Until you learn that what you do to others you do to yourself, and you can be at least a little convinced about this, you will continue to see no point in forgiving. It will have no value to you and you won't want to do it, because you see it only as a way to pardon someone else. If that is what forgiveness means to you - bestowing pardon - it reveals that you don't recognize how forgiveness benefits YOU, or how you are involved in and a recipient of your judgement of others.

You have to keep being reminded that either both of you are innocent or both of you are guilty, a lot, because you have been severely programmed to perceive contrary to this. You think what you do to others has no effect on you, and what they do to you has no effect on them. In this there is injustice and unfairness and mistreatment and victimhood. This way of perceiving has to be gradually eroded and corrected so that you can come to believe and recognize that it simply isn't worth condemning someone because, you know only too well, that your own peace has been lost along with it.

And so this really means that you need to also learn to value peace and love within yourself, toward yourself. Without believing that you are worth loving, you aren't going to see the vested interest in loving others as yourself. You'd maybe rather maintain hate or justified anger for a while because you think the feeling of hating and being angry is actually good for you. You like the rage and the attack and the sense of helplessness, provided someone else is suffering at the same time, so you can convince yourself you're at least not as guilty as they are. But its a losing battle. You have to forgive yourself so that you can learn your worth and value and lovability, otherwise you're not going to want to protect it at all costs.

Once you do establish, to some degree, that you deserve the love of God, and you want it and value it, and your valuing of the truth has been corrected enough, you will start to experience a kind of automatic yet different response to others. Instead of maintaining condemnation at all costs, you'll start to feel that you know better, and that you know that you don't really want to feel like this. You want to feel the peace and love and forgiveness that your own heart deserves. And so even if you get mad at others, the more you forgive and learn your own innocence, the sooner you will feel a kind of growing urge to forgive them sooner. You will lose your taste for the fight and will gradually develop a greater willingness to want to put down your attacks and admit to responsibility and move into truth, simply because it is more valuable to you.

Eventually you will cease to judge, condemn, criticize, attack or project blame or anger onto anyone, solely because you've become very clear that YOU do not deserve any of that. And you also realize that truth is shared and wholeness is equal and you can't access love without sharing it with everyone. There is a oneness to it. The rules that apply to them must apply to you. As you do unto others, you DO do unto yourself. So now you have shared interests. And in your shared interest, it's in your best interest to treat both yourself and others with love and innocence and acceptance and peace. And you'll just decide you no longer want to enter into conflict or separation. And then you'll just remain at peace.

I say some of this because I understand it theoretically makes sense. I am not by any means loving all the time or at peace. But I have begun to notice a growing unwillingness to maintain angst for a long period of time. There is an increasing ... something, in my mind, which nags at me a bit more loudly, a kind of knowing, a surrender, a willingness, that reminds me of a mutual truth. And as I work on surrendering to truth and love and healing this certainty increases and speaks up more loudly. I find myself wanting to forgive sooner, just because I don't want to keep being unhappy. It takes practice. The mind needs to undo all of its ego conditioning of separation and blame and that takes a while. But slowly I see the results of a continually clarifying alignment with Holy Spirit. One forgiveness at a time.

In ACIM there is a very strong theme, based on the Golden Rule, which describes a dynamic we are all supposed to adopt. It's the idea that giving and receiving are one.

"giving and receiving are the same" UrW225

In fact, that entire phrase appears SIX times in the course.

It is the backbone of the Golden Rule, which is a law of God, that what you do unto another YOU directly DO unto yourself. And this is on the basis that your brother - other people - are a PART OF YOU. And therefore, what you do to them, you literally are doing to the part of you that is SHARED with them.

But think about this for a moment, because it really makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Jesus presents it with what appears to be a nice voodoo-sounding phrase, which is laden with impossibilities:

"Therefore, His teaching begins with the lesson: To HAVE, GIVE all TO ALL." UrT6F13

How on earth, can you give everything, to everyone, and still HAVE everything? This defies normal logic, does it not? It does not make sense. Ask anyone in the world how this is possible, they will probably be stumped. It seems totally false.

If I give you my dinner, I will not have my dinner. If I give you my car, I will not have the car. If I give you my money, I will not have the money. HOW can it MAKE SENSE, to say that if I give you everything, I will HAVE IT ALL? Or even worse, that I'm supposed to give what I have ***TO EVERYONE***? How is that even possible?

If you are savvy and paying attention, you should conclude that these kinds of statements MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL. They seem absolutely nonsense. They are totally out of line with what we experience in the world. How can they be true?

The big thing is... Jesus seems to be telling us that it is not only POSSIBLE, but the true law of God, that things which seem impossible to us are the ONLY possibility. That there is some WEIRD way by which something that makes absolutely no sense, IS in fact the truth.

He is telling us that we're supposed to "love others as ourselves" - as we would love ourselves, and knowing that they ARE a part of ourselves. How can this make any sense though? And be careful not to go into denial here and just PRETEND that "you believe it" because it sounds all magical and spiritual.

It seems ONLY to make sense to say that whatever I GIVE, I WILL LOSE. Yes? Have you ever experienced otherwise? Anything you have ever given you have lost. You have had to compromise. You have never been able to keep what you have given to anyone. Why is Jesus telling you that it is some kind of divine law or dynamic or way of relating to others that you're supposed to adopt? What nonsense!

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously." UrT1B18A

The thing is.. .. God's truth and laws are nothing like the laws of this world, or the dynamics of ego relationships, or the way by which physical objects interact and relate. What SEEMS to make sense to us here, is in truth absolutely nonsense. And that which SEEMS to be absolutely nonsense, is in fact the truth.

Now... that's a REALLY BIG CLAIM. Because now Jesus is telling us that something that seems to make NO SENSE, is in fact the truth! Nonsense is the truth?! Not only is it the truth, GOD HIMSELF apparently has a nature which makes NO SENSE.

Somehow, we're told, God gives everything to everyone, and yet keeps everything. And, supposedly we're supposed to adopt the same function, of giving everything to everyone, in order to have everything. And he even tells us that if we do NOT give it all away, we will have nothing. WHAT NONSENSE, SURELY?!

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT." UrT3G15

Here for example Jesus is saying not only are there souls created by God (hold that thought), but also that EACH of them knows God COMPLETELY. Which means, that I can have everything, and you can have everything, and we can both have everything simultaneously. WHAT THE F?! .... How can that make any sense at all?

How can you have everything, while I also have everything, without either of us having to compromise or share or take turns? But he's telling us that's how it is. And he describes this dynamic as miraculous - it IS a course in the miraculous, after all.

So here's the big issue. It is CLEARLY evident that all of the things which are true of God, and all of the dynamics of his creation and reality and the workings of his relationships and so on, SEEM TO MAKE ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.

They entail seemingly mind-bending possibilities, such as you handing over your entire inheritance and still having it all. Such that, in fact, when you give everything, the other person you gave it to now HAS IT ALL, AND YET... you ALSO have it all, which means the total amount HAS INCREASED. F me!

"God Himself created the law by creating BY it. And His Sons, who create LIKE Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the INCREASE of the Kingdom depends on it, just as THEIR creation did." UrT7C7

We're told that the entire Kingdom of God INCREASES, because when you GIVE ALL TO ALL, you still HAVE it all, and now everyone else HAS everything you gave, and now it is DOUBLED. So there is constant increase of everything real. This is a real dynamic in reality. How can this make any sense at all, that when you give stuff away IT MULTIPLIES?!!! What?

What it then boils down to, is that the ultimate truth is, God's nature, the nature of reality and oneness, what is possible, what is a fact, will always SEEM TO MAKE NO SENSE TO YOU. It will in fact seem like a collection of paradoxes. And it will seem like nonsense. And anything that is true WILL seem to be nonsense to your ego, and to your earthly way of thinking, and to the way that you REASON all your conclusions. They are all nonsense.

Here's the climax of my post. There is much debate about oneness and non-duality and so on. And people generally will say that whatever MAKES SENSE, must be the truth. Screw that! God has dynamics which DO NOT make sense to ordinary reasoning. Giving everything away in order to keep it, what?! What's given increases when you give it away, what?! It seems like nonsense. BUT IT IS TRUE.

So you should NOT be quite so certain, that God's reality and workings are supposed to fit nicely into what you think "makes sense". In fact, if you think that God's functioning makes sense based on ordinary reasoning, YOU ARE CONFUSED.

To normal reasoning, God's workings are supposed to look like paradoxes. They are SUPPOSED to look like contradictions. They are SUPPOSED to look like they make no sense at all and can't be true!! Because the reasoning being used to LOOK at it is itself BACKWARDS and false.

The people who thus claim ACIM is non-duality are using backwards reasoning to claim that "oneness" and "it's all God" and "you don't exist" makes perfect sense. That's a total fail. God is capable of BREAKING all your rules and TRANSCENDING all your little limitations and requirements.

ACIM clearly is teaching a transcendental thought system which, to the way that most people think, DOES NOT make sense. And this is supposed to reveal to you, at some point, that THE WAY YOU THINK IS WRONG. Not just what you think, but HOW. Not just the line of your thinking and the conclusions you come to that you THINK make sense, but the entire method and logic that you use to draw conclusions IS MISTAKEN. It is OPPOSITE to the nature of God.

This is why ACIM is not non-duality. Non-duality is far too absent paradoxes. It contains none of the mind-bending transcendence of laws and limits present in the Golden Rule. It has no recognition of the fact that God can do things which SEEM impossible, including the creation of multiple sons/souls who themselves are creators in reality, WITHOUT VIOLATING ONENESS. Which... you guessed it, seems like it would be "totally impossible" and "totally nonsense", BUT ISN'T.

So you should really get used to the fact that reality WILL NOT make sense to your typical reasoning. Your conclusions are all back to front and entirely within the separation-based thought system of the ego. Even non-duality and oneness are ego constructs resulting from a way of reasoning that doesn't even acknowledge the rule-breaking nature of God.

If you think this is not correct, think again. Think again about the facts we're being taught. We're being told to do something that seems TOTALLY COUNTER INTUITIVE. Which seems to run TOTALLY OPPOSITE to how your ENTIRE thought system works. To treat others in the knowledge that they are a part of you, such that what you do to them you do to yourself. That is not something that makes any sense to the world's thinking.

Don't be deceived that making sense of something means it is true. An entire system of thought can have internal consistency and seem to make total sense, and yet be entirely wrong. We are not here in the business of just being a sheep that follows the basic little conclusions the ego comes up with.

"It's all one therefore there can't be many"... nonsense.

"God couldn't create anything otherwise there would be separation" .... nonsense.

"If I exist then I must be an ego" ... nonsense.

"If there are many things in reality then reality is dualistic". ... nonsense.

The truth is FAR more mind-bending and waaaaaaaaay outside the box of how you think about things. If you have not encountered all the paradoxes and found a way to live with them, you are still squarely locked into the ego's thought system.

"ACIM is non-dualistic" is a conclusion drawn by egos following all of the ego's rules of separation-based reasoning, without showing the slightest sign of appreciation for God's PARADOXICAL nature, in which two completely opposite-seeming things can be simultaneously true, WITHOUT it being wrong.

If you think everything about God's nature has to sound like it makes nice tidy sense, you haven't even begun to recognize what God is like. God is a creator, and oneness DOES have real parts to it, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that fact at all. If YOU see a gross contradiction, YOU have not escaped the ego's mindset.

To the ego, in order to have something you must take it from someone else. To the ego, there is limited quantity because everything is considered to be finite. It has no concept of sharing. It only has a concept of compromise. If you are to have anything at all, someone else must lose. And by their loss, the ego believes that it can gain. This is part of the ego's laws of chaos.

The ego therefore is the belief that when you receive something, whoever gave it has diminished their supply. And this is also part of the belief that, if you give something, you will diminish your own supply, will increase your own lack, and will now suffer and be in need.

This is why everyone is so reluctant to let go of their possessions or money and tries to get as much "bang for buck" as possible, to get a deal or a discount or some great big receipt of value with the minimal amount of sacrifice/loss possible. And all commercial ventures play into this ego quality by constantly dwelling on how much more you will be receiving than giving, which is a lie, because they don't tell you how cheaply they got the shit for in the first place. Anyway...

So the ego only has this sense that there is an "exchange" or a negotiated deal or some kind of weighing up of what you will get vs what you will lose. It has absolutely no concept of something increasing, of two people being able to partake of the same thing without limiting each other's enjoyment, and it believes that there is a huge difference between giving and receiving. It in fact believes that giving is sacrifice, and that receiving is salvation provided you only receive from outside yourself and not from God.

The ego also is a murderous thought system and any time that there is an inbalance between giving and receiving there is "murder" happening. That is, either you are perceiving that you are having to give more than you are getting, meaning you are losing, which is a form of death, or you are taking more than the other person is willing to give, which means you are trying to destroy them.

To God, this is all nonsense of course and God's laws do not operate this way at all. Instead, anything real can be shared without it diminishing. All parties can experience FULLY what is being offered without anyone having to sacrifice or only get a small slice of the pie. There is no compromise. There is no limitation or finite amounts of anything. Everyone is able to share fully and equally. If I get 100% of God's love, it does not mean that there is no love left to go around. It means there is still 100% of love to go around. Everyone partakes in and SHARES SIMULTANEOUSLY in the same "stuff" without loss or sacrifice or hoarding or possessiveness of trying to "own" it or make it your own. This again reinforces the that God operates holographically because the 'whole' can be fully presence in more than one place at a time.

God's laws also tell us that in order to have anything we must give it and be willing to share it. Nothing real can be "owned" by egoic concepts of selfishness or isolation. You cannot section off a piece of God and claim it as yours without it also belonging to everyone. And when something real is given, it is not lost to the giver at all. In fact it increases. If I have unlimited light and I give some light to someone, my light simply shines more, it does not decrease, it brightens. To God, anything real that is given is increased, its receipt intensifies, sacrifice is reversed, there is no lack or loss possible anywhere, and there is an absolute unlimited abundance of everything which is only growing and increasing at all times, not diminishing at all. It is the perfect "economy" in a constant state of growth and abundance.

God's abundance is freely and fully given, is available to everyone equally, there is no limitation on its supply, it is infinite and unlimited, it can only be shared and increased, and there is no such thing as lack or sacrifice.

Jesus redefines the meaning of fear. It is not some mere feeling that you have. In fact, He teaches that fear is the opposite of love. Love is essentially equated with the entire Kingdom of God and the nature of Creation. So fear really is another word for "the entire ego thought system."

Fear is the idea of love's opposite. If you are slightly unhappy, if you are sick, if you are dead, if you are at war, if you are suffering in any way less than experiencing eternal life, there must be fear present. The entire dream of death is a dream of fear. Fear is death. Fear is unwillingness.

I bump into this all the time. It just seems that I keep encountering some form of fear, over and over and over again. It doesn't always seem like fear, unless I look at it carefully and notice that it seems less than loving and has some kind of fearful resistance or reluctance or uncertainty running through it. All stresses, all upsets, all are based in fearful perceptions.

All of my efforts to awaken or be spiritual etc all seem to be this constant "battle" with fear coming and going, sometimes stronger than other times. It feels like trying to stay afloat or even to approach the surface where the light shines, only to be dragged down by these fearful anchors. If I could be released from fear, I would be in a state of love, therefore, and would be happy.

If happiness and love is what I want, and to be miraculous you must be expressing love, then it makes sense that all fear has to be undone. Fear is really the big problem. And fear is nothing but the illusion of the absence of love. It's the idea of darkness. Fear is seriousness. Fear is hell. Fear paralyzes. Fear is attack. And fear stops life.

All forms of hate and vengeance, all grievances, all self attack, all projections, it's all rooted in fear. All attempts to fix and solve and figure out and plan are based in the fear that something is wrong. All ego motivations and seeking to not find, is based on the fearful idea of loss and lack. Without fear there can only be love.

We must seek out and remove all traces of fear and the cause of this fear. Undoing fear allows you to relax. Undoing fear re-establishes trust. Undoing fear lightens you up. Undoing fear makes you happy and corrects your perception. Without fear you will see the shining face of Christ and be glad.

"All healing is essentially the release from fear."

"The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite."

"T-1.VI.5. All aspects of fear are untrue because they do not exist at the creative level, and therefore do not exist at all. 2 To whatever extent you are willing to submit your beliefs to this test, to that extent are your perceptions corrected. 3 In sorting out the false from the true, the miracle proceeds along these lines:

4 Perfect love casts out fear.

5 If fear exists, then there is not perfect love.

6 But:

7 Only perfect love exists.

8 If there is fear,

It produces a state that does not exist.

9 ****Believe this and you will be free.**** 10 Only God can establish this solution, and this faith is His gift."

"We have said that you have but two emotions, love and fear. One is changeless but continually exchanged, being offered BY the eternal TO the eternal. In this exchange it is extended, for it INCREASES as it is given. The other has many forms, for the content of INDIVIDUAL delusions differs greatly. But they have one thing in common; they are all insane. They are made of sights which are NOT seen, and sounds which are NOT heard. They make up a PRIVATE world, which CANNOT be shared. For they are meaningful ONLY to their maker, and so they have no meaning at all. In this world their maker moves alone, for only HE perceives them."

All of spacetime, and everything within the realm of relativity, is contradictory, impossible, insane, self-defeating, lacking and unwhole.

The reason is that it was made entirely by denying God, denying the absolute, denying wholeness, and trying to bring about something completely impossible - an opposite to God.

But as soon as you lack wholeness, you have things like separation, specialness, scarcity, contradictions, differences and lies.

The problem with such a system is that it contradicts itself. For example, anything separate seeks to destroy other things and to be different from that, so that it can stand out more and be distinct and exist.

It's the same with the ego, the ego wants to separate off and exclude and isolate, because the more contrast there is the more it has a seeming identity. Its identity is then made from the walls of separation.

The problem then is that even though the ego and the world define themselves based on what they lack about other things - what they do not have, and through the attempt to attack everything, they simultaneuosly need those things to exist in order to have any contast.

You can see this with ecosystems for example, where you depend on plants to create oxygen so you can breathe and yet you also eat the plants, thus depriving yourself. If you were have a population explosion that eats all available food, suddenly you would have mass extinction. So now "total life" contains "total death."

The reason is that a relative world is a denial of God's law of the golden rule - that giving and receiving are one. In relativity, this is denied and the rule is now that what you give you lose.

So each time you go to do anything at all in spacetime, you simultaneously get the opposite. Any gain is a loss, any advancement is a retreat from something else, anything you try to destroy you need for your own survival, if you don't share you end up with nothing, when you give what you have you don't get to keep it, etc.

Ultimately the binding rule in spacetime is that every single thing you do is thwarted by the fact that its opposite is also included. You literally cannot have wholeness. You have to choose what you stand to gain, and what you stand to lose, at the same time.

It's an extremely frustrating system because it means there is no whole truth, you can't win without losing, you can't gain without loss, you can't choose one thing without sacrificing the other things, you can't even breathe without reducing the oxygen that you depend on to live.

It's a totally self-defeating, self-destructive, contradictory, frustrating, impossible, nonsense, bullshit system in which nothing can really work and nothing is as it seems.

This is encapsulated by the idea of yin-and-yang, in which there are seeming opposites or polarities, but also you'll find some trace of the other opposite with each. As one increases the other decreases. As one is gained, the other is lost.

Basically, it means that no matter what you do in a relative system you can only partially win, and you must also partially lose, because every gain contains some loss, and every loss contains some win. Nothing is just one thing, nothing is just itself, and nothing is whole. It's all a mixture.

And that means on a physical level everything is a compromise, and a sacrifice, and a limitation. It means you can't have your cake and eat it. It means you can only ever partially succeed at anything, all the options available to you are lacking in some way, there is no way to pick one thing and be totally satisfied with it, and everything is broken in some way.

The ego depends on separating off from and attacking others in order to reinforce its sense of being special and different and unique, of existing at all. Its whole identity is increased by contrast. But at the same time, the very thing it attacks it needs to exist, and if it were to destroy it there would be no contrast and the ego would have no definition. So it cannot fulfill its own goal and must be frustrated in its entire functioning.

This is also why making choices in this world is utterly ridiculous, because no matter what you choose there will always be something lacking and missing, because nothing is perfect. You can't get the whole of anything ever. You pick one thing and you get that sinking feeling that you should've picked the other, because the other has some valid parts and yet not all the parts. And yet the other thing if chosen lacks these parts as well, and so you can't decide. Because every single choice the world offers you is between partial success and partial success, and never does it offer you a choice of completion, totality, wholeness or satisfaction.

How frustrating and stupid is such a system, founded on a belief in the impossible, an attempt to bring about the contradictory, and a state which totally denies itself in every way. While yin-yang is supposed to be a symbol of balance, it's really a symbol of complete dis-satisfaction and impossible inequality. All it really means is that every single thing is equally unwhole, not itself, contradictory and against itself.

"God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

A major way the ego tempts us to seek outside of ourselves and to not find what we are seeking, is to suggest that the truth really is out there somewhere. The belief that you can actually find it outside of yourself, is simultaneously the belief that it does not exist inside of you.

Establishing that the truth is not IN you already, fully and completely, or that you do not have it, is the entire foundation of the ego‘s thought system. Once this is believed, you will cease looking within for it, and start on a quest, which you might even call a "spiritual journey", attempting to "seek" for the truth.

This seeking can show up as very earnest and well-intentioned and an attempt to find the ultimate spiritual answer. BUT, because you are fundamentally looking in the wrong place, you are guaranteed never to find it.

The ego is very sneaky about this. It will tempt you to believe that reality, and truth, are outside of yourself. This means the entire world is real. It also means the world contains the truth. And this then justifies your seeking IN the world to try to find it. The ego has promised you can succeed at this, but it is utterly impossible. The truth is already inside you, where you are not looking, and where the ego will NEVER have you look.

Looking outside yourself CAN also include finding the truth within a book such as A Course in Miracles. Especially if the FORM of the book seems to be more of a truth than other forms. If the words seem to show symbols which don’t even look like symbols, but look like concrete pieces of the truth itself, which is the ego’s way of turning illusions into reality, you can become quite fixated on picking apart the tiniest nuances of what specific words say, become extremely specific, and pull apart even the tiniest of statements, which completely loses all sense of context and increases your insanity. The truth is NOT THERE!

You will go deeply into the Course words and the form of the words. You will not recognize them as mere symbols twice removed from the truth, and will not acknowledge the Course’s holographic nature. You will instead attempt to turn the Course into a linear, finite, concrete piece of "evidence", an attempt to PROVE that the truth is outside of you.

The result of this is an OBSESSION in trying to find the truth. You will feel compelled by the lack of truth in you. And yet, here‘s the problem. The more you seek for it, the more you dwell on what the Coure says, the more you become obsessed with the exact specific words of a given version, the more you dissect it and analyze it and try to figure out what it means based on its form, the more it will slip through your fingers! And the more you do this, the more desperate you will become, because you continue to fail to truly FIND what it is the ego promised you would find there.

The form of the Course IS NOT THE TRUTH. The truth is an inner experience of direct reality with God. It is not intellectual. It has nothing to do with study. It absolutely has nothing whatsoever to do with quote fests or throwing quotes at people to correct them. It definitely has nothing to do with pitting different FORMS of the course against each other. It’s completely nothing whatsoever to do with what exact words were said, who can find the best citations, or who can use the Course as a weapon.

THE TRUTH IS NOT OUTSIDE OF YOU.

There is nothing so blinding as sight of FORM!

The Course is ONLY there to help point you AWAY from the form of the Course and towards an experience of God, which is already in you, just covered up. The more you obsess over the Course’s words the more you are going to get lost in the intellect. And the more you do that, the more you will believe you are "finding" the truth, and are delusional.

The words are just symbols, *representing* a truth that is quite removed from those symbols. When we fight about which exact words are used where, or what they mean, or what they "say", we’re completely forgetting they are symbols and are trying to break the Course out into some kind of direct truth in its own right. This was never how it was intended. This is an ego trap.

Blocks to awareness of the fact that you are ALREADY WITH GOD need to be removed. That’s all. Period. This is nothing more than the undoing of denial and stopping searching outside yourslf, even within the course, for something which is not there. The Course if understood is telling you to do this. You are supposed to leave the Course behind at some point and go within to God with empty hands! You can’t do this, and you cannot experience the truth, while trying to make yourself RIGHT about what exactly the FORM says or seems to prove. There is NO PROOF in the Course. It’s an illusion.

Go within.

When you try to remove something from your life but you aren't genuinely ready and healed to the point of recognizing that you're already detached from it, it is like ripping it out and trying to enforce a state of compliance. That is the ego working overtime, taking over the spiritual path to try to be the enforcer of spiritual laws on a behavioral level.

You cannot let go of something while you value it or while you believe it is the truth. And regardless of whether that thing is good for your sanity or not, or even if it is making you suffer, the demand to remove it when you're not ready to brings about sacrifice. And usually it means you are "should-ing" yourself.

It is the ego's way of attempting correction without actually correcting anything. It wants to simply take an axe to anything in your life that has been deemed "unspiritual" or not in alignment with "the course" etc, as if doing so will make you more spiritual. And yet these so-called unspiritual things are OF the ego. So then it's the ego pretending to get rid of the ego, which it will attempt to do with great gusto. That passionate slaying of the dragon passes for what appears to be a valiant effort to be more spiritual, but really keeps and reinforces and increases the ego.

So sacrifice, while seeming to be a call for a reduction of ego, is actually a call for an increase of ego, masked by the illusion that sacrificing has the same 'goal' as true spirituality. If the course says you are not a body, the ego will come along and say "get rid of the body otherwise you are not being spiritual". Yes the goals are the same, but the reasoning and the consequences and the purpose of this information is different. Or rather, how the goal is obtained is different. Spirit would have you gently look at what makes you believe the body is real and to examine how beliefs you've held are in fact false, so that you can recognize you are not them, thus releasing them, avoiding the need for sacrifice. But the ego would tell you, ok, you gotta get rid of this shit, you are not spiritual enough.

The ego's intention therefore is to reinforce the sense that you are deprived, not good enough, not spiritual enough, and lacking, such that it will compel you to "sacrifice more" in order to become more spiritual in a short space of time. This really is a device to increase the sense of separation between what you are (love) and what you think you are (ego) by affirming just how in need of correction you are. What it means then is that underneath this attempt to sacrifice is some form of guilt which is telling you "you're not spiritual enough" and "you need to get more spiritual urgently", which compels a sense of panic and attack, taking the form of sweeping cuts to all kinds of things which you're not ready to relinquish.

Sacrifice then is the ego trying to be spiritual, trying to move too fast, trying to enforce the Course's truth before you are ready, trying to make out that you are in spiritual poverty and therefore need some horrific sweeping tools to correct you. This is not what the Holy Spirit asks of you. It is not what the Course asks of you. It is what the ego tries to make of the course, in the name of upholding its truths.

Holy Spirit asks only that you become willing, of your own free will, to have your perception corrected, when you are ready, so that you can SEE clearly what is true and what is false, so that you can recognize that what you thought was valuable is not, and what you thought was true is false, and thereby recognize that you no longer want the ego. Only then can you genuinely be willing to let go of it, or rather, recognize that it never really was something you had to begin with. Then it falls away without any fanfare or enforcement or effort. And certainly no sense of sacrifice or pushing or urgency. Holy Spirit is infinitely patient and kind in this matter and would never ask you to be ripped from the ego while you still believe it is who you are.

Be kinder to yourself today in recognition of what you still have left to correct and let Holy Spirit be the gentle corrector, according to your genuine willingness and readiness, and try not to impose artificial enforcement upon yourself asking for sacrifice. It's ok to take your time and it's okay to still be doing "all the guilty things" that are "of the ego" for as long as you need to, while you're still believing in them. Correction needs to take place at the level of willingness and readiness, not at the level of leaping ahead and skipping steps just to prove you are worthy of God.

I had no idea, that I had been spending vast majority of my life attempting to use the ego's persona in order to 'make life better'.

All the times that I people-pleased to try to make bad people go away.

All the times that I tried to fix everything bad that ever seemed to be happening.

All the times that I tried to appear to be innocent and yet was acting like a victim.

All the times that I tried to look pleasing to others so that they would maybe not hurt me.

All the times that I thought I had to give others what they wanted, and that I was not inherently wanted in a loving way - only in terms of what others wanted to take from me.

There was even a time in my life that was especially low where I felt so bad about myself, such low self 'esteem', ie shame and unworthiness, that I believed I did not deserve any love, and that the only people who would 'want me' were those who wanted to use me or take from me or have me be a slave to. It was tremendously disempowering.

Ultimately this was all because I had such a strong belief that my personas (personii?), were actually capable of IMPROVING my life, making things more palatable, protecting me or defending me from what I did not want. I wanted to simply shut out all the bad icky stuff and focus solely on the good stuff.

And I remember actually believing that I was becoming 'very spiritual' by rejecting even the everyday egos of other people, which I relegated and judged and condemned for 'being ego' or 'being selfish' etc. This sort of twisted double-edged idea of spirituality arose out of this in my late teens where I was simultaneously terrified and hounded by scary stuff in my mind, while thinking that I was also having deep spiritual insights. And maybe I was in a way, but it was strongly dualistic, and my mind was very split. There was a 'rift' in my life, a strong sense of separation, and that persona of exalted, lofty specialness, really holier-than thou, simultaneously felt like I was approaching death.

I used the persona to get rid of and attack everything that I was against, believing that what I 'kept' was all good and acceptable and allowed. BUT, the more that I got rid of... and believe me I included a LOT of stuff in the list of what I rejected, way above and beyond normal classifications (ie most of the world), the more what I had LEFT OVER got smaller and smaller. The more I found myself in a hole of isolation and loneliness. And the more I became depressed. I felt like this impending sense of everything coming to an 'end'. My whole reality just felt like it was saturated with a sense of impending doom, with no way out. Because I was hiding in the persona and not being authentic at all, even though I felt justified by my pain.

I was repressing so much and rejecting so much, perhaps in attempt to heal myself of strong wounds, which I had projected onto everyone else, that I was perhaps trying to find a way to get away from it all and at least 'fake' that I was healing, as a starting point. Very much fortunately, things gradually started to turn around at that point, massively fuelled by my meeting my beloved wife who came into the darkness like an angel of light. Then the healing commenced.

Now, looking back, I can see how my entire time was spent choosing the persona, putting on a fake image, trying to give people what they wanted, trying to please, trying not to upset anyone, trying to maintain status quo or 'peace' by never asserting myself or standing out, etc. It was a rough lesson! And all of that resisting, all of that... rejecting of life... merely diminished my own. Now I am learning that using the persona at all is an attack on myself. It is a way to buy into the belief that I need to cover myself up because there's something wrong with me. As self-love increases - genuine honest God-shared love - so too does the need for these masks diminish.

I am seeing clearer and clearer that all of the confidence, all of the fearlessness, all of the certainty, all of the clarity and strength, that I thought I was going to find by using rejection, separation, persona denial, etc... are actually already IN ME... it was being denied BY the use of the persona. I just needed to learn WHERE the truth is, what WHAT the truth is. I was looking in the wrong place for my whole life - outside of me, and was rejecting myself the entire time.

Now I see that if you stand with yourself in your truth and don't reject yourself, you don't even NEED any of the persona masks, because you already HAVE what God has given you, you already ARE powerful and safe and strong. You don't need to hide from people, because you are unconditionally loving yourself. You're saying, I'm going to ALWAYS be real, true and honest, in all situations and with all people. I am ALWAYS going to come from unconditional love no matter what. And in that, you not only drop all of the efforts to 'get rid of bad stuff', you also drop all of the efforts to 'choose only the good stuff'. And along with that goes all sense of depending on, or caring about, what anyone else thinks of you or what you do. It is a freedom. In a sense, an independence - being set free from the energy-sucking vampire that the ego is and being AVAILABLE now to God, to allow Him to live through you.

It wasn't getting rid of bad stuff that made my life better. Trying to do that made it worse. Accepting myself fully is the goal.

It's not where I thought life would go. But this is where it is heading for all of us. Back to our true selves. Back to love.

Where do you find a sense of certainty? A sense of something you can trust? A sense of actuality or correctness? Where do you find a truth, that is so acceptable and so full and complete that you have no doubt?

I find that as I try to find answers in, and with, the ego, i.e. with my own mind and faculties, I cannot come up with a satisfying answer. I instead come up with a multitude of possible answers, all of which are different and none of which really give me a sense of .... yes, this is IT, I found it!. .. Or at least, if I think I found it, then later I'll realize it doesn't quite fit. So none of the answers work. None of them.

In fact, the more that I get into 'I need to figure this out', or 'maybe it's this - maybe it's that', .. the more I try and effort to investigate and find "the truth" in this way, the worse the situation seems to become. Confusion increases. I move away from a sense of certainty, peace, truth or acceptability. I move towards increasing UN-certainty.

Key insight: Trying to figure out and explain what's happening using my own separate ego mind/intelligence creates MORE confusion! I'm barking up the wrong tree!

So I dig and dig and get clever about what 'might' be "the answer", only to sense that this answer is flawed in some way, it doesn't quite explain things, and I just can't get a feeling of 'absolute certainty' around it. It seems like it *might be* true, it's *possibly* a description, it's *could be* what's happening etc... but never a sense of .... "this is".

And you know what, the more I try to do this the worse it gets and the more confused I become and the less I have peace.

So, the lesson here is, clearly... I have made the problem real, and now I am reacting to it by trying to explain or justify or intellectualize 'why' it is happening... rather than IF it is happening. And that means, I'm using the ego, I'm trusting my own self instead of God, I'm looking for answers in the ego world outside of me, I'm trying to find ego proof of the truth, and basically am constantly coming up empty handed.

It can become... exasperating, trying to find the truth where the truth IS NOT. The secret truth is: EVERY ego answer is NOT TRUE! The ego does not and cannot KNOW truth AT ALL!!! All it can do is speculate and guess and wonder and deduce and pretend it has the prowess to figure this all out on its own. And it will never be able to find the truth. The ego cannot wake up to reality!

So the question becomes, where I am going to get my sense of certainty from? Where is the real truth? Where is a truth or an answer or whatever that I can really believe .... yes... this is exactly IT. And I can tell you, it's very possible to come up with numerous ego explanations or rationalizations that all say... yes... this is exactly it, that this is an exact match to the situation and it really seems to be 'this'... only to find loopholes, inconsistencies, doubts, and then some 'other' possibility comes along. This is all because I'm searching within the realm of relativity, partiality, differences, a lack of wholeness and a world of lies.

So where will I find THE answer? What is THE answer? Where will I get that sense of... certainty, peace, joy, and KNOWING, that comes from the 'real truth'.... something I can really get behind and know, this IS it.

What is the real truth? God IS it, of course! God is WHERE the truth is. God is the certainty I seek. God is the answer that I can actually TRUST.... to trust that it will be consistent and unwavering and complete. There is no sense of consistent truth like that in the ego's world. No matter what the ego's explanations or meanings are, NONE of them are the whole truth. And none of them bring the feeling of... ahhhhh yes... that God brings.

But then, you have to realize this... God isn't an explainer, as such. God doesn't spend time diagnosing, or figuring out, or doing any of those activities that the ego mind does in attempting to find out what it thinks is happening. In fact, God doesn't even deal in the realm of 'maybe'. God HAS the answer already, whereas the ego is SEPARATE from the answer so has to go SEEK for it!

"Seek and do not find!" - ACIM

And the harder you seek the truth, the further you get from the TRUTH! Doh!!! I've been looking in the wrong place this whole time :-D

So ... God has really no interest in spending time trying to discern what illusions are doing or what to do about them to 'fix' unreal problems. God doesn't make problems real then OBSESS over trying to solve them, not realizing that believing they are a problem IS the problem.

So as I go to God, I see that God's 'way' is different from the ego's 'way'. God's way is more to do with.... a constant, direct, immediate correction and healing, which solves the problem, instead of all of the dwelling on basically 'keeping' the problem that the ego loves to indulge in while disguised as a problem solver. Hah.

So again... this is about learning to trust He who KNOWS, versus being lost in he who 'thinks' he knows.

And perhaps it's not until we can really let go of all efforts to 'explain real illusions', that we will turn to God in surrender and trust and allow Him, instead, to bring healing to the situation FOR us.

Thank you God.

"If you can accept the ONE GENERALIZATION NOW, there will be no need to learn from many smaller lessons."

Effectively what the Holy Spirit is trying to teach you is ONE LESSON. This one lesson is to learn how to "teach only love", because you are only love. It's to have a single response of love in all situations, to use love's miraculous power to heal all sickness and to solve all problems. To recognize no orders of difficulty or hierarchies of illusion, to see all forms of suffering as the same effect having the same ONE cause. One problem with one solution to rule them all.

Over time, in the application of what may seem like more specific lessons, ultimately what you are LEARNING is really to simply be as God created you. To be loving. To be singular, or ONE. One in character and substance and nature and identity and attitude and response. One single way of always consistently being the same, in complete disregard for any illusions of forms or differences. Completely ignoring orders of magnitude or difficulty or importance or seriousness or size or duration or any other property.

As we gradually "polish" our minds from seeming to be fragmented, with different responses for different people, different relationships with different individuals, different reactions to different objects, different meanings for different things, we gradually GENERALIZE the learning and move into a much more ABSTRACT state of mind. A much more singular state of mind, whole and one and unified and undivided and free from conflicts. Being so one, this state of mind - miracle mindedness, houses the power of love and truth and sees all things from a single perspective.

This is the ONE LESSON which the Holy Spirit is teaching, behind all the lessons in the workbook, behind all the text material and all thoughts and life lessons/trials, behind all relationships and dramas, the simple movement away from complexity and multiplicities of action, towards simple unification, integration, wholeness and oneness. This lays the groundwork for one-mindedness, which is a state of complete abstract purity and wholeness, in which the entirety of everything acts as one with no conflict or difference or adjustment to conditions.

Unconditional love is completely ignorance of conditions. It ignores the form of problems, the shapes of bodies, the types of sickness, the reasons for their supposed causation, the worldly powers, the forces of nature, the laws of physics, the many rules and regulations. It doesn't even care to need to know how something came about, to analyze it or diagnose it or figure out the complicated pathways of cause and effect. It simply APPLIES ITSELF singularly by giving itself and sharing itself, to increase itself and to supply the lack - the lack of love, the lack of unification, or seeming unwholeness, which is the basis for all suffering.

Learn this ONE LESSON, and you are done with the curriculum forever. See past the illusion of separations, which gives rise to countless numbers of bits and pieces. Look to the one vision to show you the one true reality. And you will rise above the fragmented battlefield into the wholeness of light.

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF." "This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

"The Holy Spirit will repeat this ONE inclusive lesson of deliverance, until it has been learned, REGARDLESS of the form of suffering that brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him, He will make answer with this very simple truth. For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

"My one lesson, which I must teach as I learned, is that no perception which is out of accord with the judgment of the Holy Spirit CAN be justified." "That is why you must teach only ONE lesson. If you are to be conflict free yourselves, you must learn ONLY from the Holy Spirit, and teach ONLY by Him."

"We said before that the message of the Crucifixion was teach ONLY love, for that is what you ARE. This is the ONE lesson which is perfectly unified, because it is the only lesson which IS one. And only BY teaching it can YOU learn it."

"As the teacher of God advances in his training, he learns one lesson with increasing thoroughness. He does not make his own decisions; he asks his Teacher for His answer, and it is this he follows as his guide for action. This becomes easier and easier, as the teacher of God learns to give up his own judgment."

"But the Holy Spirit teaches one lesson and applies it to ALL individuals in ALL situations. Being conflict free, He maximizes ALL efforts and ALL results. By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS. Its application does not matter. It is ALWAYS maximal."

"Thus is YOUR healing everything the world requires, that it may be healed. It needs ONE lesson that has perfectly been learned."

"As you perceive more and more common elements in ALL situations, the transfer of your training, under the Holy Spirit's guidance increases and becomes generalized. Gradually, you learn to apply it to everyone and everything, for its applicability IS universal. When this has been accomplished, perception and knowledge have become so similar that they share the unification of the Laws of God. What is One cannot be perceived as separate, and the denial of the separation IS the reinstatement of knowledge."

"The purpose is to train the mind to generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is as applicable to one situation as it is to another."

"the impairment of the ability to generalize is a crucial learning failure" "Place cause and effect in their true sequence in one respect, and the learning will generalize and transform the world."

"The specificity of the ego's thinking, then, results in a spurious kind of generalization, which is really not abstract at all. It will respond in certain specific ways to all stimuli which it perceives as related. In contrast, the Soul reacts in the same way to everything it knows is true, and does not respond at all to anything else."

"Miracles demonstrate that learning has occurred under the right guidance, for learning is invisible, and what has been learned can be recognized ONLY by its RESULTS. Its GENERALIZATION is demonstrated as you use it in more and more situations. You will recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in miracles, when you have applied them to ALL situations. For there IS no situation to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them TO all situations, you will gain the REAL world."

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you CAN see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His RESULTS, you will understand where He MUST be, and finally KNOW what He is."