"The Garden of Eden, which is described as a literal garden in the Bible, was not originally an actual garden at all. It was merely a mental state of complete need-lack. Even in the literal account, it is noteworthy that the pre-Separation state was essentially one in which man needed nothing."

In heaven's reality, there's nothing wrong. At all, in any way. Everything is perfect forever. There is no lack, no needs, nothing missing, nothing damaged, nothing to fix, nothing to become, no urgency or sense of having to do something unless something else goes wrong, absolutely no sense of a REASON to NEED to do anything at all. And that is a state of peace and rest because there is literally nothing that needs to be "addressed" or sorted out or corrected or made to stop doing something wrong in any way. There is nothing to DO, and God's will is DONE.

When we are judging things as wrong, hating people, disliking things, believing that something has gone wrong, believing that something is sick or damaged, believing that death is even possible, we are in denial of God's reality. And that means we are being unforgiving.

So this means that to be FORGIVING, is to recognize that nothing is wrong with anything, nothing is really broken, there is no real damage, sickness and death are an illusion and a lie, and there is a perfection that is so flawless that it has absolutely no need for repair or fixing or changing for any reason. By that I don't mean the physical world is configured as heaven, but that we see past its illusion of "something has gone terrible wrong" to the light of truth that for REAL things, nothing has gone wrong.

As we move closer to our true nature of being ALREADY created perfectly by God, in which we acknowledge the perfection of God's creation and accept its utter flawlessness, its utter impossibility of being corrupt or damaged or in any kind of state a of NEED or LACK at all, this influences our perception here and causes us to be forgiving. A forgiving sight is rooted in that sense of a total lack of need. A sense that you have actually reached a state of wholeness and COMPLETION, in which there is nothing further that need be done to make you any better, in recognition of your perfection. And if you are perfect, you have no need for a spiritual path, learning, growth, healing, becoming, forming a self, or anything else that might change you.

"In peace he needed nothing, and asked for nothing. In war he DEMANDED everything, and FOUND nothing. For how could the gentleness of love respond to his demands, EXCEPT by departing in peace, and returning to the Father?"

"However holy his perception may become, no world OUTSIDE himself holds his inheritance. Within HIMSELF he HAS no needs, for light needs nothing but to shine in peace. And from ITSELF, to let the rays extend in quiet to infinity."

"God made nothing either necessary OR difficult. But YOU have perceived both AS IF they were part of His perfect creations. Yet it is surely clear that the perfect NEED nothing, and CANNOT experience perfection as a difficult accomplishment because that is what they ARE."

"I Need Do Nothing" (emphasis on the lack of need)

"To DO anything involves the body. And, if you recognize you NEED do nothing, you HAVE withdrawn the body's value from your mind. Here is the quick and open door through which you slip past centuries of effort, and ESCAPE from time."

"And I must learn I need do nothing of myself, for I need but accept my Self, my sinlessness, created for me, now already mine, to feel God's Love protecting me from harm, to understand my Father loves His Son; to know I am the Son my Father loves."

"It is this that makes the holy instant so easy and so natural. YOU make it difficult, because you insist there MUST be more that you need do."

"Father, in Heaven it is different, for there, there are no needs."

"Nothing employed for healing represents an effort to do anything at all. It is a recognition that you HAVE no needs which mean that something must be DONE."

"Without guilt there is no scarcity. The sinless have no needs." "God's Son can make no needs His Father will not meet, if he but turn to Him ever so little."

"Until the Separation, which is a better term than the Fall, nothing was lacking. This meant that man had no needs at all. If he had not deprived himself, he would never have experienced them."

Sometimes it seems like stuff happens that you did not ask for.

The only reason this seems possible is because you are not fully aware of every part of your mind, and some hidden parts of you are working against you.

You believe that your current awareness is a full awareness, that you are fully aware of your entire self. Wherever you sense the edges of your awareness to be, that is the boundary that you believe is the edge of your entire being. And that there is nothing else beyond it.

But your mind, unless you are spiritually awakened, has parts to it which you are unaware of. There are parts which are hidden behind walls of denial and fear. These parts are essentially unconscious to you, i.e. you are not aware of them in your conscious awareness and this makes it seem as though they do not exist. There is more to your mind than you realize.

If you were to ask most people if they have an unconscious mind, it would be a complete guess, because really you can't be aware of the unconscious until it is made conscious. So you have to take someone's word for it that you may even have unconscious parts to you. But unless you are aware of the presence of God, there must be some parts of your mind which are outside of your awareness.

Now, simply because some parts of your choosing mind may be outside of the scope of your conscious awareness, it is possible that those parts of your mind are active and are choosing to make things happen, but without your knowing it. These parts of your mind are filled with beliefs and thoughts and attitudes which do express and do create situations and events to reflect what it believes.

Particularly, the unconscious mind is usually a repository of darkness, self-attack, guilt, hatred, and all manner of insanity. And this tends to be so denied that it shows up in your experience as though it is outside of your body, and embedded into or laid on top of other people. You experience it out there as though it has nothing to do with you at all, and yet it is your own hidden self-hate.

So then, it seems to your conscious self as though stuff starts to happen to you that you did not consciously want or remember choosing. And to explain the origin of these things that happen to you, being unaware that you chose them yourself, it seems to make sense to now find some "other" source of these things. Like other people.

So the mere fact that you have a split mind which is partly conscious and partly unconscious, automatically puts you into a situation where you see yourself as being victimized. Choices are being made, a will is performing its desires, and someone somewhere is deciding things, but it doesn't seem to be yourself. So automatically, you will look outside of yourself for the cause.

This is the origin of all scapegoating, all blame, all perception of being a victim in any way, all anger towards others, all attempts to find other people guilty or wrong, and all belief that it MUST be someone else's fault, simply because you are not aware of what hidden parts of yourself are doing to yourself. You become hell-bent on finding someone else to be the cause of your condition, not realizing that YOU are the cause.

Given that you are not aware of the full scope of your whole mind, and given that the hidden parts of your mind are still believing that you are guilty, and given that those beliefs will lead to self-punishment, it is no wonder that once those punishments start to happen, you're going to be desperate to find out WHO did it to you. You'll think it's not you.

It can seem to be difficult to accept that you chose suffering or difficult situations or major problems or sicknesses or pain or fear. It can seem like there is just no way that you would've wanted this situation, and that there is no way that you - your conscious self, would choose this. But you're not aware of your whole self, so you don't really know that you chose it, or why.

Over time, with forgiveness, which is really just the insight that you've been doing EVERYTHING to yourself and NOTHING has happened to you that you did not choose - unconsciously or otherwise, you will become more aware of the content and attitudes hidden in your unconscious. The unconscious will be integrated back into awareness, you will uncover your secret sins and hidden self-hates, and through healing you will come to a fuller awareness of the whole of yourself.

It is in the light of that fullness of who you are, rather than being a little portion of yourself, that you can recognize that you cannot possibly have been victimized. You will be honest in admitting the truth, that you have been doing this to yourself, you did plan it all along, and there is nobody else to be held accountable.

If you can see and accept that you really DID do this all on your own, to yourself, without needing anyone else to explain why things happened, then automatically everyone else is innocent and you have hope of freedom. But this DOES require that you be AWARE, i.e. able to see, that you really ARE doing this to yourself. Then you will not even think to blame it on anyone else because you obviously are the cause.

Because now that you are in your full mind, you can choose again, and decide to stop hurting yourself. You can choose life. You can give up your death wish. You can let go of your self abusive attitude. You can stop hating yourself and stop condemning yourself. You can stop believing that you are sinful or guilty. And you can come to realize that God still loves you because you have not really done anything at all.

Awareness sets you free of the delusions and illusions of suffering, that you conclude are caused by anyone other than yourself. The belief in your fate being chosen entirely by "other than me" is a choice for death. And even then you are still doing it to yourself. You do not have to die.

Increasing your awareness through undoing of the blocks that keep the mind in the dark, will set you free and bring you back to life. This is the time of your resurrection. This is your return to who you really are, free of the illusion that you can suffer at the hands of another. It was never anyone else's fault.

The secret to salvation is that you are doing this to yourself, and have been all along. And yet you have done nothing real at all. In this view, both you and others are equally innocent, and all is forgiven and released.

Here's why having a thought of attack or judgement about someone else automatically includes you and attacks you.

Mind in its natural state is free of all judgements and attacks. It is "empty". It sees reality for what it is with no interpretation.

In order for mind have a 'judgement' about someone, the only way mind can do this is to generate some kind of situation within itself that looks like a judgement. An attack thought.

So within the mind itself, made from mind, mind has to invent images, forms, thoughts, impressions, sensations, which put a judgement into the mind's experience. Otherwise the mind wouldn't be able to PERCEIVE that there is a judgement taking place. Mind can only experience what is within itself and is absolutely blind to anything external (because there is nothing external, really).

So now the mind is having a judgement about "someone", but it couldn't create this judgement outside of itself. It's setting off nuclear bombs about this so-called other person, but the fallout from that explosion is affecting the mind because it's all taking place inside the mind.

Even though the mind is having a judgement ABOUT something that it thinks is outside of itself - beyond the body identity - the actual experience of the judgement and the conditions that this judgement creates, are happening inside the confines of the body-mind.

So that means it's happening to you. Not only is it happening to you just as much as it's happening to someone else, it's actually ONLY happening to you, and not happening to someone else at all!

So to perceptually attack someone else, you have to put attack into your mind. Your mind has to believe in attack, and it goes both ways. The mind doesn't conceive of 'attack on xyz person' hoping to escape how that attack feels, it conceives of 'attack' in general. And that means, the same rules it applies to someone else, applies to itself.

The mind cannot perceive or experience anything outside of itself. It's like, the ocean cannot know what life is like in a desert - it can't go there, it doesn't exist there, it can only be aware of what's in the ocean.

So you THINK that you can use your mind to make up stuff 'about someone not myself'. You THINK you have this ability to objectively sit on the sidelines and judge and attack and have absolutely no effects from this at all. That's absolutely mistaken and a totally ego-based self-deception. Nobody has this ability. It's a myth. If you want bombs to go off against other people, you have to set them off within you, and pretend that they're having an affect on someone else. Good luck with that.

So you have this vested interest in not attacking 'others' because in fact it doesn't even attack others, it attacks you.

Try hating someone or being really angry at them, at the same time as loving yourself. Any luck with that? It's not possible. You can't maintain a state of mind for love to exist while simultaneously having a state of mind where hate/fear/guilt/judgement/attack exists. YOUR mental condition has to degrade in order to generate hatred. Hatred destroys you. Your mental condition has to become unconscious and blocked in order for you not to see love in someone. And by not seeing it in someone, those blocks will block your own awareness of your own love. You put up walls to keep others out, and to keep you in a prison.

So you see you can't do anything to others and think that you're getting away with it, or that you are not going to be affected in some way. You are deeply affected, and ONLY you are affected, when you really get down to it. So it's utterly futile.

You have this interest in not attacking others not because you even can attack others, but because every single time you do this you do not realize that you are ONLY attacking yourself, YOUR mind suffers, YOUR mind changes into a hate machine, YOU are experiencing the hate, and other people aren't even experiencing it.

You think you can generate 'stuff' in you that somehow leaks out and overflows and travels over to other people and does stuff to them. You think you have these weapons of warfare, the power to affect someone else. You don't. It's a total myth. If someone doesn't choose to experience effects they will not. If you're in a judging hateful mood and you're going around believing you're capable of attacking people, and the people are all laughing and not taking it seriously, obviously you don't have the power to affect them. You're deluded.

You are the only one who is upset.

"You do not realize how much you hate each other. You will not get rid of this until you DO realize it, for UNTIL then, you will think you want to get rid of EACH OTHER and KEEP THE HATRED."

In the past couple of weeks, I've been having some hatred coming out for release. It's from deep in the past. But I did not recognize it as hatred. I was too "in it", feeling it. I had no idea what it was, only that everyone seemed responsible for it.

I kept flip-flopping between what it felt like and how it was making me perceive, and what was more of my "current" way of perceiving. But it was hard to maintain this. I kept falling back into it.

It felt like an intense form of separation, and of accusation. It seemed sharper and stronger than just anger. It felt vicious and hurt and blameful. It took several days of going through it before Jesus clued me in that it was even hate, because I couldn't tell what it was.

When you're angry at some person you're trying to make them guilty, yet there's some form of desiring that they stop being "wrong" mixed in with that. Hatred on the other hand is a bit more like just pure despising. It's almost like the reason why you were angry gets buried and all you're left with is a concentrated hatred of a person. It's almost like sin's reflection.

Each time that waves of this stuff came up, I would feel extremely scapegoaty. Just really convinced that the person was just evil and wrong and bad. Just like a passive observation, but quite strong in actively condemning them. This then started to overflow into how I was relating to everyone. There was just this constant forceful pushing of blame all the time regardless of who I was relating with.

You might have noticed that I made several posts recently where I was sounding fed up with people, accusing people, tired of people, resentful of idiots, annoyed at people not being willing to listen or learn, angry at their fixed nature and stubbornness etc. This isn't really like me, but I couldn't help but keep moving into blame because the feeling of hate coming up was so accusatory. It was making me see everyone as wrong.

The hate was seemingly based on what I saw as what someone did to me, seeming to inspire revenge or a justification for "why" I should hate them. A viciousness that seemed to make sense. It felt like an extreme form of dissociation and ego and specialness, as well. It was driven by unhealed "hurt" and a definite "you did this to me" kind of mentality of victimhood.

I'm glad to say that now that this is mostly cleared out, my perceptions and evaluations are returning to a much more forgiving place. But it was a pretty deep dip in the road. Jesus talks in the course about just how intense our "hidden hates" really are, how much we blame and accuse. What we don't realize is that it's really ourselves that we're hating, at the same time. I certainly found it extremely difficult to feel loving or forgiving while feeling hate. It is just not possible to remain in a peaceful or happy state of mind with such things going on.

"No-one who hates but is afraid of love, and therefore MUST he be afraid of God."

"Let me not think that I can find the way to God if I have hatred in my heart."

"Your hatred is not real, But it is real to you. IT HIDES WHAT YOU REALLY WANT."

"If hatred finds a place within your heart, you will perceive a fearful world, held cruelly in death's sharp-pointed, bony fingers."

"It is in the special relationship, born of the hidden wish for special love from God, that the ego's hatred triumphs. "Look once again upon your enemy, the one you chose to hate instead of love. For thus was hatred born into the world, and thus the rule of fear established here."

"When hatred rests upon a thing, it calls for death as surely as God's Voice proclaims there is no death."

"It fears and it attacks and hates itself, and darkness covers everything it sees, leaving it dreams as fearful as itself. No miracles are here, but only hate. It separates itself from what it sees, while light and strength perceive themselves as one."

"And thus will all the vestiges of hell, the secret sins and hidden hates be gone, and all the loveliness which they concealed appear like lawns of Heaven to our sight, to lift us high above the thorny roads we travelled on before the Christ appeared."

"This level cannot be attained until there is no hatred in your heart, and no desire to attack the Son of God."

"The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love."

"What hatred has released to love becomes the brightest light in Heaven's radiance."

"Do not let your hatred stand in the way of love, for NOTHING can withstand the love of Christ for His Father, or His Father's love for Him."

"You have projected outward what IS antagonistic to what is inward, and therefore you would HAVE to perceive it this way. That is why you MUST realize that your hatred IS in your mind, and NOT OUTSIDE IT, before you can get rid of it. And why you MUST get rid of it, BEFORE you can perceive the world as it really is."

People like to think they don't have an ego, or that if they have one it's tucked away somewhere. Distancing from it is a way to protect it. But having ego means being to ANY degree, even slightly, outside of heaven. The tiniest belief in separation is all it takes. And that applies to just about everyone on the planet.

So we have to at least acknowledge honestly that if we're still here we probably still have egotism to some degree. And that means we can't just pretend that we don't have one. It means that there's some part of our mind which is mentally ill, and distorted, and lost and confused. A part of the mind that believes things which are not true, but still believes them anyway. And that part of mind has a sense of identity attached to it, a sense of truth about oneself.

And that ego-identifying mind is going to have false perceptions and egoic viewpoints, regardless of how much a person is doing ACIM, how often, or for how long. So we can't just be in denial and pretend we're not being egotistical, we are being egoistical pretty much 100% of the time in one way or another. And denying this will only produce sacrifice and repression and even more separation in the mind.

There has come to be an ACIM 'culture' now of ego denial. It's one thing to recognize that yes we have to work on undoing our egotism and return to wholeness, but it's another to just pretend we don't have egotism when we do. Shoving it under the carpet isn't healing the mind, any more than throwing the book at it 24/7. It will generally take a long a slow and gradual process to correct all of the mind's errors and until then you have to 'work with' your ego and be gentle with yourself.

We have to admit that we DO have an ego right now and we - at times, need to be IN that ego, in order to feel a sense of being "what we are", because our sense of what we are has become ego-identified. If we pretend not to be e.g. body-identified, while still being so, we will move into sacrifice and body shaming and other things which are unhealthy. People are developing increased senses of shame and guilt over 'having an ego', or outright denial at having one while demonstrating it, instead of being gentler with ourselves about where we are at.

It's ok to acknowledge that you're being/having an ego while you are doing it, while you are working on undoing it, and not pretend that just because you believe the truth of the theory of ACIM that you somehow are above it all. Or that you can live as though you don't have an ego, before you are truly ready to do so. Everyone is mired in ego and mental illness until they reach enlightenment, and no-one is excluded from that.

So we have to then recognize this and be gentle with our self-deceptions and our delusions, even if that isn't an ideal scenario, and isn't healing it. We have to be where we're 'at', while we're trying to move closer to God. Once we've moved closer, great, we're more spiritually aligned, but while we have ego we shouldn't be treating it like some kind of enemy or bashing it or hating it or trying to lock it in a box, because YOU will experience the effects of that.

It comprises part of your belief about yourself, and a sense of your current identity, and denying or attacking that will be experienced as an attack upon yourself, which will not make you happy. You don't have to snuggle up beside it and love it and want to keep it, but you also shouldn't be demonising it or not having compassion for where you're at. Everyone's trying to run and they don't even know how to walk.

Many ACIM students think that they are not only miracle workers but also egoless selfless lovers of everyone, having barely stepped foot on the road to God. This is part of the ego arrogance itself. Can we just for goodness sake just be where we're at and relax and stop pressuring ourselves to be perfect and flawless when we're clearly riddled with issues that we're working on? It's okay to be a mess while you're working on cleaning up the mess.

"The Soul in its knowledge is unaware of the ego. It does NOT attack the ego."

"The voice of the Holy Spirit does not command, because it is incapable of arrogance. It does not demand, because it does not seek control. It does not overcome, because it does not attack. It merely REMINDS. It is compelling only because of what it reminds you OF."

"Truth does not struggle AGAINST ignorance, and love does not ATTACK fear."

"Light does not ATTACK darkness, but it DOES shine it away."

Here's something that may be very difficult to own up to. If you are upset by anything in the world, it is because you have attacked the world. And usually when you are upset, it is because you perceive someone else did the attacking. And then you recoil and despise the attack, and it affects you, and you become upset. And this all covers up the fact that you are attacking. Sin seems outside of you, not in your mind.

You see, you cannot see attack unless you attack. If someone seems to murder someone in front of your face, most people would be horrified. But that's the ego being horrified, about what the ego has done. The reaction has to be fake, because if you knew the truth you'd know nothing has really happened, would laugh at it, and raise the dead. Nothing real can be threatened. There is no death. You're just seeing a dream.

What's very hard to confess to or even be aware of, is that the only reason you are upset by a murder is because there is part of your mind that believes in murder, and is murderous. It reminds you of that, and triggers that in you. You are horrified by your OWN belief about YOURSELF. It reflects what you think is going to happen to you, and what you are doing to yourself. Otherwise you would dismiss it in an instant.

You might say, well, I'm a really loving person and I absolutely would never want to hurt anyone. I advocate for love and can only love. BUT, when someone gets murdered in front of my face, I may freak out. Why? How is that possible? It's only possible because I make it real, I believe it's true, and I value it. I see what I value, and value what I believe in. So I believe in the murder, and its horrors just reflect what I believe I deserve, because of my belief in sin being real, which I am perceiving outside of me.

There HAS TO BE something in my mind that is made of sin, in order for me to react to the "sinful behavior" of others. Otherwise I would be absolutely unmoved by this illusion. So on the one hand I'm claiming to be love/loving, but these events prove my love is conditional, and that means I MUST be in denial. Invulnerability is a characteristic of innocence and holiness, not reacting with ego emotional trauma. A peace that passes all understanding. The immovable rock of sanity.

So we have to be really, REALLY honest with ourselves. Are we REALLY loving, if we are so easily shaken by sin? Are we really awake, if we are still affected by the world we see? Something is incomplete if there is even a slight trace of upset. If we have any reaction other than love, we are in the ego. To the Holy Spirit, all things call for love, not fear.

Yet sometimes we split the world into two things. There are perceived behaviors which are "okay and loving" and other behaviors "which are evil". This is the result of a split mind looking at the world. And when the loving things happen we think, ok, that's love, I'm doing that, so I'm loving. Then when the unholy things happen we think, that's NOT love. But instead of recognizing it as a meaningless illusion we recoil in horror and pass blame and point a finger and make the person wrong. Because we're not really whole in our love. It's not unconditional.

If I derive my sense of happiness from what happens "to me" or what happens "in the world", then I am easily robbed of happiness when anything goes wrong. And there are plenty of things that will go wrong. Invulnerability and love can only come about by becoming CAUSE, not effect. By recognizing that you are NOT at the effect of the world, in ANY of its forms, any events, or when anything happens. If I want to be actively loving in this world, it can't be that I ditch love at a moment's notice when something alarming seems to occur. That's special love, and too much fear. Fear does not enter where it is not welcome, and fear is its denial.

And so it's possible to have special love for the world, which means that you value bodies and the planet and want to keep it and want to have "loving behavior" and so on, but without overlooking these illusions and without being consistent. Some actions are then considered acceptable, others are considered evil and are despised. That is not love. That's judgementalism. That's fake spirituality. That's the ego trying to spiritualize an illusion and make it real. It takes many forms, sometimes things such as "not eating meat", or "hating murderers", or trying to focus solely on "the positive", or wearing "spiritual clothes".

That is denial. It is the two-facedness of the ego. The ego is especially good at taking sides and making out that one "way" is right and one way is wrong. Still continuing to be affected by the world is a certain sign of unforgiveness. Forgiveness overlooks the world which is why it causes you not to take anything seriously in it, recognizing it is not real. This can be difficult to learn because many things in the world SEEM evil or unloving. But you can't have a life where you are "loving sometimes" and call it loving. You have to learn to realize that the unloving, hateful, vengeful things are NOT THAT, and see through them to the truth.

This is a course in Cause, not effect. The world is not a cause. Believing it causes anything produces effects in you and makes you sick. To suffer with upset or horror when bad things happen is sickness. To blame the bad things for causing it is sickness. To not realize what you did to yourself to make yourself experience upset, is sickness. A Course in Miracles isn't about putting on a nice facade of persona all the time and "looking loving", and then taking off the love and going into fear or judgement when the situation changes.

Beware of illusions of love. Real, genuine, deep love is unconditional in its application, sees ALL things in this world as unreal, recognizing NOTHING can change what it is, and has NO effects from worldly events. To love is not to take sides or to judge or to hate sinners. To love is to recognize the Christ in each is the only truth and all the rest is bullshit. "For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew YOU were dreaming."

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

Jesus tells us that our perception works like a mirror. Whatever we have inside of us, we project outside, and perceive it reflected back. We are doing this all the time, every second of every day.

We first look within, find our own attitude about ourselves there, and then we project that out and see it. This means in effect that we are really blind to seeing anything out there OTHER THAN ourselves.

If we have guilt in our mind, we will see guilt in others and in the world. If we have innocence in our mind, we will see innocence in others and in the world. This is because the world acts like a mirror and reflects back to us whatever we project onto it, including meaning. This is because it follows the Golden Rule, that what is true of you is true of the whole.

"Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego."

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real."

If you are not seeing innocence in the world, in which you see there is nothing to forgive because everything is innocent, it is because you yourself are not being innocent. You are looking at the result of what you believe is true about yourself and others.

If you want to see and experience the world in a happier way, in a lighter way, in which the world seems beautiful and kind and lovely, then you have to be beautiful and kind and lovely in your mind.

This is the meaning of:

"God is in everything I see because God is in my mind."

When you have an awareness of God in your mind, you will project this out and see it reflected back. Then it will seem as though, in the mirror, you are looking at the reflection of God or heaven, because you are putting it there.

This is a fixed rule of how perception works. You do not ever really see something that is true of others or the world that isn't true of you. As in, "you but accuse your brother of your own sins." The guilts and offences and blames and stuff that you see in the world are yours, projected.

You are always looking at yourself!

If the world seems lacklustre, your mind is lacklustre. If the world seems dark and evil, you are being dark and evil. If the world seems sparkling and new, you are being sparkling and new. If others seem sinful and guilty and hated, you are hating yourself and regarding yourself as sinful and guilty.

As we progress with the course we're meant to be getting to a point where we see the world with so much forgivingness - ONLY because we have forgiven OURSELVES - such that we see the forgiven world. The forgiven world is beautiful and lovely and new, seen in the present FROM a state of mind that is lovely and beautiful and new.

"From my holiness does the perception of the real world come."

Similarly the eyes of christ look out upon the world and SEE christ reflected back. This is because Christ is in the mind FIRST, and then is projected and reflected. By being aware of heaven in your mind within, you see the reflection of heaven on earth. This is STRICTLY how it works - this is the functional mechanics of perception.

What you believe you perceive. It's not about "believing your eyes" or "I will have to see it to believe it." It's the other way around - what you BELIEVE you will SEE. We are meant to see this world and the bodies through beautiful forgiving eyes, which see them as beautiful and forgiven.

We are meant to see from holiness and innocence within, so that we will see holiness and innocence without. So if we're not seeing that, we're not being that and we have work to do within ourselves in our mind healing. You can't see what you're not willing to be.

"Perception is a mirror, not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind reflected outward. I would bless the world by looking on it through the eyes of Christ."

"How lovely does the world become in just that single instant when you see the truth about yourself reflected there. Now you are sinless and behold your sinlessness. Now you are holy and perceive it so."

"And the love He feels for us becomes our own as well. This will become the only thing we see reflected in the world and in ourselves."

"By sharing its reflection HERE, its truth becomes the only perception which the Son of God accepts."

"The blameless cannot blame, and those who have accepted their innocence see nothing to forgive. Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. It is the reflection of God's Love on earth."

"It is the witness to your state of mind, the OUTSIDE picture of an INWARD condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive."

"Projection MAKES perception, and you CANNOT see beyond it."

"All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes."

"Your gift to me, and it has power to translate all that the body's eyes behold into the sight of a forgiven world. How glorious and gracious is this world!"

"The teachers of God have trust in the world, because they have learned it is not governed by the laws the world made up. It is governed by a Power which is in them but not of them. It is this Power that keeps all things safe. It is through this Power that the teachers of God look on a forgiven world."

"To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified. To the extent to which you recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent will you perceive attack cannot BE justified. This is in strict accord with vision's FUNDAMENTAL law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you WANT it there. Perception HAS no other law than this."

"Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean, and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it. God will shine upon it of Himself. Only the clear reflection OF Himself can BE perceived upon it. Reflections are seen in light. In darkness, they are obscure, and their meaning seems to lie only in shifting interpretations, rather than in themselves."

Your ego is not going to like this. But in order to be fully forgiving you're going to have to find a way to find everyone innocent, no matter what they seem to do.

This includes every degree of criminal behavior, every form of attack, all abuse and torture and sexual perversion, every single way that one person might seem to hurt another. Even if you see it, even if it is continuing, you STILL have to find a way to see innocence. God does not turn anyone away for any reason.

How are you going to do that? Society is definitely not going to support you in this. Most people across the world are so full of guilt they don't even know what innocence is. They see the whole world through a filter of guilt and darkness, which translates anything anyone does into a sin.

Being incapable of forgiving, most people will just react with fake horror at the first sign of anyone else's mistake, and will jump at the chance to scapegoat them. To hate and to blame, to condemn and accuse, to demand their punishment, even their death. This is very unforgiving.

If you are to see that an "evil criminal" is completely innocent, you're not going to be able to maintain your USE of them as a scapegoat. The only way you could really find them guilty is by finding yourself guilty, then trying to shovel that off onto them. And this is what most people are doing.

We have to become able to reognize that all insane behavior is just a mistaken state of mind, people acting on confusion and delusion, various forms of madness and dysfunction and unhealed wounds. And all of this calls for healing, not further harm.

The key is that when we witness someone seeming to make a horrendous mistake, we see it NOT as a sin, but as merely a mistake calling for love. And the only way to do that is to NOT enter into the game of projecting guit. You must not find them guilty of what they appear to be doing. No matter what it is they seem to do, even if it's what we'd call some horrendous murder.

Typically when someone does something wrong, all of society will jump on them in justified anger, point a finger, blame and hate, and want that person to be punished. This is not forgiveness and is part of those people's insanity. They are trying to take the opportunity to get rid of their own guilt and madness, by conveniently attaching it to someone else's mistake.

When you forgive enough, you can no longer side with the people that want to have a witch hunt. You can no longer accept that when someone does something to hurt another it's completely justified to be angry at them and want them to be punished. You can no longer tolerate and accept other people taking advantage of the situation to deal out some punishment that they think is deserved.

All punishing, all accusing, all hurting, all destroying, all anger, all attack, all guilt, has to stop. It can hardly be corrective to USE any of these as a response to someone that DOES any of these. To punish someone who is doing something wrong is a double punishment. To hate someone who is hating does absolutely NOTHING to improve the situation. It just adds insult to injury and is hipocritical.

The only proper response to anyone doing anything is to love, and to help them to return to love, through healing and help. Nothing else is sane. Nothing else is effective. There has to be rehabilitation, reintegration, therapy, healing, love, support, encouragement and a desire to have the person return to the community, welcomed with open-arms and loved.

In fact, if any one person is relegated to evil, deserving of punishment, or we decide they "should be guilty", we are not helping anything at all. We are just reinforcing ego and making it worse. Punishment is not education, it is the opposite, and has the opposite effect. It is not a deterrent, it just reinforces ego patterns.

Only forgiveness works. And in order to forgive, it must be seen as justified. And the only way it is justified is if YOU perceive that everyone DESERVES it, because you do not see or recognize or support guilt in them. And the only way to not support guilt in them is to not have any in yourself. Only the self-accused condemn. Only the innocent can be forgiving. And those who project guilt are more guilty than those they project it upon.

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in this view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin except a false idea about God's Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God."

"But first, lift up your eyes and look upon each other in innocence, born of COMPLETE forgiveness of each other's illusions, and through the eyes of faith, which see them not."

"And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt?"

"Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. It is the reflection of God's Love on earth. It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me to my home."

sThe world in itself is altogether intolerable. It was designed to be a place of limitations and difficulties and problems.

As Jesus says,"Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

That means you can't really expect the world to stop having problems, making things go wrong, being utterly awkward and stupid.

But what you can do is change your attitude.

All your suffering comes from believing that the world SHOULD NOT have problems, that it should work, that perfection is possible, that things will always go well, that every problem has a solution, that you can gain everthinge you want without losing it, and that the world has something truly valuable to offer.

If you believe that, you will be up shit creek, because the world CANNOT function that way. It's not capable of acting like heaven because it was made to be heaven's opposite in EVERY way imaginable. If you want it to function OTHER than how it DOES function, you will fight with it and be at war with it and hate it.

It was designed to be difficult, riddled with problems, totally contradictory, and hard to deal with. It was designed so that all choices are choices for partial things, and never can you get the whole from anything. It was designed to fail and be broken and lacking and special. It was NOT designed to be sane or to have order or to function benevolently. It was meant to be cruel and vicious and malicious and murderous. So let it be that.

If you can accept that the world is completely broken and ridiculously beyond all hope of improvement, then you're onto something. Because now your attitude is not BASED ON the world and not playing by its rules. You are under no laws but God's. You are not dealing with the world on the world's terms, you're transcending its terms.

If you can accept that the world is a completely stupid pile of shit that would be better of flushed down the cosmic toilet, then you'll be better off. Because then you'll allow and RECOGNIZE that it is like this, and not deceive yourself. It's only when you DENY that it is like that that you suffer, because then you are going against its grain and are in conflict with it.

Everything it is made to tempt you into suffering, to believe in death, and become disappointed. But only if you thought that the world would NOT be like this. If you are deceived into thinking that you can have it all, succeed, stop the problems, make everything work right, or prevent everything from dying, then you're going to be VERY upset when it constantly works against you. The world WILL have it's way, and it will fuck you over.

It will then seem that the world is against you because your demand for what you want the world to be like is against the world's nature. And so really you are against yourself. Strangely and paradoxically, if you can let the world be utterly shit and BE OKAY WITH THAT, without resisting it or hating it, without condeming it with sin or judgement, then you can let it be only what it is.

And then even though it is not heaven and is not of God, and continues to completely fuck up at every opportunity, you can now laugh at these mistakes and shortcomings, you can overlook them in forgiveness, you can not let them disturb or disappoint you, and you can therefore transcend them in peace. As Jesus said, you are not then trying to "escape from problems here", but you are instead seeing those problems with a more forgiving view.

The more forgiving view is to recognize that the world was MADE TO be a place of suffering and bullshit and conflict. It functions on the basis of separation. It was projected out from the insane ego mind, made by minds driven mad by guilt. It is not meant to WORK. But because it was designed BY something other than itself, it is NOT really responsible for its shortcomings. It can only be what it has been designed to be, and in that light you CAN FORGIVE IT, because it is not the cause of its own limitations.

The way out then isn't to try to stop the world from being the way it is, it's allowing it to be the way it is to that you are not caught up in fighting against it. Resistance is futile, and all it does is bind you to the world. When you drop the resistance you drop the attachment, and then you are free from the world. The world is not then disappointing you, if you never expected it to work out well. The world is not then doing something horrible that it shouldn't be doing, because that's all it CAN do. And you can just recognize its corrupt and inadequate nature and have pity on it for its inability to work any other way. And in that lack of sin you are set free.

Let the world burn, and be happy. A world that truly works and has order and peace and wholeness and where you can get everything you want without loss and receive perfection and have no problems, is not this world. It is the Kingdom of God, which God created as your true home, beyond this realm of nonsense and impossibilities. Let the impossible be impossible, so that possibility can be possible. Let the world "world" itself to death, while you by passerby and laugh at its unimportance.

You can't forgive the world, by focusing on it, and trying to regard it as forgiven. You can't love it by loving it directly. It's not there. This is something that I get hung up on quite often. I ask myself, how do I forgive the world?

Usually I'll take a look at the course and see it saying over and over again that awakening is recognition, there is no world, the world is unreal, it's not happening, etc. But in that I find it hard to see how love enters into it. It's just a "fact" that the world is not real, but this is rather a cold clinical truth, and doesn't integrate the love.

So then I ask myself why would I love the world, especially when the world seems so cruel? And the fact is I can't love a cruel world. If it is really there and it's really cruel then it is unlovable and cannot be overlooked. If I make it real, if I believe in it as not a dream, then there is no way I can be at peace about it, yet alone love it.

Then I'm reminded that if I strip away all sense of causation from the world, all beliefs that it's doing things to me, all notions of attack and suffering caused by it, or sinfulness on its part, then maybe this lays the groundwork for being able to see it as innocent, to a degree, or at least not accused. Is this what allows me to be loving toward it?

What occurred to me though is that forgiveness really isn't about targeting the world and forgiving it, or having a certain attitude about it. It's not even there to have a relationship with, really. In fact, Jesus says in the course "to forgive is to overlook", and that christ vision looks beyond the body/matter to the light. So really if I'm being forgiving, I more or less should practically ignore and deny the world. "The world you see must be denied" and all that.

But again this denial of the world, this ignoring of it, doesn't really clue me in as to how to be loving. So then what came to mind is, if the world were stripped of all its seeming attack and causation, what is left? Well, what is left is me having an attitude problem. It's me having hatred or anger or a projection of sin. And now we get down to the real situation.

Because in truth it's not really so much that you need to forgive the world. It's more to do with that you need to forgive YOURSELF. If you have sin in your mind, any belief in attack or guilt or fear etc, you're going to project it onto the world and use it as a scapegoat, in one way or another. Whether it be hating the weather or attacking the neighbors or judging the politicians or whatever. The world becomes a target of focus and attention and distraction through projection.

So let's be reminded again. "It can be but myself I crucify", and "I can be attacked by nothing but MY thoughts", and "I am doing this to myself" and "I but accuse my brother (and the world) of my OWN sins." So now we're getting down to it. Because if I have an attitude problem, a belief in sin, an inner guilt, which I am trying to escape through projection and blame, that not only has a whole lot to do with me being unloving toward the world, it also is what MAKES the world that false perception sees. Because "The world is false perception."

In that sense, the world really in truth is neutral and nothing, and "I have given everything I see all the meaning it has for me." Meaning that any sense of "the world is cruel, wrong, bad, evil, sinful" isn't something inherent to the world itself, it's something I've given it. The world is nothing more than what I have given it to be. Through my lack of love.

It still remains impossible to love the cruel world because it is my unlove that makes it cruel. You can only love the real world, and you will only see the real world when you love. Because a loving perception only makes a loving world, because "The world IS perception". "You maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts". "There is no world apart from what you wish." "The world you made" in hate can be stripped of the hateful attitude and is re-made by the Holy Spirit.

So at the end of it all, trying to love a cruel world is impossible, because the perception of cruelty is part of projected sin and anchors you into false perception. You cannot see it as neutral or forgiven or overlooked while having an unloving attitude, and the unloving attitude always starts within. Because you look first within to what you believe about YOURSELF and then you project that out and THEN perceive. "Perception is a RESULT not a cause" and "projection makes perception."

When you're all caught up in how to forgive the world, you really need to shift the focus to how can you forgive yourself, so that you don't accuse the world in the first place. When you are no longer accusing the world, you aren't believing that it is a bad thing or an evil thing or a real cruel thing. It becomes, I presume, impossible to see it at all, when love is ruling the mind, because "love looks upon love" and hate looks upon hate. And only in unlove can you see the world of death.

To forgive the world, forgive yourself. What you think of yourself will be projected and extend outward, projecting the world you see, causing you to either see the hellish world of bodies and flesh and death, or the real world of light and peace and happiness. You must come from love, to see love or to justify forgiveness. And you can't be forgiving towards the world if you can't be forgiving towards yourself first.