It may be the most counter-intuitive, impossible thing you can imagine, but if you are feeling like shit, the best thing you can do is to send love to someone.

That sounds like a tall order, in fact maybe seemingly the hardest thing you could do at the time. Because it you feel shit then you really don't want to love, don't have love, don't seem to be able to give anything, and are in no position to help anyone. You feel separate and cut off and probably angry at someone.

But that's just the thing. It's the lack of love in you that is really the problem, and when you SEND it to someone, you RECEIVE it. Giving and receiving are one.

As you effort to transmit love, even if it takes a while to rev up the engines, even if you don't feel loving at all to begin with, it lifts YOU up. You become healed along with them, it brightens you, it opens you and heals you.

The thing is, even if it seems like you have no love to give, if you TRY anyway, you'll find that you in fact have the ability to "get the flow moving". If you PUSH, express, send, flow, love like an energy, it actually gets the juices flowing.

You're able to move yourself from unlove to love, even if love seems absent, and even if it seems like you have no love to give.

The key that unlocks the infinite reservoir of love, even from "standing still" and being very unloving, is your little willingness. Your will has the power to direct the flow. Your will has the power to express and to cause the love to express.

So even if you are stuck, even if you feel very upset, you have the freedom of will that allows you to unstick yourself.

If at first you can't possibly feel any love, you just start to say some loving things. Even if you don't feel them. Express how thankful you are to God for creating someone's perfection and describe their perfect nature. Put into words what is true of them and you. It will lift you up.

Before long, you'll get the stuck-ness moving, and you'll start to tune into the love, and you'll start to feel it in your heart. Especially as you open up to sending/relaying God's love as an extender of love.

Love heals you when you share it. You are included in the healing. So you are giving it to yourself. That may sound weird that you can transmit love to yourself, but you can, provided it includes another.

Ideas are increased by being given away. To have love, give love. Giving it, you must have it, and so it increases in you and the other. You have the ability to express love at any time, and it has the power to melt all walls and blockages.

We're all holding hands. You either lift others up or you drag them down. And always you are included in which direction you aim. Be the light of the world.

"Miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver."

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."

We would rather lay down and pretend to be dead than face what we think is the wrath of God.

We would hope to take over His duty of punishing us, by punishing ourselves in suffering and martyrdom so much that He might actually pass us by.

We tell ourselves, if we suffer enough and really put on a good show for how much we should suffer, then God might take 'pity' on us and, while laughing at ourpatheticness, decide to pass us by as being 'not worth the effort'.

Sickness is a defense against the truth, and this kind of behavior is a defense mechanism to try to defend ourselves from God.

We would worship sickness as an idol, by making sure that we suffer in silence. We would prefer to do it in isolation, and especially keep it hidden so that nobody knows about it.

We would also keep away from us all loved ones and friends and anyone who might offer signs of 'love' or 'joining' because those are outlawed when sickness is being worshipped.

Also when a person is in sickness, sickness will itself become 'all powerful' and overthrow all other rules and demand that it be obeyed and worshipped and give a special 'free pass' to get away with anything. All other normal modes of interaction are off and nothing that might bring healing is allowed in.

A fortress is erected around sickness to protect it and to keep it in the dark, just in case anyone might realize that it has no foundation or who might strip it of its false decorations. Only in the dark, behind closed doors, secretly suffered, can it maintain a sense of power or torture or truth.

Expose sickness to the light and it's crumbles and withers and disappears. Light, love, sharing, joining, oneness, all are antidotes for sickness. Openness and a willingness to reveal sick ideas of separation and punishment to the One Who Is Open (God) is sure to shine a healing light. And that is what the sick person does not want.

Lives of quiet desperation. Suffering in silence. Taking a hit for the team. Being the martyr who carries all the burden. Being the whipping boy or the one who keeps everything afloat, leeched off by everyone else. The poor sucker who gets to suffer in the dark, alone and quiet and abandoned. All of these are identities and roles that arise in the worship of sickness, put on the altar as an offering to the God of Death. Which, by the way, does not exist.

The ego's God is the God of sickness and punishment. The real God could not conceive of such things. The real God has no concept of sickness in Him, knowing it is forever impossible to separate from Himself or not be completely joined with His creation.

In truth there is no sickness and there is no death. All of the rest is just denial, a pretend play at acting as if you should suffer for some good reason. There is no good reason. There is no justification for separation because it is impossible.

You are not sick, you are just playing dead.

God still loves you.

So, every feeling you have, every reaction you have, you choose to have, on your own. And it has nothing to do with stimuli or what other people are doing or what happens.

So you're really walking around with a blank slate, happy, having absolutely no reason to be upset, and then you literally are picking something out of the environment and saying, AHA, I think I'm going to claim that I'm triggered by that, I'm going to create a reaction, I'm going to choose to be unhappy.

So then you do.

And it had nothing to do with what happened outside you.

So really, you're this kind of walking talking reacto-machine which just fires random reactions all over the place for no particular reason.

If nothing outside of you is really to blame or really has anything to do with why you are upset, and your upset is just YOUR OWN STUFF which you need to be fully responsible for, then you quite literally are manufacturing every interpretation and every reactive experience that you're experiencing, inside yourself, by yourself.

So once you start to take responsibility for this, then this is breaking the spell. It's breaking the connection between something happening and you then having a reaction and blaming the causality of it on the thing - "it caused me to have an effect" gets broken.

Once that starts to be broken and you stop CONNECTING or JOINING fake external causes/triggers with internal effects, and you realize the cause is IN YOU not out there, now you're in a different scenario. You cause all of the effects you are experiencing, AND you are causing all of what SEEM to be the effects of outside causes. You are causing your own reactions!

So now you can stop having reactions, by choosing not to. Or you can at least own up to being the one who is choosing to have it. And what begins to happen as you begin to 'stop' making the tie between external causes and internal effects, and reclaim the tie between internal causes and internal effects, is you start to realize they are not and don't need to be joined.

So that means, if you wish, on a whim, you could decide NOT to have any reaction whatsoever to something you'd normally react to. And conversely, you could decide to react on purpose to something ridiculous that would not normally call for a reaction (a bit harder to do without the unconscious element).

So as you practice this you grow stronger in the awareness that your reactions aren't actually caused by anything outside you, and that you can - at will - choose not to have them. By owning them you disconnect from the ego and automatically choose Holy Spirit. And by severing the tie between external causes and internal effects you now regain access to your inner causality.

So how about you then learn to simply choose to no longer PRETEND to be at the effect of external causes, and maybe you ADMIT that you cannot BE affected by anything external WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT (including death). And then you find yourself laughing because you realize you're being upset for absolutely no reason and because of no cause, which gives way to laughing for absolutely no reason and with no cause. Because when YOU are the cause, you are aligned with GOD the Cause, which is nothing but joyful.

Whatever you are experiencing, comes from whatever mindset you have. Either you're in the ego mindset and thus experiencing a physical world of bodies, or you're in the Holy Spirit's mindset and on the spiritual level.

Thoughts/attitudes/beliefs/truth on the Holy Spirits level is completely incompatible with the ego's level. Never the two shall meet. So the ego is really confined inside its bubble of private insanity.

Within the ego's bubble, it starts to believe it can ACCESS and thus experience, what it is like in the Holy Spirit's world. It actually wants to do this because it wants to become more powerful, to have more domination and control, and to wield what would seem to be the kind of 'special' powers that Holy Spirit apparently has access to.

Except the ego has a problem. It cannot leave its mindset. It can't *actually* get into the Holy Spirit's mind. So it pretends that it can. And as always, it uses separation to do this (the same old story, separate in the name of joining).

The ego takes its own mindset and separates it even further, dividing it into 'good' and 'bad' parts. All still within the ego thought system. So now it labels some parts of itself/the world as good and some parts as bad. It sort of creates the illusion that it can 'borrow' some goodness from the bad stuff and attribute it to the good stuff, to make the good stuff seem extra special and sparkly and important and valuable. And of course that means taking some of the 'bad' that you'd find in this stuff and attributing it to the 'bad stuff' so that it seems extra bad - a repository for nasty dark judgements and hate and so on.

This creates the persona - the spiritualizing portion of the ego mind which tries to focus only on the 'good' interpretion of the world, and simultaneously creates the 'shadow', which is whats left of all the stuff that is 'not good'. For something to seem good, something else HAS to seem bad. To have special love there has to be special hate. To idol worship there has to be 'the enemy' who clearly do not get what's so special about the idol. And to have all the 'spiritual behavior' you must relegate 'unspiritual behavior' to the shadow. You try to hide everything bad IN the shadow, AS the shadow, and you then try to get RID OF the shadow. Tuck it away, hide it, destroy it. And then guess what happens?

The shadow part of the ego mind, the bad stuff, now takes the symbolic form of all of the enemies, attackers, victimizers, causes of sickness and so on. The 'goodies two shoes' part is the facade of special love and special appearances which 'saves face' and makes it seem like you are MORE spiritual ie more SPECIAL than you are. ie, if you sweep all of the sins under the carpet it LOOKS LIKE you're more innocent than you are. The ego's use of the persona is what gives extra weight to the idea that your persona is valuable, important, special, wanted, loveable (in an ego way), desirable, innocent (ego innocence) etc. And so the 'good ego mind' and the 'bad ego mind' are now AT WAR. Reinforcing the good reinforces the bad because it's like a seesaw - you take less load off the good end to make it seem 'lighter', the bad end gets badder and 'heavier/darker'.

So this ego attempt to divide itself and be at war with itself, which creates the persona and the shadow in conflict with each other (e.g. person who everyone always thought was 'good' gets unfairly attacked or sick etc), allows the ego to lend special meaning to some parts of its mindset - a glow of specialness - sacredness - holiness - spirituality. Not genuine holiness or genuine spirituality, but a fake APPEARANCE of it. A facade. This can take the form of huge sacrifices or changes in behavior, level confusion, trying to be good, trying to not be bad, trying to ATTAIN very lofty levels of 'spiritual advancement and capabilities' that make it look like you're very advanced and special.

Since the ego cannot leave its own mindset and cannot actually become spiritual, it just fakes it. It pretends it is spiritual. And it fools itself. And this is what YOU do. This is what I do. This is where we TRY to attain experiences and mindsets which are OUTSIDE of what THIS mindset (our current ego mindset) can achieve. Our ego mind tries to 'be spiritual', while KEEPING the ego mindset. This is because the ego wants to live in two minds. It wants to take the ego self TO the Holy Spirit and to KEEP it and to at the same time TAKE ON the Holy Spirit's power. Obviously this cannot be achieved because the Holy Spirit's mind completely dispels the duality that the ego is based on, and completely undoes it. But that doesn't stop our ego from trying!

So whenever you are KEEPING the ego mindset and are trying to INCLUDE spiritual mindsets in some way, you are spiritualizing.

Whenever you try to express, quote, espouse, affirm or act is if you are being or accessing spiritual truths which are WAY higher than the ego's mindset, and you cannot actually ACCESS and experience the level of mind where those truths can be EXPERIENCED, then you are spiritualizing.

So let's see... course quotes and concepts... for example the idea of oneness. You could say to someone like, "it doesnt matter because we are all one". Bullshit. This isn't an EXPERIENCE of the truth of that statement. You can only experience that at a level ABOVE the holy spirit in the mind of HEAVEN. That's the only place where this truth is experiential. Remember, truth is what you can experience. If you cannot experience it, you're kidding yourself every time you make statements about it AS IF you are living it.

Or how about even saying, "I am immortal spirit"... well.. not as an ego you're not. Who is saying you are immortal spirit? It's the ego. You can only BE immortal spirit when you have completely let go of the entire ego mindset. So this information is just... information from another world, from another dimension, another state of mind. Thus it has no PRACTICAL USE for you here, on the ego level, because you cannot EXPERIENCE it here. So it remains lofty. It remains a concept. And then if you spend time just regurgitating the concept, stating it, quoting it, because it 'sounds spiritual', then you are spiritualizing.

You're taking very high truths from very high levels of mind, which require AT LEAST a total atunement to Holy Spirit's mindset AND a total relinquishment of the ego's way of experiencing, and are trying to bring them INTO the ego's mindset. This is spiritualizing. Adding spiritual value to a valueless system. Borrowing spiritual truth from a level of mind that is beyond where you are at. That's faking it. That's spiritualizing your ego. And what happens then is that the best you can do is quote these things and say them and affirm them as if doing so is EXPERIENCING them when in fact you cannot experience them yet, and so they remain MENTAL, and that makes them INTELLECTUAL. Thus you end up intellectualizing the course's truths, you intellectualize higher levels of reality and you pretend that doing so means you are experiencing them here and now. You're not. The ego is deceiving you and trying to be special. And this makes these truths BECOME nothing more than specialness. And then you end up sounding like a bliss ninny, lol

Anyway. I'm sort of expressing this as it's coming to me.

You need to be realistic about the level that you're on, what mind you are IN, the scope of that mind, what is OUTSIDE that mind, what you can actually EXPERIENCE right now, and stop hitting yourself over the head with these lofty spiritualizing ego-inflating truths which you can't even experience yet. You need to focus only on the truths which you can PRACTICALLY APPLY, ie BE EXPERIENCED, to help you to transition your EXPERIENCE from what you are experiencing now in the ego mind to what Holy Spirit will allow you to experience in his mind. If it does not involve your experience, and if it is not practical and you can't actually USE it to change your experience, it is intellectual ego noise trying to spiritualize itself.

I know that I have done this over any over again, believing that if I could just say the correct thing or think the correct thought or understand the correct concept or say it in a special way, that meant that I am BEING IT. I believed that my intellect had the capability of experiencing the truth. Hah. It doesn't. The intellect is only activated when you are not able to LIVE the truth, but are trying to incorporate it into your experience, so you can inject it into your THOUGHTS, which are fantasies, and you can pretend you are living it, but really you are not. If it's stuck in your mind and isn't in your heart or in your feeling or in your actual direct experience of 'reality', then it's not really your truth right now. And if you accumulate a lot of that 'information', no matter how spiritual it is or how lofty the metaphysics, if you are not EXPERIENCING it, then you are spiritualizing your ego. This is what I have done over and over again.

All you are capable of is letting go of the ego mind and the way of experiencing that that mind gives you, and transitioning your experience of reality to the holy spirit's mind where you can experience HIS level of truth fully. Where you can LIVE IT. A course in miracles is all about LIVING the truth and PRACTICING it and PRACTICALLY EXPERIENCING it. The rest is just ego noise.

The physical properties of matter, this universe, enacts the ego's law of separation between cause and effect. Every single thing which happens in this universe stems from this fundamental canvas of separation.

For one thing to do something to another thing and not experience the same effects, is separation. The laws of physics even tell us that an action produces an equal but opposite reaction - not the same reaction at all but one completely different.

In this world therefore, what applies to one thing does not apply to another. There is no equality. It therefore becomes "possible" to do something in isolation in this world, and have it affect only an isolated part of the world, and perhaps not even effect the person who does it at all.

Another way to put this is that this world allows the ego to get away with murdering God. Its pictorial statement that cause is separate from effect is a statement that God has been separated from His son. It is also therefore an attack on His Son and therefore a picture of the crucifixion of His son.

The way that the ego gets away with murder, is to suggest that it is capable of doing something to God, causing God in some way, but that the effects produced by that attack affect God only, and not the ego self. Therefore the ego self "gets away with it" by separating itself off from the effects. It claims that what applies to God does not apply to you, and therefore you can produce attack without experiencing the results.

This ENTIRE UNIVERSE is set up based on this. ACIM even explicitly says this: "This world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son." Also in chapter 27 there is an entire section titled "The picture of crucifixion" where Jesus goes into this more.

The physical universe was made by the ego to depict what it would be like for God's son to be crucified, ie murdered and attacked and rendered separate from God. To be separate from God is to be separate from Cause, and therefore cause and effect are separate in this universe, down to the subatomic particle.

Even the idea of space and time, that there could be something which applies in one place or time and not another, is an idea of the separation between cause and effect, and Jesus states in the Course that both space and time are merely beliefs. That doesn't mean you have a belief ABOUT space and time, it means space-time ITSELF is a belief in the larger mind, and is therefore an illusion.

If it were not for this entire world, this entire universe, being based on this separation from Cause, it would be IMPOSSIBLE for you do any of the things you do "in life". You could not use a knife to slice an apple - if the effects which apply to the apple apply to the knife, the apple would have to equally cut the knife. You would not be able to eat food and digest it, the food would have to eat you and digest you also.

Nothing that we call "life" in this universe would be possible without the separation of cause and effect playing out.

Now, here is a VERY important point to make. You can change your mind about this world and work on changing what seem to be your personal beliefs "about" the world, correcting your thoughts and perceptions in terms of undoing your inner belief in separation from Cause. BUT, even if you achieve that, what is to become of the physical universe?

If it persists, it IS still a picture of crucifixion. It is still a physicalized expression of an idea of death and murder. It is still being run by laws of separation and conflict. Everything that takes place in it is un-heavenly and an attack. Every way that every single object moves and interacts with other objects symbolizes and IS the belief that cause and effect are separate - which ultimately is the belief that God and His Son are separate.

You could seem to be awake in the world and yet if the world continues to govern what happens to you, if you have no apparent power to undo it or change it, if you are subject to death, if you cannot heal the sick and undo disease, if you cannot cause objects to move or to change into other objects, then you are BOUND by the laws of the ego. That's a fact.

How can this be allowed to persist, thought to be in some way holy and real, as we stay in this world, confined by this world's laws, completely governed by them, still subject to aging and DEATH, and claim that we are enlightened? There is much more to the truth than this. This world was made as an attack. That's all it was made for. You can see it as a beautiful illusion but does it undo it?

This world's fundamental functioning, it's separation-based operational laws, is precisely what we derive our egoic beliefs from. We base our logic and reasoning and beliefs and values on top of how this separation of cause and effect operates. This leads to an "automatic" ego mind which believes and THINKS just like this universe functions, as though this universe makes sense and is normal and natural and true.

And if we are to reunite cause and effect in our awareness, in our mind, then this should mean that we re-gain access to a causal power which was completely separate from us when we believed what the world shows us. Its picture of death is completely the opposite of real life.

Its claim that cause and effect are separate is a law which MIRACLES break. Miracles come to demonstrate that this world's entire foundation, the fabric of this "reality" (bullshit) is simply false and not true and not what is running the show. Miracles demonstrate that cause and effect are NOT separate, because they come from a mind where the two are one.

Miracles therefore are capable of overriding everything which arises from this world, beyond the ego's laws, and that literally means your causal power is capable of doing absolutely anything which this world would consider physically impossible.

In this world an apple is not an orange. To a miracle-worker, an apple can be turned into an orange. In this world, throwing a ball at someone's head will hurt them. To a miracle-worker, throwing a ball at their head will stop the ball mid-air and turn it into a butterfly which then lands on the person's head and kisses them. In this world when a match is taken to a flammable liquid it will ignite and explode. To a miracle-worker, the match will be cancelled out and nothing will happen, and maybe even that flammable liquid will be turned into wine.

Miracles. Miracles. Miracles. Miracles which completely DEFY absolutely every physical law and limitation, every way that one thing does something to something else against its will, and any way that one cause seems to produce an effect on something other than itself. Think you can punch Jesus in the face and knock him out and leave him with a black eye? Have a try.

The Son of God is NOT subject to this stupid illusory world and its stupid pretend laws and made-up rules and fictional regulations. Jesus tells us in the course, literally, "there is nothing you cannot do". NOTHING. NO-THING. Not just just some small things, not just some big things, not just a few slightly miraculous-seeming hints at something magical. You can literally do ANYTHING. Including moving a mountain.

Is this too far fetched? Is your mind too scary to wield such power? Are you too afraid of the potential of this, being so profoundly abundant that you can manifest anything you need at any time directly from God's unlimited supply, without having to go through stupid ego laws to slave and work hard to earn ridiculous bits of paper and metal so that you can buy what you need at a store? You are far more capable than that. BY FAR!

There is no limit. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

The only problem we have is that we are not recognizing what is true and what is false correctly.

There are things that the ego says are true, which are actually false. But we believe they are true.

There are things which God says are true, which we believe are false, but are actually true.

It has a lot to do with willingness. The willingness to ACCEPT that God's truth is true, and the ego's truth is not true.

But see... if we think the ego's truth actually IS true, we're going to automatically think God's truth is false.

For example.

If we believe we sinned and are guilty, we will believe we deserve punishment and not love.

This belief will distort our perception.

We will see the worthiness of being punished as TRUTH, and we will agree with it.

We will then see the punishment NOT as punishment, but as welcome. Something we want.

We will even welcome death, seeing it as salvation.

As soon as we start being convinced that what the ego says is the truth, our perception just gets all flipped upside down and the things which would HURT us start to look like they're going to be HELPFUL.

Things which are NOT true, start to look true. Things which HURT us, start to seem appealing. Things which make things WORSE for us, start to look like solutions. Things which make us SUFFER, start to look like they are helping us.

And then, things which REALLY are true, start to look false. Things which would HEAL us, start to seem like a threat. Things which would make things BETTER, start to seem like something that would make things worse. Things which would UNDO suffering, start to seem like things which would ADD suffering.

This is how mixed up we become. We do not ****RECOGNIZE**** what is true and what is false.

We MISTAKE false things for true things, and true things for false things.

This makes us very CONFUSED, and yet we will still believe in the midst of that insanity, that we are TOTALLY sane, things TOTALLY make sense, we are TOTALLY right, we HAVE the whole truth, and we're seeing everything PERFECTLY. We will not even REALIZE that we are in a state of suffering or denial or unhappiness. We will not ACKNOWLEDGE it, or see it, or recognize it for what it is.

By believing the ego's lies are truth, those lies STOP LOOKING LIKE LIES, and start looking like truth. It doesn't matter how sane or insane someone is, or how confused, EVERYONE will always believe they are seeing fully, clearly, perfectly, correctly, rightly, accurately, and that their discernment is 100% correct. Even if the are believing the death is the only way to live, they will believe they are TOTALLY CORRECT in that perception. They simply have become BLIND to the ability to DISCERN that their own perception is very distorted.

We would, in the ego, happily jump into a vat of acid, or destroy ourselves in any number of horrific ways, BELIEVING SINCERELY, that it is going to SAVE US FROM GOD's WRATH. Death actually start to look APPEALING to those who are insane and whose thought system is so backwards that they think SUICIDE is actually SALVATION.

The ego has flipped everything around. It sees lies in the truth and truth in lies. It sees life in death and death in life. it sees gains in losses and losses in gains. It sees hurt in love and love in hurt. It sees sin in innocence and innocence as sinful. It sees death as the doorway to eternal peace. It sees sacrifice as a way to gain everything. It becomes ATTRACTED TO GUILT AND DEATH, simply because it does not RECOGNIZE them as guilt and death, it instead thinks they are sacred and HOLY and PURE and WELCOMING!!!

This is how insane it gets. And all death is suicide, CHOSEN, by people whose perception is so back to front that they think that moving AWAY from life will bring them closer to it. That death is a way OUT of the suffering that seems real. That death is a "real option" that will "solve all problems". Only the blind would choose such a solution.

"Forgive them father for they know not what they do."

Literally, anyone in the ego DOES NOT KNOW that they are in the ego. They don't RECOGNIZE it for what it is. They think they are in heaven when they are in hell. They think they are in hell when they are in heaven. They think their successes are failures and their failures are successes. It's all back to front, and it's not even RECOGNIZED.

Being in the ego means being UNCONSCIOUS, and in unconsciousness, what is true and what is false loses ALL CONTEXT. That means REAL TRUTH has been shut out of awareness, and now there is nothing to COMPARE anything to. No yard stick or hard and fast reliable consistent truth to compare things to to say, is THIS true, or is THIS false? There is a loss of perspective. A loss of sight. A loss of contrast. A loss of sanity. And all that remains is to thrash about in the dark MAKING UP truth and being totally confused about whether it is actually true or not.

To correct this we need to do only really ONE THING. That is, to become willing to consider we might be MISTAKEN about what we believe is true.... to consider, maybe we were mistaken about God's truth, and maybe what we BELIEVE IS TRUE, is actually FALSE. Every belief of the ego SEEMS true, but is false. Yet we currently believe it. Whether it be a belief that we sinned, a belief that we're guilty, a believe that we're unworthy of love, a belief that we're not good enough, or don't deserve forgiveness, or are lacking, or whatever.

These "false beliefs", these untruths masquerading as truth, NEED to be CORRECTED. The course says that perception needs to be corrected but its really your BELIEFS, because belief is your conviction about what is true. What you BELIEVE you WILL PERCEIVE. And you will perceive it BECAUSE you believed it. And then, upon perceiving it, it will seem to CONFIRM that what you believe is true, not realizing you're stuck inside a closed box of your own making.

You have to be willing to dig out and challenge your ego beliefs. Then you need to be willing to RECOGNIZE THEM AS FALSE, by "deprogramming" yourself. Whatever way works for you. To DISBELIEVE these lies, to strip them of all belief, to collapse your trust in them, to REVERSE them, to stop believing they are TRUE, and to start believing, simply, THEY ARE NOT TRUE. They are false. It's NOT TRUE that you are a sinner. It's NOT TRUE that you are guilty. It's NOT TRUE that you don't deserve love. It's NOT TRUE that you can't be forgiven. etc.

I have found personally that any act of affirming or clarifying or emphasizing that some false ego belief IS NOT TRUE, is an act of moving towards God and towards healing. It is an act of transitioning from a mistaken truth to a real truth. It seems to be ONLY this changing of hands, this willingness to CHANGE BELIEF, so that what you thought had truth to it, is BELIEVED LESS, and what you thought was false, is BELIEVED MORE. ***THAT*** right there is the way to change your perception, and THE ONLY WAY.

This sorting out of what is true and what is false will take you ALL THE WAY to the atonement. It's the ONLY process to get there. Somehow, you have to shift allegiance from listening to and trusting the ego's voice, to listening to and trusting the Holy Spirit's voice. To stop BELIEVING that the ego's beliefs are true, and to RECOGNIZE them as FALSE. That's all you need to do! Just keep systematically reversing these beliefs, undoing them, stopping believing them, withdrawing faith from them, learning to MISTRUST the ego and to TRUST God, and to CLEARLY DISTINGUISH.. what is true, from what is false.

This clarification is what will make your perception CORRECT. Correct perception, or true perception, means you are perceiving WITHOUT DISTORTION. It means you can SEE, but what you see ... you recognize which parts of it are actually true, and which parts are actually false, in terms of the REAL TRUTH. Rather than, MIS-IDENTIFYING some parts as false which are true, or some parts as true which are false.

For example do you believe people have real sickness? All those people in hospitals? THEY DO NOT HAVE "real sickness". They only have FAKE SICKNESS. There IS no such thing as real sickness. So this is a major belief which has to be CORRECTED. How about your belief that something "bad happened"? That's a belief that sin is real. Is it true? You have to question that. It did not REALLY HAPPEN. It was an illusion in a dream. There have NOT been any real consequences in reality. You did NOT lose your innocence.

Discernment. What is true. What is false. Being completely clear about which is which in reality, and not what you've made them to be. This will liberate you from all suffering and make you CONVINCED that God's truth is the ONLY TRUTH, and the ego's truth is THE ONLY LIE. Then you are ready to accept the atonement.

Fear is really resistance to what is. It's an attack on what is. It's a desire to make what is go away. It's the feeling you have when you a refusing to receive something. Per the golden rule, giving and receiving are one. If you refuse to receive, you also refuse to give.

Not giving is hateful and separating and selfish. Fear becomes a repression of self and others, a murderous attempt to destroy. Fear is a desire to separate and hold back and hold extension within and not extend God. It's what it feels like to want to not give anything, in order to try to not get anything, and it results in a sense of emptiness and lack and weakness and frailty, of vulnerability and limitation and eventually paralysis. As if you have nothing left to stand up to anything with and are overpowered (by your projected power).

Fear is the opposite of love because it is what you get when you try to deny the golden rule. If you are not willing to give, you will get a lack of love back, and it will appear as danger and threat and something you do not want. By giving "I don't want to", you receive things that you do not want, and they seem to loom over you as something you don't want. And the more you don't want them the worse it gets.

Fear is the ego's problem solving solution, the way by which it says you are "protected" from what you're getting. But really it's an attempt to be protected from receiving God. Fear is a defence against God and against love. It is an attack on love and is vicious and victimising, which is why it also appears like a victim role. Giving and receiving are one. If you give victimisation you get victimisation. Ego is really a fearful idea and is very afraid.

The antidote to fear is always through trust development and giving love. Love has to be extended in order to be received. Its safety comes to you as you give it away. In the extension of love there is no fear because you are only giving love and so are only receiving love. It is the way out of hell.

Resisting what-is represses your being and your presence. Resistance is fear and what you resist persists, because what you give you receive. When you stop resisting what happens you are saying "yes" to it rather than "no". This yes embraces it with full attention and presence, which actually counter-intuitively makes you feel stronger and more safe. It's how you shine your light, and that light dispels darkness, makes fear go away, and heals.

Strangely enough, what you are afraid of you are not really letting happen. It's the resistance to it that makes it difficult to deal with. And it would seem insane to fully embrace it, because the ego would suggest if you do that you will get more of it and will be consumed by it - why would anyone in their right mind want to go towards the thing they are fearing?

But when you confront it head-on without resisting it and just sit with it and watch it, radiating your fuller presence toward it, it becomes transmuted into love. Because then you are giving love and seeing from love. The thing you are confronting then starts to disappear and is shone away, healed away, by the presence of your mind and the extension of power. Dropping resistance increases exposure and darkness cannot remain in the light.

It’s not just a matter of something happening physically. It’s not just a matter of what is demonstrated. Since form can be changed EASILY by a miracle worker, sickness can be flipped on and off, and bodies made to appear and disappear in an instant, it is hardly that important to use miracles JUST to show off or to make stuff happen. If these things were second nature, miracles would be like an everyday occurrence, just something natural.

The important thing about miraculous demonstrations is that they PROVE that the ego is false. Even if the demonstration is taking place inside the dream world, witnessed by regular people who may not even be particularly aware spiritually, it is a *teaching device* because it shows in an obvious way that ego beliefs are false. This can have a profound effect on the mind that witnesses them.

If something were to happen according to the ego’s laws, some kind of "accident" perhaps where someone gets hurt, and if suddenly all of the effects and harm are completely undone in front of onlookers, what do you think that will do to their mind?

If you witness a miracle, it can really blow your mind. You might interpret it as a threat, as magic, as voodoo, witchcraft, some kind of demonic posession, or any number of things, because your EGO will not be able to deny it or comprehend it. The miracle will SHOW, demonstrate, that some aspect of your ego belief system is FALSE. Right in front of your eyes.

If you believed that the body is real, bad things happen, wounds can’t be healed, and then suddenly all of that is shown to be FALSE, something profound happens to your awareness. It’s like there is suddenly a LIGHT, you suddenly SEE something which you never saw before.

You see a possibility. You see OUTSIDE of the ego’s laws. Your thought system is thrown into question. Your entire world view is undermined. It’s been blatantly proven to you that the ego’s laws are false, and you can barely believe it, but you can’t deny it. The demonstration of the truth permanently changes your mind! It causes you to have an awakening! Something inside your dream has come to show you that it IS a dream and is not true.

This is the powerful TEACHING DEVICE of the miracle. It is not there to just show off that you can manipulate matter or raise people from the dead. They are used to show that the ego is FALSE, all of its laws are FALSE, laws of physics are FALSE, limitations are FALSE, even death is false. If this were shown to you right in front of your face, you would NEVER again be able to look at life the same way.

When Jesus resurrected and came back and showed up as a body, having just been made dead not so long ago, witnessed by many people, this DEMONSTRATED that death is an illusion, that the body has no power over the mind, and that you are IMMORTAL. If you experienced this first-hand, can you imagine the profound challenge this PROOF would pose to your thought system? All your world view and beliefs about what you thought the world and the body even ARE, as gross assumptions, would be brought into question. You would never be able to think of death or bodies the same way again!

It’s not the "form" the miracle took that is important, but what it TEACHES, by virtue of the mere fact that it is POSSIBLE. IF such things are possible, it renders many other things obviously UNTRUE - ie, the ego. It blows the doors off what you THOUGHT was true, and awakens you. This is how miracles SAVE TIME because they are such powerful learning experiences!

If Jesus could do it, so can you.

The world's idea of the most ideal relationship is where you find the chosen one and give them all your love. But you don't give that same love to anyone else. The chosen one gets exclusive access, special rights, permissions and trust. But this exclusivity means that the love is conditional, and is switched off around other people. The two of you will likely side with each other against everyone else.

While the ego and the body and the world might suggest that this is the only natural way to relate, as if everyone is supposed to be paired up with one person, it is actually highly unnatural. If you follow this kind of relationship dynamic to its extreme conclusion, it would mean that the person you love is the person you most imprison, and you live in a prison with them in order to keep everyone else away from you. They become a safe haven in the storm, and everyone else is left outside.

Unconditional love is a kind of love that doesn't change based on who you are with or where you are or what you're doing. It gives all of the love to all of the people all of the time. It doesn't pick favourites, nor does it hold back the love only to give it to those who have met your standards, or you like them, or they have something in common, or they aren't seemingly against you. Love just loves always in one single response to everything. This is total holy relationship, which is inclusive not exclusive.

Trying to love only one person or only a small group of people is quite a confined and ego-driven form of love. It's an attempt to narrow love down and only hand it out to the most special winners of the human contest. And if you can only trust that one person you will have mistrust of just about everyone. What would Jesus do? Would Jesus hold off on loving someone because they aren't apparently his closet companion?

Special love is imprisoned love, conditional love, and limited love. Special love is actually an attempt to cover up all the special hate you have for everyone by selecting the most ideal and agreeable person that you seem have the least hate for.

"The special love relationship is an attempt to limit the destructive EFFECTS of hate, by finding a haven in the storm of guilt."

"The special love relationship is NOT perceived as of value IN ITSELF, but as a place of safety, from which hatred is split off, and KEPT APART. The special love partner is acceptable ONLY as long as he serves this purpose."

"the special love relationship is an attempt TO BRING LOVE INTO SEPARATION."

"The special love relationship is the ego's chief weapon for keeping you from Heaven."

"To believe that SPECIAL relationships, with SPECIAL love, can offer you salvation, IS the belief that separation is salvation."

"Beyond the poor attraction of the special love relationship, and ALWAYS obscured by it, is the powerful attraction of the Father for His Son. There is no OTHER love that can satisfy you, because there IS no other love. This is the ONLY love that is fully given, AND FULLY RETURNED. Being complete, it asks nothing. Being wholly pure, everyone joined in it HAS everything. This is NOT the basis for ANY love relationship in which the ego enters. For EVERY relationship on which the ego embarks IS special. The ego establishes relationships ONLY to GET something. And it would keep the giver BOUND TO ITSELF, through guilt."