In ACIM we're told about "the real world" and many people have different ideas about what that's referring to. Here's my take on it. It took me quite a long time to realize this.

Contrary to popular belief, the real world is actually another name for Heaven. God's creation. Reality. This is why Jesus correctly uses the word "Real" in relation to it. It is the Heaven that God created, which also is another name for the Sonship. It is described for example in this quote:

"Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself, "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are no streets where people walk alone and separately. There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever."

The shining forever only takes place in Heaven. It's not a temporary shining or an intermediary place. There is no Earth there, no bodies, no walls, and no sun to cause "night and day." No buildings, no streets, nothing physical. It's talking about Heaven.

Now, in some OTHER statements Jesus makes, he is speaking in a context of having perception still. And when He is speaking within this context, He refers to "the real world". But is now referring to the real world, Heaven, from a perceptual standpoint. So now what he's calling the real world, is the PERCEPTION OF the real world. It's a symbol, within a dream. An interpretation or judgement, a partial glimpse or reflection of Heaven within the separated state. He refers to that "image" of the real world AS the real world, because you are PERCEIVING the real world - heaven - but this is not the same thing as being IN Heaven.

"The real world is a symbol, like the rest of what perception offers. Yet it stands for what is opposite to what you made."

"The perception of the real world will be so short, that you will barely have time to thank God for it. For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world, and have been made ready for Him."

Jesus says for example that you can PERCEIVE the real world, which means that you can be still OUTSIDE of the Kingdom, looking in from a separated state - because "perception is a separated state". It's like window shopping.

"To believe that you can perceive the real world is to believe that you can know yourself."

"The forgiven world", is actually a reference to Earth/this universe which is seen through, past, and beyond, as a thin veil which covers the face of Christ. The "face of Christ" is another synonym for the PERCEPTION OF the real world of heaven - sort of an outside exterior look at the surface of Heaven from a separated state. The forgiven world is Earth, the real world is Heaven. And "the real world" (perceived) is what you see BEYOND "the forgiven world" (earth) when you overlook it with forgiveness but are still having perception. And "those who perceive still need healing" and "perception of the truth (perception of the real world) is not the same as knowing it (being IN IT, one with it)".

"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 (perception of heaven), reaching quietly and gently across chaos (earth/hell/forgiven world), and removing ALL illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf (part of the forgiven world, NOT the real world) becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection (signs are symbolic, not the ACTUAL thing - the perfection seen is the real world BEYOND the forgiven world of the leaf). 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."

Similarly "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind" really means that you look at/through/beyond the forgiven world of Earth, it becomes transparent, and you see BEYOND IT, to the real world, and it is the real world that is GOD... that you SEE BEYOND the physical, beyond forms, and seems to be "in" what you physically see, because you're seeing both the physical AND the real world at the same time. This does not in any way make the forgiven world REAL, NOR does it associate it with God. God is IN what you see because he is BEYOND the forgiven world that forgiveness is OVERLOOKING and seeing PAST, TO reality. And when you forgive the world and see God "in" it, the world disappears and reveals there is ONLY GOD, no world.

"Every illusion brought to its forgiveness is gently overlooked, and disappears."

"A forgiven world cannot last."

Once the face of christ is seen, ie real world is perceived, the forgiven world - the veil - actually disappears from sight completely, because "it is impossible to see two worlds."

"This world you see (earth/forgiven world) MUST BE DENIED (not put on a pedestal!!!), for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS (there ARE TWO WORLDS, heaven and earth, and Heaven is HERE, Earth IS NOT HERE). For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER." - its like a seesaw, you can be up or down but not both. As true perception dawns, false perception ends. As heaven is recognized, earth is forgotten.

"For what appears to hide the Face of Christ (earth/forgiven world) is powerless before His Majesty, and **disappears** before His holy sight." (thus earth can't be holy)

"Before this light the body disappears, as heavy shadows MUST give way to light." (body is made of darkness - "the body is a dream" "the body is the IDEA OF SIN made flesh and projected outwards.")

Here for me is the key distinction between these "four" different worlds/terminologies:

Unforgiven world" Earth/this world, not overlooked, it is an illusion, and IF YOU BELIEVE IT IS REAL, you are delusional and insane and are blinded by perception of form. You are not seeing PAST form so are no forgiving. This makes the world seem like a real place, a real nightmare of hell. Where "things happen", people suffer, and there is real death. THIS is "the world you made." It has nothing to do with God, and the Holy Spirit DOES NOT see it because His forgiveness COMPLETELY overlooks it and fixates on the real world.

Forgiven world: Earth/this world, overlooked with forgiveness, seen through, recognized WITH truth of true perception as BEING FALSE, becomes transparent and disappears when the face of christ/real world is seen. True perception overlooks it. "Forgiveness does not look upon bodies." Teachers of God (not advanced) still see it overlaid on top of the perception of the real world as a thin veil and so can operate "in" the forgiven world/earth from a state of "mostly awake" or "Awareness of dreaming is the function of God's teachers". This awareness is NOT awakening. It is "conscious sleep", because dreams are still being DREAMED.

Real world (as perception of heaven from outside): Also is the same thing as the face of christ, and "the real world still is but a dream". This perception OF the real world isn't reality, it's a reflection of Heaven within the dreaming state. It seems heaven-like and "holy" but it is still an illusion. Perceiving this FULLYy you NO LONGER SEE planet Earth and cannot remain in this state longer than an instant before God scoopes you up and you return to awareness of BEING IN Heaven.

Real world (as Heaven itself): Being IN heaven, with no perception, no forgiven world, no bodies, no buildings etc. This is the living world of light. God's creation. The sonship. Reality. The REAL world that is not earth in any way.

"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike (no perception IN the real world of heaven). Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done (includes atonement). And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God (all physical forms/worlds). 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 (perception of real world has made it impossible to see physical worlds), and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause (forgiven world disappears in this perception of light). For where God's memory has come at last (in heaven) there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies (no f'ing bodies in heaven!), and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

Here for example is a reference to how Heaven, the REAL real world, can reach into THIS world - the forgiven world.

"This aching world (Earth/physical/unforgiven world/hell/even as the forgiven world) has not the power to touch the living world (real world of Heaven) at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world (Heaven IS ANOTHER WORLD - the REAL world). But the REAL world (heaven) HAS the power to touch you even here (outside the Kingdom, in this illusory world), BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT (heaven). And what you call with love WILL come to you (from Heaven). Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made (earth/unforgiven world), and do not want (earth holds nothing that I want). The only effort you need make, to give this world (earth) away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make (God created Heaven not earth), is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE. (Earth, un/forgiven world, is FALSE!)."

"The world you made (earth etc) is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself (heaven)."

God created the real world of heaven: "The real world (heaven, perceived) is the way that leads you to remembrance of this one thing that is wholly true and WHOLLY YOURS. For all else you have LENT yourself in time, and it WILL fade (earth will disappear). But this one thing is ALWAYS yours, being the gift of God unto His Son ("And God so loved the world (heaven) that he gave it TO His only begotten Son - God doesn't give planets."). Your ONE reality (heaven) was GIVEN you, and BY it, God created you as one with Him. (in heaven)"

Now, the Holy Spirit is a simultaneous MAKER (not creator) of the world you made. You made hell, but he repurposes it to direct you towards Heaven, and to change your perception of/making of it so that you stop interpreting it as hell and reinterpret it as a REFLECTION of Heaven, once removed from Heaven. HE, therefore, made "the real world" as in, the PERCEPTION OF the world GOD CREATED, Heaven, from inside the dream. And this real world is the face of christ. It is NOT EARTH. He ignores, overlooks, cancels, everything of the forgiven world and points beyond it.

"There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the mad belief that ANYTHING could be established and maintained without some link that kept it still within the laws of God; NOT as the law itself upholds the universe as God created it (heaven), but in some form adapted to the need the Son of God believes he has. Corrected error IS the error's end. And thus has God protected still His Son, even in error. There IS another purpose in the world that error made (you made earth in error/sin), BECAUSE it has another Maker Who CAN reconcile its **goal** with His Creator's purpose.

In His perception of the world (forgiven world, totally overlooked), nothing is seen but justifies forgiveness and the sight of perfect sinlessness (and "to see a sinless body is impossible" because perception does NOT SEE bodies). Nothing arises but is met with instant and complete forgiveness. Nothing remains an instant, to obscure the sinlessness that shines unchanged, beyond the pitiful attempts of specialness to put it out of mind, where it MUST be, and light the BODY up INSTEAD of it."

You can only perceive bodies if you believe in sin. You can only see bodies if you are Unforgiving. You can only see bodies/the forgiven world if you are NOT fully forgiving! Because a forgiven world cannot last and sinlessness is not OF the forgiven world, it's of the real world. Holy Spirit totally overlooks Earth and bodies and the forgiven world and fixates on the real world, temporarily through perception OF the real world and simultaneously IN the real world (heaven).

The Holy Spirit offers a happy dream to replace the nightmare dream that you made. It does not replace the world you made, it reinterprets it, OVERLOOKS it, and looks toward Heaven. The world you made as opposite to Heaven is hell, this planet, this universe. Spacetime. It is opposite to Heaven in every way. Holy Spirit allows you to forgive it and overlook it and forget it. This does not mean looking AT IT and LOVING IT. IT means learning TO SEE, by NOT SEEING THE WORLD - not allowing "perception of form" to BLOCK YOUR SIGHT. To look away from dark dreams of hell towards the light and eventually beyond it entirely. The real world is BEYOND the forgiven world. Christ Vision is like x-ray vision.

"You will first DREAM of peace (forgiven world/perception of real world), and THEN awaken to it (in Heaven/THE real world). Your first exchange of what you made for what you want, is the exchange of nightmares for the happy dreams of love (false perception vs true perception). In these lie your true perceptions, for the Holy Spirit corrects the world of dreams (earth + symbol of real world) where ALL perception is."

"And the real world is but your welcome of what always was (perception of heaven gets you ready to wake up TO heaven). Therefore the call of joy is in it, and your glad response is your awakening (being IN heaven) to what you have NOT lost. "

"The world you made" and "The world you see" are this planet and the surrounding environment. All of spacetime. You are not supposed to hold it dear or value it or want to keep it. *****SIGHT OF IT, IS COSTING YOU*****. "This world you see (earth, with body's eyes) MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. ****YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS****. (very key mechanic, one or the other not both) For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER." - you cannot see earth if you see heaven, period. You cannot see even the perception of the real world/face of christ and still see physical objects.

"You do not really want **the world you see** (earth + space), for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built (yes physical houses) have never sheltered you. The roads you made (yes physical roads) have led you nowhere, and no city that you built (yes like chicago, new york, london) has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of ***death*** upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust even as you made it." (get rid of that shit!)

"To be without a body is to be in your natural state."

True perception, perception of the real world (heaven), the face of christ, the happy dream, are all the same. Perception is always within the dream, OF the dream, or as an interpretation of heaven. It can reflect heaven or rather you can shine heaven's light into the dream from heaven and illuminate it and shine it away or overlook it, and see YOUR reflection of your IMAGE of your real self there. Once removed from reality.

"Knowledge is power BECAUSE it is certain, and certainty is strength. Perception is temporary. It is an attribute of the space-time belief, and is therefore subject to fear or love. Misperception produces fear, and true perception produces love. NEITHER produces certainty because all perception varies. That is why it is NOT knowledge. True perception is the BASIS for knowledge, but KNOWING is the affirmation of truth."

Knowing occurs only IN heaven, not through perception.

Notice also there is a huge difference between the REFLECTION of heaven, and ACTUALLY BEING IN heaven.

"Those who have learned to offer ONLY healing, because of the reflection of holiness in them (YOU are the reflection), are ready at last for Heaven. There, ***holiness is not a reflection***, but rather the ***ACTUAL CONDITION*** of what was but reflected TO them here (on earth, BUT IN YOU, Earth does not become holy). God is no **image** (reflection are IMAGES in a dream), and His creations, as part of Him, hold Him in them in truth. They do not merely REFLECT the truth, for THEY ARE truth (ACTUAL holiness). When **no perception** stands between God and His Creation, or between His Children and their own (perception is gone), the knowledge of creation MUST continue forever. The **reflections** that you accept into the mirror of your minds in time (within the dream of spacetime), but bring eternity nearer or farther.

But eternity ITSELF is beyond ALL time (beyond spacetime!) Reach out of time and touch it, with the help of its ***reflection IN you***, and you will turn FROM time to holiness, as surely as the reflection of holiness calls everyone to lay all guilt aside. Reflect the peace of Heaven HERE, and bring this world to Heaven. For the REFLECTION of truth draws everyone TO truth. And as they enter INTO it, they leave ALL reflections behind. In Heaven, reality is SHARED, and not reflected. By sharing its reflection HERE, its truth becomes the only perception which the Son of God accepts. And thus, remembrance of His Father dawns on him, and he can no longer be satisfied with anything but his own reality."

PERCEIVING the real world (heaven) is seeing the "face" or "surface of" Christ from the outside. Outside the kingdom essentially. "The world", aka Earth etc, is a block - a literal physical blockage - a wall of sin - the veil - standing before and in the way of sight of heaven. Jesus refers to it as "the granite block of sin" which the body's eyes are totally blinded by and cannot see past. PHYSICAL sin.

"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 (earth) forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

So as stated in you cannot see two worlds, once you FULLY perceive with true perception, you become INCAPABLE of seeing the world of bodies. The veil - which houses all the bodies and planets - DISAPPEARS, and now you PERCEIVE Heaven only. This is perception of the real world. What many people think "is the real world". But this reference, this perceived IMAGE of a real world, is a dream. ie "The real world still is but a dream"

The world of bodies, planets, animals, forests, civilizations, galaxies, is a dream world. It becomes the forgiven world. HELL, becomes forgiven. And this "forgiven world" WAS made of the idea of sin and separation and death. And by forgiving it, you are OVERLOOKING it, which causes it to DISAPPEAR. If you forgive hell, it will disappear. If you overlook sin, things MADE OF SIN, will disappear. If you overlook the separation, THE GAP, which contains spacetime, will disappear. And leave no trace in its going.

"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 (earth is made 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 (spacetime world) in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. (spacetime ends) Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible (bodies cannot exist in heaven, they rely on spacetime). Forgiveness proves it is impossible (no exceptions) because it sees it not (forgiveness, complete as the atonement, DOES NOT SEE THE WORLD OF BODIES). 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"

Once the world is forgiven by all beings/souls, the forgiven world will entirely vanish. It is made of darkness. It is the ABSENCE of light. It is the idea of death. "Without the idea of death there is no world." It is opposition to reality. It is denial. It is made of the attempt to claim that light does not exist and darkness exists. When the light comes, light shines away darkness because darkness is not a real "thing". It's merely the illusion of the absence of light/love/God, and being an illusion it vanishes when it is recognized as such. "Illusions recognized must disappear." "The body cannot stay without illusions."

"They live in secrecy, hating the sunlight, and happy in the body's darkness, where they can hide, and keep their secrets hidden, along with them."

"And the seeming reality of the darkness makes the idea of light meaningless."

"No darkness abides ANYWHERE in the Kingdom, so your part is only to allow no darkness to abide in your OWN mind." (yes, your OWN mind, as an individual mind, one of many)

"Light does not ATTACK darkness, but it does shine it away."

"The barren sands, the darkness, and the lifelessness are seen only through the body's eyes." (body's eyes cannot see reality ever, and it also cannot perceive the real world!)

"The body is darkness."

The universe, as we know it, the physical, with Earth and other stuff, will disappear in the light. Earth does not translate INTO light, because it an ILLUSION of light's absence. It does not BECOME heaven. Earth is the ILLUSION, that there is an absence of heaven. It's a lack of light, which is impossible. "It is the world you see that is impossible." It's NOT THERE NOW. It's just an illusion, not a real thing. IT doesn't have an "it". When there seems to be darkness it is only because there seems to be a lack of light. There is a huge difference between light's seeming absence, and ACTUAL real darkness. Real darkness does not exist. The world, does not exist. It will simply vanish as an hallucination. There is no world. There is no body. There is no earth in heaven.

"Eternity will shine away the world."

"The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."

THERE WILL NOT BE A SINGLE SHRED OF EARTH KEPT WHEN IT IS SHONE AWAY BY THE LIGHT, just as all darkness VANISHES COMPLETELY when you switch the light on. "Illusions leave NO TRACE in their going."

"The stars will disappear in light, and the sun, which opened up the world to beauty, will vanish. Perception will be meaningless, when it has been perfected. For everything that has been used for learning, will have no function. Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that made perception possible, will occur. The perception of the real world will be so short, that you will barely have time to thank God for it (because to SEE it you will NO LONGER see earth). For God will take the last step swiftly, when you have reached the real world, and have been made ready for Him."

And yes it does say literally, the SUN.... will vanish.

And then... there's being IN heaven.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made (earth) and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself (earth does this) is not of Him. He did **not** make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

Yes the physical planet earth, hell, is opposite to Heaven in EVERY WAY. And God would've have to have been SPLIT MINDED In order to make it because he DID create Heaven and heaven is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to Earth's nature and laws. "The laws of this world go against your nature." So he could not have created Earth AS WELL as Heaven. And earth IS NOT Heaven, it's a "sorry outcome".

"He thinks he made a hell opposing Heaven, and believes that he abides in what does not exist, while Heaven is the place he cannot find. " (you think you abide in, live, in reality, on planet earth. It is not reality, it is hell)

You can go beyond this world to the world of light, Heaven, which God created as your true home. Your REAL HOME. The REAL world.

"Put out your hand and see how easily the door swings open with your one intent to go beyond it. Angels light the way, so that all darkness vanishes and you are standing in a light so bright and clear that you can understand all things you see. A tiny moment of surprise, perhaps, will make you pause before you realize the world you see before you in the light reflects the truth you knew, and did not quite forget in wandering away in dreams. (talking about PERCEPTION of the real world/forgiven world).

You cannot fail today. There walks with you the Spirit Heaven sent you that you might approach this door some day, and through His aid slip effortlessly past it to the light. Today that day has come. Today God keeps His ancient promise to His holy Son, as does His Son remember his to Him. This is a day of gladness, for we come to the appointed time and place where you will find the goal of all your searching here and all the seeking of the world, which ends together as you pass beyond the door." (into heaven).

"This loveliness is NOT a fantasy (perception OF the real world from outside). It is the real world, bright, and clean, and new, with everything sparkling under the open sun. Nothing is hidden here, for everything has BEEN forgiven, and there ARE no fantasies to hide the truth. (forgiven world has disappeared). The bridge between that world (perception of the real world) and this (Jesus talking from INSIDE OF HEAVEN - the REAL world) is SO little, and SO easy to cross, that you could not believe it is the meeting-place of worlds so different (yes, two entirely different worlds, earth and heaven). Yet this little bridge is the strongest thing that touches on this world (earth/forgiven world/perception OF real world) at all (from beyond it). This little step, so small it has escaped your notice, is a stride through time (spacetime) into eternity (heaven), and beyond all ugliness (YES EVERYTHING IN SPACETIME IS UGLY - the forgiven world is ugly), into beauty that will enchant you (the beauty of HEAVEN ITSELF), and will never cease to cause you wonderment at its perfection."

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."

If something seems to have gone wrong with your body, the temptation is to believe it is has reality and truth to it.

ACIM: "Temptation has one lesson it would teach in all its forms wherever it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty and bound by what it orders him to feel."

This is the temptation, the ego's attempt to get us to BELIEVE that the sickness is true, the damage is real, the suffering is really happening, something really has gone wrong. It's all part of the belief in sin.

Our challenge then is to do the opposite of be tempted, which is to seek Atonement, by learning to UNDO the false perceptions which are causing you to see an illusion as something more than just an illusion.

If you have come to believe that your sickness is a REAL SICKNESS, then you're got a problem far more deceptive than the sickness itself. You not only have "a sickness" but also a sickness of perception, a mental illness, in which you believe that an ILLUSION of sickness in the body is actually reality and truth. You are having perceptual hallucinations. You are not seeing correctly.

To UNDO these false perceptions, you must be willing to re-frame what you thought was sickness and see it in a different way. You must become able to see it in such a way that it "registers" with you as completely "false". You need to come to recognize it as and be convinced that it is, nothing more than an ILLUSION and NOT a reality.

This does imply, and means, that all forms of sickness are FICTIONAL, and all forms of sickness are merely fake images which you have MADE in an attempt to put on a show of sickness really happening. Whatever the sickness allegedly is, it is not a REAL sickness, it can only be a fake sickness.

In God's reality, there is no such thing as real sickness. Sickness is separation from God. And one expression of such a sickness, which believes an illusion of separation is real, shows up as physical sickness. That means that in how you're looking at this sickness, your belief in it, your seeing SIN in it, your belief that it's really happening and has weight and is tangibly real and NOT an illusion, IS your sickness because it's an expression of separation from HEALTH, which is separation from WHOLENESS or God.

It is tempting to believe the body's signals, like, well, I have this thing going on in my body and it's doing stuff to me and I don't know how it got there and it's a threat and it has power over me and I don't want it. If you believe this, then you WILL start trying to fight with it and to get rid of it.

But you're trying to get rid of an ILLUSION which YOU yourself believe is really there, so your BELIEF in it is actually you VALUING it, giving it credit as truth and reality, which means you will KEEP it. And then you will be attempting to fight against your own belief that it is real, which is an attempt to keep it, so your war against it will just be a state of conflict between yourself and yourself.

To become single-minded and whole you can't be believing in it while trying to get rid of it. You must UNDO your belief that you have a REAL sickness. You must convince yourself in any way possible that it is NOT a real sickness, it is NOT really happening, it does NOT have truth to it, you are NOT at the effect of it, it does NOT have power over you, and it is not REAL at all. It's completely fictional. It's an illusion, not a reality.

It's a made-up, faked, artificial, PRETEND SICKNESS, which you invented. You are the one who has fallen for the temptation to believe in it. You are the one who put it there. You are not a victim of it. And you do have power over it. And in truth, because it IS an illusion, it is completely FALSE, you do NOT have a real sickness, there IS NO SICKNESS, and the sickness is ALREADY GONE! The truth of all sickness is that it has not really happened at all.

Seeing that about the sickness is seeing the Atonement, which means you are forgiving or overlooking the sickness. You overlook sickness by overlooking the temptation to believe that the ILLUSION of sickness is the truth. If the sickness has literally not happened because separation has not happened, and if it is recognized as completely FALSE because of your recognition of what the TRUTH is - God's truth, then you will REMEMBER that this "sickness" simply cannot exist at all.

That's the kind of place where your mind needs to get to in order to heal. That's the kind of perception that you need to have. Illusory things are actually RECOGNIZED as illusory. The way that illusions strike your perception is then very different to how they seemed or what they meant when you believed in them. You will EXPERIENCE them as false, have a sense even of the falseness of them. A sense of not believing in them and regarding them as not true. That's the healing of perception which is your mind UNDOING the belief in the sickness so that it can be recognized as not existing.

Thus you recognize it has disappeared because it never really existed, it's already gone, it never even happened in the first place, you do not believe in it, there is no truth to it, it is completely false, unreal, and God did not create it. Therefore it simply cannot be happening and is not happening.

This reveals that you are actually quite a powerful creator who has literally MADE UP a sickness and presented it as an IMAGE of sickness, showing up in the FORM of your body, and that nevertheless this is not really there. You are a maker of dreams! You brought the illusion of a sickness into being and you can just as much demolish that illusion by becoming willing to see it for what it is. It is not truth, it is fictional. All sickness is fictional. There is no such thing as a real sickness of any kind.

You must learn to withdraw ALL of your belief in the FANTASY of "sickness" that this world holds dear. You must decide that you will never believe sickness is real ever again. You will not be tempted by the illusion of it, you will not see it, you will recognize it as a LIE which you do not fall for or want, and which is always completely false. Sickness is NOT THERE. It must go because it is already gone. Collapse the sickness and get all belief in sickness out of your life forever.

Believing that the truth is true, and only the truth is true, will give you the power to work miracles.

If you are not being absolutely immortal, then you are trying to be a victim. Victims are not just those who seem to be overtly attacked by another. Victims are those who believe they can be CHANGED AT ALL BY ANYTHING.

There is a wide range of victimhood, or what you might call "victim consciousness", from mild to extreme. But everyone's doing it. We're all trying to make out that we're something that can be affected. That we can be hurt or suffer, made to feel something, caused against our will, converted and transformed and modified by the world.

The bizarre but factual truth is that the world does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to you. It is not the cause of you, God is. There is not a single speck of anything in the whole of spacetime that has ANY ability to change what you really are at all. You are changeless and eternal and you do not have the ability to change.

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it was. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea." UrM6C3

We all entered into a grand charade of pretending we can die. Pretending we can be mortal, that we can suffer, that stuff can happen to us, that we can be affected and changed. Even that we can change ourselves against God's will. None of this is true.

"You see yourself as a ridiculous parody on God's creation, weak, vicious, ugly and sinful, miserable and beset with pain. Such is your version of your self; a self divided into many warring parts, separated from God, and tenuously held together by its erratic and capricious maker, to which you pray." UrW95L2

"You see yourself as vulnerable, frail, and easily destroyed. And at the mercy of countless attackers more powerful than you." UrT22G11 You cannot change what is permanently changeless, but you can BELIEVE you can. This belief is a mistake and a lie. Everyone who believes they can be victimised, attacked, hurt, damaged, destroyed, is lying. Anyone who feels they are suffering or weak or threatened or afraid are lying. Anyone who claims that someone did something to them is lying.

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you." UrW191L9

This can be a harsh truth especially when it seems so real and convincing, especially when some other body comes along and performs a physical abuse or harm upon your body or feelings. Especially when it seems to blatantly obvious that someone "not myself" is wholly responsible for "causing changes in me."

And we've all been through shit. We've all experienced what we call suffering. We've all had pains and hurts, sicknesses. We've all died many times over. We've all gone through every form of misery possible and every form of unhappiness and every kind of horrendous nightmare. And even in spite all of it, NOT ONE SINGLE BIT OF IT IS TRUE.

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do." UrT9K8

We CANNOT be victimised or attacked or hurt or damaged or threatened or changed at all. God who is immortal maintains us forever in his mind by his infinite immortal will to be immortal beings forever. We are absolutely incapable of change or of being change or of changing anything. There is NO CHANGE in reality.

"Unless you have hurt yourselves, you could never suffer in ANY way, for that is not God's Will for His Son. Pain is not of Him, for He knows no attack, and His peace surrounds you silently." UrT10D1

We must remind ourselves frequently when tempted to believe we have BEEN changed, or CAN change, that we HAVE NOT done this. IF we believe we have done this, we will believe we have sinned and are guilty, deserving more fake punishment. We cannot BE punished. We cannot become guilt, or turn into evil, or transform into the anti-christ.

"No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants, and no one dies without his own consent. " UrW152L1

Beyond all lies and all deception and all fake suffering and all pain and sickness and all death, beyond space and time, we are all absolutely infinite beings that are so absolute and so always the same forever that we have not even BEGUN to change into anything else.

"There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are." UrW190L5

All that's happened is we have gone into DENIAL about our permanent reality, our permanent perfection, our permanent Christhood. And have PRETENDED to be something that changes. We have damaged the body, damaged the emotions, damaged the thinking, but we have not damaged the soul. What we are can never be changed.

"The Son of Life cannot BE killed. He is immortal as his Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the universe that MUST be One." UrT29G1

All that's required then in awakening to the truth is to ACCEPT THE TRUTH, that nothing has EVER happened to us, nothing CAN happen to us, and there is not even a world that could be accused of doing such in the first place. Attack does not exist. There is no pain or suffering or sickness or death. We are the sons of God and we are free from suffering forever.

"There is no death, and we renounce it now in every form, for their salvation and our own as well. God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death and see the life beyond." UrW163L8

"There is no death. The Son of God is free. And in His freedom is the end of fear. UrM29A4

Being vulnerable in itself isn't a bad thing. To be vulnerable is to be exposed and open to something. Able to be affected by it. If you expose yourself to God openly you would resurrect into eternal life and joy. That's a good thing.

It's only when you expose yourself and open up to the ego, or really to the idea of the opposite of life, to attack, that you are becoming vulnerable to suffering. Exposing yourself to the ego produces sickness and death. It's like it's toxic, and the more you make yourself able to be affected by it, the more dead you become.

Now, in the victim mentality, which is ego, we always seem to be exposed to and at the effect of something in the world. Something other than God. Really it's an exposure to attack and sin, and ultimately to death. We accuse death of making us dead. We claim that external causes have the power to destroy us and make us sick and suffer. As if "death" happens to us.

In this kind of a mindset, a person is really rejecting invulnerability. They're saying, I am small and weak and frail and easily affected by everything. Everything has power over me and causes me against my will all the time. I barely hang onto life by a thread and live in constant fear that I will be attacked. I have to hide from everyone and everything and become paralized with terror. And anyone who wants to take anything from me can do so.

This mindset of blame and projection, or the reversal of cause and effect, of the disowning of power and playing small and weak, is the opposite of the mindset of immortality. Immortality means you cannot be affected, you are only at the effect of God, and you can only be exposed to life. It makes you invulnerable to attack or threat or danger of any kind, because what you are being vulnerable to is harmless. It is life-giving, not death-giving.

So the question is, what do I want to be vulnerable TO? To life or to death? What do I want to be affected by and open to? By life or by death? If I want to be not affected by the world, not made to suffer, not caused to react, not upset by anything, not terrorized, not threatened or hurt, and actually completely invulnerable to the world, then I need to choose to make myself vulnerable to God. Because God is my safety.

So we have this choice to make between heaven and hell, between life and death. A choice of what I will be an effect of. I am either an effect of God who is life, or I am an effect of death. I will become the spawn of satan. If I become an effect of death I will show up in the world as dead. If I don't want that the only alternative is to be vulnerable with God and open up to him through trust, so that I can be exposed to the life-giving power of his mind.

Just being in his presence can resurrect you back to life and permanent health and eradicate all attackability. Opening up to God reclaims your immortality. It makes you literally invulnerable to anything in the world. And that is the only way you can be safe. Exposing yourself to God IS exposing yourself TO safety. And when you are safe in God, you can never die.

"In my defenselessness my safety lies."

"Nothing except your thoughts can make you think you are vulnerable. And nothing except your thoughts can prove to you this is not so."

"The mind that serves the Spirit is invulnerable."

"Casting spells" merely means "affirming error", and error is lack of love. When man projects this onto others, he DOES imprison them, but only to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already made. This distortion makes them vulnerable to the curse of others, since they have already cursed themselves. The miracle worker can only bless, and this undoes the curse and frees the soul from prison."

"It is not YOU that is so vulnerable and open to attack that just a word, a little whisper that you do not like, a circumstance that suits you not, or an event that you did not anticipate upsets your world, and hurls it into chaos."

"Illness of any kind may be defined as the result of a view of the self as weak, vulnerable, evil and endangered, and thus in need of constant defense."

"Concerns about the body demonstrate how frail and vulnerable is your life; how easily destroyed is what you love. Depression speaks of death and vanity of real concern with anything at all."

"Listen to what the ego says, and see what it DIRECTS you see, and it is sure that you will see YOURSELF as tiny, vulnerable, and afraid. You WILL experience depression, a sense of worthlessness, and feelings of impermanence and unreality. You WILL believe that you are helpless prey to forces far beyond your own control, and far more powerful than you. And you WILL think the world you made directs your destiny."

"This would not be YOUR wish unless you saw yourself AS ONE with the ego, which ALWAYS looks upon itself, and therefore on you, as UNDER attack, and highly VULNERABLE to it."

"You do NOT need God's blessing, because that you have forever. But you DO need YOURS. The picture you see of yourselves is deprived, unloving, and very vulnerable. You CANNOT love this. But you can very easily escape FROM it, or better, leave it behind."

"The idea that knowledge will make the individual invulnerable. This is the reaction formation against the underlying fear of vulnerability."

"You see yourself as vulnerable, frail, and easily destroyed. And at the mercy of countless attackers more powerful than you."

"A mind which has been blocked has allowed itself to be vulnerable to attack, because it has TURNED AGAINST ITSELF."

"A sick god MUST be an idol, made in the image of what its maker thinks HE is. And that is exactly what the ego DOES perceive in a Son of God; -- a sick god, self-created, self-sufficient, very vicious, and very vulnerable."

"Their OWN thoughts have made them vulnerable."

"The vulnerable are essentially miscreators, because they misperceive Creation."

In A Course in Miracles there are at least TWO levels on which Jesus speaks, because there are TWO stages in awakening.

There is the level that you relate to as an individual self, waking up to your higher self.

Then there is the level of the entire sonship waking up to the Christ self.

The individual self projects illusions ONTO the dream world which the Christ self is dreaming.

That means, the individual self undoes itself by taking back its projections onto or about others, and forgiving itself. This leads to awakening as the Higher Self. One son in the sonship. People wakening to this level generally do not express many miracles and will still die in a body. Examples: Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Mooji, various Hindu yogis etc

But then there is more. Christ is beyond this. Christ is the dreamer of the physical world and is the maker of it. And Christ has full power over all of it. At this level the body is completely dissolved and disappears, which Jesus demonstrated.

These two levels have led to a rift in the ACIM community. Those who relate only to the individual awakening try to shove everything Jesus teaches into that box and make it fit. This results in the complete disempowering of supernatural miracles and a redefinition of them as just corrections in perception. That's not what Jesus means by miracles at all.

Miracles are at the level of the Christ mind overriding the dream that the Christ mind is dreaming. And that means, overriding all of the physical laws that the Christ mind is sustaining as the way this world operates. Such miracles are beyond the nature of the physical world (dream), they are SUPER-NATURAL. Everything Jesus says about miracles relates to the mind of Christ, not to the mind of the sonship.

These two levels in awakening (sonship vs christ) are the entire reason why there is a community rift, why some people believe that the Course is only asking us to change our misperceptions about a pre-existing world, to accept peace in the presence of sickness, to become peaceful or have true perception "about" the world. And the Course DOES want us to do this - it's the first stage in awakening. BUT THERE IS MORE.

Stage 2 entails waking up as Christ and demonstrating supernatural miracles all over the place, knowing that you made sickness and death and can abolish both. This is also the level on which Jesus teaches "there is no world" - this is the level where this is LITERAL, because the physical world is a dream.

Those who attempt to smash all of Jesus's teachings from all levels onto ONE level, result in a tremendous amount of confusion and delusion and limitation and closed-mindedness about what the Course is teaching and what it means. This produces a "sanitized" course, void of real miracles, void of anything supernatural, and void of the power to change anything or to stop or reverse death.

Certain statements Jesus makes are directed at the second phase of awakening to Christ, and make no sense at the first stage. Assuming there is only one stage or only one awakening is a huge mistake.

This is something I was very confused by for a loooooong time because so many people are also confused by this and just assume the Course has a single truth pertaining to a single level of experience. Jesus is speaking of at least 3 levels - the false ego self projecting ONTO the world, the Higher Self which is awake IN the world, and the Christ self which has awakened FROM the world.

Knowing when Jesus is talking about a specific CONTEXT or a level of AWARENESS or IDENTITY, is very important in properly discerning what He means, what He is referring to, and how it makes sense in the bigger picture. Most ACIM students are lost in believing that the Course has 1 level, that you should just change your mind about the world and find some way to be at peace with it, and then stay in the world and die and be hurt like all the rest of the world. That's WAAAY falling short of what ACIM is teaching and is a bastardization of the Course (by the ego, no doubt).

For example:

"The world you see does not exist." "There is no world"

This is at the level of CHRIST. It is LITERAL at this level. The physical universe does not exist and it has no power over you and you can change it in any way you see fit because it is your dream. You have that power.

If you interpret this at the level of an individual Son in the sonship, as an individual self, in a body, you will interpret this to mean that the "world" is your interpretation of the world, about the world, projected onto the world, and that you need to correct that "perception" in order to wake up. Well, NO! This is wrong. You need to correct perception but this only leads to the undoing of perception, NOT the undoing of the making of the world. This belief is a level confusion.

Another example:

"Seek not to change the world but seek to change your mind about the world"

At the level of CHRIST, this means your mind has power over the world and CAN change the world any way that it sees fit for any reason, because the Christ mind is the one that is dreaming it and LITERALLY can perform "physical miracles".

At the level of the personal mind, this is MIS-UNDERSTOOD (because it's being applied at the wrong LEVEL and it thus level confusion) to mean that you should only change your mis-perceptions of the world, self and others, in order to come to awakening to truth, and that's it... no power over the world, no power over physical matter, no ability to stop the dream or change it, really a form of resigning oneself to a state of "accepting the world as it is", which is a state of POWERLESSNESS AND VICTIMHOOD. It is a TRAP!

Recognizing the levels is very important to avoid these mistakes, but because these mistakes are made prolifically, MANY MANY MANY course students are very confused about what Jesus teaches and what the Course is teaching.

"There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the mad belief that ANYTHING could be established and maintained without some link that kept it still within the Laws of God."

God is the law. His nature is the law. His creation is an extension of the law. Anything created is within the law and under the law and governed by the law. It is impossible that anything God created can be unlawful or capable of breaking the law, otherwise it would break God. God's will cannot be opposed.

Part of God's law is that everything created is unlimited in its freedom. This includes even the freedom to try to use freedom to imprison oneself and others. This is an attempt to be "freely imprisoned", which is an obvious contradiction and circular logic. This is why it's not really possible.

But the mind is free to deny that it's impossible and to pretend that it can be accomplished, even if doing so is insane and makes no sense and still cannot be accomplished. We cannot actually create a body, or create planet Earth, or create space or time, but we can imagine what they might be like if it were possible. And that's all we've done.

So now we seem to live in an imaginary world which seems to be a world where all of the laws of God are violated. Where everything is opposite to God's nature. Where impossible things seem to happen all the time, such as sickness and death. Things which would be a total violation of God's nature if they were possible, but cannot be possible in reality.

Even if you attack and destroy someone or something in this dream, this imagined world, it isn't actually accomplishing anything. Nothing real can be threatened, nothing immortal can die, nothing of God can be hurt. What is being attacked? Nothing but an illusion, attacked by an illusion, with illusory effects which mean nothing at all.

God's law is that we are free forever. Even if we attempt to use that freedom to deny freedom. If we use our freedom to deny the freedom of others we attempt to imprison and destroy them, expressing the idea that they are not free to exist - a seemingly murderous thought.

We are allowed to have this thought, the freedom to be mistaken is entirely within the scope of God's law. It doesn't mean God intends that you be imprisoned or that you imprison others, and in truth you cannot actually imprison or destroy anyone. You can dream of imprisoning and destroying but it isn't actually happening.

So you are free to, in a dream world, do whatever you want, without limits, given that you are free to do whatever you want per God's law. And therefore even if you seem to be a murderous evil person you still are not breaking God's law. That might sound controversial, but the attack isn't real and it has no real effects on anything real. So you are free to imagine you can be evil, but you can't actually be evil.

In effect all you can be is either correct or mistaken. You can either accept reality or deny it. But you can never change the law, you can never break the law, and you can never actually commit a real sin. You can dream of sinning and dream of being guilty, but these are fictional guilts and make-believe sins. They're not even real sins. And believing they are real sins is part of being mistaken.

God still wills that we be free and happy and loving, but he doesn't demand it or stop us from trying to be otherwise. Thus there is no guilt and no sin, no actual attack, no violation and no real victims. There are dreams and nightmares of such things but they're not real. They're just mistakes, all rooted and founded on a lie that such things are even possible in reality. We're kidding ourselves when we think we hurt people, so there's no point in trying to.

Forgiveness isn't about you recognising that you did something and then trying to get over it. It's about recognising that you actually didn't do anything. And your brother didn't actually do anything. It's all a dream fantasy of doing things that can't really be done. A dream of mortality and murder which has no effect on anything real.

This doesn't justify doing such things, because a person who is in touch with unlimited freedom is also unconditionally loving. A person aligned with God's will only wills life and happiness. Ironically and paradoxically, granting everyone total freedom to do anything produces a state of mind in which there is only a desire to do good, as God sees it. In other words, being truly free to 'murder' actually produces a state of having no desire to do so. It's only when you deny freedom that you think you could gain something from attack.

So God's laws can't be broken, we are never breaking them, and we are never in a state of sinning. We never do anything that demands a real guilt, because there isn't even such a thing as real guilt. There's a mistakenness about being guilty which is founded on a lie, that sin is possible when it isn't. You couldn't cause yourself to be destroyed even if you tried because God wills that you live forever, along with everyone else.

So really we need to recognize we cannot break the law of God, and this is the only real law. But if you embrace the law it means having to give freedom and love to everyone, because freedom and love is the law. And anything else you try to do can be nothing but an illusion.

"The ego cannot OPPOSE the laws of God, any more than YOU can. But it can INTERPRET them according to what it wants, just as YOU can."

"The ego, using its own warped version of the laws of God, uses the power of the mind ONLY to defeat the mind's real purpose."

"It is the distorted product of the misapplication of the laws of God by distorted minds which are misusing their own power."

"This IS the law of God, and it HAS NO EXCEPTIONS"

"You do not think this mysterious, even though ALL the laws of what you awake to WERE violated while you slept."

"The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will."

This means that your mind is CONSTANTLY CAUSING STUFF TO HAPPEN, AT ALL TIMES, WITHOUT STOPPING.

And that means, regardless of whether you think you have the power to make things happen or not, whether you are very powerful or totally powerless, YOU ARE ALWAYS CAUSING IT WHATEVER STATE YOU ARE IN.

Therefore even if you are in suffering and sickness you MUST BE MAKING IT HAPPEN.

Even if you are dying you MUST BE CHOOSING IT.

Even if you are unhappy because you think someone did something and that you're "held" in this unhappy suffering due to forces outside your control, IT IS NOT TRUE, YOU ARE CHOOSING TO SUFFER.

Your mind never stops causing. It never sleeps. It is always ON. It is always creating or projecting. YOU ARE PERMANENTLY CAUSAL.

Therefore if you can realize this, it means literally that NO MATTER what seems to be happening or what seems to have caused it, YOU CAUSED IT - this is the secret to salvation - and therefore YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND AND CAUSE SOMETHING ELSE. Therefore NOTHING happens outside of your decision, so WHATEVER you are experiencing YOU DID CHOOSE IT!

This is precisely reflected here:

"Decisions CANNOT be difficult. This is obvious if you realize that you must ALREADY have made a decision NOT to be wholly joyous if that is what you feel. Therefore, the first step in the undoing is to recognize that YOU ACTIVELY DECIDED WRONGLY, BUT CAN AS ACTIVELY DECIDE OTHERWISE."

"I must have decided wrongly because I am NOT at peace.

I made the decision myself, but I can also decide otherwise.

I WILL to decide otherwise, because I WANT to be at peace."

This is all about you being 100% FULLY RESPONSIBLE for having DECIDED - CHOSEN - to experience what you are experiencing. If you are afraid, unhappy, sad, grieving, sick, dying, in pain, confused, mentally ill, whatever it is, YOU HAVE CHOSEN IT. You HAVE decided to experience it, and you have ASKED FOR IT. And you have received as you have asked and it has been given you.

This is what the Song of Prayer pamphlet is talking about - that you are ALWAYS ASKING and your prayer is always being answered, and therefore whatever you are receiving YOU DID ASK FOR, and therefore if you want something else you need to "raise your prayer" to a higher happier level - a happier request.

Whenever you think that something is happening that you did not ask for, or that you have no power to stop or change something, or that you are stuck with suffering, or that there is no way to change situations, YOU ARE WRONG. You are mistaken and you are UNCONSCIOUS of the part of your mind that is CHOOSING IT. Therefore you HAVE made a wrong decision. You have to totally own it. And you have to admit that YOU decided it yourself. And then you can also start to realize that you WANT to decide something else, and that IF YOU DO, you WILL EXPERIENCE SOMETHING ELSE, because your decision making has POWER.

This means, in no uncertain terms, that you are NEVER A VICTIM. Victimhood is completely impossible. It is a lie. People who are in a victim state are STILL DOING IT TO THEMSELVES, they just are not aware of it. They are STILL CHOOSING IT AND WANTING IT. Even if it looks like they have absolutely no clue why it's happening to them against their will. They are NOT VICTIMS. They are deliberate choosers who are unconscious of their decision making and who have decided to HURT THEMSELVES.

Jesus affirms that "you cannot be hurt UNLESS YOU HURT YOURSELF" and similarly "those who are sick do not love themselves for if they loved themselves they would heal themselves." He also confirms that "no-one dies without their own consent" because you HAVE TO CHOOSE DEATH in order for it to happen.

This is THE CENTRAL TEACHING of A Course in Miracles, that you have absolute unlimited POWER, EVERYTHING that happens you have chosen, NOTHING happens without your consent, and therefore you ALWAYS are receiving what you are asking for. Therefore if you do not like what you are receiving, CHOOSE AGAIN.

"At least I can decide I do not like what I feel now. " "I want another way to look at this." "Perhaps there is another way to look at this, what can I lose by asking?"

This is Jesus's black and white, absolutely no-exceptions teaching. There is NO SUCH THING as a victim. There is NO SUCH THING as an accident. There is NO SUCH THING as dying against your will. There is NO SUCH THING as "becoming sick" without having decided to be sick. There is NO SUCH THING as unwanted suffering. And there is NO SUCH THING as losing the power of your mind to CAUSE.

"This is a course in CAUSE, not effect". That's what this means. Jesus is trying to get us to see that we ONLY CAUSE. We are NOT AT THE EFFECT OF ANYTHING WHATSOEVER! This is the secret to salvation - that you are just doing this all to yourself. There is NO OTHER WILL. There is no alien will. There are no enemies. There are no external forces. Nothing has power over you. Nothing in the world has the power to make you ill or sick or weak or afraid. Nothing can happen to you against your will.

Therefore if stuff is happening that you seem not to have chosen or do not want, it is ONLY because you DID CHOOSE IT but you are unconscious of that choice. That's why you need to remove the blocks to awareness so that you can BECOME A CONSCIOUS DECISION MAKER. Then you will NOT CHOOSE TO HURT YOURSELF! And this is why it leads to salvation, because literally there IS NO CAUSE OF YOU other than God, and you CANNOT BE CAUSED by anything or anyone else in existence. Therefore if YOU STOP CAUSING YOURSELF HARM, you will be permanently invulnerable! IMMORTAL!!!!

We are simply unconscious day-dreaming lazy choosers who have forgotten our own power and are victims of ourselves and nothing else. This is all we have to own up to and correct. To reclaim our INHERITANCE and our right to freely choose. To claim our freedom from fake stories of external un-asked for victimhood, and to erase ALL trace of believing that there is ANY POWER OVER YOU from anything other than yourself. Not even God goes against your will. Not even Jesus goes against your will.

Your power, shared with God, in holiness, is unlimited. "God is unlimited, there is nothing He cannot do." "There is nothing my holiness cannot do." "There is nothing He (holy spirit) cannot do." UNLIMITED, UNOPPOSED WILL POWER. There is NO ROOM in that for any kind of "it happened because I didn't choose it." or "it was an accident" or "didn't intend it" or "didn't ask for it."

There are no real victims. This is Jesus's message. We are only experiencing the consequences of our OWN DECISIONS. "Heaven is a choice I must make." If you so choose, nothing can go against your will. Your will is as powerful as Jesus's will. It is ALL CHOICE.

To the ego, being powerful means recognizing that there are significant powers outside of you which you have to FIGHT WITH in an attempt to dominate and "over-power" them against their free will. It sees power as a way to FORCE things to happen aggressively. This kind of power is DISEMPOWERING to all involved.

To God, and in the truth of ourselves, REAL POWER means the recognition that THERE IS NO OPPOSITION. There is no OTHER POWER. There is no enemy (thus all are innocent). There is no alien will. There is no hand of oppression or "cause of death" that can come along and choose FOR you when you will suffer and die. Death is always chosen. And so if you do not choose it, you will not die. That's the responsibility you have to own up to.

YOU HAVE THIS POWER NOW. IT IS OPERATING NOW. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN OPERATING. IT ALWAYS WILL BE. It's just a matter of what you are USING IT to do. And if you are using it to hurt yourself, that's a mistaken decision. "Holy Spirit will undo the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him. I choose to let Him by allowing Him to choose for (in favor of) God for me."

You are only ever afraid of yourself. You are your own worst enemy. You are your only victim. You but victimize yourself. You have no opponent. There is no cause outside of you.

You are FREE TO CHOOSE! Choose again. Only by having the POWER TO CHOOSE EVERYTHING do you have the power to choose HEAVEN!

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS."

The entire problem of the people of the world is that we're very confused about what is true. God, who is truth, has been deeply misunderstood. We've tried to replace God with a false God of vengeance, which we want to have nothing to do with.

"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."

God has been framed as a murderous evil tyrant that wants us dead. We've associated him with all the properties of that which is not true, including darkness, evil, enemy, hateful, destructive, murderous, vengeful, sick, and death itself. We've even tried to make out that God is non-existence.

This "anti-christ" attitude is part of the separation idea of being opposite to God. In order to be opposite to God, we've made God out to be opposite to himself. We now believe God is nothing like he really is. We've turned him into a false God of war.

At the same time, we've mistakenly misbelieved and misunderstood and failed to recognize all false things for what they are. We think that non-existence is existence, that death is life, that hell is heaven, that suffering is atonement, that murder is justified, that fear is safety, that sickness is saving your life.

So now we have this worldwide problem that we're trying to move away from God, on the basis that we believe God is what we do NOT want. And we try to move toward the world of illusions, on the basis that we believe it IS what we want.

To put it another way, we now see God as an evil enemy to be feared, we want nothing to do with him, we do not want his affections or help, and we do not want to wake up to exposure to the fact of his existence. We are running away from him. We think that God is death and that we're running towards life. But we are confused, and we are actually running away from life towards death.

So now we have a state where we're all choosing to suffer on purpose because we are afraid of God. We're afraid of what we've made of him, what we think he is like. We don't want to go toward him because we think we'll stop existing. Even though moving away from him was an attempt to stop existing.

When we move away from God we are moving away from happiness and wholeness and love and peace and health and sanity. We'd rather choose suffering and unhappiness and despair and pain and sickness and death. We then want to keep our suffering and NOT let it be healed, because we literally believe it is defending us from God. We'd rather die than let him heal us with his poisonous offering.

This is the state of the world. A hugely common belief that we want the opposite of what God is offering. Even if that means we actually end up choosing to make, and maintain, even more suffering. Because we do not recognize it AS suffering, and do not think it's an insane thing to tolerate pain, and are quite content to put up with all manner of misery for as long as possible.

Not to mention the guilt, which we adore and cherish and want more of, and will preserve in an attempt to keep us and others stuck in bodies and suffering in order to protect us from God. The world actually believes that people leaving their bodies means they've move into the forbidden realm to be swallowed up by death. Something to be avoided at all costs.

The world is incredibly backwards. It has become acceptably normal to not question death, to put up with pain, to reject help, to not want healing, to fear questioning the reality of the world, on the basis that these are all threats to the protection it offers. The only reason we think the world is saving us is because we a very very mistaken about it and do not recognize it as a picture of crucifixion, with nothing to offer and no power to do anything.

It all boils down to this one simple thing. We're afraid of God and we don't want to go home. We think God will never forgive us, and we would rather die and be weak and helpless than admit to being mistaken. We are most afraid of the very thing we mistakenly believe is true, because it is false. And the very things we think are false, are actually true, and yet we hate them and want nothing to do with them.

Our minds have been reversed, our entire reality has been opposed, our sanity has been turned upside down, and our whole sense of what we want has done a 180-degree flip. Trying to convince the world to let God help is quite a challenge. The insane and fearful are heavily suspicious and mistrusting. The sick want to die. The lost want to stay lost and rely on their confusion for navigation.

But there is hope and a light because the reality of God's loving truth in heaven has sent its witnesses and its teachers and its healers and its power to resurrect the dead and lift us into the light. A light which at first we do not want and fear and dread, but which later we might come to trust as our salvation. It is only a false fear, which is a lie about God, that keeps us from happiness and health.

"For anti-Christ becomes more powerful than Christ to those who dream the world is real."

"And you ask help of Christ or anti-Christ, and which you choose WILL join with you, and tell you what to do."

"This is the anti-Christ; the strange idea there is a power PAST omnipotence, a place BEYOND the infinite, a time transcending the eternal. Here the world of idols has been set by the idea this power and place and time are given form, and shape the world where the impossible has happened. Here the deathless come to die; the all-encompassing to suffer loss; the timeless to be made the slaves of time. Here does the changeless change; the peace of God, forever given to all living things, give way to chaos. And the Son of God, as perfect, sinless, and as loving as his Father, come to hate a little while; to suffer pain, and finally to die."

"It is extremely hard for those who still believe sin meaningful to understand the Holy Spirit's justice. They believe He shares their OWN confusion, and can NOT avoid the vengeance that their own belief in justice MUST entail. And so they fear the Holy Spirit, and perceive the wrath of God in Him."

"Who sees a brother as a body sees him as fear's symbol. And he will attack because what he beholds is his own fear external to himself, poised to attack, and howling to unite with him again. Mistake not the intensity of rage projected fear must spawn. It shrieks in wrath, and claws the air in frantic hope it can reach to its maker and devour him."

"It is NEVER God Who coerces you, because He SHARES His Will WITH you." God has given you freedom. This cannot be revoked. You are free to create, or to mis-create. God cannot oppose your will because it is part of his own freedom.

This means that you have to decide to go back to God, of your free will. You can't be forced, coerced, manipulated or made to do anything you don't want to. You have to willingly choose heaven again.

"The attraction of light must draw you willingly, and willingness is signified by GIVING."

"But to accomplish this, all your dark lessons MUST be brought willingly to truth"

"Heaven is a choice I must make."

Does this mean that you can take forever? Does it mean that you can decide NEVER to return to God? Does it mean that you could stay in separation and never wake up?

Given that you have total freedom, it should mean that you can take as long as you please, and even to never return.

The thing is, that while God wills that you be free forever, he also wills that you be one with him forever. And here we have signs of a "natural limit" placed by God.

"Free will does not mean that you establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what to take when. It is just because you are not ready to do what you should elect to do that time exists at all."

"Free will can temporize, and is capable of enormous procrastination. But it cannot depart entirely from its Creator, who set the limits on its ability to miscreate by virtue of its own real purpose."

The way I read this, "will" always has an element of freedom to it, even when will is being USED to try to be unwilling. You cannot escape willingness. You will always have some willingness even if you are highly unwilling, which means that you will eventually will to be back with God.

"He can wait, delay, paralyze himself, reduce his creativity almost to nothing, and even introduce a real developmental arrest or regression. But he CANNOT abolish his creativity. He CAN destroy his medium of communication, but NOT his potential."

God has also placed a limit on spacetime, ie the separation. It has been repurposed as a classroom to learn lessons, which involves consent. And we have all willed freely to participate. In effect, there is a guarantee that we will wake up eventually.

"The Atonement was built into the space-time belief in order to set a limit on the need for the belief, and ultimately to make learning complete."

"For if you could REALLY separate yourselves from the Mind of God, you WOULD die."

Another thing is that trying to be away from God is painful. It is a rejection of happiness and love and ease and joy. A rejection of health and wholeness. It is a state riddled with suffering. And eventually this is intolerable, especially when it becomes extreme.

The more extreme the separation, the more it hurts. The more you try to be evil, the worse your life gets, and the more you become insane. The harder you try not to exist, the more you repress and hate yourself. And it does not feel good. Some people have extreme tolerance levels but not unlimited.

"The misuse of will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way."

This is part of the fact that there is a safeguard built into free will. Basically, in order to fully will something, you have to be fully willing. If you become unwilling, ie try to use will to NOT will, you are arresting the will. This causes you to shut off access to your power to create, and you become "weaker".

Effectively, if you oppose God's will, you become powerless. If you deny your freedom, you imprison the will. It all gets automatically shut down because by choosing separation you're literally denying freedom and power.

""Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul."" ... "If it does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants."

The end result is that you cannot use will to attack will, or to attack or change God. Or to change the truth or anything real. When you try to, there is a lack of will, which shuts it down and causes nothing to happen. You might hallucinate that the nothing is something, but nothing is really created.

Also the Holy Spirit has been created to guarantee holographically that the whole is always in the part, and thus no matter how many times mind tries to split itself the whole of God is still there. You cannot leave eternity or really separate.

"There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the mad belief that ANYTHING could be established and maintained without some link that kept it still within the Laws of God. NOT as the Law Itself upholds the universe as God created it. But in some form adapted to the need the Son of God believes he has. Corrected error IS the error's end. And thus has God protected still His Son, even in error."

So God has naturally caused a number of things all which guarantee you are not only protected and safe (immortal) and have not really done anything, but also has the side-effect that when you choose away from him you do not like it, and inevitably choose against it. It's almost like saying the impluse to return is built-into the attempt to leave. And you never did quite leave in the first place.

"I CAN offer you my will to make yours invincible by this sharing, but I CANNOT oppose yours without competing with it and thereby violating God's Will for you. Nothing God created can oppose your will, as nothing God created can oppose His. God GAVE your will its power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of His."

We could say then that, we are always free, and can choose when to return to God, but at the same time staying away from God is fundamentally unpleasant, and eventually you will seek to return.

Another aspect of this is that God is so certain and so powerful, and the Holy Spirit shares his infinite power, such that he CANNOT FAIL in helping us to return. In his repurposing of the world we made, he guarantees that we will return to heaven. There are no loopholes in God's plan for salvation.

The Holy Spirit has effectively already finished the job.

"His task is mighty, but the power of God is with Him. Therefore, to Him, it is so easy, that it was accomplished the instant it was given Him for you."

"God's promises make no exceptions. And He guarantees that only joy can be the final outcome found for everything. Yet it is up to us when this is reached; how long we let an alien will appear to be opposing His."

"God's guarantee will hold against ALL obstacles, for it rests on certainty, and NOT contingency."

"Reality observes the laws of God, and NOT the rules you set. It is His laws which GUARANTEE your safety. All illusions that you believe about yourself obey NO laws."

"The Atonement is the GUARANTEE of the safety of the Kingdom. Nothing good is lost, because it comes from the Holy Spirit, the voice for Creation."

"The world WAS a way of healing the Separation, and the Atonement is the GUARANTEE that the device will ultimately do so."

"No force except your own will is strong enough or worthy enough to guide you. In this you are as free as God, and must remain so forever."

"The truth is still that the attraction of God is irresistible at ALL levels, and the acceptance of this totally unavoidable truth is only a matter of time. But you should consider whether you WANT to wait, because you CAN return now, if you choose."