The requirement to eat and get food is built into spacetime, did you know that? If space is the idea that something is "over here and not over there", then the thing over here lacks what is over there. This makes all of spacetime fundamentally lack based. Which means that everything that relies on it, which is all physical matter, every atom, is in some way lacking and deficient. Everything thus depends on something other than itself to attempt to become whole or sustained.

This lays the ground rules for what later becomes "feeding". Taking something outside of something to try to replenish what is lacking. And because of the ego's laws, if you take something from somewhere in order to address a lack, there is no increase, and only decrease, and now that thing is forced to lack "against its will". So if I take the apple from the tree the tree is now lacking an apple, and I have impoverished it.

If I take an animals body it no longer has its body. If I take water from the fountain it now lacks some water. Everywhere in this world this is true, with absolutely no regard for the form or type of object. And the act of "getting" from "others" is a murderous, attacking act, because it's an attempt to deprive them and to diminish what they have and to steal it away for your own selfish reasons. And so every single atom in spacetime is fundamentally, scientifically selfish.

The system of massive dependency later becomes what people call an ecosystem. An inter-dependent system where stuff consumes other stuff, selectively, and so it seems some things are "more ok" than other things. That's just part of the hierarchy of illusions. There are no special separate laws for animals versus plants versus microbes. It's all governed by the same ego laws of physics which are fundamentally selfish and murderous. This is why this is a cruel world that God did not create.

It's impossible to not be murderous if you do anything in this world physically. "The world of bodies is the world of sin." Best you can do is let Holy Spirit use the body and inform you of what to select, but this is not on a basis of being able to spiritualize or avoid the fact of what is happening here based on ego's laws. If you were truly operating under holy laws, God's laws, and no other, you would manifest food out of thin air, symbolizing the laws of increase of God, so that nothing is deprived or made to lack at your expense.

That is the ONLY way not to be murderous, by breaking the ego's laws entirely and bypassing them. This is why Jesus materialized food to feed people. You can justify and spiritualize a breakdown of objects into categories and give some special rules and other different rules if you want, suggesting some items are more sacred than others so you should avoid eating them, but that's a fragmenting and separation-based illusion of harmlessness, trying to be harmless to some parts of the world of death so as to justify why its okay to harm other parts. "The world was made that problems (like this) could not be escaped."

Only in God's Kingdom or under God's laws is there the possibility of true harmlessness.

To the ego, in order to have something you must take it from someone else. To the ego, there is limited quantity because everything is considered to be finite. It has no concept of sharing. It only has a concept of compromise. If you are to have anything at all, someone else must lose. And by their loss, the ego believes that it can gain. This is part of the ego's laws of chaos.

The ego therefore is the belief that when you receive something, whoever gave it has diminished their supply. And this is also part of the belief that, if you give something, you will diminish your own supply, will increase your own lack, and will now suffer and be in need.

This is why everyone is so reluctant to let go of their possessions or money and tries to get as much "bang for buck" as possible, to get a deal or a discount or some great big receipt of value with the minimal amount of sacrifice/loss possible. And all commercial ventures play into this ego quality by constantly dwelling on how much more you will be receiving than giving, which is a lie, because they don't tell you how cheaply they got the shit for in the first place. Anyway...

So the ego only has this sense that there is an "exchange" or a negotiated deal or some kind of weighing up of what you will get vs what you will lose. It has absolutely no concept of something increasing, of two people being able to partake of the same thing without limiting each other's enjoyment, and it believes that there is a huge difference between giving and receiving. It in fact believes that giving is sacrifice, and that receiving is salvation provided you only receive from outside yourself and not from God.

The ego also is a murderous thought system and any time that there is an inbalance between giving and receiving there is "murder" happening. That is, either you are perceiving that you are having to give more than you are getting, meaning you are losing, which is a form of death, or you are taking more than the other person is willing to give, which means you are trying to destroy them.

To God, this is all nonsense of course and God's laws do not operate this way at all. Instead, anything real can be shared without it diminishing. All parties can experience FULLY what is being offered without anyone having to sacrifice or only get a small slice of the pie. There is no compromise. There is no limitation or finite amounts of anything. Everyone is able to share fully and equally. If I get 100% of God's love, it does not mean that there is no love left to go around. It means there is still 100% of love to go around. Everyone partakes in and SHARES SIMULTANEOUSLY in the same "stuff" without loss or sacrifice or hoarding or possessiveness of trying to "own" it or make it your own. This again reinforces the that God operates holographically because the 'whole' can be fully presence in more than one place at a time.

God's laws also tell us that in order to have anything we must give it and be willing to share it. Nothing real can be "owned" by egoic concepts of selfishness or isolation. You cannot section off a piece of God and claim it as yours without it also belonging to everyone. And when something real is given, it is not lost to the giver at all. In fact it increases. If I have unlimited light and I give some light to someone, my light simply shines more, it does not decrease, it brightens. To God, anything real that is given is increased, its receipt intensifies, sacrifice is reversed, there is no lack or loss possible anywhere, and there is an absolute unlimited abundance of everything which is only growing and increasing at all times, not diminishing at all. It is the perfect "economy" in a constant state of growth and abundance.

God's abundance is freely and fully given, is available to everyone equally, there is no limitation on its supply, it is infinite and unlimited, it can only be shared and increased, and there is no such thing as lack or sacrifice.

"There IS a wariness that is aroused by learning that the body is not real. And there ARE overtones of seeming fear around the happy message "God is Love." Yet all that happens when the gap is gone is peace eternal."

Jesus talks about "a gap". What is that?

Originally there was wholeness. A single complete something. And then the separation idea happened. The idea was that the wholeness was not the only thing, and that there was something else. A second thing. Since only wholeness existed, this idea of "another" could only be formed by SPLITTING the wholeness into two parts, based on the idea that something was lacking in the wholeness - that it was not whole. This resulted in the split mind.

But you have to then ask yourself, what is it that seems to "divide" the wholeness into two parts, which forms a disassociation of the two? Well this is what Jesus refers to as "the gap". It's a seeming place in the whole where there seems to be signs of lack, a place where one half stops and the other starts, a place where they don't share or overlap, a kind of rift or chasm like a gaping gulf which "parts" the two and holds them off from each other.

This little gap is also the idea of attack, and it contains all ideas of murder and hurt and suffering and sickness and death. It is a kind of rift of protest attempting to push the two halves apart and emphasize the ways that they are not one thing. The more it can emphasize separation the more it can induce illusions that this "wall" or "gap" is actually keeping the parts apart from each other.

Within this gap, and formed BY the gap, and made OF the gap, and not existing prior to the gap, is PLANET EARTH. Planet Earth was made as an attack on God. The body and all bodies are all part of this gap. They are walls drawn around the mind to try to fence it off. They are part of the split mind. They are literally forms of attack which were made solely to try to rip apart wholeness and divide and separate, producing ends and all forms of suffering. This gap is literally the "pit of hell" that you tried to make to divide heaven.

An entire physical universe has formed as this gap. It is a device for separation. It's like a wall of death, designed to come between and block sight of the whole. Its function and purpose in your making it was to block sight, decrease awareness, corrupt unity, and bring about death. This planet, Earth, and all the planets, and the stars, and this whole universe, IS THE GAP. It is the content of the various ways that we have tried to attack God.

Now, the fact is, that you cannot keep the gap and know God. You cannot keep having the gap and be happy. You cannot keep the gap and be WHOLE. The gap IS a block to awareness. The body IS a wall of flesh surrounding the mind designed to make you limited. The world IS a veil drawn across the face of Christ so that you would forget that Christ exists. This OBSTACLE TO PEACE HAS TO GO.

At first, the gap is gently healed. Soothed. Anointed. At first, it is forgiven and overlooked. At first, its defenses are dismantled and withdrawn. At first, it is questioned for its original intention and given a different purpose of helping you to learn to overcome the NEED for the gap, or the desire to keep making it. It is repurposed by the Holy Spirit to help to bring you home to wholeness. And it ONLY has this purpose. When this purpose is fulfilled, this world, this entire gap, this universe-sized gaping hole of hell, will close up and disappear and exist no more.

It is like a wound. It heals. The parts on either side which were kept apart are reunited. There is a rejoining. There is celebration. There is wholeness. There is the ability to see past the walls. There is the ability of Christ Vision to overlook forms and see the unity they were hiding. This vision RECOGNIZES that the gap and its contents, including Earth, are nothing more than ILLUSIONS, which DO NOT EXIST, and NEVER HAD THE POWER TO SEPARATE. And in recognizing these illusions, the GAP DISAPPEARS, and the Earth being part of that gap disappears along with it.

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

The idea of death and separation, once it ends, ends the gap, and therefore the whole world is swallowed up and disappears into the nothingness from which it came. This is healing. Healing HEALS AWAY the world. IT ERASES the separation idea. IT REMOVES and UNDOES everything that was manifest as a result of this gap and the belief in separation being real. You do not need this world. You do not need bodies. You do not need special earthly places and desires. All you need is the wholeness of Heaven. In wholeness there is no gap, no Earth, and no world here.

There are two things that you can receive from the world when you are being a victim:

1) It does bad stuff to me

2) It does good stuff to me

Both of these are really the same. They both rely on you being a victim.

This means, you have to perceive that something outside of you has power over you, and can affect and change you.

When you have what we call emotional reactions to things, these so-called reactions are actually the 'effects' that are brought about in you to 'match' the causes that you see outside of you. They are like a mirror reflection or an expected, standard response to that external cause. Because you believe and perceive there to be a cause 'out there', that same belief manifests 'changes' in you to match that perception of yourself, and so you literally redefine and re-mold yourself - your experience - and it feels like hurt emotions.

Perceiving there is an external cause with power to do something to you, regardless of whether the reaction you have is good or bad or happy or sad, is a state of victimhood.

The ego will tell you that only the bad stuff that happens to you is part of your victimhood, and that you should decrease those things.

The ego will also tell you that only the good stuff that happens to you are things that you want, and are not part of your victimhood at all. It tells you that you should in fact try to increase and focus on those things as much as possible.

What that actually means though, being a trap, is that so long as you are focused on and dependent on being 'positively affected' by outside causes, you STILL are firmly and squarely inside a perceptual structure, in which you play the role of victim.

Victim means, perceiving that something separate from you, something outside of you, something you have no connection to, has the power to do something to you, which changes you in some way. Usually we focus on this being 'bad stuff' or 'enemies' or 'unwanted events' or 'things which scare us', but that is only half the story.

So the ego is very clever here to deceive you by saying, if you will focus on decreasing the bad stuff that happens to you, and focus on increasing the good stuff that happens to you, this means you are succeeding and improving and gaining a better life. It is an absolute farce. A total trap. 100% lie. The persona part of the ego is saying, keep the good stuff, but reject the bad stuff, which reinforces the sense of separation between the judgements of good and bad, which intensifies the bad stuff, and diminishes the good stuff. So eventually in your effort to increase good stuff that happens to you, you will in fact increase bad stuff happening to you. Focusing on receiving exclusive 'goodness' automatically generates more badness. Go figure. The trap has been set and many of us constantly fall for it.

As you then become dependent on trying to get good stuff to happen to you, so that you can indirectly be 'caused' to be happy, you don't realize it but you're sealing your own fate. In order to get good stuff to happen to you, and to want good stuff to happen to you more, you must buy into the perception and belief that you are at the effect of the world more. You want to experience even more good stuff affecting you and the only way to do that is to position yourself as even more vulnerable and disempowered. The ultimate good thing that can then happen to you is some kind of sacrificial death or 'going out on a high' or escapism. Or like, being sexually pleasured to the point where you practically die from overstimulation.

You don't want this.

There is another happiness. There is a permanent happiness that you can attain, that has nothing to do with what happens to you. It's a happiness in which you are completely invulnerable and at peace and cannot take anything in the world seriously, because you do not position yourself as at the 'effect' of the world. It means surrendering your attachment to getting good things or making good stuff 'happen to you'. Instead it requires you to honestly realize that that's a victim mentality, and that you need to stop seeing yourself as a victim otherwise eventually you will just be attacked. There is no invulnerability in 'good stuff happening'. There is no peace or protection or security there. It's an ego gamble, that maybe you'll temporarily feel happier and then inevitably lose it.

Permanent happiness comes from relinquishing all NEED for having good things happen to you. Letting go of all DEPENDENCE on the world being 'good' to you. Letting go of all aspects of the victim role, which is a role of the reversal of cause and effect. You don't want to be affected positively by the world. You want to realize YOU are the world, you are the cause, and you cannot be affected.

As ACIM says, pleasure and pain are the same thing. Perhaps now you can see why. Pleasure means you are being affected by causes outside of you, made to feel things, caused to have experiences that you can't control. And this relies on you being a vulnerable victim. And so it's the same thing as pain, it is actually hurting you just as much, but it's in a different form to pain, because that's part of how the ego disguises the illusion of it. Pleasure is really an attack disguised as something you want, while pain is an attack disguised as something you don't want. Neither of them are your natural way to be. And you do not need either of them.

Happiness given by God is given permanently and relies on nothing and no other sources for it to exist. It just is. It is there, permanently, underneath all these other deceptions that say it isn't, which are the very same deceptions that lead you away from true happiness seeking for artificial sources of happiness outside of you. Trying to get something separate from you to make you happy is irresponsible and indirect. You can experience direct happiness from God. It is also a far more magnificent happiness than anything, ANYTHING, that you can experience coming at you from outside of you, as an effect of an external cause.

This is where the Course says, "this world holds nothing that I want". Not even the 'good stuff'.

"A world forgiven cannot last. It was the home of bodies. But forgiveness looks past bodies."

"The world of bodies is the world of sin, for only if there were a body is sin possible."

"And gone are bodies in the blazing light upon the altar to the Son of God."

"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."

"Bodies now are useless, and will therefore fade away, because the Son of God is limitless."

"From the world of bodies, MADE by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind which made it."

"Sins are in bodies. They are not perceived in minds. They are not seen as purposes, but ACTIONS. Bodies act, and minds do not."

"It takes the central place in every dream, which tells the story of how it was made by OTHER bodies, born into the world OUTSIDE the body, lives a little while, and dies, to be united in the dust with other bodies, dying like itself."

"In the brief time allotted it to live, it seeks for other bodies as its friends and enemies."

"It hires OTHER bodies, that they may protect it, and collect more senseless things that it can call its own."

"It looks about for special bodies which can SHARE its dream. Sometimes it dreams it is a conqueror of bodies weaker than itself. But in some phases of the dream, it is the slave of bodies which would hurt and torture it."

"Is healing frightening? To many, yes. For accusation is a bar to love, and damaged bodies ARE accusers."

"For all the hurt that war has sought to bring; the broken bodies and the shattered limbs, the screaming dying and the silent dead, are gently lifted up and comforted. There IS no sadness, where a miracle has come to heal."

"YOU SEE THE WORLD YOU VALUE. On this side of the bridge, you see the world of separate bodies, seeking to join each other in SEPARATE UNIONS, and to become one BY LOSING. 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."

"Within the dream of bodies and of death, is yet one theme of truth; no more, perhaps, than just a tiny spark, a space of light created in the dark, where God shines still."

"Homeless, the ego seeks as many bodies as it can collect, to place its idols in, and so establish them as temples to itself."

"The Holy Spirit's purpose lies safe in your relationship, and not your bodies. You have ESCAPED the body. Where you are now, the body cannot enter, for the Holy Spirit has set HIS temple there."

"The unholy instant IS the time of bodies."

"You have a fear of broken bodies, because your ego cannot tolerate them."

"Those who call upon the Name of God can not mistake the nameless for the Name, nor sin for grace, nor bodies for the holy Son of God."

"And sight of bodies becomes the sign that sacrifice IS limited, and something still remains for you alone."

"A mind within a body, and a world of other bodies, each with SEPARATE minds"

"Some idea of bodies MUST have entered, for minds can NOT attack."

"The thought of bodies IS a sign of faithlessness, for bodies CANNOT solve anything. And it is their INTRUSION on the relationship, an error in YOUR thoughts ABOUT the situation, that then became the JUSTIFICATION for your lack of faith."

"You do not perceive your brothers as the Holy Spirit does because you do not interpret their bodies AND YOURS solely as a means of JOINING THEIR MINDS and uniting them with yours and mine."

"But if you use it ONLY to reach the minds of those who believe they ARE bodies and teach them THROUGH the body that THIS IS NOT SO, you will begin to understand the power of the mind that is in both of you."

"For only bodies can be separate, and therefore unreal. The home of madness cannot be the home of reason."

"It sees NOT through the body's eyes, nor looks to bodies for its justification."

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

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 ego's thought system resulted in this physical universe including the Earth. It is all based on separation and exclusion and difference. The ego's way of THINKING and reasoning logically, is completely consistent, yet based on "separating out" everything and comparing the parts to each other.

To make forms of matter or objects, the ego has separated things out, claimed that one thing is different to another, has given certain illusory properties to one object which another object does not share, and thus establishes that they are not only "different" from each other, but that because of these differences they must be SEPARATE. Not just a little separate, but COMPLETELY separate.

So for example because an apple looks very different and has different taste and structure and color to a banana, the ego reasons that the apple is different to the banana, not sharing the same qualities or characteristics, and therefore they cannot be ONE THING, and therefore must be TWO THINGS.

This is not merely a way of thinking ABOUT the world we made. It actually is the thinking BEHIND the world, the thought system which PRODUCED the world, and every part of physical matter in this universe proceeds according to these same rules.

Every atom is unlike the others, no two objects can share the same location, everything is different and changes, no two things are allowed to be seen as exactly identical, and because all things are different to each other this gives them a fragmented "identity". This is why regarding someone as a human body "identifies" the person AS being that body, because that body clearly does not overlap or share anyone else's body, and looks different and has different form, therefore is not the SAME, and therefore is SEPARATE.

So separation is BUILT IN to this entire universe's fundamental fabric. It's built into all matter. In fact, because differences mean that something applies to one thing and not another, another word for that is MURDER. From it has come the ego's laws of cause and effect which state that one object can affect another object WITHOUT receiving any consequences, which is exactly the same thing as "getting away with murder". This is because the ego's thought system is murderous, and all forms of INEQUALITY and competition or "not being identical" are forms of murder.

Sacrifice is also completely built into this universe. Because the ego has separated everything out into discrete separate parts, which are each different, its reasoning extends from this. And so it SEEMS logical to say, because oranges are orange and this banana is yellow, it can't be an orange. That seems to make perfect logical sense, except it is insane. It is insane because the banana and the orange are being KEPT APART by the separation idea, they are being made to look DIFFERENT to each other on purpose, and they are a PICTURE OF DEATH.

That means that for example if I eat the banana, there is only an orange left. And that means, the banana has now been sacrificed, because there is now a LACK of banana. Lack is fundamentally built into this universe. It's part of the laws of this world, the ego's laws of chaos. In this world, to give "matter" to someone means to LOSE IT, and therefore to decrease what you have. It's not merely your thoughts about the world that produce this kind of conclusion, it's literally BUILT INTO the way that this world's "reality" is set up. Therefore this universe is fundamentally DRIVEN by scarcity and LACK and ATTACK.

Then, whenever we think in terms of how we usually "reason out" something to do with this world, we actually have MAPPED our logical reasoning onto the way this world functions (or is an extension of it). So now it SEEMS to make sense to say, if Paul's body is not the same as Susan's body, then Paul is not Susan. This makes SENSE, but it is INSANE, because Paul and Susan are NOT SEPARATED by their bodies and the Holy Spirit recognizes that they SHARE MINDS and therefore they are IDENTICAL and NOT DIFFERENT and are NOT ENEMIES and therefore there IS NO SEPARATION between them as such.

So the Holy Spirit's thought system is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to how the ego thinks, God's world is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to how this universe functions and is structured, God's MIND thinks totally opposite to how this world thinks, and all of the logical conclusions that "make sense" to the ego are UTTER NONSENSE in God's eyes.

Yet we use and trust and rely on the ego's way of thinking to "learn the course" and to try to understand what Jesus means and what the nature of Heaven is and whether or not God has created many sons or minds, etc.... all producing FALSE conclusions that make SENSE to the ego. And because we TRUST that the ego's "sense" is actually sanity, or a sane conclusion, we are too quick to ACCEPT that these conclusions are the truth about God's creation, not realizing that we're totally overlooking and distorting His nature USING the ego as our guide to God.

In God's world, everything is essentially IDENTICAL In its nature, nothing is in competition, there aren't any "differences", one thing is not "separated from" another in the traditional ego sense of total isolation, and yet there are many individual beings which the EGO reasons cannot be possible. The ego sees separations where there are none, and sees singularity where there are distinctions. It cannot see how God could have "parts" or "creations" or "sons" without FALSELY concluding that this indicates isolation.

God and the ego do NOT communicate, so for the ego to think it can look at God "sanely" and make correct evaluations, is also insane. But we CAN learn to think like God and to share His mind and see what He sees, learning WHY it is possible for Him to Create the way He does, in violation of what makes sense to the ego.

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.

The thing about the body is that it's a limitation. You as a spirit are unlimited, infinite, everywhere. You are omnipresent like God. To seemingly "enter" a body you have to massively confine yourself to one location, separated off from the rest. It's like having your hands tied. Huge amounts of awareness have to be shut out. Not to mention that your intimate expansive unified relationships with the entire Sonship are shut out.

You are squeezed into this tiny little space that you then seem to inhabit. The body forms this fence around a part of the mind and seems to keep it inside, protected and separate from the rest of the mind which is outside. Large distances are placed between bodies to ensure they are kept separate. This is all the ego's design for isolating and imprisoning God's children.

Then the ego goes one step further and says, ok, now that you are in this body, wouldn't it be great if you could connect with other people? How about we bring your body closer to other bodies? How about we have your bodies try to join with other bodies? Maybe you'll feel wonderful things as you merge and feel close to others. And the usual response to this temptation is that is sounds great, it seems like an improvement, we don't have to be so alone and isolated.

The problem here is that we're accepting a massive artificial limitation as though it can never be changed, we're deliberately confining ourselves to being trapped in a little body, acting from littleness. We're handicapping ourselves, and then pretending that to bring bodies together is going to somehow "undo" this. But so long as the handicapping nature of the body is maintained, so long as we are isolated in space and time, anything the ego offers as a special relationship is a ridiculous substitute for true joining.

Two spirits should share, join, merge, connect, be one, and access each other fully and completely and in a truly unlimited way. You are in your brother's minds. You share everything with them. To do that, you need to not be restricted and limited. Trying to first accept massive limitation and to then try to continue to join, is like two people with a ball and chain around their ankles, chained up to separate prison cells, trying to reach out to be closer to each other. They can't leave the prisons or get past the bars.

It's also a simple fact that nothing in spacetime can truly join. Quantum particles are designed to be separated off. If atoms were to truly occupy the same space they would annihilate each other in a nuclear explosion. Forces repel the particles and keep them separated. Even what seems to be a physical collision or sensation of touch is really what it feels like to bump up against these force fields. Atoms don't ever really touch each other at all. So right off the bat the ego has made this scenario where even if it looks as though you are as physically close to something as possible, you still aren't actually making real contact. All sensations of touch are sensations of two forcefields repelling each other.

To try to join with another spirit while having a body is next to impossible. Someone who knows they are spirit would also find it pointless and very limiting to try to make this connection via the body. Why, when you can experience direct mind-to-mind communication ("minds need not bodies to communicate"), would you first filter all communication through your body, then through another body, in attempting to share something? Why not just go mind-to-mind?

When two bodies attempt to join in sexual acts it also really is an attempt to identify with your own body, to identify the other person with their body, to bring the two bodies together in an attempt to believe that the two persons/spirits are actually joining. This is a body delusion. The physical bodies are all that are coming together, and even their sensations of contact are illusions. Forms, matter, energy, keep individuals separated off at all levels and at all times.

Trying to relate to another brother, a spirit, by trying to relate TO or WITH the body, is almost like you're having a relationship with someone's clothing. If you were to fall in love with someone's jacket and trousers and completely ignore the person wearing them, this would indeed be very strange and somewhat insane. But this is what we do when we relate to people as bodies, completely failing to overlook the illusion of the body, failing to see the real person beyond it.

The ego first established a state of massive lack and deprivation. Its isolating of us made us lonely and in need. It built compulsions to try to join physically, not in an effort to bring us closer together, but in an effort to reinforce and emphasize the reality of the body. Pleasure and pain accomplish the same goal of making the body and illusions of sensations the primary focus. "To sense is not to know", and by focusing on sensations we become blinded by perception of form.

In efforts to bring two bodies together in a special, body-worshipping relationship, we actually necessarily exclude vast quantities of individuals. More is left out than is taken in. Due to the separating and localizing nature of spacetime, bringing 2 bodies together must entail excluding billions. The attempt to make two bodies extra special, psychologically, requires the downplaying and attack upon other bodies. A special body cannot be elevated and idol worshipped without condemning all the rest.

"On this side of the bridge, you see the world of separate bodies, seeking to join each other in SEPARATE UNIONS, and to become one BY LOSING. 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."

What appears on the surface to be an attempt to join, is ACTUALLY an attempt to separate. And so the ego's promise of body union in fact leads to an increase in separation, unconsciousness, loss, lack, loneliness, isolation and imprisonment. The supposed freedom produced by sexual union actually produces an increased state of exclusion and illness. With the body as the main focus, the mind is shut out and true joining based in real love becomes impossible.

You could say, in fact, that the attempt of two bodies to come together to join to make a baby, is actual a death ritual. The bodies celebrate their triumph over all other bodies, they worship the idol of death, separation ensues and now there are three bodies. Illusions have given birth to illusions. And while this is much celebrated in the world, the ego does have these underpinnings in its mechanics of what is actually happening.

It's possible, for a time, to still use the body for a holier purpose. Love can be extended through it to others, it can be used to teach, to make the body less real, and to overlook form. To the Holy Spirit, the body actually is seen as having NO function.

"It is still true that the body has no function of itself."

"When it is used only as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function."

"It is the dream in which the body functions perfectly, having no function except communication. "

"Healing IS the Holy Spirit's form of communication, and the ONLY one He knows."

Trying to make bodies real, to use them as exclusion devices, emphasizing and believing in and falling into the temptation of the flesh, being deceived by physical sensations not recognized as illusions, believing your brother is a body, etc are all ways that the ego uses the body to keep you from what it promises will be the outcome. The ego guarantees separation, while the Holy Spirit guarantees union.

For a time we can use the body with the Holy Spirit, but not to emphasize bodies. Not to use it as a way to focus on the body or believe it can give us anything. Not to use it to get from others. And not to use it as a symbolic act of exclusion. We are to love everyone equally, and this is impossible at the physical level.

"You cannot enter into REAL relationship with any of God's Sons unless you are willing to love them all AND equally."

"Think not that we can relate in peace to God or our brothers with ANYTHING external."

The entire world of bodies has to be more or less "overlooked". "To forgive is to OVERLOOK." To overlook means to "bypass seeing", to see past and beyond. If we stop to dwell on the physical, our sight is blinded. If we stop to focus on the body, the mind stops extending past it. This produces various forms of illness. If we truly want to have a real relationship with anyone, it has to be a real relationship with everyone, at the level of unconditional love, through mind and spirit.

"The only VALID use of sex is procreation. It is NOT truly pleasurable in itself. "Lead us not into Temptation" means "Do not let us deceive ourselves into believing that we can relate in peace to God or our brothers with ANYTHING external."

"For minds NEED not the body to communicate. The sight that SEES the body, has no use which serves the purpose of a holy relationship."

Look at this from the perspective of spirit. You as spirit have a mind and you can communicate, ie commune with, any other person in full. You can completely immerse yourself in someone and be one with them. This joining is so full and unconditional and meaningful that there is nothing else more satisfying or enjoyable. It is "truly pleasurable". "All true pleasure comes from doing God's will."

Then consider what the body is. "The body is a limit on love." "It was made to limit you." So now the body is regarded as this very crude device which filters out relationship, blinds you to false perceptions, and makes illusions real. "Only the body makes the world seem real."

"The body's eyes are not the means by which the real world can be seen."

So take it from the vantage point of a highly spiritual person. This person is able to FULLY relate to another person in total love and union. They share everything that can be truly shared. If one of them was to say, okay, let's not relate like this, let's instead narrow down our relating, stick ourselves inside limiting little bodies, narrow down our perception to where we can't even see each other, rub our bodies up against each other, and see if that's an improvement. ... do you think they will be able to find the same degree of oneness? Of course not.

The body does not ADD anything to the relationship capabilities of spirit. "Think not the world can add anything to the power and glory of God and his holy sons." It does not IMPROVE how you relate to others, it just gets in the way. It's almost like taking an universal unlimited infinite being and trying to shove it inside a dark closed box and expecting it to be enjoy being disabled, impaired, shut down, limited and restricted.

This is why Jesus is saying that the only proper use of the body is for procreation. The body is a biological device and it has reproductive organs, ie a method for self-replication (separation), as all organisms do. Whether it be cell division or male/female relationships, the process here is physical. The only VALID BIOLOGICAL FUNCTION of the reproductive system is to reproduce. It is to function to inseminate and impregnate and produce a baby body. That is its only valid physical purpose.

When you look from the vantage point of enlightened spirit, therefore, a mind which does not NEED a body to communicate fully with another person, and who recognizes that the body will just NARROW their relationship, such a person will have no interest in using the body for "casual sex." Who would choose to restrain themselves and limit their ability to perceive and be with another, in the name of "intimacy"? You can be MORE intimate without the the body than with it. The body just gets in the way.

Furthermore Jesus recognizes and tells us that if you focus on the body in any way, you make the separation real. If you focus on, or EVEN SEE, the body of your brother, you are moving into the ego and into separation and sin.

"Your mind and his ARE joined in brotherhood. His body and his dreams but SEEM to make a little gap, where yours have joined with his. And yet, between your MINDS there IS no gap. To join his dreams is thus to meet him NOT, because his dreams would SEPARATE from you."

"As long as you believe that, to be with a body, is companionship, you will be COMPELLED to attempt to keep your brother IN his body, HELD THERE BY GUILT."

Focusing on bodies joining in any way, makes the separation real. It makes you body identified and produces and ego. It is a state of mental illness. To fixate on your brother's BODY causes you NOT TO SEE HIM.

"Who sees a brother's body has laid a JUDGMENT on him, and sees him not. He does not REALLY see him as sinful; he does not see him at all. In the darkness of sin, he is INVISIBLE."

So Jesus is basically saying, in order for your mind to be sane, and in order for you to be in holy relationship, and in order for you to not make the separation real, and not mis-identify yourself and your brother as a body, and not SEPARATE, you cannot relate to your brother AS a body or on the level of the body. If you have any desire about it, lust for it, adoration of it, affection for its sensations, a valuing of its pleasures and pains etc, then you are in fact mis-using the body for ego purposes.

The only valid use of the body then is for the purposes of the holy spirit, which lifts AWAY from it any purposes it served before. That includes purposes of making bodies real, trying to become one with a physical object, trying to join physically and attempting to gain artificial pleasure. When the mind is sane it has no real use for the body. It does not use the body to get anything, nor does it believe anything the body's eyes see, nor anything its senses report. It steps back and regards the body as having NO FUNCTION.

"It is still true that the body has no function of itself. "

"Healing is the result of using the body SOLELY for communication."

"Your brother's body is as little use to you as it is to him. When it is used ONLY as the Holy Spirit teaches, it has no function."

"It is the dream in which the body functions perfectly, having no function except communication. "

In this state where the body is healed by the mind, the mind extends PAST the body and does not STOP at the body. This means the mind is supposed to OVERLOOK the body, which is the function of forgiveness.

"The arrest of the mind's extension is the cause of all illness, because ONLY EXTENSION IS THE MIND's FUNCTION. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have BLOCKED THE MIND's JOY."

"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."

So Jesus is quite literally saying that if you focus on and see and interact with bodies at all you are coming from unforgiveness and ego, making separation real, and using the body for attack which induces sickness.

If a healed mind in a healed body remains, then it is possible at that level to use the body ONLY for communication, which actually bypasses the body itself and ignores it. This means a mind extending PAST its body, PAST the body of another, and joning with their mind. As such, minds bypass the body and do not attempt to join at the physical level. They have NOTHING TO GAIN by trying to join physically. The only benefit then to a physical "act", using the puppet for its inherent functioning, is to use it to make a baby.

This is why Jesus is trying to say that sex is only for procreation. Sane people do not need bodies. Insane people only use bodies for self gratification and reinforcing separation and specialness. Healed minds are limited by using bodies to try to join, and have no need of them. If you can imagine being highly spiritual and enlightened, maybe you can catch a glimpse of the total disinterest that you will have in the body and all its activities.

"The body is nothing." "The body is hardly worth the least defense."

The level of the body is a physical level. The body is a biological machine at this level. It has no mind or thought or decision or desire for another. Using it to make bodies real requires a belief in sin. The only proper use of it is to render itself unnecessary, bypass it, ignore it, overlook it, and therefore allow it to NOT GET IN THE WAY. As such you join with another in holiness and true meaning and validity. Trying to make bodies have a function of joining is level confusion between mind and body. Sex is entirely based on the idea of trying to "make bodies have oneness." Physical joining IS SEPARATION.

"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."

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

"Salvation must reverse the mad belief in separate thoughts and separate bodies which lead separate lives and go their separate ways."

"And if God created bodies, death would indeed be real."

On the one hand, it seems that people are not the same. That is, if you look at their bodies, their seemingly different personalities, they're all quite different. That's what we think makes everyone unique. But there is really no equality on this level. This is the level of differences, of disagreement, of conflict. Just the mere fact that two bodies are not alike is war.

We then look to higher morals and try to treat everyone the same, with some kind of unconditional love or equality of rights. That someone who is a certain race or sexual persuasion or gender etc might be treated in the same way as any other person. But the fact is that in order to lift up out of the realm of differences into the realm of equality, you HAVE to transcend the body.

We can't be saying that, on the one hand, we are bodies that are for sure all different, while on the other hand trying to find some kind of moral equality, or equal rights, democracy, or whatever. These higher ideals MUST transcend the very fact of the body's variation. It must in fact overlook and defy the very things that make the bodies stand out as unlike each other.

This is why for example if we are to be kind to people who have bodies that seem overweight, then we have to really be looking past the overweightness. And we can't honestly do that if we're looking at the body still, trying to make the body special or sacred or holy or more important or equally important or anything else is really a kind of denial.

You cannot find equality at the physical level. Physical things are NOT equal and never will be. So when we start talking about treating a person of a certain "type" in a fair and equal way to other bodies of other types, we're really trying to have our cake and eat it.

To keep the bodies and identify people as separate objects, while simultaneously deciding that they all deserve the same rights. But this is impossible. The separate and the same cannot be reconciled, nor can the different and the equal. But isn't variety and difference and uniqueness a wonderful celebration of individuality? No it's not.

So then we set about this confused mixture of trying to make all the special separate bodies special in their own ways, exalting them, having marches to support them, rallying to get certain kinds of bodies the same rights as other kinds, but all still entirely focused on bodies and identifying people with physically different objects. And there is simply a total inherent tug of war in that, you cannot be maintaining belief in separate things while claiming to be a proponent of equalism.

The ONLY way that makes any sense and which can produce TRUE unconditionality, is to entirely transcend ALL conditions, all differences, all forms, all shapes and sizes and colors, and every definition of a person as a physical object. You can't keep being a man or a woman and claim to be interested in equal rights. The ONLY way there is equality between the two genders is for them to NOT be two genders. For gender to not matter at all, you can't KEEP gender on the table. You have to look past it.

This means the only way to find any sense of unconditoinality towards anyone, you MUST not regard them as a physical body in any way, to any degree. You cannot make their body extra special, or put the bodies alongside each other and say they are all the same - which is a lie, and you cannot make out that certain bodies are deserving of what other bodies have. That's total insanity.

Only if we are NOT bodies is there equality. Only if we are all identical in every way, created by the same one creator, in the same design, with the same will, sharing the same mind, sharing the same everything together, united singularly under one purpose and one function, can there be equality. This is why there is only true equality in heaven, where the differences of separation and form and conflict and war do not exist.

You CAN "embody" that reality here, to an extent, which is what forgiveness is about. It's about living like you are in heaven while you're on earth, seeing with loving eyes instead of the physical eyes, and using the mind as primal cause instead of the body. And to do that you cannot put any emphasis on the body whatsoever.

You cannot be confused that people are their bodies because this fundamentally denies their soul. You cannot say that somoene is a certain shape or form because now you're separating them out which is in fact an attack. To say that anyone is a body is an attempt to bring them down, to isolate, to condemn, and to accuse of sin. You can't be doing that if you are interested in equality and unconditionality.

Bodies are utterly incompatible with love. They are utterly incompatible with treating everyone the same. The only way to treat everyone the same is to NOT treat them like they are a body, or have a body, or that their body means anything whatsoever. The body is NOTHING. It has no real value or meaning and isn't even real.

To regard a person as a body is to believe a fantasy about them and to NOT see them. Bodies are disguises, a form of camouflage, which people who want to hide from God wear to pretend they are physical objects. You won't find any true sense of trust or meaning or purpose or function or value or reality by regarding people as human bodies, or by trying to reconcile their utter incompatibilities by pretending they're all the same.

Bodies will never be the same, every single one of them is unlike the rest. And if you believe people are their bodies, you are literally denying them equality. Gay bodies, straight bodies, male bodies, female bodies, trans bodies, autistic bodies, tall bodies, skinny bodies, large bodies, short bodies, they are NOT the same, and they are NOT TRUE OF ANYONE.

"While you believe that BODIES can unite, you will find guilt attractive, and believe that sin is precious."

"He will, in fact, be unable to recognize his brother at all, for his Father did not create bodies, and so he is seeing in a brother only the unreal."

"Yet, in the dreaming, has this been reversed, and separate minds are seen as bodies, which ARE separated, and which cannot JOIN."

"Communication MUST have been restored to those that join, for this they COULD not do through bodies."

"On this side of the bridge, you see the world of separate bodies, seeking to join each other in SEPARATE UNIONS, and to become one BY LOSING. 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."

Upon entering the separation, we immediately entered into states of suffering. This happened because we rejected our wholeness. By choosing to believe we could be separate from God, in the fall of man, we were choosing not to be the whole of who and what we are.

We rejected our wholeness and wanted to be partial. We started to believe in lack. We saw ourselves as special and wanted to hoard some things for ourselves selfishly, meaning that we also wanted to be deprived of what others had. We introduced this depravation and suffering into our own minds.

"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. "

This meant that upon the very instant of beginning to enter into separation, in the fall, we introduced suffering into our own minds. This suffering is nothing more than the seeming lack of wholeness. Simply by rejecting wholeness, we placed our minds in every conceivable condition that you might think of as suffering.

For example, all of "the separated ones", by rejecting their whole identity, actually came to be uncertain whether they really exist. They rejected their souls and began to experience a tremendous uncertainty about whether they were even real, or even existed at all. This is because we rejected our Father, and therefore rejected the belief that we had been CREATED. So this brings with it a fear of not existing (fear of death).

"The dispute over authorship has left such uncertainty in your mind that it may even doubt whether you really exist at all."

Also in the separation, by trying to be partial and special and not whole, we introduced the idea of lack and scarcity. We saw ourselves as lacking, or being less than whole. This alone lays the foundation for feelings of inadequacy, shame, unworthiness, weakness, fear of not having what it takes, a desire to hide, powerlessness, deprivation, scarcity, lack of abundance, fear of loss, constant anxiety about being overcome, and perpetual stress.

"Today's idea will eventually overcome completely the sense of loneliness and abandonment which all the separated ones experience.""Recognition of meaninglessness arouses intense anxiety in all the separated ones."

So by going into the separation, we immediately placed ourselves into suffering states. It's not like something in life happened to cause the suffering. It's not about some event taking place on a timeline. It's not about people doing stuff to us on a Tuesday. It all began and has its deepest roots in the separation from God itself. That's where it all started.

Your sense of suffering, lack, unworthiness, inadequacy, fear etc, can be compounded, and seem to increase or decrease, based on reactions to life events and so on. But fundamentally it isn't the world that's making you suffer, or any specific person, or any even major event. It's the separation from God. It's the lack of wholeness in your mind. It's the rejection of your soul. That's what's making you suffer, and that is the core root of ALL suffering. Which as the secret of salvation tells you, YOU are doing to yourself.

This really is also the source of all sickness and death. By believing that we are not as God created us, we reject eternal life, and believe in death. By seeing ourselves as unsufficient, a failure, lacking, unprepared, incapable, disabled, broken, etc, we form an image of ourselves as a body, representing what we think is true of us, and this now symbolizes and pictures our inner condition. So now the body is sick and frail and disabled because the mind is sick and frail and disabled."If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick."

The resistance against the truth, puts the brakes on the extension of creation, rejects your natural functioning, and places you into a state of malfunction. This is the root of ALL forms of sickness. Worded in another way, it is a fear of the state of wholeness, a fear of approaching that state of wholeness, and therefore a fear of awakening to wholeness.

"All forms of sickness even unto (physical) death are PHYSICAL expressions of the fear of awakening."

This tells you also that if you were not to be afraid of awakening, if you were to embrace wholeness, if you were to open up to your perfection, and if you would deny and reject anything not of God any power over you (including death therefore), your mind would not be in a state of fear and would not need to defend itself against the truth, sickness would vanish and the body would return to a symbol of health.

It ultimately isn't stuff in the environment, little viruses, people's attacks, weather conditions, poisons in the food and water, or anything else in the world that is making us suffer. It is solely our own seemingly broken relationship with God. It is the connection between you and your soul, which has become blocked off and rejected. It is the denial of your SELF, that is making you have an ego exprience.

All pain is therefore induced by the denial of God. "The denial of God is the ego's religion." This denial of God produces a false "God of sickness". And this God of sickness demands the rejection of health both mentally and physically.

"Allegiance to the denial of God (and thus your wholeness) is the ego's religion. The god of sickness obviously demands the denial of health, because health is in direct opposition to its own survival."By even dipping your little toe into "the separation", by even perceiving at all, by believing a single illusion, you are entering into a realm of suffering and pain and fear. You cannot feel safe until you are whole. You cannot feel free from death until you embrace your eternal life. You cannot end suffering or be happy until you know you are with God.

"A Son of God is happy only when he knows he is with God. "So we can look externally all day for illusory sources of suffering. We can attribute the cause of death to anything OTHER than ourselves. We can blame the whole world for causing us to suffer. We can use the world as a gigantic scapegoat. But it will never change the underlying fact that WE cause our own suffering through our belief in separation. And this is the ONLY cause of suffering, sickness and death.

"Every illusion carries pain and suffering in the dark folds of the heavy garments in which it hides its nothingness."

"Illusions carry only guilt and suffering, sickness and death, to their believers."

"Reason will tell you that the only way to escape from misery is to recognize it and go the other way."

"Our efforts will be directed toward recognizing that there is only one problem and one answer."

"Today I would remember the simplicity of salvation by reinforcing the lesson that there is one problem and one solution."

For those of us, us "separated ones", who see ourselves as trapped in bodies, and prone to suffer, we need to be gentle with ourselves in recognition of WHY we suffer. We see ourselves as unworthy and insufficient, lacking and unwholy/unholy, imperfect and flawed, weak and frail and afraid, guilty and shameful, not good enough, disempowered, lost, alone, withering and dying. We believe this because we believe in being separate and are deceived by illusions.

It's quite natural to then become afraid of failure at every step, because if you know/believe that you are less than whole, you know that you do not have everything you need. And you then see yourself as incapable. And in recognizing your limitations, you will not trust that you can do things. You will undermine yourself, sabotage your efforts, avoid, procrastinate, and generally "fail" to live. And in seeing yourself as inadequate you will avoid doing anything because you know that you do not have what it takes to do it.

All this undermines your sense of confidence and certainty. It places you into doubt and fear and weakness. So you have to now be gentle with yourself in trying to "recognize your disability", which is mentally imposed, and work to undo this disability. To overcome your belief in being limited and confined and broken. Because by recognizing your immortal perfection you can rejoin yourself in wholeness and undo the illusions of damage and reverse your belief in being a frail lifeless piece of garbage.

We are all here as "recovering" death-addicts. We are all trying to find the strength to carry on. The will to live. We have to develop trust in a truth bigger than ourselves that we are far more powerful than we realize, are fully capable, and "there is nothing our holiness cannot do." This is a pathway in becoming re-empowered, re-energized, and alive again. It is the path of resurrection from death. You are coming back to LIFE, because you are crawling our of your hole of self torture and torment and hell, and are rising up the stairway to heaven's gate, where God is there to welcome you Home.

It's a deadly trap to believe that you need to get that person to love you in order to prove you are lovable.

You can feel very sorry for yourself because of how other people seem to mistreat you or how they don't love you enough.

You can get into a state where you see yourself as unworthy and unlovable purely because other people don't seem to love you.

Then you will be yearning for them to love you, will try to manipulate them into loving you, will secretly want to take love from the, and will try to steal it from them, in order to get some love for yourself.

You think that if they will love you, you will feel better about yourself.

Well here's some news. It doesn't work this way.

Love has to come from God and come through you and be shared. Love is sharing. You have to share in it in order to have it, and by sharing in it you must also share it, meaning you must extend it and give it.

Now, this also leads people to another mistake which is the belief that you should always give give give in an attempt to give everyone what they want, so that you might be able to get them to give some love back to you.

This is a deadly trap as well. If you're waiting for or are dependent on other people to be the source of love for you, or to approve of you, or to give you attention, or make you be okay, or accept you, then you're going to be waiting a very long time and suffer the consequences.

Other people are not supposed to be the source of love for you. Other people are not supposed to approve of you. Other people are not supposed to accept you. Other people are not supposed to give you attention. Other people are not supposed to love you more than others. Other people are not supposed to save you. Other people are not supposed to be your savior or your idol or your hero. Other people are not where you should be receiving love from.

You can't experience love unless you are in it. You can't be in it unless you are sharing it with God because God is the only source of love. You can't share in it unless you are willing to receive it from God. You can't get it into you unless you are willing to remove all of your false beliefs which say that you don't deserve it, can't receive it, aren't good enough, or that you are in need of it. You can't share it unless you're willing to let others also receive it just as much as you. And you can't have it unless you are willing to give it away.

To your ego, giving away love means losing it, which means you are sacrificing it, which means if you give give give you will end up with none for yourself. This won't coerce others into loving you, nor will it make them love you in return in order to have an equal or fair relationship. That's bullshit. That's not a relationship, it's a bargain. Your ego needs to get out of the way if you are going to experience love.

You need to realize that God's love is infinitely abundant and always available and is unconditional and freely given to all equally, all the time. That includes you. You must be included in the love and having the love, even when you give it. If you are overflowing with God's love, from WITHIN, having received it inside of yourself directly from the source (God), then you will be so happy to share it and spread it around.

And here's the little secret. When you share and receive God's love and are open to an unlimited supply of it coming into you from Him, which He has already put there, you will have so much that even if you give it away, it will not decrease whatsoever. The secret is, that as you give real love, unconditional love, you not only get to keep that love, but the love INCREASES.

You don't need, and cannot get, love from someone else. It must come from God to you to others, in that order. If you don't feel lovable or loved, YOU are not loving yourself and YOU are not letting God love you. It's an inside job.

You will not EVER find love outside of you, and you will not EVER be loved from outside of you. "Outside of you" means separate from you, and anything separate from you is impossible to experience. You can only experience love when it is NOT separate from you, meaning it's INSIDE you, meaning God put it there and you're experiencing it where it IS.

You already have it. You just have blocks to awareness which is preventing you from accepting and allowing it. Your ego is getting in the way. It's making you believe, falsely, that you do not have love in you, cannot have love in you, don't deserve love in you, and that you are not love. YOU ARE LOVE ITSELF. You are an extension of love. How can you not be love, when Love (God) created you like Itself? You aren't going to get this love by force-feeding it from the outside in. You aren't really lacking it! You just need to UNCOVER IT, because it's already been given.

God has already given you 100% of all the love in existence. If you are blocking it, you're going to go seeking for it outside of yourself, and it will stay outside of yourself, and you will never have it that way. It's not anyone's job to love you. It's only God's function to love you, and He already has. The only part left now is your WILLINGNESS to accept and allow it and RECOGNIZE it where it is, within you, where God already put it. You are already loved, unconditionally and eternally, so if that's not what you are experiencing, YOU are blocking yourself from being loved.

It doesn't even matter if other people love you or not. Other people could be loving you 100% unconditionally and totally all the time, but you could still be shutting it out, ignoring it, rejecting it, and not believing you deserve it. How are you going to get that love into you if your entire reason for trying to find it out there is because you don't really believe you deserve it? No-one can give it to you if you don't allow it to be in you, and to allow it to be in you is to accept it from God.

Love has already been shared with you. Love is already available permanently. Love is what you are really made of. You can't not be loved or lovable or loving. But you can pretend, and you can cover it up, and you can be in denial. That simply means you need to uncover all these ways that you keep love from yourself. It's not because other people are keeping love from you, it's YOU that does not really want it. You say you do, but evidently you don't, or you would accept it from God right now.

God loves you. Just so you know.

When we all love each other, it means that we have love within us, because we are love, and are sharing that love, NOT BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE NEED IT, because they also have the love coming from God within themselves. To love everyone is not to substitute for their belief in lack, or to love them FOR them, or to force love upon them. We all are responsible for and naturally function as extenders of GOD'S LOVE, because God is the only source of love that's real. Access your own unique connection to Him, your own relationship, and heal it, so that you can experience love again.

Attachment occurs whenever you are trying to get rid of or avoid something you don't want.

It follows the simple rule that what you resist, persists. Or what you are afraid of, you attract to you.

What happens is, when your mind chooses to perceive that something is separate from you, and that this thing is in some way against you or behaving in a way that you do not want, or is having an affect on you that you do not want, you are actually choosing for that thing to happen. And so you are actually keeping it and creating it. You are effectively visualizing it and believing in it.

When you decide to see someone as your enemy, or a situation happening that you don't want to happen, your mind becomes split. Within the confines of your mind there will now be a sense of identity that you want to keep and protect (ego persona) and a seemingly separate projected enemy that you are resisting (ego shadow). You will perceive that the shadow-part is within someone else, or within a situation, and that it is trying to attack the persona part of you, and thereby cause it to be afraid.

What you may not realize is that your own mind is now in conflict with itself and is literally scaring itself, by having this perception of separation and victimhood. It is not really another person or situation that is causing the fear, but the portion of your own mind that you perceive IN or projected ONTO that person or situation. And that's your own mind's content. You've made an enemy of yourself.

So now you have this mind which seems to have two parts, which are against each other, and the persona part is resisting or trying to deny or push away the shadow part. And as such it seems to project outward. And that means that you now have this booger hanging around in your mind which you're trying to shake off, but it keeps sticking. And the more that you try to get away from it, the more you reject it and hate it, the stronger it seems to become.

Denial is an attempt to push away, but this pushing away actually broadcasts and transfers every. It simply funnels more energy from the persona part of you into the shadow part of you, and so you literally 'empower' or give power/energy to what you think of as your projected enemy. As you try to get rid of, deny or resist stuff, your 'rejection' of it seems to you like a pulling away, but it is in fact an attracting towards. Your attempts to PUSH your enemies away therefore brings you closer to them.

So now while there's one part of you that is thinking hey, I don't want what 'they' are going to do to me, and which is actually already perceiving that they ARE doing something to you - you see them as a threat or danger - there's this other part which is firmly anchored in and as that very threat. So you've effectively latched onto that person or situation with your mind, as though you cast an anchor overboard and it's hooked itself into your worst enemy.

The way you will generally experience this is that you feel like you've become vulnerable. That there is now some part of you that is weak and afraid and susceptible and exposed. And this exposed part experiences itself as accessible to the projected enemy, it feels like it is unsafe and very visible and noticeable. Your mind reaches out (in its projection) and latches onto that person or situation and forms a kind of energetic connection to them. Through projection you've basically taken your mind and stretched it out and have tied it into something outside of you. Now it seems like there's almost a kind of funnel or bridge joining you to your worst enemy, as though this allows them to gain access to you and target you and upset you.

When this happens, often you'll find it hard to stop thinking about that person or situation. They will keep coming into your mind. You'll keep having fearful thoughts about them. Or if it's driven by anger (which is usually based on fear) you'll keep feeling more and more angry about them, as though you just can't put it down and can't let go of feeling this way. This energy seems to keep coming up inside you to remind you that you are not at peace about them, and they are simply "on your mind" all the time.

So what's happened is, by creating a split in your own mind, forming a sense of threat and an enemy, creating a persona and a shadow, and projecting it outward onto something separate (which really has nothing to do with anything - its just a scapegoat), you've become "attached" to that person or situation. While you seem to be wanting to get rid of it, you are keeping it even more.

Each time you try to escape from it, it follows you. Every time you try to avoid it, it hunts you down. The more intensely you try to remove it from existence, the more it seems to become empowered and gains extra staying power. You just can't seem to shake it off this way, because you are moving your own power around in your own mind and are visualizing yourself being your own enemy.

So there is an attachment in place, and it's there because you have not forgiven, and are at war with yourself. What you need to do in order to energetically, mentally and spiritually stop being so agitated and upset 'by' this supposed opponent, is obviously that you need to apply some forgiveness. That is, you need to get really honest about who is doing what to whom, and what is happening in your mind, and own up to the responsibility you have of MAKING them seem like they are doing something to you.

The 'sword', if you will, which will cut through this attachment - which actually can take on the form of a 'cord of fear' that seems to tie between you and others, is simply to recognize and affirm that "they are not doing anything to me" or "I am not being affected by them". This is a taking back of the projection and it almost immediately will deflate the sense of exposure or vulnerability, will massively decrease your fear, will stop you from obsessing about that person or situation, and will help you to return to some sense of having power and peace. You need to then simply complete the forgiveness the process, taking back all of the power you gave away, owning up to the fact you have only been doing this to yourself, and thereby LET GO of whoever or whatever it was that you were attached to.

So in this process there is an owning up, and there is a letting go. You actually have to learn what it feels like to let something go, to drop it, to relinquish the attachment. It feels strange particularly if you are used to being controlling (afraid). It means allowing people and situations to be as they are, regardless, unconditionally. Letting go of believing that you have to do something about it, or that there's something wrong with it, or that it's simply 'wrong' and upsetting you. Learning to let go means, ultimately, letting go of all sense of being at war with yourself, letting go of the split in your own mind and surrendering to God. It is a letting go of the ego, because the ego is nothing more than self attack. And once you do that, you will have peace.

P.S. Archangel Michael can be particularly helpful in cutting energetic cords, fear attachments and other such gunk if you ask for his help in clearing you, and helping you to detach and let go.

What we think passes for a special love relationship on Earth, is typically the exact opposite of how relationship should be in heaven. This is not something that the people of the world want to look at or hear about.

The special relationship is the ego's way of relating. The ego's thought system is insane and deeply rooted in separation, specialness and exclusion. It rejects wholeness in favor of some special part which is different and unique to all the rest. It uses its worshipping of these little parts as idols to shut out and reject everything else. It is not really a device for relationship, it is a device for shutting relationship down and reducing it to almost nothing.

The physical world, which is a projecting out of the insane thought system of the ego, is founded on the same thinking, on the rejection of wholeness and the emphasis of separations and differences. Special relationships then become ways for the ego to use physicality to serve ego purposes, because now bodies can be used to section off and isolate and exclude, to narrow the field down to the ultra-special chosen one, to the exclusion of all others.

As the ego pursues what it tells you is the most treasured relationship, it promises that this relationship will give you total freedom, liberation, a savior who will fulfill all your needs, will give you everything you want, do things to you that you prefer, and together you will join in triuph over everyone and everything. A power-couple, exclusive in every way, fighting against the whole universe.

Such a special relationship is founded on exclusivity, with special rights and permissions granted, commitment to the other held up with the condition that you be uncommitted to anyone else, loyalty it seen as defending and siding with the other against everyone else, and nothing is allowed to occur outside the boundaries of the relationship. Especially not the intimate sharing of the body, which is really the exclusive target of the sense of special love, in which the other is held up as an idol to be worshipped, so that you'll stay away from God.

The truth however is that by pursuing relationship on the basis of how exclusive it is, also guarantees that the relationship is a prison. Two come together to share a prison, bound by chains, and commiting to fight together against the hoards of the universe who are left outside. There are limits on what you can, where you can, who you can be with, what you can say and to whom. Break the terms and conditions and you are violating the trust and the commitment of this meeting of minds, this joining of bodies, and this attempt to merge into oneness.

In effect such a relationship is not a releationship. It is a way of using a tiny speck of relationship focused around a single exclusive separation-device body, in order to keep everyone else away. The more exclusivity is given to the pair, the less there is for others to share in. In the strictest and most controlling of examples this can turn into highly abusive "love" situations where every little act is controlled and monitored and inspected for violations. And of course this can lead to abuse and violence and all manner of anti-relationship, all masquerading as a relationship. A relationship made in hell, where rotting together in death passes for love. And how cute it is that the corpses die in each other's arms.

The ego thus attempts to merge with one special other, exclusively and only that one other, and not even the whoel of them, in order to in some way commit fully to identifying with your body and with their body. And by doing so the ego uses the body and sex to try to bind the mind to matter, to make the body out to be the mind, and to believe in the allure of the body itself. All designed to place so much focus on the physical that the relationship becomes mindless and love doesn't enter into it. The relationship can then be all about sex and no real love, no real sharing or communication, and simply the using of each other's form.

But the ego clings to this because it's like it's rock in the storm, the stronger it can bind to bodies the more it can stay away from God and define itself in terms of what the body is, separating self off from others and therefore forming a sense of identity and of existing as something unique and special. Thus the more the relationship becomes exclusively special the more the ego increases and sees this temporary ally as joining it in its fight against all others.

This results in a dependency on an external savior, a seeking outside of yourself for love, an attempt to find yourself in the other person by denying yourself, a giving away of power, all manner of sacrifices and compromises and people pleasing, losing yourself, and a high degree of dishonesty. It is a closed-off relationship based on a prison, in which the two are chained to each other in "monogomy" and "marriage" and this is held up as holy any good and God's will. A holy and unquestionale institution, which is really founded on the lie that as the two come together there will be love, when really there is love's prison.

What the ego will never tell you is that each person is never supposed to be in a dedicated exclusive relationship with only one other, in which being with them is a tool to exclude everyone else. To do this is to place someone in a prison and call it freedom, to say you love them all the wihle keeping them captive and making sure they have no life beyond what you allow. Everyone is supposed to love everyone, and equally. It is completely unnatural that a person be kept so isolated and exclusive and separated off that they're not allowed even the slightest relationship with anyone, lest there be jealousy and grounds for revenge.

That means it is completely natural in God that everyone would experience full and total unconditional love towards absolutely everyone simultaneously. That is the total opposite of exclusivity and specialness because it's based on inclusivity and openness and sharing. It is true freedom and it applies to all souls. This is what all souls want and know and trust and enjoy. You are one with everyone, not just one little individual, whose specialness is there to tempt you and keep you away from everyone else.

On Earth therefore bodies are not only separation devices and prisons, they are also used by the ego to bring exclusive bodies together on exclusive terms so that the body can essentially be used to keep both persons away from God. And in their specialness they will think they are being holy and better and rightous and above all others, whom them look down upon together.

This belief that we are all supposed to find one single person and "love them" but in such a way that this relationship excludes others and is not the same as what is shared with others, is an ego device to separate and destroy relationship. It also leads to madness, in the belief that you are completely dependent on this one other person for your salvation, and if they are gone or if they stop giving you what you want, you are desperate like some kind of stalker that just can't let go or grant freedom. The belief that you can only get your needs met by that one person is a recipe for disaster and for endless torment. You don't even really have any needs.

In order to be free from that turmoil, which is largely also the root cause of grief and loss when a person leaves or dies, the sense of exclusivity must be dismantled. The person can only be "let go" by giving them freedom and allowing the exclusive rules to be broken. And indeed when they are broken it will not horrify, but instead bring great relief. Relief from the sense of isolation, from the straight-jacked of special terms, from the obedience and worship and codependency, and from the sense of not being able to live or do anything without their approval. No more burden, no more distorting yourself with sacrifices to please them, and no more putting them on a pedestal in order to cut them down.

If the person were to for example "cheat" or go outside the bounds of the agreement, or in some way withdraw what they were giving, or the grounds of the relationship are attacked and undermined, leading to a breakdown in the specialness and the romance, then perhaps this is a good thing. Because then it can open the doorway to actually transcending the ego's attempt at imprisonment, the glorifying of the body, the desire to merge with the body, and the sense that only this one person in all the world can ever be good enough for you.

"I want you and nobody else", as many-a-song goes, becomes the ego's mantra for exclusive specialness. The special one, the chosen one, the other half of yourself, the perfect one, the ideal one, the one who does only what you want and gives you none of what you don't want, the seeming savior and oasis in the desert to keep you from the madness of others, that special someone who who can side with an gel with and connect with by way of proving how everyone else is wrong, that's the ego's goal. To use separation to masquerade as relationship, to use a reduction in communication with the whole sonship under the guise of increasing communication, and using body contact to substitute for the true intimacy of oneness and to keep it away from heaven. And yet the ego thinks this is heaven on earth.

None of this is easy stuff to look at because everyone's doing it and everyone wants this feeling that you get when you look into the eyes of that special chosen one, and how they seem to offend you the least, justifying your murderous attitude toward everyone outside the special inner circle. Relationship can be far far higher than this, much more unconditional, and far more open and sharing, but not on the egos terms, and not really in terms of bodies - only up to a point.

But let it be known that, as you grant freedom to your partner, you are also giving it to yourself. And the special relationship therefore has to be converted into a holy relationship, where the terms and conditions are no longer the ego's, but the Holy Spirit's. And where the loving becomes equal and unconditional, there isn't a foundation of neediness and dependency, and both parties attain wholeness within themselves as well as with each other. There is a way out of the ego's chains and its little prisons of isolation, but it will require a dismantling of everything you ever thought specialness was good for.

Ultiamately it means giving up the entirely egocentric belief, in the ego itself, that you or another can be everything, exlusively and alone, to the exclusion of all else. That there can be this one sole person that is capable of being so limited, isolated, controlled and imprisoned, that they are somehow made permanent and constant and always the same to you. A person who will obey your every wish, do everything you want, be everything you want them to be, and never leave you. An idol to merge with in oneness, to posses and to own and control. Setting the other free from this punishing demand sets you also free form the LIE, that anyone could ever be, or is ever meant to be, the only one you could ever love.

Allowing their love to overflow to others, begins the dissolving of specialness, and therefore also of the ego itself. It is the beginning of letting go, the giving of freedom, the allowing of the other to be with anyone and everyone they so please. So that you can also be free to be unrestricted and unlimited in your relationship to all whom God has created equal.

"You cannot enter into REAL relationship with ANY of God's Sons, unless you love them all, and EQUALLY. Love is not special. If you single out PART of the Sonship for your love, you are imposing guilt on ALL your relationships, and MAKING them unreal."

"Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly. And, to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe."

"On this side of the bridge, you see the world of separate bodies, seeking to join each other in SEPARATE UNIONS, and to become one BY LOSING. 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."

"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."

"The special relationship is a strange and unnatural ego device for joining hell and Heaven, and making them indistinguishable. And the attempt to find the imagined "best" of BOTH worlds, has merely led to FANTASIES of both, and to the inability to perceive either one AS IT IS. The special relationship is the triumph of this confusion. It is a kind of union from which UNION IS EXCLUDED, and the BASIS for the ATTEMPT at union RESTS on exclusion. What better example could there be of the ego's maxim, "Seek, and do NOT find?"

In ACIM we're often talking about "the separation", or being separate. This is a way to describe a divide between two things. But another way is to refer to two "opposites". Heaven and hell, life and death, reality and illusions, etc. The separation was an act of opposition against God, producing an opposite state of mind.

When we're in a "separated state", we're in a state of opposition. This means we have an opponent, which we are totally un-like. And it also means we are at war. And because we are un-like our opposition, we do not "like" it. And this produces great tension.

When there seems to be opposition, there is tremendous temptation. The more extremely opposite two things are, the more they contradict each other and are in conflict. They can be in a state of extreme disagreement. In this disagreement, there is a maximal likelihood or temptation that conflict will arise, given how much the two seem to be at-odds with each other.

Tension arising from arguments, disagreements, conflicts, debates, righteousness, defensiveness, denial, protection of one's truth, opposition to or disbelief in the enemy's view, is all very likely to induce a form of war. There will be fighting and bickering and hatred and weapons being thrown and a taking of separate sides.

It's very difficult to "stay out of" such a conflict, when faced with extreme opposition. And the more they oppose you the higher the temptation is. If someone is digging in their heels and does not want a single shred of what you are offering, for example, there will be a stand-off, rejection, a communication breakdown, and a high chance of attack. They may want death, while you want life, but it won't stop them from trying to destroy you.

In this world, things which seem more alike or have something in common, seem to also experience an illusion of less conflict. I found this to be true when, for example, a person who was highly obnoxious and aggressive decided to walk a road with me one day. This person would take up a very opposing position of rebellion and anger, and this would produce a high likelihood of temptation and a flare-up of aggression. He was easily triggered due to his unhealed pain.

I decided on this occasion to pretend to be like him. So I sort of acted like him and agreed with him and spoke things he might speak, even though what I was agreeing to was not what I believed. And strangely this person started to see me as a friend or ally. I was actually doing this to try to protect myself at the time, but it showed me that it's really the distance or contrast between opposites that incites violent reactions, and so long as I did not "oppose" overtly, this person didn't target me at all.

There is similar temptation in ACIM circles, on any forum or discussion. When someone believes something opposite, particularly if it is wildly or deeply opposite, this produces a great temptation. Someone who is very patient, forgiving and calm, can perhaps resist the temptation. That takes some profound mastery. Someone who can't keep their cool in the face of intense conflict and contraryism, however, will likely lose it. How do you not be tempted by extreme evil? "One ring to rule them all"?

There is the most temptation or "tension" when something is completely opposite and contradictory. This is as if to say, someone is 180 degrees from you across the table and going head-to-head. There is also tension from misunderstanding, when someone is at 90 degrees, whereby the two do not look at anything from the same angle, like they are talking entirely different languages. They conflict more on a basis of not even understanding what each other is saying.

You'll perhaps notice that all the wars in the world are generally based on two parties very strongly disagreeing. They oppose each other. One tries to suppress the other to protect their own truth. They don't see it possible that they can live together in peace or accept each other's extremism. And just the mere existence of the other seems enough justification to destroy their heinous hedonism.

"Tension" is that sensation of very strong discordant energy between two opposites, and as each party has a stand-off and doesn't want anything to do with each other, it intensifies the tension. It's as though they rip apart from each other and pull on the fabric of existence in an effort to put as much distance between them as possible. The sense of resistance and rejection of each other heightens the tension, until breaking point.

The opposite of that tension is peace and harmony. But this can only exist either when the two opposites are able to be totally at peace with other without trying to disagree with each other, or when there are no opposites. It should also be obvious that you can't really hold a position that disagrees with someone else and be at peace. Like "let's agree to disagree" is really just a standoff, not an agreement. Either you have to be inclusive or you will be exclusive. And the only way to truly agree is that both believe exactly the same thing.

This all seems to be the same basic temptation presented over and over again in many forms in this world. Groups of people disagreeing with other groups. Nemesis and enemies going at it all over again. People getting heated because they think their beliefs are under attack. The sense of offense and hurt from other people seeming to be against your ideals. Everyone trying to correct and destroy everyone else that is different to them. Conflicts based on different bodies and genders and so on. The whole world is riddled with such temptations.

"Everything the body sees is a form of conflict." - ACIM

Sometimes when there is less contrast between two things they seem to get along. ACIM refers to them as allies, where the two are still in subjective egotism, but because their egotism "matches" they become in a way blind to each other. Neither of them "stands out" in opposition so they seem to be in harmony. But it is an illusion of harmony between two equally insane individuals. And if one of them defects, the claws come out and they scream betrayal.

Atoms and molecules conflict with each other, just by being different. Difference IS disagreement. Bodies conflict with each other just by being different. The first law of chaos is that the truth is different for everyone, and everywhere, and for everything. Every single particle of matter is different to, therefore in conflict with, every other. Everywhere you look, everything the body sees, mountains and forests and oceans and cities, it is all conflicting in its form. To be unalike is to be discordant and at war.

"The world was made as an attack on God."

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

And so where there is conflict or difference of opposition, there is temptation, because there is extreme disagreement. Difference IS attack. And if you buy into the opposition or give it any power whatsoever, you set it up as an enemy in your mind. And then you will feel attacked by it, and will be attacking yourself, and will retaliate defensively, trying to preserve your sense of truth.

All special relationships demonstrate this. They're all founded on an illusion of peace, brought about by two conflicted individuals, who are at war with the world, finding an escape from the conflict seemingly with each other by having something in common. They hide from a mutual enemy together in the confines of an exclusive relationship prison.

"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."

So you've got a world of differences which tempts war, and two people who are at war with the world, who "take sides" together because they see an absence of war in each other, because they both are warring in the same way. They both hate the same stuff, they both exclude the same stuff, and so they are narrow and closed off in a similar way. And this produces an illusion of love. The same happens when siding with political parties or sports teams or segments of society or religions.

But this love is very volatile and unstable and riddled with conditions and contradictions. And if any of those conditions are not met, it quickly devolves into the special hate that it's based on. If one person even decides to be more unconditionally loving, the other conditional person may see this as proof of defection, and that the other is against them and unwilling to hate with them. And then it's bye bye relationship.

I think its probably true of most people that we tend to avoid conflict and try to create an illusion of peace in life. A safe house to live in. A way to avoid sickness. An avoidance of bad people. Trying to eat the right food. Staying away from known threats and dangers. All to try to pretend that the world is not a world of conflict, to make a nice comfortable corner in the desert where you can hang out with a false sense of security. Until shit comes knocking.

True peace can only come from a transcendence of opposition. But it has to also come from "taking sides with God". That doesn't mean being against anything because in God there is no opposition. God is all encompassing and love has no opposite. It is really only the opposition to God that believes in opposites. This is why the ego attacks and hates the Holy Spirit but the Holy Spirit completely ignores it. He doesn't attack the ego at all, He just shows you that it is invalid.

To take sides with God is to be vigilant for his truth and his Kingdom. It means to believe only what God believes, if God had beliefs. To know what God knows. To be under no laws but his. To recognize that opposition is truly fiction and there is only one real world, one reality, one truth. This light then shines and shines away the darkness of rebellion and of sin and war. And in the final recognition that there is no opposite to love, conflict disappears forever.

(and why this world is NOTHING like God’s creation)

"For what you are is what He is. There is no love but His, and what He is is everything there is. There is no limit placed upon Himself, and so are you unlimited as well."

Everything about the ego is based on the idea of not sharing anything. This results in everything being completely separate from everything else. What is in a banana, is not in an apple. What is in my house, is not in your house.

Because this ENTIRE UNIVERSE has been made by the ego thought system, every property of matter follows the same law. The ego’s entire statement is "share nothing". Bodies do not share or join. Atoms do not share or join. One mountain is not another mountain. The Earth is not Mars.

In this ego world, absolutely everything is confined to limited FORM. The form or appearance of the surface of objects, fixated on by the body’s eyes, show you a picture of "nothing being shared". Another word for a world where nothing is shared, is DEATH!! This is a world of death, a dream of death, fundamentally. That is why is it OPPOSITE TO LIFE, and OPPOSITE TO HEAVEN IN EVERY WAY. "There is no life outside of heaven" "Only the creations of light are real."

The form of your TV separates and distinguishes it from the form of your chair. Forms seem to have different properties, qualities, identities. This applies not only on the level of the PHYSICAL UNIVERSE, it also applies in all aspects of EGO THINKING.

The ego literally thinks in terms of not sharing. It fundamentally assumes that one thing is separate from another. That one thing is limited by its form and is not something else. There is no oneness. No sharing. No overlap. No unity.

To the ego, there is "only so much to go around". It evaluates the "amount" of something based on "how much form there is". Or in other words, how limited something is. It does not give ANY value to any idea of sharing. It does not count something twice. It does not measure amounts by anything present in multiple objects simultaneously.

This leads to a way of thinking which is anti-abundant, has built in SCARCITY, is fundamentally a thought system of LACK, and therefore produces competition, war and sacrifice. To the ego, there is simply NOT ENOUGH to go around. Not enough of anything. This is the ego saying, God is not enough, God is not sharing, God is nowhere, and love is limited.

It does not simply make this statement or belief on a mental level. It is DEMONSTRATED on the level of PHYSICAL OBJECTS. This entire universe is an idea of lack, deprivation, limitation, scarcity, loss, with nothing being shared, and God being nowhere.

This is because the ego is very very EXCLUSIVE in its thought processes. It *separates out*. It divides. It sees in one part what is MISSING from other parts. If I own the only 1 pound diamond in the world, you do not. If I own the best property in New York, you do not. If I bought all the apples at the store, there are none left for you. There is NO SHARING in the ego. It has absolutely NO CONCEPT of INCLUSIVITY whatsoever.

This is intentional. Because this is the TOTAL OPPOSITE of what God is like. God is not like this AT ALL. This is why "Heaven and earth are opposites IN EVERY WAY". Earth, and this "physical" universe, fundamentally demonstrate the idea of SEPARATION in ALL ITS FORMS. Every form - or object - is the form of ERROR. This world is fundamentally NOT LIKE GOD, down to the subatomic quantum particle. This is why GOD DID NOT CREATE THIS WORLD. It is NOTHING LIKE HIM!!

Here is what God IS like.

God thinks ONLY INCLUSIVELY. God thinks only in terms of SHARING. God thinks only in terms of INCREASE, abundance, availability, unity, creation, an NO form of exclusion.

God does not think, hey, all of myself is over here being shared with Paul, therefore, there’s none of myself left to share with that other person. God does not DECREASE by sharing himself. He is not a quantity. He is not limited. He is not finite. "Nothing real can be increased except by sharing".

Because of SHARING, which the ego has completely opposed, it IS POSSIBLE in God’s world (Heaven) for something to be accessed by multiple individuals simultaneously without ANY LACK. This is because there is no POSSESSION or ownership or exclusivity. Everyone SHARES everything.

This means not simply, there is a limited amount of stuff and we all compromise on how much each gets. That is ego. Rather, each time something is shared, IT INCREASES, because it is CREATED, and this ADDS TO what exists. Each time God shares himself in an act of creation, he puts all of himself into the creation, and yet STILL has all of himself left.

Remember, ideas are INCREASED by being shared or given way. Remember also that nothing real can EXIST UNLESS it is shared and extended. It must extend in order to have PRESENCE, and this makes it shine with radiance. In God’s reality, if you give something to another, you do not LACK it. You do not lose it. You are not left wanting. What you give, YOU HAVE, and you give it only because you have it, and you KEEP IT by giving it. "To have all, give all to all". Giving does not REDUCE. Giving INCREASES.

That means, unlike in the EGO WORLD, Heaven is utterly filled with abundance, everything functions based on SHARING, and sharing does not mean lack or loss. This sharing requires the ability for multiple individuals to OVERLAP, to literally SHARE the same space. Another word for this is oneness. Oneness doesn’t mean "one finite thing" - that is the ego’s version of oneness. Oneness means SHARED WITH ALL AND BY ALL. It DEFIES ego logic.

You being a creation of God, one of many, occurred because God shared the WHOLE of Himself in order to create you. And He created you AS A WHOLE. You have been FULLY created. God thus INCREASED His Kingdom by creating you. You have been ADDED to God. This means that God is IN you, fully, and yet it ALSO is fully present in all other souls. God being in you does NOT limit Him or deprive anyone else of Him. For one simple reason, the one idea and NATURE that the ego hates: SHARING.

You SHARE God with all other creations. You all have access to all of Him, at the same time, with no lack and no private hoarding. This gives new meaning to "whats mine is yours". "One mind contains all minds" "One brother is all brothers". God has One Son AND MANY SONS simultaneously - this is the Sonship. It is REAL BECAUSE it is shared. This is impossible in terms of the ego world of matter, but entirely possible in heaven. "It is the world you see that is impossible" refers to the physical universe, which is a picture of impossibility, a picture of death, a picture of NOT EXISTING because there is no sharing, and a picture of the crucifixion of God’s Son, IN MATTER.

This can be demonstrated through miracles WITHIN this impossible world. Here, it should NOT be possible to feed 5000 people with only a few loaves of bread and a few fish. This is because there is not enough FINITE AMOUNT to go around. The ego says, by its laws, you can only give 5 loaves to 5 people and you have no more to give. This is embedded into the nature of the PHYSICAL OBJECTS.

If there are only a few loaves of bread and a handful of fishes, and there are 5000 people to feed, the ego says there is not enough to go around. God says, YES THERE IS. And through SHARING, at the supernatural level, those loaves and fishes MULTIPLY. The amount INCREASES. All 5000 people get fully fed. This *demonstrates* that what appeared to be finite lack, was an ILLUSION, was not TRUE, was not God’s law, and it was PROVED to be false through a miracle of demonstration. Jesus fed all the people by demonstrating GODS LAW, God’s truth, that sharing increases abundance, there is NO LACK, giving does not diminish, and supply is unlimited.

This is what it means to perform a MIRACLE in this world. To demonstrate that the ego’s ways, the ego’s laws, the very nature of matter itself, IS FALSE, a lie, can be demonstrated to BE a lie, and that God’s power is UNLIMITED. This shows through proof, that this world is lying to you, because its laws of lack and limitation are NOT TRUE. This is why miracles are teaching devices. Jesus didn’t just feed the 5000, he TAUGHT that THERE IS NO LACK, there IS enough for everyone to have ALL of what is available without loss, and what is given to one person is GIVEN EQUALLY to all from an unlimited source.

God shares all of himself with EVERY PART of his creation. There is no competition, no war, no scarcity, no lack, no deprivation, no loss, no reduction, no inability to have everything, no isolation, no exclusion, and no posession. This is why God’s world - heaven - is TOTALLY OPPOSITE to the "physicality" or physical NATURE of this entire universe. God CANNOT have created this world of limitation. Next time you don’t have enough money, remind yourself, THE EGO DID THIS. When you run out of food, the ego did this. When you had to SACRIFICE, the ego did this. There is no sacrifice in God. EVERYONE SHARES EVERYTHING FULLY.

There is an abundance of love to go around. Being loved does not mean others are not loved. Getting God’s attention does not mean others are excluded. Receiving a LOT does not mean the supply is reducing. Having a lot does not mean others are being deprived. God has an UNLIMITED SUPPLY OF LOVE. Everytime it is given, it increases. God has FULL LOVE for you, not just scraps of attention or leftovers from what other people have ripped away as their own posession.

Ultimately your SELF is unlimited. You thought you could posess a part of God’s creation and make it your own. You thought you could STOP SHARING and place a limit on your identity. Your individuality is not a problem and is not ego. All of God’s children are permanent and real. The only problem is that you tried to reduce by seeking to be special, to have exclusive interests for yourself. To give yourself more, so that others would have less. This is the opposite of SHARED INTERESTS. Everything in heaven has shared interests.

You being a self is not ego because your self naturally SHARES. You being SELFISH and not wanting to share, is ego. You being an individual is not ego. You believing in sacrifice and lack and deprivation and possessiveness is ego. You being one of God’s Sons is not a problem. You trying to ISOLATE YOURSELF so that SHARING is prevented, and so that there is a LIMITATION on yourself, THAT is the ego. Lack of sharing is imprisonment.

Placing your mind under authority of ego places it under tyrannical rule and leads to imprisonment. It leads to the ego’s thought system of NO SHARING and lack and finite limitations. It leads to BODIES being made to represent the idea that nothin is shared AS physical, limited matter. It makes this universe. It leads to all forms of suffering, lack and sacrifice. And it leads to DEATH. What is starvation but the total lack of sharing or access to what you need? Death is DENIAL OF GOD. Death is DENIAL OF SHARING.

That is not God’s will for you. It is God’s will for you that you HAVE EVERYTHING, and that you share it with ALL OTHERS, AND that you increase it by creating MORE, which ALL SHARE IN. Abundance is your natural inheritance. You will NOT find it in the physical world, which is a world of lack, limits and sacrifice. It is a world of compromise and loss. Although you can DEMONSTRATE it here through supernatural miracles which prove just how UNLIKE God this world is, and that "you are undo no laws but God’s".

Your abundance is waiting for you in Heaven. In God’s world. By Gods laws. God wants to share ALL OF HIMSELF with you, and he already has. That is how you were created and that is what is natural for you. You ARE sharing fully with God, with His One Son, with All His Sons, and with the whole Sonship, FOREVER.

You are loved and provided for by God, UNLIMITEDLY. "There is NOTHING my holiness cannot do."

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.