"The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man (souls/sons) by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind (his own free-will creations).

The latter (the son’s ability to create) required the endowment of man by God with FREE WILL because all loving creation is freely given (God gave us freedom).

Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement (no separation)or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects (each aspect being a son of God with free will) are of the same order."

Also...

"In the service of the right mind the denial of error frees the mind, and re-establishes the FREEDOM OF THE WILL. When the will is really free it cannot miscreate, because it recognizes only truth."

When we have free will, and it’s really free (not under illusion) it creates like God creates, freely, independently. What we will is the same as what God would will. But it is still our free will which wills it. When we enter into illusions, the will becomes NOT free, because entering into separation is a denial of freedom and a denial of will. Therefore the ego does not have free will. The ego is the denial of freedom and will. The ego only has WISHFUL THINKING. And to wish is to not will at all. To have no will at all is to not will to live, which is the choice to die.

Because EACH SON has free will, each son INDEPENDENTLY gets the TOTAL FREEDOM to decide, whether or not to believe the ego and oppose God’s will, or to co-create with God. Blocking will means you are choosing to be against your own will. This creates the split ego mind, within which you have multiple conflicting wills. At the very least two (typically persona and shadow, or conscious and unconscious).

When your mind is split your will is split, and you will be in CONFLICT with yourself. At war with yourself. You will attempt to will one thing with a partial will, and another part of you will attempt to oppose it. Trying to oppose God’s will opposes your own will. This puts you into a tug of war between yourself and yourself. This cancels out the effects of your willing, because each time you will one thing, you also will to stop it and bring about an opposite. This puts a FREEZE on your will, making you POWERLESS, and incapable of willing anything at all. To use your free will against itself renders you impotent and UNWILLING. It also means you no longer will LIFE, and therefore make death as a statement of your unwillingness to live.

The ego has no will. It only has wishful thinking. Death is wishful thinking, because it is impossible to kill God’s son. The secret to salvation tells us we are doing this all to ourselves. That’s because we are the one WILLING against ourselves in a split mind. Willing against God’s will and against our own will produces an alien will which we fight against within ourselves.

When our will is split, we cannot perform miracles. When our will is WHOLE, we are SINGLE MINDED, with a single unified will which does not stop itself from expressing, and a whole mind is a miraculous mind. Miracles express from wholeness. Spit-minded people are anti-miraculous (anti christ). To be miraculous you must use your "whole heart", or whole will, not a partial will. Being "in two minds" (with two wills) means being in fear, and miracles cannot be performed in a spirit of fear. Whole mind has no limits to what it can create because when it wills, it does not oppose its own will, and therefore what it wills MUST be expressed and manifest.

Also since we all have our own FREE WILL, this does not mean we are necessarily contradicting each other. It does not mean we are willing against each other provided we all want the same thing. We are all willing the same thing. We all will to expand and create and share love and joy. It is ONLY when free will is used against ITSELF and against God, that we attack ourselves and go into a state of a split mind, where our will ceases to produce real effects.

This produces a private world of dreaming in which our will is divided and fragmented, along with our identity. We then seem to have a "separated will" which is attempting to implement the authority problem. It is an improper use of will. It is an attempt to will something that God would not will, a fiction or an idea of loss/lack/attack etc. Willing to "create death", is actually a will to create NOTHING, and so is an attempt not to will anything at all. This is why nothing real can be threatened - no opposing will can truly will anything.

Also because we have free will, this FAR MORE CLEARLY explains the workings of perception. In that, it is our task, each of us individually, to take full responsibility for what we are experiencing. It means as an individual son, *I* am responsible only for what *I* am doing to myself. It is not possible to do anything to other people against their will. It is not possible to be affected by anyone else’s will. Everyone’s will is equally powerful, which is why Jesus can’t force us to wake up. Whatever I am experiencing, I did it to myself.

Having free will means that I am responsible only for the INNER content of my mind, which is my state of self attack and conflict with myself, in which my own will is opposing itself. It also means I am responsible for my own mental and physical health. It also means therefore, because other souls have FREE WILL, the state of their mind and their body is NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY. Nor does the state of their mind or body have ANY POWER to cause me to be UNABLE to choose absolute atonement and awakening for myself as ONE SON in the sonship. Jesus has already proven this. We are not holding him back. If other people were part of his mind "lagging behind" he would not have been able to wake up because we would be holding him in hell "against his will."

No-one has the power to stop you from returning to God. No-one has the power to choose for you. No-one has the power to force you to be awake. No-one has the power to force you to heal. No-one has the power to make you be "not sick" if you want to be sick, and all sickness is the choice of THE INDIVIDUAL FREE WILL to select sickness for themselves. Each individual Son with free will DOES select and create THEIR OWN BODY. Bodies are not created en-masse like some kind of production line by a single "son" - EACH SON materializes their own body and they are responsible for it.

Other people’s sickness is NOT in my mind. The only thing in my mind is my additional layer of projected sin that I ADD to their pre-existing condition. Taking that projected sin OFF of them, which wasn’t even ON them to begin with because ideas do not leave my own mind, WILL NOT heal them. All it will do is it will allow me to PERCEIVE CORRECTLY and clearly, recognizing that THEY STILL are insisting, by their own free will, that THEY want to make themselves suffer. They also have to be willing, idependantly, to want to receive help and healing, otherwise there is nothing we can do. This is why every part of the sonship has to become WILLING to return to sanity on their own.

The idea that there is only one son, or no son, or the son is god, or there are not multiple sons, or no-one has free will, or there is only one free will, or the entire content of my perception includes all other people’s un-freely-chosen suffering, or that other people’s sickness is my sickness, or that other people are inside my mind, or that I cannot perceive other people’s free will choices (even the choice to be sick or dead), is ALL BULLSHIT.... derived from a basic fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge that God gave FREE WILL to every single Son/Soul he created, and He created multiple equal sons each of them ABSOLUTELY FREE to choose on their own, AND therefore each is 100% responsible for their own self, mind, choices, consequences, suffering, death, or choice to accept atonement.

Without free will it is impossible to properly explain the functioning of perception or the choice to be sick or how the mind works or what the course means on wide variety of topics. And without acceptance of multiple free wills, everything will just get lumped together into one big soupy MUSH ... which is the equivalent of putting the sonship in a blender.

YOU have free will. YOU are responsible for what you create. YOU are responsible for what you choose. YOU are responsible for what happens to you. YOU are responsible for accepting the atonement for YOURSELF. YOU are responsible for making yourself sick or well. YOU are responsible for extending God’s will or choosing to oppose it. YOU, one of many sons of God with free will, are NOT responsible for the FREE WILL CHOICES of other free-willing Sons of God. And their free will choices have nothing to do with you, nor can they do anything TO you, nor can you do anything TO them against their will.

You are NOT responsible for other people being sick. You are NOT responsible for other people choosing fear. You are NOT responsible for other people staying asleep when you wake up. You are NOT responsible for making others sick or well. You are NOT responsible for putting suffering into the world as though it is part of your own mind, when in fact it put there either by other people’s free will or as a collective decision. You are NOT responsible for fixing other people’s freely chosen suffering. You are NOT responsible for anyone else in any way, OTHER THAN.... to offer a SERVICE to them, by offering them miracles, and becoming open to SHARING WITH THEM.

Since you have free you can give miracles because you temporarily have more, and can give miracles to those who temporarily have less, to fulfill a lack - a lack which another brother HAS, but you DO NOT have. Their lack is NOT your lack. Their lack is NOT part of your mind. God created many sons, many free wills, and MANY MINDS. You must forgive and awaken IN SPITE OF the free will choices of others.

Here are some more statements about our free will which clearly tell us that we have free will as given by God:

"But I trust in You. You Who endowed me with my freedom as Your holy Son will not be lost to me. Your Voice directs me. And the way to You is opening and clear to me at last. Father, my freedom is in You alone. Father, it is my will that I return."

"How wonderful it is to do your will! For that IS freedom. There is nothing else that ever should be called by freedom’s name. Unless you do your will, you are not free. And would God leave His Son without what he has chosen for himself? God but ensured that you would never lose your will, when He gave you His perfect Answer. Hear It now, that you may be reminded of His Love, and learn your will. God would not have His Son made prisoner to what he does not want. He JOINS with you in willing you be free. And to oppose Him is to make a choice against YOURSELF, and choose that YOU be bound."

"Think not He wills to bind you, Who has made you co-creator of the universe along with Him. He would but keep your will forever and forever limitless."

"The world awaits the freedom you will give, when you have recognized that YOU are free. But you will not forgive the world until you have forgiven Him Who gave your will to you. For it is BY your will the world is given freedom. Nor can you be free apart from Him Whose holy Will you share."

(Please note, when this part says you share God’s will, that DOES NOT mean that God takes over your freedom and you have no freedom to will. It means you AGREE with God’s will and extend His will which is the SAME as your will in its character or attitude. You have the same KIND of will that God has. God is free, and so are all of his children.)

When we try to make sense of things, we use logical reasoning. You do this all the time even if you don't realize it. You take what you "know is true" and build a conclusion from it.

Everyone tries to make sense of things. Whatever seems to make sense, you accept as true. When something doesn't make sense, you feel confused or regard it as false. This actually means you are HEAVILY dependent on whatever the logical process produces as a result, and usually don't question the process itself.

Everyone has a sense of what is true and what is false. What is true for you is the result of your reasoning. Your reasoning might be very accurate, or it could be very confused, but either way you end up with a conclusion.

The main way that people reason is based on a simple SEPARATION BASED method. It's based in separation because it defines whether or not something IS OR IS NOT something. A similar way we do this is trying to determine that something is EITHER THIS OR THAT. But with the clause that "it cannot be both". ie ... it's a model of NOT BOTH. SO it is "exclusive" and AGAINST equality.

Because the physical world itself, spacetime, is built from the separation idea, physical objects appear to be "separate" from each other. And being NOT equal, they are all DIFFERENT. This arrangement of "separate and different" objects lends itself very well to this kind of "either/or" reasoning.

So you can use this logic to say, my car is either in the garage or parked up front. Or, I will have the ham sandwich not the turkey sandwich. Or, my body is male not female. Or, this is my house not yours.

This kind of thinking maps exactly and very well to the arrangement of the physical world, because the physical world was MADE in an idea of separation. It has separation infused into it. And so Object A and Object B seem to be separate options. Either A, or B.

What this world, and this kind of reasoning, is EXTREMELY poor at, is dealing with matters of SHARING. It has no way to deal with the notion that something applies to BOTH, or to A AND B at the same time. It works very well when things are kept in separate boxes, sectioned off. But it has no way to deal with the idea that something is in two places at once, or that the truth applies equally to two things, or that two things are also one thing.

So in this world we can't usually say, I am sitting in my car AND I'm sitting in my house. Or that I am a human and a fish. Or that both me and my wife each get 100% of the pizza. These kind of ideas seem like nonsense or "not possible". We'd say, they are false.

The thing is, while THIS world is based on separation logic, as a THOUGHT SYSTEM founded on the idea of things being completely separate, God's reality is TOTALLY UNLIKE this.

God doesn't think in terms of separation. He doesn't think in terms of separate boxes. He also doesn't think in terms of EITHER THIS OR THAT. He doesn't draw contrasts between things in this way. He isn't exclusive or special or isolated or one-sided or treating one thing differently than another.

Also, given that God is whole and perfect, when God creates, God creates wholly and perfectly. This means that whatever God creates, has properties which are fully inherited from Himself and his nature. Like father like Son. But this means that, what is true of the father is true of the son. It means they are BOTH something. e.g. they are both holy, both innocent, both have everything, both are creators, etc. In fact this goes to such as an extent as to say they are ONE, and yet they are two, because they BOTH exist even though they share everything.

"This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND."

Similarly the Golden Rule, which is God's law, which is based on the idea that what is true of one thing is true of another and all things are treated equally, DEPENDS ON the idea that what is true of me is true of me AND YOU. That BOTH of us get to have everything.

That ME AND YOU are exactly alike. That what is true of me, is true of you, and vice versa. This is perfect equality. And it even goes so far as to mean that there is no compromise, lack, scarcity, or competition, because everyone has FULL access to everything simultaneously. This is true sharing.

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did.""Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

However, this kind of equality, with a single truth applying to all things, where the truth is SHARED, and where BOTH elements are "as one", cannot be handled by the either/or logical process. In truth, for example, any thought of God contains all the thoughts of God. Any son of God is all the sons of God. This DOES NOT COMPUTE to the separation-based reasoning.

The ego, using separation thinking, would say, a son of God HAS TO BE EITHER, here, or there. He has to be in this box, or that box. He cannot be in both. God would say, that is totally untrue, that one son of God shares all of himself with another son of God, and BOTH of them are in BOTH boxes at the same time. That you are LITERALLY IN your brother, one with Him, as though he is part of you. This is absolutely sensible, rational, logical, and perfectly impeccable based on HOW GOD THINKS.

What you'll find is that, anything to do with God, his creation, his mind, heaven, reality, the sonship, sons/souls, holy spirit etc, absolutely anything that existed before the separation and without ego. .. is governed NOT by laws of "either this or that", but by laws of "both and". Laws of equality. Laws of identicality. Laws of oneness, which TRANSCEND BOUDARIES.

Therefore, whenever you think of any of these TOPICS, and you start trying to draw conclusions about these topics, IF you use either/or separation based logic to do so, you WILL come to COMPLETELY FALSE conclusions, but these conclusions will seem to make sense. They seem to have consistency, but they are based on a false premise (separation), and so are not sound or valid.

For example, God has created a sonship which comprises many sons. But it is also true that each of these sons IS the other sons. For example "one brother is all brothers. one mind is all minds". A son isn't just a "separate son", it's a son who IS ALSO the other sons. And there are many sons who are each other as well. And this is not in any way a contradiction nor is it anything to do with separation in the ego sense.

But if you use EITHER/OR based reasoning, and you look at heaven, you'll tell yourself, EITHER .... a) God has one son or b) God has many sons. And you'll tell yourself that it would not MAKE SENSE unless it were ONE OR THE OTHER. That the answer must be "not both". But "not both" is a TOTAL DENIAL of the fact that everything in heaven IS BOTH. It's a system founded on "both", on "and", on "sharing and inclusion."

The ego's way of thinking is EXCLUSION BASED. One object is excluded from another object. One boxes content is exclusive to that box and not the other box. This is how 99% of the world population thinks about EVERYTHING.

God's way of thinking is INCLUSION BASED. One object is also in another object. One object is in multiple locations. One object IS the other object. Two boxes contain one object. This is INCLUSIVE reasoning. This is how God thinks, and how his entire thought system functions. Because God is not BOUND by the LIMITATIONS of separation or a separation based system. God DEFIES separation.

So when you think "exclusively" about God's reality and creation, you are MAKING AN ERROR. Because you are using a logic system NOT designed to accommodate a system that overflows boundaries. So you are trying to FORCE boundaries onto that system, are trying to FORCE things into separate boxes that they are not restricted to, and are attempting to PROJECT SEPARATION onto heaven.

It is quite funny but almost everyone does this with regards to course topics. In other words, using an ego-based logic process to think about NON-ego topics, IN an ego way. The result is FALSE conclusions, which masquerade as "making total sense." But in truth, what makes sense to the ego, is totally nonsense, and what makes sense to God, is totally nonsense to the ego. Because the ego is insane.

That means that separation-based reasoning IS INSANITY. And trying to shove God's creations into finite boxes IS ISANITY. And trying to claim that God HAS to have only one son in one box IS INSANITY. And claiming that God can't have ONE son AND many sons AT THE SAME TIME, which is "perfectly legal" in God's system, is INSANITY.

The problem isn't so much that people are drawing false conclusions, it's more that people DO NOT realize that they are USING an ego-affirming thought process to FILTER and JUDGE a NON-egoic system. And so they SEE separations where they don't exist, AND they OVERLOOK separations where they DO exist as well. Such as here:

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless ***created separate beings who have everything individually***, but who want to share it to increase their joy."

It would seem "logical" to most to say God EITHER has to have one son OR many sons, and it can't be both. And it seems logical to say that IF God only has one son HE CANNOT have many sons. And it seems logical to say that therefore those sons must be part of "separation" because "the absence of separations" is more spiritual. BUT ALL OF THIS IS A FALSE CONCLUSION, projected onto a divine system of logic, BY a BACKWARDS system of logic based on separation and exclusion.

We just don't realize that we do this. We do this all the time. Like literally EVERY conversation in this forum about the course uses separation-based reasoning. We think that reasoning in terms of either/or is totally normal, natural, and the ONLY way to think. It is TOTALLY not how God thinks and it is actually extremely unnatural. It is what leads to false perception in fact.

If your whole mindset and thought process is always proceeding along the lines of "this or that" "either or" ..... you are literally enforcing separation. You are being EXCLUSIVE, which means you are EXCLUDING others. And this is precisely what separation means - exclusion from the whole, exclusion from relationship, exclusion from communication and sharing.

If you THINK this way, about everything, all the time, you are thinking WITH the ego, even if you think you are being spiritual or thinking about spirit. This forces you into BODY identification because the body symbolizes a SEPARATE BOX, kept apart and exclusive from the other boxes. Exclusive reasoning anchors you into space and time and bodies. It is a thought system of death and isolation. This is NOT how God thinks and it is NOT how his thought system operates.

And anyone wanting to do the course will need to learn to grasp paralogical reasoning. Otherwise you can't possibly comprehend how your brother is yourself, or how you can have a holy relationship, or how you can be one with something without losing your identity.

Oneness with others is an INCLUSIVE idea, not an idea of exclusion, and you can't USE exclusive thinking to understand it. But you CAN use inclusive logic, which is holographic as well. Because God thinks holographically not linearly. We have to INCLUDE if we want to awaken, not shove God's creation into prison cells with only room for "one".

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is perfectly natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you. "

It is not JUST true that God has one Son. It IS true that God has one son. AND it is true that he has many sons. And his many sons are direct creations of his, while also the one son encapsulates them all, without removing them from him even slightly as a direct parent. To suggest God's SONSHIP - which is a collection of sons - is "an ego thing", is a COMPLETE LOGICAL FAILURE. To suggest that the presence of many sons is "separation", is a complete logical failure as well.

When there is BOTH AND ..... me AND you .... US as one ..... united and together as brothers forever..... THAT is reality. A system of total equality, sharing and simultaneous union. You exist, AND I exist. WE are one and many.

"We are the Kingdom, WE, the Sons of God."

Originally, the only existence was in Heaven. But in the separation, we opposed heaven and made an opposite state of mind. This state of mind then projected an opposite world, rooted in the idea of death (opposition to eternal life). This includes the Earth and the Sun.

"Earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way." "For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

What we actually did was, we went from total heaven, to total hell. We took it to the extreme. We wanted to be AS opposite to heaven as possible, opposing EVERY law and nature and property of reality. This threw us immediately into insanity, resulting in "false perception."

In making a world opposite to God's nature, we made space and time and matter and planets and bodies. All of these were made in the spirit of opposition and falseness, of attack and sin, of murder and death. The body was also made within false perception, LOCKED IN to false perception, such that we could only see what is false and project it out to make a world. The world was therefore made by us to symbolize total opposition to reality, and the crucifixion of God's son.

"The world is false perception. It is born of error"

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"These eyes made not to see will never see."

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son. And until you realize that God's Son CANNOT be crucified, this is the world you will see."

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely."

It's important to realize that in fact TWO things happened in the separation:

1) Your mind was in a false state, believing in the murderous opposition to God. It was insane, driven mad by guilt over the attack on God. It could not perceive accurately or truly, it could only be confused and lost and afraid and murderous. It was trying to destroy itself. It had lost touch with truth and reality, and was in darkness or 'evil'.

2) From this dark state of mind, we projected the world. This includes the making of the physical planet Earth and all its bodies and forms, as well as the environment around it. We made the physical world as an attack on God. Due to the insane state of mind we were in, we made it "in hate", with laws of death and punishment, and with the intent to destroy. This is why everything in it eventually dies.

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt."

"For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin." "The body is the idea of sin made flesh." "You made the body in attempting to deceive yourself."

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death."

Since we made the world in INSANITY, to oppose heaven's nature and to attack God's family, we really made it without seeing it clearly. We made it in a confused state of mind. We made it in blindness and in darkness and in unwillingness to see. We made it TO hide reality from ourselves, and so have not really looked upon its 'actual' nature. We haven't seen what we really made, we've only seen what it APPEARS to be while in a state of inner false perception.

What Jesus is saying in the course is that because this is all rooted in your mental state, and you can change your mind, you can also be restored to sanity. Your internal landscape can be healed so that it becomes able to recognize reality, recognize that an illusory world IS an illusion and not real, and that you can then return to having real vision. That you can open your eyes and actually take a good clear look at what you made, WITHOUT the negative dark evil baggage of false perception.

It's like, okay, you were in a bad mood one day, you lashed out and made some horrible sculpture, which seemed evil and twisted and wrong. And then your mood brightened, and you lightened up, and you remembered sanity, and then you looked upon the sculpture you made and saw it as if new - as if for the first time, without the past and without hate or sin or guilt or fear. And in that "new light", it does not appear to you the way it appeared in false perception.

Note that this does not mean the world's FORM necessarily changes at all. In fact, the same physical laws apply, the same decay and chaos and war and famine and murder and death and sickness still occur. And the body, which is part of that system, is always able to still "see" that as its reality. BUT, when you see it without the ego baggage of murderous destruction, you are "forgiving it".

Jesus refers to true perception as "accurate perception". That means you are becoming able to see correctly, or clearly, "what is there". ie, to take a look at the twisted, "strange world you made", but from a lighter mood. With a more loving attitude. One which doesn't project guilt and sin ONTO it. But one which also lets you "see it straight", without distortion and without confusion. And this lets you see the world you made in a "forgiving way".

This doesn't in any way really change the fact that the world STILL is a place of suffering and murder and death, or run by death's laws, or designed to attack. But you no longer are DECEIVED BY it, tempted by it, fall for its forms and appearances, or buy into its implications.

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see."

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal."

"Vision already holds a replacement for everything you think you see now. Loveliness can light your images, and so transform them that you will love them even though they were made of hate."

"The world is false perception. It is born of error, and it has not left its source. It will remain no longer than the thought which gave it birth is cherished. When the thought of separation has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be seen in quite another light; and one which leads to truth, where all the world must disappear, and all its errors vanish. Now its source has gone, and its effects are gone as well."

So what we're trying to do here is to, while being in a body, change the internal contents of our minds, so that we are no longer in the same state of mind we WERE in when we made the world as a projected attack, so that we STOP PROJECTING THAT. At first, the world is seen WITHOUT the hateful baggage, and then later the lack of ITS SOURCE within our minds, the undoing of the world WITHIN our mind, causes us to STOP PROJECTING IT AT ALL. And then the world disappears.

"These words are sacred, for they are the words God gave in answer to the world you made. By them it disappears, and all things seen within its misty clouds and vaporous illusions vanish as these words are spoken. For they come from God."

"You have been promised full release from the world you made. "

"The real world was given you by God, in loving exchange for the world YOU made, and which you SEE. But take it from the hand of Christ, and look upon it. ITS reality will make everything ELSE invisible, for beholding it is TOTAL perception."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"For time YOU made, and time you CAN command. You are no more a slave to time than to the world you made."

"For, if you think the world you made has power to make you what IT wills, you ARE confusing Son and Father; effect and Source."

"LOVE ALWAYS ANSWERS, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made, but do not want. The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

""The real world, in its loveliness, YOU learn to reach. Fantasies are all undone, no-one and nothing remains still bound by them, and, by YOUR OWN forgiveness, you are FREE TO SEE. And WHAT you see is only what YOU HAVE MADE, with the blessing of your forgiveness on it. And, with this final blessing of God's Son UPON HIMSELF, the REAL perception, born of the new perspective he has learned, has served its purpose.

The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function. Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that made perception possible, will occur. The perception of the real world will be so short, that you will barely have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world, and have been made ready for Him.

The real world is attained simply by the COMPLETE forgiveness of the old; the world you see WITHOUT forgiveness. The Great Transformer of perception will undertake WITH you the careful searching of the mind that MADE this world, and uncover TO YOU the SEEMING reasons for your making it. In the light of the REAL reason that He brings, as you follow Him, He will SHOW you that there is NO reason here at all. Each spot HIS reason touches, grows alive with beauty. *****And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness.***** Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release.

All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently ***across chaos*** (the chaos is still there), and removing all illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign (symbol) of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there, he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there in peace.

Even salvation will become a dream, and vanish from his mind. For salvation IS the end of dreams, and, with the closing of the dream, will have no meaning. Who, awake in Heaven, COULD dream that there could ever be NEED of salvation? How much do you WANT salvation? It will GIVE you the real world, trembling with readiness to BE given you. The eagerness of the Holy Spirit to give you this, is so intense He would not wait, although He waits in patience. MEET His patience with your IMpatience at delay in meeting Him. Go out in gladness to meet with your Redeemer, and walk with Him, in trust, ***out of this world***, and into the real world of beauty and forgiveness."

The great lie of the world is that we are all separate. Each of our bodies testifies to this. I have my own body, my own feelings, my own mind, my own thoughts, my own beliefs. It seems that you have your own as well, and mine is separate from yours. We don't seem to really share anything. And any changes I make seem not to affect you.

This is what bodies were designed to do. They were meant to be "separation devices", to separate me off from you, to isolate each of us in our own little prisons, keeping us apart. They were made to imply that nothing is shared, what is mine is not yours, I am not like you, we are not the same in any way, I am unique and so are you. We're cut off and different. What I have you lack. What you have I lack. And thus we have no oneness.

But this is utterly completely opposite to the nature of spirit and mind as God created it. It's utterly opposite to your true nature, and mine as well. We're not meant to think of ourselves as separate from each other, sharing nothing, not overlapping, or kept at arm's length. We have to transcend the limits of the body entirely.

The truth is that there is a part of you which is shared by me. And there is a part of me that is shared by you. Kind of like one thing which has two people controlling it simultaneously. Kind of like siamese twins, with two heads and one torso. There is actually some of you in me and vice versa. There are actually aspects of your self which is what I am, and aspects of my own self which is you.

In truth we are joined together as one. In truth we share everything. And this is not in any way the same thing as sharing between two separate people, where they remain separate but there is some kind of transfer between them to bridge the gap. It's a real sharing where I literally am overlapping with where you are located, and vice versa. Where we are literally fused together as one thing, but from two vantage points. One mind, with two focal points.

Because of this, we are actually part of a collective consciousness. And the really big thing is this. Everything that I do or think or feel or choose or believe, affects the entire universe. And everything you do or think or feel or choose or believe, affects the entire universe. If I lift myself up, it must lift you up in some way as well because I am a part of your self. If you lift yourself up, I must be lifted up in some way because part of me is you.

We are NOT isolated, alone, separate, cut-off, imprisoned, separated, orphaned, divorced, abandoned, relegated, split apart or confined. Everything that we each do, affects us both. And even affects the whole sonship beyond us. What that means is that there are no private thoughts. Not simply from the vantage point of there being two separate people who send thought transmissions across the gap between them which they pick up on, but where my mind and your mind are literally welded together such that when I think something YOU think it with me. Part of your thought process is taking place in my mind and vice versa.

Jesus teaches similarly that if I am healed, I am never healed alone. If some kind of healing takes place for me, it is also on behalf of the whole universe, which is the sonship (not spacetime). Jesus also tells us that we are not alone in experiencing the effects of our thoughts. That if I have a thought, both me and you are affected by it. And your thoughts affect me. Not in terms of you sending them over to me across a brick wall but in terms of part of me BEING you and vice versa, SHARING those effects as one, transcendentally of space of time.

Jesus is even telling us that vision transcends all spatial limitations, depends not on any thing physical, can see and experience without regard for distance or seeming remoteness. Simply because you can BE everywhere, in everyone. This is the true nature of mind, that it is not really naturally limited to any one location at a time. Or to any one person at a time.

What this also leads to is a matter of responsibility. Anything that I think affects the whole world. Anything you think affects the whole world. In that sense, and given that these thoughts are never private or isolated from anyone, everyone experiences the effects of our thoughts, and therefore I have to consider that I need to "think responsibly", and without guilt, because my thoughts are actually affecting everyone.

I think on behalf of everyone, just as you do, and just as everyone does. And all our minds are joined. Which means that we're sort of like this one tapestry where each of us seems anchored to the fabric of it in different places, but if I pull upwards I'm pulling you all with me. And if you pull down you're going to drag a lot of others down with you. Unless of course they are pulling up at the same time. This means that we really are all a TEAM. Because we have to now consider that EACH PART of the sonship INFLUENCES THE WHOLE.

You ARE part of a holographic system and since you are the whole of the sonship at the same time as being part of it, your relationship INCLUDES everyone. It affects everyone. Every thought is offered to everyone. Every healing brings peace to everyone. Maybe in ways they might not entirely be aware of but in some way on some level, everyone affects everyone.

This also brings me to the proper understanding of why joined minds produce the healing of sickness in others. A part of your mind is actually my mind. And my mind is part of your mind. We are NOT separated off with entirely isolated minds. Our minds overlap and are shared. I actually manipulate part of your mind, so to speak, and you manipulate part of mine. Our minds are actually one and shared. Mutual minds. Like two people driving the same bus.

So let's say you believe in your part of the mind that you are sick, which is really an attempt to believe the whole sonship is sick. And then let's say that normally this belief would attempt to weaken me and others. But then let's say that I'm in a particularly loving space in my mind which is more powerful than your assertion of weakness.

If I choose to believe that there is nothing wrong with you, while you are believing there is something wrong with you, I override your belief. The part of your mind which is shared with me, which is my mind, changes your belief FOR you. Part of your mind is in me. If I change my mind, I am literally changing a part of your mind. And that actually influences what you might think of as the rest of your own mind.

As Jesus says, when you do not believe the falsehoods that your brother believes about himself, you weaken his own belief in being faulty. And so you weaken his sickness. If your mind, which is part of his, and his as part of yours, asserts strongly that your brother and you are not sick, then you are actually taking a part of HIS mind (as yours) and are causing it to not believe in sickness. And so he cannot get "his" mind to project sickness onto his body because YOU, as part of his mind, are not allowing it.

This is why Jesus says that you are your brother's keeper. This is why he says you should not allow your brother to be sick. This is why you are in a sense responsible for everyone, because your contribution to their experience is part of the fact that your minds are shared.

It's not simply that you are joining minds, because God actually joined all minds together in the creation. But moving away from the belief in being separate/isolated and returning to an awareness that your minds ARE joined, naturally, lets you tap into the ability to influence the minds of others more consciously. And naturally this openness to sharing is rooted in love, so can only be used for good.

So instead of seeing ourselves as separate people, living separate lives in separate bodies, as if everything we think and do is utterly isolated and affects no-one else, we need to really think of ourselves as part of a combined mind-mesh, part of a team, part of a collective hive mind, and there isn't anything we can think without it being shared by everyone in that collective. And any effects which those thoughts might produce are going to be shared by everyone.

This is also of course the foundation for shared interests. Because if mind is really yours AND your brother's, then what you use it for is being used on his behalf as well as your own. As per the golden rule, whatever applies to him applies to you equally. This is also why Jesus says that forgiveness is not real unless it brings a healing to both your brother and yourself. Your healing IS HIS healing. When you heal, HE ALSO is healed along with you in a very direct way - because he is part of your self.

And further, this also tells us that forgiveness is not just a gift of healing you give to yourself, it is also something that extends and is given to everyone. If you are healed you become an instrument of healing. If you are the light you shed light into other's minds and enlighten them. If you are filled with the Holy Spirit you can fill others with the Holy Spirit. If you are whole you can make others whole. And atonement is a lesson in sharing, not a lesson in isolated enlightenment.

When you forgive, you actually do heal both yourself and the mind of your brother. When you forgive and undo your belief in someone being sick, you do actually in fact undo some of their belief in being sick. This is sort of tied into the idea of "holding them in the light", not through some wishful thinking that the light might rub off on them but much moreso the fact that since you ARE them, you being the light "forces" them to be the light also.

Your mind influences other people! Your mind is not JUST your mind. It is yours AND it belongs to others. You are thinking on behalf of everyone. Your whole resurrection is for the benefit of the entire sonship. This is why Jesus's resurrection reconnected the ENTIRE sonship to God, and why in his awakening YOU woke up in some way to some degree as well. How could the whole world not be affected by such an event? Jesus did in fact "save you" from the belief in sin, through his own atonement.

I am you and you are me and we are one and everyone is us and we are all the collective sonship family of God. If I choose the light, you're coming with me.

"And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch, or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you. Perhaps you will not recognize them all, nor realize how great your offering to all the world, when you let healing come to you. But you are never healed alone. And legions upon legions will receive the gift which you receive when you are healed."

"Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him. A miracle can offer nothing LESS to him than it has given unto you. So does your healing show your mind is healed, and has forgiven what he did NOT do. And so is HE convinced his innocence was never lost, and healed along with you."

"Attest his innocence and NOT his guilt. YOUR healing is his comfort and HIS health. "

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself."

"Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him Judge what the response should be. So is he healed, and in his healing is his pupil healed with him. The sole responsibility of God's teacher is to accept the Atonement for himself. Atonement means correction, or the undoing of errors. When this has been accomplished, the teacher of God becomes a miracle worker by definition."

"Healing is an act of thought by which two minds perceive their oneness, and become glad. This gladness calls to every part of the Sonship to rejoice with them, and let God Himself go out into them and through them."

"Two minds with one intent become so strong that what they will becomes the Will of God. For minds can only join in truth."

"When two minds join as one, and share one idea equally, the first link in the awareness of the Sonship as one has been made."

"Whoever says, "There IS no gap between my mind and yours," has kept GOD's promise, NOT his tiny oath to be forever faithful unto death. And by his healing IS his brother healed. Let THIS be your agreement with each one; that you be one with him and NOT apart."

"Do not accept your brother's variable perception of himself, for his split mind is yours, and you will not accept YOUR healing without his. For you share the real world as you share Heaven, and his healing IS yours. To love yourself is to HEAL yourself, and you cannot perceive part of you as sick and achieve your OWN goal. Brother, we heal together as we live together, and love together."

"Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN. To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

"You will forsake yourselves and your God if you forsake any of YOUR brothers. You are more than your brother's keeper." "Concern yourselves not with the EXTENSION of holiness, for the nature of miracles you do NOT understand. Nor do you DO them. It is their extension, far beyond the limits you perceive, that demonstrates you did NOT do them. Why should you worry how the miracle extends to all the Sonship, when you do not understand the miracle itself?"

Lesson 54: ""I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts." ... I am alone in nothing. Everything I think or say or do touches all the universe. A Son of God cannot think or speak or act in vain. He cannot be alone in anything. It is therefore in my power to change every mind along with mine, for mine is the power of God."

God and his Kingdom of Heaven are the truth. God's laws are the only laws. Anything which is true is true of God and his creation. There is no other truth because God's truth is absolute and all-encompassing.

In the "separation from God", we tried to make an opposite to this. We wanted to oppose the truth. The opposite of what is true, is clearly what is false. It must be false if it does not share any of the properties of what is true, and claims the exact opposite.

And so we actually made up a world, a fiction or fantasy world, which depicts things AS IF they are true, but which are inherently false. Since what is true is also what is real, and alive, the world that we tried to invent is both unreal and unalive.

It is also true that God and his truth are the only meaning. God is fully meaningful because he is fully truthful. That means he is honest, and accepts only the truth as true. He does not confuse what is true with what is false.

This also means that the world we made is meaningless, because we wanted to oppose meaningfulness. And so we made a meaningless, unreal, false, untrue, artificial world. A world which isn't really what it seems to be.

Another word for what is false, is a lie. Or we can also call it a deception. All illusory unreal things deceive because they cannot be true, but attempt to assert that they are. This effort to be something they are not, is what we call temptation. It is the temptation to believe that what is false is true, what is unreal is real, and what is impossible is possible.

This is why the world depicts a great many things which seem like they are possible, are happening, are true, are real, as if the world is even alive and existing. This cannot BE true, because the world opposes all of these things. It opposes possibility, truth, reality, and existence.

What this basically boils down to is that the world is a fiction and everything in it is impossible. It is a lie. A huge gigantic universe-sized lie. Absolutely everything in it is not true. Not one single thing that seems to be happening is happening. Not one single thing that seems possible is possible. Not one thing which seems to prove evidence that it HAS happened, has happened at all.

So now you have a world which is fundamentally a mistake. We were mistaken when we made it, because we believed the impossible was possible - in the tiny mad idea. We made it "by mistake" in the sense that we thought it could be achievable, even though it wasn't. And so all we really did was wish and dream for a world that cannot ever exist.

Ultimately then, heaven is in a state of perfection, reality and truth, wherein everything there is happening and does exist and is alive. Everything there is completely natural and permanent. There is nothing wrong with it, nothing ever goes wrong with it, and it cannot be affected or attacked by anything.

In that truth, which is the only truth, everyone is permanently safe. No one is ever really sick. No one ever dies. There is no suffering of any kind. No-one has any real unhappiness. There is no attack or war or grounds for murder. Everything is permanently perfect and everyone knows it.

So then what we have in front of our physical false faces, is a depiction of a lie, an idea of something utterly impossible, which isn't really there and isn't really happening. All the things you see in the news. All the wars and conflicts, arguments and attacks, people with sicknesses and pain, murder and deaths, and all the claims of "the proof of sin" that say "it really has happened" are entirely lies.

So yes that means that even if there seems to be a dead body laying on the ground PROVING that a murder did happen, and there is police evidence, this is STILL not true. There is not really a dead body anywhere, or even a ground. And so the world is riddled with what we call the "proof" that sin is happening all the time. The seemingly undeniable in-your-face look-at-it-and-don't-deny-it lies which are held up as victory over God and over reality.

NONE OF THIS IS REAL. IT IS ALL A LIE.

The weird thing then is that we have a reality of the Kingdom of God which is perfectly happy and joyous and filled with love and peace and celebration, in which everyone is utterly perfect and harmonious. And then we have "over there" this "picture of crucifixion" which depicts all manner of horrible nightmares and upsetting events transpiring. And only one of these can be true.

Either God's reality is true and there is no nightmare of any kind, or the world is real. Either there are only God's permanent laws, or the laws of physics are true. Either we are immortal unlimited beings or death is real. Either sickness is utterly impossible or sickness is completely happening all over the place.

This is the choice we are making all the time, between heaven or hell. It is the only choice there is. Are we going to be CONVINCED by this LIE OF A WORLD, or are we going to be convinced of the truth of heaven's reality? Is God correct, or is the ego? Is eternal life the only possibility, or is mortality and suffering and death the ultimate truth? You have to pick a side because they can't both be true.

If the world is indeed a lie, then NOTHING IN IT IS TRUE. And learning this fact and accepting it is the recognition of enlightenment. It means being faced with an illusion and SEEING THROUGH it. "To forgive is to overlook." And the world that you forgive has to disappear. "Illusions recognized must disappear." "A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies, but forgiveness looks past bodies."

Heaven asserts, nothing has ever gone wrong, and everything is still perfect. Everything real is still perfectly immortal and unharmed and undefiled and there is absolutely nothing to be upset about. The Earth asserts, everything has gone wrong, it's all falling apart and going to hell, everything dies and there is no escape. Which are you going to listen to? The ego represents the shrieking voice of hell and evil, while the Holy Spirit represents the Voice that speaks For God - in favor of God.

Only one truth can be true. Are you going to trust, have faith in, believe, side with, and adopt God's truth as the only truth, or are you going to allow a completely fictional false world to masquerade as reality?

All miracle workers must recognize the world IS FALSE, and everything in it IS UNREAL. That sick bodies are faking it. That dead bodies are not really dead. That there is nothing they cannot do because they rest on the unlimited laws of God. They dispel and disbelieve any claims by anyone that there is anything wrong with them, disregard all symptoms as lies, and refuse to acknowlege the lie that death can happen. And through this strength of conviction their miracles come forth and resurrect the sleeping and the dead.

"The world is false perception. It is born of error, and it has not left its source."

"You looked upon the unreal and found despair. But by SEEKING the unreal, what else COULD you find? The UNreal world IS a thing of despair, for it can never be."

"But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change." "This is the great deception of the world, and you the great deceiver of yourself."

"Judging truth as something they do NOT want, they perceive deception and block knowledge."

"But to give illusions to Truth is to enable truth to teach that the ILLUSIONS are unreal, and thus enable you to ESCAPE from them."

"to overlook the truth in an unfounded effort to deceive yourself by making an illusion true."

"Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus KEEPING it unreal for you."

"Fear is deception. It attests that you have seen yourself as you could never be, and therefore look upon a world which is impossible."

"the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal."

"We try to hide from Him, and suffer from deception."

"Except for God's teachers there would be no hope of salvation, for the world of sin would be forever real. The self-deceiving must deceive, for they must teach deception. And what else is hell?"

"Pain is a wrong perspective. When it is experienced in any form, it is a proof of self-deception. It is not a fact at all. There is no form it takes which will not disappear if seen aright. For pain proclaims God cruel. How could it be real in any form?"

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal?" "Let not the dream take hold to close your eyes. It is not strange that dreams can make a world that is unreal. The WISH to make it IS incredible."

"Each thing you look upon you saw but for an instant, long ago, before its unreality gave way to truth."

"Let not the world deceive you. It was made to be deception. Yet its snares can be so easily escaped a little child can walk through safely, and without a care that would arrest its progress."

"this strange world you made, but do not want. The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

"Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self deception. And like all the rest its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole. The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself."

"The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without meaning of ANY kind. For it was made out of what you do NOT want, projected FROM your mind, because you were AFRAID of it."

"The real world was given you by God, in loving exchange for the world YOU made, and which you SEE."

"Leave ALL deception behind, and reach beyond all attempts of the ego to hold you back."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"You are no more a slave to time than to the world you made."

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

"It IS essential it be understood what they are FOR, because it is their PURPOSE to make meaningless, and to ATTACK the truth. Here are the laws that rule the world you made. And yet they govern nothing, and need NOT be broken; merely looked upon and gone beyond."

"If the center of the thought system is TRUE, only truth extends outward from it. But if a lie is at its center, only DECEPTION proceeds from it."

"The mind can make the belief in Separation VERY real and VERY fearful. And this belief IS the devil. It is powerful, active, destructive, and clearly in opposition to God, because it literally denies His Fatherhood. Never underestimate the power of this denial. Look at your lives and see what the devil has made. But KNOW that this making will surely dissolve in the light of truth, because its foundation IS a lie."

"Side with me CONSISTENTLY against this deception, as we have sided against it briefly already."

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

"Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done TO you. Acknowledge but that YOU have been mistaken, and ALL effects of your mistakes will disappear."

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within YOU, there is a force which NO illusions can resist."

"The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given." "You have need to use the symbols of the world a while. But be you not deceived by them as well."

"Now it becomes your task to let the illusion be carried to the truth. Be steadfast but in this; be not deceived by the "reality" of any changing form."

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see."

"For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take." "Fail not in your function of loving in a loveless place, made out of darkness and deceit, for thus are darkness and deception UNdone."

"Leave it behind. Do not listen to it, and do not preserve it. Listen only to God, who is as incapable of deception as are the Souls he created. As teachers and therapists, release yourselves and release others. Do not present a false and unworthy picture of yourselves TO others, or accept such a picture OF them yourselves."

"Illusions serve the purpose they were MADE to serve. And FROM their purpose, they derive whatever meaning that they seem to have. God gave to ALL illusions that were made ANOTHER purpose that would justify a miracle, WHATEVER form they took. In every miracle ALL healing lies, for God gave Answer to them all as one. And what is one to Him must BE the same. If you believe what is the same is different, you but deceive yourself. What God calls one will be forever one, NOT separate. His Kingdom IS united; thus it was created, and thus will it ever be."

"Be not deceived by what appears as many choices. There is hell or Heaven. And of these you choose but ONE."

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

The idea of separation is madness, because what it implies is impossible. It is not possible to be separate from God. But the mad idea was the idea that you CAN be separate from God, even though it is impossible.

To insist it is possible, must be madness, because to believe it you have to deny reality and truth and blind yourself to sanity and sense. This belief makes the mind insane, because it now believes impossible things are possible. This is why the separation from God was an entry into a state of mental illness, ie insanity.

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth."

"The instant that the mad idea of making your relationship with God unholy seemed to be possible, ALL relationships were made meaningless. In that unholy instant time was born, and bodies made to house the mad idea, and give it the ILLUSION of reality."

The mad idea gave rise to a mad world, based on insane notions and crazy laws, devoid of meaning and empty of truth. And into this insane world we projected our insane beliefs, producing a mad and false world to reflect our inner madness. And all who participate in it are mentally ill.

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."

What we've ended up with then is a fictional world which insane people believe exists. And it is populated with people who have insane beliefs about who and what they are. They do not know themselves, are out of touch with their own reality, and think they are something they're not. This especially is entwined with the belief that they are physical bodies, which their immortal souls could never be. And they see themselves as limited and lacking.

"Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where truth should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

Realize then that the world as we know it is populated by beings who originally were, and in truth still are, wholly immortal, perfect, innocent, loving, healthy, happy and completely invulnerable. Beings who God created to live forever in divine perfection, who lacked nothing and were capable of anything.

In the separation, these beings gave belief to impossible nonsense and thus moved their minds into insane states. This produced the anti-christ or otherwise known as the ego, which is an idea of what you THINK you are, as a kind of wishful thinking or denial of your true nature. Thus each person developed a SECOND self for themselves, which they identified with and as, and thought to be the whole of who they are.

"This is the anti-Christ; ... Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE."

So now you have a world seemingly populated by individual beings who strongly believe they are NOT as God created them. They've added an entire layer of lies on top of themselves, to cover themselves up. They've invented a second self to suit their preferences.

They have profound denial which means they actively resist admitting to the truth about themselves and each other, and instead participate in lies and fantasies about what they are. They want to be a body and they want to suffer and they want to die, and they think this is normal because they think the hell they created is heaven.

"He has come to save me from the evil self I made."

"They DO believe that Heaven is hell, and ARE afraid of love. "

"For your definition of Heaven IS hell and oblivion, and the REAL Heaven is the greatest threat you think you COULD experience."

This has thrown these individuals into states of mind that are distorted and unnatural. They are mentally ill. They believe they are something or someone they are not. They have associated with being a physical object. They think they came into existence with the body. They believe they are limited and lacking and insufficient and defective and broken and sinful and guilty and in need of fear. And they relate to others through specialness and selfishness and mistrust and victimhood.

"the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt."

On the level of the world then it always seems that you're interacting with a whole person, who is egoic, and who has major selfishness issues, and who relates in special ways, and strikes bargains, and wants to get, and sees themselves as limited and lacking and defective. And it seems this is ALL THERE IS to the person. As if they ACTUALLY ARE a limited dysfunctional individual.

You see this appearance as the whole truth about the person, and people seem to really be in states of "becoming", of "growing", of transformation, learning, progression, acquisition and so on. As if they have started out with nothing and are lacking and little and weak and frail. And so the whole world seems to be populated with egoic individuals who are all far less than magnificent and most of whom find themselves to be unworthy of love or life. Which drives them all to self-punishment and suicide.

"...the sense of loneliness and abandonment which all the separated ones experience. Depression is an inevitable consequence of separation. So are anxiety, worry, a deep sense of helplessness, misery, suffering, and intense fear of loss."

"the delusions of the Separated ones."

"All the separated ones have a basic fear of retaliation and abandonment. This is because they BELIEVE in attack and rejection, so this is what they perceive and teach and LEARN. "

It seems then that we're living in a world where people represent varying degrees of ability, accomplishment, skill, confidence, and a very wide range of personalities and potentials. And in all cases no-one is perfect and everyone is lacking in some way. And everyone is trying to improve themselves because they all think they were created broken. And now there is competition and everyone fights to be better than all the other defective ones, while the defective ones lick their wounds and want to die.

If you take this at face value, if you think this is normal and natural, then you'll think that the EGOS that you interact with ARE people. That their egotism is NOT a mental illness, but is in fact just some normal psychological structure. A personality trait perhaps. And that it's completely normal for people to hate themselves, to attack others, to be angry, to worship idols, to take from others, and to seek for exclusive relationships. As if this is what completely natural mentally-sane people do. So normal because it's so common.

What we have to realize is that this is NOT sanity. And these ego people, the way they present themselves, is NOT really their self. It's not their real identity. They in fact are pretending to be something they're not. They present themselves as fictional characters, with traits and behaviors that aren't even natural. With beliefs about themselves that are unfounded and false. In denial of their own self and repressive of their own freedom.

"If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick."

They don't even know who they really are. They don't know where they came from or how they got here. And they certainly don't even suspect that they even have a real self. And even think that maybe they don't exist at all, have no real creator, invented themselves, and maybe aren't even real.

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

What we're looking at, when we look at the world, is in fact a place where a very large number of mentally ill people are gathered together. And all of their mental illnesses are regarded as largely normal and natural, ie not an illness at all. We don't even recognize insanity when we see it. We think it's normal that people relate the way they do, think of themselves in such unnatural ways, and are completely lost and out of touch with their own reality. On a planet filled with suffering, how can you remember what it's like not to suffer?

If we don't suspect that there is a higher, larger truth about people, then it's going to make it seem like their ego self is REAL, that it is the WHOLE truth of them, and there is nothing more to it. And in that view you will relate to their EGO in terms of special relationship, and with no sense of forgiveness. Anything they do in insanity will be a sin, and you will justify holding it against them. Because you don't recognize they are mentally ill. And all their twisted behaviors are in fact part of their illness.

If you had only ever known someone in an ill condition, and had never known them when they were healthy, you would have great difficulty seeing past their illness. If you had only met them after they became dysfunctional, you'd have a hard time having any notion of what they are REALLY like when they're not sick. And if the whole planet is sick, how can you know what society is supposed to be like, when no-one can even remember a time when there was no suffering at all?

If we have no sense of the actual REALITY of each person, then this is what we're going to do. We're going to BUY INTO their illusions of who and what they are, fall for the same temptations, go into false empathy, join them in suffering, and compound their ego. This keeps them imprisoned and does not offer any kind of healing. And they need healing because they are not sane. Falling for this means YOU are insane, because you've failed to recognize that the illusion of sanity is not sanity, and so think that you are sane when you're not.

Everyone, when sane, is a loving, powerful, supernatural, immortal, eternal being of light, filled with joy and laughter and miracles. Such a person is invulnerable, cannot be sick, cannot die, cannot be upset, has no grievances, doesn't judge or blame anyone, is perfectly innocent and holy, knows God intimately, depends on God for everything, and has no authority problem. This is what EVERY person in the world was like when they were created. This is the kind of self they ARE behind their mental illness. And if their mental illness was cured, this is how they would be. A world of christs!

To not RECOGNIZE that people's egos are not their real self, is to fail to forgive. To forgive requires having in mind an awareness BEYOND THE LIES, of what the person's souls is really like, as created by God. The original self. The real self. The holy self. The higher self. That is their true self. And that self has no limitations or lacks or failures or malfunctions or depressions or sicknesses or lies about themselves or others.

So then we have to realize that we join with the Holy Spirit as therapists in the world, as healers, come to offer SANITY to those who are insane, and to lift them up and resurrect them to truth and light, so that they are restored to their true function and true abilities. To their real identity. To remember who they are, to know themselves and to live out from the love that God put in them.

"Now must you share His function, and forgive whom He has saved, whose sinlessness He sees, and whom He honors as the Son of God."

"your function in this world is healing"

"As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares HIS with you on earth."

The only way you can forgive someone is to know the real truth about them on a higher level. The bigger picture. Their true nature as established by God. And this truth has to STILL be true, even if it is covered up by their own mind, and obscure and hard to see. Even if they themselves don't know it's there, and even if they themselves deny that it's true of them. Because people are in fact out of touch with their own souls and don't even remember what their real identity is. It is our task to REMEMBER FOR THEM, so that they might remember also and wake up to their true nature.

"Remember for everyone your Father's power, that He has given them"

"He must HIMSELF withdraw that power, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP. Do not allow your brother not to remember, for his forgetfulness is YOURS. But YOUR remembering is HIS, for God cannot be remembered alone. THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN. To perceive the healing of your brother as the healing of yourself, is thus the way to remember God. For you forgot your brothers WITH Him, and God's answer to your forgetting is but the way to remember."

"Do not allow your brother to be sick, for if he is, have YOU abandoned him to his own dream, by SHARING it with him."

Since the ego is really a smokescreen of lies, it is not true of a person. Even if they are holding it up strongly in front of your face as an obstacle to peace. To forgive is to OVERLOOK it, and see BEYOND it, beyond their body, and beyond their false sense of identity. To recognize who they are in spirit, and to acknowledge the PERMANENT TRUTH about them. To hold them in the light and acknowledge that they ARE in the light.

This means in fact bypassing their illusory ego beliefs, their ego self, and realizing that on a higher level their mind is SANE. Only a small portion of their mind is insane and their soul is still perfect. By tapping into the higher self and truth of the person, you JOIN with them in love. This bypasses the ego and increases the wholeness within the mind, which in turn undoes the false ego identification - the sickness - the mental illness. Because "all sickness is mental illness." This is how miracles are performed.

Don't be deceived. People are not who they say they are. Everyone has an imposter in them. The Holy Spirit knows who we really are, and will awaken this truth in us if we will let him.

"Seek not to make the Son of God ADJUST to his insanity. There IS a stranger in him, who wandered carelessly into the home of Truth, and who will wander off. He came WITHOUT a purpose. But he will not remain before the shining light the Holy Spirit offered, and you accepted. For there the STRANGER is made homeless, and YOU are welcome. Ask not this transient stranger, "who am I?" He is the only thing in all the universe that does not know."

"Forgiveness is the only gift I give because it is the only gift I want, and everything I give I give myself. This is salvation s simple formula."

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"It can be but myself I crucify."

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF."

"You but accuse your brother of your own sins."

As I learn that any upset I feel is entirely self created and internal and nothing to do with anything else, I begin to experience a strangely unexpected disconnection between what seems to happen and how I react.

I can see that things happen externally, and perhaps they trigger internal reactions initially, but if I work on those reactions or realize they are just some old unhealed junk surfacing in my awareness, and I heal it, I am then restored to a more peaceful happy state even in spite of the fact that the external situation may still be the same.

And so this shows me that there are kind of two things running simultaneously. There's the external story, the world, showing pictures of things happening. And then there's this internal story or dialog, this inner reactive ego response, which runs alongside it. The ways that I am attacking myself, and then USING the world as a scapegoat.

As I practice ownership of my inner experience and see myself responsible for choosing and causing it, rather than making a false ego causal connection between "what I feel" and "what is happening outside", the two previously merged stories are peeling away from each other. Whereas before I thought that my upset goes hand in hand with a given situation, it is suddenly evidence that the two are not connected.

They no longer completely coincide and I now see myself sometimes moving outward to join with the external story but then flowing back inward again to pull away from it. If I identify with the "what's happening out there" story, I lose myself and react to it. But if I recall that I'm doing this all to myself internally, and ideas leave not their source, and any reaction in me I have chosen to reinvent myself, the whole sense of being "caused by" the world diminishes.

Where there used to be simply a total confusion and distraction and immersion and absorption into the hierarchy of illusions, all of the effects the ego dream would suggest I have, and its entire script for what I "should" be experiencing as a result, there is now an intermittent but increasingly wide divide between "what the dream is doing" and "what I am doing to myself."

If I am being triggered a lot by some situation that is ongoing, but then I recognize the triggered reaction is a re-emergence of a prior condition of self attack in my mind, my own accusation of myself as sinful, and I work on that and undo it, and it goes away, and the external situation just continues in its normal form but without triggering me, I see that there is a definite difference between me and "it".

It's as if, we don't just become body identified, we become world identified. We believe that *everything* external to the mind, which includes the body, has become the storage place and cause of all the stuff we are experiencing. We bind with it, just as we bind with the body in pain. We fail to separate out what is the dream and who is doing the dreaming. It's like an attempt to be one with the dream, to merge with it, and to fail to recognize it is not dreaming you.

If I think the world is dreaming me and causing me, I'm going to go out of my mind and connect my sense of who and what I am to whatever the world suggests I should be, based on that causality. If I let the dream dictate everything I experience, I am now in a constant victim role. As I continue to believe that I'm at the effect of the world, I cannot separate out what is happening within me versus what is really causing it. Because the world is not really the cause at all, and I'm doing this all to myself from within, to within.

I have to learn to recognize that whatever is going on inside me, whatever feelings or upsets or experiences or beliefs I'm having, not one single one of them is the result of the external dream world. There is not a single cause in the world with the power to do anything to me, as an invulnerable, immortal being. And that means learning to stop having this symbiotic merging of identity with the world, where I plug myself into the external illusion and allow it to trample all over me under the belief that it CAN and IS doing so.

I have to learn that nothing I experience is caused by anything but my innermost self. And if I am upset, I must address what I am doing to myself. And if someone *seems* to trigger me, I have to not accuse them of causing what comes up because they did not put it there, I did. And I would then thank them for bringing it to my attention. And so I must then recognize, if it weren't for me hurting myself, accusing myself, upsetting myself, I would NEVER be hurt, accused, or upset. An in fact as Jesus says, "you cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

It actually isn't really so much a matter of what the world has been doing TO ME. It's more in fact a matter of what I have been doing TO THE WORLD. I have been putting MY self-accused sins ONTO the world and have been attacking it and using it as a scapegoat to blame for causing the very things *I* have been doing to myself! The world has not been guilty at all, it's been innocent the whole time. And it's my own inner conflict that has been playing out projected and disassociated externally, to make it SEEM as if it's not part of me or in my mind or anything to do with me. I then get away with blaming the world for everything I do not like about myself.

MY task now is to step back, out of the drama I am causing, out of the rollercoaster of reactions and suffering that I'm producing based on what I've done to myself and tried to accuse others of, and constantly correct the "spilling over" of my inner wounds onto the world. Indeed I am to take off of the world all of the shite that I have been dumping onto it through my egoic projections of self attack.

All the guilt, sin, fear, unworthiness, shame, whatever.... if I address it as an internal scenario that I am doing to myself, NOT caused by anything or anyone else, and it is addressed honestly and correctly within my mind, then gradually I'm lifting off of the world all of this inner baggage that I was associating or attaching to it. And that means the world itself, the dream, is going to be recognized more as not really the cause of anything.

In this way, gradually the world becomes forgiven, in the sense that it is seen WITHOUT my inner content projections. As I stop seeing inner junk "out there", what was behind the junk - the illusory world onto which I projected more illusions - the illusory world is "revealed" more for simply what it is and not what I was making of it. Without my sins being projected, and without having any sins, I cannot see sin IN it.

The guilty meanings I was projecting onto it, the causality I was accusing it of, the sense of vulnerability and stress and suffering that I thought IT was responsible for causing but which I was doing to myself backwards, are no longer seen as "coming from" the world or from anyone else, but myself. It's all an inside job. And it's really me that needs the forgiveness, having accused myself of things that are untrue of my perfect divine holiness.

If I am wounded, by my self attack, I will project my wounds all over the place, bleeding out onto the world a blackness of self hatred. This will cloud my perception of the world and render it dark. As I heal the inner wounds, within, where the problem really is, in my mind, I can no longer have anything TO leak out onto the world. The world simply becomes automatically "forgiven", not because it did anything, but through simply being able to SEE what is there as the world, through self-forgiven eyes, rather than seeing THROUGH the old lens of sin and guilt.

As such, the world becomes uncovered, released, "saved" from me, from my projected self attack. And without a log in my own eye, I no longer HAVE sin in my mind TO attempt to displace onto external figures. And without this sin blocking my vision, I become more able to simply see the world for what it is, without all of the sin guilt and fear dumped onto it or filtering it. And without this angry dark content, perhaps the world is filled with light.

We're told that as we progress with this, the "real world" will become more visible to us. That is, the world we made, but without judgement, projection, disassociation, displacement, or all the other forms of disowned self attack masking it. Without this content, its forms seem less inherently meaningful. Without putting these dark meanings onto the world, the world IS meaningless. It is also neutral, and in a way pure, because it is nothing.

The world, in its "reality", or rather, seen "as is", is just a picture, without sin or guilt or fear or death projected onto it. It just stands like a thin veil before the face of Christ. It has no meaning of its own, because God only creates meaningful worlds and He did not create this. It is not dark. Or alive. Or dead. Or holy. Or sinful. In fact it can become more seemingly beautiful, as the inner beauty begins to look upon itself and shine outwards, illuminating the picture rather than attacking it. And as such the "real world", the forgiven world, begins to show up in awareness as a reflection of your OWN holiness projected onto a NEUTRAL canvas.

While the world in its physicality and form is "false perception", in which the forms are only focused on as part of seeing falsely and dwelling on separations, guilt and death, as perception rises toward the light within, looking first within and then looking outward, the forms are overlooked. They don't define anything quite so strongly as before. They don't separate off with harsh boundaries and walls. They become less solid, less heavy, less dark. They loom with less weight and seem to have less substance or meaning. As if they are not there, because they aren't, being just illusions.

The world becomes lighter, within, and seen without, as the dream seems to turn to a happier dream, where the unhappiness that was in you is no longer added to it. Where happiness returns to the mind and the world is seen as not containing any real sin or guilt - because the mind has none to project onto it. You can only look upon yourself. If you are love you see love in everything because the world is not real or evil. If you are guilty, you see guilt in everything and the world seems like hell. By forgiving yourself and restoring heaven to your mind, the world can be but a reflection of heaven to you.

The world without your guilt is the forgiven world, shining and sparkly and new. Still an illusion, yes. Still neutral and meaningless, yes. It is still nothing at all. But now the meaningfulness of love - God's will - is projected and seen within it, rather than darkness. This makes the world seem "lovable". Not because it is love or made of love, but because you can see only the love BEYOND it and can do nothing else. And God does love the world we made. This love, seen in it, is its only reality, and in the intensity of this love, all of the forms melt and disappear. Because the love is deeper than the forms and lives between the lines.

When eternity finally shines away the world, all its forms have vanished, everything has fused into oneness, love has erased death and the nothingness of the world of bodies ceases to exist. Without separation there are no forms. In light, there is no darkness. And in love there is no fear. All that remains beyond this disappearing world is heaven. Love looks upon itself. Christ looks upon Himself. And then God is known in completion.

"When you think you are projecting what you do NOT want, it is still because you DO want it. This leads directly to dissociation"

"The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world. YOU CAN DECIDE TO SEE IT RIGHT. What you made of it is NOT its reality, for its reality is only what you GAVE it. You cannot really give anything but love to anyone or anything, nor can you really receive anything else from them. If you think you have received anything else, it is because you have looked within, and thought you saw the power to give something else WITHIN YOURSELF. It was only this decision that determined what you found, for it was the decision of what you SOUGHT."

"You are afraid of me because you looked within, and are afraid of what you saw. But you could not have seen reality, for the reality of your mind is the loveliest of God's Creations. Coming only from God, its power and grandeur could only bring you peace, IF YOU REALLY LOOKED UPON IT. If you are afraid, it is because you saw something THAT IS NOT THERE. Yet in this same place you could have looked upon me and all your brothers, in the perfect safety of the Mind that created us. For we are there in the peace of the Father, Who wills to project His peace through YOU."

"When you have accepted your mission to PROJECT peace, you will FIND it. For by MAKING IT MANIFEST you will SEE it. Its holy witnesses will surround you, because you CALLED upon them, and they will come to you. I have heard your call, and I have answered it, but you will not look upon me, nor hear the answer which you sought. But that is only because you do not yet want ONLY that. Yet as I become more real to you, you will learn that you DO want only that. And you will see me as you look within, and we will look upon the world as God created it together. Through the eyes of Christ, ONLY the real world exists, and can BE seen."

"As you decide, so will you see. And all that you see but witnesses to your decision. When you look within and see me, it will be because you have decided to manifest truth. And as you manifest it, you will see it both without AND within, for you will see it without BECAUSE you saw it first within. Everything you behold without is a judgment of what you beheld within. If it is YOUR judgment, it will be wrong, for judgment is not your function. If it is the judgment of the Holy Spirit, it will be right, for judgment IS His function. You share His function only by judging as HE does, reserving no judgment at all unto yourselves. For you will judge AGAINST yourselves, but He will judge FOR you."

Remember, then, that whenever you look without and react unfavorably to what you see, you have judged yourself unworthy, and have condemned yourself to death. The death penalty is the ego's ultimate goal, for it fully believes that you are a criminal, as deserving of death as God knows you are deserving of life. The death penalty never leaves the ego's mind, for that is what it always reserves for you in the end. Wanting to kill you, as the final expression of its feeling for you, it lets you live but to await death. It will torment you while you live, but its hatred is not satisfied until you die. For your destruction is the one end toward which it works, and the only one with which it will be satisfied."

Everything that we consider to be a sin, is nothing more than being mistaken. Being mistaken means you are making an error in judgement. You've come to a false conclusion. It means you are incorrect. You have faulty reasoning. You are not recognizing what is true.

Sin is also the idea of insanity, and insanity really is nothing more than confusion about what is true and real. Believing that something is true which is not, is simply a state of being mistaken. You have simply made an error, and now you are confused.

While you are in the confusion, believing that your false truth is true, you ARE mistaken, but you do not recognize that you are mistaken. You believe that you have actually sinned, pulled off the impossible, and accomplished something that can never happen in reality.

To believe this IS, nevertheless, being very mistaken. Just as denial hides the truth from you. Just as framing all acts as sins is a failure to recognize they are JUST mistakes. God knows that his children as simply mistaken, and can never be sinners, and all they need is to recognize their error and accept the truth.

In fact let's put it this way. You should reframe EVERY sin, as nothing more than being mistaken. Every single thing which you consider sinful, evil, wrong, bad, negative, etc should be recognized for what it IS and not for what you think it is.

If someone is trying to attack another, they are simply mistaken. They are mistaken about who they are. They are mistaken in believing the other person is not one with them. They are mistaken for believing they are guilty, and they are mistaken in believing that projecting that guilt onto someone else is going to make it leave their mind. Even if they go through with this, they are still simply making a sequence of mistakes.

Even serious attack such as murder is a state of being mistaken. The person is obviously insane, which means they are confused and do not recognize what is true. They are very much mistaken about what the truth is. They believe that they are justified in the attack, when in fact they aren't, and so they are mistaken. They believe that the death of the other will allow them to gain something, which isn't true, and so they are mistaken. And by finding the other person to be deserving of death, is a totally mistaken notion, since no-one deserves death.

No matter how you look at it, if you look at the big picture and recognize what is true - the immortal innocence and perfection of all beings, it becomes very clear that we can simply be MISTAKEN, but we cannot sin. All evil acts are mistakes. All scapegoating is a mistake. All belief in your own unworthiness is a mistake. Every abuse, torture, rape, killing, destruction, is all to do with people being very mistaken. Even the causation of horrible events is a mis-creation, a mistaken choice in what to cause.

No one in their right mind is mistaken. Being sane means recognizing reality and knowing what is true. If you know what is really true, you are not mistaken about what is true. If you are in touch with reality, you are not mistaken about what is possible. No one in their right mind would even try to sin or attack anyone, because they recognize that they would have to be VERY mistaken to believe it could a) be accomplished and b) be justified.

If you feel guilty, you are simply incorrect about being guilty. You cannot be guilty in God's eyes, because He created you to be innocent forever. So your belief that you are guilty is an error. You are incorrect. You are confused about what is true. You might be insisting that you are RIGHT, but it's not going to make you HAPPY, because being right about something which is false is a state of the denial of happiness.

Forgiveness, in the purest sense, is nothing more than recognizing what is true. It's a state of NOT being mistaken. It's a state of recognition, sanity, and having the whole story. It lacks no information and is not deceived. It simply looks and notices that everything ego or evil is simply false, impossible, untrue, unreal, has no consequences, and does not prove anything. It also recognizes that to believe in such things as possible would be a mistake.

It's kind of like, a question of whether or not you have the facts. If you have all the facts, you are in touch with reality. You know what the whole picture is. But if some facts (information) are missing, you probably are going to start drawing some false conclusions. And now you are entering into illusions, into temptation and deception, because something now appears to be something it isn't.

So let's put it this way. Right now this instant, there is no sin anywhere. There is no evil anywhere. All there is, is a bunch of people who are, temporarily, very mistaken. That is all. They're not evil. They're not sinners. They're just confused. They are out of touch with who they are. They don't recognize their brothers. They believe things are true which aren't. They are just temporarily insane. And insanity is nothing but being mistaken.

Mistakes can always be corrected. They are just temporary errors that you are making. Kind of an "oops". You concluded something which was incorrect. You decided that something means something that it doesn't. You reasoned with faults and ended up confused. You are perhaps unwilling to accept the truth and are in denial of it, which is just a desire to stay mistaken, due to not recognizing that you are.

Those who are insane therefore don't recognize they are simply mistaken, and believe their beliefs are completely true. Those who are in denial do not recognize that they are in denial, they believe they are fully aware of everything and are accepting all of the truth. They aren't, and so they are mistaken. But they believe they are not mistaken.

This then ends up being the key to the turning point in the mind. It's a matter of having to have that "little willingness", to be open to the possibility, that what you believe MIGHT simply be a mistake that you've made. Not like having to admit to being in sin, or that you really are guilty, but just that you are somehow "technically" incorrect. This doesn't have to entail shame or guilt or other rebounds related to being "wrong". It's just a simple fact.

If, while you are in the midst of believing you are completely right, and are not mistaken, and are not recognizing why you are mistaken, you become at least a little willing to consider with some humility that you MIGHT not be "correct", then you start to open up to CORRECTION. You have to be able to get some larger truth into your mind. You need a miracle to shine in the mind and remind you of what is true. To correct your level confusion. Being CORRECT has nothing to do with being RIGHTEOUS.

Correction, which is provided by the Holy Spirit and the truth he represents, is simple the radiant fact of "the miracle", the truth, reflecting the truth of God. It acts as a light of sanity, correctness, accuracy, truth, recognition and reason. You need correction, having made ERRORS, so that you will become "corrected". When you are corrected, you are sane. When you are corrected, you are happy.

So really it all boils down to a simple matter of whether you are correct or whether you are mistaken. Sin never really enters into it, nor does guilt or fear. Those are all the seeming side effects of being mistaken, coupled with the rejection of correction. The rejection of forgiveness. Forgiveness is really just a matter of diffusing the drama of "sin guilt and punishment" and looking at the facts. Looking with sight, with reason, at what things ACTUALLY are. Recognizing that ALL you are right now is in a mistaken state, you've made an error somewhere along the lines, and now all you need is to correct it.

"CORRECTION of the error brings release."

"The term "right-mindedness" is properly used as the correction for wrong- mindedness, and applies to the state of mind which induces accurate perception."

ALL sin must be re-framed as nothing more than being mistaken. Every person you hate, is just mistaken. And you are just mistaken for hating them. Anyone who ever hurt you, was simply mistaken for hurting you, because they made an error. And any hurt you experienced was simply you being mistaken, believing you can be hurt at all, given you are immortal. So now you, and the other person, are just mutually mistaken. And that is all.

And what that tells you is that if someone's attack upon you was merely a consequence of them being MISTAKEN about yourself and themselves, they DID NOT REALLY MEAN IT. They were NOT in their right mind when they expressed this action, based on a mistaken state of mind. They did not realize what they were doing. They THOUGHT they were right and correct and true, but they were mistaken. They were CONFUSED. And they attacked you BY MISTAKE. Since what they did was out of a state of mind of being mistaken and in error, an error which they THEMSELVES did not even realize they were making, you cannot hold it against them.

To forgive someone, therefore, for sin or abuse or attack or harm of any kind, for any kind of upset or broken relating or outright onslaught, is merely to RECOGNIZE that they are NOT in their right mind, they ARE very mistaken. And if you buy into it, into the belief that they are TOTALLY sane in all their decisions and are acting against you ON PURPOSE knowing exactly what they are doing, deliberately, YOU are very mistaken as well. There's just got all these people making mistakes all over the place, NOT sinning, NOT being truly guilty.

The world is just a world of insanity. A mad world, within a mad idea. Even the tiny mad idea that you can do the impossible, was simply a mistaken conclusion. It was an effort to assert something that can NEVER be true. It was an attempt to claim that God can be attacked or opposed. That is not possible. Anyone who believes in that is SIMPLY MISTAKEN. And any belief in sin or separation or bodies or spacetime is SIMPLY a mistaken belief. These things are all false, untrue and impossible.

It utterly boils down to nothing more than a question of accuracy. Are you correct, or are you mistaken? Are you really in touch with what is true, or are you confused and mistaken? Are your beliefs lined up with God's will and truth, or have you invented some MISTAKEN truth which contracts the truth and is therefore mistaken? Do you recognize you are mistaken and are you willing to accept correction?

When Jesus says (biblically) "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do", this encapsulates the whole thing. If you were to recognize what people are doing, or what their state of mind is being driven by, you'd recognize they simply DO NOT KNOW what they are doing. They are MISTAKEN, in a mistaken state of mind, a state of insanity. They aren't even aware of what they're doing. They think they are doing something else. And if they do not love you they don't even recognize you.

By recognizing that all "sinful behavior" is simply by confused, temporarily mentally ill people acting out from states of mistakenness, not realizing what they are doing, not really knowing why they are doing it, how can you accuse them or hold it against them? All they're doing is making a mistake and being in error, doing something by mistake, believing it was something else, not REALLY intending to. No-one REALLY wants to hurt anyone. No one REALLY in a right-minded sane state WANTS to induce suffering.

Let's say that simply, when someone's mind goes into a state of confusion, they lose touch with reality. How they act or express themselves then is going to be coming from a kind of unconsciousness, a lack of awareness, not really knowing what they are doing. They are going to act in error. They BELIEVE they know what is true, but they don't. And everyone simply acts on what they believe is true. It's not possible to do otherwise. So now you've got people seeming to exhibit insane evil behavior, justifying it, but who are only acting WITHIN the confines of their thought system - within the confines of their truth.

When their truth is not true, when they are mistaken and confused, they are LOST. And when they are lost they are out of touch with themselves and with others. And all their actions now become ACCIDENTAL. They keep making mistakes. They keep justifying things based on mistakes. They keep being motivated by mistakes. Compelled by mistakes. Urged into certain reactions based on mistakes. Because they are not awake. And the whole time they don't even know they are doing this because their conscious mind is disconnected from reality and everything they do they believe is totally justified.

There is no sin. There is only a temporary error. And all errors can be corrected. And making a mistake does not call for PUNISHMENT of any kind. If someone is taking a math test and makes a mis-calculation and comes up with a confused result, which they think is accurate, and which they will defend, they hardly deserve to be punished, hit, abused, damaged or destroyed. Because those are not the things that the person NEEDS, and those things are NOT CORRECTION. It does not provide them with the CORRECT ANSWER in any way.

PUNISHMENT DOES NOT CORRECT MISTAKES. THOSE WHO PUNISH ARE MAKING MISTAKES.

In fact, punishment is itself a mistake. It's based on a false perception that the error was a SIN, and not just a mistake, and that a person can undo their temporary insanity by experiencing pain and suffering, to "motivate" them towards the truth. This is utterly ridiculous. All that punishment does is cover up the mistake, turn it into a sin, solidify it, lock it in, and add to the mental illness in the mind by adding more confusion-inducing pain and suffering. It does not work. All it does is lead to even more resentment and mistaken conclusions later.

If someone has made an error on their math test, what it really calls for is proper correction of the mistake. The person needs to be SHOWN, by example, what the CORRECT truth is, and why it is true. The MISTAKE needs to be identified and pointed out, not as a sin, but simply to bring awareness and recognition. Then the student recognizes WHY it was a mistake, because the true truth makes more sense, and automatically justifies alignment with it because it is OBVIOUS. The student than "takes on" the greater truth and receives it and is now corrected, such that in future they will not be mistaken again. They have become the truth. This is the true correction of errors without punishment ever entering into it.

A belief in sin calls for punishment and death. A belief that a mistake is NOT merely a harmless correctable mistake, is a belief that it deserves to be punished. Evaluating that all mistakes CAN'T be corrected, due to severity or consequences, is still a further mistake, which justifies punishment. Oops sorry, your mistake was TOO BIG, so it's overflowed into sin territory, so now we're going to attack you and take something from you so that you suffer, to "atone for it". Punishment then becomes atonement.

Yet even murder is JUST A MISTAKE, and through miracles all the consequences of that wrong decision can be undone by the holy spirit. "He will correct all the consequences of my wrong (mistaken) decision IF I will let Him."

Real atonement, the undoing of error, which is forgiving, and which always recognizing that we're all JUST mistaken, not sinners, is a gentle correction, a loving correction, a harmless correction, which merely makes you aware of what the truth really is and shines a light so that you can see. And then in that light the mistake is recognized for what it is, its underpinnings are exposed, the steps are retraced, and it is undone at its source. Now is the mind corrected and correct, accurate and truthful. And now forgiveness has brought a healing and life instead of death.

This is possibly the most threatening and mind-blowing teaching in A Course in Miracles. There is in fact NOT a world here! It's not even a matter of who made the world, it's the even higher truth that it DOES NOT EXIST. Earth is in fact NOTHING.

"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it"

"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere?"

Everything that happened in the separation from God, involves a belief in something existing which does not exist, something being true which is false, something being real which is unreal.

For example, we made a separate self which seems to have free will to do as it pleases. However, this self is in fact the DENIAL of self, which is why it results in death. But it APPEARS to be the presence of a self. This is why it's an illusion - it seems to be showing you something which is not there, as if it is. It's supposed freedom of will is in fact an imprisoned will, which is not free, but SEEMS free.

Take a look at the body. "The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist." The body SEEMS to picture "you", presenting an appearance and form, it seems to positively exist and move and do stuff. But, the body is NOT you, it is a replacement for you, and is only an image of what you THINK you are. What it SEEMS to be, is the opposite of what it actually is. The body is the ABSENCE OF YOU. And you do not look like your body. "What you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

It is the same thing with regards the difference between light and darkness. Darkness is not possible. Where there seems to be an absence of light, there must be an ILLUSION of darkness. If you believe the darkness is real, you are giving it false reality and are claiming it "is a something." But a shadow on a wall is not the PRESENCE of darkness, it is the absence of light. It appears to be a something, but is really the lack of a something.

It is also the same with regards to sin and error. Error or mistakes are just illusions of impossibilities, recognized as false. In their "true form" it is clear they cannot be true. But if you invest belief in them, are deceived and tempted by them, and buy into them, they turn into sin. And now it seems that they assert that something has REALLY happened, and something is REALLY possible, that isn't. So sin is really a lie, depicting stuff happening that CANNOT happen, as though it is really happening. It is deceptive.

The same applies to this world. This world is in fact NOTHING. But by believing in it and investing it with reality, it turns from an illusion of a something to an ACTUAL something. It seems to exist. It seems to host events and happenings. Things in it seem possible. But the world is impossible, and the things which happen are impossible, and sin is not real. The world was made to try to prove that sin and guilt are real.

"Their aim is to fulfill the purpose which the world was made to witness and make real. They see in its illusions but a solid base where truth exists, upheld apart from lies."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin."

So basically, we have a world that SEEMS to be here, which is made of sin, which testifies and proves that impossible things are possible, which hosts the idea of the death and murder of reality, and SEEMS to have real consequences. But it has none. And it does nothing. And it causes nothing. And it has no power. And it isn't really there at all.

"It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere."

"The world does nothing to him."

"There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

The really deep thing to realize is this. The world is in fact, the ABSENCE OF EXISTENCE. It is the antithesis of heaven. It is the LACK OF HEAVEN. It is a HOLE, which we call the spacetime bubble, in which are housed impossibilities and unrealities. It is an hallucinated world, because it seems to be there to see, but isn't. You are projecting it and making it up as you go along.

The idea that there is no world isn't simply that the world "exists" and it has to be "undone". It's really the RECOGNITION that the world you thought was here, does not exist. And this doesn't mean there's a better view of it. It means the WHOLE THING IS GONE. It has no reality at all. No presence. No life.

"There is no life outside of heaven."

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

"He does NOT realize that HE MAKES THIS WORLD, for there IS no world outside him."

Through unwillingness, we resisted God. We failed to create. We wanted not to shine. We tried to end eternal life. We wanted to stop reality. We opposed the Kingdom. We attacked will. We tried to deny our own existence. We blocked awareness. We tried to destroy. And ultimately this is all a matter of TRYING NOT TO EXIST.

In so doing, we seemed to make a world which SEEMS to exist, which is really actually the LACK OF A WORLD. It's like you took a part of heaven and DRAINED IT of all life. Held it back and prevented its extension. As though you could attack heaven and remove its presence. This world, which includes the Earth, is the ANTI-world. It is a mis-creation. It is empty and it is nothing.

We have GIVEN the world, the fake world, all manner of belief in trying to MAKE IT BE SIN, so that it is GIVEN reality, so that we can try to make it exist. It's our attempt to give it life and immortality. But we can't. We tried to make the world be a cause. We tried to make it have power. We gave our power to it to try to animate it. We tried to make it appear to be alive with "life forms", which are illusions of life. We tried to imagine it has a mind and alien will of its own. We tried to make ourselves subject to it and affected by it, to confirm its reality. We made bodies to sense it and to tell us that it is there.

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

Quite simply, this world, this planet, this galaxy, all the stars, all bodies, all animals and "life forms", are NOTHING. They are life's ABSENCE. They are the LACK OF LIFE. They are something that is really NOT there, appearing to be there. Like an hallucination. A lack of light, appearing to be the presence of a real darkness. And to believe in it is to believe that evil is real, asserting that the world has power OVER heaven. That the world CAN CAUSE immortal beings to die. Believing this world is real is level confusion.

Our task in forgiveness, then, is not to find a way to give EXTRA reality to the world, but to recognize ITS UNREALITY, and see finally that it SO NOTHING, that it disappears and fades into nothingness. All it is is a veil of illusions, a block, hanging in front of the face of christ, pretending to exist. Our guilt makes it seem solid. Our fear gives it reality. Our belief in sin anchors it in our minds. But it is not there at all. It is an empty shell.

"Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within YOU, there is a force which NO illusions can resist."

"What can the causeless BE but nothingness. The picture of your brother that you see is wholly absent, and has never been."

"Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not. Its NOTHINGNESS is guarantee that it can NOT be sick."

"The body that is asked to be a god WILL be attacked, because its nothingness has not been recognized. "

"Yet its nothingness IS your salvation, from which you would flee."

"His body's nothingness releases yours from sickness and from death."

"For here is nothingness, where neither birth nor death is real"

"The final judgment on ****the world**** contains no condemnation. For it sees the world as totally forgiven, without sin, and wholly purposeless. Without a cause, and now without a function in Christ's sight, ****it merely slips away to nothingness.****"

"Your faith is placed in the most trivial and insane symbols; pills, money, "protective" clothing, "influence," "prestige," being liked, knowing the "right" people, and an endless list of forms of nothingness which you endow with magical powers."

"To recognize this is to recognize nothingness when you think you see it. As such, it is the prerequisite for vision."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it WERE a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else BUT form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see."

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

"But if you refuse to worship him, in whatever form he may appear to you, and wherever you think you see him, he will disappear into the nothingness out of which he was made."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"The "changes" the ego seeks to make are not really changes. They are but deeper shadows, or perhaps different cloud patterns. Yet what is made of nothingness cannot be called new or different."

"We can but go from nothingness to everything; from hell to Heaven." "What loss can be for you in choosing not to value nothingness? This world holds nothing that you really want, but what you choose instead you want indeed!"

"***The world stands like a block*** before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just ***a fragile veil***, so easily dispelled that it can ***last no longer than an instant***. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it ***cannot fail to disappear***, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant ***is the world forgot***, with time forever ended as ***the world spins into nothingness*** from where it came."

"What is the ego? Nothingness, but in a form that seems like something. In a world of form the ego cannot be denied for it alone seems real. How could God's Son as He created him abide in form or in a world of form?"

"What can correct illusions but the truth? And what are errors but illusions which remain unrecognized for what they are? Where truth has entered errors disappear. They merely vanish, leaving not a trace by which to be remembered. They are gone because without belief they have no life, and so they disappear to nothingness, returning whence they came. From dust to dust they come and go, for only truth remains."

"The bleak little world will vanish into nothingness, and your heart will be so filled with joy that it will leap into Heaven and into the presence of God."

"God wills salvation be received today, and that the intricacies of your dreams no longer hide their nothingness from you."

"Nothingness will become invisible, for you will at last have seen truly." "Like all things in the world its meaning is temporary, and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it."

"All that is veiled in shadows must be raised to understanding to be judged again, this time with Heaven's help, and all mistakes in judgment which the mind had made before are open to correction as the truth dismisses them as causeless. Now are they without effects. They cannot be concealed because their nothingness is recognized."

"How can a battle be perceived as nothingness, when you ENGAGE in it?" "There is a silence covering the world that was an ancient dream so long ago no one remembers now. Its time is done, and in the little space it seemed to have is nothingness. The dream has gone, and all its dreams of gifts have disappeared as well."

"Pursuit of the imagined leads to death because it is the search for nothingness, and while you seek for life you ask for death.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death."

"The more complicated the results become, the harder it may be to recognize their nothingness, but it is not necessary to examine ALL possible outcomes to which premises give rise to judge the PREMISES truly."

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth.""

"EVERY illusion carries pain and suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments with which it hides its nothingness."

"And so is ALL time past, and everything EXACTLY as it was before the way to nothingness was made. The tiny tick of time, in which the first mistake was made, and ALL of them within that ONE mistake, held also the Correction for that one, and ALL of them that came within the first. And in that tiny instant time was gone, for that was all it ever was. What God gave Answer to IS answered, and IS gone."

"Specialness is the idea of sin MADE REAL. Sin is impossible even to imagine, without this base. For sin rose from it, out of nothingness, an evil flower with no roots at all."

"In the Divine psyche, the Father and the Holy Spirit are not incomplete at all. The Sonship has the unique faculty of believing in error, or incompleteness, if he so elects. However, it is quite apparent that so to elect IS to believe in the existence of nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement."