The appearance of the sickness is actually an illusion which covers up what the problem is. The sickness, the symptoms, are actually there to function as a distraction, to make you focus on the body and to make the body real. This is a protective mechanism to try to defend your ego-aligned self against a misperception of the truth.

It's not that the form of the sickness is the problem. The PURPOSE of the sickness is the problem, which is to act as a defense. There is a perceived NEED for a defense, and that manifests as physical symptoms. But the appearance of it, the physicality of the sickness, is not really the cause or the thing that's happening.

What's happening is the underlying attempt by the MIND to shut out God and to cling to the body. It just happens to CREATE symptoms such as pain and disease, in order to try to get the awareness to fixate on the body, to think that the body is very real, and therefore IGNORE the truth - to shut it out of awareness.

So sickness is an escape from reality. If someone has cancer they don't need to be healed of cancer. They need to be healed of the belief that they need cancer in order to protect them from reality. As Jesus says, when the purpose of the sickness is recognized, and when it is understood to be an illusion, it must disappear. If you had no more "use" for the sickness, and it wasn't serving a purpose of any kind, it would have no basis for the mind to keep sustaining it, and it would vanish.

So it's like, someone gets exposed to truth but their ego misinterprets it and their interpretation scares or threatens them, so they put up a "shield" of protection, which cuts them off from Life and blocks life-sustaining "energy" flowing in the system, and creates distortions in the body image. The body image then shows a sickness to symbolize the need for escape, and to provide an escape. Therefore the sickness is always a form of distraction and an attempt to make the body MORE real than the truth. Trying to make illusions more real than reality produces sickness.

If you could be convinced that you don't really have a need for the sickness because the purpose of it was misinformed, and what you experienced as a threat is not really a threat, and it's not a threat because you're not really the ego self that sees it as a threat, then you'd be willing to let it go and stop using it to protect you. You'd see no purpose in it, no need for it, and no use for it. So it would disappear.

The trouble is that once sickness is implemented, its symptoms and suffering can be so effective at distraction, so effective at absorbing your attention, so effective at making the body seem real and frightening, that you have all kinds of peripheral reactions as a whole other "layer" of experiences. You start trying to defend yourself against the defense! And that means you start to view the sickness as though you did not choose it.

Theres's a very good reason why you do not want to admit to having chosen the sickness, and it's because if you did, you'd have to own up to that and wouldn't be able to hide behind it. The sickness was made to block awareness and to shut out the truth, so if you were to admit you made it, you would not longer be able to receive its benefits of defending you.

You don't want that, so instead you shut out awareness that you made it, perceive that you did not want it or ask for it, and then launch into a series of reactions to the sickness as though it is attacking you, you want it to go away, etc... but you really don't. Not honestly. If you really wanted it to be done with you wouldn't react to it at all, you'd just admit to the ways you wanted and needed it and would drop those, having come to accept that the truth was true and your misinterpretation of the truth was invalid.

Fighting with sickness therefore is part of the huge distraction that sickness presents, and can have you spinning your wheels trying to just deal with the symptoms and discomforts. Part of you is saying you want it to go away, while another part of you - now unconscious - is actively choosing to keep it, because in the bigger picture you're still terrified of what you saw in the truth and are trying to protect yourself. It therefore frightens you to think of actually being HEALTHY, because that would mean you'd take away your PROTECTION, and then the truth would be able to attack you again. So efforts to become "well" actually can have a lot of resistance and a lot of defense against, because it actually threatens you more to become free of the sickness, IF you are still misperceiving the truth.

Perhaps a key then lies simply in the mistaken perception you originally had which seemed to show you that you needed to become sick in order to defend yourself. You need to look at what you perceived and why you perceived it. But you need to look at it with Holy Spirit or a higher perspective of truth. You need to be willing to have been mistaken. This is why you need to APPLY FORGIVENESS, to undo the ILLUSIONS that you were under that made you misperceive, creating the need for a defense. You need to disassociate from the ego identity in some way so that you do not take the truth as a threat, and do not see it as meaning that you are going to stop existing.

The primary "cause" of sickness, if you will, is the simple fact that you have bound yourself to the ego, are perceiving what IT perceives, are interpreting the truth THROUGH it, and therefore you become frightened whenever you are exposed to the truth. The truth is that the ego is not real and does not exist, and everything it believes in is false. If you are identified with it and think that it is you, then whenever the truth comes along you will be frightened that you are being attacked by it, that it implies you do not exist, that you are not real, and that's horrifying. It is a misperception, but it's horrifying. And who would not want to defend themselves against that?!

Correction is needed therefore, and a forgiveness is needed and a willingness to consider that who you are is not the ego. You need some reassurance and clarity and perspective that just because the truth says something, does not mean it is attacking you. Who you thought you were was mistaken. How you were perceiving was mistaken. What you saw in the truth was projected onto it by your own mistakes. It amounts to a willingness to accept that the truth is TRUE, and not that the truth contains evil intentions. If you can accept that the truth is true, and not false, and that what you thought was true is false, then you have the key to unlock the NEED for sickness to protect you from it.

When there is no misperception of the truth, there is no need for sickness, and you will not create it or use it.

Sickness isn't really the problem that needs healing. Sickness showing up in form is an ILLUSION, because it covers up the underlying secret ambition of self preservation, and is meant to be a distraction and a smoke-screen. That's why sickness isn't real. It's not the problem that needs to be corrected. Trying to treat the sickness or the symptoms of sickness therefore will fail.

It should be obvious that since sickness is an attempt at self-preservation, making oneself sick and likely to die in the name of self-preservation is insane.

WHAT IS TIME? IS IT ETERNITY? IS TIME REALITY? GOD's CREATION?

There have been a couple of posts here talking about time, and speculating with wishful-thinking that time is eternal or a creation of God. This is not true. The course is very clear on this.

"Time and Eternity cannot both be real, because they contradict each other." - ACIM

"For place (space) has gone as well, along with time." - ACIM

"It is this fact which demonstrates that time is an illusion." -ACIM

So what is time anyway? And what is eternity? And why does Jesus state that they CONTRADICT each other?

Eternity means, everything always exists forever. There is no beginning, there is no end. There is also no change. There are not temporary one-off events. There is no transition, no adjustment, no becoming, no growth, nothing gradually progressing. There is no decay, no distortion, and no death. Eternity is a PERMANENT state of PERPETUAL SAMENESS.

"Nothing there but shines and shines forever."

"Reality is a constant state."

"And what He knows exists forever, changelessly."

Now, in this state of eternity, prior to the separation, there was NO SUCH THING as time or space. Reason being that both time and space are illusions which COMPLETELY OPPOSE the idea of eternal life. Not just a little. They are diametrically opposite and completely contradictory.

In eternity, everything exists everywhere. Everything is shared by everything. Every son of God shares all of himself with every other son of God. God is one with everyone. You are united with your brothers. But not only this, but in "spatial terms", what exists in one location exists fully in all locations. This is the idea of omnipresence and is the divine nature of everything that exists in God.

In the separation idea, we wanted to DENY eternity, and to DENY that everything is everywhere, and DENY that everything is shared by everyone, and DENY omnipresence. We wanted a TOTAL OPPOSITE to this condition of abstract unity. The result of this was SPACE.

Space is a false belief, based entirely on the notion of an opposite to spacelessness, ie an opposite to omnipresence. It's the idea that God, who is everywhere, does not exist anywhere. By virtue of the fact that in space, no two things share the same space, and by virtue of the fact that in space any particular location contains only PART OF what exists and not the whole, space is literally the idea that "nothing exists everywhere" and "everything exists nowhere." This could not be more of an attack on God's nature.

"The world was made as a place where God could enter not."

"The world was made as an attack on God."

Time is similarly blasphemous. In eternity, where everything is always the same, everything has eternal immortal life, nothing changes, and everything is permanent. What exists has always existed and always will, without the need for time.

Time is nothing short of the idea of a TOTAL OPPOSITE to eternity. It's founded on the false belief that everything changes, nothing is EVER the same as it was, what exists now DID NOT exist before, and what exists now WILL CEASE to exist in the near future. It is the idea of IMpermanence, the idea of MORTALITY, and the idea of DEATH. Time, is the symbolic notion that *everything always changes* and therefore *nothing exists forever*. This could BE MORE opposed to the nature of God and the divine continuity of reality.

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

So make no mistake, both space and time were EGO FABRICATIONS based in the tiny made idea, made as ATTACKS upon God, designed to SHUT OUT God's nature, to depict a world or state so completely opposite to the omnipresent everlasting nature of God, that if you behold the world you are BLINDED to God.

"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."

Space was an attack on God's nature. Time was an attack on God's nature. NEITHER of them are holy, spiritual, virtuous, constant, permanent, truthful, or real. Space and time, all of "space time", the entire "space time continuum", is A LIE. It is fiction. Everything within it is AN ILLUSION. The world, the planets, the galaxies, all of it, ANYTHING that RELIES UPON three dimensional spatial relations is an illusion. You cannot have a three dimensional planet earth WITHOUT space, and it cannot "evolve" WITHOUT time. And every moment of "evolution" is a moment of DEVOLUTION, a proof that eternity has ended and something has come to replace it. Change is only possible in hell, not heaven.

Without space or time, the world that we made CANNOT EXIST. Without space, there is no way to have 3D physical objects, yet alone planets. JEsus says this here:

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

Without place and time, ie spacetime, it is NOT POSSIBLE to have planet earth. In any form. And without guilt, there is no belief in spacetime. So when guilt is gone, the world MUST vanish.

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

The fact is, space and time are ego illusions. They do not really exist. They are NOT God's creations. And they absolutely are not holy or real or spiritual. They are literally nothing, mere illusions, a thin veil of smoke and mirrors, designed to deceive. And as Jesus says in the quote I opened with, time and eternity are CONTRADICTORY. Totally opposites to each other. Time is not a "misinterpretation" of eternity. It's a total fiction. We have not "misunderstood time's reality". Time is NOT reality. Ever. Never. If time has ANY reality, God would have an end.

Do not fall for the wishful level-confused thinking of some ACIM students who want to keep the world and find ways to spiritualize it. They are not ready to accept that this world is not real, or that space and time aren't even real at all. You don't NEED space or time to exist, any more than you need a fictional body.

Time is an illusion. There is no time. Only eternity is real.

False perception means you are looking at something in such a way that you do not recognize what it is.

If the thing you're looking at is false, your mind will think it's true.

If the thing you're looking at is true, your mind will think it's false.

Although it's called false perception, this can be misleading because it makes it sound like it only focuses on falseness. But being a "false" perception, it's really a state of mind that INVERTS EVERYTHING.

What is true is swapped with what is false. What is false is swapped with what is true. That's all part of "perceiving falsely." Perhaps it would be better to call it inaccurate perception or mistaken perception.

If the world itself were a reality, an inaccurate perception would make it seem unreal. An inaccurate perception would distort whatever the world is, and show it to you as it is not.

If the world itself were NOT reality, an inaccurate perception would make it seem real. An inaccurate perception would distort whatever the world is, and show it to you as it is not.

So being in false mistaken perception doesn't inherently tell you whether the world itself is real or not. It only tells you whether you are in a state of mis-perceiving or not. Whether your mind is distorting or not, inaccurate or not, or deceived or not.

However, Jesus does refer to false perception in contrast to true perception. Perception is "true", or correct and accurate, when it is lining up more closely with facts and isn't introducing mistakes. A truer perception becomes somewhat transparent and stops interfering with what's being perceived. It kind of gets out of the way and reveals something "as it is", rather than interpreted incorrectly.

Nevertheless, even a true perception does not tell you whether the thing you're looking at is true or false, real or unreal. In and of itself perception does not determine this. All a true perception does is it stops distorting vision and takes a direct undistorting look. Whatever is there, no matter whether it is real or unreal, will be seen more for "what it actually is."

But what something "actually is" does NOT inherently tells us whether the thing actually is true, or actually is false, in its own right. Seeing a world truly does not mean that you automatically are looking at a true world. You can see a false world truly as well. You can see a word of fiction truly, just as you can see a work of non-fiction truly. You can see a fake world just as accurately as you can see a real world.

So at no time does perception actually tell us in any way, WHETHER or not the world is INHERENTLY real. It does not tell us if the world is genuine. It doesn't tell us if it is God's creation. And it doesn't tell us whether the thing perceived is really there.

Part of this comes from the fact that "projection makes perception". This means that you in fact have to PROJECT something out first, in order to perceive it. And you can only perceive WHAT you project. And you perceive it because you believe in it, and WANT it to be there. You look within at what is inside of you, and you project it out, and perceive its projection, which REFLECTS back to you like a feedback loop and you perceive it. This is why Jesus says:

"Perception is a RESULT, not a cause."

Perception does not cause anything, it does not define whether what you perceive is real, it does not give us any facts, and it does not prove whether the world is real or unreal. All it shows us is WHAT WE ARE GIVING, and what we therefore are CHOOSING TO SEE. And we see whatever we WANT or wish to see, projected out, because WE PUT IT THERE to see.

The question then becomes, do you actually ever perceive "an objective world", in its own right, in its own nature, or do you ONLY perceive what you project ONTO it? And how is it that you can project something onto it in the first place?

If the world were, let's say, completely real and God created, it should not be possible to project ANYTHING onto it at all. It should not be possible to modify it, define it, shape it, interpret it, or in any way have anything to do with "what is there." God by his will has put a world there and it would then be our job to accept it as it is and know it and be one with it. It would not be possible to "project perception".

That it IS possible to project perception onto "this world", the world we recognize as Earth etc, tells you that this world cannot have any INHERENT MEANING of its own. It has to be able to reflect what you project, and it can only reflect it because it is neutral. It is neutral only because it is nothing, and being nothing it has no inherent truth of its own. How could you project false things onto it, OR true things onto it, if it had ITS OWN truth? Its own truth would fight with and block anything you tried to give it.

Perception therefore really hints at us to realize that "there is no world apart from what you wish." There is no world apart from what you give to the world. There is no objective world out there. What we're projecting onto is an emptiness and an illusion, not a reality. What we're perceiving things IN is a mirror. We only see what we put there, otherwise there would be nothing TO see.

Note that perception is feedback, and it is a feedback from what was projected out.. True perception is less distorting that false perception, and could potentially become more transparent, to where it could "see past" what is projected to the underlying inherent nature of the world. To see it for what is actually there. But if there isn't something real actually there, true perception should also reveal that the world is unreal.

We need to realize that true perception does not mean that you see "the truth" as if it is the objective truth. It means that you are seeing in a "true way", such that WHATEVER you see won't be distorted. You are projecting an idea of love which makes the least amount of distortion or misinterpretation.

Seeing truly is only accurate vision, which DOES NOT IN ANY WAY indicate whether WHAT you look upon with it is, in and of itself, actually true or false. True perception can just as easily look upon a FALSE WORLD, and recognize "the truth that" it is a false world. True perception is not "blindness" to what is false, and we must not confuse WHAT is seen with HOW it is seen. You can look truthfully upon and lie and recognize it is a lie, just as much as you can look truthfully upon something that is inherently true in and of itself. True perception DOES NOT tell us whether the world is really there or not!

You can see that perception really has absolutely nothing to do with establishing whether or not this world exists, whether God created it, whether what you see is true and real, or what the inherent nature of the world is. Even if you see love in it, even if you see reality in it, even if you see God reflected in it, it STILL does not prove that the world is objectively real. Beyond what you GIVE to the world, or what you MAKE OF it, you have literally NO IDEA whether the world is really there or not.

True perception can potentially show you "what is there", but it doesn't of itself tell you what "it is." True perception is just as capable of showing you that THE WORLD IS FALSE.

"Projection makes perception; the world you see is what you GAVE it, nothing more than that."

"The world can give you ONLY what you gave it, for being nothing but your own projection, it HAS no meaning apart from what you found in it, and placed your faith in."

"The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world. YOU CAN DECIDE TO SEE IT RIGHT. What you MADE of it is NOT its reality, for its reality is only what you GAVE it."

If you know what the secret to the magic trick is, you know that there is not really any magic happening. But if something is hidden, if there is information missing, it becomes possible to enter into an alternative state of awareness - a state of deception and misperception.

In that state, where you don't know that information is missing, or that something is hidden, you believe that you're seeing the whole truth. You therefore make sense of it, and it seems to be what it is, based on its appearance. You think you're seeing the truth because you think you are seeing fully.

But if you are not seeing the whole of the information, and some information is hidden, you aren't seeing the real truth. So when you then believe that you are, you're inside a hallucination.

In other words, you're seeing meaning where there is none, you're convinced you're awake but you're not, you're certain you are making complete sane sense out of what's happening but you're mistaken, and you don't even realize that you're nuts.

This state of insanity is automatically a state of imagining truth where there is none - a hallucination of the truth, which is a state of believing the truth is something it is not.

Puzzles are another good example. When you first encounter a new puzzle, you do not see the answer. It seems obscure, hidden. At first you are confused, and you don't understand it, and it makes no sense, and you can't "see" how it is possible. And yet it seems to be possible that the unsolved state of the puzzle is truth, because you see no way to solve it or see additional truth beyond that. But over time, as you question your perception, you gradually might realize that by undoing your own assumptions and reversing your own conclusions, i.e. collapsing the hallucination, the answer suddenly becomes obvious.

Once you have solved the puzzle, it's because you've seen some information, really a state of greater awareness, which has burst the illusion and suddenly you are seeing outside of it. You are no longer fooled, you've found the answer, it seems clear as day and now you kick yourself for the apparent stupidity of having not seen it earlier. In other words, you realize you were mistaken the whole time and its pretty embarrassing.

Bringing this around to A Course in Miracles, it is the same with the "illusion" that this world is a reality. There is an illusion here, in front of your face, which if you were able to see ALL of it clearly, you'd see past the hallucinations and the misinterpretations and the misunderstandings, and suddenly realize, in a state of greater awareness, that what you THOUGHT was true before, was actually false. And you'll understand why. Because now you have revealed some kind of awareness of information that was hidden before, and this information is vital to being able to see the illusion correctly. Ie to overlook the deception, to overlook the delusion and insanity, which was telling you that all kinds of other stuff was true.

So right now, unless you're in full awareness, you're still inside what seems to be a puzzle. And because there's some stuff you are blocking from awareness, there's some information you are not privy to. And because of that limitation, and because you don't even know that the extra information exists yet, you believe that you're seeing the entire truth as it appears to you. That's in spite of the fact that you're only seeing part of a scene, are coming to false conclusions, are seeing "truths" which actually aren't quite true, and are therefore having hallucinations about the meaning of what you see.

You see a dark shadow behind a door, and because you lack information - awareness of "God facts" - in your belief that you are seeing correctly you believe that "its true" that there is a scary monster behind the door. However, if you turn on the light, which reveals to your awareness extra information, now it becomes obvious it was just clothing, and you once again kick yourself for falling for the silly belief that there was a real monster there. But before that, you really believed there was a real monster, and you were therefore frightened. Frightened by an hallucination - a false belief about the truth.

When there is enough awareness of "what is here", of what this illusion IS, its structure and purpose and functioning, and the ways that it deceives, it is no longer possible to believe the magic trick. You've seen through and past all of the mistaken perceptions which you thought were showing you reality.

All of the horrifying mis-truths that you believed in, such as that sin and death were real, are revealed to be completely false. All of the reasons you ever had to be afraid, suddenly have no foundation whatsoever because the truth emerges and shows you that the things you thought were frightening were not TRUE, they were delusions and hallucinated meanings, and thankfully there is a larger explanation for them. When you don't understand what is happening or why its happening, it will scare you, because the illusory truth it presents makes it seem real. When a correct explanation is given, you're like, oh... okay then. Then you drop the false belief, with relief that you no longer have a valid reason to be afraid.

So a blockage placed on awareness leads you to believing that the meaning of reality is obscured, the truth no longer quite makes sense but still seems true, you see things IN and ON TOP OF the illusion that are not even really there (thereby hallucinating), and the sense that you make of it is actually a deception. When the blockage to awareness is lifted, you can no longer be deceived. It's like hearing the punchline to the joke, and never again can you hear the joke and have quite as much of a laugh because you know the answer. Knowing the real answer, the real truth, is revealed by awareness.

So here's a question. If there is a grand illusion of a physical universe, a world, and a body, and if the only reason that you believe you're even seeing them is because you are lacking awareness, then doesn't it suggest that if you had enough awareness, you might suddenly see past that illusion and realize the world does not even really exist? It was just a kind of twisting of consciousness, a distortion, which you could only experience while insane and hallucinating? Maybe the world you thought existed was your misinterpretation of reality, and only existed as a hallucination based on a lack of awareness. Maybe there is no world.

Jesus said in relation to seeing through illusions, "What is understood as nothing must disappear."

and

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. "!!

It's not just that there really is an illusion. It's only even an illusion because you believe there is one. Really, you are just misperceiving reality. That misperception shows you an illusion that there is a world. Once the puzzle is seen through and the truth is revealed, you will no longer be able to perceive that there really is a world. You will not believe it. You will recognize it was just an illusion, and nothing about it was ever really true. Like a dream. Not a real dream, but a dream-dream.

Form, matter, bodies, the universe, events, people, places, sins, guilts, death, sickness, it's all an illusion, a deception that APPEARS TO MAKE SENSE or appears to be real and true, ONLY because we lack awareness, and ONLY be cause there is some hidden information. When all is revealed, all of these illusions must disappear into the perfect omnipresent light of God, in which they DO NOT EXIST.

In reality, the world does not exist. We're dreaming it, hallucinating it, imagining it, reading into it, and are TRYING to make it a reality. It's just what you get when you haven't solved the puzzle yet, because the truth is obscured. When the truth is revealed, it will be obvious that there isn't really a world there. It was part of the puzzle while you fell for it. And now that the light has come, it is gone.

Lesson 75, "The light has come":

"The light has come. You are healed and you can heal. The light has come. You are saved and you can save. You are at peace, and you bring peace with you wherever you go. Darkness and turmoil and death have disappeared. The light has come. Today we celebrate the happy ending to your long dream of disaster. There are no dark dreams now. The light has come. Today the time of light begins for you and everyone. " - ACIM

Communication means sharing. Not sharing where one person hands over something to someone else, who now possesses that thing, but the first person doesn't. It means, you both have access to the same state at the same time concurrently. In other words, communication means Oneness.

When there is a breakdown in Oneness, where separations are introduced, it' like erecting walls that come between. Separate parts of mind - or individuals - now seem to be on either side of the wall, like the Berlin wall. This wall breaks communication. It makes it hard to share and join and connect.

Once communication has broken down, i.e. sharing has broken down, we get into a state where there is barely any real sharing. Separate individuals now seem cut off from each other with various forms of distance between them.

The physical world with all its illusions arises out of this breakdown in communication, resulting from separation and illusions of fragmentation and distance. "Spacetime" really means "distance from here."

When communication is diminished, it degrades and devolves into what we commonly think of as forms of communication. These forms of communication are severely strained because there is so much separation involved.

While you can write or speak to others, across a gap of separation there must be misinterpretation. Information will be lost, mis-perceived, and disagreed upon. When two people seem to be a little more eye-to-eye, communication may be elevated, or they may seem to share more.

But there is also an illusion of sharing. Prowess at using the ego's forms of communication doesn't necessarily mean there is openness to true sharing. There are excellent "communicators" in the world but they are not necessarily One with God, or experiencing the same exact identity and state of being as the One Son of God.

The body limits communication, and every way that we use it to express through its forms, are breakdowns in communication. Once in the body this way, unless you are so awakened that you are communicating from pure love, you will feel this urge to try to, or to have to, force others to see things the way you see them.

This happens because you know that there is a major difference between the way you perceive separately and the way they perceive separately. You have to make egoic efforts to force them to listen, and the ego then produces this fictional idea that ... if you could just get people to "get" what you are saying, if you could just get them to "see" your point of view, or if you could just shake the denial out of them to get them to agree with you wholeheartedly, THEN this would be communication. However, this is impossible to achieve.

This automatic compulsion to coerce others to see things your way, is simply because you are not both sharing the same direct experience and there is no Oneness. This means the other person will have to be changed in order for them to seem to share what you are experiencing, and this change can only be brought about through force, in defense of what you perceive as being the whole truth.

While there is a separation, there cannot be perfect communication. The ego will attempt to claim it is possible to KEEP the separation between you and others, to communicate only through its approved channels, and to nevertheless perfectly transfer what is in you to others, or to precisely get from others what is in them. This is impossible and will never work. The separation distorts the message and will always inhibit it.

True communication in ACIM means Oneness. When there is a revelation, God is communicating fully to you. When there is full awakening, you are then able to share in full communication. The Course speaks of how we are to use miracles to help us to "raise the level of communication". What this means is decreasing separation so that there can truly be real sharing - oneness.

"To be with a body is not communication."

"The whole aim of the miracle is to raise the level of communication."

"11. Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is received, and through miracles love is expressed."

"Like any communication medium, the body receives and sends the messages that it is given. It has no feeling for them. All of the feeling with which they are invested is given by the sender and the receiver."

This also means that, in fact, the ego does not facilitate communication - it blocks it. It spins illusions of communication to try to bridge the gap of separation which it itself put in place, which is "special communication" (that's not an official course term but it could be). Illusions of successful communication, or the ways that you improve the ego's forms of communication, covers up and distorts real communication.

In truth then, nothing that the ego attempts to "share" goes anywhere. It's ultimate form of communication is attempted death, whereby the body is used as the ultimate weapon to try to prove that oneself is dead and therefore so are others. And yet, this has no effect on others. The more you enter into the ego the more cut off from others you become, and the effects of what you attempt to bring about cease all the more.

This is also why nothing real can be threatened. The ego cannot attack God. The more it attempts to attack God the less effective it is. The ego's attacks are withdrawals from God. The more it tries to bring about death, the more confined and separated it becomes, and this keeps all of its effects securely at a distance from God. The Kingdom of God cannot be assailed because the ego's forms of communication - "attack" - is actually an act of failing to will anything real.

"Exclude any part of the Kingdom from yourself and you are not whole."

"The body no more dies than it can feel. It does nothing."

"Nothing outside yourself can hurt you, or disturb your peace."

"Nothing can destroy your peace of mind because God goes with you wherever you go."

"There is no death because the Son of God is like his Father. Nothing you can do can change Eternal Love."

There is a view of what ACIM says, based around the idea that this universe is all there is.

It's a view that God created this universe, and thus created all the galaxies and planets, all bodies and objects etc.

People with this view will adopt a model of ACIM in which perception is projected onto God's creation.

They will then believe that false perception means a misinterpretation OF God's perfect creation, and a true perception means a perfectly accurate view of God's creation.

They also will then believe that knowledge is merely a slightly different or more direct way of seeing the SAME stuff that you saw with true perception. That this same world is kept and known.

And therefore to these people, forgiveness means that you forgive the world instead of attacking it, BECAUSE it is real. Because it is God's Kingdom, it's thought to to be your job to "forgive the Kingdom" and stop attacking it. As if "forgiveness means to "be loving toward what's really there."

Another side effect of this view is the belief that, in the separation from God, we DID NOT make a second world. There was no making of space or time by us. There was no forming of galaxies or planet Earth by us. There was no making of human physical bodies by us.

Essentially that there was no result from opposing God, no other world made, no effect producing a dream world, other than that you entered into some kind of egoic state of mind where you don't see heaven correctly. And then the correction of this lets you see heaven directly.

This leads to yet another strange occurrence, whereby since there is no "second world" covering over heaven, and you didn't make THIS world, any references in the course which refer to "the world" are now grouped together with references to egoic perceptions.

So when Jesus says something about "the world", which would be referring to the second world we made without God, and since it's believe such a world was never made be us, those same quotes are now thrown into a "must be an ego interpretation" bucket.

If any such statements suggest that "the world" is not real, is not created, is cruel, is in denial, attacks itself, is contradictory, or anything else that seems un-God-like, then such believers now have to put ALL of those statements into a "false perception" bucket. They have to be interpreted as being egoic mis-perceptions of what would otherwise be recognized as a perfect creation.

As such, since in this model there is no second world to assign anything to, and there is only the first world of the Kingdom of God, anything speaking about "this world" in a less than holy way is thought to be part of the ego's use of it, and NOT a statement about the world itself. Thus false perceptions/interpretations and projected meanings are now MIXED IN with factual statements about the INHERENT nature of the world.

This of course then strips away every single statement which might suggest "this world" is not God's Kingdom, and shuffles all of those facts into an ego bucket where they are safely tucked away and brushed under the carpet. If there is no second world, there is no world to ATTACH them to or associate them with or see them referring to, except "the ego's world".

The end result of all this is that, if you believe there never was a second world made in the separation, and if you believe that Earth is therefore literally God, as God's creation/extension, then you will be completely unwilling to question this world's authenticity.

Forgiveness then becomes a love-affair with the planet, in which we think that we should love what God created, and keep what God created. And forgiveness is no longer seen as UNDOING something that's unreal, but rather as "correctly seeing" something that IS real.

The fact that forgiveness would make what is forgiven DISAPPEAR, because you can ONLY forgiven illusions, becomes swept under the carpet. The notion that the world will disappear when recognized for what it is, as NOT God's creation, now becomes completely denied. There is no place for such a notion in a mindset that cannot accept that we made this world.

So now instead of forgiving the world in order you undo it, we would see our function as forgiving it as though it's something completely perfect and real that we've been mean to and need to apologize to and come to love again. Our entire relationship to this world and what it is thus vastly different when you think of it as God's creation and will, rather than the antithesis of God's nature.

In this model, which seem simple, there is simply God's creation and our perception of it. If we perceive it as anything other than God's perfection, we're seen to be doing something wrong. And if we perceive it as holy and perfect then we're doing something right. And direct cognition or knowledge is then thought to be almost identical to true perception - that true perception shows you what you will still continue to see in a state of knowledge.

But while this model seems simpler and, in and of itself has internal consistency, it still flies in the face of a great amount of what A Course in Miracles says. ACIM actually does say many many times in many many ways that we produced a second world. It says that we made a world opposite to God's world.

It also distinguishes clearly that this second world was DISTINCT from the ego's USE of this world. That ego projected meaning onto this world AFTER it was made by us. And that the Holy Spirit's REPURPOSING of what we made, is NOT a repurposing of the ego or of false perception, but a repurposing of a second world. We can see Earth reflecting heaven or hell, due to its neutral nothingness.

If God truly had created this world, the course would actually be somewhat easier to grasp. We would simply need to realize that we should love everything we see with the body's eyes. That it is all real. Another problem arises though, that the course does not speak well of the body. It even states that it does not really exist and is not God's creation.

In a mindset that thinks that this world IS God's creation, references to "the body" HAVE to take on a different meaning. If the course says the body "is nothing, which it is", this doesn't fit with the idea that God created the physical world. So then we have to shift the body once removed from the world, ie think of the term "body" not as referring to the physical "God created" body but rather to some kind of internal EGO PERCEPTION. And now, this should mean, that all references to "the body" are NOT talking about the physical body, bur about some internal interpretative state.

This kind of shifting of levels, this displacement of meaning and the need to completely redefine basic recognizable words, is an unfortunate side effect of this warped view of the course. Changing the meaning of words becomes necessary otherwise they would indeed imply that physical things are not God's Kingdom.

Indeed, "The body is clearly destructible and therefore not of the Kingdom" tells us that all physical things are not the Kingdom of God. And yet a belief system bent on believing the opposite to this will refuse to accept this meaning. Instead, "body" will be redefined as "must be something the ego is doing", because we don't like the idea that the actual human body is being identified as inauthentic and not of God.

In fact, what we find is that in many many areas, believing that God created this world leads to a completely OPPOSITE belief to what ACIM is actually saying. It produces beliefs which are absolutely and completely diametrically OPPOSED to the teachings of A Course in Miracles. 180-degrees opposite, heading AWAY from the truth instead of towards it.

So when the course tells us that Earth and the body are not of God, such a believer will believe they ARE of God. And when the course tells us that WE made this world, such a person will believe we DID NOT. And when we're told that false perceptions look at an illusion and make it seem real, such a person will invert this to mean that a false perception happens when you're looking at something REAL in an illusory way. And now as someone develops a special-love relationship with the planet, they THINK that they're entering into a genuine and holy relationship with it.

This whole view of ACIM leads to a complete flipping upside-down of almost everything it teachers. It puts reality and creation where it does not belong. It fails to see that the Kingdom of God is not like this world. It cannot comprehend that the physical body is not of God and nothing like our true nature. It completely reverses the meaning of false and true perceptions. It suggests that keeping the world is atonement, instead of its undoing. And it finds no reason to leave this world behind.

In this estimation of the world, it also includes having to believe that things which die are a part of God. That the seasons are God's will. That murder and rape and torture are entirely within what God allows to happen. That war and conflict and destruction are completely normal and natural. And that if you're not accepting them with love then you must be perceiving them with the ego.

As such, believers of "Earth is God" will insist that all of the dark twisted things of the world, when seen with true perception, will be seen as so holy and perfect that they will be deemed on par with God's will and nature. That it is absolutely natural for leaves to fall from trees, for animals to be squashed on roads, for weapons to be manufactured and guns shot towards bodies, for explosions to destroy buildings and for wars to destroy cities. These "destructions", these physical events and objects, are considered to be absolutely divine creations. And it should be fairly obvious that such a suggestion implies that God is far from sane.

It is one thing to forgive a world in which these things occurs, on the basis that they are NOT God's creations, which leads to seeing them in a better light with more forgiveness. But only as a stepping stone toward their dissolution. It's quite another to suggest we would not only love these things but even desire to KEEP THEM FOREVER, as an inherent part of what God is like. The PURPOSE of forgiveness is no longer seen as the end of even the potential for destruction, and instead is seen as a way to recognize that from God's view, destruction IS creation.

"You have expressed surprise at hearing how VERY different is reality from what YOU see. You do not realize the magnitude of that ONE error. It was so vast and so COMPLETELY incredible, that from it, a world of total unreality HAD to emerge. What else COULD come of it? Its fragmented ASPECTS are fearful enough, as you begin to LOOK at them. But nothing you have ever seen BEGINS to show you the enormity of the ORIGINAL error, which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and TO FORCE YOU TO FURTHER SUBSTITUTIONS."

You made the ego as a device for separating from God. Symbolically, the body is the ego - the hero of the dream. The ego is a machine designed to operate in separation, opposition, and delusion, believing that illusions are reality and that reality is an illusion. Its perspective is that what is true is false/evil, and what is false is the truth. It is convinced that death is salvation from God, and that sin is real.

You who made this ego really are not bound by it at all, since it is imaginary and doesn't really exist. But you chose to believe that it is real. You gave reality to it by using it, since it is a device for turning illusions into reality.

Your decision to identify with it, was an attempt to attract yourself and attach yourself, or cling to, something other than God, like a magnet, which would allow you to attempt to resist the attraction of God.

So you tried to wear the ego like a piece of clothing, and this is pretty literally symbolized by the wearing of the body, which is the symbolic manifestation of the ego - the false self image. It is helpful to recognize that the body itself is the symbol of the ego, within this dream, although this entire dream is also the ego.

Now, in order to try to repel God and attract yourself to something more attractive than His Love, your ego device offers you the pretend opportunity to be magnetized to something else. You hold onto the ego, cling to it, attach to it, attempt to join with it, and try to be one with it. You try to make it your identity.

Your very sense of self you try to give to it, you empower it, you add reality to its illusory nature, and really you are trying to bring it to life. It is like a frankenstein which is made of death, that you pretend can be animated and take over your self. This is the ego's version of raising the dead!

One of the major ways that you accomplish this, and how this symbolically plays out in the dream, is in your identification with the body - the symbol of the ego. The ego is hiding in the body, as the body, as its attempt to withdraw from God and be protected against the truth. This is why the body is fundamentally an idea of sickness, which must eventually disappear when it gives way to the truth. The body is a defense.

Knowing this, each time that you identify with the body and thus the ego, you do so in order to pull yourself away from God. You are trying to rip yourself away from being identified with God and to anchor yourself into some other identity. You're trying to fuse yourself with the ego and body and turn yourself into them.

The closer that you associate with the body, and the more you push God away, the more the body starts to exhibit sickness. Sickness is a defense against God, and it makes the body more real. The more reality you give to the body, the more you are able to become "one" with the ego, and therefore whatever happens to the body is happening to you.

Eventually, a profound "unity" with the ego, as the body, produces death. Death simply means that you've created so much sense of clear distinction and separation between you and God, that you have super-magnetized yourself to the body, and have done everything you can to cut off the source of Life.

The body then cannot be long maintained when it is starved of Life, and the perception that you are disassociated from God makes you perceive that you have no power and no causality. What has no cause cannot exist, so without a cause you will die.

In attempting to overcome this, the journey simply involves giving up the identification with the ego and thus the body. But at first this is going to be difficult. Each time that you find a willingness to expose yourself to the truth, your association with the ego is going to have a major reaction. Since you've come to see through the ego and with the ego, you will interpret the meaning of the truth as the ego would interpret it.

Whatever the truth says, the ego perceives to be false, unwanted, an attack, dangerous and threatening. Whatever the truth claims is true, the ego cannot see clearly or correctly, will read into it, and will see reflected back to it its own ego nightmare, which will be frightening. So this produces a lot of resistance. You will defend the ego, protect its beliefs, side with it, trust it, believe it is telling the truth, and go along with its guidance. You will think you're doing this completely sanely and in order to not only uphold innocence but also to protect your life. You are trying to preserve your sense of self.

No-one in any state of mind wants their self to really be destroyed. Whether your self is identified with your real self, or with the ego self/body, you will protect it and defend it. If you are associated with ego and the ego experiences the truth as an attack, you will defend your ego, believing that you're doing exactly the right thing. However, when you defend the ego, you are choosing death.

Each time that you are aligned with the ego and try to protect it, because you think that you are protecting what you are - what you perceive yourself as - your self/identity - you protect illusions and give reality to them. This cuts you off from God/Life, which is a step towards death. It will produce sickness. So in the name of self-preservation, you will actually believe you're preserving your existence while in fact you are destroying yourself.

This is how people choose to die! This is why all death is a choice and all death is suicide. People don't realize that when they're identified with the ego/body, they keep doing the perfectly natural thing of defending themselves, but because their identity is all caught up in the ego, they inadvertently defend the ego. And that is a major problem. Everyone defends the truth, as they see it, and if the truth is the ego's truth, they will defend it to the death, literally.

Also when you are exposed to the truth, if you are holding onto the ego identity/body and believe/see yourself as the body, you will perceive that the truth is threatening you. Anything in agreement with your current beliefs is seen as truth and anything not in agreement is seen as an unwanted evil attack. This is what makes it difficult to learn to trust God - because initially God is thought to be evil, a threat, a danger, and an attempt to stop you from existing.

This is why you have developed in your mind a sense of a "false God" who is evil, out to get you, wants you to stop existing, is trying to destroy you and wants you dead. This is your ego's view of God. This is its interpretation, and you've made it your interpretation. This is the God of wrath and vengeance and revenge. And this part of you, the ego part, really believes that it is God's will that you die. And it uses this as perfectly rational-seeming justification for why you should die - because it's what God wants for you and you think it's inescapable. This is the death wish.

In order to overcome this "evil God", you need to recognize that your association with the ego has clouded your judgement, has presented the truth as something false, has presented what is false as something true, your whole world is upside down and back to front, and you need to become willing to rediscover what the truth really is.

That's not going to seem easy or welcome, especially to your ego alliance, because the real truth appears as the complete opposite to what the ego believes. It seems to be evil and dangerous, and you will feel tremendous resistance to approaching it. You think it wants you dead, and nobody in their right mind would want to approach their most feared enemy.

However, you need to learn that the God you fear is not REALLY what God is like. The God you think will mean you don't exist, does not REALLY prove you don't exist - that's just what the EGO thinks about God. God demonstrates not only that you exist but that you exist forever, are immortal, eternal, and that God completely supports and sustains you in every way.

This isn't the view of God that the ego will ever be able to see or accept, because it was not designed to do so. It was only designed as a kind of filtration device, to block the truth and invert it, and make illusions seem real. That's all it does and that's all it was meant to do. That's what you designed it to be, and that's why the ego cannot awaken. How can an illusion awaken? The ego isn't really anything at all.

So to awaken, you must awaken FROM the ego, in spite of the ego, and in order to recognize that the ego is not real. Everything the ego perceives and believes in MUST be false and unreal. So you get this choice, to decide who you are going to side with. God or the ego. There isn't really a choice because the ego isn't real and doesn't exist, but it will seem like a choice so long as you think the ego is who you are.

Believing you are the ego goes hand in hand with believing you are a physical body, because the body is the symbol of the ego thought system. And as you expose yourself to truth, mis-perceiving it with the ego will threaten "you", or your sense of self (ego aligned self), and you will want to defend yourself against it. Therefore you will resist the truth, resist waking up, want nothing to do with the Holy Spirit, will not want to entertain the idea of powerful miracles, and you will fear the rejection of God. Not just God's rejection but that, if God is real, you (ego) do not exist.

That is terrifying to the ego, so if YOU have associated yourself with the ego and believe it is you (you are a body), then you will be afraid that you don't exist. You might have noticed when you read ACIM especially at the beginning, that you feel like it is saying a truth that completely ignores you, doesn't even mention you, doesn't acknowledge you, and acts as though you don't even exist.

It can be maddening and make you genuinely angry. This is the ego, because the truth DOES ignore the ego and does not acknowledge it as existing. Because it really doesn't. It simply overlooks it entirely and demonstrates that it is not real. So if you are tied to the ego you will think that this applies to YOU, and that is pretty upsetting.

You might even put up a defense against the truth because you do not want it and see it as an evil enemy, and therefore implement sickness in your body/mind/emotions to try to protect your identity from the truth. You'll try to make the body more real than the truth, and give truth to the body.

This will put power into the ego, will distort your view of yourself as someone little and vulnerable, will shut you off from the Source of Life, and will show up in the body/as the body as sickness and disease. Eventually if you do not choose to be willing to accept the real truth as it is, and not the ego's misinterpretation of it, this will produce death, and you will have chosen it on purpose because you thought you were saving your life.

So really it's a struggle to wake up when you have this ego thing that you made that you are still pretty fond of, which you side with and listen to and trust and use, because it makes you very defensive against the truth and very suspicious of it. Remember the ego will go from suspiciousness to visciousness, and you can bet that with enough exposure to "reality" it will turn viscious in an effort to block it out.

Gradually you will surrender and let go, allow the truth to seep in with little steps of willingness, open yourself up to accepting God as the truth, allow Holy Spirit into your heart and mind, and come to recognize that illusions are not real. This will mean realizing the body is not real, just an illusion, as a symbol of the ego in the mind, and that you do not need it.

Your dependence on it and on the ego's laws regarding what the body needs must also go. And so your mis-identification with the ego will come to an end. Finally you will let go of it, detach from it, and recognize that it is nothing at all. It has no power, it is not real, it holds no truth, it cannot do anything to you, and you are free of it. And having no further purpose or use for it, it will disappear, and it will not be YOU that is disappearing but just something that didn't really exist to begin with.

So you can see this is all really an exercise in identity. Who are you? You've become an ego, but it's not who you are. You cling to it and the body like you're trying to turn it into yourself, or yourself into it. You use the body and your oneness with it through sickness to reinforce your ego's reality and deny God's. All because you are always trying to protect your "self" even if your sense of self is misplaced.

The desire to defend yourself isn't misplaced, although the course says "If I defend myself I am attacked", meaning that if you defend the EGO, you are attacked. Defending your enemy will result in attack. You just don't quite as yet recognize fully the ways in which you and the ego are best buddies, trying to stay associated with it and to keep it ONLY because you've become convinced that it is you.

If you were to recognize clearly that YOU are not the ego at all, and it is nothing but an illusory device, having withdrawn all belief that its illusions are real (including sin and death and sickness and physical matter and the body and the world), then you wouldn't have any real reason to need to defend 'it' AS you, and you'd simply be who you really are. YOU need no defense at all when your sense of identity and self is associated with your Real Self - the Higher Self - or even as Christ.

Be free!

Quite often there are discussions in ACIM circles about whether this world is real or not. Whether the planet earth really exists, or is an illusion. Whether perception overlays on top of it or is just a misinterpretation of its objective reality. Whether the world is the forgiven world or the real world. Whether God created the physical or whether it's really not physical, and whether it will continue to exist after all atonement is done.

There seems to be just so much fundamental uncertainty among people as to whether this "thing" of a "planet" we call earth is actually part of God's creation, and whether it's going to live forever in some way.

For me I often come back to some very simple statements which I find practically impossible to deny. Such as that "God did not create the body". But you'll also get some people questioning what references to "the body" are, and going off on tangents about the body being real or "the body" referring to an interpretation in the mind, or some kind of perceptual psychological body, or whatever else.

Despite the fact ACIM refers to various aspects of the body that are very obvious such as the physical features, limbs, body parts, and their typical physical interactions with the environment. I think one think we can say is true, we've done a darn good job of just twisting and mangling the course's statements as a result of our confusion and uncertainty to the point where, sometimes, it's barely recognizable what it's even saying.

For me I take a fairly honest direct approach to what I'm reading. I think Jesus is super advanced in his mastery and knows exactly what he's saying. I think he is very careful about his word choices and their meanings and I also don't think he's ever expecting us to do major mental gymnastics in trying to understand what he's saying. "Like the Text for which this Workbook was written, the ideas which are used for these exercises are very simple, very clear, and totally unambiguous."

"You have begun to realize that this is a very practical course, because it means EXACTLY what it says."

That means that when he refers to such things as "the body" he's just very simply talking about the physical human body. And when he talks about "earth" he's referring to the physical planet earth. The earth which EVERYONE recognizes as a name for this physical planet. I don't see ANY reason to question that or to suspect that there's some kind of super-subtle esoteric "only for experts" meaning to those terms, where you have to study it for 50 years to finally grasp the nuance of that word is attached to.

A body is a body is a body. Earth is the planet earth. It's simple enough. And I think Jesus would've been a pretty terrible teacher if he were using such obvious terms in some kind of alternative, bizarrely indirect, nebulous way that only very few can ever grasp. It's a bit of slap in his face, to me, when people suggest that Jesus has somehow not been obvious or literal, or plain enough in his language, intending for most people to grasp it as easily as possible.

In light of that, for me personally, I come away from ACIM with a very strong impression that all things physical are fundamentally an illusion, the human physical body is an illusion - as in "the body is a dream" and "God did not create the body" etc, and that planet earth - the spatially separated spherical ball of rock and vegetation and creatures - is all totally an illusion. Not even that it's some counterpart to a higher more spiritual "version" of the planet or that it's some kind of stepped down denser version of some actual planet in heaven. But simply that it is NOTHING LIKE heaven in any way and is an artifact of separation and attack.

When you further look at other references in the course to very obvious well-known physical things, and look at what Jesus is saying about them, it becomes very clear that he really is referring to the physical world. Such as when he talks about children being born in pain, growth attended by suffering, being trapped in the human brain, growing old and dying, being buried in the ground, these are all such obvious references to the physical that anyone with half an ounce of sense has to recognize that's what he's talking about when he's referring to "the body". And in those references it is clear that he's saying "such things" are not like God or of God or anything to do with God. That God would be cruel to have created them.

But for some who knows what reason, some people who think of themselves as advanced experts on the course, seem to still persist in the belief that somehow Earth is heaven and human bodies are God's wonderful creations and all the little cute animals are part of the Kingdom and all we have to do is change how we look at it in order to recognize this. As if to say that true perception of this world is practically the same thing as what you would be aware of when you have KNOWLEDGE of this world. As if they're practically identical.

I see a lot in the course talking about forgiving this world, reflecting in this world, using this world for a purpose of eventually leaving it, and that this world will not last. I even see stuff about seeing it in such a heaven-like way that it seems to be almost part of heaven itself. But I still cannot get past the fact of how this world requires separation in order to show up at all. It is STILL an illusion of a world, like a shadow. It's an absence of a creation. The body is a residue of an idea of not being joined, and a wall that comes between things. I cannot see that a wall of separation can ever be thought of as truly part of heaven, or like God. God does not create limitations.

So for me, at some point earth is going to end. It's going to be forgiven and not condemned and light is going to be seen in it and then it's going to be shone away. It is not going to be able to withstand the light of God once we stop defending it from him. Such as in "eternity will shine away the world." And "the stars will disappear in light". And "The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came." That's the extra step that some people don't seem to like the idea of, that even in its forgiven state this world is going to end. "The world will end in laughter because it is a place of sorrow." I don't think people realize that this still means the world WILL end, because it has a beginning.

Fundamentally it boils down to the fact that you cannot have "separated things", or space, or time, without separation ideas. These are ideas of a lack of love, an idea of sin. A gap or splitting off. These gaps and splits cannot exist when there is total healing. Healing would eradicate the gaps. And that means space will end and so will time. And that also means that now you cannot have physical matter with separate objects and distances and private locations and things being in one place and not another. The whole foundation for a three dimensional planet goes out the window. The body itself can no longer exist WITHOUT separation, it utterly depends on it.

There is also a fundamental fact that you can only forgive something that's an illusion. Some people seem to think if you forgive the world you are taking illusions away from it and seeing it as real. But that isn't forgiving the world, it's forgiving the illusions about the world. The forgiven WORLD, if it is earth, and if we are trying to forgive the earth, is only possible if the earth itself is an illusion. Only illusory worlds can be forgiven, and forgiveness is undoing. This is why anything you forgive MUST DISAPPEAR, because it's not really there. You can't therefore have a forgive world AND KEEP IT. Forgiveness eradicates it.

So either earth is going to remain unforgiven and kept, or forgiven and disappeared. Which means earth is fundamentally an illusion of a world. If we have false perceptions of it we are having illusions about an illusion - two layers of illusion. If we have true perceptions of it, we're having accurate perceptions of an illusion. Just because true perception sees earth for "what it is" doesn't mean "it is real". It is just what it is. It's an illusion of a world. A world that NEEDS separation in order to show up, that RELIES on space and time, that CANNOT EXIST without them. And once they end, it has to vanish. Because without sleep, there is no dream content. And "the body is a dream", and so is the entire environment in which it finds itself.

It's very very very obvious to me that ACIM is teaching us that there is NO EARTH, as in "there is no world." That it is literally an illusion of a world and not real. It's part of a "second order reality" or a second thought system which was invented temporarily in the minds of insane people. It doesn't have real existence, it only seems to. And the only reason to "save it" is to remove sin and accusation from it for the purpose of being able to finally recognize it as NOTHING, so that it can disappear. It still boggles my mind that anyone can come away from reading what ACIM says in such plain terms and still think that the earth is somehow a permanent reality.

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

"The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream, in which it acts as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed."

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom. The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist. The Holy Spirit, as always, takes what you have made and translates it into a learning device FOR you. Again, as always, it re-interprets what the ego uses as an argument FOR separation into an argument AGAINST it."