The sheer extent of being deceived by FORM, is easy to recognize in this world. The sheer degree by which we have fallen for the belief that DIFFERENT FORMS are in fact different things.

We've given them different values, different meanings, different importance, different seriousness, different degrees of problem, different solutions, different natures, different materials, different shapes and colors and sizes. There is no end to the variations.

Look then at our addiction to forms. Our addiction to OBJECTS. To bodies, to toys, to buildings and cars, to special foods, to special relationships, to idols we worship. The idolization of places and things.

Look at how we seek after the next best special toy. That particular preferred clothing. That special kind of house. That dream car. That selection of food at the grocery store we like the taste of. That lifestyle. That environment. The decorations for our homes and bodies.

And look at how the world is constantly driven to tell you the many ways that the FORMS of things are different, special, unique, worth having. That some forms are SALVATION. That other forms are to be avoided, in favor of the chosen ones.

That if you just get this special form you will be happier, better off, safer, healthier. That some forms have magical powers and are better for you, while others hurt you. That some forms are to be avoided while others are to be deeply desired.

Look at all the bullshit values we've given everything. A bar of gold is allegedly more valuable than a bar of shit. The fancy dresses and suits seemingly worth more than shabby rags. Expensive houses and cars seemingly better than that old clunker.

The world tries to manufacture untold new forms, to leverage new properties of matter it discovered, and to sell the next most amazing form to you. This leads to all the shopaholic frenzy of possessions and purchases, sales and discounts. Ways to get more objects and forms of salvation.

To surround yourself with a fortress of form and to completely shut out all reality. To tell yourself your important job is doing some real good and is a great symbol of status, when all it is keeping you blinded and locked into a prison. To seek for riches, or for poverty, believing either one is the better form or more spiritual.

And then look at how we spiritualize forms and worship idols. How we put them on pedestals or throw them in the trash. And not for long will the next amazing form tempt you with its thrills, only to be discarded soon after when another comes to take its place.

Always competition. Always one-upmanship. Always the next best thing. Always superceding and overthrowing and exalting only to destroy. This is what the world is like. Driven mad by the utterly nonsense illusion that ANY form is DIFFERENT to any other. That one thing is not another thing. That all things are separate.

And so by worshipping form we worship death, because death means a lack of wholeness, and a preference for littleness. And there is no wholeness in the world as a result. And wholeness is health, meaning the worship of forms produces sickness. And now the body has become the hero of the dream, the celebrity, the one to watch.

Every way this world offers up the next puke casserole of "stuff" that you're supposed to think of as "not the same" as all the "stuff" that came before it, be not deceived. Consider that this world is going to just keep churning out form after form after form, all the while thinking it is creating something NEW, when all it is doing is rehashing and remaking what is old and dead.

Do you really WANT anything this world has to offer, when all it offers is the same one thing? The same illusion of fake things which have fake importance? Stuff you don't need, stuff you don't really want, stuff you can't rely on, stuff that just constantly changes into new forms to tempt you away from the truth.

Just how many thousands of "things" do you need? Just how many pieces of paper and shiny coins? How many different pairs of shoes and pieces of clothing? Exactly why do you collect all the rare and unusual trinkets and treasures? Why do you think EACH one is truly unique and not like the rest, worth having? And why do you seek to find the rarest and most valuable ultra-special items, exclusively for you which no one else has?

This is the madness of the world. It is disappearing up its own backside in its obsession with MAKING more and more and more. Regurgitating an endless list of piffle and drivel. Tempting you that the next right kitchen counter and the next sofa and the next douvet cover is going to save you from the very biased lopsided problems it is designed to cause? And which solution will ever set you free from the very problems it induces?

The forms of this world are a trap. They are ALL made to tempt you away from God and from wholeness, health and truth. They are all a decoy, disguising the fact that they are all ONE THING. One big illusion, pretending to be many illusions.

You keep buying the same shit over and over and over again because you don't realize it is the SAME as the last shit, just in a different form. And while you think the differences that keep forms apart are desirable, you will keep falling for the same one trick. This world really has NOTHING to offer. And ALL its objects are a lie.

"The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are no streets where people walk alone and separately. There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need."

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

"This world holds nothing that you really want"

"The world you see has nothing that you need to offer you; nothing that you can use in any way, nor anything at all that serves to give you joy. Believe this thought, and you are saved from years of misery, from countless disappointments, and from hopes that turn to bitter ashes of despair. No one but must accept this thought as true, if he would leave this world behind and soar beyond its petty scope and little ways."

"Each thing you value here is but a chain that binds you to the world, and it will serve no other end but this. For everything must serve the purpose you have given it until you see a different purpose there. The only purpose worthy of your mind this world contains is that you pass it by, without delaying to perceive some hope where there is none. Be you deceived no more. The world you see has nothing that you want."

"When we are all united in Heaven, you will value NOTHING that you value here. For nothing that you value here you value wholly, and so you do not value it at all. "

"If you will lay aside the ego's voice however loudly it may seem to call; if you will not accept its petty gifts which give you nothing that you really want; if you will listen with an open mind which has not told you what salvation is; then you will hear the mighty Voice of truth, quiet in power, strong in stillness, and completely certain in Its messages."

"Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world 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."

"What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own Soul?" This means that if he listens to the wrong voice, he has LOST SIGHT of his Soul. He CANNOT lose it, but he CAN not know it. It is therefore LOST TO HIM, until he chooses right."

"The wearying, dissatisfying gods you made are blown-up children's toys." "The gap that is not there is filled with toys in countless forms." "Look calmly at its toys, and understand that they are idols which but dance to vain desires. Give them not your worship, for they are not there." "Shall we continue to allow God's grace to shine in unawareness, while the toys and trinkets of the world are sought instead?" "Shall we not put away these sharp-edged children's toys? How soon will you be ready to come home?" "In my hands is everything you want and need and hoped to find among the shabby toys of earth. I take them all from you and they are gone. And shining in the place where once they stood there is a gateway to another world through which we enter in the Name of God." "What toys or trinkets in the gap could serve to hold you back an instant from His Love?" "Today He gives you His defenselessness, and you accept it in exchange for all the toys of battle you have made." "Whom He has judged can only laugh at guilt, unwilling now to play with toys of sin, unheeding of the body's witnesses before the rapture of His holy Face."

Believing that evil is real, is a mistaken perception. It's actually a failure to recognize what the so-called evil is. Only in a total lack of recognition, does it appear to be "real evil" at all. Without forgiveness, it seems to take on a kind of authenticity, as if it's actually a viable opposite to God, or some kind of real threat to what is good. But if you see evil this way, it is because you yourself are unforgiving, which means you are the evil one.

It's interesting to realize that evil is nothing but a way of describing someone who is not in their right mind. No-one in their right mind would ever attack or be harmful or anything other than loving. Evil really is just a term for someone who has lost their right mindedness and is now "not in their right mind", ie is insane. This insanity is simply a state of being confused and mistaken about what is real and true. It's a state of false belief, false perception, false values, and made-up fantasies about reality.

So someone who is in that state isn't really evil. It's not like their minds are in a state of wholeness and health and balance but just happen to believe something negative. To hold the beliefs that they do, their minds cannot be whole, they have lost sight of reason, they are in the darkness, are experiencing self conflicting ideas, must be living in fear, and do not know what is real any more.

Such an "evil" person may indeed seem to "do evil deeds", ie to sin in the world, and indeed they may well be vicious and attacking and harmful to themselves and others. But this isn't because they are "really evil". It's only because they are mistaken, confused, lost, in denial, are blocking the love they are, are unaware God loves them, and are trying to hide in the darkness. They are not really evil at all, they are just opposed to God's reality, experiencing what must be temporary insanity.

No one in their right mind would ever choose to do what an evil person would think is reasonable, justified, valid, worthwhile, functional, truthful, and a form of salvation. Such insane people simply have lost sight of what is true and real and now believe that all kinds of illusory made-up things are more true and real. They are therefore simply making an error, and are in a state of being very mistaken.

We can't then really say that such people are evil. When viewed through the same evil distorted perception they will appear to be truly evil, but this is also an unforgiving perspective, not an enlightened one. When you look at the big picture and what obviously must be true of such people, it becomes clearer that they are not really sinners, and there is no real sin. This isn't too much of a stretch because it's simply a fact.

In truth, sin is not real and evil does not exist. So whatever these people are being or doing isn't real sin and they are not really evil. If we can't recognize that, WE must have some kind of illness of our own that is producing false perceptions and making sin and evil real to us. And now we are scapegoating the "evil ones" to try to get rid of our own sinful beliefs about ourselves. Now we're essentially just as nuts as they are, and have become hypocritical in our claim that they are the evil ones and not us.

Anyone who blames the evil ones is just as insane, and looking to take advantage of what they see as a "really evil person", to justify why it's okay to find fault in them. It seems to be "true" that the evil ones are the evil ones, and not me. And now I've gotten away with murder by pinning the blame for my own sinful outlook onto someone else, just because they appear to me to be the evil one. This reveals a lack of sanity on my own part. I'm hardly justified in pointing a finger when there's a log in my own eye. And why am I casting stones when my own mind supports sin being real?

What we have to learn is that there are no sinners and there are no evil persons. Not in God's reality. His Kingdom is purely good and whole and innocent and there is no evil anywhere. And here in the world, these people are not evil sinners either. They are ONLY mistaken people, in error, whose minds are temporarily insane, and who do not know what they are doing. This is why they are forgivable. You can hardly hold anything against them if truly they are so confused that they do not really know what they are actually doing. And being not in their right minds they certainly are out of touch with reality.

So these evil persons are simply insane persons who have lost their way, and who truly must be afraid and calling for love, and who need healing and forgiveness, not more condemnation. They do not need us to make their sins real. They do not need us to compound and imprison them by holding their own mistaken-ness against them. If we do that, we're just as nuts and unforgiving as they are. We are in false perception the instant that we condemn people for what they are not really doing.

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

Forgiveness does not pardon sins or make them real. It does not mistake what we call evil people for "real evil". It does not look at a "sinner" and blame them for actually sinning. It recognizes what they are doing is not sin or evil. What they are doing is merely hurting themselves through mistaken choices and confusion.

Those who seem evil merely have lost touch with what is really true and think that other things are true which are not. And so they choose the darkness by mistake, believing it is the light. Their navigation system is reporting false positives and steering them towards hell and death and sin under the belief that they are moving towards truth and life and heaven. They are deceived and are deceiving. They are in denial. They believe in something that is not what it is, and so worship false Gods and lies. This doesn't make them evil, it just makes them mistaken.

It is our job to recognize that every so-called evil person is not evil. And that every so-called sinner is not a sinner. Because that is actually the TRUTH. And if no-one is ACTUALLY evil, and no-one has ever REALLY sinned, and if these people are just in need of some correction and healing, then we can open up to being more compassionate towards them.

Just as Jesus would, we now can recognize that even the most "evil" people deserve love and forgiveness. He would ask us to love our "enemies". He would stand up for the well-being and innocence of all people even if the world would judge them as sinners. He would defend even a murderer against those who would accuse the murderer of being disgusting and despicable. Simply because he knows this is not the truth of the person, and they have not really done what they seem to be doing. Would you beat down someone who is mentally ill and who does not know any better?

Only blind people who cannot see would accuse blind people of making accurate choices based on vision. And if every case of so-called "evil" falls within the umbrella of "those who are insane", then there is no-one on the planet who is truly evil. And we must then learn that to accuse anyone of evil is really part of our own evil. In our harmlessness we would not condemn or point a finger or scapegoat or project blame or judge or try to justify attack or enact revenge. Those are all signs of someone who is, themselves, full of shit and in need of correction.

God loves all His children. Everyone is innocent. No-one is evil. There are no sinners. But there are a great many insane people who need psychological healing and help because of their confusion. And every one of them deserves to be loved.

If you can no longer describe people as "really evil", this not only lifts away all sense of threat and danger from such people, it also makes you harmless and sane and puts you back into your right mind. No-one in their right mind would believe that anyone is an evil sinner, because sin and evil and death do not really exist. To accuse is to be accused, and accusation is never truth.

Recognizing no one is really evil is all part of remembering the truth, that we are all completely innocent, there are no enemies, there is no "real evil" plotting to destroy you, evil is just a call for love, and it is your function to forgive them for what they are not really doing. Those who seem evil are innocent children of God. And every single one of them is welcomed Home by God with open arms and unconditional love. Love is justified because they are just experiencing a bad dream. And nothing in dreams is true.

Jesus loves "the devil".

"18. A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously."

This touches on the essence of A Course in Miracles and the Golden Rule. Jesus is literally telling us that YOU ARE ONE WITH OTHERS. This means you are literally IN THEM. And therefore the way that you treat them is the SAME as the way you treat yourself.

There is no exception to this. You treat BOTH yourself and others the same way at the same time. To recoil for another is to recoil from yourself. To not love another is to not love yourself. To hate another is to hate yourself. There is no escaping this because fundamentally, by the Law of God, you ARE them.

"One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds. Such is the truth."

So per the Golden Rule, that means that every person you encounter, you should love them, IF you want to be loved and if you love yourself. You should SEE YOUR SELF in them. Because both you AND them are Christ. And your love of them IS your love of yourself, directly. What you give to them you receive. What you transmit to them, you transmit to the part of you that is in them.

The "part of you" that is "in them" is the target of everything you give to them, so you have a VESTED INTEREST - a shared interest, in treating them well in order for YOU to be treated well. This is not a play on words or an option. This is how minds share and relate. This is how they were created. This is the dynamics of the laws of God which are always applying.

It is always the ego that suggests, the way you treat another is NOT the way you are treating yourself. Or that you can attack without being attacked. Or you can be murderous without experiencing the consequences. Or you can judge without being judged. Or you can hate without being hated. Or you can be right and they can be wrong and there is no equality between you.

These are all LIES because they fly in the face of the inescapable LAW. It can SEEM as if you can treat someone differently to how you treat yourself, but all of that MUST be an illusion. Because the only truth is that ALL of God's children are perfect EQUALS. Making them perfect brothers in the sonship. And this is permanent fact.

Any kind of inequality is an illusion. And that not only means that you and your brother are SEPARATELY EQUAL as individuals, like two identical twins standing next to each other. It in fact means that you SHARE EVERYTHING, which means you OVERLAP with each other, are ONE with each other, JOINED with each other, IN each other. You literally are in your brother's mind with him. Even if that means part of you seems to be "over there" in another person, from a separated point of view.

This is really the only thing to be learned. How to love yourself AND others equally. How to recognize that you are ONE with all people. To realize that, you cannot GET AWAY WITH anything. You cannot hurt without being hurt. You cannot attack without being attacked. Scapegoating and blame are delusional and denial. When you attack anyone you are hurting yourself, and you have to ask yourself, do you want to keep hurting yourself?

Anger and attack towards "others" drives a RIFT into your mind between the part of your mind which seems to be isolated to "inside your body" and the part of you which seems to be "inside other people's bodies". The more you attack what you THINK is a "separate them", the more you are SPLITTING OFF part of you which is in "you" (as a body identified self) and the part of you which is ONE WITH THEM. Which means you are directly attacking yourself and splitting your mind.

The split mind is divided by bodily boundaries, and as you focus on the ways in which you are NOT ONE, by emphasizing the solidity and reality and restriction of bodily obstacles, it simply SPLITS your mind and causes you to disassociate from yourself. And now you think you are literally two selves, with one part of you trapped in your body and the other part of you trapped in another person's body. You've now made an ego for both of you. And now you want to attack another to steal back from them the part of your SELF that you believe they have kept from you. As discussed in "the laws of chaos", everyone is looking for the self they think they lost.

So this seems to be a catch. The catch is, that if you choose to attack someone, you WILL be attacked, and you will suffer consequences, directly inflicted BY YOURSELF upon yourself. This is the secret of salvation, that you are doing it to yourself. And the only way to alleviate this suffering is to LOVE the other person. If you love them you will be loved. If you hate them you will be hated. By yourself. You cannot escape this "clause". It is the law of God. It is the Golden Rule. It is both a curse if ignored, and a clue to how to be happy if embraced.

The Golden Rule doesn't just mean that if you might treat someone as you would have them treat you, they MIGHT elect to treat you in a similar fashion. If there is any possibility that cause and effect breaks down and they MIGHT NOT treat you how you are treating them, then the law is breakable, and it is not a law, and it has devolved to the level of physical behaviors. The true nature of the Golden Rule is the oneness you always have with everyone in the mind, whereby you LITERALLY are DIRECTLY treating yourself the way you are treating them, because you are IN THEM.

"Do unto others because you ARE doing unto yourself." is what it should say.

If there is a person you hate, you will drive a separation between you. In this separation you will believe that person is completely separate from you, and you want to have as much distance and dis-association between you as possible. You do not want to be associated with them. You want to destroy them and have them not exist. And in this intensity of hatred and rage and attack and anger, you believe THEY ARE NOT YOU. And as such you can hurl as much blame and condemnation upon them as you can muster, and it seems to be 100% about their faults, and 0% about yours. This is a state of insanity.

This is a great way to split your mind, leading to states of personal suffering, unlove, a total lack of peace, and literal self destruction. Those who murder are trying to kill themselves. And those who attack are undermining their own integrity. And those who hate do not love themselves. Just as those who are sick have made themselves sick in an attempt to accuse OTHERS of sin as well as themselves.

"You but accuse your brothers of your own sin."

"Damaged bodies remain accusers."

The only solution, and the only option, and the only law which you HAVE to abide by, and cannot escape, is the law of God, that how you DO treat others IS how you are treating yourself, because YOU ARE ONE WITH THEM. And being literally part of that person, anything you hurl at them you are hurling at yourself. And you WILL experience the consequences. So really, your hands are tied and you do not have any loopholes or ways to get out of it.

Either you love BOTH you and your brother, or you hate both you and your brother. Either you love both you and your brother, or you attack both you and your brother. Either you attempt to make both you and your brother sick, or you HEAL both you and your brother. When you suffer you suffer along with him. The truth that applies to you applies to them equally and to the same degree. And not simply because they are your equal, but because THEY ARE YOU.

"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."When this is recognized as true, when cause and effect are reunited so that anything you cause you also experience the effects of instantly, and when there is no way to attack without attacking yourself, you now have shared interests and the only option is to love. The only sane choice is to love. If you don't love you will hurt yourself and others. If you do love you will uplift and heal yourself and others. And "when I heal I am not healed alone."

It is by recognizing that you have a vested interest in loving others, because it allows you to be loved, that you will automatically steer clear of attack upon yourself. You will realize that you CANNOT attack another person WITHOUT suffering the consequences. And there is no way to hurt them without being hurt. So your only sane choice is to love unconditionally, so that you will be loved. Otherwise a failure to recognize your oneness leads to it seeming plausible, justifiable and warranted, that you can attack without consequence. And then you are on the slippery slope to hell.

In times when I am moving into uncertainty about whether it's true that this world is unreal, I refer back to some key statements in the course which seem very clear to me. One of them is "the body is a dream".

This anchors the truth that the body, and therefore everything the body is made of, and therefore by extension anything ELSE in the same environment which is made of similar stuff or is covered by similar laws, MUST ALSO be a dream.

This then implies logically that the whole world and universe is a dream, and the body is merely one part or character within that dream. And the course similarly backs this up. The body is the hero of the dream, and it cannot exist WITHOUT a dream.

"The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. ****There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream****, in which it acts as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed."

"The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive SOMETHING, and WITH something."

"The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to PROVE it is autonomous and real."

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

The body IS a dream, and can only exist INSIDE a dream, and DEPENDS ON dreaming, and cannot exist WITHOUT dreaming. Which means that it REQUIRES SLEEP in the mind in order for a DREAM to be taking place in order for a body to show up. It exists WITHIN perception and NOT in knowldge. There can be no body without this sleep, and there can be no dream without this sleep.

Even those who seem to have "awareness of dreaming", who seem more awake than others but still are in bodies, are still having DREAM bodies. And these bodies are STILL dreams. And these people are STILL dreaming. Awareness that you ARE DREAMING is not the end of dreaming, it is merely a point of perspective on the fact that you are NOT AWAKE. And this perspective on being "awake in the dream" is NOT the same as BEING FULLY AWAKE, never again to dream a single dream.

"No-one asleep and dreaming in the world remembers his attack upon himself. No-one believes there really was a time when ****he knew nothing of a body, and could never have conceived this world as real.**** He would have seen at once that ****these ideas are one illusion****, too ridiculous for anything but to be laughed away. How serious they now appear to be!"

The metaphysics of this is very simple and clear. When mind is FULLY AWAKE in heaven's reality, there is NO dreaming, NO sleep, and therefore there CANNOT BE BODIES. Bodies are dreams, and unless you are dreaming you cannot dream of bodies. Bodies are made up in the mind as part of the dreaming process. They are characters in the dream. Just as trees and houses and cars are characters in the dream. And none of them exist when you truly wake up to Reality.

"What seems to be the opposite of life (heaven - "there is no life outside of heaven") 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."

It is also very simple and evident, therefore, to realize that WITHOUT SLEEP, you cannot have a body. You cannot BE IN ONE and be fully awake. You CANNOT be in the full awareness of heaven, in which you are FULLY AWAKE, and at the same time claim that "you have a dream body". Dream bodies ONLY seem to exist for those who are asleep and dreaming still. The body cannot enter heaven because heaven is a waking state, not a dreaming state, and the body REQUIRES a dreamer.

This is also why you CANNOT be "Christ in a body", or "God in a body". Or "awake in a body". Or "in heaven in a body." And also why Jesus was NOT "christ in a body."

"God cannot enter a body, nor can you join him there.""Love was never in the world of dreams."

To suggest this is possible, is to suggest that you can be in the full awareness of the Christ WHO IS IN HEAVEN, in the WAKING AND NOT DREAMING state, while simultaneously BEING ASLEEP AND DREAMING and therefore materializing a body. It is simply impossible. If/when Jesus shows up as a body now, to Earth people, it is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. A temporary image within dreaming, used to symbolize something that is BEYOND the dream. Because Jesus is permanently in heaven.

"Christ has never slept."

"Jesus is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit"

"I am the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, and when you see me, it will be because you have invited Him."

Either you are squarely in heaven 100% in total awareness of God and reality. Or, you are in some way ASLEEP, having perception, dreaming of a world and inventing fake bodies. The only special exception to this is the Holy Spirit who spans the waking and dreaming states as a bridge, temporarily, to offer you a SYMBOL of heaven within the dreaming state - the real world, to prepare you for a full and gentle awakening.

The body is a dream, a fiction, an imagined fantasy, an image, a fake symbol, not an end in itself, a representative, an avatar, a depiction of something it can never truly picture.

"It is a picture of a body still, for what you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

It is not possible for your body, or anyone's body, to FULLY REPRESENT what you are as spirit. You are INVISIBLE to this realm. You cannot be seen by the body's eyes. The body CANNOT SEE REALITY or spirit.

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."So for example if Jesus were to show up here, his body would NOT BE HIM, because he is not body identified. His spirit would NOT be seen. And the body would be nothing but a SYMBOL, vaguely approximating an appearance that you might find appealing or reassuring, for some purpose. And the body that shows up is NOT HIM. It is merely a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Even if it looks just as 3D and real as other bodies. Because Christ cannot "be a body" any more than God can.

"Jesus was a man who remembered his soul." "But I was a man who remembered the Soul and its knowledge. "

You will not ever see GOD directly in a dream. He is not a body. He does not have a body. He cannot be IN a body. He is not in your body or in anyone's body. Even the idea that "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind" is an idea of seeing the REAL world BEYOND bodies, in which there ARE NO BODIES. God in his unlimited infinite nature will not EVER be reducible to a finite form or shape or appearance. Even "visions" of God are perceptual illusions.

"PROPERLY speaking, a "vision of God" is a miracle rather than a revelation. The fact that perception is involved at all removes the experience from the realm of knowledge."

So you see, if you follow what ACIM says, it is very clear and consistent. Bodies are dreams which only exist inside of dreams for those who dream of them during sleep. And while you can become more aware of the dreaming state, this too is only preparation for true awakening FROM the dream state. And to awaken FROM the dream state you CANNOT maintain a body, or be in one, or have one. It cannot go with you to heaven. And as soon as you stop dreaming the DREAM BODY made of DREAM STUFF has to disappear entirely.

"The body is a dream. Like other dreams, it sometimes seems to picture happiness, but can quite suddenly revert to fear, where every dream is born. For only love creates in truth, and truth can never fear. Made to be fearful, must the body serve the purpose given it. But we can change the purpose which the body will obey by changing what we think that it is for.

The body is the means by which God's Son returns to sanity. Though it was made to fence him into hell without escape, yet has the goal of Heaven been exchanged for the pursuit of hell. The Son of God extends his hand to reach his brother, and to help him walk along the road with him. Now is the body holy. Now it serves to heal the mind that it was made to kill."

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

Upon entering the separation, we immediately entered into states of suffering. This happened because we rejected our wholeness. By choosing to believe we could be separate from God, in the fall of man, we were choosing not to be the whole of who and what we are.

We rejected our wholeness and wanted to be partial. We started to believe in lack. We saw ourselves as special and wanted to hoard some things for ourselves selfishly, meaning that we also wanted to be deprived of what others had. We introduced this depravation and suffering into our own minds.

"If you will accept yourself as God created you, ***you will be incapable of suffering.*** But to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father IS the ***acknowledgment of yourself as you ARE***. 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. "

This meant that upon the very instant of beginning to enter into separation, in the fall, we introduced suffering into our own minds. This suffering is nothing more than the seeming lack of wholeness. Simply by rejecting wholeness, we placed our minds in every conceivable condition that you might think of as suffering.

For example, all of "the separated ones", by rejecting their whole identity, actually came to be uncertain whether they really exist. They rejected their souls and began to experience a tremendous uncertainty about whether they were even real, or even existed at all. This is because we rejected our Father, and therefore rejected the belief that we had been CREATED. So this brings with it a fear of not existing (fear of death).

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in your mind that it may even doubt whether you really exist at all."

Also in the separation, by trying to be partial and special and not whole, we introduced the idea of lack and scarcity. We saw ourselves as lacking, or being less than whole. This alone lays the foundation for feelings of inadequacy, shame, unworthiness, weakness, fear of not having what it takes, a desire to hide, powerlessness, deprivation, scarcity, lack of abundance, fear of loss, constant anxiety about being overcome, and perpetual stress.

"Today's idea will eventually overcome completely the sense of loneliness and abandonment which all the separated ones experience.""Recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones."

So by going into the separation, we immediately placed ourselves into suffering states. It's not like something in life happened to cause the suffering. It's not about some event taking place on a timeline. It's not about people doing stuff to us on a Tuesday. It all began and has its deepest roots in the separation from God itself. That's where it all started.

Your sense of suffering, lack, unworthiness, inadequacy, fear etc, can be compounded, and seem to increase or decrease, based on reactions to life events and so on. But fundamentally it isn't the world that's making you suffer, or any specific person, or any even major event. It's the separation from God. It's the lack of wholeness in your mind. It's the rejection of your soul. That's what's making you suffer, and that is the core root of ALL suffering. Which as the secret of salvation tells you, YOU are doing to yourself.

This really is also the source of all sickness and death. By believing that we are not as God created us, we reject eternal life, and believe in death. By seeing ourselves as unsufficient, a failure, lacking, unprepared, incapable, disabled, broken, etc, we form an image of ourselves as a body, representing what we think is true of us, and this now symbolizes and pictures our inner condition. So now the body is sick and frail and disabled because the mind is sick and frail and disabled."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 resistance against the truth, puts the brakes on the extension of creation, rejects your natural functioning, and places you into a state of malfunction. This is the root of ALL forms of sickness. Worded in another way, it is a fear of the state of wholeness, a fear of approaching that state of wholeness, and therefore a fear of awakening to wholeness.

"All forms of sickness even unto (physical) death are PHYSICAL expressions of the fear of awakening."

This tells you also that if you were not to be afraid of awakening, if you were to embrace wholeness, if you were to open up to your perfection, and if you would deny and reject anything not of God any power over you (including death therefore), your mind would not be in a state of fear and would not need to defend itself against the truth, sickness would vanish and the body would return to a symbol of health.

It ultimately isn't stuff in the environment, little viruses, people's attacks, weather conditions, poisons in the food and water, or anything else in the world that is making us suffer. It is solely our own seemingly broken relationship with God. It is the connection between you and your soul, which has become blocked off and rejected. It is the denial of your SELF, that is making you have an ego exprience.

All pain is therefore induced by the denial of God. "The denial of God is the ego's religion." This denial of God produces a false "God of sickness". And this God of sickness demands the rejection of health both mentally and physically.

"Allegiance to the denial of God (and thus your wholeness) is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."By even dipping your little toe into "the separation", by even perceiving at all, by believing a single illusion, you are entering into a realm of suffering and pain and fear. You cannot feel safe until you are whole. You cannot feel free from death until you embrace your eternal life. You cannot end suffering or be happy until you know you are with God.

"A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is with God. "So we can look externally all day for illusory sources of suffering. We can attribute the cause of death to anything OTHER than ourselves. We can blame the whole world for causing us to suffer. We can use the world as a gigantic scapegoat. But it will never change the underlying fact that WE cause our own suffering through our belief in separation. And this is the ONLY cause of suffering, sickness and death.

"Every illusion carries pain and suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments in which it hides its nothingness."

"Illusions carry only guilt and suffering, sickness and death, to their believers."

"Reason will tell you that the only way to escape from misery is to recognize it and go the other way."

"Our efforts will be directed toward recognizing that there is only one problem and one answer."

"Today I would remember the simplicity of salvation by reinforcing the lesson that there is one problem and one solution."

For those of us, us "separated ones", who see ourselves as trapped in bodies, and prone to suffer, we need to be gentle with ourselves in recognition of WHY we suffer. We see ourselves as unworthy and insufficient, lacking and unwholy/unholy, imperfect and flawed, weak and frail and afraid, guilty and shameful, not good enough, disempowered, lost, alone, withering and dying. We believe this because we believe in being separate and are deceived by illusions.

It's quite natural to then become afraid of failure at every step, because if you know/believe that you are less than whole, you know that you do not have everything you need. And you then see yourself as incapable. And in recognizing your limitations, you will not trust that you can do things. You will undermine yourself, sabotage your efforts, avoid, procrastinate, and generally "fail" to live. And in seeing yourself as inadequate you will avoid doing anything because you know that you do not have what it takes to do it.

All this undermines your sense of confidence and certainty. It places you into doubt and fear and weakness. So you have to now be gentle with yourself in trying to "recognize your disability", which is mentally imposed, and work to undo this disability. To overcome your belief in being limited and confined and broken. Because by recognizing your immortal perfection you can rejoin yourself in wholeness and undo the illusions of damage and reverse your belief in being a frail lifeless piece of garbage.

We are all here as "recovering" death-addicts. We are all trying to find the strength to carry on. The will to live. We have to develop trust in a truth bigger than ourselves that we are far more powerful than we realize, are fully capable, and "there is nothing our holiness cannot do." This is a pathway in becoming re-empowered, re-energized, and alive again. It is the path of resurrection from death. You are coming back to LIFE, because you are crawling our of your hole of self torture and torment and hell, and are rising up the stairway to heaven's gate, where God is there to welcome you Home.

This is a MAJOR axis in the course, transitioning from false perception to true perception. Learning to overlook the world of bodies and see beyond it to the light of the real world, so that you are ready to move on to Heaven. It is VERY CLEAR that the physical world of bodies is ONLY SEEN through the body's eyes, and learning to OVERLOOK it and not believe any of it is forgiveness.

"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."

"Sin is a block, set like a heavy gate, locked and without a key, across the road to peace. No-one who looks on it without the help of reason, would try to pass it. The body's eyes behold it as solid granite, so thick it would be madness to attempt to pass it. Yet reason sees through it easily, BECAUSE it is an error. The form it takes cannot conceal its emptiness from reason's eyes."

"ONLY the form of error attracts the ego. Meaning it does not recognize, and does not know if it is there or not. Everything that the body's eyes can see is a mistake, an error in perception, a distorted fragment of the whole, without the meaning that the whole would give. And yet mistakes, regardless of their form, can be corrected. Sin is but error in a special form the ego venerates. It would preserve all errors, and make them sins. For here is its own stability, its heavy anchor in the shifting world it made; the rock on which its church is built, and where its worshippers are bound to bodies, and believe the body's freedom is their own."

"If you but recognized how little stands between you and your awareness of your union! Be not deceived by the illusions it presents of size and thickness, weight, solidity, and firmness of foundation. Yes, to the body's eyes it looks like an enormous, solid body, immovable as is a mountain. Yet, within you, there is a force which no illusions can resist. This body only seems to be immovable. This force is irresistible in truth. What, then, must happen when they come together? Can the illusion of immovability be long defended for what is quietly passed through and gone beyond?"

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

"It is not Will for Life, but wish for death, that is the motivation for this world. Its ONLY purpose is TO PROVE GUILT REAL."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not. And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

"The body's eyes will NEVER look on it. Yet they will SEE what it dictates. The body will remain guilt's messenger, and will act as it directs, as long as YOU believe that guilt is real. For the REALITY of guilt is the illusion which seems to make it heavy and opaque, impenetrable, and a REAL foundation for the ego's thought system. Its thinness and transparency are not apparent, until you see the light BEHIND it. And then you see it as a fragile veil, before the light."

"This world you see (with the body's eyes) MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision (christ vision). YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER."

"You do not really want the world you see (with the body), for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust even as you made it."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"The purpose of these exercises (workbook intro) is to train the mind to a different perception of everything in the world. The workbook is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the undoing of what you see now, and the second with the restoration of sight."

"Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

"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."

"Corrective learning always begins with awakening the spiritual eye, and turning away from belief in physical sight. The reason this entails fear is because man is afraid of what his spiritual eye will see, which was why he closed it in the first place. We said before that the spiritual eye cannot see error, and is capable only of looking beyond it to the defense of Atonement. There is no doubt that the spiritual eye does produce extreme discomfort by what it sees. The thing that man forgets is that the discomfort is not the final outcome of its perception. When the spiritual eye is permitted to look upon the defilement of the altar, it also looks immediately toward Atonement. Nothing which the spiritual eye perceives can induce fear. Everything that results from accurate spiritual awareness merely is channelized toward correction. Discomfort is aroused only to bring the need to correct forcibly into awareness.

What the physical eye sees is not corrective, nor can it be corrected by any device which can be physically seen. As long as a man believes in what his physical sight tells him, all his corrective behavior will be misdirected. The reason why the real vision is obscured is because man cannot endure to see his own defiled altar. But since the altar has BEEN defiled, this fact becomes doubly dangerous unless it IS perceived. This perception is totally not-threatening because of the Atonement. The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. The fear arises because of the necessary willingness to look at what man has done to himself."

"Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. 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."

"But the outcome is as certain as God. The spiritual eye literally CANNOT SEE error, and merely looks for Atonement. All the solutions which the physical eyes seek, dissolve in its sight. The spiritual eye, which looks within, recognizes immediately that the altar has been defiled, and needs to be repaired and protected."

"The REAL beauty of the Temple cannot be seen with the physical eye. The spiritual eye, on the other hand, cannot see the building at all, but it perceives the altar within with perfect clarity. This is because the spiritual eye has perfect vision."

"Vision adapts to wish, for sight is always secondary to desire. And if you see the body, you have chosen judgment, and not vision. For vision, like relationships, has no order. You either SEE, or not."

"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".

"The concept of the self stands like a shield, a silent barricade before the truth, and hides it from your sight. All things you see are images because you look on them as through a barrier which dims your sight and warps your vision, so that you behold nothing with clarity. The light is kept from everything you see. At most, you glimpse a shadow of what lies beyond. At least you merely look on darkness, and perceive the terrified imaginings that come from guilty thoughts and concepts born of fear. And what you see is hell, for fear IS hell. All that is given you is for release; the sight, the vision and the inner Guide all lead you out of hell with those you love beside you, and the universe with them."

"And this he learns when first he looks upon ONE brother as he looks upon himself, and sees the mirror of himself in him. Thus is the concept of himself laid by, for nothing stands between his sight and what he looks upon, to judge what he beholds. And in this single vision does he see the Face of Christ, and understands he looks on everyone as he beholds this One. For there is light where darkness was before, and now the veil is lifted from his sight.

The veil across the Face of Christ, the fear of God and of salvation, and the love of guilt and death, - they all are different names for just one error; that there is a space between you and your brother, kept apart by an illusion of yourself which holds him off from you, and you away from him. The sword of judgment is the weapon which you give to the illusion of yourself, that it may fight to keep the space that holds your brother off unoccupied by love. Yet while you hold this sword, you must perceive the body as yourself, for you are bound to separation from the sight of him who holds the mirror to another view of what he is, and thus what YOU must be."

"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."

"If you send forth ONLY the messengers the Holy Spirit gave you, WANTING no messages but theirs, you will see fear no more. The world will be transformed before your sight, cleansed of all guilt, and softly brushed with beauty. The world contains no fear that you laid not upon it. And none you cannot ask love's messengers to REMOVE from it, and see it still. The Holy Spirit has given you HIS messengers, to send each other, and return to each with what love sees. They have been given to REPLACE the hungry dogs of fear you sent instead. And they go forth to signify the END of fear."

"My holy vision sees all things as pure" - "And while we still remain outside the gate of Heaven, let us look on all we see through holy vision and the eyes of Christ. Let all appearances seem pure to us, that we may pass them by in innocence, and walk together to our Father's house as brothers and the holy Sons of God."

"Be willing, then, to see your brother sinless, that Christ may rise before your vision and give you joy. And place no value on your brother's body, which held him to illusions of what he is."

"Vision is freely given to those who ask to see. Your brother's sinlessness is given you in shining light, to look on with the Holy Spirit's vision, and to rejoice in, along with Him."

"There is no problem, no event or situation, no perplexity, that vision will not solve. All is redeemed, when looked upon with vision. For this is not YOUR sight, and brings with it the laws beloved of Him Whose sight it IS. Everything looked upon with vision falls gently into place, according to the laws brought to it by His calm and certain sight. The end, for everything He looks upon, is always sure. For it will meet His purpose, seen in unadjusted form, and suited perfectly to meet it. Destructiveness becomes benign, and sin is turned to blessing under His gentle gaze.

What can the body's eyes perceive, with power to CORRECT? Its eyes ADJUST to sin, unable to overlook it in any form, and seeing it everywhere, in everything. Look through its eyes, and everything will stand condemned before you. All that could save you, you will never see. Your holy relationship, the source of your salvation, will be deprived of meaning, and its most holy purpose bereft of means for its accomplishment. Judgment is but a toy, a whim, the senseless means to play the idle game of death in your imagination. But vision sets all things right, bringing them gently within the kindly sway of Heaven's laws."

"The barren sands, the darkness, and the lifelessness are seen only through the body's eyes. ITS vision IS distorted, and the messages IT transmits to you, who MADE it to limit your awareness, ARE little and limited, so fragmented that they are meaningless. From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it. And these messages bear witness to this world, pronouncing it as true. For YOU sent forth these messengers, to bring this BACK to you."

"Anger but screeches, "Guilt is real!" Reality is blotted out as this insane belief is taken as replacement for God's Word. The body's eyes now "see"; its ears alone can "hear." Its little space and tiny breath become the measure of reality. And truth becomes diminutive and meaningless."

"Reason would tell you that the world you see through eyes that are not yours, MUST make no sense to you. To whom would vision such as this send back its messages? Surely not you, whose sight is wholly independent of the eyes which look upon the world. If this is not your vision, what can it show to you? The brain can not interpret what YOUR vision sees. This you would understand. The brain interprets to the body, of which it is a part. But what it says, YOU cannot understand.

Yet you have listened to it. And long and hard you tried to understand its messages. You did not realize it is impossible to understand what fails entirely to reach you. You have received no messages at all you understood. For you have listened to what can never communicate at all. Think, then, what happened. Denying what you are, and firm in faith that you are something else, this something else, which you have made to be yourself, BECAME your sight. Yet it must be the SOMETHING ELSE which sees, and, as NOT you, explains its sight to you.

YOUR vision would, of course, render this quite unnecessary. But, if your eyes are closed, and you have called upon this thing to lead you, asking it to explain to you the world it sees, you have no reason not to listen, nor to suspect that what it tells you is not true. Reason would tell you that it can't be true, BECAUSE you do not understand it. God has no secrets. He does not lead you through a world of misery, waiting to tell you, at the journey's end, why He did this to you. What could be secret from His Will? Yet you believe that YOU have secrets. What could your secrets be except ANOTHER will, that is your own, APART from His? "

"Your sight was given you, along with everything that you can understand. You will perceive no difficulty in understanding what this vision tells you. For everyone sees only what he thinks he IS. And what your sight will show you, you will understand BECAUSE it is the truth. Only your vision can convey to you what YOU can see. It reaches you directly, without a need to be interpreted to you. What needs interpretation MUST be alien. Nor will it ever be made understandable, by an interpreter you cannot understand. Of all the messages you have received and failed to understand, this course alone is OPEN to your understanding, and CAN be understood."

"Reason will tell you that they must have seen each other through a vision not of the body, and communicated in a language the body does not speak"

"My condemnation keeps my vision dark, and through my sightless eyes I cannot see the vision of my glory."

"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."

"Miracles are seen in light" "It is important to remember that miracles and vision necessarily go together. This needs repeating and frequent repeating. It is a central idea in your new thought system and the perception which it produces. The miracle is always there. Its presence is not caused by your vision; its absence is not the result of your failure to see. It is only your awareness of miracles that is affected. You will see it in the light; you will not see it in the dark."

"Only be quiet. You will need no rule but this to let your practicing today lift you above the thinking of the world, and free your vision from the body's eyes."

"To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified. To the extent to which you recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent you will perceive attack cannot BE justified. This is in strict accord with vision's FUNDAMENTAL law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you WANT it there. Perception HAS no other law than this."

"But on His Vision sin can NOT encroach, for sin HAS BEEN corrected by His sight."

"What is the resurrection?" "Here the curriculum ends. From here on, no directions are needed. Vision is wholly corrected and all mistakes undone."

"Now there are no distinctions. Differences have disappeared and Love looks on Itself. What further sight is needed? What remains that vision could accomplish? We have seen the face of Christ, His sinlessness, His Love behind all forms, beyond all purposes."

"These things await us all, but we are not prepared as yet to welcome them with joy. As long as any mind remains possessed of evil dreams, the thought of hell is real. God's teachers have the goal of wakening the minds of those asleep, and seeing there the vision of Christ's face to take the place of what they dream. The thought of murder is replaced with blessing."

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"These are among the many magical beliefs that come from the conviction you are a body, and the body's eyes can see. You also believe the body's brain can think. If you but understood the nature of thought, you could but laugh at this insane idea." " Yet this is no more foolish than to believe the body's eyes can see; the brain can know."

"It is your weakness that sees through the body's eyes, peering about in darkness to behold the likeness of itself; the small, the weak, the sickly and the dying, those in need, the helpless and afraid, the sad, the poor, the starving and the joyless. These are seen through eyes which cannot see and cannot bless. Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them. It unites with light, of which it is a part. It sees itself. It brings the light in which your Self appears. In darkness you perceive a self that is not there."

"The body's eyes are closed, and as you think of him who grieved you, let your mind be shown the light in him beyond your grievances."

"You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally. If it is not the body's sight, it MUST be understood. For it is PLAIN, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. It CAN be understood. And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their different ways."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it were a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see. For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them. What was its maker's GOAL, but not to see? For this the body's eyes are perfect means. But not for seeing. See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and cannot go beyond. Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning."

"Let not the FORM of his mistakes keep you from him whose holiness is yours. Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body's eyes can see. Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins, and of his body. What is there in him that you would attack, except what you associate with his body, which YOU believe can sin? Beyond his errors is his holiness, and YOUR salvation. You gave him not his holiness, but tried to see your sins in him, to save yourself. And yet his holiness IS your forgiveness. Can YOU be saved by making sinful the one whose holiness is your salvation?"

"There has been some controversy (in human terms) as to whether seeing is an attribute of the eyes, or an expression of the integrative powers of the brain. Correctly understood, the issue revolves around the question of whether the body or the mind can see (or understand). This is not really open to question at all." " The body is not capable of understanding. Only the mind KNOWS anything." "Only the mind sees".

"Your world is seen through eyes of fear, and brings the witnesses of terror to your mind. The real world cannot be perceived except through eyes forgiveness"

"I would bless the world by looking on it through the eyes of Christ."

"You keep an ancient memory before your eyes. And he who lives in memories alone is unaware of where he IS."

"The real world is attained simply by the COMPLETE forgiveness of the old; the world you see WITHOUT forgiveness. The Great Transformer of perception will undertake WITH you the careful searching of the mind that MADE this world, and uncover TO YOU the SEEMING reasons for your making it. In the light of the REAL reason that He brings, as you follow Him, He will SHOW you that there is NO reason here at all. Each spot HIS reason touches, grows alive with beauty. And what SEEMED ugly, in the darkness of your LACK of reason, is suddenly released to loveliness. Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release.

All this beauty will rise to bless your sight, as you look upon the world with forgiving eyes. For forgiveness literally TRANSFORMS vision, and lets you see the real world, reaching quietly and gently across chaos, and removing ALL illusions that had twisted your perception, and fixed it on the past. The smallest leaf becomes a thing of wonder, and a blade of grass a sign of God's perfection. From the forgiven world, the Son of God is lifted easily to his home. And there he knows that he has ALWAYS rested there, in peace."

"Forgiveness is the home of miracles. The eyes of Christ deliver them to all they look upon in mercy and in love. Perception stands corrected in His sight, and what was meant to curse has come to bless. Each lily of forgiveness offers all the world the silent miracle of love. And each is laid before the Word of God upon the universal altar to Creator and creation, in the Light of perfect purity and endless joy."

"Seen through understanding eyes the holiness of the world is all I see, for I can picture only the thoughts I hold about myself."

"Vision is the means by which the Holy Spirit translates your nightmares into happy dreams; your wild hallucinations, that show you all fearful outcomes of imagined sin, into the calm and reassuring sights with which He would replace them. These gentle sights and sounds are looked on happily, and heard with joy. They are His substitutes for all the terrifying sights and screaming sounds the ego's purpose brought to your horrified awareness. They step away from sin, reminding you that it is not reality that frightens you, and that the errors which you made CAN be corrected.

When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and seen it change to sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of violence and death, and watched them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away; who need persuade you to accept the gift of vision? And after vision, who is there who could refuse what MUST come after? Think but an instant just on this. You can behold the holiness God gave His Son. And never need you think that there is something else for you to see."

"This is your purpose now, and the vision that makes it yours is ready to be given. You have the vision that enables you to see the body not. And as you look upon each other, you will see an altar to your Father, holy as Heaven, glowing with radiant purity, and sparkling with the shining lilies you laid upon it."

And this will be your concept of YOURSELF, when you have reached the world beyond the sight your eyes alone can offer you to see. For you will not interpret what you see without the Aid that God has given you. And in His sight there IS another world. You live in that world just as much as this, for both are concepts of yourself, which can be interchanged, but never jointly held. The contrast is far greater than you think, for you will love this concept of yourself, because it was not made for you alone. Born as a gift for someone not perceived to be yourself, it has been given YOU. For your forgiveness, offered unto him, has been accepted now for BOTH of you."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals."

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

"Now is there silence all around the world. Now is there stillness where before there was a frantic rush of thoughts that made no sense. Now is there tranquil light across the face of earth, made quiet in a dreamless sleep. And now the Word of God alone remains upon it. Only That can be perceived an instant longer. Then are symbols done, and everything you ever thought you made completely vanished from the mind which God forever knows to be His only Son."

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

"The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that come and go, the tides, the seasons, and the lives of men; all things that change with time and bloom and fade, will not return."

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

In ACIM there is a very strong theme, based on the Golden Rule, which describes a dynamic we are all supposed to adopt. It's the idea that giving and receiving are one.

"giving and receiving are the same" UrW225

In fact, that entire phrase appears SIX times in the course.

It is the backbone of the Golden Rule, which is a law of God, that what you do unto another YOU directly DO unto yourself. And this is on the basis that your brother - other people - are a PART OF YOU. And therefore, what you do to them, you literally are doing to the part of you that is SHARED with them.

But think about this for a moment, because it really makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Jesus presents it with what appears to be a nice voodoo-sounding phrase, which is laden with impossibilities:

"Therefore, His teaching begins with the lesson: To HAVE, GIVE all TO ALL." UrT6F13

How on earth, can you give everything, to everyone, and still HAVE everything? This defies normal logic, does it not? It does not make sense. Ask anyone in the world how this is possible, they will probably be stumped. It seems totally false.

If I give you my dinner, I will not have my dinner. If I give you my car, I will not have the car. If I give you my money, I will not have the money. HOW can it MAKE SENSE, to say that if I give you everything, I will HAVE IT ALL? Or even worse, that I'm supposed to give what I have ***TO EVERYONE***? How is that even possible?

If you are savvy and paying attention, you should conclude that these kinds of statements MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL. They seem absolutely nonsense. They are totally out of line with what we experience in the world. How can they be true?

The big thing is... Jesus seems to be telling us that it is not only POSSIBLE, but the true law of God, that things which seem impossible to us are the ONLY possibility. That there is some WEIRD way by which something that makes absolutely no sense, IS in fact the truth.

He is telling us that we're supposed to "love others as ourselves" - as we would love ourselves, and knowing that they ARE a part of ourselves. How can this make any sense though? And be careful not to go into denial here and just PRETEND that "you believe it" because it sounds all magical and spiritual.

It seems ONLY to make sense to say that whatever I GIVE, I WILL LOSE. Yes? Have you ever experienced otherwise? Anything you have ever given you have lost. You have had to compromise. You have never been able to keep what you have given to anyone. Why is Jesus telling you that it is some kind of divine law or dynamic or way of relating to others that you're supposed to adopt? What nonsense!

"A miracle is a service. It is the maximal service that one soul can render another. It is a way of loving your neighbor as yourself. The doer recognizes his own and his neighbor's inestimable value simultaneously." UrT1B18A

The thing is.. .. God's truth and laws are nothing like the laws of this world, or the dynamics of ego relationships, or the way by which physical objects interact and relate. What SEEMS to make sense to us here, is in truth absolutely nonsense. And that which SEEMS to be absolutely nonsense, is in fact the truth.

Now... that's a REALLY BIG CLAIM. Because now Jesus is telling us that something that seems to make NO SENSE, is in fact the truth! Nonsense is the truth?! Not only is it the truth, GOD HIMSELF apparently has a nature which makes NO SENSE.

Somehow, we're told, God gives everything to everyone, and yet keeps everything. And, supposedly we're supposed to adopt the same function, of giving everything to everyone, in order to have everything. And he even tells us that if we do NOT give it all away, we will have nothing. WHAT NONSENSE, SURELY?!

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT." UrT3G15

Here for example Jesus is saying not only are there souls created by God (hold that thought), but also that EACH of them knows God COMPLETELY. Which means, that I can have everything, and you can have everything, and we can both have everything simultaneously. WHAT THE F?! .... How can that make any sense at all?

How can you have everything, while I also have everything, without either of us having to compromise or share or take turns? But he's telling us that's how it is. And he describes this dynamic as miraculous - it IS a course in the miraculous, after all.

So here's the big issue. It is CLEARLY evident that all of the things which are true of God, and all of the dynamics of his creation and reality and the workings of his relationships and so on, SEEM TO MAKE ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.

They entail seemingly mind-bending possibilities, such as you handing over your entire inheritance and still having it all. Such that, in fact, when you give everything, the other person you gave it to now HAS IT ALL, AND YET... you ALSO have it all, which means the total amount HAS INCREASED. F me!

"God Himself created the law by creating BY it. And His Sons, who create LIKE Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the INCREASE of the Kingdom depends on it, just as THEIR creation did." UrT7C7

We're told that the entire Kingdom of God INCREASES, because when you GIVE ALL TO ALL, you still HAVE it all, and now everyone else HAS everything you gave, and now it is DOUBLED. So there is constant increase of everything real. This is a real dynamic in reality. How can this make any sense at all, that when you give stuff away IT MULTIPLIES?!!! What?

What it then boils down to, is that the ultimate truth is, God's nature, the nature of reality and oneness, what is possible, what is a fact, will always SEEM TO MAKE NO SENSE TO YOU. It will in fact seem like a collection of paradoxes. And it will seem like nonsense. And anything that is true WILL seem to be nonsense to your ego, and to your earthly way of thinking, and to the way that you REASON all your conclusions. They are all nonsense.

Here's the climax of my post. There is much debate about oneness and non-duality and so on. And people generally will say that whatever MAKES SENSE, must be the truth. Screw that! God has dynamics which DO NOT make sense to ordinary reasoning. Giving everything away in order to keep it, what?! What's given increases when you give it away, what?! It seems like nonsense. BUT IT IS TRUE.

So you should NOT be quite so certain, that God's reality and workings are supposed to fit nicely into what you think "makes sense". In fact, if you think that God's functioning makes sense based on ordinary reasoning, YOU ARE CONFUSED.

To normal reasoning, God's workings are supposed to look like paradoxes. They are SUPPOSED to look like contradictions. They are SUPPOSED to look like they make no sense at all and can't be true!! Because the reasoning being used to LOOK at it is itself BACKWARDS and false.

The people who thus claim ACIM is non-duality are using backwards reasoning to claim that "oneness" and "it's all God" and "you don't exist" makes perfect sense. That's a total fail. God is capable of BREAKING all your rules and TRANSCENDING all your little limitations and requirements.

ACIM clearly is teaching a transcendental thought system which, to the way that most people think, DOES NOT make sense. And this is supposed to reveal to you, at some point, that THE WAY YOU THINK IS WRONG. Not just what you think, but HOW. Not just the line of your thinking and the conclusions you come to that you THINK make sense, but the entire method and logic that you use to draw conclusions IS MISTAKEN. It is OPPOSITE to the nature of God.

This is why ACIM is not non-duality. Non-duality is far too absent paradoxes. It contains none of the mind-bending transcendence of laws and limits present in the Golden Rule. It has no recognition of the fact that God can do things which SEEM impossible, including the creation of multiple sons/souls who themselves are creators in reality, WITHOUT VIOLATING ONENESS. Which... you guessed it, seems like it would be "totally impossible" and "totally nonsense", BUT ISN'T.

So you should really get used to the fact that reality WILL NOT make sense to your typical reasoning. Your conclusions are all back to front and entirely within the separation-based thought system of the ego. Even non-duality and oneness are ego constructs resulting from a way of reasoning that doesn't even acknowledge the rule-breaking nature of God.

If you think this is not correct, think again. Think again about the facts we're being taught. We're being told to do something that seems TOTALLY COUNTER INTUITIVE. Which seems to run TOTALLY OPPOSITE to how your ENTIRE thought system works. To treat others in the knowledge that they are a part of you, such that what you do to them you do to yourself. That is not something that makes any sense to the world's thinking.

Don't be deceived that making sense of something means it is true. An entire system of thought can have internal consistency and seem to make total sense, and yet be entirely wrong. We are not here in the business of just being a sheep that follows the basic little conclusions the ego comes up with.

"It's all one therefore there can't be many"... nonsense.

"God couldn't create anything otherwise there would be separation" .... nonsense.

"If I exist then I must be an ego" ... nonsense.

"If there are many things in reality then reality is dualistic". ... nonsense.

The truth is FAR more mind-bending and waaaaaaaaay outside the box of how you think about things. If you have not encountered all the paradoxes and found a way to live with them, you are still squarely locked into the ego's thought system.

"ACIM is non-dualistic" is a conclusion drawn by egos following all of the ego's rules of separation-based reasoning, without showing the slightest sign of appreciation for God's PARADOXICAL nature, in which two completely opposite-seeming things can be simultaneously true, WITHOUT it being wrong.

If you think everything about God's nature has to sound like it makes nice tidy sense, you haven't even begun to recognize what God is like. God is a creator, and oneness DOES have real parts to it, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that fact at all. If YOU see a gross contradiction, YOU have not escaped the ego's mindset.

It was only about a year ago that I finally 'came out' as a bisexual person and owned it after 49 years in a dark closet. Since then I've been exploring and expressing and working on more deeply coming to terms with this and living it more - being more visible.

But one aspect that has been nagging in the background is a fear that I will be attacked and judged and hurt by others about this. Largely this is based on an awareness of what people can be like, especially the bigoted angry people, and what's happened to others in brutal attacks and judgement.

I didn't realize for a while that I was taking this position, or playing at being a victim, or that it was even something I needed to do some forgiveness about. But then I became aware of it. So how does one forgive such a thing, where we're at the mercy of the world and afraid of what it might do to us? Safety is a primary concern of everyone and all of us can relate to feeling afraid of being hurt in some way.

I first had to recognize that I was even in a state of "not peace" about it, that I was having worries and thoughts about it, and this was not normal. It's quite easy to just "have" those thoughts and feelings and not even have the awareness to step outside of it or notice that it's a problem or something to even work on. In that mindset, even the idea that there's something wrong can be out of awareness and we just go through the motions of suffering.

Having recognised something is bothering me, I then start to look at it. What's going on here, who is doing what, what is this based on, and am I willing to explore more honestly what's really happening?

As I looked at this I remembered that if I'm immortal I can't really be attacked, so if I believe I'm attackable that's a mistake on my part. That cuts through a lot of crap. Nothing real can be threatened, so I must be believing something faulty if I think people can attack me. That gives some quick relief.

Then I started to notice that I believe other people are going to do something to me, have power over me, hurt me, judge me, attack me, maybe even violence. But then I had to notice, who am I in that scenario, what role am I playing? It becomes clear that I'm seeing myself as a victim, being victimised by others. They're doing something to me, and I'm afraid of it, afraid of being attacked and judged.

When I stayed in the viewpoint that people are going to do something threatening, I couldn't see an option other than to fantasise about how I might try to stand up to them, become angry at them, give them a speech, have to get into a fight, or otherwise keep the belief in being victimised while trying to fend them off. But that was like a closed loop of suffering and the cracks were starting to show.

It's always valuable to remember that nothing in the world is doing anything to me, no-one out there is the cause of me, other people don't cause me or have power over me, and I cannot be affected or changed by anything because I am immortal. So where does that leave the victim role?

I saw that I am positioning myself as a victim for some reason, and setting people up in my mind as attackers to play a role, so that I can get some kind of payoff. And what's that? To have a reason to find them guilty of something. To justify anger on my part or to reinforce defenses. If they were to do anything to me, I would be justified in revenge, and blame, and scapegoating.

So then again this recognition that I'm actually scapegoating comes in. I'm using these people and actually want them to be attacking me, am framing them as attackers, so that I can take the opportunity to have them look like they're the ones sinning, so that I can take advantage of their guilt and shove some of my own guilt in there with it. If they do something to me I can happily project my own guilt onto them, mix it in with their guiltiness, and get rid of it.

In other words, being a victim boils down to wanting to be attacked in order to get a payoff of being able to take advantage of the attacker and project my own guilt onto them. In effect, by becoming the face of innocence, the innocent victim, I can get away with saying "brother at your hand I die", and am willing to suffer and be hurt and die for it, seemingly a small price to pay if it means I can use these attackers to get rid of my guilt.

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

So then this reveals the basic dynamic of projecting and blaming. I first attack myself, I make myself guilty for some reason, I then find someone willing to play the role of attacker/sinner, I bait them and want them to attack me through fantasies of suffering, I hope they'll do it while pretending to be afraid of them doing it, and if they go through with it I'll have a great opportunity to blame them and shove my self-inflicted guilt onto them. Yay.

So there's that. And that has to be unraveled and taken back. Once you see what you're doing it becomes obvious. I fear being attacked for "seeming to be gay" in any way, based on seeming "proof of sin" that this does happen in society, reinforcing a victim role, so that I can hopefully be attacked and get rid of some guilt in the process. So I'm really using these people as scapegoats so that I can benefit.

What I then have to look at or ask is, why am I projecting guilt, and how or why am I making myself guilty in the first place? Are these people really the ones who are denying me, attacking me, judging me, not accepting me, OR ... could it be that I am the one who is attacking me, judging me, not accepting me? Maybe it really is that I am the one who is "not okay with" me being the way that I am, and the fantasies of other people attacking me for it are really the way that I'm using my own mind to attack myself.

The insight from this is that, I really need to more fully own who and what I am (as God created me, transcendent of body/sex roles), allow myself the guiltless freedom, and accept myself, and if I were to do this I would be completely unconcerned with what anyone else might try to do to me.

If I am centered and solid in knowing myself, and fully owning being myself, not only will other people's attempted attacks be correctly viewed as "calls for love" on their part - a way that they attack themselves, but also I'll not take it personally because it won't resonate with an unhealed guilt within myself.

And probably, if I own and am at peace with myself, I will give off peace-vibes, and other people will not feel drawn to attack me for it anyway. Because really an attitude of "I should be punished for this, please attack me" is an energetic and psychological invitation broadcast to everyone if I'm not okay with myself. A temptation asking others to fulfil the role I expect of them.

In effect then, the real issue I/we have is that we are not being entirely true to ourselves, are not fully accepting ourselves, are not granting ourselves absolute freedom, are guilting ourselves and accusing ourselves of sins and shames and guilts, and this puts us into an insecure position. We then seek to problem-solve this in a faulty way by projecting the insecurities onto others, asking them to play roles in which they do to us what we are already doing to ourselves, so that we can pretend not to be doing it to ourselves.

I find and have found then, that my real challenge is the forgiveness of myself, the undoing of my own self-inflicted guilts and shames, and the need for taking full responsibility for who and what I am. If I become fully aligned with and on-the-side-of myself in terms of acceptance and allowing, I won't need to play the victim role or imagine how people would do things to me. And thus I will take away the self-threatening mental activities that were causing fear. When you have no guilt about yourself, nothing anyone does can target you.

Because ultimately we really just are using our own disowned power against ourselves, which turns into a projected indirect form of self-threat, which produces a fear reaction. I was doing this all to myself, and that's what the "secret of salvation" reveals.

Coming to recognize full responsibility for "I have done this to myself" leads to the miracle of healing and to freedom. If you are free to be as you are, then you don't invent or interpret people attacking you for it, and can walk in peace. Personally I still have to work on this some more, it's a work in progress, but at least I can now see the way out by recognising what was the way in. Know Thyself is what 'pride' should be about, and not a victimy disowning and projecting of guilt onto fictional attackers.

"And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."

"Only the self-accused condemn."

"I can be attacked by nothing but my thoughts."

"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF. No matter what the form of the attack, this STILL is true. Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, STILL is this the truth. Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is STILL true. For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that YOU were dreaming. Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they COULD have no effect on you, unless you failed to recognize it is YOUR dream. This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."

"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. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness."

God and his Kingdom are unlimited. They are EVERYTHING. In the separation from God, we tried to be opposite to God. We made-up a world opposite to everything. The opposite of everything is NOTHING At the same time, we confused the true with the false, and so believed that the nothing was actually SOMETHING. This is the entire problem to be corrected. It is a lack of recognition that the world is absolutely NOTHING. It is because you believe it is SOMETHING, that you think it has something to offer, or something to do to you.

What is nothing has no real effects because it is not really a cause. The world isn't right or wrong or good or bad. The world isn't anything at all. It is meaningless because of this nothingness.

God's Kingdom is all meaningful and means everything to you. The world you made means NOTHING AT ALL. But you tried to GIVE IT meaning that it does not have. Because it is NOTHING it can reflect the meaning you project onto it. But of itself it has none. Of itself it has nothing of anything. The world is not a something, it is an ABSENCE.

Our task then is simply to see through the lies and appearances produced by the wishful thinking, ie the denial, that the world IS something, when it isn't. To stop believing it can BE something it is not. Or indeed that it can be anything at all. There is nothing there. It's not really a world. It's an illusion of a world. A smokescreen. A hallucination of a world. It is unreal and does not exist. There is no world at all.

To recognize it AS nothing requires seeing through illusions. It requires correctly discerning that the world is NOT what you thought it was. It also requires the recognition of what it IS, which is nothing. You are not really afraid of nothing because, being afraid of nothing means you have no fear at all. You are afraid of nothingNESS because you think it's something you can experience - as if it is somethingNESS. Yet it cannot be both something and nothing at the same time.

Jesus asks us merely to come to our senses and realize that the world is nothing whatsoever. The body is nothing. Events are nothing. Nothing is happening. Or indeed, the nothingness is not happening. It's only because we think there really is a world there that we suffer. It's only because we give the body roles and duties and laws and purposes that it seems to become sick. We keep trying to twist a world of nothing into a dedicated something, which it cannot be. And so this denial attacks it.

Let the world be nothing. Only by it being nothing can you truly let it go. Its meaninglessness, emptiness, nothingness and absence must be recognized. What is absent CANNOT BE THERE. what is nothing cannot be the truth of everything. What is nothingness CANNOT HAPPEN. There is no world.

The world is not a guilty world or a sinful world. Nor is it an innocent world or a holy world. It is not a forgiven world or an accused world. The world isn't anything at all. To forgive it is to overlook it and to not see it. And so the world must disappear because it is not there to be seen or believed. Only the Kingdom of God remains.

"What is the ego? Nothingness, but in a form that seems like something. In a world of form the ego cannot be denied for it alone seems real."

"Symbols which but represent ideas that cannot BE, must stand for empty space and nothingness. Yet nothingness and empty space can NOT be interference. What CAN interfere with the awareness of reality is the belief that there is SOMETHING THERE."

"The body that is asked to be a god WILL be attacked, because its nothingness has not been recognized. And so it seems to be a thing with power IN ITSELF. As something, it CAN be perceived, and thought to feel and act, and hold you in its grasp as prisoner to itself." ... "Yet its nothingness IS your salvation, from which you would flee."

"His body's nothingness releases yours from sickness and from death."

"Sickness is a demand the body be a thing that it is not. Its NOTHINGNESS is guarantee that it can NOT be sick. In your demand that it be MORE than this lies the idea of sickness."

"What can the causeless BE but nothingness. The picture of your brother that you see is wholly absent, and has never been. Let, then, the empty space it occupies be RECOGNIZED as vacant, and the time devoted to its seeing be perceived as idly spent, a time unoccupied."

"For here is nothingness, where neither birth nor death is real, nor any form in the misshapen mind that spawned it has any meaning in the Mind of God."

"Dreams are dreams, and every one is equally untrue. This is the only lesson to be learned. Yet will fear linger until every one is recognized as nothingness, and seen exactly as it is and nothing more."

"Now the hosts of Heaven come with us, to sweep away all vestiges of dreams and every thought that rests on nothingness."

"The final judgment on the world contains no condemnation. For it sees the world as totally forgiven, without sin, and wholly purposeless. Without a cause, and now without a function in Christ's sight, it merely slips away to nothingness. There it was born, and there it ends as well. And all the figures in the dream in which the world began go with it. Bodies now are useless, and will therefore fade away, because the Son of God is limitless."

"Your faith is placed in the most trivial and insane symbols; pills, money, "protective" clothing, "influence," "prestige," being liked, knowing the "right" people, and an endless list of forms of nothingness which you endow with magical powers."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness, as if it WERE a solid wall, see truly? It is HELD BACK by form, having been made to guarantee that nothing else BUT form will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see." ... "See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"To recognize this is to recognize nothingness when you think you see it. As such, it is the prerequisite for vision."

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

"The "changes" the ego seeks to make are not really changes. They are but deeper shadows, or perhaps different cloud patterns. Yet what is made of nothingness cannot be called new or different. Illusions are illusions; truth is truth."

"God's Will is all there is. We can but go from nothingness to everything; from hell to Heaven."

"Such is the choice. What loss can be for you in choosing not to value nothingness? This world holds nothing that you really want, but what you choose instead you want indeed!"

"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."

"But hold out your JOINED hands and touch this heavy-seeming block, and you will learn how easily your fingers slip through its nothingness. It is no solid wall. And only an illusion stands between you and the holy Self you share."

"What is the SENSE in seeking to be safe in what was MADE for danger and for fear? Why burden it with further locks and chains and heavy anchors, when its weakness lies, NOT in itself, but in the frailty of the little gap of nothingness whereon it stands?"

"The bleak little world will vanish into nothingness, and your heart will be so filled with joy that it will leap into Heaven and into the presence of God."

"God wills salvation be received today, and that the intricacies of your dreams no longer hide their nothingness from you."

"Nothingness will become invisible, for you will at last have seen truly."

"Like all things in the world its meaning is temporary, and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it."

"Now are they without effects. They cannot be concealed because their nothingness is recognized."

"And the alternative you think you chose seems fearful and too dangerous to be the nothingness it actually is."

"How can a battle be perceived as nothingness, when you ENGAGE in it? How can the truth of miracles be RECOGNIZED, if murder is your choice?"

"There is a silence covering the world that was an ancient dream so long ago no one remembers now. Its time is done, and in the little space it seemed to have is nothingness. The dream has gone, and all its dreams of gifts have disappeared as well. The first dream has been seen and understood for merely an illusion of the fear on which the world was based."

"To mean these words acknowledges illusions are in vain, requesting the eternal in the place of shifting dreams which seem to change in what they offer, but are one in nothingness."

"Pursuit of the imagined leads to death because it is the search for nothingness, and while you seek for life you ask for death"

"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."

"The more complicated the results become, the harder it may be to recognize their nothingness, but it is not necessary to examine ALL possible outcomes to which premises give rise to judge the PREMISES truly."

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt."

"EVERY illusion carries pain and suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments with which it hides its nothingness."

"And so is ALL time past, and everything EXACTLY as it was before the way to nothingness was made."

"Specialness is the idea of sin MADE REAL. Sin is impossible even to imagine, without this base. For sin rose from it, out of nothingness, an evil flower with no roots at all."

"Only the ANTICIPATION will frighten you, for the reality of nothingness cannot be frightening."

"Very simply, then, you may BELIEVE you are afraid of nothingNESS, but you are REALLY afraid of NOTHING. And in THAT awareness you ARE healed."

"In the Divine psyche, the Father and the Holy Spirit are not incomplete at all. The Sonship has the unique faculty of believing in error, or incompleteness, if he so elects. However, it is quite apparent that so to elect IS to believe in the existence of nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement."

Although God's kingdom is a state of changelessness and permanence, THIS world isn't. This world is a world of shifts and changes, transformations, beginnings and endings. Nothing here remains the same whatsoever.

In and of itself this wouldn't be a problem if we would LET IT CHANGE. If we would not fight against, resist, or try to control its fundamental changing nature. If we would not hold onto its states and conditions, not want it to be a certain way, not prefer even that it stay in a certain configuration, we would be better off. But to do this we would have to let the entire world go and be attached to nothing.

The world has to be allowed to change because that's all it CAN DO. And it will be a bit of a rude awakening to say this, but, regardless of what you WANT, you WILL NOT be able to stop it changing. And everything that came will go, and everything that arrived will leave, and everything that was born will die.

This is the nature of illusions, of unreality, or dreams. They are not permanent, they are not immortal, they are not eternal. They canont stay the same. They depend on relativity and differences. They have to constantly fluctuate and move and change form in order to seem to exist at all. There is no stillness, no peace, no rest, no constancy of any kind in spacetime.

In order to recognize this and allow the world to be like this, it means you have to stay entirely in the present moment, in which you resist nothing and have no issue whatsoever about how anything else. No resistance against what arrives, no holding on to what is leaving. And that would be enlightenment.

The problem we have is that we tend to live in a way that assumes things can NOT CHANGE. We form relationships, we build houses and cities, we spend time accumulating, we become attached, we develop favorites, we form emotional bonds, we cling to treasures. All of this is an attempt really to DENY that the world IS going to change, to dream a little while that we can find a way to make the world stay the way we want it.

Most of our urges to do something in the world are based on a drive to try to make it permanent in some way. We build the house we want to live in and decorate it and fill it with objects hoping to make a home that will last. We work on relationships and deepening bonds and falling in love with bodies in the hope that they will always be there. But inevitably it all comes tumbling down because the harsh truth is that the world MUST change, and it will.

"It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

The suffering we experience is the direct result of attempting to CONTROL THE CHANGE. To resist it, to deny that the world has a fundamental nature of change, and attempting to keep things how we want them. Every time that we become invested in NEEDING or WANTING something to stay a certain way, we are going to suffer. Because it IS going to change, and then we are going to be unhappy because we've come to depend on it being that way.

We develop expectations that things will stay how we want them. And then our expectations are dashed and smashed. We set the world up to CAUSE US, to give us what we think we want in a certain specific form that we agreed to. And then it changes, and it fails to give, and then we are left hanging.

When there is a disconnect, a gap, a distance of spacetime, a contrast, between how the world IS NOW in its present configuration, and how we WANT it to be, that contrast is LOSS. It is discord and tension and stress and war. The ego says "I want it thus!", and the world just repeatedly says "no". And so the world moves on and you stay in the past, clinging to what once was, hoping it will continue, hoping it will return, and it never does.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

As such, the world disappoints you over and over again WHEN you are expecting it to be a certain way that you prefer. It can't satisfy your wishes. It can't give you what you want. You can manipulate it and control it and manage it and rearrange it to try to fend off change (death), to try to keep an illusion that it is going to stay the same. You can repaint the walls and repair the rotten wood and redo the garden but again and again the onslaught of time - which is change and death - will keep happening.

The degree to which you have strings attached, psychological investment in, and desire to KEEP the things of the world, to that degree you will suffer when it ignores your wishes and changes anyway. Because it can't help it. You hold onto possessions, places, things, relationships, people, bodies. You resist them changing, you don't want to lose them, you fear loss, you try to preserve bodies for as long as possible, and maybe you don't even conceive of your favorite things coming to an end at some point. But they will.

This is not to be morbid. The world is a dream of death and it can't help but keep recycling itself. It transforms from birth to death and back to birth again. It is utterly incapable of staying the same forever. Expecting that it can and trying to live as though it can will make you suffer.

When something changes "against your will", and you cling to how it was, and live in the past, and don't want to accept the change, you will experience loss and despair. In order to "move on" from the perceived loss and stop perceiving it as a loss, you have to let go of CONTROL, and of wanting things to be how you want them. That means, to move on, is to move WITH the change and let it happen, accepting that change HAS occurred and surrendering to the fact that you can do nothing to stop it.

In a way that seems like beign powerless and a victim, in that you have to accept the change and LET IT change. To let go is to let go of the resistance against change, to admit it has changed, and to stop fighting against it. When you fight change you fight the world. When you fight the world you are also fighting reality and moving away from the present. The only way to live, is to live in the present and go with the flow of whatever happens with no resistance to it.

That means letting go of all your wishes, all your wants and desires and needs, all your dependencies, reclaiming all the power you gave to wordly things to affect you how you preferred, letting all bodies go, letting people come and go, surrendering control and allowing whatever happens. Ultimately you can only fully do that in the present, in the holy instant, in the eternal now. And it means relinquishing all attachmen to everything you value here, because the world holds NOTHING that you want.

It's in the present that you really transcend change, and become changeless, as you observe changes come and go without resistance. It's in the present that you find peace, and God, and love, and become open to what is. It's in the present that you gain "reality contact". And it's in the present that you find freedom from suffering. Dropping the "unreasonable expectation" that the world can be something it can never be, sets you free. Accepting how it is NOW, is the only way.

"Whenever we move from one instant to the next, the previous one no longer exists."

"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. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it into another world."

"Simply do this: Be still and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false or good or bad; of every thought it judges worthy and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."