In the physical world, events seem to happen where physical objects and bodies are involved. Coupled with the illusion that some objects cause effects on other objects, it seems as though we live in a world where some thing or person does something to someone else.

It seems as though these causes produce real effects, which you can see with your eyes and touch with your hands. The effects seem very tangible and convincing. You could be standing there looking at the effects of an action, proving that it happened because of what has been changed.

The ego uses these physical events to demonstrate and prove its belief that things have really happened, that there has been real sin with real consequences. This can all be very convincing to the body's eyes.

When you witness these things, if you look on them as real and believe in what you are seeing, your mind is actually entering into a belief in illusions. It is not actually true that any of these has happened for real, because it is only a dream. Taken seriously, it seems to be true, proved by what the body is sensing about what has taken place.

Perceiving that, and trusting that to be true, your mind aligns itself with these illusions and therefore is mis-perceiving. This becomes a trap, because by believing in what seems to have happened, you join in the ego's thought system and become convinced of a lie.

Believing that what we see happening in the world is real and true, this leads to a host of psychological deceptions. For example, in this world, scenarios happen where it seems blatantly obvious that one person is wrong and another person is right. If there is a green tree in the yard and one person is claiming the tree is purple, and the other is claiming the tree is green, the person seeing a green tree may see themselves as "right". According to the physical ego evidence, they are right.

But this then becomes a trap for that person. If they are perceiving the illusion of a green tree and are believing they are right about what they are seeing, and that the other person must be wrong, because the tree is "real", that person is still in the ego mind. They will start to become righteous. They will believe they are completely justified in being righteous because of what is obviously a green tree. And so the physical evidence proves that they are justified in being right.

Believing they are "right" is now a trap because their mind is now trying to make the other person wrong, and is believing in an illusion. It's a very subtle trap because, in terms of the physical scenario or events that seem very real, the structure of the events makes it really seem as though they are right. There is physical proof. In this situation, they are correct. But this is a "temptation", to believe psychologically that they are right as well.

Even though it seems true that you are right, in that what is happening in the dream seems to prove that you are the one who is right, if your ego gets involved in this you will use it to become righteous. So the challenge is, that even though you are right, technically, based on what the dream is doing, to be careful not to use it as an opportunity to bolster your ego.

If your mind starts to psychologically align with the physical events and appearances, you will start to defend your position and get into the ego. Being willing to not make yourself right, when technically in this situation you are right, requires some subtle discernment and honesty. When the physical events seem to prove that you are right, and the proof is staring you in the face, you must learn to detach from appearances and stay centered in the real truth.

The real truth is that you do not need to be "right", even if you are right. It's easy enough to realize that you're being egotistical if you are "wrong" and are trying to defend a position which even the physical situation doesn't prove or support, but when the physical situations seems to agree that you are right, it is now much easier to be tempted to fall into its trap.

There is also another way that this subtle temptation happens. When situations arise where it seems like you are innocent, and it seems that someone else really is doing something against you which seems uncalled for, your belief and perception that you are innocent is a trap.

It becomes very easy to believe that you are innocent because, according to what's happening in the physical world, what the person is doing, what your are not doing etc, physical events seem to "prove" that you are innocent. If you're sitting at home and someone comes along and throws a ball through your window, breaking the window, it seems, based on the physical evidence, that that person is guilty and you are innocent. This then is a significant temptation by the ego for you to believe what you're seeing - they are guilty, you are not.

Because the situation seems to physically prove your innocence, it then becomes very easy for your ego to use that as the basis for justifying your anger and counter-attack. If you're not careful, you will use the physical proof to justify retaliation and upset. If events transpired where you were the one who broke the window and were guilty, it would be perhaps a clearer contrast for you to notice the ego at work. But when the ego seems to agree with what you want to believe about yourself, that you're the innocent one, the slippery slope is much harder to stay away from or even notice.

It becomes again a subtle trap, where the physical proof aligns with your ego mind, and you become almost blind to the possibility of being mistaken. When physical events correlate to the ego's beliefs, there is a blindness or unconsciousness. When physical events are in contrast or opposite to what the ego believes, it is more noticeable and discernible. It's easier to be honest and unconditionally loving, it seems, when events support it, than when they don't. It is easier to love someone when they are giving you love, than when they are seeming to attack you.

Our lesson then is to detach ourselves from all appearances, which includes appearances and events which seem to be in our favor, as well as events and appearances which seem to be against us. Even the ones which seem to be on our side, or show us as right, or prove we are innocent, are just as much a trap to fall into. You do not want to be found innocent or guilty by the ego's world. Neither is the truth.

In some ways, when things in the physical world seem to align with your interests, be on your side, support your case, prove your innocence and finds someone else guilty, it's a much bigger temptation than when the world is finding you guilty. If the world says you are guilty, it ties straight into your unconscious guilt, bypassing your ego's fake facade of innocence. It blows the ego's cover-story about why you are not guilty, given that it really believes you are guilty deep down.

So beware of things going your way in this world. Beware of physical situations, evidence and proof, seeming to imply that you are the one who is right or innocent, and someone else is not. It's a temptation to believe the ego and to align with and support its dream. It's an attempt to get you to want to keep the world and stay on the ego's side and maintain allegiance with it.

We have to be honest enough, consistently aligned with the real truth, that even when it seems like we are receiving the long end of the stick, we dispel that and ignore it and find both yourself and others equally innocent. We need to overlook all occurrences of illusions which portray either ourselves or others as either innocent or guilty, based on appearances or physical evidence. None of it is truth.

Neither the ego-proven innocent or the ego-proven guilty are really either. We are all beyond the ego's verdict. We need to learn not to define who we are or what is true based on what is external or physical or proven with evidence. Our innocence lies in the Holy Spirit's viewpoint, which is that none of the ego's illusions are true. We are all equally innocent because nothing that seems to happen physically in a dream is real. No-one is the winner in a world of lies.

Decouple yourself from depending on the world to define whether you are right or wrong, or innocent or guilty. Get your truth and your verdict from the Holy Spirit, who will find you unconditionally innocent, and everyone else along with you. Then in that view, no-one can be considered righteous and no-one is guilty, because nothing has really happened.

Physical events are illusions. They are part of the ego's thought system. Part of the ego's mind. Objects and people and bodies and events and happenings are all part of this dream which isn't real. We need to learn not to depend on or trust or believe any of it. God is the greater reality in which we can trust, and in which our faith is justified.

Physical evidence doesn't prove anyone's guilt or innocence, because physicality is not reality. In God's eyes, everyone is innocent, and unconditional love and forgiveness is always justified.

Since all things physical are rooted in separation, it is impossible to do ANYTHING in this world without it being in some way connected to being separate.

Eating, breathing, talking, touching, fighting, whatever, everything physical is not God’s nature.

We tend to section off certain physical things as somehow “meaning” that they are good or bad, right or wrong, better or worse, more or less spiritual. But physicality can’t really be said to be selective in terms of what it represents.

A war, a butterfly flapping, people hitting each other, baking a cake, painting a picture, on the physical level it’s all still forms in a dream, images made of ideas of separateness and conflict. But somehow arbitrarily we’ve assigned all kinds of hierarchies and categories to physical things to say that some are better than others.

Given that you can’t DO anything in the world without it being rooted in separation, it then comes down to PURPOSE. And by purpose we have to mean that how it is being USED or toward what ultimate goal. The use of it isn’t inherent to the thing itself, because purpose is about mind and the meaning the mind gives to things.

It is mind that judges murder as bad, or as worse than kissing. It is mind that decides that a dead broken body is more evil or proof of sin that a healthy athlete running a race. It is mind that decides to say that people shooting others with guns is bad while hugging is good.

Ultimately the strange truth is that all things physical cannot be used to determine “what it means”, or whether it is a good thing or not. Our categorizations of stuff comes from judgements, and most of those judgments are rooted in ego. It is technically the ego that says that physical war is ”an ego thing.” Which is kind of a confusion of two levels - mental and physical.

Let’s remember the world is a dream. And the dream is made of symbols. And the symbols can sometimes look what we have decided is nice and other times not nice. Even the death of the body has been artificially endowed with negative meanings, while the non-dead bodies have been endowed with positive meanings. Yet:

“The body cannot be meaningfully invested with attributes of Christ OR the ego.” Because the body is actually “nothing.”

So if we stop completely trying to evaluate whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, spiritual or not, based on its FORM … we might be better off. This means all illusions are equal and there is no hierarchy. Just because something looks like “a big disaster” doesn’t mean it IS actually in truth “worse than” a seemingly small problem. These are DECEPTIONS based on being blinded by perception of form.

A headache or cancer are technically both equally unreal and untrue, and one is NOT technically worse than the other. One is not more serious than the other either. Both are supposed to be regarded as equally meaningless and their forms are meant to be regarded as illusions of deception. We are not supposed to buy into how stuff looks on the physical level, as though differences mean something.

This is a bit radical because it means putting physical war and murder alongside kisses and hugs as equals. And not just categorizing the arbitrarily as opposites. It means that terrorism and abuse are “just another form” of the same illusion as someone throwing a birthday party and giving gifts. Because the FORM something takes is not its real meaning.

As the course teaches, when we look to the form tell us “what it means”, and USE and depend on the form to “describe” its meaning, we are deceived by illusions. A healthy body is not better or worse than a sick body in this sense. But the world is very accustomed to evaluating rightness or goodness based on what form something takes. Technically a nuclear bomb is no more ‘evil’ than a feather falling to the ground lightly.

“Let me not use this as a sign of sin and death, or as an obstacle to peace, but help me to use it to facilitate its coming.” This applies to all the seemingly physical FORMS of “bad things” in this world as much as anything - you should be able to find a way to laugh at it and see it as affirming a mental purpose of peace.

In terms of judgement, meaning, purpose, evaluations of whether its good or bad, judging whether it is spiritual or not, an ego thing or not, more or less ego based, etc…. that’s all mental stuff happening on a separate level from the physical. We have to give stuff all the meaning it has because it has none of its own. It’s a meaningless world. It has many different forms and we seem to prefer some over others, but truly we are not supposed to. The form illusions takes is not supposed to sway us whatsoever.

So then it comes down to the mind’s USE of the form, the PURPOSE it gives it from a higher level. What is it for. What meaning do we give TO it. What goal will we use it to serve? Who are we looking at it with - ego or holy spirit? You could say that a physical war could be used by the holy spirit’s vantage point to welcome laughter and happiness, just as much as you could say that a happy dance with hugs and kisses could be used by the ego as a sign of treachery and betrayal and conflict.

We’re not supposed to be dividing up the world based on what FORM things take, whatever category we put those forms into, or what meanings we give to those categories. Otherwise we start to try to “spiritualize form”, by saying that certain behaviors, acts, physical movements, styles, wardrobe choices, words, whatever, are somehow “more spiritual”. And before long we’re creating an illusion of being “physically spiritual.”

Of course a mind at peace, coming from Holy Spirit, may well tend to be guided to act in a certain way, to avoid certain things, or to do other things. But the things that are done are done for a higher purpose. And the form that these things appear to take may be misunderstood as “not looking spiritual.” There could be a higher purpose at work even if on the surface something does not “look spiritual.” Who are we to judge anything?

Can physical forms of separation and attack be AVOIDED in this world? Probably not. No matter what you eat, no matter how you move, what you do, it’s all still technically unreality and an attack on truth. Forms of sin and weird strange behaviors. You can’t avoid it. The whole system is one of death. But you can change how you look at it, what meaning you give to it, and what you make of it. And that’s all you can do with it. See it differently.

The key to seeing it differently is detaching from HOW IT LOOKS, disregarding the form, not trying to make the form take on a certain shape in order to be more spiritual, and not feeling guilty about what form it does take. Even going to the toilet is technically an act of war on the physical level. Nature’s nature is to devour. Everything you eat requires something else to starve. There is no escape from problems in this world. But you can change your mind about it and how you use it.

While in Heaven, before the fall of man, everything that existed was of God. And it still is. Creation is the presence of something real. It exists. It has substance. It lives.

At this point, all things which DO NOT exist, simply did not exist at all. They were not anywhere. They had no substance, no reality, no life. They did not happen. They simply weren't anywhere. Nothingness was nothing. And nowhere was nowhere.

Non-existence simply does not exist. It is not somewhere you can go and exist. It is not a realm or a dimension. It has no presence or location. It is simply, logically, absolutely nowhere at all, is nothing, does nothing, and cannot be.

In the separation, the tiny mad idea suggested that in ADDITION to Heaven, the nothingness actually was SOMETHING. And that Heaven, God and His Son did not exist. It was a complete reversal of the truth.

This was a completely ridiculous idea and we should have laughed at its nonsense. Nothingness cannot possibly exist. It can't BE something. It has no presence. But we believed it could.

This was our mistake. It was a mistake because it is patently impossible and illogical and nonsense. Nothing cannot exist. Which is a similar thing as saying, only what CAN exist DOES. And that is only of God's creation. Anything other than God's creation simply isn't anywhere. There isn't anything else. But we believed there was.

By forming this belief in nothingness being SOMETHINGNESS, we basically were becoming confused. Confusing levels. Confusing the truth with what is false. Confusing possibility with impossibility. Confusing reality with unreality. We wanted to GIVE nothingness all the attributes of God's creation so that we could BELIEVE that it was in fact SOMETHING POSSIBLE, and something that has existence.

This of course was an insane notion and totally wishful thinking, because it still remains impossible. And even in believing that it IS possible this does not cause it to be possible. Nothing can never be something. Non existence cannot suddenly come into existing. Even the idea that non-existence could exist is to confuse existence and non-existence to the point or ludicrous nonsense.... how can non-existence STILL BE non-existent at the same time as claiming it exists? But this is what we insisted was true.

In attempting to MAKE non-existent things EXIST, we dreamed, imagined, wished for, wanted, and tried to MAKE HAPPEN, "a world" on the basis of non-existence. A world where everything opposite to God's creation is manifest. A world where life does not exist. Where love is blotted out by fear. Where death has come to replace life, and time to replace eternity. Where space opposes omnipresence and where evil substitutes for the good.

Even in doing this, in our imagination, essentially, we still were not ACTUALLY doing this, because it is patently impossible to make non-existent things have reality. But we still BELIEVED that we could, that we did, that we have, and that we continue to do so. And so we hallucinated a fictional world which IS NOT THERE, and CANNOT EXIST, as if it were existing.

And so here we are, on planet Earth, jewel of the solar system, a completely make-believe, false, unreal, non-existent world, which in our minds we BELIEVE IN, and want to exist, and try to make happen. Which nevertheless, at no time ACTUALLY exists, and is nothing but imagined - images in the mind, attempting to DREAM OF what it MIGHT be like IF non-existence could exist.

So we haven't even really made non-existence exist. Non-existence CANNOT be made to exist. But we have BELIEVED that it is possible, which is an insane and completely mistaken belief. And we persist stubbornly to DENY the facts, and AVOID the truth, and HIDE FROM reality, in an effort to keep the truth in the dark so that you won't ADMIT that a non-existent world isn't here. And meanwhile we dream of space and time and happenings and sickness and death as if they are possible.

"it (mind) merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere."

What ultimately happens when we reach atonement, which is the total willingness to admit to the truth and come to our senses, a return to SANITY, and a correct recognition of the facts, is that we come to RECOGNIZE that non-existent things DO NOT EXIST. What we thought existed, or what we thought happened, IS NOT THERE. This literally culminates in the awareness and accurate perception that THERE IS NO WORLD.

"Forgiveness recognizes that what you think your brother did has not OCCURRED."

Quite literally, the world, which is based on the idea of nothingness, IS NOTHING. It cannot be. It is not. It does not. It cannot. It doesn't. It hasn't. It isn't. It won't. The world is merely a fictional fairytale fantasy, trying to believe that impossible things are possible, and trying to PROVE it through fictional stories and images and deceptions, smoke and mirrors, illusions and lies. The world is nothing but confusion.

There quite literally is no world here. Only the Kingdom of God exists. The world is nothingness. The body is nothingness. And true perception recognizes that the world is nothing. This is why christ vision cannot SEE the world, because it MUST VANISH when recognized as NOT EXISTING. The body is not alive or dead. It is not even THERE.

"My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was. And that is what "rolling the stone away" means. The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body’s nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist."

"At no time does the body exist."

"There is no world."

"There is no world apart from what you wish."

"He does not realize that he MAKES this world, for there IS no world outside him."

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

"Without the idea of death there is no world. All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions."

"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again."

"But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now."

Recognizing there is no world, is like FORGETTING the world. Paying no attention to it. Becoming unable to SEE it. Erasing it from memory. Like it was nothing. Like it never happened. Like not one single thing occurred. And then ONLY the Kingdom of God is accepted as real, existing, present, possible, and happening. And upon accepting that ONLY the truth is true and nothing ELSE is true, you awaken to the recognition of the real truth in God.

"Accept the one illusion which proclaims there is no condemnation in God's Son, and Heaven is remembered instantly; the world forgotten, all its weird beliefs forgotten with it, as the Face of Christ appears unveiled at last in this one dream."

"The world you see must be denied."

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

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 were 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."

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish."

"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

“The first thing to remember about miracles is that there is no order of difficulty among them. One is not harder or bigger than another. They are all the same.”

Jesus says all miracles are the same. There is no order among them in terms of difficulty, or size, or adjusting proportions in relation to “what the problem is”. Miracle mindedness is a state of equality and evenness. It is flat.

All expressions of love are maximal, which means EVERY miracle expression is at the same level of maximal love. Not wavering or varying in degrees of application. Almost like there is one “button” that you push and it puts out a miracle and this same miracle has the power to do anything, every time. So there is no need for varying degrees of expression.

Similarly there is a hierarchy of illusions, in which all illusions APPEAR to have a total LACK of sameness. That everything is different, all forms are different, there are different degrees and amounts and importance and severity. Different amounts of hardness. “In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur.”

So the scenario we are presented with is a world which seems to show us “there are varying levels of difficulty”. And this is based on form. The form that something takes, is taken to be what it MEANS. We look at the form, the state, the shape, the texture, the color, the composition, the seeming evidence of what’s happened, the “proof of sin”, and we use that to come up with a JUDGEMENT of what “it is”. And this gives rise to what we think it MEANS, or implies. And that results in an entire hierarchy of degrees of difficulty, not to mention varying levels of reaction.

In LESSON 1 of the workbook, Jesus introduces us to this powerful idea, hitting the ground running. That everything in the world, all things we see, all objects, all FORMS, do not MEAN anything. That the form of things is NOT its meaning. And this is based on the simple yet deep idea of “there is no world”. The world is NOTHING, and therefore the things you see are NOT anything, and therefore do NOT MEAN anything.

“Lesson 1 "Nothing I see in this room (on this street, from this window, in this place) means anything.”

If you can realize how this is basically saying that NOTHING in the world means anything, it is telling you that the forms, physical states, conditions, amounts of stuff, it does not HAVE any meaning. One thing is not bigger than another. One thing is not harder to deal with than another. Even a certain form of body state, whether the body seems alive and healthy, or on its death bed, it is NO DIFFERENT in its meaning.

“They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful.”

We have INVENTED all the meanings we’ve given to everything in the world, including dead bodies. We have DECIDED that a body in a certain state MEANS death, and a body in another state “is better”. This is totally arbitrary, based loosely on the form of what we see, which is an illusion. A body seemingly in a state of death is NOT more dead than any other body.

So what we have to learn is that the physical state of things, regardless of its form, no matter its severity, even if a person is dead, even if they are severely sick, even if there’s a car crash, it should not MEAN that this is a very big serious terrible thing. It should not MEAN that this is more serious or more important or more severe, OR harder to recover from, OR really in any way a more DIFFICULT thing to deal with. It is all equally NOTHING.

“Yet it is when judgment ceases that healing occurs, because only then it can be understood that there is no order of difficulty in healing.”

Nothing I see means ANYTHING. A person seeming to be severely sick, is a judgement based on believing that their FORM is telling us its meaning. That certain states of the body are proof of certain degrees of death. That some things are worse than others. What we have to learn to be miracle minded is that the FORM that something takes, its appearance, no matter what that appearance is, is NOTHING AT ALL, and therefore it does not MEAN anything at all. One form is NOT different to another.

A serious ”bad situation” IS NOT a serious bad situation. It’s an illusion of one, taking the form of one, while simultaneously being absolutely nothing at all. And because it is nothing, it cannot mean anything. It cannot MEAN that it is a horrible nightmare Of awfulness. Because it is nothing, it cannot REALLY be a sickness. Because it is nothing, it is NOT really death, disaster, terror or hell. We can’t look to the form to tell us what anything means. Form is a lie. All physical states and shapes and conditions mean nothing whatsoever.

So the miracle has to overlook the appearance of the situation, completely disregard the evidence, turn away from what every physicality-believing person says, disregard the opinion of everyone who looks upon bodies and consider their states to be real, and do not GIVE any power to death. To not differentiate BETWEEN illusions. “There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal. ”

We are to not believe that a certain “state” is any kind of proof of anything. That it MEANS anything, indicates anything, implies anything, will lead to anything, or tells you a prognosis of even the potential of what might be possible. The form of the world cannot TELL YOU what is real or what anything means. You cannot look to IT to tell you what is true. You should ASK the physical to tell you what is spiritual fact.

We are to DEFY the world of illusions by bringing a power and a light from another world, a power which ignores form and completely overlooks the hierarchy of illusions. That flattens the hierarchy and renders all physical things EQUAL. Which sees all situations as THE SAME. And therefore having ONE response of love and power which deals with this ONE state of illusions, this ONE substrate of deception, and does ONE thing to bringing about a change.

Lesson 5 “Applying the same idea to each of them separately is the first step in ultimately recognizing they are all the same.”

lesson 79 “Everyone in this world seems to have his own special problems. Yet they are all the same, and must be recognized as one if the one solution which solves them all is to be accepted.”

“Accept the holy instant as this year is born, and take your place, so long left unfulfilled, in the Great Awakening. Make this year different, by making it ALL THE SAME.”

When all things in the world are recognized as nothing, they do not MEAN what you thought they meant. You have a clean slate. You have taken away from the world all the meanings it has, which you gave to it, under the belief that IT gave them to you based on its forms.

Its form are deceptions, they do NOT mean what they appear to mean. They ARE not what they seem to be. Do not listen to people telling you that something MEANS something because of its current “state”. This is just feedback from an illusory world where nothing is true.

“Nothing that the world believes is true.” “No one has been sure of anything since.”

ALL illusory forms, all physical objects, all bodies, all states are illusions of differences and appearances of conflicts. As if that means something. As if that’s proof of what is happening. Some things seem terrible and awful while other things seem harmless and nice. But none of this is true. All the things in the world are ONE thing, one equal sameness of nothing. And it is their nothingness that guarantees their healing. Because now if it is nothing, you are not dealing with a “big bad problem”, you’re dealing with an illusion, and illusions recognized as nothing must disappear.

It is the fact that this is all NOTHING, that gives you the power to be free from it, to not fear it, to not endow it with attributes it does not have, to not use it to prove sin is real, and have no effects from it. What is nothing can do nothing and is nothing. There is no world. There is no death. The son of God is free.

“Think how this SEEMS to interfere with the first principle of miracles. For this establishes degrees of TRUTH among illusions, making it appear that some are HARDER to be overcome than others. If it were realized that they are all the same and EQUALLY untrue, it would be easy, then, to understand that miracles apply to ALL of them. Errors of ANY kind can be corrected, BECAUSE they are untrue.”

"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."

“The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear.”

I find very often that if I am not constantly "rebuking" everything the world seems to portray, I will fall into temptation and buy into problems. Then I'll have reactions based on ego and form and bodies and appearances, and will suffer, wondering how to get out of it.

The fact is that we're presented with a false word, right in our faces, 24/7, every single day. The body continuously reports on it as if it's real and makes it seem real. Every single sensory input is a lie to the mind, suggesting that something untrue is true, something impossible is possible, and something that can never happen in reality is happening.

It may seem completely casual, living our everyday lives, interacting with objects, doing household tasks, looking at things and commenting on them, seeing bodies, etc... as though this is totally normal and natural. We can just "live an ego life", a body life, functioning the same way we always have. Immersed in space and time and physicality. Interacting with the world as if it's just another day, things are just ticking over as they always do, as is this is totally normal.

But as we start trying to wake up to reality, we start to find that the world is absolutely opposite to reality. And now we're tasked with trying to peel ourselves away from absolutely everything the world throws at us. Every appearance is false, every body sickness is a lie, every picture of death is unnatural, every problem isn't really there. If we don't counteract these inputs, they become overwhelming and we just sink down into them like it's what everyone does.

It seems then that we have to constantly fight against illusions. Every second. The kind of life we live without even thinking about it, as if it's normal, is riddled with deception. If we drop our guard and just go through the motions acting like everything in the world is how things are supposed to be, within seconds we'll find ourselves thinking and speaking and acting based on what the body says is real. And now we're lost all over again. And every morning we wake up immersed back into the same dungeon of deception and darkness.

It sure as heck seems that if we aren't CONSTANTLY asserting God's truth, constantly denying what is not of God, constantly stating and affirming that body states are not fact, constantly PUSHING and broadcasting God's truth and light all the time, repelling sin and hell, then we will just once again fall for the next subtle trap. The next little everyday seemingly insignificant scrap of an illusory world which is just as deceptive and distorting as all the rest.

The impression I'm getting lately then is that we have to eventually get to a state where we are "professing christ" all the time. And I mean like, being on our guard at all times. In a sense, praying a higher prayer all the time. Giving off happier more loving vibes all the time. Teaching only love, all the time. Refusing to accept anything we see in the world, all the time. And that means being really heavily centered in God's truth and laws and mindset and just constantly vigilant for staying in that mindset as much as possible, even when the world is sandblasting you in the face with visual lies.

Jesus says in the course that atonement is our natural profession. That we should PROFESS christ. Which means to express, emit, teach, radiate, give christ at all times. To counteract and fly in the face of the world. To be coming from God at all times. To be healers at all times, in the world but not of it at all times. Under no worldly laws but God's at all times.

Because, quite frankly, what I've found is that if I DON'T attempt to do that, I will just sink right back down into ego land, body sensations, false perceptions, reactions to bodies and sicknesses appearing real. At every turn, someone's sick body is attempting to testify to them having been changed and corrupted against God's will. And it is our task to NOT believe that, to assert and SEE and claim the truth of the person that they are still as God created them. Which is in complete defiance of what their body looks like, staring you in the face with its fake suffering and temptation.

The degree of temptation is just so totally off the charts. It seems that if we don't rise above it and stay above it and continually REPEL it every minute of the day, we're just going to keep falling back into it. Maybe over time we can talk ourselves into such a state of conviction that we can more effortlessly remain in the light and the truth and not have to make such an effort of it. But meanwhile it seems like a constant fight, a constantly struggle, to get out of hell and get back into a more heavenly state. Day after day after day of the world trying to pull us back down.

"The Disciples were officially and specifically told to heal others, as Physicians of the Lord. They were also told to heal themselves, and were promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the natural profession of the Children of God, because they have professed Me."

"In His perception of the world, nothing is seen but justifies forgiveness and the sight of perfect sinlessness. Nothing arises but is met with instant and complete forgiveness."

If we are to INSTANTLY meet every perception with forgiveness, that means we have to CONSTANTLY be in a state of forgiveness every single second. We have to be on our toes. We have to be totally ready and right minded at all times. As in keeping our mind right-side up at all times and sane in order to be ready to perform miracles.

"Readiness here means keep your perception right side up, (or valid), so you will ALWAYS be ready, willing, and able. These are the essentials for "listen, learn, and do. You must be READY to listen WILLING to learn and ABLE to do"

To stay OUT of deception and temptation and distraction is difficult. Everything the world believes is not true. Everything physical matter shows is false. We have to pierce the veil and push past the body and connect with the divine. To have "reality contact".

"Miracles are examples of right thinking. Reality contact at all levels becomes strong and accurate, thus permitting correct delineation of intra- and interpersonal boundaries. As a result, the doer sees the truth as God created it. This is what is meant by the point on "perspective adjustment."

It really seems to me that in order to be a consistent miracle worker we have to be practically from another world, a temporary visitor here, come to help and heal and uplift, siding entirely with God, falling for no temptation, buying into nothing the world suggests. As if we were briefed before we came, that the world was going to try to eat us alive, and that we had to stay on our toes and not for a second believe a single bit of it. To float above the battlefield constantly lest we fall off the wagon again and again and again. To clarify just how extremely difficult it can be, Jesus even says that the most advanced teachers still succumb to temptation at times.

The world can seem insurmountable in its immensity, its diversity of illusions, its deceptions. Gradually the mind HAS to be trained away from believing any of it. Has to learn to see through and past illusory things. Has to learn NOT to believe in what the body reports. And that takes time to reinforce the mind's attitude over and over and over and over again with affirmations and restatements and reframing.

"Even the most advanced of God's teachers will give way to temptation in this world."

Every day, every hour, every minute, every second, we have to be watchful for buying into the world. Over and over again we will keep slipping back down the slippery slope to hell, and have to keep pulling ourselves back out of the muck again and again and again until we can learn to fly enough that we stay out of it for good.

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK"

"Everything the body sees is an illusion."

Years ago when I began the course, I thought I understood forgiveness. I thought it basically meant not blaming people, and trying to learn that everyone is innocent. It's kind of that. But over time and with deeper study my grasp of forgiveness kept expanding.

I realized at some point forgiveness is a state, a high state of mind, in concert with true perception, and that our efforts "to forgive" move us in the direction of that state. At some point we would achieve a truly forgiving state of mind as an end result or goal. And this state recognizes there is no real sin.

And so then "doing forgiveness" to me was more to do with purification, healing, release, not judging, taking responsibility, embracing the secret of salvation etc. I made effort to forgive myself and others through various means and to move out of fear into guilt, out of guilt into sin, and out of sin into innocence. But this still wasn't the whole story.

It gradually became clearer that the entire world needs to be overlooked. Particularly because the world itself is an illusion, it wasn't enough to undo my mistaken ideas and beliefs about it, somehow I had to learn to "see past" the world to a light or reality beyond it. And this is significantly challenging. The world hangs like a veil before the face of Christ, a granite block of sin, designed to tempt you to believe everything you see.

It became clearer that the entire physical universe, all forms of matter, all bodies and planets and objects, are there as temptations, appearances and deceptions. That seeing something seem to happen in the flesh was in fact untrue and unreal. That people are not bodies, but something beyond their physical form that I'm meant to see. And so my efforts shifted toward trying not to be deceived by the world in general.

This is where things seem to become quite difficult. When you consider that we've lived in a physical body for many years, assuming the world is real, reacting to everything the body senses as if it's happening as proof, there is a lot of conditioning to undo. And it starts to go into a territory where you have to literally question fundamental reality, whether events are even really happening, whether sick bodies even exist, whether all of the hierarchy of illusions really testifies to bad things happening or if it's just some awful dream. And that means questioning even what your body senses say is happening.

For me lately the challenge has been intensified because I've been presented with some very difficult "physical" scenarios with my wife that present powerful temptations. Temptations to believe that awful things are happening, that there is physical loss, that body parts are malfunctioning, that there is seriousness and heaviness and fear-inducing problems. I've been extremely pushed and impressed upon by the apparent reality of these horrors.

Just the mere act of seeing something physically "wrong" and believing it is truthful, real, happening, or a danger, is enough to incite fear and reactions. When the world is dangling "proof" that sin is happening, attack is happening, that bodies seem to be real, in front of your face, proving that sin is real, what do you do? Because this is where we really get into some major need for forgiveness.

It has become more and more apparent that everything physical is an illusion. All body states are fictional. The ego uses forms to hold the idea of death in front of our noses, asking us to believe that it's really happening. It asks us to regard people as bodies as though, when parts of the body are threatened or lost, the person is threatened or lost. And if you buy it, you will be very upset. And this is why the world is so unhappy.

Presented with a torrent of nightmarish happenings, my challenge has been to try to learn to disbelieve them. To not buy the appearance. To trust a bigger plan. To see beyond the short-term nonsense. To not believe it means something. To not go into fear as a reaction to my own belief that something is very wrong. From what I've been shown through these trials and lessons, not only that our immortal reality the only truth, but also everything bodies testify to is an illusion.

My wife had to have an amputation of her left foot. At first this was horrifying. Just the idea of it made me guilty and afraid. I feared the "loss of her" because if her foot was gone, part of her was really gone. That's what the ego teaches through form. Physical loss means something real has been destroyed, which automatically leads to loss and grief. And so I entered into loss and grief and had to struggle to get out of it. It was induced by the belief that what the body was showing was true of her. That a) she was a body, a b) she was attacked and really suffering and c) it was an irreversible sin.

This is where forgiveness really meets the road. I've had to learn to try to see past and disbelieve all physical events, happenings, states, conditions, people's expert opinions about how serious it is, the physical testimony that "it really is happening", all proof, and all suggestion by the ego world that something is terribly wrong. It is not easy. The level of temptation has been so high and so frequent that I've been thrown far off-center and struggling to get back a sense of truth.

But I do realize through all of this that the opportunity has presented me with a "test", a way to find out if I will be willing to not buy into this problem and laugh it off with love, perhaps to even become miraculous and healing through that love, or whether I will sink into fear and forgetfulness. To say that the road has been extremely bumpy is an understatement. And so the challenge to forgive is to NOT BELIEVE that any of this is even happening at all. To disregard it as illusions and as lies.

Somehow through the clearing smoke, it seems I disbelieve the physical with more certainty now. And as I see other people's sick bodies, somehow I now see them with the same attitude that I see my wife's body with. Her example has changed my perception. Whatever the education has been, it now applies to a transformation in my vision. I can't by any means claim this is total or even halfway to where it needs to be, but it's clear that forgiveness has evolved way past what I thought it was, and now onto a more living experience of not being deceived by form. Even the suggestion of physical death now seems like a ridiculous lie.

It's no small undertaking. We literally are being asked to not believe ANYTHING in this world. That all forms, appearances, bodies, objects, are mere illusory appearances designed to tempt us, causing us to have to learn NOT to be deceived by them. It's very difficult to not buy illusions when someone close to you is seriously ill with visible and "serious" physical symptoms. But this is what we have to do. The body is a denial of the truth. We have to deny the denial of the truth. We have to learn not to buy a single thing the world says is happening, and look beyond the world to the light. We are safe in God, merely dreaming of exile.

In this view, our task is to overlook the world, which transforms it into the forgiven world. And a forgiven world cannot last. "A forgiven world cannot last. It was the home of bodies but forgiveness looks past bodies." We look beyond the forgiven world, beyond the real world, to the Kingdom of God. We regard the Kingdom as the only reality. We are vigilant only for its truth and immortality. We are not deceived by lies of mortal death or suffering. Nothing that the body senses can distract us from an unwavering fixation on God's truth. We are under no laws buy God's, and only the truth is true and this world is not true.

This is what we are asked to do. This is how we forgive. We overlook the false world we made and see it not. We ask to see only the reality of the Kingdom. Nothing else is real. Nothing else has value. Nothing else attracts us. Nothing else satisfies. Only in the forgetting of the world and the complete overlooking of its transparent veil of lies can we look upon the face of Christ and finally move beyond to our True Home.

"A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make.

Consider the Kingdom which you have made (Earth), and judge its worth fairly. Is it worthy to be a home for a Child of God? Does it protect his peace, and shine love upon him? Does it keep his heart untouched by fear, and allow him to give always without any sense of loss? Does it teach him that this giving is his joy, and that God Himself thanks him for his giving?

That is the only environment in which you can be happy. You cannot make it, anymore than you can make yourselves. But it has been created for you (Heaven), as you were created for it. God watches over His children and denies them nothing."

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body, and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched, a purity undimmed by errors, pitiful mistakes, and fearful thoughts of guilt from dreams of sin. It sees no separation. And it looks on everyone, on every circumstance, all happenings and all events, without the slightest fading of the light it sees."

"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 were 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.

This is the shift that true perception brings: What was projected out is seen within, and there forgiveness lets it disappear."

"You HAVE carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is TOTAL CONFUSION ABOUT EVERYTHING."

When we believed in separation from God, we entered into a very confused and backwards way of thinking. We shut out reality. We denied truth. We split and narrowed our minds and drove ourselves insane.

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

"This IS an insane world, and do not underestimate the actual extent of its insanity."

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt."

We swapped the meaning of everything. What was true became false. What was false became true. Innocence was considered a sin. Sin was considered innocence. God was regarded as an evil dictator. Ego was regarded as your saviour. Death was believed to be life, and sickness was believed to save you from God. Darkness was light and punishment was atonement.

You no longer recognize what anything actually is. When you look upon things you do not see what they are, you see what you made of them. You see the twisted meanings and deceptions that you made of them. You don't believe that God is love. And you think death is your friend. You do not even recognize your own self.

"There is no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this: I do not know the thing I am, and THEREFORE do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world and on myself."

"Nothing the world believes is true. It is a place whose purpose is to be a home where those who claim they do not know themselves can come to question what it is they are."

So now we have a world filled with crazy people. People who do not know which way is up. People whose priorities are all over the place purely because they think they've made a really great decision, when in fact they have poor judgement.

If your whole belief about what something is, is wrong, it changes how it looks to you and what it means to you. If it's something which in truth would hurt you, and you see it as helpful, you might choose it on purpose believing it will help you.

This is the case with sickness. "Sickness is a defense against the truth" tells you that you mis-perceive God. You think God or Truth is a threat to you, an enemy. You see attack and vengeance and danger in him. Having hallucinated these lies, you then react to them. And you reason, if God is trying to destroy me, I need to get away from God.

Then you will try to create a distance between you and God. And this is a problem because God is, in the big picture truth, life and wholeness and health and happiness. So you resist God, thinking God is your enemy, and by doing so choose to go away from these things. So you head towards sickness and death and limitation and weakness, all under the belief that you are saving your life from a real threat.

Then you end up suffering and you hate it and you think you didn't choose it. You don't want it because who could want it really, but you did want it because you chose it. And you chose it because you made a wrong decision.

"I must have made a wrong decision because I'm not at peace."

The decision was based on you thinking that you knew what everything is, when you didn't, and were misinformed and deceived. So you deceived yourself and lied to yourself and then followed that lie as guidance and ended up hurting yourself. But you didn't think it was going to hurt, you thought it was helpful.

So literally the people in the world believe that suffering is salvation. Punishment is seen as justified and right and a form of healing and education. More suffering for the guilty is seen as atonement. And people literally choose to die, in an attempt to claim their innocence. If someone else is to blame, you get to be exonerated, and you think this will save your life, but you die instead.

"Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die."

It's all to do with having a faulty guidance system. A screwed up navigation. The map is all wrong. The signposts are all backwards. You think you're going towards stuff which is truly good by choosing things which are definitely not. And all because you do not know what the fuck you are doing.

You do not know who you are, what you are, where you came from, how you got here, why you are here, what you are doing, why you are doing it. You even doubt whether you were even ever really created and suspect that you are an illusion that doesn't even exist.

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

So this is the problem we all have. We do not correctly recognize what anything actually is. And so we keep being in a state of self-deception. And then we make choices based on this deception, which turn out to move us towards "what we want", just as all choices do, except the stuff we've chosen is not in our best interests. But we thought it was.

So we keep hurting ourselves. We know not what we do. We are lost. We are insane. We need to be straightened out. We need help from outside the insanity (Holy Spirit etc). We need to be corrected. We need to be willing to be mistaken. We need to examine the beliefs and meanings we've given to everything and look for a better way.

"Do not, then, think that following the Holy Spirit's guidance is necessary merely because of your own inadequacies. It is the way out of hell for you."

Every strategy. Every form of problem solving. Every way of relating. Everything you think you'll gain or lose. Every scenario. It all has to be brought into question and re-evaluated by the One who knows. Your mind needs to be corrected and trained to line up with what is ACTUALLY TRUE, and what you can actually have, and want, and what is fully in accord with God's will.

"ALL real pleasure comes from doing God's will. Whenever it is NOT done an experience of lack results. This is because NOT doing the will of God IS a lack of self."

Recognition is the key. Properly discerning what something is or isn't. Being not deceived by anything. Correct clear accurate perception. Proper categorization of things. Is something true on God's terms, or is it false? Can it be real in God, or is it unreal? It is really what it appears to be, or is it something else? Are you mistaken? If you are not enlightened, you are mistaken.

"Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all."

If you could fully recognize what everything actually is, to see it clearly, without distortions of reality, without hallucinations, without fake meanings and artificial values, without wishful thinking or delusion, without denial and without attack or resistance, you would be enlightened.

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

When everything false is finally seen for what it is, recognized to be unreal and nothing, with no value and no further purpose, it will disappear.

"Illusion recognized must disappear. Accept not suffering, and you remove the thought of suffering. Your blessing lies on everyone who suffers when you choose to see all suffering as what it is."

"The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal? Could you have FAITH in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? AND WOULD YOU SEE IT? Hallucinations disappear when they are RECOGNIZED for what they are."

"Healing, then, is a way of APPROACHING knowledge by THINKING in accordance with the laws of God and RECOGNIZING THEIR UNIVERSALITY. WITHOUT this recognition, you have made the laws themselves meaningless TO you."

"Yet what makes them God's teachers is their recognition of the proper purpose of the body."

"In fact, the recognition that you do not understand is a prerequisite for undoing your false ideas."

"The ego will NEVER let you perceive this, for this recognition WILL make it homeless. For, when this recognition dawns clearly, you will NOT be deceived by ANY form the ego takes, to protect itself FROM your sight."

"Today we would experience ourselves at one with Him, so that the world may share our recognition of reality."

"He overlooks the mind and body, seeing only the Face of Christ shining in front of him, correcting all mistakes and healing all perception. Healing is the result of the recognition, by God's teacher, of Who it is that is in need of healing. This recognition has no special reference. It is true of all things that God created. In it are all illusions healed."

"Let us try to recognize this today, and experience the peace this recognition brings."

"The light is come today to bless the world, for you have recognized the Son of God, and in your recognition is the world's."

"That is why the recognition of your OWN invulnerability is so important in the restoration of your sanity."

"The recognition of God is the recognition of yourself."

"For recognition comes of vision and SUSPENDED judgment."

"The full awareness of the Atonement, then, is the recognition that the separation NEVER OCCURRED."

"The aim of our curriculum, unlike the goal of the world's learning, is the recognition that judgment in the usual sense is impossible."

"Your inheritance awaits only the recognition that you have BEEN redeemed."

"Think of the freedom in the recognition that you are not bound by all the strange and twisted laws which you have set up to save you."

"Your function here is only to decide AGAINST deciding what you want, in recognition that YOU DO NOT KNOW. How, then, CAN you decide what you should do? Leave ALL decisions to the One Who speaks for God, and for your function as He KNOWS it."

"The real world is all that the Holy Spirit has saved for you, out of what you have made, and to perceive only this is salvation, because it is the recognition that reality is ONLY WHAT IS TRUE."

"Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point."

"The recognition of the real creative power in yourself AND others brings release because it brings peace."

"Truth must be all-inclusive if it be the truth at all. Accept no opposite and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely. Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true and nothing else is true."

"Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow HIS plan of Salvation, in recognition of the FACT that you do NOT know what it is." "Awaking unto Christ is following the laws of love OF YOUR FREE WILL, and out of quiet recognition of the truth in them."

"Defenselessness is strength. It testifies to recognition of the Christ in you."

Physical objects are forms, taking on one form or another, to produce a range of forms. Some of them we call life forms. Others we might call lifeless forms, forms of materials, forms of objects etc.

The body's eyes look at these forms and takes them to be exactly what they are. It looks at the shape, the position, the color, the nature of it, and claims that this is what the form MEANS. It derives meaning from the form based on how the form looks.

A form will then imply something, suggest something, seemingly tell you a truth about itself and its world, as if the form is a cause which has influence and power. And so we look to forms with the body's eyes and ask the form to tell us what the world means.

We see the form of a broken body and we think that this means the body is damaged. We see the form of a puppy and think this means it was recently born and still innocent. We see a rotting apple and think this means death is taking place.

We constantly are sending the body's eyes out to look upon the world, as if the world can then tell us what everything means just by looking at it. If a body is sick we think it means the person is sick. If the body is dead we think life has ended. And we thus allow the world to dictate every sense of meaning.

This has happened, therefore .... that has happened, therefore. ... constantly analysing situations and scenery and coming up with explanations based on what appears in form to be there.

This way of seeing is what we call false perception or unforgiveness. It holds the form against itself and derives meaning from it, suggesting the form is defining meaning from the outside in, telling us a story of truth through perception.

But all we're doing here is failing to overlook the form, we're fixating on differences, emphasising the way one thing is not like another, finding the ways that nothing is shared between them, and trying to elicit meaningfulness from the uniqueness of the objects.

When something then seems to go horribly wrong, there is a severe damage to the body, a car is crashing, a house is on fire, or any other such drama in which form is screaming at us to believe it, if we only look at it based on its form we will be horrified.

Whatever the form dictates we'll take as truth, and will react accordingly. We'll absorb the hierarchy of illusions and have emotional reactions and disturbance based entirely on what the situation appears to be. We can't seem to rest in peace until all the forms have resume their proper arrangement and the bodies have stopped dying and the threats and dangers and pointed spiky things have become blunted.

If all we do is look at the physical world, believing everything we see, not questioning anything, falling for differences and appearances, buying into every little nuance of change and inequality in order to tell what's going on and what it means, we are lost and blinded. There is nothing so blinding as perceiving forms.

Forgiveness asks for an entirely different way of looking at this. It does not mean that you continue to focus on specific, individual, exclusive, separate things, in exactly the same was as before, with the body's eyes, but trying to find some kind of new angle on it. This is not an improvement whatsoever.

Forgiveness actually requires that all the sense of differences, inequalities, uniqueness, shapes, sizes, colors, behaviours, all physical properties, be completely OVERLOOKED, not dwelled upon, not seen, not thought to mean anything, not thought to dictate what the situation is, and no sense of truth whatsoever is derived from them.

Forgiveness must transcend the form entirely and look past it, past all sense of "many separate things" to look for a singular oneness of truth. And that truth is not inherent to those forms, or a part of them, but lies beyond them, because the forms were made to hide the truth entirely and to obscure all meaning. This is why Christ Vision does not become distracted by bodies or forms or the planet and looks past it to the light, to real meaning which lies beyond all objects and all physicality.

When we are buying into the way the world looks, with separate objects vying for attention, objects at war with each other, objects having differences, and being deceived to believe that these differences are important and meaningful, we are not being forgiving. We are being lost in a dream and falling for an illusion.

The appearance of one object seeming to have properties that another object does not have, if regarded as meaning something, is an illusion. It deceives you just by looking at it and not seeing through the disguise. Believing that a bike is not a house and a car is not an airplane, your vision splits apart and separates out and becomes totally fragmented, turning into a hierarchy of illusions instead of a singular vision.

These appearances of different form are all lies and deceptions designed to steer the body's physical sight down a rabbit hole into a dark corner where the mind cannot escape. This is temptation. This is falsely perceiving. This is believing the world is real and that constantly shifting forms and constantly dying objects are somehow the truth.

To forgive we have to find a way to not simply regard "what happens physically" to be in any way true, in any way a whole story, or in any way meaningful. A dark disturbing physical situation should not be seen as dark and disturbing. The darkness and dustrbingness are just properties of its form, the appearance it's taking, and is NOT meaningful.

A bloodied body should not induce feelings of horror and upset, otherwise the form is now acting like a cause and is dictating the truth based on its shape and appearance. A broken body, a disabled body, a suffering person, a scenario of starvation, a warzone, a battlefield, are all deceptive lies in which objects in certain forms suggest that certain things are true, that bad things have happened and that they are real.

Configuraitons of objects are meaningless. The entire physical world is meaningless. Its forms do NOT mean anything at all. Bodies in one state and not another does not mean anything. Sickness in one form or another does not mean anything. Bodies seeming to be alive or dead does not mean anything. These differences are all lies. A change in form from one state to another is utterly meaningless.

Remember that we have given everything all the meaning that we think it has, but typically we're doing this by looking at the form of objects and asking it to dictate TO us what "that" means. One shape means this, another shape means that. If the shape changes, the meaning changes. And then our response to it changes.

What we need to be striving for is a complete ignoring of all forms, all physicality, all objects, looking past it with forgiveness, taking none of it seriously, believing nothing we see through physical sight, ignoring all differences, having absolutely no change of reaction when external circumstances change, and being completely unmoved by the bullshit lies and temptations of the physical world. Not one single thing the physical seems to suggest is true. And nothing that happens physically is really possible in God's reality.

True meaning comes from God and is a singular whole meaning, a consistent unconditional meaning, which does not change or waver. It is the meaning of love and is so genuine and valuable that it is truly meaningful to us. It is all that means anything at all to us, and it's all that we really want. We can look out through this one meaning onto a world of a trillion meanings and disregard all the world's claims as false. Nothing in the world matters and it means nothing.

A teacher of God, a healer, does not consider for a moment the appearances of form, the forms of sickness, the stories of suffering about how this form came about, the family history, the background of what happens or the chain of events. None of it means anything and none of it is a cause. The miraculous mind considers only administering the love and truth that is missing, extending the power of God to fill and erase the gap, ignoring the form entirely.

The forms may change, the body may heal, the world may resurrect, but these too are illusions that ultimately mean nothing. Temporarily they symbolise changes in the mind and perception but ultimately there is no world to mean anything anyway. How can a world which does not exist mean something, and how can the events that transpire mean anything at all? There is no meaning to be found in a meaningless world. Only God's Kingdom of heaven has any meaning at all.

"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

"Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form MEANS understanding HAS BEEN obscured. Only MISTAKES have different forms, and so they CAN deceive. You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is NOT reality, it MUST be an illusion. And is Not THERE to see. And, IF you see it, you MUST be mistaken, for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it WERE. What cannot see BEYOND what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions AS THE TRUTH. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?"

"Therefore, He OPPOSES differences in form as meaningful, and emphasizes always that THESE DIFFERENCES DO NOT MATTER."

"ONLY the form of error attracts the ego. Meaning it does not RECOGNIZE, and does not know if it is there or not. Everything which the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole, without the meaning that the whole would give."

"There IS no meaning in the form, AND THERE WILL NEVER BE."

"What is perceived takes many forms, but NONE has meaning. Brought to truth, its senselessness is quite apparent. Kept APART from truth, it SEEMS to have a meaning and be real."

"Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

"For form is not enough for meaning"

"The Holy Spirit is not concerned with form at all, being aware only of MEANING."

"Creation cannot even be conceived of in the world. It has no meaning here. Forgiveness is the closest it can come to earth. For being Heaven-borne, it has no form at all. Yet God created One Who has the power to translate into form the wholly formless. What He makes are dreams, but of a kind so close to waking that the light of day already shines in them, and eyes already opening behold the joyful sights their offerings contain."

"Come home. You have not found your happiness in foreign places, and in alien forms which have no meaning to you, though you sought to make them meaningful. This world is not where you belong. You are a stranger here."

"Bodies may battle, but the clash of forms is meaningless."

"God knows not form. He CANNOT answer you in terms which have no meaning. And YOUR will could not BE satisfied with empty forms, made but to fill a gap which is not there."

"Fear is the emotion of the world. It has but one. Its forms are many - call them what you will - but it is one in content."

In the separation, you confused the true and the false. You assigned God's properties to the false world, BUT YOU ALSO assigned false properties to God. This turned God into an evil enemy to you in your perception of him. This was necessary in order to believe that the world you made was something you would want instead.

This means you actually framed God as opposite to his nature. As if God is evil, destructive, attacking, sinful, deadly, sick, suffering, weak, powerless, unreal, illusory, vengeful and special. While many people focus on how they are going to forgive the false world, which entails lifting truth from it, you ALSO have to forgive God and lift the FALSE from him.

You may not realize that you have assigned false properties to God. But you have in fact framed God as a special false God. You have tried to make out that God is evil and an enemy. The ego believes this. It wants nothing to do with God because IT believes and perceives God as "everything evil", while seeing itself as holy.

"No-one who hates but is afraid of love, and therefore MUST he be afraid of God."

"You are more afraid of God than of the ego, and love cannot enter where it is not welcome."

"And being deceived in yourself you ARE deceived in your Father, in Whom no deceit is possible."

This means you do in fact have within you various reasons to avoid God, to fear God, to not want God, and to hate God. Part of you wants God to be dead. You have to therefore actually forgive God of the projections and misperceptions that you have laid upon him, and recognize that he is not those things.

It is your attempt to AVOID looking at your "attack on God" blasphemy that compels you to focus on forgiving the WORLD instead. You do not want to look at this because you actually believe that your attack on God has made you GUILTY. And you do not want to revisit the idea of approaching God because you believe it means admitting to having sinned against him, and you think he's going to kill you for it.

"You do NOT see that EVERY sin and EVERY condemnation which you perceive and justify IS an attack upon your Father."

"Your brothers and your Father have become VERY fearful to you, and you would bargain with them for a few special relationships, in which you think you see some scraps of safety."

"For through guilt, you EXCLUDE your Father and your brothers FROM yourself."

"It is your Father Whom you would defend against."

If you think that God is evil you will not want to go home. If you think the world is NOT evil you will not want to go home. You've turned God into an enemy and do not trust him. That's why there is a whole process of "the development of trust". You have misplaced your trust in the ego world. You have to learn to trust God again.

"You CHOSE to forget your Father, but you did NOT will to do so."

To trust God you have to be willing to accept the possibility that God is not the scary monster that you think he is. That he is not going to hurt or attack or reject you. That he still loves you because he is still love. You have to take away from God the false accusations you've made that he is evil and vicious and not to be trusted. You have hurled abuse at God and have accused him of sin. This has to be undone.

You will only approach God, tentatively, if you can have a little willingness to be mistaken about him. And this requires that you trust and have faith that he isn't out to destroy you. You have to be wrong about God, because you have become mistaken about him and his nature. You cannot conceive of him without a body, or think of him as anything but selfish like your ego. This has to be reversed.

"And either the ego, which you made, IS your father, or its whole thought system will not stand."

"Your gods are nothing, because your Father did not create them." "You who have been unmerciful unto yourselves, do not remember your Father's love."

This aspect of forgiveness doesn't seem to be talked about very much in ACIM circles. A lot of time is spent talking about forgiving the world and its contents and the people that piss you off, but very little about looking at the fact that you rejected God, hate God, do not want God, and are trying to destroy him and his son. This picturing of God as an enemy has to be undone in order for you to feel safe to be intimate with God again.

You have to unlearn your rejection of God and learn to love him again. Perhaps the real reason that many people do NOT focus on forgiving God, or looking at how they have framed God as evil, is because it would suggest tremendous guilt and fear, to admit that you have tried to attack and kill off God himself. Fortunately God has not held any of this against you and dispels it entirely, and is his hands are held open in welcome to receive you as his most loved creation once again.

To want to go towards your brothers in Christ, to want to forgive anything, you have to be willing to forgive God. You have accused him and must correct this. The world was made as an attack on God. You can forgive the world but you also have to forgive the idea that you've attacked God. You have made God into a false God and have redefined what you think God is like. This has to be corrected. You have to learn to love God again, and you can start by admitting that you don't.

"You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor, and God did not give it. For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL Father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him."

"Allegiance to the denial of God is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."

"The "attack on God" made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression."

"Do not look to the god of sickness for healing, but only to the God of love, for healing is the acknowledgment of Him."

"The god of the crucifixion demands that he crucify, and his worshippers obey."

"You MADE the god of sickness, and BY making him, you made yourself ABLE to hear him. But you did NOT create him, because he is NOT the Will of the Father. He is therefore not eternal, and will be UNmade for you, the instant you signify your willingness to accept ONLY the eternal."

"You were willing to accept even death to deny your Father."

"You have interpreted the separation as a means which you have made for BREAKING your communication with your Father."

"You can give up the god of sickness for your brothers; in fact, you would HAVE to do so, if you give him up for yourself. For if you see him anywhere, YOU are accepting him."

"GOD is not at war with the god of sickness which you made, but YOU are. He is the symbol of willing AGAINST God, and you are afraid of him BECAUSE he cannot be reconciled with God's will. If you ATTACK him, you will make him real to you. But if you refuse to worship him, in whatever form he may appear to you, and wherever you think you see him, he will disappear into the nothingness out of which he was made."

"Embodiment of fear, the host of sin, god of the guilty and the lord of all illusions and deceptions, does the thought of death seem mighty. For it seems to hold all living things within its withered hand; all hopes and wishes in its blighting grasp; all goals perceived but in its sightless eyes. The frail, the helpless and the sick bow down before its image, thinking it alone is real, inevitable, worthy of their trust. For it alone will surely come."

"There is either a god of fear or One of Love."

"Or will you make another idol to replace it? For the god of cruelty takes many forms."

"The ego is not a traitor to God to Whom treachery is impossible. But it IS a traitor TO YOU who believe you have been treacherous to your Father." "You who have played that you are lost to hope, abandoned by your Father, left alone in terror in a fearful world made mad by sin and guilt, be happy now. That game is over."