Jesus said a curious thing to me last night, after I was pondering how I seemed to be here and was uncertain if he was present. He said:

"I'm not invisible, you are."

There is quite a lot of truth to this. This world we live in that we think is visible, is really invisibility. It is the attempt to hide from God, in darkness, and be unseen. It's a world of a lack of recognition. Of unawareness. Of not seeing. "I cannot see in darkness but in light".

And then there is a world, Heaven, where Jesus is, which is completely exposed, absolutely obvious, totally visible, where everything is seen in the light and nothing is hidden. How can that be called invisibility? Yet it seems invisible to our BODY.

The body was made specifically to feast its 'eyes' upon form and be blinded by it. It was made to shut out VISION, and to replace it with 'sight'. But that sight was designed to ONLY show you illusions and errors and projections and dreams, and not reality. It was in fact made to cover up reality and shut out vision.

So here we are walking around thinking everything is oh-so visible and yet this is a movement into invisibility. And we think that we're the ones who are 'showing up' and 'being present', through physical means, but physical means is the OPPOSITE of showing up and being present.

Jesus is therefore saying, he is right here in front of our face and we don't see Him. He is not hiding. We are. And he is totally visible, and we are not.

Beings who have gone before us and are of a 'higher vibration' and who are ascended etc seem to leave the field of frequency of our body's ability to perceive, but it's not actually that they stop being with us or around us, it's just that WE stay in too low of a frequency and we think that visibility is invisibility, and vice versa. They actually enter into visibility, and we stay invisible, and then think we can't see them any more.

So what Jesus is saying to me and to you is, he is with you, all the time, fully and completely, 'in person', and he is even more present than you are and it's you that needs to wake up and become aware of 'sights' that you are missing and things that you are not seeing. To join the heavenly party.

Jesus is waiting for us to show up!

It's quite interesting that you could be completely surrounded with safety and love and happiness, and yet not be able to see it, and to then believe that you are not safe or happy.

This is the fundamental ego problem. It is a blindness, an inability to see what is really there. It is a denial of reality.

You could be surrounded by loving, supportive people, completely protected and safe, and yet, within yourself, hiding in a private prison world of insanity, believe that there's all kinds of reasons to be afraid and upset and not feel safe. Because you cannot SEE the safety that is present, and are not ACCEPTING it, you remain in isolation and despair. Even though you're immersed in love!

You are still within God. God is still with you. You are still as God created you. And yet, here you are, in your little private ego world, believing that God is not here at all. You believe its not safe in this existence, that there are many reasons to be upset and afraid, that you are alone and unloved, unworthy, unhappy. But you're INSIDE GOD! And you don't see it. You don't recognize it. You don't realize how incredibly perfectly okay everything is.

So it's really NOT a matter of, or a question of, are you okay, or are you safe, or do you have reasons to be upset, etc... that's not really what's going on. Because, behind your BLOCKS TO AWARENESS, there IS perfect safety and love and happiness surrounding you RIGHT NOW. Fully and completely. Love everywhere. But you are now AWARE of it, because you are blocking it, and so SIMULTANEOUSLY you believe that it is not there.

It's like you're swimming in a lake and wondering where the water is.

It's like you're laying on a beach perfectly dry and believing you are drowning.

It's like being terrified that everything's going wrong when all around you are miracles and love and joy and celebration.

You simple are not AWARE of what is REALLY happening, WHERE you really are, WHO you really are, or WHAT really is.

Removing the blocks to awareness IS THE ONLY WAY for you to become AWARE that you ARE SAFE, and loved, and happy, and that you are still with God as God created you. The blocks to awareness are showing you a cruel world. The blocks to awareness are making you believe and hallucinate that dangerous monsters are all around you, when in fact GOD is all around you.

Instead of ... what if something terrible has happened (separation from God) ..... what if..... you are still in God and everything is ok and nothing has happened?

Removing the blocks to awareness REVEALS what is really here, which is God, and love, and all is well

You don't need to become more loving. You already are created by love as love.

You don't need to become more innocent. You are already perfectly innocent in God's eyes.

You don't need to become more truthful. God already has established the truth and nothing can be added to it.

You don't need to become more spiritual. You are already immortal spirit.

You don't need to seek to find what you think you have lost or never had. You have everything God provided already, and it has not been lost and never will be.

You don't need to become more of yourself or figure out who or what you are. God has already established who and what you are.

All of these qualities which you might strive for, in your "spiritual seeking" is usually the ego seeking to maintain the the idea that you lack all of these things, and usually it will very passionately tell you you are not any of these things already. This is what takes you away from what is already your natural inheritance.

You don't need to be in the business of becoming spirit, or gaining immortality, or establishing innocence, or getting forgiven, or turning into God's child. YOU ALREADY ARE. Underneath all the bullshit, lies, cover-ups, deceit, illusions and denial, YOU already are absolutely perfect, shining in the brilliance of God's love.

The ONLLLLLLLLYYYY task you have, is UNCOVERING YOURSELF. Taking off the mask, removing the presence, getting rid of the illusions, seeing through the deceptions, shining a light on the untruths, recognizing false beliefs as false, not believing the ego's lies and not listening to your own bullshit.

Underneath your own bullshit is YOU, the real you, already perfect and immaculate and immortal and innocent. It has not been removed. It has not been changed. It has not been damaged. It has not been defiled. It has not been interrupted or upset or made to be what God didn't want it to be. You are still EXACTLY as God created you.

So this is all you need to work on. ... uncovering the truth, not defining it, not making it up. Revealing it. Exposing it. Not strengthening it - it is already total strength - but becoming more aware of the strength that is already in you. Not building yourself up. Not becoming a hero or a spiritual guru of worship. Just being yourself - the you that you are, beneath all the facades of the ego persona and shadow that seem to disguise you in a cloak of death.

You're immortal spirit, you know, son of God, hiding out with heavy clothing on. You just need to get naked.

There are two sort of perspectives relating to perception that we seem to fall into.

1. There is an objective world with our perception OF it, and what we project ONTO it is to do with how we interpret it.

2. There isn't an objective world and we're just dreaming it up and not projecting anything "onto" it because we're projecting IT in the first place.

I am coming to see that neither of these is correct.

There is a third possibility.

3. I am having a dream, which is surrounding me with a fictional environment which is coming from my mind. Without my dreaming of it - my projecting it - there wouldn't be any world here at all. There is NO objective world. There is ONLY a subjective world. My projection makes my perception and makes "the world I see."

The important distinction here is that the world I am projecting/dreaming, is coming from my mind and SEEMS to be an objective world. AND yet at the SAME TIME, this world is being projected BY me. So it seems to be both objective and subjective.

The key is that the objective part does not exist at all, and that's what ACIM means by "there is no world apart from what you wish", and wishes are dreams.

So it's not just to do with hey, I'm projecting something "onto" the objective world. It's that literally I am projecting the world ITSELF - that I think is an objective world - with my dreaming mind. And when my mind dreams of a different world, I project out an entirely different world. The old world doesn't transform because it has no objective reality or continuity of its own. I just project a different dream and stop projecting the old one.

When we go into false perception, however, there is an additional LAYER of projection, which seems to project "onto" the dream. Like, you're filled with anger and hate and so this seems like it projects "onto" the objective world. But the objective world itself is still being projected from your mind at that same time. So in truth, you are not really projecting ONTO the world, you are projecting the world and your "bad projecting" is actually changing the world and making it appear like a bad world to you.

In this way, it would appear that ACIM is never really talking about "projecting onto" anything. It's entirely talking about you projecting the world itself, directly, and your "bad attitude" projects what later is perceived to be a world that you seem to experience in a negative way. You think there is some other objective world that is "not negative" hiding underneath your negativity, but there isn't! You think you're projecting ONTO the world, but in fact you're not. You're projecting the world, period. Projection makes perception. Not "projection makes perception makes projection makes perception."

Just as at night when you dream, your mind forms en entire environment/world filled with buildings and people and stuff, and you seem to show up as a single body person. But your mind is making the world AND your body person. How the body person seems to experience the dream is an illusion because the person is actually MAKING the environment. Any attacker in the dream is you. People in the dream are figments of your own mind. It's the same with "waking life". We are literally dreaming of an entire universe.

This is an important passage which describes how you bring the ego and its world TO the holiness of truth, EXPOSE IT to the light, and it is SHONE AWAY by the light. Earth, which is part of the ego's world, is to be brought "to holiness", so that it is shone upon BY the light of holiness, which MAKES IT VANISH. Because the ego's world is made of darkness and illusions.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world and God DID NOT CREATE IT."

Earth, CANNOT, EVER, BE CONVERTED INTO HEAVEN, because it is UNHOLY and an ILLUSION. If it approaches the light, it will temporarily SEEM to become more holy because the light ITSELF is shining on and through it, and only the light is holy. The Earth will be shone away by eternity. Keeping it AWAY from the light maintains it in your mind and gives it "reality". Earth is never holy because it is not WHOLE. Holiness is only of Heaven. Eternity SHINES AWAY the world you made. This is A Course in Miracles.

"The Atonement does not MAKE holy. You were CREATED holy. It merely brings UNholiness TO holiness, or what you MADE, to what you ARE. The bringing together of truth and illusion, OF THE EGO AND GOD, is the Holy Spirit's only function. Keep not your making from your Father, for hiding it has cost you knowledge of Him, and of yourselves. The knowledge is safe, but wherein is YOUR safety, APART from it? The making of time, to TAKE THE PLACE of timelessness, lay in the decision to BE NOT as you WERE. Thus, truth was made past, and the present was dedicated to illusion. And the past, too, was changed, and INTERPOSED between what ALWAYS was, and NOW. The past that YOU remember NEVER was, and represents only the denial of what ALWAYS was.

Bringing the ego to God, is but to bring error to truth, where it stands corrected, because it is the OPPOSITE of what it meets, and is undone because the CONTRADICTION can no longer stand. How long can contradiction stand, when its impossible nature is clearly revealed? What disappears in light is NOT attacked. It merely vanishes, because it is not true. DIFFERENT realities ARE meaningless, for reality MUST be one. It CANNOT change with time, or mood, or chance. Its changelessness is WHAT MAKES IT REAL. This CANNOT be undone. Undoing is for UNreality. And this, reality WILL do for you.

Merely by BEING WHAT IT IS, does truth release you from everything that it is NOT. The Atonement is so gentle, you need but whisper to it, and all its power will rush to your assistance and support. You are not frail, with God beside you. But WITHOUT Him, you are nothing. The Atonement OFFERS YOU GOD. The gift which you refused, is held by Him in you. His Spirit holds it there FOR you. God has not left His altar, though His worshippers placed other gods upon it. The temple still is holy, for the Presence that dwells within it IS Holiness. "

Somewhere seemingly inside you, there is a perfect self. The soul that God created, one in Christ. That's you. That's what you are.

This perfect self has nothing wrong with it at all. It is already absolutely perfect. God created it to be perfect with perfection, and it was created perfectly by perfection.

Your actual self, what you are, does not need fixing or healing or resurrecting or correcting. It is absolutely perfect right now.

This self already exists. It is NOT your job or role or function or ability to CREATE IT, to make it, to cause it, to define it, to add to it, to build it up, to produce it, or in any way to turn yourself into it.

All spiritual "learning" is geared towards typically trying to become something other than what you are. This has led you AWAY FROM what you are. Even if it seems like progress.

The truth of your being isn't actually something you need to gain or cause or accumulate. It's something you need to RECOGNIZE AN ACCEPT.

It's actually something that's already there. It's waiting for your acknowledgement. It's waiting for you to find it and see it and realize it's already there and it's always been there.

It was just covered up by your mind with its layers of denial and unwillingness and believing other things. As soon as you saw yourself as not yourself, you lost track of yourself, lost sight of yourself, and went off trying to reinvent yourself.

And the you thought that in order to become a better version of you you'd have to keep reinventing yourself, to become a spiritual being. But that's how you end up with a spiritualised ego. A converted polished tweaked alternative self that is still not the self that God created.

You'll find after a while that you cannot manipulate an artificial self into being real, you cannot perfect the imperfect, you cannot get your "not really my real self" to turn into something spiritual enough.

You can produce illusions and specialness and artificial forms of what may look more spiritual but you can't really escape the realm of illusions this way. You can polish a turd but it's still at turd. Or paint some lipstick on a skeleton, or put some clothes on a corpse. But you cannot convert this non-self into a self.

What you really need to do is very simply to seek within and find and become aware of, recognize, acknowledge, access, a self that is sitting there waiting for you to find it again. This is more an act of going within and just trying to become aware that you are ALREADY perfect.

Look for your pre-existing perfection, don't try to invent it. Look for your holy self, don't try to turn yourself into a holy self. Appreciate and acknowledge and become aware of what God has already created you to be. It's in you, lurking there behind the dark curtains.

It's in this sense that you need do nothing. You need do nothing to make yourself be perfect and happy and well, because God has already done this. He's give you absolute perfection. You tried to hide from it. Now you just need to stop hiding from it and own it.

You are Christ, already. You are sinless already. You are holy already. You are everything already, and always and forever. What was all this seeking and not finding for, but to pretend that's not true?

"Why wait for Heaven? Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all." UrW188L1

Your sense of who you are depends entirely on the extent of your awareness. Awareness is your IDENTITY.

How much of your mind you are aware OF, determines the boundaries of your sense of Self.

If you have a lot of repression and denial and unconsciousness, your sense of Self will be little and confined. This is what Jesus refers to as "littleness".

You will still be aware, but your awareness will be limited. And yet, you will believe that the amount of Self you are aware of, is all of yourself. You won't even suspect there is more to you.

Everyone always believes they are their whole self. Whether they are actually aware of the whole of their self, is another matter. You could be aware of only 10% of yourself, and still believe that you are aware of your whole self.

The amount of awareness you have, if your awareness of your wholeness is limited, will also be limited. You will think you wake up in the morning and are "fully aware", at the maximum of your ability to be aware. But you won't be.

Your mind is vast. But it is blocked and divided and segmented. Your conscious self has been sectioned off into a small corner of the mind, and the rest has been made unconscious in order to hide your sin and guilt.

You will still, as the conscious self, believe that you are all of yourself, and that you are a whole person.

When obstacles to peace, blocks to awareness, denial and suppression and unconsciousness begin to be lifted away from your mind, you become aware of parts of your mind that you didn't even know existed.

That means your awareness of your whole mind increases.

Realize, that IDENTITY, is very tightly tied into how much awareness you have of your mind. If you are only aware of 10% of the mind, you will believe that everything you ARE aware of is all that there is to you. Your sense of SELF is limited by the outer edges of your awareness.

As your mind becomes freer of blockages, and things which were unconscious become conscious, your awareness is going to increase. And along with that, you are going to become more aware of a "larger Self", or a bigger sense of Identity. Your identity is going to expand.

Gradually your sense of "Who am I" is going to expand away from littleness into magnificence and grandeur, and thus your sense of Self will expand. You will "turn into" your Higher Self.

Really, it is just a matter of revealing, uncovering, remembering, making conscious again, and becoming aware of again, parts of your own mind which have been hidden and kept in the dark for a long time.

We call this clearing out of the clutter, "purification", and it produces an "awakening", i.e., simply an increase in awareness. Becoming aware that there is more to you than you realized.

That you are not just a little self stuck in a body. You are not just some little victim in a dream. You are huge and powerful, you are Christ.

And the amount of awareness that you are going to have as a result, is going to be much more than you have been used to. You literally will be MORE AWARE than you ever thought was possible, because you will be AWARE OF more than you ever thought existed.

When there is nothing left hiding in the darkness, no secret sins or hidden hates, and no more unconsciousness, and no more shadow or persona, the mind will be made whole again - fully aware of all of itself at once, and that is what it means to become aware of your Real Self. Spiritual awakening.

Aware of all that is - God.

Denial denies that the truth is true.

Denial attempts to make something else be true, which is false.

Denial is a lie.

Denial is essentially the only ego device. It is another word for separation - the attempt to make the truth go away, to get rid of God, to kill of God's Son, to go unconscious.

You have to own up to and admit to everything, and that is an act of surrender. To stop denying the truth is to surrender or give up the ego position of fighting against it.

In the example of someone who has committed a crime but who is denying that they did it, until they are willing to surrender and stop hiding from the truth, they will maintain denial as a defense. To give up that denial is to admit the truth, which means surrendering to Authority. In the world this usually means the authority of others over them, to decide their fate, but psychologically is means surrendering to the Authority of God, which is a blessing.

Denial then is an authority problem, where you are attempting to have authority over the truth by redefining what it is and making it be something it is not. It's your ego's attempt to assert itself and make itself valid. To surrender to the truth, to God, is the undoing of the authority problem, the relinquishment of the ego, and is a rejoining of mind in wholeness.

To put down denial is to open up to God, to receive love, to accept reality, and to return to sanity. It means admitting that there is nothing you can do to make the truth be something it isn't, and to gladly accept it and welcome it as it is. That doesn't mean accepting that the world is real or that things in the world really are happening. That's not the truth. It means accepting that this world doesn't exist because God did not create it, and being untrue means there is no reason to be upset about it.

You cannot change the fact you live forever. You cannot undo eternal life, because it is immortality. Spirit is in a state of grace forever and has never changed. But you can deny it. You can pretend it is not true. You can try to avoid it, you can make-believe it isn't real, and you can weave illusions to try to make it seems like it isn't true. You can try to invent death and make death seem to happen. But you cannot kill what God created. Death isn't real and it never will be.

To die is to deny Real Life, and death is just a state of heavily denying what the truth is. Death therefore cannot be the truth, and must be reversible if you are willing to surrender the illusion of lies. Death, being denial, cannot be considered a true state, a final state, a whole state. It requires considerable effort to maintain, and cannot last. Like all things made without God, it has a limit to what it can seem to do. That is why the Spirit escapes it, and why we then have more lifetimes.

You can deny the truth up and down and left and right and pretend to be something you are not and try to die in every way imaginable, pretending you deserve it and make-believing it is justified, but it is always a state of lies. You simply are not being honest. The honest truth is that God has created you eternal and you cannot die and this world does not exist. So, what is there to be concerned about? Why pretend you are vulnerable? Why attempt to make out that you can be attacked? You are immortal spirit.

Denial is an attempt to get rid of something, make it go away, place it anywhere other than here, push it outside of conscious awareness, and to disassociate from it. It’s an attempt to pretend it does not exist. This is a psychological act.

When there is denial, the "displacement" of what is being avoided appears to become separate from where it is (in you) and is sort of "pushed away" from you. Thus you push it outwards - outside of yourself.

So where there is denial, there is a pushing away, ie projection.

You can often experience this happening if you are ever around someone who represses their feelings. Regardless of how they feel, they will attempt to pretend they’re not feeling it, or they try to hide the feeling from themselves in an attempt to hide it from others. They think that if they are not aware of something, others won’t be aware of it either.

This is quite funny really and is similar to how we hide from God in order to pretend that God is not there. It’s also why we hide our secret sins and hidden hates, to KEEP them but pretend they are not there. Out of sight out of mind, but it doesn’t work.

What then happens is these people, because of denial, broadcast their stuff outward quite intensely. The more the denial, the more they project. This can especially be true of more intellectual people who do not like to feel emotions. They become loud broadcasters of what they do not want to feel. They are trying to get rid of it by projecting it away from themselves. They think that hiding it from themselves makes it go away from everyone, but it does not. Their feelings, pushed onto others, are even EASIER to see by others.

If you are sensitive or empathic you will likely easily pick up on these broadcasts and wonder why you are suddenly flooded with confusing feelings. Being around "projectors" can be quite toxic. They are emotionally irresponsible people who want to maintain a persona of everything being okay all the time, instead of being authentic. People-pleasers do this too.

This is also how we project stuff in our mind. Projection makes perception. Or you could say, denial makes projection. Upon "not wanting to see" what is being denied, it will be projected outward and then seen even more intensely. The only difference is there is a disassociation and a denial that it is inside yourself or has anything to do with you.

Always, being more responsible for everything you experience and feel will put you much more in touch with who you really are, give you strength, make you more aware and loving, and you will be much more authentic. You will also then stop sliming everyone else with your garbage disposal system.