The Son of God is causal and creative.

The Son of God paints brand new pictures on a blank canvas.

The Son of God does not paint pictures on top of old pictures.

The Son of God does not ask old pictures to comply in getting out of the way so that He can paint new pictures.

The Son of God doesn't wait for old pictures to listen to His powerful brush-strokes and to then decide on their own to form a new picture.

The Son of God knows that there really are no old pictures and there really only ever is a blank canvas.

The Son of God directly paints to the blank canvas every time, bypassing all old images, ignoring their stories.

The Son of God enforces the paint to be laid on the canvas, and needs no cooperation from whatever was there before.

The Son of God doesn't listen to the pictures that are before Him, he simply paints anew, obliterating the old.

The Son of God is not obstructed. There is nothing standing in His way.

The Son of God has no enemy or opponent or force of resistance working against Himself, because He has reclaimed all of His own power.

The Son of God knows that any force of resistance was always His own power working in conflict with His own will.

The Son of God dances merrily, painting here and there new realities and new worlds, care-free and absolutely.

The Son of God is free.

You are the Son of God. Pick up your brushes and paint!

MINDS DO NOT NEED BODIES TO COMMUNICATE!

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used only as the Holy Spirit teaches, IT HAS NO FUNCTION. For ***MINDS NEED NOT THE BODY TO COMMUNICATE***. The sight that sees the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship. And while you look upon each other thus, the means and end have not been brought in line."

"***ONLY MINDS COMMUNCIATE***. Since the ego CANNOT obliterate the impulse to communicate because it is also the impulse to CREATE, it can only try to teach you that the BODY can both communicate AND create, and therefore does not NEED the mind. The ego, then, tries to teach you that the body can ACT like the mind, and therefore IS self-sufficient. But we have learned that behavior is NOT the level for either teaching OR learning."

Now, I know that some people LOVE the statements in the course about the body being used "as a communication device" or "only for communication". However, think about this.

The body ITSELF does not communicate. It does not HAVE a function or a holy ability. It is like, a completely blank canvas or "speaker system" which can do NOTHING but allow the Holy Spirit to pass through and beyond it, IGNORING IT. It is the holy spirit that communicates. It is MINDS that communicate MIND TO MIND, OVERLOOKING THE BODY, BYPASSING THE BODY.

The body itself doesn't DO anything magical or special when it is used for communication. Essentially the body is inert and has absolutely NO FUNCTION other than for Holy Spirit to move PAST IT as a kind of temporary portal into this world. The body becomes nothing but an open window. Making the body "special" by saying it's a communication device, or that it is important, or does something, or is worth keeping for that reason, is a mistake.

MINDS DO NOT NEED BODIES TO COMMUNICATE. The body was made to limit communication. The body **ITSELF** DOES NOT COMMUNICATE. The Holy Spirit communicates THROUGH or BEYOND it, as if the body wasn't even there. Let's stop trying to make the body spiritual and God's gift to man. It's nothing but a separation device and only by IGNORING IT can communication happen IN SPITE OF IT.

"The Christ in you inhabits NOT a body."

"You have the vision that enables you to see the body not."

"Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid aside, and that is all."

"I will not use the body s eyes today."

So, every feeling you have, every reaction you have, you choose to have, on your own. And it has nothing to do with stimuli or what other people are doing or what happens.

So you're really walking around with a blank slate, happy, having absolutely no reason to be upset, and then you literally are picking something out of the environment and saying, AHA, I think I'm going to claim that I'm triggered by that, I'm going to create a reaction, I'm going to choose to be unhappy.

So then you do.

And it had nothing to do with what happened outside you.

So really, you're this kind of walking talking reacto-machine which just fires random reactions all over the place for no particular reason.

If nothing outside of you is really to blame or really has anything to do with why you are upset, and your upset is just YOUR OWN STUFF which you need to be fully responsible for, then you quite literally are manufacturing every interpretation and every reactive experience that you're experiencing, inside yourself, by yourself.

So once you start to take responsibility for this, then this is breaking the spell. It's breaking the connection between something happening and you then having a reaction and blaming the causality of it on the thing - "it caused me to have an effect" gets broken.

Once that starts to be broken and you stop CONNECTING or JOINING fake external causes/triggers with internal effects, and you realize the cause is IN YOU not out there, now you're in a different scenario. You cause all of the effects you are experiencing, AND you are causing all of what SEEM to be the effects of outside causes. You are causing your own reactions!

So now you can stop having reactions, by choosing not to. Or you can at least own up to being the one who is choosing to have it. And what begins to happen as you begin to 'stop' making the tie between external causes and internal effects, and reclaim the tie between internal causes and internal effects, is you start to realize they are not and don't need to be joined.

So that means, if you wish, on a whim, you could decide NOT to have any reaction whatsoever to something you'd normally react to. And conversely, you could decide to react on purpose to something ridiculous that would not normally call for a reaction (a bit harder to do without the unconscious element).

So as you practice this you grow stronger in the awareness that your reactions aren't actually caused by anything outside you, and that you can - at will - choose not to have them. By owning them you disconnect from the ego and automatically choose Holy Spirit. And by severing the tie between external causes and internal effects you now regain access to your inner causality.

So how about you then learn to simply choose to no longer PRETEND to be at the effect of external causes, and maybe you ADMIT that you cannot BE affected by anything external WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT (including death). And then you find yourself laughing because you realize you're being upset for absolutely no reason and because of no cause, which gives way to laughing for absolutely no reason and with no cause. Because when YOU are the cause, you are aligned with GOD the Cause, which is nothing but joyful.

"All your time is spent in dreaming."

Do you ever get the feeling everyone is just making stuff up as they go along? Or do you experience yourself doing this?

From time to time I *think* that I know what I want to do, and sort of talk myself into it, and do it, and it seems right, then later I am disillusioned and don't know what I saw in it. I add justifications and reasons why, in order to "convince myself", and later these turn out to be empty and hold no weight.

This world is insane. And we try to "give it all the meaning it has". We use scapegoats to justify doing or not doing things. We make things into enemies in order to deflect our decision making in a certain direction. And no-one knows what the fuck they're doing.

Half the time it seems all the medical people are just making shit up and don't know what the heck they're doing, cus every solution they come up with has awful side effects. The ads on TV for medications are utterly ridiculous.

People tell you what you eat and why eating this or that is better for you. Turns out none of them have the truth and none of them can agree to anything. Everyone and their cat has an opinion.

I get convinced for a while that doing something is "what I want to do" and get all lost in it and then something interrupts me, and then some time passes, and I come back to it and have no idea why I would want to be doing that thing. What I thought was "salvation" turns out to be another completely meaningless wild goose chase.

In a way, it's like trying to find "real meaning" in a meaningless world. ACIM says the world is meaningless, and we put all the meaning onto it. So when we start weaving a story about "why" something is or is not a good choice, it's all made up. It's all ego bullshit. There is no truth here.

In a way that leads to realizing, there is nothing meaningful in the world. And meaning must be deeper within somewhere. And that also reveals that the world is entirely a senseless, insane illusion that has no truth and doesn't mean shit.

If I choose to make something happen, let's say I decide and go make it happen. Well, now I made it happen cus I force it it to happen. Totally meaningless.

I'm looking around for a sense of "that's really what I love to do" sort of thing, only to find that even the things I thought I loved to do are just empty containers onto which I project various fake motivations and ideas, to try to "dress them up" and explain why they're so great. There's nothing there.

The world seems like a blank canvas. It has nothing inherent to it. It's a effect. So it can't really "do" anything "for" you. It can't save you, or make you happy or sad. It does what you make it do. And that means it has no real opinion, or value. If you don't make it valuable, it's not valuable. If you don't read into it, there's nothing to it.

It's like we're living in some kind of giant snow globe pretending it's an amazing real place with built-in value and importance but it's really all just a pile of tosh, lol.

"I do not know the thing I am."

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

Hah!

"I do not know the thing I am, and therefore do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world or on myself."

Yet in learning this is salvation born. And what you are will tell you of Itself.

Come home. You have not found your happiness in foreign places and in alien forms that have no meaning to you, though you sought to make them meaningful. This world is not where you belong. You are a stranger here.

God’s welcome waits for us all, and He will welcome us as I am welcoming you. Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world has to offer."

Projection makes perception and makes the world you see. You put it there. You give it its meaning. It has no real meaning at all. This is all just a big lie we keep telling ourselves. THERE IS NO WORLD!

Jesus describes the process of becoming sick...

"Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more."

What happens is, we're in a deluded mindset (ego) and are misperceiving and misinterpreting reality. Then we are exposed to the truth, but in our thought system what is actually true is perceived as "false", because we see truth in what is false and vice versa. That's part of our delusion.

So instead of seeing the truth for how it really is, we see it as an enemy. In particular the ego sees the Holy Spirit as an enemy, just as the ego sees the miracle as an enemy.

By misperceiving the truth, i.e. filtering it and reinterpreting it and coming to a conclusion that it has properties of "falseness", in our twisted thought system this means it is an enemy, or it's evil, or its attacking what we are, or is against us in some way.

The "natural reaction" to this PERCEPTION (albeit a mistaken one), which is totally understandable, is to DEFEND YOURSELF. You tend to want to get away from what you believe is false, and draw yourself towards that which is true for you. Whether or not your idea of truth is back to front or not is a different matter.

So your natural reaction to your OWN misperception of the truth, is to defend yourself, because you see attack IN it, which you have projected onto it. You therefore believe you are seeing an enemy, and you want to escape.

You want to get away from that which you see as false, because it is evil, riddled with darkness, vicious and sure to threaten you. In the interest of preserving your sense of SAFETY, and in effort to DEFEND THE TRUTH (at least, your delusional truth), and in the interests of maintaining your sense of INNOCENCE (albeit mis-identified), you use your creative powers to put up a DEFENSE.

This defense is something you do with your mind. It is resistance. It is denial. It is an attempt to disassociate yourself from the truth, to put distance between you, to emphasize the separation between you and it, and therefore effectively SHUT YOURSELF OFF FROM LIFE. Truth is life, i.e. God, so as you defend yourself against God, you produce the opposite of life - a movement towards death. All forms of sickness are partial deaths. There is not really such a thing as sickness, only life or death - and death is an illusion.

Therefore you believe that you've actually done the right thing, that you've defended yourself, that you've upheld the truth, that you've maintained innocence, and that you've blocked out some vicious murderous God who wants you dead. You really believe that you've actually made a wise move and that you are BETTER OFF being rid of, or having escaped, the terrible monster that you MIS-INTERPRETED the truth as.

As you continue with such delusions, you can drive yourself to death, believing fully that you are all the while defending the truth, upholding innocence, protecting reality, and thwarting the 'real menace' of God. People commit suicide every day. Every person who dies is choosing to die in order to escape from God. Death is a choice for self-murder, to escape Life, because Life has now been wrongly perceived as DEATH. Life and death have been flipped, their roles and meanings inverted, and you are now convinced that dying is actually a choice for life - that it is your SALVATION, and that it will bring you PEACE! Hah.

So you can see how deluded we can be, that the truth contains horrors we do not want. But the fact is, the truth is a blank mirror, in which we see a REFLECTION of all of our own delusional beliefs. When it looks frightening, it is ONLY because it does not support, uphold, or even acknowledge, the egoic belief system and all that it believes in. Thus when we are ego-identified, we believe we are defending ourselves from a separate enemy, but we're actually running away from our own SHADOW.

This is why we need to forgive God, i.e. undo our delusion that illusions are real, or that there is a truth other than God's truth. It is also why we need to have "a little willingness" to be mistaken - that our sense of truth may not be the real truth, and become open to accepting God's truth as our truth - sharing truth with Him. This opens the way for healing miracles. But even moreso, it is the RESURRECTION of the Son of GOd.

The sick are merely delusional and self-deceived in what the truth really is, believing that the opposite is true. They do not realize they are choosing against the truth, and that by doing so it produces sickness. And then sickness seems to come about almost accidentally through mis-creation. Before you know it, you're sick and suffering and heading for death. But this can ALWAYS be corrected, and you can ALWAYS choose again.

Correction is needed, and that is all.

Holy Spirit is the answer. He is here to help awaken you from the ILLUSION that death is real, that death will protect you from death, and that God is evil.

God is love. Love is all there is. Love is what you are.

It's possible to rationalize and justify ANY viewpoint you want to take. If you look, you will find all kinds of reasons in support of your opinion. The thing is, you won't think it's your opinion because you'll justify how your opinion is 'reality' by saying, look, look at the truth, look at the evidence I found.

But what you don't realize is, you can flip-flop your opinion and change your mind about what you're trying to prove is true, and then you'll start to see all kinds of evidence supporting THAT viewpoint as well. And again you'll probably tell yourself, well, look over there, that proves that this viewpoint is true.

And again you've fallen for the same ILLUSION.

The world does not have a meaning of its own. There is no truth in the world. It does not contain facts or proof. It is not objectively real. But we keep looking to it to TELL US what the truth is. And each time we find some evidence we fall into this blindness about how this proves what is real or true. And if that evidence supports our case, which it usually does because beliefs create evidence, we'll keep believing that the world contains some truth.

The trick is to realize we are always CHOOSING the meaning that everything has, we are always GIVING meaning to stuff in the world, we are SELECTING the evidence that we resonate with to support whatever our belief is, and we are always being SUBJECTIVE.

What if I told you there IS NO TRUTH in the world? At all? And that every time you are 'sure' that something is proven in the world, it's actually still just you making it up as you go along, projecting belief into the neutral world and giving it meaning? And each time you say, see, this proves it, these are all the external reasons 'why', regardless of whether it's for or against, you fall into the same ego trap of not realizing it's a blank canvas.

You literally hallucinate the meaning you want to see in the world to justify the viewpoint you are CHOOSING to see SO THAT you will see evidence to prove its truth and to have faith in it. And then you switch to some other belief and do the same. And each time you think, see, I'm seeing the factual real world. You're not. You're only ever seeing your MIND CONTENT. Your fiction. You make up the story as you go along and the world never proves anything on your behalf. You RATIONALIZE why various things you pick out support your case and point to them as proof to support your view, not realizing you view is entirely your choice.

Ever had one of those times where you get all excited about something and you find all these reasons why it's the best thing you can do and why, when you do it, things are going to be better, and all this, and you find all these explanations to support it. Then some time passes and... this delusion starts to occur to you as maybe being flawed, and you start shifting to the opposite viewpoint... maybe this is not the thing you should do, bla bla bla, and then you start to justify why it is NOT the thing you should do, finding evidence to support that as well. But it was never that the world proved in favor or against either viewpoint - you're making it all up as you go along!!

So each time you look OUTSIDE YOURSELF for answers, for truth, for proof, for evidence, to determine some kind of inherent meaning or inherent objective factual truth, you are kidding yourself.

Your mind is NOT able to separately 'observe' what it perceives without interfering with what it perceives, because what you perceive is IN THE MIND that is perceiving it. Even quantum physics points to this. You can't look at something and say, I'm looking at this objectively and I'm only seeing what 'is really there', and then use that to explain why you should or shouldn't do something, or why something is right or wrong or good or bad or whatever. Each time you observe you MAKE ILLUSIONS and hallucinate. In that hallucination you dream-up rationalizations and justifications, and as you project what you WANT to see, you see it - projection makes perception.

So don't be fooled thinking you have a faculty for neutrally observing the world or neutrally finding evidence outside you that is there all on its own with no involvement from you. That's a victim viewpoint. YOU PUT IT THERE. And you will dream up whatever you want to in support of whatever you happen to be deciding is what you will dream is true today. There are no neutral thoughts - there are no neutral perceptions.

Ok, so today I will dream that it's a great idea to move to live in Hawaii, and I'll screen out everything that tells me its not a good idea and focus in on what tells me its a good idea, and that'll make it seem like its a really good thing to do. And then by convincing myself that its a good thing to do, I'll then say, well, I didn't have anything to do with deciding this - look at the objective evidence, it's clearly what I should do because of this and that and the other.

And then you'll be like, ok I will move to Hawaii because the external evidence shows me its the best thing. ie the situation or the world outside me is 'telling me I should' go there (which is a victim standpoint and disowning of power and responsibility). And then you move and its crap and you don't like it or its too expensive and you want to go home because you're living a DELUSION.

You're not being authentic and honest with yourself about the HUGE part you play in what you are perceiving and choosing, and how you are PRETENDING that you are not choosing so that you can blame it on external circumstances and BE A VICTIM. So long as we keep looking outside of ourselves to the world to 'ask it to tell us' what is out there, we're going to be victims.

So where will you turn for truth and facts? Truth and facts are of God, learned through Holy Spirit. He is the only one who can be 'objective' and not contribute hallucinations to your decision making.

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."

Whatever you see in something, if you think it is inherently offensive, it is not. The offensiveness is in your own mind, and you put it there.

That can be hard to accept because it means that you've been used to this idea of an objective reality outside of yourself all this time. A reality which has its own inherent qualities and which reports them to you as though they are distinct from your perception.

What it implies now is that what you're experiencing as reality, is in fact a hallucination that's part of your own mind's malfunctioning, that you literally are inventing everything that bothers you, that you are doing all that to yourself.

This implies also that there is no fixed reality out in the world, and therefore there is no inherent truth based on form. You literally give everything the meaning that it has for you.

ACIM lesson #2, right at the start: "I have given everything I see…all the meaning that it has for me."

This means that you are basically inventing every single justification that you think is truth, or that you think is based on objective facts outside of you. It means that, if you want to, and when it suits you, you MAKE UP everything that you think is true.

If you are in favor of something, you will make up reasons why it is a good idea, to support it and lend weight to your conviction that it is somehow inherently right. And if you are against something, you will make up reasons why it is a bad idea, in order to continue to support your belief that the reality outside of you is fixed and has nothing to do with your experience of it.

It can be perhaps alarming to discover that you are literally making everything up as you go along, and that all the things you thought were factual or true are really just your rationalizations. You decide what stuff means. You lend it credibility and pretend that this credibility comes from outside of you.

You think that other people's opinions, authority, certifications, education, experience, or even physical evidence, are all ways in which the world has an inherent truth. You have come to depend on this notion that you are not experiencing the results of your own made up subjective fantasy, but that everything that's going on is happening "on its own" without your input. And because you do not see the ways that you contribute to it or indeed create it, you do not accept that IT HAS NO TRUTH.

This leaves you in a kind of limbo like state where you're kind of just hanging there with no sense of what the truth outside you is anymore. If you're making up all the meaning, and quite literally the entirety of humanity is totally making up the meaning of everything in society as it goes along, then really there IS no inherent meaning outside of your mind.

This means the world is basically either neutral or insane, and that, based on the ego, it CANNOT make sense. There cannot be truth to it, and since it is a mental hallucination, it is nothing better than a chaotic illusion. Trying to "understand it" is an attempt to discover that it has an inherent meaning of its own, separate from your mind. We are very addicted and conditioned to continually look for meaning outside of ourselves, in the world, in order to disown true meaning (God/Self).

This is what happens when you try to figure things out, diagnose sickness, analyze situations, look for what is really happening, try to find proof, explain the background of something, try to identify causes, look for rational explanations or depend on the opinions of other people's authority. This is you attempting to turn an illusion into a reality, trying to convince yourself that you are NOT the one who has given it all the meaning it has, or that it is not just some blank canvas onto which you've projected an entirely fantastical world.

What this means for your mind and your sense of reality is that you cannot continue to claim that there is an objective world out there, and nor does that world have its own meaning at all. It is in fact a meaningless world, and this meaningless world cannot be understood unless you transcend it.

ACIM lessons 10 through 14:

"10 My thoughts do not mean anything."

"11 My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world."

"12 I am upset because I see a meaningless world.

"13 A meaningless world engenders fear."

"14 God did not create a meaningless world."

If the world is meaningless, and God did not create it (thus it is not objective reality), then this shows you that every meaning you see in it is made up but your thoughts, which are themselves meaningless and contain "pretend meanings". These pretend meanings attempt to give meaning to a world which has none.

What you may be afraid to admit is that it is not possible to find truth in any way shape or form in the world, because the world is not real. And that means your mind, your sense of reality, has been believing that it's had nothing to do with what you perceive all this time. When in fact it is the sole inventor of all the meanings that you think the world has.

Everything supposedly "out there" is neutral and therefore if you think something is good or bad or right or wrong or acceptable or unacceptable it is ONLY because you're making up a truth which you try to turn into reality and try to justify to yourself as being objective. It is not. It is subjective hallucination. So if there's no truth out there, it leaves you sort of hanging as to how to deal with reality.

It is as though you create your own reality, which is a popular new-age concept, which also leads on to manipulating the world. But this really is denying the fact that you do not create reality. You are creating UNREALITY. But it's a step closer to realizing that what you are experiencing is coming from you, and therefore what you perceive is not necessarily objectively real.

You're dreaming, and only God creates reality!

This is why in your awakening journey you then have to go through the process of recognizing the part that your mind plays in inventing meaning, how it distorts perception, how you contribute to what shows up outside of you, how you use it, how completely subjective you're being, and how everything that you thought was objectively real is in fact not real at all.

As you do this you will gradually realize more and more that there IS an objective reality, it's just not "out there" as a physical world, and instead it is within, in your Oneness with God. Formless, timeless, spaceless, ageless. The ONE and only meaning. A meaning that has not been fragmented into a billion conflicts. A meaning which hasn't been artificially attributed to an illusion. A meaning which ACTUALLY IS MEANINGFUL to you - that you can feel in your heart, in your very being.

God is true meaning. God is the one and only meaning. All else is meaningless.

It's important for us to be willing to look at the world and recognize that it HAS NO MEANING. The world ITSELF is utterly meaningless. It was made as a projected idea of the opposite of God. God is entirely meaningful, so his opposite means nothing at all.

A meaningless world is not necessarily therefore an upsetting world, or lacking world, or a world that can't reflect positivity. It can't of ITSELF be positive, or holy, because it is nothing. But it CAN act like a completely neutral mirror in which holiness can be reflected.

And meaninglessness does NOT necessarily mean depression, darkness, boredom, despair, suicidal tendencies, or lack of purpose. These are in fact all MEANINGS of the ego which it projects onto the world. True meaninglessness is devoid of ANY meaning, either positive OR negative.

The world is therefore really nothing, or you might think of it as neutral. It has no meaning of its own and can only act to symbolize something GIVEN to it. You therefore have to give or project meaning ONTO it to make it mean something at all.

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real."

The world thus acts like an empty mirror. You can project egoic ideas of hell onto it, or ideas of heaven and love. You can project God onto it. Since the world HAS no meaning, the ego rushes in to try to give it a hellish meaning. It projects meaning of sin and fear and attack and death. But this only happens when you don't recognize that the world is meaningless. If you don't regard the world as a MIRROR, in which a REFLECTION is seen, because it has no real image of its own, you mistakenly associate the reflection FOR the mirror itself. And now you think that what you projected ONTO it is what it inherently IS.

The world is kind of like a void, or am empty shell. It is nothing in itself. So you give it meaning. You ego gives it the meaning of hell, while the Holy Spirit helps you to give it a the meaning of heaven. Whatever meaning you give it, it REFLECTS back to you. It reflects rather than IS anything, because it is meaningless and so does not have ITS OWN meaning to give you. This makes it act like a mirror.

This reflection IS an image, and is not heaven itself, but is a reflection of heaven. God can be seen reflected IN the world (because he's in your mind), because the world ITSELF is NOT God. Being NOT God, or God's opposite, it has NO meaning of its own, and so CAN reflect HIS. The challenge then is to put aside the projections of hell that you have GIVEN to the world, the meanings you have given to everything, and allow yourself to RECOGNIZE that the world IS meaningless. Without your projections of hell, it is NOT hell, OR heaven. It is just a blank canvas.

"In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

The thing is that when the mirror is crowded with egoic images, dreams you project onto it and perceive, it becomes dark. And now you are looking at a reflection of darkness IN the mirror, and mistake the darkness FOR the mirror. And now the world seems like hell, and the darkness makes it impossible to see God's reflection.

When you are willing to recognize that the world is a neutral meaningless mirror, really NOTHING, with no meaning of ITS OWN, this is in fact a good thing, and not a depressing thing. It means you are willing to stop projecting FALSE images onto it, or to give it a meaning it DOES NOT have, or to try to MAKE it mean hell. By not putting images of hell onto it, you do not see hell IN it. Recognizing it AS a mirror opens your mind to NOT KNOW what it is, and to instead allow the Holy Spirit to project the real world's reflection for you to see.

When the mirror is spotless and clean and devoid of ego projections, this LACK of meaning acts like a shiny surface in which EVERYTHINGNESS is reflected, rather than like a dirty dark mirror which filters OUT the reflection.

In the true reflection of God's meaning IN the mirror of the world, God's reflection is seen IN the world, and now the world appears to REFLECT heaven. It now appears to share heaven's MEANING, because heaven's meaning (love etc) is projected ONTO it, an so reflects BACK to you through perception. "Projection makes perception." "Perception is a result not a cause."

By being open to acknowledging that the world it NOTHING in itself, and is MEANINGLESS in itself, you are in fact becoming open to allowing God to put HIS meaning there. And thus is the world redeemed and saved from projections of hell onto it. And in an empty space, devoid of ego attack and sin ideas, the world can now reflect heaven.

And thus doing this can make you HAPPY because you can recognize that hell does not really exist when you don't GIVE hell to the world. And the world can now seem to turn into a happy dream, where heaven is reflected and God is seen IN everything (as a reflected IMAGE of God). Such a world is the forgiven world, in which everything seems sparkling and bright and new and lovely. And in this state the body is healed and incapable of sickness. And now you are ready to go home.

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

"Recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones. It represents a situation in which God and the ego "challenge" each other as to whose meaning is to be written in the empty space which meaninglessness provides. The ego rushes in frantically to establish its own "ideas" there, fearful that the void may otherwise be used to demonstrate its own unreality. And on this alone it is correct."

"It is essential, therefore, that you learn to recognize the meaningless, and accept it without fear. If you are fearful, it is certain that you will endow the world with attributes which it does not possess, and crowd it with images that do not exist. To the ego illusions are safety devices, as they must also be to you who equate yourself with the ego."

"You think that what upsets you is a frightening world, or a sad world, or a violent world, or an insane world. All these attributes are given it by you. The world is meaningless in itself."

"What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be. It is this you see in it. It is this that is meaningless in truth. Beneath your words is written the Word of God. The truth upsets you now, but when your words have been erased, you will see His. That is the ultimate purpose of these exercises."

When considering "what are you?", the body could be said to be responsible for a vast majority of what you think you are, including most of your personality and aspects of your mind.

All bodies are different, even if there are similarities. All brains are different. The body gives rise to a superficial personality as well. Within this personality there are different parts and some of these parts even conflict with each other, are activated in different scenarios, and have sub-personalities within them.

Consider what happens in the eyes of your soul, as it passes through different lifetimes with different bodies. Sometimes you are a man, sometimes a woman. So right away your seeming gender is not a consistent and permanent part of your real self. Sometimes you are gay, sometimes straight, sometimes asexual. Your sexuality is not a permanent part of what you are.

Sometimes you are black, sometimes white, asian, mexican, chinese, english, who knows. None of these qualities or ethic backgrounds or body types or genetic materials defines what you really are. Sometimes you have brown eyes, sometimes blue or green. Sometimes you have dark hair, sometimes blond, or red, or whatever. None of this is part of your permanent identity.

The body also gives rise to personality. Personality springs from the various qualities and focuses and 'talents' and attributes and wirings of the brain and the rest of the system. People are born with certain qualities, which give rise to preferences and interests.

Some are born with a strong intellect, while others may lack the precision and brightness of thought. Some are born highly emotional, while others may be shallow. Some are born flamboyant and dramatic, while others may be more subdued and withdrawn. Some are extroverted, some introverted. These are largely all based on the nervous system and the brain wiring.

You'll notice also that you generally keep roughly the same personality throughout the lifetime. Even if you're working on spiritual things, your voice is much the same, your mannerisms, your way of walking, your intonations, your subtle ways and nuances, all much the same still.

In the course for example in the manual for teachers, Jesus remarks about how teachers of God retain these attributes:

"The surface traits of God's teachers are not at all alike. They do not look alike to the body's eyes, they come from vastly different backgrounds, their experiences of the world vary greatly, and their superficial "personalities" are quite distinct." UrM5A1

So here he's saying that the physical appearance of the body is going to be much the same, to the body's eyes their bodies are all different still, they have different backgrounds and experiences, they have superficial personalities still which we quite distinct etc. None of that changes just because your mind is waking up. And notice how it says the personality is superficial - ie appears to be an entire character, but isn't really you.

You'll notice also for example that people who go through awakenings don't suddenly really change their physical or personality nature or style. They still have the same body, the same general personality, the same way of talking, the same sense of humour, the same general way of expressing etc. Their personalities are much the same. They might be more serene and calm, more peaceful, happier, lighter, healthier, etc... but in general the body and personality stay much the same.

So that being the case, we have to ask ourselves, WHAT exactly is your real self, if all of these many varied bodies and personalities are NOT what you are? And how do we transcend or rise above or dis-identify from this superficial personality, if it is not our real self?

You might've been thinking all this time, doing the course, waking up, that "you" or "your mind" is somehow "your real self". That you are applying things "separate from" some kind of lower ego self or body. But perhaps that isn't true. Perhaps the personality that you've been using and thinking is "you", is actually part of the body's personality. Maybe this whole character, this person, that you think you've been all this time, isn't actually you at all. And maybe your real self is actually so far out of sight and out of your awareness that you don't even know it's there.

"You do not realize the whole extent to which the idea of separation has INTERFERED with reason. Reason lies in the other self you have CUT OFF from your awareness." UrT21F5

Perhaps you've divided up parts of your fictitious self and called some parts the real you and other parts the fake you. But maybe all of it is the fake you. Maybe quite honestly, the whole of what you think has been you all this time, is not you at all, except for what? What exactly is left over, when you take away the body, the gender, the sexuality, the nervous system, the brain wiring, the personality, the preferences, the things you feel comfortable with, the compatibilities and incompatibilities? What part of any of your experience is actually the real you at all?

We're told that CHOICE is at least a freedom we still have, which is part of the mind. Here is Jesus saying that even our seeming "consciousness" is not really what our real mind is like.

"In this world the only remaining freedom is the freedom of choice; this choice is always between two choices or two voices. Will is not involved in perception at any level, and has nothing to do with choice. CONSCIOUSNESS is the receptive mechanism, receiving messages from above or below; from the Holy Spirit or the ego. Consciousness has levels and awareness can shift quite dramatically, but it cannot transcend the perceptual realm. At its highest it becomes aware of the real world, and can be trained to do so increasingly. Yet the very fact that it has levels and can be trained demonstrates that consciousness cannot reach knowledge." UrU2A6

So it seems that in some regard, "consciousness", in its essence, which is a separation-based psyche, and part of the larger "mind", is the only part of our experience and reality that we would retain if we awaken. And indeed consciousness itself is based on a split mind, and that split will end when we wake up, restoring us to "awareness". But it is mind that has belief and denial and choice, and mind is where we can have perceptual changes and alterations to values and desires.

Yet some parts of what seem to be mind may not really be our real mind. And many of our thoughts are not even what ACIM would consider real thoughts. Ego thoughts, separate thoughts, thoughts about bodies, thoughts of attack, etc, these are illusions of thoughts, in what is really a sort of blank mind not really thinking anything real. But we have to work with thoughts to get our mind to re-align with spirit.

"Only the mind and body need Atonement. The miracle joins in the Atonement of Christ by placing the mind in the service of the Spirit. This establishes the proper function of mind, and abolishes its errors." UrT1B27E

"You have seen the extent of your lack of mental discipline, and of your need for mind training." UrW94L4

"An untrained mind can accomplish nothing. It is the purpose of these exercises to train the mind to think along the lines which the course sets forth." UrW1Ln11

So it seems that overall the "course" or curriculum is about training the mind to be put back into its proper role as a medium for the soul to use for creative constructive purposes. This mind is trained by various practices, in the mind, including a shift in a sense of identification. From believing that you are the body, or that you are even the body's "personality", to identifying yourself as Christ/Spirit/Soul/Sonship. And this includes dis-identifying from the body's "personality" character.

"Miracles praise God through men. They praise God by honoring his Creations, affirming their perfection. They heal because they deny body-identification and affirm Soul-identification." UrT1B26

Along the way, we have to sort out and question, what parts of what we think are our "self" are actually part of self, and what are just transient temporary things. All aspects of the body are not permanent and not part of a permanent identity. Even across lifetimes. Whatever body attributes seem locked in for a lifetime, are irrelevant to what you are. But this also extends to major personality traits, the way you handle emotions, the sensitivity level with which you experience the world, the way you speak, how your body moves as an expression of your sense of your "character", all of this stuff is superficial.

I think then at some point we have to realize, even our personality here is not likely to really be true to how we are in spirit. This "person", this character in a dream, that you thought was you, maybe that too is an illusion. Maybe it would change radically if you switched bodies. Maybe none of these personalities are real personalities. Maybe all that is left over in your awareness that is real, is a much more fundamental underlying "pure awareness", coupled with the magnificence of the soul and the attributes of being part of God.

For now, this "you" that you have to work with, is like an interface to the world, a tool... just a figure in a dream, like a puppet, complete with a built-in software character, that has certain characteristics. A sort of persona. And you can work through that and use it, but must find a way to not regard it as your self. If you could see all the seeming selves you've been across lifetimes this would be far more obvious.

The fact that the personality is part of the body, and that we have a superficial egoic mind, is revealed in this paragraph, where we're told that "the body" "seeks for friends and enemies", it has a concern for safety, it looks for comfort, it looks for pleasure, it avoids hurtful things. These could not be attributed to a mindless body, they have to mean that the body and personality-mind are part of one system, this "character" of a dream person, a false self comprising physicality AND personality, which interacts with the world and has motivations and actions and preferences - like a favourite ice cream and favourite music. This is all part of the body, and not part of what you really are.

"The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream, in which it acts as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed. It takes the central place in every dream, which tells the story of how it was made by OTHER bodies, born into the world OUTSIDE the body, lives a little while, and dies, to be united in the dust with other bodies, dying like itself. In the brief time allotted it to live, it seeks for other bodies as its friends and enemies. Its safety is its main concern. Its comfort is its guiding rule. It tries to look for pleasure, and avoid the things that would be hurtful. Above all, it tries to teach itself its pains and joys are different, and CAN be told apart." UrT27I1

"There is ANOTHER vision and ANOTHER voice, in which your freedom lies, awaiting but your choice. And, if you place your faith in them, you will perceive ANOTHER Self in YOU." UrT21F3

It seems that Jesus is telling us in the course that all of our regular thoughts are the sole cause of all our suffering. Our faulty THOUGHTS are the problem. Just the mere act of HAVING a thought that is fearful or guilty or attacking produces an upsetting and endangered perception, which we complain about but continue to think of. Having the thought AT ALL is the problem. And there are much higher thoughts of love and peace and invulnerability that we could be having instead.

"My thoughts do not mean anything."

"My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world."

"I am affected only by my thoughts."

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

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

"I see everything upside-down, and my thoughts are the opposite of truth. I see the world as a prison for God's Son."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you."

"The idea for today contains the only way out of fear that will succeed. Nothing else will work; everything else is meaningless. But this way cannot fail. Every thought you have makes up some segment of the world you see. It is with your thoughts, then, that we must work, if your perception of the world is to be changed."

"What but your thoughts of misery and death obscure the perfect happiness and the Eternal Life your Father wills for you?" "Only YOUR thoughts have been impossible."

-- -- -- --

However, Jesus also distinguishes that we can have true/real thoughts instead of false/unreal thoughts. And it is our false/unreal thoughts that are a problem. The problem is, we spend almost our entire time having false/unreal thoughts. And our thoughts produce 'images' or interpretations which affect or define what we see.

"As a man thinketh, so does he perceive."

"My thoughts cannot be neither true nor false. They must be one or the other. What I see shows me which they are."

"The thoughts which the mind of God's Son projects, HAVE all the power that he gives them. The thoughts he shares with God are BEYOND his belief, but those HE made ARE his beliefs. And it is THESE, and NOT the truth, that he has chosen to defend and love."

"As my thoughts of separation call to the separation thoughts of others, so my real thoughts awaken the real thoughts in them."

"Whatever I see reflects my thoughts. It is my thoughts which tell me where I am and what I am."

"The images I see reflect my thoughts."

"Everything you see is the result of your thoughts. There is no exception to this fact."

"The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all. It merely represents your thoughts. And it will change entirely as you elect to change your mind"

"Your thoughts of death envelop it in fear, while in your kind forgiveness does it live."

"But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effects will change automatically."

"Nothing except your thoughts can attack you. Nothing except your thoughts can make you think you are vulnerable. And nothing except your thoughts can prove to you this is not so."

"Today's idea introduces the concept that your thoughts determine the world you see."

"Until this shift has been accomplished, you can not perceive that it is but your thoughts which bring you fear, and your deliverance depends on you."

"I can escape from the world I see by giving up attack thoughts."

-- -- -- --

Jesus goes on to tell us that if we will opt to think with and like God, sharing the Holy Spirit's thoughts, then we will see differently and will stop hurting ourselves.

"Father, I give You all my thoughts today. I would have none of mine. In place of them give me Your own. I give You all my acts as well, that I may do Your Will instead of seeking goals which cannot be obtained, and wasting time in vain imaginings."

"Your Thoughts can only bring me happiness. If ever I am sad or hurt or ill, I have forgotten what You think, and put my little, meaningless ideas in place of where Your Thoughts belong, and where They are."

"But let today's idea find a place among your thoughts, and you have risen far above the world and all the worldly thoughts that hold it prisoner."

"You think with the Mind of God. Therefore you share your thoughts with Him, as He shares His with you. They are the same thoughts, because they are thought by the same Mind."

"Father, my mind is open to Your Thoughts, and closed today to every thought but Yours."

"We accept Your Thoughts as ours, and our will is One with Yours eternally."

"Peace to my mind. Let all my thoughts be still."

"In quiet would I look upon the world, which but reflects Your Thoughts and mine as well."

"Place, then, your future in the hands of God. For thus you call the memory of Him to come again, replacing all your thoughts of sin and evil with the truth of love."

"If you would remember your Father, let the Holy Spirit order your thoughts, and give only the answer with which He answers you."

"Your ministry begins as all your thoughts are purified."

"Give Him your thoughts, and He will give them back as miracles which joyously proclaim the wholeness and the happiness God wills His Son as proof of His eternal Love."

"Exclude the outer world, and let your thoughts fly to the peace within. They know the way. For honest thoughts, untainted by the dream of worldly things outside yourself, become the holy messengers of God Himself."

"The higher mind thinks according to the laws which the Soul obeys, and therefore honors only the laws of God."

"And your thoughts will be as free as God's."

-- -- --

In order for us to atone to our real/true thoughts with God, we need to perform some degree of mind-training, mind-watching, and careful articulation of the mind's abilities. It isn't enough for us to just go about our daily business, mind-wandering, using thought to think anything and everything, and consequentially suffering from every single ego thought that crosses our minds. We have to learn to be carful with how and what we think. Especially if we want to be performing miracles which require a careful focus and intent.

"It is certainly much more useful to remind you that you do not guard your thoughts at all carefully, except for a relatively small part of the day, and somewhat inconsistently even then."

"As you sit and quietly watch your thoughts"

"Watch your minds for the temptations of the ego, and do not be deceived by it. KNOW it offers you nothing."

"Watch your minds for the scraps of meanness"

"You persist in believing that when you do not consciously watch your mind, it is unmindful."

"It is a particularly difficult form for the undisciplined mind because it represents a major goal of mind training."

"It is difficult at this point not to allow your mind to wander if it undertakes extended attempts. You have surely realized this by now. You have seen the extent of your lack of mental discipline, and of your need for mind training. It is necessary that you be aware of this, for it is indeed a hindrance to your advance."

"It is a particularly difficult form for the undisciplined mind because it represents a major goal of mind training. It embodies precisely what the untrained mind lacks. Yet the training must be accomplished if you are to see."

"It is difficult for the untrained mind to believe that what seems to be pictured before it is not there. This idea can be quite disturbing, and may meet with active resistance in any number of forms."

"An untrained mind can accomplish nothing. It is the purpose of these exercises to train the mind to think along the lines which the course sets forth."

"The purpose of the exercises for today is to begin to train your mind to recognize when it is not really thinking at all. While thoughtless "ideas" preoccupy your mind, the truth is blocked. Recognizing that your mind has been merely blank, rather than believing that it is filled with real ideas, is the first step to opening the way to vision."

"THIS IS WHY VIGILANCE IS ESSENTIAL. Doubts ABOUT being MUST not enter your mind, or you CANNOT know what you are with certainty."

"Vigilance is not necessary for truth, but it IS necessary AGAINST ILLUSION."

"Your vigilance is the sign that you WANT Him to guide you. Vigilance DOES require effort, but only to teach you that effort ITSELF is unnecessary."

"Consider how much vigilance you have been willing to exert to protect your ego, and how little you have been willing to exert to protect your higher mind."

"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. Your vigilance does NOT establish it as yours, but it DOES enable you to use it ALWAYS and in ALL WAYS."

"Attack thoughts cannot enter such a mind, because it has been given to the Source of Love, and fear can never enter in a mind which has attached itself to Love. It rests in God, and who can be afraid who lives in Innocence and only loves?"

"Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation. Otherwise, the miracle will be necessary to set the mind ITSELF straight"

"Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

(...and why a sick body means the mind has NOT been healed)

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies." - ACIM

Think of the body as a blank canvas, onto which you can paint a picture representing who and what you are.

If you are in the business of believing in sin, you will deny it and attempt to project blame onto someone else. Perceptually you will see them as causing you in some way, and simultaneously your mind MUST implement the "effects" of that causality onto yourself.

You therefore put in place, or paint a picture of, an identity which has been affected by something external. You show yourself as suffering, you position yourself as looking like you are sick, you damage yourself, and you take out this attack upon yourself. You do so in an attempt to show everyone that THEY did this to you.

It's really the insight that we implement the EFFECTS upon ourselves BEFORE we blame the cause of those effects onto something outside of ourselves. This also would tie into the fact that in this case, cause and effect have been reversed. We express effects of sickness, suffering, damage, etc in order to attempt to accuse others of doing this to us. We actually sort of wear the costume of looking like someone who has been hurt, and then walk around trying to find someone to blame for causing it.

Projection makes perception, and denial makes for projection. But how about.... we first believe we are attacked and implement the effects that the attack would produce, and then project the cause outward?

So what we do is, we make ourselves sick, we show ourselves as a picture of suffering, and we do this with the body. The body is our canvas, our "picture" of our Self, our identity. We make the body sick in order to accuse our brother of making us sick. We say, "hah, look at me, you did this to me you fucker. It's your fault."

The fact is, it's not possible to accuse another of doing something to you without YOU experiencing the effects. The ego says, no, if you do something to someone else you can escape the effects. But in truth, the mind does not work that way. Whatever applies to you applies equally everywhere. So in order to accuse someone of attack and sin, YOU must picture yourself as attacked and sinful.

YOUR body is like a picture which YOU hold up in order to show to OTHERS what you believe THEY are! It is not just a picture of yourself, it is a picture of BOTH OF YOU. This is because the body is a device for separation and that is two-sided, the selves on both sides are kept apart and affected equally - as within so without. The body then as a separation device is a picture of YOU AND YOUR BROTHER in a state of attack!

You can't hold up a picture of THEM and say, you're sinful and I'm not. Instead you hold up a picture of your "self" (the body) in an attacked state as if to say to someone else, "this is what you are". You're talking to yourself, accusing yourself, and picturing yourself as suffering.

So you can't accuse without attacking your body, meaning you're trying to USE the body to attack someone and the result is that your body MUST become a picture of attack, showing symptoms of a belief in attack. If it applies to your brother, it applies to you. You try to take them down, and take yourself down in the process. This is why all death is suicide. As Jesus says, use the body for attack like this and it will appear weak and it will die.

The opposite of this is that if you do not attack "through" the body, you do not project sin, you do not accuse yourself of sin, and you see the equal innocence of yourself and another, you will not "picture yourself" as attacked, and thus the body WILL SHOW a picture of you in a non-attacked condition. Your mind will project a body which is "healthy". It must.

When the body is not used for attack, and is used only to express/extend love, the body will appear "lovely", or a symbolic picture of a self which has no attack in it. Thus all signs of sickness and disease must vanish from it, and it will demonstrate what you believe is true. You can't project an image of a body which is sick while being truly in the truth, any more than you can project an image of a healthy body while your mind is attacking.

Essentially, this also leads to the realization that when someone dies, they literally have committed suicide, but they also have attempted to "attack with death". Their attempt to die is an attempt to accuse everyone of being dead, to affect everyone, to make everyone suffer as well, and is an attack on everyone. The body becomes a picture of death to show that the mind is using it for attack. It is like a suicide bomber or a kamikaze attacker who is attempting to throw their own body at their enemy in an attempt to eradicate them.

Death is the ultimate attempt to destroy EVERYONE as well as yourself, except that it is only yourself that ends up suffering. It's like saying, I so hate everyone and so believe in separation, that I am going to completely cut myself off from all Life and therefore shrivel up and be weak and die, because this is what I think of myself and you, and I believe that both of us should not exist. What applies to me applies to you, and if I am dead so you will be as well! But the result is that the person's body itself dies, and other people's do not.

Whatever you attempt to do to God, you do to yourself. If you believe that God should be dead, you will destroy yourself. If you try to kill God, you will kill yourself. If you try to make out that God is sinful, you will become sinful. If you try to assert that God does not exist and you have escaped from God's Life, you will die. God won't, you will. Just as other people will not die when you attempt to kill them with your death, but you will. You will do it to yourself. YOU CANNOT ATTACK WITHOUT HURTING YOURSELF FIRST. All attack is self attack, and all attack will destroy YOU and not your so-called enemy.

This is why this is so ridiculously obvious, that it is in YOUR BEST INTEREST not to find anyone sinful or guilty, because it MUST mean that you are sinful and guilty, and YOU will suffer terribly. What you do to another you do to yourself. What you accuse your brother of you have accused yourself of. And what you would have them experience, you will experience. You cannot escape from the law that what you do unto others you literally are directly doing to yourself. You cannot get away with murder without you dying as well. You should recognize it is in your best SHARED INTEREST to not hurt or accuse anyone else, because doing so directly hurts and accuses you.

If you attempt to hurt someone else without hurting yourself, you are buying into the ego's thought system, which is a lie, and you will still receive the effects of your own attack. It is the ego's grand illusion that something can apply to you without applying to others and vice versa. The truth will always be true, and the law will always be in place, that the only way to attack another is to attack yourself and show your attacked self to them, and they may not even be attacked at all. All attack separates you from the other, which protects them in a way. This is why attack on God did not affect God, but affected you greatly.

Death is a weapon that doesn't work. It is always an attempt to prove that someone other than yourself made you be dead, accusing them of sin. Sin is punishable by death alone, in the ego's thought system. To die is to make a statement that everyone is a sinner, all are evil, and they have caused you to die. No-one dies without being a victim, and no-one dies without accusing the world of doing it to them. This is also why death is futile, because it is self-destruction which has no real effect on anyone else and only makes yourself worse off. To choose it is insanity.

It's fortunate that in the metaphysics of truth, there is a kind of protection against death. The illusion of death cannot assail the kingdom of God. God cannot be affected by what is unreal. Attempted attack or death is actually a movement away from Life and a movement away from existence. It is withdrawal, not attack. All forms of attack or illusions of attack seem to be outward expressions but this is an illusion. All forms of attack are withdrawals away from everything. Death is a collapse away from Life, and therefore confines all of the effects of death to the one who dies, not to who they were attempting to make dead.

God has been completely unaffected by our attempts at using death to hurt him. God cannot be changed whatsoever. This is also why death is merely a state of denial. It is powerlessness, weakness, is completely ineffective, and literally does nothing. It is a state of a lack of all will to live, and therefore all will is absent from it, and as such it is a state of total unwillingness and can produce no real effects at all. It is not a cause at all, being purely a state of being at the effect of everything. How WEAK it is then, this weapon of death which is supposed to be the ego's most extreme form of attack possible... the stronger the attack, the weaker the attack. Death is the most pathetic attack of all, causing nothing real to happen.

We do not need to die. We do not need to be under attack. We do not need to be sick. We do not need to suffer. But if we want to be free of these things, we cannot be accusing ourselves and/or others of sin. We USE OURSELVES to show our brother what we are accusing them of, which turns us into shriveled up sickly prunes with no ability to do anything. We cannot escape our own wrath. Accuse others of causing sickness and you will be sick. Blame them and you will suffer in guilt. Try to get rid of God and you will get rid of yourself. Your body is your picture of your state of mind. All of its sicknesses MUST GO if you are to show that you fully believe in your innocence and invulnerability. To be invulnerable is to not be at the effect of anything in the world, and therefore not to PUT EFFECTS into your body.

You need not attack yourself today.

"You cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness. Show him that he cannot hurt you and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself. This is the meaning of turning the other cheek." - ACIM

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."

To the ego, it will not attempt to teach anything that it does not already know. It relies entirely on its own learning or what it already believes is true.

In this sense, everything within the ego thought system has already been there for a very long time and there is "nothing new".

The ego does not therefore really learn anything. It just reveals to itself more pieces of what was already within its thought system, but kept unconscious.

The ego pretends to learn by gradually bringing into the open more information which seemed hidden before, from its vast reserves of useless information, laws and regulations, any anything that sustains its thought system or makes it more real.

The ego does not want you to be open to guidance, it does not want you to trust a source of information outside of its thought system, and it's not really interested in learning. It's entire purpose is to unlearn the truth, to block the truth, and to keep you in the dark. And it can do that very effectively with an ILLUSION of learning, in the guise of learning something which is not really God's truth. And we've done this a lot.

There is a line in the Course for example which says "your mind is a blank". Even though the ego mind seems filled with thoughts and activities, it is really filled with nothing but illusions and so nothing is really happening. Even our ego thinking is not real activity. It is not creation. Plus we're given ourselves what Jesus describes as a "learning disability", an attempt to make our ability to learn more difficult, so that we will resist the truth.

Now, as you become willing to un-learn the ego's bullshit, and reveal the real truth to yourself, you'll begin to develop trust in a source of information outside of the ego's mind. Holy Spirit is there to help, along with many Mighty Companions.

But in order to "learn" what is outside of the ego's thought system, it requires the un-doing or un-learning of the ego, to make room for what's to come IN from outside. And also the rules for learning change as you open up to the Holy Mind.

In the ego's system, it will only attempt to teach if it ensures that you will not learn anything, or it sets you up as solely a teacher who is not a student, a dictatorship basically. The students are considered inferior and the teacher is superior. Teaching or the classroom is then more or less a prison.

It won't let you attempt to teach or even feel confident about teaching, unless you seem to already know everything there is to know, and are certain enough of being in control of that enough to be able to seem to give it to someone else. And when the teaching is occurring, the teacher is not intent on learning at all.

This works differently with Holy Spirit. In order to learn the truth, conditions have to be set up where you are willing to receive new input. But because in the One Mind giving and receiving are equal/one/balanced, there cannot be input without output. You cannot "share" and thus experience the new truth, or learn it, unless you are also willing to have it flow through you and extend out of you. In a way this means you cannot "learn the truth" without the truth flowing through you and being shared, in a "teaching and learning" role.

The Kingdom of God must be extended in order to exist, and that means the truth has to be shared. You have to be open to having that truth come through you, even if you do not seem to know what that truth is going to say. You won't necessarily get a head's up and you aren't going to be able to learn it all ahead of time. Instead, it's going to only be fed to you, shared with you, and shared through and beyond you, in the moment, in the instant that you are actually attempting to give it to another.

This requires that you drop what you think you know, open up to trust in a higher source, and that source may not even be seen or directly accessed yet. This therefore requires FAITH, ie trust that even if you yourself do not know, you're going to be supported and given what you need and told what to do and where to go, spontaneously, as and when it's the right time. In a way it's like being blind or in the dark blindfolded, but trusting someone else to guide you safely to the exact right destination without hurting yourself.

If you are unwilling to "teach" because you don't think you know the subject matter well enough, you will never learn it. Teaching means demonstrating, so it doesn't necessarily have to be through writing or traditional roles, it can just be by being a living example of love. But what is true for you, you will demonstrate/teach. If you stop yourself from TRYING, you won't gain access to support and guidance. You have to take a leap of faith. You have to be willing to be mistaken, and you need to be open to learning AS you teach. You teach, in order to learn.

Basically you just need to show up, be willing, and step into a FLOW. As the flow begins, as you start to express, IF you trust the truth you are attempting to express, MORE TRUTH WILL COME AS YOU GO. The new truth will only enter once the flow is flowing.

It's kind of like plumbing. You've got this water in the pipe, but the only way new water is going to enter the pipe, is when the water that's already in the pipe starts to flow out the other end. Otherwise there is no room, and there's no flow. A lack of flow is a lack of extension. The water can't extend out of the pipe if you won't RECEIVE and if you are not willing to just be open minded to let whatever comes in, come in, just as it's needed, spontaneously.

Heaven's support, and the flow of truth, is very spontaneous. It is ready to act NOW. You don't get the whole download on the spot and then go write about it. You just make yourself flow out the stuff you already know, albeit limited, maybe based on just one little insight, and then you get into a flow about it.

As you do, Heaven comes to support you. The reason is that you are now fulfilling your function. You are aligning yourself with the truth by being willing to have it express through you, you are letting truth sort of align your wavelength to Heaven/Holy Spirit, and the result of that is that Heaven actually rushes in to support and help you. Mighty companions show up. Jesus and Holy Spirit start to wisper in your ear. You start to be told specific words and corrections and things you weren't expecting.

You start to "channel". And as you do this, you receive stuff that you didn't even know beforehand, and you therefore learn, often just as much as anyone else reading or hearing what you expressed. And then you may find yourself going back to read what you wrote because you yourself are its student as well.

This also means you are learning to COMMUNICATE. Communication in the Course is different to the ego's communication. The ego only communicates what it thinks its already knows and nothing else, regurgitating the past. Real communication entails the EXTENSION OF TRUTH, the flow of truth, in true sharing, where receiving and giving are one, and where there is an openness to spontaneously, creatively express from a place that's totally outside the ego. Just in the moment, freely flowing a loving expression.

So it takes an act of faith. Miracles are taken first on faith, because you may come to trust something which is as yet unseen, but which is there, and which has proven it must be there by its witnesses, ie evidence or proof which manifests as a result of taking a leap and putting one foot in front of the next. You don't have to teach alone, and you can't. You can only truly teach truth if you are open to receiving it at the same time, and then it speaks through you.

Holy Spirit is the highest communication medium, in that He is so pure and devoid of ego that he can perfectly "channel God", as it were, to be the Voice for God. You also can become a Voice for God if you are willing to spontaneously flow Heaven and therefore to actually communicate. Just speaking words is not communication, because the ego is very good at just waffling on about bullshit. But when the words are coming from a higher place, extending God as a "Teacher of God", now you are learning God because you are teaching God.

In essence you should ALWAYS be in this state of "learning", not so much a state of accumulating or building up some knowledge base, but being always RECEPTIVE and CREATIVE in the flow of truth without having to know beforehand what's going to be said or what will happen.

As you learn to trust this, you will teach and it will become your own teaching of yourself as well. The best way to learn is to try to teach someone else what the truth is, to prove to yourself what the truth is. If you can communicate, truly, to another, you will learn the truth. The act of attempting to tell someone else what the truth is, causes your mind to become creative and dynamic and spontaneous in visualizing and sort of filling in the blanks as you go. The MODE of mind functioning to "express" puts it into a state of flow, and you just need to get stuff MOVING OUT even if it feels like you are totally winging it, or even "fake it till you make it". Just the act of expressing even without knowing what the next word is going to be, allows guidance to come IN immediately as it is needed.

You only need to start out with a little idea. What I usually am doing is I just had some kind of spontaneous idea or insight, or I just learned some basic thing, or something became relevant for me in the past 24 hours. So I will start to write about it based on what I already know... ego learning.... but I go about it with Holy Spirit/Jesus at hand, and then they start to inject more flow and more idea and more clarifications and as the whole thing unfolds, it ends up being an education not just for others but for me also.

When I get to the end I then have to go back and re-read it myself, to digest it and take it in more, because what came out was usually mind-expanding in some way. This very post itself for example, I was not planning to write whatsoever, until I was inspired by a post that Myron Jones wrote today, and felt this intuitive "excitement" about elaborating on. I did not know how this would come out or in what words until I just started to do it.

So just start with what you think you know and be open to extending truth and just making yourself available, just sit down and start writing something, and so long as you are expressing truth in some way, Heaven will rush in to support you and give you help and put words in your mouth. This is how you learn to "channel" or be a Voice for God.

Speaking or writing the truth gets the attention of Heaven, angels will come to you to help you, and Holy Spirit and Jesus will be right there to support you and guide you. This is also partly how miracles come about, because as you spontaneously trust and start to speak the truth about someone and diffuse illusions and authoritatively command an expression of the truth of God, things line up and you magnetize Heaven's strength to you and through you, and then the earth moves. It's a collaboration. Your willingness is all it takes to get into the flow. Just start somewhere and see what happens as you go. But if you don't start at all, you'll never see the miracles and you won't learn.

Teach like a fool. Teach even when you don't know what to say. Just start doing it. The rest will follow automatically. Seek the Kingdom of God and express it and your way will be made straight and will be held up by Heaven's helpers.

For example, on my website I started a 'questions and answers' service, because I felt that I wanted to be pushed to have to answer things that I did not know how to answer, and wanted people to come up with questions so that I wouldn't be able to premeditate or just write about what was relevant to me at the time. What I found happens is, when someone asks something, it's usually not something I even thought of as being a topic people needed help with.

And then I'll ask Holy Spirit what He wants to say about this, and to please help me with it. And then I start writing about it, and I just get into this place where the most amazing stuff gets written, especially when I didn't really know what I was going to say or what there even was to say about it. It all just comes together because I TRUST that I'm going to be helped and the help shows up. Provided I am willing to just show up and be available and let the truth be written through me.

Okay so, you hear people saying the Earth is flat - the "flat Earthers"... and obviously it's not. But... technically it is.You see, there is this thing called the "hierarchy of illusions". The hierarchy is an ILLUSION that there are differences. All differences are illusions.

So you've got things like different importance, different value, different size and weight, different difficulty, different materials, different appearances, different behaviors, different forms, all of that.

However, the world isn't real, and these differences aren't real.Imagine a canvas on which an artist is going to paint a picture. The canvas itself is just one thing, neutral, empty. There is nothing inherently pictured on it. This is the background of the illusory world.

The artist takes the paint and starts to paint pictures of humans. There's a large body over here, and a small one over there. There's one with two arms, and there's one with only one arm. There's one that's jumping in the air, and one that's laying seemingly dead on the ground.

But the truth always is, that these are all just images, made of the same paint. There is really no difference between the body jumping in the air and the one that appears dead. They're both equal in the sense that any of their difference are an illusion. There aren't really ANY bodies on the canvas, it's just images of bodies.

And so what the illusion of the picture of a world of bodies is, is really a picture of what those things might LOOK LIKE. A body which looks LIKE a dead body, a body which is similar to how a living body might look. And this makes the images on the canvas once removed from the actual thing, from "reality" or "real bodies". They are pictures OF bodies, not actual bodies.

The thing is, the physical world is usually considered to be real, where the "real bodies" are, but in fact the physical world is the realm of the what LOOKS LIKE a world. It's a picturing of a world, an image, like a photograph of some place that you visited. The photograph is not the place itself, just an idea of what it might be like there. That's what the world is. The world is the paint on the canvas, pretending to look like things. A picture OF some OTHER place that doesn't exist.

"The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what is its waking state. ***It cannot make a body***, nor abide within a body. What is alien to the mind does not exist because it has no source. For mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state. ***It cannot make the physical. What seems to die is but the sign of mind asleep.***"

ie The physical world is not REALLY a REAL physical world, it's a picture of one, an imagined idea of what a physical world might be like. It is like a dream about a far off land that you never really visited.

You have never actually REALLY seen a real body, you have only seem what bodies MIGHT look like if they existed. Because really the world is a dream of, an idea of, what it MIGHT be like IF you were able to separate from God. It remains true that you cannot separate from God because God is everywhere. Nor can you REALLY create bodies. So we've just pictured a world which looks LIKE some OTHER place that we've never been to, trying to form it in its likeness to represent it. To symbolize it. The world is a SYMBOL OF a world OUTSIDE of God, which does not exist.

Now, because the physical world of form is the layer of paint on the canvas, and let's say the canvas is what ACIM calls "the real world" which has no inherent forms or bodies or places or things, when you look at it and recognize it as "all made of the same stuff", or "its all just paint" or "its all an equal image", this FLATTENS the hierarchy of illusions. It's stops it appearing as though one thing is bigger or heavier or more important or different to another. Or that any of it is real.

This recognition that the world has NO hierarchy, and that it is all just one thing appearing to be many things, is what it's like to recognize that the picture is just the layer of paint, and it's all just paint. Which means that really a picture of a living body is just as much equal and just paint, as a picture of a dead body. Neither of them are truly different. They're both illusions.

The form of the living body may appear different to the dead one, but that is the illusion of it. "Nothing so blinding as perception of form." When you focus on the forms and their differences you're being deceived by the painted picture, and are failing to recognize it for the trick that it is. You're not realizing it's only a painting, and are mistaking it for BEING the thing it visualizes. You think the PICTURE OF a body really IS a body. That pictures of death really ARE death.

When you overlook ie forgive the ILLUSION of things being different, and you don't fall for there really being a live body or a dead body, and you see the paint instead of the picture, that is true perception. That is accurate perception. It isn't a perception that looks at paint on a canvas and believes there are real people living there with real bodies. It isn't the way the "brain" sees a photo of a body and believes it's looking at the actual person. It's a recognition that it's JUST a photograph, looking at the grain on the paper and the blots of ink.

This is a "flattening" of the hierarchy. A PICTURE of a dead body is now equal to a picture of a living one. A PICTURE of a body with disease is no different in truth than a picture of a body that seems healthy. Because really they are both just images on a blank canvas. And neither of them is more dead or alive, in truth.

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

There is no more MEANING in a dead body. There is no more "seriousness" in a dead body. There is no more "lack of life" in a dead body than in a supposedly "living" body. Which tells you also that the living bodies are NOT REALLY ALIVE either. The bodies aren't alive, and they aren't dead, they are just pictures of bodies. They are symbols, not ends in themselves. All made of the same illusory stuff.

"The body neither lives nor dies, for it cannot contain you who are life."

"There is no life outside of heaven."

"At best an illusion of life, at worst death."

"The body is not an end in itself."

So what that calls for, in order to see with forgiveness, is to recognize that there is no truth, life, will, mind, power, causality, strength, force, capability, or existence, to either the living bodies or the dead bodies. They are nothing but pictures. They don't have a "life" to be defended against death, and "death" cannot happen to them any more than life can. e.g.

"Now in the hands made gentle by His touch, the Holy Spirit lays ***a picture*** of a DIFFERENT you. It is ***a picture of a body*** still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all."

The body is just a picture, in a painting in your mind, which has NO DEPTH. It is not really three dimensional. And its differences are ALL illusions of the way (form) that it's painted in. See the paint for what it is and you no longer see bodies there, or imagine that pictures of houses are real houses, or that pictures of cars are really cars, or that pictures of death are really death.

This ultimately flattens the hierarchy and means there IS NO DIFFERENCE between illusions. There is only one separation, one illusion, one picture, and it's all equally false. Even the suggestion that something would be more DIFFICULT to change than another thing, is part of the illusion of the hierarchy. It is not true. And this ultimately means that there really is no "orders of difficulty."

"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."

From the vantage point of recognizing it all as ONE THING, one dream, one illusion of a world, and ignoring its FORMS, overlooking its differences, and not being deceived or tempted to believe there really ARE any differences at all, there is no "orders" in the world. There are no divisions and levels and parts and pieces. It's all just one illusion, one separation idea. Which means live bodies and dead bodies are the same thing, pretending to be two different things. They are both the dream of death. An illusion.

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."So ultimately THE WORLD IS FLAT, because the hierarchy is flat. When you take away all the illusions of difference, which is false perception - not recognizing it's all just paint - all you end up with is a FLAT world. A world where there is ONE WAY of looking at everything, and it is recognized as ONE THING. And so there is no bigger or smaller or harder or easier.

From that perspective, which is the state of miracle mindedness and true perception, in which everything is given NO extra meaning other than the universal ONE meaning of love, and there is no falling for the deception that a sick body is "a really serious bad thing", and there is no difference in meaning given to "that body seems really healthy" versus "that body seems disease-ridden and ugly", you are now coming from ONE perspective. One vantage point. One loving outlook. One all-inclusive perspective. No longer tempted by form.

From that one perspective, with Vision, for you there is no longer a rough terrain, or a 3D world, or a world where some things are dealt with differently to others. There is one problem and one solution, not many. And there is no hierarchy of orders of difficulty. So now it is ONE ACT, to change the painting, to any given form. It is ONE ACT to perform a miracle which modifies a PICTURE of a dead body into a PICTURE of a living one. One act which can in turn convert a living body into a dead one, and back again. Because all bodies are fake.

To that mind, there is "no order of difficulty in miracles." "They are all the same". Each one is an expression of a spark of life which repaints the picture. A modification to the mind projecting so that the paint on the page changes to SYMBOLIZE something else. Because remember the paint is what something looks LIKE, not what something is. It is all symbolic and once removed. So the body now SYMBOLIZES eternal life, instead of symbolizing death.

It now becomes useful to heal the mind to heal the body, ie to convert the PICTURE of the body into a body free of pain and suffering and damage and death, because this picture in the dream world demonstrates and SYMBOLICALLY communicates an IMAGE of, a representation of, innocence and immortality and harmlessness and holiness. And this TEACHES those who look upon it that they must be innocent, because it does not play by the rules of the laws of a world of difficulty. It does not prove their sinfulness. And proof of sin is not there, breaking the laws of physics.

"Your body can be means to teach that it has never suffered pain because of him. And in its healing can it offer him mute testimony to his innocence. It is THIS testimony that can speak with power greater than a thousand tongues. For here is his forgiveness PROVED to him."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life. This call has power FAR beyond the weak and miserable cry of death and guilt."

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

"It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured. But THIS one has NOT been used for purpose of attack, and therefore never suffered pain at all. IT witnesses to the eternal truth that you can not BE hurt, and points BEYOND itself to both YOUR innocence and HIS."

So you see, the world IS flat, because it is only an ILLUSION that it has any FORM at all. And all its differences are illusions. Bodies and planets and galaxies are not alive, or dead, or anything. They are once-removed PICTURES on a canvas, the underlying canvas of "the real world", and the pictures shift just like the shadows on the wall of the cave. And they are not reality. They are just imagined ideas of what it might be like to go be where God is not. it's not the same place as actually going there. And so the world is just a brochure for hell, not real hell itself.

There is no death, and dead bodies are no more dead than live ones. And live ones are no more alive than dead ones. And all levels of sickness are meaningless. And all degrees of suffering are a lie. And miracles express from a higher vantage point in which the Earth is flat and the hierarchy is flat and every artistic act of "healing bodies" is merely a way of reconfiguring the paint, so that it can symbolize eternal life and point in the direction of heaven rather than hell. As a physicalized symbol of forgiveness.

In this view the body is nothing but an IMAGE in the mind. It has no sickness or health. It cannot be well or dead or suffer at all. I this no will, it has no mind of its own, or instincts, or natural ways. It does not really obey ANY laws of the world, unless your mind believes in the hierarchy of illusions. When you lift away from this PICTURE of a body, the rules and laws and restraints that your mind GAVE to it, trying to make it something OTHER THAN just a neutral image in a dream, it no longer serves the laws of the world.

And now the body is not under the effect of the world. And it cannot become sick on its own, nor can it die against your will. It is now simply suspended in the mind as a figment of imagination, and mind has complete power and control over it, to override any external influences. It cannot age, it cannot get sick, it does not need the world to exist, it does not depend on anything, it just moves around like a puppet for the mind. An avatar in a dream. A figure pretending to be you. A symbol of your immortal self.

Of course, when you throw the painting in the trashcan there is no world, and "heaven is all that remains."