God is wholeness, or Holiness. He is the whole of everything, everywhere. There is no lack in Him. He is unlimited and infinite. He is omnipresent. He is the all in all.

"The mark of Wholeness is Holiness"

"God is all in all in a very literal sense. All being is in Him because He IS all Being. YOU are therefore in Him because YOUR being IS His."

Every part of God contains all of God. All of God is everywhere. All of God is shared, within Himself, with all of Himself. All of God has access to all of God. And all of God is God.

"The Will of God is without limit, and all power and glory lie within it. It is boundless in strength and in love and in peace. It has no boundaries because its extension is unlimited, and it encompasses all things because it CREATED all things."

God cannot access anywhere that He does not exist, and there is nothing outside of God. He already exists everywhere, so there is nowhere to be added, and no space to add into.

"Heaven is not a place nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect Oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else. Nothing OUTSIDE THIS Oneness, and NOTHING ELSE within."

God cannot create an external space, nor can he add a separate thing outside of Himself. He cannot "tack on" any kind of a creation to the outside of Himself.

The internal nature of God, however, is one of sharing. God fully shares with Himself. He is fully open. He loves Himself, and therefore gives Himself to Himself.

"Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself created you. Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS."

Within God, within His mind, within His being, there is total unlimited sharing. This sharing is a transcendence of space and time and limitation. It enables God to be a host, and to share Himself by giving Himself.

"Everything He created is given ALL His power because it is part of Him and shares His Being WITH Him."

"Being is known by sharing. Because God shared His Being with you, you can know Him."

"Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him."

"You cannot separate your SELF from YOUR Creator, who created YOU by sharing HIS Being WITH you."

"I am forever host to God."

God wants to give Himself because it is His nature to share everything. This giving is what we call love, or life. It also leads to what we call projection, extension, or creation. Love loves itself.

"God shares His Fatherhood with you who are His Son"

"God shares His function with you in Heaven"

"Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS."

"projecting outward of God. That is why everything which He Created is like Him."

God is able to share Himself, within Himself, and can extend Himself as what we call Thoughts or Creations. These thought-creations can only occur provided they inherit the whole of God, and in turn share His will to share the whole of themselves.

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite, and everywhere without all limit. Only Love creates, and only like Itself."

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind."

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul." "ALL princes INHERIT their power from the Father"

"the Children of the Father inherit from Him"

"Glory is your inheritance, given your Soul by its Creator, that you might EXTEND it."

Any thought-creation of God can only share what they are given, and can only give what they inherit. They also must create by sharing, and can only create by sharing, by hosting within their own being.

"By CREATING all things, it made them PART OF ITSELF. YOU are the Will of God, because this is how you were created. Because your Creator creates only like Himself, you ARE like Him."

"accept the Thought of God as its inheritance."

"Perceiving the majesty of God AS your brother is to accept your OWN inheritance."

"The inheritance of the Kingdom is the right of God's Son, given him in his creation."

Creation, therefore, really occurs as a kind of internal expansion, or a giving inward. God shares the whole of Himself, which produces creative thoughts, which must inherit the whole of God, and be wholly like God. "The Father and the Son are not identical, but you CAN say "Like Father, LIKE Son."

"GOD gave you the function to create in eternity."

"God gave Himself to BOTH of you in equal love"

"God GAVE you Heaven"

"God GAVE you all there is."

God also can only share wholly, or fully. He cannot only partially give, or partially create, or partially share. When He shares, He creates wholly, and creates only wholeness. And anything He creates must be completely whole. "Each part you remember adds to YOUR wholeness, because each part IS whole." "which recognizes the wholeness of God's creation and BY this recognition knows its Creator."

"That is the law of God, for the protection of the wholeness of His Son." "God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they, were created neither partially nor in part."

This means that any creation of God, any extension of God, MUST be a completely whole creation. It must be fully given, fully established, fully sharing, and fully created.

"This is the ONLY love that is fully given, AND FULLY RETURNED."

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect."

This leads to the FULL creation of living thought-beings, ideas of children, which are the living thoughts of God. Each is a miracle, and each inherits absolutely everything from God. Each HAS everything, and IS everything. "You ARE the Kingdom of Heaven"

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

"God and HIS miracles are inseparable."

Absolute wholeness is passed down and is SHARED by every creation. Therefore, two things become true. 1) Every thought-creation is a completely autonomous being who is a whole fully-created being, and 2) Each being shares AND IS the whole of creation.

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy."

This results in a scenario where each Son of God literally IS God, and is PART of God, and IS EACH OTHER. There can only truly be one whole, which must be shared by EACH whole. And therefore each whole is the one whole. This is what oneness really means.

"The wholeness of God, which IS His peace, cannot be appreciated EXCEPT by a whole mind, which recognizes the wholeness of God's creation and BY this recognition knows its Creator."

"God's wholeness IS the wholeness of his Son."

This means that each Son of God IS the other Sons of God, as well as being an individual Son of God. "Individual" does mean "undivided". And thus each brother is all brothers. And every soul is part of God. And every child of God is every other child of God. And all of them share the same whole - all of themselves - with all the rest.

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

"For your Father wills you to know your brother AS yourself."

"to know your brother IS to know God."

This produces the Sonship, which is the family of God, the Kingdom of Heaven. And having inherited everything from God, as His perfect extensions, each Son of God is a fully created being and has SO much freedom and autonomy that they are established as TRUE co-creators - free-willed "separate" beings.

"the Sonship is your Soul"

"you are part of God, and the Sonship is one"

"in a relationship in which ALL the Sonship is together blessed"

"Think not HE wills to bind you, Who has made you co-creator of the universe along with Him. He would but KEEP your will forever and forever limitless." "If you believe that all of the Souls that God created ARE His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul MUST be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship."

This doesn't merely mean that they just do God's bidding, or that he dangles them like puppets, or that they are slaves to His will. They have been WHOLLY created, and therefore do in fact have free independent will. But remember that, at the same time, this will is ALSO shared with everyone. And to remain free it has to be shared, yet still retain freedom.

"The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given."

Blessed with free will, in a sense "free from God", or as "separate beings", individuality has been established. They are individual because they are whole in and of themselves. Yet they are one because they share everything.

"For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

"be reminded of His Son, our holy Self, the Christ in each of us"

"every member of the family of God must return"

They now proceed to naturally share everything that they have, because this is their one nature. They can only share everything because it is by the sharing of everything that they exist at all.

"You HAVE the power to ADD to the Kingdom, but NOT to add to the Creator OF the Kingdom."

"We said before that WHAT you project is up to you, but it is NOT up to you WHETHER to project, for projection is a law of mind."

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

So in turn they create their own creations by sharing everything and hosting them within their own mind and being, just like and with God. And as such the Kingdom continues to expand internally as a continuous line of extension and creation.

"all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in either of these statements implies any sort of level involvement, or, in fact, anything except one continuous line of creation, in which all aspects are of the same order." "As God's creative Thought proceeds FROM Him TO you, so must YOUR creative thoughts proceed FROM you to YOUR creations."

"YOUR creations belong in YOU, as YOU belong in God. You are part of God, as your sons are part of His Sons. To create is to love. Love extends outward simply because it cannot be contained. Being limitless, it DOES NOT STOP. It creates forever"

"YOUR creations add to Him, as YOU do. But nothing is added that is different, because everything has always BEEN"

Wholeness, within wholeness, shared by the whole, in which each whole is the one whole, and all wholes are one. And yet at the same time, there are many wholes because God constantly shares itself. And all living beings therefore continually create and extend and think and give, and the increase of the Kingdom is endless.

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father. Know then the Sons of God, and you will know ALL Creation."

"And BEING loving, they are like the Father, and therefore cannot die."

"A co-creator with the Father must have a Son (your creations). Yet must this Son (your sons) have been created like Himself. A perfect Being, all-encompassing and all-encompassed (by you and your brothers and God), nothing to add and nothing taken FROM; not born of size nor weight nor time, nor held to limits or uncertainties of ANY kind."

"You do not know YOUR creations, because you do not know your brothers who created them WITH you."

"for in him you will find your creations, because he created them WITH you."

The simple fact that God, who is whole, gives the whole of himself, wholly, to wholly create whole beings, who share the whole of himself, alignes exactly with the holographic principle. That the whole is in every part, and every contains and IS the whole, and every part is the SAME whole. And therefore all the wholes are one.

This is why heaven is a truly holographic structure. Not holographic in the sense of 3d projected images - which have nothing to do with holograms. But in the sense that the whole of God is in every creation of God, and every creation of God IS the whole.

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you."

This is what heaven is like. It is not some singular blob that sits there by itself. It is not just some kind of singular oneness which doesn't create or extend. It isn't populated by God alone. It is not devoid of individuality. Nor is it devoid of relationships or free will. It is host to an entire family of unlimited thought-beings, and every part of it is part of God, and part of you, and of your own spirit-children.

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually"

"Each Soul knows God completely."

"By HIS willingness to share it, He becomes as dependent on you, as you are on HIM."

"God is as dependent on you as you are on Him, because HIS autonomy ENCOMPASSES yours, and is therefore incomplete WITHOUT it."

"TOTALLY dependent on their One Creator for EVERYTHING"

"God and the Souls He created ARE symbiotically related. They are COMPLETELY dependent on each other."

"God created Souls so He could depend on them BECAUSE He created them perfectly."

This is why certain other conceptual models of reality are not a good fit. Traditional ideas of oneness don't quite cut it, because they fail to acknowledge that oneness MUST share itself, MUST extend, and MUST be given to create.

Ideas of non-duality don't cut it either, because God is a creator and HAS to create whole expressions of Himself, forming a divine family. He does not will to be alone, or that you be alone, or that you will beings that are alone. All of heaven is about creation and sharing and openness and inter-dependence.

"the whole family of God, or the Sonship"

"the Holy Family"

"If you created GOD and He created you, the KINGDOM could not increase through its OWN creative thought. Creation would therefore be limited, and you would NOT be co-creators WITH God. As God's creative Thought proceeds FROM Him TO you, so must YOUR creative thoughts proceed FROM you to YOUR creations. In this way only can ALL creative power EXTEND OUTWARD. God's accomplishments are NOT yours. But yours are LIKE His. HE created the Sonship, and YOU increase it. You HAVE the power to ADD to the Kingdom, but NOT to add to the Creator OF the Kingdom."

"The Kingdom is forever extending, because it is in the Mind of God."

"Your gifts TO the Kingdom are like His to YOU."

"God extends outward beyond limits and beyond time, and you, who are co-creators with Him, extend His Kingdom forever and beyond limit."

"And His Sons, who create LIKE Him, follow it gladly, knowing that the INCREASE of the Kingdom depends on it, just as THEIR creation did."

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father. Know then the Sons of God, and you will know ALL Creation."

"The Kingdom of Heaven IS you."

"You, too, have a Kingdom which your Soul has created."

"I have a kingdom I must rule."

"God HAS kept your kingdom for you"

"Your Kingdom is not of this world because it was given you from BEYOND this world."

"Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world has to offer."

"The Kingdom of Heaven is the dwelling place of the Son of God, who left not his Father, and dwells not apart from Him."

"His Kingdom has no limits and no end, and there is nothing in Him that is not perfect and eternal."

"For Christ DOES rise above the ego and all its works, and ascends to the Father and HIS Kingdom."

"The inheritance of the Kingdom is the right of God's Son, given him in his creation."

"My Kingdom is not of this world, because it is in YOU. And YOU are of your Father."

"Because you are all the Kingdom of God, I can lead you back to your own creations"

"What God calls one will be forever one, NOT separate. His Kingdom IS united; thus it was created, and thus will it ever be."

"The Kingdom of Heaven is the right of the Soul, whose beauty and dignity are beyond doubt, beyond perception, and stand forever as the mark of the love of God for His Creations, who are wholly worthy of Him and ONLY of Him. Nothing else is sufficiently worthy to be a gift for a creation of God Himself."

Your mind is very powerful and it chooses what to create. Your thoughts enact real influence. You can change the contents of the world using your mind.

There is a huge amount of scientific evidence for this, from scientists and medical science experiments to psychology experiments. All showing that mind has great influence over matter.

There is the placebo effect which has been shown in some cases to cause people to have the same effect of medications just by believing in it. That a person could have the same pain relief of morphine just by believing they had been given it when they hadn't.

People's cancerous tumors have appeared and disappeared on the basis of whether they believed they were getting a treatment. Some have experienced telekinetic activity where objects in the room move around in different ways depending on their mood. While others have materialized objects out of thin air.

Jesus indeed demonstrated the power of the mind over matter in many ways, including defying gravity, transforming objects into other objects, healing sickness, generating body parts, multiplying food, calming storms and so on.

The problem we have is that we generally DO NOT believe that our minds have ANY power. We believe our thoughts have NO influence over the world or the body or each other. We seem rarely to notice or recognize any changes in our lives that we attribute to some thought or feeling we had. We just don't seem to see the connection between what we think and what happens.

But this is something ACIM is training us to be able to do. It requires a recognition of the mind's power, and it also therefore requires taking RESPONSIBILITY for having that power. The simple fact that what's going to show up and happen is based on what's going on in your mind, and that therefore, you are making stuff up as you go along.

It's YOU that is making sickness show up. It is YOU that is making healing show up. It is YOU that is influencing the weather and adjusting the environment. It's YOU that is orchestrating events and making stuff happen. If you could recognize this you would realize you have to be careful about WHAT you think and where your mind is at, because it produces EFFECTS.

This is the recognition that you are a CAUSE, and not an effect. That you are a CREATOR and not merely a perceiver or victim. That stuff is coming out of you with causal power and influence. And therefore it's your responsibility to carefully and mindfully and constructively use that power for good.

When you realize that "you are doing this to yourself", per the secret of salvation, you also should realize that this means you are CAUSING all of your own suffering and by the POWER OF DECISION you can choose something else.

"Very few people appreciate the real power of the mind. Nobody remains fully aware of it all the time. This is inevitable in this world, because the human being has many things he must do, and cannot engage in constant thought-watching. However, if he hopes to spare himself from fear, there are some things he must realize, and realize them fully, at least some of the time. ... The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will." UrT2E8

"People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them." UrT2E12

"Learning must lead BEYOND the body to the re-establishment of the power of the mind IN it." UrT8G14

"I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body AND the power of the mind, by uniting MY will with that of my Creator, which naturally remembered the Soul and its own real purpose." UrT3F21

"While expressions like "think big" give some recognition to the power of thought, they still come nowhere near the truth. You do not expect to grow when you say it, because you don't really believe it. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains." UrT2E10

"Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a little feat for such a power. For faith can keep the Son of God in chains, as long as he believes he IS in chains. And, when he is RELEASED from them, it will be simply because he no longer BELIEVES in them, WITHDRAWING faith that they can hold him, and placing it in his freedom INSTEAD." UrT21D3

"All miracle-workers HAVE to be trained that way. I have to be able to count on them. This means that I cannot allow them to leave their mind unguarded, or they will not be able to help me. Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation." UrT2E18

"There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly." UrW132L4

"You cannot resolve your authority problem by depreciating the power of your minds. It CAN hurt you if you misuse it, because you KNOW its strength." UrT3I3

"The Son of God CAN be mistaken; he CAN deceive himself; he can even turn the power of his mind AGAINST himself." UrT19C3

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts." W19

"Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do." W38

All thoughts create form at some level. This is because thoughts (ego thoughts) are ideas about separation. Regardless of their specific content they are always separation ideas.

Separation ideas always therefore lead to "form" in some way.

What this means is, the idea of separation from God, having that tiny mad idea, AUTOMATICALLY means that form MUST come from it. Form must be the end result of an idea of separation. The thought ITSELF shows up as form - separate images appearing real, and eventually being so "firm" that they seem like solid matter.

Form results from thoughts of separation because separation requires us to make an illusion of how two things are different and disconnected, not sharing space or properties. These illusory appearances make it seem like separation is real and result in the illusion of "separate objects".

Any ego thought therefore emphasizes separation between illusions. As the division between thoughts intensifies, or becomes more "dense", it HAS to eventually lead to the illusory manifestation of what we would call "physical solid matter" - a physical universe - which is essentially just a very heavy/serious thought.

Or to put it simply, the mad idea of being separate from God HAD to create a physical universe. It is a completely logical progression and consequence of having such an idea. Form derives from separation.

If separation is perceived or believed to be real, some kind of universe of forms, to some degree, must seem to manifest.

Before the physical universe there were also prior "stages" if you will, subtler levels of this, which have produced additional levels in the dream. Other dimensions. These are all part of the same ego holographic dream and many of these levels feature form to varying degrees.

As Jesus says for example, nighttime and waking dreams differ only in their forms/content. Being in the physical world is nothing more than being inside the tiny mad idea of separation. It is just an idea, and is not really happening. This is why the physical universe is an illusion. It's an illusory thought of separation - a thought of impossibility.

When you can recognize the illusion correctly, you have completed forgiveness. This means being able to transcend and overlook the thought which has made the physical world. Seeing the truth of this, is seeing the "real world", ie the true nature of the worlds of form (which may pertain to physical level as well as higher levels/dimensions of form).

Overlooking illusions makes them disappear. Overlooking the thought of separation makes it, and everything which has come from it (is inside it), disappear. This is why the physical and other higher dimensional universes MUST eventually disappear, or rather be recognized as having been nothing more than a dream/illusion to begin with. Illusions recognized must disappear. The tiny mad idea, recognized as purely false, must end.

Only Heaven is reality, the home of Immortal Spirit. Only Heaven will be left when all of these illusory universes disappear. Only Heaven is the Home of God and the Son of God. Only Heaven, God's Creation, is the real truth - the real universe of oneness.

"***The world, in its original connotation, included both the proper creation of man by God, AND the proper creation by man in his Right Mind.***" (and nothing else).

"The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in either of these statements implies any sort of level involvement, or, in fact, anything except one continuous line of creation, in which all aspects are of the same order."

The "world" God created, is a synonym for Heaven, which is a synonym for Creation or Sonship or Kingdom. As in the statement above, what God created is "man" (a synonym for souls/spirits) - the Sonship of souls. The Sons of God. These are all inside or are the Kingdom of Heaven. That is God's world. There is nothing else to it.

Notice also that it states NO LEVEL INVOLVEMENT, meaning no "level 2", no "dream", no "earth", nothing except ONE level of reality. All ASPECTS (parts of God, sons) are of the same order (same order of reality).

"The Kingdom of God contains all his Children and their creations."

The Holy Spirit is also technically a Child of God since God created Him.

The Kingdom of God DOES NOT contain ANYTHING ELSE.

And.... guess what folks. THAT'S ALL HE CREATED.

So in simple terms, God created the sonship, and then extends his creation through the sonship. He adds the Holy Spirit. AND THAT IS ALL.

Nowhere in this equation is God in the business of creating planets and galaxies. Nowhere does he get into making bodies or food or animals or television.

If you understand this, it is very simple and obvious.

ONLY THE HOLY TRINITY EXISTS.

This is what is means by "Only the creations of light are real". The creations of light are the Holy Spirit, the Sonship and the Sonship's extended creations (children of your will - living beings). The living world of light. That is all that exists.

God, the Sonship (and their creations), and the Holy Spirit.

That's all. And these creations (Sonship and HS) are perfect EXTENSIONS of God's nature. They are not bodies. They are not planets. They are not fish or ice-creams or digestive tracts or poop.

God only creates spirit beings.

Period.

"The only function of spirit is to extend God's being."

Extension means... it transfers ONLY what was in the source, extending it outward, reproducing it perfectly. Nowhere in extension is anything happening that was not ALREADY God's nature. God is not a donut. God is not a hamster. God is not the Eiffel Tower. God can only extend absolute perfection of Spirit.

In the ego mind, the mind is split, and so is your will. You have willed against yourself. So now your mind has more than one will in it, seeming to act in contradiction. You are at war with yourself.

So what happens now is, your will attempts to still "cause", but then this other opposing will also attempts to "cause", and the two of them are opposite each other in every way so this "cancels out" all of the possible effects.

It's like being constipated, or a stalemate. We literally basically STOP ourselves from willing anything at all. This is why we do not produce and EFFECTS. This is also why, in a split mind, it seems like we cannot have any power over the world or use the mind's power to make anything happen directly. We're stuck in a body that seems to be cut off from the environment and our mind seems totally powerless.

When the will is reunited as whole and is not divided against itself (no ego), the mind no longer has opposition. It is able to now be single minded and to will consistently in one direction. This unopposed will has the Power of God, to CAUSE, AND to produce effects. This unleashes the power of the mind to manifest. It was in this state that we originally made the universe appear.

This is also a key in miracle working. Miracles don't work in a spirit of fear, and fear comes from separation, meaning that if you are afraid that "the miracle wont work" or "the symptoms aren't going away" or "I don't trust this power" or "I don't think I can do this etc"... the perceived "things that would oppose success" are actually other aspects of YOUR OWN WILL in your own mind, in conflict with what you're trying to achieve.

This is why when the mind and will are split, there are no miracles happening. Something has gone wrong. The mind is literally believing in an opposing will which it thinks is "out there" or is alien to it or external to it. It is not. It's inside your mind. So when you are "against yourself", you are literally stopping your will, against your will. And so you cancel out the effects of what you try to make happen.

A mind which is whole does not even regard the current state of the world, appearances, how severe a problem seems, how big the challenge, whether it's healing a headache or moving a mountain. When the mind is clearly aware that it has ONE WILL, and there is no opposing will (because nothing happens against your will, therefore everything happens BY your will).... it is more like... an artist painting new brushstrokes. The canvas does not resist the paint. There is nothing stopping an entirely new projection from happening. What was there before has NO POWER to stop the effects from showing up.

This is why in miracle working you do not "ask" stuff to go away or be healed. That is evidence that you believe there is a will opposing yours (physical matter? sickness? causes?) which has the power to stop you, therefore you have to "ask permission" for it to change. That's not how miracles happen.

Also you will find it's useful to "command" that something change. If you are certain and authoritative and whole-minded/loving enough, it must comply. But the fact is, you're ultimately not even commanding a "separate thing" to change. In your truest nature, you simply EXPRESS. You CREATE. Stuff just comes out of you joyfully and, if that means making forms, then the forms just instantly show up and materialize. Not because you asked them to, but because you simply created them.

To work miracles we must UNDO all belief that there is any cause in the world, any power over you, any alien will, any separate strength or reason or order of difficult that suggests "it might not work because" or "thats too big a challenge" or "it appears to much a problem."

I'm reminded of star wars, where Luke is being taught by Yoda, and believes he cannot lift the spaceship from the swamp because "its too big". That's the hierarchy of illusions. Yoda then demonstrated that size does not matter. Effectively he was demonstrating the miracle-working power of the mind.

OK.

This is going to have to be pretty long because this is a very difficult subject to explain, so bear with me. Some of you may be willing to accept what I'm going to say, some will not.

Oneness. What does it seem to mean? God is whole. God is complete. God is "all there is". God is everywhere, omnipresent, lacking nothing. God is the same everywhere. So... if this is true in terms of ego logic, it means the following:

God has no son. God is dreaming this world. God is a murderer. God created death. God makes people suffer. The separation happened inside God. God is mistaken. God is afraid. God is all people. God is experiencing "himself" through and as all people in the world. There is nothing other than God. We are God. Separation is real. God created this world. etc.

Absolutely none of that is true. That is the purest most logically accurate definition of what non-duality means to the ego. It is the most precise conclusion you can draw from how the EGO understands oneness or what it means to be "one". If oneness truly means "there is only one", the God is responsible for hell. And it is grossly mistaken.

If God is one, then God cannot even create anything because there is nowhere for the creation to occur and nothing to add which wasn't already there and so, literally, "there is only God". This is the conclusion many many Course folk have come to. It seems to in some ways make sense TO EGO THINKERS and those who use linear logic who think that such linear logic is capable of encompassing and understanding the nature of God.

God is not like this. And oneness does not mean "there is only God". And non-duality, as the opposite of duality, does not properly describe the holographic creative nature of God or reality. Non-duality is CLOSE to being correct, and is more correct than duality, but it is still a concept and it falls way short, as you will see. If there is non-duality there should be just "one thing". In that, there can be no Son of God at all, no creation, no love, no extension, no sharing, no sonship, and no holy relationship.

In fact, what's happened widespread in ACIM folk is various false conclusions which have established themselves as if written in stone "what the course says". And yet the consequences of these errors are quite horrific. To believe God is all there is is to equate God with ego and death. To claim that God is all there is also denies and murders every Son of God.

OK.

Now, let's talk about how God actually exists and thinks and creates and the nature of His creation. If the strictest definition of oneness or non duality is true, then God cannot even create anything. And in a sense, PARTS of the Course speak to this. E.g. "God is". And also, "nothing real can be increased except by sharing". So anything real, like God, is permanent, fixed, unchanging, does not increase or decrease, and therefore there can be no creation whatsoever. Which means no son. UNLESS, this thing called "sharing" happens.

Recognize that God is love, and because of what love is, it automatically goes out and shares and extends. It shares because it has no reason to hold anything back. It is fundamentally a state of sharing, including, giving, and this radiation of love is another way of describing the act of creation.

God in and of Himself is whole, complete, lacking nothing, needing nothing, and is already permanent. Like a solid rock. Unchanging. That does not really sound like something that can create, does it? It seems very fixed. Like absolutely nothing is happening or possible. That's strictly what most definitions of "oneness" imply also. That nothing else is possible besides God existing. That's false.

God loves, and in that love, God radiates, extends, shares, creates, miraculously. Ego logic will NEVER account for "the miraculous", and God's creative ability is truly miraculous, which is why YOU ARE A MIRACLE. To the ego, God CANNOT create, and the act of His creating defies ALL EGO LOGIC and demonstrates that God is a miracle worker. Something happens in God which defies explanation and seems impossible yet happens. God SHARES AND CREATES something "other" than Himself, out of nowhere.

If you think of God like a light bulb, God is the fixed light bulb which does not move or change really, but the bulb radiates and SHINES light. The light goes outward and illuminates. That "shining", that light radiating, that is creation. The light radiating is not necessarily the same thing as God Himself. God is complete and whole already, but God SHARES Himself by shining light and radiating and extending, and that which extends outward is creation.

It is in this way that God created the world of Heaven. Here is how the Course describes it is a NATURAL division:

"The world was made as "a natural grand division," or a projecting outward of God. That is why everything that He created is like Him. Projection, as undertaken by God, is very similar to the kind of inner radiance which the Children of the Father inherit from Him. It is important to note that the term "project outward" necessarily implies that the real source of projection is internal. This is as true of the Son as of the Father."

So God in and of Himself is complete and whole, but He "projects outward" (extends) and that which is projected forms a "world" (heaven). This world is, in a sense, "divided from" God in a natural way, in that it comes FROM God and is God SHARING, but God as its SOURCE still remains in a sense, beyond it.

This is because God is the "first cause" and what God radiates is the "effect" of God. His Thought/Shining is the effect of Him as the "thinker". The effect of God is not capable of turning around and "causing God" in reverse, or of making God its effect. The creation (the Son/sonship) is being constantly sustained by, projected by God, forever, is coming FROM God, and therefore the Son is ONLY "as God created Him" and cannot change what He is. The Son has no real say in what He is at all, He merely gives thanks for having been created perfect.

God is cause, not effect. God cannot be affected. This causal extension or "creating of effect" in a way puts up a kind of "wall" or division you could say, just on a causality level, which in a sense, separates the creation from God's own Self, but only in the sense that the created Son cannot cause God back. But the Son CAN share love with Him.

This is not the same thing as the "separation" that we are accustomed to thinking of as what the ego does or relating to the "separation from God" which was a different matter. The "separation from God" happened when the Son, who is only effect and not capable of causing God, attempted to cause God. That means the Son tried to will against God's will or to undo what God has created, trying to replace it with something else. That was an act of impossible denial, which brought about the separation and the "fall of man".

That's an entirely different thing to the "natural division" between God and His Son. The division between God and Son is NATURAL in that this is How God intended it, that the Son is imbued with the SAME WILL TO CREATE, the same love, the same completeness, the same wholeness, AND SHARING the WHOLE OF GOD within itself, as well as sharing THE WHOLE OF CREATION within itself. All of God is in the Son, shared with the Son, and yet the Son is in some way also "divided" from God as a creation of God or thought of God.

In nonduality and oneness concepts there is no accounting for God thinking anything at all, yet alone creating a son. It completely glosses over the fact that God is LOVE, and love radiates and extends and creates. When people tell you what the definition of oneness is they become very clinical and ego-specific in describing God as a kind of "single blob". There is no love in that concept, nor does it appreciate the NATURE of Oneness, which is to share, extend everywhere, create, increase, and to experience JOY. Do you equate oneness with joy, or power, or love, or creativity, or miracles? As a logical device, no. But God is joyful and creative and all powerful and miraculous.

Now, it is possible for God to create AT LEAST One Son, and the Course references the "one son of God" in various places. And due to misunderstandings, many people have come to believe God only has one Son. So now there are two camps - a set of people believing that God is one therefore has no son or "I am God", and a camp of people accepting there is One Son (somehow) but not more. It relates to how much of the nature of God is grasped.

OK. So holograms. Did you know God thinks holographically? Do you know what a hologram is or why this is totally different to how the ego thinks? If you are thinking about God's creation or oneness without thinking about holograms, then you WILL come to false conclusions, such as that there are no divisions in heaven or God has only one Son or no son, because non-holographic logic CAN ONLY arrive at these conclusions. Ego logic is FAULTY and limited.

The essential idea of a hologram is that the whole is able to express in many "parts" and yet each part contains ALL of the whole. This makes NO SENSE to the ego, because it thinks in terms of separated space, where it is impossible for all of God to be in one part AND all of God to be in another part simultaneously. The ego will wager, "there is not enough God for God to be elsewhere, if God is fully here". And that's why the ego is BLIND to the nature of heaven. It does not account for SHARING.

Here's what the Course says about the holographic nature of God and the Sonship - note how ILLOGICAL and CONTRADICTORY these all sound, at first:

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you."

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship. You do not find the concept that the whole is greater than its parts difficult to understand. You should therefore not have too great difficulty with this. The Sonship in its Oneness does transcend the sum of its parts."

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite."

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought, and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. All His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other."

So Jesus is saying two things, which seem to clash. 1) God created One Son. 2) God created many sons. The conclusion here, to THE EGO, is either, a) God only created one Son, or b) The "many" or "multitude" nature of the sonship tells us that it is OF THE EGO and is therefore not real. Are either of these conclusions true? NO! They are both mistakes, and reveal the limitations of the ego's thought system when it tires to understand the EGO DEFYING nature of God.

In a hologram, the whole is present in EVERY part. Now, if you think in terms you are familiar with in this world, like physical objects and space, you think ok, if I take 1 gallon of water and I pour it into a 1 gallon container, there is no water left to fill another container. Yes? This is ego thinking. And ego thinking gave rise to this ENTIRE universe, including all physical forms, and all laws of physics, to paint a picture that attempts to PROVE that God's NATURE is NOT the way things are. And we have used physical form as a way to understand the nature of existence. This is a major error. We are BLINDED by sight of form, because forms express the EGO IDEA of separation, limitation, "measuring" how much of something there is in a finite way, and then concluding that there is lack and limitation.

When ALL of God is poured into one creation, how much God is there left to pour into another? ALL OF HIM! He does not run out. He INCREASES BY SHARING. The ego cannot believe this. The multiplying of fish and bread to feed 5000 people is a good example of this principle. Giving ALL to something does not diminish it AT ALL, it merely increases by being given away.

God puts ALL of the whole of his nature into His creation, in EACH thought. And what He creates is FULL, complete, and whole, AND shares ALL of itself with God, and includes all of God, and all of any other creation God creates. So then God has another thought, creates another WHOLE, and then another WHOLE, and another. You should get the idea then, spatially, even in ego terms, that adding more wholes INCREASES the sum total - and this is How the Kingdom expands.

To the ego, it is impossible that God be fully in one location and yet fully in another. This is completely impossible in terms of a physical object. However, bi-location is a miracle because it demonstrates that we are not bound by space or by instances or amounts. The Course says that God has many thoughts, INFINITE IN NUMBER. That amounts to an INFINITE number of Sons of God. And each Son of God is WHOLE and complete and perfect in itself, has free will just like God, extends and creates just like God (you have your own creations in Heaven), and radiates love just like God. This means each son is not just some "partial person" or limited or unlike the rest, it means EVEY son is FULL, whole, complete, absolutely unlimited, and shares EVERYTHING with God in perfection. And so do all the rest.

That God does not diminish when sharing himself fully to create a WHOLE SON, means automatically that God can create MANY sons without any diminishing of Himself at all. And all of God is in every Son. AND every Son is within every Son. And the ENTIRE SONSHIP is within every Son. This is entirely NATURAL AND NORMAL in Heaven. Heaven therefore contains INFINITE "naturally divided" (causally divided) INDIVIDUAL WHOLES - which are souls or Sons of God - each one holy and perfect.

Ok.

So now we need to talk about why some people are confused in constantly saying that God has One Son or there is "only oneness" or the Sonship is an part of separation etc. It's because people are getting PART of the picture and not the whole picture, because EGO LOGIC is telling them to EXCLUDE some parts of the holographic nature of God. They can "see" that God's oneness makes sense, but this seems to imply there is no son or at least not more than one. They can't see HOW God can have created many sons OR how a "division" is natural. And so they just can't get their heads around the nature of God or how it's possible for there to be a sonship at all.

And if you will go looking, ACIM contains specific quotes which SEEM to support the ego's interpretations by focusing on only one PART of the holographic picture, using that as justification for why "the course said this". For example, "God has but one Son", or countless references to "God's Son". Well, this leads God people to conclude that the Course is saying God doesn't have more sons. It's a mistake. With no grasp of God's NATURE - which is holographic, it makes sense people will be in error. And then they will say well, since God has only one Son, the sonship is a lie, or I do not exist, or I am God, or I do not have a self, or there is no-one here, or whatever else.

These are NON-DUALITY concepts which FAIL to appreciate God's nature. And you can see how, if it is true that God has many sons, these kind of "beliefs" are HARMFUL. They basically DESTROY the sonship, DENY the Self, and render God impotent.

When I finally understood how God thinks holographically and realized that non-duality is bullshit and a limited EGO concept of God, I felt great RELIEF about the simple recognition that "GOD CREATED ME". Me, as an INDIVIDUAL. Not me as an EGO, that's different, but that I have a HOLY SELF, which is sharing with other holy selves, and all of us are PERMANENT and INTENDED by God to have free will. When I saw this, I cried tears of joy, and also release of sadness, which had built up from the non-duality teachers, who have MISLED countless students and spread LIES ABOUT HEAVEN, resulting in the belief that "I do not exist", which can only lead to despair and depression because it DENIES GOD'S CREATION.

A course in miracles is NOT non-duality at all. The principle of Oneness is NOT that there is "only one and nothing else". Oneness truly means, sharing, creation, unlimited extension, INFINITE wholes, and a heaven filled with SOULS that live forever in a state of perfection and wholeness, sharing everything they are with ALL OTHERS including God. Why do you think Jesus refers to you as a brother? It's not just a temporary thing. You will ALWAYS be equal to and a brother of Jesus, AND at the same time, one with Him, and literally sharing everything WITH Him, AND still having your own soul, and still having your own free will which happens to be the same in focus as God's.

So now we have a very different picture of Heaven, and it has NOTHING to do with Earth or this universe. "Heaven and Earth are opposite in EVERY way." Heaven is a PLACE in the sense that it EXISTS as God's creation and you can experience it and BE there in it/with it. There are many references in the course where Jesus says "in Heaven" and also referring to Heaven as a "world" and as something God created. And given that THIS world - earth, physical universe, DOES NOT EXIST BECAUSE THERE IS NO WORLD - where IS there to BE or live or exist other than Heaven? In that sense, it IS a place, far more a REAL place than planet earth. Earth is not a place at all.

Heaven is within the mind of God. "The kingdom of God is you" is another reference to you being The Son of God and one of may sons of God. You are part of and all of heaven. Something you can be INSIDE OF and BE, and where there are infinite souls and angels, plus the Holy Spirit, plus an entire sonship of equal souls, all equal with Jesus, all individually a Son of God, AND also every one of those souls is THE Son of God as well. And each soul continues to CREATE MORE. There is nothing unnatural about this at all. All PARTS of heaven are of ONE ORDER.

Per Jesus: "The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects are of the same order." (Here "man" is the same thing as soul or son of God, not humans.)

One final word then. Each Son of God, being a hologram of God, is whole and complete in and of itself, lacking nothing. And AT THE SAME TIME, is so OPEN and so SHARING, that it is wired into the ENTIRE CREATION of God. Picture it as your mind is so expanded that you are "one with" ie sharing in, the entire sonship. God therefore experiences ALL of his many thoughts, as ONE, while simultaneously allowing them to be many.

This is why there are many references to God having only one son. When it's speaking of this, it refers to how God experiences all Sons as though they are all the same and one, experienced simultaneously and so sharing that they do not seem "separate". Yet they are still divided. And then when the course speaks 250+ times about the many sons of God, this is not contradictory because God DOES have many sons AND one son.

God thinks holographically. All of God is in every son and all of every son is in every son. The whole sonship is in every son and every son in the sonship. You are the ONE SON of God, AND you are one of many. This is heavenly logic, not ego logic. When every individual PART of the sonship has returned to its true nature, all of the sonship as a whole communicates with God again.

The only other point to make I think is the difference between division and ego separation. In heaven you are divided from others and from God. But only in the sense that you are a loving family who shares everything together. Loving families are still individuals yet joined. The individuality does not go away. When walls are erected between family members, ie artificial separations are introduced, there is denial of the sharing, denial of the oneness, and denial of wholeness. This UNNATURAL DIVISION is the ego. This is what the course refers to as separation.

You have to get your head around the idea that you can be individual AND joined and that this is normal, natural and real. It is not your individual soul nature that makes you an ego. It is not that you are PART of a huge family of souls (sonship) that makes you an ego. What makes you an ego is that you withdraw your connection from God, withdraw your connection from the sonship, and become ISOLATED behind artificial imaginary walls of denial. It's got nothing to do with whether you are an individual or not.

Perhaps the most misunderstood thing about ACIM is the belief that ego means separate self, and therefore means individuality, and therefore having an individuality is ego. THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!! Individuality is not the problem. Cutting your individuality off from sharing with the whole is the problem. Trying to be a "part" of the hologram that does NOT contain the whole. Trying to not be an effect of God. Trying to cause God and change Him and affect Him. Cutting yourself off from the sonship. Believing you are not equal to all brothers. Being special. THAT is the problem and that is what the ego is made of, not your individuality.

Individuality does not mean you are separate from God, it means you are one of God's Son's. YOU DO EXIST. Just not as an illusion of an isolated self who has no connection to others. What is death but the end of all connection and the bringing about of total separation from Life? Joining with Life does not make you disappear! It's not about "you're not really out there". It's more like, "you are MORE than you APPEAR to be." You are God's Son and one of many sons. You are one with God and with all others and you SHARE with them all, one in sharing, not in number.

ACIM is not non-duality. And ACIM is not about the ego's idea of what oneness means. ACIM is not teaching that God only has a single son "separate from" the many sons. Heaven is a cascade of creation and miracles and light and souls and beauty and sharing and union and freedom. This is why YOU are responsible for everything YOU CHOOSE. Choose again.

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

1. God is permanent. Earth is not. Earth will end.

2. God is eternal. Earth is not. Earth does not last forever.

3. God can only create by extending himself, and so whatever He creates has to be LIKE Himself in EVERY way, having extended from His own nature. For God to create Earth, God has to be a planet.

4. God, being eternal, never changes. He is changeless. And everything He creates CANNOT change. Earth changes all the time and at NO TIME has a permanent identity.

5. God is eternity, in which there is no time, because there is no beginning or end. He is everywhere at once. In God, there is no space or time. Earth 100% relies on the seeming existence of space and time without which it cannot show up as a 3D planet. And spacetime is just a belief.

6. Nothing God creates can ever be sick or decay or die. Nothing real can be threatened. Everything real last forever. On Earth, everything is sick, decaying and dying.

7. God can only create ONE Kingdom or world. That world has to mirror His nature. Earth, is opposite to Heaven in every way, and God would have to have a contradictory split mind in order to produce TWO DIFFERENT worlds. "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

8. In God's perfect extension, He can only create like Himself, and so creates CREATORS, who in turn have the ability to create like God. Everything on Earth CANNOT CREATE, cannot pass down all of its own qualities and abilities, and everything on Earth is a dead end.

9. Knowledge is only possible in God, where there is no perception, and nothing to perceive. Earth requires perception in order to see it, and without a body it cannot be experienced. "To sense is not to know", and the body is a sensor. Knowledge is not possible in a body. "You cannot remain in this world with this knowledge." It requires the end of perception, and the end of the body.

10. Immortality is God's nature. Nothing real can be threatened, attacked, changed or hurt. Everything about Earth can be threatened, attacked, changed and hurt. It cannot be real.

11. Because God creates/extends only Himself, in His likeness, everything He creates is equal and identical. There is no difference between any Son of God. On Earth, everything is different, unequal, there is no harmony and therefore inherent war.

12. Life means eternal life, that which is sustained forever. God sustains it forever by His permanent will that there be eternal life. Real life never ends. On Earth, all life has a non-existence, followed by an illusion of a beginning, followed by illusory suffering, followed by an illusory death, followed by a non-existence. That is not eternal life.

13. God, being forever, is always the same. Eternity is always the same. It never changes. Time, is the idea that nothing is EVER the same, and everything always changes. It is totally opposite to eternity. Earth, governed by time, is never the same and always changing. Earth is not eternal.

14. God creates only the perfect, being perfect, and creates them perfectly. This perfection is flawless, has no damage, no imperfections, no lack, nothing missing, no corruption or limitation. Everything on Earth is flawed, damaged, imperfect, lacking, missing something, and severely limited.

15. Holiness is a quality and condition possible only in the Kingdom. Holiness comes from wholeness. In God, who is whole, He creates wholes, who create wholes. Wholeness only begets wholeness. On Earth, nothing is whole, because everything lacks what everything else has. This is what makes all thing unique and different. The world cannot be holy.

16. Only the truth of God is true. And God is everywhere. This is why love has no opposite. There is nowhere for an opposite to exist. That which is false is unreal and nothing unreal exists. Earth is opposite to truth, being an illusion which attempts to oppose reality. Everything about it is false. This is why it doesn't exist.

17. In God, there is only love. The extension of God's likeness produces the Golden Rule. What is true of one Son is true of all others. What applies to one, applies to both. Earth is an attempt to break this law, by making it seem possible that what applies to one thing does not apply to another. That you can cause, and escape the effects. That something can be true of another and not you. This is the idea of getting away with murder. Earth is the idea of the crucifixion of God's Son. "The world was made as a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son." The planet is murderous.

18. Life in God is eternal. It is real. Life means eternal life, life without end. Everything in the Kingdom has eternal life. That which does not last forever is the idea of death. That which can be attacked is the idea of death. "The world was made as an attack on God." "Without the idea of death there is no world." Earth is the idea of death, a dream of death, and is not life. "An illusion of life at best, at worst, death." Earth is not alive or dead, it is nothing.

19. The world God "projected" ie extended or created, is the Sonship. God's ONE SON, is God's ONE CREATION. The Son, is God's world. "You are the Kingdom of Heaven." "We are creation, WE, the sons of God". When the son sleeps, God creates the Holy Spirit. This forms the TRINITY. God never creates ANYTHING ELSE. Father, Sonship an Holy Spirit are all that exist. There is no Earth in this equation.

20. God's world is reality. The Kingdom is real. Because it is permanent and never changes. Anything as an alternative to reality must be unreality, or illusion. Another word for illusion is dream, and all dreams are dreams of opposition to life. "Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem." Even "the real world" is an illusion of death. Illusions are not eternal life. Every part of the dream, does not exist in reality. No part of the dream is created by God. God is not a dreamer. When the dreamer (sons) wakes up, the entire dream content vanishes, having never existed. Earth is a dream world. There is no Earth in Reality, and Earth will vanish BECAUSE it is not really there. "Illusions recognized must disappear." "The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came." "There is no world."

Here is the simple LAW OF GOD’S EXTENSION.

1. God can ONLY create (cause) that which is LIKE HIM (as the source), made OF HIM (same substance), with the same inherited abilities.

2. What God creates must be able to do what God does. It must SHARE all of God’s properties, AND pass them on fully to its own creations.

3. God does NOT create ANYTHING that is NOT LIKE HIM. He can only create based on Himself, using Himself, expressing Himself. He can ONLY create in his own likeness.

4. What is not LIKE God’s true nature is NOT OF HIM, and MUST be an illusion. What is not eternal, permanent, perfect, powerful, everlasting, holy, loving, infinite, unlimited, omnipresent, etc CANNOT BE HIS CREATION.

5. What God does not Create does not exist, has no reality, is not alive, and must be false. Anything you attempt to create NOT LIKE HIM, MUST be all illusion and CANNOT exist. Or be real.

6. God cannot create trees, or buildings, or bodies, or planets, or galaxies, or mountains, or food, or humans, or animals, or planet Earth, because He would HAVE TO BE LIKE THEM IN EVERY WAY. God has no end, does not decay, has no form, is NOTHING LIKE this world. Therefore God cannot have created it.

7. God cannot create planets because God is not a planet. The planet cannot inherit its nature from God. The planet is not n extension of a "God planet". God is not a planet. God does not create planets. The planet is not a creation of God. There are no exceptions to this law of perfect extension. God only creates more God!

"The world you see (Earth) is an illusion of a world. God DID NOT CREATE IT. For what He creates MUST be eternal as Himself, and the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"Earth, Heaven’s opposite in every way". Earth is therefore NOT LIKE GOD. Because Heaven IS like God. And so are you.

"what God creates is eternal."

"There is no death because the Son of God is like his Father."

"His will is like His Father's"

"God's accomplishments are NOT yours. But yours are LIKE His."

"The Son's creations are like his Father's."

"And He is like His Father."

"And BEING loving, they are like the Father, and therefore will not die."

"I see my own thoughts, which are like God's,"

"Without your Father you will not know your fatherhood. The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father."

"God creates only "that which, or one who, is of surpassing excellence or merit". Man is capable of this kind of creation, too, being in the image and likeness of his own Creator."

"Only what God creates is irreversible and unchangeable"

"God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them."

"God created Souls so He could depend on them BECAUSE He created them perfectly."

"Anything that God creates is as true as He is. Its truth lies only in its perfect inclusion in Him Who alone IS perfect. To deny this in any way is to deny yourself AND Him"

"While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"What is the same as God IS One with Him."

"We have said many times that ONLY what God creates, or what man creates with the same will, has any real existence."

"It is BECAUSE he is God's Son that he must ALSO be a father, who creates as God created him. The circle of creation has no end. Its starting and its ending are the same."

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

"God created nothing beside you, and nothing beside you exists, for you are part of Him. What except Him CAN exist? Nothing BEYOND Him can happen, because nothing EXCEPT Him is real."

"There is no death because what God created shares His Life."

"No accident or chance is possible within the universe as God created it"

"Forgive the world, and you will understand that everything that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real."

"Everything God created KNOWS its Creator. For this is how creation is accomplished, by the Creator, and by His creations."

"Nothing God created can oppose your will, as nothing God created can oppose His. God gave your will its power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of His."

"The Son that God created is as free as God created him."

"I and my father are one."

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is perfectly natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you."

What this means is that God, who is Himself WHOLE, when He creates, He must create another WHOLE. The Son of God, or Sons of God, must be whole, in and of themselves, because they are created in the likeness and image of God. God only creates wholeness, he only creates fully (wholly), and whatever He creates MUST be whole.

This means that by creating a Son, God has added a second "whole" to the first whole. There are now at least two wholes in reality. The whole which is the Son, is a PART OF, the whole that is God, and yet the whole that is the Son, is in and of Himself, a WHOLE. He is complete, not lacking. This also continues on with the creation of all God's children, AND their creations.

The presence of multiple wholes in reality, wherein each whole is in and of itself a full complete whole, and yet also therefore MUST share with all other wholes in order to BE whole (oneness), is the natural state of the Kingdom of God. A wholeness of being, which encompasses additional whole beings.

If the idea of "many wholes" sounds like it makes no sense, it is because it makes no sense to THE EGO, who cannot comprehend whatsoever that there can ever be more than one whole. But what makes sense to the ego is nonsense, and when the ego sees nonsense it is truly sensible.

"God, who encompasses all being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually (are whole as individuals) and want to share it to increase their joy".

"The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created. There is no lack in it."

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

"EVERY mind that God created is equally worthy of being healed because GOD CREATED IT WHOLE. "

"Holiness created me whole."

"Because the Sonship MUST create as one, you remember creation whenever you recognize part of creation. Each part you remember adds to YOUR wholeness, because each part IS whole. Wholeness"

"Every Soul God created is part of you, and shares His glory WITH you."

"He was created that YOU might be whole, for only the complete can be a part of God's Completion, Which created you."

"And God has NEVER forgotten what makes Him whole."

"Though every aspect IS the whole, you cannot KNOW this, until you SEE that every aspect IS THE SAME, perceived in the SAME light, and THEREFORE one. "

"And perception WILL last until the Sonship knows itself as whole."

"If they are deprived, their perception becomes distorted. When this occurs, the whole family of God, or the Sonship, is impaired in its relationships."

"You will be made whole as you MAKE whole"

Reality, Heaven, the Kingdom of God, God's mind and thought system, real existence, Creation, your Divine Home, the Sonship, and the dwelling place of all the Creations of Light, is "structured" as a perfect hologram.

If you don't know how a hologram works, I'll try to simplify it. First of all we're not talking here about a projected 3D image like you see in the movies. Those are not holograms. They are just regular projected images.

First consider a photograph. A photograph contains a surface which has a number of locations on it. At each location there is a drop of color. When you view the entire surface you see a picture. But there is only one drop of color at each location. So when you move the 2D image in 3D, the image is still the same. Each part only contains part of the image.

Holograms are not like this. The difference is, a hologram stores an ENTIRE set of information, ir the whole picture, AT EACH location on the surface. So all of the picture is encoded in one tiny area, and another tiny area, and another. The entire surface is covered with "copies" of the entire image. The WHOLE image, is in each part of the image.

What this allows, in terms of images, is that you can encode "multiple viewpoints" of a 3D object, onto a single 2D surface. When you then move and tilt the surface, you actually see a DIFFERENT viewpoint. It's as if there are thousands of images all stored within one image, all at different angles, making the hologram appear to move in 3D.

This is based on the holographic principle that "the whole is in every part. and every part is whole".

The whole of whatever was the source object, is represented FULLY in EACH part of the second object. This also produces an interesting scenario in which, you can cut that surface in half with scissors and you don't actually LOSE any information, because the WHOLE of the image is stored in the remaining parts. And you can still see the "other sides" of the object as you move the surface, even if previously they were in the part of the image that was cut off. (But that's not really relevant to what we're talking about here.)

Now. In heaven, God is whole. God is everything, everywhere, unlimited. So God's fundamental nature is wholeness. He is the WHOLE of everything. All of it.

Then, God is a creator. "God did not will to be alone". "Divine abstraction takes joy in application". "God is first cause." Therefore, God creates by extending himself. This form of creation takes whatever is IN God, AS God, and places it into "another". God creates a second being, or what we call a Son of God, or soul.

Since God is whole, God can only create "wholly", and when He creates He FULLY creates (wholly), and gives EVERYTHING of Himself to his creation. The WHOLE of God is extended to the Son. This results in a situation where the SON is WHOLLY created, is FULLY created, is WHOLE in and of himself, HAS wholeness, AND shares the whole of God with God. The Son is a "standalone" entity but the Son is NOT CUT OFF from God - it is FUSED with God and SHARES what God has directly.

"The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created. There is no lack in it."

This relationship between God and His Son, is what we call INHERITANCE. The son, inherits everything he is, from God. In fact, God is IN the son. "You are forever host to God." The son is also given God's freedom, and given TOTAL freedom, and so this establishes the son as "free". Bound to God, in terms of oneness, but FREE "from God" in its own right, as an individual being. And since God is the WHOLE of being, God HOSTS this Son WITHIN himself by SHARING his wholeness with His Son. The Son is "separate", but ALSO joined.

"All loving creation is freely given."

"God who encompasses all being (the whole) nevertheless created separate beings (free whole beings) who have everything individually (shared with God) and want to share it (like whole beings do) to increase their joy."Now, SHARING becomes the fundamental attribute of all things in heaven, because God creates via a process of SHARING himself. "Nothing real can be increased, except by sharing." God hosts us within His being. So we SHARE what God HAS. e.g. "To recognize that all power is of God is to gain all power."

A son of God, who is a PART of God, and is also a WHOLE, SHARES all of itself with God, INHERITS everything from God, and therefore hosts the whole of God. Being a fully created free-willed being, this son of God is now established in a position of CO-CREATOR. This is because God is a creator, and the Son INHERITS fatherhood/creatorship/authorship. So the Son can now "do" what the Father did.

"God created the Sonship. You were created to add to the Sonship."

"It is this Thought by which the Father gave creation to the Son, establishing the Son as co-creator with Himself."

God does NOT stop at "only creating one child." "God did not will to be alone, and did not will that you be alone." Other Sons of God are also co-creators with God, and WITH YOU, and as such you AND God AND your REAL PERMANENT BROTHERS co-create together, because you SHARE EVERYTHING with each other as unified wholes.

"You will never know that you are co-creator with God, until you learn that your brother is a co-creator with YOU."

"Decide but to accept your rightful place as co-

What God creates must be permanent because He is permanence and can only create like Himself.

Therefore, if something is not permanent, if it changes at all in any way, if it is born or dies, or if it comes and goes, or transforms, or isn't always the same forever, then God did not create it.

Since God is reality, being the consistency and constancy needed for there to BE a "reality", some state which never wavers and is completely reliable, then anything that wavers or changes is not REAL.

Therefore, the physical world, the physical universe, everything in it, all bodies, everything you see here, and all forms of perceiving it, cannot be real.

Since what is real actually exists, permanently, and since what is unreal cannot possibly exist because it is not permanent and always changes, what changes cannot be REAL.

Therefore, because the physical universe is constantly changing, it CANNOT be real, and it MUST be an illusion. God cannot have created it, and it cannot really exist.

It is as plain and simple as this.

God is infinite. Infinite means in-finite, not finite. Finite means limitations, and limitations allow multiple possibilities. Infinity does not mean 'all possibilities'. It means all REAL possibility, but in terms of number, there is only ONE possibility. Infinity means oneness - one possibility, one reality, one way. This is how God is infinite. Infinite does not mean that God creates all kinds of forms and many multitudes of different things. God only creates ONE state of being and nothing else.

Nothing real can be threatened, because nothing unreal exists. God cannot be threatened because the physical world and all of its weapons of separation does not exist. This world is nothing but an ILLUSION that a world exists, and if you believe it and perceive it then you have fallen for the illusion and are not awake.

"There is no world." This is the central thought the course would aim to teach. - ACIM

The ego produced the idea that when you cause something, it produces an effect, but the effect itself is not CAPABLE of causing something in turn.

This shows up in the relationship between mind and matter or mind and body. The body seems to be an "end result" but of itself it cannot create anything. The ego made the illusion that it can create children but really it is a dead end.

This is because the ego "separated" cause and effect, meaning that mind seemed to become cause and matter became effect, so that mind would seem to STOP being able to CREATE something that in turn can create.

When you think about your self in heaven, you are an effect of God. But in God's world cause and effect are not split apart like this, and an "effect" is NOT a dead end. When God creates something, he give it ALL of his own ability to create, and therefore it ALSO becomes a CAUSE.

You are an effect of God, which means you are still as God created you, but it DOES NOT MEAN that you therefore have to be whatever God forces you to be. You are not like the "body of God" or some kind of projection of Him that cannot think for itself or has no will of its own.

This is a very important point because in terms of the ego's thinking, if you are just an EFFECT, then you cannot CAUSE anything, and that basically means God created death, or created an end to extension.

You are created TO EXTEND, to CO-CREATE, and to CAUSE CREATION. You are an effect of God but you are ALSO FREE to cause of your own free will. If you were not given the freedom to be a cause, you could not be like God or in his likeness, and you would not be able to create like Him.

So God has created you, you are the effect of Him, but you are also a cause. God causes causes. God creates creators. And because you ARE a creator and you can create, you MUST HAVE freedom to WILL freely. Your independent free will was given you BECAUSE IT WAS NECESSARY in order to grant you the ability to create freely.

By God having created creators who can create creators, and IF those creations freely willingly choose to extend or "will like God's will", then creation extends endlessly as a continuous outflowing of creativity. When a creation of God freely chooses to dream and to pretend to oppose God's "intention" and tries to block their own free will, his "communication channels" are blocked and God thus recognizes his son is "sleeping" and creates the Holy Spirit to help him to FREELY CHOOSE whether/when to wake up.

"The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with FREE WILL because all loving creation is FREELY GIVEN."

God has unlimited presence and enjoys complete freedom.

God is creative.

God creates in his own likeness.

Therefore God creates things like himself, which are also free. If God has a son, His son MUST have permanent freedom. This "freedom to be free" is a "natural division". It is not separation.

In order for God to give his creative ability to His creation, which he shares with His creation fully, he HAS to give His creation freedom.

That freedom automatically means, his creation is FREE to will on its own.

That freedom also automatically means, the creation’s freedom is never REVOKED by God, nor is it possible for that freedom to be lost. God guarantees it because God’s creative expression which creates the son is CONTINUOUS and permanent.

Therefore the creation (son) has permanent freedom.

This makes it impossible for the son to "become God".

If the Son were to become God in the literal sense of "oneness" as it’s usually understood, it would ALSO mean the son can ACTUALLY develop the authority problem in reality. That he can replace God with HIMSELF.

This is never possible because God has permanence and permanent freedom, and so does the son.

The son’s permanent freedom, free will, will never be undone by God. It makes it impossible for the son to become "uncreated". For him to be literally "one" with God, as in, there is only God, would UNCREATE Him. This is impossible.

The son(s) of God we’re FREELY GIVEN. And freedom was given TO them. And they are free. In this sense only, they are "free of God", so to speak. But in their freedom and joy, they subsequently SHARE everything they are, lovingly, with God.

Oneness then does not mean one big mushy blob of a single identity and no parts. A Course in Miracles is not non-duality or pure non-duality. God DID CREATE many sons each with free will. His freedom is his Gift, from God, and to his own creations.

There is nothing unnatural about many "free" beings being free together, but sharing a love so deep and full that it seems almost as if they are "one". Sharing can be extremely maximal, to the point where only the "free will" itself seems to stand between them. The soul. And souls are permanent.

The son only figuratively disappears into the father because he cannot stop being free. Yet the unity between Father and Son is so great, essentially nothing can come between them other than the honoring of that freedom. Freedom does not mean separation. Especially given the Son lovingly wills to share his love and joy as fully as possible with the father and with all other creations.

The people who are touting "oneness" and non-duality as the core truth of ACIM, are not acknowledging that God - the infinite - has FREEDOM. And because it is infinite, there are no limits, meaning it is natural for infinity to "expand" permanently and unlimitedly, which is "Creation". And infinity must also mean sharing beacuse sharing means unlimited giving and unlimited receiving. And therefore God is both creative and free and creates freedom.

God is a being of Spirit. God extends through Creation, producing the Sonship, and the Sonship in turn extends God's being as a co-creator. The Sonship is within God's being. The sonship's extension further creates more spirit beings, within each of the Sons's being, within God's being.

This creation of eternal life and extension of eternal life is spirit's ONLY function. All Spirit ever does is extend God's being. It never is involved with making worlds, planets, bodies, animals, forms, "life forms", sandwiches, or death. Spirit only creates spirit. It never creates objects or bodies.

"Being must be extended. That is how it retains the knowledge of itself. Spirit yearns to share its being as its Creator did. Created by sharing, its will is to create. It does not wish to contain God, but wills to extend His Being. ... The extension of God's Being is spirit's only function."

God creates only in the likeness of Himself according to His own nature, characteristics and laws. God is unlimited infinite being. God is omnipresent, meaning He is everywhere at once, and God has Eternal Life.

When God extends Himself in His Divine Application, He merely creates more like Himself. His Son is given spirit/being/soul, mind, eternal life, the ability to create, and omnipresence. Just like the Father. The Son has everything the Father has, lacks nothing, and is exactly identical in nature. This identically is what "Oneness" or "One With" means - being of like kind.

It is not possible for God to create something unlike Himself or unlike His nature. Nor is it possible for the Son to be unlike God's nature or to create something which is unlike God's nature. The son's creations are just as much like God as the Son is, following all the same characteristics of perfection and divinity and wholeness, and with just as much ability to extend creation.

Eternal life is eternal BECAUSE it is permanent and cannot be changed. Nothing real changes or wavers or fluctuates. Anything that changes is not real. "Reality is a constant state." Eternal life requires the total absence of anything that can change or be changed. Change itself is the idea of what exists no longer existing, and is the idea of death.

The idea of "spacetime" is exactly opposite to the nature of God's creation, and God could not, and did not, and cannot create it.

Space is in direct opposition to the nature of omnipresent creation. Omnipresence means everything that exists is everywhere at once. Space means whatever exists is NOT everywhere at once. Space goes on to assert that everything is not everywhere, nothing is fully anywhere, anything that is anywhere is not everywhere, nothing exists everywhere, and therefore everything does not exist anywhere. It is the ultimate statement that everything, God, does not exist anywhere. It is in total opposition and violation of God's will, God's laws, God's nature and God's creation.

Time is also in direct opposition to eternal life. In eternity everything is permanently the same, nothing changes, everything extends forever and there is no interruption or alteration to what is. In time, time suggests that nothing is EVER THE SAME, that all things are constantly changing, in a state of flux and uncertainty and fear, that what existed no longer exists, and what is to come will obliterate what is here now. Time is a direct attack on God's nature, Kingdom, laws and nature, just as space is. And together they form the foundation of the ego's manifestation of HELL - the exact OPPOSITE OF HEAVEN IN EVERY WAY.

Now, everything you see with the body's eyes, and the body itself, is directly and totally dependent on this system of space and time, which is totally and UTTERLY OPPOSED to God's nature and Kingdom. One part of the body is over here, but not over there. One part of the world is over here but not over there. This planet is not where the other planet is. My body is not occupying the same space as your body.

This is a system of the total ABSENCE OF SHARING of any kind. In God's Kingdom, everything is always shared everywhere by everyone simultaneously. With no ownership, no possession, no exclusivity, and no special rights. Within spacetime, there is no such thing as sharing. Space asserts that what is here, is not there, and so it is isolated, and in fact not whole, because wholeness means being everywhere and so nothing in space is whole. Time asserts that what just was, no longer is, and so it does not extend or share into the present or future, killing it off and turning it into history.

The planet Earth, is entirely dependent on space and time both for its apparent existence. In order to even be a three dimensional object made from particles which do not share space, and which are all spread out in different locations, and whereby England is not America and Australia is not the North Pole, nothing is everywhere and so everything is nowhere. It is an illusion of place and time, shift and change, destruction of reality, attack on God's Kingdom, and TOTAL DENIAL of the laws of God. This planet entirely goes against the nature of God and therefore is against YOUR nature. "The laws of this world go against your nature."

Without being separated out in "space", or changing over "time", there cannot be a three dimensional planet taking up space. Continents cannot be kept apart. Bodies cannot be maintained. Animals and plants cannot retain their shapes. Particles of matter cannot exist independent of each other. Drops of water cannot move as an ocean. And sunbeams have no capability of shining. All of this stuff is THE EGO THOUGHT SYSTEM, made as an ATTACK ON GOD. "The world was made as an attack on God". "The world was made as a place where God could enter not." "Earth, which is HEAVEN'S OPPOSITE IN EVERY WAY."

If you can grasp the nature of God's Kingdom, God's law, and God's ways, you MUST recognize that everything in and of spacetime is absolutely bullshit. It is TOTALLY NOTHING LIKE GOD'S NATURE, it is absolutely utterly OPPOSED TO LIFE, and is a PICTURE OF CRUCIFIXION. "The world is a picture of the crucifixion of the Son of God." It is crucifixion simply because it is the idea of what God's Son is NOT LIKE, it is the idea of how God's Son would look if he were SPLIT APART, it is the idea of God's Son being in a state of constant change and insanity, and it is the idea of God's Son PERISHING AND DYING. It is NOT a pretty picture of God's creation, it is NOT EVEN REMOTELY HOLY, IT IS NOT GOD'S WILL, and it IS ***NOTHING LIKE GOD***.

Thankfully, God's ACTUAL creation, heaven, is not like this world. This world, is "the world you made" and "the world you see" with the body's eyes, which see nothing but illusions. God's creation is entirely a LIVING WORLD OF LIGHT, not even remotely in the shape of any kind of object or form or planet or body, FREE OF SPATIAL SEPARATIONS, FREE OF TIME AND CHANGE. It is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the world you see.

Anyone here who is claiming that God COULD, WOULD, SHOULD, or DID create this world, is not comprehending why that is an utterly ridiculous idea. That means you do not RECOGNIZE exactly HOW this world is attacking God, HOW and WHY spacetime is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to Heaven's nature, why the laws of this world are entirely EGO LAWS OF CHAOS, and why God is NOT LIKE THIS AT ALL. If you really think God is LIKE THIS WORLD, you really, really, really do not know what God is like. To accuse Him of creating it, labelling it as sacred or holy, or regarding it are real, is nothing short of blasphemous.

God can only create LIFE. And that life MUST EXTEND LIFE. And so if that which God creates does not in turn CREATE LIFE OUT OF NOWHERE, through a MIRACULOUS CREATIVE ACT, then it is not life. Look now at the world YOU made, Earth, this universe, in which NOTHING extends life through miraculous creation, NOTHING creates in its exact image and likeness, NOTHING lives forever, NOTHING is permanent, NOTHING is free from threat because what is UNREAL CAN be threatened, and NOTHING is even remotely God-like. To believe this world is God's creation is to believe ILLUSIONS ARE REAL, which is FALSE PERCEPTION. It is delusional. And failure to recognize this is INSANITY.

C-4.1. "The world you see is an illusion of a world. 2 God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. 3 Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. 4 Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. 5 But the time will come when all things visible will have an end.

C-4.2. The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. 2 And so they do. 3 For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. 4 While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"C-4.4. The world stands like a block before Christ's face. 2 But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. 3 It is seen at last for only what it is. 4 And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. 5 Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

"A forgiven world cannot last."

1) Whatever God creates must EXTEND who and what he is and be LIKE him in every way. Whatever comes from him must be God-like, and eternal, and immortal. Anything that does not last FOREVER, cannot come out of an immortal creator.

2) Whatever God creates is PART OF HIM, and so he IS his creation. Which means that if you suggest that dogshit and explosions and machine guns and atomic bombs and supernova are God's creation, you are saying that GOD IS all of these murderous things.

3) Whatever God creates is REALITY. If this world is reality, God has to BE it, live it, will it, condone it. He literally has to PERSONALLY cause it. And he has to BE that which IT IS. So now any form of attack is God attacking himself, any murder is God killing himself, any death is God punishing himself and making himself suffer to try to kill himself, which makes God suicidal and insane.

4) God can only create that which extends himself and he endows his creations with the ability to extend themselves. They are co-creators. The line of creation MUST NOT STOP. There must be no dead ends, or a lack of inheritance of ability to create forever. Every creation must be a powerful creator. Cars and machine guns and gravestones and dirt and bricks CANNOT CREATE. They are dead ends and cannot be of God because they CANNOT EXTEND. Failing to extend eternal life is DEATH.

5) Whatever God creates shares his immortality and cannot be attacked or hurt or ever die. "Nothing real can be threatened. If it can be threatened, IT IS NOT REAL. Threats include attack, damage, decay, murder, aging, explosions, war, etc. None of these things can be God's creation otherwise he has created MORTALITY. Mortality cannot come from an immortal creator who can only share his own immortality with his creations.

6) God is absolute perfection without a single flaw or thing missing or malfunction or breakage. Anything that is NOT perfect is NOT of God and cannot come out of him in creation. That includes broken down rusted cars, crashed airplanes, sick bodies, warzones, rotten food and corpses. God could not even think of such things yet alone make them.

7) God can ONLY conceive of that which is innocent, holy, pure, good, happy, loving, peaceful, gentle, beautiful, permanent, immortal, joyful and alive forever. If anything does not have these properties it is NOT created by God. A gentle benevolent God cannot even THINK OF or imagine or dream up machine guns, tanks, dangerous crevices, barren dry deserts, frozen tundras, black holes, or supernova that destroy entire solar systems.

8 ) God being of one nature can only produce one kind of outcome because he always gives everything fully and excludes nothing. This means he can only create ONE KIND of creation, not two. Given that Earth is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to heaven in EVERY way, as the course clearly states, it would REQUIRE God to be split minded and have a divided will and be indecisive in fear and unsure whether he would have one kind or output or another. God cannot contradict himself or produce contradictory worlds. Earth and heaven are OPPOSITES.

9) God only causes and condones and wills POSSIBILITIES that are in total alignment with his loving gentle happy nature. His kingdom is HIS MIND. He creates WITHIN himself. He does not allow there to be even the POSSIBILITY of "bad things happening", murder, death, suffering of any kind, things that break down, decay and rot, bad smells, separations and walls, weapons, or any such thing which could IN ANY WAY suggest it's even POSSIBLE for such things to exist. His laws DO NOT ALLOW there to be even the slightest real possibility that a "real weapon" could ever exist whatsoever. Any such things, any world that supports such things, IS NOT POSSIBLE.

10) God is one, and is oneness, and is unified and whole. He has absolutely no separation in him. No ego. No walls. No divisions. No things which are opposite to each other, or against each other, or hidden from each other, or different to each other. It is all one nature. He cannot even IMAGINE bodies separating off his creations. He cannot even imagine walls, solid objects, space or time. All physical objects ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE SEPARATION in order for there to even be SPACE whatsoever. Space in which some things exist over here, and some things exist over there, and nothing is everywhere. Space in which the very idea of physical matter is an attempt to SEPARATE OFF, and without the idea of separation IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THERE TO BE SPATIAL OBJECTS. All bodies, all planets, all galaxies, all matter entirely, with any label attached or not, perceived in ANY way, is a form of an idea of separation and DOES NOT exist in God's creation.

"For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"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 place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

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

Intellect here is being basically equate with the ego thought system. Intellect is a device that separates and analyzes. It looks at things and separates them off and compares them. It judges them and evaluates them. This splitting apart is an emphasis on separation and increases the send of fragmentation of things. Things can become extremely complicated in the intellect.

As such, since the physical world is made from the idea of separation and the intellect similarly fosters perceptions of separation, the intellect can be said to be responsible for making the world. ie the ego mind of separation reinforces ideas of differences and contrasts and directly leads to physical matter showing up.

Jesus congrats this against real thinking, ie the thoughts you think with God, thoughts of love and creation, which are extensions of God's mind. Those create wholeness and spirit and eternal life because they are not based on separation. It's a way of thinking that doesn't dissect or analyse or judge or evaluate. It's a thought process that looks out from a loving whole state of mind and creates more of the same - the good, the beautiful and the holy. This extends the Kingdom of God (heaven).

"Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy. Do not lose sight of this."

You might notice also that when you move away from love and the present moment, the mind creates a sense of separateness from "what is" and moves into a kind of more fictional, theoretical, conceptualizing state. This produce a sort of "shift upwards" in the mind, or what we might call moving thought up into the intellect. In the intellect everything becomes theoretical and non-practical, or is a lack of application because it's a lack of real engagement and sharing. It could be thought of as a way of shutting down and separating off by trying to hide from immediate reality, going into fantasies and sidetracks.

"Intellect may be a "displacement upward"

The intellect can be somewhat useful perhaps for assessing things in this world and sorting out what to do and so on, but only as a temporary tool. It's easy to become lost in it and to be so involved in intellectualizing that your whole experiences becomes one big theory and not a whole lot of relationship. Then you can be sort of living in a cloud of "course thought" masquerading as "doing the course" but only really being good at talking bout it, around it, and indirectly referring to it. The truth has to be lived, and that means eventually the intellect will be transcended and used no more.

God has one law. It is very simple.

God can only create in his own likeness. He doesn't know anything else. He creates beings - sons or souls - who are all identical to Him, and therefore are identical to each other. What applies to each one of them, applies to all of them equally. What is true of one, can be said to be exactly true of all of them.

This sets up "The Golden Rule", which is the primary law of God's creation, that everything applies the same to everyone, everywhere, at all times. The law simply states that what applies to you applies exactly the same to all brothers.

This law is always in effect. It is permanent. You cannot escape it. The law is in effect whether you like it or not. The law is in effect regardless of whether you are awake or asleep, aware of Heaven or suffering in the dream of spacetime. The law is the truth.

Our friend "the ego" is nothing other than the attempt to DENY that the law is in effect. It is an attempt to be outside of the law. The ego is nothing other than the belief that something DIFFERENT applies to one son versus another.

If the law of God means UNCONDITIONAL LOVE, since all sons are loved equally, then the ego means CONDITIONAL LOVE or "special favor", in which some sons are to be treated differently and unequally from others. Special love is a lack of love and so the ego is a thought system of lacking equality and unconditionality.

When you are trying to be "in the ego", you are in denial of the law. That doesn't mean the law stops applying. Denying that it always applies is suicidal. What happens when you try to operate outside of the law is that you will hurt yourself. You will believe that you can do something to others that you yourself escape the consequences of, and yet you will not escape those consequences.

When you do not treat your brother as a perfect identical equal, you will think you can get away with murder by getting away with attacking them and avoiding the effects. But you will not escape the effects. What you attempt to do to him you WILL do to yourself, because the law is always functioning. You cannot attack without being attacked. You cannot treat someone in a special way without withdrawing from love. You cannot attempt to hurt without hurting yourself.

The Golden Rule - the one law of God - also applies in the dream in terms of bodies, sickness, and death. The Course teaches clearly that if you show your brother a physical body which is sick, you are accusing him of sin and are attacking both of you. When you use the body for attack it becomes attacked and weak and sick and dead. This is a consequence of denying the law of God.

Simply, what applies to you always applies to others. So when you go into attack, attack is the idea that you can be different to others and have special treatment. This differences drives a wedge of separation between you and your brother and attempts to assert that what applies to them does not apply to you, or that you can attack without being attacked. This is the basis of all projection, where you try to project blame onto another as if to say "that is true of you, but not true of me".

When you do this, you are in denial of the law, and the law is still functioning, and so you will experience a split mind and are attacking yourself. You cannot cause your brother to be treated separately without treating yourself separately. Separation comes BETWEEN you. The body comes BETWEEN you as a separation device. You cannot have something apply only to him and not yourself.

Sick bodies are accusers. When you try to make your body sick you are accusing your brother of sin. That means that in your attempt to "make plans for him" you inevitably end up hurting yourself. You cannot accuse him of attack without being attacked. And so as you try to make out that your brother is a sinner, you are accusing yourself. It applies to you as it applies to him. And this hurts you. You will experience the consequences. It seems to be to an unfair consequence or something you did not want, but you literally did it to yourself. Whatever you try to do to another, you WILL do to yourself.

The Golden Rule also works in your FAVOR when you comply with it and recognize it and work WITH it. Recognizing it is the secret to salvation. That means you must be willing to have the truth be the same for everyone, all are treated equal and no-one is special. And that means moving into unconditional love. Here, the Golden Rule actually supports you and helps you, because it ensures that giving and receiving are one, therefore as you treat others with love you receive love. As you give miracles, you receive miracles.

When you acknowledge the law is in effect and you COMPLY with it, it ensures that you will be treated with unconditional love, that you will have access to sharing the entire treasure of God's creation, and that you will recognize your brother as your identical equal. "Healing is a thought in which two minds perceive their oneness and become glad". This means that the two minds recognize the law, know it to be true, see that they are identical children of God, and celebrate their equality.

A Course in Miracles is entirely based around this law. All of its concepts about how what you do to others you to do yourself, how giving and receiving are one, how you attack the body, how you become sick, how you must demonstrate a BODY THAT IS FREE FROM ATTACK, and how you must overcome death, is all based on the law of God - the Golden Rule. This is why Jesus says that either everything lives or everything is dead.

When the rule applies and you acknowledge equality, you are recognizing that anything God creates must be like him, and since He is life, everything He creates must live. And that means ALL that He creates is alive forever. And in this acknowledgement you are acknowledging that YOU are alive and cannot die, any more than anyone else can. Acknowledging life is the resurrection and in the resurrection the curriculum ends, because it's there, in the atonement, that you acknowledge and receive the unconditional love that comes from ALIGNING with the law of God. Accepting the truth.

When you comply with the law, everything is peaceful in Heaven. When you oppose the law, you make yourself suffer. Denying the law is ego and is suicide. Accepting the law is heavenly and protects you perfectly in eternal life.

"The world was made as "a natural grand division," or a projecting outward of God."

First of all, the use of "OR" here means there are two ways of saying this. A natural grand division is the same thing as a "projecting outward". Which is the same thing also as extension and creation. When God projected outward from Himself he Created "the world". This is the world of heaven, having nothing to do with the physical universe.

"That is why everything that He created is like Him."

So we know that everything God creates is LIKE Him. Like a copy. "Heaven and Earth are opposites in every way" - so we know God did not create Earth.

"Projection, as undertaken by God, is very similar to the kind of inner radiance which the Children of the Father inherit from Him. It is important to note that the term "project outward" necessarily implies that the real source of projection is internal. This is as true of the Son as of the Father."

The clarification here is that what God is, internally, is "distinct" in a NATURAL way, from the "projecting out" (creating) that God performs. His CREATION, is "naturally divided" from Him. This reflects in the idea that God is the FATHER, and His Creation is HIS SON. He is Cause, His creation is Effect.

This is considered a NATURAL division. Because it is natural, it is not alien, it is not an attack, it is not ego, it is not separation, it is not a dream, it is not artificial, it is NATURAL and normal and healthy.

All of God's children (plural - many) inherit this same ability to create which is the ability to radiate outward from their being, to create things which are NATURALLY DIVIDED from themselves, in terms of the relationship of cause to effect. All children are CAUSE of their Creations, which are their effects.

The natural division between Father and Son tells us Father creates the Son, but the Son does not create the father. If there was no "division", the Son would indeed create the father. The Son is INCAPABLE of doing that, because He is the EFFECT of the Father, so He is "divided off" from being able to BE the "Cause of God'. But he Himself inherits Fatherhood abilities, meaning He can "father" (create) His own creations.

To create His own creations he MUST be given free will. God is freedom and God only creates that which is free. If the Father has even ONE Son, that son MUST have FREEDOM. A free will. Bestowing complete freedom upon the Son is basically a MIRACLE, because in a way it means the Son is DISTINCT in His own ability/independence/individuality to Will either WITH the father or to try to will against Him. FREEDOM gives Him that "right" or ability.

"The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects are of the same order."

There is nothing UNNATURAL about these divisions. Effect is not cause. However God creates so fully and so freely and gives so unconditionally that He gives ALL of His abilities to His Son, endowing Him with both FREEDOM and the ability to CREATE FREELY. As the quote says, this is all in one continuous LINE OF CREATION, in that, the SonS (plural) and THEIR creations (and the creations of their creations etc) are all one simultaneous timeless eternal creation. It has all always been.

That there are NATURAL DIVISIONS, particularly between cause and effect or Father and Son, doesn't necessarily mean that there is anything blocking the Son from being completely equal to and "one with" the Father. There is no "difference" that comes between them. But they are still distinct. They are as close to each other as close can be, to the point where they practically disappear into each other. But they are still divided! Like, they can HUG!

An UNNATURAL division, is what the course refers to as SEPARATION. An unnatural division is unhealthy and incorrect and is an error. It's an artificial division that isn't supposed to be inherent to the nature of Creation. It is a wall, a block, a barricade which attempts to cut off some portion of Creation and keep it in the dark. This is the ego's separations. Divisions in heaven do not keep anyone from SHARING with each other. Ego separations BLOCK SHARING. Every ILLUSION of multiplicity, every ego form of attack, every wall or block or unnatural separation, these are UNNATURAL. This is not the same thing as a NATURAL division.

Heaven has NATURAL divisions. There is a kind of hierarchy of cause and effect: God > Many Sons > Son's Creations > Creations of Son's Creations etc.

Even the idea of God having ONE Son suggests a hierarchy: God > Son. Yet the ego would say, noooooo... can't have heirarchies or any concept of separations or multitudes in Heaven. YES YOU CAN. And they are NATURAL, meaning they are not WRONG to be there, and they are not attacks, and they are not ego.

""I am forever an Effect of God."

"Father, I was created in Your Mind, a holy Thought that never left its home. I am forever Your Effect, and You forever and forever are my Cause. As You created me I have remained. Where You established me I still abide, and all Your attributes abide in me, because it is Your Will to have a Son so like his Cause that Cause and Its Effect are indistinguishable. Let me know that I am an Effect of God, and so I have the power to create like You."

You are at the effect of absolutely nothing, except that you are forever an effect solely of God. Being an effect of God means God is the cause of everything you are. He decides what you are, He defines you, He creates you, He sustains you, and His will is constant and permanent and good.

Being an effect of God, however, doesn't mean you are ONLY an effect. Because you are so like God that you must inherit every attribute of Him. This includes the ability to CAUSE, and therefore to create. By God creating you, He has created you to BE A CREATOR. To be causal. And so you inherited His Power and can use it to create. You have done this, creating your own creations, co-created with Him and with everyone else.

It can be very powerful to focus on this. Contemplate the various ways in which you are in relationship to God. Ask yourself, if God is the cause of me, what does that mean? What does it imply? If it is true, and if nothing else is true, what does that mean? This can be very useful in clarifying your relationship with God, and the truth about you. Because only what God established as true about you can be truly true.

You are caused by God.

You have no say in what you are.

You cannot change yourself.

You are perfect because God is perfect.

You are holy and loving because God is holy and loving.

You cannot die because God cannot die.

You are sustained by God at all times.

You are permanent because God is permanently willing you.

You are welcomed and wanted by God, as what God wants.

You are exactly what God wanted you to be.

You have all power because you inherit all power from Him.

You can create like and with Him as a co-creator.

You only have what came from God.

You have nothing that God did not give you.

You have everything real because God shared it with you.

You are defined solely by His will and causation.

You can be affected by nothing but God.

You are eternal and immortal because He is.

You are constantly happy because He makes you happy.

You are a reflection of His love and nature.

You are so like Him that you share everything with Him.

You are never alone because God is in you.

You cannot be attacked because God is the only power.

You are forever safe from harm because God is harmless.

You cannot change what you are even if you try to.

Your salvation and safety are guaranteed.

Your inheritance is permanently given you.

You are what God has given and you give thanks for this.

You know God because He created you by knowing you.

You cannot be separate from Him.

You cannot be abandoned or rejected by Him.

You have freedom because He insists you be free.

You are immortal because He eternally broadcasts you.

You are forever maintained by Him in perfect condition.

Your health is guaranteed because He gives it to you.

You can never be sick or suffer because He can't.

You can't make yourself sin or be guilty.

You can never lose the innocence that He created you as.

You don't have to do anything to earn His love.

You can never sin because He makes it impossible.

You cannot transform yourself into and evil monster.

You have never changed yourself from His divine design.

You must be still totally as He created you.

You cannot be affected because of His permanence.

You are in constant joy because He created you with love.

You can never be alone because He created your brothers.

You will always be friended because He created Holy Spirit.

You will always be protected by His angels.

You can never die because He wills you live forever.

You can create worlds because He gave you that ability.

You are permanently miraculous and you are His miracle.

You are unlimited because He placed no limits on you.

You have constant peace because He keeps you safe.

You are loved forever by His Will.

You are strong because your strength is His strength.

You can see because He shines a light for you to see in.

You are beautiful because He creates you beautiful.

You share everything with everyone He creates.

You are harmless because He does not will you harm.

You can never be lost to Him, He knows where you are.

You are forever encompassed by His heavenly being.

You can never be distant from Him because He is in you.

You are all powerful because He shares His power with you.

You are real because He added you to His reality.

Your identity is defined by Him alone.

You are his Son/Daughter/Child because He created you.

You have nothing real that He did not create.

You have no faults or flaws because He created you perfect.

You lack nothing because He gave you everything.

You have no needs because He supplies all your needs.

You cannot be a body because He is not a body.

You are like God in every way because you are part of Him.

You are God's investment and you have His inheritance.

You are blessed because God has blessed you.

You are a priceless part of God's Kingdom.

You can never change or be changed or change yourself.

You are already divinely perfect and complete in every way.

You have nothing wrong with you and everything is right.

You are pure, clean and new because He creates you new.

You are immaculate and impeccable and magnificent.

You are a shining star in the heavenly Mind of God.

You are what comes from Him alone.

You can only be what he wants you to be.

You do not want to be anything other than He wills.

You have free will because divine creation is freely given.

You are free to be what God intended you to be.

You were not created capable of sin or attack.

You have never sinned or attacked or been attacked.

You cannot oppose His Will because you are His will.

You can only accept and be glad that you are as He desires.

You are forever God's effect and share His causality.

You can do what God can do.

You will always be a child of God, and not his sibling.

You are authored by God and you share His authority.

You are in awe of God because He spans your brothers.

You are a made of light because He is made of light.

You will always be loved by God and God loves you now.

"To all who share the love of God the grace is given to be the givers of what they have received. And so they learn that it is theirs forever."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world, God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

When something has an end. .. just that fact alone... makes it NOT ETERNAL. Because very simply, ETERNAL means WITHOUT END! God ONLY creates that which is eternal because HE is eternal and creates in his own likeness. He can't even CONCEIVE OF anything "ending" or being "not forever." You have eternal life, because God does.

Now if you look around you at this world you made, planet Earth. Look at it. Look for a while and notice that things end. Things come and go. There are seasons. There is birth and death. Things change. There is no sign of permanence anywhere. Not even the solid rocks last forever. Not even planets and stars. It all ends. So how can we sit here and claim that this is ETERNAL? That this is ETERNITY?

Think about this also. In the linear timescale of things, planet Earth came about LONG BEFORE human beings arrived on the planet. The Earth was here before a single soul set foot on it. IF God created it, the world's condition was set up BY GOD, PRIOR to the human race. Think about that for a moment. Because it means that if there was anything going wrong in the world BEFORE human kind came along, it was GOD'S DOING, nor ours.

So take a look at 4 billion years ago. No humans to be seen anywhere on the Earth. What was happening? Well, there were volcanos erupting, causing massive lava flows and killing off all kinds of creatures who were burnt and suffocated to death or destroyed by toxic fumes. There were massive floods the likes of which we haven't seen for millennia, wiping out entire continents of "living creatures", none of whom could do anything to stop it. There were horrendous storms during which all manner of things were zapped to death. There were asteroids impacting the earth and wiping out entire civilizations of animals, dinosaurs and the like. This all was happening before facebook, FYI.

So all that stuff is GOD's DESIGN, right? That was all HIS doing. HE created it. HE put it in place. HE manipulated the weather. He forces the tides to move. By an act of God he struck down an entire continent. If God made it, God SET IT UP, God set the wheels in motion, and it had NOTHING to do with humans.

So what does that mean, it means IF God did that, God is ***EXTREMELY CRUEL***, murderous, malicious, hateful, vengeful, careless, irresponsible, destructive and deadly. Is that REALLY what you think God is like? Is that REALLY how a loving, all powerful, eternal-life giving father acts? Is that REALLY the kind of environment that He would CREATE for his children to live in? Of course it's not. If he created it, he WOULD be *extremely cruel*.

And fortunately, God is NOT cruel. God is loving, kind, gentle, considerate, compassionate, protective, empowering, equal, perfect. He does not go around making death planets or hell words. He does not manufacture suffering. Nor does he calculate the ways that innocent creatures will be made only to be later destroyed. God is not like this. God is life-sustaining, loving, nurturing, holy, peaceful, benevolent.

How can ANYONE go through this Course and come out the other side believing that God made this planet? Are you in denial? I mean... are you just turning a huge blind eye to the things that happen here? And by blind eye I do not mean christ vision. I mean actual DENIAL. It makes NO SENSE to claim that God made a world where this kind of crap happens on a daily basis.

Did you know that over 130,000 human beings DIE every day? And if God made this world, is that not God's fault? YES. He made it possible. He must want it. That's what it means if He made the world. No exceptions. He is all in, and it's not human's fault. Can we really believe this and be sane? There should not be one SINGLE death in God's plan, in God's world. Not one. Yet alone 130,000 a day. I don't know why some people are so in denial of this. Why can't we admit that this world IS VERY CRUEL and because of its cruelty IT CANNOT BE LIKE GOD?

And that perhaps, just maybe... there is ANOTHER WORLD that God DID create which is TOTALLY PERFECT? Our heavenly true natural HOME, where we belong? And perhaps the Course is right when it says we are a STRANGER here in this alien, crumbling, tired old world, which has nothing but the STAMP OF DEATH on it?

"The laws of this world go against your nature"

"To be without a body is to be in your natural state"

When will we wake up and accept that this world is not our home? That we are a fish out of water here? Just visiting, in a dream nightmare. A world which thankfully IS NOT TRUE and will end. Because it's end IS guaranteed, just as it never was begun.

"HOW WILL THE WORLD END?

Can what has no beginning really end? The world will end in an illusion, as it began."

I am grateful for the world GOD created. I am grateful that it is NOT THIS ONE. Because if it was, fucking hell we're all screwed.

"Your creations ARE the logical outcome of His premises. HIS thinking has established them FOR you. They are therefore THERE, EXACTLY where they belong. They belong to your mind, as part of your identification with HIS. But your state of mind and your recognition of WHAT IS IN YOUR MIND depends, at any given moment, on what you believe ABOUT your mind. Whatever these beliefs may be, they are the premises which will determine WHAT YOU ACCEPT INTO YOUR MINDS."

Jesus talking about the fact that you MUST have your own creations in heaven (and plural), because they are the logical consequence/outcome of GOD's premise. Since he is a creator, and creates in his likeness, YOU MUST be a creator who creates in your likeness and his. Thus you MUST have your own creations in heaven.

"His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father."

"A co-creator with the Father (one or many of his sons) must have a Son*. 2 Yet must this Son have been created like Himself. 3 A perfect being, all-encompassing and all-encompassed, nothing to add and nothing taken from; not born of size nor place nor time, nor held to limits or uncertainties of any kind."

This is indisputable fact. You have children in reality.

Not only do you have children in Heaven, you also created them WITH YOUR BROTHERS.

"Accept your brother in this world, and accept NOTHING ELSE, for in him you will find your creations, because he created them WITH you. You will never know that you are co-creator with God, until you learn that your brother is a co-creator with YOU."

And because your brother is a CO-CREATOR with you and with God, your brother MUST be a permanent INDIVIDUAL BEING in heaven. You and your brother and God create multiple individual beings in heaven.

"In number infinite" - ACIM

"My self is ruler of the Universe: It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept. For thus am I led past this world to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

Whatever you are experiencing, comes from whatever mindset you have. Either you're in the ego mindset and thus experiencing a physical world of bodies, or you're in the Holy Spirit's mindset and on the spiritual level.

Thoughts/attitudes/beliefs/truth on the Holy Spirits level is completely incompatible with the ego's level. Never the two shall meet. So the ego is really confined inside its bubble of private insanity.

Within the ego's bubble, it starts to believe it can ACCESS and thus experience, what it is like in the Holy Spirit's world. It actually wants to do this because it wants to become more powerful, to have more domination and control, and to wield what would seem to be the kind of 'special' powers that Holy Spirit apparently has access to.

Except the ego has a problem. It cannot leave its mindset. It can't *actually* get into the Holy Spirit's mind. So it pretends that it can. And as always, it uses separation to do this (the same old story, separate in the name of joining).

The ego takes its own mindset and separates it even further, dividing it into 'good' and 'bad' parts. All still within the ego thought system. So now it labels some parts of itself/the world as good and some parts as bad. It sort of creates the illusion that it can 'borrow' some goodness from the bad stuff and attribute it to the good stuff, to make the good stuff seem extra special and sparkly and important and valuable. And of course that means taking some of the 'bad' that you'd find in this stuff and attributing it to the 'bad stuff' so that it seems extra bad - a repository for nasty dark judgements and hate and so on.

This creates the persona - the spiritualizing portion of the ego mind which tries to focus only on the 'good' interpretion of the world, and simultaneously creates the 'shadow', which is whats left of all the stuff that is 'not good'. For something to seem good, something else HAS to seem bad. To have special love there has to be special hate. To idol worship there has to be 'the enemy' who clearly do not get what's so special about the idol. And to have all the 'spiritual behavior' you must relegate 'unspiritual behavior' to the shadow. You try to hide everything bad IN the shadow, AS the shadow, and you then try to get RID OF the shadow. Tuck it away, hide it, destroy it. And then guess what happens?

The shadow part of the ego mind, the bad stuff, now takes the symbolic form of all of the enemies, attackers, victimizers, causes of sickness and so on. The 'goodies two shoes' part is the facade of special love and special appearances which 'saves face' and makes it seem like you are MORE spiritual ie more SPECIAL than you are. ie, if you sweep all of the sins under the carpet it LOOKS LIKE you're more innocent than you are. The ego's use of the persona is what gives extra weight to the idea that your persona is valuable, important, special, wanted, loveable (in an ego way), desirable, innocent (ego innocence) etc. And so the 'good ego mind' and the 'bad ego mind' are now AT WAR. Reinforcing the good reinforces the bad because it's like a seesaw - you take less load off the good end to make it seem 'lighter', the bad end gets badder and 'heavier/darker'.

So this ego attempt to divide itself and be at war with itself, which creates the persona and the shadow in conflict with each other (e.g. person who everyone always thought was 'good' gets unfairly attacked or sick etc), allows the ego to lend special meaning to some parts of its mindset - a glow of specialness - sacredness - holiness - spirituality. Not genuine holiness or genuine spirituality, but a fake APPEARANCE of it. A facade. This can take the form of huge sacrifices or changes in behavior, level confusion, trying to be good, trying to not be bad, trying to ATTAIN very lofty levels of 'spiritual advancement and capabilities' that make it look like you're very advanced and special.

Since the ego cannot leave its own mindset and cannot actually become spiritual, it just fakes it. It pretends it is spiritual. And it fools itself. And this is what YOU do. This is what I do. This is where we TRY to attain experiences and mindsets which are OUTSIDE of what THIS mindset (our current ego mindset) can achieve. Our ego mind tries to 'be spiritual', while KEEPING the ego mindset. This is because the ego wants to live in two minds. It wants to take the ego self TO the Holy Spirit and to KEEP it and to at the same time TAKE ON the Holy Spirit's power. Obviously this cannot be achieved because the Holy Spirit's mind completely dispels the duality that the ego is based on, and completely undoes it. But that doesn't stop our ego from trying!

So whenever you are KEEPING the ego mindset and are trying to INCLUDE spiritual mindsets in some way, you are spiritualizing.

Whenever you try to express, quote, espouse, affirm or act is if you are being or accessing spiritual truths which are WAY higher than the ego's mindset, and you cannot actually ACCESS and experience the level of mind where those truths can be EXPERIENCED, then you are spiritualizing.

So let's see... course quotes and concepts... for example the idea of oneness. You could say to someone like, "it doesnt matter because we are all one". Bullshit. This isn't an EXPERIENCE of the truth of that statement. You can only experience that at a level ABOVE the holy spirit in the mind of HEAVEN. That's the only place where this truth is experiential. Remember, truth is what you can experience. If you cannot experience it, you're kidding yourself every time you make statements about it AS IF you are living it.

Or how about even saying, "I am immortal spirit"... well.. not as an ego you're not. Who is saying you are immortal spirit? It's the ego. You can only BE immortal spirit when you have completely let go of the entire ego mindset. So this information is just... information from another world, from another dimension, another state of mind. Thus it has no PRACTICAL USE for you here, on the ego level, because you cannot EXPERIENCE it here. So it remains lofty. It remains a concept. And then if you spend time just regurgitating the concept, stating it, quoting it, because it 'sounds spiritual', then you are spiritualizing.

You're taking very high truths from very high levels of mind, which require AT LEAST a total atunement to Holy Spirit's mindset AND a total relinquishment of the ego's way of experiencing, and are trying to bring them INTO the ego's mindset. This is spiritualizing. Adding spiritual value to a valueless system. Borrowing spiritual truth from a level of mind that is beyond where you are at. That's faking it. That's spiritualizing your ego. And what happens then is that the best you can do is quote these things and say them and affirm them as if doing so is EXPERIENCING them when in fact you cannot experience them yet, and so they remain MENTAL, and that makes them INTELLECTUAL. Thus you end up intellectualizing the course's truths, you intellectualize higher levels of reality and you pretend that doing so means you are experiencing them here and now. You're not. The ego is deceiving you and trying to be special. And this makes these truths BECOME nothing more than specialness. And then you end up sounding like a bliss ninny, lol

Anyway. I'm sort of expressing this as it's coming to me.

You need to be realistic about the level that you're on, what mind you are IN, the scope of that mind, what is OUTSIDE that mind, what you can actually EXPERIENCE right now, and stop hitting yourself over the head with these lofty spiritualizing ego-inflating truths which you can't even experience yet. You need to focus only on the truths which you can PRACTICALLY APPLY, ie BE EXPERIENCED, to help you to transition your EXPERIENCE from what you are experiencing now in the ego mind to what Holy Spirit will allow you to experience in his mind. If it does not involve your experience, and if it is not practical and you can't actually USE it to change your experience, it is intellectual ego noise trying to spiritualize itself.

I know that I have done this over any over again, believing that if I could just say the correct thing or think the correct thought or understand the correct concept or say it in a special way, that meant that I am BEING IT. I believed that my intellect had the capability of experiencing the truth. Hah. It doesn't. The intellect is only activated when you are not able to LIVE the truth, but are trying to incorporate it into your experience, so you can inject it into your THOUGHTS, which are fantasies, and you can pretend you are living it, but really you are not. If it's stuck in your mind and isn't in your heart or in your feeling or in your actual direct experience of 'reality', then it's not really your truth right now. And if you accumulate a lot of that 'information', no matter how spiritual it is or how lofty the metaphysics, if you are not EXPERIENCING it, then you are spiritualizing your ego. This is what I have done over and over again.

All you are capable of is letting go of the ego mind and the way of experiencing that that mind gives you, and transitioning your experience of reality to the holy spirit's mind where you can experience HIS level of truth fully. Where you can LIVE IT. A course in miracles is all about LIVING the truth and PRACTICING it and PRACTICALLY EXPERIENCING it. The rest is just ego noise.

As Jesus says, "the separation has occurred". The separation is another name for the fall of man. We did in fact "fall asleep" and dream of another world in which we believed in and thus made/maintained "en ego". It has not been fully created because it is not created, but made. But we DID have the tiny mad idea and enter into dreaming.

"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."

In heaven, God thinks holographically. The whole, which God is, creates. Anything he creates must be like himself. Therefore his sons/creations must also be completely whole. To be whole, and given God is everything, they must share all of God. So now you have parts, which are wholes in and of themselves, which also share with and are joined with the whole in "oneness". All the creations are of like kind, whole like God. And also the sons of God who are wholes also create whole children.

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is perfectly natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you."

"The soul is the idea of self fullness."

"The soul has not only been created perfect it has been fully created. There is no emptiness (unwholeness) in it."

So we have this whole, which creates more wholes, which are whole as individual beings and who also share the whole with all other wholes.

"God who encompasses all being (is the whole) nevertheless created separate (distinct parts within the whole) beings who have everything (the whole) individually (as whole sons/beings) and want to share it (sharing is fundamental to reality, true sharing is oneness) to increase their joy."

The part where the separation comes in is, where a part, which is a whole joined to the whole, attempts to disconnect itself from sharing the whole. It tries to cut itself off from the whole of God and from its brothers that were previously sharing everything with it.

"Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply BEING."

So a son of God puts a fence around what appears to be himself, the "part as a whole" individual self, and tries to isolate it from the sharing/communicating-with portion of itself. It tries to "become separated" from sharing with anyone or anything. This turns it into a "part which is not sharing". Which is the idea of selfishness.

"The ego is the idea of selfishness."

Having become "separated off" ie isolated from sharing with the family, we are now "the separated ones" and we have a "separated self". But this doesn't mean we invented a self at this point, it just means we took our self and imprisoned it in a body concept.

"The body is clearly a device for separation."

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

By imposing upon ourselves ideas of "not sharing with the whole", we necessarily shut out some portion of our self which was shared with the whole. And that now means that we are seeing and experiencing ourselves as "partly myself", or a part which has no wholeness. This "partial self" is hemmed in by illusions of separation, and it confuses itself with these illusions and believes they are true of it, thus defining it. This produces "the ego" in the mind, which is basically a belief by a fundamentally whole/joined entity that it is not whole/joined. It's self denial. The ego is the idea of what you are not, which is an attempt to destroy your whole self, which leads to death.

"The body is the means by which God's Son returns to sanity. Though it was made to fence him into hell without escape, yet has the goal of Heaven been exchanged for the pursuit of hell. The Son of God extends his hand to reach his brother, and to help him walk along the road with him. Now is the body holy. Now it serves to heal the mind that it was made to kill."

To awaken we have to undo the illusions of imprisonment by not believing in them, opening and expanding our sense of identity to align our mind with our soul, reconnect with God and the sonship through total sharing (holy relationship), and thereby disappear the egoic selfish idea of being "separated off". Thus we regain and re-inherit our inheritance from God, reclaim our identity as part of Christ, and resume our position in the sonship. Wholeness is restored and we return to being whole (aware of it) and to being "one with God", ie sharing everything with God and the whole Kingdom.

The thoughts that arise in your mind, have a cause. They are produced BY the mind as a result of thinking. They do not show up out of nowhere. Nor are they generated without intention, because "there are no neutral thoughts."

Ego thoughts are reactions, or effects, in response to a perceived external cause. They happen in a split mind in a state of dissociation. One part of the mind sees itself as causing the other part of the mind, and this produce effects. The effects are thoughts of judgement, reaction, threat and fear. These reactions also produce all the ego emotions.

If you believe there is a cause outside of yourself with the power to do something to you, you will have a "reaction". However you are reacting to your own perception that you are being threatened or caused against your will. The belief in this cause splits off part of the mind and pits it against the rest of you. And you can't believe in being caused without also believing there are effects.

The mind generates both the sense of being causal, and the sense of being affected by that cause. ie that you are "doing this to yourself". In the split mind, ie the ego, this dissociation leads to all reactions.

So for example if you perceive there is an external threat of some kind, or a person having power to affect you, your mind will not only believe in being caused, it will also believe in being affected. Cause and effect alway exist together. Your mind will manufacture what it believes should be the "effects", results or consequences, corresponding to the severity of the threat.

This is also because there is a hierarchy of illusions. If you believe there is a very big threat, you WILL have much bigger reaction. The intensity, size, seriousness, importance or value of the perceived danger, which is a belief in YOUR mind, produce a corresponding effect.

For example there was a time when my wife had cancer, and when this was diagnosed, and through the later surgery, I was stricken with intense fear thoughts. And they would not stop erupting. They were strong and persistent and were in direct response to "how serious" I believed the situation was.

It was interesting though that because of this intensity, I got to see first hand the way the hierarchy of illusions works. The ego, in effect, insists that you SHOULD react with a given amount of severity, based on how severe the cause is. Bigger problems call forth bigger reactions. More serious problems have stronger "temptation" and inspire much larger responses.

So I at least got to see that the only reason I was having such a big fear response, with my mind flooded with terribly fearful thoughts every few seconds, was because of this supposed hierarchy. I didn't HAVE to have such a big reaction, and I shouldn't have been having it based solely on the seriousness of the supposed situation. But there it was. Big perceived threats, produce big reactionary thoughts.

You can see in the course a trend whereby it's asking us to not only transcend the hierarchy, but also to stop being affected by external causes. It's moving us towards a reintegration of the dissociated parts of mind, and to stop attacking yourself. And thereby it's bringing about "peace of mind", calmness and quietness of thought, simply as a result of removing your BELIEF IN the hierarchy of illusions.

It would be denial to say that your mind can be peaceful while still having attack thoughts, while still having ego thoughts, while still being plagued by emotional reactions, or while you're still riddled with fear. There is no peace there. Peace arises from the ABSENCE of ego thoughts, having been placed with God-like thinking, which leads to only loving, peace-inducing experiences.

A mind which does not believe the hierarchy and is not tempted by external causation, does not HAVE these reactions. This is reiterated in the secret of salvation, ie "you would not react AT ALL to figures in a dream that you knew YOU were dreaming." By remembering its a dream and its coming from us, we step out of the "reaction mode". And if you can't react, you can't have reactionary thoughts or emotions. And this leads to the mind becoming quiet and undisturbed.

So really it is your mind that makes the ego thoughts. And it makes them both in the form of attack thoughts, and in the form of reactionary thoughts. Where there is attack there is cause, and where there is cause there is effect. YOU make the thoughts that keep flooding your mind with fear, based on false perceptions. Without false perceptions, you have no basis for CAUSING negative effects because you aren't thinking in an attacking way.

So it's not so much that you have to spend time trying to watch thoughts come and go, or try to ignore them, or deny them, or control them. It's more a matter of needing to heal your beliefs and undo the split in the mind, so that you don't PRODUCE all these attacking thoughts.

What this really points to is that, your mind creates its own suffering, your mind creates all symptoms, your mind creates all reactions, your mind puts in place all bodily states, and you are responsible for healing the split so that you don't MAKE these things in the first place.

Here are some quote which speak to miracles or miraculousness being something that does not depend on perception, suggesting that miracles are not "shifts in perception", but rather that miracles are creative expressions of love which can *produce* shifts in perception.

This is because MIND and PERCEPTION are two different levels. Mind was mind before perception was introduced. Perception is a layer of interpretation on top of the mind. Miracles come through the mind from God's mind, as expressions of MAXIMAL LOVE, and CAUSE perception to change to line up with the mind. "Miracles are a corrective device introduced into the MIND by me." But the miracle is occurring and coming FROM the mind-level of love, producing secondary EFFECTS in the perceptual realm.

Decoupling miracle mindedness from perceptual shifts, and seeing the shifts as "effects" of miracles, allows us to see that you can be consistently miraculous when your perception has nothing left to shift. Simply because miracles originate BEYOND PERCEPTION, which is why they can CORRECT it.

This is also why we become MORE miracle minded and more miraculous and more able to constantly perform miracles, as we uncover love and our mind lines up with God's will and power. Being miraculous isn't temporary. We are a PERMANENT MIRACLE and miraculous creation is our nature. Which is why "Miracles are supposed to be happening all the time. When they aren't, something has gone wrong."

"12a. Miracles are thought-creations. Thought can create lower-order or higher-order realities. This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

"23 ... YOU are a miracle. God creates only "that which, or one who, is of surpassing excellence or merit". Man is capable of this kind of creation, too, being in the image and likeness of his own Creator. Anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the Creations of Light are real."

"Prayer is the medium of miracles, not because God created perceptions, but because God created YOU. At the beginning of this course, we said that YOU are a miracle. Therefore, the miracle worker is a miracle NOT of his own creation."

"Each *Soul* knows God completely. This IS the miraculousness of the *Soul*. The fact that every each *Soul* has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

"9. Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of love, which are ALWAYS miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws."

"4. All miracles mean life and God is the giver of life."

"27. A miracle is a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers."

"38 - The Holy Spirit is the mechanism of miracles."

"43 - Miracles arise FROM a miraculous state of mind, or a state of miracle-readiness."

The ONLY model for a correctly functioning family, is God's model of Heaven.

It is very simple.

God creates all children of God (Sons of God/Souls) simultaneously.

All of these children are perfectly equal and identical and loved equally. They all love each other equally.

NONE of the children are the CAUSE of each other. They are not Father OR Children to each other. There is NO CAUSALITY between them. They neither cause nor affect each other.

God is their only Father.

God's family has only these levels:

1. God

2. All of His children as equals

3. The children of each child

At all times, you and your brothers are ALWAYS the direct creation of God, and there is nothing else in-between you and God. You do not accrue a lineage of grandparents.

Each son of God also creates, and extends God's love, to produce additional beings who are the children OF children. These are the ONLY part of reality that are truly children of YOU - creations within your being. These children remain only in Heaven and do not incarnate into bodies.

The only correct functioning then is to recognize that ALL CHILDREN OF GOD share the same single Creator - the Holy Father/Mother - God.

This means that there is absolutely ZERO cause or effect between individual sons. Your brother does not cause you. You do not cause your brother. Therefore THERE IS NO horizontal causality between brothers. All you can do is share love with "others".

Anything else that seems to happen, any other dynamic of not being equal to others, any ARTIFICIAL relationship structure such as human parents vs human children, or bosses vs employees, or strangers doing something to you, or you being able to attack others, or some group having power over you, or laws which work against God's family structure, is DYSFUNCTIONAL.

It becomes inherently dysfunctional the instant that you believe your brother can or does do something to you. This is literally the belief that he is the cause of you, meaning you think he is your creator or father, and you are his child. You are positioning yourself as the effect of him. You are NOT the effect of any brother. You are only the effect of God.

Believing otherwise instantly leads to dysfunction where suddenly it seems possible that individual beings are able to attack each other. "Attack" in all its form is an attempt to implement HORIZONTAL CAUSALITY, which the Course refers to as "horizontal perception". Within this horizontal perception, it seems that one brother causes another, one object causes another to react, one cause on the SAME LEVEL causes effects on the SAME LEVEL.

Your brother is on the same level as you. There is no causality on the same level. This level you are on is the EFFECT of a higher level. To believe that your brother is the cause or effect of you is LEVEL CONFUSION.

How about this. How about you recognize that NEVER EVER has there EVER been a cause coming from ANY BROTHER EVER. All throughout history, all throughout your life, all of your experiences, even in childhood, NEVER has there been causality coming from other people toward you, and you have NEVER done anything to anyone else. And right now, you are 100% responsible for EVERYTHING YOU CHOOSE TO DO TO YOURSELF, an there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE that can happen to you against your will because there is NO OTHER CAUSE on the level of your brothers or the level of the world.

What if it is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE for any brother to cause or attack you EVER? And what if no-one has EVER done so? Where does that leave you? It leaves you in a position where you MUST acknowledge that ONLY YOU are the chooser who makes stuff happen to you. Anything you are experiencing YOU MUST HAVE PUT THERE. Anything you feel you want to feel. Any upset you have you choose. Any sickness is put there by yourself. And if you do not choose die nothing can cause you to die. This is the truth of the Course.

No-one else ever causes you anything. You are 100% responsible for everything. "You chose sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

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

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

SO.....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIS WORLD, is NOT God's creation.

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

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

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

"Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself, "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are no streets where people walk alone and separately. There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever." This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER."

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

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust even as you made it.

This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world. But the REAL world (heaven) HAS the power to touch you even here, BECAUSE YOU LOVE IT (heaven). And what you call with love WILL come to you. Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it, from every part of this strange world you made (earth), and do not want. The only effort you need make, ***to give this world away in glad exchange*** for what you did NOT make, is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

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

There is a huge difference between CREATING, and MAKING. "The world you MADE" is NOT a world that's been CREATED.

Creation is the perfect extension of the whole of God. God creates perfect children who are perfect mirror image reflections of Himself. They are given ALL of God. They are equipped to create fully and wholly, just like God, with no lack or limitation. The creations of these creators are also just as equipped to create perfection and wholeness.

At every step of the extension, there is no loss of abilities, no differences, no partial inheritance, no lack, no interruption to creative power, and no interference with sharing absolutely everything of God. Every created being shares the entire whole of creation and is fully unlimited in every way. The creation is a continuous line which extends forever as a whole, which creates wholes, who in turn create wholes, on and on and on. Each created being has ALL THE ABILITIES of its parent, and what is true of the father is true of the son.

Now, **MAKING** is not like this at all.

Making is based on a belief that there is lack, limitation, restriction, a lack of inheritance, a lack of perfection, differences, something missing, and is actually the idea of death. To make, rather than create, is an attempt to put the brakes on extension and bring creation to a halt. It is the attempt to bring about an END to creation, so that that which is made is NOT ABLE to create, CANNOT replicate itself in its own likeness, and completely fails to extend.

The collapsing down of creative power, the distorting and interruption of perfect extension, the mangling of God's will, the twisting of reality, and the dreaming of creating something UNLIKE God, has produced THIS WORLD, which is the idea of sin and death, and is TOTALLY UNLIKE THE FATHER.

It is through MAKING, which is actually an attempt to NOT CREATE ANYTHING, and is also an attempt to deny creation and bring creation to a STOP, that we "made this world." Planet Earth, and the rest of this universe, is "the world you made" per ACIM terms.

When you look at this world you can see WHY this is true. Nothing in this world can extend. Nothing in this world can create a perfect mirror image reflection of itself. What is true of any parent here is NOT perfectly true of its children. Forms and bodies and physical objects are NOT able to extend themselves indefinitely, nor can they create more of their own self in their own likeness.

This is because the world is fundamentally the picture of the crucifixion of God's son, it was MADE as an attack on God/Creation, it was made so that God could enter not, AND it runs completely CONTRARY to your nature. It is the nature of your soul to extend God's being forever. It is this world's nature to PUT A STOP to that. This happens at the level of PHYSICAL MATTER, not perception. Matter is fundamentally made of the thought of the idea of an end to life, the thought of separation.

Through making, we invented "an end to creation" and "an end to life". Making, is death. It produces a condensing of expression, a collapsing of unlimitedness, an imposing of limits, the manifestation of FORMS of error, the production of pictures of sin, and the solidification of the idea of grinding to a halt. This forms PHYSICAL MATTER, which is extremely resistant and dense. Jesus says we made this world from UNWILLINGNESS, which is why it is very hard to change it.

Truly then, this whole universe is what it looks like when you try to stop the extension of God's creation, resist life, deny immortality, reject God's will, oppose the nature of Heaven, and try to bring about DEATH. It literally ENDS in death, and it is literally MADE OF the idea of death, because in this world ALL PHYSICAL FORMS CANNOT CREATE OR EXTEND.

You take a computer and you design a car. The computer operates the machinery and robots and the people play their part to build the car. But, now because the car has been defined as specific forms, with limitations imposed on it, it has now lost the ability that the engineers have. The car, cannot create, other cars.

Even the human body and the bodies of other "death forms" are not capable of creating a perfect reflection of themselves. Human children may inherit traits from one parent and not another, or even from prior generations. None of them are alike and none of them represent the truth of the parent. All forms are different and lacking and every body is incomplete, keeping the rest of existence outside of itself and isolated.

This world, quite literally, down to the particles and energy (really thought) that it seems to be made of, is MADE OF the IDEA - the thought - of "what is it like if life comes to an end" or "what is it like if unlimited extension is limited and stops".... and this is the idea of **death** - the END of eternal life. "Without the idea of death, there is no world." There literally CANNOT BE a planet Earth without the idea of death, which means, without the assertion that EXTENSION MUST STOP, CREATION MUST END, and therefore that LIFE IS ENDED.

Life, REAL LIFE, is of Heaven. "Only the creations of light are real." "There is NO LIFE outside of Heaven." Earth, which is "outside" of Heaven, HAS NO LIFE. It is a picture of death. Real life extends forever, has immortality, lives without sickness or suffering, is fully and wholly creative, ONLY CREATES WHOLENESS, and extends life itself forever. This ONLY happens in Heaven.

Fake life, which is really various degrees of the idea of death, even if the body is "holy" or "a picture of immortality", is STILL A DREAM OF DEATH, and still a separated state, and still NOT perfect unlimited extension of God's being. This world, this planet, your body, my body, are all illusions of life MIXED WITH the idea of death, and so are all limited.

All "semi life, semi death forms" here, WILL PERISH, because they were MADE in the idea of EXCLUDING GOD, which means they are made WITHOUT LIFE, and they are literally made NOT TO LIVE FOREVER. They are LITERALLY an expression of an attempt to MAKE LIFE END. All dreams, are dreams of death. Therefore all things MADE automatically have an END. "The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came". The world WILL END. The dream WILL END. It has to because it has ENDING built into it. It is made FROM the idea of the END of existence.

Jesus says "A world which attacks itself and denies its own existence cannot exist." This is earth. Earth is a DENIAL OF EXISTENCE. It's an attempt to reject Heaven, an attempt to OPPOSE Heaven in every way, and an attempt to assert "there is no heaven." This world was MADE BY YOU from the notion that God's world, God's creation, DOES NOT EXIST, and is the attempt to prove it, by picturing the idea of "world does not exist". This world, is a picture of NOT EXISTING. It is denial of life and denial of self. And that is death. And it is non-existence. WHICH IS WHY IT DOES NOT EXIST.

Similarly, ONLY CREATION IS REALITY. Anything which extends forever perfectly has eternal life and is REAL. Anything which is MADE, which is NOT CREATED, and which is the illusion of a resistance to reality, IS UNREAL, and DEOS NOT EXIST. Therefore, because this world is the world you ***MADE***, NOT the world you "created", IT HAS NOT BEEN CREATED. It has not been created by God because God only creates eternal life and perfect extension. This world IS NOT EXTENSION AT ALL. It is NOT CREATION. It is MAKING. And making is the fiction of opposing God's will. THIS WORLD IS NOT GOD'S WILL. IT HAS NOT BEEN CREATED. IT DOES NOT EXIST. THERE IS NO WORLD!!!

A light way to look at things and a dark way. It is similar to how, from above the clouds, the sun shines on everything, and yet beneath the clouds, everything looks dark and threatening.

Looking back toward the light with obstacles in the way, creates the impression of threat and danger and doom and gloom. When the clouds are there, the light seems obscured and it feels like you've got walls keeping you from it. It seems like you're trapped in a prison and that everything is against you.

Looking toward the light from a position of being separated from the light, by the clouds, creates the ego. The ego is an attempt to turn around and look back at God and find him blocked from vision as if he doesn't exist. And when the clouds are heavy, it will feel as if God doesn't exist, as if there is no light.

Shifting back into alignment with the source of light, means getting "above the battlefield", through and beyond the clouds, past the illusion of separateness and self importance, and turning around 180-degrees so that you too are a part of the light that shines outward. You need to become a sunbeam, of sorts, extending love outward.

Looking up to the sun with clouds between you is akin to the ego looking inside at itself. The ego wants to catch a glimpse of itself as if it really exists as a separate identity. What you are 'is', and you can't identify it as something separate from you. Yet when you're "under the weather" and trying to wrestle with upsets and darkness you keep trying to look 'at' yourself, similar to how you keep trying to look back at the sun. You don't really need to look at yourself or to look at the source of light, you need to BE IT.

Changing your vantage point changes your perspective. If your vantage point is rooted in your ego then your ego will do the looking and it will look toward the clouds and tell you the clouds are real and that you're separate from God. This will of course be frightening and horrifying. And it's not true, but it will seem true, and you will feel stuck.

Changing your vantage point to that of Holy Spirit (the sun) changes everything. It changes how everything looks to you and what it means. Your light shines ONTO everything you see illuminating it and revealing its beauty and happiness. It helps you to see clearly and fully. It helps you to not be deceived by the strange shadows that play out on the landscape when you are "in the dark". And it helps you to remember there is ALWAYS another way, ALWAYS a better way than any ego viewpoint.

And you need to be reminded... the light of God is always present and always available and always true and always powerful, and no amount of ego or darkness or horror will EVER obliterate it or shut it out or make it permanently lost. EVER. The light is always stronger than the darkness because the darkness is weakness. The light is always there. It is sanity. It is reason. It is truth. Sooner or later you have to admit to it and allow it and accept it and be it. You can prolong suffering but you cannot make it permanent. The light is calling to you to join it and to laugh at the silliness of the ego's mistakes.

God loves you.

God, Who encompasses all being, created BEINGS (plural) who have everything INDIVIDUALLY, but who want to share it to increase THEIR (plural) joy.

Nothing real can be increased except by sharing. (this is very key, God HAD to share ie create in order to increase, because he was already complete, and it was HIS JOY to create).

That is why God created you (talking about you as ONE INDIVIDUAL). Divine Abstraction takes joy in sharing (notice that sharing means GIVING by creating). That is what creation means.

"How," "what" and "to whom" are IRRELEVANT, because real creation gives everything, since it can create only like itself. (God creates in his total likeness!)

Remember that in the Kingdom there is no difference between having and being, as there is in existence. In the state of being the mind gives everything always."

This is from Chapter 4, the illusions of the ego: creation and communication.

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT.

God's miracles are as total as His Thought, because they ARE His thoughts. God shines in them all with perfect light."

In heaven, in God's mind, all of God is in all parts of God. Not just that his left hand is on one side and his right hand is on another, so to speak, but all parts of him are simultaneously in all places.... if we can speak of it in terms of space. This is God's omnipresence. Not just that He is everywhere, but ALL of Him is in EVERY location at once. In this sense, God is kind of a "blur".

Similarly, when God has a thought, this thought is alive. It is a living being. His thoughts produce souls. The thing is, since God is whole, absolute, and omnipresent, when He creates or has a thought, it produces something which is also WHOLE, complete, omnipresent. This leads to the interesting and mind-boggling situation, that there are now TWO WHOLE THINGS. God and His child.

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they, were created neither partially nor in part."

"The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created. There is no lack in it."

His children are not partial children. They are not finite children. They are infinite, absolute, complete, whole, eternal, endless, unlimited beings. They are completely whole in and of themselves. Which means God, who is whole, and who is whole in every part of Himself, creates a part (a thought) which itself JUST AS WHOLE as God is. And now there are two wholes.

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is perfectly natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you." (this is holographic - the whole in every part!)

Now, logically speaking, to the ego, this is impossible. It makes no sense whatsoever. How can there be two wholes? But heaven's nature has an attribute unlike spacetime which makes it completely possible. That attribute is the fact that everything OVERLAPS AND IS SHARED.

An analogy in spacetime would be that you literally occupy the same space as another person's body. That your atoms occupy the same space. They literally are right on top of each other, overlaid like two layers in one. This isn't possible in spacetime because it would cause atoms to explode, ie death would occur. But in heaven it's opposite - and life occurs.

God and his children are one, in that they are each a whole in and of themselves, and yet are so united that they SHARE and OVERLAP everything. One soul has all of God, full access, total unlimited complete "ownership" of everything God has. AND so does another soul. And another. And another. Each soul has everything.

In this world it's not possible to share anything because everything is finite. If I give you some pizza I can only give you half otherwise I'll have none for myself. But in heaven this doesn't happen. Both can have the whole pizza simultaneously. This is possible because they truly SHARE everything. They both simultaneously have full total access to everything. We both get the same full pizza. This unlimited sharing is oneness.

This same dynamic is actually what Jesus is referring to as "miraculous". This is the miraculous nature of the soul. It's able to have everything, while also sharing everything with others. And therefore there IS EVERYTHING LEFT for another soul to have everything.

Similarly when God creates you he does not "run out of" himself. Since God gives you everything, ego would say there is no God left over at the end. This is nonsense. God gives everything AND retains everything. He does not diminish by creating, he increases creation. This defies ego logic but is completely true and miraculous.

Actually it's not even possible TO create anything real, generally speaking, because if reality is already whole and infinite you cannot ADD to it. BUT, God HAS added to it, miraculously, not by "tacking on" extra being, but by SHARING HIMSELF. Making room, so to speak, within his own being, that he SHARES WITH His creations, so that no "extra room" is needed.

"Nothing real can be increased, EXCEPT by sharing."

This is only possible in a system where all the creations are sharing fully with each other, therefore overlapping fully, one with each other and cooperative. It doesn't require the cessation of individuality, only the cessation of conflict. Or more to the point, the absence of selfishness, which is the opposite of sharing.

All things that are real, are permanently miraculous. They are miraculous because they defy the strict boundaries, exclusions, boxes, limits and selfishness of the ego's thought system. In heaven it is not a problem for multiple individuals to have everything for themselves at the same time. This is impossible in this world. It was the selfishness and exclusion and attempt to NOT SHARE, that produced the entire ego thought system and all of space and time.

What that means is, in God's holographic thought system, every part of God, every individual being, is just as totally whole as God is, at the same time, without there being any issues of "no room" or "private ownership" or "hoarding" or selfishness. It's all totally shared. Shared so much that you are literally one with all your brothers. You are literally THEM, in a sense, because you SHARE everything with them. Yet you are still two, and are still brothers. There are many children of God who are all one.

What some people are calling a paradox, is actually MIRACULOUS. It's paradoxical to say many individual beings can co-exist and have everything at once. But miraculously they can. God is a miracle worker. "You are a miracle." "God's miracles." "Miracle are a universal blessing from God". God is ENTIRELY MIRACULOUS AT ALL TIMES. And being miraculous - having this nature - of shared minds, equality, oneness with others, is completely natural. It's how we're supposed to be all the time. It's why being a miracle worker is permanent.

This is also why miracles are not mere shifts in perception because the fact is that you are uncovering your PERMANENTLY MIRACULOUS nature. Your soul is always miraculous. You are meant to be miraculous all the time, every day. This is why "miracles are natural, when they are not happening something has gone wrong" and "every day should be devoted to miracles." This is also why Jesus is STILL miraculous even after accepting atonement.

Miracles are not the healing EFFECTS that occur, or the shifts. They are a REMEDY, a cause of healing - a spark of life which resurrects. Healing or shifting is the effect. When you are done shifting, you are STILL miraculous. If shifts were miracles you would stop being miraculous when you reached the atonement. You don't. You are in the process of RETURNING TO being miraculous FOREVER, uncovering your miraculous nature, and resuming the nature of your soul. All beings of light are eternally miracles and eternally miraculous.

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite, and everywhere without all limit. Only Love creates, and only like Itself. There was no time when all that It created was not there. Nor will there be a time when anything that It created suffers any pain. Forever and forever are God's Thoughts exactly as They were and as They are, unchanged through time and after time is done." W320W111 urtext.

Many people have an idea in their head, before they even come to ACIM, that reality must be some kind of "oneness". It's based on their idea of God as "one great big giant thing". But A Course in Miracles has a very different definition of God and reality, so this idea of oneness has to be thrown in the trash if you want to do ACIM.

ACIM's model is that God is a creator. God is a cause. God creates many things. God has children. God has created an entire sonship comprising many sons. God's children are also creators who cause the creation of living beings. And God has also created a permanent Holy Spirit, and angels.

Without the idea of God as a creator of many things, there is no notion of God having ANY sons. There is no way to explain the authority problem or its undoing. God is now the one who separates and has to atone. There is no way for mind to be in the service of spirit. There is no way for you to be as God created you. There is no way for you to have permanent brothers to share with so that you're not alone forever. And without God as cause, you cannot have an inheritance.

ACIM's model is very very fundamental on this. God HAS to be thought of as your creator, the source, out of whom not only you but also others are created. God has to be acknowledged as your father otherwise you cannot share his power or give his gifts. God has to be seen as the cause of you and of everyone else, otherwise you are at the effect of your brothers. God has to be fundamentally acknowledged as having created A FAMILY.

This flies in the face of the idea that reality is just one thing, or its one giant expanse of energy, or there is only God being alone, or God doesn't cause anything, or that there is a kind of oneness that is all just a great big "one" without anything in it or any parts or anything to share with.

If you like, A Course in Miracles is a kind of "creationist" teaching, not that God created the Earth and bodies but God IS a creator of something. And that makes it impossible that reality just be one big blob or some void or some kind of giant emptiness or expanse of singularity. This fundamental idea of reality being "a oneness with nothing in it" IS NOT what ACIM teaches.

If someone wants a path that teaches that God is just sitting there on his own and that you are him in his entirety, then you really are barking up the wrong tree by taking this course. ACIM is not for you if you want to believe that God has no family. Or that YOU in turn are not a co-creator with your own creations. Your mind HAS TO EXTEND in order to live and to be healthy, just as God's does, which automatically implies that creation is the only true nature of anything real. Without it God is dead.

ACIM is a teaching on cause and effect, with God as cause of his effects, who inherit everything from him, and in turn become causes with effects. Reality has to be accepted as a very large "place" within which God hosts a great many things he has created. And which is forever increasing. An entire Kingdom of souls and beings and life. A Kingdom of unlimited thoughts and power and creation.

If that's not what you "like" or you think reality is not like that, then you probably should chose a different path which frames God as an inert blob. Trying to force ACIM to BE that path is just mangling its teaching, creating denial in your mind, splitting you away from the truth and producing a fairytale about not existing with no brothers to relate to. It's a shame that some people consistently assert that they have no self and there is no one else. If that were true, God has no creative power whatsoever.

God has a mind. God has awareness. God has many thoughts. God has creations. God has a Kingdom. God has power. God has a will. God has love. God feels. God knows. God be's. Gid us an author. God causes. God shares himself. God communicates. God has relationships. God is far more than just some expanse of existence.

It is not possible to PERCEIVE **within** reality, because there is no perception WITHIN reality. Perception is an interpretative process based on judgement. You can evaluate reality and PERCEIVE it, but this isn't the SAME as knowing it or DIRECTLY experiencing it.

"Only your vision can convey to you what YOU can see. It reaches you directly, without a need to be interpreted to you."

Perception ends before you enter the Kingdom, this does not mean that you cannot SEE in some manner WITHIN the Kingdom.

"Only the mind CAN SEE."

In fact, after an extensive search, I found a great deal of evidence in ACIM that mind in fact DOES have a permanent ability to see. And that even God can see. This seeing does not use PERCEPTION, however. It uses cognition, recognition, and knowledge.

It is possible to KNOW reality, and to RE-COGNIZE God and your brothers. This knowing is a DIRECT experience of what IS THERE. You KNOW it, in awareness. This may well not entail BODIES, but you are SPIRIT, and spirit can be known and SEEN. The son of God can also be seen. YOU are a perfect shaft of light, which can be seen. The great rays can also be seen and they stretch to infinity.

Perception is a way of seeing based on JUDGING or EVALUATING what is there. It is interpretative. Beyond perception, WITHOUT judgement or interpretation, you can directly KNOW what is there. This knowing isn't just some fact or piece of information of non-visual experience. You can SEE GOD and His Creation - the universe of love. Knowing is UNDERNEATH perception and provides direct awareness of reality.

I will present below only a small segment of all the quotes I found. These ones speak more directly to seeing in God, seeing God, seeing His Son, God's ability to see, beyond perception, and beyond vision.

"Perception can reach everywhere under His guidance."

"Perception changes, made to take the place of changeless knowledge. Yet is truth unchanged. It cannot be perceived, but only known." (does not mean it cannot be SEEN!)

"To perceive the truth is not the same as knowing it."

"The innocence of God is the true state of ***the mind of His Son.*** ***In this state, man's mind DOES see God***, and because ***he sees Him as he Is***"

"God knows His Children with perfect certainty. He Created them by knowing them. ***He recognizes them*** perfectly."

"Blessed are the pure in heart for ***they shall see God***" is another way of saying the same thing. Only ***the innocent CAN see God.***"

"The soul never leaves ***the sight of God***"

"ONLY what God creates, or what man creates with the same will, ***has any real existence***. ***This, then, is all that the innocent can see.***"

"The wish to see calls down the grace of God upon your eyes, and brings the gift of light that makes sight possible. ***Will you behold your brother? God is glad to have you look on him.***"

"***See His creations as His Son***, for yours were created in honor of Him. The universe of love does not stop because you do not see it, nor have your closed eyes lost the ability to see. ***Look upon the glory of His creation***, and you will learn what God has kept for you."

"***You will see that God Himself*** is where his body is. Before this light the body disappears"

"***God is in everything I see*** because God is in my mind."

"***God is the light in which I see.***"

"***You cannot see apart from God*** because you cannot be apart from God."

"When you ***look upon knowledge***, all judgment is automatically suspended, and this is the process that enables ***recognition to REPLACE perception.***"

"Judgment is the process on which perception but not ***cognition*** rests." ... "It is ***perfectly possible to look on reality without judgment***, and merely ***KNOW it is there*** By knowing this, you are not doubting its reality at all."

"The innocent see safety, and ***the pure see God within His Son***, and look unto the Son to lead them to the Father."

Your natural state of being is:

1) God is the source of love and extends you

2) You receive everything from God and extend it further

3) Your own creations receive from you

Another way of putting it is:

1) God is the Father and extends you as His Son

2) Since he shares everything He is with you, you also inherit the ability to be a father

3) You therefore father your own creations which are your Sons

And another way of putting it is:

1) God is the source of love and love is miraculous

2) God creates you miraculously and shares miraculousness with you

3) You extend God's miraculous love and perform miracles

In this arrangement, which is the way things are in Heaven, and which is the perfect condition of your relationship with God, you RECEIVE everything from God. God just loves you unconditionally all the time for no reason other than to love you. You receive that, and appreciate the awesome gift that it is, and you joyfully extend it.

Now, when the 'separation' happened, the Fatherhood of God was separated from the Sonship of the Son. The son stopped experiencing Himself as the Son of God because, having cut off God's role as His father, He no longer could see Himself as a Son. However, the former Son of God retained the outward creative fatherhood properties He was given. So He continues to try to create, except that having disconnected from the Father he is no longer EXTENDING God's creation, but instead tries to be the SOURCE of what He creates. That means creating without God, which is MAKING.

The former Son of God also then sees Himself as orphaned from God and, having no source for Himself, is left only with 'Himself' to deal with His situation. Instead of receiving love and support from God, this 'separated self' has to invent its own support and its own substitute or love. Having separated from God, this separated self is now alone and afraid and lacking and limited. He is also powerless and weak. He attempts to continue the behavior of extension but without sourcing 'what to extend' in God. So instead he INVENTS, makes up, dreams and projects an imaginary creation (the world) which does not really exist, which is not sustained by God's love, and which therefore must perish.

Clearly, what's gone wrong in the separated Son's life is the disconnection between Himself and God... the shutting off the FLOW that comes FROM God to sustain Him, to provide for Him, to protect Him, to nourish Him, and to give abundantly to Him and to BE everything for Him. That's what the separation shut out of His mind. So now His mind seems intent on going off on its own tangent, running its own life, deciding everything alone, doing everything alone, and generally failing and suffering a lot. There is only one problem - separation from God, and there is only one solution - repairing the separation from God.

So now we find ourselves in this dreamworld of unreality, with separated lives and separate wills, with everything going to shit, and we wonder why. And we wonder how to get back to peace. And then we start doing our forgiveness and our thought management and so on, but you need this bigger picture in order to realize WHY you are doing all this and what the overall goal is. The goal is to UNDO THE SEPARATION FROM GOD completely. And that must mean, the restoration of the dynamics of the relationship that you had with God before the separation.

So this means, your mind/self now needs to transition from being alone, separate, making up lies and doing everything yourself, to RECONNECTING to God, opening up to receive supply/abundance/safety/love/protection/guidance FROM God again, becoming willing to extend what GOD has created (His love), allowing Him to be the source/God/origin instead of you having to invent stuff on your own, and then EXTENDING that outward to all of creation, acknowledging that this 'ex Son of God' is once again THE Son of God, restored to perfection.

So this means having to learn to surrender all of the side-effects that came about from becoming a separate self, which includes surrendering thinking for yourself, deciding for yourself, controlling life, regarding your life as 'your life' that you own in exclusion/exile, giving up the ways that you block the flow of love/miracles, undoing all sense of judgement/attack/separation/sin/guilt/fear that comes between you and God, opening your mind to RECEIVE from God His guidance and love and support, and weaning yourself off of all the ARTIFICIAL SOURCES of support and coping and replacements for what you lost (special love etc), which you MADE to take the place of God.

So as we RECLAIM our rightful place as Son of God again, and restore the relationship with God, and re-open ourselves to receiving the flow/extension of God's love/miracles, we are returning to being Christ and we're letting go of the 'circumstances' of how things ended up after separating from our Father. All the ways that we 'coped' with the separation need to be undone and replaced with getting our supply from God again.

A few quotes coming to mind...

"God goes with me all through the day"

"I am sustained by the love of God"

You might ask what does miraculousness mean, because God is also miraculous and all living beings in reality are miraculous in nature. There are references to "God's miracles" and "You are a miracle" for example, referring to creations in heaven. There is of course other context to do with miracles "in this world" or on this level, used for healing and such.

But miraculousness itself is a little trickier to describe. It has something to do with the golden rule relationship between multiple beings in a holographic system. It's the way by which for example God can create multiple sons and each of the sons contains the whole of God and is whole in and of itself and shares the same whole, yet is still a created thing absolutely created in its own right. That it can be one and many simultaneously - there is a transcendental nature to that which goes beyond non-duality and duality. It's what most people would describe as a paradoxical thing - seemingly impossible.

For example there is this line which mentions the miraculous power of the soul:

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

This is talking about a transcendental holographic ability of the soul in which even if it were to have literally everything for itself, there WOULD STILL be absolutely everything accessible to everyone else at the same time. Its possible for the soul to be the whole and have the whole and give and share the whole, and each soul can have the whole all at once simultaneously, without any sense of compromise or taking turns or lack or whatever else. The soul transcends these ideas because it's part of the holographic principle in the mind of God, in which the whole is in every part and every part is whole.

To boil that down, if you ask yourself about what makes it possible for God who is everything to create another whole being, whereby that being IS distinct and a whole being in its own right, yet STILL is 100% one with God and sharing everything with God, WITHOUT losing its distinctiveness. .... how those two things can be true at once - oneness and manyness. .... trying to put your finger on what that quality is, that possibility, that nature of God that allows this to happen, it is quite literally MIRACULOUS, and it defies absolutely all explanation.

Personally I believe it to be somehow related to the INFINITE nature of God which makes everything possible, such as in the will of God being able to do anything, even things which seem utterly impossible to us. The creation of many sons of God IS a miracle and is made possibly BY miraculousness - the miraculous nature of God. God is literally miraculous - and the miraculous-ness is driven by the holographic inter-relationships and symbiotic harmony of God and his creations, which are living thoughts, who are many and one at the same time.

Another aspect to this is that it's all about LIFE. Pure life. God is pure life. Life without the slightest notion of death or change or suffering of any kind. Pure immortality. God's eternal nature. Totally 100% life forever. The essence of life itself. THAT is GIVEN in the creation whereby God literally creates his children simply by WILLING IT, through an act of GIVING LIFE. He thus extends and creates literal beings that are ALIVE - souls, that are so immortal and alive that they live forever.

"ALL miracles mean Life, and God is the giver of Life."

On Earth, what we call miracles reflects that, something that kind of emanates out of the mind from a state of LOVE, in which there is unconditional giving - maximal service - where a person who is "more alive" or whose mind is more aware of being purely immortal, gives LIFE ITSELF to those who seem to be trying to play dead or who are in darkness or suffering. That giving of LIFE (could call it love, light, power etc), literally resurrects and heals and returns people to life, and can do the same to their bodies as well. Because there is NOTHING your holiness cannot do, literally.

Here from the CoA edition or Notes... "Remember a miracle is a spark of Life. It shines through the darkness and brings in the light. You must begin to forget and remember."

Don't think of miracles as a STATE therefore. There is a state of miracle mindedness and miracle readiness, but that is not MIRACLE DOING or MIRACLE WORKING. Working a miracle HAS to be an act of GIVING TO ANOTHER, or to CREATE ANOTHER. A spark of LIFE has to come out of you and enter another to enlighten their mind and heal it. It's the most open loving unconditional pure blessing that you can give to anyone. It literally reverses death and sickness and makes them impossible, REPLACING them with life itself. There is massive power in this because it uses the power of God.

You being in darkness and shifting your perception up to a greater level of "being alive" is in a sense a miracle that you work for yourself, but the purpose of doing that is purification so that you can become able to GIVE miracles to others.

"He MUST heal his perception in this respect. 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."

You can only give the miracles you have received, meaning that as you heal you become an instrument for healing, because you become more alive and more loving and more able to GIVE what you have received. The more you give the more you receive also and miracles benefit both the giver and the receiver by increase the total amount of love - which is through a similar mechanism to how the kingdom of God increases and how ideas of love strengthen when they are given away - giving and receiving are one - thats part of what miraculousness means.

Ultimately the performing of miracles CREATES LIFE that has eternal life and lives forever. You create your creations in heaven with God and your brothers through miraculous acts of life-giving power. On earth you can't use it to create because of the separation/ego etc, but you can use it to restore and heal which is a similar use of giving life. And this is what RESURRECTION is all about.

Recall this about miracles GIVING LIFE:

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

What you have to give, what is within you, is LIFE ITSELF. Pure essence of livingness, shared with and given by God. Awareness, presence, being, vision, creative power etc. You GIVE YOURSELF. You GIVE GOD. You GIVE LIFE to others. That is miracle working as a "creative energiser", which you become able to do when you have done sufficient purification through "working a miracle for yourself" ie focusing on resurrecting your mind and moving yourself back closer to identification with your immortal spirit.

The so-called "shift in perception" is a SIDE EFFECT of temporary changes in the mind, it is in and of itself not a miracle. "Those who speak of "the miracle OF healing" are combining two orders of reality inappropriately. Healing is NOT a miracle. The Atonement, or the final miracle, is a REMEDY. It is purely a means, while any type of healing is a result."

A shift in perception may be called an EFFECT of a miracle, a healing result, it itself is not a miracle. A miracle is a spark of life from the power of God extended through you from God which has the power to extend to others through you, CAUSING perception to shift IF it is needed. Miracles have a whole lot to do with CAUSATION, not passive states of perception.

What is real can only be increased by sharing. This is because what is real cannot changed. Nothing can be added to it or taken away because it is already complete.

Therefore in order to 'increase', the only option available to God is to "share" ie CREATE. God has to therefore create something which is whole and complete within itself, yet individual, yet one with Him. "Connected", holy spirit says.

He thereby creates untold numbers of INDIVIDUALS, each of whom has everything individually. This is why every soul has free will and the freedom to create and choose individually.

Individuality does not mean ego. Individuality means wholeness and sharing with other wholes (souls). Ego means putting up walls to try to stop sharing.

Course quote:

"5 God, Who encompasses all being, created beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing real can be increased except by sharing. That is why God created you. Divine Abstraction takes joy in sharing. That is what creation means. "How," "what" and "to whom" are irrelevant, because real creation gives everything, since it can create only like itself. Remember that in the Kingdom there is no difference between having and being, as there is in existence. In the state of being the mind gives everything always."

The opposite of love is fear. Love is power.

The opposite of power is powerlessness. Therefore, fear is powerlessness.

I think you'll agree when you are afraid you are in a victim mode, you feel helpless, powerless, things are happening you cannot control, you can't do anything to stop it, you're scared its going to get worse, its happening to you, you seem to be weak and frail, you can't seem to go up against it becacuse it seems to be overpowering you etc.

Powerlessness is weakness, it is vulnerability, it is littleness and being small, it is hiding from yourself and God, it is shrinking into darkness, it is lack of love, it is being entirely at the effect of the world, it is disowning the power of decision, the freedom to choose, and a giving away of all responsibility.

If you are dis-empowered, meaning, you have pretended to have no power and are trying to make sure everyone other than you has it to use against you, you will be afraid. Fear is the feeling of being under threat.

You could only ever be under threat from something that could potentially cause you in some way - to have power over you to change you or affect you. And so fear requires you see yourself as a victim, under the power of the world.

As you reclaim your power and own up to being a son of God, you reclaim the power of God and become stronger. And this strength creates safety, and in turn reduces fear. Eventually you will realize you cannot be attacked at all, unless you attack yourself. And so you have only ever been scaring yourself with your own power.

"Do you not see that all your misery comes from the strange belief that you are powerless?"

"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."

"The army of the powerless is weak indeed. It has no weapons, and it has no enemy."

"The slave of idols is a WILLING slave. For willing he MUST be, to let himself bow down in worship to what has no life, and seek for power in the powerless."

"Faith given to illusions does NOT lack power, for, BY it, does the Son of God believe that he is powerless."

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the FEAR OF AWAKENING. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual."

"I am not weak, but strong. I am not helpless, but all powerful."

"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."

"The miracle ITSELF is but the witness that you HAVE the power of God in you."

"It is only your weakness that will depart from you in this practice, for it is the practice of the power of God in you."

"All fear is ultimately reducible to the basic misperception of man's ability to USURP the power of God. It is again emphasized that he neither CAN nor HAS been able to do this. In this statement lies the real justification for his escape from fear. This is brought about by his acceptance of the Atonement, which places him in a position to realize that his own errors never really occurred."

"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. Believe THIS and you WILL be free."

It's very simple. God is the ONLY cause of you. God is the ONLY cause of anyone. Everyone who exists is solely caused by God and NOTHING else. Whatever God wills that we all be, we are that, and even we have no say in this.

We are all totally EQUAL and next to each other, and God is above. God creates me fully and creates you fully. I do not create you, and you do not create me. It is nonsense to suggest that I am your creator or that you have caused me to exist.

This means that your brothers are NOT the cause of you. Nor is the world. Nor is the body. NOTHING ELSE can EVER cause you. Not one single person in the world is causing you right now, nor who has ever caused you, nor have you ever caused anyone.

When you believe someone is at fault or doing something to you, you MUST be confused about who your creator is. Whoever creates you causes you. No-one else has any input to this or any power over you. To believe someone is causing you is to believe you are NOT caused by God. To blame someone is to reject God as your creator.

Forgiveness then can very simply entail deprogramming yourself from ANY belief that ANYTHING other than God has power over you. This is the same as saying you should use the power of denial to deny anything NOT of God ANY POWER over you. That includes denying that your brother has any power over you, or that you have power over anyone.

The EGO is the confusion about cause and effect, about who your creator is, and therefore where CAUSE is coming from. If you assign cause to your brothers, or to the world, or to the body, then you are confused. They are NOT the cause of you in any way. When you believe cause is outside of you making you its effect, or you are at the effect of the world, you are claiming that the world is your creator.

You DO actually have creations which YOU HAVE caused, which are the living beings in heaven that you co-created with God and your brothers. These are not the people of the world. You DO have power over these beings because you are the CO-CREATOR of them. But you have created them by giving them freedom, just as God has with you.

If in any way right now you think that some person is doing something to you, or some company, or some group, or something in the body, or some aspect of the world, or anything at all in this dream, then you ARE MISTAKEN.

The ego will then form notions of a kind of cord or connection or chain or cause and effect, between you and others, between you and the body, or you and the world. It will suggest there is a tie or bridge across which stuff from another person "comes into you" and "does things to you" or "makes you" or changes your emotions or induces reactions in you. The belief in these artificial cause-effect relationships have to be SEVERED.

Whenever you are mistaken about causality you will find a belief in your mind that someone or something has kind of latched onto you, is outside you, causing you from the outside in, and now you are at its effect. This is NOT true. This belief has to be undone.

You can simply do this by just looking at the beliefs you DO have about these horizontal cause-effect relationships, and UNDOING your belief in them.

I am not being caused by that person. That person is not doing anything to me. I am not at the effect of them. They are not responsible for how I feel. They are not making me upset. They are not doing anything to me. They are not the cause of my feelings. They have not attacked me. They are doing NOTHING to me.

You can see then that this leads to the fact that your brother is innocent, because if they truly are NOT CAUSING you at all, then you cannot claim that they are in ANY WAY sinful, guilty, wrong, bad, evil or attacking. So they must be innocent. Sorting out the fact that they are NOT the ones doing anything to you, helps you to see their innocence and yours, and places responsibility for sight back your own court.

It is also important to affirm that you are not doing anything to anyone else. I am not attacking them. I am not hurting them. I am not abusing anyone. I am not causing anyone to feel anything. I am not making anyone upset. I am not responsible for anyone feels. I am not making anyone sick or afraid. I am not attacking anyone. This is simply because YOU are innocent. You CANNOT DO ANYTHING TO ANYONE.

God himself PROTECTS everyone by his will. No-one but him can touch his children. His children CANNOT hurt each other in reality. This is the simplicity of forgiveness and atonement. Simply putting cause and effect back into their proper place, being willing to be forever an effect of God, and realizing that LOVE is all that you can actually share with anyone.

"It is God's Will that nothing touch His Son except Himself, and nothing else comes nigh unto him. He is as safe from pain as God Himself, Who watches over him in everything" "I am forever an Effect of God."

"Father, I was created in Your Mind, a holy Thought that never left its home. I am forever Your Effect, and You forever and forever are my Cause. As You created me I have remained. Where You established me I still abide, and all Your attributes abide in me because it is Your Will to have a Son so like his Cause that Cause and Its Effect are indistinguishable. Let me know that I am an Effect of God, and so I have the power to create like You. And as it is in Heaven, so on earth. Your plan I follow here, and at the end I know that You will gather Your Effects into the tranquil Heaven of Your Love, where earth will disappear, and separate things unite in glory as the Son of God."

"I am not the victim of the world I see."

"How can I be the victim of a world which can be completely undone if I so choose? My chains are loosened. I can drop them off merely by desiring to do so. The prison door is open. I can leave it simply by walking out. Nothing holds me in this world. Only my wish to stay keeps me a prisoner. I would give up insane wishes, and walk into the sunlight at last."

"Here is the perfect statement of my freedom. I am under no laws but God's. I am constantly tempted to make up other laws, and give them power over me. I suffer only because of my belief in them. They have no real effect on me at all. I am perfectly free of the effects of all laws save God's. And His are the laws of freedom."

"He (God) did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way. God does not suffer conflict. Nor is His creation split in two. How could it be His Son could be in hell, when God Himself established him in Heaven?"

God did not make two minds. One mind has produced the creation of Heaven, some "other mind" has produced the result of "Earth" (yes literally planet earth).

If BOTH of them exist, God must be SPLIT MINDED and would have to have created TWO DIFFERENT creations.

Since Jesus tells us clearly "Earth.... which is heaven's opposite in every way". So earth is NOTHING LIKE heaven.

Therefore, either God is split minded and has two entirely conflicting creations, which is absurd and can't be true, or ONLY ONE of the two "results" can really exist (be created).

Heaven is God's ONLY creation because God is SINGLE MINDED and whole and only creates heavenly creations.

Therefore, simple logic folks .... THERE IS NO EARTH.

Earth has not been CREATED. It does not exist.

This is the meaning of "there is no world."

To claim God created Earth and that it therefore is real and exists, is to claim that God created both heaven AND earth, and therefore does NOT create in his own likeness, and therefore is a dougnut salesman. There's a pretty big HOLE in that logic! ;-)

By the way, Earth is hell.

ACIM is not really non-duality, or duality. It's sort of both. ACIM makes this clear statement about the nature of God and reality:

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you" UrT16C3

This is the holographic principle. There is a whole (God) which has parts (sons of God), and each part contains the whole (oneness with God). The one whole is shared by the whole and the parts (brothers, inheritance etc).

Most people think of reality as sort of "one thing". Like one large area or an expanse or some kind of bigness. But that's more or less the same as the idea of spacetime or the universe. God is not actually like that. God is holographic.

In a holographic system there is a singular wholeness, which we call God. But there is also a characteristic of this wholeness - the entire wholeness is in every part. Every part of God contains the whole of God. ALL of God pays FULL attention to EVERY part simultaneously - because God is infinitely transcendental and can do this even if it sounds impossible.

God is also a creator and is capable of fully absolutely creating secondary beings who are like himself. But he cannot add-on anything outside of himself, so instead he adds on INSIDE of himself.

He does this by SHARING himself entirely with that which he creates, and that means that his creation has to also SHARE all of itself with everything. This is a kind of "internal expansion" of the Kingdom. It does not involve creating OUTSIDE the kingdom or beyond be pre-existing totality of God.

This sharing produces fully-created beings who inherit everything from God and share everything with God. They have a oneness with God. But they ARE fully created individual beings. They are completely full in every sense of the word. They contain everything like God does. Which means they absolutely exist, and yet at the same time are one with the absolute.

This results in a holographic system in which God is the main whole who creates "additional wholes" that share everything with him and with each other. Each part of God has the whole of God in it. Each son of God contains the whole of God and everyone else. We are all unified and merged and fused together.

This doesn't mean we lose our duality. It doesn't mean we lose individuality, or that we can't tell where we end and God begins. We DO have a discrete independent existence as absolute beings. But we ALSO have total oneness with the whole.

This seems like a paradox to most people. But it is actually miraculous.

Because a holographic system has wholeness to it, we identify that wholeness as "oneness" and might call it "non-duality". However, a holographic system ALSO has parts to it - whole parts, which share the whole and yet are whole in their own right. These "parts" might be called "duality".

This means that IN REALITY, the nature of God as a holographic system comprises BOTH ... non-duality AND duality, fused together as one. Everything is God, but God has parts which are living beings in their own right.

This is what A Course in Miracles teaches. And it means that there is material which in a certain CONTEXT is focusing on the non-dual aspects of the hologram, such as the oneness and the "God is" and "there is no opposite" and all that. But in other contexts it also speaks of God's infinite creations, the many sons of God, your own creations, your own kingdom, permanent brothers and so on.

ALL of these aspects of the course are simultaneously true. Even if they sound contradictory. If God's reality was NOT holographic they would indeed be contradictory and you'd have to resolve that by separating off some parts as "ego" or "separation" or "illusions". That's what many people do, in error. Because they don't realize reality actually is a holographic system not a "blob".

Ultimately then ACIM is not non-duality, or duality. But it is PARTLY non-duality and PARTLY duality. The two are fused together in a kind of "trans-duality". Transcendent of both exclusive-oneness and exclusive-separateness. God is not EXCLUSIVE anything - God is INCLUSIVE. Which is why the "non-duality" INCLUDES "the duality".

By duality here I do not mean spacetime. Spacetime is duality WITHOUT the non-duality, ie exclusively dual. That's not the same as the trans-duality of God in which every part is the whole. In space time, every part is PARTIAL and incomplete. The opposite of duality is not-nonduality, it's transcendental of the whole "either this or that" mindset.

"The whole does define the part, but the part does NOT define the whole. This is as true of knowledge as it is of perception." UrT8H2

"There IS no difference between the whole and the part where change is impossible." UrT8H2

"Because the Sonship MUST create as one, you remember creation whenever you recognize part of creation. Each part you remember adds to YOUR wholeness, because each part IS whole." UrT9E5

"Creation is the holy Son of God, for in Creation is His Will complete in every aspect, making every part container of the whole." UrW320W113

"The whole power of God is in every part of Him, and nothing contradictory to His Will is either great or small." UrT10G10

"It shines in every part of Him, as in the Whole." UrT17E16

"Every loving thought held in ANY part (of the Sonship) belongs to every part. It is shared BECAUSE it is loving. Sharing is God's way of creating, and also YOURS." URT5F9

"The creations of every Son of God are yours, because every creation belongs to everyone, being created for the Sonship as a whole." UrT7J6

"But the Resurrection IS the symbol of sharing, because the re-awakening of every Son of God is necessary to enable the Sonship to know its wholeness." UrT6B13

A person's body is held up as a picture. It covers up who they are. It says, "this is true of me." Or "this is what I am."

"You made the body in attempting to deceive yourself."

"What you are cannot be seen nor pictured."

If a person's body seems to have a problem, the body is now a witness for the ego and is proving that something has gone wrong.

But here's the thing.

If God created you, then you have to be as God created you. You have no say in this. You cannot change what you are because you are HIS will.

That means, whatever you are, HE is responsible for.

If you therefore, as a body, seem to be sick, then it can only mean one of two things.

1) He did create the body and therefore sickness is real and God is responsible for creating you sick, which means God must be totally cruel and sadistic. Or...

2) God did not create the body and therefore the sickness is not real, and you cannot be sick. This means God is loving because he only creates perfection, not sickness.

If #2 is correct, then in the most literal sense, you CANNOT be sick. Nor can anyone. If the body is appearing to be sick, appearing to claim "this is the truth", it CANNOT BE the truth.

Sickness has to always be a lie, a fiction, a disguise, something false. It isn't actually a true or real sickness, either. It's always a fake sickness. Because how can any sickness have truth, reality or validity if God has not had a hand in it?

The fact then is the body is a lie, and it's sicknesses are a lie. They are not really sicknesses and they aren't even possible. They cannot be there. You cannot BE sick. No-one can be sick, if they are to be as God created them.

So now this means the body is there to tempt you to believe something is true which isn't, to tempt you to associate the Son of God with a physical object, and to lie to you about what is true of someone.

Either God is sick and the person has sickness, or God is not sick and the person CANNOT EVER be sick. You have to choose to believe one or the other. Even if a person is telling you they are sick, even if they show the proof, even if they're looking half dead, it is not POSSIBLE in reality.

To go along with it, to buy into it, is to be deceived by temptation. The body showing up at all tempts you to believe something that isn't true. Even if someone holds up a "picture of crucifixion" to say, "you did this to me" and "I am a victim", you have to not side with that. Otherwise you are reinforcing the sickness.

By NOT believing they are "really sick", and recognizing their sickness as UNREAL, only then can you withdraw your support for the sickness and thus weaken the person's belief in it. When no-one goes along with the lie, it loses its strength and disappears. A lie that no-one believes is not worth telling.

"The ACCEPTANCE of peace is the denial of illusion, and sickness IS an illusion. Yet every Son of God has the power to deny illusions ANYWHERE in the Kingdom, merely by denying them completely in himself."

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

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

"What is temptation but a wish to make illusions real? It does not SEEM to be the wish that NO reality be so. But it IS an assertion that some FORMS of idols have a powerful appeal which makes them HARDER to resist than those you would not WANT to have reality. Temptation, then, is nothing more than this; - a prayer the miracle touch not some dreams, but KEEP their unreality obscure, and GIVE to them reality instead."

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

Well actually yes you do. Here's why.

Evaluations of 'good and bad' are both ego. In your ego, there are two parts.

A) The persona self, which is what the ego 'keeps' of your identity, and is only a part of the whole. It rejects everything it considers bad, through judgement about what's good and bad, and relegates all of the bad stuff to the shadow. Therefore, this good-seeking persona, which you think is all of your conscious self, is actually responsible for creating bad stuff - the very bad stuff that it seeks to get rid of.

B) The shadow self, houses the bad stuff that the persona judged as not good enough. This bad stuff is all the things your persona believes are dark and evil and not acceptable as part of the 'self'. Whatever the ego keeps as the persona, it gets rid of as the shadow. The shadow still stays as part of your mind, the unconscious mind, which houses all the repressed murderous through of the persona. The persona is murderous because it tries to get rid of all bad stuff, in order to make itself look good. Surprise!

Okay so, most people who do forgiveness, focus on getting rid of bad stuff. And this is because you are so conditioned by the ego to always keep the persona, and attack something else. This is the ego's survival mechanism - throw out a decoy, attack the decoy even though it's made of ego, and pretend that what's doing the judging is not ego. Therefore, you accidentally keep the ego in the name of getting rid of it. The ego is quite sneaky. And we fell for it big time.

So we're spending most of our time in the persona, thinking this conscious self is all of ourself. And our hidden shadow self is usually unconscious, unless it rears its ugly head at which point it hurls attack at the persona (which is sort of a good thing, cus the persona is a big liar and needs to be dismantled), but this also can manifest as sickness and death.

The problem is, we think that all of the 'bad stuff' that bothers us, that we don't like, that we are upset by, we think it is all the fault of our shadow (which we project onto others). So we get busy forgiving that stuff... we forgive the enemies, we forgive what seems 'bad', BUT, really the only way truly forgive what seems bad is to stop the 'good-loving' persona from doing its nasty work. We have to become willing to recognize the 'good' persona is actually just as much the problem.

The good persona is the victim in most scenarios, victimized by the shadow, and desiring to protect itself from destruction. If you were to protect it, you'd keep the ego. Yet if you don't protect it, you still keep the ego because it will be attacked. Lose lose. The only way to win, is to see that you are playing both parts, you're focusing on only keeping good stuff and this is creating more bad stuff.

So really your GOOD judgements are what creates bad stuff. Your special love. Your special idol worship. Your favoritism. Your people pleasing. Your trying to appear successful and happy. Your spiritual seeking. All this stuff is creating the shadow.

So we need to be careful we're not just trying to undo the shadow. Working ON the shadow, as our 'enemy', actually is a decoy and deceives us into not noticing the behavior of the persona, which is where the ego houses all of its bullshit and lies. The persona needs to be undone, in order to get rid of the shadow, but the persona wants to keep manufacturing the shadow in order to 'get rid of it'. Getting rid of shadow makes more shadow. Fail.

I guess my longwinded point is, don't just think you have to forgive the bad stuff. If you believe in bad stuff it MUST mean you believe in good stuff, which is still a dualistic judgement from the ego persona, trying to pretend not to be evil. It is still separation. There is still a war going on. Its this separation between good and bad that is the problem, not just the bad stuff. Both parts are actually innocent, not just the bad stuff. But until you see that, recognize both parts are the cause of guilt, not just the 'bad stuff'.

Forgive the good and the bad, undo the separation of duality that creates them both, and return to wholeness. That's forgiveness.

God has created you as an infinite, immortal soul, who is perfectly complete and lacking nothing.

There is nothing that you need to add to yourself to improve yourself or to make yourself in any way better than God created.

You are lacking nothing at all. You are perfect.

God created you as a beautiful soul filled with love and joy and perfectly creative. Fully equipped to exist in Heaven and to extend love forever. You need nothing else.

When Jesus says "There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else." he is talking about the fact that He is simply being ONLY the Self that God created. He has not added anything or taken anything away. He is being his normal, natural God-created self.

This perfect self is hiding underneath every idea of imperfection, lack, separation, limitation and death. God already has created you with perfection, to be perfect, forever. You are flawless.

And since you are created from creativity and from love, you are endowed with creativity and love. You are permanently miraculous. There is nothing that you cannot create with the power of the mind, in accordance with God's will, to increase the Kingdom.

Somewhere inside you, you know this. There is a place in which your soul is already within you, perfectly holy, undefiled, unchanged, unaffected, perfectly sane, happy and at peace. It's already there. God creates only permanent creations which cannot change.

Your soul is divine, forever. "Spirit is in a state of grace forever."

"Eternity will shine away the world."

"The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."

"A forgiven world cannot last."

"There is no world."

This may seem obvious to say, but... whatever existed BEFORE the separation, is **all** that should exist AFTER it is over. Before the separation, there WAS no world. There were no bodies. There was no curriculum. There was no space or time. Whatever was true and real and permanent BEFORE the separation, will be true and real and permanent AFTER it is over. And that is all.

The separation did not ADD ANYTHING to reality, or take anything away. Nothing really happened, remember?

"The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it."

Before the separation, the ONLY REALITY was God and the Sonship. In the separation God added the Holy Spirit and you added nothing. After the separation only the Holy Trinity will remain. No bodies, no dreams, no world. The ENTIRE content of the dream of death will vanish. The world, the sun, th stars, space and time, all of it. It does not really exist NOW.

Awakening to reality means returning to Creation, to the knowledge that only the Kingdom is real, and the complete FORGETTING of "the world you made" - its dream bodies and all. Nothing that you made will remain except the love you expressed. Only love is real. Only heaven is real. When the separation is OVER, the world will spin into the NOTHINGNESS from which it came. No-one has need for a dream world in reality.

"The voice of the Holy Spirit IS the call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind. When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed, there will be no call to return, but what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless THEIR creations and keep them in the light of joy.

You ARE the Kingdom of Heaven, but you have let the belief in darkness enter your minds, and so you need a new light. The Holy Spirit is the radiance that you must let (in to) banish the idea of darkness. His is the glory before which dissociation falls away, and the Kingdom of Heaven breaks through into its own."

WHEN THE SEPARATION IS OVER, ONLY HEAVEN IS REAL

"Eternity will shine away the world."

"The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."

"A forgiven world cannot last."

"There is no world."

This may seem obvious to say, but... whatever existed BEFORE the separation, is **all** that should exist AFTER it is over. Before the separation, there WAS no world. There were no bodies. There was no curriculum. There was no space or time. Whatever was true and real and permanent BEFORE the separation, will be true and real and permanent AFTER it is over. And that is all.

The separation did not ADD ANYTHING to reality, or take anything away. Nothing really happened, remember?

"The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it."

Before the separation, the ONLY REALITY was God and the Sonship. In the separation God added the Holy Spirit and you added nothing. After the separation only the Holy Trinity will remain. No bodies, no dreams, no world. The ENTIRE content of the dream of death will vanish. The world, the sun, th stars, space and time, all of it. It does not really exist NOW.

Awakening to reality means returning to Creation, to the knowledge that only the Kingdom is real, and the complete FORGETTING of "the world you made" - its dream bodies and all. Nothing that you made will remain except the love you expressed. Only love is real. Only heaven is real. When the separation is OVER, the world will spin into the NOTHINGNESS from which it came. No-one has need for a dream world in reality.

"The voice of the Holy Spirit IS the call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind. When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed, there will be no call to return, but what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless THEIR creations and keep them in the light of joy.

You ARE the Kingdom of Heaven, but you have let the belief in darkness enter your minds, and so you need a new light. The Holy Spirit is the radiance that you must let (in to) banish the idea of darkness. His is the glory before which dissociation falls away, and the Kingdom of Heaven breaks through into its own."

One thing people in the world don't realize, is that when you make one part of the world 'special', it HAS to make other parts of the world rejected.

So if I say, I really love Mac computers, it tends to make me feel that I dislike PC's. Or if I say, I like sporty-looking cars, it tends to make me believe that other cars are 'uglier'. Or if I say, I like the summer, it tends to make me feel antagonistic toward winter.

We do this every day, but we just don't really realize how we are actually *creating* the enemies that we despise, indirectly, by elevating various other things to special/hero/idol-worshipped status.

If I worship an idol and put something on a pedestal and believe it is my savior, that's all well and good but I don't realize that simultaneously I've created a nemesis somewhere else. It may not even seem to be in my conscious awareness, but I can't MAKE something an idol without using a tool of attack on everything the idol is not.

So people are going around for example trying to be good, trying to people please, trying to have the right behavior, trying to choose the right political candidate, trying to be in love with a special something, trying to save a special group of individuals, trying to stand up for some kind of social justice, or trying to eat the right foods etc. And what does this do?

What happens in the mind when we say "only this part of the world is acceptable?". We reject the rest of it, which is an act of denial, which is an attack, which throws all kinds of darkness and secret hate onto the 'rest' of the world. And since this is all really about the MIND, it basically creates an unconscious mind filled with everything we don't want.

And then this unconscious mind turns around and projects into the world and manifests as enemies, examples of what we hate, examples of the kind of people we think are sinners, examples of behaviors and actions that we consider not allowed, etc. And the more we try to really intensely focus on what is 'right', we inadvertently keep CREATING what is 'wrong' and reinforcing it.

Then all this extra wrong stuff shows up in the world and we hate it more and try to separate from it more, which is secretly an ego ploy to reinforce and keep it. We go on our crusade and blow our trumpet in defense of 'all that is good' which is exactly what actually creates and manifests 'all that is bad'.

If we're not being neutral, if we're attached to outcomes, it we're judging something as right or wrong, if we're invested in seeing a certain thing be kept while other things are destroyed, we just keep creating a greater TENSION between 'right and wrong' rather than actually undoing what's wrong. And this tension grows the more we try to separate from what's 'wrong', because the pursuit of what's 'right' ISN'T a pursuit of the truth - its a pursuit of one-sidedness and is a spiritualizing of the world.

So everyone's on this ego rollercoaster of chasing after what they have decided means 'right' and 'correct' and 'not sinful' and not realizing that this is directly and explicitly creating even more of the stuff they are trying to get away from. Because all that they're really doing is trying to escape from, deny, and shut out, everything they consider bad. You can't have a happy life by being in FUCKING DENIAL!

The world is neutral. It's we who give it all the meaning it has and label it with all our made-up labels of 'oh that's ok' and 'oh thats not ok'. And this constant effort to separate out the ok from the not-ok is just more ego separation which leads to war, hate, anger, and attack. It does not WORK. And it does not lead to progress. If you want the kind of progress where you create a world where everything is only 'good' and nothing 'bad' happens, you will never attain it, because the very desire to do so is a desire to DENY that 'bad' exists and therefore create it. And so the world is spinning its wheels. Isn't it horrifying to realize that YOU are creating the very enemies that you hate the most, and that you will keep doing so while you keep trying to reject a part of yourself?

Have you ever had a dream at night where you're being chased by someone and you're running away in fear and you just can't seem to get away, and the more you run away or fight with the person the stronger and more adamant they seem to become? This is exactly this dynamic, because the person chasing you is YOURSELF who is only appearing as an attacker because you keep rejecting yourself. In your dreams, when you stop running, and you surrender, and you do what the ego would say is 'letting yourself be caught', the person stops chasing you, and they stop attacking you, and all of a sudden you are friends. How about that?

We have to become able to ACCEPT and ALLOW everything. Not split it out and say one part is ok and one part isn't. This is true equality. This is a value worth pursuing. Unconditional love, not conditional love. Not a love that's only given to friends and not enemies. Not a love that, in being given only to friends, turns everyone else INTO an enemy, for the sake of being able to reject them further.

What would Jesus do? He would overlook all sin and recognize the innocence and equality of everyone.

Ok.. stepping off the righteous soap-box for now.

Separation is the idea that there is an opposite to love.

It has given rise to a world where both love and hate seem to coexist, where there is both joy and sadness, and where there is both Life and death.

The "duality" of the world is therefore a picture of the belief that Life and death both coexist, that death has been added to the realm of God's existence, and that it's possible for opposites to occur simultaneously.

There seems to be duality in the world because the ego believes in conflicting goals and opposite possibilities. We seem to now experience a world of both life and death, happiness and sadness, love and hate, certainty and fear.

We say that the hate and the unhappiness and the death and the fear are the problem that the ego created. But moreso it's the belief that these things can exist and that they are separate from the good stuff - love/light/joy/peace - that creates this illusion of a split.

The world is an idea of the introduction of an opposite to Life, an opposite to love and an opposite to happiness. It therefore has to manifest forms which depict both of those opposites. To have one without the other would seem to be impossible. Where there is life there must be death.

But in truth, real life does not require death in order to exist. Death on the other hand requires life in order to define itself as its opposite. Death is not a true opposite to life. Life is eternal and death is nothing.

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

Notice here that Jesus talks about how God has his own "completeness", which is not in any way affected by our choice to separate. His own being, his real identity, is unaffected.

However, his "going out", his extending, his loving, his radiating, his creating, is BLOCKED, when the sons of God do not communicate with Him fully. This is because the sons have their own freedom. God's inner completeness is "separate from" the individual souls.

His creating, his radiating, goes out FROM his inner completeness, to create souls, but his own completeness is not changed by this act. Therefore the sons "are not God" as such. You are not merely the effect of God, or "God's radiance". You are more than that. God has ADDED TO existence in creating you as a distinct entity, "outside of" his own completeness. (really inside, but).

So there is a difference between what God IS - his completeness - his inner being - contrasted against his radiance, extension or creation, which goes out FROM Him to create his children, heaven, angels, holy spirit etc. God is thus complete within himself regardless of what his creation gets up to, which is why he does not participate in the separation, nor get dragged into it by his creations.

The key here is that God is free, and God creates beings who are free.

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

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

Realize that it is not at the SOUL LEVEL that separation takes place. There is NO EGO at the level of souls. Nothing real can be threatened. Spirit is in a state of grace forever. The SOULS do not experience the separation. The soul does not become part of the separation idea or the tiny mad idea. The soul is OUTSIDE OF the separation at all times.

And that means, the idea of there being MANY SOULS, or MANY SONS OF GOD, has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with egotism, separation, madness, dreaming, or anything to do with "the separation" AT ALL.

The fact that there are many souls (children of God) is actually BEYOND the separation idea. And it is permanent, and real, and NATURAL AND NORMAL. It's not correct to try to say that "many sons of God" or "many souls" is a SEPARATION IDEA. It is not, it's totally beyond the separation because the soul is BEYOND THE MIND. And it's only the MIND, where there is free will, which has dreamed of opposing God's will.

Souls are forever BEYOND the ego and the separation, and their many-ness has absolutely nothing to do with the ego thought system.

The very first level confusion occurs when we as Sons of God attempt to "cause God".

Whenever an effect, or a lower level, attempts to cause effects in the very cause that caused it, ie a higher level, that is level confusion.

The first level confusion was the separation from God itself.

God is cause. God creates and produces effects. We are his creations/effects.

As effects, effects do not cause the thing that caused them.

Sons of God do not have the ability to cause God. If they did, and this is what the whole separation is about, this would mean that we can produce effects in God and therefore change God. If they were to do that, they would be capable of destroying the very causal power which maintains their own existence, which is impossible.

There is a cause-effect distinction between what is God and what is a Son of God. God is "first cause". Sons of God are His effect. His Sons have been given the ability to cause ie create in God's likeness and their own, but they do not have the ability to actually cause anything other than this.

When Sons of God attempt to cause something unlike God, or something which goes against the freedom of will granted by God to extend love, "fiction" happens. A dream of impossibilities. Make-believe worlds and pretend bodies. That all comes from wishful thinking. And it's all a level confusion.

The attempt by the Son of God to cause His Father, to produce effects in the father, is the idea of sin. To make God change and be attackable/hurtable/modifyable is the very idea of sin. It is also the same thing as the authority problem - believing we have power to will against God's will.

So the very moment we entertained this tiny mad idea of being separate from God, it was an idea of being able to cause effects in God and therefore usurp his will. This was the first act of level confusion.

Every single thing that takes place inside the egoic dream of impossibilities and death, is also level confused. Absolutely every part of the ego is level confused. It is all entirely an attempt to reverse cause and effect. It is all a belief in magic and victimhood. And it is all impossible.

A brother is an equal sibling, who shares the same parent as you. Right? Yes.

So in order for there to be brothers, there has to be more than two children coming from the same parent, right? Yes.

When the children exist as brothers, does the parent become obliterated? No, of course not.

Does the fact that there are brothers, overthrow and undermine and attack the parent's existence? Not at all, especially given the parent created the brothers.

Who is the ultimate parent? Is it not God? Right? God is the creator parent of all that is.

If God is your parent, and you have brothers, your brothers are God's EQUAL children, right? Yes of course. If there is more than one son, then God's children are brothers.

If the term "brother" is NOT tied to God, then who is the parent of the brothers? Is it the ego? Is the ego your daddy? That would have to be true, because if God is not the parent God's opposite must be. Which is ridiculous.

How about God's supposed "one son". Are you are CHILD OF the one son? If you were, you and your brother would indeed be brothers. The one son is real, therefore so too are the brothers, because a real parent can only create real children. Just as an illusory parent creates illusory children.

How about we say your parent is the ego, and therefore you and your brother must be egos. This makes "brother" into a synonym for "the ego". And that means when the ego is gone, the brothers cease to exist at all. ie they are imaginary brothers. Or their brotherhood is a temporary illusion. And when undone, BOTH DISAPPEAR, leaving no child at all!

If that is true, then we MUST be claiming that, as ego brothers, who exist only due to "the separation", we have the ego as our creator. The ego must be the parent of whatever the brothers are. And brothers can't be brothers without a shared parent.

Nowhere in ACIM does it EVER say, that brothers are the children of the ego. Never. And it would be ridiculous to do so.

It DOES SAY, many times over, that brothers are children of GOD. And what that has to mean is, that God MUST not only have multiple children, but also that brothers is a term for REAL created beings who are permanent, not children of the ego, and not children of the separation.

So in ACIM, every reference to "your brother", is talking about THE SOULS that God created, who are many in number, necessarily more than ONE, and AT LEAST TWO, so that they can BE brothers, and share the same parent who is God.

And because God is a REAL parent, his children MUST be real as well. Meaning that, ... unless brother means "son of the ego", brother MUST mean REAL CHILDREN in reality, in heaven, with God, many in number. ie God has multiple sons.

This is simple enough accurate reasoning. Either your brother is a child of the devil or he is a child of God along with you. And you'll be very hard pressed to find references in the course to your brother being anything less than holy, innocent, divine, a co-creator with God, and your total equal IN HEAVEN.

"Brother", therefore, in ACIM, refers solely to the SOULS in heaven that have eternal life, ***are many in number***, and who share the same parent - God. And this automatically means God has many sons, not just one in number.

Jesus even states on multiple occasions that your brother is a CO-CREATOR with you and with God. Which is only possible in heaven, therefore making brothers permanent real beings, a heavenly multitude, the sum of which we call "the sonship". Aka. "God's family."

"Will you behold your brother? God is glad to have you look on him."

"Heaven is the home of perfect purity. And God created it for YOU. Look at your holy brother, sinless as yourself, and let him lead you there."

"Perhaps you come in tears, but hear Him say, "My brother, Holy Son of God, behold your idle dream, in which this could occur," and you will leave the holy instant with your laughter and your brother's JOINED with His."

"You could no more know God alone, than He knows YOU without your brother."

"Whenever you heal a brother by recognizing his worth, you are acknowledging his power to create and yours."

"And therein lies your need to see your brother sinless. In him is Heaven."

"It is impossible to over-estimate your brother's value. Only the ego does this."

"The Son of God extends his hand to reach his brother, and to help him walk along the road with him."

"For you will realize that the ONLY value that the body has, is to enable you to bring your brothers TO the bridge WITH you. And to be RELEASED TOGETHER there."

"You will not remember that you are co-creator with God, until you learn that your brother is a co-creator with YOU."

"You do not know YOUR creations, because you do not know your brothers who created them with you."

"When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed, there will be no call to return, but what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless THEIR creations and keep them in the light of joy."

This is a conclusion I've come to over time, and I'll explain why it makes sense to me.

God is whole. Everything God does is whole. When God creates he fully creates. What he creates is fully created and is whole.

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in him."

God is a creator and has many thoughts. Each of those many thoughts are also whole thoughts, and thoughts of wholeness. Each of those thoughts contains the other thoughts, because there is one wholeness shared by all of them - that's oneness.

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they, were created neither partially nor in part."

God has created many children, each of which therefore must be whole, and they all share the whole of God.

Now, in terms of relationship, God can ONLY relate fully. With each of those thoughts or created beings, God must have a full-on complete relationship. It is a whole relationship, in which God shares the whole of Himself. And all of Himself is received by his creations.

If you take a definition of "personal", to mean that you get the fullest most undivided attention, where someone totally commits to you and gives to you without any lack or limitation, ie you're getting "fully personal service", then God IS giving fully personal service. He is giving you ALL of the attention and service possible for anyone to ever receive. The best personal service you ever had.

God gives his full total whole attention and being to one child. That child receives the whole of God. God does not lack or limit or hold back anything he is sharing with that one child. The relationship they have is totally whole. Therefore as far as that child is concerned, God is being fully attentive, fully relating, fully present, fully focused and fully giving to them.

That is the MAXIMUM amount of personal service possible in any scenario. It's not even possible for God to be MORE personal, because he is meeting ALL of the needs of that child. He is giving them absolutely everything. There is no definition of getting fully personal attention from God than this.

The truth also is that EACH of the children of God are being given the FULL attention of God. God is wholly fully giving all of himself to child A, and to child B, and to child C. This is where God's abilities transcend ordinary states of spatial relationship, limitations, compartments and categories.

God is omnipresent. This not only means that God is everywhere but it also means that all of God is in every part of God fully, simultaneously, and without restriction or limit. God is actually capable of giving FULL attention to any given part, while also giving FULL attention to any other part.

All the parts of God, all of his creations, therefore individually experience a full, whole, completely, total, unlimited relationship with their creator. EACH of them experiences God as fully and wholly relating with them personally. Not that God is distracted with other children, or only has a short amount of time to spare.

God is entirely 100% personally attending to each child individually. Every child of God has God's full attention at all times, in a maximally personal relationship. And every child of God is receiving all of God at all times, without there being conflict, because they all share God's omnipresent transcendental nature.

This means that God is fully personal in relationship with each child. But God is also fully giving the same fullness to each child. This means there is no difference between what God is giving to one child, or what God is giving to another child. God is giving the same total wholeness to child A, and child B, and child C. They are all treated equally and fully.

Therefore, this means that God is truly being "impersonal", in the sense that none of his children are receiving SPECIAL FAVOR, and every one of them is receiving the fullness of his attention. Each child has a fully total personal whole relationship with ALL of God. While from God's perspective, he is having this full total relationship with EACH child simultaneously, and fully, without limit.

God therefore is impersonal because every single creation is related to in the SAME way, with the same wholeness and fullness and love. Nothing is given to one which is not given to another. EACH child of God has the WHOLE of God. Every child of God has EVERYTHING. All the children of God share ALL of God, and the same one whole is shared by them all. That is their oneness in holographic relationship with the whole, as whole parts.

This means, in conclusion, that God is fully entirely personal in relationship with EACH of his creations, and yet simultaneously is fully entirely personal in relationship to EVERY creation, and is therefore ALSO fully impersonal. Impersonal does not mean remote and distant and cold. It means not differentiating between any two persons, and not giving something different to one and not another.

Being impersonal is inclusive, but many people think that being personal is exclusive. And this is why many people think God cannot be personal. It is also why many people think God is COMPLETELY impersonal, without ANY "personal" (ie not fully attentive) relationship at all, which portrays God as some kind of remote uncaring generalized abstract blob that has no real personal relationship with ANYONE. That is not what God is like.

Similarly, because in the world of form and ego, people recognize that ego is selfish and exclusive, many of us also think that being personal is an ego thing. That it means exclusive, or something applies to one person and not another, or someone gets special treatment, or that someone is lacking something that another has. That is an earthly definition of "personal", based on separation, and rooted in the ego thought system. It is NOT the proper definition of personal as it applies to God.

God gives all of himself to every child, in a fully personal relationship, while also giving all of himself to the whole of creation at once, transcending earthly limits and seeming to do the impossible - being wholly in relationship with multiple beings at the same time without the slightest indication of loss or limitation or sacrifice or compromise or being distracted or special.

This is why I firmly believe God to be BOTH impersonal and personal. Fully personal, indeed MORE personal than any kind of ego-based specialness idea of personal, MORE personal than even a single person receiving something exclusively that others lack. MORE personal than the ego's definition of personal, which is a definition of lack and limitation and selfishness and hoarding. God is MORE personal than what most people think would be a maximal amount of "personal".

It is also why God is fully impersonal, in the MOST spiritual way. Impersonal not in a cold detached remote way, but in terms of absolute equality and fairness, totally treating every single person in the same way, relating with the same ONE unconditional love towards EVERYONE at the same time, and giving everything TO everyone simultaneously. This is far beyond the ego's definition of impersonal relationship, and is the guarantee that God fully personally relates to EACH AND EVERY child of God in exactly the same absolute way.

You can see these facts reflected in many statements from A Course in Miracles. For example Jesus speaks about revelations, which are communications FROM GOD, to an INDIVIDUAL soul, in which the soul experiences a HIGHLY PERSONAL relationship with God, which doesn't even entail the inclusion of others. This relationship moment reflects the original form of communication between God and ONE child, which continues to be a reflection of the PERSONAL aspect of God's relationship with EACH child.

God knows YOU personally, and fully. You have a full total whole relationship with God, personally. But at the same time, God has personal full relationships with your brothers. And his treatment of the whole Kingdom as one is his impersonal consistency and honesty with every creation. This is why I believe God to be A PERSON (or, an "impersonal fully-personal person"), why the Holy Spirit is A PERSON, why the children of God are PERSONS, and why being a person/being is completely natural. We all share everything with everyone.

"Revelation is intensely personal"

"He DOES want revelation brought to others. This cannot be done with the actual revelation, because its content cannot be expressed, and it is intensely personal to the mind which receives it."

"Revelations induce complete but temporary suspension of doubt and fear. They represent the original form of communication between God and His Souls"

"God HAS kept your kingdom for you, but He cannot share His joy with you until you know it with your whole mind."

"The purpose of the Atonement is to restore everything TO you. You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

Quite often when I'm stressing about whether I'm doing the right thing or not, focusing on doing something I think I want to do but feeling guilty about it, Holy Spirit will give me a wide berth of permission. Instead of saying to stop doing it, He'll encourage me. Instead of reprimanding me, he'll suggest I even put aside things I'm "supposed" to be doing and do what it is I want to do.

There are also times when I'm doing something which seems very ego and 'against' waking up or being spiritual, and I might even be stubbornly refusing to listen to Holy Spirit's guidance. Not that he isn't speaking to me often, but that I am ignoring Him or choosing something on my own. Even then, Holy Spirit will say something like ... "its your life."

The sense of being 'allowed' that comes from this is immense. And usually just be experiencing no resistance like this, it will highlight for me and make clear whether I really want to do this or not. Holy Sprit is so non-forceful. Like, zero force. When I am expecting there to be force, or demands, or requirements, or permission, or whatever other form of guilt, He comes through with openness and acceptance.

It always catches me by surprise. I am never expecting His generous response. It's very loving. Instead of making me wrong for anything, even if I am doing something wrong, He makes me feel like it's okay, and then this creates a space in which to see clearly. Usually then when this attachment and resistance is gone, it becomes much more obvious where I really stand. And then I find myself being willing to either pursue what I was pursuing, or surrender it.

I become willing to do what He wanted me to do along, and then he turns around and says, "tomorrow". i.e. carry on doing whatever else.

It's always a blessing.

1) You already have eternal life because God creates only that which is permanent and lives forever.

2) It is not possible to change eternal life or to bring an end to it.

3) You do have the freedom however to DENY whether you have eternal life by PRETENDING that you don't.

4) Denial of eternal life does not stop it. All it does is it puts you into a mindset of blocking out awareness of the fact that eternal life is still there, causing you to HIDE it from your awareness as if to pretend it is not there.

5) Denial of eternal life shows up as death. It's a fictional attempt to make it SEEM as if eternal life is not true, doesn't exist, or has ended.

6) Death as "denial of life" is not END OF LIFE, it is an illusion PRETENDING that real eternal life can be affected in any way whatsoever.

7) You can become quite accomplished in making it look like you are mortal and can die. But it is fake. And it can therefore be easily reversed, because it has no truth in it. Death is a lie.

8) Given that you already have eternal life and are just pretending otherwise, at some point you might as well stop being in denial and just return to being eternal. Immortality is your natural inheritance.

9) When you stop being in DENIAL of eternal life, you will simply accept it and "live with it" and experience it, allowing it to be your truth without resistance or denial.

10) When you accept the atonement you are accepting the pre-existing truth that you already have eternal life, it cannot be removed, it's always been true of you, and you literally are incapable of really dying. In this, you are accepting that you are immortal and therefore CANNOT die and never did. And in this acceptance, death is recognized as and becomes impossible for you.

The soul, which is your self, your real identity, and your true nature, can be thought of like a piece of machinery in the engine of heaven - in the mind of God.

Given that the soul is WHAT YOU ARE, it's useful to know the operating perameters of yourself. What are you? What are you capable of? What can and can't you do? What are your limits? What are your design specifications?

God is the DESIGNER of the soul. He is the manufacturer. HE ALONE determines the design of your self, gives your self its function, assigns it its abilities, specifies what it can and cannot do, and guarantees that it will always function as HE WILLS IT.

"The only function of spirit is to extend God's being."

Your soul is like a machine. It serves a function. It plays a role. It is used by God for a purpose. It operates according to HIS RULES ONLY. "I am under no laws but God's."

This means that in the overall picture of heaven, YOU are designed by God for a specific FUNCTION. Your functionality includes certain FREEDOMS or abilities.

These freedoms are inherited or BASED ON God's abilities. God can only design what He can conceive of, and He can only use Himself as a reference. He designs you to be LIKE HIM, and to operate WITHIN the confines of HIS abilities.

Your functionality includes the ability to extend God, to create, to know, to love, to experience joy and happiness, to co-create further creations, and to increase the Kingdom.

There are also some things which YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO DO. And thankfully these things are not things you'd WANT to be able to do. You cannot attack anything real. You cannot sin. You cannot hurt or be hurt. You cannot damage or be damaged. You cannot cause or experience any kind of sickness or suffering. And you cannot die.

God DID NOT GIVE YOU the ABILITY to sin, attack, suffer or die. You CANNOT DO THESE THINGS. You HAVE NEVER done these things. You WILL NEVER do these things.

In your design, you also have an INPUT and an OUTPUT. The INPUT to you is God Himself. You host Him. He plugs you into His power source and his light, and extends Himself to you. He POWERS your soul. He GIVES it life. It SUSTAINS it in His mind. AND, he also MAINTAINS YOUR FUNCTIONING AT ALL TIMES.

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind."

God Inc's equipment therefore comes with a GUARANTEE. It is a lifetime guarantee. And in fact God creates such excellent quality equipment that it is guaranteed to FUNCTION CORRECTLY FOREVER. He Himself makes sure of this by designing the soul PERFECTLY, ensuring it never needs maintenance and cannot go wrong. God PROTECTS his equipment permanently and really get's behind his product.

Everything the soul machinery is able to do, is determined solely by God. He is THE ONLY designer. He is the cause of you. Anything you can or cannot do, any function you do or do not have, is by HIS WILL alone. You cannot add to yourself or take anything away. No-one else can add to take away either.

This means that your soul is FIXED in its functionality. It cannot change itself. It cannot redefine what it is. It cannot modify itself. It can only operate WITHIN the parameters it was given. So let's say that the soul is given certain FREEDOMS, such as the free will to create. It IS possible that the soul can potentailly MIS-USE its power to create, to mis-create, but it CANNOT give itself the power to CREATE REAL damage. It cannot cause REAL sin. It can ONLY create constructively.

The other thing about this is, that the soul should generally ACCEPT its design, its functioning, its place in the Kingdom, and its overall abilities. It is in its best interests to do so. But sometimes souls decide to rebel against their creator. They want to be something they can never be. They deny their inherent nature. They imagine they are something they are not, and that they can do things which they CANNOT ever do.

When this happens, the soul isn't going OUTSIDE of its limitations, but it is PRETENDING that it is. Because it DOES have the power to FREELY CHOOSE, and so can freely PRETEND through denial that it is NOT what it is. This produces a "shut-down" mode, aka spiritual sleep. In this mode, by denying itself, the soul is shutting itself down. And when it is asleep, it dreams of impossibilities that CANNOT be really happening.

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

The soul IS FREE to do this, because it can use its freedom against its freedom, which is a mis-use of its own abilities. It can try to use free will to NOT WILL ANYTHING, which is an obvious contradiction in terms. When the soul tries to CAUSE something it was NOT DESIGNED TO OUTPUT, it merely causes nothing real to output. And instead dreams of imaginary outputs that don't exist.

The soul has been set up to have OUTPUT parameters as well as INPUT parameters. It can PRODUCE certain "products". It can generate living beings. It can CREATE LIFE. It can radiate love. And it can share joy and peace. It can experience relationship with other similar soul machinery (brothers), made by the same manfacturer. And it can enjoy perfection forever.

When the soul believes it is able to output something which God DID NOT MAKE POSSIBLE, it imagines it is producing things which it cannot possibly produce. These would include the making of bodies, planets, worlds, space and time, illusions of sickness, all forms of suffering, and death. None of these are REAL outputs, they are wishful thinking.

"Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

When the soul does this, it is akin to a toaster oven believing it can wash your car, or a tv set believing it can cook dinner. It still remains IMPOSSIBLE, but the soul is free to use its freedom against itself to DENY its inherent functioning, and to PRETEND that other things are possible.

Since God did not give you THE EQUIPMENT FOR SIN... because your "soul 2000 model" did not COME WITH "the ability to sin" built in, it literally CANNOT DO IT. It can pretend to do it, but it cannot really do it. It can only dream of sinning, and never really attack any thing real. Just as your vacuum cleaner cannot bake cookies."Nothing real can be threatened."

God did not give you the ABILITY to threaten anything real. He did not BUILD IN a FUNCTIONALITY that can in any way CAUSE suffering. He did not provide you the equipment or parts to PRODUCE death. You cannot undermine your perfect functioning. You cannot make yourself malfunction. You cannot interfere with your inner workings. YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE AND NOTHING ELSE.

"I am still as God created me."

For the sake of what we'll call your SANITY, or operating in your soul in the WAY IT WAS INTENDED, without running amok and going haywire with UNPRODUCTIVE distorted outputs, it is in your best interests to ACCEPT YOUR FUNCTION. This means not having grandiose ideas of BEING SOME OTHER EQUIPMENT. It means not being jealous of the GOD MACHINE. It means not wanting to REJECT YOUR NATURE. And it means therefore the end of the authority problem.

You can't experience the EFFORTLESSNESS that God gave you, while you are trying to DISTORT your function. You cannot BE YOURSELF, while you are denying what you are. And you cannot be CONTENT or AT PEACE, while you are trying to turn yourself into something YOU WERE NOT DESIGNED TO BE. This means a willingness to ACCEPT your design specifications, without question, as GOOD ENOUGH. And this isn't some kind of second-best or booby prize either, because God creates perfect machinery!

The willingness to BE ONLY AS GOD CREATED YOU, to accept only the function THAT WAS GIVEN YOU, to fulfill the ROLE that God assigned to you, and to ONLY BE, HAVE, AND DO, that which God WILLED for you to do IN YOUR CREATION, is what re-aligns you with God's will and enables you to FUNCTION correctly. Or rather, to not disguise your true function with artificial functions.

This means having a willingness to accept FROM GOD, the specifications of WHAT YOU ARE. To allow ONLY HIM to define the TRUTH about you. To let him be YOUR FATHER. To let him be the one that decides WHAT YOU CAN AND CANNOT DO. And to acknowledge that you ARE EXACTLY HOW HE WANTS YOU TO BE. When you line up with this, and be ONLY this, and have ONLY what God gave you, and DO only what God willed for you, without objection, only then will you be happy and at peace and free from illusions.

To accept "the atonement" is merely to RECEIVE the ORIGINAL BLUEPRINT from the manufacturer. To be willing to ACCEPT that you ARE ONLY what God has designed you to be, and to function optimally within his parameters. To WANT nothing else, and to cease the MIS-USE of your function. You thus RESUME your function of creation and merely carry on as if nothing had happened.

Nothing can change what you are. You cannot change yourself. You cannot change other people's souls. You have NEVER DONE ANYTHING AGAINST GOD'S WILL. You have not exceeded your operating parameters. You have not BROKEN, gone downhill, degraded, corrupted, caused unnatural side effects or damaged anything. YOU CANNOT SIN OR ATTACK OR DIE. You have NEVER DONE ANYTHING WRONG.

You therefore are still exactly the innocent, perfect, holy, acceptable, worthy, beautiful, loving, harmless, immaculate, immortal, eternal, happy, joyful, powerful, free, flawless and completely divine piece of machinery that GOD CAUSED YOU TO BE. Just by being TRUE TO YOURSELF, knowing yourself, and BEING YOUR SOUL, you need do nothing else.

All that God wants for you is to be true to yourself and fulfill the NATURAL INHERENT FUNCTION he gave you. And since that function includes happiness and joy, it is a function you WILL approve of.

"All true pleasure comes from doing God's will."

"When he said "mind is the builder," he did not realize that it is only what it is building NOW that really creates the future. The past, in itself, does not have the ability to do this. Whenever we move from one instant to the next, the previous one no longer exists."

Here's a little statement which correlates to the idea that your body is not really a continuation from the past, nor does it have its own ongoing "state". It is a NOW-MOMENT-PROJECTION from the mind, and the mind is currently projecting NOW a fresh image NOW of the body, in whatever condition it wants it to appear in NOW. If the body *appears* to "carry over" conditions that seemed to be established in the past it is because the MIND is NOW re-projecting a similar image to the image it projected previously, NOT because the body itself has a "causal past" that makes its current condition predetermined.

The spacetime continuum is an illusion. And this also matches with the fact that in this 2019 moment right now, the mind is projecting this universe, and making it APPEAR to be a picture of a very old universe, even complete with all the details necessary to suggest that its current condition is the causal "result" of a distant past big bang, and yet every single speck of this world is a NOW MOMENT PROJECTION from the mind, designed to make it APPEAR as though this world has been taking a very long time to reach its current condition. The universe is no more than a nanosecond old.

This is reflected in night time dreams also, whereby when you go to sleep, you dream, you imagine an environment, and it seems the environment is very established and would've taken countless millions of years of evolution to arrive at its current condition, and yet it has NO HISTORY, having only just been dreamed at a moment's notice. Even if it seems to have a huge back-story or a sense of time having passed, the entire thing is being made up RIGHT NOW to LOOK AS IF it's very old and as if there is evidence of the processes that it must have undergone to reach this current condition. There is no past! It's all a present-moment projection. You are dreaming this all up right now!

There are two kinds of power, God's power and ego power.

Ego power means that you have to rise up against enemies and fight them strongly. This manifests as intensity, anger, attack. You think that if you can 'over-power' the 'other', then you will gain power and win.

But this demonstration of power is actually not power at all. It is a show of weakness, because you can't believe in separation and have strength. Strength comes from wholeness, not opposition. Strength comes from inclusiveness, not exclusion.

When you are attempting to be powerful over something in this ego way, you're really saying that you believe very strongly that the enemy has some kind of power over you, and therefore you need to muster a huge amount of supposed might against them in order to not be disempowered. But this only means you still continue to believe they have power over you, which is a perspective of weakness. This isn't really power at all.

God's power is wholeness, in that when you are being what you are, you are infinitely powerful. There is no limit to what you can do or what you can choose to create. And nothing can affect you, and you have no enemies.

See, the essential difference is, that in God's power you don't need the power in order to rise up against anyone because the power comes from wholeness and not from separation. It comes because it's natural and shared, and is therefore strong. It automatically protects you from inventing enemies, and therefore there are no enemies that this power needs to 'go up against'. You are powerful SO THAT you have no opposition.

It is actually a choice to have a lack of power, that creates a perception of enemies. It is a choice to see yourself as a victim, that leads to you believing that someone other than you has a power to affect you in ways that you can't prevent. And ultimately if you believe they have tremendous power over you, they will destroy you. But really it is you destroying yourself, because you're the one giving your power away.

So yes, you choose and feed your enemies. You give them their ammunition. You set them against you.

If you want to feel empowered it's not going to come from fighting against things that you think are unacceptable or not right. YOU ARE THE ONE WHO IS PUTTING THEM OUT THERE! It's from shifting into an awareness that nothing can harm you because you have no opposition and are not attacking others with a judgement of wrongness. Stop making enemies for yourself.

In the separation from God we made what seems to be a world, opposite to God - space and time and bodies etc. But we're told this world is unreal. What does "unreal" mean? Because while we're told it's unreal we're also told we believe in it, and that by believing in it it becomes real to us.

Being unreal is a way to say it's not ultimately true and isn't how God creates. So in a sense, it is dream-like. But people DO have dreams, and the mind IS dreaming of a world of space and time. This dream can seem very real and solid and effectual to the dreamer.

As such even though the world is ultimately unreal, which would seem to write off anything that seems to happen in it, while we are still in it believing in it we do still have experience of it AS IF it were real. In fact we can make it extremely real to ourselves and have a horrible nightmare.

"anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist."

"The mind can make the belief in Separation VERY real and VERY fearful. And this belief IS the devil. It is powerful, active, destructive, and clearly in opposition to God, because it literally denies His Fatherhood. Never underestimate the power of this denial. Look at your lives and see what the devil has made. But KNOW that this making will surely dissolve in the light of truth, because its foundation IS a lie."

But nightmares do in fact seem very real and frightening and full of suffering and stress to the believer. To the believer, even if they are hallucinating, even if what they experence is total fantasy and not possible in God's laws, it nevertheless can seem VERY real and true to a mind that belives in it.

How do we overcome this nightmarish experience of a world in which everything suffers and dies? What is NEEDED? What is called for? If the problem is that the mind is believing in it and giving it power, then the mind has to withdraw that power and stop believing in it. And by not believing in it, the mind will ultimately stop seeing it.

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal? Could you have FAITH in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? AND WOULD YOU SEE IT? Hallucinations disappear when they are RECOGNIZED for what they are. This IS the healing and the remedy."

Here the course doesn't say that the remedy or approach we're supposed to take is to just write the world off with labels like "unreal, illusion, nothing, doesn't exist" ESPECIALLY when the mind IS honestly still believing in it and giving it reality. That's a form of denial. Instead it says we are to use RECOGNITION to realize that the world isn't real and isn't true, WHILE still in it. That's different from PRETENDING TO BE OUTSIDE IT.

A hallucinated world will disappear only when RECOGNIZED that it is a dream and not a reality. This is what "awareness of dreaming" is about. Awareness of dreaming isn't denial. It's in fact a state in which you are still asleep and dreaming, but you have the awareness of what you're doing.

We're not supposed to keep bypassing the world in an attempt to overcome or escape it. In fact, Jesus's remedy for us is to CHANGE PERCEPTION so that we will come to first see this world from a different vantage point. That does require us to "love the world" and to find peace in the world. Before we can leave it. As the course says:

"First you will dream of peace, then you will awaken to it."

If we try to skip the dream of peace, or the happy dream, or the forgiven world, and just try to jump from false perception to knowledge, we're doing a bypass.

"Knowledge is not the remedy for false perception since, being another level, they can never meet. The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception. It will not endure. But for the time it lasts it comes to heal. For true perception is a remedy with many names. Forgiveness, salvation, Atonement, true perception, all are one. They are the one beginning with the end to lead to Oneness far beyond themselves. True perception is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist. And it is this that true perception sees."

Those who use non-dual-seeming statements like "the world doesn't exist so it doen't matter what you do", "the body isn't real so don't bother healing it" etc... are trying to use truths from the level of KNOWLEDGE, to correct the problem. But Jesus says this will not really work. THE ONE CORRECTION for false perception is true perception. We can't skip having true perception. We have to find a way to forgive this world and everything in it first instead of trying to jump ahead to being what is only really experienced AFTER we complete the curriculum.

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

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

"You have expressed surprise at hearing how VERY different is reality from what YOU see. You do not realize the magnitude of that ONE error. It was so vast and so COMPLETELY incredible, that from it, a world of total unreality HAD to emerge."

"You looked upon the unreal and found despair. But by SEEKING the unreal, what else COULD you find? The UNreal world IS a thing of despair, for it can never be."

"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."

"The separation is merely a faulty formulation of reality, WITH NO EFFECT AT ALL. The miracle, without a function in Heaven, IS needful here. ASPECTS of reality can still be seen, and they will replace aspects of UNREALITY. Aspects of reality can be seen IN EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE. Yet only God can gather them together by crowning them AS ONE with the final gift of eternity."

There are some basic facts in the course. These facts are completely clear cut, black and white. They do not have any exceptions. There is no "maybe" to them. They are so perfectly defined and clear that all you can do is either accept them or deny them. Such is the truth.

e.g. The fact is, God is eternal.

So if you can start by accepting this fact, we can move on to another fact. But if you cannot accept this fact, or think there are exceptions to it, or don’t understand what eternal means, we can’t make any other sensible conclusions.

Eternal - lasting forever, always the same, permanent, unwavering, lacking all change or difference, never ending or beginning, constant and unfaltering. Yes?

If you can accept this, you can accept this is God’s nature. And under NO circumstances is this ever opposed, or untrue. If God is eternal, the truth about God must also be eternal. It is fixed. It’s a fact.

Upon accepting this premise, we can move on to say, clearly, if God is a creator, and because God is eternal, God creates in an eternal way. What he creates MUST BE eternal also, as an EXTENSION of His own nature.

Would it make sense to say that an eternal creator would create anything less than something eternal? Think about what that would entail. It means God has a VARIETY of kinds of creations which are different and contradict each other, and so is confused. It means God does not always think eternal thoughts, and so thinks of death. It means God changes his mind. It means therefore that sometimes God is not God. In fact, it means sometimes God stops being eternal also, and dies. Do we really want THAT to be the truth?? Does that make ANY sense? Not at all. Do not accept this nonsense.

So to make sense here, we have to accept, admit, the fact is, when God EXTENDS HIMSELF, when God expresses eternity, when God GIVES HIMSELF to His creations, He MUST produce ONLY eternal life. He can only give what he has. He cannot create UNLIKE Himself. This should make perfect sense because it is impeccably logical. Creation is the extension of God’s own eternal nature. And this simply leads to the fact that God CANNOT create anything that lacks eternal life.

So now you might be thinking about things you know of in this world, wondering if or HOW they might have eternal life. You might now enter into wishful thinking, even strong resistance, or unwillingness to realize that they may not HAVE eternal life. You might want to blur the definition of what eternal means. You may not want this "cold hard fact" to be true. It might imply some things you do not want, or incite ego reactions and upset. And these are poor quality ego thoughts. The mind is slipping out of impeccable logic and reason and going into denial.

Facts can be accepted or denied, but they cannot be changed. You have to have a CLEAR grasp of what ETERNAL means. And you can’t be wishywashy about it. It is black and white. Something lives forever or it does not. Something is permanent and unchanging OR it is temporary and changes. Which is it? You have to be honest here. Denial does not bring the truth.

There is no OPINON involved here. There are no "multiple possible interpretations". The facts are rock solid. Impeccable. Clear. Perfect. So true that they are not OPEN to interpretation. You either accept them as a result of RECOGNIZING the sense they make, or reject them. The great thing about dealing with impeccably logical facts is that the ego cannot have a say, opinions do not matter, and there is no way to be incorrect UNLESS you fail to reason correctly. Your role of "decider of what is true" goes bye bye. Facts are the end of the ego. The truth sets you free.

Fact is, a world that changes is not eternal. How could it be, when eternal means NEVER ENDS and NEVER CHANGES? If God is eternal, he CANNOT create a changing world. This is a raw fact. Beginnings and ends are not of Him. This is why the world - Earth - which ONLY changes, and has no permanent identity, cannot have come from Him. And therefore, it cannot be eternal reality, or His creation. This is why ACIM refers to it as the world YOU made. And it OPPOSES His because it opposes eternal life.

It is an impeccable fact that this world is not God’s Kingdom. It is not real. And it does not really exist. This is why there is no world. This can be accepted, or denied, but the fact cannot be changed. Your only freedom is in whether you are WILLING to ACCEPT that it is a fact, or deny it. And denial of facts brings illusions of suffering. If you want the truth, you have to be WILLING to let go of anything which goes against the facts.

A Course in Miracles is BASED ON these facts. It’s metaphysics lines up with it perfectly. And it is these facts which lay the foundation for the Holy Spirit’s thought system. Accepting there is no world is accepting the facts. And accepting the facts results in accepting eternal life. The truth of God is not yours to define. And only His eternal truth is true.

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit."

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death."

"follow the simple logic, by which the Holy Spirit teaches you the simple conclusions that speak for truth, and ONLY truth."

I'm learning at the moment that healing of the body is impossible. Healing of the mind is possible, but the body cannot be directly healed.

The mind creates the body.

The mind is constantly projecting the body and basically 'overriding' anything you do `to` the body.

So it's like this... there's a blender in the kitchen and the lid is off and its spinning and there's juices and ooze flying all over the kitchen making a mess. So what do you do. You fetch a mop to clean up the floor. But you don't switch the blender off. So now you are FIGHTING against the cause of the problem by trying to address the symptoms/effects directly. And doing this is basically a way to IGNORE the cause and NOT FIX IT.

You better turn the tap off before you mop up a flood.

You better put the lid on the beehive before you start to address the bee stings.

You better get out of the burning building before you start trying to put the fire out.

The mind needs to be corrected. There's something in the mind that is mistaken.

Now, this is where the ego cackles because it's done a very good job of making it seem like you do not have a mind. The mind seems invisible. Where is it? What does it look like? How does it function? What does it contain? How does it store stuff? How does it get changed? Do you even know any of this? I have no clue.

Yet the mind is where the problem is. In our mind there is something that needs to be corrected because it is mistaken. It believes wrongly. It sees wrongly. It has conditioning that's running against itself. That's where the problem is. And that's what needs to be healed.

So then we go looking for the switch, in the mind, that needs to be flipped, in order to fix the body problem indirectly. But its not the body problem that's an issue. It's the mind-content that projecting onto it. Belief in the body being real. Belief in sickness. Use of disease as a defense. Use of lack and rejection as a defense. What's going on in the mind that needs to change in order to be healed?

Our mind has impeccable logic. The thought system of the Holy Spirit has impeccable logic. Everything which extends from God has impeccable logic. The metaphysics of the course is PERFECTLY logical. If something does not correlate logically it is false.

"The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite. Fear is the opposite of love. If love has an opposite it creates a state which does not exist." ergo.. logically... fear does not exist.

"He (God) did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way. God does not suffer conflict. Nor is His creation split in two. How could it be His Son could be in hell, when God Himself established him in Heaven?"

Our mind has this capacity for perfect logic because it is perfect. However, when we are in the ego, the ego also USES our perfect logic to develop its entire thought system. Every single part of the ego's thought system is derived perfectly logically from an initial false premise.

All aspects of separation, the reason for the making of matter, the result of sickness and death, the making of an artificial world, all wars and conflicts, all dynamics of interpersonal relationships, all specialness and attack, is ALL - ABSOLUTELY ALL - based on a progression of IMPECCABLE LOGIC.

This world coming about and the arising of bodies and the invention of sickness and war and death can ALL be explained using nothing but logical statements. No interpretation or "fluffy glue" or fanciful ideas needed to make sense of it. It is all BLACK AND WHITE.

The belief that you are guilty because you sinned, is logic. The belief that your real sin affected God and therefore God is justified in a counter attack, is logic. The idea of denial is a logical split with entirely predictable logical consequences. Every consequence and result that has come about from the separation from God, can only happen ONE WAY and with ONE RESULT because it is all derived LOGICALLY.

If you can see the logic, you are seeing the METAPHYSICS.

"The ego has a purpose, just as the Holy Spirit has. The ego's purpose is fear because only the fearful can be egotistic. The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit because your mind has all the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects. But again, let us remember that both are in you. In Heaven there is no guilt because the Kingdom is attained through the Atonement, which releases you to create. The word "create" is appropriate here because, once what you have made is undone by the Holy Spirit, the blessed residue is restored and therefore continues in creation."

This section of the course is fairly explicit about how God created many sons. It also uses the term "one with him", which does not in any way undo the fact that there are many sons, showing that "one with" does not mean "there is only one".

As I type this, Jesus is clarifying for me that oneness means "joined". Multiple individuals who are joined. Notice also at the end of this section it says God’s holiness is *PART* of us. That means some part of us IS God Himself, and some part of us is a distinct creation with its own free will. Being JOINED to God therefore does not mean we are ONLY God. God has CREATED sons!

Are a mother and her baby, "joined" by an umbilical cord, "one" self? Birth is after all a SYMBOL of creation, followed by a SYMBOL of separation.

"Creation is the sum of all God’s Thoughts, in number infinite, and everywhere without all limit. Only Love creates, and only like Itself. There was no time when all that It created was not there. Nor will there be a time when anything that It created suffers any pain.

Forever and forever are God’s Thoughts exactly as They were and as They are, unchanged through time and after time is done. God’s Thoughts are given all the power that Their own Creator has. For He would add to Love by Its extension. Thus His Son shares in creation, and must therefore share in power to create. What God has willed be forever one will still be one when time is over; and will not be changed throughout the course of time, remaining as it was before the thought of time began.

Creation is the opposite of all illusions, for Creation is the truth. Creation is the holy Son of God, for in Creation is His Will complete in every aspect, making every part container of the whole. Its oneness is forever guaranteed inviolate; forever held within His holy Will beyond all possibility of harm, of separation, imperfection and of any spot upon its sinlessness. We are creation; we the Sons of God.

We seem to be discrete and unaware of our eternal unity with Him. Yet back of all our doubts, past all our fears, there still is certainty. For Love remains with all Its Thought, Its sureness being Theirs. God’s memory is in our holy minds, which know their oneness and their unity with their Creator. Let our function be only to let this memory return, only to let God’s Will be done on earth, only to be restored to sanity, and to be but as God created us.

Our Father calls to us. We hear His Voice, and we forgive creation in the Name of its Creator, Holiness Itself, Whose holiness His own creation shares; Whose holiness is still a part of us."

The simple transition which occurs as the result of A Course in Miracles, applying forgiveness correctly, is that you transition from blaming everyone else to becoming responsible.

Auto-pilot for the ego is that everything you experience is caused by everyone and everything else outside of you. When you think about that, it's a pretty strange way to live - only ever experiencing what life throws at you, reacting to it like a passive victim.

As you begin to see that the person you were blaming is not the CAUSE of your problem, that the cause is IN you, not outside of you, and that you are completely responsible for EVERYTHING you experience, you stop seeing others as justified targets for blame.

Now you begin to see that it is not really the person being blamed that has a problem. It's the person doing the blaming.

If a person is upset, it is NOT the person they are upset with that has the problem, its the person who is upset.

If someone seems to have been hurt by someone else, it is NOT that other person's fault, it is the responsibility of the person who was hurt. You cannot BE hurt without the consent of your mind. Your mind is powerful and CREATES the *response* of hurt in your body in cooperation with the attacker, otherwise your body could not possibly show effects.

All of the attention of blame and projection and scapegoating onto others, all finger pointing, all perception of being attacked, all perception that someone or something is causing you positively or negatively, and all ideas of being changed by, affected by, caused by or upset by, anything whatsoever outside of you, has to go out the window. There perceptions are false and they are incompatible with health, happiness and sanity.

Imagine realizing that absolutely nothing outside of you has ever affected you, absolutely nobody has ever done anything to you, absolutely nobody is to blame for anything, there is absolutely no-one worthy of being judged or reacted to, and that YOU are the sole responsible agent for what you are experiencing. And if this is true, then notice how freeing this is, how safe it feels, how deeply peaceful it makes you.

If the world is NOT attacking you, if other people are NOT hurting you, if there ARE no causes outside of you, and if you cannot ever be at the effect of anything in the world... you are SOOOOO safe, so protected, so calm and reassured, and so permanently transcendent of all suffering. Yes please!

I was thinking about why we seem to have a body at all.

It occurred to me that all ego illusions are put in place as a form of level confusion. When the dream (effect) seems to have a causal ability, it does something "to you". This produces illusions of effects in you, and in your body. Believing that cause is outside of you instead of inside of you, makes the world basically tell you what you are. And you comply.

The body showing up, then, shows us not so much that it's being projected from inside the body itself, but is showing up as an image which is being "caused by" the world. By all of the ego's laws, the body is only there because the world put it there. It's only there because there is level confusion. It's only there because you believe in magic. And it's only there because you see yourself as an effect of your dream.

Effects within dreams show up as "forms". All thoughts produce form at some level and all ego thoughts produce illusions of forms. Belief in ego therefore means you believe the world is the cause of you, and this belief ALONE places an IMAGE of a body over your mind. It is a picture of what is seen from OUTSIDE of you looking inwards (reversed cause-effect), which is why everyone ELSE sees it.

But really the body is nothing but a state of a belief in external causes, a projection of ego sin. "The body is the belief in sin projected outward and made flesh." - ACIM

So we believe in sin, which sets up a reversal of cause and effect, which creates level confusion, which makes it seem like our dream is dreaming us, which feeds back towards us as a body which is perceived, from the outside in. Projection makes perception.

This is also why when level confusion is completely corrected, what is true is recognized as true, and what is false is false, THERE CANNOT BE A BODY. The body cannot SEPARATE YOU from what is or from yourself. You are no longer being "caused" by the world. There is no longer proof that you were made by matter. You now have mind over matter and your inverted perception from the outside-in will now turn inside out and be in its correct order. The body cannot show up at all when there is no belief in separation or illusions. This is why Jesus's body disappeared.

This is a slight technicality which the ego forgot to mention.

If you knew and could see that any attempt you make to influence or hurt or affect another, immediately has direct repercussions upon yourself, and that it is absolutely impossible to escape ANY of the effects, then you would have no choice but to always love.

It is ONLY because you do not see, ie are not aware, that this is true, and applies in every situation, that you think it's possible to get away with one set of rules applying to someone else that does not apply to you. Or that you can cause something without experiencing the effects.

The ego is entirely based on this idea that you are not equal to your brother in some way, that they can be the one who is a sinner and not you.

This creates the tremendous illusion, commonly believed-in by most of the planet, that you literally can attack or judge or harm or condemn without having any side effects whatseover.

This is false. It is not true at all.

You could call it karma. It's not pay-back. It's not compensation. It's the simply fact that WHATEVER you do, you WILL do it to yourself and everyone.

"Whatever you do unto the least of my brothers you do unto me" ... or something like that. Every way you treat everyone else, you are treating Jesus and God the same way.

Not necessarily that they will receive the treatment you are dishing out, but you will believe they are.

What applies to others applies to you. At all times.

There are no loopholes. There is no exit clause. There are no workarounds. There is no hope of being especially skilled or capable or clever or imaginative in how you figure out how to cheat the system. The system is not cheatable. God's laws are pemanent.

This is what "shared interests" are all about. You, being literally one with your brother, SHARE everything with them, and therefore receive everything you give.

This is also why giving and receiving are one. What you give you will receive.

This is a pretty deep and abstract passage from lesson 167, "There is one life and that I share with God." It speaks of how immortal mind is permanently awake, it thinks of being asleep in which it dreams of a world of spacetime, everything in that dream is nothing with no consequences (there is no world) because it’s a dream of NOT existing and NOTHING happening, and then it simply awakens, the dream world disappears, and it resumes creation with God. You have to read it slowly to really get a feel for it. So I added some commentary...

"The mind (shared with God in heaven) can ***think*** it sleeps, but that is all (has a THOUGHT of sleeping - tiny mad idea). It cannot change what is its waking state (can’t change the truth). It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body (cannot make a REAL body). What is alien to the mind does not exist because it has no source. For mind creates all things that are (all creations in heaven), and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state. It cannot make the physical (literally impossible to REALLY create the physical). What seems to die (the illusion of the physical) is but the sign of mind asleep (mind can only imagine physicality, it cannot create it as a permanent creation, and we are currently "living" within that IDEA).

The opposite of (eternal) life can only be another ***form*** of life (a real opposite is impossible, the physical is not completely opposite, it’s still within God - safe in God, dreaming of exile). As such, it can be reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite in truth. Its form may change; it may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind (mind is still mind even if it experiences wakefulness or THINKS OF a sleeping state) awake or sleeping. It is not its opposite in anything created (mind MAKES the illusion that mind is absent, free will is used to make the illusion of imprisonment), nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps (even death is a deliberately chosen idea by a *living* mind).

God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them (not possible to make an actual separation, death, body, etc) The **thought** of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life (absolute death is not possible at all, the thought of death is just an idea WITHIN the awake mind and are illusions, love has no opposite, so death is not a true opposite, it’s just a state of thought). Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God (souls etc) remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within Themselves, for They are everywhere.

What seems to be the opposite of life (eternal life) is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not (e.g. trying to be a world or body), and to assume an alien power which it does not have (made-up ego laws or ability to really sin), a foreign state it cannot enter (illusions of vulnerability, sickness, suffering, death), or a false condition not within its Source (nightmares, attack, sickness etc), it merely ***seems*** to go to sleep a while. It ***dreams*** (thinks of) of time (this whole universe); an interval in which what *seems* to happen never has occurred (tiny tick of time, nothing in this world ever happened), the changes wrought are substance-less (no real consequences, no sin), and all events are nowhere (nothing ever really happens because its a thought of "nothing happening"). When the mind awakes (to the Kingdom of God, and stops dreaming up a world), it but continues as it always was (in heaven).

Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy heritage. Our life is not as we imagine it. Who changes life because he shuts his eyes (failure to acknowledge reality, denial of God), or makes himself what he is not (trying to be a dead body) because he sleeps and sees in dreams (this world) an opposite to what he is? (Everything you see in this world is OPPOSITE to reality - "Earth, heaven’s opposite in every way.") We will not ask for death (this world - "without the idea of death tehre is no world") in **any form** today. Nor will we let imagined (bodies, planets) opposites to (eternal) life abide even an instant where the Thought of Life Eternal has been set by God Himself.

His holy home (heaven) we strive to keep today as He established it, and wills it be forever and forever. He is Lord of what we think today. And in His Thoughts, Which have no opposite, we understand there is one life (eternal life with God), and that we share with Him, with all creation (the Kingdom of God, not this world), with their thoughts as well, whom He created in a Unity of life (all created beings in heaven) that cannot separate in death and leave the Source of Life (God) from where it came.

We share life because we have one Source (God), a Source from Which perfection comes to us, remaining always in the ***holy minds*** which He created perfect (yes God DID create many minds!). As we were, so are we now and will forever be ("we" existing within reality). A sleeping mind must waken (individually) as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of Life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there (sees the real world, reflects holiness here). And now it is no more a mere reflection (when you go to heaven). It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes reflection possible. No vision now is needed (vision/perception has no purpose IN heaven/reality - "Indeed, you cannot remain in the world with this knowledge."). For the wakened mind (awake in heaven, not in a body or in this world any more, not in the dream, not having dreams, not having the thought of the world, not asleep, fully awake in God) is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness."

Sometimes when an old hurt is coming out, you'll start to project it onto someone else. It's kind of as if you switch on a movie projector, you fetch an old tape from your vault, load it up and press play. The movie starts to project and you start to see it and experience it. Except now it's mapped onto other people who probably were totally unrelated to causing it, which starts to make it seem like they are causing it.

As you project, you are kind of hurling the pain at someone else. Whatever the issue is, let's say you are angry at someone for how they treated you or that they acted a certain way that was hurtful. As this hurt comes up in your mind, it will find a target and project toward it. It actually tries to turn that person INTO the person that you are upset about, and you start interpreting their actions as though they're doing exactly what that person did.

And as you do this projecting, it's kind of like you are judging, condemning and attacking the person with this stuff. You're trying to turn them into this stuff, to fill the role. And for most people this actually influences them and may cause them to start acting in a way that fits the 'role' that you are projecting. And this makes it even more plausible that all of this upset is because of them.

In the midst of such hallucinations you can really get to believing that this person is doing this to you, and at the same time you are feeling the old hurt, and putting two and two together you think its because of them. But what's really happening is the person is just triggering your old hurt and you're not really dealing with it.

Whatever the person seems to be doing, it likely is similar to what someone else did in your past. Form-wise it may not be similar at all. It could be that the person has the same attitude, or reminds you of how someone was a certain way when around you, even though their physical behavior and appearance may be different. The psychological 'content' seems to match and this creates a connection.

In this state of semi-consciousness it's pretty hard to realize that this is what is going on, especially when you're convinced it's all to do with this other person. But what you're feeling is your own stuff, for which you are responsible, and this projection is just hurting the other person. You are accusing them of what you believe someone else did to you so that you have a way to scapegoat the energy and seem to get it out of your mind. Which doesn't work.

The only way is to realize that you are triggered, you are reacting, you are re-experiencing old stuff, it's nothing to do with anyone else, and you need to own it and heal it. Taking the burden off the shoulders of the other person is a good start.

Love recognizes perfect equality in all children of God. The Golden Rule states that what applies to you applies to all other creations and the entire sonship without exception.

When you believe that something applies to you which does not apply to someone else, you are being murderous.

When this happens, there has been a separation idea introduced in-between cause and effect. God the Father is cause, you are His effect. To separate from God you drive a wedge between the two.

This now means that you believe you can cause something without being at the effect of what you cause. That you can GIVE, without RECEIVING, which is a principle of sacrifice. And that in turn means, you can do something to someone else, and escape the consequences.

This immediately places you in a position of seeming to be able to "get away with murder", because if you can do something to someone or have something be true of them and not of you, you can attack them and cause them harm without seeming to hurt yourself (which is delusional.)

This is why anything short of love is attempted murder. It's an attempt to say, hey brother, we are different, and you are this thing that I am not, and so it's possible for you to suffer without me suffering, and it's possible for me to attack you without me receiving the same attack.

In this view, giving a receiving are no longer equal and what is true of me is no longer true for you, and so I can make something apply to you without it applying to me, and thus get away with it.

Even the slightest hint that the Golden Rule does not apply, or that there are different rules of values for each child of God, introduces a fundamentally murderous thought system, which is murderous at its very core. This is why anything which is not eternal life, is death, and there is no life outside of Heaven.

It IS a black and white, literal teaching. The ego is fundamentally a murderous thought system. Any lack of equality is an attack. Any imbalance or specialness or special favor or chaotic lack of identicality is an attack on the entire sonship.

God creates only perfectly identical mirror-image beings who are in His own image and likeness in every way. None of them lacks anything, nothing is missing. "God who encompasses all being nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually and want to share it to increase their joy." When such beings attempt to not share, and to not increase joy, and to not be perfectly identical, they enter into lack, which produces perceived attack, which is a state of attempted murder.

Jesus is very clear about this. "What is not love is murder." If it's not perfect unconditional divine holy love, the person is being murderous. And that means even a slight grievance is murderous. Even a casual judgement. Even a single attack thought. Even an irritation or slight annoyance. It may seem to show up as "degrees" of murderousness but it's still ALL murderous.

If you are feeling unworthy or unwanted, know this.

In spacetime, cause and effect seem to occur whereby you cause something temporarily, it produces something temporary, and then the cause is withdrawn. As if it has deposited a creation and left it alone, essentially similar to the idea of birth.

Physical creations are like discarded pieces of trash, made momentarily and then forgotten about. In effect, its creator abandons it, does not want to maintain it, withdraws life from it, and leaves it to die alone.

What is deposited upon the Earth is merely thrown away, discarded and no longer nurtured by its creator. And being without a cause, it must die. This is true of all bodies and objects and forms, which are nothing but discarded rejects from a temporary creator who creates nothing that lasts and who wants none of his creations.

This is the metaphysical origin of feelings of unworthiness, of rejection by God, of being discarded and abandoned, of deserving death and of being orphaned in a trashcan of a world. If you ARE a body, then you are disconnected from your source, and your creator has rejected you as unworthy.

It is simply because you believe you are identified with something that is not permanent, came from a creator who does not permanently love you, were produced by a sinful evil cause who hated you and no longer wanted you, and who has left you for dead in a graveyard, lost and alone to wither and die.

No one can be sustained or maintained without a cause. Effects do not exist unless their cause is ongoing. You cannot step away from something, believing you have caused it, and have it remain. To do so is to reject and discard and abandon it to death. A creation which can exist on its own without its creator is a total illusion in this world. Without your creator you are nothing.

God is a permanent creator and he creates only that which is permanent, and he maintains you in his mind forever by his thought and will and power. He cannot ever stop loving you or stop creating you or sustaining you. That is why you are able to live forever, because he is permanently holding you in existence. You are forever ever-present and ever-perfect. He WANTS YOU permanently and so does NOT leave you.

Only in such a way can you BE worthy, or WANTED, or DESIRED by your creator, or VALUED enough to have permanent ongoing nurturing, support, maintenance and continued existence. Only if you were wanted FOREVER could you have eternal life. And this is how we have to learn to think of ourselves.

If we see ourselves as children of temporary parents, or deposits of a creator who has turned his back on us, or effects who have become orphaned from their cause, or fatherless sons, or motherless daughters, or in any way disconnected from our source, then we will see ourselves as unwanted. This is why all those walking the earth feel themselves to be unworthy, because they think they have become separate from God.

Separation is really the idea that cause and effect have become separated. That father and son have been separated. That the son no longer has a father. That the father is no longer a father and does not want a son. That the father has rejected the son and is trying to destroy him. And that the son has rejected the father and is trying to destroy him also. This MUST produce a sense of unworthiness because it means the father does not want the sons and does not value his life.

If you are the child of a permanent creator, who wants you permanently, and who can never stop wanting you, then you must be worthy and you must be wanted. If you are something lost and forgotten, discarded like a piece of trash, hated and reviled, evil and ugly, then obviously you're going to feel unworthy. Identifying with a body you MUST reject God and msut therefore feel valueless. The body is not worth ANYTHING, and if it is your self, then you have no creator.

A lack of worth therefore is nothing more than a breakdown in cause and effect. To be an effect without a cause, is to have been disowned. If you are disowned by your creator then what can that say of your value, who has turned his back and left you behind to suffer alone? Only if cause and effect are permanent can you be worthy of God. You cannot be some lump of flesh that was squirted out and became a separate thing, otherwise you ARE literally separate from your creator and are PHYSICALLY unwanted.

Fortunately God never leaves his children comfortless. He never abandons you. He never forgets you. He never stops loving and wanting you. He never finds you to be imperfect or worth discarding. He never stops suspending you in his mind, or making sure theat you live forever. He never leaves you and he never forsakes you. And most of all, he never fails to value you, because he has decided to hold you in his heart forever.

"You have not left me comfortless. I have within me both the memory of You, and One Who leads me to It."

"You do not walk alone. God's angels hover close, and all about. His Love surrounds you, and of this be sure: that I will never leave you comfortless."

"Before that, there was no need for healing and no-one was comfortless."

"It was accomplished FOR you by the Will of God, who has not left you comfortless."

"He will not leave you comfortless, nor fail to send His angels down to answer you in His Own Name."

"He would not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release your minds from everything that hides His Face from you."

"God did not leave His Children comfortless, even though they left Him."

"And he is entitled to everything, because it is his birthright as a Son of God."

"The Children of God are entitled to perfect comfort, which comes from a sense of perfect trust."

"God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they, were created neither partially nor in part."

"The Atonement was built into the space-time belief in order to set a limit on the need for the belief, and ultimately to make learning complete."

God exists everywhere. God fully exists in all locations simultaneously. All of God is in all locations. God is omnipresent. Because God is always everywhere, always is eternity, and in reality everything is constantly the same.

Spacetime is an ego belief. It was manufactured to oppose reality and attack it. Space attacks God's omnipresence. It claims that nothing is present in more than one location, the whole of everything isn't present in any location, nothing is fully present anywhere, everything is present nowhere, and therefore everywhere is nowhere. It is the idea that NOTHING IS EVERYWHERE. It is totally opposite to God's nature.

Time is also an attack on God's nature. Where eternity proves that everything is always the same, time is the attempt to prove that nothing is EVER the same. It suggests what existed before, no longer exists, there has been death of Heaven, and something has replaced it. Every instant of time testifies to this. It is the idea that God is not always the same, has changed, and has been affected. Time is rooted in sin and death.

Spacetime was made in order to attack God and attempt to kill his Son. It's a depiction of an idea, really just a belief, that God is nowhere. It paints a picture of crucifixion in which God's son is depicted as being nowhere, not whole, ie dead.

"The world is the picture of the crucifixion of God's son."

This world applies to the ENTIRE content of spacetime, not just Earth. It refers to this entire universe, all planets and stars and galaxies. All bodies, all "life forms", which are really death forms, because it is a dream of death and made to oppose eternal life.

Everything within spacetime, including Earth, were made as an attack on God's nature. "The laws of this world go against your nature." This is why Earth is a dream world, not a real world. It is the world you made and the world you see. It is an illusion. "The world you see is an illusion of a world, God did not create it, for what he creates must be eternal as himself."

There are numerous statements in the course that confirm that there are miraculous things going on in God in heaven.

Not only does the course ACTUALLY SAY that God perform miracles, it also says that WE as sons of God ARE his miracles, and because we inherit from him this cause US to be a miracle. We EXTEND miracles BECAUSE we are miracles.

Think about that. YOU are a miracle. Not a shift in perception. Not something that comes and goes and is done. You are PERMANENTLY MIRACULOUS. This is what the course actually does say.

There is a lot of talk about miracles referring ONLY to the things of this world, healing in this world, changing your mind in this world, as though there is NO MIRACLE ANYWHERE IN REALITY. This could not be MORE OPPOSITE to the actual truth.

ALL of reality is entirely miraculous forever. God is miraculous. God performs miracles. You are miraculous. You perform miracles. This is why miracles are natural and are supposed to be happening all the time. Not just all the time IN time, but IN ETERNITY AS WELL! There, miracles have more of a creative function.

It's completely radically inappropriate to say that miracles are irrelevant in God. God HIMSELF is a miracle. You as a creation of God ARE a miracle. To claim that miracles are just something to do with a shifting perception in a dream world, or something you only do in a separated state, is completely writing off a deeply powerful and profound fact:

YOU YOURSELF ARE A MIRACLE.

YOU YOURSELF WILL ALWAYS BE MIRACULOUS.

FOREVER.

"God's miracles are as total as His Thought, because they ARE His thoughts. " UrT3G16

"YOU are a miracle. God creates only "that which, or one who, is of surpassing excellence or merit." " UrT1B23B

"Prayer is the medium of miracles, not because God created perceptions, but because God created YOU. At the beginning of this course, we said that YOU are a miracle. Therefore, the miracle worker is a miracle NOT of his own creation. " UrT3G6

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. " URT3G15

"ALL miracles mean Life, and God is the giver of Life." UrT1B4A

"God and HIS miracles are inseparable." UrT3G17

"Today the promise of God's Word is kept. Hear and be silent. He would speak to you. He comes with miracles a thousand times as happy and as wonderful as those you ever dreamt or wished for in your dreams. His miracles are true. They will not fade when dreaming ends." UrW106L4

"It is a real misunderstanding of both God and His miracles. UrT3G42

Consider for a moment, a definition of yourself, in which YOU CANNOT CHANGE. You are absolutely changeless. You exist always the same, fixed, absolute, certain, permanent. Something that never alters, adjusts, transforms. Something incapable of becoming anything, losing anything, having anything taken away from it, or added. Just the same, always and forever, always existing, always being, always you. Same old you since you were created.

Then with this is idea it being IMPOSSIBLE to experience change, consider the contrast this produces to all the forms of suffering in the world. Someone doing something to you, being affected, upset, made to feel this way or that, moved by the wind, affected by the environment, threatened by the politicians and the warmongers, altered by sickness, pushed around by health concerns etc. All of it... all forms of CHANGE. All things which say "I can change you and you will change whether you like it or not."

What are you and where do you stand and how are you able to play any of these games if YOU CAN NEVER CHANGE? If you cannot be changed by anything, you are invulnerable, immortal, eternal. Always perfect, always strong, always beyond the reach of every kind of influence, every force, every attack, every threat to your nature. You cannot change, you have never changed. You remain as God created you and always will be the same. So can you believe you have been changed, caused, forced, yet again, to become something you can never be?

"You were NOT born to die. You CANNOT change, because your Function HAS been fixed by God." UrT29G4

"Can YOU see guilt where God KNOWS there is perfect innocence? You can DENY His knowledge, but you CANNOT change it." UrT13C8

"You cannot be ANYWHERE that God did not put you, and God created you as part of HIM. That is both WHERE you are and WHAT you are. This is COMPLETELY unalterable. It is total inclusion. You cannot change this now or ever. It is forever true. It is NOT a belief, but a fact." UrT6C6

"In the longer practice period, we will think about your reality and its wholly unchanged and unchangeable nature." UrW67L2

"Now He can remind the world of sinlessness, the one unchanged, unchangeable condition of all that God created." UrM19A2

"Your Self is radiant in this holy joy, unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable forever and forever." UrW190L6

"As God created you, you must remain unchangeable with transitory states by definition false. And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in conditions of the body and the mind, in all awareness and in all response." UrW152L5

"The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky. So high in Heaven is it set that those outside of Heaven know not it is there. But still and white and lovely will it shine through all eternity. There was no time it was not there. No instant when its light grew dimmer or less perfect ever was. Who knows the Father knows this light, for He is the eternal sky which holds it safe, forever lifted up and anchored sure." UrT30D8

"Only what God creates is irreversible and unchangeable. What YOU have made can always be changed, because when you do not think LIKE God, you have not really thought at all. Delusional ideas are NOT thought, but you CAN think that you believe in them." UrT5G11

For many years I’ve had this strange knowing in the background, that the course is about immortality. But in our society, immortality is laughed upon as something utterly impossible and ridiculous.

I did not see hardly anyone else speaking of the immortality implied in the course. I thought maybe I was wrong about it and that it wasn’t about this. But over time the more I’ve studied it the more I see the ENTIRE course pointing towards our TOTAL invulnerability. Even "forgiveness" is only an aspect of the fact that no-one has even really done anything to you, because you are immortal!

This means immortality, as a spirit-identified person, is not only completely natural, it is the ONLY truth. Mortality is in fact NOT true at all. Yet the world believes everything is mortal, attackable, susceptible, vulnerable, hurtable, destructible. And this is because the world itself is all of these things, being unlike the nature of reality.

Regardless of the seeming profound lack of support for ideas of immortality among other ACIM students, I continually feel drawn to it like a moth to a flame, as a bright light which beckons with truth .. and something about it which is known. A beacon of truth in the midst of all darkness and confusion and the avalanch of opinions.

Becoming identified as a non-body spirit entity, and stopping believing that I am a body, is entirely an act of siding with immortality. Regarding myself as incapable of being attacked by anyone but myself, is an act of aligning with invulnerability. Realizing that the world has no power over me beyond what I give to it, is a restoration of my unlimited power and unopposed will.

Everything in ACIM is pointing towards heaven. Pointing towards reality. Pointing towards the fact that God’s truth and immortal nature are the ONLY truth, and everything else is utterly bullshit."You are immortal and you cannot die, but you can confuse yourself with things that do."

The entire world, all bodies, the entire ego thought system, all attack sickness and death, is a "confusing yourself" with things that are not immortal. Confusing who you ARE. Not knowing yourself as God knows you. Rejecting your true nature. Separation is rejection, and is the opposite of joining with yourself. And when you reject your immortal self you do not love yourself.

Love is immortality because it is endless. It is permanent and unconditonal and unlimited. It is what you are made of. You cannot die, ever. You cannot be hurt in any real way. You cannot be abused or persecuted or offended or attacked or damaged. No-one can do anything to your soul.

You alone are responsible for the confusion you have of believing that these things CAN affect you, which is an act of affecting yourself and blaming it someone else. All you need to learn is this one thing. You can never die. You are PERMANENT. You can never be changed. You can never malfunction. You cannot be sick. Nothing can ever be wrong with you. If you think there is something wrong with you, you MUST be mistaken.

God creates only that which is permanent. You are still as God created you. Not one single speck of the world has ever touched you. Not one single event has ever changed or defined you. Not a single second of a single day has done anything whatsoever to change God’s creative act of creating you perfect. And you WILL NEVER stop being PRECICELY as He wills that you be forever.

We are meant to extend God's reality, as the Son of God, to extend His Kingdom.

When we deny Him and deny we are His Son, we stop extending Him (as source of everything) and instead have to 'make up' stuff which we think WE are the source of. This is how we 'make' the world and the body.

We see ourselves as the starting point of creation because we do not extend God and do not receive from God, and so we think reality originates with us. Then we make stuff.

The problem is, the stuff we make, takes after ourselves. Like 'Father' like 'Son', we make things which CANNOT extend us. Since we believe our nature is not to extend what created us (God), we must believe that the things we MAKE without God also cannot extend.

So we make things which, instead of having properties of being able to, in turn, have creative power, we make things which become 'dead ends'. Things which have no creative potential. Things which cannot extend life. Things which are stuck being only what they seem to be, in form, and which have no (or very limited) life.

The physical world of form, which we made, is an exact example of this. It is a world where we make 'creations' which barely have any semblance of their maker, and which have very little creative power, and which therefore constantly limit what they create.

We as their maker - the maker of the world - put so much limitation on ourselves in order to shut out God, that we create `limited things`. These things have very little freedom or life and so take on the appearance we are familiar with - inanimate objects and creatures that only live a short time then die.

As the Course says, anything made without the Father's Life cannot be sustained and withers and dies. Such is the physical world that WE made, not God.

Now, once we've 'made' stuff which barely extends life, we recognize it has no creative power. It's just a dream. BUT, since we are on a higher level (mind) than form, WE still believe in extension more than our made-up creations do. We still believe in enough of an idea of giving our creations the power to CAUSE, that we retain a certain belief that whatever we've made can 'do something'.

Unfortunately, since there is great limitation to what we made, and it can't really do much at all, when we try to project this idea of causal power onto it, we imagine that it has 'magical powers'. Powers to create that it does not have. And this directly creates LEVEL CONFUSION, which is MAGIC, and which is a reversal of cause and effect, because now this weak, powerless, lump of matter seems to us to have (or is supposed to have) causal power to further creation.

Believing that something that has no power, has power, is magic. And believing it can cause, when essentially it is what we call an 'effect' (effects that have no cause in them - separation of cause and effect), we have to believe that these forms and objects have a mind of their own, a will to create, a causal power over us, and now we are at their effect.

This produces all sickness.

Creating without the Father, without extending His love, produces sickness. And that sickness takes on form because we're 'making magical illusions'.

Something like that, anyway

Everything about most religions is fairly accurate in that it describes what's happening INSIDE THE DREAM. They describe what APPEARS to be true here.

It SEEMS that sin is real, it SEEMS that therefore God will judge and condemn us, it SEEMS that death can be justified, and it SEEMS that we can never be with God again.

The key point is, there is a chunk of metaphysical truth regarding what happened BEFORE the separation, before the dream, which frames the entire dream in a different light. And this chunk of truth, missing from religions, is extremely key in putting everything into its proper perspective.

Recognizing that Heaven is real, God is unconditional love, separation is impossible, and the innocent cannot sin, would have to tell you that the entire content of the dream and everything that goes along with it is not REAL. It is impossible.

But without that key fact, if you only look at what seems true within the dream, after the illusion of separation, it starts to seem quite sensible to conclude the exact opposite. You'll then say that sin is real, death is real, God has vengeance, you need to repent of real sins, etc.

The religion then becomes all about this fiction of having "actually sinned", and what you need to do to atone for it. And ultimately within that same idea, there MUST be also the idea that only death can atone for sin. And so the religion, while seeming to uphold moral values and lead towards love, also inadvertently supports death.

Descriptions of what seems real in a dream can only ever be opposite to the truth.

This is the one key area in which A Course in Miracles is different, because it explains what happened BEFORE separation or what conditions were like, such that the entire content of the dream is clearly RECOGNIZED as being false, unreal, untrue and impossible. It gives us the clarity to see that everything within the dream is an ILLUSION, not a reality.

This puts an entirely different spin on everything we perceive here. It totally reverses the illusion of the meaning of what seems to happen, or all the conclusions that have been drawn from appearances. The proper framing of everything that goes on in the dream world puts everything into its correct place and perspective, recognizing the real truth for what it is, and recognizing the illusion as an illusion. Failure to do this, or the deliberate "omission" of this key foundation at the core of truth, makes the entire content of the dream suddenly twist to a completely opposite and confused explanation of events.

Only a truth based on completely pure non-duality can explain and properly frame why and how everything within the dualistic world is false and unreal. Otherwise if you stop just short of awakening from the dream, or you stop just beneath the peak of the dream's heights, it will make the dream seem to be real and you will not wake up from it. This is why those religions ultimately keep people asleep. They are religions of the ego, based in the ego's thought system, worshipping the ego's God of death.

Death can't be true and separation can't be true and sin can't be true because God only creates eternal innocent life. If the absolute truth remains hidden, all true meaning is lost and insanity begins to seem sane.

ACIM uses the term "sons" referring to God's many directly-created REAL sons, 82 times. Here are some of the quotes which are so blatant in their statement that God has created MORE THAN ONE SON.

"*PERCEIVE him correctly, so that your Soul can KNOW him. Right perception is necessary before God can communicate DIRECTLY to his own altars, which he has established in His Sons."

"*It is the final lesson that I learned, and God's Sons are as equal as learners as they are as Souls."

"*The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true."

"*Holy indeed are we, because our Source can know no sin. And we who are His Sons are like each other, and alike to Him."

"*God created His Sons by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they, were created neither partially nor in part."

"*All the Sons of God are waiting for your return, just as YOU are waiting for THEIRS."

"*Could you hear His answer except as He answers all of God's Sons?"

"*We are creation; we the Sons of God."

"*Only one equal gift CAN be offered to the equal Sons of God, and that is FULL APPRECIATION."

"*Your creations cannot establish your reality, any more than YOU can establish God's. But you can know both. Being is known by sharing. Because God shared His Being with you, you can know Him. But you must also know all He created to know what they have shared. Without your Father you will not know your fatherhood. The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father. Know then the Sons of God, and you will know all Creation."

"*You cannot enter into REAL relationships with ANY of God's Sons, unless you love them all, and EQUALLY."

"*God is not a stranger to His Own Sons, and His Sons are not strangers to each other."

"*Because God's equal Sons have everything, they CANNOT compete."

"*The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons."

"*When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed…the Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless their creations and keep them in the light of joy."

"* If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship."

"*If you believe that all of the Souls that God created are His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul must be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship."

"*The voice of the Holy Spirit IS the call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind. When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed, there will be no call to return, but what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless THEIR creations and keep them in the light of joy."

If you look at the various things ACIM says, it becomes clearer and makes more sense when you don't think of "mind" or "one mind" or "christ mind" as being the highest or deepest level of existence. We need to distinguish that mind IS NOT the same thing as spirit, soul, SON or being.

For example, there is a distinction between MIND and SOUL:

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

For example, the soul USES the mind to create or miscreate. The mind is at its disposal, like a tool, described here as a MEDIUM *through which* the soul/son/spirit expresses itself:

"The Creation of the Soul is already fully accomplished. The mind, if it votes to do so, becomes a medium by which the Soul can create along the line of its own creation."

For example, we're told that YOU (whatever you are) has control OVER the mind. That mind is the mechanism of decision (free will), and so the "what you are" CONTROLS the mind or has POWER OVER it, meaning it is on another "level", causality-wise:

"For you DO have control over your mind, for the mind is the mechanism of decision. "

All of this indicates that you essentially are OUTSIDE OF your mind. Your mind is something you HAVE, not something you ARE. It's something you USE, and it's not the same thing as your soul.

Soul is a synonym for spirit, and a synonym for "Son of God". So too is BEING an aspect of the soul/son/spirit NOT an aspect of the mind. The essence of what you are at the deepest or highest level, is BEYOND the mind, and CONTAINS the mind inside of it. What you ARE, is the soul/son/spirit/being.

Now look at this:

"Your will is the means by which you determine your own condition, because will is the MECHANISM OF DECISION. It is the power by which you separate or join, and experience pain or joy accordingly. My will cannot overcome yours, because YOURS IS AS POWERFUL AS MINE. If it were not so, the Sons of God would be unequal."

Here, "separation" or "joining" occur WITHIN the realm of your free will, WITHIN the realm of decision, which is WITHIN the mind. Note also that Jesus clearly states your free-will decision is AS POWERFUL AS HIS. That the two of you, EACH, have a free will. Therefore, you both have your own minds.

If you can distinguish these two "levels" within reality, whereby at the highest level there is being/soul/son/spirit, and at the lower level there is MIND, which has IDEAS such as the tiny mad idea, and where ALL ideas are contained INSIDE the mind and do not leave the mind (never affect or determine anything about the soul), then it becomes OBVIOUS that "the ego" is occurring IN THE MIND, NOT IN THE SOUL.

The ego is occurring on an entirely different LEVEL to your soul/spirit/being/son/self.

This means that WHAT you are - a spirit being - is in a larger realm than your MIND, and the ego is never happening in the realm of the spirit. Your SPIRIT does not have a separation idea, the mind does. Your SPIRIT does not develop an ego, the mind THINKS of egotism. Ego is an idea, a thought, in the mind, NOT part of the soul.

Which means... drumroll please... that whether or not there are many SONS, many SOULS, many BEINGS, or many SPIRITS, has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not there is EGO or separation. They're on two entirely different levels. How many sons there are, thus, is completely BEYOND the realm of ego, beyond all speculation as to "it means separation", and beyond all ideas of separateness in the EGO sense. The KIND of separateness that we're trying to undo, has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with souls, sons, spirits or beings. We're ONLY trying to correct the MIND, NOT THE SOUL.

The separation is a MIND problem, NOT a soul problem.

And this in turn means, that whether there are many souls/sons, or one, or not, has absolutely nothing to do with the separation or the ego. It is NOT a separation IDEA to suggest that there are many sons, because IDEAS are confined to the MIND, and souls/sons are BEYOND that.

This is why, Jesus is able to tell us in the course that WHAT we are, is permanent brothers, permanent real beings, permanent family, permanent souls, permanent multitudes of spirit beings, and that this fact has NOTHING to do with the ego THOUGHT in the mind.

The ego thought does not come BETWEEN souls, it does not DEFINE their "separateness", it does not CAUSE them to BE separate, and it says absolutely nothing as to the VALIDITY of whether it is NATURAL for there to be many souls in reality. Or therefore, many sons of God. And in fact it also means any statements about "sons of God" plural is absolutely NOT contradictory against ideas of ego separation. They're not even on the same level. Ego is inside the bubble of mind, mind is inside the bubble of being.

"Mind is the activating agent of spirit."

Does not mean mind IS spirit. It's merely a PART of what you are or HAVE.

This is why it's totally OKAY, NATURAL, NORMAL, REAL, and NOT AN EGO THING, that there are MANY SONS OF GOD. And that these son's of God are many in NUMBER *without* it having anything to do with "an ego thing".

God literally has MANY thoughts, in his mind, which is not his being. He literally creates many other BEINGS, and GIVES THEM their own mind, as a reflection of his own nature. Thus God has created many minds, many sons. This is "the family of God".

"Creation is the sum of all God's Thoughts, in number infinite, and everywhere without all limit."

The "One Son of God" is a synonym for Creation, meaning ALL of the sonship. Christ is the MIND that is SHARED in communication between God and the Sonship. SONS are the SOULS/spirits/beings that God created as equals forever (brothers, children of God). And each child has a soul/spirit/being and a MIND with which to create.

Sons of God (meaning God's literal direct descendent IN REALITY) is mentioned 82 times, in direct relationship between God as Father and US (plural) as many BEINGS:

"All the Sons of God"

"We are creation; we the Sons of God."

"Only one equal gift CAN be offered to the equal Sons of God, and that is FULL APPRECIATION."

"Know then the Sons of God, and you will know all Creation."

"When the Atonement has been completed, all talents will be shared by all the Sons of God." (AFTER the ego is GONE, no separation left, there are STILL many sons of God sharing talents!)

"When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed…the Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless their creations and keep them in the light of joy." (AFTER the ego, with no separation left, the SONS OF GOD are STILL PLURAL!)

"Our creations are as holy as we are, and we are the Sons of God Himself and therefore as holy as He is."

God creates permanent BEINGS (plural):

"Since only beings of a like order can truly communicate, His Creations naturally communicate WITH Him and communicate LIKE Him."

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. "

God creates permanent CHILDREN (plural):

"God watches over His children and denies them nothing."

"God knows His Children with perfect certainty."

"The Children of Light cannot abide in darkness, for darkness is NOT in them." (no ego!)

"The Children of God are entitled to perfect comfort, which comes from a sense of perfect trust."

"Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy heritage."

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Sons and their children, who are like the Sons as they are like the Father." (not only are there multiple sons, there are multiple CREATIONS BY sons - grandchildren of God).

"Only God's own holy children are worthy to be channels of his beautiful joy"

And similarly there is plenty of mention of SOULS (plural), over 120:

"They represent the original form of communication between God and His Souls"

"It is the final lesson that I learned, and God's Sons are as equal as learners as they are as Souls." (soul=son)

"Souls were given their own true authorship"

"The Revelation unites Souls directly with God."

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

"It should be noted that God has begotten only one Son (the combined totality of ALL the sons). If you believe that all of the ***Souls that God created are His Sons***, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then ***every Soul must be a Son of God***, or an integral part of the Sonship." (every means PLURAL! - MANY beings, who SHARE everything).

"They represent the original form of communication between God and His Souls"

"Many Souls offered their efforts on behalf of the Separated Ones" (not all souls used their minds to believe in ego!)

God additionally also created MANY MINDS, not just one:

"God's memory is in our holy minds"

"How holy are our minds!"

"If you allow yourselves to HAVE in your minds only what God put there, you are acknowledging your mind as God created it."

"And peace will be restored forever to the holy minds which God created as His Son" (good example of the ego-rule-breaking logic, that God has many sons who are, IN TOTAL, "His Son").

"Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one." (still many minds, they don't stop being many just because they are ONE. On means IDENTICAL, of like nature or KIND, NOT one in number).

"all the minds which God created one with me"

"Not being in their Right Minds, they turned their defenses from protection to assault, and acted literally insanely." (MULTIPLE right minds)

The evidence is totally overwhelming for anyone willing to be open to this. It does NOT mean "separation" in the ego sense. It does not mean, ISOLATION, or SPECIALNESS. It only means many EQUAL BEINGS WHO SHARE EVERYTHING AND YET ARE INDIVIDUALS.

There ARE many beings, spirits, souls, sons. There ARE many minds that SHARE as the Christ mind. Ego has NOTHING to do with this. It's NOT unnatural. It's not "wrong". It's not "the separation". Individuality is NOT an ego thing. Ego has ONLY anything to do with whether INDIVIDUALS choose to BELIEVE in lies or truth, WITHIN their minds. That's is all.

"And reason now can lead you to the logical conclusion of your union. It must extend, as you extended when you joined."

Some of us like to describe reality as oneness, or perhaps that "its all God", or "non-duality". A state with no separations or differences. But there is a problem with this.

If you take something and you "boil it down" to something else, you end up with this idea of something very simple. Something seemingly singular. Perhaps even a single word which represents it. So maybe we'll say that there is just oneness and that's an entire description of reality.

But the problem is this. If you can't take that boiled-down simplified concept, and arrive at the original state, condition, nature, contents, of reality by building upon it, extending it, then something has become lost in the process. If you START WITH e.g. "God is all there is", you can't logically get to "God has a son".

There is an analogy in the world of data compressionm like when you "zip" some files on your computer. When you try to compress a file, you can do so losslessly or with some acceptable loss. If you want to get every single byte of the file back in its original condition when you decompress it, you have to use a lossless algorithm or process.

Whatever it "boils down to" or compresses to, it has to be detailed enough that when you reassemble the original file, every single detail is still there. If you omit even a tiny bit of "information", you can't get the original file back. How much it can boil down is determined by how much information there is, and relates to the "entropy" of the data. This is why your big image file cannot be compressed below a certain level. It has to maintain enough information to get the original back.

What happens is, if your method of boiling down leaves out some details, omits some information, doesn't fully and accurately represent the original data, then when you go to re-expand the file you don't get back the same data you started with. It becomes "inaccurate." Something has been lost in translation. That means, whatever you boiled it down too was too generalized, too simplified, too basic, and not descriptive enough. Trying to get back the original data is then impossible because too much information is lost. So the simplified file no longer accurately REPRESENTS the "actual reality" of the file.

The same thing happens when we try to describe reality and use concepts or terms which are TOO simple, too basic, and omit too much information. They seem like nice handy symbols but logically they are lacking too much information. You should be able to take a simplified description of reality and derive the full contents of reality from it, by "decompressing it" or reversing the boiling-down process.

You should get back what you started with. So if your description is the "starting point" you MUST be able to fully ACCOUNT FOR every possible detail or characteristic of that reality. And your description of reality in its "most condensed" or most simplified form MUST have enough descriptive information, otherwise you simply cannot end up with what you started with. And when you try to do so, you will produce massive errors.

Particular culprits of this kind of loss of information are conceptual terms such as oneness, "its all God", "God is", "non-duality", "no differences", "no separation" "no self" "unity" etc. These all sound plausibly realistic or representative of the full details about reality, but they're not. They in fact are too generalizing, too basic, and not accurate enough. They leave out some details. And so when you then try to base the description of heaven, for example, on this "premise", on this basic generalization, you CANNOT get back the details of heaven. And in fact you will get back conclusions you did not bargain on.

So if you say ok, it's all oneness, or one thing. Well, now you cannot get a son of God out of that. At all, in any way. Or if you say "its all God", you cannot get out of that an accurate description of why the son of God dreamed and God DID NOT because God has been too mixed in or included in the tiny mad idea. Or if you say it's non-duality and there are no separations, you can't get back the fact God has a Son, yet alone that there is a holy trinity and a bunch of creations.

So there is a big risk, actually an error, in using these really super basic ego-logic-derived terms and concepts to try to describe the reality or God. There is such a thing as something being TOO lacking in detail to accurately describe it. Yes God HIMSELF is one, and reality itself is singular, and there is no opposite to reality, but this unfortunately is not the WHOLE STORY. And so major aspects of the picture become lost in the process of over-simplifying. To the extent that they BLOT OUT key characteristics of reality's true contents.

When you look at what ACIM says about the contents of reality, it is a very different picture to just "its all one" or "there's only God there" or "there are no separations". Yes, there are aspects of reality which ARE only one, or that it IS all just God, but that is only PART OF the story. There are more facts, there is more information needed, and more has HAPPENED in reality because God is a creator. Just the fact God creates results in these ideas being not sufficient to ACCURATELY AND FULLY describe reality.

So if God is to for example have even one son, we cannot JUST say that it's all one because that's now illogical. Yet it IS all one, and that is always true, but it MUST also be true that there is SOME WAY for there to be a son. Otherwise God is not a father or a creator and he is alone and cannot love and there is no extension of life and so on.

In fact the PUREST possible non-duality concept logically ends up with the conclusion that God is dead because He has nothing to give or extend or share or create. It makes him lifeless. You get all kinds of utterly nonsense conclusions deriving FROM that "basis" of what reality IS, when you leave out some facts. So if you start out your reasoning based on things like "its all God" you WILL end up with some horrendously wrong conclusions.

So if you take for example what ACIM says, which is that God has one son, which is also many sons, who have their own sons ad infinitum, and also there is the holy spirit and the angels, apparently in many legions and with a hierarchy, and who knows what else you've created, to describe that ACCURATELY, you can't JUST say "its one thing". A blob is one thing. A state is one thing. A singular entity like God is one thing. But there is MUCH MORE going on in reality than that according to what Jesus tells us. And we should be trusting his word.

So describing it as oneness, or generalizing too far and blotting out the details, or boiling it down so much that the nice soup mixture of various key ingredients becomes just a singular meaningless slush, is actually an error in logical reasoning. It does NOT accurately describe reality or what is happening in reality. It does not accurately describe God's nature either.

It in fact in some ways it can be far better to be MORE DETAILED in describing the nature of God and His Kingdom than it is to be LESS detailed. Just saying "God is" is a premise SO BASIC that it is massively open to huge false conclusions when you try to derive the Kingdom out of it. If God is were the WHOLE story, God would not have a creation at all.

The ego only leans towards less detail because it reasons, if I remove all sense of separations and divisions and multiplicity, I will end up with ONE THING, and this one thing SEEMS like it might most accurately describe the idea of what is all encompassing and infinite. Except that it doesn't. Its a total fail.

It does not take into account that God has a mind, has thoughts, creates beings, or that there are relationships, or that the beings he creates have their own children, minds, and will, or that there are millions of angels for example, or that God doesn't will to be alone. That all goes out the window because the EGO'S conclusion about God IRONS OUT all the details to the point of nothing - the loss of information. It's a great way to become BLIND to what reality is really like.

In the ego's thought system, its sense of logic is that something is either this or that, but not both. This results in differences, and it sees the existence of the separation between those differences as "separation". It even labels that separation as "ego". And then it seeks to get rid of those separations, to attack itself, to remove all separations, in order to end up with "no separation", thinking that this is what it will be like when you have "undone the separation", and must therefore describe God.

And so it reasons, reality is one thing, a oneness, a pool of singularity in which nothing happens and there is no creation. This is only PARTLY correct because it loses too much information. And so the ego cannot accurately describe reality with THIS thought process. You have to become open to thinking outside the box and using God's reasoning in order to describe what God and His creations are like. And since God does have at least one son, it certainly is not a state of logically pure non-duality, nor is it "only oneness", and certainly it's not "just God" because he has ADDED you to Himself.

"YOUR creations add to Him, as YOU do. But nothing is added that is different, because everything has always BEEN."

If you end up with "it is oneness" or "its all God", and then you decompress that idea to address for example the issue of the making of death, you have to conclude God is death, or God is a body, or God separated from God, or God is a pile of shit, or God went insane, or even God is an illusion that doesn't really exist. Without enough information you cannot "get back" the full picture of what God is, what has happened, what we dreamed, and what has not really occurred, without making some CRAZY false conclusions.

I had a dream last night where I seemed to be teaching someone about using the mind to heal.

This woman and her husband were in a hospital where their daughter was in the bed. She had some problem with her knees and couldn't walk. The parents were pleading with the doctor to do a procedure, but the doctor was hesitant that she was not ready.

I approached and spoke to the mother, and I asked her, when you look at your daughter's knees, what thought do you have? She said that she thinks "my daughter is sick". I told her that her mind has power and her thoughts actually cause things to happen. So when she thinks her daughter is sick, she actually makes her sick.

I then told her that she has these thoughts as reactions and is letting the situation tell her what the truth is, instead of using her thoughts to heal. I told her that she can have thoughts of her daughter being not sick, and that this would actually cause her to be healed. That this was the power that we all had in our minds to be able to change the situation.

That was the end of the dream. It all seemed very simple and straightforward. You have to ignore what you see as the current state, because that's just the result of past choices. Then you choose what you want to see and use the power of thought to believe in it. This causes the situation to change and now you see what you wanted to see.

It's because people think that their thoughts have no power or influence, and are afraid of them, that they think there is nothing they can do to change situations. That thoughts are just neutral commentaries on what is happening.

But thoughts have power and can cause things to happen. This is what we are afraid of, that our thinking can actually influence situations. And by not recognizing that our thoughts are powerful, we end up reinforcing sickness by "reflecting on it" instead of choosing to undo it.

It's much more supportive to believe someone is not suffering than to believe that they are. The mind doesn't just observe, it creates. Everything you think and feel has an influence on the whole world.

"People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them."

"EVERYONE teaches, and teaches all the time."

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts.

I am alone in nothing. Everything I think or say or do touches all the universe. A Son of God cannot think or speak or act in vain. He cannot be alone in anything. It is therefore in my power to change every mind along with mine, for mine is the power of God."

"It should especially be noted that God has only one son, yet ALL HIS CREATIONS ARE HIS SONS, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts (T-2.VII.6:1-3)."

Although it leads by saying God has one son. It follows by telling us that God has MANY creations. And that therefore, it logically follows, that ALL of those creations must be PART OF the one son. ... that ALL of God's creations have the same characteristics, being made in HIS LIKENESS. They all share the same holiness, the same innocence, the same mentality, the same love. Yet there are many.

And because they are SO ALIKE AS TO BE IDENTICAL, yet still MANY... all of them together are "the sonship", and because oneness transcends separation the sonship as a whole is more than the sum of its parts. God + sons + angels + heaven + whatever else is all one big oneness, yet still SOMEHOW has multiple parts to it.

"WE are creation; WE the SONS OF GOD. We seem to be discrete, and unaware of our eternal unity with Him. Yet back of all our doubts, past all our fears, there still is certainty. For love remains with all its Thoughts, its sureness being theirs. God's memory is in OUR (many) HOLY MINDS, which know their oneness and their unity with their Creator (W-pII.11.4:1-5)."

CLEARLY... "oneness" does not mean "just one by counting". We do not understand oneness. Oneness means SHARING AND EXTENSION. Oneness must be shared, it must extend, it must CREATE. This is how even "the one son of God" was created in the first place, because truly if there was ONLY ONE ONENESS, there would ONLY BE GOD, and there WOULD NOT BE A SON!

Oneness creates by extension of itself, and must extend in order to exist. Therefore, it HAS to create a son, and the son has his own creations, and God HAS to create many sons. Yet they are one.

When our EGO tries to understand how this is possible it becomes confused and it makes no sense, because THE EGO CANNOT UNDERSTAND GOD. It is simply something we have to accep is true, and TRUST that because Jesus has shared this information, IT MUST BE TRUE.

There are many sons of God, there are many minds that God created, ALL of them together is "the son ship" or what, TO GOD, is experienced as "ONE SON".... referring to the grand inclusive "experiences them all at once" kind of experience, knowing their equality and sameness, as though they are all identical, AND YET... He has created MANY BY NUMBER, somehow. In a way that we cannot possibly understand or get our head around, because numbers imply separation and bla bla bla bla bla.... NEVER will get this. It has to just be accepted as true, trusting that Jesus is telling us the truth.

You really have only this choice.

A) Love

B) Hate

Just as Jesus says that what is not love is murder, and that even the slightest grievance is murderous, so too it is true that if you are not being FULLY loving you are not really being loving (at all) and therefore are in a state of HATE.

Now, it does not seem to most people that they are being hateful when they are not Loving. This is because so much of the hate has been made unconscious.

Sin has been denied with guilt, guilt has been denied with fear, and a veneer of fake innocence has been drawn over the mind. This innocence, seemingly all that is left in conscious awareness, creates the ILLUSION of unawareness that you are "being hateful" at all.

The result is that you feel relatively neutral, seemingly not enraged, seemingly quite calm most of the time, and seeming not to be actively hating. But this is because you are lost inside of layers of denial and unconsciousness. It renders your current perspective as though you are not intending to sin at all, and are relatively mild and weak.

But we have to at some point more honest about this. Jesus says love cannot be fully understood until the love is WHOLE, and without that wholeness it is not really love. It seems we can have degrees of love but that also means degrees of hate. He says we simply do not RECOGNIZE just how much we hate our brothers. Similarly, when we’re just casually coasting through life on unconscious autopilot, we do not recognize that we’re spending almost all our time in some form of hate. If it’s not total love, it is hate.

This is quite sobering and if we can own up to this without guilt, we’ll be able to use this information to recognize that whenever we are not being totally loving, we MUST be hating. We are not merely in some neutralized state. It is love or hate, those are the only choices. There is no escaping this. So that means, if I am not fully loving right now, I must be in SOME way hating.

Equipped with that information it now becomes easier to RECOGNIZE that, if I’m not being loving, I’m hating in some way, and so this helps me to be motivated or attentive to the "need" to return to being more loving. It identifies that what I thought was neutral or ok is in fact negative and hurtful in some fashion.

We’ve become far too used to letting moderate hatred slide by without correction. Or as Jesus says, too tolerant of mind wandering (away from our love self). Recognizing that I am actively "hating" and realizing that I’m really not being fully loving towards people, brings AWARENESS, and that’s a good starting point for wanting to change my mind.

In A Course in Miracles, Jesus gives a new definition for what is life, and what is death. He does not mean that life is "the stuff in this world" and that death is "when bodies are totally dead and lie on the ground decaying." He has a totally different view of life and death because he recognizes what things ARE, not what we think they are.

"Life" is equated ONLY with eternal life. That which lives forever, cannot be attacked, never becomes sick, does not age or grow old and cannot die. Life which extends forever and produces more life through miraculous creation in the extension of God's being, which is the ONLY function of Spirit. That is real life. And such a life is only possible in what Jesus refers to as HEAVEN. And Heaven is considered to be completely OPPOSITE to Earth and a totally different place to exist. "Heaven is the dwelling place of the Son of God." "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

"Death" is equated with anything that is NOT that or which opposes it in any way, which includes dreams, and includes this world (Earth). It includes any state of separation, any dream world, any dream body, any thought of attack, any even minor upset, even a slight grievance, all forms of sickness ("all sickness is but a little death"), all levels of suffering, and the "final" death itself. In other words, everything in this world and universe is considered to be DEATH. It is a dream of death. The entire thing is made of death. "Without the idea of death there is no world."

This is why "there is no life outside of Heaven". There is nothing ETERNAL in this world, because all things visible will end and all things that perish are illusions. "The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for everything He creates MUST be eternal as Himself." And let's face it, without denial, nothing in this world lasts forever. This world is the idea of being outside of Heaven, it is founded on separation, and it is founded on denial of life. Which is death.

Jesus states, this world is "at best an ILLUSION OF LIFE, at worst, death". Even if this world is seen with forgiving eyes, even if it is seen through true perception, even if it is supposedly loved, it is STILL an illusion of an opposite to Heaven and it STILL entails the idea of death, without which it CANNOT seem to exist at all.

This is what Jesus means by life and death. Life is Heaven, Earth is death. Life is eternal. Anything limited is an illusion of life and is made of the idea of death. Anyone who has perception still needs healing because they're still inside a separated state and are inside the idea of death. Anyone who is a teacher of God, using the body for a holy purpose, is still inside a dream of death.

Until you GO HOME TO HEAVEN, you do not have access to eternal life. Even though it is permanent, and hiding behind this world's illusions. Until you are IN HEAVEN, and have forgotten this world Earth, you have not CLAIMED eternal life or gone beyond that which perishes and ends. Earth IS NOT HEAVEN. It cannot be heaven. Its laws and the spacetime belief that it is based on a TOTALLY OPPOSED TO LIFE. The things you see in this world which you THINK are life, are NOT. They are illusions of life.

Even the "real world" is an ILLUSION OF LIFE. It may reflect or seem SIMILAR to or like Heaven but it is NOT the same thing. And nor is LOVE, in this world, the same thing as LOVE in Heaven. Because love means LIFE and CREATION and that is ONLY POSSIBLE in Eternity. Outside of Heaven, LOVE IS AN ILLUSION OF LOVE, a REFLECTION, which appears like a picture, an image, symbolizing love. It falls short of the full love of God which can ONLY be experienced beyond this universe, beyond the world, beyond the body, beyond ALL illusions of life.

This is why RESURRECTION HAS MEANING. When you get to the end of the curriculum, it ENDS IN THE RESURRECTION. It ends there because resurrection means LIFE. And that means, that every state you were in BEFORE the resurrection, WAS NOT LIFE. Resurrection is the RETURN TO eternal life. Before that, you did not have awareness of eternal life. You only had awareness of dreams of life. The body has absolutely nothing to do with LIFE.

"The body does not live or die, it is nothing at all." To think that EVEN the human body is alive, is a mistake. It does not live, because if it lived it would have a mind and a will and a soul and THAT is the level confusion that produces sickness. The body does not CREATE. Believing it creates is SICKNESS. It does not CAUSE anything. It has no ability to EXTEND LIFE. Its production of other bodies is an ILLUSION of the extension of life. Baby bodies are no more "life" than adult bodies. They are all illusions in a dream world.

"The body is the central figure in dreaming." It depends on the dream, without the dream it does not exist, and the dream cannot happen without it. Dreams are not REALITY. They are not REAL LIFE. If you endow the body with the properties of Christ, ie eternal life, mind, spirit, extension, etc.... you are making an illusion real and you have false perception. It IS FALSE PERCEPTION to believe that this world is ALIVE. It is false perception to believe that physical objects EXIST. It is false perception to SEE BODIES. It is false perception to look with the body's eyes and senses and believe that what they show you EXISTS AT ALL OR IS EVEN HAPPENING. These are illusions. "To sense is not to know."

This is an imaginary universe designed to block your awareness of LIFE. It is a dream state. And ALL dreams are based on the one central dream from which all illusions stem - death. It may seem to entail a spectrum, ranging from what what seems like life, to what seems like death, and it may seem to you that a living body is "more alive" than a dead one, but they are ALL THE SAME ILLUSION. NONE of them have eternal life, and they are all ILLUSIONS of life and death. They are not real. They do not exist.

ONLY the creations of light are real. ONLY the extension of God's spirit/being is real. ONLY unlimited infinite love is really love. ONLY Heaven is ALIVE. It is the LIVING WORLD OF LIGHT. It is absolutely nothing like this illusory world of darkness and death. And if you think that death is ONLY the state where things are do decayed that they are laying on the ground "lifeless", think again. That is merely the extreme end of a spectrum ranging from death to death.

You, RIGHT NOW, in your body, imagining you are living, are NOT REALLY ALIVE. You are NOT RESURRECTED. You are half dead. Asleep. That is what UNCONSCIOUSNESS means. Until you are FULLY CONSCIOUS, fully awake and aware of Heaven, you are unconscious and asleep and dreaming, and in your dream you imagine a world that you think is alive, even though it is being manufactured by a mind that is RESISTING LIFE and AVOIDING BEING ALIVE. We are all just zombies, "the living dead", walking around a world made of death, without which there is no world.

Heaven is life. Earth is death. Heaven is heaven. Earth is hell. Heaven is eternal. Earth will end. Heaven is reality. Earth is a dream. Heaven is immortality. Earth is mortality. Illusions of life do not turn into life. They disappear and reveal the life that they were trying to hide. Heaven on Earth is "heaven on an illusion". Not going to happen. Illusions recognized disappear. "A forgiven world cannot last." You will not find even ONE example of eternal life IN THIS WORLD, YET ALONE being able to say that ALL THINGS in this world have eternal life. Not even ONE LITTLE THING lives forever here, and anyone who thinks that's not true, is clearly in denial.

"Where God created life, there life must be". IN Heaven.

The "one mind" or "one mindedness" is the mind of the soul in total union with all of creation.

The "right mind" or "right mindedness" is the same as miracle mindedness, the Holy Spirit's mind of atonement, a state of true perception, and the end of the dream.

The "wrong mind" or "wrong mindedness" is the same as false perception or various states of denial within perception.

HOWEVER, at times Jesus has referred to you having a right mind BEFORE the separation. e.g. "You who prefer specialness to sanity could not obtain it in your right minds. You were at peace until you asked for special favor." This suggests you and others (souls in heaven) had "right minds" prior to the separation idea. If being right-minded is being sane, it means you were sane before the separation, and right-mindedness as in atonement is a reflection of that.

It seems the right mind "ends" when one mindedness takes over but you cannot become LESS right-minded when this happens, so one-mindedness includes right mindedness.

"The term "salvation" does NOT apply to the Soul, which is not in danger and does not need to be salvaged. Salvation is nothing more that "right-mindedness" which is NOT the one-mindedness of the Soul, but which must be accomplished before one-mindedness can be restored. Right-mindedness dictates the next step automatically, because right perception is uniformly without attack, so that wrong-mindedness is obliterated. The ego cannot survive without judgment, and is laid aside accordingly. The mind then has only ONE direction in which it can move."

"The Holy Spirit is nothing more than your own right mind. He was also mine. The Bible says, "May the mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus," and uses this as a BLESSING. It is the blessing of miracle-mindedness. It asks that you may think as I thought, joining with me in Christ-thinking."

"A major step in the Atonement plan is to undo error at ALL levels. Illness, which is really "not Right Mindedness", is the result of level confusion in the sense that it always entails the misbelief that what is amiss in one level can adversely affect another."

"We said in a previous section that the miracle is an expression of miracle-Mindedness. Miracle-Mindedness merely means Right-Mindedness in the sense that we are now using it. Right-Mindedness neither exalts nor depreciates the mind of the miracle worker nor of the miracle receiver. However, as a creative act, the miracle need not await the Right-Mindedness of the receiver. In fact, its purpose is to restore him TO his Right Mind. But it is essential that the miracle worker be in his Right Mind, or he will be unable to reestablish Right-Mindedness in someone else. "

"In this sense, when their behavior is unstable, they are obviously disagreeing with God's idea of the Creation. This is a fundamental right of man, although not one he would care to exercise if he were in his Right Mind."

"Biblical quotation relates to the healing of a devil-possessed man, in which the sufferer was subsequently found healed, in his right mind, and sitting at feet of Jesus."

"He is invariable as the peace in which you dwell, and of which the Holy Spirit, that which is nothing more than your right Mind, reminds you."

"The ego, which is not real, attempts to persuade the mind, which IS real, that it IS its own learning device, and that the learning device is more real than IT is. No-one in his right mind could POSSIBLY believe this, and no-one in his right mind DOES believe it. "

"Innocent (or true) perception means that you NEVER misperceive, and ALWAYS see truly. More simply, this means that you never see what does not exist in reality. Whenever you lack confidence in what someone else will do, you are attesting to your belief that he is not in his Right Mind. This is hardly a miracle-based frame of reference. It also has the disastrous effect of denying (incorrect use) the essentially creative power of the miracle. The miracle perceives everything AS IT IS. If nothing but the truth exists (and this is really redundant in statement, because what is not true CANNOT exist) Right-Minded seeing cannot see ANYTHING BUT perfection. We have said many times that ONLY what God creates, or what man creates with the same will, has any real existence. This, then, is all that the innocent can see. They do not suffer from the delusions of the Separated ones."

"The world, in its original connotation, included both the proper creation of man by God, AND the proper creation by man in his Right Mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given. Nothing in either of these statements implies any sort of level involvement, or, in fact, anything except one continuous line of creation, in which all aspects are of the same order. "

"Only One-Mindedness is without confusion. A separate, or divided, mind MUST be confused. A divided mind is uncertain by definition. It HAS to be in conflict because it is out of accord with itself. "

"The Holy Spirit is the mind of the Atonement. It represents a state of mind that comes close enough to one-mindedness that transfer is at last possible. As you well know, transfer depends on common elements in the old learning and the new situation to which it is transferred. Perception is not knowledge, but it can be TRANSFERRED to knowledge, or CROSS OVER into it. It might even be more helpful here to use the literal meaning "carried over," for the last step is taken by God. "

"Punishment as a concept is in total opposition to Right-Mindedness. The aim of the Final Judgment is to RESTORE Right-Mindedness TO man. "

"This is what his own Right-Mindedness cannot but dictate. The purpose of time is solely to "give him time" to achieve this judgment. It is his own perfect judgment of his own creation. When everything that he retains is lovable, there is no reason for any fear to remain in him. This IS his part in the Atonement. "

"NEVER confuse right-with wrong-mindedness. Responding to ANY form of miscreation with anything EXCEPT a DESIRE TO HEAL (or a miracle) is an expression of this confusion. "

"Only Right-Mindedness CAN create in a way that has any real effect."

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

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

We do not recognize an illusion when we see one. Since birth we've been looking at this world believing it's real. It seems real enough. But "there is nothing so blinding as perception of form."

The problem is, we don't have something MORE real to compare it to. There is no frame of reference to evaluate it or contrast it. If you could see something truly real, it would frame this world AS an illusion, it's illusory nature would become obvious, and you would be able to tell that this world is clearly false and unreal. But you have to have a sense of what true and real things are like in order to be able to compare and contrast, that this illusion is opposite to that.

Think for a moment then about reality, about God, about Heaven, about the nature and quality of infinite immortal being. Contemplate what God is like. The eternal nature, the endlessness, the freedom from sickness and death, the inability to create anything less than perfection. Then ask yourself, is this thing you are looking at, THAT? Does it match up? Does it correlate? Does it seem like something God would create, something immortal, unlimited, perfect, beautiful and pure?

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

With something to compare it to, it becomes more obvious that the things of this world, the stuff you've been looking at since birth, MUST BE an illusion. It must be something manufactured, artificial, pretend, fake, unreal, deceptive. It cannot really exist. There is no cancer in God. There is no insanity in God. There is no dog shit in God. There is no crying in God. There is no attack in God. There is no fear or threat or danger in God. Can this appearance of sin and attack exist WITHIN God's perfect being? Not even slightly. So what is it you're looking at?

It has to be something that is not really there. It has to be a lie, an illusion, a deception and a temptation to believe in something unreal. It's some kind of hallucination. It's make believe fairytale dreaming. It can't exist. It can't really be there at all. It seems to be but it's not. It is really nothing, pretending to be something. The impossible, pretending to be possible. It can't exist in God. It has no real cause. It hasn't been created. Remind yourself of this, and it will become clearer and more RECOGNIZED, that what you're seeing is an ILLUSION, some kind of invented puff of smoke masquerading as something else. It can't be real. It can't exist. It's not there. It's gone.

"Illusions recognized must disappear."

There is only God and His Kingdom. "Only the creations of light are real."

As an immortal being, you should be accustomed to everything always being perfect. You live forever, everyone you know lives forever. There’s no sickness or suffering of any kind. No death, no destruction. Nothing ever goes wrong, no problems, no situations to solve or things to fix. Nothing ever malfunctions, there’s always perfect happiness.

So then consider, what is this fucked up state that we’ve gotten ourselves into? This nightmare that we’re having. Truly it is a nightmare when we suddenly start to regard there as being something wrong with someone. Something isn’t working. Someone is partly broken. Somehow things are happening that should never happen. Stuff starts showing up out of nowhere which should be impossible. Horrors and traumas and tragedies suddenly erupt seeming to topple all sense of immortality. Sudden sicknesses take hold of the eternal and render them inept. What was created to live forever is suddenly destroying itself.

What kind of madness is this? This is the state of mind, and world, and identity, which we have opted to enter into, instead of being as God created us. It is an insane nightmare, in which things which absolutely should never be happening seem to be happening all the time. It is so incredibly alien to us. It is so wrong. It is so not of God and not one single speck of this cruel world could ever be even conceived of by the immortal beings of heaven. How horrifying that anything could even remotely go wrong, anything would break down, anything could suffer or die in any way. Truly a nightmare, and completely unnatural. This world is not my home.

"Principle 23 ... YOU are a miracle. God creates only "that which, or one who, is of surpassing excellence or merit". Man is capable of this kind of creation, too, being in the image and likeness of his own Creator. Anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the Creations of Light are real."

“Pain is but witness to the Son's mistakes in what he thinks he is. It is a dream of fierce retaliation for a crime that could not be committed; for attack on what is wholly unassailable. It is a nightmare of abandonment by an Eternal Love Which could not leave the Son whom It created out of love.”

“Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares all mean nothing. They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you. The Holy Spirit WILL restore your sanity, because insanity is NOT the Will of God.”

“Learn that even the darkest nightmare that disturbed the mind of God's sleeping Son, holds no power over him. He WILL learn the lesson of awaking. God watches over him, and light surrounds him.”

“Let us not save nightmares, for they are not fitting offerings for Christ, and so they are not fit gifts for YOU. Take off the covers, and look at what you are afraid of. Only the ANTICIPATION will frighten you, for the reality of nothingness cannot be frightening.”

In this world we've all heard the statement "I love you". This is usually from one person to another one person. Also this is not usually true unconditional love, and is most often special love.

This is an exclusive love, which is directed by one separate person to one separate person, maintaining a sense of separation while also claiming to reach the heights of at least "some loving sentiment" toward them. But not too much mind you, lest it challenge the very notion of being separate.

As we open up to the atonement, which is all about sharing, we have to actually learn that we don't do anything alone. We are not alone. The Holy Spirit being with us guarantees we will never be alone, and our acknowledgement of his presence ensures an end to our solitude and loneliness.

Then it becomes not so much about what you are doing alone, but what you and the Holy Spirit are doing together. That he becomes involved in your doings and you become involved in his. "Do his works". And now as you go to express and give and love, you should find that he becomes involved in this as well. And now the two of you are doing it together.

If you take this to its logical extreme, you should have the experience that you and the Holy Spirit are completely one, joined, fully open to each other, willing God's will together, and that together you are expressing the same intention and love. That the two of you are, for example, sending love to a person. The two of you love that person.

This also extends outward to be fully inclusive, in which you should experience that, in truth, you are the whole sonship, including Jesus. And Jesus is also with you and you should be aware of being one with him. And you and the Holy Spirit and Jesus all together should be functioning as one unit, expressing one love.

And then it becomes more obvious that you aren't just a solitary lonesome loser expressing limited exclusive love to one special individual, it's more that you AND the whole Kingdom of God AND God also are expressing love together in a co-creative act of mutual willing and sharing.

The whole kingdom creates as one. The whole sonship gives everything to everyone. And one single person is not even the only target, because the love spills over and resonates and is shared among everyone when you give it to even one person - because they too ARE the whole.

In my healing efforts now to send love to a person, I now find myself including the Holy Spirit, Jesus and God. That all of us together express and extend love. This is in alignment with our co-creative ability and natural function.

For me it brings to light a renewed meaning to when Jesus says repeatedly, "you will see miracles through your hands through mine." Because if we can join with Jesus and be aware of his presence in us, sharing with him, and TOGETHER we can operate and function as one, then BOTH you and Jesus can perform the functioning of miracle working. And thus you will see HIS miracles AND your own working together as one, through your hands.

I fully imagine at this point, that at some future time I will become so much immersed in union with Jesus and Holy Spirit that it will be as though Christ is working through my body and the whole light of heaven is pouring through it along with me at the same time. We don't do this work alone. It's a team effort. The whole Kingdom of God is professing christ, which is the work of the atonement.

There may be a few I missed but this is most of the references to SOULS in A Course in Miracles. Souls are God's Children, they are permanent creations of light, and there are MANY of them.

"Revelations induce complete but temporary suspension of doubt and fear. They represent the original form of communication between God and His Souls, before the intrusion of fire and ice made this impossible."

"The Revelation unites Souls directly with God."

"The Miracle unites Souls directly with each other."

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

"By perceiving the Spirit, they adjust the levels and see them in proper alignment. This places the Spirit at the center, where Souls can communicate directly."

"Eternal validity belongs only to the Soul. The miracle acknowledges only the Truth. It thus dispels man's illusions about himself, and puts him into communion with himself and with God."

"The Soul never loses its communion with God. Only the mind and body need Atonement."

"The miracle restores the Soul to its fullness. By atoning for lack, it establishes perfect protection."

"The strength of the Soul leaves no room for intrusions."

"The forgiven are filled with the Soul, and their Soul forgives in return."

"The soul is in a state of grace forever. Man's reality is ONLY his soul. Therefore, man is in a state of Grace forever."

"The miracle worker can only bless, and this undoes the curse and frees the soul from prison."

"HIS slip (rivet) was an expression of a Soul gaining enough strength to request freedom from prison. It will ultimately DEMAND it."

"The Soul is therefore unalterable because it is ALREADY perfect, but the mind can elect the level it chooses to serve. The only limit which is put on its choice is that it CANNOT serve two masters."

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

"The Creation of the Soul is already fully accomplished."

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

"Most of the abilities man now possesses are only shadows of his real strengths. The Soul knows, loves, and creates. These are its unequivocal functions."

"Perception did not exist until the Separation had introduced degrees, aspects and intervals. The Soul has no levels, and ALL conflict arises from the concept of levels."

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

"Any attempt to endow the ego with the attributes of the Soul, is merely confused thinking."

"The mind returns itself to its proper function only when it WILLS TO KNOW. This places it in the Soul's service, where perception is meaningless. The superconscious is the level of the mind which wills to do this."

"The mind DID divide itself when it willed to create its own levels AND the ability to perceive them. But it could NOT entirely separate itself from the Soul, because it is FROM the Soul that it derives its whole power to create."

"Even in miscreating, will is affirming its source, or it would merely cease to be. This is impossible, because it IS part of the Soul, which God created, and which is therefore eternal."

"But I was a man who remembered the Soul and its knowledge."

"God and the Souls He created remain in surety, and therefore KNOW that no miscreation exists."

"I demonstrated both the powerlessness of the body AND the power of the mind, by uniting MY will with that of my Creator, which naturally remembered the Soul and its own real purpose."

"Strong wills can do this NOW. And you WILL find rest for your Souls. God knows you only in peace, and this IS your reality."

"Never forget that the Sonship is your salvation, for the Sonship is your Soul."

"Your Soul does not need salvation, but your mind needs to learn what salvation IS. You are not saved FROM anything, but you ARE saved FOR glory"

"Glory is your inheritance, given your Soul by its Creator, that you might EXTEND it."

"But if you hate part of your own Soul, ALL your understanding is lost, because you are looking on what God creates AS YOURSELF without love. And since what He created IS part of Him, you are denying Him His place in His own altar."

"The peace of YOUR Soul lies in its limitlessness."

"Limit the peace you share, and your own Soul MUST be unknown to you."

"Every altar to God is part of your Soul, because the Light He created is One with Him."

"We have repeatedly emphasized the fact that one level of the mind is not understandable to another. So it is with the ego and the soul, and with time and eternity. "

"Eternity is an idea of God, so the soul understands it perfectly. Time is a belief of the ego, so the lower mind, which IS the ego's domain, accepts it without question."

"The Holy Spirit is the mediator between the interpretations of the ego and the knowledge of the Soul. Its ability to deal with symbols enables it to work AGAINST the ego's beliefs in its own language. Its equal ability to look BEYOND symbols into eternity also enables it to understand the laws of God, for which it speaks. It can thus perform the function of RE-INTERPRETING what the ego makes, not by destruction, but by understanding."

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

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in him."

"The Soul, because of its own likeness to its Creator, is creative. No Child of God is capable of losing this ability, because it is inherent in what he IS."

"With full recognition of its transitory nature, (a recognition which I hope you both share), Helen offers a very good teaching example of alternations between Soul and ego, with concomitant variation between peace and frenzy."

"In answer to Bill's question, it is perfectly apparent that when she is ego-dominated, she DOES NOT KNOW her Soul."

"Man reacts to his ego much as God does to His Souls, - with love, protection, and great charity."

"The ego's ceaseless attempts to gain the Soul's acknowledgement and thus establish its own existence are utterly useless."

"The Soul in its knowledge is unaware of the ego. It does NOT attack the ego. It merely cannot conceive of it at all."

"While the ego is equally unaware of the Soul, it DOES perceive itself as rejected by something which is greater than itself. This is why self-esteem in ego terms MUST be a delusion."

"The religiously ego-oriented tend to believe that the Soul existed before, and will continue to exist afterward, after a temporary lapse into ego-life. Some actually believe that the Soul will be punished for this lapse, even though in reality it could not possibly know anything about it."

"The term "salvation" does NOT apply to the Soul, which is not in danger and does not need to be salvaged. Salvation is nothing more that "right-mindedness" which is NOT the one-mindedness of the Soul, but which must be accomplished before one-mindedness can be restored."

"Attack is ALWAYS made on a stranger. You are MAKING him a stranger by misperceiving him, so that you CANNOT know him. It is BECAUSE you have made him into a stranger that you are afraid of him. PERCEIVE him correctly, so that your Soul can KNOW him."

"To be fatigued is to be DIS-spirited, but to be inspired is to be IN the spirit. To be egocentric IS to be dispirited. But to be self-centered in the RIGHT sense is to be inspired, or in the Soul. The truly inspired are enlightened, and cannot abide in darkness."

"He can speak from his Soul or from his ego, precisely as he chooses. If he speaks from his Soul, he has chosen to "be still and know that am God."

"Your real worth IS your divine authorship, and your Soul is its acknowledgement. I cannot guide your egos EXCEPT as you associate them with your Souls."

"Chesterton wrote an excellent description of Cervantes and his perception of his "unheroic hero," a view of man which the ego tolerates all too frequently, but the Soul NEVER countenances."

"The ego may will them because the ego IS both lean and foolish. But the Soul CANNOT embark on them because it is forever UNwilling to depart from its Foundation. The journey to the cross should be the LAST foolish journey for every mind."

"The soul's true functions are knowing, loving, and creating."

"Note again that the functions of the Soul were not referred to as abilities."

"The clear-cut implications of relativity, which properly inheres in this statement, DEMONSTRATE that abilities are not functions of the Soul. The Soul's functions are NOT relative. They are ABSOLUTE. They are OF God and BY God, and therefore God-like."

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

"Peace is a natural heritage of the Soul. Everyone is free to refuse to accept his inheritance, but he is NOT free to establish what his inheritance IS."

"Remember that the Soul knows no difference between being and having. The higher mind thinks according to the laws which the Soul obeys, and therefore honors only the laws of God. To Him, getting is meaningless, and giving is all."

"Having everything, the Soul HOLDS everything by GIVING it, thus creating as the Father created."

"Can the Creations of God Himself take joy in what is not real? And what is real except the Creations of God and those which are created like His? Your creations love you as your Soul loves your Father FOR THE GIFT OF CREATION. There IS no other gift that is eternal, and therefore THERE IS NO OTHER GIFT THAT IS TRUE."

"In every case you have thought wrongly about some Soul that God created, and are perceiving images your ego makes in a darkened glass."

"It is possible even in this world to hear ONLY that voice and no other. It takes effort and great willingness to learn. It is the final lesson that I learned, and God's Sons are as equal as learners as they are as Souls."

"What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own Soul?" This means that if he listens to the wrong voice, he has LOST SIGHT of his Soul. He CANNOT lose it, but he CAN not know it. It is therefore LOST TO HIM, until he chooses right."

"In contrast, the Soul reacts in the same way to everything it knows is true, and does not respond at all to anything else. Nor does it make any attempt to ESTABLISH what is true. It knows that what is true is everything that God created. It is in complete and direct communication with every aspect of Creation, because it is in complete and direct communication with its Creator."

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

Since spirit obeys only God's laws, and Spirit is love, expressions of love (miracles) are expressions of the laws of spirit. Spirit is beyond the "nature" of the ego, and therefore miracles have a super-natural, spiritual origin. What you may not realize is that this entire world is constructed from the ego's fake laws of nature, even down to the subatomic physics.

The laws of the ego are invented by the ego. The dream, which is an effect of an "invisible" higher-level cause, does not contain any real causes. But it contains illusions of causes. These illusions of causes make it seem like one part of the same level causes effects in other parts of the same level. This is not true. All effects are orchestrated from a higher level, including the illusion that one thing causes another.

So when you study this fictional "world", and you see one object seeming to move and collide with another object to "cause" it to behave differently, this SEEMS like there is some kind of a law involved. Like the laws of physics, suggesting that actions have equal and opposite reactions.

The truth is that actions do NOT have equal and opposite reactions. Actions on this level are not actions. They are all reactions - effects, pretending to be actions. The action, and its effects, are both effects coming from an unseen dimension.

The ego has been very clever to disguise and hide God's nature and the laws of Spirit, by creating FORM, and nothing is so blinding as sight of form. The behavior and interaction of forms creates an illusion of cause and effect happening on this same level. And so on this level it appears that some things cause other things, and that this is "natural". It could not be further from natural.

What it really expresses is the fact that what is not love is murder, and every part of the ego thought system (of which this world is a part) is murderous. The ego thought system believes that what applies to one thing does not apply to another, therefore there are differences, therefore you can cause (attack) without being attacked (affected).

This is why so-called "causes" in this world seem to escape the effects they inflict on other things. It seems possible to throw a brick through a window without damaging the brick. But since what applies to the brick does not apply to the window, this is an illusion based on differences, and is an expression of a murderous idea. The brick "gets away with" (murders) the window because the so-called properties of the brick (the laws applying to it) are "different" to the properties and laws of the window. It is not "natural" to be murderous, and so this "law of nature" that the brick will break the window is NOT being governed by a natural law or the "laws of physics".

The truth about this universe/world/planet is that it is not run by laws of physics, there is no such thing as physics, and in fact it is run by the mind from a higher level. And it doesn't really exist because it is just a dream being projected and dreams are fictional. This is why "there is no world."

Since all true causality is in the mind, and all of the mind is "above" the level of this world and its effects, when the mind decides to exercise its ability to cause, it can "modify" the content of the dream, or rearrange it, in order to demonstrate and prove that it is NOT really governed by the ILLUSORY LAWS, but by the laws of spirit.

Since spirit is love and love's expressions are miracles, these "acts of love" demonstrating the true laws or "true nature" of existence, MUST DEFY AND BREAK the illusions of horizontal laws that the ego assumes are true.

If a child is playing with a train set and the train is traveling around the track "on rails", seemingly by itself, following physical laws, it can only go where the "laws" seem to tell it to go. However, if the child reaches down and picks up the train and positions it in a totally different section of track, all of those laws are completely defied. Indeed, another child may complain that "you're not supposed to do that" because it breaks the ILLUSION of the game they were playing at PRETENDING the train is going around the track on its own.

The mind of the dreamer is what dictates what shows up, where it shows up, how it shows up, and how it behaves. Any so-called "interactions" of objects are FAKE. The objects would completely pass through each other and occupy the same space if it were not for the MIND deciding to make it seem like they collide with each other and perform a cascade of so-called "reactions". There is no such thing as a real reaction. Spirit creates and extends, it does not react.

This whole world and everything in it was designed to conceal the nature of God and His laws, behind a smokescreen of fake laws and fake nature. To present an illusion that one thing depends on another or causes effects in another, thereby expressing the ego's insane idea of un-equal laws or finite laws which apply only some of the time to some objects. After all, not all objects are causing something to happen at all times, and even objects which are affected turn around and become causes soon after. Are they causes, or effects, or both, or neither?

Nothing in this world has the power to express the laws of Spirit on its own because "form" is the form of ERROR, and error is all about separation and powerlessness and fake causality. Miracles HAVE to express something which is BEYOND the nature of this world, in order for them to be miracles at all. It is not a miracle for a car to drive down a road. It is a miracle for the car to disappear and reappear 50 miles further along in a split second. It is not a miracle for a tree to catch on fire. It is a miracle for the tree to avoid being burned in the midst of a raging forest fire where everything around it was incinerated. Ego laws MUST be defied in order for it to be miraculous.

Miracles obey the laws of Spirit, not the laws of the ego. For a miracle to express, something which the ego APPEARED to establish as true is shown to be FALSE, and is demonstrated to be false, by completely defying and breaking and overriding the ego laws to produce effects which are outside those laws. This would include for example giving someone new eyeballs after they were born without any eyes. Or re-growing a missing limb. Or turning water into wine. Or walking on the top of the ocean without sinking.

If this nature-defying, thus super-natural element is missing from miracles, and if miracles in ACIM are not super-natural, then what are they? There is nothing super natural or ego defying or ego-law-breaking about shifting perception. There is nothing ego-law-breaking or capable of demonstrating that the laws don't apply, in correcting some thoughts. There is nothing that's going to change the direction the world spins when some old emotions are released. There's nothing particularly powerful about any of these efforts at purification. They are just clearing away belief in ego laws to make way for Spirit to express itself.

The vital truth of forgiveness, is to recognize that what you thought happened, DID NOT HAPPEN.

"Forgiveness is the recognition that what you think your brother did has not OCCURRED."

This doesn't mean that it happened and then you forget about it. It doesn't mean you remember it and trust your memory of it. It doesn't mean there are real consequences that continually PROVE that it happened.

It means it literally DID NOT OCCUR. EVER.

Jesus says of the separation and the world:

"The changes wrought are substanceless. All events are nowhere."

This is a central idea. Not simply that the world exists or existed and we need to deal with it. But that the world DOES NOT exist, IS NOT happening, and NEVER DID happen. Essentially, that there IS NO WORLD.

I am not sure if many of us are willing to take our forgiveness to this extreme. Because we can recall "doing things" in the world. We can remember "sins", attacks, happenings. But even the slightest hint of the idea that "you did it" or "they did it" IS the belief that sin is real.

No one ever really DID anything, because of the CONTEXT of this entire world.

This world is nothing but A DREAM. It is an imaginary world. It has NO real consequences UPON anything real. It IS UNREALITY. It is the unreal world. Not one single thing in it is really happening. Not one single appearance is really there. It is an ILLUSION of a world.

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

Forgiveness isn't merely the overlooking of what "is there". It is the recognition that, literally, IT IS NOT THERE. This requires that you remember the entire CONTEXT of what you are INSIDE OF when you think that stuff is happening.

IF this world were reality, then yes, everything it is would REALLY be happening. And all sins would be real. And all attack is real. And all damage, suffering and death is real. IF the world is real, then it is ALL VALID, and it is all of God.

But if this world IS NOT real, if it is ONLY a dream and nothing more, then this COMPLETELY INVALIDATES absolutely everything within it. Not one single event is really happening. Not one single image is true. Not one single planet really exists. And NONE OF IT is real.

NONE OF IT!

The ultimate recognition of this fact, in its fullest possible capacity, is the recognition that THERE IS NO WORLD. AT ALL. It does not really exist. It is not there. Nothing is happening there. And no-one is living in it. There IS no history. There IS no past. There IS no planet.

"There is no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. At best it seems like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. ***Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere.*** Outside of Heaven, ***only the conflict of illusion stands***; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions are but forms. Their content is never true."

So when you consider, indeed remember, that THIS IS A DREAM WORLD, not a REAL world, it completely reframes everything that happens. Or rather, it even brings into question WHETHER anything is happening, and indeed WHETHER there is EVEN a world here.

Space-time is 100% fiction! It is a BELIEF and nothing more. A mistaken idea of separation and delay. Space and time don't even really exist.

So any "sins" that seem to occur, any happenings, any events, any attacks, and sicknesses, any deaths, any day to day lives, any people going to jobs, any houses being inhabited, any lakes being swum in, any wars being waged, all of is JUST A DREAM, WITHIN an imaginary context. And so ALL OF IT IS A LIE.

IT IS NOT HAPPENING.

And it is ONLY when you can recognize that YOU DID NOT REALLY DO what you think you did, that you can RECEIVE THE CURE, which is the atonement. And atonement IS forgiveness. There is no sin because sin is impossible, and recognizing this is atonement. You HAVE NOT sinned because you CANNOT sin, because THERE IS NOWHERE TO SIN and sin is impossible everywhere. NOTHING CAN HAPPEN OUTSIDE OF GOD'S KINGDOM and THIS world, earth, and all the solar systems and galaxies, IS the illusion of exile outside of heaven.

The shit does not exist.

You know this deep down. And you KNOW that if there is even a SHRED of a notion that this world IS REAL, then EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER DONE IS A REAL SIN. And it cannot be forgiven. You can only forgive an illusion and cannot forgive real sin. Sin has to be UNREAL for you to forgive it. Only when your sins are recognized as NON EXISTENT are you aware of your innocence. And they are non-existent because they are IMPOSSIBLE.

You have never sinned. You never will. And no-one has ever sinned against you. Sin does not exist anywhere ever. Nothing has happened. All of spacetime is fiction. "The world of bodies is the world of sin." A world of sin cannot exist in God's world of innocence. You have NEVER sinned. You WILL never sin. YOU CANNOT SIN. You HAVE NOT sinned. You are just as holy and innocent as when God created you. And all the world will vanish.

THE WORLD IS NOTHING.

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

"God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them. The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within Themselves, for They are everywhere.

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

There are two versions of this answer.

One relates to conditional love. If God has certain conditions which must be met in order for you to be worthwhile loving, then if you don't meet those conditions you aren't worthy enough. This makes you think that in order to become worthy you have to meet certain conditions, or turn yourself into a more lovable person. And also you believe that if you aren't meeting certain conditions, this PREVENTS God's love.

But then there's unconditional love. If God loves you unconditionally then it doesn't matter what your current state is, or what you think you did, or whether you're awake or sleeping. God is loving you 100% regardless. This means he must be overlooking everything you think would keep you from Him, and instead sees the REAL YOU.

Being worthy of God also means that God wants what you are or what you represent. It means God shares the view of you that you have of yourself. And it also means that your worthiness is lofty enough to be attractive to Him.

When you believe you are unworthy, it is a form of denial which attempts to shut God out, because if you didn't, you wouldn't be able to believe you are unworthy. So you have to pretend you're not. But it is only pretend. You can never be ACTUALLY unworthy, you just think you are.

Also to be worthy of God means that God values you and wants you and welcomes you. If you think there's something about you that proves that God wouldn't love you, maybe you're too ugly or have too many grievances or don't like your job or whatever, maybe you hold this up as the reason why God wouldn't love you. But it isn't proof. It's a mistake. And it is an incorrect answer.

God can't stop finding you worthy because God is constantly creating you, choosing you, sustaining you, loving you, extending you and protecting you. You came FROM God, because He decided he would extend love, as love, as you. Your very nature, your foundation, is love. If you came FROM God then obviously you ARE what God wants, because God wouldn't be in the business of creating something he doesn't like. He only creates with love. So you must be lovable.

Your belief that you're not lovable is the only problem. You think there's some reasons why God doesn't love you. None of those reasons are the truth and none of them have the power to stop God's love. You think they can, but they don't. You can hate yourself to death but God still loves you. And then He's like, ok, are you done playing now? It's time for dinner.

Forgiveness is nothing more than seeing correctly.

It means recognizing that illusions ARE illusions, and not falling for them.

It means overlooking illusions and seeing past them, rather that taking them at their appearance and thinking they are real.

This extends all the way to the illusion of death, which is where the Son of God in all HIs divine freedom and power creates the ILLUSION that He has absolutely no freedom or choice left, or that things can happen to Him against His will.

This is of course impossible, so it is an illusion, bit it APPEARS on the surface to be an unwanted death, happening to someone who didn't seem to ask for it. But the Son of God is faking it.

If and when you can recognize and see that this is in fact an illusion of death, not a real death, then you are now over-looking and not falling for the trick. Believing it's real is a complete mistake.

You will only believe illusions are real when you forget to forgive, which puts you into so-called "judgement", which is really to do with attacking appearances and making them out to be the truth.

Illusions are not the truth. Death is not truth. But as soon as you are convinced that it's real you've become blinded, you've been tempted and you've succumbed to the deception. You didn't notice that it was the Son of God, infinite and immoral, who was pretending He can die.

And so because you didn't look past the ILLUSION of death, to see its Author, which would reveal to you plain as day - this is absolutely pretend - so you enter into the illusion yourself and go unconscious.

All you need realize then is that all you need to do to 'wake up' is to see correctly, ie have your perception corrected, so that you are not falling into the lie, are not believing the trap, and didn't go along with the story. It means fixing your vision on the truth, on what is really going on here, not buying into any form of victimhood or suffering or accidental events, and staying very certain that the immortal Son of God cannot be harmed. Death cannot be real. And nothing is really happening.

To overcome an illusion, ie "forgive", you must learn to see past the deception that you've fallen for, remember the truth, and stop taking it seriously. It's like some old trick that someone keeps playing on you and finally you figure out that someone is behind it and it's not just some random bizarre thing going on, his cover is blown and the illusion is broken, and now you can no longer fall for it. That's all it is, just learning to recognize and see the truth and stop being deceived by appearances.

All false appearances are your interpretation of the 'illusion of separation' as though it is not an illusion. Behind this misinterpretation there is still an illusion being created by the Son of God, but it has no power to convince you it's real unless you choose to play along with it. Then it's just something you can't believe anymore and you know is false. As such you escape death, because death is just part of believing that illusions are the truth.

"God did not create the body."

"The ego’s fundamental wish is to replace God. In fact, the ego is the physical embodiment of this wish. For it is this wish which seems to surround the mind with a body, keeping it separate and alone; and unable to reach other minds except through the body which was made to imprison it."

"Love did not create the body."

"A mind and body cannot both exist."

"You CANNOT make the body the Holy Spirit's temple, and it will NEVER be the seat of love. It is the home of the idolater, and of love's condemnation."

"God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom. The body is the symbol of what you THINK you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist."

"For minds need not the body to communicate."

"How can a body be extended to hold the universe? Can it create, and BE what it creates? And can it offer its creation all that it is, and never suffer loss? God does not share His function with a body."

"I am not of this world." "I am not a body I am free."

"Yet God did not will the destruction of His creations, having created them for eternity."

"The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There IS no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream, in which it acts as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed."

"The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to PROVE it is autonomous and real."

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

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

"Yet could God's Son as He created him abide in form or in a world of form?"

"(Pain) Its purpose is the same as pleasure, for they both are means TO MAKE THE BODY REAL."

"It is a picture of a body still, for what you REALLY are can not be seen nor pictured."

"The Great Rays would establish the total LACK of value of the special relationship, IF THEY WERE SEEN. For, in seeing THEM, the body WOULD disappear, BECAUSE ITS VALUE WOULD BE LOST. And so your whole INVESTMENT in seeing it would be WITHDRAWN from it."

"It is impossible to seek for pleasure through the body and NOT find pain."

"A miracle reawakens the awareness that the spirit, and not the body, is the altar of Truth."

"All separation, all distinctions, and the multitude of differences you believe make up the world. They are not there. Love s enemy has made them up."

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?"

"The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards."

"Perception involves the body even in its most spiritualized form."

"Forgive the world, and you will understand that everything that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real."

"(The body) Leave it behind, it cannot enter Heaven."

"The mind that made the body can make another because all form is illusion."

All of the course’s METAPHYSICS is based on perfectly clear, black and white, impeccable logical reasoning. REASON is the attribute of a sane mind. Through reason, you can literally SEE SENSE. What makes perfect sense is true.

"The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite."

(something which is everything, leaves no room for anything else, right? Something that takes up all the space leaves no room for an opposite. That’s perfectly logical)

"Noting real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists."

(if real things cannot be threatened, and ending existence requires threat/attack, then everything that produces non-existence must be unreal. That’s perfectly logical)

"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."

(if there is fear, there is not love, ie there is a lack of love, because love’s presence casts out or shines away fear. Lights dispells darkness. This seems to suggest if darkness is present, light is not. Or if fear is present, love is not. But believing that is believing illusions. Only love exists, and love is all encompassing, so fearful states do not really exist. This is perfectly logical)

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

(believing that what is true is false, and that what is false is true, is total confusion about what is true and real. Ego is a state of total confusion. Which is inanity - believing illusions are real, believing lies are true, beliving the impossible is possible. This is perfectly logical)

"A sick body does not make any sense. It could not make any sense, since sickness is not what it is for."

(bodies are communication devices. Confusing their purpose and attacking them for you seeming to fail to communicate is insane. Thus sickness (attack upon the body) is nonsense. It’s implementing on false grounds as a defense against truth and against sense. No one in their right mind can be sick. This is perfectly logical)

Jesus goes on, and the course is littered with blatantly logical statements. If you can SEE the logic in them, behind the words, you are seeing the metaphysics. The metaphysics is totally flawless and not open to interpretation or opinion. There aren’t 1500 different versions of the LOGIC. There is only ONE. Otherwise you are making logical errors. And this is also why only the ONE truth is true.

Anyone reasoning correctly should have no option but to accept and admit and agree with it. Seeing sense means seeing the LOGIC. WHY it makes sense. This is why the atonement eventually becomes so obvious that it makes sense, is the only truth that makes sense, and nothing else makes any sense. When you can see why it is the only TRUTH, logically, reasonably, you will have no OPINION left to defend against it, and will submit yourself to God.

The atonement is the logical concluson of God providing a perfect answer to the mistaken logic of the separation. This is why it is a flawless response, making ascension absolutely inevitable. It makes perfect sense that God knows how to perfectly resolve the logical thinking ERRORS of his children.

If you want to experience any of the attributes that are true of God, such as love, peace, happiness, health, joy, power, etc, then it does entail actually moving closer to God. God has these attributes in him as part of his nature, permanently. And the place in you where you have these attributes is the place he put them, which is within your real self - your soul.

In order for you to experience these things, it actually entails getting in touch with your real self and being aligned with God's will. You can't stay separate from God and expect to feel what it's like to be like God. You have to actually be willing to be close to God, close to love, close to permanent happiness, close to peace, close to that which creates these things.

God is the creator of these things, not you, not the body, not the world. They dwell inside of you in the very same place where you are joined with God, at your inner altar. If you want peace, you have to go there to find it. If you want to be loving, you have to share love with God. If you want to be happy, you have to be with God as well.

This means identifying with your real holy perfect self as God created it. This also means if you are not experiencing these things it's not because there is something wrong with you, it's because you're not being true to yourself and have distanced yourself from God. So the remedy is to simply move back closer to God again. The question then, really, is, where are you, and how much distance (spacetime) have you put between you and the reality of peace, love and happiness?

"A Son of God is happy ONLY when he knows he is WITH God. That is the only environment in which he will not experience strain, because that is where he belongs. It is also the only environment that is worthy of him, because his own worth is beyond ANYTHING that he can make." UrT7L2

"The step I take today, my Father, is my sure release from idle dreams of sin. Your altar stands serene and undefiled. It is the holy altar to my Self, and there I find my true Identity." UrW309L2 "Oh my brothers, if you only knew the peace that will envelop you and hold you safe and pure and lovely in the Mind of God, you could but rush to meet Him where His altar is." UrU5A8

"We clear a holy place within our minds before His altar, where His gifts of peace and joy are welcome, and to which we come to find what has been given us by Him." UrW104L4

"Only at the altar of God will you find peace, and this altar is in you, because God put it there." UrT9I18

"If you would look within, you would see only the Atonement, shining in quiet and in peace, upon the altar to your Father. Do not be afraid to look within." UrT13C7

"A miracle reawakens the awareness that the spirit, and not the body, is the altar of Truth. This is the recognition that leads to the healing power of the miracle." UrT1B22G

AWAKE IN THE DREAM vs WAKING UP FROM DREAMING

There are two states.

1. Waking

2. Sleeping.

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

When you are inside the sleeping state (2), the state of sleep experiences two polarities, or somewhere along the spectrum between them.

1. True perception (clarity, recognition, christ vision)

2. False perception (confusion, blinded by forms, victims)

Being a "Teacher of God" means being INSIDE the sleeping state (2), at the level of or close to True Perception (1). This means the mind IS STILL ASLEEP. But you at least are very close to awakening and not convinced by the dream.

"Teachers of God choose to look on dreams a while" .... "but they are not deceived by what they see."

Awareness of dreaming - being asleep but aware that you are inside a dream that you are producing and have control over - is often MISTAKEN, for the state of awakening. It is NOT the same thing as moving to state #1. It is only state #1 WITHIN state #2.

Remaining in a DREAM body, inside a dream, inside a state of sleep, which REQUIRES you to be not awake, in order to DREAM OF a body, is not a state of total awakening. But it is a "more wakeful" state than the state of false perception. This can be experienced as though you have woken up IN the dream, but are STILL dreaming. And therefore, still sleeping. This experience is NOT the same as being IN HEAVEN. It is nothing more than a reflection.

In order to wake up from dreaming, you HAVE to wake up from SLEEPING. The dream has to end. The body has to vanish. You have to get OUT OF the dream. Out of the body. Out of this world. To cease SLEEPING at all. You've got to get up out of your heavenly bed and stretch your heavenly arms and realize that nothing that seemed to exist in the dream world exists AT ALL. No bodies, no planet, nothing.

To return to state #1, total wakefulness, you have to no longer sleep, AND no longer dream. Which means you CANNOT HAVE a dream body. Being "in a body awake" is a temporary stage in between sleeping and waking. It's as awake as you can be WHILE ASLEEP. Like a lucid dream.

"My Self is ruler of the universe. ... It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept. (this is the state of lucid dreaming where you can choose what the dream contains).

For thus am I led ***past this world*** (beyond sleep) to my creations, children of my Will, in Heaven (waking state #1) where my holy Self abides with them, and Him Who has created me."

"Indeed you cannot remain in the world, with this knowledge."

"To be without a body is to be in your natural state."

One of the worst and most generalizing interpretations of ACIM's teaching, is that "there is no separation". This has framed any kind of separateness as wrong. It has associated all separation with duality, and has stripped oneness of any possibility of being many things.

So now we have in our minds this idea that oneness must be the total absence of separation. This even seems to make logical sense. But it's not the truth. How do we even know that reality has to be oneness? Where did we learn that crap? We've also taken it further to mean that, separation equates with duality, and a lack of separation equates with oneness. As if, there literally is "only one thing", a count of one, as reality. And obviously that must be God, so there is only God. God being alone all by himself. But that's not the truth etiher.

For a start, just as a cursory glance, ACIM has all kinds of material talking about God having a son. A what now? How can God have a son if there is no separation? If you are being strict about this it's impossible for God to have a son at all. Surely that implies there are separations in reality? Surely it's not true that reality has separate parts to it? Surely it has to be all one thing?

Who came up with this notion that reality HAS TO be all one thing with no parts? That is a gross preconception. So many of us keep projecting this idea onto what the course is saying, insisting that reality HAS to be one thing. It HAS to be oneness. We all want that lovely shiny oneness, and it absolutely cannot have any separations in it, because separation is ego, right? Well no.

How about, it would be okay for there to be a kind of separation, where even though there is a separation, it isn't a complete severance? How about if a single environment can contain two things, which are indeed two fully distinctly and wholly created things, but those two things ALSO are unified and share everything with each other? Is it still separation or ego if they are completely open to sharing everything without any selfishness?

The kind of separation that exists in reality is not the same kind of separation that exists in the ego world. The thing that you really need to get your head around is this. One thing can also be many things while still being one thing. Does that sound too radical or difficult to understand? Is such a thing impossible, and why does it have to be "not the truth"?

Wouldn't such a scenario where something is one thing, but is also two things, and the two things are still two things, but are also one thing, be somewhat transcendental? It would have to warp and transcend every notion we have about how everything is supposed to be in a nice tidy box of its own, wouldn't it. It would be some kind of weird thing where something can be one thing and two things at the same time. It might even have to be described as miraculous.

If God cannot create, God cannot live. If God cannot share, God cannot give. If God is devoid of any kind of separation, God can never create a son. Not even one. Not a single son of God can exist in God if God is this very vague idea of "oneness". Some people seem to not be comfortable with the idea of God having TWO sons, but they seem to be okay with him having ONE son, even though that's still a logical contradiction. Why is ONE SEPARATION okay?

Just on the general jist of it, ACIM is saying a whole lot of stuff about God having a son. Now, I don't know about you but if it were to be meaning that he DOES NOT have any sons AT ALL, then I would say Jesus is a terribly misleading author. Just on the basis of how often and how much "the son of God" is referenced, either Jesus is full of shit, or Jesus is deceptive, or the ENTIRE course is metaphorical.

Now, sometimes people actually do opt to believe that the whole thing is metaphorical, because that seems to put a nice bandaid on it and COVER UP the truth. It sort of ties up some loose ends. Those nasty little loose ends that keep saying God has a son. It would be great to just say, well it's all a metaphor, there isn't really a son of God, and to then go onto say that Jesus is just placating your little pretend ego self because it can't handle the truth. Where have you heard that before?

It would be quite convenient IF Jesus actually were only talking in riddles, and the entire course was a lie, and the whole thing was just playing to your ego's need for specialness, and if only "the special advanced students" will get and accept the fact that there really is NO SON AT ALL.

This is the kind of of mad thinking that some people have adopted to try to justify and explain away the very intensely radical truths in the course, to make themselves feel better and to try to understand what the heck it's saying. But it's simply wrong.

God absolutely does have a son. You're going to have to deal with that. If you think he does not have a son, then there is only God. What are the implications of this idea? If there is only God, then you are God entirely, God is dreaming of exile from God, God is insane and believes in death, God has special relationships, God creates poop, and God kills people. Hmm... Is that going to jive with your spiritual goals? It doesn't exactly sound very loving, but it is perfectly logical.

For God NOT to have participated in this madness of a hellhole we're in, he MUST be distinct from you in SOME way. There has to be some kind of freedom that you have "from him" that allows YOUR insanity to not affect him. Otherwise any madness you go into would instantly infect him, and then we'd all be lost forever. God did NOT enter "the separation", did not buy into the mad idea, and did not dream of hell. So who did? And the obvious answer is of course that you - as the Son of God - or at least ONE OF the sons of God did.

The kind of warped bandaids that a person has to come up with to try to mangle the course's meaning to make certain untruths "fit" is quite incredible. We've got people saying that God has no son at all, people saying that one separation is acceptable but not two, and we've got people saying that God can't have many sons because that mean separation. It doesn't, but that's what they think.

And mainly it's because people just cannot seem to conceive of something that TRANSCENDS "either this or that". They just can't seem to envision what a reality is like where one thing is also two things, or even many things, while still being one thing. There is NO parallel to that in the physical world. There are NO examples in your environment that you've ever encountered where one thing is also two things, or two things are one thing, or two things entirely overlap and share the same space. It seems impossible. But THIS world is impossible, so don't you think that means "one as two" is entirely possible?

What some people then don't like is the seeming SIMILARITY between this idea of God being "one and many", and their idea of duality. Oooh... it's a little bit too much like duality isn't it, that must be an ego thing, that must be a bad thing, let's get rid of it. But duality is NOT the same thing as the transcendental multiplicities of reality.

Duality really means, things are separate, AND they do not share anything. The lack of sharing is a vital part of it. It's not just that there's a separation, it's that the two things are kept apart and do not join or connect. So then you might ask what is the opposite of that? Is it oneness? NOT NECESSARILY. How about the opposite of duality, is a reality in which there are STILL many things, BUT at the same time, they SHARE EVERYTHING? What would that be like? Because that's what reality IS like.

That's exactly what Jesus describes over and over again in ACIM. A reality in which there are many parts, and where each part is the whole, and each part shares everything with all the other parts, yet is STILL a part. You being one with God, while STILL being yourself. You having your own soul, while ALSO sharing the soul of others. You being christ, while OTHERS are also christ. You having many brothers, yet each brother BEING the other brothers. That's all over the course in hundreds of ways and that's what you have to come to realize about reality.

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is PERFECTLY natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you."

Reality IS NOT ONENESS. It is not the kind of "opposite of separation" that you think it is. It IS oneness, but it's not ONLY that. It is a oneness which has expressed infinite power to CREATE additional ones. It is a wholeness which has FULLY created additional WHOLE beings. It's an entire constellation of creations, where each INDIVIDUAL creation is also so joined to the others that they are ALSO one. Oh my God, did he just say that we have an INDIVIDUAL SELF IN REALITY? How can that be?!!!

"We share our life because we have one Source, a Source from Which perfection comes to us, remaining always in the holy minds which He created perfect."

"We have also emphasized that man, insofar as the term relates to Soul, has not only been fully Created, but also been created perfect. There is no emptiness in him."

Now I can hear the thoughts in your mind trying to whirl around to visualize this. And you're probably thinking well, how do these many separate things be joined, to the extent that they are one, without DISAPPEARING? Because in spacetime we only have analogies where, as two things become one thing, the separation vanishes and you can't tell them apart any more. But that's NOT the case in reality. The two things are FULLY two things, AND fully one thing, at the same time. That's what you have to come to accept. The dynamics of heaven's reality is NOT the same as the laws of physics.

God is one, and has many children, who are one, who have many creations of their own, which are one. And every one creates with every other one. And the whole sonship, which is a collection of ones, creates as one, to create many additional ones, with God, who is one with them all. Oneness extends itself, to produce more onenesses, which are each oneness, and each gives oneness, creating more onenesses, which are in turn still the same oneness. One thing, creating separate things, which are one thing still.

This cannot be understood by separating things into separate boxes. It cannot be understood by insisting that reality be a count of one. It cannot be understand by projecting ego ideas of the "lack of separations" onto it. It cannot be understood by trying to get rid of all the sons of God and all your brothers and turning the world into a solo-gameshow of you vs yourself. There ARE other people here, there are other dreamers here, there are other free willed beings here, and you DO have relationships.

The course has been smushed, crushed, distorted, twisted, mangled, bent, upheaved and shattered, by well-meaning but mistaken individuals who THINK they know that heaven has to be a singularity of God. ACIM if you read it carefully does not support this idea. Even when it says "God is". Even when it says "God has but one son". Even then it STILL ALSO SAYS that God has many sons and a family and even grandchildren. Your creations are his grandchildren. That's all in A Course in Miracles, whether a person likes it or not, or whether it makes sense or not.

Can we just let the course be what it is and say what it does and try to FIND A WAY TO ACCEPT IT, instead of keep trying to CONVERT IT INTO the models and concepts and theories and theologies that WE think it has to be? Because it is not like them. ACIM is not non-duality, it is not adviata vedanta, it is not about oneness in the traditional sense, and it doesn't teach that there is only God.

Let it be itself and let it tell you what the whole truth is. Take ALL of what Jesus says and recognize that he does NOT contradict himself, and if he says two things which SOUND contradictory, it does not mean they are. What it means is YOUR THOUGHT SYSTEM contradicts itself when it is exposed to a truth that trancends it. It isn't the course that's confused, it's you. Jesus knows what he's talking about. "We are the Kingdom, WE, the Sons of God."

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

"Because He did not will to be alone, He created a Son like Himself."

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

"It was not His Will to be alone. And neither is it YOURS. Forgive your brother, and you CANNOT separate yourself from him, nor from his Father."

God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it.

1. "The Separation is merely another term for a split mind."

So the so-called "separation from God" or "being separate" or "believing in separation" is in YOUR mind, in the form of YOUR mind being SPLIT. It splits by attacking, which is sin, which creates a divide or gap, which is also spacetime, and separates part of mind off from the rest.

2. "Projection will ALWAYS hurt you. It reinforces your belief in your own split mind, and its ONLY purpose is to KEEP THE SEPARATION GOING."

You use projection, which is also exclusion and dissociation, in order to increase the separation IN YOUR MIND, by continuing to SPLIT YOUR MIND between seemingly internal and external parts, while identifying only with the internal parts, and with the body which is a symbolic separation device.

3. "In your madness, you OVERLOOK REALITY COMPLETELY, and you see ONLY YOUR SPLIT MIND everywhere you look."

You see a projection of YOUR SPLIT MIND everywhere you look, and then you think that the "separated off" exclusively guilty parts you see are not part of you, but they are, because ideas do not leave their source/mind.

4. "A split mind CANNOT perceive its fullness, and needs the miracle OF its wholeness to dawn upon it and heal it."

YOUR mind needs healing in order to stop being split and return to wholeness. It's not just a matter of not "believing in separation", your mind must STOP SEPARATING itself into two parts. The SPLIT in the mind has to be healed. It's like a psychological wound, a deep rift driven down the center of you.

5. "Your mind IS one with God's. Denying this and thinking otherwise has held your ego together, but has literally split your mind. As a loving brother, I am deeply concerned with your minds"

Denying God is denying wholeness, which therefore induces a state of believing you are less than whole, therefore partial, therefore split apart into parts, therefore separated off and divided. Your mind is in fragments until it becomes healed and reintegrates as a whole mind, one within itself.

6. "It is your task to heal the sense of separation that has made him sick."

You can undo the separation in your mind, AND in your brother's mind, to heal others of the separation. Separation induces illness because it is a denial of wholeness and therefore is against immortality and life. A whole mind is a healthy mind, which in turn induces physical health. Mind is healed by INTEGRATION.

"The purpose of this course is integration."

"The lack of integration which this split state implies"

"Fear produces dissociation because it induces SEPARATION. Healing ALWAYS induces harmony because it proceeds from integration."

"The mind always strives for integration, and if it is split, and WANTS TO KEEP THE SPLIT, it will believe it has ONE goal by MAKING IT ONE."

"True depth perception becomes possible only at the highest order of perceptual integration."

Real innocence is invulnerable. It is strong. It needs no defense. It cannot be attacked. It has immortality. It is pure. Sinless. Guiltless. Fearless. It is powerful. Truthful. Honest. Nothing happens to true innocence against its will. True innocence can work miracles. It is love and peace and has no enemies.

The ego's version of innocence is vulnerable. It is weak. It needs constant defense. It is deceptive. It is a lie. It lays the groundwork for finding others to be the one who sinned. When someone attacks this "set up" of vulnerability, it is the perfect trap to facilitate justified anger. It makes us victims, open to attack and unable to defend ourselves from death.

Bodies in the world were made by the ego to be the ego's picture of fake innocence. A body which can be weak, small, vulnerable, attackable, seemingly minding its own business only to be assaulted un-asked-for by sinful enemies, the belief in which creates a wonderful opportunity to get rid of sin.

The ego's version of innocence is a guilt trap, a way to make sure we are passive, powerless, helpless and hopeless. To the ego, being innocent is being deserving of attack. It believes the innocent are sinful and therefore deserve punishment. And then when punishment is given, enacted by the fake-innocent themselves upon themselves, it simultaneously claims it did not deserve it, to justify revenge. It plays both sides of victim and victimizer roles.

Fake innocence is denial. It portrays oneself as anything other than the obvious "one who sinned". It is a deflecting maneuver, designed to make guilt unconscious and deflect absolutely all possible signs that we were the one to attack God. It is a facade, a coverup, a persona, painting a picture of ourselves as having not wanted to sin at all, all the while keeping the belief that we really wanted to sin hidden in the mind.

Bodies were projected in order to deny guilt, and guilt was made in order to deny sin, and sin way made in order to deny God.

Bodies which are born and which seem to be innocent in the ways that the ego describes innocent, are not innocent. They are decoys. They are facades designed specifically to deceive and distract and deflect attention away from the sin in the mind which has been made unconscious. They work tremendously well, because for the ego, its main symbol of innocence within its dream is the perfect hiding place for hidden hates and secret sins.

True innocence is invulnerable. It is powerful. It cannot be hurt. It is immortal. It needs no protection or defense. It needs nothing to look after it. It has no dependency on external guardians to keep it safe. It needs nothing from the world to sustain it. It cannot be attacked and it cannot sin and therefore it is utterly free of every illusion of sickness and death. Real innocence brings the peace of God.

The physical universe is a grand illusion. It was designed on purpose to make it seem like God does not exist. You might think it exists for some other reason or as a natural phenomenon or as creation or whatever, but it's even more extraordinary to realize it was made as a cover-up to block the light, and how it accomplishes this is very remarkable and very much with a purpose.

God has an unusual characteristic which you will not see expressed in any form. All of God can be everywhere at once. Omnipresence. But this is even more interesting than just that God is like - really big.

It's not just that, let's say, the top part of God is in the Arctic and the torso of God is in the atlantic ocean and the arms of God are in Europe and the USA etc. That would mean some parts of God are not the same as the other parts. It would mean God is not the same everywhere. The truth is that ALL of God, and I mean literally ALL of his properties and characteristics and identity, are FULLY PRESENT in every single speck of existence, equally.

It is difficult to imagine this simply because it defies absolutely all ego-thought-system logic. The only way to really know this is to EXPERIENCE it because it transcends the ego. But it IS possible for ALL of God to be in me, while ALL of God is also in you, and ALL of God is in your neighbors. That makes absolutely no sense to the ego which cannot fathom how there would be any God left to be shared, if ALL of Him is in me, or in you. But yes, ALL of God is in all parts of existence. This is WHY the dream/illusion is holographic - the all is in every part, which defies all physics and ego-based rationale.

Now, physical matter itself was made on purpose to make God's omnipresence seem very obscure. When you look at an object, you see differences. You see properties that one object has that another object does not. And so based on physical matter, you conclude that what is in one location, is not in another. No two objects can share the same space without annihilating each other (ie they cancel out and exit this illusory existence). Nothing can overlap. Everything is separated out.

In the atomic world you will also find that particles pretty much never actually touch each other. It's not contact between particles that creates the impression of collision or a solid surface, it's force fields that radiate around the particles that push each other away. In other words, separation. Separation between different particles, which cannot share in any real way, creates the illusion of solidity. Or to put it another way, REJECTION OF ONENESS/GOD makes matter seem solid.

So what you'll find, and you're very familiar with this, is that when you look at objects and forms you notice the ways that they do not really share anything. They are all separated out, they are all different, they all have different identities, properties, characteristics, behaviors, etc. What this tells you is this simple counter-God idea, that what is in one place is NOT in another place, and there is not ANYTHING that is the same everywhere, and there is not ANYTHING that shares anything, and what is in one thing CANNOT be fully, or even partially, within something else.

This idea is the complete opposite of God's nature. When you look at physical matter in this way, you see a picture of the opposite of omnipresence. It is a picture of NO-presence (presence must be shared - God must be extended!). You see separation. You seem forms, which are blinding to your awareness. You do not generally see God, UNLESS you can learn to truly overlook the entire illusion and expand your mind to the point where you can see God IN SPITE of the illusion of form trying to tell you otherwise. This comes from true forgiveness, and with awareness. Without awareness, the illusion of form is very much a solid-seeming wall which shuts out the awareness of God's presence.

It's not really so much the physical matter itself that has any POWER to shut out the awareness of God. It is an attempt to do so. It's sort of like a 'potential trap' which you may or may not fall for depending on whether you are awake or not. But it depends on whether or not in your mind, you believe that it is reality and truth. If you are not aware enough, you WILL perceive physical matter as very strongly withholding an awareness of God from your mind. You will believe objects are all separate. You will believe God doesn't exist because you can't experience his presence.

But let me tell you this, from experience. IF and when you can expand your awareness to a significant enough point, you will begin to overlook the ILLUSION of NO-PRESENCE, which is what physical matter is, and you will start to become aware of God. In this awareness of God you will start to notice that God is not just in one object and not others, but that there is something the SAME in all objects. Beyond the appearance of the object. And you'll start to notice something consistent and the same in all people. And you'll start to experience God's OMNIPRESENCE.

The illusion of matter is there, it's being offered, but you do not HAVE to believe in it, and you CAN awake your awareness so that you can actually OVERLOOK it and see clearly, to the point where you can SEE GOD. You are then seeing God beyond the matter and in spite of the matter. This does NOT mean that the matter is God. The matter is an illusion, designed to try to STOP you from seeing God.

You see God in everything you see because God is also in your mind and therefore you are experiencing Oneness and therefore your mind will overlook form. This can make form and objects and bodies and people SEEM like they are very lovable, acceptable, unconditionally worthy, etc. Even inanimate objects will take on a considerably non-judged experience as though they are absolutely lovable.

You will also experience that because ALL of love is in everything, you do not need to GO ANYWHERE to get to where the love is. It is all where you are, whether you move or not. It's in what you look at, whether you change what you look at or not. But ultimately, it is not the objects and forms and matter and physicality that are God, it's that God is BEYOND these things and they are an illusion. The world can appear to be very lovable at this point because you are looking WITH love, AT love, IN SPITE OF the veil of illusion of the physical world - your OVERLOOKING of the physical is what is allowing you to experience love, while there are traces of this illusion left in your awareness.

Overlooking means overlooking the illusion that physical matter is the truth or that objects really are separations or that there is nothing the same or shared anywhere, which MUST mean looking PAST the form of matter itself, its physical existence, in order to experience or see love as God. This is why the matter ITSELF is not God.

Eventually sight of this "forgiven world", which Jesus describes as being very beautiful-seeming - the 'real world', will give way to a brilliant light of Oneness which completely TRANSCENDS PHYSICAL MATTER. Because if you're really going all the way far to an awareness of God's omnipresence, there are going to be no holds barred - TOTAL IMMERSION IN ONENESS, which is beyond all forms and materials. The true reality of God is not physical, and is not this universe. (When I asked Holy Spirit about this recently, He said God makes the physical universe POSSIBLE (ie via freedom), but it is YOU that makes it appear to exist by mis-creating illusions).

As such, this world, this physical universe, which is entirely composed of the IDEA of separation, based on the notion of 'SPACE-TIME', which is really the suggestion that God does not exist at all times (meaning He doesn't exist ever), and is the suggestion that God does not exist anywhere (meaning He does not exist at all)..... this world is entirely an ILLUSION. Right down to the atoms, right down to the fabric of spacetime itself, right down past the quantum level, beyond the background MIND that even holds it in suspension. This world is nothing but a make-believe attempt to block your awareness from God.

What's going to happen when you become fully aware of God and everyone becomes fully aware of God? What's going to happen when nobody believes in physical matter any more? What's going to happen when nobody is DECEIVED by physical matter any more? We're going to see past physicality entirely, see God entirely, experience God entirely, and GO HOME! And the physical universe.... bleh.... it simply will be recognized as having never existed. "This world holds NOTHING that I want" - ACIM. .. because I want God.

And with that ... poof... it's gone. And all that will be left is the true existence of Heaven - God's real creation, which is not physically oriented at all. Why would Heaven obscure God's omnipresence with ideas of separation and form and materials that differ and keep apart?

Pure Oneness. Peace at last. Home.

"The world, in the original connotation of the term, included both the proper creation of man (souls/sons) by God and the proper creation by man in his right mind (his own free-will creations).

The latter (the son’s ability to create) required the endowment of man by God with FREE WILL because all loving creation is freely given (God gave us freedom).

Nothing in these statements implies any sort of level involvement (no separation)or in fact anything except one continuous line of creation in which all aspects (each aspect being a son of God with free will) are of the same order."

Also...

"In the service of the right mind the denial of error frees the mind, and re-establishes the FREEDOM OF THE WILL. When the will is really free it cannot miscreate, because it recognizes only truth."

When we have free will, and it’s really free (not under illusion) it creates like God creates, freely, independently. What we will is the same as what God would will. But it is still our free will which wills it. When we enter into illusions, the will becomes NOT free, because entering into separation is a denial of freedom and a denial of will. Therefore the ego does not have free will. The ego is the denial of freedom and will. The ego only has WISHFUL THINKING. And to wish is to not will at all. To have no will at all is to not will to live, which is the choice to die.

Because EACH SON has free will, each son INDEPENDENTLY gets the TOTAL FREEDOM to decide, whether or not to believe the ego and oppose God’s will, or to co-create with God. Blocking will means you are choosing to be against your own will. This creates the split ego mind, within which you have multiple conflicting wills. At the very least two (typically persona and shadow, or conscious and unconscious).

When your mind is split your will is split, and you will be in CONFLICT with yourself. At war with yourself. You will attempt to will one thing with a partial will, and another part of you will attempt to oppose it. Trying to oppose God’s will opposes your own will. This puts you into a tug of war between yourself and yourself. This cancels out the effects of your willing, because each time you will one thing, you also will to stop it and bring about an opposite. This puts a FREEZE on your will, making you POWERLESS, and incapable of willing anything at all. To use your free will against itself renders you impotent and UNWILLING. It also means you no longer will LIFE, and therefore make death as a statement of your unwillingness to live.

The ego has no will. It only has wishful thinking. Death is wishful thinking, because it is impossible to kill God’s son. The secret to salvation tells us we are doing this all to ourselves. That’s because we are the one WILLING against ourselves in a split mind. Willing against God’s will and against our own will produces an alien will which we fight against within ourselves.

When our will is split, we cannot perform miracles. When our will is WHOLE, we are SINGLE MINDED, with a single unified will which does not stop itself from expressing, and a whole mind is a miraculous mind. Miracles express from wholeness. Spit-minded people are anti-miraculous (anti christ). To be miraculous you must use your "whole heart", or whole will, not a partial will. Being "in two minds" (with two wills) means being in fear, and miracles cannot be performed in a spirit of fear. Whole mind has no limits to what it can create because when it wills, it does not oppose its own will, and therefore what it wills MUST be expressed and manifest.

Also since we all have our own FREE WILL, this does not mean we are necessarily contradicting each other. It does not mean we are willing against each other provided we all want the same thing. We are all willing the same thing. We all will to expand and create and share love and joy. It is ONLY when free will is used against ITSELF and against God, that we attack ourselves and go into a state of a split mind, where our will ceases to produce real effects.

This produces a private world of dreaming in which our will is divided and fragmented, along with our identity. We then seem to have a "separated will" which is attempting to implement the authority problem. It is an improper use of will. It is an attempt to will something that God would not will, a fiction or an idea of loss/lack/attack etc. Willing to "create death", is actually a will to create NOTHING, and so is an attempt not to will anything at all. This is why nothing real can be threatened - no opposing will can truly will anything.

Also because we have free will, this FAR MORE CLEARLY explains the workings of perception. In that, it is our task, each of us individually, to take full responsibility for what we are experiencing. It means as an individual son, *I* am responsible only for what *I* am doing to myself. It is not possible to do anything to other people against their will. It is not possible to be affected by anyone else’s will. Everyone’s will is equally powerful, which is why Jesus can’t force us to wake up. Whatever I am experiencing, I did it to myself.

Having free will means that I am responsible only for the INNER content of my mind, which is my state of self attack and conflict with myself, in which my own will is opposing itself. It also means I am responsible for my own mental and physical health. It also means therefore, because other souls have FREE WILL, the state of their mind and their body is NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY. Nor does the state of their mind or body have ANY POWER to cause me to be UNABLE to choose absolute atonement and awakening for myself as ONE SON in the sonship. Jesus has already proven this. We are not holding him back. If other people were part of his mind "lagging behind" he would not have been able to wake up because we would be holding him in hell "against his will."

No-one has the power to stop you from returning to God. No-one has the power to choose for you. No-one has the power to force you to be awake. No-one has the power to force you to heal. No-one has the power to make you be "not sick" if you want to be sick, and all sickness is the choice of THE INDIVIDUAL FREE WILL to select sickness for themselves. Each individual Son with free will DOES select and create THEIR OWN BODY. Bodies are not created en-masse like some kind of production line by a single "son" - EACH SON materializes their own body and they are responsible for it.

Other people’s sickness is NOT in my mind. The only thing in my mind is my additional layer of projected sin that I ADD to their pre-existing condition. Taking that projected sin OFF of them, which wasn’t even ON them to begin with because ideas do not leave my own mind, WILL NOT heal them. All it will do is it will allow me to PERCEIVE CORRECTLY and clearly, recognizing that THEY STILL are insisting, by their own free will, that THEY want to make themselves suffer. They also have to be willing, idependantly, to want to receive help and healing, otherwise there is nothing we can do. This is why every part of the sonship has to become WILLING to return to sanity on their own.

The idea that there is only one son, or no son, or the son is god, or there are not multiple sons, or no-one has free will, or there is only one free will, or the entire content of my perception includes all other people’s un-freely-chosen suffering, or that other people’s sickness is my sickness, or that other people are inside my mind, or that I cannot perceive other people’s free will choices (even the choice to be sick or dead), is ALL BULLSHIT.... derived from a basic fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge that God gave FREE WILL to every single Son/Soul he created, and He created multiple equal sons each of them ABSOLUTELY FREE to choose on their own, AND therefore each is 100% responsible for their own self, mind, choices, consequences, suffering, death, or choice to accept atonement.

Without free will it is impossible to properly explain the functioning of perception or the choice to be sick or how the mind works or what the course means on wide variety of topics. And without acceptance of multiple free wills, everything will just get lumped together into one big soupy MUSH ... which is the equivalent of putting the sonship in a blender.

YOU have free will. YOU are responsible for what you create. YOU are responsible for what you choose. YOU are responsible for what happens to you. YOU are responsible for accepting the atonement for YOURSELF. YOU are responsible for making yourself sick or well. YOU are responsible for extending God’s will or choosing to oppose it. YOU, one of many sons of God with free will, are NOT responsible for the FREE WILL CHOICES of other free-willing Sons of God. And their free will choices have nothing to do with you, nor can they do anything TO you, nor can you do anything TO them against their will.

You are NOT responsible for other people being sick. You are NOT responsible for other people choosing fear. You are NOT responsible for other people staying asleep when you wake up. You are NOT responsible for making others sick or well. You are NOT responsible for putting suffering into the world as though it is part of your own mind, when in fact it put there either by other people’s free will or as a collective decision. You are NOT responsible for fixing other people’s freely chosen suffering. You are NOT responsible for anyone else in any way, OTHER THAN.... to offer a SERVICE to them, by offering them miracles, and becoming open to SHARING WITH THEM.

Since you have free you can give miracles because you temporarily have more, and can give miracles to those who temporarily have less, to fulfill a lack - a lack which another brother HAS, but you DO NOT have. Their lack is NOT your lack. Their lack is NOT part of your mind. God created many sons, many free wills, and MANY MINDS. You must forgive and awaken IN SPITE OF the free will choices of others.

Here are some more statements about our free will which clearly tell us that we have free will as given by God:

"But I trust in You. You Who endowed me with my freedom as Your holy Son will not be lost to me. Your Voice directs me. And the way to You is opening and clear to me at last. Father, my freedom is in You alone. Father, it is my will that I return."

"How wonderful it is to do your will! For that IS freedom. There is nothing else that ever should be called by freedom’s name. Unless you do your will, you are not free. And would God leave His Son without what he has chosen for himself? God but ensured that you would never lose your will, when He gave you His perfect Answer. Hear It now, that you may be reminded of His Love, and learn your will. God would not have His Son made prisoner to what he does not want. He JOINS with you in willing you be free. And to oppose Him is to make a choice against YOURSELF, and choose that YOU be bound."

"Think not He wills to bind you, Who has made you co-creator of the universe along with Him. He would but keep your will forever and forever limitless."

"The world awaits the freedom you will give, when you have recognized that YOU are free. But you will not forgive the world until you have forgiven Him Who gave your will to you. For it is BY your will the world is given freedom. Nor can you be free apart from Him Whose holy Will you share."

(Please note, when this part says you share God’s will, that DOES NOT mean that God takes over your freedom and you have no freedom to will. It means you AGREE with God’s will and extend His will which is the SAME as your will in its character or attitude. You have the same KIND of will that God has. God is free, and so are all of his children.)

When we try to make sense of things, we use logical reasoning. You do this all the time even if you don't realize it. You take what you "know is true" and build a conclusion from it.

Everyone tries to make sense of things. Whatever seems to make sense, you accept as true. When something doesn't make sense, you feel confused or regard it as false. This actually means you are HEAVILY dependent on whatever the logical process produces as a result, and usually don't question the process itself.

Everyone has a sense of what is true and what is false. What is true for you is the result of your reasoning. Your reasoning might be very accurate, or it could be very confused, but either way you end up with a conclusion.

The main way that people reason is based on a simple SEPARATION BASED method. It's based in separation because it defines whether or not something IS OR IS NOT something. A similar way we do this is trying to determine that something is EITHER THIS OR THAT. But with the clause that "it cannot be both". ie ... it's a model of NOT BOTH. SO it is "exclusive" and AGAINST equality.

Because the physical world itself, spacetime, is built from the separation idea, physical objects appear to be "separate" from each other. And being NOT equal, they are all DIFFERENT. This arrangement of "separate and different" objects lends itself very well to this kind of "either/or" reasoning.

So you can use this logic to say, my car is either in the garage or parked up front. Or, I will have the ham sandwich not the turkey sandwich. Or, my body is male not female. Or, this is my house not yours.

This kind of thinking maps exactly and very well to the arrangement of the physical world, because the physical world was MADE in an idea of separation. It has separation infused into it. And so Object A and Object B seem to be separate options. Either A, or B.

What this world, and this kind of reasoning, is EXTREMELY poor at, is dealing with matters of SHARING. It has no way to deal with the notion that something applies to BOTH, or to A AND B at the same time. It works very well when things are kept in separate boxes, sectioned off. But it has no way to deal with the idea that something is in two places at once, or that the truth applies equally to two things, or that two things are also one thing.

So in this world we can't usually say, I am sitting in my car AND I'm sitting in my house. Or that I am a human and a fish. Or that both me and my wife each get 100% of the pizza. These kind of ideas seem like nonsense or "not possible". We'd say, they are false.

The thing is, while THIS world is based on separation logic, as a THOUGHT SYSTEM founded on the idea of things being completely separate, God's reality is TOTALLY UNLIKE this.

God doesn't think in terms of separation. He doesn't think in terms of separate boxes. He also doesn't think in terms of EITHER THIS OR THAT. He doesn't draw contrasts between things in this way. He isn't exclusive or special or isolated or one-sided or treating one thing differently than another.

Also, given that God is whole and perfect, when God creates, God creates wholly and perfectly. This means that whatever God creates, has properties which are fully inherited from Himself and his nature. Like father like Son. But this means that, what is true of the father is true of the son. It means they are BOTH something. e.g. they are both holy, both innocent, both have everything, both are creators, etc. In fact this goes to such as an extent as to say they are ONE, and yet they are two, because they BOTH exist even though they share everything.

"This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND."

Similarly the Golden Rule, which is God's law, which is based on the idea that what is true of one thing is true of another and all things are treated equally, DEPENDS ON the idea that what is true of me is true of me AND YOU. That BOTH of us get to have everything.

That ME AND YOU are exactly alike. That what is true of me, is true of you, and vice versa. This is perfect equality. And it even goes so far as to mean that there is no compromise, lack, scarcity, or competition, because everyone has FULL access to everything simultaneously. This is true sharing.

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did.""Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

However, this kind of equality, with a single truth applying to all things, where the truth is SHARED, and where BOTH elements are "as one", cannot be handled by the either/or logical process. In truth, for example, any thought of God contains all the thoughts of God. Any son of God is all the sons of God. This DOES NOT COMPUTE to the separation-based reasoning.

The ego, using separation thinking, would say, a son of God HAS TO BE EITHER, here, or there. He has to be in this box, or that box. He cannot be in both. God would say, that is totally untrue, that one son of God shares all of himself with another son of God, and BOTH of them are in BOTH boxes at the same time. That you are LITERALLY IN your brother, one with Him, as though he is part of you. This is absolutely sensible, rational, logical, and perfectly impeccable based on HOW GOD THINKS.

What you'll find is that, anything to do with God, his creation, his mind, heaven, reality, the sonship, sons/souls, holy spirit etc, absolutely anything that existed before the separation and without ego. .. is governed NOT by laws of "either this or that", but by laws of "both and". Laws of equality. Laws of identicality. Laws of oneness, which TRANSCEND BOUDARIES.

Therefore, whenever you think of any of these TOPICS, and you start trying to draw conclusions about these topics, IF you use either/or separation based logic to do so, you WILL come to COMPLETELY FALSE conclusions, but these conclusions will seem to make sense. They seem to have consistency, but they are based on a false premise (separation), and so are not sound or valid.

For example, God has created a sonship which comprises many sons. But it is also true that each of these sons IS the other sons. For example "one brother is all brothers. one mind is all minds". A son isn't just a "separate son", it's a son who IS ALSO the other sons. And there are many sons who are each other as well. And this is not in any way a contradiction nor is it anything to do with separation in the ego sense.

But if you use EITHER/OR based reasoning, and you look at heaven, you'll tell yourself, EITHER .... a) God has one son or b) God has many sons. And you'll tell yourself that it would not MAKE SENSE unless it were ONE OR THE OTHER. That the answer must be "not both". But "not both" is a TOTAL DENIAL of the fact that everything in heaven IS BOTH. It's a system founded on "both", on "and", on "sharing and inclusion."

The ego's way of thinking is EXCLUSION BASED. One object is excluded from another object. One boxes content is exclusive to that box and not the other box. This is how 99% of the world population thinks about EVERYTHING.

God's way of thinking is INCLUSION BASED. One object is also in another object. One object is in multiple locations. One object IS the other object. Two boxes contain one object. This is INCLUSIVE reasoning. This is how God thinks, and how his entire thought system functions. Because God is not BOUND by the LIMITATIONS of separation or a separation based system. God DEFIES separation.

So when you think "exclusively" about God's reality and creation, you are MAKING AN ERROR. Because you are using a logic system NOT designed to accommodate a system that overflows boundaries. So you are trying to FORCE boundaries onto that system, are trying to FORCE things into separate boxes that they are not restricted to, and are attempting to PROJECT SEPARATION onto heaven.

It is quite funny but almost everyone does this with regards to course topics. In other words, using an ego-based logic process to think about NON-ego topics, IN an ego way. The result is FALSE conclusions, which masquerade as "making total sense." But in truth, what makes sense to the ego, is totally nonsense, and what makes sense to God, is totally nonsense to the ego. Because the ego is insane.

That means that separation-based reasoning IS INSANITY. And trying to shove God's creations into finite boxes IS ISANITY. And trying to claim that God HAS to have only one son in one box IS INSANITY. And claiming that God can't have ONE son AND many sons AT THE SAME TIME, which is "perfectly legal" in God's system, is INSANITY.

The problem isn't so much that people are drawing false conclusions, it's more that people DO NOT realize that they are USING an ego-affirming thought process to FILTER and JUDGE a NON-egoic system. And so they SEE separations where they don't exist, AND they OVERLOOK separations where they DO exist as well. Such as here:

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless ***created separate beings who have everything individually***, but who want to share it to increase their joy."

It would seem "logical" to most to say God EITHER has to have one son OR many sons, and it can't be both. And it seems logical to say that IF God only has one son HE CANNOT have many sons. And it seems logical to say that therefore those sons must be part of "separation" because "the absence of separations" is more spiritual. BUT ALL OF THIS IS A FALSE CONCLUSION, projected onto a divine system of logic, BY a BACKWARDS system of logic based on separation and exclusion.

We just don't realize that we do this. We do this all the time. Like literally EVERY conversation in this forum about the course uses separation-based reasoning. We think that reasoning in terms of either/or is totally normal, natural, and the ONLY way to think. It is TOTALLY not how God thinks and it is actually extremely unnatural. It is what leads to false perception in fact.

If your whole mindset and thought process is always proceeding along the lines of "this or that" "either or" ..... you are literally enforcing separation. You are being EXCLUSIVE, which means you are EXCLUDING others. And this is precisely what separation means - exclusion from the whole, exclusion from relationship, exclusion from communication and sharing.

If you THINK this way, about everything, all the time, you are thinking WITH the ego, even if you think you are being spiritual or thinking about spirit. This forces you into BODY identification because the body symbolizes a SEPARATE BOX, kept apart and exclusive from the other boxes. Exclusive reasoning anchors you into space and time and bodies. It is a thought system of death and isolation. This is NOT how God thinks and it is NOT how his thought system operates.

And anyone wanting to do the course will need to learn to grasp paralogical reasoning. Otherwise you can't possibly comprehend how your brother is yourself, or how you can have a holy relationship, or how you can be one with something without losing your identity.

Oneness with others is an INCLUSIVE idea, not an idea of exclusion, and you can't USE exclusive thinking to understand it. But you CAN use inclusive logic, which is holographic as well. Because God thinks holographically not linearly. We have to INCLUDE if we want to awaken, not shove God's creation into prison cells with only room for "one".

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part, is perfectly natural. For it is the way GOD thinks, and what is natural to Him, IS natural to you. "

It is not JUST true that God has one Son. It IS true that God has one son. AND it is true that he has many sons. And his many sons are direct creations of his, while also the one son encapsulates them all, without removing them from him even slightly as a direct parent. To suggest God's SONSHIP - which is a collection of sons - is "an ego thing", is a COMPLETE LOGICAL FAILURE. To suggest that the presence of many sons is "separation", is a complete logical failure as well.

When there is BOTH AND ..... me AND you .... US as one ..... united and together as brothers forever..... THAT is reality. A system of total equality, sharing and simultaneous union. You exist, AND I exist. WE are one and many.

"We are the Kingdom, WE, the Sons of God."

"If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

You may be wondering how "the separation" was possible, and how we came to seem to be in the situation we're in. There IS an explanation, which Jesus has given in many forms.

The essence of it, is that God gave you TOTAL unlimited freedom when you were created.

"The latter required the endowment of man (Souls) by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given."

"Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul."

This means God gave us all absolutely free will. Our will has TOTAL freedom. Now, here's the interesting part.

Because the will is totally free, it actually has the freedom, or potential, to try to use its own free will against even itself. It can actually try to "will not to will." It actually is free to even use its freedom to try to prevent its own freedom, if it so chooses. Doing so is self-defeating, but you CAN do this.

This is an inherent function of the mind and actually completely natural, because it's part of being totally free. God HAD to give you the freedom to potentially "mis-use" your will, otherwise you could not be free. He couldn't just lock you in to some kind of mandated use of it, you had to be free to use it as you saw fit.

The freedom God has given you INCLUDES the freedom even to deny God if you want to. It includes the freedom to resist him, to deny reality, to try to use free will to stop willing, the ability to try to create nothing, to use the will destructively, and to at least ATTEMPT to separate itself from its source.

Your mind can in fact go into a state of denial. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, in terms of it being "not allowed by God." God had to GIVE YOU this ability in order to give you total freedom. He doesn't necessarily will for you that you USE the will in this way, ie non-constructively, but you CAN if you so choose.

When you do choose to use it in a self-defeating way, you are "mis-creating", in an attempt to use the will against itself. This is really an attempt not to create, or to cause nothing, or to be inept and inert, or to not extend. It's like a kind of resistance, which is also fear. An attempt to be UN-WILLING, or to NOT will what God wills. Indeed, to attempt to will AGAINST him, which is "the authority problem."

"Remember, we have already stated that denial is not a purely negative device; it results in positive miscreation."

There is a fundamental truth that you cannot will against God's will. But, that does not mean you aren't free to TRY to. You are free to attempt it. When you do attempt it, you FAIL to change his will at all, and instead go into denial.

In the denial you BELIEVE that you have succeeded, but you haven't. Also when you are in this denial state, you are denying yourself, denying God, and denying reality. It's very important to realize however that denial does not CHANGE reality. It has no effect on the truth. Denial merely means to believe that something is not true, even though it still is true. It's a kind of rejection or refusal - an unwillingness - to accept what is true.

Your mind, as given by God, DOES HAVE the freedom and ability and power to go into a state of denial. This is BUILT IN to its fundamental freedom. It HAS to be able to potentially use its own freedom even against itself, otherwise it is not free. It is because of this "clause" if you will, that we could potentially elect to "go into the separation", ie to believe that we have become separate, even though we haven't. ie to go into denial.

"The sense is very literal; -- denial of Life perceives its opposite, as ALL forms of denial replace what IS, with what is NOT. No-one can really DO this, but that you can THINK you can, and BELIEVE YOU HAVE, is beyond dispute."

"For the separation is only the DENIAL of union, and, correctly interpreted, attests to your eternal knowledge that union is true."

Mind then is perfectly natural in its ability to try to deny its own creator if it so chooses. God has given it the freedom to use itself against itself. The fact is that it HAS DONE THIS, which is what we call "the separation" or the fall of man. Our minds HAVE elected to deny their own freedom, placing themselves into a state of imprisonment.

When mind uses its own free will to will AGAINST freedom, it induces a state of imprisonment. The will becomes imprisoned and the mind seems to go to sleep, or seems to become unable to will anything.

"That is why the ego IS the denial of free will. It is NEVER God Who coerces you, because He SHARES His Will WITH you."

"If it does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants."

This has actually happened, without in any way leaving God or leaving God's laws or operating outside of your inherent nature. There is fundamentally nothing "wrong" with this as such, but it IS out of accord with God's will. It is an attempt to reject his will. All this can produce is a state of denial, because God's will itself cannot be opposed, but you can thus "believe" that you are opposing it. Even if it's just a belief, it DOES alter your mind when you believe it.

"Remember a very early lesson, -- "never underestimate the power of denial." It has no power in ITSELF, but YOU can give it the power of YOUR mind, whose power is without limit of ANY kind."

"God did not ALLOW this to happen. But you DEMANDED that it happen, and therefore believed that it was so."

"God did not blot it out, because to eradicate it would be to attack it."

"It is NEVER God Who coerces you, because He SHARES His Will WITH you."

The main truth is that there is no real benefit to using freedom against freedom. The circular logic becomes obvious. For example, we're saying that it's possible to "will not to will". The more that you will not to will, the more you are using will, and obviously contradicting what you're claiming to accomplish. You therefore cannot will NOTHING, and have to will something. So instead you will a sense of EMPTINESS or a sort of "lack of creation."

"If a mind creates without love, it can create an empty shell. This CAN be possessed by evil."

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

"He can create an empty shell (see previous reference), but he DOES NOT create nothing at all."

So in fact what happened is we used our free will and our freedom of choice to elect to use the mind, mis-creatively, to try to "create nothing", and this produced a sort of empty creation, or a lack of creation - a lack of love's extension. In the mind this produced the hallucinated state of the lack of God, which is space-time and all its contents. Jesus refers to it as an empty screen onto which we then project meanings.

So long as the mind is unwilling and is resisting freedom and therefore is in denial, it is maintaining its belief in something opposite to God. That maintains 'the ego' and the illusion of a meaningless world. The world is meaningless because it is an "empty shell" which has no real content of its own, onto which we project images and meanings either thought false or true perception.

While it is true that mind cannot create a real separation, and you cannot leave God, and you cannot violate his reality or his laws, it is also true that the ability to deny IS within his laws and his reality. It is part of your rights as a created free-willed being.

God actually does not COERCE or shame you or guilt you or punish you for WANTING to use your freedom against itself. You ARE FREE to do so if you so choose. It's just that when you do so, you do bring suffering upon yourself and He does not will that you suffer.

"If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it."

So God gently INVITES you to return back to willing constructively with him rather than destructively. You have to FREELY CHOOSE IT, and accept atonement because you want to, not because you are forced to. This is because your mind still has the power to exercise freedom - a power that you have never lost.

So being in the denial of God, is actually a possibility of reality. It is not PREFERRED, but it is possible. It is not what God wills for you, but he HAS given you your own will, so even though he does not make it possible for you to actually separate, he DOES allow you to BELIEVE that you have. And this has taken place. This is why Jesus says "the separation has occurred." We HAVE tried to deny God and we HAVE believed that we've become separate.

The problem then isn't REALLY denial. Denial is NOT a negative functionality. It is not inherently a bad thing. You actually can use denial positively and for protection. The proper use of denial actually denies illusions and supports the truth of reality. It is only the improper use of it which has led us to deny God and accept lies, instead of accepting God and denying lies.

"Because of your Father's love, you can NEVER forget Him. For no one can forget what God Himself placed in his memory. You can DENY it, but you CANNOT LOSE IT."

"You can DENY His knowledge, but you CANNOT change it."

"But denial is a defense, and so it is as capable of being used positively as it is of being used destructively."

We have actually moved into a denial state, in the mind that God gave us, as part of the freedom he gave us, and this has TEMPORARILY produced the 'tiny mad idea' and the 'unholy instant'. It has led to the hallucination of spacetime - a belief in possibilities which aren't actually possible in truth. This has happened. But none of the things which seem to happen WITHIN this denial, have really happened.

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

This ability for the mind try to elect to be what it is not, to assume an alien power it doesn't really have, or to enter a state that it can't really enter, IS the power of denial that all minds are naturally capable of, in reality or otherwise. If you use the mind against itself it attacks itself and produces insanity. And since denial is a rejection of or avoidance/hiding from reality, it is a form of unconsciousness or an attempt "not to know", which induces a sort of sleep, in which we dream of imaginary worlds.

You CAN deny God, that's not against his law. But when you do, you induce a nightmare of suffering.

"What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His."

"What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist."

The world you "made up" does not really exist. It's a dream. The ability TO dream, is not made up. It is part of your natural freedom. God is not stopping you from choosing to go into denial, but he IS inviting you to come out of that denial when you are freely willing to do so, and therefore return to a happier state in alignment with his will. Denial is not an illusion, it PRODUCES illusions when misused.

So basically, "the separation", otherwise called "the attempt to deny the truth" has happened, the mind HAS exercised its free will to repress its own freedom, and this HAS induced a kind of sleep state in which the mind dreams of separation. The dream isn't valid at all. The DREAMING is a mind function and not to be discarded. It is simply something that you can choose or not choose. When you DON'T choose to dream, you instead choose to accept ultimate reality, and use the mind ONLY for constructive creative purposes.

"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."

Long story short, mind DOES have the potential and freedom to go into denial, and this is entirely within the laws of God. It's just that when we do this, we are not happy, and it induces fantasies of things that aren't really possible. God does not will that we suffer so he instead calls us to return to him, knowing that it's best to use our free will creatively rather than self-destructively.

"It is for this denial that you need Atonement. Your denial made no change in what you are. But you have split your mind into what knows and does not know the truth."

"Both the power and the strength of man's creative will must be understood, before the real meaning of denial can be appreciated and abolished. Denial is NOT mere negation. It is a positive miscreation."

"Extension cannot be blocked, and it has no voids. It continues forever, however much it is denied. Your DENIAL of its reality arrests it in time, but not in Eternity."

"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial." "For fear IS a call for love, in unconscious recognition of what has been denied."

"The out of mind is out of sight, because what is denied is THERE, but is not recognized. Christ is still there, although you know Him not. His Being does NOT depend upon your recognition."

"Fear and love are the only emotions of which you are capable. One is false, for it was made out of denial, and denial DEPENDS on the real belief in what is denied for its OWN existence."

Mind is free to deny itself, at any time. It has denied itself. That's why we're dreaming of exile. Its ability to do this is God-given. Its election TO do this is its own free choice. It HAS chosen to do this, and so it IS in a denial state. That is why there arose a NEED for atonement and God had to create the Holy Spirit to maintain a link to his children, guaranteeing that they can return to him when they are willing to do so.

We are not to be in the business of trying to "deny" that the mind can or has done this. It absolutely has done this. But it can choose again. It can choose to stop mis-creating and to instead create only the extension of God. It can choose to stop denying its own freedom and reclaim its inheritance. It can move out of its temporary state of resistance, into acceptance, out of fear into love. And at no point is God sitting there saying "denying me is against the law." He doesn't condone it, but he also doesn't force you not to choose it.

You may find it hard to accept the truth, because you do not believe it about yourself. You look within yourself to see if it applies there and find yourself wanting. Your self doubts and your limitations work against your attempts to believe it.

What I'm finding is it can be more effective to borrow some clout from God. The train of thought goes along the lines of, "Is this true of God?". I ask myself if God can have this thing, this false thing, this problem, this suffering, this sickness, whatever it is.

For some reason I seem to be much more convinced that God is perfect and immortal and incapable of any kind of suffering than I am. So I use that fact. I contrast it against his nature and ask myself if I can believe that God has this. And usually I cannot, usually it seems ridiculous to even suggest it, and this helps me to be unconvinced of it also.

The underlying process here is simply "being one with God" more and more. Sharing everything with God. If something is true of God it is true of me. If it is not true of God then it is not true of me either. I am part of God. If I have something, God has to have it also. If God has something, I have to have it also. No exceptions, because we are one.

So if you are finding it a struggle to convince yourself that certain things are not true of you, that you don't have sufferings or illnesses or fears or guilts or whatever, instead of "doing it all by yourself" or in relation to yourself, do it in relation to God. Include God in the equation and question. You may find it a lot more effective and easier to let things go when you can see the impossibility of God having anything wrong with him.

You might also consider that this kind of practice is not merely one of many tools, but is in fact the end goal. We are supposed to be increasing our oneness with God. We are supposed to be seeing ourselves as sharing everything with him, and being like him in every way, having been created in his perfect likeness. To be one with God and like God is to remember your own true nature! This is the goal of the course, reunion with God and Self.

"But to heal is still to make whole. Therefore to heal is to UNITE with those who are LIKE you, because perceiving this likeness IS to recognize the Father."

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today."

"And every dream serves only to conceal the Self Which is God's only Son, the likeness of Himself, the Holy One Who still abides in Him forever, as He still abides in me."

"Shut off from your Self, Who remains aware of His likeness to His Creator, your Self seems to sleep, while the part of your mind that weaves illusions in its sleep appears to be awake."

"Here is your answer to the world, and God's as well. For here it is you join with Him, His likeness being yours in this alone."

"God created man in his own image and likeness" is correct in meaning, but the words are open to considerable misinterpretation. This is avoided, however, if "image" is understood to mean "thought," and "likeness" is taken as "of a like quality." God DID create the Son in His own Thought, and of a quality like to His own. There IS nothing else."

"The Soul, because of its own likeness to its Creator, is creative. No Child of God is capable of losing this ability, because it is inherent in what he IS."

"YOU are a miracle. God creates only "that which, or one who, is of surpassing excellence or merit." Man is capable of this kind of creation, too, being in the image and likeness of his own Creator. Anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the Creations of Light are real."

Before the physical world of matter was produced, there was already an insane ego mindset of sin, guilt and fear. This is referred to as the "original error" below. The tiny mad idea took hold and we were now in an insane thought system.

Mind is not able to create "nothing", but it can create a sort of "empty shell" with seems to lack. And this emptiness is like a void, which is meaningless. The lack of meaning makes it act like a "screen", onto which you can PROJECT stuff.

Once the ego thought system was established, we PROJECTED that mindset onto the void of meaninglessness, forming the physical world as a kind of image on the screen, made from the idea of sin turned into flesh and matter.

So there's sort of a layer of egoic thought and mind, outside of heaven and believing in sin and separation, which then projects onto the empty screen forming "a physical world" as a symbol of the separation.

The ORIGINAL error seemed to cast us out of heaven into a 'empty void'. The ego mindset was present, and then projected its ideas of sin and separation, turning them into what we call physical matter.

"You have expressed surprise at hearing how VERY different is reality from what YOU see. You do not realize the magnitude of that ONE error. It was so vast and so COMPLETELY incredible, that from it, a world of total unreality HAD to emerge. What else COULD come of it? Its fragmented ASPECTS are fearful enough, as you begin to LOOK at them. But nothing you have ever seen BEGINS to show you the enormity of the ORIGINAL error, which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and TO FORCE YOU TO FURTHER SUBSTITUTIONS.

That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected, and drawn between you and truth. For truth extends INWARD, where the idea of loss is meaningless, and only INCREASE is conceivable. Do you REALLY think it strange that a world in which EVERYTHING is backward and upside down, arose from this? IT WAS INEVITABLE. For truth brought to THIS could only remain within in quiet, and take no part in all the mad projection by which this world was made." UrT18B2

also

"If a mind creates without love, it can create an empty shell. This CAN be possessed by evil." URT1B28C

"We also have observed that man can create an empty shell, but cannot create nothing at all. This emptiness provides the screen for the misuse of projection." UrT2A3

"The body is the ego's idol; the belief in sin made flesh, and then projected outward. This produces what SEEMS to be a wall of flesh AROUND the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death, and given but an instant in which to sigh and grieve and die in honor of its master. And this unholy instant SEEMS to be life." UrT20G11

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold?" W250W41

also the secret dream behind the physical, in between you and reality. "The gap between reality and dreams lies not between the dreaming of the world and what you dream in secret. THEY are one. The dreaming of the world is but a part of your own dream you gave away, and saw as if it were its start and ending, both. Yet was it started by your SECRET dream, which you do NOT perceive, although it CAUSED the part you see and do not doubt is real." UrT27H11

This all points to a somewhat 'hidden' state of mind, the ego thought system of separation and sin, of which a portion "materialises" as physical matter. If you like, a mind-dream of separation, followed by a projecting from that mindset to form physicality. A sort of "ego content" followed by "ego form." Two layers covering up God's Kingdom.

T-11.VII.1."The world as you perceive it cannot have been created by the Father, for the world is not as you see it. 2 God created only the eternal, and everything you see is perishable. 3 Therefore, there must be another world that you do not see."

"C-4.1. The world you see is an illusion of a world. 2 God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. 3 Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. 4 Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. 5 But the time will come when all things visible will have an end.

C-4.2. The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. 2 And so they do. 3 For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. 4 While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"T-8.VI.2. The world can add nothing to the power and the glory of God and His holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. 2 You cannot behold the world and know God. 3 Only one is true. 4 I am come to tell you that the choice of which is true is not yours to make. 5 If it were, you would have destroyed yourself. 6 Yet God did not will the destruction of His creations, having created them for eternity."

M-20.5. "You see in death escape from what you made. 3 But this you do not see; that you made death, and it is but illusion of an end. 4 Death cannot be escape, because it is not life in which the problem lies. 5 Life has no opposite, for it is God. 6 Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life. 7 Forgive the world, and you will understand that everything that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real."

W-pI.14.1. "God did not create a meaningless world. ... What God did not create does not exist. 3 And everything that does exist exists as He created it. 4 The world you see has nothing to do with reality. 5 It is of your own making, and it does not exist.

"T-25.III.2. God's laws do not obtain directly to a world perception rules, for such a world could not have been created by the Mind to which perception has no meaning. "

W-pI.132.9"You are as God created you. 3 There is no place where you can suffer, and no time that can bring change to your eternal state. 4 How can a world of time and place exist, if you remain as God created you?"

T-7.XI.1."The world goes against your nature, being out of accord with God's laws. 6 The world perceives orders of difficulty in everything. 7 This is because the ego perceives nothing as wholly desirable."

"T-13.VII.1. Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself: "The real world is not like this. 2 It has no buildings and there are no streets where people walk alone and separate. 3 There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. 4 It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. 5 There is no day that brightens and grows dim. 6 There is no loss. 7 Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever."

T-13.VII.2. The world you see must be denied, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. 2 You cannot see both worlds, for each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. 3 The sight of one is possible because you have denied the other."

T-14.V.1."Leave the world of death behind, and return quietly to Heaven. 9 There is nothing of value here, and everything of value there."

Bodies, the Earth, the Sun, all the stars, all the galaxies, will vanish, because they are an illusion and not of God. This will mark the "disappearance of the universe". And all that will remain is the Kingdom of God, which was there before spacetime was ever dreamed of. And not one single thing which appeared to come into existence will exist in any way, and will simply fade into nothing without a trace. No-one needs the world except to help us to leave it behind and go home.

"Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does so." (Special messages 19)

"Like all things in the world its meaning is temporary, and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it." UrM14A1

"Let us today behold earth disappear, at first transformed, and then, forgiven, fade entirely into God's holy Will." UrW326L4

"in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came." UrU5A4

"When not one thought of sin remains, the world is over. It will not be destroyed nor attacked nor even touched. It will merely cease to seem to be." UrM15A2

"An unremembered world will leave no trace behind its going, when God's gifts have been accepted as the only thing you want." UrG1A8

"Idols MUST disappear, and leave no trace behind their going." UrT20G9

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end." UrU5A1

"To close all things of time, to end the sight

Of all things visible; and to undo

All things that change." UrM30A8

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way." UrW137L1

"Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came." UrU5A4

"The song of our rejoicing is the call to all the world that freedom is returned, that time is almost over, and God's Son has but an instant more to wait until his Father is remembered, dreams are done, eternity has shined away the world, and only Heaven now exists at all." UrW230W25

If a child were playing make-believe and pretending that things were happening, would you believe it? If you knew better, if you knew that the toy car is just a toy, not a real car, but the child was whizzing it around making car sounds and saying "beep beep", would you believe there really was a car there?

Of course not. And the reason is, you know without any doubt, and have a clear awareness, that the toy is just a toy, not a car, that it isn't a "real car", and that the child is just pretending. You know that the car is only moving because the child is moving it. You know that the car is only making "beep beep" sounds because the child is making those sounds appear. So you see everything, you are aware of the whole scene, and so you smile and laugh at the gentle play that the child is performing, knowing it is completely unreal.

The thing is, in this big physical world, we do not realize that everything in it is also a toy. It is a toy that is being played with by the Son of God. And the Son of God is having a great old time making things move around, making sound effects, pretending that He is a multitude of difference characters. He is really versatile and clever. He even pretends to be multiple characters at once, and they even interact with each other and seem to do things to each other. And from the point of view within that pretence it sort of seems like certain characters seem to not know that this is all just a big made up fairytale that the Child of God is playing out. And even that not knowing is part of the play!

And the other thing is, the Son of God is so powerfully creative and expressive, and so intelligent, and so sophisticated at weaving pretend illusions to make things seem like they're really happening. He animates snowflakes falling from the sky. He causes trees to seem to grow. He makes the birds flap their wings. And he creates war. And he creates death and suffering too. Yes the Son of God made death (and can abolish it).

But even as He is make-believing these things, from His vantage point He knows that none of these are real. He is just playing, just pretending. He's having fun and laughing to Himself about how He is playing 'within' His own being, dreaming up fantasies and pretending to make them real. He even is capable of pitting one of His many personalities against another. And He is even capable of manifesting sickness and death, as though these are really happening, and yet all a long He is absolutely unaffected by these and they do not change Him at all. How could they when He is immortal? How could they when He, like the child playing with toys, knows all along that He is just making this all up?

The Son of God knows He cannot die. He knows he is immortal. He knows there cannot be a separation from God. He knows there is nowhere to go where God is not. He knows sin is not possible or real. He knows He is forever innocent. He knows all is forgiven because there is nothing to forgive, because nothing has REALLY happened. And so He is just playing with this 'tiny mad idea' of 'what if separation is possible'. It's just a toy. It's a mind toy. And nothing has really gone wrong. And even as he dreams about this extreme separation from God, and even as it seems to be a horrible nightmare, even the horrible nightmare He is making up on purpose, willingly, wanting it to happen, as part of His great pantomime that He is orchestrating every part of from a higher perspective. And it seems like 'we' are here on the receiving end of this 'chid' playing with illusions, making our lives hell, but 'we are Him and we chose this too. See how creative and imaginative we are, to invent a life of hell on purpose just to see what it's like?

If a child were playing and acting and pretending that they are some character, and if the child is at war with some other child, in this character, and this other child's character comes along with his mighty sword and attacks the child and the child pretend to fall down dead, do you believe it? Of course you don't. You know they are pretending. You know the child is not really dying. And you know this because you know who the child really is. You know their true identity. You see their real self. And so for you, you see their illusions from the outside, and recognize that they are not real or true, and not for a second would you take them seriously or think they are actually doing anything to the child.

But what SEEMS to be happening to 'us', as little Earth people in little bodies, is that us, as characters in Christ's dream, seem to be acting a role in which we seem unaware of who the dreamer even is. It seems like the Son of God has, somehow, even though this is IMPOSSIBLE, has somehow forgotten that He is just pretending, and has lost sight of His true identity, and has become unaware that everything that moves in this fantasy world is because He chooses to make it move. This absolutely cannot be true, but it can SEEM very much the case, and we SEEM to be finding ourselves in this situation, this role, where it SEEMS like we 'really' have gone and fricking done it this time.. where we've *actually* separated from God, where we're *actually* not the Son of God anymore, and where the stuff that seems to be happening really seems like we're not choosing it whatsoever.

This is the extreme prowess of the Son of God, that He is actually capable of making it seem, to Himself, that He is not even Himself anymore, that He doesn't even recognize that He is making up His own pretend dream, and that He is not the author of any of it. He is actually capable of creating WITHIN Himself, what appears to be the almost complete negation of Himself, to the point where He seems to 'die', even though some part of Him must still be existing in order to project this fantasy of 'death', and so He is not all the way dead and still continues to pretend. And even as He seems to experience what it is like to be an actor who has forgotten He is an actor, EVEN NOW He is still Himself and, very very subtly, STILL has not really lost touch with reality, or with the fact that He is STILL the author of this entire dream, even a dream of death. He is STILL the Son of God and He is STILL the one who is choosing and dreaming all this. The subtlety with which He has pretended to not be Himself is so extremely subtle that it is very easily overlooked and unrecognized.

So then the Son of God (you) then seem to even die. And you seem to experience this extreme state of stuff happening that you do not choose or want, like you have absolutely no power to choose otherwise or to stop death. And then it happens, and this SEEMS to prove that you are not the author of this dream. You have given an absolutely tremendous PERFORMANCE, you have totally fooled everyone even yourself (it seems, but not totally), that you have actually died. Once again, if there were an audience who knew better, they would erupt with rapturous applause at just how prolifically brilliant your performance of 'dying' was, and you would then stand up in costume yet identified now as an actor, at the end of the play, and take a bow.

Becoming aware of how this make-believe fantasy world has been turned into something that SEEMS like it is REAL, is the simple act of "waking up" from the dream. It's not that we're not the dreamer, it just that we're pretending not to be the dreamer, and doing a very good job of it. We cannot disconnect ourselves from God. And here's the good news.

Everything that we thought was really happening in this world, all the bad things, all the terrible things, the wars and tragedies, the sickness and death, all of it... every single horror, the absolutely hilarious news is... that all of this IS, absolutely, JUST a pretend play that the Child of God is pretending to enact, as part of an innocent play with toys, and the Child of God - which is who you really are - IS absolutely unharmed, undisturbed, untangled, undead, in your divine comedy of play and pretend. All of what you thought has gone wrong, is not really true. All of the things you thought could attack you, were coming from yourself. All of the things that upset you, you deliberately chose to be upset by. All of the things you thought were capable of keeping you from God, they never were - you just kept pretending they could.

And so ultimately, the gentle happy good news is, when you can come to realize it and see it, that everything is absolutely alright. Everyone is okay. Nobody has been hurt. The Son of God has not been defiled. There has been no real upset. Nothing real can be threatened, and nothing unreal exists. All of the elaborate pantomime of 'planet earth' is a hoax. All of the stories that have been told about who did what to whom, it was all part of childs-play. All of the supposed tragedies, terrors, horrors, disasters and upsets, were all being deliberately chosen and performed by a full cast of Sons of God. And we're all completely safe in Heaven with God right now in total joy and bliss and happiness, laughing our heads off at how much fun it was to invent such a wacky world of wonders.

If we can just realize this and just tap into this truth, that nothing has really gone wrong and that we're just fooled by the illusion of appearances and by our own role play and acting, we would stand up and laugh and feel so completely free. And we'd be free of the terror of fear, the ugly weight of guilt, and any belief at all that everything has truly gone wrong. We'd be free from the constant anxiety that we've gone off the rails, that life is unfair, that we're in danger, that there are threads and things that upset us, thats there is reason to be unhappy, that we're justified in being unhappy, and we'd be free from our own faked dying forever. The end of fear, the end of suffering, the end of death.

This is all just a SHOW! It's not a real world. It's not a real history. These bodies are not real people. There is nothing real happening here. The kids are just playing in the sandbox. It's make-believe. Don't buy into it or think it's real, remember they're the innocent Children of God to whom nothing can happen. And they're just having fun.

Only love is real.

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

"If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. But to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father IS the acknowledgment of yourself as you ARE. Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fruit of only ONE tree was "forbidden" to man in his symbolic garden. But God could not have forbidden it, or it could not have BEEN eaten. If God knows His children, and I assure you he does, would he have put them in a position where their own destruction was possible?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything in the world is an illusion. Everything. And this includes the bodies which are seemingly healthy, the bodies which are seemingly sick, and the bodies that seem dead. This also means that trees which have fresh green leaves are as much an illusion as trees whose leaves have fallen and are decaying. Images of a lovely sunset are just as much an illusion as stormy skies. Animals leaping around happily is just as much illusion as carcasses on the side of the road.

In the ego world, there are symbols, because it is a dream. And sometimes these symbols seem to imply that some parts of the world are different to others, or mean something that other parts do not mean. So we are used to the idea that a dead body is the idea of death. But bodies that are walking around are also not really alive either. We can think that when the leaves are falling from the trees, it's death happening, but perhaps we didn't realize when the leaves were on the trees that it was still a dream of death.

So in this world, there is deception all over the place. Things appear to be something they are not. The symbols that look like life only seem to be life, while the ones that look like death are only different in their forms. And it is us who have given meaning to them and decided "this one means death and that one means life". All of the forms, in whatever condition they are, are forms of death. As Jesus tells us:

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. *****In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it seems like life; at worst, like death.***** Yet both are judgments on ****what is not life****, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven (e.g. on Earth), only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true. "

So because illusions are forms (objects, shapes, materials, bodies, planets etc), their content is not true. They are illusions of life and death. An illusion of life is not really life. Life actually means ETERNAL LIFE, that which can never perish, that which is not born and does not grow and does not die and has no sickness or transformation. Life means that which never changes because it is permanent. Only in Heaven's reality is there eternal life, and that is the only REAL life there is. The rest of what we call life, the "life forms" of this world, are an illusion of life AT BEST.

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

Here Jesus is contrasting vertically the two states or levels. In Heaven all things live and cannot die. In illusions, all things die and cannot really live. The world we see is an illusion of a world that God did not create.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

So having been in this world a long time, we are likely very used to the deception that some things in the world are more alive than others. Some people seem to have more health than others. Some bodies seem more dead than others. This is an illusion. All bodies are illusions, and their condition or state does not make them more or less real. One is not really more or less dead than another. Even a dead body in the ground is, in terms of miracle mindedness, no more dead than a living body. This is why for a miracle worker "dead-seeming" bodies can be converted or resurrected into living-seeming bodies as a kind of "translation of form".

"EVERYTHING is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the Mind. The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who ARE life."

Again Jesus is telling us life is to do with mind and heaven, not to do with bodies. And it's reinforced by this idea.

""And the last to be overcome will be death." Of course! ***Without the idea of death there is no world.*** All dreams will end with this one. This is salvation's final goal; the end of all illusions. And in death are all illusions born. What can be born of death and still have life? But what is born of God and still can die? "

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem."

So every illusion, every part of the dream, all objects, all bodies, in all states and configurations, are all made of illusions, and ALL illusions are made of death. We have to therefore realize that death does not mean HORIZONTAL death, as in, at the end of the road of time for a given object. Or a state that follows on after another. Rather, the ENTIRE world we made, the universe, is all a dream of death. This whole planet is an idea of death.

VERTICALLY, anything on this level physically is an attempt to remove ourselves away from where eternal life is, away from Heaven. To move down a level. To drop into illusions, to sink into a dream world. And that world is based entirely on the idea that reality, Heaven, is not real. It's the idea of separation or opposition to Eternal Life, that you are exiled and outside of the Kingdom where eternal life is. And so it's the idea of NOT being alive. It's an idea of the opposite to life and permanence. And everything in it, no matter its form or appearance, is an illusion of death or partial life at best.

Even the most vibrant bunch of flowers is actually an illusion of not life. Even a newborn baby, of any species, is not a "new life" but rather a new form of death. Even as the season of spring seems to give life to new fresh growth, it is only later to transition into the season of "dying" and decay simply because both the birthing and dying are built into the system. Anything made of illusions has the mark of death upon it, meaning it already is formed from ideas of death and separation at the moment it is made. Every particle of matter is a separation idea and therefore an idea of opposition or attack upon God.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. ****Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it.*** Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust ****even as you made it.****"

So even at the instant that illusory things are first formed, they are formed FROM the idea of death and separation and limitation. They have it built in. If they are born at all, death is guaranteed and "happening" already. Because all forms are lacking in some way, they are all lacking what the other forms seem to have, and all of them are inherently limited and limiting. None of them are whole, none are complete, and not have eternal life. And every single body is an idea of being little and lacking and less than everywhere.

"This aching world (Earth) has not the power to touch the living world (Heaven) at all. You could not give it that, and so, although you turn in sadness from it, you cannot find in it the road that leads AWAY from it, into another world."

So this world is not the living world. The Kingdom of God is the living world, because life means permanent life, not some temporary mockery of life. It is insane to think that real life is a matter of existing a little while and then dying at a bodily level. Life perpetuates and sustains and continues forever and cannot be destroyed. God creates ONLY the eternal.

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

"What God creates is eternal."

A big part of awakening then must entail the re-framing or re-evaluating of everything you see here. We need to realize the dream entails a hierarchy of illusions, and this hierarchy is entirely fictional. And everything it suggest through different FORMS is a deception and a temptation to believe something that isn't true.

Big bodies, small bodies, healthy bodies, dead bodies, are all the same illusion. None of them are more real than another. None of them are really closer to God. Big sickness, small sickness, tiny headache, massive tumor, none of them are any different. The only reason you would believe they are different, or more or less serious, is by looking to the appearance of their form and taking it as evidence or MEANING as to what the thing is. Every single illusion is deceptive. Every appearance is a lie.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. ***They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see.*** ***They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful.*** Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

When we reach a state of not being deceived by ANY appearance, we are in miracle mindedness. Which is right mindedness. Here the hierarchy of illusions is completely flattened and meaningless. There is no difference between a form in one configuration or another. We are not deceived by physical form, shape or appearance. One type of appearance does not trigger worse reactions than another, or any reactions, nor means something different to the rest. A "dead" appearing body is not regarded as any more dead than a living one. As such raising the dead is seen as NO MORE DIFFICULT than curing a headache, because all illusions are the same and you are not deceived by them. You can raise the dead as easily as heal an upset feeling.

"You who are dedicated to the incorruptible have been given through your acceptance, the power to release from corruption. What better way to teach the first and fundamental principle in a course on miracles than by showing you the one that seems to be the hardest can be accomplished first?"

When you are not deceived by illusions of life and death, forms of sickness, appearances of severity, you cannot be afraid, you can only be miraculous. Miracle mindedness transcends the world of illusions because The Miracle IS the state of Christ Vision which overlooks all forms. There is, from that position, nothing that your holiness cannot do. And it is from this state that you are a miracle worker. Here you are using miracles as demonstrations to PROVE that what appears to be death is not death, and you are under no laws but God's, where miracles break all the illusory laws of the world of appearances.

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world."

"Miracles reflect the laws of eternity, not of time."

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you can see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for ****miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it.**** Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His results, you will understand where He must be, and finally KNOW what He is."

In the physical world, the ego has cleverly set things up so that cause and effect seem separate.

It is even a "law" of physics that each action has an equal and opposite reaction. Or that if you put some energy in, some energy comes out. Or that if you cause some object to move, it will have to move.

This whole world is set up to show you a picture of causes having effects.

Object A moves and hits object B and therefore object B now gains some energy and moves.

And to your perception, this looks as though some parts of the world are causes and some parts of the world are effects.

And this is pretty malleable because in any given situation something which was causing an effect on something else can, itself, become the effect of something else.

So this world, in how it appears, as physical matter that moves through time and space, is MEANT to show you a picture of cause and effect being separate.

And that means, if cause is separate from effect, YOU can be caused by this world and affected by it.

It also seems to mean that you can do stuff to this world which does not affect you. This is how you get away with murder.

The illusion that something "made something happen" here, shows your mind a very convincing picture which seems to train it to believe e.g. the body is sick because it was attacked by the wrong food, or the body is sick because the weather changed, or the body is sick because someone just cut your leg off.

Well, that's a pretty darn convincing illusion right there, portraying and "proving" that your leg is powerless over a chainsaw and it is now laying on the floor in a bloody mess.

Except that..... ... you, as immortal spirit, and not a body, and not a part of this world, DO have the power to overcome even this convincing illusion.

You could, if you so chose, manifest an entirely new body. You could undo all of the effects of the dismembered leg.

You could make the illusion appear as though nothing happened.

You could even in fact become so invulnerable "in" your body that it is impossible even for your body to be moved or hurt or damaged in any way at all, even if someone lets off a nuclear bomb in your vicinity!

What God creates is permanent. Therefore it is invulnerable. And therefore it cannot be hurt. And therefore it is immortal. And that is what you are. So ....

All of this world with its ILLUSION that there are causes and powers and wills outside of you that can do something to you or make accidents happen or harm you in any way, IT IS NOT REAL and IT CAN BE OVERCOME.

And when you overcome it, this will be thought of as miraculous. Because it is, in a certain context. But miracles are natural. They are everyone's birthright. And when they're not happening something has gone wrong.

You cannot be hurt by a dream that isn't really there.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys.

God made no contradictions. What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him.

He did not make two minds, with HEAVEN as the glad effect of one, and EARTH the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

This clearly tells us that God did not create the Earth because to do so would've required he be in TWO minds with TWO effects, which is impossible. Since Earth is opposite to Heaven in EVERY way, God would've had to have created two DIFFERENT creations, unlike each other in every way. This is impossible because everything God creates is the same in every way and like Him in every way.

God could only create ONE EFFECT coming from ONE MIND. He could only create ONE WORLD. And that world must be heaven. It MUST be heaven because love has no opposite, and only the creations of love (God) are real, and therefore the only WORLD that is real is the one God did create, which is Heaven.

Take your pick. Heaven or Earth. Which is your home? Do you REALLY want Earth when you could have Heaven?

Earth is nothing. Heaven is everything. Leaving the Earth behind and going to heaven you will gain everything and lose nothing. This world holds nothing that you want! A teacher of God will gladly give up all the pleasures of the world! This world is not your home! How can a place which does not even EXIST be your home?

As Jesus says:

"Go on to meet them gladly, and learn how much awaits you, for the simple willingness to give up nothing, BECAUSE it is nothing. The new perspective you will gain, from crossing over, will be the understanding of WHERE HEAVEN IS. From HERE, it seems to be outside, and ACROSS the bridge. But, as you cross to JOIN it, IT will JOIN WITH YOU, and BECOME ONE with you. And you will think, in glad astonishment, that for all this, YOU GAVE UP NOTHING! The joy of Heaven, which HAS no limit, is INCREASED with each light that returns, to take its rightful place within it."

Jesus also says we will watch the world (earth) disappear, together.

"Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there any time you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does. And then-and then-I cannot speak of that. A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death. This is the message of the crucifixion: there is no order of difficulty in miracles. This is the message of the resurrection. Illusion are illusions. Truth is true. Illusions vanish. Only truth remains."

Earth is illusion. It disappears. ONLY TRUTH remains. Earth does not become part of the truth. IT VANISHES. IT NEVER EXISTED TO BEGIN WITH!!!!!!!!

Earth does not exist. There is no world.

The ego doesn't have any real power of its own. Its only strategy is to try to get you to willingly give your power to it.

To do this, it has to present to you some kind of temptation or lie, something untrue, and generally something that upsets you in some way. If it can especially get you to have a reaction, or be triggered, then you have fell for its trap.

The ego uses your own beliefs and your own blind-spots, as a way to get you to agree to go along with it. While you remain unconscious and attached to a certain egoic belief, you are quite literally agreeing with the ego and giving it permission to use this against you.

The ego cannot take power from you, you have to give it away. When you give it away, you give it away through playing the role of a victim, perhaps entering into fear or guilt etc. This is your way of making it seem as though the power you share with God has now been separated from God and is handed over to the ego.

In certain other religious circles, this principle is taught in terms of the devil, sin, and how the devil operates. That is, that you first must sin which means you believe in something that's mistaken. Then based on this sin, you have literally agreed that something untrue is true. And now this creates an 'open door' and an invitation and a resonant agreement, which allows 'the evil' to come in and control you. This is also how evil 'spirits' enter people's lives. Because YOU have violated a law of God, so to speak, by going against it, you have permitted darkness/ego/devil to use this darkness against you.

But notice here that the ego/devil does not actually have its own power. And it completely depends on you agreeing with it, and continuing the 'sin' i.e. the false belief. It also does not actually have any power to prevent you from undoing that belief, or choosing again, or waking up. It has ZERO 'actual' control over you, besides your own willingness to play along. If you were to decide to stop playing along, and to withdraw your belief, and to take back your power knowing it is yours, and knowing that the ego can do absolutely NOTHING to stop you, the ego would be dis-empowered.

The only tool the ego has is the presentation of illusions, in an attempt to try to play upon what you believe and to convince you that it is either your friend and ally, or to distract you from choosing again by throwing fears or guilts or rationalizations or whatever else your way, to try to once again push your buttons or pull up your past hurts or play upon your own fears, to keep you ensured in its mindset. And often, in unconsciousness, you will go along with this and be pulled right back in, but ONLY because you have not become conscious/aware enough yet to discern and to decide not to listen or believe what it's saying.

So really the ego is just a mirror for your own mis-beliefs. And it shows you and reflects back to you what you currently believe. Change your belief, and the reflection of that belief - the ego - must disappear.

There is nothing keeping you stuck. There is nothing stopping you but yourself. There is no reason why you can't be loved. There is no reason why you can't wake up. The only thing keeping you asleep is yourself.

Ego is a device for separation. It is like a stained glass window made of many fragments and different types of filters. Each colored panel obscures and distorts the light behind it and changes it, filtering out what it does not want to see.

When the ego attempts to hold itself up to the light of God, to heaven, to creation, and attempts to look at it, it looks through this stained glass window. It CAN ONLY see separations. It is INCAPABLE of seeing unity. It thinks it is objective and impartial and unbiased but it is absolutely incapable of ever seeing and recognizing the nature of Oneness correctly.

All it sees are separations, partial truths, information which is left out and distortions that have been added. It is literally impossible for it see oneness, wholeness, truth, or consistency.

When the truth of Heaven is that God creates and has many sons and they each have individual free will, the ego looks at this through its stained glass window. All it sees is, oh look, there seems to be a correlation between the different pieces of glass and the idea of "many sons".

You can be sure that, if the ego ever looks at Oneness and sees something CORRELATING to its way of looking, that it is seeing separations, you know that something is UNTRUE. The ego cannot see God and understand it. If it is seeing something "in" God and saying, that it matches up to how the ego sees in fragments, IT IS NOT SEEING the truth.

All we can say for sure is, the ego can never see God correctly, cannot understand Oneness correctly, cannot comprehend how God has many sons without it being a separation, and therefore we need to TRUST and have FAITH that God's many sons is a truth the ego will never accept.

We are to accept the truth as it is presented. The course is telling us God has many Sons. Jesus is not a liar. Therefore, it's telling the truth. And somehow, all of those sons are "one", yet still distinct with individual free will. We have to simply accept this is true even if our egos don't understand how.

"To know reality is not to see the ego and its thoughts, its works, its acts, its laws and its beliefs, its dreams, its hopes, its plans for its salvation, and the cost belief in it entails."

"Where there was darkness now we see the light. What is the ego? What the darkness was. Where is the ego? Where the darkness was. What is it now and where can it be found? Nothing and nowhere. Now the light has come: Its opposite has gone without a trace. Where evil was there now is holiness. What is the ego? What the evil was. Where is the ego? In an evil dream that but seemed real while you were dreaming it. Where there was crucifixion stands God’s Son. What is the ego? Who has need to ask? Where is the ego? Who has need to seek for an illusion now that dreams are gone?"

I went back and slowly re-read the entire "miracle principles" from a very early urtext version, plus some other sections.

The impression I have of miracles now is different and more cohesive. Whatever our understanding of them is, they must incorporate every single thing Jesus says about them, including the ability to literally move mountains, to heal the sick and raise the dead, and also to correct perception. Here are some key points and new clarity on the subject.

1) Miracles are best understood in a vertical direction. They come down from above and lift upwards, or restore life and reality. "Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from heaven." "performed by those who have more (above) for those who have less (below)". They extend or radiate down into the world from God. They also go out sideways between brothers because brothers are ultimately IN heaven.

2) Every aspect of the "descent" into egotism, separation, degrading reality, becoming insane, unwillingness, unconsciousness, etc which is all an attempt to introduce separation between brother's minds (to split the sonship or divide the Kingdom), to interfere with mind-to-mind communication, is the exact opposite of miracles. Projection is opposite to miracles. Magic is opposite to miracles. Miracles inherently correct level confusion, heal projections, undo magic (which includes sickness), and restores awareness of the truth.

3) Every movement towards restoring communication, reintegrating reality, bringing wholeness to your mind AND your brother's mind, uniting you with your brother, healing relationships, removing separations, all effects resulting from separation and sin (including sickness, illness, suffering, death), and cancelling out the "consequences" of sin, are accomplished by miracles. "Miracles unite you directly with your brother". "The purpose of miracles is to restore reality". "Miracles make brothers one in God" etc. The ultimate aim of miracles is to induce revelation and direct communion with God. This however does not exclude miracles that manipulate forms or move mountains, because mountains are actually also thought-forms in the MIND and are actually BELIEFS which mind can manipulate. "The world IS perception" (in the mind).

4) Miracles originate in the mind of Christ. They require the absence of fear, and an awareness of Christ's presence. Jesus inspires them. While they come FROM the Christ mind, you can be in varying degrees of "miracle mindedness" depending on whether your mind is functioning and responding in an ego-driven way or a love-based way. "Miracles are seen in light" "Miracles reflect an inner awareness of Christ." They are therefore typically requiring quite an advanced state of mind, BUT they also can be performed even by "beginners" who are able to temporarily put fear aside and shift into VERTICAL perception away from the horizontal belief system, which allows them to bring forth a miracle which helps develop "conviction in the ability" by seeing physical appearances change. The ability to make this shift isn't necessarily an act of your own purification but a USE OF the parts of your mind that have already been purified.

5) There are two aspects - miracle-mindedness/readiness, and miracle-working. To be miracle-minded is based on the STATE of your mind. But a mind based on love is not unexpressive or static. It is a mind that extends, gives in order to have, shares, increases, creates. Being miracle-minded/ready emphasizes that you are "ready, willing, and able" to "perform" or "do" miracles. The "action" aspect of miracles should be under Christ control (Jesus) due to the atonement plan and should be "involuntary". You are not supposed to consciously control that part of it yourself, but you ARE responsible for becoming "ready, willing and able".

6) "Miracles are thought-creations". Our mind goes through varying degrees of power to CREATE or project, depending on how much ego there is. We become more able to express creatively as we wake up. The mind can shine INTO and BLESS other minds due to having both been created by the "same spark" of God - being of like kind. Miracles not only unite you with your brother, they also increase your own strength by giving love, and also strengthen your brother. They in a sense "repair" the sense of separation between both of you, increase the level of communication, and therefore UNDO the manifestations of the separation idea (forms of sickness etc). Miracles are tightly associated with CREATION, and therefore are capable of creating. They combine "thought-creation" with belief, in order to produce results, which includes changes to *appearances* - meaning all forms, in a law-defying way (including moving mountains).

7) Miracles are not shifts in perception as such. However they can produce a shift in the perception OF OTHERS. Miracles are inter-personal ACTS. They are something you DO to EXPRESS the state of love that you are. They are an "application" of your holiness, and thus create in the same way that God applies himself to create. Because they can "correct" misperceptions in yourself AND others, they can heal your brother and yourself. They bestow grace and blessing on others. Miracles can correct perception and shift it, but when you yourself "correct thinking" and "change perception" that act itself is not necessarily a miracle. Miracles express from above downwards, changes of mind express from below upwards. You stepping "up" to the miraculous mind can require many steps before you are "high" enough to express "downward" with miracles. In a way though, any movement towards God/truth/love is a step in the right direction. The shifting itself isn't the miracle, the miracle is the love that expresses AFTER the blocks to awareness are removed. Although having said that, when you express a miracle it strengthens you also, increasing your sanity, so....

8) The miracle-mind thought system is totally different to the ego thought system in that it has an omnipresent and holographic nature. This means that the miracle is everywhere. It also means the miracle can express in "a part" of the dream and seem to produce a wide variety of specific results. However all miracles are inherently united and consistent and devoid of any recognition of levels of difficulty or heirarchy or size or any other ego construct. "To God all things are possible." I visualize God as like this ocean of liquid where all aspects are fluidly flowing all over the place and completely defies the entire ego thought system and all of its very rigid, compartmentalizing laws. The miracle-minded are literally miraculous in that they can create anything, can do anything, can heal anything, can produce any changes to any appearance, and there is nothing they cannot do.

9) Miracles collapse time because they introduce sort of a separate "moment" of time in which all of the horizontal laws are defied and a "new state" is directly implemented, instantly, which is almost like taking a tiny clip from "the future" and inserting it into the current timeline "out of the temporal order". Another analogy is a vynil record, as if you suddenly bump the arm and it skips some tracks and resumes playing further along in the song. The interval in-between of the "thousands of years" that were skipped, essentially has collapsed or deleted an entire portion of the timeline. Their purpose IS to collapse time and bring about the end of the need for time. Ultimately they lead to revelation and total wholeness, and then are no longer needed. This is all to do with mind. But this DOES NOT exclude apparent changes to forms, bodies, sickness or death, because all of those things are actually mental states, thought-forms, ideas, images in the mind, which are just as much within the scope of mind-power as anything you would normally consider "inside your mind". You have to realize the entire universe is WITHIN our shared minds, and therefore even physical forms have to be ultimately disappeared and "healed" and "shone away" by our light, in order for the the entire sonship to totally be free from dreaming.

10) Miracles are a maximal service you can render a brother. All expressions of love are maximal. That means they express FROM "total" love, not partial. However, you can be in varying degrees of miracle mindedness depending on how you express or "relate". If in a given situation, you have one possible response which is egotism where you make the problem real and use it for attack etc, and another possible response is that you remain "in love" and affirm the truth of both of you and see your brother as sinless and calling out for love and you "empower" both of you, this is a miracle. You chose to love instead of hate, you chose to express a truthful healing charitable gracious blessing rather than attack.

11) Miracles are also "energizing" in that they give LIFE to others ("all around the signs of life spring up"). They supply a lack. They are given by those who have more to those who have less. Lack is just "lack of love", so by supplying love you bless and remove a curse and energize and shine light onto the "area of separation" which causes it to reintegrate and become whole again. "The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness" because you have to be in a mindset of wholeness (miracle readiness) in order to see your brother's holiness and innocence, which strengthens this in both of you and thus energizes and gives life to both of you. When you heal, therefore, BOTH of you receive healing. Separation isn't a "private idea", it's something that "comes between" like a double-sided sword, and removing this sword restores communication in BOTH directions.

12) Miracles can move mountains and raise the dead. Since both of them are illusions and all forms are illusions, and all illusions are based on separation, the miracle-minded have total power OVER these things, either by bringing life to them and healing them, or by demonstrating this power OVER them by changing appearances. A body returning from death and decay to life, or a mounting moving from left to right, are both "changes to appearance". Miracles change appearances to PROVE and demonstrate that the forms themselves ARE illusions BECAUSE they could be changed, and therefore cannot be real because they are so easily manipulated by the mind. The illusion of objects being physical, heavy, large, or that death is too difficult to undo etc, all these illusions crumble to nothing when they are shown to be changeable.

13) Miracles require faith and trust. Having faith in your brother's innocence even when they show up as guilty/sinful/sick, overcomes/overlooks/forgives their illusions and can shine them away. Your mind CAN enter the mind of another and enlighten it. Also certainty (fearlessness) is required (even if temporarily suspended), because miracles occur as thought-acts which are decisive and committal. You don't have to merely have "strong belief" "of your own", you need to also RELY ON or depend on God, trusting HIS power and strength, and knowing what HE is capable of, so that you have TRUST in the certainty of the outcome and KNOWING that it must occur. This goes beyond your "self" as an individual or separate miracle worker. You can do nothing on your own, but you can work WITH God to co-create. Faith/trust also correlates to belief.

14) Miracles also correlate to acceptance/receiving of atonement. They are expressed through PRAYER, which brings about the active "doing" of miracles, because in the prayer you combine thought and belief and faith (key ingredients that are MUST have's), and ask with the heart (not necessary to use words). This "asking" is almost the same thing as "expressing" or "stating" and "seeing" what change you want to occur, as though it has already happened and has been received. "Believe you have received and you shall have it." Miracles EXPRESS FROM the atonement. You have to accept some atonement to accept some "miracle juice", so that you can give it. That means that in some small way, in some part of you, on some issue, you accepted the truth about you as innocent and loved, rather than condemn yourself with sin. This part of you now has received a miracle or has been restored to a more miracle-oriented way of being, and this now can express to others. In a healed part of you, when confronted with another situation like what happened before, you might now "bless" instead of "see sin", and this IS capable of healing others.

15) Overall it seems miracles are essentially HOW the entire illusion of separation is reversed. In all its way, all its appearances, all its consequences. Every form of suffering, all sickness, death, and also demonstrations of the falseness of the ego's laws. Moving a mountain may well demonstrate and violate laws of physics and weight and size and so on, proving that these are not TRUE, that illusory limitations are not true, and this can bring healing to the mind. Miracles can be teaching devices. They remind you and your brother of what is true about you. The entire "lifting up" of all brothers and the "lifting away" of all forms of separation and the "disappearing" of all suffering and forms and illusions and eventually the universe itself, is "the miracle", which is kind of everywhere and omnipresent and comes from God.

16) You are a miracle. This means that God creates miraculously because God is also miraculous. It's natural to be miraculous. You are miraculous in the sense that anything is possible to the holy, and God who is alive has miraculously created the sonship. To the ego, it should not be possible, but it is. A miracle as a "creative expression of thought" is your natural way of creating in heaven. It's how you express love. It's an extension of yourself and increases joy and overcomes lack and restores BOTH you and the thing you create. When you express miracles or miraculously in the world it similarly follows the same laws of GOD and creates wholeness, healing, health, happiness, freedom, love, perfection, holiness, joy, peace, life.

17) Miracles are super-natural. This means they are totally above the ego's "nature", and fly in the face of everything we think of as "the nature" of this universe. This includes all ego laws and physics and time and space. They express from above the battlefield, from heaven, falling like drops of healing rain on the desert (absence of love) below and supply a lack and bring the dead back to life, raising it up towards resurrection. Miracle workers are like angels or holy beings who step inside a dream of death and start expressing themselves, demonstrating all over the place that nothing here is fixed or limiting or has any power over you at all. As beings of light and immortality and creativity, when we express as this kind of identity (christ-aligned) we totally defy every law of the world and therefore literally produce "miraculous" effects. To the ego, miracles are considered un-natural, but to God they are considered completely natural. There is nothing they cannot do and there is nothing your holiness cannot do. You are UNLIMITED, and the sheer degree of limitation of this ego world is shown to be extremely false by every miracle expression.

18) Being miraculous is your natural inheritance and does not require anyone else to choose to be miraculous. It doesn't "require" a holy relationship. BUT, it can IMPLEMENT a holy relationship due to the fact that it heals the separation between brothers. Jesus as the one who woke up can perform them for anyone, and he inspires all miracles which intercede for your holiness, but in so doing, he also unites you with Himself and the two of your minds join and share love, if you are willing. You still have free will and no-one can force anyone to wake up or be healed if they do not want it or if it would frighten them.

19) If you can grasp how God's mind is omnipresent and this means that all of him is in every location FULLY at the same time, which TOTALLY defies the entire ego world and all its forms of matter and space and time, you can get a better sense of how anything is possible in God. And how, in contrast to that, this world and its laws are set up to be extremely limiting, to suggest no two things share anything, forms are things in their own right, nothing is coming from the mind, mind has no power over anything ("the mind must be stronger than the body, every miracle demonstrates this"), and everything is separated off and compartmentalized into boxes and finite objects. This is SO TOTALLY OPPOSITE to God's nature and the nature of anyone who has access the miracle-working mind or the "attitude of love". Love isn't just a finite thing in a box. It is miraculous, life-giving, spacetime defying, and completely ignores all illusory differences. When the world is PROVEN to be NOT separated out, and NOT disconnected from the mind, and NOT a thing in its own right and can easily be changed by the power of the mind, the true nature of God's UNLIMITEDNESS is revealed.

20) Miracles are what happens when an ego-defying, omnipresent, spatially-defying, time-defying, massively potential, unlimited, whole miraculous mind, comes into contact with the ego illusion of limitation and separateness. You can express them and bestow them everywhere, they are unlimited in number, and all support each other forming a "web" of atonement. You have to realize that all physical objects are part of the MIND, and are thoughts, and are perceptions, and are ideas in the mind. Therefore when mind changes and there are actions of expression of miracle-mindedness, this CAN and DOES also change and manipulate the appearance of physical objects. Separating mind from body is an error in this sense. Mind has power OVER the body. "That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind proves the mind must be stronger than the body." Whenever you elect to "be a bit more miraculous" or "be a bit more loving" or "express and stay strong in the truth" or "utilize your creative power" or "bless another" or "repair separation" or "reveal the unreality of an illusion" or "demonstrate that you are not limited" or "join minds with your brother" in any way, you are being miraculous.

I believe I have received. Thank you God.

2000 years ago Jesus said "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."

Gratitude is an attitude of fully appreciating what is already present, or has been already given.

What you may not realize is, if it appears you do not have what you want, if you be pre-grateful for it ahead of time, believing that you have already received it as if receiving was "in the past", it comes to you!!

There is a law here. The law is, that where there is gratitude, the thing you are grateful for is being appreciated and therefore it must be present. Should you be grateful for the presence of something that the world seems to not contain, it will materialize. It has to, because gratitude extends and believes in what it is grateful for.

In other words, gratitude CREATES. God created through gratitude because gratitude appreciates what already is and God appreciates - is aware of and fully embraces - what He already is, which creates more of the same.

This seems like complete nonsense to the ego, how can gratitude create when the thing to be grateful for doesn’t seem to exist yet? The ego thought system is only grateful for what it "gets" in the future, not for what is HAS. It’s non existence is an illusion because all that God provided is ALREADY GIVEN, merely hidden temporarily. And so lacking it is NOT TRUE.

It operates similarly to the law of forgiveness. Forgiveness is fore-giveness, ie it gives love and truth ahead of time proactively SO THAT nothing goes wrong and therefore there is nothing to forgive. It brings about a state in which it’s own law is extended to ENSURE there is no problem.

Similarly, gratitude to God for what he HAS GIVEN, pro-actively CAUSES it to be present, acknlowdging that it must already be here, and therefore expressing and creating it so that it does not seem to be lacking. Gratitude undoes lack or the illusion of lack, just as forgiveness undoes the need to forgive by removing the illusion of unforgiveness or judgement. And remember that miracles supply a lack and that is why they heal, therefore gratitude is miraculous!

God’s power works in the opposite direction to the ego. The ego says, I presently lack and therefore need something and so I "desire"it and then tries to use its own will power to force it to happen, without God.

This morning I found myself doing this because I was "commanding" that something be healed, it was not working, the problem seemed real and not healed yet and I became quite intense and demanding about it. Then I became frustrated and angry. I had to admit that I was trying to force it myself and was using my own will. This wasn’t working. So in frustration I gave up, which was a good thing.

God works in the opposite direction. He does not focus on the lack of what you want, because absence is the idea that God is absent. He does not focus on the answer being in the future because that reinforces the idea that God is not here right now, and that He has been here already this whole time. He does not complain because complaint is the opposite of gratitude and complaint is a failure to appreciate what is present.

Complaint attacks what is here now, gratitude loves what is here now. However, this does NOT MEAN that you should love and be great full for what is currently showing up in form! Form is an illusion! Be grateful for the shit the ego gave you and you will keep it! You have to ignore form because God did not create it. You have to love and be grateful only for what God has given, what may seem invisible to you at first.

So to bring forth a miracle healing or manifestation from God, we must ACT LIKE God’s truth and in line with God’s nature. It’s no use attacking what is, or complaining, or trying to make it go away with intensity or will power, or to desire what you want as if you do not have it. Those are not forms of asking, or forms of receiving. They focus on lack and make it real.

The ego’s attempts to "get"are guaranteed to fail because they do everything other than be like God, everything other than receiving His will, and everything which actually pushes away what you are trying to bring about. As usual, the ego makes it appear like it is asking and desiring and wanting, when in fact it is doing the opposite. Seek and do not find. To desire something on the basis that God did not already supply it, and therefore it is not here now, and only exists in the separated state of the future, is a GUARANTEE that you will continue to lack and suffer!

If God’s nature is the truth and we are asking for God‘s help, then we first need to get rid of the idea of "needing help." Instead, let us acknowledge what is TRUE ALREADY. You have already received God’s healing. God already established your perfection when He created you, which you can think of as in the past. So the perfection, restoration, healing, what you want, is not in the future. It must be already present because God alreaday established it in the past, and so it’s is already here, now.

This seems somehow impossible to ego thinking. Is it even possible to get your mind to believe that it has already received what is already given by God, even if it *appears* that it isn’t showing up yet? Yes, it is possible! Is it possible to appreciate and be grateful for, what currently appears to not even exist yet? Yes!

That your perfection appears to not be showing up right now is an illusion. It is merely blocked. Any current appearance of you not being or having what God has already given, only means that your perfection IS here already but it is hididen. The notion that it is not here, showing up as illusions of "my healed self must be in the future", is an ego lie. Your healed self IS already here. Forms that are currently showing up can be blinding. They are not really there.

You must just bring about the recognition of, gratitude for, appreciation of and belief in the truth, that God has ALREADY GIVEN what you seem to lack, literally "in the past". Gratitude receives, by focusing on the acknowledgement of it being here now, of the healing having already occurred, and truly believing that this is so because it is in accord with God’s nature.

Eventually once you have let go of all of the egoic ways you are trying to bring about a result, you need to get purely into the mindset and belief that you HAVE received from God already, regardless of what is showing up, and regardless of whether it’s absence seems to continue to show up for a while. You have to ignore all ego signals, what form looks like, what conditions seem to persist, or any fearful doubting ego thoughts about it having not worked.

If you can get your mind into this seemingly "backwards" way of thinking, which boils down to "I believe I have already been given this, I have already received it, and I am grateful to God", or even more simply, "thank you", and hold onto that belief, God will answer. Believing it is important. It has to be true for you that you feel that you HAVE received it, even if it has not materialized in form yet, and you develop that conviction by thanking God.

If you are thanking God for having already supplied your lack, then it implies you HAVE, therefore it is true, and therefore you believe it. This helps you to see through any illusion that you lack or continue to be sick. It gives you a feeling of certainty and joy in spite of any illusory conditions, and you will stay true to that belief in spite of lingering forms or circumstances. And that’s means, you are now HAVING FAITH.

Faith is a state of genuine trust and knowing, not wishful thinking or hope. It is rooted firmly in the believing that God has already provided and therefore it is a DONE DEAL. It is belief that God’s way or truth is TRUE. This belief will ignore and pay no attention to what anyone says or any doubts or anything showing up in form. It bypasses illusions and all ego signals. It transcends what appears to be showing up, knowing that God’s HAS provided.

If you are completely certain that you have received, it will give you strong faith ie strong belief, which will make it impossible for you to be swayed by external illusions or claims to the contrary. It will also give you a sense that you know the days of your sickness are now limited because you believe God more than you believe the ego illusions.

This takes you beyond the ego’s nature. Now you are playing by God’s rules, according to His will for you that you be divinely happy and healthy. That you ARE that already, and merely need manifest it by focusing on it and believing in its presence. Jesus says to be vigilant only for the Kingdom of God. This is what it means. To believe only God’s nature and to align yourself with it and receive it as God already gave it. I am still as God created me says the same thing.

You are still as God created you, therefore the perfect Self that God created before time began is still here now, it has been fully given, it is true of you, it is present already, you are grateful for it, you believe in it and know it to be true, you trust it, you allow and accept it (atonement principle), and it is therefore your reality.

Believing this way, having this faith in a God, makes you supernatural.

"Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers."

This describes the whole miracle-working system.

All power is of God. God is therefore the source of miracles.

"Miracles mean life, and God is the giver of life."

God is the one who actually blesses by giving/supplying life.

"There is no love but God's". "Miracles are expressions of love." Therefore God is the one supplying the love.

He blesses you, but he also blesses THROUGH you. The power that is in you, the power to work miracles, is God's.

"The power of God, and not of you, engenders miracles. The miracle itself is but the witness that you have the power of God in you."

So here's how it's set up. God created you, giving Himself to you. You are host to God. God's LIFE is in you. His power is in you.

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

The power of God in you is your inheritance from God. His will is in you. You share his mind.

So God gives YOU the life/light/miracle, and then you PASS IT ON to your brothers. You share it and extend it. This is the fundamental setup.

You, as a miracle worker, in a state of truer perception, a loving perception, allow God's love to flow through you, to others.

You give the miracles you receive.

"Prayer is the medium of miracles. Through prayer love is received, through miracles love is expressed."

So basically you openly commune with God, within your being, and recognize and open to His presence IN you, but what is IN you is given to you FOR you AND FOR your brother. So it must pass THROUGH you to others. And thus you become a miracle worker.

"Miracles are the maximal service you can render another."

So when you are fully EXTENDING, passing on, what you are receiving from God, you are working miracles.

It is God's power that works through you.

And WHO or what is the mechanism by which miracles occur? It's the Holy Spirit.

"The Holy Spirit is the ONLY therapist."

"The Holy Spirit is the mechanism of miracles."

"The human therapist can only LET HIM FULFILL HIS FUNCTION. He needs no help for this. He WILL tell you EXACTLY what to do, to help ANYONE He sends to you FOR help, and will speak to him through you, IF YOU DO NOT INTERFERE."

Essentially, you are like a MEDIUM or channel. You are to allow the Holy Spirit to operate through you. Similarly Jesus is involved in this:

"You will see miracles through your hands through mine."

Which again means you HOST Jesus and allow him to work THROUGH your hands.

Love must be received from God, as a blessing for you, and then you must pass it on for others. Doing so works miracles. The power of God can move through you to move mountains, literally, and to raise the dead.

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

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

Receive from God, give to others.

Receive from God, supply to others.

To do this you have to be purified yourself, so that you become a conduit for love, and WILLING and ABLE to express love, so that you can EXTEND the love of God that is in you.

You have to become the light of the world, in order to allow God's light, which is yours, to shine THROUGH you, to illuminate the minds of others.

Miracle working thus is basically just a matter of letting the Holy Spirit operate through you, allowing Gods power to flow through you, and to extend their love and power to your brothers to help them.

This is why miracle working isn't just about you receiving miracles, or you shifting perception. It's about you fulfilling your function in the MACHINERY that God has set up. He has already provided the power and the healing, YOUR ROLE or function is to extend and express it.

This parallels the way that you are a co-creator with God in heaven. God creates you and puts the power and light in you, you USE IT to extend His will and thus co-create with him. You share His love with everyone else. Just as miracles are a form of sharing.

"Miracles unite you with your brother."

Operating in holy relationship with others thus produces miracles naturally because you are functioning the way you were intended to, as a relay station for God's love.

The main thing I don't really like about ideas of non-duality and oneness, is that it really ignores the CREATIVE qualities of God.

If there is only God, and there is nowhere to go, and nothing to do, and God is just sitting there by himself, as a "oneness", in which there is no "duality" or separations of any kind, how do you get from there to a recognition that God CREATES?

For God to even have thoughts, or to create even one son, flies in the face of this idea that God is one thing. Even if you say, well, God has one son but it's part of Him... you can't even really say that either. There can't even be anything you can refer to as "one son", if there is only God.

Jesus says for example, "I am my father are one". And he goes on to clarify that this does not mean there aren't PARTS to that statement. It does not mean, there is only the father. It does not mean, that whatever we're referring to as the son is actually the father, and therefore we are really talking about "one thing". It ACTUALLY means, there *IS* a distinct Son, who is in SOME way "separate" from the Father, enough to establish that there are really TWO things.

"I" (part 1) and "the father" (part 2). Otherwise we might as well just not ever mention the Son or Christ whatsoever and just say that God is all that exists. Jesus is careful to make this distinction, that Son and Father are having some kind of mutual experience or state of being which he's labelled as "one", but that this oneness does not UNDO OR ignore the fact that there are still two things happening here.

In the truest sense of what non-duality or oneness means, it implies there isn't a two-ness of anything. And if you are being really, really, really strict about that logical reasoning, it SHOULD mean that God has NO SON AT ALL. There's either oneness - one thing, or there isn't.

There's a whole spectrum of beliefs out there which proceed from the strictest of interpretations ie "there is only God" through the slight blurring of boundaries to suggest "there is a son, but there's only one of them", through to "there are other sons but they're really the one son", through to "sons are the ego", and all manner of interpretations in between.

But here is the simple fact of it. If God has a thought which creates a son, or if his "effect" is his son, or his son is actually really "himself" pretending to be a son, then this makes himself also the dreamer of dreams and the maker of death. Does that fly with you?

Are you willing to have God be the one who is responsible for separation? And what about the Holy Spirit, did God - who must be dreaming, create the holy spirit as a perfect non-dreamer, in order to pull himself out of the dream he himself made, due to apparently not being able to wake up himself, while simultaneously having created a holy spirit who is not asleep? Does that make any sense whatsoever?

We're told conflicting messages by various teachers who have not really reasoned this out. If there is a God to return home to, a God who did not believe in the separation idea and did not dream, how is that even possible unless somehow there is something that distinguishes God from the one who is having a dream? Even if it's just ONE son, how is it that this one son is able to do ANYTHING that is COMPLETELY SEPARATE from the Father, ensuring that the Father does not entertain or enter into or be affected by this dreaming son?

If truly they are so joined and are so "one" that they literally are the same thing, or the same self, the son literally cannot dream without dragging the father into it. And that would mean the entirety of EXISTENCE would now fall from grace and we'd all be permanently dead, God included. There has to be SOMETHING about the son of God, or this aspect of God, which somehow renders its choices incapable of affecting God. How is that possible if God is supposedly so joined to and connected to this dreamer, in such a way that there is "influence" between them?

What it HAS to indicate, is that EITHER there is a separation between the Father and the Son, OR some other mechanism or dynamic of relationship which guarantees that God will not ever dream. Because if God is the dreamer, then God has made a world of death and also doughnuts and rainbows and chocolate bars. So what IS it that makes God NOT affected by the dream? What is it that sections off the dreamer from God? Even if it's just a dream, it IS still a made idea, it IS an IDEA in the mind, even if it's an idea of impossibilities. We DID have a mad idea, even if it's a nonsense idea. Why didn't GOD have the idea, and why isn't God trapped in an illusion?

The ego would conclude, it MUST mean that there is separation in heaven. It cannot conclude otherwise. But there is another possibility. FREEDOM. Is it not possible, that God gave such TOTAL FREEDOM to his creations, that by all intents and purposes, his creations actually are ABSOLUTELY free and therefore literally have a will of their own, a mind of their own, a spirit of their own, and can CHOOSE on their own, WITHOUT it having any effect on God whatsoever? If the son or sons is FREE, and God has "given" them FULLY, and has COMPLETELY set them in heaven as permanent free-willed beings, this WOULD completely explain why it's possible for God to not be part of dreaming.

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

For me, heaven absolutely IS NOT a picture of what we traditionally are told is a state of pure non-duality, or even really a state of this "oneness" where there is "only God" happening. It's NOT one thing. It contains FREE WILLED BEINGS OF LIGHT, who are SO free that they literally are free to choose whether or not to will with God.

So get this picture... that God created beings - who are not only fully created and completely SET FREE by unconditional love, but He even gave them SUCH freedom that they could in fact freely decide for themselves whether to love or not. You'd think that this would be quite insane, or suicidal, for God to create thoughts which seem capable of disagreeing with their own creator. Why would God do such a crazy thing? Because He knows that nothing REAL can be threatened, and even if they DO choose to side with dreams, these dreams don't REALLY threaten reality. And that anyone who does dream WILL awaken at some point, because it is not God's will that He be cut off from his creations.

The picture I have of God is that He is FAR more a creator of individual free-willed souls, to whom He has given TOTAL freedom, to the extent that they have to willingly COOPERATE and CO-CREATE by their own will, that they are not mere "parts of God Himself" but actually are real distinct entities with their own minds and their own being. They CAN and do naturally want to share their mind and being with God also, and with the whole sonship, but not because they are forced to or inherently made to. They freely willingly want to do so, to increase their joy, and because Heaven is filled with celebration of Creation.

God is a creator, not a blob. God has sons, many many many sons. God also created angels. This is all perfectly written about in ACIM by Jesus with hundreds if not thousands of statements supporting it. It is the EGO which has a tough time comprehending how it is possible for God, who is whole, could create "many wholes". Or how many wholes can exist simultaneously. Or how God can ADD something to existence. Or how He could create "distinct beings" who have everything "individually", including the creation of multiple minds, and how these multiple minds can coexist harmoniously without war, and without competition, and without differences.

Oneness means "of one kind". In the LIKENESS of God. It means SHARING, by multiple individuals. It does not mean "God is all that exists".

Yes there are statements which at times seem to speak to certain ASPECTS of God's nature in isolation which perhaps gives impression that Jesus is saying there is nothing but God, or that God is all that is, etc... but... it's not the complete picture. Sometimes Jesus refers to the "one son", sometimes to the sonship, sometimes to individual sons. References to the one son do NOT cancel out references to individuals. The ego has a SPAZZ about how this can make sense and be true. It sees only separations where there are none, and joins together things which are not one thing.

Oneness, as in, "there is only one thing" is actually an EGO IDEA. It is the result that EGO reasoning comes to when it boils everything in its EXCLUSIVE thought system down. And it thinks that this final conclusion is accurate and truthful. It is not. It is divisive and incorrect and a false conclusion. God's creation is not "one thing", God's sonship is not devoid of parts, and God DID create multiple beings. Objections to this are, funnily enough, THE EGO objecting to ITS belief in what Heaven must be like.

We are creations of God, children of God, God has created multiple minds, multiple souls, multiple sons, each of whom is SO FREE that they are able to decide for themselves whether or not to will with God. The only REAL choice is to will with God, but our minds DO have the ability and freedom to CHOOSE to dream of an alternative. And we have used that ability. And it has not affected God.

Many many times Jesus has said to me, "you are free". And I could never really quite accept or understand how this is possible, given the framework of how everyone is teaching the course. What wish teachings of "time is already over" and "there's only one son" and so on, I couldn't see how it's possible that I am free. How does a son of God be free, if that son is just part of God's enforced will or some kind of script? Gradually and very confusedly I've come to accept more that we actually DO have free will, because we DO have total freedom. We are to come to God WILLINGLY.

This is why we NEED to have "a little willingness" and eventually total willingness. Willingness isn't coercion. Love does not enter where it is not welcome. We actually literally MUST CHOOSE HEAVEN "heaven is a choice *I* must make". We have to WANT to WILLFULLY choose to accept it. We're not going be willing OR able to accept it if we think it's being forced on us and we don't want it. We have to have total personal willingness to will WITH GOD, to CO-CREATE, to participate and to exercise WILLINGLY the decision to carry out God's will. We are not slaves.

We are not JUST effects. We have been given the power to CAUSE as well, the power to will, and the power to create FREELY. Free will was given NECESSARILY in order to allow us to create freely like the Father. Without this freedom, we could not WILLINGLY WANT to agree with God's will for us. God, who is cause, caused us to BE causes. It is an EGO IDEA that we are "only an effect". That's a dead end. We are not a dead end. We are extenders and freely-willing CO-CREATORS with God. Because we want to be, because it's natural to want to be, and because God ONLY willed that we will FREELY.

Jesus is truth-full. He is honest. He is awake. He is aware of everything. He does not lie. He has no reason to hide anything.

Since Jesus IS the Atonement, in order to "accept" the Atonement we are going to have to at some point completely Accept everything Jesus has said as true. ALL of it. Not just some parts, not just the bits we like, all of it.

Our questions should not so much focus on "whether" what the Course says is true. We are supposed to TRUST JESUS, that He is being truthful and that we can rely on His Word. If He says something is true, it simply is true. It is our job to ACCEPT IT.

When we take other parts of the course and pull it apart and bring up the quotes and use them as "evidence" as to some "contrary meaning" or conflicting truth, something has gone wrong. We are using the course against ITSELF, because Jesus is perfectly truthful all the time. When we use one quote to attack another, we are claiming that Jesus Himself is a liar.

What we can't seem to agree on is what Jesus MEANS, and we have all these discussions about what OUR opinion is, instead of putting aside our opinion and simply being open to TRUST AND ACCEPT Jesus's at His word, in a very literal way. We are simply not willing to be honest enough. Honesty is not self-serving.

I sometimes put up a quote of what Jesus has said. It is plain and obvious. And then people start saying either what it does or does not mean, or give other quotes to try to fight it. Even if it's extremely obviously clear and plain.

This is OUR EGO attempting to be some kind of "authority" through whom all decisions and approvals have to be fed in order to accept anything at all. We stand here like some kind of armed guard only allowing through the little parts we like and rejecting the rest. It is really an act of denial and keeping the Truth at arm's length. It's a defense against the atonement.

This very ego ITSELF has to be put aside, and we have to open up to TRUSTING JESUS. Trusting that He is telling us the truth, not deceiving us. Trusting that He is genuine and honest and authentic. Listening to what He has said. And that means, even if it does not make us look good, accepting it ANYWAY. Accept it first, learn how it MUST BE CORRECT later. Otherwise where's the trust? Where's the listening to and accepting of Atonement? Where's the taking Jesus at His word and not fighting with everything He has said?

When He says over 250 times that God directly created multiple children and also gave them free will, we listen to that, and we ACCEPT IT. We don't get into nonsense arguments of denial that have one goal and one goal only - to NOT accept it at its word. When He says plainly that God would not create a world like this, we have to ACCEPT IT, not get into "whether" it is true or not. When He says God creates Angels directly, we have to ACCEPT it. When he says miracles can heal the sick and raise the dead, we have to ACCEPT IT. When he says you can LITERALLY move a mountain with your faith, we have to ACCEPT IT. We have to stop fighting with Jesus all the time and TRUST HIM.

My wife had said she was getting a foot cramp and that pain was coming down her leg from the middle of the shin bone downwards.

This was the site where, some 15-odd years ago, she had bashed into the dishwasher door and probably chipped the bone. She had a hard bump there ever since due to how the body had tried to heal it, which was a little painful to push on. It protruded out of the smooth shinbone and was easily visible and easy to feel with the fingers. It was an area a little smaller than a 25-cent coin.

I put my two fingers on the area and was in quite a strong inner condition, relatively free from fear. I intended that it be healed. My fingers started vibrating as Holy Spirit began to flow.

I did not say anything for a while. I felt that instead of trying to force the thing to heal, I would sort of step back and stay within my inner strength. I had a sense of certainty and knowing. I didn't feel the need to go out of my center and try to force it, but rather, remained centered in being free from fear.

She said "there's no point, it's been there for years". I said, "that doesn't matter". I was certain that this was irrelevant.

Holy Spirit suggested words: "go down". So I spoke this at the bump. I also told it to "heal". I could feel beneath my fingers a sense of "sinking" or collapsing. I commanded it again "be healed" "bone fuse together".

I could feel under my fingers two or three times the sensation of something disappearing. About a minute later I checked. The whole area had reduced down and was much flatter. The whole upper area had become completely flat. All that remained was a small area about half the size of half of a 1 cent coin which was still protruding.

We stopped there, but it was quite cool to see that there was a marked difference. She tested it herself and remarked that it had indeed seemed to have worked.

I learned from this the difference between going off-center and trying to become aggressive or pushy in trying to force something to change, versus staying clearly centered in strength and freedom from fear and commanding "from a distance". I felt much stronger and more certain this way, as though I didn't need to fight with it because I knew with more certainty that I was in the truth and it was not.

I later was asking Holy Spirit about this. It turns out that this remaining centered in truth is the same thing as "having faith". It's not wishful thinking nor blind hope. It's a sense of certainty and truth and freedom from fear or indecisiveness. I also was shown how miracle-working is very similar to how God creates, He simply remains strong in the truth and remains "centered" and then "shines" outward from there, staying within Himself but "expressing" from that point of Authority. This is how we need to be when we are working miracles, otherwise if we step down from the position of authority in trying to make something happen, we move away from strength and certainty and thus become weaker.

This is why the ego's version of power is to have power over something through force, while God's version of power is to BE IN strength (love, fearlessness, certainty, truth) and stay IN it while "emitting" the creative power.

How was the tiny mad idea possible? How was it possible for us to mis-create? Why did God give us the ability to try to sin? Did we lose our innocence in the separation? How is it that this world seems to exist?

When God created his children, He gave them the freedom to will and create. The mind is not capable of ever doing anything that God didn't give it the ability to do. It cannot add abilities to itself, it can only operate within the parameters of its design. This means you literally cannot go against God's will or do anything He did not make possible.

"God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them."

But what God did do, was give you freedom. The power of the mind to freely choose to will to co-create. And this freedom is fully given.

"The world, in its original connotation, included both the proper creation of man by God, AND the proper creation by man in his Right Mind. The latter required the endowment of man by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given. "

Within the context of being "completely free", it is technically possible for you to try to USE your freedom against itself. You HAVE to be free to do this, in order to truly have freedom. While you have free will, it HAS to be possible for you to potentially USE that free will to try NOT to will anything. If this weren't a part of the freedom of will, you would not have free will. It's not a productive USE of will, since it creates nothing, but it is still part of it.

The thing is, although you are free to TRY to deny freedom, something completely pointless happens when you do so. Since it remains true that God's will cannot be opposed, and you cannot remove your freedom from yourself, and you cannot make yourself unpowerful, and you cannot be changed in any way, the exercise of TRYING to use your will to NOT will, to be "unwilling" or to oppose God's will, HAS to be futile.

It's not that you aren't free to TRY to do this, it's just that there is really no point in doing it. It's not possible to cause anything real to happen this way, because it denies creation. So it's like saying, I want to use my free will against itself to cause nothing to happen. I want to will not to will. I want to not create anything. I want to deny myself.

There is a circular logic which enters into this. You are trying to use your free will to cause your free will to stop being free and to will nothing. But how can you still be WILLING that you will nothing? You have to still USE the will to will that you don't will anything. So the notion is really absurd. You have to keep using the will, while claiming that you're not using it. And so it has to entail denial and it has to NOT accomplish what you're trying to make it accomplish. And never can you will the WILL itself to cease to exist, because you'd have to USE will to do that.

It has to be a state of denial, because the fact remains you can't change your freedom or power. So trying to DO so can only mean you are going into a DENIAL of what is true of you, and are PRETENDING to do whatever you're doing. You can't actually make yourself un-free or destroy your power. You can, however, seemingly deceive yourself in believing that its possible. Precisely BECAUSE you are free to do so. God did make it possible for you to be free to try to not be free, but He did not make it possible for you to ACTUALLY affect your freedom.

"Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

Another way to put it is, it is not possible to change God's will or to cause your own will to stop. It is literally impossible to separate from God or be where God is not. However, you are FREE to use your freedom to TRY to do so. You can INSIST that it is possible, and invest belief in it, and try to GIVE IT truth and make it real and convince yourself of it and deceive yourself, but you STILL cannot make it a reality or actually do it in reality.

As you try to do so, as you attempt to use your freedom to stop being free, as you try to will not to will anything, or as you try to will nothingness, or try to give reality and meaning to something impossible, you go into what we're calling the "tiny mad idea". The idea of separation and sin. Which just means you're insisting that something impossible is possible - that something false is true. That you CAN separate, you CAN sin, you have done so, and there is proof that the impossible is happening.

This can only be self deception and denial, because it's still impossible. But you are free to believe it if you want to. To believe it you have to DENY what is true, try to be out of touch with the facts, and pretend that the will has been denied. You are free to pretend that you have no freedom, which seems to place the mind in a state of "sleep" or dormancy, as though it is not creating or has no power, or is not alive. A sort of "stand-by mode", in which the mind believes that everything impossible is possible, and thus imagines that the opposite of God is happening through a kind of hallucinatory process of wishful thinking. ("There is no world apart from what you wish").

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

Now, going into this state, is NOT A SIN. NOR is it outside of the scope of what God made possible. You can never actually rewrite the laws of God. You can't give yourself something He did not give you. You cannot change yourself. You cannot destroy yourself or your freedom or your will. But it IS within your rights and within your power to deny or pretend that you can do these things.

Pretending that you are not immortal is the best you can do, because you cannot cause yourself to die. But you certainly can produce illusions, fabrications, that its happening, through the DESIRE to have it be possible. You can confuse your identity with these illusions. You can also believe that the suffering is real. But it remains unreal, and the truth is unchanged.

What this simply means is that by "mis-using" the mind to believe that impossibilities are possible and happening, you hallucinate a world of make-believe, which you try to invest in and convince yourself is true and real. You even try to give it immortality and life and will and a mind of its own. But you can't succeed. You can only fake it. But you are free to fake it.

Entering into this state of "denying that you are free", using your freedom of will to try to will not to have freedom of will, you are ONLY entering into a state of being MISTAKEN. If it is true that you HAVE freedom and will, you are mistaken when you believe that you don't. If it is true that you are immortal, you are mistaken when you believe death is possible. If it is true that sin is utterly impossible, you are mistaken when you believe sin is happening.

Being mistaken is still an "innocent" condition. Guilt does not have to enter into it at all. Someone can make an "innocent mistake", which is simply a failure to willingly admit that you're trying to do something which makes no sense. You can be mistaken in believing that willing against God's free will is possible. It's not possible. Nor can you really will against yourself. But you are free to believe it's possible, and to try to do it, and to try to convince yourself that you've done it. But you cannot do it, and so are mistaken when you believe this.

Believing that you can be separate from God, is a simple mistake. Since it's not possible, you can't do it. But you can try to convince yourself that it's possible. Doing that is pointless and futile because it can't BE possible. But you are free to try. You are free to resist the truth. Or to use your power to try to pretend to be powerless. You are innocent in this because all you're doing is using your God-given powers in a way that is a pointless exercise. A way which results in nothing really happening, as you "play small" and try to be little and powerless.

Provided that you recognize that mis-creation is just a state of being mistaken, and is not a sin, and is still well within the laws of God, and that at no time is God's will violated, even when you are mistaken, then you can also see that mis-creating is an innocent act. It's really not an act at all. And it does not change the truth about you. All it does is set up some illusion of deception and some confusion about what's really possible.

"There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the mad belief that ANYTHING could be established and maintained without some link that kept it still within the laws of God; NOT as the law itself upholds the universe as God created it, but in some form adapted to the need the Son of God believes he has. Corrected error IS the error's end. And thus has God protected still His Son, even in error."

"Not even what the Son of God made in insanity, could be without a hidden spark of beauty, that gentleness could release."

The Course also talks about how entering into this "detour into fear", which is just an attempt to make true what is not true, or to use will against itself, produced a "lower order mind" or a "system of thought" which seems to function opposite to how God originally indended it in higher reality. This lower (ego) mind is a mind of denial, deception, untruth and confusion. But it is not a sin. It's just a mis-configured and unwise mis-use of your God-given abilities.

"Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience, or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical, and the other creates the spiritual."

The physical world of bodies is what is produced in the deceptive state of being mistaken about the truth. In the state of denial, the dream of death, the illusion of separation, the pretense at being powerless and imprisoned, it produces the "forms of error" which the body sees. Error is just a mistake.

"No one CAN be "taken over" unless he wills to be. However, if he places his mind under tyranny, rather than authority, he intrudes the submission/dominance onto free will himself. This produces the obvious contradiction inherent in any formulation that associates free will with imprisonment."

Attempting to assert that will can cause will not to will, produced an illusion of an "unwilling world." A world in opposition to God. But this is STILL within the confines of the Son of God's freedom. The angels also have this freedom.

"Error cannot really threaten truth, which can always withstand it. Only the error is actually vulnerable. You are free to establish your kingdom where you see fit..."

"The "Princes of this World" are princes only because they are really angels. But they are free to establish their kingdom where they see fit.""God does not coerce".

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

God is not viewing your excursion into "trying to make impossible things possible", as being a sin. He doesn't see it as a real threat to what you are, either. Nor does he coerce you into stopping doing this against your will. For God to oppose your free will he would have to oppose his own. He does however "encourage" and guide and help his children to "come to their senses". Because it remains true that "trying not to will anything" is a rather pointless exercise which can't really result in anything creative. It's more like, taking a nap where you dream of destruction or "the opposite of creating". A dream of mortality and death as "the opposite of eternal life."

We mis-created the world, but only as a mistake. Not as a sin. When it is recognized as only a mistake, sin is lifted away from it and it is regarded as forgiven. Being an illusion of something impossible seeming to be possible, this is seen through and beyond, and this overlooking is forgiveness. It's a forgiveness which looks past bodies and the physical to the light of reality, not deceived by the illusion that false things are true. To the the light of sanity and reason. We simply made the world in error and it can be undone.

"You made the body in attempting to deceive yourself."

"Miracles reflect..." "I have done this thing and it is this I would undo."All we're doing here, is basically, innocently, trying to do something which isn't really possible. We're using our freedom to try to imprison ourselves. We're using our immortality to pretend to be mortal. We're using our holiness to pretend to be sinners. And we're using the power of the mind to pretend to be weak and powerless. We can't ACTUALLY be imprisoned, or mortal, or sinful, or powerless. And so we're using all these things against themselves, to PRETEND that we don't have these things. This BLOCKS and disguises them, using illusions to make it appear something is true which isn't.

Seen as nothing more than an error, a mistake, a futile attempt, a pointless exercise, the dream of death is not "against" God's will, which cannot be opposed, but is an ATTEMPT to believe that opposing God's will is possible or has merit. The mind is just stretching the truth. But using the mind in a "destructive" way, against its own nature, isn't constructive or creative and it also doesn't allow you to experience happiness.

"The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly but yet within Themselves, for They are everywhere."

"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."

God DOES will that you maintain the sanity of the clear recognition that there is NO POINT trying to use your freedom against itself. That it is truly impossible to WILL nothing. Or to make yourself have no power. Believing you are powerless when you are powerful, or that you are imprisoned when you are free, is obviously a state of denial, and this denial of life can only produce illusions of suffering and pain and misery."We also have observed that man can create an empty shell, but cannot create nothing at all."

"Whenever projection (creation) in its inappropriate sense is utilized, it ALWAYS implies that some emptiness (or lack of everything) must exist, and that it is within man's ability to put his own ideas there INSTEAD of the truth."

When you try NOT to create, you enter into "making" illusions. You produce an "emptiness" or lack of love, which is the world of "sin", meaning just the illusion of love's absence, or the absence of light. It isn't the presence of darkness, or of sin, or of real death, it is the illusion of the absence of their opposite. Because even in illusions you can't get outside of God's laws. You can never violate the parameters of your functioning as given by God. And so the world remains ONLY a mistake, not a real sin.

God's own will follows the knowledge that it is pointless to use will against itself, even though its possible to TRY to do so. Because when you try to do so, nothing is willed, and so nothing happens. God knows this and he is sane. His will is that you know it also. When you refuse to know it or you deny it, insisting that you CAN will nothingness to be something, you become deceived and confused. And God does not will that you enter into such suffering. "God's will for me is perfect happiness". And you can only be happy when you will in accord with God's true will - purely constructively and using your freedom to create. Free from self destruction.

"God Himself gave you the perfect correction for everything you have made which is not in accord with His Holy Will."

"The miracle compares the creations of man with the higher level of creation, accepting what is in ACCORD as true, and rejecting the DISCORDANT as false."

In all this, you always remain innocent, you can be correct or mistaken, but you cannot change the laws of God or of your true nature. You can be asleep in a denial state of trying to pretend that impossibilities are possible, but you can't ACTUALLY cause an opposite to God to happen. You can dream of it, imagine it, try to give it reality, even convince yourself of it, but you can't make it true. So at some point you have to admit, it's a fruitless exercise, and just return to creating with God. Using will to willingly will your creations, as God intended.

"The idea for today is, of course, the reason why a meaningless world is impossible. What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist."

Meaningfulness is of God. Meaning is reality. Love is meaningful. What God creates has meaning. It shares God's purpose. It's meaningful because it's full of genuine authentic value. It's what you really want because it means a lot to you. It's worth having. It what you were meant to have. It correlates to reality because it means what it really is without deception.

We're told in the course that this is a meaningless world - that we made a meaningless world. This means the world in and of itself has no value. We're also told that we have given it all the meaning it has by projecting meaning onto it. We're also told that we can extend God's meaning onto the world instead of the meanings we were giving it, which changes the meaning of the world.

When events transpire in the world, you might use the evidence the body provides to explain what is happening and what it means. You decide that it means something. This symptoms means this, those occurrences mean that. You come to conclusions in order to derive meaning from what you see. You then give what's happening this meaning. But you don't have to. The meaning isn't inherent to what's happening. Meaning is given it by you.

Jesus tells us that we've given the world all the meaning it has, and that if we will change our mind about what we value and believe, then it's going to change the meaning of the world. Meaning relates to what you value. What you value is what you want. What you want, you want to see. You then proceed to see it. What is it you are seeing? You are seeing meaning, projected onto the world, based on what value you want it to have. In other words, what you want it to mean to you.

In and of itself, the world has no meaning. We give it meaning. We can give it negative meaning, or we can give it love and see love in place of it. The love is meaningful. Love has within it God's meaningfulness. By giving love to what was made in hate, you change the world from a meaningless world into a meaningful world. Or at least, the love that you see in it is meaningful, because the world in and of itself is nothing.

What you want in life is meaning. You want meaningfulness. You want something of true value. You want worth. You want acknowledgement and heartfelt deep connection with genuine love. You want a purpose of love and joining. You want God.

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

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

"God did not create that disaster [specify], and so it is not real.""

""God did not create a meaningless world. He did not create [specify the situation which is disturbing you], and so it is not real.""

"WHAT IS THE RESURRECTION?

Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death. It is a reawakening or a rebirth; a change of mind about the meaning of the world. It is the acceptance of the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the world's purpose; the acceptance of the Atonement for oneself. It is the end of dreams of misery, and the glad awareness of the Holy Spirit's final dream. It is the recognition of the gifts of God. It is the dream in which the body functions perfectly, having no function except communication. It is the lesson in which learning ends, for it is consummated and surpassed with this. It is the invitation to God to take His final step. It is the relinquishment of all other purposes, all other interests, all other wishes and all other concerns. It is the single desire of the Son for the Father.

The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely. Life is now recognized as salvation, and pain and misery of any kind perceived as hell. Love is no longer feared, but gladly welcomed. Idols have disappeared, and the remembrance of God shines unimpeded across the world. Christ's face is seen in every living thing, and nothing is held in darkness, apart from the light of forgiveness. There is no sorrow still upon the earth. The joy of Heaven has come upon it.

Here the curriculum ends."

As you attempt to get rid of parts of yourself that you do not like, such as parts that you have condemned as sinful and guilty, you will gradually be running out of Self to get rid of.

Yet, trying to keep only the good parts and get rid of the bad parts appears to make you seem like an increasingly good person. And that's because you're progressively denying more and more that there is any bad stuff in you.

If your strategy is to become more innocent by denying your own belief that there's unlovability in you, and if the only way to get rid of those unlovable parts is to unlove them even more, pretty soon you're going to be perfecting your innocence. And that really means, you will find that there is none of you left to BE innocent.

This attempt at denial and suppression of your belief in your sinfulness, will eventually put so much self-hate into your unconscious that it will erupt into consciousness and be perceived as an attack. You won't be able to keep it concealed forever, and the more you censor yourself the more you'll feel threatened by anything that lets the hate leak out.

This is the ego's strategy for finding a way to prove that you're innocent. It logically concludes that if it can isolate outside conscious awareness all of the stuff about you which is less than innocent and good, and if nobody (including you) ever sees the bad parts, then you'll finally be recognized as innocent.

And conveniently you'll find lots of opportunities to project and blame the relegated self-hatred in yourself onto others, giving you yet another way to displace your sinfulness and get rid of it. Or at least you believe you're getting rid of it, when in fact you are just lost in a private world where your unloved parts are at war with your acceptable parts.

Eventually the end of the war will only happen when you run out of goodness, because the ego suspiciousness will always undermine the potential for you to be truly good. Good is never good enough, and your efforts to people-please will always make you suffer. Your attempt to wear a mask of innocence is actually an attempt to destroy you, because it creates in your mind the very toxic enemy - your own hated self - which will haunt you incessantly.

There is no real escape in this arrangement. There is no real way to be free of guilt without self-sacrifice. There is no way you can truly be free of it without dying. And this is why you see death as a logical and worthwhile conclusion to your efforts at being "good" all the time. Being good, in denial of being bad, leads to death and is a choice to die.

It is a choice to die because feeding your persona and trying to *pretend* that you don't believe in your own guilt is diminishing what's left of you. Pretty soon you'll run out of anything that's good enough about you, and meanwhile your hated self will be making plans for your funeral.

While sin and guilt are real, or true of you, there is no escape. While you believe in them, you will try to cut off parts of yourself that you deem the locations of that sinfulness, and attack it to try to get rid of it. You will attack it with denial and disassociation as well as hate.

The only true escape for you is to learn that you have not really sinned and that guilt is therefore never justified. When you can see that you must be innocent because you did not sin "in reality", you no longer need to try to make yourself be innocent in the face of sin being real. Instead, you are simply innocent because there is no real sin. And this is forgiveness, and it is also the atonement.

So either you will use the ego's strategy to make you innocent, which will kill you, or you will use the Holy Spirit's strategy to make you innocent, which will save your life.

It can be very therapeutic to just listen and be still and judge not while someone expresses themeslves. This is the essence of being forgiving.

"Forgiveness … is still, and quietly does nothing. … It merely looks, and waits, and judges not" - ACIM

When we all have egos, we're all so busy not listening. We're too busy broadcasting and transmitting illusions and stories to make ourselves special.

Even if you're in a conversation with someone and you're supposedly listening, you're probably still not FULLY listening because you're not in a state of forgiveness.

Instead you're starting to mentally engage with what was said, are starting to process it, are chewing on it, judging it, judging the person, thinking about what to say, having memories of your own personal story, resisting the person and hoping they will shut up soon, etc. All of these activities mean you are not being forgiving, but it also means you are not fully listening. You're not paying full attention. You are not being fully present because you're lost in your own ego.

So then when the person speaks, they sense this. They know in the mind/energetic level that they are not being heard. They know that there are limits and boundaries in place, which you put there, which are your attempts to make them stop and shut up. Especially if you start to offer advice or talk over them or try to stop their expression. Maybe their expression is very ego and it triggers you and you just want it to stop because you can't just be still.

The result of this is that the person does not feel permitted to fully express themselves. They don't feel that you are listening, that you recognize them deep down, that you really care unconditionally, or that you even want them to continue. They will take these cues, consciously or not, and it will stop them fully expressing.

We are all so used to walking around in a world where everyone is always broadcasting that we feel terribly constipated with ego energies, feelings and expressions, which are not being ALLOWED to fully express. Nobody is listening! And that's because everyone has egos and are not in a state of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a state of mind of stillness and listening and allowing and presence and non-judgement. That's the state that we're sorely lacking in this world.

This state is a state of "holding space". It means that you are so still and clear and non-judging and present that you simply allow and listen and permit everything. You do not resist, you do not get caught up in your own thoughts, you don't get lost in your own reactions, and you don't try to stop the person. If you do this for someone and you let them just express, you will notice something really interesting happens.

Not only will they express themselves and all their ego stories, feelings and thoughts, but they will seem to really go overboard, over the top with major ego expression. Given permission that it's okay to express fully, as proven by your forgiving willingness to listen and be present, it all just comes flooding out. The person doesn't even quite know why they are doing this. They can seem to become "very ego" while they do this. YOU MUST NOT try to stop that. It's good. They are venting. Maybe for the first time someone is finally fully listening to their heart's pain and they can therefore finally let it out and let it go all the way.

People are natural expressers. Even if it's ego shit coming out and totally bullshit, they still need to express it, and not being in a situation where it's safe and okay - unconditionally okay - to be as ego as they like, it just stays stuck inside.

Also when you are in a state of holding space and being fully present with the person, where you are actually giving your FULL ATTENTION while simultaneously backing totally off from expressing anything of your own, this creates a kind of "space". That is, your intense attention connects to the person where they are, and the fact that you are totally withholding your own expression creates "space" in between the two of you. It's a space that you're not flooding with your own expressions, because you are RECEIVING.

This space is held by the mind and can actually be an energetic presence. You form it with your EMPATHY. In True Empathy you are listening intently and sharing awareness and unconditional acceptance, WITHOUT ENTERING INTO the person's problem. This is TRUE empathy. Empathising without engaging or joining in or making real the illusions that flow out in any way. And that doesn't just mean be quiet on the outside, you must be totally present and attentive INSIDE your mind as well, otherwise you are distracted with ego and are not listening.

And because there is a kind of law that nature fills a vacuum, their ego is SUCKED OUT. It pours out to fill the space. Or to put it another way, your willingness to FULLY RECEIVE allows them to FULLY EXPRESS. The person may not even realize they are really digging deep and sharing all their deep dark secrets and even stating embarassing egoic "secrets" that they never told anyone. Onlookers might judge them and label them as evil! But you have to let it just flow out into the space. Just listen, fully. Give your full attention in silence.

After the person has "finished" expressing, having been heard deeply perhaps for the first time ever, and having aired tons of dirty laundry and guilt and everything in between, they will tell you... if you succeeded in this .... they'll tell you, they feel TREMENDOUSLY PEACEFUL. They got it out! They finally could let it all out and let it go instead of having it shoved halfway down their throat by everyone else who is too self-absorbed to ever give them permission to fully express.

I have done this before, by accident. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was doing it. I recall a person at an old job who started to brag. He was a natural bragger. But as he did, instead of wanting to shut him up as such, I just paid attention and let him get on with it. I held space, sort of accidentally. And he just kept going, and going, and going. He really really vented, and started even telling me about all these secret exploits and perversions that he'd been doing, just a great big giant ego brag. He didn't even know why he was expressing so much, he just kept going! An onlooker judged him, not understanding what was happening, telling him that he should stop talking because he was making a fool of himself. But it was a HEALING.

And then,..... he wound down, and he said, he couldn't believe how peaceful he felt. He was shocked at how calm he was. It was simple. Pay full attention and be fully present without your own mental noise.

Also, if a person is quite shy or sensitive, introverted or has difficulty or fear expressing themselves, this is like GOLD. If you are like this, you know that you are very much put off by the loud intensity of everyone else's expressions, and usually you will only express yourself to one individual in a secret corner when no-one else is looking. Only if there is near silence do you feel permitted to make sound, to speak, or to express yourself. You are really sensitive and everyone's just "regular" level of expression is experienced as like LOUD. Like, they're shouting all the time and don't really want to hear you at all. And especially if the person is domineering or controlling or takes over expressing for everyone, you can bet you will just shrivel up into a hole of loneliness.

That's why sensitive people become so quiet and shy. In their spectrum of expression, they are drowned out. Loud intense or even just regular people can "shut down" sensitive people and make them even shyer, because they're never really given an opportunity to BE HEARD. People won't shut the fuck up for long enough to let them express their soft gentle expressions!

If you say to a shy sensitive person, that you're going to be totally quiet and just listen and that they can go ahead and just talk and tell you anything... anything at all, just go ahead and I'll listen quietly.... that's like GOLD. If you will trust that as a sensitive person, you will then start to express yourself, and you'll keep going, and going, and you'll explore and uncover all kinds of things that you could never tell anyone. It's SO healing and cathartic. To be heard in this overly broadcasting ultra-loud ego-screaming world, it's absolutely treasure. It touches a person. It heals them. Sometimes as a sensitive person I wish the whole world would SHUT THE FUCK UP for long enough for me to express myself.

(I WILL BE HEARD! Thanks for letting me express that, lol)

This is also partly why my expressive energies have diverted themselves into the silent, unhurried expression through typing and writing.. ... people don't shut you up when you put it down on paper.Mostly. Until they start reading it, hah. Then it's "that's too long to read, shut up". .. ie, I can't read all that text... when will *I* be able to talk about myself! lolol

Anyway. Hold space for people. It is thoroughly deeply healing. We should have healing circles where we do nothing but let people express silently. This is partly how it's set up in Alcoholics Anonymous and AlAnon and other programs with a "no cross-talk" rule... although it should be extended to a "no mental chatter either" rule. No ego.

Be quiet. Be present. Listen. Let people be fully acknowledged. This is an expression of true forgiveness.

Remember, this is part of being truly forgiving. And having the opportunity to PRACTICE this is an opportunity to be forgiving. As Jesus said:

"Forgiveness … is still, and quietly does nothing. … It merely looks, and waits, and judges not" - ACIM

In ACIM Jesus sometimes says things which SOUND contradictory, but they are not. He will claim one thing, then claim another, sometimes in the same sentence. And it will sound like the two things are totally opposite. So then you'll tend to conclude only one of the two statements can be true. But this is a mistake.

Here are some examples of logically cryptic-sounding self-contradictory statements:

"It should be noted that God HAS begotten only ONE Son. If you believe that all of the Souls that God created ARE His Sons, and if you also believe that the Sonship is One, then every Soul MUST be a Son of God, or an integral part of the Sonship."

"I and my Father are one."

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

"Within its holy circle, is everyone whom God created as His Son."

"Healing is when two minds recognize their oneness and become glad."

"God has but one Son, knowing them all as one."

The reason they sound contradictory is because they simultaneously take two logically opposing positions. For example he tells us God has one son, but in the next breath tells us God created many sons. Or he tells us there's "I" and "my father" and then says they are "one". Then he's talking about brothers, suggesting more than one, but is talking about how they are seemingly one thing. Or how God created "everyone" within heaven, but then refers to them as a seemingly singular "one son". Even to suggest that God has one son, but that he knows "them all" as one.

So then you find yourself asking, how can it be possible that God is having one son AND that God is knowing "them all" as one? And USUALLY what almost everyone does, who thinks the way most people think, is to SIDE WITH one or the other of the statements, and DISMISS the other. Because that "seems to make sense". Because if you can turn a blind eye to the contradiction, you seem to "solve" the problem. But this is a TOTAL FAIL. Here's why.

The ego thought system is based on separation. The separation always suggests that something is true of one thing which is NOT true of another. It is the opposite of an equality-based system. It reasons that the truth is DIFFERENT for everyone. That something is either true of this OR that, but not both. The whole ego approach is to differentiate and make un-equal everything it refers to. This results in ME VS YOU, ie war.

Examples of this are e.g. "I am innocent, you are guilty". "I parked in the first parking space, not the second". "I bought the red one, not the blue one". "Its either male or female". "You can go north or south". "I took the left door, not the right door." "I am Paul, not Jim" etc.

The whole PHYSICAL world, and all of space and time, was MADE based on this thought process or "way of reasoning". In fact you can say the physical world IS the ego thought SYSTEM. And so when you THINK this way, in terms of "EITHER THIS OR THAT, BUT NOT BOTH", it maps very very well to the physical world. It doesn't seem to produce contradictions either.

I'm either in America or in England but not in two places at once. I can go north or south, but not both. I am old or young, but not both. I can have the salad for supper or the beef steak but not both. I can buy the house or the condo but not both. etc. I can go left or right but not both. etc

The trouble is, God's Kingdom is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to this way of thinking, being opposite to THIS WORLD.

"Earth, heaven's opposite in every way."

The whole system is completely unlike it. And what's POSSIBLE in God's system is IMPOSSIBLE in the ego's system. And what makes SENSE in God's system appears to be utter NONSENSE in the ego's reasoning.

And the thing is, pretty much everyone in this world, whether you're into ACIM or not, and even if you are, USES the ego's reasoning system to draw conclusions.

That's fine, if you're talking about the physical world. But the instant you start talking about God's Kingdom, his laws, his nature, his creations, you are now in TOTALLY inappropriate territory for that way of thinking. That way of thinking is NOT how God thinks, so it WILL NOT map correctly to God's Kingdom or draw correct conclusions about it. And HIS world is not broken up into pieces of "either this or that."

The key difference is that God's Kingdom and system of thought, logic and reason, are based on INCLUSION AND SHARING. Whereas the ego's system is based on EXCLUSION and SEPARATION. This can be simplified to two simple equations or formulations:

God: BOTH THIS AND THAT ARE EQUALLY TRUE.

Ego: EITHER THIS IS TRUE OR THAT IS TRUE, BUT NOT BOTH.

You can also see that since God's Kingdom is reality, and the ego is the idea of the OPPOSITE of God, the ego is a logical "operation" of NOT GOD, or the negation of God. And if eternity is "always", the ego's opposite is NEVER. ie "always never."

Which is why its whole system is based on this notion of "This is true, but that is not". ie EITHER this is true, OR it's false, but not both. Or this applies to ME OR YOU, but not both at once. There is no simultaneous, at-once, sharing, or inclusiveness, in the ego world. And that limits its thought process.

In God's thought system, God shares all of himself with his creations. This SHARING, fundamental to his nature, means that his creations HAVE everything God has. Without limit. Without compromise. Without one person having something and having to wait until the other is done with it. They SHARE it, like simultaneous access. And they OVERLAP each other, which is impossible in the physical world without causing an atomic explosion.

Similarly, the Golden Rule which describes God's thought system, applies here just the same. What is true of one brother, is true of another brother. What is true of one of God's creations, is true of ALL creations. Every thing God creates is EQUAL in its nature and its wholeness and its perfection and its LIKENESS to God.

So now you can say something which sounds bizarre like, if what is true of ME is true of YOU, then it is true of BOTH of us. It is true of ME *AND* YOU. Which means if it is true that I am me, it must also be true that YOU ARE ME ALSO. And now there are two things, me and you, which are ALSO simultaneously BOTH one thing, while still being two things.

THAT is the "oneness" that is taking place in reality. And it's this oneness of sharing that many do not understand because it DEFIES exclusive thinking. I am INCLUDED in my brother, I am INCLUDED In God, and my creations are INCLUDED in me.

In God's system, a whole bunch of seemingly bizarre things are possible and true. For example Jesus talks about how when you GIVE in reality, you SHARE it, and now YOU have it AND the other has it. Because now both of you share the same thing. And instead of having to LOSE the thing, you now allow another to GAIN it while you RETAIN it. Which means it has INCREASED. This defies the ego's reasoning.

"Ideas are increased by sharing."

It would be silly to suggest that when God creates, he sacrifices himself and there is nothing of himself left, given that he GAVE ALL of himself to his creation. But that's what the ego would conclude. The ego would also conclude that if YOU have everything, NO ONE else can have ANYTHING, because there is nothing left to have that is not already yours.

Ego produces a FINITE system because it does not want to share anything and so sees everything as LIMITED in its amount. This also leads to conditional love, like love is a scarce commodity to be traded. The ego would say if you have all of God, no-one else can have any of God, because the ego is based on SELFISHNESS, which arises naturally as part of a system of exclusion. As Jesus confirms:

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

In the ego system, when you give something, you lose it, the other gains it, you sacrifice, and there is no increase. If I have a pizza and I want to "share" it with you, I have to SACRIFICE AND LOSE half the pizza. This is compromise, not sharing. We both have less than wholeness. But in heaven, its the total opposite. I can have the whole pizza, you can have the whole pizza, because we share it. We OVERLAP. We merge together and are one in our having of the pizza. And now we BOTH have THE WHOLE.

Similarly when you think about sons of God, the EGO's way of thinking would say you have to put things in concrete boxes and keep them SEPARATE. Which leads you to conclude, EITHER I am in my body, OR I am in your body, but not both. But God's law would say, I am in my brother and in myself at the same time. What is true of me is true of him. Therefore there are TWO brothers who ARE ONE. Their oneness or union DOES NOT IN ANY WAY overthrow or erase or undo or cancel, the fact that there are STILL TWO. And this applies clearly in cases like "one brother is all brothers", and "I and my father are one." Jesus confirms:

"This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND.""

"Every mind is in all minds."

Notice here that he clarifies that there are STILL TWO PARTS in the statement. There is still ME and GOD. Two entities. Yet, they are ONE. Which means logically, 1=1 and 2=1. This makes no sense to the ego. But it is true. And accurate. And correct. This is how things are in reality. God has created a son, SHARED everything with him, so now THEY BOTH have everything, and thus they BOTH AS TWO ... are one. Their oneness does not undo their twoness, and their twoness does not undo their oneness. None of this has to do with the ego or "the separation".

The ego on the other hand, or those who THINK WITH the ego, tend to think about God's kingdom in EITHER OR terms. This is a complete logical failure. It results in false conclusions all over the place. If AIR, let's say, is in one box AND in another box, the ego would have to say, the air can only be IN one box OR the other box, not both. But the air is in both boxes. Similarly, a son of God is in his own box, BUT he is ALSO in the boxes of all the other sons. And in God's box/being.

If you use ego reasoning to draw conclusions about the inner contents of the Kingdom, YOU WILL come to a false conclusions, guaranteed. God's Kingdom is not made up of SEPARATE (un-shared) BOXES. It's made of SHARING boxes. So you can't say "either this or that", or "either one son or many", or "either God or God and a son", or "either oneness or separation" or "either one or many". That's all ego thought. It's a mistake. You have to THINK LIKE God to "get" what God's system is really like. And that way of think is to think WAAAY outside the box.

Once you recognize that God's system is based on a totally different kind of logic, basically "BOTH AND" rather than "EITHER OR", *EVERYTHING* Jesus says no longer is a contradiction. It is no longer contradictory to say "God has but one son knowing them all as one". It does not mean He only has a count of one son, because that ignores the fact he has many. And is does not mean that by having many they are "separate" in the ego sense, because they DO SHARE EVERYTHING and therefore transcend their boxes and thus ARE one. Their oneness and manyness coexists.

If all you do with these kind of statements is to TAKE SIDES with one PART of the statement and relegate the other to "the ego", that's a total fail. Because now you will relegate perfectly legitimate multitudes of creations of God to the realm of EGO, or multiple minds are now considered fragments of one mind, or multiple sons is considered an illusion. WHICH IS WRONG. It is completely a total failure of logical reasoning because the wrong kind of logic is being used

You can't just say "well it says I and my father are one, therefore I don't exist.". That's BS. That's what the EGO concludes. That's not God's conclusion, nor is it true. It is still true that YES, essentially, in truth, you and God ARE ONE THING. But, this oneness DOES NOT in the traditional sense mean or imply that there aren't ALSO two things. God IS a father and DID create a son.

I want to just make it clear that this is also NOT the same thing as"duality". Some people will argue that God having many of anything is duality. It is not the same at all.

Duality is the ego's idea of separateness. That is, that something is EITHER this OR that. This denies sharing. When you change the "OR" into an "AND", to correctly map to God's nature, the statement becomes THIS AND THAT. Which now suggests that there is sharing between TWO or more things. This is no longer duality, but it is also NOT THE END of individuality or many-ness. In any "contradictory" statement Jesus makes like that, THIS (part A) AND THAT (part B) are BOTH true. Without cancelling each other, and without opposing each other.

God's Kingdom is not duality. Duality means separate boxes WITHOUT sharing. As Jesus confirms:

"It is the part that believes your existence means you are SEPARATE. Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply BEING."

Those RELATIONSHIPS, are the SHARING nature of the Kingdom. You need more than one of something to have relationship. It's what joins you with God and the Christ mind. But these relationships also do NOT undo your individuality. Nor does it imply that you having a self is unholy.

God who is whole, creates additional wholes beings. He cannot create partial beings. "The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created, there is no lack in it." So now if God has a son, which he does, because he's a creator, and a father, His son MUST BE A WHOLE, yet to ego logic you can't have two wholes.

If God is all encompassing, there is NO ROOM FOR ANY SON AT ALL. To the ego, anyway. Because "two wholes" is nonsense to the ego. Yet many proponents of oneness and non-duality like the idea of there being at least a son still, which is COMPLETELY illogical in any thought system.

Ego thinkers who struggle with logic will conclude this. But the truth is God does have a son, and there ARE TWO WHOLES. The reason this is POSSIBLE is because of sharing. The two wholes SHARE everything, and therefore ARE ALSO ONE WHOLE. EACH SON therefore is a WHOLE SON, has everything, and shares it with the WHOLE of the rest. As Jesus confirms:

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

This is a statement of divine logic. God is whole, and yet, he SHARED himself to create MANY "separate" beings, INDIVIDUAL WHOLES - souls, sons, who HAVE EVERYTHING because they share all of God, and they WANT to SHARE it. This statement was taken out of later editions btw, probably due to ego thought processes that deemed it "nonsense" or "suggesting separation", appearing to be a contradiction when it IS NOT. God created separate beings who are share as one.

Technically God should not have a son, or be a father, or a creator, if God is everything. Because what is all encompassing cannot have an opposite, thus cannot create a division or separation. BUT God DOES that, not by SPLITTING, but by SHARING. He allows within his own being the presence of additional beings provided they SHARE ALL of what is, thus NOT invalidating their individuality OR the wholeness of the system

"Nothing real can be increased, except by sharing."

Even to the ego the idea of God having even ONE son makes no sense. It implies separation and two-ness. And that is against the EGO'S spiritualized concept of "oneness" meaning "a count of one". Ego reasons, if you remove all separations, you must end up with ONE BLOB. One perfect blob, which we'll call oneness or God. And thus IT concludes THIS is what God is like. But this is the logical outcome of EGO thought processes. And it is COMPLETELY WRONG.

Or perhaps we can say it is partly right, because God IS one and his whole creation IS one, BUT.... it is also many. And it is this "one AND many" which the ego CANNOT comprehend. It can reason there is one, OR many, but not both. And BOTH is true. Because God IS a creator of many sons, and has a FAMILY. And his nature is to share, and be inclusive, which means BOTH me AND God exist.

"the whole family of God, or the Sonship"

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

AND, you have your own creations, which further adds to the sonship. AND God created the holy spirit. AND the angels. The Holy Trinity DOES have three entities. And "The Kingdom of God includes all his children and their creations." AND "Heaven is the sum of all God's thoughts, in number infinite." Infinite creations is a LOT MORE than "one". But the ego would balk at this as if it's some kind of "duality", or separation, or ego. EGO concludes that God is ego-like!

So if you really want to grasp HOW and WHY Jesus is NOT contradicting himself, and WHY his seemingly opposite statements are NOT against each other, and why ALL parts of his statements are true simultaneously, and why God did create multiple children who are BROTHERS, and why separate individual beings does not mean ego or duality, you have to adopt a whole different way of reasoning. A thought system LIKE how God thinks.

"Either this or that" is ego and DOES NOT work when used to think about ANYTHING in heaven. And this one "default" way of reasoning is what almost EVERY acim student uses, because we don't recognize that we're basing all our thought on a false permise and assumption. It's an assumption to believe that two things cannot be one thing, or it's "natural" for two things to be separate and not share anything, or that you can never have two things being one thing. You have to question this.

Such thinking has led to countless horrendous manglings of the course material and its meaning. Relegating Jesus's TRUE statements to PARTIAL truths and partial falsehoods. Which has produced interpretations of the course which fall way short. People then either conclude WRONG things about heaven, or they give up and exclaim its not possible to undestand it because they can't see HOW to think outside the box. BOTH are ego reactions to ITS failed logic.

"No-one who looks upon this "reasoning" EXACTLY as it is could fail to see it does NOT follow, and it makes NO sense. Yet it SEEMS sensible"

To the ego, the truth is UTTER NONSENSE. But what is nonsense to the ego, makes perfect sense to God. To him it is completely natural to create an infinite number of creations which all are whole and coexisting in total harmony, sharing everything without selfishness or egotism. And God's creations DO NOT think in terms of "me or you", but in terms of US. You have real holy brothers and always will.

"We are creation, WE, the sons of God."

If you are affected in any way, it is not YOU who is affected, it is an illusion (body etc). And if it is affected in any way, you are trying to use it to prove you can be affected. You cannot be affected, you are immortal. So you're faking it, and it's pointless. You can't change the fact you are immortal, ever. Your permanence is guaranteed.

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No-one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness."

"He can see no evil; nothing in the world to fear, and no-one who is different from himself."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"I am not the victim of the world I see."

"It is but an effect that YOU have caused, and you would not BE cause of this effect."

"And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect it cannot make effects. "

""My Self is ruler of the universe." - It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen."

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this."

"He MUST deny the world of pain, the instant he perceives the arms of love around him. "

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS. For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER. ... Both are not true, yet either one will seem as real to you, as the amount to which you hold it dear. And yet their power is NOT the same, because their real attraction to you IS unequal. You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust even as you made it. ...This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all."

"You cannot be hurt unless you hurt yourself."

"You are immortal and you cannot die. But you can confuse yourself with things that do."

"I am not afraid but all powerful."

YOU are not responsible for establishing the innocence of yourself or others.

The nature of a soul is ENTIRELY the responsibility of God. God establishes the nature of the soul at its CREATION, and gives it its attributes. These attributes are permanent, because God's nature is permanence and He only creates that which is permanent.

God is also innocence so the soul INHERITS His innocence permanently. God does not design the soul to be ABLE to sin, to attack, to be sick or to die. These things are literally impossible in reality. The soul remains PERFECTLY INNOCENT FOREVER.

The function of forgiveness is not there to ESTABLISH the innocence of yourself or others. It is moreso a way to RECOGNIZE the PRE-EXISTING innocence of yourself and others.

Forgiveness and atonement are the same thing. To accept atonement is to accept the truth. But the truth that's being accepted isnt "the atonement" itself. The truth is OF GOD. The truth is the reality of the soul. The reality of the soul is being accepted in the atonement. And so similarly forgiveness recognizes the EXISTING innocence of the soul.

This is why forgiveness is said to be the recognition that there IS NO SIN. It is by recognizing the heavenly truth of yourself and others that you become aware that you HAVE ALWAYS been innocent, nothing has changed, and you STILL ARE innocent. This is awarenes that you HAVE NOT sinned because SIN IS NOT A FUNCTION OF THE SOUL.

Literally and without exception, every soul is permanently innocent and permanently sinless and utterly incapable of ever sinning. Atonement or forgiveness is merely the recognition and ACCEPTANCE of this FACT. It is a willingness to see reality and to put aside all notions that contradict the will of God.

Given that God WILLED, in the creation of the soul, that the soul be permanently sinless, forgiveness merely "sorts out" whether or not an accusation of sin is true of the soul or not. By clearly distinguishing what GOD WILLED in the soul's creation, which is done forever, you can recognize the truth.

"Recognize this, for it is true, and truth MUST be recognized, if it is to be distinguished from illusion"

"This is because of the miracle's inherent avoidance of within-error distinctions. Its SOLE concern is to distinguish between truth, on the one hand, and ALL kinds of error, on the other."

What Jesus refers to a the miracle, which perhaps we can also equate with atonement and forgiveness, is the state of recognition that ONLY God's truth and will are true, and nothing else is true. This is a recognition of WHAT GOD HAS DONE, versus what we believe has happened in dreams.

This is also why Jesus says: "The miracle does nothing. All it does is to UNdo. And thus it cancels out the interference to what HAS BEEN done. It does not add, but merely takes away."

Since "to atone is to undo", all we're doing in forgiveness is NOT doing the ego stuff, and cancelling out the interference to what GOD HAS DONE. That means recognizing the truth God established already in the creation of souls, and putting aside anything that contradicts that truth.

Individual miracles can also be said to reawaken the mind to the correct awareness of what the truth IS, as given BY GOD. They remind the mind of what is already true.

So forgiveness is just the process of discerning whether GODS TRUTH is true, or whether some other truth is true. Recognizing the truth of your brother is recognizing his soul nature. The truth about his soul was already established by God. Recognizing the permanent innocence of yourself and others is the way to remember God and to do His Will.

The world is nothing. Therefore anything that it seems to be is neutral, or meaningless.

This means you cannot assign ANY attributes to it. It cannot be said to be sinful and guilty. But it also cannot be said to be holy and innocent.

Many people think that in order to forgive things in the world you have to find them innocent. If you take the sin and guilt away, doesn't this imply that you end up with something innocent?

That would apply ONLY IF the world were a real thing. Because the world is UNREAL, it is really nothing at all. So it can't BE anything. It is not a creation.

So you can't say it is guilty or sinful. AND you can't say that it is innocent or holy. It's a mistake to think that forgiving the world is taking an attitude of regarding it as innocent and holy. It can't actually BE those things because the are attributes of real things, not illusions.

The world and body must be recognized as NOTHING, just a dream, just a meaningless void. You can't say it is sinful or hate it or attack it or want to destroy it. You can't project guilt onto it because it can't actually BE guilt or sin.

But in the same vein, because it is NOTHING, you also cannot say the world is love, or light, or real, or true, or innocence, or holiness. It can't BE any of those things because it is really an illusion and not actually there to attach those things to.

We're actually meant to FORGET this world and focus squarely on the Kingdom of God - heaven, beyond this world. We're meant to RECOGNIZE that this world is nothing at all - effectively that there IS NO WORLD AT ALL.

There is no world because the world is not ANYTHING real. It's not positive, or negative. It's not lovely or ugly. It's not true or false. It's not innocent or guilty. It's not sinful or holy. It's not anything you say it is. It is nothing at all, and it is not really there. It's an hallucination - and you wouldn't assign real attributes to something fictional.

To forgive the world therefore, yes, you need to stop projecting sin and guilt and hate onto it. But you ALSO must not flip to the opposite and start trying to project innocence and holiness onto it. It can't BE that either. It's just a dream. It doesn't have the presence, reality, substance or truth to house or hold or LIVE these attributes. It's just a puff of smoke drifting away in the wind.

"To see a SINLESS body is impossible. For holiness is POSITIVE, and the body is merely neutral. It is NOT sinful, but neither is it sinless. As nothing, which it IS, the body cannot meaningfully be invested with attributes of Christ OR of the ego. EITHER must be an error, for both would place the attributes where they cannot BE. And BOTH must be undone, for purposes of truth." UrT20H4

"The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE." UrT12G3

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end." UrU5A1

"The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real." UrW132L4

"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach." UrW132L6

"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere?" UrW132L13

"Without the idea of death there is no world. All dreams will end with this one." UrM28A6

"He does NOT realize that HE MAKES THIS WORLD, for there IS no world outside him." UrT11D6

"The world you see does not exist BECAUSE the place where you perceive it is not real. " UrT28F7

"I cannot seen in darkness but in light."

Instead of thinking of the ego, think of two thought systems or two minds. Jesus refers in ACIM to us having a higher mind and a lower mind. A portion of mind became 'lower' in the separation from God, and focuses on being separate.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought"

"I AM working with your higher mind whether you are asleep or awake, (just as your ego does with your lower mind.."

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

When you are in the higher mind, you are in the light and you can see. You recognize what everything is, nothing is hidden, and you are not deceived.

When you are in the lower mind, you cannot see, you cannot recognize, and you are deceived. It's like being unconscious. You cannot tell that you are in the lower mind because it is a place of darkness.

When you are in the lower mind you lose perspective and lose sight of where you are, lost in the woods. You may not even realize you are in the lower mind at all, and think everything is normal, and may forget completely that there even is a higher way to see.

This is because the lower mind is the realm of egotism, separation, darkness and confusion, narrowness and closed-ness and limitation. It's a mind level that perceives falsely, makes illusions real and believes in the physical world. It is where you are deceived and distracted and reacting as a victim.

So really when you are in the "ego-mind" (thought system) you have a kind of loss of awareness that makes it much much harder to recognize that you are in the ego. The whole thought system of that mindset is like being in a dark prison cell, lost and alone, and not even remembering that there even is a light outside.

When you get back out into the higher mind, into the light, you can see again, you can recognize things, and you can tell where you are. You also, when in the higher mind, suddenly have the perspective that recognises where and what the lower mind is, and that there even is a lower mind within you.

This allows you to realize that you WERE in the lower mind, because you know that it was a state of ego. From the perspective of being in the higher mind, you have a sense that you have a kind of "lower self" within you that is very primal and basic and victim-oriented and fearful.

This is the "self you made", the ego-oriented thought system. Like a child that throws temper tantrums and screams at the universe. It's a whole system of thinking and perceiving.

If you slip out of the higher mind you lose sight of even HAVING a "lower self" within you, that you need to be vigilant against, and you fall back into it. Then you lose sight of the big picture and it seems like the lower self is all that exists and all that you are. Then it's a scramble trying to get yourself back out of it into the light.

It's like, you need the light of the higher mind in order to be able to tell that you're in the lower mind, but when you're in the lower mind you don't have that light so you get lost and stuck in it easily. Trying to get yourself out of the darkness into the light is the best thing you can do to give you perspective and help you to recognize where you are and what you're doing.

The aim is to be in the higher mind as much as possible so that the lower mind is ultimately dissolved. Or rather, that that portion of mind is freed from its egoic focus and its belief in separation so that that mind can be reintegrated as part of the higher mind.

Also note that the lower mind includes the intellect, which is a seemingly 'higher' function within the lower mind that uses separation to split things up and analyse and judge. Jesus says in ACIM that this intellectual lower mind actually produces the physical world of space and time. The higher mind rises above the battlefield and transcends it.

"Miracles are the absence of the body. They are sudden shifts into invisibility, away from lower order reality. That is why they heal."

This includes the kittens and puppies and adorable farm animals and all the wild creatures of the earth, including the human bodies and aliens.

I would like to know if you find it difficult to let go of the idea that these "creatures" are real, that they are "alive", that they were somehow "made by God", or that they even exist, in terms of what the Course says?

For example "there is no world" and "there is no life outside of heaven" and "this is a dream of death" and so on. If this is true, all these things, these forms of matter, these objects which move around as if they are alive, being animated as illusions by the mind, they really do not exist or have "life".

As Jesus says even the human body is not alive. It doesn't really exist, it's not who you are, and it is an illusion. It is made of the idea of separation and death. So really it's more appropriate to say it's a "death form."

So now we have various creatures and plants and trees and so on which at times can appear to be lovely and all that. You can have love for them or be attached to them or want to protect them and save the environment etc. But... it's all an ego trap, right?

Over time my belief that physical objects are "alive" has had to come into question. There's two things being asserted and they can't both be true.

This is a cruel world which God did not create. If you go to youtube and watch some videos of wild animals maming and killing and eating each other, you can see that there is little "love" in that, and God couldn't possibly have created it. So is it life, or are these the creatures of hell?

What God creates lives forever. Is that true of anything in this world in particular? Pretty much nothing. "There is NO LIFE outside of heaven." So this world, which is the idea of being outside of heaven, is not life, right? So what is it? It's an illusion of nothing, depicting an idea of death.

"The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son." The whole world. All the matter, all the particles, all the separate things, all the creatures which feast on each other, all the beings that take away and must attack to continue living, and all the humans who must hunt and kill in order to avoid the ego dynamic of starvation.

Is this LIFE? here? ... this world? Is it ALIVE? really? Or is it simply a dream of death, where everything is MADE OF the idea of death and separation, masquerading as life and pretending to be alive? Is it not "the dry and dusty desert where starved and thirsty creatures come to die"? To "come to hate a while, wither and die"? A cruel world which LIFE could not possibly have created, which is part way between life and total death, and thus barely alive at all?

How about "this world holds NOTHING that I want"? Or "A teacher of God will gladly give up all the pleasures of the world"?

There may be some remaining semblance of life here. We cannot actually fully separate ourselves from God and even the illusions we make cannot be fully "outside the laws of God". Even these illusory forms must come from a mind which is alive enough to project them. They may have a little life left, but it isn't much. And it's nothing compared to heaven.

It's a sorry picture. But this world is really not what LIFE is like. It's not HOW life lives. It is not how life FUNCTIONS. It is run by ego laws of death, competition and destruction. We like to stick a bow on it and wrap the dogs in clothes and make little play houses for the cats but hey... they die, right?

Their bodies can't be real. And the humans... their bodies also can't be real.

Immortality is of the soul, which God created, in heaven. That is where life is. That's real life. Eternal life. Life which cannot be changed or killed or hurt in any way. That's reality. That's where the LIFE is.

Forms, all forms, are "the form of error". They are depictions of separateness. Every single one of them. Are they life forms, or are they LIE forms? What is LIFE really?

There are two worlds. The Kingdom of God, which really exists, and the world we made to oppose the Kingdom as an assertion of death and non-existence.

The Kingdom of God is a permanent, real world. It is Creation, in which everything is alive and has eternal life. All is immortal, perfect, loving and at peace. Nothing can ever happen to this world or anything in it, except through the joyful extension of God's will to create and share and celebrate.

The world we made, was made as an opposite to the Kingdom. It is encapsulated by spacetime and takes on the form of everything material, physical, energetic etc. All of it is an illusion, a dream, an imagined world, where strange things seem to happen and impossibilities seem possible.

"Heaven remains your one alternative to the strange world you made."

"Earth, Heaven's opposite in EVERY way."

The simple but seemingly difficult challenge for us, is to put all of our attention, belief, trust, identity and intimacy into the hands of the Kingdom, and NOT into the hands of the world we made. To overlook the world we made and look past it with Christ Vision TO the Kingdom is our goal.

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK."

"Therefore, the Holy Spirit's third lesson is: "Be vigilant ONLY for God and HIS Kingdom."

"This is why you MUST be vigilant ON GOD'S BEHALF. The ego speaks AGAINST His Creation, and therefore DOES engender doubt. You cannot go BEYOND belief UNTIL you believe wholly."

"Vigilance is not necessary for truth, but it IS necessary AGAINST ILLUSION. Truth is WITHOUT illusions, and therefore WITHIN the Kingdom. Everything OUTSIDE the Kingdom IS ILLUSION."

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it seems like life; at worst, death."

This seems difficult because it's asking us no less than to identify as being something beyond all bodies, to recognize others as not bodies at all, to find nothing in the world we made that we value or want, to recognize the world has nothing to offer, to let go of all delusions about the world being real, to fall for absolutely no temptations to believe otherwise, and to completely transition to identifying and recognizing ourselves as ONLY spirit.

We are OF another world. We seem to be IN this world. But we need to become absolutely clear that there is no world here. This doesn't seem to be easy and in fact seems difficult given the sheer extent of how much we believe in, react to, identify with, and are convinced by the illusory world presented to us. But it IS our final goal, in the atonement, to completely peel ourselves away from this fake world and all it seems to offer or suggest, and put our hearts entirely into the hands of God.

"God commended His Spirit to you, and asks that you commend yours to Him."

"NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends his Spirit into the hands of His Father. By doing this, the mind awakens from its sleep, and the Soul remembers its Creator. All sense of Separation disappears, and level confusion vanishes."

This means we have to literally wean off the world. We have to want the Kingdom with all our willingness and hearts and minds. We have to recognize that immortality is the only truth and mortality is a completely powerless fiction. That only God's truth, as His Living Kingdom, is true and real and acceptable and attractive. We must believe strongly and fully in the reality of God's creation and our immortality, and disbelieve and overlook all suggestion to the contrary.

To do this we have to learn also that we are not a physical body, nor is anyone else a physical body. We have been very confused that people are their bodies, and when things happen to bodies we recoil and react as if the person is affected. This only means we are confused in thinking these immortal beings are susceptible to suffering. Bodies must be overlooked. The world must be overcome. We must attune to the spirit world and return to it through truth and sanity and recognition.

Only the Kingdom of God really exists. Only the Holy Trinity is real. Only the creations of light are real. There is no world here.

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

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The main difference between us as yet is that I have NOTHING ELSE. This leaves me in a state of true holiness, which is only a POTENTIAL in you."

Nothing belongs to you exclusively. Everything is shared by everyone inclusively. This is the law of God.

"We come in confidence today, aware that what belongs to us in truth is what He gives. And we would wish for nothing else, for nothing else belongs to us in truth."

"what is Yours belongs to me as well"

"As every gift my brothers give is mine, so every gift I give belongs to me."

"We ask no more than what belongs to us in truth."

"everything WE do belongs to you as well"

"God gives WHATEVER belongs to Him, because He gives OF HIMSELF, and EVERYTHING belongs to Him."

"Every loving thought held in ANY part (of the Sonship) belongs to every part."

"Sharing the perfect Love of the Father, the Son must share what belongs to Him, for otherwise He will not know the Father or the Son."

"And EVERYTHING belongs to each of them."

"What is God's BELONGS to everyone, and IS his due."

"The creations of every Son of God are yours, because every creation belongs to everyone, being created for the Sonship as a whole."

You have nothing that is yours alone. Which means you have nothing special or exclusive or just for you. This means you aren't special, have not been granted special favor, and don't have any treasures that belong just to you. This however doesn't mean you have nothing at all, because in fact you share everything with everyone. God's Kingdom is not a place of exclusive ownership. It's kind of like an open buffet. Everyone is welcome, everything is for everyone, everything belongs to everyone, and everyone has simultaneous access to everything. It's completely open and unlimited.

"Nothing real can be increased except by sharing."

God who is complete, cannot add anything to himself. He is already infinite and everywhere. He is kind of like a closed system that way. However, all parts of God host all of God, because every part of God is God. And this means every part of God shares the whole of God. All of God belongs to every part of God, and every part of God is whole.

God can therefore create by sharing himself. He hosts his creations within his own being, literally sharing his own existence. But this requires that anything he creates, must be created to purely and completely share all of himself. Any created being must have full access to everything God has, and must inherit everything from him.

Inheriting from God does not mean you receive a windfall that's exclusively just for you. It's not like winning the lottery. Everything that exists still belongs to God, and is him. But he creates you by allowing you to share everything he has. He gives himself to you in your creation. You inherit God, and inherit everything from God, but God is a co-owner of everything he shares.

"I who am host to God AM worthy of Him."

"When God GAVE Himself to you in your creation, He ESTABLISHED you as host to Him forever."

"And yet, it is your mind that IS the host to Him."

"The mind is then in a state of Grace, and naturally becomes gracious, both to the Host within and the stranger without. By bringing in the stranger, he becomes your brother."

This means that you are created to share everything, and the only way you can exist at all is if you share absolutely everything. God cannot add anything onto the outside of himself, so can only share what is inside of himself. You are hosted by God within his own being, and your entire function must be to share everything openly and fully. Only by sharing it can you have it at all, and you must be willing to give it all in order to have it.

This creates an environment in the Kingdom that we might describe as a totally open society. It's a relationship in which everyone has total full access to everything at all times. Everyone has all of God. Everyone is plugged into God. Everyone has FULL access to everything that exists, simultaneously and in parallel. One being having full access does not deprive any other being any kind of access. Their access overlaps.

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

"This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

You can exist only if God shares everything that exists with you. And now both of you have everything that already exists. And you can only exist if you are willing to fully share everything that exists with everyone else. Which means that no-one anywhere in the Kingdom has anything that anyone else lacks, and no-one lacks anything that anyone else has. Everything belongs to everyone forever.

This also leads to the fact that no-one can have anything that belongs ONLY to them. You have absolutely nothing that is yours alone. The ego begs to differ, because "the ego is the idea of selfishness." It is the part of you that believes in specialness and in exclusivity. It wants to have everything for itself, such that it shares nothing with anyone. The ego is the antithesis of sharing and openness, and wants exclusive rights, ownership and control. It was the desire not to share that led to the separation. "You were at peace until you asked for special favor, and God did not give it."

What this leads to is the truth that, in and of yourself, by yourself, alone, you have absolutely NOTHING that belongs exclusively to you. Nothing you can put your name tag on, nothing you can say is legally yours, nothing that is just yours and no-one else's. If it seems that you have such things, possessions, toys, clothes, cars, houses, bodies, whatever, which seem to be exclusively "yours", and no-one else's, then you are aligned with the ego.

We need to recognize that in and of our own selves, we can do nothing. We have no life without God. We have no power without God. We have NOTHING without God. You don't even have any existence without God. You have nothing that is personal just to you which is yours alone. Nothing belongs just to you. In effect, you are utterly powerless and tiny and weak and afraid and empty and non-existent if it all boils down to "what is only mine".

"I am nothing without the Father, and YOU are nothing without me because by DENYING the Father you deny YOURSELF."

"The presence of fear is a sure sign that you are trusting in your own strength."

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

This is where it becomes interesting. You alone, on your own, in isolation, have absolutely NOTHING. That is to say, ignoring God for a moment, ignoring your inheritance, ignoring anything that anyone else has, you actually have absolutely ZERO "for yourself'. Zero that is "of you". Nothing that has been sourced in you, that you have invented, within yourself, which is unshared or belongs to you alone.

That really means that you don't have any kind of special talents or abilities that can be said to "make you unique". You don't have any special "super powers" that others lack. You don't have any exclusive "something", some kind of special secret treasure, that no-one else has. You don't have any possessions that really are yours alone, which is easily proven by the fact that anyone can take them away from you, and they all can be lost, because they were never really yours to begin with.

So you are empty. Without God, you are nothing. Without God you don't even have existence. HOWEVER, you are not without God. If you are willing to go beyond your ego, you in fact regain access to your inheritance. You become once again a member of the Sonship. You open up to receiving your inheritance, which is everything real, in exchange for giving up the NOTHING that you have otherwise. "We will gain EVERYTHING by giving HIM the power and the

glory, and keeping NO illusions of where they are."

"As You created me, I can give up nothing You gave me. What You did not give has no reality. What loss can I anticipate except the loss of fear, and the return of Love into my mind?"

"for the simple willingness to give up nothing, BECAUSE it is nothing" "Is it a sacrifice to give up nothing, and to receive the Love of God forever?"

"Of yourself you can do none of these things."

"Specialness is the function that you gave yourself. It stands for you alone, as self-created, self-maintained, in need of nothing, and unjoined with anything beyond the body. In its eyes, you are a separate universe, with all the power to hold itself complete within itself, with every entry shut against intrusion, and every window barred against the light."

So here are your options. On the one hand you have what the ego is offering, which is absolutely nothing, disguised as something special and rare, something which is exclusive just for you, something special, which makes you important and unique and different. But which really is made of nothing at all, and is not something you can really have, nor can it last forever. And by trying to have it, you may seem to gain the fictional world, and lose your soul.

"What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own Soul?" The alternative on offer, is that you are invited as a guest to join in the Kingdom of God, in which you are allowed to participate openly, freely, and fully. Provided that you are willing to share everything that exists with everyone. And provided you are willing to share your entire self with everyone. And provided you are willing to grant everyone total free access to everything at all times.

And provided you do not in any way attempt to hoard anything for yourself, to have any trace of selfishness, nor to regard anything as belonging ONLY to you. That nothing belongs ONLY to you doesn't mean you have nothing, only that what you HAVE isn't ONLY yours to have and must be shared. You DO have power, but it only so long as you acknowledge that you SHARE this power with God and with everyone. To take it away from them, to have it just for you, is to strip it from yourself and be powerless.

Provided you are willing to enter into a relationship with the whole sonship, where everything belongs to everyone equally, then you can enter the Kingdom of God. To receive your inheritance isn't to receive a big special christmas gift that no-one else gets to play with. All things that are real, that you can actually HAVE, have to belong to everyone. It belongs to God, it belongs to you, AND it belongs to all your brothers. And everyone can access all of it all the time at the same time. "To have all, give all to all."

So you can either have basically nothing for yourself, disguised as receiving the illusory riches of the world, which appear to be valuable bullshit items that you don't even really want, and which have no real value, but which appear to be extremely valuable treasures. Or, you can openly share non-exclusive rights with everyone, to own ALL of the Kingdom of God, ALONG WITH God and with everyone else, in which everything belongs to everyone.

The gifts of God are given in order to "passed forward". He gives you the power to create, so that you can share and give what you have been given. Quite simply, "give what you have been given" is the only rule of the system. Give the love that God has given you. Nothing is ever given to just you alone, it is given FOR everyone.

"The therapist does not heal; he LETS HEALING BE. HE can point to darkness, but he CANNOT bring light OF HIMSELF, for light is NOT of him. But being FOR him, it MUST be for his patient."

"Healing must be for everyone"

"It MUST be for your brother, BECAUSE it is for you."

"The gifts you have are not for you alone. What He has come to offer you, you now must learn to give. This is the lesson that His giving holds, for He has saved you from the solitude you sought to make, in which to hide from God."

"It will NOT be for you alone, for therein lay its misery."

"Atonement is for all, because it is the way to UNDO the belief that ANYTHING is for you ALONE."

"Would God have created a Voice for you alone? Could you hear His answer EXCEPT as He answers ALL of God's Sons?"

"Salvation IS His Will BECAUSE you share it. NOT for you alone, but for the Self which IS the Son of God."

"The contrast is far greater than you think, for you will love this concept of yourself, BECAUSE IT WAS NOT MADE FOR YOU ALONE."

Quite simply, you either can be utterly powerless, afraid, weak, lacking, deprived, miserable, sick, unhappy, lost, desperate, improverished, bereft, and empty, OR .... you can acknowledge that the ONLY real thing you can HAVE is everything God has given already, and you can ONLY have it IF YOU ARE WILLING TO SHARE IT. Be selfish and end up alone and with nothing, or share with everyone and gain everything there is to have.

You can truly have what EVERYONE has, and only by ackowledging that it belong to them as well, OR you will end up empty handed. To try to take possession of some part of heaven for yourself, all of heaven will slip through your fingers. The more you try to own something, the less you have it. The more you try to depend on yourself alone, the less you become able to deal with life. The more you try to "go it alone", the more helpless you become.

God is your strength! His shared strength is literally YOUR strength. Without God, you have no strength at all. Of yourself you are nothing and have nothing. He is the battery-pack which fuels your power. However, because you are OF GOD, you HAVE EVERYTHING AND ARE EVERYTHING. God's power belongs to you, God's life belongs to you, God's entire creation belongs to you.

Everything real is YOURS. It is not just partly yours, it is FULLY yours. But it is also fully everyone's. You cannot have it by grasping for it to keep it for yourself, you can ONLY have it by acknowledging that it is EVERYONE'S RIGHT. And therefore you have to be open to GIVING IT. You must give what you have received, be open to sharing what you have, and everything must belong to everyone.

To admit that you have nothing SPECIAL about you, is humility. But this does not leave you powerless. It simply leaves you without a SPECIAL power that you invented. It strips you of your "super powers", your fictional sense of personal strength, and your illusion that you can do this ON YOUR OWN. You cannot do ANYTHING on your own. You are helpless and powerless on your own. The ONLY way you can live at all is to join with God and let him help you.

This is why you have to surrender your ego. You simply can't do life by yourself. When you try to you will depend on your own exclusive strength, which is pitiful at best and nothing at worst. And you will not be able to deal with anything. Only WITH God do you have stength. Only WITH God do you have anything at all! But with God, you are ALL POWERFUL. With God, you CAN DO ANYTHING.

"You can do ANYTHING I ask." "The power to work miracles belongs to you." "There is nothing my holiness cannot do." "Do his works." "What the holy spirit enables you to do is clearly not of this world."

"He brings you gifts that are not of this world, and only he, to whom they have been given, CAN make sure that you receive them. He will place them on YOUR throne, when you make room for him on his."

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you CAN see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His RESULTS, you will understand where He MUST be, and finally KNOW what He is."

"God gives WHATEVER belongs to Him, because He gives OF HIMSELF, and EVERYTHING belongs to Him."

"The Unity that specialness denies will save them all, for what is One can HAVE no specialness. And EVERYTHING belongs to each of them."

"It knows that it is EVERYWHERE, just as it has EVERYTHING and FOREVER." "No-one who knows that he has everything could seek for limitation, nor COULD he value the body's offerings."

"Being wholly pure, everyone joined in it HAS everything. This is NOT the basis for ANY love relationship in which the ego enters. For EVERY relationship on which the ego embarks IS special."

"No-one who has everything WANTS the ego. Its own maker, then, DOES NOT WANT IT."

"Who would have more OR less is not aware that he has everything."

"Innocence is INCAPABLE of sacrificing anything, because the innocent mind HAS everything and strives only to PROTECT its Wholeness."

"When EVERYONE has EVERYTHING, individual contributions to the Sonship will no longer be necessary."

"Your inheritance can neither be bought NOR sold. There can BE no disinherited parts of the Sonship, for God is whole, and all his extensions are like Him."

"Glory is your inheritance, given your Soul by its Creator, that you might EXTEND it."

"Those who witness for me are expressing, through their miracles, that they have abandoned deprivation in favor of the abundance they have learned BELONGS to them."

The holy spirit is not a metaphor, or an idea, or a concept, or a fiction, or just part of your own mind. He is an eternal, immortal spirit being. He is also a creator. Just as much real as you are.

"The Holy Spirit, being a creation of the one Creator, creating with Him and in His likeness or spirit, is eternal and has never changed."

In fact, Jesus tells us that we are part of the Holy Spirit, as much as He is part of us. He shares himself with each of us just as much as we each share ourselves with each other. This does not make him literally "our own self".

"This form is not His reality, which God alone knows along with Christ, His real Son, Who is part of Him."

The holy spirit existed before Jesus accepted atonement and exists forever.

"He has established Jesus as the leader in carrying out His plan."

"The Atonement principle was given to the Holy Spirit long before Jesus set it in motion."

The holy spirit is a bridge across the gap of separation who remains permanently aware of God and permanently aware of your connection to him. He is the answer to separation and the bringer of salvation.

"The Holy Spirit is described as the remaining Communication Link between God and His separated Sons. In order to fulfill this special function the Holy Spirit has assumed a dual function. He knows because He is part of God; He perceives because He was sent to save humanity. He is the great correction principle; the bringer of true perception, the inherent power of the vision of Christ. He is the light in which the forgiven world is perceived; in which the face of Christ alone is seen. He never forgets the Creator or His creation. He never forgets the Son of God. He never forgets you. And He brings the Love of your Father to you in an eternal shining that will never be obliterated because God has put it there."

Jesus further clarifies that the Holy Spirit "abides" in your mind, but this does not mean he is literally you or "your right mind". He is IN your right mind and the right minds of all souls, and yet has his own being or spirit and his own mind. He *represents* your self - that doesn't mean He IS your self. He is alike your self, and alike God. He proves you and your father are one, ie, of like kind. The part of your mind that joins with the whole sonship in "christ" is where He lives.

"The Holy Spirit abides in the part of your mind that is part of the Christ Mind. He represents your Self and your Creator, Who are One. He speaks for God and also for you, being joined with Both. And therefore it is He Who proves Them One."

After the atonement plan is complete, and after resurrection of all sons, Holy Spirit will remain as a permanent real creation of God. His function of perception will disappear and He will remain holy. His return to the formlessness of God does not mean He ceases to exist.

"And you will be with him when time is over and no trace remains of dreams of spite in which you dance to death's thin melody. For in its place the hymn to God is heard a little while. And then the Voice is gone, no longer to take form but to return to the eternal formlessness of God."

"When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed, there will be no call to return, but what God creates is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with the Sons of God, to bless THEIR creations and keep them in the light of joy."

Sin is really an attempt to make out that God is evil. It’s an attempt to turn a "loving cause" into "an evil cause".

When you are projecting your belief in sin outwards onto other people, what you’re really doing is trying to push God away by projecting ideas of evil onto Him, pushing Him out away from yourself, and to see Him as an external cause who is acting "against your will."

Really, sin is YOUR attempt to act against God’s will. The result of that is that you PERCEIVE that God is against your will.

When you see sin in a brother, you are really seeing your idea that God is a sinner. You see "cause" in the person, but you also combine that idea of cause with the idea of evil. So you see it as an "evil cause" or a "cause of evil". That’s the exact same thing as seeing someone as sinning against you, being against you in any way, being an enemy, etc.

You think it’s just your projection of your idea that you sinned, but it’s really the projection of your attempt to turn God into something unloving. You see this unloving cause outside of you because you think God is an unloving cause who is separate from you and acting against you.

When you choose to die, if you do, and given that all death is chosen on purpose, a state arises where you perceive that an "external deadly cause" comes along and finally manages to INFLICT ITS WRATH upon you, "causing you to die". In this act, it’s really your attempt to prove or play out your belief that God wants you dead, God is an evil hateful vengeful attacker who is causing you to die, and that therefore God does not cause creations of Eternal Life, but that God instead creates death.

So it is actually God who we believe destroys us every time that we die. We see it as this separated off, externalizations, rejected, hated enemy who is evil and vengeful who wants us dead. Even if we don’t acknowledge that consciously, EVERY DEATH occurs on this same basis of belief. This is the ego thought system playing out. Every death will appear to be caused by anyone OTHER than you, because you still see yourself as the "effect of God", and God has been mis-identified as causing death.

So when you try to die, you are actually trying to prove that God is a murderer. That it is God’s will that you be dead. This is why in your death wish, you actually believe that God WANTS you dead because you sinned. Or rather, you are attempting to prove that GOD is the sinner and that He is sinning against your innocence. You lay down and "allow" his wrath to happen to you to attempt to prove that you are not the one who sinned against God, but that HE Is the one who is murderous. When you prove this through death, you are trying to say that you do not believe in death at all - that He is the one who has rejected you, abandoned you, and who wants to punish you.

This is so twisted and backwards. God could not possibly want you dead. When you believe in real sin, your own sin, you WILL believe that God is the sinner and that you are innocent. You WILL see that God is outside of you plotting to kill you. And you will experience yourself as though "cause" is outside of you acting against your will. God’s will could never be against your will, if YOUR will were not trying to be DIFFERENT to His. Your opposition to His Will is what makes it seem as though His Will is acting against yours.

You will see this played out in all your relationships, because ultimately, your ONLY relationship is with God. So those people you think are your enemies, that’s really your mis-perception of God. You are not recognizing God, and instead see IN Him a false God of death. The real God is love, Life, and would never want to attack you. The real God is never against your will, although you can be against His and think that you are at war.

Sin is not real. You. Did not sin. God is not your enemy.

Our mind in its natural state is joined with our Soul and with God. In this state, it receives the causal expression and extends it. In a sense, the mind does not have its own content, it just extends what it receives.

After separating from God and ourselves, the mind is cut off from its "owner". This is due to a separation introduced between cause and effect. That which at the effect, the mind, starts to see itself as causeless, and so begins to make up its own ideas about what it is and what is true.

This turns the mind from being an extender of truth, to being a solo broadcaster of imagination.

The problem then is that anyone with an ego tends to broadcast a lot, and tends to receive very little. Being alone or isolated or trying to live without God makes us weak, vulnerable, afraid and helpless. Yet it also makes us spew out "noise", the noisy broadcasts of the ego, which basically is an attempt to be recognized as the cause of oneself, rather than being caused by God or Soul.

In a world where so many people are broadcasting themselves, there isn’t much listening. Consequently, even though people are broadcasting loudly, 24/7, everyone is talking over everyone else. People then are not really being present, available, un-distracted with themselves, or able to pay full attention. That means that those who are broadcasting, paradoxically end up not being heard.

This is because the rest of the broadcasters are not willing to receive. So no matter how loud you shout, if everyone else is also shouting your expressions will be stunted and stifled and you won’t feel like anyone really listens to you. In fact, the more that you shout louder in an attempt to be heard more, you will be heard less.

Many people in this world are expressing the ego. Few are expressing silence or stillness or presence or quietness or a willingness to receive. If you yourself become willing to receive from Spirit, your own mind will become quiet and you will subsequently become willing to receive ie listen to and pay attention to, what other people are expressing. Without distraction from your own thoughts or memories or judgements or attempts to process or reflect on what someone said.

Learning to listen is part of waking up, because it entails your own willingness to listen to Spirit. That means instead of running your own show, you turn your mind and your life over to the care of God. You become willing to receive input from Spirit. You become willing to trust Spirit. You become willing to let Spirit guide your every action, to even speak for you and through you.

The willingness to receive is what has become blocked by the ego. Separations and blocks to awareness are attempts to not listen to God, to hide from God, to replace God’s Word with your own, and to make up your own truth. Becoming willing to accept Atonement entails becoming willing to receive from God, to be guided by God, to allow yourself to accept love, and to let miracles be performed through you.

Therefore as you tune into Spirit, handing over your stolen life to its rightful owner, and giving back control of the mind to Love, you automatically become a better receiver and listener. You become better at being present. You become more available. And you start to allow others to fully express, willing that you receive everything they are offering. This simultaneously creates space for them to fully express themselves, to be heard, and to know that their expressions are not being met by deaf ears or a wall of selfishness. This holding space alone can be very healing.

You simply need to put all of your ego distractions aside, pay full undivided attention to the person, let them express absolutely anything they want to without interrupting or interfering or offering advice or any kind of transmission, without your secret mental judgements or attempts to chew on what they expressed, free of your reactions and defenses, just totally being fully present for them.

Do this for someone and you’ll be offering a tremendous healing service just by listening attentively without judgement. Afterwards, even if their ego erupts in a free-flow of expression, they will feel so peaceful and relieved that finally they could express themselves fully without someone being self-absorbed with their own ego reactions.

Give the gift of unconditional receiving and listening to someone this year. Let them have the microphone 100%, not 50%. Let them tell you whatever they want to tell you and just receive it.

Giving and receiving are one.

Time to get your mind out of the gutter?

"Eternity is an idea of God, so the soul understands it perfectly. Time is a belief of the ego, so the lower mind, which IS the ego's domain, accepts it without question."

Jesus refers to you having a lower mind and a higher mind. The lower mind, or the place where you have a "thought system" of spacetime and ego, arose in the separation from God.

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought that is PERFECTLY real in time, though not in Eternity."

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

The lower mind, or egoic false perception, tends to look at things in a narrow, hateful, judgemental way. It's kind of like the mind is coming at the things it seems from a "lower" vantage point, down on the landscape or battlefield. What we need is a "higher" vantage point which "overlooks" ("To forgive is to overlook") and sees with love.

Forgiveness, or being forgiving, is a gift given by the Holy Spirit. It's a true-perception viewpoint that looks from a high vantage point of holiness, harmlessness, innocence and love. The Holy Spirit sees with Christ Vision, and looks upon everything correctly, ie based on God's truth and love.

We might spend a lot of time trying to figure out "how to forgive", which is really the lower mind trying to stay in control. Instead, consider that we simply need to join with the Holy Spirit. We need to not simply ask for his help, but invite him in. We need to allow him to operate on us, and to help us to share in how he is seeing things.

That means getting your mind to see what and how he is seeing. Your mind has to experientially, not in theory, actually "shift" or move into a higher position, in which you receive the Holy Spirit's healing vision. In which you allow yourself to BE forgiven and to see with HIS forgiveness. A forgiveness that is GIVEN you, rather than one you keep trying to make yourself.

"Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven."

Notice how it says that overlooking guilt - in which to forgive is to overlook - means that forgiving must entail letting HIM forgive, and simply trying to line your mind up with his to be open to entering into, joining with, and experiencing, his sight. A little willingness is all that is needed to invite him to help, and to ask for his viewpoint, not to merely hand it down to you but to actually orient yourself so that you let his perspective become your own. Such that God's will becomes your own.

Also, although this is not stated often, forgiveness is the same thing as love. A forgiving perspective is a loving perspective. The mind has to be willing to want a HIGHER way to look at things.

"Forgiveness is an earthly form of love which as it is in Heaven has no form. Yet what is needed here is given here as it is needed. In this form you can fulfill your function even here, although what love will mean to you when formlessness has been restored to you is greater still."

Part of our challenge is we often do not recognize that we're in need of moving into a higher perspective. We are stuck and lost in our lower ego mind having false perceptions, which act like prisons and traps, and may not even realize that we're doing it. We think it's normal and don't question it. But we need to try to be vigilant and notice what we're doing, when we're being unforgiving, when we're going it alone, and when we need to ask for help.

The holy spirit is there to help you. God created him entirely TO help you, to heal you, to guide you, and to love and support you. You can't very well move closer to God without sharing in his mindset, his viewpoint, and his higher perception. But to move into it you have to be willing to let go of attack and sin and guilt and death. To be wiling to admit, you might be mistaken, you might've made a wrong choice, and you want something better. The only thing that is ever better is something closer to God.

"While I am not attacking your egos, I AM working with your higher mind whether you are asleep or awake, (just as your ego does with your lower mind.)"

If ACIM is to be believed, and interpreted correctly, it is literally saying that this world is the OPPOSITE of what's real. And therefore it is completely unlike the nature of God's Kingdom. Indeed, unlike your real self.

"For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true."

"earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

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

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

This presents a major challenge, because if the world is completely opposite to reality, truth, nature and eternal life, then every single thing in it is going to be doing things which are completely against who and what you are, against God's nature and will.

The Holy Spirit is now a spokesperson for the true nature of God's reality, and our own, and is here with us to help us to become heaven-like instead of earth-like. All of his motivation points towards eternal life rather than towards the world of mortality.

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death" "Nothing the world believes is true."

But if you'll think on this it's pretty crazy the contrast. Here we are in a world which seems very tangible and immense, and yet Jesus is saying that every single thing in it is opposite, upside-down, and backwards, from what is true. And that the body was made to deceive us into believing it is real. "The body is the instrument the mind made in its striving to deceive itself."

"Only the body makes the world seem real."

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

It would be much seemingly easier to just live a life in this world acting the way bodies act, interacting with objects, not questioning anything. Just taking everything to be verbatim as-it-is and not deceptive at all. Believing everything you see and hear.

Jesus's message is far more radical though, because if what he says is true, then fundamentally the entirety of space and time and all their contents, including all planets and galaxies, are completely false, unreal and untrue. "The only effort you need make, to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did NOT make is willingness to learn THE ONE YOU MADE IS FALSE."

So now on a daily basis, you have this task of literally questioning everything in the world, trying to recognize the world is an illusion, trying not to be deceived by everything the body shows you, trying not to identify with the body as your self, and basically denying and rejecting everything in spacetime.

That can seem very unnatural perhaps, to suggest you have to deny that the world is of God, and then deny everything about it, but Jesus does appear to be telling us to do this. That the only way out of suffering, sickness, misery and death, is to cancel out the entire seeming universe and believe none of it. That's a pretty tall order.

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

Nevertheless, it's clear that this is what Jesus is instructing us to do. To exchange the belief that this world is founded on reality, for a recognition that it is nothing but a dream. A fiction of a world which is hallucinated and not really there at all. Nor does it comprise anything real or permanent or of God.

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal?"

The world is nothing. Not something, but nothing at all. It's not there. It's a pretend world, hiding the Kingdom of God. And there is nothing in the world worth keeping as a substitute for the real thing.

"Yet its nothingness IS your salvation"

"The world can ADD nothing to the power and the glory of God and His Holy Sons, but it CAN blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

God is permanence. What God creates is also permanent. How can it be, that if God has created you as permanent, that you can malfunction? The whole idea that you can even have anything wrong with you is completely incompatible with you being permanent.

How can your total complete perfection, immortality, innocence, holiness, sinlessness, purity, guiltlessness, immacuate cleanness, ever turn into some kind of MALFUNCTION? How can heaven just BREAK someday? How can immortals suddenly become sick out of nowhere? How can what is permanently perfect, ever degrade or corrupt or decay or be destroyed?

The idea of death and the idea of eternal life are UTTERLY INCOMPATIBLE. You can't BE malfunctioning. God does not create things that don't work. His brand even comes with a guarantee.

"My sinlessness is guaranteed by God."

"God's promises make no exceptions. And He guarantees that only joy can be the final outcome found for everything."

"The Guarantee of Heaven"

"We thank you, Father, for Your guarantee of only happy outcomes in the end."

"He Who ensured your sinlessness must be the guarantee of strength and light as well."

"God's guarantee will hold against ALL obstacles, for it rests on certainty, and NOT contingency."

"In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything; the central core of its existence and its guarantee of immortality."

"It is His laws which GUARANTEE your safety."

"And thus His Will provides the means to guarantee that it is done."

"Leave, then, the transfer of your learning to the One Who REALLY understands its laws, and Who will GUARANTEE that they remain unviolated and unlimited."

"It needs but two to understand that they can not decide alone, to GUARANTEE the joy they asked for will be wholly shared."

"Yet, to the dedication to the truth as GOD established it, NO sacrifice is asked, NO strain called forth, and all the power of Heaven and the might of truth itself is given to provide the means, and GUARANTEE the goal's accomplishment."

"But the guarantee of your continuity is God's, not the ego's."

"The Atonement is the GUARANTEE of the safety of the Kingdom."

"The removal of blocks, then, is the ONLY way to guarantee help and healing."

"The world WAS a way of healing the Separation, and the Atonement is the GUARANTEE that the device will ultimately do so."

"Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God."

"My sinlessness is guaranteed by God."

"Its oneness is forever guaranteed inviolate; forever held within His holy Will, beyond all possibility of harm, of separation, imperfection and of any spot upon its sinlessness."

"In me is His creation sanctified and guaranteed eternal life."

"It is in this that the simplicity of salvation lies. It is because of this that it is guaranteed to work."

"God's treasure house can never be empty. And if one gift were missing it would not be full. Yet is its fullness guaranteed by God."

"Your claim to miracles does not lie in your illusions about yourself. It does not depend on any magical powers you have ascribed to yourself, nor on any of the rituals you have devised. It is inherent in the truth of what you are. It is implicit in what God your Father is. It was ensured in your creation, and guaranteed by the laws of God."

"The end IS sure and guaranteed by God."

"Our home is safe, protection guaranteed in all we do, power and strength available to us in all our undertakings."

"We will attempt today to find this Thought, Whose presence in your mind is guaranteed by Him Who speaks to you from your One Self."

"And God Himself has GUARANTEED the strength of miracles for what they witness TO."

"Where two have joined for healing, God is there. And He has guaranteed that He will hear and answer them in truth."

"Morning and evening do we gladly give a quarter of an hour to the search in which the end of hell is guaranteed."

"The "right to live" is something no-one need fight for. It is promised him, and guaranteed by God."

"The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible."

"Who could be surer that his happiness is fully guaranteed?"

"What is the Will of God? He wills His Son have everything. And this He guaranteed when He created him AS everything."

"Our success in transcending the ego is guaranteed by God, and I can share my perfect confidence IN His Promise because I know He gave me this confidence for both of us and ALL of us."

The passages below are pretty intense (each is from different parts of the course). They're basically saying that EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD IS DESTINED TO DIE. And that isn't an easy thing to comprehend yet alone accept. And if you CAN accept it (the meaninglessness of the world), perhaps you will be willing to go home?

The main reason we don't accept it is because it SEEMS as though, in the short term, some things live. That there can be seeming gaps in the dying, or sometimes paths will seem lighter and easier, even "pleasant" and enjoyable, and yet, NEVERTHELESS, even these brief vacations from death ultimately TURN INTO DEATH.

Even the lovely fresh bouquet of flowers, withers and dies and rots. Even the newborn baby, grows and ages and wrinkles and malfunctions and dies. Even the planet is born in the cosmos and evolved over billions of years only to be destroyed when its sun explodes. No matter what it is, no matter what you look at, ALL the things of this world are DESIGNED TO DIE, sooner or late.

This is the sense of the inevitability of death in this world, that "the world of bodies is the world of sin" and, therefore, since "the wages of sin is death", ALL types of bodies must die. And please note that I am not being negative or pessimistic here. I'm taking a square look at some facts. Facts that we like to avoid and pretend aren't true.

Such as the fact that EVERYTHING in the world eventually breaks down, goes wrong, malfunctions, decays. Yes it might take a while, and in the meantime it may seem that there are signs of life, of positivity, or purpose and meaning, activity, reasons to live, things to do and places to go. Which is sort of temporarily true. But then what happens eventually? It all goes to shit. Bar nothing.

Not one single thing in this world lasts forever. Not one single thing is permanent. This means the world cannot offer you safety, it cannot offer you freedom, it cannot offer you relief from problems, it cannot offer you life, it cannot offer you happiness, and in fact it really cannot truly promise ANYTHING, because ultimately everything is designed to die. Which means the world really has NOTHING TO GIVE. And that is because IT ONLY TAKES AWAY.

This is why, the only real salvation is found by TRANSCENDING THE WORLD, going within, rising above the battlefield, overcoming the world, moving beyond the earth, opening up to another world, returning to heaven, and waving bye bye to the dream of death. You can't find salvation outside of you because outside you there is only death and illusions of life. And this ultimately means, THERE IS NO WORLD. When will we be done playing with lifeless toys and dreams of mortality?

"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. It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction. Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life." God is insane, and fear alone is real."

"Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer. ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"I see only the perishable.

I see nothing that will last.

What I see is a form of vengeance."

"The world as YOU perceive it cannot have been created by the Father, for the world is NOT as you see it. God created ONLY the eternal, and everything YOU see is perishable. Therefore, there must be another world which you do NOT see."

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

In ACIM there are lessons surrounding the idea that God is my strength. It's a very simple 4-word sentence. But in it you can also see the dynamic of relationship between you and God, in terms of the power that you have.

Specifically, MY strength, IS GOD, AND is myself.

Which means, that within you, there is a strength, which you experience as YOUR strength. But, at the same time, this strength that is in you, could be said to BE God himself. It is not one or the other, it is both.

This is because of the chain of cause effect that happens in creation and extension. When God creates a child he doesn't just deposit a new thing in an environment. He doesn't walk away and leave it alone. He doesn't disconnect from it unbilically.

Instead, He extends himself out and shares himself, RETAINING his thought in his mind, keeping his creation WITHIN his being, and the two are one, shared. Which means that God does not let you go, or disconnect from you, and you effectively don't leave the womb.

Therefore you kind of have God embedded in you still.

Therefore, anything you have, is indeed truly YOURS, because it is fully given to you and fully shared without conditions. But at the same time, it is fully GOD's, because he gives it to you not by losing it but by SHARING it. You overlap and share the same space, and everything there belongs to both of you.

So now the strength you have in you is yours, AND it is God's. The power that is in you, which makes you ALL POWERFUL, is God's power.

It is also not appropriate to suggest that the power that is in you is ONLY God's power. Nor that ONLY God wields that power. Or that only God does anything. This is the flipside of further ego thinking that God and you are separate.

The power that is in you is indeed HIS power, and He is all powerful, as well. But this power IS also yours. And his. At the same time. Together you SHARE the same power.

Power MUST be shared to BE power. It does not belong ONLY to you. But this also doesn't mean it DOESN'T belong to you, ONLY to God.

God has given it to you fully to use AS YOUR OWN, and freely. But only provided that you use it WITH everyone AS everyone. Everyone has the same power because everyone was created BY and WITH power.

It's tricky to understand because our mind wants to separate things off and assign ownership to one and not another. Our power is God's AND ours. We as children of God ARE all powerful. There is nothing WE cannot do. We do it WITH GOD. We AND God are all powerful.

But without God, if you take God out of it, you end up with NO power, because HE has all power. Without him you have NO power. With him, you BOTH have power. Without God you have nothing. With God you have everything.

God AND Christ are all-powerful. Jesus acknowledged God as the source of his own power, giving God FULL credit for the power, because he knew the power did not COME FROM himself. But this did NOT mean that Jesus had NO power, because he had inherited ALL power from God, and so WAS and IS extremely powerful.

"I am not helpless but all powerful."

"YOU did not make this power any more than I did. It was created to BE shared, and therefore cannot be meaningfully perceived as BELONGING to anyone AT THE EXPENSE of another. "

"My Father gives all power unto me"

"Your Will can do all things in me, and then extend to all the world as well through me. There is no limit on Your will. And so all power has been given to Your Son."

"You are part of Him who IS all power and glory, and are therefore as unlimited as He is."

"God has one Son, and he is the resurrection and the life. His will is done because all power is given him in Heaven and on earth."

"To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. As God created you, you have all power."

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

"By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS."

"All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do."

"Knowledge is power, and all power is of God. You who have tried to keep power for yourselves, have lost it. You still HAVE the power, but you have interposed so much between it and your AWARENESS of it, that you cannot use it."

"He understands all power in earth and Heaven belongs to him because of who he is."

"They will always be treasured by God, because they belong to His Beloved Sons who belong to Him. All power and glory are yours because the Kingdom is His."

"My mind will always be like yours, because we were created as equals. It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth."

"But the truth is very simple; ALL POWER IS OF GOD. What is NOT of Him has no power to do ANYTHING."

"Sickness is idolatry, because it is the belief that POWER CAN BE TAKEN FROM YOU. But this is impossible, because you are part of God, Who IS all power."

A very useful tool is to ask yourself the question, "what would God have to be like if he created this?"

An important thing to realize is that whatever God creates, is a part of himself. Whatever he wills, he wills for himself. Whatever is real and a part of reality, must be a part of God. And everything that really does exist, must be God's will.

So now, take a look at something in this world, and ask yourself, if God created this, what would God be like?

If there is someone with a sickness, who is suffering and miserable, ask yourself, what would God be like if he created this?

If God created sickness for example it means that sickness is a part of God, God wills the person to be sick. the sickness really exists, sickness is permanent, and therefore God makes people sick.

So the kind of God that God would have to be, if sickness were real or a creation of God, is that God would have to be murderous, abusive, attacking, hurtful, hateful and punishing.

If the sickness has reality, and if reality has to always be tied to God, then a "real sickness" proves God is sick.

If you flesh it out a bit, you'll realize that in order for anything in this world, with all its faults, shortcomings, pains, wars, conflicts, sufferings, death and murder etc.... to be real and to be God's creation, God would have to be very cruel.

It's a simple enough conclusion. If cruel things happen and they are real, then they are God's will and God is the perpetrator. Which makes God a "God of sickness". A God of suffering and pain.

Then you have to ask yourself if you are okay with that. Are you okay with God being a murderer? If that doesn't sit right with you, and it probably doesn't unless you are pretty twisted yourself, then you have to entertain the idea that God is not murderous.

If you want a God that loves, then such a God cannot create cruel things. And that now means that cruel things cannot be a part of God, are not part of reality, and do not really exist. They cannot be his creations.

So then it boils down to a simple logical statement.

Either God is cruel and sickness is real, or God is not cruel and sickness is not part of reality.

It's going to have to be one or the other. Then if you decide to side with the idea that God is loving, then you MUST also reject the idea that sickness is real. And doing so is forgiveness.

Lesson 14 says...

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

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

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

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

As you can see here, Jesus agrees that God must be NOT cruel, and must be loving, and therefore did NOT create sickness or illness or war or disasters.

Therefore, these things cannot be real. If they are not real, they must be an illusion or dream, some kind of fiction, which can't really be there. They must be some kind of hallucination or make-believe. And you must be mistaken if you are seeing them. And by forgiving, you should end up not seeing them, and they should disappear, because they don't exist.

"What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you REALLY understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who SEEM to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder and destroy themselves, are WHOLLY unreal? Could you have FAITH in what you see, if you ACCEPTED this? AND WOULD YOU SEE IT? Hallucinations disappear when they are RECOGNIZED for what they are. This IS the healing and the remedy. Believe them not, and they ARE gone. And all YOU need to do is recognize YOU DID THIS. Once you ACCEPT this simple fact, and take unto YOURSELF the power you GAVE them, YOU are released from them."

Imagine that you live in a reality where you are always included in everything. Anything that happens, happens to others, and it happens to you. Anything that you give, you give to others, but you also receive. Anything that transpires happens to all at once.

Anything that is expressed by you is received by everyone, and received by yourself. Like, you literally ARE the whole of everything. The whole is your self. The entire realm of reality, the kingdom of God, is your self. So anything that takes place, you know about it, you feel it, you experience it along with everyone.

Everyone co-creates together. You are never excluded in any way. That's the fundamental fact of how reality actually IS. This is the law of God. This is the golden rule. What you do to another you do to yourself. You are one with everyone. You are the whole environment, not just a figure in the environment. You are heaven. The kingdom is your self. The sonship is your soul. All your brothers are part of you. No-one escapes anything ever. Everyone is always included, shares everything, has everything.

This is how reality really is. This is what produces shared interests. How would you act, think, feel, behave, if you knew that this was the fundamental law of existence? That anything you do even slightly you will do to yourself as well? This provides the incentive that you should only love, otherwise you will deprive yourself of love. You should only heal, otherwise you will make yourself sick. You should only include, otherwise you will become alone.

This is what ACIM is teaching you to remember and to attune to. Knowing your neighbor and brother as yourself. Realizing that if you do something you do it to yourself. The secret of salvation. Whatever you give you receive. Anything you see as being in your own interest is to be seen as being in the interests of everyone. Miracles are given to you in order that the be given through you to others and thus shared by everyone. Miracles are a universal blessing from God to the entire sonship all at once.

We need to re-learn this because we have forgotten how to live as shared entities, with shared identities. We think we are separated off by bodies, exclusive, omitted, rejected, lost, alone, not qualifying, left out. As though others can do something that doesn't include themselves, and you can do things in return that don't include yourself. As if you can get away with murder. As if you can attack without being attacked, or project guilt and escape from it without it still belonging to you. This is all the ego's realm of lies and deceit, denial and projection, dissociation and separation.

You have to learn to remember again that you are not just some separate figure in the world, separated off from others, separate from effects. You are the entire environment. You are the whole. You are the sonship. You are the kingdom of God. You are included in everything at all times. Every thought affects everyone. Every act impacts the entire universe. You are the one, shared with all. Everything belongs to you and to everyone else simultaneously. Everyone has full access to everything at all times. There are no limits anywhere.

"The secret of salvation is that you are doing this to yourself."

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thinking."

"When I heal I am not healed alone."

"Nothing is for you alone."

"Atonement is a lesson in sharing."

"I will not judge lest I be judged."

"Giving and receiving are one."

"Miracles are a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers."

"One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds. Such is the truth."

"You had everything when you were created, just as everyone did."

"The sonship is your soul."

"We are the kingdom, WE, the sons of God."

"The Kingdom of heaven includes all his children and their creations."

"I and my father are one."

Seeing yourself as deprived makes you perceive others as taking from you, and that you don't have enough left to give.

For example when I'm having some emotional release/healing, maybe I cried and I'm tired and crabby and feeling vulnerable. Maybe I'm not totally past it all yet and still am feeling whatever the lack is - lack of love, lack of peace, whatever... I'll see myself as being quite 'in need', i.e. needy.

When I see myself this way, I start to perceive everyone else as being needy too. Even if they're not. I'll perceive they're trying to take from me or demand something of me that I can't supply. I'll feel put upon and taxed and offended by the demand I see in them.

And especially if the other person is in a state of need themselves, it'll trigger anger that someone is so insensitively expecting something from me when I apparently don't have anything to give. I see them as trying to 'take take take'.

But what's really happening is I'm seeing myself - the demand in them is ME demanding FROM them. So I'm needy AND demanding, stating that I do not have what I need and someone else needs to give it to me. (Secret side-tip: although I'm saying I am in need and want to GET from others, I secretly do NOT want to get because then I would't be able to see myself as needy).

I'm the one who is actually trying to 'take take take'. I'm trying to GET, in order to make up for the lack that I perceive in myself. I'm accusing other people of trying to take because they're thwarting MY effort to take.

So as I see myself deprived and lacking, it's because I believe I don't have enough love. I believe the love is not in me and that I need to get it from someone else. So if they fail to give it, or if they demand it from ME, then I am left totally empty-handed with no way to resolve my problem, and that produces fear and anger... A sense that 'I can't and I won't... which often is in the form of a lot of reluctance or resistance or, comedically, "I can't take it anymore" (when secretly I am taking big-time).

But the thing is, seeing myself as deprived is actually the CAUSE of my perceiving a sense of lack of love, which led to the feeling of neediness, which led to the drama of being pressured to give what I don't have to needy people.

So an antidote for this... if I'm seeing myself as needy, and realizing it, is simply this:

Give love.

IMMEDIATELY this cancels out and dissolves all trace of a sense of neediness, all trace of not having enough, all trace of anger and reason for fear or resentment.

I'll be honest, I've only remember this a couple of times in real situations. One of them was just now. As soon as I suddenly remembered (after asking Holy Spirit to help) that my neediness is making me try to 'get' because I am seeing myself as deprived, it made me LAUGH. Because it introduces truth at the root of this bullshit and immediately corrected all of the EFFECTS.

I have to learn to remember this more often. When I feel shit and like I am deprived and don't have anything to give and don't want to give..... the way I am feeling is BECAUSE I don't want to give, not the other way around.

I choose to position myself as unloved and in need, which creates feelings of deprivation, which leads to the whole drama. If I choose NOT to see myself unloved by SHARING love (remember giving and receiving are both required, not sacrifice or greed), the whole problem is corrected.

And then, now that I've accepted healing of the actual problem - a lack of love - I can now give love and FULFILL the needs of others, which in fact then disappear, because they were never really needy to begin with. I was just seeing my own neediness projected.

Problem solved.

In the section below, Jesus writes about how God did not create a meaningless world, God only creates things which are meaningful, and the world we see (earth etc) is not meaningful, and therefore does not exist, because God did not create it. For example he even gives examples of things in this world which God did not create and are therefore not real:

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

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

God did not create that disaster [specify], and so it is not real."

This means not only are your personal perceptions and interpretations of the world not real, it also means the stuff IN the world, the wars and airplanes and disasters and so on ARE NOT REAL, so they DO NOT EXIST AT ALL, regardless of how you are looking "at" them. Looking at a plane crash in a "happy way" is denial of the fact that there IS NO plane crash, and that isn't to do with your personal private perception, nor is it really to do with your interpretation of way of looking at the plane crash. It's on a much bigger scale, of the fact that there is no plane or crash whatsoever because it doesn't exist, and the plane and the crash are PART OF YOUR MISPERCEPTION.

He goes even further to tell us that the illusions we "see", some of them can be part of our "personal hell", while other illusions are "shared".

I think this is an important point because "perception" is not just about your own personal hell within your own mind. And accepting atonement is not just about you becoming happy with a horrifying world of death and destruction, sitting on a fence smiling at passers by who go about their torture. Some aspects of perception are also taking place on a shared level, outside your body, and in "forms" which are actually parts of your perception as a much larger being/mind, shared with other minds as part of the sonship who is dreaming this whole world.

Many people think the Course is only about fixing your "personal hell" ie the illusions or perception that are "inside your own mind". This is only PART of the truth. A big part of the illusions which need correcting are OUTSIDE your personal mind, in the larger mind which we collectively are contributing to, and which encompasses this whole universe. This is why Jesus says "this world IS perception".

Whenever Jesus talks about "the world you see" many people have interpreted it to mean he's referring to your personal private interpretation of the world, as though an imaginary world that you overlaid on top of the world. This correlates to many passages in the course about false perception and seems to give it credence. But it also misses the point that Jesus is quite plainly referring to THE PHYSICAL WORLD not just your personal interpretation of it. The world you see, this universe, does not exist. The world you see, this universe, which is not "inside" your little mind, but is part of a collective shared mind, needs to be "corrected" because IT is perception.

Objects and clouds and rocks and people and mountains and rivers and trees and dogs and cats are all part of this illusion, and all part of perception, and all part of your mind. Not just the stuff that seemed to be inside your personal space.

"God did not create a meaningless world.

The idea for today is, of course, the reason why a meaningless world is impossible. What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist. "

"This is your personal repertory of horrors at which you are looking. These things are part of the world you see. SOME OF THEM ARE SHARED ILLUSIONS, AND OTHERS ARE PART OF YOUR PERSONAL HELL. It does not matter. What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His. Therefore, it has no meaning. In recognition of this fact, conclude the practice periods by repeating today's idea:

God did not create a meaningless world."

"Without a cause there can be no effects, and yet, without effects, there is no CAUSE. The cause a cause is MADE by its effects; the Father IS a father by His Son. Effects do not CREATE their cause, but they ESTABLISH its causation. Thus the Son gives fatherhood to his Creator, and RECEIVES the gift that he has given Him. It is BECAUSE he is God's Son that he must ALSO be a father, who creates as God created him. The circle of creation has no end. Its starting and its ending are the same. But, in itself, it holds the universe of all creation, without beginning AND without an end."

The entire "separation from God" is nothing more than an attempt to reverse cause and effect.

God is the Cause (Creator) of You. You are God's effect (Creation).

You tried to reverse that. That's all. The entire ego thought system and separation and universe of dreams is contained entirely in this one idea.

You tried to cause God and produce effects in Him (which is the idea of sin), while also denying that you are the effect of Him or His Creation (which has imprisoned your Will).

The authority problem is entirely described this way also - your attempt to usurp God's will is just another way of saying you tried to be the cause of God.

Level confusion is the same thing. It's what you get into when you think God is your effect and you are His cause. You are now confused and this produces "inverted perception." And this is the same thing as magic.

Seeing God as the effect of you and you as His creator, requires you to deny that you are as He created you, meaning you must deny what you are in order to deny what God is. This self-denial or denial of self/soul eventually results in death.

When people come along and attack you and you seem to be at their effect, still this is the same thing playing out. It's you perceiving backwards, that God who is your cause is now against your will, or rather, you are now willing against what's happening and seeing yourself as a victim.

The ONLY correction that is needed, to correct the ENTIRE ego thought system, all sickness, all death and everything of form, is to restore cause and effect to their proper sequence.

The Atonement is nothing more than the correct awareness, recognition and acceptance that God is the cause of you, you are His effect, and this is simply a fact. Accepting it recognizes you are still as God created you because you're acknowledging you did not change you OR God.

This also reveals that sin is a lie because you CANNOT be the cause of God or make Him affected. Therefore you have not done so, and therefore you are still innocent. In this recognition is also the true definition of forgiveness - that you have not sinned, sin is not real, and God still loves you.

This is a course in cause not effect, meaning you have to also recognize that while God is the cause of YOU, YOU are the cause of your creations, and you are a co-creator with Him. He does not oppose your will, he wills WITH you. You have your own creations. In your own causality YOU are the cause of everything you experience, but you are not the cause of God.

When you see yourself as an effect, you will make yourself a victim, because you are not recognizing that God shared His causal power with you. That means you are literally choosing everything and causing everything that happens. That's the secret of salvation - that you are doing this yourself.

It's all about cause and effect. It's very very simple. Get the facts straight in your awareness about who is the cause of what, and you're done. At that point you are no longer at the effect of anything but God and nothing has any power over you, not even death.

Everything about practicing the Course could be described as moving "backwards". Accustomed to how the ego operates always "forwards" this can at first seem counter-intuitive and a difficult "direction" for the mind to operate in.

Purification and correction are entirely geared towards a backwards motion, such as retracing your steps, seeking inward rather than outward, undoing, reversing, collapsing, deflating ego, re-winding time, digging deeper to find the true inner cause, looking "behind", getting to the core of oneself, going within, taking attention away from illusions, becoming whole, acknowledging what already is, accepting what is already true, receiving what is already given, lifting away layers of false belief, recognizing things for how they are, taking back projections, claiming responsibility for yourself, re-owning yourself, coming back to center, un-ravelling, seeking back through time to when beliefs were formed, reversing the effects of sin, cancelling, deleting, removing, restoring to a former state, moving backward to before any sense of something happening, returning to innocence, becoming aware of love which is already present, listening, receiving, accepting, allowing, reversing sickness and death, resurrection etc.

Notice that all of these procedures take you from being externally focused to focusing within, in the direction of yourself. The truth is inside of you. All of these actions return you to yourself.

Now, the ego is the total opposite of this in every way. The ego wants to always add something, increase denial, hide stuff behind new layers of illusions, implement things, find success, seek outside yourself, lose yourself, forget who you are, move away from yourself and God, project, attack, point a finger of blame away from you, destroy others, fight with an opposing will, acquire, get, consume the external (food etc), implement magical solutions which undo nothing, add lie upon lie, twist and distort things out of recognition, get rid of sin onto others, disassociate from yourself, believe that cause is outside of you, see yourself as an effect of the external, positioning yourself as a victim of something separate, pursuing wild goose chases and dead ends, running away from God, becoming alone and isolated, losing your mind and sanity, fragmentation, making others responsible for your existence, trying to get someone else to choose for you, trying to get someone else to love for you or to wake you up, going to sleep, living in ignorance, becoming unconscious, entering darkness, achieve, strive for goals, develop an image, accumulate and build stuff that never existed, fill the emptiness with idols, idol worship, seeking external salvation, believing that things outside you can save you and solve all problems, being sick as a result of an external cause, dying by someone else's hand, listening to the ego's counsel, making things worse, an eye for an eye, waging war, murder, etc.

Notice that all of these actions are in an outward direction, away from yourself. They are all designed to disconnect you from God and put distance between you and God and therefore between you and yourself. They take you away from yourself and place every attribute of yourself outside of you into someone else's hands.

The main difficulty I find is that having been in the ego mindset for such a long time, my mind has sort of become very used to or unconsciously has formed habits whereby the mind moves in a direction away from myself. It pursues the external and thinks in externalizing ways. It's like there's all these arrows pointing outward and it seems to make the mind "flow" in that direction automatically. Even normal "thinking" processes seem to head in the direction of the external and these are just accepted as automatic or "normal".

So then when we come to the Course, our mind is coming up against a set of truths and techniques which are all INWARD pointing, and basically flowing in totally the OPPOSITE direction to the ego's thought system. They all point towards God, towards your true self, towards what is inside of you already. Even just the simple idea that you need not seek to find love or teach love because that is what you are but that you need to REMOVE the obstacles you've built against it. We are not accustomed to REMOVING anything. We're accustomed to believing that we LACK God and therefore need to go seek for specialness and ADD it to ourselves in order to "become" loving or spiritual. That's totally the ego, KEEPING its belief in sin and hiding it and then pretending to try to find solutions to it externally, where solutions do not exist, and thus building layer upon layer of denial and failure. It's all the authority problem, believing we can add to or change God's creation into something better or more true.

So it's quite difficult to get the mind to even move in the direction of thinking inwards, thinking upwards, thinking IN REVERSE, or thinking towards what ALREADY EXISTS within you. To think in reverse means to go from where your mind is at to what came BEFORE it, rather than going from where your mind is at and proceeding forwards to some kind of next step. It seems alien. It seems unnatural at first. It seems to take steps that bring all of the illusion into question, all assumptions are undermined, and all beliefs have to be examined and exhumed and tossed out, all values are brought into question, every attachment has to be surrendered, all external structures are collapsed, and your whole life is brought into question. And that's not what the ego wants at all, and it's not how we're used to thinking. To question everything, to question sin and sickness and death. To assume nothing, and to believe nothing that even our body's senses are telling us. To travel backwards up the chain of causality to where we came from.

You are already as God created you, you are already love, you are already perfect, there is NOTHING you can add to God's creation or Kingdom other than to increase what is already in it, which is perfect joy and love and happiness. And you are already WHOLE, already complete, needing nothing, lacking nothing. All of this other stuff that you keep trying to deal with by ADDING or CHANGING layers of illusions, are ego solutions and ways of dealing with this, really attempts to hide it even more.

So like, something happens and your ego steps in with a reaction and says, oh my God, this thing is so externally real, it is really happening, and the future is going to suck, so I better do something about this. I know, I'm going to do this and that... and then comes up with a long list of reactions and plans and solutions which it is going to DO, to tackle what it itself made real, as though something really occurred. It creates this entire "chain of thought" or train of thought, which goes from "here" to way off in the distance down all kinds of twists and turns, taking you away from presence. We need to stop the train before it even leaves the station, get off it, and then look backwards down the tracks to where we CAME FROM and go in THAT direction, undoing, backtracking, reversing and returning, inwardly and upwardly BACK to the truth, BACK to the answer to end all questions, and BACK Home to God.

To think with Holy Spirit is to think BACKWARDS. This requires us to initially STOP and put the pause button on. Freeze-frame things. Freeze the entire scenario and just observe what it contains, from a big perspective. And then start to REVERSE the steps we have already taken, to backtrack, to look at our real hidden motives (secret sins/hates etc), and to UNDO layer upon layer of false beliefs and projections and stuff that we basically tried to ADD to ourselves already, that has led to us witnessing a falsely perceived situation. But this seems awkward and counter-intuitive - or at least counter-ego. It's therefore essentially all about letting go and letting God, relinquishing attachments, surrendering to what is already true, accepting God as God is, returning to yourself, and becoming EMPTY of all the stuff that you "added" to yourself to try to make yourself become something you are not - different to how God created you (and how you still are, buried under the ego lies).

To question... "has this even really happened" - that's a totally backwards step which brings into question any ASSUMPTION that the ego has made, and digs way deeper into what is happening than to react to it and try to fix it or attack it with Course quotes or to deny it with fake positivity or to build a spiritual ego to defend against it (and keep it). To stop and go backwards, to ask, is this even real? Why do I believe this? Where is my perception coming from? Why have I chosen this? How did I put this in place myself? Who am I really underneath this? Is this really true of me? Not ACCEPTING stuff into your mind.

As Jesus says, whatever you accept into your mind, it becomes real to you. The ego automatically is just accepting everything "into" the mind like a black hole sucking the life out of everything. We have to learn to stop that, to think in reverse, and to cancel the ego, to go within, to reverse our thinking processes and develop this new "inward direction" which flows away from illusions and towards the PRE-EXISTING truth and love within us, which is already there and is already perfect. To ACKNOWLEDGE what is already true and accept it, rather than trying to REPLACE it or cover it up or deny it with stuff we MAKE (invent/add) with the ego.

At first this kind of backwards thinking is not at all easy for the mind to do. It seems like the mind has become "wired" to think forwards with the ego, outwardly. But gradually over time as you "practice" this and go through this PURIFICATION process, digging out and releasing old pain, getting to the bottom of things, finding yourself, taking back your power, returning to responsibility, accessing the power of choice, accepting atonement, it becomes easier because there is less of your own ego-aligned will working against you.

It's like you're literally learning how to reverse the direction of flow of a river. The mind has become separated from Spirit and is flowing out all by itself, broadcasting its own ideas and trying to replace God's creation with something of its own. That needs to be totally reversed and undone. We need to go back within and reconnect with God and plug ourselves back into the service of Spirit. It takes time to break out of the unconscious habits of flowing outward with the ego.

And there is a paradox here. Funnily enough, the more you go within and withdraw your projections away from the external and get to the core love that's already in you, THEN that's when love starts to radiate out from you. You don't become loving by trying to give give give without receiving.

You must receive inwards first. It's more like, you become a light bulb, the switch goes on, and you simply stay CENTERED and rooted in your true self, in Spirit, and you RADIATE from there, staying in that center at all times, instead of going away from yourself or abandoning or losing yourself. To the ego giving is a loss of yourself. To Spirit, giving INCREASES and you not only keep/hold onto your inner real self but you also SHARE that and it extends out on its own. Love extends because of what it is, without your help.

So to be more loving, stop dwelling on the external or on trying to sacrifice yourself or martyr yourself. Return inward to access awareness of love's presence and then simply SHINE from within. This is how God creates, by shining and radiating and sharing and extending, remaining true to Himself and still complete and anchored within Himself. He does not lose Himself in the process. This is how the Kingdom is increased. This is what it means to be the light of the world. To shine from within rather than to lose yourself. To become an intensely bright light which goes out from within. You have to BE WITHIN first in order to do that, and stay there. This outward shining is CREATION, and it is the same thing as sharing and extending. It is how God created you to begin with. And in that light you have never stopped being God's innocent child.

Have you considered, that someone dying is an insane notion?

Imagine that you are born, you grow up, you have a life, you love people, and then someone comes along and says. ... sorry, your entire existence has to be exterminated, you're not allowed to continue. Everything you've done up till now was pointless. You're dead.

Essentially this would mean that everything you lived for, everything you learned, everything you gained, your whole development and growth and purpose, was for nothing. A pointless life, meaningless and a waste of time, just to be thrown in the trashcan at the end of it. If you can die at all, there was no point in living.

This is why death is a cruel insane idea. That a person - if they were a body - would just suddenly end in a horrible way, never again to be seen. It's the most ridiculous idea that genuine life is automatically ended, and you simply don't get to live.

The whole world seems to accept that this is normal and natural. But such an occurrence would, if this world were reality, be the workings of some kind of cruel and unloving creator. A creator who creates you, only to take your life away later when you reach a best-by date. A creator who essentially is sadistic and evil and merciless.

Jesus asks here that we carefully consider this matter - whether a benign and wholly loving creator could ever come up with a scenario where his creations are exterminated after a period of time. If we in ourselves do not RECOGNIZE how and why dying is INSANITY, then we do not understand God or A Course in Miracles. How could God's most beloved children be destructible, and killed off by the very same creator that gave them life - by their own parent?

Only beings created to live forever in eternal life without end, as permanent spirit beings that cannot be attacked and can never die, can be the product of a truly loving and absolute creator. And anything which can die cannot be a part of his creation, otherwise God is cruel and insane indeed. To believe the God of Life would lead to any form of death is insanity.

"Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it still more carefully. It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path, - all this is taken as the Will of God. And no-one asks if a benign Creator could will this." UrM28A1

"Pain is a sign illusions reign in place of truth. It demonstrates God is denied, confused with fear, perceived as mad and seen as traitor to Himself. If God is real there is no pain. If pain is real there is no God. For vengeance is not part of love, and fear, denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead, has shown that death is victor over life. The body is the Son of God, corruptible in death, as mortal as the Father he has slain." UrW190L3

"There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. It does not have degrees. It is the one condition in which all that God created share. Like all His Thoughts, it has no opposite. There is no death because what God created shares His Life. There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. There is no death because the Father and the Son are One." UrW167L1

If sickness is real, and given that God is the author of Reality, it would have to mean that God created the sickness. And since God is Reality, this would mean that God Himself IS the sickness.

The belief that sickness is real, is therefore actually a belief that God is sick and that God wants you to be sick. If the sickness is truth, ie reality, then God cannot be a loving God.

Love would not create sickness. Love would not want someone to be dead. To suggest that sickness is real, is to suggest it was created by Love, and that Love wants you to die. This is utterly ridiculous!

Sickness therefore CANNOT be reality. It simply cannot be real at all. It MUST be an illusion of sickness. ALL sickness must be an illusion. It may look like sickness, behave like sickness, be caused by things like sickness is, etc, but IT IS NOT REAL SICKNESS.

There cannot be real sickness. If reality is associated with sickness in any way, God would have to be sick.

The belief that sickness is real is the belief that an ILLUSION is actually real. It is the belief that illusions are real that IS sickness. Sickness is the belief that Reality is not reality, and therefore that illusions have taken the place of reality. It is the belief that God is not healthy, and therefore it is true and real that God must be dying or dead.

Sickness is therefore an attempt to kill God and His creation, to destroy His son, and to render God nothing. Anyone believing in sickness as something real, something serious, something to be afraid of, or something to struggle with, is believing that sickness is not an illusion, that God is dead, that sickness is the truth, and that it is God's will that you die. Again, UTTERLY RIDICULOUS!

So, let's all learn this and learn it well. Every single person or establishment or governing body or hospital or clinic or doctor or researcher or scientist or anyone in the public or anyone struggling in their home with sickness etc, ANYONE that claims that sickness is REALITY, they MUST be out of their mind! They are not sane and they are not telling the truth. This MUST be a false belief.

God cannot and does not create suffering. God is LOVING. And God is REALITY, and therefore only love is real. And since love would not create suffering in any way - love only creates love and health - ANY and EVERY form of sickness, suffering, lack, death, loss, pain and misery must be a complete illusion. It is NOT REALITY.

We need to wake up to this. We need to become clear about this and recognize this. And we need to stop accepting and listening to everyone who says that sickness and suffering are real. It is a lie. Even told by those who are sick or those who are jist onlookers. People who look at the sick and think others are sick but they themselves are not sick, ARE sick, because sickness is real to them.

People are doing the best they can to try to deal with the sickness, rarely finding a cure. There is a better way. Miracles are everyone's right!

Not believing in sickness means not believing that an illusion is real, which means being SANE. And sanity is the solution to all sickness, because all sickness is mental illness.

Who and what you are in REALITY cannot be sick. You are fucking immortal! You cannot be sick, you cannot die, you cannot change, you cannot be unwell or tired or lacking or depressed. You cannot be dead. You cannot be dying. And you cannot be suffering in any way. Anything that looks like it is contrary to that it MUST be an illusion. And if you believe it is not an illusion but a reality, then you are mistaken and you need correction by the Holy Spirit.

"Your plan I follow here, and at the end I know that You will gather Your Effects into the tranquil Heaven of Your Love, WHERE EARTH WILL DISAPPEAR, and separate thoughts unite in glory as the Son of God. ... Let us today BEHOLD EARTH DISAPPEAR, at first transformed, and then, forgiven, fade entirely into God's holy Will."

"There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release."

"Without the idea of death there is no world. All dreams will end with this one."

"He does not realize that he MAKES this world, for there IS no world outside him."

""Heaven & Earth shall pass away" means that they will not always exist as separate states. My Word, which is the Resurrection and the Light, shall not pass away, because Life is Eternal."

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

"There is no life outside of heaven."

"From here we give salvation to the world, for it is here salvation was received. The song of our rejoicing is the call to all the world that freedom is returned, that time is almost over, and God's Son has but an instant more to wait until his Father is remembered, dreams are done, eternity has shined away the world, and only Heaven now exists at all."

"There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again. But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now. Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize. ... Some see it suddenly on point of death, and rise to teach it. Others find it in experience that is not of this world, which shows them that the world does not exist because what they behold must be the truth, and yet it clearly contradicts the world."

"There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere? Deny illusions, but accept the truth."

"The idea for today is, of course, the reason why a meaningless world is impossible. What God did not create does not exist."

"How can a meaningless world exist if God did not create it?"

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"The world stands like a block before Christ’s face. But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies. This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."

"Leave it behind. It cannot enter Heaven. But I can take you there any time you choose. Together we can watch the world disappear and its symbol vanish as it does. And then-and then-I cannot speak of that. A body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death."

God is omnipresent. What this means is, the entirety of His being is fully present in every part of His being.

If you could conceive of God as taking up "space", then this means that in one particular location, the WHOLE entirety of God is fully present. And yet, simultaneously, in another location, the WHOLE entirety of God is present. This should give you a sense of how God is SHARING or is "stretched out" between these two locations, as though he completely DEFIES all sense of spatial limitations.

And when God is fully and completely present in one location, this does not detract from His presence in another location. He is able to be everywhere simultaneously and fully. This UTTERLY defies the entire ego's way of thinking and its world of separation, in which nothing can share with anything, an object cannot be in two places at once, and everything shows you a picture of there being some things in one place that are not in another.

For God to be able to be fully in multiple locations at once, defies absolutely all ego laws. God simply is UTTERLY UNLIMITED by any concept or law or structural or spatial construct. Jesus says that ALL of Him is in EVERY PART, fully and equally. And this is why every PART has been expressed as a SOUL, which is an entire WHOLE within itself because God expresses His wholeness in every part of Himself and creates WHOLE BEINGS.

The closest I can come to conceiving of God's nature is some kind of absolutely massive network of connections that share every part of Himself everywhere. Every part of God is EVERYWHERE. In God there IS no space or time. He is instantaneous omni-present and fully present in every speck of existence.

Similarly, God utterly transcends absolutely every limitation or difficulty or restriction or space-time concept that you can ever come up with. He quite literally, is INFINITE and UNLIMITED in every way. This is absolutely ego defying. Totally law-breaking and COMPLETELY OPPOSITE to this world.

This world was made as an attempt to shut out God by presenting a picture of what God is NOT LIKE, a world where nothing is shared, nothing is in multiple locations, there is no omnipresence, every location lacks something or has compromised with others, there is severe finite limitation placed on everything etc. This is totally unlike God.

In our development of trust, we ARE to learn to start TRUSTING and putting FAITH IN God's totally unlimited nature, in defiance of this world's totally LIMITING framework. We are to learn to OVERLOOK the limitations of matter and form, to NOT BELIEVE the sight of form, because "nothing is so blinding as sight of form". Form literally was made by the ego to create an artificial, unnatural "nature" that operates and looks NOTHING like God's nature. We have to learn to NOT BELIEVE IT, look past it, and recognize the sheer POSSIBILITY AND FREEDOM present in God.

This freedom breaks absolutely every law of this universe, because this entire universe is in OPPOSITION to God's nature. And so God's nature completely DEFIES every conceivable limitation. That means we have to learn, literally, to put our FAITH and trust in a God who can DO ANYTHING, a God who IGNORES orders of difficulty, a God who is completely FREE of all limitations and problems, and a God for whom NOTHING is impossible.

That means shifting our allegiance away from the ego, not just in our mind and perception but also in terms of what we think we are "stuck with" or what is "assumed" or "cannot be changed" or " is a given" in this world, including the so-called inevitability and irreversability of death, which is nothing more than one more ego statement that "This has the power to prevent God's will, and kill His Son, and He can do nothing about it." That is the ego's motto, and we've fallen for it.

Now it is time for a new thought system. A new way of looking at the world, and a new POWER to place our trust in. This is the foundation of all MIRACLE WORKING, which IS SUPERNATURAL, which defies and breaks all ego laws and proves that NOTHING CAN RESIST GOD'S POWER, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, and therefore show that this world is EASILY changed because it is merely an illusion.

If we are to be miracle workers, we can't be sitting on a fence looking happily upon a dying world. Our task is to demonstrate that to God anything is possible, and therefore that is NOTHING that cannot be healed or reversed, and even death - the consequences of sin, all torment and sickness and disaster and world-wide or even universe-wide problems CAN be reversed. "There is NOTHING my holiness cannot do", not even the most radically extraordinary things you could ever imagine being possible.

The limitations of this world are a total lie. We are to demonstrate this fact by performing miracles which place total faith in GOD'S COMPLETELY UNLIMITED NATURE. If we trust that HE CAN DO ANYTHING, then we too can do anything in cooperation with His Will.

Perhaps one of the key features about the ego which many people do not realize, is that it is constantly attacking itself.

The ego IS the idea of self attack. It is the idea of you, attacking you. It is self destructive, which is why it leads to sabotage and suicide. It is just another word for your own will to will against your own will.

It would perhaps seem too insane to consider that the ego actually attacks itself on purpose, and this alone might deter you from even considering it. But the ego is not sane.

The ego is not like the kinds of people that you think are normal people. You think that due to separation, what one person does to another they do not do to themselves. You think that you can attack without consequences, or be attacked by another without them receiving the attack.

The ego's main plot here is the idea that, because you are separate from your brother, what applies to him does not apply to you. This allows both parties to get away with murder. Or appear to. And this creates an illusion in this world, as though it is "ego" to attack someone and get away with it.

But beware. This is a decoy!

If you fixate on this idea that one person does something to someone else, causing effects in them, without receiving the effects - which certainly APPEARS to be the case almost all the time due to separation, then you will not notice the ego's underlying insanity. You'll think that it makes total sense that something can apply to one person and not another, or that you can cause effects which you do not receive - ie giving and receiving at not one.

The ego's secret insanity is that it deliberately attacks itself, and it is NOT escaping the effects of the attacks it tries to cause, nor does it want to. It is both its own attacker and its own victim. It deliberately wants to hurt itself. It also seems to simultaneously want to get away from that hurt. It should be fairly obvious that it is completely insane, to the highest degree, for someone to want to intentionally harm themselves, consciously and deliberately, and to simultaneously enjoy and suffer doing so.

Anyone in their right mind would recognize that they are one with all brothers, and share a mind of oneness, and therefore what applies to you applies to everyone equally. In this mind of oneness it is impossible to cause or do anything without receiving the effects. It is therefore in your vested interest to share only love, that you will receive only love. But when you enter into the ego and attempt to give without receiving (which is attack), you can be sure you will experience attack.

The ego is clever at making cause and effect unconscious. It makes it SEEM as if attacking another will not attack yourself. But the ego is fundamentally insane. It IS the idea of self attack, and so attacks itself on purpose. It would sacrifice itself in the name of saving itself. It is constantly two-faced. You think that normal people have "one face" or one personality or one side to them.

The insane ego is never one-sided, it is always contradictory, hipocritical, self denying, a liar, a cheat, manipulative, and it is even capable of showing up as "good cop" and "bad cop" simultaneously.

I had a dream once where some creepy man was trying to get to me, and so I ran to escape and I did escape, and met another man on a hill who appeared at first to be helpful and welcoming. It seemed like he would help me to be safe. But what quickly became apparent, was that in fact this man was the same "person" as the other man - as if he was the same man in disguise. He was both of them. And so the ego's two-faced secret was revealed, that it is perfectly capable of playing the part of victim and victimizer, attacker and savior, enemy and hero, or any other polarities which makes it SEEM as if they are two completely unrelated separate things.

The ego's illusions are ALWAYS geared towards getting you to believe that one kind of illusion is better than another. That one way of behaving or less evil than another. That something will actually help you without hurting you. That a solution will work without any side effects. It's always bullshit. The ego is fundamentally insane and so always has in its back pocket some kind of "clause" or excuse or secret that disguises the fact that it has NO intention of making its solutions work, and it has NO interest in being truly helpful, because ALL of its sides and solutions take you away from wholeness.

We have to be careful to discern and listen and recognize, that both positive and negative are part of the ego thought system. Both good and bad, right and wrong, all opposites. The ego plays both sides of every argument and does not care who sins. It will happily fund every war and conflict on both sides just for the sake of increasing the conflict. It is fundamentally existing in a state of self conflict and being divided against itself, thwarting its own moves, willing against its own will etc.

This is why we have to learn that "this world holds nothing that I want"... because everything it offers, the "good" and the "bad", are both ego deceptions designed to get you to take a side and fall for one of two of its traps. It does not care one shit about which side you take or whether you go light or dark or right or wrong, so long as you fall for the trap of believing that one of two choices is better than the other and will save you. There is no salvation in the ego. All of its roads lead to hell.

Thoughts are attempts to create. They are attempts to give and express. They produce effects. They are not passive or neutral. A negative attacking thought is an attempt to use thought for destructive purposes. That means to "mis-create" or to attempt to "create destruction" or to "not create", ie to create a lack of love (an emptiness/sin).

Let's say that expression/extension is life, and is a matter of thought. As you express anything, you are creating or miscreating. Either way you are producing an effect. Mind, as it thinks, is applying itself. It actually causes something to happen.

When we having loving thoughts, the thoughts we think with God, they have a miraculous healing power because they are thoughts of wholeness, holiness, innocence and harmlessness. They are creative thoughts. They are miracles with the power to affect others.

When we having attack thoughts, thoughts thought with "the ego" or "lacking God", lacking life, we are thinking destructively and are attempting to bring about a less-than-creative outcome. This has an effect just as much as holy thoughts, except holy thoughts are far stronger because innocence is strength.

A thought you have of someone is not just a separated-off commentary, it is an expression and a transmission. It is a creative act. You are trying to give something to them and send it to them. And there are no private thoughts, so they will receive it. This is also how people perform "psychic attack" by thinking negatively or fearfully of others.

Jesus indeed even goes on to say that we curse others through what we might call a "spell", which is an attempt to reinforce the ego beliefs others have already chosen, which further imprisons them. Your thoughts are capable of imprisoning others just as much as setting them free and healing them.

Perhaps we don't want to admit that thought has such a power or influence because we are really afraid of thought and of the responsibility which comes with "thinking well" of ourselves and others. And the fact that this is also the secret of salvation. The ego interprets responsible thinking as a reason for guilt and blame.

The thoughts we have of others aren't merely mental chatter, or a conversation. They are creative acts. You give people your thoughts. You communicate them to them, sharing the thought with them, to either strengthen or weaken them.

If you have high uplifting thoughts of others, you resurrect them with your mind. If you have fearful victimized concerned guilty thoughts about others, you imprison them and attack them. If you feel lovingly toward them to are thinking them into health. Thoughts are powerful, they are not idle.

"If I did not think I would not exist, because life is thought."

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

"ALL thinking produces form at some level. The reason why people are afraid of ESP, and so often react against it, is because they KNOW that thought can hurt them."

"By denying his mind any destructive potential, and reinstating its purely constructive powers"

"And YOU are healed BECAUSE you wished him well. This is the law the miracle obeys"

"It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not the real reason why you don't believe it.

People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them." "I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thinking."

""Casting spells" merely means "affirming error", and error is lack of love. When man projects this onto others, he DOES imprison them, but only to the extent that he reinforces errors they have already made."

"It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains."

"The truth is that you ARE responsible for what you THINK, because it is only at this level that you CAN exercise choice."

"You WOULD be responsible for the effects of all your wrong thinking IF IT COULD NOT BE UNDONE."

"It is pointless to believe that controlling the outcome of mis-Thought can result in real healing. When you are fearful, you have willed wrongly."

"Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. They are thus twice removed from reality." ALL words in ACIM are symbols TWICE removed from the truth.

The word "apple" is twice removed from reality. The thing it represents, the actual apple itself sitting in your fruit bowl, is once removed from reality. Notice that words are symbols OF SYMBOLS. Therefore the apple itself is a symbol, and is NOT reality. Everything in this world is symbolic, just as all dreams are made of symbols.

"The body is the symbol of what you THINK you are."

"The body DOES appear to be the symbol of sin"

"The body is the symbol of the ego"

"As nothingness cannot BE pictured, so there IS no symbol for totality."

"Give welcome to the Power beyond forgiveness, and beyond the world of symbols and of limitations."

"The body can become a **sign** of life ... and by its health and loveliness proclaim the truth and value that ***it represents***." (symbolizes)

Symbols are not an end in themselves. They don't have their own identity. They represent something else. They serve as a reflection or representative for something they point to. The body for example is not a THING in its own right, it is not an end. It SYMBOLIZES something else, and therefore is an effect of something else.

"Regarding the body as an end, it has no real use for it at all, because it is not an end. "

The metaphysics of ACIM does not really exist at the level of words twice removed. The metaphysics is once removed from reality. The words themselves, SYMBOLIZE, the metaphysics. They are expressions FROM or structured BY the metaphysics. Behind the words, deeper than the words, there is a core metaphysical structure which the course's expressed statements are BASED ON or coming from.

Or to put it more accurately, the ACTUAL metaphysics takes place as STATES OF MIND, as REALITIES, as WORLDS, playing out in the mind as SYSTEMS of logical thought. A THOUGHT of separation produces an ENTIRE WORLD representing that LOGICAL STATE. So what is this "deeper" metaphysics? There is a perfectly pure LOGICAL SYSTEM, underlying both reality and illusions. But the system is not a concept. It actually takes places as STATES of mind. As experiences of "realities". Conclusions have effects because PREMISES ARE CAUSES!

Both God's thought system and the ego's thought system are based on a LOGICAL premise. God's premise is Himself. His nature establishes the laws of what is TRUE. As He expresses/creates, His thought SYSTEM functions, and follows the laws established in his nature. The OUTCOME or "logical conclusion" of His system of thinking, MUST be in accord with his nature and be THE ONLY possible outcome that could come from such a starting point.

Because God is eternal, the outcome of His thinking must be eternal. Because God is alive, His thoughts must be alive. Because God is love, His thoughts must be made of love. Because God is happy, His thoughts must be happy and lead to happiness. Because God is a creator, the living beings He creates must be creators also (co-creators).

Everything that comes FROM Him is in accord with His Will and nature, and is in his perfect LIKENESS. It HAS to be in His likeness because in a logical system, everything that comes from the ORIGIN of the system stays WITHIIN the confines of the system and thus is governed by the same laws.

These FACTS, have nothing to do with interpretations, ideals, made-up spirituality, theory or theology, or any other kind of conceptual make-believe. These are ACTUAL FACTS of reality. And "metaphysics" is based on irrefutable FACTS. It is a fact that God is a creator, and therefore it MUST be a fact that God's creation is also a creator. Regardless of whether ACIM ever mentioned that in its words at all, that HAS to be true.

ACIM happens to say "A co-creator with the Father must have a Son." But you can DEDUCE this, LOGICALLY, by following God's system of thought. Simply, God is a creative father. He passes on Himself to whatever He creates. Therefore, logically, if God Himself has a nature which results in a Son, then the Son MUST have a nature which results in a Son of a Son. YOU, as a Son, MUST therefore have creations. This isn't true just because ACIM says so in its words. It's true LOGICALLY. And that is the deeper metaphysics. Jesus has BASED those quoted statements ON that logic.

Let's look at another example, the separation from God. Without even considering anything ACIM says about separation, let's assess it with purely impeccable logic and see what we get.

Ok so God wills eternal life because God IS eternal life. God wills happiness. God wills a total lack of limits because He is unlimited. God gives freedom, because God IS freedom. The co-creative living entities that God MUST create, therefore must have His freedom. But this also means, they are free FROM any kind of limitation or restraint. The only truth is that they must function WITHIN the system of God. They cannot leave God. BUT, they can exercise their co-creative ability to freely choose to try to DENY or oppose God's will and nature, thus opposing their own. What would HAVE to happen if you did that?

Look at it purely logically. Reality is ..... light, life, happiness, peace, love, unlimited, constant, unchanging, equal/harmonious, permanent, truthful, open, immortal, etc. BECAUSE, this is what God is. So everything IN God's system must be this too. What would an OPPOSITE to this be? What would you get, if you DENIED this system and tried to bring about an OPPOSITE system?

Well, an opposite system would have to be based on the "belief" that all of the nature of God is NOT true or real. It has to be a PREMISE, that OPPOSES God's premise. So the premise is, ... darkness, death, unhappiness, conflict, hatred/fear, limitation, change, inequality/difference, impermanence, everything is false, closed, mortality, etc. Because these are the LOGICAL opposites to God's nature. And if this collection of "unpleasant" CONDITIONS is the PREMISE of the entire ego SYSTEM, everything WITHIN this "line of thinking" MUST RESULT IN, all of these things. DEATH, is the logical outcome of the ego thought system.

So the question is, does this logical conclusion LINE UP with what A Course in Miracles says. And the answer is YES. It does. In fact Jesus even says so.

"From the belief in sin (the premise), the faith in chaos MUST follow. It is because it follows that it seems to be a ***logical conclusion***; a valid step in ordered thought. The steps to chaos ***DO follow neatly from their starting-point***. Each is a different form in the **progression** (logical thought process) of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror, and away from truth."

"The Holy Spirit uses logic as easily, and as well, as does the ego, except that HIS conclusions are NOT insane. They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death."

"The logic of the world MUST therefore lead to nothing, for its GOAL is nothing."

So what you find is, if you can get a grasp of the PURE LOGICAL BASIS of God's system, and if you can then grasp the idea that the "separation" is simply the idea of AN OPPOSITE TO REALITY, you can LOGICALLY come to conclusions. And the fact is, that these conclusions EXACTLY MATCH what Jesus has described in A Course in Miracles. WITHOUT ERROR. They totally correlate to the separation, the result of separating, the OUTCOME of starting on a basis of sin.

"The wages of sin is death - ie, if you start with sin (which is the idea "an opposite to God is possible", you must end with death". Death is the suppression and denial and NEGATING OF, God's reality. It is the "end of life" because it OPPOSES GOD'S WILL which supports life.

Therefore, and this is a metaphysical FACT.... a belief in separation MUST LEAD TO a seeming "world" or "logical state of mind", wherein everything is based on an idea of sin and death. e.g. "Without the idea of death there is no world." "The world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's son" - ie its the idea of God's LIVING son, pictured in a condition OPPOSITE to living. Similarly "the world was made as an attack on God" is based on the LOGIC that by trying to OPPOSE THE TRUTH, you "attacked" the premise of the truthful thought system (God), by trying to establish another SYSTEM that was totally opposite.

For example, Jesus says "Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way". Why is Earth OPPOSITE to Heaven? Because it is part of a "world" or STATE of OPPOSITION to THE TRUTH. The world is thus a logical outcome of the ego thought system. It is MADE OF DEATH. It is made of denial. It is made of sin. This isn't something I need to say based on ACIM saying it. I can make this "claim", IMPERSONALLY, WITHOUT OPINION, because the METAPHYSICS accurately indicates that this MUST be the case.

Now, here is the interesting thing about metaphysics. The underlying core logic describes VERY accurately, PERFECTLY, not only the nature of God's "system" or world, and the nature of any world that tries to oppose it. Through LOGICAL REASONING, which must be "impeccable", you can actually make "statements"- symbolic word expressions once removed from the metaphysics, that were never written IN the Course itself, but which are TOTALLY in line with it. This is not an opinion or a matter of making something up. The LOGIC tells you, BY ITSELF, WHAT MUST BE TRUE.

For example we could say, anything that is opposite to God who is eternal life must be incapable of living forever. It doesn't necessarily explicitly SAY that in the course, but it MUST be true. It does however say basically the same thing in other words, e.g. "there is no life outside of heaven."

We could also say, "everything in this world opposes reality". It doesn't necessarily say that in the course. But it MUST be true. The metaphysical LOGIC, the impeccable reasoning, TELLS YOU, that it MUST be true because it is perfectly sound logic. And this world IS A LOGICAL SYSTEM BASED ON AN ENTIRELY LOGICAL PREMISE.

The really interesting thing is, the metaphysical LOGICAL SYSTEM completely removes the need for OPINIONS. Of any kind. If God is truth, anything not of God is not true. That is purely logical. It's not an opinion. In fact the LOGIC is such a COMPLETE system, with no strange fuzzy exceptions or loopholes or things unaccounted for, totally black and white in its perfect clarity and precision, that it leaves NO ROOM for ANY INTERPRETATION. NONE.

And this is why the multitude of "interpretations" of the course, ALL of which are NOT really based on pure logic, are faulty and OF THE EGO. And this inevitably results in conflict and arguments because it inherently leads to CONTRADICTIONS. The ego cannot even reason correctly. Our normal ego thought processes don't even typically function "LIKE GOD THINKS", and therefore comes to FALSE conclusions about His system of logic. Frequently. And you can see by all the debate and WAR in this forum the sheer extent of this CONFUSION, which has resulted from NOT SEEING THE METAPHYSICAL FACTS CLEARLY, errors in logical reasoning, and false conclusions that EGOs have arrived at. There is ONLY ONE TRUTH.

All we can do is look at the logical system and let IT TELL US, what the truth MUST be. If we don't, and we start trying to MAKE UP TRUTH, or DECIDE what the truth is, we are now delusional and are not following the logic and are not having REASON. We then will not MAKE SENSE and this leads to all confusion. That means, the logical conclusions being drawn here, or by anyone who can reason impeccably, COMPLETELY TRANSCENDS opinion. It REFLECTS the truth. It is FACT. That means it is not MY opinion, or yours, or anyone's. It is how things actually are.

Therefore, if you can grasp this and SEE the sense in it, you can USE the metaphysical logical BASIS of everything the course says as a TOOL. You can USE it, practically, to inform you of what the course MUST BE MEANING. You can actually hold up a quote, and COMPARE IT, to the metaphysical structure, and provided your grasp of the structure is accurate, it will TELL YOU the context in which the quote is placed, the meaning of the references, what it is referring TO, and thus what it MUST MEAN.

If you get used to doing this, you will find gradually that everything Jesus says in the course is BASED ENTIRELY ON logical reasoning. Jesus is an absolute MASTER of this. And you will then realize that all of the WORDS in the course are in fact expressions OF the metaphysics. The number of ways and forms of expression OF those FACTS, is largely unlimited. Jesus wrote a huge book expression FROM the facts. He could've written more. If you "get the facts straight", and are not in denial or making logical errors, you can evaluate everything the course's WORDS say, and CORRECTLY RECOGNIZE what they MUST MEAN, in light of what the logical truth says MUST be true.

This however is one area that we are all struggling with, because most of us do NOT think logically or impeccably enough. We make a lot of errors. And the main reason for that is simply NOT SEEING the core logical BASIS behind the ENTIRE metaphysics of the course. And so instead, we'll try to "put together the pieces" from the bottom up, starting with loose ends, trying to assemble a cohesive picture, and making a lot of errors along the way. We then depend too heavily on the WORDS. The wordings. The phrasing. What it SEEMS like it says. And we will find that sometimes the CHOICE of words can seem misleading, when you compare it to the metaphysical meaning.

What the logic can do for you though, is it can provide you with a powerful tool for discernment, it can guide you, it can tell you what Jesus's words mean, it can clarify what the words CANNOT mean, and it can help you to get past all the nit-picking arguments and disagreements that come from MULTIPLE OPINIONS, all of which result from a LACK OF true facts and too much faulty reasoning or "blindness" to the LOGICAL METAPHYSICS. All of the discussions about "is it this or that" come from this "difficulty" with seeing the logic behind it.

Does A Course in Miracles line up with a PURELY LOGICAL set of conclusions, a logical system of black and white conclusions? YES. It totally does. Was this world made as a result of a LOGICAL conclusions? YES. Does death occur because of the conclusion that MUST come "inevitably" from a premise of real sin? YES. Would we make BODIES as a logical CONCLUSION in a thought system? YES, because they are the "natural outcome" of WALLS THAT BLOCK TRUTH, as "separation devices". Bodies ARE the idea of the rejection of wholeness. They ARE limitation, as an experiential idea or state of mind.

The atonement is logical too. It is nothing but the recognition that only the truth is true. There is no real sin. An opposite to what is all encompassing does not exist. It is the TRUTH. It represents God's PREMISE and therefore results in the resuming of the extension of creation. IT HAS TO. That's part of its logical basis. This is also why by "denying the denial of truth", you LOGICALLY cancel out the denial. Because you took what is FALSE, and you tried to make it TRUE, in order to deny that the truth is true. So if you REVERSE that by DENYING that the false is true, you deny the denial of the truth, restoring the truth as the only truth. This is entirely logically based.

To restore you to reality, you must UN-OPPOSE God. You must stop "negating" the truth". You must stop believing in sin, which is the idea of God's system having been destroyed and opposed. You must surmount death, which means resurrection is nothing but an assertion of TRUTH, which is life. Everything to do with God's creation, everything to do with the separation, everything to do with the descent into the ego and death, and everything to do with healing and awakening to reality, is all ENTIRELY the interplay of PURELY LOGICAL SYSTEMS or states.

Awakening is even logical and inevitable because you, being an effect of God, must FOREVER be an effect of God, since God never changes, and therefore CANNOT ever stop being God's son. Your reality is SECURED as a result of the logic of the system. The ending of death is just as inevitable, because when you get yourself into a logical STATE of ONLY TRUTH, there cannot be a state of an opposite to life, and death is therefore "snuffed out" as Jesus puts it.

Jesus's choice of words is masterful, but sometimes potentially misleading. There is a lot of material to digest. There seems to be a lot of stuff to figure out. Sometimes things seem contradictory which are not. And our egos make a TON of logical errors. Error, ie sin, is nothing but a logical mistake. You cannot oppose God's will, so it is "error", logically, to CONCLUDE you can. Healing is therefore the undoing of error, by re-establishing the facts of reality and accepting God's premise as the only true one.

This is all the metaphysics. It's behind the words. When you GET it, you can express FROM it, and be coming from the truth. You can express 100,000 books BASED ON this and every single one will be in line with ACIM. We're inside a logical system of thought, albeit based on a FALSE starting point, resulting in FALSE experiences, and FALSE outcomes. A false outcome is SUFFERING. Suffering is inevitable when the entire SYSTEM is founded on opposition to health and life. Suffering means you are "suffering from" being mistaken about the facts of reality.

If you want eternal life and happiness, you must open up to accept the REASONING of the Holy Spirit, which is the SAME as God's SYSTEM or WAY of thinking. Thought BASED ON TRUTH will set you free.

ALL of the conflict in the ACIM community is based on NOT SEEING and NOT ACCEPTING the purely LOGICAL CORE TRUTH in A Course in Miracles. All of the disagreement about what it says, what it means, what it implies, is all based on NOT being logically sound. ALL OPINIONS ARE MUTE! Your opinion has no value, and nor does mine. We are supposed to get away from having opinions. We are supposed to recognize the FACTS OF REALITY, instead of trying to MAKE UP interpretations. Interpretations are entirely ego. The course HAS NO INTERPRETATIONS. The course is based on FACTS. It is based on TRUTH.

And truth is not an intepretation. It is an expression FROM THE PURE LOGIC SYSTEM OF GOD'S THINKING. When everyone finally recognizes this and accepts the ONE CORRECT metaphysics, there will be no more NEED for conflict, no more BASIS for confusion, no more REASON to fight about it, and no more DEBATE about what it means. Behind all the seemingly varied WORDS in the course, behind all the many EXPRESSIONS, behind the choice of phrases and the language and the way Jesus speaks, there is a PURE METAPHYSICAL CLARITY.

Do not be DECEIVED by the ILLUSION OF DIFFERENT FORMS in the course. Do not be deceived by taking the WORDS too literally. The WORDS ARE NOT THE METAPHYSICS. They are only based on it. And if you base your entire understanding on THE WORDS, you will very likely come to false inconsistent conclusions. When you get bogged down in isolated quotes, inconsistent reasoning, things taken out of context, and all the rest of it, you are missing the CLARITY of the course's truth.

Go deeper. Get behind the words. SEE the logical structures. Recognize the metaphysics. It's beyond words. It's beyond those symbols. The course is PURE TRUTHFUL FACT and it is totally consistent without contradiction. If you are confused, wondering about meanings, uncertain about structures, or any other reaction to what's said, you are not using logical reasoning and so are using blind ego interpretation. If you see contradictions, you made a logical error.

If something doesn't fit, you haven't seen the logic behind it clearly enough. And if you conclude things OUT OF ACCORD with what the LOGIC says, you are mistaken, regardless of what the words seem to say. Jesus is 100% perfectly ACCURATE in every single thing he has expressed FROM a PERFECT GRASP of the PERFECTLY CLEAR metaphysical basis of truth. HE has not made any errors. His expressions in words are not erroneous. He is PERFECTLY CORRECT. Our only challenge is coming to SEE, RECOGNIZE and ACCEPT, the CORE TRUTH behind the entire course. REASON will allow you to literally SEE SENSE.

"The introduction of reason into the ego's thought system is the beginning of its undoing. For reason and the ego are contradictory. Nor is it possible for them to co-exist in your awareness. And reason's goal is to make plain, and therefore obvious. You can SEE reason. This is not a play on words, for here is the beginning of a vision that has meaning. Vision is sense, quite literally. If it is not the body's sight, it MUST be understood. For it is PLAIN, and what is obvious is not ambiguous. It CAN be understood. And here do reason and the ego separate, to go their different ways."

But this is going to require that you come to accept and live from a very simple truth, which is somewhat 'secret' for most people: the secret to salvation is that you are doing this to yourself.

What this means and implies, is that every single thing that seems to happen here, is completely deliberately chosen by whoever is involved. Not only that, but whatever each person is experiencing, that person has to be deliberately creating that experience within themselves, "doing it to themselves". We are creators, not perceivers.

In this model, it is absolutely impossible to experience anything that you did not choose and ask for AND implement yourself.

Literally, nothing can happen to you against your will. You cannot be harmed. Nobody can change you. Nothing can affect you.

So if you're having some kind of emotional upset, it HAS to mean that you actually are generating that emotional upset yourself, regardless of what the situation is.

It also has to mean that there are absolutely no victims and that victimhood is absolutely impossible. Nobody can be a victim if everyone is 100% choosing what happens, and if nothing unchosen can happen.

You literally get exactly what you ask for, you get ONLY what you ask for, and you do not get anything else. Not that you even 'get' it, because in truth, you CREATE it.

You are 100% responsible.

This of course flies in the face of the ego which is a thought system based on the complete opposite to this reality, which suggests things happen outside your control, that you didn't ask for, life goes off the rails, bad things happen for no good reason, people get victimized, there is unfairness, there is mis-treatment that people don't want, there is undesired suffering, woe is me, and life just generally sucks. That's all ego perspectives based on irresponsibility and blame and shifting of WHO is making the decisions here.

So you may be wondering, how immortality is possible. Well it is only possible if you can accept that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING can happen without your say-so. "Nobody dies without their own consent", Jesus says. It seems a tall claim, but it is truth. Jesus says so and Jesus is the man ;-)

So what this means is, the idea of 'stuff happens that I can do nothing about' is a FICTION, not a fact. It means the idea of victimhood is actually an ILLUSION, not a reality. It means that the idea of being hurt against your will, or having sickness show up in your body without choosing it, or being incapable of doing anything about what happens, is all MADE UP LIES. It is very poor discernment, very poor judgement, unconsciousness, lack of awareness, inability to see the whole picture, dishonesty, and an unwillingness to accept the truth, that leads to this MYTH that things happen to people against their will.

It's not that you need to find a way to be invulnerable against things that happen randomly that you can't control. That's not invulnerability. It's not that you need to become protected from serious dangers through some kind of superhero shield, which is also not invulnerability. It's simply that all of the things that we all believe have this "power to hurt", DO NOT EXIST, and even the illusion of them existing is something we are PRETENDING is happening.

We are invulnerable because there is no ego. We are invulnerable because it is not possible to be hurt. We are invulnerable because victimhood is completely illusory. We are invulnerable because suffering is not reality. We are invulnerable because we are putting in place absolutely everything we are experiencing, and can STOP THAT, and thereby be free of who exactly IS the culprit.

Because this really boils down to, WHO is responsible for making shit happen. WHO is it that has this power to pull the strings and make stuff manifest and cause events and effects. When you believe incorrectly that it is other people, random events, nature, groups, animals, viruses, whatever fake causes, you are greatly MISTAKEN. And in that mistakenness you are actually using your POWER to create illusions of powerlessness, you are using your 100% choice to choose to make an illusion of not having a choice, you are using your total freedom to pretend to be imprisoned, you are using your invulnerability to pretend that you are vulnerable, and you are basically weaving ILLUSIONS that you are not THE ONE WHO IS DOING IT.

Game is up. It's you. We all know it. Admit it. Caught you red handed playing dead.

This is why the dead can be raised, because the person who appears as dead is PRETENDING TO BE DEAD. And they need to snap out of this illusion-making and come back to reality and demonstrate the truth that it is not possible to die.

Death is pretend, death is reversible.

That's how invulnerable you really are. But if you are not AWARE of your responsibility, if you have not OWNED your power, if you not become very honest about who does what to whom, and if you have not seen the secret activities of your mind where you attack yourself and pretend that you don't, which creates the myth that other people have power over you, then you will SEEM to suffer (even though you can't). That's how you disguise yourself in a costume of despair when all the while, underneath it, you are totally joyful.

Nice try.

You have made a secret agreement with all your victimizers and attackers.

1) Their half of the bargain entails they must appear to be responsible for all the guilt you do not want to own in yourself, which you thought was true of you. They must carry the burden of it and be condemned by it, by you. You get to blame it all on them and to displace it away from yourself, rendering you seemingly innocent and them guilty. You get to claim they are the cause of all problems and that you did nothing at all.

2) Your half of the bargain entails you must allow them to attack and victimize you, in direct relation to how much guilt they are carrying for you. The more guilt you put onto them, the more you will experience them as an enemy, and the more you hate them the more they will hate you. You give them a permit to punish you, in exchange for their service.

3) You will suffer because of them, and you will not want it, and you will be terrified of it, and you will create tremendous drama about how you did not ask for it due to your newfound 'innocence', BUT deep down you KNOW that you gave them every permission to do this to you, and as such you AGREE with it (oh the horror!).

4) You secretly PREFER that they victimize you compared to having to carry the responsibility of the GUILT that was yours to begin with. You think its a bargain, because you experience yourself as 'innocent' while experiencing them as 'guilty'. It's just unfortunate that, in this innocence, you also MUST be an 'innocent victim'. That is the price you have to pay.

This whole agreement is set up to defend you against your own guilt. You hire everyone who provides this service for you and does this to you, and you are grateful that it creates an illusion of innocence for you. You would rather tolerate this than to actually obtain REAL innocence, which you DO NOT BELIEVE IN, because you DO believe it is true that you are sinful and guilty and deserve to die.

Nothing heavy.

You do, however, have a clause in the contract. You are permitted to break the agreement. However, breaking the agreement has TERMS. The terms are:

1) You must take back the guilt that you projected onto them and find them innocent. You must stop blaming them or scapegoating them or accusing them in ANY way of being the cause of ANYTHING you are experiencing.

2) You must ADMIT that you were the one who wanted this agreement, you are the one who agreed to it, and you were the one who ACCEPTED the consequences, even if you did not like how it felt.

3) You must be willing to take back all of the guilt, which undoes your own perception of yourself as innocent (and that alone is terrifying), and which places responsibility for ALL of it back in your own lap. You may not want this. And if you stay in this perception for long you will suffer. That suffering is why you wanted to make the agreement in the first place.

4) You must admit that you were only ever a WILLING victim, a willing participant, that you wanted every single attack, and were willing to LAY DOWN AND DIE if it would mean you are seen as innocent again. Nobody dies without their own consent.

5) You must admit that, now, because these people are NO LONGER in the contract with you, that they are wholly innocent, and this means they ARE NOT victimizing you and you HAVE NOT BEEN victimized by them. All blame for any past experiences must be lifted from them and you must be willing to see them as forgiven. You MUST also be willing to THANK them for their cooperation, service, perfect role-play, and for carrying out your contract to perfection, recognizing they did ONLY what you wanted them to and they did it well.

Having taken full responsibility for arranging this agreement, you are holding the guilt, but you have an exit option. The option states you are permitted to either re-enter the victimhood agreement with more people, and continue seeking for artificial innocence, OR, you can seek for real innocence, by appealing to an AUTHORITY ON TRUTH, such as the Holy Spirit. You have to be willing to go before Him, take your guilt with you, expose it TO Him, allow Him to be aware of all of it WITH you, look upon it from HIS perspective (in the light), and be willing to be SHOWN the truth about it. You must agree to accept His verdict, whether it is that you are innocent or guilty (and btw it will always be that you are truly innocent).

If you take the exit option, you must be willing to surrender the guilt that you placed on yourself and own up to the deeper truth that you are TRULY INNOCENT, HAVE DONE THING WRONG, and you must accept God's love again. Too much to ask? Choose again? You could always choose to be a victim some more.

Imagine what life might be like if you let God do everything for you? Literally everything? You can just lay back and relax and do nothing, while God does everything.

Trying to live without God is painful and limiting and doesn’t work very well.

We’ve gone off into a fantasy of trying to be God, to replace Him with an entire array of substitutes, and to try to "go it alone". Without God, everything sucks.

God wants to do everything for us. He wants to love us for us. He wants to protect us, heal us, nourish us, give us life, show us the truth, make us happy, undo all our suffering, wipe away all our tears, and give us perfect peace.

He wants to be the one to GIVE all of this to you. To SHARE it all with you abundantly. To OFFER it to you. To LET YOU receive all of it from Him. So that you HAVE NO NEEDS.

He wants to meet ALL of your needs. Everything. Being in his mere presence undoes all your doubts and fears, all your sense of loneliness, all your loss and emptiness, all your suffering, all your sickness and pain, and all problems. Just by being with Him.

Being without Him AUTOMATICALLY creates problems, lack, limitation, suffering, pain and tears. It is the separation FROM HIM that is causing these problems for you. This means YOU CANNOT live separately from Him AND SUCCEED, because the separation from Him ITSELF is a big problem for you.

If you are separate from God, your needs will go UNMET. If you deny God’s love, you will be NEEDY And LACKING. If you shut out God’s healing, you will become sick and suffer. If you reject God’s eternal life, you will experience illusions of dying. You don’t want that.

LIFE DOES NOT WORK WITHOUT GOD.

You cannot succeed on your own. You cannot be so amazingly "god-like" that your existence separate from Him is a total success. BEING separate will infuse your life with fear and denial and self attack and loss and all manner of manifestations of the ABSENCE OF GOD. Without love, it all goes to fucking hell.

God wants to love us for us. He wants to choose for us. He wants to will for us. He wants to give us life. He wants to fulfill every need. He wants to make it so you have no questions and only answers. He wants to take away all your suffering and forms of sickness. He wants to heal your mind to perfection and sanity. He wants to restore you to eternal life and to love you forever. He wants it so that there is NOTHING that you need DO on your own, separate from Him. Nothing at all. That you are HAPPY AND FULFILLED, living a life of True Meaning!

TOTAL DEPENDENCE ON GOD ALONE to do EVERYTHING FOR YOU. Doesn’t that sound heavenly? That you could be so thoroughly served, supported, so abundantly helped, so unlimitedly sustained, by God, without any effort on your part? Totally effortless bliss and happiness forever? No need for defenses or walls or counter measures or magical solutions or bandaids or denial to make illusions that everything is ok. God wants you to know that you are exactly the way HE CREATED YOU and always will be because it is His Will to SUSTAIN YOU FOREVER and to constantly ensure you LACK NOTHING.

Everything is not ok with you when you don’t have God. Everything SUCKS big time when God is suppressed from your life. When you are doing it all yourself, everything goes wrong. When you are RELYING ON YOUR SELF, you MUST become afraid. Depending on your weak, limited little self is guaranteed to make you afraid because you KNOW that you lack God’s power and are powerless to deal with life. You also believe that God’s Will is against you, which is insurmountable, causing you to cower in the shadows in fear of death.

You need God!!!!!!!! YOU NEED HIM! You need what he is offering. It is IMPOSSIBLE to be sustained without Him! Accepting His Gifts will solve everything for you. To have God back in your life is going to bring you so much happiness an peace and effortlessness. So much guidance about what to do and where to go and what to say. So much healing flowing through you, for you, and for others. So much PURPOSE. So much MEANING to living. So much reason TO BE GRATEFUL because of the TOTAL BLESSING that has been given to you. Open to receive help! God is here for you and loves you now!!!!

THANK YOU GOD!!!!! I OPEN TO RECEIVE YOUR DIVINE SUPPORT AND MY NATURAL INHERITANCE. THANK YOU FOR SUPPLYING EVERY SINGLE NEED AND FOR TAKING CARE OF EVERY PROBLEM. I TRUST YOU IN EVERY AREA OF MY LIFE. I SURRENDER MY SEPARATE WILL AND WANT WHAT YOU WANT FOR ME. I ACCEPT YOUR LOVE AND YOUR HELP AND AM WILLING TO BE OF SERVICE TO CARRY OUT YOUR WILL ONLY. I AM HERE FOR YOU AS YOU ARE HERE FOR ME AND WE LOVE EACH OTHER. AMEN.

Where do you find a sense of certainty? A sense of something you can trust? A sense of actuality or correctness? Where do you find a truth, that is so acceptable and so full and complete that you have no doubt?

I find that as I try to find answers in, and with, the ego, i.e. with my own mind and faculties, I cannot come up with a satisfying answer. I instead come up with a multitude of possible answers, all of which are different and none of which really give me a sense of .... yes, this is IT, I found it!. .. Or at least, if I think I found it, then later I'll realize it doesn't quite fit. So none of the answers work. None of them.

In fact, the more that I get into 'I need to figure this out', or 'maybe it's this - maybe it's that', .. the more I try and effort to investigate and find "the truth" in this way, the worse the situation seems to become. Confusion increases. I move away from a sense of certainty, peace, truth or acceptability. I move towards increasing UN-certainty.

Key insight: Trying to figure out and explain what's happening using my own separate ego mind/intelligence creates MORE confusion! I'm barking up the wrong tree!

So I dig and dig and get clever about what 'might' be "the answer", only to sense that this answer is flawed in some way, it doesn't quite explain things, and I just can't get a feeling of 'absolute certainty' around it. It seems like it *might be* true, it's *possibly* a description, it's *could be* what's happening etc... but never a sense of .... "this is".

And you know what, the more I try to do this the worse it gets and the more confused I become and the less I have peace.

So, the lesson here is, clearly... I have made the problem real, and now I am reacting to it by trying to explain or justify or intellectualize 'why' it is happening... rather than IF it is happening. And that means, I'm using the ego, I'm trusting my own self instead of God, I'm looking for answers in the ego world outside of me, I'm trying to find ego proof of the truth, and basically am constantly coming up empty handed.

It can become... exasperating, trying to find the truth where the truth IS NOT. The secret truth is: EVERY ego answer is NOT TRUE! The ego does not and cannot KNOW truth AT ALL!!! All it can do is speculate and guess and wonder and deduce and pretend it has the prowess to figure this all out on its own. And it will never be able to find the truth. The ego cannot wake up to reality!

So the question becomes, where I am going to get my sense of certainty from? Where is the real truth? Where is a truth or an answer or whatever that I can really believe .... yes... this is exactly IT. And I can tell you, it's very possible to come up with numerous ego explanations or rationalizations that all say... yes... this is exactly it, that this is an exact match to the situation and it really seems to be 'this'... only to find loopholes, inconsistencies, doubts, and then some 'other' possibility comes along. This is all because I'm searching within the realm of relativity, partiality, differences, a lack of wholeness and a world of lies.

So where will I find THE answer? What is THE answer? Where will I get that sense of... certainty, peace, joy, and KNOWING, that comes from the 'real truth'.... something I can really get behind and know, this IS it.

What is the real truth? God IS it, of course! God is WHERE the truth is. God is the certainty I seek. God is the answer that I can actually TRUST.... to trust that it will be consistent and unwavering and complete. There is no sense of consistent truth like that in the ego's world. No matter what the ego's explanations or meanings are, NONE of them are the whole truth. And none of them bring the feeling of... ahhhhh yes... that God brings.

But then, you have to realize this... God isn't an explainer, as such. God doesn't spend time diagnosing, or figuring out, or doing any of those activities that the ego mind does in attempting to find out what it thinks is happening. In fact, God doesn't even deal in the realm of 'maybe'. God HAS the answer already, whereas the ego is SEPARATE from the answer so has to go SEEK for it!

"Seek and do not find!" - ACIM

And the harder you seek the truth, the further you get from the TRUTH! Doh!!! I've been looking in the wrong place this whole time :-D

So ... God has really no interest in spending time trying to discern what illusions are doing or what to do about them to 'fix' unreal problems. God doesn't make problems real then OBSESS over trying to solve them, not realizing that believing they are a problem IS the problem.

So as I go to God, I see that God's 'way' is different from the ego's 'way'. God's way is more to do with.... a constant, direct, immediate correction and healing, which solves the problem, instead of all of the dwelling on basically 'keeping' the problem that the ego loves to indulge in while disguised as a problem solver. Hah.

So again... this is about learning to trust He who KNOWS, versus being lost in he who 'thinks' he knows.

And perhaps it's not until we can really let go of all efforts to 'explain real illusions', that we will turn to God in surrender and trust and allow Him, instead, to bring healing to the situation FOR us.

Thank you God.

"The world you see (with ANY kind of perception) is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."

This is talking about THIS world, Earth, its physical nature, its inherent cruelty. Jesus goes on to say something which COMPLETELY bypasses any idea of having thoughts ABOUT the world, it being merely an emotional statement, or something to do with perceptual states...

"***Children are born into it*** through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. ***Their minds are trapped in their brain***, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And ***their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground***, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel. "

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving."

Notice here the profoundly obvious references to things happening on a PHYSICAL level, within an environment He is referring to as "the world". He isn't speaking in metaphors or poetry or internal interpretative states. He's referring to this PLANET.

He mentions children being born "into it". This has absolutely nothing to do with your perception or attitude about the world. He's talking about child birth. The PHYSICAL birthing of human babies.

He mentions minds being trapped in brains. This CLEARLY distinguishes that the MIND, which might be the realm where you claim to have an attitude "about the world", is completely distinct from "the brain". And I think we all know that the brain is NOT a reference to an ATTITUDE. It's talking of the physical blob of brain tissue in the physical head of the physical body. And these bodies, which house these brains, are part of the physical world that is being referred to as THE WORLD THAT IS CRUEL.

Further He mentions about how the bodies become frail, wither, suffer and die, and are laid in the ground. Unless you have a graveyard IN YOUR HEAD, this is again a direct reference to MULTIPLE bodies (not just yours) being laid in the PHYSICAL SOIL of the ground. As an aspect of this WORLD that he is making reference to as CRUEL.

All of these references are clearly speaking of a world, the PHYSICAL world, where children are born through human child birth, people's minds seem trapped in their physical human brains, and their physical bodies grow old and die and are buried in the physical soil of the ground. None of this is metaphorical, poetry, fluffly language or indirect. It is totally literal and plain as day.

THAT WORLD, where all this stuff happens, is being referred to as CRUEL, and NOT a world that God would create. For God to create a world where children are BORN, where minds are stuck in BRAINS, and physical bodies become sick and die and are buried in the GROUND, God would have to be a CRUEL FATHER. Because all of this IS cruel. At the PHYSICAL level. This has nothing whatsoever to do with perception or attitude or meanings you give to things.

"If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel."

This is fortunately NOT THE REAL WORLD. It is not reality, God is NOT cruel, God does NOT subject His children to this madness, and REALITY is nothing like this hellish world. The dream of death is not God's will. It was made to oppose His will. "The world was made as an attack on God." IT IS madness to think of life as being born, suffering, and dying in the end. It is completely unnatural.

This world is not the Kingdom of Heaven. Regardless of how you look at it, perceive it, think of it, interpret it, project onto it, or have attitudes or meanings given to it, it STILL remains what it IS, which is an unnatural artificial world of cruelty. Even teachers of God look upon it and RECOGNIZE THIS, and are NOT DECEIVED BY IT'S LIES.

"God's teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice.For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences.The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are?Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die.Yet they are not deceived by what they see."

Why are they not deceived? Because they RECOGNIZE that the world MUST BE A LIE, is NOT showing them reality, and does NOT contain the truth. They look upon THE DREAM (this world) and recognize it is FALSE. It is the ego's world of cruelty and hell. And even when forgiven it remains nothing but an ILLUSION of a world.

"Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God's teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs."

"The world you see (in any way) is an ILLUSION of a world. ***God did not create it***, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is ***nothing*** in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when ***all things visible will have an end.***"

When something is logical, you start with a premise, and then as the nature of this premise "extends", it produces logical conclusions. The conclusions that will come from this premise are really established in the premise itself. The limitations or scope of the premise determines what can come from it, and what comes from it is completely in accord with its starting point.

"Every system of thought must have a starting point. It begins with either a making or a creating, a difference we have already discussed. Their resemblance lies in their power as foundations. Their difference lies in what rests upon them. Both are cornerstones for systems of belief by which one lives."

When you use logic, and you arrive at a logical conclusion, what you're looking for is consistency, or the lack of contradiction within the logical system. If what you end up with seems to correlate to what you started with, and there was no obvious "nonsense" creeping in, then you can conclude that your logical conclusions are valid. You won't see any sign of contradiction so you'll consider the conclusion to be "correct". It will seem that the logic "makes sense".

What's happening is you're finding an internal consistency within the system, set up by the premise you started with. And each step you took in your reasoning did not violate the rules of the logic system. So whatever conclusions you ended up with seemed to make sense, based on what you started with. And this gives you a notion of things making sense, being valid, even being correct.

The problem is that the premise itself has absolutely everything to do with what you end up with. The conclusions that come from it, if you follow the logical steps carefully and impeccably, are really "automatic". If you start at a given starting point, you WILL end up at an ending point which is in harmony with the starting point. And you won't be able to come to a "false conclusion" if you reason it through carefully.

But if you start off on the wrong foot, if you begin with an assumption, of your premise is entirely wrong to begin with, what will happen? You'll still make logical steps, you'll still seek out internal consistency, you'll still look for that sense of "it all seems to fit together", and you'll still draw conclusions which seem to be in accord with the premise you started with. And you'll conclude "it makes sense" even. But the conclusions you come to, if you start off on the wrong foot, will be actually false. Even though they'll seem correct.

So you can be logical, and be wrong. If you start out wrong, you will only get something wrong at the other end. If you begin with a lie, you will end up with a lie, but it will be a logical lie which makes sense within the context of the whole system.

Thought systems work the same way, whatever the system is based on determines what can come from it, and only that can come from it and nothing else, unless you want to be contradictory. Yet if you start out with a system based on a lie, you will end up with lies. The lies will seem to make sense and even will seem "true" in that they seem to "add up" without contradicting the starting point, but they will still be false in the big picture. But if you believe them, you will be trapped and stuck, while believing you are free. And that is false perception.

This is the problem with the ego thought system. In the really big picture, the ego's system is a "small picture", and it is out of context, and it does not start with the whole truth. It is not beginning with something that is actually really true. It is starting out on the wrong foot, such as the belief that separation is true, or sin is real, or the impossible is possible, or death is life, or something real can be threatened etc.

When you start out with something ultimately false like that, you will produce an ENTIRE logical "system", where your reasoning will progress completely "logically" from the start to the end. And you will end up with conclusions which seem consistent. The conclusions will even seem to make total sense, IF the premise is true. But in the big picture, if it is recognized that the premise was false to begin with, then even though the conclusions are logically consistent, they are still false conclusions.

So the ego starts off on the wrong foot, on an assumption which is wrong. It starts with the belief that separation is possible, or sin is real, and then begins a progression of seemingly natural logical conclusions. If separation is real, then it must be true (consistent) that bodies are real. Then if bodes are real, it must be true that anything bodies experience is real. And if their experiences are real, then death is real. etc. That's a natural logical progress and completely impeccable logic. But the conclusion is insane because the whole "system of thought", the system of logic, began with a false premise.

When you start with a true premise, such as that God is infinite and permanent and immortal, there are once again logical progressions which come from this. If you follow the steps and start to draw conclusions based on that, and if you are careful to be consistent and not contradictory, you will end up with natural conclusions. And these conclusions will make sense, and seem valid, and they ALSO WILL BE TRUE. If you start with truth, you will end up with truth. And so whether or not the result is true or false, depends on whether the premise is true or false. And what you get out of the system as a natural logical conclusion or outcome, is set up in its starting point.

When the starting point is God, the natural logical outcome of God is the creation of the Kingdom. It's not that God randomly decides to create immortal beings, it's that the whole system just functions that way, truth goes in at the start, progressions of logical consistency occur, and you automatically get creation out the other end. And because you started with immortality, you end up with immortality. "God is but love, and therefore so am I." Such conclusions therefore are not only making sense, they are also TRUE.

"The Kingdom is the result of premises, just as this world is. You may have carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is total confusion about everything."

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit, because your mind has the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects."

"From the belief in sin, the faith in chaos must follow. It is because it follows that it seems to be a logical conclusion; a valid step in ordered thought. The steps to chaos do follow neatly from their starting point. Each is a different form in the progression of truth's reversal, leading still deeper into terror and away from truth."

When you begin a thought process/system on a lie or illusion, you will end up with illusory lies which seem to make sense but are false. This means the total absence of REASON, which is the absence of sanity, because the whole system of thinking started out insane. When you start out the thought process/system with sanity and truth, you end up with a SANE conclusion. This is what ACIM refers to as REASON. The reasoning is LOGICAL, just as the ego's reasoning is logical, but it starts with sanity so ends with sane conclusions.

Just because something seems extremely logical, does not mean it is true. And this is a BIG problem for a lot of people studying ACIM. If for example you start out with a premise that e.g. God created the world, and you do not challenge this premise, the ENTIRE course will now be interpreted to try to "fit" it into that premise. And every conclusions drawn will not challenge that premise.

In order to uphold the premise that God created this world, a LOT of adjustments have to be made to the course's meanings, in order to produce consistency and a lack of contradiction. And this can lead to what seems like a consistent picture, but it is also completely wrong. Because it started out with a belief that is completely mistaken and unfounded, in light of God's nature.

A massive collection of CONSISTENT logical conclusions will be made based on it. And all of these conclusion together will form the appearance of what seems like a completely consistent internal coherence. It will STILL all seems to "fit together". A clear "picture" will form. There won't appear to be any contradictions. And any steps necessary to keep the premise valid will be made, regardless of the extent to which that means changing the meaning of the course.

Everything it says will be interpreted through that lens and filter. And the person will end up with a very elaborate, consistent, highly polished, internally supportive, self un-contradictory, and seemingly highly sensible set of conclusions. And it will all seem TRUE because it seems to make sense. And they will marvel at the seeming beauty of its logical harmony. BUT, the entire thing will be bullshit, because it all starts out with a false premise. And so the entire system of thought is completely mistaken. Yet it is regarded as truth because of its consistency.

You have to therefore be careful that your reasoning begins with something which is absolutely true. You need to understand God's nature first. And when you reason based on the truth, you will end up with truthful and valid and consistent answers, which are correct. You can't start with the world and try to reason backwards to find the truth. You have to start at the beginning of the system.

You have to have an awareness or grasp of what the absolute truth IS FIRST, before you can even proceed to think about anything. If you set off on the wrong foot, every conclusion you come to will be potentially false. But most of us will start out with false conclusions and assumptions and not question them, resulting in more false conclusions. Because we're starting out exploring all this with our egos, which has taken a whole bunch of assumptions as true, and this has not yet been questioned.

We have to find out first what the premise of our entire thinking is, whether we have started out on the wrong foot or not. And for that you have to ask yourself, what is the ultimate truth really like? What is God like? What is his nature? What IS the ultimate absolute premise? Where DID everything actually start, and what is the logical nature of that premise? Because from God, everything real proceeds as a logical system of thought, and it proceeds only according to His nature, and nothing can come from it which is unlike its starting point. So you have to be REALLY clear about God's nature before you can reason anything correctly.

When you can understand what God is like, you can start to draw truthful conclusions. And if you are careful, you can be GUARANTEED that these conclusions will be true. But if you do not understand God's premise, or you have difficulty being impeccable with your logic, then you will come to false conclusions because you'll be starting out with something false. And yet these conclusions will see true to you and make sense, even though they are mistakes or errors in reasoning. And you can end up with a whole lot of "it makes sense" even if you start out with lies.

This is happening A LOT in ACIM circles because many students are not yet in a position to grasp the nature of God's system, the premise of reality and the one truth. And so most of us are struggling to come to terms with what the conclusions are, yet alone being able to grasp where it all started or what it's all based on. And a lot of time is spent trying to uncover or learn about the premise.

If you return to the highest possible starting point, the pre-separation system, and you look at how God functions, and then you begin to reason out what CAME from that premise, and if you do so impeccably logically, you WILL come to true conclusions. But if you are mistaken about God, you will be mistaken in everything you conclude.

Those true conclusions will not only show you the things God COULD do, it will also show you what he COULD NOT do. What CAN come from Him, and what cannot. What He would will, and what he would not. And thus what you are, what your nature is, and what you are capable of in reality. When you do that, you'll see why the ego's system is entirely a FALSE premise, and EVERYTHING that comes from it will be false. And that includes the attempt to oppose God's premise, to overthrow the Kingdom, to make another world (including Earth), and why Earth CANNOT have come from God due to its nature being a complete contradiction of God's nature.

God does not make contradictions because He is logically consistent. For Him, heaven is the natural outcome of His premise. And Heaven is the ONLY outcome of His premise. Nothing else CAN come from it because it is rooted in truth. And because of His nature, Heaven HAD to be created. It's in God's nature to extend His logical premise to produce The Kingdom. Which is why it has always existed.

Earth, which is OPPOSITE to heaven in *EVERY* way, CANNOT COME FROM GOD. Its nature is opposite to His premise. It does not function like Him. It does not begin with the premise He begins with. And it cannot be a natural outcome of His thought system. If He were to create it, in addition to creating Heaven, that would mean two entirely different and opposing outcomes can result from a single premise. This is logically IMPOSSIBLE regardless of what the premise is. Each premise produces ONE conclusion in accord with it, not two different ones.

God could only create one or the other, and which one is set up in his beginning nature. Since Earth is opposite to Heaven, God could NOT have created it, otherwise He would have to have STARTED OUT with a split mind and be opposing himself. He would have to be fundamentally contradictory, as a premise, in order to PRODUCE two contradictory outputs. He could only Create ONE or the other, not both, and they cannot both exist or "be one" because of their contradictory natures. If Earth is real, heaven does not exist at all.

God is NOT contradictory, so He can ONLY produce ONE outcome. That outcome is HEAVEN, and Earth is therefore NOT OF GOD, and is not based on truth or reality. And since God is real, Earth therefore, logically, cannot be real. And since only what God creates CAN exist, Earth does not exist at all. And if God is permanent, Earth cannot be permanent. And if God exists, having Created ONLY heaven, Earth cannot exist at all. This is why "there is no world" and God did not create it.

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates MUST be eternal AS HIMSELF" is a logical statement. Since Earth is NOT eternal, it must have come from a NON-ETERNAL premise, and since God is eternal, it cannot have come from HIS premise. And because HIS premise is true, it must have come from a FALSE premise. And therefore Earth is an illusion, and never will it be His one outcome.

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

Disassociation plays a big part in making your forgiveness seem much more difficult.

Disassociation means that you are "not associating your self" with something. You're trying to put distance between you and something.

The problem is that you use disassociation on your SELF. You split off a part of your own self, the content of your mind, by having an unforgiving attitude of judgement. Then you try to reject that part of yourself, label it, judge it, hate it. You try to think of it as something you don't want, that is not your self.

You use these tools of separation against it because this helps you to have the impression that it's got nothing to do with you. You want nothing to do with it, like you want nothing to do with an enemy.

It is possible with your mind, to so thoroughly disassociate yourself from this "part" of yourself that you've decided to hate, and to have such a strong sense of rejection against it, that you come to believe it is NOT YOU.

So now that this part of you seems like it is not you, you quite literally perceive, experience, and belief that this thing is 'someone else'. You believe it is "not me".

If you've ever had an enemy in the form of a person, someone who perhaps seemed to abuse or hurt you a lot or who you were really angry with, or who over time you built up a hate towards, it could be a family member or an old friend or lover or a politician etc... notice how you had this sense of wanting nothing to do with them. You did not want to associate yourself with them, didn't want to be near them, even wanted to "get rid of them" from your experience. Maybe you even wouldn't have minded if they were dead or something.

Well this is what happens with a part of yourself that you disassociate from. You attack this part of yourself so strongly and pull yourself away from it, split yourself off from it, and there is this seeming "rift" between you. A separation. You use denial and illusions to make it SEEM like it is not part of your "self". You dis-identify with it, and form a different sense of identity that shuts it out. And the way that you perceive this part - which now appears like an 'other', with an alien will - looks to you like someone completely separate from you.

So as you break off parts of yourself and reject them, you form an attitude of tremendous rejection and attack towards them, and this makes them change how they appear to you. They look like something you don't want, like an enemy. And your sense of 'self' is disconnected from it. You say it is not you. You perceive it not you. You isolate your sense of "self" from it so much that you really believe it is not you. And that means, it's not "inside you". It's not part of yourself. And therefore, it has to be NOT YOU. So... if it's not you, it must be someone else's stuff, right? It must belong to someone else.

So this is where you then perceive that this rejected part of yourself is in fact intimately tied into someone else. And as you walk around the planet and meet people, you will still continue to experience this condemned part of yourself, within yourself, but you will have disassociated from it so much that you will perceive it's part of other people. You will think it is theirs. And this is what we usually refer to as "projection". This is how you seem to project things onto other people. You overlay your disassociated self onto others.

So then when you're in this situation where it seems like someone is an enemy, and you hate their guts, they really have nothing to do with this. There is a portion of your mind that you hate the guts of, and you're seeing this on top of the person. And you're so dis-identified with that part of you, that you think it's not you, or yours.

Like, it seems like it the other person is quite literally the one who is doing this stuff to you, because you think that this hated part of yourself is attacking or enemy of what remains of your "self". And so is born the idea and perception that you are being victimized by "other" people, by "not me". And this also means, you are now completely irresponsible because you are allegedly not the one who is doing this to you. And simultaneously this paints whats left of you as "innocent" - the innocent victim who has nothing to do with this evil thing.

But you are not really in a victim/victimizer relationship with other people. You're in this relationship with this broken-off part of your own self, which you hate, which is STILL within the confines of your own mind. So the question arises, who are you? What is left of you, if you are not this part you rejected?

Well when you've broken off part of yourself and judged it and disowned it, the part that remains is what we call the ego persona. You think it is the part of you that you are identified with and which is your "self". You think it is all of your self, your whole self, because it's the only parts of you that you have accepted and allowed. It's the parts of you related to what you want to be, how you want to be seen, the good citizen, the successful achiever, the strong personality, whatever. The parts you "keep" are the parts that you have not disassociated from, so you think this is still you. You don't realize that the other parts you've cut off within yourself are also you.

So now within your total mind, there is this small portion that remains, the persona, which is who you THINK you are, and this persona self focuses on including what it wants and rejecting what it doesn't want. And what it doesn't want are the things that it judges and attacks, within you. So this persona attacks you. And it relegates part of you off as not worthy, not allowed, not acceptable, not lovable, not forgivable, not good enough, bad, evil, etc. All of those parts form this disassociated self, another word for which is the "shadow".

This shadow portion of your own self is still within your mind, and there is a war going on between it and your persona. The persona wants to get rid of it at all costs, and does so by continually refining and trimming down what's left of you, chopping off parts it doesn't like with goal of artificial perfection. If it were to succeed with that goal, there would be nothing left of you because it will have relegated so much of you to the hated shadow. The shadow part of you, the disassociated self, which you think is in other people, is really still within your mind, and there is a war waging between these two parts.

So the stuff you hate about you, projected onto others, is believed to be attacking the stuff you exalt about you, which now sees itself as under attack and needing to defend itself. But the hilariously ridiculous, insane thing is, both of these perspectives, these two identities, are both inside of YOU. You have a split mind. Everything you think is inside you, inside your body, you have kept, and now the surface of your body shows this 'mask' of the persona to represent where you stop and where "otherness" starts. And anything outside your body that you think of as "not you" is where you DUMP all of the parts of you that you cannot love. And by relegating all these parts to "not me", "other", "external", it is very easy to perceive that this stuff belongs to someone else.

So now it's someone else'e fault that you nice tidy ego persona is being attacked. Or someone else is doing it to you. Or there is a cause outside of you - so you think. Or you are being affected and upset by something, some separate self, some alien will, that is outside of what you think is 'you', attacking you and trying to destroy you. But it's really part of you. It wants to be integrated and it wants to be unified and it wants to actually cancel out the persona so that your IDENTITY can become WHOLE.

The separation between these two parts of you is the problem. The fact that the persona attacks you by saying only a part of you is acceptable, and the rest is not, creates a split in your mind and therefore creates the shadow. So now the persona has become the defender of a false idea of self, and the shadow that it ITSELF has created, now becomes its apparent enemy.

This makes forgiveness difficult at first because you walk around this planet constantly perceiving that everything to do with "other people" has nothing to do with you, is not your stuff, is not your problem, is not in your mind, is not something you put there, you can do nothing about, you are a victim of it, and you want nothing to do with it. This is disassociation. It IS your stuff. It IS your self. It IS your content. So you have to see that your upset about so-called "other people" has NOTHING to do with them. It's your upset about a part of your own self. It's your persona being upset about the shadow. Part A being upset about Part B, of you.

So you are at war with yourself. And you are attacking yourself. And both sides of yourself are attacking each other. And there is a separation between them. And you hallucinate that the separated-off you is not yourself. So this has to be healed somehow. The separateness of these two split parts needs to be undone.

The only way this can be achieved is when you become willing and able to see, and recognize, that this whole drama is taking place WITHIN YOU. It's really not outside of you. It's got absolutely nothing to do with other people. The problem you see in them is YOUR STUFF. It's your power. It's your attack. So there's this victimizer that you think is out there, and this victim that you think is in here, and BOTH of these characters are inside the whole of your own mind. Both of them are being PLAYED BY YOU. You are simultaneously being the victim and the victimizer. The part of you that you think remains - your persona self, is being animated by your mind. And the part of you you think is not you, the projected shadow, is also being animated by your mind - like a remote puppet on a string.

Now, when you see this, it is very powerful because no longer are you paralyzed by believing in disassociation. No longer are you locked in from being able to do anything about this as a result of believing it's totally under someone else's control, is not within the realm of your mind and is not something you can wield control over. By seeing that you are the actor who is playing BOTH SIDES, the person and the shadow, the wanted and the unwanted, the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the innocent and the guilty, the attacker and the attackee, you will see this war going on INSIDE YOURSELF.... and recognizing that YOU are the one who is playing both parts, that must snap you out of falling for this ILLUSION that it's got something to do with someone else. You must see that your identity, your actual identity, is "behind" both of these split characters, and therefore YOU are doing this, YOU are creating this 'performance', and YOU are the one who is having a war with yourself.

So if you can see this, that you're doing this to yourself, that you're playing both roles, and nobody else is involved, then this AWARENESS unmasks both characters, because it is so utterly ridiculously that you can no longer be deceived by it, and you recognize that they're both you. So now you have become INCLUSIVE, instead of exclusive. Inclusivity is healing, unifying. The awareness in which you see both characters simultaneously shows you that it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to have been one and not the other. It's impossible for you to be maintaining this position of "I'm the victim who isn't doing this to myself". And it's impossible to also maintain the position of "I'm the victimizer who is doing it to the persona". The cover is blown. The illusion is broken. They're both you. And you're doing it to yourself. It can be shocking to see this. But it is liberating. It sets you free to see the truth of what's going on.

Anyone who sees this, that they are doing this to themselves, will be set free. The persona and the shadow both will be undone, and an awareness will take their place. This awareness is your real self. Or in other words, your WHOLE SELF, which does not have these parts disassociated from each other. Your whole self is not stuck inside the illusion of victim/victimizer roles. It is not deluded that someone is doing something to it, or that it is doing something to someone. So now you are set free by the light of truth.

This also then means, automatically, that you will stop believing that this has got anything to do with other people, and that they're not really your enemies, and they really had nothing to do with this from the start. You thought it was to do with them because you were projecting your shadow self onto them and accusing it, attacking it, trying to get rid of it. Jesus describes this completely clearly in the course, that we project our own sin onto others and then attack it in attempting to destroy it. But other people are all innocent. This war was never with anyone else, it was with yourself.

This is the secret to salvation. You are doing this to yourself. You are your own enemy - but not just the receiver of attack, but also the one who attacks. You are both parties. And its you that needs healing and forgiveness between what has become two parts of you.

The idea of non-duality is an attempt to describe reality or the nature of God. What is really real and really exists. At first we have the idea of duality or polar opposites. Then we reach the idea that the world is secretly "all one thing", as though all the objects are connected together by a singular "one" something.

Then we're presented even further with the idea that if we're being really "pure" about it, the forms and objects really don't exist at all, and the "oneness" beyond them is all that really exists, ie God. In this model of "pure non-duality", there is no world", and this is what SEEMS to correlate to SOME of what ACIM says. This usually leads to conclusions such as "oneness" as in "a count of one something", "its all God", "it's all mind" etc.

So various people took up the idea that ACIM is pure non-duality. But this has some problems. Let's put it this way - the idea is not pure enough. Because if this is a logical concept and we're trying to get down to the purest essence of "what is", usually you'll find that the pure non-duality folk will ACCEPT that "God has one son". There's a lot of material about God having a son - "The Son of God". And while this is accepted, it's not actually pure.

How can God have a son, at all, if there is only God? How can you even label some aspect of God - like his "radiance", as "a son"? God would not be able to have parts, or aspects, or anything you can ever attach a label too. Not even in the most vague of ways. Some people like to try to get around this by suggesting that the Son of God is so joined to God that there is nowhere he ends and God begins... while STILL keeping somehow in their minds this loose idea that SOMEHOW, you can still point a finger at this "part of God" and call it God's Son. THAT is still not pure. It's a bandaid attempt to explain it.

The problem is that if you get really pure about it, and we remove all sense of separations, divisions, multitudes, labels, parts and aspects etc... and we REALLY boil it down to "one thing" as in the traditional idea of "oneness" (the ego's idea of purity), we end up with .... there literally is only God. And that means God, sitting there ALONE, by Himself, WITHOUT a Son, without a sonship, without any creations or thoughts, just totally alone, no-one to share with, nothing to communicate with, just complete a total loneliness. THAT, actually, is the purest possible interpretation of "pure" non-duality. That "there is only God" all by Himself and he doesn't even have a Son at all. Not even one.

But many people will not want to "go there" because to suggest there isn't even one Son flies in the face of a lot of ACIM material. And certain popular teachers have taught for a long time that a) there is only one thing but b) a slight exception is made for there being a single son. This sort of hybrid mishmash of logical concepts has been quite widely accepted as a correct mapping to what ACIM is saying. One God + One Son, who is God, but isn't, but is. It's a bandaid and not logically pure nor does it match what the Course itself says.

The fact is, if there is truly this "oneness" in which there are not "many" of anything, in an effort to avoid "duality", there is **no son** there whatsoever. Not even as an aspect or expression or radiance or thought or part of God. And that leads also to the super watered-down conclusion of "it's all God" ie "there is nothing else". And that conclusion by itself has problems because e.g. the Course speaks of how a) God does not will to be alone and b) God is a creator and c) God has at least one Son and d) God created the Holy Spirit and e) God created angels and f) the Son has his own creations as well. Which is shaping up to be a lot of "parts", a lot of "somethings" that are sufficient enough to say there isn't "just" God there - that there HAS BEEN an act of creation. That something has been ADDED TO reality.

There is also an issue of freedom. If everything in reality is God and God is just being God in all of His ways, then there is no freedom in which any part or aspect has any free will. There is no way that you as a Son of God can dream of exile. There is no way that anything can occur without it being God doing it Himself, directly. And any idea of a Son must really be an idea of some kind of PUPPET that God is manipulating that has no mind or life or will of its own - no freedom at all. Which really runs counter to what Jesus tells us of the Son of God, free will, the ability to choose and the separation seeming to happen.

If you also blob it all together and say "its all God" then you end up with the alarming scenario that God therefore MUST be dreaming of exile, God must have invented the illusion of death, God is REALLY cruel, and God has attacked himself. This renders God insane, and that just isn't acceptable. Because if God could go off the rails, there is no way He would ever return to sanity, and all of existence would vanish.

It is vital that there be some kind of freedom between God and the Son in order for God NOT to be pulled into insanity along with His Son's dreaming. Free Will is absolutely vital in order to prevent this. But to have free will means, you guessed it, there MUST be a kind of "independence" or individuality, in which the Son CAN, if He so chooses, try to will against God. And this is based on the fact that God is the CAUSE of His Son, His Son is the EFFECT of Him, and God has given His son FREEDOM to SHARE His freedom with Him, or deny it. Either way, without freedom there is no free will and no son at all.

There is also another major problem with non-duality. God by His nature is love and love MUST be given. Unless it is given ie shared, it does not extend or shine and so becomes essentially lifeless. IT MUST go out and create. If God has no son, there is nothing TO love or to SHARE it with. And so love cannot love. And this means, ultimately, logically, that God is dead because He isn't LOVING. This again is unacceptable as a conclusion. God can't be dead or unloving. But to be alive, GOD MUST CREATE, so we must accept God has created ADDITIONAL BEINGS in a state of freedom.

And this is the key part that non-duality shits all over. Regardless of the fact that it destroys the sonship and ignores God's creations, it basically denies that God CREATES at all. It's the idea that God is just sitting there alone twiddling his thumbs. And this means He is not creating a son, not even one. It means there is no Kingdom. No Heaven. No HOME for the Son of God. No inheritance. It means the denial that God has a family. It denies that God's SON is a creator, AND it denies that God's son has created children. It's not conceptually a good FIT for ACIM's metaphysics.

So non-duality basically suppresses the MANY thought creations of God, denies many aspects of REALITY, and overthrows the Kingdom. It kills off God, puts a stop to Creation, eradicates sharing, makes it impossible for God to create many children, and interprets the Sonship as a collection of egos. Now, WHO exactly do you think comes up with such a concept of "what reality is like"? THE EGO. These are the EGO's conclusions, non-duality is an EGO CONCEPT, and like all ego concepts it actually NEGATES what is true and cancels or denies reality.

All non-duality models are the ridiculous FALSE conclusions that the ego comes to when trying to understand something TOTALLY BEYOND the ego. Something whose nature is NOTHING LIKE the ego, and so the ego is utterly clueless as to its nature. Non-duality is not really an attempt to define or describe reality, it's an attempt to destroy it.

At best, and only loosely, non-duality MIGHT describe "God Himself", if you could isolate Him and say, God is one whole being, PRIOR to creation. But beyond that, in terms of God being a CREATOR, who HAS CREATED CHILDREN, it totally falls flat on its face. There is no sonship without creation. Non-duality is Kingdom-denying. Reality IS NOT a state of "its all God" or "its all mind". It's all God AND God's creations AND their creations. Because you can ADD TO REALITY, reality cannot be non-dualistic.

"HE created the Sonship, and YOU increase it. You HAVE the power to ADD to the Kingdom, but NOT to add to the Creator OF the Kingdom."

"God created His **Sons** by extending His Thought and retaining the extensions of His Thought in His Mind. ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they were created neither partially nor in part."

"You should know that all God's children are fully worthy of COMPLETE courtesy."

"We are creation, WE, the Sons of God."

"And we, God's children, rise up from the dust and look upon our perfect sinlessness."

But let's back up a moment. The Course DOES say that there is only God. It DOES say God has one Son. It DOES say there is only one mind (Christ mind). It DOES speak of oneness. "Into eternity where all is one" "I and my father are one" "God has but one son" etc. And that *seems* to support the idea that "its all God". But here's the thing. IT IS all God, it IS all "one", BUT.... THERE IS **ALSO** CREATION. And all created BEINGS are LIKE God, share with God, are one with God (of the same nature, joined to Him), yet have THEIR OWN FREEDOM.

God HAS created a family of beings. God IS a creator. God DID create at least one son. SO non-duality is out the window. Reality is not some giant expanse of singularity. It's more like a womb in which God has given birth to creations, WITHIN His own being, and has given them FREEDOM. Living, whole-minded, willfully free beings. Children of God. And if that makes you uncomfortable because it "does not compute" or "it sounds like duality", too bad. It is what it is and its your job to accept it.

It's not the same thing as duality. Duality means the localization of parts which are split off and kept separate by NOT SHARING with each other, confined and isolated and different. Duality is the nature of space and time, where nothing shares. Non-duality is the idea of the opposite of that - that the differences are illusions and everything is one thing. But that too is not accurate. Reality isn't some "state" where God is contemplating his navel. Reality isn't like duality even with its many parts because they STILL are all "one" AND YET also many. And each part SHARES with all the rest and IS EVERYWHERE. "One mind is all minds."

Love is EXPRESSIVE. "Divine abstraction takes joy in application." "God did not will to be alone." And as such God has gone BEYOND the concept of "there's only one thing there". God has CREATED children. He has ADDED to existence, and your function is to add to it further. That's not non-duality by a long shot. Nor is it duality (spacetime where things are separated and limited).

God has created a Kingdom. A home for His Sons. Who are one, but many. This is what's miraculous and ego defying. Because of SHARING ("nothing real can be increased, except by sharing"), God has "made room" for beings within Him who share with Him FULLY (oneness) but who STILL retain their own souls. The soul has been FULLY ADDED to existence.

"The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created. There is no lack in it."

After the ego is undone, after the separation has ended, after the universe has disappeared, after all divisions and artificial UNNATURAL separations are gone, when duality is no more... the children of God WILL REMAIN children of God, just as they were BEFORE the separation.

"I am as God created me".

"The Holy Spirit promotes healing by looking beyond it to what the children of God were before healing was needed, and will be when they have been healed."

"The Voice of the Holy Spirit is the Call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind. When the Atonement is complete ***and the whole Sonship is healed*** there will be no Call to return. But what God creates (Holy Spirit) is eternal. The Holy Spirit will remain with ***the Sons of God***, to bless ***their creations*** and keep them in the light of joy."

A Course in Miracles is NOT non-duality. It only loosely teaches that "its all ONE" or "we are all one". That's TRUE. We're woven from the same cloth. BUT, it's not the WHOLE truth. We are ONE, BUT, God as the Oneness has created many of us WITHIN His being. And this is NOT contradictory to God, only to the ego. It is miraculous. And this is because God is MIRACULOUS. He HAS done what seems impossible to the ego. He HAS created a Kingdom filled with souls, beings of light, who share everything together as one united family, WITHOUT destroying reality and without fragmenting existence.

"God, who encompasses all being, NEVERTHELESS (regardless of whether you like this or it makes sense) created **separate beings**, who have everything **individually** and want to share it to increase their joy."

A desire to affirm what is true or spiritual or more positive, can actually be a form of denial.

What you are actually doing is you are trying to make the bad stuff go away, not by its proper undoing, but by glossing over it, replacing it, trying to create an illusion of peace or happiness, or trying to attack it with images of something you prefer.

Years ago this was my only strategy to deal with long-term unhappiness - to try to pull myself out of the mud temporarily and yearn toward the light and try to be positive and look on the bright side and act as if it wasn't there. And then it pulled me right back into it, because I was being a spiritual ego. I was in denial and using denial to try to make stuff go away rather than dealing with it.

So if you are thinking that you just need to repeat what the Course says, or say your favorite quotes, or use certain magical phrases, in an attempt to "deal with" the problem, what you are doing isn't so much correctional as it is a reaction and a way to try to make the bad stuff go away.

It is not our job to make bad stuff go away. This was an ego strategy and it is the ego's attempt at being spiritual. It will try to cover up bad stuff with a glossy surface layer, painting pretty pictures and having positive thoughts and trying to strive towards a happy-go-lucky attitude, all the while keeping depression and self hatred and thoughts of suicide buried underneath.

Dark shit is not healed this way. It doesn't go away, it merely goes out of awareness. The ego's strategy for dealing with anything has always been to make stuff go out of awareness, in an attempt to create the illusion that it no longer exists. This is how it "got rid of God". This is how it denied sin and covered it up with fake guilt instead of undoing it.

This is how it turns guilt into fear and fear into punishment and punishment into death. It uses a form of denial and replaces it with something which looks, on the surface, to be something initially better or more promising or which creates an illusion of things having improved.

But all this does is KEEP the underlying belief, does not correct anything, and in fact makes things worse, because now you have a solid belief in sin covered over with a nice layer of fake innocence, so now you have two layers of problems.

Don't think that denial only looks like denial. Denial takes on whatever form is necessary in order TO deny the truth, and so it is always deceptive in its appearance. It can look like salvation. It can look like peace and light. It can look like becoming more spiritual or being happier. It is the ego's coping mechanism for trying to "deal with" the underling problem in a way which DOES NOT REALLY WORK, but which SEEMS to work.

So if you are trying to combat the bad stuff with quotes and sayings and phrases as if to say these things is getting your mind to believe them more, you are not really directly tackling the problem. You are not looking at the problem squarely and asking yourself, is this even true? Is it even real? Why am I even believing this in the first place? Just assuming it is true and then using denial to make it go away, does not work. At all. Ever.

We come to the course with the ego, and that means we come to it with the ego fully functional in its efforts to cope with life and to manage what it thinks are problems. Its mechanisms for doing this need to be uprooted. If you have always tried to be light and positive and happy while burying your belief in sin and guilt, then you're going to be in for a surprise when someday that 'body of pain' erupts in your mind and cannot be ignored.

When something happens or someone seems to upset us or something goes wrong, if our response to this is to quote course at it or try to be positive or to "see it a different way" (ie see only the good in it, even though we still believe it's happening), then we are using the ego to do the course and are in denial.

Denying what we've already made real does not undo it and this is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is willing to look directly at the dark shit, with truth and light, and examining what it is made of, where it came from, whether there is any real truth or reality to it, and upon recognizing that it is FALSE, letting it go, rather than hiding it.

If your bath is overflowing and there is water all over the floor and it's starting to leak through the floorboards and go all over the place, the solution is not to fetch a magical mop and bucket or to throw down some towels to soak up the water, or to just shut the door and deal with it later. It's to turn off the fricking tap! The problem must be addressed at its CAUSE, its SOURCE, not in terms of its effects or things further down the line.

This is why we have to QUESTION EVERY ASSUMPTION about the ego or about what's seeming to happen. To question even whether it is even really happening at all. To question whether sin is even POSSIBLE, yet alone whether someone sinned. Accepting anything of the ego as a "given" is a mistake, and all of the reactionary band-aids that you use to try to cope with the "effects" of those "real causes" are not going to work. The only thing that will work is to correct the problem at its source by learning to recognize what it is and what it is not.

Here's why having a thought of attack or judgement about someone else automatically includes you and attacks you.

Mind in its natural state is free of all judgements and attacks. It is "empty". It sees reality for what it is with no interpretation.

In order for mind have a 'judgement' about someone, the only way mind can do this is to generate some kind of situation within itself that looks like a judgement. An attack thought.

So within the mind itself, made from mind, mind has to invent images, forms, thoughts, impressions, sensations, which put a judgement into the mind's experience. Otherwise the mind wouldn't be able to PERCEIVE that there is a judgement taking place. Mind can only experience what is within itself and is absolutely blind to anything external (because there is nothing external, really).

So now the mind is having a judgement about "someone", but it couldn't create this judgement outside of itself. It's setting off nuclear bombs about this so-called other person, but the fallout from that explosion is affecting the mind because it's all taking place inside the mind.

Even though the mind is having a judgement ABOUT something that it thinks is outside of itself - beyond the body identity - the actual experience of the judgement and the conditions that this judgement creates, are happening inside the confines of the body-mind.

So that means it's happening to you. Not only is it happening to you just as much as it's happening to someone else, it's actually ONLY happening to you, and not happening to someone else at all!

So to perceptually attack someone else, you have to put attack into your mind. Your mind has to believe in attack, and it goes both ways. The mind doesn't conceive of 'attack on xyz person' hoping to escape how that attack feels, it conceives of 'attack' in general. And that means, the same rules it applies to someone else, applies to itself.

The mind cannot perceive or experience anything outside of itself. It's like, the ocean cannot know what life is like in a desert - it can't go there, it doesn't exist there, it can only be aware of what's in the ocean.

So you THINK that you can use your mind to make up stuff 'about someone not myself'. You THINK you have this ability to objectively sit on the sidelines and judge and attack and have absolutely no effects from this at all. That's absolutely mistaken and a totally ego-based self-deception. Nobody has this ability. It's a myth. If you want bombs to go off against other people, you have to set them off within you, and pretend that they're having an affect on someone else. Good luck with that.

So you have this vested interest in not attacking 'others' because in fact it doesn't even attack others, it attacks you.

Try hating someone or being really angry at them, at the same time as loving yourself. Any luck with that? It's not possible. You can't maintain a state of mind for love to exist while simultaneously having a state of mind where hate/fear/guilt/judgement/attack exists. YOUR mental condition has to degrade in order to generate hatred. Hatred destroys you. Your mental condition has to become unconscious and blocked in order for you not to see love in someone. And by not seeing it in someone, those blocks will block your own awareness of your own love. You put up walls to keep others out, and to keep you in a prison.

So you see you can't do anything to others and think that you're getting away with it, or that you are not going to be affected in some way. You are deeply affected, and ONLY you are affected, when you really get down to it. So it's utterly futile.

You have this interest in not attacking others not because you even can attack others, but because every single time you do this you do not realize that you are ONLY attacking yourself, YOUR mind suffers, YOUR mind changes into a hate machine, YOU are experiencing the hate, and other people aren't even experiencing it.

You think you can generate 'stuff' in you that somehow leaks out and overflows and travels over to other people and does stuff to them. You think you have these weapons of warfare, the power to affect someone else. You don't. It's a total myth. If someone doesn't choose to experience effects they will not. If you're in a judging hateful mood and you're going around believing you're capable of attacking people, and the people are all laughing and not taking it seriously, obviously you don't have the power to affect them. You're deluded.

You are the only one who is upset.

For Jesus, miracles were natural. We'd call them supernatural because our idea of natural is less than natural.

Each time He performed a miracle, it wasn't that He was shifting his awareness from illusions to truth. He wasn't doing some kind of correction of Himself in His own mind.

He performed miracles BECAUSE He had already gone through a purification process, not in order TO purify himself.

He was doing miracles all the time. Every single day, every hour, every minute He was miraculous.

This idea that a miracle (in A Course in Miracles) means the process of correcting your own illusions, clearly does not hold up against the evidence. Jesus would have run out of illusions a long time prior.

When he raised the dead, multiplied food, walked on water, turned objects into other objects, restored sight to the blind etc, he wasn't in a mode of "waking up". He was able to do these things BECAUSE He had woken up.

All of His miracles were inspired by, came from, and were powered by God's love. His simple willingness to love unconditionally was miraculous. That love was possible because of the removal of the blocks to love's awareness, for Himself, which He had more or less finished already.

If miracles come from love and require love, and if blocks to awareness shut love out, then you could believe that lifting away the block to awareness is a miracle. In a sense, you go from being less miraculous to more miraculous, because you go from less love to more love.

But it isn't the transition from darkness to light that is miraculous. It isn't the process of going from illusions to truth that is miraculous. It isn't the waking up process over time that is miraculous. Miraculous is what you naturally ARE once those processes are complete.

And yet, even without their completion, all that it takes is enough willingness and faith in an unseen truth to be able to bring forth demonstrations that that truth is true. Expressions of love, not just concepts of love.

"The perceptual content of miracles is wholeness" means that miracles occur when the mind is whole. If the mind is very far from whole and there is a lot to be undone yet, you can hardly call the undoing of a thin layer of illusion miraculous. That isn't wholeness.

Just as claiming the atonement once and for all is miraculous, and just as COMPLETE forgiveness is a state of having nothing left to forgive, so too is the miracle an expression of that state of mind. This is why the Holy Spirit, who is in the "right mind", is the mechanism of miracles, because He sees with whole perception. WHOLE perception, not partial.

As we are transitioning from partial perception toward whole perception, let's be honest. Those steps are worthwhile and they bring correction and it is easy to use various course quotes to justify calling this a miracle, but it's not. Miracles become POSSIBLE because of this process.

This is why it was natural for Jesus to perform miracles all the time, and why when miracles are not happening all the time, something has gone wrong. When something has gone wrong, you're in the ego illusion and need some purification, correction, but that is only to bring you BACK to the miraculous mind.

Having faith, from a standpoint of being still filled with illusions, creates a kind of bridge between where you're at and the mind of Holy Spirit. He is still able to be miraculous on your behalf because from His vantage point, He sees with wholeness. He is in a state of CORRECTNESS, which is capable of correcting, except that this correctness also knows that there is not really a NEED for correction.

He can help to correct by showing you only that, in truth, all is forgiven already and nothing need be corrected. That this is the truth. Correction does NOT mean "real correction" as in a change within an illusion which you believe is true. It is the UN-doing of illusions, and it not really a change at all.

You are miraculous because of what you ARE. You are miraculous because you are of God. You are love. And to the unnatural, who believe they are natural, this will appear to be supernatural. Awakened, purified, perfected, in perfect forgiveness, and having claimed the atonement COMPLETELY, you will not STOP doing miracles.

If miracles were just shifts in perception and you had no perceptions left to shift, does that mean you will stop being miraculous? No. The Course is telling just the complete opposite. When you are done shifting your perception to truth, or even as you take steps towards this, miracles will become your RIGHT, and you will share the Will of God to perform them. They will be second nature, happening all the time.

Being miraculous is the way of God's children.

What the world is, is really only the tiny instant of its current state right now. Not what it was before, and not what it will be. There is a tiny thin slice of 'time' in which everything is always changing and transforming, and in which the only stuff that exists is actually there.

Whatever state the world is in right now, that's all that exists of the world. The future doesn't really exist yet, the past is already gone. There isn't really any time, no past and no future. Time is really an avoidance of the present and an avoidance of reality.

So all we have of the world is whatever is "left over" right now this single instant, the current objects, the things in their current positions, the current conditions of stuff, arranged in whatever way they are arranged right now.

As changes occur this same one moment right there now shifts and morphs before your eyes, becoming slightly different than it was just before, but only the stuff that still remains NOW is what is here.

There is no recording of past states, other than through fictional memory, and there is no predicted future. As soon as something changes, how it was before is totally irrelevant. It is only in the configuration that it is in NOW. It is not its past or it future states, just the current one.

As far as the physical world is concerned, there is no past or future at all, just a single slice of time in which everything appears to come and go, right now, here and now, in the present.

The now-moment of time, is symbolic of the foreverness of eternity. It is not the same as it but being in the present moment of time puts you very close to the eternal. By being only in the present you effectively aren't going anywhere, even if the appearance of forms keep shifting and changing.

The world is like a pool of water which is mixing and flowing around but it's still the same one pool of water. Just moving and animating within the present tiny slice of time.

To be in the present there can't be a sense of knowing what is about happen, because everything has to be met immediately as though it is completely new, otherwise you're projecting past learning onto the present.

There can be a lot of resistance to just being totally present, which is fear, and is ego, in which the mind is not really paying attention, it's projecting a wall of expectation and anticipation and the dullness of having "figured it out ahead of time", such that the mind is paying attention to what it thinks will happen rather than to what is.

This is the importance of the "I do not know", because this leaves the mind open to receiving an present-moment awareness of what is happening, rather than being lost in concepts and thoughts and beliefs about what "might be".

God can only be found in the present because God IS PRESENCE, which is an eternal property of here-and-now and always-and-forever. God's absoluteness means he is fully and totally present everywhere, as in in-person and fully attentive to it. So you can't be aware of God when you're living in the past.

Living in the past really means you're caught up in a kind of dream about things which aren't even here anymore, and which have changed into something else, such as old grievances and losses and pains and so on. And it's just as bad to live in the future, where you are imagining what might happen and trying to predict and control it. Sin locks you into the past just as guilt sucks you into the future in anticipation of punishments to come.

We really in truth only can exist in the present. Where else could you possible BE present, or really exist? You are here now with God forever. The "real world" also only exists in the present and can only be experienced by being present.

"This instant is the only time there is."

"(Edgar) Cayce's mind was imprisoned to some extent by an error against which you have been cautioned several times. He looked to the past for an EXPLANATION of the present, but he never succeeded in separating the past FROM the present. When he said "mind is the builder," he did not realize that it is only what it is building NOW that really creates the future. The past, in itself, does not have the ability to do this. Whenever we move from one instant to the next, the previous one no longer exists."

"The mind's preoccupation with the past is the cause of the total misconception about time from which your seeing suffers. Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is. It therefore cannot understand time, and cannot, in fact, understand anything."

"The present now remains the only time."

"The only aspect of time which is really eternal is NOW. That is what we REALLY mean when we say that now is the only time. The literal nature of this statement does not mean anything to the ego. It interprets it, at best, to mean "don't worry about the future." This is NOT what it really means at all."

"What time but now can truth be recognized? The present is the only time there is. And so today, this instant, now, we come to look upon what is forever there; not in our sight but in the eyes of Christ. He looks past time and sees eternity as represented there."

"And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now."

"It IS a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which MEANS there is no time."

You may be accustomed to just thinking about "stuff". As if thought is a natural function which you can use however you like. It seems like you can think about anything without any effect. As if every thought is neutral.

But you may also notice that when you think about something unpleasant, you do not feel happy. When you have a fearful thoughts, you do not feel safe. When you have an attacking thought in anger, you do not feel peaceful. And when you have an accusation thoughts, you feel guilty.

The issue then is that just by the mere fact that you are HAVING these thoughts, that is WHY you are not feeling happy and at peace. Just by HAVING the thought, you are producing an upset.

This doesn't mean that, therefore, you should not have thoughts, because thought is life and the mind must think. However, the thoughts of attack and fear and so on are not CONSTRUCTIVE thoughts. They are thoughts of destruction. And when you USE thought to think in such a way, you hurt yourself.

You can play with this idea by simply asking yourself, whenever you are thinking about something and not feeling good, would you have still felt this way if you DID NOT HAVE the thought? If you did not THINK THIS, would you be unhappy? Are you ONLY feeling unhappy because you thought this? And you'll find the answer is yes.

If you had not thought of attack and fear and horrible things, you would NOT be experiencing hell, upset, fear, loss, anger, or any other unpleasant response. Your thoughts are CAUSING your suffering. Your thoughts are CAUSING your emotions. Your thoughts are NOT neutral, and are in fact having an effect on you.

You think you can just use thoughts without any effects, without any responsibility, without causing a change. As if it isn't the fact that you are having an attack thought that's causing you to feel threatened and guilty. As if having the thought is just some neutral observation, passive, that just reflects what's going on.

We might think then that our thoughts are just little mirrors which are interacting with the world and reflecting what's in it, commenting on it and responding to it as if we only have reactionary thoughts. As if thought is all just an EFFECT of the world. But this is not at all true. Thought is CAUSAL.

When thought is causal, HAVING a thought CAUSES things to happen. Thought creates some kind of form. Thought has power. Thought produces effects. Thoughts MAKE YOU sick and unhappy and angry and upset. Thoughts produce death. Thoughts put you in hell. HAVING these negative thoughts is the real problem, and it's in your mind.

However, you need a better thought if you want to be happy. You need to start USING thought constructively, supportively, empoweringly, happily, and with more light and love. Loving thoughts are healing thoughts. Loving thoughts tune to the power of God. Loving thoughts can literally move mountains and raise the dead. Loving thoughts are resurrectors. Thoughts are GIVING.

If you think of LIFE, then you are CAUSING LIFE. If you think of HEALTH, then you are causing health. If you think about how HAPPY someone is, you are helping them to be happy. If you having a true optimism, which is a proper use of denial, then you are rejecting suffering and sickness and death. True thoughts empower you just as much as false thoughts bring your own suffering. And NOTHING other than your thoughts cause you to be happy or unhappy, sick or well.

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source of innocence and holiness."

"Neutral thoughts are impossible because all thoughts have power. They will either make a false world or lead me to the real one. But thoughts cannot be without effects. As the world I see arises from my thinking errors, so will the real world rise before my eyes as I let my errors be corrected. My thoughts cannot be neither true nor false. They must be one or the other. What I see shows me which they are."

"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. By affirming this, the miracle worker releases the mind from over-evaluating its own learning device (the body), and restores the mind to its true position as the learner."

"I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts."

"People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them."

Nothing has gone wrong.

There is nothing wrong with you.

You have not sinned.

You are immortal.

You cannot be hurt or suffer or be sick or die.

God created you eternal and holy forever.

You are sustained by the love of God at all times.

You have never sinned.

There is no real sin or guilt in you.

Any consequences of sin are utterly make-believe.

You are perfectly pure and forever innocent.

There is nothing you have ever done or can ever do which can make God decide to turn you away or judge or condemn you.

Your innocence is incapable of being defiled.

You are immortal and all forms of suffering and sickness and death are fiction.

No-one has ever died and no-one has ever really suffered.

You cannot die and you already have eternal life.

You are already in Heaven with God right now, right here, and always have been.

You are not lacking anything and there is no loss in you.

You have no needs whatsoever, and you are already complete and whole.

There is nothing that you want beyond what God has given and your only desire is to extend and share joyfully in the creation of more love.

You cannot be in error and you cannot be lost.

It is impossible for you to be separate from God in any way or to make Him unaware of you.

There is nowhere to hide and you have no secrets.

God is aware of everything about you.

God knows everything about you and always has.

He knows you are eternally guiltless and sinless and could not sin if you tried.

God did not create beings capable of sin or separation.

You have not malfunctioned or gone off the rails or hurt anyone or hurt yourself.

You are not too far gone, you have not gone anywhere.

There is nothing you can do in reality or truth besides extend love and create happiness.

You are always happy.

You are always perfect.

There is nothing being held against you and there is nothing you could ever do to turn God's love away.

God has not changed His mind about you at all and still regards you as perfect because He still creates you as perfect forever.

You have never caused anyone to suffer and no-one has ever caused you to suffer.

You are incapable of being damaged or threatened in any way.

You are real and exist forever in Heaven with God right now.

There is light everywhere within you because you are made of light and shine forever with a radiance of love.

You have not rejected God and God has not rejected you.

Your spirit is immortal and nothing can happen to it.

Who you are, your identity, has not changed and cannot change.

You are permanently real and permanently as God intended.

You have not wavered and nothing has altered the divine perfection that you are.

Nothing can be added to you and nothing has been taken away.

You share the absolute infinite abundance of all creation and could not possibly lack or need anything beyond what has been supplied fully.

You have no sickness and have never been sick and can never be sick.

It is impossible for you to be evil or sinful or dead.

You are an immortal soul, supremely perfected by the Perfect Creator and you are everlastingly immaculate.

Not one single note has been lost in Heaven's song and not one single note has been lost in Heaven's Son.

All is well and there is nothing to fear.

There is only love and only love is real.

There is no real reason to worry about anything.

Everything is absolutely perfect and always has been.

There is no fictional world and only Heaven is real.

Heaven holds everything your heart could ever desire and you want nothing else, nor have you ever traded it for anything else.

Heaven is your natural inheritance and you are worthy of it now.

You know deep inside that God loves you unconditionally at all times and there is absolutely no reduction in His measure of love for you, nor will there ever be.

You are eternally worthy of unconditional love at all times and it is impossible for you to offend God or to make Him angry at you.

He is incapable of hurt or attack or anger or fear or revenge, as are you.

You are like God in every way and always will be.

You are immortal and invulnerable and invincible and immune and innocent and fully identified with the whole of yourself.

You have never become something you are not, nor are you capable of being someone you are not.

You have never dreamed a real dream and you have never entered into a real separation.

God's love is the only love you ever will need and you have it fully.

You are absolutely complete and already completely yourself, needing no spiritual path and no seeking and nothing has been denied you.

You are incapable of real denial and it is impossible for you to reject God.

You are 100% the same as you have always been in every way, and need do absolutely nothing because there is only cause for celebration and gratitude.

You have been created perfect, and there is nothing you can do to change this.

You are worthy of all of the love of God, endlessly and forever, and you are receiving this love right now.

God loves you, and the truth of Heaven is your permanent Home.

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

This is one of those 'clincher' statements about the world which make it SO clear that he's talking about the physical world, and NOT some kind of interpretation of the world.

Children are PHYSICALLY BORN into it, through physical pain and in physical pain.

The children's PHYSICAL bodies grow and suffer.

Their minds are trapped in the PHYSICAL brain.

Their PHYSICAL bodies become hurt.

Their PHYSICAL bodies wither and die.

These are not perceptions. These are physical states.

And because of this, because of these things happening, PHYSICALLY, with actual physical matter going through these things, people would believe that God is cruel.

This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with having false perceptionr OR true perception ABOUT the world. It is merely a statement of facts about the PHYSICAL. Physicality, ITSELF, is cruel, and if it were real, God would be its creator, which would make God cruel. And everyone who DOES BELIEVE that the physical world is reality, MUST believe that God is cruel.

Either the world is reality and God IS cruel. OR, the world is NOT reality and God is loving. Since the world IS PHYSICALLY cruel, regardless of anyone having any perceptions or meanings of projections or interpretations or judgements of it, PHYSICAL DEATH IS A CRUELTY, if such things are real then God must be cruel.

And this is why so many people legitimately recognize that because the physical world IS fundamentally, INHERENTLY cruel, a loving God CANNOT have created it. If God had created it, God MUST be cruel, because the world is physically cruel.

And this is why many people become disillusioned with God existing, because they reason that since the world IS cruel, God must either exist AS a cruel creator - which we rightly would want nothing to do with, and would be justifiably angry at, OR God does not exist at all.

But of course the alternative option which many overlook, is that God DOES exist, and IS NOT cruel, and HAS NOT created this world, because the physical world IS NOT reality. The assumption that it is real has to be questioned in order to arrive at any sense of what can possibly be NOT cruel - a loving experience, a loving God.

When you attune to the loving God, your interpretation of or use of this cruel physical world changes, and you RECOGNIZE it as cruel, and not of God, while simultaneously being in a greater state of love WITHIN yourself. The world then appears to take on what we might call a less harmful registering with the mind. But it is still always PHYSICALLY cruel even if it is interpreted as not psychologically cruel. It is then a STRANGE combination, like a "beautiful tragedy", or a "happy dream of death".

And who wants a world that is a contradiction anyway. A world that a loving God creates cannot even entertain the merest POSSIBILITY of cruel things occurring, such as damages or breakages or loss or getting stuck or attack or harm or decay or weapons or war or forms of sickness or pain or misery or death. These things cannot even be CONCEIVED OF by a loving God, yet alone exist.

If God is loving, there can BE no real explosion, no real wars, no real sicknesses, no real missing limbs, no real deaths, no real losses, no real attacks or lacks or limitations of any kind, no physical plane crashes, no broken bodies or bodies at all. And that means there can be NO PHYSICAL WORLD. Because physicality itself is literally a state of separation and sin. And without the idea of death, spacetime would vanish completely along with all its contents.

Earth IS NOT heaven. At best it can reflect heaven when you look at it lovingly, but in and of itself it is nothing but an illusion of a system of death and destruction. And it will end. Just as space and time will end. Nothing unreal lasts forever.

It means there's something you have absolutely no awareness of. You can't see it, taste it, smell it, touch it, hear it or sense it. It's as though it does not exist whatsoever. And since you place a lot of trust in your body's perceptual abilities you conclude that whatever is unconscious simply does not exist. That's the whole point of having made something unconscious in the first place.

For you, what you consider sanity, and what you consider to make sense, and who you think you are, are all based on how much awareness you have. You believe that you are fully aware right now of everything there is to be aware of.

Your sense of identity is intimately tied into this, because the edges of your awareness of Self creates a sense of where you stop and where otherness begins. Anything outside of your self seems to be not who you are.

The problem is that it's possible for there to be something so out of your awareness, so inaccessible to your senses, that you have absolutely no evidence of it and absolutely no way to believe that it's there. It'd be like me telling you there's a giant pink monster dancing outside your house, and without you being able to see it whatsoever you have absolutely no reason to believe me.

You do place a lot of trust in what your body shows you and if you cannot perceive something, you basically will say, well.... that doesn't exist, it's not true. And if someone else is experiencing something that seems totally unreal and untrue for you, you will not believe them, and dismiss it as fictional nonsense.

But it is actually possible for there to be something that exists outside of your conscious awareness. It's actually there, but you seem to have absolutely no awareness of it. This relates not only to immense unconscious guilt and unconscious sin, but also to the presence of God. You have made God unconscious to you, and in being not aware of His presence you basically believe that He does not exist.

While you are unconscious of God, or other stuff, it's possible for your mind to conceive of what might be there, to develop trust that it is there, and to utilize it in some way or experience/witness its expressions, without you necessarily being able to be fully aware of it, to understand it, to directly experience it or to see it. Placing some amount of belief in its existence, even if it is outside of awareness, is an act of "faith", ie trusting in something you believe is true in order to bridge the gap between your limited awareness and a state of greater awareness which is temporarily hidden.

As A Course in Miracles says: "The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it, and show it rested on a world more real than what you saw before; a world redeemed from what you thought was there."

As Jesus is telling us, it is possible to have faith in God and trust God's truth, to some extent, even if you're not fully experiencing Him yet. You might not be in a state of revelation, but miracles pave the way for revelation. This also means that it is possible to receive the benefits or expressions of that love, even if it's coming from outside your awareness, and to SEE (ie witness) its power and effects in the form of miracles, even if you do not yet understand it.

Such miracles don't require you to be fully aware of God. They only require you to trust and therefore have faith that God is there to do His part and fulfill His function at all times, regardless of your readiness or willingness, and all it takes is a LITTLE willingness from you to open the door and let Him in. This includes the correction/healing of your mind but it also includes the expression of love as miracles of healing and other manifestations, which can come about through having faith/trust even if you are not yet aware of the whole of yourself as Christ.

At some point we will cease to be unconscious and therefore will cease to be limited. We will be more directly able to express love and use its power. Until then, we learn to trust in a power greater than what we are aware of, even if we can't see it, and gradually the gap between you and it will diminish, it will reveal itself more directly over time as love's presence, and you will eventually be One with it, recognizing yourself in it.

"T-1.III.2. "Heaven and earth shall pass away" means that they will not continue to exist as separate states. 2 My word, which is the resurrection and the life, shall not pass away because life is eternal."

What this says in words is slightly deceptive in terms of what it MEANS. We must stay 100% compliant with the consistency of the truth.

1) It is impossible for there to be TWO REAL STATES.

2) It is impossible for there to be TWO REALITIES.

3) It is impossible for those realities to be UNLIKE each other in every way and BE REAL.

4) God does not create TWO DIFFERENT REALITIES or states.

5) Only what God creates is real. ONLY ONE of the two states is real. The other one MUST NOT BE REAL.

6) Therefore, if there SEEMS to be two states right now, THIS MUST BE AN ILLUSION.

7) Being an illusion of two separate states, it is the ILLUSION OF THERE BEING TWO STATES that will pass away when the truth comes.

8) Since only one of the two states is REALITY, And God only created Heaven, Heaven is the only REAL state, and Earth MUST BE an unreal state.

9) Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Therefore, the state which is UNREAL, the illusion of a state of "earth", DOES NOT EXIST.

10) What does not exist, does not exist now, never existed, and never will exist.

11) The Earth as an illusion of a separate state, DOES NOT EXIST NOW and it is made of NOTHING.

12) The *ILLUSION* of there being two simultaneous real states - "heaven and earth", will pass away. This DOES NOT MEAN that Heaven will pass away. It means only that the ILLUSORY STATE, which WAS NEVER THERE, Earth, will CEASE TO APPEAR AS THOUGH IT EXISTS. Because it does not exist.

13) Therefore Earth will be RECOGNIZED AS AN ILLUSION, and illusions when recognized MUST DISAPPEAR.

14) The Earth will disappear because IT NEVER REALLY EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE, being 100% an illusory "2nd reality" that is impossible. "It is the world you see that is IMPOSSIBLE."

15) The idea of there being two states MUST refer to the level at which the illusion SEEMS to exist, and cannot therefore be a comparison between heaven being REAL and earth being REAL. It is an ILLUSION of a comparison. Therefore the quote is NOT speaking about the END OF HEAVEN. Only the end of the OPPOSITE of haven.

16) The FICTIONAL ILLUSION of the two separate states will end, because THE TRUTH is that ONLY THE TRUTH WILL REMAIN. The truth is HEAVEN. Earth is NOT the truth, because it is an ILLUSORY STATE. There cannot be two real states. Earth is an illusion!

17) "My world, which is the resurrection and the life, shall not pass away because it is eternal." is PURELY a post-undoing-of-illusion statement (actually true always), that HEAVEN, God's world, God's ONLY WORLD, will not pass away because it is eternal. This is a confirmation and reassurance that God's world will ALWAYS be there (heaven), therefore heaven ITSELF did not "pass away" when "the two states" passed away, and therefore THE OTHER WORLD - Earth, which was a fictional second reality, DID pass away. It never existed in the first place.

A clarifying REWORDING of Jesus's intention can be done as follows, completely 100% in line with the metaphysical logic:

---------

"Heaven and earth shall pass away" means that Earth never existed as an opposite to Heaven, and therefore Earth has never existed and will pass away when dreaming ends. The only thing which remains will be Heaven which God created as Eternal and never passes away, and Earth will have been recognized as having never existed.

---------

You can deny this if you want to. Or you can accept it is true. There is no logical fallacy in this black and white metaphysical logic. I challenge anyone to find a hole in it. You will not.

Any hole you find, MUST BE FICTIONAL and a rationalization by the ego to attempt to DENY that this is true. This being true has nothing to do with whether you will ACCEPT IT, and a even if it IS true and even if you can see it is true, you STILL can deny it if you want to.

Classic denial #1: they both become one so now we have a combined sum total of the parts. Bullshit.

Classic denial #3: heaven and earth both pass away leaving some other state. Heaven never passes away, so that's bullshit.

Classic denial #3: earth will be "translated into" heaven. Bullshit. There is NO EARTH TO TRANSLATE, because a 2nd state of "something real" cannot exist at all. Earth cannot exist. THE WORLD YOU SEE IS IMPOSSIBLE.

There is no world. There is no earth. Earth is not real. Heaven is the only reality. Heaven is your home.

Forgiveness corrects a reversal of cause and effect.

In every single situation, every false perception, every belief, every error or mistake you can make, every relationship, every drama, you CAN only really make one mistake.

You can only get cause and effect back to front.

The ENTIRE ego thought system, all of the separation, everything that happens in this world, all events and experiences, are ALL entirely based on a reversal of cause and effect.

God is cause. You are God's effect. You also can cause, because you are like God. But you cannot cause God, being His effect.

HOWEVER, because you are free to choose, when you choose to TRY to cause God, all hell breaks loose.

This is simply because you are trying to upset the divine order. You are trying to convert God, who is PURE CAUSE, into an effect. And you are simultaneously trying to change YOU, who are purely an effect of God, INTO the cause of yourself.

In this is the entire authority problem, usurping of God's will, all sense of sin, and every consequence that comes from sin including guilt and fear and sickness and death.

Every form of level confusion is a reversal of cause and effect. All belief in magic, every state of victimhood, every delusion possible in the mind, all conditions of the ego and its thinking, the emergence of a physical body, even death, are all SYMPTOMS of an inverted cause-effect relationship.

Therefore, THE ONLY CORRECTION, the only "forgiveness you need do", is to set cause and effect back into their proper relationship. In all ways, at all levels.

So when you're in the midst of some drama story about who did what to whom, or why you're afraid of this and that, or how you've been caused to be sick against your will, or why death is looming, or why you "can't" or "won't", or why someone else is responsible for your existence etc, this is ALL because somewhere in your mind you are mis-perceiving and have attempted to reverse cause and effect.

There are two parts to this error.

1) The belief that God is causing you against your will and you don't want to be affected.

2) The belief that you are the cause of making yourself and do not need to be an effect of God.

This plays out in all kinds of ways and in all kinds of dramas.

ALL you have to do, to forgive, is fix the causality.

That means, you need to UNDO, ANY belief that says anything to the contrary of how God naturally creates. If there is any aspect of what you believe or perceive that is saying "its happening to me against my will" or "I did not choose this" or "I am not responsible for causing this" or "they did this to me", that's a mistake. That must be flipped around.

It's very EXTREMELY SIMPLE. There is NOTHING ELSE that has gone wrong. It's not merely a sense of separation from God being corrected. That sense of separation arose through attempting to change causality. You wanted to be the cause of God instead of his effect. That's all. And because of that, you now see other people as being the cause of you against your will, which SECRETLY is your desire to be NOT caused BY God.

So you fix the causality. I am not being caused by that person. That person is not doing anything to me at all. I am not experiencing anything because of them. They did not cause this. I am not a victim of them. They can do nothing to me. I take back all of my power that I gave to them. They are not responsible for my life or existence or feelings or experiences. I chose everything I am experiencing myself. I am completely responsible for this whole thing. I am not at the effect of the world I see. I am not a victim of anyone or anything. etc

This is placing you in your proper role of *causing the dream*, but also is placing you in your proper role of BEING THE EFFECT OF GOD.

Because as you acknowledge YOUR causal power, which you inherited from Him, you are acknowledging that God's causal nature is IN YOUR MIND, and therefore so is God.

All you are doing is cancelling out all belief in "horizontal cause-and-effect". There are no causes on this level. There are only effects on this level. You are NOT one of those effects, because you CAUSED this whole level from above.

Fix the broken causality and EVERYTHING ELSE will fall into place.

Miracles are examples of vertical causality which defy all horizontal laws of cause and effect.

ACIM: "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."

It's a very common belief that ACIM teaches "separation is impossible". It's the idea that "the separation did not happen". And this also leads to the belief that "I need do nothing" because nothing's really happened. Which then justifies literally "doing nothing" in the presence of "something happening".

The fact remains, that there is a "something" body sitting looking at a screen reading these words on the surface of a physical object. And no matter whether separation "happened" or not, something other than total abstract reality IS occurring right now. You ARE reading this. If it were "the whole story" that "separation did not happen", it would not even be possible to read these words, or for you to even have eyeballs. But it is. And denying that is not helpful. Something is happening here. Or at the very least, SEEMING to.

The distinction that needs to be made is this. REAL separation is not possible. Let's be clear, that you cannot in reality change God or His Creation. "What God has has brought together let no man put asunder" basically means what God creates is permanent. So literally, you cannot create a REAL split in Reality. You can't ACTUALLY cut your REAL self off from the REAL Father.

It is in this sense and only in this sense, that separation is impossible and has not happened. You literally cannot and have not separated. It's the same thing as saying you cannot sin because you cannot cause God. Which means there literally is no REAL sin. Nothing real can be threatened. So we can say, you cannot REALLY separate from God. However, this is not the end of the story.

"Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

While on the one hand you can co-create with God freely, in accord with His will, you CAN also DENY creation, because you HAVE that freedom. This is what "mis-creation" means. You use your freedom to create, against itself, to try to create nothingness. And here is the fact. We DID attempt to do this.

We DID have a tiny mad idea, that it was POSSIBLE to deny creation. Not merely to conceive of mis-creating or denying reality, but that by doing so it would have REAL EFFECTS. By mis-creating or attempting not to create, the result in truth is NOTHING HAPPENS. It's more like you become unwilling and stop willing anything at all, so you don't really do anything.

But you BELIEVE that by denying reality you DO something REAL, which you believe has real consequences or effects. You think that somehow "willing nothing" (death) can be real, and can replace reality. That "not creating" can be considered a "happening". It's because you believe in the mad idea, that you "make it real" to you. And whatever you believe in SEEMS like reality.

You cannot produce a REAL separation, and you haven't. BUT, you can deny reality and TRY to believe that an IMAGINED separation is possible. You can dream of separation. You can invent illusions, which is what it looks like when you repress or withhold extension. You can put the brakes on eternal life, by resisting your own creative power. And this is an attempt to STOP creation. ie, to kill it.

This results in what seems to be a state of death, or a dream of death. "Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem." As the mind denies itself, which imprisons its will, this kind of "puts it to sleep". It is resisting its own wakefulness. This resistance against life seems to take on the form of bodies and forms and sickness and death. These are the "slowing down" of unlimited extension, or the contraction of fear which "materializes" as physical matter. Or as the Course says, "the granite block of sin."

You can believe in this dream and make it seem real to you. You can imagine or mistake this dream for "actual" separation. And therefore can believe that a sin has really occurred. You can look to "events" and believe them, as if proving separation IS happening. But it's not REAL sin or REAL separation that we're trying to fight our way out of, it's an IDEA of it. We're believing that an IMPOSSIBLE separation is possible. And this believing is PRODUCING the world.

This is why Jesus says "The separation HAS occurred." Because He isn't referring to an ACTUAL separation. "The separation", also referred to as "the fall of man", isn't a name for a REAL separation from God. ACIM isn't even dealing with a real separation. But it is dealing with the fact that you DID have an idea of the impossible being possible, and you DID believe in it, and you DID mis-create, and you DID resist and deny reality.

While this "state" is not real separation, it IS a "mis-use" of freedom to create against creation. It has resulted in the "illusory" state of what it looks like to seemingly "not create". Or rather, to use creative power to make it seem like there is no creative power. To use life to pretend there is no life. To use the mind to pretend there is no mind. Even in death, a state of "no choice or will", both choice and will are being fully utilized to make it seem to happen.

"The separation" isn't anything to do with "you actually did separate". It's to do with you ACTUALLY DID DENY reality. You DID conceive of using free will against itself. You DID use your mind to deny your mind, putting it into what seem to be states of unconsciousness (death).

This has resulted in "dreaming", which has resulted in the making of entire illusory worlds, complete with seemingly happening bodies. And yet "all events are nowhere" because they are really a DENIAL of happening. The "occurring" or "happening" is actually a NOT occurring or happening, masquerading as an occurring or happening. This is how it deceives. It SEEMS to be real.

This has thus "made up" (fiction) a world which Jesus refers to as "a lower order reality". It is something you made in an attempt to NOT create anything. It is a NOT world. It is made of NOT bodies. It is the dream of pretending you are not creating anything, and not having eternal life. It's what you get when you use freedom to will against will. THIS illusory mis-creative state DID OCCUR. Mind DID go to sleep a while. It HAS dreamed of a universe made of nothing.

This doesn't mean a real separation has happened. But a fictional separation HAS happened. And so long as we believe it is a "something", rather than an attempt "not to do anything", or "not to live", we are in a state of denial. This denial produces all illusions of suffering and death. Thinking UNREAL things are real, that the world is real, is a mistake. It is a DENIAL OF reality.

"The world was made as a place where God (reality) could enter not".

God wills only to create. He does not ever will to use creation against itself. He does not deny himself or go to sleep. However, creation BY His children is not yet perfected, and so we need help to return to "sanity", which means only using creation constructively.

To be in reality means to not use will against itself, and to not believe that doing so does something. All it does is nothing. Mistaking the nothing for a something is "the fall of man", ie "the separation." Deception, denial, confusion, insanity, and the dream of death.

"The creation of the Soul itself has already been perfectly accomplished, but the creation BY Souls has not. God created Souls so He could depend on them BECAUSE He created them perfectly. He gave them His peace so they would not be shaken, and would be unable to be deceived. Whenever you are afraid, you ARE deceived. Your mind is NOT serving your Soul. "

"Your creation by God is the only foundation which cannot be shaken, because the light is IN it. "

So we ARE in a situation where we're making an illusory world, made of nothing, which seems like a something. And it's not quite a total nothingness otherwise even this would not seem to happen. It has a little amount of reality left in it. Even the ego depends on God a little. But these dreams of opposition to creation are lesser realities, denials of happiness and blocks to awareness. They also deny permanence and eternal life.

So the fact is, we DO need to "do something", given the context of the denial state we are in. Which is why God created the curriculum and the Holy Spirit. Because we DID choose to believe in unreality (the rejection of reality, using reality against itself). We are trying to hold a fake world in place. We, in time, are still choosing the ego.

"I need do nothing" is an atonement-level truth, only LIVED when fully accepted. It means there are no REAL NEEDS. You don't NEED to accomplish something because all that's happened is the ABSENCE of accomplishment. Darkness is the ABSENCE of light.

Even though in reality there are no real needs, your investment in neediness DOES have to be undone. You do need to UNLEARN everything you taught yourself in error. Until there is no more "need" for time and space. The curriculum therefore is aimed to help you to remember that mis-creating against your will is not what you want, and has no merit, or appeal.

It is futile, because you are merely attempting to NOT CREATE anything. The "creation" of death is not creation of anything. Or in other words, "the separation" does not cause anything to happen, has no real consequences, and is pointless. The "sane" would recognize this, and not bother to entertain the notion that "denying creation" is a worthwhile exercise. And in the total withdrawal from trying to make it achieve something real, the world you made disappears.

"The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."

There has been no real separation.

There has been AN ATTEMPT to make the impossible possible.

You have TRIED to separate from God.

You have used creative will against itself, denying your will to will anything at all.

You mistook the "willing of nothingness" for a "something".

You now seem to NEED atonement. To correct the mistaken belief that willing nothing will produce a SECOND KINGDOM.

Once you accept that ONLY the Kingdom of God accepts its own existence and is in accord with willingness, the world that was NOT created does not exist.

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

There is no world. But you think there is.

A belief in separation takes place within your own mind. Your own mind becomes divided. A portion of your will goes into one part and the rest into another. Eventually this forms the conscious self and the unconscious self.

Separation leads to a splitting out of cause from effect, receiving from giving, and other from self. But because it splits the will, it results in two opposing wills which do not see things the same way.

"Being in two minds" means having an ego mind - a divided mind at war with itself. It must produce indecision and an inability to resolve conflict. It in fact must produce conflict, because one part of will is acting to cancel out the other. This creates a standoff, or a stalemate, or a situation of simultaneous push and pull.

The result of two wills acting against one another in opposite directions is that they will cancel the effects of each other and create a paralysis. One will tries to move in a given direction, the other will stops it. The other will tries to move in a given direction, the first will stops it. Nothing happens.

With two opposing wills trying to operate at the same time, there must conflict - an inner war with yourself. You will thwart everything you try to express. This conflict is literally the same thing as insanity, because the single whole mind is attempting to achieve two opposite and incompatible goals at the same time. It produces impossibility - which is the opposite of the possible. Miracles are another name for possibility. And with God, all things are possible.

When you are in this world and are in two minds, ie you have an ego and therefore two wills, you are literally against yourself. You are experiencing self attack. Your will and ambitions will be thwarted, sabotaged and undermined. You will become "stuck", ineffective, powerless and frozen.

Ultimately this leads to fear which will stop you in your tracks. Fear is a state of intensely experiencing separation between yourself and yourself, where one part of you seems like you and the rest seems like a separate enemy. Fear is paralyzing. It puts a freeze on action, it strips both parts of mind of all power, collapses the power of will and is an attempt to extinguish yourself.

No wonder then that when your mind is split, you cannot manifest miracles, you cannot see yourself as sharing God's power, you do not see yourself as causal, and every time you try to even perform a miracle it becomes thwarted and nothing seems to happen. You get used to this mode of being un-mraculous, believing it is normal to have no power over anything.

The only reason you can't make objects move, raise the dead, heal the sick, levitate or whatever else, is because your mind and heart is not WHOLE, with a single focus or goal. It is divided against itself. You try to cause stuff to happen, but the rest of you tries to stop it.

A simple example is that you attempt to produce a miracle but you "ask" for something to change, you fear that it won't change, you have doubt about seeing results, you look to form to change to see if something worked, and generally undermine yourself. You waver. You lose sight of the truth. You listen to other people's doubts and buy into the appearance that it isn't working. You listen to the ego. And this basically cancels your efforts.

But you'll think that all of these things are happening against your will or that you're really trying hard to make this miracle happen. PART of you is. ONE of your wills is. But you have another separated will - part 2 - which you are still actually USING, albeit largely unconsciously, to sabotage your efforts.

Your belief in fear splits your will. Your belief in a lack of authority splits your will. Your belief in not being completely causal, or not having power over anything, splits your mind. If your mind becomes split like this, you are literally working against yourself. One hand is reaching to express a miracle, the other quickly wrestles with it and stops it. Not physically, but in your mind and perception.

To work miracles requires an allegiance to the truth, and a loyalty and clarity about staying true to it no matter what illusions present. Holding fast regardless of things appearing to not work, or even if they seem to become worse. Is it the truth? No. But if you take it in and make it real, that's you using the other half of your will against yourself.

The only reason that a miracle won't happen, effectively, is because you stopped being causal and turned yourself into an effect. You paralyzed yourself - dis-empowered yourself. It is your false perceptions which strip you of your sharing of God's power. You can't work miracles when you're divided against yourself and thus God. It's like asking God to stop flowing. It means you do not really know what you want, and uncertainty does not produce the certainty of God's power.

Another way of saying that is that when your mind/will is split, you are asking for two things at once, which is like asking for nothing clearly at all. So you get nothing, or you "mis-create", and end up with effects that you don't think you asked for.

When you "ask" by focusing on only one thing, wholly and clearly, it must be given you. Therefore realize if the only thing stopping your miracles was your own divided will, once your will, mind and heart are whole, you will not stop yourself, and no-one else has any power to do so either. Anything is possible.

Being so used to having a split will, which renders us practically powerless and inept, we are not accustomed to being solely causal. We are not used to the power of the mind when it is expresses in one direction, with one intention, one focus, one belief, one thought, one love. We are not accustomed to giving and receiving being one. And we are not used to having so much authority over illusions.

The mind has massive creative power. It never stops being creative, Jesus says. It's just that we keep using it against itself and thus keep mis-creating, producing effects which conflict with part of what we asked for, or we create things which attack ourselves, or things which seem unwanted or a mistake. There are no mistakes. You ARE getting what you're asking for, it's just that you keep asking from a confused state of not really knowing what you want.

What happens when you cause and you do not stop yourself? You create. That's what produces miracles, manifestations, signs, healings, wonders, etc. Jesus was masterful at this, coming from such a state of pure love that He could express all of God's power, undivided, certain, with great authority, and there was nothing He could not do. You can be this way also.

I asked Holy Spirit how better to produce miracles. He said, "be truth." Truth is absolute. All or nothing. Commitment. Certainty. Confidence. Authority. Power.

The world, Earth, this universe, was made as an EXACT LOGICAL OPPOSITE to God's Kingdom. It was made on purpose to OPPOSE every possible quality of God's nature, so as to ATTACK God's nature and suggest that since this world is ABSENT of God's nature, God is absent here entirely. And so the world proclaims that God and His son have been crucified, and the world has come to replace immortal reality with a dream of death.

God's Kingdom says, "God is everywhere."

Spacetime says, "God is nowhere."

God's Kingdom says, "Everything is everything."

Spacetime says, "Nothing is everything and everything is nothing."

God's Kingdom says, "Everything is shared."

Spacetime says, "Nothing is shared, everything is separate."

God's Kingdom says, "Everything is always the same."

Spacetime says, "Nothing is ever the same."

God's Kingdom says, "Everything is equal."

Spacetime says, "Nothing is equal, everything is different."

God's Kingdom says, "What existed still exists and exists forever."

Spacetime says, "What used to exist no longer exists and nothing will continue to exist."

God's Kingdom says, "All things are fully everything."

Spacetime says, "Nothing is fully anything."

God's Kingdom says, "Every part is whole and holy."

Spacetime says, "Every part is unwhole, a-part and partial."

God's Kingdom says, "All of God is in all places at once."

Spacetime says, "None of God is in any place ever."

God's Kingdom says, "Everything has eternal life."

Spacetime says, "Nothing lives forever."

God's Kingdom says, "Nothing can be threatened."

Spacetime says, "Everything can be threatened."

God's Kingdom says, "Everything is permanent."

Spacetime says, "Nothing is permanent."

God's Kingdom says, "Everything exists forever."

Spacetime says, "Everything is nothing."

God's Kingdom says, "Self is accepted and loved."

Spacetime says, "Self is denied and hated."

God's Kingdom says, "All things must live forever."

Spacetime says, "All things are dead."

And so you can see that in EVERY way imaginable, the properties and qualities of God's reality were utterly OPPOSED in the making of space and time. Both space and time were ATTACKS on God's nature. They were assertions of a world UN LIKE GOD and not of Him, against His will and made to sin.

Even death is built into spacetime because of how time asserts "nothing lives forever" and "whatever exists will not always exist", in its protest against eternal life. In EVERY WAY, Earth, being fundamentally DEPENDENT ON and MADE WITHIN spacetime, is HEAVEN'S OPPOSITE. It was made to attack God and His Kingdom. And yet it is nothing because there is no world.

Earth is an ILLUSION OF A WORLD, opposite in its NATURE to Heaven in every way. It denies its own existence and contradicts itself. The planet is a lie.

----

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

"This is the "natural" condition of the separation, and those who learn that it is not natural at all seem to be the unnatural ones. For this world is the opposite of Heaven, being made to be its opposite, and everything here takes a direction exactly opposite of what is true. In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as union. Here, where the illusion of love is accepted in love's place, love is perceived as separation and exclusion."

"The world is false perception. 2 It is born of error, and it has not left its source."

"The world was made as an attack on God."

"Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him."

"This world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son."

"If this were the real world, God would be cruel."

"It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time."

"They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant"

"For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

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

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

"Only the creations of Light are real."

"Like all aspects of the belief in space and time, it is temporary."

"This produces what seems to be a wall of flesh around the mind, keeping it prisoner in a tiny spot of space and time, beholden unto death"

"Acts were not necessary before the separation, because belief in space and time did not exist. 5 It was only after the separation that the Atonement and the conditions necessary for its fulfillment were planned."

"The Atonement was built into the space-time belief to set a limit on the need for the belief itself, and ultimately to make learning complete."

"So do the parts of God's Son gradually join in time, and with each joining is the end of timebrought nearer."

"The Holy Spirit stands at the end of time, where you must be because He is with you."

"The real world signifies the end of time, for its perception makes time purposeless."

"Today the light has come. And you will see the world that has been promised you since time began, and in which is the end of time ensured."

"Time is a trick, a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic"

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end.

The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last, but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place? For place has gone as well, along with time. Only the body makes the world seem real, for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible. Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not."

"Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant is the world forgot, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

If a person is sick, God is a murderer.

If the sickness exists, if it has reality, it has been created, then it must have been created by God.

Only what God creates is real, or exists, or has been created.

There is nothing that exists other than what God has created.

There is no reality other than what is a part of God.

Only what God wills really exists or happens.

If a person is sick, God must have willed it to happen.

If a person is sick, God must have created the sickness.

If a person is sick, God has produces a real sickness, has given it to the person, and is making them sick.

But if God were to have to created a real sickness, then God has given sickness to the person on purpose, by his will.

If God wills that people be sick, then God is a vicious murderous bastard.

Only a cruel, unloving and unkind God could give a sickness to someone. To make them sick on purpose, to guarantee their suffering.

Such a God would have to be sick himself, hateful, vengeful, murderous, torturous, evil, twisted, malicious and an attacker.

God himself must have attacked the person cruelly and inflicted a curse of hell upon them, if they are really sick.

So the fact is, if that sickness is real, if it has been created, if it is God’s will, and if it really exists, then God is a cruel vicious hateful creator. A condemner and a killer.

The situation then is, you have to decide, whether or not God is like this. Whether God could create real sickness and give it to people.

Is God the kind of God that could create and will and curse someone with suffering?

Does God want them dead?

Is God punishing them?

Is God really cruel, vicious, hateful, and an attacker?

Has got personally inflicted suffering on someone and given them a sickness that he believes they deserve?

If God hasn’t, and if God is loving, and if God is not an attacker, and if God does not will that someone have a sickness, then God is NOT the cause of the sickness.

If God did not cause the sickness, then the sickness has not been created.

If it is not created, it is not a part of God’s creation, and nothing but God’s creations exist.

If the sickness is not created by God, it cannot exist. Nor can it cause or create anything.

If the sickness is not a part of God’s will, then it has not been willed at all.

If the sickness is not given to the person by God, the person has not inherited it from God, and they do not have it. No-one has anything other than what they have inherited from God.

If the sickness does not share God’s reality, then the sickness does not have any reality.

If the sickness has no reality, it does not really exist at all. It cannot be there, it has no life, it has no will, it has no power.

Either, God is loving and does not will that there be sickness, or God is hateful and has caused all the sickness everywhere.

But if God is loving, then not only has God not created any sickness, God actively WILLS that you NOT be sick.

“God does not will that you suffer.”

“God’s will for you is perfect happiness.”

A loving God wills that you be healed, and whole, and healthy, and happy.

A loving God wants you to have no sickness at all.

A loving God would take your sickness away in a heartbeat, knowing it is not there.

A loving God can only love you, sustain you, create you to live forever, and never attack you.

In fact a loving God can only protect you, keep you safe, maintain your perfection, and give you immortality.

If God is loving, you cannot be sick.

If God is loving, that sickness cannot exist, and must be a lie.

“God did not create that sickness, and therefore it does not exist.”

Whatever that sickness appears to be, it cannot be a real sickness.

Whatever that sickness appears to be, it does not really exist at all.

That sickness has not been created.

That sickness has not been caused.

That sickness is not there.

There is no sickness.

There never was a sickness.

That person was never sick. They never can be sick. And they never will be sick.

The sickness must be a lie, it must be false, and it cannot be real.

The sickness is not true.

The sickness must not be anything. The sickness is nothing.

Either the sickness is real and exists and is the will of God, or there is no sickness and the person is not sick and God wills their immortality.

That person is not sick now and never was.

Whatever the sickness appears to be, it is not a part of that person, or a part of anything real.

The sickness is a gone.

There is no real sickness and there never will be, otherwise God would have to be sick and share his sickness.

God is not sick.

Therefore, that person cannot be sick.

That sickness is not there. There is no sickness. There is no death.

That person must be whole, they must still be as God created them, they cannot suffer, and they cannot ever be sick. Otherwise God would be death.

There never was a real sickness.

God never created real sickness.

Real sickness does not exist.

You are not sick. I am not sick. God is not sick.

God does not will that you be sick.

God wills that you be healed and whole and healthy.

Sickness is impossible.

It is impossible for you to be sick or to die.

God wills that you live forever.

God has already willed that you live forever.

God’s will cannot be undone. God’s will is done already. So you must be healed already.

You are already permanently whole and perfect.

There is no sickness in you.

God knows you are already whole and healed and holy.

Only love is real. Only health is real. Only wholeness is real.

We are the whole of healthy holiness together.

God has guaranteed your health and your permanence.

You will never die. There is only life. You will live forever.

ACIM: "The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end." (clarification of terms, chapter 5, paragraph 1).

Other religions that teach that the physical world is nothing but a dream/illusion...

1. Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta)

Concept: Maya (illusion) – The material world is an illusion created by ignorance (avidya), and ultimate reality (Brahman) is formless and unchanging.

Teachings: The Upanishads and Adi Shankaracharya’s Advaita Vedanta philosophy teach that individual identity (atman) is identical to Brahman, and the world of appearances is like a dream. Only through knowledge (jnana) can one realize this truth.

2. Buddhism

Concept: Śūnyatā (emptiness) & Māyā (illusion) – All phenomena lack intrinsic reality and are conditioned, much like dreams.

Teachings: The Buddha compared the world to an illusion, a mirage, and a dream in texts like the Diamond Sutra. The Madhyamaka school (founded by Nagarjuna) and Yogacara school (which emphasizes "mind-only" reality) both argue that what we perceive as reality is shaped by mental constructs.

3. Platonism & Neoplatonism

Concept: The Cave Allegory – The material world is a shadow of a higher, true reality.

Teachings: Plato described the sensory world as mere reflections of the eternal Forms. Neoplatonists like Plotinus argued that the material world emanates from the One and is a lesser, dreamlike version of true reality.

4. Gnosticism

Concept: The material world is a deceptive prison created by an ignorant or malevolent demiurge.

Teachings: Gnostic texts (like The Gospel of Thomas and The Apocryphon of John) describe the world as an illusion that traps the soul. True knowledge (gnosis) allows one to awaken from this illusion and return to the divine.

5. Taoism

Concept: The relativity of perception and the dream-like nature of experience.

Teachings: Zhuangzi’s famous parable of the butterfly dream questions whether reality is absolute or a shifting illusion. Taoism often portrays distinctions between waking and dreaming as fluid. 6. Sufism (Islamic Mysticism)

Concept: The world as a shadow or veil obscuring divine reality.

Teachings: Rumi and Ibn Arabi describe the world as an ephemeral illusion, with God (Al-Haqq, "the Real") being the only true existence. Sufi thought emphasizes awakening from worldly distractions to experience divine unity.

7. Christian Mysticism & Idealism

Concept: The world as a temporary illusion compared to eternal divine truth.

Teachings: Some Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme, emphasized that the physical world is fleeting and that true reality is found in union with God. Later, philosophers like George Berkeley argued that reality exists only as ideas in the mind of God. 8. Sikhism

Concept: Maya (illusion) – The world is transitory and deceptive, keeping people from realizing God.

Teachings: Sikh scriptures, including the Guru Granth Sahib, emphasize that attachment to worldly things is an illusion. True reality is found in devotion to God and spiritual awakening.

9. Hermeticism

Concept: The material world is a lower reflection of the divine mind. Teachings: The Kybalion and other Hermetic texts describe reality as mental in nature ("The All is Mind") and suggest that the physical world is a projection of higher consciousness.

10. Kabbalah (Jewish Mysticism)

Concept: The material world is a lower, imperfect manifestation of divine reality.

Teachings: In the Zohar, the world is described as a series of emanations from the Ein Sof (Infinite). The material realm is an illusion in the sense that it veils the deeper truth of divine unity.

11. Rosicrucianism

Concept: The physical world is a veil hiding spiritual truths. Teachings: Rosicrucian teachings, influenced by Hermeticism and Gnosticism, describe reality as a temporary, symbolic projection meant to teach spiritual lessons.

12. Manichaeism

Concept: The material world is a trap created by a lesser, evil power.

Teachings: This ancient dualistic religion, founded by Mani, teaches that the physical world is a deception created by darkness, while the true realm of light exists beyond it.

13. Jainism

Concept: The material world is impermanent and a source of bondage.

Teachings: Jainism teaches that the soul is trapped in illusion and karma. Liberation (moksha) is achieved by transcending attachments to the physical world.

14. Some Indigenous and Shamanic Traditions

Concept: Reality is fluid, dreamlike, and shaped by spiritual forces. Teachings: Many indigenous traditions, such as those in Native American, Aboriginal Australian, and Amazonian cultures, describe reality as a dream, a shifting landscape influenced by spirits, ancestors, or cosmic forces.

15. Pythagoreanism

Concept: The world is a mathematical illusion.

Teachings: Pythagoras and his followers believed that reality was structured by numbers and harmony, with the material world being a lesser, imperfect reflection of the perfect, mathematical order.

16. Theosophy

Concept: The physical world is an illusion created by spiritual ignorance.

Teachings: Helena Blavatsky and later Theosophists describe the world as maya, emphasizing that true knowledge comes through spiritual enlightenment and connection to the higher planes.

17. Catharism (12th–14th Century, Medieval Europe)

Beliefs: The Cathars, a dualist Christian sect, saw the physical world as an evil illusion created by Satan. They believed that the true, divine world was purely spiritual, and human souls had to escape material existence to reunite with God.

18. Eastern Orthodox Hesychasm (Byzantine Christianity)

Beliefs: Some interpretations of Hesychasm (a mystical tradition within Eastern Orthodoxy) suggest that the material world is not truly real compared to the divine presence of God, which can only be known through inner contemplation and prayer.

19. Christian Science (Founded in 19th Century)

Beliefs: Founded by Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science teaches that the material world, including sickness and death, is an illusion. True reality is purely spiritual, and healing comes through understanding this truth.

20. Some New Age and Esoteric Christian Movements

Some modern Christian esoteric groups, influenced by Theosophy or the New Thought movement, teach that the material world is a mental construct or illusion, similar to Hindu maya.

"My Father gives all power unto me."

"all power and glory are yours because the Kingdom is His"

"By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS."

"All power is given you in earth and Heaven. There is nothing that you cannot do."

"But the truth is very simple; ALL POWER IS OF GOD. What is NOT of Him has no power to do ANYTHING."

Our natural relationship with God is quite different to how we think of ourselves in a separated state.

Here we might think of ourselves as independent, relying on no-one, having our own power and our own abilities. We walk in separate bodies and think of ourselves as self-sufficient and reliant on ourselves. But this isn't a natural state to be in, and it isn't how God set it up.

From God's point of view, he does not create separate things, which stand apart from him as though disconnected. He doesn't create things which have special stuff of their own, or powers that they don't share with others. Nor does he let go of them or cut the off or stop being a part of them.

When God creates you he extends his own self, gives everything he has, and includes you within his own being as part of himself. It's like living and staying in the womb forever. You have nothing that you've gathered for yourself, and nothing that didn't come from God. And everything you do have, remains his as well, but shared simultaneously with you.

Your natural condition then is to actually be completely dependent on God, in which you host God within yourself. It's like, without him you are an empty vessel, and he places his own power, mind, will, thought, life, love, peace etc, into you. And now you act as a host to him. And this mean that unless you are hosting him, you don't really have anything. No power, no mind, no love, nothing.

So in order to be in your natural state, functioning the way God intended, you actually have to rely on God and depend on him to BE the qualities that are best in you. There is no other source and you literally cannot live without him.

The sense of strength that you have does not come from you, it is actually the presence of God in you. The light which you see in isn't a light that you put there, it's his light shining in your mind from God. The will you will with, the thoughts you think, the freedom you share, your very own life, is actually all HIS. He shares it with you and you therefore have a symbiotic relationship with him.

This really means that not only do you have nothing that is exclusively your own, you literally have nothing at all without him. You are nothing and do not exist without him. However, with him you share and have everything that he has. You have all his gifts, all his power, all his thought and mind, all his will and freedom, all his love and life. It is in you, but it is not of you. Yet it is yours, because it is his, and you are part of him.

This means the only way to function naturally is to acknowledge God in everything, to let him BE the strength in you, to let his light shine through you so that you can see, to align with his will and thoughts, to do his will, and to function as a team with him. He does protect you and strengthen you and provide for you.

This plugs you into his power, and regardless of having NO power of your own, you have ALL of his power. By allowing your power to be his power, shared with him and expressing through you, his power becomes your own. He has given it to you, but without losing it himself, and so both of you have it. Without what God has given you, you have no power to do anything.

This is why the model of your body and your ego are against your inherent nature. They are ways to cut you off from everything and to have nothing. They disconnect you from God and from the only source of anything real. And once you are orphaned, you basically have nothing but scraps of lifelessnes and weakness and incapability with which to function. You can't live life like that, as an exclusively autonomous prisoner, captive to nothingness.

You can only really live and be happy and have strength and sanity by sharing life with God. He has to be acknowledged, interfaced with, and allowed to be a part of you. He has to be integrated into who and what you are. You have to make room for him. You have to let go and let him deal with stuff through you, because you simply cannot do it alone. He lives withiin you at your inner altar.

Depending on your own strength will only make you afraid because you know you are too weak to deal with anything without God. Depending on God however, you become all-powerful, strong, confident, certain and capable. And then there is nothing your holiness cannot do, miraculously, because he does it for and with you. God has taken care of everything.

First of all, let's touch on what the "authority problem" is. You as a Child of God, were authored by God. God caused you. His authority, or His power to Author you, designed you to be the way God wanted you to be.

You are the result of His Will, your nature is as He chooses, everything you have is inherited from Him, you only have what He has given you, you are only capable of what He created you to be capable of, your identity was given to you by sharing His with you, and you cannot change anything about yourself.

In fact, you are an extension of God Himself, you "host" God within yourself. It's not just that God is sitting there in a chair and then created you sitting in another chair some distance away. He extended out from Himself and put Himself into you, as you.

"I, who am host to God, AM worthy of Him. He Who ESTABLISHED His dwelling- place in me created it as He would have it be."

"When God GAVE Himself to you in your creation, He ESTABLISHED you as host to Him forever. He has NOT left you, and YOU have not left HIM."

You host Him, which is what your "inner altar" is. So you are not only a self, you are a self that also contains all of God. You are joined to God within you. You overlap with Him. You are a part of God which is also host to the whole of God. His own being is embedded into what you are. It's like, His light is shining in your heart. He is radiating through you. He is so intimately close with you that He is inside of you, and together you co-create as one.

In the separation idea, you questioned authority. Which means you questioned who was the Author of you. You questioned God. You protested against being Authored by God, and became unhappy with the fact that you were ONLY as God created you. You wanted to be not only the author of yourself, you wanted to be the author of God also, the definer of reality, and the chooser of what is true.

You wanted to become something other than you are. You wanted to change your idea of what God is. You wanted God to stop Authoring you, so that you could "be God", ie so that you could take Authority away from Him, and have this authority for yourself. Even to the extent that you wanted to have authority OVER His Authority, which is the idea of sin - the ability to affect, change, and cause God.

In concert with Him, you shared His Authority. His Power, His Authority, is in you. And it operates through you. But you wanted to be able to exercise a power that did not come from Him. You wanted a power of your own, or to regard yourself as authoritative without His Authority being the source of it.

"The issue of authority is really a question of authorship. When an individual has an "authority problem," it is ALWAYS because he believes he is the author of himself"

In fact you wanted God not to be your Father, to not be the source of you, and to not be the Author of your identity, inheritance, or nature. And by denying that God was the Author of you, you denied that you had been Fathered (created) by Him. This was necessary in order to reject or oppose His Authority.

But by doing so, you made yourself fatherless, like an orphan. And so instead of being the Self that God created, you become "anonymous", attempting not to share His identity, rejecting your inheritance, and claiming to have not been Authored at all. This was an attempt to separate cause and effect, Father and Son, and to block awareness of your identity.

"and men preferred to remain anonymous when they chose to separate themselves FROM their Author. The word "authority" has been one of their most fearful symbols ever since."

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in the minds of man that some people have gone so far as to doubt whether they were ever created at all. "

Now that an individual has developed an artificial "problem with Authority", they move into the ego thought system. Here they believe God is not their Father, who and what they are is not defined by God, they do not want to be defined by God, they are the author of themselves, and they even proceed to invent a new Father to explain their own origins.

"being uncertain of their true Authorship, men believe that their creation was anonymous. This has left them in a position where it SOUNDS meaningful to consider the possibility that they must have created themselves."

"Third, the belief that man can distort the Creations of God (including himself) has arisen, and is tolerated. ... Fourth, that since man can create himself, the direction of his own creation is up to him."

"The "attack on God" made His Son think he was fatherless, and out of his depression he made the god of depression."

"he would not accept the fact that, although he was a creator, he had been created."

While rejecting God's Authorship of you places you into turmoil, accepting it restores you to peace. God HAS established the only facts of your existence, the only truth that is true of you, and is the sole source of your nature. You cannot change this fact because it is absolute. It is impossible to alter God's will, but you can deny it. You can reject the fact that "you inherit God", but this just makes you unaware of your inheritance, which God saves for you.

"Peace is a natural heritage of the Soul. Everyone is free to refuse to accept his inheritance, but he is NOT free to establish what his inheritance IS. The problem which everyone MUST decide is the fundamental question of his own authorship."

"He has thrown away the reason for his own peace, and sees himself only in pieces. This strange perception IS an authority problem."

The question then is how to return to an acceptance of what your true Authorship is, how do you return to being a host to God, how do you become aware of your inheritance, and how do you resume your real function in heaven. Obviously this will involve the undoing or ceasing-to-do of the various ways that you play God, the attempt to author/define yourself, and the unwillingness to accept your function as extender of God's being.

It entails acknowledging that whatever you are, you are what God says you are. And you need to become okay with that. It needs to become acceptable to you, even welcomed, that you are ONLY as God created you. That ONLY the truth is true of you, and nothing else is true.

It means you have to recognize that the way Creation is set up, you ARE an effect of God, He DOES define you, you CANNOT define what you are AT ALL, and you have no desire to do so. Accepting Atonement simply means accepting the truth is true, accepting your position in the machinery of heaven.

You were created to create with God. You were created to HOST God. God is in you, at your sacred inner altar. You and God are one, and everywhere you go He is in you. You do everything together. And you are still as He created you. Nothing has changed, you have not changed His Will or His Mind, and you Will only to Will like Him, in accord with His Will.

"Instead of "seek you first the Kingdom of Heaven" say "Will ye first the Kingdom of Heaven," and you have said "I know what I am, and I will to accept my own inheritance.""

This means putting aside your need to be the gatekeeper or decider of what is real or true. It means making room for God to operate THROUGH you. It means accepting that you have nothing of your own, and everything you DO have, which is everything, is OF or FROM God. Even AS God.

"Recognizing that all Power is of God is to gain all Power."

"If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. But to do this, you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father IS the acknowledgment of yourself as you ARE. Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

It means giving up trying to do everything alone, or by yourself, or dependent on your own strength, which is at best highly lacking. You HAVE nothing that God has not given. Not even strength, ability, will, power, mind, or anything. You are in a symbiotic relationship with God. You cannot live without Him.

"Symbiosis is misunderstood by the mentally ill, who use it that way. But I also told you that you must recognize your total dependence on God, a statement which you did not like. ... God and the Souls He created ARE symbiotically related. They are COMPLETELY dependent on each other. The creation of the Soul itself has already been perfectly accomplished, but the creation BY Souls has not. God created Souls so He could depend on them BECAUSE He created them perfectly. He gave them His peace so they would not be shaken, and would be unable to be deceived."

You and God function like a Team. It's kind of like He is the hardware, His mind and power is His software, He creates you as a new piece of Hardware, and downloads His software into you. Without Him you have nothing. With Him you have everything, but you only have what He has given, and what you create together.

So it's really a matter of humbleness and honesty and a willingness to make room for you to host God again. You have to receive Him. You have to allow Spirit to guide you again. You have to plug your mind back into your Soul. You have to become an instrument through which healing can occur. And you have to be willing to let your mind be loving so that it can not interfere with the automatic extension and expression of love, which is miraculous.

In your purified state, you resume the proper function as the Light of the world, because HIS Light is in you and extends through you. You resume your place as powerful miracle worker, because HIS power operates through you. You act as a relay station for His miraculous love.

"The miracle extends WITHOUT your help, but you ARE needed that it can BEGIN. ACCEPT the miracle of healing, and it WILL go forth because of what it IS. It is its NATURE to extend itself the instant it is born. And it is born the instant it is offered and RECEIVED."

Your proper function is to express God and Christ. To be in such a state of cooperation and alignment and agreement that their functioning empowers your functioning. You thus become a miracle worker, able to give what you are receiving, to others. This is simply because having been Authored by God, He has given YOU the ability to Author, and thus you become able to create and to work miracles. To extend and express what is in you, which is God Himself.

The final acceptance of being host to God, and thus that God operates through you to others, is what establishes you as an UNLIMITED miracle worker, and is the acceptance of the atonement. It requires you acknowledge God is your True Father, the ONLY cause of what you are, that you are not caused BY anything else, and therefore resume your place as a Son of God, co-creator of miracles and life.

"Souls were given their own true authorship"

When you act as/with Christ, operate through the Holy Spirit, and activate the Power of God, there is nothing your holiness cannot do.

"24. A miracle is a Universal Blessing from God through Me to all My Brothers. EXPLANATION: You once said that souls cannot rest until everyone has found salvation. This happens to be true. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. The Disciples were officially and specifically told to heal others, as Physicians of the Lord. They were also told to heal themselves, and were promised that I would never leave them or forsake them. Atonement is the natural profession of the Children of God, because they have professed Me."

"A miracle is a Universal Blessing from God through Me to all My Brothers. " simply reflects on this arrangement of beings. You host God, God is in you, God is the source of miracles, Holy Spirit is the mechanism, it extends THROUGH you, TO ALL OUR BROTHERS, or perhaps to an individual brother. You operate as a "physician of the lord" to go out and profess Christ, healing the sick and raising the dead as a miracle worker. This is atonement - being part of the great crusade to give to those what they seem to lack.

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

Remember that ability is the potential, Achievement is its expression, and Atonement is the Purpose."

"There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The main difference between us as yet is that I have NOTHING ELSE. This leaves me in a state of true holiness, which is only a POTENTIAL in you."

When the mind dreams, it is capable of projecting any kind of image at will. It does not require time in order for anything to "evolve" within the mind's projected images.

The mind doesn't have to wait for time to pass, for its projected images to develop certain states or conditions. It is able to project NOW, absolutely any image.

It can project NOW an image of sickness, an image of a body which seemed to have aged, an image of a baby which was just born, an image of a body in great condition, or any kind of body at any point in "time", with absolutely NO NEED FOR TIME TO PASS in order for that body to ARRIVE AT that condition. It is projected in its "whatever state", RIGHT NOW.

You can easily see this at work when you dream at night. When your dream BEGINS, an entire environment can show up complete with what appears to be qualities and properties which, in time, would have to have taken many many years to establish.

That environment isn't "brand new" looking. It isn't the beginning of evolving an environment. It isn't the start of civilization. It isn't the beginning of the universe. Instead, the mind projects NOW images of bodies already in a state of decay, environments which must allegedly have been "built" by people over time, trees which must have "grown" in order to become as large as they seem, and events which allegedly could only come about through an entire sequences of prior events.

The mind puts all of this in place NOW. It does not take for you to dream for 100,000 years in order to have a dream of a planet Earth in which you are walking around. The dreaming mind INSTANTLY projects what APPEARS to be forms at a certain point in time, with a certain condition. It therefore instantly also invents HISTORY, all of the prior events which SEEM like they must have happened in order to lead to THIS moment. And yet, you only started sleeping an hour ago, and here you are dreaming of a world which has been around for a billion years.

With this in mind, realize this about your current mind also, in your waking states. As Jesus says, your waking dreams and nighttime dreams differ ONLY IN THEIR FORM. The mind that you have now is dreaming NOW, it is projecting an entire universe NOW, it is making images of stuff which "must have taken a very long time to arrive at" NOW, without having to go through ANY of that time.

Therefore, realize this. Whatever is showing up NOW, is an ILLUSION of something which took a very long time to evolve. ANY state of existing in form can be projected INSTANTLY. Any environment, any body state, any experience, any condition, any sickness, any objects, any condition of objects which allegedly have developed wear and decay and weathering can all be projected NOW, afresh, to LOOK LIKE they have been around for a million years. It makes you wonder, if history really exists, doesn't it?

And guess what.... your mind is projecting YOUR BODY in exactly the same way. The way that your body is showing up NOW, HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE PAST. And the key to understanding this is to understand what a decision is.

The ego's illusion is that, at some point in time, you make a decision. You make this momentary decision and something happens. This decision is then "locked into" in the past and cannot be changed. This is the idea of irreversible sin which you can do nothing to undo, and have to just suffer the consequences going forward. The consequences of this decision then seem to carry over into the future, over a long period of time. For example, it may SEEM as if, in time, you hurt your leg, and thereafter, your body had "leg problems", which seemed to sustain over time, and was "because of" this event which happened in the past. THIS IS NOT HOW DECISIONS WORK.

When you decide something, it means that you are typically choosing a new BELIEF. You are, essentially, making a change of "direction". Like turning corner. You establish a belief in your mind, which you have made be your "new truth", and then you KEEP THAT BELIEF. Because that belief is kept in your mind, it is CONSTANTLY REPROJECTING whatever that belief would produce.

So if a situation comes around where you choose and create an illusion of your leg being hurt, and you then put in place a belief that your leg is hurt, that there were "real consequences", you will KEEP THE BELIEF OVER TIME. Your mind will then continually REPROJECT a damaged body over, and over, and over, and over again.

At any given moment, the body has no existence of its own. At any given moment, the mind is projecting a BRAND NEW IMAGE, an out picturing of an inward condition. At any given moment, the body you had "just now" has DISAPPEARED, and it has been REPLACED with an entirely NEW PROJECTION.

An analogy to this is a digital movie. Movies are comprised of "frames", which are still images. Each frame is a snapshot of a given state of images. The projector (mind) SHOWS one image at a time. It shows a picture of a body in a certain state, then the frame ends, and is removed, and then the NEXT FRAME REPROJECTS an entirely *separate image*, nothing whatsoever to do with the previous image, showing a DIFFERENT PICTURE of a body.

Since this happens very very quickly, at every quantum of time, this creates an ILLUSION OF ANIMATION. Also, and this is the really key point... if the mind keeps projecting a very SIMILAR IMAGE across multiple frames or moments, it creates ****AN ILLUSION**** that there is something "consistent" or "continuous" present "over time".

This ILLUSION leads you to believe that there is some object, some form, which exists "through time". And because it seems to exists through time, YOU start to believe that IT HAS A LONG-TERM EXISTENCE OF ITS OWN. That somehow it is a "thing", an "object", a discrete ENTITY, that somehow continues on existing ON ITS OWN. *This is entirely an illusion*!

The course tells us that at NO point in time does the body really exist, being either an anticipation of the future, or a memory of the past. This is the illusion I am talking of. The *appearance* that some "thing" continues over time and therefore, is a consistent "thing" IN TIME, being maintained OVER TIME, that has ITS OWN EXISTENCE. The body does not have its own existence. It is a temporary IMAGE, which is SWITCHED OUT constantly, BY THE MIND, and replaced with a new image, every tiny instant of time.

Now. Realize then, that when you make a decision, forming a belief, you KEEP that belief in place OVER a long period of time. You keep it in the mind. The mind is a projector of the body "image", and the presence of a false belief in the mind will project an image of that false belief. It is not projected ONTO the body. It is projected AS the body. The body is not a discreet thing in its own right. Therefore, the mind DISTORTS its perception and PROJECTS a distorted, malformed, corrupted, disabled, limited, damaged picture. It therefore shows up as a picture of a BROKEN BODY, proving that the mind has not been healed because the mind believes separation is truth.

IF YOU KEEP that belief "over time", your mind will keep continually REPROJECTING body IMAGES (yes plural, over time, billions of them), which will create the ILLUSION that there is a "long term sickness". It will also create the illusion that the "cause" of the sickness was way in the past, at some single moment in time. IT WAS NOT. This is the ego's attempt to pretend that sin is in the distant past, you can never go back to the past to change your momentary decision, and therefore you are stuck with the consequences FOREVER. This is a bullshit lie, because this is not how decisions work and you can CHOOSE AGAIN AT ANY TIME.

The cause of the sickness is the content of the mind *NOW*. The mind NOW has a belief in sickness and NOW it is projecting a sick body. And the mind is perfectly capable of creating ANY ILLUSIONS OR IMAGES necessary in order to make it seem consistent, justified, believable, obeying "ego laws", even showing seeming evidence from "the past", or changes "over time", because the mind - just as when you DREAM at night, is perfectly capable of creating an ENTIRE UNIVERSE RIGHT NOW as an INSTANTANEOUS PROJECTION. Th year 2017 IS NOT the result of all previous years of "evolution", it is being projected NOW, including every sign and "evidence" that it SEEMS like it took billions of years to evolve to this point. That's an ILLUSION. The dream is being dreamed IN THE PRESENT and automatically INVENTS pictures of "there must have been a past" AT THE SAME TIME.

So, in terms of miracles of healing, what needs to happen is that the mind is healed of ITS BELIEF in some lie, some false ego belief. This false ego belief had been MAINTAINING LONG TERM SICKNESS showing up AS a sick body, because the MIND was "sick" for a long time. It had nothing to do with moments in time or one-off decisions. Decisions ARE CONSTANT. You change your mind by changing which ROAD you start walking down, and a you KEEP walking down that road ENDLESSLY until you change your mind and take a different direction. That's how decisions really work.

So if you seem to have "long term sickness", it has absolutely nothing to do with the body itself, it has nothing to do with the past, it has nothing to do with anything that happened outwardly over time, it has nothing to do with the world, it WAS NOT CAUSED BY ANYTHING EXTERNAL, it is ONLY being caused "now" by the beliefs that you are holding onto NOW, REPROJECTING that body image to look "similar to before", because the BELIEF is still similar to before. If the belief has not changed, what is projected is not going to change either. And that creates the illusion that the body is a "thing" in its own right which gets "its own sickness" and "has a mind of its own".

This ILLUSION of long-term sustained bodily conditions is responsible for deluding people into the belief that the sickness exists ON ITS OWN, or that the body ITSELF gets sick, or that something happens TO the body, or that the body is happening TO the mind. It is also entirely the reason why people who believe THE ILLUSION of continuation of the body, also believe that the body's condition WILL CONTINUE TO BE SICK, when the mind wakes up. This is EGO BULLSHIT! It is not true whatsoever. It's entirely an illusion.

There is NO REASON why the body should stay sick if the mind is healed. The ONLY REASON the body is even appearing WHATSOEVER, is because the mind is projecting it. The body is not showing up as a result of you "being born in the world." Your parents did NOT create your body. Your MIND put YOUR BODY into your mother's womb and manifested its form entirely ON ITS OWN, without any "real" processes occurring on the part of the mother. Everything to do with "having babies" is part of the ego's ILLUSION that what you are is born FROM THE WORLD, and not from your mind.

Since your mind is PROJECTING your body image RIGHT NOW, afresh, every moment, a complete new projection, complete with all the "stored beliefs" and "kept self-attack" which the mind is holding onto, causing the body to SEEM to show up again and again and again in roughly the same "form".... there is absolutely NO REASON WHY your mind could not project a COMPLETELY PERFECTLY HEALED BODY RIGHT NOW. This is what miracles are capable of showing!

That the mind can heal the body but the body cannot heal the mind, proves the mind MUST be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this!

The mind PROJECTS the body. Every instant. Every moment. As an outward picturing of what the mind believes IN THAT MOMENT. The body does not show up FOR ANY OTHER REASON or as an effect of ANY OTHER CAUSE. The body is not caused by the world, or by matter, or by forms, or by anything external. Mind makes the body.

So guess what happens when you change your beliefs in your mind? Guess what happens when you undo your belief in separation from God? Guess what happens when you stop believing in attack? The body will CONTINUE to SHOW UP AS a projection of the content of your mind, but because your content has changed, the body that shows up WILL BE DIFFERENT!

It is entirely possible, therefore, for ANY AND EVERY alleged form of sickness, TO BE HEALED INSTANTLY! Jesus says this himself: "The patient could merely rise up without their aid and say, "I have no use for this." There is no form of sickness that would not be cured at once." Realizing that your mind's projections are occurring IN THE PRESENT, and that the past DOES NOT EXIST and has no influence over the present, should show you (if you get this), that when your mind changes, your body image MUST CHANGE. Your mind WILL project a different image, to reflect the change in beliefs.

The body CANNOT STAY SICK if your mind changes its beliefs. It cannot stay sick because IT HAS NO LIFE OF ITS OWN and it is purely a mental projection. Nothing else can make the sickness stay. Nothing else in the world or in time can cause the sickness to stay. THERE ARE NO CAUSES outside of the mind. The body is a results of YOUR DREAMING IT!

This should tell you that there is absolutely no grounds whatsoever for believing that sickness in the body will "stick around on its own" when you wake up, that somehow you will become "at peace with sickness", that you can be "happy about dying", that "sickness will stay" when the mind is healed, that you need to learn how to be at peace "in spite of sickness", or that it's even the teaching of the course that sickness is real and will CONTINUE ON ITS OWN when the mind is in a state of enlightenment. ABSOLUTE LIES! Makes no sense whatsoever, is absolutely untrue. This is NOT what happens. This is not how the mind works. Believing any of this bullshit demonstrates that your mind HAS NOT BEEN HEALED, because it means you believe in a reversal of cause and effect, your mind is continuing to maintain defenses against truth, and therefore the mind CANNOT BE AWAKE.

The state of the body is a DIRECT REFLECTION of what the mind PUTS OUT THERE, based on ITS BELIEF SYSTEM and the content of its sense of SELF. The body is a depiction of "this is what I think of myself". ALWAYS. It never deviates from that, it has no will or mind or power of its own to choose otherwise, NOTHING can make it change against the mind's will, and there are NO CAUSES external from the mind that can influence it's condition. NONE. Mind is cause, body is effect. Period.

THIS HAS TO MEAN, that when the mind TRULY and genuinely overcomes its obstacles to peace, is TRULY genuinely healed of beliefs in separation, uses of the body for attack, defenses against truth, long-term false beliefs and so on... the body that "shows up" being projected out from the mind's inner condition, MUST, *ABSOLUTELY MUST* show up as in PERFECT UNDISTORTED HEALTH!

I quote:

"The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use if for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all." - ACIM

Key term here.... "CANNOT BE SICK" when the mind is holy. CANNOT. Will not maintain sickness, has no sickness, literally is IMPOSSIBLE TO BE SICK PHYSICALLY if the mind is healed. I know many people have resistance to this idea and think it's either not important or an incorrect focus or not what atonement is for. But atonement WILL BRING HEALING TO THE BODY because the mind that is holy will only project a holy image, i.e. an image of wholeness - a body which is not lacking or limited or broken in any way. If the body continues to show up as sick, something IS WRONG WITH THE MIND. Or to put it more accurately, the mind will STOP PROJECTING A SICK BODY and will only project a healthy body. Healing doesn't happen TO the body, it happens to the mind and the mind projects the body form to match.

This is law. This is how mind functions. The body is the mind's projection, it's dream. It ALWAYS CORRELATES to the state of the mind. Healed mind MUST only project a healed body, a sick mind MUST only project a sick body. This is also why Jesus teaches that we are meant to DEMONSTRATE THAT WE CANNOT BE HURT BY OUR BROTHER, by only ever showing him a HEALED BODY, proving that whatever he did or even tried to do, HAS NO EFFECT on your body because it has no effect on your mind, and your mind is totally in charge of what kind of image it projects. This therefore proves, if you are holy in mind, showing only a holy body, that your brother IS INNOCENT, through PROOF, because his attack DID NOT CAUSE YOU OR YOUR BODY TO CHANGE!

For miracles, there are no orders of difficulty, there is no hierarchy of illusions, and there is no PAST that has power over the present. Bodily states have nothing to do with time, and nothing to do with history, and nothing to do with the body seeming to be a "discrete thing" that someone can point to over time and say, that's a consistent object in its own right. It is not. It is a freshly projected DREAM, right now, this instant. When the instant is being projected from a mind of holiness - the miracle of the mind will completely dissolve and NOT PROJECT an image of sickness.

When the miracle occurs therefore, which is a movement towards God and an undoing of separation beliefs in the MIND, the body MUST SHOW THE CHANGE in some way. It can't refuse it, it can't block it, it can't prevent the projection of the mind's healed condition. The body has NO POWER over the mind whatsoever. It has to OBEY. And so this means it is ENTIRELY POSSIBLE, as Jesus said above, that if there is an instant of a miracle, shifting to a vertical perception and undoing the illusion of separation, which means letting go of a long-term belief, the mind CAN be healed INSTANTLY, and therefore it CAN project an image of the body having been healed *INSTANTLY*. One moment there was terrible sickness and suffering, the next moment it was simply not there. One moment the body seemed practically DEAD as a picture of the mind's belief in death, the next moment it was showing up as "alive", to represent the fact the mind is now ALIVE.

Instantaneous! No delay whatsoever. Miracles in this way produce a skipping of TIME, they completely ignore ego laws, pay no attention to the past, have no regard for illusions of difficulty or severity or importance, and create an interval of time in which there is a shift towards God, into invisibility, which is why they heal THE MIND, which then projects a healed body IMAGE. This can happen absolutely instantly. One instant there was terrible sickness, the next, gone. Healed. Boom!

The illusion of a continuous body with continuous sickness is entirely within the LEVEL of the ego's dream. Miracles and the power of the MIND OVER MATTER, extends from an entirely higher LEVEL where the mind is the CAUSE of everything that shows up AS THE DREAM. Bodies that move, mountains that move, planets that move, is all being DREAMED by the mind. It has no will of its own. It has no effects of its own. There is literally nothing that your HOLINESS cannot do. There is nothing your MIND cannot do. Mind NEVER LOSES its creative power, even IF it is mis-creating images of false bodies on false planets in a false universe. Even IF it is creating an illusion of time, history, the past, a future, or anything other than realizing WE ARE PROJECTING ALL OF THIS ENTIRE UNIVERSE THIS INSTANT. It did not come from the past. It is happening in this illusion NOW.

Just as in our dreams at night, which differ only in their form, the waking world, planet earth, and all the people in it, are being projected NOW, in whatever condition they seem to be in, because the mind projecting them has false beliefs NOW, which MIGHT be similar to beliefs it had "just a moment ago", creating an ILLUSION of things being maintained over time. Nothing is being maintained over time but a KEPT BELEIF which has not been let go of. Time is an illusion. There is nothing keeping us asleep and nothing keeping planets in motion other than the mind CHOOSING TO DO SO OVER TIME.

There is no reason whatsoever in all the universe why you cannot be completely healed and whole in physical form and mind, RIGHT NOW. If you were to choose this, it would happen for you, right now. If you are showing sickness, and if you've had sickness for 30 years, it is because you are believing in sickness RIGHT NOW. It's got nothing to do with the past or anything that came before. NOTHING. You create your "reality" by creating your DREAM of what you want to be true RIGHT NOW. History has no power over the present - that's an ego illusion.

At no point in time does the body really EXIST, because it is only ever a projection in the NOW, not in time, and it does not even really exist in the now. A mind which has BELIEFS IN SEPARATION, will project a picture of a self WHO IS SEPARATE. This is what we call "the body". It's not a body. It's the MIND showing up with "body-formed" CONTENT, AS its BELIEF in being a separate individual. Such thoughts take "form". The body APPEARS because the mind is regarding ITSELF (spirit) as limited and separate in some way. It has false beliefs and a false sense of identity. This is what MAKES THE BODY.

To put this even more clearly, how you think of yourself is how you will SHOW UP. If you regard yourself as sinful and guilty, you will show up with a FORM OF SIN AND GUILT. As the course says, "the body is the idea of sin made real then projected outwards"!.... Literally this is what I've been saying in this post. if your mind believes "you" are "made of sin"... YOUR MIND will manifest an "image" of a "sinful self", which will "appear" as what people call "a body". That image is not really who you are. But it's what you think you are. Whatever you think you are, you will show up AS! If you think you are AN ILLUSION, you will show up AS AN ILLUSION. That's what makes the body appear. If you do not believe you are an illusion AT ALL, you will show up as - HAVING NO ILLUSORY BODY AT ALL - pure spirit.

WHEN the mind no longer has *ANY* false ideas about its identity, has no beliefs whatsoever, is aware of God, and does not believe in ANY form of victimhood, reversal of cause and effect, that the world is ANYTHING but your OWN DREAM, and that it is ALL coming from YOUR MIND, THEN.... what happens to the body? IT DISAPPEARS COMPLETELY!

A mind which is being entirely true to spirit, true to the true nature of YOURSELF, will show up as. .... TRANSPARENT! Transparency means total honesty. Total willingness to be aware of and ACCEPT WHAT IS, as it is, which means, no distortions, no illusions, no thoughts to the contrary, no limitations placed on SELF, and therefore the mind PROJECTS ETERNITY, projects LOVE, projects abstract God, projects LIGHT, projects absolute total lack of "forms of error", and therefore, STOPS PROJECTING A BODY. To those in the world, this will appear as though the body DISAPPEARS ENTIRELY. To the mind that is disappearing the body, IT IS NOW AWARE that the body WAS ALWAYS based on false beliefs, and has NO REALITY of its own, and NEVER EXISTED, and HAS NO TRUTH, and is not being KEPT by the PAST or the WORLD or any other cause outside of the mind. Therefore the mind stops supporting it, stops MAKING IT, and it stops showing up at all!

This is how Jesus made his body DISAPPEAR, as given in the "extra notes to Helen" after the course, where he stated that he finally recognized the last illusion - that death was not real, and therefore, had no further need for the body, and therefore, caused it to DISAPPEAR, because all that was TRUE, all that could REMAIN, was pure spirit at one with its mind, fused with God, in absolute eternal truth and atonement. This is how YOU LEAVE THE DREAM. Through truth, not through death, not through sickness, not through suffering, not through the body going through a death process. Through making it VANISH, because the mind HAS NO ILLUSORY CONTENT IN IT, and therefore STOPS PROJECTING THE BODY!

There is no body. There is no world. There is no sickness. There is no death. There is no sin. There is no guilt. There is no fear. There is no separation. There is no time. There is no space. There are no forms. There is no planet earth or physical universe. There is no consistency over time in the world. There are no sicknesses which last on their own. There is no life or power or will or mind in the body or in the world. The world has no effect and is not the cause or the birthplace of anything.

You do not need a body to exist because you are IMMORTAL SPIRIT. You are as God created you, AS SPIRIT, not as an ILLUSORY BODY IMAGE. You are not a projection of a sick mind. You are ONLY IMMORTAL SPIRIT. This is the only truth about you. Everything to do with the body is a lie.

The body will and MUST become "healthy" BEFORE you awaken. It cannot stay sick if the mind is to be healthy. A healthy mind WILL project a healthy body. The body must go through "becoming healthier" "over time" as the mind gradually is healed. Sicknesses must fall away "over time". A sick body is proof that the mind IS FURTHER REMOVED from God than a healthy body. "A broken body is proof the mind has not been healed." This is why, before awakening, bodies WILL and MUST become healthier, and therefore health will be enjoyed more, and healthy bodies feature in HAPPIER DREAMS, which precede awakening.

Making the body healthier per-se is not the ULTIMATE goal, because the body ITSELF is a picture of separation and sickness. But before that ultimate goal is reached, the body WILL BE HEALED and sickness WILL be undone and the dead WILL BE RAISED and all forms of "things which cannot be undone" will be undone.

I quote:

"You who perceive yourself as weak and frail, born but to die, to weep and suffer pain, hear this: All power is given unto you in Earth and Heaven. There is nothing you cannot do."

Miracles CAN DO ANYTHING, CAN HEAL ANYTHING, CAN REVERSE ANYTHING, even death. If miracles could not undo death, we would be STUCK HERE FOREVER. There is NOTHING your holiness cannot do. You are the Son of God! You are not at the effect of the world and you are IMMORTAL.

"You are immortal BECAUSE you are eternal"

You are immortal. Generally that means you live forever without any kind of end, you can never be changed, and you are permanently the same all the time.

You'll then find that any notion of "change" introduces the potential for coming to an end. If you can change or be changed, you could be stopped, interfered with, attacked, damaged, or caused to die.

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

So change of any kind cannot be part of immortality. Which is why changelessness is your real nature, and this is also why you remain still as God created you. You have not changed a single bit since you were created.

This then has to mean that if there is anything that does change, it cannot be a part of you. If there is a body that can change, it cannot be a part of you. If there is a building that can be destroyed, it cannot be real. If there is a planet which can go through seasons, it cannot be real. Any kind of change is a form of death.

It's very simple really. You can just ask yourself if something will last forever. If the answer is no, then it is not a real creation and not a part of God. If it lasts only a little while in time and then changes and then goes away, it cannot be part of creation or of God. Nor can it be God's will.

"Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

Here Jesus simply affirms this by saying that all things which are visible will have an end. Some will last longer than others but ALL of the visible things will have an end. It then doesn't matter how you are looking at the visible things, whether you hate the visible things or love them. ALL of them will come to an end.

This again tells you essentially that if anything is visible, it is not a part of God's kingdom. If it is visible, ie forms of matter, energy, bodies, planets, stars and so on, they will come to an end some day, and therefore cannot be a part of immortal reality. Anything that does not last forever uninterrupted is not a part of God, nor can it be made into a part of God.

There is a world that we made, a world of space-time and of physicality and of forms of matter and objects. These things are visible and will end. They end because of their nature being part of a dream of death. And because of this, they are not a part of God or a part of you. Nor are they a part of heaven.

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

Bottom line, if it's not immortal it doesn't really exist. It's a very simple test for anything. If it's not immortal it's not of God. If it changes it is not of God. If it can be attacked it's not of God. if it goes through a transformation process it is not of God. If it can be born or grows or withers or suffers or dies it is not of God.

It also doesn't matter if you change your perceptions about such things, to see objects in a different light or from a different vantage point. Seeing objects that end in a different way doesn't actually override the fact that they still end.

Just because you are happy it will not make the earth last forever. Just because you are loving it will not stop the seasons from changing. Just because you are peaceful it will not change the falling of leaves when the weather get's cold.

These are still proof that these things are not a part of God's reality. It doesn't matter if you see a unity in these things or a reflection of God in these things, they still behave and act and function in ways that are open to a denial of immortality. If the thing, the object, the matter, the form, the body, the world etc, can in any way ever be modified or changed, then fundamentally it cannot be a part of reality.

This is why "there is no world." This is why "God did not create the body." This is why "the body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist." This is why we withdraw investment in physical sight and open up to a different kind of vision which overlooks/forgives the world. And that the world can BE forgiven is purely because is it an illusion of a world, and not a reality. Only illusions can be overlooked and "a world forgiven cannot last."

We can accept the reality of God's Kingdom, which is to accept God's truth and God's law and God's wholeness. That is the wholeness of the Kingdom of heaven, in which all things live forever and never change. It is not a place where bodies are born and planets spin and stars exhaust their fuel supply. It is not a realm where objects get stuck in crevices and the dust of dead flesh settles on surfaces or where food rots and decays and turns to a corpse. None of these things can be a part of heaven.

Only the immortal is true. Only the immortal is alive. Only the immortal is of God. Only the immortal exists. Everything else is an illusion. Not even what ACIM calls "the real world" will last forever. "Even the real world will vanish from your sight." You cannot convert an illusion into a reality. You cannot turn an unreal world into a real one. Nor can you turn a picture of death into real permanent life.

What lives forever must be created by an immortal creator to live forever from the beginning. What is made in an insane mind out of illusions which intended they die, cannot have eternal life. They have not been created or given immortality and so they do not exist at all. Their illusion of existing is nothing but a deception and the recognition of this fact is enlightenment.

"Only the creations of light are real."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever."

"There is no world. This is the central lesson the course would attempt to teach."

You may not realize what this implies. But consider this.

It means that this entire world, planet Earth, its surrounding environment, the sun, all the stars and galaxies, which you made, you are dreaming of. And that means none of them really exist.

It means the entire history of the human civilization is fiction. It means there is no planet. It means your body is an illusion. It means that everything you think exists in the world is absolutely and literally nothingness.

Essentially, there is not really a dream. And everything that seems to be in the dream is not really anything at all. There is NOTHING HAPPENING. There is NOTHING HERE.

This is the proper use of denial. The recognition that what is false is false, what is true is true. What is illusion is not real. And death itself is something you made up.

"You made sickness and death and therefore can abolish both."

The trees are not really there. The cars are not really there. The houses are not really there. The planet is not really there. It's all a huge giant dream. Dreams do not carry over when you wake up from them, because they depend entirely on you being unconscious. Dreams require you to be asleep, ie in denial of reality, so that you can imagine something UNLIKE reality. Whatever you make up in the dream simply stops being MADE when you wake up from dreaming. It switches off.

This is why this is such a huge, immensely radical and totally amazing lesson to learn. It means you cannot be fully awake while maintaining a dream body. "The body is a dream". "The body is clearly a device for separation and therefore does not exist." This is literally factually true. The body IS NOTHING. There is no real body. There is no world here.

That's how much of an illusion this world is. And this is why it's such a challenge to come to really believe and recognize this truth, as the culmination of the entire curriculum. It means you have to learn not to be deceived by ANYTHING you see or sense. It means you have to realize all your body senses were made to NOT KNOW reality. It means you have to realize everything you THINK exists, is happening, or has ever happened in this world, IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Nothing but an illusion. Nothing but a dream. A fantasy fairytale imagined universe in which NOTHING REALLY HAPPENS.

No-one is ever really sick. There is no real death. You made it up. You are an immortal spirit being who God has established as permanently real and perfect forever, who cannot change nor can you change what you are. You are temporarily in denial, wanting to believe that this isn't true, and in your denial you are trying to block awareness of the truth by dreaming of a UNIVERSE in which all manner of other stuff seems true and real. And none of it is.

Literally, ONLY the Kingdom of God is real. This world you made is NOT real, whatsoever. ONLY God's world is real. The world you made is total fiction, illusion, unreality, nothing. Literally NOTHING. Made of nothingness.

"The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came."

That means you're here sitting there reading this crap thinking this is all real and happening, that even this message is happening, and it is not really happening.

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

Nothing in this world is eternal. Nothing. It is all temporary, fleeting, transitioning, changing, illusory. That's WHY it's an illusion. Miracles demonstrate that illusions ARE illusions because they CAN be changed. Anything that changes is not real. Nothing real can be threatened or changed. Anything that ever seemed to change or be affected or hurt was not real. Nothing real can be attacked ever. You are reality. You are the Son of God. You are immortal. You cannot be hurt. Pretending that you can is futile nonsense.

You cannot even die. You can confuse yourself with things that do. You can pretend to go through it. But it has NO EFFECT on who you really are. It does not even touch your spirit at all. It is totally immaterial, inconsequential. You made up death in your denial of the fact that you are immortal and have eternal life. You are PRETENDING you can suffer.

"Sickness is an attempt to prove you can be hurt."

You cannot be hurt. But you keep trying to prove it. You cannot die, but you keep trying to prove it. You cannot be attacked in any way, but you keep believing you can and have. This is confusion. You are mistaken. All beliefs in space and time are a mistake. There is no world here. Only God's Kingdom exists. Only the HOLY TRINITY is real.

There is no world. Sums up the entire truth about this realm. All of it is NOTHING. It's not even really here. It's all fiction. Do not believe it. The world is a lie. This isn't being negative about the world. It's factual. The world is not negative or positive. It is NOTHING. The body is not negative or positive. IT IS NOTHING.

"You cannot endow the body with attributes of Christ. Holiness is positive while the body is merely natural." (paraphrase). And when you think of the body and the world being NEUTRAL, you should NOT be thinking of them as being as SOMETHING. THEY ARE NOTHING. Neutrality means it has NO ATTRIBUTES AT ALL. The neutral world is NOT a world. The neutral body is NOT a body. You can't use neutrality to KEEP what does not exist.

We're hanging out on a fake planet interacting with imaginary characters played by sleeping brothers, pretending that things are happening, that we have important stuff to do, that there are places to go and things to see and do, important experiences to be had, magnificent illusions to sense, worlds to explore and accomplishments to be made. THERE IS NOTHING HERE. This is why ultimately "I need do nothing" - an atonement-level thought, in recognition of the fact that there is literally NO WORLD and NO SEPARATION and NO ILLUSIONS and therefore nothing has happened and there's nothing to do about it.

It's kind of like, you live in Heaven, but you're temporarily on a vacation to a fake imaginary planet Earth, and you're hanging out there for a LONG time, and kind of forgot to go back home. But some day you will go back home and leave this world, and never come back.

An interesting insight I had is that what we see as causing us, we literally take to mean it is causing us to exist. If we are the effect of it, we are whatever it decides we are.

When we are caused by God, we are forever an effect of God. Whatever God wills us to be we are that. God has total authority and privilege in this and we have absolutely no say in it.

Fortunately God's idea of us and what he wants us to be is very loving and beautiful, and so we are created and "forced to be" perfect happy immortal beings forever.

But if you switch your idea of what causes you to anything else, anything of the world, the body, the ego, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, a similar thing happens. Your SELF is once again defined by it.

So let's say the world does something to "you", someone attacks your body or something, you might see it as not changing YOU but maybe changing your body or causing upsetting feelings. But you assume that YOU are still you.

However, this can't be true, because if you perceive that these external things are CAUSING you at all, you MUST believe you are their effect. YOU, your self, your identity, is the effect of them. And they have the power to change you, alter you, upset you, affect you, modify you according to their will.

This is part of how the mind shifts its IDENTITY from being identified with spirit/Christ to identifying with other things like the the ego or body. When we try to become one with these things, or we give them power, or we see ourselves as caused BY them, our very sense of SELF actually changes.

You begin to see yourself kind of like through the eyes of this other thing, the thing you gave power to. However it's treating you, whatever it's doing to you, is redefining you. You now become the effect of it and your whole sense of identity repositions as a victim and a sufferer and that which is attacked and weakened.

When we look for things to forgive, we might say that a person did this or that to us, or something in the world is upsetting us. But it's not just that it does something to upset us, it does something to CHANGE us, and that literally changes our sense of who we are.

When you believe the world, which is your dream, is dreaming you, and it has power to affect you or change what you are, your sense of self shifts from an immortal being to a temporary mortal suffering entity. The mind shifts its view of itself as though it's now being caused BY the world, and loses track of the soul. As if what causes you CREATES you.

Who you see yourself as, the role you play, how you are positioned, who you are in the drama or story, all becomes defined BY the causes you perceive to be having an effect on you. This can happen even with emotions and thoughts where you start developing a sort of sense of being a suffering person who the emotions or thoughts are happening to.

To wake up from this we have to become clear that we're not only not affected by anything in the whole world, but that nothing in the world has any power to CHANGE us in any way. Otherwise it has the power to change our SELF, and convert our identity into something we're not. Even a slight upset emotion is a change in identity, a twinge of unhappiness, a minor fear, it's all going to change your view of what is true of you.

So we have to learn to stop making ourselves CAUSED BY anything other than God. Nothing in the world does ANYTHING to us. We are UNCHANGEABLE, and nothing anywhere can change us except for God - who has no intention of ever changing his mind about us. We have to let ourselves be only what he wants us to be, and accept the truth of ourselves, in order to recognize WHO we really are.

"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." W191L9

"The world does nothing to him. He only thought it did. Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it was. Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea." M6C3

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are." URW190L5

"My Self is ruler of the universe. ... It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept." UrW253

The connection between denying illusions and working miracles...

"The miracle worker is one who accepts my kind of denial and projection, unites his own inherent abilities to deny and project with mine, and imposes them back on himself and others. This establishes the total lack of threat anywhere. Together we can then work for the real time of peace, which is Eternal."

The ego's kind of denial is the denial of God, the denial of truth and reality. It denies heaven and accepts hell.

The proper use of denial does the opposite, accepting God and denying hell. This means that denial itself is not necessarily negative or positive, but you HAVE to always deny something, because you also have to always accept something. Whatever you accept into your mind is reality to you, and whatever you deny is shut out of your mind.

"Whatever you accept INTO your mind has reality for you. It is, however, only the ACCEPTANCE which makes it real."

"Every illusion which you accept into your mind, BY JUDGING IT TO BE ATTAINABLE, removes your own sense of completion, and thus denies the Wholeness of your Father."

Similarly we are to use projection as Jesus would use it, because projection itself is NOT inherently positive or negative.

"WHAT YOU PROJECT YOU BELIEVE. This is an immutable law of mind in this world as well as in the Kingdom."

"We said before that WHAT you project is up to you, but it is NOT up to you WHETHER to project, for projection is a law of mind."

The ego's use of projection is to attack or deny what's within, and project separation.

The proper use of projection is to accept and see what is within and project wholeness and innocence.

A miracle worker therefore is tasked with using denial and projection appropriately, ie constructively. To deny the denial of the truth.

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

"This world you see MUST BE DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS, for each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. The sight of one is possible because you have denied the other." Miracle mindedness is a state in which the world of form - anything not of God - is fully denied. And heaven is fully accepted. And whatever you accept into your mind becomes your reality, while whatever you deny (properly) becomes invisible to you. To see the real world you must accept its truth, which is atonement. And this requires that you DENY the physical world - anything not of God.

"Sickness and separation are not of God, but the Kingdom IS. If you obscure the Kingdom, you are perceiving WHAT IS NOT OF GOD."

"Whatever is revealed to Him that is not of God, is gone."

"Teach no-one he has hurt you, for, if you do, you teach YOURSELF that what is NOT of God, HAS POWER OVER YOU."

"THIS peace is totally incapable of being shaken by human errors of any kind. It denies the ability of anything which is not of God to effect you in any way."

The whole course can be summed up fairly simply as.... accept only the Kingdom of God, and deny the world you made. Refuse to accept anything is true about the world, and do not deny God.

Denial is a powerful defense and tool which acts like a pivot around which your whole perception revolves. Deny reality and you make an illusory world real. Deny all the illusions of the world and heaven becomes real to you again. To accept the atonement is to deny the illusory world and be utterly unphased by the dream, denying it any power over you at all.

To remain in miracle mindedness you must be vigilant for the Kingdom - accepting that only the truth is true and nothing else is true. To accept only that which is of God, wholly and openly, and refuse to accept anything God did not create.

"What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist."

"What God did not create can only be in your own mind apart from His. Therefore, it has no meaning."

"How can a meaningless world exist if God did not create it?"

"INDIRECT proof of truth is needed in a world made of denial, and without direction."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

"Do not perceive ANYTHING God did not create, or you ARE denying Him."

"But denial is a defense, and so it is as capable of being used positively as it is of being used destructively. Used negatively, it WILL be destructive, because it will be used for attack. But in the service of the Holy Spirit, the law becomes as beneficent as all of the laws of God" "Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth."

"Remember a very early lesson, -- "never underestimate the power of denial." It has no power in ITSELF, but YOU can give it the power of YOUR mind, whose power is without limit of ANY kind. If you use it to deny reality, reality is gone FOR YOU. REALITY CANNOT BE PARTLY APPRECIATED. That is why denying any part of it means you have lost awareness of ALL of it."

"I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body's worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is an illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand." - Jesus

"If the mind can heal the body but the body can't heal the mind then the mind must be stronger than the body."

"The mind must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world that has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail." (or a body).

-------------------------

If the mind is stronger than the body then the body must be caused by the mind. And as Jesus said about his resurrection, He materialized another body with HIS MIND, in order to demonstrate that the mind that MADE a body ("the body of jesus") can make another, since form is an illusion. That means ALL BODIES are made by the mind, not by the world.

What we can controversially conclude here, is this:

God is your only Creator, not anything in the world.

Your earth parent's bodies did not create your body.

Your body was not the result of sperm and egg.

Your body as a baby did not manifest as a result of biological laws, it manifested as a result of the MIND.

The mother's womb is a symbol not a cause.

Bodies cannot make bodies. They have no causal power at all. How can effect make an effect?

The mind that made the body, also made the world, and therefore the world did not make the body.

Your body was NEVER made by the world or anything in the world, because there are NO CAUSES in the world.

"It (the world) is incapable of change because it is merely an effect."

Effects are not causes. On the level of this world, causes and effect seem horizontal/linear and this is 100% an illusion. The only true cause is vertical, as demonstrated in the vertical perception which brings about miracles, through the proper order of the LEVELS, which means the higher level of MIND causes the lower level of FORM.

"Mind over matter" is ALWAYS the case for any form that shows up. The mind is the ONLY CAUSE of stuff (bodies, world, objects etc) being made.

So even if it SEEMS like your body is a thing ("as no time does the body exist AT ALL"), or has a history, or is ruled by biological laws, or is the effect of the world, or caused by parents, or put there by SOMEONE ELSE, you're basically claiming that you are automatically at the effect of the world you see and are a victim. Being born BY or FROM the dream, as a body that the dream MAKES "for you", is victimhood. It is a lie.

This is because the ego set up the body-making ILLUSION, the illusory causes of bodies coming about, to make it SEEM as though the world creates the body. This is 100% the reversal of true cause which is that body comes from within not without, and the world has NO CAUSAL POWER at all. To suggest part of the world itself can "create life" is the most opposing illusion, opposing the fact that only God/souls create life, and there is NO LIFE OUTSIDE OF HEAVEN. The ego deliberately has made this ILLUSION of "being born to parents" in order to cover up the causality of the mind or the true source of the body, which is the dreaming mind.

YOUR MIND MAKES THE BODY AT ALL TIMES, from "inception" to death.

When you acknowledge that your mind or some kind of mind is making your body, you will also realize that the body is not something you "attach to" or "identify with" or "put on as a costume" or "incarnate into" like it's something that exists ON ITS OWN independently from you. Like it's some kind of thing in its own right, which happened to .. .just show up magically with no-one being the cause of it?

Instead, recognize that when your mind believes YOU are made of ego illusions, ego illusions will SHOW UP, i.e. materialize, as an image seeming like a solid body in the mind. When your mind has no illusions or ego in it, it will cease to materialize a body, because it does not identify itself AS being made of ego stuff. Therefore the body disappears and you become "invisible" to this world. A clear mind produces invisibility i.e. no form.

Unless we are willing to take FULL RESPONSIBILITY for making the body be what it is, for making it show up, for MAKING IT period, we will see it as a separate "thing" and that WILL keep us stuck in this ego illusion. It cannot be let go by disassociating from it or separating from it.

That means you're actually performing an unworthy form of denial, by trying to keep the body and detach yourself from it. That's an act of premature death. The mind that is making the body, if it attempts to then pretend it is not making it, is simply in denial. The only way to leave the dream is by DISAPPEARING IT, by no longer identifying AS ego. And your mind will then make it vanish.

"You are not a body" does not mean, make a body and pretend you didn't make it.

Did you know God is very, very, very powerful?

Did you know that you inherited that power and are also very powerful? God is the source of all power, and is all-powerful, but he also shares his power with you, so that you too have power.

"The power to work miracles belongs to you."

Without God, you would have no power at all. But with God, you have all power.

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

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

This in no way means that you have no power to work miracles. It means you have ALL of GOD's power to work miracles.

This also means that miracles, of the supernatural kind, actually do involve a use of a POWER.

There are far too many people doing ACIM who either do not realize or refuse to be open to the idea that miracles require a utilisation of POWER.

This isn't just some weak force or some willingness or a bit of help from above. It's actually a real power, a very very strong power. The power of God.

God is also love, which is why love is also power, and since love and forgiveness are related, being forgiving is also powerful.

We live in a very, very disempowered state right now, which is why it seems that we not only do not have any power but cannot access it and don't even know it's there to use. We think that we're going to remain just as un-powerful when we wake up or get closer to reality. It's not true. To be a miracle worker you must be able to use the power of God, and it really is VERY POWERFUL.

"You who have tried to keep power for yourselves, have lost it. You still HAVE the power, but you have interposed so much between it and your AWARENESS of it, that you cannot use it. EVERYTHING you have taught yourselves has made your power more and more obscure to you. You know not WHAT it is, nor WHERE. You have made a SEMBLANCE of power, and a SHOW of strength, so pitiful that it MUST fail you."

If you have never experienced this power in this life, you may not have a clue what I'm talking about. I've experienced it a few times. It's a power so strong, so certain, so absolute, that it feels like it could accomplish literally anything. It could move mountains, it could change bodies in an instant, it could raise the dead with effortlessness and ease. It has such strength and, if you like "force" in it, that it's like some kind of 1000-foot tall giant compared to a little ant.

"What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them."

"It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains."

"Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a little feat for such a power."

Jesus isn't kidding here. There is a power, a real capability, an immense supernatural strength, far far far beyond anything you've ever encountered in this world, that is literally unlimited and absolute. It is not relative power, or partial power, or a high wattage of power, or even an extreme power. It is total unlimited absolute unmoveable permanent power that is so strong it can create entire universes.

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

You USED your power to make space and time and all the galaxies and planets and all bodies and all events here. Not through some "laws of physics" bullshit or some "evolution" bullshit. POWER OF GOD. Immense psychological ability.

"He, too, MUST begin to think of himself as a very powerful receiving and sending channel"

"The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force."

Just FYI, we're not weak little frail little nuggets wiggling around on a little planet. We're super immensely powerful beings. The power of God is in us. How do you think Moses parted an ocean, and how did Jesus raise the dead and calm storms and materialise food and so on? It was through utilisation of a power that's so strong and capable that there is NOTHING it cannot do.

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do."

This is not a course in sitting on fences and observing and doing nothing and having no power to do anything. It is a course in EMPOWERMENT and you getting your power back so that you can act and carry out God's will!

"My holiness is unlimited in its power to heal, because it is unlimited in its power to save." ... "In the presence of my holiness, which I share with God Himself, all idols vanish."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance, and limits of any kind. Your holiness is totally unlimited in its power because it establishes you as a Son of God, at one with the Mind of his Creator."

"Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do."

"The miracle ITSELF is but the witness that you HAVE the power of God in you"

"The power of God IS limitless."

"It is therefore in my power to change every mind along with mine, for mine is the power of God."

"Alone they are nothing. But in their joining is the Power of God." "Then let the power of God work in you and through you, that His Will and yours may be done."

"God's Teacher, and His lesson will support your strength. It is only your weakness that will depart from you in this practice, for it is the practice of the power of God in you."

"I am not weak but strong." "I am not afraid but all powerful."

"There is now no limit on his power, because it is the Power of God."

"His task is mighty, but the power of God is with Him. Therefore, to Him, it is so easy, that it was accomplished the instant it was given Him for you."

"Who can limit the power of God Himself? Who then can say who can be healed of what, and what must remain beyond God's power to forgive? "

"The whole power of God is in every part of Him"

"The power of God, and all His Love, without limit, will support you, as you seek only your place in the plan of Atonement arising from His Love."

"The power of God will support every effort you make on behalf of the magnitude of His dear Son."

"And He will do so, for the power of God in Him AND YOU is joined in REAL relationship, so holy and so strong, that it can overcome even this, WITHOUT fear."

"All fear is ultimately reducible to the basic misperception of man's ability to USURP the power of God."

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

"My mind will always be like yours, because we were created as equals. It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth. My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision FOR YOURSELF. The will for this decision is the will to SHARE it, because the decision itself IS the decision to share. It is MADE BY GIVING, and is therefore the one act of mind that resembles true creation."

"If you knew Who walks beside you on THIS way, which YOU have chosen, fear would be impossible."

Fear is a psychological tool which you use to put yourself into the role of victim, where you then see yourself as being affected by something separate from you.

You are powerful, strong, confident, certain, loving, aware, filled with truth.

However, when you disown these properties, you do so by creating a split in your mind. You use separation to try to separate yourself from these properties, to disown and push them away, and you literally give them TO something separate from you.

So you take all your power, all your certainty, all your inherent love, and you separate it from yourself and push it outwards onto someone else.

This now means that in your perception, you see yourself as lacking confidence, lacking power, lacking certainty, and that will be experienced as "being afraid". It is a state of powerlessness and weakness and a vulnerability to be affected by a power greater than what you seem to possess.

You seem to them possess less power than what is outside of yourself, because you have displaced your own power out there and see yourself as having "less". Therefore those outside of you seem to have "more".

It will seem then that you are afraid because those outside of you have more power than yourself, ie have power over you, and are capable of causing you or affected you in some way. They seem to have control over you, able to decide against your will what you will be or experience. And that's frightening. But it's not the cause of the fear. It's just how the fear is experienced once it's put in place.

Fear is always an act of deliberately disowning yourself and giving yourself away, which RESULTS IN you perceiving that what you've given away is now outside of yourself in someone else's hands. It then seems frightening that they can use this power against you, which creates this whole victimhood story about what they're doing "to you" and why you don't have the power to stop them. But that's a cover-up for the fact that you are using fear IN ORDER TO see them as victimizing you.

That power which you perceive as being in them and not in you, is your own power, which you have disowned. You've tried to set up other people as more powerful than you so that you can appear weak and afraid and in threat of attack. To choose to be afraid is to deliberately position yourself a a victim and to see yourself as in danger of dying. It is a choice to try to bring about your own death. That it seems later as though someone else is going to "cause" this death for you, is a total cover-up lie which you orchestrate in order to make it seem like YOU are not the one choosing it.

Death is an attempt to relinquish the power and ability to choose, to cover up the power of choice, to disown everything about yourself and to allow the external separate imaginary source of power to decide FOR you what is going to happen TO you. But all along this fearful CHOICE is still a choice. It just looks like it's a loss of choice or of having no choice at all.

If you are afraid, you absolutely DO have a choice and you absolutely ARE using your choice, in a mis-creative and self-destructive way. To be afraid does not call for pity. It calls for you to get honest and reclaim responsibility for the power that you keep trying to make out that others are taking from you against your will. It's YOUR power that YOU have GIVEN to them BY your will! You need to take it back.

You only experience fear when you have disowned yourself and are being irresponsible for who and what you are - when you are unwilling to fulfill the FUNCTION that God has given you to represent Him and to extend love and power. When you try to give this function away, other people will seem to wield this function over you against your will. Or in other words, when you attempt to not want to fulfill this function, this function will seem to fulfill itself in opposition to you, because you are in opposition to it.

To escape from fear will NEVER be successful so long as you continue to believe your own lie, that the power you're afraid of belongs to everyone other than YOU. That the power you see in someone else is not your own power. If the power you see projected onto others is not your own, and it has power over you, then you will believe it is inherent to them and that it is real or true that they own it. They have not stolen it, you've given it to them.

Having made this seem real to yourself, which means you trust it (fear is trusting the ego), you will think that the only way to be safe in the face of something scary is to become "just as scary" or intimidating or have some sense of fake power or aggression or anger, in order to go up against this formidable foe to overpower them. It thus becomes a fight against a fictional enemy. The suggestion to stand up for yourself or to assert yourself then becomes a really frightening challenge, because it means being at WAR.

Confrontations with real-seeming enemies are not really solutions to the problem. Sometimes this seems to be the only thing you can do to stop them from attacking you, but this is according to the ego's rules. The only reason a so-called "attacker" is showing up in your life is to show you that you keep giving your power away and that you've put your own power outside of yourself. The challenge is not to make the enemy real and fight with them to "win", but to recognize that the power that you think is in them is YOUR OWN, to own it, take it back, be responsible for it, and thus return to a state of certainty and a stillness of confidence, a clarity about your power which makes you unmoved and unmovable, and a clarity in which you realize it was YOU that you have made into an enemy.

You don't need to fight an opponent to gain equal power. You need to realize it's your own power and reclaim it, to stop perceiving yourself as a victim, to stop using fear to project "cause" (really blame for causing sin) onto others, and to therefore become invulnerable. There is no need for the invulnerable to defend themselves or to fight or be at war. They are immovable, unchangeable, invulnerable, and cannot be attacked. That's what you really need to get to. And that means stopping putting yourself into the psychological perceptive mode of seeing yourself disempowered while others seem to be more powerful.

Ultimately you are doing this to yourself because it is a part of your own mind which you are up against, it's a part of your own power that you're threatened by, and it's a part of your own Self that seems separate from you and having a will of its own. This is all happening inside your own mind and has nothing to do with anyone else out there. There is no-one else out there. This fear is all just your own self-attack. Fear is a defense against the truth. Fear is denial. And no-one who is afraid is "innocent" of causing things to go wrong. It's all chosen on purpose.

"Be not afraid", Jesus would say... not because there is a real reason to be afraid, but because being afraid isn't becoming of you - it's a choice to be weak when you could be powerful, and it's not your best move. It works against yourself and is a way of you hurting yourself. You don't need it.

There are two thought systems, and each has its own way of thinking. Each has its own logic and reason.

The ego’s system, which is also the physical world ("the world is false perception"), is based on separation. It completely rejects any kind of sharing. It’s reasoning follows a simple rule, which is at the root of consciousness:

This... is separate from that. Therefore, this is not that.

This is how the entire physicality of the world is mapped. An apple is not an orange. You are either at home or at the mall but never both at once. My body is not your body. I am not you.

Most of the world believes in the world, believes that the way that physical objects are separate is "natural and normal", and learns to think along these lines.

We then think of another as "not myself". We think of one object as separate from another object. We think if we give something we have to physically lose it. We think we are in one location and not another.

Our entire "way of thinking" adapts to the illusory world of false perception and thinks along ego lines. Separate this, separate that. Either this, or that. Not both. Nothing is shared. Everything is kept apart.

Its main thought construct is "either this or that". For example, if you put the apple in the left bucket, the apple is not in the right bucket. Either the apple is in the left bucket, or the right bucket.

This seems natural as a way of thinking because it seems to map to how the world is physically arranged. Objects seem to "prove" that this is how things are, so we think in the same way. We reason logically, based on evidence and physical experience, that "the apple can’t be in both buckets at once."

The thought system of God, is COMPLETELY opposite to this. It BREAKS all of the egos laws, both physically and in terms of reasoning. God’s system is NOT broken out based on separation. It isn’t rooted in something being "not" something else. And there are no differences to keep things apart.

When you want to wake up, to develop spiritually or to approach God, your mind has to actually learn to stop thinking like a physical object, and think like spirit. This is not easy because it’s so completely alien to how the world is set up.

For example, Jesus talks about how if you give away an idea, you keep the idea, and now both you and the other have the idea. And now the idea is strengthened. To the ego this is a violation of its laws.

The ego would say, it is not possible for one thing to be in two places at once. And that it is not possible for two people to have the same thing at the same time. It wants sacrifice. It wants lack. It wants finite limited resources. It wants exclusive ownership.

The ego can’t comprehend the idea of sharing. True sharing doesn’t mean compromise, or that each person gets half. True sharing means two individuals have everything at the same time. This is utterly nonsense to how the ego-minded thinker thinks.

The ego would say, It is utterly impossible for one thing to be two things and still be one thing. But God would say, that’s completely natural and entirely possible. God thus creates many children of God who are each other. Effectively, one son of God, an apple, is in both buckets at once. He is in his own bucket, and in the bucket of his brother. But the ego says this is impossible.

Becoming able to think in terms of sharing, or what is very often called "oneness", you have to drop notions of separation. To comprehend how you and your brother are one, and yet still brothers, you can’t think about it in terms of how the ego thinks about it.

The ego will conclude, either there is one son of God, or many sons of God, not both. To suggest both is true simultaneously seems like utter nonsense. But God’s laws break the ego’s laws. And God’s logic and laws of reason pay no attention to the limitations the ego imposes.

Thinking like and with God is nothing like thinking with the ego. The suggestion that you ARE your brother, and the two of you are joined, transcends the ego’s idea of separation. But until you "love your neighbor as yourself", your mind is not truly in a state of love, or recognizing who you are.

Part of you is in your brother. Your mind is also part of their mind. "One brother is all brothers. Every mind contains all minds, for every mind is one. Such is the truth."

This in no way means that, when the two brothers become "one", there are no longer two brothers. The twoness doesn’t go away. Ego says it has to. God says the ego makes no sense. The two are brothers precicely because they are two in number. And just because they are BOTH each other, doesn’t mean they are not also themselves. This makes TOTAL sense in terms of how GOD thinks.

When you think about anything to do with God’s Kingdom, creation, sons, sonship, christ, souls, holy spirit, creations, etc... anything pre-separation.... you CANNOT think of it with the ego’s way of thinking. Because God’s system of thought is NOT spacetime. It is not broken out into separate things that share nothing with each other. It isn’t a system of lack or difference or exclusive compartmentalization.

EVERYONE who thinks about these topics using earth-bound separation-based ego reasoning, comes to FALSE conclusions about what ACIM is saying.

We can’t even really understand how it’s possible that you are one with your brother, or how God has more than one son in reality, or how we share minds, or how joined minds are healed, etc.... if you can’t also get your head around how to think TOTALLY OUTSIDE of the ego’s box.

The Golden rule states that what is true of one is true of another. There is one truth applicable equally to everyone. This is because god’s nature is singular and is shared by everyone. This then means that if something is true of your brother it must also be true of you. But the ego will say no, it’s no possible for you and your brother to be IDENTICAL... you have to be different.

Since the Golden Rule is God’s law, ego’s thought system breaks God’s law. It is an attempt to ignore the rule of equality of truth, which results in "the truth is different for everyone" - the first law of chaos. And chaos - total disorder - arises from there. And the ego calls this disorder - nature. Physical nature. As if it is completely natural. Yet it could not be more unnatural.

So if you want to understand the higher truth that ACIM is trying to teach, the dynamics of holy relationship, the sharing of minds, how miracles work, the relationship you have as brothers, the laws of God that you are under, and all the other things which are OUTSIDE of the ego’s way of thinking... you CANNOT USE the ego’s way of thinking to think about them. If you do, you will come to false conclusions, absolutely guaranteed. Because ego thought REJECTS the fundamental basis for God’s thinking, which is that everything is shared.

Sharing vs separation, is the two thought systems. And they DO NOT think alike. And they do not reason alike. And they do not conclude alike. There are TWO WAYS of thinking. One is false, and one is true. This higher way of thinking is everything written in the course talking about anything above "false perception", ego, body, or physical states.

Everything of true perception, christ, God, Sonship, heaven, healing, miracles etc.... is NOT OF THIS WORLD. And you cannot think about it correctly by thinking in the way that this world thinks about itself. You have to learn a NEW way to think, to reason, to perform logic, and to draw conclusions. And it has to break the laws of what you have always thought makes SENSE. The world does NOT make sense because it is a system of insanity and separation. So it’s "sense" is actually nonsense. And what you think is nonsense about God, is true.

"You are at home in God, dreaming of exile, but perfectly capable of awakening to Reality. Is it your will to do so?"

The truth is that there is nothing wrong. There is nothing wrong with you, there is nothing wrong with anyone. All of creation which God created in and as heaven is still absolutely perfect, untouched, unchanged. The so-called separation from God has absolutely no effect on it.;

"So VERY long ago, for such a tiny interval of time that not one note in Heaven's song was missed."

The REALITY is, the TRUTH is, that we are all in fact, in our Christly spirit self, absolutely the same as we have always been. Nothing has happened to us, nothing has changed us, and we have not changed ourselves into something else. This has always been true, it is true now, and it will always be true.

So what's with all this suffering? What's with this world of bodies, of events and disasters, or wars and fighting, of pain and sickness? It must not be true. Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing real has ever been threatened. This unreal world is not a threat to God's kingdom.

"Healing is freedom, for it demonstrates that dreams will not prevail against the truth."

"The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not prevail against it. Amen."

The truth is that this world is entirely an illusion. Everything that seems to happen here is false, untrue, a lie. Nothing the world believes is true. No events mean anything. The changes that seem to happen are empty and powerless. Nothing in the world does anything to you.

"It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere."

"The world does nothing to him."

"Nothing in the world can bring oppression"

"I am not at the effect of the world I see."

Everything that this world depicts is not true, and is having no effect. The world has no power over what is real or what you are. Little specks of dust gather on the ground, pushed there by the wind and forces beyond their control, and they lie there motionless and easily displaced because they have no power to cause anything. A world of dust has no power because it is not of God.

The happy news is that, in fact, you have a self right now which is actually perfect and whole, it's totally devoid of sickness and pain, it has no disturbance or irritation or inflammation, it is utterly beyond all attack and damage, it has never been hurt and cannot be destroyed in any way. It can't even change slightly.

This is actually a fact. A hard fact. This self exists right now, perfect as ever. The ONLY thing that seems to be coming between 'you' and your awareness of this existing fact, this present truth, is that you are hiding from it. You are in denial. You are pretending it's not true and are covering your eyes.

"Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all."

Why is enlightenment a recognition? Because the truth already exists and is always perfect. All you have to do is be AWARE of it and ACCEPT it. You aren' putting it in place, you aren't fixing it, you aren't doing anything to it at all. You just need to look at it and realize it's there. Your real perfect unharmed immaculate self is sitting there right now waiting for "you" to identify with it.

"Christ waits for your acceptance of Him as YOURSELF, and His Wholeness as YOURS. For Christ is the Son of God, who lives in his Creator, and shines with His glory."

"At God's altar, Christ waits for the restoration of Himself in YOU."

So in truth, the truth that you are already Christ is very reassuring. It means you are safe in God, it means nothing in the world can hurt you, it means you can never die, it means you're not sick, it means you must always be happy, it means you are already at peace, it means nothing that happens in the world has any effect on you, and it means there's nothing to be afraid of.

"It is sin's unreality which makes forgiveness natural and wholly sane, a deep relief to those who offer it; a quiet blessing where it is received."

"And now you are prepared for freedom. If you have been practicing thus far in willingness and honesty, you will begin to sense a lifting up, a lightening of weight across your chest, a deep and certain feeling of relief."

By accepting the REALITY of what you are, what you ACTUALLY are right now, hidden behind your layers of denial and blindness and unwillingness to admit to it, is a truth so safe and sure and certain that it is a deep RELIEF to accept it and recognize it. It's completely reassuring to realize that YOU ARE SAFE IN GOD. And you always have been, far from all suffering and all danger.

"The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen. The still infinity of endless peace surrounds you gently in its soft embrace, so strong and quiet, tranquil in the might of its Creator, nothing can intrude upon the sacred Son of God within."

This is why forgiveness leads to happiness and a sense of peace. It is based on your immortality. It reminds you that nothing can happen to you, that you are protected by God, that your sinlessness is guaranteed, that you have never become guilty, and that you cannot change. It reminds you of your stability, your certainty, your centeredness. It restores to your awareness your true identity and lets you be true to yourself. And ultimately it leads to knowing thyself as God created you - which brings the happy revelation that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU.

"What could you want forgiveness cannot give? Do you want peace? Forgiveness offers it. Do you want happiness, a quiet mind, a certainty of purpose, and a sense of worth and beauty that transcends the world? Do you want care and safety, and the warmth of sure protection always? Do you want a quietness that cannot be disturbed, a gentleness that never can be hurt, a deep, abiding comfort, and a rest so perfect it can never be upset?

All this forgiveness offers you, and more. It sparkles in your eyes as you awake, and gives you joy with which to meet the day. It soothes your forehead while you sleep, and rests upon your eyelids so you see no dreams of fear and evil, malice and attack. And when you wake again, it offers you another day of happiness and peace. All this forgiveness offers you, and more."

"YOU are a miracle. God creates only "that which, or one who, is of surpassing excellence or merit." Man is capable of this kind of creation, too, being in the image and likeness of his own Creator. Anything else is only his own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the Creations of Light are real."

"While expressions like "think big" give some recognition to the power of thought, they still come nowhere near the truth. You do not expect to grow when you say it, because you don't really believe it. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move mountains." UrT2E10

"Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a little feat for such a power." UrT21D3

This is literal. Your mind, has the power, to move an entire physical mountain, from one location to another.

BEFORE DENYING THIS OR WRITING IT OFF ..... look at where your skepticism is coming from. Try to be open minded.

The mind is EXTREMELY POWERFUL.

"The mind is a very powerful creator, and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating, and ALWAYS as you will. " URT2E8

Not only can you move a mountain, you can invent entire worlds.

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free." UrT9K9

Your mind has the power to CREATE WORLDS!

In fact, your mind ... YOUR mind .... made this entire universe of space and time and all the galaxies.

That is how powerful your mind is. And this is a small feat for such an INFINITE UNLIMITED POWER.

Because you have the power of God in you.

"Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do." UrW38L1

"The power of God, and NOT of you, engenders miracles. " UrT14F7

If the POWER OF GOD, which is unlimited, engenders MIRACLES .... then surely MIRACLES (real ones) MUST be POWERFUL ACTS! A shift in perception is not a demonstration of INIFNITE POWER.

"The power of God IS limitless." UrT14F7

You, have a power in you, which is limiteless, infinite, without measure, so vast and so incredible, that it is capable of creating entire kingdoms. "I have a kingdom I must rule." UrW236L1

"You, too, have a Kingdom which your Soul has created. It has not ceased to create because your ego has set you on the road of perception." UrT4D3

You are an incredible powerful being, and the idea of you healing the sick and raising the dead IS A SMALL FEAT for the power that you have in you. It is the power OF God, but it is also given TO YOU TO USE, and IT IS YOURS, beause you SHARE IT with God.

"Here again is the paradox often referred to in the course. To say, "Of myself I can do nothing" is to gain all power. And yet it is but a seeming paradox. As God created you, you have all power." UrM30A4

Why aren't people USING INFINITE POWER? Why are people profoundly skeptical of miracles that can MOVE MOUNTAINS, raise the dead, end physical suffering and heal minds?

"You still HAVE the power, but you have interposed so much between it and your AWARENESS of it, that you cannot use it. EVERYTHING you have taught yourselves has made your power more and more obscure to you. You know not WHAT it is, nor WHERE." UrT14G1

Just because your power is obscured does not mean you do not have it. And the goal here is to uncover and remember and re-access this power so that you can WORK MIRACLES WITH IT.

Because real miracle working - which CAN cause the moving of physical mountains - FOR WHATEVER REASON .... and not knowing the "purpose or sense" as to WHY you would do this is NOT an excuse for writing it off and rendering the power inept ..... is perfectly capable of wielding the unlimited power of God which has been GIVEN YOU in order to GIVE YOU THE POWER to work miracles. Not merely the power to "change your mind a bit" which is a TINY change.

"The power to work Miracles BELONGS to you. I will create the right opportunities for you to do them. But you must be ready and willing to do them, since you are already able to. Doing them will bring conviction in the ability. I repeat that you will see Miracles through your hands through MINE. Conviction really comes through accomplishment. Remember that ability is the potential, Achievement is its expression, and Atonement is the Purpose." UrT1B23K

Notice that it says that you have a POWER to work miracles. This is not "the power to shift a perception" or "the power to only fix your mind" or "the power to change your thinking a bit". It is a POWER. A power which is potentailly unlimited and vast and unstoppable and capable of having dominion over the entire universe. Especially given that...

"My Self is ruler of the universe." --- It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept." UrW253

What happens is what you desire? You desire someone's arm to be healed? It's done. You deesire a mountain to be moved to another location? It is done. You desire to raise the dead or walk on water? It is done. UNLIMITED POWER!!!!!!!!!!!!

We are meant to be becoming EMPOWERED PEOPLE, as miracle workers, as children of God, beings with the power of God in us, a power so vast that it can create entire worlds, create living beings, can stop floods, can end wars, can do ANYTHING AT ALL.

"There is nothing my holiness cannot do because the power of God lies in it." UrW38L5

We are playing at being small and little, helpless victims, powerless little self-helpers, studying in a nice quiet corner, disturbing no-one, doing nothing, having no CAUSATION, demonstrating nothing, having no proof of the power of God, no evidenec that the Holy Spirit is working through us, nice and queit and safe and tidy. Where is the POWER? Where are the REAL MIRACLES? We are better than this, bigger than this, mightier than this. We are sons of God!

"You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you CAN see His MANIFESTATIONS. And UNLESS YOU DO, you will not realize He is there. Miracles are His witnesses, and speak for his Presence. What you cannot see becomes real to you only through the witnesses who speak FOR it. For you can be AWARE of what you cannot see, and it can become compellingly real to you, as its presence becomes manifest THROUGH you." UrT11h4

"Thus is the body healed by miracles BECAUSE they show the mind MADE sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or EFFECT, of what it made." UrT28C11

"If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind MUST BE STRONGER. Every miracle demonstrates this. " UrT6F9

"The Holy Spirit is invisible, but you CAN see the results of His Presence, and through them, you will learn that He is there. What He enables you to do is clearly NOT of this world, for miracles violate every law of reality, as this world judges it. Every law of time and space, of magnitude and mass, of prediction and control, is transcended, for what the Holy Spirit enables you to do is clearly beyond ALL of them. Perceiving His RESULTS, you will understand where He MUST be, and finally KNOW what He is." UrT11H3

"Although you have attacked yourself, and very brutally"

In the separation from God, each of us has condemned ourselves. We've accused ourselves of sin, and condemned ourselves to suffer. We want ourselves to be punished, murdered, and destroyed. Ultimately this is a death wish, in which we have become suicidal because we don't believe we deserve to live or to be loved by God. You might be thinking, suicidal? I'm not suicidal. Well think again.

At the same time as trying to destroy yourself to prove you don't exist in God, your true self is utterly sinless, guiltless, innocent, holy and pure. You have never sinned or hurt or commit a crime or broke a law. You have never done anything to anyone, and no-one has ever attacked you. You are immortal and eternal and endless and permanent. And no harm can come to you because God himself protects you.

"The Thought of God protects you, cares for you"

The problem is, there is a seeming "gap" between what is really true of you, and what you currently BELIEVE. And if you are not in touch with your utter immaculate sinlessness, then some part of you DOES believe you are condemned to hell. God isn't doing this condemnation, nor are your brothers.

It's all an inside job of your own self attack. It is your self destruction. And this is suicidal. Even though death isn't real, this needs to be undone because the belief in your non-existence keeps you from being happy.

Looking at what you are doing to yourself is not pretty. If you are not accepting your sinlessness, it means you are believing you are sinful. It means you don't love yourself. It means you actively attack yourself and are trying to destroy yourself. Such as in "my attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability." It means you don't really like yourself, yet alone love yourself with the love of God.

So now if you think about it in terms of the "relationship" that you have "with yourself", as if you could relate to yourself like a third party, how do you really feel about yourself? What is your honest current attitude towards yourself? If it's not one of total unconditional perfect love, then it isn't a very healthy relationship.

If there is a belief in being sinful, or evil, or a monster, or unworthy, or not good enough, or you resent yourself, or are angry at yourself, or keep judging yourself, or see yourself as weak, or hurt yourself emotionally or physically, or keep being abusive towards yourself, there are all signs of a breakdown in relationship.

And what that ultimately means is that you have not forgiven yourself. You're in this relationship with someone that you don't want to be with. And that is going to split your mind and hurt your mind. If you don't love yourself and embrace yourself with acceptance then how can you possibly relate to yourself at all?

Think of yourself as in the shoes of a person that you don't like in a similar way. If you don't like that person you don't want to be near them. You don't want to give them things. You don't want to share with them or spend time with them. You don't want them to exist. You don't care if they get hurt or suffer. You want them to suffer. And you may even feel so bitter towards them that you wish they were dead. Is that the relationship you are having with YOURSELF?

You have to look deep within yourself with much honesty to find this out. And it's probably going to be somewhat painful or even scary. You may not actually even realize or recognize that you have it in for yourself, or want yourself to suffer, because you may be so used to a general level of background destructiveness that you think it's totally normal. You might not have even seen how much you hate yourself.

"You who think you hate your bodies, deceive yourselves. YOU HATE YOUR MINDS, for guilt has entered into them, and they would remain separate, which they CANNOT DO."

"You HATE the prison that you made, and would destroy it."

"You are afraid of Him, and do not see you hate and fear your Self as enemy."

"And why do you attack them anywhere except you hate yourself?"

"But if you hate part of your own Soul, ALL your understanding is lost, because you are looking on what God creates AS YOURSELF without love."

"You do not realize how much you hate each other. You will not get rid of this until you DO realize it, for UNTIL then, you will think you want to get rid of EACH OTHER and KEEP THE HATRED. "

So you have to look at this stuff. And typically you need a strong contrast in order to recognize it. Get in touch with what it means to be sinless. That your sinlessness is guaranteed by God. Get a feel for total pure innocence and the complete absence of all attack, even slight annoyances. And then in that light, look at how you feel about yourself.

Do you still feel like attacking? Do you still feel a need or requirement to judge and blame? Do you condemn others to hide your self condemnation? Are you constantly fighting with people? Do you feel unhappy most of the time? If you have any of the "symptoms" of the ego, which is anything not of God, then certainly there is room for improvement in your relationship with yourself.

First you need to recognize that you even DO hate yourself, before you can be willing to take steps to heal that relationship. And you can't see that unless you have some kind of higher truth about you to compare it to. Your utter pure sinlessness in God, your immortal innocence, the guarantee of eternal life, can act as a contrast and at reality-tester to find out just how you really do feel about yourself. And once you find that out, you have healing work to be done upon yourself. You need correction and forgiveness. You need to FORGIVE YOURSELF, in order to recognize you are sinless and free.

"You have condemned yourself, but condemnation is not of God."

"You who believe you have condemned the Son of God"

"But in the dream of judgment, you attack and ARE condemned."

"And unless He had given you a way to remember, you would have condemned yourselves to oblivion."

"Now has the mind condemned itself to seek without finding; to be forever dissatisfied and discontented; to know not what it really wants to find."

"If the Son of God is guilty, then is he condemned, and he DESERVES no mercy from the God of justice."

"Guilt is ALWAYS in your OWN mind, WHICH HAS CONDEMNED ITSELF. Project it not, for while you do, it cannot BE undone."

"The delusional can be very destructive, for they do not recognize they have condemned THEMSELVES."

"It is not God Who has condemned His Son. But ONLY you, to save his specialness, and kill his Self."

"Remember, then, that whenever you look without and react unfavorably to what you see, you have judged yourself unworthy, and have condemned yourself to death."

"You have handled this wish TO KILL YOURSELF by NOT KNOWING WHO YOU ARE, and identifying with something ELSE. You have projected guilt blindly and indiscriminately, but you have NOT uncovered its source. For the ego DOES want to kill you, and if you identify WITH it, you MUST believe ITS GOAL IS YOURS."

You don't need to die. You need to forgive yourself.

I never really knew how much my 'mind' seems to think that it has an answer about everything. It can't seem to shut up. I am completely addicted to the belief that "thinking equals knowing". And it's becoming apparent that it will come up with an answer even if it has really no grounds for knowing. And it will share that answer like it's some kind of fact. I go around clucking like a chicken making all these mental noises and thinking that I'm actually speaking truth, when in fact all of the things that come out are just stories and ego-based comments. I'm some kind of babbling idiot.

All of these activities seem to make up a 'me' that I really thought was aware and speaking truth. But everything coming from my ego mind is deception and illusion. In every way possible, my mind is constantly attempting to seek for the truth outside of it, and separate from where truth is.

I realize more and more, that God is the ONLY location of truth. The ego quite literally is running around this world believing 'it' knows everything, when in fact it knows absolutely nothing. It thinks it knows what is true, but it absolutely doesn't know any truth at all because truth is GOD!

The ego is not a faculty of knowing and the ego mind is NOT CAPABLE of knowing anything. All it can do is imagine and think and believe that it can obtain and hold the truth. Yet it is not a faculty of connection to Truth (capital T). It is not a device that can even perceive what the truth really is. It is obsessed with finding partial answers in amongst an absolute minefield of fragmented possibilities, seeking deeply to have the 'intelligence' to 'solve' apparent problems by delving into them even deeper, which makes them worse, and which turns into an exasperatingly frustrating experience of loss and failure.

It relies completely on analysis of the situation. In other words, it has already made everything seem real and now goes into detail trying to explain 'why' whatever is happening is happening. And as it digs for this answer in a swampland of confusion, it always comes up empty handed. It never finds any sense of absolute certainty, although instead it comes up with what it thinks is certainty, which is really, honestly, not complete certainty. And no matter how many times I take this trip with it, even if it comes up with what the world would think of as 'the' answer, it STILL is not the answer.

There is still no sense of completion in the search, no sense of complete acceptance, no sense of finding a truth which encompasses everything so fully that there is no doubt left. It is quite literally incapable of finding such a Total Truth within the realm of partial ideas, partially perceived distorted perceptions, false ideas, cleverly imagined possibilities, carefully explained analysis or any other approach to trying to find truth IN the illusion. All the time this ego mind has been looking for truth outside of it, in everything and everywhere other than in God, believing it is actually POSSIBLE to find truth outside of itself.

All of this activity is geared towards a completely impractical waste of time, to always avoid a real solution or answer, to avoid healing, to ignore God and to shut out the correction which would undo the perception of there being a problem in the first place. The ego is absolutely not interested in truly solving any problems whatsoever, or of really succeeding at finding 'the' answer that gives a satisfying and acceptable explanation for 'what is' (i.e. it is not interested in accepting God). It is only interested in dissecting and studying them deeply, wearing a hat which says "worlds best problem solver" on it. It seeks and does not find, all of the time.

It constantly fails to find a real answer, anywhere, about anything, in spite of the fact that it fervently believes it CAN find an answer, which makes it an obsession. And since the answer can never be found, going looking for it (seeking) always comes up empty handed, frustrated, lost and confused, obsessed over why there 'should' be an answer, and simply not letting go of the total absorption with its own reliance on itself.

Absolutely every ego activity, thought, behavior and process, entirely stems from this ... insane search, which is absolutely guaranteed to fail, because the very thing that would actually conclude the search and bring an answer is the very thing which would inherently UNDO the entire ego. God is the answer and God is the only truth. God is the only place where you will experience a sense of wholeness or completion or a sense of peace at having 'found' something which actually completely SOLVES all problems. And the problem is only solved by rejoining and being one with God/Holy Spirit, which the ego has absolutely no interest in.

The ego would have to SURRENDER, which means stopping searching, stopping seeking, stopping looking for, stopping figuring out, stopping imagining outcomes, stopping trying to control the situation, stopping giving energy to fruitless pointless conceptualizing and storytelling, stopping running away from God, and stopping believing in separation in all its forms. The ego mind is only even in a state of doing things 'on its own' BECAUSE OF the separation from God which gave birth to it. The separation from God was a separation from truth, answers, facts, reality and peace of mind. For the ego to believe it can find any of these things is insanity.

It seems to want to now be in the driver's seat, in charge of running the show, playing God, depending on its own prowess and utilizing its own separate intelligence and intellect to solve aaaaaaaaaall of the problems that have arisen because of its own seeming existence. How can the ego solve its own existence when IT is the problem it's trying to solve? How can it be free of a problem when its attempt to solve it creates it? How can it pursue the truth where it is not, expecting to find it, and have any hope of doing so?

The only truth is God. The only answer is love. The only response to any situation is love. The only sane practical solution is to extend God. The only response to the world is unconditional love. The only practical and wise response to any problem is to HEAL IT NOW through the miracle. And the only way for the problems to all 'go away' is for the EGO to go away. It is our very own ego self, our intellectual mind, our reliance on our separate faculties, and our intent to never surrender to actually ASK GOD FOR THE ANSWER, that ensures we will just keep spinning our wheels in suffering.

The ego will never be the truth. It will never find the truth. It cannot know the truth. And it is not the truth. The ego is FALSE. Your ego self is false.

Your TRUE SELF is in God. The truth is in God. And who you really are is in God. The answer to every problem is in God. The end of suffering is in God. The practical application of healing and correction that truly ANSWERS all problems is in God. And God is all there is.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it seems like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

In this statement, Jesus has arranged some metaphysics. First he establishes there is such a state or place as Heaven, and that there is not "really" anywhere outside of this place. It's the only real place where life must exist because it's where God lives.

He then goes on to suggest that in any state apart from or outside of Heaven, life is illusion. In the first part of his statement he's saying that there really is nothing outside of Heaven and life is only inside, and then is adding that IF you believe there IS an outside, it MUST be illusory because it can't really exist. Heaven doesn't have a real outside, so any idea of BEING outside MUST not be reality. And he describes that "outside heaven existence" as an illusion of life.

That outside of heaven place, which includes Earth, is described as being AT BEST an ILLUSION OF LIFE, and at worst of death. But it is also a fact that this illusory realm is NOT life, OR deal. It's not real either way. It's illusion. So believing it IS life is a false judgement, and believing it IS real death is a false judgement. It is nothing, really. It's a meaningless world that you made in your dreaming.

He then tells us that any kind of life that isn't INSIDE heaven, is not really possible. In fact it is impossible, because Heaven is eternal life and is everywhere, having nowhere that it is not, and no outside. This does not mean that the "outside place" where "life is illusion" is also PART OF heaven or inside of it. It does not mean an illusory world is life. That would run completely contrary to what he just established - that any life outside heaven is not life. And as he says, what is not INSIDE heaven is not really anywhere.

Now he makes remarks about what life "outside of heaven" must be like, if you happen to believe in such a "place" or a possibility of existing in such a place, which must be an impossibility and so is an illusion. Outside of heaven, ONLY illusions stand, and they are in a state of permanent conflict. These illusions are senseless, impossible, and beyond reason. So this so-called "outside the Kingdom" state, which is an ILLUSION of a WORLD, an impossible world, where there is only conflict and an ILLUSION OF LIFE, is not really there, not real, not possible, and not part of REAL life. The only REAL life is ETERNAL LIFE, in the Kingdom.

This "outside the Kingdom" place is perceived as a BARRIER to Heaven. It's a veil over the face of Christ. It's what physical matter comprises, the forms of error, the block of sin, the surface of nothingness, the illusory world that we made when attempting to oppose Heaven. Illusions are forms, and the world of forms (bodies, objects) is an illusory world. The content of such a world, that which it contains in any way, is NEVER TRUE.

The body, which is an illusion, and is part of this illusory world of forms, was made to look upon this BARRIER and not see past it. Its eyes were made NOT to see past it. And "only the body makes the (illusory) world seem real". This is why christ vision/spiritual eye has to be developed (opened up to, accepted), so that you CAN see past the barrier TO reality. So that you can no longer be deceived by a world in which "life" is an illusion of life at best, and NOT ACTUAL LIFE AT ALL.

So this is some pretty simple and clear metaphysics. And it's also based on this statement:

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

So in effect, you are IN heaven where there is ALL life, and the only place that there is any life. You are in a state of denial which has induced a kind of sleep where you are now dreaming of EXILE. You are dreaming of being NOT WHERE YOU ARE, or exiled from Heaven. It's a dream of literally being OUTSIDE THE KINGDOM. Outside of the only place where eternal life is, seemingly in some kind of state - let's call it a WORLD - comprised entirely of illusions, where there is ONLY an ILLUSION of life, where everything is in conflict and where everything is impossible.

Such a "place", while not real, is the dream of death, which is this world we made. It includes ALL forms, because illusions are but forms. It is based on the idea of exile (separation, denial). It is based on a thought of not being where you really are, not being alive, and not being yourself. It's made of ILLUSIONS OF LIFE which seem like life but which are nothing like the real life in the Kingdom. These forms include bodies which are not alive.

"The body neither lives nor dies."

"At best, it seems like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

"The world you see (with any kind of perception) is an illusion of a world, God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as himself."

So in our state of EXILE, in which we are dreaming of being OUTSIDE the Kingdom, which has produced an ILLUSORY WORLD - an entire "realm" or space in which we seem to exist, which seems to be "outside" Heaven, but which is just a dream we are having inside heaven, we're thinking this world is reality when in fact it is entirely the OPPOSITE of the Kingdom.

"Earth, heaven's opposite in every way."

What does this mean about awakening to reality? It means if you want to be fully awake, fully natural, fully as God created you, in your original state, you need to wake up to heaven, which means the END OF THE EXILE. It must mean the end of the illusion of being outside the Kingdom. It must mean that the "outside the kingdom" "illusion of life" "place" must disappear. Because as Jesus says it is IMPOSSIBLE. And believing in it is ego. Finding yourself "in it" testifies to the fact you are still believing in exile.

The only way to truly wake up to Heaven's reality and to be IN heaven, is to completely transcend this world, overcome all illusions, go beyond the illusion-of-life body, wake up from the DREAM of exile, and no longer be INSIDE the dream of exile. "You cannot REAMIN in this world with this knowledge!"

Only the Kingdom of God is real. Only the Holy Trinity is real. Only the creations of light are real. Only the living world of light is real. "Exile planet" is not your home.

"The body's eyes see ONLY form (matter, objects, bodies). They cannot see beyond what they were MADE to see. And they were made to look on error, and **not see past it**. Theirs is indeed a strange perception, for ***they can see only illusions*** (matter is an illusion - ANYTHING SEEN WITH PHYSICAL SIGHT IS AN ILLUSION), unable to look beyond the granite block of sin (solid matter is sin), and stopping at the outside form of nothing (surfaces of objects). To this distorted form of vision, the outside of everything (all objects), the wall (matter) that stands between you and the truth (physical matter stands between you and reality), is wholly true."

"Yet how can sight which stops at nothingness (the surface of objects), as if it were a solid wall (solid objects), see truly? It is HELD BACK by form (all objects, bodies, planets), having been made to guarantee that nothing else but form (matter) will be perceived. These eyes, made NOT to see, will NEVER see." (cannot see reality or light ever - is permanently FIXED in false perception).

"What was its maker's GOAL, but not to see? For this the body's eyes are perfect means. But not for seeing (can't see reality ever). See how the body's eyes rest on externals (the surface of physical objects), and ***cannot go beyond*** (seeing a surface means photons bounced OFF the solid surface and BLOCKED YOUR VISION of what is beyond the surface!). Watch how they stop at nothingness (the physical world is an illusion and is nothing), unable to go beyond the form (shape, appearance, solidity etc) to meaning."

"(There is) nothing so blinding as perception of form (matter). For sight of form (objects, bodies) means understanding has been obscured. Only MISTAKES have different forms (objects are forms of error/sin), and so they can deceive. You can change form (matter, bodies etc), BECAUSE it is not true. It could not be reality, BECAUSE it can be changed. Reason will tell you that, if form is not reality, it must be an illusion, and is not THERE to see (all physical objects are illusions). And, if you see it, you must be mistaken (using body-based false perception), for you are seeing what can NOT be real, as if it were (believing the world is real is false perception because it's an illusion of a world). What cannot see beyond what is not there (cannot see past the physical universe), MUST be distorted perception. And must perceive illusions as the truth (blinded by perception of form). Could it, then, RECOGNIZE the truth?"

"Let not the vision of his holiness, the sight of which would show you your forgiveness, be kept from you by what the body's eyes can see (body cannot see it). Let your awareness of your brother not be blocked by your perception of his sins, and of his body. (look PAST the body, past matter, past form, past error, past sin, past the solid universe)."

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen (fact, you cannot use the body's sight to see reality ever), for the illusions that they look upon (all planets are illusions) must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do. For everything they see not only will not last (proven by decay, entropy, death), but lends itself to thoughts of sin and guilt. While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt (he did not create this world and the world he created cannot be seen by the body ever)."

"The world you see is an illusion of a world (seen with the body, it is illusory, and cannot be seen by the spiritual eye). God did not create it (fact! God did not create ANYTHING that the body looks upon!), for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see (with the body) that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end." (anything visible to the body has an end, including this planet - that's why it's an illusion not an eternal reality).

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face (solid matter blocks your vision of christ). But true perception (through the spiritual eye, NOT the body's eyes) looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant (the world is an illusion and can be OVERLOOKED - to forgive is to overlook - to NOT SEE). It is seen at last for only what it is (it is ONLY an illusion). And now it cannot fail to disappear ("illusions recognized must disappear"), for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived (body world) the face of Christ appears, and in that instant ***is the world forgot*** (earth, illusory universe, go bye bye), with time forever ended as the world spins ***into nothingness*** from where it came. (world of matter is NOTHING - there is no world)"

"A world forgiven cannot last (forgive Earth, it will disappear, forgiving it OVERLOOKS it - stops seeing it). It was the home of bodies (forgiven world is the illusory world). But forgiveness looks past bodies (christ vision). This is its holiness; this is how it heals. The world of bodies is the world of sin (matter is sin - "the body is the idea of sin made flesh"), for only if there were a body is sin possible. From sin comes guilt as surely as forgiveness takes all guilt away. And once all guilt is gone ***what more remains to keep a separated world in place***? For place (space) has gone as well, along with time (spacetime ends). ***Only the body makes the world seem real*** (blinded by perception of form, world of matter/form is an illusion), for being separate it could not remain where separation is impossible (no bodies in heaven). Forgiveness proves it is impossible because it sees it not (christ vision does NOT SEE the world of bodies). And what you then will overlook will not be understandable to you, just as its presence once had been your certainty."

"And now God's knowledge, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. ***And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God***. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has ***shone away time's final instant*** (and spacetime and all three-dimensionality), and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause (the "real world" is not the goal, its a stepping stone). For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls (no material universe), no bodies (no planets, no stars), and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

There are two distinct aspects to creation. One is God's own Self which is complete, the other is God's creation or the exending/projecting outward of God. This extension is referred to as Christ or the Sonship or Kingdom.

Now, we're told that it is the Son who is dreaming, not God. We're also told that God does not believe in or acknowledge the dream, otherwise God would have become insane and there'd be no God to go back to. How is this possible?

Technically speaking, if everything is one and there is only God, then God is responsible for the dreaming of the cocacola delivery truck which just drove past my window. And he is responsible for babies seeming to die. And he's responsible for war. Can God conceive of war, even in a dream?

There's a bit of a problem there, because the course says "never was love in the world", ie, God did not "enter into" the dream. Jesus is also quite clear that while the dream never truly happened in terms of reality, the IDEA of it happening did happen. Can God have an idea of being separate? Is he even capable of that? What would happen if he were capable of that? Who is going to get God OUT of the dreaming state and wake Him up, if God Himself is asleep?

This is why God created the Holy Spirit to "do his dirty work" so to speak. To awaken His son from sleep, cooperatively.

What this all boils down to is this. If God is not part of the dream or dreaming, there ABSOLUTELY MUST be some kind of "distinction" or "separation" between what is God and what is the Son. The Son's mistaken use of will does not affect the father. The son can't cause the father. So that means the Son effectively has free will. COMPLETELY FREE will. It means if the Son chooses to try to will against God, although it in truth impossible, He can still imagine it happening, without God's "approval" so to speak.

Jesus describes mind (of souls) as having two potential functions. One is creation - which uses mind as a medium to Create along the same lines as God, AND He uses the term "co-create" several times. The other is the POTENTIAL of mind to PROJECT, which means it actually has the freedom to ELECT whether or not it will will with God or not. He even says that the fallen angels are "free to establish their kingdom wherever they choose". ie God isn't going to force them to comply with His will anytime soon.

This is ALSO why, the curriculum is mandatory and REQUIRED, BUT... you can elect WHEN to take it. You can postpone it, ignore it, choose away from it, and decide not to learn it right now. How is that possible, if God's will is somehow forcing you to act a certain way or make certain choices? And how is it possible that "love does not enter where it is not welcome", meaning that if YOU elect to do so, you are able to make love not welcome?

Basically, long story short, God does not WILL that there be death, God does not will suffering, God does not will war or conflict, God does not even will any kind of dream. In fact God wills that you WAKE UP from dreaming, and that's why He created the Holy Spirit to facilitate that. And this is why you also have to give your WILLINGNESS - your little willingness - in order to CO-OPERATE with God's Will for you.

There absolutely definitely IS a distinction between the freedom of God's will, and the freedom of your own will. Will does not coerce or force you. While you are an effect of God, you are not his slave. You are not created to "have to" do anything you do not choose to do.

The ONLY WAY that God cannot be the one who dreams, is by having given you ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY FREE WILL. As in... practically the same thing as saying you are SEPARATE. Absolute complete freedom. If you did not have absolute total autonomous freedom to decide for yourself, dreaming would be impossible and if dreaming were happening God would die.

This is why A Course in Miracles is not well represented by thinking of it as a teaching of conceptual "oneness" ie singularity, or as a teaching of "non-duality". Non-duality completely ignores the FREEDOM with which God creates, and the total freedom He GIVES to his creations. As the course says itself

"How wonderful it is to do your will! For that IS freedom. There is nothing else that ever should be called by freedom’s name. Unless you do your will, you are not free. And would God leave His Son without what he has chosen for himself? God but ensured that you would never lose your will, when He gave you His perfect Answer."

"The mind can be right or wrong, depending on the voice to which it listens. "

"Souls were given their own true authorship, and men preferred to remain anonymous when they chose to separate themselves FROM their Author."

"Peace is a natural heritage of the Soul. Everyone is free to refuse to accept his inheritance, but he is NOT free to establish what his inheritance IS."

"God, who encompasses ALL Being, nevertheless created separate beings who have everything individually, but who want to share it to increase their joy. Nothing that is real can be increased EXCEPT by sharing it. That is why God Himself created you. Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and that is what creation MEANS."

"You should truly give as you have truly received. The Golden Rule can work effectively only on this basis. "

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

The Golden Rule is simply based on the fact that God creates in his own likeness. The sons he create are all identical to each other and are identical in nature to God. Being identical is what "being one" means.

This means that what applies to one son, applies to all sons. And what applies to any son, also applies to God. The same rules apply equally to all of God's creations, who are all treated equally with unconditional love.

This sets up God's "law" - the Golden Rule - that quite literally, whatever applies to you, applies to others, at all times.

The Golden Rule is always in effect because it is always true. It is even in effect when you go into ego denial and pretend that it doesn't apply.

For example, everything to do with the ego is the denial of the Golden Rule, in which it asserts something different applies to you than applies to others. The ego is the idea of "being different", which is the same thing as specialness.

Being different is of the ego. Being identical is of the soul.

When something seems to apply to one and not another, this sets up the ego's murderous thought system. This means that you believe there is a separation between cause (God) and effect (Sons). Therefore you believe you can cause without experiencing effects, or that there is a separation between giving and receiving. That the Golden Rule does not apply.

This belief is murderous because it means you are attempting to cause someone (who is really your equal), to produce effects in them, while being separated off from those effects, thus "getting way with" murder. This is why "what is not love is murder."

The Golden Rule is always applying, no matter where you are. Even in the dream. Even as the ego attempts to *pretend* that the Golden Rule is not applying, it is applying. And it thus suffers the consequences, because DENIAL of the law does not circumvent it.

That means that, for example, if you attempt to treat a specific brother in a way that is different to others, you are in denial of the law, and MUST experience that how you treat them you are treating yourself. But you will pretend that you are able to treat them a certain way while escaping the consequences. Yet you will NOT escape the consequences.

It is not just a matter of IF you do unto others they will do unto you. Nor is it an optional matter of "treat others as you would have them treat you". Others may not seem to comply or reciprocate. The fact is, you cannot NOT do this. As you treat others, you ARE treating yourself. Directly.

Acknowledgement of the Golden Rule also acknowledges the secret to salvation, that you are doing it to yourself. However you try to see or treat others, you will treat yourself, and so you are hurting yourself when you try to hurt another. And anything they seemed to do to you, you must've done to yourself, because everything is shared equally.

Being in denial of the law does not cause you to escape the law. You can never be outside of the Golden Rule. It is God's law. It is firmly rooted in reality. If you pretend that it doesn't apply to you, it STILL will apply and then you will likely hurt yourself.

Trying to deny the law and act as if it isn't operating, you will do something to others that you think you can get away with, but instead indirectly hurt yourself. You may not realize that you hurt yourself, but you do. Trying to deny the law leads to "karma", or rather, self-inflicted attack. All attack is self attack.

The only way to be happy is to comply with the law. When you do this, the law is really on your side. It treats you well, because it recognizes that you deserve to be treated just as equally as everyone else. It recognizes your divine equality with all beings and that you deserve to be loved UNCONDITIONALLY and fully at all times.

When you operating in alignment with the Golden Rule you are perfectly safe, perfectly loved, perfectly empowered and free from all suffering. It is the recognition that you are as God created you and that all brothers are your perfect equals.

"Healing is an act of thought by which two minds perceive their oneness, and become glad."

You will be glad to recognize that what applies to you applies to your brother. You will be glad to recognize that the TWO of you are identical, and that each of you is equally treated with the same love by God. And you will be glad to see that you both SHARE everything together and have been given EACH OTHER to share WITH each other, that you not be alone, because God does not will to be alone.

And in that identicality, you are "one" - of one kind - with each other, and so recognize and know your brother as yourself.

The Golden Rule is littered throughout A Course in Miracles. It's embedded into and lays the foundation for so many concepts and ways of relating to others. The way that as you treat your brother you treat yourself. Your use of your body to demonstrate to your brother what you think of him. The sharing of minds. Seeing your oneness in him. It's all based on this fundamental principle, to love your brother as yourself.

Cause produces effects. This is God's permanent law, without exception. It applies everywhere always. There is a secret to performing miracles based on this, resulting in the undoing of effects. This is directly tied into the Atonement and The Miracle.

"the word "atone" really means "undo." (remove illusory effects)

"The miracle does nothing. All it does is to undo (removes effects). And thus it cancels out (by not causing) the interference (effects) to what has been done (caused in reality). It does not add, but merely takes away (removes effects)."

I have experienced several times the instant vanishing of symptoms when causation was removed. This takes place at the level of the mind and the mind's belief in causes. As I stripped away belief in who or what caused this, the entire symptom literally disappeared in a split second.

Nothing happens without causation. Effects can only appear when there is a cause. This includes the **belief** in there being a cause, even if the cause is made up in dreaming. When the cause stops causing, or is undone, the effects immediately disappear. Causation is like a broadcast, emitting consequences, effects, symptoms and results. Effects come from it.

Just as God is first cause, He MUST create effects. His effects are His Kingdom of Creation, including the Sonship. Because God is permanently causal, and true cause means creation, His creations have eternal life and always exist. True causality creates permanent, living beings. You did not cause God (which would be sin, authority problem, level confusion), God caused you.

"I am forever an effect of God."

There is also what we call "making", which is also a form of causality. It causes destructive illusions instead of creative reality. It is a made-up BELIEF in a cause, as an attempted cause, in the mind. It's a made-up cause that we believe is real, and which in turn produces made-up effects which we believe are real. Just because it is made-up doesn't mean it does not DO something.

A **belief** in a cause isn't a real cause, or of God. So what it produces is not a real effect, but is an effect nonetheless. Artificial causes produce artificial effects. But they DO produce these effects, which includes symptoms of sickness in the body, and ultimately the body itself.

"The body cannot remain without illusions (illusory causes)."

When the mind believes there is a cause, it MUST include the belief that there are effects. The mind thus believes in BOTH. They are made together, and are undone together. Effects cannot remain without a cause of some kind. When you switch off the broadcast projector, there is no more making of images. Both the broadcaster and the broadcast disappear.

It would be easy for us to switch on and off causes and effects at will. This always takes place in our minds. The problem is that we keep disassociating from the part of our mind that is causing or believing in causes, and project the ownership of the causation onto external things - anything other than our own mind.

So if we think a person is causing us to be upset, we're in false perception. We see cause as separate from and outside of our own mind. Yet this BELIEF in cause, is INSIDE our mind because "ideas leave not their source."

We are confused in thinking that someone else is causing our upset. But the IDEA of "someone is causing me to be upset" is our own mind's idea, which projects, resulting in a false perception. And this idea IS STILL CAUSAL. By believing, "I am being caused", we literally are CAUSING ourselves, and our mind DOES produce effects within us, from it. And this is actually part of the belief that we are creating ourselves, the result of a split mind.

It is not possible to believe in a cause, WITHOUT the belief itself having an effect. Even if the visualized cause seems to be mapped onto some other person, it is STILL a "belief in cause" in our mind, and this gives it power. If our mind is generating, picturing, imagining, "there is a cause", it WILL and MUST also picture, generate and imagine an effect to correspond to it. And usually the severity of the effect lines up with where the cause falls in the hierarchy of illusions.

This now means that as we picture ourselves as being caused, we WILL also picture ourselves as being affected. This believing in and use of causality, no matter how it is dressed up in appearances about others, will result in OUR MIND producing EFFECTS in ourselves. These will show up as symptoms in mind and body, as emotional reactions, fearful thought responses, justified anger, and other effects.

As the secret of salvation tells us, it does not matter how it appears that someone is a victimizer, or who is doing what. When your mind "sees itself" as being victimized, that way of seeing itself ALONE victimizes you. And you cannot see yourself as being victimized WITHOUT seeing yourself ALSO as a victim.

Funny that - as you believe in victimization it sets up a causal belief in your mind which causes you to MAKE YOURSELF a victim. Your mind then generates the effects and symptoms of having been affected. It pictures itself in the roles of victim AND victimizer.

Now, here's the key. Based on this law, that even your BELIEF in a cause IS CAUSAL, and has illusory believed-in effects, removing this belief in a cause MUST remove the effects. This even includes the physical symptoms of sickness which YOUR MIND put into your body, as a result of YOUR MIND visualizing itself as at the effect of its own causal beliefs.

If my belief is that a person is upsetting me, three things are happening. 1) I am "projecting" causality onto the person falsely, resulting in a false perception that "they" are causing me. 2) MY belief in being caused is causing me, 3) I am inventing the upsetting effects because of this belief, BY this belief. If I clear up the confusion about WHO is causing who, and then STOP causing through this belief, the effects MUST go.

If my mind is thinking, "I am upset because of them", and I"m feeling the upset, my mind MUST be seeing a line of causality starting with "them" and coming into me and impacting upon me, producing upset. This is what my mind is picturing. This is HOW I am making the effects. If I tell myself, "they are not causing me to be upset", I am taking a step towards undoing the cause.

I'm almost saying, "since they are not causing this upset, I am not upset." or "everything that came from them, has not come". They then become your savior because now you are using them to explain why you are NOT affected negatively, or as a way to say "I am healed because of you". Or as the course puts it, "Brother, at your hand I live." This requires the removal of all symptoms of attack in the body and mind, accomplished by removing fake causality or accusing your brother of causing (sinning against) you.

Sometimes, if the causing seems fairly clear-cut and well defined as to who I think did what, and I remind myself I am NOT caused by the person, it can be enough to undo my mind's belief in the cause, and thus stop causing my own upset. Symptoms of upset vanish instantly. Even physical symptoms, because *I* was producing them.

Other times, I've found I've built up a collection of beliefs in causes, which have to be dismantled more methodically, piece by piece. I have to remove all belief that anyone or anything else is causing my issue. I must not believe that I am at the effect of anyone else's mind or any "causes" that I THINK are in the world. My BELIEF in them being causes does not make them causes. This is confusion/projection/disassociation.

MY BELIEF in being caused is what causes me to suffer. When something is seen as having NO causes left, and being the cause of nothing, it disappears.

I have to also remove all belief that I am causing any issue in others, because this too ties me to guilt. For example if I have an argument, it is not enough to undo the belief that I am being upset by them. I will likely believe I upset them also, and this too is fake causality. Anything THEY are experiencing, THEIR mind has chosen to cause. I must be accepting of this by dismantling my belief that I caused them, which in turn will heal them and set them free from imprisonment.

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself."

Once this is clarified, that no-one caused my effects but myself, and that cause is in my mind because I believed I was caused, I must now recognize that my own choice to believe I am being negatively caused DID produce my own symptoms. I am responsible for it. This is the secret of salvation. But we can't stop there. WE must STOP causing our own suffering.

This requires us to stop believing that even WE have caused our suffering. Seeing that we did it to ourselves, and recognizing our own mind is causing itself, may be enough to collapse it. Recognizing the futility of hurting ourselves, we will drop the desire to continue. Seeing that we are causing our own suffering, we cannot escape the causation or blame it on anyone, have to admit the truth, and admitting the truth presents us with a fact - we did this, and we no longer choose to.

We might have to work on undoing the belief that we are caused, as well as being willing to no longer suffer the role of victim. Without a cause that we believe in, we cannot believe in being affected. In recognizing we were the victimizer of ourselves, we can stop being the victim. No-one has ever been victimized by another person.

Remember that you have no neutral thoughts. All thought creates form on some level. All thought is causal. You cannot neutrally casually think about stuff without producing effects. Imagining fearful things happening to you, IS actually you DOING them to yourself. Dreaming about scenarios isn't a freebie thought. We deliberately DO, or DO NOT. We cause, or do not cause. And only what we cause happens.

""My Self is ruler of the universe." It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens (effects) is what I desire (cause). What does not occur (effects) is what I do not want (cause) to happen. This must I accept."

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

"My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability."

Stripping away all sense of "the cause of this", MUST undo the effects. When you cease attacking yourself with thoughts of being attacked, you will not be attacked or attackable.

Without a cause, there can be no effects. Without belief in separation, there can be no sickness. Without seeing yourself as a victim you cannot be victimized. Without victimizing yourself you cannot be hurt. Without belief you are sinful (caused bad stuff) you cannot be guilty, and without guilt you cannot frighten or threaten yourself. Without a cause, your sickness must vanish. And without a cause, the dead must rise.

All illusions have no REAL cause. The causes are made up beliefs, which DO cause illusory effects, and without maintaining these beliefs the effects cannot stay. Anything not of God or made without love has no real cause. We MADE sickness and death by believing they have been caused and are the cause of us (the God of sickness and death), and can abolish it by believing they have NOT been caused.

To recognize something has NOT been caused, is to recognize it CANNOT have happened. Without a cause, the effects must go. What has not been caused cannot exist. And since illusory effects and symptoms DEPEND on the mind believing in them, without believing in them they MUST vanish. Which undoes physical suffering, sickness and death

This is forgiveness and atonement. The recognition that separation has not been caused and sin has not caused effects because there is no sin. The lack of belief in sin as "causing evil" erases death. The knowing that there is no death. Withdrawing causes of illusions will undo them all.

"Illusions recognized (I caused this myself, it did not cause me) must disappear."

This literally is tied into the atonement. If to atone is to undo, then by cancelling the fake causes that we were using to make things "be done", and if miracles undo and take away the effects by recognizing they have not been caused, then to accept the atonement is to accept that there are NO CAUSES other than God. We HAVE NOT CAUSED separation, there is no cause of death (sin), illusions DO NOT exist, and we are no longer manufacturing fake effects.

This will ultimately UNDO the world because the world is nothing but an EFFECT of a belief - the spacetime belief.

Shifting away from made-up causes, and aligning ourselves with God's Will, which is truly causal and creative, we become miracle workers. Operating from vertical causation, not mis-creation. Our causing now becomes love-based, constructive, creative, healing and miraculous. No longer against ourselves, no longer affected by the world, we regain invulnerability and power. We can now give life and cause resurrection.

We become a cause that does not cause itself. We become free from effects of our own making, or the illusion of effects made by others. Our will is now undivided and single-minded. Nothing can oppose us as ruler of the universe. We are free to carry out the will of God. To cause with IMMEDIATE effects. And to be truly helpful to others through causal miracles.

"This is a course in cause and not effect."

"miracles reflect the simple statement, "I have done this thing, and it is this I would undo.""

"Without a cause there can be no effects, and yet, without effects, there is no CAUSE."

"Who can predict effects without a cause? And who could fear effects UNLESS he thought they had BEEN caused, and judged disastrous NOW?"

"Who can perceive effect WITHOUT a cause? What can the causeless BE but nothingness."

"And this DENIES the fact that ALL are senseless; EQUALLY without a cause or consequence, and CANNOT have effects of ANY kind."

"In its passing went its consequences, left without a cause."

"And to realize that pain is purposeless, without a cause, and with no power to accomplish anything."

"Nothing can have effects without a cause, and to confuse the two is merely to fail to understand them both."

"Without a cause, and now without a function in Christ's sight, it merely slips away to nothingness."

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

"Fear cannot be real without a cause, and GOD is the only Cause."

"The healing of effect WITHOUT the cause can merely shift effects to other forms."

"A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect. What you would prove to him you will believe. The power of witness COMES from your belief."

"And therefore all your sins have been forgiven because they carried no effects at all."

"There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression."

"And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect it cannot make effects."

"What is projected OUT, and seems to be EXTERNAL to the mind, is NOT outside at all, but an effect of what is in, and has NOT left its source."

"Here is the proof that he has NEVER sinned; that NOTHING that his madness bid him do was ever done, or ever had effects of any kind."

"It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power-surge that can literally move (cause) mountains. It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is merely arrogant, but that is not the real reason why you don't believe it. People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert (cause) real control (effects) because they are literally AFRAID of them."

"And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"And once all guilt is gone what more remains to keep a separated world in place?"

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

"Forgiveness is not real UNLESS it brings a healing to your brother AND yourself. YOU must attest his sins had no effect on YOU, to demonstrate they were not real. How else COULD he be guiltless? And how COULD his innocence be justified UNLESS his sins have no effect to WARRANT guilt? Sins are beyond forgiveness just BECAUSE they would entail effects which CANNOT be undone and overlooked entirely. In their UNDOING lies the proof that they were merely errors. LET yourself be healed, that you may be forgiving, offering salvation to your brother AND yourself. A broken body shows the mind has NOT been healed. A miracle of healing proves that separation is WITHOUT effect."

It's very simple.

God is love and we are to have a loving relationship with God.

In love, everything is perfect, holy, immortal, safe and alive.

If you reject God's love, you will introduce hell into your mind. You will invent all forms of suffering, and all forms of objects, and all forms of death. Every conceivable problem exists only within the realm of "God is absent".

God is everything and all truth and all perfection. In God there are no problems.

The ONLY problem is that if you reject God ("The denial of God is the ego's religion"), you invent a false experience of suffering, riddled with problems.

EVERY problem in the ENTIRE universe of space and time is a SYMPTOM of the absence of God. It is entirely logically composed of the attempt to oppose God's love. It exists only while God's love seems to be absent, just as darkness exists SOLELY as an illusion of the absence of light.

You either have God, or you do not. If you lack God, you produce every imaginable problem. Every imaginable problem is made of the belief that God is not one with you, sharing love with you. An entire world of spacetime has been produced within this mad idea.

If all problems are symptoms of the lack of God or love, then REUNION WITH GOD is the ONLY solution to this problem. And union with God will solve ALL problems. Union with God will UNDO the separation. Union with God is the atonement, the acceptance of God and the restoration of oneness with God, recognizing you are in God and never left or changed.

You live in God. If you try to live without God you live in a nightmare. When you choose God again the nightmare ends. The nightmare IS the denial of God's love. When you stop denying God's love the nightmare disappears.

God is the ANSWER to the LACK of God. If God is lacking, the ONLY SOLUTION is to get God back. To rejoin with Him. To commune. To repair the rift in your relaitonship. To close the gap between you. And to become one again.

God GAVE HIMSELF as his answer to the separation, because the Holy Spirit symbolizes his love, power and truth. The Holy Spirit answers the separation by recognizing and holding in mind the fact that you ARE STILL as God created you and are STILL one with Him.

Love solves ALL problems because all problems are the absence of love. When love or light comes along, all problems melt and darkness vanishes. The entire universe of spacetime is UNDONE by love.

It boils down to one simple thing. The cause of, or the whole separation, is the ONLY PROBLEM. One problem, with one solution. A sense of separation from God is the ONLY problem you need correct. Which means, rejoining with God and loving God and letting yourself receive God's love again.

To love God, or not to love God, that is the question. Your ONLY GOAL should be to love God again.

"The ego's logic is as impeccable as that of the Holy Spirit, because your mind has all the means at its disposal to side with Heaven or earth, as it elects."

"Our efforts will be directed toward recognizing that there is only one problem and one answer. In this recognition are all problems resolved. In this recognition there is peace."

"Today I would remember the simplicity of salvation by reinforcing the lesson that there is one problem and one solution. The problem is a grievance; the solution is a miracle." (miracles are expressions of love)

"Above all, remember that you have one problem and that the problem has one solution. It is in this that the simplicity of salvation lies. It is because of this that it is guaranteed to work."

"Salvation does depend on recognizing this one problem, and understanding that it has been solved. One problem -- one solution. Salvation is accomplished. Freedom from conflict has been given you. Accept that fact, and you are ready to take your rightful place in God's plan for salvation."

"Your Father created you Wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

"And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made; we choose between illusions and the truth, or pain and joy, or hell and Heaven."

"It still remains within him to project as God projected his own Spirit to him. In reality, this is his ONLY choice, because his free will was made for his own joy in creating the perfect."

"Sin is the only thought that makes the goal of God seem unobtainable."

"The goal of God is lost in the quest for lesser goals of any kind, and prayer becomes requests for enemies."

"Within the world of opposites there is a way to use forgiveness for the goal of God, and find the peace He offers you."

"In your holy relationship is your Father's Son. He has NOT lost communion with Him. NOR WITH HIMSELF. When you agreed to join each other, you acknowledged this is so."

"Communion is another kind of completion, which goes beyond guilt BECAUSE it goes beyond the body. Communion comes with peace, and peace MUST transcend the body."

"The miracle sets validity where it belongs. Eternal validity belongs only to the Soul. The miracle acknowledges only the Truth. It thus dispels man's illusions about himself, and puts him into communion with himself and with God."

"The Soul never loses its communion with God. Only the mind and body need Atonement. The miracle joins in the Atonement of Christ by placing the mind in the service of the Spirit. This establishes the proper function of mind, and abolishes its errors."

"Oh come ye faithful, to the holy union of the Father and Son in YOU."

Many many times in the Course it talks about the importance of *extension* - that if you do not share what you have you cannot have anything. 'Having' to the ego means not sharing. 'Having' to Holy Spirit means sharing. But why is this?

God extends Himself AS you to Create you and sustain you. You are His Creation. And because He gives you all the properties of Himself - his 'Fatherhood', you also therefore would naturally be a Creator and express your own fatherhood by further extending. So provided there is all this extension going on, everything is natural and normal. It's when we refuse to extend, that we enter into ego, because we're trying to stop Creation.

Now, Course stuff is sometimes hard to really understand using our regular language. In Heaven there really isn't any time or distance and there isn't a before-and-after scenario. But the idea of extending you can't really get a sense of it unless you put it sort of a chronological order like that, i.e. God extends from him to you, then you extend from you to others etc.

So I asked myself, if it weren't for this way of looking at it, how would I understand extension and why does God even extend at all.

I see it as... God radiates everywhere. Like a glow of light. It is his Presence (I'm hearing). Presence everywhere, God everywhere. God being everywhere. It's not like, God is separate from you and he shines outward onto you or through you. It's more like, God radiates His Presence everywhere and you ARE this 'radiation', somehow. I know we really can't properly put it into words, but.

So God being everywhere shares Himself everywhere. This idea of 'sharing' really means... God is present everywhere. There is nowhere that God is not, so that must mean he is 'fully shared'. The opposite of that would be that God is absent somewhere, so that would mean God does not 'share in' that part of existence (thats the ego's idea). So sharing has a lot to do with presence and Oneness and wholeness.

So God shares himself, be's whole himself, shines himself everywhere, and that is extension. The Course then says God did not will to be alone. By this I assume it to mean alone as in lonely. The Course also describes being alone a an ego concept of being separate. God doesn't will to be separate. But God is ONE, and whole, so it's not like God's sitting there twiddling his thumbs wondering if anyone is going to show up to play with. But for some reason, at least in Course terms, he 'creates' a Son. The Son is this idea of the 'end result' or effect of His Cause.. but really cause and effect are One and this doesn't happen over the course of time. The effect is always present forever because God causes/sustains forever.

But how do we explain that God created a Son out of the need to not be alone? Perhaps this means that God didn't will to not receive. He willed to both give and receive, and in a sense, what he receives 'from' - although it is One with Himself - is what the Course is calling 'the Son'. The feedback, if you will. But again there is no separation or time involved here. God shines everywhere and the radiance of God upon Himself is the Son.... even though this again suggests a gap of separation of time or separate caused and effects etc... this is why it's impossible to really describe.

Anyway. God extends us and we therefore must be extenders also because we are like Him. When we withhold extending or deny extension, we're trying to put a stop to Creation and to being an end to Life. That is the ego's choice for death. So to choose Life you must extend in the same natural way that He Created you. This means God radiates 'through' you, in a sense, although again there is no space or time involved here. God doesn't broadcast and then the broadcast travels through space and time a bit and then is received by you or relays through you. There is no spacetime. Extension is His shared Presence. Extension is the idea that God is already everywhere.

So when we have blocks to love, are trying to deny God, are trying to stop Life's extension, are trying to bring about an end/death, we're standing in the way of Creation and suffering. When we lift those blocks away and ALLOW GOD, everything 'flows' naturally and there is no blockage, thus no sickness or death.

Sometimes God's suggestion to me is.. ... "shine".

So here I am, shining a bit.

Let's get back to 'having'. If you don't extend you can't have anything. What this means is... the presence of God is blocked when it is not extended, so it if is really thoroughly inhibited, this essentially prevents God's presence. God's presence is WHAT IS, which means that's what you can HAVE i.e. experience in reality, so you can't join in that experience if God's presence is not being allowed to extend. So in effect it's like snuffing out a candle... if you stop the light you can't have the light. If you stop God you can't have God. And you can't really have anything other than God because nothing that He didn't Create exists.

So if you want to 'have' you have to "give all to all" i.e. give God - all that is - to God - to everything. This sharing, giving, extending of presence, shining, radiating, allows God's presence and thus for you to 'have' and own your real Self, which is One with Him. You can have all of your real self by extending it. It gives because it shines and is present everywhere. Without shining/extending you have nothing - by not extending, you prove there is nothing to extend, which implies you have nothing to extend.

Something like that.

(this will be a fairly long post, so please bare with me)

The ego thought system is based on separation. Separation resulted in space and time. In space, spatial relations are HOW the ego thinks. The physical universe IS its thought system.

This includes physical objects, which are separated out, where an object is EITHER HERE OR THERE, (but not in both places). This is a "natural" ego thought process. One thing seems to exist in one location only and not all locations. One thing is NOT something else, and all things are DIFFERENT, separate, and kept apart.

The entire physical universe is arranged according to this WAY that the ego thinks. It regards the entire thing as structured by SEPARATIONS. One object versus another. One location versus another. And then it draws comparisons, and has reasoning, and finds conclusions, based WITHIN the framework of separation.

So you, in your ego thought processes, then start to THINK this way. You think in terms of EITHER THIS OR THAT. And this seems to make SENSE to you because it maps directly to how the world is arranged. It then becomes "second nature" to think of anything in the world in SEPARATE terms.

For example, I parked my car in the first spot, not the second. I ordered the fries instead of the onion rings. My car is red, not blue. This is my body, not your body. Earth is not Mars. etc.

Our whole WAY of thinking runs according to these rules, based on SEPARATING things out, sectioning them off, isolating them, keeping them APART, emphasizing their differences, and locking them up in little prison boxes. And we think this is a natural way to think, to relate, to communicate, to reason.

Then we go about USING this way of thinking, to think about EVERYTHING. Not just to think about things which ARE based on a thought system of separation, but even to think about things which are completely BEYOND the ego thought system.

"It is the part that believes your existence means you are SEPARATE. Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships (sharing) that imply BEING."

This may not seem to present any problems when you use SEPARATION-BASED reasoning to discuss the things of space and time, but it COMPLETELY misses the mark when you think this way about heaven, God, creation, sonships, sons, souls, etc.

The Kingdom of God is a thought system, and God similarly has a WAY of thinking. His WAY of thinking is NOT based in the idea of separation. It is NOT based on the limitations of space or time or spatial relations. It does NOT separate things off, make them different, put them in SEPARATE BOXES, or keep them apart.

God's thought system/reality also does not demand that something HAS to be separate from something else. It does not require something to be EXCLUSIVE to one box and not another. Nor does it assert that everything that exists MUST be partitioned off into EITHER one state OR another. God simply does not THINK in terms of "either this or that".

God's mind, his creation, his way of THINKING, is actually based on a totally different kind of reasoning. This reasoning is INCLUSIVE, rather than exclusive. It also completely embraces the idea of SHARING. The ego's thought system completely blots out ALL suggestions of sharing, overlap, simultaneity, unity or oneness.

In God's system, it is NATURAL for there to be one thing, which SHARES all of itself with another. It is natural for one thing to GIVE all of itself and STILL RETAIN all of itself without loss. It is natural for TWO things to BE one thing. It is natural for one thing to be in ALL locations simultaneously. It is natural for one thing to be in one box, AND in another box, at the same time. It is natural for something to SPAN and TRANSCEND separations.

The Golden Rule, the law of God and of equality, simply states that what is true of one thing is true of another. Whatever is true of God is true of His Sons. Whatever is true or me is true of you. This is equality. God treats all his creations the same way. The Golden Rule reflects this, because it is a rule based on INCLUSION. We are both included in the same truth. The ego however is COMPLETELY AGAINST sharing and inclusion. And so is this world.

In reality, God THINKS in a holographic way. In a hologram, the whole is in every part, and every part is a whole in its own right, and every part shares the entirety of the whole with the whole. ACIM confirms that this is the way by which God thinks, and NOT through a process of separation:

"The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you."

This means for example that GOD IS WHOLE, being infinite. And God as a creator therefore extends and creates ANOTHER WHOLE. His Son, is a WHOLE SON. A full creation. As described here:

"The soul has not only been created perfect, it has been FULLY created. There is no lack in it."

"There can BE no disinherited parts of the Sonship, for God is whole, and all his extensions are like Him."

"EVERY mind that God created is equally worthy of being healed because GOD CREATED IT WHOLE."

However, for God to BE whole, and to CREATE wholly, and thus to create another WHOLE.... becomes TOTAL NONSENSE to the way that the EGO thinks. And if you think in the same separation-based way that the ego thinks, this FACT registers to you as total nonsense. You will reason, "how can it be possible that there are TWO wholes, that makes no sense!". It makes no sense to a thought system of separation, yes. But God's reality is NOT based on that kind of system. God is not limited by separation or spacetime.

In order to recognize AND accept, that God's mind and creation DO NOT follow the ego's rules, and that God does not THINK or create like the ego would, and God's Kingdom is NOT spatially separated out like the physical world is, you will have to become willing to think massively outside the box. You CANNOT use separation-based logical reasoning to evaluate the truths or falseties of reality.

Let's look at what happens when you try to shove God into a box-based thought system. God for example gives ALL of Himself when he creates. His Son inherits EVERYTHING. But... if you are thinking with the ego, you SHOULD conclude that by God giving all of Himself AWAY, there SHOULD be nothing left. Thus God should snuff out of existence and only His Son should remain. This is LOGICAL to the ego because the ego believes in SACRIFICE AND LOSS, which is inherent to a box-based world. But it is complete nonsense.

Similarly, you could suggest that if God gives EVERYTHING to ONE SON, there is NOTHING LEFT to give to another Son. This is how the ego would think in finite terms. However, God has ALL of Himself left to give again to ANOTHER son, and another, and another, without any reduction at all in Himself. And this is how the Kingdom INCREASES. And by giving ALL of himself away, reality is increased. As stated here:

"Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human thinking, in which if any ONE has everything, there is nothing LEFT."

"To have all, give all to all."

You can see that if you think in exclusive, separating terms, you WILL come to FALSE conclusions about what's happening in reality. You'll conclude that if I have everything, you have nothing. But in reality, as Jesus describes in ACIM, me having everything DOES NOT prevent you from having everything also. How is it possible that we BOTH simultaneously have everything? Because we SHARE IT. And this sharing does NOT mean compromise or that we each only get half.

Sharing is the way by which God's Kingdom INCREASES. Because if it weren't for the ability to share, there would be no logical way for God to ever create anything more than just God, because he is already unlimited and everywhere. As this states:

"Nothing real can be increased, except by sharing."

If SHARING, INCLUSION, BOTH/AND is the natural thought SYSTEM of Heaven's reality, and it follows that thought PROCESS when it reasons anything, then SELFISHNESS, EXCLUSION, EITHER/OR, SEPARATION is the natural thought system of spacetime. And they are TOTALLY opposite. They are opposite because "this not that" is a direct reflection of the separation idea of "ego not God" or "death not life" or "non-existence not existence." The ego thought system is the NEGATION of reality.

If God creates two sons, who are brothers, and both are whole beings who have and share everything, co-creating with God, and then we look at this fact WITH THE EGO, we will see false conclusions. For example we'll say that there can't BE two sons. Or that if there are two sons, that's "duality", because now the two sons are KEPT APART in separate boxes meaning duality.

But this is not how it works at all. The fact that there are two, WHO SHARE, violates the boundaries of those boxes. One son is IN the other son and vice versa because they share everything. So there are two sons, who are ALSO each other.

"One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds. Such is the truth."This also extends to the relationship you have with God. Those who think LIKE the ego, will reason that EITHER.... God is all there is, OR there is a separation. Or similarly, EITHER God and I are one thing, OR we are two things. Or that, if you get rid of all separations, you will end up with oneness.

There is a major flaw in that reasoning. The ego first establishes that you MUST think in a separating way, in which there is duality, and all things are kept apart. THEN it has you DESTROY all of the other parts except for one of them, by getting rid of the idea of separations between the parts. But it will not have you get rid of the ego thought process. Then it concludes falsely, that when you remove the separations, you end up with ONE THING. And this one thing is thought to mean "oneness", or to represent God.

This however is a false conclusion, because now "separate boxes" have been mapped onto God, and God has been shoved into a separate box, all by himself, and there is no creation and no sonship and NO SHARING. And the ego rejoices that it has imprisoned God this way, in the name of freedom.

When you look at what ACIM says, Jesus DOES NOT say that God is alone, or that he is separated off from creation, or that he has no creations. Instead it tells you in fact that God has a huge family and is simultaneously one with them. And that His oneness DOES NOT ERASE their manyness.

"Heaven is the sum of all God's thoughts, in number infinite."

"We are the Kingdom, WE, the Sons of God."

"The Kingdom of God includes all His Children and their creations."

This does not mean the Kingdom is duality or that it contains separate boxes. It means it contains overlapping shared beings who ALL have everything and ARE everything, seemingly as OPEN boxes who are not in any way confined, yet are still many things. HOW that's possible, is due to heaven's miraculous nature.

Ego thought processes do not allow this to be true. Nor does ego thinking allow it to be possible that when you are "one with God", you still have an individual self. EGOS then become AVERSE to any notion of individuality, which is self destructive, which the ego loves. You being one with God, DOES NOT ERASE your individuality.

"This appears to contradict another statement: "I and my Father are one." It doesn't. There are still separate parts in the statement, in recognition of the fact that the Father is GREATER. Actually, the original statement was "are of one KIND."

There ARE STILL "separate parts" in the statement, AND in some ways God is NOT totally like His sons, in terms of function or role. Meaning, YOU still exist as a distinct entity, AND God exists as a distinct entity. And what you SHARE between you, is your oneness with each other, AS TWO BEINGS. That is what ACIM teaches. And its definition of oneness is not "one thing being alone", it is EQUALITY. Being of THE SAME KIND. And an equality which is more than just two separate boxes next to each other - an equality where you SPAN the boxes.

Similarly, the ego will falsely conclude that if God and His Son are TWO things, this is duality. It is not, because we're again jumping the gun and projecting separate boxes onto heaven. Just because they are TWO, does NOT mean they do not share, and does NOT mean there is no unity. The Father and the Son are one, but there is still a Father and a Son. Just as WE will ALWAYS be brothers even in heaven.

In fact, the way by which God is everything, AND YET, His children are also FULLY created beings, who are also everything, is the course's definition of MIRACULOUSNESS. This miraculousness is completely alien to the ego thought system and all separation-based reasoning. The ego has NO CLUE, how it is possible, that God could have even created ANYTHING, yet alone multiple beings who somehow have been added-on to an already infinite reality. Nevertheless:

"MIRACULOUS CREATION was his own Source, and also his own real function.""Each Soul knows God completely. This IS the miraculous power of the Soul. The fact that each Soul has this power completely is a fact that is entirely alien to human (ego) thinking"

"Miraculousness", is the nature of God's reality. UN-miraculousness is the nature of spacetime. Everything in God's MIND and reality is permanently miraculous. It is miraculous because it makes possible what the ego says is IMPOSSIBLE. Just as the ego is the idea of impossibility.

For one soul to be a whole being, that shares everything with another whole being, as brothers, and with God, without a loss of self or individuality, and without ceasing to be "separate", and without being CONFINED to separate boxes, is miraculous.

This miraculousness is also reflected in THE MIRACLE. And in true perception. And in learning to THINK LIKE GOD, which the course asks you to do. In order to think like God, you have to TRANSCEND the "separating off and putting in boxes" nature of the ego and its thoughts. And that includes thinking of souls as separate bodies.

This entails overlooking separations and seeing unity beyond it. It requires you to not be blinded by perception of form, because form is anchored in separation. Your whole perception has to become similar to heaven's reality, which breaks all the ego laws. And this is also why miracles break all the laws of space and time AND of ego reasoning.

Becoming able to THINK LIKE GOD, requires you to align with the truth of the Golden Rule, in holy relationship, where what is true of you is true of all others. Where differences are completely ignored. Where no-one is IMPRISONED in a box. And where your whole way of REASONING is LIKE God's.... that is, based on "paralogical reasoning" - or AND/BOTH reasoning, rather than either/or.

We could say, THE ENTIRE COURSE is geared towards developing this BOTH/AND kind of perception, thought and experience, for all students. We are supposed to stop thinking with the ego, OR LIKE the ego. And we are supposed to learn that we are undo no laws but God's, and HIS laws are NOT laws of separation, exclusion, spatial relations, or limitations.

In order to fully grasp ANYTHING that ACIM says about the pre-separation state, God, the Kingdom, oneness, sonship, sons, souls, creation, extension, holy spirit, etc..... any of that non-ego stuff, you CANNOT USE the ego-based reasoning method. If you do, you will fail. Guaranteed. And you will see truth that is false, and what is really true will appear false to you. That's how BACKWARDS the ego thought system is.

Any conclusions you come to about God or oneness etc, if it's rooted in "either this or that", IS WRONG. Guaranteed 100%. Only when you start to think in terms of BOTH.... me AND you.... WE.... only then do you start to approach the NATURAL way of thinking like God, which is a miraculous state of mind. And ONLY by thinking that way will you understand and grasp the metaphysical facts of God's nature.

Non-duality for example is complete bullshit. It is bullshit because it is the result of an EGO thought process. The ego reasons, well, I believe all things are separate, so if we attack all the parts and end up with one victor, this ONE THING that's leftover, which is practically nothing, but is a single thing, symbolizes God. Because to the ego "less separation" is equated with spirituality or simplicity. So it will then map this "one thing" idea of oneness onto God and claim God is one thing - that there is NOTHING ELSE other than God. That God is SEPARATED OFF. That is NOT what ACIM teaches at all!

God is not only a creator and a father, God has a HUGE family of whole beings, all of whom are co-creators with each other. You and your brother co-create your creations. You and God and your brother co-create together. Even the holy spirit is a co-creator. And we all have this HUGE family of created beings in heaven. This is utterly incompatible with both the traditional idea of "oneness" and the idea of "non-duality".

And ALL of those beings are of ONE KIND, and SHARE EVERYTHING, and yet ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY MANY. Because that is HOW GOD THINKS. A holographic thought system in which the whole has created many parts and each part shares the whole with the whole of the rest. That is what ACIM says! And in order to INCLUDE all of what ACIM says, WITHOUT EXCLUDING any material or any factual statements, you will ONLY be able to accept ALL of what it says if you think in a non-separating way.

As soon as you get the simple idea that heaven's reality is based on BOTH/AND, rather than either/or, it will all fit into place and become clear. Because everything real is based on a both/and system of reason and thought processes. Creation ITSELF is based on sharing between two. God SHARES HIMSELF, in order to create, and He does not will to be alone. The natural logical outcome of that is that WE, as many permanent brothers, in the sonship which God DIRECTLY created, are all "one" (equal/sharing) because we share everything.

If this does not make sense to you, it is because you are thinking with the ego. If it seems like nonsense, it is because the ego is projecting its separation ideals onto it. If you cannot follow it, either I explained it poorly or you can't get past your ego thinking. But either way, God's entire reality is NOT LIKE EARTH, and you have to learn to RADICALLY think WAAAAAAY outside the realm of boxes if you want to recognize its true nature. Heaven is not spacetime!

"Earth, Heaven's opposite in every way."

This is more than just another way to think or use the intellect. This ties into how you should PERCEIVE, how you experience the real world, how you tune into the miraculous state of mind, the nature of the miracle and the atonement, all holy relationships, living by the golden rule, holy spirit's thought system etc.. It's all based on heaven's nature which is NOT based on a world of separate boxes.

"The separation IS the notion of rejection. As long as you teach this, YOU still believe it. This is NOT as God thinks, and you must think as He thinks if you are to know Him again. Any split in will MUST involve a rejection of part of it, and this IS the belief in separation."

"Exclusion and separation are synonymous."

"Can you who see yourselves WITHIN a body, know yourself AS AN IDEA? Everything you recognize you identify by EXTERNALS, something OUTSIDE itself. You cannot even think of GOD without a body, or some form you think you recognize."

"To you the miracle cannot seem natural, because what you have done to hurt your mind has made it so unnatural that it does not remember what is natural to it. 2 And when you are told what is natural, you cannot understand it. 3 The recognition of the part as whole, and of the whole in every part is perfectly natural, for it is the way God thinks, and what is natural to Him is natural to you. 4 Wholly natural perception would show you instantly that order of difficulty in miracles is quite impossible, for it involves a contradiction of what miracles mean. 5 And if you could understand their meaning, their attributes could hardly cause you perplexity."

"God's miracles are as total as His Thought, because they ARE His thoughts. God shines in them all with perfect light. If they recognize this light anywhere, they know it universally. "

"For you cannot understand Wholeness unless YOU are whole, and no part of the Son can be excluded,"

"the whole Kingdom as literally PART OF YOU."

"For in your part lies ALL of it, without which is no part complete, nor is the whole"

"One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds. Such is the truth.""If they are deprived, their perception becomes distorted. When this occurs, the whole family of God, or the Sonship, is impaired in its relationships.""Though every aspect IS the whole, you cannot KNOW this, until you SEE that every aspect IS THE SAME, perceived in the SAME light, and THEREFORE one. "

God created you by using his infinite power, and you therefore inherited his infinite power. And that means you are infinitely powerful. You have the power of God in you, and there is nothing the power of God cannot do.

Having power means that you can CAUSE things to happen. You can create life. It means there's an expression of a kind of "force" that comes out of you which is so strong that it can cause anything to occur.

This in turn means that you are not something that is just passive. You are not some observer or some fence-sitting person that just watches stuff. The idea of the mind being passive was the state of consciousness produces by the first split in the mind at the separation from God. It made the mind a perceiver, as though things happen to it and tell it what exists, rather than as a creator which simply chooses and causes what to exist and puts it in place. What you say goes, and no thing else goes.

"Consciousness was the first split that man introduced into himself. He became a PERCEIVER rather than a creator in the true sense."

The truth though is that you are not a perceiver, you are a knower. And knowledge is power. You do not need senses to sense the world and report back what they find, as though you do not know anything at all and have to wait to be told. Instead, you are the cause of what exists, you put it in place, you will it with your mind, with the power of God that you share.

You should think of yourself as an extremely powerful, causal, creative force, which has the power to create entire worlds through will alone. You mis-created space and time, and the planets, and the bodies.

There are no neutral thoughts. Your thoughts have power to produce effects. You are not alone in experiencing the effects of your thoughts. Your mind has the power of God in it that can part oceans, raise the dead, heal the sick, convert objects, move planets, without limit.

The course is geared towards you learning to take back your power, and to reclaim your inheritance from God, which includes the power of God. This means regaining the ability to do anything through your holiness. You should think of yourself as a powerful causal being, so strong (God is your strength) such that things only come out of you, they do not come into you from the outside. You are cause, not effect.

"People prefer to believe that their thoughts cannot exert real control because they are literally AFRAID of them."

"If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

"My Self is ruler of the universe. --- It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself. Even in this world, it is I who rule my destiny. What happens is what I desire. What does not occur is what I do not want to happen. This must I accept."

"It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the power to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail. But it is you who have the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you are."

"The Soul's functions are NOT relative. They are ABSOLUTE. They are OF God and FROM God, and therefore God-like."

"Therefore, being is never threatened. Your Godlike mind can never be defiled."

"It was only my DECISION that gave me all power in Heaven and earth. My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision FOR YOURSELF."

"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."

"God is my strength."

"Knowledge is power, and all power is of God. You who have tried to keep power for yourselves, have lost it. You still HAVE the power, but you have interposed so much between it and your AWARENESS of it, that you cannot use it. EVERYTHING you have taught yourselves has made your power more and more obscure to you. You know not WHAT it is, nor WHERE."

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

"I am not weak, but strong."

"I am not helpless, but all powerful."

"Your holiness reverses all the laws of the world. It is beyond every restriction of time, space, distance, and limits of any kind. Your holiness is totally unlimited in its power because it establishes you as a Son of God, at one with the Mind of his Creator. Through your holiness the power of God is made manifest. Through your holiness the power of God is made available. And there is nothing the power of God cannot do."

"The power of God, and NOT of you, engenders miracles. The miracle ITSELF is but the witness that you HAVE the power of God in you."

"It is impossible the Son of God be merely driven by events OUTSIDE him. It is impossible that the happenings that come to him were NOT his choice. His power of decision is the DETERMINER of every situation in which he seems to FIND himself"

There's a bizarre contrast between the absolute unchangeability of your real self, versus this entire realm of spacetime and matter in which everything seems to change.

Given you are completely changeless, permanent, eternal, always and forever, it is starkly UNBELIEVABLE how the world of change has absolutely NO EFFECT on you at all.

It's like, there you are this completely fixed motionless immovable mountain that is absolute and permanent and infinite in its consistency. And there's this entire world of changes, transitions, alterations, adjustments, modifications, things causing other things, and NOT ONE SINGLE SPECK can even come close to touching you or affecting you.

So that means that everything in this entire world that CHANGES, which is all of it, is LYING TO YOU when it says that it IS changing something real. You are real, it is not changing you at all.

This means we are faced with a "world of change", maximum change, and yet for all that changes NOT ONE SINGLE THING about you changes. So every single "change" that the world appears to undergo, that seems like an ACTUAL change, is NOT a change at all.

So here we have a world which is entirely made up of comings and goings, beginnings and endings, changes and transformations, everything becoming something else, and all of this is a LIE, suggesting that massive change is happening to reality, when in fact NO CHANGE AT ALL is taking place.

Not one single change in the world has any power whatsoever to cause a change in ANYTHING real. The weather, the natural disasters, the armies, the tides, the seasons, the environments, the temperatures, the erosion and destruction, the murder and death, NOT ONE SINGLE PART OF IT CHANGES YOU.

Every single thing in this entire "universe" is FAKE CHANGE. Fake news. Utterly an ILLUSION of change, appearing to be a change, when in fact it is ABSOLUTELY NOT CHANGING ANYTHING.

When you contrast the sheer degree to which this world seems to suggest that change is absolutely normal and maximal and everywhere, against the fact that nothing real EVER CHANGES, it becomes clearer just how much of an illusory dream this world is. How FALSE it is, how much of a LIE and DECEPTION it is. Nothing happening here does anything whatsoever to anything in reality.

Change is in fact IMPOSSIBLE. What God creates can never change. God never changes his mind. Creations never stop being creations. There is no suffering or sickness or death. There are no beginnings or endings. There is no growth or decay or maturation or degradation. There is no destruction or dismantling or starting over. There is no sickness or malfunction or damage or hurt. There is no dying and no death.

Not one single thing in the entire seeming history of space and time has EVER DONE ANYTHING AT ALL. And YOU have never been altered even slightly by a single part of it. You stand like a beacon of infinite power and light and truth and certainty in the midst of the deceptive waters of spacetime, and nothing happens to you.

"(mind) .. it merely seems to go to sleep a while. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere." UrW167L9

"The "changes" the ego seeks to make are not really changes." UrP3B2

"For this one thought would be enough to save you and the world, if you believed that it is true. Its truth would mean that you have made no changes in yourself which have reality, nor changed the universe so that what God created was replaced by fear and evil, misery and death. If you remain as God created you, fear has no meaning, evil is not real, and misery and death do not exist." UrW110L1 (I am as God created me)

"Today we practice making free our minds of all the laws you think you must obey; of all the limits under which you live, and all the changes which you think are part of human destiny." UrW127L6

"God changes not His Mind about His Son with passing circumstance which has no meaning in eternity where He abides, and you with Him." UrT24G3

"Perception changes, MADE to take the place of changeless knowledge." UrT26H2

"The shifts and change are what the dream is made of." UrS3D2

"Nothing will ever change; no shifts nor shadings, no differences, no variations that made perception possible, will occur." UrT17C4

"dreams are what they are BECAUSE of their illusion of reality. Only in waking is the full release from them, for only then does it become PERFECTLY apparent that they had no effect on reality at all, AND DID NOT CHANGE IT." UrT17A1

"All the images His Son appears to make have no effect on what he is. They blow across his mind like wind-swept leaves that form a patterning an instant, break apart to group again, and scamper off. Or like mirages seen above a desert, rising from the dust." UrW189L9

"Appearances deceive BUT CAN BE CHANGED. Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all. And if you fail to see BEYOND appearances, you ARE deceived. For everything you see will change, and yet you thought it real before, and now you think it real again. Reality is thus reduced to form, and CAPABLE of change. Reality is changeless. It is this that MAKES it real, and KEEPS it separate from all appearances. It MUST transcend all form to be itself. It CANNOT change." UrT30I1

"But time, with its illusions of change and death, wears out the world and all things in it. Yet time has an ending, and it is this that the teachers of God are appointed to bring about." UrM2A4

"Yet nothing in the world of dreams remains without the hope of change and betterment, for here is NOT where changelessness is found." UrT29F7

"Change is always fearful to the separated, because they cannot conceive of it as a change toward HEALING the separation. They ALWAYS perceive it as a change for further separation, because separation WAS their first experience of change." UrT4B6

There is a fundamental split in the mind, which has produced essentially two systems of thought at once. There is heaven and there is earth, and there seems to be a separation between them. Jesus doesn't say that your whole mind has gone into the separation, or all of yourself. He says a PART of your mind has split off. Or rather, your whole mind sees itself as split into two parts. One of those parts is still in touch with knowledge and reality while the other part seems to see itself as separated off.

"But you have split your mind into what knows (level 1) and does not know (level 2) the truth."

"Your mind IS one with God's. Denying this and thinking otherwise has held your ego together, but has literally split your mind."

"The Separation is NOT symbolic. It is an order of reality, or a system of thought"

Mind doesn't leave heaven just because it believes in hell. There is still "the rest of you" awaiting for this "part of you" which you think is "all of you" to reintegrate with it. There is more to you than just the little self that you think is in a body.

"Every symptom which the ego has made involves a contradiction in terms. This is because the mind is split between the ego and the Soul, so that WHATEVER the ego makes is incomplete and contradictory."

So in truth you have a mind which is partly committed to God and partly not. This contradiction "is the ego", or takes the form of a separation or split, in which you seem to be in two minds or having two goals. One part of you knows, the other part is uncertain.

It's not just that there is one mind with a division in it, in which both sides of the division are equal. It's that there is mind being natural and mind be unnatural, or reality and its opposite being upheld in a single mind. So there are two sort of compartments where one part is unified with the soul and the other is in support of the ego, resulting in two systems of thought at once which are incompatible.

Typically while identified with the ego and body, you are aware only of the part of mind which is uncertain and does not know. But this is not the whole of your mind.

"Ego-illusions are QUITE specific, although they frequently change, and although the mind is naturally abstract, it became concrete voluntarily as soon as it split. However, only PART of it split, so only PART of it is concrete."

"The concrete part is the same part that believes in the ego, because the ego DEPENDS on the specific. It is the part that believes your existence means you are SEPARATE. Everything the ego perceives is a separate whole, without the relationships that imply BEING."

Notice how Jesus says only part of the mind became concrete/specific, while the rest of the mind remained abstract. In effect, the split is not just a division between levels it's also a movement into the idea of "split-ness" or separateness. Within the split off part of mind, that part of mind believes in an entire system of separations and limitations, while the "higher mind" does not.

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

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

So Jesus is saying that actually we have a higher part of mind, and a lower part of mind. The part of mind that is lower is only temporarily lower because it believes in something opposite to the higher. That lower part of mind is the part where "ego" seems to live, and where you are identifying as being ONLY the lower mind, out of touch with the soul. The little part of mind that seems to be in a body, which you THINK is all of you, is only a part of you. There is also a higher part which your blocks to awareness hide from you.

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and completely limitless idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that, within it, is YOUR Kingdom, where God can enter not. Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

"This little self is NOT your kingdom. Arched high above it, and surrounding it, with love, is the glorious whole, which offers all its happiness and deep content to EVERY part."

In order to undo the split in the mind, the lower mind has to reintegrate with the higher mind, which is achieved by transcending the separation-based ego thought system and thinking like the higher mind. ie Mind needs to re-adopt a single functioning and be undivided in its will.

The lower part of mind needs to align with God's will and accept the rest of mind as part of itself, to reunite with the sonship, so that it can be whole. This will entail a kind of "expansion" of identity to include more than you thought you were before.

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

"The part of mind where reason lies was dedicated, by your will in union with your Father's, to the UNDOING of insanity. Here was the Holy Spirit's purpose accepted and accomplished, both at once."

"While you believe that two totally contradictory thought systems SHARE truth, your need for vigilance is apparent. Your minds ARE dividing their allegiance between two kingdoms, and YOU are totally committed to neither."

"The real world still is but a dream." - section 7 of Chapter 29, section 4 of ACIM.

In the Course, sometimes Jesus uses some terms which SEEM to imply something He did not mean to imply. When he referred to the "real world", He did NOT mean the world is real. And by world here, I'm talking about the physical universe, because every reference to "world" in the Course is referring to the physical universe (the dream of death).

So Jesus referred to the world, seen correctly with "true perception", ie perception without any errors - still perceiving WITHIN the dream, within space and time, but without any delusions ... as the "real world". It is "real" as in, seen WITH TRUTH, the truth OF it is seen correctly. The truth OF it is that it is NOT REAL. The truth of it, is that it is FALSE and untrue. When this is RECOGNIZED with true perception, you are seeing the "real version" of the world. In other words, real as in, what it actually is (unreal) compared to what you thought it was (illusions appearing real).

He uses this terminology because He's comparing it to when you have false perception, where you see this physical world with eyes of hate and judgement, and do not recognize it for what it is. In false perception you see a world of vengeance. You see hate IN the world. When you compare that false view OF the world, with a CORRECT view OF the world, the correct view is seeing "the truth" ABOUT the world... which shows you, in correct recognition, that this world is FALSE and NOT REAL.

The world is still an illusion. A false perception OF an illusion makes it seem real to you, and then you do not recognize it is an illusion, and you think it is the truth. That mistaken perception of the world needs to be corrected in order to see the FORGIVEN WORLD. When the world is seen through forgiving eyes - eyes of truth - those eyes do not see hate and guilt and fear IN the world. It simply sees what is "there", which is... an illusory world. It SEES and recognizes that there is a FALSE WORLD appearing in perception. You might well see God "in it", or see God "about it", or overlook the world to see Christ beyond it. But the world ITSELF is recognized as NOT REAL. The "real world" is actually the NOT REAL WORLD.

Once the world is recognized as not real, ie you are finally able to SEE what this thing IS for what it actually is - a false illusion pretending to be a world - then the purpose of perception and of the world is complete, and THEN YOU WAKE UP FROM THE DREAM, the world disappears, and there is only you with God. NOW you are in reality.

Jesus's use of the term "real world" in the Course has been very confusing for many students, because so many of us rely on the exact specific words Jesus uses and we don't really take it all in proper context of the bigger picture. This creates contradictions. If Jesus really meant the "real world" was actually REALITY, this would go against 99% of the rest of the Course. He ONLY uses this term to describe a correct perception of an UNREAL world - see the "reality" or "truth" of the world, which shows you that it is not really there. It's not a real world at all.

Jesus actually does this also in some other places in the course where he uses a terminology that SEEMS contradictory or seems to suggest something He did not intend. To discern this you need quite a bit of experience grasping the metaphysics. For example He said in one place that something can be "perfectly real within time but not in eternity." That can seem to imply that something inside of time - even though the course teaches that time is an illusion - is "real". If you interpret it that way, you will now come to a vast array of further confused conclusions. Jesus is not saying that anything in time is real at all. He is only saying that eternity is real and anything in time is an ILLUSION of reality, and seeing it correctly is seeing the "reality of it" - the truth that it is an illusion, just as above.

The "real world" is not real. There is no real world. This is the central thought the course would attempt to teach. This is the thought which anyone with an ego DOES NOT WANT. The fact is that when you get to True Perception, you WILL and MUST recognize that this thing you've been calling a real world, is JUST an illusion. Nothing more or less. It has no reality to it, no truth to it, it is recognized and registers with you as completely FALSE. You see THROUGH it, with forgiving eyes. You do not buy its illusions, you do not believe in it, you do not think it is really happening. And then it disappears as God scoops you up and you wind up back in REALITY. A reality in which THE WORLD DOES NOT EXIST. Or in a word, "Heaven". Only heaven is real.

"THE WORLD YOU SEE DOES NOT EXIST" (the world you see with your physical eyes does not exist).

"Forgiving dreams have little need to last. They are not made to separate the mind from what it thinks. They do not seek to prove the dream is being dreamed by someone else. And in these dreams a melody is heard that everyone remembers, though he has not heard it since before all time began. Forgiveness, once complete, brings timelessness so close the song of Heaven can be heard, not with the ears, but with the holiness that never left the altar that abides forever deep within the Son of God. And when he hears this song again, he knows he never heard it not. And where is time, when dreams of judgment have been put away?" - ACIM

I will explain now in one sentence, why there is no world, the entire foundation for miracle-working, and the meaning of cause and effect....

*** This universe (world) is once removed from reality. ***

Did you catch that? Read it again if it’s too short. Here’s the breakdown.

This world, including Earth, is not a thing in its own right. It is not direct reality. It is the EFFECT of a cause which is unseen and unmanifest. It is a projection, from a mind which seems invisible.

Being an effect of that mind, this universe itself has no identity of its own, no mind, no will, no causality, no truth, no reality, no purpose, no love, and basically does not exist.

If this world were a direct experience of reality, it would be different. Then it would make sense to believe its illusion that it exists on its own and is a real thing. But it’s not. This world is a by-product of dreaming, and whatever the dreamer decides to dream, shows up as this world.

This world has no will. It cannot decide to make something happen. It has no mind. It cannot think for itself. It has no purpose. It is not alive. It does not even move unless the hidden dreamer decides to move it. Nothing here breathes or seems to live unless a hidden mind somewhere else is causing every single moment of motion. It is absolutely nothing more than a "movie" being projected. It is nothing more than an IDEA that someone, somewhere, is HAVING.

A movie is a lifeless, inert, neutral, illusory nothingness. A movie does not cause anything to happen in reality. A movie is the EFFECT put in place by a mind entirely separate from the movie, who is choosing to make the movie appear one way or another.

Everything in this world, this world itself, this planet, all objects and bodies, all of it is SECOND HAND. It is showing up like a REFLECTION. It’s not really there. And since it has absolutely no life of its own, it can DO nothing without the hidden mind saying so.

The dreamer of this dream is the Son(s) of God. They are invisible to this world. This world is being PROJECTED from their mind. It seems to be outside of them. But this world is not first-hand reality. It is second-hand. Just an effect and nothing else.

Nothing within the world can change the world. Nothing within the world causes the world. Nothing within the world made the world appear. Nothing within the world is alive. Nothing within the world has a mind, or a will, nor does it think for itself. Nothing within the world is the cause of life or death. Nothing within the world makes events happen. There is nothing within the world, because the world is nothing. It does not DO anything. IT does not EXIST.

This correlates to miracles and to cause and effect. The mind which is causing this universe is the mind of the Son(s) of God. Everything that is showing up, the Sonship is putting there. Everything that moves, all chemical processes, all physical interaction, all events, the entire history of the universe, is all being WRITTEN from ANOTHER PLACE that you are not seeing with your eyes.

Cause is not IN THE WORLD. Cause is OUTSIDE THE WORLD. Cause is DREAMING THE WORLD. The cause of this universe is unseen, a mind so vast and powerful that it is able to make anything seem to happen.

Cause is the mind, the world is the EFFECT of its dreaming. Cause, from a holy mind, would normally CREATE. But we’re a little bit confused. Cause from a confused mind MIS-CREATES and MAKES a universe.

This does not mean that the mind literally creates a world that exists on its own with its own will and causality and life! The world NEVER is more than an EFFECT and it can do NOTHING on its own. This world/universe is the result of mis-creation, or dreaming, COMING FROM a LEVEL OF REALITY beyond this entire universe. Mind is cause, this world is effect.

Because of this, recognize that a miracle is what happens when it is REVEALED, that a mind BEYOND this world has the power to CAUSE this world. It only appears that there IS no such separate cause, ONLY beause the dream has not featured miracles very much. For the most part, the dream seems to just tick over, and its FAKE LAWS seem to just keep on applying with very little evidence that there is ANOTHER CAUSE outside of it. So we think this is normal, and believe those fake laws, and take the world to be real.

From within the world, within its illusion, we take it at face value for how it appears. "Nothing so blinding as sight of form". This leads us to believe (in ego) that this world is a thing in its own right, living and breathing and existing. This is NOT TRUE. It is not DOING ANYTHING. It’s like an image being projected onto a wall. It can’t change itself!

Everything happening in this world, and this world itself, is just an effect FROM a hidden, higher level of reality. Mind is causing it. Which means, in order for ANYTHING to seem to show up in this world, indeed for ANYTHING to happen in the world AT ALL, the mind has to put it there. It has to dream it. In order for objects to even MOVE, the MIND has to move them. In order for a river to flow down a hill, the MIND has to move every single particle. NOTHING HAPPENS without the consent of the one who is dreaming it. Not even death. If mind were not dreaming it, there would be nothing here!

This means that the mind which is BEYOND this world, causing it, would have to PRETEND that things WITHIIN it are causing each other. There is, factually, absolutely NOTHIING within this world that causes anything else to happen. Laws of physics are an illusion. Time is an Illusion. Death is an illusion. Something happening to someone against their will is an illusion. There CANNOT BE causes within the world itself, because it is ALL coming from the mind.

Mind MAKES ILLUSIONS that SEEM to appear as though one thing causes another within the world, and all the while the mind is secretly pulling all the strings. Nothing in the world "makes something happen". Nothing in the world "affects something". Nothing can BE affected "by" the world UNLESS the mind CHOOSES to PUT THE EFFECTS THERE. This is why the proper loving use of the body, temporarily, makes it IMPOSSIBLE for it to be sick or die! If mind does not will it, NOTHING happens to it.

So absolutely every so-called "cause" in the world is not real. And the "effects" which those so-called causes produce ARE NOT the result of those causes. That’s linear fiction. Believing that is FAILNG TO RECOGNIZE THE ILLUSION. Believing that something WITHIN this level causes effects WITHIN this lever, is "horizontal" or linear cause-and-effect. There IS no such thing! It’s not real. It’s a totally made-up fictional explanation by SLEEPING IDENTITIES who think this word is first-hand reality. ONLY THE MIND causes anything to seem to happen here. ONLY THE HIDDEN LEVEL of causality produces CHANGES in this world.

The mind is ALREADY CHANGING THE WORLD. The mind is MAKING THE WORLD TURN. The mind is animating the oceans. The mind is dreaming of life and death, things being born and growing and dying. None of this happens without the mind making it happen.

If there seems to be a flower growing, the MIND is growing the flower. If there seems to be a person walking, the MIND is walking the person. If there seems to be a drop of rain falling totally unbeknownst to any human in the middle of nowherer, it is ONLY falling because SOMEWHERE, MIND is making it move.

If there was a pause button to this projection, you would be able to stop and look at objects suspended in mid-air, wondering at how they can even be there, and demonstrating that they do not move by their own will. They are just EFFECTS, and being in touch with CAUSALITY ("this is a course in cause and not effect") gives you MIRACLE WORKING FREEDOM to IGNORE the laws of this world (which cause nothing), demonstrating the TRUTH that mind is the cause of this world.

Miracles occur as EXPRESSIONS from the mind of Love, the hidden mind, which is a DIRECT REALITY. That level of reality expresses and DEMONSTRATES that *this* level of reality, EFFECT, is TOTALLY UNDER ITS CONTROL. The "miraculous" mind has no limits to what it can do nor does it care what is in othe world, nor how big or small it seems to be, or the illusion of how "difficult" it might be to perform a particular miracle. It knows that MIND IS POWERFUL and MIND IS DREAMING THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE!

Any illusion of a fictional linear cause or effect has absolutely NO POWER to prevent the mind from manipulating the dream in any way it chooses. If the mind decides to throw pebbles in the air and turn them into butterflies, THAT WILL HAPPEN. If the mind chooses to freeze-frame a waterfall and to hold a lump of mid-flow water in the hand in suspended animation, that WILL happen. If the mind decides to LITERALLY MOVE A MOUNTAIN from one location to another, completely defying "gravity", SO BE IT!

This is all possible, and more. Nothing happens here AT ALL without the mind’s consent! No-one dies without their consent! No-one is attacked against their will! No-one can be sick unless they attack themselves. Nothing affects the body. Time does not even PASS unless the mind MAKES IT PASS. The cells in your body do not even move or eat or divide or anything unless the dreaming mind MAKES THEM APPEAR TO DO IT. Absolutely NOTHING HAPPENS HERE other than what the mind projects. That’s because there is no world, and this universe DOES NOT EXIST unless we keep dreaming of it.

Realize also that because even those cells in the body are nothing but a projection, even the shift from one "state" to another is ONLY happening because mind is making it happen. Mind is projecting, projecting, projecting, projecting, and over time, that makes it seem like "the object" being projected exist IN ITS OWN RIGHT. It does not. It is NOT ALIVE. It is just a constantly shifting IMAGE that the MIND IS DREAMING. It’s not there. It is NOT a life form.

So when you look at the world, realize this. You’re NOT looking directly at reality. You’re looking at a ONCE-REMOVED side-effect or projection from SOMEWHERE ELSE. All of the DECISION MAKING, all of the CONTROL, all of the choices as to what will show up, is happening somewhere else entirely, out of sight. You’re seeing an EFFECT. A big giant effect, like a huge movie that’s being broadcast from SOMEWHERE ELSE, to create the illusion that there is no projector. The projector is the MIND, not the world. Earth is a fairytale.

This is why "there is nothing my holiness cannot do". The mind of the Son of God who is DREAMING this world, can choose to do whatever he likes with it. HE ALREADY IS. The year 2017 is being projected by Him NOW. If He weren’t projecting this, there would be NOTHING HERE. No planet, no world. He is ALREADY CHANGING THE WORLD, every second of time, every moment, is only seeming to happen beacuse HIS MIND is making it change! Right now!

To be fully in touch with this TRUTH, and to therefore RECOGNIZE that everything in this entire universe is an ILLUSION, with NO real cause-and-effect happening within it, and having NO INHERENT EXISTENCE of its own, and with cause being SOLELY the mind that is dreaming it, will grant you ACCESS to "make changes". Free will.

The ability to make these changes was eloquently demonstrated by Jesus. Walking on water proved gravity is bullshit. HE MADE GRAVITY. Healing the sick proved there was no such thing as sickness and it had no power to resist him. And he also demonstrated that death can be overcome. "You made sickness and death and can therefore abolish both." They’re just DREAMS! WE make them up ourselves and pretend they’re happening against our will.

Everything about the Course makes sense in this simple framework. Cause is in the mind. Mind is projecting the world. The world is nothing but an effect of your mind and doesn’t really exist. You can do anything you want to change it beacuse you already are the one putting it there.

"There is no order of difficulty in miracles" because YOUR MIND is CAUSING EVERYTHING HERE. "Here", this world, this universe, this planet, isn’t doing anything on its own. It has no life, mind, will, or intentions. It causes nothing. All of its causes are ILLUSIONS. All cause is BEYOND this world. There is no world!!!!!!!

If you believe planet earth is real, or created by God, or causing stuff to happen, or has truth in it, or is alive in any way, YOU HAVE FALLEN FOR THE ILLUSION. It means you believe the PROJECTION from the mind IS the mind.

It means you believe Earth is alive and has a will of its own, which will automatically make you a victim of magical causes, suffer and die. It is LEVEL CONFUSION on a grand scale. Higher level mind CAUSES everything! The world causes nothing.

That which cannot cause anything cannot create, and so it cannot extend life, and therefore it is DEAD. This is a dream of death. "There is no life outside of heaven." There is no world here. It does not exist apart from our dreaming it, and no part of it has its "own existence".

There is no world because it is just an effect. Our effect. We are the cause.

Ok so, various people have expressed doubt that there are "levels" in ACIM or that this is in any way important or useful. So I thought I'd ramble on a bit about this from my point of view. I can see this being somewhat controversial.

The first thing is this.

Jesus wrote ACIM and he is not in a body, and throughout the Course we're taught we are not a body. That's even today's workbook lesson - I am not a body I am free. That doesn't mean, oh, you're still IN a body but it's not you. Also the course says at no time does the body exist. Ok. So.... WHERE do you exist? Where is there no physical matter? Not this universe.

Clearly this means there is some other seeming 'place', if you will, in which mind - spirit - is able to exist, which does not require a physical form and has nothing to do with the physical world, which, by the way, is not real.

So here we at the very least have 2 `levels`. The level of the physical world of form, and some other spiritual level. Sort of like a 'dimension' if you will. It's non-physical. It's where you end up when your body dies. And its the stopping off point between lifetimes.

Now, each 'level' has to be like a 'place' of sorts.. which the Course refers to as a 'universe'. And if you read the text carefully, when it mentions universe it uses that exact same word even though it's sometimes referring to the universe of form, and sometimes referring to the universe that God created. ie reference to at least some other non-physical level or experiential existence.

So if you don't believe there are levels, and you read the course talking about 'universe' in this way, and you don't discern exactly what that relates to given the context, then you're going to assume it's always talking about the physical universe. And then when it makes statements about 'universe' it's going to throw you into a whole bunch of confusing misunderstandings and ego interpretations. You'll attribute all kinds of 'truth' to the ego universe because you think the course is telling you this is the case.

The course is often quite subtle about this, and it also shifts around quite a lot between which 'level' of experience it's referring to, without necessarily giving you a nice obvious disclaimer that it's doing so.

Now, this other universe, the spiritual universe, also has to be broken down into sub-levels because there are parts of the course which speak of certain truths which cannot possibly apply to a separate place like that. For example whenever the Course speaks of 'heaven', and of 'souls', and of 'Gods Creation', and of 'knowing', and 'oneness' and all these interesting things, they often refer to the very highest 'level' of the metaphysics - heaven if you will.

But then at other times the course speaks of things like the sonship, alluding to you having multiple brothers, a brotherhood, not in terms of all brothers being ONE SON, but in terms of a multitude of sons. Also the urtext speaks of multiple souls. Now, in terms of the metaphysics, it does not make logical consistent sence to group together references to these 'sub-level' ways of looking at things with the highest-level way of looking at things. If you do that, then when the course refers to something like heaven or knowing or whatever, or the son of God, you will lump it all together under a general umbrella of 'heavenly spiritual stuff' and make the only distinction that this apparently is 'not the ego' level. This will result in all manner of confusions, misunderstandings of meaning, wrong implications, false conclusions and just a big mess. The metaphysics will break, the course will become inconsistent and you won't be able to understand it.

So now at the very least, there is a level of heaven, a level where the sonship exists as multiple sons, a level of christ where there is only one son, and a level of the physical universe where the ego plays out in duality. This is all quite clearly in the course text throughout and referred to in multiple ways and in multiple contexts. And if you read it and if you understand what it means, then when you read about christ you know that its referring to the unified one son and when its referring to sonship or brotherhood you know its referring to the level of multiple sons.

So there is a level of the metaphysics, which has its own 'universe' and its own 'state of mind', like a 'place' of experience if you will, for each of these aspects of the course. This is the structure of the dream that the ego made. Different levels of 'splits' in the one mind. And these are on a colossal scale. Astronomical. The ego dream comprises separation from God, resulting in a separate son 'level', and then a split into a sonship/brotherhood which is a whole other universe/level, and then there's the level just above the physical (level 2) where the holy spirit resides, and then the physical level. All of these levels are explicitly referred to in the course and if you really can grasp the logical and subtle implications of every thing Jesus says in each section, you can tell that these levels 'exist' in the metaphysical structure.

So now, if you don't believe in these levels, then as mentioned, you will draw all kinds of false conclusions. It results in all kinds of behaviors where you try to attain states of mind/being/experience which are extremely far beyond the 'level' of the dream that you find yourself on. You generally can only transition to the next highest level, one level at a time, you can't easily jump to the top - to heaven. Holy Spirit is on level '2', in a different 'dimension' if you will, which is where we all are being asked to get to as our main next step. When we try to move beyond that to things like awareness of the sonship, total equality, oneness, christ-mind, etc... we basically CANNOT do it and it leads us into all kinds of ego deceptions - a spiritualized ego.

The spiritualized ego is what happens when the ego, or shall we say the mindset, of a given 'level 'of the ego's total dream, attempts to transfer itself to a higher-order level of existence. It tries to KEEP its mindset (e.g. level 1 ego duality) but at the same time take itself to the next level where there is really a totally different mind (Holy Spirit's mind). But this is impossible, of course, but this doesn't stop it trying. And this creates a great amount of specialness and fake spirituality and fake progress and ego images and behavioral fuckups which call for sacrifice and illusions and all kinds of madness. It's not possible. We have to let the 'mindset' of level 1 - the ego - we have to let it GO, detach from it, so that who WE are can travel up to level 2 and proceed from there.

So anyway... if there's only one level, or even only 2 levels, you will develop a spiritual ego from it because it will lead you to so many false conclusions and so many attempts to greatly spiritualize lower-order levels of existence that cannot contain those truths. The lower mind cannot grasp and experience the higher states.

If you read the Course with these levels in mind, it is much more clear where and when Jesus is referring to certain specific levels of the dream - different dimensions, different universes, different mindsets and different aspects of the metaphysics. Also if you look at your own 'course attitude' based on these levels, you will see that you've been attempting to become an achiever of very high-level metaphysics but still while being a level-1 identity/mind. This produces bliss-ninny spiritualization of the ego, and it is rife in the course community. And in myself as well. I'm just starting to realize how far this has gone.

So anyway. The levels are just a way to map actual levels of experiential existence in the hierarchy of the total dream, which comprises several 'dimensions' of which the physical universe is only one, and therefore it's really just a clear and truthful acknowledgement of this fact, allowing you to navigate realistically and to understand what the heck the course really means when it says something. Very high-level truths are of NO USE TO YOU when you are on level 1. You cannot be christ when you are a level-1 ego. You have to become level 2, then 3, then 4, then 5. It is also a relief to let go of the pressure of trying to attain such impossibly high spiritual states which are out of reach of the level-1 mind. You can attain them but your ego cannot, and until you let go of 'level 1' thinking you cannot get to level 2 yet alone up to heaven.

Such defenses are put in place on purpose. They are chosen. They have a purpose, to fulfill a perceived need. They have a function - a task that they are to perform in order to achieve a goal.

The goal of sickness is to defend you or protect you or counter-attack against something you have perceived which seems to threaten your existence. Isn't it strange that a retaliation against a perceived threat damages you?

Sickness is not just some thing that happens. It is a device, a deliberate mechanism or tool that you use for a specific purpose. Like a bandaid, you use it to help your little wounds to heal. Or a screwdriver, you use it to help screw screws into wood. Sickness helps you to be protected against what you perceive as an attack.

Sickness implements separation. It pushes away the attacker and creates a gap or distance between you, so that you feel a sense of perceived safety. You want to put distance between you and the threat. Or put up a really solid wall that blocks them. These blocks are blocks to awareness.

The result is what expresses as a materialization of physical form in a distorted configuration, which is what we usually refer to as "sickness", illness or disease. The mind is literally warping the body to try to turn it into a defense mechanism.

The ONLY purpose of sickness is to defend you. This is the only reason why you want it. And it is the reason why you really have an actual desire to keep it. If you were to remove the defense, and if the attacker is still present without having changed at all, then you will be in danger.

You will also go to great lengths to build an entire fictional story around the symptoms of sickness explaining and justifying why the sickness ITSELF is the problem that you want to get rid of, in order to DENY that you really want to KEEP it, because to truly get rid of it would expose you to your enemy. We will make a lot of noise about the unfairness of the sickness and about how we did not ask for it, in order to HIDE the fact that we did ask for it on purpose and we are the ones who put it in place. To admit that would threaten to undo it, which goes against the entire point of us creating the sickness in the first place.

You do not want to remove your defense because of this. It is creating an illusion of safety and protection, further covered-up by layer upon layer of denial and displacement of what the real problem is. Unfortunately, all defenses are attacks and your own defenses are attacking you as much as the other. Construct a razor-wire fence and you better be careful not to touch it!

The only purpose of that defense is to block a threat. You must look at what it is that you believe is a threat. Typically it is anything which your ego perception mis-perceives as the opposite or undoing of itself. Your sense of identity is at stake. Any suggestion of "truth" which implies that the ego does not exist, will threaten "you" when you are identified as the ego.

Your false beliefs are your artificial identity which you believe are the truth. You want to protect that truth as though your life depends on it. You see its opposite as false, evil, and an attack. So long as you remain loyal to those misperceptions you will defend them, even if doing so requires you to implement defenses which attack you as much as anyone else. All defenses are double-eged swords and you cannot escape their toxicity and potency.

What must be truly undone before you will be willing to let down your defenses, is to learn to accept the truth as it is and not as it appears to be when seen through the ego. This will have to mean that your sense of identity is mistaken and must be set free. It must shift from "I am this ego thing" to "I am holy and innocent". Forgiveness must happen of yourself, and healing must take place in terms of how you see yourself or who or what you regard yourself as.

You need to find a willingness to be open to being mistaken about who you thought you were, and what you thought was true, so that you can allow the truth to save you from this illusion. The truth will show you a new identity and reveal the truth about you. This will reveal how the ego is in fact the thing which is false, and that it is not who you are.

If you can accept the truth as helpful and welcome instead of as a threat to your existence, you will see no NEED to defend yourself against it. You will not see attack in it, having not attacked. You will see no justification for trying to prevent it or reject it. You will accept it and allow it to be in you. You will invite it in and it will be your Identity.

At this point you will be WILLING to accept that your device of defense and separation is no longer needed. It's function is irrelevant. The sickness was ONLY serving your purpose of trying to protect your "self". You no longer need this protection because who and what you are is not being threatened by the truth but is in agreement with it. The truth is your friend. You can now let down your defenses.

This means, you will now admit that the sickness only came into being because you put it there, wanted it, needed it, and it was helping you - or so you thought. You have now been corrected and you now RECOGNIZE that this sickness was just something you used to believe in and no longer do. It is now false. It is not the truth. It is not something you need. You have not purpose for it and you admit that it is just a way of attacking yourself more. You don't want it anymore and don't have any attachment to it.

Illusions recognized as such MUST disappear. All of the symptoms and consequences of that so-called "sickness" must disappear. "He will undo the consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him" - meaning that your willingness now to admit the truth (allow Holy Spirit access) can and will supernaturally UNDO and make disappear all forms and signs and symptoms and content of sickness. All of the expressions - consequences - of deciding poorly will be undone. Your lack of support or need for the sickness will let it go and it will just vanish.

Properly recognized as completely false, unhelpful, unneeded, unwelcome, pointless, futile, purposeless, meaningless, and utterly useless, the sickness will be recognized as having no reality or truth or validity and this will make it disappear. Literally. All symptoms will go if this is truly deeply accepted.

The sickness was nothing more than a temporary protective device which you wanted and needed. If you don't need it, you WILL drop it. If your will is genuine and you've become really really honest with yourself, that sickness will be undone. And sickness is nothing more than a belief that separation is the answer to God, or that separation can save you from the truth. Undoing sickness heals your mind.

Once the sickness - as mental illness - as belief in separation - AND as symptoms of defense - is gone, THEN you will be at peace. Not before. No-one can be at peace when they are at war with themselves or with the truth. No-one can be at peace who believes sickness is real and must just be accepted. No-one can be at peace who is using death as a defense against the wrath of God. True peace can and must be experienced as complete and total perfect "health" in mind and all the expressions of mind.

If you truly do not believe in separation from the truth, you will have no defenses and you will not exhibit symptoms of sickness. You will walk your walk and not just talk your talk. And you will demonstrate therefore, by example, living example, that you are immortal and invulnerable because you do not believe in separation or sickness and they are not real. You will thus teach others that sickness is not the truth and the truth needs no defense. If signs of sickness remain, you are teaching the exact opposite because, in all honesty, you have not completely undone your belief in separation.

Sickness must go. Disease must be healed. Death must be undone. Resurrection is the only truth. If you are sick you are attacking yourself, everyone else, and God. A guiltless mind cannot suffer, and a guiltless mind exhibits no symptoms of sickness or damage. A broken body is a sign that the mind has not been healed. Complete healing is not only possible but necessary. You must teach that nothing has happened to you and you can't do that intellectually. You must show it and act like it.

Let's take a closer look at sin and find out why no-one has ever sinned.

"While everything that God created is forever without sin and therefore is forever without guilt."

"Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain, and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him, you bring sin, pain, and suffering into your OWN mind, because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also DENY what it creates, because it is free."

""Sinless" means without sin. You cannot be without sin a little. You are sinless or not. If your mind is part of God's you must be sinless, or a part of His Mind would be sinful."

What is sin?

Simply, it is the attempt to reverse cause and effect. You are the effect of God, and God is the cause of you. When you attempt to reverse this, so that you are CAUSING GOD, this is "sin". It would mean God is now affected by you, changed by you, against His will. That means you have attacked Him and changed him. The belief that you CAN do this, and that you HAVE done this, is the belief that sin is REAL. But this is IMPOSSIBLE.

There is a simple fact to keep in mind. You CANNOT change God in any way. You cannot cause him or affect him. You cannot do anything against His will. You cannot attack Him or make Him be something He does not want to be. Which means, literally, YOU CANNOT SIN against Him. You cannot cause God, therefore you cannot sin. Your hands are tied. You cannot attack anything real.

This also means that IN REALITY, nothing real can be threatened, nothing real can be sinned against, nothing real can be CHANGED, and therefore SIN IS IMPOSSIBLE. You literally cannot go against, oppose, object to, resist, attack, defend against, or do anything TO God or anything real. Sin is literally impossible. Sin literally CANNOT HAPPEN, and HAS NOT HAPPENED. And this isn't mere theory, you literally HAVE NOT SINNED AT ALL.

It is vital to absorb this FACT, because it lays the foundation for correctly framing what's to come next.

You have not sinned, you cannot sin, sin cannot occur, you cannot attack God, you cannot change reality, and you cannot cause the death of life. SIN IS IMPOSSIBLE IN REALITY.

Now. As you find yourself in a DREAM WORLD, Earth, reading words on a screen, you are not being aware of reality. You are not effectively "IN" reality. The world is an attempt to overthrow reality and replace it with unreality. The world is unreal. It's a dream of death. It's an ATTEMPT TO SIN, despite the fact that actually doing this IN REALITY is impossible. It's your best effort to TRY to PROVE that sin is not only possible but has occurred.

You MADE UP a bunch of dream illusions to try to paint a picture of what it might look like *IF* you had sinned. That picture is this world. "The world was made as a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son." It's a picture of THE IMPOSSIBLE. "It is the world you see that is impossible." In this world, NOTHING HAPPENS. "All events are nowhere."

Yet this world SEEMS to contain things happening, seems to feature bodies attacking bodies, and seems riddled with sin. "The world of bodies is the world of sin." And if we BELIEVE that this world is REALITY, we WILL believe that the "sins" that occur are REAL sins, mistaking FANTASY SINS for reality. These ILLUSIONS of sin, IMPOSSIBLE sin seeming possible, are literally nothing but fiction, with NO REAL CONSEQUENCES against anything real. God is not affected by it, nothing real is threatened by it. You literally have NOT CAUSED ANY DAMAGE OR HARM EVER.

The fact remains. You literally cannot sin. You can't even begin to sin. This world is not real and so anything "happening" here is not REALLY happening. If you break a window, you did not break a real window. You broke a dream window. If you killed a flock of sheep in a fit of rage, you didn't. You merely dreamed of doing so. If you think you did some terrible crime that is punishable by death and suffering, you are ATTEMPTING to hold a deathly judgement against an INNOCENT Son of God, BY MISTAKE.

Because here's the fact of the matter. If you cannot sin against anything real, and therefore sin is impossible, you believing you HAVE DONE SO MUST BE MISTAKEN. You MUST be confused. You MUST be delusional. You MUST be out of your mind insane if you think it's even POSSIBLE to sin, yet alone that you have, or "have the proof" to show for it. There is no such thing as evidence of sin. There are only lies and illusions of sin. There is no real sin. ALL SIN IS FAKE.

Only by being very mistaken does anyone BELIEVE they have sinned. Only in confusion are we convinced that it's even POSSIBLE to cause something against its will. Only by being in ERROR having made an error of discernment does it seem plausible or "happening" that there can be "real death", "murder", "war" and the like. These are DREAMS of hell, not real hell. They are illusions of sin in an illusory world.

You have never sinned. You will never sin. God finds you guiltless, sinless and innocent forever. This is what you need to wake up to - accepting this is FORGIVENESS. The overlooking of sin, the overlooking of guilt, the overlooking of death. There is no sin, or guilt, or suffering, or sickness, or death. ALL of it SEEMS real, SEEMS to be happening, SEEMS like an awful terrible nightmare. But it is nothing BUT a nightmare. It's a nightmare to BELIEVE you can sin when you can't, or that you HAVE sinned when it's impossible.

You cannot sin. You will not sin. You have not sinned. There is no sin. No one has ever sinned. No one can sin against you. You have never sinned against anyone. YOU ARE NOT A SINNER. You are ETERNALLY INNOCENT. This is the only verdict the Holy Spirit will accept about you because He knows without a doubt that your idea of sinning is UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE and completely illusory.

You are DREAMING of sinfulness, suffering and death. You are punishing yourself in a hell of your own making for NO GOOD REASON. You are finding yourself guilty for having DONE NOTHING. You are not criminal, sinful, or guilty. You have never hurt anything or anyone. You are EXONERATED because IN REALITY SIN DOES NOT EXIST. If you think it exists, you are unaware of reality.

Belief in sin IS THE PROBLEM, not the sin itself. This whole world, the entire ego separation, the dream of death, is ALL about your BELIEF that you DID SIN, in DENIAL of the fact that YOU DID NOT. The WHOLE THING is a case of mistaken identity and false accusations. A claim that you accomplished something you could never do. It's an attempt to invent the evidence and give it credit/reality so that it SEEMS to prove you DID commit a horrible crime against God. YOU COULD NOT, NEVER DID, NEVER WILL.

So this whole world is A MISTAKE. You are MISTAKEN when you believe you or others are sinful or guilty. "BELIEVING in" sin being true is the actual issue. Your belief is mistaken. Your belief is madness. Your belief is an ERROR. And all errors can be CORRECTED. You believing you CAN and HAVE sinned is NOT TRUE, it and this error in thinking needs to be corrected so that you will REALIZE, you never did anything AT ALL. You accused yourself FALSELY.

No matter what you think you did, no matter how extreme or severe or what the consequences seemed to be, YOU HAVE NOT done a single thing EVER that God is upset with you about. You have ONLY been very mistaken. You have only ever had "mental illness", believing something is possible that isn't. You've acted insanely because you were not in your right mind. No one in their right mind believes in sin because the authority-problem notion of "I can change reality" is utterly ridiculous.

Mistakes call for FORGIVENESS AND HEALING. To forgive is to overlook the error and recognize the truth. You have not sinned. There is no sin. "And in this view are all your sins forgiven." A mistaken person merely needs healing, not punishment. You deserve forgiveness and healing, not condemnation. You have simply been confused and have mistaken illusions and dreams of sinning for reality.

Not one single sin in the history of the planet has ever happened. There is no sin anywhere. All "doing" is illusion. Everyone is eternally innocent. God finds you worthy, and loves you forever. Sinless, guiltless, deathless, fearless. You are holy and always were.

Jesus seems to be trying to tell us that the past and future do not really exist. That only now exists.

If you were completely centered in the present instant, you might think of the past and future as entirely conceptual. Regardless of all the things you've been told about them, all the ways you seem to use memory, how you imagine and predict the future, you don't ever actually go into them. You are always here now. Even when you remember "the past" you are remembering it in the present.

You could be seeming to dwell on the past, or "living in the past", or remembering past events, or pulling up feelings and traumas that seemed to happen long ago, or reflect on how your body is the result of changes that happened years ago, but all of this is kind of a make-believe idea of some "place" other than here, as if it still exists, as if the past has influence on and causation of what's in the present - which it DOES NOT.

And the future is just kind of an idea of a jumble of possibilities, predicted outcomes, plans, things you dream of happening next, goals to work toward, but none of it ever really takes you into an actual "future" - like you can literally skip into tomorrow and come back again. You are always still here in the present imagining some far off place that isn't here. Only when the future "arrives" in the present now does it seem to have come to pass.

The holy instant is the idea of you recognizing that you're totally in the present moment, in a mere narrow instant, in which you realize there is no past or future. Just because you have seeming memory of configurations of objects as they "used to be" some time ago, doesn't mean there is such a thing as a real past. These are images and snapshots of states which have changed, and they are no longer in those old configurations. All that is "left" from the past is what is here NOW.

The idea of the past is really an ego concept, an attempt to suggest that what is always and forever isn't the same as it always was or always will be. It's the idea of death, and it is the idea of change - the ability to change the changelessness of eternity, and thus suggest that something that was created has been uncreated. That things that "used to exist" don't exist anymore. That has to be a lie.

The idea of the future is another ego concept, an attempt to avoid what is here now by yearning for some alternate configuration, some plan of control, some expectation, some desire that things become different, all forms of ego attack on the present moment. Even the physical body doesn't exist in a single instant of now, it's an illusion that shows up as an anticipation of what might be here next, or a remembering of what used to be here. Matter itself doesn't even exist "now".

It is only when the mind gives credit to the idea of past and future that it starts to become lost in some kind of mental state which is denying the present. And in that state the mind seems to be "living in the past" or "living in the future" but it isn't actually living in either of them. It is daydreaming unconsciously of places and times and events that aren't actually happening. To think of the past or future doesn't put you INTO them, and if you believe it does you are lost in a fiction.

The past is gone, there is no past at all. The future does not exist. You can seem to steer the present toward a given future by making changes IN THE PRESENT ONLY, which reconfigures what is here now and alters it in order to seem to move toward what was a "future goal", but that still does not take you out of the present.

When your mind believes it is in the past or future it is having a delusion, it is trying to escape from God, it is believing in spacetime and separation, it is denying reality, it is avoiding identity, and it is trying to die. God only ever exists in the present instant. Reality is here now, not off somewhere else.

And essentially even spacetime itself is nothing more than an infinitely small "blip" - a tiny instant, without a long history behind it and without a long future in front of it. Just a tiny slither in which things shift and transform. Just because it seems like the Earth is the result of millions of years of "evolution", and seem to have "evidence" of that fact, that doesn't mean that the Earth NOW is IN the past or made of it. It is only its current state.

There is really no past, and there is no future. This is why sanity restores you to a state of PRESENCE.

"Time is a trick; a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic."

"Time is a belief of the ego, so the lower mind, which IS the ego's domain, accepts it without question. The only aspect of time which is really eternal is NOW. That is what we REALLY mean when we say that now is the only time."

"There is no past nor future, and the idea of birth into a body has no meaning either once or many times."

"When he said "mind is the builder," he did not realize that it is only what it is building NOW that really creates the future. The past, in itself, does not have the ability to do this. Whenever we move from one instant to the next, the previous one no longer exists."

"At no SINGLE instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but NEVER experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely. For sin is never present."

"The Holy Spirit's use of memory is quite APART from time. He does NOT seek to use it as a means to KEEP the past, but rather as a way TO LET IT GO."

"Memory, like perception, is a skill made up by you, to take the place of what God GAVE in your creation."

"The Christ revealed to you NOW has no past, for He is changeless."

"It is impossible to accept the holy instant WITHOUT RESERVATION unless, JUST FOR AN INSTANT, you are willing to see no past or future."

"There IS no past to keep its fearful image in the way of glad awakening to present peace."

"You HAVE "sinned" IN THE PAST, but there IS no past. Always has no direction. Time seems to go in one direction, but when you reach its end, it will roll up like a long carpet that has spread along the past behind you, and will disappear."

"The Savior's vision is as innocent of what your brother is as it is free of any judgment made upon yourself. It sees no past in anyone at all. And thus it serves a wholly open mind, unclouded by old concepts and prepared to look on ONLY what the present holds."

In this world, all things lead to death. It's as though a missile has been fired, flying through the sky, and hurtling toward the ground. There is a sense of inevitability of decay, that everything will just gradually erode and age and suffer and die eventually. As though this is the way of the world.

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

When you look at the world in this way you can't really help but notice this is the case, except if you are denial of this fact. And while in that denial you might be thinking the world isn't so bad, except that eventually it proves itself. "Real choice is no illusion. But the world has none to offer.

ALL its roads but lead to disappointment, nothingness and death. There IS no choice in its alternatives. Seek not ESCAPE from problems here. The world was made that problems could not BE escaped. Be not deceived by all the different names its roads are given. They have but one end. And each is but the means to GAIN that end, for it is here that all its roads will lead, however differently they seem to start; however differently they seem to go. Their end is certain, for there is no choice among them. All of them will lead to death. On some you travel gaily for a while, before the bleakness enters. And on some the thorns are felt at once. The choice is not WHAT will the ending be, but WHEN it comes."

I recognize that when I am looking with my ego, or my worldly earthly body-identified 'normal view', this is the view I am adopting. I am going along with this "plan" of the world that everything before my eyes will wither and die. "The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

This is just how the world functions. It's how we set it up. It's what we call "natural". So when the leaves fall from the trees we think this is totally normal. When the bodies lay in the graves we think this is totally normal. But this entire system is entirely unnatural and not at all like God's reality.

"Without the idea of death there is no world." When you are aligning yourself with God's reality, with heaven's true nature, you are in support of life. In fact you support eternal longevity. You reject all notions of decay, degradation and death. In fact you not only move away from the downward "arc" of death's direction, you move UPWARD in a direction towards God. In this direction there is an arrow pointing toward the sky, as things which were death come back to life, and life is restored, and things are working out, and there is healing and miracles and reasons for happiness.

After a while of trying to recognize that God's ways are upward-bound, and earth's ways spiral into the dirt, the two "systems" of thinking become more clearly distinguished. And they are very much opposed to each other. The contrast between the two "modes of perception" becomes more intense and obivous.

"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. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight. The alternating investment in the two types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a long time, and can become very acute."

The world might be giving a message like "this is just going to get worse until there is death". But a God-aligned mind is asserting life, saying "This is going to get better and better until there is immortality." The two paths or viewpoints do not meet in the middle, they do not converge or agree with each other at all. They point in totally different directions - toward heaven or hell, towards life or death.

If you look at something happening and you say to yourself, this is real, and it's true, and this is natural, and this is how it's just going to be, and there is no hope and no future and eventually there's going to be death, then you're in the ego. You're falling for TEMPTATION. You're getting lost in the world and doing nothing to counteract its lies. Because the world is NOTHING like heaven and all its efforts are attempts to prove that sin is real and death is justified.

"This IS the "natural" condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is NOT natural at all, seem to be the UNnatural ones. For this world IS the opposite of Heaven, having been made to BE its opposite. And EVERYTHING here takes a direction EXACTLY opposite to what is true. In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as UNION. Here, where the ILLUSION of love is accepted IN ITS PLACE, love is perceived as separation and EXCLUSION."

To be in this world but OF ANOTHER WORLD, to be of God and heaven and yet with your feed on the earth, is to be UNNATURAL in terms of what the world thinks is natural. But in fact it is to be ABOVE the nature of the world - which means super-natural. It is the world that is unnatural. It is the world that is false and a lie. To recognize it for what it is, one has to adopt the upward-pointing resurrective miraculous path. Otherwise you are simply heading for the grave.

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

"They take a direction EXACTLY opposite, pointing as clearly to Heaven as the ego points to darkness and to death. We have followed much of the ego's logic, and have seen its logical conclusions. And HAVING seen them, we have realized that they can NOT be seen but in delusions. For there alone their SEEMING clearness SEEMS TO BE CLEARLY SEEN. Let us now turn AWAY from them, and follow the simple logic, by which the Holy Spirit teaches you the simple conclusions that speak for truth, and ONLY truth."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACIM lessons 10 through 14:

"10 My thoughts do not mean anything."

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

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

"13 A meaningless world engenders fear."

"14 God did not create a meaningless world."

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

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

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

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

You're dreaming, and only God creates reality!

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

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

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

The Course says "Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world (T-21.in.1:7)."

This seems to say only focus on changing your mind and never try to change the world (not even with the mind). That's not what it means.

The Course says "The sole responsibility of the miracle worker is to accept the Atonement for himself."

This seems to say you should do your own self-study and keep it quiet and accept Atonement for yourself and not have anything more to do with the world or other people (waking up in isolation). That's not what it means.

The Course says "God's answer lies where the belief in sin must be in the mind, for only there can its effects be utterly undone and without cause."

This seems to say, the cause of all problems is in the mind therefore the answer is in the mind and you should therefore focus on undoing it in the mind and not attempt to do anything to the body. This is not what it's saying.

How about "all mistakes must be corrected at the level on which they occur. Only the mind is capable of error. The body can act wrongly only when it is responding to misthought."

This seems to say you must correct at the mind-level and apply the course at the mind-level only, where the error is. But it also tells us that the mind can mis-think and that its mis-thoughts seem to affect the body. This means that in those mis-thoughts, there is a level confusion, because believing that errors on one level can affect another level is level confusion.

Ok so how about this: "A major step in the Atonement plan is to undo error at ALL levels. Sickness or "not-right-mindedness" is the result of level confusion, because it always entails the belief that what is amiss on one level can adversely affect another. We have referred to miracles as the means of correcting level confusion, for all mistakes must be corrected at the level on which they occur. Only the mind is capable of error. The body can act wrongly only when it is responding to misthought. The body cannot create, and the belief that it can, a fundamental error, produces all physical symptoms. Physical illness represents a belief in magic"

This is a clearer definition of what's going on with level confusion. ALL sickness is a result of a confusion of the levels. When there is error on the level of the mind and the mind is mis-thinking, the body responds to this mis-thought because the body itself is a projection from the mind. The level of mind overrides the level of the body. The body therefore does not have power over the mind and the mind does not ever react to the body. The mind creates the body and projects it and maintains it and instructs it. The mind even tells the body what to experience and what to perceive and what to supposedly 'sense' with its senses. Yet the body does not really ever tell the mind anything it doesn't already know.

So when we have e.g. a belief that the body has a mind of its own, the body is affected by outside sources, the body has its own sickness, that the sickness is because of something happening at the body level, that we are a victim of the body, that the body's issues have power over us, or anything like that, we are in level confusion. It's a reversal of cause and effect.

"Physical illness represents a belief in magic". This means, when you believe that there are 'magical causes' beyond the mind's reach, outside of the mind and beyond the body, which have the power to make something happen, THAT is a belief in magic. When cause and effect are reversed, that's a belief in magic. And it's a level confusion. Magic = level confusion.

Correcting level confusion and thus sickness and thus 'doing the course' entails correcting error on the level it exists. Error exists on the mind level. We must recognize mind as cause and body/world as effect. You can't change an effect, which is why the earlier quote said not to change the world but change your mind about the world. If you change your mind, the body/world MUST change. Not 'maybe', or 'sometimes'. It must. The world comes from the mind. If miracles are not occurring, something has gone wrong.

You seek to change your mind about the world in order to correct mental error on a mental level. But that does not mean there are no 'effects' in the world or on the body level. The body level, a 'slave' to the mind, must reflect it. Therefore, there CAN be a reflection of 'heaven' on earth. A REFLECTION... not the actual thing. Elsewhere the Course talks about how this reflection is possible and how it is still one-step removed from the real thing. You can see a reflection of God in the world, but it is not God.

So no, miracles are not to do with shifts or changes in perception, or mental corrections as such. Miracles, moreso, as expressions of love, are what may happen when the shift/change/correction of mind perception has already been accomplished (through purification/forgiveness), ALLOWING love to flow through us and extend miracles to others. In this way, the world CAN be changed. The world CAN be healed. Sickness and death both can be abolished in yourself AND others because we invented them on the mind level.

So there is, to me, definitely an aspect here to bringing God 'to' the world, bringing heaven 'to' the world, bringing miracles of healing 'to the world'. BUT... not because the world IS heaven, but because it can reflect it temporarily. We are not meant to just focus on our navel and do mind correction in private and never have it have any effect on our body or on other people. The Course comes down to this:

Remove all of the blocks to the awareness of love's presence.

What happens when you remove these blocks? The awareness that love is present, returns to you. So now you are aware of love. And love is in you. And love is God. And God is powerful. And God loves everyone. So now that you're not standing in the way of God, and you're not creating error in the mind, what's going to happen now? Love is going to extend through you unhindered and uninterrupted by the ego and it's going to broadcast through you to the whole world. And that's going to produce healing miracles, and heartfelt interactions, and love and support for others. Unconditional love. That's very different from the Course being all about 'you' and your seemingly separate mind. Your mind is NOT separate from other people's. And your body is IN the mind. And the world is IN the mind. And all of this can be healed and corrected.

Beware the ego. You bring it with you into the Course, and it will do everything it can to delude you, confuse you, distract you, blind you, and make you use the Course as a weapon.

One of the main ways that it does this is by engaging the intellect. Whatever you are experiencing right now, that is your most real-seeming experience and represents your current truth/beliefs. In order to really change that experience you have to undo some ego, which will shift you to experiencing something else.

The ego doesn't like that. The ego wants to keep the ego and increase itself. A major way it does this is through shifting into concepts. In essence, attempting to take on board "truth" which is too far outside the envelope of what you actually are experiencing, it shifts awareness into the intellect. You can "conceive" of the thing being talked about, but you cannot experience it.

The intellect is the ego's attempt to bridge the gap between where you are most authentically at, and where it pretends it wants to be. It is a tool for dissection and analysis and trying to find answers in illusions. It's a mechanism for judging, it experiences reactions, and tries to make realities. It's part of the dreaming mind.

What happens unfortunately is that the intellect becomes strongly engaged by studying the Course. There are so many concepts, theories and ideas in the Course. There are so many quotes which say or thing or another. A student will amass an internal library of all these things, and then the ego will use them as weapons and justifications.

What happens is, because the intellect takes you away from the present experience and into fantasy, the intellect becomes a way for the ego to avoid the present. The intellect loves to be a quotation machine, it loves to get hung up on the form of words, it loves to fixate on what is specifically in or not in the course, and it loves to be the ultimate judge or the authority or thing which figures out and decides what is true or not.

What I've seen is, some Course students become so lost in the form of the Course's words, the theology, the quotes, the concepts, that their intellect goes into overdrive. When you try to hold a normal conversation with these people, there is practically nothing you can say which won't be picked apart. You can't speak to these people with normal words because if there is any overlap with course words or if the course seems to have a redefinition of a term, they will see the use of the word as an error.

What then happens is they will have a reaction to a perceived error, will use the course to back up "why" its an error, and then the conversation will shift away from presence and into the course concepts where they'll assert all the reasons/quotes as to why what you said was wrong. You don't even really know what it was you said, being normal, that was so erroneous, and then you end up being bombarded with all this "correction" that you didn't even need.

Another favorite ego tool is to jump around in the levels. This is a classic move. Basically you're talking about something within a given context. Maybe you're discussing the ego or the world or something. You say something. Their ego intellect kicks in and sees a opportunity to be right, or basically pulls up a quote or course concept which they believe has truth to it, and they then use it as a weapon. They'll jump out of the `level` or context you're discussing on, and jump into some super-high conceptual level of the course. This "trumps" whatever you said, and seems to render you in error, or less true, and therefore you're wrong.

For example, you could be talking about forgiveness or how to apply it to something, and you say something, they get triggered, and then they suddenly come out with something like "that doesn't exist" or "nothing happened" or something... something at a higher level, which basically ultimately is true, BUT, it's being used as a way to discredit and overly dismiss whatever you said that wasn't even a point of contention. The person positions themselves with weapons of truth, concepts, in order to have the best most high trump-cards possible, so that no matter what you try to discuss with them, they will constantly undermine you. There is no way to hold a normal conversation with such people.

I think we all do this to some extent. But Course students especially are prone to this. It is so easy to get hung up on what the Course said on some matter and to then use it as a way to be subtly right, to use it against other people, to make people wrong etc.

I recently was in a group of people discussing ACIM stuff. I was shocked. I couldn't believe how much of this intellectual prostrating was going on. It seemed practically impossible to say anything without some person jumping all over it and pulling it apart, with a sort of "I've got a better truth" attitude. Even saying things which were absolutely nothing to do with the course whatsoever, which suddenly were turned around and explained to be false or in error because of something it contained. It turns into an addiction to correcting people.

The intellect can be used by the ego to really firmly latch onto the concepts as though they are the truth. They are held onto like precious jewels. And then they are used as weapons. The concepts are not the truth itself. Truth is an experience. Getting lost in debating the Course is very easy to do. It's possible to amass a considerable body of conviction about what the Course is saying or meaning and to then be so rigid and fixed in that that you can no longer talk to people normally or allow them their mistakes.

One person I was talking to was so distracted by intellectual positions that it was almost like talking to no-one. I would say one thing, they would do an instant bypass, find some other quotation or concept to go against it, and throw it back at me. I also wrote a few posts which were clear and obviously correct. But what happens is, people will then read it, sort of quietly refuse it, find one word you said which was slightly "not pure course-correct lingo", and then go in a diatribe about how you were wrong, completely glossing over and ignoring what you actually said or whether it was true.

This is what the ego does. It creates diversions. Distractions. Cover-ups. It makes noise about something, anything, other than what is immediately present. It pulls you away from the here and now. It takes you out of conversations and into wars. It uses its prowess to launch counter-attacks to perceived attacks, which it itself put out there with its mis-perceptions and judgements, and then reacted to.

You have to beware of the ego doing this. It will try to use the Course to point out the ways that people are wrong and then react to this perception by trying to correct them, when in fact it is your own mind which is at fault. It's just another way the ego projects responsibility and blame.

"WHAT IS NOT LOVE IS MURDER" - ACIM

Here's how this works.

A mind which is fully awake and aware, recognizes that it actually shares a mind with everyone. It is at one with them. It sees its own identity within others, and knows that they are part of itself.

A mind of oneness therefore recognizes that whatever applies to others directly applies to itself. It is aware enough to see that, because it is "in" others, if it were to attack others, it would be attacking itself. And because this is very obvious to the awake mind, it recognizes that such actions would be completely self-defeating, and so does not attack.

When the mind can see clearly that it is one with others, it will treat others only with love, because to do anything else would hurt its own self.

However, when the mind enters into a belief in separation, what it's doing is it's introducing an illusion of denial inbetween itself and others. This denial makes it seem as if other people do not have "shared interests" with itself, other people are different somehow, other people are disconnected from itself, and therefore what applies to them does not apply to itself. It does not recognize or see itself in others so does not believe that what applies to them applies to itself.

On these terms, the mind is now partly unaware that it is one with other minds, does not see itself in others, and does not recognize that to hurt others would hurt itself. It now seems plausible that there is an `option`, a possibility, to do something unto others that is not done unto itself.

Another way to put this is that a separation is introduced in-between cause and effect. The mind now believes it is capable of causing effects in others which are not caused in itself. It does not see that attempting to hurt others hurts itself, so it think it can "get away with" or be excluded from those effects.

The idea of being able to do something to others which does not directly affect yourself, is the idea of "getting away with murder." It means you can now seem to attack another without experiencing the consequences. This is attempted murder. The entire ego thought system is based on this, and absolutely everything that happens in the ego thought system is murderous!

The problem of the mind then is that even though it believes it is not one with other minds, and that it can get away with attacking/causing without being affected, it's actually not true that it gets away with it. In one way or another, the mind IS still attacking itself, and it is hurting itself when it tries to hurt others. The ego will claim this is not true, and that you can escape from the consequences, but it is in denial. If the mind attacks another, it itself will be attacked BY itself.

This then becomes the ego trap of believing that you can get away with projecting your sin onto others without having to deal with the consequences. It sets up the entire foundation of how you will deal with your sin/separation, by trying to make someone else receive the consequences of it, supposedly making you innocent or rather, letting you "get away with" your murderous intentions by having someone else be blamed for them. In this way, the ego creates a state of "fake innocence"... where you seem innocent because someone ELSE has taken the blame for your attack.

Therefore to the ego, innocence is murderous. To the ego, it is possible for the innocent to sin, and for the innocent to insanely destroy others without destroying itself. Can you imagine how ridiculous and twisted it is to believe that someone can be free of responsibility even though they're standing there with the murder weapon having just attacked their brother, believing they are completely free of all consequences? Within the dream, this is insanity, given they did not and will not escape the consequences. The cost of attack is the loss of their own identity.

When we say "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", this does not really mean that other people are separate from you and you should just treat them well. This would mean that maybe, maybe not, they might treat you well in return. This is still a breakdown in cause and effect, leaving open the possibility that even if you treat others well, they may still attack you.

The real meaning of this is that, in the mind aware of its oneness, how it treats others IS how IT treats itself. Therefore it is in its own vested interest ("shared interest") to treat others as it DOES treat itself, because whatever it does to another it IS DOING to itself. This does not rely on others to decide whether or not to reciprocate, because if you treat others with love you WILL experience the effect of love. This is also the true meaning of "karma", not that separate causes will decide to attack you in retaliation, but that YOU attack yourself. All attack is self attack.

What is not love, is murder. Any belief in attack, any sin, any guilt, and anger, any argument, any belief that something applies to others and not you, any way you come between people, any sense of separation, any illusion of being innocent while secretly scapegoating your sin onto others, means you are being murderous. You are trying to "get away with" having sinned and to not suffer the consequences.

The fact is, you do not escape the consequences of sin. If you believe in it, it will destroy you. It's not possible for something to apply to someone else that you don't also believe applies to yourself. You never really get to be "right" and others wrong, because if you are right, you are wrong. You never get to "succeed" in the ego's terms, because that means you have failed. You never get to "win" the ego's game, because that means you have used separation and have lost.

The only way to end the murderousness is to return to love. That means removing the blocks to awareness which prevent you from being able to RECOGNIZE yourself in others, to be aware of your ONENESS with others, and to therefore KNOW that if you do even one tiny thing to hurt anyone, it's going to hurt you. That's a pretty big incentive to always remain loving, because to attack is to be attacked by yourself, and who in their right mind, a sane mind, would want to do that? There is no sense to it.

The fact that what is not love is murder should not be used by the ego right now to make you feel guilty, or to say, well, this means that I'm being murderous because I'm not awake yet, therefore I'm even more sinful. Don't let the ego use this information to accuse you even more than you already have. Simply recognize this is what's happening and continue with your forgiveness of yourself. Murder is not REAL, it is an illusion. There is no REAL attack or REAL separation. It is just a state of being mistaken and thinking that it's possible to accomplish murder and to get away with it, when in fact it's not possible, AND you cannot really hurt who you really are.

There is no murder in heaven. There is no murder in God's reality. Only love is real.

Fear has but one cause, not many. It is not caused by what you think it’s caused by. Every single fear in the world has one cause.

When you tried to sin, you may have believed you succeeded in creating real effects. Real irreversible damage. But you had an option. Either proceed forward to guilt, or go backwards to the reversal of sin. Guilt or forgiveness was the choice. Either sin is real and you are guilty, or sin is not real and you’re innocent.

Choosing not to forgive yourself, and choosing to keep your belief in sin, the only option is to condemn yourself to death. Go towards forgiveness and you’ll choose life, accepting that you deserve to be forgiven. Go towards guilt and you’ll choose death, accepting that you deserve to be punished for what you did.

This is where the core root of all fear comes in. You actually ACCEPT and AGREE that you SHOULD be punished, because you’re guilty. The punishment seems completely justified. Your own belief that you deserve punishment for being guilty then creates fear of that punishment. But it’s not a fear of being punished by others. Here’s the secret cause of all fear:

You are afraid of what you are going to do to yourself.

This fear arises solely because you, yourself, believe you deserve to be punished, in total agreement that you are guilty, and having accepted that "it is true" that you really sinned and are therefore guilty. It is your own belief about yourself. You actually "agree" that it not only makes sense, but is completely justified, and acceptable, that you be punished for this.

This is a big problem, because it is the continued development a death wish. It means you want to hurt yourself and you believe you should be hurt.

This is not only the source of all fear in the world, it is also the source of all victimhood. Because at this point, you actually welcome punishment. You actually position yourself so that you can be attacked. You actually make yourself powerless, and allow yourself to be abused. You actually hire people to come along and hurt you. And you actually make plans for being attacked justifiably.

Ultimately then you become afraid of the fact that YOU have it in for yourself. That YOU want you to be punished and to "atone" for your sin. And ultimately the only punishment you believe is justified and worthy of you, is death.

This is not anything to do with anyone else. It has nothing to do with what other people are going to do to you. It’s not even anything to do with the fear of HOW the punishment will come or of WHO will be the one to inflict it.

Typically however you will make your own death wish unconscious and project it and then obsess over this general anxiety about what "someone else" is going to "do to you" against your will. But while you are busy in conscious awareness making plans to avoid your attackers, unconsciously you are asking to be attacked.

If someone were to seem to then attack you would claim it was completely unjustified, because you have made your self-attack and death wish unconscious. You actually think you don’t want to suffer or be punished, nor deserve it. That’s what the facade of fake innocence is for - it covers up you guilty secret. Then you get to pretend you are justified in being angry when someone hurts you, as if you didn’t want it. But you did ask for it, and you did it yourself.

On the surface, consciously, you will experience this as being a victim, as if you are not asking for and do not want any kind of punishment at all. You’ll even run away from it and try to make yourself safe and avoid people and create an illusion of innocence and security, presenting yourself as harmless and that no-one should suspect you of guilt. But it’s only to cover up the underlying belief that you deserve to suffer and die because you believe you are guilty.

It’s pretty grim isn’t it. This is what every ego plans for its host.

But the fact is, you cannot be free of such suffering until you can admit that it is YOU who is trying to do something to yourself. So long as it *seems* as if someone else is the one punishing you, or its your job, or its the weather, or food you ate, or something environmental, or a group of people, whatever, these projections are designed to KEEP your unconscious self hatred hidden. The more you can disown it and project it and see it coming "from" anyone other than yourself, the more you can play the victim role and pretend you don’t want it.

Make no mistake. NO-ONE dies without their own consent. All attack is self attack. You are 100% responsible for what you are trying to do to yourself. You cannot suffer AT ALL if you do not choose to believe you are guilty or sinful. All of your projected causes of fear, which make it look like you’re afraid of what is going to "happen to you" without your will, it is a DECOY for what you secretly are planning to do to yourself.

You have to get to where you are willing to admit to this, if you want to be free of it. It’s you who believes you deserve to die, not the world, and not anyone else. YOU, need to forgive YOURSELF, for what you have not really done. YOU, need to let go of your belief that you really are guilty and deserve punishment, so that you will stop planning for your own suffering while building fake defenses against it.

No-one is attacking you against your will. The world is not causing you. Death cannot happen to you against your will. Remember that all attack is self attack and it is only your attempt to be at war with yourself that needs to be corrected. A belief in deserving punishment, or of being truly sinful or guilty, IS a belief in death and being deserving of death. It is, literally, a suicidal belief. All death is suicide.

Forgiveness is needed, of yourself, to recognize your innocence and to opt to NOT believe you sinned. You do NOT deserve to die, and you do NOT need to be punishing yourself. You DO deserve the love of God and you ARE innocent. All the rest is a mistaken ego belief.

All fear is the fear of yourself.

Here is how Jesus puts your self attack:

"Lay down your arms, and come without defense into the quiet place where Heaven's peace holds all things still at last. Lay down all thoughts of danger and of fear. Let no attack enter with you. Lay down the cruel sword of judgment that you hold against your throat, and put aside the withering assaults with which you seek to hide your holiness."

Everyone should love everyone, and be a part of everyone. That is natural. What is unnatural is to be separated off and not share with each other.

The device which we use to separate ourselves off, is the body. Bodies act like little anchors that root you in a little spot of space and time and keep you apart from others. And without a body there cannot be specialness or special relationships.

Within this scenario, all bodies are separate and unrelated. There are no relationships, only separateness. Everyone is alone. The body is like a prison with legs, walking around keeping its occupants inside. The prisoners cannot reach outside of their prisons, but they can shuffle their prison cells around to try to get closer to each other. Usually the prisoners clash and disagree and hate each other for their differences.

Sometimes, when two prisoners find each other and regard each other as similar, sharing common ground, common features, common backgrounds, common interests and beliefs, they see each other as less of a threat. They are less than totally hated for a while, granted special rights and privileges.

To perceive another as being like you, in terms of physicality or form or beliefs etc, creates the illusion that you are less at war with them. There seems to be something that you agree about. When there is a lot of agreement, you might even feel trusting enough to become closer to the person.

You then enter into a special relationship. The relationship, which is really the absence of relationship, and more like two prison cells banging against each other in the darkness, brings two together so that everyone else might be excluded.

"When two INDIVIDUALS seek to become ONE, they are trying to DECREASE their magnitude. Each would DENY his power, for the SEPARATE union EXCLUDES THE UNIVERSE. Far more is LEFT OUTSIDE than would be taken in. For God is left WITHOUT, and NOTHING taken in."

They come together to share on the basis of how they are alike, and therefore how they threaten each other less than others. This mutual illusion of trust seems to open doors and lets the two become more intimate. But their intimacy depends on the rejection of all others.

These chosen ones, the special love interest, the exclusive partner, the one with whom special rules are agreed to, whom has special rights which cannot be shared with anyone else, becomes the idol. They are given special artificial value, not inherent to who they are, but in contrast to what others seem to lack.

And so they experience feelings of closeness, seeming special love, a certain degree of trust, a magicalness in which the whole world seems to disappear, and you wish you could be with this person forever and to hell with everyone else. Coming home to this person feels like a breath of fresh air, as you both lick your wounds and hate the rest together, pointing out their flaws and keeping them at a distance.

The so-called relationship is then a tentative state of mutual partial agreement, or allegiance. Certain terms are made which cannot be broken. The persons are not allowed to become too different or step away or act outside the prison walls, otherwise they are violating the contract. And the contract may even be called a marriage.

If one of the persons strays too far, goes outside the envelope of interests, violates the common ground, breaks the walls, stops being exclusive, tries to become intimate with another, changes in a way which makes then unalike, or steps on their toes, the underlying sense of loneliness, isolation, abandonment and rejection will come flying out, hurled at the other to accuse them of sin.

And so the special love quickly turns to special hate, as those who once were trusted allies turn into enemies, brothers become strangers, lovers become divorcees, and significant others become forgotten.

For as much as they allowed the other to come into their secret circle, they kept everyone else out. They had to in order to make the relationship special. This chosen one was the only one permitted to be loved. This special one was the only one who could gain permission to access secrets and hidden hates. The whole world was against them and they against it. But their conditional love always had conditions from the start.

At some point, a relationship based on bodies, and on such specialness, and illusions of joining, may be brought into question. If there is enough of a movement or willingness towards becoming more unconditional, truly open, or sharing more honestly, a relationship not based on flimsy illusions but on something deeper, then the special relationship will be brought into question.

This questioning of it will reveal that the two did not really come together in love, they came together in hate, and hated together, and thought this was love. And the whole relationship will be seen as unfounded, in which what they thought was a magical kingdom of perfection and bliss was in fact founded on a lie. A lie of loneliness and shared suffering and false empathy and codependency and enabling and justifying attack together.

This can produce a lot of pain and misery and shock, because suddenly what was an illusion of love and magical specialness and special value is suddenly recognized as false, faulty, flawed and fake. You thought you were in a relationship but you really weren't. And so now in order to convert this specialness into a true relationship, a holy relationship, it's going to take some transcendence of its exclusive limitations.

The terms of the relationship will have to change. Who you think you are relating with will have to open up. You will have to become more unconditional and accepting and tolerant. You will have to put aside grievances and unforgivenesses and hatreds. You will have to dig deep to find love even in the face of rejection and attack. And this will also mean having to heal and love yourself so that you are willing to give more than you ever gave before.

If the relationship can tolerate this transition, from a make-believe love affair of idol worship, special love, body worship, physical intimacy, safety in numbers and so on, to a more encompassing inclusiveness, then it can be converted into a holy relationship.

To do this, bodies must be transcended. The other cannot be regarded as a body. Nor can yourself. Special values and beliefs which seemed to apply only to the two of you have to be questioned, and now the interests of others have to be incorporated as well. Others have to be included in the circle which has to expand to include everyone. Exclusivity has to go out the window, and all sense of physical limits has to be uprooted. The whole sense of who and what you are, your identity, is brought into question.

This is where you are learning to truly join, to unconditionally love, to identify beyond the body, to learn to see the other for the first time beyond the body, to truly open up and expose oneself, to join in minds instead of in bodies, and to realize that you ARE each other. Interests become shared, special boundaries become blurred, the world is no longer an enemy, and an equality sets in.

In true equality, the other can no longer be seen as a parent, or a child, or a special one, or someone better or worse than self or others. They have to be seen as God's equal creation, alongside you, in which it is an honor to support and help them in their ascension into the light. To heal with them and to share with them. The two of you have to come into the light of honesty and truth and forgiveness. And then you might find that you are able to actually BE related, because you are part of each other.

The prison doors begin to swing open, true access begins to reveal itself as mind reaches out beyond the body, and now the two can become one. Thus specialness ends, and the unholy become whole again. And now the wholeness incorporates the whole, and all are regarded as included in this whole. One way of relating to every one. One love, one truth, one family of God.

The appearance of the sickness is actually an illusion which covers up what the problem is. The sickness, the symptoms, are actually there to function as a distraction, to make you focus on the body and to make the body real. This is a protective mechanism to try to defend your ego-aligned self against a misperception of the truth.

It's not that the form of the sickness is the problem. The PURPOSE of the sickness is the problem, which is to act as a defense. There is a perceived NEED for a defense, and that manifests as physical symptoms. But the appearance of it, the physicality of the sickness, is not really the cause or the thing that's happening.

What's happening is the underlying attempt by the MIND to shut out God and to cling to the body. It just happens to CREATE symptoms such as pain and disease, in order to try to get the awareness to fixate on the body, to think that the body is very real, and therefore IGNORE the truth - to shut it out of awareness.

So sickness is an escape from reality. If someone has cancer they don't need to be healed of cancer. They need to be healed of the belief that they need cancer in order to protect them from reality. As Jesus says, when the purpose of the sickness is recognized, and when it is understood to be an illusion, it must disappear. If you had no more "use" for the sickness, and it wasn't serving a purpose of any kind, it would have no basis for the mind to keep sustaining it, and it would vanish.

So it's like, someone gets exposed to truth but their ego misinterprets it and their interpretation scares or threatens them, so they put up a "shield" of protection, which cuts them off from Life and blocks life-sustaining "energy" flowing in the system, and creates distortions in the body image. The body image then shows a sickness to symbolize the need for escape, and to provide an escape. Therefore the sickness is always a form of distraction and an attempt to make the body MORE real than the truth. Trying to make illusions more real than reality produces sickness.

If you could be convinced that you don't really have a need for the sickness because the purpose of it was misinformed, and what you experienced as a threat is not really a threat, and it's not a threat because you're not really the ego self that sees it as a threat, then you'd be willing to let it go and stop using it to protect you. You'd see no purpose in it, no need for it, and no use for it. So it would disappear.

The trouble is that once sickness is implemented, its symptoms and suffering can be so effective at distraction, so effective at absorbing your attention, so effective at making the body seem real and frightening, that you have all kinds of peripheral reactions as a whole other "layer" of experiences. You start trying to defend yourself against the defense! And that means you start to view the sickness as though you did not choose it.

Theres's a very good reason why you do not want to admit to having chosen the sickness, and it's because if you did, you'd have to own up to that and wouldn't be able to hide behind it. The sickness was made to block awareness and to shut out the truth, so if you were to admit you made it, you would not longer be able to receive its benefits of defending you.

You don't want that, so instead you shut out awareness that you made it, perceive that you did not want it or ask for it, and then launch into a series of reactions to the sickness as though it is attacking you, you want it to go away, etc... but you really don't. Not honestly. If you really wanted it to be done with you wouldn't react to it at all, you'd just admit to the ways you wanted and needed it and would drop those, having come to accept that the truth was true and your misinterpretation of the truth was invalid.

Fighting with sickness therefore is part of the huge distraction that sickness presents, and can have you spinning your wheels trying to just deal with the symptoms and discomforts. Part of you is saying you want it to go away, while another part of you - now unconscious - is actively choosing to keep it, because in the bigger picture you're still terrified of what you saw in the truth and are trying to protect yourself. It therefore frightens you to think of actually being HEALTHY, because that would mean you'd take away your PROTECTION, and then the truth would be able to attack you again. So efforts to become "well" actually can have a lot of resistance and a lot of defense against, because it actually threatens you more to become free of the sickness, IF you are still misperceiving the truth.

Perhaps a key then lies simply in the mistaken perception you originally had which seemed to show you that you needed to become sick in order to defend yourself. You need to look at what you perceived and why you perceived it. But you need to look at it with Holy Spirit or a higher perspective of truth. You need to be willing to have been mistaken. This is why you need to APPLY FORGIVENESS, to undo the ILLUSIONS that you were under that made you misperceive, creating the need for a defense. You need to disassociate from the ego identity in some way so that you do not take the truth as a threat, and do not see it as meaning that you are going to stop existing.

The primary "cause" of sickness, if you will, is the simple fact that you have bound yourself to the ego, are perceiving what IT perceives, are interpreting the truth THROUGH it, and therefore you become frightened whenever you are exposed to the truth. The truth is that the ego is not real and does not exist, and everything it believes in is false. If you are identified with it and think that it is you, then whenever the truth comes along you will be frightened that you are being attacked by it, that it implies you do not exist, that you are not real, and that's horrifying. It is a misperception, but it's horrifying. And who would not want to defend themselves against that?!

Correction is needed therefore, and a forgiveness is needed and a willingness to consider that who you are is not the ego. You need some reassurance and clarity and perspective that just because the truth says something, does not mean it is attacking you. Who you thought you were was mistaken. How you were perceiving was mistaken. What you saw in the truth was projected onto it by your own mistakes. It amounts to a willingness to accept that the truth is TRUE, and not that the truth contains evil intentions. If you can accept that the truth is true, and not false, and that what you thought was true is false, then you have the key to unlock the NEED for sickness to protect you from it.

When there is no misperception of the truth, there is no need for sickness, and you will not create it or use it.

Sickness isn't really the problem that needs healing. Sickness showing up in form is an ILLUSION, because it covers up the underlying secret ambition of self preservation, and is meant to be a distraction and a smoke-screen. That's why sickness isn't real. It's not the problem that needs to be corrected. Trying to treat the sickness or the symptoms of sickness therefore will fail.

It should be obvious that since sickness is an attempt at self-preservation, making oneself sick and likely to die in the name of self-preservation is insane.

The Kingdom of God has the interesting property of having to be shared and extended in order to exist. And the Course teaches that in order to truly 'have' something, you must give it away, because giving it proves that you must have had it and you can only give what you have. It also tells us that in order to experience anything you must SHARE in it because it is available to all and is not for your private possession.

"To have all, give all to all".

This is also reflected in "giving and receiving are one".

What it means is, things of God don't just sit there idle doing nothing. God isn't just "being God" without any increase or creation. If you are not sharing and extending love, love is not being love. This is why definitions of 'oneness' and 'non-duality' fall far short of the creative, extending, loving qualities of God.

We are also told that miracles which come from love will "go out because of what they are", but that "you are needed that they can begin." What that means is, love simply automatically radiates and extends by its own nature, but in order to allow it to extend through you you have to remove your blocks to it first. Then it moves through you without you having to make it do so.

Everything about God's Kingdom shares this nature. Something is not real unless it is shared, open, extending, increasing. This sharing and extending is like a RADIANCE or a radiation, or radiating outward. This produces LIGHT and PRESENCE. In a sense "God said, let there be light", speaks to God's creative ability to shine and create and extend.

Remember that in God's Kingdom everything is increased by being given, and giving something does not mean there is a loss (an ego idea). Instead, giving anything real increases it because giving does the opposite of losing.

Jesus talks about this in terms of everything being an idea. When you share an idea it is increased and it becomes stronger the more people believe in it. It does not diminish and the person having the idea does not lose anything.

The Course also says, "nothing real can be increased except by sharing". It is also the nature of love to extend and increase, because it has absolutely no reservations or limits or reasons to withhold itself from "shining" and radiating and going out everywhere.

Jesus talks about this in how the children of God contain the same "inner radiance" as the Father, and this is the source of all extension and creation.

Creation and extension and sharing are the same thing. To share to the ego means both parties have less than the whole. To share in Heaven means that both parties SHARE the WHOLE, and there is no decrease, and in fact there is an increase. The total is greater than the sum of the parts.

This is also true of the Sonship - "the combined total of the Sonship is greater than the sum of its parts". This is because each Son in the Sonship is not just a finite unit. Instead, each son SHARES and extends and increases and amplifies the rest of the Sonship. So it's not just like 500 sons lined up alongside each other, it's more like 500 sons overlapping and increasing with each other, creating a wholeness which is far larger than their individual contributions. This is also part of the holographic nature of creation.

Everything about God, His Kingdom, Creation, Extension, Sharing, Reality, Truth, Love, it all has this property of increase and sharing and going out and radiating and illuminating. And if this radiating and extending were not occurring, none of this stuff would be able to exist.

Love could not be love unless love loved to love and radiated love and extended and increased love's presence. Creation would not be possible at all (since nothing real can increase unless it shares) if it weren't for this sharing, giving, increasing.

There would be no light without the ability for it to shine, which means to "project" or extend outward beyond its source. God would have no Sons or Sonship and Heaven could not exist without it being in a constant state of radiance and increase.

Also therefore you cannot have or enjoy or share in anything real unless you also are willing for it to be given and extended. This is because, if you think about it, in order to receive something of God, you cannot just take it and possess it and diminish God's supply of it. Instead you have to be open to receive, to SHARE it, ie both you and God are experiencing the same thing, which also means this openness makes you willing to GIVE it as much as you receive it - giving and receiving are one, and therefore to experience love requires the willingness to share, receive, and give love, which automatically increases it.

God's act of CREATION, which we also possess since God shared it with us and created us capable of creating like Him, is an act of RETAINING your own light and love and yet 'projecting' it outward so that you shine, and this shining produces an increase, and manifests a "new creation" which itself possesses the ability to create and extend to exactly the same degree as yourself and God, and so now there is the whole of God + the whole of you + the whole of your own creations, and nothing is lost, and so there has only been an INCREASE. This is why Heaven rejoices as each Son of God returns Home to increase its light, and why joy increases, and everything just keeps on "growing" infinitely.

As love is received, shared, and extended, it increases because you are now acting like an amplifier or a relay which boosts the signal as it passes through. By giving it, by sharing it, you can 'have it', but you can't 'have' it by claiming it in isolation for yourself (which is ego). And so anything that is real cannot be possessed it has to be shared, and so anything real automatically has this sharing/increasing quality to its "terms and conditions". To exist (to have), it MUST extend. This is also why God creates and why every child of God is imbued with the same will to create. It is NATURAL to extend and create and to increase the presence of love. Nothing can exist without sharing and extension and equal giving and receiving.

This is the VERY SIMPLE essence of our work with ACIM to return to sanity. We simply need to identity and recognize, correctly, WHAT IS TRUE, AND WHAT IS FALSE.

This recognition comes about through the DISTINCTION between the two. Some things are simply inherently true - such as the creations of light. Some things are simple inherently false - such as the illusions of the dream world.

It is only because we have CONFUSED AND SWAPPED what is true and what is false, that we do not clearly recognize which is which. We have lost touch with reality and sanity. We simply need to learn to distinguish clearly between them, and recognize that ONLY that which is really true is true.

If your mind has confused or mixed or swapped truth and lies, it perceives accordingly. False perception is INVERTED perception, meaning what is true appears false and what is false appears true. This "total confusion" is the logical outcome of the ego thought system. It produces false perception in which NOTHING is recognized correctly.

To access true or accurate perception, that which actually is true must be "separated out" from that which is false. The false must be clearly and accurately recognized AS inherently false, and the true must be clearly accepted AS the only real truth. All real truth is of God. All real truth is THE KINGDOM and its contents. All real truth about YOU and your brothers is defined in the creation of souls.

When you have COMPLETELY distinguished correctly what really is true and what is not, BOTH the true and the false are recognized for what they are. The true - as in heaven or the real world, is seen as the only truth (vigilance for the Kingdom), while the false - the world of illusions - is regarded AS false and give no reality.

Jesus in fact tells us that if we give reality or truth TO that which is false, we will SEE IT, because we invest it with belief. This produces false perception and sees the world of bodies. When that which is true is the ONLY place where you allow there to be reality and truth, you will SEE ONLY the face of Christ.

This means that learning to SEE THE TRUTH (the Kingdom), allows you to OVERLOOK the false world (which is now the forgiven world, the veil, which disappears from sight). He wants us therefore to SEE ONLY REALITY.

Jesus makes reference to this many times over...

"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing ELSE. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM."

"Recognize this, for it is true, and truth MUST be recognized, if it is to be distinguished from illusion"

"You do not have them now, because your mind is totally undisciplined, and you cannot distinguish between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, love and fear."

"Therefore, if you learn the tests by which you can distinguish everything from nothing, you will make the better choice."

"Only by learning what fear is can you finally learn to distinguish the possible from the impossible and the false from the true."

"Its sole concern is to distinguish between truth on the one hand, and error on the other."

"His Voice will teach you how to distinguish between pain and joy, and will lead you out of the confusion you have made."

"Thoughts are not big or little; powerful or weak. They are merely true or false."

"Thought-systems are but true or false, and all their ATTRIBUTES come simply from what they ARE. Only the Thoughts of God ARE true. And all that follows FROM them, COMES FROM what they are, and is as true as is the holy Source from which they come."

"But a hypothesis is tested as either true or false, to be accepted or rejected accordingly. If it is shown to be true it becomes a fact, after which no one attempts to evaluate it unless its status AS fact is questioned. ... EVERY idea which the ego has accorded the status of fact is questionable, because facts are in the realm of knowledge."

"For perceptions cannot be partly true. If you believe in truth AND illusion, you CANNOT TELL WHICH IS TRUE."

"The one correction possible for false perception must be true perception."

"My role is to separate the true from the false in your own unconscious, so it can break through the barriers the ego has set up and shine into your minds."

"Jesus remains a Savior because he saw the false without accepting it as true."

"In his complete identification with the Christ, the perfect Son of God, His one creation and His happiness, forever like Himself and One with Him, Jesus became what all of you must be. He led the way for you to follow him. He leads you back to God because he saw the road before him, and he followed it. He made a clear distinction, still obscure to you, between the false and true."

"For reason sees the SOURCE of an idea as what will make it true or false."

"Innocent (or true) perception means that you NEVER misperceive, and ALWAYS see truly. More simply, this means that you never see what does not exist in reality."

"If nothing but the truth exists (and this is really redundant in statement, because what is not true CANNOT exist) Right-Minded seeing cannot see ANYTHING BUT perfection."

"The way to correct all such delusions is to withdraw your faith from them, and invest it ONLY in what is true. To whatever extent you side with false perception in yourself or others, you are validating a basic misperception. You CANNOT validate the invalid.""If you are willing to validate what is true in everything you perceive, you will make it true for you."

"The Spiritual eye perceives both the Creations of God AND the creations of man. Among the creations of man, it can also separate the true from the false by its ability to perceive totally rather than selectively. It thus becomes the proper instrument for reality testing, which always involves the necessary distinction between the true and the false."

"Christ's Second Coming gives the Son of God the gift to hear the Voice for God proclaim that what is false is false, and what is true has never changed. And this the judgement is in which perception ends."

"In sorting out the false from the true, the miracle proceeds much along the lines suggested very correctly by Bill, e.:

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 existBelieve THIS and you WILL be free."

God is the truth. Originally there was only the truth. But then we made up an opposite. We thought there could be something false as well, a falseness which had truth to it.

"For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM." UrT10H2

And so we swapped what is true and what is false, and confused them. We took all the attributes of truth (God) and assigned the to something untrue (an illusory world). And then we took all of the attributes of illusions (non-existence, death, evil etc) and assigned it to God.

So there was this huge reversal in our minds. Not only did this put us out of touch with reality, which meant we were insane, we also were extremely confused and lost. We became lost because we could no longer tell whether something is true or not. We lost track of which way is up, what God is really like, etc.

This meant we lost the ability to properly discern the difference between what is true and what is false. It meant we developed a belief that God is cruel and evil and wants us dead. And it also means we invested all our sense of value and attraction into a false world in order to stay as far away from him as possible.

"You HAVE carried the ego's reasoning to its logical conclusion, which is TOTAL CONFUSION ABOUT EVERYTHING." UrT7J9

So now when you look at death, you actually do in your mind believe it has some properties of life and truth and reality. And when you look at attack you think it is salvation. And when you look at hell you think of it as heavenly. And when you look at suffering you think it is atonement. And when you look at God you think he is an evil enemy to be avoided.

So then you have this sort of totally mixed up radar. Your whole navigation system of "what you want to go towards" is all thrown off by a kind of huge magnetic storm, which is affecting your compass. All your arrows which point in directions you think you want to go, are actually pointing in the opposite direction from where they're supposed to point.

The problem is because you're so lost in the woods you can't tell which way the arrows are supposed to point. So everyone in the world keeps making suffering for themselves because they keep choosing things which they believe are good and true which are not. And people will create sickness because they think that getting away from God (life, health, wholeness) is saving their lives. And people will even destroy and kill the body believing that it's going to set them free.

So there's not only a huge amount of confused and lost people in the world, all these people have a backwards upside-down thought system. They don't recognize what they are actually choosing in the big picture, and believe they're making excellent choices in the narrower picture. But the ego temptations are leading them down dark paths under the guise of making good progress.

This is really the problem of the world. That we're all mis-creating very faulty outcomes, poor choices, which are bringing us suffering, because in the big picture we are actually choosing suffering but we don't recognize that we are. We think we're making choices that will lead to us being better off. We are deceived, confused, insane, and lost. We don't know which way to get home, so we keep heading down a dark tunnel to death.

This also brings with it a huge amount of resistance and unwillingness to go towards God. It creates a fear of being helped. It can cause people to suspect that a miracle is going to destroy them. That the Holy Spirit is a threat. That God is not going to love them. Who would stay away from God's love unless they thought that it would make things worse for them? But that's what people believe.

So when you go to help people often they do not want the help because they see it as harm or as a threat, as if its going to take away their treasure. And they want to keep their suffering and keep trying to destroy themselves because they think that's in their best interests.

You've got a world full of very confused backwards-thinking people who don't know what they are doing or why they are doing it, but they think they do, so they keep blindly choosing very poorly and ending up suffering, having not mastered their creative power.

What we need is to get our minds straightened out and to learn to recognize again what is really true. But that's going to mean that you have to question what you believe, and be open to the possibility that you are VERY mistaken, and you have to then be willing to want something better. Not something you think is better, but something actually better in God's terms. And you will resist that and NOT want it.

It will literally be like you're being asked to go towards the very thing you want to get away from. You will advance in fear and see the destination as a threat to your existence. This is because the ego is so backwards and has framed God as the opposite of love. All of this confusion has to be sorted out and undone. And that's really all we have to do. A lack of recognition is the problem.

This is why we are to learn that "only the truth is true", ie to find out that only God's truth is true, and it's a loving truth. And to recognize also that false things ARE false and ARE unreal. Such as this world, and the body. Because while we believe we are a body in a real world we'll want to KEEP that, because letting it go or questioning it would be a threat to our entire existence.

This is why there is a lot of reluctance in some people to question whether this world even exists, and they'd rather stay asleep in a pleasant dream of a physical reality and not upset the apple cart. Some people are just not ready for the higher truth.

It also means that because people are confused, they do not recognize they are confused, and they believe they have the whole truth already when they don't. It requires great humility to be willing to be mistaken and to become open to something you were heavily resistant towards before. Everyone will get there eventually but it will take a lot of time for everyone to overcome their reluctance to go home to heaven.

"ALL are called but few choose to listen. Therefore, they do not choose RIGHT." The "chosen ones" are merely those who choose right SOONER." UrT3F23

There is a physical time, in terms of spacetime, which is actually just a 'now moment' that keeps shifting its form. The present of time is the only time that seems to exist. Once stuff "as it was" is no longer, the past is gone. There is no actual past or future.

We are located in the present moment, but in the present we keep dreaming of the past and future. We drift away from the present to hide from the light, and to keep replaying the ego/past. All grievances and suffering is in the past.

If you are seeing the past you are psychologically focusing in on what is not here now. In time, the present moment is all that remains. The present moment of time symbolises the always-here-now foreverness of eternity. The present of time is also WHERE you will find access to heaven.

The present moment is where the reflection of God is because presence means immediacy and hereness and actuality. It's where reality is. It's where there is light and love. It's where you'll find peace and happiness and heaven. It's allocated in the now because that's the only "place" where stuff actually is.

When you are dwelling on the past you are in the present dreaming of the past, thinking of old hurts, remembering pain and suffering, attached to things that are gone, hiding in darkness. It is an avoidance of the presence, because the present is where light is.

When you are psychologically focused on the past you do not see anything as it is now in the present, but instead project the darkness of the past onto the present. When you are in the present you are closer to heaven and project heaven's reflection onto it instead, seeing the real world.

You can ONLY find the real world, happiness, love, light, God, peace, etc in the present. You cannot find it in the past or future. NOW is where God is. The past does not exist.

The ego tries to drag the past into the present to keep it going, blotting out the present by projecting the past onto it, and then trying to extend the past into the future producing an illusory 'continuum'. This erases the present from time.

The holy spirit's view is that the present is the only time, there is no past or future, and remaining centred in the presence he extends the present into eternity.

Everything to do with 'level 2' which we might call the separation or the lower order reality or spacetime or the ego thought system, is all to do with the psychological past. All darkness, suffering, sickness and death, victimhood, grief and guilt, fear and sin etc, is all movements into the past. 'Level 2' is the past and its projected future, Level almost-1 is the present in time, and level 1 is eternity.

Eventually time and the present-now-moment of time will disappear, leaving only eternity. The now of time symbolises eternity and is as close as you can get to God/heaven etc while still in spacetime. It's where you see the world "as it is", the real world, the forgiven world, the present "reality".

It's where the happy dream is, where you can see in the light, and where miracles are born. You cannot perform miracles in the past, only in the present. Holy instants are moments in the present without a past. Every part of ACIM's teaching leads toward becoming totally present in the here and now and letting go of everything past and future.

Forgiveness IS the present!

"I see only the past." W7

"My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts." W8

"The mind's preoccupation with the past is the cause of the total misconception about time from which your seeing suffers. Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is." W8

"now is the only time" UrT5E8

"This instant is the only time there is." W308

"Your mind cannot grasp the present, which is the only time there is." W8

"The present is the only time there is." W164

"The present now remains the only time." W132

"There is no past nor future" UrM25A1

"You HAVE "sinned" IN THE PAST, but there IS no past. Always has no direction." UrT11J7

"A miracle is a beginning and an end(ing). It thus abolishes time. It is always an affirmation of re-birth, which seems to go back, but really goes forward. It undoes the past in the present, and thus releases the future." UrT1B13

"For healing CANNOT be accomplished in the past, and MUST be accomplished in the present to RELEASE the future. THIS interpretation ties the future to the present, and EXTENDS THE PRESENT, rather than the past." UrT12D10

"NO SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP IS EXPERIENCED IN THE PRESENT." UrT16H2

"His past has NO reality in the present, and you CANNOT see it." UrT12F1

"Let no dark cloud out of YOUR past obscure him from you, for truth lies ONLY in the present" UrT12F5

"Here in the present is the world set free." UrW132L3

"He is as safe in the present as he was before illusions were accepted into his mind, and as he will be when he has let them go." URM17A7

"There is no fear in the present, when each instant stands clear and separated from the past, without its shadow reaching out into the future." UrT15B7

"In the holy instant, you see, in each relationship, what it WILL be, when you perceive ONLY the present." UrT15F8

"Let no defenses but your present trust direct the future" UrW137L20 "The miracle reminds you of a Cause forever present, perfectly untouched by time and interference." UrT28B7

"Past, present, and future are not continuous" UrT12F4

"Yet in the present love is obvious, and its effects apparent. All the world shines in reflection of its holy light, and I perceive a world forgiven at last." W293

"The birth of Christ is now, without a past or future. He has come to give His present blessing to the world, restoring it to timelessness and love. And love is ever present, here and now." W308

"FUTURE loss is not your fear. But PRESENT joining IS your dread." UrT26I3

When he said "mind is the builder," he did not realize that it is only what it is building NOW that really creates the future. The past, in itself, does not have the ability to do this. Whenever we move from one instant to the next, the previous one no longer exists.

"In brief, the past is NOW your justification for entering into a continuing, unholy alliance with the ego AGAINST THE PRESENT. For the present IS forgiveness." UrT17D11

The present is before time WAS, and WILL BE when time is no more. In it is everything that is eternal, and they ARE one. THEIR continuity is timeless, and their communication is unbroken, for they are NOT SEPARATED by the past. Only the past CAN separate, and IT is nowhere.

In A Course in Miracles, forgiveness is a movement away from believing that illusions are true and real, towards recognizing that they are in fact not true or real. This becomes clear when your awareness increases sufficiently to reveal a larger truth, which shows you the ways in which the "smaller truth", i.e. illusory lies, are in fact limited and untrue.

Forgiveness, as a process, is also a movement from unawareness, in which you don't see clearly or fully, to a state of expanded awareness where you see more of the whole picture and with greater accuracy. As you go through this, what seemed to be true of your illusions starts to be recognized as being not as true as the larger truth.

It's a matter of becoming clear about what REALLY is true, and what is actually false. Getting truth and illusions confused is the ENTIRE content of the ego, and the entire content of the separation from God - which is you trying to make illusions become reality.

As you become more aware of what the truth really is, and less convinced about what the truth is not, your discernment of true vs false becomes clearer. You learn to recognize the truth for what it is (not the illusion you thought it was), and recognize the illusion for what it is (not the reality you thought it was).

Through forgiveness you will eventually reach a truly, fully "forgiving" state of awareness, which recognizes ALL of the truth, which is that nothing has really happened, there is only innocence, and therefore there is nothing to forgive.

Now, there are a couple of pieces of the puzzles of performing miracles which I did not really get, but which certain Christian practitioners tried to describe. They would say that you have to a) believe in Jesus ("be a believer"), and b) have "faith". Since their belief in Jesus was heavily wrapped in Christian theology, I had trouble discerning exactly WHAT it was about Jesus that I was supposed to believe - such as that He died for our sins and such, which is not an ACIM teaching. I also have never really 'got' what faith means, because it was never explained in a clear context.

But I've become clearer on this now.

The only way that "believing in Jesus" and "having faith" become meaningful, is when you can discern that the ENTIRE WORLD IS AN ILLUSION. It is necessary to have a really strong clear distinction between what is TRUE, and what is FALSE. So as you go about your life believing in the world, (even if you're trying to learn not to believe in it you probably still do), while you're in this sort of in-between phase of "some of the truth is true, but some of it I don't get", you will also be similarly confused about what it means to believe in Jesus, and what faith is.

If parts of the world are real to you, in spite of what you might claim otherwise, this HAS to mean that you in part also believe that God is not entirely real. It also means that you have 'faith in' the ego, and faith in sickness and death.

Now, this isn't something that people want to admit but, the simple fact is, either you believe that God is real, fully, or in some way you don't believe it. And that displaced belief will be put into a conviction that the ego is real - that it is truth, and that everything it claims is true. That will go on to mean that when shit happens in the world and it seems real, part of you will be trying to look to God for a way out of it, but part of you will be attached to believing in it. And so you are now torn, or your faith is divided. And Jesus says faith cannot serve two masters.

So what needs to happen is, through proper forgiveness, we need to become REALLY CLEAR about the distinction between reality, and illusions. We can' have this mishmash of partial reality and partial illusion. It will confuse us and rob truth of meaning.

To be able to believe in Jesus, means that you believe Jesus is 100% reality, He is 100% love, He is 100% truth, 100% immortal, 100% innocent, 100% at peace etc. He shares this truth with God 100%.

IF that is true, if that's your definition of truth, then it HAS to mean, that anything not of God is not truth. So now you need to be very clear, WHAT is not of God? Because if you go on believing God created the world, and yet the world seems to be the place where things fuck up big time, then... well, now you are super confused. And of course you are confused because it makes no sense that God would create a world with sickness in it, because that means God creates sickness. So now if you were to follow that truth, and you were trying to find some healing or peace from experiencing sickness, how the heck would you have any kind of power to turn to if that power believes in sickness? You'd be hopeless.

So... to believe in Jesus means to believe in God, that God is the one and only truth, and only things which are completely in accord with unconditional love are of God. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else at all can be permitted to take up the label of "real" or "true".

So then you have to ask yourself, did God create the world? No. He did not. So that means the world is not real. And that's mind-blowing, if you really take in deeply. It completely undermines your entire view of reality - or rather, your mistaken view in which you think illusions are reality. Because all this time you've been thinking you're living in a 'real' world and now you find out, it's a tricking illusion pretending to be real!

But this is how you can then have faith. You can have faith because, now that you believe in God's truth, and you know that God's truth is the only truth, and that this world is NOT a part of God's truth, that means whenever any shit happens in the world, you can BYPASS it, OVERLOOK it (forgiveness), and HOLD STRONG to the truth as God would have it be. That means, NO MATTER WHAT is in front of your face, no matter what happens, no matter how serious it seems, no matter how final - even death, YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IN IT, because believing in it would have to mean - you really do not believe in God all the way.

But if you DO believe in God, then.... no matter what happens, no matter how serious, you do NOT pay it attention, you do NOT believe in it, and you instead express and extend GOD'S REALITY in place of it. You cancel it out. You overwrite it. You clarify that the problem is NOT real, is NOT the truth, and you replace it with love. This shows the nothingness of the illusion, puts everything in its correct order, and corrects all confusion. It also produces miracles.

So you have faith by believing that God's truth is true, and that this is shared by Jesus.... and you have faith by holding true to that fact regardless of how the world seems to be. The only question of your faith wavering is when you believe the illusion enough that your belief in God's power wavers, and that means you've temporarily forgotten that God's truth is true. You've believed in the ego again. So you lose faith when that happens.

This kind of faith in God is not blind faith or just 'hope'... it is CERTAINTY, it is KNOWING, it is TRUTH, and it is CORRECTION.

Holy Spirit interjected while writing that the word "trust" is really what faith means. Trusting God. Trusting the real truth. Trusting that BECAUSE of what the truth is, that "this problem" is not insurmountable or irreversible. It is that knowing of the truth, that trust in the truth, which powers miracles.

So forgiveness leads you to miracle mindedness, a clarity about what is true and what is false gives you miracle mindedness, and a certainty about the truth being true (and that therefore the world is not real) gives you the foundation for faith. Your trust/faith in God's Way gives you miracle-working capabilities.

To get there you're going to have to question the validity of every way that you're trying to find truth in the world, because it means that you're looking for truth in an illusion. It means you're not clear yet about what is true and what is false. The world is false - head's up!. Entirely false. It is entirely an illusion that doesn't really exist or mean anything at all. Every time you 'seek' for truth in it, you will not find it, because it is not there. You need to learn to stop trying to do that and instead believe in God.

The miracles will flow from there.

It basically works like this. You believe you are not loveable and are separate from the love that you ARE. You experience a sense of lacking love. This creates a false need. The need motivates you to search. You search externally outside of yourself for what you've lost. You deny your own value and lovability so you project this onto others. You set them up to look like they can save you, that they are better than you, that they are above you, and that they will fulfill your need. You put them on a pedestal in order to put yourself down, and you worship them hoping to get some small scrap of love (that you don't deserve).

We do this with our children. We project so much of our own missing value onto them (by sacrificing ourselves), that we turn them into idols. As idols, they are more important than we are, they are more valuable than we are, we would just about kill ourselves to save them, and we worship them. We set them up to look like they can do no wrong. We enter into denial about any flaws that they might possibly have. We see them as 'can do no wrong'. We imagine that they absolutely are supposed to love us back and that they are only loving and completely overlook any faults. We make them seem like they are our savior and that they have something we don't have, capable of doing for us what we refuse to do for ourselves. And ultimately we live vicariously through them because we've made them into 'everything'.

This all can seem extremely noble and humble and prideful and correct. But it is filled with self deprivation, self denial, unworthiness, self sacrifice, martyrdom, loss, exhaustion, having no time for yourself, being less important, and generally all forms of inequality. Inequality also includes of course the flipside of idol worship which is what happens when YOU believe you are the idol and that the child (or other audience) should worship you. This is just another expression of the same egotism and may result in the child becoming the idol-worshipper (of you). If you are the idol, then you believe you are secretly flawed and NEED to have people worship you to prove that you are good enough - except you never believe it, and it never works, and it's never enough. Idol worshippers are the more obvious victims of the world (those who are bullied), and idols are the more obvious victimizers (those who bully). BOTH of them believe they are not loveable.

This dynamic also extends to all other special relationships, because they are all based on you having a LACK of love, and therefore being compelled to find it in another. The other now contains something valuable and special that you want but don't have. You want to get it from them. Except that you don't REALLY want to receive it because doing so would undo your belief that you're not worthy of it. So you would steal it away and destroy it, to deprive yourself. "If I can't have it, nor can anyone else."

Another great example of idol worship takes place in many Christians/Catholics who worship Jesus. They will put Jesus on a pedestal and endow him with all kinds of special value and worth. At the same time, they will claim that they themselves cannot possibly have EQUAL value, so they must be unworthy. Secretly they STARTED by saying they are unworthy, and this is why they see Jesus AS worthier than they are. They may thus 'worship' Jesus AS an idol (even though he doesn't want this), and continually believe that Jesus will save them for them. They will, however, constantly REFUSE to believe or admit that they in any way deserve saving, that they can be saved, that they can be loved to the degree Jesus would offer. That is, unless they believe they have atoned enough to be the 'chosen ones' who are in Jesus' favor and better than those suckers who are even less worthy and who clearly are going to hell (throwing them under a bus).

So with one hand they are trying to reach out to Jesus to say, "hey, please love me for me and save me from my (wretched) self because I can't", while the other hand says "stay the fuck away from me I am not worthy to be your equal." The ego here has conflicting voices - one which sounds like it is filled with adoration and justified worship, but the other which clearly does not REALLY want Jesus to love them fully. If Christians were to fully receive and acknowledge Jesus's love for them, they would have to ADMIT that they too are just as loveable as he is. Otherwise, how could they possibly receive His love? This is what they do not want, because they do not want their own love which God already gave to them.

When you idolize someone you make them more valuable than yourself because you've projected your own value and worth. You then say you want them to save you FOR you, but secretly you hope that they won't. It becomes especially toxic when the person you idolize refuses to be your idol. If they pull away from you or separate from you, they might occasionally throw you a tiny scrap or mosel of attention, which you think is all you deserve. And when that scrap comes, you feel like the entire relationship has been saved - finally you got a blessing from that person on-high and now that means they love you and that they will save you. Your tremendous need/lack of lovability gets a little bit of attention and now it seems like there's hope. And then they withdraw their love again and you feel devastated.

The problem is, you're not really devastated by their lack of loving you, you're devastated by YOUR not loving you. When they withdraw their idol status without you withdrawing your idolizing of them, ie they separate or distance themselves or fail to deliver, you are left with nowhere else to go. You can't get the love from within or from God because you don't believe that is where the love IS, and if your idol ditches you your mind is now reminded of just how empty it is. This is painful and is experienced as loss and grief. The loss of your own self. The grief of your own separation from God.

This is a spiritual lesson, and a hard one. And essentially it is the only lesson. You believe you are separate from love and will never get back to that love, or that it is NOT love, and now you've projected the source outside yourself where it does not exist. To resolve and complete the lesson, you have to UNDO the beliefs you've formed about YOURSELF which tell you that love is not who you are, love is not what you deserve (from within), that you do not love or forgive yourself (and God), that God is not love, that you are not loveable or worthy of love, and that you are not yourself. This belief in separation is what drives the entire projection and idolization of external love. But YOU ARE THE LOVE YOU SEEK.

God knows this. He hasn't forgotten you. Holy Spirit knows it. Jesus knows it. The angels know it. Even you as Christ know it and can't forget it. But somewhere along the lines some part of your mind became convinced by a lie - a LIE - that you are not love itself. This needs correction. And it cannot be corrected by anyone else outside of you because they are not the source of the correction OR of the separation. You might blame them because they seem to be separate from you and they seem to not be fulfilling your 'secret bargain' to love you for you, but it's not really their fault. It's not their fault they fail to love you for you. They're not supposed to. You need to learn to love yourself again so that you no longer NEED to get it from somewhere else, and consequently so that nobody else CAN take it away or deny you.

You are the way, the truth and the light. You are Jesus's equal. You are equal to your children. You are equal to your parents. You are loveable by God and in God and as God's extension of love. And you are absolutely worthy of the joy and happiness of RECLAIMING YOUR VALUE.

It is a scene in the mind. It is an imagined scene. A dream.

It is inside of a mind. It is made of thought. It presents images but these images are only there because of imagination.

Physical matter is not fixed and is not separate from the mind that dreams it into being. Bodies, made of this matter, are similarly just images in the mind - the mind that is dreaming the world.

You could liken it, symbolically, to as if we are living inside someone's brain. Inside someone's imagination. The universe is a giant idea. A thought. Even physical matter itself is not really physical or fixed matter, it is just an imagined idea.

It is all mind. And it is all within the mind. There is no such thing as outside the mind, and ideas leave not their source.

Objects, bodies, people, cars, houses, planets, they are all just ideas in the mind. They are being held in suspension and made to seem as though they have their own personal history and a "state" of their own, but this is entirely an illusion.

All forms are being regenerated and reprojected by the mind, within the mind, every quantum of time. Each object is completely forgotten and regenerated.

The only reason that objects appears to maintain their "state" or have a "history" over time, is because the mind that is dreaming them maintains a certain belief over time, and therefore keeps re-generating an almost identical image of form.

You think objects such as your body have a history, but they do not. They are being recreated now by the mind. What they appeared to be a year ago only seems to correlate to how they appear now because the mind that is making them keeps making them in the same way, based on the same beliefs.

Your body does not have a will of its own, or a story of its own, or a history of its own, or a state of its own. It is nothing but an image coming out of a projector. The projector is running a movie and keeps projecting a similar-looking object with similar properties, to create an illusion of consistency over time. Your body now has nothing in common with your body a moment ago, at the bodily level.

This is all happening in the mind. Inside a giant mind. This entire planet and everything happening on it is just a bunch of images in a mind. Imagination. A dream of the Son of God.

When this mind changes its mind, you can bet that the dream it is imagining is going to change as well. When this mind chooses forgiveness, you can bet that the images in the mind are going to out-picture a forgiven state of being as well.

This is why miracles - as expressions of love which CURE - and as expressions of love which DEMONSTRATE that the body has not been harmed, to symbolize the fact that the mind is unharmed, MUST be expressed on the level of "form".

This world is not just some place. It is not just a physical location. It is a place in the MIND. All of the objects in it are THOUGHTS. All of the forms and all of the so-called matter is nothing but a fluidic, liquid state of mind which can change at any moment.

It is not fixed, it is not permanent, and all of its illusions of continuity are just that - an illusion, maintained by a mind which keeps on projecting the same or similar images. That does not mean the mind cannot project different images if it wants to.

Miracles then, as demonstrations that you are healed, will manifest as the so-called "body" being healed, which means that the MIND is healed. And since the body is IN the mind, the undoing of the ILLUSION of a body will make the body change. It has to.

The body is not separate from mind or outside of mind. It is made OF mind. And if the mind chooses to stop dreaming a particular part of the dream, or to dream something different, that dream - physicality - will change.

You are living in a thought-world. It is a thought-form in the mind of the Son of God. Where else could you be but in the mind that you exist in, shared with God? There is nowhere else. There is no separate place to go.

Therefore, miracles, in A Course in Miracles, must be expressed as changes to FORM - which really are changes of MIND - whereby the "personal mind" that hides in the body and the body itself as an extension of that mind, must show up in the same way.

This is why Jesus, when he ascended, saw that his body - an image of a body - was just an illusion, and that it had no real meaning, it disappeared. It disappeared WITHIN the larger mind. The mind that is dreaming the dream. He erased part of the dream, because it was nothing more than illusory images - imagination. Clearly, if a dreaming mind decides to stop dreaming, whatever it was dreaming will cease to exist. And as such the "physical body" will disappear, IN the mind, because it was always in the mind all along.

Realize this. The physical universe is made of MIND! It is made of thoughts and thinking. It is constructed by consciousness. It is entirely within the bounds of the imagination. All of the forms and objects are just images in the mind. That is why when you change your mind, when you forgive, FORM WILL CHANGE. Because mind will change.

World events, tragedies, disasters, wars, attacks, celebrations, weddings, carnivals, shows, sporting events, whatever... all of it is happening in the mind. Its all a MIND-show. Mind events. Mind choosing to create dreams. Absolutely anything is possible. The mind could even create a fantastically perfect-looking world filled with abundance and incredible creatures, if it chooses to.

And people are collectively, worldwide, constantly choosing and creating futures which comprise of all kinds of stuff happening, because they chose to believe in it. We are changing "reality" because we are changing the dream as we go along.

And this is also why certain parties attempt to manipulate global consciousness to bring about a mental manifestation of certain outcomes. (Conspiracy theory alert! lol) - they know that mind creates this world and that mind can be coerced to create preferably futures. It's all part of manipulating the dreamer.

To believe that form will not change is purely the belief that mind is limited to the body and that the body is not inside or made of the mind. And that is a very common misperception, because that's precisely what the ILLUSION shows, if you believe it.

Your car is in your mind. Your house is in your mind. Your body is in your mind. Your job is in your mind. Your family is in your mind. Your entire life is in your mind. Even the physical stuff. It's all mental. Thus, changes of MIND, changes FORM, and that is why supernatural miracles happen.

They are demonstrations of truth, that the mind that is BEHIND the form has chosen something different, defying all of the illusory laws that the IMAGES in the mind appear to follow.

And this is also why the Course's REAL definition of "miracles" is that they are SUPERNATURAL. They defy the natural laws implied by illusions and come from a mind which is dreaming the world, easily capable of changing them and producing "healed" images of bodies.

Ultimately, a completely healed mind will acknowledge that the body does not really exist at all, and that it was just a dream coming from the mind. The mind was just projecting it and making it up. And it showed up in the "world" because the world is in the mind. And then, it will cease to dream the body, and the body will disappear.

A disappeared body is the ultimate body in perfect health, because perfect divine health means freedom from illusions and forms. Thus the perfect body is disappeared into perfection and by perfection, as the ultimate HEALING of the mind that dreamed it.

The body was made to come between the mind and God, and to make it seem like the Son of God was not Himself. It must go. And its ultimate healing is its removal. Its total undoing. This is the final demonstration that you are not a body. And if you want, you could re-manifest one later to demonstrate this, just like Jesus did after the cruxifixction.

The world is just a dream in your mind. Anything goes.

Time for another super-radical teaching!!!

There is no LIFE outside of Heaven. This world is not ALIVE. Bodies do not LIVE. "Life forms" are really "death forms". All forms are illusions. Bodies do not exist. Bodies are nothing, they neither live or die. Animals are not life. Humans are not life. The planet is not alive. This is a dream of death.

First of all, God did not create this world. As stated here:

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end."

Second of all, only that which is made of light (spirit) is LIFE, as stated here:

"Only the creations of light are real."

Third, LIFE means eternal life. Life is EXTENSION of God. Only in pure extension is there eternal life. Anything that is even slightly short of eternal life, is NOT life. Anything which does not have eternal life, does not have life AT ALL because it must be an illusion of an opposite to life.

"Either all things have eternal life or all things must die."

Fourth, bodies do not really exist an are not real. They do not live because they are illusions. As nothing, they do not have a life of their own. God did not create ANY KIND of body. Humans, or animals, or planets.

"The body neither lives nor dies, it is nothing."

"God did not create the body." "Love did not make the body."

Fifth, this extends to ALL FORMS and bodies. Animals, plants, fish, insects, humans, planets, the rules are the same. These are not forms of life. They are illusions in a dream. They might seem like life but they are not. How can an illusion be alive? What appears to be life is an illusion of something living that is not. To see bodies is deceiving. Nothing so blinding as perception of form.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS LIKE LIFE; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments ON WHAT IS NOT LIFE, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusions stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions ARE but forms. Their content is NEVER true."

The eternal barrier is the Earth and this universe. All physical objects. All illusions are forms. Their content is NEVER true.

Sixth, this is a dream of death. Death is the CENTRAL ILLUSION from which all others stem. That means EVERY illusion is an illusion of death. Anything even slightly less than immortality, is death. Even a slight headache is death. "Sickness is but a little death." Jesus also redefines death as anything that isn’t pure joy. Even a slight upset is death. A minor grievance is death. All forms are death forms. Bodies do not live. "Let the dead bury the dead."

Seventh, the body is the central figure in dreaming. There is no dream without it, and it depends on the dream entirely. NOR DOES IT EXIST without the dream. This means that when dreaming ends, which it MUST when you wake up, all stuff "made of dream stuff" MUST disappear. "The body is a dream". A dream of life, made of illusions, which denies life and Heaven, which must be death, is not ALIVE. Only that which is soul or mind is alive. Spirit is life.

Eigth, the body, as an illusion, cannot exist outside of dreaming. This applies to human bodies, animal bodies, and planetary bodies, and bacteria and fungus. All parts of MATTER are not life. It is a picture of crucifixion. A picture of death. Without illusions, bodies cannot exist or seem to. When all of your illusions are gone, and you are no longer asleep dreaming, the body must vanish. It literally disappears.

"The body cannot stay without illusions, and the last one to be overcome is death."

"Illusions recognized must disappear."

"The body's eyes are therefore not the means by which the real world can be seen, for the illusions that they look upon must lead to more illusions of reality. And so they do."

Ninth, "to see a sinless body is impossible." All bodies are made of sin. The body’s eyes look upon sin and fail to see past it. The granite block of sin is PHYSICAL MATTER which the body looks upon and fails to see past, stopping at the outer surface of nothing. Sin is literally embodied as forms. All forms are forms of error. To forgive is to OVERLOOK. To see PAST bodies to reality. If you see a body, including animal bodies, you are blinded by sight of form. All bodies are sin. They cannot be redeemed, only overlooked.

"The body is the idea of sin made flesh and projected outwards."

"Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch?"

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible."

Tenth, being WITHOUT a body is NATURAL. Bodies are UNNATURAL. What we call "nature" is NOT natural. It is totally unnatural. It is chaos. The nature of this universe is OPPOSITE to the nature of Heaven. It is against God’s nature. The world was made as an attack on God. Even with True Perception, this world is STILL SIN.

"To be without a body is to be in our natural state. To recognize the light of truth in us is to recognize ourselves as we are. "

"The laws of this world go against your nature."

Eleventh, there is no world. The world is nothing. It does not exist. Anything within it must not be life, because life exists forever, and this would prevent the world from being nothing. "The world will spin into the nothingness from which it came." "The time will come when all things visible will end." If this world does not exist, it is not life, so it must be death. The end of death is the end of this universe. The end of the dream of death.

"And the last illusion to be overcome will be death."

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies."

"And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his"

"For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

Only heaven is real. Only the truth is true. Everything there extends forever. Extension of life is eternal life. Lack of extension is MAKING. "The world you made" is made, not created, so it has no eternal life and lacks life. Thus no life at all. It is an illusion of life. A dream of death.

"Here He leans down to lift you up to Him, out of illusions into holiness; out of the world and to eternity; out of all fear and given back to love."

Resurrection is the return TO life, the return to Heaven. It surmounts death, therefore overcomes the world. Here the curriculum ends.

"Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death"

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely."

God‘s "living world of light" is ALIVE! You are there. You have eternal life. To sleep is to be unconscious. Unconsciousness is death. A waking dream is still a dream. The end of sleep is the end of dreaming and the end of death. To awaken is to return to life.

"All living hearts are tranquil with a stir of deep anticipation, for the time of everlasting things is now at hand. There is no death. The Son of God is free."

"Heaven remains your one alternative to this strange world you made and all its ways; its shifting patterns and uncertain goals, its painful pleasures and its tragic joys. 2 God made no contradictions. 3 What denies its own existence and attacks itself is not of Him. 4 He did not make two minds, with Heaven as the glad effect of one, and earth the other's sorry outcome which is Heaven's opposite in every way."

An opposite of Heaven is an opposite of life. Earth is the opposite of Heaven and is the opposite of life. It will never be life. It does not exist. There is no world. There is no life outside of Heaven.

1. DUALITY - is the idea of "real opposites". That there really is good and evil, black and white, up and down, male and female etc. The differences of objects are believed to be "real" and a first-hand reality. That when you see these things you are looking at reality. They I really am my body, that you really are your body. That there is no unity at all, no connection, no joining, everything really is separate. In the Course, this is equated with "false perception." And in fact Jesus says "the world is false perception", meaning that the physical objects/forms themselves ARE the idea of separation, without which they would not exist at all.

2. NON-DUALITY - the original form of the non-duality idea is that all of the objects present in duality "are there" still, but there is an underlying oneness/unity which joins them all together. It's as if to say, God is a limitless being who is "expressing as" various objects. As if a clock and a chair are "really" one thing, as if joined by a hidden energy field of field of mind. That "all things are one".

In this view, the world, bodies, Earth etc are actually "kept" and still show up and move around seemingly independently etc, but are thought to be all part of one overall single Mind's thinking, or its self expression. As if God is animating the world. As if God Himself is the world or is "in it", like in the background, pulling the strings. In this view, the world is retained but is reinterpreted as "one thing", wherein its various parts and shapes seem only to be separate things when the mind is unaware of the unity it springs from.

That you might in some way "experience it all at once" if an experience of oneness, a kind of transcendent unity in which "you are the airplane" "you are the car" "you are the house". Here, God seems to be in everything you see. This idea is actually not really in ACIM at all. Some people believe it is. But ACIM actually teaches that reality is BEYOND the forms, not AS them, regarding the forms themselves to be illusions regardless of how they are experienced - that even experience as "all one thing" is an illusion. This is often confused with "true perception" which is similar but not the same - in true perception see reality beyond forms, not as "their true nature".

3. PURE NON-DUALITY - as touted by several others, is a progressive form of non-duality, takes the aspect of non-duality that seems to still be "a world" with things happening, and says that all of these worldly things are literally 100% not there. Not even that they are reinterpreted or experienced as "one thing". Not even that you are "experiencing them all at once" - it separates the "oneness" from the "things" entirely and labels the things as absolutely nothing - non-experiencable. In pure non-duality, the idea is that there is "only God", and nothing else. Only the oneness. Seemingly the oneness alluded to by non-duality but dispensing entirely with the world of forms and all objects and bodies and happenings. This does tie in with the Course teaching that "there is no world". Not simply that "the world is one thing" but that it is NOTHING.

A pure state of "only God". Just an expansive eternity is sameness, no change, no movement, no creating, no increase, no individuals, no objects, no forms whatsoever, no differences, no appearances of any kind, just rock solid God on his own. In this view, logically, it should also mean that there is no Son of God and no Holy Spirit. Some people sometimes actually "go there". That we are God. That only mind exists. That even the Son doesn't really exist as anything other than God's radiance, still solely God.

Some have used this to justify that the Holy Spirit does not exist, that Jesus does not exist, etc. It's often associated with the idea of "Oneness". That there is only "one thing". Literally a count of "one". One box, one entity, one being, just God all by Himself. This view ignores creation, sonship, free will, souls etc. This view is really not in ACIM **AT ALL**, but many think it is. It's actually the result of the ego's reasoning, believing that if you remove all separations and get down "one" thing, it must be the final answer about what exists. This essentially boils down to the idea that God is alone and is dead because he is not extending, creating, sharing or loving. He just "is" ("God is"), WITHOUT anything having been created (no sonship, no souls, no creations). It logically becomes the idea that God is dead, because love has to be shared and has to create in order to exist.

4. TRANS-DUALITY - I don't know if there is really a word for this. It takes the idea of pure non-duality, in which there is NO WORLD (only Heaven exists and Earth is not it) but then acknowledges that "God did not will to be alone". That God is a creator. That God loves to ADD to His "solo" reality. That God has in fact created, not just one thing, but a great many things. That the Holy Trinity is real, there really are three parts, and the Sonship (as one of them) actually contains many souls that God created to freely create WITH him. This is much more closely aligned with Christianity.

All of these creations, together "the one son" in ACIM, aka "sonship", are extensions of His mind and being and have been fully created as essentially autonomous entities, with their own minds. However, this is not the same as in duality. In duality these individuals would be cut off from each other, ie separate. In "trans-duality", these entities share everything with each other. AND YET, do not lose their individuality. They share such extensive oneness with each other, you would think there is nothing defining their "self", and yet there is. God has fully created souls. It defies ego thinking. It is miraculous.

In this model, which is really the model of God being a creator who has created a Sonship (and the Holy Spirit) as eternal beings, "The Kingdom of God contains all his children and their creations", these beings are co-creators with God, and have their own creations, which are shared and celebrated by the whole. This is an extraordinary state where everyone shares absolutely everything with everyone else, including God. Total access. Total openness. No selfishness, no exclusion, no ego, no separation ideas, no thoughts of imprisonment or unwillingness or denial.

A family of God, sharing in love endlessly, celebrating and being thankful for having been created, joining with all brothers in a union which seems to transcend their self yet allows them to still have one. "The ego is the idea of selfishness, the soul is the idea of self fullness." It is the miraculousness of the soul that allows it to share everything without ceasing to exist. God created many children who are permanent brothers to each other.

God is a holographic thinker and creator - every part is a whole in its own right. He has created beings, "in number infinite". THIS IS THE TRUE MODEL OF A COURSE IN MIRACLES. It acknowledges God as Father and you as A SON, one of many. This is not non-duality, it is not pure non-duality, it is not duality. It is a state of "many and one" at the same time. It is God's family.

God's system is a system of inclusiveness, which is why all beings He created share everything. It's a system of AND/BOTH rather than the ego's system of EITHER/OR. All children of God are equal, per the Golden Rule, and are brothers. "One brother is all brothers. One mind is all minds." This does not in any way mean there is only one mind or only one brother. Nor does it mean they are not joined as if one. It is a fusion of oneness and many-ness, without contradiction, and with no ego involved whatsoever. It is not a separation idea, is not duality, or non-duality. It is the Creation of an omni-present being who is fully present in all things He creates without limit, making each creation a whole in itself. It is a system of "many wholes", which defies all ego thinking.

This is what A Course in Miracles is teaching. This is reality.

"Do not perceive ANYTHING God did not create, or you ARE denying Him."So you can PERCEIVE something God CREATED, which is in heaven?

"ALL His Thoughts are thus perfectly united within themselves and with each other because they were created neither partially nor in part. ... The Holy Spirit enables you to PERCEIVE THIS WHOLENESS NOW."

These statements clearly tell you that you are able to PERCEIVE the contents of heaven. To perceive Christ. To perceive Creation.

This doesn't mean that perception is the same as knowledge. "To perceive the truth is not the same as knowing it". But this again implies that you CAN perceive the truth - and God is truth.

"God is in everything I see because God is in my mind?" should perhaps read "I can use perception to perceive God."

"Perception, at its loftiest, is never complete. Even the perception of the Holy Spirit, as perfect as perception can be, is without meaning in Heaven. Perception can reach everywhere under His guidance, for the vision of Christ beholds everything in light. Yet no perception, however holy, will last forever."

I did a very in-depth study of EVERYTHING that ACIM says about "the real world". It seemed ultimately very clear that the real world is a little removed from heaven itself. e.g "The real world still is but a dream."

It also became clear that there is such a thing as perceiving the "face of Christ". Yet.... Christ is in heaven, so are you not perceiving heaven?

I STILL keep coming back to this idea, that the real world, the reflection of heaven, the face of christ, the perception of truth, perceiving God, seeing the Son of God, etc.... is in some manner... YOU LOOKING AT HEAVEN, but THROUGH the filter of perception.

This would seem to make more sense in terms of the "real world" being used a a term (which is not the same as the forgiven world). The forgiven world is the overlooked ILLUSORY world (earth etc), while the real world is the PERCEPTION or vision of reality. Appropriately named "real" as in, it reflects reality or is "true". True perception can perceive the truth.

We know that the real world is a "borderland of thought" in between the illusory world and heaven. Just outside the gates. But we also know it is so much on the 'border' of the illusory world of dreams that it is practically outside of it and beyond the VEIL of illusions, which was covering the face of Christ. ie it IS the face of Christ.

It makes more sense also to say that the FACE of christ, is the PERCEPTION of Christ (which is not the same as the KNOWLEDGE of Christ). And that the real world isn't just some static state, but is you looking AT heaven through perception.

"You will first dream of peace (heaven) then awaken to it."

I continue to come back to this idea that the "real world" really is a kind of "window shopping" into heaven. Like looking into heaven from the outside, from a vantage point of separation. Because "perception is a separated state." It is like an IMAGE or a photograph of heaven. A reflection in a mirror. Just once removed slightly from the actual thing.

It's appropriate to then say that the REAL real world is heaven, and "the real world" we PERCEIVE through interpretation, is "the real world" ie the light seen through the filter of consciousness. This is also why ACIM says that "nothing there but shines and shines forever" and that everyting in the real world IS ETERNAL.

If eternal means PERMANENT, the real world HAS to be a perception OF that which is permanent (heaven)... even though the real world "state of mind" ITSELF is temporary, because it's happening via perception. So what you see in true perception is heaven, eternity, but through a judgement/interpreration based way of seeing, which is itself removed from the direct experience.

In the first quote above, it is implied that you CAN see things that God created. I also did a very deep study of all terms relating to VISION, and SEEING within heaven, and there is very strong evidence that congition is able to SEE... the mind can SEE... in reality. This seeing isn't PERCEPTION, which is an interpretative function and a substitute for knowledge. "Nothing there is perceived, only known."But knowing, cognizing, is a direct awareness of what is really there. e.g. "The soul never leaves the SIGHT of God." And we're told many times that Christ lends us HIS EYES. There is a whole lot of material about being able to see in reality, without a need for perception. There, seeing is KNOWING what is there.

We should then perhaps think of "the real world", aka the face of christ, or the "interpretative image of heaven", as an actual PERCEPTUAL experience of the Kingdom. It's not quite the same as being IN the Kingdom or KNOWING it, but it is very closely correlated. "Those who perceive still need healing."

And as another quote says, perception can reach ANYWHERE under the Holy Spirit's guidance. That should include being able to perceive the Kingdom. And how would the Holy Spirit look upon CHRIST, given Christ is IN the Kingdom?

There is a curious line, like this, for example, which perhaps is literal, relating to seeing gardens and endless dancing brooks..."When you have looked on what seemed terrifying, and seen it change to sights of loveliness and peace; when you have looked on scenes of ****violence and death, and watched them change to quiet views of gardens under open skies, with clear, life-giving water running happily beside them in dancing brooks that never waste away****; who need persuade you to accept the gift of vision? And after vision (knowing heaven), who is there who could refuse what must come after? Think but an instant just on this; you can behold the holiness God gave His Son. And never need you think that there is something else for you to see."

It also clues you in that when the course talks of "you cannot see both worlds" and "beyond the world there is a world I want" etc... it's ACTUALLY referring to the comparison of Earth vs Heaven, but it saying that you can at first PERCEIVE heaven using vision/true perception, THEN go there. ie the perception of the real world is not like an internal vision inside a closed box where you see the interior walls, like its own 'state'. It's actually like a GLASS ROOM where you can perceive heaven beyond it, so clear that it's almost like being there.

So what if, false perception shows you the unforgiven world, earth. .... true perception renders the false world untrue and forgiven, recognized as an illusion, overlooked, and seen beyond, and true perception/christ vision also allows you to look to the LIGHT of heaven beyond the world, to christ and God, which you first perceive, then know. ie we're being asked to see the IMAGE or REFLECTION of heaven, using perception, before we cross over into it.

If we say that seeing the face of Christ, is really a use of perception from WITHIN the realm of perception, INSIDE the separation, LOOKING OUT BEYOND the separation at heaven OUTSIDE the bubble of spacetime and matter, then the true perception we are cultivating is really an ability to SEE Christ, who is OUTSIDE the dream, FROM the inside. The veil of matter becomes invisible, like a glass room, allowing you to look OUTSIDE its walls.

This renders "the real world" - a perception - not as simply some kind of "inbetween state", where all it sees is its own content, but rather than it is a PERCEPTION of reality, seen from a separated vantage point, but with such clarity and accuracy and openness that it is like peering into heaven itself. There is no perceptual function IN heaven (where you have true sight), but there is a perception OF heaven from the outside looking in.

And so forgiveness brings the ability to SEE truth, reality, love, light, heaven, holiness, christ, God, peace, perfection, etc."The miracle perceives everything (in heaven) as it is. If nothing but the truth (heaven/reality) exists, right-minded seeing cannot see anything but perfection. I have said that only what God creates or what you create with the same Will has any real existence. This, then, is all ***the innocent can see*** (can see perfection, which is in heaven). They do not suffer from distorted perception."

God's will isn't really a matter of "whether" you do God's will or not. If God wills something, it is done. But that doesn't mean you have no freedom.

ACIM teaches that "God does not coerce" and "even God would not oppose your will". Since your will is really one with God's will, or the same as, to in any way require you to will with Him or like Him would be like Him trying to force Himself against His own will.

God is not sitting there trying to "decide for you" the question of whether or not you'll will with Him or like Him. When you ask for guidance as to whether or not to do something, with the typical "should I do this?" kind of question, you'll probably be told that "you are free", instead of yes or no. In fact I get this response so often it's somewhat annoying, because I keep asking "should I" questions.

So God isn't trying to force you into anything or to choose for you whether you will with Him. Yet He does have a will, and He also wills something "for" you.

For example "God's will for me is perfect happiness". God does will or "want" that you be happy. In truth, God creates you happy, by His Will, and in your acceptance that you are as He created you, you automatically are happy. In effect, you are doing God's will by accepting your true nature.

But that doesn't mean God is pushing you into happiness, or requiring it, or forcing it, or demanding it. He loves you, and "love does not enter where it is not welcome". "Love waits on welcome, not on time".

So there is a component to your free will, that you yourself have to freely willingly will or "want" or elect to will with and like God. To be happy, God can't just force happiness on you. Anymore than he forcefully rips you of the world and puts you back in heaven, or anymore than he stops you from trying to hurt yourself against your will.

You have to be willing to be happy. And in your willingness, which is of your own free will, and yours to decide whether or not you will do so, you either choose to will what God wills for you, or you will something else. God does will that you be happy, but your refusal is up to you.

You can ask questions of guidance which may give yes or no answers, in terms of information, learning about a situation, asking whether something might be in someone's best interest etc. You can even ask for advice such as whether to buy the computer, or whether to stay at a job etc. This is part of trust. And the advice can come across as clear and wise and true, but it is still devoid of the component of force or demand.

When you move into believing that God is demanding, you are really becoming an idol worshipper. That means you see yourself as under tyrannical rulership by God, really the false ego God that you invented, and believe that God has cruel power over you to dictate what you must do. It's like cave dwellers worshipping a God in fear of retribution that, if you don't, there will be punishment. And then the admiration of God is more like trying to love something that's forcing you to do so.

"No one comes to the atonement except willingly" and "heaven is a choice I must make" means that you still, at all times, have the freedom to choose. Similarly ACIM says of angels that "they are free to establish their kingdom wherever they see fit", in reference to them setting trying to create a Kingdom on Earth. God would "prefer" that they establish their Kingdom in Heaven but he does not force them there.

Let's be clear that God very powerfully and strongly and certainly does have a will for you, a desire, an expression or broadcast of what He "himself" wants. What he supports. What he is in favor of. What he provides and gives and sees you as deserving. And whatever He wills, is DONE. But at the same time he cannot force it down your throat. If you don't want it, he waits patiently until you do. Just as if you do not want Jesus's help, he will wait patiently until you do.

Becoming one, or sharing interests, does not entail the giving up of your freedom. It really entails the reclaiming of your freedom, and freely electing to serve God. Freely assuming the function He has offered to you. Freely wanting to create with and like Him, together, as a team. Freely accepting God's harmlessness and desire that you be happy forever. Freely allowing God to give you everything, in acknowledging that He already did share everything with you in your creation. And at no point does it entail God ever "taking over" or going into a mode of demand.

God does not demand that you accept Him. You cannot really leave Him, because of His will that you be together forever. But you are free to block awareness of His will and pretend that He does not will what He does. You can deny His will just as you can deny your own will. Which has no effect on His will. And as you enter into unwillingness to will with God you enter into unwillingness to will freely, placing your will in a state of imprisonment. And then you will your own imprisonment by a tyrannical God that is really you playing the part of prison guard.

What God wills, truly, already is. And that includes the creation of you, the defining of what you are, what you are capable of, what you really have. It also includes your true nature, your innate built-in desire or character or "what you want". In a sense you could say that God "forced" you to "naturally" want to will with and like Him. To create loving living beings joyfully. To create the beautiful and divine. But at the same time, God "forced" you to also have total unconditional freedom. It sounds like a paradox but God permanently guaranteed that you can never "escape" being free.

You are a co-creator with God, as established in your creation by the fact that God DID grant you total freedom. Because in sharing all His nature and attributes and desire with you, He established you as similarly creative, powerful, unrestrained, unlimited, and completely free. And so God did bless you with the freedom to choose "whether to" will or not. Whether to will with or like God or not. But he did not grant you the freedom to throw away that freedom in any permanent way.

You can hide from what He has willed, but what He wills cannot be opposed, or undone, or attacked. His will is insurmountable and infinite and all powerful. But so is yours. As Jesus says, "Your will is as strong as mine", and He cannot oppose it anymore than God can. In fact God is incapable of opposing your freedom, because to do so would be to revoke the fact that He willed that you BE free.

God just wants you home, wants to love you, wants you to acknowledge what you are, wants you to remember your safety and certainty, wants you to be happy, wants you to feel free and unrestrained and unlimited, wants you to be willing to will with Him and like Him, and to create with Him. But it is by invitation only, and never by force or dominance. God even gives you all of His power.

"To acknowledge that all power is of (from) God is to gain all power."

So now, if you accept it freely, you are now as powerful as God, and God cannot oppose this. You have the power of God in you. You share His power and express and extend it. This makes you all powerful. As ACIM says, "I am not afraid but all powerful."

In some ways, in terms of the causation between God and His creative act of creating what you are and what you in-built nature is, and therefore what you are "likely" to want and desire when you are being true to yourself, God DOES have total power and authority and His will HAS fully "restricted" or "defined" the rules and scope of your freedom. Your function. Your ability. What you can and cannot do. That is not open for question and your rebelling against that is the authority problem and the separation.

But in other ways, when it comes to what happens AFTER your creation, how you USE your existence, how you express your nature, what you want to choose, what you are capable of creating, that is all entirely within the scope of your freedom. That is where you have absolute authority over whether you will or whether you are unwilling, whether you want to acknowledge God or not, whether you want to admit to co-creating with Him or not.

You can't stop your function and you can't change the rules and you can't make yourself be what you're not, which thankfully provides a guarantee that even in ego and dreaming you cannot actually change what you really are, and this therefore guarantees your place in Heaven forever, you DO have the freedom to deny it and pretend otherwise, to seem to want something else, and to reject your own freedom. What God wills is permanent, but since He willed your freedom you are free to deny it, but not change it.

It is in fact your freedom, within the scope of what you are, but not freedom or power OVER God, that has guaranteed that God did not enter into the insanity of separation with you. Because your will is free to block itself, but not to undo itself, you were able to "will" (un-will) to make a dream world unlike and without God. But because you were free to do this, God was not pulled into the separation or the insanity with you. In this respect you are not "one" with Him, ie you do not cause God or overpower His will, even if you dream of doing so. You can bring an illusion of suffering into your own mind, within your own self, but you cannot bring it into God.

"Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain and wholly without suffering of any kind. 10 If you deny Him you bring sin, pain and suffering into your own mind because of the power He gave it. 11 Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also deny what it creates because it is free.

You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His Love, would not have it so. 2 Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free. 3 To interfere with you would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane. 4 When you deny Him you are insane. 5 Would you have Him share your insanity? 6 God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. 7 That was the condition of His Son's creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. 8 To know that is sanity. 9 To deny it is insanity. 10 God gave Himself to you in your creation, and His gifts are eternal. 11 Would you deny yourself to Him?"

You are free to imprison yourself. And untimately it IS only you that can seem imprison your own will. No one else can imprison you, not even God. And you can also set yourself free, per the secret of salvation, that you and you alone are doing this to yourself. But in order to become free, you do have to accept the "ground rules of the house of God", the nature that you have, the function He assigned to you, to serve WITH Him and accept that you are still as He created you.

It still requires you to want to accept that you can only be as God chose you to be, which the ego interprets to be a limitation, a requirement or restriction, a demand, and a lack of freedom. The ego sees it as you "having to" comply by certain rules and be a certain way in order to be in God's world. Which is true, in a sense, because the Kingdom does have conditions for entry, for acceptance, for being in it and of it. You cannot experience it without "complying" with its nature. And wanting to be of a different nature exiles you from it. You cannot hate and attack and expect to be aware of divinity.

It's the desire to be something else, something unlike God, something unhappy, something lacking freedom, something limited and less, something broken and breakable, something that God would not will, that is the ego. When you want to suffer, when you want to die, when you want to hurt, abuse and attack and murder, that is all a desire not to will like God would have you will. It's an unnatural will. It also isn't really free will, because its a way of making your will imprisoned and being unwilling. And the more unwilling you are to will with and like God, the less you acknowledge your freedom. And thereby your will SEEMS to become imprisoned, weak, diminished and hidden. Not free at all.

The ego's version of free will is really an imprisoned will which does not want to will anything. It opposes will and rebels against God. It sees itself as having a "separate will" or a will which has separated itself off from being anything like God's will, and this poses as "free will". Defiance. But it is not free will, really, it is is an illusion of freedom. It is really imprisonment, masquerading as freedom, which is why it is an illusion. And giving this up is not really a loss of anything, because the ego's version of free will is really a desire to have no freedom at all, or to have an illusion of freedom. And death is an illusion of freedom from God, who is life.

In death you attempt to assert that you have no will, no choice, no power, no desire to will anything that God wills. And this is considered "free will". It's a statement of defiance, an expression of a total unwillingness to do anything. To will anything. It's a refusal to live, because life is what God wills for you. It's a desire to not exist, because God wills that you exist. It's an expression of attack and revenge and hatred and hurt and abandonment, having done these things to yourself instead of God, knowing that God would never do these things. Death is an attempt to end your freedom and to stop God's will.

But it is in life, in resurrection, in choosing, willing, opening, trusting, having faith, uniting, sharing, loving, that you regain access to not only your own freedom and true nature, but also to God. And this flowering, blossoming, returning to how you were designed to be, does require your "little willingness". And that means a little bit willing to be like God, to acknowledge truth, to be like your true self, which is forgiving and loving and whole and healed. Which is happy and healthy and immortal. Which is joyful and peaceful and unconditionally loving.

And so you return to what you always were given, to what God willed for you already. And you open to what you have no say in, freely and gladly, knowing that it guarantees your happiness and peace and freedom. And you are restored to heaven and to the full inheritance of everything God has given you without limit. And thus your freedom leads to the restoration fo your awareness that you are the will of God and always have been. And simply by being what you really are, unlimited, you are simultaneously free. Free of coercion and demand and sacrifice and force. Free in God, because God decided you be so.

And then you resume your function, the extension of God's spirit, the joyful co-creatorship and authorship with God, and the celebration of your total freedom and unity, one with all of Creation forever.

"It is NEVER God Who coerces you, because He SHARES His Will WITH you." God has given you freedom. This cannot be revoked. You are free to create, or to mis-create. God cannot oppose your will because it is part of his own freedom.

This means that you have to decide to go back to God, of your free will. You can't be forced, coerced, manipulated or made to do anything you don't want to. You have to willingly choose heaven again.

"The attraction of light must draw you willingly, and willingness is signified by GIVING."

"But to accomplish this, all your dark lessons MUST be brought willingly to truth"

"Heaven is a choice I must make."

Does this mean that you can take forever? Does it mean that you can decide NEVER to return to God? Does it mean that you could stay in separation and never wake up?

Given that you have total freedom, it should mean that you can take as long as you please, and even to never return.

The thing is, that while God wills that you be free forever, he also wills that you be one with him forever. And here we have signs of a "natural limit" placed by God.

"Free will does not mean that you establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what to take when. It is just because you are not ready to do what you should elect to do that time exists at all."

"Free will can temporize, and is capable of enormous procrastination. But it cannot depart entirely from its Creator, who set the limits on its ability to miscreate by virtue of its own real purpose."

The way I read this, "will" always has an element of freedom to it, even when will is being USED to try to be unwilling. You cannot escape willingness. You will always have some willingness even if you are highly unwilling, which means that you will eventually will to be back with God.

"He can wait, delay, paralyze himself, reduce his creativity almost to nothing, and even introduce a real developmental arrest or regression. But he CANNOT abolish his creativity. He CAN destroy his medium of communication, but NOT his potential."

God has also placed a limit on spacetime, ie the separation. It has been repurposed as a classroom to learn lessons, which involves consent. And we have all willed freely to participate. In effect, there is a guarantee that we will wake up eventually.

"The Atonement was built into the space-time belief in order to set a limit on the need for the belief, and ultimately to make learning complete."

"For if you could REALLY separate yourselves from the Mind of God, you WOULD die."

Another thing is that trying to be away from God is painful. It is a rejection of happiness and love and ease and joy. A rejection of health and wholeness. It is a state riddled with suffering. And eventually this is intolerable, especially when it becomes extreme.

The more extreme the separation, the more it hurts. The more you try to be evil, the worse your life gets, and the more you become insane. The harder you try not to exist, the more you repress and hate yourself. And it does not feel good. Some people have extreme tolerance levels but not unlimited.

"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."

This is part of the fact that there is a safeguard built into free will. Basically, in order to fully will something, you have to be fully willing. If you become unwilling, ie try to use will to NOT will, you are arresting the will. This causes you to shut off access to your power to create, and you become "weaker".

Effectively, if you oppose God's will, you become powerless. If you deny your freedom, you imprison the will. It all gets automatically shut down because by choosing separation you're literally denying freedom and power.

""Free will is the attribute of the mind, NOT the Soul."" ... "If it does not freely elect to do so, it retains this creative ability, but places itself under tyrannous rather than authoritative control. As a result, what it creates is imprisonment, because such are the dictates of tyrants."

The end result is that you cannot use will to attack will, or to attack or change God. Or to change the truth or anything real. When you try to, there is a lack of will, which shuts it down and causes nothing to happen. You might hallucinate that the nothing is something, but nothing is really created.

Also the Holy Spirit has been created to guarantee holographically that the whole is always in the part, and thus no matter how many times mind tries to split itself the whole of God is still there. You cannot leave eternity or really separate.

"There is another Maker of the world, the simultaneous Corrector of the mad belief that ANYTHING could be established and maintained without some link that kept it still within the Laws of God. NOT as the Law Itself upholds the universe as God created it. But in some form adapted to the need the Son of God believes he has. Corrected error IS the error's end. And thus has God protected still His Son, even in error."

So God has naturally caused a number of things all which guarantee you are not only protected and safe (immortal) and have not really done anything, but also has the side-effect that when you choose away from him you do not like it, and inevitably choose against it. It's almost like saying the impluse to return is built-into the attempt to leave. And you never did quite leave in the first place.

"I CAN offer you my will to make yours invincible by this sharing, but I CANNOT oppose yours without competing with it and thereby violating God's Will for you. Nothing God created can oppose your will, as nothing God created can oppose His. God GAVE your will its power, which I can only acknowledge in honor of His."

We could say then that, we are always free, and can choose when to return to God, but at the same time staying away from God is fundamentally unpleasant, and eventually you will seek to return.

Another aspect of this is that God is so certain and so powerful, and the Holy Spirit shares his infinite power, such that he CANNOT FAIL in helping us to return. In his repurposing of the world we made, he guarantees that we will return to heaven. There are no loopholes in God's plan for salvation.

The Holy Spirit has effectively already finished the job.

"His task is mighty, but the power of God is with Him. Therefore, to Him, it is so easy, that it was accomplished the instant it was given Him for you."

"God's promises make no exceptions. And He guarantees that only joy can be the final outcome found for everything. Yet it is up to us when this is reached; how long we let an alien will appear to be opposing His."

"God's guarantee will hold against ALL obstacles, for it rests on certainty, and NOT contingency."

"Reality observes the laws of God, and NOT the rules you set. It is His laws which GUARANTEE your safety. All illusions that you believe about yourself obey NO laws."

"The Atonement is the GUARANTEE of the safety of the Kingdom. Nothing good is lost, because it comes from the Holy Spirit, the voice for Creation."

"The world WAS a way of healing the Separation, and the Atonement is the GUARANTEE that the device will ultimately do so."

"No force except your own will is strong enough or worthy enough to guide you. In this you are as free as God, and must remain so forever."

"The truth is still that the attraction of God is irresistible at ALL levels, and the acceptance of this totally unavoidable truth is only a matter of time. But you should consider whether you WANT to wait, because you CAN return now, if you choose."

It is clear from what Jesus says, and metaphysically, that physical matter, space and time are entirely illusions, made to oppose reality. The term physical always refers to literally PHYSICAL objects. Matter, bodies, planets, galaxies, animals, trees, flesh and bones, brains and so on.

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

"Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds are trapped in their brain, and its power declines if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert, and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and seem to be no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel." ... "If this were the real world, God WOULD be cruel. For no father could subject his children to this as the price of salvation, and be loving."

Some people do not like this definition that PHYSICAL MEANS LITERALLY PHYSICAL, because they think that the ACTUALLY physical is somehow God's creation that we're misperceiving. And to justify this they'll come up with ingenious forms of denial to try to frame the term "physical" as meaning ... ANYTHING BUT physical. This is a TOTAL reversal of what physical means. When Jesus says physical he means physical. When he says Earth he means planet Earth's physical matter. When he says body he means the physical flesh and bones body.

It's fairly obvious when such a huge modification to the meaning of words is happening, that it's going way outside of what Jesus ever intended it to mean. To claim that "physical body" is not referring to your actual flesh and bones physical body but some kind of esoteric mental identification, is a major form of denial. Body identification means identifying WITH the physical, not that the body itself is a mental construct. Or that the "body's eyes" is some kind of "false mind eyeballs" that doesn't refer to the actual PHYSICAL eyeballs and their biological sight.

Yes in some way the physical is just thought and dream and illusion and is in the mind, but this can't be used to ever frame them as being truly spiritual, holy, perfect, or permanent. Physicality entirely depends on space and time, to keep the atoms separated and prevent a massive nuclear explosion. Without the illusion of space, matter is not possible and all physicality cannot seem to exist at all. And space itself is nothing but a belief.

That which is physical is FALSE PERCEPTION. "The world is false perception". It is the granite block of sin. "The world of bodies is the world of sin". It is the veil which covers over reality and the face of christ. It is the gap of separation which splits the mind and comes between you and your NON-physical brothers. Nothing physical is real. Everything physical is an illusion. And the physical flesh and bones body can only see the physical world, not reality.

If physical matter is TRUE, and is REAL, then physical matter HAS TO BE GOD. And this means God HAS TO be decay and torture and scarcity and limitation and suffering and sickness and death. This simply does not fly. The physical Earth is nothing like God. "Earth, heaven's opposite in every way."

"Ultimately, of course, space is as meaningless as time. The concept is really one of space-time BELIEF. The physical world exists only because man can use it to correct his UNBELIEF, which placed him in it originally. As long as man KNEW he did not need anything, the whole device was unnecessary. "

"Attack is ALWAYS physical. When attack in ANY form enters your mind, you are EQUATING YOURSELF WITH A BODY. "

"When you look upon a brother as a physical entity, his power and glory are lost to you and SO ARE YOURS."

"Thought cannot be MADE into flesh except by belief, because thought is not physical."

"The body cannot create, and the belief that it CAN, a fundamental error responsible for most of the fallacies already referred to, produces all physical symptoms."

"All physical illness represents a belief in magic. The whole distortion which created magic rested on the belief that there is a creative ability in matter, which can control the mind."

"Physical medicines are a form of "spells.""

"Corrective learning always begins with awakening the spiritual eye, and turning away from belief in physical sight."

"What the physical eye sees is not corrective, nor can it be corrected by any device which can be physically seen. As long as a man believes in what his physical sight tells him, all his corrective behavior will be misdirected."

"Power, fame, money, physical pleasure; who is the "hero" to whom all these things belong? Could they mean anything except to a body?""Like all expressions of love, which are ALWAYS miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws."

"A miracle is a reversal of the physical order because it brings more love to the giver AND the receiver."

"This is the basic distinction between intellectualization and thinking. One creates the physical, and the other the spiritual, and we believe in what we create."

"Man believes that what he cannot see does not exist, and his physical eyes cannot see in the dark."

"It frequently happens that an individual asks for physical healing, because he is fearful OF BODILY HARM."

"However, at the same time, if he WERE healed physically, the threat to his thought-system would be considerably MORE fearful to him than its physical EXPRESSION."

"The first involved the fallacy that only the physical is real.""The third involves the endowment of the physical with non-physical properties."

"All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. They are attempts to reinforce UNCONSCIOUSNESS out of fear of CONSCIOUSNESS. This is a pathetic way of TRYING NOT TO KNOW by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual."

"His "birth trauma", another valid idea, was also too limited, in that it did not refer to the Separation, which was really a FALSE idea of birth. Physical birth is not a trauma in itself. It can, however, remind the individual of the Separation, which was a very real cause of fear."

"The confusion of miracle impulses with physical impulses is a major perceptual distortion. Physical impulses are misdirected miracle impulses."

"You can use your body best to help you enlarge your perception so you can achieve real vision, of which the physical eye is incapable."

"The body is merely part of your experience in the physical world. Its abilities can be and frequently are overevaluated.""The so-called "battle for survival" is only the ego's struggle to preserve itself, and its interpretation of its own beginning. This beginning is usually associated with physical birth, because it is hard to maintain that the ego existed before that point in time."

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

"Attack is always physical. When attack in any form enters your mind you are equating yourself with a body, since this is the ego's interpretation of the body. You do not have to attack physically to accept this interpretation."

"If you are physical, your mind is gone from your self-concept, for it has no place in which it could be really part of you. If you are spirit, then the body must be meaningless to your reality."

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.

Ego's world is run by the egoic thought system, based on an EITHER-OR mindset of separation.

God's world is run by God's thought system, based on a BOTH-AND mindset of sharing.

EITHER-OR is based on the idea of separation - there is a separation between who has and who has not, who does and who does not, what is and what is not, etc. An object is this, but not that. It's either red or blue. It's either here or there.

BOTH-AND is based on sharing, something is equally true of both me and you, we both have everything, me and you are loved the same by God, etc. There is no separation in that. What exists is in all locations simultaneously, space and time do not place limits on anything.

Because the world of physical matter is entirely an expression of the egoic thought system, space and time and everything within them (bodies, planets, etc) are governed by this idea of EITHER OR. Living in such a world, the seemingly "natural" way to think about anything is to align our thought processes to the "natural world" and think in accord with it.

So now we "learn" to think in an EITHER-OR way. Either I will turn left or right. Either I will eat at 5 or at 6. Either I'm male or female. Either I am asleep or awake. Either I choose option A or option B.

We adopt this as an entire way of thinking about the world, of reasoning about anything, of what to do, where to go, what to choose, always a selective judgement based on either this or that. It seems to "fit" well with the way the physical world is structured and how it behaves. But it is completely unnatural and completely opposite to God's world.

In God's world, seemingly miraculous things are possible. Everywhere. All the time. Everything in God's world breaks all the ego's laws of separation, and therefore the entire basis of EITHER-OR thinking. God does not think, hey, either one son or another will get my attention. He thinks, BOTH of them get my FULL attention. Nor does he think, I will give 50% attention to one and 50% to another. He thinks, I will give 100% love to both at the same time. And this is done WITHOUT loss, without sacrifice or lack, and without compromise.

The true meaning of divine sharing is that everything applies to BOTH me and you equally, simultaneously, and always. If there were such a thing as a divine pizza, I could eat the whole pizza and you could eat the whole pizza. We both get everything. This is not possible in the physical world, but it is possible in spirit.

One of the tricky things about understanding ACIM is that we come at it with the ego thought system. We come at it with EITHER-OR thinking. And that's a serious problem. Because whenever ACIM speaks of ANYTHING to do with God, Heaven, Creation, Sonship, Holy Spirit, Laws of God, beyond spacetime, etc.... any of those topics, the laws of GOD are applying, not the laws of ego.

So then a statement like "I and my father are One", is completely misunderstood. It's a truth WITHIN the scope of God's BOTH AND system of thought. There, I can be one with God while still being an individual. I am both, myself and part of God. The course also states that God has only one son, BUT that the one son is also many sons. It literally states that BOTH statements are true, that there is one, and many. The Sonship comprises many children, who are ALSO one.

But to the ego this seems nonsense, it cannot fathom how there can be ONE AND MANY at the same time. It insists that it is EITHER one, OR many. And then it decides that many sounds like an ego thing, and one sounds "more spiritual", so it hacks out the many from the one and ends up with its version of what Heaven must be like. And it's totally bullshit.

To grasp anything of the divine nature of the Kingdom, on ANY topic "that side" of the separation boundary, anything real and true, anything to do with Sonship or Creation or God, you have to totally put aside the EITHER OR exclusive separatist way of reasoning logically, think WAY out side the box, and adopt a BOTH AND way of reasoning. THEN the things that Jesus says that sound totally contradictory finally make perfect sense, WITHOUT having to change anything or turn stuff into ridiculous metaphors.

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

Does not mean there is EITHER one brother OR many brothers. Nor does it mean there is either ONE mind OR many minds. Literally, the entire statement is true. There are many brothers, and they are all one. There many minds, and they are all one. And as soon as your thought process tries to "axe" the "many" part of those statements in favor of keeping only the seemingly unifying "one" part of the statement, you're off on an ego tangent of error.

We are one, but we are still brothers. We are the one son of God, but we are also PART of a sonship of many sons. I am a child of God, and so are you. I have individuality, and so do you, and yet simultaneously we share everything. I have everything that God is, which should to the ego mean there is nothing left for you, but you also have everything that God is, simultaneously, because we share it all. Sharing does not mean a collapse of individuality either.

The BOTH AND system of thought, which "runs heaven", is a completely miraculous thought system. It defies all ego laws. It breaks space and time. It ignores silly limitations and false conclusions. It allows to be possible that which the world of EITHER OR would find absolutely impossible. It ignores spatial limitations of all kinds. This is why God is omnipresent, meaning existing in all locations simultaneously. It ignores the idea that we must be kept apart in order to be individuals. And it defies every attempt to split it up and compartmentalize it into nice little prison cells.

The entire Kingdom of God and everything in it is miraculous because of this fundamental logical premise of the whole system. "Nothing real can be increased (God cannot create) except by sharing". As God SHARES, this is an AND scenario. God AND his creation. God AND his son. BOTH God and His son exist. His son is in his likeness because they BOTH are of the same Kingdom and nature.

When I give to you, BOTH of us have it, and I do not lose it. This is why sharing INCREASES the supply in heaven, while sharing causes scarcity in the ego world. When God creates you, God gives ALL of himself to you and yet loses nothing and HAS everything still - BOTH you and God now share everything and there has been an INCREASE. This is miraculous, it dissolves the idea of separation and exclusivity, transcending all ego concepts. The entirety of reality depends on it.

The system of God's mind, his thought system, how the Kingdom is run, is entirely based on this idea of simultaneous sharing, union at the same time as creation, multiplicity at the same time as oneness, having everything while also sharing it with others without anyone being excluded in any way. Heaven is not like this world. It's laws are totally different to the separated-out world the ego made to depict isolation and selfishness. There is no selfishness in the Kingdom, only self-fullness.

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

You have everything, and we all share it as God's family.

The "physical world", exists only IN false perception. This is why the body's eyes can see it. The body's eyes are rooted in false perception permanently.

"Everything the body sees is an illusion."

"These eyes made not to see will never see."

"The body is not the means by which the real world can be seen."

"Eyes perceive falsely"

The world is like a veil that hangs in front of the face of Christ to block your vision. It must be seen THROUGH and past, which is what it means to OVERLOOK it, which IS forgiveness.

When you overlook the world, and look to the light beyond all forms and bodies, the light of the real world, you will become UNABLE to see the world. At its peak, christ vision makes the veil become totally invisible, the world is utterly forgotten, and it disappears.

You only become able to see the physical world by LOWERING your "frequency" to one less loving, causing you to enter into illusions and start to allow them into your mind, making them real, causing you to "see them". Without false perception, you CANNOT SEE the false world. And you cannot see BOTH the false world and the true world in their simultaneous entirety.

"The world you see (the false world) must be denied, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."

"You cannot behold the world and know God."

In order TO see the real world, the TRUE world, you have to make the false world - Earth, FALSE, and not believe it's TRUE, otherwise you are making NO distinction between what is true and false and are CONFUSED (ego). Only by being clear about what is true and what is false, or what is good and what is evil, can you DISCERN with accurate (true) perception what is REAL and what is UNREAL.

The world that exists ONLY in false perception, DOES NOT exist in true perception. In true perception you see the real world, in which there ARE no streets, buildings, houses, shopping malls, street lights, not even night and day, and not even the sun and the earth.

If you want to see the face of christ, you have to LET GO OF this world. You have to access the spiritual eye and use christ vision. And you have to see PAST physical matter, IGNORING IT. Making it unreal to yourself. Recognizing it as false. Realizing it IS just an illusory world, not a real world. It is by recognizing that illusions ARE NOT REAL, that you transition from false to true perception. True perception recognizes what is real and what is illusion.

You cannot forgive the world and keep the world. "A world forgiven cannot last." You can ONLY forgive that which is an ILLUSION, and see through its illusory nature to the truth beyond it. Doing this makes the illusion DISAPPEAR. Forgiving the world UNDOES it, and makes it disappear. You cannot SEE IT when you see the face of Christ. Because then, the world is forgotten entirely.

In the following quotes, Jesus outlines clearly why you CANNOT see BOTH worlds at once, in full. And sight of one REQUIRES that you NOT SEE the other. You cannot therefore keep both heaven and Earth, you have to choose one or the other. And ONLY one of the two is real.

"The world is false perception. It is born of error, and it has not left its source. It will remain no longer than the thought that gave it birth is cherished. When the thought of separation has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be seen in quite another light; and one which leads to truth, ****where all the world must disappear**** and all its errors vanish. Now its source has gone, and its effects are gone as well."

"***The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it***, for what He creates must be eternal as Himself. Yet there is nothing in the world you see that will endure forever. Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when ***all things visible will have an end.***"

"The world as YOU perceive it cannot have been created by the Father, for the world is NOT as you see it. God created ONLY the eternal, and ***everything YOU see is perishable***. Therefore, there must be another world which you do NOT see."

"The real world can ACTUALLY BE PERCEIVED. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive ***nothing ELSE***. For if you perceive both good AND evil, you are accepting both the false AND the true, AND MAKING NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEM."

"Accept the one illusion which proclaims there is no condemnation in God's Son, and Heaven is remembered instantly; ***the world forgotten***, all its weird beliefs forgotten with it, as the face of Christ appears unveiled at last in this one dream"

"The world stands like a block before Christ's face. But true perception looks on it as ***nothing more than just a fragile veil***, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now ****it cannot fail to disappear****, for now there is an empty place made clean and ready. Where destruction was perceived the face of Christ appears, and in that instant ***is the world forgot***, with time forever ended as the world spins into nothingness from where it came."

"Sit quietly and look upon the world you see, and tell yourself, "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are no streets where people walk alone and separately. There are no stores where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there but shines, and shines forever." ***This world you see MUST BE DENIED***, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision. ***YOU CANNOT SEE BOTH WORLDS.*** For each of them involves a different kind of seeing, and depends on what you cherish. ***The sight of one is possible because you have DENIED THE OTHER.***

***Both are not true***, yet either one will seem as real to you, as the amount to which you hold it dear. And yet their power is NOT the same, because their real attraction to you IS unequal. You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust even as you made it.

This aching world has not the power to touch the living world at all."

"The body's eyes will continue to see differences. But the mind that has let itself be healed will no longer acknowledge them. There will be those who seem to be "sicker" than others, and the body's eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the healed mind will put them all in one category; they are unreal. This is the gift of its Teacher; the understanding that only two categories are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be the outside world. And of these two, but one is real. Just as reality is wholly real, apart from size and shape and time and place—for differences cannot exist within it—so too are illusions without distinctions. The one answer to sickness of any kind is healing. The one answer to all illusions is truth."

"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. This ultimately reawakens the spiritual eye, ***simultaneously weakening the investment in physical sight.*** The alternating investment in the two types or levels of perception is usually experienced as conflict for a long time, and can become very acute.'

"Consciousness was the first split that man introduced into himself. He became a PERCEIVER rather than a creator in the true sense."

In ACIM terms, before the separation from God, we simply enjoyed what Jesus calls "awareness". This awareness is tightly tied into oneness and knowledge.

In awareness, you ARE that which you are aware of. There is nothing truly "separate" to observe that isn't already you. Since you ARE that which you are aware of, you have immediate and direct "knowledge" of it. Thus knowledge and awareness and oneness is all tied together.

Awareness also has power and love and creation in it. It can cause by will the creation of extensions to God's kingdom. It extends ITSELF as a co-creator, also extending God, to KNOW that which it creates. Just as God created US through directly KNOWING us.

"God knows His Children with perfect certainty. He Created them by knowing them."

In the separation, we attempted to reject all this. We rejected oneness and introduced separation. This now meant that we wanted something to "come between" ourselves and ourselves. Between us and God. Something which can be different over here than it is over there.

As a result, mind split and now formed what ACIM refers to as "consciousness". It's a separated state. The mind in this state is NOT creative, and does NOT have knowledge. Instead of being causal and powerful and one with everything, it is instead a state relying entirely on maintaining separation.

"Consciousness is correctly identified as the domain of the ego." At the same time of course the sense of identity went from you being the whole, to you being only a part. And now in the egoic consciousness state of mind, the mind became UN-creative (mis-creative) and unwilling to be one with everything.

Mind's rejection of creation and knowledge was kind of like trying to make the mind empty, or to stop broadcasting (creating). So instead of extending and uniting and sharing, it became sort of passive and unwilling.

As a result, mind now regards itself as a sort of RECEIVER of inputs, signals, which come to it from something it regards as NOT part of itself. Not one with itself or known. As such there now develops ideas of space and time, of distance and delay, or separateness between self and brothers and God.

"Perception is a RESULT not a cause."

"Consciousness is thus the level of perception, but NOT of knowledge. Again, to PERCEIVE is NOT to know."

"Consciousness is the level which engages in the world, and is capable of responding to both external and internal impulses. Having no impulses from itself, and being primarily a mechanism for inducing response, it can be very wrong."

The perceiving "consciousness" state has now gone from being a powerful knowing creator-extender that is one with everything, to a disempowered passive state that doesn't know anything and sees everything as separate. Effectively it now sees itself as a victim or at the EFFECT OF things separate from itself.

Signals then enter the conscious mind either from without or within, and from the superconscious (God level) or subconscious (miracle level). Consciousness sort of RECEIVES these signals and thus PERCEIVES what it is TOLD exists. As though something outside of itself is making impressions upon it and giving it signals and telling it that stuff exists.

All of these signals in the perceiving mind are SENSED, in particular by the body. There is now a separation between self and other, so a separation between observer (who has awareness) and the observed. Because of the separation split between these two, it introduces the delay and distance of spacetime.

As such, every single physical object, all matter, space and time themselves, all human bodies, the planet Earth, the sun and moon etc, it's all ONLY a perceptual signal occurring in a state of separation. Separate things, being sensed by a separated mind, in a state in which the mind is not ONE with those things, and in which both the separated things AND the "separate observer" (ego) are illusions.

Both the ego mind (separated self) and the world it perceives (spacetime) depend entirely on maintaining separation and differences in order to maintain the mind split that leads to perception and consciousness. Without this "first split" in the mind, consciousness is not possible, perception is not possible, and separate objects are not possible.

This doesn't mean that the separate objects can be perceived "as one with" the observer. If the two are separate, perception is possible. If the two are one, perception is NOT possible and separation is NOT possible and OBJECTS are not possible. Matter is not possible, space and time are not possible, without a split mind.

"To see a sinless body is impossible."

"Since perception rests on lack, those who perceive have not totally accepted the Atonement and given over themselves to truth. Perception IS a separated state, and the perceiver DOES need healing."

Thus if you are still perceiving, you are NOT knowing. Even true perception is NOT knowledge, not oneness, and not a healed mind. Thus you can seem to wake up to or attain very high states of CONSCIOUSNESS, in which you can perceive the "real world", BUT, this is not the same as the realm of total oneness which is heaven.

"Even the perception of the Holy Spirit, as perfect as perception CAN be, is without meaning in Heaven. Perception can reach EVERYWHERE under His guidance, for the vision of Christ beholds EVERYTHING in light. But no perception, however holy, will last FOREVER."

Waking up WITHIN consciousness, in a perceptual realm, is still a split-minded state of separation. Only when consciousness ENDS, the split is entirely healed, and separateness becomes impossible, does the mind return to TOTAL KNOWLEDGE, oneness, perception is impossible, and space and time are impossible. Without the split of consciousness, there is no world. And the mind must wake up FROM consciousness in order to return to the awareness of reality.

No more dreams, no more material objects with differences, no more bodies and planets, no more observers and observed things. Only a directly known realm of SPIRIT AND LIGHT, created by God to last forever.

"To perceive the truth is not the same as knowing it."

"And now God's KNOWLEDGE, changeless, certain, pure and wholly understandable, enters its Kingdom. Gone is perception, false and true alike. Gone is forgiveness, for its task is done. And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God. God knows it is His Own, as it is his. And here They join, for here the face of Christ has shone away time's final instant, and now is the last perception of the world without a purpose and without a cause. For where God's memory has come at last there is no journey, no belief in sin, no walls, no bodies, and the grim appeal of guilt and death is there snuffed out forever."

"The intrusion of the ability to perceive, which is inherently judgmental, was introduced only after the Separation. No one has been sure of anything since then. You will also remember that I made it very clear that the Resurrection was the return to knowledge, which was accomplished by the union of my will with the Father's."

"Listening to the ego's voice MEANS that you believe it is possible to attack God. You believe that a part of Him has been torn away by YOU."

"We have repeatedly emphasized that the ego DOES believe it can attack God, and tries to persuade you that YOU have done this."

"But sin, were it possible, WOULD be irreversible."

So you have this part of your mind, which believes in ego ideas of attack, which is the same as sin. The ego in you believes that you CAN attack real things, even though "nothing real can be threatened." It also believes that not only can it attack God, but it HAS attacked God.

It's the part of you that believes, deceives, and is trying to convince yourself, that you are the ego. That you are not as God created you. And therefore that YOU can attack God, and that you have done so.

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects."

If you believe this, you will believe that you've sinned. This is what the "original sin" is all about. It's the authority problem, the notion you can cause your own cause. That you can cause God against His will, and therefore change him and destroy him.

It is utterly impossible that you're able to do this. God cannot ever be attacked because He is permanent and immortal. You cannot have attacked anything real, at any time. You have never sinned. Not only have you never sinned, sin is actually literally impossible.

The ego however believes that sin IS possible and HAS happened. So you have these two perspectives. The truth in you is asserting that you must still be sinless, but the lies in you are fighting against it and trying to insist you have done something awful. Something totally EXTREMELY awful, as to try to murder God. The ego even thinks it has succeeded.

The belief that you HAVE attacked God, produces a death wish. If you've attacked Him and hurt Him, then he would logically be in a position to be completely justified in revenge. And that now means that God is angry and attacking and threatening. This goes hand in hand with believing that you've attacked and threatened him through anger.

"Death wishes ... DO kill spiritually. ALL destructive thinking is dangerous. Given a death wish, a man has no choice except to ACT upon his thought, or behave CONTRARY TO it. He can thus choose ONLY between homicide and fear."

"And you do not recognize that it is WHAT YOU INVITED IN that would destroy you, and DOES demand total sacrifice of you."

"The ego wants YOU dead"

That being your "new truth", you will then believe that because sin has actually happened, you deserve to be punished. That you are guilty and should die to atone for it. Or that death will allow you to escape from God's wrath. Because now you see God as having vengeance, as having a very good reason to hate you and to want you dead. That your death is God's will.

You will also then see that by believing you attacked God and hurt him, he is not happy with you. That he cannot possibly love you any more. And therefore you find yourself unworthy and unlovable. And even moreso that you cannot go home. That you are expelled from Heaven and are not welcome there, nor do you ever want to go back there.

What this does is it sets you up for the belief in "death as inevitable." Because if you can't go back home to LIFE, then your ONLY choice is to head towards death. It means you can kind of "never live again". And so you crawl away with your tail between your legs, licking your wounds, condemning yourself for what you think you did, and trying to guarantee your own punishment. And to think this is only because you LISTENED to the ego and BELIEVED it's lies about you being sinful.

Thus you become suicidal because now you yourself believe you deserve punishment for sin, that it makes complete sense that you're guilty, that God would never forgive you, and that what you did is irreversible. It's not even that you think others will punish you for this crime, it's that you yourself believe you deserve to be punished, and you yourself begin to actually enact it upon yourself.

This then frightens you because now you are actually against yourself and are entering into self-harm and self-punishment. You are trying to make yourself dead to pay for what you did. So that now means that you've become suicidal. And your only seeming hope to take away from God all power and rights over you, is to head towards death as a doorway out. You reason that if you will die, you will be saved. And now although you fear it, death becomes salvation and is attractive to you as a solution.

This is literally how every single person chooses to CAUSE their own death, and why all death is suicide, and why "no one dies without their own consent." It's all because you don't think you deserve to live. The ego in you believes so strongly that sin exists, you CAN sin, and you HAVE sinned, that a whole cascade of logical conclusions follow on from it, condemning you to death as the ONLY remaining option.

The only way you will get out of this downward spiral into hell and self-destruction, is to move away from the ego's "version" of what is true, and embrace God's version of what is true. That means questioning the belief in sin, that sin is possible or that you're guilty of doing it. This means the undoing of guilt as well, and therefore also fear.

While the ego in you is screaming "I have sinned", the God in you is gently reminding you that "sin is impossible." While the ego is trying to condemn yourself to hell, God is reminding you that you can't attack anything real. While the ego in you believes and is committed to keeping guilt, and to project it, in order to keep the separation going, the Holy Spirit is trying to teach you that you're not guilty because you have never sinned. Because sin is impossible. That everything the ego believes and asserts is a lie.

"You think if anyone could see the truth about you he would be repelled, recoiling from you as if from a poisonous snake."

"Whatever mistakes you made, the truth about you is unchanged."

"You need to hear the truth about yourself as frequently as possible, because your mind is so preoccupied with false self-images."

"The truth about YOU is so lofty that nothing that is unworthy of God is worthy of you."

"The Holy Spirit knows the truth about you. The image you made does not."

"Only what God creates is irreversible and unchangeable."

"You have NOT attacked God, and you DO love Him. Can you change your reality? No-one can will to destroy himself."

This morning Jesus told me to "listen". So I just lay there and focused on listening. My thoughts stopped. It was at times difficult to maintain extreme focus on listening intently, particularly without anything to listen "to". My mind kept getting lost agains in ego dreams and thinking. Then I'd come back to it.

Listening very intently stops all thoughts. It also makes you more present.

Then something else happened. Holy Spirit said, "receive". So while maintaining this listening state, I allowed myself to receive. This means, receiving without necessarily 'giving' anything. Allowing God to come to me. I immediately felt Holy Spirit's presence in my body which then proceeded to shake and stuff as Holy Spirit healed me. Each time I allowed myself to stop, listen, and receive, another wave came.

Here's why listening and receiving seem so alien to the ego, and why it stops ego thoughts.

Your mind in its natural state is supposed to receive everything from God. It is a receptive device. It's willingness to listen to everything God is sharing and to be open to it keeps it plugged into love. It is supposed to receive a constant broadcast of love, all the way into the deepest depths of the soul.

This is simple cause and effect. God is cause, God creates and sustains you forever, you are the effect of God and so it is completely natural for your soul to simply receive whatever God is creating you to be.

This openness to receive God, to allow God, puts the mind into its natural state of extension, where it receives input from God and then broadcasts it, like a repeater. It allows God to flow through it and express love outward, increasing the love and joy.

But in the separation idea, something happened.

Another way to think of separation is that we tried to unplug ourselves from God's input, to stop listening to His Voice, to stop receiving His love, and to run off with our hands over our ears trying not to acknowledge, allow or be open to receiving the truth. It was an attempt to shut out the 'cause' of ourselves and to pretend that we ourselves are our own cause.

This does something unnatural to the mind.

Without input coming from God, the mind starts 'inventing' inputs. It starts to dream. It makes stuff up. And since what it is making up is not love, all of this dreaming produces ego thoughts and forms. "All thoughts produce form at some level." So now instead of simply radiating silence, or peace, or love or joy, the mind starts making "noise". This noise takes the form of ego thinking.

So ego thinking then is, in every case, an attempt to run away from God, to not listen to God, to not RECEIVE, and to instead try to give without receiving. This is because in the separation, ego separated giving from receiving. It actually is trying to give give give all the time (because it is sacrificial), but without receiving, because it wants deprivation and lack.

So the ego-driven mind is very good at making noise, broadcasting, giving without receiving, creating lack, inventing thoughts and dreams, and making illusions. It is all symptomatic of being unplugged from God and not receiving God as input.

So what happens is, if you focus on listening, ALL of your ego thoughts will go silent. Very automatically. You don't need to thought-watch or try to transcend them or stop them or whatever. They are only happening because the mind is not listening to God. So as you put all your focus on God, all your problems are solved and the mind automatically stops inventing stuff.

All of the ego's thoughts are mind wandering. And mind wandering means, allowing mind to take you away from yourself and away from God. This means going into ego thinking, making illusions, believing separation, and stopping receiving. If you did not "wander away" from yourself, ie yourself in God, you would not have any ego thoughts - OR any ego at all.

Essentially this is the ONLY meditation that works, because there is only one problem - separation from God, and only one solution, rejoining your mind with God and putting your mind back in service to spirit. ie being willing to receive God's will and extend it, rather than willing against it.

It is very easy and simple and very powerful. Just put all your attention on listening. Listening means you are shutting up and stopping making noise and being quiet and allowing something else to have it's say. It means you are willing to stop being the author of illusions, and to receive reality - what it wants to tell you it is rather than your ideas about it.

Whether you listen to sounds or not does not matter. But even if there are sounds and if you put all your focus on listening to them, that is helpful too. Not much different to transcendental meditation where you focus on one thing. But you don't even need something to focus on.

You are basically focusing on God. On allowing God to express to you, whereby you listen to that expression and thus receive it. Listening and receiving are the same thing. This is also how you get in touch with spiritual guidance.

"If you do not hear the voice for God it is because you do not choose to listen."

When you surrender and listen, and become open to receive, it can seem as if you are being selfish by ONLY receiving. But try it. Allow God to come to YOU, rather than you doing all the "seeking". "Be still, and know that I am God." Just allow yourself to receive God's love, let Him love you, let the love come to you, and simply absorb it. Without needing to express anything, nor even trying to extend it.

We have become SO used to not receiving that we think we're supposed to do something in order to earn or be entitled to something. You don't. God would love you regardless of whether you do anything. Just be still and listen and let yourself receive from God.

I think I posted about this a while ago and called it "God bathing"... like sunbathing, you just soak up God and receive the warmth. Like recharging a battery before use. It feels great to let yourself receive love. Especially to allow yourself to be loved without you having to do anything, recognizing you are worthy of that. It actually makes you feel VULNERABLE. Exposed to God. Allowing God into your innermost private areas. Soak up the love. It will heal you.

And, if you are willing, to receive God's love, you might also invite Holy Spirit to enter you at that time, and He really can go to town healing you. There are major miracles of healing waiting for you to receive if you will just surrender and be willing to let it come to you. This is also the key to abundance.

Let's have a closer look at what the course says about the world and whether it is God's creation. This is going to be a long post so bear with me or pick and choose which quotes you want to look at. I put a comment after each one.

To me, the way that all of these statements sound paints a clear picture that the "physical world" i.e. the physical universe - planet Earth, is NOT God's creation whatsoever in any way shape or form.

It also says to me and that every time Jesus refers to the world as something we do not want, he is not referring to some "misperception of it" that we don't want - some imagined version of the world, which he talks about in other passages - but rather, literally "the world" - planet Earth. It is an illusion not created by God, and it does not exist, and it is not our home.

Confusion comes in because at times, Jesus IS speaking about our false perceptions and the need for the correction of perception. But at other times, he is speaking at a higher "level" either at the level of someone with true perception, or even higher at a level of the One Son of God who made this universe. Not having a clear distinguish about WHICH level he is talking at in any given quote leads many people to a lot of confusing and false conclusions. Let's take a look at some quotes....

"You do not want the world." (who would want a world God didn't create?)

"The world provides no safety." (because it is an attack on God)

"This world was over long ago." (because it never happened)

"Nothing the world believes is true." (because the world itself is fundamentally a lie)

"Love was never in the world of dreams." (because God cannot be in the world or of the world nor can He create the world. The world of dreams is not your dreamy interpretation of planet Earth, it IS planet Earth, a dream which you are inside of right now, sleeping - look around you! "Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all." - tells us that when we wake up in the morning to eat breakfast, WE ARE INSIDE A DREAM, not a world that God created.)

"There are no satisfactions in the world." (because the world was made by us as a substitute for God's universe)

"It is the world you see that is impossible." (because the world we see - literally planet earth, not your interpretation of planet earth - is impossible. It cannot exist because God did not create it.)

"Miracles do not obey the laws of this world." (because this world is entirely an EFFECT and it has no power to do anything)

"The world is not left by death but by truth." (because the world ITSELF is death, and truth is its undoing)

"Without the idea of death there is no world." (see .. the world is MADE OF DEATH and it will not ever be made of Life or given life or resurrected or turned into something living or God-created).

"All the "pleasures" of the world are nothing." (because they are illusions, and substitutes for God's love. This means the world can NEVER be a satisfying replacement for God's Creation).

"Perception selects, and makes the world you see." (Many many people think this means, that you have misperception OF the world, peeking out from a separate body, looking incorrectly at planet earth which somehow objectively came to exist "on its own" or created by God. What this really means is, YOUR perception, as the One Son of God, MADE THE ENTIRE WORLD, and the world *itself* IS a state of mind containing images. Trees, houses, people, it's all part of perception. Not perception OF trees and houses and people, but literally the things themselves. Those objects, your body, planet earth, are misperceptions.)

"The world you see is but a judgment on yourself." (because you are the One Son of God and the ENTIRE WORLD is a judgement against you. It's an attempt to deny who you are, to turn you into a form which dies, to picture what it would be like to be dead, and to completely obscure the light of Christ. The world itself IS judgement. Judgements OF or ABOUT the world are an entirely additional LAYER of bullshit that you added as a separate human, and is a SECOND LAYER of sleeping you added on top of dreaming the world.)

"The world you see has nothing to do with reality." (Again, this is one which many people think means, the world your little separate body-located self sees... thus your private perception. No. It's the world your eyes see. You see trees. You can call the trees good trees or bad trees, hated trees or loved trees, you still see trees. The trees you SEE - trees AT ALL - are nothing to do with reality. God did not create trees.)

"If this were the real world, God would be cruel." (This SHOULD be an obvious one. Given all the suffering and terror and death in the world, which is inherent to the world's nature, should NOT be possible if God created it. And claiming that it's really love or life if viewed correctly, is a complete distortion, again based in one person's body-identified personal opinion about the world. God does not create worlds where there are forms or bodies or things which die, NOR does he create worlds where even if those things are all part of one lovely "whole", they are possible either. God only creates HEAVEN, which is formless and has absolutely nothing to do with planet Earth in any way.)

"The bleak little world will vanish into nothingness." (Yes, planet Earth, is a bleak little world, and it will vanish into nothingness, because God did not create it. This does not mean your personal misperception of the world will vanish (though it will also) - the world ITSELF will vanish, because it is a lie).

"The world was made that problems could not be escaped." (the purpose for this self-made world was to create problems that are inescapable, such as sickness and death. These problems however have no power over miracles which can undo them all BECAUSE God did not create a world of problems.)

"This world is a picture of the crucifixion of God's Son." (I like this one because it says it like it is. The entire world, the entire physical universe, is a "picture" in the MIND of the Son of God, who is absolutely vast and unlimited, who is dreaming this ENTIRE physical universe and everything in it, and it was designed by him as the crucifixion of himself. Its depiction of things which have beginnings and ends, stars which are born and die, flowers which wilt, people who die of disease, planets that die, etc... is a picture of CRUCIFIXION not a picture of "God is very loving." While you can come to perceive it in a more forgiving way, that does not make or prove it is God's creation either, because if you recognize it for the illusion/lie it is, it MUST disappear.)

"The world you see does nothing. It has no effects at all." (This is because the world is an effect of dreaming. What appears in it as "causes" are illusions of causes put in place by the dreamer. The world has no consequences. Anything God creates MUST have the power to CAUSE, and since the world cannot cause anything, it cannot be a creation of God.)

"The unreal world is a thing of despair, for it can never be." (There can only be joy and love and peace in what CAN be, i.e. God's creation, heaven, the kingdom, but outside of that there is no life and nothing can be joyful or loving or peaceful. The world is inherently a depiction of what peace is NOT like. Separation in all its forms is played out here, and every single particle of matter is at war with all the rest.)

"Salvation is no more than a reminder this world is not your home." (This world is not your home... literally, planet Earth is not your home. This entire physical universe is not your home. But some people interpret this to mean, well, this imaginary interpretation of the world is not my home - the world I'm putting on top of the world is not my home. Bullshit. "The world" is simply planet earth. Planet earth is not your home. Surely you FEEL this? Surely you recognize that you feel like an alien here, and that the more you wake up the more you recognize that you do not belong in this illusory place? I know I do.)

"There is a place in you where this whole world has been forgotten."(Thank God, because this world is not something God would ever create. God is suddenly the author of duality and sickness and death? God sees sickness and death as lovely and precious? I think not.).

"The world has never been at all. Eternity remains a constant state." (Planet Earth has never existed at all. This is hard to accept I know. There is no world. This is the one core teaching in ACIM which many people refuse to entertain. This is because we believe the world is REAL and cannot conceive of how it would not be. Especially if you come to the course with a background in beliefs which say God made the world in some way, that's hard to put down. This isn't referring to a privately perceived interpretation of the world. Again, it's just simply... this world, planet earth, has never existed. We can deny and fight this all we want.)

"In the world of scarcity, love has no meaning and peace is impossible." (Would you say planet earth is a world of scarcity? I sure would. That's not a judgement or an inability to see its pure loveliness. Yes there's a forgiven world, which is the recognition that this world is an illusion and is nothing, but I think most would agree this is a world of lack and rarity. Just look at how empty outer space is and how distant civilizations or inhabitable planets are. Extreme scarcity.)

"The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt." (So here again you could say, well, this means my perception is nuts and I'm not seeing the world correctly. Ok. That's one LAYER of the problem. Once you undo that false perception you're going to find out, that the world is STILL a delusional system. Inherently, the mountains, trees, planets, forests, oceans, it's all a state of DELUSION, and that's not going to change when you get over your personal misinterpretations of it. See, the problem is, we think that when we overcome "my" personal misperceptions, that's going to be the end of the story. It's not. You have to not only get over your personal interpretations (which is ONE level of awakening), AND then go beyond the definition of "my self" to incorporate ALL SELVES into one single Son of God - as Christ. And in that view, there is an entirely second level of awakening which leads to God, and the acceptance that the One Son of God MADE this world out of insanity and guilt. Guilt, denied, became unconscious, and projected out as the physical universe, in which we are now hiding from it by pretending to be innocent. Hmmm)

"The Holy Spirit sees the world as a teaching device for bringing you home." (because the world ITSELF is not your home. It's just a way Holy Spirit can USE it to help you to ESCAPE from it through truth - because it doesn't exist)

"The world you see is an illusion of a world. God did not create it." (Plain and simple. Normal language. The world you see, with your eyes, regardless of your mental interpretations or labelling or judgements, is an illusion of a world. God did NOT create it. Many people want this mean, my personal interpretation of the world is not the world God created, and once I am free of my personal interpretation, God is going to reveal that this world - planet Earth - is his lovely creation. Good luck with that. Planet Earth does not exist. It is an illusion. The course even tells us the "real world" is an illusion and will disappear.)

"There is no world! This is the central thought the Course attempts to teach." (AHA!.. .. If you can GET this one and accept it, you've made a huge leap away from the ILLUSION that this world dis real, or that God could have created it whatsoever, to the awareness that this world can NEVER be real because to believe that requires a belief in sin and death. There is no world. Yes, planet Earth. There is no planet earth, neither as a separate planet nor as part of some seamless "soup" of God-stuff. Pretty threatening to the ego which is why it fights it tooth and nail.)

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never be undone." (Miracles can UNDO the world itself, and everything the world says cannot be undone (itself), BECAUSE the world CAN be undone, proving that it is NOT REAL. What is real cannot be undone. If miracles can undo the world, they can bring about RESURRECTION - the undoing of death in ALL its forms, including physical and mental death. Eventually the entire physical universes is going to be UNDONE, because it does not exist. Only God's kingdom will remain.)

"This is an insane world, and do not underestimate the extent of its insanity." (Obviously, but this actually does not just mean that the people in the world are nuts (and most are, me included), it means the world ITSELF, the very fabric of spacetime, is insanity. It is impossible to be separate from God and this universe attempts to prove otherwise.)

"On confusion has this world been based, and there is nothing else it rests upon." (here, we're told the world RESTS UPON confusion. The world itself. Now, if this means your perception, sure, that'd seem to make sense. You can be confused, and become unconfused. Sure, makes sense. But this statement isn't speaking about you or your personal world. In fact, most of the course is not speaking to or about anyone's EGO SELF, and yet 90%+ of ACIM students THINK that the Course is talking about THEIR PERSONAL EGO, which leads to a ton of confusion. The world ITSELF is based on confusion because it's an expression of a belief that separation from God is possible, which is a confused state of mind.)

"It is not will for life but wish for death that is the motivation for this world." (And this never changes. The world is BASED ON death, made of death, and is ALWAYS DEAD. There is no life here. There is no life outside of heaven. All forms of "life" in the world, all bodies, animals, plants etc, the sun and stars, it is all part of a DREAM OF DEATH, and not one part of it has eternal life. Death was the motivation that MADE THIS WORLD. This world was MADE BY A DEATH WISH, not by God. That's quite extremely opposite to the folk who believe God created this world somehow).

"The world is only in the mind of its maker. Do not believe it is outside of yourself." (When this says "yourself" note that it does not just mean "you in a body and not other people." Most people take it that way because they have an ego. Statements about you making the world or the world being in your mind, is not about it being in your SEPARATE MIND. It's about it being in THE ONE MIND of the son of God. The ONE son of God is the maker of this entire world. It is not outside of THAT SELF. You are busy focusing on how to get your LITTLE SELF to a state of awakening of maximal naturalness, but there is more beyond that - realizing that you are the entire sonship and more. You are Christ, not just one Son.)

"What profiteth it a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own Soul?" (Who wants the crappy world anyway? It's full of shit.)

"You are not the victim of the world you see because you invented it. You can give it up as easily as you made it up." (You can believe you are victimized when you believe the world itself is a CAUSE and you are its EFFECT. But when this is reversed (this is a course in cause not effect), YOU become the cause and the world is recognized as an EFFECT. It has no power over you because it is an EFFECT of YOUR dreaming it (as the One Son). This is how you are not a victim of it. Otherwise, the world can still kill you against your will. No-one dies without their own consent.)

"Holy are you, eternal, free and whole, at peace forever in the Heart of God. Where is the world, and where is sorrow now?" (Apparently Jesus is clear that the world is not a place of peace or freedom or holiness. So God cannot have created it.)

"What is seen in dreams seems to be very real. Yet the Bible says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam, and nowhere is there reference to his waking up. The world has not yet experienced any comprehensive reawakening or rebirth." (Yes dreams seem very real. What if i told you right now that you are actually INSIDE A HUGE DREAM? Right now... this room you are in or whatever, the people you are near, it's part of a DREAM. This is not what God created because it is a DREAM, not a reality. God does not dream or make worlds of dreams, or dreams of death. God did not create a dream world. You're dreaming, and you need to wake up FROM this dream, not TO it.)

"Forgive the world, and you will understand that every thing that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real." (Objects in this world have ends and beginnings. Every particle begins and ends. Every flower is sown and grows and blooms and dies. Beginnings and endings. It's not just a matter of not seeing them correctly or not realizing that "God is making them grow" or some BS, it's simply that, ALL FORMS ARE FORMS OF DEATH, and they all end, and that is why they are NOT eternal, and God did not create them.

"Temptation has one lesson it would teach in all its forms wherever it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty and bound by what it orders him to feel." (Exactly, and elsewhere Jesus tells us that love (God) did not make the body. God does not create forms, or planets, or a physical universe).

"The tiny instant you would keep and make eternal, passed away in Heaven too soon for anything to notice it had come. What disappeared too quickly to affect the simple knowledge of the Son of God can hardly still be there, for you to choose to be your teacher." (The entire world and all things in it were MADE by us to be NOT ETERNAL, which is WHY it passed away, because it could not last. Nothing God creates can die or end or transform or change, no matter what words you use to try to make out that it wouldn't be seen "as change" when you're awake.)

"Everything in this world is little because it is a world made out of littleness." (I like this quote also because it locks in the form of the world as being evidence of a mistake. Everything in the world, bodies, objects, even the planet, are "little". All little particles and atoms. All little tiny little creatures walking around thinking they are big. Go up in an airplane and you'll see how little it all is. Every FORM in this world is little, as an idea of not being unlimited or infinite, because it's an idea of contraction AWAY from God. This is not God's creation or God's will, and God would not maintain this for an instant.)

"There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see and all the world must change accordingly. (mind over matter)" (Again this is another one which people can and do use to try to prove that references to the world are all about "your personal misperception", and that you need to fix how you see in order to see it properly, and that afterwards, you'll keep the world and stay in it because it's real. No. Your WISHES have MADE A PLANET. The wishes of the one son of God, has made an entire physical universe. These are wishes to die. Wishes to be crucified. Wishes to sin. Wishes against God's will. God did not make this. What you want to see, changes, IN FORM, as mind-over-matter, because your mind is THAT POWERFUL. It doesn't just mean you change your perception OF stuff, when your perception properly changes, the world ITSELF must change form, and so must the body.)

"The world that you see is what you have put there to see; nothing more and nothing less and so it is important to you. The world that you perceive is the witness to your state of mind, the outward picture of your inward condition." (You put it there (forms, bodies, trees, buildings) because you WANT TO. Do you think you don't have that much power? The mind is very powerful. The world must match the outward picture of the inward condition of the mind of the ONE SON. The One Son is attempting to destroy himself BY fragmenting himself into many many individuals and forms scattered across many worlds. What shows up as objects and bodies is what the Son of God wants to see there. It IS his perception. The course says literally "the world IS PERCEPTION", which does not mean that your little human "perception" contains the illusory world, it means the ENTIRE WORLD OF EARTH is inside the perception of a vast mind - it is that mind's IMAGINATION. Meaning, physical objects, are actually a part of SEEING, the mechanism of trying to VISUALIZE STUFF, which brings it into appearance as fake images i.e. objects and forms and bodies. When the mind is free of all this, the physical world - yes - planet earth in all its ways - MUST DISSAPPEAR.)

"Forget not the Kingdom of God for anything the world has to offer. The world can add nothing to the power and the glory of God and His holy Sons, but it can blind the Sons to the Father if they behold it. You cannot behold the world and know God. Only one is true." (I would rather have what the Kingdom of God offers than what this world offers. This world is not my home. It does not contain the truth. It is not real. And God did not create it. It HAS blinded the sons to the father, which was its purpose. You cannot behold (see in any way) the world (physical planet earth) and behold the kingdom. Only one of them is true and real. Planet earth does not exist, was not created by god, is an illusion, and if you're still SEEING IT in any way, with any mind whatsoever, you are not in the Kingdom. To suggest you can BE in God, in his kingdom, while the world continues to appear or move or change or have form, you are in denial.)

"O my brothers, if you only knew the peace that will envelop you and hold you safe and pure and lovely in the Mind of God, you could but rush to meet Him where His altar is. Hallowed your Name and His, for they are joined here in this holy place. Here He leans down to lift you up to Him, out of illusions into holiness; out of the world and to eternity; out of all fear and given back to love." (Looking forward to this! Finally a relief from this world of nightmares and death and suffering. THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD BEYOND THIS which God did create - his kingdom, heaven, filled with joy and life and peace and celebration. It is HOME. It is where you really want to be. Do not let the world, planet earth, bodies, objects, forms, people, places, idols, or anything else, KEEP YOU FROM going there and accepting it as your true home where your true nature is free at last. The world offers nothing in comparison. Pleasure is not love. Specialness is not love. Forms are not love. Sunsets and kittens are not love. "Never was love in the world."

There is no world. The people who do not believe this will continue to not believe this, and will object to this post and everything it says. They are free to do so, but they are not free of the confusion that is going to accompany those beliefs, or the fear that will be induced upon being confronted with this truth. I would hope people will change their mind and see what the course is really telling us. Then we have real hope.

"The world as YOU perceive it cannot have been created by the Father, for the world is NOT as you see it. God created ONLY the eternal, and everything YOU see is perishable. Therefore, there must be another world which you do NOT see."

I think this is a fairly clear statement about how things are set up in terms of "worlds."

1) There is a reference at first to "a world" which "you can perceive". Not necessarily assuming this perceivable world is Earth or heaven or anything. But some kind of a world.

2) We're told that you have a way of perceiving said world "as you perceive it", in one of two ways. The way YOU are perceiving "it" is not the way that "it is."

3) You cannot assume here that the world being referred to is Earth. It is very much more likely to be heaven or the real world.

4) We're then instructed that "God created ONLY the eternal", and that "everything you see is perishable." Notice how he is tying in everything you see, with the previous statement that you're looking at some kind of a world in the wrong way.

5) If God creates the eternal, and everything you see which is "the world as you see it, not as it is" is perishable, then we need to examine what is perishable. Look around you. Look at the physical objects. Are they perishable?

6) The simple result of that inquiry SHOULD be (unless you are in heavy denial), that everything in the physical world that "you see" is perishable. The trees have lost their leaves which are rotten. The bodies die. The food rots. Nothing seems to last forever. In other words, "it is not eternal."

7) From that alone, you should draw the simple conclusion that everything physical is perishable. And therefore, if "the world" (nonspecific) that "you see" which is NOT created by God and is NOT eternal, is planet Earth etc, then the "perishable world you see" is a direct reference to the physical world, space time and this so-called universe.

8 ) Jesus goes on to say that there must be ANOTHER WORLD, besides and beyond this PERISHABLE world, that you do not see. But notice also that earlier in the statement he said that there was a generic "world" that you have two ways of seeing, and that when you do NOT see it "as it is", you see a perishable world. In comparison to seeing the perishable world, when you see right you should see "the generic world" as it is, which will appear to be "another world" by comparison. A world which IS NOT PERISHABLE.

9) So essentially the whole statement is saying, God created an eternal kingdom, another term for which is a "world" or environment, which has eternal non-perishable properties, which means it's a world in which there is no perishing, no rotting and decay, no dying. And when you do NOT see that world as it is, you INSTEAD see a PERISHABLE world. When you do not see God's creation, you literally see another world - ie planet Earth, rising up in your sight, showing you things perish.

10) The simple conclusion you should draw from this is that planet Earth and all things physical are "what you see" when you DO NOT see God's creation of heaven. And seeing planet Earth is therefore a symptom of NOT seeing God's creation. And when you see God's creation you will NOT see a perishable world.

Some people would suggest that the whole thing is saying that if you see planet Earth correctly, "as it is", you will recognize that IT IS heaven. ie, that heaven contains physical objects, food which rots, bodies which die. But somehow that seeing them correctly "as they are" allows you to see some kind of thread of oneness running through them, such that it renders the whole scene some kind of "perfection", and "eternal."

The problem with that is that, without being in denial, even if you see a perishable world in such a way that it seems to reflect heaven, the physical objects STILL PERISH. There is still physical death. There are still seasons. The food still has a shelf life. Because that is part of being perishable. That is NOT a sign of somethinge eternal. Eternal things do not change, they do not transition, or go through phases, or shift. They cannot be modified or attacked or damaged or hurt, or be made sick, and they cannot die. Those are the qualities of heaven.

So you can see that it is impossible that Earth, in ANY form, in ANY perception, can be the "world God created". An eternal world, free from perishing. Jesus's statement to me clearly says that God created a kingdom which is eternal and in which nothing dies in any way shape or form, and when you do not see it "as it is", you superimpose on it an entire "second kingdom" (spacetime), world, which includes all physical planets and bodies, which is like a layer of denial placed OVER God's kingdom so that you DO NOT see it.

"The world (physical, earth) stands like a block before Christ's face (heaven). But true perception looks on it as nothing more than just a fragile veil, so easily dispelled that it can last no longer than an instant. It is seen at last for only what it is. And now it cannot fail to disappear"

Notice in this statement for example that Jesus says that there is an entire world standing like a block, in front of (overlaid upon, superimposed) heaven (Christ is heaven). Then that TRUE perception looks upon that world and sees it as a vail (covering up heaven) which can be dispelled and disappears. It does not say that FALSE perception looks upon that world. True corrected perception looks upon that world and sees it as a veil covering up reality. So it is not a faulty view "about the earth" that causes you to see "earth wrongly", it is a faulty view "about heaven" that causes you to see "a veil" - which is the physical world.

"Christ's vision has one law. It does not look upon a body and mistake it for the Son whom God created. It beholds a light beyond the body; an idea beyond what can be touched"

And here again we're told that there is a light BEYOND the body, beyond the physical. Christ vision looks to that light, that world, looking PAST the body. This is why ACIM says that "to forgive is to overlook". To forgive means to OVERLOOK (not see) the physical planet earth.

Earth is simply part of a "veil of illusions" which was overlaid as a second world, as spacetime, ON TOP OF heaven, in an attempt to BLOCK AWARENESS of heaven. It is a gap of separation, and is filled with illusory things and impossible things, such as things which can perish and die. Bodies and planets. Entire galaxies. All made to COVER UP heaven. And if you believe in sin or guilt or fear, or make separation real, you will SEE the physical world, and sight of heaven will be blocked. But if you look to the light beyond the physical, you will see THROUGH and past the physical to a world of light.

"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."

Lately what I've been trying to focus on is what can be *experienced*. The truth can be described in thousands of words but really it is an experience. We're really talking about you getting to the point where you can experience happiness, experience love, experience peace, experience God. God is an experience.

So what this means is looking at what you are experiencing NOW, and looking at what tools you can practically USE to actaully shift your experience to a happier, fuller, more truthful/authentic one.

And this has nothing really to do with what you are thinking about what you're experiencing or what's going on around it or what you should be experiencing, but the actual direct immediate experience - your feelings, your psychological reactions, your perception of reality, your union with God. What is reality to you right now, in honesty and not trying to 'please' Jesus?

This isn't done on a mental level or in terms of theory or discussion. What you really need is practical tools that WORK that bring about a real TRANSFORMATION of what you are experiencing. You are meant to LIVE the truth, not just talk about it. You're meant to actually feel God's love, live in God's love and be God's love.

What I've been seeing also is that when you try to be or attain a goal or theoretical truth that is too far beyond what you can actually EXPERIENCE, all of your energies start to flow into the intellect because they aren't grounded or rooted in what is real to you. You try to grasp at it and affirm it and think about it and make it seem like you understand it but you're not actually *experiencing* it because it's outside your envelope. It's very easy to conceptualize 'oneness' but, are you actually fully omnipresent and experience absolute unlimited psychological access to every part of existence? Nope.

I can testify that I went to great lengths in my mind and intellect in understanding the Course and the metaphysics and the high-level statements of truth and how it all fits together and all that. I was looking for some kind of a way to experience truth by having the biggest or best thought about it, or the widest grasp of where it fits, or the most abstract or subtle aspects of what Jesus has taught about the truth.

But even when I thought I really really really was getting it and understanding it, mentally, it was NOT followed by a result of experiencing love, or experiencing God. It did not bring peace. And it was like getting to the end of a path that you thought would lead you to the truth or to God only to find out that it does NOT lead there.

It doesn't lead there because its a journey in thinking and intellectualizing rather than the much more real, direct EXPERIENCING of truth. So I had to learn this, the hard way, that it can't be all about the talk or all about the theory or all about the metaphysics. It IS okay to seek for understanding (ACIM says understanding is appreciation of the truth), but you can't EXPERIENCE it on a purely theoretical level.

When we're not actually dealing with what we are experiencing - the immediate interaction of you vs what's in front of your face right now and how your mind is having a RELATIONSHIP with it - then it moves away from here-and-now and becomes removed and distant, turning into just a theory or concept.

Your head, your intellect, is quite capable of handling concepts and theories and thoughts about them, but its as though the intellect is an artificial ego device to be separated from reality, from the here and now. I would find myself tending to even intellectualize my feelings, transferring emotional energy into my head and trying to process it there through thought. Instead of feeling. Instead of experiencing.

I've also seen people get caught up in what they 'should' be doing or are supposed to be believing, launching into 'trying' really hard to force yourself to be those things, without ACTUALLY being able to do so. It creates the spiritualized ego. And when asked questions about what they are experiencing now or what they are really feeling, they are disconnected from it.

They will respond about what they think of it or what it means or what they think they're supposed to say or what lofty course idea they're meant to believe, but they don't REALLY believe it. They don't REALLY mean it. And they're out of touch with where they're really at, cut off from FEELING. Feeling is much closer to being than intellectualizing. But people don't want to feel. They don't want the immediate experience of reality, preferring to be buffered against it by all of these intellectual walls of thought and guilt and shame and force and pressure and ... using the wrong tool for the job.

What you may find as I have, as well, is that what I can experience has certain boundaries that prevent me from experiencing anything too far outside my 'comfort zone'. My mind won't stretch that far. If there's a suggestion to be or do something that I'm just not ready for, there's no way I'm going to be ABLE to do it yet alone willing to do it.

You can be willing enough to take small steps from where you actually are to where you want to get to next, but giant leaps are next to impossible. And when you try to make giant leaps before you're really ready, you will BYPASS, which means you're in denial about what you're really believing and experiencing and are pretending to be further along than you want to admit to. It's the ego that tries to throw you into 'advanced spirituality' before you are really ready or willing or able to actually BE it, because it wants the prowess of 'mastery' without ACTUALLY letting go of enough ego to experience it truly.

So you need to stop, go within, and look much closer to home, much closer to where you are realistically at right now. What are you experiencing right now. What are you feeling. And this is where you have to be really honest. Do you REALLY believe what the course is saying? Probably not. What do you believe instead? You have to work through this stuff. You can't pretend not to have blocks to awareness, you have to ACTUALLY look for them and acknowledge that they're there and then work on transforming your beliefs/viewpoints/attitudes so that you can ACTUALLY be free of these blocks.

They don't go away by sweeping them under the carpet, or by using denial, or by shutting them out, or making yourself unconscious, or bypassing to a level of advancement you're not ready for. There is nothing to be ashamed of in admitting that you are NOT the advanced spiritual successor to Jesus just yet. If you don't acknowledge what you're actually experiencing then you aren't going to be able to change your experience. And I think that's what this is all about - transforming what you are experiencing so that you can experience something better. And this means dealing with the 'reality' of your situation, not some ACIM-driven fairytale about how spiritual you are or how lofty the concepts are or what you are 'supposed' to be like.

How do you feel? Where are you at? What is honestly true for you right now? Have the courage to look at it, feel it, experience it, be with it. Acknowledge how fucked up you are. Then re-interpret your evaluation of yourself and transform your experience of yourself into a genuinely higher version of yourself.

Authenticity.

Separation HAS occurred? Sort of.

Some people claim that it is impossible to explain the "tiny mad idea". It seems logical at first, because when the ego asks a question like "what if", it's not really a question, and the tiny mad idea hasn't "really" happened in reality. It has no real consequences in reality, and it's just a dream.

But the tiny mad idea HAS happened in IMAGINATION. It HAS happened in your mind, and you've "made it real to you". That is why you are sitting there right now reading this on your screen, which *seems* real. A dream "at all" wouldn't even be possible unless God gave you free will to choose to mis-create and dream.

"Whatever is true & real is eternal, & cannot change or be changed. The Soul is therefore unalterable because it is ALREADY perfect, but the mind can elect the level it chooses to serve. The only limit which is put on its choice is that it CANNOT serve two masters."

Your mind has FREEDOM, and therefore can be used to choose EITHER to will with God's will, or to will against it. Either in service to the soul/spirit, or in service to a fictional ego. This freedom granted you the very REAL "possibility" of being ABLE to make this choice, to use will against will, and to mis-create. God would not give you an `option` that could *actually* hurt you at all, and it has not, but this freedom HAS given you the ability to OPT not to laugh at the idea of separation, if you choose.

Jesus also describes below how while you have free will, it is necessary to choose both FOR (toward) God and AWAY from the option of ego/dreaming.

"While the ballot itself is a secret one, and the right to vote is fully protected, voting ALWAYS entails both election AND rejection. If two candidates are voted for for the same position, the machine cancels the ballot automatically.

This is necessary, because a split vote does not represent ANY REAL allegiance.

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

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

So you can see here that the mind actually has the freedom to "choose to dream" if it wants to. It CAN place itself under tyrranical rule and seem to "sleep". Of course this dreaming is FICTIONAL and it is not REALLY happening in reality, it has no real consequences in heaven, but it IS still a "valid option" that you are free to entertain or ELECT.

This essentially means that, the tiny mad idea is a POSSIBLE CHOICE, but it is not a REAL choice. That's a vital distinction. You COULD choose to dream if you want to, to mis-create, to opposte God's will (or try to), but it's not a REAL option. It's an option of unreality that the mind is quite capable of making if it chooses to. This is why "heaven is a choice I must make" - the mind HAS to freely, willingly, elect to choose heaven, ie the only real option, and not the ego, which is an imaginary option you've tried to MAKE real.

Does this mean the dream "has happened"? It has not happened IN REALITY, but it HAS occurred within the context of the mind's freedom to dream. It doesn't have REALITY to it, but it IS something you are CAPABLE OF PRODUCING through mis-creation. And when you DO freely choose it, with your free will, it will become seemingly real to you because what you accept into your mind becomes your reality.

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

The mind has to ELECT (choose) to be under service to Christ. This IS a free-willed choice, not something forced upon you. God does not create slaves.

"Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny mad idea"

There DID creep an idea, a thought, an imagining, into the mind, because IT COULD. The mind CAN DREAM. But the dream that it produces is not real or like God. Elsewhere Jesus refers to it as "an order of reality", meaning that you gave reality TO it to try to turn it into reality, through belief, but the belief is based on a false premise, so it is ultimately unfounded and fundamentally unreal at its core.

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

I will leave you this statement by Jesus: