There is one reference to "vertical perception" in ACIM, as part of miracle principle 41. Jesus says:

"41. The miracle is a learning device which lessens the need for time. The sudden shifts from horizontal to vertical perception which the miracle entails introduces an interval from which the doer and the receiver both emerge much farther along in time than they would otherwise have been."

So he introduces this idea that there is a horizontally oriented way of perceiving, and a vertical way. The horizontal way is what you don't want, and the vertical way is what you should be trying to shift towards. But what are these two ways of perceiving?

Let's start by saying the world doesn't exist yet. You are designing a new world inside a computer. You're using some 3D software to model forms and objects and are placing them in a scene. Your intention is to create a 3D holographic movie of various CGI scenes, in which anything goes.

As far as you are concerned, as the director and editor, it's a level playing field. There are no inherent rules or laws as to what is possible or what can happen. There are no laws of physics set up. There are no limitations. Your imagination can run wild.

So you start designing this environment, composed of what seem to be models of objects - cars, buildings, bodies etc. But simply by putting them in the scene, nothing happens. They just sit there. Nothing causes anything. There are no consequences. There are no laws. There are no forces of repulsion or gravity or collisions between things. Objects can exist in the same space overlapping even. There are no chemical reactions. No biological processes.

From this perspective, which we'll call "vertical" or "above the battlefield", you are in a position of vertical causality. The level you are on is ABOVE the level of the world you're making below. Whatever you decide, happens. So if you decide to move one of the models of a car, the car moves. It can't move on its own. But moving it doesn't do anything. There are no effects or limits. You can even move one car to overlap another car, without anything happening. But let's say you want to make it SEEM as if there is a car crash. What do you do?

Well, you're first going to have to CAUSE there to be a scene with two cars in it. You're going to have to cause the two cars to SEEM to move. They will not be moving as a result of having an engine, that's just a pretend engine "for show". Your mind is going to determine where the cars are. You can even pick up the cars and plonk them down somewhere else, or make them float in the air, with no regard for any laws of physics. So you deliberately move both cars in what appears to be a direction towards each other, on a fake road, pretending they are "driving" and making "broom boom" sounds like children at play.

When the cars approach and seem like they should "crash", nothing's going to happen. They'll pass through each other. So you have make up some fictional "laws of physics". You make up some rules which suggest, when this car touches the other car, it will SEEM as if they push into each other, "causing" a crash. One car might be thought of as SEEMING to "cause the crash". But this is entirely illusory. It's on purpose. The car does nothing. The mind that causes EVERYTHING about the car, causes what seems to be the crash.

The director - the true causer - is deciding that car A will crash into car B. And the director also has to deliberately model the way car B will deform to make it LOOK AS IF car A's impact caused bodily damage. So when you now "play the scene", it's going to SEEM as if it's an animation in which the two cars move towards each other on a road - under their seeming own power - not seeing the hidden hand of the director - and collide. Car B seems to become damaged, and it looks like car A was the cause. But it's just an illusion. Everything that happens is orchestrated from above. Did you fall for it?

You know better. You know that NEITHER of the cars has any causal power. You know from this vertical position, looking down on the whole scene from above, as the director, who can pull all the strings and change anything at will, even changing or breaking the laws of physics, that it's NOT TRUE OR REAL that car A crashes into car B. But based on appearances, viewed through a camera (the body's eyes), it SEEMS as if car A causes damage to car B. The camera frames the scene just right to make it seem believable.

This is because when you look at the scene through the camera, which ONLY looks at the **end result** of the director's work, the body's eyes do NOT see that the entire scene is fabricated, they do NOT see that if the director so chooses the car will not be damaged, they do NOT see that there are strings being pulled to create the ILLUSION of laws of physics, and they do NOT see that the movement of both cars is being orchestrated by the ACTUAL CAUSE, the mind. All the laws of physics are EFFECTS, not causes.

Even the damage to car B cannot occur without the higher level mind causing it. It is NOT caused by car A. The illusion that car A has causal power is AN ILLUSION! It's "causality" is ONCE REMOVED from what the REAL cause is. And taken at face value, the body is "blinded by perception of form" and appearances, not looking past them and not seeing the trickery and lies that are producing this illusion. And so it is tempted and deceived by what it sees.

So at the level of the world, which is the scene containing the objects, viewed through the body as the camera, looking at the props and taking them to be not only real but the FIRST ORIGIN OF CAUSALITY, your body assumes there is no other cause that CAME BEFORE, no prior or higher cause, no bigger picture, no author, no orchestration of the world, no secret agenda, no plot to deceive, and just takes it at face value. It thinks then that the car ITSELF had causal power. And now there's reason to blame the car for "causing it".

Seeing the scene this way, is what we call FALSE PERCEPTION. The entire physical world IS FALSE. All the objects are false. ALL the laws of physics are false. ALL of it is a lie. It's a movie set. Every apparent "horizontal causality", where it seems something on this level in the world CAUSES something, or is the true origin or chooser of something, creates the illusion that the world has real consequences, causal power, makes things happen on its own, and isn't being run by a deeper, hidden author.

The DREAMER - the director of all things that happen - goes unnoticed and hidden behind the scenes. He is the cause of the "causes" in the world. He is the one deciding that all objects move. He is the one making up the laws. HE is the one deciding what SEEMS to affect what. HE makes both the causes and the effects that we see as being on the same level. He orchestrates all events and has power OVER everything.

He can also BREAK all the laws and consistencies and illusions of the world through his seemingly "miraculous" freedom and transcending of all illusions. He can rewrite the world. He can make mountains move in an instant. He can reverse death. He can make a pretend body seem to walk on pretend water, as if gravity were total nonsense. He MADE UP gravity, and is not bound by it. He MADE what we call sickness and death, and can ABOLISH both. He is the director. He has the power to dominate all things in the world. There is NOTHING his holiness cannot do. His mind has the power to make WORLDS appear!

To those on the horizontally perceiving level, who are living within the context of ASSUMING the world is real and causal, when the awakened dreamer - a miracle worker - decides to CHANGE the dream in a way that BREAKS the normal order and laws, having shifted into vertical perception, and EXPRESSING a vertical causality, SEEMS to be doing things which are "impossible".

He seems to be breaking the laws of physics. He's walking on water, he's multiplying objects, he's cancelling death, he's curing all sickness, he's moving mountains with his mind, and seems completely unlimited by anything in the world. To those asleep, he appears miraculous. Yet he is just being natural. He is in touch with the power to cause and choose, under NO LAWS but God's. Those fixated on the body's world see him as OUTSIDE what's possible. He breaks their reality. And they do not understand how he can do this.

When you are believing everything the body sees, which is an illusion, the illusory world of form, you are having "horizontal perception". It's the same thing as false perception. And everything in the world, all objects, all laws, are what you see when you are only looking through the camera which was designed on purpose to NOT SEE the secret behind-the-scenes activities. The body fixates only on the story, the appearance, and the illusion. The end result or effect. The dream. "Only the body makes the world seem real."

To horizontal perception, ie false perception, everything in the world seems to be lined up side by side. Like in a crowd of people. All horizontally spaced out. And so if one of the bodies is sick, and dies, the appearance is that not only is the sickness and death "reality", there is also a strong BELIEF IN (being deceived by) these appearances. The divisions between things make the body's appearances seem very tangible and pronounced. Differences are emphasized, so as to blind you to the deeper truth.

Someone operating on the level of false perception believes that sickness is real, death really happens, the world is dangerous, people sin in bodies, stuff is attackable, there are causes to be afraid of, we are victimized by the world, and are at the effect of the world. To them, the FORM of differences are very strongly deceptive, bodies all seem different, problems seem different, and the world is highly fragmented. What the body sees is believed. And then all kinds of coping strategies arise from that perception of horrors.

To move into "vertical perception" ie true perception, you're not merely going upwards above the battlefield and still perceiving in a horozontal way, you're moving OUTSIDE of horizontal causality and seeing from an entirely different perspective. Outside of the laws of space and time and physics. You're lifting up out of the illusory world, the story, the fictional movie. You're taking your perception OUT of the role of "character in a dream", and becoming aware that YOU ARE THE DREAMER. You are that one who MADE the world, made the bodies, made the planets, and invented all the laws. And you recognize you have been "doing it to yourself" - which is the secret of salvation.

You made up bodies, made up a world, made up laws, made up scenarios, forgot who you were, believed YOUR MOVIE was orchestrating YOUR life, that your scene had causal power over you, that you were now a character IN the movie, a body - the hero of the dream, and thought the dream was happening to "you". You lost touch with your vertical causality, the fact you are directing the whole thing from above, and that you are under NO LAWS BUT GOD's!

Your "miraculous" freedom FROM all causality and laws on the horizontal level, allows you to perform "miracles" - or rather, expressions of vertical causality, which BREAK AND DEFY these "second hand" "once removed" causes. Illusions of causes and illusions of laws are nothing to a miracle worker, who recognizes there is no order of difficulty because ALL of the lower orders are at YOUR effect, including what seem to be causes. You are free from all limitations. The hierarchy of illusion is FLAT to you. ALL illusions are the same. Raising the dead is no harder than healing a headache.

From the higher vantage point of vertical perception, looking down on the WHOLE scene from above, the distracting ILLUSION of appearances is SEEN THROUGH. The spiritual eye, Christ vision, looks PAST the movie set. It sees all the props and cameramen and sound crew. It reads between the lines. It sees the glue holding the scene together. It sees the light of the room in which the movie is being edited.

It does not BELIEVE FOR A MOMENT anything that the appearance of the movie would say is true. It doesn't even buy that physical objects are even really there. It pays no attention to appearances of form, shapes, colors, sizes, distances, weights, laws, or supposed differences of any kind. It has the VISION to SEE the WHOLE scene, including all hidden parts and mechanisms and trickery. It recognizes it is all an illusion. It is not DECEIVED by anything at the level of the world. Vertical perception is inclusive, horizontal perception is exclusive.

Mind is cause. World is effect/dream. Mind being causal is vertically positioned above the world. Everything below, in the world, is an illusion of horizontal causality. Nothing about the world is TRUE. Believing it is false perception. When you are in true perception you do not REGISTER the illusions of differences between things. Bodies are not separate. Objects are not real. There is a subtle connectedness that you didn't see before. A light which sparkles between things. A glue which you become aware of. A sparkling unity and sameness that seems to be behind everything.

A vertically perceived world is a forgiven world. Being aware of ALL the information about the scene is awareness of the real world. You cease to project sin and guilt and fear and death onto the scene. These arise only from false perceptions. You don't see it from a horizontal vantage point. You ignore the eyes of the body. You know that nothing in the world is real, so nothing is sick, and nothing is dying, and everything is one thing.

You see death as not an end, at the end of a horizontal linear sequence, but as a dipping DOWN from a higher level to a lower level perception. As an immersion into falseness. And from above, you know death is TOTAL FICTION. Just some arrangement of fake particles that you DECIDED you would call death. Which can easily be rearranged and reanimated if you so choose. It's totally fake. Actors in a movie do not die when their character dies.

Here, above the battlefield, you know you cannot die. You are the author of the world. You are not a body. You are not the story. You make the rules. You can break them. And nothing in the world has any bearing on anything real. Death is now vertically no longer seen as an interruption, but as merely another form of objects on par with all others. Just an effect you have power over. You can choose not to make it happen.

Dead bodies, living bodies, they are all illusions. They have NO inherent meaning. The world has no inherent meaning. You give it all the meaning it has when you design it, projecting made-up stories onto it. The world is nothing but fiction. You are not bound or limited by any of it. You are free. The director of a movie is not bound by ANYTHING that seems to happen. And edits can be made at any time. You have power over the world, because you are its cause.

"W-pI.190.5. It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. 2 Nothing external to your mind (horizontal) can hurt or injure you in anyway. 3 There is no cause (at the horizontal level) beyond yourself (who are above it) that can reach down and bring oppression. 4 No one but yourself affects you. (from above) 5 There is nothing in the world (below) that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. 6 But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see (as director, author, dreamer, law-maker) by merely recognizing what you are (from a position vertically aligned above the world)."

"Separation" is an ACIM buzzword and yet often misunderstood. Most people associate separation with something unnatural, something to remove, and a sign of the ego. Separation is bad, oneness is good. Anything that even hints at a sign of separation is considered to be wrong, some kind of "duality" which is opposite to the truth. But this is actually incorrect in ACIM terms.

If you look deeply at the course you may eventually realize that heaven's reality is not the same as the world of space and time. Heaven entails the sharing of everything. Spacetime entails NOT sharing anything. As you look deeper, you discover that God in fact isn't "arranged" like objects in spacetime. His whole mind and system and creation are in fact more like a holgoram.

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you." The holographic principle is that there is a whole, and there are also parts. But each part isn't merely "a part of" the whole, lacking in some way. Each part in fact contains ALL of the whole. Every part is whole in and of itself, and is host to the whole. ACIM refers to this for example as "I am forever host to God." And "You had everything when you were created just as everyone did."

Each of the parts of a hologram experiences immense SHARING with the whole. And the whole includes all of God, and all other parts. This means that every part IS every other part, and is also host to God. This sharing, however, is not like sharing in spacetime. It does not mean that there are two separate things and something is transferred between them. Each part "houses" the whole, and therefore IS the same whole as the other parts. One part IS another part.

ACIM again expresses this in statements such as: "One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth." This is not easy to understand in linear terms or by drawing analogies to spacetime objects, because in spacetime each object is "apart" from others, is NOT a whole, does NOT share anything, and is "separated off". This is not what it's like in a hologram. In the hologram, that which is in one part is located in all the other parts as well. It TRANSCENDS space and time, beyond spatial separations.

This also parallels very closely the idea of omnipresence, which is an attribute of God and everything he created. This doesn't just mean God is everywhere, it also means that THE WHOLE of God is in EVERY location. Not just one part of him over here, and another part of him over there. But ALL of him is simultaneously in multiple places. This again transcends the limits of space and time.

Now, in ACIM terms, the main whole is referred to as God, and the "whole parts" are referred to as souls, or God's children. There are a great many creations, which are many thoughts of God. Each thought of God IS whole, because God can only think wholly and in terms of wholeness. What he thinks of "creates another whole", which SHARES everything with the original whole and with all other wholes. Each whole is FUSED to all the others and effectively IS them.

This is the real meaning of oneness - a shared experience in which EACH wholly existing distinct "part" is united with and sharing everything with all the others. "The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been fully created." This is part of the miraculous nature of God, that a part of God is the whole of God, a creation of God contains all of God, and therefore every part "is one", and yet there are parts. These parts are not PARTIAL parts, or lacking what other parts have. Every part is A WHOLE.

Then we come to the idea of "the separation from God". This is where paople start to demonize the idea of separation or of "many things". When people don't recognize that heaven's natural state is one of TOTAL SHARING AND UNION, they may think of it more in terms of space-time objects. Such as the son of God is one "object". And then the only way to conceive of separation is to "split the object" so that there are now two or more objects. But this is NOT what happened in the separation, because heaven is not object-oriented or spatially separated.

In the separation, or "the fall of man", basically some of the WHOLE PARTS which were aspects of the hologram of God's thought, chose to STOP SHARING EVERYTHING. They wanted to become selfish. Their innate nature is to share everything with everyone. Everyone in heaven has everything. Everything belongs to everyone. Everyone IS everyone. "We are the Kingdom, WE, the sons of God." But "the ego" is actually the idea of trying NOT to share. And "the separation from God" was actually moreso an act of OPPOSING God's holographic family unit.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness. The soul is the idea of self-fullness."

The separation from God was a movement AWAY from sharing, towards selfishness. Selfishness goes by many names, all of which are efforts to "separate off", to withdraw, to hoard, and to move into a small isolated part which is NOT SHARED with the rest. This results in SPECIALNESS, which is the desire to have an exclusive special "something" true for you, which is not true for others.

Another way to view the separation is to say, individual whole parts of the hologram, rejected their union and shared totality with the whole, and tried to become "parts which do not share". They tried to orphan themselves. They did not want to be "part of" the collective sonship. They did not want to have the total holy relationship of sharing everything with everyone. They wanted to go of by themselves and have something special and exclusive just for them. "You were at peace until you asked for special favor, and God did not give it."

It's important to note then, that in fact in the creation of God, in the hologram of the Kingdom, there were in fact MANY INDIVIDUAL BEINGS prior to "the separation." God had created the sonship which comprised many souls, who are permanently brothers, and who were joined and sharing everything happily. These were INDIVIDUALS, but at the same time each individual was ONE WITH all the other individuals. Each one, is one and many, because the truth of a holographic system is that the one is many and the many are one.

The existence of many individual beings DID NOT MEAN that there were many "separate people" standing around like disconencted objects sharing nothing. That is not what multitudes are like in heaven. In heaven, many beings are individually present, AND YET at the same time, they are so intimately joined to and ONE WITH all other beings, that they ALL ARE one thing at the same time.

The separation from God did not actually INVENT "many selves". Many selves existed before that, and is completely natural. Nor did the separation produce individuality. But it DID produce a SECOND SELF, which was the idea of being not yourself and unlike how God created you - the ego. The denial of your joined identity (in christ - every soul is christ), formed a false self image.

"God who encompasses all being, nevertheless created separate beings (who SHARE, not who are isolated), who have everything individually and want **to share** it to increase their joy." "Nothing real can be increased except by sharing."

God had already created "many beings", not separate OBJECTS, or isolated cut-off individuals, but individuals who were ALSO joined together. They wanted to SHARE everything with each other, even their own souls. One soul IS another soul. There are many souls and each of them is an individual being, but also IS the other beings. The possibility of this is the "miraculousness" of the soul. You can see Jesus contrasting the WRONG way of thinking about the soul, here:

"Each Soul knows God completely (is the whole). This IS the miraculous power of the Soul (that it can be both a self and the whole at the same time). The fact that ***each Soul has this power*** completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

Indeed when we think in terms of spatially separated objects, we would conclude that if I have everything or am the whole, there is nothing ELSE for another soul to have. But in heaven, EACH individual being IS THE WHOLE. YOU are the whole sonship. "The Kingdom of Heaven IS you." I am the whole sonship. So are you. And WE are both there as brothers. Each PART of the sonship is the whole sonship. All the many children of God, which will always be many children of God and equal brothers, are the whole of heaven.

So in "the separation" event, some of the whole parts of the hologram rejected their SHARED nature, and wanted to ISOLATE. They didn't want to be included, they wanted to exclude. Thus they used denial and unwillingness and attack to reject the hologram. They were ALREADY individual beings, that have a total relationship of sharing with all others. But they tried to CUT OFF COMMUNICATION to end their shared relationships.

This turned them INTO "the separated ones." They BECAME separated, precicely because they existed in a NOT separated state before that. But this does NOT mean they didn't have an individual self before this. The only thing that changed was the loss of sharing (aka communication).

"Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply BEING. The ego is thus AGAINST communication, except in so far as it is utilized to ESTABLISH separateness, rather than to abolish it."

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

Some of the beings, who existed as whole beings, who had everything, who shared and WERE everything, "cut themselves off" from sharing anything, and isolated themselves. They wanted to have something SPECIAL for themselves. They tried to end their RELATIONSHIP with God. They wanted God to treat them with special favor. They wanted to be different and have something of their own. They wanted to be SELFISH.

Selfishenss is the opposite of sharing. Separation means a desire to be exclusive and selfish and to NOT SHARE. Which is why JOINING is its correction. And joining does not mean undoing your SELF!

To "be separate" therefore really means to NOT JOIN, or to not share. Spacetime is very obviously a state of not sharing. Each object is separated off. One car does not share with another car. One thing does not exist in two places at onces. Two things are not one thing. You cannot be located in one place and another at the same time. No two objects can overlap, otherwise they'd destroy each other. Spacetime was an attack on the SHARING of the sonship, resulting in a realm in which everything is separated off and excluded.

The body arose from the idea that you wanted to be isolated from the collective. You wanted to have something exclusive to you which others did not have - your own body. You wanted to be different than everyone else and not like them - your own appearance. You wanted to have some small portion of heaven that you thought of as exclusively yours, locked up inside a fence, surrounded by a wall, to keep others out and to keep you in. And you wanted to inhabit this small area of existence as exclusively yours, so that ONLY YOU exist within it and everything else is outside. This is what the BODY is based on. It is a separation device. And within it you are lonely and isolated, unless you are willing to extend or join PAST it.

"The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built to separate parts of his Self (holographic shared self) from other parts (your brothers who ARE also you). It is within this fence he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles. For within this fence he thinks that he is safe from love (wholeness/sharing)."

The UNDOING of separation, the atonement, healing, does NOT therefore necessarily mean ... ."let's get rid of anything that hints at separation". God had already created "separate beings" in heaven before the ego came along. They were separate in the sense that they were MANY, but they were ALSO JOINED. That which is BOTH many and one, is heaven's natural holographic condition. This is NATURAL. There is nothing wrong with it. It's perfectly legitimate that God has a family of souls. This has nothing to do with the ego.

"Ultimately, every member of the family of God must return."

Heaven means separate beings who are not separate. Whole parts which are parts but also the whole. There is an aspect of separation to that, because there ARE many beings. But they are not ISOLATED because they share everything. So the "attack on separateness" is NOT correct. The attempt to remove all sense of "separation" in all cases is NOT correct. We are not supposed to be removing the holographic aspects of reality. We are not supposed to be undoing the sonship. And we are NOT supposed to be getting rid of individuality!! You and your brothers all have permanent souls, created by God, which can never be destroyed.

What we ARE supposed to be doing, is realizing that we threw away what CONNECTS us. We threw away joining and sharing and RELATIONSHIP. We threw away holographic wholeness. We want to undo isolation, specialness, selfishness, possessiveness, ownership, exclusivity, localization, littleness, unwillingness to share etc. These are what being "separated off" really means. But we are not supposed to take it to the point of erasing ALL hints of "many things". God having many children is NOT a dualistic idea, because all of those many things ARE ONE as well.

Duality really means that there are many things which DO NOT SHARE. This is a false experience and is the basis for spacetime.

Nonduality is the idea that there are NOT many things. This is an attack upon heaven's creation and an attempt to claim that God is NOT holographic. It is ignorant and false and an ego conclusion.

Reality is in fact a kind of "trans-duality", a hologram, a paralogical and omnipresent system, in which many parts DO exist but they are NOT "separated off" parts like in spacetime. It is NOT duality to say that God has many sons, because while there are a count of many, they ALSO are fused together as one. They are WHOLE beings, who are each ALL the whole. And therefore each child of God is ALL children. This is why the sonship itself is united via the ONE MIND of christ, yet EACH INDIVIDUALLY is christ.

So we have to be careful when dealing with "undoing the separation" that we're not mistaken in trying to also undo the holographic aspects of creation. We can't just remove ALL trace of separation, because this undoes God's Kingdom. We can't just use a blanket statement to wipe out all notion of separateness because this kills off all the souls that God created. Separateness is therefore not really the PROBLEM. The problem is that the separate individuals are being selfish and don't want to SHARE THEMSELVES. It is a breakdown in communication and relationship that needs fixing, NOT individuality.

"Heaven includes all God's children and their creations." We can't just say "separation is a bad thing". It depends on whether or not the separate things are including or excluding each other. INCLUSIVE SEPARATION is perfectly normal. EXCLUSIVE SEPARATION is ego. The undoing of the ego is NOT the undoing of separation. It is the reversal of EXCLUDING OTHERS. This does not result in the erasing of individuality, nor of the undoing of multiple individuals. It results in a REUNION OF BROTHERHOOD in the sonship of God, in which all God's children are one big happy family who share everything with each other forever.

One thing has been a constant throughout your whole life. You have always been you alone. You have always been a separate person, autonomous within the confines of a body, and not once has there been anyone in there with you. Everyone else is just like you, in that they are unlike you, and unlike everyone else. And never have you found anyone who is the same as you.

This experience comes with a sense of "I am only me", completely cut off from others by a wall of bodies. And that seems to suggest "I am wholly myself." And yet, it is not an experience of knowing who you are, but of being out of touch with who you are. It's an experience of "I don't know who I am" while at the same time clutching at straws to define who you are. Looking for something to identify with, to convince yourself it is your self, because you have lost yourself.

You have been lost, confused, afraid, alone, lonely, weak, powerless and constantly bombarded with attack. And every time it has been "only my self" that has experienced this - the poor-me victim. And every time you have been unhappy it has seemed you are unhappy alone, afraid alone, suffering alone, sick alone, guilty alone, dying alone. And not once has it seemed that anything you have felt within yourself has been the same as that of anyone else at all. You haven't even had the slightest clue what anyone else is thinking or experiencing.

This is the experience of what we might call someone who is "being an ego". It is the automatic experience of anyone whose sense of self is a "separated off" self. A self that is excluded, isolated, imprisoned in a body, kept apart from sharing anything with anyone, and thoroughly limited to what the body dictates.

"This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time" Such a person has not really changed in terms of their perfection, but they have changed in terms of their relationship. There has been a communication breakdown between themselves and others. The body depicts this breakdown as a tremendous hurdle which filters and translates everything into confusing symbols. This is a person who once was free, but who has been locked up inside a body and has forgotten what it means to share. Their mind seems isolated and unaware of anyone else's mind.

Let's say there is no such thing as "an ego" at all. There are only people. And some of these people have decided to try to cut themselves off from others. They have done this by placing themselves inside a prison cell, and have tried to identify with that prison cell so that their whole sense of self narrows and confines to within its walls. They are a self which once was glorious and magnificent, expansive and unlimited, which has dimmed its light and condemned itself to a dungeon, to die alone and in solitude.

"The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to PROVE it is autonomous and real. "There is no man who does not feel that he is imprisoned in some way. If this has been the result of his own free will, he must regard his will as if it were NOT free, or the obviously circular reasoning of his own position would be quite apparent."

"For his belief in limits HAS imprisoned him."

"An imprisoned mind is not free by definition. It is possessed, or held back, by ITSELF. Its will is therefore limited, and not free to assert itself."

It is unnatural to be only yourself. Some people will model what ACIM says on the basis that, when you are awake, you are wholly yourself. And therefore when you are in ego, you are not entirely yourself, or are unwhole. But this is not entirely accurate. It is more accurate to say that when you are in ego you are ONLY yourself to the EXCLUSION of others, and when you wake up you are waking up to being MORE THAN just yourself. You are a whole self AND MORE THAN a whole self.

The entire premise of being "in ego" or "in separation", is that you are excluded from others. You are not sharing with them. You are not identifying with them. You don't regard them as part of you and you see yourself as a standalone, independent, self-reliant being. Not that being self-reliant is wrong. In fact you were created to be wholly sufficient and complete and lacking nothing, sharing the power of God. It isn't that you are "capable" that's wrong, it's that you try to be capable ON YOUR OWN.

This means that fundamentally the separation is really about you rejecting your inheritance from God. It's about you not wanting to be an effect of God. A rejection of God as your father. An unwillingness to acknowledge that you ONLY have what he has given you. That you do not have anything, nor can you BE or DO anything, WITHOUT him. That everything you are, comes from him, and is part of him and shared with him. Rejecting all that God has given is what makes you "separated off".

As soon as you are separating yourself off, to be a powerful being who does not want power, you immediately disempower yourself. You immediately enter into fear, because you know deep down that you have actually stripped yourself of power. You know you are not capable anymore. You can't successfully do ANYTHING on your own, although you can try. It will fail in some way. Anything you make will die. And all your mis-creations will crumble. You can't give immortality to anything because you are denying it in yourself.

You can be with God and be guaranteed of success. Or you can be without God and be guaranteed of failure. Realize then that everything that you try to do ALONE, WILL FAIL.

Everything. You are fundamentally in a state of fear whenever you try to be without God, think without God, do without God, see without God, think without God, live without God. You are fundamentally rejecting success, and life, and power, and happiness, and health, by trying to go it alone. Imprisonment as a solo-self is not freedom.

What this reveals then is that, for your whole life, you've been acting LIKE an ego. You've been trying to independently figure everything out, to understand what everything is, to give meaning to everything based on your whims, opinions and beliefs, and there is nothing that you've ever done that wasn't a solo effort. Even when you did things in a team or with others, you were still alone. And even your efforts to be a part of something bigger than yourself kept you in the dark.

This means there is a logical premise at work, behind every failure, and guaranteeing everything you do will fail. And it goes like this: IF you are a separated-off self, you LACK EVERYTHING. And therefore everything you do will be a mistake, will break, will be wrong, will upset you, will make you suffer, and will be depressing and frustrating. Being alone IS a limitation.

IF you are a separated-off self, you are automatically in a state of fear and anxiety which you will not be able to get rid of. It doesn't matter how much you work on it. It doesn't matter what path you take, what you believe, what choices you make, what thoughts you have, how you feel. Nothing you do will work completely, if you do it separately. Doing it separately CAUSES you to suffer. Doing everything alone PUTS YOU IN PRISON. There is NO freedom there. Or as some may put it, "there is no rest for the wicked."

"Today's idea will eventually overcome completely the sense of loneliness and abandonment which all the separated ones experience. Depression is an inevitable consequence of separation. So are anxiety, worry, a deep sense of helplessness, misery, suffering, and intense fear of loss."

See how Jesus confirms that if you are a "separated one", you WILL experience all manner of unhappy things. Note that he also says that since the separation, no-one has been sure of ANYTHING...

"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."

We have quite literally entered into a state of FAILURE, by participating in the separation. It is a state of being flawed, of fundamental attack, insecurity, unholiness, suffering and despair.

The problem then comes when you start to believe that there is something you can DO about it, WITHIN the confines of this situation, that will make it better. You will try to fix it yourself. You will try to think your way out of it with your own thoughts. You will try to do techniques on your own. You will be the one who decides what you prefer and what will work for you. You will make all the wrong choices. And you will always be the central figure in every single thing that you do. Your whole life will revolve around yourself, and you will be trying to SAVE this self at the same time.

This self will do A Course in Miracles. This self will pray. This self will try to become more spiritual. This self will try to become separately enlightened. This self will try the latest techniques and sample the spiritual buffet-line, looking for something it thinks it needs, something it has lost. Some kind of salvation, which will save it from all the fuck-ups and failures that continue to plague it. And as it seeks for this, it will not find it.

"Everyone is looking for himself and the power and glory he thinks he has lost."

"Yet the ego, though encouraging the search very actively, makes one proviso; - do not FIND it. Its dictates, then, can be summed up simply as, "Seek and do NOT find."

The problem is that it is this very sense of being an isolated self that is the ENTIRE problem. The confinement, the walls that surround you, the body, the gap, the lack of communication, the broken relationship, the isolation and the exclusive specialness, all CONTINUE the problem. Being "separated" is the problem, the problem is NOT being a self. Because when you are separated, you are NOT being yourself.

This "self" that you are working WITHIN the confines of, trying to get IT to be holier and more awakened, just stays WITHIN those confines and does not want them to ever be questioned. It doesn't consider that ITSELF, or, its way of identifying itself as "separated", is the whole problem. It's the ONE problem behind all problems. The one issue that isn't getting solved. You think you are already all of yourself, and only yourself.

So then some people will say that you have to GET RID OF, ie KILL AND DESTROY, this self, in order to be free. In order to be truly spiritual, it has to die. This is utterly bullshit. It's just another in a long line of solutions which separated selves have come up with for how to deal with their suffering. The whole act of trying to BE separated off is an attempt to destroy the unlimited nature of yourself, in the first place. So making the self FULLY dead is just a continuation of that. Self needs to expand, not die.

"The sudden EXPANSION of the self that takes place with your DESIRE for it, is the irresistible appeal the holy instant holds."

The self does not need to be destroyed. The self needs to EXPAND its definition of its identity. It needs to realize that it is MORE THAN the confined limited sense of self that it has been living under. That it is MORE THAN ITSELF.

Because ego really is just a notion of selfishness or being self-absorbed, as though to say, putting your whole attention on YOU EXCLUSIVELY. If you being exclusive is the problem, destroying you isn't the solution. What you need is freedom from exclusivity.

"You have made much progress, and are really trying to make still more, but there is one thing you have never done; not for one instant have you utterly forgotten the body."

What Jesus is saying here is that the one thing we have never really done is question THE PRISON that we're in, the sense of what it is that has defined us as "separated". We have not brought into question whether we actually ARE separated, and have not been willing to realize that ALL our suffering has been CAUSED BY that sense of isolation. If I am ONLY me, then I have become separate.

Identifying WITH the body has made us narrow and limited. The body is narrow and limited. It's like an anchor in time and space. When we think of it as "my self", we have to think of ourselves as narrow and limited. And now we are small and special and selfish and cut off. We have to forget the body in order to expand the sense of self beyond the separation. The body symbolizes the separation (as a separation device), so we have to open up to being MORE THAN a body. And if I am more than ONE body, I am more than JUST myself.

Before the separation, every soul that was created by God in heaven, was whole, and also overlapped with each other. Everyone shared everything including identity. Christ is the one identity of every soul, and every soul is a member of that identity. I am christ and you are christ and we are one as two christs. The fundamental premise here is that everything is shared including yourself. You are you, but YOU ARE ALSO me. You are everyone. Therefore you are more than JUST a separate being - you are not just ONE creation of God, you are all of them.

It is natural therefore that you should regard yourself as ... fully wholly yourself, AND fully wholly everyone. This is a normal sense of identity. You are the whole sonship. You are in fact the entire Kingdom of God. And all its contents, every part of it, all its beings and creations, are a part of your self. This is what a natural identity is supposed to be. You, as an individual whole being, are ALSO one with everything.

"The Kingdom of Heaven IS you."

"The sonship is your soul."

"Is he the Christ? Oh yes, along with you."

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds."

"The separation" was nothing more than a WITHDRAWAL of the parts of you which are shared with others, a retreat into fear, into being small and scared and vulnerable trapped in a little tiny body in a corner of spacetime. It was simply your unwillingness to SHARE YOUR SELF, and an attempt to have exclusive ownership and control over who you are. It was just your attempt to break away from the family unit and orphan yourself, like a black sheep who has become estranged and unwanted.

After the separation you simply wandered off "alone", as though you had been unplugged from the hive mind, disconnected from the input of spirit/soul, and unable to communicate with God anymore. You saw yourself as lacking everything and absent of anything. And so you were starting out empty and bereft. You had nothing left but your little sense of "there's only myself left". And this "only me, not you", formed your sense of identity. This is what we call "an ego". It's not really something new you made, it's the self God created that has been locked in chains.

The one thing we therefore need to do for salvation, and the one thing we may never have done in our entire lives, is consider that we are NOT JUST OURSELVES. We are more than just ourselves. To really truly SHARE with anyone we have to BE them. We have to open up to an identity, a sense of self, that INCLUDES OTHERS. Others have to actually become a part of you again. Not to the exclusion of you, nor calling for your destruction. You are a self who is whole, who must also reconnect to the whole.

If your every effort to go it alone and do everything independently of God has meant AUTOMATIC FAILURE, in every case, then your ONLY salvation from all forms of suffering is to stop doing everything on your own. The end of separation is simply the end of "trusting in your own strength" to the exclusion of all else. It means waking up from a sense of "I am only me", to "I am us." From ME to WE. From individual, to mutual. This is what shared interests are about.

Only if I am willing to let God decide WITH me can I be sure that the decision will be accurate and wise and certain of success. Only if I am willing to let the Holy Spirit judge the meaning of everything for and with me, can I be sure that the meaning I SEE is correct and sane. Only if I admit that everything I do alone WILL BE FUCKED UP, by default, can I be open to allowing myself to be HELPED. Opening up to His Help is opening up to RECEIVE.

The Holy Spirit is there to HELP us. He is the help, because he is the notion of being more than limited. He is unlimited, as we are in truth. And to remember our unlimited nature we have to be open to allowing something MORE THAN JUST ME to participate in everything I do, think, feel, plan, decide, pursue, live, say, etc. Only by allowing God back into our lives, in effect, can we resume our natural state of DOING EVERYTHING WITH HIM. And therefore, no longer being alone.

Everything you have ever done alone, no matter what it is, no matter how intelligent you've been, no matter how much you planned and schemed, no matter how much you figured out or understood, no matter how many concepts you came up with or how accurate they were, ALWAYS produced suffering in one form or another. Because all of them were attempts to narrow and confine yourself. And always because of the simple fact that YOU DID IT ON YOUR OWN.

That was ALWAYS the problem, because being alone is unnatural. God did not will that you be alone, so to be yourself you must rejoin the brotherhood of light.

"For you dwell in the Mind of God WITH your brother, for God Himself did not will to be alone."

"To be alone is to be separated from Infinity, but how can this be, if Infinity has no end?"

"There IS no end to God and His Son, for we ARE the universe. God is not incomplete, and He is not childless. Because He did not will to be alone, He created a Son like Himself. Do not deny Him His Son, for your unwillingness to accept His Fatherhood has denied you yours. See His creations as HIS Son, for yours were created in honor of Him."

"He is the Voice for God, but never forget that God did not will to be alone. He SHARES His Will with you; He does not thrust it UPON you."

"To be alone MUST mean you are apart, and if you are, you cannot BUT be sick."

"To be alone IS to be guilty. For to experience yourself AS alone, is to deny the Oneness of the Father and His Son, and thus to ATTACK REALITY."

"God would not have us be alone because HE does not will to be alone. That is why He created His Son and gave him the power to create with Him."

"The gratitude of God Himself is freely offered to everyone who shares His Purpose. It was not His Will to be alone. And neither is it YOURS. Forgive your brother, and you CANNOT separate yourself from him, nor from his Father."

"The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and its content is not true."

First let's be clear that all true properties belong to God. God's reality entails what is real, permanent, certain, true, exists, is happening, is powerful, has will, causes, with real effects (creation), is eternal and immortal.

The separation from God was an attempt to conceive of an opposite to God's reality. It ultimately produced what appears to be an entire world. In light of the fact that God's reality is real, this second world we made as its OPPOSITE is unreal. It inherently has the properties of the opposite of God's properties.

The world we made is unreal, temporary, uncertain, false, it doesn't exist, nothing in it really happens, it is powerless, has no will of its own, causes nothing, has no real effect, is not eternal, and everything in it is mortal. It is an illusion of a world because it is not a reality of a world.

"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."

"The world you see does not exist BECAUSE the place where you perceive it is not real."

"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."

So now we have these two seeming worlds. One is completely real, one is completely unreal. One holds all the truth, one is utterly false. One is permanent and powerful, the other is temporary and powerless.

The unreal world, which is the world of bodies, is a mistake. It presents ideas that are not possible. It is not possible for example for anything real to die or be threatened, but in the unreal world it seems things can die and be threatened. In reality everything is immortal, yet in the unreal world everything has mortality. In reality everything is unlimited, and in unreality everything is limited.

The unreal world is actually an idea of what is not possible, founded on a "mad idea". God's reality holds all possibility. The opposite of possibility is impossibility. The unreal world seems to show things happening which are not possible in God. In God nothing can die, so leaves falling from trees and flowers dying and bodies dying is not really possible.

The unreal world presents pictures of impossibilities all the time. Everything in it is impossible because the world itself is the idea of impossibility. The world "is not" - which is why ultimately "there is no world."

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

Now. In ADDITION to the reality of God, and the unreal world, there is also a matter of BELIEF, resulting in an act of projection UPON these worlds. There is something that happens in the mind in terms of belief. Mind can choose to be fully aware and accepting of the sane fact that ONLY God's truth is true - that only heaven's reality is real. OR, it can go into a state of denial.

When the mind is in denial, it flips everything around. It takes ALL the properties of God's reality, and assigns it to the unreal world. It then takes all the properties of the unreal world and assigns is to God's reality. This produces total confusion and insanity. It is insane because you've lost track of what is really real and what isn't, and can no longer distinguish between them, making you lost and confused - ie mistaken.

"You HAVE carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is TOTAL CONFUSION ABOUT EVERYTHING."

In a state where the attributes of God are assigned to its opposite, you are confused and insane. This puts you into what we call "false perception". In false perception, everything about God is assigned to the unreal world, and vice versa. The ramification of that, is that a simple MISTAKEN world, an IMPOSSIBLE world, begins to take on properties of actual reality. This interprets mistakes as SIN, because sin mean "a real error that can't be undone because it's real."

So now, the unreal world is considered to be real, have permanent qualities, to be eternal, to depict the truth, to house all possibilities, to have a will of its own, to be meaningful, to be heaven, to be life, to be really existing and really happening. In this mode, you have "made illusions real", ie have "made the world real", because you have GIVEN it reality. You are assigned reality's properties to it. You BELIEVE it's real.

There is also a flipside to this. All the properties of UNreality are now assigned to God's reality. God is now considered to be false, non-existence, lacking will power, not happening, being totally unreal, having no life, being mortal and dead, being impossible, being insane, and making no sense. God is considered to be nothing, is rejected as untrue, and relegated to oblivion.

When mind is in this state, this is where the world is experienced like a nightmare. Given that an unreal world is very UNNATURAL and disturbing, if it is REAL then you'll experience it as a horror show. This is what is happening when you see problems arise and you feel like you cannot do anything to change them. The reason they seem unchangeable, is because you've assigned properties of permanence, existence, happening and reality to them. This in a sense "locks them in". ONLY illusions can be forgiven or undone or changed, and not whatever is regarded as real.

If it is true that this world is REAL, then everything in it is permanent, fixed, unchangeable, irreversible, absolute, total, certain, and eternal. Because these were all attributes of God's reality before the confusion. Given that you believe this about the world, you CANNOT bring yourself to conceive of how you can possibly do anything about anything. Everything will seem like some horrible fate, some pointless hopeless disaster, some kind of cruel unchangeable unhealable trauma, that just happens by its own will leaving you a helpless victim.

In this state of false perception you will also completely forget about God's reality. It will seem like it does not exist. Mind will shut down. Any sense of being above the battlefield, stepping back, detaching, being able to wield supernatural miracles, anything to do with healing or correcting problems genuinely will go out the window. Your mind will fixate on THIS world, the unreal world, as if it is THE ONLY REALITY, and all that exists is happening before your body's eyes. Everything it sees is now real to you and you are powerless over it. If an unnatural, "evil", impossible world of conflict and disaster is REAL, you MUST suffer without escape, and death is now the wages of sin. "Only the body makes the world seem real."

This is the state that produces all despair and suffering, all sense of the "irreversibility of sin", all notions that what happens cannot be undone, that sickness is progressive, that death is inevitable, that your fate is set in stone and you have absolutely no say in what happens. This is the state of being a victim, with the world doing everything in its power to simply be horrifying and traumatic, throwing up unsolvable problems all over the place every single day.

So the world in the state of false perception is a COMBINATION of .... 1) an unreal world of mistakes and impossibilities, and 2) the properties of reality being confused with and assigned to it. You MAKE the world seem real by GIVING it properties of reality, and this converts all illusions of sin into what seems like REAL sin.

Once illusory events, which really cannot be happening, are UNITED or "made one with" properties of reality, everything that happens will appears to be a sin. The whole hierarchy of illusions will demand specific responses, reactions and effects. You'll feel compelled to just go along for the ride and have every single reaction that the world says you should be having. And anything anyone does that appears in any way wrong will be regarded as a REAL SIN. An unforgiveable act, and you will NOT be able to forgive it because you believe it is REAL, and therefore permanent.

"The purpose of Atonement is to dispel illusions, NOT to establish them as real, and THEN forgive them."

"Good cannot BE returned for evil, for forgiveness does not first ESTABLISH sin, and THEN forgive it"

What the world IS, in terms of it being an UNREAL world, an ILLUSION of a world in which nothing is true, is distinct from your interpretation of that world - ie what it means to you. If you GIVE the world reality, then you BIND reality WITH illusions and the result is a nightmare of inescapable sin and irreversible suffering. If the world is REAL, nothing in it can be undone, because reality is permanent and can never end.

But your way out of this hell of suffering is simply then to change your mind. This is NOTHING more than a change in the PREMISE of the world. It's a shift from "the world is real" to "the world is not real." Every single attribute of reality and God that you have mistakenly given to the world, you have to TAKE BACK from it.

You have to dis-identify everything God created from the world, and RE-IDENTIFY it with spirit. This is the same as shifting from body-identification to spirit-identification. What is TRUE AND REAL about you has to be re-identified with what God created, requiring your IDENTITY to transition from a limited body to an unlimited soul.

"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, remembering that all power is of God. YOU CAN REMEMBER THIS FOR ALL THE SONSHIP."

You have ASSIGNED power to the unreal world. That's why it seems to have power over you. You can and must TAKE BACK that power, and assign it back to God/spirit/soul where it belongs. This is the only real change of mind. It's a change of belief. It's a restoration of your acceptance of, and recognition of, WHAT REALLY IS TRUE. Or of what really is REAL.

"This is a very simple course. Perhaps you do not feel that a course which, in the end, teaches nothing more than that only reality is true is necessary. BUT DO YOU BELIEVE IT?"

"Only the truth is true, and nothing else is true."

Our task in "applying forgiveness" then is nothing more or less than properly assigning the properties of reality to GOD's reality, and the properties of unreality to the unreal world. To undo the confusion between the two. To become very clear only God's stuff is real, and all the illusory stuff is not. That only God's world is TRUE, and the world you made out of illusions IS FALSE.

"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."

The unreality of this world has to be recognized. This is what "true perception" means. It is accurate perception, or the ability to recognize accurately WITHOUT confusion, what the world "actually is". Or in a sense, to see "the truth of" or "the reality of" this world. When you see the reality of an UNREAL world, ie the truth that IT IS unreal, you are seeing it for what it "actually is". Yet an unreal world isn't "actually" anything, because IT IS unreal. Recognizing this recognizes IT IS NOTHING AT ALL.

To then transition from being heavily absorbed, confused, lost, and threatened by, a mistakenly mis-assigned property ... where you've given the world or something in it - some body or event or thing - properties of God, you need to go through some kind of purification or process to revert your mind back to the truth. To return to sanity. We call this sort of "applying the principle of forgiveness", or trying to "atone".

"To atone is to undo." What we are undoing is our CONFUSION about what the world is and is not, and what God is and is not. BOTH the truth AND what is false have to be fully and clearly distinguished and recognized, and NOT confused with each other.

"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing ELSE. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM." By correctly identifying all properties of God WITH God, and taking them AWAY from the world - or undoing their mis-association with the world, your mind returns to sanity.

"Sin is insanity", meaning that when you combine the insanity of confusion about what is real, WITH an unreal world, you turn a mistaken world into a sinful world. You make sin seem real when you are insane, but when you return to sanity sin converts back to a mistake - or what Jesus calls an error. The world is simply an error, not a truth.

To forgive then, we simply need to undo, reverse, cancel out, heal, purify, and correct, the mistaken beliefs that we have about what the world's nature is. We need to remind ourselves, maybe we need to talk ourselves into it, maybe we need help and healing from the Holy Spirit or Jesus, maybe we need affirmations or reminders or cue cards or whatever it is. We need to LIFT AWAY from the world all the properties of reality which we gave away TO it, and give them back to God. The ACIM workbook is designed to facilitate this correction, e.g.:

"God did not create that war, and so it is not real."

"God did not create that airplane crash, and so it is not real."

"God did not create that disaster (specify) so it is not real."

"God did not create that illness (specify with name of person) and so it is not real."

This could simply be in the form of you telling yourself, "this world is not real, it is just a dream." "This is an illusion of a world, not a reality." "Nothing is really happening here." "No-one has sinned because it did not take place in reality." "Nothing is held against anyone because it's a dream and is not true." "People are not really bodies." "My identity is not a body." "The world is urneal." "Only God is real." "Only heaven's reality is my reality." etc. Whatever form it takes.

All that needs to happen is the proper re-categorization of everything in the world. To put the world itself into the "unreal, non-existing, not-happening, not permanent, entirely undoable and nothing" bucket. And at the same time, putting heaven back into the "really does exist and has reality and is the only reality" bucket.

"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."

To forgive then is simply to RECOGNIZE what is true and what isn't. To get the mind back into a state where it has been deprogrammed of the LIES that appears as real sins. Nothing in the world is real. Nothing in the world is causing anything. Nothing in the world is happening. Nothing in the world is permanent. Nothing in the world is changeless. Nothing in the world is true. "Nothing the world believes is true."

"There is no sin" because "real sin" requires the combination of an unreal illusion, incorrectly mixed with "a sense of reality." When you withdraw the sense of "it is real" from the "sinful act", it is no longer a REAL sin. It is only a mistake, an error, a forgiveable nothingness which hasn't even really occurred.

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

This LITERALLY means that anything you think ever happened in this world, HAS NOT OCCURRED. It has not occurred FOR REAL, because it is taking place in an UNREALITY, in a dream, which is NOT real, and nothing real happens in a dream. Dreams by definition are fantasies and hallucinations. Everything in them is false. No events in the history of planet Earth have ever occurred. Accepting this is to accept atonement, in which only the truth of God is true, and the world is false.

"When the thought of separation has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be seen in quite another light; and one which leads to truth, where all the world must disappear, and all its errors vanish. Now its source has gone, and its effects are gone as well."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt. The ancient Calling of the Father to His Son, and of the Son unto his own, will yet be the last trumpet that the world will ever hear. Brother, there is no death. And this you learn when you but wish to show your brother that you had no hurt of him. He thinks your blood is on his hands, and so he stands condemned. But it is given you to SHOW him, by your healing, that his guilt is but the fabric of a senseless dream."

"The miracle establishes you dream a dream, and that its content is not true. This is a crucial step in dealing with illusions. No-one is AFRAID of them, when he perceives HE MADE THEM UP. The fear was held in place BECAUSE he did not see that he was AUTHOR of the dream, and not a figure IN the dream. He gives HIMSELF the consequences that he dreams he gave his brother. And it is but this the dream has put together and has offered him, to show him that his wishes have been done. Thus does he fear his OWN attack, but sees it at another's hands. As victim, he is suffering from its effects, but NOT their cause. He authored NOT his own attack, and he is innocent of what he caused."

In this world, death is inevitable. This is a scientific and metaphysical fact. Entropy guarantees the end of the universe. It's all going to die.

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

Meanwhile, since it seems that the dying is long and drawn out, this can create the impression that there is some life to be lived. There are even what we call new births, growths, things to see and do, entertainment and short-term goals. Do it all - while you still can. The clock is ticking.

This however doesn't mean that even these new things won't die. All the flowers that ever bloomed are dead now. All the babies that were born are dead in the ground. And there's only a handful left to populate the Earth, seeming to live, standing in line, waiting to die.

All that remains of what we call "alive" is a thin surface, a small collection of those things that temporarily aren't fully dead yet. And it's a vey small amount compared to what has come and gone. Life is a small slither of the dying, and billions of years have already come and gone.

The fact is that the world does not GIVE you a choice in this matter. It is set up to guarantee death. It can appear that there is life temporarily, but it is also certain that it will not last. What appears to be life, such as a seed growing into a plant, producing a flower and then dying off, is all living on borrowed time. The flower was destined to die as soon as it was sown.

All the world's roads lead to death. Sometimes there are roads which don't seem like they're so bad, and are tolerable, and sometimes even seemingly enjoyable. These are diversions and detours. They present an illusion of what seems like it's not dying. They might even look like growth and building and construction and birth. But not one of these things will escape death.

There is not one single city that has been built that hasn't crumbled. There is not one house that hasn't been reduced to a pile of rubble. There is not one body that hasn't been laid in the ground, if there was anything left to bury. There is not one food that hasn't rotten. There is not one place that hasn't deteriorated. And there is not one meaningful civilized movement that hasn't come to an end.

Why is that? Because death is built into the system. Space and time MEAN death. Delay, which is time, is an avoidance of being present, an attack on permanence, and an attempt to overthrow eternity. Time means death and time guarantees death. All the things in spacetime end up dead because time itself forces them to change, to stop being what they are, and to stop existing.

"This is the world of time, where all things end."

There is a seeming regurgitation of death, appearing to turn into new life, such as when trees in a forest are feasting on the corpses of their ancestors. New flowers seem to bloom as so-called "nature" attempts to find a way to perpetuate itself. Only to continually be met with an onslaught of destruction. Yet while the "new" stuff seems to perpetuate an illusion of a life, the rest of it just withers and dies. And even the new stuff will end someday.

This dire situation is simply the state of the world. It is hopeless. Anything you begin will end. Anything you build will crumble. Anything you think you've achieved will come tumbling down. Everything you've tried to create will be destroyed. Not one thing you've ever made will withstand the laws of physics. And time will sweep your whole life under the carpet.

Given that death is inevitable then, logically speaking it really means there is no point in living. After all, what's the point in putting in so much effort to do and achieve and accomplish when it's all just going to be destroyed anyway? At some point the sun is going to go supernova and blow your hopes and dreams to smithereens, and there will be not one trace left of everything you worked for.

Civilization rests on the idea that somehow you will leave a legacy and pass on the relay baton to the next runners who, like you, will also have to pass it on to the future generations because they too will die before the finish line. And so mankind pretends to live as screaming corpses toss the temporary illusion of life to the newcomers and ask them to do the same when their time comes to die. And we call this a sustaining of life against all the odds.

This is what spacetime has in store for you. And because of this, there really is no point doing anything. There can only be seeming short-term rewards, temporary advantages, momentary gains and short-lived enjoyment, all guaranteed to come crashing down and be trampled on by the universe. Have you not realized this yet, that the whole world is set up to try to kill you off? It was MADE as an attack on God and as an attempt to destroy you.

The truth is then that even though there sometimes seems to be a reprieve or temporary ceasefire, ALL the worlds roads and paths and choices eventually lead to death. All its roads do NOT lead to God. They all lead to destruction and despair and suffering. This is the way of the world. If you attempt to deny this you are mentally ill, and out of touch with reality. Death has plans for you that it will never give up.

So the truth is that, really, in the big picture, you do not HAVE a choice in life. You are not really choosing between life and death. You are choosing between death now or death later. You are choosing only to some extent when it will happen, and certainly not IF it will happen. And for the most part, it is going to choose for you. A sudden tragedy, a spontaneous seeming sickness, an accident, an act of nature, whatever it is that comes knocking to give you a really bad day.

You don't have a choice, if this world of spacetime is all that exists. If this is all there is, you are bound to death. If this world is the only reality, you will never escape death and it is your destiny to die. That means you are bound by fate and there is nothing you can do about it. Therefore you are not free. You are prisoner in a prison world, doing time, and waiting to die.

The only way, logically speaking, for you to have an ACTUAL CHOICE, is if there is some kind of way of existing that is not bound by the laws of spacetime. The only way you can have an alternative TO choose from, is if there IS actually a real alternative. There has to be an alternative to spacetime, otherwise you have no choice at all.

And don't be deceived in thinking that you have a lot of choices in life, to decide how you can make your life better, to choose something you prefer over something you don't, to choose which compromise appeals to you more. For everything you gain you will lose something else, and will not come out on top overall. Life will give you little scraps and will then take them away again. It will award you and please you and delight you and then shit in your face.

And you'll think it was unfair and unnatural and just some exception that things went to hell. But then it will happen again. And again and again and again. And you won't seem to be getting the message that this is how the whole system is set up. There is NO ESCAPE from the problems of the world. The world was made so that problems would be endless and no escape is possible. There's plenty more in store for you if you stick around. The world has an unlimited supply of hands to slap your face with.

You might believe that problems are only temporary. You might be delighted with your ability to fix things and problem solve. You might think that you're able to create a little oasis in the desert where you seem to be relatively safe and life is good. But that means you're living in denial. You are not prepared for what could happen, and it will happen, and you will be shocked and upset because you thought it could never happen. And then you will exclaim it is unfair and try to move on and look for the next lull in the storm, ever lurching onwards towards the grave like a half-living zombie.

Unless there is another world beyond space and time, out of reach of death and destruction, you have no hope. Unless there is an actual reality where you can live and have life and experience, out of the reach of death's clutches, there is no hope. Unless there is GOD, heaven, creation, God's Kingdom, you do not have any hope. Unless there's an actual real alternative to this world, you are not going to surmount death or overcome the world or find a way to live forever.

It is quite insane to suggest that being born, living for a while, and then dying, is natural. It is commonplace yes, but that doesn't mean it's natural. All the things of "nature" seem to do it, but that also doesn't mean it's natural. It is completely insane to suggest that there could be a life which is given, but you only have a short time, and then it's going to be ripped away unfairly before you're done. That you could live for only a short period and then stop. It makes no sense at all to think that people could just be destroyed endlessly.

Due to death seeming to be so inevitable, people think they do not have a choice. That there is nothing else to choose. In fact they don't even think they have a choice at all, not really. Even though they pretend to choose things all the time, they are just choosing different roads to death that temporary look appealing. And none of them offer any REAL choice because none of them lead to permanent life. There is no alternative when the only option is death, and that means you have no choice to choose with.

If there were to be another option, you actually would have a valid choice. This would mean two things. Firstly that you can choose something else, and secondly that if you choose it you will have it. It has to be true then that death is actually a decision, and that you somehow have it within your power to choose what you want and to make it happen. Otherwise, if permanent life were an option and you chose it, death could still take it away from you. It has to be that somehow in you there is a power of decision which overthrows what happens and determines your own destiny.

This means ultimately that, even while death disguises the fact that you are free to choose, death itself must be chosen in order to happen. This same power in your mind that can choose eternal life can also choose the illusion of death in space and time. If there really is an alternative, and you can choose it, and by choosing it it becomes yours, you must have the power to NOT choose death, to not consent to it, and to therefore PREVENT it. Even to reverse it, undo it, cancel it, and make it impossible.

The only real alternative therefore to this world of eventual death is a world of permanent life, in which death is impossible, and life is inevitable. Where there is a power capable of keeping death at bay, of guaranteeing immortality, of ensuring invulnerability, of making certain that nothing can be attacked or harmed or destroyed in any way. It must be a world of creation and not destruction, rooted in laws of permanence and protection, of safety and of love, of harmlessness and order.

To entertain that there is a valid alternative to the world requires you to believe in God. To have faith in heaven. To trust and be open to the possibility that such a place actually exists, that you can go there and merge with it and live there forever, out of harm's way. To do this is the only way to step out of the downhill slide towards destruction. You have to believe in a movement towards life, and life is God. Going towards life resurrects you and restores your life, while going away from God takes you into the world and towards death.

If you want to live forever, you will have to turn your back on death and on the world. You will have to overthrow the laws of physics. You will have to violate every seeming natural consequence of the world. You will have to become able to demonstrate through miracles that you are under the laws of God and not the laws of death. You will have to be able to raise the dead, resurrect to life, and restore order. Only by surmounting death and preventing sickness and reversing decay can you prove that you really mean business in your commitment to living.

Accepting sickness is not a commitment to living. Sickness is a form of death. Tolerating suffering is not full living. Putting up with dying is not living. Only the sustained continuation of life endlessly is real life. And if you are not in favor of that, are not actively choosing that, are not causing that to happen, then you are choosing death. It's not a difficult thing to consider. You either choose to live or die, and it's on you. Living doesn't mean living for 80+ years. It means living forever.

Since everything in the world points toward death, even in its forms of life and its new births and so on, you will have to fly in the face of the entirety of spacetime in order to overcome death. You will have to believe in laws that are not of this world, you will have to side with God, and you will have to reject every belief in sickness and death. All forms of suffering will have to by uprooted and every denial that you use to pretend you're going to live has to be questioned.

There IS a real alternative to death, and it's not of this world. Life is of God who is eternally alive. If you want to live you will have to side with God. You will have to choose to resume your natural station of being like God. If you do not choose this, you are choosing to be unlike life, and therefore dead. And that is what you will receive. If you do not want to receive it, you will have to choose immortality. And the only way to choose it is to stop choosing anything the world says must happen.

You're going to have to go against the grain, run contrary to the worlds beliefs, defy the opinions of everyone, stand up for the real truth, stop supporting the number-one religion of death-worship, have faith and trust in God's power to correct all problems, and become a medium through which resurrection can occur. The ONLY way out of this is through miracles. The ONLY way to end death and guarantee life, is through the expression of life and the giving of life. And through miracles you will return to an endless life in God.

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped." "The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

"Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them."

"All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it still more carefully. It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path, - all this is taken as the Will of God. And no-one asks if a benign Creator could will this."

Projection doesn't just mean you're trying to blame others. ACIM has a much larger definition, and blame is only a small part of it.

Projection is actually a natural function of ALL minds, including God's. Projection really means extension, whereby something that is IN the mind is extended or pushed outward, or in a forward direction. It really means GIVING, and is also a part of CREATING. Blame is actually a form of mis-creation, or an attempt to create destruction.

"Project (verb): to extend forward or out." - ACIM

"We said before that magic is essentially mindless, or the destructive (miscreated) use of mind."

"Miscreation is still a genuine creative act in terms of the underlying IMPULSE, but NOT in terms of the CONTENT of the creation."

"Every mind MUST project, because that is how it lives, and every mind IS life."

"In the Creation, God projected his Creative Ability out of Himself toward the Souls which He created, and also imbued them with the same loving wish (or will) to create."

"the miscreations of the mind do not really exist."

The mind HAS to give ie project/extend, in order to exist, because love has to be shared in order to be what it is. To love is to share, and sharing requires giving, which requires extension, ie projection, which creates.

In heaven before the separation, projection was PROPERLY used by God to create the Sonship, and by the Sonship to create their own creations. Proper projection is also used by the Holy Spirit, in the same way that God does.

"The Holy Spirit, as well as the ego, utilizes projection but since their goals are opposed, so is the result. The Holy Spirit begins by perceiving YOU as perfect. KNOWING this perfection is shared, it RECOGNIZES it in others, thus strengthening it in both." ... "this arouses love FOR both because IT ESTABLISHES INCLUSION." ... "Perceiving equality, it perceives equal needs."

Proper "sane" projection, or the projection/extension of holiness, means that what is in you is seen as extending to and including others. You give love to your brother and recognize that that love is shared by him and is in him, as part of yourself. Thus you see yourself in him and love both of you equally.

Projection is actually a law of the mind which always functions on all levels. God and the Holy Spirit use it share what is true and loved. But the ego has its own distorted USE of projection, which results in trying to get rid of (or project away from itself) what it does not want, rather than giving what is loved.

"Projection is a fundamental law of the mind, and therefore one which ALWAYS operates. It is the law by which you create and were created. It is the law which unifies the Kingdom and keeps it in the mind of God."

"To the ego, the law is perceived as a way of getting RID of something it does NOT want. To the Holy Spirit, it is the fundamental law of sharing, by which you give what you value in order to keep it in your OWN minds."

"Projection to the Holy Spirit is the law of extension. To the ego, it is the law of deprivation. It therefore produces abundance or scarcity, depending on how you choose to apply it."

So there is a natural innate mind function of giving and extending what is inside your mind. This is always there. You give what you have, or are. When the mind is sane, it loves itself, and sees love in itself. It extends this love outward and sees it in others.

But if the mind is not sane, the mind first attacks itself. It regards itself as not loving or lovable. It sees a lack of love, and a darkness. It sees evil and guilt and sin within itself. It is trying to destroy itself. It is in a state of denial. The projective function of the mind then still operates, but now it is trying to "send out" this egoic content as a projected attack.

Since the ego content or insanity is a matter of separation, in a split mind, made of denial and attack, denial and attack are projected by those with egos. Since denial or attack is a way of "not wanting" yourself and God, or not wanting to love, a "not wantedness" is projected ie extended out of the mind, and you "do not want" the stuff you are expressing.

"A second fallacy is the idea that you can GET RID of something you do not want BY giving it away. GIVING it is how you KEEP it. The belief that by giving it OUT you have excluded it from WITHIN is a complete distortion of the power of EXTENSION."

"This is the opposite of the Golden Rule, and having placed this rule upside down, the reverse of miracles, or projection (in the ego sense), follows automatically."

(note here that miracles are EXPRESSIONS ie PROJECTIONS FROM LOVE, whereas "ego projection" is a projection from fear or ego content - as such the proper use of projection is miracle working, ie the sharing and extension of love/life!)

This means that the mind projects or tries to "get rid of" what it does not want, rather than wanting to SHARE or INCLUDE others in what it does want. Since giving and receiving are usually one, projecting love indicates that you have it and keep it, and now both have it and the love increases.

But when this breaks down, we enter into the ego's rules of "either/or" and separation, where EITHER you have something OR the other does. You therefore believe that by projecting your self attack or "unwillingness", you can cause what you do not want to actually LEAVE your mind entirely, to be given but not received. That you can put your guilt, sin and fear onto someone or something else, and disown it.

This disowning is part of denial and also what we call dissociation. You dis-associate from it, by pretending that you can give it through projection and therefore LOSE it. That it can be placed outside of you, away from you. That you can put the blame for your internal "sin" onto someone else and escape it. So now you seem to be blaming your own self-attack, and your attack on God, onto something "external."

The truth is, however, that "ideas leave not their source". And projection does not actually make anything go outside the mind. It is because of the split in the mind, and its denial and its attempt to "destroy" what it does not want (its self-destruction), that there SEEMS to be a gap of separation between what's "inside" the mind and what's "outside".

"This is because their projections have NOT left their minds"

But at all times, all of this content is STILL within the mind. The mind is split, and has simply sectioned off a region within itself to "project" or dump its self-hate, in pretending to be free of it. It is now deluded into thinking that it has gotten rid of sin and guilt by putting it "outside" itself, but this is only because its sense of self has reduced to a sub-portion of the mind. The "outside" is really just the rest of the mind.

To perception, it then seems as if that which you used to destroy yourself, which has been projected outward, has somehow magically been displaced or given into some kind of "external" world, beyond the mind and body. The body seems to then act as the separation device or barrier dividing internal and external worlds, but really the mind encompasses both.

It's very easy then, in a state of dissociation, to believe that the guilt does not BELONG to your mind, being seen as "not inside it", and so it becomes logically sensible to associate it WITH someone else. "You but accuse your brother of your own sins". You bind other people to your projected self hate. You try to accuse them of doing what you are doing. And you see your guilt in them as if THEY own it or are even the source of it.

Since you have "not wanted yourself", and thus attacked yourself with unlove, you project what you do not want (really yourself) outward, and continue to attack it. You now seek to destroy it "in" another person, or condemn them for it. This is an indirect attack upon yourself still. But because you are projecting separation or dissociation, you see yourself as "safe from" the junk you have projected, which seems to exonerate you and render you innocent. This then produces the face of innocence.

"Anger ALWAYS involves PROJECTION OF SEPARATION"

"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."

So in its true sense, projection is a permanent part of the mind's nature, whereby it extends itself and gives or shares itself. The ego hijacks or distorts this by attacking YOU and then projecting FROM that distorted view of you. What is first seen within you as darkness is projected outward as darkness, and the attack continues.

In effect the ego projects TO SEPARATE or to keep emphasizing the dissociation or split in the mind, to try to "keep the guilt away" from you. Thus the more the mind believes its ideas HAVE left it, the more it thinks it is safe and innocent, but its insanity is increasing. The more it projects attack the more it splits itself, between the part it attacks (seemingly in others) and the part doing the attacking, both of which are ALWAYS in your own mind. Separating off from others or pushing them away deepens the internal rift between you and yourself.

"Projection will ALWAYS hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its ONLY purpose is to KEEP THE SEPARATION GOING. It is solely a device of the ego to make you feel DIFFERENT from your brothers and separated FROM them. "

So there are some passages in the course where Jesus talks in the big-picture context of ALL minds projecting, the main projective or extending function. There are some passages where this is referred to AS extension and is contrasted AGAINST "projection" in the sego sense - where projection means the ego's projection of self-attack or an attempt to "push out of the mind" what you do NOT want. And there are also other passages where Jesus is talking ONLY about the ego's projection of self-attack. So it's important to be aware of the context.

Here's one final big thing to realize. In the separation from God initially, before there was a world here, and before the Earth, we had a split mind. We already had seen guilt and sin in our mind. Thus we entered into the ego's use of projection. The separation was the belief in the "lack of everything", or love's absence, or the lack of heaven and God - and the idea of death. We projected the "lack of everything", as the idea of heaven's total opposite, outward. This was a projection of the idea of emptiness and NOTHINGNESS. The projection of the idea of separation.

This projected THE WORLD, which "arose" as an attempt to DISOWN the separation, something you DID NOT WANT in the mind, in an attempt to get rid of it, because it was fearful to you. This projection of an illusion of nothingness took the form of a "screen", somewhat like a mirror, a meaningless neutral world, because it was a projection of insanity and meaninglessness. And it seemed to take on the form of error, or sin, producing space and time and bodies, as a natural consequence of the total opposite of God's laws. Planet earth and human bodies were the projected result - a mis-creation or a "world of destruction."

"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth."

"the mad projection by which this world was made."

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

We had "created" an ILLUSION of a world of emptiness, opposing all of Heaven's laws. A world made of the idea of death and of alienation and murder. We then ALSO in a SECOND STEP, projected our inner mental garbage ONTO that screen, which is where "projection makes percpetion" comes in. We project stuff ONTO the "neutral world screen", which GIVES it meaning, and the mind determines what to make of what the body tells us about it.

"The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without meaning of ANY kind. For it was made out of what you do NOT want, projected FROM your mind, because you were AFRAID of it."

"Having projected his anger onto the world, he sees vengeance about to strike at him."

"If you do not want it, it was never created. If it was never created, it is nothing."

"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth."

So in the separation we made an error and projected this error, and the world - spacetime - including all planets and galaxies, arose in an ILLUSION of a world, made of nothing appearing as something. This "world" is really nothing, and we then proceeded to PROJECT ONTO IT, the continued negative content of our minds. This secondary step of projection produces perception, a kind of feedback, in which we project either guilt or innocence, sin or holiness, and this changes how "the world" appears to our perception.

What I see in the course now is that "the world" itself was an initial projection of the separation, a world we made to attack God and heaven. And in the making of bodies we placed ourselves within it to "perceive it". And now we project ego shit ONTO it, either falsely perceiving it, or perceiving it truly. True perception shows you that you have GIVEN (projected) holiness and love and peace, and only BY giving (projecting) that do you see a forgiven world. If you project ego onto it you see a world of sin.

Once you cease to project ego ONTO the world, the "nothing world" - really the absence of heaven - is recognized as nothing, with no sin put ONTO it, and it is forgiven. In this view it loses all of the illusion of "real sin" or "existence" or "happening", and eventually disappears completely. We then wake up in God and resume our REAL PROJECTION of creation in the Kingdom. "It still remains within him to project as God projected his own Spirit to him. In reality, this is his ONLY choice, because his free will was made for his own joy in creating the perfect."

"All of his miscreations can disappear in the well known "twinkling of an eye", because it is a visual misperception."

At first you will see a reflection of God in the world, a reflection of heaven, because the world ITSELF is just a screen and has no meaning of its own. It was a projection of nothing, acting as a neutral canvas on which TO project what you wanted to see. However, upon doing this, the world itself will ultimately give way to heaven, because its total nothingness is recognized.

"But to find the place, you must relinquish your investment in the world as YOU have projected it, allowing the Holy Spirit to project the real world TO you, from the altar of God."

"You can REFLECT HEAVEN here. But no reflections of the images of other gods must dim the mirror that would hold God's reflection in it. Earth can reflect Heaven or hell; God or the ego. You need but leave the mirror clean, and clear of all the images of hidden darkness you have drawn upon it. God will shine upon it of Himself. Only the clear reflection OF Himself can BE perceived upon it. Reflections are seen in light. In darkness, they are obscure, and their meaning seems to lie only in shifting interpretations, rather than in themselves."

"At first you see a world which has accepted this as true, projected from a now corrected mind. And with this holy sight, perception gives a silent blessing and then disappears, its goal accomplished and its mission done."

"Let us today behold earth disappear, at first transformed, and then, forgiven, fade entirely into God's holy Will."

I've heard some people saying that we do not perform miracles. I've also heard some people saying that Jesus always acknowledged God as the one who does miracles. I've also heard people saying that we do not have any power to do anything, we're supposed to "do nothing", and our only job is not to interfere. I'd like to clarify this.

Consider these quotes:

"To recognize that all power is of God is to gain all power."

"The power of God and not of you engenders miracles."

"What the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."

"You do not do them."

"The power to work miracles belongs to you."

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

"There is nothing your holiness cannot do."

"You share the Holy Spirit's function on Earth." "Your function on earth is Healing."

"Do His works."

"I have nothing that does not come from God."

"You are forever host to God."

"You must be ready, willing and able."

"All power in heaven and earth has been given you."

"It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth."

"All power in Heaven and earth is therefore given him and he will share it with you when you have completed yours."

"All power is given unto you in Earth and Heaven. There is nothing you cannot do."

There is no contraction in these statements even though some of them seem to talk about God/HS doing stuff, some talk about you doing stuff, and some about you both doing stuff.

If you think in terms of EITHER OR... like, either God has the power OR I do. Or.... either God does miracles OR I do.. .. this is how the ego thinks. It's a separation-based form of reasoning, because the ego does not like to acknowledge any kind of sharing or oneness or joining.

It's not a question of whether God OR you perform miracles. Or whether God OR you have power. Nor is it really a question of whether God OR you do them. The "setup", or the arrangements of parts and functions in the machinery of miracle working, is more sophisticated than this.

We can't think of this RELATIONSHIP between you and God, in terms of either-or. Either him or me. That's ego thinking. We have to look at how we actually relate to him.

In heaven, God GAVE all of Himself to you in your creation. He EXTENDED Himself AS you, giving you His power, His will, His Mind, His strength, His love, His freedom etc. You HAVE all of this stuff, because He gave it to you. And He gave it to you FULLY.

"God is my strength."

"God is the mind with which I think" etc

"The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created."

"All loving creation is freely given."

So now this sets up a scenario where you have God IN you. You are HOST to God. You have an "inner altar" where God is shining within you, with HIS light. You shine brightly WITH light, because the light is IN you AS you, but the you didn't PUT the light there, the light IS GOD ie "of God". Yet it IS your light.

It is true to say, that all love is God's love and there is no other love. It is also true to say that God IS the light in which you see and there is no other light. And it is true to say that vision is GIVEN you just as love is given you. God is the SOURCE and PROVIDER of these things. What you have is an INHERITANCE. You INHERIT power from God.

Since God does FULLY GIVE these gifts, you do FULLY HAVE them. In fact, in your creation you were created to BE a POWERFUL CO-CREATOR. This does not mean that you are just some kind of puppet for God to manipulate. Nor does it mean that God coerces you into doing His will. Nor does it mean that you just sort of "step aside" or "get out of the way" and DON'T PARTICIPATE, so that God goes about HIS business without your grubby little hands getting into the mix. God Wills that YOU will to create WITH Him. This is why you have "children of my will."

The way it's set up, you actually CONTRIBUTE. You have the power TO CREATE. You actually CO-CREATE with God. BOTH of you create together. And you create in ACCORD with His will. But this isn't coercion, or being a puppet, or having no say in what is created. God has given you free will and the power to choose. So now you AND GOD, together, are co-creating the Kingdom. This is why YOU have YOUR OWN CREATIONS, because YOU have the power to create them.

Now, because His will is YOUR will, and his power is your power, by acknowledging that all power is OF (from) Him, allows you to ACCEPT that He has GIVEN you His power, and therefore YOUR sense of "my power" is in fact HIS power. This is what it means that "God is the mind with which I think" and "God is my strength". What seems to be YOURS, is ALSO his. The power that you inherently have is in fact God Himself, in you.

The distinction that has to be made is that God is not the ONLY ONE who has power. God is not the ONLY ONE who creates. And God is not the ONLY ONE who does anything.

The ego likes to claim that it has a power which is OF itself. A power which IT HAS, which God DID NOT give to it. It's an invented power, an alien will. This is the authority problem. It's the attempt to believe that you have and can do things which God did not allow or give. That you "gave yourself" your own creation and your own power. And now you depend on "yourself alone".

But then let's consider what is the OPPOSITE to this. And this is where we have to be VERY careful. It is NOT appropriate to say that, since the ego is the idea of "a power of my own"... that the opposite of this is "I have no power". That is NOT the truth. It is only the "of my own" that changes.

Before joining with God, you will believe that any power you have is YOUR OWN power, in isolation, separate from God. But as you join with God, you have to be careful not to believe that you are entering into a state of having NO POWER. God did not create powerless beings. Christ is not a powerless being.

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

It's the "by myself" part that goes away. Which means, that when you are not doing everything ALONE, you are now doing everything WITH God. And this is a relationship of SHARING! It's not the same thing as a relationship where God is the ONLY ONE who has power. That's the ego's idea of its opposite, a tyrannical God who has power OVER it who makes IT have no power and takes everything away from it. That's the idea of NOT sharing anything. And that's not how God operates.

YOU are to reclaim and regain YOUR power. BUT, this can only be done by recognizing that the power which is YOURS, is not OF you. "Of" means "from". You do not originate your power in yourself, it comes from God. And your power IS God Himself being powerful. But because you are ONE with Him and joined and share with Him, literally, IT IS YOURS. God has created you to BE a powerful CO-CREATOR with Him. You will TOGETHER.

Jesus for example performed miracles and he attributed the power to accomplish the miracles to God. However, this can be misunderstood. If it is taken to mean "ONLY GOD did anything", this ignores the FUNCTION that Jesus had as a miracle WORKER. It is completely appropriate to attribute all power - the source of the power - TO God, but it is NOT appropriate to DISOWN that power, because it IS yours. And Jesus IS POWERFULLY MIRACULOUS.

You see, there is a function that you fill. "The only function of spirit is to extend God's being." "Miracles are a universal blessing from God, through me, to all my brothers." "Love goes out because of what it is, but you are needed that it can begin." YOU.... have to fulfill a FUNCTION.... in order for miracles to GO OUT. When you block this function, which is extension and expression of YOUR mind's power, miracles do not happen. "Miracles should be happening all the time, but when they do not something has gone wrong."

Your function, which is healing while on earth, and creating while in heaven, are mirrors. Being a miracle worker is in line with being a co-creator. You are an extender of God. But YOU yourself HAVE to fulfill a comprehensive list of requirements in order to do this. You can't just sit there "doing nothing".

Your mind has to be miracle minded. Your heart has to be open. You have to be willing to love. You have to express love. You need to be free from fear. You have to have purified yourself. You have to be placing faith and trust in God and the Holy Spirit. You have to be open to the Holy Spirit working through you because He is the mechanism of miracles. You have to be willing to go and be where the people are that Jesus sends to you, lay your hands on them, pray for them etc. In fact, Jesus says this about doing nothing...

"This quiet center, IN WHICH YOU DO NOTHING, will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent."

"I need do nothing" is a state of inner calm WHILE you are operating in the world. It is NOT a state of inactivity.

So you have to actually step up and BE the powerful, co-creative, extending, loving, miraculous, unified, whole being that God created you to be, in order for you to perform miracles. There is a ROLE that you play. A function that you have. You are NEEDED to fulfill this function, as the light of the world, in order FOR miracles to be ABLE to express and extend. You actually HOLD BACK God's miracles when you resist doing this. If you weren't holding back, they'd be happening ALL THE TIME.

Jesus is clear that YOU are a powerful entity. The only distinction is that this power that you have, did not COME FROM you. God IS this power. He literally is embedded into your being like a battery. He POWERS you. And you in turn USE His power, which is YOURS, to perform miracles. And by being ONE WITH His Power, when you use his power, it IS HIM doing this through you, but it is ALSO you doing it WITH him.

If you were to perform such miracles and then CLAIM, that "I did this all by myself WITHOUT God", this would be arrogant. But to claim "I did this WITH God" or "God did this THROUGH me" AND "I fulfilled MY function as well", that's appropriate. Because you ARE powerful and loving and creative and a force to be reckoned with. There is nothing egoic about acknowledging that you are a powerful creative being, provided you don't claim to be that way WITHOUT God.

This is why Jesus is getting you to re-acknowledge YOUR power, which is God's.

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

"Power is of God, GIVEN by Him, and re-awakened by the Holy Spirit, Who knows that, as you give you GAIN."

"Those who choose freedom will experience only its results. Their power is of God. And they will give it only to what God has given, to share with them."

"See, then, the power of sinlessness within your brother, and share with him the power of the release from sin you offered him."

"Here again is the paradox often referred to in the course. To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. ***As God created you, you have all power.*** The image you made of yourself has none."

The image you made of yourself is the ego, not your soul/self. It is ONLY the ego that has NO power. This is why it can only seem to have power when YOU give it power, because YOU have power TO give, because it was given to you. By acknowledging that "of yourself you can do nothing" does NOT mean that YOU can do nothing. Only that you cannot do anything WITHOUT the source of power. Add in fact YOUR power IS God IN you, so rejecting God rejects your power and makes you weak.

It means you can only do nothing IF you are alone. It means you can do nothing BY YOURSELF. That isn't the same thing as saying that when you INCLUDE God, you STOP being able to doing anything at all. It's the "by myself" part that is the ego. All by yourself you have no power and are weak and can do nothing. Acknowledging God as the source of your power, YOU CAN DO ANYTHING.

"There is nothing your holiness cannot do."

We are JOINED with God. We SHARE with God. God IS in us. Our power IS his power. His strength is in us AS OUR strength. We are not "separated off" from God, like some kind of weak container that God sometimes visits and passes through. We are literally HIS will. We are HIS power. We are one with Him. And He has established us as having UNLIMITED POWER, BECAUSE He shares His power with us.

You have to stay plugged into God, basically. So long as you are hosting and staying plugged into God, YOU get the electrical charge of his power supply. If you UNPLUG yourself, you become isolated, and become weak, because you have no power OTHER than the power of God. Alone you have no power, but ego will claim there is "self-power" that it made. WITH GOD you ARE all powerful. We must acknowledge that God DOES the miracles, but He only does them WITH you, and CAN only do them when YOU cooperate with Him, because YOU BOTH do them, just as you BOTH create.

This is why YOU are a miracle worker and a miracle doer. This is why YOU have to become miracle minded. This is why YOU have to be willing to extend love. It's not a matter of you stepping out of the way onto the sidelines efforting not to interfere, passively, while a SEPARATE power does stuff. Your function is NOT passive or inert. It's that YOU AND GOD need to get IN LINE with each other, BOTH of you need to WILL together, and BOTH of you fulfill your functions in the machinery.

This is also why Jesus says things like "DO his works" and "What the holy spirit enables YOU TO DO is clearly not of this world." The power is joined. There IS a "doing" component on YOUR PART that is required here. It's just that what you become ABLE to do is BEYOND what you can do ALONE, YOU do not understand miracles because they come FROM God and yet YOU CAN DO THEM. And you are being ASKED TO do them. Add you can only do them by SHARING.

"The power to work miracles belongs to you."

"The distinction has also been made here between "miracle-mindedness" as a STATE, and "miracle-doing" as its expression."

If miracles are expressions of love, then DOING a miracle is to EXPRESS love. Expression is a DOING. It's an ACTIVE role. Expression is not a state. This is why in the great crusade, "members of my party are ACTIVE workers." Not passive sideline-sitters. You are a powerful co-creator and a powerful miracle-worker. But you GET your power from God, and HE IS the power that you utilize. Thus HE AND YOU work together to perform miracles.

"Atonement is the natural profession of the children of God."

"The first two are not enough. The real members of MY party are ACTIVE workers.

The power to work Miracles BELONGS to you. I will create the right opportunities for you to do them. But you must be ready and willing to do them, since you are already able to. Doing them will bring conviction in the ability. I repeat that you will see Miracles through your hands through MINE. Conviction really comes through accomplishment. Remember that ability is the potential, Achievement is its expression, and Atonement is the Purpose."