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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I used to strongly believe that when a body dies, that is "death". And this is a bad thing. It's something to avoid at all costs. Because the body has to be kept in its "alive" state for as long as possible. And that's based on the belief that a valuable real person IS a body and the body's end IS the end of them, and a great loss to be avoided.

But for all the fighting against death and wishing it wouldn't happen, it happened. And I was so done with fighting against it that I pretty much surrendered and let it happen. This was a good thing actually. Actually as I look back and see all the efforts I made to fight against it, I see now that the whole situation was designed to exhaust my attempt to use "fear of death" as a way to reinforce sickness and separation.

What this giving-up did was it uprooted my belief that death is bad, especially given that when the person died they were liberated from a lot of limitations and suffering. For them it was actually quite a helpful thing.

In fact it was so good for them to be out of the body and back in a state of freedom and happiness, that it made the whole idea of keeping the body going seem nonsense. And with that, the whole idea of defending the body against death seemed nonsense.

Before I knew it, my whole attitude about death being the opposite of life was being broken down. Especially when my wife came visiting from the other side several times, in ways that were unavoidable proof that she still existed.

This in turn demonstrated strongly that physical death is not really death, because even if the person's body was dead the person was not. Eternal life carries on. So the death of the body is meaningless. As Jesus says:

"The death of an illusion means nothing."

So there I was faced with the pretty strong fact of the illusion of physical death, which was in fact a total lie, contrasted strongly against the ongoing presence and life of my partner. And this couldn't help but uproot and bring into serious question the idea that physical death and physical life mean anything different at all.

In fact, the way I see it now, I'm recognizing more and more that the whole world is an illusion. None of it has any meaning. It is not right or wrong, good or bad. It is not life, and it is not death. As Jesus states:

"There is no life outside of heaven" ... " Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible, and beyond ALL reason, and yet perceived as an eternal BARRIER to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

"To see a SINLESS body is impossible. For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless. As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth."

The body, the world, it is neutral. It is not alive, and it is not dead. It does not have any inherent meaning at all. We've given it all the meaning it has. We've placed labels on it to pick out parts and separate things off and say ... this thing is good, this thing is bad, keep more of this, avoid more of that.

Death is relegated to being seen as the label we give to things that symbolise death, like dead bodies, dead leaves, decay and rot etc. Life is a label reserved for the things that move around, that seem to grow and be born and new. But THAT is precisely what the illusion of the world is, and why the world is an illusion.

The world is an illusion that certain states of matter are different to other states, that certain bodies are more alive than others, that certain forms are more dead than others, that there is hierarchy in the illusions and separate categories for things. That is all illusion. It is all one thing. One big illusion.

It's like a giant smokescreen which sometimes takes on the form of what looks like life, and sometimes it takes on the form of what looks like death, but it is never really either of those things. It is nothing. As Jesus states:

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

Living moving bodies are not life. Stationary decaying bodies are not death. We made up these labels for aspects of one thing that seems like two things. The illusion that it is two things is the problem here. We believe that the form that things takes tells us what it means. That is the bullshit lie. Nothing here means anything. "Nothing I see means anything."

"The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

Our task then is to learn to stop separating off some parts of the world and giving it special labels, which are in opposition to the labels we give to other parts. Pitting these labelled parts against each other and making them more SEPARATE, is the problem. All this does is keep the ego and the separation from God going.

War and peace in the world, at the world level, are not different. They are two sides of the same coin. One is not better than the other. They are both meaningless. Activity or lack of activity is the same thing.

This means that it actually does not matter if bodies are living or dying because they are not really living or dying. A body in one form is no different than in another. Being deceived or horrified by the appearance of a body in a disabled or broken or damaged form is entirely a temptation of the ego to regard some parts of this world as worse than others. Death is not worse than life, and life is not better than death. They are equally nothing here. One dream of illusions pretending to show up as many separate things.

Our entire shift is a transition away from believing that the world - or our mind - is split up into many compartments in which some compartments are different and better or worse than others .... to a state of wholeness in which there is only one truth that applies to all of them. It is a shift away from a separate victim and victimiser, to a total ownership of all power and causation. A shift away from being a mere character in a dream, to being the one who dreams the entire dream environment and all things that happen to all parts of it at once.

The great illusion and deception of the world is that the form of life is preferable to the form of death. Or that one is better, or one is more alive, or one is more dead, or one is more to be avoided. If you play that game you will be lost and you will fear death and think that you live, while not really living. Living in a belief that death is a specific separate thing is a belief in not living at all. To really live you must claim eternal life, in which there are no such shiftings and changes and transitions between appearances.

All beliefs in how different parts of the world are different, how they are not alike, how they are conflicted and at war, how some are better than others, how some are more holy or more evil, more wanted or more unwanted, all of these inequalities have to be completely ironed out. The whole world has to be regarded as equally one thing, with no separate truths or multiple levels or categories or labels. All of it is nothing. And none of it is of God.

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences, but the mind which has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the mind will put them all in one category - they are unreal."

"This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. And of these two but one is real. Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place, for differences cannot exist within it, so too are illusions without distinctions."

"Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeing and yet surely theirs."

You are not of this world. This world isn't the only world.

You are of another world, the Kingdom of God, in which you have immortality - eternal life as given by God Himself.

This world is an illusory world. It's kind of like a layer on top of reality. A pretend world, a picture, of a form and nature opposite to reality.

The things in the illusory world can appear to change, shift, grow, die, etc. But it really has no effect at all on the deeper underlying world of God. God's Kingdom is completely permanently unassailable and impenetrable and perfect forever. It is "the living world of light."

"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. But the REAL world HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT."

"Let your Guide teach you their unsubstantial nature as He leads you past them, for beneath them is a world of light whereon they cast no shadows."

What you are, as an immortal spirit, is firmly anchored in Heaven. Nothing can attack you or change you in any way.

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there."

For you as an immortal being, death is not possible. It's not an option. You cannot choose it to happen to your spirit. Your spirit is invulnerable.

So what is it that can ever die, or seem to die? It can't be you. A body is an illusion, part of the illusory dream world of death. Everything in the dream world is made of illusions and all illusions are the idea of the opposite of reality. Since reality is life, all illusions are the idea of death.

"Without the idea of death there is no world."

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."

So we know that every illusion, whether it appears to show up as a healthy body, or a sick body, or a dead body, or no body, or even just an environment, or a planet, is still essentially made of the idea of death. Even Earth is the idea of an opposite to God's Kingdom.

"Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

So from the outset, since what you are cannot die whatsoever, the things that can seem to die cannot even be who or what you are. You are spirit, not a body. You exist on an entire other level.

So really you do not need a body, it adds nothing to you, it doesn't improve you, it doesn't allow you to do things that you couldn't do already, and it only essentially was designed as a limit. It can be used in different ways, by an immortal spirit, but the body is not ever what you are.

As spirit, and being on a higher level, you have power over everything on the lower level of the illusory world. All of the world's laws are secondary and once-removed. This world is not primary reality, or the starting point of anything. It is not a cause but an effect of a higher mind's dreaming.

So this means, you on the level of Christ, have power over, total power over, everything in the world. That includes the body, it includes all states of sickness and death, it includes matter and energy, it includes all of the so-called laws of physics and biology, and in effect you have power over everything in this universe.

"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."

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

Since you have power over everything in the universe, "there is nothing my holiness cannot do", "what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world.", you get to dictate what happens to the body. You, from a higher more vertically causal level, get to choose how to USE any aspect of this secondary world.

You can choose to use the body to attack through, which is a toxic idea which affects the body and attacks it. This produces sickness and death of the body on this level. The body then conveys the idea that being dead is the only truth.

You can choose to use the body to heal through, which is a healing idea which affects the body and heals it. This produces a picture of a healed body, an illusion of a healthy body, which then demonstrates the thought/belief that being alive is the only truth.

So your mind gets to decide whether or not the body dies. And this depends entirely on what you use the body FOR. If you use it for attack it will be attacked. If you use it to heal it becomes healed. And in its healed condition, sustained by the mind, sickness death cannot "happen" to the body against your will and your power.

"You cannot die unless you choose to do so."

"No one dies without their own consent"

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"The mind being sane heals the body."

"Now is the body healed by miracles."

So in effect, you could choose to use the body for healing and to symbolize eternal life, resulting in it being healed. By the power of your mind, the body is not allowed to be in a state of sickness, yet alone physical death.

The body can be sustained indefinitely, at least in time. It can't be eternal because the mind has to constantly maintain it and it is not natural to constantly project bodies. It could stick around for a million years if the mind so chose. Aging can be reversed and halted. But eventually once the purpose of healing is fulfilled in the help of others, there is no longer a need for a body to use to reach those who dream of death. Its purpose of healing is part of the atonement plan.

"Illusions recognized must disappear"

"Eternity will shine away the world."

"A forgiven world cannot last."

"The body cannot remain without illusions."

When the entire idea of death, which the world and body is founded on, is recognized, it must disappear. When it is no longer useful for the atonement plan, and all souls have returned home, there is nothing more to keep the world intact. Nor is there any need or will to maintain it.

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

You don't have to automatically go towards physical death. Death is a choice made by an immortal being pretending it can die. You cannot die. "Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt." "Swear not to die, you holy son of God. You've made a bargain that you cannot keep."

"You are immortal and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do."

There is no point choosing to make death happen when you acknowledge that you already have eternal life. What sense would it make? It would be not only futile but a completely pointless waste of time. If you knew you could NEVER die, would you CHOOSE to attempt to make death happen? That's what we do when we cause sickness and death. And if we were to never do that, would sickness or death happen?

No. Because there are no other causes of it. The only cause of death is your mind's power to choose to attack through the body. If you don't do that, the body cannot physically die or become sick.

"Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions responsible for the condition of the body"

"hTe body can become a sign of life, a promise of redemption, and a breath of immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have healing as its PURPOSE. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that it represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless life, forever unattacked. And to your brother let its message be, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I live."

"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.

This is where my mind went last night. I had no idea God felt so highly of me. Holy Spirit guided my thoughts.

God loves you.

God knows you.

God created you.

God designed you.

God chose you.

God still wants you.

You are God's treasure.

God cherishes you.

God holds you like a most beloved thing.

God feels happy with you.

God is pleased with you.

God is joyful that you are exactly perfect.

God values you.

You are worthy of God.

God sees you as being worth something.

God feels you are important and special to him.

God smiles upon you.

God wants you.

God is overjoyed that you can share with him.

God actually thinks you are highly valuable to him.

God knows you deserve to be loved.

You are worthy of receiving love from God.

You are worth loving.

You mean something to God.

You mean everything to God.

You are God's child.

God is very happy that you are like him.

God knows you are perfect.

God knows you are innocent.

God sparkles with delight at your beauty.

God wants you.

God welcomes you with open arms.

God desires for you to exist.

God wills to protect you always.

God wants to protect you because you are his treasure.

God treasures you and is enamored with you.

God adores you.

God loves to give you everything.

God loves being with you.

God is very close to you.

You are very intimate with God.

God protects you and surrounds you with himself.

God envelops you in his love and safety.

God knows he has created something very good in you.

You are a divine creation of God.

You are completely loved by God.

God deeply cares about you.

God sees you as permanently holy.

God recognizes you and knows you.

You belong to God.

You are God's personal property.

God maintains you with his power forever.

God shares all of himself with you.

God hides nothing from you.

God is open with you.

God wants you to be happy.

God wills that you be perfect and whole.

God has given you eternal life.

God depends on you.

God knows you are completely dependable.

God trusts you.

God is ecstatic at how lovely you are.

God created you with all his heart.

God loves you unconditionally.

God can never stop loving you.

God wants to love you forever.

You will never be alone.

You can never be out of his sight.

God will always be with you.

God wants to be with you always.

God enjoys you.

God is certain of your endless innocence.

God will never accuse you of anything.

God will never hold anything against you.

God is your family.

God is your creator.

God holds you like a perfect star, high in heaven.

God wants you to be surrounded with love.

God wants you to never be alone.

God has even created your brothers to enjoy being with you.

Everyone loves you like God loves you.

God finds you worthy of inheriting everything he has to give.

You have everything that God has.

God has opened himself up to you fully.

God himself shines upon you to light your way.

God goes with you everywhere.

God will never hurt you.

God will only heal you and support you.

God understands you perfectly.

God knows you completely.

God accepts you entirely.

God is very happy with you.

God sees you as deserving everything good.

God wants you to have everything.

God blesses you and harmonizes with you.

God wants to help you to create with him.

God is overjoyed to see you being yourself.

God loves you laugh with you.

God is your best friend.

God is completely benevolent toward you.

God beholds you as magnificent.

God finds you to be glorious and grand.

God could not have created anything better than you.

You are the absolute maximum of God's perfection.

God has pulled out all the stops for you.

God suspends you in his perfect love and adoration.

You can never offend God.

You can never make him stop loving you.

God will love you for eternity.

God loves you very much.

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there. But still and white and lovely will it shine through all eternity. There was no time it was not there. No instant when its light grew dimmer or less perfect ever was."

"The difference is that I love ONLY what God loves WITH me, and, because of this, I treasure you beyond the value that you set on yourselves, even unto the worth that God has placed upon you."

"God wills you better. Could you not look with greater charity, on whom God loves with perfect love?"

"Every brother God loves as He loves you; neither less nor more."

"God loves His Son forever, and His Son RETURNS his Father's love forever."

"God loves His Son."

"God wants us to be healed"

"God WANTS you to behold what He created, because it is HIS joy. Can your grandeur be arrogant, when God HIMSELF witnesses to it?"

"God wants only His Son, because His Son is His only treasure. You want your creations, as He wants His. Your creations are your gift to the Holy Trinity, created in gratitude for YOUR creation."

"If God knows His children as wholly sinless, it is blasphemous to perceive them as guilty. If God knows His children as wholly without pain, it is blasphemous to perceive suffering anywhere. If God knows his children to be wholly joyous, it is blasphemous to feel depressed."

"Nothing that God knows not exists. And what He knows exists forever, changelessly. For thoughts endure as long as does the mind that thought of them, and in the Mind of God there is no ending, nor a time in which His Thoughts were absent, or could suffer change." "God knows what His Son needs before he asks."

"God knows His Son as wholly blameless as Himself, and He is approached through the appreciation of His Son. Christ waits for your acceptance of Him as YOURSELF, and His Wholeness as YOURS. For Christ is the Son of God, who lives in his Creator, and shines with His glory. Christ is the extension of the love and the loveliness of God, as perfect as his Creator, and at peace with Him. Blessed is the Son of God, whose radiance is of His Father, and whose glory He wills to share as His Father shares it with Him."

"You can know yourself only as God knows His Son, for KNOWLEDGE is shared WITH God. When you awake in Him, you will know your magnitude by accepting HIS limitlessness as YOURS."

"Say to the Holy Spirit only, "Decide for me," and it is done. For His decisions are reflections of WHAT GOD KNOWS ABOUT YOU, and in this light, error of ANY kind becomes impossible."

"Can YOU see guilt where God KNOWS there is perfect innocence?" "And so is Heaven's Son prepared to be Himself, and to remember that the Son of God knows everything his Father understands, and understands it perfectly with Him"

"If God knows His children, and I assure you he does, would he have put them in a position where their own destruction was possible?" "God knows His Children with perfect certainty. He Created them by knowing them. He recognizes them perfectly."

"God knows you NOW. He remembers NOTHING, having ALWAYS known you exactly as He knows you now."

"God knows you are deserving of life"

"And you WILL find rest for your Souls. God knows you only in peace, and this IS your reality."

"How simple is salvation! All it says is what was never true is not true now, and never will be. The impossible has NOT occurred, and CAN have no effects. And that is all."

I've found personally that I cannot fully let something go so long as I believe it has any reality at all. If I believe it happened, then I believe it had some reality. That it was an event, in which "something" occurred. This somethingness is precisely what holds it in place in my mind and gives it a seeming existence.

You cannot forgive something when you are making it real. If the world is in fact just a dream, which it is, but if you believe it is not just a dream, you will hold onto it psychologically. This is attachment. It means you believe in it being more than just imaginary, as though it is a reality. It means you have accepted it into your mind as having truth.

The ONLY way to accept atonement, which cures all such sickness, is to fully recognize that what you thought happened did not happen. This isn't merely a matter of saying, someone did something but you're willing to let it go. Nor is it a matter of saying, the events transpired but you're willing to look at it with love. You have to actually get to the point where you recognize IT DID NOT HAPPEN.

The reason that it did not happen, or the recognition of this, requires a change in the PREMISE of the world. If the premise is that separation occurred, producing a dream world, which has some reality, then you CANNOT forgive anything. Once the premise shifts to "there has never been a separation", in which a world opposite to reality does not exist at all, and all events are nothing, only then is your mind in a position to truly let it go.

So long as you believe that anything even occurred at all, that the happenings were NOT a dream, that there were some REAL consequences, and something was AFFECTED, you will not let it go. You won't be able to. It is your belief in it having a power and a causation and a proof of sin, that anchors you to it and fuels it, keeping it going. You cannot fully turn your back on it until you can recognize it as NOTHING. Illusions must be recognized as NOTHING in order to disappear.

Similarly you cannot forgive the world fully until you can recognize that it is absolutely nothing. There cannot be a single bit of belief in it left. It can hold nothing that you want. You have to withdraw all value from it. You have to not accuse it of anything. You have to not believe that it has ever done anything to you or anyone. That it has had no real effect, no consequences, all of its changes are completely substanceless, all of the events are nowhere, and nothing ever happened but a dream.

"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 substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."

This seems like a major stretch for most of us to accept. Jesus isn't merely saying that the past happened that you should forgive what happened. He's saying this ENTIRE world, all of human history, the whole history of spacetime, all events, all happenings, all changes, are ALL ENTIRELY FALSE.

All fiction. All hallucinations. All made-up and meaningless. With no real causation and no real effect on anything real. With no threat against reality and having absolutely no real substance. That this is all literally NOTHING, and will completely vanish and be forgotten when you fully awaken to God.

That means that to truly forgive and let something go, you HAVE to recognize that it is absolutely nothing. This is only possible by recognizing this entire realm of experience is UNREAL, ie a dream. And being unreal, none of what appears to happen means anything or causes anything, or has any effect on anything or anyone.

Forgiveness of the world is the recognition that THERE IS NO WORLD. Only an illusory world, recognized as truly NOTHING, can BE forgiven. It can be forgiven BECAUSE it is not there. It can be let go BECAUSE there is nothing really there to hold onto. It can be accepted as having never happened BECAUSE it has not really happened at all.

This is merely coming to an acceptance that what you thought you lost was never something to have to begin with, and that you never really had it to lose. It is an acceptance that anything anyone seemed to do to you or anyone, was never done to you or anyone, and nothing real has ever been threatened. It's a willingness to stop using scapegoats and characters and events and groups and so on as reasons to dramatize your engagement with a fictional world, trying to hold on to suffering and victimhood in order to avoid God.

Given that forgiveness truly means to recognize that what you think your brother did DID NOT HAPPEN AT ALL, you have to literally come to recognize that even the events did not really transpire, the things said were not really said, the actions taken were not real actions, the consequences were nothing whatsoever against anything real, and even your memories of it happening are false. Memory of the past is just another body sense mechanism which pretends to make the world seem real.

I forgive [xyz] person/place/happening/event simply because it literally was nothing, did not happen, has not happened in heaven's reality, has affected nothing, has caused nothing, has no power over anything, did nothing, was not a real sin, did not produce real loss, had no effect on me or anyone, and was never really even there. Only God's Kingdom really exists, and only creation is a real event. "Only the creations of light are real."

"Today I will recognize that all this has not occurred."

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin. And in this view are all your sins forgiven."

"If you remain as God created you appearances cannot replace the truth, health cannot turn to sickness, nor can death be substitute for life, or fear for love. All this has not occurred, if you remain as God created you."

"To condemn is thus impossible in truth. What seems to be its influence and its effects have not occurred at all."

"Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins that never were accomplished, healing but removes illusions that have not occurred. Just as the real world will arise to take the place of what has never been at all, healing offers restitution for imagined states and false ideas which dreams embroider into pictures of the truth."

"Instead, it merely asks that you respond appropriately to what is NOT real, by not perceiving what has not occurred."

"Both this world and the real world are illusions because right-mindedness merely overlooks, or forgives, what never happened."

"The instant the idea of separation entered the mind of God's Son, in that same instant was God's Answer given. In time this happened very long ago. In reality it never happened at all."

"Everything God wills is not only possible, but has already happened. And that is WHY the past has gone. It NEVER HAPPENED in reality. Only in your minds, WHICH THOUGHT IT DID, is its undoing needful."

"The childhood of your body and its place of shelter are a memory now so distorted that you merely hold a picture of a past that never happened."

"But the Holy Spirit tells you that even RETURN is unnecessary, because what never happened CANNOT involve ANY problem."

"Nor to its results, as this world sees them; sickness and death and misery and pain. These things have not occurred, because the Holy Spirit sees them not, and gives no power to their seeming source."

A year or so ago, someone close to me was sick. We weren’t sure what really happened. It was very strange. It seemed to come out of nowhere overnight, had no apparent cause, and seemed impossible to diagnose.

The person seemed to turn into a bit of a monster, was confused and paranoid, suddenly dropped a whole bunch of longheld beliefs, and seemed to turn into another person. This was baffling and very upsetting.

I took it upon myself to try to "figure out" what was happening. So I started to research. I went online and was googling like a madman. Sometimes I ran across something which seemed it "might" explain what’s happening. Some things seeemd to fit.

Each time I found something, I started to exclaim "this is what it is", or "this is what is causing it!" I started driving the person nuts with my explanations and ideas of what I thought the problem was. Each time that I found something, it seeemd like the true cause. But later, it turned out to be, maybe not "it". Something about it, didn’t quite fully explain all the symptoms.

Did that stop me? Nope. I thought that this meant I should seek even harder to find the truth. That I should have the "ability" to find the truth out there somewhere. I was convinced at the time that the truth IS out there somewhere. That if I just try hard enough, I will find it. That "cause" is out there somewhere. Identifying the cause would seem to suggest what is happening, to explain it, and that this would lead to a SOLUTION.

It never happened. Each time I went seeking, I felt more desperate. Each time I searched, I came up more and more empty handed. I felt exasperated and frustrated. It became obsessive. Surely the truth was there somewhere, and dealing with this person being the way there were was intolerable. I wanted to find the truth. But I was looking for it "out there", and could not find it. The more I sought and did not find, the more upset I became, the more desperate I felt, and the more I then felt COMPELLED to search even harder.

This turned out to be a good thing after a while, because I FAILED. I totally failed to find the truth out there. I "exhausted" all efforts to search externally. So my mind gradually was using up its last vestige of a sense of "possibility", that the truth was out there. I started to notice something. The truth does not seem to be out there! Anywhere! I lost faith in the world and SAW THROUGH the illusion that the world contains the truth. Any kind of truth. Anywhere.

It was a very short hop from this perception to realizing, bringing into question, that perhaps.... THE TRUTH IS NOT ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. That it literally cannot be found. That seeking is a EGO TRAP. The more you seek for truth out there, the LESS you find it. And that’s because, in truth, the truth is INSIDE YOU. Each time I basically "left my inner truth", believing I "did not have the truth", I went searching for it in the world. I really believed strongly, the world HAD the truth in it SOMEWHERE. But it did not. I inadvertently proved it to myself.

So I failed, and that was great, because this idea suddenly popped in, that there is no truth in the world at all. NOTHING in the world is true. This was quite eye opening. It meant that, for example, the sickness which I’d been trying to diagnose and fix this whole time, ALSO wasn’t the truth. It also meant, it wasn’t being caused BY anything out there. The truth was NOT out there. There must have been another cause, an inner cause.

And so began a whole new phase for me, of withdrawing my belief from the world, learning to recognize it is COMPLETELY FALSE, that it is not true in any way, and that also sickness is entirely fake. These were important steps in the direction of forgiveness, and completely shifted the way I was looking at the sick person 180 degrees. Clearly, it wasn’t a question of "what out there is causing it". It was a matter of, "It is NOT being caused".

Gradually as I’ve been practicing this and growing stronger in the recognition that this is true, that earth is 100% false, and nothing in it is true, my miracle-working has gone up. It is my job now not to figure out, "what caused that", but to learn to NOT BELIEVE that it is caused by anything other than the mind. That there is no truth IN what I’m perceiving. People showing up with sickness, are trying to assert a lie. Sickness is recognize more and more as FALSE, an illusion, with no truth to it.

Miracle working **ABSOLUTELY REQUIRES** NOT BELIEVING THIS WORLD IS THE TRUTH. If we believe it is the truth, we will keep it, lock in its form, have no will to heal it, and be convinced by illusions. The truth is not in the world or in form. "Never was love in the world." It is not out there. It’s inside. IT comes from God. God is the only cause, not this world. Mind is the only cause of what’s out there.

What appear to be causes in this world are LIES. Fiction. Fantasy. Illusions. Dreams. Make-believe cause that suggest, yes, the world has truth in it because the world has a causal power. The world causes nothing. It is nothing but effect. Cause, therefore truth, is somewhere else. Truth is always equated with REALITY. Since there is NO truth in this world, not in false perception or in true perception, THE WORLD IS NOT REAL. And therefore it is NOT THERE, and whatever is showing up as "sickness happening" IS NOT HAPPENING.

What is not a CAUSE, is nothing but an EFFECT, and therefore has no reality of its own. Because the world is an effect, and has no truth/cause in it, IT IS NOT THERE. It is not happening. Separation never happened.

Jesus:

"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 that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail."

"The world that you perceive is the witness to your state of mind, the outward picture of your inward condition."

"The cause of healing is the only Cause of everything. 4 It has but one Effect. 5 And in that recognition, causelessness is given no effects and none is seen."

"There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect."

"And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect, it cannot make effects."

"what you made has no cause and no effects at all."

"But it also shows that, having no effects, it is not cause because the function of causation is to have effects"

"The world is but an effect, it is not a cause at all."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it."

"The world that you see is what you have put there to see; nothing more and nothing less"

"The world you see does not exist."

"Nothing the world believes is true."

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

"You are the dreamer of the world of dreams."

"The world you see has nothing to do with reality."

"The bleak little world will vanish into nothingness."

"The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all."

"Salvation is no more than a reminder this world is not your home."

"There is a place in you where this whole world has been forgotten."

"The world has never been at all. Eternity remains a constant state."

The problem we have mainly is we do not correctly recognize what anything is. Even if we're looking right at it.

In the separation, we stopped recognizing that God is God, that we are immortal, that separation is impossible, and that there is no ego. We started to believe that these things were not true, failing to acknowledge, accept, allow or be aware of them being true. We started to perceive something else as though it were true.

That means, we started to "recognize" that ego really exists, that separation is possible, that we are not immortal, and that we're sinful. These things started to seem like reality and truth to us. So when we look at them, we seem to "recognize" that there is truth in them, even though it is not there, because we're actually failing to recognize that these things are obviously not true.

So while we're asleep and trying to wake up, we're going from a state where we don't see, or correctly recognize, what is here, transitioning to a state where we get a much clearer view of things and can tell what is what.

As we do this, removing blocks to awareness and becoming much clearer about what something is and what it isn't (true vs false), things which we never used to recognize as something become more obvious.

One thing I've noticed for example is that various forms of sickness are starting to be recognized by me as the ego at work. I see egoic tendencies, victimhood, self destruction and unwillingness "within" the sickness. I also am seeing the sickness "as" something that has gone wrong, rather than the strange prior condition of awarding it reality or truth or acceptability.

Some people claim that as you wake up more, approaching true perception, you should become unable to see sickness. The fact is, when you are in false perception where people appear to be sick, you are NOT seeing sickness. You are not recognizing it as sickness. Sure you see some of the surface attributes to be able to say it is sickness, but you do not SEE it correctly because to you it seems like truth and reality and irreversibility and natural.

You in fact are seeing it as though it has truth and reality and something worth protecting in it. You don't in that state SEE the sickness, you are actually seeing something IN the sickness that is not there... distorting your perception of the sickness and turning it into reality.

As your perception becomes CORRECTED, you start to see things without those distortions. You step outside of the sickness. You see it from outside of itself instead of from the inside. You learn to *recognize* it for what it is, and not for what you thought it was. That's an increase in awareness and an increase in the clarity of perception. It has absolutely nothing to do with "not being able to see sickness", in fact it has everything to do with becoming ABLE to *correctly* see sickness, recognizing it as false, and not as truth.

This still correlates to the fact that you are becoming aware that sickness is not real, that it is fake, that it has no reality to it and is not the truth about a person. So you are still overlooking the ILLUSION that sickness is the truth. But the removal of the illusions ABOUT the sickness, reveals to you what the sickness IS, rather than what it isn't. What it IS, is something false, something unreal, an ego deception.

Most people who are sick DO NOT recognize the sickness for what it is, they instead experience an unconscious interpretation of it which renders it real and threatening and unchosen and filled with truth. That is not awareness of sickness, that is unconsciousness. And as you look upon someone who is sick, if their sickness appears to you not as it really is but as a tragedy or real or irreversible or set in stone or natural or understandable or it makes sense etc, then there is something wrong with your perception. "A sick body makes no sense."

Yes ultimately you will realize that all sickness is an illusion and eventually you would recognize that there literally is no sickness anywhere. Or at least, that there is no REAL sickness. All of the sickness will be recognized as make-believe and self-inflicted pretense which has no real effect on anything real. That does not mean you won't still perceive it in others while you are in a body. Having true perception is still having perception. It just means that you see the TRUTH of the situation, rather than seeing it falsely. Seeing sickness truthfully shows you that it IS false.

It's the same thing with regards to the real world. In clear perception, the world is RECOGNIZED AS FALSE. It does not mean the world becomes reality or truth. In fact, it is while you believe that the world is true and real that you are in FALSE perception, a state in which you've attempted to convert something which is inherently false, into something true.

This entire world is made-up and does not exist. This is the central lesson the course would attempt to teach - that there is NO WORLD HERE. This whole universe is fake. And when you have true perception, you see truthfully, and this will show you - it will strike you - that this world is in fact FALSE. There is an inherent falseness to it. An unbelievability. Like a vast sea of lies. When you *RECOGNIZE* it for what it IS, and not for what you were making of it, you will simultaneously see it clearly, and see that it is NOT God's creation.

In the Course, the "real world" or forgiven world therefore refers to how this world appears to us when we are seeing it through eyes of love and forgiveness ie CORRECTLY PERCEIVING it without adding to or denying it. It shows us the "truth about" this world, which is why Jesus uses the term "real world" - the reality of this world, is that it is not real. To see the "real world" is to see a glimpse of heaven (which is real), a reflection (face of Christ) in which you can compare and realize, that this world is in fact NOT real and is not part of God.

It's all about recognition. Do I recognize this thing for what it actually IS in the truest perspective, or do I think that it means something else? "I have given the world all the meaning that is has" literally tells us that in false perceptual states, we have tried to turn something fake into something true, something unreal into something real, and have convinced ourselves that we're living inside a real world. This is false. This means we're not perceiving correctly or clearly and do not RECOGNIZE this world for what it actually is. And so we are deluded and deceived.

As we become clearer about what is, we are also becoming clearer about what God is, instead of believing as the ego has that God is evil or dead or the opposite of what you want. Sickness starts to be seen for the blight that it is, and not for something worth keeping.

Jesus speaks in the course about his "inability to tolerate the suffering of others". This doesn't mean He freaks out and gets mad about people being sick. It means he recognizes all forms of suffering as UNNECESSARY and as expressions of false beliefs, coming from distorted perception, and having RECOGNIZED them for the 'guiltless mistakes' that they are, can easily discern and know that they can be corrected. And he can correct them. That's what miracles are for.

But if we do not even recognize sickness or suffering for what it IS, we will actually keep it and support it and fight with it and continue to suffer, because we don't see how easily it can be changed or why it is not what we thought it was. It's almost like learning a language or something... at first all the words seem confusing and we get lost and say the wrong things. But later we become fluent and are able to discern which words are correct. We start to recognize them. Another word for recognition is simply clarity. Awareness. Knowledge.

"Hold onto nothing."

Loss is self-induced suffering. It is a feeling of not getting what you want, like a childish temper tantrum. It's produced by the demand that things should be the way you want them to be, at the same time as them NOT being that way.

There is a sense of space and time, a gap, a separation, between what you seem to want, and what is. This gap is produced by two anchors. One anchor is the thing which is already gone, has left, has died, doesn't exist, is now in the past. The other anchor is your WANTING that thing to be not gone, to be still here in the present with you.

The stronger you want something to be a certain way, and the greater the contrast between that and how things actually are, the more you will suffer and feel despair, a feeling that something you really want strongly has been taken away or denied to you. But this is because YOU are denying how things are now, and so experience as though you are being denied something. If you deny, you will be denied due to the golden rule.

Wanting is actually denial, in which you are denying that things are the way they are, instead of accepting the facts. It is an unwillingness to accept the "reality" of what has changed. If something or someone has left, they have left. This is a fact. But if you want it to not be this way, you are in denial.

This denial produces lack, which produces neediness, which produces desire and wanting. If you are wanting, it means you do not have something - wanting=lacking, as in "you are left wanting." But wanting masquerades as an attraction or desire to have something, which the ego uses as a substitute for love. Wanting is part of specialness, and wanting is a way of saying "I do not want this."

When something leaves, it has left. It is in the past. It is not here. This is a fact. You should allow it to be free to be gone. But if you cannot accept and allow this fact, you will resist it. This resistance is like insisting that it shouldn't be this way, it's not right, it's not fair, you don't "want" it, because you want things to carry on as they were.

This insistence that worldly things NOT change, is in direct contradiction to the nature of all things in this world - which is that they AWAYS change, and sooner or later they "die" (change). It is their nature to change because they are illusions, and illusions are always temporary, with beginnings and endings alike.

Trying to make changing things NOT change, is an attempt to control "reality" and deny what has changed, because you "want it thus." It also means you are trying to give permanence to something that is not permanent, such as body or home or whatever.

"Dreams are perceptual temper tantrums, in which you literally scream, 'I want it THUS!'"

When things have changed, and you have not accepted that they have changed, you are denying the change. You do this to try to suggest that - if you hold on, if you resist, if you don't want the change, if you keep wanting things strongly to be the way they were, then you'll actually stop the thing from going away, you'll stop it from leaving, you'll stop the loss. This is like a desperate pleading that something doesn't leave when it's already left.

When this involves the seeming loss of a person - really just a change in the status of the body - you can resist and deny that they've gone, because you believe that by doing so you'll prevent their death. You try to keep them around by holding onto them, attaching to them, wanting them. And it seems counter to your desires to have to question whether you should even "want them" anymore, as if that would mean itself the loss of what you want.

The thing is, that the stronger you deny what has changed, the more you go into denial, the more you will feel that you are being denied something. It could take the form of you being in a different country with an inability to travel to see your family at christmas for example, and just because you are denied access, it creates a sense of a rift or gap or spacetime, a distance of separateness, which induces horrible feelings of despair - which we call loss or grief.

The intensity of the loss is really in proportion to how much you are denying and holding onto something which is not there. The more you want to keep it and not let it go, the more you feel awful when faced with the fact that it has already gone. And indeed the desire to keep it around is a way to NOT SEE that it has already gone, because you do not WANT that to be true. You want the person to still be around etc.

So there becomes this mismatch between... what is in front of your face as the "reality" or configuration of the illusory world right now, and what you PREFER that it be. If you prefer that your dead partner or family member be still in a body, and they are not, that is a contrast between what is and what is not. That contrast is a separation of spacetime, which turns into a pit of hell and despair.

Jesus in the course is leading us to learn to let everything go. To hold onto nothing. That means letting everything that is in the past be in the past. It means not WANTING to control whether something seems present or not. It means not DENYING what is happening now.

Ultimately there is a plot twist here, in that the use of denial to deny that something has gone, which places focus on something that is past and amplifies the sense of its absence while simultaneously focusing on it, takes you away from the PRESENT. And so the denial of death for example becomes a way to choose it and thus to avoid life. Being in a state of despairing loss is a way to not live in the present moment, and instead to focus on what is NOT present.

Eventually we have to get to a place where we are so detached from whatever seems to come and go, recognizing that all illusory things like bodies and places are indeed just transient fleeting things, in no way deceived into the idea that they can be permanent or last forever. When you are a "under no illusion" that temporary things are temporary, then you become able to accept the illusion's transient nature, and can ALLOW it to be the way it is.

Essentially the antidote to loss and grief is then is to learn recognize the that you are in denial and cannot allow things to be the way they are, you have to stop wanting something that you cannot have, let go of the thing so that it CAN go, allow it to move away from you, accept that it is gone and not present, give it freedom and set it free so that it can come and go without your controlling it (conditional love), and therefore reach a point of acceptance and freedom.

When you can GIVE freedom to the thing that has gone away, you can RECEIVE freedom for yourself that enables you to "move on." If you do not let the thing itself "move on" ie into the past, away from you, then you will not be able to move on either. If you deny the thing its nature of change and temporariness, you will feel denied by the way that the illusory world keeps changing in ways that you do not want. But as you come to allow the thing to go, you will allow yourself to live and be set free. And as you can accept that the thing HAS gone, you can set yourself free by accepting where you ARE in the present. Life and living is always in the present, not the past.

Essentially it all boils down to something very simple. Let all illusory things leave when they leave, live in the present, and stop trying to "stop change" from happening. Find away to accept the circumstance that you "do not want" rather than fighting against it and "wishing" it were different. This is a kind of "sobering up".

Do not BECOME attached, which will only set you up for loss when you find you have difficulty allowing the cord to be severed when the thing leaves. Non-attachment doesn't mean no life or relationship it just means not being confused about whether illusory things are permanent or temporary. People are not bodies. Places are not your real home - which is in God. Everyone in spirit are always joined to each other forever.

Accept that all temporary things are temporary, let them all come and go, and you will enter into acceptance. This is simply a willingness to accept the FACT of what has changed. In acceptance you will be in the present, because you have let all past things stay in the past instead of trying to drag them into the present as baggage. This acceptance opens the way to the acceptance of that which IS permanent, as changeless reality, in which nothing real is ever lost, no-one created ever dies, and there is no possibility of despair.

We are all a part of each other in God. You are the person you think you lost. Everyone is you. There is no death and no separation. Everyone is everyone forever.

"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."