There was a man I posted a video about recently who killed several people. This man was hallucinating that the people were trying to kill him. In his self-defense, and terror, he thought he was completely sane in ending their lives.

He did not see these people for who they were. He did not see their innocence. He saw something in them which was not there and which they were not doing. But he was convinced they were his enemy. He perceived them as an enemy and was certain the only sane course of action was to destroy them before they destroyed him.

Obviously this is insanity, but this is how the ego functions in all of us. When we are in the ego we go into a PRIVATE WORLD in which we hallucinate and project our OWN sin onto other people. We perceive it there, as though it is not our own stuff and as though it is real. We don't even see the person for who they are, and instead interact with that hallucinated projected enemy self, as if it's really out there.

In a sense, when we do this, we are no better than murdering other people. It may seem to be to less of a degree, but it's the same mechanism. And yet, it is not really other people that we're attacking, because as soon as you choose ego you go into a private world. You are then actually attacking a portion of the inside of your own mind, where you see a hallucinated version of your own sin and guilt. You attack your own ego. All of this has nothing to do with other people.

We need to learn to let go of identifying ourselves as ego, i.e. sinful and guilty, so that we can gain a clarity that is very important. We need to become able to truly SEE people as who they really are (Christ, innocent). But we're not going to be ABLE to see that in them if it is not also our own identity. Anything less than love will project a private world of self attack, in which we are at war with ourselves and THINK that it's a war with other people.

Anyone with enough awareness to KNOW that they are Christ, that they are innocent, CANNOT fall for the impression that someone else's insanity has anything to do with them. Someone else's self attack, someone else's private world, someone else's hallucination, or someone else's attempt to project their illusions onto you, has NOTHING to do with who and what you are. It doesn't even touch on who you are, is not targeted at who you are, and doesn't even acknowledge your identity. It's like the person is sending out packages with address labels that are for... not you, even though they're throwing them at you. They just do not register with you. They don't land with your identity.

You then have enough awareness to SEE clearly that the person is actually experiencing insanity. What they are accusing you of they are accusing themselves of. What they think is true of you is true of them, to themselves. Their belief that their enemy is evil is really their own belief that they are evil. They are having a mental illness. They are inside a private hallucinatory world, interact with make-believe selves, and it's literally got NOTHING to do with you at all.

IF you can get to that awareness, which requires that your own awareness be full and know yourself as innocence, you will have the clarity you need to NOT fall for the delusion that someone else's madness is about you. You will see, instead, that their entire experience is a CALL FOR LOVE. THEY need help. It's got nothing to do with you personally. This also will reveal to you that you are completely invulnerable, completely inaccessible to their ego attacks, because YOU do not believe that you are made of the things that they are accusing you of.

Therefore, this gives you access to a freedom, an awareness that nobody CAN attack what you ARE, because what you ARE has shown you that everyone else is trapped in private worlds. Their attacks are on THEMSELVES, and therefore, actually, NOBODY IS REALLY ATTACKING YOU. That then will give you natural confidence and fearlessness, and compassion. And you will be able to come from love.

Nobody has ever really attacked you. You are innocent and immortal and invulnerable. Nobody's harsh words have ever really been toward you. Nobody's abuse was ever an abuse of what you are. You are not abusable. You cannot be defiled in your innocence. You are naturally OUTSIDE of the ego entirely, outside of people's private reality bubbles. You are outside of other people's private worlds, you are outside of their hallucinated attacks, and you are outside of their delusion that their rage has anything to do with you. What a peaceful, safe place to be!

You only are "affected", which really means, are attacking yourself, when YOU believe that you are less than innocence and lovable. That means you believe you are ego, and you are now having your own private world of hallucinations. And other people's hallucinations will start to resonate with your false truth, and you will believe they join together and that therefore other people ARE now capable of attacking you. And when they express their hallucinations toward what you are, you will believe they really are about you, and you will really generate "hurt" in yourself (really done by your own mind), believing that they put it there. That's the mode you have to get OUT of, by reclaiming the Atonement.

Atonement is the awareness of your innocence, your invulnerability, and your immortality. And in this view of clarity, you'll laugh when you see that NOBODY is actually even attacking what you are AT ALL! They're all too busy attacking themselves, and are all lost and unconscious in their own little worlds. How freeing! Nothing real can be threatened, because nothing real is BEING threatened.

There are some parts of the course which suggest that if you will just change HOW you look at the world, or what meaning you GIVE it, suddenly seemingly horrifying scenes are interpreted as healed and lovely.

Obviously this loveliness MUST transcend the FORM of what is happening, because a broken leg is still a broken leg, and an explosion is still an explosion. But somehow, Jesus is saying that just by changing your perception, a world which used to look like hell, can look "like heaven".

"What loveliness we look upon today! What holiness we see surrounding us! And it is given us to recognize it is a holiness in which we share"

"There is no place for hell within a world whose loveliness can yet be so intense and so inclusive it is but a step from there to Heaven."

This seems ridiculous at first. You ask yourself how this is remotely possible, and how it is not just a totally insane idea to suggest that THIS world's horrors can be "smiled upon" or interpreted as "lovely". But this is what true perception and forgiveness is offering.

Somehow, a changed perception projects God's love onto the world, God is seen as a reflection IN the world, and Earth now reflects heaven instead of hell. It still has its same forms, and the same things may be happening physically, but what they MEAN changes. And there becomes a light that you see in and around everything.

Jesus says the Holy Spirit can liberate even the darkest bullshit we made, and make it appear lovely and a blessing. That even a dead body could appear to use like it is sparkling and healed. And this doesn't necessarily mean it is in a form or condition that is physically healed, like a cancerous tumor disappearing, but it is still interpreted as healed.

This SEEMS to suggest that the cancer could remain, physically, while perceiving from an advanced perspective of love and light. It would be seen as "lovely". This however doesn't necessarily imply that the cancer SHOULD remain, because the mind is capable of performing miracles to change matter. And sane minds heal bodies so that even symbolically, even in form, they symbolize eternal life and healing.

"Think of the loveliness that you will see, who walk with Him! And think how beautiful will each of you look to the other!"

"The special ones are all asleep, surrounded by a world of loveliness they do not see."

It is hard to get ones head around how it is possible to see this shitty-ass world as beautiful, light-filled, lovable. But ACIM says that even God loves the world. And that we can see God in everything, when God is in our mind, due to projecting God's meaning ONTO the world. That you can see God IN it, because you mix it WITH His love.

I used to get a sense of this, when I would read the course even years ago, where it sounded like he was saying that just by having a different state of mind, the world would be seen as entirely healed. I wasn't sure this was a correct interpretation, because I wanted to also include miracles. But it does seem to hold without undermining miracles of healing.

The world seen through the eyes of Christ, is a "healed world". It's redeemed. It's "translated into heaven", ACIM says. And then this REFLECTION of heaven, paves the way to knowledge and to the return home to the real thing.

"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth."

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive SOMETHING, and WITH something. This is why perception involves an exchange, or a translation, which knowledge does NOT need. The interpretive function of perception, (actually, a distorted form of creation), then permitted man to interpret the body as HIMSELF, which, although depressing, was a way out of the conflict he induced."

"Through Him, YOU stand before God's altar, where He gently translated hell into Heaven. For it is only in Heaven that God would have you be."

"Be not unwilling now, you are too near, and you WILL cross the bridge in perfect safety, translated quietly from war to peace."

"For, once you have accepted it as the ONLY PERCEPTION THAT YOU WANT, it is translated into knowledge, by the part that God Himself plays in the Atonement, for it is the ONLY step in it He understands."

"This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel you need a course which, in the end, teaches that only reality is true. But do you believe it? When you perceive the real world, you will recognize that you did not believe it. Yet the swiftness with which your new and only real perception will be translated into knowledge will leave you but an instant to realize that this alone is true. And then everything you made will be forgotten; the good and the bad, the false and the true. For as Heaven and earth become one, even the real world will vanish from your sight. The end of the world is not its destruction, but its translation into Heaven. 9 The reinterpretation of the world is the transfer of all perception to knowledge."

"Each spot HIS reason touches, grows alive with beauty. And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release.

All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing ALL illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there, in peace."

As I recently have been undoing my own belief in my own sinfulness, which is also the general belief that sin is real, I've been coming up against challenges. I had several days of some pretty heavy "release" which was overwhelming.

Holy Spirit was glad that I could realize I was only releasing because I had been willing to let go of some old belief in my sinfulness/guilt, but also advised that I should be gentle and slow down a bit. Trying too hard to undo all of it so quickly.

A major cornerstone of what was releasing, was the feeling and belief of not being lovable by God, because of sin and guilt that I still think is true of me. So I was trying to dig all of that out. Even though that's worthwhile and helpful, in the big picture, we do have to pace ourselves a bit.

What came after this release, though, was a feeling of self-love the likes of which I have never felt before. For about half a day I just felt really soft and loving toward myself and others. This proves to me that this undoing of beliefs is very worth pursuing.

I've also noticed, as I "push" myself or challenge myself to question ... do I REALLY believe I am sinless? ... it is pushing into my awareness various beliefs that I have that I'm going to have to look at. Here are some of the strong ones which have been coming up for me lately, and these might be the same for you. I think these beliefs are strong because they have a lot of social support and emphasis. Beliefs like:

Cancer

Evil

Death

Unworthiness

Being attacked

Loss of a loved one

etc...

I've quite often heard the word "cancer" come up from my ego, at stupid times, and I know it's a false belief but it still comes up driven entirely by fear. And it comes up because I still believe in it. There has been so much attention given to cancer, making it seem REAL, making it out to be a huge dangerous threat, an enemy, that everyone is trying to avoid and attack etc. That has seeped into and formed a belief in me - my own doing really, but I've created this belief that it has truth and reality to it. So now that shows me that I have the job of undoing my belief that cancer has ANY reality to it whatsoever.

Similarly, I have started to come up against questioning whether "evil" is real. I found myself for a few days getting lost again in trying to figure out what evil IS, how it operates, WHY it is doing what it appears to be doing etc. I've had some experiences that involve "evil spirits", if you can call them that. They're not friendly. I cast one out of me a few months ago kind of by accident when Jesus was helping me with a healing. I felt it leave. And I've had other encounters.

In the illusory dream world they "seem" to exist, and putting any amount of attention on them may attract them. But also, fearing them is just as bad. The "fear that evil is real" is a quite fundemanal ego belief. As a belief that "evil is real" it must produce fear, which is the suggestion you don't want it but the belief in it is a choice to want it. You become scared because of your OWN belief in it being real, which sort of pushes you into a confrontation with the thing you want to get away from.

Ultimately these things are illusions and love has no opposite. Jesus told me that they are "just fear". Just as this whole world is based on fear. And fearing it is not helpful. We have to be firm in Christ and in truth. Belief in sin being real produces the conditions for the ego to attack in all its ways, not just through hellish beings. We are not meant to fear these things or try to get into trying to understand or explain them too much, because it's really easy to get lost in that.

I found myself getting lost in the attempt to figure out what and how and why these things exist, only to find myself feeling more afraid and to be in a stronger mode of "questioning". Being in a mode of questioning is not a mode of answers OR answer-finding. Jesus's instruction to me again was "decide", which I've come to learn means I am not a victim and have the power to choose, and if I choose to believe that these things are not real and that they have no effect on me, then THAT WILL BE my experience. If I choose to believe in them, I will experience them as such. I get to decide. If I am in indecision, I'm actually unconsciously choosing to believe evil is real.

So I think we have these quite basic, quite strong beliefs we have to unearth and sort out. There is nothing about evil that is other than just another description of the ego. And the Holy Spirit knows that the ego does not really exist. That needs to become our belief also, and then we will be in celebration and joy and safety and fearlessness, knowing this truth. The truth shall set you free of evil because there IS no real evil. Evil is just as much an illusion as everything else the ego made.

It's a bit of a challenge though... confronting these beliefs and being in that place of "uncertainty" about whether it MIGHT be true and real. The sense of threat that comes from actually really considering it to be a real possibility. And then feeling unsure whether to believe it is real or not. That just means we're trusting the ego too much and are choosing to make it real. We just need to keep chipping away at these beliefs and keep undoing them to get to the point where we can truly accept the Atonement fully and recognize illusions for what they are.

Real Love, is not like anything else in this world. Love, to be experienced, must be shared by all.

Love is a presence that exists everywhere and extends everywhere. It radiates. It flows. It overcomes all separations. It does not and cannot belong to any one individual without simultaneously belonging to everyone. Nobody can put a wall around it and deny it to everyone else.

So if you want to experience love, you can't do it by locking love in a box. You can't do it by being absent of love yourself and expecting someone else to give their portion to you. Love it not limited and finite, or lacking or scarce. It's not like some kind of substance or material or object or commodity that someone exchanges for something else. It's not money used to buy a favor.

The ego believes that if you give something, you will lose it. It thinks that giving produces sacrifice. That you're going to be worse off, and have less, if you give. And especially if you share, there is no way to share with anyone without loss.

To the ego, sharing doesn't exist. It doesn't see how you can share, in any way, without diminishing what you have. And it's enacted this belief in the way that all physical 'forms' appear to behave.

If you want to share your apple, you're going to have to cut it in half and give half away - sacrificing half, and now you will only have half an apple. And you will experience that in the ego as loss, and unworthiness of having the whole. You might think you are sharing the half in kindness or generosity, but to the ego you a secretly jealous and bitter at having 'taken a hit' for the sake of someone else.

And then, to the ego, this form of sacrificing becomes equated with giving. It says, if I give half of this apple, and I do it in spite of the fact that I believe it is a sacrifice, then I am doing some kind of 'good for others'. This then leads to guilt that you are not giving ALL of what you have to others, and that even more sacrifice is called for. Ultimately it would have you give all of your apple to others, and having nothing for yourself.

That is the culmination of its belief system - that you are left with nothing, in total sacrifice and loss. Such is martyrdom. Such is what we commonly think of as 'giving selflessly' when in fact it usually is the ego sacrificing. To the ego, you should just give everything you have to others in order to be 'good' so that you'll meet God's graces, which is bullshit. It is a death wish. If you still have an ego and you are giving in this way without giving equally to yourself (receiving), that's not being a saint, it's being a martyr and an idiot. And it's also not what giving means.

Where in the ego's form of giving is there anything other than sacrifice? How in the ego's world is there anything even remotely similar to real sharing, other than loss? How can the ego give without losing what it has? It can't. Because the ego's idea of what it HAS is an illusion, a false value, and its idea of sharing it is the same thing as NOT sharing it. To the ego, sharing means posession and a transfer of ownership.

Real love is not like this. Real love does not diminish when it is shared or given. Real love doesn't call for sacrifice. Real love doesn't give give give, endlessly from your ego self, in the guise of some kind of 'atoning' or being 'selfless'. Real love cannot be owned by you exclusively, and you cannot give it away without you keeping it. Real love can't exchange hands and be in one place and not in another place at the same time. Real love doesn't leave you empty and lifeless. Real love doesn't ask you to be a martyr or to please everyone else except yourself.

Real love is like a giant vast ocean of love. Love's rule is that you can share in it by opening up to it and allowing it to be in you, but you cannot possess it or own it exclusively. You can participate in it and enjoy it and experience it, but this does NOT prevent others from doing the same. And there is an infinite supply, so there is no way you can have it all to 'yourself' and deny it to others, nor is there a need to get it FROM others because they too have their own access directly from God.

So unlike the ego, where you must 'get' love from others, because you think you lack it, you can't actually experience it even if you could get it, because you're trying to deny it to the other person. You want them to love you, sacrificially, by giving you what they have so that they don't have any left. That bleeds them dry, just as you trying to be an ego saint bleeds you dry. The only way you can experience love, is to get in line with how God has arranged things.

Simply, as ACIM says, "to have all, give all to all". Which means, to experience love fully, fully GIVE LOVE to everyone unconditionally, by EXTENDING what God has given you (unlimited love). In this you receive love from God in unlimited supply, and you extend it to others. But notice this key point:

If you do not extend the love to others, YOU cannot have it either. If you do not radiate the love to others, YOU cannot feel its radiance. If you do not SHARE love with others, YOU cannot share IN it either. Love has to be shared to be experienced, otherwise it is stationary. It needs to be extended and amplified to be what it is, like a radiant shining light. It has to shine outward. So you need to shine it outward, not from a limited supply of your own, but from God. Extend God's love. Extend God's healing miracles.

Simply...

God... help me to love [person's name]. Help me to extend your love to them and see them as lovable.

You will then feel love in your heart, for the other person, and you will feel the love and share in the love. It is the privilege of the loved to be loving.

A fear years ago, I was at an ACIM retreat and we were doing a breathing exercise. I became filled up with some kind of energy, which lifted my "vibration" very high. My mind started to see past the physical and reach out and started to see God BEYOND the veil. In that moment I would've left the entire world behind to be with Him.

I'll skip some details but after that, I was seeing with true perception. The amount of awareness and wakefulness I had was off the charts. Everywhere I looked, still seeing physical objects with my eyes, I saw God. God was in everything I saw and God was in my mind. My mind had expanded in some way, moving up the hologram, to where my ego self seemed dissipated and diffused into the back of my awareness, as though I had no center. My mind somehow pulled back away from the world and I began to feel like I was melting into the background, one with it. I felt like I was becoming Christ.

My awareness for some days after, entailed the ability to see a profound gentleness in everything. Everywhere I looked there was unconditional love, in all things. This love seemed so whole and complete, no matter where I looked, that I felt I had no need to look anywhere else to go find anything. I saw it in a chair leg. In a water bottle. In the shadows on a wall.

People were still going about their business doing exactly everything in the same egoic way as before - nothing changed there, because the body's eyes can ONLY see the physical form of things. But at the same time, there was awareness of a love and presence. I was aware of something that it seemed no-one knew was there, even though it seemed obvious. I became so soft. God was so gentle, so soft and joyous. And he was very, very intimate, which was shocking at first because I had previously always put God far away in the sky and here he was well under my skin.

I also became aware of the higher levels of the hologram, an experience of unity, in which the whole was in each part. All of God was in each object I saw. I therefore recognized for the first time in experience, that even though physical objects seemed to assert that "nothing is the same anywhere" or "there is nothing that is whole" or "the whole is not in any of the parts", here in my awareness I could still see this forms and yet, simultaneously, my mind was aware that a single consistent unified whole was present in all parts, fully, transcending their limitations and differences. This taught me the way in which physical matter is a lie, a deception designed to shut out awareness of God's nature.

I was in an altered state for a couple of weeks. I was very ungrounded. I could barely do tasks because my mind was quite expanded and out of body. Yet each time I did something "grounding", this energy that was in me started to funnel down, and this produced immense joy. Joy would beam out of my face toward others as I started at them very directly, something I had shy'd away from before, recognizing I had no needs, no lack, and that there was only outward extension. Nothing could "come in" to me from the outside. I felt so safe and protected and free from needs. I didn't even want to eat food, it felt so alien.

Gradually as I grounded back into my body my expanded awareness narrowed down, became more focused into and through the body, and I became more immersed in the physical body again. This was like receiving some kind of brain damage. My awareness diminished greatly and it felt like being greatly subdued and suppressed, shut down and locked inside a prison suit. This also stripped away most of the intense wakefulness that I had, which felt like "leaving God", which was VERY upsetting.

This made it impossible for me to have God in my mind, and thus I stopped seeing God outside of me in all things. It seemed God left. I kept trying to find God outside of me because I thought that He was out there, having seen Him there, but I couldn't find Him because I was no longer aware of Him WITHIN my mind. And for weeks this was depressing and infuriating, although gradually I adjusted and was reassured by a few momentary glimpses that God was still with me. Returning to my body felt like a huge isolation. As my eye sight returned to looking out solely through the body's eyes, it was like building a brick wall "behind" me such that I could no longer have any sense of what was there. The body cut me off from awareness of God, and so I got to see first hand just how limiting bodies are.

What I later came to realize was this was an experience of true perception. A state of seeing a forgiven world. It was as though layer upon layer of thick "judgement" had been scraped off the surface of the world revealing an extremely gently held picture of something very lovable. And yet at the same time, the physicality was the same. The appearance physically to my eyes was the same. It was what I saw IN it, in SPITE of the physicality, that I longed to reconnect with.

This is why, for me personally, I know that this physical world is not real. I know how much the body lies. I know how the body's sense are massively limiting. I know how matter lies to try to obscure the holographic nature of God and his omnipresence. I've seen it and experienced the transition back and forth. God gave me a glimpse of awakening and it was the most profoundly directly educational experience of my entire life.

This is why I know first hand that there is something very much beyond this world, a reality which is completely obscured by forms and trapped by bodies. This world is not my home. I have grieved for the "loss of God" and gradually over time use this as incentive, a taste of what's to come, to find my way back to God again.

The attraction to Him was SO STRONG that I would've leapt into His arms in an instant without so much as a consideration for anything else in all the world. We have protected ourselves from remembering just how appealing God is, and why NOTHING else means anything even remotely close to Him. We only block awareness in order to hide this extreme attraction. Otherwise we would awaken in a heartbeat.

It is not natural to feel sad, unhappy, depressed, angry, alone, lost, grieving, frustrated, offended, victimized, weak, afraid, guilty, sinful, hurt, broken or annoyed. These are NOT natural. They are NOT the signs of a person being "emotionally mature" or "in touch with their feelings" or "psychologically healthy". It is NOT natural to feel upset about anything for any reason.

"Anger is never justified."

"Depression is blasphemous."

They are all ego reactions to a belief that there is an external CAUSE in the world capable of FORCING you to have a certain negative reaction. They are illusions of consequences made up from an evil mindset. They are not real, or valid feelings. All of them are based in victimhood and attack and vulnerability and defensiveness. Even feeling happy "because of" something that happened to you is fake and driven by "positive victimhood." Especially feelings of love and happiness "caused by" a SPECIAL love interest.

The only real emotions are those which extend out of you from God, such as love and joy and happiness and peace and gratitude and holiness. Those are natural. They are signs of true sharing and connection and sanity. Those should be happening all the time and when they are not, something has gone wrong. No-one is supposed to be suffering in any way.

"God does not will that you suffer."

"God gives you only happiness."

"God's will for me is perfect happiness."

Just because the world is riddled with despair and loneliness and depression and rage and hatred and all manner of suffering, does not mean it is natural. Just because people TEND to have certain feeling reactions to terrible "real" things happening, does not mean it is natural. It is understandable, given their insanity, but it is NOT supposed to be happening.

It is utterly unnatural, against the nature of God, to ever be anything short of completely happy all the time.

"Happiness is a constant state."

If someone seems to be in a body and the person dies, it may seem natural, even supposedly unavoidable, that you would feel a terrible sense of loss and grief. Aloneness, anger, resentment, abandonment, and all manner of hell. But these responses are NOT natural. They are happening because the person believes that death is real, that bodies are people, and that things really happen in the world. This is deception, insanity, mental illness, and a failure to recognize the truth. Which results in suffering.

ALL of the ego emotions can be completely overcome and avoided through forgiveness and the recognition of what really is true. The recognition that the world is a DREAM and that nothing real can be threatened, is enough, if fully experienced, to completely obliterate the foundation for ANY sense of suffering. Emotional or physical. All forms of physical sickness are also symptoms of improper responses, reactions of un-love, to perceived external attacks.

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

Every single form of suffering, every emotional upset, all nightmares and hellish situations, every unhappiness, all sense of loss and lack and despair and hopelessness, are all SIDE EFFECTS of an improper perspective on life. They are all symptoms which show up as effects, "caused by" external seeming happenings, which really is a person's mind attacking itself.

A person who believes the world "does things to them" is victimized and thrown around by it senselessly. The world then dictates whether you are happy or sad, what you are able to receive, what you can get, how you should feel, how you should react, how severe something is, how important it is, what its value is, how you should react to it, and what it means to you. It practically shoves meaning down your throat and demands that you suffer, changing you against your will.

Anyone who believes the world is real and a cause of anything will fall into this trap and all manner of hellish experiences will result. Because it is completely unnatural, completely false and a total deception. Falling for the temptation to believe that you are AFFECTED, in any way, by the world, is deception and delusion. It is based in the confusion of not recognizing what really is true or real. Of not knowing yourself. Of being out of touch with the IMMORTAL CHRIST in you.

"Nothing real can be threatened."

You cannot be affected or made happy or unhappy by the world. Nothing in the world can "bring you joy". Nothing in the world is supposed to "make you happy" or "cause you to" feel anything. If it does, you have reacted to a dream as if were not a dream. And that begins the slippery slope into hell. The world is not there to CAUSE YOU to be enlightened, or happy, or spiritual, or holy. It cannot heal you. It cannot give anything to you. It is meaningless and is nothing.

Everything you can have, must come from God. All that you can experience, must be rooted in him. All real feelings must be shared with Him. Any states of happiness or joy must come from WITHIN. All love has to be EXPRESSED and given, from the inside out. You have to light up the world in order to see it as lovable or meaningful or filled with joy. You have to GIVE it that. You can't GET it from the world. The world is a piece of shit drizzled on a turd wrapped in a horseshite. It has NO value and NO power over you.

This is the one lesson to learn. The one lesson the holy spirit teaches over and other. That nothing that happens, no matter the seeming cause, no matter the suffering, it all has ONE CAUSE, that cause is in YOUR MIND, and you are doing it to yourself.

"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.""

I kind of feel like, all this time doing the course I've been generally "pulling away" from the world. Seeing the world as out there and sort of trying to detach from it and rise above it. Or rather, to withdraw from it and get away from it.

But I'm getting this intuition that, maybe this is backwards. That the darkness and confusion and illusions and ego stuff isn't "out there in the world", but rather than I am IN that stuff within myself.

The result being that I need to get OUT of myself and "embrace reality", ie attune to the reality of the world - the real world - through forgiveness and awakening. To experience "loving the world", as that vital stepping stone towards ascension to heaven.

Not that this means like, regarding spacetime as God's creation or as ultimate reality but... I'm wondering if my whole approach has been fundamentally wrong this whole time, due to the projection of judgments onto the world and associating them with it, and then trying to get away from those projections.

If I stop judging the world, then it's obviously not the world that's "in the wrong", it's my mind. There could be a "lovable real world" "out there" that I'm not seeing because I keep trying to "separate from it", because I'm lost internally in the ego darkness and judgments and stuff.

The course is clearly pointing toward finding a way to see what the world is in the present moment, without condemnation, without my ego judgments, without guilt projection, and with the Holy Spirit's holiness and eyes of Christ. To look upon that "out there" I obviously can't be trying to "remove myself from it".

Perhaps the defensive posture of "get away from the world" has been a backwards ego decoy this whole time, laden with projected judgments designed to justify not engaging with it or opening up to it. Because who would want to become in some way "closer to" something "judged" to be evil and cruel.

Maybe my judgements of it have been unfair and unwarranted and incorrect, and maybe the forgiven world is there to be seen when I'm not projecting internal confusions onto it. Maybe there is a way to love the world, for what it is - not to give it reality or permanence or confuse it with heaven but, at least to look at it with a greater embrace of "what it is" without all the projections of "what it is not" that I keep putting onto it.

The world has been my favourite scapegoat for many years, presumably my whole life. Maybe the world isn't really the problem. Maybe the problem is in my mind. And maybe I've been lost in an internal "dream" of reality distortion and denial of the truth.

It seems we're meant to learn to see "with accurate perception", the world "as it is". To recognize it, to see past the differences and contrasts. To see an underlying "reflection of heaven" in it. Actually seemingly "out there". Such that we experience the world from a whole-minded forgiven vantage point of openness and welcome and sharing rather than attack and rejection.

Perhaps ultimately we give the world we made a big hug and then watch as it dissolves away.

"Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does so. "

"From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home."

"Father, Christ's vision is Your gift to me, and it has power to translate all that the body's eyes behold into the sight of a forgiven world. How glorious and gracious is this world! Yet how much more will I perceive in it than sight can give. The world forgiven signifies Your Son acknowledges his Father, lets his dreams be brought to truth, and waits expectantly the one remaining instant more of time, which ends forever as Your memory returns to him."

"The teachers of God have trust in the world, because they have learned it is not governed by the laws the world made up. It is governed by a Power which is in them but not of them. It is this Power that keeps all things safe. It is through this Power that the teachers of God look on a forgiven world."

"Can the world seem bright and clear and safe and welcoming, with all my past mistakes oppressing it, and showing me distorted forms of pain? Yet in the present love is obvious, and its effects apparent. All the world shines in reflection of its holy light, and I perceive a world forgiven at last."

"Can the world seem bright and clear and safe and welcoming, with all my past mistakes oppressing it, and showing me distorted forms of pain? Yet in the present love is obvious, and its effects apparent. All the world shines in reflection of its holy light, and I perceive a world forgiven at last."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there is a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

It is important for you to claim the atonement for yourself, because you are an extender of God's love.

If there is a block in your awareness, whereby you are not willing to receive love for yourself, love is not going to be able to flow through you to other people.

Love comes from God, goes through you, and extends outward to others.

If you put up a roadblock in your mind where you are not willing to receive love yourself, you will be incapable of allowing that love to fully flow through you to others.

You only will see God in everything you see when God is in your mind, and God has to be in your mind FIRST. The doors have to be open for the light to shine through.

You might think it is important to learn to love others as much as possible. I thought this was what I was supposed to do, becoming very loving and try to love all the time. But Holy Spirit corrected me on this.

He said, "you must love yourself first."

If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love others. The amount of love you can give entirely depends on how much love you have. If you are empty of love, you can try to fake it, to sacrifice, and to strain to try to love others, but you will hit walls and limitations.

There will be ways in which you also believe that other people are not lovable, they are just too irritating or annoying or upsetting, or they make bad choices or attack you or whatever. You will think that it is because of them that you cannot love them, or that you can only love them conditionally some of the time.

When pushed to your limits you will find out that in fact the thing stopping you from being able to love this monstrous enemy is your own inability to love any more than you already do. And the reason you can't do that is because you're hitting the limit of how much you love yourself.

So then it becomes a matter of, it's not really other people that you can't love another ounce, it's yourself. You yourself are hitting the limits of how loving you can be, because there is something about your own self that you do not love. There is a blockage in you, an unwillingness to let that much love be present in you.

So now it's simply impossible for you to love other people that much extra without FIRST addressing what it is about your own self that seems unlovable. You have to make room for love in yourself before you can love others that much more.

It seems ideal and appealing to be very loving to others as much as possible but you simply will not be able to, or willing to, and you will stop short of being able to find that much love and compassion in you, simply because you yourself are not willing to let YOU be loved that much.

The challenge then is learning to let yourself be loved, to become open to love and receive love for yourself. This means undoing false ego beliefs and self attack, so that you can come to believe the truth is true and be actually WILLING to accept the truth - your innocence - your lovability. You must therefore accept Atonement FOR YOURSELF, SO THAT you can access and receive love, be open to love coming to you, open to it flowing through you, and thus be able to offer it to others.

When you do this, when you take that sole responsibility of accepting atonement for yourself, it means you are now willing to receive love and recognize that you CAN be loved and are loved. This willingness to acknowledge the worthiness of love within yourself GIVES YOU the ability to see love and worthiness in others, you will believe they deserve that love also, and then you will give it to them. This is the START of your ability to be MIRACULOUS, because miracles are always expressions of love.

You must receive the gift of love first in order to give it. You must receive the miracle for yourself first in order to give it. You must heal yourself before you can heal others. And you must forgive yourself before you can extend forgiveness to others. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. It is the privilege of the healed to heal. It is the privilege of those who have accepted miraculous truth for themselves to perform miracles to help others be freed from their illusions of suffering.

Accepting the Atonement for yourself, as your sole responsibility, should never be seen as meaning that other people are SEPARATE from you or that they are excluded from your atonement. Once you have accepted atonement for yourself you ARE accepting it on behalf of everyone else, and it WILL result in you becoming loving towards others and able to perform miracles for them.

Many people use this "sole responsibility" as an argument for some kind of "private awakening", which excludes everyone else and it used to explain why you would not then perform and miracles. Its meaning is totally the opposite. To accept the atonement is to accept oneness, which applies to YOU AND EVERYONE because it makes you an extender of love. You must take responsibility for accepting it for yourself, SO THAT you enter into a state of SHARING, and are then able to EXTEND THE ATONEMENT to other people in the form of miracles. The atonement justifies being a miracle worker.

Sometimes it's very hard to forgive someone. You become fixated on what they did to you, or what they were supposed to do that they didn't do. And sometimes this might've been something that occurred over a very long period of time, such that you can't even imagine life without this grievance. You just can't see how you can forgive this person.

This way of perceiving someone is very hard to get past especially if the person is important or valuable to you. And especially if your involvement with them has been largely a 'special relationship', or a victim/victimizer role. When all your focus is on how they affected you, you become blocked and unconscious as if there is no other way of looking at this.

So there you are, your mind is fixated on this person, on what they did to hurt you, and you just can't seem to get past this experience. One thing you do need to do is allow yourself to FEEL the feelings that have arisen as a result of what seemed to happen. By not feeling it you are in profound denial. Never mind that you had anything to do with how you perceive the situation, but to even deny that you feel hurt at all is a whole other layer of denial on top of it. Pretending it didn't happen when your whole being is screaming that 'it did' is an attempt to protect yourself from it, to hide it in order to pretend it is healed. But it does not go away, and it will eat a hole in you until you acknowledge it.

So as you gather a little willingness to explore 'healing', you can begin to at first allow yourself to acknowledge more of yourself, of what you are, and of what you believe has happened to you. Let yourself feel. The feeling has to come up for release. Up and out. This isn't necessarily forgiveness, but it is a form of catharsis to release old stuck energies which do obscure your perception. It's hard to see someone with innocence or calm when you're really feeling angry and hurt. Acknowledging and feeling the feelings, by FEELING them, not describing them, is a step forward in your healing.

Once some of that is past, you have cleared the way to experience a new way of perceiving. You may already have experienced cognitive shifts as a result of releasing emotion, like clouds clearing away which expose the sun. But you need to go deeper. Because this whole dynamic of "they did this to me" leaves you a victim, and if you stay there, you are stuck. Almost all feelings besides LOVE arise from perceiving yourself unfairly treated, or outright hurt. Fears, doubts, anger, hurt, suffering, pain, embarrassment, abandonment, etc all arise from 'its happening to me'. You need to move past this way of looking at the situation. But this is where it's hard, because it requires some form of detachment or greater perspective.

This is where Holy Spirit comes in because you're now willing to change your mind/perception about what happened and potentially see it differently, even if you can't yet see how that's possible. Until you take that inward journey you won't discover the answers and clarity that you need. You must seek reunion with God by joining with Holy Spirit and asking for His Help to overlook the way you've been seeing.

Now, what you have to get past is the belief and perception that ALL of your upset is the direct result of, and put there by, the other person. That it's their fault. That they are the sole cause. That you did absolutely nothing to ask for it at any time. That's irresponsibility. You MUST take some responsibility, even if a little at first. You can't be free from the victim role if you are not responsible. So let yourself be a little willing, however small, to open up to the possibility that there might be another way to look at this. Maybe you participated somehow. Maybe you made a decision or chose a way of experiencing the situation, which resulted in the evidence of hurt that you're left with.

Maybe you choose to AGREE with what the person was doing. Maybe you choose to BELIEVE that you deserved the treatment they gave. Maybe you chose to change your own sense of who you are, based on what they seemed to demonstrate was true of you. Maybe at some point in between what they 'offered' and what you 'took' from what happened, there was a little interval of choice where you came to your OWN CONCLUSION about what this means. Maybe you therefore did this formation of a false belief to yourself, USING the situation by taking it personally. Your belief in it, your agreement with it, your perception that it is the truth having lost sight of the real truth about you, WAS the 'attack' that you perpetrated against yourself, regardless of what the person modeled for you.

Ultimately you're 100% responsible for choosing. You made up the belief you're left with, on your own. Maybe you didn't know any better. Maybe you were too young. Maybe you forgot you are unconditionally lovable. Maybe nobody told you and you lost track of who you really are. But if you're 100% responsible for AGREEING to this punishment, then you also have the POWER to "choose again". And you can do that at any time that you are willing to admit to choosing this belief, and being willing to SURRENDER it to Holy Spirit, because it is simply false.

But you can't tell a belief is false just by saying it is. You need to know what is true. You need to transfer your allegiance and faith. You need to therefore open up to a greater truth, perhaps reminding yourself of what is true of you, or how God views you, or what God thinks of this false belief, or how Holy Spirit sees you in His Light. Ultimately, to FORGIVE, you need to get `into` the light of the Holy Spirit, at least a little bit, so that it can "shed light" on your belief and SHOW YOU that it is false. False beliefs simply ARE false, and you only need to see them clearly to recognize this. It's not seeing them clearly that makes you trust them. In the light of forgiveness you can witness the obvious fact that what you thought was true of you, is completely untrue, and THEN you will be perfectly willing to let it go. You'll know it was a ridiculous, untrue belief, not in line with the Truth of God. Or in other words, you'll see the VALUE of the real truth about you, and the LACK of value of what is false, and therefore RECOGNIZE that what is false does not even apply to you.

It doesn't apply to you. Because you're innocent and holy and forgiven already. You're loved by God. You're safe. You're at peace. You're with Holy Spirit. You're whole and healed. That's the truth. This event never happened. The person never really did anything to you. You did this to yourself and now you can see that you don't want to keep doing so. So you surrender. You surrender the false sense that is MADE FROM this false belief.. this false identity that isn't a true description of you. It wasn't really who you are anyway.

Then you remember who you are as God's Innocent Child and receive HEALING.

In the separation from God, we basically denied God and tried to reject him. We tried to will against his will, reject his fatherhood, block awareness of his love, and hide in the darkness. We did not want God to love us, and wanted to hide our love for him.

This means that now, in our separated ego state, we are actually in a position where we are not allowing ourselves to be aware of God. Or to put it another way, we're trying to shut him out of our mind.

This means ultimately that we're trying NOT to be loved, to block and limit love, and are trying to resist being loved or loveable. We have to suppress our love and lovability in order to shut God out, because God himself IS love.

Before the separation, and in our creation, God gave ALL of himself, all of his immense unlimited unconditional love to us, and loved us with an endless deep love. We received this love and ARE this love. We are created as entirely lovable to God, loved BY God, and we are THE love of God.

In the separation, in the authority problem, we tried to deny this love and therefore also this lovability. But now we find ourselves feeling empty, lacking love, unlovable, unworthy, not good enough, and feeling that we don't love ourselves.

The thing is, that we can't love ourselves WITHOUT including God in that love, and that means that any willingness to love ourselves will have to also be a willingness to LET GOD love us as well. It means being willing to RECEIVE LOVE.

The problem we have is that we basically have stopped letting ourselves RECEIVE, and have placed great emphasis on giving without receiving, which is sacrifice. We don't love ourselves in isolation, and can't love ourselves while trying to be separate from God.

The secret then is that in order to feel loved and loving, you HAVE to let God love you. You have to let God in, into your mind, into your awareness. You have to be willing to allow yourself to RECEIVE LOVE from God, acknowledge that God has already GIVEN total love to you, and have gratitude that it has been given so that you can give it back as well.

You can't feel loved unless you share and flow love. You can't flow love unless God is its source. You can only share the love of God. You can only feel loved if you let God love you and are willing to extend it to others. You can't find love in isolation or exclusion, nor can you find a love in yourself that you can love yourself with that is other than God's love.

This is why when you try to love yourself you fail, because you cannot create love out of nothing. You have to get it from God. There is no love other than God's love, so you have to let God in and let him love you in order to feel love. And when you do... .... you feel loved and safe and happy and strong, and have love to give.

"And I must learn I need do nothing of myself, for I need but accept my Self, my sinlessness, created for me, now already mine, to feel God's Love protecting me from harm, to understand my Father loves His Son; to know I am the Son my Father loves."

"For we will learn today what peace is ours when we forget all things except God's Love."

"Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. It is the reflection of God's Love on earth. It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me to my home."

"Yet is the world of hatred equally unseen and inconceivable to those who feel God's Love in them. Their world reflects the quietness and peace that shines in them; the gentleness and innocence they see surrounding them; the joy with which they look out from the endless wells of joy within."

"The only part of your mind that has reality, is the part that links you still with God. Would you have ALL of it transformed into a radiant message of God's Love, to share with all the lonely ones, who have denied Him with you? GOD MAKES THIS POSSIBLE. "

"YOU are the work of God, and His Work is wholly loveable and wholly loving. This is how a man MUST think of himself in his heart, because this is what he IS."

"I am sustained by the Love of God."

"Put all your faith in the Love of God within you, eternal, changeless and forever unfailing. This is the answer to whatever confronts you today. Through the Love of God in you, you can resolve all seeming difficulties without effort and in sure confidence."

"I am surrounded by the Love of God."

"I feel the Love of God within me now."

"If you feel the Love of God within you, you look out upon a world of mercy and of love."

"To all who share the love of God the grace is given to be the givers of what they have received."

"You who could give the love of God to everything you see and touch and remember are literally denying Heaven to yourselves."

"I bless you, brother, with the Love of God which I would share with you. For I would learn the joyous lesson that there is no love but God's and yours and mine and everyone's."

"Sacrifice is gone. And in its place, the Love of God can be remembered, and will shine away all memory of sacrifice and loss."

"If you would but let the Holy Spirit tell you of the Love of God for you, and the need that your creations have to be with you forever, you would experience the attraction of the Eternal. For no-one can hear Him speak of this, and long remain willing to linger here. For it IS your will to be in Heaven, where you are complete and quiet, in such sure and loving relationships, that ANY limits are impossible."

"For the special relationship is THE RENUNCIATION OF THE LOVE OF GOD, and the attempt to secure for the self the specialness that He denied."

"But the sane KNOW that only attack COULD produce fear, from which the love of God COMPLETELY protects them."

"The love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another."

"You who identify with your egos cannot believe that God loves you. YOU do not love what you have made, and what you have made does not love you. Being made out of the denial of the Father, the ego has no allegiance to its own Maker. You cannot conceive of the real relationship that exists between God and His Souls, because of the hatred you have for the Self you have made."

"You cannot understand how much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in your experience of the world to help you understand it. There is nothing on earth with which it can compare, and nothing you have ever felt, APART from Him, that resembles it ever so faintly."