"You're doing this undo yourself."? No way!!!

The ego objects to the secret of salvation. "I CAN'T be doing this to myself! There's no way I'm causing or choosing this! I don't want this, I didn't ask for this, I didn't do anything to make this happen."

Of course the ego thinks this because this IS the defense that is covering up the awareness that you are all powerful. That you chose and caused.

See, ego equates responsibility with guilt and it has absolutely no notion that you can be responsible WITHOUT being guilty. It sees responsibility as "where the blame lies", who is guilty, who sinned, who did it.

It doesn't WANT to be open to the idea that you could take responsibility and be INNOCENT. And so it has a lot of defences and denials and resistance to this idea.

When you start taking responsibility the ego is going to come in and say that you are guilty because of this. So you're going to have to learn to separate out the responsibility from the accusation.

It can really challenge you to be willing to consider that you might actually be choosing what you are experiencing. It means you're going to have to let everyone off the hook and not hate them. It means you can't be a victim, you can't be unfairly treated, you can't be being misrepresented or not heard or accused.

The ego sees taking responsibility as on par with admitting to a crime that's going to send you to prison. It does not want to do it. It sees confession of truth as totally against your best interests. It's like admitting to being a guilty sinner, tapping into your deepest hidden hurts and sense of regret and guilt and shame.

Who wants to admit to being the cause of something awful, or some suffering, or something unpleasant even? But this is what we're going to have to do. The ego has been judge and jury and has decided that the only way you can have the power to do anything is by having the power to be a guilty suffering attacker.

This is why it's a bit challenging, admitting to the truth. You suspect that you sinned, you suspect you're guilty, you don't even want to look at it in case it's true. Or it seemed true when you last looked at it, so you hid from it and vowed to keep it hidden.

But the truth is that you cannot suffer unless you choose to do so. And that's easy to say but a lot harder to totally own. It means you're going to have to look at and question how you might have actually done this. How you chose. The power of your decision. How you decided and the purpose you were trying to serve in your deciding. Why you wanted to suffer. Why you wanted sickness. Why you wanted pain and misery.

Probably you'll feel that the reason for this self-attack was some kind of horrible sin that you committed long ago, maybe an ancient sin, you know, like trying to kill God? Which you believe is true. So you're going to have to confront that at some point to find a path through so that you can get to where you are responsible without the guilt. Where responsibility can mean a verdict of freedom.

We are quite averse to admitting to what we think we've done because we don't want to. And we've become used to projecting it rather than owning it, because owning it feels like shit. But we are not being asked to own up to something terrible that we did, we're being asked to own up to having NOT DONE ANYTHING.

But the road to freedom requires the total acceptance of total responsibility. Without ANY sin or guilt entering into it. When responsibility is polished clean of all guilt, it simply means you are still as God created you, pure and clean, innocent and sinless. And cause for celebration.

"Loudly the ego tells you NOT to look inward, for if you do, your eyes will light on sin, and God will strike you blind. This you believe, and so you do NOT look. Yet this is NOT the ego's hidden fear, nor YOURS who serve it. Loudly indeed the ego claims it IS. TOO loudly and TOO often. For underneath this constant shout and frantic proclamation, the ego is NOT certain it is so. Beneath your fear to look within because of sin is yet ANOTHER fear, and one which makes the ego tremble. What if you looked within, and saw NO sin? This "fearful" question is one the ego NEVER asks. And you who ask it now ARE "threatening" the ego's whole defensive system too seriously for it to bother to PRETEND it is your friend."

"The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is KNOW THYSELF. There is nothing else to learn. Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost."

God gave us our perfect self, with eternal life and immortality. There is nothing wrong with us.

But we denied who we were, hid from ourselves, blocked our awareness of being perfect, and tried to destroy our selves.

Having blocked our perfection we thought we were lacking and in need, as though empty of self, and began to feel compelled to find ourselves. But without questioning the belief that we were not already love within.

So we started to look outside ourselves, separate from ourselves, for ourselves. We thought we had to invent ourselves, add ourselves, redefine ourselves, make ourselves. Because we lacked ourselves.

And so we made up a false identity, an ego self, a fake self, of our own making, in an effort to have a self. In an effort to compensate for the lack of self, resulting from self denial.

By following the "seek and do not find" paradigm we thought that we could replace the self God created with another one of our own choosing. But this can never work because we keep trying to create it separate FROM ourselves.

And this self we keep trying to make needs bolstering, needs validation, needs attention, needs reinforcement, needs effort and energy and work, needs to be constantly patched up, constantly fixed, constantly modified and perfected, made to be "right" and superior and to be proud of this self. It is always becoming a self and never really being one.

But all this effort to make a false self is arising from the denial of BEING a self already. It's coming from not accepting who you really are as created by God. It's a substitute for the self you think you LOST and believe you do not have.

So if you were to simply accept yourself as God created you, if you were to uncover your real Christ self, if you were to just let yourself exist already as a creation of God, you'd have no lack of self, and no need to make a self, and would stop manufacturing the ego.

The making of a separate self is the end goal of attempting to have a "spiritual path". Attempting to become something, to gain something, to transform into something, to produce something. You keep wanting to form a spiritualised ego, a self that is spiritual, of your own making. But this is an ego pursuit - a pursuit of ego by ego. Trying to turn yourself into something more spiritual, while your real self is already 100% spirit.

It's all to do with you trying to seek to have a self that you think you lack. Why would you need to invent a new self and have an ego self or be a body if you already had a self that God gave you?

Thus accepting atonement is simply about you owning up to being what you already are, uncovering the self God created, re-identifying with your true nature, and simply knowing yourself. Know thyself as you were created by God, as you have always been, and as you will always be.

You cannot be someone you're not, you are not lacking, and you cannot be the creator of yourself.

Before the physical world of matter was produced, there was already an insane ego mindset of sin, guilt and fear. This is referred to as the "original error" below. The tiny mad idea took hold and we were now in an insane thought system.

Mind is not able to create "nothing", but it can create a sort of "empty shell" with seems to lack. And this emptiness is like a void, which is meaningless. The lack of meaning makes it act like a "screen", onto which you can PROJECT stuff.

Once the ego thought system was established, we PROJECTED that mindset onto the void of meaninglessness, forming the physical world as a kind of image on the screen, made from the idea of sin turned into flesh and matter.

So there's sort of a layer of egoic thought and mind, outside of heaven and believing in sin and separation, which then projects onto the empty screen forming "a physical world" as a symbol of the separation.

The ORIGINAL error seemed to cast us out of heaven into a 'empty void'. The ego mindset was present, and then projected its ideas of sin and separation, turning them into what we call physical matter.

"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.

That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth. For truth extends INWARD, where the idea of loss is meaningless, and only INCREASE is conceivable. Do you REALLY think it strange that a world in which EVERYTHING is backward and upside down, arose from this? IT WAS INEVITABLE. For truth brought to THIS could only remain within in quiet, and take no part in all the mad projection by which this world was made." UrT18B2

also

"If a mind creates without love, it can create an empty shell. This CAN be possessed by evil." URT1B28C

"We also have observed that man can create an empty shell, but cannot create nothing at all. This emptiness provides the screen for the misuse of projection." UrT2A3

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master. And this unholy instant SEEMS to be life." UrT20G11

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?" W250W41

also the secret dream behind the physical, in between you and reality. "The gap between reality and dreams lies not between the dreaming of the world and what you dream in secret. THEY are one. The dreaming of the world is but a part of your own dream you gave away, and saw as if it were its start and ending, both. Yet was it started by your SECRET dream, which you do NOT perceive, although it CAUSED the part you see and do not doubt is real." UrT27H11

This all points to a somewhat 'hidden' state of mind, the ego thought system of separation and sin, of which a portion "materialises" as physical matter. If you like, a mind-dream of separation, followed by a projecting from that mindset to form physicality. A sort of "ego content" followed by "ego form." Two layers covering up God's Kingdom.

"The first chaotic law is that the truth is different for everyone. 2 Like all these principles, this one maintains that each is separate and has a different set of thoughts that set him off from others. 3 This principle evolves from the belief there is a hierarchy of illusions; some are more valuable and therefore true. "

Basically the first law means that because you believe there is the absence of love/God within you, there are blocks to awareness, thus divisions, thus levels and hierarchies, and now everyone is separate and in competition. If love is not in you, you now have to find it outside of you.

"The second law of chaos, dear indeed to every worshipper of sin, is that each one must sin, and therefore deserves attack and death."

Since we're all separate and no-one apparently has love in them since it's been denied, we must all be sinners and therefore we all deserve attack and death. Another way to put this is that we now see "someone else" as having denied the love in us, its their fault, so we are justified in attacking them to get it back (even though we did this to ourselves).

"This leads directly to the third preposterous belief that seems to make chaos eternal. 6 For if God cannot be mistaken, He must accept His Son's belief in what he is, and hate him for it."

We then believe that God cannot be the source of love and therefore if God is not a source of love He must be evil and therefore is justified in hating us and wants us to be dead. So our own rejection of His love, creating the illusion of His absence, has rendered Him seemingly like an enemy, and we cannot "go there" to get love or salvation, so we have to find it elsewhere.

"The ego values only what it takes. 2 This leads to the fourth law of chaos, which, if the others are accepted, must be true. 3 This seeming law is the belief you have what you have taken. 4 By this, another's loss becomes your gain, and thus it fails to recognize that you can never take away save from yourself."

We now perceive that we must take from others in order to "get" what we are in need of, and that be taking from them, you can have it. This is a reversal of the fact that in order to have anything real you have to give it/extend it from God. The ego says you can "gain" or increase by accumulating from others against their will, so since all love is now considered "finite and limited" there is only so much to go around, taking it from others must cause them to have less, and so now you can gain by having more.

"But what is it you want that needs his death? 2 Can you be sure your murderous attack is justified unless you know what it is for? 3 And here a final principle of chaos comes to the "rescue." 4 It holds there is a substitute for love. 5 This is the magic that will cure all of your pain; the missing factor in your madness that makes it "sane."

In the fifth and final principle, basically we believe that this substitute for love - specialness - can be taken from others by force, causing in the most extreme cases for them to be drained of it thus murdered, and so their death has given you life, for which you are justified due to their sinfulness. We presume that this magical specialness will cure all of our pain and lack and needs and is what we are "lacking" and thus it will bring us salvation, make us sane, and take away all the emptiness. Except, it does not work.

The only solution to the emptiness is to return to awareness of love's presence within, by undoing all stages of separation and denial and becoming aware again that the truth is true - that we are already love, did not separate, have not lacked, and therefore need do nothing to be the love that we already are.

I think one of the main reasons people seem to be homophobic, is just because we expect men to be men and women to be women. And if we ourselves are "straight" which largely means squarely or "purely" male or female and not a mix of the two, we project that onto everyone.

I think we become conditioned to think that there are only 100% males and 100% females. Then we project that onto people and expect them to comform to that.

When someone is more of a mix of gender traits, partly male, partly female, in whatever ways, it starts to fall outside of the standard "heteronormative" society model.

This is where a person starts to become offended, because whenever something seems to go outside of our beliefs, it registers to us as false. Whatever we believe or think is the acceptable standard is always regarded as true. When something seems opposite or doesn't fit with our truth, we judge it as false, and that also gets lumped in with negativity, evil, darkness, sin, guilt, perversion, rejection, etc. It's quite a basic mechanism.

So then if some man is partly female, but the model in the viewers mind is that they are supposed to be purely male, the person will seem to be violating the model. That will register as that they're not conforming to the norm, and are doing something they're not supposed to be doing. That registers as sin and violation and offence.

It's interesting that if a man is feminine and doing some things that a straight man would judge as wrong, but if you then ramped up the femininity of that man to the point where he turns into a complete woman, then the straight man suddenly would find no problem with them, because now they are conforming again to the model of strictly separate genders. So it's only the middle-ground where someone isn't entirely fitting into the strict model, that registers as an offence against the model.

This then leads to the viewer becoming offended, feeling violated, attacked, threatened, upset by the hideous creature they they see, which seems to be doing things and acting in ways that are not "normal" to them, or rather, not conforming to their model of what a man or woman is.

The problem really is that there is an expectation and a projection of the idea of what a man or women must be, and the ego especially likes to keep these extremely separated out. That you can be either one or the other, not both. "Not both" is the ego's standard function of "not God", because God's whole system of truth is based on both/and. The opposite of both/and is either/or, which the ego loves to uphold.

And indeed its sense of identity requires a strong contrast between exclusive opposites, in which the males try to keep the females outside of themselves so that they "know who they are" and have a firmer and clearer sense of identification with their gender. Or rather, so that their ego can stand out as being more separate and different, in order to have an identity, because the ego depends on opposition. And if you are not being "man enough" then you somehow are becoming too feminine and are stepping over the line.

If someone seems to fall outside of the projected model, it registers as false, evil, wrong, offensive, upsetting, an attack, violent against their very sense of identity. This does two things - it threatens the clarity of distinguishing who they are, in which they need to keep male and female separate in order to "exist", and secondly it seems to threaten the model of what a man or woman is.

This perceived violation is then interpreted as that the stranger is actually breaking rules, attacking their truth, going outside the bounds of what is acceptable into territory of "perversion", is seen as unnatural, vile and disgusting, can't be tolerated, and is seen as actually a direct attack upon the viewer and everything they stand for and are. Indeed if the person IS really purely a man AND then proceeds to act like a women, that would be register as an actual perversion.

Having perceived that the not-quite-straight person is threatening them and offending their ways, this then produces the perception of justified anger, because they feel actually literally under attack by the non-conforming person, as if that person will infect them, change them, influence them, invade their integrity, remind them of the fragility of their masculine identity, invade their boundaries, and do things to them which persons of a given gender are not supposed to be doing.

This can take on ridiculous forms such as fearing that the queer person will turn the kids gay just by living nearby, or radiate gay rainbow vibes into their minds, or have ultra evil sexual powers of lust after their treasured ones such that they'll be taken into a cult and subjected to satanic abuses, or that the queer person is simply am abomination against their God and breaking all the laws of heaven in a state of sin and madness.

So then they project hate and rejection onto the queer person, which they see as completely justified, because they've perceived that the queer person has attacked them first just by existing, and now this evil spectre must be destroyed in order to protect oneself. Which means the homophobia is seen as a justified and needed act of self-preservation based on fear. This is where the "phobia" part comes in, because the anger and abuse literally stems from a perceived fear, that something outside of what is acceptable is threatening to undermine their truth. Not just their truth, but their whole sense of identity and reality.

Because if a man can be partly not a man, and a woman can be partly not a woman, then that brings into question what is a man or woman, how are they defined, and how to distinguish a sense of self in the midsts of the seemingly "vague and muddy" mixture of gender and identity.

The ego would like things to be clear-cut, but the queer person is presenting a picture of something not so clear-cut, something which appears to be crossing over boundaries, "gender bending", breaking the ego rules of either-this-or-that, and corrupting the whole model of "man and woman produce male or female kids only." And now queerness is a boundary-violating attack upon families and marriage and religious institutions. And all this is is a concern for what happens when something transcends the rigid boxes that everyone wants to live in.

Really all of these reactions, which are just ego projections of a rigid model of identity, are only happening because the viewer lacks discernment and sees things in a very black-and-white exclusive and special way. They are not recognizing something, which is always the failing of the ego mindset. By not recognizing that the person is not JUST male or JUST female, and that people actually can be "not entirely one thing", there is no account made for people who seem to blend across the boundaries. And then "non-binary" is seen as the ultimate sin and rejection of all that is good and proper in the human race.

If they would open their minds from the closed-off either/or mindset of male/female strictness, which is closed-mindedness and a lack of spirituality, they would consider that some people (in body terms) are not purely male or purely famale, and that such people are completely acceptable and part of "nature".

If the viewer would then stop trying to force the person to be eieither man or woman, they wouldn't actually produce all the distorted reactions - which they do to themselves - that arise from trying to fit something into a box that it doesn't belong in. It's only because of the projecting of the "I know what a man is!" that a person requires someone else to conform to that.

There has to be an opening up to a greater repertoir of how many different types of human bodies there are, just as we have to open up to accept people from other countries and enthicities without judgement. And to then drop the expectation and conditioning that says you have to be one of only two things, and you must never be a mixture in any way. It's only those strict rules that give rise to a sense of the rules being violated, which then leads to the fear of invasion and the discomfort of being "pursued by a gay rapist", which then leads to the angry projections of guilt, which becomes homophobic abuse - all an attempt to maintain the ego.

If we could better recognize what people ARE, rather than what we think they SHOULD BE, we'll be better able to accomodate everyone and stop trying to force people to conform to a rigid tight little structure. The problem is really that egos are JUDEGMENTAL, and this judgement is always flawed and narrow and wrong.

Homophobia is actually just an expression of the regular ego doing its regular ego thing, just in the same way as any other conditioned belief which results in a sense of being offended by anyone or anything that outside of that belief - be it someone of another religion, another race, another gender, another color, size, hairstyle, whatever.

The fact is that the world is not black and white, it is not purely either/or, it quite often happens - though to less of a percentage usually - that there are exceptions to rules. Flowers that sometimes grow double heads, creatures which sometimes are half female and half male, humans that sometimes have a mix of sex-oriented organs, people with darker skin who become albino, people that are sometimes born as siamese conjined twins instead of separate bodies, etc.... nature isn't completely strict in its forms.

People only have prejudice against various aspects of the physical world when they think it's supposed to be a very very basic black-and-white model, where you have to be 100% this or 100% that. And as the mind believes strongly in separation the egotism emphasizes this contrast and exepcts everything to conform to it. And anything that deosn't is labeled as a sin. That's standard ego functioning, nothing special. It's unforgiveness. It's based on the belief that the world is absolutely real, and therefore separation is truth.

To be more forgiving we have to be willing to really look at what things are, not what we wish they would be, or what category they're supposed to fall into, or to judge them based on appearances while trying to fit them into neat little boxes. Some people are such a mix of things that you'd have a hard time even describing them accurately. In the past society was much more recognizing of the fact that everyone is to some degree bisexual, which is still true, even if people try to deny it.

Long story short, society needs to become more forgiving and learn that the human race isn't composed of pure men and pure women, but rather than absolutely everyone is at least to some degree partly both. All human embrios start out as female and even the males still have some trace of that in them. This is a world of relativity, in which nothing is absolute and nothing is extremely pure and nothing is completely separate. There is no real man or real woman. We are ALL hybrids, and everyone is queer. That's not wishful thinking etiher, that's the nature of spacetime.

In truth, the self that is real and the self that we really are, is our soul, which is part of the sonship in/as heaven. That self is perfect already and is incapable of being imperfect. The soul needs no salvation or healing or resurrection.

The thing is, the soul also has a mind, and it is in the mind that we have a problem. We've used our minds against ourselves, against the soul, to deny the soul. This means we've put our minds into a state where we re denying having a self.

This is also reflected in the authority problem which is a rejection of being authored by God, and brings with it a doubts as to whether we have even really been created, or exist at all. Denying God as our father makes us wonder who we even are.

Similarly in denying reality we have put ourselves out of touch with reality, which is an insane state of mind. This state of mind is filled with ego, and ego is literally the denial of self/soul. Ego isn't really a self, it's a lack of real self. It's like a sense of self that has parts missing and is unstable and changeable and lacks reality.

Ego is more like a temporary sense of "self-consciousness", in which you feel like the centre of the universe and under attack by everything. It's a tight contraction of fear, holding on for dear life, small and weak, separated off and exclusive, seeming to peer out upon an insurmountable world which it sees as a threat, divorced from itself and alien to it. But this is all due to a kind of 'lack of wholeness', ie a lack of soul.

When we're doing the course, applying forgiveness, trying to wake up, we might think that we - our self - is waking up. That's because we think that the way that we are, in our ego, in a body, not yet awakened, is our "self". That we're somehow having a self right now. And that we're taking that self and transforming it into an awakened state.

But this isnt' really the case. We're not even really being ourselves right now. And we're not really taking ourselves into reality. Our real self/soul is already in reality and is already perfect, it can learn nothing and needs no correction, it cannot grow and it cannot sleep.

So what are you - who are you - what is this sense of "my self" that you're having? Who or what it is that thinks about waking up?

Really we have a problem in the mind, where the mind is confused and has lost touch with reality and with the self/soul. This has made the mind selfish, rather than wholly self. Selfishness makes everything revolve around being separate and isolated, while the self-wholeness of the soul revolves around sharing everything with everyone.

Mind is that which is varying. Mind is that which is changing its mind about itself. Mind is that which is seeming to sleep, or seeming to wake up. Mind is that which needs correction. Mind is what is learning and unlearning. Mind is the realm of nightmares and happy dreams. It's all something to do with the mind.

But mind is not the self. Mind is a medium that the soul/self uses for creative expression and decision making. The will is part of the mind, which the soul uses TO will things, but the mind isn't the self itself.

So who or what is trying to wake up? Mind is trying to wake up, but mind is not a self. Instead we need to shift a bit in how we think of what is happening.

First we need to recognize self is really the soul/spirit/christ which is in God in/as heaven. It is already perfect and whole and immortal. It doesn't need any learning or fixing.

Then we need to recognize that mind is where something has gone wrong, and it's mind that is confused. Soul has used mind against itself to deny self. So now mind is in a state where it is not serving the soul, it is not recognising that the soul IS the self, and it is thinking that self is something else - such as an ego or a body or a fluctuating transitioning self, or an image of a self.

Mind changing is not about 'you' becoming and growing and learning and transforming into an awakened being. It's more about mind recognising the pre-existing presence of the soul/self and identifying that it IS the self. That you are a soul, not a body or an ego. This mind recognition though isn't a matter of a 'you' that shifts into being a soul, it's more to do with accepting and recognising and seeing the soul and knowing it as self.

That said, as the mind changes and opens up to awareness of the soul, its "sense of self" changes, and that sense of having or being a self or what the self is like seems to change, and that makes 'you' think that 'you' are changing and growing and expanding your self. But really you are tapping onto more and more of a self that is already fully formed in God, and its your degree of awareness of it that changes.

Part of that entails also recognising that 'who or what' you are seeming to be right now, your sense of self, is a mixture of some sense of 'me' and a whole bunch of things which are not the soul. Believing you are a body, or an ego, or a made-up sense of identity, or identification with emotions or relationships or the world. Things which are not the spirit, which you have mistaken for a self.

So really it's not that 'you wake up', it's more that the mind reconnects with and receives input from the soul and aligns with it and comes to recognize that the soul is the self that you forgot you had. And to get there, other senses of self, and other senses of it being 'your self' that is changing, has to go out the window. Really your self doesn't change at all - false senses of self shift and change and seem to grow and transform but they are not really what you are. You wake up FROM senses of self that are mistaken, returning TO the only self you ever really had.

You are a soul, safe in God, dreaming of exile with the mind and within the mind, lost and confused and unsure of who or what you are, temporarily believing that the self is the ego or the body or other things you made up, but gradually coming to recognize that the self is none of these things and was the perfect soul all along, merely hidden by blocks to awareness, and finally revealed as having been you all-along.

"Your Soul does not need salvation, but your mind needs to learn what salvation IS." UrT10E1

"The Soul never loses its communion with God. Only the mind and body need Atonement." URT1B27E

"The forgiven are filled with the Soul, and their Soul forgives in return." UrT1B29A

"The soul is in a state of grace forever. Man's reality is ONLY his soul. Therefore, man is in a state of Grace forever." UrT1B300

"It should be quite apparent to you by now why the ego regards the Soul as its "enemy." The ego arose from the Separation, and its continued existence depends on your continuing belief in the Separation. Reducing the Soul impulses to the unconscious, the ego has to offer you some sort of reward for maintaining this belief. All it CAN offer is a sense of temporary existence, which begins with its own beginning and ends with its own ending. It tells you that this life is YOUR existence because it IS its own." UrT4D9

"The ego is trying to teach you how to gain the whole world, and lose your own Soul. The Holy Spirit teaches that you CANNOT lose your Soul and there IS no gain in the world, for OF ITSELF, it profits nothing." URT11G1

"The Soul does not need healing, but the mind DOES." UrT3F10

"The term "salvation" does NOT apply to the Soul, which is not in danger and does not need to be salvaged." UrT4C23

"The Soul is therefore unalterable because it is ALREADY perfect, but the mind can elect the level it chooses to serve." UrT1B37C

"Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul. The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God." URT1B37F

Every time I see a body, I am tempted to believe I'm seeing a person. The person seems separate from me, they are not me at all, their body belongs exclusively to them, it's not my body, we are not in any way connected to each other. What applies to them does not apply to me at all.

That is the horrendous lie that bodies present to us. The temptation that your brother, who in truth is literally one with and a part of your self, is somehow cut off from you. On the basis of assuming that people are "not me", we then proceed with an entire culture and way of relating that revolves around "I am separate from you."

Ultimately this boils down to a question of, are you living by God's law of the Golden Rule, or are you denying it and trying to break God's law? First let's be clear that the Golden Rule is not some optional thing, it's fundamental to the nature of reality and all creations. We are all one with each other, part of each other, joined together and sharing, like a collective consciousness hive mind. In that arrangement we are still individual beings but we also share everything.

Within that thought system of sharing, overlap and oneness, the natural way to relate to someone is to regard them as YOURSELF. They are thus your brother, an equal, as perfect and whole as you, and literally part of yourself. This produces shared interests and an automatic motivation to ONLY treat them with love so that you are directly treating yourself - the part of you that's in them - with love. Everything belongs to everyone, everyone has everything, and everything is mutual.

In the ego's rendition, the body is a separation device. And make no mistake that the body literally symbolically CUTS YOU OFF from the hive mind. It represents the idea of being separate, disconnected, not sharing, not joined, not a part of anyone else, and completely alone. It is absolutely the opposite of the true nature of our collective sonship and brotherhood, and is totally unnatural.

This means that if you are in a body being identified with a body, believing bodies are separate people, you are literally LOOKING AT the denial of the laws of God. You are looking at the opposite of the golden rule, manifested as images of forms walking around, testifying that separation is real. The body ITSELF is nothing less than a demonstration of the idea of being completely separate.

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind"

"This separating off is symbolized, in your perception, by a body which is clearly separate and a thing apart. Yet what this symbol REPRESENTS is but your wish to BE apart and separate."

Therefore just the mere sight of a body is enough to tempt you into the belief that God's law has been broken, the Golden Rule does not apply to anyone, and you are NOT in any way sharing anything with your brothers. You don't even have to act or relate to people or treat people a certain way for God's law to be broken by the mere appearance of the body.

Therefore, as the course is teaching, if you see a body, you are seeing WITH specialness, with selfishness, and thus with the ego. And the result is false perception, which fixates on physical form and makes bodies real to you. Upon seeing this, you have already believed in separation, and now the body is lit up and appears to you as a separation device, anchoring and fixing your brother into a prison within space and time, and cutting you off from them.

As soon as you are relating on a basis of "I am not you", ie your body is separate from my body, and I see you AS a body, and regard myself as my body, and we are NOT each other, we are in a state of special relationship. And that literally means we are at war. We have withdrawn the shared part of ourselves from each other and have gone to our separate corners, ready to fight.

We are at war merely by the very fact that we are identifying who and what we are with a device for separation, and have therefore believed that we ARE separate, and therefore are different, and thus not equals, and thus competitors.

Any time that I associate anything at all exclusively with a body, whether it be my own or that of another, I am in the ego and at war. I am having a special relationship, taking sides, judging, projecting guilt, attacking, accusing, and trying to destroy. Just by seeing a body and regarding it as the anchor and prison wall which is surrounding and sectioning off you or another, you are taking sides.

Once you've taken sides, you will not be able to help but relate to the other person AS a body, ie as a separated off, exclusive, isolated, distinctly separate being. One with whom you are NOT sharing, are not one, and they are NOT seen OR recognized as being a part of yourself. The entire vision of recognition and enlightenment which would show you that your brother IS part of you, is obscured by the body.

"the BODY of the other, ALREADY a severely limited perception of him"

"For sin is the IDEA you are alone, and separated OFF from what is whole."

Then you will proceed to go to war. You will find it effortless to accuse someone of being, doing, having, making, causing something, which ONLY they are doing, and you are not. You will now be into the realm of "getting away with murder", because it now seems that what applies to the other does NOT apply to you. What applies to what their body is doing, is not what your body is doing. Their separated-off will is now disconnected from your own, and you are not sharing or cooperating or willing in accord. Therefore you are against each other.

The loss of the awareness that you are one with your brother has devastating consequences. As soon as you have slipped away from unity ie holy relationship even slightly, you've pulled away from being joined to the other and have identified yourself as exclusive. That exclusivity is selfish and special, and will manifest as a body, which will show up in the mind to testify HOW you are separated off from the other. The body literally symbolizes your separateness.

"The body is the symbol of the ego, as the ego is the symbol of separation. And both are nothing more than attempts to LIMIT communication, and thereby TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE."

By believing that you are not your brother, you are not a part of him and he is not a part of you, you cannot help but see yourself and your brother as separated off by a body. This identifies both of you with your bodies, and holds you apart from each other like inmates in separate prison cells. This is a breakdown in communication and an attack on love. It is a lack of relationship and a disconnect from each other.

It doesn't matter if the other person is someone you are allegedly married to, a spouse or partner, a lover, a sibling or child or parent, some stranger or neighbor, a boss or remote stranger, any time that we are unaware of our oneness with each other we have moved inside an entirely separate thought system of separation, in which the ONLY culture is "me not you".

Nor will you be able to sufficiently repair the relationship and bring it to a state of holiness WITHOUT questioning whether or not you and your brother are a body. The belief that they ARE their body, automatically cuts them off from you, and your believing this is HOW you imprison them.

"The special relationship is a device for limiting YOUR self to a body, and for limiting your perception of others to THEIRS."

"For the ego would limit everyone TO a body for ITS purposes, and, while you think it HAS a purpose, you will choose to utilize the means by which IT tries to turn its purpose into accomplishment."

"As long as you believe that, to be with a body, is companionship, you will be COMPELLED to attempt to keep your brother IN his body, HELD THERE BY GUILT."

No matter what you think your relationship is, regardless of how close or intimate you seem to be with another body-person, you are NOT intimate if you are not one. You are also not happily married if you are married to a body. Nor are you head over heels in love if what you're in love with is a body. To love a body is to separate yourself from the other person, to NOT SEE them, and to keep them at arm's length, pun intended.

If you want to overcome the conflict, the war, the fighting, the disagreements, the arguments, the special hate, the special love, the lack of communication and connection, your only choice is to transcend bodies. You have to get your mind out of the separation-oriented culture and resume an entirely opposite culture based on the Golden Rule. You have to learn that you ARE part of the other person, neither of you is separated off BY a body, and the bodies are not even there. You have to see yourself INCLUDED in them as you look upon them, and NOT look to their bodies to identify them.

If you are heavily into the association that the person IS their body, and you've bound their identity to it, and every time you see the body you think that's them, you have a lot of work to do. And it could take some considerable time to undo all the ways that you've taught yourself to separate people off, bind them to physical objects, identify them by those objects, and therefore stay separate from them.

The ego culture of exclusivity and separateness is completely opposite to God's natural culture of sharing and unity. Bodies cannot and will not ever depict or accomplish God's culture. They have to be bypassed and transcended and overlooked. Your whole sense of who and what you are has to expand to INCLUDE others. And then how you relate to them, WHO you are defending, WHAT you are relating with and to, radically changes.

"Minds need not bodies to communicate."

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU."

If you have relationship issues which, guaranteed, every body-to-body relationship HAS, the real problem is THE BODY. Allowing, supporting, and facilitating the use of the body as a separation device, anchoring people TO bodies, is the whole foundation of your relationship woes. Nor can you overcome those woes and KEEP the body. You have to be willing to stop identifying people with bodies, including yourself, and including your "loved ones."

"The body cannot KNOW. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds you."

Any time that you fall for the trap of believing "that person is not me", because you've seen their body and have witnessed to the belief that their body IS SEPARATE FROM YOU, you have gone into the ego culture of separation and war. Any time that you do not recognize your brother as yourself, you will fall into a special relationship. Any time that you can see PAST the bodies, and identify the person with a SHARED IDENTITY in Christ, which is part of your own identity as Christ, you have moved into holiness and union.

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of ***loving your neighbor as yourself***. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

"***It is impossible for a Child of God to love his neighbor EXCEPT as himself.*** That is why the healer's prayer is, "let me know this brother as I know myself."

If you want to perform miracles, you have to transcend the entire mindset, thought system and culture of "separate me versus them". You have to join minds with the other so that your mind can share its light with the other mind and heal it. You cannot save or be saved without doing this, and bodies will always interfere with this.

If you pay any attention to the body AT ALL, you are looking at and emphasizing the separation. The body is separation's symbol. It is the wall around the mind that keeps it separated off from other minds. As long as you are having relationships WITH BODIES, you are not having real relationships with your brothers as God created them.

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

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, ***keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time***, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master."

"Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

"The urgency is only in dislodging your minds from their FIXED POSITION here."

"The special relationship is totally without meaning WITHOUT A BODY. And, if you VALUE it, you must also VALUE THE BODY."

"To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

"The ego's fundamental wish is to replace God. In fact, the ego is the physical embodiment of this wish. For it is this wish which seems to surround the mind with a body, keeping it separate and alone, and unable to reach other minds except through the body which was made to imprison it."

"And BOTH of you stand there before Him now, to let HIM draw aside the veil that SEEMS to keep you separate and apart."

"If you WITHHOLD agreement, and accept the part YOU play in making sickness real, the other mind cannot project its guilt without your aid in LETTING it perceive itself as separate and apart from YOU. Thus is the body NOT perceived as sick by BOTH your minds, from SEPARATE points of view. UNITING with a brother's mind prevents the CAUSE of sickness, and perceived effects."

Sometimes you have to throw your ego a bone. It's one thing to be constantly trying to question everything, forgive everything, affirm truth all the time, deny all illusions, and act all super-spiritual constantly, but the fact is that for the time being you still have an ego.

Your ego still has needs, and doesn't want to be spending all its time trying to be spiritual about everything. It has to be okay to let yourself take a break from hitting yourself over the head with metaphysics and taking the high-road. While you have an ego you have needs and values and beliefs and denying this will just produce sacrifice and another layer of depression.

It's one thing that it's all true, and eventually you will totally embrace it all and be able to live it authentically all the time, but until then you'll naturally be wanting to go back and forth, advancing and retreating, and sometimes that means you can't be just "doing the course" 24/7 every day like some kind of robot. In fact in a way it's dishonest and inauthentic to try to fake being authentic before you're really able to do so.

Let yourself off the hook and let it be okay to relax and have fun and enjoy some ice-cream or sex or movies or whatever stupid ego stuff gets you going. It's okay to live your life. Yes continue forgiving and rising above and resurrecting as you're able but realize that you are not a 'master' yet and you don't need to be pretending to be one. It's okay to be normal and do normal shit and have fun in the [its all a stupid illusion] dream world while you're working on waking up to reality someday.

"If you want to be LIKE me, I will help you, knowing that we ARE alike. If you want to be DIFFERENT, I will wait until you change your mind. I can TEACH you, but only you can choose to LISTEN to my teaching. How else can it be, if God's Kingdom IS freedom? Freedom cannot be learned by tyranny of ANY kind"

"The truth is still that the attraction of God is irresistible at ALL levels, and the acceptance of this totally unavoidable truth is only a matter of time. But you should consider whether you WANT to wait, because you CAN return now, if you choose."

"The acceptance of the Atonement by everyone is only a matter of time."

"It is crucial to say first that this is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what to take when. It is just because you are not ready to do what you should elect to do that time exists at all."

"The ego, then, raised the first question that was ever asked, but it can never answer it. That question, which was "What are you?" was the beginning of doubt. The ego has never answered ANY questions since, though it has raised a great many." UrT6E3

Here Jesus tells us that the 'problem' of the separation really stems from a single question. What are you? This is a questioning of your SELF. Your identity.

It's not really a question that actually wants to FIND OUT what you are, or what you are like. It's actually a form of doubt in which it is UNSURE of what you are, and does not KNOW what you are, and is not really interested in knowing what you are.

It's actually an insinuation, an accusation, a way to say, YOU ARE NOT YOUR SELF. A way of saying, "I doubt you" or "I don't believe you." It's a sort of uncertainty, as in fearful outlook, where the ego mind is not sure at all and has a SUSPICION that you are not what you say you are.

And so at this point the ego is actually insinuating that YOU ARE NOT YOUR SELF, and that there is something true of you which is not really true, and that you're actually something ELSE. Because the ego wants to consider that IT is you, and wants you to believe that you are IT. So this is the beginning of a shift in identity.

There has not really been anything new or different that has happened since that moment. We have just gone further into the same doubt and fear, the same questioning and mistrust, the same desire NOT TO KNOW who we are.

So the entire separation could sum up as being, an attack on your identity. A state of mind that is in DENIAL of who you are, and is reading into your identity some properties or qualities that are not there. A state that does not want to ACCEPT what you are, but instead rejects it.

So the whole problem we have really is always about our SELF. The big question of, who are you? Because the true solution to the questioning is to KNOW THYSELF. To accept the atonement which means to accept fully WHAT YOU ARE. To accept the truth of you.

This all significantly hinges around your identity, because your mind has all the power and the ego needs your mind-power to support itself. If you were to withdraw power from this mis-belief about yourself it would undo the ego thought system entirely.

The big aim of the course then is the REVERSAL OF THE FIRST QUESTION, or rather, the ANSWER to the question. The true answer, which the Holy Spirit helps to remind you of, is .... I AM CHRIST. Or... I am still as God created me, I have not changed, and I am still perfectly innocent in God.

This response UNDOES the ego because it actually answers the question. And so it brings an end to the questioning, which was never an attempt to get the answer in the first place.

"An unwilling will does not mean anything, because it is a contradiction in terms which actually leaves nothing. You can make yourself powerless only in a way that has NO MEANING AT ALL. When you think you are unwilling to will with God, you are not thinking. God's will IS thought. It cannot be contradicted by thought."

"And His Sons, who are like Him, cannot contradict themselves or Him. But their thought is so powerful that they can even imprison the mind of God's Son if they so choose. This choice does make the Son's function unknown TO HIM, but never to his Creator. And because it is not unknown to his Creator, it is forever knowable to him."

When we try to use our free will to will AGAINST free will, or in essence to "not use" your will, you attempt to be UN-willing. But this is a USE of will, and so makes no sense. It's more like, willing strongly that you don't will anything at all. It is a loss of will, and a loss of freedom. That is why it results eventually in the loss of the will to live (death).

What the ego and the world call free will, is actually a reduction in will, and an illusion of freedom. It's more like an opposition to will, a rogue or alien will, which in deceptive illusions SEEMS to will separate things, but in truth is not REALLY willing anything.

What SEEMS to be "independence" and autonomy separate from all others, held up like a hero, is really the absence of freedom, absence of self, and absence of life. The ego is not your self, it is the denial of your self, an unwillingness to be your living eternal self, which is why it resists life and induces the "death of you".

The illusion of conflicting and contradictory "wills" runs rampant in this world, but it is not really what free will looks like. IT's more like a bunch of prisoners who have imprisoned their will due to being unwilling to will like God. And in this world, being upside down and backwards, those who will the most "freely" are really the most unwilling to will with God.

This is why Jesus asks us to have a little (and later total) willingness. We need to move upwards into freedom, and into accord with God's will, so that we are willing freely. Or rather that we are willing anything at all. This is why in order to enter heaven, you have to be FULLY WILLING to do so. You cannot be forced there, because you ARE free, but in your "exile" you are resisting being free, using your free will to oppose your freedom. When you are ready, you will go home to God. And nothing will be able to stop you.

Unwillingness is really a state in which your will is being used to will against itself, and this means there is conflict in your willing. You are willing one thing, and opposing it at the same time. This can only CANCEL OUT the will's power and produce NO REAL EFFECTS. This in turn results in the mind seeming to "have no power to cause anything", which is why those who are unwilling have no miraculous power to heal or change the world.

When your will becomes undivided, and you are no longer willing against yourself, which is the secret of salvation, you become single-minded instead of split-minded, enter into miraculous power, and become unlimited and unopposed. Since you are no longer stopping yourself from exercising the power of God, there is NOTHING your holiness cannot do.

"No one comes to the atonement except willingly."

"God does not coerce."

"God commended His Spirit to you, and asks that you commend yours to Him."

"Nothing can prevail against our united wills because nothing can prevail against God's."

"Your will is free, and nothing can prevail against it."

"Nothing can prevail against a Son of God who commends his spirit into the Hands of his Father. 2 By doing this the mind awakens from its sleep and remembers its Creator. 3 All sense of separation disappears."