Let's take a closer look at sin and find out why no-one has ever sinned.

"While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"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."

""Sinless" means without sin. You cannot be without sin a little. You are sinless or not. If your mind is part of God's you must be sinless, or a part of His Mind would be sinful."

What is sin?

Simply, it is the attempt to reverse cause and effect. You are the effect of God, and God is the cause of you. When you attempt to reverse this, so that you are CAUSING GOD, this is "sin". It would mean God is now affected by you, changed by you, against His will. That means you have attacked Him and changed him. The belief that you CAN do this, and that you HAVE done this, is the belief that sin is REAL. But this is IMPOSSIBLE.

There is a simple fact to keep in mind. You CANNOT change God in any way. You cannot cause him or affect him. You cannot do anything against His will. You cannot attack Him or make Him be something He does not want to be. Which means, literally, YOU CANNOT SIN against Him. You cannot cause God, therefore you cannot sin. Your hands are tied. You cannot attack anything real.

This also means that IN REALITY, nothing real can be threatened, nothing real can be sinned against, nothing real can be CHANGED, and therefore SIN IS IMPOSSIBLE. You literally cannot go against, oppose, object to, resist, attack, defend against, or do anything TO God or anything real. Sin is literally impossible. Sin literally CANNOT HAPPEN, and HAS NOT HAPPENED. And this isn't mere theory, you literally HAVE NOT SINNED AT ALL.

It is vital to absorb this FACT, because it lays the foundation for correctly framing what's to come next.

You have not sinned, you cannot sin, sin cannot occur, you cannot attack God, you cannot change reality, and you cannot cause the death of life. SIN IS IMPOSSIBLE IN REALITY.

Now. As you find yourself in a DREAM WORLD, Earth, reading words on a screen, you are not being aware of reality. You are not effectively "IN" reality. The world is an attempt to overthrow reality and replace it with unreality. The world is unreal. It's a dream of death. It's an ATTEMPT TO SIN, despite the fact that actually doing this IN REALITY is impossible. It's your best effort to TRY to PROVE that sin is not only possible but has occurred.

You MADE UP a bunch of dream illusions to try to paint a picture of what it might look like *IF* you had sinned. That picture is this world. "The world was made as a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son." It's a picture of THE IMPOSSIBLE. "It is the world you see that is impossible." In this world, NOTHING HAPPENS. "All events are nowhere."

Yet this world SEEMS to contain things happening, seems to feature bodies attacking bodies, and seems riddled with sin. "The world of bodies is the world of sin." And if we BELIEVE that this world is REALITY, we WILL believe that the "sins" that occur are REAL sins, mistaking FANTASY SINS for reality. These ILLUSIONS of sin, IMPOSSIBLE sin seeming possible, are literally nothing but fiction, with NO REAL CONSEQUENCES against anything real. God is not affected by it, nothing real is threatened by it. You literally have NOT CAUSED ANY DAMAGE OR HARM EVER.

The fact remains. You literally cannot sin. You can't even begin to sin. This world is not real and so anything "happening" here is not REALLY happening. If you break a window, you did not break a real window. You broke a dream window. If you killed a flock of sheep in a fit of rage, you didn't. You merely dreamed of doing so. If you think you did some terrible crime that is punishable by death and suffering, you are ATTEMPTING to hold a deathly judgement against an INNOCENT Son of God, BY MISTAKE.

Because here's the fact of the matter. If you cannot sin against anything real, and therefore sin is impossible, you believing you HAVE DONE SO MUST BE MISTAKEN. You MUST be confused. You MUST be delusional. You MUST be out of your mind insane if you think it's even POSSIBLE to sin, yet alone that you have, or "have the proof" to show for it. There is no such thing as evidence of sin. There are only lies and illusions of sin. There is no real sin. ALL SIN IS FAKE.

Only by being very mistaken does anyone BELIEVE they have sinned. Only in confusion are we convinced that it's even POSSIBLE to cause something against its will. Only by being in ERROR having made an error of discernment does it seem plausible or "happening" that there can be "real death", "murder", "war" and the like. These are DREAMS of hell, not real hell. They are illusions of sin in an illusory world.

You have never sinned. You will never sin. God finds you guiltless, sinless and innocent forever. This is what you need to wake up to - accepting this is FORGIVENESS. The overlooking of sin, the overlooking of guilt, the overlooking of death. There is no sin, or guilt, or suffering, or sickness, or death. ALL of it SEEMS real, SEEMS to be happening, SEEMS like an awful terrible nightmare. But it is nothing BUT a nightmare. It's a nightmare to BELIEVE you can sin when you can't, or that you HAVE sinned when it's impossible.

You cannot sin. You will not sin. You have not sinned. There is no sin. No one has ever sinned. No one can sin against you. You have never sinned against anyone. YOU ARE NOT A SINNER. You are ETERNALLY INNOCENT. This is the only verdict the Holy Spirit will accept about you because He knows without a doubt that your idea of sinning is UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE and completely illusory.

You are DREAMING of sinfulness, suffering and death. You are punishing yourself in a hell of your own making for NO GOOD REASON. You are finding yourself guilty for having DONE NOTHING. You are not criminal, sinful, or guilty. You have never hurt anything or anyone. You are EXONERATED because IN REALITY SIN DOES NOT EXIST. If you think it exists, you are unaware of reality.

Belief in sin IS THE PROBLEM, not the sin itself. This whole world, the entire ego separation, the dream of death, is ALL about your BELIEF that you DID SIN, in DENIAL of the fact that YOU DID NOT. The WHOLE THING is a case of mistaken identity and false accusations. A claim that you accomplished something you could never do. It's an attempt to invent the evidence and give it credit/reality so that it SEEMS to prove you DID commit a horrible crime against God. YOU COULD NOT, NEVER DID, NEVER WILL.

So this whole world is A MISTAKE. You are MISTAKEN when you believe you or others are sinful or guilty. "BELIEVING in" sin being true is the actual issue. Your belief is mistaken. Your belief is madness. Your belief is an ERROR. And all errors can be CORRECTED. You believing you CAN and HAVE sinned is NOT TRUE, it and this error in thinking needs to be corrected so that you will REALIZE, you never did anything AT ALL. You accused yourself FALSELY.

No matter what you think you did, no matter how extreme or severe or what the consequences seemed to be, YOU HAVE NOT done a single thing EVER that God is upset with you about. You have ONLY been very mistaken. You have only ever had "mental illness", believing something is possible that isn't. You've acted insanely because you were not in your right mind. No one in their right mind believes in sin because the authority-problem notion of "I can change reality" is utterly ridiculous.

Mistakes call for FORGIVENESS AND HEALING. To forgive is to overlook the error and recognize the truth. You have not sinned. There is no sin. "And in this view are all your sins forgiven." A mistaken person merely needs healing, not punishment. You deserve forgiveness and healing, not condemnation. You have simply been confused and have mistaken illusions and dreams of sinning for reality.

Not one single sin in the history of the planet has ever happened. There is no sin anywhere. All "doing" is illusion. Everyone is eternally innocent. God finds you worthy, and loves you forever. Sinless, guiltless, deathless, fearless. You are holy and always were.

If you'll take a look, willingly, for a while, you'll notice that everything in the world goes wrong sooner or later.

The food goes moldy. The leaves die off. The cars break down. The tv stops working. The shoes develop a hole. The carpet gathers dirt. The river drowns someone. The volcanos explode. The lightning strikes a cow. Suns go supernova etc.

Do you notice a trend? If you look for long enough without denial?

Are you expecting these things not to happen?

What part of life is it that gets our hopes up that these things won't occur? Have we become clever at building an illusory sense of safety, a little oasis in the desert, a barricade against death?

Jesus says the main purpose of special relationships is to draw a little circle around a portion of hell to keep attack out and create an illusion of safety within. Why do we do that? Some kind of denial that the food is going to go moldy, the house windows are going to break, the trains are going to rust, the babies are going to die?

We find ourselves in this hellish world we made which, if you sit and look at it, you can see it "dying" all the time. If you take off the rose tinted glasses, the hopes and dreams, the wishful thinking, the defenses, the attempts to protect yourself from its onslaught, just sit and watch it. Everything dies here sooner or later.

That isn't pleasant. It's not pretty. It's built into the system.

We can be quite heavily in denial of this. In fact there's a whole lot of motivation and activity in the world geared towards brushing this fact under the carpet. The denial of it, while you go pursue successful careers and happy families and build your houses on ground that will, eventually, swallow them up.

I'm not trying to be morbid here, or negative. I'm not passing any judgement. Just look at it. This is what the world is like. Do we want to stay in denial of this? Do we want to keep pretending it's not how it is, and keep running away from death? Not that we should run towards it either, but we have to be willing to recognize what this world's nature is without flinching.

Jesus says "The world is false perception". He also says "without the idea of death there is no world." He also says "The body's eyes are not the means by which the real world can be seen." and "Only the body makes the world seem real."

What this tells you is that this world, which is always in a state of death and dying and decay, is fundamentally ONLY existing in a state of FALSE perception. And when you move toward true perception, opening the spiritual eye, and seeing with Christ Vision, you are looking using a non-body apparatus, a non-false apparatus, a true perception, which looks past this world entirely and looks to reality. And in that reality this world doesn't exist, because you can only see it when your mind is in error. Because it's an hallucination.

The world was made to be the opposite of life. It's a dream of death. It's not a dream of life. It sometimes appears to contain illusions of life, spring, birth, renewal, regeneration, growth and so on. But these are all illusions. Flowers all die in the end, that's a fact. There is no life form anywhere that lives forever. Everything is always transitioning from spurts of what appear to be life, towards death. That's what the world does. It's built in, fundamental to its nature.

Do you think you can make this world stop doing that? By all means you can override this behavior through miracles, because the power of the mind trumps false perception and can easily change illusions. But nevertheless the world will still keep dying, destroying, eating and consuming everything else. It denies even its own existence and is against itself. The world is suicidal. This whole universe is.

The ego has a massive effort to try to save the world. It's a farce. The effort is to suggest that a world which is fundamentally made of death can be made to live. That death can be avoided, even though all its efforts to avoid death attract it and make it real. The world only contains a seeming mixture and the living and dying because we introduced an "opposite to life" into our minds and now try to live in a contradictory world where both life and death happen. And now we've made both life and death into an illusion.

Even as you awaken towards true perception, people will still continue to experience body death and sickness. There will still be wars. In case you didn't notice, doing the workbook does not cause the workbook to disappear. Nor does it change much what's on the news. Pandemics have happened in the lifetime of ACIM students. Because they do, because they're part of this world's functioning. This world has a function of failure and that does not change.

The effort to make this world change or to turn it into a physical form appearance of heaven, is impossible. It's an attempt to spiritualize an illusion and turn a illusion into something real and sacred and worth keeping. If you could do that you'd be stuck in hell forever with no reason to go home. You can't make an equivalent as attractive as God's creation. As Jesus says:

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world 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. "

There are no roads, in hell, that lead out of hell. Darkness cannot become light while keeping the darkness. Ego cannot turn itself into holiness. Death cannot be alive. And non-existence cannot take on an existence. It's a closed system.

Life isn't here. Life is in heaven. If you want to be where life is, you go to where life is. You don't try to polish up a turd and turn it into something special. Your home and your natural environment are in the Kingdom with God, where you were designed to be. You cannot be comfortable in another world that's alien to you. This world is an alien world and the people on it are all aliens.

Can we let it be what it is, recognize its shortcoming, and turn away from it to the light, knowing that "this world holds nothing that I want"? Can we recognize its offerings of idols, pleasures, toys, temptations, treasures, as nothing but scraps of hell that we do not really want? And can we recognize as Jesus says that you CANNOT really WANT the world? Not really. It's fundamentally lacking.

We are to forgive the world, and shine a light of truth upon it, and recognize it for what it is WITHOUT the judgement that "sin is real" or "its really hell". But this merely lifts away from it any confusion about what it is. We then recognize it is simply false and nothing and not your home. A world of illusions. Not really sinful, not really anything. But not your home. You can love it, unconditionally, but you can't be in love with it if you want to be with God.

The world is dying. It was already dead when we made it.

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER.

Both are not true, yet either one will seem as real to you, as the amount to which you hold it dear. And yet their power is NOT the same, because their real attraction to you IS unequal. 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.

This aching world has not the power to touch the living world 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. But the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT. And what you call with love WILL come to you."

"The higher mind thinks according to the laws spirit obeys, and therefore honors only the laws of God."

Since spirit obeys only God's laws, and Spirit is love, expressions of love (miracles) are expressions of the laws of spirit. Spirit is beyond the "nature" of the ego, and therefore miracles have a super-natural, spiritual origin. What you may not realize is that this entire world is constructed from the ego's fake laws of nature, even down to the subatomic physics.

The laws of the ego are invented by the ego. The dream, which is an effect of an "invisible" higher-level cause, does not contain any real causes. But it contains illusions of causes. These illusions of causes make it seem like one part of the same level causes effects in other parts of the same level. This is not true. All effects are orchestrated from a higher level, including the illusion that one thing causes another.

So when you study this fictional "world", and you see one object seeming to move and collide with another object to "cause" it to behave differently, this SEEMS like there is some kind of a law involved. Like the laws of physics, suggesting that actions have equal and opposite reactions.

The truth is that actions do NOT have equal and opposite reactions. Actions on this level are not actions. They are all reactions - effects, pretending to be actions. The action, and its effects, are both effects coming from an unseen dimension.

The ego has been very clever to disguise and hide God's nature and the laws of Spirit, by creating FORM, and nothing is so blinding as sight of form. The behavior and interaction of forms creates an illusion of cause and effect happening on this same level. And so on this level it appears that some things cause other things, and that this is "natural". It could not be further from natural.

What it really expresses is the fact that what is not love is murder, and every part of the ego thought system (of which this world is a part) is murderous. The ego thought system believes that what applies to one thing does not apply to another, therefore there are differences, therefore you can cause (attack) without being attacked (affected).

This is why so-called "causes" in this world seem to escape the effects they inflict on other things. It seems possible to throw a brick through a window without damaging the brick. But since what applies to the brick does not apply to the window, this is an illusion based on differences, and is an expression of a murderous idea. The brick "gets away with" (murders) the window because the so-called properties of the brick (the laws applying to it) are "different" to the properties and laws of the window. It is not "natural" to be murderous, and so this "law of nature" that the brick will break the window is NOT being governed by a natural law or the "laws of physics".

The truth about this universe/world/planet is that it is not run by laws of physics, there is no such thing as physics, and in fact it is run by the mind from a higher level. And it doesn't really exist because it is just a dream being projected and dreams are fictional. This is why "there is no world."

Since all true causality is in the mind, and all of the mind is "above" the level of this world and its effects, when the mind decides to exercise its ability to cause, it can "modify" the content of the dream, or rearrange it, in order to demonstrate and prove that it is NOT really governed by the ILLUSORY LAWS, but by the laws of spirit.

Since spirit is love and love's expressions are miracles, these "acts of love" demonstrating the true laws or "true nature" of existence, MUST DEFY AND BREAK the illusions of horizontal laws that the ego assumes are true.

If a child is playing with a train set and the train is traveling around the track "on rails", seemingly by itself, following physical laws, it can only go where the "laws" seem to tell it to go. However, if the child reaches down and picks up the train and positions it in a totally different section of track, all of those laws are completely defied. Indeed, another child may complain that "you're not supposed to do that" because it breaks the ILLUSION of the game they were playing at PRETENDING the train is going around the track on its own.

The mind of the dreamer is what dictates what shows up, where it shows up, how it shows up, and how it behaves. Any so-called "interactions" of objects are FAKE. The objects would completely pass through each other and occupy the same space if it were not for the MIND deciding to make it seem like they collide with each other and perform a cascade of so-called "reactions". There is no such thing as a real reaction. Spirit creates and extends, it does not react.

This whole world and everything in it was designed to conceal the nature of God and His laws, behind a smokescreen of fake laws and fake nature. To present an illusion that one thing depends on another or causes effects in another, thereby expressing the ego's insane idea of un-equal laws or finite laws which apply only some of the time to some objects. After all, not all objects are causing something to happen at all times, and even objects which are affected turn around and become causes soon after. Are they causes, or effects, or both, or neither?

Nothing in this world has the power to express the laws of Spirit on its own because "form" is the form of ERROR, and error is all about separation and powerlessness and fake causality. Miracles HAVE to express something which is BEYOND the nature of this world, in order for them to be miracles at all. It is not a miracle for a car to drive down a road. It is a miracle for the car to disappear and reappear 50 miles further along in a split second. It is not a miracle for a tree to catch on fire. It is a miracle for the tree to avoid being burned in the midst of a raging forest fire where everything around it was incinerated. Ego laws MUST be defied in order for it to be miraculous.

Miracles obey the laws of Spirit, not the laws of the ego. For a miracle to express, something which the ego APPEARED to establish as true is shown to be FALSE, and is demonstrated to be false, by completely defying and breaking and overriding the ego laws to produce effects which are outside those laws. This would include for example giving someone new eyeballs after they were born without any eyes. Or re-growing a missing limb. Or turning water into wine. Or walking on the top of the ocean without sinking.

If this nature-defying, thus super-natural element is missing from miracles, and if miracles in ACIM are not super-natural, then what are they? There is nothing super natural or ego defying or ego-law-breaking about shifting perception. There is nothing ego-law-breaking or capable of demonstrating that the laws don't apply, in correcting some thoughts. There is nothing that's going to change the direction the world spins when some old emotions are released. There's nothing particularly powerful about any of these efforts at purification. They are just clearing away belief in ego laws to make way for Spirit to express itself.

"Glory is your inheritance, given your Soul by its Creator, that you might EXTEND it."

"Your inheritance can neither be bought NOR sold. There can BE no disinherited parts of the Sonship, for God is whole, and all his extensions are like Him."

"Yet perfect security and complete fulfillment are my inheritance. I have tried to give my inheritance away in exchange for the world I see. But God has kept my inheritance safe for me."

"The inheritance of the Kingdom is the right of God's Son, given him in his creation."

"Their Father gave the SAME inheritance to both. Who would have more OR less is not aware that he has everything."

Here's the facts.

God already gave you everything. He shared all of creation with you. You share with every brother. Everyone shares the total abundance of Heaven together. It is yours permanently because that is God's will.

You cannot make it go away. You cannot defile it or break it or diminish it. Nothing you do can make you unworthy of it. It is already yours because it IS YOU. It's built into what you are. You are an aspect of Heaven itself. You are the gift of God.

The only other option you have is to GO INTO DENIAL and pretend that you do not HAVE the inheritance that God has provided. This denial does not actually undo the inheritance, nor does it destroy it or make it undone. All it does is COVER IT UP with blocks to awareness.

Since you cannot change God's will, all you can do is block awareness that it is permanently true. You do this through denial which makes you unconscious. You attempt to shut out of awareness the unavoidable reality of your inheritance, believing that if you just hide your head in the sand like an ostrich you won't be "aware" that the truth is still true, and therefore "that means it's not there." This is self-deception at its finest.

All that is required therefore is the removal of the blocks to the awareness of love's presence. The love is still there. The inheritance is still there, and God kept it for you permanently. You don't get to cancel it, but you can hide from it. All you need to do therefore is remove the blocks to awareness, which is nothing more than DENIAL and a LACK OF ACCEPTANCE, which lifts away these barriers in your mind and increases what you are AWARE OF.

And in so doing you reveal to yourself what is ALREADY THERE and what is ALREADY YOURS. This is how you ALLOW yourself to reclaim your natural inheritance from God, which is always yours forever.

As an immortal being, you should be accustomed to everything always being perfect. You live forever, everyone you know lives forever. There’s no sickness or suffering of any kind. No death, no destruction. Nothing ever goes wrong, no problems, no situations to solve or things to fix. Nothing ever malfunctions, there’s always perfect happiness.

So then consider, what is this fucked up state that we’ve gotten ourselves into? This nightmare that we’re having. Truly it is a nightmare when we suddenly start to regard there as being something wrong with someone. Something isn’t working. Someone is partly broken. Somehow things are happening that should never happen. Stuff starts showing up out of nowhere which should be impossible. Horrors and traumas and tragedies suddenly erupt seeming to topple all sense of immortality. Sudden sicknesses take hold of the eternal and render them inept. What was created to live forever is suddenly destroying itself.

What kind of madness is this? This is the state of mind, and world, and identity, which we have opted to enter into, instead of being as God created us. It is an insane nightmare, in which things which absolutely should never be happening seem to be happening all the time. It is so incredibly alien to us. It is so wrong. It is so not of God and not one single speck of this cruel world could ever be even conceived of by the immortal beings of heaven. How horrifying that anything could even remotely go wrong, anything would break down, anything could suffer or die in any way. Truly a nightmare, and completely unnatural. This world is not my home.

"Principle 23 ... YOU are a miracle. God creates only "that which, or one who, is of surpassing excellence or merit". Man is capable of this kind of creation, too, being in the image and likeness of his own Creator. Anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the Creations of Light are real."

“Pain is but witness to the Son's mistakes in what he thinks he is. It is a dream of fierce retaliation for a crime that could not be committed; for attack on what is wholly unassailable. It is a nightmare of abandonment by an Eternal Love Which could not leave the Son whom It created out of love.”

“Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares all mean nothing. They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you. The Holy Spirit WILL restore your sanity, because insanity is NOT the Will of God.”

“Learn that even the darkest nightmare that disturbed the mind of God's sleeping Son, holds no power over him. He WILL learn the lesson of awaking. God watches over him, and light surrounds him.”

“Let us not save nightmares, for they are not fitting offerings for Christ, and so they are not fit gifts for YOU. Take off the covers, and look at what you are afraid of. Only the ANTICIPATION will frighten you, for the reality of nothingness cannot be frightening.”

Everything within the ego thought system, every part of separation, this universe and world, issues with bodies, all forms of sickness, every problem or upsetting situation, all appearances of external causes and even death, can be described by one SIMPLE statement:

The sequence of cause and effect has been reversed.

This BEGAN in Heaven when you attempted to will against God's will. To will something separate from God's will. This "authority problem" was an act of trying to CAUSE GOD.

God is cause. You are God's effect. God did grant you the power to cause and create, but He did NOT grant you the power to cause HIM.

The entire separation and everything that followed from it, was formed on the basis of this belief that you are willing against God's will, and therefore God's will is outside/separate/external to your will and acting against your will.

This is the idea of sin. That you could cause and therefore produce EFFECTS in God, to hurt Him, to change His mind, to make Him not love you anymore, or to destroy Him, and that you have in fact been capable of doing this with "real effects".

This was the beginning point of all dreaming.

It's all entirely because you tried to stop being the effect of God and to instead cause God.

Let's describe that in terms of levels. The higher level is causal (God). The lower level is effect (You/Son of God). You are as God created you, as God intended, as God willed. When you, who are on the lower level, attempt to CAUSE the higher level to change, this is LEVEL CONFUSION. It is the authority problem. It is the belief in magic. It is the belief in an external will. It is the source of ALL SICKNESS. Eventually to will so strongly against your own cause, against God, is to deny God and deny life, and results in DEATH.

This all comes from reversing what the Course calls the "divine order". The proper sequence of creation. Cause produces effects, not the other way around. The world that we are in now, is also a "level", and it is being caused by a higher level. It is a dream-effect or a causal mind "above" this world. Everything in this world is an effect, not a cause. But when anything in this world is given properties of "causing" or "willing" or "making effects happen", that is LEVEL CONFUSION also, another layer of it. And this is the source of all our suffering.

Everything in your life that you "need to forgive", is BASED ON this same dynamic. Every upset you have. Every perception that someone is acting against your will. Every form of victimhood. All states of sickness and death. Every argument. Every conflict or war. All special relationships. Every part of the ego thought system is based on this reversal of causality. "All sickness is the result of confusing the levels". Whenever something "below" or an "effect" is believed to have an ability to CAUSE, that is level confusion, it is mental illness, it is an illusion, it is false, it is ego, and it encapsulates the entire ego thought system.

It causes you to "perceive" that cause is outside of you, causing AGAINST you. This is because instead of God flowing into you from "behind", and you extending it outward and "forward", you have instead turned around and taken a stand "against" God's outflowing will, to try to will in the other direction, to STOP God's will. Like a rock in a river trying to stop the flow. ALL your suffering and problems come from this.

So to CORRECT IT, to "apply forgiveness" as we like to say, you ONLY need to correct this one fundamental error in the dynamic. You need to re-reversed cause and effect so that the levels are in their proper ORDER, and so that you recognize yourself as the effect of God, so that you are not against God's will, and thereby do not perceive that there is a will acting against you.

That also means you no longer perceiving or believing that there is a "separate cause" outside of you, or a cause in the world, or a cause on a lower level, or a cause in the body, or a cause in other people, or a cause in laws of physics in the environment, or any other externalized cause. Cause is IN YOU. God is IN YOUR MIND, so Cause is in your mind, and your mind is the effect of GOD and nothing else.

Every situation in your life which seems like 1000 DIFFERENT problems with different dynamics and issues and reactions and emotions and so on.... all those differences are illusions COVERING UP the simple CORE THREAD which is the SAME in all of them. That is, somehow, you have become mistaken about what is a cause and what is an effect. And so now you see causes as doing stuff to you against your will, when they are not. And you've turned yourself into an effect of the world, instead of the cause of it. This same simple concept runs through EVERY FORGIVENESS LESSON.

Now, before you can undo this problem in real life situations, or even recognize it in your upsetting situations, you need to recognize something.

The ego has invented its own idea of cause and effect. It believes that causes and effects are "horizontal". This has resulted in "horizontal perception". That means, it believes and perceives that something in the world on this same "level", has the ability to "cause" something else on this same level, and produce effects in it. So now it seems possible that an object can produce a reaction in another object, a person can come along and hurt you, someone can be to blame for doing something to you etc. Causes and effects are seen as linear on the horizontal plane, or sideways. This is totally opposite to the truth, which is that the HIGHER level is the only cause and the LOWER level (this world) is ENTIRELY EFFECT.

So part of what you have to realize is, this world does not contain any real causes AT ALL. It is all effect. It is all a dream, all the effect of you dreaming from a higher level. It doesn't matter how it APPEARS, that a cause is outside you on this same level. There are NO CAUSES IN THE WORLD. There are no causes in your body. There are no causes in other people doing stuff. There are no causes in the environment. Cause is on a higher level, and it's in your mind, "above the battlefield."

The recognition that causality is VERTICAL, results in what the course calls "vertical perception." It also says a sudden shift from horizontal to vertical perception is required in order to produce a miracle. Miracles are expressions of VERTICAL CAUSALITY in which the levels are in their proper order, there is no level confusion, there is no belief in something in the world causing something else, and therefore the higher level which MADE the word can CHANGE it in total defiance of any illusory laws or horizontal cause-effect relationships. This produces supernatural miracles which are ABOVE (super) the "natural" (nature) of the horizontal illusion and prove through demonstration that cause-effect on this level is ENTIRELY AT THE EFFECT OF YOUR MIND.

So what you're going to need to do in an everyday upsetting situation, something you "need to forgive", is UNDO BELIEF IN horizontal cause and effect, so that you CAN SHIFT to a vertical perception, in which God is cause, you are His effect, and YOU ARE THE CAUSE OF THIS WORLD that you're dreaming.

Recognize therefore that the ego INVENTS the idea of being caused by things outside of you on this same level. It is never true. This forms a kind of fictional "connection", mentally and energetically, between you and other people. You perceive and believe they, or the environment, or you food, or events, or the body, can "cause you". This is FALSE. So what you need to do is COLLAPSE the ego's horizontal cause-effect beliefs and relationships. Cancel them out, separate them out, and that leads to a pretty simple goal:

Recognizing that there is NO CAUSE OR EFFECT between any two things in this world. This whole world is an EFFECT of your mind ON A HIGHER LEVEL. And therefore you are NOT ON THIS LEVEL, you are ABOVE IT.

So what you want to do is effectively "SEPARATE" cause from effect on this level. It's like two boxers in a ring who are fighting, you need to separate them, get them back to their corners, and stop them from affecting each other. Break them up. Put a GAP between the horizontal causes and the horizontal effects so that you can believe and perceive that YOU ARE NOT AT THE EFFECT of anything in this world.

The only way you can believe and perceive that you are not at the effect of anything in this world, is to not believe in CAUSES in this world, of any kind, and therefore to shift into a VERTICAL perception which is miraculous, which recognizes that this ENTIRE WORLD is made up, its a dream, it was all made at once, and every ILLUSION of causality or effects were made TOGETHER simultaneously. There ARE no real causes here.

I like to do this with a simple process of "correcting ideas" something like this:

You did not cause me. I am not at the effect of you. You have not made me upset. You are not the one who attacked me. You did not do anything to me. You have no power over me. I am free of you. You are not the source of my upset. Everything I am experiencing I have chosen. These feelings are my own. This hurt is something I put there myself. I am responsible for everything I am experiencing. It's got nothing to do with you. I must've wanted to experience this. I chose this myself and made a wrong decision and can choose again.

Notice regardless of the words you use, that there is only ONE THING happening here over and over. I am CUTTING TIES between myself and the other person. These are ARTIFICIAL ties of horizontal causes and effects. They are not real or true at all. I am SEPARATING MYSELF from the "fictional causes" so that I am not at their effect. You could express this a 1000 different ways, whatever words or aspects you need to use to break up all of your personal perceptual errors and beliefs in how something is affecting you.

But note that in order to FULLY CANCEL the ego's illusion of horizontal causality, you need to also apply this same set of clarifications to the other person or cause as well. This helps to "balance it out" or to complete the undoing of any other beliefs or perceptions which you might have such as that YOU affected the other person, resulting in guilt etc. This really helps to clean up any possible effects which have come from what you falsely experienced. For example:

I did not cause you. You are not at the effect of me. II have not made you upset. I am not the one who attacked you. I did not do anything to you. I have no power over you. You are free of me. I am not the source of your upset. Everything you are experiencing you have chosen. Your feelings are your own. Your hurt is something you put there yourself. YOU are responsible for everything you are experiencing. It's got nothing to do with me. You must've wanted to experience this. You chose this yourself and made a wrong decision and can choose again.

When you do this, you BREAK the ego's chain of fake causes and effects on the horizontal level. That means you actually will no longer believe or perceive or experience that there are ANY CAUSES on this level affecting you. While this is still a horizontal state of perception, it actually lays the groundwork for you being able to then shift into VERTICAL perception. You may be still in the world not affected by the world, but now you need to position yourself ABOVE the world, above the battlefield.

You got into your right mind, now you need to get into the ONE mind. So if there are no causes in the world that you believe in, this makes it pretty easy to then recognize you are ABOVE, in terms of levels and causality, the divine order is re-established, the levels are in their proper sequence, and you recognize that everything in this world is AN EFFECT and you are a HIGHER CAUSE.

This readies you to be MIRACULOUS. Miracles flow from a higher level to a lower level, like love or creation does. God causes you, you are the miracle of God. You then cause a level below yourself, and these are your miracles. When your higher mind CAUSES effects in the lower level of this world, these produce SUPERNATURAL EFFECTS. This is what miracles really are about. A higher level causing a lower level and proving that the lower level is nothing but an effect of the mind - that mind has total power OVER it.

This more or less is ALL you need to do. If you can really go deep with this, it will undo all your false perceptions, your upset, your stress, your emotional reactions, your fears, your obsessive thinking which can't let go of the situation, and it will bring you back to peace AND empowerment. Then you are in a position to ACCEPT THE ATONEMENT by recognizing that you are the effect of God, you accept that you are STILL as God created you, God has NOT been affected or changed, and therefore is not willing against you.

This process ALWAYS WORKS to undo ego because it addresses THE ENTIRE EGO THOUGHT SYSTEM at its foundation. There is not one part of the ego that escapes this, because the ego is BASED ON the reversal of cause and effect, so the correction of cause and effect cancels out the entire ego. Therefore it can be applied to EVERY situation and will always lead you back to truth.

Try it.

We can perhaps summarize this way:

God causes me.

I have not caused God.

I am the effect of God.

I am the cause of what I made/projected/created.

What I made/dreamed is not the cause of me.

Therefore I am still as God created me.

Change the world? Well. As it turns out, its not possible to immediately materialize changes with the mind, unless of course you are more spiritually advanced. In this world, all things tend to be governed by the ego laws, and everything is difficult. To bring about any kind of alteration requires effort and a lot of time. A lot of work. You have to go through the proper channels and processes and plans and all the steps that it takes to go from idea to creation. It's a very long, laborious, slow process, no matter what you do.

Such a scenario is unnatural. It is our God-given ability to create life in an instant just by willing it. But in this world we've become severely limited, stripped of our powers seemingly and able only to affect change through physical brute force. Someone somewhere has to use the tools or move the objects. And then that leads to entire segments of activity like skills, the arts, craftsmanship, construction and assembly etc, all the efforts we make to "make stuff happen". To bring about a change. Long and slow and effortful and difficult and fraught with problems.

I thought it was maybe just me, some failure on my part or some inability to get things done. Or some procrastinating attitude. But really the difficulty and hurdles are built into spacetime. It's just the nature of the place. We literally made things difficult for ourselves and embedded orders of difficulty into just about everything. And now either you just do nothing and be a lazy bum or you are going to have to put in effort and struggle to make anything happen. And then this struggle is spiritualized and lauded as a valuable thing in its own right. And those who make bigger waves or create within the confines of the laws of spacetime become idol worshipped.

Change... on this level, is not an easy thing. And any amount of "getting stuff done" or trying to bring about a goal, takes a lot of constant efforting and striving and expenditure and loss and frustration. Those who become good at it can turn shit into money. Those who are bad at it end up with few abilities and a lot of limitations and poverty. And all of it is an attempt to "make something" out of the world and convert it into something else, some kind of magical transformation to some supposedly better more desirable form. Because otherwise it's a turd waiting to be polished.

So excuse me while I just take a lazy break from efforting and accomplishing, and just sit back and laugh at how broken the world has always been.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur. The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one. The miracle is the one thing you can do that TRANSCENDS order, being based, NOT on differences, but on equality. Miracles are NOT in competition, and the number that you can do is LIMITLESS. They can be simultaneous and legion. This is not difficult to understand, once you conceive of them as possible at all. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your natural condition is that you are a powerful, loving, mind-causal, capable, miraculous being, who can do literally anything.

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles."

That "nothing" is utterly literal and all encompassing. Anything you can possibly imagine you can do, no matter how radical.

When there are blocks to awareness, these blocks are blocks to this natural ability. It is a block to love, a block to power, a block to will. A block to awareness is a form of denial, which is part of a split mind. And a split mind is willing against itself, which cancels out the power of the will because it's now a divided will, working against itself instead of being undivided and unopposed and powerfully causal.

There is a lot of emphasis in ACIM on removing these blocks. In fact, most of the course is aiming towards the removal of the blocks rather than the "teaching of the meaning of love" which it says is impossible. "Love goes out because of what it is, but you are needed that it can begin" speaks to how you need to give back your willingness to love so that you aren't blocking it, but the love and power in you naturally EXPRESSES when it is unblocked.

The thing is, a vast majority of course folk see this emphasis on block removal and think it is the entire course. To the point where they are constantly focusing on "shifting perception", undoing their false beliefs, stopping judgements, etc to try to heal their minds. Which is valid, and we are supposed to be doing that. But the emphasis on this process, which is "the work" that needs to be done one way or another using whatever process, the REASON for doing this work starts to become eclipsed and forgotten and denied.

What happens when the blocks are removed, is that the flood gates are opened and the power of God starts to stream out. The will becomes unopposed, whole and powerful. Thought begins to express causally with the power to make things happen. The blocks are literally like resistances to allowing the power to come out. They are a reluctance to EXPRESS love. When the blocks are removed you NATURALLY become more loving. The lovingness and power are already there underneath or behind the blocks. When the blocks go, the love expresses and you get back in touch with being miraculous, powerful and capable. Capable of moving mountains with your mind.

"Miracles are natural and should be happening all the time. When they don't, something has gone wrong" (awareness is blocked).

"Miracles are everyone's right but purification is necessary first" (block removal - purification - must be done first in order to REVEAL the miracle working power).

So there are really two parts to this. You first remove the blocks by doing "work" (purification)and THEN when the mind is free enough the light is free to shine. The Holy Spirit can extend through the body. Mind can extend to and join with other minds. Separation can be undone and erased. And it is this EXPRESSING (all expressions of love are miraculous) that a vast majority of ACIM students are missing, ignoring, hiding from, even not wanting.

It has resulted in a widespread belief that all you have to do is basically do this work, undo the blocks, and then sit on a cloud in a state of happiness and peace DOING NOTHING. NOT EXPRESSING. NOT BEING MIRACULOUS. It's a very "safe", self-help-ish way of going about it. People think you just need to get rid of these false beliefs and attain a STATE of mind in which you will dwell with no further need to do anything. This state of mind is "miracle mindedness". Right mindedness, true perception, atonement etc. And the course very much DOES focus on attaining that state. And you could say it's a state of acceptance.

But the part that a lot of people are missing, afraid of, avoiding, in denial of etc, is the EXPRESSING. The stuff that happens when the blocks are gone. The fact that you become part of the atonement plan and perform miracles all the time every day. The fact that you now regain the power of the mind and will OVER the body and the world. The fact that you can now move mountains, heal the sick and raise the dead. That you can DO ANYTHING. Even things which BREAK the laws of physics.

"Miracles break all the laws of this world." "What the holy spirit allows you to do is clearly not of this world." "You cannot see the Holy Spirit but you can see his manifestations." "Your mind has the power to make worlds."

This is the aspect which I find very commonly LACKING in a vast majority of teachings and interpretations, especially those that focus on "accepting the world" or "accepting what's happening".

The "going within" and "doing nothing" becomes a trap, which completely ignores the outward expression, miraculous power, ability to heal others, the performing of miracles etc. I just don't see enough people talking about this part of it. The whole REASON for doing "the work" AT ALL is to get the blocks out of the way so that you can perform miracles all over the place! It's not just about you and about your ego becoming peaceful.

It's almost as if people think they have this state of "peaceful non-activity" lurking buried underneath a stockpile of ego stuff, and all you need to do is uncover it and then settle into this peaceful, non-expressive state, where you dwell forever. This is a complete failure to recognize the real NATURE of that peaceful state, the fact that it entails the POWER OF GOD, the fact that it EXTENDS naturally, the fact that it goes out and expresses and HEALS, and the fact that you naturally WANT to share it with everyone and help them to experience this natural state as well. THAT is what the Great Crusade is about.

"The purpose of the Atonement is to restore everything TO you. (That is, to restore the awareness. Later clarification.) You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did." (your natural state isn't just peace and non-action, it's having everything and being able to do everything)

"Having been restored to your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself." (you accept the atonement NOT to ignore everyone, but to become PART OF A LARGER PLAN TO HELP OTHER INDIVIDUALS).

"You now share MY inability to tolerate the lack of love in yourself ***and in everyone else***, and MUST join the GREAT CRUSADE to correct it. The slogan for this Crusade is "Listen, Learn, and DO." (this is not voluntary, Jesus says you MUST help others)

"This means: Listen to MY Voice, Learn to undo the error, and DO something to correct it. The first two are not enough. The real members of MY party are ACTIVE workers." (It is not ENOUGH to not "do something"! You must ACT in the world).

I cannot comment on whether particular teachers are doing this or not. Maybe some teachers are in support of this also but often it sounds not to be the case. Many avoid the supernatural aspect of the course. There is a lot of fear surrounding the power of the mind.

"It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains. It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not the real reason why you don't believe it. People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them. "

I just want to make sure we're not JUST focusing on purification/work, we're also clearly focused on what is NATURAL to us, the expression of the power of love and the willingness to help others. It's not just about attaining miracle mindedness, it's about MIRACLE WORKING. And you don't even BEGIN to perform miracles until AFTER a large amount of blocks to awareness have already been removed. Until love can express, you are not miraculous. But when the blocks are gone, you ARE miraculous. And now you can be OF SERVICE TO OTHERS.

The ego loves to tell you that when such-and-such happens, you MUST have a reaction.

It acts like it's a given. This is because it believes that a 'cause' outside of you has the power to affect you. This so-called cause DEMANDS that you be affected by it.

This is also to do with the hierarchy of illusions, which means that apparently different severities of problems seem to demand different kinds of reactions.

The ego had this set up so that, for example, when you blow your nose you don't have a significant reaction, but when someone tells you you have a disease, you freak out. Or when someone stubs their toe you have a slight response but when they fall on their face and hurt themselves you have a much bigger response.

We've become conditioned by what seems to be 'called for' in different situations, largely based on how things *appear* physically, causing us to develop a conditional response. Situation A calls for response A. Situation B calls for response B. This way we have learned to be conditional and to be reactive and affected by what happens.

We need to BREAK this connection between external causes and given levels of reaction, if we are to become unconditional.

I was talking to Jesus last night and was imagining this scenario where a person might die and how I would feel, and already just with the imagining of it I noticed I felt upset, and Jesus stopped me. I looked at it and realized, I am actually giving energy to this idea and I'm the one who is imagining it. So really, it's nothing to do with the situation happening, I am literally doing it to myself right now. So I stopped, I stopped buying into my own prediction, and laughed.

What this showed me is that we do not HAVE to suffer. Just because something supposedly 'bad' might happen around us, it doesn't HAVE to mean that we have a given reaction. We don't HAVE to have a meltdown. We don't HAVE to completely lose it and become seriously upset.

What we have to learn to see is that it is our own perception that shows us a belief in external causes being real, in being powerless, threatened or victimized. It's our own mind that is CHOOSING to suffer. Suffering is a choice, brought on by a perceptual mistake. We can choose not to have this reaction by choosing not to to see the situation this way.

So this breaks the ego's strangle-hold and the hierarchy of illusions, by breaking the connection between external causes and internal reactions. We do not have to suffer. We do not have to be upset. We do not have to have reactions. We are literally choosing to suffer on our own by how we're using our mind and perception. If something 'bad' happens, if something 'serious' happens, those are judgements by ego, that seem to demand serious reactions. We don't have to play that game. We don't have to lose our peace.

All is choice.