"But you will not realize this, until you accept the eternal fact that God's Son is NOT GUILTY. He DESERVES only love, because he has GIVEN only love."
"Love, Which created me, is what I am."
"Having offered love, only love can be received"
You are love, created by love, with love, in love. God loves you permanently. Love is your real identity. It's what you are. But in order to accept this and be this, you have to love yourself. It's not simply a matter of loving others, you must love everyone including you. Which means if you do not love yourself, you have some healing to do in your relationship to yourself.
To accept atonement you have to love yourself fully. If you believe that you do not deserve this love, or are anything other than love, you will not accept it. Your unwillingness to accept it will stem from believing that you have accepted something else, something opposite, which seems true of you.
If you believe you are guilty, you cannot believe you are innocent. If you believe you've sinned, you cannot recognize your sinlessness. If you are ashamed, you in self condemnation and are still attacking yourself for some perceived failure to love.
So essentially, you believe you failed to love, and now you are failing to love yourself as a result of that, because you entered into a state of unlove. But that just means you're still doing what you thought you did wrong in the first place. And the only reason you're not loving yourself is because you didn't love yourself. If you would decide to love yourself, you would love yourself. If you would decide you are innocent, you would not be guilty.
Does it seem arrogant that you are allowed to find yourself innocent? Even if you did something, seemingly sinned, and now find yourself guilty, do you deserve to be forgiven? Will you let yourself off the hook and love yourself again? Can you let go of what you think you did, and recognize nothing real can be threatened? And therefore that you cannot have done anything in reality?
You are not guilty. You are sinless, guiltless, deathless, fearless. You have no valid reason to be ashamed. You have not sinned. You cannot attack God and you have not attacked God. Nothing real has been affected at all. You are merely MISTAKEN about yourself. You believe something is true of you which is not. You cannot be guilty because guilt isn't real. There is no such thing as real, valid, justified, correct guilt. All guilt is an illusion.
When you are guilty you are merely mistaken about what you are. You believe you are something you are NOT. You are innocent and holy, how can you be guilty? To believe in your guilt is to be mistaken about yourself. You need correction because you CANNOT be guilty.
There is nothing you have ever supposedly done that cannot be forgiven and undone, because you have not done anything. There is no sin so terrible it cannot be shown to have had no effects on anything real. There is no murderous idea so horrible that God would change His mind about you because of it. You literally are incapable of doing anything to change God's opinion of you. God can't stop loving you no matter how hard you build a case against yourself and try to overthrow his verdict of permanent innocence.
If you do not love yourself, you are in need of healing. It means your mind is sick, because it is believing something that isn't true. "Those who are sick do not love themselves, for if they loved themselves they would heal themselves." Do you deserve healing? Of course you do. You deserve absolute permanent health, another word for which is immortality. God has already given you eternal life. If you are not accepting it, because you are busy trying to prove you are mortal and deserve to die, you obviously need healing.
You are not guilty because you cannot sin. You have not sinned. You have never attacked reality. God has not changed or been changed. Heaven is perfectly intact. You have not changed your holy self. All you've done is become mistaken, moving into beliefs that something UNTRUE of you is actually true. You couldn't be really guilty if you tried. Nothing you are holding against yourself is true. You are innocent, holy and pure. And God loves you as much now as He ever did.
Forgive yourself for what you have not done. You deserve peace and happiness. You deserve love and life. You deserve to be with God again in awareness of His eternal love for you. You are endless and you cannot die. Love is the answer.
There's a perspective on the world and upon our minds and beliefs, which is very beautiful. In fact it's quite divine. It's the perspective that God and the Angels would have of what we seem to think is happening here.
From their viewpoint of love and joy and compassion, they know that the entire ego thought system is nothing but a simply mistake. Every belief in sin is just someone being confused. Every seeming attack is nonsense that's not really happening.
And they know that those who believe in the nightmare, are akin to those who have lost their minds. That we're simply somewhat insane and are having wild hallucinations, being very confused about what is true and false, very uncertain about what is real or unreal.
They know that nothing about the separation or the entire world is true or real at all. They know that we're just literally having a nightmare, a bad dream where we're imagining all kinds of horrible stuff. And in this dream we seem to think that we're sinners and evil monsters who deserve to suffer and be sick and die.
And they know that this isn't true. They know that we don't deserve any of that. They know our real selves, and they know that in awakening we'd realize it to. That we are the beautiful angelic shining eternal beings of love and light that could never sin or suffer in any way. They hold that view of us because it is the truth about our real selves.
So as they come to our aid as our mighty companions and helpers, including the Holy Spirit and Jesus, they have this perspective that we're simply mistaken. We're just confused and lost and afraid and are scaring ourselves with imaginary monsters and strange dark threats which aren't even real. That we're just having a strange crazy dream and making up all kinds of things which aren't true.
They see us as just temporarily mentally ill. As having temporary insanity. They have the utmost total compassion for us because they completely recognize that all of our nightmares and screams are simply calls for help, asking for love and to be saved.
No matter how much it seems we might be wanting death and destruction they still discern clearly that in the midst of that belief is a sense of horror and fear and of not wanting what is happening. They recognize everyone's calling as a call for love and a cry in the wilderness. And God has answered.
The whole world is just one big psych ward. One big psychiatric hospital. Where all the patients and even the people caring for the patients and even the people who seem to have nothing to do with patients at all, are all patients. It's a crazy world filled with crazy insane people, and very little sanity.
God knows that. The angels know it. They love us and wait for us until we're willing to accept the truth. They keep guiding us, healing us, steering us to the truth, back to awareness of being home. And we will all return to that eventually. It's guaranteed. Because God is love and He loves His children, and has guaranteed their safe return.
"Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where truth should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch? What would they hear or reach to grasp? What would they sense at all? To sense is not to know. And truth can be but filled with knowledge, and with nothing else. ... The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself. "
"Sin is the home of all illusions, which but stand for things imagined, issuing from thoughts which are untrue. They are the "proof " that what has no reality is real. Sin "proves" God's Son is evil; timelessness must have an end; Eternal life must die. And God Himself has lost the Son He loves, with but corruption to complete Himself, His Will forever overcome by death, love slain by hate, and peace to be no more."
"A madman's dreams are frightening, and sin appears indeed to terrify. And yet what sin perceives is but a childish game. The Son of God may play he has become a body, prey to evil and to guilt, with but a little life that ends in death. But all the while his Father shines on him, and loves him with an everlasting Love which his pretenses cannot change at all."
"How long, oh Son of God, will you maintain the game of sin? Shall we not pull away these sharp-edged children's toys? How soon will you be ready to come home? Perhaps today? There is no sin. Creation is unchanged. Would you still hold return to Heaven back? How long, oh holy Son of God, how long?"
I's very important to realize that when you separated from God, it was completely deliberate. There wasn't any victimhood involved prior to this. It was a very clear choice. And no matter how it was experienced as unwanted after that decision, it was completely deliberate from the start.
Without even beginning to get into what happened after the separation, realize that you had a 'plan', a reason, a goal and a desire, which you were attempting to achieve by separating from God.
You wanted to find out what it would be like to be separate from Him. To put it simply, you wanted to PRETEND that it was possible to be something you are not, to be independent, to have your own self-made identity, and to exist without God. This was not possible to actually do at all, so you were basically pretending to make-believe that it was possible. This was your original purpose for the ENTIRE dream of separation, regardless of its content.
This original purpose, this reason for separating, has absolutely stayed with you the entire time that you've been inside the separation idea. No matter what you may experience or feel or perceive within the dream, you still have your mind basically FIXATED on trying to achieve what you set out to achieve from the beginning. It is why you came into the dream to begin with.
In the biggest possible picture, from beginning to end, the whole purpose for your dream is to try to imagine what it would be like to be completely the opposite of God. And that basically means, you have a death wish. It is only a wish, which cannot really be fulfilled, but nevertheless, underneath every single experience you have 'inside' the dream, there is a constant drive to move towards death. And make no mistake, this drive is very ACTIVE and DELIBERATE and PURPOSEFUL, and it overrides all other wishes and decisions and intentions.
You see death as an appealing doorway, the pinnacle of the dream, its culmination, in which your seemingly new identity will suddenly be born into an entirely separate existence. You see death as an achievement, as the way in which you make it "actually possible and real" to be separate from God. Only by completely obliterating (from your awareness anyway) your Real Identity, and Life, can you finally seem to achieve an identity that God did not create.
So let's put aside absolutely every OBJECTION that you have to dying, because the fact is, right from the start of your journey toward death, you have ABSOLUTELY WANTED IT. It doesn't matter what else comes along to seemingly distract you. It doesn't matter how horribly you might suffer along the way. It doesn't matter how terrified you are of this death, or what seems to happen to bring it about. No matter how much you kick and scream and say you do not want it, your attraction to death is EVEN STRONGER than every other possible 'wish' you can imagine.
You would not sacrifice your ultimate goal - your plan to succeed in completely becoming the opposite of Life. You will allow absolutely anything else to happen if it means you can inch closer to it. You could be absolutely horrified by death and want to get as far away from it as possible, AND YET, at the same time, somewhere in your mind there is still a DEATH WISH, an overruling desire to get as far away from God as possible. This is the ENTIRE PURPOSE of your entire dream - to experiment with what it might be like to completely separate from Him. Everything else is inconsequential and less important to you.
So you see, the Son of God is playing with illusions, imagining outcomes, dreaming of dying, and wants to play with the idea of complete and total separation. It's not really possible for Him to be hurt by this, because it is not real. It's not really possible for Him to REALLY die. All He can do is pretend to die, to make-believe that He has, and to put on a really great SHOW within His dream, that makes it LOOK LIKE he did not choose it.
See, death, and suffering, and fear, and guilt, and sin, all require that you appear to relinquish your power of choice. They are all ways in which you give up responsibility for choosing, or at least, ways to HIDE the fact that YOU ARE DOING THIS TO YOURSELF. The entire purpose of every sin, every guilt, every fear, every punishment, and all death, is to PRETEND that you do not want what is happening. It is all part of 'not wanting' God - you use very intense 'not wanting' as a way to push God away, meaning that very strongly not wanting death is actually your attempt to bring a complete separation into being. Death is you pushing God away, on purpose.
So you use all of these DENIALS in order to make the ILLUSION that everything that you are has been taken away from you, denied, repressed, disowned. The ultimate expression of this denial is death - death is just a denial of Life, and not its actual removal. You are trying to deny that you will live forever. You can deny this quite well, but you cannot make it true.
So even though it seems very upsetting to be terrified, or guilty, or ashamed, or sinful, or to suffer, or to be sick and diseased, and indeed to die, even though all these things seem like something you do not want, underneath them all there is a deliberate decision TO WANT all of these things and TO MAKE THEM HAPPEN to you. Even if that seems insane, which it is, you want to die to fulfill the entire purpose of separation.
So you will feel guilty and it will feel like something you don't want to feel, yet which you've accepted that someone ELSE has decided you are guilty, SO THAT you can disown and hide the fact that you are deliberately choosing to be guilty, in order to help you towards your goal. And every time you are afraid, even though fear seems like you're experiencing something you absolutely do not want to be happening, secretly YOU DO, because so long as you are afraid you get to be a victim and you get to disown your power.
It is easy to feel sorry for anyone who seems to have sinned, or who feels terrible about what they did to God. It is easy to feel sorry for anyone who is experiencing guilt or shame. It is easy to feel sorry for someone who is afraid. It is especially easy to feel sorry for someone who is experiencing punishment, suffering or sickness. And it is ESPECIALLY easy to feel sorry for someone who SEEMS to be dying and who then eventually dies. THIS IS ON PURPOSE.
You are MEANT to feel sorry for all of these roles, because their appearance shows you that these people are NOT CHOOSING THIS, and you especially believe this the most strongly about death. Death is the ultimate `non-choice`, in which the person has so completely given up on life (God) that they sort of 'surrender' to death, becoming completely powerless and passive, absolutely incapable of stopping it, and then death 'happens to them'. And secretly, they are absolutely CELEBRATING that they've finally achieved the most extreme form of separating from God that's possible - short of actually doing it.
So yes, I feel like shit when I feel guilty, BUT, my guilt is secretly serving me by allowing me to justify moving further away from God. And even if I feel like i don't like this guilt and don't want it, I secretly do want it, very much. It allows me to maintain the illusion that *I* did not choose this guilt, and that I am guilty because of someone else. This way, I get to disown and hide and conceal responsibility for the fact that it was actually ME who decided to be guilty, and it was not put upon me by anyone.
See we have this very long STORY that we've told about WHY we have to be away from God... it's all to do with believing that God kicked us out of Heaven, that we sinned, that we really did it, and then we HAD to be guilty, and then we HAD to be punished, and then we HAD to die. We actually believe that God wants us dead, and that it is God's will that we die, and that if we go along with this will then we're somehow atoning for sin. It's bullshit, but deep down we believe in it, BECAUSE it's a story that justifies all of our decisions to go from sin to guilt to fear to punishment to death.
Don't be deceived by the appearance that just because you are afraid, or guilty, or suffering in some way, that you did not choose it. Don't be deceived into thinking that what you want MORE THAN ANYTHING is for this fear and guilt and suffering to end. You don't. It's not what you want the most. What you want the most is to fulfill your mission, your dream, your imagining, or what it's like to be dead. That's all. You want to be dead. And the only thing you REALLY want more than death is God. Death is meant to COVER UP your attraction to God, because without covering it up you wouldn't be able to believe that separation is possible or that God has become separate from you.
So you see this is all really a great big farce... that we ourselves are choosing and putting into place. We keep pretending that God and others are there to choose for us, and to 'make us' go through suffering. We keep claiming that the body does stuff to us on its own, and that we have no power over anything. We keep maintaining this story that death is going to inevitably come and therefore we have to just lay down and take it. But this is ALL OUR OWN MADE UP STORY. We're very conveniently PRETENDING that this is al someone else's doing, because this is the only way that death can seem to be possible. We can't die while we have a choice, and we can't die while we are aware that we're the one who is making ourselves seem to die.
So always keep this in mind. If you want to get really honest and purify and look past the illusion of a guilt that seems horrible, or an unworthiness that you think is genuine, or a sin that you think is true, or some horrible experience that you think you didn't want,... think again. Think again, otherwise you really WILL remain lost in your illusion with no way out. Unless you can admit to yourself that you have chosen this, and that you have done ALL of this to yourself, you will have no power. Or at least, you will keep hiding your power from yourself.
You are a child of God. You are unlimited. You are immortal. You are invulnerable. You are powerful. And you are just PRETENDING to be separate from God, like a child playing with illusions, make-believing a long drawn-out story of the how and why of it all happening. But really deep down underneath it, you know that it is not real and you know it is not really possible. So you keep pretending. Until you are done pretending, and want to own up to the fact that it is you that is doing all this, it's your dream, you're the one making it all happen, and then maybe it will lose its appeal. Just like a toy, you will put it aside and remember to laugh. Because really nothing has happened at all.
The ego thought system, the mind with which you operate most of the time, and the system of perception or 'world view' which governs most of your decision making, is completely the opposite of the truth.
The mind which uses the egoic mind, still experiences, interacts and expresses itself, but the egoic mind acts as a reversal of cause and effects.
This generally means that instead of creating what you truly want and causing it to come into being as a direct effect of your power, you instead cause to come into being exactly what you did NOT seem to ask for, do not want, and are in fact trying to get away from.
Most of this world is heavily engaged in a state of consciousness where they do not realize that they are miscreating or mis-using the mind's power, and are therefore inadvertently creating and manifesting expressions which they are in conflict with. They are literally bringing into expression everything they do not want, not realizing that they are doing so, and then are fighting with those expressions.
When the egoic mind expresses and therefore fails to express what should have been a miracle, it instead expresses the opposite, manifests it, makes it seem real, and the result is that you produce stuff you do not want. The perception and experience then that stuff is happening that you do not want and did not intend, further reinforces your belief that there is a disconnect between what you are causing and the effects you are producing.
Since your effects do not seem to match your awareness of how you are causing, you conclude that these effects are happening against your will, are not things that you wanted or asked for, and therefore you are being unfairly treated. You will then react to this by fighting with and waging war against these effects, as though they have come with an "alien will" to have power over you, to threaten you, to disturb your peace, and to bring death.
And so in this confused state, few realize that they themselves are actually, literally, directly, causing to happen ALL of the effects that they are experiencing. The unconsciousness with which these effects are being produced, and their apparent opposition to what the person is aware of desiring, amplifies the sense of disconnect and disownership, leading to victim consciousness.
Since you do not see the mechanism by which you are choosing everything that happens to you, by which you are experiencing exactly what you are asking for, and by which nothing is happening to you against your own will, is simply evidence that you are not AWARE of the way that you are using your own will and power against yourself. You are your own, and only, enemy.
Since you think that there are powers outside of the scope of your will, which you really share with God, that are capable of preventing your will, or which interrupt it, or which interfere with it, you also attribute responsibility for the deeds of such a will to other people, mother nature, random chaos, sudden events and so on. Or perhaps even a devil. But ultimately it is YOU who are doing all of this.
You just do not realize just how powerful you are, the fact that you are very creative, the fact that you are expressing your desires correctly, and the slight 'error' that you are making expressions through the ego mind, which is interfering with the outcome of what you want. It is because your ego mind filters and interferes with and reverses and opposes and turns upside-down everything you are flowing outward, that you keep seeing and experiencing results which seem to be what you do not want to happen. And as such, apparently outside of your awareness - unconsciously - you keep choosing to be sick, to suffer, and to die.
Jesus reminds me, we are but doing this to ourselves, and awareness of this fact and ownership of this fact and complete experiential living out from this fact, is the secret to salvation.
What if everything that ever happened was done by yourself? What if everything that ever happened to you, seemingly, was actually chosen and done by you, even if you did not seem to want it, even it was torturous and horrible? What if you asked for every single person to treat you the way they did, and they did so faithfully? If this is true... then there are absolutely NO GROUNDS WHATSOEVER on which you can claim that you are a victim.
This might seem horrifying at first, to reclaim responsibility for what you seem to have done to yourself, and to let everyone and all external causes off the hook, but it also means it's opening the way for you to accept your power, to become clear that you CAN and DO do things to yourself, and that you can now choose to treat yourself with love and respect. Then once you put down your own weapons, there ARE no other weapons or sources of attack that can come to threaten you. And you are invulnerable.
Immortality.
Your belief that you're guilty ... because you sinned .... is a mistaken belief .... and it is not true.
You are NOT guilty because you HAVE NOT sinned, and your belief is mistaken. Because it is mistaken it is not true and does not apply to you, so you are free of it. And in that freedom you find RELIEF and can be thankful to God that you HAVE NOT DONE what you think you've done.
YOU DIDN'T DO ANYTHING!!!!
THAT is applying forgiveness to yourself.
"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in this view are all your sins forgiven. What is sin except a false idea about God's Son? Forgiveness merely sees its falsity, and therefore lets it go. What then is free to take its place is now the Will of God."
Sin, is a FALSE idea, about YOU - as God's son. Forgiveness SEES ITS FALETY. That means, a recognition, that it is NOT TRUE. It is NOT TRUE that you have sinned. That's what you need to recognize and accept.
The belief that you are guilty, is a mistaken belief. You have to recognize that YOU HAVE BEEN MISTAKEN TO BELIEVE IT. You haven't ever done anything wrong!!!
And the reason why you are mistaken is because you HAVE NOT SINNED. You did not do what you think you did.
Notice this line:
"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred."
Applying this to yourself as well, what you THINK you did, HAS NOT OCCURRED.
Now, this does in fact LITERALLY mean that even events that seemed to happen in this world, even things you think you did to other people or their bodies, crimes committed, attacks you performed, whatever. HAS NOT OCCURRED.
It really does mean this. You DID NOT do these things. If you DID really do these things, and if this world is REAL, then YOU CANNOT ever be innocent. And thankfully this is not the case.
The reason you did not do them is because this world is NOT REALITY. And because it is not real, anything that SEEMS to take place here is part of a dream, and is not happening TO anything real.
Reality cannot be changed or affected or attacked. Reality is PERMANENT. Because it is permanent you CANNOT sin against it. You cannot attack God, you cannot kill his son, you cannot murder the sonship, you cannot destroy heaven, and you cannot change yourself into an evil monster. You also cannot stop being innocent.
What you THINK you've done, whether it be in heaven or on earth, YOU HAVE NOT DONE. This is an actual TRUE FACT. You CANNOT have done anything to God (nothing real can be threatened) and anything you have done in a dream world (nothing unreal exists) IS IRRELEVANT because it doesn't really exist and has no REAL effects.
This is why there is no sin. There is nowhere REAL that it can take place, and anywhere else is UNREAL - meaning any sins taking place there are UNREAL. Sin is not possible anywhere on any level.
The entire world, everyone in the world, is believing that they've done something terribly wrong, and believe it's had a real effect on something REAL IN REALITY, and that therefore they ARE actually truly guilty. And then everyone is filled with this guilt and is proceeding to PUNISH themselves, torment themselves, threaten themselves with death, inducing suffering and sickness and all manner of horrors in themselves and their lives, because they BELIEVE they deserve it.
This is the big problem of humanity. Everyone is trying to destroy themselves over something THEY NEVER DID.
The separation from God was a very strange thing. It wasn't that anyone ACTUALLY did anything real, TO anything real. Nothing real WAS ever affected. Instead, it was more like, everyone started to spiral inward into a private world of confusion and insanity, lost in a haze of fear and uncertainty, delusion and self-deception, TELLING themselves that they were something they were not, that they had DONE something they COULD NOT have done.
And in that confusion they believed they HAD in fact committed some terrible crime that they HAD NOT committed. That something real had been hurt by it, and they had done it, and that therefore THEY were the guilty one. And because they believed that innocence had been defiled, God had been attacked, heaven had been murdered, they believed they ARE guilty for causing something horrible to happen. And because of this guilt, they deserve to die.
This produced a death wish in which people believed there was no way God was going to forgive them for this REAL SIN, and therefore they could never go back to God, never return to home to heaven, and never be forgiven. In effect, they could never return to LIFE. And that means the ONLY OPTION LEFT was go go off in a dark corner and suffer and DIE.
But this is based on a false premise. The false premise is the belief that you EVER DID ANYTHING AT ALL. What do the innocent exclaim? "I never did anything." What do the guilty exclaim "I did it!". Only by recognizing the FALSETY OF THE PREMISE, does it rip out the idea of having sinned at its root, undo the belief in "separating", and thus completely invalidate all guilt. And as the guilt goes, the ego goes as well, because the ego is just a false belief about yourself (guilt).
YOU HAVE NOT DONE WHAT YOU THINK YOU'VE DONE. YOU HAVE BEEN VERY MISTAKEN. EVERYTHING IS OKAY!!!!!!
You got the wrong end of the stick, believed a lie, deceived yourself, told yourself something that wasn't true, wanted it to be true, tried to make it happen, and believed that you'd done it. And yet AT NO TIME did you EVER actually accomplish what you thought you did. And it has had NO EFFECT ON ANYTHING. Everything real is PERFECT ALRIGHT AND UNHARMED!
You have NOT sinned. You are NOT guilty.
This recognition IS forgiveness. THERE IS NO SIN.
"Let me remember that there is no sin."
"What if you looked within, and saw NO sin?"
There is a profound RELIEF that happens, when you realize that you HAVE NOT DONE a terrible thing that you thought you'd done. It's like being able to finally breathe and let go and be happy. Finally, a correct judgement, that you DIDN'T DO ANYTHING. Ahhhhhh. Thank God for that!!!!!! After all that time that you spent stressing and fearing punishment and worrying about the suffering that you BELIEVED you deserved and WERE TRYING TO MAKE HAPPEN. Over a FICTIONAL CRIME that you never committed!
Finally to hear that "all is forgiven, you can come home, God still loves you!" What a relief!! Thank GOD you haven't done anything at all to anything ever!! You are still completely innocent. You are STILL as God created you. You are WELCOME in heaven. God STILL loves you completely and NEVER STOPPED. Ahhhhhhh.
In the separation from God we made what seems to be a world, opposite to God - space and time and bodies etc. But we're told this world is unreal. What does "unreal" mean? Because while we're told it's unreal we're also told we believe in it, and that by believing in it it becomes real to us.
Being unreal is a way to say it's not ultimately true and isn't how God creates. So in a sense, it is dream-like. But people DO have dreams, and the mind IS dreaming of a world of space and time. This dream can seem very real and solid and effectual to the dreamer.
As such even though the world is ultimately unreal, which would seem to write off anything that seems to happen in it, while we are still in it believing in it we do still have experience of it AS IF it were real. In fact we can make it extremely real to ourselves and have a horrible nightmare.
"anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist."
"The mind can make the belief in Separation VERY real and VERY fearful. And this belief IS the devil. It is powerful, active, destructive, and clearly in opposition to God, because it literally denies His Fatherhood. Never underestimate the power of this denial. Look at your lives and see what the devil has made. But KNOW that this making will surely dissolve in the light of truth, because its foundation IS a lie."
But nightmares do in fact seem very real and frightening and full of suffering and stress to the believer. To the believer, even if they are hallucinating, even if what they experence is total fantasy and not possible in God's laws, it nevertheless can seem VERY real and true to a mind that belives in it.
How do we overcome this nightmarish experience of a world in which everything suffers and dies? What is NEEDED? What is called for? If the problem is that the mind is believing in it and giving it power, then the mind has to withdraw that power and stop believing in it. And by not believing in it, the mind will ultimately stop seeing it.
"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal? Could you have FAITH in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? AND WOULD YOU SEE IT? Hallucinations disappear when they are RECOGNIZED for what they are. This IS the healing and the remedy."
Here the course doesn't say that the remedy or approach we're supposed to take is to just write the world off with labels like "unreal, illusion, nothing, doesn't exist" ESPECIALLY when the mind IS honestly still believing in it and giving it reality. That's a form of denial. Instead it says we are to use RECOGNITION to realize that the world isn't real and isn't true, WHILE still in it. That's different from PRETENDING TO BE OUTSIDE IT.
A hallucinated world will disappear only when RECOGNIZED that it is a dream and not a reality. This is what "awareness of dreaming" is about. Awareness of dreaming isn't denial. It's in fact a state in which you are still asleep and dreaming, but you have the awareness of what you're doing.
We're not supposed to keep bypassing the world in an attempt to overcome or escape it. In fact, Jesus's remedy for us is to CHANGE PERCEPTION so that we will come to first see this world from a different vantage point. That does require us to "love the world" and to find peace in the world. Before we can leave it. As the course says:
"First you will dream of peace, then you will awaken to it."
If we try to skip the dream of peace, or the happy dream, or the forgiven world, and just try to jump from false perception to knowledge, we're doing a bypass.
"Knowledge is not the remedy for false perception since, being another level, they can never meet. The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception. It will not endure. But for the time it lasts it comes to heal. For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one. They are the one beginning with the end to lead to Oneness far beyond themselves. True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is this that true perception sees."
Those who use non-dual-seeming statements like "the world doesn't exist so it doen't matter what you do", "the body isn't real so don't bother healing it" etc... are trying to use truths from the level of KNOWLEDGE, to correct the problem. But Jesus says this will not really work. THE ONE CORRECTION for false perception is true perception. We can't skip having true perception. We have to find a way to forgive this world and everything in it first instead of trying to jump ahead to being what is only really experienced AFTER we complete the curriculum.
"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."
"We have discussed the fall or Separation before, but its meaning must be clearly understood, without symbols. The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity. All beliefs are real to the believer."
"You have expressed surprise at hearing how VERY different is reality from what YOU see. You do not realize the magnitude of that ONE error. It was so vast and so COMPLETELY incredible, that from it, a world of total unreality HAD to emerge."
"You looked upon the unreal and found despair. But by SEEKING the unreal, what else COULD you find? The UNreal world IS a thing of despair, for it can never be."
"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."
"The separation is merely a faulty formulation of reality, WITH NO EFFECT AT ALL. The miracle, without a function in Heaven, IS needful here. ASPECTS of reality can still be seen, and they will replace aspects of UNREALITY. Aspects of reality can be seen IN EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE. Yet only God can gather them together by crowning them AS ONE with the final gift of eternity."
I feel more relaxed and peaceful, which I think is a result of looking at the world's system of failure, unrelenting attack and constant problems.
There was always an effort to resist the world going wrong, a constant tension of trying to stop bad things happening, an expectation that things should be going well all the time, and a desire for nothing to ever turn sour.
These were all forms of denial and wishful thinking. An ignorance about the system of the world and how it functions. It was rooted in a mixed belief that the world was even capable of sustaining anything. That it should, that the norm of life should be that the world "works well", and that problems are occasional annoying exceptions.
If you look at the fact that the world is utterly bullshit and hell-bent on inevitable destruction, that all its roads lead to death, that it disappoints at every turn, and it is literally incapable of being free of problems and difficulties, you actually get more of a sense of its "true nature". Instead of the fanciful denial that attempts to insulate us from it.
We spend a great deal of time and effort trying to make the world more tolerable. We build fancy homes and cities to try to shut out and ignore the weather. We try to farm foods more carefully to avoid contamination. We're told to do healthy things and exercise so as to avoid health concerns. We're told to make money so that we don't starve to death.
And so the drive of "civilized society" is really a REACTION to the fact that the world is raw and wild and cruel and unrelenting in its onslaught of carnage. We've become quite good at making it more "comfortable" and "safe", to a degree, in an effort to make hell more palatable, trying to tame its wicked ways. To form an oasis in the desert where we can be insulated from its "nature" and distanced from its ravages. Even though NONE of this prevents the destruction of all these things.
If we drop all that and just recognize the way the world is, and not just the planet but also the whole fundamental fabric of spacetime, then we can see that it was made to function a certain way. It cannot do what it was not designed to do. Its nature has to remain opposite to heaven otherwise it will cease to exist. It must BE different and separate otherwise it cannot appear to exist at all.
So it has to maintain this system of destruction at all times. If we let go of expecting it to be otherwise, and undo this denial that tries to constantly fight against it, or has an expectation that it's supposed to turn out well at the physical level, then when its nature just "does what it does", we won't be so upset. And we won't have to keep resisting it all the time, or fearing it.
The fear really comes from the "hope" or wishful thinking that it's not going to do what it always does. That it's not going to attack or destroy or make things difficult. And then when it does we're seemingly in shock and upset because our expectation has been destroyed. Without the blindness of believing the world can function like heaven, or that it can operate peacefully, or that it will ever be devoid of its devouring deadly nature, we can actually be more at peace about it.
In sense this a form of acceptance. Not accepting that the world is real and true, since only atonement should be accepted and only heaven should be validated. But an acceptance that the world, as it is, is just the way it is, and it cannot help its nature. A recognition that it's just always going to fuck up and destroy everything, because that's the only way it can function. And then in recognition of this we can actually laugh at it and not be so disturbed or surprised or shocked when everything goes to hell again.
This isn't the same as "expecting the worst", because you can get yourself into a belief that this world is real and it always is just negative and depressing, and therefore there is no hope or alternative. But you can expect the worst in the sense of realizing that the world can't be anything BUT the worst, due to its attacking nature, and can separate your relationship with it into a space of laughing at its hilariously flawed ways. We are, after all meant to learn to laugh at the mad idea that has produced this world.
As I sit here I'm looking out the window - not a perfect window but a dirtied stained window - upon an environment in which the leaves on the trees are all dead. The grass is browned and half-dead as a result of the snow that covered it. The weather is cold and unrelentless. The brickwork on the buildings is uneven. The light of sun is blocked and producing shadows of darkness. Roof tiles are missing. Rocks are weathered and decayed. Electrical power boxes are slightly mis-aligned and a strange ugly color. And the somewhat mutilated fir trees are struggling to stay alive.
But is this unexpected for a world where all things must die because time is change and change is death? No. This is the only way it can be. It is hilariously faulty. Ridiculously tragic, and quite a mess. The world is really kind of like a giant trashcan filled with broken pieces and old rotten shite.
Can it be otherwise? It cannot. It can never be otherwise. The dust of dead civilizations will always be blown by the winds of hate in this world. And recognizing this is its nature can actually set you free. Free from the horrible suffering that results from believing it could be any other way. And free from the constant efforts to put some extra lipstick and bandaids on the corpse, trying in vain to turn a tired old world into a new one. In a sense, let the dead bury the dead, and let death be, that there may be life in the mind.
We are to forgive the world, yes. To do this we have to want another world. We have to tune into another reality. Beyond space and time, a world of light and eternal life. A world where the laws of God do not permit suffering, difficulty, problems or death. And then we bring that wholistic perspective with us as we shine its light upon the broken world and see it from a loving perspective. We don't have to condemn the world in order to see that it is inherently broken. We can forgive it for being the way it is, only because it IS broken. And in forgiveness we can laugh it away.
"The world will end in an illusion, as it began. Yet will its ending be an illusion of mercy. The illusion of forgiveness, complete, excluding no-one, limitless in gentleness, will cover it, hiding all evil, concealing all sin and ending guilt forever. So ends the world that guilt had made, for now it has no purpose and is gone." "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."
"The world will end in joy because it is a place of sorrow. When joy has come the purpose of the world has gone. The world will end in peace because it is a place of war. When peace has come, what is the purpose of the world? The world will end in laughter because it is a place of tears. Where there is laughter, who can longer weep? And only complete forgiveness brings all this to bless the world. In blessing it departs, for it will not end as it began."
I had a re-read of much of Chapter 21: Reason and perception, to try to better understand the workings of perception. Below are some takeaways. Feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken.
Typically, we look out upon a world which seems to be there independently, and however it looks to us, we take it to be how it is. If it seems like a horrible place, some kind of hell, we believe it actually IS that way. We don’t question it. We don’t for a moment think that there is something we are doing to make it LOOK that way.
But the Course is telling us that in fact, we are doing this all the time. It is telling us, there is a "forgiven world" right here in front of our faces, which has no guilt in it, no sin, which is shiny and sparkly and new, and even seems to have a reflection of heaven in it. But we’re not SEEING it, because our own minds have some kind of "gunk" in them which is making the world seem dim and dark and lonely and depressing.
In fact, it even tells us there is a reflection of Christ (the face of Christ) and God right here, that we can "See God" here, to a degree, if we have awareness of God in our mind. That we could look at flowers and tables and trees and such and see God twinkling back at us somehow. But that if we do not SEE that, due to some kind of "filtering" that is going on in our perception, the world becomes lackluster and dull and we don’t seem to see God at all.
There is a kind of perceptual trap, whereby if you believe that how the world looks, is how it IS, inherently, you will not realize that there is ANOTHER world hidden behind the one you’re seeing, that you COULD be seeing, if you were to change your mind. Since "projection makes perception", it produces CIRCULAR LOGIC in which a) you decide what you want to see, b) you project it, c) you see/perceive it, d) it tells YOU what is there, e) you believe what you perceive. Kind of a vicious cycle.
Not realizing that your mind has something to do with how things appear to you, you will just ASSUME that this world simply IS the way that you’ve always seen it to be. If it seems to really suck bad, if all your relationships seem strained by separation, if you feel lonely and cut off, if you are depressed and living in darkness, you may think that this is HOW THE WORLD IS, not realizing that you are actually MAKING IT look that way because of the content of your mind.
So in order to get out of that trap, you have to suspend belief for a moment, consider that what you are seeing is POSSIBLY not how the world actually is, that there is a world here you WANT to see - in which you’ll have to place some faith that it is here but simply hidden from view temporarily, and then take steps to change your mind so that you can finally SEE it. You almost have to IGNORE what you are perceiving now, stop accepting that you are stuck with the "results of past decisions", and that if you choose to believe differently, this shitty world will disappear and be replaced by a much lovelier version.
The course also basically says that when you are seeing the projected content of your own self-hate, sin etc, which makes the WHOLE WORLD look hateful and sinful to you, you are not SEEING correctly. Or rather, you are lacking VISION. Vision is the ability to see what is here, without distortion, without sin, without any dark content in your mind, so that you can see the forgiven world simply for how it IS.
Jesus says we need to become able to SEE, first, before we can RECOGNIZE what it is we are seeing as an illusory world. To see the "real world", relatively speaking, is to regain vision, ie to see without filtering it with your ego junk, such that you can simply look upon what’s there without adding or removing anything. This will show you clearly, correctly, what is THERE, without your contribution added to it, and in that clarity you will RECOGNIZE that even the real/forgiven world is an illusory world made as the opposite to heaven.
So right now, if you are having an experience that this world seems like a nightmare of hell, it’s not because it IS, it’s because you have a nightmare of hell happening in your MIND, which is making this world SEEM like it is hell. I’ve personally had experiences which at the time seemed like a horrible nightmare. Later, after much healing, the nightmare was over and the world did not seem so bad anymore.
The content of our mind massively influences what we see, because we will project that content out TO see, and WILL see it, overlaid on top of the "real world". It is imagined content, but it hugely influences our perception. False ego beliefs really have the "power", because we put faith in them, to greatly distort how the world registers with us, what we see it as, whether it seems harmless or harmful, and whether it feels like a happy place or a miserable place. It is not any of the things we project ONTO it. It is only what it is - a pretend planet that we dreamed, essentially neutral and meaningless.
"I have given the world all the meaning it has for me" is precisely talking about perception. You may not realize it, but your consciousness, your mind, your experience of "reality", can become significantly DISTORTED by any ego beliefs that you have, such that it will make you PERCEIVE things which are not even there at all. It causes you to hallucinate! To see imagined meaning or content where it does not exist. Your perception is capable of "shifting" from experiencing the "real word" as a nightmarish hell, to seemingly to be a reflection of heaven.
Have you ever had a day, where you are in a really bad mood... where you are perhaps having an emotional release of some heavy feelings. On that day, it seems to you as though everyone is in a bad mood! Everyone seems angry and intense and upset. Then you let yourself cry and you cathart this painful content. Suddenly, when you’re done, you feel better, but you also notice, what the heck happened to everyone else’s mood?
Suddenly other people don’t seem like they are unhappy at all? They don’t seem angry or stressed out or upset with you. You then find yourself wondering, were they really nightmarish figures who were against you and pissed off along with you or.... were you making that up this whole time? That all this time you thought they were also upset, they were actually happy?! That you just couldn’t see it and your mind was hallucinating that they were upset with you?
That’s because your ego beliefs that were in your conscious awareness were majorly distorting your perception of reality.
Jesus talks about how we get "stuck" in the circle of projecting then perceiving, whereby since we think that how the world looks is how it IS, that somehow IT decided to be the way it is, and that we didn’t MAKE IT BE that way at all, we simply accept it as if objectively real and then "make adjustments" to try to "live with it" or accomodate as though simply accepting it is really this way. We can spend a very long time living in a perceived "bad world" trying to cope with how it seems to be, making horizontal/linear adjustments instead of rising above it into "vertical perception", not even realizing that if we were to change our mind, our perception would shift UPWARDS, and we’d see a very different "higher vibrational" world that doesn’t call for any of those adjustments. ie, we don’t have to STAY in hell.
Another experience you might have is where you see the form of someone’s body, perhaps they have a broken arm or scars on their face from a fire. It will depend entirely on the content of your mind as to HOW you will perceive this, and what you will see IN it. If you believe in real sin and real sickness, and if that belief is heavy, when you see this person with theirs scars and a broken arm, you will not ONLY experience what’s there in form, their body in its condition, you will ALSO experience the content of your mind.
You might therefore be horrified, repulsed, upset, saddened, guilty, etc... seeing the disfigurement as something the person is stuck with for life, seeing sin in it like they must’ve done something wrong, holding it against them, fearing it like it will infect you if you get too close. The horror show in your mind has nothing to do with the person’s body or its form, it’s entirely to do with YOUR beliefs that you are seeing ON TOP OF what’s there. They still have a "broken body", but you are seeing "YOUR sickness" added to it.
If you then go away and do some forgiveness and undo these beliefs in real sin and real sickness, you may later be walking around and see that person again. And their body may well be in *exactly* the same condition, form-wise, because that’s something that they still believe in and they are still putting it there.
But instead of seeing it as attacking you, or repulsing you, or threatening, or being ugly, or judging them for it, or seeing it as irreversible, or hating them for it, you may instead see them with love and freedom and recognize, they are not bound by this, they are not this form, they are not this body, and you could offer them a miracle. *RECOGNIZING* what is there, versus failing to recognize what is there (seeing your own added shit), is the difference between true perception and false perception. Both of them perceive the form, but true perception does not ADD sin to it.
Someone close to me has paralysis. Her left arm can barely move and hardly any movement in any fingers. She had a stroke. When this first happened, each time that I saw this I was very upset. Or I should say... each time that I saw this form and ALSO some dark content in my own mind, I was very upset. I saw sickness as real. I believed in it. And this had apparently already been established in my belief system before this event happened. Instantly it would trigger off deep upset and guilt and grief whenever I saw it. However, it wasn’t the form or the tragedy or the paralysis that was actually upsetting, it was what I saw IN it.
Over time, I forgave this and more or less HAD to use this as a way to learn that sickness is not real, that I am not the cause of the sickness, that I am not guilty for otherse being sick, and that there is no TRUTH in that sickness. My personal perception of that person now, is that when I see this paralysis that she STILL HAS, and which has not changed whatsoever, I am not upset by it. I don’t see it as tragic or despairing. I don’t see guilt in it. I don’t see it as something having gone very wrong. I don’t see it as unfair or unchosen. It does not trigger me into deeply hurt feelings. All of that has been healed in me, and therefore in my perception. And yet, I still see - perceive - this person, and they stil have the symptoms of this stroke. They are still paralyzed. I simply do not see it with the ADDED content of my own personal beliefs in sin.
Quite possibly at some time, if I choose to really thoroughly excavate all trace of belief in sickness from my mind, maybe that will offer healing to her and undo that sickness. But if she is not ready to receive it, or if that would be frightening, it would not be appropriate to force it. This too is a lesson, that often the sick do not want to be healed against their will or readiness. My perception has changed of "what is there" and I now see it more squarely for what it IS... an illusion of sickness that doesn’t mean anything and has no power of its own. Of course this is still an area of experimental miracle-working so we’ll see what happens in future.
Regarding another’s sickness, since you are no longer believing in irreversible sin, you would not be holding their form "against them", or believing that they are stuck with it, or seeing them as victimized by it. You would not see it as "real sickness". It will strike you as an ILLUSION of sickness. Fake sickness. A simple choice to pretend to be hurt. You would not believe it has the power to stay on its own, and you could offer to heal it. It depends on the person as to whether they can accept and receive the healing, however. They have free will and their will is just as powerful as yours. Similarly Jesus cannot remove stuff from us that we are unwilling to give up because our will is as powerful as his.
One other thing I want to touch upon is the kind of experience you will have when in false perception vs true. In false perception, since you believe heavily that separation is real, and since you project what you will later perceive, you project separation. When you perceive it, you’re going to perceive that you are seeing something that has separations in it. The world is going to look to you as though it is separate from "you". It will seem like it has causal power, a will of its own, a mind of its own, and that it is not an effect, and therefore that because it is cause not effect, "you" surely did not cause IT.
You can see how this is a vicious cycle because if your mind has separation content in it, you will project that separation content onto the world, it will appear to be separate from you, and this will justify your belief that you DID NOT project it or cause it. This undermines the awareness that you projected in the first place, and somewhat "locks in" the idea that how the world appears to you is how IT IS inherently. That you are not contributing to how it appears at all. So false perception is its own trap, making it harder to tell that your mind alone determines what things look like to you.
The counter to this, is what happens in true perception.
There, your mind does not have a belief in separation. You don’t believe in real sin, or level confusions, nor do you see yourself as at the effect of anything outside of you. You recognize yourself as cause, and even see yourself projecting. Therefore, as you project, you are practically not projecting ANYTHING "onto" the world, or are not adding to it or removing anything from it, and so when you then PERCEIVE what’s there, you see it only for what it inherently IS. It shows YOU what is there, and you may even see God in it. This shows you the "real world", real in the sense that, in comparison to your unreal world of false perception and hallucinated hell, it is "real-er".
In true perception then, you will not be experiencing that the world is its own thing, that it has a will, or a mind or a power over you. You will not believe it has cause in it. You will recognize it as EFFECT only. And you will recognize that you are CAUSE only, not effect. Seeing God "in it" also will not mean that this world is "cause". God is cause, so seeing God "in" the world does NOT mean God IS the world or that the world is a cause! In this awareness, whatever the world ‘is’, MUST be coming entirely from you, and you see God IN it because God is IN your mind, not really out there. This means, you will also recognize, not simply what the world inherently IS (an illusion you made), but that EVERYTHING it is, is coming from YOU. You are dreaming it!
At this level, you are capable of manipulating it in any way you see fit simply by changing your mind, by adjusting your desire, or shifting your focus. "The word is only what you gave it" indicates that in false perception, there seemed to be you AND the world, and in true perception, there is only YOU. At this level, being aware that you are THE DREAMER of this world, reveals to you that it is 100% illusion, that the real world is an illusion, that even its forms are coming from your mind, and that therefore..... drumroll please..... THERE IS NO WORLD APART FROM WHAT YOU WISH. Meaning, there is literally no world there, just a bunch of wishes.
There is no world here because it is ONLY the content of our mind being projected. There is no world because even the real world, the "happy dream", is but a dream. When perception is perfected, it shows us there is NO SEPARATION between what is within and what is without. That planet out there, is inside our mind. It’s just an idea that has not left its source. "The real world is still an illusion". We made it up and are dreaming it, it’s not really there at all.
As dreaming ends, the entire content of this dream, this made-up world, this projected fantasy, will simply cease to be. It is not changed, it is simply unprotected. It does not live on, it simply vanishes. It is not converted into reality or heaven, ONLY THE TRUTH REMAINS and everything else NEVER REALLY EXISTED. Hence there is no world and Earth does not exist beyond our dreaming of it.
In ACIM, mistakenness is not the same thing as how the world generally thinks of it. If you go into the women's toilet instead of the men's, it could be a mistake. A mistaken action. If you pick up the wrong set of keys, it could be a mistake. If you leave your lunch box at the workplace, it could be a mistake. Something you intended that sort of went wrong somehow.
You could then try to turn these mistakes into sins and say that the person is guilty for going into the wrong bathroom, or a bad person for forgetting the proper keys, or stupid for leaving their lunch at work. But a "forgiving" reframing of this that says like "oh well they just made a mistake because they were supposed to go into the other toilet", isn't forgiveness. It just recognizes a horizontal worldly error within this system.
Forgiveness is higher than this. True mistakenness is a recognition on a vertical axis. It's a view from above, from a mindset of sanity and truth and light. It looks down and sees something impossible, something which cannot be true, and recognizes it as not true or real. Something false. Like a lie. And because it recognizes it as untrue, it is not attracted to it, and it doesn't turn it into something to be punished for. Instead it recognizes that the error just needs to be corrected. It was just a mistaken view, a mistaken belief, which can't be true, and the mind needs to be restored to the truth.
So if in the world, say, we take something that someone is believing or doing, based on a mistake. Let's say that they're having a sickness and coughing all over everyone. You could take this mistake and turn it into a sin. Sin does the opposite of see correctable errors, and sin doesn't recognize a mistake AS a mistake. Instead it thinks of it as a TRUTH, as something real and valid, and actual. The person really is coughing all over the other real people, how horrible. What a sinner.
To move to forgiveness then, we need to shift away from "it's a sin" to "it's a mistake". But not in worldly terms. Not in social preferences or rules about how to act around people or other made up stuff. True mistakenness would recognize that a) the person is not a body even if they think they are b) they are not really sick because they are immortal c) no-one is really suffering d) contagion is a lie e) nothing real can be threatened etc... that sort of thing. In effect that ... this whole show, this body person, this coughing, this spewing, is all FALSE. It isn't true, it isn't happening, it isn't POSSIBLE in God.
If we can see that this event isn't possible, is false, isn't true of the person, they are not really doing it, its having no effect, etc, then we can recognize that the person is in a sate of insanity and is just simply mistaken about how and what they are. They're showing a lie. They're trying to convince you sin is taking place. It isn't. We recognize there are just a bit insane, a bit mistaken, calling for love, in need of healing and correction. None of what they are doing is possible, none of it is true, none of it is happening but in a dream.
That's the kind of mistakenness that the Holy Spirt recognizes. He sees errors and does not mistaken them for sins. The ego on the other hand tries to take mistakenness and hold it against people, narrows down to focus on it, judges it, makes it out to be TRUE, believe it is HAPPENING, believes it is POSSIBLE, and is HAVING EFFECTS ... and that's all basically a definition of "sin". The idea of an attack which can have real consequences against real things.
"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects." UrT27I6
It's kind of all about recognition. If you recognize what is possible and true in God, then you recognize when someone is MISTAKEN. Their mistakenness calls for correction not punishment. You recognize what they are presenting is NOT POSSIBLE, and can't be true, so is not actual or real. So you can't hold it against them.
If you FAIL to recognize that the person is just mistaken or "being false", you make another mistake, by mistaking a mistake for NOT a mistake..... you turn the mistake or falseness into a TRUTH, and now because it is true it seems REAL to you. Or like a fact. The person really is coughing all over everyone. The person really did go into the wrong bathroom. The person really did leave their lunch at work for the 5th time.
"The Holy Spirit CANNOT punish sin. Mistakes He recognizes, and would correct them all, as God entrusted Him to do. But SIN He knows not, nor can He RECOGNIZE mistakes that cannot be corrected. For a mistake that cannot be corrected is MEANINGLESS to Him. Mistakes are FOR correction. They call for NOTHING ELSE." UrT19D4
Largely such mistakes are easy to mistake for sins, rooted in physical stuff. All the things we do with the body, all the things in the world, are all IMPOSSIBLE. ... and they present temptations, and illusions that you can do things which CANNOT BE TRUE in God, such as being sick. If you take those illusions AS TRUTH, you believe they are real, and now the physical act is interpreted as a sin. You lock it in place as though it can't be reversed or forgiven. And now in unforgiveness you "accuse" the person of "really doing this", and justifying punishment. Who moved my cheese?!
So basically we have a mind full of illusions and insanity which is just a state of making a lot of mistakes and believing untrue stuff. That only calls for correction. But if you take that stuff and do not recognize it and do not realize it is untrue, you will MISTAKE IT for truth and now it becomes SIN. As though you're really doing it. That's the little shift the ego insanity makes. That little shift from "it's just an illusion" to "taking that illusion seriously because you're actually really doing it." Ego grabs ahold of mistakes and corrupts them into punishable acts of evil. As if you intended it on purpose.
We are just mistaken. And we are mistaken about being mistaken. And when we lift away the mistakenness about being mistaken, we'll recognize we are mistaken, and then stop being mistaken. And that is forgiving.
sThe world in itself is altogether intolerable. It was designed to be a place of limitations and difficulties and problems.
As Jesus says,"Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."
That means you can't really expect the world to stop having problems, making things go wrong, being utterly awkward and stupid.
But what you can do is change your attitude.
All your suffering comes from believing that the world SHOULD NOT have problems, that it should work, that perfection is possible, that things will always go well, that every problem has a solution, that you can gain everthinge you want without losing it, and that the world has something truly valuable to offer.
If you believe that, you will be up shit creek, because the world CANNOT function that way. It's not capable of acting like heaven because it was made to be heaven's opposite in EVERY way imaginable. If you want it to function OTHER than how it DOES function, you will fight with it and be at war with it and hate it.
It was designed to be difficult, riddled with problems, totally contradictory, and hard to deal with. It was designed so that all choices are choices for partial things, and never can you get the whole from anything. It was designed to fail and be broken and lacking and special. It was NOT designed to be sane or to have order or to function benevolently. It was meant to be cruel and vicious and malicious and murderous. So let it be that.
If you can accept that the world is completely broken and ridiculously beyond all hope of improvement, then you're onto something. Because now your attitude is not BASED ON the world and not playing by its rules. You are under no laws but God's. You are not dealing with the world on the world's terms, you're transcending its terms.
If you can accept that the world is a completely stupid pile of shit that would be better of flushed down the cosmic toilet, then you'll be better off. Because then you'll allow and RECOGNIZE that it is like this, and not deceive yourself. It's only when you DENY that it is like that that you suffer, because then you are going against its grain and are in conflict with it.
Everything it is made to tempt you into suffering, to believe in death, and become disappointed. But only if you thought that the world would NOT be like this. If you are deceived into thinking that you can have it all, succeed, stop the problems, make everything work right, or prevent everything from dying, then you're going to be VERY upset when it constantly works against you. The world WILL have it's way, and it will fuck you over.
It will then seem that the world is against you because your demand for what you want the world to be like is against the world's nature. And so really you are against yourself. Strangely and paradoxically, if you can let the world be utterly shit and BE OKAY WITH THAT, without resisting it or hating it, without condeming it with sin or judgement, then you can let it be only what it is.
And then even though it is not heaven and is not of God, and continues to completely fuck up at every opportunity, you can now laugh at these mistakes and shortcomings, you can overlook them in forgiveness, you can not let them disturb or disappoint you, and you can therefore transcend them in peace. As Jesus said, you are not then trying to "escape from problems here", but you are instead seeing those problems with a more forgiving view.
The more forgiving view is to recognize that the world was MADE TO be a place of suffering and bullshit and conflict. It functions on the basis of separation. It was projected out from the insane ego mind, made by minds driven mad by guilt. It is not meant to WORK. But because it was designed BY something other than itself, it is NOT really responsible for its shortcomings. It can only be what it has been designed to be, and in that light you CAN FORGIVE IT, because it is not the cause of its own limitations.
The way out then isn't to try to stop the world from being the way it is, it's allowing it to be the way it is to that you are not caught up in fighting against it. Resistance is futile, and all it does is bind you to the world. When you drop the resistance you drop the attachment, and then you are free from the world. The world is not then disappointing you, if you never expected it to work out well. The world is not then doing something horrible that it shouldn't be doing, because that's all it CAN do. And you can just recognize its corrupt and inadequate nature and have pity on it for its inability to work any other way. And in that lack of sin you are set free.
Let the world burn, and be happy. A world that truly works and has order and peace and wholeness and where you can get everything you want without loss and receive perfection and have no problems, is not this world. It is the Kingdom of God, which God created as your true home, beyond this realm of nonsense and impossibilities. Let the impossible be impossible, so that possibility can be possible. Let the world "world" itself to death, while you by passerby and laugh at its unimportance.