I will be honest with myself today. I will not think that I already know what must remain beyond my present grasp. I will not think I understand the whole from bits of my perception, which are all that I can see. Today I recognize that this is so. And so I am relieved of judgment which I cannot make. Thus do I free myself and what I look upon, to be in peace as God created us.
"Father, today I leave creation free to be itself. I honor all the parts, in which I am included. We are one because each part contains Your memory, and truth must shine in all of us as one."
One of the core ideas of the Course which is perhaps the MOST resisted, is that there is no world. It is not a popular idea. People don't like talking about it. Whenever I post it about it the comments section goes quiet most of the time. It's like... there are some things that Jesus says in the Course quite clearly but our egos do not want to acknowledge it. We'd rather take the bits of the Course we think are acceptable and just reject the other bits as some kind of freaky fringe stuff that was just there by mistake or something. We gloss over it.
But Jesus is very clear.
God would not have created this world because it is a symbol of punishment, it is run by rules of suffering and it leads to death. It is a cruel world filled with disaster and sickness and pain and fear, and there is simply NO WAY that a loving God could create this. If God did not create this, that means we're finding ourselves inside what we value as a 'pretty cool word' when in fact it's just a great big illusion that we made up ourselves. It's not even real. It doesn't even exist. Can we accept that? Or do we want to remain in denial and pick and choose the bits of truth that we can allow?
The Course also speaks of how we are not a body, and Jesus speaks therein of how the body is so worthless and so illusory that it can completely disappear when you fully awaken. Not just that you wake up 'in' it and carry on having it, but that it can literally disappear from the dream. He also speaks of how he dematerialized his own body and how we can do the same. Is this too radical for us to accept? Is it such a tall order and such a strange, mystical, seemingly impossible fear so far outside our comfort zone that we would rather turn a blind eye to it? Oh... that's not for me, that's not something that can be possible for me. Resistance.
There is no world. There is no body. God did not create this world.
Can we accept this, fully? Can we accept the implications? Or do we want a watered down truth that lets us simmer in hell a bit longer?
The idea of your persona is that it rejects everything you don't like, keeping only the good stuff.
If you get really good at using your persona, you will get really brutal at cutting out things which seem even remotely bad.
Eventually you'll be trying to be SO good and perfect, that there will be practically nothing left to relegate to your 'bad' category. Like you hear people saying, "nothing is ever good enough for them" - a sign of a lack of self acceptance.
And if that carries on, there will be nothing left to get rid of, you will cease to exist. Death.
So you can see, the persona, which seems all sweet and nice and special and important, glowing with a false innocence, is in fact the ego's wish to destroy you, piece by piece, by gradually stripping off more and more parts of you and relegating them to hell, in the pursuit of 'being a God'. And along the way it will complement you on how fantastic your 'good bits' are, even though your 'good bits' are soon to come under scrutiny.
The persona attacks everything that is contrary to what it wants to keep. And its eventual mission is the total removal of absolutely everything that could be conceived of as less than absolutely perfect. It thinks that by doing this, what you'll end up with is some kind of totally 'perfect self'. The perfect ego, a shining glory, the jewel in the crown.
It should be clear that the only ambition the ego really has is to get rid of you. The only purpose of the persona is to slice you up and separate you out and throw large chunks in the trash. What it keeps, it temporarily exalts like some kind of hero or savior or idol. But slowly it continues to find flaws in that idol, demanding even more vigorous 'purification' and sacrifice.
It says, well, if you give this up, and give that up, you'll be better off. It tells you you don't need all of what is, you only need the special good bits. But it doesn't tell you what happens if you take that to its ultimate goal. Keep going, and there will be nothing left of you. You'll live in a world where everything and everyone seems like your enemy, you are totally cut off and alone, depressed and frightened and weak, barely recognizing that you even exist, BUT .... drumroll... you'll have your perfect little fake self. Yay. And then you'll die alone.
So you can see... as you dabble even a little bit in being dishonest, inauthentic, not yourself, or trying to manipulate reality to get some kind of special value, special attention, special love... you're basically buying into a death trap. The temptation is you will indeed seem to get some special love, but.... it calls for a sacrifice. You've got to give up an arm and a leg for it. And then it's still not enough.
This is the promise the ego has for you. Go along with its plan for salvation, seem to achieve some kind of fake goal, or seem to find some kind of fake trophy, or seem to present yourself as some kind of ruler of the universe, and, in return, all of the rest of what you really are will be suppressed and attacked and gotten rid of.
Ultimately, the ego's perfectionism guarantees that NOTHING is acceptable. And sooner or later this will become apparent. Until you wake up and realize there has to be a better way.
You don't need a persona. You don't need an ego. You have God.
Have you ever noticed that the physical form or shape of objects, is touted as making something "unique", but really they're all the same thing?
In the company I work for I have to add thousands of products to a website, and so I see all these variations on a theme.
Then I find myself asking myself, why would anyone want to have 3000 different types of this item? One with a little but of a more rounded look, one with more fancy bits, one in a different color, one with shiny metal on it. And companies are churning out these products by the thousands as if they are all important and worth having. We have become quite obsessed with possession of such crap.
After a while I become completely disillusioned, which is a good thing.
The human race has become really good at manipulating forms, designing objects, and creating appearances of differences. The explosion of "creating" (making stuff) is on a roll.
Since the industrial revolution especially we've really gone wild exploring every conceivable "version" of the same thing, every way to take advantage of material properties and differences, and all the different forms we can come up with.
Amazon now sells almost half a billion products, and most of them are just variations on a theme. There are now 60,000 t-shirts for sale. Do you really think the differences between these t-shirt is SO VAST that they are all completely unique? How many ways are there to cover up the upper torso?
This is something of a madness which humanity has pursued and doesn't really know how to stop pursuing. This notion that if the form is different, it is a unique thing. some forms or shapes are more desirable, and finding the "best ones" is some kind of salvation. This is mental illness.
Unique tools are needed to solve unique problems. The ego loves this. It loves to create new appearances of unique situations which call for a custom solution which is nothing like any other solution, does not extend to solve any other problem, and keeps the solution isolated and limited to this one need.
This belief that all forms are unique and different and worth existing, is the ego's insanity. Exactly why do we need 60,000 t-shirts, or 100,000 different kinds of trousers, or a million songs?
You might say well, this is human nature, to create and express and explore. No, it's not. It's UNNATURAL.
Personally I have grown significantly disillusioned with physical objects. To want to have certain special objects or toys or whatever, to try to receive their specialness or to think that I am somehow better off by choosing exactly the right items.
I used to buy into the illusion of differences of form much more and wanted to have this item or that item or be very careful about choosing. Now I care much less. Much more laid back in terms of how I think these things are going to save me or how I need to have the best this or that.
Sure it can be fun to shop, no harm done. But perceptually and psychologically, "civilized humanity" has become lost in its obsession with forms - particularly the illusion of form, its appearances and its special isolated different properties. This is a huge world filled with junk.
It's funny when Jesus talks about this and how we think that we're doing important things, earning little bits of paper and metal discs, spending them on ridiculous things we don't need or really want, to decorate and adorn our fake bodies and our fake homes, all as substitutes and distractions away from God. lol
"This world holds nothing that I want".
"Think of the freedom in the recognition that you are not bound by all the strange and twisted laws you have set up to save you. You really think that you would starve unless you have stacks of green paper strips and piles of metal discs. You really think a small round pellet or some fluid pushed into your veins through a sharpened needle will ward off disease and death. You really think you are alone unless another body is with you.
It is insanity that thinks these things. You call them laws, and put them under different names in a long catalogue of rituals that have no use and serve no purpose. You think you must obey the "laws" of medicine, of economics and of health. Protect the body, and you will be saved.
These are not laws, but madness. "
Most of the time, most of us are trying to perfect our persona-self, the self-image. This is part of the ego. This involves spiritualizing the world in some way, sectioning off the 'good bits' from the 'bad bits' and trying to only keep the good bits.
You try to build up this sort of spiritualized ego persona, which ultimately is the ego trying to attain some kind of 'image' of enlightened God-like status. But to do this, it has to keep only the special, valued, accepted, allowed, preferred parts and reject the rest.
So the main mode of functioning of this ego persona isn't so much to 'acquire' the good stuff, but to simultaneously weed out and get rid of as much of the bad stuff as possible. In other words, it is a function of denial and rejection, based on condemnation and judgement.
So once again the ego is contradictory, in that it *appears* to be seeking to include only the stuff it likes or wants, which it has selected from the big soup of life, but actually accomplishes it by rejecting and condemning and relegating the parts it doesn't want to some kind of waste basket. Fact is you can't select and section-off some part of your self or life without simultaneously rejecting and condemning some other part.
This waste basket lives in the ego as the rejected, suppressed, hidden, repressed, denied, shut-out, blocked out 'stuff', which is nevertheless still there and still functioning. This generally 'dark stuff', or at least, surrounded with beliefs and judgements of darkness, will seem to do the opposite of what the persona wants, and indeed attacks it from time to time.
When the shadow attacks (ie the pain body) you generally will want to get rid of it, of course. Just like any 'pain', even physical pain, it's generally the sensation of something you want to get rid of. But that's a major problem. Because how will you get rid of pain? You'll use the persona. The persona will then be selective and attempt to relegate, reject and condemn the pain, to make it go away. The persona doesn't want to accept the pain or integrate it so that the persona and shadow cancel each other out. The persona wants to maintain a separation.
So it seems I think, that most of us are traditionally fixated on loving the persona, building up the persona, reinforcing the persona, choosing to use the persona to manipulate and get what you want, using the persona to paint a picture of 'everything is great' when it's not, or generally repressing your real Self. And you would not SUSPECT that this alone is the entire problem with the ego, because it then directly produces a large body of repressed pain in the shadow.
The ego persona wants you to think of the persona as all sweetness and nice, so that you would not suspect IT is the big problem, yet alone suspect that it is the CAUSE of everything that is dark and unwanted. Instead it deflects all appearance of the dark icky stuff onto the shadow so that the shadow gets to look like IT is the bad guy, IT is the thing to get rid of, IT is the thing to weed out and destroy.
So on the one hand you have this picture of 'innocence' in the persona (like the innocent victim), which you would not suspect is causing any problems at all, and then you have the apparently 'guilty' shadow which looks like it is the sole location of all the pain and misery and guilt and sin. Are you fooled? Most of us are. I know I am. I am fooled all the time by this. I keep believing the persona and seeking out that innocent, denying self, and trying to get rid of all the nasty icky stuff that I think the shadow represents.
So now all the bad shit in the world seems to be blamed on the shadow, and all the 'good stuff' is credited to the persona. When in fact, all the bad stuff is CAUSED by the persona. We choose the persona first (or simultaneously), and then by choosing it, ie choosing to focus on including only a PART of what is, or a PART of ourselves, we automatically simultaneously are adding more stuff to the shadow part of ourselves. That shadow part, generally seeming to be that which we repress and deny and hate or don't want to feel etc, seemed to be generally held at bay in a sort of 'unconscious' state for the most part, until it rears up into awareness and seems to attack the persona.
But let's look at this. Does the pain body/shadow actually attack the persona? Or does it just seem to behave in the terms of what the persona has given it? If the persona chose 'i want cake not dog shit', and the shadow became 'you are dogshit', then the 'you are dogshit' comes up seeking... healing, and exposes itself to the persona, which generally reacts with its usual relegation and denial and hate and 'get rid of it' attitude, which makes it an UPSETTING experience for the persona, disrupting its facade of pretend specialness and fake innocence. But what if the persona weren't so resistant to the shadow, and instead the SELF (real self) stepped back from the persona and was simply AWARE of what's going on, observes it, and allows both the persona and the pain to basically... be seen to be the same thing, to cancel each other out, then perhaps there can then be HEALING and RELEASE.
Anyway. My main point is this. And you may have heard it before. Choosing to use the persona is a trap, which absolutely guarantees that you will experience pain and suffering, because the persona will create the perception that something is unwanted, painful, and in need of being denied/separated from. This happens the INSTANT that you put the persona mask on, because you can't wear the mask without condemning everything that the mask does not contain. ie the shadow is the 'negative space' of the persona - everything else - which the persona is made to reject. The persona can only 'focus' on what it wants to include by excluding everything else that exists, and that simply becomes the shadow rather than 'extra stuff that never has anything to do with me'.
Morale of the story then is.... you believe you have the ability to choose what you WANT, WITHOUT in any way being affected by or involved with what you DON'T want, but this is a complete 100% ego lie. When you partially included, you partially exclude. Basic fact of a dualistic mindset. Every time you partially include something you have to reject something else and that rejected stuff is. ... ultimately, what is ... which includes the whole you. So as you wear that mask, you are attacking your whole self, suggesting that only some portion of it is acceptable, and that the other portion is unacceptable.
That is like... simultaneous self-eggrandizement and self-attack. Simultaneous ego inflation and a diminishing of Self. It splits the mind in two, shows one half to the world and hides the other, and as it does so, the shown part seems to amplify into 'goodness' while the dark hidden part amplifies into 'darkness'. You cannot escape the presence of this darkness. Just because it is hidden, does not mean it's not there. And some day it's going to manifest as sickness and death. Each time you believe in good and bad, or right and wrong, or any other dualities other than true and false, you are making BOTH a persona and a shadow, and must accept the consequences of both. The persona is your special love, the shadow is your special hate. Both of them are special.
Use the ego persona, get attacked. Use the ego persona, suffer the consequences. Use the ego persona, to make yourself look good, to win, to get, to be successful, to appear to be innocent, to have this fake facade of a person that you aren't even really that, ... be prepared to die. And who will have caused you to die? Yourself. Your own choice did it to you. So it's a good idea not to play with 'fire'... don't play the ego's game, don't live a life where you are constantly trying to 'gain' in manipulative, ego-persona ways. Just be what you are. You're perfect already.
Contemplating the seemingly huge gap between where I am at and where God is at, I asked myself, what will it take to learn the whole truth?
It seemed then that the "whole" of the truth I was trying to learn was all of the concepts, information, viewpoints, seemingly separate pieces of the puzzle. A neverending mountain of concepts and thoughts.
Then I asked myself, well, what is the whole truth? The whole truth is God. The whole truth has nothing to do with ideas and concepts. It's a living experience and awareness.
The concepts, the ideas, the metaphysics, the information, the puzzles and problems, things which seem not figured out, are all symptoms or side effects of not being with God.
To be with God is the only actual goal. All that needs to be "done". All that needs to be "learned". Everything else, may be helpful up to a point, but it isn't what needs to be learned.
There is only one problem - a sense of separation from God. And there is only one solutions - returning to God. Sorting out or fixing or solving all the other illusory problems and bits of information is completely irrelevant.
So if I want the whole truth, all that means is, going back home to God. It's got nothing to do with learning anything else. All that other stuff at some point has to be unlearned and let go as well. It was useful as a stepping stone pointing the way. At some point, we have to take a leap of faith into God's arms.
There is the me that seems to be 'in here' in the body, who I believe is innocent and did not ask for this sorry treatment.
Then there is the me that seems to be 'out there' which somehow is in someone else's body, and therefore I believe it is not me at all, and that self is attacking the self that I think remains as me, within.
What's really going on is that both the me out there and the me in here are two parts of my one mind. My mind, itself, is at war with itself. This is the ego split-mind, based in duality and separation. It is two-faced.
The me that is in-here, my persona self, is the part of me that wants to retain and keep something, rejecting everything else.
The me that is 'out there', my shadow self, is the projected (but still within my own mind, since ideas leave not their source) part of me that I do not want. Therefore that self seems to be separated off behind a wall of disassociation.
I perceive that projected shadow self as "not me" and that I want nothing to do with it. I don't identify with it and I believe it is someone else. It is what I do not want. I see it as 'my' enemy, but really I am seeing it with my persona who loves to isolate the 'good bits' to my 'in here' self, and keep the 'bad bits' relegated to the 'out there' self.
I project my shadow self onto other people and since I believe that this shadow self is 'not me', not my persona-me, I believe that it must belong to other people. I believe it must be a part of them. I believe THEY must be the ones who are attacking me, they are the ones who are offensive, they are the ones who are my enemy.
The stronger becomes this sense of 'separation' between the in-here me and the out-there me, ie me vs 'other selves', which I experience hallucinatorily as other people, the stronger and deeper that rift becomes and the more 'I' am at war with those enemy selves, the more I disassociate my identity from that shadow self - the part of me that I hate and reject. And it seems I am now an enemy of that other person, but they are really me - I am an enemy of myself.
While this disassociation is in place, it will seem to me that the other self that is 'out there', which houses everything that is wrong and ugly and unwanted and guilty and evil and deadly, has nothing to do with me at all. I will want to get away from it, reject it, escape it, and run from its threat. I don't want to accept that it is a part of myself.
But what I must do if I want healing, is I must recognize that all of the projected guilt/sin/attack that I see as 'not myself', or as 'someone else's stuff', ALL of it is mine. That content is part of and inside of my own mind. See, I think my mind is only inside my body and that my mind stops at the edges of my body. It doesn't. My mind 'in here', as it perceives what is 'out there', and as it thinks about stuff 'out there', is actually out there as well. And it's not possible for my mind to perceive that there even IS an 'out there' without my mind being in some way out there too. And everything I experience, even the out there stuff, is really encapsulated by my whole mind, like a container. My body, other people's bodies. It's me.
So if I want to heal, I'm going to have to realize that in all cases where I think someone else is wrong or at fault, I am just conveniently disassociating from MY OWN self-attack, which I am seeing as 'not me' because I don't want it, and I've seen it overlaid on top of 'people' out there. It's nothing to do with them. They are ALL INNOCENT. There is not really anything out there. It's all my own mind, parts of my mind, that I don't want to look at.
To heal, I am going to have to look at this content that I think is in other people, and I'm going to have to take back responsibility for it. I'm going to have to take back the 'power' that I think it has over me, which is really my own power within my own mind. And I'm going to have to admit that the stuff I want to get rid of, that is stuff within my mind not outside of it. There is no outside to my mind! It's all inside me. And I need to therefore heal the rift between the persona-me, in here, which only wants to keep the good stuff, and the shadow me that I project, which is seemingly out there and that I do not want to accept.
I can't accept the shadow stuff or the persona stuff while they remain separate. While separate, there is war. I have to realize they are BOTH ME and cease the belief in the *SEPARATION* that is between them. That is the key. I am doing this to myself because I am both parts of my mind, the inner and the outer. I am the enemy I perceive. I need to forgive myself and undo this rift, this split mind, between what is approved-of in me and what is not approved of in me.
It is keeping these parts of my own mind held apart and separate that brings on all sickness, all conflict, all war, all upset, and death. Reclaiming ownership of the entire scenario, the inner and the outer, they become one. I see them both as me operating two personalities that are against each other, and yet both of them are within me. Therefore.... I am something else. I am not either of them. I am awareness. I am the personality. I am the one mind.
Wholeness. Peace.
Jesus is truth-full. He is honest. He is awake. He is aware of everything. He does not lie. He has no reason to hide anything.
Since Jesus IS the Atonement, in order to "accept" the Atonement we are going to have to at some point completely Accept everything Jesus has said as true. ALL of it. Not just some parts, not just the bits we like, all of it.
Our questions should not so much focus on "whether" what the Course says is true. We are supposed to TRUST JESUS, that He is being truthful and that we can rely on His Word. If He says something is true, it simply is true. It is our job to ACCEPT IT.
When we take other parts of the course and pull it apart and bring up the quotes and use them as "evidence" as to some "contrary meaning" or conflicting truth, something has gone wrong. We are using the course against ITSELF, because Jesus is perfectly truthful all the time. When we use one quote to attack another, we are claiming that Jesus Himself is a liar.
What we can't seem to agree on is what Jesus MEANS, and we have all these discussions about what OUR opinion is, instead of putting aside our opinion and simply being open to TRUST AND ACCEPT Jesus's at His word, in a very literal way. We are simply not willing to be honest enough. Honesty is not self-serving.
I sometimes put up a quote of what Jesus has said. It is plain and obvious. And then people start saying either what it does or does not mean, or give other quotes to try to fight it. Even if it's extremely obviously clear and plain.
This is OUR EGO attempting to be some kind of "authority" through whom all decisions and approvals have to be fed in order to accept anything at all. We stand here like some kind of armed guard only allowing through the little parts we like and rejecting the rest. It is really an act of denial and keeping the Truth at arm's length. It's a defense against the atonement.
This very ego ITSELF has to be put aside, and we have to open up to TRUSTING JESUS. Trusting that He is telling us the truth, not deceiving us. Trusting that He is genuine and honest and authentic. Listening to what He has said. And that means, even if it does not make us look good, accepting it ANYWAY. Accept it first, learn how it MUST BE CORRECT later. Otherwise where's the trust? Where's the listening to and accepting of Atonement? Where's the taking Jesus at His word and not fighting with everything He has said?
When He says over 250 times that God directly created multiple children and also gave them free will, we listen to that, and we ACCEPT IT. We don't get into nonsense arguments of denial that have one goal and one goal only - to NOT accept it at its word. When He says plainly that God would not create a world like this, we have to ACCEPT IT, not get into "whether" it is true or not. When He says God creates Angels directly, we have to ACCEPT it. When he says miracles can heal the sick and raise the dead, we have to ACCEPT IT. When he says you can LITERALLY move a mountain with your faith, we have to ACCEPT IT. We have to stop fighting with Jesus all the time and TRUST HIM.
Something like this has to be read carefully because all too often people quote bits of this as if it's saying "don't bother changing anything in the world", and it's NOT saying that.
"If the cause of the world you see is attack thoughts, you must learn that it is these thoughts which you do not want. There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effects will change automatically."
What it says is that the world you're seeing is the result of something you are projecting out of your mind, and therefore it makes no sense to try messing with the picture out there - you are better off changing the content of the film reel in your mind so that it projects a different world.
It in no way says that you should never try to change the world. It in fact is an instruction on HOW to change the world. Or in other words, how to SWITCH TO a different world that has the changes you want built into it.
Change your mind, so that it causes a different world to be projected. That's what it's saying. If you don't realize that your mind projects the world you'll start wrangling with the world itself trying to force it to change AGAINST your mind's projections, and there's no point doing that because you'll just keep projecting the same world. If you want to see a different world you have to change your mind SO THAT you project a different world entirely.
This also means that when it says to change your mind ABOUT the world, it does not mean that you keep THE SAME WORLD and change your mind about it. It means you need to change your mind so that it is different in its state than it was in before, SO THAT it projects a DIFFERENT world. The state of mind and its thoughts "about" the world it had projected before, has changed, NOT so that you see THE SAME world in a different way, but so that your changed mind makes a NEW world. In fact, the quote might as well also say "don't bother changing your mind ABOUT this world, because that won't change THIS world - change your mind and make a different one."
The problem people have is they think there is an objective world out there that you project onto or perceive, rather than realizing that your mind MAKES the world. If you don't like what you've made, make something else! That's what it's saying. Don't change the effect of what you already chose in the past. Don't change your mind about the SAME world and try keeping it in with a different perception. Choose something different and make something new. The world you see is what you project TO see. Projection makes perception.
In effect, you CAN'T change the world anyway, and changing your mind about the world switches to ANOTHER world. The world is just an effect. Like a picture on a movie screen. If you don't like it, change what's in the projector and watch something else.
A tree ... well.... at first a seed, is planted, and there is husk and germ, and then there is sprout, and now leaves, and a stem, and then a trunk with bark, and then flowers are emerging with petals and pollen, and now the emergence of apples with sweetness, and then there is a seed forming in the apple, and the apple falls to the ground, and now there is a seed again which could become a new tree, and on it goes.
So the question then is, what is this thing? Is it a seed? Well, temporarily, but it turns into something else. Is it a tree? Well not entirely, it was a seed at one point. Is it an apple? For a while, but it used to be bark and petals. So what is this thing? What is this so-called organism that just keeps on changing?
Really the whole cycle of what we call life is a temporary mix of things shifting and changing, as though to say, it has no permanent truth. It is never always something, it's always turning into something else. It shifts and changes, and so says it is one thing one moment and another the next. Another word for that is a lie, or untruth. A physical lie.
There is really no absolute truth of this shapeshifting "lifeform", it's one thing one minute and then you come back some days later and it's become something else. It is partly something, but not wholly anything. Bits of parts sprouting here, other parts sprouting there, at first buds and leaves, then flowers and fruits, who knows what it even is.
This is the transient cyclic undependable uncertain (fear) constantly shifting deceptive dishonest delusional system of the physical world. It has no fixed truth, and it presents one thing as true one moment and changes it's "mind" the next. It has no permanent identity, no absolute anything, nothing dependable, nothing reliable, you can't even trust it.
Such a world symbolises the ego thought system, full of illusions, deceptions, lies, shiftings and changes, nothing ever truly dependable or reliable. Always uncertain, an entire system of fear, always uncertain as to what it is or will be, impossible to depend on, undecided in its insanity, committed to nothing, incapable of being. And as physical objects it has become PHYSICAL FEAR. A physical lie, shifting before your eyes. And who knows what it is or was or ever will be next.
The world is a physical version of insanity. A mind solidified into concrete and walls. All its workings the laws of madness. Its entire system one of total uncertainty and deception. An illusion of a world, driven by insanity and rooted in lies. Not one single part of it is eternal or true.
"The world is the symbol of fear."
""A meaningless world engenders fear."
The totally insane engenders fear because it is completely undependable, and offers no grounds for trust. Nothing in madness is dependable. It holds out no safety and no hope. But such a world is not real. I have given it the illusion of reality, and have suffered from my belief in it. Now I choose to withdraw this belief, and place my trust in reality. In choosing this, I will escape all the effects of the world of fear because I am acknowledging that it does not exist."
"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."
Just because you forget the light from time to time doesn't mean it goes away. It is permanent. It waits for you to return to it. And even after your next round of madness it is still there waiting for your return. It's never possible to remove it and it doesn't go away.
The ego's voice will come up with countless ways to persuade you that there is no light left anymore. All doom and gloom and darkness and death. It'll tell you there is no light and you might as well give up. This is not actually true. The light is always there, inviting you to join it.
To join the light you have to step out of the darkness, which means no longer dwelling in the ego's viewpoint and shifting your perspective to the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is the light of truth.
Taking things lightly or lightening up doesn't have to mean you've got to fake being happy or not care about anything. It means you get to genuinely be happy and carefree because the light sets you free. The "light side" is a way of looking, a way of perceiving, and a way of experiencing. It arises from sanity and truth and certainty.
The Holy Spirit's offering is one of peace and calm and illumination and clarity. He is available to show you a view of the world which can't be taken seriously, which shows you how trivial everything is here, and recognizes that all this ego stuff really is literally nothing.
What were you so worried about? It was nothing. What was so alarming and shocking? It's nothing. The Holy Spirit looks upon the illusion of "the dark side" and recognizes it is false. It has no truth to it. It has no credibility. It isn't to be listened to and has no argument that can convince the Holy Spirit it has a solid foundation. The Holy Spirit merely looks upon it, recognizes it is completely false, and that therefore there really IS no ego. It IS nothing.
If you are caught up in the story of life or the suffering agenda of the ego or the seeming bleakness of the ego's lies, then you need some light. You can't just `lighten up` by denying, however. Sometimes you have to work through your clouds and process your feelings and coming to a point where you're ready to look at things in a different way.
But at some point you DO need to open up to the Holy Spirit. You can't get to the light by ignoring him or not including Him. Similarly Jesus is with you in the light and you can't be in the light without Him being with you.
There is hope, because darkness is never permanent or true and the light is forever and always truthful. There is hope because the Holy Spirit is with you now and always will be and WILL NOT FAIL to lead you home to the light. We but need to be willing to stop listening to our own ego voice and turn within to listen to His voice of sanity and calm and reassurance.
Everything IS alright. Nothing has gone wrong. We are already saved.
Let's also remember that God Himself has appointed the Holy Spirit as his ANSWER to all of our suffering and darkness. God has GIVEN His support. He is in us, eager to help us in any way possible if we would allow it. His Help has no limits other than our resistance to accept it. It isn't bits of truth or quotes or thoughts or certain feelings or justifications or explanations that will save you, it is the LIGHT OF GOD - as the Holy Spirit - in your mind. This is what you need to connect with. He is your APPOINTED TEACHER, comforter, and friend. He is there for a reason. Use him.
There are multiple levels/dimensions to the overall dream, of which the physical world is just one. The dream is not just the physical world. And awakening from the physical level is only one step in full awakening. For example:
Heaven
Christ consciousness (one son)
Higher Selves (realm of the sonship)
Spirits/souls (astral plane)
Physical (solid form)
Maybe I missed one or two.
Basically, the physical world IS NOT the only realm of the dream. There are higher levels of the dream also.
But also WITHIN the physical level, there are also levels. This is because there's a hierarchy of illusions. And also because there is time.
The levels within the physical realm are to do with where you are on your personal spiritual path/curriculum and what is the 'next' thing for you.
When you try to jump too far ahead of where you're at without genuinely completing the lessons needed, you 'bypass'. Typically this includes denial.
This also happens when a teacher, who is further along the path, comes along and exposes you to a light that is more inclusive than your current awareness.
They've appeared in your dream because you're ready to learn and they are ready to teach. But they might only show up for a short time, or a longer time, or a very long time depending on the relationship (see manual for teachers).
Sometimes you will be exposed to teachers who are way further along the path than you are. This will induce a lot of resistance, threat, unwillingness, guilt/inadequacy, and especially comparing yourself to them and finding yourself lacking.
So you need to be careful that you aren't trying to 'take on' too much before you are ready. So yes, this actually means, sometimes you will try to force yourself to be where a more advanced person is at, before you are ready, end up 'shoulding' yourself to bits, and this will only make you SUFFER.
So in this way, there are 'steps' or levels - sub-levels - within the level of the physical world. So when you try to skip a level/step and jump ahead too fast, you'll just get confused, frustrated and scared.
One step at a time. One foot in front of the next. If you try to skip ahead to future stepping stones, you'll slip and fall in the water.
As much as you are willing and ready to accept, given where you're at. And it's ok if you are slow. And it's okay if you do not get what the advanced teachers are expressing - they're not meant to be your teacher yet.
"Those who are to meet will meet". So let Holy Spirit decide what is the next right thing for you to learn and from whom. And you might also find that you begin to attract the right 'students' as well, who just appear out of nowhere because they're ready for what you're offering. You can help those who are a few steps behind you. But those who are far behind, maybe its okay to let them be taught by someone closer to where they are.
Gently does it.
Before the physical world of matter was produced, there was already an insane ego mindset of sin, guilt and fear. This is referred to as the "original error" below. The tiny mad idea took hold and we were now in an insane thought system.
Mind is not able to create "nothing", but it can create a sort of "empty shell" with seems to lack. And this emptiness is like a void, which is meaningless. The lack of meaning makes it act like a "screen", onto which you can PROJECT stuff.
Once the ego thought system was established, we PROJECTED that mindset onto the void of meaninglessness, forming the physical world as a kind of image on the screen, made from the idea of sin turned into flesh and matter.
So there's sort of a layer of egoic thought and mind, outside of heaven and believing in sin and separation, which then projects onto the empty screen forming "a physical world" as a symbol of the separation.
The ORIGINAL error seemed to cast us out of heaven into a 'empty void'. The ego mindset was present, and then projected its ideas of sin and separation, turning them into what we call physical matter.
"You have expressed surprise at hearing how VERY different is reality from what YOU see. You do not realize the magnitude of that ONE error. It was so vast and so COMPLETELY incredible, that from it, a world of total unreality HAD to emerge. What else COULD come of it? Its fragmented ASPECTS are fearful enough, as you begin to LOOK at them. But nothing you have ever seen BEGINS to show you the enormity of the ORIGINAL error, which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and TO FORCE YOU TO FURTHER SUBSTITUTIONS.
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. For truth extends INWARD, where the idea of loss is meaningless, and only INCREASE is conceivable. Do you REALLY think it strange that a world in which EVERYTHING is backward and upside down, arose from this? IT WAS INEVITABLE. For truth brought to THIS could only remain within in quiet, and take no part in all the mad projection by which this world was made." UrT18B2
also
"If a mind creates without love, it can create an empty shell. This CAN be possessed by evil." URT1B28C
"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." UrT2A3
"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master. And this unholy instant SEEMS to be life." UrT20G11
"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?" W250W41
also the secret dream behind the physical, in between you and reality. "The gap between reality and dreams lies not between the dreaming of the world and what you dream in secret. THEY are one. The dreaming of the world is but a part of your own dream you gave away, and saw as if it were its start and ending, both. Yet was it started by your SECRET dream, which you do NOT perceive, although it CAUSED the part you see and do not doubt is real." UrT27H11
This all points to a somewhat 'hidden' state of mind, the ego thought system of separation and sin, of which a portion "materialises" as physical matter. If you like, a mind-dream of separation, followed by a projecting from that mindset to form physicality. A sort of "ego content" followed by "ego form." Two layers covering up God's Kingdom.
Its quite easy to write something that says the truth. For example, refer to my previous post about a model for healthy existence. All the statements are true.
Now, when you read such statements .... you are worthy of love, you're innocent, there's no guilt in you etc... to some degree this 'news' can feel good. I mean, as you read it sometimes it feels like a relief to just see the words written and to experience that. I remember many times reading the Course itself and Jesus would say something simple like "there is no sin" and I'd feel this sense of relief and joy, like it soothed me or healed me in some little way.
Thing is, this is all very nice and I think maybe you can experience some degree of healing and help from reading or writing such things. And then everyone applauds and likes it and so on (thanks ;-)... BUT.... this CAN become a substitute for really deep healing and change. And it also at times becomes a bit of a quote-fest where we all like to take our favorite (special?!) bits of the Course and throw them out there, because... to some degree, it sort of makes us feel a bit soothed or tingly inside.
But we really need to make sure that this isn't all that we're doing. It's not enough to just repeat what's been said or to read the text or to quote it or to discuss the words or to say things that sound spiritual. We still have to do healing work. We still have to be willing to realize that everything happening in our normal mundane everyday life is only there as a spiritual lesson, nothing is not a lesson, and we have some work to do.
We still need to find our blocks to awareness of love's presence, which can come in the form of some deep healing at times. It can mean healing what you think of as 'past stuff', ie reinterpreting it. It isn't all cerebral. There's a lot of cerebral superstars working with the Course who are good at dealing with life on that level but don't really ever talk about how they just were a blubbering mess or had a huge catharsis or are struggling with ego reactions or having a hard time forgiving a particular person. That's where the work is, and that's where the blocks are getting removed.
So there are a few activities or types of Course people, and only one of these is actually really helping you to wake up:
1) Quote what the Course already said
2) Quote what some other Course person said
3) Refer to your favorite course sound byte
4) Discuss or debate what the Course means
5) Think about the metaphysics and figure it out
6) Understand the course concepts
7) Try to be more loving and spiritual
8) Seek for the obstacles to awareness of love and remove them
Only the last one is actually getting you to be awake! Its a dirty messy nasty business that involves a lot of healing and inner transformation. It's not about thoughts. It's not about discussion. It's about you being faced with your personal curriculum on a daily basis, which is not the same as anyone else's, and being challenged to learn a lesson, and not wanting to, and having to find a way to forgive and heal and release and transform your viewpoint to that of the Holy Spirit, using this personal situation for that purpose. It's laborious. It's long-winded. It takes time and effort and willingness. It's not comfortable. Sometimes it hurts. But unless you're actually working on changing what you are EXPERIENCING, you will not be able to eventually experience the truth.
Sometimes when I post loftier thoughts and metaphysics and statements about what God thinks of you, it can sometimes lead you to falsely conclude that digesting it is your only role, or that you should attain such a truth overnight. That's misleading. I apologize for that confusion. If its not practical and you can't really use it to help you heal, then what use is it other than to have a passtime of being interested in Course stuff, being a commentator, or a critic, or a storyteller? The Course is meant to be USED to change your mind.
Sanity and awakening is merely a matter of extreme honesty.
Honestly is a willingness to admit to what is true, to accept the truth, to not hide anything. It is visibility and exposure to God.
Honesty flies in the face of things like denial, deception, lies, guilt, shame, fear, confusion, false beliefs, anger, defences, egoic justifications etc.
All the egoic stuff, the false perception stuff, is some form of avoidance of reality, an avoidance of the truth. An unwillingness to admit to something.
In order to push through to reality we have to become ever more honest in admitting to what things are. What we are doing to ourselves.
We use at first a little willingness which then grows into a big willingness. This is a willingness to admit the truth. "Admitting" means to allow access, which opens up the mind to let the truth in. Accepting that truth is honesty - ie, reality as it really is.
The end result is a direct, immediate and accurate perception, which admits only to reality and what is true, and is completely unwilling to go into the various egoic forms of avoidance and distortion.
Honesty is openness, willingness, sanity, recognition, purity, wholeness, awareness. It's a sharp look at what is actually true in preference over all the various forms of dreaming and wishing and denial.
Bit by bit we're stripping away all the ways that we are avoiding the reality of God, avoiding the truth and trying to hide and distort what's there. Honesty reveals to us the "real" world instead of our unreal dishonest world.
It is the proper tool for weeding out all ego motives, all distortions of reality, all denial of God, all unwillingness to accept atonement, all reasons for unforgiveness, all basis for judgment.
Honesty can take you all the way home, as you emerge from the fog of lies and deceit that is the separation from God. End the bullshit, it's time to get real.
"Only within the Holy Instant can an honest question honestly be asked." UrT27E6
"I will be honest with myself today. I will not think that I already know what must remain beyond my present grasp. I will not think I understand the whole from bits of my perception, which are all that I can see. Today I recognize that this is so. And so I am relieved of judgment which I cannot make. Thus do I free myself and what I look upon, to be in peace as God created us." UrW243L1
"Be sure you are honest with yourself in making this distinction. You may be tempted to obscure it." UrW9L3
"Only the trusting can afford honesty, for only they can see its value. Honesty does not apply only to what you say. The term actually means consistency. There is nothing you say that contradicts what you think or do; no thought opposes any other thought; no act belies your word; and no word lacks agreement with another. Such are the truly honest. At no level are they in conflict with themselves. Therefore it is impossible for them to be in conflict with anyone or anything." URM5C1
"The peace of mind which the advanced teachers of God experience is largely due to their perfect honesty. It is only the wish to deceive that makes for war." UrM5C2
"God's teachers do not judge. To judge is to be dishonest, for to judge is to assume a position you do not have." UrM5D1
"True faithfulness, however, does not deviate. Being consistent it is wholly honest." UrM5J2
"For honest thoughts, untainted by the dream of worldly things outside yourself, become the holy messengers of God Himself." UrW188L6
"It is necessary for the teacher of God to realize not that he should not judge, but that he cannot. In giving up judgment he merely gives up what he did not have. He gives up an illusion; or better, he has an illusion of giving up. He has actually merely become more honest." UrM11A2
"You have been as selective in your questioning as in your perception. An open mind is more honest than this." UrT12D3
"Against the littleness you see in him you stand as tall and stately, clean and honest, pure and unsullied by comparison with what you see." UrT24C1
"Leave all illusions of yourself OUTSIDE this place, to which you come in hope and honesty. Here is your Savior FROM your specialness." URT24C10v "Be very honest with yourselves about this, for we must hide nothing from each other." URT4D19
"The search for truth is but the honest searching out of everything that INTERFERES with truth. TRUTH IS. And can be neither lost, nor sought, nor found. It is there, wherever YOU are, being WITHIN you." URT14D2
Can what has no beginning really end? The world will end in an illusion, as it began. Yet will its ending be an illusion of mercy. The illusion of forgiveness, complete, excluding no-one, limitless in gentleness, will cover it, hiding all evil, concealing all sin and ending guilt forever. So ends the world that guilt had made, for now it has no purpose and is gone. The father of illusions is the belief that they have a purpose; that they serve a need or gratify a want. Perceived as purposeless, they are no longer seen. Their uselessness is recognized and they are gone. How but in this way are all illusions ended? They have been brought to truth, and truth saw them not. It merely overlooked the meaningless.
Until forgiveness is complete, the world does have a purpose. It becomes the home in which forgiveness is born, and where it grows and becomes stronger and more all embracing. Here is it nourished, for here it is needed. A gentle Savior, born where sin was made and guilt seemed real. Here is His home, for here there is need of Him indeed. He brings the ending of the world with Him. It is His Call God's teachers answer, turning to Him in silence to receive His Word. The world will end when all things in it have been rightly judged by His judgment. The world will end with the benediction of holiness upon it. When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be.
Certainly this seems to be a long, long while away. "When not one thought of sin remains" appears to be a long-range goal indeed. But time stands still, and waits on the goals of God's teachers. Not one thought of sin will remain the instant any one of them accepts the Atonement for himself. It is not easier to forgive one sin than to forgive all of them. The illusion of orders of difficulty is an obstacle the teacher of God must learn to pass by and leave behind. One sin perfectly forgiven by one teacher of God can make salvation complete. Can you understand this? No; it is meaningless to anyone here. Yet it is the final lesson in which Unity is restored. It goes against all the thinking of the world, but so does Heaven.
The world will end when its thought system has been completely reversed. Until then, bits and pieces of its thinking will still seem sensible. The final lesson which brings the ending of the world cannot be grasped by those not yet prepared to leave the world and go beyond its tiny reach. What, then, is the function of the teacher of God in this concluding lesson? He need merely learn how to approach it; to be willing to go in its direction. He need merely trust that, if God's Voice tells him it is a lesson he can learn, he can learn it. He does not judge it either as hard or easy. His Teacher points to it, and he trusts that He will show him how to learn it.
The world will end in joy because it is a place of sorrow. When joy has come the purpose of the world has gone. The world will end in peace because it is a place of war. When peace has come, what is the purpose of the world? The world will end in laughter because it is a place of tears. Where there is laughter, who can longer weep? And only complete forgiveness brings all this to bless the world. In blessing it departs, for it will not end as it began. To turn hell into Heaven is the function of God's teachers, for what they teach are lessons in which Heaven is reflected. And now sit down in true humility, and realize that all God would have you do you can do. Do not be arrogant and say you cannot learn His Own curriculum. His Word says otherwise. His Will be done. It cannot be otherwise. And be you thankful it is so.
The truth is not information. It is not an idea or a thought. It is not a fact, like a statement about something. It is not some piece of information you can learn mentally through studying it. It isn't a bunch of metaphysics or a discussion.
The truth is an EXPERIENCE. It is experiential. It is being. It is reality. You BE IT.
In order for your mind to be healed and for the Holy Spirit to heal you, you need to gain access to an EXPERIENCE of the truth. This truth exists not as some downloadable information but as a sort of 'state of reality' or a 'place'... or maybe you could call it Heaven. It is an existence. It is something you can experience and live and be and unite with.
You can't learn truth mentally or through thought or understanding. It doesn't matter how proficient you become at grasping all the logic and metaphysics of a path like A Course in Miracles or any other.
In order to shift your mind from believing something that is false, to believing something that is really true, you cannot just replace one piece of information with another. You cannot just make affirmations or try to convince yourself. You need to find a way to COMMUNE with the truth. You need to get your mind to open up so that it can join with the truth, access the truth, and allow the truth to be PRESENT in your mind.
It is the PRESENCE of the truth that heals you.
The Holy Spirit IS this presence of truth. He is not just a memory of God like some kind of file stored on a computer. He IS the presence of God. He is something you need to access, experience, join with, commune with, unite with. You do that with your very being, not your intellect.
The Holy Spirit HIMSELF is the ANSWER that God has provided. Not an answer like, 1+1=2, that's completely powerless to do anything. The Holy Spirit is an ACTIVE answer, a CORRECTION, an EXPERIENTIAL ANSWER which dispels illusions by its mere presence, and the atonement principle that he governs is itself a POWER which - when you are in the PRESENCE of it... shines a light in your mind. It is this light which shows you the truth.
The light of truth is what sets you free. Without the actual LIGHT, you can't see. Without the light, you can't increase your awareness. Without the light, you can't see what is clearly the truth and what is clearly false. But when you DO allow this light to enter your mind, when you allow Holy Spirit and invite Him to come in and heal you simply by BEING WITH HIM, and when you open up to and trust Him to do whatever, and when you surrender your EGO, now you're getting somewhere. Now you're allowing THE ANSWER (Holy Spirit) to be received and experienced, and His Light now shines away the darkness simply by its presence and by showing you - revealing to you - what is true. And that is not just some analysis or label or description of truth, it is an immediate LIVEABLE TRUTH - an experiential reality.
The truth needs to be experienced, and in the experience of it your BEING is somewhat 'reprogrammed' just by being `shone upon`. It sheds light on who and what you are in truth. And this truth is convincing - very convincing - even more convincing than any lie. Its presence has an automatic sense of recognition and power to it which is far stronger than any dark false belief or attitude. It is when this light is PRESENT in your awareness, to any degree, that it shows up the flaws in what you were mistakedly believing was the truth - substitutes for the truth that you invented as snippets of information or bits of belief systems.
I have not once failed to EXPERIENCE a psychological transformation, an awareness of how OBVIOUS it is that my false belief IS false, and a subsequent WILLINGNESS and READINESS to surrender it to Holy Spirit, as a result of actually connecting to the truth - opening up to it, reaching out to it, aligning with it, resonating with it, even affirming it so that I can get my mind to be at least a little AWARE that it exists. This is how you let the light in, and the light does the rest.
This is what you MUST do (Holy Spirit's words) in order to awaken from the dream - to apply A Course in Miracles to your EXPERIENCE of reality.
The Truth IS GOD.
JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE AWAKE, DOES NOT MEAN OTHER PEOPLE WANT TO SHARE IT WITH YOU
JUST BECAUSE YOU PERCEIVE CORRECTLY, DOES NOT MEAN OTHER PEOPLE STOP PERCEIVING INCORRECTLY
Moving into the LIGHT, does not necessarily bring others with you, until they are WILLING to join you.
God is 100% awake right now. There is no sickness or death or suffering in God. It is "true" that these things do not exist, that separation is impossible, and no-one can die.
HOWEVER
It SEEMS. ... in an illusory way.... that we can SEEM to separate from God, to go off into a nightmare, have a bad dream, IMAGINE it is really happening, confuse it with reality temporarily, and SEEM to suffer and die.
Any such suffering, sickness or dying, is not real, and every single person who has sickness or suffering is not REALLY suffering. They are just having a bad dream.
But let's look at this with some compassion. Those "people", even if those people are not really individuals, no matter who or what they are, even if they are split of bits of the Son's mind, there is still some kind of ILLUSORY EXPERIENCE of terrible things happening.
A nightmare. A bad dream. Stuff that seems horrible, but in truth, is not happening. Yet still SEEMS to be happening to those "to whom" it seems to be happening.
And while these people are having these FALSE EXPERIENCES, God is already 100% awake, 100% healed and whole, 100% knowing that sickness and death are not possible.
WHY DOES GOD NOT UNDO THOSE NIGHTMARES IMMEDIATELY?
WHY DOESN'T GOD's INFINITE POWER AND IMMORTALITY stop people from killing themselves in the dream?
WHY DOESN'T THE FACT THAT GOD's MIND IS TOTALLY AWAKE, "cause" all "people" to NOT BE ABLE To create dreams of suffering?
Putting aside the illusion of linear time for a moment, God does not do that ONLY because those people having the nightmares keep REFUSING TO RECEIVE THE HELP. They use ILLUSIONS of denial, to pretend that they do not want the help, and that they need to suffer.
Even though God is offering 100% eternal life right now, immortal spirit is attempting to PRETEND to be stuck in a mortal body, confused with what can be sick and suffer and die.
And while we're in this illusion, having this nightmare, I think most people would AGREE that these "nightmares" can seem pretty dam real TO the person who is having them. Like if someone was mentally ill, having a terrible distorted vision of a horrible monster trying to eat them, freaking out and running around screaming because they THINK they're being attacked, even if they are NOT.... what is the loving response?
The loving response is TO LOVE.... always... the same.... unconditional love OFFERED at all times, but not being FORCED onto the person. Why not? Why doesn't God just wake us up out of the nightmare right now "against our will". Because we have FREE WILL, or at least love does not do that because it sees no NEED to do that, because it knows nothing real is happening.
Since God is 100% aware right now, and we, here, in this forum, for the most part, ARE NOT 100% AWARE RIGHT NOW, what that means is..... even though it's ultimately not true that we are unaware, it SEEMS like we are. We are having a false nightmare, a dream, a fantasy experience. Which SEEMS real to us.
And some of us here are experiencing what we think is real suffering. Maybe someone had a stroke, or has terrible pains, or anxiety about food, or had a heart attack, or their kidneys aren't working, or they have some "rare disease". Or maybe someone close to them is sick and it keeps them up at night worrying.
These are all false experiences, unreal nightmares, BUT the person having them DOES NOT KNOW THAT at this point. The illusion is so convincing, that we seem to have this twisted sense of "reality"... where we perceive and think these things are "really happening". And that produces ALL of the suffering, fear, and torment in this fictional world.
And none of it is real. And no-one is really sick. And there is no suffering. BUT.. .. that's not what people are SEEMING to experience.
What would love do about this? How would love respond to someone with mental illness, who hallucinates problems, who psychosomatically puts sickness into their body and writhes in torment over the pain they feel? What would love's response be?
TO LOVE THEM. TO OFFER A MIRACLE OF HEALING.
They might not accept the healing. Just as we seem to sleep "against God's will"... something which is really IMPOSSIBLE, yet which we are PRETENDING is possible....the person might refuse to JOIN YOU in being 100% awake. They might keep pretending that denial is real and possible and can block love. They might still manifesting artificial make-believe terrible sickness. They might PERCEIVE differently than you perceive.
Just because you go into true perception, or even go beyond perception to TOTAL AWARENESS of everything real, does NOT MEAN that other people automatically go there as well.
This is why Jesus was able to walk around the earth in a MORE HEALED state than other people, and OFFER THEM healing. He was still able to PERCEIVE that these "people" - whatever they are - parts of his mind or whatever - these people were having nightmares. Some split-off part of mind was still twisting "reality" and SEEMING to experience a terrible state of suffering. And to that piece of mind, that person, that suffering seemed VERY REAL and horrible.
Even though love knows that suffering is NOT REALLY THERE and has no real consequence and minds cannot be sick etc.... that none of this even happened.... IT IS STILL LOVING to offer miracles of healing to those "parts" which seem to be in need. This is part of the atonement process. The plan of salvation. That we are BRING LOVE to ALL PARTS OF MIND.
As Jesus says, he offers us salvation and love right now, but if we are not ready to receive it, HE WILL WAIT.
In time, people CAN REFUSE LOVE. Or at least seem to. They can produce forms of sickness in the body EVEN THOUGH God does not contain any real sickness. They can make illusions of being sick, and have horrible nightmares about those sicknesses being real. It is LOVING to alleviate that suffering IF THEY ARE WILLING to RECEIVE IT, through your offering of a miracle.
Just because there is total awareness or total perception, and even if that shows you there is NO DEATH and sickness is an IMPOSSIBLE ILLUSION, in time.. there is STILL a "need" for healing. That's why the Holy Spirit is here. His function here is healing, and we are supposed to share that with him, to OFFER HEALING to everyone who still seems to suffer from self-made nightmares. It is the loving thing to do, to offer a miracle, EVEN IF it is refused, and in spite of the fact that people can CHOOSE NOT TO PERCEIVE AS YOU DO.
Additionally, just because your perception is true and whole and healed, it does not STOP you from seeing what these "other people" or "split off bits of mind" - from the one whole son - are doing to themselves. It's possible to have COMPASSION for them, to recognize they are MISTAKEN and to not believe their sickness is REAL... yet to STILL OFFER HEALING of *THEIR BELIEF* that sickness is justified. And if they continue to spend time refusing to learn the curriculum, which is their free will right, they may well refuse to undo that illusion of sickness and will STILL EXPERIENCE SUFFERING, even if God can never suffer.
So yes, there IS no real sickness. Yes, there ARE no separate people. Yes, there are not even any bodies TO heal. Yes, no-one really needs real healing because healing is an illusion. BUT WHILE WE ARE HERE.... inside this dream illusion, where people DO choose to make illusions of attack and sickness, IT IS our role to offer and bring healing through love, to perform miracles, to heal the sick, to raise the dead, and to HELP "those" who seem to suffer. And they will thank you, because what they were experiencing before, even if it was an illusion, was WORSE to them than what they are experiencing now. How is that not KIND?
This is our function here. To offer love and truth to those who THINK they are really sick and suffering. To undo that suffering if they will ALLOW. To recognize they cannot be sick or suffer or die FOR THEM while they refuse to see it FOR THEMSELVES. Just because you wake up, does NOT mean "their sickness" disappears from THEIR EXPERIENCE. Otherwise, because God is awake NOW, it would be impossible for anyone to experience sickness. And truly they can't because sickness MUST therefore be AN ILLUSION, but people are still TEMPORARILY INSANE believing otherwise.
No-one needs saving, yet they do. In this dream, they do. There is healing to be performed. There are miracles to work. There are people who, if you walked up to them and asked, "would you like me to take away this cancerous growth", would say, "sure"... and you extend God's love in prayer and IT DISAPPEARS, and they are totally over the moon because they were suffering for years and thought they are going to have the NIGHTMARE of dying.
It's all mental illness, but love STILL HEALS IT. There is no real need to heal it, BUT LOVE DOES ANYWAY. Love just loves. While we dream, God wants us to awaken. While we refuse God's will, or try to, pretend to, God wills that we be happy and accept his will.
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SUFFER, even if it is just a made-up dream of made-up suffering. You don't even NEED TO HAVE a nightmare dream. You can have a HAPPIER DREAM. A dream which is gentler and softer and precedes awakening in a smooth and non-jarring way. You do not need to be sick, or tolerate it, or try to transcend it in order to deny it. IT CAN BE REMOVED. No-one has to have dreams of death and suffering and sickness and pain, EVEN IF it is just a dream. This is not God's will.
It is God's will for you to EXPERIENCE PERMANENT HEALTH AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, to no longer have that broken leg, or that missing arm, or that defective lung, or that cancer, or any of it. A broken body proves the mind is not healed, so these breaks MUST BE HEALED if the mind is to be healed. We do not need to find ways to "be at peace with it". We need to UNDO IT, in form, in the body, to prove and demonstrate the truth that we cannot be hurt against our will. No-one needs to be having a dream of limitations.
Arriving at work I encountered my first truck load of live pigs on their way to the sausage factory across the street. It was a double-decker piggy wagon complete with air holes and little pink piggy bits poking out and wiggling around. As I realized what it was, and that it was about to pull into the bacon death machine, I had a reaction.
The reaction felt like sadness coupled with anger. The anger felt like wanting to go stop it, and the sadness felt like the pigs didn't know what was about to happen to them - that they were going to be victimized. Regardless of what was happening, I was having a reaction so now I have to do a fricking forgiveness.
Ok.
So obviously my perception is mistaken, otherwise I wouldn't be upset. It's impossible to be upset about the truth. My perception was showing me that the pigs were helpless victims with no power and seemingly innocent. A voice in my mind, perhaps Jesus, said
"they know what's going to happen". But this didn't necessarily stop me reacting. Truth is though, on some higher level they do know because nothing happens but by choice, and it was really me that was having a dark experience.
So... by seeing the pigs as `innocent victims` with `nasty ego power` being wielded over them against their will, it was a strong contrast showing me where I believe certain things. And it's not about the piggies, because both the pigs and the sausage makers are part of the same ego thought system. The pigs only appear to be victims because I don't see that they chose this, and the sausage folk only seem like victimizers because I think they do something to the pigs they didn't ask for.
And what's this got to do with me? Always it's something to do with me and nothing really to do with them. I'm not upset because of the pigs. I'm not upset because of the bacon fest. I'm upset because it's showing me that I already have something in me, in my mind, which believes in something incorrect, and it's triggering it off. It's not about them, it's about me. I have to withdraw all blame from the pig mongers and also withdraw all projection of victimhood from the piggies.
The piggies are not victims. The farmers are not victimizers. The greasy sausage folk are innocent. They don't even really exist. They're not really out there. It's a dream. I'm dreaming it. So....
That means I made up this whole scenario. I made pigs. I made sausages. I made bacon factories. So secretly this reminds me that I actually made up this whole thing myself which would mean I am guilty. So the guilt I see in them is my own guilt. Hmm.
Hmm. Ok. I am flashed a memory of a time in childhood when I used to hunt butterflies, ... and kill them. I used to swat them with a tennis racket, or capture them and keep them a while but then they died because I didn't feed them etc. Or even perhaps would stick a pin in them. Vicious! ooo.. juicy pool of guilt there. I didn't know what I was doing, so it's forgivable.
So even though I made that mistake and I secretly covet bacon and sausages and want to stick a pin in the pigs, its only because I have lost touch with the truth of who I am. I forgot I am love. I forgot I am holy and innocent and have no needs. I forgot God loves me. So.. .I'm just mistaken about being guilty. Even if I did nasty things to innocent creatures, I'm still innocent because I am not in my right mind. So I'm making mistakes and not realizing it. I'm not to blame. The butterflies forgive me. I forgive me. I am forgiven not for what I have done but because... I have not really done it.
This is a dream, it hasn't happened. I'm with God. I am guiltless and sinless. I haven't done anything to anyone. God is not harmed. Real immortal life has not been changed. I have not stopped being perfect love. I am absolutely forgivable and innocent and free. God loves me 100% because he knows that pigs and butterflies are just parts of a dream that has no meaning and I gave it all the meaning it had. I used the pigs and pig farmers as skapegoats to project my own guilt so that I would have a reason to justify being guilty, which would help me to stay away from God. I wanted to be away from God so I could keep my ego and not be loved.
So... do I want to keep suffering? Am I willing to let this go? Can I let go and surrender this need to prove I am guilty? Yes.. I willingly surrender this guilt and recognize I am forgiven, I claim and own up to being innocent because none of this really happened. God loves me. Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing has died. Death isn't real. Everyone is equally innocent and holy. Only love is real.
Holy Spirit, please heal my mind and correct my thinking and remove all of this guilt and help me to remember my true innocent and that of all concerned. I let it go. I accept your truth.
Amen.
I am going out on a limb a bit to say, that Holy Spirit is a powerful healer and is the medium of miracles. He is quite capable of healing all forms of sickness on all levels including the physical. He shares the power of God. There is nothing that your holiness cannot do, and there is nothing that His holiness cannot do.
Holy Spirit doesn't just sit there on some throne winking at you while you watch thoughts go past or while you gently hand over little bits and pieces of ego. He isn't idle. He isn't there to just be some administrator or to sit and watch while you do all the work. And he's definitely not some intellect-friendly 'metaphor'.
Holy Spirit is an active agent of God who is perfectly capable of performing literal miracles, miracles which anyone on this planet would agree is a miracle. Miracles that include extraordinary healing of body parts, the growing of new limbs and organs, the removal of toxins and metal plates and artificial attachments, the correcting of unbalanced body proportions, weight loss, removal of scars, giving you hearing that you never had since birth, providing you with an entirely new set of internal organs... I mean.. there is NOTHING Holy Spirit cannot do.
Ok, this is a bit radical. This is not your ordinary A course in wimpy miracles. This is not "Oh a miracle is just a change in perception" or "a miracle is looking at things in a different way". Fuck that.
This is a course in MIRACLES, folks. It really is what it says on the can - learning how to perform real, powerful miracles. Not some watered-down nice safe little mind-training exercise program to listen to on your headphones. We are talking about the Holy Spirit wielding the POWER OF GOD to perform absolutely any correction to ANY consequences whatsoever that may have stemmed from your belief in separation, sin, guilt or fear.
The ONLY thing that is 'stopping Him' for enacting this power is YOU. Your willingness.
"Holy Spirit will correct all of the consequences of your wrong decision if you will let Him." - ACIM
ALL of the consequences. Not just little mental thoughts and psychological faux-pas.
Ok.. sounding a bit evangelical or something?
Well... the ACIM community is rather sparse and doesn't have a whole lot of leadership and doesn't also have a whole lot of experience in the 'supernatural' aspects of the Course. Most people want to sweep it under the carpet. I have suspected things about it for a long time but felt awkward saying so because it seemed like I was just sticking my neck out and nobody else seemed to agree.
Well. You go watch some videos somewhere of these supernatural churches etc where certain branches of Christians have, over the centuries, come to learn not only how to access Holy Spirit's power but how to wield it in such ways as to perform literally 'real miracles'. Their theology might be riddled with errors but they are STRONG in their application of Holy Spirit to really heal serious problems.
People getting out of wheelchairs. People being cured of cancer. People having completely new organs grown in place of diseased ones. The complete removal of blindness and deafness. Sure some of it is faked, but in many cases it is very genuine. These are the kinds of things that the disciples of Jesus did when they went about their Father's business. These are the kinds of things Jesus Himself performed, WITH Holy Spirit, to raise the dead and change water to wine and feed the 5 thousand and cure the blind and all the rest of it. THE SAME HOLY SPIRIT IS IN YOU, waiting for you to to LET HIM TEACH YOU TO HEAL. He's not some intellectual substitute version of Holy Spirit. He is the power of God!
"I will heal as I let Him teach me to Heal" -- doesn't just mean, oh, I'll sort of have some nice comfortable tidying up of my insides. It means, Holy Spirit can HEAL ANYTHING and He will teach you how to do so with Him, "AS I LET HIM". There is no limit to what you are capable of.
How will you overlook your brothers sins and your own and demonstrate that His attack has had no effect on you, literally, physically, if you do not have the power of Holy Spirit to reverse all physical ailments and cure all diseases and evidence of attack? Are you going to do that on your own with your little ego self? Nope. But with Holy Spirit, you can become absolutely invulnerable.
Yah I know.... sounds far fetched. Sounds "out there". Too radical. This is what A Course in Miracles wants for us. Do you think Jesus only gave us a nice watered down Course that doesn't have the real 'meaty' stuff in it? No. Jesus wants us to do what He has done and more. And that means, pretty big fricking powerful miracles. You are a miracle worker, not a receptionist.
"If you can accept the ONE GENERALIZATION NOW, there will be no need to learn from many smaller lessons."
Effectively what the Holy Spirit is trying to teach you is ONE LESSON. This one lesson is to learn how to "teach only love", because you are only love. It's to have a single response of love in all situations, to use love's miraculous power to heal all sickness and to solve all problems. To recognize no orders of difficulty or hierarchies of illusion, to see all forms of suffering as the same effect having the same ONE cause. One problem with one solution to rule them all.
Over time, in the application of what may seem like more specific lessons, ultimately what you are LEARNING is really to simply be as God created you. To be loving. To be singular, or ONE. One in character and substance and nature and identity and attitude and response. One single way of always consistently being the same, in complete disregard for any illusions of forms or differences. Completely ignoring orders of magnitude or difficulty or importance or seriousness or size or duration or any other property.
As we gradually "polish" our minds from seeming to be fragmented, with different responses for different people, different relationships with different individuals, different reactions to different objects, different meanings for different things, we gradually GENERALIZE the learning and move into a much more ABSTRACT state of mind. A much more singular state of mind, whole and one and unified and undivided and free from conflicts. Being so one, this state of mind - miracle mindedness, houses the power of love and truth and sees all things from a single perspective.
This is the ONE LESSON which the Holy Spirit is teaching, behind all the lessons in the workbook, behind all the text material and all thoughts and life lessons/trials, behind all relationships and dramas, the simple movement away from complexity and multiplicities of action, towards simple unification, integration, wholeness and oneness. This lays the groundwork for one-mindedness, which is a state of complete abstract purity and wholeness, in which the entirety of everything acts as one with no conflict or difference or adjustment to conditions.
Unconditional love is completely ignorance of conditions. It ignores the form of problems, the shapes of bodies, the types of sickness, the reasons for their supposed causation, the worldly powers, the forces of nature, the laws of physics, the many rules and regulations. It doesn't even care to need to know how something came about, to analyze it or diagnose it or figure out the complicated pathways of cause and effect. It simply APPLIES ITSELF singularly by giving itself and sharing itself, to increase itself and to supply the lack - the lack of love, the lack of unification, or seeming unwholeness, which is the basis for all suffering.
Learn this ONE LESSON, and you are done with the curriculum forever. See past the illusion of separations, which gives rise to countless numbers of bits and pieces. Look to the one vision to show you the one true reality. And you will rise above the fragmented battlefield into the wholeness of light.
"The secret of salvation is but this: That YOU are doing this UNTO YOURSELF." "This single lesson learned will set you free from suffering, WHATEVER form it takes."
"The Holy Spirit will repeat this ONE inclusive lesson of deliverance, until it has been learned, REGARDLESS of the form of suffering that brings you pain. Whatever hurt you bring to Him, He will make answer with this very simple truth. For this one answer TAKES AWAY the cause of every form of sorrow and of pain. The form affects His answer not at all, for He would teach you but the SINGLE cause of all of them, no matter WHAT their form. And you will understand that miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo."
"My one lesson, which I must teach as I learned, is that no perception which is out of accord with the judgment of the Holy Spirit CAN be justified." "That is why you must teach only ONE lesson. If you are to be conflict free yourselves, you must learn ONLY from the Holy Spirit, and teach ONLY by Him."
"We said before that the message of the Crucifixion was teach ONLY love, for that is what you ARE. This is the ONE lesson which is perfectly unified, because it is the only lesson which IS one. And only BY teaching it can YOU learn it."
"As the teacher of God advances in his training, he learns one lesson with increasing thoroughness. He does not make his own decisions; he asks his Teacher for His answer, and it is this he follows as his guide for action. This becomes easier and easier, as the teacher of God learns to give up his own judgment."
"But the Holy Spirit teaches one lesson and applies it to ALL individuals in ALL situations. Being conflict free, He maximizes ALL efforts and ALL results. By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS. Its application does not matter. It is ALWAYS maximal."
"Thus is YOUR healing everything the world requires, that it may be healed. It needs ONE lesson that has perfectly been learned."
"As you perceive more and more common elements in ALL situations, the transfer of your training, under the Holy Spirit's guidance increases and becomes generalized. Gradually, you learn to apply it to everyone and everything, for its applicability IS universal. When this has been accomplished, perception and knowledge have become so similar that they share the unification of the Laws of God. What is One cannot be perceived as separate, and the denial of the separation IS the reinstatement of knowledge."
"The purpose is to train the mind to generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is as applicable to one situation as it is to another."
"the impairment of the ability to generalize is a crucial learning failure" "Place cause and effect in their true sequence in one respect, and the learning will generalize and transform the world."
"The specificity of the ego's thinking, then, results in a spurious kind of generalization, which is really not abstract at all. It will respond in certain specific ways to all stimuli which it perceives as related. In contrast, the Soul reacts in the same way to everything it knows is true, and does not respond at all to anything else."
"Miracles demonstrate that learning has occurred under the right guidance, for learning is invisible, and what has been learned can be recognized ONLY by its RESULTS. Its GENERALIZATION is demonstrated as you use it in more and more situations. You will recognize that you have learned there is no order of difficulty in miracles, when you have applied them to ALL situations. For there IS no situation to which miracles do not apply, and by applying them TO all situations, you will gain the REAL world."
"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you CAN see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His RESULTS, you will understand where He MUST be, and finally KNOW what He is."
The idea for today is an extension of the previous one. You do not think of light in terms of strength and darkness in terms of weakness. That is because your idea of what seeing means is tied up with the body, and its eyes and brain. This is why you believe that you can change what you see by keeping little bits of glass or other clear material before your eyes held in a frame or placed against the eye. These are among the many magical beliefs that come from the conviction you are a body, and the body's eyes can see.
You also believe the body's brain can think. If you but understood the nature of thought, you could but laugh at this insane idea. It is as if you thought you held the match that lights the sun, and gives it all its warmth; or that you held the universe imprisoned in your hand, securely bound until you let it go. Yet this is no more foolish than to believe the body's eyes can see; the brain can think.
It is God's strength in you that is the light in which you see, as it is His Mind with which you think. His strength denies your weakness. It is your weakness that sees through the body's eyes, peering about in darkness to behold the likeness of itself; the small, the weak, the sickly and the dying, those in need, the helpless and afraid, the sad, the poor, the starving and the joyless. These are seen through eyes which cannot see and cannot bless.
Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them. It unites with light, of which it is a part. It sees itself. It brings the light in which your Self appears. In darkness you perceive a self that is not there. Strength is the truth about you; weakness is an idol falsely worshipped, and adored that strength may be dispelled, and darkness rule where God appointed that there should be light.
Strength comes from truth, and shines with light its Source has given it; weakness reflects the darkness of its maker. It is sick and looks on sickness, which is like itself. Truth is a savior, and can only will for happiness and peace for everyone. It gives its strength to everyone who asks, in limitless supply. It sees that lack in anyone would be a lack in all, and so it gives its light that all may see, and benefit as one. Its strength is shared, that it may bring to all the miracle in which they will unite in purpose and forgiveness and in love.
Weakness, which looks in darkness, cannot see a purpose in forgiveness and in love. It sees all others different from itself, and nothing in the world which it would share. It judges and condemns, but does not love. In darkness it remains to hide itself, and dreams that it is strong and conquering, a victor over limitations which but grow in darkness to enormous size. It fears and it attacks and hates itself, and darkness covers everything it sees, leaving it dreams as fearful as itself. No miracles are here, but only hate. It separates itself from what it sees, while light and strength perceive themselves as one.
The light of strength is not the light you see. It does not change and flicker and go out. It does not shift from night to day and back to darkness 'til the morning comes again. The light of strength is constant, sure as love, forever glad to give itself away because it cannot give but to Itself. No one can ask in vain to share its sight, and none who enters its abode can leave without a miracle before his eyes, and strength and light abiding in his heart.
The strength in you will offer you the light and guide your seeing, so you do not dwell on idle shadows which the body's eyes provide for self-deception. Strength and light unite in you, and where they meet your Self stands ready to embrace you as Its own. Such is the meeting place we try today to find and rest in, for the peace of God is where your Self, His Son, is waiting now to meet Itself again, and be as One.
Let us give 20 minutes twice today to join this meeting. Let yourself be brought unto your Self. Its strength will be the light in which the gift of sight is given you. Leave, then, the dark a little while today, and we will practice seeing in the light, closing the body's eyes, and asking truth to show us how to find the meeting place of self and Self, where light and strength are one.
After the morning meeting, we will use the day in preparation for the time at night when we will meet again in hope and trust. Let us repeat as often as we can the idea for today, and recognize that we are being introduced to sight, and led away from darkness to the light where only miracles can be perceived.
What is a sense of sickness but a sense of limitation? Of a splitting OFF and separating FROM? A gap perceived BETWEEN ourselves and what is seen as health? The good is seen OUTSIDE; the evil, IN. And thus is sickness separating OFF the self from good, and KEEPING evil there. God is the ALTERNATE to dreams of fear. Who shares in them can NEVER share in Him. But who WITHDRAWS his mind from sharing them IS sharing Him. There IS no other choice. Except you share it, NOTHING can exist, and YOU exist because God shared His Will with you, that His creation might create.
It is the SHARING of the evil dreams, of hate and malice, bitterness and death, of sin and suffering, of pain and loss, that makes them real. UNSHARED they are perceived as meaningless. The fear is gone from them BECAUSE YOU DID NOT GIVE THEM YOUR SUPPORT. Where fear has gone, there love MUST come, because there ARE but these alternatives. Where one appears, the other DISappears. And which you SHARE becomes the only one you HAVE. You HAVE the one which you accept, because it is the only one you WANT. You share NO evil dreams, if you forgive the dreamer, and perceive that he is NOT the dream he made. And so he CANNOT be a part of YOURS, from which you BOTH are free. Forgiveness SEPARATES the dreamer from the evil dream, and thus releases him.
Remember if you SHARE an evil dream, you will believe you ARE the dream you share. And, fearing it, you will not WANT to know your own identity, because you think that IT is fearful. And you WILL deny your Self, and walk upon an alien ground which your Creator did not make, and where you seem to be a "something" you are not. You WILL make war upon your Self, Which SEEMS to be your enemy, and WILL attack your brother, as a part of what you hate. There is no compromise. You are your Self, or an illusion. What CAN be between illusion and the truth? A middle ground, where you can be a thing that is NOT you, MUST be a dream, and CANNOT be the truth.
You have conceived a little gap between illusions and the truth to be the place where all your safety lies, and where your Self is safely hidden by what you have made. Here is a world established that is sick, and this the world the body's eyes perceive. Here are the sounds it hears, the voices which its ears were made to hear. Yet sights and sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. It cannot see nor hear. It does not know what seeing IS; what listening is FOR. It is as little able to perceive as it can judge, or understand, or know. Its eyes are blind, its ears are deaf. It can NOT think, and so it cannot HAVE effects.
What is there God created can be sick? And what that He created not can BE? Let not your eyes behold a dream; your ears bear witness to illusion. They were made to look upon a world that is not there; to hear the voices that can make no sounds. Yet are there other sounds and other sights which can be seen and heard and UNDERSTOOD. For eyes and ears are senses without sense, and what they see and hear they but report. It is not THEY that hear and see, but YOU, who PUT TOGETHER every jagged piece, each senseless scrap and shred of evidence, and MAKE a witness to the world you want.
Let not the body's ears and eyes perceive these countless fragments seen within the gap that YOU imagined, and let THEM persuade their maker his imaginings were real. Creation proves reality because it SHARES the function ALL creation shares. It is not made of little bits of glass, a piece of wood, a thread or two perhaps, and put together to ATTEST its truth. Reality does not depend on THIS. There IS no gap which separates the truth from dreams and from illusions. Truth has left no room for them in ANY place or time. For It fills every place and every time, and makes them wholly indivisible.
You who believe there is a little gap between you do not understand that it is HERE that you are kept as prisoners in a world perceived to be EXISTING here. The world you see does not exist BECAUSE the place where you perceive it is not real. The gap is carefully concealed in fog, and misty pictures rise to cover it with vague, uncertain forms and changing shapes, forever unsubstantial and unsure. Yet in the gap is NOTHING. And there ARE no awesome secrets and no darkened tombs where terror rises from the bones of death. Look at the little gap, and you behold the innocence and emptiness of sin that you will see within yourself, when you have lost the fear of recognizing love.
All sickness is just a form of GUILT. And removing this guilt makes sickness IMPOSSIBLE.
Guilt induces sickness because it demands punishment. It is an agreement to suffer. It is the result of NOT forgiving sin, thus believing sin is real. And once sin is real, you must become guilty and attacked, self destructive, suicidal, ready to suffer and die. Unforgiveness of sin is the root of all sickness. Removing all GUILT removes all sickness. A person is not "sick"... they are GUILTY, this guilt is IN THE MIND, in its unforgiving attitude, and THAT is what needs to be healed. Undoing this guilt, which is atonement, which is forgiveness, due to recognizing there is no sin, is the CURE which GUARANTEES PERMANENT HEALTH.
"Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea."
"If you WITHHOLD agreement, and accept the part YOU play in making sickness real, the other mind cannot project its guilt without your aid in LETTING it perceive itself as separate and apart from YOU. Thus is the body NOT perceived as sick by BOTH your minds, from SEPARATE points of view. UNITING with a brother's mind prevents the CAUSE of sickness, and perceived effects. Healing is the effect of minds that join, as sickness comes from minds that separate."
"Do not allow your brother to be sick, for if he is, have YOU abandoned him to his own dream, by SHARING it with him. He has not seen the cause of sickness where it is, and YOU have overlooked the gap between you, where the sickness has been bred. Thus are you JOINED in sickness, to preserve the little gap unhealed, where sickness is kept carefully protected, cherished, and upheld by firm belief, lest God should come to bridge the little gap that leads to Him."
"For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."
"ALL sickness comes from separation. When the separation is denied, it goes. For it IS gone as soon as the idea which brought it has been healed and been replaced by sanity. Sickness and sin are seen as consequence and cause, in a relationship kept hidden from awareness, that it may be carefully preserved from reason's light."
"Guilt ASKS FOR punishment, and its request is granted. NOT in truth, but in the world of shadows and illusions BUILT on sin. The Son of God perceives what he would see, because perception IS a wish fulfilled."
--- Part of lesson 140 "Only salvation can be said to cure":
"Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take. ***Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt.*** Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. ***It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible.*** And that is cure indeed. For sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return.
Peace be to you who have been cured in God, and not in idle dreams. For cure must come from holiness, and holiness can not be found where sin is cherished. God abides in holy temples. He is barred where sin has entered. Yet there is no place where He is not. And therefore sin can have no home in which to hide from His beneficence .There is no place where holiness is not, and nowhere sin and sickness can abide.
This is the thought that cures. It does not make distinctions among unrealities. Nor does it seek to heal what is not sick, unmindful where the need for healing is. This is no magic. It is merely an appeal to truth, which cannot fail to heal and heal forever. It is not a thought which judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real.
Let us not try today to seek to cure what cannot suffer sickness. Healing must be sought but where it is, and then applied to what is sick so that it can be cured. There is no remedy the world provides that can effect a change in anything. The mind that brings illusions to the truth is really changed. There is no change but this. For how can one illusion differ from another but in attributes that have no substance, no reality, no core, and nothing that is truly different?
Today we seek to change our minds about the source of sickness, for we seek a cure for all illusions, not another shift among them. We will try today to find the source of healing, which is in our minds because our Father placed it there for us. It is not further from us than ourselves. It is as near to us as our own thoughts, so close it is impossible to lose. We need but seek it and it must be found.
We will not be misled today by what appears to us as sick. We go beyond appearances today, and reach the source of healing from which nothing is exempt. We will succeed to the extent to which we realize that there can never be a meaningful distinction made between what is untrue and equally untrue. Here there are no degrees, and no beliefs that what does not exist is truer in some forms than others. All of them are false, and can be cured because they are not true.
So do we lay aside our amulets, our charms and medicines, our chants and bits of magic in whatever form they took. We will be still and listen for the Voice of healing which will cure all ills as one, restoring saneness to the Son of God. No voice but This can cure. Today we hear a single Voice Which speaks to us of truth where all illusions end, and peace returns to the eternal quiet home of God."
In this world, nothing gets done unless you put in some effort. And that's a chore, meaning that making stuff requires work. This isn't really natural to us - we are creators. We should be able to cause things to happen just by will alone, by mind power.
But we made the world as a result of being unwilling, which means it's not a world of will, it's a world that seems unwilling to do anything. So you have to then force it.
When bits of trash fall on the ground, they will stay there forever, unless someone does something to pick them up. If you want to "create" something here, which really means making something, there is now a craft to it, which requires skill and effort because all the objects are different.
At first, the thing you want to make doesn't exist at all, you have a blank slate, an empty canvas, a nothingness. You have no idea what it will be like, but you have to start somewhere. This is daunting, to take nothingness and make it into something.
The process of making is a process of translating higher-level abstract mind-stuff into form, which is an act of materialising, or at least sculpting and forming and reshaping and assembling and building from parts and pieces and materials.
To make anything, you have to take it from an idea to an implementation. But at first, you will have no idea how to do that. You will have to push, and force, and try to wrangle stuff to get it to become a bit more finite, more concrete, to nail things down, commit to decision, to move things forward and see it "take shape" as it turns into form.
That can be difficult because it means trying to take an empty nothingness and somehow "make" something out of it, which means having to put limits in place, define things, make lots of decisions, design and plan, and gradually refine it.
You start with a basic template perhaps, a vague idea, and you start somewhere and put some pieces roughly in place, but it's not finished and you have a lot to figure out. You don't even as yet know how it's going to end up, because you don't as yet understand how to even move forward with it.
So in order to push it forward you have to do some work on it, because if you don't it will just sit there, lifeless and doing nothing, because you're really make it out of death. And even if you do a bit of the work, it's not finished, it will just stop whenever you stop, because it has no real life of its own. It can't become anything until you force it to.
So then making becomes an act of forcing and applying effort and energy and attacking the thing to overpower it and coerce it into taking on a certain form, as an accumulation of actions. And gradually as you apply this effort you reshape the thing and refine it and it starts to turn into something.
Eventually with enough time and effort you can get through the seeming brick wall of nothingness, through all the uncertainty and difficult lack of definition, and pin things down. It's a process of taking something in the mind and trying to make it physical. You have to physically go through the motions, apply the tools, click the buttons, do all the little annoying steps, in order to get to the end result. Sometimes this can be painstaking.
This is a translation process, and it takes time. And unless you keep hammering away at it, it won't happen. Again and again you have to keep gong back to it to do more to it, to keep building, to keep growing it, to keep moving it forward toward the goal, otherwise it just sits there lifeless and incomplete. And no-one's going to do it for you or come along and rescue you, unless maybe you pay them.
And then once you complete the thing you're making, when you think it's good enough, and done, maybe you're happy with it, and maybe you recognize it's ended up a bit shit anyway. Because the things we make in form and from materials in spacetime are all very limited and strange and not really like the level of mind where anything is possible. Have you seen people's DIY disasters?
You have to make do and tolerate limits and put up with imperfections, to accept choices for one color and not another, to go with some option that partially works and know that the other options had something you're missing. What you end up with is a strange collection of stuff that is very limited and unwhole and imperfect, but it'll have to do, because that's as good as physicality gets. You're forced to have to "conform" to form, which means accepting limits and separations and exclusions.
This is all unnatural for the mind and soul, because it means trying to work within the confines of a very awkward system of limits, in which every little part of the thing you're trying to make has to be undertaken personally and with effort and force, to sculpt it and mold it and make it be something. That takes a lot of time and patience and commitment.
You can easily be put off when the next step is unclear, when you don't have the experience, when you don't know how it's going to look or what's going to work. When you have to figure things out as you go along, and the whole thing seems like you're just winging it, making it up as you go.
And then when you get to the end you don't even know if what you made is really the most ideal or best it could be, because you didn't have the foresight to be able to produce perfection. And what you then made is quirky and odd and maybe partly does the job. They you'll probably have to go back over it and fix stuff and polish it up, to do more work on it based on hindsight.
Making is certainly a strange process. But without making, nothing in this world gets done. The world just stays much the same way as it is. Your "life" stays stagnant, your home remains undecorated, your projects remain unfinished and you end up stuck in a rut. If you want things to be different in form, you have to take action. Physical action and effort. You have to try.
Compare that to heaven where to create you simply will what you want to exist and there it is, perfect and whole and complete, instantly effortless, with no time or space involved, no forcing or constant refinements, just simply direct perfect results every time, and joyfully so. How very different that is to getting anything to happen in spacetime through labor.
This is why life is a bit of a chore, and why sometimes people just can't be bothered to do the work. It's tiresome, unless you can find some way to enjoy the process itself, enjoy the craft, or feel some sense of accomplishment or purpose to why you're doing all that work. Maybe if it's of service to others you can feel better about it. Life here is hard work, in general, because the world is difficult in general. But maybe it can be repurposed and seen in a better way.
"You on earth have no conception of limitlessness, for the world you seem to live in IS a world of limits. In this world, it is NOT true that anything without order of difficulty can occur."
"You still could not will against Him, and that is why you have no control over the world you made. It is NOT a world of will, because it is governed by the desire to be unlike Him. And this desire IS NOT WILL. 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."
Cure is a word which cannot be applied to any remedy the world accepts as beneficial. What the world perceives as therapeutic is but what will make the body "better." When it tries to heal the mind, it sees no separation from the body where it thinks the mind exists. Its forms of healing thus must substitute illusion for illusion. One belief in sickness takes another form, and so the patient now perceives himself as well.
He is not healed. He merely had a dream that he was sick, and in the dream he found a magic formula to make him well. Yet he has not awakened from the dream, and so his mind remains exactly as it was before. He has not seen the light that would awaken him and end the dream. What difference does the content of a dream make in reality? One either sleeps or wakens. There is nothing in between.
The happy dreams the Holy Spirit brings are different from the dreams of the world, where one can merely dream he is awake. The dreams forgiveness lets the mind perceive do not induce another form of sleep, so that the dreamer dreams another dream. His happy dreams are heralds of the dawn of truth upon the mind. They lead from sleep to gentle waking, so that dreams are gone. And thus they cure for all eternity.
Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take. Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. And that is cure indeed. For sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return.
Peace be to you who have been cured in God, and not in idle dreams. For cure must come from holiness, and holiness can not be found where sin is cherished. God abides in holy temples. He is barred where sin has entered. Yet there is no place where He is not. And therefore sin can have no home in which to hide from His beneficence.
There is no place where holiness is not, and nowhere sin and sickness can abide. This is the thought that cures. It does not make distinctions among unrealities. Nor does it seek to heal what is not sick, unmindful where the need of for healing is. This is no magic. It is merely an appeal to truth, which cannot fail to heal and heal forever. It is not a thought which judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real.
Let us not try today to seek to cure what cannot suffer sickness. Healing must be sought but where it is, and then applied to what is sick so that it can be cured. There is no remedy the world provides that can effect a change in anything. The mind that brings illusions to the truth is really changed. There is no change but this. For how can one illusion differ from another but in attributes which have no substance, no reality, no core, and nothing that is truly different?
Today we seek to change our minds about the source of sickness, for we seek a cure for all illusions, not another shift among them. We will try today to find the source of healing, which is in our minds because our Father placed it there for us. It is not further from us than ourselves. It is as near to us as our own thoughts, so close it is impossible to lose. We need but seek it and it must be found.
We will not be misled today by what appears to us as sick. We go beyond appearances today, and reach the source of healing from which nothing is exempt. We will succeed to the extent to which we realize that there can never be a meaningful distinction made between what is untrue and equally untrue. Here there are no degrees, and no beliefs that what does not exist is truer in some forms than others. All of them are false, and can be cured because they are not true.
So do we lay aside our amulets, our charms and medicines, our chants and bits of magic in whatever form they took. We will be still and listen for the Voice of healing which will cure all ills as one, restoring saneness to the Son of God. No voice but This can cure. Today we hear a single Voice Which speaks to us of truth where all illusions end, and peace returns to the eternal quiet home of God.
We waken hearing Him, and let Him speak to us five minutes as the day begins, and end the day by listening again five minutes more before we go to sleep. Our only preparation is to let our interfering thoughts be laid aside, not separately, but all of them as one. They are the same. We have no need to make them different, and thus delay the time when we can hear our Father speak to us. We hear Him now. We come to Him today.
With nothing in our hands to which we cling, with lifted hearts and listening minds we pray:
"Only salvation can be said to cure.
Speak to us, Father, that we may be healed."
And we will feel salvation cover us with soft protection, and with peace so deep that no illusion can disturb our minds, nor offer proof to us that it is real. This will we learn today. And we will say our prayer for healing hourly, and take a minute as the hour strikes to hear the answer to our prayer be given us as we attend in silence and in joy. This is the day when healing comes to us. This is the day when separation ends, and we remember Who we really are.
You who believe that God is fear made but ONE substitution. It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of fragmentation for wholeness. It has become splintered and subdivided and divided again, over and over, that it is now almost impossible to perceive it once was one, and still IS what it was. That ONE error, which brought truth to illusion, infinity to time, and life to death, was all you ever made. Your whole world rests upon it. Everything you see reflects it. And every special relationship you ever made is PART of it.
You have expressed surprise at hearing how VERY different is reality from what YOU see. You do not realize the magnitude of that ONE error. It was so vast and so COMPLETELY incredible, that from it, a world of total unreality HAD to emerge. What else COULD come of it? Its fragmented ASPECTS are fearful enough, as you begin to LOOK at them. But nothing you have ever seen BEGINS to show you the enormity of the ORIGINAL error, which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and TO FORCE YOU TO FURTHER SUBSTITUTIONS.
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. For truth extends INWARD, where the idea of loss is meaningless, and only INCREASE is conceivable. Do you REALLY think it strange that a world in which EVERYTHING is backward and upside down, arose from this? IT WAS INEVITABLE. For truth brought to THIS could only remain within in quiet, and take no part in all the mad projection by which this world was made.
Call it not sin, but madness, for such it was, and so it still remains. Invest it not with guilt, for guilt implies it was accomplished IN REALITY. And, above all, BE NOT AFRAID OF IT. When you seem to see some twisted form of the original error rise to frighten you, say only, 'God is NOT fear, but love,' and it will disappear. THE TRUTH WILL SAVE YOU. It has NOT left you, to go out into the mad world and so DEPART FROM YOU. Inward is sanity; INsanity is OUTSIDE you. You but BELIEVE it is the other way; that truth is OUTSIDE, and error and guilt within.
Your little, senseless substitutions, touched with insanity, and swirling lightly off on a mad course like a feather dancing insanely in the wind, HAVE no substance. They fuse and merge and separate in shifting and totally meaningless patterns, which need not be judged at all. To judge them INDIVIDUALLY is pointless. Their tiny differences in form are not REAL differences at all. NONE OF THEM MATTERS. THAT they have in common, and nothing else, but what else is NECESSARY to make them all the same? Let them go, dancing in the wind, dipping and turning 'til they disappear from sight, far, far OUTSIDE you. And turn you to the stately calm within, where, in holy stillness, dwells the living God you never left, and Who never left you.
The Holy Spirit takes you gently by the hand, and retraces WITH you your mad journey OUTSIDE yourself, leading you gently back to the truth and safety within. He brings all your insane projections and your wild substitutions which YOU have placed OUTSIDE you, to the truth. Thus, He REVERSES the course of insanity, and restores you to reason. In your relationship where He has taken charge of everything at your request, He has set the course inward, to the truth you SHARE. In the mad world OUTSIDE you, nothing CAN be shared, but only SUBSTITUTED, and sharing and substituting have NOTHING in common in reality.
Within yourselves, you love each other with perfect love. Here is holy ground, in which no substitutes can enter, and where only the TRUTH about each other can abide. Here you are joined in God, as much together as you are with Him. The original error has not entered here, nor ever will. Here is the radiant truth, to which the Holy Spirit submitted your relationship. Let Him bring it here, where YOU would have it be. Give Him but a little faith in each other, to help Him show you that no substitute you made for Heaven can keep you from it.
In you there is no separation, and no substitute can keep you from each other. Your reality was GOD's creation, and HAS no substitute. You are so firmly joined in truth, that only God is there. And He could NEVER accept something else INSTEAD of you. He loves you both, equally and as one. And as He loves you, so you ARE. You are NOT joined together by illusions, but in the Thought so holy and so perfect that illusions cannot remain to darken the holy place in which you stand together. God is with you, my brothers. Let us join in Him in peace and gratitude, and accept His gift of our most holy and perfect reality, that we share in Him.
Heaven is restored to all the Sonship through your relationship. For in it lies the Sonship, whole and beautiful, safe in your love. Heaven has answered quietly, for all illusions have been gently brought unto the truth in you, and Love has shined upon you, blessing your relationship with truth. God and His whole Creation has entered it together. How lovely and how holy is your relationship, with the truth shining upon it! Heaven beholds it, and rejoices that you have let it come to you. And God Himself is glad that your relationship is as it was created. The universe within you stands with you together. And Heaven looks with love on what is joined in it, along with its Creator.
Whom God hath called should hear no substitutes. Their call is but an echo of the original error which shattered Heaven. For what became of peace, in those who heard? Return with me to Heaven, walking together out of this world, and through another to the loveliness and joy the other holds within it. Would you still further weaken and break apart what is already broken and hopeless? Is it HERE that you would look for happiness? Or would you not prefer to HEAL what has been broken, and join in making whole what has been ravaged by separation and disease?
You have been called, together, to the most holy function that this world contains. It is the ONLY one that has no limits, and that reaches out to every broken fragment of the Sonship, with healing and uniting comfort. This is offered YOU, in your holy relationship. Accept it HERE, and you WILL give as you have accepted and received. The peace of God is given you, with the glowing purpose in which you join. The holy light that brought you together MUST extend, as YOU accept it.
The physical properties of matter, this universe, enacts the ego's law of separation between cause and effect. Every single thing which happens in this universe stems from this fundamental canvas of separation.
For one thing to do something to another thing and not experience the same effects, is separation. The laws of physics even tell us that an action produces an equal but opposite reaction - not the same reaction at all but one completely different.
In this world therefore, what applies to one thing does not apply to another. There is no equality. It therefore becomes "possible" to do something in isolation in this world, and have it affect only an isolated part of the world, and perhaps not even effect the person who does it at all.
Another way to put this is that this world allows the ego to get away with murdering God. Its pictorial statement that cause is separate from effect is a statement that God has been separated from His son. It is also therefore an attack on His Son and therefore a picture of the crucifixion of His son.
The way that the ego gets away with murder, is to suggest that it is capable of doing something to God, causing God in some way, but that the effects produced by that attack affect God only, and not the ego self. Therefore the ego self "gets away with it" by separating itself off from the effects. It claims that what applies to God does not apply to you, and therefore you can produce attack without experiencing the results.
This ENTIRE UNIVERSE is set up based on this. ACIM even explicitly says this: "This world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son." Also in chapter 27 there is an entire section titled "The picture of crucifixion" where Jesus goes into this more.
The physical universe was made by the ego to depict what it would be like for God's son to be crucified, ie murdered and attacked and rendered separate from God. To be separate from God is to be separate from Cause, and therefore cause and effect are separate in this universe, down to the subatomic particle.
Even the idea of space and time, that there could be something which applies in one place or time and not another, is an idea of the separation between cause and effect, and Jesus states in the Course that both space and time are merely beliefs. That doesn't mean you have a belief ABOUT space and time, it means space-time ITSELF is a belief in the larger mind, and is therefore an illusion.
If it were not for this entire world, this entire universe, being based on this separation from Cause, it would be IMPOSSIBLE for you do any of the things you do "in life". You could not use a knife to slice an apple - if the effects which apply to the apple apply to the knife, the apple would have to equally cut the knife. You would not be able to eat food and digest it, the food would have to eat you and digest you also.
Nothing that we call "life" in this universe would be possible without the separation of cause and effect playing out.
Now, here is a VERY important point to make. You can change your mind about this world and work on changing what seem to be your personal beliefs "about" the world, correcting your thoughts and perceptions in terms of undoing your inner belief in separation from Cause. BUT, even if you achieve that, what is to become of the physical universe?
If it persists, it IS still a picture of crucifixion. It is still a physicalized expression of an idea of death and murder. It is still being run by laws of separation and conflict. Everything that takes place in it is un-heavenly and an attack. Every way that every single object moves and interacts with other objects symbolizes and IS the belief that cause and effect are separate - which ultimately is the belief that God and His Son are separate.
You could seem to be awake in the world and yet if the world continues to govern what happens to you, if you have no apparent power to undo it or change it, if you are subject to death, if you cannot heal the sick and undo disease, if you cannot cause objects to move or to change into other objects, then you are BOUND by the laws of the ego. That's a fact.
How can this be allowed to persist, thought to be in some way holy and real, as we stay in this world, confined by this world's laws, completely governed by them, still subject to aging and DEATH, and claim that we are enlightened? There is much more to the truth than this. This world was made as an attack. That's all it was made for. You can see it as a beautiful illusion but does it undo it?
This world's fundamental functioning, it's separation-based operational laws, is precisely what we derive our egoic beliefs from. We base our logic and reasoning and beliefs and values on top of how this separation of cause and effect operates. This leads to an "automatic" ego mind which believes and THINKS just like this universe functions, as though this universe makes sense and is normal and natural and true.
And if we are to reunite cause and effect in our awareness, in our mind, then this should mean that we re-gain access to a causal power which was completely separate from us when we believed what the world shows us. Its picture of death is completely the opposite of real life.
Its claim that cause and effect are separate is a law which MIRACLES break. Miracles come to demonstrate that this world's entire foundation, the fabric of this "reality" (bullshit) is simply false and not true and not what is running the show. Miracles demonstrate that cause and effect are NOT separate, because they come from a mind where the two are one.
Miracles therefore are capable of overriding everything which arises from this world, beyond the ego's laws, and that literally means your causal power is capable of doing absolutely anything which this world would consider physically impossible.
In this world an apple is not an orange. To a miracle-worker, an apple can be turned into an orange. In this world, throwing a ball at someone's head will hurt them. To a miracle-worker, throwing a ball at their head will stop the ball mid-air and turn it into a butterfly which then lands on the person's head and kisses them. In this world when a match is taken to a flammable liquid it will ignite and explode. To a miracle-worker, the match will be cancelled out and nothing will happen, and maybe even that flammable liquid will be turned into wine.
Miracles. Miracles. Miracles. Miracles which completely DEFY absolutely every physical law and limitation, every way that one thing does something to something else against its will, and any way that one cause seems to produce an effect on something other than itself. Think you can punch Jesus in the face and knock him out and leave him with a black eye? Have a try.
The Son of God is NOT subject to this stupid illusory world and its stupid pretend laws and made-up rules and fictional regulations. Jesus tells us in the course, literally, "there is nothing you cannot do". NOTHING. NO-THING. Not just just some small things, not just some big things, not just a few slightly miraculous-seeming hints at something magical. You can literally do ANYTHING. Including moving a mountain.
Is this too far fetched? Is your mind too scary to wield such power? Are you too afraid of the potential of this, being so profoundly abundant that you can manifest anything you need at any time directly from God's unlimited supply, without having to go through stupid ego laws to slave and work hard to earn ridiculous bits of paper and metal so that you can buy what you need at a store? You are far more capable than that. BY FAR!
There is no limit. "There is nothing my holiness cannot do."
You live by symbols. You have made up names for everything you see. Each one becomes a separate entity, identified by its own name. By this you carve it out of unity. By this you designate its special attributes, and set it off from other things by emphasizing space surrounding it. This space you lay between all things to which you give a different name; all happenings in terms of place and time; all bodies which are greeted with a name.
This space you see as setting off all things from one another is the means by which the world's perception is achieved. You see something where nothing is, and see as well nothing where there is unity; a space between all things, between all things and you. Thus do you think that you have given life in separation. By this split you think you are established as a unity which functions with an independent will.
What are these names by which the world becomes a series of discrete events, of things ununified, of bodies kept apart and holding bits of mind as separate awarenesses? You gave these names to them, establishing perception as you wished to have perception be. The nameless things were given names, and thus reality was given them as well. For what is named is given meaning, and will then be seen as meaningful, a cause of true effects, with consequence inherent in itself.
This is the way reality is made by partial vision, purposefully set against the given truth. Its enemy is wholeness. It conceives of little things, and looks upon them. And a lack of space, a sense of unity or vision which sees differently become the threats which it must overcome, conflict with and deny.
Yet does this other vision still remain a natural direction for the mind to channel its perception. It is hard to teach the mind a thousand alien names and thousands more. Yet you believe this is what learning means; its one essential goal by which communication is achieved and concepts can be meaningfully shared.
This is the sum of the inheritance the world bestows. And everyone who learns to think that it is so accepts the signs and symbols which assert the world is real. It is for this they stand. They leave no doubt that what is named is there. It can be seen, as is anticipated. What denies that it is true is but illusion, for it is the ultimate reality. To question it is madness; to accept its presence is the proof of sanity.
Such is the teaching of the world. It is a phase of learning everyone who comes must go through. But the sooner he perceives on what it rests, how questionable are its premises, how doubtful its results, the sooner does he question its effects. Learning which stops with what the world would teach stops short of meaning. In its proper place, it serves but as a starting point from which another kind of learning can begin, a new perception can be gained, and all the arbitrary names the world bestows can be withdrawn as they are raised to doubt.
Think not you made the world. Illusions, yes! But what is true in earth and Heaven is beyond your naming. When you call upon a brother, it is to his body that you make appeal. His true identity is hidden from you by what you believe he really is. His body makes response to what you call him, for his mind consents to take the name you give him as his own. And thus his unity is twice denied, for you perceive him separate from you, and he accepts this separate name as his.
It would indeed be strange if you were asked to go beyond all symbols of the world, forgetting them forever; yet were asked to take a teaching function. You have need to use the symbols of the world a while. But be you not deceived by them as well. They do not stand for anything at all, and in your practicing it is this thought which will release you from them. They become but means by which you can communicate in ways the world can understand, but which you recognize is not the unity where true communication can be found.
Thus what you need are intervals each day in which the learning of the world becomes a transitory phase; a prison house from which you go into the sunlight and forget the darkness. Here you understand the Word, the Name Which God has given you; the One Identity Which all things share; the one acknowledgment of what is true. And then step back to darkness, not because you think it real, but only to proclaim its unreality in terms which still have meaning in the world which darkness rules.
Use all the little names and symbols which delineate the world of darkness. Yet accept them not as your reality. The Holy Spirit uses all of them, but He does not forget creation has One Name, One Meaning and a single Source Which unifies all things within Itself. Use all the names the world bestows on them but for convenience, yet do not forget they share the Name of God along with you.
God has no name. And yet His Name becomes the final lesson that all things are one, and at this lesson does all learning end. All names are unified; all space is filled with truth's reflection. Every gap is closed, and separation healed. The Name of God is the inheritance He gave to those who chose the teaching of the world to take the place of Heaven. In our practicing, our purpose is to let our minds accept what He has given as the answer to the pitiful inheritance you made as fitting tribute to the Son He loves.
No one can fail who seeks the meaning of the Name of God. Experience must come to supplement the Word. But first you must accept One Name for all reality, and realize the many names you gave its aspects have distorted what you see but have not interfered with truth at all. One Name we bring into our practicing. One Name we use to unify our sight.
And though we use a different name for each awareness of an aspect of God's Son, we understand that they have but One Name Which He has given them. It is this Name we use in practicing. And through Its use, all foolish separations disappear which kept us blind. And we are given strength to see beyond them. Now our sight is blessed with blessings we can give as we receive.
"Father, our Name is Yours. In It we are united with all living things, and You Who are their One Creator. What we made and call by many different names is but a shadow we have tried to cast across Your Own Reality. And we are glad and thankful we were wrong. All our mistakes we give to you, that we may be absolved of all effects our errors seemed to have. And we accept the truth You give in place of every one of them. Your Name is our salvation and escape from what we made. Your Name unites us in the Oneness which is our inheritance and peace. Amen."
We are addicted to the body. We talk about the body as if it is the same thing as the person. We talk about what they are wearing as if they are the body wearing it. We ask what they are looking at, as if because the body is looking so are they. We talk about what the body did, what the body ate, and how the body slept, as if it was the person doing these things, which we then celebrate the body doing. We cover the body in clothes and remark at how wonderful WE look. We think we are it, and this is a major confusion of identity.
There is a PROFOUND degree of body identification in this world. Take a look at the news. You can be pretty much guarantee that almost every single news report will feature people who are heavily in victim fear roles, heavily bodily identified, not overlooking the situation whatsoever, and quite unconscious, discussing what happened to bodies. And then you have the whole "he did this to me" "she did that to me" "they were doing this and that". Always pointing to bodies, because only bodies can sin. "Only if there were a body is sin possible." "Only the body makes the world seem real." Always mistaking bodies for people.
And then we look to a spouse or a child or a parent or a neighbor or coworker or some other stranger and we say, look, behold, there is a person. But all we point at is the body, using our own body to sense its presence, and seeing little else.
Bodies are not souls, they are not real, and God did not create them. Parts of our mind are using the body temporarily but any confusion about the mind BEING the body is level confusion, magic, sickness, authority problem, body identification, attack thinking, blindness, and evidence of blocks to awareness. But this is how the whole world is operating almost all the time.
It is SO habitual, so ingrained, and so accepted as normal, that you see it very subtly infused into every advertising, every conversation, every interaction of body folk. It's become totally habitual. Always with the "you", in reference to the body self. "They" in reference to groups of bodies. The whole word of the law is written based on what bodies do to bodies and whose body did what to whom. Copyright law doesn't even acknowledge discarnate entities as valid authors, such as in the case of Jesus and ACIM.
It is so heavily assumed that people are bodies in this world, due to massive widespread body identification, that it is literally everywhere. In all walks of life, in all forms of communication, people think they are human beings with arms and legs. This is a problem, because it is not true. And we have to actually deprogram ourselves of this belief. And as we do this, we're going to start becoming VERY aware of the fact that the whole world is going against the truth in this way. That 99%+ of the population relates at a body-to-body level and does not see beyond it.
You can see how the development of christ vision, the opening of the spiritual eye, the clarification of spirit identification, recognizing YOU ARE NOT A BODY, you are spirit, is an entirely different kind of way of relating to people. It totally steps back from the entire association between "you" and "your body". It denies the assumption that your brother is his physical form. "You're looking great today Paul". Well, no, Paul isn't flesh and bones and you are blinded by perception of form. If Paul's like, oh hell yes, I'm looking great today, then now we're into Paul being body identified and having level confusion. And if Paul decides to confuse himself with his body in order to confuse his brother with a body in order to have a body relationship, well now he has a cell mate and they're both in hell.
This is how profound the course is. We have to learn to dis-identify ourselves from the FLESH AND BONES body prison. We have to learn it is NOT OUR SELF. We are not made of bits of flesh and strange organs. It does not look like us. It is not a representation of our true nature. At best it symbolized health and wholeness but your soul absolutely does not have a penis or vagina, nor does it make shits, nor does it sip the cool-aid. "I am not a body I am free" should mean that totally literally. 100% NOT even REMOTELY the body. Not even a tiny bit the body. Such that the body is utterly UNLIKE you in every way. Just a random picture of a form. Because "The body cannot contain you who are life." and "What you are cannot be seen nor pictured."
When we show the body to our brother, identified with it, we are offering him hell and damnation, having damned ourselves to it. We give him what we have given ourselves. We can only offer him a body if we think we are a body. And this means we are offering him something valueless and meaningless. Which is a way to attack him and strip him of his divinity. Neither you nor your brother are physical. Your mind is non physical. Your soul is formless. UTTERLY FORMLESS. Abstract. Shapeless. Boundaryless. Unlimited by space or time.
When we make the body sick we use the body to accuse our brother of sin. This is an entire teaching to do with how the body symbolizes attack and communicates a message of proof of sin in order to find your brother unworthy. But it goes even further, not just including typical sickness, and even beyond sex. It goes as far as to say that EVERY way that you use the body determines the message it symbolized and if you have ANY KIND OF BODY IDENTIFICATION, this is an attack on your brother AND yourself.
If you show the body to your brother mistaken for yourself, you are communicating that he is not himself, and this is an attack. Just as body identification produces sickness, believing you are a body is denial of yourself and your brother. If you depict it to him with an attitude of "this is my self, look at me", you are trying to cause him to be confined to his body also. You cannot possibly see his true self if you cannot see yours. You cannot possibly appreciate his divine christ nature if you think you're not christ but a body. We need to rediscover our soul, our innate inner truth, God-given, if we are to RELATE in any kind of real, loving way to anyone.
If there is not a movement towards recognizing yourself as spirit, NOT a body, there is no awakening at all. That is the whole direction of the curriculum. Moving away from body identification, confused about who and what you are, towards clarity about the fact that you are not a body at all and never were. When "you" (body) look in a mirror you should not be believing that you're looking at yourself. Vanity is ego. When "you" (body) puts on the latest clothes that you fancy yourself in, you shouldn't be believing that this changes who or what you are at all, nor do these clothes define you. You could wear a sack of shit and be spirit identified knowing your true nature is absolutely golden and that the body has nothing to do with who you are.
Sex is only a small part of the body identification issue. It's a cornerstone and a reason to keep perpetuating the focus on bodies and the belief that people are physical forms. Confusing mind and body and believing the body can create, can cause, has power, can live, and is important. As Jesus says, "the body is hardly worth the least defense." "The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist." "God did not create the body."
So isn't it clear, that in order to exist, and to be created by God, you have to become very very clear that you are NOT a body in any way whatsoever, you don't need one, you don't want one, and you don't have one. Because "to be without abody is to be in your natural state.", which is a state of being solely spirit.
It is by identifying ONLY AS spirit (and not a gender or a sexual preference) that you free yourself FROM the body and become able to return home to God. You cannot be believing that ANYTHING "true" of the body is true of you. You are not male or female. You are not gay or straight or bi or anything else. You are spirit. You are immortal. You are made of light. You are divine. The body cannot possibly be anything but a fake artificial picture of a fake artificial self in a fake artificial dream pretending to be a someone. And the body cannot go to heaven with you. "Leave it behind, it cannot enter heaven."
But you, as spirit, can enter the spirit world. Your spirit is the only way through the gates of heaven, to reunite with God, the creator of your spirit, where "the only function of spirit is to extend God's being." There, your spirit has always dwelt with its maker, and has never really left. It is your spirit that is permanently recognized by God as holy and complete. "The soul never leaves the sight of God." "God's children are as equal as learners as they are as souls." Only your spirit self is the reality of you. Everything else is an illusion that you have become tangled up with, confused with, lost in, and believing is you. The body is not you. You are eternal.
"Look upon all the trinkets made to hang upon the body or cover it, or for its use. See all the useless things made for its eyes to see. Think on the many offerings made for its pleasure, and remember all these were made to make seem lovely what you hate. Would you employ this hated thing to draw your brother to you, and to attract his body's eyes? Learn you but offer him a crown of thorns, not recognizing it for what it is, and trying to justify your own interpretation of its value by his acceptance. Yet still the gift proclaims his worthlessness to you, as his acceptance and delight acknowledges the lack of value he places on himself.
Gifts are not made through bodies, if they be truly given and received. For bodies can neither offer nor accept; hold out or take. Only the mind can value, and only the mind decides on what it would receive and give. And every gift it offers depends on what it WANTS. It will adorn its chosen home most carefully, making it ready to receive the gifts it wants, by offering them to those who come unto its home, or those it would attract to it. And there they will exchange their gifts, offering and receiving what their minds judge to be worthy of them.
Each gift is an evaluation of the receiver and the GIVER. No-one but sees his chosen home an altar to himself. No-one but seeks to draw to it the worshippers of what he placed upon it, making it worthy of their devotion. And each has set a light upon his altar, that they may see what he has placed upon it, and take it for their own. Here is the value that you lay upon your brother, and on yourself. Here is your gift to BOTH; your judgment upon the Son of God for what he is. Forget not that it is your Savior to whom the gift is offered. Offer him thorns, and YOU are crucified. Offer him lilies, and it is YOURSELF you free."
There is a view of what ACIM says, based around the idea that this universe is all there is.
It's a view that God created this universe, and thus created all the galaxies and planets, all bodies and objects etc.
People with this view will adopt a model of ACIM in which perception is projected onto God's creation.
They will then believe that false perception means a misinterpretation OF God's perfect creation, and a true perception means a perfectly accurate view of God's creation.
They also will then believe that knowledge is merely a slightly different or more direct way of seeing the SAME stuff that you saw with true perception. That this same world is kept and known.
And therefore to these people, forgiveness means that you forgive the world instead of attacking it, BECAUSE it is real. Because it is God's Kingdom, it's thought to to be your job to "forgive the Kingdom" and stop attacking it. As if "forgiveness means to "be loving toward what's really there."
Another side effect of this view is the belief that, in the separation from God, we DID NOT make a second world. There was no making of space or time by us. There was no forming of galaxies or planet Earth by us. There was no making of human physical bodies by us.
Essentially that there was no result from opposing God, no other world made, no effect producing a dream world, other than that you entered into some kind of egoic state of mind where you don't see heaven correctly. And then the correction of this lets you see heaven directly.
This leads to yet another strange occurrence, whereby since there is no "second world" covering over heaven, and you didn't make THIS world, any references in the course which refer to "the world" are now grouped together with references to egoic perceptions.
So when Jesus says something about "the world", which would be referring to the second world we made without God, and since it's believe such a world was never made be us, those same quotes are now thrown into a "must be an ego interpretation" bucket.
If any such statements suggest that "the world" is not real, is not created, is cruel, is in denial, attacks itself, is contradictory, or anything else that seems un-God-like, then such believers now have to put ALL of those statements into a "false perception" bucket. They have to be interpreted as being egoic mis-perceptions of what would otherwise be recognized as a perfect creation.
As such, since in this model there is no second world to assign anything to, and there is only the first world of the Kingdom of God, anything speaking about "this world" in a less than holy way is thought to be part of the ego's use of it, and NOT a statement about the world itself. Thus false perceptions/interpretations and projected meanings are now MIXED IN with factual statements about the INHERENT nature of the world.
This of course then strips away every single statement which might suggest "this world" is not God's Kingdom, and shuffles all of those facts into an ego bucket where they are safely tucked away and brushed under the carpet. If there is no second world, there is no world to ATTACH them to or associate them with or see them referring to, except "the ego's world".
The end result of all this is that, if you believe there never was a second world made in the separation, and if you believe that Earth is therefore literally God, as God's creation/extension, then you will be completely unwilling to question this world's authenticity.
Forgiveness then becomes a love-affair with the planet, in which we think that we should love what God created, and keep what God created. And forgiveness is no longer seen as UNDOING something that's unreal, but rather as "correctly seeing" something that IS real.
The fact that forgiveness would make what is forgiven DISAPPEAR, because you can ONLY forgiven illusions, becomes swept under the carpet. The notion that the world will disappear when recognized for what it is, as NOT God's creation, now becomes completely denied. There is no place for such a notion in a mindset that cannot accept that we made this world.
So now instead of forgiving the world in order you undo it, we would see our function as forgiving it as though it's something completely perfect and real that we've been mean to and need to apologize to and come to love again. Our entire relationship to this world and what it is thus vastly different when you think of it as God's creation and will, rather than the antithesis of God's nature.
In this model, which seem simple, there is simply God's creation and our perception of it. If we perceive it as anything other than God's perfection, we're seen to be doing something wrong. And if we perceive it as holy and perfect then we're doing something right. And direct cognition or knowledge is then thought to be almost identical to true perception - that true perception shows you what you will still continue to see in a state of knowledge.
But while this model seems simpler and, in and of itself has internal consistency, it still flies in the face of a great amount of what A Course in Miracles says. ACIM actually does say many many times in many many ways that we produced a second world. It says that we made a world opposite to God's world.
It also distinguishes clearly that this second world was DISTINCT from the ego's USE of this world. That ego projected meaning onto this world AFTER it was made by us. And that the Holy Spirit's REPURPOSING of what we made, is NOT a repurposing of the ego or of false perception, but a repurposing of a second world. We can see Earth reflecting heaven or hell, due to its neutral nothingness.
If God truly had created this world, the course would actually be somewhat easier to grasp. We would simply need to realize that we should love everything we see with the body's eyes. That it is all real. Another problem arises though, that the course does not speak well of the body. It even states that it does not really exist and is not God's creation.
In a mindset that thinks that this world IS God's creation, references to "the body" HAVE to take on a different meaning. If the course says the body "is nothing, which it is", this doesn't fit with the idea that God created the physical world. So then we have to shift the body once removed from the world, ie think of the term "body" not as referring to the physical "God created" body but rather to some kind of internal EGO PERCEPTION. And now, this should mean, that all references to "the body" are NOT talking about the physical body, bur about some internal interpretative state.
This kind of shifting of levels, this displacement of meaning and the need to completely redefine basic recognizable words, is an unfortunate side effect of this warped view of the course. Changing the meaning of words becomes necessary otherwise they would indeed imply that physical things are not God's Kingdom.
Indeed, "The body is clearly destructible and therefore not of the Kingdom" tells us that all physical things are not the Kingdom of God. And yet a belief system bent on believing the opposite to this will refuse to accept this meaning. Instead, "body" will be redefined as "must be something the ego is doing", because we don't like the idea that the actual human body is being identified as inauthentic and not of God.
In fact, what we find is that in many many areas, believing that God created this world leads to a completely OPPOSITE belief to what ACIM is actually saying. It produces beliefs which are absolutely and completely diametrically OPPOSED to the teachings of A Course in Miracles. 180-degrees opposite, heading AWAY from the truth instead of towards it.
So when the course tells us that Earth and the body are not of God, such a believer will believe they ARE of God. And when the course tells us that WE made this world, such a person will believe we DID NOT. And when we're told that false perceptions look at an illusion and make it seem real, such a person will invert this to mean that a false perception happens when you're looking at something REAL in an illusory way. And now as someone develops a special-love relationship with the planet, they THINK that they're entering into a genuine and holy relationship with it.
This whole view of ACIM leads to a complete flipping upside-down of almost everything it teachers. It puts reality and creation where it does not belong. It fails to see that the Kingdom of God is not like this world. It cannot comprehend that the physical body is not of God and nothing like our true nature. It completely reverses the meaning of false and true perceptions. It suggests that keeping the world is atonement, instead of its undoing. And it finds no reason to leave this world behind.
In this estimation of the world, it also includes having to believe that things which die are a part of God. That the seasons are God's will. That murder and rape and torture are entirely within what God allows to happen. That war and conflict and destruction are completely normal and natural. And that if you're not accepting them with love then you must be perceiving them with the ego.
As such, believers of "Earth is God" will insist that all of the dark twisted things of the world, when seen with true perception, will be seen as so holy and perfect that they will be deemed on par with God's will and nature. That it is absolutely natural for leaves to fall from trees, for animals to be squashed on roads, for weapons to be manufactured and guns shot towards bodies, for explosions to destroy buildings and for wars to destroy cities. These "destructions", these physical events and objects, are considered to be absolutely divine creations. And it should be fairly obvious that such a suggestion implies that God is far from sane.
It is one thing to forgive a world in which these things occurs, on the basis that they are NOT God's creations, which leads to seeing them in a better light with more forgiveness. But only as a stepping stone toward their dissolution. It's quite another to suggest we would not only love these things but even desire to KEEP THEM FOREVER, as an inherent part of what God is like. The PURPOSE of forgiveness is no longer seen as the end of even the potential for destruction, and instead is seen as a way to recognize that from God's view, destruction IS creation.
"You have expressed surprise at hearing how VERY different is reality from what YOU see. You do not realize the magnitude of that ONE error. It was so vast and so COMPLETELY incredible, that from it, a world of total unreality HAD to emerge. What else COULD come of it? Its fragmented ASPECTS are fearful enough, as you begin to LOOK at them. But nothing you have ever seen BEGINS to show you the enormity of the ORIGINAL error, which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and TO FORCE YOU TO FURTHER SUBSTITUTIONS."
The form that something takes is NOT its meaning. A form is like an instance, or example of something, or a certain variant of its possible range of states, or a specific configuration amongst many possible configurations. Something can take on a form, or take one form, or another form. There can be "forms of" things. Shapes, sizes, parts, configurations, structures, pieces, objects, bodies, states, conditions, etc it's all forms.
When you believe that something about the form is truth, now you are saying that the form IS CONTENT. That its inherent meaning or reality is tied to its form. So now if we say, well, my banana is looking old a rotten, we might now take this to mean the banana is dying and is not edible. Versus an underripe banana which is more firm and green, we might think this MEANS it is not yet edible. And thus we lock the form into certain judgmental definitions of what they are and what they can do.
When we mistake the form that something takes, for what it MEANS, and we derived meaning FROM it or based on it, we are deceived. This means we are listening to an illusory world asking it to tell us what is true. Form IS NOT meaning. Form is not content. Form does not have ANY truth. It is unsubstantial and meaningless and nothing. All forms are fiction and illusions. They are forms of error. They are mistakes, deceptions, lies, illusions, dreams and wishes.
To understand that everything in this world does not MEAN anything, we have to recognize that the form anything takes cannot tell us what it MEANS. One configuration of objects does NOT tell us anything. A certain arrangement of parts does not really mean anything. A bigger object or a smaller object, a certain kind of material, a piece of machinery, old versus new, none of it means anything different.
When we are in a thought system where we seem to ASK the world of form to TELL US what it means, looking to it as a source of truth and to inform us of what is THERE and what is happening, based on its particular aspects, we're literally asking a meaningless nothingness to derive meaning from itself. That a certain body in a certain state means one thing, and a body in another state means something else.
We start to then believe that there can be a DIAGNOSIS. Or a prognosis. Or a judgement or evaluation of what condition something is in, and the possible outcomes that may be consequences of that specific state. As if that means something or would lead to possible futures or potentials, while shutting off the path to other possibilities that aren't "appropriate" for this specific form. Possibilities that the FORM "claims" is not possible, BECAUSE OF the form.
So now a dead body rotting and decaying is believed to MEAN an irreversible process is taking place and the decomposition PROVES that life has ended. This is all completely bullshit and made-up. The body in this state is really absolutely no different to a body running a marathon. If we are DECEIVED by the appearance of form, then we are BLINDED. ALL appearances, all forms, all configurations, all shapes and sizes and colors are utterly meaningless and nothing true can be derived from them.
"Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form MEANS understanding HAS BEEN obscured. Only MISTAKES have different forms, and so they CAN deceive. You CAN change form, BECAUSE it is not true. It COULD not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is NOT reality, it MUST be an illusion. And is Not THERE to see. And, IF you see it, you MUST be mistaken, for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it WERE. What cannot see BEYOND what is not there, MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions AS THE TRUTH. Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?"
Recognizing all objects as EQUALLY meaningless, their forms now become irrelevant. Who cares if something is taking on a certain shape? What does it matter that there SEEMS to be a certain specific sickness? Why should our response or reaction be profoundly different when the FORM is in a certain state versus another? To have different responses or to react in fear is really a sign that you BELIEVE that the form MEANS something different in a hierarchy of illusions. That a body in "this state" means "its terribly bad", while a body in "that state" is "not cause for concern." This is all bullshit, both the good and the bad evaluations.
All forms are deceptions. That's why the world is an illusion. It SEEMS to be something that it is not. It appears to be something it isn't. IT IS NOT TRUTH. It attempts to demonstrate PROOF OF SIN, that sins and events and happenings are taking place as, as if the world and the body have some kind of power, causation, will, mind, or ability to produce certain specific outcomes, chain reactions, or consequences. None of these pretend causations are real. All of these forms are equally just fake images being projected. They are empty pictures on a blank screen.
This is why ACIM even starts out the workbook having you look around the room and identifying that none of this means anything. To apply a single response (unconditionality) to ALL illusory forms, to all objects, in order to train your mind in the recognition that the form DOES NOT MATTER. That the form IS NOT MEANING. That the form of one object is no more or less important or relevant or significant than another. To deprogram you from the belief that certain kinds of objects in certain conditions MEAN one thing while others are more preferable.
The world is just a giant soup of jumbled up bits and pieces of nothingness, scrambled together into untold seeming numbers of configurations, designed to make it look as if there are a great MANY DIFFERENT things. As if there are contrasts and conflicts and ways that one thing IS NOT LIKE another. That this object is not that object. That this sick body is distinct from that healthy body. These are all DECEPTIONS. All illusions, trying to make it seem like ONE THING is many things. That the ONE DREAM is composed of many parts. That the illusion of separation isn't just an illusion of separateness, but a collective of untold numbers.
The ONLY way to recognize that all objects are equal, is to recognize they are all equally THE SAME. And the since they are all illusions of difference, their differences cannot be TRUE. Their FORMS cannot be true, when they conflict and differ. To be truth they have to be IDENTICAL. But their forms are NOT identical, so sameness reveals that their forms are NOT TRUTH. And different forms cannot be KEPT if there is to be equality. Their forms and their appearances of difference must not BE reality, because they're all contradictory. Therefore ALL FORM IS A LIE.
Not one object means anything more or less than another. Not one body means anything more or less than another in any state or seeming condition. Extreme torment and death and suffering is not any worse, bigger, stronger, harder, more difficult to undo, or more powerful and causative, than the slightest hint of a disturbance. Form cannot be taken to be meaning, it cannot be content, it cannot tell you WHAT SOMETHING IS, and all it can do is present a smokescreen.
The world is nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's not there. Without its forms there is no world. It is empty and nothingness. A void of meaninglessness. And not one thing in it means anything at all. And so there is no order, and no levels of difficulty, and no hierarchy, and no inherent meaning in any of it.
Therefore miracles respond to it with a single response, an unconditional response, which must be love, because only love can be unconditional. And so to recognize the world is all nothing is to love it, and light will shine away the darkness of forms and separations.
"See how the body's eyes rest on externals, and CANNOT go beyond. Watch how they STOP at nothingness, unable to go BEYOND the form to meaning."
"There IS no meaning in the form, AND THERE WILL NEVER BE. "
"What is perceived takes many forms, but NONE has meaning."
"Realize that, whatever form they take, they have no meaning and no power."
"Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."
"You have not found your happiness in foreign places, and in alien forms which have no meaning to you"
"Bodies may battle, but the clash of forms is meaningless."
"For here is nothingness, where neither birth nor death is real, nor any form in the misshapen mind that spawned it has any meaning in the Mind of God."
"Take not the form for content"
"Elusive happiness, or happiness in changing forms that shift with time and place, is an illusion that has no meaning."
"What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His. Therefore, it has no meaning."
"I do not choose to value what is totally insane and has no meaning."
"Would God have left the meaning of the world to YOUR interpretation? If He had, it HAS no meaning. For it cannot be that meaning changes constantly, and yet is true."
"The world you made is therefore totally chaotic, governed by arbitrary and senseless "laws," and without meaning of ANY kind."
In A Course in Miracles, Jesus says that this world - Earth - is upside down, back to front, and inside out. Perhaps we should look at how this is the case, to realize just how OPPOSITE Earth is to heaven in its nature.
"For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true. In Heaven"
In this world, there is saying that "change is life, stagnation is death". You can find plenty of examples of this in what we call "nature".
For example when water stops moving and becomes still, it stagnates. Oxygen stops exchanging at the surface and the water becomes toxic. It can then become host to numerous bacterias and other nasty things. It begins to smell awful and would be dangerous to drink.
It seems then that movement of the water is life, because when it moves the oxygen can exchange and the water becomes infused with it. The oxygen in the water can then seem to support life, such as fish and aquatic plants. So long as the water keeps flowing, impurities are flushed away and the water remains relatively healthy. So it seems that in this world, the idea of "stillness" is equated physically with DEATH, and "movement" is equated with LIFE.
However, in heaven's reality, this is TOTALLY OPPOSITE. In truth, stillness is in fact life, because it means that there is no change, and therefore there is no end to the life, and life becomes immortal. Real life is eternal life. Life which never depletes or runs out or becomes toxic. Its stillness is its peace, and its peace is guarantee of its health. In fact life and health are now equated with what the world would call "stagnation".
From that view, what we would think of as "change" is in fact evidence of DEATH. Time is death, because it attempts to bring an END to everything. Anything that changes can suffer and die, and cannot be immortal. And so anything which seems to be born, to grow, to age and to die, is really NOT eternal life, and is NOT peace, and is NOT reality. This is the truthful perspective on this world, which recognizes that only CHANGELESSNESS is life, and therefore stillness is life, and change is destruction.
"Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life."
"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."
So if you look at it, the physical world is set up to be completely backwards in its functioning. The laws of physics are totally upside down and the REVERSE of God's laws. The laws of "nature", or what we think of as "natural" in the world, is ACTUALLY completely unnatural. And it could not be MORE unnatural.
"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."
If you think about it, in the physical world, when you move towards stillness, it seems that you will move towards death. If you stop breathing, your body may die. Indeed, it seems to prove out that if you exercise more and are more physically active, moving and changing, this seems to be "good for your health". So now health is equated with CHANGE, instead of with stillness. And if you were to become sedentary and not move much, it is proven to indicate that your health will be worse. And indeed we seem to refer to "dead bodies" or "lifelessness" as a complete lack of motion.
But a complete lack of motion is GOD. Total stillness is the nature of reality. NOT change. NOT movement. NOT constant activities. So if the world has kind of "sign posts" pointing in a direction that the ego thinks you should be going, its signposts POINT AWAY from stillness. It suggests to you even biologically that you should move towards activity and away from motionlessness. And that if you were to move towards PHYSICAL PEACE, you are in fact moving towards DEATH. This is why some people think that dead bodies are "resting peacefully", which is utterly nonsense.
"Rest in peace" is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes from waking, not from sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing; waking is JOINING."
So here for example Jesus clarifies that REAL rest, real peacefulness, actually results from spiritual awakening in which you are awake and alert, NOT from sleeping or being unconscious. But the physical world would suggest that you "get some rest" when you are physically inactive, when you are LOSING consciousness, and when you are NOT awake. This is completely backwards from God's truth.
The more you look at this the more examples you will find, indicating that the PHYSICAL NATURE of planet earth, not even considering any kind of perception or interpretation of it - just its physical functioning and behaviors and ways, is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the truth of reality and to the nature of the Kingdom of God. This is because Earth is in fact TOTALLY OPPOSITE in its NATURE to God's creation. And because it is totally opposite, it cannot BE God's creation.
"What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."
This statement literally states that Earth is opposite to heaven in EVERY way. And I could really go on at considerable length describing the WAYS that earth is nothing like heaven. This is not to reject the part of ACIM that says earth can potentially REFLECT heaven, in some kind of neutral way, but its fundamental functioning, the way the system is set up, the kinds of things which happen when you are active or inactive, etc, all point to the "laws of nature" of the physical planet being BACKWARDS.
There are similar things you can notice about guilt. You see the ego suggests that you should not look within because it says that if you do, you will approach the very thing you do not want. That if you look within you will find guilt and sin. And so as you begin to look within, guilt and sin seem to come into your awareness and the ego uses this to steer you AWAY from that direction. It instead points all its arrows outward away from yourself, away from God, and away from ever connecting with the Holy Spirit in your mind. All of its DIRECTIONS run CONTRARY to what is actually true.
"Do not be afraid to look within. The ego tells you all is black with guilt within you, and bids you NOT TO LOOK. Instead, it bids you look upon your brothers, AND SEE THE GUILT IN THEM."
It's similar in PHYSICAL terms in that as you approach things in the world which might symbolize becoming closer to reality, to peace, to freedom and so on, the more the physical world itself screams at you "go the other way". Or even, to suggest that if you keep going in this direction, you are going in completely the WRONG direction, and WILL NOT FIND what you're looking for. This is a DECOY. It is how spacetime is set up to give you constant messages that say "you're going the wrong way" when you are in fact going the right way, and vice versa. So that you are always moving AWAY from the truth.
"Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success." BACKWARDNESS IS BUILT INTO THE LAWS OF PHYSICS! THE WORLD'S NATURE IS INSIDE OUT!
The physical world therefore is in fact, so to speak, "inside out". It is a nothing pretending to be something. It is an unreality pretending to be real. It has a nature that could not be MORE unlike heaven. It makes it look like peace is associated with DYING and not with living. It steers you AWAY from stillness. And at every turn it deceives you and points you towards the very opposite of what you're looking for. It's all part of "seek and do not find."
Another example is outer space for example. In heaven, everything is light. Light is everywhere. In spacetime, however, the light has been reduced down, limited, withdrawn, condensed, SO MUCH, that all that's left are tiny little pin-pricks of light in the night sky. As though to suggest that MOST of the universe IS COMPLETELY EMPTY. That "space" itself is a LACK OF light and a lack of substance. And that all that remains of the presence of anything are tiny little specks we call atoms, in tiny little clusters, separated by billions of light years.
And then we look to the little bits of material that remain and we call it the presence of a very big planet, when in fact it is practically nothing in the big picture. It's the REMAINS of what is LEFT OVER when ALMOST EVERYTHING Has been removed. And now the presence of something is no longer recognized as the LACK OF something. The world is the ABSENCE OF a world. It is a LACK OF everywhereness. It is the opposite to heaven.
We can of course repurpose the world and the body and the weird backwards laws of physics, to use them to point in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION from which they naturally point. This is what is required in order TO use them for a higher purpose. Something which was made to KILL has to be used to support life. Something which points AWAY from God has to be used to point towards him.
"As sight was made to lead away from truth, it can be redirected." "Though it was made to fence him into hell without escape, yet has the goal of Heaven been exchanged for the pursuit of hell. The Son of God extends his hand to reach his brother, and to help him walk along the road with him. Now is the body holy. Now it serves to heal the mind that it was made to kill."
"For the body IS a limit on love. The belief in limited love was its origin, and it was MADE to limit the UNlimited. Think not that this is merely allegorical; for it was made to limit YOU."
"Let not the world deceive you. It was made to be deception."
It is only possible for the Holy Spirit to repurpose everything in the world, PRECISELY BECAUSE everything in the world moving in the WRONG DIRECTION. And so it HAS to be used in an alternative and totally OPPOSITE way to what it was originally intended. For example the body was made to KILL the son of God. It is a device for SEPARATION, to reinforce impriosnment and keep minds from joining. But the Holy Spirit puts its to use by using it for a purpose TOTALLY OPPOSITE TO ITS NATURE.
When we do this, it does not CHANGE the nature of the things we made. It does not stop the world spinning, or does not make the clouds go away, it does not change the fact that dead bodies are motionless and living bodies are moving. It does not change the fact that water stagnates when it doesn't flow. But it looks at it from a different vantage point which INTERPRETS these things as not MEANING what they originally were meant to mean. Or to USE them in an OPPOSITE WAY to their own inherent nature.
Using something for an alternative purpose than it was DESIGNED TO FUNCTION, does not CHANGE its function. It just works within its limits and uses it as best as possible towards a different GOAL. Such as if you were to grow flowers in a machine gun. Or use what the ego made as an attack on God's children (bodies) to help them to LEAVE bodies permanently. That's the whole point. Everything we made as an attack on God is now being used for a higher purpose, which runs AGAINST its inherent nature, and uses it to undo itself. This is only possible BECAUSE the world IS back to front.
As heaven becomes reflected in the world, it does not change the fact that the world is still running IN REVERSE. And even the illusion of time is actually secretly an attempt to move INTO THE PAST, not the future. The world can reflect heaven when looked at in a heavenly way but NOT in terms of ITS FUNCTIONING. It will still always operate in the same way, with the same physics. Decomposed decayed rotten bodies will still appear to symbolize peace and stillness while objects in motion will seem to have energy, vitality and life. And all of this is STILL going to be backwards if you look upon it with love.
It needs to be more clear and more widely understood the sheer EXTENT of the ways in which this world - space and time - planet earth - all galaxies - all physicality - is COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to heaven's nature. They are not AT ALL alike. And only by recognizing this can you realize that the world was made to BE opposite to God. And that is why it is NOT GOD'S CREATION, AND WILL END. We can forgive the world BECAUSE it is a picture of crucifixion, but this will not stop it BEING a system of death. Hell becomes interpreted in a heavenly way, IN ORDER TO end it.
In the very big picture, this is what ACIM is getting at. This entire world does not exist. No bodies, no planet, no sun, no galaxies, no spacetime, no events, no happenings, no consequences. It is all nothing. Only the Kingdom of God - a world of spirit and light - really exists at all. Only that means anything and is of any value to you.
"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it"
"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere?"
"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. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."
We made up this world when we tried to separate from God. We invented time and space. We made the galaxies and planets. We invented bodies to hide in. It's all a hallucinated wishful-thinking dream of denial and the belief in the opposite to eternal life - death.
"Without the idea of death there is no world. All dreams will end with this one."
"There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and you maintain the world within your mind in thought." "What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal?"
In order to accept this profound, extremely radical idea, we have to first acknowledge that we do NOT believe it. We are heavily invested in this world, we give it reality, we value it, we want it, we think it has things to offer us, we are attached to it, we fancy ourselves as being human bodies, we seek for bodily relationships, we want to collect stuff, we idolise and worship objects and bodies and places, and we just basically want to stay here as long as possible, all the while believing this is reality.
This is a problem.
In order for us to accept the atonement truth, that none of this has happened and this world doesn't exist, we're first going to have to go through a process of relinquishment. We're going to have to come to recognize, primarily, that this world is not actually a world - it is nothing. Bodies are not really bodies, they are nothing. Nothing is really happening here. Spacetime itself is an illusion. There is no space or time and nothing in it. All events are nowhere. All of the sickness and death is a lie and doesn't exist.
"It (mind) dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere."
This means we're going to have to become willing to not only recognize that the world is nothing and not worth having, we're going to have to stop trying to accumulate it. We're going to have to stop having psychological "ownership", possession and attachment to objects, people and places. We're going to have to recognize that the world holds nothing that we want, that it cannot give us anything, it cannot cause us to be happy, it cannot inherently mean anything to us, and it has no real value. And this also means letting go of all identification with (attachment to) the body, and re-identifying as a spirit being.
This is going to take an uprooting of everything that keeps you rooted in this world, all your commitments, all your investments, all your hopes and dreams and wishes, all your denials and anticipations, all your attempts to deny that this world is made of death. A big part of this involves recognising that death is woven into everything in this world, even in those things which seem like new or just born. That all the world's roads lead to death, all its laws are laws of punishment, and that it will always disappoint you. You have to come to realize that the world will not ever satisfy you, and that in itself can seem depressing.
"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."
"There IS no choice where every end is sure. Perhaps you would prefer to try them all, before you REALLY learn they are but one. The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way EXCEPT the pathways offered by the world. And, learning THEY led nowhere, lost their hope. And yet this was the time they COULD have learned their greatest lesson. All must reach this point, and go BEYOND it. It is true indeed there is no choice at all within the world. But this is NOT the lesson in itself. The lesson has a PURPOSE, and in THIS you come to understand what it is FOR."
Basically, we have to recognize that this world is fundamentally broken, spacetime is an attack on omnipresence and eternity, everything you try to do here will end in death and destruction eventually, there is no point and no meaning to this life, and then turn around and realize that there MUST be a better way, there MUST be another world, there MUST be a light and a way out of this nightmare. There MUST be a world that means something, there MUST be a truth and a light that you can depend on, and there MUST be a way to live forever. You're not going to find any of that in this world. Heaven is the reality that you heart really desires.
So then you're going to have to sort through all the ways in which you depend on, want, attach to, value, find important, give meaning to, want to keep, believe has power and will, believe can attack or heal you, basically anything to do with this world that might be a reason why you'd want to stay here and not go home to God. You're going to have to give up the whole world.
You're going to have to surrender and let go of absolutely everything and recognize you DO NOT WANT ANY OF IT. And thus you will let it all go and detach from it and become empty handed. And only by being empty handed, or rather, empty of your desire for spacetime and its bullshit offerings, will you be ready and willing to choose heaven.
So when Jesus says there is no world, which is literally true, that is the central theme of the course. The thing to "get". That there is not really a separation, there is not really a spacetime, or a planet earth, or a world of bodies and suffering and death. It's all a fiction.
In order for you to wean your mind off of it, you're going to have to go through a process of purification, of withdrawing power from the world, of recognising the world does nothing to you or for you, that it can no more please and save you than that it can offend and hurt you, of withdrawing all value and desire for the world and all wish to resist its impossible nature, recognizing that the world literally is nothing at all, and that giving up truly entails giving up a non-world.
Empty your hands of this world and reach for what God has given you in your creation in heaven. Accepting atonement is nothing more than accepting God's reality.
"Go on to meet them gladly, and learn how much awaits you, for the simple willingness to give up nothing, BECAUSE it is nothing. The new perspective you will gain, from crossing over, will be the understanding of WHERE HEAVEN IS. From HERE, it seems to be outside, and ACROSS the bridge. But, as you cross to JOIN it, IT will JOIN WITH YOU, and BECOME ONE with you. And you will think, in glad astonishment, that for all this, YOU GAVE UP NOTHING!"
"the sorry gifts of earth are joyously relinquished. In my hands is everything you want and need and hoped to find among the shabby toys of earth"
"It goes against all the thinking of the world, but so does Heaven." "The world will end when its thought system has been completely reversed. Until then, bits and pieces of its thinking will still seem sensible. The final lesson which brings the ending of the world cannot be grasped by those not yet prepared to leave the world and go beyond its tiny reach."
"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD. The only thing of value in it is whatever part of it YOU look upon with love. This GIVES it the only reality it will ever have. ITS value is NOT in itself, but yours IS in you."
"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."
"What loss can be for you in choosing not to value nothingness? This world holds nothing that you really want, but what you choose instead you want indeed!"
"You were willing to accept even death to deny your Father. But He would not have it so, and so it is NOT so. You still could not will against Him, and that is why you have no control over the world you made. It is NOT a world of will, because it is governed by the desire to be unlike Him. And this desire IS NOT WILL. 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."
"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. Love is no longer feared but gladly welcomed. Idols have disappeared, and the remembrance of God shines unimpeded across the world. Christ's face is seen in every living thing, and nothing is held in darkness apart from the light of forgiveness. There is no sorrow still upon the earth. The joy of Heaven has come upon it."
'"And so, our Father, we return to You, remembering we never went away; remembering Your holy gifts to us. In gratitude and thankfulness we come, with empty hands and open hearts and minds, asking but what You give."
"Heaven Itself is reached by empty hands and open minds, which come with nothing to find everything and claim it as their own"
"Simply do this: Be still and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false or good or bad; of every thought it judges worthy and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."
"Here He leans down to lift you back to Him, out of illusions into holiness; out of the world and into timelessness; out of all fear and given back to Love."
When you are whole, you have only one identity. You are identified with Spirit. You are one with Holy Spirit. You are at peace.
When you begin to believe that illusions are actually reality, entering into the separation state, you put denial in place to shut out awareness of God, and therefore awareness of your "whole self" (Holy Self, True Self etc) seems blocked.
Once this denial is in place, which is an act of believing in real sin, you have tried to attack your wholeness and God’s wholeness with an idea of separateness. You therefore put illusions of separateness into your own mind. These show up inside your own mind, or to put it another way, inside your own self.
So you "split yourself", in the same way that two people seem separate. The split seems like a wall coming inbetween two identities. At the same time, both of these identities are separated from the whole self and God.
Neither "part" of the split mind has awareness of the whole, because these parts, which have come about because you believed in separation, are both cut off from being aware of the whole mind. Neither of them "identify with" the whole self.
So now you have this whole mind which remains whole, in truth. Then you have this fictional scenario playing out INSIDE your mind, where there is this strange dream of separateness and division.
What keeps the parts of the split mind separate are simply illusions - appearances - that there is something about each part which is different to the other, causing them to seem to be "not each other". This cannot be true in reality, but within the split mind (consciousness), you develop a multiple personality disorder.
This split plays out as dreams of various dramas of conflict. Other terms for this conflict are war, self-attack, condemnation, judgement, the whole drama of victims and victimizers, some things being good and others bad etc.
The funny thing is then, within your whole mind, there is sort of a "stage" with a "play" being performed, with characters, and there are at least two main characters. And each character is seemingly "opposite" to the other in as many ways as possible. They want nothing to do with each other, they want to emphasize the ways in which they are separate and unlike, so that the illusion of "why" they are not ONE is reinforced and maintained.
One of these major parts of the split mind is the persona, and the other part is the shadow. I don’t think the course explicitly uses those terms/words, but it definitely does speak about this in many places and ways.
In order for there to be multiple selves in the mind, ie identities, false identities, there has to be denial and the purpose of that denial is to "shut out" one of the selves from the awareness of the other one. There are whole sections about this in the course.
The "persona" part of the split mind as we’ll call it, is really a part of the ego which attempts to create an illusion of innocence. Really the purpose you had in creating the split to begin with was an attempted solution to your belief in sin.
You figured that "all of you" was sinful, and you could not tolerate this idea. There was no way to KEEP it and also escape it. You wanted to keep "real sin" because that was your tiny mad idea/wish. So you made up a solution which is totally insane, but which creates an illusion of it working.
The solution is to section off one part of your mind where you’ll house all the "bad" or "rejected" or "condemned and sinful" parts of yourself, and then you’ll keep another part of the mind where you’ll create an illusion of a completely "innocent seeming" self.
By keeeping the two parts away from each other, ie keeping the fake-innocent self (persona) "in the dark" about the sinful self (shadow), the persona is able to maintain an ILLUSION that "you" did not sin! It shoves all of the evidence of sinfulness into the unconscious shadow part of the mind, attacks it, disassociates from it, and projects it "away" from the persona as much as possible.
One thing to note here is that you did not really want to get rid of your belief in sin. You wanted to believe it as real and irreversible. So you devised a way to KEEP it but To PRETEND you did not want it, so that no one (including you) would suspect or question that you might’ve been the one who did it, so that nobody ever will LOOK AT the fact that it was you, and therefore the idea of real sin goes unchallenged. You make yourself out to seem "innocenct" or even remorseful, with FAKE GUILT, in order to pretend you did not want to sin and weren’t the one to do it, but it’s not true.
This is all taking place still within your mind, entirely. It has nothing to do with what is "outside" of you, or anything to do with anyone else. But because the persona part of the ego disassociates from the shadow, it makes it SEEM "to the persona self" that the shadow-self is NOT ITSELF. Ie it is "other than me".
What happens is you, as the whole mind, who has temporarily lost track of who you are, and who thinks you are a split mind, with multiple personalities, now "sides with" the persona self. It is fictional and totally fake, but it seems to make "you" look like you did not sin. So you allow this persona self to be IN your "conscious awareness", and you make sure to keep the shadow self OUT of awareness in unconsciousness.
The primary function of the persona therefore is to attack your whole self, to identify that some major portion of your self is a sinner and guilty and deserving to die, ie not good enough and can’t be loved because it’s supposedly "evil", it confines all *illusory apperances* of the "bad stuff" and shoves it into unconsciousness, by using denial.
The act of putting "distance" between the persona and the shadow therefore implements *disassociation*, which basically means you do not want to be "associated with" the sin that you believe you committed against God (so no-one would suspect you). So you distance yourself from it using this denial mechanism. This MAKES the shadow ie basically creates an enemy for the persona, who it hates and despises and wants nothing to do with, ON PURPOSE, so that it can KEEP the bad shit away from itself, making an illusion of innocence.
Since this is happening all entirely within the whole of your mind, BUT since you have identified your "self" only with the persona self and not the repressed sinner/shadow, you then "perceive" that you are NOT the shadow self. That it is some "identity" separate from what you are. You disassociate from it so heavily that you literally believe it is NOT YOU. ie, this other part of your own mind is NOT part of your own mind.
What then will happen, however, is the mind cannot get rid of this dark sin, because ideas do not leave their source (!), so it can’t actually get it OUT of the mind, it can only *disguise* it. The persona will then seem to experience that it is now this little helpless innocent-seeming perfect good likeable harmless little self, and that the shadow unconscious self is this big ugly monsterous enemy that it wants to keep hating in order to keep it OUT of AWARENESS. To maintain denial.
Now. What this has actually resulted in in terms of the Son of God, is that within His mind, he has invented these fictional characters, the conscious self who is fake, and the unconscious self which is denied. The conscious self, the persona, SHOWS UP as a BODY! It acts as a visible representation of "who I am", a fake identity, appearing innocent, born seemingly innocent, and no one would suspect that it had tried to murder God.
And then, everything OUTSIDE of the body, the entire "world" and "environment" and all "people who are not me", are actually projections of YOUR OWN UNCONSCIOUS MIND. So your unconscious mind (shadow) is actually outside of your body, and your conscious persona self is inside your body. You can see just how much disassociation there is for an average person, by looking at how much they believe that they are ONLY the self that is "in the body", little and helpless, and everyone else is "not me".
Since the person’s mind is split and the person has identified only with their fake persona self, thinking that everything outside of them is "not my persona self", this happens to map exactly to how we experience the world in terms of bodies and relationships. When another "body" shows up "out there", we regard it as "not myself".
This simultaneously "maps" our unconscious, repressed, disassociated belief that WE SINNED, onto that other person, because just as we believe that our own sinful shit is "not myself", we also believe that that person is "not myself". Therefore it is EASY to "associate" your own disassociated unconscious sin WITH that "not me" other person! This allows you to perceive, and believe, that the sin is IN THEM, it is THEIRS, NOT YOURS, and THEY are the one who was the sinner against God!
Truth is, your experience of what you see "in the not-me selves" - other people out there, is YOUR belief in sin, actually WITHIN your mind still, and you are now interacting with YOUR SHADOW, inside your mind, hallucinating that it is a separate person or content within someone else, and you actually come to believe that this other innocent person is the "one" who is sinning against you.
Any attack you seem to experience, will SEEM like it is being caused by other people. IT IS NOT! It is YOUR other split off part of your own mind - your shadow, attacking the REST of your split off mind - your persona - which you think is "all of myself", but which is only PART of yourself. The persona - your conscious self, who denies that it has an unconscious mind, is "attacked by" this other part of the mind that it believes is not even part of itself.
If you think about it, the only way that it is possible for the persona part of the mind to "be attacked" is if the attacker is INSIDE the realm of where the persona lives. It can only get "access" to the persona because it actually SHARES the same "host mind", and therefore the persona can be attacked by the shadow.
We often, as personas, not our real selves, will believe that the identity who is doing the attacking is "not me", and therefore someone else is attacking "you" (your persona) and it is nothing to do with "you". You will therefore identify with being the VICTIM, who has been unfairly treated and abused against its will, by this "other". This ego persona will see itself as JUSTIFIED in being angry and getting revenge, which it does by further attacking yourself and sectioning off even more parts of you which it deems sinful.
The main function of the persona is to first condemn yourself as a sinner, then try to section off the sinful parts of you to hide them and make them unconscious through denial/disassociation, and to then try to "keep" only the bits of yourself that it deems acceptable, worthy, attractive, valuable, credible, innocent, likeable, good, basically a picture of fake innocence... a picture of someone who no-one would suspect of murder ous intent or a sinful past.
The whole point of the persona is to DENY that you were the one who sinned against God, by pretending to be totally innocent and harmless. To do this, the persona has to attack you, split parts of you off, judge them as bad, make them unconscious, disassociate them from yourself, and only keep the smaller subset of illusory qualities that it says is "acceptable for now".
The persona is a perfectionist and is NEVER satisfied and has impossible standards. The ego thus ranges from suspicious (when in the persona mainly), to visciousness (when the hated guilty shadow self comes out of unconsciousness to express pain and guilt).
You need to realize that the persona is actively GETTING RID OF YOU, by emphasizing all the things that it finds "good" about you, and getting rid of all the things it finds "bad". And sooner or later, because you are never good enough for it (because ego denies love/lovability), it will strip away "bad stuff" until there IS No good stuff left, and you will be DEAD! The persona tries to "preserve a good self" in the name of getting rid of you! It is not on your side and it is not acting in your best interests.
What you need to realize then is that every enemy and attacker and abuser and victimizer is PART OF YOUR OWN MIND. It is the shadow in your mind, which your persona made up, coming back to attack the persona to try to point out the ways that the persona is actually a murderer. While the persona is busy claiming "I did not do it, it’s the shadow’s fault, it’s the sinner", the shadow is going to have in its agenda to "expose" the bullshit lies of the persona and point out the ways that "you" are NOT GOOD, and not pure or holy or right or happy etc. The persona hates this and sees it as attack or violation, but it’s the mind’s attempt to heal itself in a way.
When the unconscious pain (pain body) starts to come into awareness, the persona freaks out in fear and tries to suppress it and get rid of it and avoid it. Trying to get rid of IT is what happens when you try to get rid of OTHER PEOPLE because you think that THEY are IT and getting rid of them will solve your problem! Except the ego’s tactics DO NOT WORK! YOU will keep your shadow self and make it worse.
You have to realize that every attacker is PART OF YOU. And, what is being "attacked by" that attacker, is also PART OF YOU. The key is, the secret to salvation, which is that you are doing this ALL to yourself. You are BOTH attacking you (persona identified self) and are also BEING the attacker (shadow). BOTH of these FAKE CHARACTERS are in your mind. You put them both there. oYu are not EITHER of them
At some point, in your undoing of the ILLUSIONS that keep these two selves apart, and which maintain war, and which keep you thinking that other people are your enemies when it’s really YOU, and that YOU are not even the self that was being attacked, you will start to see through this split-minded perspective.
At some point, you will first of all ACCEPT that BOTH of these things are parts of your own mind, nothing to do with anyone else. That means the attacker and the attacked are both in your mind. Then you will realize, that if they are both in your mind, and you put them there, YOU - whatever you are really - must be maintaining both of them. If YOU are putting both of them in your mind, then YOU are literally the puppet master who is pitting these two selves AGAINST EACH OTHER.
Therefore the war that is waging between "them" is actually FICTIONAL, the claims that each of them makes about what the "other" is doing to the is an ILUSION - a fake story and a fake set of character traits and a fake scenario of victimization, IS NOT REAL.
IF... you, as the whole mind, contain both persona and shadow, and if you are the ONE who has put them there, and if the ways they SEEM to be two separate identities is NOT TRUE, then...
IF you can realize that YOU ARE BEING BOTH OF THEM, then suddenly you will see a COMMONALITY between them, a truth which completely obliterates the entir illusion of separation, undoes all the disassociation, collapses all denial, and totally blows up this whole FICTIONAL PLAY which has been playing out in your mind.
IF they are both you, and you are ONE SELF, looking upon both of them, and realizing that they MUST both be you because *YOU ARE THE ONE DOING THIS ALL TO YOURSELF*, THEN.....nothing about them which *seems* separate can be true. They can’t BOTH exist as separate personalities if they are actually both you - ONE IDENTITY - not two identities.
Seeing this finally collapses the entire illusion, the split in the mind is OVERLOOKED, you forgive yourself for what you did not do, you stop playing the roles of attacker and attacked, victim OR victimizer, and you LET BOTH SIDES OF THE WAR GO. You realize your war with yourself could not be won because, since you were BOTH SIDES, you WERE ALWAYS LOSING, no matter who wins.
Seeing this futility will AWAKEN YOUR MIND to suddenly realizing, that since you are ONE REAL IDENTIY, NOT two fake ones, the fake ones cannot be real. And suddenly, they will DISAPPEAR. And since they were blocking your awareness of the WHOLE of who you are, and since you no longer see EITHER of them as your IDENTITY, suddenly your mind will AWAKEN to accepting and being AWARE OF who you ACTUALLY ARE, as ONE WHOLE SELF!
The fictional ego illusion deream will disappear from sight. Blocks to awareness will vanish. You will no longer pretend you are at war with yourself. You will no longer pretend to be multiple personalities. And you will simply return to your natural whole state of FULL AWARENSS OF ALL OF YOURSELF, as God created you. A mind which is whole, not split. A mind which is HOLY, not evil. A mind which is neither a victim or a victimizer. A mind which cannot BE attacked and CANNOT attack.
And now you are home, back to being who you really are, back with God, and in love FOREVER!
"The world was made as an attack on God." "The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible." "The world you see is an illusion of a world, God did not create it" "The world is the picture of the crucifixion of God's Son". "The world was made as a place where God could enter not." "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way." "The hell you made".
Okay so, apparently, we MADE some kind of a world, which was designed to attack God, is made of illusions, tries to shut God out, depicts the death of God's Son, and is totally opposite to heaven as a form of hell, where bodies sin and try to prove death can happen.
So now we're in a position where we can ask a really interesting question. What do we do about this? How is this resolved? What's the Holy Spirit's solution? How should we be regarding or viewing this hellish realm of sin and attack and death that we made? What is the way to return to Heaven? How does God deal with this situation?
There are many significant parts of the Course which talk about the fact of what this world IS. It's nature. As described above, an illusory hellish dream of sin and death. In some of the perspectives Jesus gives, he reminds us of how meaningless, pointless, non-existent, purposeless, substanceless this world is.
This seems to be a very important aspect of how we overcome it. A recognition of what it is and what it is not. No rose tinted glasses, no fluffy romantic language, no trying to make it out to BE Heaven or to BE God's creation. Just a simple recognition of its illusory nature, a picture of impossibilities and nonsenser. Just a straight forward honest appraisal of what we made and why it is not real. For example:
"(mind) ... it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was."
"There is no world" "The world sill spin into the nothingness from which it came." "Eternity will shine away the world." "A world forgiven cannot last."
"Without the idea of death there is no world."
"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 healed mind will put them all in one category; they are unreal."
"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while." ... "The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are?" ... "Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers." ... "Yet they are not deceived by what they see." ... Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."
So in this perspective, Jesus teaches us that this world we made, is an illusion of a world, which we mistakenly think is REAL. And we're supposed to recognize it's an illusion/dream and not believe in it, we're supposed to recognize it holds nothing that we want, that it is unreal, that we are not of it, the body is not who we are, and really that none of it is happening. "All events are nowhere." It has no consequences, nothing that happens causes anything real, there is no real sin. "All changes wrought are substance-less." And this proceeds all the way to the world disappearing. "The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."
There is no particular love-loss for the world in this view. It's just simple honest recognition of the fact that it is a world made from the denial of the Kingdom, dreamed in an attempt to attack God and His Son, it is illusory and has no real effects, no part of it is valuable or permanent, and it doesn't really exist.
There is, however, also an additional component to coming to recognize "awareness of dreaming of hell". To realize the world is not the real world. And this has to do with the Holy Spirit's reinterpretation of what we made.
The world we made, was made in total "false perception". The body was made to be fixed in a state of false perception, where it does not overlook/forgive ANYTHING. It is blinded by perception of forms. Its vision stops at the outside surface of nothing. It "sees" only what BLOCKS vision. "These eyes made not to see will never see."
The body's eyes can only report that "the world seems real" "it seems to exist" "it seems to be happening." They only see "sin is real" "bodies are sinful". We jumped all the way from perfect Heaven to total hell. We designed the world to be a total opposite to reality. "Earth, heaven's opposite in every way." But what does the Holy Spirit do with this hell that we made?
What he represents and makes possible, is an alternative way of looking at the hell we made. A re-interpretation of it. This doesn't really CHANGE IT, because it can't BE anything other than an illusion. You can't make it BE Heaven - God already accomplished Heaven's creation. But you can learn not to be deceived by it, so that when you see it, you don't BUY INTO IT. You don't MAKE it real to you.
"the Holy Spirit, the RE-INTERPRETER of what the ego made".
"This world is full of miracles. They stand in shining silence next to every dream of pain and suffering, of sin and guilt. They are the dream's ALTERNATIVE, the choice to be the dreamer, rather than deny the active role in making up the dream. They are the glad effects of taking BACK the consequence of sickness to its cause. The body is released, because the mind acknowledges "this is not DONE TO me, but I am doing this." And thus the mind is free to make another choice instead. Beginning here, salvation will proceed to change the course of every step in the descent to separation, until all the steps have been retraced, the ladder gone, and ALL the dreaming of the world undone."
His goal is to UNDO the dreaming of the world. To take back the cause of it. To stop the making of it. To cancel it, reverse it, dissolve it, erase it, disappear it. To STOP DREAMING. This is His aim and guarantee. But before this happens, something happens to how you experience the world you made. We're introduced to this idea that the WAY YOU SEE, perception, can be modified and repurposed, so that you gradually invest in the dream less, believe it's illusions less, are convinced it is a picture of real sin and death less, and so learn to overlook/forgive/forget it.
This means that initially, it seems as if the world is really hell. Unforgiven, it is a "real nightmare". The body is designed to fixate on the nightmare and make it seem real. But we have the ability to change our mind, which changes our beliefs, which change our perceptions. We can choose again and NOT believe in what the world is showing us, and to regard the body as DECEIVING us. It's still a picture of hell. It's still "the strange world you made." It still seems to run by ego laws of death and everything in it still is limited and flawed, per the laws of illusions/death. But if you don't BELIEVE IN IT, you don't take these appearances at face value. You are not deceived. You are not tempted.
"Temptation has one lesson it would teach, in all its forms, wherever it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel. It sets the limits on what he can do; its power is the only strength he has; his grasp cannot exceed its tiny reach."
"Be never fearful of temptation, then, but see it as it is; another chance to choose again, and let Christ's strength prevail in every circumstance and every place you raised an image of yourself before. For what appears to hide the Face of Christ is powerless before His Majesty, and disappears before His holy sight."
"Lead us not into Temptation" means "Do not let us deceive ourselves into believing that we can relate in peace to God or our brothers with ANYTHING external."
"And he will reinterpret ALL temptation as just another chance to bring him joy."
"I am the light of the world" "It is the perfect answer to all illusions, and therefore to all temptation. It brings all the images you have made about yourself to the truth, and helps you depart in peace, unburdened and certain of your purpose."
We're also told that God loves the world. Even though the world is an imaginary illusion of death, a picture of hell, somehow God still loves it so that He does NOT believe in it or mistake it for Reality. But let's be clear, that loving the world does not MAKE the world BE love. It doesn't MAKE it holy. It merely looks upon it WITH love and holiness, forgiving what is there, not believing in what it depicts. The picture of crucifixion turns into an empty MIRROR, in which you see YOUR reflection. In this, the world is meaningless in and of itself, so by taking away its meanings you reflect only Gods' meaning INTO it. This makes the world SEEM holy or heaven-like.
"The world you see cannot be the world God loves, and yet His Word assures us that He loves the world."
"What the world is, is but a fact. (it is a picture of hell) You cannot choose what this should be. But you can choose **how** you would see it."
"God offers the world salvation; your judgment would condemn it. God says there is no death; your judgment sees but death as the inevitable end of life. God's Word assures you that He loves the world; your judgment says it is unlovable. Who is right?"
What he's clearly saying here is that you have dreamed of hell, in an attempt to destroy God and His son. And Earth is still Heaven's opposite. But this hell only seems to have any reality while you believe it is real, while you are judging and deceiving. God does not believe in hell being real. He knows there is no real sin or death. So he looks UPON hell and does not make it real, does not see any proof of real sin in it, sees no evidence of real death happening, and so has no grounds for being anything other than loving. Laughing at it. Shining it away.
So now in the Holy Spirit's true perception, everything about the world is OVERLOOKED, ie not taken at face value. The world is regarded as a thin veil of nothingness hanging over the face of Christ. Substanceless, causeless, not doing anything, imaginary. An image of crucifixion still, but depicting nothing but a fantasy. An image of death and sin still, but depicting only an idle wish that sin and death can happen. It's not taken seriously. And so he does not see REAL sin in it. In this way, the picture of crucifixion is forgiven.
Here before your eyes is a vision of hell, a veil of death, which the body wants to report as real, but which the Spiritual Eye recognizes is entirely fictional and absurd. Not even worth paying attention to. But because the Holy Spirit does not see "real sin" in it, he does not project sin onto it, or judge it, or condemn it, or mistake it for reality. It is now a picture of death, interpreted as nothing, depicting fake sins, containing no real sin, and so it is forgiven. It is not seen as "full of sin". Nor is it sinless. It is a forgiven illusion, seen through and disregarded,.
And so instead it seems to symbolize innocence and holiness. If no attack or hate or judgement is laid UPON it, it's merely seen as a thin veil of illusions. It has lost its heaviness and darkness. It is now a very light picture of darkness. A thin picture of solidity. A loved picture of illusions of hatred. Because the world you made is always an illusion, always artificial, always not real, always false, always a depiction of impossibilities, and always nothing. Not taken seriously, it ends in laughter.
"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone ***what more remains to keep a separated world in place?*** For place has gone as well, along with time. (end of spacetime.) Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate **it could not remain where separation is impossible.** Forgiveness proves it is impossible ***because it sees it not.*** And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."
"Can what has no beginning really end? The world ***will end** in an illusion, as it began. Yet will its ending be an illusion of mercy. The illusion of forgiveness, complete, excluding no one, limitless in gentleness, ***will cover it***, hiding all evil, concealing all sin and ending guilt forever. So ***ends the world*** that guilt had made, for now it has no purpose and is gone."
The illusion of forgiveness covers the evil world by not BELIEVING that it is real. By recognizing SIN does not exist. So this picture of sin is false. The perspective of the big picture reveals the world's illusion, and correctly perceives it as a deception. It REPLACES the world's meaninglessness. It SHINES AWAY the world because illusions recognized must disappear. A forgiven world is a world recognized as FALSE. A FALSE world, perceived WITH love, which overlooks and shines away the world. God erases the world with love. You cannot love it and keep it. A world forgiven cannot last.
"This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world. But the REAL world (heaven) HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT (heaven). And what you call with love WILL come to you. Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made (Earth, illusion), ***and do not want.*** The only effort you need make, to give this world (Earth) away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make (heaven), is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."
"Until forgiveness is complete, the world does have a purpose. It becomes the home in which forgiveness is born, and where it grows and becomes stronger and more all-embracing. Here is it nourished, for here it is needed. A gentle Savior, born where sin was made and guilt seemed real."
"When not one thought of sin remains" appears to be a long-range goal indeed. But time stands still, and waits on the goal of God's teachers. Not one thought of sin will remain the instant any one of them accepts Atonement for himself."
"***The world will end*** when its thought system has been completely reversed. Until then, bits and pieces of its thinking will still seem sensible.The final lesson, which brings ***the ending of the world***, cannot be grasped by those not yet prepared *****to leave the world and go beyond its tiny reach.*****"
"The world will **end** in joy, because it is a place of sorrow. When joy has come, the purpose of the world has gone. The world will **end** in peace, because it is a place of war. When peace has come, what is the purpose of the world? The world will **end** in laughter, because it is a place of tears. Where there is laughter, who can longer weep? And only complete forgiveness brings all this to bless the world. **In blessing it departs**, for it will not end as it began. To turn hell into Heaven (symbolically) is the function of God's teachers, for what they teach are lessons in which Heaven is ***reflected*** (symbolic)."
To turn hell into heaven simply means, to learn to recognize that the world is not REALLY hell, it is not REALLY anything. It's claims are ignored. It's proof is thrown out. It's picture of death are laughed at. It's sins are not taken seriously. It's illusions do not deceive. The picture of crucifixion is SEEN WITH love, and a **reflection** of love and holiness is seen "in it". As if looking upon a picture of devastation and war in an extremely happy mood. What it claims to be is not what it is. You override it. And then the world disappears completely.
"**A world forgiven cannot last.** It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time."
"Eternity will **shine away** the world."
"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, **no walls, no bodies**, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."
"The world (Earth) stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as ***nothing more than just a fragile veil***, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last **for only what it is.** (an illusion of a sin/attack/death world.) And now ***it cannot fail to disappear***, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant ***is the world forgot***, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."