Time to get your mind out of the gutter?

"Eternity is an idea of God, so the soul understands it perfectly. Time is a belief of the ego, so the lower mind, which IS the ego's domain, accepts it without question."

Jesus refers to you having a lower mind and a higher mind. The lower mind, or the place where you have a "thought system" of spacetime and ego, arose in the separation from God.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity."

"Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

The lower mind, or egoic false perception, tends to look at things in a narrow, hateful, judgemental way. It's kind of like the mind is coming at the things it seems from a "lower" vantage point, down on the landscape or battlefield. What we need is a "higher" vantage point which "overlooks" ("To forgive is to overlook") and sees with love.

Forgiveness, or being forgiving, is a gift given by the Holy Spirit. It's a true-perception viewpoint that looks from a high vantage point of holiness, harmlessness, innocence and love. The Holy Spirit sees with Christ Vision, and looks upon everything correctly, ie based on God's truth and love.

We might spend a lot of time trying to figure out "how to forgive", which is really the lower mind trying to stay in control. Instead, consider that we simply need to join with the Holy Spirit. We need to not simply ask for his help, but invite him in. We need to allow him to operate on us, and to help us to share in how he is seeing things.

That means getting your mind to see what and how he is seeing. Your mind has to experientially, not in theory, actually "shift" or move into a higher position, in which you receive the Holy Spirit's healing vision. In which you allow yourself to BE forgiven and to see with HIS forgiveness. A forgiveness that is GIVEN you, rather than one you keep trying to make yourself.

"Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven."

Notice how it says that overlooking guilt - in which to forgive is to overlook - means that forgiving must entail letting HIM forgive, and simply trying to line your mind up with his to be open to entering into, joining with, and experiencing, his sight. A little willingness is all that is needed to invite him to help, and to ask for his viewpoint, not to merely hand it down to you but to actually orient yourself so that you let his perspective become your own. Such that God's will becomes your own.

Also, although this is not stated often, forgiveness is the same thing as love. A forgiving perspective is a loving perspective. The mind has to be willing to want a HIGHER way to look at things.

"Forgiveness is an earthly form of love which as it is in Heaven has no form. Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still."

Part of our challenge is we often do not recognize that we're in need of moving into a higher perspective. We are stuck and lost in our lower ego mind having false perceptions, which act like prisons and traps, and may not even realize that we're doing it. We think it's normal and don't question it. But we need to try to be vigilant and notice what we're doing, when we're being unforgiving, when we're going it alone, and when we need to ask for help.

The holy spirit is there to help you. God created him entirely TO help you, to heal you, to guide you, and to love and support you. You can't very well move closer to God without sharing in his mindset, his viewpoint, and his higher perception. But to move into it you have to be willing to let go of attack and sin and guilt and death. To be wiling to admit, you might be mistaken, you might've made a wrong choice, and you want something better. The only thing that is ever better is something closer to God.

"While I am not attacking your egos, I AM working with your higher mind whether you are asleep or awake, (just as your ego does with your lower mind.)"

In the two opposing views of ACIM - one that God created this world, and one that he didn't, there are some parallels.

Both views recognize that the ego is a problem and seeks to undo it. Both views recognize that the Holy Spirit provides a higher vision which is more truth-oriented.

Both views also seek to see THIS world in a more loving and forgiving way.

But where they diverge, is in terms of the overall goal of the relationship with this world.

In the view that God created the Earth, forgiveness is seen as a way to love what God created, as though you were attacking a real creation through your projections of guilt, and have to learn how to forgive it and reunite with it.

In the view that God did NOT create the Earth, forgiveness is seen as a way to love what WE created, in order to see the REFLECTION of God in it, as though you were attacking a FALSE world through your projections of guilt, and have to learn how to OVERLOOK it and unite with what is BEYOND it.

Both views have us changing our relationship with the world to a more loving one. To being more forgiving towards whatever it is and whatever is in it.

The view that God created this world uses forgiveness to form a better relationship with what is thought to be God's kingdom, to not merely reflect heaven in it but to see it AS heaven literally. This view rejects the idea that heaven is another kingdom distinct from the world.

The view that God did NOT create this world essentially uses forgiveness to UNDO the world we made, where atonement is seen as bringing about the END of the world. Not ended in attack, but ended after the "benediction of holiness upon it". First forgiven, then disappeared. The ending of the world then gives way to REVEAL the underlying Kingdom of God that it was hiding.

Since A Course in Miracles has plenty of material pertaining to forgiving "a world", to being loving towards "the outside world", to no longer projecting sin and guilt onto "the world" and so on, in both models, it is easy to see that the idea of God creating the world SEEMS to have a lot of material to back it up.

But where that model falls short is revealed in the difference in its final goal. It seeks to keep the world and not have it disappear. It seeks to make the world REAL, instead of recognizing its unreality. It seeks to combine heaven with earth such that Earth is fully literally heaven. And it seeks to write-off anything suggesting that Earth is not of God, by binding it to the ego's faulty perceptions.

There is an entire step BEYOND the forgiving of this world, a step where God takes us out of this world, where the world disappears, where the stars disappear in light, where the world "merely ceases to seem to be", where it "spins into the nothingness from which it came", where space and time and all their contents disappear, and where the world indeed does come to an end. We leave bodies, we leave the world, and we go to our true home in the Kingdom of God - not of this world.

So you can see that both models have a lot of parallels, both have features that have a similar approach. A person believing that God created the Earth can still adopt a loving attitude toward the world, some FORM of forgiveness toward it, and can even approach the reflection of God - albeit interpreted as literally God itself. The reflection of heaven is "read into" as being merely a way of looking AT heaven, rather than its reflection. And so a person studying under this umbrella could still potentially reach an advanced state of some FORM of love and forgiveness. But it does not take it all the way.

Only when we can recognize that God did not create the Earth can we truly have a) a place to assign statements about Earth being not of God, b) a proper recognition of what a reflection is, c) a correct understanding of what forgiveness means and implies, d) an openness to realizing there is no Earth/world, and e) a willingness to recognize God's Kingdom as beyond this world and our true home in God.

So both approaches can take you quite far, but the belief that God created the Earth will cause you to reach an impasse. You won't be able to go INTO heaven proper, because Earth will act as a doorstop. If you think you reached your destination before you actually did, you're obviously missing out on the final goal. The road doesn't end at planet Earth, it ends in another world entirely. And so the two paths DIVERGE greatly the closer you get to the real world. One aims to settle into life on Earth forever, while the other has its sights set on a world beyond the stars.

If ACIM is to be believed, and interpreted correctly, it is literally saying that this world is the OPPOSITE of what's real. And therefore it is completely unlike the nature of God's Kingdom. Indeed, unlike your real self.

"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."

"earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"This is the world of time, where all things end."

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

This presents a major challenge, because if the world is completely opposite to reality, truth, nature and eternal life, then every single thing in it is going to be doing things which are completely against who and what you are, against God's nature and will.

The Holy Spirit is now a spokesperson for the true nature of God's reality, and our own, and is here with us to help us to become heaven-like instead of earth-like. All of his motivation points towards eternal life rather than towards the world of mortality.

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death" "Nothing the world believes is true."

But if you'll think on this it's pretty crazy the contrast. Here we are in a world which seems very tangible and immense, and yet Jesus is saying that every single thing in it is opposite, upside-down, and backwards, from what is true. And that the body was made to deceive us into believing it is real. "The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

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

It would be much seemingly easier to just live a life in this world acting the way bodies act, interacting with objects, not questioning anything. Just taking everything to be verbatim as-it-is and not deceptive at all. Believing everything you see and hear.

Jesus's message is far more radical though, because if what he says is true, then fundamentally the entirety of space and time and all their contents, including all planets and galaxies, are completely false, unreal and untrue. "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."

So now on a daily basis, you have this task of literally questioning everything in the world, trying to recognize the world is an illusion, trying not to be deceived by everything the body shows you, trying not to identify with the body as your self, and basically denying and rejecting everything in spacetime.

That can seem very unnatural perhaps, to suggest you have to deny that the world is of God, and then deny everything about it, but Jesus does appear to be telling us to do this. That the only way out of suffering, sickness, misery and death, is to cancel out the entire seeming universe and believe none of it. That's a pretty tall order.

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

Nevertheless, it's clear that this is what Jesus is instructing us to do. To exchange the belief that this world is founded on reality, for a recognition that it is nothing but a dream. A fiction of a world which is hallucinated and not really there at all. Nor does it comprise anything real or permanent or of God.

"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?"

The world is nothing. Not something, but nothing at all. It's not there. It's a pretend world, hiding the Kingdom of God. And there is nothing in the world worth keeping as a substitute for the real thing.

"Yet its nothingness IS your salvation"

"The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it CAN blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

The body is supposed to be used as a communication device. This is much misundestood. What it means is that the body is to be used in a way that reflects our function of extension in heaven. We (mind/soul) are a MEDIUM or "communication channel" of extension, through which God is hosted and extends. We are to pass on what we receive. And this produces a continuous outward expansion and increase of creation. This is also communication - the outward expression of love.

"Creation and communication are synonymous. God created every mind by communicating His Mind to it, thus establishing it forever as a channel for the reception of His Mind and Will." That means, the body is supposed to, from a higher repurposing perspective, be used solely to extend and join and communicate, like a medium that you express THROUGH and BEYOND. Whereby you use it solely like a tool to give to others, placing no focus ON the body itself, or on the bodies of others. Because bodies become a LIMIT on communication if you make them real. They turn into brick walls.

The entire problem comes when you begin to focus ON the body, making it an idol, worshipping it, mistaking it for a THING in its own right, considering it an entity, dwelling on its form and function, and identifying with it as if it is your self. This converts the "channel" from being a channel, to being a roadblock in the channel. It turns the body into a blockage of separation instead of extension.

All of the minds attention is put ON the MEDIUM ITSELF, as if the medium itself is important. This separates the mind off because it now stops at the body's limits and does not go past it to join with other minds beyond their bodies. This increases the rift in the mind and induces all forms of sickness including death. It's a mis-use of the body - trying to use what's supposed to be a PIPE, as though it's a brick wall.

This is also why holy relationship is important because you're supposed to USE the body to relate BEYOND the body. It's only supposed to be used temporarily as a device for this purpose, and is not supposed to be used to exalt itself or to act as a prison or barrier. When you become body focused, you literally "lose sight" of your brother and yourself. It means we're turning a device for learning into the FOCUS of learning, as if trying to make the body BE something in its own right, which it isn't. The body is used for communication when the body ITSELF becomes NOTHING and invisible in the equasion.

"Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind which is working THROUGH the body but not IN it. If the mind believes the body is its GOAL, it WILL distort its perception OF the body, and by blocking its own extension BEYOND it will INDUCE illness by FOSTERING SEPARATION. Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot BUT foster illness, because it is not true. A medium of communication WILL lose its usefulness if it is used for anything else."

"To confuse a learning device with a curriculum GOAL is a fundamental confusion. Learning can hardly be meaningfully arrested at its own aids, and hope to understand them OR its real purpose. Learning must lead BEYOND the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it. This can be accomplished ONLY if the mind EXTENDS to other minds, and does not ARREST ITSELF in its extension. The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND's FUNCTION. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have BLOCKED THE MIND's JOY."

"The Holy Spirit's purpose lies safe in your RELATIONSHIP, and NOT your bodies. You have ESCAPED the body. Where you are now, the BODY cannot enter, for the Holy Spirit has set HIS temple there."

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's CONDEMNATION. For here is love made fearful, and hope abandoned. Even the idols that are worshipped here are shrouded deep in mystery, and kept APART from those who worship them. This is the temple dedicated to no relationships, and no return."

"The Holy Spirit's temple is NOT a body, but a RELATIONSHIP. The body is an isolated speck of darkness; a hidden secret room, a tiny spot of senseless mystery, a meaningless enclosure carefully protected, yet hiding nothing. Here, the unholy relationship escapes reality, and seeks for crumbs to keep itself alive. Here it would drag its brothers, holding them here in its idolatry. Here it is "safe," for here love CANNOT enter. The Holy Spirit does not build His temples where love can never be. Would He Who SEES the face of Christ choose as His home the only place in all the universe where it can NOT be seen?"

I have a number of reactions regarding those who are sick.

All of these reactions entail me feeling sorry for the person, or wishing they were well, or being sad that this has happened to them.

I have reactions of guilt that somehow I caused it, and reactions of fear that somehow it will worsen.

And I also have reactions of compassion and understanding.

But all of these reactions are actually responses to perceptions which are not true.

Ego reactions always occur after having perceived something wrongly, and unless you are coming from love your reaction is founded in victimhood.

It can seem like I am caring or wanting a person to be healed, because I am upset about them being sick. It can seem like I am wishing for their best. It can seem as though I want the sickness to go away and that this is a good attitude to have, or shows a sign of caring or compassion.

But the truth is, these reactions are all founded on DOING NOTHING ABOUT IT.

They are not attitudes of correction, or healing, or forgiveness, or undoing. They are responses founded on the belief that the sickness is real, that it is happening, that the person is suffering, that "someone" needs to swoop in and save the person - anyone other than me.

If you really look at this in yourself, you may well be a very sympathetic, empathetic, compassionate, caring-seeming person, but the fact is that a lot of these responses are born in a state of inability to help. A state of disempowerment. A state of passivity. A state where you believe that there is nothing you can actually DO to correct it, even though you may be filled with wishful thinking about how you would do something if you could.

YOU CAN!

These attitudes are actually a cover-up for miracle mindedness and an excuse for not forgiving. They are an ego response that looks as though you are deeply concerned about someone, while at the same time strongly believing that they really do have a problem.

What we have to come to learn is the art of correction, which is more to do with an active undoing of the problem rather than an agreement that it exists. Corrective measures. And we DO have the ability to do this, not alone but as a result of our union wth Holy Spirit and God.

I've been in states of sorrow and despair plenty of times in which I've "begged" God to help and sometimes there is some help and sometimes not, but in general each time that I find myself thinking of asking someone ELSE to help, someone who "has the power", I am either nudged or have an innate knowing that doing so is basically shirking an obligation.

God has empowered us to extend His love and healing, and to do so through the mechanism of forgiveness, in which we cancel out, undo, correct and make vanish, all signs and symptoms of artificial causes, demonstrating that separation has not occurred, that problems are not real, that sickness is an illusion and that even death can be reversed.

It is one thing to be terribly upset and guilt-ridden. You feel guilty and responsible for causing someone's suffering, even if you did not appear to directly cause it, because you feel as though you are supposed to be able to take it away but are failing to do so. So in a sense, your mind knows this and actually will experience guilt when you are not performing miracles. When you are in support of sickness and are believing in problems and are making it real instead of correcting it actively, your mind will know that you're actually using this as a way to avoid your ROLE as "the light of the world", and this produces guilt.

So you will feel guilty when you are not helping others to heal, and you will feel guilty when you are failing to forgive. It's not your fault, but either you are choosing health as truth or you are choosing sickness as truth. Being upset that someone is sick does not mean that you are a believer in health and wellbeing. It means you believe sickness cannot be undone, which is a strong belief that sickness is the truth.

This we have to become honest about and weed out of ourselves, to become the miracle workers that we are meant to be. Forgiveness is the way to bring about miracles, through the correction and undoing of what is false. Not through the ego's victimy reactions of guilt, powerlessness, well-wishes and the like. Those are like saying, sorry you are sick, but I believe in sickness and therefore I think you should be sick.

We need to learn to make the universe disappear and all sickness along with it. The end of death, sickness, the body, and the world.

Usually we want to get rid of everything we do not like, everything that feels harmful, every fear, every upset, every ounce of grief or loss. We want to get rid of all our enemies and things that hurt.

But this is actually the ego in action. It wants to get rid of these things because there is a potential that these things might be used to wake you up.

So long as you're in the midst of a lesson, in which something seems to be against your will, you will have this sense of "I don't want this and it shouldn't be happening". This is the ego's reaction. It does not want you to use this opportunity for forgiveness. It does not want you to learn the lesson.

Not that the ego is arbitrarily against you. You made it and you asked it to do this for you. You wanted it to deflect you away from sources of healing, from anything that might trigger an awakening to truth. You wanted it to keep telling you that stuff isn't supposed to happen to you, and you wanted it to make you see things as if they are happening against your will. That way you could stay asleep.

But each time you try to 'get rid of' what you do not like, or be free of a lesson, or fix a problem, or make a bad person go away, or stop something from happening, you're really using ego denial. And you do this in the name of spirituality.

You think it is spiritual to have a life where there are no problems, where nothing is happening to you, where you have no enemies, where everything goes well, where people seem to just adore you, and where you aren't hurt or offended by anyone. I mean, as a goal that's great... That could be true of real spirituality, but the ego wants this goal WITHOUT awakening.

So that means, getting rid of all protagonists, all offenders, all enemies, and all threats. It tells you you shouldn't be afraid and that fear is a bad thing. It tells you not to be guilty. It even tells you you should be constantly happly or people-pleasing. These are all deceptive ways the ego gets you to NOT deal with your shit, and it forms a spiritualized ego.

When you are afraid, that's very good, because you are being confronted with the results of some belief that you have and it's coming into your awareness. This is a great opportunity. Instead of the fear hiding out in the back of your mind, it's being brought into awareness. You don't like it, for sure, but recognize it is an opportunity because now some normally hidden dark shit has come out into the open where you can take a look at it.

It's all about how you use things - whether you use it to deny your shit or use it to bring light to your shit and undo it. So you could take the fact you're scared as a great opportunity to look at WHY you are scared, rather than to just want the fear to go away. It's pretty normal to want the fear to go away, but it's not healthy. It is healthier to take a look at it with Holy Spirit and find out why you are afraid... What guilt is the fear based on? What's the deeper cause of it? Why do you want it? How's it serving you to keep you in the dark? Where is the so-called truth that surrounds the fear to make it seem justified? What is the real truth of this situation?

Its the same with feeling guilty, upset, angry, offended, whatever... Each time this stuff comes to your awareness it's a great opportunity to heal and undo. So don't try to hide this stuff away. Don't shove it back down or want to get rid of it or to avoid it. And don't blame people for triggering it off - they're trying to help you to look at the stuff you don't want to look at. You're better off dealing with it and then being done with it, rather than constantly hiding from it and feeling its torment in the back of your mind, only to keep resurfacing saying "please acknowledge me and recognize my message to help you grow, and please use me for awakening."

This is all great material. Great opportunities to make progress. It's hard work but it's worth it, and it's far better for you than to want to just keep making this stuff go away. You can be free of it permanently if you deal with it properly and heal it. Isn't that better?

"The power to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference"?

If you believe there is something outside of you which has causal power that you can do nothing about, you are *GUARANTEED* to live in a state of fear and suffering.

Accepting these "causes" as "outside of your power" CANNOT bring you peace.

"Letting go" of stuff that you supposedly cannot "control", could well be you resigning yourself to powerlessness and inevitable death.

How about.... I can change anything at will?

How about... the mind is so powerful there is nothing it cannot do?

How about... there is nothing that cannot be changed, and nothing that cannot be reveresed, and therefore, no "acceptance" of the consequences of sin is required, or possible? How about, this form of "acceptance" is an attempt to live with sin and death, letting them go unchallenged?

Who can "accept" that the consequences of sin are irreversible, and call that a healthy state of mind? What exactly are these effects which we are supposed to "let be" and do nothing about? How is it possible to live with suffering?

Instead, the Course is not teaching this. The course is not telling us to accept the world "as it is", as such.

Now, to clarify here.... there IS merit in RECOGNIZING what the world really is, clearly, and accurately, with true perception, without adding to or removing anything from it perceptually, which is an act of "not resisting" it. Or, in a sense, letting it be what it is rather than trying to turn it into something it is not.

HOWEVER, THAT DOES NOT MEAN, that you have no power to change it or no reason to do so. Nor does it mean that you are supposed to therefore "accept the form" of it as though it's written in stone tablets and can never be changed. Nor does it mean that whatever sickness or suffering is occurring, you're supposed to just "accept it" and let it be there. Otherwise, we literally would be saying, that we are supposed to accept death. And that is completely the opposite of what the Course is leading us to.

The course is not asking us to accept death, or to accept sickness. It's telling us that both are not reality and can be reversed and undone and healed. It's telling us to demonstrate that there IS NO DEATH and no sickness. It's telling us to show everyone that we are not at the effect of ANY causes in this world, because we are the cause of the world.

Jesus demonstrated in his resurrection that he was able to make another body, simply to show that "the mind that made the body can make another". And therefore that you are immortal spirit. But people did not understand it.

We're not supposed to be making the world real and then, like, believing that there is real sickness and real suffering, and then feeling compelled or motivated to try to "get rid of it" because of how awful it is. That's a trap of becoming a "fixer" and trying to NOT accept what you yourself as making real.

If you've made shit real, and if you either try to "accept it" or "fix it"... BOTH OF THOSE responses are ego and false. The course is not teaching either of those.

But the course is also not saying, that you are powerless to do anything about these things. It is by recognizing that they are NOT real that you will, paradoxically, recognize that you HAVE POWER OVER IT. That "illusions can easily be changed". As you realize that this stuff is not the truth, it becomes EASIER to change it, not harder. As you recognize sickness has NO POWER over you, it becomes EASIER for you to make the sickness GO.

Not to make it go because it seems real and you are "really suffering", but to make it go TO PROVE that your mind is healed and to demonstrate not only that you BELIEVE there is no sickness, but also that you will stop using the sickness to accuse your brother of being the sinner who caused it. Every sickness proves that. And every broken body proves the mind is not healed.

We are asked to NOT ACCEPT sickness or death as real, or as inevitable, or as a "death sentence", or as something we can do nothing about ("because its real") and to then simply turn into a passive mouse sitting on the sidelines waiting to die.

DO NOT ACCEPT DEATH! ACCEPT LIFE. Accepting life is accepting the atonement. But to "accept" that this world is only what it is - an illusion of a world with no power to do anything, and in THAT form of acceptance you will have power over it and not the other way around.

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace."

This means that if in ANY WAY I am not at peace, am sick, upset, unhappy, afraid, in pain, suffering or dying, it has come about ONLY because *I* made a wrong decision. This "consequence" is showing up ONLY because of the power of my own decision. I put it there. I made it happen to myself. There are no other causes. I am responsible for having attacked myself. I decided wrongly and it produced these effects. I must claim responsibility and ownership of this power to choose what I experience and stop blaming others.

"I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise."

This is further compounded in this second line - that *I* made the decision myself. Which means, the secret to salvation, I did this to myself. I am not unhappy because of something someone else did or something that happened to me against my will. I made a DECISION, on my own, which was a poor decision, which was a DELIBERATE decision, to choose ego and suffering, on purpose. I have to own that. I made myself suffer and unhappy. I chose it.

Then once I can see that I own that fully, I can now realize that, in spite of this, I can change my mind and "choose again". Acknowledging that I chose this in the first place puts me in touch with the power to choose. Owning the choice I MADE allows me to own my power of CHOOSING and therefore puts me back in touch with my power to choose a different experience. And whatever I choose, I will receive.

"I WILL to decide otherwise, because I WANT to be at peace."

Notice in the early version it says I *WILL* to decide otherwise meaning I actually DO IT, whereas in the FIP version they changed it to "I want" which is somewhat removed from actively DOING it. And so now you are realizing, that you no longer want what YOU CHOSE, you no longer want the suffering YOU MADE HAPPEN, and so now you WILL - choose - actively -towards a more sane decision which will results in consequences of peace instead of conflict.

"I do NOT feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM."

You now recognize clearly that you have not sinned, and merely have been mistaken. Mistakes can be corrected and they call for forgiveness, not punishment. Therefore you do not need to be guilty, which isn't helping anyone. Guilt is not love or a change of mind. I also don't have to worry about all the giant fuck of a mess that I made, myself, that I did to myself, even if that means having attacked myself and made myself sick or suffering or in pain or half dead.

Whatever the consequences of my wrong decision were, whatever the MANIFEST EFFECTS were, THEY can be undone. AND they can be undone BY the Holy Spirit through supernatural healing means. And the only thing remaining to ALLOW this to occur is my own willingness to LET HIM HELP ME. There is no consequence He cannot undo, including incurable diseases, and including death.

"I WILL to let Him by allowing Him to decide for God for me."

Again this says that I WILL, whereas I think in a later version it was changed to "I choose". We need to realize that WILLINGNESS is very important because it indicates full commitment and POWER. Your choice and your will are very powerful and your mind is powerful. This isn't merely an inert, neutral, powerless small decision. It is a choice to OPT for and CLAIM a different experience. If you change your mind, the whole world must change. You are ruler of the universe! Nothing happens that you do not choose and whatever you choose MUST HAPPEN.

Additionally, when you ALLOW Holy Spirit, you invite him into you, you let him help you, you ask for His healing and you RECEIVE the truth (atonement), He can AND WILL AND DOES come into you and can heal ALL OF THE CONSEQUENCES that you produced in your wrong decision. He can heal all pain and sickness and suffering. And you must be WILLING to let him, to trust him, to allow him, to give him permission, in order to have him take your INVITATION and come in to heal you and clean up the mess.

He is here to HELP YOU and you do not have to tolerate suffering of ANY kind, and you do not have to put up with consequences you caused, and you do not have to stay sick, and you do not have to do this all on your own. Allow yourself to RECEIVE THE LOVE that you now choose and WILL and accept as a sane decision. Love will heal you AND your body.

There is an interpretation of ACIM that I run into quite often, which has nothing to do with it.

In the world in general, many people have the idea that "the world" is duality. And then at some point they get the idea that "behind the world" there is a oneness.

So here you have two basic sort of levels, a oneness and a twoness. Usually this idea suggests that all the "things" in the world are actually joined together as "one thing". That it's all God. As if the "forms" of objects are some way in which the "formless God" is manifesting or showing up.

This is a variant of what some people call a non-duality idea. And many people think that for example, space and time are "the universe", ie all of existence, and that the universe "as a whole" is God, a oneness that makes up the stars and planets.

For these people, there is usually no notion of any existence beyond space time, beyond this "universe", any other dimension, or anything but what is front of their faces.

Many of these people bring this "model" of reality to ACIM with them and do not let it go. Instead they try to fit ACIM into this model. I've seen some pretty severe cases of this where a person studying ACIM for decades still believes this basic arrangement of reality.

It seems like a simple enough idea.... and also seems to be supported by science for the most part. It's the idea that physical matter is somehow a sort of illusion, and it's really all made up of energy or some lower-level substance, which at the lowest level all seems to be one big thing.

There are various statements in ACIM which, if read with this model of the world in mind, might seem to validate it. Such as God being in everything you see, or reflections of heaven on earth, or heaven not being a place but a condition, etc.

Some people have really dug into this model and believe it's the whole of what ACIM is teaching. But, in my opinion, it's far from it. One of the major problems with it is that it gives credit to the illusory world as "God's creation", it shifts an entire level of existence down a notch so that the physical world becomes part of reality, even the Kingdom. Then people want to forgive the world in terms of lifting away from it unfair judgements "of God's Kingdom", as if Earth is God's creation. And this couldn't be more mistaken, leading to making illusions real.

In ACIM's definition of reality, heaven is an unlimited realm which is hosted within God. It is God's creation or kingdom. It hosts many beings etc. In ACIM, this sonship is synonymous with references to "universe". In this view, there never was a planet Earth or space or time or physical matter or bodies or quantum fields or dark matter or any of the rest of it. There's just God's being and its divine light-based contents.

It then tells us there was a major event, sometimes called "the fall of man" and sometimes "the separation" or "descent into hell" or "detour into fear", which seemed to split the minds of some of the occupants of heaven. And this resulting in the illusory hallucinated making of a whole other seeming realm, a lower-order reality, another "universe", space and time, physical matter, planets, bodies and so on. None of this existed before, and in reality does not really exist now. And it's certainly not a creation of God.

That's very different than saying that all of the physical contents of spacetime are joined together in a oneness. It's really saying that all of the contents of spacetime, and space and time themselves, are really a single illusion, covering up ANOTHER reality beyond them. In effect, 1) the illusory world of objects, 2) the world of objects is all one big dream - but not the oneness of God, and 3) beyond this unified singular illusion is ultimate reality - actual God and heaven.

Three seeming layers, not two. Not just duality and non-duality, or duality and oneness, but separate illusions (false perception), singular illusions (true perception), and oneness (no perception). We need to open our minds to listen to what ACIM is telling us about the structures of existence, rather than dragging our baggage and preconceptions and assumptions into it, trying to force ACIM to justify and prove some pre-held beliefs. We have to surrender all prior beliefs and listen and let ourselves learn a new truth.

Space and time and matter and all of these contents that we call "the universe" is not the universe. It is an illusory realm of separation and an attack on God. It exists only as a dream in the minds of those who are asleep and in denial of actual reality. You can at best change how you look at it and see a reflection of light in it, in order to prepare for leaving it, but you cannot turn it into reality. It is fundamentally not really there. It is not existence. And it is not secretly oneness. "There is no world."

We speak of the separation from God. But the separation is also a separation from the sonship, which means a separation not only from others, but also from the part of you which is shared with them.

Before the separation we were all one, joined together and sharing everything. We even shared our identity and our souls. We overlapped and everything belonged to everyone.

But then in the separation, we went into an isolation mode, where we saw our own self as not shared with others, as not extending to include them, and had a sense of a "gap" or rift of distance (space) form in-between us.

This then led to the production of bodies symbolizing this separateness, in which we enter a state of solitude. Or to put it another way, solitary confinement. By seeing that other people are not a part of myself, I saw myself as exclusively "only me", and therefore disconnected from everyone.

That's a very lonely state to be in, in which we see ourselves as the only inhabitant or our little prison body, and everyone else seems kept apart from us physically. Jesus refers to this state as one of solitude, in which we basically tried to stop sharing anything with anyone. We also can really think of this as the ego, because it's this way of changing your sense of identity to identify with a body and believe that you are a lonesome person.

The truth is then, that if your IDENTITY does not include others, you ARE alone. And since separation is selfish, you ARE being selfish if you think ONLY of what seems to be your own self. You must expand your sense of identity to encompass and include all others, recognizing them as PART OF YOU.

Only when you can experience that others ARE part of your own self can you have a vested interest in developing shared interests. If you ARE others, then what benefits you benefits them equally. This means opening up to being more than JUST you.

This isn't really an attempt to throw away your self. The sense of egocentricity only comes from having a sense of identity that doesn't share with anyone. It's a temporary side effect or symptom. I think we can say the ego is a symptom of the separation, and without separateness from others there is no egotism.

Instead we are to open up to join, to reunite, with others. To let them into us. To see our own self IN them. To recognize them AS ourselves. And to share everything with them equally. This doesn't mean getting rid of myself, it means ADDING ON all the other selves that I CUT OFF in the separation. It means GAINING a much more expanded sense of self, which INCLUDES everyone as part of you.

When you are more than just yourself, you have made room for the interests of others in your life. When your own separate self stops being "all important", when you stop depending on your own strength, when you put aside making all your own decisions, and when you let go of trying to be in control of everything, you make room for others, and for God.

I can only make room for God if I make room IN MY SELF to include others and to include God as part of me. I literally am you and you literally are me. ONLY when identity is SHARED, is there true holy relationship. Only when I am US, am I devoid of the selfishness of the ego.

"Lead not your little lives in solitude, with one illusion as your only friend."

"We do not go alone. And we give thanks that in our solitude a Friend has come to speak the saving Word of God to us. And thanks to you for listening to Him."

"In Heaven God's Son is NOT imprisoned in a body, nor is sacrificed in solitude to sin."

"To each who walks this earth in seeming solitude is a Savior given, whose special function here is to release him, and so to free himself."

"But those who KNOW that they are all the same, need not salvation. And each one FINDS his Savior, when he is ready to look upon the face of Christ, and see Him sinless."

"This is the lesson that His giving holds, for He has saved you from the solitude you sought to make, in which to hide from God."

"The body HAS no purpose of itself, and MUST be solitary."

"I made up the prison in which I see myself."

"Christ's hand has touched your shoulder, and you feel that you are not alone. You even think the miserable self you thought was you may not be your identity. Perhaps God's Word is truer than your own."

"It is impossible to remember God in secret and alone. For remembering Him means you are NOT alone, and willing to remember it. Take no thought FOR YOURSELF, for no thought you hold IS for yourself. "

"If I am with you in the loneliness of the world, THE LONELINESS IS GONE. You CANNOT maintain the illusion of loneliness if you are NOT alone."