This is a simple logical premise deeply rooted in the Course. Heaven was all that existed, and WE MADE UP an opposite to Heaven. And that opposite is ALWAYS opposed to Heaven, totally UNLIKE Heaven in every way, and is the idea of HELL, no matter how you perceive it or look at it or think about it. An opposite to heaven DOES NOT EXIST. Therefore there is no world - Earth, as Heaven's OPPOSITE, does not exist.

Below are a selection of quotes, which all highlight that Earth and Heaven are OPPOSITE. They will NOT EVER BE "one thing", or the "same thing". Earth was made to OPPOSE the one possibility of Heaven in every way. "The world was made as an attack on God." In no way, at no time, will the Earth merge with Heaven. "Love, which is all encompassing, HAS NO OPPOSITE", and so the opposite to Heaven, which is Earth, shall simply disappear into the nothingness from which it came.

You are either "in heaven", without an opposite, or you are "in hell" (Earth) with an opposite. If you are in the Earth, Heaven must then HAVE an opposite, Earth is now hell, and there is no escape from duality.

Perception has nothing to do with that fact. Perceiving hell in a heavenly way is only a temporary state in order to prepare you for the reality that Heaven is the only reality and THERE IS NO WORLD. Earth, as Heaven's total opposite, CANNOT CONTINUE being "Earth" in any recognizable way, which is MADE OF OPPOSITION (which is attack), while also being "equated" with or identical to Heaven. Heaven HAS no opposite. Earth DOES NOT EXIST.

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"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."

"Heaven remains your one ALTERNATIVE to this strange world YOU MADE and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. 2 God made no contradictions. 3 What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. 4 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."

"FOR THIS WORLD IS THE OPPOSITE OF HEAVEN, being MADE TO BE ITS OPPOSITE, and everything here takes a direction EXACTLY OPPOSITE of what is true. 7 In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as union. 8 Here, where the illusion of love is accepted in love's place, love is perceived as separation and exclusion."

"It applies to everything that God created, and ONLY what He created is real. It is beyond learning because it is BEYOND TIME AND PROCESS. It HAS NO OPPOSITE; no beginning and no end. It merely is."

"How could the Son of God make time to take away the Will of God? 3 He thus denies himself, and contradicts what HAS NO OPPOSITE. 4 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."

"From knowledge and perception respectively, two distinct thought systems arise which are OPPOSITE IN EVERY RESPECT. In the realm of knowledge no thoughts exist apart from God, because God and His Creation share one Will. The WORLD OF PERCEPTION, however, is MADE BY THE BELIEF IN OPPOSITES AND SEPARATE WILLS, in PERPETUAL CONFLICT with each other and with God. What perception sees and hears appears to be real because it permits into awareness only what conforms to the WISHES of the perceiver. This leads to a WORLD OF ILLUSIONS, a world which needs constant defense precisely BECAUSE IT IS NOT REAL."

"In this world Heaven is a choice, because here we believe there are ALTERNATIVES to choose between. We think that all things have an OPPOSITE, and what we want we choose. If Heaven exists there must be HELL as well, for contradiction is the way we make what we perceive, and what we THINK is real."

"CREATION KNOWS NO OPPOSITE. 2 But here is OPPOSITION part of being "real." 3 It is this strange perception of the truth that makes the choice of Heaven seem to be the same as the relinquishment of hell. 4 It is not really thus." (because hell doesn't exist)

"For truth is true, and NOTHING ELSE is true. 7 THERE IS NO OPPOSITE to choose instead. 8 There is no contradiction to the truth."

"IN DEATH ALONE ARE OPPOSITES resolved, for ending OPPOSITION is to die. 4 And thus salvation must be seen as death, for LIFE IS SEEN AS CONFLICT. 5 To resolve the conflict is to end your life as well."

"In me is love perfected, fear impossible, and joy established WITHOUT OPPOSITE. 4 I am the holy home of God Himself. 5 I am the HEAVEN where His Love resides."

"Now the light has come: ITS OPPOSITE HAS GONE WITHOUT A TRACE. 9 Where evil was there now is holiness. 10 What is the ego? 11 What the evil was. 12 Where is the ego? 13 In an EVIL DREAM that but SEEMED REAL WHILE YOU WERE DREAMING IT."

"The OPPOSITE OF SEEING through the body's eyes is the vision of Christ, which reflects strength rather than weakness, unity rather than separation, and love rather than fear. The OPPOSITE OF HEARING through the body's ears is communication through the Voice for God, the Holy Spirit, which abides in each of us."

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily and as well as does the ego, except that His conclusions are not insane. 5 They take a direction EXACTLY OPPOSITE, pointing as clearly TO HEAVEN as the ego points to darkness and to death (earth)."

"What could you choose between but life or death, waking or sleeping, peace or war, your dreams or your reality? 2 There is a risk of thinking death is peace, because THE WORLD EQUATES THE BODY WITH THE SELF WHICH GOD CREATED. 3 Yet a thing can NEVER BE ITS OPPOSITE. 4 AND DEATH IS OPPOSITE TO PEACE, because it is the OPPOSITE OF LIFE."

"The perception of goodness is NOT knowledge, but the denial of the OPPOSITE of goodness enables you to recognize a condition in which OPPOSITES DO NOT EXIST."

"The Thought of peace was given to God's Son the instant that HIS MIND HAD THOUGHT OF WAR. 2 There was no need for such a Thought before, for peace was given WITHOUT OPPOSITE, and merely was."

"From here we give salvation to the world, for it is here salvation was received. 2 The song of our rejoicing is the call to all the world that freedom is returned, that time is almost over, and God's Son has but an instant more to wait until his Father is remembered, DREAMS ARE DONE, ETERNITY HAS ****SHINED AWAY THE WORLD**** , and ONLY HEAVEN NOW EXISTS AT ALL."

Worth repeating:

"There is NO LIFE OUTSIDE OF HEAVEN. 2 Where God created life, there life must be. 3 In any state APART from Heaven LIFE IS ILLUSION. 4 At best it SEEMS LIKE LIFE; at worst, like death. 5 Yet both are judgments on what is NOT LIFE, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. 6 LIFE NOT IN HEAVEN IS IMPOSSIBLE, and what is not in Heaven is NOT ANYWHERE. 7 Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet PERCEIVED as an eternal barrier to Heaven. 8 Illusions are BUT FORMS (life forms). 9 Their content is never true."

At first we believe physical sight is perception. And everything the body's eyes look upon is taken as real. And thus we learn that the world appears to be an inherently bad place. Regardless of trying to be optimistic or positive, bad shit happens frequently. And people seem to die.

Assuming that everything we see is real, we might not realize that there is a flexible component to perception. Our mind gets to actually decide what to "make of" the images that the physical eyes see. It categorizes them, projects meaning onto them, and decide what they are for.

This is because only the mind really sees, and it is looking upon the images the body shows to it of the world, as pictures of reflected photons bouncing off blockages. And the mind can decide what this means and what to project onto them, choosing what to see in them, God or ego.

What this means is the world you initially see is a combination of "the physical world" and the overlaid projected junk in your mind. The dirt on your lens. The baggage and self attack and sense of sin and guilt which you see in the world as if it's outside of you.

What you have to learn, is that what the world is, and the sense of it being a negative hellish place, are two different things. It's easy to hate the world, be angry at it, mistrust it, fear it, and want to escape it.

You can easily get into a mindset that if you will get away from "that bad place" through some spiritual means, you'll be better off. You can judge and demonize the world and decide it is a hell you want nothing to do with. But this isn't escape. It really is just making it real to yourself, which keeps you trapped.

The real solution is to develop true vision, which allows you to look upon whatever the world "is", without your projections of baggage. Without your distortions of meaning. Without your judgements. Without your sin and guilt seen in it.

But to do that, you have to in a way give "the world" the benefit of the doubt, or a kind of second chance. A possibility of redemption. Because somehow you have to be able to get to where you forgive the world, where you shine a light of love towards it, and where it no longer appears to threaten or upset you.

It may have taken a long time to build up resentment towards the world, which bound what the world is to a negative, false perception of the world. And in this confusion you thought the world was inherently a bad place. But now you have to be open to the idea that the world is not inherently bad. That there is another way to see it.

This entails the recognition that if you will change the component of your mind that gives meaning to the world, you actually can redefine what it means to you. Instead of meaning hell, or indicating sin, or proving guilt, or producing fear, the world can be seen in a much different light.

What the world IS, isn't what you see in false perception. That's the unforgiven world. That's Earth with your self hate and belief in sin projected onto it. It actually makes what the world IS appear to be a hellish place.

What the world IS, is nothing more than a simple thin veil of illusions injected in-between you and yourself, or you and Christ and God. Kind of like a wall, or as Jesus calls it "the granite block of sin." It takes on various forms of error, and depicts sin and attack and guilt. But without the meaning of "sinful", "attacking", "guilty" projected onto it, what's left?

The world is really just a thin illusory world, a whisp of smoke, a faint remnant of an idea of separation, and a strange area of nothingness pretending to be something. It does not have any meaning. This is why Jesus tells you that the world you see is a meaningless world which God did not create. It is devoid of meaning, in its false-viewed form, because love is the only real meaning.

As you forgive it, as you lift away guilt from yourself, as you have no sin to project onto it, as you recognize your own innocence, the dark heavy shadow of guilt which makes the world seem SOLID, is lifted away from it. Like a heavy curtain or a thick wall, it thins out and lightens. And eventually without any judgement upon it at all, it is recognized only as a light veil of illusions swirling around.

It is not positive, or negative. It is not alive, or dead. It is not really anything. The world, the veil, being illusions, is nothing at all. It is not loving, it is not holy. It is not even really there. And eventually when Christ Vision is fully accepted it vanishes completely.

Just prior to that, however, you reach "the forgiven world." A forgiven world is always an illusory world, because forgiveness overlooks illusions, not reality. It looks beyond bodies. It looks toward the light. So as you forgive the world you are learning to look past it to the light of the real world. And this causes the world to appear thinner and lighter and less burdened with guilt and the reality of sin.

It should over time look less and less sinful, less and less serious, less and less threatening, less and less solid even. Christ Vision is practically similar to having x-ray vision. It literally bypasses matter, as the spiritual eye can see anywhere and with no regard for distance or obstacles. It is not blinded by perception of form and its sight does not stop at physical surfaces. It is not deceived or blocked by what they appear to be. It sees through them.

As the world becomes forgiven, due to you forgiving yourself, what used to be "world + negativity", becomes "world + holiness". Your holiness or the meaning of love, is projected onto it. It is seen WITH love. This does not make it love, it is still nothing. And in fact this love causes it to disappear even more. But if you do see it still, just short of going home to God, it will appear beautiful and lovely in its sparkling forgiven state.

And so what once seemed like a world of inherent hell, reflecting hell and showing signs of attack and death everywhere, your view or perspective on it changes to one of spiritual love. And from that vantage point of true perception, there is no longer a belief in real sin projected onto it. And being made of sin, it is therefore recognized as fake sin, and not sin at all. The world is simply recognized as false, not sinful. And just as it is about to be seen as a perfect reflection of heaven, it disappears, revealing Christ.

And then you go home.

"The body is a dream". "The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream"

The dream is coming from the mind of a dreamer. The dreamer is dreaming of a world, and a body within that world. The dreamer puts the body there and puts the environment there and moves it all around, making it seem alive.

If the dreamer forgets that they are dreaming it, they will lose the perspective of who and what they are. They will cease to know themselves as the dreamer of the dream. And now they will forget that they are the one dreaming it.

"Thus are you NOT the dreamer, but the DREAM. And so you wander idly in and out of places and events that IT contrives.""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."

And now the world will seem to be being dreamed by someone else, happening by some other will, and doing things to the dream body against its will. And now instead of believing you are the dreamer you will believe your are the dream, at its effect.

"He CANNOT doubt his dreams' reality BECAUSE he does not see the part he plays in MAKING them, and MAKING them seem real. No-one can waken from a dream the world is dreaming FOR him. He becomes a part of someone ELSE'S dream. He CANNOT choose to waken from a dream he did not make."

This identifies you with being the very dream body which you are dreaming of. And now you think that you are not dreaming of a body, but that the body is real. And that it is your self. And now you seem to walk around within the dream as if the body is your mind.And then things in the dream seem to happen to the dream body and this seems to threat you, as a dream body. And now you seek escape from these threats, and ways to adjust to the dream. And you live in fear and are in states of unconsciousness, ending in sickness and death.

All of this suffering seems to befall you not because it is happening against your will, but because you have forgotten that you are the dreamer of the dream. You have lost sight of the fact the entire dream environment is happening inside your mind. And you have forgotten that you cannot possible be a mere tiny part of the dream, or any of it.

Your sense of identity has to shift back to the recognition of the reality of yourself, as the dreamer, in order to acknowledge your freedom from the dream itself. This must entail you dis-identifying from the dream body, not mistaking it for your self, not believing anything it seems to experience, and not losing track of your true nature as spirit.

"Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as SEPARATE from himself, and done to HIM.""You share NO evil dreams, if you forgive the dreamer, and perceive that he is NOT the dream he made. And so he CANNOT be a part of YOURS, from which you BOTH are free. Forgiveness SEPARATES the dreamer from the evil dream, and thus releases him."

By lifting yourself above the battlefield and outside of the context of the dream contents, you can now see that it really is just a dream, in your mind, and not really a world. And anything happening in the dream is merely part of what you decide must happen. Because you are the ruler of the dream universe.

"My Self is ruler of the universe." - It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

"For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes.

A world forgiven is a world recognized as not being responsible for what it seems to do. Because the world is merely the effect of your causality, your mind's dreaming. You are the one putting it there and making it move. Your mind makes the world turn. You make the bodies move. You make bad things happen. And both sickness and death are simply of your making.

"Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead." "You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

You are the maker of the world. The dreamer of the dream. The causer of its events. The source of its illusions. The reason why it acts as it acts. The beginning of its nature. And the end of its suffering.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs.""I am not at the effect of the world I see."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. 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."

"Nothing more fearful than an idle dream has terrified God's Son, and made him think that he has lost his innocence, denied his Father, and made war upon himself. So fearful is the dream, so seeming real, he could not waken to reality without the sweat of terror and a scream of mortal fear, unless a gentler dream preceded his awaking, and allowed his calmer mind to welcome, NOT to fear, the Voice that called with love to waken him."

"The happy dreams the Holy Spirit brings are different from the dreams of the world, where one can merely dream he is awake. The dreams forgiveness lets the mind perceive do not induce another form of sleep, so that the dreamer dreams another dream. His happy dreams are heralds of the dawn of truth upon the mind. They lead from sleep to gentle waking, so that dreams are gone. And thus they cure for all eternity."

Freedom of Choice > Responsibility > Power > Causation > Effects.

To simplify, think of cause and effect. You are either the cause, or the effect. If you see yourself as the cause, you cannot be an effect. Your casual outpouring is so strong nothing can come at you. If you see yourself as not the cause, you MUST see yourself as being highly affected and therefore ARE an effect of something.

When you project responsibility outside yourself, onto another or the world, you are disowning and giving away your power. You are giving power TO them. You are framing them in your mind as having the power to CAUSE YOU, and to make you have effects. And it will seem these effects are against your will - something you did not choose.

But you are choosing it, because you are using your power to PRETEND to disown your power, you are still using your power to frame someone as having power over you, and the power that you see IN them acting against you IS YOUR POWER. You just are seeing it as though it belongs to someone else and is not a part of you.

You've separated yourself from your power and now your power is seeming to turn around 180 degrees and come back at you in the form of "an alien will", causing you, changing you, defining you, altering you without your choosing. Or so it seems. Because you ARE choosing this. You are choosing to see your power as against yourself, doing things to you. Even if it seems to be being done "through" others vicariously.

This means you're in a position which is rather strange, where you are FIGHTING YOURSELF. Like literally you are taking your power, moving it away from you, turning it around, and then launching it at yourself in an attack mode, causing you to have effects.

Your mind believes the power is out there against you. Your mind ALSO must believe therefore that since you are NOT having the power, you are NOT the cause, you are NOT responsible, you MUST BE AN EFFECT. The belief in being not the cause and being affected go hand in hand.

This means that your mind is putting in place both the framing of something external as "attacking you", AND it is putting in place the SYMPTOMS, physically mentally or emotionally, that you would expect to occur IF that power were acting upon you. Your mind ITSELF, makes up effects, that correspond to the perceived cause.

This literally means your mind makes symptoms in the body, makes up sickness and disease and even death, makes up wounds and heartache, makes up emotional reactions and loss and sadness and anger and hurt, to correspond to the perceived external cause. Not just imagining it, but actually MAKING IT, producing it, putting it into your experience, changing your feelings, changing your body.

This especially happens when you project guilt, in which you are basically projecting responsibility, which is cause. You are saying, I am not the cause of this, you are, and are pointing a finger and hurling guilt at another to try to make it stick to them. But moreso what you are doing is you are trying to give them power and responsibility and will and freedom and choice and causation to have these things INSTEAD of you.

It's rather bizarre then that we literally give power to people, to frame them as capable of attacking us, threatening us, making us afraid, upsetting us, doing things to us. We effectively WANT THEM TO. Even if on the surface we are claiming to be innocent, even if we are feeling that feeling of "I didn't choose this, I don't want this, I didn't ask for it."

You see, that victim perspective in which you feel like you are being unfairly treated, that's the feeling you get when you are becoming "an effect". It's the recognition that you have indeed projected power, cause, responsibility etc, and so see yourself as NOT responsible, NOT the cause, NOT the one using power to make something happen.

In victimhood (ego) you perceive that you are not the cause of what's happening, and you are in denial of this, and having denied it you are projecting it. So now you see cause as outside of you, in someone else, acting upon you, at the same time as NOT seeing that you are causing anything yourself. The denial acts as a barrier blocking awareness of what YOU are doing, that YOU are using power, that YOU are responsible, that YOU are causing this.

It's understandable then that as the victimhood role strengthens, the denial and disownership of power, causation and responsibility increases. You believe less and less that "it's your fault" (guilt-related). You believe less and less that you chose it, wanted it, made it happen, or had anything to do with it. Almost as if you were just minding your own business doing nothing at all and someone came out of the blue and attacked you for no good reason. As if you were just completely innocent (the face of innocence).

And that's simply because the power has been projected. The power has been given away, disowned, you don't want it, and you WANT the other to have it. So you simultaneously have this experience of "I didn't ask for this, how could you do this to me", and "that person is having power over me and is the cause of me." You can't have one part without the other. Just as you can't have a belief in an external cause WITHOUT a belief in having effects as well. "I want you to have my power, please use it against me, and I will pretend I don't want you to."

So we quite literally use the power of our mind to dissociate from our power, we hand it over to all kinds of things out there that HAVE NO POWER, other than us giving it to it in our minds. And then having given it to them, they seem to loom over us and we now fear them and feel powerless and weak and feeble. Unable to go up against such a power, as though we have no power at all. And now we are tempted to see ourselves as unfairly treated.

What we have to recognize of course is the secret of salvation - that we are doing this to ourselves. We have to recognize and own the power and responsibility. We have to take back the power of decision and use it to choose otherwise with the Holy Spirit. We have to stop believing that ANYTHING outside of us HAS OUR POWER, and indeed need to recognize that the power we THOUGHT was theirs is in fact our own. It only seemed like theirs because we disowned it and didn't want it.

So we take our power back. We claim responsibility for causing everything we are experiencing. We acknowledge, I have caused this thing, I have done this to myself, it is not being done by this other person or something in the body or the world, I am not a victim of this, I am not being affected by them, they have no power over me. I own and take back and reclaim my own power which I gave away, and take full responsibility for it. Which means that I must be CHOOSING what happens, I must be CAUSING what happens, and I MUST have caused all of my own suffering.

All my symptoms I put in place myself. All my upset emotions I put in place myself. All my despair and loss and shame and guilt I did to myself. All sense that I'd been attacked or mistreated or shamed or attacked by anyone else was MY MISTAKE in perceiving this wrongly. I did not recognize that I was using my power to pretend to disown my power, and using it to set up others to attack me for me. I didn't realize I was fighting against myself with a divided will. I have been using my power to try to destroy myself, attacking myself, using others to do my bidding, and then blaming them for it.

Ultimately you need to resume your role and position as ruler of the universe. You are the CAUSE of everything you see and feel and think and experience. You are the co-creator with God with unlimited power. What you say happens, what you do not want does not happen. You articulate reality. You CREATE. You cause what happens and you WANT what happens because you chose it. Everything that happens YOU MUST BE CHOOSING. And by the power of your decision you choose NOT TO SUFFER AND TO STOP ATTACKING YOURSELF LIKE THIS.

Indeed, when you realize that nothing at all has been attacking you OTHER THAN YOURSELF, through your mis-use of your power and will, you can find relief in knowing that if you would just stop hurting your own self, stop giving away your power so that you can be indirectly attacked by yourself, stop disowning responsibility for CAUSING, for CHOOSING, you would stop suffering entirely, and forever. Because NO ONE HAS POWER OVER YOU OTHER THAN YOURSELF! And no-one and nothing can ever cause you to suffer, to be sick, or to die without your consent.

"For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

The golden rule is the nature and law of God. In God, everything is equal and shared. What applies to one brother applies to all brothers. What is true of me is true of you. But even moreso, because brothers are ONE, they literally share identity and soul. I am in you and you are in me. We are part of each other. We are irrevocably joined and share everything, even our selves.

We can describe this as the golden rule, in which what I do to you I also do to myself. There is no option or clause that your brother MIGHT treat you a certain way. You treat your brother a certain way SO THAT you are treated a certain way, because you ARE him, and so you are DIRECTLY treating yourself how you would wish to be treated.

There are no exceptions to this and it is impossible to violate or break this law or be outside of it. It is always operating, whether you are accepting of it and living by it, or whether you are attempting to ignore it and pretend it doesn't apply to you.

If we are one, then I have a shared interest with you. Whatever I do to you I do to myself. Whatever I give to you I receive. Giving and receiving are one. If I were to attack you, I'd be attacking myself. Therefore, it's in my own best interests to ONLY LOVE, otherwise I will make MYSELF suffer, and by my own hand. I have to INCLUDE you, otherwise I will suffer from exclusion.

"Ego" is nothing more than an attempt to oppose, deny and ignore this law. It is an attempt to pretend that it does not apply. That I am not you and you are not me. That we are not equal. That what applies to me doesn't apply to you, because we are different. If we are separate, we not one, and now I should have my own selfish interests - survival of the fittest.

It's like, were both standing on the same floor. Then there is a separation, like an earthquake. The floor cracks in two. I now seem to be on one side, and you on the other. But also the heights of the floors have shifted, and mine is slightly above yours. The two floors are now separate and different and not equal.

This is the separation from God, the seeming split in the mind, which suggests that instead of us all being one, we are now two, split apart, separated off, isolated in our own private territories, and kept apart. We can't seem to share because we can't span the divide of the broken ground, and everything we do is separate.

On this basis of separation, or not being able to share, the breakdown in unity, the collapse of oneness, the arising of exclusion, and the seeming imprisonment on either side of the rift, we get the denial of the golden rule. It seems possible now that because I am not a part of you, and am separate and isolated on my own island, I can only now think of my OWN interests. What I do to myself is done to myself alone, and if I throw a rock over at you, it hurts only you and not me.

While I might believe that what I do to you is NOT done to myself, or what is true of you is NOT true of me, it becomes possible to enter this state where we're trying to get away with murder. It suggests I could attack you, and escape the consequences. I could do something to you which is not done to me. I could give something that I do NOT receive, because I am not INCLUDED in it, because I've become EXCLUDED from you. As though giving and receiving are not one.

So the whole ego system is all about this sense of being exclusive, separated off, not sharing, not one, unequal, different, disconnected, dis-associated, and isolated. Our whole belief then shifts to it seeming to be plausible that we can attack without being hurt, or we can accuse without being accused, or we can make someone be guilty to take the guilt off our own shoulders. That no matter what we cause, we can escape the effects. I can hurt you, and not myself.

So this is then what the ego does, all the time. IT HAS ONE MODE of functioning. It's all it CAN do, because it is ONLY the idea of separation. Its aim is to emphasize, enhance, increase, and deepen the sense of being separate, so that IT increases. That's it's only goal. To attack ever more strongly and cause ever more disruption in equality. It's entire existence DEPENDS on the continuation of this inequality, this rift between brothers, and this sense that you cannot share anything with anyone because they're separated from you.

If the two floors or islands were to meet, and reconnect, and level out, and become one single unified space again, the two brothers could be reunited, and all sense of inequality and difference would melt. And ALSO there would have to now be an acceptance of the golden rule, because if we are sharing everything, then what applies to me now also applies to you and vice versa. We are now the SAME. We are one. So I cannot do anything to you without doing it to myself.

The interesting thing is that even when we're in an ego state of believing that we ARE separate, and are not a part of others, the golden rule actually still applies. We can BELIEVE that we are attacking something "not myself", and we can BELIEVE that the effects are being felt ONLY by that other separate person, and we can BELIEVE that we completely escape any consequences for it, BUT WE DO NOT. Because there are dire consequences STILL operating, consequences which are SELF INFLICTED, which CANNOT be avoided.

If you attack another, you STILL attack yourself, because you STILL ARE them. If you hurt another, you ARE hurting yourself. If you try to destroy another, you ARE destroying yourself. You may not REALIZE that you are, because you think of yourself as PROTECTED BY THE SEPARATENESS, as if the prison walls keep you SAFE. And so you think that attacking someone makes you SAFER. But it in fact erodes your safety because the more you attack the more YOU become imprisoned and weakened.

"Exclusion and separation are synonymous. So are separation and dissociation. We have said before that the separation was and IS dissociation, and also that once it had occurred, projection became its main defense, or the device which KEEPS IT GOING. The reason, however, may not be as clear to you as you think. What you project you disown, and therefore DO NOT BELIEVE IS YOURS. You are therefore EXCLUDING yourself from it, by the very statement you are making that you are DIFFERENT from someone else. Since you have also judged AGAINST what you project, you attack it because you have already attacked it BY rejecting it. By doing this UNCONSCIOUSLY, you try to keep the fact that you must have attacked yourself FIRST out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe."

You cannot be strong without your brother. You cannot be happy without your brother. You cannot be healthy without your brother. You cannot be loved without your brother. You cannot be powerful without your brother. You cannot be free without your brother. You cannot be innocent without your brother. You cannot be holy without your brother.

So if you try to attack in any way, to produce the separation, to make yourself MORE separate, emphasizing the ways that someone else is an inferior evil shit that you hate and who should feel terribly guilty for being so wrong, YOU ARE accusing yourself of this. So you might ask yourself, "would I accuse myself of this?" You will think you're NOT accusing yourself because you don't see yourself as A PART OF the other person, but you are still doing it.

There is a HUGE COST to attempting to ignore the golden rule. The cost is that your mind becomes split, you become self-destructive and suicidal, you become alone and lonely, you become weakened and live in darkness, the world becomes a nightmare of conflict and war, you lose all sense of peace and happiness, communication breaks down and you become unable to relate to anyone, it makes you question whether you even exist, and you will try to destroy yourself. That's a pretty major cost for believing something that isn't true, as if it were real.

You DO have a vested interest, because when you attack you DO experience consequences, even if you do not REALIZE that you do. You may not recognize that every time you attack you feel worse. You may not recognize that when you hate someone you feel awful and guilty.

You may not recognize that when you accuse someone angrily of being guilty of something, to make yourself feel better, you increase your sense of being separate and small and weak and alone. Or that anger hurts your mind and body. You have to recognize what the consequences of attack ARE, so that you will decide that you do not WANT to be murderous anymore, because it actually is not REALLY in your best interests.

The golden rule always applies. It is never broken or violated. You can deny it. If you deny it you will suffer. If you deny it you will be confused as to why your life sucks, and you will probably blame it on someone else, thinking that they are not you, and that therefore you haven't blamed yourself. Everything you do you to do yourself and to all your brothers, to the entire sonship and to God. This is also the secret of salvation. You are INCLUDED IN EVERYTHING. And inclusion is ultimately love.

The physical world was made as a projection of a false idea. Everything in it is false, untrue and unreal. It therefore depicts a lie, a deception, an illusion, and an attempt to ASSERT that something false is true. That something impossible is possible. That everything which CAN go wrong HAS gone wrong, or is about to.

Everything it does and says and expresses is fiction and make-believe. This is because you made it by WANTING to believe that something untrue was true. And so you produced a world which constantly asserts the idea that an impossible evil exists. And now everything in the world is there to try to convince you that this is true.

If you consider the idea of hell, and you think of a place where everything in it is trying to PULL YOU DOWN, to SUCK YOU IN, to PERSUADE you, to try to get you to BUY into it, to KEEP you there, whispering evil lies in your ear, then you have an idea of what temptation is.

It's like the "devil" telling you things which are utterly untrue and heinous and blasphemous, trying to get you to side with it, so that you'll stay and give it your strength. To talk you into believing it instead of trusting God's word. It wants your soul in exchange for all of hell to be yours forever.

Be not mistaken that this whole world is set up to do this. And the body was made in attempting to deceive yourself thus. And now the world acts as a picture of total utter bullshit and madness, in the hope that you would convince yourself with it and fall for the trap, buying into illusions as if they are real, rendering yourself insane.

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

"Nothing the body's eyes seem to see can be anything but a form of temptation, since this was the purpose of the body itself."

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt."

If your mind gives any BELIEF to the world, to the body, to anything physical, then you are falling for temptation and are not in forgiveness. If even a speck of it seems TRUE to you, has validity, is worth listening to, is actually happening, or is anything you WANT, then you are falling for temptation.

"Lead us not into temptation" really means, help us to not believe that anything in the world is true. Help us not to fall for the ego trap of believing in hell. The world we made IS hell, but can only gain our support if we GIVE it our support. And we do that by buying into it, wanting it, believing it, trusting it, having faith in it, valuing it, giving it power, giving it credit, and siding with it. If you side with Earth, you are siding with an illusion of evil and are trying to make sin real.

"your mind has all the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects." (not both)

"He (Holy Spirit) will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God."

Make no mistake then, in the separation from God we DID attempt to make hell itself. The hell we made, the world we made, including bodies, is the opposite of heaven. Its whole nature was an attack on God and an attempt to deny eternal life. Which is why it has produced a dream of death and corruption.

We may not RECOGNIZE it as "actual hell" because of our silly ideas of fire and brimstone and pitch forks, but earth basically is the opposite of heaven. And heaven's opposite IS hell by definition. You are in hell right now, or so it seems.

"...and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

"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."

"The mind can make the belief in Separation VERY real and VERY fearful. And this belief IS the devil. It is powerful, active, destructive, and clearly in opposition to God, because it literally denies His Fatherhood."

"The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible."

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master."

Fortunately, your experience of the world of temptation, of a hell which at every turn is blasting you in the face with IMAGES OF SIN, trying to TEMPT YOU to believe that evil really is possible and sickness can happen and death is inevitable, depends entirely on your mind GIVING it power over you.

You give hell power by believing in it, valuing it and wanting it. If there is hell IN YOU, then you are supporting the world of temptation. What you accept as true becomes your reality. Heaven and earth are both in your mind, and you can SIDE WITH one or the other. But you can't have both because they are opposites.

If you side with spirit/heaven, you are denying earth and the body. You are giving up nothing to gain everything. Because hell, ie earth or the world, is really nothing in and of itself. It's just a fiction sitting there doing nothing until you decide that it is more than that. And then you give it all the meaning it has. Changing your mind about is remains entirely possible.

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son. And until you realize that God's Son CANNOT be crucified, this is the world you will see."

"You are safe in God, dreaming of exile (hell), but perfectly capable of waking to reality."

So hell - the world - is there to POTENTIALLY tempt you, or to at least very strongly lean in the direction of being a demonstration of "real evil" and impossibilities. A picture of the opposite of God, or the anti-christ. But if you decide not to BELIEVE it, then you stop supporting it, and it loses its seeming power. Because it has no power other than what you give to it. It NEEDS your support in order to even seem to exist at all, because you are dreaming it.

This means the way "out of hell" is to learn to side with God, with heaven. To be vigilant for the Kingdom, ie to put all your focus and value and wanting and trusting onto what is actually real. Which means denying the world and not falling for temptation.

"The world you see must be denied"

"True denial is a very powerful protective device. You can and should deny any belief that error (hell) can hurt you. This kind of denial is NOT a concealment device, but a correction device. The "Right Mind" of the mentally healthy DEPENDS on it."

As you side with reality/heaven, you side against the illusion of an evil world. You become more identified with spirit and stronger in the truth. You learn that only God's truth is true and learn to better catch yourself when you fall for the potential trap of ego and external salvation.

To NOT believe that the world is REALLY hell, is to be saved from it. Because it in truth is not really anything. It is only an illusion of hell pretending to be hell. And it has no reality or truth or strength or anything at all APART from what you give it. Apart from your wishes. Yet if you choose to believe in it, you will become very confused and lost and deceived.

It's like a world of smoke and mirrors which can do nothing unless you give it your faith. And by doing so you go into it and become confused. To get out of it you literally have to learn to say NO to everything the world says is happening or possible, and say YES to everything that God says is possible. Ultimately, ONLY God is possible, and the world CANNOT exist at all.

The simple recognition that only the truth is true, is the culmination of a process of purification which leads to the atonement, and to enlightenment. It is the simple recognition that hell is nothing and there is nothing in it that you want, and therefore nothing in it can tempt you or hurt you in any way.

You are done with your window shopping for death's costumes and now are ready to move on to reality and to eternal life.

"The imagined usurping of functions not your own is the basis of fear. The whole world you see reflects the illusion you have done so, making fear inevitable. To return the function to the One To Whom it belongs is thus the escape from fear. And it is this that lets the memory of love return to you. Do not, then, think that following the Holy Spirit's guidance is necessary merely because of your own inadequacies. It is the way out of hell for you."

I'm learning recently that my mind and attitude may well affect other people. I think this is part of being more responsible for what my mind is doing "to itself", and extends to others, in that whatever I am doing to myself I am also attempting to do to others. Whatever sense of sin or guilt I have about myself I am likely to project. And this projecting is a kind of psychological attack that accuses and weakens others.

I notice that all the various thoughts I have about a person, all the fears, wonderings, ideas, visualizations of what may or may not happen, form a kind of "broadcast" that I experience as kind of "in front of me". Perhaps I experience it as being outside of me or coming out of me, due to the disassociation of projection.

So there is this whole "wall" or screen filled with ego thoughts that I am pushing out of me. And so by even having these thoughts at all, "about" someone, it's as if I am putting those thoughts onto the person and holding them within it. Framing them in my ideas about them, and trying to make it apply to them. Even if these thoughts seem harmless in the thinking of them.

Whatever I think about them is a form of framing them, interpreting them, deciding what to see in them, having an opinion about their condition etc. And the thing is, the ego has this really sneaky way of suggesting that "all thoughts are neutral", "you can think anything without having any effect", "your opinion is unbiased".

Early in the workbook we're told that "I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts". That's a pretty major deal right there. And it also taps into the fact that our minds are powerful and our thoughts have effects. It also says "I have no neutral thoughts", so the ego myth of a neutral unbiased objective opinion or evaluation of what something is or is not doing, is a lie. Every thought is biased and has an influence and an effect and is a DECISION to see or believe in a certain way, NOT an impartial detached idea.

The power of the mind to affect real consequences is something which Jesus says we are afraid of.

"People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them. Therapists try to help people who are afraid of their own death wishes by depreciating the power of the wish. They even attempt to "free" the patient by persuading him that he can think whatever he wants, without ANY real effect at all."

So you could put it this way. Either you are broadcasting love to people, or you are broadcasting fear and attack to people. How's that for responsibility? The whole collection of ego interference, predictions, controls, visualizations, imaginings, worries, concerns, etc that my mind has, are all forms of attack. So if I'm not loving, I'm attacking. "What is not love is murder." Gotta get honest here. We are either healers and blessers, or we are attackers.

I see that if I'm in attack mode, which is unto myself but also now seems to be "about someone not myself", and is still an idea in my own mind, that can't exactly be helpful to others. In fact it's what Jesus refers to as imprisoning your brother. And he even goes as far as to say that we're capable of cursing people with this.

""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."

So if someone is already in some ways cursing themselves, weakening themselves, and you then start to go into a reaction, and start to join with them in this belief, and fall for ego illusions, and have fears and other attack (non-light) thoughts about them, you are cursing them and reinforcing their errors. Your thoughts are NOT idle or private, they are having effects. Fortunately, negative ego thoughts are likely "weaker" than light-filled miracle thoughts.

Most likely it's accurate to say, we are all pretty sick minded and spend most of our time attacking each other psychologically. If I am in sin and guilt, I am not really going to be very helpful to others. I am likely cursing people all the time, not blessing them. If I want to be a miracle worker, in which I express love to people which actually has the power to affect them positively, to heal their minds and bodies, to set them free from imprisonment, then I am going to get my own mind healed so that I can bless, not curse.

When you withhold or cease to attack/project sin with the mind, when you are not being in fear, when your ego isn't running wild with interference and planning and deciding everything and playing God, when you are listening and following God's will and trusting Him in love, you effectively "take off of" others the chains of imprisonment and the curses you have been putting onto them. This DOES appear to have an EFFECT on them. You are now "not supporting" THEIR own self-curse and are not reinforcing their own weakness. Instead you supply the lack and strengthen them through your miraculous blessing.

"The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH The sick must heal THEMSELVES, for the truth is IN them. But, having OBSCURED it, the light in ANOTHER mind must shine into theirs, because that light IS theirs."

So there is this pivotal message in the course. Either we are in a state of attack upon ourselves and others, which imprisons us AND them, in which we actually act like a prison guard controlling and isolating and defining people's confinement to ideas of limitation, OR we are setting ourselves and our brothers free by shining freedom onto them which actually HELPS them. By not supporting their self curse, we can perform miracles to alleviate their own imprisonment. Your loving mind CAN HEAL OTHER MINDS!

"The miracle is the act of a Son of God who has laid aside all false gods, and who calls on his brothers to do likewise. It is an act of faith, because it is the recognition that his brother CAN do it. It is a call to the Holy Spirit in his mind, a call to Him which is strengthened by this joining. Because the miracle-worker has heard Him, he strengthens His Voice in a sick brother by weakening his belief in sickness, which he does NOT share. The power of one mind CAN shine into another, because all the lamps of God were lit by the same spark. It is everywhere, and it is eternal."

So we have to ask ourselves a humble question. Do we want to be a prison guard, controller, attacker, limiter, interferer, free-will denyer, and curser today.... or will we get out of the way and be miracle working healers who can only bless and extend love and who can literally bring about the release of others by our willingness to ONLY bless with thoughts of light, strength, support and love? We can resurrect the dead by believing in our own life. We can heal our brothers. This is the goal.

Our thoughts exert real influence. This is why we have to learn about the power of the mind. This is why we have to learn to be careful and responsible about what we think. Even our so-called "private thoughts" are being received by others. If you think poorly of someone, watch how they start to act negatively in return, because they DID receive your broadcasts even if you didn't speak in person.

If you take back all your projected bullshit and stop attacking yourself and others, watch how people start to miraculously awaken and heal in your presence. The strength of the Holy Spirit's light in you is powerful enough to resurrect the dead, waken the sleeping, and cure the sick.

"Very few people appreciate the real power of the mind. Nobody remains fully aware of it all the time. This is inevitable in this world, because the human being has many things he must do, and cannot engage in constant thought-watching. However, if he hopes to spare himself from fear, there are some things he must realize, and realize them fully, at least some of the time.

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."

"While expressions like "think big" give some recognition to the power of thought, they still come nowhere near the truth. You do not expect to grow when you say it, because you don't really believe it. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains. "

"Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation."

"Now is Christ's power in your mind to heal as you were healed."

"The thoughts which the mind of God's Son projects, HAVE all the power that he has"

If you meet a person who complains a lot, they frame themselves as a victim and then tell you all the many many ways that someone or some group of people are wrong. They go on and on and on and on and on endlessly. And meanwhile you feel like you are being held hostage and can't get away and you can't shut them up. And then as you try to leave, they follow you and keep on going with their diatribe.

What's happening is the person is full of guilt and shame and secretly condemns themselves a lot. They see themselves as victimised by all the many things in the world that they seem to not like. But they are not being spiritually responsible, for their experiences and feelings, so constantly accuse the world of causing it. They feel justified in pointing a finger of blame and listing off all the many sins they see outside themselves, but really because they themselves believe they are sinful. They hate themselves, so they like to hate others. Their shit don't stink, and they portray themselves as always idyllic and harmless and justified in being righteous.

The payoff for them is that if they can project their sins onto other people and find everyone to be guilty, it makes them have a certain sense of psychological relief from the heavy burden of their own hidden guilts. They get to come off as innocent and not like those who sin, separated off from them, and therefore not the guilty one. It produces an illusion that they believe they are not guilty, which is a form of denial.

Meanwhile, the more that they do this, the more they are basically imprisoning others. They are projecting their own imprisonment, and in effect really see themselves as imprisoned by their own guilt. They are locked in and stuck in their own confinement, so are expressing confinement to you. And that makes you feel like you are being locked in confinement. Whether or not they actually target you or complain about something you are believing or doing, it doesn't matter, because they want your indirect acknowledgement that they're right and that you are bearing witness to their innocence.

So long as you agree with them, don't stop them, allow them to spew, and go along with it as though condoning it and not challenging it, they will keep going and never end. They find validation by your passive receipt of it. Meanwhile their condemning blaming imprisoning vibe can make you feel like you're being held hostage and that the other person is using you, like you're chained to them and have to hear the long list of sins, so that they'll feel better about themselves. They don't want to let you go or be free because they won't be able to scapegoat and get rid of their guilt. It's really a guilt dump onto you so that they feel better, in illusion.

There is another way that this plays out. I've noticed if someone sees themselves as a victim and isn't being spiritually responsible, they'll believe that things you personally do make them feel unpleasant, guilty, shameful etc. They will then accuse you of being the cause of their suffering, even though they did it to themselves by taking something personally. They will twist what you said and use it against you as though you caused them to have a reaction. And now they'll start to get angry at you and scapegoat you and demand an apology.

This becomes a form of intimidation, where responsibility has been shifted, and now you supposedly are responsible for making them feel better. They hold what they did to themselves against you, and now you feel like it's your fault, you feel guilty, and now you feel like you have to atone or make it up to them. You have to now grovel and lower yourself and make an apology, after which they grin with delight that they forced it out of you and made themselves feel superior.

It becomes a kind of tyrannical relationship of control and blame, where you are accused of causing them what they're supposed to be responsible for. You feel imprisoned by this accusation, and supposedly guilty for causing them. They get this angry strong opinion about how you're wrong. They totally depend externally on someone apologising or meeting their needs or sucking up to them, in order for them to feel better, because they are not being responsible for how they feel. They depend externally on this positive feedback and getting positivity from others, to make up for their lack of responsibility for feeling shit. And meanwhile they judge the living shit out of everyone and everything.

So then you start to feel obligated and held hostage and like you can't tell them they're wrong. Since they depend so heavily on external validation, you also sense that if you were to say anything against them or that they might take as an attack or that they might think of as not validating their bullshit, they will become even more angry and negative and scapegoating, and then they'll become a big monster and do something even more threatening and aggressive and controlling. So then you become afraid that they'll have power over you, control you, manipulate you, and that you're not good enough.

This kind of person is so victimy and so dependent on externals and so believing the physical world and generally likely atheistic and non-spiritual, such that they act like a gatekeeper and superior person whose opinion has to be requested on all matters. Like they are really important and special. And if you agree with them they shower you with ultra positivity and loveliness, and if they don't agree with you they go into an angry pout mode and become aggressive.

The special love flips to special hate. So now it's very hard to question their motives or to point out their flaws or to push back on their strong opinion because you know they'll just go into attack mode and make you an enemy. So instead they get to stay in a kind of 'everything's wonderful' state of illusion and fake special love relationship and dishonesty and irresponsibility, acting like they have the face of innocence all pleasant and nice to everyone, only to become an enraged monster when anyone points out their bullshit.

Either way you can end up feeling held hostage by someone's ego, with demands that you act a certain way, or indirectly demands that others act a certain way, in order for them to be happy. It can be difficult to stand up to and to draw a boundary with these people, to stop them from their spewing or to raise doubts about their motives. In both cases the person is a scapegoater, a judger and a hater of the things in the world that they consider wrong.

They segment the world into positives and negative, side heavily with what they like and side heavily against what they don't like. This is a spilritualizaiton of the world, an attempt by their egos to make out that some parts of the illusion are better than others, and leads to believing that they themselves are better than others. In their siding with the face of innocence they become overpowering and seeing themselves as holier than thou. In effect, those who portray themselves as the innocent victims tend to be the most vicious accusers.

"The partly innocent are apt to be quite stupid at times." UrT3D3

"This is particularly unfortunate, because frightened people are apt to be vicious" UrT3C15

"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." UrT31E2

"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." UrT31E4

Jesus clearly refers to the physical body dying. He remarks about how the physical worms eat the physical body. Which is indeed true. Go dig up a freshly buried corpse and look at the worms. Just as the body is destructible and can be destroyed, so too are the worms destructible and can be destroyed. What do you suppose the worms would eat if this world was heaven and there was no destruction and no way to take anything away from anything?

The worms wouldn't even eat, because eating is part of the devouring aspect of destruction. And human bodies wouldn't eat or digest either because all that means is they harvest chunks of the world and kill them off and destroy them and shit them out.

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds It from awareness like a shield held to obscure the sun. The grimness of the symbol is enough to show it cannot co-exist with God. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction. Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life." God is insane, and fear alone is real."

When people suggest that planet Earth is God's creation and is real, it sets off my immediate bullshit alarms. There is absolutely no two ways about it, and no way to twist it around. We could say, well, the world is totally neutral, it doesn't have any meaning, so if an animal seems to die and we strip away all meaning, we could say that's totally neutral and means nothing and its not really death and its not really life. We could smile on it and love it and be joyful even as it happens and clap our hands as human bodies are mowed down my machine guns and bombs which we celebrate along with God as the children are savagely killed.

We could celebrate happily as the bodies are blown up. And if the bodies were real, that would indeed be quite insane. Who would be able to feel joyful about people's bodies getting killed off if the bodies are really people and the world is real? If the world is real all those victims are horribly mistreated and destroyed against their will and it is all terribly upsetting. There is NO WAY to be happy about that, if it is true. The mind HAS to suffer because of its belief that it is true.

We could say, well, if you lift away all judgements and all meanings and sense of guilt and attack and calling some things bad or wrong and labelling some things as horrible etc, then what are we left with? A strangely neutral meaningless world in which, even so, the machine guns are blazing and the bombs are ripping through the bodies and all the nice creatures are snuffing it still. Can this really be completely natural and normal and sane and the way things really are? Can this really be the hallmark of a completely loving creator?

Can it be, in all honesty, the will of a loving creator God, to create a world which is simultaneously regarded as perfect and harmless and holy and innocent and joyous and eternal and safe and free from all attack, smiling upon it like it's an absolutely beautiful creation, while simultaneously the actual forms of the world continues to fight and kill each other and suffer? While the pain receptors are still firing and the bombs are still destroying the houses and the bullets are still ripping holes in people's bodies. If you are totally forgiving toward it and seeing it with love and holiness then it could perhaps reflect heaven. But this heaven would have to be still separate from the things that occur.

It would be quite ridiculous to suggest that God in his infinite love would simultaneously love AND attack, or create beautiful things AND cause them to not last and to destroy each other and to change their forms such that none of them have long to exist at all, becoming unrecognisable and forgotten. Does it really make sense to suggest that even a world loved and forgiven that continues to have creatures falling down holes and weather freezing bodies and starvation and pain and all manner of limitations and difficulties, that this would make Earth BE heaven? It simply cannot be.

Who wants a God that is so contradictory that he produces a chaotic world while laughing about it? Who wants a God that in his infinite unlimited unconditional love produces environments for his creations to live in which simultaneously attack them and make their lives difficult? Who wants a God that "allows death to happen" as though He Himself condones and causes and sanctions and lives it? And who wants a world created by such a split-minded freak? Surely anyone with half a brain can at least see that the idea of God creating this world is utterly nonsense.

Some people will take this obviousness - that the suffering in the world is ridiculous and no-one can love it if it's real - and draw a conclusion. Either you could conclude the world is real and therefore life is bullshit and God is an asshole or doesn't exist at all. Or you could conclude that God does exist and is not an asshole and instead the whole world is not his creation. Either the world is real and God sucks, or the world is not real and God is great. Those are the only options. And thankfully God's reality guarantees that the suffering can end forever.

The strange twisted unforgiving loveless difficult limiting world of Earth and space and time is not of God. You can look upon it without judgement and forgive it, you can project the meaning of love onto it, you can transcend its separations and overlook its differences of form, you can bypass its behaviours and its faults and shortcomings, and remain in a happy state in spite of it. But to think that this means the world IS heaven is a huge mistake.

Heaven, the Kingdom of God, the world created by a truly loving and benevolent creator, could never even so much as CONCEIVE of forms and shapes that conflict, of scarcities that require feeding, of such things as weather which threatens existence, of wars and war machine and weapons, of having any such bullshit as a part of his pure perfect divine holy mind and life. Regardless of forgiving these things, of lifting away the demonising of these things, or labelling them as sinful, regardless of shining happily upon them as the light of the world and blessing them with love and healing, EVEN THEN the machinery of spacetime marches on its dismal chaotic endless tirade of destruction and uncertainty and constant indecision.

God could never create a world such as this. And if he could, he could not be a God, nor could he live, because his own nature would be to be partly alive and partly dead. He would be literally devouring parts of himself, destroying parts of himself only to make up new parts that were nothing like the ones that came before. This constant shifting and changing and fluxing of reality would mean that nothing is real AT ALL because there is no stable reality or constant state or perfect dependable anything. If God created the Earth, God is fragmented and deceptive and has multiple personalities and is at war with himself and is insane.

Anyone with half an ounce of sanity should recognize that a world such as the physical is absolutely in all ways and to all degrees utterly removed from what God could EVER be capable of creating or condoning. It is NOT his will that you live in this environment, in this way, with these objects, around these things, with these happenings. The world is insane and God wants better for you than this. God has created an environment for you in and as heaven which is so perfect you would laugh hysterically at even the suggestion that Earth could match up to its qualities.

This has nothing to do with hating Earth, or judging it or attacking it, or condemning it, or dwelling on its negativities, or amplifying its faults. It just is what it is. It is a flawed mistaken world made from insane minds that thought they could do better WITHOUT God. It just is what it is and nothing more. It simply is far short of the divinity of heaven and the perfection of real creation. A beautiful mistake at best, a half-hearted effort at best, and a rather confused strange twisted mistaken effort at best. But you can do better, and you deserve better.

We know the secret of salvation tells us that we are doing everything to ourselves, but we also need to realize how it applies to others. The only way to correctly grasp how it applies to others, is to recognize you are ONE WITH others. If you are your brother, and your brother is part of you, then anything that applies will apply to BOTH of you simultaneously.

If you are one with them, this gives you new insight into the secret of salvation. If you try to do anything to them, you will realize that you are doing this to yourself. Giving and receiving are one. But also anything THEY try to do "to you", they are also doing to themselves.

This becomes very obvious when you regard them as one with you. If you are one with them, you are a part of them. As part of them, when they do something "to you only", they are also doing it to themselves. The secret of salvation now applies to the part of you that is your brother. Your brother is doing it to themselves. In truth, the secret of salvation isn't just about you doing things to yourself (selfishly), but in fact tells us that EVERYONE DOES EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE.

When you are one, anything that is done is done to both. Everything is shared. Anything you alone give, you also receive. Anything they alone give, they also receive. The two of you are doing everything to the two of you. Anything anyone does is done to the whole sonship. When ego comes along, by which I mean separation, it always results in a sense of NOT being one. We separate off and stop sharing, because ego is about selfishness. This selfishness seems to imply that what I do to another person I DO NOT do to myself. And in turn, what they seem to do to me, they DO NOT do to themselves.

This is the default mode of arguments, fights, annoyances, upsets, reactions, special relationships, and all manner of conflict. It always appears that the other person is separate from you. Therefore, if you are angry at the person you SEEM not to be angry at yourself. If they are angry at you, they SEEM not to be angry at themselves. But this is a breakdown in the truth and is NOT the whole truth.

It is ALWAYS true that anything anyone does, they do to themselves. This is the golden rule, the law of God, and it is not negotiable. It applies to everyone everywhere at all times. Even when you think someone is doing something exclusively to you and not themselves (or others), THEY ARE. If you see yourself as separated off, you WILL NOT see this. You will fail to recognize that they're hurting themselves.

If you are separate from your brother, the TWO of you are separate from each other. You now see anything they do to you as being done ONLY to you, and not to themselves. And vice versa. You won't be able to recognize that anything is shared, and you won't realize that they are actually doing it to themselves as well.

The only way to break out of this is to join minds, share identities, recognize your brother as part of yourself, and be one with them. This means INCLUDING THEM in everything, just as you simultaneously include yourself in everything. Anything that applies, applies to BOTH of you at once.

In this oneness you can immediately see the efforts of the other person to separate off. You can see how when they attack, seeming to attack only you, they ARE also attacking themselves. You can see that YOUR attempted attacks are not only toward them, but also toward yourself. This INCLUSIVENESS is the light in which you can see the whole picture.

Having included your brother within yourself, within the scope of who and what you are, two as one, it becomes effortless, natural, and constant, to remember that everything always applies to BOTH. To you AND the other. Both/And is always the logic of the golden rule, while Either/Or is always the logic of the separation/ego.

Now when your brother appears to try to separate off and attack only you and not themselves, you will know that THEY ARE attacking themselves. They must have attacked themselves first in order to be projecting onto you. You will be open to seeing this. You will be open to recognizing they are hurting just as much as they're trying to make you hurt. You will not fall for the deception that their attack only applies to you, and you will see them as hurting themselves.

This is how you then become able to recognize a "call for love". Only in a SHARED STATE can you recognize the call for love, because you have to be open to the fact that giving and receiving are one. A person is recognized as calling for love when they are trying to DENY the shared state, trying to REJECT the golden rule, and are PRETENDING that it does not apply. When you KNOW it applies, because you ARE APPLYING IT, this will shed great light on the relationship and show you the truth about who is doing what to whom.

A person who seems to attack only you, trying to be excluded from the attack, is now clearly seen to be trying to hurt themselves. You no longer can play the role of victim, or see them as being solely a victimizer. You no longer fall for the attempts to frame you as the sole evil one, and instead you can have compassion as a result of ENCOMPASSING your brother in yourself. Wrapping them in the inclusive truth and seeing them from a perspective of WHOLENESS.

Recognizing your brother is attacking themselves, OBVIOUSLY compels you to a sense of compassion and understanding, and a response of love. The call for love, seen correctly as self-attack, and seen only IN a state of unconditional love (shared interests, joined minds, shared identity), now inspires ONLY LOVE as a response. Since you are already seeing them WITH love, in order TO recognize their call for love, love is all you are giving and receiving. The call for love is answered with love, and sharing is its only function.

Your oneness makes this possible. Your separateness hides it from you. In oneness your shared inclusiveness of your brother puts your arm around them and comforts them. In oneness you see the two of you as equal and as joined. In oneness everything applies to both of you simultaneously. Anything they do they are doing to themselves. Anything you do you are doing to both of you.

In this dynamic it becomes impossible to see yourself or the other as a victim or victimizer, and love becomes the only obvious course of action. Nor can it be TRUE that what they claim about themselves is the truth, because YOU know that in your joined state YOU love both of you. If you know you are both equally loved, and they claim they are unloved, you will recognize their claim is FALSE. And so it does NOT apply to either of you. And in this oneness you are both lifted up by a miracle.

"The only judgment involved at all is in the Holy Spirit's one division into two categories; one of love, and the other, the call for love."

"Each one must share one goal with someone else, and in so doing, lose all sense of separate interests. Only by doing this is it possible to transcend the narrow boundaries the ego would impose upon the self. Only by doing this can teacher and pupil, therapist and patient, you and I, accept Atonement and learn to give it as it was received."

"Those who would learn the same course share one interest and one goal. And thus he who was the learner becomes a teacher of God Himself, for he has made the one decision that gave his teacher to him. He has seen in another person the same interests as his own." "For fear IS a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied."

"Perceive in sickness but another call for love, and offer your brother what he believes he cannot offer HIMSELF. Whatever the sickness, there is but one remedy. You will be made whole as you MAKE whole, for to perceive in sickness the appeal for health, is to recognize in hatred the call for love. And to give a brother what he REALLY wants, is to offer it unto yourself. For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself. Answer HIS call for love, and YOURS is answered. Healing is the love of Christ for His Father, and for HIMSELF."

"Mistakes are FOR correction. They call for NOTHING ELSE. What calls for punishment, must call for NOTHING. Yet every mistake MUST be a call for love. What, then, is sin? What COULD it be but a mistake you would keep hidden; a call for help that you would keep UNHEARD, and thus UNANSWERED?"