, you've now settled for something you don't totally want, and can't get behind, and now you don't want any of them.

This is the malady of human life, and it's not your fault and its not particular to you. It's the same for everyone, because it's built into the system. The entire system of spacetime, of relativity, is a systtem of partiality, because it lacks the wholeness of God. It's a system of impossibilities, contradictions, lacks, scarcities, imperfections, flaws, limits, inadequacies, and frustrating nonsense.

You think you can solve a problem here, but every problem solved produces another problem. You can reduce the overall problematicness of something, but to do it you have to add something else, which brings its own problems with it. The duck tape you fixed that broken whatever with, is now subject to decay and over time it's going to fail. Solutions are problems, and there is no escape.

There is no wholeness to be had in the world. The world cannot ever give you perfection. There is no perfect answer. There is no real lasting solution. There is no correct path to take. There is no completely right choice. The best you can hope for in such a ridiculous sytem is to make do and shut up and put up with shit.

But at least if you recognize that its the system itself that has this limitation, then you can drop your expectation that it SHOULD be able to offer you perfection, and then you can at least stop fighting with it or being utterly disappointed by every single thing you ever go for. Accept it's all shit and play with the turds and recognize it was all meant to be shit right from the start. Then you can laugh about it.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

There is a significant ego trap at play, when people are significantly upset about the world. Maybe upset about cruelty to animals, upset about violence or torture, upset about the economy, upset about how people treat each other, upset about who got elected, or whatever. And especially if you are more sensitive or more easily affected or more reactive, you will join the rollercoaster ride of hell and despair.

When we are 'upset', we are making this bold statement of how we're justified in being upset because the world is not right. Which means, we are locked into being upset, because if the world doesn't change and we maintain this attitude, we are permanently going to be upset. And that means we have absolutely no way to be happy because the world sucks.

So as people get upset, they get locked into reactions, because they can't change what's happening out there to trigger them, and the truth is, they do not want to change their attitude or perspective. They don't realize that their perception is coming from ego, or that there is another way to look at this, or that there is any way in which 'this horrible thing' could be acceptable.

The ego loves to be upset about the world. The ego loves to be unhappy about how things are happening. The ego loves to be upset about all the little damaged animals and all the broken homes and all the warring countries. It loves that. It gets to be victimized by it, at the same time as saying it doesn't want it. It gets to complain about it. It gets to scapegoat. It gets to project blame all over the place. It gets to condemn and judge, in the name of upholding some kind of ideal of perfection and right living.

The ego is always two-faced like this. It says one thing while doing another. It is always contradictory. As it seems to take great offense at something, it's simultaneously taking the opportunity to counter-attack. There is just no end of suffering to be found when all you can do is react with upset to a world of hell and death. So then if you 'care' too much about the world, about the sorry sob-story of the little victims and so on, then you won't be able to detach and you won't be able to find peace.

Some of the things happening in this world are seriously disturbing, to the ego, because it wants to be really really upset, because it loves that. Some of these things happen and you just can't get them out of your mind because they're so upsetting. And the ego loves that. It can be very controversial and very unpopular and very radical to suggest... that you should look at this thing differently, such that you become at peace with it and you 'allow' it. How dare you look as though you are actually allowing horror to take place, says the ego, who wants to find you guilty. It doesn't want you to be detached because that means, detaching from IT.

So it's one thing to be all upset and pissed off and unpeaceful and JUSTIFIED in being this way... but anger is never justified. You cannot and will not ever be happy if all you do is react in a state of unconsciousness and unawareness to every 'bad thing' that appears to be bad out there.

How about this. How about it is all a trap? How about there is a word for all these bad things? How about.... temptation? How about the ego made this stuff on purpose, to deliberately try to upset you, so that you would believe it is real, so that you would take it seriously and buy into it, so that you would..... drumroll please...... stay the hell away from God? Are you so sure that all those innocent victims are really so innocently victims, now that they are actually a part of the ego's plan to destroy you? Are you going to keep listening to that? There HAS to be a better way.

On the surface, it seems that fighting against something is a noble attempt to bring about change.

But what's really happening is that the ego has split the mind in two, one part is now opposed to the other part, and the two parts are at war with each other.

That means one part is positioning itself as this righteous savior or hero or protestor or fixer or helper who has come to "correct" the wrongs done by the other part. And the other part has been positioned as the evil enemy who must be overthrown and stopped.

The part which acts as the savior of the world appears on the surface to be doing everything to care about what is right, to fight for rights, to uphold some kind of ideal, BUT.... and this is a big but.... that role DEPENDS entirely on KEEPING the enemy separate, attacking them, stopping them, disallowing them, rejecting them and therefore maintaining their position of power.

It is ineffective and inefficient to protest in this way. And it is dishonest.

Your mind when whole is powerful enough to directly dissolve all concepts of enemies and wars and opposition. It undoes all illusions of separation. It simply would extend and create peace and love. It wouldn't be engaged in this INDIRECT attempt at getting the opposition to change, which really is a belief that you do not have the power to change things directly.

Indirect confrontation always shows up AS IF it is direct confrontation. It always shows an illusion of people marching and signs being held and things being shouted. It always involves a lot of offense and defense and people being offended and outraged. It's a good show, by the ego.

But it doesn't really work very well because it's a state of war, which is the ego's attempt to prolong separation. The mind can only be acting against itself with a split will, fighting with itself, making an enemy of itself, and therefore struggling to make any headway whatsoever because it keeps working against itself.

Trying to get "someone else" to change when, in truth, that someone else IS YOU, simply means you're are fighting with yourself and not realizing it. One part of you is willing one thing and another part of you is willing another. You think you have no way to influence the other, so you make a big stinking war against them to try to convince them or defeat them. But they are you, their will is your own, and it's really YOU fighting with your own will. This is what happens in a split mind. Anyone with an ego does this. To realize this and to become singular and whole in your will will show you that there IS no enemy and there IS no opposing will and therefore there IS nothing to stop you bringing about peace and love.

Enemies are not outside you. You are making an enemy of your own self, inside you. You are fighting against your own will. You are split in your interests and have conflicting simultaneous goals. You are the one who has offended you, and it is you that you are outraged against. It is you that you are trying to stop. And that's really going to ramp up the frustration and anger, which is highly ineffective and weak.

Those who thus protest seem to be those who are making the most effort to bring about a "positive change", but secretly, their egos are actually the ones who are attempting to make the LEAST amount of change by seeing themselves as disempowered, making disempowerment real, using separation to attack opponents and keep them separate, using hate as a weapon against hate, and basically this just leads to a stalemate, or in extreme cases, violence.

All attack is self-attack. All protests are against yourself. All opposition is within your own mind. When your mind is made whole and is undivided against itself, it will admit that it was its own self that it was fighting with. It will realize how FUTILE it is to be split against yourself, trying to bring about one thing while another part is bringing about something else. When your will becomes ONE, singular, and whole, you then are much more POWERFUL because now you have no opposition at all. You are not canceling out your own efforts, and you do not see enemies. And thus are all your problems solved and there can be peace.

YOU are the cause of everything you think your enemies are doing to you, and you WANT them to keep doing it to you, and your attempt to portray yourself as believing otherwise is a stay of pure DENIAL.

You can create an illusion of being responsible, by positioning yourself as being angry and upset about what other people are doing. You can make yourself seem like you are responsible by standing up for people's rights or agreeing with the ways that certain people are very wrong.

This paints a picture of you as a hero and savior and as someone who does not believe in mis-treatment and so on, but is also hipocritical and irresponsible given it gives you opportunity to accuse and condemn and judge.

You can seem like a very responsible, caring person who is deeply upset by the hurtful things people do, that your fellow man is mis-treated by society or that certain politicians are trying to destroy the world. But this is all a fake responsibility.

You are not responsible unless you are being responsible for yourself and for what you are doing to yourself, for the ways that you are using others by scapegoating them, the ways that you judge and condemn and project your own hidden guilt, and are owning up to being Christ. Owning up to what you have been doing to yourself and passing off as what other people are doing. That's real responsibility.

You don't win any points for finding other people guilty or being outraged or angry or placing the blame somewhere. That's selective judgement. Selective blame. Some set of people get to be very very wrong while other people get to be very very right. It's a huge trap and it's hugely dishonest.

This always happens when you believe the world is real and you want to find a way to be more spiritual or innocent or pure or good or to uphold some high standard or ideal or higher ground. But there is no higher ground in an illusory world, it is all insane. The higher ground is beyond this world and recognizes that this world is not spiritual and it cannot be spiritualized by your ego.

What you may not realize is that your ego is split and by making some aspects of this world good and worthy and acceptable and other parts wrong and bad and unacceptable, you've fallen for the ego's primary trap of believing that SEPARATION is real. Separation between good people and bad people, between the righteous and the unworthy.

It doesn't matter which side you are on. It doesn't matter if you identify mostly with being goodie two-shoes, or some kind of dark evil monster. Both of them are false because they are both states of un-wholeness and exclusivity. They are both a lie from your ego. And those being all "good" and nice and so on are just as "evil" as the evil ones. They believe in separation and segragation, often even more than the rest of the crowd, and yet will constantly spout off about how segragation and conditional love are unfair or unwelcome.

You can't be right by judging judgers, or hating haters, or attacking attackers, or being angry at angry people, or hurting the hurtful. That's the ego's motto of an eye for an eye. There is absolutely no holiness there whatsoever. It's a fake holiness, a holier-than-thou attitude, a pretense that you are innocent when in fact you are just as guilty because you BELIEVE in guilt.

You can believe in guilt and accuse people of being guilty and believe that you're being pure and innocent by finding them guilty, but all this means is you believe strongly in guilt. You try to not appear to be THE ONE who is guilty, but you cannot HAVE a belief in guilt in your mind at the same time as a belief in holiness. And whatever you believe you will BE.

Rules cannot apply to other people separately from how they apply to you. Judgements cannot be given to others without judging yourself. You can't find someone else guilty without you believing that you are guilty. The righteous will go down in their own flames.

"Would you rather be right or happy?" - ACIM

Being happy can only come by not finding ANYONE guilty. Because other people ARE YOU. What applies to them applies to you. This is fundamentally different than seeing yourself as a SEPARATE person. Separation is attack, not holiness. So are you really escaping your own attack?

People like to think they don't have an ego, or that if they have one it's tucked away somewhere. Distancing from it is a way to protect it. But having ego means being to ANY degree, even slightly, outside of heaven. The tiniest belief in separation is all it takes. And that applies to just about everyone on the planet.

So we have to at least acknowledge honestly that if we're still here we probably still have egotism to some degree. And that means we can't just pretend that we don't have one. It means that there's some part of our mind which is mentally ill, and distorted, and lost and confused. A part of the mind that believes things which are not true, but still believes them anyway. And that part of mind has a sense of identity attached to it, a sense of truth about oneself.

And that ego-identifying mind is going to have false perceptions and egoic viewpoints, regardless of how much a person is doing ACIM, how often, or for how long. So we can't just be in denial and pretend we're not being egotistical, we are being egoistical pretty much 100% of the time in one way or another. And denying this will only produce sacrifice and repression and even more separation in the mind.

There has come to be an ACIM 'culture' now of ego denial. It's one thing to recognize that yes we have to work on undoing our egotism and return to wholeness, but it's another to just pretend we don't have egotism when we do. Shoving it under the carpet isn't healing the mind, any more than throwing the book at it 24/7. It will generally take a long a slow and gradual process to correct all of the mind's errors and until then you have to 'work with' your ego and be gentle with yourself.

We have to admit that we DO have an ego right now and we - at times, need to be IN that ego, in order to feel a sense of being "what we are", because our sense of what we are has become ego-identified. If we pretend not to be e.g. body-identified, while still being so, we will move into sacrifice and body shaming and other things which are unhealthy. People are developing increased senses of shame and guilt over 'having an ego', or outright denial at having one while demonstrating it, instead of being gentler with ourselves about where we are at.

It's ok to acknowledge that you're being/having an ego while you are doing it, while you are working on undoing it, and not pretend that just because you believe the truth of the theory of ACIM that you somehow are above it all. Or that you can live as though you don't have an ego, before you are truly ready to do so. Everyone is mired in ego and mental illness until they reach enlightenment, and no-one is excluded from that.

So we have to then recognize this and be gentle with our self-deceptions and our delusions, even if that isn't an ideal scenario, and isn't healing it. We have to be where we're 'at', while we're trying to move closer to God. Once we've moved closer, great, we're more spiritually aligned, but while we have ego we shouldn't be treating it like some kind of enemy or bashing it or hating it or trying to lock it in a box, because YOU will experience the effects of that.

It comprises part of your belief about yourself, and a sense of your current identity, and denying or attacking that will be experienced as an attack upon yourself, which will not make you happy. You don't have to snuggle up beside it and love it and want to keep it, but you also shouldn't be demonising it or not having compassion for where you're at. Everyone's trying to run and they don't even know how to walk.

Many ACIM students think that they are not only miracle workers but also egoless selfless lovers of everyone, having barely stepped foot on the road to God. This is part of the ego arrogance itself. Can we just for goodness sake just be where we're at and relax and stop pressuring ourselves to be perfect and flawless when we're clearly riddled with issues that we're working on? It's okay to be a mess while you're working on cleaning up the mess.

"The Soul in its knowledge is unaware of the ego. It does NOT attack the ego."

"The voice of the Holy Spirit does not command, because it is incapable of arrogance. It does not demand, because it does not seek control. It does not overcome, because it does not attack. It merely REMINDS. It is compelling only because of what it reminds you OF."

"Truth does not struggle AGAINST ignorance, and love does not ATTACK fear."

"Light does not ATTACK darkness, but it DOES shine it away."

It is important for you to claim the atonement for yourself, because you are an extender of God's love.

If there is a block in your awareness, whereby you are not willing to receive love for yourself, love is not going to be able to flow through you to other people.

Love comes from God, goes through you, and extends outward to others.

If you put up a roadblock in your mind where you are not willing to receive love yourself, you will be incapable of allowing that love to fully flow through you to others.

You only will see God in everything you see when God is in your mind, and God has to be in your mind FIRST. The doors have to be open for the light to shine through.

You might think it is important to learn to love others as much as possible. I thought this was what I was supposed to do, becoming very loving and try to love all the time. But Holy Spirit corrected me on this.

He said, "you must love yourself first."

If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love others. The amount of love you can give entirely depends on how much love you have. If you are empty of love, you can try to fake it, to sacrifice, and to strain to try to love others, but you will hit walls and limitations.

There will be ways in which you also believe that other people are not lovable, they are just too irritating or annoying or upsetting, or they make bad choices or attack you or whatever. You will think that it is because of them that you cannot love them, or that you can only love them conditionally some of the time.

When pushed to your limits you will find out that in fact the thing stopping you from being able to love this monstrous enemy is your own inability to love any more than you already do. And the reason you can't do that is because you're hitting the limit of how much you love yourself.

So then it becomes a matter of, it's not really other people that you can't love another ounce, it's yourself. You yourself are hitting the limits of how loving you can be, because there is something about your own self that you do not love. There is a blockage in you, an unwillingness to let that much love be present in you.

So now it's simply impossible for you to love other people that much extra without FIRST addressing what it is about your own self that seems unlovable. You have to make room for love in yourself before you can love others that much more.

It seems ideal and appealing to be very loving to others as much as possible but you simply will not be able to, or willing to, and you will stop short of being able to find that much love and compassion in you, simply because you yourself are not willing to let YOU be loved that much.

The challenge then is learning to let yourself be loved, to become open to love and receive love for yourself. This means undoing false ego beliefs and self attack, so that you can come to believe the truth is true and be actually WILLING to accept the truth - your innocence - your lovability. You must therefore accept Atonement FOR YOURSELF, SO THAT you can access and receive love, be open to love coming to you, open to it flowing through you, and thus be able to offer it to others.

When you do this, when you take that sole responsibility of accepting atonement for yourself, it means you are now willing to receive love and recognize that you CAN be loved and are loved. This willingness to acknowledge the worthiness of love within yourself GIVES YOU the ability to see love and worthiness in others, you will believe they deserve that love also, and then you will give it to them. This is the START of your ability to be MIRACULOUS, because miracles are always expressions of love.

You must receive the gift of love first in order to give it. You must receive the miracle for yourself first in order to give it. You must heal yourself before you can heal others. And you must forgive yourself before you can extend forgiveness to others. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. It is the privilege of the healed to heal. It is the privilege of those who have accepted miraculous truth for themselves to perform miracles to help others be freed from their illusions of suffering.

Accepting the Atonement for yourself, as your sole responsibility, should never be seen as meaning that other people are SEPARATE from you or that they are excluded from your atonement. Once you have accepted atonement for yourself you ARE accepting it on behalf of everyone else, and it WILL result in you becoming loving towards others and able to perform miracles for them.

Many people use this "sole responsibility" as an argument for some kind of "private awakening", which excludes everyone else and it used to explain why you would not then perform and miracles. Its meaning is totally the opposite. To accept the atonement is to accept oneness, which applies to YOU AND EVERYONE because it makes you an extender of love. You must take responsibility for accepting it for yourself, SO THAT you enter into a state of SHARING, and are then able to EXTEND THE ATONEMENT to other people in the form of miracles. The atonement justifies being a miracle worker.

There are two approaches to ACIM. One is to learn the theory about what is true or false. The other is to actually change your mind and transform your awareness so that you wake up to experiencing it.

Theory is learned on a horizontal level. It involves the intellect. It involves trying to understand what ACIM says and means. It's analytical and it studies the words, the levels, the structures, the relationships of things, the definitions of words and the "description" of the truth. it dwells on the form and the word choices and so on.

Some people have an easier time learning the theory than others. Some people are not as intellectually able to get their heads around the intricate depths and nuances of Jesus's genius. For some the theory seems complex and off-putting. And many people get the theory profoundly wrong, while others are very accurate in their discernment of it.

Sometimes there are debates and fights about what the course says and means. This is all to do with the horizontal approach. It's an intellectual battle in which sides try to convince each other that their understanding of the course is the correct one. And in many cases some people may well be correct while others are very lost. There are some people who are so incredibly lost on the theoretical level that they are practically learning a totally different belief system. They think they're heading toward reality while heading away from it.

Then there is a vertical movement away from hell toward heaven, away from darkness toward light, away from ego towards the Holy Spirit, away from the body towards the soul, and away from the world towards the Kingdom of God. This is a transformational movement which does actually require a vertical change of mind, an awakening, a willingness, an opening, and a trust.

In the vertical learning we actually have to apply the theory. The mind has to be transformed. Beliefs have to be undone. Healing has to take place. Your life and your curriculum presents you with challenges and lessons which you have to learn. Your relationships have to change and your sense of identity has to alter. This is not achieved through theory.

Some people struggle to accurately understand the course's theories on the horizontal level, and turn a blind eye to this fact by trying to focus on something more experiential. They may focus on love or feeling. This can produce progress upwards to some extent, but then the faults in the theory hold them back.

It can hold them back such as, for example, someone believing that Earth is God's Kingdom, which is going to pull the person in the completely wrong direction. So while they're trying to go up, faults in the theory are pulling them down. It's like a handicap. There are some quite loving-seeming people doing ACIM who nevertheless say things which are profoundly wrong and delusional.

On the flip side, there are also people who become expert at the horizontal theory. Great intellects and scholars and theologians who are very good at discerning accurately the logical structures and relationships of things. Of realizing how everything fits together and correctly putting everything in its proper place. Some people are very good at this. But at the same time, those same people can at times become lost in this understanding and fail to apply the course to move vertically. The "study" of the course then becomes a handicap that keeps them from opening their minds and actually encountering reality.

I think for the most part the ideal is to be proficient at both. We need theory in order to help us to make sense of things, to guide us in the right direction, to clarify meanings, to have a proper framework so that you know what you're supposed to be doing and why. But to also then take that and use it, apply it, live it, look at how it works in your life, use it to change your mind, to develop trust, to actually open up to reality, to a different kind of vision, and to shift your sense of identity away from the body. As the workbook begins:

"A theoretical foundation such as the Text is necessary as a background to make these exercises meaningful. Yet it is the exercises which will make the goal possible. An untrained mind can accomplish nothing. It is the purpose of these exercises to train the mind to think along the lines which the course sets forth."

So yes you need to be pretty accurate with the theory, but the purpose of that is so that you can be more effective and efficient in your application of it to your life. Your living curriculum of lessons, holy relationships and life events is where you will be having to apply the principles.

"The miracle is the means, the Atonement the principle, and the healing is the result."

It's not enough to be excellent at the theory and not apply it to change yourself. It's not enough to try to change yourself while being absolutely all over the place on the theory. If you really want to shoot for the stars you need to understand the course in principle, and apply it in practice. The two work together to atone your mind correctly, heading in the appropriate direction for the appropriate reasons. Otherwise it's like sailing your boat in the wrong direction.

As Jesus once said to me, "you understand it, now you just need to apply it."

The ego is sneaky about projecting sin and guilt onto others. If someone else is not really doing anything wrong, it is riskier and perhaps more difficult for you to "unfairly" project your own sin and guilt onto them. If you do, it will appear much more obvious that you are the one doing the attacking, and that it is not called for. This is too "overt". Just picking some random innocent target and attacking it would indeed be vicious, but our ego tends not to do this.

Instead, we lay a trap and lay in wait, trying to find a target. A target is someone who, of their apparent own free will, is sinning on their own. Someone who is digging their own grave. Someone who is hurting, attacking, being at fault, choosing poorly, doing something offensive, believing wrongly, saying harmful words, punishing or whatever. So long as the person is, themselves, seeming to be clearly the one who is sinning.

"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."

Once we see this "proof of sin" in someone else, it becomes a strong temptation. It tempts you to believe it. It almost invites you to agree with it, to see judgement as justified, and to therefore launch an attack which reinforces the person's sinfulness. But this is a slippery slope, even though it's what the ego enjoys as its less overt tactic.

When it's clearly someone else who seems to be wrong, it presents a wonderful opportunity for your own ego. Since all attention is on the other person, and since they appear to be the one who is making things worse for themselves and everyone, your ego takes the "opportunity" to sneak in and USE it for its purposes.

If it can now condemn and accuse the person, based on "what they are doing", it seems completely justified. But the sneaky thing is that you aren't having to "invent" a sin for them to be accused of. They have already provided a nice sin for you to latch onto. All you have to do is "point it out". So now the ego simply seems to be mirroring what the person is already doing, rather than making a "fresh accusation".

By doing this, the attack upon the person becomes disguised. It hides in the darkness of the other person's actions. They were already sinning, so it seems like you're not ADDING anything to them. And so simply by "identifying it" and "pointing it out" and labelling it AS a sin, you appear to be not attacking them at all. But if you step back, you ARE still in fact accusing them of sin still, you are attacking them, you are compounding their own sin, and are being just as judgemental as before.

It's just that, when someone else provides the "material", you seem to not be the one who is "inventing" the sin, so your accusation against them seems invisible. It doesn't stand out from what they are already going. It's like you slip in a little sin of your own hidden by theirs. All the focus is on them, by their own doing, so your ego gets to hide from being the center of attention. It's still attacking but now it seems like you're not doing anything.

This becomes quite risky though, to yourself, because you can become quite blinded by this sleight of hand, even unto yourself as you're doing it. You may not even realize that you have been "tempted" by the sin of another, and that you fell for it, believed in it, and recognized it as a perfect opportunity to condemn without the implication fo yourself. You can then find yourself accusing the other of "doing what they're obviosuly doing", convincing yourself that YOU are not doing anything, and therefore are now are attacking even more unconsciously.

It's one thing to be more aware of your desire to project your own shit onto someone else. It's another to be attacking someone on the basis of what they are seeming to do, and then not even realizing that you're attacking them. When they are the "source" of the sin, you can easily lose sight of how you are contributing to it, or mirroring it. Your own attack becomes invisible to you, and then you believe that you're not even doing anything wrong at all.

Thus you end up in a pattern of not attacking people unless they sin first, and then when they do seem to sin, you take it as an ideal opportunity to scapegoat. Because you think no-one will notice what YOU are doing because they'll be so busy focusing on what THEY are doing. A good decoy goes a long way. Except that you even distract your own attention, and now you much more easily allow your mind to fall into a scapegoating mode.

Overall I personally experience this as "falling for temptation", in that the world is constantly presenting "opportunities" to focus on sin and make it real. It's a constant vigilance to try not to "take a cheap shot", when someone is obviously mistaken in some way. If I don't recognize it as "just a mistake", I will make it real and try to compound it, drawing myself away from myself, trying to displace my own guilt onto someone else. But only if "they started it."

No-one wants to overly be seen as an unjustified attacker, so we wait until someone makes the first move, before we pounce on it. Then the gloves come off and the claws come out, and rightly so, because now the other person has invited us to attack them. They want punishment, and if we agree with that we will give it to them, and benefit from doing so. It's much easier to "fall for" this temptation to "beat someone when they are down" than to look like a total a-hole hurting people for no apparent reason. This is why almost all attacks on others are "justified" as being "called for" based on what we think other people "did wrong first."

Of course, "only the self-accused condemn" and "we but accuse our brother of our own sins."

"You are NOT limited by the body, and thought CANNOT be made flesh. But mind can be manifested through the body if it goes beyond it and DOES NOT INTERPRET IT AS LIMITATION. Whenever you see another as limited TO or BY the body, you are imposing this limit ON YOURSELF. Are you willing to ACCEPT this, when your whole purpose for learning should be to escape FROM limitations?" UrT8G16

Bodies don't really matter in a relationship. The soul is androgynous and perfect. It isn't male or female. It has no limits and loves unconditionally.

It uses a body temporarily and then moves on. It might've had lifetimes as men and women, children and the elderly, as parents or alone. It could've had a gay body or a straight body, an overweight body or a skinny body. Whatever. Across its experience of so many different types of bodies, it cannot help but generalise the learning and detach from the specifics of each of them. It learns again to love regardless of form.

There could be a lifetime where two souls meet and they have certain types of bodies. They may or may not even be attracted to each other's bodies, or be compatible physically. Perhaps they are man and woman but one of them is gay. Perhaps they are from different cultures or races. It doesn't matter.

The body really is just a kind of tool that the soul uses. The body has its severe limitations and its limited scope of expression, which means that as the soul uses it, it has to work with what it's got. If it wants to talk, the words are likely to come out sounding the way that the body instrument allows to happen. If it wants to have intercourse, it has to work with whatever appendages or holes are available. If it wants to hug it has to deal with its length of arms and its roundness of belly.

If the soul is not heavily body identified, its view of the body is very detached and transcendental. The body doesn't really matter to it, nor does the bodies of others. When the soul is more identified with and lost in its current body, taking it to define itself and to be itself, this narrow perspective will inhibit relationship and make it more conditional. The bodies of others then matter more, relationships have more criteria, and everything has to be acceptable within limits. There is also more hell to pay when the rules are broken.

Ultimately we're meant to learn to love ourselves and everyone equally and fully, regardless of their bodies. We are to use the body as best we can to relate though and beyond, without placing so much emphasis on the body itself of what appear to be very limited categorisations of types.

Jesus suggests in the course for example that everyone should love everyone regardless of specific bodily appendages. A soul-to-soul communication is more important than cutting off a brother because their body is a certain type or style. This even applies to people having disabilities and sicknesses, learning to love them regardless of what their bodies are doing, and looking past the body to the immortal spirit within.

In my marriage for example, I was a male-gendered body person married to a female-gendered body person. She was 18 years older than me, which didn't matter. I had some attractions towards men as well, which didn't matter to her. She was from a different country thousands of miles away, which didn't matter. She grew up in a different culture, which didn't matter either.

Regardless of the sense of specialness and exclusivity in the relationship, there was also a more transcendental and unconditional element. I had some attractions to men for example, which she knew about, and she found it interesting and a curiosity instead of judging against it. She was willing even to encourage me toward it even if it meant her and I possibly not being together. Just as she at times wanted to be with other men.

We still had intimate relations which entailed a biological compatibility, even if in some way we might not have been entirely on the same page. We used what we had and made it work, because it was really more important that we were together and loving each other. A love that transcended the physical. A love between souls that spanned many lifetimes and many bodies. We could've been even more extremely different on the physical level and I think we would still have had a deep soul connection.

Ultimately what this has taught me is that the physicality of the body is not really that important. It is much more important to love a person and be open and honest and trusting. To share deeply and intimately, emotionally and psychologically. This can happen even if the bodies appear to be what the world would consider thoroughly incompatible. We turned heads with our weirdness and our age gap, for example. This can happen for gay or straight people, for people with any kind of body and any kind of persuasion. Every relationship has the potential to be holy.

What I realise now is that for any future relationship, it doesn't really matter if the person is male or female, or looks a certain way. It doesn't have to be a 'mr right' or a 'mrs right', or some kind of ideal model of perfection. The person is more important, the mind-to-mind is more important. If it comes with a certain type of body, and even if that body has certain limitations, it doesn't really matter.

Having a full whole relationship is more important than just some physical sexual hookup that's empty and cold and full of ego. If the person has certain genetalia, or types thereof, what does it matter, really, if the love transcends it? The two souls potentially relating on a higher and more whole level is what's important. This can even take place without any physical interaction or proximity or anything that the world might think of as a relationship. It can happen with strangers. It can happen anywhere, and beyond any type of body.

Looking past the body to the soul/mind is what's really important. The holy spirit's home is in our relationship to the christ in ourselves and others, which overlooks bodies and regards them as nothing but tools. If you still use them to interact then so be it, within the limits and specifics that the body allows. Sex is a limitation just as gender is but you can still use it while the mind is in a higher state. We're supposed to learn to love people as beings, as children of God, regardless of what their bodies are doing. Because ultimately no-one is really a body anyway.