Most of the time, most of us are trying to perfect our persona-self, the self-image. This is part of the ego. This involves spiritualizing the world in some way, sectioning off the 'good bits' from the 'bad bits' and trying to only keep the good bits.

You try to build up this sort of spiritualized ego persona, which ultimately is the ego trying to attain some kind of 'image' of enlightened God-like status. But to do this, it has to keep only the special, valued, accepted, allowed, preferred parts and reject the rest.

So the main mode of functioning of this ego persona isn't so much to 'acquire' the good stuff, but to simultaneously weed out and get rid of as much of the bad stuff as possible. In other words, it is a function of denial and rejection, based on condemnation and judgement.

So once again the ego is contradictory, in that it *appears* to be seeking to include only the stuff it likes or wants, which it has selected from the big soup of life, but actually accomplishes it by rejecting and condemning and relegating the parts it doesn't want to some kind of waste basket. Fact is you can't select and section-off some part of your self or life without simultaneously rejecting and condemning some other part.

This waste basket lives in the ego as the rejected, suppressed, hidden, repressed, denied, shut-out, blocked out 'stuff', which is nevertheless still there and still functioning. This generally 'dark stuff', or at least, surrounded with beliefs and judgements of darkness, will seem to do the opposite of what the persona wants, and indeed attacks it from time to time.

When the shadow attacks (ie the pain body) you generally will want to get rid of it, of course. Just like any 'pain', even physical pain, it's generally the sensation of something you want to get rid of. But that's a major problem. Because how will you get rid of pain? You'll use the persona. The persona will then be selective and attempt to relegate, reject and condemn the pain, to make it go away. The persona doesn't want to accept the pain or integrate it so that the persona and shadow cancel each other out. The persona wants to maintain a separation.

So it seems I think, that most of us are traditionally fixated on loving the persona, building up the persona, reinforcing the persona, choosing to use the persona to manipulate and get what you want, using the persona to paint a picture of 'everything is great' when it's not, or generally repressing your real Self. And you would not SUSPECT that this alone is the entire problem with the ego, because it then directly produces a large body of repressed pain in the shadow.

The ego persona wants you to think of the persona as all sweetness and nice, so that you would not suspect IT is the big problem, yet alone suspect that it is the CAUSE of everything that is dark and unwanted. Instead it deflects all appearance of the dark icky stuff onto the shadow so that the shadow gets to look like IT is the bad guy, IT is the thing to get rid of, IT is the thing to weed out and destroy.

So on the one hand you have this picture of 'innocence' in the persona (like the innocent victim), which you would not suspect is causing any problems at all, and then you have the apparently 'guilty' shadow which looks like it is the sole location of all the pain and misery and guilt and sin. Are you fooled? Most of us are. I know I am. I am fooled all the time by this. I keep believing the persona and seeking out that innocent, denying self, and trying to get rid of all the nasty icky stuff that I think the shadow represents.

So now all the bad shit in the world seems to be blamed on the shadow, and all the 'good stuff' is credited to the persona. When in fact, all the bad stuff is CAUSED by the persona. We choose the persona first (or simultaneously), and then by choosing it, ie choosing to focus on including only a PART of what is, or a PART of ourselves, we automatically simultaneously are adding more stuff to the shadow part of ourselves. That shadow part, generally seeming to be that which we repress and deny and hate or don't want to feel etc, seemed to be generally held at bay in a sort of 'unconscious' state for the most part, until it rears up into awareness and seems to attack the persona.

But let's look at this. Does the pain body/shadow actually attack the persona? Or does it just seem to behave in the terms of what the persona has given it? If the persona chose 'i want cake not dog shit', and the shadow became 'you are dogshit', then the 'you are dogshit' comes up seeking... healing, and exposes itself to the persona, which generally reacts with its usual relegation and denial and hate and 'get rid of it' attitude, which makes it an UPSETTING experience for the persona, disrupting its facade of pretend specialness and fake innocence. But what if the persona weren't so resistant to the shadow, and instead the SELF (real self) stepped back from the persona and was simply AWARE of what's going on, observes it, and allows both the persona and the pain to basically... be seen to be the same thing, to cancel each other out, then perhaps there can then be HEALING and RELEASE.

Anyway. My main point is this. And you may have heard it before. Choosing to use the persona is a trap, which absolutely guarantees that you will experience pain and suffering, because the persona will create the perception that something is unwanted, painful, and in need of being denied/separated from. This happens the INSTANT that you put the persona mask on, because you can't wear the mask without condemning everything that the mask does not contain. ie the shadow is the 'negative space' of the persona - everything else - which the persona is made to reject. The persona can only 'focus' on what it wants to include by excluding everything else that exists, and that simply becomes the shadow rather than 'extra stuff that never has anything to do with me'.

Morale of the story then is.... you believe you have the ability to choose what you WANT, WITHOUT in any way being affected by or involved with what you DON'T want, but this is a complete 100% ego lie. When you partially included, you partially exclude. Basic fact of a dualistic mindset. Every time you partially include something you have to reject something else and that rejected stuff is. ... ultimately, what is ... which includes the whole you. So as you wear that mask, you are attacking your whole self, suggesting that only some portion of it is acceptable, and that the other portion is unacceptable.

That is like... simultaneous self-eggrandizement and self-attack. Simultaneous ego inflation and a diminishing of Self. It splits the mind in two, shows one half to the world and hides the other, and as it does so, the shown part seems to amplify into 'goodness' while the dark hidden part amplifies into 'darkness'. You cannot escape the presence of this darkness. Just because it is hidden, does not mean it's not there. And some day it's going to manifest as sickness and death. Each time you believe in good and bad, or right and wrong, or any other dualities other than true and false, you are making BOTH a persona and a shadow, and must accept the consequences of both. The persona is your special love, the shadow is your special hate. Both of them are special.

Use the ego persona, get attacked. Use the ego persona, suffer the consequences. Use the ego persona, to make yourself look good, to win, to get, to be successful, to appear to be innocent, to have this fake facade of a person that you aren't even really that, ... be prepared to die. And who will have caused you to die? Yourself. Your own choice did it to you. So it's a good idea not to play with 'fire'... don't play the ego's game, don't live a life where you are constantly trying to 'gain' in manipulative, ego-persona ways. Just be what you are. You're perfect already.

Denial is an attempt to get rid of something, make it go away, place it anywhere other than here, push it outside of conscious awareness, and to disassociate from it. It’s an attempt to pretend it does not exist. This is a psychological act.

When there is denial, the "displacement" of what is being avoided appears to become separate from where it is (in you) and is sort of "pushed away" from you. Thus you push it outwards - outside of yourself.

So where there is denial, there is a pushing away, ie projection.

You can often experience this happening if you are ever around someone who represses their feelings. Regardless of how they feel, they will attempt to pretend they’re not feeling it, or they try to hide the feeling from themselves in an attempt to hide it from others. They think that if they are not aware of something, others won’t be aware of it either.

This is quite funny really and is similar to how we hide from God in order to pretend that God is not there. It’s also why we hide our secret sins and hidden hates, to KEEP them but pretend they are not there. Out of sight out of mind, but it doesn’t work.

What then happens is these people, because of denial, broadcast their stuff outward quite intensely. The more the denial, the more they project. This can especially be true of more intellectual people who do not like to feel emotions. They become loud broadcasters of what they do not want to feel. They are trying to get rid of it by projecting it away from themselves. They think that hiding it from themselves makes it go away from everyone, but it does not. Their feelings, pushed onto others, are even EASIER to see by others.

If you are sensitive or empathic you will likely easily pick up on these broadcasts and wonder why you are suddenly flooded with confusing feelings. Being around "projectors" can be quite toxic. They are emotionally irresponsible people who want to maintain a persona of everything being okay all the time, instead of being authentic. People-pleasers do this too.

This is also how we project stuff in our mind. Projection makes perception. Or you could say, denial makes projection. Upon "not wanting to see" what is being denied, it will be projected outward and then seen even more intensely. The only difference is there is a disassociation and a denial that it is inside yourself or has anything to do with you.

Always, being more responsible for everything you experience and feel will put you much more in touch with who you really are, give you strength, make you more aware and loving, and you will be much more authentic. You will also then stop sliming everyone else with your garbage disposal system.

This sounds like a tall order, but ACIM is saying we should not in any way be at the effect of the world. It should not do anything to us. We should regard other people as having not done anything to us. That is forgiveness. You are immortal and unchanged.

Forgiveness therefore is being causal and not an effect of the world. In forgiveness nothing happens to you, no-one offends you, nothing upsets you, nothing can hurt you, nothing can be taken from you. The world does absolutely nothing to you at all.

There is a very strong thread through the course that teaches this. It basically means you should be having absolutely no reaction to the world for any reason. You should be in a calm and whole state of mind which is always unconditionally loving, always deliberately acts, always gives the same one response to everything, and never re-acts to anything.

A "re-action" is an indirect action, a response, to a seeming provocation from outside yourself. Something happens first, and then you act, rather than acting first. And the action you perform is determined by what was done to you, rather than by what you truly will to do from love.

Reaction means you are a victim. It happens when you believe that stuff in the world is doing something to you. This happens when you believe it is REAL. This applies to everything physical. Everything the body can see and sense. All physical things are illusions, with a nature that is designed to tempt you all the time.

The world tempts you to believe that bad things are happening, cruelty and injustice, threats and dangers, wars and attacks, sicknesses and suffering. It shows this to you as pictures of crucifixion, pictures of bodies, pictures of things going wrong. It presents this to you as physical images, as physical objects, suggesting to you - look at this, it's true!

All physical things are forms of sin. Even the body is made from the idea of sin and deception. They give rise easily to a sense of guilt and fear, IF you buy into them. If you look at them and you start to buy into it, believe it, trust it, want it, you'll be giving it power over you. And then you'll perceive that it is causing you. Which means you are being affected by it.

This then causes you to be changed BY the world, seemingly. Or rather, you are using the world to pretend you are affected by the world. The result is that your mind will believe the external world is causing it, and it will manufacture effects to correspond to it. Your feelings will change, you will be "made" to feel a certain way, and you'll start having all kinds of effects - reactions, to what you've perceived.

Basically, if you believe that anything in the world is true, you are giving it power and truth and reality, which in your mind will set you up as the victim of it, and that will cause a reaction. If you are reacting in any way, with upset, fear, guilt, anger, anything at all, you have bought into the illusion that the world exists and is truly causing you.

The aim then is that you need to get to where you recognize that the world - which is a dream - is only a dream, which you are dreaming. And because it is only a dream, it is not a cause, and is only an effect. You must withdraw all power from it, all truth, and all reality. You must recognize it as nothing, doing nothing, causing nothing. All of its physical testimonies and states and forms must be recognized as lies - false - untrue.

Anything you see with the body's eyes, do not believe it. if you believe it, you will become deceived. It means you've bought into a temptation, and temptation puts you in hell. Anything that seems to be happening or existing in the physical world is NOT OF GOD and is not true. It must be denied. To deny it you must withdraw all belief in it, not play along with it, not go into false empathy, not join with it or become one with it.

The aim is to reach a state where you recognize that the world does nothing whatsoever, it has no power and no cause over you. You dominate it because you are all-powerful and causal. You are its dreamer. And as a result you cannot react to anything. It means the end of victimhood, the end of being affected or upset, the end of suffering because of anything other than yourself.

It does sound like a tall order - to not react to anything here whatsoever. To not react to a war, or a murder, or an abuse, or a fire, or a loss, or a threat. To be completely calm and still and unmoved and uncaused by anything in the world. But it is the goal we're seeking to achieve. If we are to be forgiving, it means we must be overlooking the world, which means not resting on the world, and not giving the world things it does not have.

In full recognition of being the cause or dreamer of the dream, you no longer can go along with believing that people are really suffering, or that sickness is true, or that death has any power to suppress anyone, or that bad things can make you unhappy, or that anything in the world can take anything away from you by any means.

It means the end of all effects from the world, all shifts to emotion, all fluctuating state and responses. It means being singular and unconditional, with one response to everything. I am not at the effect of the world I see. I will not react to the world I see. The world I see does nothing to me. I am immortal spirit and nothing in the world can change me or do anything to alter me in any way.

"That this is all the BODY does, is true. For it IS but a figure in a dream. But who REACTS to figures in a dream, UNLESS he sees them as if they were real?" UrT27I4

"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." UrT27I10

"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." UrT22F5

"Be not deceived by the form of problems today." UrW79L10

"Now it becomes your task to let the illusion be carried to the truth. Be steadfast but in this; be not deceived by the "reality" of any changing form." UrM28A7

"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." UrM13A6

"For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take." UrW140L4

"Be not deceived by forms the "something" takes." UrT29I8

"You have need to use the symbols of the world a while. But be you not deceived by them as well. They do not stand for anything at all, and in your practicing it is this thought which will release you from them." UrW184L4

"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." UrT31D2

"Be not deceived by what appears as many choices." UrT41G14

"Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done TO you. Acknowledge but that YOU have been mistaken, and ALL effects of your mistakes will disappear." UrT21C2

"He looks on what he chooses to see. No more and no less. The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did." UrM6C3

"for the world will never again appear to rule the mind" UrM6C3

"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." UrW190L5

"If you give no power to the fog to obscure the light, it HAS none, for it has power ONLY because the Son of God gave power TO it. He must HIMSELF withdraw that power" UrT11C5

"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." UrM9A6

"The purpose of the world you see is to obscure your function of forgiveness, and provide you with a justification for forgetting it. It is the temptation to abandon God and His Son, taking on a physical appearance. It is this which the body's eyes look upon." UrW64L1

"Nothing the body's eyes seem to see can be anything but a form of temptation, since this was the purpose of the body itself." UrW64L2

"Temptation has ONE lesson it would teach, in ALL its forms, WHEREVER it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel. It sets the limits on what he can do; its power is the only strength he has; his grasp cannot exceed its tiny reach." UrT31H1

"What you behold as sickness and as pain, as weakness and as suffering and loss, is but temptation to perceive YOURSELF defenseless and in hell. Yield NOT to this" UrT31H6

"For all temptation is nothing more than the attempt to substitute another will for God's." UrM17A9

"Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated." UrT27K4 "The world I see has nothing that I want." UrW128

"God's teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children's toys?" UrM14A4

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way." UrW137L7

"Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself, "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 is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever." This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of 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." UrT12G1

"This world IS a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son. And until you realize that God's Son CANNOT be crucified, this is the world you will see." UrT11J4

Before the ego existed, you had a self, created by God. Just as everyone did. In the separation, you denied your self. The denial of self, was an attempt to destroy your self. But you had to have something to identify with. So you shifted your sense of "what am I" away from your soul, towards an ego that you invented.

The ego is really the idea of the denial of life, of God, and of your soul. It is the attempt to eradicate you, which is why all its efforts lead to death. While the ego seems to be a self, it really is a lack of self. It is the absence of you and the rejection of mind. It masquerades as a self, when in fact it is the opposite of having a self.

Having identified with it, when people talk about oneness and non-duality you might feel frightened, as if it means that YOU are going to end. So long as you are identified with your ego, which is a false and second self, you will interpret any movement towards God as threatening.

The ego does not understand union or oneness and interprets it as death. This is also why you have ego rebounds and feel afraid and offended when you try to move into the truth. It's not really that YOU are under threat, it's that the ego is. But having identified WITH it and believing it to be what you are, you interpret ITS fear as your own.

So then the idea of returning to oneness, seems threatening to your ego, because your ego indeed cannot exist in oneness. And if you think that your ego is your self, YOU WILL not want to wake up. It will seem to threaten you. Especially the idea that the ego does not exist at all, is taken by the ego as an attack, and YOU will experience this as an attack upon your very existence. But only IF you believe the ego is your self.

The truth is that when the ego is undone, this happens as a result of YOU dis-identifying with it. Or to put it another way, you reintegrate yourself, identifying with your soul/spirit, reclaiming your mind, and dis-associating from the ego. This means you stop believing that the ego is your self, or that you even have an ego. Once you can recognize that your self, and your ego, are two different things, you are no longer threatened by the idea of undoing it.

A return to heaven is not really a return to no self. In fact, the ego is the state of no self. It is the state of self denial. It is a denial of life and a denial of existence and of identity in Christ. Returning to heaven is a REUNION with your real self, a re-identifying as a soul or Son of God in the Sonship, and a reclaiming of your true nature. You actually are returning to HAVING a self. That's why this is all about RESURRECTION.

The self God created you to be is permanent and will always exist in reality. Your Holy Self is God-given and cannot ever be destroyed. It's only your identification or sense of "who am I" that has become confused. Shifting your "who am I" from the non-existent ego to the permanent soul, can be nothing but reassuring and authentic.

Some people interpret the course to mean there is either a oneness or a duality, either God alone or many egos. And that undoing egos results in God being alone again. But this is not sufficient or accurate. God created you as a real living being, and it is you IDENTIFYING WITH ego that produces the ego and the separation, NOT the creation of an individual identity. You were an individual (who also shared everything) before this all happened.

Returning to God is not the annihilation of your individuality, it is the reclaiming of your individuality. The ego is NOT individuality, it is the rejection of having any real identity at all.

"God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy."

The world is the denial of God. The body is the denial of God. If you side with the world and body you give them power to affect you. It's a way of saying that your own dream is dreaming you. You give your power away to them to establish them as having power over you, then cower from the self-induced threat. You have to take your power back from the world.

You should use denial to deny that the world and body exist."The world you see must be denied"

This doesn't mean PRETENDING that you don't have a body, when you still believe that you do. Nor does it mean pretending that the world doesn't exist while you're still believing in it. That would be an IMPROPER use of denial beacuse it DOUBLES the denial. The proper use of denial means RECOGNIZING that in truth, the world and the body ARE themselves a state of denial, then truly denying that they REALLY ARE that.

"this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him"

Since the world is made OF denial, it DENIES. Its inherent nature is to deny everything, even itself. Your task is to deny the denial of the truth.

"The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH"

By recognizing that the world IS denial, and that it denies God, the remedy is to DENY THE DENIAL, by asserting God. The assertion of God is the assertion of life, which is resurrection, and opposes the world of death.

If you could just remember this one thing, that you should always deny anything NOT OF GOD any POWER, and not GIVE it any power, then you would assert that you are immortal and cannot die. That you cannot be affected, upset, caused by, offended by, threatened by or in any way changed by the world.

"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."

You must deny that the world or the body, which is NOT of God, and does not exist in heaven, has ANY POWER AT ALL. It has no power over you, no power to affect or change you, and is not responsible for anything you experience.

This means that even if the world seems to be doing something most would consider "a threat" to you, you should stand firm in your strength and truth and NOT be threatened. Because ultimately it is NOT the world that threatens you, it is YOUR BELIEF about it and USE of it to threaten you, that threatens you.

As per the secret of salvation, ONLY YOUR MIND causes itself to suffer. "It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain." "It can be but myself I crucify." You should deny that anything in the world is even CAPABLE of causing you in any way. No matter what it "does", you should actually remain calm, peaceful, undisturbed, and completely powerful. It should not ruffle your feathers, induce fear, or cause you to be alarmed.

Knowing yourself, being true to yourself, ACCEPTING what is OF GOD, and denying what IS NOT, is a very powerful protective device. Not merely something you MIGHT use, but something you eventually HAVE to use all the time. Because only by asserting your God-given perfection and DENYING anything of spacetime, can you live in a mental state of complete invulnerability.

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

"It denies the ability of anything which is not of God to effect you in any way."

It's very easy to believe that we are here in the dream, as a body, as an ego, trying to get to Heaven, which is far off in the distance, and we seem not to be there yet.

But this is only the perspective we've become accustomed to. It's how the ego sees things. It believes that its illusions have actually taken us out of heaven and not merely denied who we are but has literally changed who we are into a different kind of person.

The ego suggests that the light that we once were has been corrupted and blotted out, that it sinned, and it then transformed into a darkened self. That somehow we "fell" from Heaven and became guilty and riddled with problems.

But this is, and always has been, a lie. It's a cover-up. Because the fact is, that we have still not left heaven at all. As the Course says, we are "at home in God yet dreaming of exile." So in terms of where are located, we are NOT actually located outside of Heaven in some world we made, we're still in heaven but have surrounded ourselves with a strange hallucination.

From this side of what appears to be separation, it seems as if we never were in Heaven and that we are lacking Heaven's qualities, therefore we need to gain it or build up to it or find it or add it to ourselves. But there is a fundamental lie behind this, that we are lacking it, and that it is not already in us.

The biggest ego lie of all is the suggestion that we are not still in heaven or still as God created us. Or that somehow who we were before separation has been undone and removed and replaced with something else. It hasn't been replaced, not at all.

In fact, the self that we really are, our soul/spirit, is still very much exactly the same as it has always been, exactly as God intended it, is completely awake and alive and unharmed, totally innocent and holy, having never sinned and still simply going about its business.

"You are a perfect creation."

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you."

You also have come from God and are still coming from God, it's just that you've also tried to "add" a bunch of other stuff to change yourself in ways that are impossible, which temporarily BLOCKS awareness that you are STILL as God created you underneath those blocks.

So it's not that you "actually" left home and turned into a murderer, you actually are still at home now, and there's simply some layers of denial and pretense that are covering it up to make it SEEM like it's not there already. Uncovering and removing those layers of hiding will REVEAL what is already present, which is your holy self which has not changed at all.

And if God created bodies, death would indeed be real. But God would not be loving."

Let's just be clear about something here. God creates or extends reality. Everything real is within God's being. Everything real comes from His Will. Ok. The entire "realm" of God is within Himself, and all of it is real and deliberately created BY HIM.

SO.....

If we claim, God created planet Earth, God created bodies, THEN... we have to also say this:

Earth, bodies, dog shit, death, war, terror, sickness, suffering, starvation, explosions, supernova, ice ages, being eaten alive, piles of puke and diarrhea, cannibalism, murder, destruction, rape and incest, etc... ALL OF IT.... MUST, be part of God, per God's will. If it is God's CREATION, there is no loopholes, no exceptions, no OTHER makers of this stuff. It is all God's. And it's all real. And you cannot escape any of it.

If whatever God creates is within HIS OWN BEING, and is part of HIS OWN SELF, per HIS OWN WILL, then absolutely EVERYTHING within his being must be in accord with His Will, CREATED BY HIM, without exception. And therefore everything "created" MUST reflect God's nature, intention, attitude.

This should be pretty obvious. The ENTIRE CONTENT of whatever "world" He creates must be 100% HIS DOING and entirely WHAT HE WANTED.

So this now means, every single thing in this world, good or bad, right or wrong, happy or sad, is HIS DOING. And this leaves NO ROOM for other wills to have other doings. There are no other causes. This makes God the AUTHOR of all hatred, pain, torture and decay. All suffering is HIS FAULT. HIS WILL.

God causes floods. God causes famines. God causes stars to explode destroying solar systems. God causes black holes to suck up galaxies and civilizations. God causes murder and attack and death. ALL OF IT MUST be part of God's mind and will, IF GOD CREATED THIS WORLD.

And if you can understand why this is entirely correct, you should also realize that if God WERE to do this, to have DONE this, God WOULD BE EXTREMELY CRUEL.

As the opening statement says, if God created BODIES, which includes all forms of bodies not just human, including planetary bodies, IF GOD created them, DEATH IS REAL. Because these bodies DO DIE. Flowers die. People die. Planets die. Galaxies die. IF God created these things, DEATH IS REALITY. And if death is reality, then you CANNOT UNDO IT, you cannot overcome it, you are guaranteed to die forever. And that means there is NO SUCH THING as eternal life. So you better be counting the days until your "inevitable death."

The idea that God made the world is the idea that GOD IS THE EGO!!!!

And that means, quite simply.... GOD WANTS YOU DEAD. That it is GOD'S WILL THAT YOU DIE.

So now, we're in a bit of a predicament, because unless you want this to be TRUE of God, you CANNOT be claiming that God made the world. It literally CANNOT BE POSSIBLE that God had ANYTHING to do with the making of any of this shit, if God is to be loving. It is absolutely ridiculous to suggest, God WANTED there to be suffering, sickness and death.

Now, some people, who are insane and in denial, and cannot accept this fact, try to find another way to look at this situation, so that they can do two things: 1) KEEP the world and keep believing God created it, 2) Explain it in such a way that it is NOT terrible, bad, ugly and murderous. And so what do they do?

They come up with this bullshit idea that if you will simply change your mind ABOUT it, you'll suddenly realize that MURDER AND DEATH are totally LOVELY. That it is NATURAL for animals to eat each other alive. That there is SUPPOSED to be seasons in which things are born, suffer, and die. That if we will just skew our perception enough, supposedly "truly", then we'll see it as GOD INTENDED, as though to say, the things which SEEM like death and cruelty, ARE NOT ACTUALLY that.

And so what does that mean? It means God is totally nuts. Because now God does CRUEL THINGS, on purpose, under the BELIEF that THEY ARE NOT. It makes God out to be an absolute idiot. It justifies murder. It justifies death. It tries to adjust to the world to MAKE IT OK. It sees true perception as a device for changing the MEANING of a meaningless world, to GIVE it meaning, so that it seems meaningful. It's an attempt to find a way to look at this world such that EVEN THE HELL of it SEEMS LOVELY AND ACCEPTABLE.

That, is totally nuts. But that is what some people are doing with ACIM.

This world cannot be God's will. God HAS TO BE CRUEL to produce ANY of this, regardless of how you perceive it, regardless of how you think it was conceived, regardless of how you think God views it. God could not construct EVEN THE POSSIBILITY for suffering. God could not come up with even a scenario where you MIGHT even die. Yet alone to accuse God of MAKING DEATH. And to then try to explain it away by saying it''s not death, really, it's actually totally natural part of life. BULL SHIT.

I want you to consider this deeply. Think about it. God HAS to be TOTALLY FUCKING CRUEL in order to make a world like this. Which,may I remind you...

"Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end?"

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel."

And therefore, Because God IS NOT CRUEL AT ALL, He CANNOT have made it.

Nor does it STOP BEING cruel just because you try to LOVE IT. Just because you forgive it, look past it, or truly perceive it, this does not change what it is. A true perception of a world of death doesn't turn it into a world of life. Who can look on death and believe IT IS NOT THAT? No amount of forgiveness has ever stopped animals from eating each other alive, babies from dying at birth, planets colliding, or black holes swallowing whole entire civilizations.

THIS WORLD, is NOT God's creation.

THIS WORLD, is the world WE made when we were delusional and trying to DENY God's world. This is written all over the course. A delusional system of those driven made by guilt. A place where God could enter not. An attack on God. A picture of the crucifixion fo God's son. Make no mistake it is NOTHING LIKE God's creation, and crediting it to him is a MASSIVE disservice. God in his perfection could not come up with the shite that happens in this world. And all of the shit that happens would HAVE TO BE BECAUSE OF HIM if he created it.

God does not create hell, suffering, death, decay, destruction, sickness, meaninglessness, suicide, insanity or hatred. Look around you. This is not reality.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world.God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself."

"Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself, "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 is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever." This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of 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."

If you want to SEE REALITY, you have to DENY THIS WORLD. There are two worlds. One you made, one God created. In God's world there are no bodies, no day and night, no stores, no stupid stuff you don't need, no sickness, no death, no muder or attack, no suffering, no time, no loss, no dog shit, and especially no bad weather that kills people. If you want to SEE IT, to see the world GOD ACTUALLY created, you have to STOP LOOKING AT THIS PLANET. Sight of it is COSTING YOU the ability to SEE CHRIST where HE IS, in God's Kingdom, BEYOND THIS WORLD.

"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.

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 (heaven) HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT (heaven). And what you call with love WILL come to you. Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made (earth), and do not want. The only effort you need make, ***to give this world away in glad exchange*** for what you did NOT make, is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

Heaven is not like this, folks. God can do a lot better.

This pretty much explains why you have the freedom to deny God.

"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. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free.

You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His love, would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack HIMSELF, and God is not insane. When you denied HIM, you WERE insane. Would you have Him SHARE your insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. That was the condition of His Son's Creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. To know that is sanity. To deny it is insanity. God gave HIMSELF to you in your Creation, and His gifts ARE eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him?"

Note also that "separation" as in the theoretical idea that you CAN BE separate (which is impossible), is totally different from "THE separation", which is another name for the fall of man, the tiny mad idea. We DID in fact have the idea, we DID believe it, and we DID "fall". This is why there appears to be a facebook. BUT, the fall is not actual real separation, it's just belief in it and a denial that actual separation is impossible.

"The Separation (not ACTUAL separation, but the state of believing it's possible) HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."

So we did have the tiny mad idea, we did go into it through belief (which is really denial), and we did find ourselves in a "lower order reality". But this state in which we SEEM separate is not ACTUAL separation or real separation, which is impossible. It's just us MISTAKEDLY believing that it's possible and happening.

THE separation, the fall from Heaven, did occur. But it was not an actual separation.

"The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a failure in communication. "

The failure to communicate (to receive, to give equally), resulted in a state of denial, not listening, being unaware of perfection, a breakdown in the experience of oneness. It did not change anything perfect, it just closed the communication channels to a degree.

"What God DOES know is that His communication channels are not open to Him, so that He cannot impart His joy and know that His Children are wholly joyous. This is an ongoing process, not in time, but in eternity. God's extending outward, though not His completeness, is blocked when the Sonship does not communicate with Him as one. So He thinks, "My Children sleep, and must be awakened.""

"Those who communicate fear are promoting attack, and attack always BREAKS communication, and therefore makes communion impossible."

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them BOTH away, and understand that time can NOT intrude upon eternity. It IS a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which MEANS there is no time."

"Adam's "sin" could have touched none of you, had you not believed that it was the FATHER Who drove him out of Paradise. For it is in that belief that knowledge of the Father was lost, for it is only those who do not understand Him that COULD believe it."

"When the "lies of the serpent" were introduced, they were specifically called lies because they are not true. When man listened, all he heard was untruth. He does not have to continue to believe what is not true, unless he chooses to do so. All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception.

Man's spiritual eye can sleep, but as will shortly appear in the notes (reference Bob, elevator operator) a sleeping eye can still see. One translation of the Fall, a view emphasized by Mary Baker Eddy, and worthy of note, is that "a deep sleep fell upon Adam". While the Bible continues to associate this sleep as a kind of anaesthetic utilized for protection of Adam during the creation of Eve, Mrs. Eddy was correct in emphasizing that nowhere is there any reference made to his waking up. While Christian Science is clearly incomplete, this point is much in its favor."

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

"We have discussed the fall or Separation before, but its meaning must be clearly understood, without symbols. The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity. All beliefs are real to the believer.

The fruit of only ONE tree was "forbidden" to man in his symbolic garden. But God could not have forbidden it, or it could not have BEEN eaten. 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?"

"Eating of the tree of knowledge is a symbolic expression for incorporating into the self the ability for self-creation. This is the ONLY sense in which God and His souls are NOT co-creators. The belief that they ARE is implicit in the "self concept," a concept now made acceptable by its WEAKNESS, and explained by a tendency of the self to create an IMAGE of itself."

"Until the Separation, which is a better term than the Fall, nothing was lacking. This meant that man had no needs at all. If he had not deprived himself, he would never have experienced them.

After the Separation, needs became the most powerful source of motivation for human action. All behavior is essentially motivated by needs, but behavior itself is not a Divine attribute. The body is the mechanism for behavior."

"The intrusion of the ability to perceive, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the Separation. No one has been sure of anything since then."

"You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor. And God did not give it. For the request was alien to Him, and you could not ask this of a Father who truly loved His Son. Therefore, you made of Him an UNloving father, demanding of Him what only such a father COULD give. And the peace of God's Son was shattered, for he no longer understood his Father. He feared what he had made, but still more did he fear his REAL father, having attacked his glorious equality WITH Him.

In peace he needed nothing, and asked for nothing. In war he DEMANDED everything, and FOUND nothing. For how could the gentleness of love respond to his demands, EXCEPT by departing in peace, and returning to the Father? If the son did not wish to REMAIN in peace, he could not remain at all. For a darkened mind cannot live in the light, and it must seek a place of darkness, where it can believe it is where it is NOT. God did not ALLOW this to happen. But you DEMANDED that it happen, and therefore believed that it was so."

"Whenever projection in its inappropriate sense is utilized, it ALWAYS implies that some emptiness (or lack of everything) must exist, and that it is within man's ability to put his own ideas there INSTEAD of the truth. If you will consider carefully what this entails, the following will become quite apparent:

First, the assumption is implicit that what God has Created can be changed by the mind of Man.

Second, the concept that what is perfect can be rendered imperfect (or wanting) is intruded.

Third, the belief that man can distort the Creations of God (including himself) has arisen, and is tolerated.

Fourth, that since man can create himself, the direction of his own creation is up to him.

These related distortions represent a picture of what actually occurred in the Separation. None of this existed before, nor does it actually exist now."

"The Garden of Eden, which is described as a literal garden in the Bible, was not originally an actual garden at all. It was merely a mental state of complete need-lack. Even in the literal account, it is noteworthy that the pre-Separation state was essentially one in which man needed nothing."

"Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul. The Soul always remains changeless, because it never leaves the sight of God.

The Creation of the Soul is already fully accomplished. The mind, if it votes to do so, becomes a medium by which the Soul can create along the line of its own creation. If it does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants.

To "change your mind" means to place it at the disposal of True authority. The miracle is thus a sign that the mind has elected to be guided by Christ in HIS service. The abundance of Christ is the natural result of choosing to follow him."

So you see, we are IN a state of sleep, dreaming, denying, pretending not to be as God created us, imagining things are true which are not, being unwilling, and trying to give it reality through belief. But none of it is true, or really happening, what it represents (an actual separation) is fictional, and it's just an illusion masquerading as a separation.

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

You might think that the only blocks to awareness are in your mind. ie, in your brain. You might think that there is no such thing as a block "outside your body."

But the world you see out there, is coming from your mind. And in fact, your mind has made a world. It is hallucinating a world. This means that effectively, your blocks to awareness will be regarded as outside of you, just as much as internal.

In fact, let's even go so far as to say, that blocks to awareness can be PHYSICAL. Especially since "you maintain the world in your mind with your thoughts" and "both Heaven and Earth are in your mind."

Let's see what Jesus says about this:

"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."

So Jesus is saying, THE WORLD - Earth, physical matter, is standing like a BLOCK in front of the face of Christ. ie the world's FORMS are BLOCKING your sight of Christ. They are coming between you, getting in the way. This is no mere symbol or metaphor either. Literally you've put what appears to be a PHYSICAL WALL between you and God.

Jesus also goes on to refer to the seemingly solid world as a block.

"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."

Notice how the body's eyes are looking upon this "block of sin" as though it is SOLID GRANITE. Thick and solid seeming. Physical matter. This is "the veil". It is a BLOCK to awareness of Christ. A PHYSICAL WALL, made of thought in your mind.

He also notably tells you that REASON is able to SEE SENSE by OVERLOOKING this block. Recognizing the block as an "error". Which means physical objects are ERRORS. They are the FORM of error, the various forms that error (the separation idea, belief in sin) has taken. And here we are also clued in that physical forms are "forms of error."

"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."

Jesus also refers to solidity, in equation with illusions. Ie the physical world which SEEMS SOLID, is an illusion.

"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?"

So to the body's eyes, the forms of error, physical objects, solid matter, their seeming "solidity" "weight" "firmness" etc.... these things all seem real. And failing to OVERLOOK them, is a lack of forgiveness. They form "the veil", which covers up the face of Christ. In fact, this world of SOLIDITY is an attempt to BLOCK YOUR VISION. The physical world, including Earth, and all the stars and galaxies, were made as a place where God could enter not. ie, were made as a WALL to BLOCK YOU from God. To come between you. To make it seem like you are not in the Kingdom.

To the body's eyes, "these eyes made not to see will never see" were made so that you CANNOT see the face of Christ. They were designed to LOOK AT the outside surface of nothing, matter, whereby photons are reflected off (denied) and bounce into the eyes to tell you "the world is there, it is solid, it exists." But because the world BLOCKS vision, it is the fact that your sight was BLOCKED BY the solid matter, that you have not ACTUALLY SEEN. You did not OVERLOOK the surface of the physical objects, and so did not see the face of Christ. "Nothing so blinding as perception of form."

"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."

Here's Jesus is clearly stating that the physical human body's form of sight, can ONLY see forms, and they only look on ERROR, and this error of form they look at is the granite block of SIN. Which means that the physical world is made of sin, and the body was designed to make the sin seem real. The body's vision STOPS at the SURFACE of nothing (forms, objects) and fails to see past it. This forms A SOLID PHYSICAL WALL, which stands between YOU and THE TRUTH (heaven/God/Christ).

"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."

"How is this done? It is extremely simple, being based on what this little kingdom really IS. 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.

Everything these messages relay to you is quite external. There are NO messages that speak of what lies underneath, for it is NOT the body that could speak of this."

The body can only "see" BLOCKS, and it sees them precisely BECAUSE vision STOPPED at their surface and failed to go beyond. Seeing with the body is thus NOT seeing at all, it is false perception. It is a state of seeing the interior surface of a walled-in room of hell and darkness, as if it's all that exists. A failure to look through or past the walls (with a kind of x-ray vision, christ vision), makes the world seem like it is SOLID and REAL and ALL THAT EXISTS. And believing this is blindness. It's an unawareness that the Kingdom exists, and an attempt NOT to see God.

"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."

So here Jesus is clearly saying, that there is a light BEYOND the veil, beyond the wall of flesh, beyond the granite block of sin, beyond physical matter. By becoming able to SEE this light, you MUST use spiritual vision (christ vision) which is forgiving and DOES NOT SEE BODIES. "Forgiveness does not look upon bodies." It looks PAST bodies, past the illusion of form, past error, past the WORLD, TO the light. To the face of Christ. The face of Christ is effectively BEHIND the world (really outside of it, because we're inside a bubble of illusions, dreaming of exile).

So what this really adds up to is, BLOCKS TO AWARENESS are not simply your attitude about the world. They are not taking place just "in my head". There quite literally has been a PHYSICAL BARRIER placed outside you as the world, designed to tempt you to believe that THE WORLD is real, so that you do NOT SEE reality. So long as you use the body's eyes to see it, you will be blinded. You cannot look AT it with forgiveness to try to TURN IT INTO a Kingdom of God. It is made of the denial of the Kingdom. The world itself has to be OVERLOOKED.

And that means, blocks to awareness are not just inside your mind in the way you might think of them. The planet is a block to awareness. If you BELIEVE IN IT, your mind agrees with your body's eyes and you become unable to see. You instead perceive hell. This is false perception. The world you made is hell, the opposite of heaven. "Earth, heaven's opposite in every way." But if your mind chooses NOT to believe what your eyes are telling you is there, it becomes able to OVERLOOK what the body sees to see THROUGH IT, PAST IT, like a thin veil.

You not only overlook a block to awareness "in your mind", you overlook it "out there" also. By not believing in the world, you do not SEE IT. And this is based on the fact that your mind IS LARGER THAN THE UNIVERSE. It must be, because it CONTAINS planet Earth. If size can be considered real, your mind MUST be bigger than your body. In fact all bodies are within it, including all galaxies. And you put them INSIDE your mind to BLOCK awareness of where you really are - in Heaven. To remove the block, therefore, is ultimately to REMOVE THE WORLD.

"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."

You must DENY that what the body sees is real. You must OVERLOOK everything it shows you. You must NOT BELIEVE the testimony of the flesh. You must IGNORE it. You must look through its lies, its errors, its illusions, be NOT deceived, and look PAST THE WORLD, past your brother's body, to reality. This is what Christ vision allows you to do, and the development of this overlooking is the whole purpose of the workbook.

"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."

Look at that.

Christ vision DOES NOT look up on a body. It does not regard the body as "there". It looks PAST it. That is forgiveness.

It beholds a light BEYOND the body. That light is the face of christ. It's reality, or at least the real world.

It sees NO separation (no forms).

It sees BEYOND all happenings and events that the body seems to suggest are still there, while fixated on the light that is BEYOND it.

BEYOND WHAT CAN BE TOUCHED (the physical).

So as you "remove blocks to awareness", you are learning NOT TO SEE the blocks. To see beyond them. Which means seeing beyond the WORLD, which is really in your mind as AN HALLUCINATION OF A WORLD. To not believe in the blocks allows you to forgive the world, and this means being able to LOOK BEYOND it to reality. Because the world is an illusion, that you made up, to block your vision, so that you would not be aware of God.

"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."

Once the face of Christ is seen, perfectly, the physical world - the veil - which hangs like a block - disappears completely from your sight. The world is forgotten. Perception translates to knowledge and you wake up in Heaven.

"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."

"What YOU have "given" life is NOT alive, and symbolizes but your wish to be alive APART from life, alive in death, with death perceived as life, and living, death."

"If death is real for anything, there is no life. Death denies life. But if there is reality in life, death is denied. No compromise in this is possible. There is either a god of fear or One of Love."

"For death is total. Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible."

In heaven, cause or creation produces an effect. This effect is not just an "end-result", but also a beginning. Ends and beginnings are one. A creation inherits from its creator all of the creators abilities. The creation is FULLY given, endowing the creation itself with the same exact capability of creating freely in the likeness of its own creator. Nothing is lost and the "child" creation is not in any way less creative or capable than the "parent" creator. The child can in turn create, and so too its children, with no loss or reduction in the creative ability passed on to each generation. This continues endlessly and immortally in "one continuous line of creation".

On Earth, the story is very different. When we try to create something here, we endow it with a very limited ability of its own to create in turn or in its own likeness. We can build machines which build machines, but only up to a point. Creation here produces effects, but the effect is practically a dead-end. Sometimes we can create things which seem, in turn, to have some limited ability to create other things. But very quickly, the creative flexibility and freedom is diminished down to nothing. After hardly any time at all, all creative ability is lost, we end up with a dead end, and in fact this produces death itself. This world was made as an idea of bringing an end, or putting a stop, to everlasting life.

We're quite proud of being able to reproduce human bodies which pass on traits and give similar potentials to their offspring. This is about as close as we come to any kind of "lineage" or unlimited line of creation. But it still falls far short of the unlimited creative potential of Heaven. Each body eventually typically meets death, because it is limited and most minds in bodies attack their bodies, producing aging and sickness and death, which is the choking-off of creation. With each death, the line of creation comes to a close. This is symbolic of nothing short of the "end of creation" and the end of extension, in which the lineage dies off. To the ego, beginnings and endings are not united, and endings bring a stop to extension. Creating something which cannot itself create, leads to death.

This is why death is so unnatural. It is an attempt to stop creation entirely, to halt the extension of heaven, to cease to do God's will, to stop the flow of life-giving forces from God, to stand in the way of love's expression, to limit and retard the father-son cause-effect relationship, to produce effects which are nothing like their cause, to put a stop to life, to strangle the son of God until there is no life left in Him, and to squeeze every last drop of life from Him. And because death is SO far against the nature of God, SO antithetical to eternal life and constant extension, and so limiting to the unlimited expression of immortality, that anyone exhibiting death in this world cannot be carrying out God's will, nor following the laws of Heaven.

If we are to truly be demonstrations of God's Will, of eternal life, of endlessness, of permanent constancy, of continuation and the total freedom from limitation or reduction, we simply have to overcome death in all its forms so that absolute life can perpetually flow freely and without hindrance through us and as us. We are to become living demonstrations of immortality, a shining light in a dream of death, demonstrating that it is God's will that there be no end to existence, and proving that there IS no death or need for death in the creative life of a Son of God.