<3 “Change", is the idea that Eternity has STOPPED being what it was, it has been destroyed, it has been replaced by something that did not exist, which also will be replaced by an upcoming denial of what is. Anything that changes is NOT REAL. Anything that changes is NOT OF GOD. Changes, which require time and space, are not reality.

"What is timeless IS ALWAYS THERE, because its BEING is eternally changeless."

"He does not teach, because His Creations are changeless."

"Reality is changeless."

"Your brother has a changelessness in him beyond appearance and deception both."

"For that is changeless, and has no effects which anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal BECAUSE they change."

"Reality is changeless."

"BECAUSE reality is changeless is a miracle already there to heal all things that change"

"And when He has appeared to you, you will be certain you are like Him, for He is the changeless in your brother AND in you."

"But do not give it power to replace the changeless in him in your sight of him."

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen."

"Nothing is asked of you but to ACCEPT the Changeless and Eternal that abide in him, for YOUR Identity is there."

"Yet nothing in the world of dreams remains without the hope of change and betterment, for here is NOT where changelessness is found."

"This in no way contradicts the changelessness of mind as GOD created it."

"You are recognizing the changeless mind in your brother by perceiving that he could NOT have changed his mind."

"If YOU see only the changeless in him, you have not really changed him at all."

"Then ACCEPT His decision, for it is indeed changeless, and refuse to change your mind about YOURSELF."

"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom."

"Teaching aims at change, but God created ONLY the changeless. The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a failure in communication."

"It is impossible that God lose His identity, for if He did, YOU WOULD LOSE YOURS. And BEING yours, He cannot change Himself, for your identity IS changeless. The miracle ACKNOWLEDGES His changelessness, by seeing His Son as he always was, and NOT as he would make himself."

"And YOU are Its effects, as changeless and as perfect as Itself."

"His Will does not vacillate, being changeless forever."

"Perception changes, MADE to take the place of changeless knowledge."

"Here is the opposite of God proclaimed as lord of all creation, stronger than God's Will for life, the endlessness of love and Heaven's perfect, changeless constancy."

"Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within Themselves, for They are everywhere."

"The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God."

"You are still My holy Son, forever innocent, forever loving and forever loved, as limitless as your Creator, and completely changeless and forever pure."

"Yet love must be forever like itself, changeless forever, and forever WITHOUT alternative."

Change the world? Well. As it turns out, its not possible to immediately materialize changes with the mind, unless of course you are more spiritually advanced. In this world, all things tend to be governed by the ego laws, and everything is difficult. To bring about any kind of alteration requires effort and a lot of time. A lot of work. You have to go through the proper channels and processes and plans and all the steps that it takes to go from idea to creation. It's a very long, laborious, slow process, no matter what you do.

Such a scenario is unnatural. It is our God-given ability to create life in an instant just by willing it. But in this world we've become severely limited, stripped of our powers seemingly and able only to affect change through physical brute force. Someone somewhere has to use the tools or move the objects. And then that leads to entire segments of activity like skills, the arts, craftsmanship, construction and assembly etc, all the efforts we make to "make stuff happen". To bring about a change. Long and slow and effortful and difficult and fraught with problems.

I thought it was maybe just me, some failure on my part or some inability to get things done. Or some procrastinating attitude. But really the difficulty and hurdles are built into spacetime. It's just the nature of the place. We literally made things difficult for ourselves and embedded orders of difficulty into just about everything. And now either you just do nothing and be a lazy bum or you are going to have to put in effort and struggle to make anything happen. And then this struggle is spiritualized and lauded as a valuable thing in its own right. And those who make bigger waves or create within the confines of the laws of spacetime become idol worshipped.

Change... on this level, is not an easy thing. And any amount of "getting stuff done" or trying to bring about a goal, takes a lot of constant efforting and striving and expenditure and loss and frustration. Those who become good at it can turn shit into money. Those who are bad at it end up with few abilities and a lot of limitations and poverty. And all of it is an attempt to "make something" out of the world and convert it into something else, some kind of magical transformation to some supposedly better more desirable form. Because otherwise it's a turd waiting to be polished.

So excuse me while I just take a lazy break from efforting and accomplishing, and just sit back and laugh at how broken the world has always been.

"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur. The miracle, therefore, has a unique function, and is motivated by a unique Teacher, Who brings the laws of another world to this one. The miracle is the one thing you can do that TRANSCENDS order, being based, NOT on differences, but on equality. Miracles are NOT in competition, and the number that you can do is LIMITLESS. They can be simultaneous and legion. This is not difficult to understand, once you conceive of them as possible at all. "

You may believe that you need to get love from someone important. Maybe a spouse or a friend or a child or parent.

But this love that you think you need from them, is a substitute for the love of God.

Your attempt to need or depend on their love is a way for you to claim that you need to get love from outside of yourself, because you lack it, because God doesn't love you.

You'll be upset about how your need for love is not fulfilled by others, and why they are supposed to fulfill it, and why you feel so lost and empty because of their failure to do so.

But this so-called "need" that you have, is really your own belief and assertion that you're not lovable, an attempt to avoid being loved by God, and a way to hide from love.

The external seeking for that love when then look like a really deep desire to be loved and to want love, but it's really in truth a cover-up for an attempt to not want love to be inside of you.

So long as someone else is tasked with providing love for you, and so long as you keep them in that role, you are in denial and are trying to stop yourself from being actually loved.

You do not need other people to love you. You do not need to get special love from them.

Your "need" is a belief in, a choice for, and attempt to bring about, a lack of love, because it's part of your ego's defense against God. For it to then seem to yearn for love externally is a fake motivation, a cover-up story, to pretend to desire love very strongly, as a way to always move away from where love really is.

This so-called "need" for love is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that as soon as it's put into place, it stops love from being present. It's an avoidance of love, and an assertion that love does not exist. To then proceed to seek for love based on this is to guarantee you will not find it. "Seek and do not find" is your ego's primary mandate.

The only way you are going to experience love is to let all those people off the hook, to stop expecting or needing them to be the ones to love you, to recognize they themselves need love because they are resisting God, and that you need to get your love directly from God within. And the only way to do that is not to fulfill your need for love, but to get rid of your neediness because it's actually what's blocking you from love's presence.

You need to instead open up to accept and allow God to love you directly, to receive it, to experience it, to let it be true, and to be filled up with it from the inside. It means dropping your belief that you can't be loved or that it's someone else's job to do so. You need to learn to love yourself, and in so doing, allow God to love you also.

It's God's love that you really want. It's God's love that is the only real love, anyway.

Everything about most religions is fairly accurate in that it describes what's happening INSIDE THE DREAM. They describe what APPEARS to be true here.

It SEEMS that sin is real, it SEEMS that therefore God will judge and condemn us, it SEEMS that death can be justified, and it SEEMS that we can never be with God again.

The key point is, there is a chunk of metaphysical truth regarding what happened BEFORE the separation, before the dream, which frames the entire dream in a different light. And this chunk of truth, missing from religions, is extremely key in putting everything into its proper perspective.

Recognizing that Heaven is real, God is unconditional love, separation is impossible, and the innocent cannot sin, would have to tell you that the entire content of the dream and everything that goes along with it is not REAL. It is impossible.

But without that key fact, if you only look at what seems true within the dream, after the illusion of separation, it starts to seem quite sensible to conclude the exact opposite. You'll then say that sin is real, death is real, God has vengeance, you need to repent of real sins, etc.

The religion then becomes all about this fiction of having "actually sinned", and what you need to do to atone for it. And ultimately within that same idea, there MUST be also the idea that only death can atone for sin. And so the religion, while seeming to uphold moral values and lead towards love, also inadvertently supports death.

Descriptions of what seems real in a dream can only ever be opposite to the truth.

This is the one key area in which A Course in Miracles is different, because it explains what happened BEFORE separation or what conditions were like, such that the entire content of the dream is clearly RECOGNIZED as being false, unreal, untrue and impossible. It gives us the clarity to see that everything within the dream is an ILLUSION, not a reality.

This puts an entirely different spin on everything we perceive here. It totally reverses the illusion of the meaning of what seems to happen, or all the conclusions that have been drawn from appearances. The proper framing of everything that goes on in the dream world puts everything into its correct place and perspective, recognizing the real truth for what it is, and recognizing the illusion as an illusion. Failure to do this, or the deliberate "omission" of this key foundation at the core of truth, makes the entire content of the dream suddenly twist to a completely opposite and confused explanation of events.

Only a truth based on completely pure non-duality can explain and properly frame why and how everything within the dualistic world is false and unreal. Otherwise if you stop just short of awakening from the dream, or you stop just beneath the peak of the dream's heights, it will make the dream seem to be real and you will not wake up from it. This is why those religions ultimately keep people asleep. They are religions of the ego, based in the ego's thought system, worshipping the ego's God of death.

Death can't be true and separation can't be true and sin can't be true because God only creates eternal innocent life. If the absolute truth remains hidden, all true meaning is lost and insanity begins to seem sane.

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning." UrW132L4

Some people regard this world as something negative, some as something positive. But the course regards it as NOT SOMETHING AT ALL. It acknowledges that the world is NOTHING, and the body is NOTHING.

It also acknowledges that when we think that it is SOMETHING, we will give it attributes and meaning that it does NOT have, and believe that it does have them inherently. This means we are deceived, because we are PROJECTING things onto a nothingness and seeing the projection AS IF it is there.

It's important to understand what NOTHINGNESS means. It does not mean negative, or positive. It does not mean meaningful, or meaningless as in the sense of it being a something that is depressing. It is not good or evil. It is not holy or corrupt. It is not really anything. It has NO ATTRIBUTES, no labels, no categories, no types, nothing. Like a void.

"Recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones. It represents a situation in which God and the ego "challenge" each other as to whose meaning is to be written in the empty space which meaninglessness provides. The ego rushes in frantically to establish its own "ideas" there, fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own unreality. And on this alone it is correct." UrW132L2

The world, the physical world, matter, spacetime, all flesh and bones bodies, the whole system, is NOTHINGNESS, pretending to be something. It's only seeming to be something because we keep projecting stuff onto it.

"What is the ego? Nothingness, but in a form that seems like something." UrU3A2

It is also true then that a "nothing world" acts like a mirror. A mirror is something which has NO ATTRIBUTES of its own. It has no inherent image, no inherent meaning, no inherent anything. It just REFLECTS, indirectly, seeming images and forms and meanings PROJECTED ONTO it from something once removed from it. In other words, what it seen in the mirror is not first hand reality, it is second-hand.

And then that projecting thing sees the REFLECTION of what was projected in the mirror, as feedback in consciousness, and thinks it is THERE. As if it is "in the mirror", part of the mirror. But confusing what is seen in a mirror for the THING that is reflected there, is a mistake.

"Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego." UrE14E5

"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth." UrT18B3

Earth - spacetime, physical matter, bodies etc. ... can REFLECT, because these things are NOTHING IN THEMSELVES. They can reflect whatever you put ONTO them. You can project hellish ideas of sin and guilt onto them, and will then see that IN the mirror, as though part of the mirror. You can project heavenly ideas of love and peace onto them, and you will see that reflected in the mirror also, as though part of the mirror.

But when we confuse what is REFLECTED with the fact that we require a MIRROR in order to have a reflection, and the reflected thing is confused for BEING the mirror, we are lost in the mirror of perception. And now we think that the world IS this, or IS that. That if we project sin onto it is IS sinful. And if we project love onto it it IS love. And if we give it reality it IS real. This is a mistake. This is someone not recognising that they are looking in a mirror, and NOT at an objective reality. Whatever they PUT there to see, they see, and there is nothing else to see. If they walk away, the world is gone.

"Projection makes perception; the world you see is what you GAVE it, nothing more than that." UrT21A1

"The world can give you ONLY what you gave it, for being nothing but your own projection, it HAS no meaning apart from what you found in it, and placed your faith in." UrT13C3

"The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world. YOU CAN DECIDE TO SEE IT RIGHT. What you MADE of it is NOT its reality, for its reality is only what you GAVE it." UrT11H10

"Perception is a mirror, not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind reflected outward." UrW304L1

So what we have to realize is, whether you're seeming to work with an evil hateful dangerous nasty world, or you're seeming to work with what seem like a benevolent lovely forgiven world, you are working with a REFLECTION IN A MIRROR, not an ACTUAL FACT.

The truth is, that there is no world there. There is ONLY your projection. You are seeing what you put there to see. That is hardly objective. In fact it is completely subjective, and the world has NO objective reality or truth of its own.

This means that in order to awaken from it, we have to learn to project "happier things" onto the mirror, so that it seems to reflect a "happier dream" to us, and we can seem to pull out of it aspects which seem to REFLECT heaven's nature. So that we'll be more prepared psychologically to move on to a realm of heaven where what we experience is NOT a reflection but an ACTUAL reality.

"Those who have learned to offer ONLY healing, because of the reflection of holiness in them, are ready at last for Heaven. There, holiness is not a reflection, but rather the ACTUAL CONDITION of what was but reflected TO them here." UrT14E8

So fundamentally, planet earth, every particle of matter, all energies, all of space and time, the whole galaxy and 'universe', is all part of a MIRROR. It is a mirror because it is NOTHING REAL and is a meaningless world. We PROJECT ONTO this world what we want to see IN it, and see it reflected. This is ONLY possible because the world HAS NOTHING OF ITS OWN, because it is nothing at all and doesn't really exist.

Recognising that the mirror reflects only what you put there to see, leads to the recognition that the world IS a mirror, and IS NOT a thing in its own right. That there is no world there other than your wishes projected outward from within. You are having a dream, making up a subjective "reality", hallucinating what you want to see, and are inventing meanings for a world that isn't there.

The ultimate teaching therefore is that THERE IS NO WORLD. Not that the world is transformed, or kept, or ascended, or turned into heaven, or made to be ANYTHING. IT cannot BE anything because it is a NOTHING. Mirrors don't have identities. Mirrors don't have their own nature. Mirrors have no substance of their own, no attributes, nothing. You thought you saw a world in a mirror for a while, and were deceived. It is not there. Only heaven exists.

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real. Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came. There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly." UrW132L4

"To see a SINLESS body is impossible. For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless. As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth." UrT20H4

"The body that is asked to be a god WILL be attacked, because its nothingness has not been recognized. And so it seems to be a thing with power IN ITSELF. As something, it CAN be perceived, and thought to feel and act, and hold you in its grasp as prisoner to itself. And it CAN fail to be what you demanded it to be. And you WILL hate it for its littleness, unmindful that the failure does not lie in that it is not MORE than it should be, but ONLY in YOUR failure to perceive that it is nothing. Yet its nothingness IS your salvation, from which you would flee." UrT29C9

"The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment. The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be." UrM15A2

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came." UrU5A4

I have made a pretty big mistake with ACIM, and maybe you are doing the same. Sorry this is a bit long and rambly, I'm still coming to terms with it....

I always believed that the goal in ACIM was awakening to the awareness of God's presence, which was some kind of a singular state of being. As I read and worked with the Course it at first seemed plausible that every reference to 'what truth is like', or the high-level metaphysics, all described a single absolute state of being/mind.

I felt confused by some of the interpretations of this that other people were expressing because it seemed there was a level of truth deeper or 'more true' than what most other people were understanding. So I felt I needed to go deeper into re-reading it and re-learning what it has to say. So I started reading the urtext. And I actually learned a lot, much of which made me question what the status quo understanding was on many topics. I polished and refined my grasp of what the truth really meant, all still within this idea of 'there is only one kind of awakening', like, either you are totally doing it perfectly or you're kidding yourself.

I even saw how some people who claim to be awake were still falling short of what I believed that should really entail. I always felt a certain faith in Jesus and his example, and never could see anyone matching up to that. Yet I felt that in the Course it does directly speak to the kind of total mastery that he demonstrated. This included the ability to heal all sickness, raise the dead, have total mastery over illusions, be capable of changing form, of appearing as any kind of a body, absolute invulnerability (literally), not dying simply because you choose not to etc. I had Jesus practically flying around the room.

The thing is, all of the metaphysics in ACIM seemed to point to this potential and it made total logical sense to me that we "should" be able to wield total power over all illusions. Just like Jesus. So I had in my mind this kind of very high-level 'goal', which was very lofty, which I thought we were meant to strive to achieve. That was my idea of what it means to be fully awake, and anything short of that was not it. I felt frustrated that some people were saying they were awake and yet were clearly not demonstrating Jesus's level of mastery, and so of course that led to judgement but also confusion. Why was the Course saying one thing and then other things were happening? Why were people not matching up to Jesus's level and how is it possible there (obviously) has been an awakening of some kind in some people and yet they still can't raise the dead? The Course clearly spoke of some extremely high-level truths and implications which nobody seemed to be getting.

Well. As it turns out, the Course actually encompasses several "levels" of metaphysics. I had no idea of this, so I was always lumping everything together as a kind of super-level and then trying to attain that. I had no idea about this until Michael Murray started to bring forward this information about "the levels", or rather, the timing of me stumbling upon his videos and being ready to listen. Basically, there is much more going on than it appears, and without this extra information you'll make the huge mistakes I've made.

In very brief summary... this physical universe is only one of several levels or dimensions of the dream of separation. These dimensions are all states of mind but they also, to our senses, appear to be 'places' which have entire universes of their own. The physical universe is the lowest level. Above this there is a "spiritual universe" which is also the level at which the Holy Spirit resides. You might've heard it referred to also as the astral plane or similar. These levels are btw somewhat referred to in Hinduism and some other religions and you might be more familiar with them if you are "new age". Anyway.. above "level 2" the Holy Spirit's mind, there is a level 3 where our "higher self" resides, and also this is where angels seem to exist, the akashic records, and also this is where "the sonship" is - as separate higher selves. Above this level there is a fourth level which is the level of Christ where the sonship is ONE. Jesus 'the higher self' was the first to transcend the previous level and unify as Christ. Then above this level is Heaven - God.

Ok so... here's what I did totally wrong and this is where my spiritualizing ego got totally screwed up, and this is also probably where you are doing the same. Clearly, because there are levels to the dream beyond the physical, there are effectively different levels of awakening. This also means there are different levels of 'capability' and mastery (someone at level 3 does not have mastery over level 3 because to do that you must be on level 4). Also because of these levels, there are certain "capabilities" that are only possible at certain levels and there are certain 'parts' of the Course that are directly related to certain levels, e.g. the 'real world 'is a very high level thing (and nothing to do with the physical world). This also reveals that the Course itself 'speaks' on many different levels, in other words, in relation to different dimensions of the dream and different universes where the experience is on a whole different level. Truths which apply on one level totally superceded stuff on the levels below, so as we ASSUME that all of this is just ONE BIG LEVEL, or 'the one goal', we get really messed up and confused about what's being asked of us.

Also because of these levels, typically in order to go "up" the levels you need to go in sequence. You can't just jump to the 5th level or just pop into heaven when you're still down at level 1. And pretty much most of us are on level 1, me included. So here's the huge mistake I made.

In assuming there were no levels, and lumping them all together, and in becoming aware of the Christ-level truths in the Course, I created for myself an extremely lofty Christ-level goal, comparable to Jesus. Because I can see the parts of the Course which DO speak of/from this level (all of the course comes from the Christ level but speaks OF or as-if from other levels also), this 'highest truth' level became my concept of "the only level" or "what awakening means".

So I was basically down here on level 1, with my big ego, and trying to BYPASS all the way up to the Christ level in one straight shot. I wanted to embody and encompass ALL of the characteristics of Christ, in a kind of all-or nothing grand-master-of-the-universe power-over-everything ultra-mastery i-can-fly-around-the-room-if-i-like-and-there's-nothing-you-can-do-about-it sort of ideal. Anything short of this was "not good enough". So now I had this hugely lofty "should" or how I am supposed to be, or what I'm supposed to get to, or what I need to realize etc. And this also included this HUGE burden of 'what I am responsible for'... as if I caused the entire universe and everything in it, all by my little ego level-1 self, which is NOT true.

Having this extremely lofty goal of "be Christ", bypassing all of the levels that are REQUIRED to go THROUGH in order to get there, put an ENORMOUS BURDEN on my shoulders. A huge weight of guilt at falling short and not even barely being able to accomplish it. And believe me I tried, really hard. I even attained some small ability to bring about healing through Holy Spirit, some of the time, in small amounts. And I KNEW that the parts of the Course that speak of the Christ-level were true. So this kept me dangling from a thread, chasing after this carrot of perfection and power, but falling way short. All this did was put PRESSURE on me (and my wife) to match up to this enormous responsibility which is far beyond what 'I' (level 1 me) am actually capable of. Yes my Christ self IS capable of such things, but that's way above where I'm at or can even GET TO or ACCESS from where I'm at.

The truth is that we are only really capable of going from level 1 to level 2. The first awakening. Some people bypass this and jump to level 3 but only in extreme rare circumstances. The rest of us can only, and are only really asked to, go from level 1 to level 2, which in Course terms meaning letting go of the persona and shadow and aligning with Holy Spirit's mind and letting go of the *physical* world level. This lets us be in the "spiritual universe", or to move up from there. But we can't just jump to the top, especially not WITH the ego. And that's what we're all trying to do - a huge spiritual bypass in which our ego gets to try to be Christ.

So this is a blow to the ego. Here's little me down in level 1 world believing that I'm oh-so-spiritual, advanced, getting ready to graduate, believing that I'm more spiritual than others, and finding out that I actually am probably on this level BECAUSE I am still on level 1. Hah. Not level 2 or 3 or 4 or 5... level 1. Sucks! lol ... BUT the freedom comes from this realization..... you don't need to try to be Christ. You don't need to even try to be the higher self or to jump up to that level. You ONLY need to get to level 2 - the Holy Spirit's mind. So this somewhat lets you off the hook.

It means that you can drop all of huge expectation that you're putting on yourself to be Christ-like. It means you can stop trying to raise the dead or expect yourself to be able to. I have to tell you, I recently got a 'sty' in my eye and it was sort of infected and stuff, unsightly and uncomfortable, and I really dug DEEP into possible causes and unforgivenesses in attempt to heal it, because I was really convinced I was SUPPOSED to be able to just 'make it go away' with my mind. I did some healing, yes, but the dam fucker did not change. It didn't just disappear. So this was a blow to the spiritual ego, which thought it had to be Jesus-like or that it could. And I had to accept I just cant do that. Fuck it.

But this is really a relief. It's a huge relief to realize that you do not have to "try" to be christ. You do not have to be responsible for stuff that is in "the script" - a script written by and powered by a mind far huger than yours is now. You don't have to try to be this dead-raising master. You don't have to turn water into wine or be some extraordinary guru. You're not capable of that until probably the 5th dimensional awakening. You don't have to blame yourself for all the shit that comes from the unconscious mind that you are not consciously choosing, as if it's all your fault. You don't have to own every single little thing that happens as if, just by it happening, it proves that you SUCK and that you're a total course failure. You don't have to keep beating yourself up for "not doing the course right" ie not matching up to the kind of capabilities that you pretty much CANNOT accomplish until you ARE at the Christ level, which is not going to happen until you've at least gone through 2 or 3 other levels of awakening.

So there's all this huge weight of guilt and expectation that we've all been putting on ourselves because we're all trying to live up to this extraordinary goal of being Christ when, in fact, from this level 1, we can only really be expected to get to level 2. It's true that there is no world and its just a dream and that the Christ mind can create planets... ok... but little me, little you... at level 1, no, there isn't going to be any planets getting made. So that's not something you can be responsible for. We have this hugely inflated spiritual ego (ok, speaking for myself, but I bet you do too) that's trying to claim the "power" of being Christ while still being very limited and incapable.

We have to stop putting level 3/4/5+ realities and responsibilities and powers onto our shoulders as level 1 ego folks and stop expecting ourselves to live up to this hugely lofty standard. WE have to accept that we are NOT at the level of Jesus and probably very few people are going to be. We have to accept that even the best of the best of the ACIM teachers aren't even at that level. Not even the enlightened gurus and yogis necessarily at that level. All we need to do is do our SIMPLE job of forgiveness and development of trust in Holy Spirit and come into his mind and accept his truth and his way of perceiving. The other levels and the potency and power of those other levels will follow on from there naturally as the 'next steps'. But we can't just bypass and jump to those steps. And we have to admit we've been doing this, our spiritualized egos are about to POP, and we can take a big sigh of relief that we're NOT supposed to expect such huge things of ourselves.

This should relieve us of all the guilt, all the sense of failure, all of the exasperation at not getting it, all of the fear and guilt and frustration that we have to accomplish Christ-level capabilities otherwise we're going to die, etc. We have to strip it all back. Let go of the highest goals. Focus on the NEXT step which is just getting to level 2 - Holy Spirit's level, and letting go of the idea that our LEVEL 1 EGO is EVER going to be capable of being at the Christ level, LET ALONE even level 2. And yet it's trying. It's been trying hard this whole time to live up to some kind of universe-creating mega goal. It loves to. Even though it's a total failure at it. So we can at least admit, we don't have to think of ourselves as total failures any more because we were never meant to be level-5 ego's to begin with.

All this comes from the clarity that the Course contains levels, that we're on level 1 trying to get to level 2, and that everything else is irrelevant. Yes at some point we will create planets but not today. First things first. One step at a time. We're getting ahead of ourselves and our expectation and fear of not being able to match up to the high-level truths is, thankfully, not even being asked of us right now.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

When you first perceive that someone has something wrong with them, is sick or suffering in some way, and this strikes you as real, you will have a reaction.

Your reaction will be part of what you have put in place in your mind, because both what you see in the other as sickness and your reaction to it coexist in a single split-minded dynamic.

You will react to what you've shown yourself, believing it. If it is real to you, you will be horrified and upset and will want to stop the suffering as if that will solve your upset, but the other person's suffering isn't the cause of your upset - your split minded perception is.

You will want for the person to be free of this pain or sickness or situation. You think that if you solve that, your own upset will go away, but it won't. You will then automatically start trying to fix them and change them and even force them to be different.

Your attempts to fix them will then compel you a great deal and produce a lot of what seems like a genuine desire to help, a motivation to research and figure out and find solutions. You can get into that quite deeply.

You will convince yourself that you are being caring, that you just want to help the person, are trying to heal them, want to take away their hurt and save them.

But what you don't realize is that you're doing all this as a reaction to something you perceived which frightened you and upset you. You think that your response is based in helpfulness and selflessness but it's really a selfish reaction to what you showed yourself and what you saw in the person.

Your use of them entailed you seeing truth within their sickness, believing their sickness to be real, showing yourself their illusion of sickness as though it is the truth and is really happening. That is actually an attack on your part. That is you using the opportunity to imprison them by holding these perceptions as true of them, maintaining the sickness and keeping it.

Your efforts later to get rid of the sickness, as extremely caring as they may appear to be, are actually an egoic cover-up to the fact that you are keeping the sickness in place, have attacked the person with the sickness by agreeing with it, and some part of you actually wants them to be sick.

The truth can be upsetting to admit to. Shocking isn't it, that you thought you were just trying to help and care about them and in fact you were hurting them, contributing to their suffering and keeping them imprisoned.

All you've been doing this whole time is rebounding off your own false, erroneous perception, which showed you an illusion of sickness as though it was God's given truth, which must be horrifying if sickness is the truth, and then were attempting to get rid of that as though it was in the person and not in your own mind. The making-real of what you thought was in the person, was just a projected portion of your of mind attacking itself.

If you admit to this then you will learn to stop trying to fix and heal and correct and help and solve the person's problem, because in REAL truth they do NOT have a problem. You do. YOU are upset about what you see. YOU are upset about what appears to be a real suffering. IF it were real, your upset would be justified indeed. But it's not. You are mistaken. And that means that all your attempts to help based on keeping it real and believing it's truly happening, are actually counter-attacks and are NOT forms of healing.

So all this time you thought you were trying to help, you were hurting, agreeing with what the person believes about themselves, and holding them captive to their own suffering. Your failure to UNDO their sickness is an attack. Your failure to see through and overlook the illusion of their sickness - which is not REAL sickness (it doesn't exist), is actually an attack. Since you did not forgive, you must have judged, and judgement is condemnation.

If you can admit this to yourself and collapse this whole illusory response to a misperception, you will stop trying to fix and solve the person based on what is "really happening to them." It's a false reaction, because it's not TRUE that something is really happening to them. Their sickness is an illusion, not a reality. Their immortal self is NOT threatened. There is no real danger. Life isn't under attack. Only by perceiving and believing as such do you support life and set your brother free from their imprisonment.

Once you admit you were only reacting to your own upset, because of what seemed like a really deep "genuine" feeling of caring and wanting to help and make everything better, you will see that this desire to help is really an illusion. It's part of the ego. As supportive as it SEEMS, it is not helping at all. It is just your own emotional upset flaring up into a nightmare and causing you to go on the offensive trying to solve everything that doesn't exist. Pretty funny actually.

When this denial has been undone, you are now more clearly confronted with a greater degree of truth about the situation. Your challenge now is to ACTUALLY FORGIVE what you see, to not believe in it, to truly UNDO it, by correcting your mind and offering this correction to your brother. Your lack of support for their belief that they are sick will be healing, helping to guide them towards the truth that will set them free.

Now you can be TRULY HELPFUL, by offering a miracle of forgiveness and coming from real love, which isn't a love that enters into FALSE EMPATHY. False empathy means you are believing in the suffering of others and agree with it and therefore are attacking them and yourself with it by joining in it with them. That isn't helping you or them. True empathy means representing God, genuinely, offering miracles of love, and shining a light for your brother to see.

There are parts of the Course describing miracles where it says that they shine a light to reveal all the ways that we are in error. It doesn't necessarily do anything but it reveals how we are in fear and let's us see that clearly so that we can recognize illusions and thus make them disappear. It points the way to the truth.

We must learn to OVERLOOK the appearance of sickness, instead of reacting to it. We must learn not to believe our eyes or think that this is proof. We must recognize our own ego reactions based on our own nightmare of hallucinating that sickness contains the truth. Sickness is always an illusion and if we're not recognizing that we will become upset and try to attack it with "help". That is not forgiveness and it is not healing or helpful. Such helpfulness is hurtful.

Strangely, you will become more loving and truly compassionate when you are not having your own gigantic mega reaction to someone's plight. You'll be more present and available and productive and constructive. You'll be able to truly help them and support them, rather than making it all real and going on a rollercoaster ride. It's not easy. The ego has lots of traps up its sleeves and this is one of the big ones.

You might be trying to deny that God exists because you believe that you can ACTUALLY pull it off. You think you can actually get rid of God.

God is permanent and will always exist. But you attempt to prove that God is impermanent.

This can absolutely never work. God is permanent. God will never be impermanent.

This is what your entire life in the world is about. Your every effort to be separate. Your whole campaign against God. Your attempt to deny Him and everything He created (which includes you). This is all because you think one day, somehow, you will prove once and for all, that death of permanence CAN be accomplished, and that you actually HAVE sinned.

Sorry to tell you this, but, .... what is permanent cannot, by definition, ever be impermanent, and can never, ever, ever, ever die. And what is innocent CANNOT SIN.

The ego might've forgotten to tell you that one little technicality.

So go ahead and keep trying to die, all you like. You won't achieve it.

At best you might experience what looks like death, which will be just a temporary transition.

Since it's not possible to die, the ego HAS to have you whisked away to some other dimension when you die to create the illusion that 'you're gone', which is all smoke and mirrors, because it's not actually capable of killing you. Ever. Because you're permanent.

The game is up.

It is futile.

You cannot win.

You cannot make God be dead.

You cannot destroy yourself.

Maybe it's time to surrender and give up this fight? And... why not just stop denying that God loves you and actually LET HIM love you? Why not RECEIVE what is being offered? You'll be far happier.

Maybe it's time to drop the whole charade of trying to prove you can't be loved. It will never work. Nothing can act against the will of God and it's Gods will that you be lovable forever.

You CAN'T make death real.

You CAN'T be separate from God.

You CAN'T succeed in what you are trying to do, ever.

So maybe its time to give up and let go of all of this effort to destroy yourself, which will never work, and just let God love the heck out of you. I know I know... that would be like, something you have to suffer through and do begrudgingly right? Like being kissed by your grandma? lol

You can be loved. There is NO POINT denying it.

But will you admit it and let it happen or just keep stubbornly refusing - insanely refusing - trying to keep asserting that it's actually possible to be dead?

You are permanent.

Here is a perfect ACIM quote: "Failure is all about you while you seek for goals that cannot be achieved. You look for permanence in the impermanent; for love where there is none; for safety in the midst of danger; immortality within the darkness of the dream of death. Who could succeed where contradiction is the setting of his searching, and the place to which he comes to find stability?"

Upon entering the separation, we immediately entered into states of suffering. This happened because we rejected our wholeness. By choosing to believe we could be separate from God, in the fall of man, we were choosing not to be the whole of who and what we are.

We rejected our wholeness and wanted to be partial. We started to believe in lack. We saw ourselves as special and wanted to hoard some things for ourselves selfishly, meaning that we also wanted to be deprived of what others had. We introduced this depravation and suffering into our own minds.

"If you will accept yourself as God created you, ***you will be incapable of suffering.*** But to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father IS the ***acknowledgment of yourself as you ARE***. Your Father created you ***wholly*** without sin, ***wholly*** without pain, and ***wholly without suffering of any kind***. If you deny Him, ***you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind***, because of the power He gave it. "

This meant that upon the very instant of beginning to enter into separation, in the fall, we introduced suffering into our own minds. This suffering is nothing more than the seeming lack of wholeness. Simply by rejecting wholeness, we placed our minds in every conceivable condition that you might think of as suffering.

For example, all of "the separated ones", by rejecting their whole identity, actually came to be uncertain whether they really exist. They rejected their souls and began to experience a tremendous uncertainty about whether they were even real, or even existed at all. This is because we rejected our Father, and therefore rejected the belief that we had been CREATED. So this brings with it a fear of not existing (fear of death).

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in your mind that it may even doubt whether you really exist at all."

Also in the separation, by trying to be partial and special and not whole, we introduced the idea of lack and scarcity. We saw ourselves as lacking, or being less than whole. This alone lays the foundation for feelings of inadequacy, shame, unworthiness, weakness, fear of not having what it takes, a desire to hide, powerlessness, deprivation, scarcity, lack of abundance, fear of loss, constant anxiety about being overcome, and perpetual stress.

"Today's idea will eventually overcome completely the sense of loneliness and abandonment which all the separated ones experience.""Recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones."

So by going into the separation, we immediately placed ourselves into suffering states. It's not like something in life happened to cause the suffering. It's not about some event taking place on a timeline. It's not about people doing stuff to us on a Tuesday. It all began and has its deepest roots in the separation from God itself. That's where it all started.

Your sense of suffering, lack, unworthiness, inadequacy, fear etc, can be compounded, and seem to increase or decrease, based on reactions to life events and so on. But fundamentally it isn't the world that's making you suffer, or any specific person, or any even major event. It's the separation from God. It's the lack of wholeness in your mind. It's the rejection of your soul. That's what's making you suffer, and that is the core root of ALL suffering. Which as the secret of salvation tells you, YOU are doing to yourself.

This really is also the source of all sickness and death. By believing that we are not as God created us, we reject eternal life, and believe in death. By seeing ourselves as unsufficient, a failure, lacking, unprepared, incapable, disabled, broken, etc, we form an image of ourselves as a body, representing what we think is true of us, and this now symbolizes and pictures our inner condition. So now the body is sick and frail and disabled because the mind is sick and frail and disabled."If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."

The resistance against the truth, puts the brakes on the extension of creation, rejects your natural functioning, and places you into a state of malfunction. This is the root of ALL forms of sickness. Worded in another way, it is a fear of the state of wholeness, a fear of approaching that state of wholeness, and therefore a fear of awakening to wholeness.

"All forms of sickness even unto (physical) death are PHYSICAL expressions of the fear of awakening."

This tells you also that if you were not to be afraid of awakening, if you were to embrace wholeness, if you were to open up to your perfection, and if you would deny and reject anything not of God any power over you (including death therefore), your mind would not be in a state of fear and would not need to defend itself against the truth, sickness would vanish and the body would return to a symbol of health.

It ultimately isn't stuff in the environment, little viruses, people's attacks, weather conditions, poisons in the food and water, or anything else in the world that is making us suffer. It is solely our own seemingly broken relationship with God. It is the connection between you and your soul, which has become blocked off and rejected. It is the denial of your SELF, that is making you have an ego exprience.

All pain is therefore induced by the denial of God. "The denial of God is the ego's religion." This denial of God produces a false "God of sickness". And this God of sickness demands the rejection of health both mentally and physically.

"Allegiance to the denial of God (and thus your wholeness) is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."By even dipping your little toe into "the separation", by even perceiving at all, by believing a single illusion, you are entering into a realm of suffering and pain and fear. You cannot feel safe until you are whole. You cannot feel free from death until you embrace your eternal life. You cannot end suffering or be happy until you know you are with God.

"A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is with God. "So we can look externally all day for illusory sources of suffering. We can attribute the cause of death to anything OTHER than ourselves. We can blame the whole world for causing us to suffer. We can use the world as a gigantic scapegoat. But it will never change the underlying fact that WE cause our own suffering through our belief in separation. And this is the ONLY cause of suffering, sickness and death.

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

"Illusions carry only guilt and suffering, sickness and death, to their believers."

"Reason will tell you that the only way to escape from misery is to recognize it and go the other way."

"Our efforts will be directed toward recognizing that there is only one problem and one answer."

"Today I would remember the simplicity of salvation by reinforcing the lesson that there is one problem and one solution."

For those of us, us "separated ones", who see ourselves as trapped in bodies, and prone to suffer, we need to be gentle with ourselves in recognition of WHY we suffer. We see ourselves as unworthy and insufficient, lacking and unwholy/unholy, imperfect and flawed, weak and frail and afraid, guilty and shameful, not good enough, disempowered, lost, alone, withering and dying. We believe this because we believe in being separate and are deceived by illusions.

It's quite natural to then become afraid of failure at every step, because if you know/believe that you are less than whole, you know that you do not have everything you need. And you then see yourself as incapable. And in recognizing your limitations, you will not trust that you can do things. You will undermine yourself, sabotage your efforts, avoid, procrastinate, and generally "fail" to live. And in seeing yourself as inadequate you will avoid doing anything because you know that you do not have what it takes to do it.

All this undermines your sense of confidence and certainty. It places you into doubt and fear and weakness. So you have to now be gentle with yourself in trying to "recognize your disability", which is mentally imposed, and work to undo this disability. To overcome your belief in being limited and confined and broken. Because by recognizing your immortal perfection you can rejoin yourself in wholeness and undo the illusions of damage and reverse your belief in being a frail lifeless piece of garbage.

We are all here as "recovering" death-addicts. We are all trying to find the strength to carry on. The will to live. We have to develop trust in a truth bigger than ourselves that we are far more powerful than we realize, are fully capable, and "there is nothing our holiness cannot do." This is a pathway in becoming re-empowered, re-energized, and alive again. It is the path of resurrection from death. You are coming back to LIFE, because you are crawling our of your hole of self torture and torment and hell, and are rising up the stairway to heaven's gate, where God is there to welcome you Home.

I was thinking for a while that maybe certain people were inept. Maybe it was certain groups of people. Maybe it was medical people. And maybe it was the body. Maybe it was just some portion of things. But the more I look at it the more I realize that the ENTIRE WORLD, the whole SYSTEM of thought of this lower-order reality of spacetime, is fundamentally broken. It is an impossible system, based on laws of failure and lack and insufficiency.

The whole thing functions in a ridiculously faulty way. Every motion, every action, every doing, every impulse, causes a disruption and changes and side effects. You cannot do anything physical without it potentially leading to more problems. Everything you do to fix something gives rise to new problems. Every use of materials degrades the material. Every aspect of this entire cosmos is fundamentally stupid as fuck and ridiculously backwards.

The whole thing simultaneously gives one thing and takes away another, in a two-faced self-contradicting self-denying expression of incapability and limitation. Nothing in the world has any ability ever to truly do anything unconditionally or perfectly. There is no unlimited giving, no flawless correction, no ultimate solution, no perfect response, no clear answer, and no magical salvation.

There is literally no salvation in the world which produces a state of utter hopelessness. This is the stupidity of the world at large, and the whole thing is one big giant fuckup. There is no escape from it. The only way out of this hell is through transcendence and forgiveness, recognizing it is NOT REAL, and therefore thankfully there ARE no unsolvable problems. Such is the miracle's ability to reverse everything the world says can never be undone.

The world is an ILLUSION. An illusion that presents itself as being one thing when in fact it is its opposite. Everything it tries to do it does the opposite. Every way it helps it hurts. Every pleasure leads to pain. Every solution becomes broken. It cannot go towards God because everything if offers ALWAYS points towards death and destruction. Even its so-called "life" has death in it.

Contemplating this fact of the world's bullshittery made me laugh so much.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

"It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give."

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

"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."