"Perhaps there is a fear of failure and shame associated with a sense of inadequacy."

Perhaps worse than guilt, shame is self destructive and a form of self imprisonment. There is not much spoken of this in ACIM. But shame is very prevalent and heavy and harmful.

I looked up psychology definitions of how shame and guilt are different. A loose summary goes like this...

GUILT - A kind of internal judgement that you feel, based on what you did outside of yourself. Like attacking another person or breaking some moral or social code. It's not too far removed from remorse or regret, and somewhat "feels sorry for" the person. It to some degree recognizes that your behavior was wrong but it doesn't condemn your entire self.

SHAME - A kind of external judgement upon your entire inner self, based on what seems to be true of you. This can be based on something you did that you're guilty of, or just on some condition that you have. It can be based on your body's state or life situation or relationship status or whatever.

It's a condemnation that you are not deserving of love, you're lacking, deficient, inadequate, not good enough, weak, decrepit, insufficient, inferior, bad, sinful, evil, unlovable. Somehow that your SELF is fundamentally judged as "of lesser or no value". That you are not equal to others, you're beneath them.

When you apply shame to yourself, it's like a form of self punishment and imprisonment. ACIM does say that when you attack in any way, it induces guilt. But what it doesn't go into is that once you've found yourself to be guilty, you now decide that BECAUSE OF your guilt, you do not deserve forgiveness. To be found guilty is to sin and NOT forgive it. Having found yourself guilty, you've decided you are UNFORGIVABLE. And that also means you should not be loved, you are unworthy, and you should be ashamed. That you should feel deeply bad about yourself as if you've "become a permanent sinner".

Feeling ashamed is feeling really bad about who you are, as if you are inherently flawed. It causes you to withdraw and separate and hide and shrivel up. It's a disempowered state. Shame can also be fairly closely tied to embarassment. E.g. if you get pulled over by the cops for speeding for you might feel guilty for breaking the law, and then feel ashamed at having to "face the judgement" and be found guilty, for it to be proven that you were deficient and flawed. And if that's taking place in public with a crowd watching, you're going to feel shameful.

Shame is very self destructive. It's one thing to feel guilty, and the course talks a lot about guilt. But once you've found yourself guilty, you start to punish yourself. You agree you do not deserve forgiveness, which relegates you to being some kind of inferior creature. Something that does not DESERVE to be treated well. Like some caged animal that has no rights.

Because surely there is something inherently WRONG with you, that you did this. And this puts a major dent in your sense of worthiness. You feel unworthy of love and forgiveness. You feel unworthy of happiness. You feel unworthy of having relationships. You feel unworthy of existing, because you're not valuable enough to "qualify".

Within that state, a person moves further towards suicide. It's like they are bringing a ton of bricks down upon their own head. It's self condemnation. A desire to hurt and destroy oneself. And it's rooted in this belief that you don't deserve to live or be happy, therefore you deserve to DIE and be unhappy. And if death were to come to punish you, you'd practically welcome it, unwilling to choose against it, because you yourself think it would be justified, based on your self loathing.

You can become ashamed even just through simple mistakes. You can mistakenly accidentally hurt someone. And then you might feel ashamed of yourself that you were so incapable of avoiding it that there must be something wrong with you. You can also take on shame through public judgement by others, peer pressure, social pressures and so on.

You can feel ashamed from not fitting in, being different, looking and moving differently, not matching up to some kind of ideal standard. Shame is always a discrepancy between what you are "meant" to be like ideally, and what you are actually like (due to ego). You can feel ashamed for having an uncommon trait or body shape or being "too this" or "not enough of that." Not measuring up. Shame evaluates that you are simply LACKING, which places you below everyone else in the pits of hell.

Feeling ashamed makes you feel like you are some kind of lesser creature. That you don't have the same rights as others. That you can be used and stepped upon and mistreated, and you have no right to stand up to it. It's welcomed as though you think you deserve it, like you're this hideous unlovable ugly wart of inhumanity that everyone hates. And because you then believe you do not deserve love or respect or freedom, your only seeming remaining option is to seek out distorted forms of affection and attention - little conditional scraps here and there, from those who typically want highly special relationships and to take from you. Which feeds right into becoming a martyr, a slave, a victim and a punching bag for others.

Perhaps the worst part about shame is that it's really an attempt to destroy your very self, and your identity. To de-value and de-humanize you. It strips you of your freedom, your rights, your validity, your sacredness. It labels you and puts you in a box. It cuts you down and diminishes you and stomps all over your dignity.

It puts you out of touch with who you really are. It's a major loss of power and a state of weakness and fear. It makes you live in a little darkened cage like an animal, with no friends and no allies. It puts you into isolation, separates you off, portrays you as worth nothing, and seeks your destruction. Shame is like being eaten alive from the inside out.

When you have shame, therefore... through "secret sins", this HAS to be healed. You have to find forgiveness. And you have to find a way to regain your "self worth" - to recognize your value. You have to get your power back and become able to stand up to those who might try to diminish your light or limit you. In particular you have to find a way to forgive YOURSELF, in order to approach a sense of being valuable to God, to regain acceptance of your innocence.

In shame, it will always seem like everyone else has power over you, that you are not good enough, strong enough, capable enough, powerful enough, smart enough, creative enough, good enough, loveable enough etc.... just not enough... for anything or anyone. And this will make you feel limited and like a constant failure.

You'll avoid doing things because you believe you'll fail at it because you're already a failure. You'll fear the judgement and rejection and punishment of what you think is others, for an inevitable insufficiency and heaps of mistakes that you are destined to make, because you believe you are fundamentally flawed. And this will turn you away from expressing and creating and playing and enjoying simply on the basis that it threatens to expose you. It threatens to put you in the spotlight in the arena where you are much more likely to be called out for being unworthy.

The only way though that this can seem to affect you is by you yourself agreeing to it. Which means its your own harsh judgement of yourself that you have to get past. It's really not other people holding you down or making you inferior, it's you. It's your decision that you are unworthy because of your guilt. That has to go, so that you're not constantly second-guessing everything you do. You cannot feel confident about anything while you're riddled with self-sacrificing martyrdom and making yourself small and playing the part of weak and helpless.

Then you'll find that what was really holding you back was YOUR shame, which you imposed upon yourself. And it wasn't really that other people were keeping you locked in a tiny corner of the world, but your own unwillingness to be seen, to be heard, to stand up, to own yourself, to be authentically you, or to stand firm in the face of un-called-for criticism. You have to grow in your strength and power and your imperviousness to judgement.

Ultimately the fact is that all mistakes are forgivable, everyone is worthy to God, no-one ever needs to feel guilty or ashamed, and everyone is loveable. Whatever you did that you feel so bad about, that you're dragging along the ground like a ball and chain around your ankle, you don't deserve that. And because you don't deserve punishment, you don't deserve to die. And that means you deserve to live and resurrect and enjoy your life. You deserve freedom and power and health and joy and relationships.

Below are some of the very brief things ACIM says about shame...

"Perhaps there is a fear of failure and shame associated with a sense of inadequacy."

"The seeds of sickness and the shame of guilt He cannot bridge,..."

"For specialness is triumph, and its victory is his defeat and shame. 9 How can he live, with all your sins upon him?"

"Let not some dreams be more acceptable, reserving shame and secrecy for others."

If you see yourself as being victimised in any way, mistreated, not respected, attacked, hurt, threatened, judged, abused, terrorised, not recognised, hated, left out, invalidated, accused, misrepresented, subject to racism or sexism or homophobia, in any other way somehow slighted or offended by anyone OTHER than yourself, they your ego has formed a FACE OF INNOCENCE, and you ARE in heavy denial!

This face of innocence is a facade the ego wears to DENY AND COVER UP the internal guilt, to hide itself from itself in self-hate. The internal guilt is denied, so that it is not even recognised as existing at all within you, and is then projected. It is then seen IN AND AS everyone else other than oneself. It then appears that everyone but yourself is doing something TO YOU against your will that is un-asked for and undeserved.

This projection of guilt and ego frames you as an innocent victim of it in OTHER people, which in turn justifies an angry counter-response - since you see yourself as doing absolutely nothing wrong at all, which points a further finger - a second layer of projection - designed to hide the first, to further reinforce the ways that other people have obviously sinned, been guilty, committed evil acts, failed to live up to standards, or any other way that they are defective.

The "mask" of innocence is worn as a face psychologically, really a disguise, as part of the ego. And it is especially part of the spiritualised ego. Having denied that oneself believes oneself to be guilty - which is still an ongoing internal belief - on sees oneself as "not guilty", and thus innocent. But this is a fake innocence covering up a persistent guilt. The guilt is then projected onto others and associated with them, as though attached to them and part of them.

It is particularly viciously reinforced by an increased level of anger and resentment, as a REACTION to what is now perceived as something other people are doing to you and not you doing to them. The more you feel justified in anger the more you project even more separation and increase the sense of dis-association between you and the guilt. This is designed to make sure it seems that you have nothing to do with the guilt, and it is entirely associated with someone other than yourself. The more this is believed the more unconscious you become as a helpless victim.

What this entails really is self attack, which began long before the projection of guilt. Self and self innocence were denied, producing an accusation against oneself as an attack upon oneself. This is a denial of self as God created you. This is an opinion of oneself - an ego view of oneself - that is far short of the divine holy self that God created you as.

This vicious self-attack produces guilt, inferiority, judgement, self-hate, and various other forms of self destructive behaviour. This is DENIED, which makes it seem largely unconscious or at least disowned and "not part of me". And the result of this is projection. It is given away in order to try to make it not be a part of oneself, or within one's mind. It is seen as "outside" the mind, external to the self (body perimeter), as though literally someone other than oneself, seen as an inherent built-in permanent PART OF someone else. And now it is THEY who are guilty and full of sin.

The result of this is then the formation of a face - a facade - a persona - a cover-up face of innocence, which sees itself AS innocent, but with fake innocence. This fake innocence is shallow and is merely a smokescreen to hide the self-hate that is behind it. Thus self-denying person then believes they are doing no wrong, asking for no harm, doing nothing to hurt others, and are completely benevolent, yet conveniently also are experiencing being "unfairly treated" as a victim. And this of course, if it were true, means anger is completely justified and everyone else should die for THEIR sins against the innocence.

The fact is however that this still remains a SELF ATTACK, because the mind is still hating itself, still believes it is guilty, does not want to admit to this, is IN DENIAL, and refuses to even look at what is being denied. The unwillingness to look at the denied guilt is because of the belief that IT IS THERE, and that it is dark and real and terrible. And the ego DOES believe that you are full of sin. So instead of looking within, it looks without, to find the guilt there instead.

Once the guilt is denied and projected there forms an extremely long lists of all the sins, errors, guilts, mistakes, faults, weaknesses, defects, horrors, and various other forms of unholiness that are regarded as the truth about OTHER people, and not oneself. And THEIR guilt and sinfulness is kept apart from YOURS, so that you are in no way associated with it, and can maintain an illusion of being the innocent one.

Being subject to an incredibly long list of things other people are doing wrong, and thus attacked and victimised BY, is DESIRED AND CHOSEN, so that the face of innocence can be maintained. Even if it seem to hurt oneself to do so, and even if one has to be willing to BE victimised - or so it may appear on the surface - this is ACCEPTED as the natural cost of being able to find someone else to be the fall guy for the guilt.

We even in the extremes are willing to be attacked, hurt, made to be sick, destroyed and killed off, if it will mean that someone ELSE can be accused of sin. And then we can say, "brother by your hand I die." This means that we literally are willing to suffer, be sick, and die, if it means the sick body can accuse someone ELSE of causing it to be the way it is, so that the mind can be exonerated of the sin IT believes it has committed against self, others and God.

But not for an instant does the guilt leave your own mind, not for an instant does your mind truly become healed of it, not for an instant do you escape what is being denied, not for an instant do your accusations of other people's wrongfulness NOT target you, not for an instant do you escape the murderous consequences, and not for an instant do you get away with NOT being hurt by the projections. Yet alone the fact that you then hurt yourself through other people due to the way that you see them as causing you to be hurt, which you want.

Ultimately this means that this whole mechanism is STILL a way of attacking and destroying yourself, of hurting yourself, and that you are doing this to yourself. This is the secret of salvation. Recognizing that it is YOU who is accusing yourself of guilt, it is YOU who is projecting the guilt, it is YOU who is in denial, it is YOU who does not want to admit to wearing a face of innocence, it is YOU who wants to be a victim, and it is YOU who keeps using people to attack yourself. And not once do you really WANT it to stop, because that would mean having to be more honest, stop scapegoating, look within at the guilt, and undo it. Those who are dissatisfied with OTHERS, are incredibly dissatisfied with THEMSELVES.

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"You but accuse your brother of your own sins."

"Projection will ALWAYS hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its ONLY purpose is to KEEP THE SEPARATION GOING. It is solely a device of the ego to make you feel DIFFERENT from your brothers and separated FROM them. The ego justifies this on the wholly spurious grounds that it makes you seem better than they are, thus obscuring equality WITH them still further."

And if you think you are not condemning yourself and it is only others that are condemning you, you ESPECIALLY are doing this. Your denial can be very strong and it can make it seem like you are not doing anything wrong AT ALL, that you have never chosen or provoked the slightest attack, and it is entirely everyone ELSE on your list of sins that has failed to measure up to God's standards.

Admitting to all this takes a greater willingness to be honest, to stop attacking yourself, to stop hating yourself, to stop projecting blame onto others, to stop believing that other people are the guilty ones, to stop judging others as the ones with egos, and to be far deeper in the willingness to look at WHAT YOU ARE DENYING. Because only by admitting that you are denying how much YOU hate yourself, are you going to ever stop finding a thousand ways to encourage others to hate you FOR you.

Projection of guilt simply keeps the separation going, and the ego absolutely loves that, as it hides behind its wall of "I'm completely innocent, I'm not doing anything to myself." You are trying to destroy yourself. Look at that! And stop doing it.

"The concept of the self the world would teach is not the thing that it appears to be. For it is made to serve two purposes, but one of which the mind can recognize. The first presents the face of innocence, the aspect acted ON. It is this face that smiles and charms and even seems to love. It searches for companions, and it looks at times with pity on the suffering, and sometimes offers solace. It believes that it is good, within an evil world. This aspect can grow angry, for the world is wicked, and unable to provide the love and shelter innocence deserves. And so this face is often wet with tears, at the injustices the world accords to those who would be generous and good.

This aspect NEVER makes the first attack. But every day a hundred little things make small assaults upon its innocence, provoking it to irritation, and at last to open insult and abuse. The face of innocence the concept of the self so proudly wears can tolerate attack in self-defense, for is it not a well-known fact the world deals harshly with defenseless innocence? No-one who makes a picture of himself omits this face, for he has need of it. The other side he does not want to see. But it is here the learning of the world has set its sights. For it is here the world's reality is set, to see to it the idol lasts.

Beneath the face of innocence there is a lesson that the concept of the self was made to teach. It is a lesson in a terrible displacement, and a fear so devastating that the face which smiles above it must forever look away, lest it perceive the treachery it hides. The lesson teaches this; "I am the thing you made of me, and as you look on me you stand condemned, because of what I am." On this conception of the self the world smiles with approval, for it guarantees the pathways of the world are safely kept, and those who walk on them will not escape.

Here is the central lesson that ensures your brother is condemned eternally. For what YOU are has now become his sin. For this is no forgiveness possible. No longer does it matter what he does, for your accusing finger points to him, unwavering and deadly in its aim. It points to you as well, but this is kept still deeper in the mists below the face of innocence. And in these shrouded vaults are all his sins and yours preserved, and kept in darkness, where they cannot be perceived as errors, which the light would surely show. You can be neither BLAMED for what you are, nor can you CHANGE the things it makes you do. And you are each the symbol of your sins to one another, silently, and yet with ceaseless urgency condemning still your brother for the hated thing you are.

That you are what your brother made of you seems most unlikely. Even if he did, who gave the face of innocence to you? Is this YOUR contribution? Who is, then, the "you" who made it? And who is deceived by all your goodness, and attacks it so? Let us forget the concept's foolishness, and merely think of this; there are two parts to what you think yourself to be. If one was generated by your brother, who was there to make the other? And from whom must something be kept hidden? If the world be evil, there is still no need to hide what YOU are made of. Who is there to see? And what but is attacked could NEED defense?"

In ACIM, we're told that we made a world, which is really spacetime, and a part of this spacetime is planet Earth. This didn't exist before the separation from God, and DEPENDS on the continuation of separation in order to take on "form".

The world itself was the idea of the opposite to everything-ness, which is the idea of nothingness. Thus the world was made as an empty shell symbolizing nothingness or a "lack of God", onto which we project meaning.

"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth." (the world Earth comes between you and the truth as "emptiness" and "nothingness", and we then project ONTO the Earth)

The Earth itself is meaningless, and is nothing. Being devoid of any inherent properties of its own, like a dark shadow, it acts like a mirror, reflecting meaning given to it. You have to give it meaning because it has none. And even when you give it meaning, it still has no INHERENT meaning of its own.

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning."

Because Earth is meaningless, you can project good or bad thought onto it. Thus it can REFLECT an IMAGE projected onto it. It can reflect ideas of heaven or hell, and you can see these IN it, as though a reflection once removed from the thing projected. This doesn't mean the Earth IS heaven or hell, it is neutral, but it can be INTERPRETED as REFLECTING either.

"Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego."

"If a mind creates without love, it can create an empty shell (spacetime/Earth). This CAN be possessed by evil."

Having projected an "empty screen" AS EARTH, our egos rushed in and attempted to project ego meaning onto the Earth. It tried to focus on form and separations and differences to emphasize the separation, projecting this onto the Earth so that Earth "reflects hell."

"It represents a situation in which God and the ego "challenge" each other as to whose meaning is to be written in the empty space which meaninglessness provides. The ego rushes in frantically to establish its own "ideas" there, fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own unreality."

Earth, and spacetime, are a "void" of nothingness, onto which we project God or the ego. Our task then becomes to recognize that we are projecting ego/hell onto a neutral/nothing/meaningless world, and that we can instead project God/heaven onto it. This seems to project meaning and reality onto it, as well as love and peace and holiness. It then becomes possible to see IN the world, a REFLECTION of heaven.

As in "God is in everything I see". This doesn't mean the thing reflect IS LITERALLY the world or AS it, but is reflected IN it. Just as an image of your body is seen IN a mirror. This reflection is an image, and is also referred to as forgiveness. It is SYMBOLIC. It represents something once removed from itself. Just as a reflected IMAGE in a mirror is once removed from the actual object. The reflection of heaven on earth is NOT heaven ITSELF, but it appears to be LIKE heaven. And it is what you PUT THERE that is "the only reality it has."

"The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love. This GIVES it the only reality it will ever have. ITS value is NOT in itself" (it has no inherent love/value/reality) A mind which is healed translates the neutral nothingness of Earth into something that resembles heaven, interpreted with ideas of wholeness and healing, with love and peace, with light and happiness etc. This "converts" in a sense, through an inner translation, the form of the world into something that seems to mean heavenly things. Thus Earth appears to the mind to become heaven-LIKE. A REFLECTION of heaven, a symbolic DREAM of heaven. A "real world."

However, we need to be clear that this reflection of heaven on Earth IS NOT the same thing as heaven ITSELF. Heaven Itself, which is reflected ONTO the Earth through projection, is still a distinct dimensional reality created by God. Earth, as a veil of illusions, as an illusory world, as an empty screen, as a void, as a nothingness, must disappear. Part of seeing heaven in it ALSO entails seeing that the world has no attributes of its own, otherwise the reflection cannot be seen. And having no attributes, Earth is recognized as NOT REALLY THERE.

As the veil thins, the mirror dissipates, the reflection in perception (forgiven world) gives way, and parts. And now it disappears and is forgotten. Everything that entailed "the Earth" fades into the nothingness from which it came. The reflection of heaven, the real world, is gone.

"The real world still is but a dream." "Even the real world will vanish from your sight."

With the disappearing of Earth and space and time and the sun and stars, shone away BY light, because they are darkness, REPLACED by heaven, all that then remains is heaven ITSELF. An actual real created "world", not Earth in any way, not space or time, or any other such form, but the living world of light, the creations of light, the true Kingdom of God, which the nothing Earth was all this time made to CONCEAL and hide.

Heaven is first reflected in the world, seen "in the world" here, as Earth is "translated" into heaven. But then Earth ends. A translation IS once removed from the original form of something, and although our minds can see the translation the thing BEING translated is still a void of nothingness and illusions. Earth cannot remain as part of the Kingdom, it is not ACTUAL holiness, the body cannot BE holy, and all other divine attributes cannot be fused into the planet.

"As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

As the world, Earth, spacetime, disappears, heaven itself, a condition of ACTUAL holiness and BEING holy, is all that remains. This is A Course in Miracles.

"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."

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love. This GIVES it the only reality it will ever have. ITS value is NOT in itself" (notice how you GIVE it reality/love, it does not HAVE it itself)

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real." (wishes can be unholy or holy, but they're still GIVEN and not inherent)

"This interpretation of the body will change your mind entirely about its value. Of itself it has NONE."

"But what is truth to him must be brought to the last comparison that he will ever make; the last evaluation that will be possible, the final judgment upon this world. It is the judgment of the truth upon illusion, of knowledge on perception; IT HAS NO MEANING AND DOES NOT EXIST." (the Earth mirror does not exist, spacetime has no meaning of its own)

"Creation cannot even be conceived of in the world. It has no meaning here. Forgiveness is the closest it can come to earth." (forgiveness is an earthly symbolic form of heaven's love)

"The body no more dies than it can feel. IT DOES NOTHING. Of itself, it is neither corruptible nor incorruptible. IT IS NOTHING." (this is literal, the physical body is nothing at all, it has no reality).

"It is still true that the body has no function of itself."

"The test of EVERYTHING on earth is simply this: "What is it FOR?" The answer makes it what it IS for you. It has NO meaning of itself, yet you can GIVE reality to it, according to the purpose which YOU serve." (it has NO MEANING of itself, Earth has NO MEANING of itself. You have to GIVE it TEMPORARY meaning)

"Darkness is lack of light. It does not have unique properties of its own." (Earth is like a shadow, a lack of light, the absence of God - world made as an attack on God/light etc)

"All these attributes are given it by you. The world is meaningless in itself." (Earth has no inherent attributes)

"In the world you, can become a spotless mirror, in which the holiness of your Creator shines forth from you, to all around you. You can REFLECT HEAVEN here. But no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego." (Just the fact Earth can reflect VARIABLE things means NEITHER is permanent)

"Those who have learned to offer ONLY healing, because of the reflection of holiness in them, 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. God is no image, and His creations, as part of Him, hold Him in them in truth. They do not merely REFLECT the truth, for THEY ARE truth." (notice how reflecting holiness on earth makes you READY to go to heaven, cus you're not there yet. IN heaven, holiness is a condition not a reflected image)

"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." (again, bringing heaven to earth to REFLECT here, gets you ready to LEAVE)

"As I begin to see, I recognize His reflection on earth."

"Forgiveness, truth's reflection, tells me how to offer miracles, and thus escape the prison house in which I think I live."

"All the world shines in reflection of its holy light, and I perceive a world forgiven at last."

"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" (again a distinction between reality being shared (communion) in heaven, vs reality being REFLECTED on earth (communication))

"What they have felt in them they look upon, and see Its sure reflection everywhere."

"A sleeping mind must waken as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of Life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there. And now it is no more a mere reflection. It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes reflection possible. No vision now is needed. For the wakened mind is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness." (again moving out of the reflected heaven on earth, INTO heaven proper, leaving the world behind)

"We do not see the ego's shadow on the world today. We see the light, and in it we see Heaven's reflection lie across the world." (heaven's REFLECTION, not heaven itself)

"the world he made. In error it began. But it will end in the reflection of his holiness." (the world ENDS when heaven is reflected in it, it doesn't go any further or enter INTO heaven)

"Where this Child shall go is holy ground. It is His holiness that lights up Heaven, and that brings to earth the pure reflection of the light above, wherein are earth and Heaven joined as one." (one means similar, not singular. also heaven is above the earth and they are not the same thing)

"God's laws do not obtain directly to a world perception rules, for such a world could not have been created by the Mind to which perception has no meaning. Yet are His laws reflected everywhere. ******NOT that the world where this reflection is, is real at all.*******" (The place where heaven is reflected on earth IS NOT REAL AT ALL - Earth is not real at all!! The reflection appears to be a real-like IMAGE, but is not heaven itself. Earth is never heaven but can appear heaven-like through translation.)

"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."

In the separation from God, we attempted to make a world completely opposite to God, in every way possible. Where God expressed eternal life, we wanted death. Whether God was permanent, we wanted everything to change. Where God was immortal, we wanted everything to be attackable. Where God was innocent, we wanted everything to be sinful.

We projected out a world, made from the idea of sin and death. "Without the idea of death there is no world." This isn't merely a substitute for heaven, it is heaven's OPPOSITE. Everything about it is opposite. A world more like hell than heaven, where the immortal come to die and the existing come to cease existing.

"For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

Having made a world opposite to heaven, which is "the hell you made", planet Earth, we then populated it with bodies. The body has a very specific design to serve the purpose of trying to make this unreal world seem real. The body was made to deceive us, not just a little bit, but completely. It reports everything that's false (the whole world) as if it is true.

"The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

It takes illusions and presents them as if they are totally real. It sees things happening which are absolutely impossible in reality, and looks upon them as if they are really happening. It witnesses sins and attacks and wars and murders as if they are absolutely proven, with evidence to back it up as the bodies lay on the ground to show you their truth. And everything the body senses is reported as though absolute undeniable fact.

The body doesn't especially care whether to judge or not, it just judges all the time. It is locked into false perception. "These eyes made not to see will never see." The way the body sees the world, through physical and biological means, based on the "rejection of light" as photons bounce off illusory objects, is entirely designed to give credit to illusions. It is an illusion-detector, which having sensed illusions presents them to the mind as though they are totally real. And it can see nothing else.

"The body's eyes see ONLY form. They cannot see BEYOND what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and NOT see past it. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for they can see ONLY illusions, unable to look beyond the granite block of sin, and stopping at the outside FORM of nothing. To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true."

The body is actually incapable of seeing actual reality, at all. "The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen." If you think about that for a moment, the body is 180-degrees opposite to the truth, everything it reports is a lie, everything it sees or senses is 100% locked into being blinded by form, and it is absolutely incapable of being "awake" to any kind of real truth. It has its head shoved into a darkened box, permanently.

So then we place ourselves in these bodies and we peer out at a seeming world and the body shows us what's happening. It shows us things which cannot happen, states which are impossible, events which must be nowhere, and people seeming to walk around as if they live there. And not one single shred of this is true or real, or even really exists.

So when we use the body, when we listen to the body's input, when we take its sensory messages and decide what they mean, it is very very easy to be deceived. Not even just a little deceived, but 100% completely deceived. What the body shows you is absolutely TOTALLY OPPOSITE to what is true and real. The body cannot discern, and it never forgives. It is blind, and all it can see is an unreal world, masquerading as though reality.

It's the most bizarre thing, and this is why it's such a challenge for us to wake up. We actually need to find a way to recognize in the mind, that everything the body reports is false. We have to find a way to categorize every sensory input as not true, not real, and not happening. The body CANNOT tell the truth.

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. 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.

"This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. And of these two but one is real."

This is SO strange to us. Basically we are immortal beings in heaven who temporarily are placing a part of our minds inside these body devices. The devices show a COMPLETELY BACKWARDS view. They turn reality upside down, they swap all opposites, they make everything that's impossible seem possible, and everything truly possible seem impossible. They hide all real meaning, shut down vision, make it impossible to see reality at all, and lock your entire focus onto the form of objects. As if the form that something takes IS its meaning. They are prisons for the mind, and their every perception is back to front.

Through the body's eyes, every single thing you see is fixated on its form, it shape, its physical behavior. As if you have COMPLETELY failed to forgive, have entered into the most extreme false perception, have had your mind strapped into virtual-reality goggles, and are forced to look at scenes of a world that doesn't even exist. It's like having your head totally buried in the sand. An extreme denial of reality. As if you judged the whole world from a perspective of separation and sin, accused it of being entirely devoid of light, and rendered it a living hell.

That's what the body is equipped to do, and that is all it can do. Its limited senses cannot be expanded. Its eyesight is incapable of seeing reality, ever. It cannot detect real light. It cannot even really think, it has no mind, and can make no decisions. It's like a lifeless automaton, a zombie, with no real life of its own, inert and mute and blind and incapable. The body was made like this on purpose to LIMIT those who are immortal and unlimited.

"It is only the awareness of the body that makes love seem limited. For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU."

"God cannot come into a body, nor can you join Him there. Limits on love ***will ALWAYS*** seem to shut Him out, and to keep you APART from Him.""

There is no way to transform the body into a detector of reality. There is no way to change its senses or how they work. There is no way to make it wake up. There is no way to get it to be aware of God. It exists solely as a device for separation and will always be a device for separation. In and of itself, it is just a piece of machinery designed to make hell seem real and completely ignore heaven. It is a "hell validator", utterly biased and completely incapable of questioning anything it senses. "To sense is not to know" - to sense, is to reject all real knowledge.

The only hope that we really have, is the fact that we are not the body, and our mind is free to decide what meaning to give to everything the body tells us. It is the mind that decides whether to believe what it is being shown by the senses. It is the mind that decides whether to give it reality or not. It is up to the mind to be the one to either recognize the body's inputs as true, or as false.

The body cannot determine this for us, because it's going to keep feeding us absolute BULLSHIT forever. We have to decide mentally what to do with everything the body claims, because the body is permanently anchored to the battlefield.

"Jesus remains a Savior because he saw the false without accepting it as true. And Christ needed his form that He might appear to men and save them from their own illusions."

Think about that for a minute. Jesus, as mind, entirely dependent on God, able to see and experience God through spiritual vision, believing he was under no laws but God's, still temporarily utilized a "reality inverter" body, so that he could meet with other embodied people and help save them from their bodies.

And all this time, everything that Jesus saw THROUGH the body, registered to his mind as FALSE. Every single thing he looked at that was physical, his mind said "that is not true". Every sight, every body, every sickness, every situation or location, his mind recognized "that's an illusion, it's false". All sickness was recognized as unreal, all physical ailments as false, all damage as fake, he even recognized that dead bodies were not "really dead".

Can you imagine how profound that is to be seemingly in a world, not of it, and so OPPOSITE to its nature, feeling like it is not your home and you do not belong there at all, that you basically "disagree" with every single thing the body seems to report. Where not one thing you witness to is considered real or true. An entire world regarded as unreality and as false to your awareness. Where the body is used/repurposed ONLY so that you can interact with other embodied people, to use it against itself to undo itself and point away from bodies entirely.

That's where we are heading. Lifting our minds up out of believing what our bodies are telling us, out of hell, out of seeing the world as true or real, and into a state of totally dismissing the entire world as a false unreal world. That's actually forgiveness, because forgiveness recognizes illusions as illusions. The world IS an illusion of a world, and recognizing it for what it IS is to forgive it. And "a world forgiven cannot last" because "illusions recognized must disappear."

We are to simultaneously forgive the world, AND recognize it as FALSE, and NOT believe anything that seems to happen in it, and look upon it through forgiving eyes so that we are not tempted or deceived by any of it. To not believe ANYTHING the body reports, using its inputs ONLY to navigate the physical realm temporarily, knowing the entire place is an illusion. Firmly rooted in ANOTHER WORLD, in another reality, another kingdom, under God's laws only, completely denying the physical world and all it entails.

It is the body that seems to make forgiveness difficult. But only if the mind believes what the body is reporting. The mind does not have to go along with the body's reports. It's like, you have to learn how to receive reports from "the field", handed to you on pieces of paper, take the input and assess it, recognize that none of what it says is true, dismiss it, and then use it temporarily only for the purpose of getting others to leave the world with you.

The body is saying "there's a war out there". Your mind has to be saying "war is impossible, there is no war." So long as you use the body it will STILL report lies to the mind, and the mind is going to have to learn to be COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to how the body functions.

To use denial properly to deny the denial of the truth, which is the basis of miracles. To deny that the world is real or true. "The world you see must be denied, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision." And so we need to develop ANOTHER WAY TO SEE that CAN see reality and DOES recognize the truth and doesn't invert everything back to front.

"Beyond this world there is a world I want.

I choose to see that world instead of this,

For here is nothing that I really want."

A Course in miracles does not mention the phrase "unconscious guilt". However, Jesus does teach about it. In fact, the whole course is about removing the BLOCKS TO AWARENESS. A blocked awareness is indicative of UNCONSCIOUSNESS - not being consciously aware of love.

Here for example he refers to "veiling in shadows", things which must be "raised to understanding" (brought back into conscious awareness), in order to make the choice for heaven consciously:

"Heaven is chosen consciously. The choice cannot be made until alternatives are accurately seen and understood. All that is veiled in shadows must be raised to understanding to be judged again, this time with Heaven’s help, and all mistakes in judgement which the mind had made before are open to correction as the truth dismisses them as causeless. Now are they without effects. They cannot be concealed because their nothingness is recognized."

Anything which is a hidden hate, a secret sin, something concealed, any form of denial, all illusions, all forms of sin guilt fear sickness and death, are forms of unconsciousness.

The entire idea of "awakening" is of returning to full conscious awareness, out of a state of semi-consciousness or, in the case of death, unconsciousness. It is also the same thing as the idea of "forgetting".

Here are for example paragraphs from 5 separate chapters talking about unconsciousness...

"These mad beliefs can gain UNCONSCIOUS hold of great intensity, and grip the mind with terror and anxiety so strong that it will not relinquish its ideas about its own protection."

"Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be UNCONSCIOUS but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them."

"Like to a dream of punishment, in which the dreamer is UNCONSCIOUS of what brought on the attack against himself, he sees himself attacked unjustly, and by something NOT himself."

"He is merely making every possible effort, within the limits you impose upon Him, to re-establish your own will in your consciousness. You have imprisoned it in your UNCONSCIOUS, where it remains available, but cannot help you."

"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. This is a pathetic way of trying not to know by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual."

So you can see our unconscious states are quite well discussed in the course and this is only the tip of the iceberg.

There is one test by which you can find out if you have "unconscious stuff". First of all, realize that even if you have some amount of conscious awareness, it does not mean that you do not have an unconscious. When something is unconscious, you LITERALLY are NOT AWARE of it. There can be huge sections of your mind which have been walled off and kept hidden in the dark, which you do not even know are there.

It is the assumption of just about everyone that because you have conscious awareness, you are aware of EVERY part of your mind. This is usually far from the case. The test to determine whether you have an unconscious mind is simple:

If you perceive there is a cause affecting you which has not come from yourself, you have an unconscious mind.

This must be true because the only way you could perceive that something is happening against your will, is by being unaware of the way that you do everything to yourself. The secret to salvation is realizing you do everything to yourself. Therefore, if you are not directly confronted with AWARENESS of the way in which you are CAUSING everything you are experiencing, no matter what form it takes or how it is projected, YOU DO have a part of your mind which is unconscious. And yes, that means pretty much most of us.

It is valuable to realize you have unconsciousness, because you DO need to bring those parts of your mind back into conscious awareness in order for your mind to be FULLY AWARE OF LOVE’S PRESENCE, and to be able to consciously choose heaven. You cannot enter heaven while part of your mind is unconscious.

Typically, most people walking around this planet, believe that they are FULLY aware. When they wake up in the morning, they believe they have woken up fully. They believe that everything they are aware of comprises the sum total of all things that exist. And therefore, whenever they are trying to make sense out of what caused something to happen, they will reference everything they are aware of, trying to make sense out of how this could happen. And since they believe they are fully aware (but are not), they HAVE to find an explanation for what causes thing, usually by blaming it on someone else.

If you are blaming others or the world for causing ANYTHING, it is proof that you do not recognize that YOU are the cause, you did not SEE yourself cause it, and you seem to have asked for something without realizing it. So recognize this, if you are a victim in any way, you are unconscious.

That means there is a whole bunch of information, facts, truth, and content, which has been BLOCKED from your conscious awareness. These are nothing less than blocks to the awareness of love’s presence. These blocks, these barriers of denial which make the mind unconscious, is precicely what we are REQUIRED to UNDO, in order to restore our awareness of God.

But if you are walking the world thinking, you know everything there is to know, and are aware of everything there is to be aware of, and yet stuff is happening to you seemingly against your will, in any way, then YOU ARE IN DENIAL. And that means, you have a portion of mind which is currently NOT CONSCIOUS, which you are not aware you even have. It is tucked away, out of sight, and you don’t even SUSPECT that you have it.

It is vital to uncover these portions of mind and to heal their content. Too many people think that "forgiving" only means taking back projections. This is beause they have no idea that they have unconscious stuff in their mind. They think that they only need to deal with what they are consciously aware of, ie what someone seems to be doing, and to take back that projection.

That’s a fine stepping stone, but if it does not lead to a) removing the denial that made guilt go unconscious (fear), b) removing the denial which made sin go unconscious (guilt), c) removing the denial that made God go unconscious (sin), by bringing all of those into conscious awareness and undoing them, and accepting Atonement, then this is NOT complete forgiveness. It’s scratching the surface, and many people are NOT forgiving fully.

These hidden dark secrets are hidden behind shadows and illusions and layers of denial. Fear for example is made entirely to make guilt unconscious. Fear defends against guilt and protects the guilt. It causes you to fixate on what the fear is being caused by, anywhere other than within, so that you will not look within to see where the fear is really coming from.

All fear has its source in your unconscious belief that you are GUILTY. It has absolutely no other cause. But while you remain unconscious/unaware of that guilt, you will keep trying to make sense of why you are afraid by blaming the cause on something outside of you. And since that is never the cause, it will not provide you with a solution.

Fear has to be recognized as a decoy, an illusion that is nothing more than an effect, not a cause. It is the effect of guilt. Fear is not causing anything because it is only guilt that can cause it. When you can recognize fear as an effect of guilt, the implication as to what caused it automatically will start to give you some breadcrumbs which will bring that guilt back into conscious awareness. Then you can work on undoing the guilt.

Guilt also is a problem because, guilt is not the problem. Guilt actually is another decoy like fear, designed to block and keep sin unconscious. It’s sole purpose is to pretend you did not sin and did not want to sin. It disowns the sin and disassociates from it, projecting blame for it on something or something outside of you. So long as you are feeling sorrowful and guilty and allegedly unworthy of forgiveness, this will block the dishonest fact that YOU DID WANT TO SIN, and that you yourself believe in it. Guilt keeps sin real and prevents you from looking at it. It keeps it out of conscious awareness.

Guilt has to be then recognized as just an effect of sin, and not a cause of anything. It’s bullshit lies of "didn’t mean to do it" has to be seen through. Guilt is fake. It is there solely to stop you from bringing your unconscious belief in sin into awareness. When you can see that guilt is just an effect, and all guilt is caused by a belief in sin, that will help you to bring the sin into conscious awareness. It will resurface as soon as you make the connection of causality that sin caused guilt, therefore behind guilt there is sin lurking there.

Once the belief is sin is in your awareness, it is not going to be pretty. Always look at this stuff with Holy Spirit, because there is some really dark murderous death-wish kind of beliefs tucked way in the unconscious mind. But these beliefs like all the rest are fake. You have to realize then that sin actually is yet another block to awareness. It keeps something out of conscious awareness. Can you guess what it is?

God.

The belief in sin makes God unconscious. Not only is it a belief that God is dead and IS unconscious hisemself, it also shuts awareness of God out of the mind. It can only do this through denial and unwillingness to accept the truth. It is just another block to let go. You must recognize sin is not a cause of anything. Sin is just an effect of a mistaken idea of separation. It has not caused anything, and therefore has not happened. Undoing this will REVEAL GOD to you, consciously.

So you see, we have a LOT of shit that’s just sitting there in the unconscious areas of mind, and yet not exactly inert or inactive. Unconscious self-hate will project outwards and cause all manner of SHIT stuff to "happen to you", and it will seem to come out of nowhere, because you will not see that you asked for it. And so you will think you are just an innocent victim.

This is the big problem. Believing you are "innocent" just because you are not AWARE of the fact that you attacked yourself, is the entire foundation for projecting blame outside of yourself for everything you experience. You won’t be able to ACCEPT that you have done this to yourself, until you can consciously own up to it and actually SEE that you have in fact been the one who did it. To recognize that YOU PUT THERE all of the suffering you are experiencing, including all of your sickness. Until you can own it, you cannot let it go.

Just because you THINK you are innocent right now, on the basis of not being fully aware of your whole mind, is FAKE INNOCENCE. And it is this fake innocence which leads many people to not even suspect that they have unconscious shit to undo. It also leads many to believe they DID NOT CAUSE the shit that happens, which actually is an act of profound irresponsibility. It is this irresponsibility, the disownership of self, that produces all suffering.

Remember that the secret to salvation is that you have done this ALL to yourself. This is a course in CAUSE, not effect. You are to learn you are the CAUSE of everything in the world, not the effect of it. And you can only do that by becoming AWARE consciously that you in fact DO cause things. That means removing the blocks to AWARENESS, which are simply forms of denial which have made you partly UNCONSCIOUS. And extreme denial produces all denial of life, which leads to sickness and death as total unconsciousness.

If you want life, you must become willing to bring this unconscious stuff back into awareness for healing and release. And that’s going to have to mean, taking full responsibility for everything you are experiencing. Otherwise, guaranteed, you will suffer at your own hand without even realizing it. No-one dies without their own consent!!!

"Maybe I am causing this" "I must be responsible for this" "I am doing this to myself" "I am the cause of this" "I must have some unconscious stuff to heal if I seem to be suffering against my will" "There must be something I am not aware of where I am attacking myself" "I need to undo my belief that I sinned by bringing it back into awareness and letting it go."

Remember, "heaven is a choice I must make" - a conscious choice. You cannot have stuff lurking in unconsciousness, otherwise you are in denial, and the beliefs you are denying will make you unwilling to accept the atonement. A healed mind is a wholly conscious mind.

"You, then, have two conflicting evaluations of yourself in your minds, and they CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE. You do not yet realize how COMPLETELY different these evaluations are, because you do not understand how lofty the Holy Spirit's perception of you really is."

It is vital to have a firm grip of what the truth is, in order to be able to make a clear comparison with what is false. The light of heaven, the immortal soul, the truth of the laws of God, the nature of reality, must be very clearly discerned. In light of this truth, all things which are not of God become very obvious. But you have to see IN AND FROM the light of truth in order to tell what everything is.

You cannot have clarity or see clearly without being able to clearly discern what things are. You cannot clearly discern whether you are a body or not unless you can get a clear view of who and what you really are. In light of that, with everything seen in its proper place, you can then clearly see that the body is totally opposite to what you are. Now it is recognized as not the same, and clearly not your self.

In order to find recognition, which is enlightenment, you must use contrast. It needs to become extremely clear to you the difference between reality and unreality, truth and illusions, spirit and form, immortality and mortality, innocence and guilt, health and suffering, eternal life and death. You can't find clarity if you cannot recognize what things are and why they are not the same.

In the ego states of confusion, there is a great loss of clarity and a total lack of recognition. All of its reasoning leads to total confusion about everything, in which it cannot tell what is true or false, it does not know whether something is real or not, it does not recognize who or what you really are, or are not, and it is incapable of telling anything apart. It is so out of touch with what is actually real, distinct from what is not, that it has lost touch with reality and is insane.

You need an anchor. You need something very very dependable and firm and unchanging. You need a fixed perspective. You need a light which does not waver and does not lie. You need even a conceptual or theoretical foundation of what the truth is like, what is of God and what isn't, what reality's nature is, what is true of you, and who you really are. Even if at least in theory you can build up a picture of the qualities and aspects of what is true of you, you can hold onto that and then use it to compare.

Comparison then becomes a very valuable tool when used AGAINST the ego. The ego would use it make all things part of the same soup, within which it uses comparison to produce inequality and specialness, to upset the balance and to produce war. This is a horizontal use of comparison. When you use comparison vertically to compare between reality and illusions, or heaven and earth, or spirit and bodies, or eternal immortality vs sickness and death, it becomes fare more constructive.

I found a great deal of clarification by simply focusing on heaven and investigating the qualities of reality. Building in my mind a description of God and or creation, or the holographic principles of a shared existence, looking at cause-effect relationships in truth and the nature of an immortal life. This really helped me to greatly "compare" this clear picture of the light, with the darkness, in order to be able to tell which is which. And this is what we have to do. This is what the "sorting out" is all about.

For me lately the fleshing out of "what is true" has for me been converging ever more upon "who am I". Recognizing that I need to learn to know myself, to acknowledge my original self as God created me, to recognize my immortality and permanence, my invulnerability and unchangeability. A sense of self which is rock-solid fixed and unalterable, an IDENTITY that I can not only latch onto but identify WITH, and recognize it as the truth about me.

This also provides for me now a basis for recognizing the truth about others. By accessing the christ in me and opening to the holy spirit, learning of my immortal nature behind everything, which is non-physical, I can also think similarly of my brothers. I can now compare and contrast and see that, in comparison to who people are in the light of God, the body and its form cannot be who they are. Sickness cannot be true of their immortal nature. Death cannot be happening to them.

This also reveals that all physical form is a lie, the whole world is nothing but an illusory appearance, something appearing to be something it's not. Something appearing to show something as if it's true, which cannot be true. And the reason I can discern it cannot be true is because I have an increasingly clear grasp of what the truth MUST BE. By very strongly and intensely focusing on God's truth about me and others, I can REJECT and properly deny the illusory lies of apparent matter when I am presented with it. I NEED the clear handle on the light in order to recognize the darkness for what it is.

As the course says, the Holy Spirit also uses contrasts, and that you need contrast in order to correctly discern anything. You need to be able to COMPARE God's truth to the world's truth and recognize just how OPPOSITE they are, how they are totally unlike, and how they are INCOMPATIBLE. And it is in the light of bringing these two opposites into awareness that your mind becomes able to see. ... that it must reject one of them, THEY CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE. When placed side by side and compared and are seen to be opposites, you CANNOT confuse them OR accept both of them. Only one can be true.

It is the totally clear CATEGORIZATION of all things true into the "true" box, and all things false into the "false" or unreal box, that gives you the recognition of enlightenment. The GOAL here then is to sort out what is true and what is false, what is of God and what is not, what is God's law and what isn't, what is real and what is unreal, what is immortal and what is mortal. Everything that gets in the way of this or makes it seem like the two are unclear and not different, is CONFUSION. And to become SANE again is nothing more or less than undoing your confusion about which is which.

We are to completely separate out the true from the false, so that ONLY THE TRUTH IS TRUE, and NOTHING ELSE IS TRUE. And that is a matter of comparing and contrasting until it becomes COMPLETELY black and white. Clearly discerning what is and what is not, is what this ENTIRE course is about. Increasing the CONTRAST between the two so that you can make a CLEAR choice and RECOGNIZE that reality is real, and unreality is not. Only in that intensely black-and-white contrast can you be CERTAIN, and therefore free from fear.

"You have need of contrast only here. Contrast and differences are necessary teaching aids, for by them you learn what to avoid, and what to seek."

"You can only GO BEYOND it, and look back from a point where SANITY exists, and SEE THE CONTRAST. Only BY this contrast, can insanity be judged as insane."

"They ARE together, and when they are SEEN together, ALL attempts to KEEP both truth AND illusion in the mind, where both MUST be, are recognized as DEDICATION TO ILLUSION. And GIVEN UP when BROUGHT to truth, and seen as totally UNRECONCILABLE with truth, in ANY aspect, or in any WAY."

"The Holy Spirit points quietly to the contrast, knowing that you will finally let Him judge the difference FOR you, allowing Him to demonstrate which MUST be true."

"For you will NEED no contrast to help you realize that THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT, and ONLY this."

"ou who are steadfastly devoted to misery, MUST first recognize that you ARE miserable and NOT happy. The Holy Spirit cannot teach WITHOUT this contrast, for you believe that misery IS happiness."

"The contrast between what is true, and what is not, is PERFECTLY apparent, yet you do NOT see it."

"And changing concepts IS salvation's task. For it must deal in contrasts, not in truth, which has no opposite and cannot change."

"In contrast, the Soul reacts in the same way to everything it knows is true, and does not respond at all to anything else."

"Nothing can show the contrast better than the experience of both a holy and an unholy relationship."

"The picture of light, in clear-cut and unmistakable contrast, is transformed into what lies BEYOND the picture."

"If sin is real then happiness must be illusion, for they cannot both be true."

"Now need you but to learn that BOTH of you are innocent OR guilty. The one thing that is impossible is that you be UNLIKE each other; that they BOTH be true."

"What you can decide BETWEEN is fixed, because there are no alternatives, EXCEPT truth and illusion. And there is no overlap between them, because they are opposites which CANNOT be reconciled, and CANNOT both be true. You are guilty OR guiltless, bound OR free, happy OR unhappy."

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. 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. This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world."

"Let us try today to realize that only the truth is true."

"He made a clean distinction, still obscure to us, between the false and true."

"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing ELSE. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM."

"There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time."

"They are all true OR all false. It is absolutely essential that you understand completely that behavior is erratic until a firm commitment to one or the other is made."

"That is why I always choose between truth and illusion; between what is there and what is not. The light has come. I can but choose the light, for it has no alternative. It has replaced the darkness, and the dark is gone."

"What COULD you choose between, but life or death, waking or sleeping, war or peace, your dream or your reality?"

"Now MUST you choose between yourself and this ILLUSION of yourself. NOT both, but ONE."

"The real and the unreal are all there is to choose between, and nothing more than these."

"And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven."

"This is the world of opposites. And you must choose between them every instant while this world retains reality for you."

"You will have to choose between TOTAL freedom and TOTAL bondage, for there are no alternatives but these."

"You ALWAYS choose between YOUR weakness and the strength of Christ in you."

"Remember that you ALWAYS choose between truth and illusion, between the REAL Atonement that would heal, and the ego's "atonement," that would destroy."

"Consider what temptation is, and see the real alternatives you choose between. There ARE but two. Be not deceived by what appears as many choices. There is hell or Heaven. And of these you choose but ONE."

"Some see it suddenly on point of death, and rise to teach it. Others find it in experience that is not of this world, which shows them that the world does not exist because what they behold must be the truth, and yet it clearly contradicts the world."

When God created you, He created you perfect. You were created whole, complete, absolutely divine and lacking nothing. He created you incapable of sin, capable only of extending love and joy.

It is IMPOSSIBLE for you to change what you are, what God created, your identity, your nature, or anything about you.

It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for you to BE anything other than the perfect divine soul that God intended for you to be.

God does not create you at one 'moment in time'. There is no time. God is ETERNALLY EXPRESSING YOU. You are constantly and permanently being radiated by God, and whatever God expresses is what you are, and you HAVE NO SAY in changing that.

You are the EFFECT OF GOD, The Son of God, and His Will has absolute power over your creation, your existence, and your nature. What you are is a reflection of His own perfection, and you CANNOT CHANGE IT. And you HAVE NOT changed it.

You ARE still as God created you. Your soul is STILL perfect. It has not changed, it has not sinned, it has not been damaged, it has not been lost, it is not unconscious, it is not asleep or deluded, it has no ego, and nothing can happen to it.

Regardless of what it looks like to you, right now, in time, your soul - your REAL SELF - ALREADY EXISTS IN PERFECTION. You have ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED being "perfectly spiritual". You have ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED being divine, holy, perfect. You are already beyond the atonement. You are ALREADY IN HEAVEN WITH GOD. Right now.

So if there is anything else going on in your mind, any other beliefs to the contrary, any suggestions that you are lacking or not there yet, any delusion that something has gone wrong or something is wrong with you, or that you need to "do something" to become better or more spiritual or more pure and holy, or that you are not forgiven yet, or you didn't atone yet.... ALL of that is ego bullshit lies.

ACCEPTING the atonement means accepting this fact. It means, accepting that NOTHING HAS HAPPENED, nothing changed, you did not go anywhere, you did not die or suffer, you did not sin or become guilty, you did not stop being with God, you are literally incapable of willing against God or yourself, and you are STILL exactly as God created you. You WILL ALWAYS BE as God created you, and there is literally NOTHING you can ever do to change that.

Even if it seems this is not true of you, and you are this ego identity who lacks and suffers and has a long way to go and all this crap... it's not true. The spiritual self that you are trying to become, IS ALREADY IN YOU. Your higher self, your holy self, your spirit, your soul, you real identity, your christ self, you as a son of God, your heavenly identity, is already here, already fully complete, already perfectly awake and aware, already absolutely cured and healed, already in perfect divine happiness and health, and ALREADY EXISTS.

Even if it seems you will become this holy self "in the future" or "you are not there yet", THAT is a lie. Your holy self is ALREADY HOLY. So while you are contemplating what you need to do to get back to God, you never left. Right now, this second, you are DONE. You are DONE with the entire spiritual path. And seemingly, at the same time, you SEEM to be not done with it. Your holy self can talk to you right now. Your holy self is, in a sense, your future self. But it is really your real PAST self, because it existed BEFORE TIME and did not stop existing.

I think this is really important to recognize because this can be very powerful in putting everything into its proper perspective. I've talked before about how you need to get some idea of TRUTH into your awareness in order to have a reference point, to compare things to, and to put things into their proper perspective. Remembering that you are ALREADY AS GOD CREATED YOU PERFECT, reflect on the nature of your soul, and acknowledge your EXISTING PERFECTION, this can really cut through the ego bullshit like nobody's business.

So like, there I am, feeling sorry for myself, feeling guilty, thinking I sinned, but wait... I am still as God created me, I am still perfectly innocent and with God, so how can it be true that I have done anything at all? How can it be true that I sinned or am guilty? What IS this guilt and sin but simply FALSE? It is a lie. I am not sinful or guilty, and I do not need to "become" innocent again because I already am. I already am perfectly holy, nothing has happened, and this other stuff must be ego illusions.

See the entire ego thought system, all of the separation from God, and everything to do with sin and death, is A LIE, and it's all an attempt to COVER UP WHAT IS ALREADY TRUE. And what is already true has already been established by God, is permanent, YOU cannot create or invent it or make it happen by yourself, all you can do is ACCEPT IT. And that means SURRENDERING every effort you have ever made to deny it, to try to make something else true, or to try to make it untrue.

When you stare the truth in the face like this, and you acknowledge, yes, I need do nothing because I AM STILL as God created me, it forces you to have to ADMIT, that everything else you've been believing is FALSE, it's a lie, you've basically just being trying to deny and not accept or allow this to be true, to try to claim that something else is true, but it's not. It's almost brutal in how the acknowledgement of this truth shows you that you LITERALLY CANNOT CHANGE THE TRUTH, you HAVE NOT CHANGED THE TRUTH, and YOU NEVER WILL.

There is absolutely ZERO ROOM for you to have any power to do that. And the entire separation from God is ALL about your belief that it is POSSIBLE to do that. That you could somehow bring about a sin, or make guilt real, or produce a real sickness, or create death, or will against God, or defile Heaven, or make God convinced that you are not worthy, or make yourself unworthy, or whatever else. It is ALL A LIE. You do not have that power at all. Not even a tiny bit. Either you accept God's truth and ADMIT you are ABSOLUTELY INCAPABLE of changing it, or you will be in denial.

The problem is not whether you are spiritual enough or not. The problem is that you ARE spiritual enough and you keep pretending not to be.

Remember this is not a course in love because the meaning of love cannot be taught. It's a course in UNDOING THE BLOCKS TO THE AWARENESS OF LOVE'S PRESENCE, because the love is ALREADY THERE and you are simply not aware that it is already there. You have denied that it's there. Blocks to love make it seem like WHAT IS TRUE, is not true, or that it has gone away, or love is lost, or you have stopped being as God created you. That's their purpose. To deny the truth. They do not CHANGE the truth, they merely cover it up to PRETEND that it is not true already. Death is a form of denial, an attempt to claim that you do not have eternal life ALREADY. YOU DO. YOU ARE ALREADY IMMORTAL. You can't NOT be immortal!

So as Jesus says, the course is not about establishing love, or making you more spiritual, or necessarily about waking up or having to do anything at all. It is about a RECOGNITION of the ENLIGHTENED SELF that YOU ALREADY ARE, RIGHT NOW, which is merely hiding behind walls and clouds of FAKE SHIT, which you tried to use to cover up the EXISTING TRUTH, which God has already PERMANENTLY established. The course is ONLY about undoing your beliefs that you aren't ALREADY IMMORTAL, or ALREADY INNOCENT, or ALREADY WITH GOD, or ALREADY A PERFECTLY DIVINE SOUL.

So let's say this. Right now, accept that you are still as God created you, a perfect soul. You are in heaven NOW. You are already DONE with any supposed "ego goal" of trying to GET THERE. You are already FINISHED with making yourself innocent. You are already COMPLETE in the establishing of your perfection in the eyes of God. God has not changed his mind about you. He still sees you as perfect because HE IS CONSTANTLY EXTENDING YOU as perfect. You did not create yourself, and therefore you have NO SAY in changing what God has created. You have NO ABILITY WHATSOEVER to overthrow God's will by undoing OR CHANGING his creation in any way, and YOU HAVE NOT. You're done already. Already perfect. Already complete. Already whole. Already happy. Already loved. Already innocent. Already safe. Already divine.

Everything else is what needs to be let go. All the beliefs about this not being true. All the attempts to make out that you are mortal or can suffer or be sick or die. It's bullshit. You who ARE IMMORTAL ALREADY cannot ever die or even suffer a tiny bit. You are permanent. All of this pretending that things have gone wrong, it has to go. All of this pretending that you can be dead, it has to go. All of this disbelief or rather, UNWILLINGNESS to accept, allow, welcome or acknowledge, THE TRUTH, which already is perfectly established, has to go. All of this desire to NOT ACCEPT the atonement - the truth - has to go. All reluctance, unwillingness, denial, rejection, choosing away from, unconsciousness, hiding, secret sins and hates, it all has to go. Because it is never true and cannot ever exist.

And in fact, this entire world, does not exist. It has not been created. It has not happened. If it's not part of heaven, it does not exist, is not real, and has not been created. The entire history of human civilization is a bullshit lie. This world holds NOTHING that you want. Your heart is with God, NOW. This world that we "made" was NOT really made, it is not even here, it does not exist at all, and NOTHING IS HAPPENING. Nor has anything happened. No-one has ever died, there has never been a real war, all sickness is bullshit, death is imaginary, YOU CAN'T STOP BEING IMMORTAL.

So we need to learn, basically, since enlightenment is a recognition and not a change, to recognize and acknowledge what ALREADY IS TRUE, what God has ALREADY ESTABLISHED, and give thanks for the fact that WE ARE ALREADY SAVED and are ALREADY IN HEAVEN, NOW. All the other ego pursuits, the spiritual path, processes, techniques... unless they UNDO and REMOVE the fake lies that the truth is not already true, it is ego. Unless it moves you INWARD back closer to WHAT YOU ALREADY ARE, it is ego. Unless it makes you aware that you are ALREADY PERFECT and therefore do not need to SEEK, it is ego. Unless it produces GRATITUDE for what God has already given, it is ego.

You are already done making yourself perfect. God accomplished that already. It's not your job. It's not what the course is for at all. The only purpose of the course is to help you to let go of what is FALSE, and merely ACKNOWLEDGE what is ALREADY TRUE. You're sitting in heaven right now, happy as heck, totally overjoyed and celebrating that nothing can ever go wrong, and completely in love with God. Everything else... bullshit.

Some quotes:

"God and the Souls He created are completely dependent on each other. The creation of the Soul has already been perfectly accomplished... He created them perfectly. He gave them His peace so they could not be shaken and would be unable to be deceived."

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in him. The next point, too, has already been made, but bears repetition here. The Soul, because of its own likeness to its Creator, is creative. No Child of God is capable of losing this ability, because it is inherent in what he IS."

"Spirit is in a state of grace forever. Your reality is only spirit. Therefore you are in a state of grace forever."

"Be vigilant only for God and His Kingdom. As long as belief in God and His Kingdom is assailed by any doubts in your minds, His perfect accomplishment is not apparent to you. This is why you must be vigilant on God's behalf.The ego speaks against His creation and therefore does engender doubt."

"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God."

"The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance."

CLAIM YOUR INHERITANCE! IT IS ALREADY YOURS!

Ego always wants what it doesn't want, and doesn't want what it wants, because it is a contradictory though system that makes no sense. It may say it does not want death, and does not want people to be dead, but it does.

So while it says it does not want death, does not want people (bodies) to die, does not want sickness etc, it simultaneously is believing in and wanting those things. It is simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by everything, which is part of the uncertainty of fear as well. Insanity is two-faced like this, it can't commit to any one thing fully.

So in our egos, in our false perceptions, our insane split minds, our belief in separation, we literally believe both that a) we do not want death to happen and b) we totally want it to happen. This has to be looked at and recognized. It does mean that if we "don't want death", we DO want it.

Adopting any attitude based on "it really happens" is wanting it, having already given it reality and truth and value. If you value it you make it real. If you value it you want it to happen and try to make it happen. To believe in death, which is not love, is murderous.

Making death unreal is the only way to not play the game and get out of the flip-flopping confusion of wanting it and not wanting it. It's like being addicted to something that hurts you. You hate it and love it at the same time, in a twisted sort of way.

While you might try to take a side, and side with the angle that you do NOT want a person to have died (a body identified person), the mere belief that they are a body and HAVE died IS a decision to join in false empathy and to therefore value death and WANT it to be real. This is why for example in ACIM Jesus says that we try to keep people in their bodies, held there by guilt.

"As long as you believe that, to be with a body, is companionship, you will be COMPELLED to attempt to keep your brother IN his body, HELD THERE BY GUILT." UrT15H12

Our world-driven body-based perspective that bodies are real people, and we do not want them leaving "this world" because that seems like an end from our point of view, is totally blind to the fact that we belong in another world, and coming HERE is death. Birth is death. And even coming into this world took place BECAUSE we wanted to believe in death and keep it.

Prisoners have gone into a prison and are so insane that they believe the prison in their home and they don't want to leave, and are kicking and screaming to stay in the prison, because they think that outside the prison walls is a prison, and that they are free right now in their cell. They have no idea how backwards their thinking is and do not even recognize a prison when they see one.v

So yes if you are "upset by" some body person dying, it does mean that you believe it is real, want it, are choosing it, are reinforcing it, are being murderous, and are participating in trying to keep the person in a state of death. You'd rather they be suffering and dying than alive in God. Whether your ego likes to hear this or not is another matter, but we have to be honest and willing to look at it if we want salvation.

Being in grief, the grief simultaneously is a reaction that seems to say "I care greatly about this person and now they've been destroyed and I feel bad about that because I don't want it" .... at the same time as ..... "I totally want to believe they're dead and I'll happily bargain that they come back into their body and stay in a body forever in my little prison world and die along with me."

So then you discover that the grief is not just "pure grief" or purely justified or purely innocent or purely anything. It's not a whole story. It's a tainted mix of ego reaction and a sort of fake remorse masquerading as caring and feeling a loss, much like what we do in guilt. The loss is a lie because if the mind believes there is a loss it is choosing it and wants it. All emotions are caused by the mind choosing to feel what it wants.

"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. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is." UrW152L1

We do have secret ulterior and selfish motives. We want them back because WE feel deprived. Our egos want to keep people in bodies forever and keep destroying them forever. A living death, followed by the death of non-life. Just recycling around over and over again, but never waking up from it. We can even say that yes it is selfish to grieve, it's always about a sense of what we want, what we have lost, how we feel hurt by what someone has done, anger at someone's leaving, as if their death attacked us. It's not easy to admit to how unforgiving this viewpoint is.

Remember that nothing real can be threatened. If something seems to have been threatened it cannot have been real. We believe it was real, which is a mistake. Believing a person is a body and that the body and world are real is a mistake. When the body, like a chunk of reality, goes away, we are forced into an experience of having lost a part of reality itself, as if part of God is dead. That MUST cause a sense of loss. It's not based on a real truth, but it's based on a perceived truth, and can produce horrendously deep despair.

But the despair is a lie. It's fake. It seems justified and understandable and common ("normal") and so on, but it is not really natural under God's laws. If nothing real can ever die, which is true, then there can BE no reason for despair. And the despair must be a smokescreen to hide a wish for death to be real, and for God's truth to not be true.

Grief isn't just grief, it's a mask used to cover up attack. Just as the "face of innocence", which sees itself as unfairly treated and unwillingly caused to lose something it values, secretly hides a vicious special hatred and a desire to attack and destroy. The victimy little "poor me" of the suffering grieving self is essentially an attempt to enter into the perceived death and join with it and be one with it, such as to become dead also.

This is why in grieving we are not really living, and people have a really hard time returning to life. I might feel grief still but at the same time that means I am believing in death and not life. It means I'm trying to join with the death and die along with it. That's not living. Eventually the sympathetic "part of me has died" game has to be given up and we have to RESURRECT back to a firm commitment to immortality and eternal life. God does not will that we suffer.

Yes it is very very very hard and deep and horrible to go through grief, but grief is not grief. Nor is the only way out to "go through it". It is deception. And no matter how long it takes or how quickly, we are asked to rise up out of it (the battlefield) into the light where loss is impossible and we can be only happy. We do not escape death by dying, we escape it through the light of truth.

The end of grief is the end of death. How much suffering is enough before we will choose again for a better way?

"Loss is not loss when properly perceived. Pain is impossible. There is no grief with any cause at all and suffering of any kind is nothing but a dream. Such is the truth, at first to be but said, and then repeated many times, and next to be accepted as but partly true, with many reservations, then to be considered seriously more and more, and finally accepted as the truth. I can elect to change all thoughts that hurt. And I would go beyond the words today, go past all reservations, and arrive at full acceptance of the truth in them." W248

"For what would be the use of pain to me; what purpose would my suffering fulfill; and how would grief and loss avail me, if insanity departs from me today, and I accept my holiness instead?" W285 "Who could despair when perfect joy is yours, available to all as remedy for grief and misery, all sense of loss, and for complete escape from sin and guilt?" UrW165L5

"Forgiveness IS your peace, for herein lies the end of separation, and the dream of danger and destruction, sin and death; of madness and of murder, grief and loss." UrT29G1

"He laughs as well at pain and loss, at sickness and at grief, at poverty, starvation and at death. He recognizes sacrifice remains the one idea that stands behind them all, and in his gentle laughter are they healed." UrW187:6

"The way is not hard, but it IS very different. Yours is the way of pain, of which God knows nothing. THAT way is hard indeed, and very lonely. Fear and grief are your guests, and they go with you, and abide with you on the way. But the dark journey is not the way of God's Son. " UrT10D4

"Release the future. For the past is gone, and what is present, freed from its bequest of grief and misery, of pain and loss, becomes the instant in which time escapes the bondage of illusions where it runs its pitiless, inevitable course." UrW195L5

"Unshaken does the Holy Spirit look on what you see; on sin and pain and death, on grief and separation and on loss. Yet does He know one thing must still be true; God still is Love, and this is not His Will." UrW95L5 "If you have the gift of everything can loss be real? Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? UrW155L2

"Through this, he learns that where he anticipated grief, he finds a happy light-heartedness instead; where he thought something was asked of him he finds a gift bestowed on him." UrM5B5

"The gentle have no pain. They cannot suffer. Why would they not be joyous? They are sure they are beloved and must be safe. Joy goes with gentleness as surely as grief attends attack. God's teachers trust in Him. And they are sure His Teacher goes before them, making sure no harm can come to them. UrM5F1