Jesus said this:

"The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind."

Here we’re told that God created "man’ (souls) and gave man (souls) the ability to create, when in his right mind (as God intended). All of this is taking place within God’s realm, the Kingdom of Heaven. Heaven also IS God’s Creation and everything in it including the souls.

The souls together comprise "the sonship" and since they share oneness with all of Creation, they are all "the One Son" ie the one/united creation. At this point it has absolutely nothing to do with physicality or planet Earth or separation.

"The latter (man’s ability to create in his right mind) required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given."

So we know that it is natural to have free will, for each "individual soul", who is part of oneness, and who is also christ. Each individual soul is therefore "free" to independently dream or not.

At this point, pre-separation, in my opinion all of this is encompassed within God’s Kingdom, Heaven, which IS the sonship and IS creation and INCLUDES all souls. All as one Sonship, one creation, on being, on sense of identity yet still many parts. (I know I know, suspend disbelief).

All of this content, is what the Course originally refers to as WORLD. This was God’s world, God’s creation. What really exists. (Not the "real world"). This is the same thing as "the universe" of God.

God gave a world to His Son, spoken of here:

"The statement ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life’ needs only slight correction to be meaningful in this context; ‘He gave it to His only begotten Son.’"

I believe, the world referred to is simply the Kingdom of God, heaven. It is the only place where there is everlasting life. This is true in both versions - that "God gave His Son" = world (God’s created universe, not earth, God expressed/gave the Sonship), and that "God gave the world to His Son" = God’s creation, heaven, given "to" his Son to SHARE and be a part of as God’s Kingdom/expression. This has nothing to do with the physical universe, a world made by separation, or planet Earth in any way.

At this Level, Heaven, Creation, God, Sonship, The Son, The Sonship, Souls, Reality, Universe, World, Eternity, Oneness, Christ, Children of God, and Christ’s Creations, and the creations from Souls, are essentially all part of a single experiential realm or state of mind/being in which there is perfect sharing, multiple minds, yet all sharing and reflections of God’s mind as well.

"God has but one Son, knowing them all as one."

"It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts."

ie, "the son" IS the sonship, which contains multiple sons of God, all equal, and perhaps there is no single "first begotten son" kind of identity. Just the multitude souls? Yet every soul is fully one with the whole sonship, sort of implying two levels or aspects to identity? "Soul-self" and "shared-self’? And that when the "sharing" is severed, what’s left is the soul estranged as a separated son, still having its own identity but seemingly disconnected from the whole.

Then there was the separation...

"All fear is ultimately reducible to the basic misperception that man has the ability to usurp the power of God."

Or to put it another way, each soul can choose to sleep (or they all slept at once?), and "dreaming" (authority problem, separation, sin, level confusion, fear) is the mis-creation of each soul’s free will. Each soul tried to "withdraw" from the unity of the whole sonship, going into a state of isolation with artificial walls around it (later to become bodies), seeming to no longer be part of oneness, no longer sharing, no longer connected.

Jesus says this:

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

Notice it says "the son of God". Given all souls form the sonship and together they are collectively "the son of God", along with whatever else God created (angels etc?), does this not mean that all (or some of?) God’s "Creation" collectively had the tiny mad idea? Ie we’re not just talking about a single son, but many sons "falling" together?

We’re also told this:

"What God does know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His children are wholly joyous….God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thought, "My children sleep and must be awakened."

So we’re told there that when some parts of the sonship (souls) are blocking, the entire sonship is affected and so God then knows he needs to create the Holy Spirit.

Here is the version from the urtext, which is more clarifying:

"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness does transcend the sum of its parts. However, it loses this special state as long as any of its parts are missing. This is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all of the individual parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then, in the true sense, can the meaning of wholeness be understood."

When the sonship, or even one part of it, still believes in separation, is dreaming, unaware of the whole, or rejecting the sonship, the sonship is incomplete. In this state, what the sonship experiences now is the "fall" into, and the dreaming OF, collectively, the "second world".... the world of death and separation.

This second world comprises everything that is "inside" the tiny mad idea, all thoughts of sin and death, the entire physical universe which was made a "place" (actually a state of mind) in which God seems not to exist. This second "world" is the world in which we experience perception (of all kinds). This "world" is the entire physical universe. It may additionally comprise further fake universes in higher dimensions because the separation from God progressed through various stages.

So then there are two worlds. God’s universe/creation/heaven, and the illusory universe/what we made/physical universe which is artificial ("Earth is opposite to heaven in every way"). We typically think of world as the planet, but it means the entire realm in which we seem to exist. All of the "universe" we think is the universe, all planets and stars, all galaxies and nebula and civilizations. And all of the massive expanses of space and time. All of this is "the world" - the world WE MADE, which God DID NOT CREATE. A world of separation. And within this world, this realm, planet Earth is just one of many illusory locations.

There is a series of workbook lessons, I posted about this recently, which tell us 1) we’re experiencing a hell of false perception laid on top of the world we made, 2) true perception is then introduced as an alternative way to view "this world" (this fake universe), 3) we’re guided to experiment with discerning true from false, 4) we’re then told about how HEAVEN is ANOTHER world (a 3rd experience, beyond false and true perception) reachable when "this world" is left behind (the world/realm/universe we made).

The lesson "No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth" specifically describes us leaving this "world" and returning to Heaven, to the realm of Creation, to God’s universe. Which is not the Earth or even the physical universe.

This also means that, the collective "Son of God" dreamed the fictional "world" which houses the fictional planet earth (there is no world). This also means then that if true perception shows you the "accurate perception" of the world YOU MADE (physical universe), to see accurately/truly the world you made is to see what THE SON projected. Since this "world", the physical universe, is the "One Son’s dream" or, the collective dream of the Sonship, which we all made together, and since the course says "The world IS perception", seeing this world with true perception is us perceiving PERCEPTION. Perception twice removed!

As individual souls we’re looking upon what the One Son projected as a fake universe. Within this context alone, we EACH have a false perception OF the One Son’s perception. A false perception of "the world" (and you can include Earth in that world). False perception ADDS a "personal layer" on top of the world we made, true perception removes that layer and reveals what is "there" without distortion. Yet this world we’ll see, the "real world", is STILL within perception. It is STILL the 2nd world, the one WE MADE, not the one God created.

We will disappear this 2nd world. This 2nd world is one we made up, invented, it is a DREAM. An illusory universe. It doesn’t really even exist at all. IT is the opposite to the nature of heaven in EVERY WAY. It is not a part of heaven now, and it will never be. Being an illusion, it must disappear entirely. Being literally NOTHING, it never was, does not exist NOW, and never will. It simply will vanish when recognized in the light of truth. The light will shine it away. It will be no more because it never was. We don’t need it.

God has created a "world" - Heaven - a "place" (as much as any, though different to the physical experience), "fit for a King" ... a realm of permanent joy and love and eternal life. It is EVERTHING, where the "world" we made is nothing. The world we made is not real. "There is no world" is a direct statement speaking to this - this world we made, which includes planet Earth and more, does not exist. "The world holds nothing that I want" ... not just the world of false perception, OR the world of true perception. The world we made, to replace God’s world, holds nothing that I want. The "real world" is an illusion, not a reality. God’s reality is the REAL, real world.

These are, to me, essentially the two worlds. And within the world we made, because perception is selective and has degrees, there is a really screwed up state of false perception (hell), and a much more preferable and closer-to-reality state of "true" perception. As clear a state of perception as we can possibly have while still being OUTSIDE of heaven. And "there is no life outside of heaven", because the world we made is not life.

I guess I’m just putting this out there. FInding my way to a clarity about this which makes sense to me. Take what you like leave the rest.

Many people teach about the course in such a way, that it all seems to be about going up towards God.

This seems to make sense in many ways. We're told to take illusions to the truth and not the other way around.

We're told the world doesn't exist and that it's not our home. That we have added all these blocks on top of our love and need to remove them.

It all seems to focus on an undoing process. The whole "impression" you get of the course then it that it's ENTIRELY about this undoing and removing ego and going within and stepping back from the world.

But what is not taught enough, is the whole PURPOSE of doing this process.

The purpose of the course isn't simply to remove and undo. The purpose of the removing and undoing is so that LOVE CAN SHINE. The undoing itself is just clearing the way for EXPRESSION.

Everything about love shining is NOT in an upwards direction, nor is it in an inwards direction, nor is it to do with taking yourself away from the world, nor is it to do with simply reaching a "state" where you are sort of sitting on the fence just observing everything and waving.

What ACTUALLY happens is that as you remove these blocks to love, as you shift your perception seemingly "toward" God more, LOVE EXTENDS THROUGH YOU MORE.

Far too much emphasis has been placed on the process of the removal of blocks, to such an extent, all this focus on forgiving and purifying and undoing ego etc, that we can actually miss the POINT of all this. Which is that we're doing this SO THAT the love, which has been blocked, can FLOW FREELY.

Love flows OUTWARD. It is shared. It is given. It heals OTHERS. It produces MIRACLES.

Projection, as defined mainly in the course, is an act of denying the presence of love, which creates a sense of emptiness/lack/sin, which results in displacing that sin externally. So then people think that this was the only function of the mind. It's not.

The mind can either CREATE, OR project. And it has free will to choose which process. Miracles come from the creative/extending function of the mind, illusions/ego comes from the projecting function. We've become so busy with fixing the false projections, that we forget that the mind in its natural function actually is creative, expressive, giving, extending, radiating, healing, unifying, miraculous.

So it seems a bit paradoxical but, as you lift away blocks in the mind which seemed to project outward, it actually uncovers LOVE and then love extends outward. As you get closer to God, you become more loving. As you have more awareness, you become more miraculous.

Many teachers and students actually have adopted this kind of idea that the only point of the course is to get your ass out of here and go home. Like, you're only supposed to do the forgiving part, the undoing part, the fixing of your mind, the stripping away of ego and all this reducing. But this leaves a HUGE gaping hole in the rest of the story. It turns the atonement into a totally selfish goal that you "accept for yourself and no-one else".

And this is because THE EGO is a ONE-DIRECTIONAL thought system where giving and receiving are separated. The Holy Spirit's thought system is BI-DIRECTIONAL, meaning that giving and receiving are EQUAL. The EGO interprets the course to mean, we are only moving in the direction of God. Holy Spirit sees it differently. In fact, you could say, the only TRUE nature of spirit is that it INCREASES OUTWARD. That's totally opposite to what the ego is trying to do with the course.

It successfully also denies major aspects of the course which is the OUTGOING of love, and everything that comes from that. Which, VERY importantly, includes the PERFORMING OF ACTUAL MIRACLES. Miracles are such an outward expression of love that all this "taking back" and "going inside" and "returning home" malarky doesn't even touch on it. You can do all this retracting and get to a point of sitting on a fence having a personal peace experience with not a single miracle coming out of you. Something is wrong with that!

There are entire audiences now following various teachers who preach this one-directional movement away from the world and towards God. It SEEMS to make sense, after all we came from God and want to go home. But it is not in our NATURE to head in the direction of God. The only reason we're heading toward God is because we left. It's in our NATURE to EXPRESS AND EXTEND God. It's entirely an outward expression of love.

There's a really interesting section in the course which I posted about recently, which goes something like this. When the mind is naturally extending fully THROUGH the body, it heals the body and flows past/overlooks/forgives the body and flows OUTWARD beyond the body, extending to others and seeing the same love in others. This produces perfect healing of oneself and others, it produces miracles, it maintains the body in perfect divine health. ie the body is a MEDIUM through which love radiates and is used as a COMMUNICATION device to TRANSMIT.

But any time that you start to make the body the focus, any time there are blocks to awareness, any time you start identifying with being the body, or you start blocking the outflowing of love, the mind starts to "stop at" the body and, in a sense, collide with it. The blockages are like acts of will against the flow of will. This causes "attack", and the body thus becomes a kind of target. It thus becomes sick and weak and suffers, and eventually dies.

THAT DEATH RIGHT THERE is actually the logical RESULT of only fixating on the INWARD direction of movement away from the world. And that is PRECISELY why there are many gurus and others who have had a measure of awakening who LATER DIE without having performed a single miracle. Leaving the world is only half of the story. And if all your focus is on leaving the world, it CAN result in death, especially if your belief system is then really focused on NOT HELPING OTHERS and not demonstrating the overcoming of the world by BEING ENTIRELY CAUSAL. We are not asked to being NEUTRAL. This is a course in CAUSE, not effect or neutrality.

It makes the self too special. It's an imbalance between giving and receiving. When the blocks are removed, love NATURALLY flows outward because of what it is, and there is all this outpouring of LIFE and POWER and MIRACLES. There is this radiance, this shining, this blessing of yourself and everyone. The body becomes healed by the sane mind as the mind flows past it, carrying love with it, and flows it out PAST self to others.

So we really need to look at this and be careful about this. When ALL that we focus on is the "undoing", which in a sense is the same thing as "the ego getting what it wants without giving", we SHUT OUT any of the GIVING, because we equate it with some kind of "doing" which we think is sinful. Jesus says in the course that the undoing aspect of the miracle IS important, but that the DOING aspect is FAR MORE important.

The only REASON there is such a huge course book here which is helping to remove blocks to awareness of love, which seems to be a major point of the course, is to REVEAL the love and to let it SHINE. Because the course can't teach the meaning of love, and focuses heavily on the removing of the blocks to awareness, this leads so many people to think that "removing blocks" is the SAME THING AS being natural, or being healed, or getting out of this world.

The ONLY PURPOSE of removing blocks is SO THAT you can fulfill your function as the light of the world and so that the love IN you can EXPRESS and HEAL and BE MIRACULOUS. To essentially, "bring heaven to earth", supernaturally, while people are still calling out for love and struggling to get home.

And that DOES MEAN "bringing" the love and power of HEAVEN to this world, because it NEEDS IT. This is why "miracles fall like drops of healing rain from heaven", causing the "signs of life" to spring up. It doesn't say "suck it all in and you won't look so fat".

Major course teachers have pushed this agenda of "get out of here and screw the rest". You are actually to become PART OF the atonement PLAN, which is a plan FAR BIGGER than just your individual atonement. You become part of the atonement ITSELF when you accept it. And accepting it is accepting and receiving miracles, which you are to then GIVE TO OTHERS. Your job is not DONE when you've accepted atonement. That's so selfish and ego. Jesus needs our help to BRING healing and truth and light and love and miracles TO the world and those in the world, to HELP THEM to return to God as well.

Love shines. Love radiates. Love is miraculous. Love extends OUTWARD. Love moves PAST yourself and past the world. Love looks PAST bodies. It doesn't recoil. Jesus talks about how there is what seems to be a "state" you reach where you are miracle-minded and miracle-ready.... but reaching the STATE is only important so that you can get into "MIRACLE-DOING". We're not supposed to look at this whole process in terms of just "withdrawing" everything from the world. That is of course a majorly important ASPECT, but it is ONLY HALF OF THE STORY, and I would even say it's not even half.

The focus on being at peace about the world and accepting personal atonement and "there is no world so no point doing miracles" and "holy spirit has nothing to do with the world" and all this intellectualized "escaping" from the world, has really basically CUT OFF all mention of, teaching of, support for, any of the EXPRESSION which we are supposed to be DOING THIS FOR. That's the whole point - to return to BEING LOVING, to expressing love, to demonstrating miracles, to giving LIFE TO OTHERS, and being truly helpful beyond our own nose.

As Jesus says, "members of my party are ACTIVE WORKERS". As Jesus says, he told the disciples (and if you are an ACIM student you ARE a disciple) to be physicians of the lord and go out and HEAL OTHERS. Jesus also says to "listen, learn, then DO". Not just listen and learn. DOOOOOOOO. DO miracles. DO healing. Help people. Shine your light.

Once upon a time, in heaven, there was a rebellion against the will of God. The children of God believed they were separate, and threw themselves into a nightmare world of magic and hell and death.

God saw this and, loving his Children, created the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was a divine idea in God's mind, a single perfect idea of healing the entire separation. A thought of miraculous power and of love. An expression, as though a voice, calling his children to return, and providing them with all he help and healing they would need.

The Holy Spirit was established as the single perfect solution to the thought of separation, the bringer of the atonement, the very idea of resurrection and healing. The miracle, which was given by God to completely and fully and successfully heal the entire sonship.

The Holy Spirit has been endowed with all of the power in heaven and earth. All of God has been given him and he is absolutely unlimited in his capabilities. He is the mechanism of miracles, because he alone is in a state of the transfer from hell to heaven.

He is your only appointed friend, he is your only teacher, your only qualified therapist, and your comforter. He has been given to you by God as the only help you need to return to heaven, to become a miracle worker, to act as a healer, and to resurrect the dead.

His healing capability is perfect and flawless and guaranteed to always work. He never fails. His healing is powerful and effective and there is absolutely nothing beyond his reach. There is no situation he cannot resolve and no sickness he cannot undo.

He is your guide through foreign lands and alien worlds. He is there for you. He has been created as a permanent part of reality, bridging your mind and God's mind like a bridge, guaranteeing your absolute success in returning to reality.

The Holy Spirit cannot fail. He is beyond all flaws, beyond weakness, and beyond death. There is nothing he cannot do, and nothing he cannot do through you when you are willing to let him. He can undo all the consequences of all wrong decisions, all faulty choices, all attempts to make yourself suffer, and all forms of sickness. The reversal of death is effortless to him.

He has been given to you by God as the single perfect solution to your desperate attempt to be separate. He is the answer to the questioning and the doubting and the fearing of God. He provides the vision for you to see, the power for you to heal, and the guidance and comfort to guarantee all outcomes.

Your mission is to align with him, follow his guidance, turn to him for all decisions, depend on him for healing, work with him to heal others, and help to facilitate and extend his perfect function in the world. Your destiny is to be a healer with the Holy Spirit. He is the power that works miracles through you. Utilizing his power is the natural expression of all the children of God for the good of all.

He is not of this world. He is of God and of heaven. He brings to you and to this world a power and a functioning which is in complete violation of all the world's laws. He stands for an opposite and alternative solution, a happier dream, and the only way home. He will guide you and strengthen you and support you and work through you. He will speak for you, see for you, decide for you, heal for you, and resurrect you. And he will guide you back to eternal life. With him you are unstoppable and all powerful. With him there is nothing your holiness cannot do as a miracle worker, the light of the world, a teacher of God, a physician of the Lord, and a representative of God.

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you CAN see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His RESULTS, you will understand where He MUST be, and finally KNOW what He is."

"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays a picture of a DIFFERENT you. It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."

"Lead not your little lives in solitude, with one illusion as your only friend. This is no friendship worthy of God's Son, nor one with which he could remain content. But God has given him a better Friend, in whom all power in earth and Heaven rests. The one illusion that you THINK is friend obscures HIS grace and majesty from you, and keeps his friendship and forgiveness from your welcoming embrace. Without him you are friendless. Seek not another friend to take his place. There IS no other friend. What God appointed HAS no substitute. And what illusion CAN replace the truth?"

"Make NO illusion friend, for if you do, it CAN but take the place of him whom God has called your Friend. And it is he who is your ONLY Friend in truth. He brings you gifts that are not of this world, and only he, to whom they have been given, CAN make sure that you receive them. He will place them on YOUR throne, when you make room for him on his."

"All therapy is release from the past. And that is why the Holy Spirit IS the only therapist."

"The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist. He makes healing PERFECTLY clear in ANY situation in which He is the guide. The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION. He needs no help for this. He WILL tell you EXACTLY what to do, to help ANYONE He sends to you FOR help, and will speak to him through you, IF YOU DO NOT INTERFERE. Remember that you ARE choosing a guide for helping, and the wrong choice will NOT help. But remember also that THE RIGHT ONE WILL. Trust Him, for help is His function, and He is of God."

"Do not, then, think that following the Holy Spirit's guidance is necessary merely because of your own inadequacies. It is the way out of hell for you."

"Leave ALL decisions to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as He KNOWS it. So will He teach you to remove the awful burden you have laid upon yourself, by loving not the Son of God, and trying to teach him guilt INSTEAD of love."

"Make no decisions about what it is, or where it lies, but ask of the Holy Spirit EVERYTHING, and leave ALL decisions to His gentle counsel. The One Who knows the plan, of God which God would have you follow, can teach you what it IS. Only His wisdom is capable of guiding you to follow it."

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."

"Perception is not an attribute of God. His is the realm of knowledge. Yet He has created the Holy Spirit as the Mediator between perception and knowledge. Without this link with God, perception would have replaced knowledge forever in your minds. With this link with God, perception will become so changed and purified that it will lead to knowledge. That is its function as the Holy Spirit sees it. Therefore, that is its function in truth."

"The Holy Spirit was God's answer to the separation, the means by which the Atonement could repair until the whole mind returned to creating. The Atonement and the separation began at the same time. When man made the ego, God placed in him the call of joy. This call is so strong that the ego always dissolves at its sound."

"The Atonement principle was given to the Holy Spirit long before Jesus set it in motion."

"Therefore, says reason, if escape from guilt was given to the Holy Spirit as His purpose, and by One to Whom NOTHING He wills CAN BE impossible, the means for its attainment are MORE than possible. They must be THERE, and YOU must HAVE them."

"The seemingly new abilities that may be gathered on the way can be very helpful. Given to the Holy Spirit, and used under His direction, they are very valuable teaching aids."

"The Holy Spirit is the way in which God's will can be done on earth as it is in Heaven."

"The Holy Spirit is the mind of the Atonement. It represents a state of mind that comes close enough to one-mindedness that transfer is at last possible."

"The Holy Spirit is the MOTIVATION for miracle-mindedness. It is the will to HEAL the separation by letting it go. It is IN you because God placed it in your mind, and although you can keep it asleep you cannot obliterate it. God Himself keeps it alive by transmitting it from His Mind to yours as long as there is time. It is partly His will and partly yours. The miracle itself is just this fusion or union of will between Father and Son."

"The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Joy. It is the call to return, with which God blessed the minds of the separated Sons. This the vocation of the mind."

"The way to LEARN TO KNOW your brother is by perceiving the Holy Spirit in him. We have already said that the Holy Spirit is the bridge or thought-transfer of perception TO knowledge, so we CAN use the terms as if they were related, because in HIS mind they are. "

"The Holy Spirit is the IDEA of healing. Being thought, the idea GAINS AS IT IS SHARED. Being the call FOR God, it is also the idea OF God."

"The Holy Spirit is the mediator between the interpretations of the ego and the knowledge of the Soul. Its ability to deal with symbols enables it to work AGAINST the ego's beliefs in its own language. Its equal ability to look BEYOND symbols into eternity also enables it to understand the laws of God, for which it speaks."

"The Holy Spirit is the perfect teacher. It uses only what your minds ALREADY understand, to teach you that you do not understand it."

"The voice of the Holy Spirit IS the call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind."

"The Holy Spirit is the radiance that you must let to banish the idea of darkness. His is the glory before which dissociation falls away, and the Kingdom of Heaven breaks through into its own."

"The Holy Spirit is the call to awake and be glad."

"The Holy Spirit is the Christ mind that senses the knowledge that lies beyond perception. It came into being with the separation as a protection, and inspired the beginning of the Atonement at the same time."

"The text explains that the Holy Spirit is the Answer to all problems you have made."

"The Holy Spirit is the home of minds that seek for freedom. In Him they find what they have sought."

"The Holy Spirit IS the translator of the Laws of God to those who do NOT understand them."

"We once said that the Holy Spirit is the Answer. He is the answer to EVERYTHING, because He knows what the answer to everything IS."

"The Holy Spirit is the part of the mind that lies between the ego and the Soul, mediating between them ALWAYS IN FAVOR OF THE SOUL."

"The Holy Spirit is the light in which Christ stands revealed."

"We have said that the Holy Spirit is the MOTIVATION for miracles. This is because He ALWAYS tells you that ONLY the mind is real, because only the mind CAN BE SHARED."

"Remember that the Holy Spirit is the ANSWER, not the question." "The Holy Spirit is the bridge to Him, made from your willingness to UNITE with Him, and created by His joy, in union WITH you."

"Remember that the Holy Spirit is the communication link between God the Father and His separated Sons. If you will listen to His voice, you will know that you cannot either hurt or BE hurt, but that many need your blessing to help them hear this for themselves."

"The Holy Spirit is the Highest Communication Medium."

Everything in the world is an illusion. Everything. And this includes the bodies which are seemingly healthy, the bodies which are seemingly sick, and the bodies that seem dead. This also means that trees which have fresh green leaves are as much an illusion as trees whose leaves have fallen and are decaying. Images of a lovely sunset are just as much an illusion as stormy skies. Animals leaping around happily is just as much illusion as carcasses on the side of the road.

In the ego world, there are symbols, because it is a dream. And sometimes these symbols seem to imply that some parts of the world are different to others, or mean something that other parts do not mean. So we are used to the idea that a dead body is the idea of death. But bodies that are walking around are also not really alive either. We can think that when the leaves are falling from the trees, it's death happening, but perhaps we didn't realize when the leaves were on the trees that it was still a dream of death.

So in this world, there is deception all over the place. Things appear to be something they are not. The symbols that look like life only seem to be life, while the ones that look like death are only different in their forms. And it is us who have given meaning to them and decided "this one means death and that one means life". All of the forms, in whatever condition they are, are forms of death. As Jesus tells us:

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. *****In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it seems like life; at worst, like death.***** Yet both are judgments on ****what is not life****, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven (e.g. on Earth), only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true. "

So because illusions are forms (objects, shapes, materials, bodies, planets etc), their content is not true. They are illusions of life and death. An illusion of life is not really life. Life actually means ETERNAL LIFE, that which can never perish, that which is not born and does not grow and does not die and has no sickness or transformation. Life means that which never changes because it is permanent. Only in Heaven's reality is there eternal life, and that is the only REAL life there is. The rest of what we call life, the "life forms" of this world, are an illusion of life AT BEST.

"Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible."

Here Jesus is contrasting vertically the two states or levels. In Heaven all things live and cannot die. In illusions, all things die and cannot really live. The world we see is an illusion of a world that God did not create.

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

So having been in this world a long time, we are likely very used to the deception that some things in the world are more alive than others. Some people seem to have more health than others. Some bodies seem more dead than others. This is an illusion. All bodies are illusions, and their condition or state does not make them more or less real. One is not really more or less dead than another. Even a dead body in the ground is, in terms of miracle mindedness, no more dead than a living body. This is why for a miracle worker "dead-seeming" bodies can be converted or resurrected into living-seeming bodies as a kind of "translation of form".

"EVERYTHING is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the Mind. The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

Again Jesus is telling us life is to do with mind and heaven, not to do with bodies. And it's reinforced by this idea.

""And the last to be overcome will be death." Of course! ***Without the idea of death there is no world.*** All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions. And in death are all illusions born. What can be born of death and still have life? But what is born of God and still can die? "

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."

So every illusion, every part of the dream, all objects, all bodies, in all states and configurations, are all made of illusions, and ALL illusions are made of death. We have to therefore realize that death does not mean HORIZONTAL death, as in, at the end of the road of time for a given object. Or a state that follows on after another. Rather, the ENTIRE world we made, the universe, is all a dream of death. This whole planet is an idea of death.

VERTICALLY, anything on this level physically is an attempt to remove ourselves away from where eternal life is, away from Heaven. To move down a level. To drop into illusions, to sink into a dream world. And that world is based entirely on the idea that reality, Heaven, is not real. It's the idea of separation or opposition to Eternal Life, that you are exiled and outside of the Kingdom where eternal life is. And so it's the idea of NOT being alive. It's an idea of the opposite to life and permanence. And everything in it, no matter its form or appearance, is an illusion of death or partial life at best.

Even the most vibrant bunch of flowers is actually an illusion of not life. Even a newborn baby, of any species, is not a "new life" but rather a new form of death. Even as the season of spring seems to give life to new fresh growth, it is only later to transition into the season of "dying" and decay simply because both the birthing and dying are built into the system. Anything made of illusions has the mark of death upon it, meaning it already is formed from ideas of death and separation at the moment it is made. Every particle of matter is a separation idea and therefore an idea of opposition or attack upon God.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. ****Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it.*** Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust ****even as you made it.****"

So even at the instant that illusory things are first formed, they are formed FROM the idea of death and separation and limitation. They have it built in. If they are born at all, death is guaranteed and "happening" already. Because all forms are lacking in some way, they are all lacking what the other forms seem to have, and all of them are inherently limited and limiting. None of them are whole, none are complete, and not have eternal life. And every single body is an idea of being little and lacking and less than everywhere.

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

So this world is not the living world. The Kingdom of God is the living world, because life means permanent life, not some temporary mockery of life. It is insane to think that real life is a matter of existing a little while and then dying at a bodily level. Life perpetuates and sustains and continues forever and cannot be destroyed. God creates ONLY the eternal.

"Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

"What God creates is eternal."

A big part of awakening then must entail the re-framing or re-evaluating of everything you see here. We need to realize the dream entails a hierarchy of illusions, and this hierarchy is entirely fictional. And everything it suggest through different FORMS is a deception and a temptation to believe something that isn't true.

Big bodies, small bodies, healthy bodies, dead bodies, are all the same illusion. None of them are more real than another. None of them are really closer to God. Big sickness, small sickness, tiny headache, massive tumor, none of them are any different. The only reason you would believe they are different, or more or less serious, is by looking to the appearance of their form and taking it as evidence or MEANING as to what the thing is. Every single illusion is deceptive. Every appearance is a lie.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. ***They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see.*** ***They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful.*** Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

When we reach a state of not being deceived by ANY appearance, we are in miracle mindedness. Which is right mindedness. Here the hierarchy of illusions is completely flattened and meaningless. There is no difference between a form in one configuration or another. We are not deceived by physical form, shape or appearance. One type of appearance does not trigger worse reactions than another, or any reactions, nor means something different to the rest. A "dead" appearing body is not regarded as any more dead than a living one. As such raising the dead is seen as NO MORE DIFFICULT than curing a headache, because all illusions are the same and you are not deceived by them. You can raise the dead as easily as heal an upset feeling.

"You who are dedicated to the incorruptible have been given through your acceptance, the power to release from corruption. What better way to teach the first and fundamental principle in a course on miracles than by showing you the one that seems to be the hardest can be accomplished first?"

When you are not deceived by illusions of life and death, forms of sickness, appearances of severity, you cannot be afraid, you can only be miraculous. Miracle mindedness transcends the world of illusions because The Miracle IS the state of Christ Vision which overlooks all forms. There is, from that position, nothing that your holiness cannot do. And it is from this state that you are a miracle worker. Here you are using miracles as demonstrations to PROVE that what appears to be death is not death, and you are under no laws but God's, where miracles break all the illusory laws of the world of appearances.

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world."

"Miracles reflect the laws of eternity, not of time."

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you can see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for ****miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it.**** Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His results, you will understand where He must be, and finally KNOW what He is."

A collection of ACIM quotes focusing on the UNREALITY of the world. It is vital, and our only task, to correctly identify the world AS unreal, to take away from it all sense of reality and assign it to the truth of God. Only God's reality can be real. The world we made is completely unreal. Nothing in it is real at all. Recognizing its unreality is the awareness of dreaming. Recognizing its unreality is liberation from all suffering.

"Fear has made everything you think you see. All separation, all distinctions, and the multitude of differences you believe make up the world. They are not there. Love's enemy has made them up. Yet love can have no enemy, and so they have no cause, no being and no consequence. They can be valued, but remain unreal."

"It is impossible to see two worlds which have no overlap of any kind. Seek for the one; the other disappears. But one remains. They are the range of choice beyond which your decision cannot go. The real and the unreal are all there is to choose between, and nothing more than these."

"We will not make a thousand meaningless distinctions, nor attempt to bring with us a little part of unreality, as we devote our minds to finding only what is real."

"Dismiss temptation easily today whenever it arises, merely by remembering the limits on your choice. The unreal or the real, the false or true is what you see, and only what you see. Perception is consistent with your choice, and hell or Heaven comes to you as one."

"You looked upon the unreal and found despair. But by SEEKING the unreal, what else COULD you find? The UNreal world IS a thing of despair, for it can never be. And you who share God's Being with Him, could never be content WITHOUT reality."

"It is, then, only your WISH to change reality that is fearful, because, by your wish you think you have ACCOMPLISHED what you wish. This strange position, in a sense, ACKNOWLEDGES your power, yet by DISTORTING it, and devoting it to 'evil,' it also MAKES IT UNREAL."

"It is not my will to grope about in darkness, fearful of shadows and afraid of things unseen and unreal."

"We will attempt to leave the unreal and seek for the real. We will deny the world in favor of truth. We will not let the thoughts of the world hold us back, and we will not let the beliefs of the world tell us that what God would have us do is impossible."

"Then try to go past all the unreal thoughts which cover the truth in your mind, and reach to the eternal. Under all the senseless thoughts and mad ideas with which you have cluttered up your mind are the thoughts which you thought with God in the beginning."

"The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form BECAUSE IT CAN SO EASILY BE CHANGED. This demonstrates that it was never real, and COULD not stem from his reality. For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

"Temptation, then, is nothing more than this; - a prayer the miracle touch not some dreams, but KEEP their unreality obscure, and GIVE to them reality instead."

"Reality is changeless. Miracles but show what you have interposed BETWEEN reality and your awareness is unreal, and does not interfere at all."

"There is such a temptation to dismiss fear thoughts as unimportant, trivial, and not worth bothering about that it is essential you recognize them all as equally destructive but equally unreal."

"This is the corollary of the "original sin"; the belief that guilt is real and fully justified. It is therefore the psychotherapist's function to teach that guilt, being unreal, cannot be justified. But neither is it safe. And thus it must remain unwanted as well as unreal."

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was."

"When you try to bring TRUTH to illusions, you are trying to MAKE THEM REAL, and KEEP them by JUSTIFYING your belief in them. But to give illusions to Truth is to enable truth to teach that the ILLUSIONS are unreal, and thus enable you to ESCAPE from them."

"Love is not special. If you single out PART of the Sonship for your love, you are imposing guilt on ALL your relationships, and MAKING them unreal."

"God would not have His Son embattled, and so His Son's imagined "enemy," which he made, is TOTALLY unreal. You are but trying to escape a bitter war from which you HAVE escaped. The war is gone."

"Nothing destructive ever was, or will be. The war, the guilt, the past, are gone as one, into the unreality from whence they came."

"Forgiveness that is learned of ME does not use fear to UNDO fear. Nor does it make real the UNreal, and then destroy it."

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your minds AT ALL, or you will also believe that you must UNDO what you have made, in order to BE forgiven. What has no effect does not exist, and to the Holy Spirit, the effects of error are TOTALLY non-existent."

"Include all of the ego-based attributes which you ascribe to yourself, positive or negative, desirable or undesirable, grandiose or debased. All of them are equally unreal because you do not look upon yourself through the eyes of holiness."

"But you have not left open and unoccupied the altar where the gift belongs. Where THEY should be, YOU have set up your idols to something ELSE. This OTHER will, which seems to TELL you what must happen, you GAVE reality. And what would SHOW you otherwise must therefore seem unreal."

"Faith in the UNreal leads to ADJUSTMENTS of reality, to make it fit the goal of madness. The goal of sin induces the perception of a fearful world, to JUSTIFY its purpose. What you desire, you WILL see. And if its reality is false, you will UPHOLD it by NOT realizing all the adjustments YOU have introduced, to MAKE it so."

"But they have names which differ for a time, for time needs symbols, being itself unreal."

"Yet when peace is found, the war is meaningless. And it is conflict now that is perceived as non-existent and unreal."

"You can see yourselves as separated FROM your meaning only by EXPERIENCING YOURSELF AS UNREAL. This is WHY the ego is insane; it teaches that you are NOT what you ARE. This is so contradictory that it is clearly impossible."

"Because God's equal Sons have everything, they CANNOT compete. But if they perceive ANY of their brothers as anything OTHER than their perfect equals, the IDEA of competition HAS entered their minds. Do not underestimate your need to be vigilant AGAINST this idea, because ALL your conflicts come FROM it. It IS the belief that conflicting interests are possible, and therefore means that you have accepted the IMpossible as true. How is that different from saying that you are perceiving YOURSELF as unreal?"

"Is it harder to dispel the belief of the insane in a larger hallucination as opposed to a smaller one? Will he agree more quickly to the unreality of a louder voice he hears than to that of a softer one? Will he dismiss more easily a whispered demand to kill than a shout? And do the number of pitchforks the devils he sees carrying affect their credibility in his perception? His mind has categorized them as real, and so they are real to him. When he realizes they are all illusions they will disappear."

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

"You cannot make the UNreal because the ABSENCE of reality is fearful, and fear cannot BE created. As long as you believe that fear is possible, YOU WILL NOT CREATE. Opposing orders of reality MAKE REALITY MEANINGLESS, and reality is MEANING."

"You cannot DISTORT reality and KNOW WHAT IT IS. And if you DO distort reality you will experience anxiety, depression, and ultimately panic, because you are trying to MAKE YOURSELF UNREAL."

"When you see a brother as a body, you are condemning him BECAUSE you have condemned yourself. But if ALL condemnation is unreal, and it MUST be unreal because it is a form of attack, then it can HAVE no results."

"The self you made is not the Son of God. Therefore this self does not exist at all. And anything it seems to do and think means nothing. It is neither bad nor good. It is unreal, and nothing more than that."

"Pleasure and pain are EQUALLY unreal, because their purpose CANNOT be achieved. Thus are they means for nothing, for they have a goal without a meaning. And they share the lack of meaning that their PURPOSE has."

"He will, in fact, be unable to recognize his brother at all, for his Father did not create bodies, and so he is seeing in a brother only the unreal."

"There is nothing to prevent you from recognizing ALL calls for help as exactly what they are, EXCEPT YOUR OWN PERCEIVED NEED TO ATTACK. It is only THIS that makes you willing to engage in endless "battles" with reality, in which you DENY the reality of the need for healing by making IT unreal."

"Salvation is a paradox indeed! What could it be EXCEPT a happy dream? For you are asked but to forgive all things that no-one ever did; to overlook what is not there; and not to look upon the unreal as reality."

"Such is the ONLY rule for happy dreams. The gap is emptied of the toys of fear, and then its unreality is plain. Dreams are for nothing. And the Son of God CAN have no need of them."

"For you have believed that you can injure, and the right you have established for yourself can be now used against you, 'til you lay it down as valueless, unwanted and unreal."

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal? Could you have FAITH in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? AND WOULD YOU SEE IT? Hallucinations disappear when they are RECOGNIZED for what they are. This IS the healing and the remedy."

"The special relationship is your DETERMINATION to keep your hold on unreality, and to PREVENT yourself from waking." "It is not strange that dreams can make a world that is unreal. The WISH to make it IS incredible."

"How can faith in reality be yours, while you are bent on making it UNreal? And are you REALLY safer in maintaining the UNreality of what has happened, than you would be in joyously accepting it FOR WHAT IT IS, and giving thanks for it?"

"Nor could one mind think only for itself, unless the body WERE the mind. For ONLY bodies can be separate, and therefore UNREAL. The home of madness CANNOT be the home of reason. Yet it is easy to LEAVE the home of madness, if you see reason."

"We said before that, to limit love to PART of the Sonship, is to bring guilt into your relationships, and thus MAKE THEM UNREAL."

"It does not really matter, in the end, whether you judge right or wrong. Either way, you are placing your belief in the unreal. This cannot be avoided in any type of judgment, because it IMPLIES the belief that reality is yours to choose FROM."

"Only the timeless must remain unchanged. But everything in time can CHANGE with time. Yet, if the change be real and not IMAGINED, illusions MUST give way to truth, and not to other dreams which are but equally unreal."

"To you who still believe you live in time, and know not it is gone, the Holy Spirit still guides you through the infinitely small and senseless maze you still perceive in time, though it has long since gone. You think you live in what is past. Each thing you look upon you saw but for an instant, long ago, before its unreality gave way to truth. Not one illusion still remains unanswered in your mind."

"And everything that points the way in the direction of the past but sets you on a mission whose accomplishment can ONLY be unreal."

"Every step taken in the making, the maintaining, and the breaking off of the unholy relationship, is a move toward further fragmentation and unreality."

"YOU have made the relationship unreal, and THEREFORE unholy, by seeing it WHERE it is not, and as it IS not. Give the past to Him Who can change YOUR mind about it, FOR you."

"The search for truth is but the honest searching out of everything that INTERFERES with truth. TRUTH IS. And can be neither lost, nor sought, nor found. It is there, wherever YOU are, being WITHIN you. But it CAN be recognized or unrecognized, real or false, to YOU. If you hide it, it becomes unreal to you, BECAUSE you hid it, and SURROUNDED IT WITH FEAR."

"The decision whether or not to listen to this course and follow it, is but the choice between truth and illusion. For here IS truth, SEPARATED from illusion, and NOT confused with it at all. How simple does this choice become when it is perceived as only what it is. For ONLY fantasies made confusion in choosing possible, and they are totally UNreal. "

"The miracle dissolves error because the Spiritual eye identifies error as false or unreal. This is the same as saying that by seeing light, darkness automatically disappears."

"Fantasies are distorted forms of thinking, because they always involve twisting perception into unreality. Fantasy is a debased form of vision."

"But Christ-control takes no account at all of the MAGNITUDE of the miracle itself, because the concept of size exists only in a plane that is itself unreal. Since the miracle aims at RESTORING reality, it would hardly be useful if it were bound by the laws of the same error it aims to correct."

You'll often hear talk of how "my ego this" and how "the ego" that. A lot of clout and blame is pinned on "the ego" now. It's used to describe all kinds of stuff in the world and in life.

People have even turned it into a kind of enemy that they fight with and blame and try to accuse for doing stuff. The label is thrown around like there actually is an ego, and then you'll hear explanations for why it doesn't "really" exist except in a dream.

There are widely common interpretations that Jesus is describing "the ego" in the course and therefore "the ego" is a thing or an entity or a something, that is responsible for some bad stuff. And this sets up a whole premise of being at war with it.

This is all confusion. Jesus is NOT trying to suggest that the ego exists AT ALL, not even fictionally in a dream. So let's put aside any belief that there is such a thing as "the ego", and we'll start from scratch.

God's world, heaven, reality, has various qualities, characteristics, properties etc. It has a nature. For example it's immortal, alive, permanent, perfect, whole, innocent, etc.

"Ego", is nothing more than, a CONCEPT OF, the "opposite to all that is".

Someone had a thought in their mind, like, "What if the opposite to God's Kingdom is true?" And so began the tiny mad idea.

This is ENTIRELY conceptual. It's someone sitting there just wondering, imagining, theorizing. Asking themselves, "what is the opposite of all this?" Or indeed, "what if I OPPOSE all of this?"

We simply tried to use our free will to oppose free will, or to "create" (will) that there be an outcome OPPOSITE to what God wills. A "mis-creation" or a "mis-use" of will. That is all.

This was a silly idea, ridiculous in fact. To try to use will, to make yourself NOT will, is obviously circular logic and makes no sense. It's impossible to will to be unwilling. But this is what you tried to do. You tried to put your will to sleep, to disempower your creative powers, and to strip yourself of what you are. To oppose yourself.

So ego is just this idea of opposition. What would it be like if there was an opposite to everything real? The opposite to life would be death. The opposite to permanence would be impermanence. The opposite to happiness would be unhappiness. The opposite to existence would be non-existence (death).

Now it's important to also put BELIEF on hold because I'm not even talking about BELIEVING IN this concept yet. At this point we're happily sitting in heaven just theorizing. Asking a question. "What?" Questioning everything, which is an attempt to oppose it.

What you come up with conceptually is, the idea of "non-existent impossibility." This non-existence, by definition, DOES NOT EXIST. It's not some real place you can go and visit. You can't live there. You cannot be its nature. It's ENTIRELY theoretical. Non-existence DOES NOT EXIST. It's the idea of being OUTSIDE of and completely SEPARATE from, existence. And existence is God.

So we started out with just a conceptual notion, an idea of an opposite to God's nature. An idea of NOT existing. And fundamentally we could never actually DO that. We could not LEAVE God and go where God is not. We couldn't get outside of God to go to that "non-existent" place. It's impossible. Literally totally impossible.

For example God is infinite and is everywhere. So you cannot go be somewhere and expect him not to be there also. Everywhere you go, God is there. He is omnipresent. So this idea is an idea of, what if you could go and be somewhere that God is not? Which is obviously a totally ridiculous idea, and no sane person would give two seconds of thought before laughing at being outside of infinite unlimited boundaryless reality.

So first we came up with this theoretical notion of "an opposite to what is". This was prior to believing in it. And at this point we were still sane. What made it a MAD idea, or turned us mad, was that we then attempted to CLAIM or assert, that you actually CAN go where God is not, you actually CAN be opposite to his nature, you actually CAN be unwilling.

You BELIEVED IN IT by denying its obvious impossibility, thus making you unable to RECOGNIZE it for what it is, and thus losing sight of the fact that it IS impossible. You became confused and lost.

This obviously was a form of denial and confusion and being totally mistaken. The logic shows that its impossible, but you insisted anyway. To insist that something is possible that is patently impossible, is essentially "nuts". BELIEVING IT in spite of its ridiculousness, became the only problem.

It was only when you forgot to laugh at the ridiculous notion of not existing, that you took it seriously. And you became deceived, tempted, and you "fell" into delusions, denial, hallucination, confusion, mistakenness, and all manner of fantasy nightmares. You lost track of WHAT IS TRUE AND REAL, and so went insane.

What were you trying to do? You were trying to MAKE non-existence be TRUE of you. Whatever you believe is true of you, you regard as your IDENTITY. Your truth describes you, defines you, establishes WHAT you are. And originally this was God's truth about you. But now you were attempting to assert that some OPPOSITE truth was true of you. And so your sense of WHAT I AM, your identity, became CONFUSED WITH, or caught up in, identified WITH or "matching" this notion of being opposite to what you are.

You did not actually make an ego as such. You did not accomplish the making of a non-existent self, because it is impossible. You did not ACTUALLY get outside of God's existence. You did not reach non-existence. You did not cease to exist. BUT, you BELIEVED YOU COULD. And so you DREAMED OF "the ego". A dream of the ego concept is NOT the same thing as ACTUALLY being it or bringing it into existence.

So when you believe that "the ego concept" (impossible non-existence) is POSSIBLE, your sense of IDENTITY shifts to align with it, to reflect it, to mirror it. You try to BE LIKE it. To be one with it. To merge with it and make it true of you, thus redefining your whole sense of what you are. And so by putting belief in "opposites to reality", your sense of WHAT IS TRUE changed, and thus your sense of WHO I AM changed.

Your sense of identity shifted from your soul, to an IMAGINED idea of what ego might be like. This did not actually make "the ego". You never created a "real ego". You just BELIEVE what is BEYOND your dream on the other side of oblivion. You believed in not existing. You believed in impossibilities. You believed in being opposite to what you are. That is all.

So there is no EGO doing anything whatsoever. There is no EGO taking responsibility for making ANYTHING happen. There is no ego to pin stuff on. There is no ego to say "the ego did this". There is no ego PERIOD. So every time there's someone teaching that "acim says" there is an ego, they are mistaken.

NON EXISTENCE DOES NOT EXIST. THE EGO DOES NOT EXIST.

Not even in dreaming do you go there. Not even in your wildest fantasies can you ever CREATE an ego. You never have. All you've done is TRIED to exchange God's reality for UNREALITY. Which means, taking everything true about God and trying to make it false. And taking everything untrue about God and trying to make it true. This results in CONFUSION (insanity) and that is all.

If you believe something is possible which isn't, you are not sane. If you believe you are IN the non-existent realm outside of God, you are insane. If you think you DID become separate and thus are OUTSIDE God, you are insane. But that IS what you believe, and that BELIEF is the tiny mad idea. The notion that the ego concept is OPPOSITE to what the ego concept IS.

Earth is just a neutral fantasy ABOUT non-existent realms, an attempt to REFLECT hell/ego/impossibility, as an "image" in the mind IMAGINING what having no imagination is like. Thinking about what having NO thought is like. Being unwilling to will anything real.

Let's put this another way. If the ego concept is non-existence, impossibility, death, nowhere-ness, lovelessness, emptiness, etc... in your BELIEF in it, you have tried to assign it the attributes of heaven, reality, truth, and God. You've tried to BRING IT TO LIFE. You've tried to turn hell into heaven, you've tried to claim that non-existence exists, you've tried to assert that immortality can be killed, etc. You've produced an entire hallucinated world based on this attempt to oppose life and make NOT LIFE appear to "live."

The body is nothing. The world is nothing. But in our BELIEVING (spacetime), we have TRIED to make it APPEAR AS IF bodies live, worlds evolve, there are "life forms" etc. it is NOT LIFE. It is an illusion. it is nothingness pretending to be something.

"There is no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. At best it seems like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions are but forms. Their content is never true."

So there literally is no ego. We need to stop blaming "the ego" for stuff. EGO IS NON-EXISTENCE. It does not exist even in dreaming. There is no ego anywhere. Evil is not real. An absolute opposite to everything does not exist.

"What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

"By steadily and consistently cancelling out ALL its effects, EVERYWHERE AND IN ALL RESPECTS, He teaches that the ego does not exist, and PROVES IT."

So what does happen? What does happen is OUR MIND keeps on trying to turn itself into "the ego". It keeps trying to get CLOSER TO the CONCEPTUAL idea of "being ego", which is non-existence and impossibility and total limitation and death and a void and emptiness and lack and darkness and lovelessness. We keep trying to BECOME it, as if reaching through the outskirts of God's being to another world. But we can't. And we NEVER will. So it's all wasted effort. We might as well just accept the truth.

This is why the secret of salvation tells us that we MUST recognize that WE are doing this ALL to ourselves. Not the ego, not the world, it's us. We do the shit, we must undo it. It is NOT the ego, ever. It's part of our own mind running rogue and opposing the rest of our mind. It's us TRYING TO BE opposite. Working against ourselves. We are the dreamer. Miracles reflect the idea that it's this thing I have done and it is this I would undo. ME. My mind. Not "the ego".

You cannot give your power to the ego either. EVER. All you can do is BELIEVE that you are giving your power to "it". And thus YOUR MIND now goes into a distortion, against ITSELF, pretending to be opposed, pretending to BECOME an ego, and acts ego-LIKE, and now you blame "the ego" for stuff, but its PART OF YOU doing stuff to yourself. So now you are disassociated and projecting and trying to make your ideas leave your mind. That is all. Take responsibility for that. Never blame ego for anything. It does not exist whatsoever.

And when I say that I don't even mean, ok, this is a dream, so ego doesn't REALLY exist, cus none of this really happened, but it seems to, and so in the dream it does exist. IT DOES NOT. Ego doesn't even exist IN the dream. It's ENTIRELY just a theoretical concept and label for "absolute opposition". It's BEYOND God completely and even this dream is not THERE. It not here, it's not anywhere, and you can never make contact with it. This is why the Holy Spirit and "the ego" never communicate.

If you could actually leave God completely, and go to where existence is NOT, you've meet "the ego". But you can't and you never will. And all your dream life is about is imagining that you ARE or HAVE or CAN, when you AREN'T and HAVEN'T and CANNOT. It's wishful thinking at best. Ego is nothing but a theory. Which is why when it's gone, it's recognized as nothing.

Replace "the ego" with "I". Your mind is either whole or split. There is nothing else.

"The ego's opposite in every way, in origin, effect and consequence, we call a miracle. And here we find all that is not the ego in this world. Here is the ego's opposite and here alone we look on what the ego was, for here we see all that it seemed to do, and cause and its effects must still be one.

Where there was darkness now we see the light. What is the ego? What the darkness was. Where is the ego? Where the darkness was. What is it now and where can it be found? Nothing and nowhere. Now the light has come: Its opposite has gone without a trace. Where evil was there now is holiness. What is the ego? What the evil was. Where is the ego? In an evil dream that but seemed real while you were dreaming it. Where there was crucifixion stands God's Son. What is the ego? Who has need to ask? Where is the ego? Who has need to seek for an illusion now that dreams are gone?"

Judgment is a fairly large topic in ACIM. The course teaches us to basically "not judge". But that's not the whole story. Judgement can relate to evaluating the meaning of something, but also can in its lower forms mean condemnation. It can devolve into hate and attack and sin, or it can elevate to true justice and forgiveness.

Judgment is tied into perception, which "selects and evaluates" the meaning of things. And because it's based on perception, it is uncertain and unstable. That is, until it is stabilized by the Holy Spirit.

He has correct judgement because he, in part, has perception, but he also has knowledge. You have to know EVERYTHING in order to correctly discern what anything is. It thus requires vision, based on knowledge. He is the only one who can judge correctly, until you can learn to share his judgement in place of the ego's judgment. The ego always judges harshly, producing what we call "condemnation" or "being judgmental."

This is because the ego does not know anything, and is always wrong. Its judgements are always harsh and attacking, accusing everything of sin and guilt. It cannot recognize the "true" judgements of the Holy Spirit, and so its judgements produce false perceptions.

If you let the Holy Spirit judge for you, and then you match, accept or align with his judgement, your own judgement will line up with his and be accurate. If you try to judge on your own, and given you lack knowledge, most of the time you will judge with the ego and make false judgements. These judgements will be attacks and they will hurt yourself.

As you learn to let your judgement rest upon the Holy Spirit's judgement, your own judgement aligns with the truth, causing your perception to become "true". You judge with the ego less and trust the Holy Spirit to judge for you. Eventually your own judgement becomes "as true" and equal to his, shared with him.

Only when your judgement is perfected, and your perception aligned with knowledge, are you in a position to judge correctly without ego. This is an advanced state.

Jesus doesn't entirely write off all judgement. He does want us to stop using our ego to judge, and to instead depend on the Holy Spirit to judge for us until we are better able to judge with him correctly and share his judgement. His judgements are not condemning, they are healing and forgiving.

Thus to him, true judgement or "the final judgement" is a way of evaluating everything as forgiven and innocent, in which judgement becomes "non-judgmental." In this way, the attacking judgementalism of the ego becomes repurposed and is used to cancel itself out. By using judgment to not attack, the need for judging at all is undone, and so the need for perception ends.

Ultimately, by using the Holy Spirit's nonjudgmental judgement, we escape from the world. The world was made BY judging, ie as an attack on God, as a condemnation of his son. The ego aligned with the world's nature (both based on separation) and judged the world harshly.

The Holy Spirit judges the world fairly and without condemning it. You thus escape from the world by not playing the world's game of condemnation and attack (which is also sin). By not attacking what is rooted in attack, by not judging those who condemn, by seeing sinners as innocent, judgement is repurposed as a way to evaluate that the judgmental attack-world is forgiven. Thus is our investment in its nature undone, and the world is gone with it.

When judgement is perfected, ie shared with and in agreement with the Holy Spirit, ego and the body and the world disappear. Perception ends and we return to a state of knowledge, waking up in the reality of the Kingdom. In the Kingdom there is no condemnation and no sin and no ego, and no need to judge or evaluate the meaning of anything. Everything there is inherently meaningful and means everything, which thus gives way to cognition and knowledge.

This all boils down to:

1) Do not condemn (hate, attack, sin, make guilty, attack-thoughts, grievances etc).

2) Do not evaluate anything on your own, recognizing you cannot (let Holy Spirit judge through you - extend his judgement).

"The intrusion of the ability to perceive, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the Separation. No one has been sure of anything since then."

"Can this be judgment? You have often been urged to refrain from judging, not because it is a right to be withheld from you. You cannot judge. You merely can believe the ego's judgments, all of which are false. It guides your senses carefully, to prove how weak you are; how helpless and afraid, how apprehensive of just punishment, how black with sin, how wretched in your guilt."

"No-one who loves can judge, and what he sees is FREE of condemnation."

"How can His Son AWAKEN from the dream? It is a dream of judgment. So must he judge NOT, and he WILL waken. For the dream will seem to last while he is PART of it. Judge not, for he who judges WILL have need of idols, which will hold the judgment off from resting on himself. Nor CAN he know the Self he has condemned. Judge not, because you make yourself a PART of evil dreams, where idols are your "true" identity, and your salvation from the judgment laid, in terror and in guilt, upon yourself."

"Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearance that it likes. It merely looks and waits and judges not. He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. But he who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it is."

"When the Bible says "Judge not that ye be not judged" it merely means that if you judge the reality of others at all, you will be unable to avoid judging your own. The choice to judge rather than know has been the cause of the loss of peace. Judgment is the process on which perception but not cognition rests."

"Yet will his perfect sinlessness RELEASE you both, for holiness is quite impartial, with one judgment made for all it looks upon. And that is made, not of itself, but through the Voice that speaks for God in everything that lives, and shares His Being."

"We will receive but what is given us from Judgment made beyond the world."

"Judge not, for you but judge yourself and thus delay this final judgment. What is your judgment on the world, teacher of God? Have you yet learned to stand aside and hear the Voice of Judgment in yourself? Or do you still attempt to take His role from Him? Learn to be quiet, for His Voice is heard in stillness. And His Judgment comes to all who stand aside in quiet listening, and wait for Him."

"How CAN specialness be just? Judge not because you cannot, NOT because you are a miserable sinner too."

"We cannot judge ourselves, nor need we do so. These are but attempts to hold decision off, and to delay commitment to our function. It is not our part to judge our worth, nor can we know what role is best for us; what we can do within a larger plan we cannot see in its entirety."

"Love cannot judge. As it is one itself, it looks on all as one."

"The Savior's vision is as innocent of what your brother is as it is free of any judgment made upon yourself. It sees no past in anyone at all. And thus it serves a wholly open mind, unclouded by old concepts and prepared to look on ONLY what the present holds. It cannot judge because it does not know. And RECOGNIZING this, it merely asks, "What is the meaning of what I behold?" Then is the Answer given, and the door held open for the Face of Christ to shine upon the one who asks in innocence to see BEYOND the veil of old ideas and ancient concepts held so long and dear AGAINST the vision of the Christ in you."

"Father, we wait with open mind today, to hear Your Judgment of the Son You love. We do not know him, and we cannot judge. And so we let Your Love decide what he whom You created as Your Son must be."

"Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me. Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction. Teach me how NOT to make of it an OBSTACLE to peace, but let You use it FOR me, to FACILITATE its coming."

"Good judgment" in these terms, does not mean anything. No more does "bad." It is necessary for the teacher of God to realize not that he should not judge, but that he cannot. In giving up judgment he merely gives up what he did not have. He gives up an illusion; or better, he has an illusion of giving up. He has actually merely become more honest. Recognizing that judgment was always impossible for him, he no longer attempts it. This is no sacrifice. On the contrary, he puts himself in a position where judgment through him rather than by him can occur. And this Judgment is neither "good" nor "bad." It is the only Judgment there is, and it is only one: "God's Son is guiltless, and sin does not exist."

"Remember how many times you thought you knew all the "facts" you needed for judgment, and how wrong you were! Is there anyone who has not had this experience? Would you know how many times you merely thought you were right, without ever realizing you were wrong? Why would you choose such an arbitrary basis for decision-making? Wisdom is not judgment; it is the relinquishment of judgment. Make then but one more judgment. It is this; there is Someone with you Whose judgment is perfect. He does know all the facts, past, present and to come. He does know all the effects of His judgment on everyone and everything involved in any way. And He is wholly fair to everyone, for there is no distortion in His perception."

"No-one can escape God's final judgment. Who could flee forever from the truth? But the final judgment will not come until it is no longer associated with fear."

"The final judgment on the world contains no condemnation. For it sees the world as totally forgiven, without sin, and wholly purposeless. Without a cause, and now without a function in Christ's sight, it merely slips away to nothingness. There it was born, and there it ends as well. And all the figures in the dream in which the world began go with it. Bodies now are useless, and will therefore fade away, because the Son of God is limitless."

"The aim of the Final Judgment is to RESTORE Right-Mindedness TO man. The Final Judgment might be called a process of Right-evaluation. It simply means that finally all men must come to understand what is worthy and what is not."

"Nothing the Son of God believes can be destroyed. But what is truth to him must be brought to the last comparison that he will ever make; the last evaluation that will be possible, the final judgment upon this world. It is the judgment of the truth upon illusion, of knowledge on perception; IT HAS NO MEANING AND DOES NOT EXIST. This is NOT your decision. It is but a simple statement of a simple fact."

As humans with egos, we are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as "separate people." This is because of the ego. We have identified "self" with an individual body, and not the bodies of others, and thus perceive that we are ISOLATED and SEPARATE.

It is from that perspective of being an isolated, cut-off, separated being, that we interpret what ACIM seems to be saying about your perception, your mind, exactly what is inside your mind and what seems not to be. This has led to a great deal of misunderstanding of Jesus's teachings about perception and correction because it's all being viewed FROM a state of EGO.

"What is the Body? The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built, to separate parts of his Self from other parts. It is within this fence he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love. Identifying with his safety, he regards himself as what his safety is."

You have to recognize that the Sonship, which contains all souls God created, are not just a sum total of many individuals. It's not simply "7 billion humans" all lined up next to each other. There is an essential part to the nature of God's holographic creation, which is SHARING.

The minds of each Son, WHEN in His right mind, is very much shared with other minds. Or let's say, "open to" or "joined with" or "connected to". Each Son is one PART of the holographic creation of God, and each PART contains the WHOLE. So while each Son seems to be an individual, and there are many individuals in Heaven, each individual is ALSO a "container" or medium through which the WHOLE also expresses. It's like being plugged into God.

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

"The mind that taught itself to think specifically can no longer grasp abstraction in the sense that it is all-encompassing."

The ONLY parts of this that turns into the ego, is when you unplug yourself from God, unplug yourself from the collective shared mindset, disconnect yourself from the Sonship, and see yourself as ISOLATED.

See, people think that you cannot be an individual and be in Heaven or that individuality is ego. This is because, as a starting point, they think that the individual is "separate" from others, and that this separation is therefore ego. But this is starting from a false premise. In God, the natural state of things is that everyone SHARES and is JOINED WITH everyone else, is open to them and shares and extends love with them. It is the reduction of the SHARING which brings about the ego, NOT their individuality. You could say, ego makes a person "more individual", it does not establish their individuality.

So if you can picture a soul in its natural state, it is an individual BUT IT IS ALSO sharing all of itself with the WHOLE of all creation, the entire sonship, and all of God. It is a part, but totally joined to the whole. And there are many parts, joined to the whole. As though everyone is sharing a collective experience, which is what we call oneness. But this oneness or sharing does not obliterate the wholeness of each individual soul.

It is ONLY when a soul unplugs itself from the whole, stops sharing God's mind, stops being one with the sonship, and "withdraws itself" from the collective, that it becomes ISOLATED. It seems isolated now because it seems cut off and separated off and DISCONNECTED from the whole. This state of isolation requires "walls" to be erected around the individual. Or to put it another way, we stop sharing with others and recoil into a defensive position of suspicion and conflict instead of lovingly embracing others. These are not walls which define the individuality ITSELF. They are walls which BLOCK SHARING. As if putting a blindfold on someone, or preventing them from ever touching anyone else.

These artificial "blocks to awareness" ARE the ego. They are what keep you CUT OFF from others, versus being JOINED WITH others. These walls are NOT what make you an individual. Your individuality is a state of being individual AND JOINED. What makes you an ego is ceasing to be joined, so that ONLY your individuality remains, as though you are now orphaned or blocked from sharing anything with the collective. It is an attempt to leave the Sonship and go off on your own.

The result of this isolation is that you end up seeming to STILL be an individual, but without a sense of being connected to the whole. Since it is normal and natural to be joined with the whole, when you are NOT joined with the whole there must be some kind of BLOCK in the way which is "separating you off", rather than allowing you to join. Joining DOES NOT UNDO YOUR INDIVIDUALITY. It SHARES IT. This makes total sense in a holographic model of heaven but not the ego's thinking.

Now, you as a "human" in "a body", this is an idea of you being separated off. As though in prison, or not allowed to share with anyone. Isolated, alone, separate, unable to join. That is what makes for an EGO. The ego is the idea of being separated from unity, but the ego is NOT the idea of having an individuality. Individuality actually is an OPENNESS TO LOVE, like a loving individual, whereas ego is an unloving individual. You can still be individual and love your family, or you can be an individual and hate your family. The hate is the ego, not the self, but the hate forms a FICTIONAL IDENTITY which you overlay on top of yourself. That fake self is a SUBSTITUTE for your real individuality, not the antithesis of existing as a self.

So you then think, ok, I am one of many separated humans in one human body. What's inside my body seems to be me. I've become separated from all others BY my body, and whatever is outside my body is not me. So that leads you to perceive, that you have a "personal mind", which is your own separate mind. You actually DO have an individual mind which God created, but it is not supposed to be isolated. It is kept in a box when it is kept inside the walls of the body. The body is a device for LIMITATION.

So you get used to this. And then you think to yourself, ok, here is A Course in Miracles, it's talking about "my perception", so it must be talking about what is INSIDE MY BOX, within my limited mind. And therefore, I need to change my limited isolated mind, my personal perception, in order to change my personal hell, and accept a personal atonement just for myself. No. That's not what the Course is telling you.

The Course completely acknowledges in fact that you SHARE illusions with other people just as much as that you have a personal set of illusions trapped in your own little box. It teaches that the content of this "world", physical objects, wars, bodies, death, sickness, lack, conflict, murder, etc, IS PART OF the illusions which are taking place in a JOINT ENDEAVOR of wrongful thinking, on the part of many many individual souls who COLLECTIVELY are DREAMING this entire universe.

So what appears to be just your personal mind, or your personal thoughts, or your personal ego illusions, which you are working on, and which the course DOES tell you to correct and heal.... that is only PART OF YOUR PERCEPTION. That is only part of your MIND. Because your mind, in its natural state, is not just that which is "isolated" within yourself like a separate cut off mind. You are not supposed to be applying the course ONLY to the part of mind which you've sectioned off and called your own.

The purpose of the course is to remove the LIMITS you placed on your mind, to undo the BLOCKS TO AWARENESS OF LOVE (awareness of the whole) which you placed on your mind, and to lift away the artificial barriers which made you think your mind was "separated off" in the first place. That means, that your mind is actually not JUST your personal private hell within your "little self". Your mind is ALSO OUT THERE, very large, very powerful, very spacious, SHARED WITH and joined with all other minds.

This is because you as part of the Sonship which God created, are not just a separate individual in a box. You RADIATE LIGHT AND LOVE outside of yourself, you extend love, and you SHARE LOVE AND MIND with all other minds. So that means, that "your perceptions" are not just limited to your boxed-in perceptions. Your perceptions ALSO INCLUDE perceptions being had by the parts of your mind which are more WHOLE, and the parts of your mind which are SHARING with other minds.

That then means, you have to look at what it is that the COLLECTIVE SONSHIP is dreaming, what the WHOLE is imagining, and recognize that this entire physical universe is actually an IDEA OF SEPARATION, within the SHARED MIND of the Sonship. And your mind IS PART OF THAT. So that means your mind also encompasses this entire universe, your mind is part of that which is dreaming this entire universe, all of the physical objects in this universe are IMAGES IN YOUR MIND, this entire world IS PART OF YOUR PERCEPTION, and the forms which are showing up are actually THOUGHTS AND IDEAS that you are having. Not just you, but many souls, collectively contributing to this mass visualization of hell.

So as you remember, ok, you are not a boxed-in separated mind, you are a JOINED connected mind, which is SHARING mind and will with the whole sonship, you are FAR LARGER than this universe and everything taking place in it even on what SEEMS LIKE a physical level,is actually happening WITHIN YOUR MIND - within all our minds. Not all illusions are totally "cut off and isolated" inside your head. There are illusions outside your head also. And even your head is an illusion. Your body is a separation device to make it seem like your mind is not part of the mind that's dreaming the world.

So if you think, ok, all I need to do is fix my own personal mind and claim atonement for myself, you are falling short. You're forgetting that you are an aspect of something much larger. And because PART OF the process of correction IS to do with correcting "your thoughts" and "your perceptions" and "your beliefs", you can find many many parts of the Course which support doing that. But if it's considered to be entirely within a context of "my separate self", you are missing additional parts of the picture.

You are MORE THAN the separate isolated self that you have come to think of as you. You are MORE THAN the self which thinks "about" this world as though it exists without your doing. You are MORE THAN the self that perceives itself to be so isolated and separated by its body, from what is "out there", that it thinks its mind is not even out there at all and is entirely housed within a box.

You are MORE THAN a perceiver OF forms which show up out there as if by magic. Who put them there? Who made bodies appear? Who invented planet Earth? YOU DID, along with many others, in a collective shared idea. Jesus says even ideas of separation have to be SHARED otherwise they cannot be ideas at all.

Separation is not just something you did alone, and it is not something that you will just undo alone. The acceptance of the atonement is NOT JUST FOR YOU. That is the selfish ego making itself special and trying to keep your mind from sharing itself with other minds. Your responsibility is to accept the atonement for yourself BUT ALSO SO THAT you accept it for others so that you can help them join you. It is not a selfish act. It merely means you must accept atonement so that you can GIVE IT because you are PART OF THE PLAN of atonement and need to become a miracle worker so that you can HELP OTHERS. This is spelled out in several quotes, like those below:

"The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself. This means you recognize that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors are healed by the Atonement. Once you accept this, your mind can only HEAL (others). By denying your mind any destructive potential and reinstating its purely constructive powers, you place yourself in a position to undo the level confusion of OTHERS."

"The unforgiven have no mercy to bestow upon another. That is why your sole responsibility must be to take forgiveness for yourself. The miracle that you receive [into your own mind], you give [to others]."

"This is what is really meant by the statement that the one responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself. The teacher of God is a miracle worker because he gives the gifts he has received. Yet he must first accept them."

"When you have been restored to the recognition of your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself. 6 As you share my unwillingness to accept error in yourself and others, you must join the great crusade to correct it; listen to my voice, learn to undo error and act to correct it. 7 The power to work miracles belongs to you."

"The forgiven are the means of the Atonement. 2 Being filled with spirit, they forgive in return. 3 Those who are released must join in releasing their brothers, for this is the plan of the Atonement. 4 Miracles are the way in which minds that serve the Holy Spirit unite with me for the salvation or release of all of God's creations."

So open your mind and eyes to recognize that the course is not a selfish course, it's not about your separate selfish ego doing the course for itself. It's not about maintaining isolation. It's not about you choosing something in isolation which has no effect on anyone else.

It's about you taking up your NATURAL FUNCTION as the light of the world, to share and extend the truth to others through miracles, to learn to give as you receive, to reclaim the role of being part of the WHOLE MIND which dreamed the world, to purify the perception that IS THE WORLD, and to therefore UNDO THE UNIVERSE by recognizing it is an illusion, even in its physicality, because it is nothing but a mistaken idea shared by the Sonship of which you are a PART AND WHOLE. Being "a part" does not mean "being apart".

The world is perception. Forms are ideas and thoughts. Objects are visualizations. Matter is an hallucination. Your mind is dreaming this entire universe along with other minds. The mind that needs correction is far broader than just your isolated little human self, yet it includes your separate self which needs to have its limitations lifted away to realize and recognize that YOU ARE THE WHOLE. You are the ONE SON OF GOD as much as you are ONE OF MANY sons of God.

Reclaiming your IDENTITY as the One Son of God is also part of recognizing your function in the Sonship and the part you play as one of many equal sons. To go from believing you are ONLY a part of God, to realizing you are part of God AND share the whole of God and his creation, is the identity shift that needs to take place. This is not a course in fixing up your ego identity, or making your isolated self happier or more at peace with an external world that you have no power over and no responsibility for and did not put there. This is a course is GOING BEYOND your identity to reconnect with the whole, the oneness, the sharing of love, which is far larger and more encompassing than you think.

Your mind IS responsible for the physical world showing up. It IS responsible for making wars happen. It IS responsible for producing mountains and deserts and forests. It DOES have that power. Not in isolation, but as part of its shared power with the Sonship. This course is not just about you. Nor is it about the ending of your individuality. It is about taking your separated-off individuality and plugging it back into the SHARED MINDS of the Sonship, and also into the collective unity of the One Son which is one with God's mind also.

That means your perception and your perceptual errors INCLUDE the world ITSELF, not just your isolated view OF the world, and not just the content of your individual isolated mind. Bodies were made by the ONE SON of God to separate "Himself" apart and make believe He is many separated parts. The One Son of God includes the Sonship, which ARE PARTS, but also are not separated off like the ego is. Instead they are JOINED NATURALLY and yet divided NATURALLY. Unnatural division is ego, not whether or not you are individual. In-dividual means 'cannot be divided', because it is A WHOLE. And wholeness means SHARING. So any whole must be shared with any other whole, and therefore all individuals must be part of a whole. This is the nature of God's creation.

"The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man (souls/sons) by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind (his own free-will creations).

The latter (the son’s ability to create) required the endowment of man by God with FREE WILL because all loving creation is freely given (God gave us freedom).

Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement (no separation)or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects (each aspect being a son of God with free will) are of the same order."

Also...

"In the service of the right mind the denial of error frees the mind, and re-establishes the FREEDOM OF THE WILL. When the will is really free it cannot miscreate, because it recognizes only truth."

When we have free will, and it’s really free (not under illusion) it creates like God creates, freely, independently. What we will is the same as what God would will. But it is still our free will which wills it. When we enter into illusions, the will becomes NOT free, because entering into separation is a denial of freedom and a denial of will. Therefore the ego does not have free will. The ego is the denial of freedom and will. The ego only has WISHFUL THINKING. And to wish is to not will at all. To have no will at all is to not will to live, which is the choice to die.

Because EACH SON has free will, each son INDEPENDENTLY gets the TOTAL FREEDOM to decide, whether or not to believe the ego and oppose God’s will, or to co-create with God. Blocking will means you are choosing to be against your own will. This creates the split ego mind, within which you have multiple conflicting wills. At the very least two (typically persona and shadow, or conscious and unconscious).

When your mind is split your will is split, and you will be in CONFLICT with yourself. At war with yourself. You will attempt to will one thing with a partial will, and another part of you will attempt to oppose it. Trying to oppose God’s will opposes your own will. This puts you into a tug of war between yourself and yourself. This cancels out the effects of your willing, because each time you will one thing, you also will to stop it and bring about an opposite. This puts a FREEZE on your will, making you POWERLESS, and incapable of willing anything at all. To use your free will against itself renders you impotent and UNWILLING. It also means you no longer will LIFE, and therefore make death as a statement of your unwillingness to live.

The ego has no will. It only has wishful thinking. Death is wishful thinking, because it is impossible to kill God’s son. The secret to salvation tells us we are doing this all to ourselves. That’s because we are the one WILLING against ourselves in a split mind. Willing against God’s will and against our own will produces an alien will which we fight against within ourselves.

When our will is split, we cannot perform miracles. When our will is WHOLE, we are SINGLE MINDED, with a single unified will which does not stop itself from expressing, and a whole mind is a miraculous mind. Miracles express from wholeness. Spit-minded people are anti-miraculous (anti christ). To be miraculous you must use your "whole heart", or whole will, not a partial will. Being "in two minds" (with two wills) means being in fear, and miracles cannot be performed in a spirit of fear. Whole mind has no limits to what it can create because when it wills, it does not oppose its own will, and therefore what it wills MUST be expressed and manifest.

Also since we all have our own FREE WILL, this does not mean we are necessarily contradicting each other. It does not mean we are willing against each other provided we all want the same thing. We are all willing the same thing. We all will to expand and create and share love and joy. It is ONLY when free will is used against ITSELF and against God, that we attack ourselves and go into a state of a split mind, where our will ceases to produce real effects.

This produces a private world of dreaming in which our will is divided and fragmented, along with our identity. We then seem to have a "separated will" which is attempting to implement the authority problem. It is an improper use of will. It is an attempt to will something that God would not will, a fiction or an idea of loss/lack/attack etc. Willing to "create death", is actually a will to create NOTHING, and so is an attempt not to will anything at all. This is why nothing real can be threatened - no opposing will can truly will anything.

Also because we have free will, this FAR MORE CLEARLY explains the workings of perception. In that, it is our task, each of us individually, to take full responsibility for what we are experiencing. It means as an individual son, *I* am responsible only for what *I* am doing to myself. It is not possible to do anything to other people against their will. It is not possible to be affected by anyone else’s will. Everyone’s will is equally powerful, which is why Jesus can’t force us to wake up. Whatever I am experiencing, I did it to myself.

Having free will means that I am responsible only for the INNER content of my mind, which is my state of self attack and conflict with myself, in which my own will is opposing itself. It also means I am responsible for my own mental and physical health. It also means therefore, because other souls have FREE WILL, the state of their mind and their body is NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY. Nor does the state of their mind or body have ANY POWER to cause me to be UNABLE to choose absolute atonement and awakening for myself as ONE SON in the sonship. Jesus has already proven this. We are not holding him back. If other people were part of his mind "lagging behind" he would not have been able to wake up because we would be holding him in hell "against his will."

No-one has the power to stop you from returning to God. No-one has the power to choose for you. No-one has the power to force you to be awake. No-one has the power to force you to heal. No-one has the power to make you be "not sick" if you want to be sick, and all sickness is the choice of THE INDIVIDUAL FREE WILL to select sickness for themselves. Each individual Son with free will DOES select and create THEIR OWN BODY. Bodies are not created en-masse like some kind of production line by a single "son" - EACH SON materializes their own body and they are responsible for it.

Other people’s sickness is NOT in my mind. The only thing in my mind is my additional layer of projected sin that I ADD to their pre-existing condition. Taking that projected sin OFF of them, which wasn’t even ON them to begin with because ideas do not leave my own mind, WILL NOT heal them. All it will do is it will allow me to PERCEIVE CORRECTLY and clearly, recognizing that THEY STILL are insisting, by their own free will, that THEY want to make themselves suffer. They also have to be willing, idependantly, to want to receive help and healing, otherwise there is nothing we can do. This is why every part of the sonship has to become WILLING to return to sanity on their own.

The idea that there is only one son, or no son, or the son is god, or there are not multiple sons, or no-one has free will, or there is only one free will, or the entire content of my perception includes all other people’s un-freely-chosen suffering, or that other people’s sickness is my sickness, or that other people are inside my mind, or that I cannot perceive other people’s free will choices (even the choice to be sick or dead), is ALL BULLSHIT.... derived from a basic fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge that God gave FREE WILL to every single Son/Soul he created, and He created multiple equal sons each of them ABSOLUTELY FREE to choose on their own, AND therefore each is 100% responsible for their own self, mind, choices, consequences, suffering, death, or choice to accept atonement.

Without free will it is impossible to properly explain the functioning of perception or the choice to be sick or how the mind works or what the course means on wide variety of topics. And without acceptance of multiple free wills, everything will just get lumped together into one big soupy MUSH ... which is the equivalent of putting the sonship in a blender.

YOU have free will. YOU are responsible for what you create. YOU are responsible for what you choose. YOU are responsible for what happens to you. YOU are responsible for accepting the atonement for YOURSELF. YOU are responsible for making yourself sick or well. YOU are responsible for extending God’s will or choosing to oppose it. YOU, one of many sons of God with free will, are NOT responsible for the FREE WILL CHOICES of other free-willing Sons of God. And their free will choices have nothing to do with you, nor can they do anything TO you, nor can you do anything TO them against their will.

You are NOT responsible for other people being sick. You are NOT responsible for other people choosing fear. You are NOT responsible for other people staying asleep when you wake up. You are NOT responsible for making others sick or well. You are NOT responsible for putting suffering into the world as though it is part of your own mind, when in fact it put there either by other people’s free will or as a collective decision. You are NOT responsible for fixing other people’s freely chosen suffering. You are NOT responsible for anyone else in any way, OTHER THAN.... to offer a SERVICE to them, by offering them miracles, and becoming open to SHARING WITH THEM.

Since you have free you can give miracles because you temporarily have more, and can give miracles to those who temporarily have less, to fulfill a lack - a lack which another brother HAS, but you DO NOT have. Their lack is NOT your lack. Their lack is NOT part of your mind. God created many sons, many free wills, and MANY MINDS. You must forgive and awaken IN SPITE OF the free will choices of others.

Here are some more statements about our free will which clearly tell us that we have free will as given by God:

"But I trust in You. You Who endowed me with my freedom as Your holy Son will not be lost to me. Your Voice directs me. And the way to You is opening and clear to me at last. Father, my freedom is in You alone. Father, it is my will that I return."

"How wonderful it is to do your will! For that IS freedom. There is nothing else that ever should be called by freedom’s name. Unless you do your will, you are not free. And would God leave His Son without what he has chosen for himself? God but ensured that you would never lose your will, when He gave you His perfect Answer. Hear It now, that you may be reminded of His Love, and learn your will. God would not have His Son made prisoner to what he does not want. He JOINS with you in willing you be free. And to oppose Him is to make a choice against YOURSELF, and choose that YOU be bound."

"Think not He wills to bind you, Who has made you co-creator of the universe along with Him. He would but keep your will forever and forever limitless."

"The world awaits the freedom you will give, when you have recognized that YOU are free. But you will not forgive the world until you have forgiven Him Who gave your will to you. For it is BY your will the world is given freedom. Nor can you be free apart from Him Whose holy Will you share."

(Please note, when this part says you share God’s will, that DOES NOT mean that God takes over your freedom and you have no freedom to will. It means you AGREE with God’s will and extend His will which is the SAME as your will in its character or attitude. You have the same KIND of will that God has. God is free, and so are all of his children.)