There is only one curriculum. It is God's curriculum. It applies to EVERYONE, no matter how awake or asleep or in what walk or life or following what religion, even people who have never heard of A Course in Miracles. There is a difference between ACIM - the book, the course - and "the universal curriculum", which applies to everyone, book or not.

The curriculum is REQUIRED, in that there is only ONE truth, and every single soul has to find their way TO that one truth eventually. The truth is non-negotiable. "The time you take it is voluntary", and you can go closer and retreat and get lost and come back again etc but generally speaking "the truth" is the curriculum that you need to learn, ie the atonement, and either you learn it or you avoid it for a while, but *everyone* HAS to learn it. Because it's God's guarantee that you WILL wake up from dreaming.

God's ANSWER to the separation, which includes ALL PEOPLE, is the Holy Spirit, who he created AS the answer. Not just a bunch of information. Not just some "optional path". He is IN YOUR MIND as a spirit being, and he forms the Christ Mind, which ALL souls share. It is *IMPOSSIBLE* to be awakened and to exclude the Holy Spirit. The truth that you learn, true perception, IS HIS perception. You can only "learn it", by joining YOUR perception with HIS and aligning with His way of seeing. There is NO OTHER way, other than the ego's.

So essentially the Holy Spirit, sooner or later, is going to form a relationship with you, you are going to develop trust, you're going to open up to Him and work with Him. He is your TEACHER. Jesus also calls him "the only therapist", due to His position of knowing the truth. There is only one truth no matter who you are.

This applies to all Christians, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists, Hindu folk, you name it. The Holy Spirit is *unavoidable* in the curriculum process. Indeed Jesus says that you must learn to join your mind with His and SHARE His mind. You cannot avoid Jesus either. And that's probably something that might piss off some people following the FORM of other paths. That is why Jesus CORRECTLY and truthfully said, "I am the way the truth and the light and no one comes to the father but by me."

Additionally, though some will not like this fact either, being a miracle worker is a God-given right and *completely natural* for anyone who is joining with the Holy Spirit's thought system and waking up to the truth. Removal of blocks to awareness releases or rather stops interfering with miracles, and "miracle working" becomes your natural profession. As Jesus says also, once you accept the atonement you become PART OF the atonement plan and then you PROFESS HIM... ie express Him, because "atonement is the natural profession of the children of God." And that applies to ALL SOULS, no matter how ACIM-oriented you seem to be right now.

The fact is that as you approach the truth and merge with love etc, you WILL, MUST, CANNOT AVOID, becoming miraculous. It is your nature. God created you miraculously and you are miraculous forever. And so you WILL perform miracles as part of your function of healing on Earth. Anyone who "doesn't like" the idea of performing miracles FOR OTHERS (professing Jesus) is going to run into a roadblock at some point because miracles are NATURAL and *EVERYONE* is supposed to be doing them.

So long story short, the curriculum is not optional, nor is becoming intimate with Holy Spirit, nor is having a direct relationship with Jesus, nor is miracle working. This is why Jesus also says you MUST join the great crusade with Him as an active worker. It's not even something you would want NOT to do. It's a given. Part of the metaphysics. You become part of the atonement PLAN which goes far beyond yourself and helps others.

So all this stuff IS MANDATORY. You can, however, avoid it. You can be in denial of it. You can try to reject it. You can refuse to accept it. But it does not change the facts or the truth. At some point, everyone is going to return to God through the universal curriculum. They MIGHT not necessarily do it through the FORMAT of "A Course in Miracles", the book, with the lessons etc... they MIGHT come to it through what SEEM like "other paths", but no matter the appearance of the path, it is ALL part of God's curriculum for awakening, which MUST include the Holy Spirit, joining with ALL brothers including Jesus, and taking lessons to learn the SAME truth as everyone.

That which is real cannot be threatened. Reality is permanent truth. What is real cannot attack or be attacked. It cannot be at war with another because it is everything. And it cannot be at war with itself because it is undivided.

The denial of reality is the ego, which is a system of thought in the mind which believes in separation. Separation leads to division, to inequality, to differences, and to conflict. This begins the laws of chaos, in which the truth seems to be different for everyone.

As soon as everyone is different, they are automatically conflicting. There is a breakdown of unity, harmony, equality, wholeness and relationship. Just the mere notion that you are different to another is a state of conflict. This applies to different particles of matter, materials, forces, events, bodies, places, times etc. They are all conflicting all the time because they do not share.

The whole ego thought system is really a system of SELF DENIAL - the denial of the soul. As such, it is a state of self attack, an attempt to destroy oneself. This self destructiveness means that one part of self is trying to destroy the rest. This also means the mind has to be split in two, with one part at war with the other.

It doesn't take much for one part of mind to SEEM to contain different beliefs, attitudes, appearances, forms, states to the other part. And before you know it, there is internal conflict. There is war, on the basis of differences in form and belief. One side of mind seems to NOT BE the other part, and so now there seem to be two identities, who separately disagree with each other.

The illusion is that one part of mind SEEMS not to be of the same mind as the other part. The differences in belief and appearance make it SEEM as if there are TWO, not one. Two identities. Two selves. Two sides. Opposing forces. Clashing attitudes. Disunity and misunderstanding. Mis-trust and suspicion. Conflict and war.

This internal war plays out on what appears to the the stage of the world, because the world is in the mind. It is a projection of the ego thought system. The forms of countries and nations, people in bodies, armies, weapons, nationalities and cultures and so on, are all just aspects of the ONE ego thought system playing the part of taking sides.

If you fall for the illusion and are deceived, you will listen to what one side says against the other and believe it. And by believing it you will disbelieve what the other side says. And the forms and behaviors of one will tell you what it means, and what its truth is. And before you know it, you think one country is more righteous or sinful than another on the basis of which difference you prefer.

But the truth is that the ego is playing BOTH SIDES. Both sides are part of a single whole. The ego is the oppressor and the oppressed. It is the victim and the victimizer. It is the bigger country and the smaller country. It is the unprovoked and the provoker. It only PRETENDS not to be EACH OTHER, through dissociation and through the illusion of forms of separation.

If you buy into this you will take sides and feel sorry for one over the other and use one as an innocent victim to accuse the other of war crimes. This happens every time. It means you have failed to recognize that BOTH sides are ego attacking itself. One side attacks the other, the other attacks back, and BOTH of them are warring, regardless of how it appears.

Nor are there really two sides, nor two camps, nor two countries, nor two armies, nor two sets of people. If you believe there are, you are buying into the ego thought system. The ego is at war with ITSELF. It splits itself apart and the armies of one part fight with the armies of another. It destroys itself, it blows up its own buildings, it attacks its own "people", and wars against its own countries. The whole thing is internal conflict.

This may seem to be playing out between two particular groups of people, in a given part of the world. Or maybe it was happening in another part of the world. Or on your doorstop. Or thousands of miles away. And it will keep happening. Because it's always the SAME LESSON over and over and over again. Yet another conflict presented as an opportunity for forgiveness and for undoing the separation. Remember the one lesson - you are doing it to yourself.

If you look at all the reactions people are having about a particular war, you'll find 99% of it is a form of scapegoating. People taking sides. People buying the illusion of innocent victims. People buying that one country IS NOT the other country. That there are two, not one. That this is a fight between TWO parties, instead of ONE overall mastermind. THE EGO is the culprit behind all wars, all divisions, all conflicts, all invasions, and is the RECIPIENT of ALL attacks as well.

The ego thought system is in fact SICK, in that it actually takes pleasure in hurting itself. It would pleasure itself to death. It would destroy parts of itself in order to preserve parts of itself. It would rip off its own arms and burn off its own legs if it meant that it could perpetuate suffering and victimhood. It is twisted and insane and evil and makes no sense. It wants to perpetuate itself AND destroy itself.

It is both the evil dictator AND the defenselessly oppressed. So don't just blindly buy into how things APPEAR to be on the physical level. There is NOT a war between two sets of people. There is an internal war by ONE set of people, ONE mind, that is trying to split apart and destroy itself, and it just LOOKS like a conflict between two sides on the physical stage. If you take either side, assign innocence to either side, assign guilt to either side, you are INTENSIFYING THE SEPARATION BETWEEN THEM and making it WORSE.

The only way to undo this is to not buy into the ILLUSION OF WAR, and instead to offer UNITY AND HEALING through unconditional love for ALL sides at all times. Don't be praying for one side to win over another. Pray for reunion and forgiveness and real peace. When you buy into external war, YOU ARE SPLITTING YOUR OWN MIND AND ARE HAVING AN INTERNAL WAR which you are projecting onto the world. Then it is YOUR mind that needs healing as well.

"When we said that prayer is the medium of miracles, we also said that the only meaningful prayer is for forgiveness, because those who have been forgiven HAVE everything. "

"How strange indeed becomes this war against Yourself!"

"War is impossible unless belief in VICTORY is cherished. Conflict WITHIN you MUST imply that you believe the ego has the power TO BE VICTORIOUS. "

"Surely you realize the ego IS at war with God. Certain it is it HAS no enemy."

"The war against yourself is but the battle of two illusions, struggling to make them DIFFERENT from each other, in the belief the one which conquers will be true."

"War is the condition in which fear is born, and grows and seeks to dominate. Peace is the state where love abides, and seeks to share itself. Conflict and peace are opposites; where one abides, the other CANNOT be; where either goes, the other disappears."

"Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war DOES deprive you of peace."

"Yet in this war THERE IS NO OPPONENT."

"Yet no-one sees himself in conflict, and ravaged by a cruel war, unless he believes that BOTH "opponents" in the war are real. Believing this, he must escape, for such a war would surely end his peace of mind, and so destroy him. But if he could but realize the war is between forces that are real and UNREAL powers, he could look upon himself, and SEE his freedom."

"God did not create that war, and so it is not real."

"Peace is impossible to those who look on war. Peace is inevitable to those who offer peace."

"Yet peace is stronger than war, because it heals. War is DIVISION, not increase. No-one gains from strife."

"The world will end in peace because it is a place of war."

"Nothing more fearful than an idle dream has terrified God's Son, and made him think that he has lost his innocence, denied his Father, and made war upon himself."

"Who COULD be hurt in such a war, unless he hurts himself? He HAS no enemy in truth."

"It is only the wish to deceive that makes for war. No-one at one with himself can even conceive of conflict. Conflict is the inevitable result of self-deception, and self-deception is dishonesty."

There is a fairly simple question that can be asked to determine if planet Earth is real, exists, or is God's creation.

There are machine guns in this world. Machine guns full of bullets. The bullets are projectiles which shoot out of this gun and may penetrate other objects. Upon doing so it is capable of ripping holes in things, and if those things are biological organisms it is capable of mowing them down and destroying them and killing them.

Now, that's simply physical fact. That's what the gun does. That's how it functions. That's what it's capable of.

It does not matter if you forgive the gun, it will still function this way. It does not matter if you see it with false perception and hate it, or see it with true perception and love it. It will still function as a bullet-launching death machine, capable of seriously damaging and destroying anything it touches.

Your healed perceptions of the machine gun do not stop it from launching bullets. Nor does your perception change the shape of the gun from being still in the form of a gun. It still has a barrel and a set of machinery and metal bullets. It doesn't matter how many years you've been doing ACIM spiritual practices, it in no way changes a single fact about how that object functions.

Now you have to ask yourself, whether God in his infinite mercy and wisdom and gentleness and love, would EVER conceive of such an object? Because if that machine gun exists, and has reality, then it MUST be of God. It must be part of God's will. It must be what he wants. And God himself must endorse it. In fact God must have designed it himself and co-created it.

How does that sit with you? Even if you forgive the machine gun and send it love and do not blame it and do not project sin or guilt onto it, does it still have a design and capacity for mowing down citizens? Yes it does. Even if you are high on a cloud of spiritual consciousness, does the machine gun still operate according to physical laws? Yes it does. Is it still capable of murder regardless of how spiritual you become? Yes it is.

So you have to ask yourself, would God create such a device? Would God's world, which should be heaven, contain such a device? Could God have willed that such a device be possible? That there can be scenarios in which some of God's other heavenly-created objects are capable of being utterly ripped apart and destroyed in a matter of seconds? Is such a thing allowed and possible and sanctioned in heaven? Is it even a POSSIBILITY, that in God's perfect absolutely infinite immortal reality, that there can be things mowed down with metal bullets?

You have to come to terms with this because the answer is quite important. The ONLY WAY that planet Earth, the physical planet, the solid matter, all of space and time, can have come from God or be in any way God's will, is if God is a maker of weapons. And even if we lift away labels such as weapons and say "that's a lovely beautiful piece of machinery isn't it" in some kind of blissful state of rose-tinted-glasses, we STILL are going to have to accept that IF IT IS PART OF THE KINGDOM, GOD WANTS OBJECTS TO BE BLASTED APART.

So we're really asking now, what is God's nature and will? Can you sleep at night knowing that God is a God who facilitates and supports and contributes to the making of weapons of mass destruction? Is that within God's laws? Does God allow AND support such a thing? Because if he does, what kind of a God is that? And how would a loving, beautiful, gentle, kind, happy God, come up with a design for a very effective "killing machine" as part of HEAVEN?

I think MOST sane or semi-sane people in the world would have to agree, that if God is loving it is HIGHLY unlikely that God could ever be conceived of as personally willing the creation of a machine gun. Not even if the gun is radically forgiven, which has no real effect on the fact that it is still capable of being used to mow bodies down. And regardless of how beautiful and shiny the paint is, regardless of how lovely the sights and sounds of bullets flying are, the fact remains the machinery still functions to attack and destroy. Is is okay with you that God's kingdom, immortal and unattackable, indestructible, has items in it which can in fact still destroy things? God would be contradictory would he not? And heaven would be full of holes.

The only sane conclusion we can come to is that either God is murderous and is responsible for personally willing the making of machine guns and bullets and death and destruction, OR God is not that kind of a God. And if God is not like that, NOTHING like that can exist. Because anything that does exist, HAS to be a part of God's mind and will. Part of his heart. God has to love it and create it otherwise it is nothing and nowhere.

Either, machine guns exist and are real and God created planet Earth and physical bodies and space and time and all the galaxies, which means God must be murderous and cruel, OR, God would never sanely allow, make possible, condone, or contribute to, the making of such objects. And therefore, if God did not create machine guns, planet earth is absolutely unreal, bodies do not exist, destructible objects are absolutely nothing, human bodies don't exist, and there is no world.

Personally for me I can only accept that God's most-beloved Kingdom of heaven CANNOT EVER CONTAIN such objects. Not in any way. Not with any kind of perception or repurposing. Not merely that they don't exist, or haven't been created yet, but that even the POTENTIAL for them to be created does not exist. It must be IMPOSSIBLE for weapons to exist in God. I absolutely cannot bring myself to ever accept or conceive of being able to be at peace and loving with God with the loophole that he is a maker of murderous articles. They simply CANNOT EXIST in heaven's reality.

To me, this is so clear and black and white, there is absolutely no way that there is ANY OTHER way for the machine gun to exist and for it to simultaneously imply that God is benevolent. Either God is loving and exists and is real, OR, machine guns exist and God is murderous and self destructive. That's the choice you have to make. Either earth and bodies exist along with machine guns, OR THEY DO NOT. And quite frankly, we should ALL be recognizing by now that THEY DO NOT.

There will be no machine guns in heaven. Not today. Not ever. And similarly, there are no bodies, and no planet Earth. That is A Course in Miracle's teaching. There IS no other interpretation.

You are either innocent or guilty. These are the only options. If sin is real, you are guilty, and guilt is real. If sin is not real, you are innocent, and guilt is not real. You can also say that if you are guilty, you must be sinful. And if you are not guilty, you cannot have sinned.

When sin is recognized as an illusion or dream, without giving it any reality or truth, it is nothing. When you start to give it reality and truth it begins to seem like a cause with power, leading to consequences or effects. The effect of sin is guilt. If you did in truth sin, then you should indeed be guilty of having done so. It is simply cause and effect.

But if there is no guilt, there cannot have been sin, and you are in a state of forgiveness. Forgiveness therefore is the recognition that there is no sin, which produces the effect of guilt's absence. Either way, when guilt is absent, sin is cancelled.

If the belief in sin being real is mental illness ie insanity, since "sin is insanity", and given that "the ego" is another name for this insane thought system, then depriving sin of its effects undoes the ego. The insanity goes away when there is no guilt there. Sin without its effects has no causal power or reality or truth, and so insanity is gone.

If you refuse to go into guilt, you are denying that sin is real. If you deprive sin of its consequences, you are working a miracle. A miracle undoes the seeming consequences of sin. Sin, if it were real, is the idea of irreversible permanent truth, mixed with something impossible. Any consequence that comes from sin can be undone by recognizing that sin has no validity.

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt."

If sin is merely a mistaken idea that's false, and if you give it no truth or reality, then nothing can come from it. Guilt cannot arise, ego cannot manifest, and sickness and suffering cannot happen. Without the presence of the guilt, derived from the premise of real sin, there cannot be any ego or any suffering. In effect, the ego IS the guilt, and the more you reinforce and increase guilt the more you are buying into the insanity.

Without guilt you must be sane. To be without guilt IS sanity because it deprives sin of any reality. To be without sin is forgiveness. You are either guilty or guiltless, unforgiven or forgiven.

"The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body."

"Release from guilt is the ego's whole undoing."

"The holy spirit knows that all salvation is the escape from guilt."

"Without guilt the ego HAS no life, and God's Son IS without guilt."

"WITHOUT guilt, attack is impossible."

"Without guilt there is no scarcity."

"When you have accepted the Atonement for yourselves, you will realize that THERE IS NO GUILT IN GOD'S SON."

"Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. And that is cure indeed."

"Where can guilt be, when the belief in sin is gone? And where is death, when its great advocate is heard no more?" "As long as you believe the Son of God is guilty, you will walk along this carpet, believing that it leads to death." "For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

"From the ego came sin and guilt and death, in OPPOSITION to life and innocence, and to the Will of God Himself." "Wish not to make yourself a living symbol of his guilt, for you will NOT escape the death you make for him, and in HIS innocence you find your own."

"The light of guiltlessness shines guilt away because, when they are BROUGHT TOGETHER, the truth of one MUST make the falsity of its OPPOSITE perfectly clear."

"The veil across the Face of Christ, the fear of God and of salvation, and the love of guilt and death, - they all are different names for just ONE error; that there is a space between you and your brother, kept apart by an illusion of yourself which holds him off from you, and you away from him."

It's not just a matter of me taking back responsibility for everything in life, and then sitting there all by myself.

There is instead a shift away from ego-self and towards being aware of and TRUSTING in God.

It's not just a matter of realizing the cause of things is in my mind, not out there, although that's necessary.

What is cause? It's not just some idea or decision. GOD is cause.

It's also not just a matter of removing blocks to awareness of love. What happens when the blocks are removed? Love/God shows up. And that's no small matter.

I've relied on my intellect, on my ego's abilities, on my separate intelligence, on my self-taught learning. But this is all essentially because I am not depending on God.

Independent thinking... okay... highly overrated. It's actually a substitute for being connected to, trusting in, and having real faith in God.

I'm opening up to a willingness to surrender, and to actually believe and stay unwavering in, a knowing-based trust that God is taking care of things.

It's not God that wavers or fails, it's my selfish ego trying to do everything on its own.

I have to let go. I have to surrender. And I have to stop being the one who has all the truth all gathered up in my separate mind like a big database of information.

Truth as information is a substitute for truth as an experiential relationship with God. It is a substitute for being WITH God, intimately. For being AWARE of God's real presence and communicating with Him and being directed BY Him.

It really boils down to a simple either-or question. Either I trust in my own abilities, or I trust in God. Either I think that I have to control and enforce everything myself, or I let go of the reigns and let God.

And in that trust, in that surrender, it's not that God just sits there idle. To trust that he is taking care of things, that he can heal all situations, requires strong faith and belief and certainty and loyalty. And that also means, knowing that God actually IS taking care of things... even worldly things, even worldly problems.

This is the next stage in the development of trust. I have to learn to step aside and not only 'let God' but actually trust God, believe God, and put aside my own little fears and worries about how God won't help or isn't in charge or can't heal things or whatever.

It's about opening up to relying on God, knowing that God goes with me, allowing God, being intimate with God and allowing myself to be supported BY God. And this has everything to do with working miracles, which REQUIRES faith and firm belief and TRUST in God.

My lack of faith, is what it comes down to. As Jesus says in the course we have placed great faith in the ego, in our own selves, in intelligence and thinking and learning, that we have displaced our faith away from God.

I/we must learn that God really is on our side, really is our partner, that we really are taken care of by Him, that he really can and will do what He says he can and will do, and to trust Him to manage life for us.

It's not just that we are separate from God and have to live in separation and maybe get some input from God once in a while. That isn't the LIFE that we are meant to live. We are meant to team up with God and be loved and united with Him, and actually have Him IN us and working THROUGH us FOR us, without us having to carry the entire weight of the world by ourselves.

How can I trust God unless I am willing to let go of control of life and actually allow Him to do this? How can I trust unless I am 'hands off'?

God repeatedly says to me, "let me". And I did not really understand what this meant. I didn't know if it meant he would do something through me if I did something. I didn't know if it meant he was 'maybe' taking care of something, and then me having no faith in that entering into fear and believing that He wasn't doing anything.

If I don't have trust and faith that God can take care of things, I in effect block God's power and actually do fail to RECEIVE God's blessings.

Anyway.

Today I am grateful and thankful that God HAS delivered, God HAS provided, God IS taking care of situations, and I am not alone any more.

The ego is simply a state of self-attack, taking place within a mind which has become divided against itself.

In this state, part of the mind has disassociated from the other part. There now appear to be two identities.

One identity is consciously identified with as "me" and the other as "not me".

The "not me" self, is very often equated with "the ego". It appears to be the self that we're always blaming and scapegoating, attacking and accusing, thinking of as other people etc.

But the trap there is not realizing who is doing the perceiving of an enemy. The person who sees enemies, AND the enemies themselves, are both two parts of ONE delusional thought system. They are both you.

The ego is not so much "that enemy" or the thing which is against you or your problems etc. It is the attacker and that which is attacked. It is both sides of every war. It is the state of *separation* taking place within yourself, between who you are and this illusion of who you are not.

Separating yourself from God was also an attempt to separate yourself from yourself. This could only create a condition in your mind where your original self remained, and a second self was added. You now think that only the second self is the "bad self", and label it the ego, but it is no more or less the ego than the self which describes it, because your real self was placed with a "persona" that pretends to be who you really are. It is the separation BETWEEN the two fake identities that is the ego.

So basically, if no-one else existed and there was just you and your mind, the entire separation from God would have to be taking place inside of yourself. And any conditions of conflict in which there seems to be wars or threats or enemies, those things MUST be also included inside your own mind. They're not outside of you.

So this is the key - the secret to salvation, that you are doing this to yourself. You have to realize that this so-called "not me", aka "my enemy", actually IS you. It's you who are against yourself, not other people. It's you who are at war with your own self. You do not have any enemies beyond yourself. That "not me" self is just part of your mind and will which you're kind of pretending not to have any control over, as if it's running on autopilot.

You have to therefore learn to recognize, that whatever it is which seems to loom over you with power and a separate will and a sense of threat or causality, making "you" at its effect, is actually your own self doing this to yourself. In other words, it's one disassociated part of your mind attacking the part which you're still associated with. You think it is not you and is attacking you - that's just part of you that thinks you are not you, attacking part of you that thinks it is you.

Truth is, you are not EITHER of these two fake identities. You are not the attacker or the attacked. You are not the victim or the victimizer. You are also not the self who looks upon the "bad enemy" and condemns them. That self is the other half of the ego, and the ego is always attacking itself. You are not the persona who rejects the shadow, and you are not the innocent victim who believes the perpetrator is not their self.

If you could see, that every pain and suffering, every attack, every torture, was actually being administered by a split-off part of your own mind, which you had disowned and disconnected from your sense of "conscious control", or your sense of the scope of your power or the reach of your influence, and if you can learn to recognize it and see yourself actually working "through" it to do things to yourself, then you will realize... you can stop doing that.

You can stop attacking yourself. You can stop hurting yourself. But even moreso, since the self being hurt is not you either, you can realize that you are no longer going to play EITHER role of victim or victimizer, and are going to give up the sense of identity that you were trying to protect from a fake enemy, transcend both of them, heal the *SEPARATION* that was creating them both, and return to a mind of wholeness and oneness.

if you could but see that you do everything to yourself, and get in touch with that choosing and doing, then you would simply realize how futile that is and stop it.

Sometimes you'll find in the day that a song is playing in your mind. It seems to be on autopilot. It can play for hours without you even noticing. And then maybe you notice and can't get it out of your head. But the thing is, it's actually being played by a part of your own mind, a part which is mostly unconscious, and you are just "allowing" it subtly to keep going. When you reclaim that power and recognize, it's YOU who is making this song keep playing in your mind, you reclaim the ability to stop it from playing. And it will stop. Because no-one else was playing that song. It was you.

It's the same thing with any aspect of the ego. You think it's outside of your control, beyond your choosing, disconnected from your influence, outside your power, and separated from "you". Reclaiming and owning that is the key to salvation. Taking back responsibility for everything you are experiencing.

No-one and nothing can happen to you against your will. No-one dies without their own consent. If you do not choose to attack yourself, you will be in capable of experiencing attack. No-one else has the power to go against your will. Your will is as powerful as the Son of God. There is nothing that can cause you other than God. You cannot be at the effect of anything but God (and that's a good thing). It guarantees that you are immortal and invulnerable forever, if you will just stop doing stuff to yourself unconsciously.

If you perceive that someone out there is your enemy, opposition, separate from you or wrong in some way, you absolutely MUST and WILL simultaneously see yourself as under attack and victimized by them.

It doesn't even matter if they actually are doing anything to you or not. Just the mere perception of them as your enemy is enough to force your mind to see ITSELF as THEIR enemy, and therefore a victim of whatever they are doing.

This happens instantaneously as soon as you are tempted to see someone else as being separate, different, worse, more guilty or more at fault than yourself.

So what this means is, by choosing to see someone as an enemy, you automatically make yourself an enemy.

Enemies experience threat and danger. Enemies fear attack. Enemies see themselves as victims. Enemies are driven to become victimizers to then try to defend themselves against that perceived attack.

But who is it that chose to see the other person as an enemy in the first place? You.

So not only did you set yourself to be the opponent of this person or group of people, by choosing to see them as your enemy, but you also set yourself up in a victim role.

Being in a victim role you MUST experience fear, anger, upset, and all manner of negative feelings and perceptions.

You might then think that these feelings are being 'caused by' the enemy. In a way they are, in that IF that person is an enemy and IF you believe they are, it would seem that you think they can and are doing something to you. But, the truth is, that it was YOUR choice to see them as your enemy that simultaneously set you up in a split-mind perception, where you are also their enemy, and therefore you are under attack.

This leads to the ultimate truth.... that you have in fact attacked yourself by attacking the other person. There is no escaping this. Either you are both innocent, or you are both enemies. Either you are both on the same side, or you are opposed to each other. It works both ways. And quite literally, everything you perceive them as capable of doing TO you, YOU are doing to yourself. It's you that is choosing to be in opposition to them, and to yourself, and it's you who has now perceived yourself in the role of victim in relation to the distorted figure you see in them.

So you can be upset about other people if you want to. But it is a *GUARANTEE* that you will victimize yourself. And that also means, if you choose not to see other people as enemies, you will set yourself AND them free.

Those who have no enemies have no fear, no anger, no hate, no danger, and no need to react. Ultimately because you are choosing to be a victim in EVERY victim situation, you are your ONLY victimizer. Once you realize this and stop victimizing yourself, recognizign the total futility of 'doing this to yourself', you will be set free. Free from your own tyrrany.

There is no questioning the truth. There is only One truth and it's God's truth. Opinions are irrelevant.

The truth is factual. It is reality. To question it is to be in denial and confused.

Either you accept the truth or you deny it and pretend that something else is true.

This is the inescapable 'is-ness' of God.

When we're learning to awaken to the truth, we're sifting through our belief that something untrue is true, and are becoming clearer that only God's truth its true.

In accepting that God's truth is true, you are realigning your will with God's will. And that means that what you say will be truth-filled. But it won't be that you're speaking the truth due to being special, or highly intelligent, or having an intellectual grasp.

As the truth is communicated through you and as you make it yours, you are sharing it with God.

You will express it just as though you were a messenger of God, come to deliver and extend His being to others. Like a news reporter who faithfully just tells you what has really happened. You are a medium for communication, an open channel through which truth can be extended and shared.

As such the truth is not information that you acquire on your own, or an accumulation of personal knowledge or skills or abilities. It is not your opinion. The truth is already established permanently and either you choose to accept what it says or you stay in denial.

When you accept what it says, you share in it and join with it. And then you express from it. And it will sound like it's "you" saying some high-level truthful stuff, that you are somehow advanced, but it's really got nothing to do with you. It doesn't reflect on any kind of personal ego advancement or spiritual prowess. There is nothing special about it. It's not your's in isolation.

You share the truth with God, it is His and He is sharing it with you. You then are of service to it and share it with others, but not because you're well learned or special. Just because you've let go of being a special teacher and have become solely a Teacher of God.

Being a Teacher of God means you are teaching God's truth, by God's will, in the way God intended it. It has nothing to do with you developing your own personal special truth or platform or heroic standing or fame or even necessarily any kind of popularity.

To be a Teacher of God is to be sane, to extend the Kingdom, to communicate correctly with Holy Spirit, and to express unconditional love.

The way existence is set up, you're supposed to be completely provided for by God, you're supposed to be connected to His Mind, you're supposed to receive unlimited Power and Love from Him which you extend all the time, and you are so sustained and empowered by this that you feel totally safe and looked after.

As Jesus says, miracles are everyone's right, but when they don't happen, something has gone wrong.

So if the miracles aren't flowing, and the love's not extending, and you're not being sustained by God, and you're disempowered, and you're alone and afraid and feeling weak and vulnerable, it's basically because you're trying to work against the grain. You're trying not to exist.

There's really no other options in this. There's no alternative that works. The options are either:

a) Join with God and be happy and healthy and fulfilled and abundant and joyful forever, or

b) Go off on your own and rely on your own little self to be terrified in an overpowering world of madness, unhappy and certain of death.

There's no other way to access true happiness, health and abundance without God being involved. You can't have the cake and eat it. The ego wants to suggest you can do perfectly fine all by yourself, thank you very much, but it's not true.

There is suffering. There is weakness. There is fear. There is powerlessness. There is degradation and decay. These are not what God wills for you. This isn't how it's designed to work. But you can't be free of these things and simultaneously stay separate from God. It doesn't work. It's the separation from God that cuts you off from all of these good things.

So either you kind of suffer in isolation and eventually seem to die, or you turn to God and open up to eternal life. Seems like a bit of a no-brainer, but we seem to fight it tooth and nail.

Maybe we've just forgotten how good things could be if we were to fully trust God, and think that we're doing pretty fantastic all by ourselves. There's no comparison. As Jesus iterates many times in ACIM, the ego is offering you next to nothing. You're going to be giving up nothing and gaining everything when you go with God's plan. He just wants you to be happy ;-)

P.S. this is sort of sounding borderline judgementalist christianity attitude where people tell you their belief applies to you whether you want it to or not and that you're going to go to hell if you don't fall in line with 'how things are' .... lol.... yes, parallels, but let's get things straight... we will all return to God eventually and God loves unconditionally. So no worries if we delay. We just might be happier if we don't.

ACIM has many statements which really don't make any sense. For example:

"To have all, give all to all."

Let's look at this closely.

In this world, let's say you have a chocolate cake. You follow Jesus's advice. You are attempting to have ALL the cake. So you give ALL the cake to everyone else. The question then is, having done this, and now that everyone else is smiling and full of cake, do YOU have any cake?

The answer is no. If you have given ALL the cake, there is NO cake left.

This is really quite simple and hopefully makes sense to you. In terms of spacetime and all its physical contents, anything that you give you lose. You cannot really share anything. We can't both have the whole pizza. If I want you to have the whole pizza, I'm going to go hungry. If I give you the whole pizza, there will be nothing left. I cannot have ANY of the pizza, if I give ALL of the pizza.

Take another look at what Jesus said: "To have all, give all to all."

Now we have to admit something here. There are two possibilities.

1) Either Jesus is lying and is completely mistaken, because giving all of something leaves you with nothing.

2) Or, Jesus is correct, and knows what he's talking about, and SOMEHOW the LOGIC that we're using isn't working correctly. Or it breaks down and is invalid for use in reference to anything real.

Either Jesus is wrong or the logic is wrong, they can't both be true because they're making opposite claims. So, when you give ALL, do you truly GET all, or do you LOSE all? Is Jesus right or wrong?

What he's implying is that, somehow, when you give EVERYTHING away, you still have everything. How is that even POSSIBLE? Let's say that Jesus is very wise and knows what he's talking about. Let's say that his claim is true and we'll trust it. What does that mean? It means that if HE is right, the LOGIC must be wrong.

Something is wrong with the way the logic proceeds. There is something fundamentally broken about "normal logical reasoning" that is incompatible with what HE says is the truth.

What it implies is that the entire way that we think about things has something wrong with it. The reasoning that we use has something wrong with it. It's somehow fundamentally OPPOSITE to some kind of logic that is needed to properly handle Jesus's claims.

We can't continue to use the same way of thinking, if we hope to understand why or how his claim is true. It can't be true that when you give everything away you end up with nothing. But that's what the logic says. So the logic is faulty. We need some other way to "reason" things out that follows some other kinds of rules.

The truth is that our normal logic is actually based on SEPARATION. It was in the separation that we introduced the idea of "separate parts". And with that, the idea of "many separate things." We think that removing the separation is a matter of removing the many things, but in fact undoing separation really means undoing the entire SYSTEM of logic.

What people doing ACIM may not realize is that we continue to use a logic system of separation when trying to study what ACIM says. And this produces faulty conclusions. Even when you attempt to remove (disguise) the separation by getting rid of all the separations between things, to end up with a count of 1, we are still actually squarely WITHIN the thought system of separation. We've just reduced the number of boxes, instead of transcending the system of boxes.

ACIM presents another kind of thinking and reasoning, which is not compatible with the way we normally think about things. It's based on paralogical reasoning. It's worth your while looking that up and learning about it. In paralogical reasoning it's possible for one thing to be two things, and for two things to be one thing. It's possible for something to be in multiple places at once, and for all of something to be in all places at once. It is a transcendental model of logic.

It is only through transcendental logic that it becomes possible for Jesus's statement to be true. If I give ALL to everyone else, the only way I can still have all of it is if I am INCLUDED in the "everyone else". I have to BE the everyone else in some way, which means I have to transcend the box that separates me off from others. And there has to still BE others in order to "give to all."

So now my sense of who and what I am has to become transcendental. It can't just be that EITHER I am me OR not. It has to be that I am me and I am also something else. I am others and also myself, at the same time. This has to melt borders and transcend boxes. When I ... who am also everything, give all to all, I am giving all to myself, and therefore end up with all. So I do not sacrifice or lose, and OTHERS, who are also part of the all, now gain what I gave them. And now everyone is sharing everything.

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

This is another of those impossible statements. If I were to have everything, normal logic would say that YOU cannot have ANYTHING. There is nothing LEFT for you to have if I have it all. e.g.

"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."

So here Jesus himself is even tipping us off, that in normal logic, if we are to say that one soul/son has everything, for itself, there cannot be anything LEFT for anyone else to have. And he's saying this is NOT the case - that in fact the soul has a miraculous - transcendental quality, which makes is possible for EACH individual soul to have ALL. At the same time. And that is a matter of sharing.

I can have all of God. You can have all of God. We both can have all of God all at once, without contradiction or compromise or sacrifice or loss or taking turns. That makes NO sense in normal logic. But it makes total sense in paralogical reasoning, in which something can be true of two things at once without being a contradiction.

A logic system based on sharing is needed in order to understand Jesus's statements about the nature of reality. You CANNOT use normal logic because it will just polarize and separate and project separation onto reality. The result will be that you'll claim either God is alone or he has a separate son, and neither of those is really true.

It's mind-bending to us because we have to find a way to accept that, it's possible, for two things to be true at once. For God to have an actual real son who is real and individual, but who simultaneously is not separate from God. That you can be one with God ie the father, but that this oneness does NOT mean you are God. That you are still his creation. To be one, and yet to be also two, at the same time, that is the true quality of reality. And that is what Jesus's statements are pointing to.

What makes no sense to the ego, or to separation-based logic, makes total sense in reality. That's because the ego is really nonsense, and its whole logic system is nonsense. It has to be possible that when we give all to all, we still have all. It has to be possible that when ideas are given away and shared, they increase, and are accessed by both persons.

It has to be possible that when I have everything, you can also have everything. It has to be possible that I am myself and I also am the whole Kingdom of God, and all my brothers. It has to be possible that you have brothers permanently, but are also one. And that you can be one with God, without losing yourself. Otherwise Jesus is telling a whole bunch of lies. Like he says, the father is GREATER than you, so you ARE NOT his equal, so you cannot just disappear into him at the loss of your soul. You have to be able to be one with God AND be yourself. Two, AND one.

"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.""

Reality's true nature is that it is one and many at the same time. This is not something that a lot of people are comfortable with. The EGO's way of thinking has told them that reality has to be ONLY one thing, with no parts or aspects or divisions or separations, which might hint at "bad evil separation" happening. But the presence of divisions at the SAME TIME AS the presence of oneness, is entirely natural. It is only when you remove the oneness aspect of that, that you end up with "only many", which is duality.

God is a creator with many parts and every part of God is one with all of God. And each of God's creations is a son of God, a member of the sonship and part of his Kingdom. Each of them is a co-creator and has their own creations, who in turn are co-creators with them. Heaven therefore includes a great many created things, all of which are "many in number", while simultaneously being ONE in number. BOTH one AND many. That is paralogical reasoning. That is what ACIM is based on and it's what we have to learn if we want to understand how it makes any sense at all.

"Heaven is the sum of all God's thoughts, in number infinite."

"The Kingdom of God includes all his children and their creations."

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