When I am upset, feeling unhappy, having a cry, feeling guilty or afraid, or whatever, Holy Spirit is gentle and compassionate. He often says, "I know". Sometimes I feel a hand on my shoulder from Him or Jesus.

They are compassionate in that they know that *I* believe I am experiencing something upsetting, that *I* feel sad or whatever. They are there for me, and they don't judge it. They don't even use the opportunity to push me towards some kind of forgiveness or greater awareness. They just hold me and hug me.

However, the fact is that all upset feelings come from a mis-perception that I chose. And I chose that mis-perception so that I could further my separation from God.

So for example, I might feel upset because I saw myself victimized by someone. I might feel sad about how someone rejected me or whatever. And those feelings seem genuine, it seems like I really feel this way and that it's very sad and unfortunate. But, once I'm done with feeling, at some point I need to find the willingness to move beyond this.

I've witnessed how, in particular, when old hurts come up from the past, to be healed, they always feel like how it felt at the time. They're always based on how I was perceiving when I was younger and less aware. Even though at the time I did not understand what was going on, or what it meant, how it made me feel at the time based on that perception is now the feeling that I need to work through and release. But I've also seen how obvious it is, that these feelings were just how I felt 'within' the framework of a certain way of looking at life, and there is usually some kind of mistake in that.

I saw myself as hurt because I didn't perceive correctly. I saw myself as unloved because I didn't recognize my infinite lovability. I saw myself as unworthy because I devalued myself sort of 'by accident' because I didn't know what i was doing. And so I created feelings of unworthy and unlove and so on, which I must 'heal' and release, but even though these feelings seem like they reflected some kind of 'truth', they're not really the ultimate truth.

I need to become willing to admit that, once I've allowed myself to feel and release the 'energy' produced by a false perception, that the perception ITSELF was faulty. And it was the fault perception that LED to faulty feelings. Unhappy feelings come from unhappy perceptions. So I need to now be willing to see differently, to look for a greater truth, to own up to the part that I played in choosing to suffer, to take back my power, to claim responsibility for doing this to myself, and to realize that nobody involved was doing it without my will.

So there is a 'forgiveness' process that needs to occur, above and beyond unhappy feelings, to correct the perception that led to them. And even though Holy Spirit knows this, he seldom prompts or forces me to 'go there' especially not right when I'm feeling how the feelings felt. I let myself fully feel because this releases the energy, even though it's a FALSE energy, to clear it out. To cathart it. THEN my mind is clearer and can have a cognitive shift, as well as being more willing and able to now apply a 'forgiveness' to change my perception.

It's important to let yourself feel and let out the trapped negative emotions, but recognize also that they are only there because of a mistaken way of looking at life, and that mistake needs to be corrected at some point. When you are ready. And not before. And nobody is pushing you or forcing you to have to do that, especially not when you're in the middle of a deep release. Trying to rush someone out of feeling into truth isn't compassionate.

So it's possible to have compassion for someone who is feeling upset even if you know that their upset is false, and there really isn't a need to be upset. Holy Spirit knows that nothing has gone wrong and there is ONLY reason to celebrate, but to tell me that in the middle of me believing heavily that I've been wronged, isn't entirely helpful because I can't hear it until I'm ready and willing. We really believe we've done something terrible to God and deserve to be punished for it, and as we work through those feelings, Holy Spirit is very patient to give you time to 'process' the consequences of a mistaken decision. And then at some point, when you're ready, you will undo the belief that caused it.

One of the really difficult things about life in the ego world is when you see or hear about something 'terrible', that is just awful, how someone was victimized or mistreated or abused, or how someone was incredibly cruel or harmful. Indeed, natural disasters and wars and terrorism fall into this category.

These kind of things seem to inspire some of the most intensely upsetting reactions. Or to put it another way, they are the most infectious. They are charged with negativity and victimhood and often a low state of consciousness, and upon experiencing them they often seem to be very potent and powerful in tempting us into very strong ego reactions.

Another of the most difficult things to deal with in this world is physical pain and sickness, which makes the body seem very very real, which seems to threaten life itself with a temptation toward death, and instills terror into the hearts of so many people.

Why?

Or more to the point, why do we have, or allow ourselves to have, these significant upset reactions to these kind of events? Why is it considered normal and even compassionate to be horrified, to be upset, to be afraid, to empathize with how people are suffering, to be worried, to feel sorry for people? Is this *actually* compassion and love, or is this the ego at play?

There are many things that many of us actually cherish and protect, about the way that certain events are considered terribly bad, wrong, unjustified, unwarranted, un-asked for. In other words, we sympathize with victims in a really big way.

Obviously no-one with love in their heart wants to see anyone hurting. No-one wants to in any way support the notion that it's okay to victimize or punish. Nobody wants to give emphasis to war or to it being okay to suffer in any way. BUT ..... this is a big and very ego-challenging but ...... there is a huge mutual victimizing and ego-reinforcing thing happening here, which compounds our own belief in being a victim ourselves, takes us away from peace, away from love, away from ourselves and away from God. And that's not really helpful.

Being upset is not love. Feeling guilty for not doing something correctly is not atonement. Feeling sorry for someone is not compassion. It is what the course calls 'false empathy'. Jesus would not feel sorry for you. He would love you and understand you and understand what you're going through and offer comfort and support, BUT. ... he would also want you to realize that there are significant illusions at work, significant ego practices, significant ways in which you are being a victim. This is not in any way to say that Jesus would be mad at you for these 'mistakes'... just that, He knows better, and he wants you to also know better so that you an experience love more directly and not be upset.

The trouble is that whatever we think is real, or is happening, we protect and defend. This is why people defend their pain, or their right to suffer. This is why people defend victims. This is why people want to find the victimizer to be extra guilty so that the "innocence" of the victim is recognized or highlighted. Victims are not innocent, not in that way. Victimization requires an ego and EVERY victim has one, because you can't be a victim without choosing to be on purpose, at some point in time either before this incarnation or during it. And if you choose not to be a victim - truly choose it - nothing can hurt you. ever again.

Anyway. We need to detach from these upsetting things. We need to realize it's an ego trap. The ego loves it when we fall for this. It doesn't serve or help us or anyone.

I have a number of reactions regarding those who are sick.

All of these reactions entail me feeling sorry for the person, or wishing they were well, or being sad that this has happened to them.

I have reactions of guilt that somehow I caused it, and reactions of fear that somehow it will worsen.

And I also have reactions of compassion and understanding.

But all of these reactions are actually responses to perceptions which are not true.

Ego reactions always occur after having perceived something wrongly, and unless you are coming from love your reaction is founded in victimhood.

It can seem like I am caring or wanting a person to be healed, because I am upset about them being sick. It can seem like I am wishing for their best. It can seem as though I want the sickness to go away and that this is a good attitude to have, or shows a sign of caring or compassion.

But the truth is, these reactions are all founded on DOING NOTHING ABOUT IT.

They are not attitudes of correction, or healing, or forgiveness, or undoing. They are responses founded on the belief that the sickness is real, that it is happening, that the person is suffering, that "someone" needs to swoop in and save the person - anyone other than me.

If you really look at this in yourself, you may well be a very sympathetic, empathetic, compassionate, caring-seeming person, but the fact is that a lot of these responses are born in a state of inability to help. A state of disempowerment. A state of passivity. A state where you believe that there is nothing you can actually DO to correct it, even though you may be filled with wishful thinking about how you would do something if you could.

YOU CAN!

These attitudes are actually a cover-up for miracle mindedness and an excuse for not forgiving. They are an ego response that looks as though you are deeply concerned about someone, while at the same time strongly believing that they really do have a problem.

What we have to come to learn is the art of correction, which is more to do with an active undoing of the problem rather than an agreement that it exists. Corrective measures. And we DO have the ability to do this, not alone but as a result of our union wth Holy Spirit and God.

I've been in states of sorrow and despair plenty of times in which I've "begged" God to help and sometimes there is some help and sometimes not, but in general each time that I find myself thinking of asking someone ELSE to help, someone who "has the power", I am either nudged or have an innate knowing that doing so is basically shirking an obligation.

God has empowered us to extend His love and healing, and to do so through the mechanism of forgiveness, in which we cancel out, undo, correct and make vanish, all signs and symptoms of artificial causes, demonstrating that separation has not occurred, that problems are not real, that sickness is an illusion and that even death can be reversed.

It is one thing to be terribly upset and guilt-ridden. You feel guilty and responsible for causing someone's suffering, even if you did not appear to directly cause it, because you feel as though you are supposed to be able to take it away but are failing to do so. So in a sense, your mind knows this and actually will experience guilt when you are not performing miracles. When you are in support of sickness and are believing in problems and are making it real instead of correcting it actively, your mind will know that you're actually using this as a way to avoid your ROLE as "the light of the world", and this produces guilt.

So you will feel guilty when you are not helping others to heal, and you will feel guilty when you are failing to forgive. It's not your fault, but either you are choosing health as truth or you are choosing sickness as truth. Being upset that someone is sick does not mean that you are a believer in health and wellbeing. It means you believe sickness cannot be undone, which is a strong belief that sickness is the truth.

This we have to become honest about and weed out of ourselves, to become the miracle workers that we are meant to be. Forgiveness is the way to bring about miracles, through the correction and undoing of what is false. Not through the ego's victimy reactions of guilt, powerlessness, well-wishes and the like. Those are like saying, sorry you are sick, but I believe in sickness and therefore I think you should be sick.

We need to learn to make the universe disappear and all sickness along with it. The end of death, sickness, the body, and the world.

Punishment comes from a FAILURE to know what is an appropriate correction.

The only appropriate correction for any mistake, is a correction based in love. The Holy Spirit knows how to truly correct, thus heal, mistakes because he is loving and forgiving.

When we are not aligned with love, we're already in a state of having punished OURSELVES, and we are just ready to jump at any opportunity to find a SKAPEGOAT.

Conveniently, someone, perhaps a child or whomever, does something that seems to be a mistake, and it REMINDS us of our own mistake, which we've already condemned ourselves for, and we already believe in punishment (of ourselves), so now we try to get rid of this self-blame by putting it onto the person.

It's an excellent opportunity to try to convince ourselves and everyone that we are absolved of guilt, becaues this other person is the 'elected' guilty one. The one who gets to die on our behalf so that the rest of us can live. This is nothing more than sacrificing people to 'the God's in order to try to avoid the wrath. That's how archaic it is.

So when you punish someone else, it is because you have already punished yourself and you already believe in punishment, and you also believe that punishment is JUSTIFIED because you are WORTHY of it and it APPROPRIATE given that you have sinned. You get to try to project your own sin onto others when they slip up, because it triggers your own unworthiness and you want to cover up that awareness as quickly as possible. To get rid of an awareness of sin you use projection and denial.

So, punishing someone for a mistake, does not correct their mistake, because you're really punishing them for YOUR mistake, AND you are not actually correcting your mistake by doing so - or theirs. All you're doing is adding your own mistake to theirs, as if to say, if they carry the burden of both mistakes then you'll be set free.

And so as you believe their punishment is called for, secretly you are getting relief from your own sin and are performing an act of terrorism. So then how can you claim the other person is guilty when you are the one who is guilty? And it's your sin that you see in them.

This is why punishment doesn't help anyone. It doesn't provide a TRUE correction. It doesn't HEAL or UNDO the mistake. It doesn't properly correct the person so that they won't contain, in their mind, the same guilt that compelled them to make a mistake in the first place. You might think punishing them for the EFFECTS of their mistake will correct the CAUSE of it. But it's totally removed from the cause. All it does is gloss over the problem and the cause.

This is why most efforts to correct bullying also don't work. If you make it all about 'anti bullying' and you go after the bullies and get all pissed and angry at them or you punish them, it WILL NOT stop them from being bullies. They are bullies because they themselves have beaten themselves up and believe they are very guilty. They're finding skapegoats (the victims) because of the huge amount of guilt they already carry around which nobody is addressing. They need a lot of LOVE, not punishment. They need HEALING and compassion.

The same applies to all victimizers. Even murderors. Can you imagine the kind of nightmaring torment that goes on in such a person's mind, who feels so separated from others and so victimized and so guilty that they have to disassociate from their guilt and project it intensely onto someone else, to feel justified in committed a terrible act. They will always feel even more guilty for doing so, because it's an ego solution - the ego's attempt to destroy itself while preserving itself. Obviously that won't work. But the murderor also needs a lot of love and healing. They need compassion. Otherwise if you ADD punishment they will only feel even worse about themselves and enter into even more darkness and hell. This is also largely why locking people up in prisons with no real HEALING ("rehab") is largely an exercise in the rest of society committing a massive act of DENIAL, rather than actually correcting the problem.

Always with any policies you'll notice that they do not really address the true cause of any problems, only the effects further down the chain of consequences. And doing that will only chop off some of those consequences temporarily. It's like digging up weeds and leaving the 'root' in the ground, which will only sprout more weed eventually. If you're not truly healing the CAUSE of something, it is not getting fixed. Period. This is why I laugh when, for example, the British government orders more security cameras to 'fix crime'. Like that will do anything. Or how software companies increase 'security' in order to try to combat hacking, even though the increase in 'security' increasingly UNDERMINES trust and erodes safety. People don't really want to fix the true cause of anything and the world will just keep manifesting problems all over the place until the real cause in our mind is healed.

Punishment just doesn't work. Counter-meaures and reactions do not work. Only love can work.

Picture yourself in the spiritual realm (non physical world) standing at a console where you are planning your next lifetime.

You look at possible life events in a brochure which precicely and specifically tells you exactly what will happen and what the results of this will be.

You find one you don't like the look of, some tragedy or a sickness or a guilt trip, and you almost want to skip past it. But then you take a look at the list of benefits that arise from the experience.

These include an increased ability to love yourself, an enhanced sense of compassion for others, a greater awareness of who you really are, the opportunity to help others to learn how to care more, and perhaps an increased sense of joy once you finally learn to let go of the experience.

You weigh up your options. You say, well, the experience sounds like it SUCKS, but the payoff is huge. So then you say, well, what's there to lose, since I'm immortal spirit and can't really be hurt.

From that vantage point, you decide that the benefits are worth the hassle, so you say yep, sign me up. I'll go on that trip.

Then you incarnate, and so it unfolds. And you forget you chose it. And then it happens and you think it sucks, which it does. But then you start to learn the benefits of the experience and move past it, and you gain great spiritual rewards from it.

Later, looking back, you acknowledge yes, I got exactly what I wanted, I came away with a gift and I am much richer for it. I'm more aware now and I am closer to God. I am grateful.

Then you pick up the brochure again and go on another trip, and another, and another, until you pretty much run out of benefits that you can gain from it. You pick your last trip, knowing that it's the final one and that you just need to clean up some loose ends.

Off you go. It all happens. You wake up and receive the gift of reunion with God. And it's all been worth it.

There's a perspective on the world and upon our minds and beliefs, which is very beautiful. In fact it's quite divine. It's the perspective that God and the Angels would have of what we seem to think is happening here.

From their viewpoint of love and joy and compassion, they know that the entire ego thought system is nothing but a simply mistake. Every belief in sin is just someone being confused. Every seeming attack is nonsense that's not really happening.

And they know that those who believe in the nightmare, are akin to those who have lost their minds. That we're simply somewhat insane and are having wild hallucinations, being very confused about what is true and false, very uncertain about what is real or unreal.

They know that nothing about the separation or the entire world is true or real at all. They know that we're just literally having a nightmare, a bad dream where we're imagining all kinds of horrible stuff. And in this dream we seem to think that we're sinners and evil monsters who deserve to suffer and be sick and die.

And they know that this isn't true. They know that we don't deserve any of that. They know our real selves, and they know that in awakening we'd realize it to. That we are the beautiful angelic shining eternal beings of love and light that could never sin or suffer in any way. They hold that view of us because it is the truth about our real selves.

So as they come to our aid as our mighty companions and helpers, including the Holy Spirit and Jesus, they have this perspective that we're simply mistaken. We're just confused and lost and afraid and are scaring ourselves with imaginary monsters and strange dark threats which aren't even real. That we're just having a strange crazy dream and making up all kinds of things which aren't true.

They see us as just temporarily mentally ill. As having temporary insanity. They have the utmost total compassion for us because they completely recognize that all of our nightmares and screams are simply calls for help, asking for love and to be saved.

No matter how much it seems we might be wanting death and destruction they still discern clearly that in the midst of that belief is a sense of horror and fear and of not wanting what is happening. They recognize everyone's calling as a call for love and a cry in the wilderness. And God has answered.

The whole world is just one big psych ward. One big psychiatric hospital. Where all the patients and even the people caring for the patients and even the people who seem to have nothing to do with patients at all, are all patients. It's a crazy world filled with crazy insane people, and very little sanity.

God knows that. The angels know it. They love us and wait for us until we're willing to accept the truth. They keep guiding us, healing us, steering us to the truth, back to awareness of being home. And we will all return to that eventually. It's guaranteed. Because God is love and He loves His children, and has guaranteed their safe return.

"Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where truth should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch? What would they hear or reach to grasp? What would they sense at all? To sense is not to know. And truth can be but filled with knowledge, and with nothing else. ... The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself. "

"Sin is the home of all illusions, which but stand for things imagined, issuing from thoughts which are untrue. They are the "proof " that what has no reality is real. Sin "proves" God's Son is evil; timelessness must have an end; Eternal life must die. And God Himself has lost the Son He loves, with but corruption to complete Himself, His Will forever overcome by death, love slain by hate, and peace to be no more."

"A madman's dreams are frightening, and sin appears indeed to terrify. And yet what sin perceives is but a childish game. The Son of God may play he has become a body, prey to evil and to guilt, with but a little life that ends in death. But all the while his Father shines on him, and loves him with an everlasting Love which his pretenses cannot change at all."

"How long, oh Son of God, will you maintain the game of sin? Shall we not pull away these sharp-edged children's toys? How soon will you be ready to come home? Perhaps today? There is no sin. Creation is unchanged. Would you still hold return to Heaven back? How long, oh holy Son of God, how long?"

"You will be made whole as you MAKE whole, for to perceive in sickness the appeal for health, is to recognize in hatred the call for love. And to give a brother what he REALLY wants, is to offer it unto yourself. For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself. Answer HIS call for love, and YOURS is answered. Healing is the love of Christ for His Father, and for HIMSELF."

If someone appears to do something wrong, perhaps they're angry and they're attacking, you focusing on this "surface appearance" is what it means to "make sin real." You judge based on the appearance of form and the form of what they do dictates what it seems to mean. You hold their physical behaviors etc against them and accuse them of what they are doing, as if to say that what you see in this judgement is all that there is to see. In this state there is no compassion or deeper insight into why they're behaving this way or any sense of a call for love. Or better yet, a call for help.

When someone is hurting and afraid and so on they tend to lash out and project and blame and attack. But in order to be forgiving, the surface appearance of what they're doing has to be looked past. Essentially this means you have to realize that their outward appearance is an EFFECT, not a cause. And therefore there is a deeper cause behind it. When you focus solely on the appearance of what they're doing, you are believing that the appearance is a CAUSE, and in particular that YOU are at the effect of it.

This means that cause and effect have kind of "shifted". The cause is in them, and their behavior is an effect of it. But now you're believing that their effects are the cause, and the effect has shifted out of them completely and into you. This is a belief that physical form is the only reality, that what the body is seeing is the truth. When the body's senses are trusted, and given the body can only see form and surfaces, this produces a suggestion that the world is primary reality. That it is the starting point of everything, and therefore causal and not an effect. It is necessary to displace the effect onto yourself or others then because this "causal form" cannot be both cause and effect.

This is the unforgiving attitude. That the dream world is real and is the cause of suffering. That surface appearances are true. That sin is real. That death is real. That sickness and suffering are happening and making more things happen in turn. In order to forgive, causation has to be pushed back into the mind or source within the person. Their behavior has to be seen as a facade and as only an effect, something to be pushed past and seen beyond. There has to be something going on with them that's deeper than just the outward expression of their pain.

When you are unforgiving you will accuse them of sin and put up a wall and use the surface appearance as a barricade to separate you off from them. The body will be emphasized and its activities will become the proof of sin. The person will be relegated to being a body only and only what you can see and sense will be given reality. This shuts you off from the person and treats them like an object. It's is a cold-hearted and vicious state of perception.

As you peer beyond this surface veil, beyond what they appear to be doing, and look deeper into the person, you're opening your heart. This is because you necessarily are opening up to a deeper truth, a higher truth. The higher truth is that beyond the layers of suffering, the obstacles to peace, the protest against reality, and their seeming attacks, there is a seemingly wounded frightened person inside longing for help. To see that they are only acting this way "because of" something else is a step in the right direction.

There is always something deeper behind the surface, just as there is another world beyond the surface of this one. To see that someone is in need of help is to shift your vantage point. You begin to see from their perspective, what they are going through and where they are coming from. You see behind the wall of sin, which also means seeing beyond the body, and acknowledge that they need help. This is a much more loving point of view. It's a compassionate point of view. It causes you to side with the person, which is part of becoming one with them. The part of you that is in them, or is them, now is included in who and what you are, and your love for them is now a shared love for yourself.

Not taking anything personally, not using what people appear to do against them, not holding events and happenings against the world, and seeing behind it to the deeper causes, is what forgiveness entails. And beyond all the deeper causes is the light of Christ which is the true nature of each person. No-one is evil and no one in their right mind would ever do anything unloving. People are just confused and mistaken. This is the movement away from making sin real, towards the forgiveness that confirms that people are simply mistaken and lost and in need of help.

Someone isn't sinful for attacking. People attack when they're hurt. Someone isn't evil just because they're being vicious and cruel. They obviously have experienced some major hurt or rejection or abuse or something that has led to this expression. We need to recognize that whenever we think the world, or bodies, or people, or events, are what they are based on the surface appearance, we're forgetting that the world is an effect and not a cause. By making it into a cause you shield the cause and hide it, and now the effect becomes the cause, with a seeming power to put the effects into you.

All of these violent expressions, all attacks and murders, all conflict and arguments, all destruction and viciousness, it all has to be seen as symptoms or side effects of something beyond it. Something in people that is in need of help. A call for love. A state of being lost and alone and frightened and guilty, that needs healing. People act out only as projections of what they have inside of them. What they are lacking is love and what they need is love and compassion. To see this need you must find a way to look deeper than the surface and see where the person is coming from, what's behind this expression, where it started, and get to the root of it. Because at the root of it is the reality of their real worth and innocence.

"That is the ultimate value TO YOU in learning to perceive attack as a call for love."

"For fear IS a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied."

"Perceive in sickness but another call for love, and offer your brother what he believes he cannot offer HIMSELF."

"The only judgment involved at all is in the Holy Spirit's one division into two categories; one of love, and the other, the call for love."

"What calls for punishment, must call for NOTHING. Yet every mistake MUST be a call for love. What, then, is sin? What COULD it be but a mistake you would keep hidden; a call for help that you would keep UNHEARD, and thus UNANSWERED?"

We know the secret of salvation tells us that we are doing everything to ourselves, but we also need to realize how it applies to others. The only way to correctly grasp how it applies to others, is to recognize you are ONE WITH others. If you are your brother, and your brother is part of you, then anything that applies will apply to BOTH of you simultaneously.

If you are one with them, this gives you new insight into the secret of salvation. If you try to do anything to them, you will realize that you are doing this to yourself. Giving and receiving are one. But also anything THEY try to do "to you", they are also doing to themselves.

This becomes very obvious when you regard them as one with you. If you are one with them, you are a part of them. As part of them, when they do something "to you only", they are also doing it to themselves. The secret of salvation now applies to the part of you that is your brother. Your brother is doing it to themselves. In truth, the secret of salvation isn't just about you doing things to yourself (selfishly), but in fact tells us that EVERYONE DOES EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE.

When you are one, anything that is done is done to both. Everything is shared. Anything you alone give, you also receive. Anything they alone give, they also receive. The two of you are doing everything to the two of you. Anything anyone does is done to the whole sonship. When ego comes along, by which I mean separation, it always results in a sense of NOT being one. We separate off and stop sharing, because ego is about selfishness. This selfishness seems to imply that what I do to another person I DO NOT do to myself. And in turn, what they seem to do to me, they DO NOT do to themselves.

This is the default mode of arguments, fights, annoyances, upsets, reactions, special relationships, and all manner of conflict. It always appears that the other person is separate from you. Therefore, if you are angry at the person you SEEM not to be angry at yourself. If they are angry at you, they SEEM not to be angry at themselves. But this is a breakdown in the truth and is NOT the whole truth.

It is ALWAYS true that anything anyone does, they do to themselves. This is the golden rule, the law of God, and it is not negotiable. It applies to everyone everywhere at all times. Even when you think someone is doing something exclusively to you and not themselves (or others), THEY ARE. If you see yourself as separated off, you WILL NOT see this. You will fail to recognize that they're hurting themselves.

If you are separate from your brother, the TWO of you are separate from each other. You now see anything they do to you as being done ONLY to you, and not to themselves. And vice versa. You won't be able to recognize that anything is shared, and you won't realize that they are actually doing it to themselves as well.

The only way to break out of this is to join minds, share identities, recognize your brother as part of yourself, and be one with them. This means INCLUDING THEM in everything, just as you simultaneously include yourself in everything. Anything that applies, applies to BOTH of you at once.

In this oneness you can immediately see the efforts of the other person to separate off. You can see how when they attack, seeming to attack only you, they ARE also attacking themselves. You can see that YOUR attempted attacks are not only toward them, but also toward yourself. This INCLUSIVENESS is the light in which you can see the whole picture.

Having included your brother within yourself, within the scope of who and what you are, two as one, it becomes effortless, natural, and constant, to remember that everything always applies to BOTH. To you AND the other. Both/And is always the logic of the golden rule, while Either/Or is always the logic of the separation/ego.

Now when your brother appears to try to separate off and attack only you and not themselves, you will know that THEY ARE attacking themselves. They must have attacked themselves first in order to be projecting onto you. You will be open to seeing this. You will be open to recognizing they are hurting just as much as they're trying to make you hurt. You will not fall for the deception that their attack only applies to you, and you will see them as hurting themselves.

This is how you then become able to recognize a "call for love". Only in a SHARED STATE can you recognize the call for love, because you have to be open to the fact that giving and receiving are one. A person is recognized as calling for love when they are trying to DENY the shared state, trying to REJECT the golden rule, and are PRETENDING that it does not apply. When you KNOW it applies, because you ARE APPLYING IT, this will shed great light on the relationship and show you the truth about who is doing what to whom.

A person who seems to attack only you, trying to be excluded from the attack, is now clearly seen to be trying to hurt themselves. You no longer can play the role of victim, or see them as being solely a victimizer. You no longer fall for the attempts to frame you as the sole evil one, and instead you can have compassion as a result of ENCOMPASSING your brother in yourself. Wrapping them in the inclusive truth and seeing them from a perspective of WHOLENESS.

Recognizing your brother is attacking themselves, OBVIOUSLY compels you to a sense of compassion and understanding, and a response of love. The call for love, seen correctly as self-attack, and seen only IN a state of unconditional love (shared interests, joined minds, shared identity), now inspires ONLY LOVE as a response. Since you are already seeing them WITH love, in order TO recognize their call for love, love is all you are giving and receiving. The call for love is answered with love, and sharing is its only function.

Your oneness makes this possible. Your separateness hides it from you. In oneness your shared inclusiveness of your brother puts your arm around them and comforts them. In oneness you see the two of you as equal and as joined. In oneness everything applies to both of you simultaneously. Anything they do they are doing to themselves. Anything you do you are doing to both of you.

In this dynamic it becomes impossible to see yourself or the other as a victim or victimizer, and love becomes the only obvious course of action. Nor can it be TRUE that what they claim about themselves is the truth, because YOU know that in your joined state YOU love both of you. If you know you are both equally loved, and they claim they are unloved, you will recognize their claim is FALSE. And so it does NOT apply to either of you. And in this oneness you are both lifted up by a miracle.

"The only judgment involved at all is in the Holy Spirit's one division into two categories; one of love, and the other, the call for love."

"Each one must share one goal with someone else, and in so doing, lose all sense of separate interests. Only by doing this is it possible to transcend the narrow boundaries the ego would impose upon the self. Only by doing this can teacher and pupil, therapist and patient, you and I, accept Atonement and learn to give it as it was received."

"Those who would learn the same course share one interest and one goal. And thus he who was the learner becomes a teacher of God Himself, for he has made the one decision that gave his teacher to him. He has seen in another person the same interests as his own." "For fear IS a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied."

"Perceive in sickness but another call for love, and offer your brother what he believes he cannot offer HIMSELF. Whatever the sickness, there is but one remedy. You will be made whole as you MAKE whole, for to perceive in sickness the appeal for health, is to recognize in hatred the call for love. And to give a brother what he REALLY wants, is to offer it unto yourself. For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself. Answer HIS call for love, and YOURS is answered. Healing is the love of Christ for His Father, and for HIMSELF."

"Mistakes are FOR correction. They call for NOTHING ELSE. What calls for punishment, must call for NOTHING. Yet every mistake MUST be a call for love. What, then, is sin? What COULD it be but a mistake you would keep hidden; a call for help that you would keep UNHEARD, and thus UNANSWERED?"

The ego is a state of insanity, in which what is true and false are completely confused with each other. In ego we have conditional love. We believe that some things are just downright evil, guilty, bad and wrong. We categorize the world into a hierarchy and we decide certain things like murder, war, sickness etc are all hell, while other things like sunsets and rainbows are lovable.

Unconditional love on the other hand would say that it loves ALL the time regardless. It sees innocence and harmlessness everywhere. Which means it continues feeling love even in the face of evil and war, attack and murder and death. It keeps smiling regardless. It even finds something beautiful to see in it.

To the ego it's going to have a reaction that this is completely insane. To suggest that war is not bad, and sickness is not wrong, and all forms of suffering are lovable. You'll feel like protesting against the idea of awakening because it flies in the face of everything the world believes. It goes against your moral compass and your sense of values and of what is good and evil.

Real love doesn't change when situations change, it doesn't adapt to the situation and it doesn't pay any attention to the form of what's happening. It could be considered oblivious and seemingly inconsiderate in a sense.

ACIM it telling us that we need to find a way to love the world even though, in and of itself, its own nature seems unlovable. Even the war and destruction and murder has to be somehow forgivable, and forgiveness is an earthly form of love. A form of unconditional love. But the idea of loving hell, or loving attackers, or loving abusers, or loving punishment, it all starts seeming outrageously blasphemous and offensive to the ego.

The ego in its insanity always believes that anything truly sane is insane. It thinks God is evil. It believes heaven is hell. It wants nothing to do with the truth or the Holy Spirit. Ideas of unconditional love are seen as treacherous and ignorant and lacking compassion for the "real suffering". Anything which really makes true sense is seen as completely nonsense.

This is why it can seem challenging to "wake up" because our egos actually believe the direction we need to head in is going to take us further into insanity, closer to evil, and away from safety. At first the notion that you can see beauty in something "the son of God made in hate" seems impossible and ridiculous. The idea that objects and forms of separation and attack could be regarded as representing the truth, seems completely false.

But somehow we still have to find a way to consider how it may be possible that there is a higher vantage point, capable of being forgiving towards attackers, capable of loving hell, and even capable of translating hell into heaven. The idea that earth can reflect heaven in spite of its completely flawed-seeming nature, at least on the level of form, seems far out of reach, and unwanted, but must be accomplished if we are to rise above the battlefield into the light.

What it claims is that if you will not say certain things, or do certain things, other people will be less hurt and less offended and less victimized. And that therefore, this is more loving and supportive.

This is not true.

What is really happening is that we're saying that people are affected by what is happening outside of them, that events and words and people's actions cause them harm, that they are therefore vulnerable, offendable, hurtable. And that therefore, because they are hurtable, we must aim to not hurt them.

But this completely assumes that it's true, normal, and natural for people to be hurtable. People are not hurtable. Someone who believes they are hurtable are in denial of their immortality. They are being a victim. They are scapegoating and blaming. They are putting responsibility for their life and their happiness into the hands of other people, in an attempt to disown themselves, to BE irresponsible, and to MAKE other people guilty.

If what I say offends someone, that's their fault. If what you say offends someone, that's their fault. If you are offended by what someone else says, that's your fault. It means you are secretly and not so obviously being irresponsible, are projecting ownership and blame for your existence onto others, are holding other people accountable for your happiness, are requiring and controlling other people to be a certain way in order to "make your ego happy", which means you are trying to get your way. It is manipulative, deceitful and controlling.

So what actually ends up happening, is that if someone avoids saying a particular word or doing a particular thing in order to not displease you, ie to please you, this is the ego persona at work. The persona tries to get rid of all unpleasant things by chopping out parts of yourself that it disapproves of, which eventually will leave nothing left, and is actually an attempt to destroy you. People pleasing is suicide.

So while on the surface it might seem like, well, we're being kind, we're taking other people's needs into consideration, we're placating, we're being gentle, we're trying to have compassion, we're understanding other people's insecurities, etc... all well and good, but this isn't AS good for people as to get them to be more responsible for their own existence. If it's up to me to change my expressions in order to not offend someone who is particularly touchy about certain subjects, then who really has the problem? Its the person who is touchy about the subject. They're actually playing a victim game, are projecting fault onto me, are trying to get me to change to satisfy their agenda, and they want me to stop being a certain way so that they can be justified in defending their beliefs.

If we're all going to 'get along' harmoniously, it is only going to happen when everyone grows up and takes full responsibility for everything they are experiencing, even if its fear or guilt or offense or hurt or whatever. It's each person's responsibility. And never is your life anyone else's responsibility. And nobody else is to blame for making you upset. If you want that, go ahead... it will make you weak and even more afraid and vulnerable to believe that.

So ultimately "PC" turns you into a victim. It attacks your invulnerability. It assumes that you are affected by the world and that therefore, as part of the world, everyone else has to tone down what they are doing to you. It's entirely based around a victim mentality. It strips people of their power. It actually disempowers people. It also makes everyone be in DENIAL. You are in denial of yourself because you're trying to not show all of yourself to others, and everyone else is in denial because they want to keep pretending you are responsible for their reactions.

It doesn't make people happier, because all it means is you are not being AUTHENTIC or HONEST toward them, and are baby'ing them, and are placating them and putting on a facade for them, likely in order for YOU to "not get hurt" through your own victimhood. So PC is really invented by victims, for victims, to continue victimization, and has NOTHING to do with helping people to be stronger or more powerful or less hurt or more respected. The ego wants to be respected, because it is disrespectful.

Yes if someone is upset, it may be compassionate to comfort and be gentle with them and empathize and help support them. But what is support REALLY? Support means also reminding them that all the reasons they are upset are not real or true, that they are actually victimizing themselves, that they are doing this all to themselves, that they can become much more empowered by owning up to this, and that there is a better way than to see themselves as affected by someone.

Is political correctness love? No. It's an ego agenda of misery and victimization and inescapable vulnerability. It worships suffering, it perpetuates fear, and destroys people.

Suck on that whether you like it or not.

Consider the idea of a script for your life which you fully planned, consented to, and passionately wanted, before you came into this lifetime. Imagine that you organized and orchestrated every single interaction. You created agreements with every single person you would ever meet and you asked them to do to you every single thing they were to do, with which they would comply. Imagine also that only what you planned would happen and nothing else would happen - except you would also forget that you planned it.

ACIM does speak to this, in that it says that nothing happens to you that you have not asked for, and that you get *everything* you ask for, and that you get *nothing* that you did not ask for. It also speaks to this when it says that nobody dies without his own consent. NOBODY DIES WITHOUT THEIR OWN CONSENT.

At some point, somewhere, whether it's in this life or before this life, but somewhere, for ACIM to be TRUE on this matter, you ****MUST**** have consented to every single thing that has ever happened in your life. ABSOLUTELY ALL OF IT. Not only consented to it but created it, asked for it, wanted it, designed it and even set it in motion YOURSELF. Not by any outside force or coercion or ANY amount of victimhood whatsoever. (this is somewhat described in the "song of prayer" pamphlet as well)

Remember the Course also says the key to salvation is this - that you are but doing this to yourself.

IF the Course is telling the truth (and it is), then everything that has ever happened in 'your life' has been exactly designed by and asked for by you. All of it. So this takes quite a lot of 'fessing up', which also means your life must become totally void of victimhood.

If you look now, and you look back at some things that you recognize as having 'happened' in your life, particularly events which involved people where they seemed to influence you in ANY way, and in particular in what *looked like* any kind of negative way, then you need to now reinterpret that. If you can allow yourself to ACCEPT that you planned and asked for every single detail of what occurred, then a few insights must arise:

1) You have to realize there was a REASON WHY you planned what you did, and that reason was FOR YOUR GOOD. Every single thing that you designed must have been for an intended purpose of, ultimately, leading you to a spiritual awakening. Every single 'lesson' or scenario that you put together, MUST have been intended to HELP YOU in some way.

2) With the information that all events are helpful, this must then shed a new light on all of these tragic past experiences, to show you that SOMEHOW, whatever happened, and no matter how it looked at the time, somehow that event and that person were ONLY doing what was in your script and they performed it perfectly. Therefore they weren't REALLY a victimizer. And you weren't REALLY a victim. At the time, yes, you believed you were, but here's the thing. You only believe you are a victim when you are UNAWARE that you are a script-writer.

3) This now gives rise to the insight that every way you've experienced being a victim in the past, was a result of a lack of awareness on your part, in which you experienced something designed to HELP YOU but interpreted it initially as HURTING YOU. This symbolically is the same thing as being loved by God but believing that you're actually being attacked by God. Ie it seemed against you rather than for you. So all of the ways that you STILL hold onto past events with a grievance, thinking of them as 'wrong' or 'unwanted' or 'bad' or 'unpleasant' or whatever, blaming the other person, all of that INTERPRETATION of events came about ONLY because you did not remember that you wrote the script. It looked like you didn't ask for what happened, which, IF it were true, WOULD justify your anger and hurt and offense. And that means, you need to to be more truly forgiving, ultimately accepting the atonement.

4) This now helps you to see that, ultimately, everyone involved is INNOCENT, because nobody has done anything outside of the contract and nobody ELSE is responsible for having done anything TO YOU against your will. Your will is embedded in your script which YOU WROTE, so even if you now find yourself unaware of this and experiencing victimhood, YOU DID STILL WRITE IT. So you can hardly blame the other person. So now you need to go look at all the unhealed grievances that you still haven't let go of, and which you still interpret in a victim consciousness that says "I didn't want this to happen", "this wasn't fair", "they did it to me against my will" etc.... you HAVE to reinterpret that.

5) This now leads us to TAKING RESPONSIBILITY. This might seem like a step which places a shitload of guilt on your shoulders, blaming yourself for what happened, bla bla bla. That's ego. What it really means is actually a doorway to FREEDOM and RELIEF. You see, if you scripted all this, and you asked xyz person to do what they did, and you can admit that and own that fact, then you can let them off the hook. You can realize they did not victimize you. YOU victimized you. You hired them to carry out your wishes. If you are responsible for writing your script (and maybe you had help on the other side to do this gently/realistically etc), then you can no longer blame anyone else for what happens, in the past or in the future. It also means you can no longer view experiences as unwanted, bad, against you, unhelpful, hurtful, something to resist, as an attack, or any other form of victimization. That means, yes, whatever they did, whatever happened, you wanted it and got what you wanted, FOR A REASON, to HELP YOU to wake up.

6) Having now admitted to this responsibility, and started to access the sense of RELIEF and freedom that this gives you... because dropping the whole victim drama is a RELIEF from suffering, you can now enter into GRATITUDE. You cannot be grateful to an attacker while you think you didn't ask them to attack you. But you can be grateful to them when you realize you DID ask them to AND you can turn your mind to look at the situation as helpful/for you. It's like looking for the silver linings. What's happening is NOT a terrible tragedy or a horrible event gone wrong. That's illusion. What's happening is trying to help you to be steered in the right direction or to keep you safe or to help you learn who you are or to guide you to remembering whats true or to learn to love and care etc.. whatever the purposes are in your plan for spiritual "growth."

7) Finally then you have to learn to change the 'direction' or angle from which you look at events. If you're responsible and everything is for your good, then you need to learn to 'take it' that way. Look for the helpfulness. Look for how it is 'positive'. Look for the silver lining, the learning, the opportunity its giving you. Look at how it is making you grow or what you're learning from it. Ultimately then there is only one LESSON, in the form of all lessons. And it's this. You need to overcome the NEED for the lesson by recognizing the truth, owning up to the responsibility of who you really are (owning your innocence), entering into the mindset of the Holy Spirit which shows you that you are never a victim, and reclaiming your FREEDOM from the dramas of the ego. Ultimately this translates to you OVERLOOKING (forgiveness) all of the ways that you get LOST in the 'game' that you set up, so that you literally are no longer CAPABLE of playing the game. Once the truth is revealed, you can never forget it. And so you no longer need to create these dramas ever again.

Remember, nothing happens to you against your will. There are no accidents. Nothing happens that wasn't planned at some point in time BY YOU. Nothing is being forced upon you against your will.

You might find yourself 'inside a lesson' in this lifetime and feeling stuck in it, victmized by it, limited by it. But you might not also remember the benefits of this situation. Maybe it has indirect effects on the spiritual growth of other people. Maybe by suffering a sickness you HELP other people to learn compassion. Maybe by being afraid you give others an opportunity to learn to nurture. We're all this big soup of roleplay and side-effects and responses.

Also let's just finish by saying you're not stuck with a lesson. Holy Spirit WANTS you to learn the lesson. The answer to it is not being hidden from you. Often Holy Spirit tells me, in the midst of some frustration and confusion, "its a lesson". So them I'm like.. hmm... what is this lesson, what am I meant to learn? And it's not like Holy Spirit is withholding the answer, but I need to experientially becoming willing to accept some measure of truth in order to complete the need for the situation. The lesson may not be obvious.

In fact a recent lesson for me was to learn to DROP the idea of miraculously healing a problem with my eye, so that i would let go of false ideas about control and spiritualization of my ego, even though this outcome seemed at the time to be totally the opposite of what I thought I needed to do. Holy Spirit eventually revealed, when I was at the readiness to admit to it, that the whole point was to help me to 'see' the truth - that I was trying to do/be something beyond what is asked of me.

Also I can't begin to tell you how much I have learned compassion and a heart-opening as a result of various challenges that a person close to me has been through. For which I'm grateful, even though it sounds 'sick' to say you're grateful for sickness.

Holy Spirit said to me, "there is a plan". I'm learning to trust that more. And thus learning to take responsibility for my part in that plan, and thus relinquishing all of the support for victim mentality and blame. Even now as I start to look back at past events in 'this new light' I can see that I need to become grateful to people that I thought were against me or who I thought did the wrong thing. They were only helping and they only DID help. I just didn't recognize it.

Ultimately you want to get to where you have no more need for writing scripts, having learned everything they offer. Then you are free from the cycle of reincarnation forever.

JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE AWAKE, DOES NOT MEAN OTHER PEOPLE WANT TO SHARE IT WITH YOU

JUST BECAUSE YOU PERCEIVE CORRECTLY, DOES NOT MEAN OTHER PEOPLE STOP PERCEIVING INCORRECTLY

Moving into the LIGHT, does not necessarily bring others with you, until they are WILLING to join you.

God is 100% awake right now. There is no sickness or death or suffering in God. It is "true" that these things do not exist, that separation is impossible, and no-one can die.

HOWEVER

It SEEMS. ... in an illusory way.... that we can SEEM to separate from God, to go off into a nightmare, have a bad dream, IMAGINE it is really happening, confuse it with reality temporarily, and SEEM to suffer and die.

Any such suffering, sickness or dying, is not real, and every single person who has sickness or suffering is not REALLY suffering. They are just having a bad dream.

But let's look at this with some compassion. Those "people", even if those people are not really individuals, no matter who or what they are, even if they are split of bits of the Son's mind, there is still some kind of ILLUSORY EXPERIENCE of terrible things happening.

A nightmare. A bad dream. Stuff that seems horrible, but in truth, is not happening. Yet still SEEMS to be happening to those "to whom" it seems to be happening.

And while these people are having these FALSE EXPERIENCES, God is already 100% awake, 100% healed and whole, 100% knowing that sickness and death are not possible.

WHY DOES GOD NOT UNDO THOSE NIGHTMARES IMMEDIATELY?

WHY DOESN'T GOD's INFINITE POWER AND IMMORTALITY stop people from killing themselves in the dream?

WHY DOESN'T THE FACT THAT GOD's MIND IS TOTALLY AWAKE, "cause" all "people" to NOT BE ABLE To create dreams of suffering?

Putting aside the illusion of linear time for a moment, God does not do that ONLY because those people having the nightmares keep REFUSING TO RECEIVE THE HELP. They use ILLUSIONS of denial, to pretend that they do not want the help, and that they need to suffer.

Even though God is offering 100% eternal life right now, immortal spirit is attempting to PRETEND to be stuck in a mortal body, confused with what can be sick and suffer and die.

And while we're in this illusion, having this nightmare, I think most people would AGREE that these "nightmares" can seem pretty dam real TO the person who is having them. Like if someone was mentally ill, having a terrible distorted vision of a horrible monster trying to eat them, freaking out and running around screaming because they THINK they're being attacked, even if they are NOT.... what is the loving response?

The loving response is TO LOVE.... always... the same.... unconditional love OFFERED at all times, but not being FORCED onto the person. Why not? Why doesn't God just wake us up out of the nightmare right now "against our will". Because we have FREE WILL, or at least love does not do that because it sees no NEED to do that, because it knows nothing real is happening.

Since God is 100% aware right now, and we, here, in this forum, for the most part, ARE NOT 100% AWARE RIGHT NOW, what that means is..... even though it's ultimately not true that we are unaware, it SEEMS like we are. We are having a false nightmare, a dream, a fantasy experience. Which SEEMS real to us.

And some of us here are experiencing what we think is real suffering. Maybe someone had a stroke, or has terrible pains, or anxiety about food, or had a heart attack, or their kidneys aren't working, or they have some "rare disease". Or maybe someone close to them is sick and it keeps them up at night worrying.

These are all false experiences, unreal nightmares, BUT the person having them DOES NOT KNOW THAT at this point. The illusion is so convincing, that we seem to have this twisted sense of "reality"... where we perceive and think these things are "really happening". And that produces ALL of the suffering, fear, and torment in this fictional world.

And none of it is real. And no-one is really sick. And there is no suffering. BUT.. .. that's not what people are SEEMING to experience.

What would love do about this? How would love respond to someone with mental illness, who hallucinates problems, who psychosomatically puts sickness into their body and writhes in torment over the pain they feel? What would love's response be?

TO LOVE THEM. TO OFFER A MIRACLE OF HEALING.

They might not accept the healing. Just as we seem to sleep "against God's will"... something which is really IMPOSSIBLE, yet which we are PRETENDING is possible....the person might refuse to JOIN YOU in being 100% awake. They might keep pretending that denial is real and possible and can block love. They might still manifesting artificial make-believe terrible sickness. They might PERCEIVE differently than you perceive.

Just because you go into true perception, or even go beyond perception to TOTAL AWARENESS of everything real, does NOT MEAN that other people automatically go there as well.

This is why Jesus was able to walk around the earth in a MORE HEALED state than other people, and OFFER THEM healing. He was still able to PERCEIVE that these "people" - whatever they are - parts of his mind or whatever - these people were having nightmares. Some split-off part of mind was still twisting "reality" and SEEMING to experience a terrible state of suffering. And to that piece of mind, that person, that suffering seemed VERY REAL and horrible.

Even though love knows that suffering is NOT REALLY THERE and has no real consequence and minds cannot be sick etc.... that none of this even happened.... IT IS STILL LOVING to offer miracles of healing to those "parts" which seem to be in need. This is part of the atonement process. The plan of salvation. That we are BRING LOVE to ALL PARTS OF MIND.

As Jesus says, he offers us salvation and love right now, but if we are not ready to receive it, HE WILL WAIT.

In time, people CAN REFUSE LOVE. Or at least seem to. They can produce forms of sickness in the body EVEN THOUGH God does not contain any real sickness. They can make illusions of being sick, and have horrible nightmares about those sicknesses being real. It is LOVING to alleviate that suffering IF THEY ARE WILLING to RECEIVE IT, through your offering of a miracle.

Just because there is total awareness or total perception, and even if that shows you there is NO DEATH and sickness is an IMPOSSIBLE ILLUSION, in time.. there is STILL a "need" for healing. That's why the Holy Spirit is here. His function here is healing, and we are supposed to share that with him, to OFFER HEALING to everyone who still seems to suffer from self-made nightmares. It is the loving thing to do, to offer a miracle, EVEN IF it is refused, and in spite of the fact that people can CHOOSE NOT TO PERCEIVE AS YOU DO.

Additionally, just because your perception is true and whole and healed, it does not STOP you from seeing what these "other people" or "split off bits of mind" - from the one whole son - are doing to themselves. It's possible to have COMPASSION for them, to recognize they are MISTAKEN and to not believe their sickness is REAL... yet to STILL OFFER HEALING of *THEIR BELIEF* that sickness is justified. And if they continue to spend time refusing to learn the curriculum, which is their free will right, they may well refuse to undo that illusion of sickness and will STILL EXPERIENCE SUFFERING, even if God can never suffer.

So yes, there IS no real sickness. Yes, there ARE no separate people. Yes, there are not even any bodies TO heal. Yes, no-one really needs real healing because healing is an illusion. BUT WHILE WE ARE HERE.... inside this dream illusion, where people DO choose to make illusions of attack and sickness, IT IS our role to offer and bring healing through love, to perform miracles, to heal the sick, to raise the dead, and to HELP "those" who seem to suffer. And they will thank you, because what they were experiencing before, even if it was an illusion, was WORSE to them than what they are experiencing now. How is that not KIND?

This is our function here. To offer love and truth to those who THINK they are really sick and suffering. To undo that suffering if they will ALLOW. To recognize they cannot be sick or suffer or die FOR THEM while they refuse to see it FOR THEMSELVES. Just because you wake up, does NOT mean "their sickness" disappears from THEIR EXPERIENCE. Otherwise, because God is awake NOW, it would be impossible for anyone to experience sickness. And truly they can't because sickness MUST therefore be AN ILLUSION, but people are still TEMPORARILY INSANE believing otherwise.

No-one needs saving, yet they do. In this dream, they do. There is healing to be performed. There are miracles to work. There are people who, if you walked up to them and asked, "would you like me to take away this cancerous growth", would say, "sure"... and you extend God's love in prayer and IT DISAPPEARS, and they are totally over the moon because they were suffering for years and thought they are going to have the NIGHTMARE of dying.

It's all mental illness, but love STILL HEALS IT. There is no real need to heal it, BUT LOVE DOES ANYWAY. Love just loves. While we dream, God wants us to awaken. While we refuse God's will, or try to, pretend to, God wills that we be happy and accept his will.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SUFFER, even if it is just a made-up dream of made-up suffering. You don't even NEED TO HAVE a nightmare dream. You can have a HAPPIER DREAM. A dream which is gentler and softer and precedes awakening in a smooth and non-jarring way. You do not need to be sick, or tolerate it, or try to transcend it in order to deny it. IT CAN BE REMOVED. No-one has to have dreams of death and suffering and sickness and pain, EVEN IF it is just a dream. This is not God's will.

It is God's will for you to EXPERIENCE PERMANENT HEALTH AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, to no longer have that broken leg, or that missing arm, or that defective lung, or that cancer, or any of it. A broken body proves the mind is not healed, so these breaks MUST BE HEALED if the mind is to be healed. We do not need to find ways to "be at peace with it". We need to UNDO IT, in form, in the body, to prove and demonstrate the truth that we cannot be hurt against our will. No-one needs to be having a dream of limitations.

People are all different. One of the most harmful aspects of this ego world is the attempt to make everyone the same and gloss over their differences. This is the ego's attempt to pretend that 'everything is ok' and 'we are all equal' as a form of denial and repression. It thus leads to people feeling like they have to 'pretend that they agree', when around individuals who are different.

For me, for example, I am an introverted person. That means I am more independent from society and social interactions and tend to be more sensitive and introspective. What seems 'natural' for me is quite different to what is natural for extroverted people. When the two worlds collide there is almost always a sense of tension and miscommunication and people-pleasing and dishonesty and lack of authenticity

For years and years I always felt compelled to have to try to 'be like others', or fit in, or just automatically accept sociable situations, as if not doing so was wrong and anti-social. This I think is largely because more extroverted people `push` sociability as though it is normal and exalted (especially with the whole idol worship/celebrity/hollywood ideals). But what is ideal for them is not ideal for me. Layers and layers of guilt and shame have had to be released and healed to come to feel that it is `ok` to be truer to my personality and my own standards and that I do not 'have to' just go along with other people.

The main area I experience this is in social interactions especially with strangers or where more sociable people are engaged. Just even the mere fact that people decide to suddenly stop and connect and converse is to me an uninvited intrusion, and due to my sensitivity I experience it as jumping ahead several steps in the amount of `trust` or depth of connection I would need to establish first. It's especially difficult around people that I think of as - social bloodsuckers - the people who suddenly decide to include themselves and involve themselves and start yacking on about themselves, especially filled with complaining and other forms of social attention-seeking, as a way to kind of `hold me hostage`. I want to tell them to shut the fuck up and leave me alone and stop invading my space.

So you can see that if you are different in some fundamental ways, whichever side of the fence you fall on, it can really produce a lot of tension and conflict, either externally or internally. That discomfort makes it feel like it's not okay to be the way you are or its not normal or its not acceptable, and that can lead to profound shame and emotional pain.

The term 'painfully shy' can arise for introverted people quite easily and the pain actually comes from social embarrassment, a lack of social prowess, troubles speaking (at all), troubles finding things to engage about conversationally (to even have the mental thoughts that lead to conversation), not belonging or fitting in, feeling inadequate socially and thus as a person, feeling lacking and insufficient and defective, feeling unheard (because more extroverted people actually don't connect at the same depth as introverted people - they are shallow and enjoy social-lies rather than truth), etc... this all can add up to a tremendous sense of 'being attacked' (either internally or by others) and that produces profound emotional pain. I suffered with that for years and years thinking it was not okay to be the way I am.

Gradually, and this is thanks in large part to A Course in Miracles and other healing and loving support, I've been learning two things - how to be more comfortable being the way I am - at least in terms of personality and needs - and consequently, being more comfortable to be around people and converse. The `opening up` of the Course has helped me to heal from 'social torture' to a large degree and to feel more confident in being `myself`. Even if that means just being my ego self more authentically. Because that authenticity is a doorway to my True Self.

Being true to yourself no matter what your `self` is, is empowering. And it also has helped me to learn healthier boundaries, that I don't have to people-please, that I can just walk away from people when I don't want to be social, that I'm not `held captive` by anyone's need for attention or domination, and generally an overall sense of ... greater peace, I suppose. These weren't necessarily goals I had with the Course but it has definitely healed to bring about healing in these areas, to remove fear and inhibitions, and to build a deeper connection of trust - and yet personal power - when interacting with others.

I don't know what kind of a moron I am in the eyes of extroverted people. I must come across as some kind of inept antisocial lifeless idiot or something. I have more to learn about how the majority of society functions. This is why it is very hard for me to envisage ever standing in front of some audience and giving a speech or being a highly visible public figure. Jesus has me doing things on a much lower-key and more behind closed doors, lol. Whatever your style is though, I'm just glad to finally be feeling a sense of RELIEF from years of torment and misery trying to be something I'm not, and I hope extroverted people can also learn they don't have to be like those annoying, antisocial, holier-than-thou, wimpy introverts ;-)

There is, as always, a paradox - the truer you are to yourself and to how you are different, not trying to pretend you are the same, actually allows you to become inter-dependent and open to true communication, understanding and compassion. And that is joining. Everyone has their gifts and talents. Let's celebrate how our differences can be acknowledged so that we can all experience peace. Political correctness out the window - we need to embrace who we are (even as an ego) in order to let others be who they are, in order to accept others and not be insensitive to their differences.

Thank you Jesus!

At the BAFTA awards this year, the actor in the very good film "I swear", about a man with tourettes, won an award. It's definitely worth a watch if you haven't seen it.

Later, there was an award being presented by two black men. While on stage, an audience member with tourettes shouted out a racial slur, using the "n word".

Now, some people have said that this is "unforgivable" because a person using a racial slur like this "under any circumstances" is intolerable and wrong. Indeed it's not ideal and something to perhaps apologise for.

But at the same time, we have to also remember that the person with tourettes doesn't have ANY control over their outburst. It's a brain condition that produces spontaneous eruptions of expression, which the person cannot stop.

So given that it erupted "involuntarily", the forgiving view should be with understanding and compassion, that it is not offensive because it was not intentional or controlled or deliberate. If people understood the tourettes condition they would be much more forgiving.

I thought it was interesting how this highlights the difference in perspectives of forgiveness vs unforgiveness. It's not about what happens, or what someone says, or the form that it takes. It's about how you look at it and how you use it.

A person could use the racial slur to attack themselves and thus believes they have been attacked by the other people. Or they could alternatively have a more forgiving attitude in which they recognize the disability or "call for love" in the other person and do not hold it against them, nor use it to hurt themselves.

We have to remember that if we see ourselves as attacked in an away, it is because of our USE OF what happens and what we make of it psychologically. And just because someone else might say something "potentially hurtful" it doesn't mean that we have to experience it that way, or that if we feel hurt it is "because of" what they said or did. We are hurt only if we choose to use it to hurt ourselves.

This is part of the secret of salvation, that no-matter who seems to be doing what to whom, who seems to be attacker or victimiser or victim, you are STILL doing it to yourself. Because that very same person who was upset about a tourettes person using the n-word, has within their capability the ability to forgive it and NOT see it as an attack, not use it to justify anger, not use it to hurt themselves, and to not give it any power over them.

But if they chose not to do that, they would instead attempt to accuse the tourettes person of a "sin", truly unforgivable, as though the cause of their own suffering. And this is the ego's victim consciousness. It is entirely up to each of us whether we will take full responsibility for everything we feel and experience or not, or whether we will hold other people accountable for "causing us" to suffer.

A person playing the victim role will see the mere "act" of the slur as an attack, and believe that it has direct causal power, and has placed within themselves a "hurt", which now justifies angry revenge. And this is the closed-minded view of the ego., which does not see that the victim is attacking themselves WITH what happens. This is the unforgiveness of false perception.

This is spiritual unconsciousness. It lacks empowerment and sees others as having power over them, wanting this to continue so that they can continue scapegoating and being a victim, to justify their anger. They could just as easily disregard the outburst as a forgivable mistake. Instead they see the physical act as "what it means", as though they are not contributing anything to its meaning at all.

The person who disregards it as nothing, and recognizes the full picture of why and how the event arose, sees no call for anything but forgiveness and love, and even laughter. How can immortal beings be attacked or offended by anything?

God is the state in which there is perfect healing all the time, not that there is 'something to heal' due to there being sickness, but that there is `pro-active healing` which PREVENTS there from being sickness, all the time. So God is in a state of health and grace forever.

God is also the source and creator of who I am as His Son. So, I extend from God. And everything I have must therefore have been given me BY God. Jesus says that the only difference between Him and us now is that he does not have anything OTHER than what God gave Him... meaning that the rest of us cling to what we think is 'other' stuff that we got from somewhere 'else', because we made it up separate from God. And none of it has any power.

Love inspires miracles and miracles are all based on love, and therefore they are expressions of love, and therefore they are expressions of GOD. They start in God. God is perpetually in a state of CHOOSING health by pro-actively always creating health. And by health I mean, a healed state in which sickness is impossible because there is only love. All true healing must then either flow from God or involve us entering INTO God to share in what God is.

So it comes down to a matter of what seems to be, two vantage points. 1) Healing flows FROM God TO where we are, and 2) We go TO God in order to share IN healing.

Most of what we seem to attempt to do in our awakening process is to go TO God in the knowledge that as we get closer to God we open up TO the healing state that is in God, so that we can share in health. However, God also is coming to us :-) God is extending constantly, and wants total health at all times, and shares total health at all times. He has no desire to 'make sick' or to 'keep sick'. And, given the chance, he would immediately flow His health to us and share it with us, healing us of all sickness.

When some portion of ego 'meets' God, God transmutes it into love and healing, or rather, health, is restored. It seems however that we live in a world where there is all kinds of sickness happening which appears not to have been 'corrected' by God yet, as if somehow it has some kind of power over God or that God for some reason does not attempt to 'heal' it or correct it. And this can lead to confusion as to exactly how it's possible that God is total health but the world is full of sickness.

Part of the issue is that we each have written 'agreements' i.e. 'scripts' before each lifetime, which were essentially sequences of events that we would 'allow' and which we would be at least a little willing to use as learning devices, to bring us ultimately closer to God, WILLINGLY, rather than necessarily being 'forced' into love. And because we did not want healing, having rejected God in the separation, it seems we now have to go through the plans that we lay out to learn our lessons and become more 'receptive' to God's love. And that can take time, and it can also seem to mean we 'have to suffer'.

However, God has no intention of making you suffer or of it having to take a long time to heal. God's Spirit works NOW. God is spontaneous and immediate and has absolutely no reason for delays of any kind, being of absolute confidence and certainty. He would heal the world in an instant. He does, however, honor the wishes of each of us to dream and pretend, up to a point. However, let's be clear, that our scripts and our excuses as to why we will not accept healing, is OUR issue, and not God's. God is not the one who keeps resisting healing or the provision of it. God wants to heal ALL THE TIME.

Because of this, I do believe it is possible that God is perfectly open to 'bypassing' your script, if an appropriate request is made. I asked Archangel Raphael about this and was surprised when he said "there is a process", and that a "petition" must be made to God. Because, how everything is sort of 'set up', we have all these agreements over many lifetimes to go through various processes to gradually awaken. God doesn't really care how long that takes, having infinite patience and knowing we're not really separate. But God is also still very immediate and instantaneous. AND, God only wants to LOVE US all of the time.

So since God is in constant love with us, and wants for us ONLY to return to Him as soon as possible so that WE can experience love and not suffering, as an act of compassion, God is perfectly capable of bypassing the script and enacting 'gifts' or 'blessings' or 'miracles' which are capable of healing someone or bringing them closer to Him 'in spite of' the ego contracts. It is possible for Holy Spirit, who has the power of God (!), to enact miracles of healing and restoration of health on all levels, at any time and to any extent. As we awaken and open to love we become co-facilitators of this and miracles become more common and natural. However, Holy Spirit is not held back by us and does not depend on us to be able to heal.

It is possible to pray for someone and to request healing for them. And this prayer basically entails you going to God in some fashion, with whatever amount of openness you currently have, and first of all emphasizing the nature of God, which is to be grateful for what already is. Grateful that God loves us, grateful that God already loves the other person, and grateful that healing and health are natural and are ALREADY TRUE. "Thank you God" is very appropriate, up-front.

We thank God profusely for having already accomplished our full and total healing, which may not be apparent in TIME but has already been accomplished in eternity. And then we might take action to EXTEND God's love (which we then are feeling) to others. We might simply ASK God/Jesus to heal someone, acknowledging and being thankful that it is DONE ALREADY (you could call this having faith), and you could even command this healing occur now.

Holy Spirit and Jesus are then perfectly capable of healing ANYTHING RIGHT NOW, and that means, correcting you FOR you, or correcting another person FOR them, without them necessarily knowing HOW to correct themselves or being capable of enlightening themselves. It is an 'intervention', a blessing and a gift. It is an extension of love. If healing is possible, it has to mean that it can occur IN SPITE OF the ego and TO UNDO THE EGO, meaning we are not really required to necessarily become miracle-minded in order to receive a miracle... IF someone else is willing to request the miracle for us. We can even request it ourselves and receive more than we asked for.

God loves us very much. We do not need to suffer. And unconditional love has NO CONDITIONS that prevent its extension.

There was a man I posted a video about recently who killed several people. This man was hallucinating that the people were trying to kill him. In his self-defense, and terror, he thought he was completely sane in ending their lives.

He did not see these people for who they were. He did not see their innocence. He saw something in them which was not there and which they were not doing. But he was convinced they were his enemy. He perceived them as an enemy and was certain the only sane course of action was to destroy them before they destroyed him.

Obviously this is insanity, but this is how the ego functions in all of us. When we are in the ego we go into a PRIVATE WORLD in which we hallucinate and project our OWN sin onto other people. We perceive it there, as though it is not our own stuff and as though it is real. We don't even see the person for who they are, and instead interact with that hallucinated projected enemy self, as if it's really out there.

In a sense, when we do this, we are no better than murdering other people. It may seem to be to less of a degree, but it's the same mechanism. And yet, it is not really other people that we're attacking, because as soon as you choose ego you go into a private world. You are then actually attacking a portion of the inside of your own mind, where you see a hallucinated version of your own sin and guilt. You attack your own ego. All of this has nothing to do with other people.

We need to learn to let go of identifying ourselves as ego, i.e. sinful and guilty, so that we can gain a clarity that is very important. We need to become able to truly SEE people as who they really are (Christ, innocent). But we're not going to be ABLE to see that in them if it is not also our own identity. Anything less than love will project a private world of self attack, in which we are at war with ourselves and THINK that it's a war with other people.

Anyone with enough awareness to KNOW that they are Christ, that they are innocent, CANNOT fall for the impression that someone else's insanity has anything to do with them. Someone else's self attack, someone else's private world, someone else's hallucination, or someone else's attempt to project their illusions onto you, has NOTHING to do with who and what you are. It doesn't even touch on who you are, is not targeted at who you are, and doesn't even acknowledge your identity. It's like the person is sending out packages with address labels that are for... not you, even though they're throwing them at you. They just do not register with you. They don't land with your identity.

You then have enough awareness to SEE clearly that the person is actually experiencing insanity. What they are accusing you of they are accusing themselves of. What they think is true of you is true of them, to themselves. Their belief that their enemy is evil is really their own belief that they are evil. They are having a mental illness. They are inside a private hallucinatory world, interact with make-believe selves, and it's literally got NOTHING to do with you at all.

IF you can get to that awareness, which requires that your own awareness be full and know yourself as innocence, you will have the clarity you need to NOT fall for the delusion that someone else's madness is about you. You will see, instead, that their entire experience is a CALL FOR LOVE. THEY need help. It's got nothing to do with you personally. This also will reveal to you that you are completely invulnerable, completely inaccessible to their ego attacks, because YOU do not believe that you are made of the things that they are accusing you of.

Therefore, this gives you access to a freedom, an awareness that nobody CAN attack what you ARE, because what you ARE has shown you that everyone else is trapped in private worlds. Their attacks are on THEMSELVES, and therefore, actually, NOBODY IS REALLY ATTACKING YOU. That then will give you natural confidence and fearlessness, and compassion. And you will be able to come from love.

Nobody has ever really attacked you. You are innocent and immortal and invulnerable. Nobody's harsh words have ever really been toward you. Nobody's abuse was ever an abuse of what you are. You are not abusable. You cannot be defiled in your innocence. You are naturally OUTSIDE of the ego entirely, outside of people's private reality bubbles. You are outside of other people's private worlds, you are outside of their hallucinated attacks, and you are outside of their delusion that their rage has anything to do with you. What a peaceful, safe place to be!

You only are "affected", which really means, are attacking yourself, when YOU believe that you are less than innocence and lovable. That means you believe you are ego, and you are now having your own private world of hallucinations. And other people's hallucinations will start to resonate with your false truth, and you will believe they join together and that therefore other people ARE now capable of attacking you. And when they express their hallucinations toward what you are, you will believe they really are about you, and you will really generate "hurt" in yourself (really done by your own mind), believing that they put it there. That's the mode you have to get OUT of, by reclaiming the Atonement.

Atonement is the awareness of your innocence, your invulnerability, and your immortality. And in this view of clarity, you'll laugh when you see that NOBODY is actually even attacking what you are AT ALL! They're all too busy attacking themselves, and are all lost and unconscious in their own little worlds. How freeing! Nothing real can be threatened, because nothing real is BEING threatened.

People like to think they don't have an ego, or that if they have one it's tucked away somewhere. Distancing from it is a way to protect it. But having ego means being to ANY degree, even slightly, outside of heaven. The tiniest belief in separation is all it takes. And that applies to just about everyone on the planet.

So we have to at least acknowledge honestly that if we're still here we probably still have egotism to some degree. And that means we can't just pretend that we don't have one. It means that there's some part of our mind which is mentally ill, and distorted, and lost and confused. A part of the mind that believes things which are not true, but still believes them anyway. And that part of mind has a sense of identity attached to it, a sense of truth about oneself.

And that ego-identifying mind is going to have false perceptions and egoic viewpoints, regardless of how much a person is doing ACIM, how often, or for how long. So we can't just be in denial and pretend we're not being egotistical, we are being egoistical pretty much 100% of the time in one way or another. And denying this will only produce sacrifice and repression and even more separation in the mind.

There has come to be an ACIM 'culture' now of ego denial. It's one thing to recognize that yes we have to work on undoing our egotism and return to wholeness, but it's another to just pretend we don't have egotism when we do. Shoving it under the carpet isn't healing the mind, any more than throwing the book at it 24/7. It will generally take a long a slow and gradual process to correct all of the mind's errors and until then you have to 'work with' your ego and be gentle with yourself.

We have to admit that we DO have an ego right now and we - at times, need to be IN that ego, in order to feel a sense of being "what we are", because our sense of what we are has become ego-identified. If we pretend not to be e.g. body-identified, while still being so, we will move into sacrifice and body shaming and other things which are unhealthy. People are developing increased senses of shame and guilt over 'having an ego', or outright denial at having one while demonstrating it, instead of being gentler with ourselves about where we are at.

It's ok to acknowledge that you're being/having an ego while you are doing it, while you are working on undoing it, and not pretend that just because you believe the truth of the theory of ACIM that you somehow are above it all. Or that you can live as though you don't have an ego, before you are truly ready to do so. Everyone is mired in ego and mental illness until they reach enlightenment, and no-one is excluded from that.

So we have to then recognize this and be gentle with our self-deceptions and our delusions, even if that isn't an ideal scenario, and isn't healing it. We have to be where we're 'at', while we're trying to move closer to God. Once we've moved closer, great, we're more spiritually aligned, but while we have ego we shouldn't be treating it like some kind of enemy or bashing it or hating it or trying to lock it in a box, because YOU will experience the effects of that.

It comprises part of your belief about yourself, and a sense of your current identity, and denying or attacking that will be experienced as an attack upon yourself, which will not make you happy. You don't have to snuggle up beside it and love it and want to keep it, but you also shouldn't be demonising it or not having compassion for where you're at. Everyone's trying to run and they don't even know how to walk.

Many ACIM students think that they are not only miracle workers but also egoless selfless lovers of everyone, having barely stepped foot on the road to God. This is part of the ego arrogance itself. Can we just for goodness sake just be where we're at and relax and stop pressuring ourselves to be perfect and flawless when we're clearly riddled with issues that we're working on? It's okay to be a mess while you're working on cleaning up the mess.

"The Soul in its knowledge is unaware of the ego. It does NOT attack the ego."

"The voice of the Holy Spirit does not command, because it is incapable of arrogance. It does not demand, because it does not seek control. It does not overcome, because it does not attack. It merely REMINDS. It is compelling only because of what it reminds you OF."

"Truth does not struggle AGAINST ignorance, and love does not ATTACK fear."

"Light does not ATTACK darkness, but it DOES shine it away."

It is important for you to claim the atonement for yourself, because you are an extender of God's love.

If there is a block in your awareness, whereby you are not willing to receive love for yourself, love is not going to be able to flow through you to other people.

Love comes from God, goes through you, and extends outward to others.

If you put up a roadblock in your mind where you are not willing to receive love yourself, you will be incapable of allowing that love to fully flow through you to others.

You only will see God in everything you see when God is in your mind, and God has to be in your mind FIRST. The doors have to be open for the light to shine through.

You might think it is important to learn to love others as much as possible. I thought this was what I was supposed to do, becoming very loving and try to love all the time. But Holy Spirit corrected me on this.

He said, "you must love yourself first."

If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love others. The amount of love you can give entirely depends on how much love you have. If you are empty of love, you can try to fake it, to sacrifice, and to strain to try to love others, but you will hit walls and limitations.

There will be ways in which you also believe that other people are not lovable, they are just too irritating or annoying or upsetting, or they make bad choices or attack you or whatever. You will think that it is because of them that you cannot love them, or that you can only love them conditionally some of the time.

When pushed to your limits you will find out that in fact the thing stopping you from being able to love this monstrous enemy is your own inability to love any more than you already do. And the reason you can't do that is because you're hitting the limit of how much you love yourself.

So then it becomes a matter of, it's not really other people that you can't love another ounce, it's yourself. You yourself are hitting the limits of how loving you can be, because there is something about your own self that you do not love. There is a blockage in you, an unwillingness to let that much love be present in you.

So now it's simply impossible for you to love other people that much extra without FIRST addressing what it is about your own self that seems unlovable. You have to make room for love in yourself before you can love others that much more.

It seems ideal and appealing to be very loving to others as much as possible but you simply will not be able to, or willing to, and you will stop short of being able to find that much love and compassion in you, simply because you yourself are not willing to let YOU be loved that much.

The challenge then is learning to let yourself be loved, to become open to love and receive love for yourself. This means undoing false ego beliefs and self attack, so that you can come to believe the truth is true and be actually WILLING to accept the truth - your innocence - your lovability. You must therefore accept Atonement FOR YOURSELF, SO THAT you can access and receive love, be open to love coming to you, open to it flowing through you, and thus be able to offer it to others.

When you do this, when you take that sole responsibility of accepting atonement for yourself, it means you are now willing to receive love and recognize that you CAN be loved and are loved. This willingness to acknowledge the worthiness of love within yourself GIVES YOU the ability to see love and worthiness in others, you will believe they deserve that love also, and then you will give it to them. This is the START of your ability to be MIRACULOUS, because miracles are always expressions of love.

You must receive the gift of love first in order to give it. You must receive the miracle for yourself first in order to give it. You must heal yourself before you can heal others. And you must forgive yourself before you can extend forgiveness to others. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. It is the privilege of the healed to heal. It is the privilege of those who have accepted miraculous truth for themselves to perform miracles to help others be freed from their illusions of suffering.

Accepting the Atonement for yourself, as your sole responsibility, should never be seen as meaning that other people are SEPARATE from you or that they are excluded from your atonement. Once you have accepted atonement for yourself you ARE accepting it on behalf of everyone else, and it WILL result in you becoming loving towards others and able to perform miracles for them.

Many people use this "sole responsibility" as an argument for some kind of "private awakening", which excludes everyone else and it used to explain why you would not then perform and miracles. Its meaning is totally the opposite. To accept the atonement is to accept oneness, which applies to YOU AND EVERYONE because it makes you an extender of love. You must take responsibility for accepting it for yourself, SO THAT you enter into a state of SHARING, and are then able to EXTEND THE ATONEMENT to other people in the form of miracles. The atonement justifies being a miracle worker.

We do not want to LOOK AT the fact that there is a NEED for healing. We actually are in denial that something HAS gone wrong, and that healing is necessary. And instead we have covered it up with a belief that NOTHING is wrong, or little, and healing is NOT needed.

Jesus describes here for example that we are afraid to look at our inner altar to realize that it HAS been defiled, and that we DO need healing, because we're frightened of the idea that something has gone wrong. But by looking at this fact with the Holy Spirit and through atonement, you can see only the need for healing as a call for healing, and thus for the restoration of the altar.

"The reason why the real vision is obscured is because man cannot endure to see his own defiled altar. But since the altar has BEEN defiled, this fact becomes doubly dangerous unless it IS perceived. This perception is totally non-threatening because of the Atonement. The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. The fear arises because of the necessary willingness to look at what man has done to himself."

He talks elsewhere as well about how we do not want to ADMIT that we have BELIEVED that we are separate from God, and now find ourselves in a state which seems to embody and symbolize that separateness. That we DO believe we are NOT with God. And that we need to be willing to look at this horrifying truth in order to ALSO be willing to correct it.

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."

This runs contrary to what many people say and teach, that "the separation has not happened". This is false. THE separation is a term for the fall of man and the tiny mad idea, which is an actual thought we DID have and DID choose to believe in and tried to make real to ourselves. THAT happened, even if actual real separation is impossible. And now we find ourselves in a FALSE experience of a world in which we SEEM to be separate and believing it's real. THAT is happening. But it's not ultimate reality, in which real separation is impossible.

But we have to be willing to admit that this HAS occurred, that something HAS seemingly gone wrong, we HAVE mis-created an entire world, we HAVE identified with fake bodes, in order to also acknowledge that there IS a need for healing. People ARE calling out for love. Miracles ARE needed.

This is something that is coming to my awareness strongly at the moment, the great NEED that there is in the world, in EVERYONE, for healing and help. Only by admitting that this IS the situation we're in, can we be willing to BE helped, and to be OF help to others.

There is also a great blindness that many people have of not wanting to ADMIT that they are suffering. A great tolerance for pain. A great denial that anything is even wrong. That they are not happy. That they are sick and dying, or seeming to. This is partly because of the tremendous confusion and thought-system reversal which has interfered with our ability to RECOGNIZE what is actually happening - what situation we ARE in - what we HAVE done to ourselves, and the NEED we have for healing and correction.

In other words, no-one wants to admit that they DO believe they have tried to destroy themselves, others, and God, because looking at this would seem to imply guilt. But looking at it honestly without egoic reactions allows you to also see the call for Atonement, and the REASON why there is a great crusade to eradicate all lack of love - of God - everywhere.

For me, this recognition is starting to take the shape of feeling like I'm on a mission. The amount of atonement I have so far received is revealing a desire NOT to tolerate the "lack of love" (guilt, sickness, fear, death) in myself and others. To side only with God and his laws and truth. It's creating a compassion for the plight that ALL of God's separated children are finding themselves in, not just in ACIM circles but worldwide. The sheer EXTENT of the fall of man and the sheer extent of the world's insanity. ONLY by looking at this can you acknowledge just how much help IS needed, which then COMPELS you to be helpful.

"Only the sick NEED healing. The Soul does not need healing, but the mind DOES."

"Perception IS a separated state, and the perceiver DOES need healing."

"The Holy Spirit is the Christ mind that senses the knowledge that lies beyond perception. It came into being with the separation as a protection, and inspired the beginning of the Atonement at the same time. Before that, there was no need for healing and no-one was comfortless."

"It is only THIS that makes you willing to engage in endless "battles" with reality, in which you DENY the reality of the need for healing by making IT unreal."

"Having been restored to your original state, you naturally become part of the Atonement yourself. You now share MY inability to tolerate the lack of love in yourself and in everyone else, and MUST join the GREAT CRUSADE to correct it. The slogan for this Crusade is "Listen, Learn, and DO."

Your mind has the ability to be either constructive (creative) or destructive. Using the mind for destructive purposes is what the entire ego thought system is about. The whole world was made in an attempt to destroy God and Heaven.

The mind, in its healing and accepting of atonement, has to be restored to being PURELY CONSTRUCTIVE. That means that any destructive tendencies or attitudes have to be healed and corrected.

A destructive tendency is anything that emphasizes the SEPARATION that has seemed to come in between you and others, or you and God, in any kind of relationship. An attempt to DESTROY relationship has produced a WORLD, the inner contents of a seeming "gap", like the pits of hell. And it is into this world that you seem to go when your mind becomes destructive.

If you desire to create, you desire to extend God's love and life and power. This extending goes out without limit and is shared with everyone fully. It is a full embracing of all your brothers in love and light. It is a complete joining and union with them.

This extension of creation and the shining of light are miraculous. It represents health and union and harmony and peace and perfection. To extend God is to be in support of The Kingdom and thus to fully support your brothers with love and His life-giving force.

This isn't merely a state of equality, it's a state of GIVING in which you are constantly maintaining the perfection, innocence and immortality of your brother, as your brother's keeper. It is a way of INCREASING what He has, therefore denying lack or weakness. Being constructive is to GIVE power, to GIVE life, to GIVE love, and to thus MAINTAIN eternal life through constant supply.

"Miracles supply a lack. They are given by those who temporarily have more to those who temporarily have less."

Becoming destructive, on the other hand, is an effort to do the opposite. It is a desire NOT to share, not to extend, not to create, not to love. It is a rejection of eternal life and thus entry into what seems like a world of mortality and death - a dream of death. Attempting TO DESTROY, is to insert some kind of separate illusion in between you and others, to focus on it, to give it reality and truth, and to believe in its existence.

"The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist."

This focusing on destruction is what makes the world of bodies and forms and objects. A world of sin. It is how the planet is held together. It's what makes sickness and death seem possible and real. It materializes as seeming vulnerability and attack and all forms of illness. It falls short of joining with your brother in love, and instead dwells upon what we call "his body", emphasizing its reality and its faults, to try to believe that your brother is NOT an immortal being but a mortal object of attackable flesh and bones.

While our focus is deceived by, tempted by, attacked by, joining with, focusing on, making real, giving truth to, agreeing with, the world of bodies, which comes IN BETWEEN you and your brother's real selves, we are being destructive. This destruction could be mixed in with some FORM of support or help, such as feelings of sympathy and sorrow, compassion, caring, concern, worry, trying to fix their bodies directly, grief when the bodies are harmed or lost etc. All of which are really DESTRUCTIVE attitudes aimed at emphasizing the REALITY of suffering rather than being truly helpful.

To be truly helpful, we have to look at the ways we buy into the dream, the illusion of spacetime, the world, and the bodies of ourselves and others, believing they are total reality, and instead learn to LOOK PAST them to the light of truth. The real truth about others is that THEY ARE PERMANENTLY IMMORTAL, and they cannot EVER have a fault or a weakness or a sickness or any kind of suffering. That is what must be given reality, truth and strength.

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK."

And to overlook means to NOT look at, or to not see, what is being overlooked. In effect to be blind to it, through the proper use of denial. To reject that it is EVEN THERE, putting our WHOLE focus on the extension of love and the recognition of the total truth about another.

"The world you see (the world of bodies) must be denied, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision (the ability to SEE your brother as he really is)."

Vision does not focus on the body or the world or the things seeming to happen on the canvas of spacetime, in efforts to be support and truly helpful. To HEAL requires looking PAST these things to the ACTUAL truth, and not being hung up on what the gap in between seems to claim. To look out FROM love, TOWARD love, completely skipping over everything IN the gap of the world, so that THERE IS NO GAP. There is no gap, because there is no world.

"Forgiveness does not look upon bodies and mistake them for the Son of God. It looks beyond bodies. That is its holiness. That is how it heals."

We have to examine, where is it that I am buying the bullshit lies of this world, the bodies of others, the appearance of things. And why am I thus AGREEING that these things are true and real, instead of rejecting their falsehood? We have to learn to look PAST these things to the reality of the immortality of our brothers IF we are to OFFER THEM immortality. And only by looking WITH love can you look AT love, which is BEYOND the body.

"Never was love in the world of dreams."

Love erases the dream. It heals the dream away. It shines it away. It closes wounds. It undoes tears. It repairs malfunctions and interference and terror and pain. Because unity has no separations, sins or guilts within it, and is perfectly smooth and harmonious and loving and strong.

To STRENGTHEN your brother is to constructively support him. To GIVE LIFE to your brother is to constructively support him. To offer him HIMSELF, equal with the love in you, is to remind him of who he really is. To EMPOWER him is to put him in touch with the innate power that GOD GAVE him already. And to deny HIS denial of the truth about him, weakens HIS belief in his own separateness, and thus HEALS the rift between you.

"The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept Atonement himself. This means that he knows that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors ARE healed by the Atonement. Once he accepts this, HIS mind can only heal. By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others. The message which he then gives to others is the truth that THEIR MINDS are really similarly constructive, and that their own miscreations cannot hurt them."

To be truly helpful is to resurrect. It is to literally SUPPORT the true nature of your brother. To uphold it. To sustain it. To reinforce it. To brighten it. To enliven it. And to ensure it.

"Do not allow your brother to be sick."

Your brother CANNOT BE sick because he is immortal. Believe only this and he wil be healed completely. Buy into his sickness and you merely become sick along with him, and now you both are weak because you suffer together, and there is no hope because you are not giving any. You must not buy into the sob story ego bullshit of your brother or loved one. It is NOT TRUE of them. It's entirely false. And the only story you should be believing is the story of his IMMORTAL CREATION and PERMANENCE, AUTHORED by God.

We are learning to be truly supportive and truly helpful. Putting aside our DESTRUCTIVE uses of mind, our ego, and embracing ONLY constructive, creative powers, which are miraculous.

Those who are sane do not attack, are not sick, cannot hurt or be hurt, are immortal and invulnerable, recognize their oneness with others, have no interest in murder, cannot suffer or be unhappy, can only will with God, and can only heal. Nothing harmful or hurtful can come from a person in their right mind.

When a person is rooted in pure unconditional love, they can do nothing but love. All behaviors are coming from love. All thoughts and attitudes are loving. The right mind is healing, healthy, happy and whole. Sane people are innocent. Sane people are compassionate. Sane people cannot attack.

What this tells you is that 99.99% of the people in the world are not sane. They are not in their right mind. They are also not fully conscious. Anyone who is not in their right mind must have blocks to awareness, must be in denial, must be to some degree unwilling to do God's will, must be sick, and must be to some degree unhappy.

Anyone not in their right mind must have positioned themselves as a victim and a victimizer. The denial/blocks in their mind is preventing them from seeing their invulnerability and their innocence, causes them to be split-minded or in two minds, have a divided will which is acting against itself, and now sees themselves as under attack.

This produces state of non-awareness or unconsciousness. The amount of conscious awareness that remains, which pretends to be a full, complete conscious awareness, is still not fully conscious. Entire portions of the mind have become inaccessible to awareness. Entire portions of a person's identity are hidden from view.

The person thinks they wake up in the morning but they merely pass from sleep to slightly less sleep. The blocks in the mind block sanity. And those who are "sleep walking" in the world are typically not awake. They will tend to hurt and be hurt. They will tend to attack and project. They will tend to sin and feel guilty. They will tend to be afraid and suffer and be sick. And they will tend to be murderous.

What we can see then is that anyone not in their right mind has placed themselves into a state of at least partial unawareness, are attacking themselves unconsciously, do not see what they are doing to themselves and so seek to explain it with causes outside of them, and are in a state of attempted murder. What is not love is murder, and those not in their right mind are not wholly loving.

But someone who is not wholly loving, is not sane. They are insane. They are un-conscious. They are confused. They do not have the awareness that's needed to show them what the obvious truth is. They are out of touch with who they are. They can't tell the difference between what is real and what is not real. They don't know what they are doing. They are acting insanely and are in a state of being mistaken.

If we frame everything that insane people do as being a state of "not knowing what they do", that they are acting this way as a result of mental illness, not being in their right mind, and we can remember that the person is simply not aware of what they are really doing, we can enter into a state of greater compassion.

It's a state of recognition of what the truth is, in which we understand every person is innocent and holy and divine and invulnerable, and so if the person is acting foolishly or murderously they must be in need. They must be lacking love in some way and are calling out for love. They must need help. Something has gone wrong with them and even they are not in a position of awareness to know how to resolve it.

We really need to recognize that most of the people in this world are not sane. Just about everyone has mental illness. And that includes all the people who seem to be conscious, successful, holding down a job, raising a family, displaying confidence, seeming to be fairly happy and sociable, or what you'd consider an "average person". If they were truly fully sane they probably would not be in a body.

If we then recognize that anyone "not being as God created them" is not in their right mind, we can say that they aren't acting the way they are "on purpose". While it's true that on a higher level they ARE choosing everything they are doing, they are not aware of this in their present state of consciousness. They have denied themselves the love that would heal them and so do not want it. And the result of love's absence is insane behavior.

If we can see that everyone is supposed to be being completely happy, joyful, alert, healthy, holy, harmless and peaceful, then if they're not, we know something has gone wrong in their mind. And that means they are calling out for love. They may at the same time not want that love, because their denial of love is what put them into this state to begin with. But they do NEED love because love is all that's absent in their mind. They need the love they have blocked.

It's like, people have tried to unhook themselves from the life support machine of God. They've pulled out the wires and don't want the help. But they NEED the help because of what they've done to themselves and the state they've put themselves in. So now they are calling out for help in the form of not wanting help, which if taken at first appearance seems to be an attack on God and on you. But it is merely an absence of love, just as light would dispel the illusion of darkness.

"It is curious that the perfect must now be perfected. In fact, it is impossible. But you must remember that when you put yourselves in an impossible situation, you believed that the impossible WAS possible."

If you can remember people are mostly insane and not in their right mind and not acting "on purpose" and not really wanting what they are doing, it becomes easier to not be deceived by the illusions they present. There is something deeper going on beyond the surface, beyond behaviors and beyond attacks. Healing is needed, called for, and the only appropriate right-minded response.

Sometimes, although we don't want anyone to suffer, and God does not will anyone suffer, ... .sometimes someone going through a "thing", a hardship, a suffering, is actually consentual and beneficial to the person.

There can be a great compulsion to stop it, solve it, take it away, make it better, avoid it, etc.... we are VERY avoidant of any threat to us. But in the big picture, these "trials" as they say are actually "lessons", which we've sort of agreed to go through in order to grow spiritually.

If we are in the business of just taking away everyone's troubles all the time, we might actually be denying them a tremendous opportunity for advancement.

How do we know that, perhaps a person becoming an alcoholic and hitting rock bottom could actually lead to them becoming a powerful advocate for healthy living and helping others to escape from it?

Or that, someone going through a horrible nightmarish experience of sickness might actually lead to new perspectives and opportunities and maybe even a new future career that ends up helping a lot of people? We have to be careful not to think always in such short-term aims, and look instead to what the purpose is in the LONG TERM plan of atonement.

Very often the things you go through give you a lot of wisdom and insight and personal experience, which "equips you" in a sense with perspectives and abilities and compassion for others who might go through something similar. And then you might find yourself using that to be helpful to them down the line.

You might for example have elected to be a really great therapist or something and, in order to do so, wanted to first-hand go through some horrible abuse situation which you had to experience and work through and heal, in order to find a way out, in order to become able to help others to find a way out. And without that, you might not have been able to be useful in that way, for the higher purposes of the atonement plan.

On an earthly level we often interpret any bad thing as bad and wrong and to make it stop. We insulate ourselves from problems and sufferings. We label all unpleasant things as unwanted. We try to make an idyllic life, comfortable and controlled, to shut out the chaos.

But in the big picture of the soul we come here to learn lessons, to grow, to advance towards God. The importance of returning to God in the long term, across even lifetimes, may be so significant that we would be willing to even go through hell and back if it meant we would find a way to rise above it when pushed to our limits.

A person might actually on a higher level be willing to go through tremendously difficult lessons because, in the big picture, they know what it is leading to. The potential for major spiritual growth. An opportunity to see the other side of a situation. The purpose of finding a different way to relate to others etc.

It's not like, God is there saying, you must suffer and I want you to go have a horrible disfigurement just so that you can learn, or some kind of cruel karmic punishment scenario. But because we have chosen to go away from God and into ego, we "need" lessons to help us to return to him. And that means we have beliefs that need undoing, and attitudes that need correction.

So we then find that the atonement plan is set up to use our "faults" and our unwillingness and our biases and blind spots and so on, as "lessons", which may appear at first like horrible trials and difficult challenges, in order to try to find a "better way". To find a way to make a better choice in that scenario so that in future we don't need to go through something like that. Or rather, that we stop making those kinds of forms of suffering because we've learned that they are ultimately not in our best interests.

So in general we can't be quick to judge whether something is a good thing or not. The most horrible looking through could well be very much consensual and very much asked for. If the soul knows that there is the POTENTIAL for massive growth and learning, it may in fact be WILLING on a deep level to suffer the most horrendous difficult challenges, because it knows that the payoff may be really really worth it.

So hats off to all you people who are and have gone through horrible states of hell and nightmares and abuses and victimhood and all manner of pain and misery. Because it may well indicate not that it was just some thing that "was not meant to happen" but rather, something that you consented to and were WILLING to experience because it would potentially have tremendous spiritual benefits.

No sane person in their right mind would want to choose any such trial or difficulty, but it's because we're NOT in our right minds that we DO choose these things, and the holy spirit REPURPOSES these things, in an effort to use them productively and constructively, to help us to make the best of it, so that it isn't all for nothing and a waste of time.

This is a more FORGIVING view of suffering, because it reframes it as potentially beneficial when used for a higher purpose. Instead of focusing on the thing itself through false perception, labelling it a dark and wrong and unwanted. We can USE anything for the purpose of becoming closer to God, and that's what all these "trials" are all about.

"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life." UrW139L19

"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you." UrT31H2

"The misuse of will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point." UrT2B69

"In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again." He would not leave one source of pain unhealed, nor any image left to veil the truth. He would remove all misery from you whom God created altars unto joy. He would not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release your minds from everything that hides His Face from you. His holiness is yours because He is the ONLY power that is real in you. His strength is yours because He is the Self that God created as His ONLY Son. The images you make can not prevail against what God Himself would have you be." UrT31H3

"Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success." UrT18F1

"There IS no choice where every end is sure. Perhaps you would prefer to try them all, before you REALLY learn they are but one. The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way EXCEPT the pathways offered by the world. And, learning THEY led nowhere, lost their hope. And yet this was the time they COULD have learned their greatest lesson. All must reach this point, and go BEYOND it. It is true indeed there is no choice at all within the world. But this is NOT the lesson in itself. The lesson has a PURPOSE, and in THIS you come to understand what it is FOR." UrT31D3

You are attacking victims with your false empathy. It's time for some honesty.

When you see someone as a victim, such as that they are sick, diseased, suffering, afraid, being victimized by someone else, are disabled, weak, helpless, vulnerable, at a loss, unhappy etc... you might take the position of caring, wanting to help them, saving them, being their hero, or wanting their suffering to stop.

The desire to want their suffering to stop can become very strong. It seems justified. It seems like you care a lot about what they're going through and want all this stuff to stop happening to them. It seems like you want to take it away and that you would if you could. But this is completely fake.

Every time you perceive someone as anything other than perfect love, it is an ego attack and you are using them as a scapegoat to get rid of your sin.

It can seem like your reaction to their victimhood is justified. It can seem like you really want to help them and take away their pain. However, what you're not admitting is that you have a secret benefit from seeing them this way, and you positioning yourself as their savior is actually a cover-up for how you are using them for your diabolical plan.

Even if you are coming across as caring and wanting them to stop suffering, you actually deep down want them to keep suffering. You want their pain to continue. You want to keep seeing them as a victim, and to keep pretending that you are their savior and not in any way someone who would be hurting them further. You would seem shocked and horrified at the suggestion that you are attacking them with your attempt at salvation.

Secretly, you have a belief that you sinned, and hold a lot of guilt to go along with it. You want to get rid of it and deny it's you who did it. Along comes a nice victim which someone or something else has set up to be in a state of suffering and punishment.

Fortunately for you, they are already appearing to be punished by causes outside of you, so you don't have any need to attack them overtly. You don't need to turn them into a victim because they are already being one. How convenient! Now all you have to do is take the opportunity of their victimhood to keep them being a victim, so that you can use them to scapegoat your sin.

Therefore instead of reacting with justified anger, as though they attacked you and you need to now establish them as the one who is wrong, you've already seen that they appear to be wrong already. So all that's left is to keep them in their suffering while making it look like you are here to save them from it.

Your perception of them as a victim IS an attack, but it seems to be an invisible attack because its effects are already implemented by circumstances. By making their EXISTING victimhood real, you get to appear as though you were not the one who did this to them, even though your AGREEING with it is just as much an attack - a veiled attack, which seems like it isn't even happening. You join in the attack by agreeing that they are a victim. Then you react instead with false empathy, a false attitude of caring and wanting them to be better.

Your desire to want them to be better, while still perceiving that their victimhood is real, is actually a choice to perceive them as wrong for being the way they are. You think they should not be being victimized, they should not be suffering, they should not be sick, that it's unfair that they've been mistreated, and you just want to "help" the poor fuckers get out of their situation.

But you don't. Your belief that they should NOT be being real victims is actually an attack. You're trying to deny them and get rid of them. You can't accept them the way they are. You will position yourself as the innocent hero who comes to save them, while secretly using them to prove that THEY are the one who is a sinner and not you.

Even though you might label a victim in such a way as to frame them as guiltless and sinless, as though innocent and not wanting their situation, by making their victimhood real and reacting to it with false empathy or false compassion, you are actually condemning them.

Your ego really wants them to stay being the one who is sick, to keep suffering, to maintain their diseases and their strife, because if they were to genuinely stop being a victim you wouldn't have a way to get rid of your unconscious sin and guilt.

So long as you can see them as a victim and pretend to care, you can enjoy a secret gladness that they are the one who is worse off and not you. "There but for the grace of God go I" - or rather, "I'm glad those fuckers are suffering because they must be guilty and not me." They are the one who must have sinned, in order to suffer, and you are clearly the one who didn't.

Even if you go to great lengths to help them and want to alleviate their situation, you're really doing so on false grounds. You do not recognize that they have attacked themselves. You do not recognize that they have chosen to suffer. You do not recognize that they want to be a victim. You don't see the ways that they are being vicious and attacking and using their ego illusions of victimhood to accuse others of sin. You do not see this because you do not want to admit to doing the same.

Eventually, someone who becomes very "helpful" in this way is actually an under-cover attacker. A wolf in sheep's clothing. A devil appearing as an angel. Helping disempowers. Helping takes away, it does not give. Becoming a fixer, and becoming addicted to fixing, simply indicates that you want other people to be broken as much as possible so that you can remain in denial about your own brokenness.

If they are the one who needs the help, it's not you. If they are the victim, it's not you. If there is something "wrong with them", then you get to look all innocent and have an illusion of being "loving". Your seemingly sincere wish to take away all their suffering and pain is actually making it real and adding to it.

YOU are causing them to suffer more. That's hard to look at and admit to. Your ego WANTS them to suffer so that you can use them and make yourself look innocent. Every time you move into false empathy and set yourself up with an ego reaction of "oh poor them, they're so sad", you are attacking them and keeping them imprisoned. You're not shining truth onto them or really helping them. Your "help" is actually HURT.

To be truly helpful can only mean that you apply forgiveness. Whatever their victimhood appears to be, IT IS NOT THAT, and something else is going on, both with you and with them. There must be a lot of denial involved and there must be a lot of self attack involved. Victims are not victims. They choose to make themselves appear to have stuff happen to them "unfairly", tragically, awfully, so that their ego can get away with murder. Your belief that their victimhood is justified and unfair is you getting away with murder as well.

Only through a correction of your perception, which is going to require you to own up to what you are using this person for, and admitting to the truth of WHY you want them to suffer, i.e. to keep your own self-attack hidden behind denial, will you then have any hope of helping YOU, OR them. You can release them from their prison by NOT agreeing with their victimhood and NOT seeing them as suffering needlessly and NOT believing the appearance of the story as to how things are happening against their will. Behind every victim is Christ pretending to suffer.

False empathy is deceit. It is not justified. It is an ego reaction. It is a tool to get rid of your own sin. It does not work, because it keeps your own sin intact and creates more. Only forgiveness of yourself will work.

"Here is the fear of God most plainly seen. For love is treacherous to those who fear, since fear and hate can NEVER be apart. No-one who hates but is afraid of love, and therefore MUST he be afraid of God."

We need to realize that when Jesus talks about fear, he isn't talking about you suddenly having an increase in a sense of fright. Or a temporary worry. He's actually saying that the ENTIRE SEPARATION is a movement away from love, into a state of love's absence. That state is called fear.

But we need to also realize that Jesus says we have entered into seemingly many things, all of which are one illusion. This includes fear, sin, attack, guilt, death, suffering, sickness, murder, etc. Even the ego itself is nothing more than a fearful thought. It may seem to house all the many aspects or attributes of separation but it is also fear. It is insanity and guilt and fear and death and many other things all rolled into one.

When you are stressed out, you are afraid. When you are worried for someone's physical health, you are afraid. When you are concerned whether something will work out or not, you are afraid. When you are seeing yourself as victimized and attacked, you are afraid. When you have a sense that everything is going wrong and there is no hope, you are afraid.

When you are entering into that familiar and horrible state of "this is a nightmare", you are afraid. When you feel like you are dependent on the world and of something being a certain way, you are afraid. When you are taking illusions seriously you are afraid. When you think that someone "is really sick", you are afraid. The fear can seem to take on many forms and in many degrees and levels and most of the time you may not even realize it.

When Jesus says that fear comes from trusting in your own strength, he is reflecting on the fact that if you listen to the ego and focus on self-sufficiency without God, you will be afraid. Because this means you're separating off from God and thus are trying to distance yourself from him - in fear. In essence, separation from God, or separation from anything or anyone, is a state of fear. Just as it is also a state of guilt, and of sickness, and of death.

Jesus tells us that "all healing is the release from fear." This pertains to you in terms of you needing to be healed, and in terms of your miracle working for others. Where there is fear there is separation and seriousness, darkness and despair. When there is fear, there is no lightness or happiness or freedom. Fear binds you and imprisons you and makes you powerless. Fear is literally a rejection of love, or life, of health, of God, of everything.

This is why he casually has said that we have made a "detour into fear". The whole separation is a detour away from fearlessness into fear. This tells you then that when you get OUT of the fear, you will find happiness and joy, lightness and peace, health and wholeness. All "forms" of separation from God have to be undone and fear is a really big part of this. Teachers of God cannot be afraid. We should be fearless. This does not mean having a lot of arrogance or physical strength or competitiveness, it means you literally are not feeling fear or having reasons to be afraid.

Ultimately this is all wrapped up as simply the opposite of love. Fear is love's absence. Fear is God's absence. Fear thus becomes the "fear of God", seemingly, as if God is causing the fear. But in truth, the fear is being used to FRAME God as the cause of fear. To justify shrinking and withdrawing.

As Jesus says, if you are afraid, know that you have withdrawn from the light. If you are afraid, you are hiding from God. This is not because God in any way is a threat, but because you have to believe God is a threat in order to pretend that you don't love him.

When Jesus was in a body he would often say, "fear not". This quite literally is like saying "do not deny God" "do not be separate" "recognize you are safe" "choose love over fear" "do not attack" "choose not to die" etc.

"There is, however, considerable clarification of this concept, which must be understood before the real meaning of the "detour into fear" can be fully comprehended."

"ALL illusions are of fear, and they CAN be of nothing else."

"The ego is quite literally a fearful thought."

"Faith is the OPPOSITE of fear, as much a part of love, as fear is of attack."

"And hate must be the opposite of love, regardless of the form it takes."

"There are no scraps of dreams. Each one contains the whole of fear, the opposite of love, (in all its ways), the hell that hides the memory of God, the crucifixion of His holy Son."

"Life has no opposite, for it is God. Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life."

"If perfect love casts out fear,

And if fear exists,

Then there is NOT perfect love.

But

Only perfect love really exists.

Therefore, if there is fear, it creates a state which does not exist."

"THE FEAR OF GOD, the final step in your dissociation."

"For once you understand it is impossible that you be hurt except by your own thoughts, the fear of God must disappear."

"When the fear of God is gone, there are no obstacles which still remain between you and the holy peace of God."

"Let this grim sword be taken from you now. There is no death. This sword does not exist. The fear of God is causeless. But His Love is Cause of everything beyond all fear, and thus forever real and always true."

"No-one can look upon the fear of God unterrified, unless he has ACCEPTED the Atonement, and learned illusions are not real. No-one can stand before this obstacle alone, for he could not have REACHED it unless his brother walked beside him. And no-one would dare to LOOK on it, without COMPLETE forgiveness of his brother in his heart. Stand you here a while, and tremble not. You will be ready."

"To look upon the fear of God DOES need some preparation. Only the sane can look on stark insanity and raving madness with pity and compassion, but NOT with fear. For only if you SHARE in it does it seem fearful."

"Death is the symbol of the fear of God. His Love is blotted out in the idea, which holds It from awareness like a shield held to obscure the sun. The grimness of the symbol is enough to show it cannot co-exist with God."

"The fear of God and of each other comes from each unrecognized belief in specialness."

"The fear of God is fear of life, and NOT of death."

"The fear of God results as surely from the lesson that His Son is guilty as God's Love must be remembered when he LEARNS his innocence."

"What seems to be the fear of God is really only the fear of YOUR OWN REALITY."

"The veil across the Face of Christ, the fear of God and of salvation, and the love of guilt and death, - they all are different names for just ONE error; that there is a space between you and your brother, kept apart by an illusion of yourself which holds him off from you, and you away from him."

While you are believing that your ego is your real self, and as you attempt to do something about this to wake up spiritually, you're going to be pulling that ego self along for the ride.

It does not want to come along for the ride and can't. Its way of perceiving, which you have made your own, must see the approach towards truth and God as dangerous. Your attempt to expose your "self" to the truth will be seen as an attack, and is highly offensive.

This is why every time you (ie your ego-aligned self) tries to allow some light in or tries to become more spiritual, you inevitably find this strong voice emerges in you which retaliates. You have this big ego rebound where you feel all hurt and afraid and abused, as though someone just told you that you don't exist and aren't worth anything.

Your alignment with the ego while simultaneously trying to wake up from it, makes you try to wake up WITH it, and thus to wake IT up. But it cannot awaken. It is purely a device for separation and is illusory. It doesn't have a life of its own without your support.

When you try to pull it towards the truth or transform it, which produces the "spiritualized ego", you might well create an illusion or persona of looking and acting "like" someone who would be spiritual. But deep down you will have this part of you that deeply mistrusts and is threatened by what you are trying to do. Like a hurt child, that part of you will attack the part of you that's trying to pull it into the light.

Over time I've seen how personally I attempted to become more spiritual, for example by writing things which seemed as spiritual as possible. And it produced a lot of backlash for the "rest" of me that was still identified with the ego and didn't want to wake up.

When I was writing my first book, I really believed that I was opening up to light and truth and it was powerful and healing, BUT at the same time it was very painful. I felt like I was flogging myself to death, or sacrificing, or attempting to push myself to the brink of tolerance. I had a lot of ego rebounds.

Partly I felt that I was approaching truth more but there was a big chunk of me that was still holding on tightly to the false idea that I was the ego, and was trying to change "it" into something more spiritual. It could not change and did not want to and saw my attempts as deeply hurtful. And so because I was aligned with that, I experienced deep hurt along with it. I kept trying to be more spiritual in my persona.

While you're "seeking" for spiritual truth this is pretty much a given that this is going to be your experience. So long as you believe you are the ego self, that part of you is not going to like or want or believe in or see sense in the truth. It is going to be threatened by it, offended by it, hurt by it, it's going to take it to mean things it doesn't really mean, and because the truth proves that the ego does not exist, your alignment with ego is going to imply you do not exist. And that's just going to scare the shit out of you.

Gradually over time, making all of these mistakes, yearning to be closer to God, willing to push my "self" (idea of self) towards the truth, and going through endless rebounds, I think I've gradually lessened the belief I have in the ego.

Letting the ego GO is really the only way to become "more spiritual". It's not through changing it at all. It's not through making it more spiritual. The only way to be free is to be free of IT, which means your sense of who you are, your identity, your definition of self, MUST shift from ego to your Higher Self, or Holy Spirit (right mind etc).

The ego can't shift there with you. If you try to take your ego self there and pretend that you're doing it, you will just enact the ego's bungie cord. Like an elastic band it will just pull "you" right back to its territory, and the more you are trying to pull it away from its territory the stronger the rebound is going to be.

This is exactly what produces reincarnation - the attempt to get out of the world without really letting it go, elasticly brings you right back into it because you still belive you are made of it. Exposing ego to too much light will burn it, and with you believing it is yourself YOU will experience that suffering, and you will flee from the light right back into the body.

Gradually, we have to let the ego identity go and awaken FROM it to realize that it is not who or what we are. Everything it perceives is not our real perception. Everything it believes about itself cannot be what we believe about ourselves. Everything it trusts in cannot be what we trust. We have placed our faith in it and are attached to it. We have to let go and "surrender" its position to make room for God.

Waking up is painful. If we could see the areas where we believe in the ego and could simply gently relax and let go of them without adding threat to them or making them confused that we're trying to imply things which are not true or real to it, then perhaps we can awaken more gently. But that kind of ability probably only comes from a more awakened self that is able to discern lovingly. In the midst of the ego we rarely have such clarity and compassion and tend to step on our own toes all the time.

Often when I become more aware of truth and want to really "get it quickly", which can also be spurred by the ego because it knows that if you "do a lot of course" you will have such a reaction to it that maybe you'll stop doing it, using it to attack you, I'll just do too much too quickly. I will have deep emotional releases and become overwhelmed. It will also become frightening.

When I started to see that sin was not real and that it could only be my belief that I sinned that is keeping me from God, I went looking for the sin in me to try to undo it all, and that was simply too much at once. I spazzed-out for a few days and it was not at all pleasant. I had to stop and take it slower. Baby steps.

There are also times where I write about the Course a lot and maybe go into overdrive and am writing several times a day, and it all seems so wonderful and truthful and inspiring but then comes the parts of me that are still holding onto lies and they fly up into my awareness like a slap in the face. How DARE you claim that that's true! How COULD you believe that! Stop it!

By all means take a big leap if you are genuinely ready and can do so without the huge ego backlash, but otherwise, take your time and be gentle on yourself. Take a break.

The world can't really be held responsible for its nature. It was given its nature by those who made it. It was made for a purpose to serve them. And it functions exactly as they wanted it to.

Its makers wanted the world to be a place opposite to heaven in every possible way. Whatever was true of heaven, the world we made had to be unlike it in the most extreme ways possible.

Whereas heaven was light and strong and eternal and perfect, the world we made HAD to be dark and weak and temporary and imperfect. There was no real choice in this. Certainly the world itself had no choice in this, because it didn't make itself.

We wanted an opposite to God, an opposite to heaven, an opposite to eternal life. So we made an unreal dream of death and unhappiness. A dream of mortality and impermanence in which all things are infiltrated by death and destruction. A world opposite to creation where creation is impossible.

"Creation is impossible in this world."

The world cannot help this. It was made to be like this. Its nature is the only nature that is even possible as an opposite to heaven. It HAD to be this way in order to be different to the Kingdom.

It's not like the world can actually choose to be heaven, or have a nature that is exactly the same as heaven. Nor is it possible that the world is actually electing which nature to have. It cannot make this choice. It is something we made, and isn't the creator of itself.

This is also why the ego - something else we made, is forgivable. It is just as forgivable as the world because it did not make itself. It has the nature it has simply because it could have no other nature. A device spawned from an idea of separateness COULD ONLY lead a state of selfishness and isolation, exclusion and limitation.

The ego itself had no say in this. In fact it has no say in its own nature. In this sense it too is not responsible for being the way that it is. It was forced to be this way by its makers. And now it is true to its nature and follows the laws assigned to it.

The ego cannot really be accused of therefore doing bad things on purpose as though it could actually ever choose not to. It isn't a device for truth and salvation, nor is it a mind that can make a decision. It certainly isn't its own author, even though it has invented a story about a false God that it thinks made it.

The ego HAD to be the way it is because this is the natural outcome of an idea of separateness. Separateness never looks any other way or functions any other way. The world and the ego and the body simply CANNOT function any other way. They were given a function when they were made and they cannot deviate from it. The reason being that this function derives from a premise which has never been altered.

So in a sense we can't really hold the deeds of the ego, or of bodies, or people, or the world, against them. They are being faithful to their nature. They are just ticking over like a machine which was designed to function a certain way. They cannot do anything about it.

"The ego's voice is an hallucination. You cannot expect the EGO to say "I am not real."

The world cannot suddenly decide to be nice to you. The ego cannot suddenly tell you what the truth is. The body cannot suddenly be immortal. Objects cannot suddenly transcend spacetime. They are all locked into a system. It's a system-wide state of laws and rules by which they were made, they always abide, and they can never escape.

They cannot escape themselves, nor can they offer salvation from themselves. They are not going to change their minds. They are not going to take on a different nature. They are always going to keep running and operating on the same dysfunctional basis because that's the nature that was given to them, and they know nothing else. Nor are they capable of anything else, just as a tool or device can only do what it was designed to do.

So while the world and the ego and bodies attack and murder and destroy, in a sense they cannot help it. It's what they do. It's all that they do. They don't know how to do anything else, nor can they be taught to. Nor can they be kept while they are transformed into something better. They can only ever keep on being the way they were always going to be from the start.

Because they do not know what they do, they are forgivable. Because they did not create themselves, they are forgivable. Because they can only function in fault and failure because they were supposed to, they are forgivable. Because they can't help but break and disrupt and distort and skew and deceive and destroy, they must be forgivable. They aren't doing it "on purpose" out of optional spite, nor are they doing it on a basis of being free to do anything else.

The world can only destroy, and it can only deny, and it can only lose, and it can only fail. That is its nature. It can only disappoint and it can only fall short and it can only hurt. That is its nature. It can only be at war, it can only decay, and it can only die. That is its nature. It was born to die, and never to live except for death.

We cannot hold its nature against itself when it doesn't even have the slightest say in its nature or behavior. We cannot redeem the ego. We cannot redeem the world. The world cannot be saved in this sense because it cannot stop functioning the way it does even if "it wanted to". It is helpless. It is powerless. It has no causal choice. It can make no decisions. It is weak and vulnerable and fearful and nothing. So it can't really do anything of its own volition.

The world and the ego are nothing but puppets on a string being dangled by sons of God playing with sharp-edged toys. The world and the ego won't stop trying to kill you off either. Nor will they suddenly turn perfect or operate with holiness and happiness. The world is a pointless depressing hopeless place because all its roads lead to death. It doesn't know how to live, it only knows how to die. You can have pity for it in that sense. You can even have compassion for it.

"Shall we not put away these sharp-edged children's toys? How soon will you be ready to come home?"

The world will never be other than what it has to be in order to fulfill the function of separation. And the ego will never have a loving truthful nature. They are lost because they are loss. They are faulty because they were not made with love. They are broken because they were not given immortality. And they can only but disappear.

I forgive the world for being true to its maker. I forgive it for being incapable of real change. I forgive it for not knowing how to function better. I forgive it for being only capable of disappointment. I forgive it for attacking and destroying mindlessly and without consideration. I forgive its determined mercilessness, driven solely by its inherent function and its blindness to anything else. I forgive its evil which does not know what it does. And I forgive it for ever seeming to be needed, for a purpose of attack, from which it cannot deviate.

There is no spiritual ego. There is no sacred planet. They don't exist and never will. How can you hold a dream against ITSELF when YOU are the one who dreamed it into existence? It is what you want it to be, and it does what you wanted it to do. And until you stop dreaming it will continue to be a dream of death.

"It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life."

"Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life." God is insane, and fear alone is real."

"The world goes AGAINST your nature, because it is out of accord with God's laws. The world perceives orders of difficulty in EVERYTHING. This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable."

"The ego cannot make this choice because of the nature of its origin."

"For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death. "

"You see the world which you have made, but you do not see yourself as the image-maker. You cannot be saved from the world, but you can escape from its cause."

"The whole purpose of this course is to teach you that the ego is unbelievable and will forever BE unbelievable."

"the world will never give a gift that is not made of fear"

"Everything the world can offer promises some joy that it will never give." "Your ego and your Soul will never be co-creators" "the body may become his chosen home, but it will never be his home in truth."

"The body's eyes will never see except through differences."

"These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see."

"The body's serial adventures, from the time of birth to dying is the theme of every dream the world has ever had. The "hero" of this dream will never change, nor will its purpose."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there is a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place?"

"For the ILLUSION of love will NEVER satisfy you. But its REALITY, which awaits you on the other side, WILL give you everything." "It costs the world we see, for the world will never again appear to rule the mind."

"There IS no meaning in the form, AND THERE WILL NEVER BE."

"Forgive them for they know not what they do" applies to anyone who believes in separation, because literally a state of ego-mindedness renders you unaware of what you are doing or why.

When you are whole minded you'll see the whole truth. Everything will be in its correct perspective. The truth will be obvious and you'll easily recognize it as true. And in contrast to it, anything that is not true will be very obviously false. There is no effort required in that, only awareness of the whole picture.

In awareness of everything, you need do nothing about the ego because you will recognize it is not real and doesn't exist. It merely needs to be seen for what it is, an illusion, which has disappeared and never was. It is made of nothing and is nothing.

But when separation is introduced to your mind, something else happens. It makes you unconscious to some degree. Separation is a form of denial or a block to awareness, so it blocks out awareness of some parts of the whole picture. It leaves you in a state of partial perception. It's like someone just hid a bunch of facts.

In particular, the truth, which was clear and obvious, becomes obscure and hidden. And without a clear awareness of the whole truth, you don't have a barometer to compare and contrast everything else to in order to find out if its true or false. It's like you forgot what reality is like, so now you're confused about whether what you're experiencing is reality or not.

Without the truth, and with key facts concealed by denial, your mind is now in a state where it is semi-conscious. It does not really realize it is not fully conscious, because it isn't aware of the stuff it isn't aware of. So it thinks it is fully conscious. Even a mind which is severely unconscious and limited still believes that it is fully aware of everything.

At all times, we believe that we're aware of the whole truth, every fact, every detail, and every piece of evidence, regardless of whether we are. Whatever we are perceiving we always believe it is the whole truth. And we are always assuming that we are 100% objective in our perception. We also assume that we are completely unbiased and perceiving clearly and without distorting anything at all, which is far from the truth when the mind has blocks in it (there are no neutral thoughts).

On the basis of this, we also then "make sense" of what reality seems to mean, based on the extent of our awareness, or the facts that we do still have access to. But if we don't actually have all the facts, something strange happens. We come to conclusions, trying to make sense of what we're seeing, based on what we are aware of. And if that means, that we are not aware of what is really causing something, we will try to come up with an alternative cause for things.

So because we're unconscious, we don't "see" that we actually cause everything, that we made the world, that we have orchestrated all events, and that we have attacked ourselves. The causality or the act of choosing to do that, is outside of awareness. So then it seems to us, in partial consciousness, that stuff happens seemingly out of nowhere, unjustified and uncalled for and unfair, as if it happens against your conscious will. It seems like another will has willed stuff to happen, without your permission, and so now you are victimized by it. Yet it it is your own will, unconsciously, making poor choices.

Based on this unawareness, and given only the limited information you have, you'll then try to make sense out of it, you'll assess the evidence, look around you, seek inside you for any sign that you made something happen, and failing to find awareness of such a cause or intention, you'll "rationally conclude" that it must've been someone else. You will then be convinced it's an external cause, or someone else willed against you, or the world did it to you, making you an unfairly treated victim.

This will all seem to make total sense to you. Because you're always trying to make sense of what you perceive, or to understand what it means based on the limited truth. So it seems to make sense, based on not having all the evidence, that other people are guilty sinners and they're attacking you and you are justified in revenge and anger.

You don't become angry on a basis of just being an angry person or as a random thing or just some reaction. You only become angry because to your consciousness, unable to see the full picture, it seems to make total sense to you that it is justified and correct and a truthful conclusion, based on what you're aware of. You look around you and do not see what you did to yourself, or any other signs that you chose it, and so this leads to obvious yet false conclusions about the scapegoats who must've been the cause.

You can't help it, either. In essence, you are not doing this on purpose to be an asshole. You're not intentionally, in your right mind, trying to be hurtful or scapegoat. You are actually simply acting very "naturally" in accord with the scope of your awareness and the resulting effect on your thought system. In essence, anyone who comes to believe in separation, MUST see themselves as being victimized. The mind simply cannot see itself attacking itself so its only option to so believe someone else is responsible.

It's pretty much automatic. Anyone with an ego will react with anger. Anyone with an ego will see themselves treated poorly. Anyone with an ego will hallucinate and be convinced that there are causes outside of their own will doing stuff to them. Anyone with an ego will see themselves as not the cause of problems, but rather at the effect of them, helplessly, and that this is indeed an unfair attack.

There is nothing special at all about the conditions and conclusions that arise in ego mindedness. It is completely predictable, and it applies to absolutely anyone who enters separation. It's like, if you choose separation, you are guaranteed to see yourself as being victimized. And anyone who does this will see themselves this way and will then react to these false conclusions of external causes.

This is why all ego behaviors are forgivable. They are forgivable because, literally, anyone acting in the ego in this way, as a victim or victimizer, MUST NOT see themselves correctly. They are mistaken. They are not aware. They are not aware of the evidence, they don't see the whole picture, they're not aware of what the truth is, they cannot see their own causal power, they are unaware of their own influence over their own perceptions, they don't even recognize their own identity, and they are very confused about what is what.

Any behaviors or attitudes that stem from this state of unawareness HAS to be forgivable, if you can be aware of the larger picture yourself and recognize the simple mistakes that people are making. A person is not trying to be an asshole attacker. They are actually quite naturally reacting and trying to make sense of their distorted reality, based on an inability to see the whole truth. They're literally doing the best they can, or at least are reactive very predictably based on their mental illness.

This is why anyone in the ego is forgivable. Anyone in the ego is simply mistaken. It does not call for attack or revenge. It does not call for condemnation or judgement. It does not call for making guilty or sinful. If you can be in the whole picture and aware of the whole truth, it is obvious once again what is what.

It's obvious that people hurt themselves. It's obvious that people think they know what is true when they don't. It's obvious that they are calling for help. It's obvious that they are confused and hallucinating. It's obvious that they think they sinned when they didn't. It's obvious that they are following perfectly logically consistent conclusions based on the limited information they have. And it's obvious they are not trying to be "bad" or evil on purpose, they're simply unconscious and mentally ill.

People are upset and angry and confused and lashing out only because they have come to believe false truths about what is really happening. They do not see. They are asleep. They think that something bad has happened to them unfairly and people are out to get them and they need to be afraid and defenses are justified and counter-attack is survival. They're acting completely logically and predictably based on their state of awareness, or rather their 'ignorance' of the whole truth. They simply do not know what they are doing.

This is why from the highest levels, you can only have compassion and be forgiving. Forgiveness is justified in the big picture because it recognizes and sees the whole picture, has all the information, can see who does what to whom, sees no victims, does not believe any of the distorted illusions or false conclusions, and simply recognizes that people are mistaken. Awareness of the truth shows you what is true and what is false, clearly and obviously.

All sins are forgivable, because even the idea of sin is just another part of being unconscious and not aware of the whole truth. Sins are forgivable because in truth they cannot cause consequences and have no real effects. Sins are forgivable because no-one can really sin and no-one has really sinned, they just think they have, because there is key information unavailable to them. Blocks to awareness are responsible for all mistaken conclusions.

We simply need someone to tap us on the shoulder the middle of our hissy fit,to remind us, hey.... that thing you thought happened, it didn't happen. You did not hurt anyone. You did not make bad stuff happen. Other people are not trying to destroy you. You actually are doing this to yourself. There is more truth that you do not see or realize. Everything is actually ok. God has taken care of everything. Nothing is out of place. You are still worthy of love. Everything is still exactly in its correct place and everything in heaven is still continuing without missing a single note in heaven's song. It's all good.

Your main problem is one of identity. You've attempted to change your identity from Christ, to take on a new identity as an ego.

Your sense of your "Self" has become associated with, attached to, and confused with, an alternative model of identity.

The ego is nothing but a device, a contraption you invented like a vehicle. It's something for you to cling to and to try to model yourself on. It does absolutely nothing on its own. It is lifeless.

It's not until you attempt to become joined with the ego, as though becoming one with it, that it becomes a problem.

If you think of it as a costume (like the body), it's not until you actually wear it that it seems to change how you express yourself.

Or, like a pair of goggles, it's not until you put the goggles over your eyes that your perception is changed. You can put them down again at any time and immediately resume normal vision.

You, as a Child of God, bring your sense of Self with you wherever you go. Your Self is your identity. The ego has no real self at all. However, if you bring your sense of Self to the ego and merge with it, you combine your sense of Self with its way of filtering reality. You then see "through" it, and see in the way that it would see if it had its own ability to see.

It is only your own ability to see - awareness - that you combine with the ego, that seems to give the ego perception. It is only your own ability to experience - being - that you combine with the ego, that seems to give the ego the ability to experience. It is only your own power which you share with the ego, which seems to give the ego power. It only shares any of this with you while you are joined with it, and as soon as you take it off, it would just drop to the floor lifelessly. Just like the body.

The problem is, when you've put your ability to experience and your sense of Self into the ego, trying to cling to it tightly as though making you become like it, you will now experience life through its eyes. Whatever it sees or how it looks at things or what it wants or how it values or what it believes, now becomes your experience. And you will see reality as very frightening when you look with the ego!

That's a problem because the ego's way of looking at reality is completely backwards. Seeing life through its eyes you will instantly reject God. God will suddenly seem to be an attacker, an enemy and a threat. The truth will suddenly seem like it is against you. The truth will come across as being the complete opposite of what you are, because it does not contain any separation, and the ego identifies with being made of separation. So the truth will then seem to be an affront, highly offensive, dangerous, hideous, and like some monster come to destroy the ego.

You, as immortal spirit, using and attached to the ego, ... if you attempt to become more spiritual while still wearing the ego identity, ie still joined with the ego mind and still looking through the ego goggles, will have a pretty interesting experience. You will not want to wake up. You will see any efforts to wake up as harmful and hurtful. You will interpret efforts to wake up as suicidal and sacrificial. And you will become afraid that the truth is coming along to destroy you. This can potentially provoke you to put up defenses against the truth, producing sickness and ultimately death.

This is precisely what you will experience each time you try to open up to more truth. Each time you let in some light. Each time you want to become closer to God. You, attached to the ego, inadvertently try to bring the ego into that light with you. It cannot go there and it won't go there. It will see it as you trying to destroy it. And it will put up a fight. Part of you which seems not to be in the ego gets closer to the light, and the part of you which does not want to let go of the ego - believing it is your Self - kicks and screams and resists and hates you for it.

This produces the ego rebound. Essentially, the ego rebound comes from trying to make the ego more spiritual, by attempting to bring it closer to its opponent. While you are identified with it, your attempt to go visit God without leaving the ego behind will create an elastic effect which will snap you back into the body and you will subsequently rage because of how you did such a horrible thing to your "self".

Waking up must entail the letting GO of the ego, recognizing that it is not your identity. Otherwise, each time you pull your "Self" into the light, and thus the ego with you, it's going to hurt. The ego cannot see the truth in any other way. It only sees the opposite of the truth as being true. It will never change. The ONLY way to be free of it is to let it go, to stop being it, stop wearing it, stop looking through it, and stop using it. We have to learn that the ego is NOT our "Self".

So this is purely a matter of identity. Are you made of ego? Is your Self really separate from God? Who are you? Are you Christ? Are you a body? Are you part of the ego thought system? Are you made of sin and guilt and fear? Do you believe in what the ego believes in? It's only because you have become CONFUSED about what really is YOU, and what is the ego, that you are having to go through this struggle of "awakening'. You literally believe, through the ego, that you are trying to destroy yourself by waking up.

Sometimes when you are exposing yourself to "too much truth" or "too much Course", you'll have these ego rebounds. You kind of can't help it. You are still holding on tightly to the very thing which is clouding your judgement, while simultaneously trying to be free of it. This makes you torn. Trying to be in two thought systems at once, or two canoes. There is part of you that sincerely believes you are the ego and you are the body. The suggestion that these things don't exist frightens you.

Letting go, letting go, letting go. Stopping being ego. Surrendering the false identity. Remembering who you really are. Accepting the truth that you are Christ. Relinquishing your belief in, trust in, faith in, confusion with, and reliance on a false self that isn't really a part of your identity. You literally believe the ego is who you are. It's not. Just some clarification needed. Some discernment. Is this really true about who I really am, or is this just a misperception caused by me using the ego goggles? Is this really who I am, or is this just a body I'm wearing temporarily?

Sorting out "who you are" is what this entire process is about. Each effort to "find out" will likely be partly fruitful and partly self destructive. Each time it will potentially offend you. Gradually you will inch towards awakening. Jesus says, "most of you will come in tears".

Each time you have a rebound, try to focus on LETTING GO. Just stop to recognize that you - part of your Self that's still identified with the ego or body, has become deeply hurt and offended by what the truth said about it. IT believes that the truth is vicious and mean and disrespectful. It is scared and freaking out because it doesn't understand what the truth really means or implies.

It, seeing through the ego, sees your efforts as blasphemous and an attack, and so it feels attacked and guilty. And that's what you'll feel like when you get a rebound - attacked and hurt and guilty. Recognize that in you and have compassion for that part of you. Try to get that part of you to let go of being ego.

Try to reassure your "self" that the truth doesn't mean YOU don't exist because YOU are not the ego. Be gentle with that part of you which is just like a confused wounded animal in the corner. Be kind to it. Don't push it too far too fast, that will just hurt more.

Likely you will have to feel the feelings of the hurt that was created by "its" mis-perception of what you did. Your attempt to wake up was like an abandonment of the ego self, like a self sacrifice. It doesn't have the ability to see any other way. So take your time and rest and recover and stop pushing yourself so hard.

Gradually and gently you need to learn to just LET GO of the ego because it is not who you really are. What you'll learn about your real identity is going to be quite a surprise!

If you're carrying around some guilt about something you did wrong, you need to let that shit go.

How long are you supposed to suffer before it's enough suffering to make up for your sin? Do you want a bit more suffering? How much do you deserve?

10 years? 50 years? The rest of your life? Are you so worthless that you don't ever deserve forgiveness? When is it enough suffering that you're done? And what is going to happen when you decide its enough?

Your offering of 'being guilty' is supposedly your GIFT to the world, in an attempt to ATONE or "make up for" the mistake you made. You think that if you walk around feeling guilty about it, that you're appropriately ashamed, and you actually agree that you're supposed to be shameful.

You think this gift of guilt is actually a helpful offering, something that is called for or wanted by everyone else. You think if you remain guilty and carry around your sob story about how awful you are, that you're making up for what you did. And if you be guilty long enough, you "pay back" the suffering that you think you caused someone else.

This is bullshit. Offering guilt to the world to make up for something you did wrong is a DOUBLE OFFENSE. You not only did something wrong, but then you followed it up with this righteous self-punishment agenda where you punish yourself, on behalf of everyone else, to try to make up for it. Like, as if you can atone through suffering. And you think this is your gift to the world but all you've done is a) committed some sin, and then b) followed it up with a prolonged period of moping around acting like a guilty asshole, as if this is helping the situation. So now the world is not only hurt by you, but it's also got to put up with your guilty portrayal of yourself which, while seeming to be self-correcting, is actually just pulling everyone down even more.

How do you compare being guilty to being loving? How is being guilty for doing some wrong BETTER for other people than REPENTING FROM THIS SIN, receiving CORRECTION WITHOUT PUNISHMENT, and then being restored to being LOVING? When you are restored to being loving - which includes loving yourself - you now are in a far better position to actually 'atone', if you will, to make up for what you did. You can now offer a true gift of love and support. You can be more present. You can be more truly helpful and more attentive and available. You can't do that if you're carrying around a big heavy weight of guilt strapped to your ankle.

IT IS BETTER FOR EVERYONE if you forgive yourself and let yourself off the fucking hook, and give yourself a frickin' break, and say hey, I made this mistake, ok... it was a mistake, but it calls only for loving, unconditionally loving compassion and correction, so that I can correct my position to one of LOVE rather than one of being heavy weight of guilt around everyone else's ankles. I need to DROP the guilt and be freed from the burden of sin and shame, otherwise what USE am I to anyone else? How can I actually give anyone anything of TRUE value - true hope, true blessing, true understanding, true love, if I'm totally captivated by my own guilt?

We have to stop believing that guilt IS love. We have to stop offering guilt to everyone as if we're blessing them with it, and especially not taking guilty actions to try to 'make up for' doing something wrong. Guilt-driven actions are further attacks! We have to stop having this stupid ego-driven "guilty conscience" which we seem to think is our judge and jury and which governs and justifies us being punished for making mistakes. Each time we listen to it, it will always say, yup, you did something wrong, you guilty fucker, you deserve to die. That's it. That's how it works. It never says well, you made this mistake, because you were wrong about yourself, because you attacked yourself, and ended up projecting it onto other people as well, but really you deserve LOVE and love is all you need. So throw the guilty conscience away. It paralyzes your entire life and it's purely an ego device!

If you're feeling guilty, you need correction and love, not punishment and hate and shame. When are you going to drop your guilt? When have you suffered enough, needlessly (ALL suffering is needless except to use it to learn that you need not suffer because you're innocence)? When will you stop listening to everyone else's bullshit ego that says, yup, you gotta suffer a really long time you guilty asshole? When will you stop your own agenda of self destruction, for which you ARRANGED events to turn sour, so that you'd have an excuse to chastise yourself? And then it's like, oh, poor me, I guess I do deserve to suffer because I did something wrong, you're right, go ahead and destroy me. Its bullshit.

You need to stop making yourself guilty for every little fucking thing you do whether it's a mistake or not. And you need to drop all of the guilt that you have accumulated which enforces your STORY about WHY you are justified in not being loved by God (which is the secret purpose of your guilt-hood to begin with), and CHOOSE AGAIN to RECLAIM YOUR INNOCENCE. It's the best thing you can do for yourself, for everyone else, even for anyone that you might've harmed in a moment of confusion. The BEST thing you can do for everyone concerned is to RETURN TO LOVE. And this is the best thing you can do even for people you might've hurt because even if THEY can't forgive you continue to project THEIR guilt and hate onto you, you MUST choose innocence for yourself otherwise you're just making the whole situation worse.

And if we're sane about this, we have to say, that we should be ENCOURAGING all of our enemies and attackers and abusers and everyone else to BECOME LOVE, to be forgiven, to be recognized as innocent and to become OUR SAVIOR. This is the only way that our brother becomes our savior and Jesus speaks on this at great length in ACIM. You brother isn't going to be your savior if you can't WANT for them to be restored to a state of perfect innocence. And you can't BE a brother to someone if you're not willing to FORGIVE YOURSELF and ALLOW YOURSELF to be innocent. It's in everyone's best interests for anyone making a mistake to be healed and loved so that they can return to equality and unconditionality, otherwise they will ONLY drag down the entire brotherhood. It is counter productive to keep enemies as enemies because it only ensures that YOU are more likely to be attacked again. You can't remove attackers by punishing them, only be healing them. Rehab!

You're useless to the world when you're guilty. Stop it. Stop playing the "poor me, I'm guilty and unworthy, you better not love me" card. The secret purpose of this card is to have an EXCUSE for why God should not love you. Your failure to forgive yourself requires you to justify it with explanations for why you SHOULD suffer. "He who would not forgive must judge, to justify his failure to forgive" - ACIM. Stop justifying why you need to be guilty, for anything. YOU DESERVE COMPLETE FORGIVENESS.

You are God's creation. You are God's child. You are INNOCENT FOREVER. Stop putting yourself down and stop using other people to put you down, and stop using your stories about your mistakes to enforce why you should be stepped all over or why God can't possibly love you. You implicitly DESERVE ALL OF THE LOVE IN THE WORLD. Period. Unconditionally. Right now. Your guilt facade isn't helping anyone, least of all you.

Nobody really cares if you're guilty or ashamed or not. If they really want you to be guilty, THEY have a problem with making themselves guilty. That's their game which they are projecting onto you. Fuck em. You need to take back your power and stop being a deliberate victim about the mistakes you made. They are just mistakes. There is not a single mistake in all of the history of the world that calls for punishment. All mistakes are a CALL FOR LOVE. God is not holding a single thing against you. You cannot sin. You haven't sinned. You will never sin. You're just having a case of mental illness and thinking that you're sane when you're confused, and making mistakes in error because you've lost touch with the truth. That's all. Nobody is to blame for this. All you need is HEALING. That's all. Mistakes call for healing and restoration and for your RETURN TO UNION AND ACCEPTANCE with everyone else.

Take your life back. Everyone else can fuck off with their judgements and shaming. You deserve to be forgiven.

I'm noticing quite a lot of ways in which our "sympathies" about victims are being uprooted in ACIM.

Where we might've bought into and felt sorry for someone who is going through difficulties or having pains or a sickness etc, we're instead being asked to recognize the big picture.

In general, we are immortal beings who are perfect and have no real needs. Jesus then frames all forms of suffering as "the game of death", in which we deliberately choose to suffer in a very wide variety of forms, in order to try to convince ourselves and others that guilt is real, sin is real, we're bodies, we're victims, we didnt' chose it, etc.

There is a huge displacement of responsibility, a huge lack of recognition, a huge disowning of power, and a presenting of oneself in a role of a victim which makes it look like we're totally helpless and didn't choose anything. But all of this is an ego disguise to cover up the secret of salvation, that we're doing it to ourselves.

So that then reframes all suffering as self-chosen, and it means that we're playing a game at trying to portray ourselves as victimized and powerless, as if we didn't choose it and don't want it, while simultaneously denying God and rejecting immortality and trying to make out that we're something dying.

A suffering person puts on a disguise in which they portray themselves with the appearance of a victim who is going through something terrible, in order to hide the other side of the coin which is the denied and disowned responsibility, choose, causation and power, that put the thing there in the first place. It's like someone presenting a lie about themselves, deceiving themselves with it, and then trying to convince everyone else. But if you see only the surface appearance you won't see the deeper fact of how they are using their power to do this.

When we then look upon someone suffering from false perception, we'll fail to recognize the truth of what the person is really trying to pull off - an illusion of being unfairly treated - and will instead enter into false empathy, where we sympathise and go into the suffering and believe in it and then react to it with egoic impulses to fix and stop the problem, having made it real.

When we buy into suffering we're not really helping or healing, and then we're not being miraculous. To be miraculous you have to assert God's truth, which is eternal life, immortality, perfection, no problems, no needs, the impossibility of sickness, the responsible ownership of power and the power of decision, the fact that we can be hurt by nothing but our own thoughts, etc.

If we want to heal someone for example we have to NOT believe in what they are believing in, otherwise we will enter into it with them and now both of us are lost. We have to believe they are NOT suffering and are NOT sick, otherwise we can't give them anything OTHER than sickness and suffering. If someone seems to be suffering, they're not really suffering. Not in truth. Nothing real can be threatened. There is no real suffering, no real sickness, no real death. It's all an illusion made by our egos, like putting on a performance in a play and pretending.

So if you knew and recognized that someone is a perfectly capable powerful immortal being, Christ even, who has been given all the power in heaven and earth, and can do absolutely anything, and here they are presenting themselves as weak and suffering and victimized and helpless, and you knew this was an "act" in a fictional story, would you believe it and buy into it? Or would you see through the appearance and remind them that this is not the truth of them?

It is not forgiveness to be deceived by people who seem to be suffering. Yes, ok, we need to be sensitive and compassionate and have empathy and so on, and it may not be appropriate to even reveal any of this to them directly. But nevertheless for our own sanity AND for theirs, we must uphold a position of NOT believing in the lie that we are something mortal, a sick and suffering self that has had things happen to it that it didn't put there. Everyone who suffers and dies choose it, including ourselves.

To be forgiving is to be miraculous, because it means that you overlook and see right through the guilty assertion that "there is something wrong", you recognise that in truth NOTHING is wrong, and therefore you do not BELIEVE the lies that are being presented. And people who are suffering and sick and afraid and unhappy and dying and so on are NOT being honest, they are lying to themselves about what is true of them. It is your job as a miracle worker to NOT buy into it, but to recognize it as a lie and not be deceived.

In order to then be truly helpful you have to be in a position where you are believing only God's laws, God's truth, God's perfection and God's reality. That means that you believe everyone is inherently immortal, invulnerable, powerful, perfect, innocent and has nothing wrong with them. And that means you cannot believe that sickness is real or true or exists, or that suffering is real or true or exists. Such things are not POSSIBLE in God. Believing in them causes and choose and reinforces them, which is the mindset of the unhealed healer.

To be a healed healer entails not believing in suffering or sickness or death in any form it appears, because you recognize it is not true and not possible at all in God. And so it must be a lie, and you will not be deceived by it. Instead, you will assert the only truth of unconditional love, which is that the other person is already perfect, and you will affirm this in them, and hold that space for them strongly, in the light, in which you see the perfection in them and refuse to accept anything else as true of them. This makes it very hard for their mind to buy into its own lies because in your joined mind you are looking right through them.

To then assert ONLY LIFE, is the expression of love that has power and life in it, which is the giving of a miracle of resurrection. It then truly helps and truly heals, because it gives what is truly asked for - a call for love is given love. You can only give this by NOT believing the lies of sickness and suffering, and instead recognizing that only immortality is true, and the person is not really dying, and they do not really have a problem, and they are not really sick or even a body. This assertion of life gives life only, and does not give death or the belief in death, and so is only a blessing and can only help.

So we need to be aware of the fact that sympathising is ego, and false empathy does not heal, and buying into someone's pity part does not help them, and even if people are convinced with a long story about what has happened to them and how awful it is and so on, you must not buy into it if you are to be truly helpful. Yes you can have compassion for where they are at, what they believe, what seems real to them, and what they are experiencing, but not at the expense of adding extra weight to it buy believing it's true and real under God's laws.

Everyone in the world has a serious case of self-deception, which is ego, and that results in all forms of suffering. And people will always complain about the suffering and seem to not want it and to have not chosen it, but that's all part of the deception and the giving away of power and responsibility. It's how we play the game and role of being a helpless victim. It is not empowering to someone to just join them in misery, it's only empowering to give them power, which comes from God, through love and healing.

As such, those who we sympathize with and who we feel sorry for and who we think are seriously definitely stuck in some situation that no-one can do anything about, are all temptations to regard ourselves and our brothers stuck in a hell of our own making, a hell that we don't want to admit to having chosen, or having power over. But we always have the power to choose otherwise.

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, with futile hopes and devastated dreams, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do. You play the game of death, of being helpless, pitifully tied to dissolution in a world which shows no mercy to you. Yet when you accord it mercy, will its mercy shine on you."

"Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks right through the thousand forms in which they may appear. It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth."

"Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth. If to love oneself is to HEAL oneself, those who are sick do NOT love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are DENYING TO THEMSELVES. If they knew the truth about themselves, they could not be sick. The task of the miracle-worker thus becomes to DENY THE DENIAL OF TRUTH. The sick must heal THEMSELVES, for the truth is IN them. But, having OBSCURED it, the light in ANOTHER mind must shine into theirs, because that light IS theirs."

Ok so, this is possibly a touchy subject, and I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty. If you have some kind of a sickness, pain, upset, disability, whatever, this is going to be talking about that and I don't mean to make anyone feel attacked. But I want to look at something the course discusses.

"***The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill.*** Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die." For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors MUST be sins."

I've been looking at this lately because I've been having to heal a sense of guilt and blame for someone else being sick. Once I started to look at what the course says about my own situation, I saw that we basically are immortal beings who keep attacking ourselves, making ourselves suffer, inducing our own sickness, and trying to die. And then I started to think about whether other people were doing this, and this is where some lightbulbs went off.

If a person is having a physical sickness, it does mean that they are attacking themselves. It means that they, as an immortal being, are trying to destroy themselves. They believe they are guilty and sinful for attacking God. This is then projected onto and through the body. The body in turn takes on forms of sickness as a shadow of the guilt in the mind, a shadow of deformity.

"Illness can be but guilt's shadow, grotesque and ugly since it mimics deformity. If a deformity is seen as real, what could its shadow be except deformed?"

But the sickness in the body isn't just there as a sickness, it's there for a purpose. The purpose is accusation. The sickness is actually part of the attempt to project sin onto others. The body is made to appear sick and weak and suffering, so that the person appears to be innocent, and so that someone else is accused of sin. The sight of a sick body therefore means someone is holding a "picture of crucifixion" up to accuse you of sin, and "sick bodies remain accusers."

"The sick remain accusers."

"You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate, and damning him to hell."

Jesus has gone even further than this, to say that in this self-destructive, projective situation, we actually are trying to kill others. As we scapegoat, ie project sin, we make the body sick, in order to prove another's guilt. And one of the ways this takes shape is in terms of contagion of physical illness, such as with a cold or flu, where someone is trying to "infect" others with their sin and guilt, so that if others become sick and suffer for it, this exonerates the sick person.

Jesus even says that when we are sick, we are being merciless, like we have this intense almost evil attitude of destruction, first towards ourselves and then towards others. We're actually even willing to die, if it means someone else is accused of causing it. And so the dead body testifies to the sinfulness of another. That we're literally willing to destroy the body in order to try to exonerate ourselves of the original sin, and pin it on something external.

"Death seems an easy price, if they can say, "Behold me, brother, at your hand I die."

So this then made me realize that, a major reason that I often have a sense of guilt or self-blame around other people's sicknesses, is because they are in fact attempting to accuse me of their sin. Their sick body is attempting to project guilt onto me, its a way they are using their body for attack, and having tried to destroy themselves they now are projecting destruction onto me. So then I end up feeling guilty because, essentially, if I "make their body real" to myself, I'll buy the temptation that the sickness is literally accusing me of sin.

I think part of realizing this, for me, entailed having to be willing to look at someone else and ask myself if they are doing the very same thing the course says I am doing to myself. ie are they trying to destroy themselves, do they have guilt from the separation, are they punising themselves, are they projecting and are they using their body for attack? And the answer is yes.

But this answer also gives rise to the realization that, the truth about myself, also applies to them. Just as I might realize that I am not sinful or guilty, that God has not been attacked, and I don't deserve to suffer, and I need to stop blaming myself or making myself guilty..... so too does this apply to others.

So now my approach to the "sick person" changes to one of compassion for them doing the exact same self-attack that I've been doing, a recognition that they are similarly not sinful, realizing that they are mistaken to believe they should be guilty, and therefore shifting to a more supportive position of reminding them of what is really true of them. And this in turn alleviates my guilt because it means I am not responsible for their condition, and its "truth" doesn't apply to either of us.

What's really true of them is that they have not sinned, their innocence is intact, they have no reason to be guilty, they have no need for sickness, they have no basis for punishing themselves, and they don't need to destroy themselves, because they haven't done anything wrong.

I am finding in fact that this kind of attitude toward them is in fact "miracle working". Because the more I express toward someone "the atonement" principle of their sinlessness, the more I am being loving, and also am treating my neighbor as myself. If my "work" is to express toward someone that they deserve love and health and happiness because they have not sinned, I am in fact joining my mind to theirs by accessing the part of them that's innocent. The "innocent self" BEHIND the self-accusation. And the accused guilty self is not who they really are.

And so it's important to overlook their self-accusation and not see it as applying to them. As I do this, I feel a POWER, and a sense of ENERGY, funneling through me. And I am quite certain this is opening the door to working miracles. If I can accept my own atonement ie my sinlessness, then I can also recognize other people have been similarly attacking themselves needlessly and can help to support them in finding their way back to their innate perfection.

"By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers, he has placed himself in a position where he can undo the level confusion of others. The message which he then gives to others is the truth that THEIR MINDS are really similarly constructive, and that their own miscreations cannot hurt them."

"He MUST work a miracle on behalf of himself here (See the point about miracles as a perception corrector) before he can effect miracles as creative energizers, which they are."

What this reveals to me is also that, when I have ever done forgiveness, it's almost always been with a somewhat selfish intent. Even if I am forgiving "others", it mostly revolves around taking stuff off them and putting it back on me, so that I can address the deeper problem in "my separate self". But what I see now is, that in fact, the very same practice which I might use to apply to myself, to undo my own belief in my own sinfulness, I can use that very same approach FOR SOMEONE ELSE on their behalf, and forgive them FOR THEM.

In effect, it's like "doing a forgiveness" for someone else on their behalf, applying it TO them, reminding them of what THEIR truth is, and helping them to see their own innocence. Just as I would do for myself, but applying to them instead.

I am certain this has a lot to do with working a miracle. Because a miracle worker begins by seeing the light in another, which you an only do if you see light in yourself, and then you reinforce their light by shining your light into their mind, as you "pick them up" and "lift them up" through the expression of the truth about them.

It's kind of like telling someone that they've been hard on themselves, mean to themselves, unfair to themselves, and have not loved themselves.... and that the reason they've done this is unfounded, and they don't deserve this self-abuse, nor do they deserve to suffer in sickness or pain or misery. To set them back on the right path and get them back in touch with their own innate soul perfection. To be like, hey, brother, what you think about yourself is not true, you are .... and then list all the things which are true of them in reality.

(Forgiveness) "It looks on lies but it is not deceived. It does not heed the self-accusing shrieks of sinners mad with guilt. It looks on them with quiet eyes, and merely says to them, "My brother, what you think is not the truth."

This IS forgiveness because it's what it means to overlook the layers of ego sin, guilt, fear, self-attack, symptoms, body-stuff, in another, and look to the fact they are a christ entity, perfect and holy, temporarily mistaken, believing stuff about themselves that isn't true, and knowing and remembering FOR them that their lies are not true of them.

This also taps into a new "mode" of forgiveness, in which we attempt to reap the benefits not by forgiving "for ourselves" or by withdrawing from others into our separate minds, but by reaching OUT to others and telling THEM what we want to be true of US.

Expressing towards someone a higher truth, simultaneously makes it true of YOU, but without the selfish component. In this sense yes your brother is your savior. You can only give the miracles you have received but you can also bolster what you receive by giving. This is why "miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver."

To pour love into someone, to recognize when they themselves do not love themselves, and to supply the lack of love, by reminding them of what is really true about them, joins your mind to theirs and enlightens it, shines truth into their mind, empowers them, awakens them, and resurrects them.

Looking for love outside of yourself is the primary function of the ego and one of the toughest lessons to overcome. We all seem to want other people to love us. We have some kind of need to have parents and children love us, to be loved by another special person or persons, to be surrounded with friends who love us, etc.

Being loved by a lot of people is a trap, if you depend on it. And if you haven't become willing to NOT be loved by others, you still are in the ego. You will not be able to be true to yourself or to speak the truth or demonstrate love's reality if you are not willing to allow others to reject it.

God is the source of love, as are all your brothers in Heaven, but the love they share with you is no different to the love that is in you, which you are created from. You already have this love inherently, so do not really need it at all from anywhere else. You are not being loved by God due to some "need", you are loved by God as an act of sharing His love with you who are already love. You were created by love, as love, to love, and there is no lack of love in you, therefore no neediness.

What happens is, due to the separation ie egoic blocks to the awareness that we already have all the love we need, we perceive a lack of love in ourselves. This is the same thing as believing God is absent - that we ourselves are absent. This perceived lack is a darkness, and it compels us to want to alleviate the unhappy sensation of that absence.

But the ego counsels, instead of actually questioning if the blocks are real, or that the love might STILL be present behind them (if you were to just remove them), to believe the blocks have really made the love go away and to then seek for a solution somewhere else.

This seeking is a sense of false neediness, which believes that the only way to have salvation is by finding it anywhere other than within yourself. The ego suggests it is not in you already, so you better look elsewhere, and that by looking elsewhere there is some kind of hope or possibility of finding it. This is a lie.

So then begins the external searching, and since you are not responsible for or aware of the love in yourself, you now look to make others responsible for providing it for you. So now they automatically are perceived as having to fulfill this "function" of being the source of love and salvation for you. Absolutely everyone will perceive this function as belonging to others if there is any block to awareness or ego present in the mind, guaranteed.

First of all, there is a fundamental problem with this. By believing there is not already the love of God in you, you believe it is absent due to some kind of unworthiness or impossibility. That belief, which is an error, when left uncorrected, lingers in the mind and asserts that you will NOT ACCEPT love within yourself. Separation from the awareness that love is in you already was an act of rejection, not acceptance, so now you are not willing to let there be love in you.

So even though your mind is now making others responsible for supplying the lack due to the belief that it's not inside you, and cannot come from God (this is one of the ego's "laws of chaos"), even IF someone external were to try to supply you with love, you would not be willing to actually let it enter you. You will do what you can to try to get it inside of you, but so long as you believe in your inner lack of it, and therefore the need for it, you are actively blocking its receipt. So then people could be surrounding you with the most magnificent love and you STILL would not believe you are loved enough.

The other part to this then, is that by believing the only possible location of love is "not in you" ie outside of you, you depend entirely on other people or objects or idols or false Gods or specialness to do FOR you and TO you what you refuse to do yourself. This is another step in the ego's laws of chaos - seeking for this "special something" which is supposed to solve your inner lack, by finding it outside of you in people or drugs or alcohol or possessions or money or success or idol worship etc.

IF those external sources, for some reason, seem to be willing to give to you something that you think you want, be it specialness or some kind of semblance of "love", your ego will to some degree seem to be satisfied. The problem is, you won't be able to fully receive it. Not only is it impossible to get fictional special love into you, you are not really wanting to receive it anyway. So now you will go back and forth between delighting in what this person "does to you", and resenting them for failing to undo your emptiness. You'll think that them loving you is the most wonderful thing you ever experienced, but it still falls short of the love of God or, more importantly, falls short of your own willingness to accept love for yourself.

IF on the other hand, the person or external source is taken away or denied or there is a refusal or rejection, well now you are really up shit creek. Because now your mind is believing the only source of salvation is external, you have this huge pressing need to "get" it, and the external is saying "no" and sticking its middle finger up at you. So now you are left hanging. You have this huge unconscious self hatred, a huge sense of neediness and lack, and no-one is willing to supply something to fill the hole.

That leaves you in a state of unfulfillable turmoil, like there is absolutely no way to solve your problem, and that throws you into a rage. This is essentially the definition of hell - a state in which you need something and the need can never be filled, so you have absolutely no hope of "escape", there is no one to save you, you are left suffering alone and with no way to solve it, and so you are more or less eternally damned. That is, unless you question the lies this is based on.

The unconscious self hatred will then surface as "special hate" and will blame the other for not doing to you what they are supposed to be doing to you. It will be all their fault that they are not "loving you" or giving you what you think you want. And this can be in the form of a bad parent or an abusive partner or a job that makes your life suck or the government sucking off all your money or whatever. When the love is denied you, you go off the rails with insanity because all you can see before you is a hopelessness and an impossibility of meeting your need.

This can also be the driving force behind people turning to crimes like rape and murder in an effort to forceably "take" from others what they are refusing to give you. It's a state of desperation. The ego has convinced the person they are so lacking in love that they are so empty and so unlovable that there is a really, really strong neediness and dependency on others to supply it, and no-one seems willing to supply it, so other people must be evil hoarders of the "specialness'' and it now has to be wrestled from them against their will.

This is the culmination of the ego's laws of chaos, in which it inspires attack and rape and murder and hatred in an effort to get from others what they refuse to give. And such a person will see those others are being entirely to blame for failing to love them, and they will see themselves as completely justified and entitled to take what they want, as if it is what they deserve and are being unfairly denied. They will believe that others have "stolen" what is theirs, and that they must rightfully take it back. Things get pretty vicious at this stage.

If you look at this with compassion and understanding you can see that when people get really desperate and needy for external sources of salvation like this, which is mental illness (inner peace is healthy, external searching is mental illness), they are really just trying to address this sense of lack and emptiness and the absence of love within themselves. They are just going about it in the only way that their broken perception tells them is possible - getting it from outside - and if the sense of it being denied is too great internally, they will feel *dependant* on getting it from outside and driven to HAVE to take it by force, almost like someone who is gasping for air and trying to stay alive.

Therefore the attempted rape and murder of others is actually someone who perceives such absence of love within themselves that no matter how hard they try they can't get the love into themselves, and so claw at others viciously and violently trying to take it, as if their life depends on it. All that's happening is their perception is very backwards and they are so convinced of their unworthiness and unlovability that they see others are unworthy and unlovable and so deserving of being taken from. It is really that the person has taken away from themselves and now perceives this denial of love as if coming from others.

So while some of us are in sort of in-between states of feeling a neediness or "why it is unfair that other people don't love me" and "surely I'm lovable, why are people not liking me" and "if only they would love me more" or whatever... we are still on the downward spiral towards viciousness. We just didn't become quite so desperate yet as for it to turn into a violent attempt to take it from others, but we're doing basically the same process. A perceived absence of love within, leads to an automatic quest to get it from without. And then it is everyone else's responsibility to supply it, and if they do not, it is their fault not ours. "What is not love is murder" because when love is perceived to be absent it produces a murderous desire to take it from someone else against their will.

Even if others were to supply huge amounts of love to us, if we are not willing to accept that it is deep inside of us and therefore has been deeply received and acknowledged as something we are worthy of, we will reject it. You can be surrounded by people loving the heck out of you and still believe there is something wrong with you. It's really got nothing to do with whether someone else loves you or not.

Them loving you does not make you believe you are lovable. Them not loving you does not make you believe you are lovable. The only way to believe you are lovable is for YOU to believe it ABOUT YOURSELF, IN SPITE OF what anyone else believes or does. And this boils down to simply accepting that love is INSIDE you, it is present, and it's there because God is there, and God is love, and God is the ONLY SOURCE OF LOVE. "There is no love but God's". God IS the only source of love, you cannot get it anywhere else, it does not exist separate from you, and seeking for it externally is absolutely guaranteed to fail every time because it is NOT OUT THERE.

So we all go through this dynamic and to varying degrees, some of us accept God's love more than others. It's all about degrees of awareness of the presence of love within us, and therefore a WILLINGNESS to ACCEPT that it is there and that we are worthy of it. We ARE worthy of God's love, but even though we are worthy of it, we can still choose to deny it believe otherwise if we want to. In other words, love does not FORCE us to be loved.

Love does not enter where it is not welcome! And that means, love from other people CANNOT get into you if it is not welcome. And so in order to welcome and receive the love from others, you HAVE to be willing to have love be welcome WITHIN YOU FIRST, which means you then accept there is love within you ALREADY, are aware of it (God's Presence in your mind and heart), and therefore DO NOT NEED TO GET IT FROM ELSEWHERE.

Opening up to accept the atonement, which is the acknowledgement and recognition and acceptance and awareness of the CONSTANT LOVE being shared by God and your TOTAL WILLINGNESS to receive it and accept it as the truth about you, is the *ONLY SOLUTION* to this problem of love's absence.

And once this problem is solved, there is no further need to get love from anywhere else, no need to have people love you or not love you, no need to be special, no need for special attention, no neediness or attention-seeking or acting out or being a sexual slave or selling yourself out or abandoning yourself or people pleasing or vicious attempts to take "yourself" from those who supposedly stole YOU from you. Since you are love, you believe that if others have the love and are supposed to give it to you, you believe they are supposed to give YOU to you and therefore are responsible for making you what you are. And it doesn't work.

You ARE love. Accepting that you are love accepts the love is IN YOU and therefore there is no LACK and therefore no NEED to seek for it where it does not exist, and therefore you couldn't GIVE A SHIT what anyone thinks of you, whether they love you or hate you, it has absolutely no bearing on whether you are happy or not. YOU are responsible for choosing your happiness, no-one else is responsible for your happiness, and no-one else has any power to take it from you.

Getting your love from within/God gives you thus tremendous psychological strength and invulnerability and resilience and confidence and certainty and knowing, which cannot be swayed or affected by anything external. Having not GIVEN anything external the power to give TO you the love you are lacking, you also have not given anything external the power to deny your lovability on your behalf, and therefore you are NOT at the effect of the world. Accepting the atonement is the key to immortality.

Once you accept it from God, it's a done deal. Permanent love within you and flowing through you. Then it becomes more about you extending love to others through you so that you SHARE IN IT and thus experience it as having been received by you from God (to have all, give all to all), rather than trying to manipulate others into making this decision for you. Now that you are able to love IN SPITE OF whether other people are loving you back or not, that is unconditional love. To love others even if they hate your guts, are attacking you, are pushing you away, and want nothing to do with you. Even if they don't see you, or acknowledge you, or recognize you. To love them anyway. Teach only love because that is what you are.

God loves you right now 100%. Can you accept it? You already ARE it, whether you accept it or not.