"The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and that its content is not true. This is a crucial step in dealing with illusions."

"Nothing at all has happened but that you have put yourself to sleep, and dreamed a dream in which you were an alien to yourself, and but a part of someone ELSE'S dream."

The VITAL thing thing to realize, which is brought to light by the Atonement principle, and seen with true forgiveness, is this.

IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO SIN. You cannot do it in reality. You are literally incapable of changing God. You are literally incapable of making effects in God, stopping His will, changing who you are, corrupting your innocence, becoming sinful or dying. LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE.

You HAVE NOT sinned. You HAVE NOT separated. You cannot leave God. You cannot do anything to change reality whatsoever. God's Kingdom is totally the same as it always has been. His Kingdom cannot be assailed, it is permanent. NOTHING HAS CHANGED. You are 100% incapable of separation or sin or death. This is literally absolutely true. You simply HAVE NOT DONE, what you think you have done, and you ARE NOT doing it now.

So the question remains, what exactly IS this "state" that you are in? If it is impossible to sin or be separate, why does it seem like you are?

Simply, because you cannot ACTUALLY sin or attack reality or kill yourself, you have ONLY IMAGINED that it is possible. And that means, you are simply IN DENIAL, and you have made the ERROR of BELIEVING that you can do what you cannot do, that the impossible is possible, that you have done what you have not done, and you think something unreal is real.

So it's not like, you actually DID separate or sin, and that now you need to undo all that and heal it. You DIDN'T do it. You HAVE NOT produced real consequences. NOTHING REAL HAS HAPPENED AT ALL because nothing real can be threatened. So it has not been threatened. Whatsoever.

All that's "happened" is you've pretended to be ABLE to do what you CANNOT do, pretending to have done what you CANNOT POSSIBLY have done, and now you are "dreaming", literally "wishful thinking", having a fantasy, that you've convinced yourself you actually DID do it. That you are doing it now. That you are PROVING that it is real and possible. But you're not. You're failing to prove it. Reality is unaffected. You are just delusional.

So it's not that you're inside a real separation trying to get out. It's ONLY that you BELIEVE you are, you THINK you are, and you are MISTAKEN in believing and thinking you are, because in truth YOU ARE NOT. You have not done anything real whatsoever. You're just someone who believes they have committed a crime that they HAVE NOT committed. You think you sinned, but you didn't. You think you had a power that you do not have. You think you've CAUSED something REAL to happen against God, but you DID NOT.

LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE.

All you have is a case of BEING MISTAKEN. All you have is a case of having MADE THE ERROR, of believing, that you can and have done something that you shouldn't have done. It's not even that you DID make a real mistake. You just THINK you did.

It's like, a child who does something and they think they broke something, and they become upset and start crying, and hurting themselves, because they feel bad about what they did. And there's the adult trying to reassure them, that what they THINK they did, it totally does not matter, they DIDN'T cause any real harm, nothing has really been affected, and if they will just open their eyes and LOOK, they will SEE that it's TRUE, that NOTHING HAS GONE WRONG.

It's the recognition that everything is STILL AS GOD CREATED IT. Everything is still perfect, holy, whole, innocent, unharmed, safe, protected, undefiled, unattacked, completely happy, and totally healed. Because it's only your MISTAKEN BELIEF that ITS NOT, that needs to be undone. You are just mistaken. Just very deluded and deceived, in believing something is true that isn't. YOU ARE JUST CONFUSED.

What you think you've done, you HAVE NOT DONE. What you think was possible, IS NOT POSSIBLE. You're merely in a state of denial, pretense, trying to convince yourself that you ACTUALLY CAN DO what you cannot do. You're using all kinds of illusory dreams of weapons against yourself and others to TRY to bring about the death of God's son, to try to attack, to try to produce PROOF that you ACTUALLY HAVE sinned and that you ACTUALLY DO deserve to die. But not only have you not sinned, YOU CANNOT DIE. And even your attempts to prove it with a DREAM, wherein the dream body seems to die, STILL does not prove it. Because you carry on.

"You have made a bargain that you cannot keep." You literally are NOT CAPABLE of proving to be true, what is NEVER true. You literally CANNOT destroy the Son of God. So this whole ENTIRE dream world, designed to try to demonstrate and prove that God's Son can be anything less than immortal, is TOTALLY FUTILE. It DOES NOT WORK. Death does not work. Death is FAILURE, failure to make illusions real, failure to prove death overcomes life, and failure to have ANY REAL EFFECTS WHATSOEVER.

So basically, there you are, an innocent IMMORTAL BEING, who can NEVER stop being immortal, PRETENDING to be mortal, pretending to suffer against your will, pretending to be a victim, pretending that a dream world is choosing everything for you against your will, and pretending that you can die. ALL TOTALLY FICTIONAL. All fake. All made-up. All illusions. Because NOTHING can change the sheer FACT of what you are, a totally immortal spirit being that IS STILL AS GOD CREATED IT. Which you can NEVER CHANGE. EVER.

"I am still as God created me" is atonement thinking. This is a forgiving perception. It is a recognition that only the truth is true. It is a remembering that NOTHING HAS REALLY HAPPENED. Nothing has gone wrong. You are totally safe and loved in Heaven. You HAVE NOT SINNED WHATSOEVER. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING REAL HAS BEEN AFFECTED!!! Not even a tiny bit! You're just sleeping and dreaming of being a sinner. You'll wake up to realize and remember, that dream was so ridiculous, it's ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE for you to sin!

Absolutely EVERYTHING In this ENTIRE WORLD, this whole universe, is UTTERLY RIDICULOUS NONSENSE. Not one single thing about it is true. It is the dream of death, a TOTAL FICTION, absolutely bullshit in every way imaginable. It is a state of denial, a state of unconsciousness, a state of dreaming that you're exiled from Heaven.

You are having nothing more than a bad dream of death, in which terrible things seem to happen, impossible things, unthinkable things. And yet when you wake up, you will know, without a doubt, the ENTIRE THING was totally impossible. And you will thank God that NOT ONE SINGLE THING IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAS EVER TRUE.

This is atonement. This recognition is forgiveness. This truth, that you HAVEN'T done anything, that NOTHING happened. That THERE IS NO WORLD, NO EARTH, NO SPECIAL THINGS, there is NO DREAM, there is ONLY HEAVEN. "Only the creations of light are real" "There is no life outside of heaven." Therefore you are JUST MISTAKEN to believe otherwise, and recognizing this is a forgiving attitude.

You ARE forgiven, fully, because you LITERALLY have NOT DONE ANYTHING!! Your only choice now is whether to recognize and accept this truth, or whether to stay in denial and pretend you can and should suffer. And it's not God's will that you suffer in any way.

"Freedom and peace and joy stand there, beside the bier on which they sleep, and call them to come forth and waken from their dream of death."

If there is a pain in my hand, and if I believe there is a pain in my hand, I will begin to experience reactions about the pain.

This is simply because I see there being some kind of causality coming from the pain. I think it has a power over me. I see it as happening to me. I seem to be experiencing it as though it has happened without me asking for it. And so it seems unfair, malicious, unwanted, unwelcome, as though these sentiments are somehow justified expressions of me being holier or more innocent than this.

And if this pain in the hand continues or increases, then I will likely increase in my perception of victim hood, and simply by the reversal of cause and effect, seeing cause as outside of myself, I am actively creating responsive conditions inside of myself which show up as reactions, having threatened my own self with my own mistaken perception of this pain.

I myself am creating my own reactions, including fear which begins to mount in response, as though the pain is causing me to be afraid - what does it mean, what is it leading to, why is it happening, but simply also the sheer apparent fact (albeit unreal) that it is even happening at all, is enough to provide an upset.

"I am upset because I see something that is not there." - ACIM

And so as my fearful reaction increases, so too does my conviction that this is a more serious problem than before, that it calls for magical curative measures which will attack it and manipulate it and try to make it go away. And the more strongly I feel passionate about the need to be rid of it, the more I will actually add empowerment to it, seeing it as being so strong and mighty as to deserve serious counter-measures.

These perceptions of the need for a counter measure, a retaliation, a reaction of any justified kind, a fear, or any sense of taking this seriously or treating it as real, simply shows the extent of my mistakedness and the fact that what I am ACTUALLY doing is CREATING THIS. I create it with my fear of it, I create it with my rejection of it, I create it with my desire to be rid of it, and I create it with my attempt to fix it.

And the more real of a problem it seems to become, the more certain I will be that I really need to get something done about this because it's very very serious indeed. And yet in perceiving it, describing it, envisioning it, interacting with it and making it be serious as such - believing in its appearance - I am merely choosing to manifest it, to give energy to it, to feed it.

The reason that we do this is because when we are using the mind incorrectly and are entering into illusions, false perceptions and errors, we start to experience the opposite of what we attempt to achieve. We think that we do not want pain in the hand, but this means that we will put it there. We think the pain in the hand should not be happening, and such intensify its happening. We think that it is making us very afraid, and as such we literally are causing it to become more monstrous.

We do not realize that as soon as we have stepped away from real truth and have entered into mistaken truth, we've lost our mind and our way, have become deceived, and are now operating our mental powers 'inversed' or back to front.

The ego is an entire thought system based on this back-to-front inversion of truth, and when we are in this mind, we quite literally ask for what we do not want, attract what we are trying to get away from, try to fix what is not even a problem, and generally compound the very issues that we suffer from, not realizing all along that we are inadvertently causing ourselves to prolong the suffering, simply because we're applying ourselves through an inverting filter, a reality flip, which gives us back the exact opposite of what we think we are asking for. And this is simply because once in the ego perception, we are in opposition to the real truth, and therefore are bringing about opposite effects.

Indeed the incorrect form of forgiveness correlates to the ego activities and behaviors of believing that you are sincerely attempting to rid the world of that which is wrong with it, by taking a purer or more innocent standpoint, all the while actually reinforcing, manifesting, increasing and generally adding to the conditions of sinfulness. Such forgiveness then becomes an attack rather than a correction of error, a judgement instead of a miracle.

True forgiveness therefore must entail the cessation of all of the above egoic behaviors, reactions, self-caused chaos, and general inversion of truth and opposition to it. All of these symptoms are expressing merely because you are using the mind backwards, expressing opposition and resistance instead of unity, order and health.

True forgiveness entails the complete UN-doing of all of these egoic thought patterns, attitudes that reinforce the reality of the monster, reactions to it founded in fear which really are created by your own self as part of your psychological reversal and belief in threat, and the cessation of "making real" this problem. To lend reality to it, to believe in it, dwell upon it, give it credit, think of it seriously, forget to laugh at it, mistake it for real danger (which does not exist), and to generally actually side with it while claiming and portraying yourself as doing the exact opposite, is simply to keep the problem and make it worse.

We need to learn to forget this world. As Jesus says, forget this world and come with wholly empty hands unto your God. To forget is to literally pay no further attention, knowing that the thing was unreal, and requires no upkeep to defend against it.

We need to learn to stop learning the wrong things. We keep teaching ourselves with the ego, we keep learning that sickness is real, that sin is irreversible, and that death is inevitable. This must all be corrected and undone and vanquished from the mind, replaced with the Holy Light of the Truth, which comes to set you free.

The truth does set you free, literally, actually, and in reality. Because the Truth is God and only Love is Real.

Those who are sane do not attack, are not sick, cannot hurt or be hurt, are immortal and invulnerable, recognize their oneness with others, have no interest in murder, cannot suffer or be unhappy, can only will with God, and can only heal. Nothing harmful or hurtful can come from a person in their right mind.

When a person is rooted in pure unconditional love, they can do nothing but love. All behaviors are coming from love. All thoughts and attitudes are loving. The right mind is healing, healthy, happy and whole. Sane people are innocent. Sane people are compassionate. Sane people cannot attack.

What this tells you is that 99.99% of the people in the world are not sane. They are not in their right mind. They are also not fully conscious. Anyone who is not in their right mind must have blocks to awareness, must be in denial, must be to some degree unwilling to do God's will, must be sick, and must be to some degree unhappy.

Anyone not in their right mind must have positioned themselves as a victim and a victimizer. The denial/blocks in their mind is preventing them from seeing their invulnerability and their innocence, causes them to be split-minded or in two minds, have a divided will which is acting against itself, and now sees themselves as under attack.

This produces state of non-awareness or unconsciousness. The amount of conscious awareness that remains, which pretends to be a full, complete conscious awareness, is still not fully conscious. Entire portions of the mind have become inaccessible to awareness. Entire portions of a person's identity are hidden from view.

The person thinks they wake up in the morning but they merely pass from sleep to slightly less sleep. The blocks in the mind block sanity. And those who are "sleep walking" in the world are typically not awake. They will tend to hurt and be hurt. They will tend to attack and project. They will tend to sin and feel guilty. They will tend to be afraid and suffer and be sick. And they will tend to be murderous.

What we can see then is that anyone not in their right mind has placed themselves into a state of at least partial unawareness, are attacking themselves unconsciously, do not see what they are doing to themselves and so seek to explain it with causes outside of them, and are in a state of attempted murder. What is not love is murder, and those not in their right mind are not wholly loving.

But someone who is not wholly loving, is not sane. They are insane. They are un-conscious. They are confused. They do not have the awareness that's needed to show them what the obvious truth is. They are out of touch with who they are. They can't tell the difference between what is real and what is not real. They don't know what they are doing. They are acting insanely and are in a state of being mistaken.

If we frame everything that insane people do as being a state of "not knowing what they do", that they are acting this way as a result of mental illness, not being in their right mind, and we can remember that the person is simply not aware of what they are really doing, we can enter into a state of greater compassion.

It's a state of recognition of what the truth is, in which we understand every person is innocent and holy and divine and invulnerable, and so if the person is acting foolishly or murderously they must be in need. They must be lacking love in some way and are calling out for love. They must need help. Something has gone wrong with them and even they are not in a position of awareness to know how to resolve it.

We really need to recognize that most of the people in this world are not sane. Just about everyone has mental illness. And that includes all the people who seem to be conscious, successful, holding down a job, raising a family, displaying confidence, seeming to be fairly happy and sociable, or what you'd consider an "average person". If they were truly fully sane they probably would not be in a body.

If we then recognize that anyone "not being as God created them" is not in their right mind, we can say that they aren't acting the way they are "on purpose". While it's true that on a higher level they ARE choosing everything they are doing, they are not aware of this in their present state of consciousness. They have denied themselves the love that would heal them and so do not want it. And the result of love's absence is insane behavior.

If we can see that everyone is supposed to be being completely happy, joyful, alert, healthy, holy, harmless and peaceful, then if they're not, we know something has gone wrong in their mind. And that means they are calling out for love. They may at the same time not want that love, because their denial of love is what put them into this state to begin with. But they do NEED love because love is all that's absent in their mind. They need the love they have blocked.

It's like, people have tried to unhook themselves from the life support machine of God. They've pulled out the wires and don't want the help. But they NEED the help because of what they've done to themselves and the state they've put themselves in. So now they are calling out for help in the form of not wanting help, which if taken at first appearance seems to be an attack on God and on you. But it is merely an absence of love, just as light would dispel the illusion of darkness.

"It is curious that the perfect must now be perfected. In fact, it is impossible. But you must remember that when you put yourselves in an impossible situation, you believed that the impossible WAS possible."

If you can remember people are mostly insane and not in their right mind and not acting "on purpose" and not really wanting what they are doing, it becomes easier to not be deceived by the illusions they present. There is something deeper going on beyond the surface, beyond behaviors and beyond attacks. Healing is needed, called for, and the only appropriate right-minded response.

How was the tiny mad idea possible? How was it possible for us to mis-create? Why did God give us the ability to try to sin? Did we lose our innocence in the separation? How is it that this world seems to exist?

When God created his children, He gave them the freedom to will and create. The mind is not capable of ever doing anything that God didn't give it the ability to do. It cannot add abilities to itself, it can only operate within the parameters of its design. This means you literally cannot go against God's will or do anything He did not make possible.

"God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them."

But what God did do, was give you freedom. The power of the mind to freely choose to will to co-create. And this freedom is fully given.

"The world, in its original connotation, included both the proper creation of man by God, AND the proper creation by man in his Right Mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given. "

Within the context of being "completely free", it is technically possible for you to try to USE your freedom against itself. You HAVE to be free to do this, in order to truly have freedom. While you have free will, it HAS to be possible for you to potentially USE that free will to try NOT to will anything. If this weren't a part of the freedom of will, you would not have free will. It's not a productive USE of will, since it creates nothing, but it is still part of it.

The thing is, although you are free to TRY to deny freedom, something completely pointless happens when you do so. Since it remains true that God's will cannot be opposed, and you cannot remove your freedom from yourself, and you cannot make yourself unpowerful, and you cannot be changed in any way, the exercise of TRYING to use your will to NOT will, to be "unwilling" or to oppose God's will, HAS to be futile.

It's not that you aren't free to TRY to do this, it's just that there is really no point in doing it. It's not possible to cause anything real to happen this way, because it denies creation. So it's like saying, I want to use my free will against itself to cause nothing to happen. I want to will not to will. I want to not create anything. I want to deny myself.

There is a circular logic which enters into this. You are trying to use your free will to cause your free will to stop being free and to will nothing. But how can you still be WILLING that you will nothing? You have to still USE the will to will that you don't will anything. So the notion is really absurd. You have to keep using the will, while claiming that you're not using it. And so it has to entail denial and it has to NOT accomplish what you're trying to make it accomplish. And never can you will the WILL itself to cease to exist, because you'd have to USE will to do that.

It has to be a state of denial, because the fact remains you can't change your freedom or power. So trying to DO so can only mean you are going into a DENIAL of what is true of you, and are PRETENDING to do whatever you're doing. You can't actually make yourself un-free or destroy your power. You can, however, seemingly deceive yourself in believing that its possible. Precisely BECAUSE you are free to do so. God did make it possible for you to be free to try to not be free, but He did not make it possible for you to ACTUALLY affect your freedom.

"Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

Another way to put it is, it is not possible to change God's will or to cause your own will to stop. It is literally impossible to separate from God or be where God is not. However, you are FREE to use your freedom to TRY to do so. You can INSIST that it is possible, and invest belief in it, and try to GIVE IT truth and make it real and convince yourself of it and deceive yourself, but you STILL cannot make it a reality or actually do it in reality.

As you try to do so, as you attempt to use your freedom to stop being free, as you try to will not to will anything, or as you try to will nothingness, or try to give reality and meaning to something impossible, you go into what we're calling the "tiny mad idea". The idea of separation and sin. Which just means you're insisting that something impossible is possible - that something false is true. That you CAN separate, you CAN sin, you have done so, and there is proof that the impossible is happening.

This can only be self deception and denial, because it's still impossible. But you are free to believe it if you want to. To believe it you have to DENY what is true, try to be out of touch with the facts, and pretend that the will has been denied. You are free to pretend that you have no freedom, which seems to place the mind in a state of "sleep" or dormancy, as though it is not creating or has no power, or is not alive. A sort of "stand-by mode", in which the mind believes that everything impossible is possible, and thus imagines that the opposite of God is happening through a kind of hallucinatory process of wishful thinking. ("There is no world apart from what you wish").

"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."

Now, going into this state, is NOT A SIN. NOR is it outside of the scope of what God made possible. You can never actually rewrite the laws of God. You can't give yourself something He did not give you. You cannot change yourself. You cannot destroy yourself or your freedom or your will. But it IS within your rights and within your power to deny or pretend that you can do these things.

Pretending that you are not immortal is the best you can do, because you cannot cause yourself to die. But you certainly can produce illusions, fabrications, that its happening, through the DESIRE to have it be possible. You can confuse your identity with these illusions. You can also believe that the suffering is real. But it remains unreal, and the truth is unchanged.

What this simply means is that by "mis-using" the mind to believe that impossibilities are possible and happening, you hallucinate a world of make-believe, which you try to invest in and convince yourself is true and real. You even try to give it immortality and life and will and a mind of its own. But you can't succeed. You can only fake it. But you are free to fake it.

Entering into this state of "denying that you are free", using your freedom of will to try to will not to have freedom of will, you are ONLY entering into a state of being MISTAKEN. If it is true that you HAVE freedom and will, you are mistaken when you believe that you don't. If it is true that you are immortal, you are mistaken when you believe death is possible. If it is true that sin is utterly impossible, you are mistaken when you believe sin is happening.

Being mistaken is still an "innocent" condition. Guilt does not have to enter into it at all. Someone can make an "innocent mistake", which is simply a failure to willingly admit that you're trying to do something which makes no sense. You can be mistaken in believing that willing against God's free will is possible. It's not possible. Nor can you really will against yourself. But you are free to believe it's possible, and to try to do it, and to try to convince yourself that you've done it. But you cannot do it, and so are mistaken when you believe this.

Believing that you can be separate from God, is a simple mistake. Since it's not possible, you can't do it. But you can try to convince yourself that it's possible. Doing that is pointless and futile because it can't BE possible. But you are free to try. You are free to resist the truth. Or to use your power to try to pretend to be powerless. You are innocent in this because all you're doing is using your God-given powers in a way that is a pointless exercise. A way which results in nothing really happening, as you "play small" and try to be little and powerless.

Provided that you recognize that mis-creation is just a state of being mistaken, and is not a sin, and is still well within the laws of God, and that at no time is God's will violated, even when you are mistaken, then you can also see that mis-creating is an innocent act. It's really not an act at all. And it does not change the truth about you. All it does is set up some illusion of deception and some confusion about what's really possible.

"There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the mad belief that ANYTHING could be established and maintained without some link that kept it still within the laws of God; NOT as the law itself upholds the universe as God created it, but in some form adapted to the need the Son of God believes he has. Corrected error IS the error's end. And thus has God protected still His Son, even in error."

"Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release."

The Course also talks about how entering into this "detour into fear", which is just an attempt to make true what is not true, or to use will against itself, produced a "lower order mind" or a "system of thought" which seems to function opposite to how God originally indended it in higher reality. This lower (ego) mind is a mind of denial, deception, untruth and confusion. But it is not a sin. It's just a mis-configured and unwise mis-use of your God-given abilities.

"Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience, or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical, and the other creates the spiritual."

The physical world of bodies is what is produced in the deceptive state of being mistaken about the truth. In the state of denial, the dream of death, the illusion of separation, the pretense at being powerless and imprisoned, it produces the "forms of error" which the body sees. Error is just a mistake.

"No one CAN be "taken over" unless he wills to be. However, if he places his mind under tyranny, rather than authority, he intrudes the submission/dominance onto free will himself. This produces the obvious contradiction inherent in any formulation that associates free will with imprisonment."

Attempting to assert that will can cause will not to will, produced an illusion of an "unwilling world." A world in opposition to God. But this is STILL within the confines of the Son of God's freedom. The angels also have this freedom.

"Error cannot really threaten truth, which can always withstand it. Only the error is actually vulnerable. You are free to establish your kingdom where you see fit..."

"The "Princes of this World" are princes only because they are really angels. But they are free to establish their kingdom where they see fit.""God does not coerce".

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception. "

God is not viewing your excursion into "trying to make impossible things possible", as being a sin. He doesn't see it as a real threat to what you are, either. Nor does he coerce you into stopping doing this against your will. For God to oppose your free will he would have to oppose his own. He does however "encourage" and guide and help his children to "come to their senses". Because it remains true that "trying not to will anything" is a rather pointless exercise which can't really result in anything creative. It's more like, taking a nap where you dream of destruction or "the opposite of creating". A dream of mortality and death as "the opposite of eternal life."

We mis-created the world, but only as a mistake. Not as a sin. When it is recognized as only a mistake, sin is lifted away from it and it is regarded as forgiven. Being an illusion of something impossible seeming to be possible, this is seen through and beyond, and this overlooking is forgiveness. It's a forgiveness which looks past bodies and the physical to the light of reality, not deceived by the illusion that false things are true. To the the light of sanity and reason. We simply made the world in error and it can be undone.

"You made the body in attempting to deceive yourself."

"Miracles reflect..." "I have done this thing and it is this I would undo."All we're doing here, is basically, innocently, trying to do something which isn't really possible. We're using our freedom to try to imprison ourselves. We're using our immortality to pretend to be mortal. We're using our holiness to pretend to be sinners. And we're using the power of the mind to pretend to be weak and powerless. We can't ACTUALLY be imprisoned, or mortal, or sinful, or powerless. And so we're using all these things against themselves, to PRETEND that we don't have these things. This BLOCKS and disguises them, using illusions to make it appear something is true which isn't.

Seen as nothing more than an error, a mistake, a futile attempt, a pointless exercise, the dream of death is not "against" God's will, which cannot be opposed, but is an ATTEMPT to believe that opposing God's will is possible or has merit. The mind is just stretching the truth. But using the mind in a "destructive" way, against its own nature, isn't constructive or creative and it also doesn't allow you to experience happiness.

"The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within Themselves, for They are everywhere."

"By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others."

God DOES will that you maintain the sanity of the clear recognition that there is NO POINT trying to use your freedom against itself. That it is truly impossible to WILL nothing. Or to make yourself have no power. Believing you are powerless when you are powerful, or that you are imprisoned when you are free, is obviously a state of denial, and this denial of life can only produce illusions of suffering and pain and misery."We also have observed that man can create an empty shell, but cannot create nothing at all."

"Whenever projection (creation) in its inappropriate sense is utilized, it ALWAYS implies that some emptiness (or lack of everything) must exist, and that it is within man's ability to put his own ideas there INSTEAD of the truth."

When you try NOT to create, you enter into "making" illusions. You produce an "emptiness" or lack of love, which is the world of "sin", meaning just the illusion of love's absence, or the absence of light. It isn't the presence of darkness, or of sin, or of real death, it is the illusion of the absence of their opposite. Because even in illusions you can't get outside of God's laws. You can never violate the parameters of your functioning as given by God. And so the world remains ONLY a mistake, not a real sin.

God's own will follows the knowledge that it is pointless to use will against itself, even though its possible to TRY to do so. Because when you try to do so, nothing is willed, and so nothing happens. God knows this and he is sane. His will is that you know it also. When you refuse to know it or you deny it, insisting that you CAN will nothingness to be something, you become deceived and confused. And God does not will that you enter into such suffering. "God's will for me is perfect happiness". And you can only be happy when you will in accord with God's true will - purely constructively and using your freedom to create. Free from self destruction.

"God Himself gave you the perfect correction for everything you have made which is not in accord with His Holy Will."

"The miracle compares the creations of man with the higher level of creation, accepting what is in ACCORD as true, and rejecting the DISCORDANT as false."

In all this, you always remain innocent, you can be correct or mistaken, but you cannot change the laws of God or of your true nature. You can be asleep in a denial state of trying to pretend that impossibilities are possible, but you can't ACTUALLY cause an opposite to God to happen. You can dream of it, imagine it, try to give it reality, even convince yourself of it, but you can't make it true. So at some point you have to admit, it's a fruitless exercise, and just return to creating with God. Using will to willingly will your creations, as God intended.

<3 “Change", is the idea that Eternity has STOPPED being what it was, it has been destroyed, it has been replaced by something that did not exist, which also will be replaced by an upcoming denial of what is. Anything that changes is NOT REAL. Anything that changes is NOT OF GOD. Changes, which require time and space, are not reality.

"What is timeless IS ALWAYS THERE, because its BEING is eternally changeless."

"He does not teach, because His Creations are changeless."

"Reality is changeless."

"Your brother has a changelessness in him beyond appearance and deception both."

"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."

"Reality is changeless."

"BECAUSE reality is changeless is a miracle already there to heal all things that change"

"And when He has appeared to you, you will be certain you are like Him, for He is the changeless in your brother AND in you."

"But do not give it power to replace the changeless in him in your sight of him."

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen."

"Nothing is asked of you but to ACCEPT the Changeless and Eternal that abide in him, for YOUR Identity is there."

"Yet nothing in the world of dreams remains without the hope of change and betterment, for here is NOT where changelessness is found."

"This in no way contradicts the changelessness of mind as GOD created it."

"You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by perceiving that he could NOT have changed his mind."

"If YOU see only the changeless in him, you have not really changed him at all."

"Then ACCEPT His decision, for it is indeed changeless, and refuse to change your mind about YOURSELF."

"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom."

"Teaching aims at change, but God created ONLY the changeless. The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a failure in communication."

"It is impossible that God lose His identity, for if He did, YOU WOULD LOSE YOURS. And BEING yours, He cannot change Himself, for your identity IS changeless. The miracle ACKNOWLEDGES His changelessness, by seeing His Son as he always was, and NOT as he would make himself."

"And YOU are Its effects, as changeless and as perfect as Itself."

"His Will does not vacillate, being changeless forever."

"Perception changes, MADE to take the place of changeless knowledge."

"Here is the opposite of God proclaimed as lord of all creation, stronger than God's Will for life, the endlessness of love and Heaven's perfect, changeless constancy."

"Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within Themselves, for They are everywhere."

"The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God."

"You are still My holy Son, forever innocent, forever loving and forever loved, as limitless as your Creator, and completely changeless and forever pure."

"Yet love must be forever like itself, changeless forever, and forever WITHOUT alternative."

While doing a fervent forgiveness process, I started to think of my relationship with God. This is where things get juicy. We might not think of whether we are really loving God because we typically are not aware of God, he's not exactly popping up in front of our faces or coming along to trigger us. But there is certainly a hefty body of emotional and psychological disturbance in between us and Him.

So I started to forgive God, along the lines of looking at what I believed I had done to God, and what I believed God had done to me. This included looking into whether I believed I'd sinned against him, hurt him, offended him, upset him, made him angry, changed him, etc.. and vice versa whether God had ever attacked me, sinned against me, hurt me, rejected or abandoned me, judged me, etc.... all ending up with the firm resolution that no, none of this had occurred. And then once that was out of the way, it's possible to more directly accept atonement and see that God still loves you and finds you innocent and so on... the relationship with God heals.

Jesus told me this was "good", to look into this and forgive God for what I thought He'd done to me, and to forgive myself for what I thought I'd done to him. None of it had really happened or had any truth to it. This was all beautiful and lovely. But you can bet this led to a MAJOR catharsis afterwards. I've found this before as well. If I receive a shit-ton of love from God, it can trigger extremely deep catharsis. We all probably have some deep unhealed shite surrounding our direct relationship with Him, and this stuff has to be brought to light and healed.

"Today's idea will eventually overcome completely ***the sense of loneliness and abandonment all the separated ones experience***. Depression is an inevitable consequence of separation. So are anxiety, worry, a deep sense of helplessness, misery, suffering and intense fear of loss."

All of this stuff has to be healed. Every separated self experiences this automatically. We are all, with egos, experiencing a belief in being abandoned by God, rejected, alone, afraid, unworthy etc. No one is excluded from this. Until atonement is accepted and we are reunited with God we are forced into a state where depression, anxiety, fear, worry, loss, helplessness, misery, suffering, sickness etc are all part of the territory. It's a very deep sense of suffering that keeps God's love at a distance.

Our relationship with God must be healed of all of these horrors and looking directly at these things is not easy. It requires that you "forgive God" and yourself in relation to him, to directly undo the "separation" between you and Him, and thus the separation itself. It's one thing to forgive your brothers, but you MUST also forgive God everything you've ever accused Him of or believed true of Him in error. And make no mistake this can be the biggest emotional hurdle you will encounter because it has been ongoing for many lifetimes, through all worldly experiences, and for the whole time you have been away from home.

Ok so, this is possibly a touchy subject, and I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty. If you have some kind of a sickness, pain, upset, disability, whatever, this is going to be talking about that and I don't mean to make anyone feel attacked. But I want to look at something the course discusses.

"***The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill.*** Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

I've been looking at this lately because I've been having to heal a sense of guilt and blame for someone else being sick. Once I started to look at what the course says about my own situation, I saw that we basically are immortal beings who keep attacking ourselves, making ourselves suffer, inducing our own sickness, and trying to die. And then I started to think about whether other people were doing this, and this is where some lightbulbs went off.

If a person is having a physical sickness, it does mean that they are attacking themselves. It means that they, as an immortal being, are trying to destroy themselves. They believe they are guilty and sinful for attacking God. This is then projected onto and through the body. The body in turn takes on forms of sickness as a shadow of the guilt in the mind, a shadow of deformity.

"Illness can be but guilt's shadow, grotesque and ugly since it mimics deformity. If a deformity is seen as real, what could its shadow be except deformed?"

But the sickness in the body isn't just there as a sickness, it's there for a purpose. The purpose is accusation. The sickness is actually part of the attempt to project sin onto others. The body is made to appear sick and weak and suffering, so that the person appears to be innocent, and so that someone else is accused of sin. The sight of a sick body therefore means someone is holding a "picture of crucifixion" up to accuse you of sin, and "sick bodies remain accusers."

"The sick remain accusers."

"You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell."

Jesus has gone even further than this, to say that in this self-destructive, projective situation, we actually are trying to kill others. As we scapegoat, ie project sin, we make the body sick, in order to prove another's guilt. And one of the ways this takes shape is in terms of contagion of physical illness, such as with a cold or flu, where someone is trying to "infect" others with their sin and guilt, so that if others become sick and suffer for it, this exonerates the sick person.

Jesus even says that when we are sick, we are being merciless, like we have this intense almost evil attitude of destruction, first towards ourselves and then towards others. We're actually even willing to die, if it means someone else is accused of causing it. And so the dead body testifies to the sinfulness of another. That we're literally willing to destroy the body in order to try to exonerate ourselves of the original sin, and pin it on something external.

"Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die."

So this then made me realize that, a major reason that I often have a sense of guilt or self-blame around other people's sicknesses, is because they are in fact attempting to accuse me of their sin. Their sick body is attempting to project guilt onto me, its a way they are using their body for attack, and having tried to destroy themselves they now are projecting destruction onto me. So then I end up feeling guilty because, essentially, if I "make their body real" to myself, I'll buy the temptation that the sickness is literally accusing me of sin.

I think part of realizing this, for me, entailed having to be willing to look at someone else and ask myself if they are doing the very same thing the course says I am doing to myself. ie are they trying to destroy themselves, do they have guilt from the separation, are they punising themselves, are they projecting and are they using their body for attack? And the answer is yes.

But this answer also gives rise to the realization that, the truth about myself, also applies to them. Just as I might realize that I am not sinful or guilty, that God has not been attacked, and I don't deserve to suffer, and I need to stop blaming myself or making myself guilty..... so too does this apply to others.

So now my approach to the "sick person" changes to one of compassion for them doing the exact same self-attack that I've been doing, a recognition that they are similarly not sinful, realizing that they are mistaken to believe they should be guilty, and therefore shifting to a more supportive position of reminding them of what is really true of them. And this in turn alleviates my guilt because it means I am not responsible for their condition, and its "truth" doesn't apply to either of us.

What's really true of them is that they have not sinned, their innocence is intact, they have no reason to be guilty, they have no need for sickness, they have no basis for punishing themselves, and they don't need to destroy themselves, because they haven't done anything wrong.

I am finding in fact that this kind of attitude toward them is in fact "miracle working". Because the more I express toward someone "the atonement" principle of their sinlessness, the more I am being loving, and also am treating my neighbor as myself. If my "work" is to express toward someone that they deserve love and health and happiness because they have not sinned, I am in fact joining my mind to theirs by accessing the part of them that's innocent. The "innocent self" BEHIND the self-accusation. And the accused guilty self is not who they really are.

And so it's important to overlook their self-accusation and not see it as applying to them. As I do this, I feel a POWER, and a sense of ENERGY, funneling through me. And I am quite certain this is opening the door to working miracles. If I can accept my own atonement ie my sinlessness, then I can also recognize other people have been similarly attacking themselves needlessly and can help to support them in finding their way back to their innate perfection.

"By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others. The message which he then gives to others is the truth that THEIR MINDS are really similarly constructive, and that their own miscreations cannot hurt them."

"He MUST work a miracle on behalf of himself here (See the point about miracles as a perception corrector) before he can effect miracles as creative energizers, which they are."

What this reveals to me is also that, when I have ever done forgiveness, it's almost always been with a somewhat selfish intent. Even if I am forgiving "others", it mostly revolves around taking stuff off them and putting it back on me, so that I can address the deeper problem in "my separate self". But what I see now is, that in fact, the very same practice which I might use to apply to myself, to undo my own belief in my own sinfulness, I can use that very same approach FOR SOMEONE ELSE on their behalf, and forgive them FOR THEM.

In effect, it's like "doing a forgiveness" for someone else on their behalf, applying it TO them, reminding them of what THEIR truth is, and helping them to see their own innocence. Just as I would do for myself, but applying to them instead.

I am certain this has a lot to do with working a miracle. Because a miracle worker begins by seeing the light in another, which you an only do if you see light in yourself, and then you reinforce their light by shining your light into their mind, as you "pick them up" and "lift them up" through the expression of the truth about them.

It's kind of like telling someone that they've been hard on themselves, mean to themselves, unfair to themselves, and have not loved themselves.... and that the reason they've done this is unfounded, and they don't deserve this self-abuse, nor do they deserve to suffer in sickness or pain or misery. To set them back on the right path and get them back in touch with their own innate soul perfection. To be like, hey, brother, what you think about yourself is not true, you are .... and then list all the things which are true of them in reality.

(Forgiveness) "It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth."

This IS forgiveness because it's what it means to overlook the layers of ego sin, guilt, fear, self-attack, symptoms, body-stuff, in another, and look to the fact they are a christ entity, perfect and holy, temporarily mistaken, believing stuff about themselves that isn't true, and knowing and remembering FOR them that their lies are not true of them.

This also taps into a new "mode" of forgiveness, in which we attempt to reap the benefits not by forgiving "for ourselves" or by withdrawing from others into our separate minds, but by reaching OUT to others and telling THEM what we want to be true of US.

Expressing towards someone a higher truth, simultaneously makes it true of YOU, but without the selfish component. In this sense yes your brother is your savior. You can only give the miracles you have received but you can also bolster what you receive by giving. This is why "miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver."

To pour love into someone, to recognize when they themselves do not love themselves, and to supply the lack of love, by reminding them of what is really true about them, joins your mind to theirs and enlightens it, shines truth into their mind, empowers them, awakens them, and resurrects them.

We have appointed our own worst enemies, our controllers, our dominators, our victimizers, our haters, and everyone we do not like, to do all of these things TO us, FOR us, because we have a secret agenda.

We do not want to be responsible for our own lives. We do not want to own up to who we really are. We want to hide. We want to shovel responsibility for our own lives onto someone else. We want to be victims so that the state of our lives is someone else's responsibility and then we can blame them for what has happened in our own life.

We have disowned ourselves. We don't even know who we really are. We have attempted to shut out God. We've gone unconscious. And we've displaced ownership of our own Real Identity, our Truth, into the hands of everyone and everything that we think is 'not us'. We now say the world is responsible for our life being terrible. No it's not. Our irresponsibility is what makes it seem like the world is responsible for our life sucking.

We need to wake up. We need to take our fucking power back. We need to own up to who the fuck we really are. We need to stop hiding our light and our truth and stand up and be visible. We need to return to the truth and stop wallowing in a dark world of victimization and blame.

It is not someone else's fault. It is not them that are doing this to you. It is not the government or the neighbors or the coworkers or strangers on the street. It is not anyone else. Its YOU. YOU are fucking up your life by not being who you really are. YOU are destroying your happiness. YOU are the one who is against yourself. YOU are your worst, and ONLY, enemy.

You are doing this to yourself. On purpose.

Why are you hiding from God? Why are you hiding from yourself? Why are you pretending to be someone you are not? Why are you pretending that someone or something outside of you is responsible for who and what you are and what you're experiencing?

Nobody has any power over you. ZERO. ZEEEEERO!

You are the one who has done all of this shit to yourself, and it's you who can undo it. You can choose again. You can remember who you really are. You can wake the fuck up to reality and stop burying your head in the sand with this victimy sob-story about, oh, so-and-so did this to me, and such-and-such a government body did that to us, and they-and-them did these terrible things to these poor innocent people, etc... its all ego blame. It's all passing the buck, shifting the responsible, and acting righteous about deserving to be outraged about how everyone ELSE is wrong.

LOOK AT YOURSELF. Take an inventory of your OWN fuck up. This is all about you, what you're doing to yourself, on your own, all by yourself, without any help from anyone else. You do not need anyone else's attack or vengeance to make up for the tremendous job you are doing attacking the living shit out of yourself, all on your own. You have enough self-hate to fill a mountain, yet alone needing anyone else to come along and add a tiny amount to it. This is all about you.

Who are you? Who the fuck are you really?

"The secret to salvation is this, that you are but doing this to yourself" - ACIM

STOP IT!

When someone says or does something that you judge and perceive as wrong, you become upset.

In your upset, you claim that you are upset because they said or did something that was wrong - i.e. something incorrect, something that is a mistake, or something untrue.

But, even though YOU are claiming to believe that this thing is untrue and wrong, you are still upset.

Why are you upset, if what the person said is not true? Why do you become upset when someone says something untrue about you, something that seems to attack you, to slander you, to accuse you, to portray you as unfairly guilty, or to label you with something derogatory? Why are you upset if its not true?

The truth is, even though you are to some degree aware that it is not true, you're upset because some part of YOU does believe it is true.

If you didn't believe it, you'd just laugh. You wouldn't take it seriously. You'd KNOW with so much certainty that it's just ridiculous and completely false, that it wouldn't even seem to touch you or engage with you at all.... like it's got nothing to do with you.

But you DO think it's got something to do with you. On some level, deeper down, there is some part of you that actually thinks there is truth to what someone has said about you, even if you are simultaneously horrified and upset and are claiming that it's completely false in a very intense way.

You could be experience a very intense sense of it being unfair, of the slander being vicious, of the person being totally nuts in their accusations, and all of this other framing of the situation that makes it looks like they are wrong and you are not... and yet, you're still upset, despite your claims about how mistaken they are.

You don't really, really, really believe that they are mistaken, you actually believe that they are REAL, and what is real is true. So if you are 'really' being attacked, then you are being attacked with truth, and you believe in this truth so you will be upset. What you receive as real will strike you as the truth and you will accept it. i.e., you took it seriously and didn't overlook/forgive it.

And so this boils down to this simple fact: you are upset because YOU believe these things about YOURSELF.

So then it's really not so much anything to do with what anyone else has said or done. It's not really that they have accused you of something so incredibly - potentially - hurtful. It's not that there is even some kind of inherent attack-power embedded into their slander, or some kind of force in their words that can actually come into you and MAKE true whatever they are judging you for.

Instead, it all boils down to your own beliefs about yourself - your own sense of identity. Has this *attempted* attack got anything to do with what I AM? If it hasn't, because I'm clear about what I am, and I am immortal spirit, and I am eternally innocent, then in that clear identity I have absolutely no grounds for even thinking that it's got something to do with me.

But if I do not believe in my own innocence, if I myself am actually in some way AGAINST MYSELF, or have undermined myself, or think of myself as unworthy or not good enough, or think that I don't deserve love, or I don't like something about myself, you can bet that when someone comes along to appear to provoke you, you WILL think that it has something to do with who and what you are - you will think that they're talking about YOU and you will 'take it' as an attack on that identity.

So you can see this in people who are very against themselves, who have a lot of self-hate or self-loathing or low worth etc. When someone seems to attack them or judge them, they become very upset very quickly. This is because they themselves very strongly believe in and AGREE WITH what the other person is claiming is true of them.

The person is so upset by the stimuli because they themselves are very upset about their own self, they are upset about how they see themselves, they are already walking around with a huge baggage of pain and suffering within themselves that they feel very badly about, and this is now tapped into by the other person.

The pimple then seems to pop and the cover of denial laid over the top of this mountain of self-attack is taken off, and out pours the gush of a "reaction"... which typically is then blamed on and projected on and targeted at the other person, as though they created all of it.

But all the other person is doing.... is nothing. Absolutely nothing. They're just showing up and mirroring back to you a reflection of what YOU think of yourself. People will come into your life "as if by magic", attracted to the vibrational frequency or mental focus of content in your mind, that reflect to you what you currently think of yourself. And you will hate them for doing this, because you hate yourself. And each time they come along and seemingly do TO you what YOU are already doing to YOURSELF, you don't like it. And the only reason you don't like it is because they are doing to you exactly what you're already doing to you.

And so even if you are upset, deep down you in some way must agree with that person, even if they seem to be a horrible enemy, otherwise, why would you be upset? Why would you be having a reaction, if their judgements were completely false and you knew it? Why would you lose your peace and blow up in a rage or whatever if you're calmly certain that that person is very mistaken about who you are, and you are very clear about who you are? And I don't mean, clear about your ego self, but clear about your REAL self as God created you - innocent immortal spirit. Your real identity.

So every time you get upset, and it seems like someone caused it, it just means that YOU HIRED SOMEONE to come along (attracted them mentally) to come and point out, within you, what it is that you believe is true, about yourself and God, so that you will become aware of what is in you, and get an opportunity to question it. Is it really true? Do I really want to hold onto this belief? And if all you're doing at that point is falling for the appearance that someone else is causing everything you're feeling, then you've totally missed the point. And you're being dishonest.

It's more honest to step back and look at why you are upset. You are upset because you believe that your worst enemy's attack is actually true of you and deserved by you. You actually want it. You chose it. You asked for it. Yes you did. And that means that they're not actually doing it 'to' you, as much as YOU have done it to you. And since you're the one who actually believes this bullshit about yourself, YOU are the one who needs some correction. The other person is only there to "trigger" you, to draw your attention to areas of yourself where you thought you were pure but are not, or areas where you believe bullshit that needs to be purified. They're helping you. They're actually on your side, in the bigger scheme of things. And you hired them to do so. All those enemies of yours? They're your servants.

So at some point you have to get past this fireworks of blame and denial and projection, and take some responsibility. It's you that believes you suck and are not worth shit. When someone does something to highlight this, you should be thanking them. AND then you should work on undoing YOUR belief that this is true. If you are upset, you DO believe it is true, and you DO agree with them, no matter what you are experiencing and no matter how much you think this is not the case. If you are upset, you are believing something untrue about yourself, and the only way to be not upset is to undo that.

So yes, it's not anyone else's fault that you're upset. Look at yourself. What have you decided about yourself? What is it you believe about yourself?

Because if what the other person has 'done to you' is not the truth, then why are you still upset? It MUST be because you actually don't FULLY believe that it's not true. Some part of you agrees and some part of you has attacked your own self.

And what this will lead to is the simple insight, that ALL of your upset is really the result of your own belief about yourself, and NONE of it is really because of other people. And therefore, if you can change your own attitude about yourself, and learn to love yourself, you will be learning your LESSONS and will wake up to the truth about who you are. And then you will have peace, and you will stop putting 'helpers' in your life to provoke you "painfully". Instead your way will be made straight and Holy Spirit will go before you to smooth the way, such that nothing is about your little ego self anymore and you are fully convinced of your own innocence.

Not until you are fully convinced of your own innocence will you cease to be upset when other people accuse you of guilt. But when you get there, you will experience invulnerability, confidence, empowerment, peace and immortality.

In terms of the truth, these are our only two options: either accept it as it is, or deny it. Denying it is an attempt to reject what the truth is, and to replace it with something else.

Jesus says denial is an act of 'positive creation' not just an attempt to negate the truth. By denying, we substitute the truth for something else, and invent or make some other illusion to take its place, to try to prove that something else is true. We actively erect barricades and something else to fixate on and believe in.

In the Atonement, we accept the truth as it is, as God has established it, without any desire or need to change it.

The opposite of Atonement or resurrection, is death, in which there is an attempt to reject all truth (life) and prove that something opposite is true (death).

Denial produced the physical universe. Denial implements all forms of sickness. Denial is death. Denial is also fear. "All forms of sickness even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening." Or to put it another way, when you do not want to accept the truth, you invent fear to try to explain "why" you cannot accept it. The fear is fake, just as death is fake. Death does not END real life, it DENIES IT and paints a picture which PRETENDS the immortal son of God has been killed. ("You have made a bargain you cannot keep.")

Denial was the attempt to reject the fact that you cannot sin, by trying to replace it with an attempt to prove that sin can and has been accomplished. Even in that attempt, it is a state of denial. It hasn't changed the truth. Denial has no power to actually alter what the truth is. But, being denial, denial is "in denial" of this fact, and so attempts to change the truth anyway, believing that it is possible. Such is denial.

Denial also represents unwillingness. When we attempted to deny God's will, or to deny that we are as God created us, we moved into unwillingness. This was an attempt to suppress our own will. We became unwilling rather than willing, or imprisoned rather than free. Death is a state of unwillingness, as are punishment, suffering, fear, guilt and sin. This is why it takes "a little willingness" in order to move towards acceptance of the Atonement (truth) because denial has to be undone.

Blocks to awareness are denial. Since the truth cannot be changed (it's established by God's will permanently), denial cannot actually change the truth into something else. And the only way to "believe in" something else being true, is to block out awareness of the fact that the truth is true. While you are still aware that only the truth is true, you cannot bring yourself to believe or be convinced by an alternative. So you have to "block awareness".

Denial does this by putting up an illusory psychological barrier, comprised of a "will to reject", which makes the truth go unconscious. Conscious awareness is cut off from accessing the truth, hidden behind this wall of denial, and so now all that you are consciously aware of is "whats left" that hasn't yet been denied. The stuff that has been denied now forms the unconscious mind, hidden from awareness and kept in the dark. Consciously, since you are no longer aware that it is present, or still true, or an unchangeable fact, and you cannot "find it" when you search around with your awareness, it SEEMS not to exist.

Many false conclusions are made based on this unawareness - based on incomplete information. For example if you are not aware that you yourself chose to believe in sin, you made the sin unconscious by implementing denial and inventing fake guilt to cover it up, you will now be unable/unwilling to see that you are the one who made you guilty. Instead you will now search elsewhere for a "cause" of the upset, and inevitably blame it on someone else, because that seems to make sense given that you are not aware of the hidden key fact of what you did to yourself. This is why Jesus said "Forgive them father for they know not what they do" - as soon as you go into denial, you do NOT KNOW what you are doing, because you don't have all the facts in awareness.

The secret of salvation lies in your willingness to remove the block to awareness, so that you can become able to SEE the chain of causality coming from yourself, the choices you made, and thereby realize that none of your conditions are caused by anyone else. Your mind is the sole cause of your experience. But this block to awareness, in order to remove it, MUST entail the willingness to remove denial. The layer of denial which literally blocks awareness - blocks the ability to SEE, must be undone. And that will only be undone through honesty and willingness.

Denial takes on many forms, and indeed all forms. It includes the belief that you are already innocent even if you have unconscious hidden hates, secret sins, unhealed wounds and layers of self-repression that you don't want to admit to. This can produce a state of "fake innocence" in which you don't SEE that you are the cause of something and so become justified in blaming it on someone else - scapegoating, accusing your brother of your own sin. It also then justifies anger, and this is why anger is never justified - to become angry is ALWAYS based on denial and unawareness of the facts. If you knew the facts, the truth, you would have NO reason to conclude that you should be upset.

Denial also accounts for this world - Earth - this universe. Jesus says in reference to it, "a world that denies itself cannot exist." The world denies itself, because it is made OF denial of God's Kingdom. All denial is self denial, and so this world is made of denial. That is why it is a BLOCK to awareness. "Nothing so blinding as sight of form." This is also why, when denial is lifted, and we are willing to see the whole truth, this world must disappear because, being made from denial AS a block, it is merely an illusion preventing us from seeing, and once you see PAST it and become AWARE that you are the cause/dreamer of it, you will stop USING IT to make God's Kingdom unconscious.

Another expression or use of denial is in the ego's motto of "seek and do not find". By denying that you already are perfect, you don't SEE the perfection in yourself so you think it is not there, and so are now empty, and are in need, and this need compels you to search for a solution to the emptiness somewhere ELSE, outside of yourself. This sets you on a "spiritual path" - ultimately the journey without distance. Here you will pursue FAKE SPIRITAULITY, fake peace, produce a spiritualized ego, spiritualize the world, spiritualize the body, and seem to side with one half of duality (ultra positive or ultra negative).

This also produces the PERSONA, which is a fake identity or fake mask which forms this idea of who you think you are, which is made of the denial of yourself. Even your physical body is a fake image, designed to make people believe that they are seeing YOU when they see IT, when in fact it is made to HIDE YOU. The body and persona then become filled with fakery, lies, self deception and dishonesty, resulting in a veneer of "looking spiritual" or "acting spiritual", decorated with spiritual clothing and performing fake rituals, which are all really designed to maintain the denial and block you from being AUTHENTICALLY YOURSELF.

The facade of innocence hides unconscious guilt, and makes a person seem holier than they really are. The main problem is the person themselves is unwilling to admit to why they are overcompensating for a deep belief in unholiness, by pretending to be holy and trying to convince everyone that they themselves are convinced of it. This "spiritual seeker" has to be undone just as much as any other denial, because it takes you away from yourself. You do not need to seek. You need to *acknowledge* what is already TRUE about you, and be grateful that God's creation has not changed.

Denial also plays out in the unwillingness to accept what is happening in your life. I spent many many years in denial that I was unhappy, afraid, angry, and it wasn't until my mid-20's when I started to admit that the way I was feeling was even those things. I did not recognize the mountain of upset in me AS fear or AS anger, and didn't even know that I was afraid and angry. Such was the denial. Denial obscures, making reality seem twisted and not what it is, so that you do not *recognize* it, and so remain in a state where you think it IS something ELSE. This failure to recognize the truth is what keeps us in the dark. Yet "illusions recognized must disappear". They can only be recognized by not being in denial.

Denial also produces various kinds of blindness. The unwillingness to see the truth. Even though people may be walking around in bodies talking and performing activities, they can be in various states of awareness ie various states of denial, thus various states of unconsciousness. Just because someone is working in a job and playing on the internet and chatting to their friends, does not mean they are aware or awake. Denial indeed is sleep. It is a suppression of awareness.

Since denial is unwillingness, it also produces justification for fear whenever the truth comes along to challenge the denial. If you are in denial and you are believing that the truth is not the truth, you've made it out to be evil, and have replaced it with a lie that you believe is your salvation. When the truth comes along, you see it as an attacker, a threat, and thus USE denial once again as the ego's only tool to reject, shut out, or put distance between, you and that truth. You bury your head in the sand to avoid it and to pretend it is not there. This induces all forms of sickness, because sickness is a defense against the truth. So yes, sickness is denial of life, as is death.

The funny thing about denial is that instead of being able to actually change the truth at all, you instead hide from the truth and block your awareness of it, reasoning that if you are not AWARE of it, it must not BE there. This is clearly denial because you are simply hiding your vision. Pretending that something is not there, does not make it go away. But in the ego, we become convinced by this delusion and think "out of sight, out of mind"... that if we can't SEE something, or cannot be AWARE of it, then it must not exist.

This way, we've told ourselves that we actually UNDID God, reversed creation, cancelled Heaven, and erased our true self. By believing that our denial of truth CAN change the truth (that darkness can hide the light), it's very easy to make the tiny shift from "I'm in denial of it" to "It's actually gone." Therefore we have come to believe, in ego denial, that we ACTUALLY HAVE changed the truth because our awareness does not show it to us and it seems not to exist any more. This way we came to believe that sin is real and has had real consequences. We think that we actually HAVE hurt God, produced a new truth, got away with murder, and destroyed ourself and our inheritance.

This belief then leads to the distorted perception that we stopped being innocent, CHANGED into a different state, our innocence went away, and now all that we're left with is guilt. And in that view it seems as though we have become unworthy, have transformed from sinless to sinful, or from innocent to guilty. The blocked awareness viewed from inside denial, makes it SEEM as if this is true. And so in denial, we automatically come to believe that our denying is actually WORKING, and is CAUSAL, and has power OVER the truth to change it. And so we think we have sinned, are really a sinner, deserve to be guilty, should be punished for it, and are worthy only of death. Denial produces the death wish.

From this side of denial, not seeing that our denial HAS NOT changed reality, we're quite convinced that we actually are guilty sinners who don't deserve love or forgiveness. And so we think we are working on or in or with this guilty "ego self", which has not only replaced our real self, but is the ONLY self left. In denial, we are not aware that our real self - our innocent self - still as God created it - is STILL THERE, still fully alive, still perfect, and has not changed whatsoever. That real self is right here with you now. That real self is already in heaven and never left, nor did it change anything in reality.

And so now we're in this strange position where we think we are only this evil self who can never go back to being holy, while all along our true self is perfectly undefiled and holy forever, existing in parallel to this false idea of ourselves. Your "higher self" therefore exists right NOW, even if your sense of identity is all caught up in denial and confusion and ego. This is why "enlightenment is but a recognition and no a change at all". It merely entails the willingness to be AWARE of what is ALREADY TRUE. And to reach that awareness, ALL layers of denial MUST be removed from the mind so that you CAN be aware of it.

To admit to being in denial, or even to admit to wanting to stay in denial - wanting to keep your denial - is still an admittance. It reveals a willingness to allow the truth to enter. Even if you say, "I admit I do not want to wake up", that is better than an unwillingness to even admit that. To admit, is to permit access. It means you are willing to let truth be said or expressed about whatever the situation is. And this truth then sets you free. Even if just a little bit. Even if you are just admitting to being in denial and that you don't want to do anything about it, admits more truth than to not even want to admit to that.

This therefore takes some willingness, and it takes honesty. It requires a willingness to be mistaken, without implying punishment. It requires you to get honest with yourself, to stop being in resistance or avoidance, and to LOOK AT what it is that you don't want to see. And looking at it with the truth, is looking at it with the Holy Spirit. He represents the state of mind in which there is no denial. Your willingness to dig out and offer up secret sins, hidden hates, grievances, and also ways that you don't want to admit or accept something, allows Him to shine away those lies and release you.

Now, in ACIM circles there are various forms of denial and blindspots and each person is different. I've seen the most denial circling around topics to do with the body not existing, and to do with the world not existing. These are two of the major sticking points because the ego denial has

built a fortress to protect belief in these two things, and believing you "are" a body or that there "is" a world are the two most fundamental "givens" in this world. The body is the hero of the dream, and the world is the dream itself. To question belief in either of these seriously pushes the ego buttons and seems to "threaten your establishments."

There is a lot of denial around these topics and a lot of refusal to accept them. Accepting that there is no world is one of the hardest things to do, because denial makes the world seem true, real, valuable and desirable. Denial that the world is a cruel place, for example, leads many to believe God created it. And with that kind of a conclusion, who would want to question God's reality? Yet we are still in denial until we are sure to have removed all denial. And we will be in denial that we are in denial, because we don't SEE that there is something unconscious to us that we believe does not even exist.

There are also good and bad forms of denial, or uses of denial. If denial is used to reject the real truth, that's not a good thing. If denial is used to reject lies, that IS a good thing. Or rather, if denial is used to reject the belief that denial is true, using the mind to ADMIT that the denial is there, or that it is FALSE, that is a worthy form of denial.

There are unworthy forms of denial, which usually entail either a direct 1st-hand rejection of what is real, OR a 2nd-hand rejection of the illusions that have arisen due to the first level of denial. For example it is denial to produce a body. The body was made to deny God and shut out sharing with the Sonship. This denial needs to be undone. But additionally, on a second level, while you are making a body, if you KEEP making it through denial, but then pretend in some way that it does not exist and try to "separate from" it, THAT is also an unworthy form of denial. Up to a point, "the body is merely a fact of human existence." But at some point, human existence (bodies) is also denial of Spirit. These denials are at different levels.

Jesus also tells us in ACIM that "the separation HAS happened." Many people DENY this, mainly due to confusion about "nothing happened" as the atonement principle. This is level confusion. We did have the tiny mad idea, and we did share it, and it did produce imaginary worlds of illusion. Jesus even says, that to deny this fact is an unworthy form of denial. But to "accept" that it has happened should only be done in order to quickly realize that atonement is the only meaningful "correction" for the separation, and that it should be done as soon as possible.

It is also possible to have denials on top of denials on top of denials. For example when you are in fear, you are pretending that you have good reason to be afraid of something outside you. But the fact is, the fear is a decoy to deny guilt. Fear is protecting you from guilt and deflecting attention away from it as the "reason" why you are afraid. Fear makes guilt unconscious and blocks the guilt. The only reason you are afraid is because you think you are guilty and want to punish yourself. But without awareness of that, in fear you'll look for causes of the fear externally. To undo fear you must remove the denial behind it, become MORE AWARE of what you denied, reveal the guilt, and fix the guilt. So you can see there are multiple layers of distortion surrounding the guilt, and even guilt itself is denial.

The ego only has one tool. "Deny what is." The one antidote is the atonement - "accept what is". But to accept what is, you have to first remove the denial, so that your awareness of "what is" increases. So this doesn't mean just accepting the world "as it is", because how you are perceiving it is NOT the fullness that's present. You are NOT seeing it for what's really there, and are not recognizing it as an illusion. Blocks have to be removed in your mind, so that you can SEE. By seeing accurately and fully, you have true perception, which shows you the truth about this world, that it is not real and doesn't exist. Without removal of denial you will try to accept it, but won't be able to recognize it or accept its unreality.

The ego used denial to hide God, by making sin. The ego used denial to hide and keep sin, by making fake guilt. The ego hid the guilt behind fake fear using more denial. The fear produces self punishment but by denying that you are doing so. And eventually death is denial even of punishment. At every step the ego is denying, denying, denying. Denying who you are, stripping away layers of what remains, until eventually there is nothing left to deny. In death there is TOTAL denial of the truth, and no-one who goes through death is in their right mind.

It all boils down to this simple dynamic. Either you accept the truth - God's truth as God established it, or you deny it. You have no other choice. And because denial does not change the truth, denial MUST be a lie, where you are PRETENDING that the truth is not true. So either you are pretending to be something you are not, or you are being your real authentic self - as created by God. It's your choice, whether to accept or deny. But no-one gets to define what the truth IS. Only God can do that. And being in denial DOES NOT redefine the truth, even though those in denial believe that this is precisely what they're achieving. This is the authority problem, which is nothing but denial and an unwillingness to be honest.

The freedom we have is one of accepting or rejecting, not establishing, but anyone in denial with an ego will be in the business of trying to establish what the truth IS, acting as a gatekeeper to have to "approve" or "disapprove" before anything is permitted into awareness. Only when we are willing to give up our attempt to be God, to make the truth, will we be willing to simply open up to ACCEPT and RECEIVE it. Accepting the atonement is like throwing up your hands and admitting, only the truth is true, and only God's will is possible, and only God's way will work. Nothing else works. The ego is a lie and death is failure. Nothing else is true. I might as well accept it and go with it. And this takes TOTAL SURRENDER.

Thankfully, the truth is on our side, and loves us and has created everything for us. A perfect home, the inheritance of eternity, immortality, absolute peace and total joy. Not too shabby an option to accept, when you realize you stand to gain everything and give up nothing by letting go of denial.

"No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth."

"Heaven is a choice I must make."

"A dream of death is not left by death but by truth."

"The truth shall set you free."