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Before the physical universe came into being, there was only the Son of God and no "other".

The mind of the Son of God contained a state of guilt, which arose from the belief in the separation happening (sin).

The Son of God then attempted to deny this guilt, making it unconscious. This denial created an illusion, a facade, that the Son of God was not guilty.

To do that, He had to invent a "picture" i.e. illusion to cover up the guilt, a picture of innocence. And this innocence had to be seen as vulnerable and powerless, so that all sense of guilt could be hidden. Only an idea of harmlessness and vulnerability would suffice.

It was through this denial that the physical universe was "put in place" to cover up the guilt in the One mind, which now became the collective unconscious mind.

The surface facade of this cover-up features "newborns" to portray this facade of innocence. Whether it be newborn babies or new plants growing or new puppies or a new planet or whatever.

The "birth" of the universe is based or starts from this idea of vulnerable innocence. Real innocence is strong and invulnerable. Fake innocence is weak and vulnerable, and only this would suffice as the opposite of being responsible for sin.

Human bodies, as babies, then are symbols which represent or try to convince us that the Son of God is not guilty. They portray Him as weak and tiny and powerless and helpless, as though anything could happen to Him and He could not happen to anything. This is the perfect cover-up for guilt. Who would suspect a baby?

The human body, therefore, is the mask of innocence, or the collective "persona" of the Son of God. It is what we wanted to show to ourselves, in denial of what is hidden in the unconscious. And then the larger unconscious mind is projected out as the rest of the universe.

We then find ourselves showing up as innocent, and with a state of so-called "amnesia", not remembering what came before. That amnesia is the implementation of denial in the mind, blocking the unconscious guilt.

The body then is a mask which the mind wears to portray itself as contained inside of that mask, vulnerable to the world and capable of being affected by it. The body, being a victim of and product of the world, is therefore represented as the one who "did not do it", i.e. did not put the world in place.

Even though the mind has created the body to be a victim, susceptible and vulnerable, it secretly wants this because it allows it to maintain denial and keep ownership of the guilt at bay.

Everything outside of the body is the "shadow", the unconscious mind in which the guilt is swirling around producing world events. Literally, and symbolically, we have shadows outside of our bodies.

And so our unconscious mind is now outside of the body, our conscious mind is inside of the body, and the body is our self image. It's not that we have a self image on-top of the body or an imaginary self-image in the mind, the body IS that image in the mind.

Fake innocence therefore is a collective coverup which starts at birth and maintains a denial of the unconscious guilt. The body itself, as the face of that innocence, is the block which prevents us from being aware of this unconscious guilt. The presence of the body at all is a demonstration that the mind behind it does not want to admit to being a sinner. It is a device for maintaining unconsciousness.

We come to believe that all that is left of us is the body, which is innocent, and is who we are, and is all of who we are. We do not remember that there was another portion of our mind which we have made unconscious, have projected outward, and are in denial of even existing.

In order to heal the unconscious guilt, you have to realize that your belief that you are innocent is not real. There is an entire layer of fake innocence stopping your mind from being consciously aware of your own belief in sin. Your belief that the body is real therefore blocks your awareness of your mind and its content (and its power to choose).

You believe your body self is all there is to you. You believe you are not the cause of your problems because you are innocent and you do not see anywhere in your awareness where you seem to be doing anything to yourself. That's because the part of you doing it to yourself is outside of your conscious awareness. It is un-conscious.

We have to then realize that we've made ourselves be in this position of being a victimizable, falsely innocent vulnerable body, as the symbolic representation of the idea of what happens after you deny your guilt. You're automatically in denial and unconscious and believing that you are only your innocent self, as soon as you "emerge" into this fake world of victimhood.

There is thus a veil of fake innocence, which aligns with physical form, which is blocking our awareness not only of unconscious guilt, but also is blocking awareness of the level of mind which came before so-called "incarnation".

Incarnation is just a state of entering into denial and going unconscious and ending up in a state of partial awareness, clueless about the larger mind that you just fled from. Incarnation is seen as an escape from guilt, and a desire to see yourself as innocent, even though deep down you do not believe it.

We have to realize this layer of this belief in being innocent, i.e. this unawareness that we ourselves actually believe we are sinful and guilty, is quite a strong layer of repression and denial. It is making us believe we're not the one who is guilty, even though we are experiencing the presence of guilt outside of us (which is our unconscious mind, made to seem separate from and "outside" of our conscious identity).

We don't suspect that we might have this guilt or that we even believe in it ourselves. We are busy believing that other people are guilty, because we do not even see that we ourselves unconsciously believe that we ourselves are guilty.

What we have done to ourselves, condemning ourselves with sin and judging ourselves as guilty, is the ONLY reason why we are upset, it is the only reason we are incarnate as a body-self, and it is the only reason why stuff is attacking us.

When we can become aware of the fact that we are faking our innocence and own up to believing in our guilt, we bring the guilt back into conscious awareness where we can at least now question whether it is true. This requires us to admit to the ways that we try to defend and maintain our "innocence" in order to keep our denial intact and repress the unconscious guilt.

Upon seeing that you yourself have attacked yourself, that you have condemned yourself, that you are the one who believes you are guilty, it is impossible to continue to pretend to yourself that your situation is being caused by someone else. What they allegedly were causing in you was actually coming from you. Admitting this is the secret to salvation - that you are only doing this to yourself.

We then must question whether we are guilty, because it is not real guilt. It is not causal guilt. Guilt is an effect of sin. And then we must question whether we are sinful, because it is not a real sin. It has not taken place in reality, nor has it affected reality at all. It has taken place only within an illusion and nothing more.

Therefore in reality, nothing has happened, and in truth, we MUST still be TRULY innocent. Believing this and accepting this as true is accepting the atonement. The atonement locates and identifies who we are OUTSIDE of the physical universe.

To uncover the unconscious mind and make it conscious and heal it, is to make your mind whole again. It also MUST mean that the facade of fake innocence must disappear. It was a device to maintain denial, and if you are no longer in denial, you do not have such a mask.

Given the human body IS that mask, and it is the belief in separation made manifest, and it is a device for denial, and its purpose was to maintain unconsciousness, if you are now choosing awareness you are literally undoing the need for or purpose of having a body at all. It is the persona, the false self image, designed to cover up the mind and block you from admitting to the truth, or from taking responsibility for what you have done to yourself.

Without a belief in sin and guilt, there is no further need for a body. The mind will simply cease to implement denial, which was a defense against the truth. And therefore the body, which was a defense against the truth, and therefore a sickness, MUST simply cease to exist. It must disappear because the guilt, which compelled the NEED for a body, has been undone.

This is because the mind has exited its identification and location within the realm of the fake innocent self - the physical universe - which WAS the unconscious mind, now made conscious, and therefore the mind has transcended the physical universe. This is ascension. This is what happens upon full completion of the atonement. It is a return to Heaven because it is an acceptance that Heaven is real and this world of fakery and false masks does not really exist.

We are children of God. We belong in the realm of love. We are innocent, forgiven and worthy of love, forever holy and eternally beautiful as an extension of God. None of this universe even happened and when it is recognized as the illusory device of denial that it is, it will disappear.

Everything about practicing the Course could be described as moving "backwards". Accustomed to how the ego operates always "forwards" this can at first seem counter-intuitive and a difficult "direction" for the mind to operate in.

Purification and correction are entirely geared towards a backwards motion, such as retracing your steps, seeking inward rather than outward, undoing, reversing, collapsing, deflating ego, re-winding time, digging deeper to find the true inner cause, looking "behind", getting to the core of oneself, going within, taking attention away from illusions, becoming whole, acknowledging what already is, accepting what is already true, receiving what is already given, lifting away layers of false belief, recognizing things for how they are, taking back projections, claiming responsibility for yourself, re-owning yourself, coming back to center, un-ravelling, seeking back through time to when beliefs were formed, reversing the effects of sin, cancelling, deleting, removing, restoring to a former state, moving backward to before any sense of something happening, returning to innocence, becoming aware of love which is already present, listening, receiving, accepting, allowing, reversing sickness and death, resurrection etc.

Notice that all of these procedures take you from being externally focused to focusing within, in the direction of yourself. The truth is inside of you. All of these actions return you to yourself.

Now, the ego is the total opposite of this in every way. The ego wants to always add something, increase denial, hide stuff behind new layers of illusions, implement things, find success, seek outside yourself, lose yourself, forget who you are, move away from yourself and God, project, attack, point a finger of blame away from you, destroy others, fight with an opposing will, acquire, get, consume the external (food etc), implement magical solutions which undo nothing, add lie upon lie, twist and distort things out of recognition, get rid of sin onto others, disassociate from yourself, believe that cause is outside of you, see yourself as an effect of the external, positioning yourself as a victim of something separate, pursuing wild goose chases and dead ends, running away from God, becoming alone and isolated, losing your mind and sanity, fragmentation, making others responsible for your existence, trying to get someone else to choose for you, trying to get someone else to love for you or to wake you up, going to sleep, living in ignorance, becoming unconscious, entering darkness, achieve, strive for goals, develop an image, accumulate and build stuff that never existed, fill the emptiness with idols, idol worship, seeking external salvation, believing that things outside you can save you and solve all problems, being sick as a result of an external cause, dying by someone else's hand, listening to the ego's counsel, making things worse, an eye for an eye, waging war, murder, etc.

Notice that all of these actions are in an outward direction, away from yourself. They are all designed to disconnect you from God and put distance between you and God and therefore between you and yourself. They take you away from yourself and place every attribute of yourself outside of you into someone else's hands.

The main difficulty I find is that having been in the ego mindset for such a long time, my mind has sort of become very used to or unconsciously has formed habits whereby the mind moves in a direction away from myself. It pursues the external and thinks in externalizing ways. It's like there's all these arrows pointing outward and it seems to make the mind "flow" in that direction automatically. Even normal "thinking" processes seem to head in the direction of the external and these are just accepted as automatic or "normal".

So then when we come to the Course, our mind is coming up against a set of truths and techniques which are all INWARD pointing, and basically flowing in totally the OPPOSITE direction to the ego's thought system. They all point towards God, towards your true self, towards what is inside of you already. Even just the simple idea that you need not seek to find love or teach love because that is what you are but that you need to REMOVE the obstacles you've built against it. We are not accustomed to REMOVING anything. We're accustomed to believing that we LACK God and therefore need to go seek for specialness and ADD it to ourselves in order to "become" loving or spiritual. That's totally the ego, KEEPING its belief in sin and hiding it and then pretending to try to find solutions to it externally, where solutions do not exist, and thus building layer upon layer of denial and failure. It's all the authority problem, believing we can add to or change God's creation into something better or more true.

So it's quite difficult to get the mind to even move in the direction of thinking inwards, thinking upwards, thinking IN REVERSE, or thinking towards what ALREADY EXISTS within you. To think in reverse means to go from where your mind is at to what came BEFORE it, rather than going from where your mind is at and proceeding forwards to some kind of next step. It seems alien. It seems unnatural at first. It seems to take steps that bring all of the illusion into question, all assumptions are undermined, and all beliefs have to be examined and exhumed and tossed out, all values are brought into question, every attachment has to be surrendered, all external structures are collapsed, and your whole life is brought into question. And that's not what the ego wants at all, and it's not how we're used to thinking. To question everything, to question sin and sickness and death. To assume nothing, and to believe nothing that even our body's senses are telling us. To travel backwards up the chain of causality to where we came from.

You are already as God created you, you are already love, you are already perfect, there is NOTHING you can add to God's creation or Kingdom other than to increase what is already in it, which is perfect joy and love and happiness. And you are already WHOLE, already complete, needing nothing, lacking nothing. All of this other stuff that you keep trying to deal with by ADDING or CHANGING layers of illusions, are ego solutions and ways of dealing with this, really attempts to hide it even more.

So like, something happens and your ego steps in with a reaction and says, oh my God, this thing is so externally real, it is really happening, and the future is going to suck, so I better do something about this. I know, I'm going to do this and that... and then comes up with a long list of reactions and plans and solutions which it is going to DO, to tackle what it itself made real, as though something really occurred. It creates this entire "chain of thought" or train of thought, which goes from "here" to way off in the distance down all kinds of twists and turns, taking you away from presence. We need to stop the train before it even leaves the station, get off it, and then look backwards down the tracks to where we CAME FROM and go in THAT direction, undoing, backtracking, reversing and returning, inwardly and upwardly BACK to the truth, BACK to the answer to end all questions, and BACK Home to God.

To think with Holy Spirit is to think BACKWARDS. This requires us to initially STOP and put the pause button on. Freeze-frame things. Freeze the entire scenario and just observe what it contains, from a big perspective. And then start to REVERSE the steps we have already taken, to backtrack, to look at our real hidden motives (secret sins/hates etc), and to UNDO layer upon layer of false beliefs and projections and stuff that we basically tried to ADD to ourselves already, that has led to us witnessing a falsely perceived situation. But this seems awkward and counter-intuitive - or at least counter-ego. It's therefore essentially all about letting go and letting God, relinquishing attachments, surrendering to what is already true, accepting God as God is, returning to yourself, and becoming EMPTY of all the stuff that you "added" to yourself to try to make yourself become something you are not - different to how God created you (and how you still are, buried under the ego lies).

To question... "has this even really happened" - that's a totally backwards step which brings into question any ASSUMPTION that the ego has made, and digs way deeper into what is happening than to react to it and try to fix it or attack it with Course quotes or to deny it with fake positivity or to build a spiritual ego to defend against it (and keep it). To stop and go backwards, to ask, is this even real? Why do I believe this? Where is my perception coming from? Why have I chosen this? How did I put this in place myself? Who am I really underneath this? Is this really true of me? Not ACCEPTING stuff into your mind.

As Jesus says, whatever you accept into your mind, it becomes real to you. The ego automatically is just accepting everything "into" the mind like a black hole sucking the life out of everything. We have to learn to stop that, to think in reverse, and to cancel the ego, to go within, to reverse our thinking processes and develop this new "inward direction" which flows away from illusions and towards the PRE-EXISTING truth and love within us, which is already there and is already perfect. To ACKNOWLEDGE what is already true and accept it, rather than trying to REPLACE it or cover it up or deny it with stuff we MAKE (invent/add) with the ego.

At first this kind of backwards thinking is not at all easy for the mind to do. It seems like the mind has become "wired" to think forwards with the ego, outwardly. But gradually over time as you "practice" this and go through this PURIFICATION process, digging out and releasing old pain, getting to the bottom of things, finding yourself, taking back your power, returning to responsibility, accessing the power of choice, accepting atonement, it becomes easier because there is less of your own ego-aligned will working against you.

It's like you're literally learning how to reverse the direction of flow of a river. The mind has become separated from Spirit and is flowing out all by itself, broadcasting its own ideas and trying to replace God's creation with something of its own. That needs to be totally reversed and undone. We need to go back within and reconnect with God and plug ourselves back into the service of Spirit. It takes time to break out of the unconscious habits of flowing outward with the ego.

And there is a paradox here. Funnily enough, the more you go within and withdraw your projections away from the external and get to the core love that's already in you, THEN that's when love starts to radiate out from you. You don't become loving by trying to give give give without receiving.

You must receive inwards first. It's more like, you become a light bulb, the switch goes on, and you simply stay CENTERED and rooted in your true self, in Spirit, and you RADIATE from there, staying in that center at all times, instead of going away from yourself or abandoning or losing yourself. To the ego giving is a loss of yourself. To Spirit, giving INCREASES and you not only keep/hold onto your inner real self but you also SHARE that and it extends out on its own. Love extends because of what it is, without your help.

So to be more loving, stop dwelling on the external or on trying to sacrifice yourself or martyr yourself. Return inward to access awareness of love's presence and then simply SHINE from within. This is how God creates, by shining and radiating and sharing and extending, remaining true to Himself and still complete and anchored within Himself. He does not lose Himself in the process. This is how the Kingdom is increased. This is what it means to be the light of the world. To shine from within rather than to lose yourself. To become an intensely bright light which goes out from within. You have to BE WITHIN first in order to do that, and stay there. This outward shining is CREATION, and it is the same thing as sharing and extending. It is how God created you to begin with. And in that light you have never stopped being God's innocent child.

"The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is KNOW THYSELF. There is nothing else to learn. Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost. Whenever you are with anyone ELSE, you have another opportunity to find them. Your power and glory are in HIM BECAUSE they are yours. The ego tries to find them in YOURSELF, because he does not know where to look. But the Holy Spirit teaches you that if you look only at yourself you CANNOT find yourself because that is NOT what you are."

Each of us has an identity. God gave us an identity in and as part of Christ or the Sonship, which we share. But in the separation from God, we denied who we were and sought an identity that wasn't shared. That meant denying our mutual identity, placing us in a state of not being certain of who we are. Another way of saying that is that we became afraid of who we are.

Then we started trying to make an identity that would replace the identity we lost. We were out of touch with reality. So we started trying to assemble an identity from various illusions, and from things which are not really who or what we are. In particular we tried to identify with something isolated and alone, that you could call "only yours", rather than sharing an identity with others.

This included identifying with our bodies, believing that our body is our self. To do this our mind has to literally "attach" itself to "mix itself with" the body, trying to become "one" with it. As if to blur the lines between what is the body and what is our self. So that there is only one seeming self, not two. By trying to identify with a body, we're trying to hide our real identity and forget it, so that all that remains is the body self.

If I bind my definition of who and what I am, or what is true of me, to the body, then I am saying I AM a body. And then everything about the body I take personally as if it speaks of and defines me. Maybe I'll feel positive about my body for various reasons, due to how it looks or what it is capable of. Or maybe I'll feel negative about it based on it being ugly or defective. But both are still identifications with the body.

We can also shift to identifying with the mind, or with thoughts. When we have thoughts we can get a sense of an artificial sense of self, mixed in with the thinking. The mind can chatter away with its noise and the more it talks the more you mistake the talking for the person doing the talking. As if the sound of thought is the presence of someone. As if the thoughts are a self. And now you've identified with thinking, perhaps with intelligence or intellect, with memory or accumulation of knowledge.

You can also identify with social standing, your social background, class, race, gender, how much money you have, where your family seems to rank in terms of some social hierarchy, whether you are upper-class or lower, living in wealth or in poverty etc. You can also identify with failing to have much of a worthwhile identity in any of these areas, perhaps with a poor body and poor finances and poor living conditions, seeing yourself as identified as a helpless victim.

I think we can also identify with objects, with animals and pets, with places, with homes and cars etc. We can identify with our children, and literally feel as though what happens to them happens to us. As though they are a part of us, to such an extent that when they suffer we suffer, or we take everything that happens to them as a personal attack. This can lead to the identity of being a father or mother, someone who wants to keep that identity and not let it go, and who cannot deal with the empty nest.

These are all confused senses of who and what you are. And we're all looking for ourselves because think we lost ourselves. We sense that we are uncertain, thus afraid, of who and what we really are - or don't want to know. We don't remember our identity. It's like we have an amnesia. Whether it be an amnesia imposed by birth through crossing the barrier of dimensions and entering a body prison, or the illusion that every time you're born you start from scratch to build an identity.

"Each man makes one ego for himself, although it is subject to enormous variation because of its instability, and one for everyone he perceives, which is equally variable." "The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all."

So the big question really is, who are you? What are you? Are you the son of God as He created you? Or have you become something else? Do you want to be something else? Are you a body? Are you a relationship, or a child that you possess, or an object you own? Are you a social status or a financial position? Are you your job, or your role as a parent? Are you made of the guilt and fear and sin that you feel? Are you your thoughts and your thinking? Are you the intellect? Are you awareness? Do you have a soul?

Finding out who you really are, knowing yourself, is what Jesus says is the entire point of this course. It's about remembering and waking up to the recognition that you are still exactly the same identity that God created you to be forever. You are still Christ, you are still a soul, still part of the sonship, still perfect. Still a spiritual being. And your real identity is shared with all the other Sons of God.

So our whole process here is just sorting out, what are we experiencing as being our identity, who or what have we identified with or latched onto, what is it that we think is our self, and where have we put that? What have we tried to become "one with", other than God? What have we wrapped ourselves around in trying to portray ourselves as something God did not create?

If I think I am my body or my thoughts and have actually bound myself to them such that I seem to experience them "as me", then I am in need of correction. I am out of touch with who I really am and am believing I am something I am not. This means I lack awareness or awakening, or am unconscious. These mis-identifiations with things we are not, are blocks to awareness.

"I am not a body I am free, for I am still as God created me."

"Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. "

"The ego IS therefore a confusion in identification, which never had a consistent model, and never developed consistently."

"By accepting the Atonement for YOURSELF, you are deciding AGAINST the belief that you can BE alone, thus dispelling the idea of separation and affirming your true identification with the whole Kingdom as literally PART OF YOU. This identification is as beyond doubt as it is beyond belief. Your wholeness HAS no limits, because its being is in Infinity."

"EVERYTHING you perceive as the outside world, is merely your attempt to maintain your ego identification, for everyone believes that identification is salvation."

"They are reflections both of your own proper identification WITH your brothers, and of your own awareness that YOUR identification IS maintained by extension."

"The IDEA of separation PRODUCED the body, and remains connected TO it, MAKING it sick because of its identification WITH it."

"This false identification makes you incapable of understanding what anything is for."

"When you imprison yourself, you are losing sight of your true identification with me and with the Father. Your identification IS with the Father and with the Son. It CANNOT be with one and not the other. If you are part of one, you MUST be part of the other because they ARE One."

"In his complete identification with the Christ--the perfect Son of God, His one creation and His happiness, forever like Himself and One with Him - Jesus became what all of us must be."

"As long as your identification vacillates, (and B's is weak) you cannot accept the gift that belongs to you."

"Your identification with the Kingdom is totally beyond question except by you WHEN YOU ARE THINKING INSANELY."

"ALL attack is self attack. It cannot BE anything else. Arising from your OWN decision NOT to be what you ARE, IT IS AN ATTACK ON YOUR IDENTIFICATION. "

"Miracles praise God through men. They praise God by honoring his Creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because they deny body-identification and affirm Soul-identification. By perceiving the Spirit, they adjust the levels and see them in proper alignment. This places the Spirit at the center, where Souls can communicate directly."

"This is not my name alone, for ours is a shared identification. "

"The body is the ego's home by its own election. It is the only identification with which it feels safe, because the body's vulnerability is its own best argument that you CANNOT be of God."

"For example, if the identification is with the body, consciousness may distort superconscious impulses by denying their Source, and seeking their impact in the orgasm."

Everything real is of God, within God. God has no opposite because God is infinite, everywhere, always. It is not possible to leave God. There is nowhere that God is not. Anywhere "else", which must be unreal, does not exist.

"Ego", is nothing but a concept. It's an idea of a TOTAL OPPOSITE to God. Since God is absolute existence, the idea of an ego is "total non existence". Literally, this conceptual idea of total opposition to God DOES NOT EXIST. Non-existence has no existence at all.

The ego is also the idea that you can totally LEAVE God, be OUTSIDE of God, totally separate from and cut off from God, in an entirely separate realm of "existence", in which God is 100% absolutely absent and there is NO LIFE. It's the idea that you can and have left God entirely, have successfully separated from reality, and are now NOWHERE, not existing, having no life, in total oblivion.

This notion, this idea, of total opposition to and separate from God, IS the idea of the ego. But IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. Non-existence HAS no existence whatsoever. It is not possible to go there, exist there, be there or live there. We have not done this. Not even in our dreaming. It's a "goal", a "wish", but it is wishful thinking to believe you can accomplish it. God has no exit.

It is literally impossible to be outside of God's being. It is therefore literally impossible to be "inside" or "in" ego. In fact, the idea of ego is the idea of nothing. "The ego" has never lived, it has no life, no mind, no will, no power, no force, no opinion, absolutely nothing. It DOES NOT exist. It is literally NON-EXISTENCE. So all it can ever be to us is a CONCEPTUAL IDEA.

The "tiny mad idea" is the idea that IMPOSSIBLE NON-EXISTENCE actually exists. It is INSANE to believe this. You CAN believe impossible lies if you choose to, but this does not make them REAL, and believing it you MUST BE MISTAKEN.

You could not EVER even in the greatest delusion produce a state of non-existence. You could not separate yourself off from God's being. You could not leave God's reality. You could not produce a state opposite to God that HAS existence. You could not place yourself in a location that you can call "non-existence". Non-existence does not exist. Ever.

But what you DID DO, is you ATTEMPTED to APPROACH this state. You attempted to TRY to leave God. You tried to imagine that you COULD leave God completely, and that you had. And given that this was literally impossible, you WERE very confused, delusional, deceived and mistaken. You HAVE NOT DONE what you think you have done. ("There is no sin.")

It's kind of like, you are inside God still, but you imagine God has "outer walls". And then you imagine that you can push against these walls causing them to stretch. You think that if you push hard enough you will cause the walls to thin out. And that perhaps even in the greatest opposition to life imaginable, you'll be able to actually BREAK THROUGH .... to non-existence. That you'll literally be able to LEAVE God forever. To enter into some state where He DOES NOT exist.

The good news is, you WILL NEVER accomplish this, because all you could possibly do is enter NON-EXISTENCE which DOES NOT exist, so you CANNOT GO THERE. The ego is the idea of that place, that non-existence hell of nothingness, emptiness, lack of God, darkness, absence of light, lifelessness, death. It's a CONCEPTUAL REALM that does not exist. But you have used this concept of an "idea" of "what's it like to totally leave God forever", as a way to TRY TO DO SO.

It should be obvious this attempt is utterly pointless and futile. It cannot succeed. You are guaranteed to never not exist. All that you've "done", is ATTEMPT to leave God. You've pushed up against fictional boundaries, you've stretched the envelope, you've tried to blot God out of you mind so that you THINK you are not still inside of Him, and you've tried to make his outer walls as thin as possible. You reason that if you can ALMOST break through God's perimeter, He will become so thin that you will be able to OVERLOOK Him. And that then you'll be able to see PAST God, TO that non-existent realm. And this is what gives rise to FALSE PERCEPTION.

False perception is the attempt to overlook God in order to NOT SEE God, and instead to ignore and see PAST God TO that non-existent ego realm. And you will then start to IMAGINE that you CAN SEE a realm that doesn't exist. That you CAN SEE things which are IMPOSSIBLE and NOT THERE. And as Jesus clearly and correctly identifies this, this MUST be form a of hallucination. Because you CANNOT SEE what is NOT THERE, but believing you can and are MUST be delusional and hallucinatory.

You CANNOT REALLY SEE non-existence, but you keep trying to. And so you hallucinate A WORLD believing you are SEEING one. There IS NO WORLD, because there is NO OPPOSITE to GOD. The world, the illusory world you made, including Earth, is the insane system of thought produced by those driven mad by guilt. By people who believe they CAN SEE GOD's OPPOSITE. "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way." Earth is an hallucination by the insane, believing they are or have escaped God.

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you really understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who seem to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are wholly unreal? Could you have faith in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? And would you SEE it? Hallucinations disappear when they are recognized for what they are. This is the healing and the remedy. Believe them not, and they are gone. And all you need to do is recognize YOU did this. Once you accept this simple fact, and take unto yourself the power you GAVE them, YOU are released from them."

The making of this hallucinated world was an attempt to leave God and to produce a state where GOD IS ABSENT. A world OUTSIDE the Kingdom, a world of NON-EXISTENCE, non-life, non-love, non-reality.

"Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born"

Yet even in this so-called "separate world", it STILL is not outside of God. We DID NOT produce a state of total non-existence. Even this world has a limited degree of seeming reality. It is not "totally not here". And so in this world, which is, let's say, hovering on the outer border between God and non-existence, still within God (a dream of exile within God), the idea of physical death is the FINAL attempt to TOTALLY LEAVE GOD. It's how we try to put as much distance between ourselves and God as possible. To be as opposite to LIFE as possible.

We reason that, in death, we finally can LEAVE the realm where God exists a little. As if we think death is a doorway into the NON-EXISTENT realm of the ego. As if even the fake illusions of life and almost-death of this world, are still not "unlike God enough", and ONLY death can seal the deal and take us TOTALLY into that ego state. To cross over into the realm of non-existence. And as such, when we produce death, we are trying our hardest to LEAVE GOD and be NOTHING LIKE HIM. Death is a total unwillingness to live, to exist, to have anything of God, and to make His Son NOT EXIST. The attempt to do this is of course murderous and suicidal.

EVEN WHEN the body dies, unfortunately we STILL do not succeed in reaching the non-existent ego realm. The Son of God's spirit cannot be affected or killed, so we HAVE TO then carry on and reincarnate. Death FAILS to take us outside of God. Death FAILS to end life. Death is not the end of life, it is merely DENIAL of the fact that you CANNOT DIE because you CANNOT LEAVE THE LIFE OF GOD. Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.

So think of this world, Earth, as merely A FAILED ATTEMPT to leave God. A failed attempt to completely separate from existence. A failed attempt to die. It does not accomplish what it claims. It cannot succeed in destroying God or His Son. Death is pointless and futile. You might as well just acknowledge you are alive in God and live forever.

"Swear not to die you Holy Son of God, you have made a bargain that you cannot keep."

In this world, "separation from God" or the LEAVING of God, producing a state of NEAR death, near non-existence, is REVERSIBLE, because it is not total. It is not total non-existence or total ego. If it were "absolute separation", it could not be undone. The fact that it CANNOT BE separation proves it is limited in its capacity to accomplish anything. And this is why death can be reversed and resurrection is possible, even physically, because death is NOT TOTAL.

This world does not work. It is a failed attempt. Death is failure. It doesn't do what it claims to do. It will NOT complete the separation or take you outside God. You might as well stop trying to die and just live. You HAVE eternal life, you just keep rejecting it. Denying it. You're an eternal immortal being pretending to suffer and die as if that were ever possible. Pretending you are limited and mortal and affected and sick and suffering. It is futile. It will not bring about an escape from God. And sickness's only purpose is to TRY TO escape from God.

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

"Sickness is a defense against the truth."

"All forms of sickness even unto death (including physial death), are PHYSICAL EXPRESSIONS of the FEAR OF AWAKENING."

You cannot leave God. You have not left Home. You DREAM that you are outside the Kingdom. You imagine you have placed yourself BEYOND God's walls. You THINK you have succeeded in entering a non-existent lifeless realm where God does not exist. You have not. You are just sleeping and pretending to be exiled.

"What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

The ego DOES NOT EXIST. It's nothing but the CONCEPT of NON-EXISTENCE. It is another word for nothingness, impossibility, absolute void, godlessness, emptiness and absence. It HAS no existence at all. All our dramas are entirely a fictional attempt to BRING IT ABOUT, to get closer to it, to attach to it, to believe YOU ARE IT. This CANNOT BE. You can't do it.

BELIEVING THAT YOU CAN OR HAVE IS DELUSIONAL. It produces hallucinations of worlds that don't exist. Stuff that is NOT THERE, that you only seem to perceive because of your BELIEF in it. Your DESIRE to DREAM OF unrealities and fictional fairtytales. It is WISHFUL THINKING. And "there is no world apart from what you wish." You're not in non-existence, you're IN GOD, PRETENDING NOT TO BE. THERE IS NO WORLD.

Post-atonement awakening reawakens your mind to realize that THERE IS NO EGO, there is no non-existent world, you never DID leave God, you COULDN'T die, nothing has really happened, and ONLY the Kingdom of God exists. It is the end of DENIAL, the end of resistance, and the end of suffering.

"Ego" is nothing, literally. Your ATTEMPT to give "it" power does not give it power. You can't empower nothing. Ego does not exist. All you do is convince yourself that you are willing against yourself and that you are using your power against itself. You merely become divided against yourself and disassociated. All your efforts to be NOT LIKE God seem to manifest "the ego's characteristics", is an attempt to BE LIKE the ego. The non-existent ego. You never BECOME it.

It's just you being confused about what you are and where you are. You are safe in God at all times.

"We also have observed that man can create an empty shell, but cannot create nothing at all. This emptiness provides the screen for the misuse of projection."

"It is the world you see that is impossible."

"Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

"Everything OUTSIDE the Kingdom IS ILLUSION."

"You could not remain WITHIN the Kingdom without love, and since the Kingdom IS love, you believe you are WITHOUT it. This enables the ego to regard itself as separate and OUTSIDE its maker, thus speaking for the part of your mind that believes YOU are separate and outside the Mind of God."

"denial of Life perceives its opposite"

"your salvation lies in teaching exactly the opposite of everything the ego believes"

"You REALLY believe that doing the opposite of God's will CAN be better for you."

"You are safe in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of awakening to reality."

"Where there was darkness now we see the light. What is the ego? What the darkness was. Where is the ego? Where the darkness was. What is it now and where can it be found? Nothing and nowhere. Now the light has come: Its opposite has gone without a trace. Where evil was there now is holiness. What is the ego? What the evil was. Where is the ego? In an evil dream that but seemed real while you were dreaming it. Where there was crucifixion stands God's Son. What is the ego? Who has need to ask? Where is the ego? Who has need to seek for an illusion now that dreams are gone?"

"By steadily and consistently cancelling out ALL its effects, EVERYWHERE AND IN ALL RESPECTS, He teaches that the ego does not exist, and PROVES IT."

God has given you free will. Anything you choose is yours to choose. No-one else has any say in what your choices are. No-one has any right to decide for you what your choices are, to make commentary about your choices, to judge your choices, or to accuse you of making the wrong choice. It is none of their business.

Each person is solely responsible for their own personal freedom, which means that anything that a person experiences is entirely chosen, and not induced by anyone or anything else. God is the only cause of anyone. "I am forever an effect of God." One brother does not cause or create another brother. All brothers are equals as siblings precisely because they are not the cause of each other. No one else has EVER been the cause of anything you have experienced. If you believe otherwise you are confused.

You do not have the power to cause anyone else. No one else has the power to cause you. Being entirely responsible for your own freedom can only arise when you grant everyone else total responsibility for their own freedom. If you attempt to control, manipulate, judge, coerce, persuade, condemn, or otherwise alter other people's freedoms, you are denying your own and imprisoning yourself. It will not help you.

When you are entirely responsible for your own perfect freedom, which is a gift from God, you will recognize that absolutely nothing happens against your will. Not suffering, not sickness, not even death. "The power of decision is my own." Your sole responsibility is acceptance of atonement for yourself, so that you can offer it to others. But it is not for you to shove it down their throats, nor can you force anyone to be at peace, or to be loving, or to choose what you think they should.

When a person begins to lose sight of their own freedom, they lose touch with responsibility for the power of choice. And they begin to believe that causation and power are outside of them. They disempower themselves by blaming others. And then they automatically begin to try to make sense of why things are happening seemingly outside of their choosing, and it starts to make sense that someone else is choosing for you. And now you have assigned responsibility for your freedom to someone else.

When you think that someone else is responsible for your freedom, you are being irresponsible, and you will now depend on them making decisions that you approve of. You will encourage them to choose for you, provided it's the right choice that you indirectly want. If they do not choose what you want, for you, you will attack them for failing to give you what you want.

This then becomes the ego's mandate of "forgiveness to destroy", in which responsibility for freedom and for change is assigned to someone other than yourself, instead of you taking the responsibility to make your own decisions. You also cannot claim total responsibility for your own decision-making, while simultaneously believing that other persons are responsible for your decisions. Which means you have to allow other people to be entirely responsible for whatever decisions they make.

When you enter into coercion, control, blame, judgement, accusation, condemnation, taking sides, demanding that people comply with your beliefs, trying to force people to act a certain way, requiring people to make certain choices that you think are the right choices (for any reason), or have expectations or "needs" relating to what they do to or for you, you are entering into insanity, a special relationship, and false perception.

"God does not coerce".

"Your will is lost to you in this strange bartering, in which guilt is traded back and forth, and grievances increase with each exchange."

"Your will is free, and nothing can prevail against it."

You can easily spot when someone is moving into ego. Instead of being responsible ONLY for their own free will choice, they begin to displace responsibility onto other people. Causation is placed outside of them. They then begin trying to manipulate or "guilt-trip" others into acting certain ways, to comply indirectly with their wishes. The seeming "boundary" of freedom between them and others is disrupted, they trespass on the sacred territory of another, and the invasion of war begins.

When people are arguing about whether they should or should not do something, or what is the right thing to do, or who did what to whom, or who is responsible for causing other people to be sick, or who is putting who in danger, or any other dynamic where one person is accused of being responsible for another, the ego is involved. The two people are becoming tangled in a special relationship, anchored at the body level of insane illusions and fictional causes.

Interestingly, when someone is doing this, which always involves projection and anger, which is an attempt to make someone guilty, the person is claiming to be acting in the interests of freedom and the good of all, but are simultaneously rejecting their own freedom by trying to control the freedom of others. Or rather, they place their own freedom into the hands of other people and then try to accuse them of mis-handling it, meaning you don't really believe that other people are free to use YOUR freedom as they see fit.

To make a long story short, what other people choose to do is absolutely none of your business. This is why Jesus asks you to "be passerby". You are only free when you recognize that your brother is free. You cannot recognize his freedom if you are trying to control him, trying to get him to side with you, are waging a war and trying to win allies, or when you're accusing him of inappropriate choices (sin).

If you reject the freedom of others you are in fact shutting down your own freedom, but you do this in the name of trying to uphold your freedom, which is insane. You clearly cannot increase your freedom, or secure your rights, by taking freedom and rights away from other people. If other people are making poor decisions, then the consequences of those decisions are their responsibility only. You cannot be affected by them, unless you yourself personally make a poor choice as well. You cannot be cursed unless you curse yourself first, and other people's poor decisions DO NOT affect you against your will.

"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."

When you move into an area of believing that other people greatly affect you, can destroy your life, can interfere with your health, can threaten your family, or can in any way do anything to you by their free choosing, you yourself have a mental health problem. You are denying your own freedom to such an extent that you think other people are the owners of your freedom. You have given them the power to do this to and for you, meaning also that you do not love yourself. And yet you accuse them of acting against your love.

You in fact want other people to be responsible for you, and in fact you want them to do things to you against your will, so that you can maintain that you are not free. You therefore use your enemies as devices to keep yourself imprisoned, and the more you hate them the more you succeed in imprisoning yourself. The only way to be free yourself is to grant freedom to everyone. Blaming people for imprisoning you or violating your rights is a great way to violate your own rights.

You might think that if you were to do this there would be anarchy, you would be vulnerable, idiots would run the country, fools would steal your possessions, stupid nutjobs would try to hurt your family, and the broken would try to infect you with their diseases. But these are actually part of your own attempt to reject health, reject life, reject protection, reject invulnerability, and reject safety. None of this can happen without your psychological consent.

You can't have it both ways. You can't be in the business of disempowering yourself and disowning your supernatural power of immortality, while at the same time claiming that other people are responsible for your wellbeing and are able to hurt you. You do in fact have a mind-over-matter power innate to all children of God, capable of rendering you immune and invulnerable to all the things of the world. You have an automatic God-given miraculous ability to heal anything and overcome anything. And nothing can prevail against you.

"Today it is the ego which stands powerless before your will. Your will is free, and nothing can prevail against it."

"Nothing can prevail against our united wills, because nothing can prevail against God's."

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father."

When you are in the business of making other people's business your business, you are not in business. You are out of business, which is why you are trying to get the business of others by being involved in their business. You busy yourself with their business because you have no business doing so. And by doing so, you have no business at all.

The people who are having an utter shit fit about whether or not to vaccinate need to pay attention to sanity and reason. You are immortal and you cannot die. No-one and nothing can happen against your will. So who are you accusing of being responsible for things happening to you? It is in fact you who is disempowering yourself and setting yourself up as a victim, and you want to have victimizers in your life who you believe oppose you, to pretend that you don't want their opposition, so that you can keep being a victim about it.

All forms of sickness are illusions produced by an insane mind, acted out upon a body. This is something that you do to yourself. "The mind makes this decision as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body." Your mind has the power to decide whether or not to live or die, to be sick or well, to be happy or unhappy. No one has the right or the responsibility to take this power or freedom away from you. And no-one can. Only you can give it away, disown it, or try to lose it, by your own free will. That's your choice.

If you fear that you can be infected by another's contagion, or by some random environmental evil, then your mind is already sick and needs help. If you are not willing to receive the help, then you are in a bind. It means you do not want to be healthy and you want to die. And yet in this condition you will claim that you want to be healthy and not be sick. But you cannot be even believe that you can be sick while simultaneously bringing about the ONLY decision capable of making you suffer. Nor can you be blaming the cause of your suffering on a speck of particles, or a car crash, or any kind of external causation.

"No-one can die, unless he chooses death. What seems to be the FEAR of death, is really its ATTRACTION."

The real deeper issue behind all this covid panick, is the fear of death and "how to be safe". However...

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped."

"There IS no safety in a battleground. You can look down on it in safety from above, and NOT be touched. But, from within it, you can find NO safety."

"The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus."

When we are body identified, we place ourselves on the battlefield and accuse ourselves of weakness. Then we set ourselves up for being subject to a warzone and threaten ourselves with causes on the same level. We then try to escape this threat with magical means and silly maneuvers which are supposed to somehow make you invulnerable and safe, as if this solves the problem. The problem is not whether or not you are susceptible to a disease, the problem is that you are choosing to believe in disease in the first place, therefore threatening yourself with inducing it.

It then does not matter whatsoever whether you choose to get a vaccine or not. Getting one is insane. Not getting one is insane. Both are insane because they are based on a false premise. If the premise is "sickness is real and I am vulnerable to death against my will", then you are already insane. And making the decision to be vaccined OR not vaccinnated are both equally insane outcomes based on a lie.

"The world was made that problems could not be escaped." You cannot go either way and claim to be making a sane decision.

You cannot escape from or have external salvation from sickness, while looking for external solutions to an externalized problem. If the world does not exist, who is doing this to you? Who is deciding that you are weak and vulnerable and attackable and destroyable? This is nothing other than your resposnibility and your belief. "I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts." ...

"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."

If you are not able to accept total responsibility, which is atonement, then you are in a predicament. You say you want salvation but you don't. You say you want life but you keep choosing death. You say you want health but you believe in sickness and then panick in fear trying to scramble to find ways to defend agaisnt it, knowing it cannot work. What are you going to do? If you are not willing to entertain a miracle, then you are left with no other option. If you are not willing to forgive and rise above the battlefield, you have no other option.

The only remedy you are then left with is a solution which can at best seem to partially work, and at worst destroy you. This is true of any vaccine as much as it is true of ANY magical solution. No magical solution will ever induce wholeness, nor will it make you invulnerable, nor cause you to be what you are. Magic will not correct your mind, it will likely have no effect on your insane beliefs, and it will not ultimately save you from death. It is your thoughts alone that decide whether or not you are choosing to die, and this overrides all magic, and the world.

So you are then in a predicament because you cannot possibly choose a remedy that truly works, all the remedies are broken, the only action you can take is incomplete, and nothing external can truly cause you to be peaceful. "salvation comes from nothing outside of you."

"THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE YOU. That is what you must ultimately learn, for it is in that realization that the Kingdom of Heaven is restored to you."

A vaccine is, at best, an illusion of a solution. It might seem to work for some people and not for others. It may seem to work to a degree, but not totally. It absolutely MUST attack the body in some way as all magic does. It will not stop any virus from entering your body and beginning to take hold.

It will not prevent your body from being vulnerable. It will not ward off death nor will it cause you to feel safe. It might, potentially, seem to manipulate the body so that it might, perhaps, if your mind consents, avoid contagion or transmission of a disease some of the time. But it will not bring peace to your soul. God doesn't live in a syringe. Nor does God need booster shots.

If all you can choose is a senseless insane choice, a partial choice, a choice which you know cannot truly work, which can at best produce an illusion of health, and which may in fact hurt you, what are you to do? This is where you need to ideally be willing to turn to someone who knows better than you. Ask the Holy Spirit. Ask Jesus. Ask your angels. Get some guidance from a higher perspective. If you are not willing or ready to go there yourself, get their input. Let them decide for you.

And this again is where we must acknowledge the freedom of your will. No divine being is ever going to mandate a vaccination, nor are they necessarily going to always advise against it in a given situation. What is right for YOU, is dependent upon every speck of your mental state and what is appropriate, not only for you, but in the atonement plan and in the script for your life.

There may be a reason for you to elect temporary sickness. There may be a reason for you to meet certain people. There may be a good reason for YOU in particular NOT to choose a vaccine. There may be a cascade of outcomes that are only possible if you do, or do not, get medicated. There may be a good reason why you SHOULD, just as there may be a good reason you shouldn't. And it has absolutely NOTHING to do with anyone else, solely because the curriculum is individualized.

The Holy Spirit knows what is best for you given YOUR situation, where you are at and what you are ready for. He knows where your trust is. He knows what you are capable of and will accept. Turn to his advice rather than that of fear or the ego. And especially beware of the egos of other well-meaning people especially the ones who are religious about the "reasons why" you should or should not make a certain choice. EVERY reason on this level is fiction.

If you cannot or will not turn to the advice of a wiser counsel, and if you refuse health, and if you actively are choosing sickness, and if you are living therefore in fear of contagion, then your options are limited. Love does not enter where it is not welcome. You can be prayed for. You can be loved. But you may reject all support. You may have a death wish. You may want to die. It might be "your time", based on your plan. Who knows. I do not know and no-one else likely knows either. Matters are far deeper than some "statics" about viruses or medicines.

Long story short, if you made it this far. .... you are always absolutely free to make any choice you want to make, and it has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. If anyone is trying to control your decision for ANY reason at all, they are denying their own freedom and are trying to make you responsible for them. They are like children looking for a parent to depend on, to decide everything for them.

This is because they have become undependeable and irresponsible. It's up to YOU to decide how to discern where they are at, and to be responsible yourself for your own choice. And whatever you choose, God loves you.

At the end of the day all you can do is make your own choice in freedom, and free from guilt, and do so decisively and with conviction. But not a conviction that turns into tyranny, or the attempt to recruit others to your cause. Let people be where they are at. Let them make their own decisions. Let them be mistaken and recognize that they are.

Not because they don't do what you want them to do, but because they are free of you. You have no business trying to coerce people to agree with YOUR fearful belief in laws that are not of God.

What I decide to do is none of your business, or anyone's. What guidance I receive regarding my own choices, is none of your business either. What I decide to do or not do has nothing to do with you either. And if you think that my choice affects you, you are deliberately disempowering yourself, because nothing happens to you against your will. This is not supposed to be a selfish free-for-all, or a war, where people are opposing each other and digging in their heels thinking they know what's true. Nothing in this world is true, it's just a dream.

Go within, and go above. That's the only place where there is any sanity.

God willed that you be innocent forever, and God's will is done. Nothing can ever change this. This innocence isn't merely some kind of judgement of your condition. It's your actual permanent state of being. In your being, in your mind, there is still a place that is wholly completely innocent and pure and will never be guilty.

"We seem to be discrete and unaware of our eternal unity with Him. Yet back of all our doubts, past all our fears, there still is certainty. For Love remains with all Its Thought, Its sureness being Theirs. God's memory is in our holy minds, which know their oneness and their unity with their Creator."

In the separation, we merely went into a state of denial. We pretended that the truth was not true. We also pretended we were no longer ourselves, no longer innocent and no longer a part of God. This denial isn't a fact, because denial doesn't actually make anything go away.

All denial does is hide the awareness of the presence of that which is STILL THERE, pretending it is gone. In fact, Jesus speaks to this property of denial and the fact that even the denial confirms the existence of that which it denies.

"For the separation is only the DENIAL of union, and, correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true." So a part of your mind does in fact still believe, right now, and always, that you are perfectly innocent forever. Then your mind became split, and now a second portion of your mind believes it is guilty. You therefore have two conflicting opinions about yourself in your mind at the same time.

"You, then, have two conflicting evaluations of yourself in your minds, and they CANNOT BOTH BE TRUE."

The problem we typically have, is that once we go into denial, the denial DOES SEEM to block the AWARENESS OF the presence of love. It seems to block the awareness that, in truth, you actually still are holy and innocent. You still are an immortal being in God. And you will never change, nor have you been changed by the denial.

So some portion of you is literally still innocent right now. And some other portion of you believes the opposite. That second portion is what we call ego.

"The ego is a part of your belief about yourself."

However, in order TO DENY the part of you that is still innocent, your mind does block awareness. This produces a shift in premise, which makes it potentially possible to become convinced that what you've denied HAS GONE AWAY. Ie, out of sight out of mind. If you are not aware of it, surely it's not there.

Entering into denial tends to make you believe that you have actually CHANGED, from an innocent holy being, into an evil anti-christ false-self. The denial suggests your real self has been destroyed, and no longer exists. That you have literally transformed from one state to another, and now you are SOLELY in a state of guilt. The unawareness of the continued presence of your innocent self tempts you toward believing these illusions.

All of the world, all bodies, space and time, all sickness and death and suffering, is entirely designed to try to HIDE FROM THE TRUTH. It's an attempt to shut out the FACT of what you STILL ARE. That you actually literally still are as God created you right now. Just as the world was made as an attack on God, it was an attempt to ASSERT a one-sided ego war upon the truth about you. To depict you as if you have been destroyed and turned into something dead.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son."

All suffering, all death, all states of sickness, all resistance to reality, all defenses against the truth, all blocks to awareness, all lies and deceptions, all body identification, its entire purpose was to resist God. To try to stop God's will. To try to overthrow and usurp his completed permanent works and replace it with something else, in order to PRETEND that his kingdom had been destroyed. That the son of God could be killed.

The strange scenario, however, is that while you are busy being guilty and worthless and deserving of horrible punishments, SIMULTANEOUSLY, there is another self, another PART OF YOU, that is right this instant STILL HOLY AND INNOCENT. It has not in truth changed.

What this then reveals is that the world, the mindset of the ego thought system, all of space and time, and every separation ego idea, is all a COVER UP. It is literally a veil placed OVER the truth of the permanence of the Kingdom of God. It is put there to come BETWEEN you and the truth to HIDE the truth. To hide from the attraction of God. To smother reality with illusions. To keep you from realizing that NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

"To this distorted form of vision, the OUTSIDE of everything, the wall that stands between you and the truth, is wholly true." "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"

Therefore, we can say that "underneath" your guilt, there is ALSO a place any our mind where you are STILL innocent. That innocent place was NOT converted into guilt, it was NOT transformed into an anti-christ, and it remains exactly as God created it. Right now. Even in PARALLEL with the guilty false sense of self that you maintain is your whole identity.

THERE IS STILL INNOCENCE IN YOU AND THERE ALWAYS WILL BE.

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen. The still infinity of endless peace surrounds you gently in its soft embrace, so strong and quiet, tranquil in the might of its Creator, nothing can intrude upon the sacred Son of God within."

"But most of all, try to sink down and inward, away from the world and all the foolish thoughts of the world. You are trying to reach past all these things. You are trying to leave appearances and approach reality."

"Go past all the raucous shrieks and sick imaginings that cover your real thoughts and obscure your eternal link with God."

"and then try to reach past all your images and preconceptions about yourself to the truth in you. If Love created you like Itself this Self must be in you. And somewhere in your mind It is there for you to find."

So Jesus is actually telling us that below the murky surface "clouds of guilt" which seem to smother and obscure, block and distract, deflect and deceive, BELOW and BEYOND the world and the body and the ego guilt, there is STILL a quiet place within you where you are perfectly innocent still. Where you are still as God created you.

This means that you actually have two parts to you right now. A holy self and a false self. Because your mind is split. The guilt is in one part, and the innocence is in another. And the guilt merely seems to HIDE the innocence, so you think there is no innocence in you, or that you can ONLY be guilty OR innocent at one time. This is not true.

Your mind is in fact divided between TWO goals, and wants two conflicting things at once. One part of you still accepts your innocence while another part is attacking it. The only reason you tolerate this is because you've identified WITH the guilt and have believed the illusions of the denial, such that you don't think the innocent part is EVEN THERE any more. And you maintain the guilt IN ORDER TO keep the innocence hidden.

Because if you were to actually become aware of the sinlessness within you, it would then become obviously clear that you cannot be both innocent AND guilty at the same time. And yet this is what your mind has actually been believing. Covered up, below, beyond, and underneath your guilt, there is a dwelling place of innocence and being as God created you still. And how can that be compatible with being guilty?

If you go within and look for that innocence and realize it MUST still be there, then it also becomes apparent that you cannot ACCEPT being both innocent and guilty, in conscious awareness. Only one of them can be true. One of them must go! And since the innocence has the property of permanence and unchangeability, the guilt MUST be fake. The guilt must be false and a mistake and NOT TRUE. And this also means the world must be false as well.

Jesus actually refers to "the real world" as this borderland of thought or place within your mind, where you come to fully realize that the innocence is true and the guilt is false. Allowing yourself to recognize that ONLY THE TRUTH CAN BE TRUE, ie only the permanent innocence in you can be really there, the guilt is correctly framed as IMPOSSIBLE, and is finally let go.

"Here is the meeting place where thoughts are brought TOGETHER; where conflicting values MEET, and ALL illusions are laid down beside the truth, where they are judged to be untrue. This borderland is just beyond the gate of Heaven."

"It HAS BEEN recognized that, if they were BROUGHT TOGETHER, their joint acceptance WOULD become impossible. But, if one is kept in darkness FROM THE OTHER, their SEPARATION seems to keep them both alive, and equal in their reality. Their JOINING thus becomes the source of fear, for, if they meet, acceptance MUST be withdrawn from one of them."

"They are brought together, and only ONE continues past the gate where Oneness is. Salvation IS a borderland, where place and time and choice have meaning still, and yet it can be seen that they are temporary, OUT of place, and EVERY choice has been ALREADY made."

"WHAT DO YOU WANT? Light or darkness, knowledge or ignorance are yours, but not both. Opposites must be brought together, and not kept apart. For their separation is only in your mind, and they are reconciled by union, as YOU are. In union, everything that is not real MUST disappear, for truth IS union. As darkness disappears in light, so ignorance fades away when knowledge dawns."

"I am not a body I am free, for I am still as God created me."

All bodies are different. Even the bodies of identical twins. No two are alike. No two share the same molecules. They can be similar, but more often than not they'll be different in a multitude of ways.

The whole world seems to thrive on the differences between bodies. And then we all tend to compare our body to the bodies of others. As if we are our bodies, and as if having certain body attributes defines whether we're good enough or lovable or correct or fit in.

But all bodies were fundamentally born from the idea of inequality, difference and conflict. They might appear to be of the same species, as if sharing common characteristics, but within that framework there is great variety. Even the wings of butterflies are not all identical. Not every fish has quite the same scales. And no two voices are quite the same.

Sometimes, those who are body-identitied then try to adjust to this fact by making out that the body is special for being different. It's unique and unalike, standing out from the crowd. And then we exalt them for certain noticeable abilities and features.

But the fact is that in order to have something in this world, you have to lack something else. In order to define yourself as one thing, you have to exlude other things. You can't have or be everything on a physical level. You must be deprived in order to gain. You must lose in order to win. And you must sacrifice in order to measure up.

There are great movements towards trying to get bodies to be considered equal. Equal rights for each gender. Equal rights or sexual persuasions. Equal rights for ethnicity or skin color. As if to say, everyone who is a body is the same. But bodies are never the same. No two are exactly the same, and never will be. They can't be. To be what they are they have to lack what the others have.

This means that no-one can ever be in a position to have everything as a body. No body can be perfect. No body has it all. Some might seem to turn out more lucky or favorable than others. Some are uglier, some more aesthetic. Some are larger, smaller, taller, thinner. Some may be fundamentally more artistic, more athletic, quicker to move, clumsier, better shaped, more manly or womanly, better able to think or analyze, more emotional etc.

So then it comes down to the fact that all bodies are really just pieces of equipment. Because people are not bodies and minds are not bodies. So each of us has this chunk of equipment strapped onto us which we express through and use. But the particular configuration or "features" of the equipment will determine what the body can seem to do.

I will not ever have the low bassy voice of Barry White. I will not ever have female parts. I will not ever have the genetically blessed muscle definitions of Arnold. I will not ever have Betty Davis's eyes. My legs won't look like that of an olympic runner. My fingers aren't ever going to be nimble enough to play Spanish guitar music. My face isn't ever going to look like a rugged lumberjack. And there is just no way my bum is ever going to look big in this.

These are just simply the facts of what kind of equipment I am using. And for some people there are significant defects. People with disabilities, limbs missing, motor control problems, defects of skin, wonky eyes, a propensity for deadly farts, and hopelessly crooked teeth. That's just what the body has, and shows us what the body also does not have.

Both of which go to defining what it seems to be capable of. If you identify with your body you are doomed to enter into a realm of comparison and low self esteem and dissatisfaction and dysmorphia and food disorders and judgement and all manner of concern. Jealousy and envy and hatred and anger and sadness and all sorts of stuff can arise from this. Because if the body's limitations are considered the truth of you, then the fact is that EVERYONE is limited in one way or another, and no-one in the whole world will ever have physical perfection.

"Freedom must be impossible as long as you perceive a body as yourself. The body is a limit. Who would seek for freedom in a body looks for it where it can not be found."

"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. Can you who see yourselves WITHIN a body, know yourself AS AN IDEA? Everything you recognize you identify by EXTERNALS, something OUTSIDE itself. You cannot even think of GOD without a body, or some form you think you recognize. The body cannot KNOW. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds you."

"The body is a limit imposed on the universal communication which is an eternal property of mind."

ALL bodies are lacking and all bodies are defective and all bodies are limited and all bodies are special. They're supposed to be. They were made in an effort to limit you and act as a decoy and disguise for your inner perfection. They were meant to separate you off and confine you and act like a prison wall. And they were designed to be a representation of what you are NOT like.

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom. The body is the symbol of WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist."

Some bodies thus seem to have talents or abilities that others do not, or aptitudes or intelligences or particular quirks that others lack. Some seem to be born blessed and others cursed. Some have wonderful voices and others sound like a freight train. Some are beautifully symmetrical and others are like a lopsided lump of lard. These are just the way bodies are. They are greatly varied and unalike and unfamiliar and unequal and unnatural.

Some will take advantage of the particular traits of their particular body to try to maximize its capabilities. And this usually means certain aptitudes in certain areas. Some become brain surgeons while totally sucking at singing. Others become pop stars but completely suck at relationships. Some become athletes but can't dance to save their lives. And others just get dealt a bad hand of shit and crap and deformity and bullshit. Then we have to sort of make the best of it, or just hate ourselves.

We can't look to the body for perfection because perfection means wholeness. Bodies are limited and varied and none of them have everything, so none of them are whole. They are fundamentally lacking. Not one of them can fully or accurately represent who and what you are. None of them look like you. And none of them can picture what you really look like.

"For what you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

If you identify with or AS your body, or your body's attributes or abilities, or the roles you assign it or the labels you give it, you are mis-identifying yourself and do not know who and what you are. This narrows you and confines you and shuts you in a prison and places major limitations on you. It distorts and shuts down your awareness, diminishes your mind, and deranges your mind.

In fact, Jesus tells us that if we conceive of ourselves as a body in any way, even slightly, we are in fact attacking what we are. Given that we are perfect whole spirit lacking nothing and sharing everything, when we identify with or as a body we are literally putting limits on ourselves. And this is an attack on ourselves, which produces symptoms of sickness, which then manifest in the body. So now the body becomes sick if you believe you are your body, because you're shutting down your unlimited life.

"If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."

"Any relationship in which the body enters is based, NOT on love, but on idolatry."

"The ego is idolatry; the sign of limited and separated self, born in a body, doomed to suffer and to end its life in death. It is the will that sees the Will of God as enemy, and takes a form in which It is denied. The ego is the "proof" that strength is weak and love is fearful, life is really death, and what opposes God alone is true."

"God created love, NOT idolatry. ALL forms of idolatry are caricatures of creation, taught by sick minds, who are too divided to know that Creation SHARES power, and NEVER usurps it."

"The power to heal is now his Father's gift, for through His Voice He still can reach His Son, reminding him the body may become his chosen home, but it will never be his home in truth."

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's CONDEMNATION. For here is love made fearful, and hope abandoned. Even the idols that are worshipped here are shrouded deep in mystery, and kept APART from those who worship them. This is the temple dedicated to no relationships, and no return."

Jesus in fact is saying here that the body, designed to be a device for separation, becomes a way to NOT RELATE TO ANYONE, by being cut off and limited physically behind a wall of flesh. If you identify with it, make it your self, see it as defining you, accept its limitations as true of you, associate or align with it, dwell on it, focus on it, make it an obstacle, or in any way allow it to come between you and others to any degree, then you are entering into the separation and into death.

"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. And this unholy instant SEEMS to be life. An instant of despair, a tiny island of dry sand, bereft of water, and set uncertainly upon oblivion. Here does the Son of God stop briefly by, to offer his devotion to death's idols, and then pass on."

"The removal of blocks, then, is the ONLY way to guarantee help and healing. Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind which is working THROUGH the body but not IN it. If the mind believes the body is its GOAL, it WILL distort its perception OF the body, and by blocking its own extension BEYOND it will INDUCE illness by FOSTERING SEPARATION. Perceiving the body AS A SEPARATE ENTITY cannot BUT foster illness, because it is not true. A medium of communication WILL lose its usefulness if it is used for anything else." There is a way to work through the body and to use it for a higher purpose, but this doesn't change what the body IS. It doesn't make it become whole or holy. It doesn't lift away its nature or stop it from being a confining limited mechanism. In truth, the Holy Spirit's repurposing of the body in fact renders the body FUNCTIONLESS and MEANINGLESS.

"Yet freedom of the body HAS no meaning."

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used ONLY as the Holy Spirit teaches, ***it has no function***. For minds NEED not the body to communicate. The sight that SEES the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship. And while you look upon each other thus, the means and end have NOT been brought in line."

"It is still true that the body has no function of itself. This is because it is NOT an end."

"The love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another. That is because the real vision is still so dim. Everyone can use his body best by enlarging man's perception, so he can see the real VISION. THIS VISION is invisible to the physical eye. The ultimate purpose of the body is to ***render itself unnecessary.*** Learning to do this is the only real reason for its creation."

The body is supposed to become UNNECESSARY to you. Un-needed, and cast off. Adding nothing to you. Giving you no abilities. Not defining you or limiting you or getting in your way. Nor does it remain and succeed in doing this, because the body has to go in order for you to experience unlimitedness. "To be without a body is to be in your natural state."

"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.**** The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not. Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

The body must be transcended, then let go completely. You must surmount it and go beyond it.

"To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body's nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear."

"The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more."

In this world, it SEEMS that death is linear, ie horizontal. You make a passage through time, the body gradually malfunctions, and eventually it dies. This seems to mean that death is the final result of life, at the end of a long road.

But let's consider for a moment, that perhaps death is not linear, but vertical. You don't become more dead by moving sideways, you become more dead by moving DOWNWARDS, away from God who is life.

If a person is closer to God, they are closer to life. They are high on life. If they are more distant from God, they are closer to death. They are removed from the present, riddled with guilt and lost in time. This is irrespective of the age of the body.

When someone enters into sickness they are entering into death. "Sickness is but a little death". But, if the sickness is healed, what does that mean? It means they have resurrected a little. They have moved closer to God who is life. Death has, for now, been surmounted. We do in fact move in and out of death, or rather UP AND DOWN between life and death, as we move in and out of avoidance of God.

Anyone who is young, or who is old, can be said to be more or less alive, not based on the age of the body in time, but upon whether the mind is close to or more distant from love. God is love, God is life, God is health and wholeness. If you are closer to that, you are more healthy in the mind, and this will result in a healthier body. Some people even become more healthier "later" in life.

Advancing upwards towards the light, is resurrection. Resurrection means "a return to life", suggesting a temporary absence or lack of life. A person can quite easily dip down towards hell, at some point in their life, hit rock bottom, and then return upwards. And in this upwards motion there is a resurrection and a healing. Life is restored, health is restored. The person is less dead than they were. They are more filled with the life of God. "Miracles mean life and God is the giver of life."

The Course asks us to "swear not to die". It is asking us to swear not to move down into death away from life, or into the ego away from God. It isn't simply pointing at you causing the body not to die at age 90, it's telling you to stop killing it at all ages. Even that it may be in near-permanence for an indefinite time.

We need to think of death not so much in physical terms but in mental terms. A "more dead" mind is one filled with ego, fear and separation. An attacking mind is certainly not in-line with life. A heavily sick mind is half dead already. An attacking mind is also very much more prone to express sickness and attack the body, making it symbolize its distance from health and life. Remember "the sick are merciless and in contagion do they seek to kill", because in sickness we are defending against life.

Death therefore really doesn't so much have anything to do with the linear progression of time, or how old the body seems to be. It is much more, and perhaps only, to do with how vertically a person becomes closer or more distant from life itself. If we remove ourselves from harmony, peace, love, sanity, harmlessness, we are removing ourselves from health and vitality as well. We are darkening our light and attacking our bodies. The ego worships the "God of sickness" who is against health and against life itself, so the more ego-filled we are the more dead we are.

A destructive mind is a deadly mind. A constructive mind is a resurrective mind. Regardless of what happens to the body, or whether perhaps it is laid down or exited or disappeared, if the mind of the person in the body is filled with life and light, the body is much less prone to destruction, decay, damage or death. It has been infused with a higher vibration of order and sustaining of life, making it much harder for degradation to take hold. And a mind free from guilt completely CANNOT suffer. "The guiltless mind cannot suffer. Being sane, it heals the body, for it cannot conceive of illness." etc

This may explicitly account for the cases of "incorruptible bodies" of some saints, whereby even though their soul/mind has left the body behind, the presence of LIFE and light and spirit, working through that body, infuses it with continuation. With life-supporting vibes. Or rather, attacks it much less, and so it is not left with an imprint of death and destruction. This causes it to remain in health and avoid decomposing because as an "energy pattern" or "thought form", it is a thought of life and not a thought of destruction. A thought FROM a living mind.

Death has to be considered vertical, in fact, because we know that death is a manifestation of fear. "All forms of sickness even unto death are physical expressions of the FEAR of awakening." Therefore death, which is the same as sickness, and all forms of sickness of the body, all malfunctioning, is really nothing to do with linear causes at all, and only to do with vertical causes. A fearful mind attacks the body and destroys it by pushing it away from heaven towards hell. A loving mind heals the body and maintains it in perfect health by lifting it up in ressurection.

What we call health then, cannot be described in terms of linear happenings. We have to think of it as a question of whether you are close to heaven (thus to order and harmony), or whether you are closer to hell (thus to disorder and disruption). The body symbolizes and represents where the mind is at, in its vertical alignment. "The mind, being sane, heals the body." "A damaged body shows the mind has not been healed." This is a vertical axis of life vs death, not horizontal.

This also corresponds perhaps to aging. If we think of aging in terms of horizontal time measurements, we are maybe missing the whole point, because horizontal aging is an ILLUSION. Yes the body can transform into various states of what we might call maturity over time. But whether or not the body is healthy or sick is nothing to do with its age. It's more to do with how the mind is using that body at a particular time. Because "what you use the body for it becomes to you." When used for attack it becomes sick (dead), and when used to bring God's word it CANNOT be sick or die - it's too close to life.

So we could say that when a person's mind is closer to the light, the body is held in a state of health and healing. It symbolizes eternal life and immortality. It is free from pain, from scars, from damage, and represents harmlessness. The healed mind heals the body and cannot conceive of illness. It forces the body into a resurrected state, by the extension of love through it, lifting it out of suffering. Light, love, life, from above, shines downwards, and lifts upwards. A light-filled body cannot age or decay or become sick or die beacuse it is infused with POWER. Vertical life overrides horizontal death.

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from heaven (downwards from above) on a dry and dusty world where starved and thirsty creatures come to die. And all around the signs of life spring up (upwards from below)."

Life, progressing from death to life, as in vertical resurrection, is a vertical movement towards God. Towards truth. Towards innocence. Towards guiltlessness. Since "sickness is but another form of guilt", and sickness cannot EXIST without guilt, the removal of guilt from the mind (as in moving upwards towards the light) causes the body to represent a higher frequency or order, and thus health. A higher mind is a more POWERFUL mind and it is filled with holiness and healing.

In fact as ACIM teaches, as the mind move upwards towards atonement, it is moving towards health and wholeness. And it enforces the body into a symbolic representation of that. It takes on "the power to represent an endless life." So at the pinnacle, the body is suspended in light and higher "vibration", free from attack, free from guilt, free from psychological torture. And this effectively leaves the body in a state of symbolic immortality. ie that it cannot become sick at all, and it has no death in it. Its appearance can also then be modified at will, to represent any age or gender or form. It becomes transparent and light and is not pulled down into suffering or the lower vibrations of decay.

So we really need to realize that in ACIM Jesus talks of sickness and death and health on a VERTICAL axis. Is mind high, or low. It it close to the light, or hiding in darkness. It is moving upwards towards God and atonement and LIFE, or is it moving downwards into sickness, damage, attack and destruction. The minds constructive powers have to be reinstated in order that it can take power OVER sickness and death, which really means, to RISE ABOVE IT, by moving the mind into a higher state, and therefore abolishing exposure to anything lower. Death is the lowest state and is simply "out of reach" for an enlightened mind.

We, all of us, on this planet, right now, are in various states of life vs death. We all need resurrection. Any measure of sin or guilt or attack or fear in the mind IS a state of removal from life. It IS a rejection of life and of health. Any movement into ego is a movement into choas and disorder and malfunction and failure. And death IS failure. It is a failure to live, a failure to be in the light, and represents the fear of God. Perhaps it's fitting to consider that death ends in the ground, while ascension takes you into the heavens.

"Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death. It is a reawakening or a rebirth; a change of mind about the meaning of the world. It is the acceptance of the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the world's purpose; the acceptance of the Atonement for oneself. It is the end of dreams of misery, and the glad awareness of the Holy Spirit's final dream. It is the recognition of the gifts of God. ****It is the dream in which the body functions perfectly****, having no function except communication."

"The resurrection ***is the denial of death***, being the ***assertion of life*** Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. Love is no longer feared, but gladly welcomed. Idols have disappeared, and the remembrance of God shines unimpeded across the world. Christ's face is seen in every living thing, and nothing is held in darkness, apart from the light of forgiveness. There is no sorrow still upon the earth. The joy of Heaven has come upon it.

Here the curriculum ends."

Let's clear this up.

For the entire time that you have a physical body with working eyeballs, you will physically see the physical world based on the laws of physics. The body functions biologically based on photons of light entering the retina etc and sending messages to the brain and mind.

THIS WILL NOT CHANGE NO MATTER HOW MUCH FORGIVENESS YOU DO, how many workbook lessons, or how much you've read. Your physical eyes will continue to report the same exact differences, conflicts, problems, wars, destruction, sickness and death. This will NOT change. If you point your eyeballs at the physical world, of which they are a part, they will SHOW YOU exactly the same PHYSICAL world.

Meanwhile, you are working on forgiveness, and on changing your mind in order to change your perception. But this is to do with your MIND in terms of what it believes. What it believes determines what it projects in terms of MEANING, and thus how it categorizes the true and the false, the real and the unreal. It puts everything into a category, and so as the body SENDS IT physical messages of physical sights, the mind INTERPRETS those signals.

It is then up to the mind to decide what to DO WITH those signals that are coming in from the physical eyes. Initially, realize that the body is LOCKED IN to false perception. It CANNOT SEE reality and it never will. The body can ONLY look upon illusions and GIVE them reality, regarding them as equally of the same material and nature as ITSELF, and therefore one with them, and thus regarding them as REAL.

"These eyes made not to see will never see."

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

Consider also then that if your mind BELIEVES everything it is shown by the body's eyes, it will categorize all illusions as reality, which is "false perception". A failure to recognize that illusions are illusions, that dreams are dreams, and that the world is not real. Taking the body "at its word" is false perception and unconsciousness.

The mind therefore has to open up to another WAY of seeing, which is the spiritual eye, or the mind's eye. The mind can see directly without photons and does not rely on the body's eyeballs to do this. True vision can see anywhere and everywhere at any time without limit, even the other side of the universe in the past or future. The mind, as it begins to OPEN UP to reality, which requires transcending the physical world, starts to IGNORE the physical sight messages and tunes into another world.

As it does this, the mind is going to start categorizing everything the BODY claims is real, as unreal. It has to in order to awaken and move into true perception. Everything the body reports is a lie because the body is blind to reality. So the mind starts to open up to seeing without the body, and seeing beyond the body, and beyond form, and beyond the world, and beyond space and time. This means it is opening up to seeing light and reality, at the same time as DENYING AND CLOSING DOWN to the physical signals coming in from the body.

However, so long as you have a body, you will STILL CONTINUE to receive signals from the physical sensory equipment. You will STILL be shown images of a broken world, images of faulty bodies, images of war and death and sickness and suffering. The body CANNOT HELP IT but keep showing this to you all the time. As soon as you open your eyelids you're going to be shown this, every single day for as long as you have a body.

So the interesting thing is then that mind is changing but the body is not. Mind is still USING a body, at the same time as learning to see WITHOUT a body. And this means that the mind is going to have to deal with TWO CHANNELS OF INPUT at the same time, in parallel. The physical sight is being phased out, so to speak, while the spiritual sight is phased in, but until you reach total atonement and awakening to heaven's reality you're going to see BOTH AT ONCE. As Jesus confirms:

"Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a long time, and can become very acute."

So this now means that you as mind are going to be getting inputs from a physical and FALSE sensory apparatus, which is going to KEEP remaining fixated on the PHYSICAL world for as long as it persists, while simultaneously it's going to get inputs from BEYOND the physical which the physical body CANNOT see. The mind is closing off to unreality and opening up to reality's at the same time. So you have a kind of DOUBLE VISION, at least for as long as the body persists.

If you think this is not true then you should consider the fact that you are STILL perfectly capable of reading every single workbook lesson no matter how many of them you've done or for how long. The words on the page have not changed, the color of the text has not changed, nothing about it has changed. It is PHYSICALLY THE SAME BOOK as when you started reading. This is because the physical sight has not changed. But your MIND'S SEEING HAS changed.

So what this means in worldly terms is, you're going to have to deal with the fact that you're going to STILL get input from the unreal physical world, claiming all kinds of things to be true which aren't, while at the same time opening up to a new reality BEYOND the physical world which the body can't even see.

This means that if you see a physical body with your physical eyes and your eyes report an image of that body which has a broken leg and skin cancer and bad hair and a limp and some blubber, you're going to KEEP ON SEEING THAT for as long as it's there physically, REGARLDESS of whether you are more spiritual or not. 10 years from now you will still look upon that same physical body and see the same physical symptoms. But what it MEANS to you will be different and what you make of it will be different, as well as your mind will be opening up to OTHER sights and sounds from beyond the world. Jesus again confirms twice:

"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."

"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 use PHYSICAL SIGHT to watch the dream figures suffer and die, BUT their MINDS ARE HEALED. They have done forgiveness work. Their mind is opening up to unlimited spiritual vision and seeing BEYOND physical bodies, but the physical body is STILL reporting the same shit as before. This is not going to change just because you're waking up.

So if you see someone with your physical eyes and they report a certain condition or state, that's because your physical eyes are still functioning true to their design. Just because your MIND is different and is seeing from a more inclusive loving vantage point does NOT mean that you will no longer see the same physical sights! It does not mean that graveyards are going to disappear, or that the wars will be gone, or that people aren't writhing in agony and screaming for help. They will still physically do this and your body will STILL physically report it. But your mind will INTERPRET it different because it will OVERLOOK it and look PAST it, beyond it to the light of truth.

So you see, you can't say that "if you see it it's' yours". And you can't say that if you see someone doing something you are judging them. And you can't say that just because you're seeing it your mind is not healed. That's all bullshit. That's a denial of the mechanisms of perception. Many people think that perception is ONE THING and that you change this ONE perceptual mechanism and EVERYTHING you see will just transform and shift away from suffering towards some kind of beautiful world where nothing ever dies. That's SORT of true in that the mind opens up vision to seeing the real world, but it's NOT true in the sense that this causes you to NOT SEE the physical world UNTIL THE VERY END.

That's because you're in a state of transition BETWEEN the two ways of seeing, which will continue for as long as you have a body, and until you see the face of christ, and forget the world entirely, as the veil of illusions lifts from your sight and you see ONLY with vision, and completely VANISH the body from your existence. ONLY THEN will you no longer see the physical, and only then do the physical signals stop bombarding your mind. UNTIL then, until you are DONE, you're going to have to continue dealing with FALSE MESSAGES coming to you from a false world, at the same time as tying to look past them psychologically.

So no, if you see bad physical stuff happening, it's NOT because you are projecting bad stuff. It's not because you are not healed or are guilty. It's NOT YOUR STUFF. Your stuff isn't physical, it's mental. Your baggage of stuff to be healed in your false perceptions, which you project ONTO THE PHYSICAL SIGNALS, is an added layer of meaning which you GIVE TO the signals coming from the physical world. It's how you INTERPRET them. You can read into them and put hate and guilt and sin onto them, or you can OVERLOOK them and diminish their power and see them as false and sinless and nothing.

If I see a person walking past with a broken leg, that's because their leg is broken physically and it will carry on being broken physically whether I'm in a good mood or not, whether I'm lining up with the holy spirit or not, and regardless of anything else I do. OTHER than to say that if I move towards the light I WILL extend healing and this will INFLUENCE the other person, and may indeed miraculously heal their broken leg, but that's a whole other story. If I have physical eyeballs I WILL SEE the physical world. And I will keep seeing it until my mind is 100% totally committed to seeing ONLY reality. That's why you can still find your way to the toilet!

This is the point at which the physical stops showing you pictures of impossible worlds:

"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."

Note then that spiritual sight only very "lightly" touches upon the physical "veil of illusions", the world, earth, as it LOOKS PAST it and beyond it to the light of heaven or the real world. It sort of lightly sees the forgiven world (to forgive is to overlook) as a result of not looking heavily AT it, and instead looking THROUGH it and past it. This makes the world gradually more transparent until eventually the veil of spacetime lifts entirely, revealing christ's face. ONLY THEN will you stop seeing the physical (forgiven OR unforgiven) world. And then you will use ONLY vision and see ONLY reality.

"By focusing upon the "good" in him, the body grows decreasingly persistent in your sight, and will at length be seen as little more than just a shadow circling round the "good."

So can we please try to stop saying that everything you see is because of how you're seeing, and stop saying that if you see something you're judging, and stop saying that every single claim is a projection, and stop saying that seeing a broken body means your mind is not healed, and stop being CONFUSED about the fact that there are TWO PARALLEL CHANNELS OF INPUT coming into your mind. One of them is true, and one of them is false. And the false channel can and will show you earth EXACTLY AS BEFORE, until you no longer have a body to look at it with. And this has NO BEARING on how healed your mind is other than to say that only in TOTAL healing will you stop USING the body at all.

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

Eternity, Heaven, is the living world of light, our home in God. It is reality. It is a "world" of light, in which there is only light. There is no darkness, no shadows, no blockages to resist the light. "Nothing there but shines and shines forever."

The separation is an attempt to deny that this is so, by trying to resist the light. It's an attempt to block awareness of the pervasiveness of light by being unwilling to accept it into the mind. We put up walls that block the light, and this SEEMS to produce states of darkness.

An extremely important thing to realize here is that the seeming presence of the darkness ENTIRELY DEPENDS on the light being absent. It is a direct consequence or "effect" of the light being blocked. When the block is removed or the light is allowed to shine and pervade, what happens to "the darkness"? It doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't displace, it doesn't hide. Darkness cannot make light go away. Light completely overpowers it and cancels it. It simply vanishes.

Where is the darkness, in the light? There isn't any. In perfect light, infinite light, there is no darkness anywhere. So what happens to the darkness when the light shines? The light SHINES AWAY the darkness. How does it do it? Because darkness isn't really a THING in its own right, it is ONLY the temporary, illusory result of blocking the light.

The darkness's entire "existence" is 100% dependent on the light remaining blocked. The darkness is like a shadow. The shadow doesn't determine for itself what it is, it is a consequence or result of the way the light is blocked. It acquires all of its properties, shapes and forms, from the blockage, and can only symbolize the blockage. Having no inherent qualities, properties, behaviors, characteristics, life, or existence of ITS OWN, it is merely a side-effect of the appearance that "light is absent."

When you block the light of Heaven's reality, the world God created (the Sonship, not the Earth), you seem to produce in your mind a blockage to the light, which produces shadows or "darkness". Or to put it another way, darkness SEEMS to come out of nowhere, when the light is blocked. It just sort of "appears", like a mirage or hallucination. It isn't caused by anything real, it is "caused by" the illusion that reality is not present.

Darkness is sort of like a "hole" in the light. And the darkness seems to take on various shapes, forms, sizes, appearances. It may seem to represent objects. It may even seem to take on the shape of a human body, a tree, a planet or a galaxy. It may even SEEM as if these "objects" are actually alive or moving and thinking for themselves, as if they have an actual existence or identity, which none of them have. Shadows have no inherent properties of their own, no mind, no will and no life. These "life" FORMS are the illusion of what *separateness* looks like - the absence of Heaven's light. Shadows are always fragmented and conflicted.

All of spacetime is a bubble of darkness, like a hole in Heaven, where light seems "shut out". The "world you made" to block the light, the world which is "an attack on God", the world which is a "picture of the crucifixion of God's son", the world of "death" or the "dream of death", are all this same one thing - the illusion of the absence of God/Light.

The entire "physical universe" is this appearance of a non-existent, lifeless, unreal, illusory world, which houses and includes the Earth and all bodies and objects. All of these things can ONLY seem to exist, WITHIN the absence of light, AS the absence of light, and only so long as the light is absent. They are "made of darkness", lack, emptiness, absence, NOTHINGNESS. They are not made of light. And darkness is only an illusion. It's a strange hallucinated imagined appearance of what it would look like IF light could be made to be absent.

When you are in a dark room, and you switch on the light, what happens to the darkness? Does it go somewhere? Does it turn into light? Is it retained? Does a chunk of it still persist in the light? Are its dark forms and shapes kept? No. The light DISPELLS them. They simply vanish. They "cease to seem to be." They don't transform into light. They just disappear. They are the OPPOSITE of the light and do not really exist. When the light is allowed to shine, the darkness or "lights absence" is corrected, light is supplied, and there is nowhere - no gap or hole - in which the darkness could SEEM to exist.

The world, including the Earth, all its forms, creatures, oceans, forests, the moon, the sun, the entire galaxy and all the thousands of galaxies, the void of space and all of time, are all symptoms or side-effects of what it seems to look like when light is absent. They are HELD in place by minds who are resisting the light and trying to enforce a blockage or denial of the light. When these minds come around and are healed, they will no longer desire that light be absent, and so there will be nothing "to keep a separated world in place." Without an active resistance to the light, there is nothing to prevent light/love from entering and dismissing the illusion that darkness exists. OR the illusion that the world exists.

It does not matter in the big picture whether you view this world through false perception or true perception. It does not matter whether you glimpse the real world or see the world as wholly forgiven and benevolent. "A forgiven world cannot last" because the world is nothing but "a thin veil over the face of Christ." When the light shines brightly enough, the dark veil that LOOKS LIKE a planet, will become transparent, thin, like a puff of smoke which can easily be dispelled. The entire universe, all forms of matter, all objects and bodies, will become increasingly invisible. As though you are pushing past a thick heavy curtain which is finally parting to reveal the LIGHT behind it which it was BLOCKING.

The world, including Earth, IS nothing but a blockage to the light. It DEPENDS ON the light remaining blocked in order to SEEM to exist at all. It is MADE OF and exists only WITHIN the illusion of darkness. Nothing about it is real. Nothing about it is light or life. It's a shadow. What happens to shadows when the light shines? They do not exist. They are REPLACED with light. The ego is where the darkness WAS. The world is where the darkness WAS. Bodies are where the darkness WAS. And they absolutely DO NOT EXIST in the light.

Being MADE OF darkness, if you take them to the light they will be dissolved, shone away. "Illusions recognized must disappear." "The body cannot remain without illusions." Try taking an illusion of light's absence INTO the light, and it cannot remain. Its nature, which is light's absence, IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH HEAVEN'S LIGHT. It is THE OPPOSITE of Heaven's light. Never the two shall meet. "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

The closer you approach the light which is BEYOND the body and BEYOND the world, behind them, the world will become less and less of an obstacle. It will seem less and less heavy or serious. It will seem to become lighter, itself, as its transparency begins to allow the light BEYOND it to shine through. As you begin to "see God in everything you see" because God is BEHIND the things you see. The things you see are BLOCKS to God. To forgive them is to OVERLOOK them (NOT SEE THEM) and to see PAST the "granite block of sin" (the veil of matter) TO reality.

"Unity alone is not a thing of dreams (not Earth). And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as **behind the dream**, **beyond all seeming** (behind the world) and yet surely theirs." It is the light BEYOND hell/dream/darkness/Earth that appeals to you, it is that light which you WANT to see, it is that light which is coming from ANOTHER WORLD (Heaven), and it is that light which is God which you see "in" or "through" or "behind" the things you see, while you are traveling TOWARDS the light.

As you move closer and closer to the light BEYOND the veil of matter (wall of sin), the veil dissolves. The veil ITSELF (the world you made - including Earth) thins out, stops seeming so solid, stops seeming to represent "real sin" or "real guilt", and it in a sense will seem to stop looking like "hell". It may even seem to become lovely or holy. But the loveliness is not there AS the world which is still made of darkness, it is there because there is increasingly LESS darkness (world) and increasingly more light (Heaven), revealed through spiritual sight/vision in parallel to the darkness that the body's eyes see.

The FORGIVEN WORLD is the thinnest, lightest, least dense, least heavy view of the SHADOW WORLD that's possible, while still seeing it. It's a perception of the ILLUSION of light's ABSENCE, in which the light is barely absent at all, such that the illusion seems to slightly remain as a THIN VEIL over Christ's face, and Christ's face is almost fully seen.

The forgiven world, Earth and spacetime, grows lovelier ONLY because it is DIMINISHING, and only because a loveliness is shining FROM BEYOND IT, coming from behind it, as the veil of matter dissolves. It is the SOURCE of the light that you want to get to. Just because the forgiven world seems illuminated BY this holy light, does not MAKE IT holy. It is NOTHING. It merely becomes like a spotless mirror in which you see a *reflection* of the light of Heaven, where it is obscuring the light the LEAST while still seeming to slightly exist. Once the light of Heaven beyond the world world/veil shines FULLY, the veil LIFTS, the face of Christ is seen, the WORLD IS FORGOTTEN, there IS NO WORLD, and Heaven is uncovered at last. And it is Heaven that you want.

Here, all the things made of death and darkness are shone away into oblivion, the "world spins into the NOTHINGNESS from which it came", the stars disappear in light, the dark world of shadows vanishes, the world is consumed by the light, shone away because the world is nothing but an ILLUSION of light's absence, and light's presence forces the impossible world to cease to exist and "Heaven is all that remains."

Not one single FORM of darkness (matter, energy or otherwise) remains in Heaven because ONLY LIGHT can remain in Heaven. "Gone are bodies in the blazing light of the Son of God." "Gone is perception". "Gone are walls" (objects, planets). "Nothing there is seen, only known." The Kingdom of God in all its glory. It was merely HIDDEN behind the blocks to love, the illusion of sin, which took the temporary illusory form of worlds and planets and bodies, made "as a place where God could enter not". These walls must go. Matter is an illusion. Spacetime is an illusion. Death is an illusion.

THERE IS NO WORLD. THIS IS THE CENTRAL LESSON THE COURSE WOULD ATTEMPT TO TEACH. Means simply... there is no shadow, no darkness, nothing OPPOSING the light. There is ONLY the Light of the Kingdom of God.

"Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world (physical) has to offer. The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true." ... "Nothing so blinding as perception of form" (objects, bodies, planets).

To behold (see) the world (Earth and space) in ANY way, is to be blinded to God. Not one single FORM, object, body, or planet, can remain in your vision if you are to experience God. You cannot keep the world, or the body, and be with God. "God cannot enter a body, nor can you join him there." "To be without a body is to be in your natural state." To be in/with/having a body is unnatural because the body is darkness (" in the body's darkness"). "The barren sands, the darkness, and the lifelessness are seen only through the body's eyes."

Light is natural. Light is eternal life. Light is your home. Light is what you are. "Eternity will shine away the world."

A Course in Miracles - Urtext material - reproduced with permission from the Foundation for Inner Peace (acim.org), and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles (facim.org).
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